Bryan Mathers is experimenting with animating his art—which is lucky for us—and he has taken the “Domains Death Star Eye in the Sky” poster he created for Domains 17 and gave it life:
But he even got crazier than that in the following video gem (be sure to make it full screen before viewing!):
How cool is that? Embedding that animated brilliance into a stack of records to help define and promote the insanity that will be Domains 17. Are you ready? Are you animated? Are you registered? No? Let’s take care of that now.
Been a while since I jumped on the Daily Create train, but I could not resist today’s OG throwback in honor of ds106 hall of famer Sarah Kountz:
It is a testament to Sarah’s insanity that among all the things I could think about on Valentine’s Day, such as over-sized Hershey Kisses, break-ups, lost loves, current loves, etc. All I can associate this day with since 2012 is this assignment. In fact, Valentine’s Day assignments have a rich history in ds106. I still use the 1970s Valentine’s day cards featuring DC super heroes:
I still show the above example whenever I ride the ds106 gravy train—I never tire of it. So anyway, I had to do the assignment, and now that I have I feel that old demented discomfort that cathartic ds106 art always brings to the fore. A Jonestown Valentine’s Day card?
Terrible, I know. But can’t I blame the Internet? Or Trump? Or some other calamity of global proportions?
The name Devo comes “from their concept of ‘de-evolution‘ — the idea that instead of continuing to evolve, mankind has actually begun to regress, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society.”[9] –Devo’s Wikipedia article
Devo’s theories of evolution have never seemed more relevant, so the latest Reclaim Hosting server is named in honor of the early 70s video/music pioneers who brought an entrenched, surreal social satire to their work. One of their unique contributions was their elaborate and trippy music videos with recurring characters such as Booji Boy and General Boy, music video narratives that prefigured MTV. Interestingly, Devo was formed in response to the Kent State shootings in 1970-where several of the band members went to school-and were conceptualized as a satirical attack on the militaristic, consumer-driven logic of contemporary U.S. culture. With the mainstream success of “Whip It” (1980), they also became representative of pop New Wave for a entire generation of kids heading into the 80s (myself included).
Yet, despite their early critiques of consumer culture, Devo was not beyond shilling for Pioneer’s Laserdisc technology in the early 80s. Their craziest work shows up in the 1984 video compilation We’re All Devo, featuring their music videos from 1976 – 1983, much of which is re-released ten years later in another compilation of their videos from 1976-1990: The Complete Truth about De-Evolution (1993). Both came out on VHS and Laserdisc, the latter work using their Pioneer promotional clips as an organizing principal. While effectively goofing on their own willingness to shill, the blurry line between a sustained critique on pop culture and indulging it always made their later work oddly uncomfortable.*
That said, Devo’s concept art-as-entertainment approach to their music and videos (I own the Laserdiscs and they are a prized possession) puts them in that interesting category of musicians who are equal parts performance/concept artists. Sharing as much with bands like The Residents as Flock of Seagulls 🙂 But unlike most of the New Wave decadents, the Akron, Ohio spud boys introduced a brave new philosophy of a changing world order premised on de-evolution. A theory we might do well to consider in some depth presently.
*I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge it was hard to stomach the hypocrisy of a band constantly complaining about corporate music shilling for Disney during the mid oughts. But sadly it seems if just about any band stays around long enough they will eventually cannibalize their catalog for profit—it’s Devo in action 🙂
On Thursday Tim and I drove to a Vintage Furniture shop outside Baltimore to pickup an old phone booth we bought on Ebay for the office. We got really lucky because the booth was in mint condition, and according to the proprietor it was part of Baltimore’s Penn Station for decades. We were thrilled to have it, and it is absolutely gorgeous, as you can see below:
The plan is to hook up some power and USB chargers and do a little insulation so folks can use it for private calls in the co-working space. And even if that doesn’t happen, it is an amazing centerpiece for the office. After tweeting out images yesterday, Bryan Mathers came back with a next level booth concept:
The tweet from Grant reminded me of his experimentation with an 800 number for ds106radio back in 2011, and I would love the idea of revisiting some of that insanity in an OG phone booth. All of which provided a brief reminder of what Twitter was like before it became a political garbage dump. We’re on the lookout for a second booth of the same kind, but not so sure we can get anything nearly as nice. Having two of these side-by-side (like in the image of the top of this post) would be so awesome. The Reclaim offices are going to be amazing.
I am wrapping up my trip to the States tomorrow, it has been most productive. I’ve basically done two things: worked and watched movies. I’ll have another post about the movies, but this one is about some of the work. Tim and I had plans to renovate one of the spaces in our new office, and we took care of that in no time. All while migrating servers, starting a new semester, and building momentum for our Domains 17 conference. It’s been busy, but I think doing some physical work broke things up a bit which was nice.
