QUANGO CREATIVE BRIDGES 2009 LECTURE SERIES
ORIGINALLY PRESENTED 6/18
DAVE ANOLIK:
We're very lucky to have Michael Hersrud in, in between gigs, in between Michigan and Qatar and I'll let Mike speak more to that in a second. Our lecture series, we started them last year, we had four and if you go to quangoinc.com/bridges you can see archived and transcribed all of our lecture series from last year, there's four of them there, a lot of content, video, everything.
As for this year, our next Creative Bridges lecture is going to be in the fall. Colin Ives, who was here last year, the head of digital arts at the University of Oregon, and myself will be giving a speech in early fall on the works of the late filmmaker, Michael Evans, so please, if you like what you hear tonight, which, I think you will, please come back and also go online. We have a blog, please keep in touch. You don't have to take notes because it will all be transcribed, videotaped and put online.
Mike, what exactly is the town and university you're going to in Qatar?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
I'm going to Doha, and its Ka-tur.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Really, is that how you say it?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yeah, that's what I've been told, even when I talk to other expatriates who are over there currently say they tend to say KA-tar but I think the actual proper way I've been told to say it is Ka-tur. So that's where I'm travelling. I'm currently kind of living nowhere. I had been living for three years in Lansing, Michigan where I was teaching at Michigan State University, teaching graphic design in their graphic design program, but I was the person who sort of did the entire spectrum. I seemed to cover the things that were very old and the things that were very new. I taught letterpress. In fact, I set up and built the letterpress lab that was there. I'll show some photos that are mixed in with some of projects that showed up. I never want to set up a letterpress shop again. That was very difficult and there was some very heavy equipment that could have been life-altering.
And then I taught the other side which is kind of interactive design which was sort of a blend of web design classes and flash classes, actions scripting, motion, dealing with even just really basic interaction that could be digital or not digital, and also a motion graphics class. And then sort of wrapped in all of that, probably my favorite class that I don't really have a lot of personal work in is book design. I teach a book design class that for me, is really exactly the same as teaching an interactive class. There are aspects of the book that you have to think about in terms of how you go from one page to the next. Or even in thinking about a book as fluid that it's not linear, page to page, but how it's become it's very non-linear, it may jump you around, and be packaged differently. There's a lot of usability involved. So just the way that you navigate that in some ways can then translate to how you navigate something in a virtual environment.
GABRIELLE:
I just want to say, I think a book is a technology and people forget to think that it is a technology. As a librarian, at one time there was papyrus, and then the book happened. And that is a step in a technological order, so I'm sorry to interact, but...
DAVE ANOLIK:
Right now, I'm still reeling from the technology of the fork. It was a technology.
*audience laughter*
DAVE ANOLIK:
Mike and I worked together. I first met Mike—it's already been, wow, this is 2009, over ten years maybe twelve. To me, it's like yesterday but it's actually been quite a bit of time. At Larsen Design Office in Minneapolis. I was in the interactive group and Mike was a designer in the graphic design and print group, pretty much, but there was also a lot of crossover. And that was really the source of a lot of fun stories for us. It was kind of at the beginning of the internet boom, which was just pumping cash into design firms. They were burgeoning at that point, so it was a pretty exciting time when we ran into each other then. And then at another point later in years, after I had worked overseas and came back to Minneapolis and Mike and I worked together at Mike's firm, Friction, which was as well very exciting. And then the third and most recent time that Mike and I worked together which was about 4 years, five years ago, Mike was the visiting creative director here at Quango for a little over a summer and did amazingly evolutionary things for our company, like took us to our first re-branding, which was big and really raised us up and helped us become a lot more of a creative boutique suite, where we had previously been a relatively tactical, technical company, and so Mike was a big part of the evolution at Quango.
We've kind of got the Actor's Studio format thing going here. Mike and I collaborated over the years on stuff and worked together and the Creative Bridges Lecture Series, we were talking a lot about this and what's very interesting to us both about that we were talking about is the concept of disciplines, bridging and trajectories of how maybe disciplines start and stop and where we are now or what we were doing. Both of us have been involved in relatively esoteric aspects of our disciplines, and also very, very business-oriented, very un-esoteric aspects of our disciplines. And so on that, we started talking and I'm going to show a short film I did many years ago, an animated film. It's very short, four minutes. I always preface that, especially with art pieces, and then I'm going to show a piece we did here at Quango. And I'll talk about them both a little bit. The first piece I'm going to show is called "Food Chain". It was made in 1991, and I'm showing it because as originally the Creative Director here and now as the Chief Creative Officer, I felt it was relevant in trying to understand the trajectory of where we came from and what we're doing now and where we're going and Mike and I were talking about how we have no idea what it means or the content or the intent or what this trajectory is, but maybe the contrast will be interesting. So, "Food Chain".
**Plays "Food Chain" video**
DAVE ANOLIK:
So, in 20 years, art schools, academia, commerce, graphic design firms, a lot of information in there, and you know, this was heady art school. Now here we are at Quango, and recently under the leadership of Marc Anteparra-Naujock, our Creative Director, we've been developing I-Phone applications, strictly for commercial pursuits but also trying to have as much fun and energy and creativity and really in the spirit of collaboration, a project that somehow has some connection to that food chain. Everybody here at Quango other than me, really worked on the I-phone app, and I would like to show you a trailer that our design director, Alec Hill, put together that was part of the marketing of this application.
**Shows I-Poop trailer**
DAVE ANOLIK:
Alec Hill, ladies and gentlemen. Brilliant.
So, segueing into Mike's work...
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
That's a hard act to follow!
DAVE ANOLIK:
I thought long and hard about this. Mike's work, for me, has an amazing combination of gravity and levity. There's an amazing amount of whimsy in Mike's work. It's talented, it's fun, it owns up to many repeated thinkings and viewings. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mike.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Thank you. I think you definitely have the food relationship right.
