Three of my pieces (Self-Portrait, Race Cube, Crayola Monologues) were included in the group exhibit "Embracing Ambiguity: Faces of the Future" at the Cal State Fullerton Main Art Gallery from January 30 to March 3.

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La Orquesta de Baja California joined forces with Nortec Collective artists Bostich and Fussible on Sunday for a free concert in the plaza outside Tijuana’s cultural center. It was the final day of Entijuanarte, a three-day contemporary art festival featuring work ranging from painting and photography to digital and performance arts.

I’ve seen Nortec Collective artists perform before and it usually involves a lot of sitting behind laptops. But Sunday was a much improved live performance. Nortec’s signature sound comes from layering samples of banda brass over electronic beats. And for a city increasingly recognized for cultural hybridity, it’s only more fitting to have a high-brow orchestra perform pop culture riffs alongside electronic music for free in the public space.

The concert started with “Tijuana Makes Me Happy,” which garnered cheers despite a bad audio mix early on. “Tijuana Sound Machine,” the title track from the latest release by Bostich and Fussible, was well received; the song’s music video recycles the city’s campy heritage in a fun, sequin-covered spectacle.

In its early stages, the Nortec Collective seemed to be more widely received internationally than on its home turf. But that seems to be changing as the youth embrace the city as their own, taking pride in Tijuana’s cultural identity.

YouTube videos from Sunday, October 4, 2009:

 

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Here’s a very rough track. I’m recording using the laptop’s built-in mic and an acoustic guitar, then processing it with Garage Band effects. It’s quick and easy, but not exactly pretty. I added some drums to fill it out a bit, which points out my wandering rhythm. You can grab the full mix, guitars, effects, or rhythm track to use as you will.

This work by Nathan Gibbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Justine Bursoni is a graduate student in art education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an editor for the online magazine Smile Politely. She came across my Self-Portrait art piece online and wanted to include it in a lesson plan for a group of fifth and sixth grade students. She asked how I created my piece, and after giving her some tips, she had her students create their own paint swatch portraits.

“During the lesson,” Justine wrote in email, “the students were quick to note how identity comes in different forms, parts of identity can be shared… but mostly, one’s identity is unique and multi-faceted and how all should be recognized and tolerated.” It’s humbling to have my work aid that learning process, and even more humbling to be included in the list of self-portraits she used in her lesson plan:

• Charis Tsevis, “Barack Obama” (2008)
• Chuck Close, “Self-Portrait” (2007)
• Michael Mapes, “Poor Boy Michael Strange” (2006)
• Nathan Gibbs, “Self-Portrait” (2002)
• Grammy Posters (2009)
• David Hockney, “Mother I, Yorkshire Moors” (1985)
• Paul Klee “Senecio” (1922)

I also want to thank Justine for allowing me to post her PowerPoint presentation and lesson plan. The PowerPoint notes include her comments on the students’ reactions:

• Download PowerPoint Presentation
• Download Paint Swatch Lesson Plan

In the vein of open collaboration and online sharing, I put together some notes from our email conversation to provide a list of steps to help others create their own pixelated portraits.

How to Build a Portrait Out of Square Blocks of Color

In my case, I used Photoshop to create a reference image first. For best results, choose an image where the face has a solid color background. You’ll want to follow these steps in Photoshop to get the right result. These steps assume you’re printing the reference image on a standard 8.5×11 inch sheet of paper.

Photoshop Instructions

• Open and Crop: Open your image in Photoshop. Using the Crop Tool, crop it down to just the face. For this exercise, hold the Shift key while using the Crop Tool to make the crop a perfect square.
• Reduce to Pixels: Go to Image Size (on the top menu, Image > Image Size). Under Pixel Dimensions, change the units to “pixels” and adjust the width and height to 8 for both. This will end up giving you an 8×8 grid of one-inch squares. Important: Make sure the check boxes for both Resample Image and Constrain Proportions are checked. Select OK.
• Set Document Size: Your image is now 8×8 pixels. But you still need to make a second adjustment to the image settings before it can be printed correctly. Go to Image Size once more. Important: Uncheck the Resample Image check box. Under Document Size, set the units to “inches,” type in 8 for width and 8 for height. Select OK.
• Print: Everything is done and you’re ready to print. From the File menu, select Print :)

The final step in creating your pixelated portrait depends on your eye to match the colors. One tip I can offer is that the “value” or black and white levels of each color are more important to recognizing the final image than the “hue” of the color itself. For people to recognize the original image, it’s more important that it have the right amount of contrast than perfectly matching the nuances of each color.

If you do use this process to make your own, I’d love to see your project. If you have a place to upload images, post a link and describe your project here in the comments. Otherwise, send me a note and I can help you post it online.

Special thanks again to Justine for allowing me to publish her class materials and for sending the photo. Seeing that image of them working on their self-portraits puts a huge smile on my face. It’s truly rewarding to see an idea I had almost seven years ago come back to life in the hands of these young minds.

From left: Panóptica (Roberto Mendoza), Bostich (Ramon Amezcua), Hiperboreal (P.G. Beas), Clorofila (Jorge Verdin), Fussible (Pepe Mogt)

A few weeks ago, the progressive Tijuana magazine ZETA published a candid interview with Pepe Mogt (Fussible). In the interview, he expresses his outrage that fellow Nortec Collective member Roberto Mendoza (Panóptica) individually trademarked the name “Nortec” as his own:

Nortec isn’t something between just the five of us. Nortec is part of the same people of Tijuana that made it possible to define the sound and its own cultural movement. Nortec is a sound. Nortec isn’t a brand, nor is it something that belongs to one person alone, or a specific group of people. At least to those of us in the collective it’s ours in the musical sense, but Nortec came from many people that gave an aesthetic and musical life to this movement; and if we have to mention names, we’d say Torolab, Acamonchi, Ángeles Moreno and an uncountable group of others. (Translation of Pepe Mogt’s comments in ZETA)

Mogt describes the name Nortec as an abbreviation of “Norteño Techno.” He clarifies that the collective registered the name “Nortec Collective” for international distribution, but says he’s unsure of the legalities in Mexico. He says this all came out of nowhere; he was notified on paper and hadn’t yet spoken to Mendoza.

Another collective member, P.G. Beas (Hiperboreal), blogged about the controversy. He confirms the group had no plans to tour in 2008 as each member works on individual or duo projects.

I haven’t the least idea of Robert Mendoza’s plans with his band named Nortec Panóptica Orchestra. The use of the name Nortec like this pisses us off; it’s already disingenuous that a band that isn’t the Nortec Collective uses the name Nortec. It’s obvious that no one in the collective knew that Robert Mendoza would register the name Nortec in Mexico as his own. This would seem obvious, but in some news it wasn’t made clear. Another thing that would seem obvious, but I’d like to underline it, is that we have said a thousand times that without Tijuana, Nortec simply wouldn’t exist. It would be nothing. (Translation of P.G. Beas’ blog post)

Bloggers (BeamTV, Xeelee) clearly agree with the anti-Mendoza sentiment, using words that just don’t have the same ring in English :)

 

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Here’s another diddy, mixed in Garage Band. I threw in a few of the default drum loops for fun. Download the individual tracks for your mixing pleasure: Guitar, Wah, Rhythm.

2 x o o x x x – 4 x o o x x x – A
F#m – A – E – F#m
G# – A – C#m – B
F#m – D – A – E
C#m – A – C#m – B
C#m – A – B – G#

This work by Nathan Gibbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.