AKA is a tattoo studio, a gallery, a café, a performance space, and a foster home for all kind of artistic stray cats. According to Zitty, Berlin’s equivalent of Time Out, it’s the best shop/store/art space of 2010. Dossier was excited to sit down and talk shop with Jon John, who together with partner-in-crime Valentin Plessy founded this extraordinary artist-run collaborative space. Achieving so much success after only being opened a little over a year, we are excited to see what they will do next.

Thomas Mader: What was the motivation for opening up this hybrid space called AKA and why did you choose Berlin as its location?

Jon John: The dream of creating a space like AKA had been in my head for a long time, written on paper in my “project” folder. As a multi-discipline artist I’ve never found a working space that combined different kinds of art. But when Valentin (aMinus) finally gave the initial impulse, we decided that it was about time to create such a space. AKA is an artist-run space in the first place, because both of us use this space as a studio for our respective art activities. We both also have loads of friends involved in art, with different backgrounds, different disciplines, and so this was an opportunity for us to give them a place to work, a place where we can all collaborate, spend more time together, be a family. That’s why we chose the name AKA. To clarify the simple fact that this place has no name, has different tags and different people involved in the adventure.

Regarding the tattoo activity, we want to show a new face of tattoo. We have once again lots of friends involved in tattooing throughout all of Europe and all of them have a different artistic backgrounds which eventually led them to tattooing. That is why their style is different, more graphic and that’s also why they are using new techniques and technologies to make their own art evolve on skins. We want to promote that.

About the location, we both live in Berlin and we both love Berlin. It is the only city in Europe which allows you to open anything creative easily. The city is focused on and filled with artists, and that is something that really inspires us everyday. Berlin also gave us huge opportunities in our respective careers. AKA was meant to be a Berliner.

Thomas: So, is AKA a space that’s purely reserved for friends or can other artists actually apply for a residency at the space?

Jon: Absolutely not! We do not want to be that cliquey! As we are ourselves two artists living in Berlin, it just happened that we came to meet and become friends with lots of artists, developed collaborations and started sharing. The place enables us to see each other more often, as we all are really busy. Working is not the nicest thing in the world, so it’s nice being able to wake up knowing that you are going to spend your day in a creative surrounding with your friends. That is definitely a special chance and feeling that we have. I know it sounds really cheesy, but sharing the love as we do everyday is really important for all of us. So, no! It’s not only for Valentin and me and for friends, but for anyone who wants to share creativity, anyone who’s looking for creative stimulation, anyone with any of these qualities. But that means that then you just might become our friend!

Thomas: What are the criteria based on which you choose the artists that get to work at AKA? Do different rules apply for the people that exhibit at AKA and those who tattoo there or do the tattoo artists also always show their art on paper?

Jon: There are no real rules. Of course we do need to be able to relate to your art and people do come to us because they relate to our way of working, too. As far as the tattooing is concerned, we are interested in artists with strong visual ideas. We do not want tribals or heavy-metal-iron-maiden-like tattoos. We promote something different. Most of the artists working at AKA are not only tattoo artists but they come from various visual art backgrounds. They are painters, photographers, graphic designers and they ended up tattooing in order to discover and conquer a new medium and a new way of presenting their art. Needless to say that of course the artists working at AKA have got to be highly skilled.

Thomas: Not to long ago AKA had it’s first anniversary and a group exhibition to party this event. How did you choose the artists that showed pieces during that exhibition?

Jon: For the show we selected our favorite artists and it turned out amazing. I think it was my favorite show since we opened AKA. Some of the artists we showed were artists that already blessed the gallery’s walls with their past exhibitions, some where up-and-coming artists , some were artists that had wanted to show at our gallery but that we couldn’t afford to have on show for a solo show. Some where trials, so to say, so we could get a better idea of how the audience would react to their work.

Thomas: What was the most important thing you learned during this one year and how do you think AKA will develop in the future?

Jon: I have learned what patience is. They say good things come to those who wait, but really only to those who wait with their heart. I consider myself gifted now. I think every person involved in AKA learned a lot, as we had to co-exist all together in one spot, dealing with everyone’s ego, culture and way of life. We all have different backgrounds and personalities and it is not easy every day, but we are all happy about being part of AKA. I guess we all really learned to be more disciplined. I am actually looking for a way to open an AKA branch in London, as a  partnership or just a corner that we could rent in an art space or in a studio. We also have a jewelry collection planned that will launch, soon and AKA fashion will also be  available in the next months. Also we established an exchange with a gallery in Barcelona in June and I’d love to do more of these projects.

Angela Aux is really a man, the title of his new album (recently released on Red Can Records) is Whatever You Guess It’s Not, and the press info provided reads that the identity of the 27-year-old singer/songwriter/producer/younameit is pretty mysterious and that the album deals with the feeling of being lost in a forest of signs. All this seems like an unnecessarily extensive effort to brand Angela Aux as unclassifiable in a time where unclassifiable has long become a classification unto itself.

Yes, the album has folk elements and hip hop elements and field recordings and movie samples and a singer/songwriter attitude, but everything on the record is absolutely coherent and intelligently arranged and forms a homogeneous entity. So let’s just forget about the forest of signs and lets go for a walk in the real forest, because that is what the album really is – a beautiful spring album that makes you forget your winter blues. It the  vision of an artist that had locked himself up in his room and imagined sunshine and green leaves and budding flowers when outside there were only gray skies, ice, snow and cold wind. It’s an album to listen to in parks, by lakes and rivers and in cars that have been warmed by the sun in the parking lot outside the supermarket. It’s easy listening for easy days, composed and arranged during sleepless nights. It’s an album that makes you forget about the albums you liked in December, January and February.

Angela Aux is the brainchild of a man who wants to disappear behind the music, but for those who know the south German independent scene it is no big secret who Angela really is, especially when you know Ms. Aux’s other bands and his feature guests. So let’s just call him a multitasking Vishnu with a thousand arms who plays in several other bands, organizes a multimedia literature festival, works on the photography and literature magazine Der Greif, and has somehow found the time to produce Whatever You Guess It’s Not.

And one thing I guess, even though the title of the album tells me not to do so, is that this album is going to make a lot of people very happy and that it might even be able to conserve some happy thoughts for the time of the year that calls for sadder and gloomier music.

In a country like Germany you often wonder how people end up living on the streets. But it happens more often than one would think and for a wide variety of reasons. Streetmag is a new magazine project dedicated to helping people who live on the street make a living, preserve their dignity, and to help make society aware of the homeless problem. At the same time, it also provides a platform for Berlin-based artists of all backgrounds to show their work. Dossier talked to Marija Stojanovic, one of the founders of Streetmag, about the publication and its vision.

Thomas: In Berlin people can already get a number of magazines that are being sold by people who live on the street. Why did you decide that it was time to create a new one?

Marija: Streetmag is targeting the young and creative population of Berlin. On the one hand, we are supporting great and ambitious artists and creatives from every genre and give them a platform to publish their works. On the other hand, the homeless people can keep 100% of the profits they make by selling the magazine on the streets. We are not offering social support or emergency shelters, therefore we can give the magazine to the homeless for free. That’s our support for them.

Streetmag is a young, fresh, modern and stylish magazine and is supported by interviews of famous actors and musicians. We wanted to create a product that is really worth the money and that people are willing to buy not only for charity reasons, but also because the magazine is interesting and cool. We’re targeting the young generation. We want people to buy the magazine and to face the unpleasant side of our reality, because the poor side of Berlin is just as present as its glamorous, fashionable side.

Thomas: Was there any personal motivation behind you getting involved in this kind of social project?

Marija: One day when I left my house to go shopping I saw a homeless man sitting close to my home. You could tell immediately that he was having a very rough time. I realized that while I was on my way to spend tons of money on cosmetics, there are people out there who have to struggle every day for survival. They have very few places they can turn to and in many cases don’t want to turn to. So I thought that by giving a homeless person the chance to make a living by selling a quality product I could make that persons life at least a little bit better. I was hoping that that would also enable people to preserve their dignity instead of having to beg for money and to depend completely on the charity of strangers.

Thomas: How do you finance your publication and how many copies do you print for every issue?

Marija: We’re financed only through advertisement and charity events, like our Streetmag charity night that took place in February at the club Maria am Ostbahnhof. Young and talented bands, breakdancers, famous graffiti artists and DJs supported the project by showing their skills. We even had a raffle of canvases with pieces by Berlin graffiti artists that were painted on site. Streetmag was also present at several events of the Berlinale film festival to find more sponsors and has already been  presented on several radio programs as well as in magazines and newspapers. I used to work in advertising so I’m going to make use of the knowledge I got from this field in order to finance Streetmag completely through advertisement. The first issue of Streetmag had 20,000 copies and was distributed all over Berlin. We are currently working on the second edition.

