So here I am checking the mail, and what do I find?
A package from Barcelona of course. I got really curious and excitedly opened it and found a box and a note from my friend Joan, who I went to school with in Finland. He had sent me 2 old Nokia phones. With a note saying, “See, I still read your journal”. Which put a big smile on my face.

Thank you my friend!!! I’ll be using the parts and the screens for robots and artwork right away! I’ve desperately wanted Nokia screens for an artwork I have in mind, but haven’t been able to get a hold of any until now.

No, this is not science fiction. I was so engrossed last year with Genpets I missed this completely.

Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created.

And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.

Cuz I'm just that mental.

I haven't been keeping this site up to date lately, as I've been to busy working on everyone else's and sculpting. But this should allow me to update more often as it's much faster.

Why reinvent the wheel?
There are lots of blogging platforms after all. There's just something about having complete control, and knowing exactly how everything functions. Too many people are calling themselves web designers these days for doing nothing more than using moveable type (blog software) to create a website. Pet peeve of mine. Seeing someone charge $3000 to someone while all they did was use free software...
Plus this was just more fun, and it's the component of something larger I'm working on...

And as much as all me OCAD chums were like [huh?] it actually does have a lot to do with my sculpture. PHP (what this is written in) is based on C, and I'll be programming my next set of animatronics in C or C++ instead of basic. So the same basic theories behind the arrays that run this site, will make a future sculpture do motion tracking.

No it's not open source, but yes it will be used on other sites. Just need to make sure there's no bugs first. And clean up a few things.

The site will change looks once I have the engine running it looking good. I'm more worried about making everyone else's site look good and W3 Validated rather than my own.

What's new?
-Comments!! There are now over 150 journal entries and not a single darn comment on any. So I'll give ya $5 if you make one! Plus it's spiffy. I added cookies so it'll remember you and a java preview.
Also categories, and an RSS feed most notably.

The music video shoot with the animatronic hearts went great. I was there just to make sure nothing went wrong, and surprisingly, nothing did. They survived being thrown, dropped, everything.

Summary.
Jeff got me to do 3 oversized (elephant size?) hearts for him and he needed them to:
1) Pump blood out of them
2) Be fully self contained. No tubes, no wires coming out.

How I made them.
The core component of the units is a 12volt DC pump. A magically strong pump that uses very little energy for what it is. Thus I was able to power it through 8 x AA batteries. Nice for filming as that way if the batteries happened to run out (it was a winter shoot) we could just go buy more at a corner store.

Then I just rigged up some tubing, and a powerade bottle in each heart. The pump was insanely high powered and could go through a bottle of water or blood in under 20 seconds, so I limited it a bit with thinner tubes, and stoppers near the tips to control the spray and drip action.

How it looked.

They looked pretty good but not perfect at first. I'm a perfectionist and the oversize made them seem not totally believable, but those were my constraints.
THEN we got BLOOD on them. It was night and day, they came alive. I’m not one to toot my own horn, but damn, they looked like fresh cow hearts, bloody and dripping, you could have almost fooled me.

And we fooled a lot of people, there were ladies that screamed as we were filming, (we were in public places) and EVERYONE slowed, got wide eyed, and stared. Which surprised me. In Toronto people never look, ESPECIALLY if you have cameras, but they sure did today.
Can’t complain and Jeff (director) was overly pleased, thus I am too.

** Thank you Crystal Pallister for painting them. We all know how Mr. partly colour-blind shys away from colour.

I’ll try to get some early video stills, but it’ll prob be a month or so.

Originally it was going to have full control by a microchip, and I had designed and built the 2 circuits, but the night before I ripped them out and switched to a simple push button trigger. It made more sense to give the actors complete control over the mechanism so that the hearts could bleed on cue at the directors discretion.

Overall, we only had to refill the blood sacks twice, and the batteries lasted for a full week of testing + 1 day shoot in the cold. I designed it around AA’s so that we could replace them if they ran out at any corner store, but it wasn’t needed at all.

Early still footage (Notice the spray)

That's right! Adam's back! Saturday was my last day. I've saved up a bit of cash and I'm going back to finish school full time and begin creating art again. I had a lot of fun at my job as the people were wonderful, but the job itself (moving bolts of fabric) wasn't exactly my life goal and it left me with only 2 hours a night to do my own thing, which I managed to get a hell of a lot done, but it's not enough with all the other things I want to do and I had to pass up on a few commercial sculpture offers, which sucked.

So here I am, ready to begin creating things again. Art + fabrication portfolio here I come.

My last day was actually pretty nice. At the end Arman, Pedro, and Shawn tied me up with packing tape and told me I couldn't leave, Angie (manager) was just like, “just don't tape his mouth”. Then I went out drinking and I thought up a new sculpture with while talking with Ryan and I'm gonna use him in it.
After drinks Jessie, Kirsi and me went over to her place and I taught her some Intro mould-making skills so that she could make moulds for dolls heads. I really like teaching.

