Jude Buffum

Jude Buffum
Photographs and Interview by Love Ablan

Artist Jude Buffum, co-curator Jon M Gibson and I (along with our friends MyTarPit and Rockpool Candy) recently spent 48 straight hours bombarding the Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin with 15,000 Post-It notes for our massive “ich bin 8-bit” installation. By the end, we were utterly delirious, jetlagged and running on empty without sleeping. Nor bathing. And we were all getting pretty ripe.

However, back at Neurotitan’s amazing artist residency in historic Haus Schwarzenberg, we had the dilemma of a transparent shower stall smack in the middle of the kitchen. So privacy was going to be an issue between the three of us who had to share the pre-war flat for 10 days. Or it was an issue, until Jude approached the shower with a handful of Post-Its and created a really long penis-shaped censor bar which would cover our naughty 8-bits whenever we bathed.

Clearly, Jude sees everything in pixels and was the perfect person to design the installation for our “i am 8-bit” exhibition for the Pictoplasma Character Walk. Armed with only the measurements and low-res images of the gallery space far off in another country thousands of miles away, Jude developed an impressive array of characters — the ultimate lifesize pixelated experience — before we even had a chance to step into the space.

After 10 wild days of Bohemian artist-living in Germany with him, I’ll be the first to say that though Jude’s vision is a pixelated wonderland, he is definitely not square.

Tell us about the exhibit and the process of putting up 15,000 Post-It notes. Who and what did it involve? And what were the challenges?

The basic idea that Jon came to me with was to do an installation of my pixel style art made completely out of Post-It Notes. Even though my characters are original, having already seen dozens of Post-It Donkey Kongs and Megamen on Flickr, I was initially skeptical of the approach. However, when he proposed incorporating other artists’ drawings on Post-Its as some of the “pixels”, I realized it was a brilliant concept. I loved the idea of an exhibit within an exhibit, that the viewer could appreciate on two different levels.

So while I went about designing the pixel art that would comprise the installation, the curators contacted 17 different artists and collected drawings on Post-Its from all of them. Putting up the installation was extremely challenging and we only had 2 days to do it. Fortunately there were five of us (myself, Jon, you, and Andy and Inga Hamilton) and we didn’t sleep much.

With what kind of sorcery were you able to make such magnificent technically accurate schematics for the “ich bin 8-bit” installation design?

Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft a five-pack of Post-Its and said “By the power of Adobe… I HAVE THE POWER!” Also, the occasional acid flashback that causes me to hallucinate in pixels helps, but it’s unpredictable at best so I tend to grid everything out in Photoshop just in case.

How did you design such a detailed installation without ever having set foot in the actual gallery?

The gallery sent us photos with measurements for each wall, so all I had to do was convert centimeters into inches, then every 3 inches into a Post-It, and then every Post-It into a pixel. From there it was just a matter of firing up Photoshop and waiting for the hallucinations to kick in.

Despite my best efforts at planning everything down to the pixel, we did hit a few snags that required… adaptation. For example, this one section of the wall had this large electrical fixture that was not in the photos, and it just happened to be where the armless blue character’s head was supposed to be! And of course we didn’t realize this until we’d installed the rest of the figure, so the solution we came up with was to make it look like the fixture had burst through his head. So all those bloody pixels and the giant “FUCK!” were not part of the original design, Jon totally did that from scratch and it looks so much cooler than what I had originally intended! It was just this pure, typographic expression of our frustration at that point, we were pretty much losing our minds!

The characters in “ich bin 8-bit” have a wonderful totemic monster/deity quality. What was the concept behind the characters?

I’ve always been fascinated by humanity’s need to create “characters” and the necessity, or even ignorance, out of which they evolve. Like, where does the sun go at night? Well there’s this guy named Apollo with a chariot who drags it across the sky of course! What causes earthquakes? Well there’s this evil god called Loki tied up beneath the surface thrashing about because a snake is dripping venom in his eyes! Obviously! Unfortunately science has since destroyed the credibility of these characters and their mythologies, so we need new gods and totems to answer the really important questions like: Why are these cookies so fucking delicious? Well there are these magical little elves who live in this hollowed out tree who reproduce asexually because there are no female elves and… well, you get the point. As faith declined and capitalism rose in power, we no longer needed characters to explain the world around us, they just needed to explain what was in our shopping cart.

Now video games completely changed that paradigm though because instead of having gods and beings that help us understand our own world, we are now creating characters who need our help understanding theirs. We’ve created their worlds, so we are the gods now. With this installation I wanted to reverse-engineer this relationship, casting my creations as gods and demigods, in the hope that they would explain to me all the mysteries of the universe. But somehow I think they just ended up looking confused and completely terrified of their situation. Especially that poor amputee bastard with the electrical fixture bursting through his face.

People kept asking me, “Why the pink ones?” Is there a meaning behind why the artists doodled on the Ultra Pink Post-Its? Or was it purely aesthetic?

It was mainly for the sake of consistency. We picked pink because it was used throughout the entire installation. It also served as a visual cue for people exploring the exhibit, to help them find all the amazing artwork that was nested within the main imagery.

