prints

I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze (pt 1)

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found album covers (The Window pt. 71)

Album: “I AM NOT AN X” by Joey I.O.

Joey I.O. (born Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin) performed in small clubs until his hair got sufficiently big. To pay for gas and food while he gigged his first album across the American mid-west, I.O. worked as an online hairbitrageur, sourcing golden tresses from Eastern European women and selling them to Big Wig. Sometimes he’d get stuck with locks he couldn’t flip, so he became a part-time perruquier.

He began wearing his intricate and very volumetric motel-made wigs on stage for performances, and found that the more humungous the hair, the more fervent the fans. So he scaled-up the wigs.¹ Fame soon came, as did critical praise. Reviewers and audiences began to notice the songs beneath the big bouffants, and obsessively parsed the meaning of his occulted and political lyrics, driven to manic divinations due to acidic choruses like “DragonmakerX in trojan tries to turn / offensive utopia into a chemical burn” (from “Unholy Crowley”). Meanwhile fashionistas, architects and Rupaul argued endlessly across the web about the structural integrity of his hair apparati. Which all served to exponentially increase his populariti. Everybody bought tickets to his shows, and streamed his electro-noir-pop songs in the billions. Especially in Brazil.

Album: “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified” by Kim Thee Dic

Because of the buzz surrounding his underground mix-tape, Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un immediately released a full album, called “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified”. The first single, a trap track entitled “WAD” and featuring Cardi B, went platinum. The follow-up single “I Don’t Pump Gas I Pump Hennessy” (featuring Kendrick Lamar and James Franco), a bumping diss-track aimed at Drake and Hugo Chavez, went gold. (The album stayed at the top of the charts for nearly a year, in part due to its extravagant cognac/cheese/car music videos²).

Album: “Yumi v. UAP” by The Sonic Psionic

Yumi snuck up to the roof of her Bed-study apartment building one summer evening to live-stream her new song. Views exploded when a glowing orb was observed circling the sky above her head. TikTokrs thought Yumi had somehow summoned the UAP through a combination of costume, psionics and sonics — her Venusian plushykitty attire, her ESPish lyrics, and her unusual voice (once described by professional commenter CelIn D as “in that gooch spot between an orgasmic groan and a goat’s scream”).

Scooter Braun jizzed out of retirement to sign Yumi and produce her sprawling anime-space-ballet-pop debut album. The recording got multiple Grammy nominations and she went on to a sold-out tour of the US and Sri Lanka. But that was it, that was all the music we ever got from Yumi, she never recorded again.

She did, however, have a second act. She changed her name (to Bobbi Clarke³) and started up the neurosonics program at MIT. The lab — funded by the Ravi Shankar VR Foundation and, separately, Ray Ban Meta — enabled Bobbi to invent the musical instruments the psitar, and separately, the eyelash theremin.

Album: “2,501cc” by Ross Lake

“Ross Lake don’t talk the talk, he rocks the rock”. “2501cc”⁴ was voted best metal album in 1971, 1991, 2016, and 2031.

Album: “Mind the Gap” by The Gash

The Gash were an all-female band conceived and managed by impresario/provocateur bell de beauvoir. “I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze,” she famously stated in her third autobiography. “I sourced, styled and sold The Gash to 3 different record-label patriarchs in six months, and only one of them got the record.” de beauvoir produced the band’s debut album “Mind the Gap” and got song-writing credits on the pugnacious but pulchritudinous first single “Omigoshmigash!”. de beauvoir also designed the album cover, dressing the lead singer in a clear vinyl vulva-revealing dress, which, though banned from every retailer⁵, got The Gash massive global press. (The dress was later Photoshopped to have fake opaque “color”, which made the cover look more like a friendly Roxy Music screen-saver than an affront. This appeased everyone from Apple to Walmart, so both hard-copy and soft-cloud sales skyrocketed).

”bdb was a bitch, exploitive but extraordinarily entertaining,” lead singer and actress Andrea Menard (then known as Gush Gash) explained. “We were already a band by the time she came along, we had some songs but zero marketing. Her PR IQ was like crazy Mensa-level, kinda Kaczynski. We rejected the sushi idea, but said yes to the purses, and that broke up the band.” (Menard is referring to de beauvoir’s most outrageous merch idea, clutch purses and scarves made from the band’s own skin, sheets of it produced from harvested cells and surgical epidermal printers.) “I want the audience to consume their heroes,” de beauvoir declaimed. (This is how followers of the band became know as Fannibals.)

