7 Billion Friends

Limited Edition 20 Shirt Shirtimation (Oh And A Regular Shirt :))

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 04:10:32 -0500

So while I lay on the couch nursing my Thanksgiving turkey hangover I was also dabbling in the strange new art of shirtimation. How new is it? Well I think I just made it up the other day. The basic idea is to take each frame of an animation and print it on an individual shirt, so that if everyone wearing a shirt from the series stood in a row you could read the whole thing. Taking a couple art direction cues from Joana Lima, Jen Ruud, and my sister (“have a bird” “chainpaws eating a fish” “make it stink less” yes, and…), and using Pierce P’s illustrations as the core, the end result is this 20-frame animation that I’m making available to all LOVELAND inchvestors who inchvest in 50 inches or more.

LOVELAND Limited Edition Experimental Shirtimation from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Each shirt will be unique and never printed again. I’ll print them through SpreadShirt when there’s demand.

I’m also very happy to finally have a finished design for a more traditional static shirt:

I’ve been behind on the shirts but now we can go. I also gotta get some made for the Degenerate Craft Fair LOVELAND will be at coming up soon in New York. Yikes! Go gadget go.

It's A Sad Fact: Peak Inches (In The LOVELAND, Plymouth Colony)

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:49:00 -0500

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m about to tell you something shocking. Something you might not even believe. But as of a couple weeks ago, inch production in the first Plymouth Colony of LOVELAND has been declining. We’re on the downslope of a bell curve and it either ends with you being a Founding Forefather of Foremother in Plymouth, or you not being one.

This isn’t the right chart, but it gets the point across:

There are fewer than 4,900 inches out of the original first 10,000 inches in Detroit left. If you want to be smart, if you want to be prepared, if you want to be on the write[sic] side of history, there’s still time, but not too much time. You can inchvest in a force more powerful here.

Avoid your own personal collapse and prepare thyself for the new economy, what dreams may come and what creams may dome.

Can't Sleep. Shirt Will Eat Me. The First Shirtimation?

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:16:00 -0500

Hey, if I told you I had a crazy idea, would you believe me? :)

So, about those LOVELAND shirts… If I told you the whole story of why they aren’t done yet you really wouldn’t even believe me. And that’s OK. The moral of the story at the present moment is that we made a couple solid designs but it’s hard to get really excited about a static shirt for an ever-changing project one month away from 2010. Well, tonight I got excited about something I’d thought about a while ago, then forgotten, then remembered.

What’s on my mind is a limited run of maybe 25 shirts to start, each with a unique frame of one overarching animation so that each shirt is slightly different, and if all 25 people stood in a row you’d see the animation play out. This sort of thing is totally doable using http://spreadshirt.com as the printer.

But I need to figure this out fast. I’m going to be at Shop Detroit in (of all places) Detroit and The Degenerate Craft Fair in New York coming up real soon in December and I want to have some there. I’ll post some concepts shortly and want to get them to print over the weekend at the latest. If you wanna help concept the first distributed t-shirt animation (to my knowledge) don’t hold back there, tiger. This should be cool.

On that note, Joana Lima ”moved” to LOVELAND, Detroit from San Francisco with a $50 inchvestment tonight. She’s a filmmaker and made a suggestion/request (sugquest?) that the shirtimation either have a bird flying across a scene or a bear eating a fish (maybe I suggested that last one).

Since Joana can resemble a turtle eating a strawberry, I’ll take her advice for what it is: awesome.

Ambitious New $0.00 Kickstarter Round, New Inchernet Map Compliments of Larry

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:12:00 -0500

LOVELAND Kickstarter Round 6: A Force More Powerful is now alive and kicking. And oh crudler! We only have 8 days to raise zero dollars! Can we do it??? /bites nails

I set the fundraising goal to $0.01 and it rounded it down to $0.00 which is pretty awesome. Kickstarter allows projects to be “over-funded” so it works out well. Joe and I have been trying to get a Shopify store going, but it hasn’t been bending to our wills yet as expected, so Kickstarter has become a Kickstoreter. Funded from birth!!

Now, exciting, check this out. Larry Sheradon who rocks out over at Lemonary has put together a lovely start to an incheractive inchvestor map (The Inchernet) now live on makeloveland.com that draws directly from the inchvestor spreadsheet I keep with the names and number of inches people have. If you’ve already inchvested you should be on here (if you’re not let me know — I know for a fact there are some in-person inchvestors I misplaced…sorry, just let me know!!! :D).

