Winter // January 2012
I noticed that through the gaps that usually occur in my creation of pre-posts, gaps that usually happen for me when ever I organize something that is unusually tedious besides drawing lines that is in itself meditative and not tedious, I miss something. In this case there is no automatic post today. And so there was a justification for taking some photos in the last few days. The above was taken last night. It is the beginning of a rather intense deep blue that will be finished within the week. I bought another smaller desk for my computer and now the larger table is dedicated to physical, non-computer activity. I have a large ‘two tails’ drawing that has been in progress since the summer, but I had started this smaller drawing using dark blue, not this one, but somehow thought I should not try to fill it all up with blue, and then decided that I had to make one entirely blue. As of this writing it has three and three quarters of a filled ‘columns.’
Another in progress is the new batch of t-shirts made by silant|nu. This group uses two drawings with blue and grey on white, grey and black shirts. One drawing consists entirely of straight horizontal lines and the other is a circular, flower like shape that was one of the test drawings for this project. Winter is definitely the best drawing period for me and I hope to take advantage of it as much as possible despite all the other things that are going on at the same time.
I am thinking that the blue will be for another batch of shirts. It has a singular solidity that will be appealing for silant|nu. I have some other ideas in mind for it as well.
silant.paper.bags
Spent part of the weekend finishing drawing and painting on brown paper bags that we have been using to put t-shirts and bags in when they are sold. One might think “is that not a waste of time?” considering how paper bags are absolutely not archival? Could be so. In my parents place there is a paper bag sitting on one of the stereo speakers that is a self portrait of my mother. I am pretty sure she drew it prior to 1981. She used charcoal, something I can’t bare to use because of the sound it makes when drawing with it on paper. I can also feel its reverberations through my skin to my nerves. The bag and its drawing are still there so there is no reason that if one cares that these bags cannot be preserved for posterity if one desired to do so.
‘Well…’: a 24 hour comic
My first 24 hour comics marathon was back in 2008, and circumstances since then had kept me away. Even though I made very few comics in that long stretch of time, and especially leading up to this past year, I came back pretty strong with more dialog and a slightly tighter and more cohesive story line than A CLUB OF INCONSEQUENCE. A lot less sloppy in terms of how the drawings are executed, and I finished it about an hour and a half ahead of time.
As is with the 24 hour comics marathons, nothing is planned. You just go, and this is great because all sort of odd things pour out of my head, although not entirely unfamiliar in terms of things that I am thinking about at the time. For example the inclusion of the Octopus stems from a fascinating article I read recently about the emotional world of Octopy. It amused me immensely to insert this creature and took great satisfaction in drawing it.
As I have yet to find a decent gallery plug-in for wordpress, you will have to read the entire thing through flickr.
video installations of 2011
This year was surprisingly full of video installations. The fact of this can be attributed to several people and reasons. First and foremost this can be attributed to some people whom, very early on, put their time, energy, enthusiasm and patience into getting these projects going. It is to them that I dedicate this post.
Firstly, while I had some experience of mapping video since, what I perceived to be the beginning of its mass proliferation, circa 2007, I had very little interest in engaging with the medium creatively. What pushed me finally was the first alpha version of MadMapper that I had access to through my role at GarageCUBE.
This technological development was similar to what motivated to get more involved with photography, when I bought a digital camera in where using a traditional film based camera always made me apprehensive about running out of film. MadMapper gave me the flexibility to get results quickly and try various compositions on the existing surfaces. Although I did discover eventually that in order to create anything of substance still requires significant commitment in terms of time. That is true of anything worth doing.
silant.bou.room was a collaboration between Bou (a technical director of the Le Zoo club in Geneva, aka Andrien Boulanger) and I, initiated by 4youreye for a party in Vienna some time around early January. Our collaboration consisted of Bou using existing materials, the large wooden beams, pieces of music we both selected that felt appropriate for the mood we wanted to create, his sequencing of the music and my creating of the loops that drew inspiration from the music and the forms.
Much credit with this project goes to fRED who, with the appearance of MadMapper, became intrigued with the idea of building wooden structures and projecting on them. Having already worked on an installation that used pre-existing sound, I wanted to work with someone to create something new specifically for the installation and introduced Electric Kettle (Matthew Bourrel) to the ideas I wanted to convey with sounds. We decided to found a collective called FAIL that would act as the platform for our future collaborations. The result of this installation and its documentation lead to invitations for is re-creation to the B-seite festival in Mannheim, Germany and the Mapping Festival in Geneva Switzerland. I need to add that for the most part, while vanity does play a role the desire to create, our enthusiasm emanated primarily from the fact that we were given more opportunities to expand our ideas.
The less loved of the three in this ‘wood sticks’ series, BEFORE THE COLLAPSE in Mannheim was a slightly different approach from the first one from a technical point of view. The name was adopted as a result of an accident caused by me that made the entire structure collapse. Things are always a bit easier the second time around anyway.
Possibly the final iteration with the incorporation of Lucy Benson. Overall I have to confess that some of what we say in this video is almost entirely redundant. Nevertheless the editing of Jerome Monnot, his styling of the material, is highly commendable.
While this was creatively a solo effort, most of what was required for its creation stands on the experience of working on the FAIL collaborations despite the complete break with the use of objects.
I have several ideas for ‘sculptures of time and light’ that were inspired by this past years installations. Whether they are of the silant. variety or are a continuation of FAIL remains to be seen in terms of time and opportunity.
#silant.happy.ne\/\/.year ***summary of 2011***
As I write this I am in the remaining hours of 2011. Snap popping outside the window of my apartment in Wedding, Berlin, small fireworks intermittently punctuate the tapping of my keyboard.
The year felt longer then those prior. It was creatively, a productive year. While I had not done as many drawings as I would have liked, I can count up to five installation works, starting with collaborations at the beginning and ending with a project of my own:
Additionally some previous works were shown in festivals in Denmark and Italy.
With drawings, I spent what ever time was available in using color. These came about primarily in the early months of the year before I moved to Wedding.
Some of them larger then the usual size, I had bought larger pieces of of paper after my move, but alas other tasks took higher precedence. I do continue to make the drawings and all of them will be posted here at some point on their regular weekly basis, every Monday.
Photographs were aplenty. Some of the highlights:
Istanbul
Abandoned Soviet base near Berlin
Kruezberg
SATTA outside festival in Lithuania
A sort of side project is the ‘Instadoggies’ book, using photos taken entirely with my phone using the Instamatic app. The idea has been to take about 100 of them and then make a book. I am up to 181 now and I am thinking to continuing until 200. Each page will have a photo and its facing page will have some text explaining the context in which the photo was taken.
Towards the end of this year I started clothing and accessories label with my assistant Manuella Trinh. I started out by designing a new logo for myself. It took a while, there were at least 30 iterations revolving around the made up word ‘silant,’ a moniker I had adopted at the beginning of the year. I will use it for the overall identity.
This is the official label that incorporates Manu’s personal logo that we have been using with the accessories and t-shirts we have started to produce and sell.
White on light grey
Black on dark grey
So far we have created a tumblr page and the obligatory but necessary facebook page.
Comics-wise, while less eventful then I wanted it to be, I did manage to do a thing or two. In the beginning of the year I participated in ‘A comic an hour’:
This was followed by bits and pieces that slowly petered out to nothing until the 24 hour comics marathon where I surpassed myself from the last time, actually finishing all 24 pages about an hour and a half before the deadline and this was even after my 24 hour comics drawing buddy and I managed to be an hour late. I have yet to scan the results properly so that will have to wait.
Several projects are already in the works for this coming year, I am very much ready for 2012 whatever it may bring.
