Mr. Arthur Small (aka Michael White) made us very happy the other day by letting us know about his Vending Art Company. Started in 2007 and operating out of La Mirada, CA, Vending Art Company sells artwork out of old postage stamp vending machines, like this one:
One of Vending Art Company's postage stamp vending machines, ready to become an art gallery!
It’s really surprising that there isn’t a lot more art vending out of postage stamp machines. Historically in the US, the three most successful vending machine styles have been cigarettes, bubblegum/toy capsule, and postage stamps. The old postage stamp machines are gorgeous, really well built, and are usually quite affordable. The first real reappropriation of vending machines by artists (that we know of) were of stamp vending machines by Robert Watts and Yoko Ono in the 60s. And yet the Vending Art Company is the first example we’ve found since 1966 of stamp vending machines used this way!
It might be the form factor. The size is limited to 1″ X 1.75″ and under .125″ thick, which can be challenging. Callithump! experimented with a postage stamp vending machine, but it was just too labor intensive. Of course, I really let philately get in in the way, attempting to recreate the “sanitary folder” the stamps came in, as well as making the artwork it contained perforated and gummed. The machine still sits in the garage, mocking me because I haven’t yet filled it with art and deployed it to a public place!
Michael found a much better approach than I did, realizing that items shaped like stamp booklets will vend. They don’t actually have to be stamp booklets! The 1″ X 1.75″ can actually be an advantage when used to deliver a concentrated dose of original art:
Oh Crap! An artwork for the Vending Art CompanyCarnival
You can find out more about the Vending Art Company at their website or on their Facebook page.
A new creative vending machine project is hitting the streets of Hamburg, Germany. I just wish I could speak German so I could be better informed, because what I can tell from looking at the pictures and reading the Google translation, what they’re doing looks pretty awesome!
Machines are where people are, where the time is even or the desire to buy the greatest. For a good machine do you make a detour, in a desolate train ride or a party would do a machine not possibly.
In other words, they’re using cigarette machines to vend books. I must confess, I’m a little envious of the cigarette vending machines the Germans get to use. Apparently, it’s still legal to sell cigarettes from vending machines in Germany, so they can still get them new there. Also, they appear to be ruggedly made, vandal and weatherproof, and much smaller than their American counterparts. So, while Art-o-mat® is confined to indoor locations, Automentenverlag can get out on the streets!
Hamburger Automatenverlag
This is where projects like this really need to be. All the Callithump! machines are in or near galleries and I really regret this. It feels like we’re preaching to the choir. The only people who are going to encounter these art objects are people who are already seeking out art in the first place. Creativity should be part of everyone’s day-to-day lives, not confined to galleries. Callithump! machines should reside in the same spaces as mainstream toy capsule vending machines (Why this is unlikely to happen is too complicated to get into right now. I’ll come back to it another day). It makes me really happy to see Automatenverlag pull it off!
It really is a perfect idea. In the States we used to have small, cheap, paperback books that were designed to fit into a purse or pocket. In other words, they were designed to fit into people’s day-to-day lives. Now even the cheapest paperbacks are oversized and expensive fetish objects. A project like Automatenverlag could make books cheap, convenient and portable. You could put them into bus stops and subways for people to read on the commute to work. They could be priced cheaper than eBooks, and would provide a much more satisfying experience. They load instantly and don’t crash. Drop them and they won’t break. If they get lost or stolen, you aren’t out $hundreds. You can share them with friends.
The cigarette pack is a perfect form factor. It’s been carefully tailored to fit into our ambient extra spaces; shirt pockets, rolled up in a sleeve, tossed into a handbag. It’s a shape we can fit into our daily lives without ever noticing until we want to. Automatenverlag isn’t the first think this shape is perfect for book publishing. Tank Books publishes a series of books in cigarette boxes:
Books in Cigarette Boxes
Automatenverlag takes this idea and raises it above level of novelty and into utility by providing it with a very public venue. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this goes!
If this were happening in the States, it would be part of an anti-smoking campaign. I was about to make a snarky comment about the loss of our freedoms, but hey! That’s really not such a bad idea! “Knowledge is more addictive than tobacco,” or something. Use banned books to promote the idea that reading is dangerous, too. You could even set the price point to match the cost of cigarettes to force people to compare what they’re getting for the price. Temporary satisfaction that can ultimately kill you vs. something that lasts forever & is fundamentally healthy.
Callithump! is all about reinventing the magazine for the Internet age. We don’t think that electronic publishing makes physical publishing is obsolete per se. However, if physical publishing fails recognize and utilize the unique possibilities that only exist in physical space, it deserves extinction.