Now, there’s an awful lot that can be done to this map, which is just the start of something that will grow to encompass all the LOVELAND properties and then, I hope, scale-up to the whole of Detroit and other places. Larry and I have been talking about what the next additions will be. Maybe clustering inchvestor territories together into squares rather than strips. Maybe adding more information like where everyone’s from or a statement of what they’re currently planning for their inches. Maybe a picture of each inchvestor in that square. Maybe Facebook Connect so everyone’s identity comes to the forefront. There’s a bunch of low-hanging fruit in the near-term and wide open spaces to run in the long.

So, we have ideas and are working on it, and if you have ideas you know who to tell. I know a guy who knows a guy who works on that project, and that guy is me.

Onward.

Making Things Betterer! Incheractive Maps, New Designs For Shirts+

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:25:00 -0500

Today I’m meeting with my friend Larry (see his awesome stuffs here) who’s been working on an interactive map visualizing inchvestors and progress in filling in colonies. He’s got a working map that sucks in all the inchvestor information from my google spreadsheet and arranges them in linear order with some information that pops up on mouseover. This picture is part his working map and part buttons and stuff I’m sketching and moving around. I can’t wait to get this up on the site!!

Who would have thought t-shirts would be so hard? I’ve been trying to get some done seemingly forever. First we had a design that I was trying to have printed at a shop and all these process issues kept popping up. Then, as can happen, I got less happy with the design and wanted a do-over. Well, over the weekend I got to sit down with one of my favorite artists ever, Pierce P, who put together the elements of the new design. Now the only question is how to arrange them! Maybe it looks good just as it is? A cute buffet of symbols? I think we might just add “I’VE GOT INCHES IN DETROIT” at the top and ship it using spreadshirt.com as the printer.

In general I think I’m reaching a point where based on personal feeling and feedback I might just take everything on the site down and start again with a much simpler aesthetic and story, almost like a children’s book in its simplicity. With some of the new visuals and interactivity, I think that’ll work well.

For The Currently Confused, Say Hello To Your New Ambassador of Fun

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:01:15 -0500

This review of my talk at DIY Days made my day. I certainly did come on stage discombobulated with a cold and a serious case of cotton head, which I announced to everybody as I fruitlessly searched the stage for a lost inch (seriously!), but I think this also serves well as a meta description of the whole project so far. When you start from scratch and put your ideas together in public, things can look like total bulls**t for a while. I look forward to putting more and more in focus for the currently confused. It’s alllll part of the game. :)

Tony Alexander Arias’ little write-up from DIY Days:

Loveland
I gotta say, I thought this talk was total bulls**t when it started. Jerry Paffendorf seemed disorganized and discombobulated on stage. By the end, I was completely charmed and I wanted to invest in LOVELAND. Hey, Jerry, so there’s a mayor of LOVELAND? Can I get a title? Make me the “Ambassador of Fun” and I’ll invest $35. Deal?

Tony, I like the idea of titles and think the Ambassador of Fun is a great one, you’re on. Maybe we’ll add a title field on the new inchvestor map we’re working on, and people can put in whatever they want? Inch Meister, Chief Inchformation Officer, Barack Obaminch, etc etc.

I Done Talked And Sniffled! DIY Days

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:34:00 -0500

Well that was rad. Thanks to Lance and everyone at DIY Days for inviting me to speak about LOVELAND with y’all. I was sick as a dog (of course that happened!) but it was great and I’ll post the video when it comes up. You’ll have to give me my two seconds to enjoy this tweet that happened during the night:

@travisarcher: at #diydays listening to many interesting seminars about trans-media storytelling and my favorite art project, makeloveland.com. genius

1… 2… OK.

I met some great people and saw some interesting work I will have to report on later. Observe and report, observe and report.

all photos from diydays.com/conference

Another LOVELAND Premonition: Augmented Reality "Inchvisible Houses", Moon Land-ing

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:59:00 -0500

Check it out:

LOVELAND Premonition: Inchvisible Houses, Moon Land-ing from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Here’s what was on my mind with this video. This is an interpretive sketch of how you might look through a camera at a little marker on one of the LOVELAND properties to see absolutely anything pop up there through the magic of augmented reality. Rita King is working on a design for the first “inchvisible house” that can be overlaid on a vacant lot using this technique. This allows for fantastic things to be “built” on tiny lots in Detroit without disturbing the neighbors. :)

The house you see stretching up to the sky in this video is an actual house in Detroit that I saw for sale for $30, on top of an actual lot I’m looking at buying for inchvestors. Here it stretches up into the sky to meet the moon where inchvestors also have some property now. Looking at the moon here got me thinking, hmm, you know, it’s possible to layer augmented reality on the moon so that when the camera sees it it can replace it with something else. In this case the moon becomes the Earth and vice verse.