DAVE ANOLIK:
There's the food. All the way, the full cycle.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
It's where you started now you're ending it, right. Or a continuation.
DAVE ANOLIK:
It's a connection.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yeah, we were looking for that connection. We've found it.
So, Dave talked a little bit about my background. I'll give you my quick, brief bio. I grew up in Minnesota. I was born in Fargo, North Dakota. For anyone who's interested and seen the movie, a lot of it is true. I just told someone earlier my parents did have a wood chipper and a log splitter. And then I ended up working in a variety of design firms in Minneapolis for several years, including starting my own, that I ran for about three years where Dave and I intersected while at Larsen. And eventually, I really got burnt out on doing a lot of design and client-based work that had a lot of marketing spin to it and things like that, which I still really enjoy, but I wanted to try something on my own like go out and venture out on my own, which kind of led me to sort of quit everything and go on a road trip and I drove around the United States, mostly the western areas for about six months, and I ended up in Portland, which seems to be the place where everyone ends up when you don't have a job. It's like this is the hub of that. And then I spent a little time at the University of Oregon, where I met Karyn who is in the audience. And I actually did some projects with her, some of which I will actually show tangents of tonight. I also met Colin, and made some really interesting Oregon connections and eventually went to the other side of the coast in Providence, Rhode Island and did graduate work at the Rhode Island School of Design for a couple of years and then found myself in Michigan and here today.
So, a lot of what I'm going to show you is a little all over the place. I definitely started with a print background. I love working with my hands, getting dirty, doing things hand-drawn, trying to do anything I can scan or build or photograph. When I was coming out of school, like David mentioned, the internet was becoming this big thing, and I started to use Photoshop and had used Premiere once and instantly I became a person who could jump in and do motion projects and design websites that I had no idea what I was doing. But I think what that taught me is I sort of immersed myself into this digital world. Even the print projects I was doing were very, very computer based, and part of me wanting to find something new also goes back to hand-done things. Building things, making things and transforming them, and I think a lot of the direction that my work has taken in the last few years in graduate school and after is sort of this hybrid.
None of the work I've done, I would have been able to do without the use of the computer, but at the same time, it's all very hand-done and sort of crossing those two areas together. My work kind of is all over the board. It's kind of all over the place where I do interactive projects. I have a lot of print-based projects. I have been doing some video work that I will show, some short experimental video pieces. All of my work has become a lot less commercial and a lot more experimental. For me, the commercial aspects of it are in my teaching, when I teach projects, when I teach students how to engage in a project from start to finish and usability and all of these aspects sort of play out, but then it allows me in my own work to really push those boundaries and break those boundaries and see if I can come up with other interesting ideas, so I've played a lot with form and structure and concept.
The title of my presentation is "In Transition", which is for two reasons, one because I sort of am in transition, as Dave said, I'm moving to Doha, Qatar and I've taken a teaching position with them to teach interactive and motion design and help build a program there which is being sponsored by Virginia Commonwealth University, so they're technically my employer while I'm over there and for me it was a great opportunity because I'm reconnecting with a friend of mine from graduate school who did his undergrad at Oregon State University, so it kind of comes full circle back to this area. The chair of the department over there is someone named Muneera Spence and Muneera was leading the graphic design department at OSU for a little while and she was the one who contacted me about this opportunity and it sounded like an interesting life tangent, so I went for it.
The other part of transition has to do just with the process itself. I'm very interested in the design processing. Something starts somewhere and ends somewhere else and it's very hard to envision an end product. In fact, I encourage my students to never try to envision an end product, but pick any point to start. There's really no wrong place to start it could be a sunset, it could be an idea, it could be something you find on the ground on the way to your studio, anything as a starting point to lead to something else. One idea, an experiment leads to another and another and another and for me, a lot of my work, even the pieces that are sort of final that I'm showing today are really just works in progress. I sort of think they're sketches, they're not quite done, they're going to go somewhere else. And in the spirit of process and participation, I don't have a linear presentation, so I'm going to have anyone at whim pick a category, I'm going to launch it and we're just going to talk about it for a little bit. And I have abridged versions of each of these six categories that we'll go through and hopefully try not to be here all night. And feel free to ask questions at any time.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Well I know it's the first one but "Dairy"? It doesn't seem to fit with the other items so it kind of interests me. Is there a Fargo connection there?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
"Dairy" is a cool project. Alright. You'll see me kind of going back and forth like this a little bit, so I apologize. So, "Dairy" is a time-based interactive type face that was developed while I was in graduate school with my friend Levi. It was a collaborative piece, actually probably the best collaborative piece I've ever done, because from start to finish we both just had these strange ideas and had no idea where it was going to go and this thing just kind of kept evolving and evolving.
So we both landed in Providence and we didn't have any furniture. We were roommates and we rented an apartment together, had no furniture. We thought it would be a cool idea to just grab some milk crates to have for just general table space at first, and as we sat there that first night drinking a bottle of wine and hanging out on our milk crate furniture we thought, what would happen if we get a whole bunch of these things and make a typeface out of it? We actually rented a car to pull this off because we didn't have a car. We rented a car to drive around the city and collect milk crates, which is what we're doing right here. We especially thank Dunkin' Donuts, who played a big part in this project and they didn't even know it. So here are some of the milk crates as we got back home and some of our other stuff we picked up along the way. I actually made my bed out of these. I wish I had a photo. It was like a platform bed with an air mattress and then a piece of foam—it was amazing. I highly recommend it.
So, that's where we started. We wanted to make a system of some sort. We stacked these things and knew that wasn't going to work. We decided to pound nails in the wall. I think we had 12 nails or something like that, which helped us to sort of hang and carefully balance everything. We started to photograph it and see what it looked like and started to figure out what we wanted to do with it. We went letter by letter we had no idea of how it was all going to work out. We didn't really plan anything out, which, maybe we should have. But essentially, this is a physical version of a pixel typeface, right? So that was how we were thinking about this as we were building it.
