Saturday, April 28, 2012

After MoCCAfest Day One - B4 Day 2

Finished up a long first day of MoCCAfest - plenty of good conversations and interest in expanding what comics can do.

The Beat's Torsten Adair was kind enough to post a few words about what i'm up to in his reflections on MoCCAfest day One column here! He mentions the Rabbit page from my Possibilities comic on Games - the entire piece is reprinted in full in my collection, but you can see the Rabbit page and a few others here.

the "Rabbit" page from "Possibilities"

I'm nestled in Row A in the midst of the Scandinavian delegation - lovely people all around. Come on by! - Nick

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Collection in Print and MoCCA Fest!!

This week sees the release of the collection of nearly all my comics over the last several years! Thanks to the good folks at Wooden Horse, this volume puts my works from 2004 to 2011 in print chronologically and serves as a primer to where I'm going with my dissertation (and look for more excerpts from that work in progress in this space soon).

I'll be debuting this collection at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art's Festival this weekend - April 28 and 29 in NYC. MoCCAfest brings together a wide range of comics makers emerging and established - and is a great opportunity to learn about new works and what's going on in the comics world - plus educational programming all weekend. 11-6 Saturday and Sunday, at the Lexington Ave Armory between 25th and 26th streets - more info on MoCCAfest here.

Come by and say hello! - Nick



Friday, April 20, 2012

Spin, Weave, and Cut gets a Logo!!

Why “Spin, Weave, and Cut?”

Invented to describe my creative practice (and give this site a name), S/W/C describes a kind of visual-verbal DJ’ing – a notion initially prompted after seeing the documentary “Scratch” in 2001(articulated in the virtual pages of thedetroiter.com here).  


Spin = revolution and continuity;
Weave = intersect and integrate;
Cut = samples from which to juxtapose.

From the music DJs sample to the raw ingredients used by a chef to the very particles composing us, the new emerges from fragments of the existing reassembled and remixed in different configurations. Consider the way spiders weave webs and storytellers weave tales – or yarns – and Arachne’s fateful duel of threads with Athena. Whether in a double helix or two turntables or the warp and weft of a loom – creation is a recombinant process, splicing together and weaving into a new tapestry. I appropriated and remixed the name from the Three Fates of Greek mythology, these intertwined figures beyond the gods who spin, measure, and cut the threads of our lives. (This is taken up in part in “Threads: A Spinning Fable.”)


For some time now, I’ve wanted to have a visualization of these three words and what they represent. Thanks to my dad – award winning physics teacher, hall of fame tennis coach, and once every 10 years or so, creator of a spot on logo design – I now have one! He took the various threads I used to describe it and realized it through the use of a continuous line (until it's cut!) that also references the spinning, weaving, and cutting of a basketball point guard. Thanks, dad! 


A scan of my dad's original sketch for the S/W/C logo design.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The Shape of Our Thoughts (Final V)

Off to the American Education Research Association (AERA) conference in Vancouver today. I'll be talking my dissertation and comics with educators - along the lines of the presentation I did at HASTAC in December. I'm posting here, the final version of the piece, the Shape of Our Thoughts, as I draw on it heavily for my talk. I posted the original version here, this 6-page proposal was accepted for publication by the Journal of Visual Arts Research over the summer and I was given the chance to revise and expand it for their edition coming out v soon (i'll post when it's available). Some curious challenges restructuring, adding elements and going from 6 to 10 pages. Interesting to compare the two versions. Anyhow - here 'tis. - Nick (btw, if it's not apparent, 6&7 make a two-page spread - when viewed in print...)









Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Interview on Microsoft's Daily Edventures

Microsoft's Anthony Salcito's Daily Edventures has done a feature profile on me and my dissertation in comic form as part of their daily look at educators around the world. They've been featuring some amazing educators and I'm humbled to be included among them. The interview is here. (Thanks to Bridget for her kind words and support in the interview).

Also, it gave me an opportunity to talk about major influences on my educational philosophy - Charles McGee, Maxine Greene, and my parents. That was a treat for me. - Nick

See comics on them below:
A Conversation with Charles (McGee)
Maxine Says...
Bi(bli)ography: A life of privilege

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

an image...

There's been a lot of talk about what I'm up to of late, but not a lot of pictures. I have been drawing a lot - road mapped the whole dissertation, laid out about a third of it, and have now drawn several pages to completion. I'll be sharing selectively as I go. Wanted to post a panel - sans the text boxes overlaying it and the rest of the page - with a promise of more to come. - Nick


One more thing: a passage from Susanne K. Langer, relevant to how I'm thinking about my use of image alongside text. She claims that due to its linear form, language falls short in conveying feelings and emotions, and thus discursive forms are seen as intelligent, while everything else is relegated to the realm of the irrational. For Langer (2009, 1962), images have an important function, for it is not that “feeling and emotion are irrational; on the contrary, they seem irrational because language does not help make them conceivable, and most people cannot conceive anything without the logical scaffolding of words” (p. 83).

Monday, April 2, 2012

Interview in Chronicle of Higher Ed

Brief interview with me regarding my dissertation, now up on the Chronicle of Higher Education's site. Curiously released on April 1, but thankfully there's no "Pow!" in the title... Thanks to interviewer Nick DeSantis for his kind words and making this happen.

For more info, check out Maureen Bakis's lengthy interview here and comic-like version of my HASTAC talk from December. - Nick