I think it would be nice to see some otherwise impossible virtual architecture popping up around Detroit, and to look up at the night sky and see the Earth so you feel like you’re somewhere else. And no, I don’t think that’s any crazier than a $30 house. :)

Detroit Goes To The Moon: Moon Territory For LOVELAND Inchvestors In The Mayfield Colony

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:24:00 -0500

So. I’m getting packed up to fly from Detrot to Los Angeles to talk about LOVELAND at DIY Days on Thursday. And while doing so I just bought an acre of the moon which I’m deeding over to LOVELAND inchvestors. The Motor City meets the Lunar City. Details to follow.

The name of the LOVELAND, Detroit moon colony is Mayfield, after Mike Mayfield, a friend and our first hire at Wello Horld (our first company, which I plan on writing more about). Mike is an inchvestor who wrote to me earlier tonight suggesting I pull the trigger on some moon land and tie it into his/our property.

This is Mike at a Wello Horld team photo shoot in 2007, pictured with friend and photographer Sara Mayti. Note the similarity in names. Mayfield. Mayti. Conspiracy? Anyway, the moon land is going to be fun. Read more about the controversy over its legality here. I love this stuff.

fuckyeahdetroit: plainpaul: Detroit’s been B-E-A-U-tiful this...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:13:54 -0500

fuckyeahdetroit:

plainpaul:

Detroit’s been B-E-A-U-tiful this month.

This shot is taken from the DMC’s Applebaum building in Midtown Detroit.

A True Inchy Cursor

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:25:28 -0500

Joe went into his system settings to tweak his cursor size and make the Inchy cursor exactly one square inch. Now that’s dedication, folks. :)

Yes, And: 10 Colonies In 10 Clusters? Taking A Cue From Mario Brothers And Expanding The Board

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:18:00 -0500

What to do, what to do…

Well, we’re at the 5,000 inch mark, and I’m trying to think what’s best to do next with not only so much to do, but so much you *can* do. There’s lots of specific things I’m working through, and then there’s broader strategy stuff, the bigger shape of things that’s fuzzy but important. Last week I got inspired to expand the LOVELAND colonies. Now, as is not uncommon, I don’t know exactly what I’m doing or what they’ll be yet, but here’s what’s on my mind.

Looking at property in the city, Detroit has 10 neighborhood “clusters”. The first inchvestor property (Recovery: 8887 E Vernor Hwy) is in cluster 3. I’ve been researching small vacant lots of land in all 10 clusters and it’s quite possible to get a little land in each of them, which would give a nice spread across the entire city.

Ultimately I want all the clusters and colonies to be as interactive as a game, where people can jump around between them on the internet to see and incheract with the real space. I’m thinking it could be cool and create a nice goal if each of the properties/colonies essentially had 10,000 shares/inches. They could each have their own creative theme to them that ties into the area in some way and use the inchvestment money to transform each space differently, like different levels and areas in a game. God bless you, Mario:

So beyond stores and deeds and site work and the craft fair and cat wrangling and and and I’ll be trying to pick up some more affordable lots in these different clusters. They’ll be sort of random based on what I see is available, but no one can accuse LOVELAND of being anything but “yes, and” as we improvise and figure things out as we go along.

Onward…

Just Like Real Art

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:54:00 -0500

Earlier this month I moved across the hall at the Russell to a bigger studio I’m sharing with three friends. I was wrestling with how exactly to move the Plymouth Colony representing the road to the first 10,000 inches of LOVELAND, which is taped to the floor. Well, Mandy, a filmmaker from Los Angeles who moved into my old space appreciates it where it is (for now anyways). So, dear inchvestors, your 5,000 claimed inches currently exist as a sort of art installation being enjoyed by Mandy from LA. It was fun hanging out around it the other night. We had the wine, and all that was missing was the cheese slices or it would have been just like a REAL ART show. ;)

Mandy and Gene:

Jennifer and Mary:

As art works go, it’s not exactly living in a gallery with a wolf:

But living with inchvestor inches has its charms.

