The grand video poetry creative invite experiment is going to the next level. I am pleased to announce that Bobby Cuevas is the winner. There were 15 entries from artists in different corners of the world submitting to the contest, and I had the opportunity to pick one to work with. Thank to everyone who submitted to the contest, it was truly an honor to see people creating music for the project, and using Talenthouse to connect us was excellent. The winner of the contest has the opportunity to work together with me on my next series of video poetry short films. I’ve never been in the position of choosing a contest winner, and in the end the choice was made on context.

Context

Judging creative work of others is a strange business, and in the end it comes down to tastes and context. There’s really no other honest way to do it. Something can be technically great but not be what you’re looking for. The context is the head of the person choosing, and isn’t something that can be predicted or necessarily designed for. This was one of the main lessons from the Professional Artists seminar I attended at the F&F Kunst schule in Zurich this summer. Art is bought in the gallery scene based on context. Is it new, does it fit with the gallery, is it maketable, does it create a reaction – and how does it do that in relaitonship to all the other art in the Zurich art world? Art doesn’t have value without context, and as the context changes, so does the value of the art.

Decisions Decisions

For the decision process, I mainly looked to see what the music would create in my head, and based off of how ambivalent or twisted those images were, I decided to go with that artist. I figured, the music which creates the strongest reaction in me is probably the best one to go with. This was a measure of how the work of the artists would match my work. There were a number of entries which were excellent, and I could imagine creating a movie with them, but just didn’t fit into the context of the project I have in my head. As an artist, the most important thing is to connect with people who like your work, that is the context in which you will be successful, and sometimes it just needs to be one or two people.

Bobby did a production called Coming Together, it starts with a cut from the song Come Together, and then drops into a drumming rhythm, it sort of bores into my head and remixing into a fluid menagerie that just mixes well with images of a Bratz doll 50 feet tall, walking through Detroit with a .50 Cal sniper rifle. It was the later part of the track that started pushing my neurons around. I could see a sort of blackness with interspiced flashes and a person walking down the street, the camera in my head did a pan and then a steadycam momevent around a guy’s face, then the scene was reversed in editing and then there was a robot fish crawling out of the ocean and started to walk.

So, I look forward to working with Bobby on a video poetry short film series. Thank you to Talenthouse, adambrioza, ybudman, lollyjean and everyone who submitted to the video poetry creative invite.

Bobby Cuevas

• http://djcuethetechnonerd.blogspot.com/


• @DjCueTechnoNerd


• Come Together Remix

Voting is open on the video poetry creative invite at Talenthouse.com! To recap, I have a creative invite running on Talenthouse, where the winner will have the opportunity to work together with me on a video poetry series of short films. I wrote about the contest previously, and now this wonderful experiment in online collaboration and general creativity awesomeness is coming to an end. Well, the first part, then will come the video poetry series. For the contest, I provided some images of inspiration, including images of Bratz and War, and the participants then needed to create a music track to submit to the contest. The highest voted songs will get the first listens from me, and I’ll then work with the winner (whoever created the best mix in my mind) if they’re interested. For the video poetry part, I’ll create some poetry concepts and shoot the needed video, and the winner can have their music featured as a component of the final videos.  It’s all very non-linear and experimental, but when you challenge people, excellent things always happen. The voting is open here on Talenthouse:

Voting Open: Collaborate with American Peyote on a poetry short film series

Something went live the other day, a fine determined attempt at creative collaboration on a global scale. It’s called, Collaborate on a Video Poetry Film Series. It’s a creative invite on Talenthouse.com, that fabulous website that connects creators together and is the current website to be on for interesting collaboration opportunities. Essentially I’m looking for a person to work with on a video poetry series. From my side, I’ll provide the visuals and words and you provide the soundtrack. I’ll mix everything together and we’ll ride the wave of internet propaganda to stardom together. On the creative invite page on Talenthouse is the inspiration. There’s a video of my latest still images, and the idea is that DJ’s, producers, etc. can be inspired by that to submit a track that fits to the images. I’ll pick the music submission that best fits in my brain and then we’ll collaborate together on a series of video poetry short films. It doesn’t matter who or where you are in the world, this is an opportunity to connect and work together across cultural, economic, societal and internet boundaries.

Where did the idea for this come from? It was a pretty organic evolution of the internet, inspiration, and motivation. In 2010 I submitted some paintings to a Talenthouse Creative Invite. I won the invite, and then participated at 1 Day of Art Copenhagen with (t)here magazine, then I printed a card of my best painting from Copenhagen and sent it to Jennifer Chalbaud in Venezuela who then had a dream inspired by my Gonzo Art and she created a cool design for Mambo Surf Deluxe. I wrote a blog post about it all and then Talenthouse contacted me, seeing if I would be interested in running a community creative invite. I said hell yes, and here we are.

