Fun-a-Day in the Bay opens tomorrow night at Rock, Paper, Scissors in downtown Oakland. As always, there will be a lot to see and a lot of fun things happening for Art Murmur. I’ll have a bunch of drawings on found paper.

6-9pm, 2278 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA.

Fun-a-Day is almost here! Pick a project, do it every day in January and show your work in a group show the following month. There are 16 shows scheduled for 2012, with more being added. See artclash.com for details on participating or starting your own show.

 
This Friday, I’m showing a new piece at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. I wrote a program that generates audio and visuals all at once. More info about the show is up on the Museum’s event page.

I posted documentation of a bunch of projects including the sound reactive program I exhibited at GAFFTA, my Fun-a-Day art jokes, building’s trip to the flea market, a few of the many paintings I made last year, the add-art show I curated, and the surprise bike finish line.

collaboration with Kyle McKinley
custom hardware and software
presented at the 2011 Maker Faire in San Mateo, May 21-22

The UC State of the Arts just posted a video of our still building installation from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts’ “Future Tense” conference last fall:

I’ll be hanging out on the street showing sound reactive software which gathers ambient street noise (footsteps, traffic, conversations, etc) and renders them as 3D particle systems in real time. For more info, see the GAFFTA website.

I’ve been playing with sound reactive 3-D particle systems in Processing using OpenGL. Above is one of sketches I’ve been working on (which has way too much information for online video compression formats, hence the fuzziness). Different colored particles react to different frequency bands (audio track not included here) and orbit at different radii around the center.

Kyle and I are bringing building to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo Event Center on May 21st and 22nd. We will be part of a project called “SpaceCamp” which will focus on hacking/making and creating community spaces. The space will include a bunch of groups from around the country doing exciting projects along those lines. Our project is called building: a how to which will include a lot of our previous software projects, hands-on workshops on how we made them, and, of course, some surprises.

My friend Brian just started a project called Occupation-Preoccupation, which looks great:

“The United States has over 700 military bases on foreign soil in sovereign countries, where we have no declaration of war. This project seeks to gather covers by American musicians of songs that are associated by origin with each of these places.”

This spring, I’m going to try to remember how to play music and put something together for this.

Then this summer, in addition to riding my bicycle all over the place, I’ll be teaching a class called “Hacking for Artists” at UC Santa Cruz. We’ll be making digital media art projects by hacking code together from various places. It will be something of a crash course in programming for artists who want to do crazy things with computers but who don’t want to study computer science.

The Fun-a-Day in the Bay show opened on Friday night at Rock Paper Scissors (Oakland) and will be up for the whole month of February. There was a great crowd, music by Jonathan Mann (who has been writing a song-a-day for over two years!) and the Rock Cookie Bottoms, a bunch of Art Murmur fun, and whole lot of art. One of my painting was stolen a little over an hour into the show after an earlier botched attempt.

My work, from artjokes.tumblr.com

For more Fun-a-Day photos, check out my flickr stream.

Some videos from the performance I worked on for the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland have found their way to the internet:

There are a couple more excerpts on youtube.

Ted and I made some art for a show in an old convent in Brooklyn now known as St. Cecilia’s Gallery. It involved lighting prayer candles and watching videos of celebrities, before they were famous, talking about how they wanted to be famous. I’ll post photos soon.

flyer by kara

“still building: mapping possibilities of student movements”

The building collective, based in Santa Cruz, CA, aims to transform the physical spaces that we occupy by playing games, engaging in conversations, going on walks, and drinking coffee. Our installation for the UCIRA State of the Arts Conference invites attendees to contribute to a collective map of UC campuses that focuses on the historicity, recent events and future possibilities of respective student movements.

Here are some photos from our installation:

I curated a show on add-art, the firefox plugin that replaces internet advertisements with art. You can read my curator’s statement and install the plugin to see the show which will be up through the first week of December. It features five super talented artists who work with the language of geometry. Here’s a preview of a few of the 136 images that make up the show:

Andrew Jeffrey Wright

Ann Altstatt

Pablo Manga

Maureen Halligan

Nik Hanselmann

Fun-a-Day, a show I started with some friends almost seven years ago, is coming up again! The premise is simple: pick a project (take a photograph, make the bed, draw a picture, bake a cake, etc), do it every day in January, then show your work the following month in a big group show. There will be a bunch of shows around the country this year and everyone is invited to participate. Check out our site for more details and to post your project ideas. Or read our quick start guide to starting a Fun-a-Day show if you want to bring Fun-a-Day to your community.

graphic by kara

building is going to San Diego for the State of the Arts Conference 2010, from November 19th-21st at UCSD. Kyle McKinley, Madeline McDonald Lane, and I will be creating a participatory installation entitled still building which will include snacks, conversations, walks around campus and an effort to create a huge spatial/conceptual mapping of the new student movement.

I’m working with my good pals Tender Forever and Ted Passon on another multimedia performance piece, this time for the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, OR (check out our last performance for the Whitney). It’s happening on September 15th in the evening. For more info, check out the festival’s website.

building, the installation-making art collective that I co-founded for my MFA show, is headed to San Diego this November for a conference put on by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). The theme of the State of the Arts Conference is “Future Tense: Alternative Arts and Economies in the University” and will look at the effects of the public education crisis on art programs and the ways in which artists are responding. building will be creating a dialogical space, mapping connections and conversations, and performing critical spatial interventions. The conference is happening from November 18th through the 21st at UCSD.

I’m teaching two class this fall: Mathematics and Computer Processes at the San Francisco Art Institute and The Art of Math at the California College of the Arts. They’re both hands-on, project-based approaches to learning mathematics.

And this November, I will be curating a show for Add-Art, the Firefox plugin that replaces advertisements with art.