3d painting and installation, aka Hands Room.
10 x 10 x 15 feet, mixed media installation, 2019
room size installation, a part of the Giant Hands series of installations
Constructed over three days and painted over two nights.
below - seen … with my phone
Top view
Hands Tesseract, giant hands painting and installation, 10 x 10 x 15 feet, 2019
No sleeping, ok?
aka Hands Room.
10 x 10 x 15 feet, mixed media installation, 2019
room size installation, a part of the Giant Hands series of installations
We can, though, try to get out using our intelligence. I am not saying our minds because every animal has a mind, and every animal uses their mind to go after food and reproduction. We can use our intelligence to grow faculties that will help us overcome our DNA limitations. Imagine that everywhere we go we put up fences - we get home and our first reaction is to lock up, we build a house and put a fence, we build a nation and put up a wall, ironically not to keep beasts out.
We build nice cities like New York, we build nice avenues with beautiful shops alongside to keep crystalline structures like diamonds and gold safe from the elements while homeless people look in from the gutters.
We tell grown adults how to conduct their love lives, we are ashamed of merely showing penises and vaginas on public television while it is hard to turn on any device without running into a celebration of violence, real and imaginary.
We sit around stuffing ourselves for hours on end with food and drink when a fifth will do, we slaughter animals indiscriminately but adore pet stores and strut ourselves with creatures on leashes. We enjoy ice cream cones in front of animals in cages.
We can do better here, much better.. this is why we print books so we don't forget that people already thought of all this in the past. Now that the vast majority is in the public domain - it is easier than ever to think - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46333/46333-h/46333-h.htm
I have identified 10 easy steps that we, together, can fix this country.
The president is just one guy - I know, he’s probably a powerful guy but just one guy what is he gonna do?
Be your own president.
I personally promise to hang onto every idea and whim that crosses my mind. To indulge in frivolous speculation and to use words from different languages in one sentence. I am interested in answers not much contrived, genuine things and fools persistent in their folly.
Stop asking people to identify themselves with their genitalia. Unless you are of course asking them out. I call this the Minds over Matter, Wits over Bums rule.
We are products of our desires, or what Joseph Campbell calls the "the zeal of the organs for each other"
I was lucky enough to spend 10 years in the San Francisco Bay Area and consider it one of the most progressive areas in the world today. It is absolutely no coincidence that apple, google were formed there.
Our identity, and sexual identity in particular, is central to our being and how we operate in the world. We embark on many quests and gender is one such a quest.
But it should remain a personal pursuit and should not be a corporation's or our government's business who we go to bed with.
If a corporation or the government requires you to specify your gender identity this is the vulgar equivalent of it pulling your pants down to check on the shape and form of your genitalia.
Stop all the cooking on television, replace kitchen cabinets with bookshelves. Eat very simple meals once or twice a day and thus gain several hours of fresh and productive life every day..
The amount of media devoted to cutting, mashing, pulverizing ingredients into the most time consuming elaborate time wasting of endless devouring, then washing dishes and shopping again in $70k kitchens, this cancer of endless cooking on TV is just killing us. Buy Buy eat repeat.
We have millions of animals suffer and have horrible lives so we can have extra 2000 calories while sitting on the couch and moving from there to the car - to the chair at work - it's not that modern supermarkets don't have 40,000 items to eat to choose from.
Eliminate the shopping cart ( except for disabled people of course ). You get whatever you can carry.
( below ) The Aboubakar family of Darfur province, Sudan, in front of their tent in the Breidjing Refugee Camp, in eastern Chad, with a weeks worth of food. DÕjimia Ishakh Souleymane, 40, holds her daughter Hawa, 2; the other children are (left to right) Acha, 12, Mariam, 5, Youssouf, 8, and Abdel Kerim, 16. Cooking method: wood fire. Food preservation: natural drying. Favorite foodÑDÕjimia: soup with fresh sheep meat. /// The Aboubakar family is one of the thirty families featured in the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (p. 56). Food expenditure for one week: $1.23 USD. (Please refer to Hungry Planet book p. 57 for the familyÕs detailed food list.)
( below ) Ottersland Dahl family, of Gjettum, Norway (outside Oslo). Gunhild Valle Ottersland, 45, shopping for weekly groceries. Model-Released.
