Blueprint Residency Interviews Eric Von Haynes (resident no. 8) is an artist, designer, and curator whose work synthesizes old and new printing methods and aesthetics. While design and printmaking are his passions, he is energized by col- laborations and the ideas and chal- lenges that come from working with a community. http://flatlandspress.com Leor Galil (resident no. 4) is a Chicago Reader staff writer and a freelance culture journalist. His work has appeared in The Washing- ton Post, Pitchfork, RollingStone. com, Spin, The Washington City Pa- per, The A.V. Club, and one too many newspapers and websites that have shuttered. He was voted the third best pizza in the city for the Reader’s 2017 Best of Chicago poll. twitter: @imleor [email protected] $5.00 (Editorial intrusions by Jordan Knecht will occasionally appear throughout this book and will look something like this.) Eric Von Haynes + Leor Galil Leor Galil: So yeah, what made you want to do the Blueprint Residency? Eric Von Haynes: Well, let me see. Generically, I enjoy collaboration. It’s part of my practice overall. So I’m al- ways looking for opportunities to do collaborative work and I love in situ. I love that aspect of doing in situ work. Jordan’s project offered me some in situ work, as well. Something on site - sorry. Something site-specific. I used it as an opportunity to do it as an ex- ercise for myself. So I went. I just built a toolbox of things that I might want to use, and I made sure to not actually go there with any definitive ideas. (Eric literally showed up with a toolbox of tools. Once the contents were emptied from the box, he neatly disassembled the box and folded it flat upon itself.) Because I didn’t want it to just be a graphic design exercise. So, I creat- ed. I just basically brought a giant toolbox and then some safety things in case for some reason I was having a creative block. So I had all these cy- anotypes that I did from paper. Like laying paper out in the sun with cau- tion tape and things on them. These also have that blue. That blue hue that’s very similar to the blueprint machine itself. But I ended up going there with... I’ll stop there. That’s what made me want to do it. And I en- joy the performative aspect of doing stuff on site and the way his project was designed, it seemed like it could have a performative aspect to it, as well since he was documenting the whole thing and his interactions with the art- ists while they were doing the work. Blueprint Residency Interviews LG: Have you ever had an experience that is performative in that way? EVH: Yes. I like to do happenings when I do events for my press. So I’ll cre- ate opportunities for that. I’ve done it with other artists. I have a friend, Josue Pellot, who is an Art and Theory artist. 1 He works in all kinds of medi- ums: sculpture, murals, performance video. I did a project with him last summer. No, no, no. It was two years ago. It was a project he’s been working on for a while called “Game Night” 2 I think that’s just the tentative [word lost in recording] for creating the work. But he brings together people. He curates groups and then he has games that you’ve never heard of be- fore. Like board games. These wild-ass board games. Some of them from the past. Some of them that are very mod- ern. Not the kitschy shit that you find at the mall. Very weird... The one we did was in Hyde Park at Connect Gal- lery. 3 It was four of us sitting around a table. The game was “Life as a Black Man”. 4 It has all of these set ups. It was a Life-type set up. There were all of these pitfalls and all of these cards. It’s like, “you lost your job and your mortgage is up or you got a traffic ticket and you had to pay bail.” These trip-falls and complications of being 1 http://www.josuepellot.com 2 https:// mcachicago.org/Calendar/2018/09/ Common-Use-Street-Level-Anime-Club 3 https:// www.connectgallery.org 4 https:// www.blackmangame.com/about/ Eric Von Haynes + Leor Galil considered an under-class citizen in a game structure. He’s done a ton of others. Within that, you can’t help but talk about what the game is breaking down into these simple components as you’re playing, which is part of the process for him, you know? It brings people to these things. It’s a really beautiful project. I don’t know if I’m doing it justice. That’s one case of in situ. (The notion of “in situ” was integral to the process of both Eric and Leor. One of the first things Eric and I did togeth- er after breakfast was take a walk around the neighborhood to get a feel for things. He keenly observed and appreciated often-overlooked nuances on the block, taking photos, seeing what jumped out at him. During Leor’s residency, Leor and I took a much longer walk through the neighborhood following and documenting the garage repair fliers fluttering through- out the alleyways on the way to and from the secondhand art supply store. At one point, we got sidetracked by a music store we had never noticed, despite it being there for decades. ) I’ve done a lot of performative work, too within the group that I work with, called “The Institute of Sociometry”, which is cross between intervention- ist work and Prankster Fluxist-in- fluence work. 5 So I’ve done projects where we went to Union Square in New York in October of 2017, I believe. Wait, no, that’s way too... Ella was two, so... subtract... Maybe 2012? Geeze... So we made these boxes. It was a proj- ect called “Art in Odd Places” which 5 http:// www.sociometry.com/wpsb/ Blueprint Residency Interviews is a festival they have once a year in New York. 6 We created boxes. This particular year they were focusing on numbers. You were given these gener- al themes and you could do what you wanted. So we created boxes and the performance piece was called, “Op- portunity for Reflection”. 7 We created these boxes set on poles, like picket signs, but they were galvanized poles with these telephone-type boxes on them that you could put your head in and when you put your face in it, it projected your head onto the shoul- ders of an archetype that we created. It could be a businessman, a 7-11 work- er, a generic woman, a nun, on and on and on and on. But there’s a cor- relating number on the outside of the box, which may or may not have any- thing to do really with what’s going on in the box, but there’s some kind of, you know for 9-11, we had different things on the inside of the box ver- sus the outside of the box. The angle was that we would just randomly ask people who were coming through this place in Union Square if they wanted a moment of reflection. They put their face within the box and then conver- sations would ensue. I’ve done a few others too. On top of being a fun ex- ercise, it’s fun to create controls and then do work within those. LG: Yeah 6 http:// www.artinoddplaces.org 7 http:// www.sociometry.com/wpsb/?p=1446 Eric Von Haynes + Leor Galil EVH: I mean, I do that in a lot of ways, but when you actually have to negotiate those controls on site, it keeps you within that rule set. LG: All this in mind - when you went to Jordan’s for the Blueprint Residency. How did the controls there shape the work you that were doing? Because you talk about going in and not hav- ing a distinct idea of what you wanted to design. How did going into that affect what you were doing? EVH: I went there and was thinking I would use elements from around the environment and then create some- thing with that using a visual vocab- ulary, but what ended up happening was I started setting up my gear and I brought 16x20” LED light table. So I set that up in his main blueprint stu- dio area and I plugged it in. When I plugged it in - and I had already set up most of my equipment that I was going to use to draw or whatever - and when I went to plug it in, I noticed that I was getting feedback from his tuner. So I started moving my finger up and down the button for my light table that increases the density of the LEDs. As I did that, the pitch on the tuner would change. That’s when I decided what I was gonna do, because I also had a program that I brought that would record audio waves and create a visual representation in space that worked on X, Y, and Z coordinates. 8 So I literally just recorded the sound 8 This is a program called sndpeek. I introduced Eric to it a few months prior to his residency. It was a treat to see him utilizing its capabilities https:// soundlab.cs.princeton.edu/software/sndpeek/ Blueprint Residency Interviews of that within the space, recorded the rain that was goin on outside, and a few other elements - and of course the human elements of what I liked and I didn’t like.