Threaded from David Lanham on Vimeo.

Last year I went through the Orange County Arts Council’s
TEACHING ARTIST PROGRAM. The focus being that the arts are under-represented and in many cases being removed from schools. Just at a time when everyone is talking about how we need more thinkers and idea people to regenerate our economy and society (sigh). Anyway, I had the pleasure of working with the last classes of 4th and 5th graders at Pine Island Elementary school in Warwick, NY. The school is now closed. The project was called Collective Comics. I had the students help me create the main character by asking each student a question about the character. Then combining the suggestions into a simple character that everyone could draw. Below are links to the 2 comics we created together and a simple (read as silly) comic I created as a concept I could show.

This is my concept piece [ .PDF File ]

A Day in the Life of Carl Blarf Bob

What’s a young girl from Jupiter to do but hang out with her 3 eyed cat named Billy, plan trips to the Earth, and get her hair done?

The Strange Day of Bob Daniell

If your favorite outfit was a tutu, basketball shoes and a birdcage on your head you might find that very little of what happens to you is all that extra-ordinary.

Since they are student work, if you would like to have a copy of the work please email me ten.eltrutkomnull@kram and I’ll send you a download link.

Over a year ago, I felt that this site was so neglected that I needed to take a break completely. So I shut it down, thinking I could then redesign it and launch “the perfect” site.

Don’t think that way kids, its so much easier to keep a site going and make changes than to kill all the momentum. So from here we add real content and see if we can get some momentum!

This is a demonstration created to try to broaden people’s ideas about web links and incorporating the idea of writing hypertext, or writing “hypertextually”. I am a big fan of the work of Ted Nelson, as well as Tim Burners-Lee’s intention of creating a ReadWrite Web from the very beginning. The essence of hypertext is to write meaningfully. Then layer more meaning into your work by linking concepts and information to further sources. This can be factual information like Wikipedia or pure fiction. Either way the act of linking a word to a concept or explanation is a very powerful thing. Its sad to see so much of the web where people have just listed index links on the top or side. It requires less thought and skill from the content creator, but it doesn’t use this new medium anywhere close to its potential.

The DEMO Can Be Found Here. >>

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled. -H.P.Lovecraft