Poster for Underground Art project. Click photo above or "more" below to view the index and catalog.more

Halloween 2008 (a & b)

(a) Sixteen inches tall. (b) Fourteen inches tall. Both: steel, nails, wire, wooden block, doll and action figure parts.more

Tinkering withFluxus Indian Fire Poles

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Golf club windmill & monument

This is going to be the biggest sculpture I've ever built.

New additions to stick garden

Janice came back from a nearby estate sale carrying new entries for our stick garden.more

Hoisting Halloween

Four hanging light-weight wooden frames wrapped in orange LED lights being hoisted up into a maple tree in the front yard.more

Falling Rock

19 pound rock suspended in fall by steel wires anchored to the top of a 8 x 8 x 15-inch box made of 1/2-inch steel rods.
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crafty pumpkin

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PIN PUNKDIY Fire Scupturewearable self-performance

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Frostcatcher #7

Eight-inch steel cube on 57-inch steel stake (stuck in ground) filled with pieces of broken bottle glass wrapped in wire and anchored to sides of cube.
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autumn harvest

Danger Music 2008

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Creative Janice

Our hibiscus plant is blooming like crazy...and shedding its wilted flowers like crazy. I challenged Janice to do something with these remnants. She knocked me out with this.

Route 1 - Big Sur Coast Highway

Eight-inch steel cube, rocks (picked up along Route 1 in Big Sur), toy car, steel wire.

Engineering

I built this tool to help me hold and weld three steel rods to form a corner with three "perfect" 90-degree angles. Four of these will make a square steel cube or box. This is an example of how the left brain can work to create a "canvas" or "space' in which the right (and left) brain can play.

Happy Birthday, Marilyn

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Manly jewelry

Manly necklaceManly badge-thing
Manly pendant
Asphalt shingles, wire, shoe strings, paint pens and safety pins.

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Saint Sparky Rides Again!

Performance with handout. Learn more about Saint Sparky here..

Tomato Tomahawks

Is this underground art? Art underground? Or not art?

Falling Rock (1A)

Fluxus Indians used suspended falling rocks to explore ideas about time and space.Steel, wire, rock--an 8-inch cube weighing 18.6 pounds. This rock will complete its fall--when the wire or frame rusts and breaks.more

Rocks from my back yard

Introducing my new welder--purchased with birthday money from my sisters.

Fifteen-pound block of steel, wire and rocks. Ten-inch x 6.75-inch x 3.25-inch steel frame wrapped on all sides with wire and filled with rocks from my backyard. Created in collaboration with Janice.

More cubism

Title of this piece: The Big and Small ElectroMagneticPunk Forces. Made this today and gave it to the guy who is letting me use his welder. Cut the 3/8-inch steel rods to size using my new electric Chop Saw (a tool Janice discovered at a Lowe's store yesterday).

Old Croquet Ball in Welded Steel Cube

Eight-inch steel cube made from rebar with a wire-wrapped vintage croquet ball. Borrowed a friend's welder to make this. Pretty poor job on the welding--need some practice. Spent several college summers working in a machine shop and doing a lot of welding.

Instructions on How to Play Croquet.

Have not had much time to create art lately. Just spent a week sitting on the roof re-shingling part of the house.

Felt hat with patches

There are 12 square felt patches on this hat--one for each of the symbols in The New Fluxus Symbol Set #1B, which first appeared on the FLUXLIST BLOG on September 6, 2006. I have used these symbols in more than two dozen objects. This hat is the latest one.

Floating Collage

Small-sized fireworks wrapped with wire and hanging in 8 x 9.25-inch wooden frame on 12-inch wooden block.

Fireworks necklace

on display board Necklace of fireworks for Aaron Anderson on his ninth birthday.

A creative social process for evaluating creativity

Here's me working with my colleagues at Grupo Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma--the 10th largest brewery in the world, headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico. I led this group through a simulation of a new advertising review process--a crucial set of meetings involving presentations and reviews that determine which advertising ideas will actually be produced and put before the public. I like to think of this work as creating new social rituals...new "social sculptures."

Fluxus rock dome/rock bowl

Every rock dome comes with a surprise inside.

Prototype

This is a wood-framed prototype for a set of metal-cubes-with-rocks I plan to make. I'm going to have to get my hands on a welder so I can make the cube from iron bars instead of wood. These 8x8x8-inch cubes would be "inverse cousins" to the cement blocks that Janice and I made a few years ago.

Self portrait?

5.5 x 8-inch clump of rocks.

recent work

Informal public exhibition of some of my recent work...including my first "underground art" display.more

Stone pot

Constructed with 18-gauge steel wire and common rocks. Seven inches round and six inches tall.

