Creative Cogitation

Just fin­ished recy­cling a bunch of “free” metal frames I have been mov­ing around my office for two years by fil­ing them with mat­ted gicleé. Never again.  Them things just aren’t designed for mats.  Even though the results appear quite nice it was a lot of work, clean­ing them up and then cram­ming the mats and prints into them.  My fin­gers are pretty chewed up now.  Hope­fully some of them will sell at the Sun­nyS­lope art­walk on Sat­ur­day — the Art­walk is between But­ler and Dun­lop on the East Side of Cen­tral Avenue in Phoenix AZ USA April 10, 2010. I just real­ized he Flights of Fancy show at the Sun­dust gallery opens tomor­row.  Busy busy busy.

I am work­ing on two more sketches, but I have been too busy this week to get any paint­ing done.  Next week doesn’t look good either as April 15th approaches and taxes are my day job, and I actu­ally have an arti­san mar­ket that day.

Any­way, here is the blog on the last piece I finished.

Long before the inven­tion of the World Wide Web, there were loose sets of con­ven­tions for com­mu­ni­cat­ing over net­works. Most had to do with multi-posting, cross post­ing, off-topic post­ing, elec­tronic sig­na­tures, whether or not to use abbre­vi­a­tions, hijack­ing a dis­cus­sion thread, in addi­tion to basic pro­fes­sion­al­ism, cour­tesy, a dis­taste for spam, pro­hi­bi­tions against writ­ing in ALL CAPS (which is the cyber-equivalent of yelling) and bans against flame wars. An unwrit­ten idea behind neti­quette is that all these com­mu­ni­ca­tions forms: email, forums, chats, and other net­works are not really pri­vate and mes­sages con­veyed over them should reflect this fact. If you would not want to see some­thing you said on the front page of the NY Times, you prob­a­bly should not con­vey it in cyberspace.

In this install­ment of Social Media Birds, I return to my Tweety. Them bright yel­low canaries are just so happy looking.

Neti­quette, by Jake Beck­man. A singing yel­low canary is perched atop his grumpy flam­ing cat monster.

I strug­gled with sketch­ing this paint­ing for quite a while.  The con­cept came quickly enough: flam­ing mon­ster, social media tweety — high con­cept.  My orig­i­nal draw­ing with a canary oper­at­ing a “blue“berry device, while sit­ting on his vaguely Chuck Jones’-esque flam­ing mon­ster was very unsat­is­fy­ing.  It was too lit­eral and did not lay out well.  I went through sev­eral iter­a­tions until I real­ized my mon­ster was look­ing a lot more like a cat than any­thing else.  Sud­denly it dawned — few things look more dis­dain­ful than a punch-face Per­sian cat.  When my mon­ster took on feline ele­ments the rest just came together.  The binary swirling out of the back­ground reads “Neti­quette” of course.

For more infor­ma­tion about Neti­quette, please refer to its art page at AKAJake.com.

What are your thoughts on Netiquette?

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

I can think of no bet­ter phrase to con­vey the para­noia that is encom­passed by con­spir­acy the­o­ries. The Grassy Knoll, Area 51, the NM UFO crash, 2012 End of Times (I think I might do a paint­ing about this too…), Illu­mi­nati, Free Masons, Skull & Bones, Knights Tem­plar, other secret soci­eties, the­o­ries about who really was behind 9/11, the­o­ries about what is really caus­ing global warm­ing, aliens, the­o­ries ancient civ­i­liza­tions that would make Erich von Däniken blush-the list of con­spir­a­cies goes on and on and I have not even begun to tap into this vein of Pop Cul­ture. Social Media pro­vides a new media-rich plat­form for the fringe to espouse their out­landish beliefs.

In this lat­est edi­tion to the Social Media Birds series, I take on one the­ory that has some basis in fact-the idea that the US States gov­ern­ment is spy­ing on ordi­nary cit­i­zens. Var­i­ous gov­ern­ments are using Sig­nal Intel­li­gence to search for ter­ror­ists and their plots, to track drug deal­ers, and for other polit­i­cal and diplo­matic intel­li­gence. Fringe the­o­rists also claim it is being used by gov­ern­ments, secret soci­eties, aliens or other secret coali­tions for large-scale com­mer­cial theft, eco­nomic espi­onage and of course gen­eral inva­sion of privacy.

Con­spir­acy The­ory, by Jake Beck­man. A men­ac­ing Amer­i­can bald eagles swoops out of cyber­space to snatch infor­ma­tion for a data stream.

The men­ac­ing Amer­i­can bald eagle is seem­ingly formed out of the noth­ing­ness of cyber­space to snatch at infor­ma­tion pass­ing through a data stream in the fore­ground.  The edge to edge binary reads, “Warn­ing: They know you’re read­ing this… Warn­ing:”. Sev­eral peo­ple have sug­gested I use some­thing other than a tweety bird in these paint­ings, so here one is.  This intim­i­dat­ing rap­tor is the very antithe­sis of my joy­ous canaries.

For more infor­ma­tion about Con­spir­acy The­ory, size etc., please visit its art page at AKAJake.com.

So what is your favorite conspiracy?

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.