Magical things happen when publishers rise to the challenge of staying relevant in the face of electronic publishing. Take T-Post, for example:
Do I look Illegal? An issue of T-Post Magazine
The magazine is a T-shirt! This is one of those Damn, I wish I’d thought of that! ideas. Of course there have been t-shirt subscription services before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the idea spun this way. The t-shirt accompanies an article, so the shirt actually serves as an editorial illustration. From their website:
More than just a fashion piece, T-post uses great design as a subversive tool to instigate meaningful thought, conversation, and action.
It’s a communication experiment that typically begins with a compliment like ”Nice t-shirt” and continues with the wearer explaining the interesting news story behind the design.
I love their spin on this commonplace object, and how the wearer becomes an integral part of the piece itself.
La Lata takes an idea from Fluxus and presents itself as a can of art objects. It breaks free of what can be expressed within the limits of bound paper to what can be contained within a can. Just look at this wonderfulness:
Contents of an issue of La Lata
Media purveyed in a can is actually something we’ve been planning on doing for some time. It’s in our DNA. If America’s lima bean craze hadn’t ended, Jess might be heir to the Brakeley Canning Company fortune:
Jess' ancestors ran the Brakeley Canning Company, which one day we'll resurrect!
One day we’ll do a series of canned art products as the Brakeley Canning Company to make sure the name lives on.
So Callithump! is really just part of a larger trend! If we’re successful, the so-called “death of print” could actually lead to a much richer physical media environment.
Patrick Farley is trying to return to web comics, and this is great news! Patrick Farley is one of the best web comics creators there’s ever been. Few web comics ever explore the potentials of the medium. Sure, some good stories are being told, but few artists have embraced the Web as a unique medium with new creative possibilities. Instead, the majority of web comics are pretty much print comics that use the Web as a delivery system. It can be so much more than that, though, as Scott McCloud showed in Reinventing Comics and with his Infinite Canvas. Patrick Farley, on the other hand, embraced the medium to its fullest, creating innovative works that could only be experienced on the Web. Check out The Spiders, for example. Even the act of scrolling contributes to the narrative, instead of being an annoyance like it often is.
Farley started strong and his work just kept getting better and better. Unfortunately, his day job curtailed creative output. Now he’s taking steps to correct that, which I wholeheartedly endorse! Using Kickstarter, a platform that allows “us regular folk” to become patrons of the arts, he’s asking for a $2 donation. When donations reach $6,000 he’ll quit his day job and go back to creating web comics full-time. Just read the comics he already has online for free. Personally, I’ve gotten way more than $2 worth of entertainment from Patrick Farley, and will happily pay for his return! If the donations don’t reach $6,000, he doesn’t quit and you don’t have to pay. But that would be a tragedy, so go pledge $2 right now to make sure it doesn’t happen!
Best of luck, Patrick! I hope this works! I also hope I can follow in your footsteps, quit my day job and work on Callithump! full time. I know all too well how that day job stifles all creativity.
Coming soon: Callithump! Broadside. A broadside, also known as a broadsheet, is a page 17″ X 22″. It’s the standard size for newspapers in the US, or at least it was before the cheesy 11″X17″ tabloid format started taking over. We’ll be screenprinting broadsides with special guests while we have them over for dinner in upcoming weeks.
Peter Selmayr prepares a Broadside!
We’d been wanting to do something in this format in homage to Robert Piser’sDaily Palette, the first publicly available art vending machine (that we know of). Once we started exploring, we discovered an interesting fact: Broadsheets were initially the domain of poets, artists and political activists. They became popular for newspapers in the early 1700s as a way to get around a newspaper tax that taxed papers based on the number of pages.
It’s time to take the format back! The time is ripe, since newspapers are abandoning the broadsheet in favor of the tabloid or the web.
It’s fun to work in a large format after being confined to capsules for so long! An advantage to newsprint is the the local paper gives us rolls of the stuff for free. This means our production costs are almost nothing, so we’ll be able to give Callithump! Broadsides away for free!
We’ve got a fun approach to creating these as well. It’s a variation on the Exquisite Corpse. We’re doing prints with multiple screens. The screens are done by different people who we’ve invited over for dinner, while we prepare dinner, eat, drink and make merry. The catch is, we don’t discuss the content of the prints beforehand, only the size limitations. The final result might blend nicely, or it might be a sticky mess. It’s gauranteed to be interesting!
The Callithump! Broadside beta, three screens into the process.
If this sounds like fun to you, drop us a line and we’ll have you over for dinner! You are cordially invited!
If you live too far away from Brunswick, Maine to come join us, please try it on your own. Give your local newspaper a call and see if they give away remnants. We use silk screens, but really, any way to make a mark on paper will do. Let us know how it goes!
Yay Jess! A reporter from the Wire attended the Craft Fix craft fair and was so taken with Jess’s cards that he used one of them for the cover of the holiday edition!
