True to Pacific Northwest form, the creatives in Portland, Oregon are very supportive of each other. Events overlap, organizations collaborate, media collide and all are invited to participate.

I’m a graphic artist—I cut my teeth on book covers and layout but prefer illustrations and posters these days. My creative scene is informed by a wide swath of events, organizations and individuals across multiple disciplines, but I’ll stick to the designer-y side of things (mostly) for this post.

Salons

Just this past October, Tsilli Pines and Eric Hillerns organized a week of design events all over the city for the inaugural Design Week Portland. Presentations, workshops, film screenings, studio tours, portfolio reviews and other designer-y events abounded. Designers descended upon the events with a ferver I hadn’t seen before.

Pines also organizes CreativeMornings/Portland, a branch of the ever-growing, international, free morning talk series. Each month, the series inspires the city with presentations by designers, web developers, museum curators, podcast hosts, fabrication specialists, photographers and more. CreativeMornings/Portland is entering it’s second year, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Designspeaks, another speaking engagement, is Hillerns’ concept. At its peak, it was held quarterly to celebrate regional design and its rich history. Though held less often lately, it remains one of the best events to bump elbows with the Pacific Northwest’s most talented and thoughtful designers.

AIGA Portland helped launch Designspeaks. It has several programs of note, including Career Tools, Digital Dialogues, Portfolio Day and Studio Tours. My favorite, however, is dMob. It’s simply a monthly meetup at a bar, to network, boast or gripe about the biz. The informal setting is quick to build camaraderie.

WeMake also has two regular events of note: sketchXchange is a monthly night showcasing a designer/illustrator/artist’s process through their sketchbooks. It’s a vulnerable position for the presenter, but the intimate space and positive atmosphere eases any anxiety. The other recurring WeMake event I love is their workshop series. Field trips to a a leather studio, garment factory, screen printing house and custom bamboo laser cutter all piqued my interest. At each workshop, participants actually make something.

And finally there’s Show & Tell. Portland State University’s design program just keeps getting better. Hosted by Kate Bingaman Burt, Show & Tell is a weekly portfolio presentation and question-and-answer session with designers from all over. Sometimes the designer is local, sometimes they’re visiting for workshops, sometimes they’re presenting via Skype. Through this, PSU students gain access to some of the best minds in the field. And since it’s open to the public, so do I.

Sites

Headed up by Rory Sparks, Em Space Book Arts Center is a collective of letterpress and book artists. They offer membership to access all their equipment, host artists in residency and hold workshops on printing and binding. The world of letterpress fascinates me. I’ve been lucky enough to print a few pieces with Em Spacers, including Kyle Durrie of Moveable Type fame.

The Independent Publishing Resource Center is another printmaker’s studio. Besides workspace access, workshops and a gallery, the IPRC is home to a library of over 6,000 self-published and independently produced materials that are not otherwise represented in public libraries—comics, chap books, novels, catalogs, zines, artists’ books, and more.

ADX is a maker’s playland. As their website says, its membership-based community is equal parts workspace and incubator in a 10,000 square-foot facility. I don’t know how to explain this in just a line. Sometimes you sign up to use their facility and make a bike or giant sign or boat or whatever your next project is. Sometimes you contact the ADX folks to hook you up with a member to make your project for you. And sometimes you just go check out their gallery or take a workshop to learn a new trade. There are more ideas at ADX than rain in Portland.

Beyond those three, Portland Center Stage, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Craft and YU Contemporary all have a constant stream of interesting events, exhibits and performances throughout the year.

Oh, and it’s worth noting Andy Baio and Andy McMillan’s inaugural XOXO – an arts and technology festival celebrating disruptive creativity – lived up to the excitement and already has creatives in the tech world salivating for next year. And Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, having just completed it’s tenth year, takes over Portland for ten days each autumn for a convergence of contemporary performance and visual art.

Society

Whew. After all that, I like to keep tabs on what Portland designers and artists are up to. Some are contemporaries, some are folks I’ve had the pleasure to work with and some I just admire from my afar. They’re always working on exciting projects.

Here’s just a few of the locals I dig in no particular order, but who you should know: Carson Ellis, Aaron Draplin, Santiago Uceda, Meg Hunt, Always with Honor, Brooke Weeber, Adam Garcia, KeeganMeegan & Co., BT Livermore and Mary Kate McDevitt.

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Although there are many collaborators and friends of the Center, Cat and Zack have formed the heart of the team in most locations. The Center is currently at work on the “Spice Mix Super Computer” for AND’s Mobile Republic.

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On our adventures traversing the globe, we have not stayed anywhere for more than 4 months in the past 2 years. With such a nomadic existence, ‘where we make’ is always changing.

On a flight: a good place to think, read and sketch, and catch up with stuff offline.

We have developed a variety of strategies for concentration and focus. For example, Zack works best early in the morning at a coffee shop with headphones on listening to drone music, while Cat works best in the peace of the late night when it seems the world has gone to sleep there are no other distractions (except for the occasional snore from Zack).

Just in the last week, we have worked at Bold Street cafe in Liverpool, on a plane, a train, in an airbnb room in Manhattan, and right now at a house with a large kitchen garden in Connecticut, charging our computers along the way and catching wireless connections where we can. These strategies have worked to greater or lesser effect in all of our temporary accommodations over the last year:

CANADA (Vancouver)
INDIA (Bangalore, the Koorgi Region)
IRELAND (Dublin)
NETHERLANDS (Amsterdam, Leiden, Rotterdam)
NORWAY (Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen)
SINGAPORE
SWEDEN (Stockholm, Uppsala)
UK (Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, London, Milton Keynes)
USA (Portland, New York City, Connecticut)

Our amsterdam apartment and office, while working on Pray for beans Project. The closer the deadline, the bigger the mess!

