REPRESSED V: FREE TO SPEAK - Call for Entries

From our friends at Gallery 5 in Richmond, Virginia comes this call for activist art...

REPRESSED V: FREE TO SPEAK May 2010

José María Heredia - poet: inspired the Cuban people to stand up and fight against Spain.

Seymor Chwast-designer - illustrator: his anti-war poster "End Bad Breath" indirectly encouraged the anti-war movement of the 70's.

John Lenin and Yoko Ono - famous musicians/artists: created the powerful anti-war campaign stating "THE WAR IS OVER...if you want it to be."

What makes statement driven art so emotionally powerful? It being witness to a piece of work that creates a bond between you, the viewer and the creator of the piece. A bond that can change the direction of thought and purpose.

A successfully executed statement driven piece can be the catalyst that inspires the average person into an active agent for change. Art exists in societies to create shared dialogues and experiences. No matter the medium, art and artists can be the spark to establishing a commonality, to allow us to empathize with each other and encourage altruistic pursuits for the greater good.

Dedicated to social awareness, Gallery5 invites visual and performing artists to submit their statement focused work to Repressed V: Free to Speak.

Deadline is March 6th.

More info and an application can be downloaded HERE (PDF).

Recent Work - CD Packaging

I'm in the process of updating the portfolio section of my website with some recent work and I thought I'd share it here as well...

 Soundtrack by Tony Award winner Stew for a production by Shakespeare on The Sound.

Pianist Lisa Moore's latest EP released by Cantaloupe Music.

Design Play

Three of my Skull-A-Day images appear in the new book Design Play from Hong Kong's Victionary. The book is a collection of clever and playful design solutions and a section of it is devoted to their 100 favorite photos of real-life visual illusions...

ALR on Tour: Gel 2010 - Generating Creative Energy

I'm excited to announce that I will be once again be participating in the Gel Conference in NYC on April 29 & 30. This year I will be leading a Day 1 workshop called "Generating Creative Energy". Participants will meet at the Etsy headquarters and will take part in a hands-on exercise to experience the benefits I found in creating yearlong daily art project Skull-A-Day. For more information and to sign-up for the nearly sold-out conference go HERE.

And if you haven't seen it, here's my talk from the 2009 Gel Conference...


Noah Scalin at Gel 2009 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Greening Your Nonprofit's IT - Virtual Conference

On February 10th I'll be speaking as part of the panel on Sustainable Design & Printing that's included in the online conference "Greening Your Nonprofit's IT – How to Save Environment and Money. presented by NTEN & the Green IT Consortium. Here's the full schedule:

Keynote Address (10:00 am Pacific / 1:00 pm Eastern) 
Joseph Khunaysir, Founder, CIO & CTO of Jolera Inc., will talk about how non-profit organizations are going green and the role that IT plays in that transition to sustainable operations.  Joseph authored a chapter on Green IT in the recently-released book, Nonprofit Guide to Going Green.

Breakout Track I (11:10 am Pacific / 2:10 pm Eastern)

Introduction to Green IT: What is it, what your organization needs to know
Presented by: Hank Dearden, Virsant

Creating a Green IT Strategy: What is the right strategy for your organization, how to start, what to plan for
Presented by: Jennifer Woofter, Strategic Sustainability Consulting and Jim Lynch, TechSoup

Overview of Green IT Software and Hardware: Types of software and hardware you’ll want to know about to green your IT
Presented by: Anna Jaeger, TechSoup 

Breakout Track II (12:20 pm Pacific / 3:30 pm Eastern)

Virtualization: What is it, what it can do for your organization, green benefits
Presented by: Peter Campbell, Earth Justice and Matt Eshleman, CITI DC

Case Studies: How Non-Profits and Foundations are Greening Their IT
Presented by: Michael Sola, National Wildlife Federation and Bill Schaefer, Care2.com

Sustainable Design & Printing: What is sustainable design, what you should know about printing
Presented by: Noah Scalin, Another Limited Rebellion, Amy Hartzler, Free Range Studios and Dave Michaels, Ecoprint

For more information and to sign-up go HERE. If you select 'GreenIT' in the "How did you hear?" field after registering you'll receive the member rate of $60!

