Fall Quarter at Cal Poly

Its been a while since I talked with all of you so i figured i'd say hi on the blogspot. Ian i have been looking at some of those pictures on facebook from Italy and they look awesome, i cant figure out whether its a climbing trip or just a general vacation but either way it looks fun! I am actually planning a trip with some friends to Europe for this summer. I think we will start and end in Portugal and go around in a general circle. There is this teacher I have now that lives in Munich and when I visit he is taking me up in a sailplane to fly around Germany for free! pretty excited about that.

Lets see, i guess the big news for me these days is that i just got a new snowboard/bindings/boots. i think you would all agree its about time, what with the 8 year old clip in setup i was using. I actually ended up getting the skate banana you were telling me about last season Ian, and got the 09 model at like 20% off so that makes me happy. now i am just waiting for the white stuff.

Also, during the summer i went on a houseboating trip that I dont know if i told any of you about or not. that was so much fun, it was at lake shasta and man did i enjoy it. I don't know how i never wakeboarded before this summer but damn is it fun.

I suppose the last big thing is that I am teaching an aerospace class right now. it is pretty weird giving lectures/HW/tests but overall its pretty easy money.

Oh ya i forgot, that plane we designed last year won the national design competition so thats cool. we get a cash prize that im basically using on lift tickets this year! It was a cropduster that we named the Spraying Mantis.






Sorry I dont have new pretty pictures, haha boring engineer? oh well, i will try to get something interesting next time.

Anyone going to Boise for Thanksgiving/Christmas? Also i am doing a trip to Tahoe probably around New Years and possibly earlier in Dec. also, let me know if anyone is interested!

Interning

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So here are some drawings of the project I am working on now. I am interning at Erstad Architects here in the Boise which is one of the better firms around. I am designing a natural history museum to go out in Albertsons College of Idaho. Its pretty sweet, I am sole designer and get to give presentations and crazy stuff like that to big wigs and such.

The building is all underground and the entrance pops up out of the ground like a beacon drawing people in. There are also a series of sky lights to bring in light to the underground as well as define the public space above for people to hang out and stuff.

What is really sweet about all this is that Im getting paid to doodle with markers and play around. Also hope all is well in good ol montana and i will hope to be there soon.

Lantern Installation

For my May Term class I did Special Projects for Art which essentially means I got to make up a class and get 3 credits for doing whatever I wanted. I've been on a paper kick for a while now, and doing it with recycled paper always seemed important in terms of being able to be mindful of the sustainability factor that is involved with paper production. I did a presentation on handmade paper in my Senior Seminar class and then started thinking that it would be neat to do more with the topic. Once I started brainstorming the idea of lanterns as a visual display of what's possible with recycled paper came to mind, so I began the process of conceptualizing just how this could work.




In the end I decided that I would make handmade paper from recycled paper around campus and use the paper to make lanterns with the project ultimately culminating in an installation somewhere around campus so that people could see what I had been working on and what you can do with recycled paper. As I reflect on this now that it's over, making paper and lanterns might have been a bit of an ambitious task. I think just focusing on paper would have been a bit more practical, considering this is the first experience I really have working with handmade paper, but as it is things turned out alright. I struggled to figure out what the structures for the lanterns would be, experimenting with wire and wood from the sculpture lab, but found myself frustrated with the inorganic shapes I was coming up with. Eventually it hit me that working with sticks and branches and using the forms that they naturally created made much more sense with the feel of the entire project than anything else I was trying. So I began gathering sticks and branches, tying them together in cube and teepee-like shapes and then tried to figure out how the paper element would come into play.




I worked with various methods, sometimes molding the wet paper around the structures and sometimes working with dry paper, often sewing it to the frames. I ended up with about 12 lanterns, 3 fairly large (anywhere from 4 feet to 7 feet tall) and the rest smaller (about a foot each). The installation was held last night in a small courtyard that is sheltered in one of the buildings on campus. While it threatened to rain all night, and sprinkled and various times, it was a huge success, with the lanterns as well as other candles providing a perfect atmosphere for people to take a moment to just be together as we all pack up to leave.

MY PROJECT

After all of my traveling I realized that what usually takes all semester to design, I had to do in a week.  So I haven't slept in 3 days and won't for 2 more but things are coming together. 

 So here are two shots of my project for this semester.  The project is a hotel/museum on a really large site.  Lots of square feet and tons of space.

