Sirocco Research Labs

Archive: July, 2010

• Life Lessons of an Intern

  Les­son #1: Sweat­ing for geometry

  Fly­ing over Cal­i­for­nia, I noticed how much we humans love geom­e­try. In a world of gra­di­ents, geo­met­ric shapes and pat­tern give us the com­fort­ing feel­ing that some sort of order exists in the universe–they’re kind of a visual equiv­a­lent of reli­gion. When we look at them, they say “out­side of these four right angles is the vast­ness of infin­ity and bil­low­ing chaos, but in here, in here I’m 100% square”.  Out the plane win­dow en route to Sirocco, there was this warm embrace wait­ing for my eyes:

  

  Just look at that and tell me you aren’t in love

  Com­ing into Sirocco, my first task was wait­ing for me: build a bed. When it came to beds, I and most peo­ple I know have been oper­at­ing under the assump­tion that we sleep on what­ever Swedish design­ers tell us to—would you like the RYKENE or the FLORÖ?  In the SRL though, every­thing was built by hand, includ­ing my allot­ted space to sleep, which was a hard­wood floor until I made it oth­er­wise. Luck­ily the Labs are some­where between a lum­ber­yard and a preschool, with end­less stacks of wood from old sets and rack over rack over rack filled with every mark mak­ing tool you could dream of. The tools were there; all I needed to do was build.

  

  For the first time in my life, I was forced to build my space for sleep and pri­vacy which felt like a small scale ver­sion of build­ing my own house. And because a sta­pler has been the most indus­trial tool I’ve used over the past ten years, the saw­ing, mea­sur­ing, drilling, and screw­ing I had in front of me made the road look that much longer.

  I spent my few hours in the labs sketch­ing what it was I would be sleep­ing on for the next month. There was no dead­line or due date, but my cur­rent hard­wood floor-bed brought an urgency to the process. In most art forms, you have the time to draw and erase, paint then paint over, add and remove—a process more of exper­i­men­ta­tion than plan­ning. With no place to sleep, I had to scrib­ble out some ideas as fast as pos­si­ble so I could start mak­ing said scrib­bles into a structure.

  

  My first few ideas were a bed in a box (felt too much like a cof­fin), bed on a box (fine, but just a bed on a box), bed with long legs (get­ting there), bed with legs and a mouth desk (still too open) , and bed with legs, desk, and fort fab­ric (per­fect!). After the rough idea of my bed was sketched out, the build­ing process was a lot sim­pler than I thought it would be. I’m still torn as to what my favorite part was, either the 8-year-old-fort-building feel­ing or going to the gar­ment dis­trict with Mar­tin to get my fabric.

  

  I decided to fol­low my heart, and it took me to polka dots

  

  All together:

  

  Such a direct hand-to-mouth rela­tion­ship was really excit­ing; hav­ing grown up in a world where actions are always ten to twenty degrees removed from their con­se­quences (e.g. how a come­dian can feed them­selves with­out ever hav­ing seen a plant), build­ing my bed felt like farm­ing my own food. And while the actual con­struc­tion was eas­ier than I thought it was going to be, the direct man­ual labor that went into my bed made me feel like I earned a place to sleep for the first time—tonight I won’t be sleep­ing on a mat­tress and frame, I’ll be rest­ing on sweat and determination.

  So as you can see, my first week in the labs was hardly about beds. Bed build­ing was really one task that embod­ied two dif­fer­ent lessons. The first was straight from the heart of Sirocco, a les­son about per­sonal agency and hid­den imag­i­na­tion — learn­ing to close your eyes and use your hands to make what you see under your lids. The sec­ond was about our need for def­i­nite lines and shapes; because in the end, my bed became another exten­sion of this geom­e­try we so love. Before, my bed was a sleep­ing bag dot in a prairie sized room in an infi­nite city.

  

  But, by assem­bling together an assort­ment of hard and opaque objects, I now have my own geom­e­try to crawl into that says “out­side these angles is the vast­ness of 15 mil­lion peo­ple and bil­low­ing smog, but in here, in here we’re 100% dreams”. Until next week, I’ll be here, star­ing out my rec­tan­gle window.

  

  –for­rest–

  Published July 31st, 2010 by Forrest Perrine

• Schmolodex

  ROLODEXXX

  who declared you would be so expen­sive to buy in the store..

  past the brink of obso­les­cence, you blindly sport a can’t-touch-me tag..

  while your mod­ern com­pe­ti­tion soars, you are weighted to the floor..

  blame it on your dis­po­si­tion, says sontag..

  you are but a glo­ri­fied t-p holder; vex us no more.

  
  

  NOW, what you’ve all been wait­ing for, the new and improved “SCHMOLODEX”!!  Made from door trim, ring binders, and a dowel rod, it can EASILY accom­mo­date con­tact infor­ma­tion for hun­dreds of your most col­or­ful friends.  Place it on a desk, mount in on the wall, sus­pend it from the ceil­ing; ANY way you look at it, bat­ter­ies aren’t included.. THAT’S RIGHT!!  There’s not a sin­gle cir­cuit to bend, no but­tons to push, and noth­ing to rub… SOOOOO, sneak into a local con­struc­tion site and build one TODAY!!