Thomas: Do you manage Streetmag all by yourself?

Marija: No, Streetmag is a project that is realized by me and my friend Aleksander Vidojkovic. He is one of the founding members and chairman of the GeniusArtCorp. e.V.

The GeniusArtCorp. e.V. is an association consisting of social workers, people from the media industry and actors like Robert Viktor Minich, Ralf Richter, Birol Ünel and Oktay Özdemir. The association is campaigning social youth work and realizing several projects like Streetmag, the movie project Keine Zeit Zu Leben (No Time to Live), the youth street theater Pirating of Love with Oktay Özdemir and many other projects.

Thomas: How do you distribute the copies to the vendors?

Marija: We deliver the magazines to every “Stadtmission” (city mission) and emergency shelter all over Berlin. Whenever we see a homeless person on the street we give him as many magazines as he can carry.

Thomas: Who can contribute to Streetmag? Peope from Berlin only? What about texts that are not in German?

Marija: Every one is invited to send us their works. If it fits to our concept we don’t care if it is in German or English. Just send us an email to info@street-mag.de

Photos by Gordon Koelmel | FTGRF Fotodesign

The Augsburg, Germany based photography magazine Der Greif (The Griffin) is a wonderful publication that began as regional project, but has since garnered worldwide attention. Since starting in 2008, the magazine’s creators have had the chance to present their brainchild at Preview Art Fair Berlin, Stroke Urban Art Fair Munich, Fotobook Festival Kassel, Dezines Madrid and Magazine Library Tokyo and annually release a special edition for the media festival Schmiede in Hallein, Austria.

The magazine combines photography and literature in a unique way. They welcome contributions from all over the globe, and try not to focus on any specific theme. What that means is that after receiving the material, the Der Greif crew acts as curators and combines the images with the texts to create beautiful new media combinations and, in a way, new pieces of art.

The people behind the magazine view their website as a forum for participating artists and as a mobile gallery to present a broad collection of photos and texts, as well as allow closer looks into individual artists work. However, they treat the physical publication more as a book than a classic magazine. By choosing a unique format, high-quality paper and not running any advertisements in the publication, every issue becomes a truly collectible item. The magazine’s creators made these choices to encourage a decrease in the speed of both content and consumption, and to allow the readers to fully immerse themselves in the art as well as the medium. But the magazine and the website are connected by means of download codes that enable the buyer of the physical publication to access exclusive non-printable content on the online platform.

Since Der Greif started out as a project by friends, its makers strongly believe in DIY ethics and networking and regularly offer workshops and panel discussions that enable others to get an insight into the processes of creating a magazine. Additionally they can be contracted as curators for exhibitions and other events.

The upcoming issue will be published in early March and has received close to 2000 submissions from over 20 countries. So check the website, get the latest edition, submit any material that you deem fit for this unique magazine, and help keeping Der Greif what it is: a wonderful experiment that hopefully gets to develop, evolve and grow for many more issues to come.

Making Of »Der Greif Schmiede Spezial 2« from Pop Ross on Vimeo.

With political and military tensions growing between North and South Korea, it’s time to take a closer look at North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il – while he looks at things. These images (and more like them) can be seen on the strangely interesting website Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things.

With America still knee-deep in the recession, and a banking industry that has long lost all trustworthiness, more people are starting to think about alternative systems of monetary exchange and trying to develop new, mainly community based, structures and platforms for the exchange of goods and ideas in general.

Dossier talked to director and media artist Gabriel Shalom about the Future of Money project, DIY tactics and the risks of speaking your mind openly when you’re a bank employee.

Thomas: The whole Future of Money project pretty much started with a very unexpected invitation.

Gabriel: Yeah. Basically the Future of Money project started when Venessa Miemis was invited to speak at this huge banking conference, SIBOS, and she approached me and asked me, could this be an opportunity to collaborate?

Thomas: Where you experienced in financial matters before the project?