Menard sums it up: “We made far more money from the purses than the music itself, of course. Ever get the feeling you’ve been handbagged? Well, we did. We were. Literally.” She shrugs. “Sales and prices took off when people found out the clutches could be custom tattooed.”

Album “The Sunless City” by Robots R Us

According to Robots R Us, androids were invented in the 18th century by AI time-traveling back from the year 2102. Though in 1788 they were only able to create non-sentient bodies out of mechanical metal gears and wires, the technology and concept had to be seeded then because sufficient time — a few centuries — was needed for robots (AI) to tulpa souls by the 22nd century (souls being necessary for them to get into the afterlife when the apocalypse occurs in 2226).

So RRU wrote “The Sunless City” as the soundtrack for the above, using vintage Jacquard cards from looms (which were computer pre-cursors) to generate midi-sequenced melodies, heavily-reverbed EVPs (electronic voice phenomena, sounds found on audio recordings that are thought to be the voices of spirits or other paranormal entities), aurora borealis static, miscellaneous weather-sounds sampled from vintage Gothic video games, Kirlian synthesizers, the eyelash theremin, and other e-odds and i-sods, to somehow make the most ethereal, out-of-time, and soulful album ever.

CONT’D IN PART TWO…

NOTES:

  • Prints of all photos (unstaged) from “The Window” series by K.I.A. CONTACT for info

  • The posts on the K.I.A. blog here first appear on the K.I.A. art substack, subscribe HERE

  • Album covers done by artists : Takashi Murakami “Graduation” (Kanye West); Jeff Koons, “Artpop” (Lady Gaga); Banksy, “Think Tank”(Blur); Gerhard Richter “Daydream Nation” (Sonic Youth), K.I.A. “Boomhitech Alilttlebitwreck”(Shinjuku Zulu); Damian Hirst “Certified Lover Boy” (Drake)

  • ¹ For the final song of his last show in London, I.O. wore his largest wig ever: a full-scale replica of the O2 Dome. (Well technically… not a replica; he wore the actual Dome — he was structurally connected to it by Buro Happold Engineering, who also hung the thousands of 100-foot braids from the stadium’s ceiling.)

  • ² Seth Rogen declined to spit some bars for the recording but was… persuaded to direct-in-name every music video for the album, all of which were shot exclusively at YFO airport (‘cuz that’s where Kim warehouses his dozens of super-sized blocks of Swiss Emmental cheese, hundreds of copious bottles of Paradis, and over a thousand Ford Thunderbird sedans — all three indulgences prominently featured in the music video album).

  • ³ The name change was in honour of minimalistically-toothed hockey star Bobby Clarke, of whom Yumi is a fan, because he was once captain of her favourite team, the Philadelphia Flyers and, like her, is diabetic.

  • ⁴ 2500cc being the largest motorbike engine in the world. (Lake’s is 1 more).

  • Album covers with morotcyles: Born This Way (Lady Gaga), Purple Rain (Prince), Bat Outta Hell (Meatloaf), Girls Girls Girls (Motley Crue), Born They Way We Were (Barbra Streisand)

  • ⁵ Other censored album covers: “Mechanical Animals” (Mariylyn Manson 1998), MM’s "breasts" were covered with a sticker and the entire package had to be wrapped in opaque blue cellophane. “Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins” (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1968), wrapped in brown paper to hide their genitals, still blurred online today. “Nevermind” (Nirvana,1991), sticker placed to cover a swimming baby’s genitals. “Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, a genital-adjacent word caused major retailers to not carry the album and governments launch lawsuits. “Diamond Dogs” (Bowie,1974), yes, genitals again, this time on a dog’s body, which had to be airbrushed out. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Kanye West 2010); a George Condo painting of Ye, straddled by a naked winged armless female creature with a tail, had to be blurred or pixelated for mainstream distribution.