( above ) Nalim and NamgayÕs family of Bhutan, with all of their possessions. From pages 72-73, Material World. The family of subsistence farmers lives in a 3-story rammed-earth house in the hillside village of Shingkhey, Bhutan. {{Family members are: Namgay (50, family patriarch and husband of Nalim), Nalim (47, family matriarch and wife of Namgay), Kinley (17, son of Namgay and Nalim), Bangam (also called Kinley, 14, daughter of Nalim and Namgay), Zekom (2, daughter of Nalim and Namgay), Sangay, (29, daughter of Nalim and Namgay and wife of Sangay Kandu), Sangay Kandu (33, husband of Sangay), Choeden (9, daughter of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Chato Namgay (7, son of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Sangay Zam (5, daughter of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Chato Geltshin (3, son of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Tandin Geltshin (2, son of Sangay Kandu and Sangay), Kinley Dorji, (61, unmarried brother of Nalim). Nalim and her daughter Sangay work as partnersÑthey take turns caring for the children and working in their mustard, rice, and wheat fields. SangayÕs husband Sangay Kandu does the plowing of the family fields but Sangay and Nalim do the planting and harvesting. Namgay, who has a hunched back and a clubfoot, grinds grain for neighbors with a small mill his family purchased from the government. They are paying for the mill as they canÑoften the payment is made in grain and mustard oil. Namgay is also a reader of sacred texts and conducts house cleansing and healing ceremonies for their 14-house village. From Peter MenzelÕs Material World Project that showed 30 statistically average families in 30 countries with all their possessions.}}
The Material World books changed my life and how I see the world and i could never unsee the photographs in them - they were done before google gave us insight into people's lives. I always found it very weird and felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we have in stores - they say the average amount of products in your average grocery store is 40,000 items. The normality of this escapes me - to quote the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Five to one against and falling..." she said, "four to one against and falling...three to one...two...one...probability factor of one to one...we have normality, I repeat we have normality." She turned her microphone off—then turned it back on, with a slight smile and continued: "Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem."
Hungry Planet:
http://menzelphoto.photoshelter.com/gallery-collection/Hungry-Planet-Europe/C0000k7JgEHhEq0w
Material World:
To me any shard that sparkles is just like any other shard that sparkles, they may or may not have previously been beer bottles. We haven't solved many of our problems efficiently but it seems a lot of carbon shards I have seen in New York are better taken care of than many humans. We need to cut the shard loose.
And always wondered why is that the case? How has this particular shard captured our imagination. Who wants it? I mean it used to be that shards indicated status, and status served to preserve social order for the better and calm of society. Now that we have publicly funded institutions in place to do that i think we need to release the shards from that duty. They are somewhat pretty but not in my mind pretty enough do deserve more than a days wage. If i see a shard decorated individual of course i am not going to think more or less of them on account of the shards. So what is it?
And number five is…
5. Cut the diamond shops loose and have free computer and learning places in there instead for people to go get free education.
What I see here is nothing more or less than polished pebbles just like any other polished pebbles and I am not gonna argue with anyone over it, I am just not going to ever bring it up again. I could see a ceremonial use for it when dancing in circles for rain for example and just for kicks but to have these shards take prominence or precedence is a waste of space - imagine if in our minds and hearts actual valuable things take place like learning how to break the speed of light, maybe instead of toiling for rocks we can toil the genome or figure out how to break out of gravity and get on real voyages and real far.
In case you need to perform a shamanic ritual and need to decorate yourself in crystals, or have gotten a job as a shaman and need to sew these into your uniform or headdress - I know a great shop in the garment district that has a million dollar necklace they sell for 25 bucks.
We get rid of all couches, better yet - throw them out together with all televisions. What's with the couch you say, poor thing hasn't done a thing against this nation.
The thing with the couch is easy - every second we spend on the couch we are not spending chasing our dreams. Or biking our neighborhood or talking to our neighbors or making extra cash for the trip around the world we have been dreaming of.
The dynasties of the world love the couch because when we are chained to it we are easily seduced to live vicariously through other people's triumphs. They setup various circuses like politics, olympics and reality shows and thus inject us with the emotions and experiences of people we have never met.
The added bonus of selling the couch is now we can do cartwheels in the living room and probably wholelotta more fun stuff without fearing falling off the lumpy..
7. Cut the lawn...
as in for you who do not get the pun - eliminate this useless waste of green space, plant a forest instead or see below for more suggestions. I have even seen people raking leaves which to me is as useless as trying to fix the leaves back to the tree.
Imagine the entirety of this nation gets busy cutting useless weeds for a couple of hours every weekend - we can figure out practical fusion propulsion if the same amount of resources was applied to doing science.
The solution - either plant something useful like fruits or vegetables and take care of them instead, get a robot ( pictured below) or get goats ( the African kind ).
