Irrational Exuberance

Phase One: Planning


I was thinking of themes today for the Newspaper Cover Art task,
and most of them came to me as single words:

Distance (or Distant)
Insolubility
Incendiary
Evasion/Invasion
Voraciousness
Illumination


I like invasion + voraciousness. I have an image of a mass of purple
tentacles creeping over the margins of the Wall Street Journal to
devour all that is normal.


As I mentioned last night, I'd prefer a theme that isn't directly
related to SF0. I'm not certain why I'd prefer it that way. Perhaps
because so much of what is displayed on SF0 is perfectly
tongue-in-cheek, and for some reason I would like the fulfillment of
this task, and the art involved, to be a little more...well, a little
More. There's the hippie in me. Hopefully you can appreciate it.

Absolutely.


Phase Two: Preparation

We met at the co-op to obtain some lunch, stopped off at the coffee
shop to pick up a newspaper test victim, then grabbed a few art supplies.

And then we set ourselves down to make some art. Poor Nicole snacked
on carrots and a block of orange soy cheese. (That bloody Taste the Rainbow task!) We sketched out masses of tentacles and experimented with different means of transferring them to our medium. Unfortunately, our stamps proved too soft and our tools too imprecise for fine details like suckers or captions.



Next we spent a couple late night hours wandering around downtown
Minneapolis looking for a suitable target dispenser. As it happens,
all the WSJ dispensers downtown are on extremely busy street corners
with no convenient parking. So instead we chose a popular uptown
coffee shop as our target: Muddy Waters.



We had already decided that we would present our art on four
consecutive days, rather than across multiple weeks. Our invasion
theme worked better that way. But should we extend it to a full week?
We experimented with different additional designs. Finally we decided
that on the fifth day, our creature would share its thoughts on the
state of the world with our readers. By now, Nicole has given up on
monochromatic food and has fed me enough 88% dark chocolate (yum) to give me a stomach ache. Poor Oliver.

Phase Three: Execution

We agreed to meet at 6am every morning to carry out our mischief. I
made a point of staying up until 3am every night to make this as
difficult as possible.

Day One: When we arrived at our target, we discovered we had a witness
- a woman waiting for the bus. We decided not to kill her and instead
sat down at a picnic table and get to work. I used a large black
binder clip to keep the box open. We were a bit surprised to discover
that there were only two papers in the box! Undaunted, we got to
stamping. Our witness seemed unphased.





Day Two: Hey, it's that same woman! Hmm, what are the odds of that? (Smart a**.)




Day Three: Hey, it's that same woman! Shut up. Dead tired.




Day Four: More like 6:30. Our witness has already caught her bus. I
crawl back into bed and sleep until noon.





Day Five: We both oversleep. Having done a graveyard shift the night
before, I finally manage to get out of bed around 11. I go to the
target and discover that it's already empty! No matter, I'll simply
scour the city for another copy and bring it back to the dispenser.
Five empty dispensers later, I return. At this hour, the coffee shop
is open and bustling. I sit myself down at my usual place and get to
work, oddly unnoticed even as I insert my paper back into the box and
photograph it.