So, along the way, we photographed everything and we shot video, and basically it was this one night performance, where we built letters with the video camera for about 15 hours straight and we had about four hours of video along the way which we started editing and we pulled out certain frames and made a stop motion video out of it. So in a way, we did it backwards. Obviously, more traditional stop motion would be like, you're clicking a shutter, and taking a picture. So we sort of did this in reverse—we shot it in a linear video fashion and then went back and selected particular video frames to get this effect.
So, that was where we started and where we went and then this project sort of died for about a year or so because we were just really busy with all sorts of other things. And then later we went back to it and it started kind of gaining in popularity as we showed people the piece and they started asking us questions and telling us things we should do with it. I made a vector font out of it, so, I took all the pieces and cut them out of the photographs. I essentially made a vector font which became a real font so that you'd be able to key it in just like any other font. We distributed for free, you can get it free off my website, actually. And since it was really limited, you kind of had to make things up as you go. Our 'and' sign was just the word 'and' at a slant, numbers had to be spelled out, so one, two, three—we didn't have numbers. We faked some punctuation.
Then, like any good design project, we needed a poster for it, so I thought I wanted to make a poster that talked about the typeface itself, so, staying true to form in the process, we went out and we rebuilt the typeface and shot it with a camera that was on an automatic timed shutter that just shot off hundreds and hundreds of photos that we then went back and looked at and started combining, which ended up being combined into a poster which looked something like this.
*Shows "Dairy" poster*
The poster went along with these installations we did. I'll show you the final piece, where it actually ended up, but the final piece is an interactive thing that would be projected in installation and then the poster would refer to it.
Another fun thing about the poster is you can see some of the up-close typography. I should warn you that in everything that I do, you're going to hear me talk about typography. Even though I try to not be a type junkie, I seem to always come back to making a typeface. I don't know why that is. Then what I thought was particularly awesome about this piece was right here, there's this book, The Elements of Typographic Style, which is supposed to be the bible for how you set text the proper way. There was this thing at RISD—we were looked down upon for not being experimental with our typography, so I put that book in the photo shoot as a way to toy with everyone. So, you can have fun and do type.
Levi, worked with me on all of this. Like I said, this was very collaborative. Although we both worked a lot at Flash, he was an Action Script guru. We worked together to come up with this final piece and he did a lot of the Action Script on it. It's really beautiful. It was taking what we did on some of the original studies and turning it into a typeface that was live.
*types words in action script*
Oh, I misspelled Quango.
*audience laughs*
It lets you go down and set different parameters, so we can type bigger sentences. And you can delete back, unless it goes too fast.
So what became really interesting is that this ended up being this weird performance piece. We were asked to show this at different art openings and we even performed at a theater opening event. We had this interactive piece and we were typing things and we had real milk crates so we were building things and asking people from the audience to build things. But that's sort of the life and process of "Dairy", how it went from an idea over a bottle of wine and some way to steal milk crates, into something that was really interesting.
DAVE ANOLIK:
We were talking about process earlier. Mike and I are both process junkies, really, and I love it how you have a couple of guys make an epiphany in five seconds and then spent two years realizing this five second epiphany. It's almost like the idea didn't matter, but the process took over and led you to a place that was very realized.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yeah, and something that we couldn't really imagine. And the interesting thing about process in that way is that it starts off with the very physical building of the letterform, but actually ends in the same way with the physical in typing and building a word, it sort of comes full circle. That's an interesting piece too. This was not a class project. It was all done on our own time, which was also a whole other funny tangent, how we actually stopped doing projects that we were supposed to be doing while we were working on this piece.
Someone who was very influential with this was a designer named Martin Deneski. He works a lot with playing with type taking out of context, cutting things up, piecing it together. I was fortunate to have him as my typography instructor at the time, and so he was definitely a behind the scenes influence to what we were doing.
Alright, another category.
DAVE ANOLIK:
I'd like to see "Social Awareness".
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
So, "Social Awareness". I think all designers or anyone, really, should be involved in social awareness and politics and keeping up on who we are as a country and what's going on around us in communities. Living in Minneapolis, it seems like a city that's very much in attuned to social awareness. And the same with being in Oregon, Portland, Eugene is that way a lot. A lot of my work, I think, is sort of undefined and the user has to figure out what's going on and the social awareness thing is the one aspect where I sort of hammer someone over the head with a very particular message, so it gives me the chance to go back into my design roots and deliver these kinds of heavy-handed statements.
I'm going to start off talking about a project that I did called 'Patriotism, Poster and Typeface'. It was in reaction to a lot of things that were going on in the United States three years ago. At the time I had just been to Washington DC and went through a lot of exhibitions from WWI, WWII, and there was a lot of talk about what the meaning of patriotism is and your country and how that is defined and how you are an American. So, I decided to take a look back at the 33 years that I've been alive and try track that backwards to see what's exactly happened during that time and keep journals of it. And at the same time, I started seeing people becoming very patriotic out in public, and I actually saw these great ties.
*shows patriotic tie photos*
I saw somebody wearing that military tie and I had to go find it. I searched over the web and found a place that sold all sorts of patriotic ties from different sources and purchased a bunch of them. Here's two of them. I'll show some of the others later. And again, I didn't even know it was going to be a poster at the time or really what was going on. I was just journaling ideas, I kind of turned it into a performance and a typeface, and so I started out by spending hours in front of the camera putting on ties and taking them off, this whole repetitive act, which was really a lot for me because I'm a person who doesn't wear ties and I can barely tie a tie, so it was a little challenge.
