Stykker af Stumper - Pieces of Bits

The first Denmark-based workshop for a secret club of the year is a mere week and two days away and I'm very, very proud of this one. We are presenting a miniature programme of films at a cinema to fuel imagination before playing. The programme consists of a surprise short by the Quay Brothers, followed by Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - links to trailer, tickets and info on a secret club's website.


Image from schhh.org

When the house lights go up, our Automatic Collage Material Vending Machine will be purring like a kitten and ready to provide the punters with everything they need to make a collage of unimaginable beauty and cleverness.

If you're in Aarhus, and want to spend a Sunday morning like it's meant to be spent, buy your tickets here.

This one is more for the grown-ups as the films are, but if any kids want to drop in at around 12.30-1.00PM when the film is over, we're not known to stop you.

offline online advent calender

Last year around this time a secret club created a little online experience or activity every day for our advent calender playing with the idea of taking an online activity and method of delivery out of the computer, there were paper kits, collage challenges and so on.



This year, our advent calendar is running on the four Sundays leading up to Christmas - this is major thing in continental Northern Europe and this time, it's even more removed from the internet that hosts it: It's a geographical game (we love geographical games) and by following the instructions posted on the website, you will find a creation of ours in the landscape in and around Aarhus.


This was the first one, now taken offline, so the directions to it are gone, but the little house is still out there for passers by to see.

the streets of Aarhus
It's no secret that I miss the art, design and inspiration of London and that Aarhus is lacking edge. I've ranted about crap galleries before and it made me very happy that Art Snob has now shut. On Sunday, however, Aarhus showed itself from its good side and gave me this:



First is a page from a porn mag, made harmless with plasters. This made me smile, the porn is disarmed but in a slight off putting way.

Second is a couple of Lego 19s added to already too many, turning it into a Paul Hardcastle song. I read about the guy doing these and the article mentioned that he repaired buildings with Lego, i figured it was just another rip-off artist, ripping off Jan Vormann but his house numbers are good. Why do so many Danes think we don't google the same stuff they do or look in the same Die Gestalten books?

Anyway, last image is an ornamental Jack White, I do love this model kit urge to accurize your house's ornaments, crap as it may look.

Actually, that's not all we found, we found one of these little unmanned shops you usually only find in the countryside too, we bought a metal fish-mould and an old tin that used to be the home of some ice cream that went under the name Tripoli, but more about them later.

Studio tour: The stuff around us
We have finished (well, we still need to make a movie) our "Spirits of the Forest" project, school's out, so no more teaching and most clients are away on holiday so let me use the time to show you round the place, you see, we moved about 4-5 months ago and sadly the new place didn't allow for a separate studio so we've engaged in a strict Not-too-much-stuff regime as the boundary between work and living has been blurred. This doesn't mean minimalist Scandinavian living like in the mags - objects feed our brains, so here are some objects that made the cut:



Don't be fooled, the clipboard look neat here, but the truth is that the photo was taken RIGHT after they got up in that old magazine rack. Also, we have more than one magazine but one is allowed in the rack at a time - at the time it was an issue of the always mind blowing Raw Vision. Right now, there are two issues of It's Nice That (3+4), Latest issue of CUT, an old Lodown, a print sample of a parenting mag and The Guardian from June 11th (We miss The Guardian so Chris of Garudio Studiage with whom I used to teach at Central Saint Martins sent us a copy back in June - If you want to send us a copy of The Guardian in exchange for anything bar our souls, please get in touch.

The candle was Mr. Mio's christening candle - a German tradition. The standard ones were pretty awful in that religious way so we made our own.

The glasses were from an optician that closed shop, they're carved in wood and the hands are from an old glove factory, someone I shared studio with once got them for a project.



Ah, the odd mix of light switches and plug sockets from different eras , the fake Pikachu one and the feather one are pretty random, the tache one was in our old studio too.



Art we like.
Some from friends, some from former students, some from former versions of ourselves, some are just nice, like the Letraset sheet there are a few things that ought to be there that aren't.



Wallpaper archeology.
I stripped of some of the newer layers of wallpaper - probably in impulse stemming from my childhood. On that wall are a couple of jumping jacks Annabelle made and a big green F that I found in a town called Ebeltoft which sounds a bit like someone the Moomins might know.



A mirror that still hasn't been put up reflects Annabelle working on something by the window that hosted The Sage, The Basil, The Rosemaries, Helen's Tomato, Pale Dill, Father Thyme, Dead Hot Chili Papas and a toner cartridge waiting to be sent to the recycling place.

That's it, I need to design some stickers for a secret club now. And you need to scoot over to that same club to join the mailing list, we have good things coming. Including stickers.

stadig et par pladser til Skovens Ånder

Der er stadig et par pladser til vores "Skovens Ånder" eventyr på lørdag.
AOA har et lille stykke om det her.


De rå masker er landet fra trykkeriet og siden billedet blev taget er de blevet maskificeret.
The raw masks have arrived from the printers and since the taking of this picture, they have been maskified further."

hidden gems

This summer, we went to a small island off the east coast of Jutland (Denmark.)
On our way there we passed a building that caught my eye - it was an odd mix of different building styles and looked something like this:



In passing, I saw a sign that said Glud Museum. After a bit of googling I found the website and on leaving the island on our way back we decided to pay a visit, mostly because of a certain folk-arty influence that flows through our work at the moment, but also because a bit of reading had convinced me that the founder of this museum was an interesting fella - he built the strange house and produced work like this:



At various points of his life, he had been submitted to mental hospitals and he had been banned from teaching drawing to a group of students. This guy was not technically mentally ill - he was just hot-headed and had strong opinions (Anti drink, smoke, coffee, meat).

He had a great love of architecture, of crafts and of preserving buildings for the past and because of that we had the chance to see this hidden gem of a museum. I had never heard of it before, but it would leave an impression and would directly influence the building of our Signalling System: We based the colour scheme on objects seen at Glud Museum - being a non-dane Annabelle was better at noticing things I had been accustomed to all my life - it takes an outsider to notice.



We'd like to return with a secret club, we'd like to organise some event there - these things shouldn't just be for big cities. Of course the eternal problem of funding will arise, but we will see if we can figure that out.

We will also need to investigate - if this little wonder escaped our eyes for so long, what other amazing stuff is out there? There's a communication task here too - why haven't we heard of it? there's a similar, but higher profile museum a bit further north - should these cooperate? Should Glud Museum target people nearer to the other museum?