Marcus Fischer: A work of art every day for a year
August 24th, 2011Marcus Fischer is a multimedia artist and musician currently living in Portland, Oregon (and longtime team member/stylist at Straub Collaborative). In addition to creating visual art, he also records and performs music under his own name and as part of the duo Unrecognizable Now. The exploration of sight and sound has been a continual focus for Marcus, both in his personal work and in his role as co-curator of vision+hearing, a series of audio/visual events that brings together musicians and filmmakers for collaborative performances. He has also had the opportunity to score various short films and videos and enjoys experimenting with unconventional sound sources to create music.
Dustbreeding.com, mid-January, 2009, About:
This is the daily art blog of Marc Fischer. I started this blog in hopes that it would be creative catalyst for me. My goal is to try and post one thing a day for the next year. We’ll see how long it lasts. If you like what you see, please leave a comment. Positive thoughts will keep me going.
He ends his introduction with humble request for a huge undertaking.
Marcus did keep going – the project made it all 365 days and now can be safely classified as an opus.
What inspired the project?
I’ve always had a lot of different interests: design, music, illustration, video work, photography, and I wanted to exercise all those areas and target what I like about all of them. At the time (end of 2008), I had been feeling creatively stagnant. I used to produce stuff all the time, then I realized that I had gone a long time without creating very much, so I decided to create a blog with the idea of doing a project a day for a year. I wanted to create conditions where I kept the creativity going every day instead of stopping and starting.
At first, I had thought, “I’ll just do it for myself “ and then I realized, “oh wait, I should tell people, then I’ll be responsible, not blow it off or do 2 in one day”, that type of thing.
Over the course of the year, it helped solidify my work. I decided the type of expression day by day – I didn’t schedule it. After a while, anything I did throughout the day could be considered a project. During a walk at lunch I’d make a recording, take a picture. Some of them were premeditated, others were found pieces, I’d spot something interesting to me, I’d take it home and hash it out.
Any specific highlights from the project?
That was one of the most important years for me a in a lot of ways, the things that came out of it and the things that happened that year including the birth of our daughter Gemma. My wife Nicole fell ill with a life threatening illness and Gemma had to be delivered via emergency C-section. She was very premature and spent 11 weeks in the hospital. When Gemma was born (she was 1 lb, 7oz.), my wedding ring fit around her bicep.
At that point in the year, the project helped keep me sane, and since there were a lot of restless nights anyway, it kept me active and productive.
Gemma had been so early that she had an underdeveloped immune system, so when she finally came home from the hospital we were under quarantine at home and neither of us could go to work and we couldn’t receive visitors. People would bring us food – we had a cooler on the porch, but we couldn’t interact very much.
During that time I did a lot of staring out the window so I welcomed the creative outlet. In the blog, there’s a section of what looks to be watercolors but it was actually long exposure pinhole photography. I’d capture the trees moving and I played with making time lapse videos.
You took an incredibly challenging situation and managed to find a place for productivity and creativity within in – calling it an accomplishment is such an understatement. Safe to guess you were changed by that experience?
I think about how I coped differently with things (during the 365 experiment) and now, because I am not actively doing that project. My dad passed away in April and my first reaction was that I wanted an outlet and didn’t’ have it at my fingertips
I did a piece of music that I posted. Definitely like a meditation that I reached out to in time of crisis. Something I could use to take my mind off the stressor, go into a creative zone.
One of the highlights of (what I produced) that year was animals that I made from Letraset dry transfer letters – a project that I had started years ago. With the daily work during the project, I got a chance to refine it. Those pieces caught the eye of a lot of people and my blog got re-posted in a lot of design blogs, and I wound up picking up a bunch of followers – people who I really respected and I had no idea were following my project. They would write to me and say, “I love your daily updates – that’s my morning ritual.”
I wouldn’t post until just before I went to sleep. I would post a picture and, while it was loading, I would write an explanation. Sometimes people would comment on a post before I finished writing the explanation.
I got a flood of emails at the end of the year from people who told me that they were sad the project was over – it was a wonderful surprise.
I have very cool story specifically about the music: there’s an artist who runs a label called 12k in NY that really I respect who started following the blog.
Long before I found that out my wife Nicole would say, “You belong on this label, you should send him a demo!”
I said, “I should, but I don’t really do that!”
It turned out that he got in touch with me and asked me to record an album for his label – I never thought that would happen. He put my album out last year and it got great reviews, sold out right away. Now we are working on long-term projects. I went out in February, did recordings, it’s turning into this cool thing. It will be released this October
It sounds like this project just kept growing in so many ways…
I discovered that there were 4 or 5 blogs influenced by mine – 2 of them have kept it up. One guy who has been doing the daily projects is closing in on his second year – it’s awesome. It was also interesting to find out that my project inspired other people to do their own. The music definitely was an awesome advancement and the Letraset project was published in a book in the UK about alphabets
I made a series of prints of the penguin one that I sold on the blog. It was great to see the reaction and I want to do a bunch more.
I think a lot of people have dustbreeding.com in their RSS reader since I still get comments when I post things. I think it was really great exercise in a lot of ways – and it’s been fun because people will email me about a posting that catches their eye. I’ve also realized that it’s really good to have documentation. Some of the things I’ve created I have no recollection of making and when I’m reminded of them, it seems like they were made in the distant past. I’ve liked watching trends – (looking back at the work), knowing where you came from, where you’ve been.
I am reaping the benefits of the daily practice. It really helped me get things going. The only possible downside is that I now have 365 + small projects, but the larger scale projects suffered (that year). I am thinking that maybe next year I’ll do one bigger project a month. It doesn’t matter which form – it could be music, drawing or design, but I’d like to do one, more complete, comprehensive project a month.
