Designing For The Greater Good

I'm happy to announce that my work is featured in the newly released book from Collins Design Designing For The Greater Good by Peleg Top and Jonathan Cleveland. The book, which features a wide-range of examples of cause related marketing & non-profit design, has 24 in-depth case studies and the Red Flag Campaign I created for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Action Alliance (shown below) is one of them!

More info and additional sample spreads can be found on the book's website HERE.

And if you're one of the first to order the book the authors will donate $10 to Haiti relief in your name! Details are HERE.

Spotted in India: Paper not Plastic

Based solely on my observations there India does not seem to have a strong infrastructure for dealing with trash or recycling, but it was nice to see at least that an effort is being made to reduce the use of disposable plastic bags (as evidenced by this sign spotted in Mumbai). Several stores offered inexpensive cloth bags as alternatives and one place even had these nifty bags made from recycled newspaper with a hand stenciled logo on them. Each one was unique and surprisingly sturdy.

Spotted in India: Coke Tree

Since I was in a more Christian part of India shortly after Christmas, there was still a lot of holiday related decoration up everywhere. In one town I saw this large faux Christmas tree covered in soda cans. I was hoping it was just a nice bit of recycling, but upon closer examination the decoration was clearly an advertising ploy as it was covered in only pristine Coca-Cola cans. Coke was also advertising their classic (white skinned) Santa Claus on billboards throughout the area as well.

Chart Wars

I found this very interesting video of Alex Lundry on Blip.tv (Conservative Political Pollster, Microtargeter, Data-Miner, and Data Visualizer according to his twitter account), talking about the political power of data visualization which he calls Chart Wars.

"A funny thing happened during this summer's health care debate: a chart that purported to show the organizational structure of the Democratic health care reform proposal took over the media cycle and triggered a partisan visualization volley.

Since then, the original chart has frequently been used as a provocative protest sign and is now the subject of a congressional investigation.

What was it that made this data visualization so powerful and politically potent? How can your organization or your cause harness data visualization as a messaging medium? With these health care chart wars as a backdrop, this presentation will show you how to be a smart consumer of data visualizations and infographics"

Spotted in India: Indo-Pak Peace Project

I arrived in India on New Year's Day and was pleasantly surprised to learn about Aman Ki Asha, a new Indian Pakistani peace project initiated by The Times of India and the Jang Group. I spotted these giant signs in Mumbai and saw this entertaining ad on the local TV...

Spotted in India: Point Blank School Zone

A good majority of the street signs I encountered in India had accompanying advertising.

I found this one in Hampi particularly creepy since the juxtaposition of language and image made me think of school shootings (perhaps something that is not as common in India as it is here).

There were also a series of signs across bridges in Goa reminded people to wear helmets, not drink and drive, go the speed limit, and not use cell phones while driving, which appropriately enough were sponsored by a phone company.

Spotted in India: Beyond Billboards

I recently spent two weeks in India, specifically parts of Goa, Hampi, and Mumbai. The majority of the areas I stayed in though were smaller villages and towns and one of the first things I noticed was that the only places that were recently painted were buildings (often small businesses) that were entirely covered in advertising. Considering how rundown the majority of the buildings were, I could see the appeal in a free paint job, even though in most cases the ad overwhelmed any other signage for what the building contained (and was usually completely unrelated). Interestingly when the ads were no longer under contract in many cases the words and logos were just obscured enough to make them illegible, but the main components of the design remained (sorry I didn't manage to photograph any of theses, they were actually quite visually intriguing).

Global Warming Cartoon

via.

Urban Farming : Hydroponics in NYC

New York City has thousands of empty rooftops; flat, unused, full sun, vacant land. It’s enough space to feed 15 million people. Check out this video about state of the art urban farming techniques.



