look out below
Jun 25
by David in Ant Farm 3 comments

Ant Farm Wins SEAF 2012!

In 2011 I was honored to take the top spot in the Viewer’s Choice award at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival for my Common Thread project. This year I hoped to continue my winning streak by once again grabbing this prize for the Ant Farm. But my plans were thwarted. For reasons unknown, SEAF decided to not allow the viewers to vote for their favorite artwork at the 2012 festival. And when I say “reasons unknown,” I mean unknown to me because it’s not like I actually took the time to ask anyone about it. Hell no, I have much more important things to do... like write this blog post. Anyway, since SEAF has abdicated responsibility for collecting and tallying the wishes of the viewers, I have decided to take matters into my own hands. Since polling all the attendees at this point would extremely inconvenient for me, it quickly became obvious that I would have to construct a different method to accurately determine and serve the will of the people. Fortunately for the citizens of Seattle and beyond I was able to do just that, and I am now making the bold—some might rightly say courageous—move of declaring my art project the Ant Farm to be the winner of SEAF 2012. Or, as the press release should read:
David  is proud to announce that he has named his Ant Farm project to be the recipient of the “Super Awesome Award of Superior Achievement and Awesomeness” award at the 2012 Seattle Erotic Art Festival. There were no other winners.
Wow! I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to take the top spot two years in a row! This is a very humbling moment for me and I really need to acknowledge that it’s not just me, but also my unique talent and vision that got me here. I’m so happy that the esteemed committee recognized the need to assign this illustrious award to the rightful recipient, which is me. I will begin work on building a display case suitable to house such a distinguished trophy, right after I build the actual trophy. I would like to thank everyone who came to SEAF this year for the sole purpose of viewing my project and I’m very happy that I can give you this opportunity to see the Ant Farm bestowed with all the accolades that I feel it deserves. Remember, when you follow your dreams, all my dreams come true.
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Mar 27
by David in Ant Farm 1 comments

Ant Farm: Finished

Well that was a hell of a lot of work. I finished photography for the Ant Farm at the beginning of February, but that did not mean I was anywhere close to being done with the project. No, that's when a whole other level of work kicked in. But maybe I should back up a bit first and describe the process that was happening during the photography stage. Each of the 100 models was shot in either a horizontal or vertical set piece that helped me keep the proportions correct. I had everything set up so that the lights would be the same for each shot, ensuring a consistent appearance. (It also helped that I was doing everything very high-key, so there really wasn't an issue with watching out for shadows.) I jumped on the post-processing right after doing each shot rather than saving it all to the end. Not only did this keep my sanity by spreading this work out over a long period of time, but it helped me catch some set-up issues early on that I was able to correct. But still, this means that for each of the 100 models I had to:
  1. Recruit and schedule, often involving quite a bit of back-and-forth emails.
  2. Do the shoot, which usually was fairly quick.
  3. Do the post-processing for that image.
  4. Add that image to the overall grid. The more the grid was filled in, the trickier this became because a domino effect would kick in. I'd discover that the new image would look great in a particular spot, but that meant I had to move another, and the process would start all over again.
Once all 100 models were photographed I spent a couple weeks doing final arrangements to make sure each person was in the perfect spot. At the same time I was constructing the framework they would be standing on. This was a bit of a challenge because I know very little about creating and manipulating textures in Photoshop, so it took a while to come up with something that had the gritty, orangic look that was stuck in my head. This is something I could have keep tweaking for the next two years, but at one point I just had to call it done and move on. My original plan was to just output the Ant Farm as a single-sheet print, which would have required using a professional print shop in order to get the size I wanted. This led me to start thinking if there was some way I could print it with my Epson 3800, even though its maximum print size of 17"x37" falls far short of the 60"x45" size of the image. After a lot of experimenting, I decided to pursue a staggered, overlapping tiled design that is a slight tip-of-the-hat to the late James Rizzi. I divided the image into a series of about 35 panels, each with two to four models. I then worked through some small-scale mock-ups to find a series of vertical offsets that would work across the entire pieces. Now that I had a game plan, it was time to move on to the construction portion. This entailed:
  1. I isolated the separate panels from my primary Photoshop file and employed my finest Tetris skills to arrange as many as I could on each sheet of my expensive 17"x22" Exhibition Fiber paper.
  2. I proceeded to waste several sheets of paper while dealing with printing problems, which turned out to be the result of accidentally selecting the wrong paper profile in the Print dialog box.
  3. When each sheet came out I hung it up in a safe place for 24 hours to give the ink sufficient time to dry. I have no idea if this is really necessary, but it makes me feel good.
  4. After drying, each sheet gets two coatings of Hahnemuhle protective spray.
  5. Once the spray is dry, each panel is carefully cut out using an X-Acto.
  6. For each panel, I cut out a foam core backing that is the same shape as the panel but slightly smaller so it would not show.
  7. I ran a black magic marker along the edge of each piece of foam core to help hide it even more. Ideally I would have just used black foam core, but when I went to buy it all the black sheets were annoying warped so I bought white and just dealt with it.
  8. I spray mounted each panel to the foam core.
  9. I defined four different heights of standoffs I would need to support the panels and decided to use styrofoam to keep the weight down. I bought a sheet of rigid styrofoam insulation and trimmed the blocks using a power scroll saw. This was extremely messy.
  10. Meanwhile, I was also constructing the wood frame. Fortunately, it worked well to just use simple 1"x6" boards and a sheet of plywood for the backing so the construction was rather simple. When building something like this, however, it's very important to think ahead as to how it will be hung on the wall and work that into your design. I added a couple support pieces to the back that will bear most of the weight. A couple coats of flat black followed by a protective clear coat and it was ready to go.
  11. I dry-fitted the panels several times to ensure that everything fit and looked good. Once I was satisfied, I glued everything in place. (The brevity of that last sentence does not convey how long this took. I spent several days glueing a few pieces at a time, letting them dry, then continuing.)
  12. Once everything was secured I affixed a sheet of clear acrylic over the front and called it done!
Since you've been so nice and read to the end of this long post, I guess I'll show you what it looks like:

