I Am Still Alive

Given the lack of consistent posting here this year and the fact that I am flying to New York tomorrow and spending the next several days in Brooklyn, Middletown (CT) and Sag Harbor, I am concerned that my previous post Cunnilingus in North Korea may stay at the top of the home page for a bit too long.

I am preempting it.

Here’s some video of my dog in the morning just really stoked to see me again.

It’s also the first video uploaded to Arlo/Artists. It was my equivalent of the 37 Signals Upload Bird. I must have uploaded this saccharine video 50 times as I tested the video encoding API this past weekend (we’re communicating with a merb app on EC2 very much like Panda). This is just the standard encoding but we are also encoding HD and .m4v for you iphoners out there.

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.