There comes a moment when you’ve just hung a feminine hygiene product dispenser on the wall of a gallery, titled it Eat Poop You Cat and called it art and you realize your life is significantly cooler than many people’s. Then you start wondering what you’re going to do to top that!
Eat Poop You Cat Superdeluxe Boxed Edition
Of course, we put a little more work into it than declaring a tampon/tampax vending machine art and hanging it in a gallery. We created all new product for it. In this case it was the Eat Poop You Cat Superdeluxe Boxed Edition on one side, and a scroll containing artwork from completed games on the other side.
Eat Poop You Cat is essentially the Surrealist party game Exquisite Corpse crossed with the Telephone Game. It’s a whole lot of fun, and you should make a pilgrimage to Augusta to buy a copy from our vending machine. Or you just grab paper and pencils and get the instructions online. But then you’d miss out because we really did an outstanding job putting this all together.
Sadly, we had many problems getting the cover for the machine to print. Here’s how it came out:
Eat Poop You Cat in the gallery
This is what it was supposed to look like:
The Original Eat Poop You Cat cover artwork
Still, I think the messed up cover matches the ridiculousness of the game pretty well, regardless!
We’re taking Callithump! in a new direction with the reboot. Originally we approached Callithump! as a magazine, with the contents of a machine constituting an issue. Each capsule contained an article, and each issue contained work by a variety of creators. We liked this approach because it reflected the chaotic variety typically found in a toy capsule vending machine.
Unfortunately, this format made it difficult to do something we feel is important to do: pay creators for their work. At 50 cents a capsule, we’re sometimes covering our materials costs. Figure in the time we put into this, and transportation costs and we’re doing this at a lost. That’s not the point, though. The point is, the 50 cents is a symbolic gesture. It says that creativity is worth paying for.
Before the new format, we were paying in contributor’s copies. Nobody ever complained, and it’s standard practice for publications. In these days of electronic publishing it’s more than many creators get for their published work. Just because it’s standard practice doesn’t mean it’s right, though, and we’d rather not be part of the problem. Now all profits go to the content creators!
The new format is more of a gallery than a magazine, with a single machine devoted to a single artist, group or concept. We think the new format showcases the creator and the work a whole lot better than before. Stop by the Gannett Building Gallery in Augusta before February 17th to see for yourself!
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, created by David at Happen Inc.'s Toy LabMini Slapper, created by Alex at the Toy Lab
There are thousands of creations in the gallery. Check it out!
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!
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.
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?
Do you make/sell things that are suitable for the magical
VogVending Machine in Calgary?
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!
This is good news! Sarah Cottrell is now doing a solo show using all three of the vending machines in Lord Hall, University of Maine, Orono.
Sarah Cottrell's Doomsday Project, now featured in Callithump!
The contents are all part of Sarah’s Doomsday Project, an ongoing exploration of the lighter side of nuclear annihilation. Read more about it here.
We’re really excited by this. It’s always been our intention that Callithump! be a kind of tiny gallery, showcasing the works of one or multiple artists at a time. Hopefully this will be the first of many. Who wants to go next? Drop us a line with your ideas!
Callithump! isn’t dead, but it has been in “maintenance mode” for a few months now. It’s kind of a long story why we’ve been so unproductive, but I’ll try to keep it interesting. Skip to the very last line to the short answer as to why Callithump! has been so absent lately if you’ve got a short attention span. Otherwise, keep reading!
It all started a while back with a broken leg and no insurance. In the space of a blizzardy afternoon we went from keeping our heads above water financially to being five figures in debt. So we left our lovely creative community in Belfast, put our plans of careers in art & education on hold, and moved to southern Maine to go work in the corporate world.
Corporate life is seductive. The pay was better than I’d ever made before, and the health benefits were phenomenal. I was also constantly surrounded by people who were really into being in the corporate world. This was their career track, and they were really committed to getting ahead. For a while it caught me. I started thinking about all the things that long term financial stability could bring. Nicer cars, a nice house, kids… It’s not that you can’t have those things without financial stability, but it’s a whole lot more stressful. I started thinking, “I can do this for five years. I can put my other plans and dreams on hold. We can pay off our debt and buy all the things we’ve had to do without…”
It didn’t work. Sitting in front of a computer screen inside a beige cubicle under fluorescent lights from 9 to 5 every day I could feel my soul going numb. Corporate logic started getting under my skin. For example, having a window in your office is determined by your pay grade. So if your cubicle was near a window, it had to have extra-high partitions so you couldn’t see it since only management was allowed to look out windows. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that it started making sense. I started understanding and accepting the necessity of such rules. The worst thing was that it started changing Jess and my relationship. We started conforming to traditional gender roles. I was the breadwinning husband, putting food on the table, Jess was the dutiful housewife, cooking and cleaning and doing laundry. I’d get home tired and cranky, with no energy to do anything but watch TV for a few hours and then go to sleep.
