Contact: colin@emceecm.com
Pulling Together Google Group Site
Collaborators and Friends:
Ted Efremoff Huong Ngo James Sham The Swan Catchers BBBP
Other Work
This picture is from an adventure I had with a giant pumpkin, back in 2005. I recently made a children's book about it that I want to publish sometime. You can read it by downloading the pdf: Emcee C.M. and the Gigantopumpkin
Today is a Work Day
One time I custom made a couple of signs for an empty sign post that had been sitting there for years with nothing on it. It was in front of the human resources building at the University of Connecticut, and across the street from a prison. The signs sparked some discussion among university employees through an interesting misreading and coincidence of timing. It was placed on a Friday, one week after Thanksgiving. The previous week university staff had been given the day after the holiday (Friday) off work, for the first time ever. So people were worried that the phrase "Today is a Work Day" might seem like a (rather absurd) authoritative admonishment to employees, something along the lines of, "You had last Friday off but that doesn't mean you have every Friday off, make sure you are at work today." My signs were removed and eventually, through my having drawn attention to it, so was the signpost.
These Colors Don't Run
This was a banner drop I did on a parking garage in 2003, trying to create a blank, neutral, unspecified, and therefore disturbing message. I was thinking about and documenting the way flags were being displayed on overpasses, construction sites, homes, and gas stations around that time, as the Terror War was getting going. I made a short super 8 film about it. This action of hanging the banner was an attempt to complicate the conversations that were going on, which seemed to be all about choosing sides. The phrase "These Colors Don't Run" has been used as a patriotic slogan for many years, in reference to national integrity and pride as embodied in an enduring, bright flag. My flag was colorless, blank, white on white.
Building Blocks
This was a studio process project I did in 2002. I made a series of sculptures from a bunch of found junk, each time constructing something, taking a slide photograph of it, making a screen print based on the construction, then taking it apart and reconfiguring the materials for the next cycle. The project was shown as a suite of 10 prints and a new arrangement of the objects, along with a slide projector automatically advancing to simulate the chug-chug sound of a train, while flashing images of the previous configurations on the wall.
This was the first public action I ever organized, back in 2000, and it has stayed with me as an example of a successful project and influenced a lot of the other things I've done since. I made this wooden machine out of shipping crates and cable spools with a support frame. A group of friends and I pushed it around disrupting traffic, and then rode it down a big hill. There were no brakes to speak of so we were worried about hitting something or somebody, but in the end it was fine.
I ran a life sized board game for a couple of days, working with some other people, back in 2001. The path was marked off with colored duct tape and we had these big dice. This was on my college campus when I was an undergraduate, and the idea of the project had to do with a critical attitude toward choosing a career and finding success in life. The game itself was all about being a kid. There were tasks you had to complete to advance along, things like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in 10 seconds, or coloring in a coloring book. Doing this project I started thinking more seriously about engaging creatively in public life, and that's where the name Emcee C.M. came in. So for me personally it was about choosing that as my game (by that I mean this: what I still do now and what this website is all about).