The art and science fair is this Saturday!

Art and sciene unite!

Saturday May 8, 12pm – 4pm

Harbourfront Centre
235 Queen’s Quay West, Toronto

Free, open to the public

“The Too Cool For School Art & Science Fair was invented to turn the spotlight on the unexpected feats of imagination and exploration that are happening all around us,” writes Sally McKay of her most recent brainchil on the home page of the project, www.artandsciencefair.ca.

The website was designed by me and the illustrations were drawn by Marc. We worked closely with Sally to come up with the name and identity graphics. I also designed some print posters that are available as  PDF downloads from the website.

What is an Art & Science Fair?

The event is structured like a typical science fair, with fifty projects and their creators assembled for one day to share their work and ideas with an audience and to compete for awards. The difference is that the projects are a mix of both art and science.

Additionally, the participants in the Too Cool for School Art & Science Fair are from all walks of life, amateurs and professionals, many sharing their pet projects with the public for the first time. Participants are selected from an open call for submissions on the basis of originality, depth of inquiry, creative innovation and the element of surprise.

Read more about the project and check out all of Marc’s awesome illustrations on the Too Cool for School website.

Ladilola jewelry logo

This is a new logo for Ladilola casual printing needs, to match the silver foil stickers I had made while still in France in 2008.

I first made some earrings five years ago out of scrap leather and beads because I didn’t like anything in the shops, and I gave a bunch of pairs away as presents. They were a hit! My girlfriends from Paris to Hawaii reported being stopped by strangers in the street to compliment their earrings. How great is that, that a bit of colour arranged just so can do that!

This was just before embarking on four years of travel, so the progress on the Ladilola project has been on the slow side. Working with my hands with colour and texture has a constant attraction, and because the parts are small I was able to continue designing and making earrings from a small kit while travelling. More recently, the earrings also sold well in a Paris boutique where they were left on consignement.

The dream to do this full time grows and incubates, and so several years later I now do finally have a name, a logo I designed with a custom font, a colour palette, a shop set up on Etsy, a splash page at my own domain name of www.ladilola.com (still waiting for further development, ha ha), and lots and lots of designs made and more ideas just bursting to get out.

The next area of focus will be to print up some business cards and catalogues and get the earrings and necklaces into some real shops as well.

Below are a few of the photos – you can see the rest in the Band Practice photo set on Flickr. Thanks to Band Practice for the photo op. :)

New Happy Sleepies piled up for a group photo at the end of a photo session.

Cloudy days have lovely diffused light and big pieces of styrofoam make really good light reflectors.

That sums up the most recent advancements in my skills as a still life photographer. I’m relieved, too, because I’ve figured out a way to take the shots at our studio, which means I can do it any time (well, during daylight hours) and to a quality that doesn’t require hours of Photoshop afterwards to cut out the background or get the colours right.

Phew.

My setup right now is on a table next to a window, out of the sun. Prop a large piece of paper on a big piece of styrofoam to make a seamless tabletop and background curve. Stand the Happy Sleepy in the middle, held away from the background to minimize shadows by leaning in the back against an empty toilet paper roll and masking tape. Use another giant piece of styrofoam as a reflector on the side of the toy away from the window, to bounce some light into the shadows. And bracket like mad.

I’ve also been experimenting with darker, colourful, and textured backgrounds that lend a lot more atmosphere to the final presentation than a gallery-white background. What I’d like to do in the online shop is have a mix of contextualized photos, with props and whatnot, and some on white backgrounds.

Check out my fledgling product photography skills and the goods in the Happy Sleepy Art and Toys Shop on Etsy.

Creative mess also makes for good photo op. The images below show how two recent fauna were made.

Flurry of cutting and piecing on the work table. My favourite shears were recently profesionally resharpened and now glide through multiple fabric layers like a heated knife through butter. Whoosh-chuk!

Here are Happy Sleepy Cyan Tutu as a pieced and cut fabric, and Retina Adjuster all sewn up and ready to flip. That's my fabourite part, the flipping the pelt inside out. It's the most dramatic part of the whole process.