Gabriel: No, not at all. This was new territory for me. Although what I did find out as we did our research was, that many of the alternative systems we were exploring were things I was already involved with. So I hadn’t per se used a complementary currency or had time banked explicitly, but I had done things in the last year that, as I worked on this project, I realized were alternatives to monetary exchange. I had traded sponsorship in one of our projects for office space earlier in the year and we had hired people to work on a project for no money but instead for reputation and exposure on the projects website. And I noticed more and more when I examined some of the concepts behind these alternatives to monetary exchange that they were already a part of the way I was thinking about how I was making ends meet, but also the business I have together with Pati Kommerell at KS12. It was funny, it was suddenly familiar once we had gotten a little deeper into the material.

Thomas: After you had gotten the invitation, you had come to come up with ideas for the funding of your project. How did you approach this obstacle?

Gabriel: When Venessa asked if we wanted to collaborate with her on this, we realized that it wouldn’t be so easy to do this for free. But we also felt confident, that there was an audience watching Venessa, what she was going do next and what move she was making. Venessa has a pretty popular blog called Emergent by Design and she’s getting close to 5000 Twitter followers, so we knew that she had a following and we spoke with her and basically planed how we could make this project relevant for the people that were already interested in her. And so we developed a crowd-funding concept and one of the first things we had to decided was whether or not to use Kickstarter. The main reason we decided not to use Kickstarter was that, although we defined a goal for how much money we wanted to raise, we were willing to try out this collaboration regardless of if we would make any money of it or not. Luckily, when we did the crowd-funding, we were pleasantly surprised to see that 50 people in the end made contributions, and four of them in fact made significant contributions, so that we were able to to raise something like $5600.

Thomas: Those four people also became your executive producers. Did that somehow change the way you were approaching the project?

Gabriel: I’m happy to say that the term “Executive Producer” in this case was gifted to the individuals who gave us that amount of money in a way that was more about acknowledging their generosity and less about giving them leverage or control over the project. They didn’t really play the traditional role of a producer in terms of the way films are usually being produced, in so far as they had no say really over what we said, how we said it, the duration of the film or the content of the film. They had no access to that. And they went into the relationship knowing that that would be the way it would be. That was a comfortable position for them to take apparently.

Thomas: Let’s talk a little bit about Amsterdam. I’ve seen some comments on your video blog that I found pretty funny. You were saying that at the big dinner of the SIBOS conference you felt like you were sitting at the kids table and you were mentioning that one day you noticed that you were the only person at the conference wearing sneakers. What were your expectations for the conference and did you feel that the representatives of the project and the project itself were being taken seriously by the other participants of the convention?

Gabriel: Our executive producers took us very seriously and I think the Innotribe team, which was the innovation team at the SIBOS conference, were big fans of the work and very supportive and glad that we were there, but you have to understand that all those individuals added up together constitute lass than half a percent of the SWIFT organization and even a smaller smidgeon of the attendees at the SIBOS conference, because there were 8000-9000 people there. On the whole I would say that I had little expectations going into it and I wasn’t particularly disappointed. I didn’t think that the message we were communicating would resonate strongly with that audience. I also didn’t think that that was our objective. I sort of saw the purpose of it as being some kind of transfer of lots of high level ideas at a very compact and high speed format, that would probably not register consciously for most people that saw it and so my feeling was that if anybody in the audience had any kind of aha-moment or epiphany because of what they saw, that then we would have somehow succeeded on some minor level, because I already felt that we were up against odds, which were very, very low, in terms of connecting. One thing that really struck me though was a connection I made with this young man from Suriname, who was actually working the door of the innovation area. He had a laser scanner in his hand and every time somebody came into the room he was obligated to scan their badge for statistics for the SIBOS conference. And I got into conversation with him and he was asking me why I was here and said that I seemed out of place a little and I said, well, you’re right, I’m not a banker, I’m a filmmaker. And I explained him our project and he said that he had actually peeked into the room when we were showing it and I asked him if it made sense to him and if it represented any of his values and perspectives. This guy was probably in his early 20′s, from Suriname, living in the Netherlands, studying, but planning on eventually going back to Suriname, and I was really surprised how readily accessible the ideas were to him. And he was someone who was not specialized, he was not someone who was, at least not yet, particularly highly educated, but he was somebody who was bright enough and of the right age, that I felt that the ideas were readily accessible to him. So what I thought at that moment was that even if we had some inability to connect deeply with this banking audience, we still made a piece of video that communicated generationally very strongly and that felt good.

Thomas: I remember that on your video blog you were saying exactly that thing, that you had gotten very little direct responses to the video by the bankers that saw the video and that you think that it really could be problem of generation or even of vocabulary.

Gabriel: One of our patrons told us that her husband, who was a banker for many years, first saw the video and speechlessly immediately rewound it to the beginning and watched it again and again and again. And after he had watched it four times without any comment, he kind of just held his head and said, we haven’t been thinking about this stuff at all. That anecdote really moved me and it only came secondhand, because I think we have to remember that the people at that event, that did feel sympathetic to what we had to say and maybe even wanted to stand up on our behalf are alienated by corporate structures and that they don’t have a voice because they are afraid of getting fired. Anything they say or do in that kind of context we were at at SIBOS is grounds for them to risk their job. If they speak out, if they any subversive or alternative opinion too loudly, then gossip or observation by their colleagues can give them a very bad reputation quickly and I think it takes empathy and sensibility to acknowledge that that kind of internal censorship and self-censorship is going on and that one has to accept the fact that there may be more fans of this project in that community than we are able to to actually perceive.

As much as we might perceive the banking industry as inhumane and full of people who have little to no moral compass and are only concerned about money, there are some people – how many I can’t say – who are really decent human beings working inside of these large organizations. So, maybe more people got it than we can actually perceive. That’s not a conclusion that leaves you very optimistic in general, cause you’d like to know how many people in the banking industry really got these ideas, but if you accept the fact that that industry is like a silo with this self-censorship and this kind of authoritarian power structure then you kind of have to shrug your shoulders and say that you hope that the ones who can change stuff internally will do, and that you hope that the ones that should be defecting quit, and just wait and see what happens.

Thomas: For what I’ve seen in the video I think that probably the biggest difference between what you’ve been doing and what other people have been doing at the conference, was probably that Future of Money was a personal and passionate project, whereas other things were just jobs. Did you come across any other interesting projects at SIBOS?

Gabriel: In terms of producing a piece that’s personal and has an opinion that’s more of an artistic expression: No. In terms of more independent though: Yes. The guy from ZOPA was there and talking in one of the innovation sessions. Again a lot of what he said didn’t seem to get much reaction, but he’s part of a company in the UK that’s at the forefront of peer to peer lending and his perspective was quite different about what the future of lending and borrowing could look like. I think some of the other individuals at SIBOS that were a little bit more black sheep were funny enough the venture capitalists, which you don’t necessarily immediately from a distance think of as the the loose canons or the radicals, but in the context of an industry which is as conservative as banking venture capitalists end up being pretty radical and they are radical because they take risks in their work. That makes them a bit more passionate, a bit more lively and generally much more free thinking than a lot of the bankers we encountered.

Thomas: Georg Zoche of Transnational Republic said something very interesting in one of your videos. He said that even though we handle money every day, its still mysterious and alien to many people. And some key words I’ve been hearing in most of the videos are trust, transparency and self-organization. Would you say that your project is a pledge for a more personal and humane access to a financial system or money in general?

Gabriel: The reflections I have had about this project are mostly how we need to experiment with our definitions of what we value and that we need to understand that if we only value money were limiting ourselves emotionally and psychologically. Ultimately people who value money to an extreme exhibit psychological imbalances. If you look at the very, very wealthy, they are often isolated, and their money is often the reason for that isolation. I guess coming out of this my biggest “aha” is that as an artist, as someone who is interested in self-expression, someone who is compelled even to express himself, I’m finding this project an affirmation of the capability of those of us who have a talent for self expression to find the support that we need in networks and that we don’t have to continue to feel dependent on hierarchies to support our creativity. I predicate this statement with the word “talent” because I do think that there’s a certain amount of requisite talent, but the good news is that its not nearly as high as the hierarchical system made it before. You can’t just be some bum with an acoustic guitar and no ability to sing and no ability to write songs – and I’m not gonna tell you that you’ll make it as long as you create a blog and a MySpace page and a SoundCloud account – but if you got talent and people around you like what you do and if you are interesting and if you have something to say then you have a good chance. It’s not about connecting with a global audience and outdoing every one else that does the same things you do in this hyper-competitive landscape that it used to be, its much more about connecting with the people that care about what you do. There’s this magic number, that if you have a 1000 true fans then you can sustain yourself as a creative person and you can actually get a message out that needs to be amplified on a much more massive level. This project showed me that we’re in an era where self-organization is something we can actually embrace in practice, we can do it and play with it and see what happens. Oftentimes I joke around with people who work more in this direction of this way of thinking and they say: Be careful what you wish for. Because I really feel that the internet is a manifestation machine at this point. If you put enough energy out there about what you want, you can and maybe will get it, if you’re talented enough and if you’re honest enough with your audience. And that becomes the big existential question for creators and for anybody really: What do you really want in your life and are actually ready to ask for it and receive it?

