tiny gigantic

Our friends at the vega project have just launched their new blog, red pill. Go give ‘em some love.

My mother, of all people, sent me this really smart anti-gun ad.

For some reason, this awesome ad for the X-box got pulled, while game ads showing a swastika hanging from the statue of liberty are running rampant on primetime tv. Um. Does that seem backwards to anyone else?

A few days ago I ran into an old acquaintance who also works in the creativity business. He said he’d heard that I’d started a studio. Was that true? I said yes.

Then, he looked me in the face and said, “So, what’s it about? Give me your elevator pitch.”

Now, up until that point I had been genuinely happy to see this person, and this request kinda ruined that a little, because it meant he wanted a neatly packaged sound-byte, one that had been scripted, and used many times before. He didn’t want the story of how I spend my days. He wasn’t interested in conversation.

Another story:
This weekend, I met a girl in a bar (no, not that kind of girl). She asked what I do. And because explaining what I do requires a real, honest-to-goodness conversation with someone who may or may not get it anyway, I shrugged and hemmed and hawed and then said, ” It’s sort of hard to talk about. But basically I run a design studio.”
“What kind of design?”
“Communication.”
Then there was a pause, which I tried to fill by saying, “See? Now we have to have a conversation.”

What happened next surprised me: she looked me in the face, and said, “Yes, let’s.”

Here was a person who was willing to spend time learning about me. She didn’t want the short version that she could immediately fit into the pre-existing file tab in her head and then promptly forget. She wanted the one with all the nuance, with all the interesting bits, the one that she could actually engage with.

See, here’s what I mean: An elevator pitch is meant for people who don’t really care. A conversation is for people willing to invest some time to understand the value of what you do. Who would you rather work with?

This is fucking awesome. But here’s a question: why does a sandwich shop somewhere in the mid-west need “viral” videos?

No matter. It’s an example of a kind of generosity marketing that we should all follow: make cool stuff and give it to people for free and the world will take care of you.

So I’ve been wondering about inspiration lately: where to find it, how to use it, and how to maintain it. You could argue that finding it is the easy part—as long as you’re paying attention as you make your way out in the world, there’s a million things that might inspire you.

But do you know when inspiration’s lacking, and you need to fill up? Do you have specific places you look? Do you alternate those places? Are you conscious of the places you find inspiration and the things you’re then inspired to do?

Go watch this beautiful beautiful animation made of paper. And yes, according to the site, each frame is really a hand-cut sheet of paper.

This is one of the weirdest ways of doing business in the Information Age I’ve come across in a while. I can’t even tell if it’s real or not.

From the company’ site:

A death switch is information insurance. Don’t die with secrets that need to be free.

Fucking freaky.

There’s some pretty cool prints over at Junkyard Sam. And they smell all good and inky when they arrive in the mail too! Check ‘em.

Wow. Don’t you just want one? I’d love to how many of these sold.

Found at It’s Nice That.

Whoa.

Using recorded brainwave activity and eye movements during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep to determine robot behaviors and head positions, “Sleep Waking” acts as a way to “play-back” dreams.

Thanks to We Make Money Not Art.

Thank You Too thanks everyone for the little things. It’s a great little project that I should have thought of first. Dammit!

Mark Khaisman makes art using nothing but brown packing tape and light. What I love most about this is that somebody is thinking this way about making art. And yeah, they’re pretty cool lookin too.

Another fantastic ImprovEverywhere project. In this one, more than 200 people freeze in place at the exact same moment in Grand Central Station. Enjoy.

So our good friends at five and a half are doing this sweet project, called The Postcard Says. You all should participate because it’s nice and simple and human and will make you feel good. Here’s how:

E-mail us@fiveandahalf.net

with “postcard please” in the subject header

and your mailing address in the message.

In a week or two, you’ll find a postcard from us in your mailbox, with a fun little task to do. When you’re done (and this is all we ask of you), take a photo of your completed activity and e-mail it back to us so we can post it online (anonymously if you wish).

What do we hope you’ll get from this? A cool postcard, a laugh when you see the task we thought up for you, and the act of doing a not-so-ordinary task that gets your mind thinking in a different way.

Okay? Okay.

Troika was asked to create a piece to mark the entrance to British Airway’s new luxury lounges at Heathrow. Beautiful.

In response, we created ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture. Flip-dots were conventionally used in the 70s and 80s to create signs in train-stations and airports. We were fascinated by their materiality, by the way they physically flip from one side to the other. The sound they generate is also instantly reminiscent of travel, and we therefore decided to explore their aesthetic potential in ‘Cloud’.

Link.

via boingboing.

You’ve probably heard of wingsuit base jumping before. But this, this made me feel all kinds of funny.

From the Daily Mail article:

“…the ‘Temples of Damanhur’ are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.

The first time the police came it was over alleged tax evasion and still the temples lay undiscovered. But a year later the police swooped on the community demanding: “Show us these temples or we will dynamite the entire hillside.”

Stunned by what they had found, the authorities decided to seize the temples on behalf of the government.”

Link.

via boingboing.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to the MFA Writing students at California College of the Arts. I’d been asked there to talk about how they could use their newly-honed writing skills to make a living in the world. I’d done a similar talk for the entire undergraduate classes a few weeks before, in which we talked about publication technology, about how to be generous rather than proprietary, and about the idea that what they understood as writing, the act of laying words down one after the other, was only a very small part of what writing actually is. Consequently, they’d all bought into the idea that there are only a few things you can do with your writing degree:

You can teach.
Sure, it’s fun and interesting and you get to be around writing and writers all the time. Problem is, this means that your world stays small, because everyone’s practicing the same discipline. There’s not much opportunity for newness. And unless you’re very dedicated and very prolific, you’ll spend more time reading student papers and writing comments, than writing whatever it is you want to write. There’s no job security, you’re getting paid almost nothing, you’re competing with your colleagues—hell, you might as well work at a coffee shop and continue to work on that novel. Oh yes, I tried my luck as a teacher—that didn’t go so well.

You can scrape by in obscurity hoping for the big break.
Sheeeit. It’s a romantic notion, no doubt. But there’s not that many people out there who have the balls or the talent to pull it off. This is not to say that if you believe you can do it, that you shouldn’t. I’m only saying that it’s hard as fuck. At least it was for me.

You can get into publishing.
Which means you’re not gonna be writing that much. Unless writing rejection letters is your thing, you’ll be spending time reading and copyediting—not a bad way to spend the day no doubt, but it isn’t writing, not even the way the graduate students understand it, and certainly not the way it should be understood.

These three directions—teacher, starving artist, editor—are the only ready-made avenues available to someone with a writing degree. The thing is, they’re not the only ways to go. Not by a long shot. There’s a whole universe of careers you can create for yourself if you try. It’s just much harder to actually figure out what it is you want to do with your time, than it is to choose from a list of options. It’s hard because it takes courage and confidence and imagination. It’s hard because no one can know you like you know yourself and so no one can do it for you.

Here’s why I’m writing this:

During the conversation, one of the students said: “so I’ll have this degree soon. Then what do I do?” This was the question of the day, the reason I’d been asked to come speak. The weird part was that when I responded by asking her what it was she actually wanted to do, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “yeah.” And that was the end of it. As if the question, as trite as it sounds, were too big to even go about trying to answer. It’s a big fucker, no doubt. But it’s also the way to greatness.

Finding your path has very little to do with your resume, and everything to do with knowing yourself a little better every day.