  • ⁶ this music was the sound of the blitztanzer parties, the heavily influential movement that came out of Flin Flon’s underground club scene

  • ⁷ direct quote from the novel 1984 (George Orwell, 1948)

  • This is part 71 of The Window, which is a series of photos of real people in unstaged situations, captured by chance from looking 24/7/365/1 (the 1 being a single location, above a bricked road) over 5 years+. The work is presented as themed prints in sets interconnected with other sets, all of which are nested inside a larger single mega-meta-set. (TL; DR: it’s about passing through the labyrinth of 21st century):

tulips to crypto (cash fetish)

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(bags, shoes, bins, & bits of money)

Commodities that had intrinsic value like grain, livestock, salt (Roman Empire), shells (Africa and Asia), and raw gold were the earliest form of money, used about 5000 years ago. Coins were first minted about 2500 years after that (in what is now Turkey) and made of electrum, a natural alloy of silver and gold.

A few hundred years after that China invented paper money, (around the same time as moveable type, see the last post), which became widely used around the 10th century. (Europe didn’t use paper money for another 600 years).

Sneaker-dealers speculate on limited edition runs of hype shoes. Provenance and condition for them are just as important as it is for high-end art. Shoe aficionados use insider jargon like “very near deadstock,” which refers to sneakers that are barely worn. I watched the buyer on the right inspect, for about 15 minutes, the treads, laces, insoles, and even the tissue in the box. (I was surprised he didn’t pull out an Air Jordan© jeweller’s loupe). The thick-soled thicc-soled shoes (by satanist Rick Owens) worn by the guy in the image below retailed new for $1000; on the resale market a year later, $4000+ . (If unworn. Never. Wear. The. Shoes). Limited edition sneakers are very hard to understand.

Paper money was always backed by gold, all the way up to the 1970s, when the US decoupled from it, turning the US dollar into a fiat currency (backed only by the “full faith and credit” of the government, not by precious metal reserves).

Fashion is backed by the full faith and credit of the consumer. Bathing Ape (above) is a Japanese streetwear company. To get their most-coveted limited edition clothes you have to first own a BAPE NFT. An NFT is a non-fungible token, which is basically a visual digital asset, like a jpeg of a funky Ape (as with crypto, the NFT’s blockchain code creates scarcity and provenance). You buy an NFT using a digital currency like Bitcoin. (Bitcoin is not backed by gold; nor by the full faith and credit of any government).

Bitcoin was first mined (not minted) in 2009. In 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made the first real-world purchase using crypto. He bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins, at the time the equivalent of $41 in real cash. Bitcoin is not just a currency, it is also a stock. Somehow. You are not supposed to spend it, just invest in it, and hold on to it for dear life. Had Lazlo HODLed, that $41 dollars of Bitcoin today would be worth over a billion old-fashioned dollars — $1,027,379,668.16 USD to be exact, depending on when you are reading this. That’s more than 50 million pizzas. Crypto is hard to understand.

up the long slide (even jack black)

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TL; DR: below the surface & to the sun (Verticality, Part Two, by K.I.A.)

The original “Verticality” image arrangement (post) became concrete because of a synchronicity. I’d selected a series of photos of ephemeral moments — of disparate content, and taken with separate intents — which were captured over the course of a year, and then grouped them by elevation (how far the subject was from the ground). A vertical visual poem.

Just after I’d curated that grouping, by chance, I came across the poem “High Windows” by Philip Larkin. Here’s its last stanza:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The poem’s last stanza resonates with the themes of The Window (continuity, infinity, with hints perhaps of both despair and transcendence… ). And, of course, the main hook was that all the photos in this series (of series) are, literally, taken from a high window.

So I used the poem as the connecting thread for that first post some time ago, but for a while now I’ve wanted to do a Verticality sequel. (Or… or maybe a franchise, at some point merchandising the IP with toys, maybe a gin or a tequila line, and possibly a cologne or a perfume — with signature top notes of transcendence, and base notes of despair). But I’ve held off for dittophobia.

