Anonymous Pen Pal Matchmaking Service

UPDATE: (March 13, 2012) I'm no longer operating this project.
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Who doesn’t love snail mail? Who doesn’t get enough of it? I thought up this simple, low commitment project to make the most of our postal service and to brighten our days. Here’s the project:

1. You send me your current mailing address, the number of pen pals you want and an alternative name for yourself; it can be a code name, alter ego, anagram or anything you’d like to go by. Send the info to go.eat.some.poison@gmail.com

2. I reply to your email with another person or persons’ information. (I will only match up people that I know will not use other people’s info to harm them in anyway.)

3. You and your new pen pal can send each other letters, drawings, recipes, quizzes, stickers, postcards, pictures, crafts, lists, compilation CD’s, article clippings or anything else. A good way to start is by committing to each send one piece of correspondence a month. If you’re afraid of forgetting about your pen pal, pick a day of the month that you will always write to them on, like paying your bills, but more fun!

4. The rest is up to you! You choose how many pen pals you’d like, how long you’d like to be pen pals for, and if you want to remain anonymous to each other.

I will be running the Anonymous Pen Pal Matching Service as an ongoing project, so there’s no deadline, but why put off a good thing?

Improvaganza + Beasts & Creeps

This June brought Rapid Fire Theatre’s 10th Annual Improvaganza, Canada’s largest improv festival. As per usual this year’s festival featured performers from across the globe, which included some of my favourite people. It was a super blast, needless to say. I did some visual consulting for the festival and a drawing project I originally started just for kicks. “My Friends as Beasts and Creeps” is a project I started on Facebook at the start of June. It consists of me “stealing” friends’ photos, re-interpreting them with drawing skills and giving them back to the source from which they came. Amy Shostak, the Artistic Director of Rapid Fire Theatre asked me to do a ‘ganza specific edition where I drew performers from the festival and displayed them in the theatre’s lobby. Here a few of my faves so far (click on photos to be enlarged.) If you have a Facebook account you can view the album here.

Art of Waiting: Photobooth Contest!

Earlier in June I got an intriguing email from Jeffrey Nachtigall who had heard of my photobooth expertise through my work with Photobooth.net. Jeff, who also goes by the name Dirk Lancer online, runs an fascinating website, The Art of Waiting where he uses the young medium of the internet to promote interest in old analogue technologies. Art of Waiting is mostly dedicated to photography but also to other ideas like using the postal service. (I love real mail!) We’ve collaborated on a summer contest for Art of Waiting and it’s all about photobooths! The project is really exciting and there are some really awesome prizes to be won. I highly recommend you check out the details here on the site, you’d be missing out if you didn’t.

June: the sit still mod podge month

I returned from my trip to Toronto a few days ago, I was there for PROJECTproject’s incredible COMBUSTIONfestival. The Tumbleweed Project (cross-Canada improv tour) went extremely well as well. May was a really swell month that involved a lot of moving and shaking- both in the geography and dance floor sense. Though June has brought a drastic change of pace and the way things have worked out I’m going to be in Edmonton for the whole month! This may not sound so outlandish to most but for the last 12 months I haven’t stayed in the same city for more than three consecutive weeks, with an average of one week in each city I visit. I’ve got ants in my pants and one month of sitting still is a lot for me to handle these days. Though I do have good reasons to be here, Rapid Fire Theatre’s Improvaganza is on from June 16-26 and I will be helping out the festival. I’m also collaborating with a retired UofA art professor on a series of photographs (more on this in a future post). For the most part I’ll be doing Go Eat Some Poison commissions and freelance gigs here and there; little things that will be good at occupying my time and putting moneys in my pockets. Which will come in handy because July brings travel adventures in Australia and Japan. All I have to do is ignore the ants biting at my legs for 4 weeks.

The photo is of a banner I made upon my return in order to encourage myself to get through June.