I like painting because it’s the unknown. I never know what will come when I stare down that big white canvas, and I have no idea what will happen with this creative invite, but soon I’m going to find out. When I create I often think like a movie maker, I hear the music in my ears and break paintings up into little movies in my head. That’s why I’m excited about the possibilities of this opportunity. It’s the possibility of meeting someone motivated to create great music to mix well with the art I’m creating. In this context the idea of video peotry films is just natural for me, it’s the natural evolution of art and video. If you’re a music maker, please check out the creative invite, and you have my deepest gratitude if you pass the word on to anyone you know who might be interested. Click here to visit the page on Talenthouse.com, and below is a video explaining the idea.

Click here to view the embedded video.

and here is the inspiration…

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m not depressed, I’m an artist. Remember this, for it is my new motto with which to deal with certain aspects of life. In a book I once wrote, “Now, actually being an alcoholic is an unhealthy way to live, but pretending to be one for the night helps break life up into more manageable chunks.” If you pretend to not be an artist, I don’t think anything good will come of it. If you wake up wondering why you feel depressed and unfulfilled in the morning, it’s possible that you’re simply an artist. This one simple realization can make a large difference in your day to day life.

Accept who you are and always look on the bright side. Pretending to not be an artist will probably make you depressed, but actually being an artist opens up a whole city of plausible excuses and diversions to sensible responsibility. For example, when you’re an artist you can say, “I can’t do math today, my brain patterns are too nonlinear.” This is a no-go statement in the engineering world, you have to do math because that’s how we understand the natural world. “I can’t work today, I’m in a creative void, I’ll stay at the cafe all day drinking espresso.” To be fair, I don’t think this is reality, it’s just what I’ve see from the movies and over-dramatic artistic characters. I imagine myself more like a poor Howard Hughes, who wasn’t an artist in the traditional sense, but had the fantastic ability to run an engineering empire and be a director of photography in the same lifetime. Or maybe like a Paul Verhoeven, who holds degrees in math and physics, but also directed Starship Troopers and Total Recall.

For the longest time I thought I was an engineer who just liked to draw in math class.  I figured it would stop at some point and I’d just use these talents to design car handles or airplane designs or something.  Now I’ve realized that I got it all wrong these first 33 years, and my birthday is just after Marche du Nain Rouge, so there must be some Detroit devil inside me, and I think it’s time to admit defeat and start dealing with being an artist. Understand, I don’t really know what it means to be an artist, I only know the engineer lifestyle. I never attended art school and haven’t a clue how to act or conduct myself. I already wear colorful shoes and carry pens around to write and draw with. There’s a room in my apartment dedicated to painting and I have a pair of jeans stained with colored latex. What else should I be doing?

I don’t have a specific medium that I work in. I was asked once what texture I use when painting – and my first impulse was to ask the woman what the fuck she was talking about. As I understand it, texture is what the surface of your painting looks like (I thought it was just a layering technique in Photoshop). Always a new language to learn. I like to think that I specialize in ideas, and they come out in painting, video, digital photography,  whatever is at hand. The biggest problem is the need for expression, and this is the friction point with traditional engineering persona. Here is where the friction of the situation leads to conflict in the brain. For some personalities it’s easy, or at least normal to just calculate things and to find solutions in a number format and to be done with it. It would be nice if that were enough, but it’s not. I want to hold a thing in my hand. I like to bring something from nothingness into being, from concept to final product. It’s scary to stare down a blank white canvas and it’s a rush to look upon the final work. When you get used to feeling that rush in the studio, you naturally want to feel it elsewhere, it becomes a normal entity in your emotional map. However, it’s difficult to attain in a traditional engineering world. The only sane solution is to find a happy medium. Something which includes design and science, something where the two sides can coexist and benefit one another. I don’t know what the future brings, but hopefully I’ll find out soon enough.

I was looking through my Facebook and saw that Jennifer Chalbaud, a designer I had met through Talenthouse had submitted to the Kanto AV speaker Creative Invite, and that it was ending in 6 hours. I had a vision for a second, and wondered what it would be like to combine Lazy Art IV and Gonzo Art in a speaker design. It seemed fitting, to take the art created from 1 Day of Art Copenhagen, and see how it would work when applied to product design. I got back to my place around 5:30pm and had until 7pm to submit my design. After screwing around with SketchUp and a dxf file in Adobe Illustrator for 30 minutes I decided to go back to what I know and started making layers and masking in Photoshop. The result might scare some people, but I would buy one.

I started off with a white Kanto speaker box from Talenthouse…it’s a nice simplistic design, speakers on the front, clean lines, contoured sides and curves, something very clean and sexy. At this point, one could go with a minimalistic design to complement the form of the product, or go in the opposite direction and create something that dominates, both in color and form. I decided on impulse to go with the latter approach, and in my mind grafted two paintings onto the Kanto…

My favorite painting from 1 Day of Art went on the front, using the lower section of the patinting, which includes passages of writing, and this flows upwards with the Basquiat-Alien inspired head. I wanted somthing else for the top though, and decided to go with Lazy Art IV, which is sort of a universe view, with lots of color combinations running into one another. The paintings are sort of inspired from music, visions in the head, so it made sense to combine them with a speaker design. The final design is on Talenthouse at…Design for limited edition Kanto speakers