Let’s free the world of the handbag, I never understood how such a thing is useful, or rather, how such a thing is more useful than, say, a plastic bag.
I call these sacks with straps because most bags are meant eventually to be handled with a hand, hence the handles. What i do not understand is why these sacks take up so much space in manhattan where we presumably don’t have much space anyway, and even in winter they sit well protected by the elements while homeless people lie outside on the sidewalk.
I do not understand how come we have rovers on Mars but prize these sacks so highly in the ladder of worthiness of things.
I started with the self and i am gonna end the essay with the self.
And number nine is believe in yourself first. The first thing you should believe in is yourself.
I know from the very beginning we were taught how and what to believe in. We believe in good things and bad things. The problem is good things turn to bad things and vice versa.
We believe in democracy, we believe in God - nice things. The even bigger problem is people tell us what to believe in all the time. Remember that a few guys out there taught us to believe in black holes and no one has even seen one. I am just making a joke here, I love science and the science of space, it is epic. But I am just saying - to prove the point that we are very susceptible to influence. I am not saying you should touch a black hole to believe in it, all I am saying is - use the one non-black hole on your shoulders often and mostly to believe in the one undeniable thing - yourself.
Think for yourself first. I know this one is hard.
For centuries people found comfort and security in being told what to think. Peoples have been thinking the thoughts of kings and queens, the thoughts of their masters, the town elders , the pharaohs, the priests ( don't get me wrong I am religious but I argue and think about my religion and don't you ever take that from me). For if there's a great gift that the French gave to the world it is the opinion of the common man … aka you.
When I open a newspaper it is as if we never went through the Enlightenment. It is full of guided content and regurgitated narratives of sex, guns, and money. No one ever tells you that the most important thing that you own, apart from your good health and the proper function of all your organs, is your ability to think independently. And the second thing is your ability to express and argue your opinion in public. These were the two Dreams of the Enlightenment.
In his Essay What Is Enlightenment? Kant defines Enlightenment as "man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance." For his second dream he says "the public use of one's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind."
Once you have traded your goods and services, obtained lodging and food, secured your home, sturdied your frame and medicated your body, feel free to use the greatest gift you may ever have, free thought.
I personally find thinking very pleasant, I quite love it, second only to chocolate ice cream.
We value the lives of unfortunate humans less than cut-up crystals and dug up and smelted earth, and sacks with straps.
What is a human progress without addressing our human needs - education for the underprivileged and poor kids and living conditions for the homeless.
Global warming is a result of our cold hearts, which now crave even more planets.
We shelter and feed our felons but look down and label the underprivileged because we like to feel superior.
Couple of years ago I volunteered for the mayor of New York’s campaign and the amount of well educated and well dressed and well meaning humans that despised the “homeless” was incredible. It broke my heart into thousand pieces. Because we only just barely got out of the caves, 30,000 years ago we were shivering under the light of fires in caves and it took a few tall buildings to forget all of our humanity.
What good is going to Mars if we are slaves to our greed and inhumanity and treat each other like beasts.
To fix it we need to fix ourselves first.
#election2020
This january i drove to Florida and back from New York to collect my art, and this reminded me that I need to tell you of the moving project ... Which is a really long story, and a lot of pictures. Some other time though.
I thought about the level of empowerment that computers and driving machines like cars have given us so if I were to travel in the past like say, several centuries ago, I would not be able to do it by myself, practically pick any spot on earth and go right now. I can just take a flight to Tasmania, be there in 30 hours, rent a car and then get in a boat and go to the Antarctic. I don't even need to carry a gun ( to fend off wild beasts ), I will not have to explain myself to anyone, i will not have to take years to do so. The car/computer combination empowered people with less physical abilities and people who are not superheroes to cover enormous distances without having to take years of preparation. All you need is a passport.
I wanted to talk about an important point. While I was driving I was marveling at our ability to create and design machines and design the system where we could move our bodies unnaturally at great speeds and basically go anywhere we want. I mean isn't it marvelous that we have been able to design these incredibly sophisticated machines, that we’re able to extract materials from Earth, mold them, shape them into these really strange stiff cages packed with electronics and all kinds of systems based on numerous inventions, and make that a moving machine. I mean this is truly marvelous and I always, always think about that incredible engineering creation. While sitting in it.
I have always been fascinated with American driving and trucking. I've moved several times across the U.S. from New York to Chicago to California, from California to New York, from New York to Florida, from Florida to California, from California back to Florida and back to New York City. There's certain Romanticism that I attach to traveling on American roads long distance, and I really love driving so this is not a painful experience for me but rather enjoyable.