Thomas: One of the tools you used to promote the Future of Money project was Twitter ,and I know that you are a big Twitter fan. So for the project you pretty much asked people what kind of questions they would want you to ask at the conference. Can people still contribute to the project or get involved in it in one way or another?

Gabriel: There are different ways people can interface directly with what we’ve built. Obviously they can comment on the blog and we’ve created a Facebook page. Also people are encouraged to circulate the video, to remix it, to mash it up, to incorporate it into larger bodies of work, as long as its non-commercial. That’s the idea of the creative comments licensing behind the project, that we want people to take this information and use it and do stuff with it. I also think that its important to say that we consider ourselves communicators. And that goes for all of the people involved in this project. Jay Cousins is a physical communicator, Pati Kommerell is a graphic communicator, I’m an audiovisual communicator and Venessa is a text-based communicator. And we are messengers. We’re here to spread information and to tell stories around that information. So if people are looking for a movement or a larger structure they can become a part of, now that this project is winding up, then really their own autonomy is the only thing stopping them from finding it. Because I don’t know if if I or Venessa or the people involved in Emergence Collective will necessarily continue with this theme of the future of money indefinitely. We’ve set some very good momentum into place and there’s the possibility there of being more work done. But I think ultimately its about following what makes us passionate. So if the passion dies out on this project, it doesn’t mean that the content isn’t still important and it doesn’t mean that other people can’t get passionate about it.

Thomas: So, what is the immediate future for the Future of Money project?

Gabriel: It is to finish what we’ve started. I think you’re gonna see at least one more video blog, which will just sort of wrap things up. There’s going to be an research visualization of the work that we’ve done so far, that people can use as a resource if they wanna get deeper into the universe of things we’ve been talking about. And we’ve got to consult our four executive producers. And then after that we’ll see. I can say that I’m already aware of at least one other opportunity where the Future of Money project could be publicly presented, but I can’t really talk about it yet, because its not confirmed 100%.

Munich-based hip hop crew Arm und Hässlich (translation: Poor and Ugly) not only produces sweet beats and rhymes, but also makes great videos. The video to their song Unperfektion feat. Soihe is one of the best stop-motion productions I have come across in a long time. Everyone on their production team must be OCD, because they have thought about everything, from a miniature Akai and electric piano to Bob Marley, ODB and La Haine posters and Karl Lagerfeld photos on the walls to Masta Ace, Mad Villain and Theodorakis record covers. Even the elephant flaps its ears in excitement when it sees the record crate. This video is just like the  Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong record the mole-like producer spins in the video. For lovers. By lovers. Thank you.

A few months ago we presented work by artist LNY in our Look section. Now Dossier got a hold of him for a quick conversation during his recent stay in Berlin.

Thomas: The pieces you posted in Berlin are site specific in different ways. How aware of current political discussions in Germany and Europe were you when you drew and pasted said pieces?

LNY: Well, let me start by saying that it’s impossible to leave “environment” out of the production of art. If you have a small studio the work will tend to be small, if your studio is the city then the work gets bigger and gains an outside context. Thinking this way I see the work made in Berlin as being “context specific” as opposed to “site specific”. Context specific in the way that they were made for and derive their meaning from the social and physical environment surrounding them. So If I put up the same pieces around, let’s say Tokyo, they would lose their meaning or gain one that is completely different. Either way my aim was to communicate with this specific city.

Of current German policy I didn’t know much, but I was aware of France recently banning the burqa. As far as making art I don’t necessarily try to be political, I just react to whatever moves me the most and to what the experience within the city dictates. In Berlin I didn’t do any research or asked questions until after I had decided on what to focus for the project, and this came from weeks of walking the streets, meeting people, and eating tons of kebabs and falafel.

Thomas: How important is it for you to work site specific and how do you choose the spots for your paste-ups?