^Office space before renovation
As you can tell from the image above, the space we were working on was pretty hideous. I think anything we did to it would have been an improvement. We replaced the carpet, ceiling tiles, florescent lights, and painted the paneling. Fairly simple.
Installing ceiling tiles and LED recessed lighting
^First coat of primer
^Second coat of primer
Lauren picked the paint color for the wall (Behr’s Script White). Tim picked the light gray carpet tiles and clean, elegant ceiling tiles. At the end of a week, we had a pretty awesome looking back office for folks to use at the Foundry. I think it came out pretty well.
^View from the Conference Room
^View from the back of the office to Conference room door
This was a very fun, manageable project. You can see the ceiling is fairly low and the space in relatively small, but the make over really cleaned it up, and it feels like a spacious, comfortable room. Lauren picked out the furniture, and I think it works beautifully. The last touch will be a few pieces of colorful art, after that we’ve reclaimed a pretty bitchin office space—and it is just a small taste of what is in store with the other 3000 square feet!
One of the more affirming things I’ve seen recently related to Domain of One’s Own is Coventry University empowering their student workers to literally design their project. Ashley Armstrong, a second year Digital Media student at Coventry, was charged with re-designing their homepage, and the final result were pretty impressive:
That “empowering students…” tagline is not just rhetoric. And beyond design work, Ashley also works directly with Daniel Villar to get classes on-boarded, trains them on using WordPress, and generally supports Domains. This is something schools really need to do more of, using something like Domain of One’s Own as a platform for a broader conversation around empowerment, literacy, and community right now seems more pressing than ever. Making students central to shaping that platform speaks directly to what building academic community means in the 21st century.
While switching to the new theme I got a chance to chat with Ashley, and I was struck by how fired up he was about the whole project. He is presently searching out opportunities in industry as part of his degree process, and when I think about the opportunity Coventry has provided him to demonstrate his digital skills thanks to Domains it reinforces why this is much more than creating a portfolio for a class, Domains gives Ashley the ability to actually create the portfolio system!
I just got another delivery of Domains 2017 art. Damn this conference has the coolest aesthetic ever. Bryan Mathers rules, and he has taken the Sci-fi 70s idea I recently blogged about and is running with it. The examples below are so colorful and gorgeous, and get at the whole play on an early attempt we made at UMW to frame Domain of One’s Own as Cloud City (which none of the students really got, which was bizarre to me). The Domains conference promises to be something totally different, and you can get a sense of that from Lauren‘s recent posts about both OKC and the venue where Domains17 will be. If you are looking for reasons to come, let the focus on space and art be amongst them!
The semester is well under way now, and the deluge of support over the last two days has been ample evidence of that. But we added a bit to our plates this months when we decided to decommission two shared hosting servers, namely Ramones (which has been going strong for over 3 years!) and Saints. We’ve been slowly migrating our infrastructure from Reliable Site over to Digital Ocean, and this month saw our first two shared hosting servers on Digital Ocean.* Once they were up and running smoothly, we decided to migrate all remaining accounts on Ramones and Saints over. That’s now done, and while these moves always require some clean-up post facto, everything’s over cleanly and all of our servers are now less than 3 years old.
The two new shared hosting servers we’re running on Digital Ocean have been named in honor of two ground breaking punk bands from the 80s: Minor Threat and L7. We were a bit hesitant to name a web server “minorthreat” given it might be immediately flagged as….well, a threat, so we opted to name it after their groundbreaking 1983 Straight Edge hardcore album Out of Step. This server is also dedicated to Peter Rowan who has been regularly hounding Reclaim about out glaring oversight of memorializing Minor Threat’s contributions to hardcore punk in the form of a shared hosting server. I couldn’t agree with him more. In fact, Ian MacKaye’s career between Minor Threat, Fugazi, and Dischord Records may be the most impressive of just about any punk rock figure. And all the while he embodied a vocal insistence on DIY, affordable shows, all ages access, experimentation, and a socially responsible ethos. He has walked the walk his entire career, and this short-lived band galvanized an entire sub-genre of punk that I grew up with in NYC. Straight Edge hardcore bands like Youth of Today, Judge, Uniform Choice, Gorilla Biscuits, Slapshot and many more all owe some debt to Minor Threat. And while MacKaye has always been ambivalent about the idea of straight edge as a doctrine or a movement, there is no question Minor Threat articulated the vision quite early with songs like “Out of Step,” “Straight Edge,” and “Bottled Violence.” So, if you find yourself on the Outofstep server, draw a big black X on your hand and refrain from all sex, drugs, and rock and roll 🙂
Image Credit: Click link for Sober Revolution article where this image was found
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVCT941jSXg
The second new shared hosting server is another ground breaking 80s punk band L7. Their in-your-face punk rock coupled with an aggressive attack on patriarchy made them a pre-cursor and influence for riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Huggy Bear to name a few. L7 songs like Shitlist, Shove, Wargasm, and Andres epitomize their hard, grinding style that helped define grunge rock in the early 90s. At the same time their songs were irreverent and their shows often filled with controversial surprises. The band formed Rock for Choice in 1991 to help support the Pro-Choice movement. Their songs are as fun and raucous as they are serious and political, a hard balance to master. That said, L7 is not for squares…get it? L7, squares….
