WEFOUNDNOTHING

Howdy partners, this post is to ask for a little help from our friends…

We’re launching an informal online survey on our research project (specifically looking at pedestrian behavior) and we’d be absolutely delighted if ya’ll could fill it up if you have time! Looking forward to seeing everyone’s responses!

The Urban Campfire is a monthly digest of stories by people from disparate places but harnessing earnest experiences, getting through the world the only way they (we) know how. (The official “About” can be found here).

The idea of an urban campfire is a meaningful one. Where and how do we gather with our community members these days? Who is our community? Well, the great big WWW is most definitely our contemporary campfire (bet you saw that coming) and getting everyone to cosy up doesn’t seem like too bad an idea.

Jellyfish in Poland by Olimpia Dior in UC’s Dec 2012 Issue

We met Loam, the founder and curator of Urban Campfire, a couple of months ago. Despite the often tiresome hours of freelancing in the event/music/arts production sphere, Loam makes it a point every month to consolidate Urban Campfire.

The IllFits featured in UC’s Sept 2011 issue

Loam easily gives his dimpled smile as he talks about his “labor of love.” Apparently, it arose because “I just felt that I knew too many cool people” and wanted to put them and their stories side by side as an attempt to pull what he calls “the greater community” into a common space.

I imagined I’d spend the week having sex with different women everyday in crazy positions, the type that would require a license and three-day safety course in the real world.  The women would be named Star-Child or Sparkle-Horse or Moon-Humper, though I wouldn’t even know that because hedonistic desert orgies don’t have a “meet and greet” portion. For seven days I’d be a purely sexual being, enjoying so much anonymous sex that Bacchus himself would look down from Mt Olympus and say, “Whoa, take it easy dude!”

That was the plan, but that is not what happened.  Instead of a lot of sex with woman, I fell in love with a man.  Which is how this picture came into existence: 

I’m sure many men have gone to Burning Man and had a homosexual encounter that made them realize they were gay.  This is not one of those stories.  I am still straight and did not have sex with a man.  No, what happened to me at Burning Man was much gayer than having sex with a man - I fell head-over-heels in friendship.

Excerpt from Mattison Perry’s Burning Man account in UC’s October 2012 issue

We’re keeping it short-ish this time, and we’ll let the stories do the talking. This January issue is a big photo sprawl - you can get it here and you should think about joining in for the next month’s campfire!

thanks, Bob.

WELL. It’s been a little over a year since wefoundnothing was conceived and launched and we thought that now would be an appropriate time to take stock of what we’ve done, update you guys with our own process, reflect, and set up our gears for the next year. We have consolidated a bunch of thoughts into 5 not-so-short points.

1. wefoundwhaaaat?
wefoundnothing set out with the very broad (and admittedly vague) mission of supporting and producing creating (as a process) and encouraging those who create. This mission still holds. wefoundnothing still very much holds on to the active doing and commitment to doing work in order to work towards doing good work.

Over the past year, we’ve heard the following comment/question several times: “Actually, I don’t know if you’d be interested into looking at this because I don’t know what you want”. Let’s try to define the parameters a little bit and we’ll try our best to be less wordy and ambiguous. Who do we want? What do we want?

We’re don’t want to review, promote or advertise portfolios. We don’t claim to be an authority of Anything and we have little intention of making bank (ha) unless it can be used to spur creating and creating peoples. We want people who keep creating because they love it, because they want to, because they can, because they have to… just because.

We are not all that interested in the product except in relation to its accompanying process and how one engages with their work, how one’s work engages beyond itself. We are interested in people who are committed to learning and exploring and experimenting and actively DOING - Not sitting down with with 4 years of  coursework in their laps, arms crossed and mouths open. We want to see you do good work - or at least, do the work that leads you to make good work. Devotion is valuable thing. We appreciate your devotion. What we also appreciate is your participation and interaction with each other. To borrow a lesson from Diana Taylor’s research on the Nahuatl - “making is the currency of participation” and we want you in on it.

All that said, we are still very happy to hear from all of ya’ll, to see what you guys are up to, whether or not the content is “appropriate” for this weird little project log here. As you can see, criteria is actually very loose. We just want to know what’s going on. LET US BORROW YOUR EXPERIENCE!

Whew. Okay, the rest are shorter, promise.

2. Documentation
This part is the most tricky and important because, duh, it’s the bulk of what we’re attempting to achieve.

For one, some people take their process of creating very personally and don’t even want someone else in the room sitting there when they’re trying to work. It’s like having someone watch you while you pee… or so we hear. We respect everyone’s process and never enter uninvited. How then can we share the stop motion production of one’s work? Should we just leave everyone behind their curtains till they’re ready to unveil what they have? How do we get people to value process?

And of course, there is a huge problem of HOW to document all this material and constellations ya’ll provide for us in a way that is engaging for all of you. We are well aware that we have a lot of words. Such as this post.

We definitely need to obtain more equipment to help achieve this goal (hello 21st century) and we plan to start tiny focus discussions on how to document outside the real of the written (typed) word. We’re working on it. If anyone would like to be on this discussion, please don’t hesitate to email us at wefoundnothing@gmail.com.