LNY: Making the work site specific is the most fun I could ever have; It’s challenging, fresh and it feels right. So it usually comes down to time and planning, you can make something real quick and it could be brilliant or you could take your time with a mural or paste up and really activate a space, but it all comes down to making that decision before you start or getting a bright idea the minute you see a spot. The Berlin pieces were made for the city but not for any specific buildings so hunting down a great spot was half luck and half improvisation. Sometimes a wall is just asking for it, or the graf on it would be so bad that you have to. I pasted with Chin Chin and she would say ,”Let’s cover that toy!” and we would. Two person democracy.

More often than not I pick an interesting area then find suitable walls in said area. For this project I started in Neukölln and went on from there to other parts of the city. Its also great went I have a chance to see how the piece decays or gets covered, tagged over or sometimes even burnt, which is all part of the discussion that happens out there.

Thomas: You just finished a residency at Space Beam in Incheon, South Korea. Could you tell us a little bit about the space, your work there and how the surroundings influenced your creative process.

LNY: Well, that was an all around super positive experience for me, I loved the Space Beam community, the artists and the village. Space Beam is an art space working out of an old rice wine factory in Baedari, Incheon. They focus on working with the community as well as serving as a catalyst for activism around the area. The residency program is based on a “public studio” format, which means the artists do not have individual studios but are embedded into the town in order to create with and for the community, which needless to say was tailor made for me and every other artist picked. What ended up happening with my work was that during the incubation period I developed these relationships with people from the area just by living there, got to know the restaurant owners, the community organizers and neighbors. So all I did was photograph and sketch the hell out of anyone I came in contact with. Later on this busy work became something else, big wall drawings, paste-ups, cut-outs, whatever. The content of the pieces reflect the people from the area, their personal history and their current situation, or at least I hope that’s what they do.

The other interesting development here was the addition of a significant budget to my process. As an artists coming out of New Jersey during an economic recession there are certain ethics you develop; self-reliance, a DIY spirit, thinking big and staying small, living on the humble. So here I had some reach, an assistant, huge ladders and some great friends I could count on so the drawings got bigger, more colorful, way developed. I was able to really take my time and activate space with the drawings by placing them in a grey area where historical, personal or social context meets architecture, environment and space.

Thomas: Now you are on your way back to New Jersey where, at least for some time, you’ll have to go back to working with a considerably smaller budget than the one you’ve had at hand while you were in Korea. Do you think that having had this experience of being given a budget has changed your way of creating art, or can you always just go back to a low-budget style of handling things and making ends meet?

LNY: I see my process of making art not only as a result of a financial situation but as a reaction to the current state of the art world and therefore as a conscious choice. I believe art must be free and it needs to engage in order to communicate, that’s why the white cube is a limited platform for communication in a world where you can reach so many people out in the streets or online. Sol LeWitt said something I always think about: ”… since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it.” To me, what LeWitt is saying really connects open source principles to art. Doing something open source software-wise basically means that the code and ideas are shared and built upon freely and collectively by a community of developers. The Berlin project cost me under 15 euros to produce – buying cheap paper, acrylic paint and two brushes plus glue. Anybody can afford to do this, just follow the code and add your ideas to the discussion. This form of art, albeit illegal, is so damn democratic. So in short, having the the extra cash did influence my work in Korea but it did not change the principles behind it, which function regardless of a low or high budget. That’s why I love it.

Thomas: How would you react if a big corporate enterprise was to offer you a huge budget to design an advertisement campaign or to paint a mural for them?

LNY: My reaction would be, ‘What the fuck? Why would they want me to do something I know nothing about?’ If it is about selling something then what I do creatively does nothing towards this goal, to some people it doesn’t even communicate! You could argue that I am selling myself but all artists do that inherently when they become part of a public discourse even if they are not trying to. For my reaction to be positive would depend on many variables. The most important one being how much respect I have for said big corporate enterprise and honestly, living in America means that the list is slim.

Thomas: But you can’t deny that a street artist’s fame and street credibility is something a company can easily exploit in order to sell products like shoes, t-shirts and what not, even if said artist knows nothing about big business.

LNY: Yes, but now we are talking about exploitation! Before I naively expected there to be a positive rapport and level of communication between the big corp and the artist, but more often than not this is not the case. Also corporations don’t really need to hire the artist anymore, they can just co-opt the art and use it in an ad like it happened with JR recently. Honestly so much of graffiti and street art is basically an attack on big corporations, rampant advertising and one sided public communication that it doesn’t organically lend itself to advertising. That is at least in its reasons for being if not in its methods of being.

Thomas: Of course we are not talking about expoitation in a literal sense, but in the sense of a willing collaboration.