"Keeping agriculture sustainable increasingly means keeping it local. Besides the environmental benefit of reducing reliance on fossil-fuel guzzling transportation, eating local food is a more seasonal and often healthier experience. With concern about food security growing, it might turn out to be safer, too. The folks in charge of the Science Barge, a new urban farming experiment in New York, are bringing local food production closer than ever. In this video Vanessa Rae learns about the floating greenhouse facility, which is designed as a demonstration of how urban space, especially rooftop space in big cities like New York, can be used to efficiently produce food. Self-powered by solar panels, wind turbines, and a biodiesel generator, the Science Barge uses state of the art computer technology and an agricultural technique called hydroponics to grow fruits and veggies using much less water and space than field farming. Watch out, city slickers. Farm country is coming to your neighborhood."

via River Wired.

Must Watch - Food,Inc

Must Watch on Sprword.com show many documentaries telling about parts of reality that global medias do not usually question or talk about and that stay unanswered by governments.

One of them is Food, Inc. by filmmaker Robert Kenner. "He lifts the veil on The USA's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment.
We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here."

Millionaire Squatters

For much of the 90's I was an active member of an amazing squatted art/music/activist space in New York City's Lower East Side called ABC NO RIO (I even designed the logo that's still in use!). During the time I was there, the building (which has been in continuous use since 1980) was threatened with closure, but thanks to the efforts of dedicated volunteers the building was officially given to the collective that ran it and the process was started to raise the funds to rehabilitate the dilapidated structure. Money trickled in over the years, but it was never enough for the growing costs (phase one is now budgeted at 2.4 Million) and it seemed like a full rehabilitation would only happen in the distant future. Fast forward to earlier this year when ABC was awarded 1.6 Million in city funding, leaving a much more manageable budget gap to be filled. Not bad, but then this past November Steven Englander, the space's executive director,  received an anonymous donation of an additional 1 Million dollars! Needless to say phase one plans are now full steam ahead and the space will live on for generations to come.

Thanks to The Groundswell Blog for sharing this news!

Spotted in New York City: Final Exit

I recently gave a talk at the New York Public Library's Grand Central Branch and discovered this sign in a stairwell in the building. Needless to say I did not go through that door.

Spotted in Newark: Meditation Room

I've been spending a lot of time in airports recently and yet the first time I encountered a sign like this was in Newark, New Jersey.

ALR on Tour: Skulls at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

I was recently asked to present a talk and workshop as part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' annual Teen Symposium. The program features several guest artists who present to 100+ students and art teachers from across Virginia. I talked about my Skull-A-Day project and then led the participants in a mini-project in which they picked an image and then made as many versions of it they could in a short period of time using a variety of materials. The results were really terrific, especially when people realized they could move beyond fixed, traditional forms. More images can be seen on my Flickr stream HERE.

Poster4Tomorrow: Words Are Power

Today the 100 selected posters for the Poster4Tomorrow worldwide exhibitions were revealed and I'm happy to announce that one of my designs made the cut! The megaphone/gun image is one I originally created for my talk at the How Conference in Austin this past June and it seemed like the perfect metaphor for talking about freedom of speech (and a shame not to use it again somewhere else). All of the posters are really beautiful and can be seen and downloaded (and used under a Creative Commons noncommercial share-alike license) from the site HERE. Congratulations to everyone that was included!

H2Oil - Alberta Oil Sands Industry

The Canadian animation company La Moustache has created these 3 animated sequences for the new documentary H2oil. The documentary, produced by Loaded pictures exposes the Alberta Oil sands industry was made entirely under AfterEffects. Art Direction and animation by Dale Hayward and Sylvie Trouvé. Illustrations by James Braithwaite. Narrated by Catherine Kidd.

