CC pamphlet

Cloud Castle was a wonderful home and turned 7 years old in April 2024! I discovered a pamphlet at another art space / group house place in Oakland, and figured I should make us one! I am good at making pamphlets. Here it is! Sometimes people would check it out when they visited and, while I don’t think it really did anything for the house as a project overall, it was fun and helped a few people feel like they “got it.”

Pizza Party

For a house party, we decided to pursue the theme of “pizza” without making it a “pizza party.” There was, in fact, pizza available to eat, but the point was to decorate pizza, dress as a pizza, make pizza activities, etc. Here you can see our cardboard pizza slices. During the party, people decorated these with a hot glue gun and pile of silly items. The refrigerator magnets are also nice!

Order More Food

One of my best works, this book is based on a fake book I made in 2019 all premised on a joke with a partner from back in 2008. She was great at ordering the right thing at a restaurant, so I made a book that appeared to be about that but wasn’t. This one is really about how to order more food, which is a ridiculous premise. The images are all AI, done with Midjourney, and use only painting styles. I made hundreds of images, curated down the best, and wrote up prose that sometimes matches the image and sometimes just continues the How To guide’s lesson. I think people love this book because each page is rewarding and there is an overarching thesis developed in many specific parts. I was wary that this book might be triggered for people with certain eating disorders, so ran it by a friend who thought it would be safe except for people who should probably know not to open the cover.

AH Croquet

For our April fundraiser, the team set up one room as psychedelic croquet, with very strange strobe lights (that give you a frame in each of a few colors), played on a fake lawn, with bizarre holes. This is really how I got to know Ben, who helped us with our Australian accents and became our friend and a wonderful sometimes collaborator. Mini-golf croquet is a formula I used at UnScruz in 2019 and trotted out here to deliver an engaging room for our After Humans party.

AH Brackets

I made up the game of brackets at a bar in January some years prior, when we debated which was the “worst month” and then I tried to rank them. It turns out that people enjoy a tournament (with 1 on 1 conflict structured in brackets) much more than directly ranking all entries. I think the bracket structure is highly imprecise, myself, but people would rather just focus on “A or B” questions and argue about these sequentially, than try to discuss a dozen things at once. Here we have brackets for the successor species to rule the Earth and for the cause of human extinction. Fun answers for each!

AH Worms

Going with the team to Target on a Saturday night is a great way to learn about new toys and fun! These “worm” sensory toys are awesome and I realized I could buy a huge number for $100, then reimburse myself from the budget of the party I was throwing. I made some cans to hold the worms; people found the worms and the cans soon emptied. I was shocked: absolutely none were found during final cleanup or in the lost and found. The can design includes a joke if you really get into the details. I love rewarding people for this, and it’s something that distinguishes my art. However, in this case, I don’t think anyone ever read the fine print.

AH Makeout Room

I love bonus projects. Having organized the event with Sophie and contracted with artists to fill all the rooms, I went after a strange closet, creating a makeout room. Linging the space with white fabric, floor to ceiling, Andie, Liz, and I added makeout content and lighting! Indeed, there were many makeouts in this room and it offered an unexpected escape from the event. The real magic here is that I knew this closet existed, from our site visit and previous events here, and that I had all this white fabric, by storing it from a 2019 project in a single bin in the storage of the festival I co-founded. Setup was hot: holding huge rolls of fabric in strange positions to staple them in works up a sweat, and the space is tiny.

Goons Posters

Deployed at a festival where no one puts up posters, these were fun for me! I put up the posters on Thursday, then ran a GOONS schtick on Saturday night, so they really are marketing ot warm people up so they’ll be more eager when they see the installation. The WOW poster’s iconic mouse lived on as a sticker and t-shirt. The petty criminal jokes here make me happy because they highlight how most of us are indeed complicit in violent and unethical institutions to make our own living.

Circle Poems

An exciting lyrical concept, I imagined that you can write a statement that ends in its start, preferably by setting its start as a new clause, and can mean something interesting! The meta-meaning is that the cycle is endless. The most important, personally, is that there is a virtuous cycle to chase in caring about things then wanting to do things causing you to care. This theme runs across all my projects, and is a critical part of cultivate meaning to live a fulfilling life.

Bluetooth

A wonderful idea that was highly pleasing to just a few people, these posters make an extended conceit of “DreamBinding” to explain how BlueTooth technology actually works and pairing your earphones can be so funky. I’ve always loved the idea that you could share a dream with someone else, both literally in the same dream like Inception, and here present it as a totally normal thing for rats. The conceit often has a subtext of romantic connection between partners, with some interesting ideas about polyamory presented in this register. The posters appeared in a corner of our installation devoted to childhood education, as if rats all learn this stuff when very young.

Tablecloth Pull

This was my most effective “schtick” experience yet, where one or two people can run the table for hours with a constant line of interested participants. The game is simple: we set the table with a (fake) cake (or two), a teapot, etc. and ask _you_ to pull the tablecloth! When they win, they get a huge ego hit, feeling talented and magical instantly. Many people told me that pulling the tablecloth was the highlight of their day. I brought this game to an event where their application deadline blocked us from getting an art grant, so I had to pack it all into my car and do setup just myself and Sophie.

I built the cakes with Bernice and Andie based on instructions from the web: two cardboard circles and paper to make cylinder walls, held together with duct tape. Then we frost it with caulk, then add spray paint. This gives you a basic cake and these were indestructible. The caulk is so strong (ALEX+) that not even a single petal on a single flower broke during many hours of tablecloth pull.

