A Day at the Toy Zoo

matt / News / 0 Comment

Toy Zoo

Cincinnati's Toy Zoo

I’m more often inspired by kids than by grown-ups. I love their ability to take multiple ideas and mash them together to make something new, before they develop that voice that says, “No, you can’t do that. That doesn’t make sense. That won’t work.” As adults I think we often put more energy into justifying why we’re not doing something than actually doing things. This is why I love the Toy Zoo. The Toy Zoo is a gallery of work created by kids in Happen Inc.’s Toy Lab. Happen Inc. takes discarded, donated toys and breaks them down into their component parts. Then kids remix the parts to create toys of their own. The results are quite remarkable!

Spider Goof

Spider Goof, created by David at Happen Inc.'s Toy Lab

Mini Slapper

Mini Slapper, created by Alex at the Toy Lab

There are thousands of creations in the gallery. Check it out!

 

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Leaking Through

Leaking Through

matt / Rambling / 0 Comment

poem

A mixed media poem found on the bathroom wall at Zoots in Camden, Maine.

What I love about art vending machines is the feeling that somehow they’ve leaked through from a parallel Earth. In that world the better angels of our nature won out. Instead of the worst of who we are (junk food and cheap crap made by children in sweat shops in China) the vending machines sell poetry and hand-made works of art.

Every once-in-a-while, I’m lucky enough to get that feeling in other ways, too. A few months ago I was using the bathroom in Zoots in Camden, Maine. Taped to the wall amongst the event posters and business cards (Camden’s equivalent of graffiti) was a mixed-media poem. It was done with great care, hand-written and painted, cut out of a paper bag and glued together. My photograph doesn’t do it justice. It was wonderful. I love the fact that for somebody out there it’s really important to inject a little beauty and wonder into the lives of people she’ll never meet. For a moment it was that alternate world slipping through again.

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Vending Activism #2: NOAH Egg Machine

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NOAH egg machine

In the NOAH Egg Machine, free range chickens protest the cruel treatment of their incarcerated factory farmed sisters.

Just before Easter last year, an Egg Machine appeared in downtown Frankfurt. The Egg Machine featured live chickens in tiny cubicles and at first glance appeared to be selling freshly laid eggs. Actually, the chickens were from a local free-range farmer and were humanely treated. The Egg Machine was a project by NOAH, an animal rights group in Germany. Its purpose was to call attention to the inhumane treatment of chickens in certain types of egg farming. Instead of eggs, the machine dispensed tokens that showed how to identify eggs laid in humane conditions.

Overall, the project was a great success, receiving international attention and lots of press. I guess there’s just something about putting unexpected things in vending machines that captures the imagination!

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Vending Activism #1: Greenaid Vending

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Greenaid Vending

Greenaid's Seedbomb vending machine. For 50 cents you too can be a green guerrilla!

In July of 2010,  Culver City, CA design practice Commonstudio got a great deal of press for their Kickstarter project Seedbomb Vending. The project was to fund the start of Greenaid Vending, which are seedbomb vending machines. Seedbombs are balls of seeds, clay and organic fertilizer designed to be thrown into vacant spaces that should have green things growing in them:

Made from a mixture of clay, compost, and seeds, “seedbombs” are becoming an increasingly popular means combating the many forgotten grey spaces we encounter everyday-from sidewalk cracks to vacant lots and parking medians. They can be thrown anonymously into these derelict urban sites to temporarily reclaim and transform them into places worth looking at and caring for.

Not only was the initial Kickstarter campaign successful, the project has continued to grow. Currently they have more than 50 locations in the US and Europe. There’s a lot to like about them:

Greenaid seedbombs are hand-rolled in Culver City, CA using local materials, sustainable packaging, and socially responsible labor.  Working in partnership with Chrysalis, a local non-profit, Commonstudio offers employment opportunities and a living wage to formerly homeless or economically disadvantaged men and women from the Los Angeles area.  Every seedbomb you purchase is an investment in our shared future on a greener, more equitable planet.

