building
installation

by Kyle McKinley and Nick Lally with Ann Altstatt, Karl Baumann, Pou Dimitrijevich, Theresa Enright, Miki Foster, Nik Hanselmann, Jessy Lancaster, Madeline McDonald Lane, Lucas McGranaham, and Sophia Strosberg.

Building anything is a process. Building something good usually involves a lot of people’s ideas and labor. building is what we have called the people and the process of building something good in this building. Each Friday at 2pm, building gets together to talk, eat snacks, and make building. building builds on itself: last week’s building is this week’s built, but this week’s built is the place to build next week’s building. The interests of building include ghosts, software studies, coffee, walks in the woods, things that turn, critical spatial practice, the politics of representation, edge sites, flea markets, poesis, precarity, female-fronted punk bands of the 70s and 80s, and building. However, building interests are always building.  The process of building results in traces of those interests. It also involves traces of the art/works of Nick and Kyle. All those traces are the building where you now stand. What will be building tomorrow?

The artists wish to thank: Kelly Brown, EG Crichton, Sharon Daniel, Jennifer González, Shelby Graham, Chip Lord, Josh McVeigh-Schultz, Joshua Muir, Soraya Murray, Jennifer Parker, Warren Sack, Elizabeth Travelslight, Lyle Troxell, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Rob Wilson, Richard Wohlfeiler, and everyone who contributed to building. This presentation was made possible with funding from UCSC’s Porter College Graduate Arts Research Committee and the Florence French Award.

And here are some photos from building (project descriptions to follow):

Each week we create participatory events and situations which explore critical spatial practices, participatory software, and social practices. Last week we went to the flea market and sold stuff in exchange for ideas for our exhibition space.

Then we built an installation which includes photos of people with the stuff they bought and the ideas they sold, audio recordings from that day, written documentation, and the receipt printer which invites people to add their idea by calling or texting 706.4048 (Santa Cruz area code–not printed here to prevent spam).

Would you like to be part of building? Contact me to participate!

My Fun-A-Day paintings

More photos on my Flickr set.

Last month Emily Glaubinger and I were commissioned to draw a chalk mural for BC Tech during a two-day medical trade show. BC Tech is an outsourced medical product development and contract manufacturing company based in Santa Cruz, California.

FUN-A-DAY!!

Create your own project and produce one piece of artwork each day for the entire month of January. Then submit your 31 pieces by early February to be included in one of the six shows this year (Philly, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Boston, Santa Cruz and Portland).

ARTCLASH.COM for more details!

flyer by Kara

If you spent the revenue of an average Burger King restaurant on $1 burgers, the losses incurred would be of equal value to this many $1 burgers.
Inkjet Print and Gouache on Paper
2′x2′
Code Snippet:
float revenue2008 = 2454.7; //in millions
float restaurants2008 = 11565;
//multiply by one million to convert revenue to dollars
int averageRevenue = int(revenue2008/restaurants2008 * 1000000);
int burgerLosses = int(averageRevenue * .10); //you lose 10 cents on each burger
for (int i = 0; i < burgerLosses; i++){
drawBurger();
}

If everyone in the US bought two $1 burgers this year, Burger King would be operating at a loss. Eating burgers is radical politics.
Inkjet Print and Gouache on Paper
2′x2′

Nik and I have some old prints in a new building: the Digital Arts Resource Center at UCSC. They’ve found a nice home along a bright red wall on the second floor.

Nik and I have a piece in the Sesnon Gallery’s Full Disclosure show, opening tomorrow. The Sesnon is in Porter College on UCSC’s campus. The opening is Wednesday, October 7th from 4:30-6:30pm and the show will be up until November 21st.

Failbase 831.xxx.4046 is a system for the collection and output of participant testimonies of failure. By leaving voicemail or sending SMS (text) messages to (831) xxx-4046, participants can submit their failures. As they speak or type, the failures are printed in the gallery as paper receipts. Visitors to the gallery space are encouraged to submit their own failures, as well as to read, cut, notate and file incoming failures according to how they see fit.

Failbase 831.xxx.4046 was conceived and created by Digital Arts and New Media graduate students Nik Hanselmann and Nick Lally under the auspices of E.G. Crichton who invited them to be part of Archive of What’s Left Behind.