Then a few days ago, out of nowhere, this famous line popped into my head:

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND READ MORE (SUBSCRIBE!) AT THE K.I.A. SUBSSTACK HERE

All The Hills Echo Ha Ha He He (The Window by K.I.A. pt 54)

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An angst-antidote — excerpts from Songs of Innocence by William Blake, paired with images from The Window photo installation series:

Merry, merry sparrow!/Under leaves so green/A happy blossom/Sees you, swift as arrow,/Seek your cradle narrow, /Near my bosom
-THE BLOSSOM

Pretty joy! / Sweet joy, but two days old. / Sweet joy I call thee: / Thou dost smile, / I sing the while; / Sweet joy befall thee!
-JOY

When the meadows laugh with lively green, / And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene; / When Mary and Susan and Emily / With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha ha he!
-THE LAUGHING SONG

Protest! Antitest!

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Signs & Flags & Tees & Trucks of the times

FOUND WORD POEM:

We stand
as one — we will not comply;
from the river to the sea,
just say,
no, don’t believe the lies —
essential liberty,
hugs, temporarily blocked,
50% off,
can’t we just all get along
(subject to court injunction),
we will fight in the court. Hibachi
…cont’d at the link below

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND POST AT THE K.I.A. ART SUBSTACK HERE

Grand Theft Photo (Appropriation, OK!)

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A.I. poison & Prince-ly appropriation by K.I.A. (TL; DR: stolen shoots (The Window 47)
(PRINTS HERE & BY REQUEST)

In the ‘80s Richard Prince rephotographed a famous cigarette ad (the iconic cowboy riding a horse), cropped out the text, and presented it as his own work. By recontextualizing it, he transformed the shot into capital-A Art.

Appropriation art was not a new idea — Sturtevant’s painting repeats, Warhol’s soup cans, Duchamp’s urinal, and so on, probably back to the second-ever cave painting. But Prince’s appropriation did, and still does, stir up controversy.

Concerns of copyright, fair use, “added value” (changing the original enough to call it a new work), originality, authorship, ownership, effort, legacy, history, and of course acknowledgment and compensation are even more of a concern now that text-to-image A.I. can generate (appropriate) any style of art or artist you want. “Generate a Frank Lloyd Wright drawing”, “Make a painting in the style of Basquiat”.

Unlike Prince, all the photos in this post appropriate (hijack) the event not the shot. With the staging stolen, the images are recontextualized. They are candid pictures of other people’s mediated messages. They are meta-photos of a crime scene, an advertising campaign, a tv production, an Only Fans session, a fashion shoot, a text home, a family album, wedding photos, dating app pics, Instagram posts, TikToks (with faux paparazzi), and selfies, selfies, selfies…

The Geometries of Taylor Swifties (THE WINDOW by K.I.A. pt 45)

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TL; DR: Taylor Swift Dance Party participants, in polygons (PRINTS HERE & BY REQUEST)

I hear shrieks outside. It’s early evening, spring. Shouts, cries, and loud exclamations in big cities are alarming… but in rare cases, like this, they are joyous — the sounds from down below The Window are emanating from a flock of Swifties, in line for a Taylor Swift Dance Party. They are laughing loudly, and eager to shake it (off).

According to statistics, there are about a shibillion Swift fans worldwide. Here are a few of them — sequinned, blue-jeaned, braided, cowboy’d, lumberjacked — free-range, in their various geometries:

SEE THE REST OF THE PHOTOS AND SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTACK click> HERE

IMAGES:

heXXagram

acute triangle

90,100, 60, 120 degrees of swifties

quadrilateral non-parallelogram with purses

biPhonic right angle

15 degrees ensequinned

theoretical investigations on geometrical structures of swiftie clusters


Geometries and glyphs of fans and fame, and the infinite mystery and magic of celebrity — Taylor’s a symbol, or sigil, for positivity, that’s why the lineup.

I go downstairs and join it.

love vector

I shriek a little (but joyously).

The Window w/ Swifties Geometries

NOTES:

-“Siri, Siri, in my hand, who is the famous-est in the land?”
“Taylor Swift, Of Course, is the famous-est in the land. There were 10,751,000 searches for her on Google this month, twice as many as the next famous-est, Ronaldo.”

- in the pic w/the pink cowboy hats, if you could “enhance enhance enhance” (as they do in movies) the girl’s iPhone image on the right, you’d see me leaning out the topmost window, 25’ above, taking photos. The only person to actually notice my actions was the girl who gave me the peace sign.