What is truly fascinating is that GPS and Google maps navigation enable me to reach my destination. I'm very absent minded person and without any sort of sense for direction so for me having a GPS and Google maps speak directions from my phone really dramatically changes how I experience driving on American roads. Otherwise I will have to stop every hundred miles just to make sure I'm on the right road.
I have a few simple rules when it comes to driving when you are a very absent minded person. One of them is I rarely drive more than 10 miles faster than the speed limit, of course often times there is a 65 miles per hour posted speed limit and the traffic moves 80 miles per hour so of course I always try to keep up with traffic. That's why one of my basic rules is to make sure that you keep up with traffic but you do not drive drastically faster than anyone else.
My second rule is I always keep basic awareness of who's beside me on the road, who's in front of me and who is behind me. I constantly check on the back mirror, the side mirrors, to make sure nobody's coming really fast. Sometimes they're people who drive really fast on the roads and to be honest I never get angry in the sense that I totally understand that some people need to hurry on the roads, so I'm not going to waste time being angry - on the contrary, I will make sure to always move over so if I'm in the fast lane as soon as it's safe to move out move into the right-hand Lane. That way I allow the person who is in a hurry to just freely move forward and tailgate the next person in line.
The above rule for checking on my surroundings especially applies when there is a multi-lane huge backlog traffic especially stop and go like around Washington DC in the stretch between Washington DC and Baltimore. Although it's counterintuitive in a way and people tend to keep very short distance between cars I usually like to keep really good distance between myself and the car in front. Usually some people move in to fill in the gap. Driving in very close proximity in a stop-and-go traffic and especially with multiple lanes traffic moving I'd like to have the opportunity to stop or move over if sudden changes on the road occur.
My other rule is that I rarely speak on the phone when I drive and I know that for a whole lot of people that is not a problem at all. But for myself I know that I need to keep my eyes on the road very very firmly because I'm very absent-minded person and it takes special care to keep my attention on the road. I also avoid eating or drinking while I'm driving for the same reason. I know for a lot of people who drive very often and when I used to drive in California my car was my second body so I never really worried about being attentive to the road but now when I only drive occasionally I really need to pay attention. Especially when I drive for long hours like 10 or 12 hours - I'm not going to lose much and like to take my time.
I noticed recently during a pretty tough drive in a section between Pennsylvania and New York when I had to drive in a fog and rain, and also in the dark - I have to say that I had a really hard time seeing the lanes from my seat. The rain wasn't too hard however my visibility was not ideal so I had to drive slower than the rest of the traffic. There was a dilemma for me whether I should just stop and wait the rain out and i decided to move all the way to the right because I can definitely see the shoulder line really well and then I had my emergency lights on so traffic could be alerted that I'm driving fairly slow. I was forced to drive with my emergency lights on for like a couple of hours but at least it gave me an opportunity to calm down and basically get to where I needed to go to safely.
One of the things I love about driving in America is that as you move from state-to-state you start noticing the changes in the environment - for example at the border between North Carolina and Georgia - it was immediately apparent in Georgia the road changed from two lanes to three lanes so richer state, more money for roads - better roads. For example in North Carolina around fort Bragg I started seeing billboards like courage and freedom so everything was very patriotic on the road and it was really fitting to be near the area of fort Bragg. Also I noticed in North Carolina there was a botanical garden named cape fear I thought it was very funny.
My boarding pass to Mars 2020 from NASA - get yours here:
The big question is why, why write this book, why put $100,000 on the cover and who cares?
My book is a bit bait and switch, how else am I going to get you to read it. It is meant to entertain and inspire.
The book is meant for all the underdogs, for all the weird kids and the misfits. The young and not so young adults who read strange books and ask odd questions. And who feel there’s nothing going for them, and that there’s no hope. They feel stuck and they feel rejected. But they have dreams and imagination.
I’m here to tell you there’s not only hope, but even your wildest dreams will become true and a lot more.
At the end of the essay I put the reason why I have hundred thousand dollars prominently featured on the cover and what it’s all about.
As a Eastern European girl growing up I had nothing going for me and I had zero prospects. I was reading weird books, and instead of doing homework I was thinking about aliens and talking about it too, guess how that went ( skipping ahead when I moved to California there was a guy there who too was thinking about aliens as a little boy. And he made a billion dollar empire out of it ).
Going back to being an Eastern European girl with nothing going for me, I should tell you I did have something going for me and it was five shelves of secondhand science fiction books, and dreams and imagination.