LNY: Well then again it would depend on the type of corporation we are talking about and if I feel comfortable working with them and what they do. I am not against artists making money from corporate entities but you know, back in art school while being groomed to become a painter, this question would hardly ever come up. My expectations of what this means are different because I’ve never cared to think about it, doesn’t really enter the equation when I’m making something. In the end what is most important to me is the work and keeping true to my vision of it, not selling shoes and t-shirts.

Thomas: Could you actually define your vision of art?

LNY: I can’t say I have a vision of “Art” with a capital A. When I work I am thinking of ideas that add up to the project at hand, so I form a vision for each particular piece or project. Just like drawing in general, there is this immediacy to the act that I don’t quite control but ends up taking me somewhere interesting, when that happens it’s like the Death Star blowing up at the end of Return of the Jedi, brraaatttt!! So no, I don’t like to define art, not my own art or in general. Too much subterfuge and it’s something you have to experience, like live music. You ever read Pitchfork reviews and it’s all poetic and shit but you really can’t tell what the music sounds like until you hear it? That’s what art is like to me. Empirical.

drawing as an action from ynlynlynl on Vimeo.

After his very impressive stop-motion film “Muto“ and after releasing several teasers over the last weeks and months, everybody’s favorite Italian Blu is back with his new film “Big Bang Big Boom.” This time he takes on the theory of evolution and shows you where life might have come from, what steps it has gone through and how it might end. And as always Blu’s universe consist of 1.000.000 liters of paint, trash and creepy creatures. Enjoy.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Unlike a paperboy, a papergirl does not follow the same route. She goes where ever she wants, never takes the same road twice, talks to strangers and doesn’t even collect money at the end of the month. She is the kind of girl all the boys, and girls for that matter, want to hang out with. And they all can. Papergirl is a Berlin-originated arts project that started in 2006, that has since spread all over the world, taking art back to the streets and to the people.

The concept of Papergirl is that any artist who wants to participate in the project is welcome to submit. The only guidelines are that submissions need to be presented in sets of two and most importantly, the art can be rolled up. The selected pieces will then be exhibited at a gallery. After the closing of the exhibition, Papergirl keeps one copy of each piece for their archive, rolls up the rest of the artwork and attaches information about the artist and the program to each roll. Then a pack of cyclists roam every district of the city and randomly hand out the art to people on the streets for free. Sina Hickey, founder of the Albany chapter and one of the brains behind this year’s Berlin edition, explained that this aspect of the project is the essential element of Papergirl, since it reaches people that wouldn’t usually get in touch with art much to actually have a piece for themselves, without having to pay anything.

The routes of the Papergirls therefore need to cover all parts of the city, especially those that don’t have galleries or museums, and the art should be given to those who least expect it. Instead of trying to make money, the project focuses on presenting the art in a spontaneous, unique and direct way. When I asked her what kind of reactions the Papergirls had gotten during last year’s paper route, Hickey just smiled and said that they had seen everything from grateful faces, to people just ignoring them, to having the art thrown right back at them. She also explained that the project is in part a reaction to the ever increasing anti-graffiti movement in Berlin, and that the handing out of art on the street is a creative approach to dodge these strict laws. The last exhibition in Berlin, Papergirl’s fifth, was the biggest so far. Added incentive-Papergirls will help you to trick your bikes out into tall cycles or low riders, so you can help distribute the art in style after the closing.

This year, Papergirls from other cities like Capetown, Manchester or Bucharest, were invited to participate in the Berlin edition, in order to share ideas, experiences and vision for the future of the project, which they hope to expand worldwide. There will also be a symposium on the topic “The Art of Giving Art.” The Papergirl Berlin exhibition is on at Neurotitan Gallery until the 23rd of July. For more dates, locations and info on Papergirl Berlin, check out their Facebook page.

Good news if you can’t get to Berlin, Papergirl hits the US this summer. The deadline for submissions for the NY State Edition has just been extended to the 1st of August, so all of you who still want to participate—get your sharpies, your brushes and your crayons and get busy. Those who want to contribute to the San Francisco edition still have until the 18th of August.

Click “Read More” for a video trailer, some photos from the last exhibit and up-coming dates.

Dumbo Art Center NYC: August 23-27
Armory in Manhattan NYC: August 28-29
Marketplace Gallery Albany: September 3-6

from SinaBasila on Vimeo.