Sometime during the afternoon today someone went into the apartment and stole Aaron’s laptop and my guitar.

Larrivee L-03R
Serial #: 76608
Spruce top and rosewood sides with a small mark or scratch near the soundhole. You can click on the thumbnail for a bigger image or visit Larrivee Guitars to see details.

HP Pavilion zt3000
Serial #: CND4280BCQ

These were stolen at 174 S. Franklin in Juneau, AK. We can give a reward if any of these are found. Call (907) 586-3440.

The final report from The Conference of Young Alaskans has been made available. There’s some interesting information in the report but it doesn’t hold a candle to the discussion and process the delegates were engaged in. These young people were self nominated and came from all over the state to share their ideas and visions for Alaska’s future. They didn’t always agree, in fact the report shows that they didn’t fully agree on anything, but they approached the discussion with a great amount of civility and respect. They identified areas of improvement for the state and found points of contention. They made compromises and friendships while trying to solve problems and I thought the process was very open and engaging.

At this point it looks like the University will work towards hosting another conference in 2009 and I hope a youth run non-profit can emerge to ensure that will continue to create more active and empowered young minds but we’ll see what happens.
Even this process had its flaws but I guess you just can’t bake a pie without someone trying to stick their fat fingers in it. In politics, it’s when the process gets distorted that I become the most frustrated. I like to think that a good open process can eliminate the influence of greed and power but maybe not. There’s a slim chance that this group can cling to what makes it good but it will probably eventually collapse in on itself or become a tool of the man. Damn the man.

Download the report here.

I was at a reception for the visiting delegates to the Conference of Young Alaskans on Monday. It was hosted at the Juneau Douglas City Museum and while I was searching for the stuffed mushroom platter I stumbled across Mark Daughhetee’s brilliant “Reconstruction” exhibit.

When I walked into the room I overheard a girl say “I’ve seen that somewhere before.. I just can’t place it.”

It’s exactly that feeling of deja-vu which breathes life into this clever collection of photos.

In the exhibit, Daughhetee recreates some of the most recognizable images of our time and questions why a particular photograph rises above millions of others to stand as an icon. He takes the moments out of their context, he changes the visual elements, and he reshapes the images in a way that playfully distort our vision by playing off memory.

Following are images and some of Daughhetee’s commentary from the “Reconstructions” collection. If you click on an image you can see a larger version in comparison with the original source.

Migrant Model
In 1932 Dorothea Lange was a photographer working for the Farm Security Administration. She was documenting the plight of migrant farm workers in California when she came upon her now famous subject, Florence, a 32 year old mother of seven, living in a lean-to tent in Nipomo, California. Lange made five exposures of Florence and her children using her 4×5 Graflex camera. According to Florence’s grandson, Lange had promised that her picture would not be published, but would be used by the government to help the struggling farm workers. And though the promise was broken, Lange’s image became a symbol for the Dust Bowl era and was instrumental in drawing attention to the needs of the people in the camps.

Insulating Foam
Associated Press photographer Bruce Weaver was one of many who documented the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. To reconstruct his image I sprayed expanding insulating foam onto sheets of waxed paper from a pressure filled can. Eventually I was able to get a reasonable facsimile of the shape of the explosion captured in the widely published Weaver photograph. The foam was allowed to set, removed from the waxed paper, affixed to a painted board and photographed.

Hosed
Hosed is based on the Eddie Adams Pulitzer Prize winning photograph depicting the 1968 execution of a Vietcong prisoner on the streets of Saigon. The Adams photograph was so powerful that it was credited with having a galvanizing effect on turning the tide of opposition to the war in Vietnam. The unidentified prisoner, who had just murdered eight South Vietnamese citizens, was shot by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, director of South Vietnam’s police force. For the rest of his life, Loan was haunted by the execution. He relocated to the United States after the fall of Saigon where he ran a pizzeria near Dale City, Virginia until 1991. His identity was eventually discovered and shortly thereafter his business failed. He died of cancer in 1998.

911
An indelible image, yet it is the only photograph in this exhibition that is not based on a single image. Instead, it was created from a compellation of many images that we saw that day and in the days that followed. The model; built from cardboard, plastic, foam rubber and steel wool, was constructed within a week of September 11, photographed and destroyed. The print was finished and put away from view. Many months world pass before I began the second image of this series.

The exhibit at the City Museum is closed but you can still catch it at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage in September or visit Daughhetee.com to see these and other photos.

