Stimulus/classification diagram

I found this image in an old sketchbook. All sorts of ideas flowed from this, I remember that for a while it was the basis of my experimental (i.e. short and rubbish) videos.

Group show in June

Currently working on a number of small-scale pieces for inclusion in a show at 42 New Briggate in The Leeds in mid-June. The concept I’m working with is that all the pieces must be created in, or take their materials from, an office environment. Images of works in progress when I get round to finding out how to embed images in the blog properly..

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- “Office artworks” by Ellie and me. A3 poster, newsprint sheet, two sided, large image on one side (keyboard drawn on post its?), other side 9-12 b&w images of existing artworks made out of blu tac, post its, rubbers, paper clips etc

- Sol LeWitt Typeface; draw on several sheets of A4 graph paper & then cut out/glue together into a single long strip (or two shorter strips – see how it looks)

[I thought it may be better to combine these two, so one side is the photos and the other is a copy of the typeface]

- series of photocopies. Must decide how this is to be shown. A book is the obvious format but there is the resulting problem that a) people are less likely to pick it up and look at it and b) it is easier to steal and would be a one off

- I’m currently recording the hold music from my innumerable hours spent waiting on the phone at work. We’ll record very short snippets of this music into MP3 format and give them away on 3.5 inch floppy discs.

Leading on from that is –

- internet page which is a gif of static, as if it is an empty/off page

essentially on commentary on the fact that i use the internet loads but there’s nothing of real consequence on there..

Dog Site

The main problem with the Black Dogs website is that it is built on a foundation laid down when I didn’t know the first thing about web design. Simon Lewandowski had given msyelf and few other fine art people a crash course on the very basics of using dreamweaver, and I seem to remember him teaching us how to do simple gifs as well. I did a gif of some characters from streetfighter 2 dancing about and it was all a bit shit.

The first version of the site was used to advertise the Arte et Labore show; it was entirely text-based (although I seem to remember adding the image of Andy’s fussball table afterwards) and set in different sizes of arial, so about as simple as a site can possibly get. For visitors it relied on people typing in the address from the invites and posters.

By the time Technically Wrong came around I had replaced the site with a new version which incorporated a menubar and lots of images. It took me a while to realise this was awful because of the prevalance of grey (it looked like an accountancy website) and all the images were tiny (expandable) thumbnails surrounded by reams of text. When I came to design the third and current incarnation of the site I kept the largely red and black colour scheme but discarded pretty much everything else.

I think the current site is reasonably well-designed, easy to navigate (but also easy to get lost in) and I’ve had positive feedback about the amout of information accessible in it, and the increase in the number and size of images has made the site far more useful and attractive.

The problem I have updating it now is that when I came to design this version I knew nothing about templates, something unbelievably basic which would make large-scale changes an utter nightmare as I wold have to change every single page manually. No doubt at some point I will make a fourth version of the site which incorporates templates, forms etc but there seems to be little sense in doing that at the moment as I have so much other stuff to do and the site works fine as it is.

I spent a few hours last night doing basic maintenance and updates whilst watching Indiana Jones. The Axis Consequences games are the main addition. I’m struggling with the front page – the interview section always opens in expanded rather than collapsed mode, and it seems daft to hit people with a lot of text as soon as they get to the site. The Agenda page looks a bit better with the new dividing border between sections, although I’d still like to make a version that doesn’t require any scrolling.

www.black-dogs.org