What’s more, the seeds in the seed bombs are matched to the area’s native species, so they’re not introducing invasive species into ecosystems.

Congratulations, Greenaid! It’s really nice to see a project like this succeed.

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Trending: Art Vending Machines

matt / Uncategorized / 0 Comment

Art Vending

According to Trend Hunter, Art Vending Machines are trendy!

Implications - Art is increasingly being commodified and made available to not only the upper classes. Art is being sold in small, on-the-go formats that appeal to the busy, but culturally-inclined, consumer. This trend also shows the continued popularity of vintage and retro designs, especially in now-simple technologies like vending machines or juke boxes.

Honestly, this strikes me as a rather trite analysis of the implications of this trend. The example Trend Hunter uses is the Art*o*mat®, who has this to say about their mission:
Artists in Cellophane (A.I.C.), the sponsoring organization of Art*o*mat® is based on the concept of taking art and “repackaging” it to make it part of our daily lives. The mission of A.I.C. is to encourage art consumption by combining the worlds of art and commerce in an innovative form. A.I.C believes that art should be progressive, yet personal and approachable.
I’ve found similar sentiments from other art vending machine proprietors. It’s not about commodifying art and making it lower-class. It’s all about making art more accessible. But maybe I’m just splitting hairs.
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The Street Librarian

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Chuck and a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Portland, Oregon’s Gumball Poetry stopped publishing in 2006. That’s a real shame. However, Gumball Poetry was just one of its co-creator Laura Moulton’s many fascinating creative endeavors. Most recently she received a grant to run Street Books, a “bicycle powered mobile library serving people who live outside.”

It makes me really happy to know she’s continuing to be creative. When I first encountered Gumball Poetry, it struck me as a wonderful way to get people to experience poetry who might never pick up a book of poems. Now she’s finding new ways to get people to read things they might not have access to. It’s really kind of a natural evolution of an idea. I wonder where she’ll take it next?

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Screenprinters: Let’s Fix This

matt / Editorial / 0 Comment

Olly Moss' wonderful Totoro screen print

Recently, Olly Moss created a new poster for the movie Totoro. Totoro is one of my all-time favorite movies and is certainly one of the best children’s movies ever made. I wanted this poster. I would have hung it in the room that will one day belong to our child, so that Totoro will be there right from their earliest memories. If you’re a fan of this movie, you’ll agree that there’s no better location for such a poster.  Unfortunately, the poster wasn’t to be mine. Within minutes of the poster dropping, it had sold out. Shortly after that, this had happened:

Screenprint Speculation

It appears that a huge chunk of posters were bought not by people who love Totoro or Olly Moss’ work, but by speculators. That’s a real shame because speculators tend to ruin good things. It’s going to happen to screen printing unless we do something to stop it.

The screen printed poster is having a golden age right now. There’s an astonishing level of variety and quality out there. Scroll through OMG Posters for just a minute and you’ll get an idea. What makes this moment especially golden is how affordable these posters are. Often for under $50, it’s possible to own a piece of original, hand-made artwork. This gets trickier once something gets “discovered.” It appears that this has happened to Mondo, publisher of the Totoro poster and many other fine posters. While Mondo has kept its posters affordable, they have limited runs that are released at unspecified times on specified days. This makes them difficult for ordinary people who have lives to actually buy them. If you don’t have time to sit around all day, refreshing your browser window to find out if the print has been released, you’re not going to get that poster. These posters are so popular, if you buy one you’re pretty much guaranteed to be able to flip it on eBay for much more than you bought it for. It’s likely that many, if not the majority, of these posters are going to speculators and not to people who love them.

Mondo is just one publisher, though. There are many others out there who are doing great things. So many, in fact, that it’s only a matter of time before Martha Stewart “discovers” them and puts a link to OMG Posters in Living magazine. Then it will be letterpress all over again. Every decent screen print will be bought by speculators while the people who loved the medium and made it possible won’t be able to afford to buy the work of the artists they once supported. The market will be flooded and diluted by mediocre “me toos” trying to cash in on the latest fad. Screen printed business cards and wedding invitations will proliferate.