This was my studio that I was working in and again, I kind of needed a backdrop really quick. I really didn't know where I was going with it, and it led me again to start creating something with type, so I took all my different ties, and I laid them on the floor, built a little stat camera and just started shooting all the ties in different configurations. When you see it like this, it all seems very simple, but until you really try to make the letter 'Y' with a tie, it's quite a challenge, like how it lays out and flops over. So there are all these problems that started happening. This is some of the raw footage of that, getting the folds right, the lighting right. Then trying to clean it up, play with it in its high resolution files and start making things with it. Seeing how it works, how it functions, what else I could do with it. So this was my complete typeface, this is the black and white version of it. Every time I see this presentation I go back and forth about which one I like better--the black and white or the colored one. There's something really nice about the black and white.
I started playing with some different quotes that I had found and this one, I'll let you read it for a second, but I thought it was a really interesting quote.
These were some quick scans of things I was writing down in my sketchbook at the time, all these little facts and questions and things I ran across. I thought the bald eagle one was really interesting. I read this whole thing on how really, the only reason the environmental endangered act was put into place was because the bald eagle was becoming extinct. Otherwise they didn't really care about any of the other wildlife that was becoming extinct. But when it's the national symbol...
And then that led again to another poster project, which was this quite large 2.5'x5' poster with all this writing that combined in the studio spaces, the ties, the type. I really enjoy doing print work where you get to see one view where you're far away but then you have to get up close to read and find details in the second view. So I separated the information where there's the first read of it, but then when you get up close, you can start to read all the handwritten type.
DAVE ANOLIK:
Who were some of your designer influences? Looking at this, in my mind I'm starting to make some connections, but...
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Well I do like James Victore—the plates on the back wall. Tibor Kalman was a huge influence to me, looking at all the 'Colors' magazines he did in the past. He was a major influence of some of the designers who come to mind.
That led me to another phase which was looking at Uncle Sam. I kind of wanted to put myself in this performance of, I'm the new Uncle Sam, sort of car salesmen person, trying to sell you on patriotism. Here are some quick shots, studies that I'm doing. Which led to this, which contains a quote that was used a lot after 9/11 happened.
*shows poster*
DAVE ANOLIK:
That's really something. It's almost obscene with your blacked out eyes, it's kind of...terrifying.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yeah I think I like to balance between weird, terrifying and kind of humorous.
This is sort of a version I created. You can see the contrast of the dot pattern. Obviously, since it's a printed piece, there's a dot pattern no matter what, but the ties themselves have a much smaller dot pattern. So there are these conceptual ideas we're implying with form and if people pick up on them or not it doesn't matter to me, but there's this read where it's like the person itself is made up of tiny little bits and pieces that visually come together almost like an illusion where the ties are part of something that was more solid in terms of patriotism and the nation. There are all these different reads that you start to think about and how you're interpreting them.
'Clean Air' is another performance piece. Michigan does not have a no smoking law, and that's really, really bugged me. And when I say that, I don't even mean bars or things like that You can go into any restaurant—some restaurants don't even have a smoking or non-smoking section. It's like a big free for all. So it's been a big thing while I was living there. It got passed, and then it got taken away and then it was almost going to get passed again and then they took it off the table. It has a lot to do with casinos and going to Canada and all these sort of things that are happening and it seems ridiculous to me. So I decided to just have some fun with this one day. I found this mask at a second-hand store, went to Home Depot and rigged up some tubing because I thought I just wanted to make this weird mask that conveyed a lawn or air or something and I was playing with this type, this quote that I was using, and I went to the capitol—being in Lansing, it's the capitol of Michigan, and I just started running around and taking pictures.
*shows 'Clean Air' photo shoot pictures*
DAVE ANOLIK:
That is so completely disturbing.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Didn't anybody say anything to you?
DAVE ANOLIK:
I went on a day when they weren't in session, because I thought I'd probably be pushing my luck on that. I did get a lot of strange looks on this particular day. There were people out and around. The lawn is public property.
DAVE ANOLIK:
It's really just an article of clothing.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
And there's a lot of crazies in Lansing. I was looking at these scientific diagrams of the lawn and how it works. And eventually it became a poster again. Not all my work becomes a poster, but I always make the point that it's more than just a poster because it went through this whole thing. It was actually like a performance and it was a physical object that I made and it was a printed piece so it kind of took on all these different forms.
*shows finished poster*
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
What is that thing dangling from the bottom?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Right there? That is actually the polyps inside of a lung. I found it in a textbook and scanned it in and then worked it into the photograph.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Did you display the posters anywhere?
Yes, so the posters were displayed. I did a show in the fall. The whole slant of the show was on social awareness and I displayed several of the posters that I've done. This one did get a lot of feedback, in fact, I did get emails from people thinking it was strange and I got emails from a person seeing if they could buy rights to use the poster at an upcoming rally. He never got back to me once I told him that he'd have to pay for it. I probably would have given it to him for free. He seemed like a strange character.
Vote. Vote is a project I started with Karyn, actually, back in Eugene. This was a campaign that came about from both of us wanting to be involved in the political campaign and really try to be bi-partisan in a sense, even though these are definitely slanted one way. But even though we have a direct message like vote, we're not really saying that someone's good or bad or who to vote for or anything like that, and we're also playing with this idea within consumerism itself making some really fun shirts for like, the Urban Outfitters crowd. Why is it that a lot of the vote stuff you see seems to be all red white and blue and boring and it's not targeted toward youth? We were really interested in getting the youth to vote, because that was a big point of trying to change the way elections have been held.
So this was something that I drew. These were little hand-drawn things that were scanned in and then created into a letterpress block print and I'll show an example. Here are some of the sketches.
*shows sketches*
All sorts of ideas. I'm just playing with words and ideas and things I heard in coffee shops. I played with the idea of the speech bubble.
DAVE ANOLIK:
You're speaking to kids today—"Voting is stimulating". Pretty cool.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
*shows letterpress block photo*
So this was the block that was made, I had this sent away to a place that will actually make these magnesium plates for you and put them on a piece of wood that's type-high so it can be printed. So all those postcards that showed up in the beginning were actually hand letter pressed onto small cards, and then those actually turned into large posters as well, where I scanned in the ink from the letterpress, but then I went back and re-digitized things so it was again this combination of hand done and not hand done, using a computer. From the very beginning it starts off as a hand sketch, it gets scanned in, turned into a plate, printed, scanned in again, turned into a poster. So it's this ongoing, evolving system.