Portable Bench

Seating is so important at events. I try to focus on what events need, and provide it. The event needs engaging spaces where people can chat with friends, have a seat, and get respite from the elements. This is a portable bench design. The seat is a board with trim and then the legs are all 2x4 and can be unscrewed, flipped 90 degrees flush to the seat, then screwed back in for transport. If you know what you’re doing, you can open them up in a few minutes. If you don’t know, it can take a whole hour! This was a good lesson in volunteer management.

Rat Trap install

Rat Trap was the criminal area of Ratlantis, the seedy back alley space. Mostly this was me and Sophie making fun thug projects. Black fabric walls was a very bad idea! The space got way too hot. Also this was too hard to get to and felt dead, so wasn’t very popular. This was a major lesson for me: don’t hide Chuk’s art in the back corner behind everyone else’s stuff. I tend to make a large volume of work, and it’s possible to stuff it all in one area. But it’s worse for everyone that way.

Crime Journal

A brilliant project, similar to the journal I made for Something Else that implies you’ve been hanging out with dinosaurs all day. In general, the journal presents loaded questions to the participant, guiding them to claim behaviors as their own and think in more detail about our imaginary world. Here, the topic is crime. I bound this book by hand. It’s like a workbook, with a space for you to write your name. The name is a chance to look for friends and giggle the more at their responses.

Rat Portraits

A formula I figured out for Villains: print images of some main characters from your lore and give them a small placard. Here, we establish that rats go into space, are into disses, have laws, and make pizza. Really, these points didn’t matter much anywhere else, as the Diss Battle game got cut. Many collaborators like to go deep on the backstory and lore, but it’s terribly hard to make any of the story matter to anyone. These portraits are a nice visual and I often reuse the assets for stickers, pamphlets, or other print materials.

Lock picking

Another great one. Here, we took the idea that rat civilization has crime to imply that rats therefore make locks and pick them. We might thusly give people the chance to play lockcraft! I made little signs for three types of locks and the whole project fits in a small bag, so it came out many times. Children and high people who aren’t used to small machine parts can really wreck the tools fast, but total cost to replace isn’t that bad. The activity is amazing when people want to deep dive into something, but is too slow at a frantic party with a lot going on. Learning to pick locks was fun too and now I’m decent at it!

Lego Cave

Strong project. The idea was that it’s fun to climb into a small space and play with legos. In the lego cave, anyone can crawl in and build things. We mounted boards on the ceiling, so you can store your item there. But Mostly it’s a lot of lounging around building a little thing. Legos cost money, so the project might be expensive to do again. Also, cleaning up legos is annoying. Otherwise, this was great and many people had a divine time hanging out in here.

Rat Shack

I worked with Dave on his project, “Rat Shack.” Dave had run Stuff Shack previously, as an homage to ridiculous items at Radio Shack. Here we continued the formula, but for rats. The idea was to sell just a few very silly items with custom packaging (sticker labels added onto real products). This was a bit more graphic design than I wanted to do here! But we made lots of inside jokes and had fun using Andie’s branding assets, copying the weird conventions of real cheese products, and taking turns making ridiculous suggestions.

Why Kiss

Best book ever! I put this together with Andie, coming up with engaging statements about kissing and pairing them with pairs of kissing animals. The book kills at events because people walk up with someone they might want to kiss and take turns reading it, exploring more and more ideas around why they maybe should kiss. Same process as most of the other books: make hundreds of images on Midjourney, keep the best ones, develop text and match it with images so each page is nice and there is some overall thesis with some development in different sections.

Story Wall

A wild idea that turned out remarkable solid, the story wall is just a piece of felt paired with a library of cutout images with velcro. Anyone can walk up and velcro on the cutouts to make images and tell stories. My prototype showed that this is easy as hell to make. Bernice did the backdrop and made most of the cutouts, which was a great match for her skills! This board was a hit and it turns out the only downside to the project is that you have to clear stuff off.

Flooding Game

Tyler made another legendary electronics-driven game for this project. In this one, you have to plug in a hanging noodle to the right box at the right time. As you succeed, you activate different stations and then eventually the final one. I plugged into this project to decorate the stations. I built a little box for this and covered it in fake plants so it looks cuter. I don’t have much passion for these support projects, but they’re worth it because the game was our main offering.

Rat Trap Painting

Our single most successful painting ever. I grabbed this weird piece of art from a thrift store in 2015 and it languished in my art storage. For this project, I grabbed it and started painting on an orange and white crime rat. Zev took a stab at this, turning the rats into real scum. Then Bernice took it over and made it shine. At an event in August, someone offered to pay $200 for it! One of our friends rejected this deal, saying he wanted it more than that.

Puzzle posters

Another attempt at the “puzzle on a wall” concept I’d been exploring around this time. Here, you solve four unique, but rather easy, puzzles to get four letters, then solve a very straightforward meta puzzle.

Hustle Posters

“I made this art” was hugely popular and got much praise, using the WOW mouse with great effect. People loved this schtick, admired that it was an entire game and meme in a single poster, and loved watching the poster travel across events. I also saw this poster on the back of a sign for one event show up again on the back of the same sign, after the sign’s face had been repainted!

Rat Tiles

When my friend offered to help the project with a laser cutter, I got excited! We can made cool little Ratlantis tiles! Ths prototypes showed little promise, and the stuff I did by hand was better. These hung around the house for a while and help establish the Ratlantis theme. I wouldn’t do this specific formula again.

Rat Pamphlets

Pamphlets are an absolute delight for me. I have many years of experience writing, persuading, and designing layouts and graphics. In a way, I’m also a humorist and a philosopher, so advocating for crazy ideas in funny ways in small pamphlets is a natural match for me. I only made two pamphlets for this project, having tired myself out the year before with Goblin pamphlets.