I Am Still Alive

I’ve spent the better part of the last half hour watching the launch broadcast of Wolfram|Alpha. Their control room looks straight out of the Apollo 13 movie and the hosts (Stephen Wolfram and others) look more than a little uncomfortable on camera. It’s been a fun, odd broadcast.

I am thinking that I will possibly launch Arlo in a live video broadcast from the apartment here in San Francisco as well.

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.

I am officially relocating to San Francisco on Monday and got a jump on the move by planning out my new apartment (at 20th & Dolores) with Google’s SketchUp. I pretty much do this every time I move into a new apartment/office (which admittedly is rare) or do any renovation.

It end up downloading and firing up the newest trial of SketchUp about once every two or three years. It’s usually nice to see how the app has changed over that period. SketchUp is largely responsible for my first introduction to Ruby (and actually any kind of programming). Years back, when I was in my senior year at Wesleyan, I wanted to model some woodworking projects before building them and tried to do it in SketchUp. The UI then was really tedious to use, but it had a Ruby console that let me model the projects programmatically. That console was powerful and I got really into Ruby. Gosh, about a two years later Rails came across the wire as I was starting to do a lot more web development. That must have been late 2004 or early 2005. Tak built the first incarnation of the web store at I Am Still Alive around that time and he wanted to try Rails out. I started tinkering with Rails at about the same time as we were working through the code for the store and have been developing in one Ruby framework or another pretty much exclusively since.

That being said, SketchUp’s interface has in the intervening years become much, much easier to use. The model below took all of fourty minutes to put together using the console, the UI and the components library. It also got me stoked for the move.

More after the jump

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.

I am also periodically posting on twitter at twitter.com/iamstillalive and sharing my trips on dopplr at dopplr.com/traveller/iamstillalive.

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.

It’s been a quiet year for the I Am Still Alive blog thus far. I have had my head down and have been working on several software apps launching in the near future – more on those to come.

The big news is that I Am Still Alive is moving to California in February after 7 years in Brooklyn. I am planning on trying to find a retail project space out West and to spend more time designing & publishing prints. In the interim, I am closing the store for the next several weeks so that I can work on my transition.

Thanks to all the artists with whom I’ve worked to produce the prints in the catalog and to all the folks who’ve patronized the store over the past three years.

I am back in Los Angeles with family from now until the 31st of December. I’ll ship orders made over the holidays once I get back east.

Hey, so with Holidays ahead of us, if you are in the New York area and looking to purchase posters, you ought to come by the studio in Brooklyn to pick up orders rather than having them shipped.

Folks purchasing in person from now until Christmas will get 50% off their orders.

I’ve finally made it back to Brooklyn. I’m a bag short, but it’s good to be home. I’m not going to fly Spirit Air again.

All in all it was a great weekend down in Miami. You can browse through the photos I took with my mobile phone while I was down there, if you’re interested.

WFMU is raising some money with a print sale at Printed Matter in Chelsea starting today, Saturday, December 6th, and running until December 13th. You can pick up a selection of the work online if you can’t make it to the show. If you are in New York, tho the opening festivities are this evening from 5 to 7pm with $mall Change spinning.

All proceeds from this sale will go towards hoisting a new booster transmitter up at 4 Times Square in Manhattan which will at long last allow freeform programming to flow freely across the 5 boroughs.

Dan Funderburgh has a huge silkscreen in the show that was printed by Justin Fines. I also really dig the print by Chris Johanson (more of his work on his site).

More info on WFMU’s blog and at Printed Matter.

Hey, if you all are in Miami this weekend, stop by the Artlog booths at Scope and Pusle and say hello. If you’re interested in seeing a bit of what I see down there, keep an eye on my artlog profile for updates from my cell phone.

I am back in Brooklyn for the day. Orders made over the last week or so have gone out. Thanks for your orders!

I am heading down to Miami tomorrow morning for the art fairs, but that shouldn’t disrupt normal shipping on Monday.

I am heading back to Los Angeles today for a generous Thanksgiving week. I’ll be back west through Tuesday the second of December. Any orders that come in through the store between now and then will be sent out upon my return to Brooklyn.

I am looking forward to some fairly big changes around this site when I get back and several new prints, but for now I am just stoked to get out of this cold.

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.