Have you got your holiday shopping done? You haven’t even started yet, have you? Well, no worries because Jess is here to take care of your holiday shopping needs. Well, as long as you give hand-made buttons, greeting cards, and onesies to everyone. If that doesn’t cover your gift list, there will be many other options to buy unique, hand-made items created by local craftspeople at the four upcoming craft shows Jess will be at over the next few weeks. Just think, instead of giving mass-market crap made by soulless multinational corporations you can support local artists and your local economy while giving really cool gifts!
Jess will be at:
Craft Fix
Sunday, November 29th, 10am to 6pm
BOUY, 2 Government St., Kittery ME
SEA Holiday Sale
Friday, December 4th, 6pm to 9pm
Saturday, December 5th, 10am to 6pm
East End Community School
195 North St, Portland ME
Picnic Holiday Sale
Saturday, December 12th, 1pm to 8pm
Maine Irish Heritage Center
34 Gray St.
Portland, ME
Artascope Studios Holiday Sale
December 10th to 30th, 9am to 7pm
352 Cottage Rd. South Portland, ME
Please come buy and say Hi and buy lots of stuff!
Craft Fix gets a special shout-out since this is their first year doing this event. I expect this one will feature a lot more of the hip, happening "new school" crafters than other crafts fairs you might attend!
Matt Jasper’s new poetry book, Moth Moon, has been published by BlazeVox! Order it now from Amazon.
Matt Jasper's Moth Moon, now available from Amazon.
This is, of course, cause for celebration! Matt is one of my all-time favorite poets. This would be true even if I didn’t know Matt personally.
If you’ve never read Matt’s poems before, well, you know those writers you’re glad for, because they’ve been places you wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) go? People like William S. Burroughs or Hunter S. Thompson. Only the places Matt Jasper goes to aren’t drug-fueled. Matt engages with people most of us wouldn’t interact with: schizophrenics, criminals, religious fanatics and other diagnoses you’ll find in the DSM-IV. But Matt’s approach is very rare. It’s not patronizing or exploitative. It’s not about packaging the “outsider” for the in crowd. These are just people with different experiences and different viewpoints that are worth hearing. This is just one source Matt draws his inspiration from. There are many true stories in Matt’s poems. The nice thing is, there’s such beauty in the words that even if you can’t decipher the story, it’s still worthwhile just for the sound of it being told.
Callithump! Condom vending machines in the MadGirlWorld bathroom
That’s right, Callithump! Condom vending machines! This is an idea we had a while ago, but never got around to finding a location for. Honestly, the MadGirlWorld bathroom is way too upscale for them.
The Blame Game and Play Hockney, two condom vending machine games.
Ultimately, I’d like to find a bar to host these, but it’s fun to hang out in the MadGirlWorld bathroom for now! Really, they were designed to be hung in a bar bathroom. The idea behind these is, well, the traditional bar bathroom condom machine is really kind of an odd thing. It’s a very singular set of circumstances. You went to a bar. You weren’t planning on having sex, so you don’t have any condoms with you. Suddenly, you’re going to have sex, and you don’t have time to swing into a drug store to buy decent condoms, so you have to pay exorbitant prices for crappy condoms with tacky names that have been sitting in a barroom bathroom for who knows how long… Anyway, it seems like a pretty unlikely situation! I wanted to create something a little more all-purpose to have on hand in a bar.
Let's not play The Blame Game!
There’s Play Hockney, which lets you pretend you’re photographer David Hockney while you’re sitting around waiting for someone to show up. There’s The Blame Game, a game designed to stimulate conversation once they do. The Blame Game was inspired by the late president George Bush Jr.’s constant whine, “Let’s not play the blame game!” whenever someone suggested he take responsibility for himself. Since Republican’s believe that all fun should be prohibited The Blame Game must be something really fun! So I had to make it exist! There’s Good Question!, a set of questions to ask on a date, or if there are just too many awkward silences during an evening’s outing. For this, I scoured all the websites purporting to have the best questions to ask on a date or in a job interview. I decided that they were all lame, and came up with a much better set of questions, for example:
Who do you think is the worst person in the world? What would it take to get you to have sex with that person? Would it make a difference if you got to be on top?
Finally, we’ve got The Right Words. This is something I’ve wished I had on many occasions. You know those moments when you wish somebody’d said something to you? Like when you spend the whole day with your fly unzipped? And then you say, “Why didn’t you say anything?” and they say, “Well, I didn’t want to embarrass you.” As if that would have been more embarrassing than walking around for hours with your fly unzipped! Well, these are cards that say those embarrassing things for you, so you can quietly slip them to someone and to keep them from making things worse. Like, He’s Gay. Really. Or, She’s got a boyfriend and she doesn’t like you.
You can pass the buck for all your problems onto many others in The Blame Game
You can find all this fun in the bathroom at MadGirlWord!
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