Another one in the can, well done ladies and gentlemen, yes yes. My last project page for the semester is up here, and within lies a mess of pictures and lots of words. Whaddaya want for nothin’? Thanks everybody for the awesome work and support!
So I’ve had the notion to fabricate a bunch of the props for this next project from styrofoam after watching MAKE’s 5 minute foam factory tutorial. However, I did not have a model train controller to use for the power source, and don’t have the space in my apartment to build the mounted, platform-like cutter in the tutorial. So I went and bought a curling iron from saver’s and some metal rod and went to work building a hot-wire jigsaw.
After connecting some guitar string for the blade and plugging the iron directly into the AC outlet, I discovered I was working with too much power: the wire exploded into hot sparks. Twice. So I did some more research, went and bought some proper nichrome foam cutter wire and a spare 9V dc adapter, also from Savers. After hacking the cords together and putting the new wire on, success!
Now the light on the iron doesn’t light up, but it still gets hot enough to cut foam pretty easily, even on low. On high it can cut slowly through denser stuff, like regular styrene based plastics and clear plastics. Now to make some stuff.
I frikkin’ bled this one out. I wound up with something presentable in the end, but it was a hard journey to get there. The materials resisting me, or me being a drained, uninspired idiot? YOU DECIDE
On another note, I think I have decided what to do for my final project. I want to get started right away because A) it’s ambitious, and B) if I make headway on it I’ll be too committed to back out when I decide it was a stupid, stupid idea and I hate it.
Looks who’s back, back again. It appears as though I will be involved in more ACTLab chicanery, this time in the form of Dream and Delirium. Fancy! I missed Tuesday’s class because my class schedule was still in flux, plus I had to work, but I dropped in on Weird Science today to check things out. Weird Science looks awesome, I may need to pop in to bother them more throughout the semester. I hope D&D is as good. I mean all we did was smack a ball around and play silly games, but dammit that needs to happen more in grad school.
Project 3 is a wrap, as is Extreme Freestyle Hacking. My presentation went very well considering I banged on the instrument pretty randomly. I think I got points for sheer scale, as D.W. horrible Hugborg was about the only thing the towered over it. After the presentations were over I played it some more and got some really nice little melodies out of it by doing some kinda complex patterns, until I fell out of the zone and messed up.
Here’s me trying once again to play the one song I really wanted to play for class. I still can’t seem to get that last part. Happy Holidays everyone!
I have been pretty remiss in updating this website, which is bad, I know. But I have finally settled on the major cause: wordpress is terrible for me to use. I understand it’s supposed to be super easy, but I’m getting absolutely fed up with it. I can’t change the width of my pages, something I could figure out in my sleep with regular html, but can’t do here. I can’t figure out how to update to the latest version of wp because my ftp client won’t delete the old files, and also I can’t backup my current files the way it says to. Everytime I try to get in here and work on this (because it’s, like, a grade), I have to reteach myself every step of it.
Meanwhile, Wordpress is sitting and waving this little “easy” flag around smiling at me and laughing condescendingly at every trip I make. I am being humiliated by a blogging platform. I guess the problem is that I cut my coding teeth on several angelfire websites back in the day, and learned to wrangle html code with my bare hands. It wasn’t fancy, but I could usually get what I wanted through brute force. So now it’s many years past and not only am I dealing with a differnt coding system and different expectations about how a website should and shouldn’t look, but I’m also messing with a system that jerks the website from my big clumsy hands, mumbling “here just let me… idiot, dumbass…” then gives me back a page that still doesn’t do what I want.
For the sake of keeping this somewhat up to date I think I need to just accept the limitations of Wordpress. I don’t have the time to relearn how to make pages when I don’t even know what my second project is.
The fake band project has been seen to completion. In the end, I was not able to produce photos of the fake band playing a fake show at a fake bar (FauxBar, hurr hurr), but I still had a good amount of material to present.
Exhibit A is the myspace page, of course. This page has access to nearly all the material I created for the project, most of it simply being backstory and bogus information. The info names the band members as Malik Vasquez, Vlad Dragos, and Kurt Jaegger, the bio has a blurb about supporting live music, and the show listing has a set of tour dates in fake bars all over the region.
The only thing missing from the page is, of course, music. Myspace allows you put your own music tracks up on your page if you are a band, but Skinny Factory has none. The reason for this is that producing music would actual constitute real content from the band, in which case it would cease to be fake. Bands like the Gorillaz have “virtual” band members who don’t necessarily correspond with real-life counterparts, but they produce albums and even tour. So, conceptually speaking, in order for Skinny Factory to stay a “fake” band, it can’t make any real music. Also, making music is hard and I didn’t have time.
The myspace account also features a blog. Because the list of show dates updates itself according to real dates, the past shows dissappear as their date passes; only upcoming shows are visible to others. Therefore, the only means of creating the evidence of performances like I intended is through bogus pictures (unable to attain thus far), bogus comments from other myspace users (several friends have been very helpful in this regard) blog entries. To this end, after certain “big” shows, I will post a Skinny Parade blog chronicling their experience and how they felt about the show, and what they are looking forward to it. The blogs are written from a group perspective, occassionally mentioning individual members in third person. One would have to assume that one of the band members drags his laptop along with him and speaks on behalf of the band as a whole. It might be rewarding to explore whose voice it is behind the blog and his relationship to the whole.
Another component to Skinny Factory’s fake existence is the groups of photos available through the myspace account. I used an afternoon at work to get photos of my coworkers hanging out in the alley next the building, in the back hallway, and exit stairs. The three are naturally photogenic and a little staging and directing were all it took to make them look like a band. The picture I chose for the main band image is one of the guys standing in the stairwell. I played with the light levels a bit to make it more dramatic, here are the results:
Left to Right: Malik, Vlad and Kurt
Stairway to heaven?
I chose to use one of the other pictures of the band in a hallway for the flier image. The inspiration/guiding principles for the flier came from the copious amount of low quality xeroxed band adverts posted on kiosks and left on countertops all over the city. I took inspiration from Kris Straub’s work on F Chords, a webcomic about a fictional Austin band. Straub invited fans to download and print out his phony flier in whatever town they live in. The Skinny Factory website encourages fans to do the same. Below is the original image, my color manipulation of it, and the final version of the flier:
Original photo
Hideous 90's Alternative Rock coloration
Flier with logo and vague show information
The flier lacks any information about specific chows, serving instead as a sort of advertisement for the website. This is so that the same flier can be put up at any time, anywhere, and not seem out of date or out of place. I gave a number of copies to the band members to circulate downtown, and few went up on campus. Hopefully a few fans out of town will distribute these as well.
That concludes the content created for this project. It was moderately successful, even if it didn’t quite reach my ambitions. I don’t know if I was able to fool anybody in class when I introduced the band as legitimate, since I quickly revealed the scam. Most people who I have shown the site to are in on the project, but there are several friends on myspace who don’t know the band is fake and added them just to be friends. For me, that’s a sign that this project is a success.
I have given the password for the account to the members, and a couple are interested in actually creating music for the myspace page. While this clashes with the conceptual founding of Skinny Factory as a fake band, I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
Acknowledgments: Band members Ted Powers, Julio Fernandez, and Benjamin Haskil, photos by Donovan Gentry
I have just set up my site (via wordpress) on the ACTLab server and I am tweaking the theme and stuff as we speak. Wordpress feels like my natural element now that I’m here, accessing the server was the big hurdle. Of course I don’t really have anything to put up here yet, seeing as how I’m one of those people who have no idea what their first project is yet, but hey, it’s a start.