Let me just clarify something important here. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining about a bad employer. My employer probably has one of the best corporate cultures of any company, and I was privileged to work with an amazing number of talented, intelligent and truly good people. The things that were good there outnumbered the things that bothered me 10 to 1. It was good to the point that I actually considered getting therapy to help me adjust to the corporate environment! It’s like that cliché break-up line, “It’s not you, it’s me.” I’m just not the kind of person who can be happy working in a corporate environment.
These problems will hardly seem like problems to most people. In some ways I’m complaining about being gainfully employed. I was living a life that was anathema to me. The majority of my waking hours were spent helping people with money make more money. We dreamed of a life of creativity, adventure, exploration and making a difference in the world. We got cubicles and television and gender roles we’d never intended.
So we made a change. We’re playing a hunch that there might be more paths out there than “starving artist” and “desk jockey.” We bought a house in Bangor, Maine. It’s actually cheaper than renting! Buying a house in Bangor vs. buying in the southern part of the state means for half what we’d spend on a “I guess we can live with this” house, we got to buy a house we love! Now we have room to build the creative spaces we’ve been lacking in the apartments we’d been renting. We’ve gone back to school, Jess to get her MFA and me to finish my PhD. I’m teaching classes again.
The new Callithump! HQ
I don’t know where exactly all this is leading us, but I know that sometimes you have to make the space for good things to happen. We’re not “there” yet, and we’re not even sure what that destination is. However, we’ve created possibilities for wonder, excitement, creativity and learning that we haven’t had in ages.
This change, however, has come with a price. Looking for a house, buying a house, moving, working two jobs while I wrap up my commitments to my corporate employer, commuting 400+ miles a week, taking classes… Unfortunately, Callithump! has had to move to the back burner, along with most of the rest of my life! However, I think Callithump! will revive soon in its new environment, in ways that will eclipse all previous work.
The challenges didn’t end with the move, though. Just as things were starting to settle, this happened:
Thumbs up to being alive!
Yeah, that’s me in the hospital, giving a big thumbs up because I was awake after a surgery that might have killed me! It wasn’t an unexpected surgery. My friend Peter was going to die without a new liver, and I was a match. People keep telling me what a nice thing I did, but you know, I just feel lucky. Having someone you care about die is on one of the worst things in the world. Having someone you care about die, while you’re left wondering if there was something you could have done that would made a difference is worse. The pain of donating a liver is minor in comparison. However, it was a big pain, nonetheless! To be a donor you have to go through a tremendous number of tests. MRI, EKG, CAT scans, I’ve had them all now, as well as a colonoscopy, at least a pint’s worth of blood tests and even psychiatric exams. Before the surgery I was going to Lahey almost every week from the end of December to the end of February. Then I was in the hospital for a week after, and I’m still operating at diminished capacity a month after. It’ll be another two months before I’m back at 100%. It’s worth it, though. Peter is alive and doing better every day!
It’s been a long trial for sure, but now that we’re getting through it, I have to say, it’s really awesome to be the LeClairs right now! Our lives are filled with more inspiration and excitement than they’ve ever been before. We’re making new friends and reconnecting with old ones. One of our big stresses is that we feel like there are so many possibilities here that we can only take advantage of a fraction of what our new lives have to offer. That’s sort of like stressing out about having so much money you couldn’t possibly spend it! This happened while we were thoroughly overwhelmed with all the other things in our lives. What will it be like when we’re done with all this other stress, and can devote all our energies to our new lives?
So anyway, the short answer to why I haven’t been posting is I’ve been really, really busy!
This is old news, but I missed it the first time around. Last September, London police stopped artist Ben Turnbull from putting a fake gun vending machine outside London schools.
Kids Have Everything These Days. You can get arrested for this in the UK!
Turnbull had planned to place the piece outside news agents near three different schools. The piece would have included a hidden camera to take snapshots of the kids’ reactions.
Unfortunately for Turnbull, it’s illegal to import or sell realistic replica firearms and to possess them in a public place “without reasonable excuse” in the UK. He was threatened with arrest and incarceration and didn’t go through with it. The piece went on exhibit at the Eleven gallery in London in October of 2009, sans photographs. See other pieces from the exhibition here.
Ben Turnbull & His Gun Vending Machine
I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would have been had he tried to do this in the good ol’ US of A?