At this stage, I think of these as pelts, when they are all ready to stuff and you can start to have an idea of the Happy Sleepy will look like. After this I still have to stuff, sew it, and embroider the eyes.

Happy Sleepy Cyan Tutu in velvet orange and turquoise fun fur.

Happy Sleepy Retina Adjuster in turquoise silk and red wool. The name says it all - the colour is so bright as to be unphotographable, and it actually kind of hurts your eyes to look at him... Not for the colour faint of heart, that's for sure!

These two creatures are now in the Happy Sleepy Art and Toys Shop on Etsy – here is Cyan Tutu, and here is Retina Adjuster.

The reasons for this were many.

Magda had a distinct feeling of being stuck.

We had figured out a way to coast through our life as freelance graphic designers/artists. We had developed a well-worn, carefully cultivated, comfortable rut of routine in Toronto. Our combination of skills and our solid network of business contacts and friends assured that we would be able to maintain a subsistence level artist existence in the city, although that year we were getting a bit more in debt every month. Although our apartment and such was comfortable, there was very little social wiggle room and the resulting torpor was upsetting to Magda. This is a very frustrating situation for someone who thrives in a rich environment characterized by rapid changes.

Our personal evolution was at a standstill. We needed to shake things up.

Stability is going to get increasingly harder to maintain.

While we were coasting in Toronto, irreversible climate change was confirmed. A significantly large coalition of scientists had agreed that by the end of this century the arctic ice cap would no longer be frozen in the winter. It is very difficult to imagine the implications of global climate change. The weather is a complex system that currently evades humanity’s best methods for understanding, modeling and predicting it. A few things were clear however; our current North American lifestyle and its relatively excessive levels of consumption were going to have to change radically.

Every aspect of city living will have to adapt to these new conditions in the next 50 years. Unlike previous generations where the threat of resource collapse was debatable and a response to the “potential” crisis could be postponed indefinitely into an unforeseeable and only potential future, our generation has to acknowledge that by the time we reach the positions of power and authority now occupied by those 10 – 15 years older than us, by the time we are expected to take the reins of civilization, we will be in the midst of an enormous climatological and consequently economic and social upheaval. The nature of this state of disruption has been compared unfavorably to the death throes of previous human civilizations.

We were not going to learn how to adapt to this new situation by coasting along in our comfortable lives. It seemed like a good time to initiate necessary change.

Hive mind activating.

By virtue of relatively new internet technologies, particularly the blog and the RSS feed, we have been learning about an incredible awareness of and movement towards sustainability in all aspects of global culture. Big business, scientists, NGO’s, i.e. numerous entities of all sizes, organizational complexity and political affiliation, representing an incomprehensibly large group of individuals are now working to realize something that resembles the utopian civilization seems to be embedded in the collective unconscious of the species. The critical mass of activity that is required to facilitate change at the required rate in order to shift this civilization’s principle models of organization, maintenance and development to allow for it to squeeze through a narrowing aperture of survival seems to be reaching a credible level.

In other words, the window of opportunity for the civilization of h. sapiens to make it into the next millennium appears to be closing. However there seems to be a vast number of humans working towards adapting this civilization so that it might actually fit through this window.

It is also important to understand that it is only the relevant, sustainable, cooperation based systems and technologies that appear to be fluid and adaptable enough to survive this transition. Top down capitalism, wealth driven democracy and fundamentalist exploitations of spirituality – any system that is based on exclusion and exhibits the traditional hierarchies of power and control will not fit through this window. They will simply lack the flexibility and speed to adapt at the required rate of change.

The most amazing thing about this collective action is that many of these groups are acting without a common strategy, without a centralized leadership, they are each moving towards their own specific goals, knowing of course that they are not alone in their intentions but not knowing of the massive scale to which this collective action has grown.