Extracting bitumen from tar sands (Oil sands) is a very high energy intensive process, requiring industrial scale heating (using natural gas) and 4 barrels of fresh water to produce one barrel of oil. So clean water resources shrink very quickly, along with the burning of natural gas to create another carbon emitting fuel, and it goes on. For more details about this environmental disaster, check out the animation.

For a fairly neutral overview of tar-sand mining check this link.

No Bones About It

Here are a couple of nice recent media pieces on my Skull-A-Day project:

I was interviewed by the director of Philadelphia's Mütter Musem for his web show "No Bones About It!"...



And I was included in a recent episode of public radio program Studio 360 as a skull expert...

The Growth of Food Stamp

The other day I came across this infographic depicting the number of Americans who received assistance from the government in the form of food stamp from Sept. '08 to May '09.

It shows that 10% of the total population actually receives food stamps. How many people in need but nor receiving are there, I wonder.

For the full infographic, click here.

"While some economists are declaring the recession over, and although the stock market continues to rise, those on the bottom of the economic ladder are seeing fewer improvements to their day-to-day lives. The number of Americans who receive assistance from the government in the form of food stamps continues to rise—the total number of food stamp recipients is now up to more than 10 percent of the total population. Here is how many people have been using food stamps for the nine months from September, 2008, to last May."

Posters4Tomorrow Exhibitions - December 10th Worldwide

Poster4Tomorrow, an international poster competition to promote freedom of expression, will have 23 worldwide exhibitions opening on December 10th. On display will be 100 posters selected by 9 jurors (including Marjane Satrapi, the author and filmmaker of Persepolis) from 1,834 submissions received from 67 countries. The entire 100 will be revealed online and in the galleries on the 10th, but here's a sneak preview of some of a few of the winners:




Exhibition location and dates:

Ankara, Turkey, Bilkent Universit, December 10-18
Beirut, Lebanon, Lebanese American University, December 10-17
Belgrade, Serbia, REX, Cultural Lab, December 10-14
Brussels, Belgium, Libre Académie de Belgique, December 10-13
Buenos Aires, Argentina, University of Buenos Aires, December 10-20
Cheonan, South Korea, SangMyung University, December 10-13
Derry, United Kingdom, University of Ulster, December 10-January 8, 2010
Gdansk, Poland, Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, December 10-13
Heidelberg, Germany, Theaterplatz, Heidelberg, December 10-18
La Paz, Bolivia, Museo Nacional de Arte, December 10-January 8, 2010
Lima, Peru, Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola, December 10-15
Lisbon, Portugal, Lx Factory, December 10-14
Los Angeles, United States, Seyhoon Gallery, December 10-17
Marrakesh, Morocco, Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels, December 10-25
Milan, Italy, La Triennale di Milano, December 10-20
Montreal, Canada, École de Design, UQAM, December 10-14
Paris, France, Les Arts Décoratifs, December 10-13
Quito, Ecuador, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, December 10-January 10, 2010
Sevilla, Spain, Facultad de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, December 10-17
Stockholm, Sweden, Designens Hus, December 10-13
Strasbourg, France, Agora Building, Council of Europe, December 10- March 10, 2010
Tbilisi, Georgia, French Embassy Cultural Center, December 10-20

The project has been endorsed by Reporters Sans Frontiéres and the Italian chapter of Amnesty International and granted the endorsments of two interrnational organizations, the Council of Europe and the French Commission for UNESCO. More info about the entire project can be found HERE.

credits:
Paris exhibition poster: Illustration by Marjane Satrapi, Graphic design by Hervé Matine
Milan exhibition poster: Photo by Sergio Tornaghi - Studio Smog, Graphic design by Pasquale Volpe
THE PRESSident: Pamela Campagna, Thomas Scheiderbauer - Triggiano, Italy
Censure: Rémi Gombert - Perenchies, France
Because this mouth is mine: Frank Arbelo - La Paz, Bolivia
Hello: Babak Madandar - Tehran, Iran
Freedom of expression : Mingliang Li - Guangzhou, China