I Am Still Alive

Finally getting over this cold/flu/whatever in Brooklyn, NY. posted to twitter

I woke up on the early side today and made some changes to this site’s layout. I am largely re-organizing things to make room for some fun projects and to accommodate a new direction for I Am Still Alive as an organization. I reckon the new masthead is a bit easier to navigate now, in any case.

More to come. Apologies if things look a bit too spare for now.

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.

Possibly a bit over the top – seemingly obssessed as he is with odor – but McIntosh makes good points and it’s a refreshing change of tone from the onslaught of (also great) TED talks we see everywhere.

In this talk I will speak in reference to my new book, “Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition.”

I consider that politics alone is not enough to tackle the scale and depth of the problem that faces us. At root is our addictive consumer mentality. Wants have replaced needs and consumption drives our very identity. Western societies and many others influenced by it have fallen prey to a numbing culture of violence and as part of it, the motivational manipulation of marketing.

I have gotten a number of emails recently from folks here in New York who’d like to purchase prints but would prefer to not pay for shipping.

That makes sense to me – if you are ever in the area (beautiful Brooklyn, New York), you’re more than welcome to stop by the studio to browse the inventory, possibly catch us on press, and pick up some prints.

Just holler beforehand to set up an appointment.

I’ve just returned to New York City from New Orleans. I’m jazzed to be having a good bagel with my coffee this morning.

Posters ordered over the weekend will ship this afternoon. Thanks for all your orders.

I am off to New Orleans to recharge over the weekend, but I will be back in action Tuesday morning. I have been working on some exciting new changes to this site and to the Artlog – expect extraordinary awesomeness in short order.

If you all are in New York this Thursday and you dig printmaking, come to the fundraiser for Stickball Printmedia Arts from 6:30 to 10:30 on Bleecker Street. There’s lots of good work including a number of our prints and work by Wayne Pate and Claire Nereim.

I am stoked to report that we have printed several new prints by Dan Funderburgh and Michael Perry. Dan’s print – ‘Census’ - is a signed and numbered 3-color edition to benefit the campaign for Barack Obama – Dan’s donating all proceeds to the campaign.

Universe Factory by Michael Perry is actually an edition of 4 prints available individually or as a set.

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.

We reprinted the We are so good together prints on speckletone natural paper over the weekend for those of you who were waiting.

I am also pretty stoked to print some new posters next week with Mike Perry and a few other folks.

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.

I am pumped to release a new print for the store by Matt Hollister. It’s a two color poster and measures 13 by 20 inches.

We ran a hundred off over the course of one evening a couple weeks back with a little moral support from Sam Friedman.

Good times.

You can pick up the print here

I just got back from ten or so days in California. Posters purchased while I was gone went out this afternoon. Thanks again for your orders, folks. More new prints coming along shortly.

I Am Still Alive is shuttering for ten days as I spend some time in Los Angeles and gear up for Artlog’s relaunch on Tuesday. Orders placed through the store between now and then will be shipped once I have returned to Brooklyn on 7 September.

The Bright Idea Shade is a project of the Eyebeam OpenLab, by Sustainability Action Group. We are converting all of our silver tipped incandescent bulbs into CFL bulbs (as they burn out.) The problem is a bare CFL bulb gives off very harsh light. So we set about designing a lampshade for the bulbs. We took several existing designs and customized the design to fit a CFL bulb, built it out of heat resistant photo diffuser material, found a diffuser material that could be laser cut, and built a laser cutter template.

The Bright Idea Shade is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Dean Allen found the name for it – Chimping. I got a kick out of this video describing chimping.

Chimping is a term used in digital photography (especially when using a digital single-lens reflex camera) to describe the habit of checking every photo on the on-camera display (LCD) immediately after capture.
From Wikipedia

We printed Hard Time by Chuck Agro over the weekend on the Vandercook.

It’s a signed open edition printed on Speckletone Madero measuring 11 by 13 inches and available for purchase in the store.

I am really enjoying working with artists on these prints for the store. Hit me up if you are interested in collaborating on a print.

I use PermalinkFu for generating nice slugs for URLs here, at Artlog and in the Backlight CMS that runs a number of websites for friends like Marlene Marino and A Crime So Monstrous.

In any case, it’s a great plugin, but it’s begun to bother me that it can generate some massively long permalinks if left unchecked. So for the new Artlog site I am going to truncate the permalinks into some limited number of words.

For example, I’ve set the note model to generate the permalinks (saved in a “permalink” column in the DB) this way:

class Note < ActiveRecord::Base
  def to_param
    "#{id}-#{permalink}" 
  end
  before_save :create_or_modify_permalink
  def create_or_modify_permalink
    self.permalink = PermalinkFu.escape(("#{name}").to_s)
  end
end

That’s fine in most situations, but if the note’s name is long you run into issues.

>> n = Note.new
=> #<Note id: nil, name: nil, permalink: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>
>> n.name = "I just flew back from Chicago and boy are my arms tired" 
=> "I just flew back from Chicago and boy are my arms tired" 
>> n.save!
=> true
>> n.permalink = "I-just-flew-back-from-Chicago-and-boy-are-my-arms-tired" 

That’s awkward – particularly if you are RESTing it up and your edit URL ends up looking like

/notes/1-I-just-flew-back-from-Chicago-and-boy-are-my-arms-tired/edit

So I am going to go ahead and create an evil twin plugin to generate more sane slugs and have the new method available across all models (rather than having the fix only available in the note model).

In vendor/plugins create a directory called “permalink_fu_hacks” or something and create an init.rb file in that directory (/vendor/plugins/permalink_fu_hacks/init.rb) that looks like the following:

PermalinkFu.module_eval do
  class << self    
    # truncate the permalinks to x number of words (specified in length below)
    def truncated_escape(str)
      length = 6
      PermalinkFu.escape(("#{str.split()[0..(length-1)].join(' ')}").to_s)
    end
  end
end

You can change the length we specify to whatever you’d like. Six may seem like to many or too few words to you, but it doesn’t really matter; you’re largely just setting an upper limit to prevent URLs from getting way too long.

You can now change your create_or_modify_permalink callback in the note model to this

def create_or_modify_permalink
  self.permalink = PermalinkFu.truncated_escape(("#{name}").to_s)
end

and you’ll end up with a better permalink:

>> n.save!
=> true
>> n.permalink = "I-just-flew-back-from-Chicago" 

We printed Gravity’s Rainbow by Dan Funderburgh this past Friday on the Vandercook. It’s a three color print that we ran in two editions (one limited and the other open).

You can pick one of the prints up in the store if you are so inclined.

We’ve putting several other prints up for sale in the next few days, so check back soon or subscribe to either our newsletter or to our sitewide RSS feed.