Every place we visit is an opportunity to connect unexpected dots. Moving around so much means we can exchange ideas, artifacts and recipes between seemingly unconnected places and people. I am sure we wouldn’t be making a Spice Mix Super-Computer in the UK if we hadn’t spent time in Bangalore being drawn into spice-rich karnatakan cuisine. Our Smog Tasting project in Bangalore was prompted by a quote in Harold McGee’s “On Food & Cooking” which seems like a particularly American approach to food. And so on.

Smog Tasting took us to the rooftops of Bangalore for a week of in-situ cooking.

The AND festival’s Mobile Republic is a microcosm of our last year. So far we have visited Manchester, Liverpool and London to work on the project, and we will be taking the caravan on the road to 4 locations in northern England. Taking on a project like this in an unfamiliar place is always a challenge because the simple tasks, such as sourcing various materials, become research efforts in their own right. The upside is that we generally see the places we visit from an unusual perspective. There can’t be many visitors to Liverpool who have strolled along Edge Lane to visit the B&Q.

The sign with no sign on edge lane by b&q, Liverpool, source: google maps

We do not have a permanent home or studio. We have attempted to consolidate our travel kit to the absolute essentials, but it is hard to bring an entire kitchen with us!

Here is an example of our other work space in the Netherlands: the kitchen of a restaurant that we took over for one evening. (Photo Credit: Lucas Evers)

Following food stories around the globe has been amazing, but we are looking forward to finding a landing spot and opening up the Center for Genomic Gastronomy as a non-nomadic entity. Maybe 2013?

All images are courtesy and © The Center of Genomic Gastronomy

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Want to take a look at more suggested blogs by artists? Look here.

“Script kiddies” is a derogatory term for a new wave of bedroom computer programmers that rely on huge chunks of code written by others. Their projects usually end up as Frankenstein’s monster, carrying a series of modular components that work well independently, but that are inelegantly tacked together.

I was warned about a new wave of motion graphics artists that seem to be following the same convention. There’s a backlash amongst some of the creative people I work with. On one hand, technology is making our lives easier – plugins, scripts, example scenes, software & tutorials mean that it’s very easy to make something pretty onscreen in a short amount of time. This (according to one MA lecturer) has caused the moving-image equivalent of “script kiddies” to unashamedly rip anything and everything they see fit. Obviously, this can be a useful workflow on a tight deadline. As long as nobody’s being plagiarised, they argue that a collage of methods could be the way forward.

One can sympathise that this is a sign of the times. The Internet is a huge collaborative community and this way of working could be a response to the very unique online disposable culture. I do believe that this workflow dilutes any message that was originally in the project and makes the craft very reductive. Some artistic integrity is obviously also lost.

I had the good fortune to visit and workshop with an US art school last year. It is famous for its motion graphic graduates, although I found huge inconsistencies with their work ethic verses one that may be found in a typical UK art school.

I helped with some portfolio reviews but it became clear that these students were far more career oriented than their UK equivalent. There was a flurry of sincere hand-shakes and “Mr. Houston”s that composed their rehearsed ritualistic job-dance. These were people that had just finished an art degree but had no intention of talking about their work. They were interested in using software packages to land a steady job. Our reference points were way off. The majority aspired to be soaked up into anonymity behind the wall of a big studio and quickly secure themselves a rung on the career ladder.

The truth is that I had only been a graduate for a year and had no idea if their work ethic was something I should adopt.

I found it disappointing that they could break their own work down into modular components. They willingly did it before my eyes:

“This was done using the new Trapcode Particular,

this is a VRAY render with RSMB applied,

this is made of thinking particles in C4D.”

Such a reductionist approach made it very easy to dismiss a potentially beautiful film as an exercise in a software package. Anybody can be taught to keyframe, although it’s rare that the outcome is worth more than the sum of its parts. David O’Reilly famously doesn’t talk about his workflow. He adds a layer of mystery around his process which helps the legacy of his films. Any recent graduate that wants to avoid piracy lawsuits may want to jump on the same bandwagon.

Is the script-kiddie workflow simply a response to the cultural (and economic) pressures that we face as “artists”? I know that I’m hesitant to use any visually distinctive piece of software in my own work as it ends up very transparent.
PART 2 _ THE GOODS:

It’s moving image month at Central Station. I thought it fitting to post a reference bank of inspiration, as opposed to a wall of text that fluctuates back & forth without reaching a definite conclusion.

The following videos are very dependant on process.  Computers were either used conceptually or as craft. not necessarily as a starting point. These have the stamp of the director/artist, not the stamp of the software. A mixed bag of very inspiring stuff that you should already have seen.

“Het Klokhuis” Opening titles from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

Peripetics from zeitguised on Vimeo.

Please Say Something – Full Length from David O’Reilly on Vimeo.

RECURSION / Zhestkov.com from Maxim Zhestkov on Vimeo.

Asymmetric Cycles: The Work Of Al Jarnow from numerogroup on Vimeo.

The chainsaw solo at 1:04 gets me every time.