I tell you with confidence, all of you dreamers, if you have zero confidence, zero connections, zero support and zero money, I want to assure you that if you have at least one shelf of science fiction books, dreams and imagination, you are at least halfway to everything you ever wanted.
Okay so in addition to being stuck and with nothing going for me, I was going to the wrong school, I went to mathematical high school and guess how I did in equations and in history. And later on I went to architectural school and my professors were asking “so, where are the toilets?” and I was: “in my buildings there are no toilets and there is no building”.
So if you feel you have zero prospects, if you feel that you are stuck like you are embedded in a rock, I’m writing this book to tell you that if you only have dreams and imagination everything will happen for you and more than you dreamed of.
And the lesson is it’s not you it’s your environment. The moment you change your environment you are going to be, man, I’m born for this.
It is not you it is your environment, change it.
The way it happened to me is that I moved to America with nothing but the clothes on my back, I have no idea how I didn’t end up in a Dracula Castle or something, sipping blood. It was so scary. But I had one thing going for me and it was that the American government decided to pay for my education.
And when I went to the Midwest for school I didn’t really like it all that much but there I found what I truly liked. And that was like finding gold. And so my lesson is when you change your environment – you must put yourself in a place of growth and learning.
I guess it doesn’t have to be necessarily a school or a university, could be just a place with potential but here’s how it happened for me and that’s what I’m telling.
When you put yourself in a place of growth and learning you’re going to find out something that you like, and guess what – they’re going to be people there that you like too.
Once you have these two things this will propel you to your next step.
Once this happens it is going to feel so natural, when you change your environment and put yourself in a place of growth and learning you are going to find people that you like and it’s going to push you forward, it’s going to literally sail you to the next thing.
When you find your true love you are going to be, man, I was born for this and of course we all know you weren’t really born for it, nobody knew but you will know.
I am back to the beginning of the essay where I promised a very important lesson about the material.
And here’s a very very good lesson. I had at one point decided that I no longer cared about the material world. And what happened is that I had taken a job as a cleaner at the airbnb I was staying at, and I didn’t have twenty bucks for a bus ticket to go see the opening of my own show. And here’s worse, all my art was in a storage unit which was going into auction. Here’s what failure looks like, and it was entirely my fault. I didn’t have a few dollars to go to the opening of my own art show which I worked really hard for, and all I worked hard at was going to be sold in the county market in Florida for pennies and be lost forever. I want you to read this paragraph again and know what failure looks like, it feels bad too. It was a great lesson for me to learn.
The important part is if you decide not to pay at least much attention to the material – make sure to do it smartly, pay attention in the same way you cross the road – you make sure you do not end up under a car. Take a week to read all there is about smart and simple living, there are so many ways to do this these days, the 4 hour work week, the nomad, the go fasting in the desert way, retreats in India if you want. Scale and live smartly and with common sense and your wits about you.
The reason I put dollar signs on my cover is that you must get the material stuff out of the way and this is the second lesson about the material. When you satisfy your material needs you are going to get sudden clarity, this is when you are going to find out what you truly love and what truly matters to you – then you could say to hell with it, I got it.
Again about the material stuff – you just have to make sure there is nothing you desire materially and take care of your material concerns early, because if there’s something you desire in the material world I discovered that it’s always going to be on the back of your mind. I realized that as creatures with DNA we are very material beings, we operate in the material world and by our nature we respond to material stimuli.
You are not going to find what you truly love if you are striving materially. The moment you are free from worry then you will have the clarity to find what makes you truly happy and what truly matters to you. And here’s my secret about what makes you truly happy – what you are really good at and what you’re great at.
Again, you are not going to find what you truly love if you are striving materially. The moment you are free from worry then you will have the clarity to surely find what makes you truly happy and what truly matters. Here’s my secret about what makes you truly happy – discovering what you are really good at and what you’re great at.
Never want stuff, instead gain inspiration, seek dreams and challenges. Look for knowledge and look for the betterment of mankind. Dream mighty things, think how to touch the hearts of people, think how to take mankind on a great adventure, and fear nothing.
And the first lesson is don’t. Hundred thousand is not much money, as a senior artist in today’s market you’re probably going to be compensated 150,000.
Don’t do it for the money. There are hundreds and thousands of great ways, there are beautiful, amazing, adventurous, awesome ways of making a lot more than a hundred thousand and if you put yourself in the right business like law, finance, governance, executive entrepreneurship, sales, acting – there are many, many ways to go about it, even making decent memes on the Internet is going to do it. You can make millions making and having all kinds of fun.