So for the "Waste" posters, I found this quote that I was blown away by and felt the need to sort of do something with. Again, this is an example of starting off by playing with some typography on the computer and taking a look at it and how things are going to work, but feeling that it didn't quite have the punch I was looking for, and eventually starting to play with things that were carved in blocks, playing with ink and rollers and scanning it in and kind of muddying it up, which led itself more to the idea of the concept itself. If the poster before was a little too clean, this one needed to be a little more dirty.
This was another thing I just did recently, which was all hand-drawn as sort of this mantra, more to myself than anything. There are all these pieces that come together. "Nourish the Earth and yourself"...all these little sayings, things to remind myself of more than anything, but also perhaps to make a message to somebody else.
You can see how I'm trying to re-piece it together digitally. And then I got to a point where I was looking for some textures and I photographed the floor in my apartment, which seemed to be beautifully perfect for what I was looking for, and I started to combine the two digitally and see how it would end up working and then added in some color which started to create this feeling of almost like a dissected globe.
What else? From the audience and not Dave.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
How about "Video and Structure"?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
"Video and Structure", ok. These are some of my favorite, actually. In graduate school, as I said, I was going back, trying to do something different. I had done a lot of motion work for companies, doing a lot of flying logos and moving type on backgrounds, that typical thing. So I wanted to use video and push the boundaries of an export. I was looking at a lot of animators such as Norman McLaren, people from the Canadian film board, also a lot of documentary artists. A more popular one would be someone like Leonard Herzog. I was just trying to expose myself to this full range of video artists and then create some video pieces kind of in a design way and what I mean by that is essentially creating a grid system or structure. Part of the video itself has a loose structure in it and letting that structure unfold the content. I'll come back to that in a little bit. For example, this is me measuring with a string to get a certain distance away with a camera.
This is a piece where I was looking at conversations. For a while, I had been eavesdropping on conversations in different places and writing things down and watching people do things with gestures and I had been studying about gestures and how we talk with our hands and all these sorts of things and I wanted to do something with it like shooting somewhere in a park or doing something with it in some way.
So this is a look at the raw footage I played with in this experiment. And this is a project that I think is still going, but these are the things that I shot, where I invited a lot of people from around the studio, our studio and other studios, to come in and have a conversation with me and I sat them down on the sofa and we just talked. I did this again for several hours and got all sorts of interesting conversations and watched people's gestures. I didn't know where this was going. I thought I was going to do something with the audio but then I started realizing that the way people were moving was actually more interesting than what they were saying and it led me to a different conclusion.
This was a very early test, just so you can see, and the way this is working is I had conversations with both these people and then removed myself from the scene and then essentially, they're having a conversation that never occurred. So I found that to be really interesting, and I decided to take the footage that I shot with this test, and ended up doing this piece.
*plays video*
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Is the frame speed the same on all of those?
No, I played with the frame speed and, I forgot to talk about this but, I was using a piece of software called Max/MSP, which allows you to play with live motion screen captures and mess with timing and I was doing that in other pieces and I thought I was going to do something with that software in this but it wasn't quite working out the way I wanted to, so I went back and all this was meticulously hand-edited, not physically hand-spliced like it was in the old-school days, but definitely sitting there playing with timing.
DAVE ANOLIK:
Amazing. You know, you had mentioned the National Film Board of Canada. This way of thinking with images and animation reminds me of early to mid 70's NFBC animators, like, did you ever hear of Ryan Larkin, who basically made a study just with pen and ink of the many ways people walk? But I think it's interesting that you've looked at the NFB and seen their handmade way of making films. They've been very experimental animators for the last 30 years and have taken it and used contemporary tools.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
So this next piece I'll show, it's a little bit longer video piece, but I think it'll be somewhat interesting. I was playing a lot with the city of Providence. I was making these maps, mostly because I hated the city, actually. I really, really disliked it, and I thought I needed to get over that because I was going to be there for that year. I started seeing all these interesting characters. The mayor had made a comment that it was going to be the next Hollywood. They'd shot the movie Underdog there. I have a quote that I can't remember off the top of my head, but he referred to it as this majestic wonderland of interesting facades, and I thought that was a really interesting statement and I want to explore that. I walked to the studio every day, I either walked or biked, it was about a three mile walk and along the way, I guess I got to see a lot, maybe more so than other people. So, I started documenting that walk to my studio both with video and with still images and recording things, writing things down in journals. The other component to this project in particular that I'm not even really going into, is that I wrote maybe 100-120 pages of short stories based on people that I met conversations that I heard. This kind of needs to take a life at some point.
Here is me walking through some things, walking around. Eventually, this led me to getting back to the structure point and I wanted to create something. The walking wasn't doing it, the video I was shooting tended to look like me walking everywhere and that didn't seem very interesting, sort of boring, although some people have called this next piece boring. I wanted to do something different which was me being stationary and letting the city move around me so I developed this system with a piece of string and a fishing lure tied to the camera.
*shows study footage*
So, this was an early study that I did. I'm trying to figure out what to do, where to stand, what to frame. I was reading a lot about framing and images and how people enter and exit a scene. And every night I was watching different Hollywood movies. So that was an early study and I had a lot of fun with this and I decided to just do this a lot and I had no idea where it was going to go and I just did this all the time. I would set my alarm and get up at 5 am and do it, I would do it at night, at 3 in the morning, on my way home, on the way to have a beer. All my friends would go ahead of me and meet me at the pub and I would stop and do a few shots. And I would, to put a little bit more concept to this, I was reading a lot about French theory and the Situationists and how they always took themselves out of context, roamed streets, played with those sort of aspects of engaging in a city and I can talk a little bit more about that later during questions.
