Times change, but the message doesn’t.

Neither do the post-tragedy trinket sales.

A brief celebration of America, courtesy of Fakeproject founding member, Shaun Fort.

Not safe for work, children, or adults.

In 1952 the Soviets published “Kniga o Vkusnoi i Zdorovoi Pishe” (”Book about Tasty and Healthy Food/Eating”).
This book contains many fascinating and beautiful examples of Soviet-era product design.
The FPCoA, having scanned the entire volume, presents the most interesting color plates here, free of charge.

The Corporation wishes to specially thank Dima and Irina Solyanoy for their assistance in locating the book.

God is dead.
Art is dead.
Mr. Rogers is dead.
Lots of things are dead.
Baudrillard is dead now, too.

I don’t think I’d have understood this the way I did, without having read his work. Full resolution, for reflection.

Psychology journal articles, from time to time, yield gems for the careful reader, squelching logical progression for a crunchy hunk of unexpected:

“Recall a scenario described earlier: A child unexpectedly runs in
front of a car while the driver is fiddling with the radio. At least
two different indices can be examined to determine whether the child
has caught the driver’s attention: One is the driver’s awareness of
the child, and the other is the effect of this unexpected event on the
driver’s radio-tuning performance.”

Most, Scholl, Clifford, and Simons, 2005.

Occasionally, too, charts and graphs provide where words fail:

Interest in buying high SPF sunscreen as a function of mortality salience and delay.

Slide five from a presentation by Arndt, from C Routledge, J Arndt, JL Goldenberg - A time to tan: Proximal and distal effects of mortality salience on intentions, 2004

Ten or so years ago, RadioSh*ck would give you a store-made sheet of frequencies for your newly purchased police scanner. When I transferred to the tiny, shitty store near Wal-Mart on Highway 10, I found a copy of one of those sheets in the back room and stashed it away in a folder. While RadioSh*ck has consistently and drastically declined in quality, the usefulness of the frequency sheet I found has not.

The legibility of my copy is pretty poor — (it looks like a fax of a photocopy of a felt-penned personal log) — and some things were unreadable. Where possible, I guessed or checked with my own lists. Where impossible, I simply marked “illegible”.

Here’s a copy of the original handout on Fargo-Moorhead Scanner frequencies.
Here’s the same in Open Office .ODS
In Excel .XLS
In .PDF

In the last few weeks I’ve unearthed a trove of old Fakeproject-generated and collected materials, project documentation, other things. I’ll be releasing it as it gets scanned and written up.

I would be extremely glad to hear from you if you had anything related to me, us, Fakeproject, the MSUM art department, the Will Kill for Gas campaign, the Fargo Winter Carnivale, or any other Dan or Fake/Fakeproject ephemera from between 1997-2007. I will scan photographs, slides, negatives, drawings, diagrams, notebooks, digitize VHS, make DVDs from your tapes, if you will only loan me a copy.

My email address is on the front page. Please write if you have something.

I’m becoming a vision scientist, slowly. This means study, which breeds research. While I don’t yet have my own experiments to publish in journals like that of the Vision Sciences Society, that doesn’t stop me from using my art training to go for the cover.

My cover image submission for the VSS 2007 journal, after Tootell’s 1982 study of the macaque striate cortex. Tootell’s research confirmed a startling, beautiful, and strange fact about the structure of the brain: the structure of the primary visual cortex reflects the projection of the world onto our retinas.

In the back of your skull is a chemical print of my website.

Nothing brings out crass consumerism like Christian holidays in Western countries. Get down- with proper sound.

As mentioned below and before, Mike Reetz is a wicked percussionist, tirelessly pounding out patterns brilliant.

While Mike is usually the one giving me creative input (producing beats for the Corporation), this time, I’ve had the pleasure of designing something for him.

On December 10th, 2006, 5:00pm at Heskett Hall, you can see and hear the man in action.

If you didn’t catch it above — here is the poster.

Here is a printable version. 300 DPI at 8.5x11″

In conjunction with an acquaintance of mine, Jonathan Rouse, I’ve made available this US government pamphlet about the Japanese tactics used in WWII.

Update: Alan White had these interesting thoughts about the pamphlet:

“The date of publication is 1 August 1945. The A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August. At that time, the Allied forces were gearing up for a potential invasion of Japan. They were anticipating last-ditch defenses much stiffer than seen at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Estimated Allied casualties were predicted to be 400,000 to a million. This booklet could very well have been started into production in preparation for the invasion, but then never produced in mass numbers because the end of the war came a few weeks later.

The front encourages individual units to reproduce the book and distribute it to individual soldiers. The explanation on that page is dated 15 July 1945, so they went to press very quickly after that, on 1 August 1945. I doubt many, if any, copies of this ever reached soldiers.”

The Fakeproject Corporation of America will continue to release interesting books. Watch this space for news.

Attribution: Jonathan found the book and scanned the whole thing. He posted a request for hosting; I cleaned the images and posted them. Long live the Internets! Long live good people with cool stuff.