Seek instead to become a highly skilled professional that people are simply going to make you an offer you can’t refuse every time. The adrenaline rush, the satisfaction and the pride you are going to take in making great work that’s the kind of thing that could never be erased or replaced by making money, because if you navigate the A player field successfully you will become capable of creating work that just can’t be beat or easily reproduced.
When I first got on board at Lucasfilm I never cared one bit about how much I was going to make but I was curious instead to find out how a highly respected venerable leader in this field operates, what type of creator, what kind of process makes people line around the block at midnight just to take a glimpse to experience their entertainment product. Millions of people go crazy about the stuff that Lucasfilm puts out, that’s indistinguishable from magic.
People pay thousands of dollars to go and learn something, and then they have to pay student loans until retirement, but instead you can get paid to get an invaluable insight into the inner workings of a great operation and I haven’t even started talking about the art aspect of it, and I haven’t even touched on the fact how much I loved Star Wars.
To sum it up if you care about the money you will miss out on developing the kind of qualities in yourself as a professional that you can be part of, that you can partake in and even create an ( entertainment product ) that simply can’t be beat.
So how do you become that? You probably need a portfolio right. Well I want to tell you a secret that even if you make the greatest bestest portfolio in the world, there are 50,000 okay maybe not 50 – 5000, 500 people that have exactly the same skill set. Portfolio will definitely help but nobody is going to call you with a great offer based on that. Because that’s not what your producer is going to be looking for.
You know of the term getting your foot in the door, and it seems logical that a portfolio will get your foot in the door but no, what really happens is that the producer on the 80 million dollars project is going to look for someone who is not going to screw up his 80 million dollars project when it gets really tough, like it gets really tough every time before a project gets out.
They want to make sure that you have a track record of delivering on a half million dollar project and then delivering on a 2 million dollar project and then delivering on a 20 million dollar project and perhaps then they can trust you with their own skin because their own skin is on the line.
See I haven’t even started talking about art yet because of course art comes into play and in a very very big way, you have to deliver what is promised, you will have to deliver under high pressure. Often times you have to work 16-hour days for months, just find out how many hours Elon puts into his rockets so that’s exactly the amount of time his engineers put into his rockets.
But for 2 years you are going to get the experience of 10 or 20 years elsewhere.
Many many many many people create beautiful things on YouTube but when a highly-skilled professional artist sits in front of that computer and they have to make a zebra – between that and the highly detailed beautiful zebra that’s prancing in the game stand numerous obstacles.
And that’s why the producer on that project is going to pay you to be able to, on your own initiative, remember – on your own initiative and without prodding or being tasked by somebody, you will have to navigate your way from zero to a highly polished entity that’s beautifully prancing in the game and that’s a lot more difficult than you think. Not least of which because they may discover that they may not need a zebra after all.
And that is because they want to make sure that there are a few hundred million people out there who will want to see the zebra prancing and it’s going to make them buy the product even in a small way. By the time you’re done with that zebra you will have become in a little way a zebra yourself and will know how to prance well.
So to sum it up your job as a video game artist, okay forget the art, as a highly skilled professional is to navigate an extremely well seeded minefield of obstacles to accomplish your goal.
There’s actually very little complacency in games because every new game is a new ball game simply because the hardware, the tools and the consumers have brand new expectations every single time. That’s why working in games is very very exciting because there’s always a brand new experience.
So how do you navigate that minefield that I talked about. Steve Jobs had a beautiful metaphor for this and it is the metaphor about the rock tumbler, so you have this rock tumbler and you put just dirty rocks from your garden into it, you turn it on, let it spin overnight and on the next day you open it up to find out beautiful polished rocks in there.
What happens when you do AAA software development, video games are in fact both software development and a product development, so what happens is that the product is so complex that it depends on millions and millions of individual interaction between highly skilled professionals to navigate the way to the beautiful polished rocks. Because unlike movies you never know what you’re going to get, you just can’t shoot the script on paper. There are so many uncertainties and ultimately you may end up with a product that doesn’t at all resemble what you started with.
Neither your manager nor your producer, perhaps nobody in the entire studio will have any idea what is it that you need to do to get your job done and I’m not saying it in a major way – of course you will have a task and you will have to complete it really nicely, but the many many moments when you will need to troubleshoot stuff when things go broke, when things will need to get better you will need to know what to do, and in this instance you have to go and find out and communicate with another skilled professional to figure out what to do cuz just imagine if 300 people on the team every day go by the producer or the art director to find out what is it they need to do – it’s going to take 500 years to make a game or a software product.