So eventually, I did all these studies, again, I had all this video, didn't know what to do with it, started editing it, and created this, which is actually about 9 minutes.
*shows finished video*
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
You know, I have a very imperfect memory of Baudelaire's script about the flaneur and Walter Benjamin's idea of the flaneur, but the one thing I do remember is that it's about the protagonist walking through the city, so it's about dynamism and motion, and in some ways what is so funny about yours is that you're the center image, but you're static and everything around you moves, except for you, so were you intentionally playing with that concept?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
I was, although I would say that like a lot of my work, that concept kind of backed into it. The reason I was doing all those shots of me walking and moving, is because I was trying to be really true to some of the things I was reading and doing but those weren't working very well purely formally, visually, in terms of interest. More interest seemed to happen when I sat at a park bench for a long time and weird things happened. So, I thought I wanted to find ways to play with that. And then the idea of the flaneur kind of backed into it. I flip-flopped it, turned it inside out.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
You almost became the spectator, because the spectator is very motionless, so in a sense you're confronting the spectator and only when it seems like it's violated by that guy who comes and talks to you that suddenly you animate and become the protagonist, like in the ending. So how did you know when the story was ended? Why 10 minutes? Why not 5 minutes?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
I struggled with that a lot. I would say the shot with the guy coming in with the green coat and the cigarette was the original ending until the ending happened a few weeks after I had done one of my rough cuts and I really struggled with how that was going to wrap up. The other part of that is the advisors I had for this project, which started as a grad school project and then kind of ended outside of grad school, his background was in film theory and he just kept nagging on me about not making it into a 60's art video, you want narrative, it needs and ending, it needs some closure, so we talked a lot about how things should end and when they should end and when I came back and told him I re-edited it with a new ending he was so pissed off at me until I showed him and then he was very, very happy with the new ending.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Well, but it's true, it's sort of like the protagonist comes and changes and then there's a sort of a resolution and so you see how it is.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
That's right, it was the perfect accidental resolution. And what was so awesome about the guy in the green coat, and again, I only picked up on this after watching it a lot, is you know how he goes and rubs his lips? It's straight out of Godard's Breathless, so it's like referencing the king of reference. So there are all these little tie-ins.
And the camera was in complete view. I get a lot of questions about that. Did you hide the camera? The camera was in complete view, everyone can see it on the tripod, so it was just people's complete disregard and not caring about the camera, which interesting.
DAVE ANOLIK:
There were many layers, especially in your editing, on action at times.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yeah, I looked a lot at syntactic qualities, looking at a particular color or movement or how a color in the sky matches the color of a building in the next shot. The way I edited it was very formal, based on time, color and position, basically, except for the kind of bridging narrative.
DAVE ANOLIK:
You know, your upper Midwest and Fargo roots. I saw similarities between a northern film maker, Aki Kaurismaki and his very slow takes and kind of stoic scenes, where less things happen.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
But you could also do Auzou or Antonioni, these very static shots of the city, like an ellipse.
DAVE ANOLIK:
Jim Jarmusch tries to copy Aki Kaurismaki a lot, and that's kind of interesting. Especially the bleak settings in winter. That has Fargo all over that.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
You thought they were settings? They're beautiful.
DAVE ANOLIK:
Well, I'm from the same region, so I guess my childhood was different.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Alright, I could keep going if we want, if you want another section, or stop.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I would like to see Remixed Letterforms.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
So this has its roots, I guess, in my interest in letterpress and playing with type, wood blocks and experimental printing. These are some shots from the little letterpress I set up at Michigan State University. And this was one of the press beds that we were able to get. We actually obtained all these for free from areas around Detroit then disassembled them and brought them to Michigan State. We had an amazing woodshop guy who helped me, Walt. I called him "Walt the Egyptian" because he'd seem to move things that weighed like 2 tons overnight. I'd see him the next day and he'd be like, "Oh, I got that press from the third floor down in the basement and set it up for you".
DAVE ANOLIK:
Pretty much what you did in the short time you were at the University is you set up a type shop huh? A press shop.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
It's an interesting thing of academia, for those who know how academia works, it was a project I started in week two and it was finished being set up just this past year around winter break.
These are some wood-type explorations I started back when I was at the University of Oregon and continued on when I was at RISD, just playing with the form of the letter and how it fragments and comes apart. A lot of my work also plays with fragmentation and reassembly. Again, just process, playing, I had no idea why I was doing this or where I was going, but I felt it was interesting in some way. These are all being done by hand, trying to get gradation in a letterpress.
That led me to wanting to try to create a typeface in just a few hours. So I printed a plate on the letterpress of these different letterforms, cut them up into a bunch of puzzle pieces, just kind of dumped them out and started putting them together with tape and recreating these new forms, and in a way, it was my challenge to myself to create a typeface not using the computer as quick as possible. Those were really my only parameters, nothing else. I thought some of the forms were interesting. They worked their own way into other work that I was doing, so it was like thinking and making at the same time.
This is a study for a video piece. This came about because I was asked to participate in a gallery show for deconstructing the letterform and this is simply electraset type, the old school rub-on letters. I rubbed them on a cotton piece of paper, took an X-acto knife, and chiseled away at it and put some water drops on it and scanned it in at a high resolution, again, that sort of hand and digital at the same time and printed it off on a big inkjet printer. There's always this balance of kinetic and static, as you pointed out which is kind of the underlying thing in a lot of the work I do.
A lot of those studies led me to start thinking about a type installation, so I took an entire alphabet, made it out of wood and hand painted everything and all the letters were dissected in a system, so either they were dissected in halves or in fourths and I went in and used an existing typeface, Cholla, which is an Émigré font, but I tweaked it so it fit a structure that I had built but I broke it all apart and magnetized it. This was a test on a door. It eventually became a gallery installation, where I was able to find a paint that had a metal base to it. I Painted the gallery wall, I had this corner, and then painted over it white so the letters sort of magically floated on the walls and you could come up and interact with the piece and spell things and make patterns. I want to do something like this again. This was just a quick study that turned into something else.
