Stuff I’ve Made

My random side projects.

DenizenMag.com

DenizenMag.com is an online magazine I created dedicated to Third Culture Kids, or expatriate children. It’s a project close to my heart because I grew up in the expat community of Singapore, and realized how rootless most “expat kids” feel.

TCKs rarely call any one place home. Instead, they are denizens, people who have “admitted rights to residence,” people who become inhabitants after “regularly frequenting a place.” They struggle with identity, relationships, visas and careers in a unique TCK way.

Denizen was my way of creating an online “home” for TCKs. With a lot of help from friends and people I’ve met, Denizen’s journalists and artists will help TCKs muddle through these challenges by fostering a virtual “expat kid” community.

takemewithyou

takemwithyou is an installation in Wicker Park Bucktown, where I hid 100 disposable cameras throughout the neighborhood. Using Twitter and Tumblr, I left clues to where the cameras were hidden. It was one of 10 finalists for Chicago’s largest art prize, “Make Believe.”

On each camera, we told the recipient to “Tell us a story” and mail it back. We developed the photographs, posted it online and hung the photos up in the store. Visit the project site and blog.

30-Day Creativity Project

One day, I did something really random. I decided to embark on a 30-day creativity project.

The goal: complete one creative project every day for 30 days.

Below are some of the highlights, or see the full 30 days here.

Day #21: Make an Exquisite Corpse (left)
Play a game invented by surreal artists in the 1920s

Day #14: Have your friends tell a collective story
I ambushed a group of Northwestern friends at dinner

Day #13: The Streets that I’ve Lived On
What does Google Images think the streets that I’ve lived on look like?

Day #12: Copycat This American Life
Create a podcast inspired by This American Life

Day #9: 10 Most Recent Emails I’ve Written with the words “I Feel”
Inspired by Jonathan Harris’s “We Feel Fine.”

Day #8: Self Portraits of my Life
I found all the images I have ever taken where I “turned the camera on myself” and explored the sequence chronologically.

The El Project

The adventure where I took one photograph for every stop on Chicago’s red line. The Red Line is one of Chicago’s major subway lines, running straight through the heart of the city. The El Project was a photography class project in college where I took the Red Line from top to bottom, got off at every stop and quickly photographed the surrounding neighborhood. Each stop is represented by one image. As the “day” progresses in the photographs (although this actually took a few weeks), you can see Chicago changing from the North Side to the South Side. You can think of the photographs as “candids” of the neighborhood. View the photographs.

24@NU

24@NU was a random, crazy idea that Tom Giratikanon and I had: document every hour on the Northwestern University campus. Over the course of a few weeks, we found different students to represent each hour, whether it was 6 p.m. or 3 a.m. We then followed each student with a video camera, and edited it into 24 short video clips. The result is random mashup of life at Northwestern University.