Days of Rock Mouse : Day 2 : There Was Nothing Else

THE RERELEASE OF DAY 4 : THE WESTERN LANDS

There is some fairly apparent symbology here: a barren landscape of ruin; the central “DOS-esque” structure communicating basic digital order and mechanical repetition; the call of warning from the Day 4 Rock Mice, spoken by William S. Burroughs (You reckon hell to leave me out — When me you fly, I am the wings.); the appearing Rock Mice hauntingly flying in triangular formations over the perfunctory monstrosity, ultimately overtaking it completely and revealing the beloved company of the Day, William S. Burroughs, and his piece The Western Lands. The bouncy balls are what i would call the trite, childish, and un-interpretable aspect of the art piece. They finally serve as buttons that reveal poetry and play snippets of the music. I think the form of the audio snippets is challenging to use, so that could be re-thought.
The audio is from the first track of an album called Seven Souls, produced by Bill Laswell and the band Material, featuring William S. Burroughs throughout, also of which Talvin Singh is featured in this track. This graphic aural escapade has always inspired a vivid image in me of human evolution: basically that it is a treacherous, horrific road crossing a massive river of shit that you can liberate yourself from by freeing yourself from fear and identification with the human body, and, as i see it, the river of shit itself.
The link below will open a new window to view the art installation. The window is 100% resizable to any window size, from very tiny to big and huge, so you’re sure to not miss anything if you have a small display. Being that this is a multimedia art installation, be prepared to listen and watch – have your speakers ready, and your iTunes off. Enjoy

All that said, please enjoy this re-release of…
Days of Rock Mouse : Day 4 : The Western Lands

THE CONCEPT

Part of the jest was to include at least three art forms: visual, aural, and written. Each installation was numbered in “days”, and one could grab the url to a particular piece to share and enjoy later. Each page had (as this one does) an Info and Contributers display window that would show what the project was about and information on who the artists were that composed the art installation. IMPORTANT: You can try to use the buttons, but they don’t really work at the stage of progress that this piece landed at – at all – and the left/right navigators will not take you to any more installations. The overall concept made it through a few revolutions, completing five art installation in all, including the original Rock Mouse Days intro page. After spending 7-10 hours on each piece, other projects replaced this one that would actually pay my rent and that sort of thing. I attempted to come up with a way to monetize the concept, but that, as is typical, surely deflated the creative gumption. When i came back in with RockMouseDays.com, i attempted to use Day 1 (the Rock Mouse Days intro) as the first page, but for some reason new versions of Flash incurred an enigmatic font breakdown, as the intro for all the Days had a series of Rock Mouse’s favorite font types. I needed to get back into the FLA to remove the buttons and add links, but was fully floundered by this issue, which, with many unanswered forum posts, never got resolved. There are foreseeable work-arounds that simply take gobs of tick tock time, and that’s been put off for that Cinderella day when there is a breakthrough that fixes the issue with the click of a checkbox. I certainly still fantasize about kicking this up again and finding other Flash savvy inspired constructors to contribute new, rich installations, so if this makes your clock turn and/or lights a fire in your belly, please tell me more about that.

Go to the The Days of Rock Mouse category archive to see what Days i’ve posted so far.

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This is a half sheet flier for Ashland, OR, singer/songwriter Heather Hutton (this thumbnail is a small cropping of the actual flier – click it to see the full version). I put a lot of time into the subtle details of the art work, all of which is original; except for one obvious thing, and that would be our little lovely bird. Yes, I actually looked abroad for inspiration for this piece and found a collage that I love by the talented Sascalia. You can see the inspiring piece here.

You’ll notice that the bird is directly abstracted from this piece of art. I gathered that it was taken from a previously printed material in the first place, so I actually truly reveled at the notion that the art had not only two generations, but now three in the production of Heather’s flier! AAAAHHHH, YES! Honestly, I did look for another bird, but no other looked quite as good as this one. Thank you, Sascalia, for the inspiration and for being a forbearer of art! [See Sascalia's Photostream on Flickr]

I was tempted to use her awesome little flowers as well, but resorted to making my own, out of respect; and joy, of course. I did trace the trunk of the tree in the art piece by Sascalia, colored to my own taste and flipped it around.

All artistic aspects are overlaid with a paper texture to give it a handcrafted, craft-paper kind of feel.

Once again, I got to make a piece of art that I love that my client loves too!

Enjoy – click to enlarge.

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This is a logo for Brian Hillden’s up and coming business, Fine Art of Living Life Skills (this thumbnail is a small cropping of the actual logo – click it to see the full version). It’s accompanied by a simple WordPress site that is also up and coming, meaning that’s it’s not ready for your pretty little eyes just yet.

I really got off on making this piece. My work is my art, so when I do it I go all out. I don’t care what someone’s budget is. When I make something, I obsess over all the details of making it be the best piece of art that I can create; because that is what I do. I refuse to do anything less. This is my service to humanity; to those that employ my skills and to myself.

Enjoy – click to enlarge.

SEO Killed the Video Star

This is the very 2007 project I created on 1/25/08 at 11:36 pm. The hallmark of this design is the left navigation and it’s resilliancy. You can open multiple menus, click it to death and it won’t jam. This took a while to pan out and required a section of timeline for each scenario, as seen in the Flash screen shots below.

You can now see the 2008 model via the link below.
It also has a little hidden smiley action for good times.

Go to: Illumination Graphics Flash Web Site

This was essentially my first major Flash site — when I was still making projects at 12 fps :O — yet, it seemed to come out pretty nicely. Then came along the SEOers, and now it’s all gone. Yes, if you go to illuminationgraphics.com, almost nothing that I made still resides on the site. Personally, I’m more of the interactive internet installation art revolution type and essentially say “screw that SEO crap!”, but I still comply to a lot of SEO techniques in composing content.
The music was chosen by the client. I don’t think the tone matches the neon color palet, but the beginning worked great with the moving spheres, so it worked out. The MP3 player is of my own design, modified from a tutorial that I downloaded.
One tricky detail about this design is that I wanted the spheres and text to spill outside of the main content box as they swooped around the screen instead of being cut off. So, in resizing the stage I was able to add a chunk of space to the right side of the layout. BUT, this meant that the screen appeared to be off center to the left. Since this detail was being addressed in hindsight and all my content was on the main timeline, it would be a nightmare to expand the stage again and shift everything to the right by about 100 pixels. So, the stop gap solution was to simply add a cell on the left side of the table with an image in it to compensate for the extra width that was added to the right side of the Flash object. Sweet. The only thing about this was that the design now relied on it’s counterpart HTML page to work properly.

Flash Animation Stills

Flash Application Screen Shots