kudos to the other guy/gal/ROBOT: No. 004

Here is a shot of my photograph titled “Green Grass Room.” I folded the 16" x 20" fine art photographic print into an origami envelope and mailed it to Sticker Robot as part of his SASE Shindig™.



backstory
Sticker Robot, the man - the myth - the screen printing vinyl sticker guru/robot, threw a SASE Shindig™. The directions stated to send a decorated envelope (with an Self Addressed Stamped Envelope inside) and he’ll send you some stickers in return.

tactile
It was so nice to have a tactile experiment like this. So much of what we (photographers and designers) do is high stress. Yet it ends with the grand finale (whimper) of posting to our FTP server, making backup #1, making backup #2 and making backup #3*. All the while, we are on a constant quest to keep images pristine, and to craft photographs as close to perfect as we can.

casual
It was nice to let my hair [um, my hair is usually already down...]
It was nice to be away from the monitors and craft something crafty by hand for the shindig. Unlike the tedium of entering the ‘photo annuals,’ this was a cathartic exercise—knowing full well that the photograph was going to get creased, postage slapped on it, written on, scuffed up and maybe even end up in the dead letter office.

trash
As a photographer, we make prints all the time: portfolio prints, fine art prints, proofs, promos, the occasional thank you card. The inkjet printer has been the soundtrack to my life, here at SAWville. Well, I can tell you there ends up being an awful lot of messed up prints; it’s just the nature of the beast. Inkjets are notorious of their clogged nozzles. There are (boring, yet helpful) Yahoo! groups dedicated to the topic of keeping your printer printing nice and smooth.

volume
Just to drive the point home, we’ve had 4 Epson 4000 printers in our studio. Here’s the kicker, my IT guy figured out that we got over ten miles of printing out of that first Epson printer! The subsequent printers have all gone the distance.

digression
A while back I created a folder in a filing cabinet called “pretty trash.” It was for imperfect prints (trash) that were just too nice (pretty) to throw away, if I do say so myself. Then came the over-sized blemished archival prints that would not fit into the filing cabinet. We subsequently dedicated a huge shelf in our walk in closet to the large inkjet prints. The stack of prints now weighs in at over 100 lbs.

lesson
As an artist it is always fun to bend (or in this case fold) your medium.

question
What do you do with the 99% perfect, 1% flawed, fine art photographic prints?

answer
Fold that “pretty trash” into “photographic origami” and surprise a robot with it.

transcript
Sticker Robot says:

“Rad origami, fold out, signed, pigment printed photograph from SAW!”

Stephen Austin Welch says:

“Thanks Robot!”

p.s. get yourself some SAW stickers.

p.p.s. here are a couple of links on flickr and facebook where you can view more photos of the envelopes Sticker Robot has received.

p.p.p.s. * = my buddy @markengelhardt says that data is not data unless it is stored in 3 places.