Putting up that many Post-It notes in just 48 hours was pretty brutal. On the second night, I barely got 1 hour of sleep on the gallery floor. Somehow, you continued chugging along after only 15 minutes. You barely closed your eyes, then you were back on the Post-It grind. Was it just pure adrenaline pushing you at that point?

I don’t know how you were able to sleep, what with all those Post-Its shouting at us.

Umm I thought I was the only one that could hear that… Anyway, after discovering that not all Post-Its are equal, in size anyway (and sometimes hue), do you plan on ever working with them again?

Fuck 3M.

I think the sight of Post-Its make us all cringe after that experience. How was it working with Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin? Would you work with them again?

Oh they were so great to work with, if they asked me to fly to Berlin tomorrow to do another show my suitcase is already packed. The gallery is in this amazing historically preserved building that hasn’t changed since the forties, and there’s an artist residency in the same building that they let us stay in. They pretty much just gave us keys to the gallery and the flat and let us do whatever we wanted. Total freedom!

That’s so great that they can give artists a place to stay. I was kind of shocked when they offered us the flat.

I know, I imagine they’re able to bring in a wide range of artists from all over the world this way. Oh yeah, so the flat was just like this… time capsule, it looked like no one had lived there for over half a century. It had these beautiful decayed walls with hand painted wallpaper and a wood-burning furnace that powered the stove in the next room that we had no idea how to use… the only trace of modernity in the whole flat was the stand-up shower in the kitchen that we endowed with pixelated genitalia.

The flat overlooked the courtyard where the gallery was, and you could also see the Anne Frank museum, which had this giant, mechanical steampunk cockroach hanging over the entrance that you could put two euros in a coin slot and it would come to life. It was like Chuck E. Cheese meets the City of Lost Children. The juxtaposition of Anne Frank’s face and this giant bug was so disturbing, I loved it. Except when we got home from clubbing at six in the morning and the cockroach would go apeshit at seven. Fucking tourists.

That whole place (Haus Schwarzenberg) is just so amazing and I kind of love/hate that mechanical cockroach as well. Tell us a little more about your Berlin experience.

Oh man, it was incredible. Particularly where we stayed, in Mitte, it was just saturated in art. Philadelphia has its share of street art, but nothing like what I got to experience in Berlin. It seems like people there not only tolerate it, they appreciate it. It really hammered home for me how lame all the government-sponsored murals in Philly are…

So, on top of all that we had the Pictoplasma conference and the 30 galleries participating in the Character Walk so you have some of the most creative people in the world all converging on this already artistic city… wow. Complete and total overstimulation to say the least, it was like that scene in the Matrix where Neo downloads a lifetime of kung-fu training into his brain in just a few hours.

I don’t even know where to begin… well of course TADO’s exhibit was loads of fun. Who doesn’t enjoy donning a giant panda head and busting out some sexy pole dancing?

The Joumi exhibit was really fun too, very innovative. They had this DDR-style pad you stepped on to create characters out of constantly moving, evolving geometric shapes, and each new shape you created would add another piece of rhythm or sound to this building musical soundscape. Totally cool shit.

And the conference was just so inspiring, whether it was Friends With You’s insane bouncy house installation or presentations by artists like Gastón Caba or Boris Hoppek. And then having these guys come to our opening and add their art to our installation? Fucking brilliant!

You’re well known for your fantastic pixelated paintings and illustrations. What is it about the pixel that appeals to you?

I’ve always been interested in the universality of symbols and the science of figurative abstraction, and I think the pixel offers an opportunity to explore both. Even before I started using the pixel as a medium, the work I did at Headcase Design was all about reducing images to their simplest forms that were still recognizable. In one of Scott McCloud’s books he talks about how the more abstract a face becomes from realism, the more people it can represent, and therefore the more universally accessible it is.

The reason I started using the pixel, is that it is emblematic of the whole concept of video games, which is just so rich in metaphorical language that can help us understand our current predicament.

Which is?

Emotionless cosmic beings that have completely lost our purpose.

Or maybe that’s just me. No but in all honesty, I think there’s this supercharged sense of purpose in video games (Save the princess! Defeat the bad guy!) that doesn’t exist in real life for most people. So I try to exploit that in my work, to say, yeah this is all just one big stupid game with no purpose, but you have no choice but to play along, and make the best of it. Break the rules. Manipulate the system. And yes, shag the princess while you’re at it.

Speaking of, I absolutely love your “Happy Ending” series. Tell me about it.

I did those for the third annual I Am 8-Bit show. At that point I was doing a lot of pieces that exploited the childish nostalgia of Nintendo characters for the purpose of examining themes of lost innocence. This series explored the ulterior motives of classic 8-bit heroes like Mario and Link, begging the question, why exactly did they want to save the princess?

Hah! Well that brings new meaning to the term ‘1-Up’! Did you play a lot of the early 8-bit games? Any favorites in particular?

