collaboration – IT IN Place

7 Spades

alex — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 18:38:53 +0000

Here is an animated gif of a sort of Palimpsest I made with a card Double_You mailed me from London. It was a seven of spades. I threw in some collage from the last time we drew IRL in Paris. Now I think I’m meant to mail it back to him? But first some digital collage below:

Closer

alex — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:38:44 +0000

Music video for Donald Johnson’s song, “Closer.” Recorded By Javier Hernadez-Miyares at his Rego Park Studio. I like to call it the Rego Ragga. The instrument you see at the beginning is a small Indian made synthesizer that is used to play Sitar and tabla against etc. It fills in for those weird squeezebox and crank driven drones that are used in Indian music to such wonderful effect. Javier likes to collect all sorts of odd little synths and electronic noise makers I thought this one would work well with the “Eastern” sound of this song, while still being contemporary…. plus I thought switching it on would make a good beginning and ending of a shot.

Storyboard: Cage

alex — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 17:10:57 +0000

I drew these with a sharpie on a big piece of paper as a sort of basic storyboard to guide us in chopping up Cage footage. Click on image to see it larger.

UU Baazaar

alex — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 01:10:07 +0000

,.
Some more digtital collabs with UU… in honor of fashion week I guess?

The Other Night At Barbès

alex — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 17:38:32 +0000

The other night I was home alone and bored with drawing on the computer and bored with all manner of other digital media distractions and most importantly, bored with being alone. I became nostalgic for Paris. So inspired by the recent and past collabs with UU, I decided to grab the old Montmartre valise of magic (drawing supplies and paper scraps,etc.) and head out to a local spot I haven’t haunted in a while, Barbes. There to make a mess with ink and paper and people and the ultimate solvent: alcohol. Tango music filled the air as I made some scribbles. It was a nice time and today I am playing with the drawings and thinking about how mixing up video images and digital drawing for Willoughby could be as fun and sort of familiar as making Café Collages, or whatever you call those things I’ve been doing on books and maps and scraps since at least Paris and then Galapagos back in ’97 or 8 I think? Still, it seems important to keep people and place and paper involved at least on a conceptual level.

In other news, it seems official that I will be doing a residency at 17 Frost from November 3 Through the end of the Year! This will be a multimedia installation for the project we’ve been collaborating on since last summer, CAGE.

Mexican Standoff

alex — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 21:58:02 +0000

More Collabs with UU

Digital Doubleyouing.

alex — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 17:36:16 +0000

While not as fun as drawing in a cafe in Paris, Double You and I are starting to play with the notion of digitally collaborating. This may lead to a series of limited edition digital prints with an international crew of artists… or maybe we’ll just have to go back to Paris:

Greetings From England

alex — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:44:25 +0000

A heart stencil from the found Left Bank Paris card. UU wishing the ugly American a happy birthday from London.

Talk To Charlie

alex — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:06:19 +0000

Card Game

alex — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:25:03 +0000

Library project alum dou_ble_you is all set to meet up in Paris to do some cafe card drawing, etc. Here is his ten of hearts start with my portrait of him from imagination.

Bitter Sweet

alex — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:27:08 +0000

Played this mashup edit along with the original movie last night at Frost. I may play some more with it some more but right now is a sort of fluxus collage.

Wyld Bites

alex — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:43:32 +0000

In what feels like a flow of collaborative energy, I spent yesterday editing some footage shot by Dave Scarborough from my opening party of The Royal Wylds playing 17 Frost Street. I quite enjoy how the talking head sometimes seems to synch with Will Croxton’s vocals. A great software program would be to take the thousand head man and build a audio sensitive logarithm that could fit the face to certain key vowel and consonant sounds in speech so that the head would be like a giant Wizard of Oz and would synch up behind the singer, or comic, or performer, or whatever. Oh if I knew anything about computers I’d do it. But even in this ambient accidental method, it’s a pretty funny trick. Later that afternoon I played with some of Akaash’s tapes on the floor: letting them and the tiles dictate some abstract gestures, etc. I’m hoping he’ll swing by and work into it. Ironing out details on the closing party. More on that later.

The Addictions

alex — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:09:40 +0000

So I’m back. The better half is back and sleeping has become less an act of rolling around in lonesome sheets till sunrise and more like, you know, sleeping. The screening is done and I was happy with the narrative arc of the pieces together as a group. I feel like I’ve been composing about a half hour stream of consciousness narrative over the last two, or three years in video. I have composed it all out of sequence and semi unconsciously and every time I do a screening (which is more and more frequent) I try to take the opportunity to chip away the extraneous bits and get to the core themes and images. I get closer and my present feeling is that I will have to overlap and edit the present sequence into a more coherent and shorter whole… Or Mash it up into a two channel diptych which worked beautifully at Monkeytown several months ago. Speaking of Mash ups, My favorite part of the weekend was hearing David Scarborough play some of his songs. He has appeared in cameo on several of the Frost Vlog videos helping me hang the big paintings, etc. I knew he sang, but it’s always nice when someone exceeds your expectations. At some point I did some timelapses of him playing (and his wife watching the whole set, sitting at his feet in what has to be the most romantic tableau I’ve seen in months). After we got the video equipment set up on Saturday night and after we’d had a few beers, I shot a video of him on my little flip cam singing in front of my animations. It was strange how the song and the pictures seemed to collide in happy tragedies.

Further Forward

alex — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:50:07 +0000

Frosted

alex — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:29:15 +0000

Frost Gallery (Sneak peak at Alex Itin show- Opening 1-30-09) from M Niro on Vimeo.
Maria stopped by Frost Street on Friday and we listened to Afromantra rehearse and drank some red wine and shot some video.

Jackard Male

alex — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:26:15 +0000

Greetings came in the post from Belgium by way of fripsmailart.blogspot.com/. This just as I was prepping my first found card (a Jack of Spades) to send off in a new mail art project I’m starting with DoubleYou in London. This one we might call Art Poker, Or Art Gin, Or Art Cards, or Art Shuffle or…. well we haven’t named it yet. It consists of finding a playing card in the street… something I do and collect because if it’s playful randomness… I mean how is it that you will sometimes find a random card on the sidewalk? It’s like finding a single shoe… Cinderalla of the game world. So the idea is that you alter this card in some way and then send it off to another artist to finish, or alter again and mail on… Could be interesting…. Shuffling the deck around the world as it were.

Opportunity Frost Bit

alex — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:02:04 +0000

Knocked up another large paper and ink drawing at Frost Street and then Alex, the drummer for Sine Parade showed up to practice his drums in the theater. Christ can that guy drum. My neighbor’s kid is back from college and so even at home I am living with drums all the time and then the pile drivers banging away next door at the construction site… Rhythm of life is banging on and i’m trying to bang out some paintings. I did a diptych with gloss enamel and painter’s caulk on some old oil paintings I found in the trash a few months back. I like to build my dreams on the broken dreams of others…It’s the American way….LOL weep LOL.

Also I’ve been playing with installation and making new works to tie up the old works. The skull is my memento mori I made on day one… it is a painter’s tradition to make a death painting to guard the studio from death… like a gargoyle or a feng shuai mirror….or a pug dog, or a gun, or whatever.

Visiting

alex — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:53:00 +0000

While the blog was down, Justin Ho visited from Minnesota and I showed him around New York on a couple of long photo Safaris. Here are a couple of vids we made together. Two years ago we collaborated at a distance on this short film:

die Alpen Lumen from eat a bug on Vimeo.