*shows letterpress installation photos*
Here are some shots from the gallery installation. People came along and spelled words and played with form and textures. It was fun to see how it changed every day. Every morning I came in, I'd check out the gallery and see how it became different things, so it was very much like "Dairy", in the idea that you could play with the text itself.
Alright, what do we have left? We have one category left. No, two. Want to do one more?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I'm interested in "Personal Geographies".
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Again, "Personal Geographies", like the studies I was doing with the video pieces, I just have this ongoing interest in the idea of geography and maps and places and spaces and it comes out in all sorts of different projects and I'm never really sure where it's going but it seems to influence a lot of what I do.
This started as a project I titled "Mars Meets Providence", again a collaborative project. The city of Providence seemed so strange and interesting and I wanted an excuse to explore it more, so I found this old map of Mars at a bookstore and it had all these weird names, all these geographic regions of Mars. I overlaid it with the city of Providence in different ways and essentially, we set this up, it wasn't quite this nice. It was more like maps taped together with a light behind it and we threw things at it to see where it would land, very much trying to play off of Situationist ideas. We picked a spot and then we'd have to go visit that spot. So we'd take a bus ride, a train ride, walk, bike, whatever it was. We had no idea what we were going to do, except document the area, photograph it, write things down.
So these were the hubs that we tended to visit more often. The big green right here is an area where a lot of shops were, this is where the studio was, and this is where my apartment was over there, so these tended to be more frequented.
We used a lot of toy cameras. I have this love for toy cameras. Old Holgas, Polaroids, anything that's very tactile. I have a lot of Holgas that I own and I've altered in different ways to shoot at night with different speed film. And we went out and just started documenting places as we went to them, so a lot of photographic images were taken to create these bizarre landscapes that we were going after. We're on Mars in Providence here. During this time, we were kind of given an excuse to use chance to explore something, see what happens and also use different photographic and printing techniques and try to do things where we actually get type, for example on these, the type is on the Polaroids, they're not prints. Same with the Holgas, sticking things inside the camera and shooting and pulling it out and the things are actually imbedded directly onto the film.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
And so, this is in camera, right? That is really weird.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yeah, some of these I'd consider 100% in camera, then some of them, we would get a negative and then have a Polaroid projector where you can shove stuff in there and shoot a new Polaroid of it. Again, this is captures motion that probably a lot of you have seen. These are several shots cut up and taped together in this big collage. Here are some posters that we generated out of it.
*shows posters*
So we were taking all of the stuff we were doing by hand, digitizing it and then composing it in some way. These were insane, actually. These Photoshop files, I can't even open anymore, I had to just work on them as they were. They're so huge that they corrupted, I guess which is kind of too bad. I can recreate it.
DAVE ANOLIK:
Well that's kind of cool and kind of in line with your process that eventually, Photoshop files just corrupt and explode.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
I actually find that I have to flatten Photoshop files and then throw away the layered versions because otherwise I'll go back and rework them. It's sort of insane.
And while I was in Michigan, the library at Michigan State University gives away free maps and I'm always in there taking maps and I just got a whole collection of these things. This was my working studio while I was working on a few different projects. This is all very new, and I don't completely know where it's going yet. These are things I've been doing in the last couple of months actually. Very fresh. Maps overtook my studio/apartment for a while. I started looking at these photographs scanning them in, breaking them down for form, looking at colors, textures, I think these are really amazing with the line qualities, little diagrams, and looking at the texture, like, you can see that that's far out but up close you can see that it's not made out of dots, but solid lines. These are color palates printed on the maps. They also look like a palate. They're not very well structured or clean. I always have this ongoing love for Buckminster Fuller, and I'm always reading little excerpts, looking at his diagrams and looking at his sketches and books, looking at some of his maps, looking at the globe and breaking it down into different configurations. Here, I'm playing a little bit with layering and collage, truly trying to see what should happen, playing with some symbols, these graphical elements that I was finding on the map and recreating into other little bits and pieces, again, not really knowing where any of it is going to go, even as of now.
I was asked to go to the University of Delaware and talk about digital printmaking and do these large format prints and I sort of freaked out because it was a last-second thing, and I took pieces that I was working on right now, and this was as of a couple of weeks ago now, I started to take all of these pieces and put them into these giant digital prints which are about 3 feet by 6 feet big. Again, I'm not sure if it's really purposeful or communicating or what it's doing yet, but at the same time, just as a graphic, if I were to go back to my graphic design days, it probably would be the coolest in-store wall display ever created.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
It's interesting because I catalog maps for universities. And so what you've done is you've taken a map and emptied it of all of its signification. All of these things mean certain things. The reason you don't use it for navigation is because it's too old for navigation, and so it's outlasted its usefulness as a tool for discovering certain kinds of things. To me, it's really beautiful because you can take these things and look at them in a completely unpurposeful way and find formal qualities that are really beautiful, but to a geographer, it's like you've taken letters and words and a novel and cut them up and thrown them on a piece of paper and created something completely unrelated to what the intention was.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
This one is very tiny, but this is kind of how I imagined they would look together. And attached to that is a series of photographs I've been doing over the past three years all over the place. This kind of ties to that map project, it's very, very new and fresh. Although I've been taking the photos, I don't know what I'm going to do with them. So right now it's a series of photographs I've been working with. I have hundreds of these that I'm forming into an interactive piece. They have different significance and meaning, I'm writing short little stories, blending ideas of digital photography and old school photography and scanning things in and re-purposing them. And again, all over the place, this was in Budapest. Paris. Somewhere over the Atlantic. Egypt. Fargo. This one is out of a bus window. That's downtown Cairo. And Barcelona. This is in the Swiss Alps. That's Oregon. And right now, this is sort of a sketch interface of where I'm going with it at this point. Each of those icons becomes buttons that you can navigate with, click, launch something, and it plays with this idea of collage and slowness and juxtaposition and randomness, and as you can see, it's sort of playing off of a Buckminster Fuller diagram. So I don't quite know where I'm going with this yet. I have stories that appear when you click and so there are images and text and sound, and this is the flash demo of it.
