"I will resist your breakfast impositions!"

Liv tried to make me eat boiled eggs.

Christmas Tree

Liv and I bought a Christmas tree. It is frikkin awesome. We spent a whole weeks wages on it, and a whole Saturday, getting up early and everything. The man we bought it from was a geezer. He was square with muscles, lifting trees around all day. We asked for the biggest one in the shop. It's three metres tall.
I wanted to decorate the tree in a really dark way, with black gauze and rubber bats. Liv objected. This was my concession:


Something sweeter:


We hung the tree with chili peppers. We had the obligatory chocolates, of course. I love the idea of hanging a whole tree with real organic things. I found a big dark red bean tree down our road, and collected the beans. They look beautiful. In the Weihnachtsmarkt in Spandau, a stall sold dried fruits from all around the world. Lovely green fruits which look like splayed fingers, spiralling seed pods, fluffy gouards.


And rubber ducks! My favourite!


We fly back to London next week! Two Christmas trees in one year. Our neighbour gets this one.

WE ARE MEDIA: Sticker (in progress)

Normal people could replace journalists.
Thousands of people write, every day, for fun. Bloggers with opinions, critique. Bloggers everywhere. No need for a journalist to fly out to the latest story, it happened on somebody's doorstep. Through the internet, they can let everyone know.

"The clicking of fingers on keys...these are the sounds of our revolution. These are the 21st century's marching armies."
Madeleine

All that's needed is a robot editor, something like a search engine that will sift this vast amount of information to find news. Maybe with a nifty slider for more or less detail in a particular area, and a memory for what you like to read.

"Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is."Clive Thompson

Being a robot, it could be completely unbiased, the closest thing to objectivity yet.

"The only way to attain objectivity is to collect the infitessimal subjective perceptions and draw a sample of the mix."
Nabokov

I am making a sticker to represent all this. It doesn't just stand for publishing on the internet, but for all the freedom of information and expression which goes with it.
It's gotta be:

• Easy to draw: as a guide, I figured anything that could go on a rubber stamp would be fine.
• Instantly obvious and recognisable: we wouldn't want anyone mistaking the revolution for something corporate/communist... Daily Mail reporters must quake in their boots at the sight.
• Semi-religious: something obsessive, cultish, that people will draw and follow. Religions have the best symbols (only 2000-odd years of design refinement).

Something like OBEY GIANT.


Space invaders are also great icon design, and Owen showed me a graffiti toaster which is also fun.

Here are my attempts so far:
Idea 1: Computer Man

It has a little man on it who has a computer head and he is thrusting out a keyboard. It says 'WE ARE THE MEDIA'.
While cute, I think it's too childish.

Idea 2: Running Man

I drew the running man from a soviet socialist realist statue in a park outside Budapest. I like the simplicity and directness of soviet socialist realism, and the propaganda feeling it injects. But this design is too complicated. This is a major problem I am having on this project, trying to suggest a lot of people working toward something collective, but keeping the design extremely simple.

Idea 3: Pixellated Man

This design is more simple in appearance, but again complicated to draw by hand.


These are ideas for the future:

Idea 4: Blog Face
A huge, anonymous, pixellated face. Each pixel would actually be a complete screenshot of a blog. The colours of the blogs would be used to form the face.
This would be fantastic as an artwork, but does not work for this symbol, as it cannot be easily drawn or stamped. It wouldn't even make much sense viewed small.

Idea 5: Blog Badge with Face
A blog badge. Like the badges on the right, at the bottom of the side-bar. Each of the eighty by fifteen pixels, a blog screenshot. The image on the left could be the face. The text on the right could read 'WAM'.
Again, fantastic as an artwork but not symbolic. Cannot be easily drawn or stamped, wouldn't make sense viewed small.


The problem I'm having is not with ideas, but with simplicity. How can I represent thousands of contributors with a simple line drawing. Either I must show one and leave the rest to the imagination, or show something which represents many. A globe would serve well, but it clichéd. A spider's web is another possibility, but is difficult to draw convincingly. The Pastafarians cunningly circumvented the whole evolution vs. intelligent design issue (and the many associated design possibilities) by replacing the whole issue with a flying spaghetti monster. Although fantastic, I want to see if I can solve this more elegantly.
More to come...