Ha! Fooled you! The best you're going to get now is this shot with the blue protective film still stuck on the plexi. I won't be posting an unobscured image of the Ant Farm until it is debuted at SEAF in June 2012. In fact, I suggest you simply attend SEAF and see it in person!  
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Feb 08
by David in Ant Farm 0 comments

Ant Farm: That’s a Wrap!

Photography for the Ant Farm project is now complete! When I kicked off this project in the Fall of 2011, I first spent several weeks working out the logistics of just how I would do the photos. I needed to construct a set that I could quickly switch between horizontal and vertical orientations without having to alter my light setup, with the goal of being able to get 100 consistent images in a somewhat assembly line process. Test shots that I did with my first setup revealed some fundamental flaws that I had to address by essentially tearing everything apart and starting over. By late October I was ready to begin and I had decide just how to solicit participants. Since I had done two large-scale projects before, I obviously had a mailing list with more than enough names of ready and willing people, but I wanted to mix things up a bit. I didn't want to go so far as to not use any of the people from the earlier projects, but I did think it would be fun to tap into some other talent pools. This time around I decided to let word of mouth (or word of Facebook) do most of the work for me. I made an intial post about the project which attracted the first few people. I then asked them to tell their friends about it, just to see what would happen. Well, what happened was that I ended up doing very little promoting of the project and the vast majority of people came in through recommendations from their friends. It became very common for emails to arrive that started with "I heard about the project through my friend and I'd love to be a part of it, too!" And with that, I was off and running. Since I'm a project manager by trade, I'm always collecting data, and the data I collected for this project is rather interesting (at least to me, that is):
  • Total number of participants: 100
  • Women: 67; men: 33. This is very interesting, because my past projects were much more gender-balanced. Why this one was so skewed, I have no idea.
  • People who had been in Self-Censored Portraits: 21; people who had been in Common Thread: 22; people who had been in both: 12. That means 69 had never been in any of my projects!
  • People I had never met before: 52
  • People who told me that they had never posed nude before: a lot (sorry, didn't keep an accurate count).
  • Youngest: 21; oldest: 62
  • Most common age: late 30s (actually, this is just a guess)
What's next? Now it's all about fine-tuning the images to prepare it for printing. I still have a bit of time so I can take this part nice and slow.
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Dec 18
by David in Ant Farm 0 comments

Is the Ant Farm Full?

(Update 1/14/2012: Yeah, it's full. By the end of this coming week I will have shot all 100 ants. I'll post a full recap soon.) Maybe... but probably not. I use a spreadsheet to keep track of all the models in the Ant Farm project; not only the ones I have already shot but also the ones that are scheduled and the people who have expressed interest but haven't yet booked a date. I just noticed that all together, these now add up to an even 100 people, which is the capacity of the project. So that means it's full, right? Not necessarily. Right now there are about 20 people who are in the category of having expressed interest but haven't yet booked a date to do the photo. History tells me that not all of these people will end up in the project; schedules can be tough to coordinate, especially this time of the year. In all likelihood I will still be able to take some new people. What I'm doing for now is putting any new people on a wait list. In the meantime I'm going to contact all the unscheduled people and ask them to try to set up a date with me by the end of the year (that is, by 12/31 tell me when you can do the photo, not necessarily do the photo by 12/31). After the first of the year, I'll know how many spots I have open and I can start working my way through the wait list. So, if you have previously told me you want to do a photo, please be in touch soon to set something up. If you are new to all this, drop me a line and I'll put you on the wait list.  
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