We need an indoor soccer arena in Juneau. We need more ice. We need more kick ass fun stuff that will keep us healthy and active. I spent last weekend in Whitehorse at a soccer tournament and they have an incredible facility. What a great way to blow $28 million dollars ($25m USD). We should abandon our boring bridges to nowhere and blow all that money on something fun instead (Yeah yeah, highway funds are for highways, blah blah blah I’m not listening.) Here’s what they got for 14 million twoonies:

• A turf arena with recessed goals for soccer (maybe ultimate and lacrosse too?)
• A hardwood arena with recessed goals for soccer, basketball, or volleyball
• A NHL sized ice rink
• An Olympic sized ice rink with practice ice for kids learning to skate
• A third story suspended track above the arenas
• A work out centre and multiple change rooms and plenty of bleachers
• A child care center with cool things to climb and chew on

This is all attached to a huge aquatic center with a lap pool, diving board, sauna, waterslide, lazy river, hot tub, and a rope swing. That maybe cost them another $20 million ducks. If you live in Juneau you should go check it out. We should just straight up steal the blueprints, the floor plans are on the internet, that’s got to cut costs right?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, what does it cost to get into this wonderful land of fun? If you’re an adult you can in for about the same price as the Augustus Brown pool. $45 (CAN) per month. Dag.

Lou, Aaron and I spent around ten hours on Saturday frantically putting together an intermission DVD for the annual JAHC Wearable Art Show. I missed a lot of the show because we arrived about five minutes before intermission but I did get to see the glass dress David Walker put together and I always get a kick out of seeing Costa on stage. She kicks ass.

For our part we included a bundle of previously screened JUMP Society films and also created several original short sequences. The new bits were all done using word balloons because we weren’t supposed to actually hold people’s attention.

It was a strange thing to make an intermission show because it was a show that no one was actually supposed to watch. They were supposed to go out to the lobby and bid on auction items.  The lights came up, the films went on and everyone milled around and talked. Announcements were made over the top of our audio and there weren’t too many people paying attention. It was just like any other intermission and it was exactly what I expected but for some reason it still sucked. I don’t usually think of myself as being a particularly needy artist but it was a lame experience.

On the upside we had a great time putting everything together in our usual last minute scramble of frantic creativity. We ended up with a batch of five short segments and I was pleased with the final products and the process. A tip of a very large hat to Katie White who helped us film and brought us food… and beverages… and limes.

• Here’s the video of our big fat heads.

In the films we used word balloons because we knew there was a chance we wouldn’t have sound. The word balloons gave us the idea to put huge heads on tiny bodies so we would look more cartoony. We dug through the quote bucket and pulled some gems for dialogue and then slapped the whole thing together learning while we went. The sploding segment was in reference to a recent front page article in the Empire about exploding birds. We also included a nod to the lonely island dudes with the sploding high five.

I really want to go back now that we’ve made these hasty clips and clean up the process. The timing on the word balloons was a little rough but we’ll get rid of them in the next round. I’m also thinking big hands and feet might be cool.

• The boys
• Lou catches air
• Lou sploded
• Sploding high-five

This weekend I got to run a multimedia show for a prog rock concert! Andy Engstrom of Volitar is the one who roped me in and it was a great show and a great experience. They played covers from Rush, Kansas, and Ozzie Osbourne but the best songs were the originals by George Wallace, Dave Crabtree, and Andy Engstrom.

For the media display we had 12 foot screens set up on both sides of the stage and Ben Sapp built some projector mounts so we could hang a pair of projectors from the lighting rigs. I recruited my dad to run a main video board with four inputs while I did the button mashing on the sources.

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Time was the theme this month in the Ruby room so I did a digital painting of a robot wearing a watch. It’s funny because robots don’t need watches. I wrote that on the painting. I thought it would be nice to let people in on the joke since it was kind of a stretch and most people probably wouldn’t really stop to think about it otherwise. If you want to get deeper you can say that the robot represents people consumed by the technology they consume and sometimes things like watches that make us more efficient are just a clever waste of time.

Click here to see the full image.

The National Film Challenge does a competition every year in which teams from around the country compete by making a short movie in the span of one weekend. At 7:00 PM local time on Friday, you receive an e-mail with a genre, a quote, a character, and a prop. Your film must be entirely made (scripted, shot, and edited) during the next three days and be postmarked that Monday.

We cheerfully took part in the competition. Friday night was our big party/brainstorming night. Unfortunately, it worked too well, and our brains were rather stormy the next day. But we persevered, and during that Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, we produced the soon to be cult sensation Snarfl’xxing with Humons.

This all happened the weekend before Thanksgiving. Today we discovered that we are finalists! Out of the 139 films submitted, we are one of the top 15! Which means that people really do like us, or they just don’t like other people (to be honest, I’m not really sure). Either way, if you like us, you should vote for our movie. That way when we get rich and famous, you can say that you knew us back in the day, and that if it weren’t for your vote, we wouldn’t be the pompous jerks we turned out to be. Pretty cool, eh?

On to the voting, go here to view the films, register and vote.