OH! And among all the other crazy ideas, me and Ryan came up with a Broadway show. In short, it involves this guy that goes crazy and kills people, but all in musical fashion with arm waving and dancing and happy singing. And blood. Lots. We were singing it in the store but then Angie asked us to stop…….
Dunno why……

And 3 new Genpet comments for your viewing pleasure.
http://mrsloquacious.blogspot.com/2005/11/weird-grossbrilliant.html
http://fookthepeople.com/
http://raymitheminx.blogspot.com/

I wonder how to deal with Genpets sometimes. When people email Sales@genpets.com I reply and honestly tell them that Genpets is an art piece. I feel that leading them on any further would be ‘dishonest'. I want to be clear that it's an art installation with a message, not some form of hoax.

But Crystal rented the "Yes men" documentary for us last night and it, along with many other performance art I've seen, makes me wonder.

There are many artists that play it up and push it as far as they can. For example, the yes men gave a talk in Australia and impersonated the world trade organization and announced that the WTO was disbanding as it put business above people and needed to rethink it's actions. All of a sudden this news was being announced in the Canadian parliament and all over the world. And they didn't get in trouble. It just made it that much better. It made their point stronger. So should I tell people its art?
a google search will come up with sites explaining genpets as art, so do I need to? I'm not sure any any feedback is welcome. no one likes to be lied to, but soemtimes you have to in order to get across a message.

Haven't seen any updates for awhile eh? That's cuz I've been slowly learning css and PHP and designing Portfolio Version5. It still won't be fully w3-validated code, but it'll sure look nicer and be a step up from this mess. Time to begin organizing this mess. I've spent more time on other peoples websites than I have on my own.

My only goal right now is to split and organize until this mess is more easily organizable. I've now got 4 sites to run and as it's not a full time job, I need it to go faster, thus, over the next few months I'll be waiving good bye to html.

For now the basic design will still look very similar to the current for the other pages outside of the portfolio.

The journal is my big pain in the ass right now, as it always has been. This website has grown too large to manage with simple html, and yet for the journal, I don't really want to use wordpress or some other premade system. I'm going to try to convert it over to simple css tables for now and use the php include command where I can as a band aid solution until I convert the entire thing to a MySQL database. That should also allow far faster page loads.

I'm also done the bulk coding for Crystals Portfolio site and I'll post a link to that once she chooses her images and I upload it. (Internet explorer and it's lack of standards though is messing up some of the css so I need to still fix that... I luv you firefox...)

You might have seen posters all over Toronto for the Toronto Alternative Arts Festival International, (and you also might not of) but if you went, you might of seen Genpets (if you followed the white rabbit,-- I mean bleeping). It seemed to go over ok and it was cool to be invited to participate. Thanks Belinda!

One of the first things they taught us in the media program in Finland was to question the word "interactive". What is interactive? From an interface perspective, are websites interactive? Are they really? Is TV interactive? What is so different about clicking through pages on websites and changing a channel on a TV? TV is static content, changing the channel is not interaction, not a dynamic form of it anyways.

Where am I going with this? Why think of all this now?

I've been thinking a lot about 'interactive art installation' lately. I've had a few lightning strikes in me ol' noggin that make me hope I might just be able to make my next piece a little more dynamic. Something that reacts. No button pushing.
Genpets was just a sculpture, a moving sculpture, but it had no soul, no AI…

Ahh nevermind. These are just the random musings of a crazy artist. Though I am getting rather excited about my next series...

It's pretty cool to have created a piece that hits so many people. From art forums, to corvette forums, to retro video game forums, people all over are discussing Genpets. Even if it's small scale, that tells me that I must be doing something right. Especially comments like:

"Wow.... what an absolutely shocking artistic piece. I'm really impressed with this."
or
"I realized after I googled it last night that it was indeed an art piece and it's creepyness went away and was replaced by a "holy shit this is cool" I think this piece is phenomenal"

Though it's annoying to see someone attempt to discuss the issues it raises and then see someone that's like, “man, it's probably just those assholes at PETA trying to make us think. This is lame, and so are all of you for falling for it. It's so obviously fake", that's part of making art public. some poeple will like it, some people won't. My only saving grace is that most of the poeple that insult me for having too much time on my hands have a post count of like 3,400+ next to their name, which speaks for itself. There's always going to be someone there to basically tell me I shouldn't have an opinion, I have too much time on my hands, and infact,.. I should watch more TV and play more xbox and buy more from the mall. I'm used to it.

There is a lot of question though as to where I get the time to do all this. For anyone wondering, I work 41hours a week + 8hours total in travel, so I dunno. I don't watch TV? Making things makes me happy man, back off. Get yer own sandwich.

As far as how the non-virtual Genepts is going, the far more important and scary one (the actual set of 19 sculptures) the feedback from having it in a queen street store window (Toronto) has been amazing. Everyday Crystal comes home with stories to tell me about all the people that had been mesmerized.

Apparently it's close to non-stop traffic. People just stopping in the street. Some come in to discuss, some don't. Many that do come in to the store, end up talking for up to 30 minutes about all the issues it raises for them. Issues they'd thought about, but now want to talk about even more. Or they just sit down, and stare at the other 10 Genpets in the store.

I'm glad I created something that affects all age groups and so many backgrounds. That was my goal. To make art, but again, art my way. Not the traditional way.

Traditions be damned, art got boring.

Art is about making things, about leading, about creativity. Not about sipping champagne and trying to act like you're above others*.

That's not the art I want to be involved in.

*I know I'm not the only one that thinks this way, but sometimes it sure feels that way.