*Shows flash demo*
It's running really slow right now because this is my old backup computer—Michigan State took all my other equipment away from me when I quit. But again, I'm not quite sure where this is going yet, so I don't have a lot to say about it. I feel like it's a sketch that's 90% there, but next week I could change my mind and completely go somewhere else with it. You can click on things and you have a lot of random mapping that's happening and creating lines and loading images and one of these will slowly load the collage images. That would probably say something or include text or other textures.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Are the sounds linked to what people click on or are they randomly mixed together?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
They're randomly mixing together, yeah, like the lines. I have soundtrack things that I'm editing together in bits, but then those are sitting in a file and it's grabbing them and pulling them out. I'm definitely not an ActionScript expert, but it's forcing me to learn more about randomness in ActionScript. And the same with the images, they're all created together and then they're all dissected into these separate little stories that are all in my head right now and then placed in folder files for it to randomly select.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
So, if we reloaded this page, we might get a different set of photos?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yes, the way it'll work is each one of these buttons will load 10-15 random images, so it' won't be completely random, it'll be random within 10-15 images, but then essentially, you can click at any time, bringing two images together and making it endlessly random in some ways, which has to do with the idea of travel and interconnectivity and bridges and everything that we started off talking about.
DAVE ANOLIK:
Well, this is great work, Mike. Any questions from anyone? It was an amazing amount of work and an amazing breadth of work, Mike. Thanks.
It was really exciting to see the evolution. Really in particular, I was struck by your ability to start something. Just to get started, but then to hold onto that and really carry it for a great distance. I know a lot of times for me, maybe I'll start a thousand things and they won't realize. That's very common. Or sometimes things just live within the ideas. People don't know how to start. But I love the way that your work starts, and then just through the process it has a life that continues through, but when looking at it as its whole, you see a very profound style and theme.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yeah, I think when I deal with my students when I talk about process, essentially, they hate me because they all sketch out that idea of what it's going to look like in five weeks and I take that and push that aside and tell them, no, I want you to go out and shoot 200 photographs of blue things and then let's come back to your idea and see how that changes what you thought about it. Because if you come up with ideas in your head and then try to put them on paper, in my opinion, you're really only going to regurgitate something that you've already taken in and you're spitting it out in a slightly different way, but you're not necessarily inventing it in a new way. I think that there has to be this physical connection between actually digging in and making something through process and thinking about it as opposed to just thinking about it and then creating it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I guess one of the things that strikes me, and maybe you can address this, is that part of what's interesting is the breaking down of barriers and being hybrid. For example, traditionally, of course, there was painting, sculpture, all these things, and as new medium were introduced there was still this emphasis on the purity of the medium, and it seems like that's something that you really abhor. So, could you talk about that for a little bit.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Sure. Say part of that again. I think I lost you a little bit.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
To me, for example, I was trained in art history, so the medium itself became... ok, so you have digital, you have photography, you have handmade things, you have things that are digitally created, so what I see, and maybe this is just really modern and I'm not on top of modern things, which is highly possible, but you want to see how those things can be combined in really different ways, so it's not enough just to do something that's straight photography, it's not enough to do something that's just computer generated. Do you know what I mean? Do you think that's because you follow a process and that you're not so attached to an idea?
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
Yeah, yeah, I do definitely think that's coming out of process, and I do feel that's a huge part of my work. I think I consciously do that, actually. Even though I'm letting the process guide that, I do consciously think about that when I'm working on something. Even with this end piece, I have all these photographs, but for me to just have them end as inkjet print photographs in the context they're in is not enough for me. I have to print them out on an inkjet printer, do something with them, scan them in, combine them and turn them into an interactive piece. I think this is becoming more and more true with the work that's going on now. I feel when I started this even just three years ago, there was this tendency to be really excited about certain toys or certain things or new software programs or new ways of doing things and you couldn't get away from that. I think as you gain more experience as artists or designers, that becomes more of a realization for everyone, but coming back to the teaching portion of it, with my students, to get them to create a flash project that has to have hand-done elements in it is mind blowing to them because they want to make everything right in the program and do something with it but then when they do that, it essentially ends up looking like every other thing that that Adobe editor has put out there. It doesn't have anything new to it. So I think kind subverting the medium itself has a lot to do with it. Does that kind of answer that?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah, because for some reason, what I think is kind of interesting, and I mean this probably doesn't make any sense and has no real purpose, but I'm interested in the handmade, DIY sort of thing and people have talked about it as sort of anti-modernity, anti-technology that's sort of fetishizing the handmade and then there's this sort of push toward technology. In my mind, because I'm old fashioned, I see this as an either/or proposition. It becomes a kind of dualism. And I see what you're trying to do is combine these things that are not incompatible, somehow, in my mind, I don't see them as compatible because they seem to be different impulses or maybe creative methods, or something. I don't know.
MICHAEL HERSRUD:
That's a good explanation. That's a good way of seeing it. I think it started out as me really revolting against doing digital things and trying to do everything by hand but then going back and realizing the power of doing things digitally as well and trying to self-create problems and limitations that are going to hit both of those. Like, what happens if I use a letterpress and code to create a piece of work which are two very descript things that you're bringing together.
DAVE ANOLIK:
Any other questions?
Well thanks Mike. I know I have initially very selfish reasons for coming up with this lecture series and that was to personally be inspired and to be re-energized and to keep up on my own work and delivering spades. So thank you very much for your inspiration.