Communication technology in its application as a tool for education and cooperation is fundamental to this movement. Movement is too small a word to convey the significance of this phenomenon. In times of optimism it feels much more like the nascent comprehension of the next stage of human civilization.

These ideas are not ours but we have now understood them for ourselves and are attempting to apply them directly to our life.

Lightening the load on us and, ideally, the planet.

One sure way to find ourselves in a rich environment characterized by rapid changes was to adopt a mode of existence that was fundamentally nimble and could be carried with us through these changes. In other words, traveling.

Traveling can teach us a number of things:

• By adopting a semi nomadic lifestyle we would be forced to deal with issues that could easily be avoided by a sedentary one – you become much more aware of all the baggage you cart around, as well as being much more appreciative of any opportunities to eat, sleep and shit.
• Cooperation, submitting to the good will of other people, becomes a regular fact of life. We are ejected from the cocoons we tend to build for ourselves in times of abundance and security.
• Also by removing ourselves from a known and secure environment we are attempting to train ourselves to be able to deal with the unexpected, to recognize opportunities that will enable us to thrive in uncertain conditions and to take those opportunities without hesitation.

Travel costs money.

Magda and I are rich in skills, experience, eye-hand coordination and time. Recognizing this, we thought that perhaps with the aid of technology (laptops, the internet, international electronic banking) we could travel and work and learn. Since 2005 we have designed websites, logos and murals, sold photographs, jewellery and art, had art shows, wrote articles and comics – the list goes on, and all from the road.

One interesting effect of the decision to go nomad is that our “subsistence level” artist incomes based on these activities would not allow us to travel in more expensive (i.e. first world) countries. Fortunately, the internet seems to have reached institutional status in most developing countries around the world. It’s remarkably easy to find the patience needed to deal with dodgy connections during deadlines in the tropical heat when a little money earned from clients back home goes such a long way in the host country. Events such as not-infrequent power outages are also easier to handle in a host culture that generally moves along at a slower, calmer pace, where richness is derived from a life lived moment by moment.

In the time that we have been traveling in Central America and South East Asia it would seem that the current conditions of living in a developing country mimics the conditions which the “developed” world will have to face in the coming century. The first world understanding of wealth centered around the accumulation of money and material security is going to be useless to us as humans as we attempt to deal with the implications of rebuilding a civilization based on the politics of scarcity.

This condition of scarcity is already a fact of existence to billions of humans in the "developing" world. The technology that is currently being deployed in these parts, where people are dealing with a situation that already resembles the resource deprived future into which we are all headed, is the technology that most clearly points the way towards the evolved civilization to which Magda and I are irresistibly drawn.

Networking = Sharing + Learning

Magda and I are both convinced that language is the primary tool for the advancement of the species. Human imagination and inventiveness, the ability to anticipate the future is based on the facility one has to manipulate language as thought (and subsequently speech, writing, music). The ability to communicate these ideas is also based on one’s language facility. The idea of language refers not only to traditional, cultural/geographically varying modes of speech and writing, but also to the ability to communicate visually. I can only speak one language! Traveling is to be a means of learning first hand the languages of others or, more accurately, how other people think.

Some other things to understand…

Our current course of action is as much of an experiment as it is a strategy. We are not sure exactly where we are going, and that is part of the exercise.
It is our intention to free ourselves from our previous mode of existence shaped by a mostly sedentary life in a North American city so that we might be able to explore the numerous possibilities for a sustainable existence that are offered by the natural and technological world.

It is also very important to understand that we are not motivated by despair, rather by the thrill of participating/contributing to systemic change. We love many aspects of our current civilization (big city life included) probably much more than the average contemplative individual. And we are very interested in preserving the really valuable elements of our culture, especially our evolving capacity for communication.

We are both idealists with strong imaginations, so why not attempt to live a dream?

See many more photos on the Happy Sleepy Flickr collection .

Marc Ngui’s art and projects can be found on the Bumblenut Pictures website.

Magda Wojtyra’s art and design portfolio is located on the RNA Studio website.