Tea bag + index card + ink

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It’s Austin like the city, Kleon rhymes with neon…

From an article about the Daniel Johnston iPhone game.

Spotted yesterday at the Texas State Capitol. Couldn’t resist.

Taken with my iPhone camera, blasphemed with iRetouch, filtered w/ Tilt-shift generator.

See more de-signs.

I grew up in a small town. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was hang out with artists. All I wanted to do was get the heck out of southern Ohio and get someplace where something was happening.

Now I live in Austin, Texas. A pretty hip place. Tons of artists and creative types everywhere.

And you know what? I’d say that 90% of my mentors and peers don’t live here. They live on the internet. Which is to say, most of my thinking and talking and art-related fellowship is online.

Instead of a geographical art scene, I have Twitter buddies and Google Reader.

Life is weird.

New word (for me) via Wikipedia:

Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as “quoting out of context”. The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context (as all quotes are) per se, but to the quoter’s decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become “context” by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice to surgical excision, historian Milton Mayer coined the term “contextomy” to describe its use by Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi broadsheet Der Stürmer in Weimar-era Germany. To arouse anti-semitic sentiments among the weekly’s working class Christian readership, Streicher regularly published truncated quotations from Talmudic texts that, in their shortened form, appear to advocate greed, slavery, and ritualistic murder. Although rarely employed to this malicious extreme, contextomy is a common method of misrepresentation in contemporary mass media, and studies have demonstrated that the effects of this misrepresentation can linger even after the audience is exposed to the original, in context, quote.

In other words, how I make all my art.

See also: “How To Look At Art:”

Happy Friday. All taken with my iPhone camera, altered in iRetouch, and filtered through Tilt-Shift Generator or Camerabag.

And in case you’re a maps geek like me, I’ve geo-tagged all these signs so you can see them on a map:

(Right now it just shows you how geographically small my life is–the dots west of 35 are where I work, and the dots east of 35 are where I live.)

See more De-Signs.

Huge thanks to everyone who entered the print giveaway! Y’all left so many nice comments, I was kind of overwhelmed. I realized that the way I worded it made it sound like the nicer the comment, the better your chance of winning (which was not true–I picked randomly!) So basically, I extorted y’all for praise. Apologies! We’re definitely going to have more giveaways in the near future, so stay tuned!

Congrats to the winner, Matt Wilson (@matt_wilson), a dad and marketing fella from Minnesota. Your print will be on the way shortly, Matt!

For those of you who didn’t win, don’t forget that 20×200 is still selling CHEAP blackout poem prints. Buy one!

Meg and I spent a good bit of the weekend going over the first pass of Newspaper Blackout. “First pass” is the author’s first chance to see the book all typeset and designed and actually looking like it will when it’s printed as a book. It looks really, really great. There are a few changes still, but it’s so incredibly close to being ready.

And still, 24 weeks to pub date…