3. Postage
For those who’ve been visiting us from the start, ya’ll know that our posts are pretty irregular. This is because (i) we have our fingers and toes in other commitments, and (ii) it’s not always to find the ‘right’ people whenever we want, and even after finding them, post it up like magic.

All that said, we are aware that irregularity can be really annoying. So in the upcoming year, we are hoping to be more consistent, even if it means fewer posts over a span of time.

4. Being Social
OH MY GOD WE ARE ON FACEBOOK.

It’s been interesting trying to figure out who what where how when etc etc to post, on Any social media platform. We have on an inch-worm schedule of having a tangible pool of followers. Sometimes, facebook tells us some of our posts have VIRAL readers! Somehow that makes us excited.

Of course, we are tumblr fans too and have found lots of cool people via the tumblr.

So… Hip hip hooray to socializing! On the interwebs! Hopefully by working on point #2 as we go along, even more cool things can happen.

5. Misc Stuff
A few things:

Troutman Sessions: For those who don’t know this, the Troutman Sessions “series” is now retired. Mostly because our location has since shifted. But we’re pretty happy with what we’ve managed to capture, and hopefully we can find a new assemblage of jammers. We’ll have to see what happens.

Haiku Hantam: is to be revived! Just not quite yet. It just needs a little bit of sitting on at the moment (and not just hantam-ing) soooo stay tuned.

Our own work/projects: The goal is to produce or help produce more work of our own. Slowly, but surely.

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Thanks for reading. Thanks for taking the effort. We appreciate you.

These days, few people set up voicemail anymore. Or if they do, most don’t check it all that often. After all, who leaves voicemails anymore, right? Who CALLS?!

Well, one hello world not only checks his voicemail every day, but he gets hundreds of messages a day – and he listens to every single one. The track you just clicked on up there (and if you haven’t, you should) is a sample of the music he creates in response to some of the messages he’s received.

Voicemails are becoming an increasingly outdated concept but the idea of leaving a voice mail is kinda like… leaving a trail of bread crumbs for the listener to follow. As disembodied as it is, your voice “places” your person, your self, your body, your mark. To us, one hello world recognizes just that in creating “a soundtrack to your thoughts”; considering that callers come from all around the world, perhaps it will soon become a soundtrack to the world’s thoughts.

How does the one hello world guy decide which vmail to respond to? Are there particular themes he looks out for? He uses the following strictly outlined criteria: it must be (1) genuine and (2) audible/clear. A couple of eyebrows might be raised at the word “genuine” (who knows what is genuine these days?) but one hello world simply defines it as someone who really means what (s)he is saying. As we listened to more tracks, detecting the “genuine” is certainly a delicate science, but what we can say for sure is that each voice has an emotion, and each voice comes from a need to share. Maybe the need to share is one of those things common to all that always stays real and true.

During the compositional process, one hello world likes to think of himself as a “synesthetic” composer; he likens his creative process to a composer scoring a movie, establishing a mood not just for the moment, but in the broader whole of the message. one hello world says he takes his cues from the “tonal arc” that each message brings, sensing the different vocal textures in order to play with the different moods and changes for each composition. We reckon it would be pretty fun to be in the same room as the voicemails start dancing to his music.

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So it’s been a year, what’s next? Well, as it is, one hello world raised enough funds to re-work and re-present a compilation of the work he’s done thus far in the form of an album. There have been ongoing collaborations with other musicians around the world (for example, check out some of the remixes already on the site) and talks of organizing a playing circuit is in the air. We also liked all the “creative responses”  one hello world gets to his work -  we might have our own little fun with one of his pieces, so watch out for that!

We were happy that we managed to conduct a phone interview with the guy who listens to a countless number of voices and be invited to hear his voice. As we held more in depth conversations about a couple of his pieces, we found an attentiveness and thoughtfulness to the caller and message. Even if he doesn’t necessarily share the same perspectives as all his callers, composing music becomes a way to understand and respond. For him, this whole “project” has presented itself as an opportunity to explore a bunch of different genres and experiment with composition. We wondered out loud if listening to so many personal stories was taxing in any way, and why he would still want to keep on with this project. His response:

“I’m more humbled that someone wants to tell me about what’s going on in your life. Listening to them just evokes my need to do something… to address what they said. … … Ultimately, I hope to give people unique perspectives and at the same time, maybe coming to the realization that we all feel very similar emotions… that we’re all very much similar after all”

Thoughtful responses through creating. We like it.

Visit one hello world here and oh, did you know that one hello world guy also has his own tumblr? Show some love and call in!

All songs/images/material belong to One Hello World.

So we’re back! (for those who noticed that we were offline for a bit)

There is some formatting weirdness going on and we’re trying to fix that. Many apologies to people who got unsubscribed or liked our posts and found that they have gone away : ( they’re all still here but shifted and we’re sorry we couldn’t make it more seamless.

In any case, do keep with us and we promise there’s only more love to come!

Hillary is an only child. This may seem like an odd fact to bring up, but it simply meant that she was queen of her domain as a kid, recreationally autonomous. She could do “whatever she wanted downstairs,” in the basement of her Minnesotan house, and for her this didn’t lead to the occult or dentistry, but phases of crafts instead.

