I Am Still Alive

I’ll be here in San Francisco this weekend, but Artlog has a booth at this week’s Affordable Art Fair on 34th St for a sale of prints by artists Maya Hayuk, Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza, Dan Funderburgh and Justin Fines.

We’re also selling a print at the booth by Gilbert & George on behalf of the Brooklyn Museum – 100% of the proceeds go twoard the museum. More info on Artlog.

If you are in New York Thursday through Sunday, come by the fair to see the work and to get a demo (the first demo!) of Arlo.

This may be a bit too obvious a screen grab, but I’ve always dug YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ work. I first saw it at a show at the New Museum last year that sort of blew me away and was underwhelming at the same time.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (YHCHI) is a two-artist collective based in Seoul, South Korea. Using Flash animation techniques, they create fast-moving, text-based artworks that are synchronized with original scores. Using a seemingly simple format—texts on monochromatic backgrounds—YHCHI weaves complex and evocative narratives. Invoking the genre of film noir, and the hard-boiled literary styles of Raymond Chandler and Phillip K. Dick, YHCHI’s imaginative, witty and often politically pointed narratives offer layered and compelling stories in which identities are assumed and discarded, and ideologies of all persuasions are held up and questioned.
cf. The New Museum

Speaking of the New Museum, Artlog is running another “Collect LES event” on 18 April and we are pumped to be working with the New Museum and more than a dozen great Lower East Side galleries. Last year’s event drew more than 1500 folks. More info about Collect LES soon – we are going to start promoting in earnest next week. We are also probably launching Arlo next week. Next week is shaping up to be quite busy.

I also really, really like the idea of a ‘two-artist collective.’

It’s nearly April and most all of the (few) posts I have committed to record this year have been to say that I am still around. Well, this one is no different, but I reckon that I will fill in some blanks and then resume posting more regularly (we’ll see).

It’s been a busy six or so weeks. I have transitioned from Brooklyn to the Pacific Coast – in Los Angeles for the time being – and am making my move northward in a few weeks presumably. I brought thousands of pounds of type, letterpress printing machines and most all of my other belongings (save a couple couches and scrap wood) along with me for the ride.

With all of that hardware safely in a storage facility (storage in West Los Angeles is plentiful and surprisingly affordable), I set about traveling a bit around the south west and even spent the first few weeks in March back in New York for the art fairs (Artlog had a booth at the Pulse Art Fair). I reckon flights back and forth between the West and East Coasts will be frequent (heading back to New York again in a few days for about a week actually).

Besides beach time, I have really been focused on coding. I built/am finishing a web application called Arlo that should be officially launching sometime next week. It’s an extraction of the Artlog portfolio system but, I figure, an enormous improvement on that system. It’s a hosted and flexible platform for web publishing and content management. Arlo is modular and will be deployed for several different types of users. Initially the setup is geared towards artists and creatives, but the plan is to tweak things in the near future for folks in bands and art galleries (letting them do a lot more online with greater ease and control than they are accustomed to).

I will be posting a bit more about it as the launch nears, but suffice it to say for now that I’ve spent just about every minute or so of my work days for the last couple months on Arlo. It’s a lot of work to make things easy for folks.

Arlo also represents a big shift for Artlog.com. Artlog is a partnership between myself and Manish Vora. It’s about a year old and we spent most of that last year exploring the art industry and figuring out where we fit within it. Part of the problem of Artlog is that up until this point I think we weren’t disciplined enough staving off feature-creep. Quite the opposite it was actually our ‘strategy’ to do as much as possible in the short term to see what worked and what didn’t (gauging feedback, user traction online and offline, financial benefits, and our own exhaustion). And it was indeed exhausting, but quite a bit worked in the process and we realized that it was time to focus our business.

So, a few months back we decided to strip as much as possible out of the Artlog app to really clarify the Artlog mission as a place to discover/share art information and art events. Most everything that doesn’t directly contribute to this goal will be pulled. Most of this work is ahead of me and it may take some time (as the only guy doing any development around here). Those orphaned features that we figure are most promising/useful will find new homes of their own like Arlo.

And to reflect this restructuring, we are now informally doing business as Ay Are Tee and Artlog and Arlo are the services that we produce. It’s a lot of names. I know. I think it will make more sense in time.

