artist, writer, photographer, meme grandpa, skeleton influencer, nerd, dad . co-founder & cco of http://glitchgoods.com . writer/co-creator of HIGH LEVEL on dc/vertigo . formerly: nine inch nails art director 1999-2014
photon decay 001 / 002. Scanner glitch art created by manually dragging materials through an old broken flatbed scanner (the same scanner I used to make glitch textures in the Nine Inch Nails With Teeth album art).
After a lot of work trying to get them right, I’ve finally translated these two pieces into new prints, and I’m excited to drop them today.
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20 years ago, in March 2005, Nine Inch Nails’“The Hand That Feeds” music video premiered, the first music video I directed. To celebrate the anniversary, I have constructed this immersive 2005 simulator to transport you to an authentic media viewing experience of the distant past.
“The Hand That Feeds” was the first single off of With Teeth, NIN’s first new album in five years, and first of the new millennium. The album and this video will always be special to me as it was the first album I art directed end-to-end, creating all of the album art and visuals surrounding the era, which included bringing the aesthetic into this music video and the production of NIN’s 2005/2006 tours. The lofi digital glitch look was something yet unseen in popular culture, as in 2005 digital media was still fairly new / rapidly evolving and the general professional approach was to showcase the latest crisp clean “perfect” technical abilities. By choosing to use technology the “wrong” way and make the texture of its flaws central to my art, I gave NIN a new visual identity for the new millennium and began a glitch art journey that defines my career to this day.
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Early Nine Inch NailsWith Teeth sketches/explorations, circa late 2004 - early 2005. Some of the many unused/unfinished stops on the very experimental journey 20 years ago that would lead to the look and feel of the album and its surrounding releases/merch/tour. Methods include digital glitching techniques, scanner glitching, DV data glitching, scientific/medical imaging, and digital photography.
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Early Nine Inch NailsWith Teeth art, January 2005. Scanner glitching, digital glitching, glass, gel electrophoresis.
At this time 20 years ago, I was refining design mockups for With Teeth after over a year of visual explorations that had begun in New Orleans with the early Bleedthrough concept and gradually evolved into a new aesthetic as we moved to Los Angeles and the album became With Teeth. This piece would become a poster for the album when it released in May 2005.
Very excited to give you a peek at my new series of glitch art video sculptures; a glitch skull for your space, rotating endlessly through waves of analog CRT modulations.
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Painting with light for the Pearl JamDark Mattertour visuals, one of the many ways we used practical film techniques to bring analog humanity to the show.
“Crown of Light” Directed by Rob Sheridan Produced by Stephanie Sheridan Post production, animation, and compositing by Joybird Studios Camera Operator: Donovon O'Neil PA: Ilana Rahaman Filmed at Rob Sheridan Productions, Tacoma, WA. Based on the Dark Matter album art light painting photography by Alexandr Gnezdilov
Tour production design by Spike Brandt / Nimblist Tour lighting director: Kille Knobel Tour video programming: Grant McDonald
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Nine Inch NailsThe Fragile released 25 years ago today. Here’s a 1999 digital camera photodump from the months surrounding the album’s release; a surreal, transformative time in my young life. Words can’t describe what it was like, but these photos and textures bring back the strangest hazy memories that feel like a dream: Not even a year out of high school, moving to New Orleans to work for my heroes as they were in the final year of recording a dense, challenging masterpiece of an album. Not everyone was ready for The Fragile at the time, but it now stands as one of the seminal works of pre-millennium art. If you’ve never experienced it, or haven’t in a while, it deserves a focused, solitary beginning-to-end listening in the highest fidelity, on your best sound system, at the loudest volume.
1: Recording The Fragile, Nothing Studios. 2: Various Fragile concept art by David Carson, Nothing Studios. 3: Gear, Nothing Studios. 4: Early NIN website concept screenshot. 5: Control Room A, Nothing Studios. 6: Live room, Nothing Studios. 7: The Fragile printer proofs, David Carson’s office, NYC. 8: Meeting with David Carson in his office, NYC. 9: Mixes, Nothing Studios. 10: Recording journals, Nothing Studios. 11: Filming the “We’re In This Together” video, Guadalajara, Mexico. 12: Band rehearsals, Bahamas. 13: Gear, Nothing Studios. 14: Robin Finck, Nothing Studios. 15: Charlie Clouser and Danny Lohner, band rehearsals, Nothing Studios. 16: The Day The World Went Away artwork, Nothing Studios. 17: MTV Awards rehearsals, NYC. 18: Skull, Nothing Studios. 19: Control Room B, Nothing Studios. 20: Various images posted to nin dot com teasing The Fragile in the months prior to its release.