Evaluating advertising concepts

Companies ask advertising agencies to think up ideas for new ads for the company's product(s). The company reviews these ideas and decides which ones to produce and put on TV. This is a very challenging process: the left-brain people at a left-brain company judge right-&-left-brain ideas from right-brain people at a right-brain company. It's a delicate dance, difficult to do well and prone to flawed judgment and friction. This proposal outlines my best ideas for how to choreograph a brilliant dance--proposal for Grupo Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma, a major Mexican brewery based in Monterrey.

Birthday present

for my sister Cheryl Bukoff who turned 63 on Friday

Object: Earthquake detector
Title: "Valerie & John"

Clay pot

Broken pieces from a terra cotta saucer wired into the shape of a pot.

"Ideas Manifesto" for Media Strategy

Consulting work for Initiative (a global media agency). Ten-page document links elements of Initiative's new media-strategy development process 1. to Antonio Damasio's view of how the body and mind work together, 2. to Social Exchange Theory and 3. to Episodic/Semantic memory functions.

Broken pottery panel

Cleaning up some broken pieces of terra cotta triggered a whole series of projects--including this one.

Designing creative procedures for work groups

One of my favorite professional practices is designing social processes that help groups creatively explore and solve important challenges (e.g., to come up with a powerful consumer insight, an idea-driven media strategy, etc.). Often I am called in by a company to custom design and implement a series of these activities at a "brainstorming" workshop or offsite focusing on a specific and important topic or challenge: I lead a group through a creative process at a special meeting. The next level of this work is to get these groups to embrace and implement these processes themselves--making them a natural part of their organizational procedures and work life. The materials illustrated below are an example of this second level of work.

The first document below--a PowerPoint presentation--describes the steps and options in a media agency process for 1. combining the information and insights produced by consumer, brand, and marketplace intelligence and 2. creatively working with this information to develop the idea that will help drive and shape how media (from TV ads to the internet to text messages, special events and sponsorships) will be used to bring the "advertising message" to the public. The first document identifies a number of special activities that can be used to creatively guide a group or task force through this process. Instructions for leading each of these activities are presented in the seven other documents illustrated below. These documents are "how to's" the media agency planners can follow to implement different sophisticated brainstorming activities that will help them get to a great idea.

Initiative Media will be distributing these materials throughout their global network. Their media planners will implement these activities as part of their leadership of the media strategy development process. If I have done my work well these activities will be easy to implement, flexible and adaptable, efficient and--most important--provide a substantial boost in the power and creativity of the media ideas that Initiative will now be bringing to their clients.

I really enjoy designing creative social processes--perfect work for a social psychologist whose life revolves around creativity. This sort of "social design work" requires an understanding of group processes (e.g., what groups are good and bad at) combined with an understanding of human creativity (e.g., the creative dance of the left brain and right brain).

Creativity in data analysis

One of the creative professional services I offer is the statistical analysis of data. Much of my graduate school training was coursework in advanced inferential statistics. The statistical analysis of data is normally considered to be a very dry, rational left brain activity, but I have found that there is a lot of use for creativity even here--both left brain and right brain creativity. I help companies bring new and more creative approaches to designing research, analyzing data, and finding insights in their consumer data.

Here's an example of some charts from some of my most recent statistical work. I used a statistical grouping technique called cluster analysis to help Initiative Media identify consumer groups who have different patterns of environmental attitudes and behaviors.

Valentine's Day Flower

For the love of my life.

The ecology of urban creativity

Some of my professional work involves designing creative methods for gathering and analyzing information and ways to summarize and display the results.

I did some work with Clear!Blue, a communications company, that had a contract with the Detroit Renaissance Foundation to identify and encourage the future of commercial and artistic creativity in Detroit. I helped design and implement a number of activities that a task force of local creative professionals used to explore the past, present, and future of Detroit's creativity.



I asked the creative task force to identify the major forces shaping Detroit's creativity over the last 100 years. I took their answers and created a chart that grouped these factors into positive and negative forces.



We asked the task force to identify the current creative highlights of Detroit--people, companies, activities and places. I used this information to create a chart with fifteen creative categories.



We asked the task force to identify the most creative places and locations in Detroit and its suburbs--places with creative energy and creative activities. The map above summarizes their responses for the City of Detroit. The map below summarizes their responses for the area surrounding Detroit.




The task force then projected current and anticipated factors and forces into a variety of possible directions or paths for Detroit's creative future.

Wearable Akron Band Genealogy

I've been making wearable art since 1980--much of it for rock bands from Kent and Akron, Ohio. This is my latest and greatest.

Stick garland/stick and wire sculpture

I made something and then Janice and I tried to figure out what to do with it.

Playing with my right and left brain

I made this object to help me explore how my right brain and left brain "work" together. Click photo to read all the gory details.