Years later and Hillary is now an Art major in a Midwestern liberal arts college, producing work that is sometimes ink, sometimes collage, and usually always abstract, such as these (Note: all images below belong to Hillary King):

They belong to her Spring 2011 collection, the Memory Series, more of which can be seen on her Flickr account here. “There are moments I remember and others that are distorted with the passage of time,” she writes as a preface. “I seek to map how memories affect who we are and the journeys we make.”

Less than a year later and Hillary is already revisiting this series of hers. In the fall of 2011, Hillary studied abroad in Denmark, and the course she took on “Memory and Identity” made her re-evaluate her approach to the concept of memory and the equally sticky notion of “home.” One outcome of the class was the realisation that memory is a specific and deliberate narrative, a mental picture that is the product of a choice. During her semester away from home, Hillary accumulated various webs of ideas for potential creative work in the future, which she shared with us:

Peeking from beneath the notebook and its blueprint of ideas is a sketchpad that illustrates the incipient stage of Hillary’s ultimate creations. Hillary can be found sketching anywhere, from common rooms to trains, and she tends to begin drawings without any preconception of what she wants her final product to look like. For example, the design pictured above, she tells us, started with a peapod, almost inconceivably enough. Sometimes, she added, she proceeds to cut the initial image up, or to repeat it on a larger scale, taking over the space.

Even though visual art is her primary medium of choice, Hillary’s ties with other art forms are still strong. A recreational singer, she says she feels more connected to music as a means of expression, and, as we’ve seen, she still writes, partially as research for her art, but also for the purposes of reflection and introspection. However, writing ultimately takes a backseat to her art, which, for Hillary, sums up and conveys a point more pithily than prose ever can.

Note: All images in this post belong to JP Kim.

This feature on Whurf Works is particularly special for us because this is probably the longest we’ve followed any process thus far (9 months - what whaaaatt!) and boy, what a journey. And it’s still only the beginning.

Note: these are not all the creatures! go seek them out yourselves : )

Whurf is the phonetic representation of JP’s creations (as conceived and communicated to us by JP himself). Technically, Whurf Ware is just a small part of Whurf Works which consists of other projects (such as a comic series and guidebook currently in the making) that take place in his imagined world called the Netherverse, but what forms the nucleus for Whurf Works is the positively awesome T-shirt Game that JP has been working on for the past year.

Whurf Ware transports the humble play of trading card games (think Magic and Pokemon) to in-person action battles which translates to a whole load of awesome fun.                      

JP does a really good job in documenting the process and rather than repeating what’s already out there, we’re going to recommend that everyone stays tuned to Whurf Ware’s facebook page to see great behind-the-scenes/teaser stuff like the Whurf Ware commercial editing stills (we got a sneak preview… it’s gonna be pretty awesome), or the Whurfening process (aka guerilla marketing) around New York and lots and lots more tasty bits. The official website and kickstarter will be up REALLY REALLY soon (!!) and though wefoundnothing will be sure to keep you updated, but you should also go straight to the source and get fresh updates as they come. It really isn’t that common that processes such as these get documented and shared in such a candid manner, so ya’ll better take advantage of this.

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Besides being a great exercise for the often neglected imagination area of our brain, we see Whurf Ware as a concerted effort of immersing people into an entire world minus the attendant isolation of, say, a Gameboy (not to say that Gameboys aren’t great) and encouraging people to extend their experience, their world, to anyone and everyone. As long as you have the goods, i.e. a Whurf Ware Shurt, the game is on; don’t limit yourself to arranged battles with a friend. See someone in the park with a Howlies tee? TIME TO ENGAGE & DO BATTLE!

Perhaps this is slightly presumptuous, but to us, these Whurf Shurts seem to explore the idea of human connection without being awkwardly preachy about it.

We feel really privileged to have seen the entire arc of the Whurf Shurts coming into being. For example, did you know that the creatures began with these guys right here: 

They now feature as splash stickers.

But practically within one night and some rumblings before, the sketches for the Netherverse came into being:

What we’ve really enjoyed about JP’s work is that he thinks in terms of ‘worlds’. We’ve used the word ‘project’ several times, but we don’t mean it in the sense that it is just a thing that ends with a full stop; it is ellipsis after ellipsis that morphs into arrows, squiggly lines and 3D shapes and digs underground and expands skyward for, ultimately, all to dwell in as well. It is a powerful thing to think in ‘worlds’. Of course, this is not to discount the many artists who similarly do so– we’ve just been impressed by and continue to be interested in how Whurf Ware has developed from this impulse. JP is making it happen and that’s what we love to see.

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We asked JP, ultimately, what is it you want to do with your work? Do you wish to be among the cartoonists who earn lots of buckaroos? What do you see through your work, be it short-term, long-term, middle-term, or obscure-term? The high-stakes question: WHAT DO YOU WANT?!

His reply:

“Ultimately, I just want to draw and explore shit.”

Y’hear?!

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Update!! website launched! check out the goods at www.whurf.com