--CENSORED--

Well they've finally done it. After much discussion and unnecessary drama I've officially been censored by Goshen College via the art department. I can't say I didn't see it coming, but there was a small, small part of me that hoped they would pull through. Alas, graduation weekend and the infamous constituency ultimately posed too great of a problem when my nude silhouettes got involved.





Ironically enough, the underlying theme of my final project was the fact that women throughout history (especially biblical women, my chosen subject matter) have been silenced and have been unable to tell their own stories. I attempted to explain this in my meeting, and I think they understood it well enough, but apparently it still doesn't overshadow the fact that someone's grandmother walking through the Leaf Raker (where the show would have been) might be offended by a naked woman holding a sword (or what have you). I was initially frustrated mainly with the art department, with the people that were supposed to support my creative endeavors and help me grow, but my anger has since shifted to the general fact that this is even happening. After a long discussion with one of my profs, I'm not really holding it against the art department, because I think they would honestly like me to be able to do whatever I want. It's just another brilliant example of how far we still have to go (we=the Mennonite church, people in general, etc etc etc) before we reach a place where we are truly comfortable with ourselves and others.

My first impulse was to say fuck you and put up empty frames with quotes about censorship, but upon a bit more thought I decided this was more a creative speed bump, a beautiful illustration of what I'm trying to make a point about, and a good opportunity to further my message. So, I matted quotes about censorship and women and silence and any number of things that would get people thinking but that also still fit with the project in terms of display. They did so graciously allow me to put up the one image that is clothed, so the quotes are surrounding that piece, and there's a note alluding to the rest of the series in the art building (their alternative space option). I'm still fairly frustrated but I suppose this is a good lesson in picking your battles and being aware of who you're working with.

I guess this is just a good reminder that it's time to get out of here, that wasting my energy on conservative Mennonites is fairly unproductive, and that all of this is really neither here nor there because the first nude silhouette I did (gold background, crazy halo) got accepted into the juried student show that goes in the actual gallery, so really I win in the end.

a lovely day in the neighborhood

yesterday i only had one class and the day was perfect. Me and the big brown Turd went for a short run down to the park, well i got pulled on my longboard. I had my friends camera, a HOLGA, and a roll of Velia 100. i under exposed by my best estimate by a stop. the Holga doesn't have a meter system and only f/11 Cloudy, and f/16 Sunny and a shutter speed of 1/125 or bulb. i shot at f/11 and 1/125 on a sunny day. When i got them developed i did whats called a cross processing which is doing a E-6 process film with c-41 chemistry. it adds contrast and super saturated colors. these photos are straight off a scan and i have done nothing with them yet so any input would be great.
hope things are good with everyone.

Installation part deux

So, after my first installation, I got real excited about getting onto a bigger scale and effecting more people at once so I started looking for ideas.  The perfect place was right in front of our studios in a large concrete open space with a building on one side, and a bunch of light wells on the other.  Nobody ever used the space, and I always liked it and wanted to sit there so it was on.

What was missing was a roof, and a sense of enclosure for people to think that they should go there and actually stay there.  So after lots of ideas came and went, we finally settled on balloons.  We would create a roof out of balloons some how.  It could have been helium and a big net or lots of strings on the ground forming a grid, and all sorts of other things.  I finally came up with the idea of rigging a structure of fishing line from the building on one side and the light wells on the other and having it touch down on the ground on specific spots as to denote where people should congregate.  Then after the structure was set, we would infill it with balloons.

You can see the fish line there just barely.

So we set about doing it and there was lots of climbing on buildings and scaling things to tie the line to random places.  All the lines connected to eachother and made a very complex and spontaneous 3d spider web.  We had no specific plan for where each line went, but as we went along and were stringing them up, we could pull the whole thing in the directions we wanted and such.  

Then we got an air compressor and blew up 2,000 balloons and tied them as long strings together on pieces of fishing line, which could then be put up between the facets created by the spider web structure.  many hours and lots of balloons and air later, we had gotten most of them up, and realized we needed more balloons, so we went back and bought 1,000 more to finish off the whole thing.  

Then we set up lots of spotlights above the floating mass to light them up and create as surreal of an environment as possible.  The variations in brightness and shadow was great, and made it feel like you were under water or something.  People called them fish eggs, clouds, cotton balls, and all sorts of other things.