And that now bring us to I Am Still Alive. I started IASA as a design company three years back and in the meantime stopped doing any client design to focus on self-directed projects. At this point the plan is to use the business structure of I Am Still Alive to house my own personal side projects. So things may be a bit quiet around here (aside from blog posts) for a bit, but once I get settled up in San Francisco and get a shop set up there, I plan on resuming the printing business with renewed vigor and on relaunching this website then in the late Spring-early Summer.

And there you have it.

Nish used the new Artlog album slideshow viewer to put together a collection of Obama print images. Obama 08 by Lance Wyman is a favorite of mine.

Artog’s Collect SoHo art crawl is tonight in – wait for it – SoHo. We’ve put a lot of effort into organizing it and it’s really shaping up.

If you are free in the city this evening, come on by and check out the shows: the Dia installations Earth Room and Broken Kilometer recently re-opened and the participating galleries have a lot of great art from emerging and more established artists; also, notably, the Drawing Center is hosting an artist talk with Pat Steir and curator Joao Ribas in their Main Gallery at 6:30pm and a show of drawings by Rirkrit Tiravanija that I am looking forward to seeing.

I rebuilt the Artlog application over the past several weeks and we launched it yesterday. I am still adding features and bringing the portfolio sites back online with the new design, but it’s a major improvement as is, I reckon.

Have a look at the new user profiles and the new map guides if you’re interested.

Artlog/I Am Still Alive ran on fumes for the past several weeks, but at this point it looks like we made it through fine – better than fine. All four big Artlog events last week were awesome.

• We met lots of new folks and showed great work here in the studio over the course of two sweltering days during the Atlantic Ave Artwalk.

• We spread the gospel of Artlog a bit during the Affordable Art Fair where we were the media sponsor and where we presented a booth full of work by Artlog users

• Konrad’s Chelsea Art Museum performance on Thursday was a big success – we provided some organizational & marketing support

• Friday’s Artlog Collect LES art walk was huge. 1,200 folks came out to see work at 24 Lower East Side Galleries and the New Museum. People at the participating venues were jazzed across the board and attendees could be spotted exploring the LES pretty much all evening event maps in hand. Big thanks to the participating galleries, the New Museum, our sponsors – Radeberger Pilsner, Christiania Vodka, A Casa Fox, Moscot, the Sixth Ward, Doyle & Doyle, Gallery Bar & LES BID – and to press that got us out there and covered the event – TimeOut, Daily Candy, Associated Press, Mashable.

Now that Nish and I have a little breathing room, we are plotting our next moves – shifting focus back to the site itself and angling in to re-focus and refine the tools over there.

So Nish, Rebecca and I have been putting this event together for Artlog over the past few months. It’s tomorrow and it all seems to be coming together nicely. Collect LES is a collective gallery open house of sorts – it’s an event we put together to shine a brighter light on the art activity coming out of the Lower East Side these days.

Join Artlog for Collect LES, an art crawl through the Lower East Side’s burgeoning art community. Coordinated by Artlog in partnership with the LES Business Improvement District, Collect LES includes 24 galleries and the New Museum.

At Collect LES ‘08, discover new galleries, artists and art works as you walk through the Lower East Side. The event will bring more than a thousand art lovers together. From Bowery to East Broadway, there will be an array of painting, photography, video and installation art. Enjoy free wine, beer and liquor and special offers at local businesses.

For more info & to purchase tickets.

If you are in New York and going to the Affordable Art Fair, stop by Artlog’s booth (#505). We are presenting work by Dana Bell, Elizabeth Daggar, Camilla Fallon, Marlene Marino, Andrew Ti, and Lara Wechsler.

I am opening the studio here for the next two days as part of this year’s Atlantic Avenue Artwalk. Artlog had an open-call and several artists from the site will be exhibited here this weekend.

I’m doing a letterpress demo here at 3pm tomorrow and attendees will keep the prints we run off. Sunday at 3pm, Konrad Kaczmarek will be playing a concert here in the space as well.

So feel free to stop on in and tell me I sent you.

NB. Don’t forget to visit Axelle Fine Arts next door for amazing silkscreen and Cannonball Press down the road.