It doesn’t have to go down this way. Screen printers could decide right now to take a different course.

For starters, stop this “to be released at a random time” crap. Who does this serve? Is there anyone buying posters because not knowing when it is going to be released is such a thrill? No. The random time thing is just stupid, insulting, and pointless, and only caters to people who are buying the prints to resell them.

Stop manufacturing scarcity. There was a time when the signed, numbered, limited edition prints were a matter of honor. The plates that made the prints degraded with each print, so lower numbers really did mean a better quality print, and the artist would stop before the quality degraded to an unacceptable degree. However, a properly treated silk screen can last for 5,000 to 10,000 prints, far more than the 200-400 prints that screen printers usually limit themselves to. Scarcity is why speculators buy things, but it’s not why true art lovers buy art. There are legitimate reasons for doing a limited print run. Many screen printers are one-person shops, handling everything from creating the artwork to pulling the print to rolling it up and mailing it out. An artist would go crazy, and never be able to start producing new work, if they didn’t find a way to limit the run. However, there must be ways to cater to the true fans, not the speculators. Instead of random drops, how about pre-selling a run? Limit the print to the number of orders received on a specific day? Announce that day in advance. Don’t make it random. Leave a wide enough window open so people who have jobs can order. The worst thing that would happen then is that you might get 10,000 orders for a poster and have a lot of work to do. But you know, if you’re selling that print for $45, you now have $450,000 to solve that problem with. Expand your shop. Hire an assistant. That’s not a bad problem to have!

Poison eBay. To their credit, publishers like Mondo have a lot of integrity. They’ve kept their prices low even while speculators are selling their posters hours after their printed for many times what Mondo sold them for. Mondo and artists like Olly Moss deserve all the success they’re getting right now. Hard work and talent should pay off. Clicking “refresh” until you can click “buy” on something just so you can resell it isn’t something that should pay off. If a printer were to say, print an extra hundred copies and then sell them on eBay the day it dropped, with an opening bid of whatever the print sells for on the main site, it’d make the speculation a little more unattractive. There might be some complaints that it’s unfair, but you could shut that up by giving any extra profit to charity. As a buyer, if I have to pay extra to get a print I really want, I’d much rather that go to the artist, not to some speculator.

That’s just the first three things off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to keep screen printing awesome. The time to fix it is now, however, while it’s still fun.

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Fluevog gets in on it…

matt / News / 0 Comment

I am so conflicted (source)

Do you make/sell things that are suitable for the magical
VogVending Machine in Calgary?
Vending Machine
 You remember the phone booth in Dr. Who? Well, similarly shaped to that, a mysterious vending machine will be going in the public BreakRoom & Flueseum, both of which are opening soon on the Mezzanine of Fluevog Calgary.We want to sell things in this magical machine that even the Japanese have never thought of – and we want Fluevogers to help us. Do you have a little company that makes cool things that could fit into the rings of such a machine? Dolls, ties, pencils, notebooks, magnets, weird-o-meters, penguins, mosquito gum, tin cowboys, mini orange bike seats, whatever… Tell us about them – send the details toVogVending@fluevog.com and we’ll see what we can do.

On the one hand, I love Fluevogs above all other shoes. On the other hand, art vending machines are a medium that artists appropriated from the corporations to put to better purpose. Much as I love Fluevog, it’s still a corporate entity, so it’s like they’re taking it back. If they’d contracted with, say, Art-o-mat®, I’d totally be celebrating. Then again, I’m thinking, “How cool would it be to be noticed by Fluevog! I should totally do this!”

We’ll see how it plays out. I guess what I find irksome is their lack of acknowledgment that there’s a long history of other people doing this sort of thing. None of us are in this for the money, but it’s nice to get some acknowledgment now & then!

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