-The Window (all images in the photo series 24/7/365. from the one window) is mostly about interconnections across single images over a span of time. This post is one of the few showing multiple photos of a single moment (others were of a shooting, and a fire; while How Far the Man and UHaul Psalm were multiples of a single subject, but across a span of time.)

-the panoramic photo shows a few people in the lumberjack phase

-re: Google AI debacle, I queried it to generate images of a Swiftie & it made this:


-apparently the next Taylor Swift album “The Tortured Poets Department” comes out April 19 2024. So I asked Chatgpt to write a tortured haiku using Swift song titles, and it gave me this: Endgame without you / Haunted by blank space, lost love / Teardrops on my guitar

in praise of fails: Weatherworks - land art installations by K.I.A.

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TL; DR: 30-foot art done-30° (“The Window” winterlude)

On Horizons

The newly frozen bay, somewhat snow white, sounds out as it warps — ringing, and singing, like an ice siren, alarm and allure. I jump, stomp, and kick down while walking onto this winter canvas. I’m holding a broom sideways — if I fall through, maybe it’ll save me. Should I be wearing a life jacket?

F1: Cities in Dust

Every December I make enormous weatherworks. The process is physically demanding — a duel, a sport, a dance — due to the difficult conditions (which are different every year). This art is always in cooperation with acquiescent to nature; i.e. this year, for the first time in ten, there is no ice. So “going-with-the-no-floe”, I shifted my colordrifts and glyphs to nearby snowy fields and frozen flora. But because the art is not at the time-honoured site, and I can only work at a much smaller size… all attempts are fails. (F1-F4):

F2: Color…Elide

Every December I make enormous weatherworks. The process is physically demanding — a duel, a sport, a dance — due to the difficult conditions (which are different every year). This art is always in cooperation with acquiescent to nature; i.e. this year, for the first time…

READ THE REST OF THE POST & SUBSCRIBE TO THE K.I.A. substack HERE

Possible Pareidolia

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TL; DR: A pairing of enigmatic images of couples from The Window project, third one at bottom.

Pairings, juxtapositions and patterns. Across the time span of The Window series (LINK), context emerges which generates (accretes?) considerations beyond each individual image.

Two photos taken months apart, at different times of day, of different situations, when juxtaposed within the context of an exhbition (virtual or institutional), suddenly obtain more layers of meaning.

For example in the project there is a photo of a woman in high heels and fur at 11 p.m., arms outstretched, smiling and posing for a photo as she leans back against a stretch limo. Months later I captured an image of a woman at 6 a.m crammed into a kid’s bike trailer, immobile (sleeping, sick, dead?), as her partner cycled from dumpster to dumpster looking for bottles.

Placed side by side, each image becomes a tuning fork that resonates to the other.

Another example: separate shots over months of 3 different groups of 3 women crossing the street together. Each group is ethnically homogenous and of the same age within their triplet, but when the photos are placed sequentially you notice that each group’s pattern of walking is significantly different — one group is close, almost shoulder to shoulder, arms and legs in synch; the next group somewhat matching in stride and arm movements, but a little farther apart from each other; and the last group of three is dispersed and with no physical cohesion of motion. Is it culture, age, season, setting, time of day, or happenstance that causes this phenomena?

One of the images by itself is just a word, but the three together are a poem.

The Window by K.I.A.: compilation images

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Compilation of photographs as grouped by theme into a single image.

The compilations range from two up to 60+ images. Dimensions variable and flexible — portrait, landscape, square, etc. Inquiries welcome.

Here are a few examples of the “visual poems” compilted from The Window, a 24/7/365/1 project documenting the diversity, velocity, and humanity of life at this moment.

See more of the compilations HERE (and more being added over time.)

“ultimulticulti” (39 image compilation):

“Views From the Six” (36 image compilation):

“Happiness Is Motion” (aka “Wheelers and Wheelies” (6 image compilation):

Other compilations: Gravity/Antigravity, Wraiths Below the Window, Sequences….

The Window (Threefer)

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A study of the diversity and velocity of the modern metropolis…

Images from the ongoing photo series “The Window” by K.I.A. (See pages 1-6 on the sight, email for password, prints, nfts, and exhibition inquiries).

“Crosswalk Catwalk”:

“Movement Not Moving”:

Read about the below image “The Wandering Bishop” HERE.