I did, and in fact what little time I do have these days to play games is split about 50/50 playing new games and old. One of the more obscure games I really enjoy playing from the 8-bit era is Monster Party. It’s just such an odd game and the ending is so fucking creepy I still have nightmares about it. But I would say the Legend of Zelda has always been my favorite, if for no other reason than it was the first game my mother and I beat together.

Wait, your mom was a gamer too?

Well, not exactly. Not at first. My mom thought television was an evil, brain-rotting box and forced me and my brother to read a book for every hour of tv we were allowed to watch. In hindsight, I guess this made her one of the greatest moms ever, but at the time we hated it. I think the only reason she even let video games into the house was because our grandfather, her father, worked for Coleco and gave us a Colecovision for Christmas one year. When the NES came along, she was reluctant to let us get one. But at that point I think she saw the cognitive benefits of gaming, that in many ways it was closer to reading a book than watching television, and so she relented. And then I got the first Zelda game, she actually got really into it, we’d give each other hints when we figured out how to beat certain bosses or where certain items were hidden, that sort of thing.

What are some of your other early influences?

I spent the first decade of my life brainwashed by a cult. “Influences” were not… allowed.

Really?

Yes. I don’t like to talk about it.

Fair enough. Working with you directly on installing this exhibition was genuinely inspiring to me. Who are your peers, your comrades, that inspire you?

In no particular order: Gina Triplett and Matt Curtius, Martha Rich, The Heads of State, Chris Neal, Aaron Meshon, Doug Boehm, Chris Buzelli, and a whole bunch of other really great people.

Honestly though, I don’t even enjoy looking at other artists’ work because I feel like what I’m doing is such shit in comparison, and I would probably hate these people for being so fucking awesome if I didn’t already love them so much.

I’m also really inspired by other artists that work with the pixel like Christoph Niemann, Doctor Octoroc, Eboy, Chris Olian, and a whole slew of other really talented people.

How did you get connected with Jon and “i am 8-bit”?

Two words: Glory. Hole.

Wait. No. Shit! I meant to say MySpace.

Hahaha! I’m going to pretend that it really was a glory hole chance encounter. What is your work process like? Do you sketch out your vision first, or do you start out digitally? Do you have a giant stock of graph paper that you work with? Or, dare I say, Post-Its, haha?

I usually do some sort of non-pixelated sketches first, but from there it’s completely digital. The only time I paint or use mixed media is for gallery shows.

So what did you study in school? How did that apply to your current work?

I graduated from the Tyler School of Art with a BFA in Graphic Design, but Tyler’s design department also comprises interactive design and illustration, so I studied all three.

I had always wanted to be an illustrator until the day my idol, Joe Sorren, was a guest speaker in my illustration class. He stuck around for our class critiques and when he got to my painting, he said, I shit you not this is exactly what he said: “I’m personally offended to have to talk about this piece, it’s THAT BAD.” I went home practically in tears, didn’t leave my room for a week, and almost dropped out of school. But I realized at that point I was a better designer than illustrator, so I stuck with graphic design.

After graduating, I ended up working for one of my professors at Headcase Design, where we mostly designed books. We ended up doing a lot of illustration for some of the books we worked on, and over the course of several years I moved away from design into primarily illustration. And now, as many illustrators do, I’ve turned to doing gallery work as a way to experiment and push my work in ways that clients might not necessarily be comfortable with.

Apparently, in addition to all of your fine art and illustration work, you also teach. Tell us a little bit about your course.

I taught at Tyler for a number of years after graduation, but I’m currently teaching in the Illustration Department at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. My course is called Design Methods, and it’s basically a cross-disciplinary class that gives the students the opportunity to illustrate and design in tandem, so that helps them understand how the other side (art directors and designers) operates. It’s kind of the perfect class for me, as I came from a background in graphic design but have transitioned over the last few years into primarily illustration.

So a majority of your work is 2D. Then you have your great plush characters on your website, a cool transition to 3D. And now an all encompassing installation. What’s the next step for you? Are you going to get all Matrix on us?

I’m glad you like the plush toys. Do you want to buy some? Cause nobody else does. No, I like doing the toys, but I think I need to get a distributor or something, I just can’t handle all the marketing bullshit needed to get them out there. I think I need to get myself a sweatshop too. I thought people would like that they’re handmade here but I just can’t charge a reasonable price. People don’t give a shit where it comes from I’ve found, I tried to be all “ethical” or some bullshit but nobody cares. China FTW!

As far as installations go, I think for my next one I would like to do something more three dimensional, I liked what Boris Hoppek does with cardboard boxes, something like that could be cool with pixel art.

Do you have any upcoming exhibits or projects where can we see more of your artwork?

I have a piece called Saved by the Bell: The Columbine Years in Gallery 1988’s current show Idiot Box, but other than that, no plans. I think I actually need a little downtime to recalibrate my creativity and just… digest all that German inspiration. And by inspiration, I mean kurrywürst.

• JudeBuffum.com
• Jude’s Blog
• ich bin 8-bit exhibit
• Gallery 1988 : Idiot Box Exhibit
• i am 8-bit
• Neurotitan Gallery, Berlin

Ich Bin 8-Bit installation timelapse from Jude Buffum on Vimeo.