The micro transactional aspect of development is one of the reasons why open source software became very popular and quite robust.
So what the Silicon Valley has worked out is that they develop this pool of talent who is proven to be capable of navigating the rock tumbler and the minefields of obstacles by learning their way while interacting with others just like them, interacting with higher ups and people down the chain, it is actually absolutely flat structure, well not absolutely flat but in terms of navigating into the process of accomplishing your work it’s a completely flat field. You will have to go and talk to 10 people to figure stuff out sometimes. Because it’s not going to be written anywhere because things develop and information gets old really fast. The funny thing is that in software development in the Silicon Valley.you manage your higher-ups and you often have to tell them how to help you to get your job done. But in order to be able to talk to a person who’s literally a salaried millionaire and ask them to do stuff for you – you have to have your s*** together.
And here’s the other important lesson – we don’t call this game making, we call it game development and similar to what they call kaizen in Japan which is gradual improvement. The word we have for making gradual improvements over time is development, especially in software and of course video games.
Anyway, what does it mean to get your foot in the door – you become part of a pool of highly skilled professionals who have been trained in that way of operation where they understand that they will need to be proactive in their work and not just sit in front of a computer and sculpt stuff, they will have to be proactive and often in a very very irrational way. They will have to complete thousands and thousands of microtransactions, alone with the computer or with other professionals to the greatest benefit of their product or their company or their employer. They will have to be highly self-motivated, they have to be motivated just because of peer pressure.
I guess the next step is really important – get yourself in a place where stuff like that happens – this is Los Angeles and San Francisco hands down, I know there are other places, I just don’t have much experience elsewhere but I can tell you that’s your best chance of finding a place where there’s concentration of talent and concentration of industry. I’m not saying you can’t go anywhere else I’m just saying that’s your best bet.
Okay so the next lesson that’s really important is you got to make sure you like what you do and you have to like it a lot. I remember I used to get up at 5 a.m. to get to work at 6 a.m. because I absolutely (until this day) loved 3D modeling, sculpting, doing work on the computer – to me it has never been even 10 minutes of work and just love.
Another important thing is you got to scratch and crawl and claw yourself into finding people that you deeply respect and admire and work for them. Never work for people you don’t respect admire and you don’t want to emulate. This last line I stole from someone, so that’s not my line but it’s a great one.
I was really lucky I have to admit in the sense that on my first job I landed people who were absolutely astonishingly hard-working, talented and capable and with integrity. Never work for people you don’t respect you don’t admire and you don’t want to emulate.
So to sum it up you got to love it, you got to get to the place, you have to do the work with people you like and admire. Actually to get all of this accomplished you’re not going to be compensated hundred thousand dollars, you going to get several million dollars worth of value out of it.
My book comes end of May – if you want to know how to make this happen and what to do with it because the time will come when you will outgrow an organization and you want to strike on your own and you got to know what to do.
The computer is like a bicycle for the mind.., ( Thanks, Steve !). It was a lot more for me because the computer gave me a life. Without the computer I would have been stuck in a kitchen somewhere, just kidding.
Just saying and telling girls everywhere – learn how to use it and learn how to use your mind because when you learn to use the computer and well you get to be around smart people and will get smarter yourself.
And because I was able to use the computer and well and I was all around smart people I was able to go and make a living in the Silicon Valley and make hundred thousand dollars and travel the world and expand my mind and learn and grow. I had a wonderful time and a total ball although at first glance you would think I was just sitting in front of a computer all the time but no, the computer was the gate to the magic kingdom.
I remember going into one of the lead engineers at Lucas’ office and I saw him sitting behind a Mac and I was like what is this, I didn’t know Macs were any good at 3D, and he’s like oh I bootcamped it, so this friend of mine taught me how to use the mac basically having both OS X and Windows installed on it. Then and there I was hooked and I’ve used a Mac ever since, of course I’ve always had a bootcamped Mac and that saved the day many times.
Being a video game artist became a part of my DNA as a fine artist and as a thinker and as a philosopher because I do have a stance and I do think a lot when it comes to life and video games and computers and how to do things and how to do things well, and I’m really into old Masters but I’m also crazy about all the new technology.
When I was growing up I grew up with the worlds of Isaac Asimov and I was constantly on some sort of a voyage in outer space on ships and fantastical planets but I see that a lot of what was in these absolutely imaginary spaceships is becoming a reality today with the computer and really fast chips being able to process incredible amounts of data and having incredible magic available at our fingertips.
