These are some shoes I made for a project that was posted on CRAFT last week. They’re based on a combination of the homemade huarache sandals that the Tarahumara wear when they run and the original Nikes that Bill Bowerman made for Steve Prefontaine back when Nike was called Blue Ribbon Sports. Plus they are made from practically all found materials.

I realized when I was making these that the original Nikes were called “Cortez,” like the Spanish conquistador who colonized the indigenous people of what is now Mexico. I think this is quite interesting because the Tarahumara escaped colonization by retreating deep into the canyons of Northern Mexico and became the famous distance runners that they are today because they had to travel so far to keep themselves out of the reach of Spanish conquistadors.

Nike “Cortez” are still very popular in latino culture, check it out:

This song makes me kind of nostalgic for Southern California. I used to see a lot of people wearing Nike “Cortez” shoes when I was growing up.

OK, I’ve got a few of these prints for sale on Etsy. They’re signed 8×10 and $20: Click here if you want one.

I’m hoping that, if I sell a few of these, I’ll make back the $50 I spent on the Nerds I used to make it (that’s just barely an exaggeration).

These prints are all that’s left of the portrait at this point:

If I run out I might make more, I dunno.

e-mail me if you have questions: asalomone [at] gmail [dot] com.

Ok, this is a portrait of Liz Lemon made out of “Nerds” candies (get it?). I made this as a demo for the class I’m currently teaching on art and technology, but I’m not sure if I’m actually gonna use it, so I thought I might as well put it on here just for fun.

I also made a special Valentine’s Day GIF out of it. Maybe you should copy and paste this into an e-mail to send to your 30 Rock-watching valentine:

You’re welcome!

more info at: Cork Contemporary Projects

Abandonded Gingerbread House Building Sites is a site-specific project I made for my show, everything is as it seems to be. Click here to see more pictures of the exhibition at The Space in Cork City.

When the global economy unravelled last year the Irish countryside was left with a lot of empty, unsold, and unfinished housing estates. This holiday season I thought it would be nice to celebrate these unique landscapes by making them into picturesque gingerbread-house decorations that will rot and eventually be thrown out much like the unfinished housing estates themselves.

Here are some pictures of some actual unfinished housing estates along with some close-ups of my gingerbread handiwork:

I found a website that helps you create youtube video mashups by playing them side-by-side simultaneously. It’s a called Youtube Doubler.

This is a mashup I made of someone beating the high score on Game Boy Tetris (every Game Boy came with Tetris) and ABC’s coverage of the Berlin Wall coming down (It turns out that Game Boy came out the same year that the Berlin Wall came down, 1989). Click the image to watch the mashup.

I’ve been thinking about making a skull out of barbies after this famous image of Salvador Dali for a while now. I finally decided that the easiest thing to do would be to stitch the barbies onto a ski mask and wear it as a Halloween costume. But after seeing the final result, it seems like there may never be an appropriate time to wear this.

This is a small commission I did for the Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art. They asked me to make a scarecrow for them as part of a community project called “Scarecrows of the Port,” where all the businesses in Portsmouth display scarecrows around Halloween. I decided to make a scarecrow out of QR code for them. Here is the press release I wrote about it:

Crows are very intelligent birds. Some types of crows have even been known to fashion their own tools. So it practically goes without saying that crows, being the geeks of the bird world, naturally keep up with advances in technology such as QR Code. QR Code (short for “Quick Response Code”) is the most popular type of bar code in Japan and can be read using the camera on most Japanese mobile phones and mobile phones with Internet capabilities using free software downloads. QR Codes can contain text-based information such as messages, serial numbers, or URLs. The QR Code Scarecrow contains a message to crows with QR Code scanning gadgets. Scan the code with your mobile phone to see the message.

The picture above is from a local newpaper’s website. The code should work if you scan it off of a picture or a computer screen, but because there is a guy in a hard hat obscuring some of the code, this picture may not work if you scan it. I told the people at the newspaper this when I went down to their office to show them how to scan the picture, but I guess they had their reasons for using that pic. Here’s an unobscured snapshot I took just in case anyone wants to try it: