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. 

Classic.

So I found this Fabulous red coat at Salvation Army over the weekend. It has quite possibly the largest collar in the world, and is more phenomenal than i could possibly put into words. Needless to say, it necessitated a photo project. If I were forced to pick one color scheme to use forever, it would be some combination of black and red.

I've also become somewhat obsessed with portraits. There's something about taking an image of just one person in a quiet, still moment. It's so incredibly personal and raw, it almost feels like a little bit of a risk each time because there's this chance you won't be able to do them justice, but you do it anyway because of the small possibility that you might get something perfect.

The MARS VOLTA

So I took a weekend to hop over to Germany to catch a Mars Volta concert.  It was a fun trip full of weiners and beersteins.  The concert was fanfuckintastic.  They rock like oldschool bands of the 60s and 70s.  The lead singer would hop off of everything and ended up throwing the drummer's symbols off stage and almost toppling over the speaker system.  Enjoy the video

the MARS VOLTA in Germany

I like colors

These are some of the most incredible ads i've ever seen.  The first one has fireworks made of actual paint believe it or not.  The bunnies one is actual stop frame animation with clay bunnies and hundreds of extras.  Everything is real in these, no doctoring the footage, just lots of awesomeness.  I don't know which is my favorite, they are all amazing.  

Sony Bravia Paint Ad

sony bravia

Sony Bravia

Sony Bravia Pyramid

FSHBWL

Greetings all from the fashion boot of the world.  I just wanted to catch you guys up on some of the things I have been getting up to in the past year or so.  It came from a need to do something out of school that let me start making stuff and getting it out there, I was tired of designing with no manifestations.  

So, last year I started a magazine and an organization that let me do whatever I wanted.  It started with a friend and I, and evolved into about 30 or 40 friends who all put our kickass-ness together to make a magazine, installations around our campus, and who knows what in the future (we have big plans).   We call ourselves FISHBOWL, and its random, but I like it.

We put out our magazine called MEANS for the first time in the spring semester of 2007 and have our next one coming out this semester.  It was the first publication to come out of our school in 10 years and was better than we could have expected.  We put out 5,000 copies which were sold in multiple book stores, sent to all the architecture schools in the US, mailed to incoming freshman, given to our Architectural Guild, and many other things.  

We kicked it off with a large public revealing of the magazine  hosted at a prominent designer chair company KNOLL's showroom and had upwards of 300 people show up with our dean and numerous architects from the LA area among them.  It was a hit around the school, seen everywhere for weeks,  and we gained some sway in the up and up in the faculty as well as gained some infamy for evading the school's power and doing it ourselves.  So now its time for the second issue, and we are in the process of putting it all together.  We are editing and designing and all that fun stuff at this very moment.  It will be put out by the end of April or May and hopefully it will top the last one.  Here are a few of the possible layouts we have been working on at the moment. The asian man is our dean. 

If you want to get an issue, let me know and give me an address, and as soon as I am back in the US, I will get my 

hands on some and send them your way.  It is a great little shiny black book of fun full of great stuff and the mistakes of 

people putting together a magazine for the first time because really, we had no idea what we were doing.  Strangely enough, when you get a bunch of smart people together doing stuff, people will throw money at you, and we raised $12,000 to get us on our way through just asking for it and selling our magazine.  So go out there make something, and take the people's money, they want to give it to you.

Uberman

Well hello friends, i figure its about time to check in and say hello from San Luis. Lately life here has been a terrible bender of sleep deprivation and bleary-eyed motorcycle rides. As you may or may not know I am taking the senior design classes for aeronautics here and we are designing an unmanned cropduster over the course of the year.

Also, i just got into the graduate program here and am taking 3 grad classes this quarter, all of which have worked together to thoroughly pound me into the dirt by about now. There is some interesting work, we are laying up some carbon fiber composites, and designing a Mach 15 air/space plane (which is not what you see on the left, thats the lame slow boring cropduster) , but the department is painfully disorganized. Oh and theres a picture below of the cad model for that formula style racecar weve been working on.

Last weekend I went to Georgia and stayed in downtown Atlanta for the weekend for my cousins' wedding, which was a blast. Basically it was a family reunion for my dad's side of the family and I got a chance to get hammered with all my uncles and hit golf balls off the 10th story hotel balcony. One of my dad's brothers who I hadn't ever gotten to know turns out is a pretty interesting guy. He has a pot leaf tattooed on his shin and had some interesting stories about being in and out of jails.

Other news, remember Ashley from that night at the bars? Ian might know, but turns out i have been talking to her pretty much every day since i left Btown and long story short we are having a strange long distance relationship kind-of thing. She and Brenna should be moving to SF sometime soon so that will be better, and I can keep an eye on the young Cavanaugh.

By the way i'd like to recap the last couple weeks just to give you a better idea of how i have been sleeping. Beginning 2 sundays ago at 7:30 AM until Thurs. that week I clocked 6 hours of sleep, then got lucky and had 4 hours Thurs night before my 6AM flight to GA. During the weekend I was on CA time so i didnt go to sleep till 4:30 each night and was open-bar-drunk for both. Then last sunday I wake up, fly home with 2 hours of sleep on the plane and pull 2 all nighters in the lab ending the second one with a 2 hour nap before a full day of classes.

This brings me to the post title "Uberman". It's a sleep schedule where you sleep for 20 minutes every 4 hours around the clock, netting roughly 2 total hours of sleep each day. I'm planning on trying this out, i think after spring break (which is in 2 weeks). So far from what I've read people that succeed in breaking past the first week of exhaustion swear by this method, so we shall see.... :) more info here: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=892542&lastnode_id=124

Blogging is strange, but better than staring at computer code.

silhouette

i love nude silhouettes. seriously. this one reminds me of all the virgin with crazy halo pictures i keep seeing in art history, only not quite.