Solar Power? (Yet Another Thing That I Am Clueless About But Want To Learn On This Project :))

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:30:00 -0500

Update: I am appointing Steve Cherry to the solar team. We need more distinct teams. Teams are good. Thanks to the peops who wrote in with solar tips.

Anyone out there with solar power knowledge or hookups willing to advise me on a few things? I’d really like to get some solar going on the LOVELAND properties in Detroit so we can power internets, cameras, and who knows what else. I know Trevor Smith is incherested in solar on his land. Josh Myer wants to do a wifi “spy robot” inchvestors can drive around live over the internet:

Is this the kind of things we need? $429: Sharp 80 Watt Solar Panel.

As much as solar may be the future, every solar power and solar camera site I find seems to have been designed in the 1920s! They either look dubious, don’t work, or won’t tell you how much stuff costs. ha. If you know, please let me know.

PS I was excited to see “Detroit Solar” turn up in a search, but it looks like they’re a family business in the UK. d’oh! :)

Today Was A Good Day: Prelude To An Inchvisible House, Vending Machines, Deeds, Incheractive Maps

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:09:00 -0500

It really was.

So first I found another couple small lots of land in Detroit that we can afford thanks to your Kickstarter inchvestments. One of them, if we get it, is right between two houses which gives me an idea for The Inchvisible House. If we do it, it will be an entirely virtual Augmented Reality house for inchvestors to play with. Basically, I’ll put an AR code on the ground and that’ll be that as far as a physical presence. So it’ll have a root in Detroit, but we won’t have to disturb our neighbors unless they want to play with it too. Here’s a picture of the house. It’s a real pixel-upper. ;)

My friend Joe Krause and I (who I share a studio with at the Russell and who I’ll be moving into a house with in December) have been looking at vending machines recently. I wanted to get some to put inches in and set them up in bars around Detroit. Well, today I thought I was going to buy one off of Craigslist, but when I showed up at the house it was actually not 1, not 2, not 3, but *13* vintage-looking mechanical vending machines that were for sale for the price of what I thought was 1. So I have a baker’s dozen of these to customize now:

I’m still waiting for the package of hundreds of magnifying glasses to arrive, but I made some test prints of the square inch golden deeds tonight. The resolution was off and I cut them jankily by hand, but these are going to be cool:

And lastly but certainly not leastly, I sent my friend Larry Sheradon the inchvestor google spreadsheet and he started making some incheractive visualizations so we can start seeing who all from where has what. The first step creates a grid based on how many inches each inchvestor owns and tells you their name when you mouse over it. This is just a pic of it, but already it’s fun and pretty to move around, and it’s not even on a map yet.

Joy. She is hard to restrain.

Don’t listen to The Hater, you can inchvest and get inches in Detroit here.

Onward.

Pritty Griddy

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:27:00 -0500

Alan emailed me this video clip with the subject “If LOVELAND were to go 3d, these guys are a long way towards nailing it”. It is pretty! And definitely a sister to some of the things in my head — that colorful glitchy virtual worldness. I can’t wait to have some slicker stuff like this produced, and mix it with rawness. If you do this sort of thing, hit a brotha up.

Parasol Island for the 2009 MTV Europe Music Awards:

Kickstarter Round 5: You're Nobody Til Somebody Hates You (Sorry, Kickstarter :))

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:10:00 -0500

While I’m working on the new store I put up another Kickstarter round featuring the first sketchy appearance by The Hater character I mentioned here, who pretty much hates everything about LOVELAND. Click through the widget or the new banner thinger to see the video where he implores you NOT to inchvest and then goes on a rant against Kickstarter. Sooorrry, Kickstarter! The Hater’s views are his own. We <3 you.

I’m really interested in techniques for making stuff like this animation very very quickly without getting too caught up on details so that I can do enough by myself, and eventually when there’s a team of artists stuff can really come flying out. As much as possible I want to find a style that incorporates automated elements in a self-consistent way that makes sense.

Like here, I used a music generator to “grow” the song at the beginning by pushing a couple buttons, and The Hater’s voice is all text to speech so all I had to do was type it, all the images minus the opening skyline are images I took around Detroit, and as much as possible I try to bring in elements from life, even if they’re not obvious, like how The Hater’s Hating Is Everything hoody is a riff on my Hunting Is Everything hoody:

As they say in France, le ship it, ship it, ship it!

Plymouth (test)

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:47:00 -0500

Testing something… Click one of the arrows.

The McCoskey Highway (test)

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:45:00 -0500

testing something…

Progress (test)

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:44:00 -0500

testing something…