To top it all off, a bunch of our friends played jazz for us and we brought a bunch of food and booze for everyone to enjoy while existing in our newly created world.  It took 3,000 balloons, about 30 people, one night and one day, and only one wild idea to make it work.

So i know i haven't been the best about keeping up with this blog but all the stuff i have been up to is analog so in order for me to post i have to scan and then deal with all that shit. I just haven't had the time but in the next week or so I'm planning on doing a lot of scanning and will have a bunch of stuff for every one to see. This are just a couple of things i shot while i was bored the other night. I grab the camera and just sat in the bathroom for about and hour taking a bunch of random shit. Let me know what you think. I'm not sure if there my favorite but there is something about them that is real and connects to me in a way that i cant explain, anyways.


These next photos are a couple that were taken over Christmas break in Jackson Hole, you should have been there Olen, +12" everyday and blue bird skies every morning, not to mention all the great back country skiing you could want. Anyways, the first to were published in a local ski mag here in town and the others were just a few i liked. the picture of the mountain is call Fraser Peak. The left couloir is call Red Couloir and was skied by me and Scott earlier this season. it was amazing.






Ill try to keep up a little better with this for now on and hope everything is going well in the other 3 corners of the world.

Installation round 1

I am now obsessed with installations and making spaces and things to effect people in some environment.  My group that I started FISHBOWL has let me get these things done.  Our first installation was a battle with the school to rip back an old cafe that was just being used for storage.  So we had some arguments with everybody, and eventually got some sort of control over it.  

So we painted the horrible red and blue walls a ridiculous lime green that has become related to our group as a starter, added new light fixtures, and would then implement our new environment into the room.  The actual space would be shaped by an object to be built in the room which consisted of multiple ribbons that could oscillate up and down parallel to each other to create seats, tables, walls, and all sorts of other pieces that we needed to make the space what we wanted.  It would be from wall to wall and sort of fit in like carpet filling the space and creating our space while at the same time not being attached to anything because one of the stipulations was that we could not do anything permanent (sucks).  It would be made up of plywood strips braced with 2x4s to make them sturdy.  Along with the insert and the painted walls was going to consist of large format stencil murals on the walls, and a series of these amazing ornate frames we found in a dumpster full of student work and the like.  The result would be a spot for everyone to hang out in, and to have pin ups and reviews in the space making it good for everyone, and bringing in a little modern love to the otherwise overly shit brick college campus feel.

So we ran into a brick wall when the interim dean found out that we had sanded, primed, and painted these horrible orange wood veneer island pieces in the middle of the room.  He claimed they were expensive Italian veneer, even though they looked like shit and were all sorts of worn down.  He made us stop everything and believe it or not, sand all the shit off the island pieces taking the paint off to reveal the original veneer even more crap like due to the paint and everything.  So this took us a hell of a long time and made us all beyond pissed because we had been spending all our time to improve the space, and the up and ups were shitting on our parade. 

Then we were forbidden from doing anything else to the space.  No murals, frames, and definitely no insert so we had to reorganize.  We were decidedly against just giving up, and there was a big speech the next day from one of our school donors in the courtyard, so we made our stand.  We built an exact replica of the insert that was supposed to be put in the room out in the courtyard where they had set up for the speech.  We waited until everyone was gone at night, and then went to work.  We frantically attacked the structure like guerilla architects.  We had spraipainted our FSHBWL logo on it and also the words SHOP CAFE NO. 2 as well as 1:1 SCALE MODEL on it to really get our point across.  Luckily enough, right as the sun was rising and we saw the first professor approaching we finished up and took all our tools with us fleeing the scene.

So we go home, take showers, and come back for studio and the speech to precede it.  As we show back up, we come upon the donor giving his speech from on top of our object.  Sweet revenge.  As he finished up, we headed to the front to explain to him what he was standing on and he absolutely loved it.  Our dean walked up, and said that this was a great example of what architecture students should be doing, right in front of the man who put the kibosh on our plans the night before.  

That night, we threw a party on the object much to everyone's great enjoyment and enjoyed watching people using the thing the exact way that we had planned.  There is something about watching people use what you design that just cannot be felt any other way.  The thing stayed there all semester and although we never got permission to put it in the cafe, it was used by people every day and made the courtyard into a better space that we could have seen.  I was well on my way to influencing people's spaces.