So I was really excited to finally make a push and put this book together because it was a totally worth the adventure and I learned a whole lot.
I did my first computer rendering when 3ds Max was called 3d studio and I think it was version 1.23 or something like that and it was running on DOS. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
So it really has been one miracle after another ever since and although I decided at some point to go into Fine Art full time and just remain in computer graphics as a teacher and freelancer I still really am crazy every time about everything 3D.
Giant Hands in East Village
Giant Hands in East Village is a week-long site specific installation created over three nights and one day on site at 172 E 4th street by the generous invitation of Chashama - Chashama.org
Giant Hands in East Village statement
The hands are towering structures traveling through space and time. The hands are the pillars of creation.
The back of every chair every pillow every brick every piece of twisted metal, every twist in a cypress, every hand of god on a roof, every red balloon and every little girl attached to it by a string, every pyramid and colossus has been made by the hand. Every city every spire every fence every wall, every gesture of kindness and generosity.
Due to the ephemeral nature of the hands, they gesture and move on. Some of them move if you wave at them gently. Site specific installation created in the space.
In creating shapes and objects I'm looking for truth, an easy state. I love the East village in the sense that it feels true New York City, with all its grittiness and authenticity. I created this installation in the span of three nights and one day and will only stay up over one week as a site-specific object true to the place. I like the pressure of working fast and keeping doubt to a minimum, I like the pressure of the ephemeral. It will never be the same again.
I loved working in the East village this is quintessential New York City, I loved the space I wanted the hands to gesture inside and to rest on surfaces. I also loved all the graffiti and the marks on the windows which overlapped the work inside. In a way I found the graffiti to be more authentic art and a good truth to aspire to. Because truth is what I am after.
Graffiti are good truth to aspire to. I thought the graffiti and city lights reflecting, overlapping the hands pretty special. This space taught me a lot.
As an artist I live a solitary life, I do investigations and create work in private. There is never finished work and there's never a definitive answer.
Working in the East Village was very special. I got in touch with a community I've never had an opportunity to work in before. Artists from the community came to my exhibit and we had hours and hours of conversations about our work and lives, conversations between artists and also between artists and the community are very important. This is the lifeblood of the creative process.
I derive a lot of inspiration from New York City and every encounter in New York City is significant to me, I really value honesty and truth in the work I create, working on the ground at 172 e 4th street felt like being part of a life process rather than a formal and confined studio experience.
This enabled me to do an investigation into the East Village, the people as well as a ground floor windowed space which invited the street outside. For me removing doubt from work is necessary and having to work under pressure takes care of doubt. Working with a deadline towards a definitive goal is very positive as it sets out a pace for the investigation, because my process is an investigation and usually fast pace keeps it true to the self.
Art is at the center of our inner lives, it is ephemeral and not with immediate material benefit. To have sustainable art practice we need sustained effort to support the workers in the “non-material” economy like artists and poets, writers and others. I am grateful to Chashama for inviting me to work in the space.
Giant Hands in East Village is a site specific installation created on site at 172 E 4th street.
In the spring of 2019, I was invited by Chashama, an arts organization in New York City, to create an installation in the vacant space of a former bank in the East Village.
Chashama liked my gorilla-style installations with giant hands in Central Park. I already had 12 giant hands and decided to make 24 more for a set of 36. Because I was still working as a teacher during the day I spent the night in the space making giant hands.
The space was open towards the street and the windows had graffiti. I wanted to include the inside into the outside. I also hung a single giant hand into the entrance hallway as a welcoming hand.
These 36 giant hands, initially simple outlines, were subsequently painted gradually over many months and hung in many installations in Central Park.
Download the Giant Hands Installations Book here.
Have been thinking of the Bay Area a lot lately. I lived on 3535 Fillmore and used to run to the foot of the bridge and back every evening. On the weekends i took a kayak across the bay but it had to be a double because of the strong currents. We sailed the Pacific out of Half Moon Bay - we paddled our kayaks south in search of whales migrating north. We carried tarp sails - basically a trapezoid cloth with two sticks - which once in the Pacific we strapped to our backs and sailed our kayaks through large swell and kelp forests. Paddle free i could run my fingers through the water and touch the tops of the kelp trees.
http://dimmerlight.com/portfolio/some-kind-of-bridge/
San Francisco’s Golden Gate – up close and personal. I used to live near the bridge and every time I went underneath it, no matter how many hundreds of times I’d done it, I’d stop to look at it. It is a very Chameleonic bridge and if you wait long enough it would cycle through all the colors of the rainbow.