I’m honored to present my work for Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter tour at the Cove Gallery at the Ohana Festival in Dana Point, California next weekend, with a series of rare photography prints to benefit the great Vitalogy Foundation. The photographs were taken by me on May 1st, 2024, during the only dress rehearsals for the tour, at an empty Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle. They showcase my visual art on the tour’s 155-foot projection screen as it united with a full band performance for the very first time; the only time it would ever be seen (by just a handful of people) in the surreal setting of an empty arena, the lights and video reflecting off the surface of the open floor.
Limited signed/numbered framed metallic pearl fine art prints will be available exclusively through Cove Gallery from Thursday September 26 at 5 PM through Sunday September 29 at 11 PM. Whatever prints are not sold at the event will be made available online at a later date.
Additionally, video screens in the gallery will present extended looks at video art pieces I created for the tour for the first time ever. I’m excited to show more of the beauty I found on my journey through states of matter and the connective tissue of the universe.
I’ll share more info, including some times that I’ll be on-site to talk about the work, as we get closer to the event. Hope to see some of you there! Thanks again to everyone at Cove Gallery, Ohana, and Pearl Jam for creating this event, supporting great causes, and inviting me to be a part of it.
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15 years ago todayNine Inch Nails played The Echoplex in LA as part of the final stretch of the beloved 2009 Wave Goodbye tour, an intimate concert series of unique setlists and special guests. Here are my poster and merch designs for the LA shows.
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10 years ago tonight the Nine Inch Nails / Soundgarden2014 summer tour wrapped up in Auburn, WA, a spectacular night and fitting home-state conclusion to what would be the last NIN show I worked on. Here are some photos from that summer tour, the final tour production I designed for NIN with some of my favorite live visual work I did for them. I took the first photo, the group shot of the band, minutes before they walked on stage for that final show.
You can see more of my work and photos from the NIN 2014 tourhere, and you can read about the production and design process of that tour as it began in 2013 here.
Spectagoria Magazine’s 1978 “Swimsuit Issue” mocked the popular institution with themes of pollution and global warming, depicting melting, skeletal, oil-drenched models on apocalyptic beaches. “Just a decade after the carefree innocence of the ‘Endless Summer,’ we are careening towards an uninhabitable future of poisonous air and a deadly summer that truly does not end.” Editor Sera Clairmont said she was inspired by her experience in the record-shattering British Isles heatwave of 1976, which “felt as though the whole of my skin was surrounded at all times by the bone-dry specters of imminent death, crowding ever-closer around me, nipping at my flesh.” The playful, sexy tone of “the swimsuit industry’s most lucrative marketing stunt” felt absurd to her after that experience, as she witnessed what she described as “psychic visions of a future where our relentless destruction of the planet boils it with rage, and dooms mankind to melt and crumble into the dust of our own ruin.”
It was far from the only time Spectagoria’s fashion photography drew influence from supposed visions or “visitations” from the future. But the British Isles heatwave was widely regarded as a standalone extreme weather event, and Clairmont’s prophecy of an imminently burning planet was mocked as the latest example of her supposed “mania” since going into hiding two years prior and shifting the magazine’s focus towards darker and more other-worldly themes. But while critics found its predictions easy to dismiss, still no one had any explanation for where the magazine was staging such elaborate photo shoots, who the models were, or how some of the seemingly impossible visuals were executed. Rumors intensified that Clairmont had powers to commune with realms beyond our own…
Two years later, the 1980 heatwave in the United States was among the most destructive and deadly natural disasters in US history, claiming at least 1700 lives. It was reported as an isolated extreme weather event. As was the next one. And the next one. And the next one…
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NOTE: Spectagoria is an ongoing work of fiction created by me. This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and interconnected alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.
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