  

  Published July 27th, 2010 by Martin Morse

• Meetings About Sirocco Stuff

  M.A.S.S.

  When your team is an array of res­i­dents all up and down the west coast, pro­duc­tion meet­ings become a thing of beauty. A real tes­ta­ment to how cool the inter­net is.

  Our weekly Mon­day MASS =

  

  

  

  

  

  

  Published July 27th, 2010 by Katie Reardon

• Intern: 001

  

  Intern #001

  Name: For­rest Kahlil Perrine

  Age: 23

  Loca­tion: Los Ange­les, California

  Prior Loca­tion: The Vanilla Dome; Belling­ham, Washington

  Objec­tive: Some­where between life expe­ri­ence and log­i­cal con­clu­sion, per­haps both.

  Lat­est exper­i­ment in the research labs: Film shut­ter speeds and doc­u­men­ta­tion of sub­ject on skateboard.

  Cre­atively most envi­ous of: Charles Burnett

  Enjoys ter­ri­bly: Fau­vism, and doc­u­ment­ing projects that were built with his hands.

  Con­clu­sive Report: For­rest is intern 001 for one month in Los Ange­les.  A list of pre­ferred women are Suzanne Son­tag, Yayoi Kusama, Samira Makhmal­baf and Han­nah Hoch.  A list of pre­ferred men are Carl Sagan, Charles Bur­nett, Dan Sav­age, Erik Satie, and John Baldessari. Favorite medium is cur­rently col­lage. Lastly, given a $100 bud­get, he would cre­ate a film of him­self con­sum­ing $100 worth of Twinkies or an 18-year-long choose-your-own-adventure film about a father who is a spy in the Appalachian mountains.

  Published July 24th, 2010 by Adrianne Goodrich

• Let’s Explore Making Art

  

  In this episode, Adi and Jimmy ask each other ques­tions about mak­ing art, pos­i­tive think­ing, two dimen­sions, and ghosts.

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

  Published July 16th, 2010 by Jimmy Marble

• Jettison Quarterly: A Feature on Sirocco

  Sirocco has received our first ever media cov­er­age — our first piece of evi­dence that this all isn’t a dream.

  Check out our fea­ture arti­cle in this month’s issue of the ever so awe­some Chicago based art rag, Jet­ti­son Quar­terly. Issue #6 is gush­ing with some Labs love.

  Some amaz­ingly charm­ing pho­tos were crafted by the Labs to add to the arti­cle. More on those soon.

  

  

  

  

  Thanks, Jet­ti­son, for all the love. We plan on com­ing to Chicago soon to give you hugs and thanks in person.

  Published July 10th, 2010 by Katie Reardon

• Lab Coats

  

  I started with this one because a good elab­o­rate idea was already in motion: with “red moon” col­ors and tex­tures, the plan was to cre­ate a plaid using strips cut from the left­over cos­tume mate­ri­als by weav­ing them together, then applique them onto the lapel.. this was going well until the auto­mo­bile car­pet mate­r­ial was too thick and stiff to con­form to the curves of a lapel on a human, and as a woven piece, it looked like a crafty grandmother’s din­ner jacket from medieval times.. but since the mate­ri­als were already in place, to get the same effect, an air­brush was used to paint black over it all, then all the stitches and strips were ripped off to reveal the white lat­tice; finally, red, gray, and white stripes were stitched to fin­ish the plaid.

  

  the future of sirocco was in mind: the “dream machine” color palatte of pas­tel col­ors was stitched on with thread of vary­ing weight, fiber, and sheen cre­at­ing a com­plete yet dis­or­ga­nized checkerboard..

  

  the nau­ti­cal theme was acheived with water­based latex paint; mask­ing and over­lap­ping lay­ers of paint was used to give the stripes a sub­tle illu­sion of depth; time and wear should slowly change them like waves on the hull..

  

  the bold line curves from neck to hem: an extra 1/8”, so simple.

  

  a jacket with room for dec­o­ra­tion; sel­vage attracted me to cre­at­ing patch­work: work­ing as appren­tice pat­tern­maker at oxxford clothes, i was the after-hours scav­enger, col­lect­ing all the sel­vage off the cut­ting room floor for their exotic locales col­or­fully woven along the edges of the oth­er­wise exceed­ingly bland (but ridicu­lously expen­sive) bolts.. these strips of mate­r­ial have irreg­u­lar ver­ti­cal stitches to sup­port the weight of what­ever might be shoved in the slots..

  Published July 7th, 2010 by Martin Morse

• A Lighthearted War, Pre-Production Teaser

  One of my sum­mer projects is a short series called A Light­hearted War.  The movies doc­u­ment two rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies in love who are fight­ing against their oppres­sive, bour­geois col­o­niz­ers.  The col­o­niz­ers have, inci­den­tally, banned whim­si­cal romance.  If you like non-sequiturs, con­tra­dicted on-the-spot real­ism, and two kids just try­ing their best, then stay tuned!

  This prep list also might give you a decent feel for the movie’s look and aes­thetic.  Sort of, anyway:

  

  

  

  

  

  Published July 1st, 2010 by Jimmy Marble