Tomato plants

Nightmare Before Christmas figures

Hats

Hats I've made and collected.

Tools with long wooden handles

Tools recently retrieved from curbside trash. Now candidates for The Stick Garden.

World Leadership

in Science Blocks

Musical Chair

Wooden folding chair, steel wire and jingle bells.

Online art market for buying and selling my work

I have begun what I hope will be a sustained and systematic effort to sell some of my current artwork online: allenbukoff.com/artmarket. I am trying to create a public market place that will allow me to sell my art objects, track who buys them, and monitor any changes in the monetary value of this work. Someone might, for example, buy one of my art objects and then turn around and sell it to someone else using my online market. The first public sale on my new market place--5 cigar boxes of Christmas tree pieces--was held on June 9th. I announced the sale simultaneously via email, on Fluxlist Blog, and through my Facebook and Twitter accounts. All five boxes sold in less than 30 minutes!

Helmet for a sport that remains to be invented

Hat or helmet made from ten discarded plastic plant pots fastened together with wire loops.

click here for enlarged image

Janice's title for this is Pothead

Update: backyard robots

Radar and Napoleon
- made with discarded junk -
earlier versions

Caprese salad with garden lettuce

Recent creative work from Janice. With fresh basil and lettuce from our garden.

Buckets, pots, and baskets

Things purchased by an English major.

Dissecting Christmas

Christmas Tree 2008Five New Boxes From Fluxus MidwestVisit the Dissecting Christmas website

Trophy for my sister the social worker

My sister Cheryl had a birthday recently. I asked her about retirement (maybe in a couple of years) and it got me thinking about her life and career as a social worker in Detroit (since 1972). I really admire her for devoting her life to making the world a better place and got the idea to honor her in some way now instead of just waiting until she retires. I was fooling around with some metal scraps left over from some other recent projects and wound up making the object you see above. It's sort of a cross between a trophy, a crown, and a globe. [Some people would not consider a junky object like this to be a prize, but Cheryl has always prized the stuff I make.] So thanks, Cheryl, and here's to celebrating your spirit, dedication, and career.
Click here for more object photos.

Jumping the social media gun

I think most people in business who are launching social media efforts are starting in the wrong place.Read all about it.

How to Play Croquet: Game No. 1 (2009)

Mallets, posts, and other pieces from old croquet sets. Click on photo above to view enlarged image. Click here to visit website displaying some of our previous games.

Twitter "business" card I created and handed out at a "Tweet-Up" (dumb name for a meeting organized via Twitter). The hallmark of Twitter is that it allows you to send only very short messages (140 characters or less). I used a small return-address label to represent a twitter-like message window and added my Twitter name (@bukoff) and my public bio on Twitter. General consensus was that this was a clever format. Also liked peel-and-stick feature as it mimics the light "stickiness" of the Twitter medium. A few people--including me--stuck these on their shirts or folders. Making these is an easy trick using mailing label paper and an ink-jet printer.

Numbers in the snow

finger, snow, slate table

Firewood

Rocks

in the snow

Science Art - Block #2

Square block on wheels: 5.5-inches x 5.5-inches x 7.75-inches & 5.4 pounds. Wood, strips of metal from old microscope sets, nails, and four swivel wheels.click here for panoramic view

Evil Art #3 - Mummy

Mummy figure - 3.5 x 5.25 x 12.5-inches. Wooden block, rusted sheets of steel, nails, altered action figure, asphalt roof cement. This is object #3 in the Evil Art Series.

Science Art - Block #1

Rectangular block on wheels: 11-inches x 5.5-inches x 5.5-inches & 7.6 pounds. Wood, strips of metal from old chemistry sets, nails, and four swivel wheels. The swivel wheels were Janice's idea.
click here for panoramic view

(ladders)

12 stepsFound these two ladders by the side of the road last night. My backyard sculpture now.

Radar and RobbyLadders and 3 discarded snow shovels.

Shoes

12 pairs

Science Art - Cube #2

Eight-inch-square welded steel cube, parts from several different microscope sets (including metal, glass, plastic, rubber, and paper), graphic cut from metal chemistry set cabinet, and 19- & 22-gauge annealed steel wire.

Culinary creativity

I live with a woman who is the most incredible chef. This was her three-course appetizer selection for us to eat while watching the Oscars on Sunday evening, February 22. I am constantly amazed by her remarkable culinary creativity. Her work should be being displayed in a museum. But I can't resist--and it disappears into my stomach.
better photo and description

Science Art - Cube #1

Eight-inch-square welded steel cube, parts from several different chemistry sets (including metal, glass, plastic, cardboard and chemicals), graphic cut from metal chemistry set cabinet, and 24-gauge galvanized steel wire.

Valentine 2009

7.5 x 8.5 x 1 inches; plastic, old wooden board, nails

Icicle harvest

A collection of a few of the icicles hanging on the eaves of our house.

snow tags

tree - snow - finger
sidewalk - snow - feet - hands - windshield scrapper

FOUND SNOW

door - snow - finger

Spin & Marty

SpinMartyMary Tiegreen sent me some rocks from Arizona. I used them to create Spin & Marty. Spin & Marty are now living with Mary Tiegreen and Hubert Pedroli in Arizona.

Christmas fling

Janice and I are big on Christmas lights. We hang them in the front yard, the back yard, and all over the inside of the house. The front yard display shown above (click photo for larger picture) was new this year. More than 1000 C-5 LED lights--10 continuous strands more than 340 feet in total length. Hung and flung over the limbs of three different trees using a variety of techniques--e.g., standing on a ladder, throwing a tennis shoe (tied to a rope tied to the next strand) over limbs then pulling the strand up and over, and using a long aluminum extension pole with a hook on the end.

This year I decided to create and host my own "virtual" office Christmas party. Here's the email "invitation" I sent out: We've just moved into our new world headquarters, and we're throwing our biggest office Christmas party ever. You're invited! Please come by any time between now and Christmas Day: http://allenbukoff.com/info . Merry Christmas! Allen Bukoff. When they clicked on the link they arrived at the web page shown below:

This audio file I created was broadcast by Aaron Anderson from a pirate radio station at the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art on December 5, 2008.

graphic design

16 x 16 pixel graphic icons for 12 of my websites --icons appear in address bar of browser.

Then I turned these graphic icons into a small laminated badge. If you would like one of these to wear or collect, send me 1. ONE DOLLAR (OR a bit of your own art/creativity work) and 2. a self-addressed- &-stamped envelope, and I'll mail you back a laminated safety-pin badge in a paper wrapper displaying an index to all 12 icons/websites --all neatly folded and held together with an "it's all about me" sticker. Mail to Allen, 1465 Fairfax, Birmingham, MI 48009.

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

Evil Art #1 - No BodyEvil Art #2 - Bring Me The Head of Barbie

(#1) Sixteen inches tall. (#2) Fourteen inches tall. Both: steel, nails, wire, wooden block, doll and action figure parts.more

Tinkering withFluxus Indian Fire Poles

more

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.
more

crafty pumpkin

more

PIN PUNKDIY Fire Scupturewearable self-performance

more

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.
more

autumn harvest

Danger Music 2008

more

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

more

Manly jewelry

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

more

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.