The Artist and the Nightwatchman

I just posted a full animatic of my thesis project, The Artist and the Nightwatchman, over on the Animation page. It shows the full scope of the project with scenery rendered in Cinema 4D, and characters animated in Photoshop. All music and voice work was done by me, although some of the sound effects came from other sources. The next step is to model and animate the characters themselves, and then we should be ready to roll.

If, for whatever reason, the video above does not show – you can visit it here.

Exercises in 3D Animation

I’ve been working on some motion graphics for my portfolio by following some tutorials over at Greyscalegorilla. There are more to come, but I have two to post now. Each took a few hours of solid work to get to their current state which, admittedly, is still far from perfect.

I used sound effectors in my first video to make some orbs react to music, kind of like the iTunes or Winamp equalizers and visualizers do. The song is “Transpose” by Emalkay. It seemed like a good idea to use some dubstep for some reason. The redder and (in most cases) larger orbs on the left indicate the bass channels, while the cooler blue orbs on the right represent treble.

In the second video I used cloners, tracers, and a randomizer to build a walking human figure out small rectangular prisms. It’s hard to tell, because I set the animation speed too low, but the small wisps are moving around, slowly building up the figure. The song is “Brainfeeder” by Flying Lotus.

Like I said, there will be more coming soon. These are just some preliminary exercises. I’m also working on an animated storyboard for my graduate thesis, which I hope to post sometime soon.

Social Activism in Folk Music

“A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is or who’s out of work and where the job is or who’s broke and where the money is or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.”  ~ Woody Guthrie

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I recently taught an abbreviated class for adults on the impact of social activism on American roots music, and vice versa. I was able to accumulate a vast library of audio and video while doing research, and decided to translate the class into a podcast for consumption on a much larger scale. It will be available here, on my site, completely free of charge.

Learn about some of the most exciting times in history, and how we used music to rise above and beyond and achieve equality for all (and by “all” I mean “most”). We talk about the Hutchinson Family Singers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, right on up through the folk-revival during the civil rights movement and beyond. Learn about the history of protest music and the future of protest music, right here in these easily digested episodes featuring full musical performances and recordings.

You can see my page for the podcast by clicking on the logo above, or following this link. Enjoy!

What is Contemporary Art?

A professor of mine recently encouraged me to read a section from the e-flux journal double issue about the nature of contemporary art.

Some very interesting questions are raised, and answers are sought out (if not always directly found). The term itself, “contemporary”, is a slippery one. The introduction, written by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle raises some interesting (and some scathing) points.

“When there are no longer any artistic movements, it seems that we are all working under the auspices of this singular ‘-ism’ that is deliberately (and literally) not one at all.” For them, contemporary is “…a term we know well enough through its use as a de facto standard by museums, which denote their currency through an apparently modest temporal signifier.” The seeming meaninglessness of the term contemporary becomes evident. “With this shift,” they continue, “out go the grand narratives and ideals of modernism, replaced by a soft consensus on the immanence of the present, the empiricism of now.” The entirety of the introduction is not so bleak, however. They finish by saying that even though it is a meaningless signifier, its use in everyday art vocabulary means it must have some kind of significance.

There is also an article in this book, written by Cuauhtemoc Medina, that expounds eleven theses on the subject of “contemporary art.” Some noteworthy points include the idea that the contemporary exists to mark the end of the modernist movement. The term itself, contemporary, is an absolutely oxymoronic term that signifies a point in time, when time continues to move. “The hunger to be part of the global art calendar has more to do with the hope of keeping up with the frenzy of time than with any actual aesthetic pursuit or interest.” The arts are no longer separate disciplines, but rather “a single multifarious and nomadic kind of practice that forbids any attempt at specification.” And, finally, that the goal of contemporary art is to protect cultural critique and social radicalism from the “banality of the present.”

A Visit to 5Pointz

I recently took a trip down to Long Island City to see the infamous 5Pointz graffiti haven. I was lucky enough, while I was there, to meet the man behind the location: Meres One. It was a morning well-spent, and I have a lot of great photos to show for it.


It’s just a reminder that art doesn’t need much in order to flourish. A blank wall, a backpack full of spray-paint. Some of these mural pieces were more impactful and colorful than anything you could see in a museum. I think that there is a very good reason for that, also. Sure, graffiti comes from a tradition of being egotistical and having attitude; but the art-form itself comes from very humble beginnings. You don’t need an MFA to make art. Hell, you don’t even need to graduate High School.

Check out the whole album here.

Matteo Pugliese’s ‘Extra Moenia’

I’m not exactly sure what Matteo Pugliese had in mind when sculpting these figures, but I know how they they make me feel. Pugliese calls these his Extra Moenia, which I believe is Italian for ‘outside the walls’. There are no complete figures here, the forms emerge from the wall as if breaking free from what’s holding them back.

Pugliese is not a classically trained sculptor, although you wouldn’t know it from looking at his work. He has a remarkable grasp on the human form. The surfaces themselves are scratched and pockmarked with scars and defects, tributes to the imperfections of man and the fallibility of the human experience.

As I said earlier, I do not know if my explanation of the purpose of these pieces coincides with Pugliese’s, but I do not think it matters. Such is the beauty of art-making and art-appreciation, there is rarely a correct (or incorrect) answer. These sculptures speak of escape, of breaking away from, of deliverance and liberation.

Philip Barlow’s Blurred Reality

Barlow uses oils to explore the behavior of light on different surfaces. Abstracted and blurred, in an out-of-focus kind of way, his work is far more about light than it is about form.

Which poses an interesting question? What is painting, if not the exploration of different kinds of light rendered on different kinds of surface. What is sight, if not light reacting with the color cones in our eyes? Is it the moment our cones react with incoming light, or is it when the signals reach our brain, that we truly see?

Philip lives in Cape Town, South Africa, where he used to be known for his large public murals. These, however, feel more like Impressionism than anything else. We get hints, not facts. Everything else is left up to us to figure out. What is going on in the scenes? What’s the stories behind the subjects? What are they in the process of doing?