So, that’s our two latest servers, and they are filling up fast, so we have a third in the works. It’s good to be a Reclaimer, just don’t make our shit list!
*We have finally been able to setup shared hosting on Digital Ocean thanks to the relatively recent addition of block storage.
When I was cruising around the web early this morning I saw an announcement that Vine was finally shutting down and January 17th (a.k.a. yesterday) is the last day to download your videos. I was a bit bummed because I created about 30 Vines that I wanted to archive. Fortunately they were still there, but unfortunately I could no longer get a downloadable archive from Vine. I’m sure those folks who are not Vine dilettantes like me got their stuff off in a timely manner. But I only used Vine for the UMW Console project (and a couple of personal outings) back in 2015, so the deadline for archiving fell off my radar. But once faced with the possibility of losing the videos, they quickly became invaluable memories waiting to be lost forever 🙂 Although, I think what bothered me most was the idea that 20 or so Vines across various blog posts would leave a huge, gaping embeddable media hole on the bava blog.
So I spent much of this morning using savedeo.com to grab my Vines (as well as those of folks whose vines I had embedded on my site). Savedeo worked well, but keep in mind it will try and get you to click ads and install crap, so you need to navigate that minefield. That said, it’s pretty simple to use, just put qq before the URL of any Vine video’s permalink and you will be redirected to a site that offers you various quality downloads of the video, much like PWN Youtube does.
I did that for about 40 videos, so I now have a full archive of all the Vines embedded on this blog. I was considering uploading them all to Flickr and embedding those videos, but given my growing fear of having to archive and move them yet again, I am leaning towards finding a video player that acts like Vine and serving them directly from my blog given none of them are over 3 MBs.
But as you may have gathered from this post, they did not disable embeds from Vine just yet, so I figured I would enjoy the service while it lasts and share some Vines I took one day while toy antiquing in Fredericksburg during the Spring of 2015.
I’ve been back in the US for the last week working on the Reclaim offices, and it’s been a lot of fun. The last two days the whole crew has been working together in the new diggs, and the vision of the office, co-working space, maker space, and 1980s video rental store is coming together nicely.
Tim and I did some work installing ceiling tiles, hooking up recessed lighting, painting paneling, and laying carpet tiles in a small back office while the major construction work continues in the main area. Considering we’re two web hosting sysadmins, it went pretty well and relatively fast. In fact, the room is almost done. I’ll save the before and after images for later this week when all the furniture is in and the final ceiling tiles are done. But in the meantime I wanted to share a quick action photo.
The above shot was taken after painting, and the suit was a necessity given I didn’t have any throwaway painting clothes. It was also an homage to the Reclaim Hosting migration page art (which is an homage to Repo Man):
I also started calling the suit I was wearing a Devo Suit to pay respect to the awesome style sense to America’s greatest New Wave band from Akron, Ohio. I even put a Reclaim Hosting sticker on my heart in order to seize the marketing opportunity. After Tweeting the image, it came back to me as the best album cover I have seen in a very, very long time! Paul Bond is no joke, and he was even attentive enough to incorporate Booji Boy, a character created by the band and the name of their early independent label.
I never tire of the remix engine that is my Twitter community. Solid gold!
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“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
The semester is well under way now, and the deluge of support over the last two days has been ample evidence of that. But we added a bit to our plates this months when we decided to decommission two shared hosting servers, namely Ramones (which has been going strong for over 3 years!) and Saints. We’ve been slowly migrating our infrastructure from Reliable Site over to Digital Ocean, and this month saw our first two shared hosting servers on Digital Ocean.* Once they were up and running smoothly, we decided to migrate all remaining accounts on Ramones and Saints over. That’s now done, and while these moves always require some clean-up post facto, everything’s over cleanly and all of our servers are now less than 3 years old.
The two new shared hosting servers we’re running on Digital Ocean have been named in honor of two ground breaking punk bands from the 80s: 
The above shot was taken after painting, and the suit was a necessity given I didn’t have any throwaway painting clothes. It was also an homage to the
