|ABOUT|

       For UNDR RPBLC 31's artistic direction, I looked directly to the last for inspiration. The first thing that stood out to me was Daan Botlek's statement that, "You might as well be a robot sending me automated questions..." Now I had already been employing some of Jeff Thompson's bots to tweet for @undrrpblc with some success as means to pump-fake online trolling, so this was already well within grasp. I started out by designating four specific bots to round out the sections of a complete interview. They were the intro-bot, subject-bot, process-bot and outro-bot. From this initial setup, I went ahead and copied & pasted various subjects, titles and themes from each ARTST to be FTRD in the MGZN for the bots. And after some quick testing, the bots were off and blasting @ 960-ish tweets-a-day for however long it took to reach 31K tweets. I then randomly selected 31 questions from each bot, and sent them to their assigned ARTST with instructions for them to choose their favorite five questions from each bot to answer. “Cool. Next.”
       Hyperreality and reification—Michael Reedy and Dario Maglionico. With UNDR RPBLC, I've met so few of the people I've worked with. Almost everything is done online. Shit, my entire MGZN’s "on the line". So these terms make sense to me. I began studying my surroundings, my world, my belief systems. “How did I get here??” Back to Botlek... He had mentioned his imposing strict restrictions on his work to create challenge for himself therein, with emphasis on the cube as being "the most basic unit for space and dimension." I thought, “My room's like a cube... But how would a bot build a MGZN?” And after taking a look at Thompson's work with INTERP, it hit me... “Let's document my surroundings and superimpose images from those to be FTRD in this issue to create "real-life" 3D MDLs.
       I began this process by taking 160 rotating pics of my room. I then scraped each of the ARTSTs' WBSTEs of all their images. With a ton of material to sort through, I slimmed it all down to 99 images apiece (with the 99 pics from my room completing a full 360° rotation), and sorted, sized and renamed 'em all. This was done quickly according color, shape and difference. “Oh, shoot—before I forget...” With each of the FTRDARTSTs, I took a whole ton of screen caps from three of their vids each. After sorting, the images were placed at a ⅔ ratio atop each of their corresponding numerical room pic. Like this...

       These newly created images were then used to sike PhotoScan into thinking that they were just of my room, and generate 3D MDLs from the images outlying objects, structure and dimensions. And keeping true to the OG total of 99 pics, a total of 99 MDLs were created. Being that the software mistakenly assesses the images as hailing from a uniform space (my room), it tried its best to render the surface texture from the images provided. This did provide for some interesting results, but did not compliment the needs of the MGZN. So I then replaced each of the 99 MDLs generated texture image files with that of its corresponding ARTST image and numeric representation as its texture. So for |MDL|23|, you've got Graffiti-23.jpg, and for |MDL|45|, you've got Joonghyun-Cho-45.jpg and so on... This allowed for the creation and application of rules to which I had no control, following suit with a bot bustin’ it all out. And also it helped to create a sorta funky hybrid, amalgamation of each other's work. “Yeah!” Make sure you check all the MDLs out, and DWNLD the ones you like–they’re all available for FREE.99.
       That brings us to this WBSTE... Up until recently, I had little to no experience in working with MySQL databases, so some learning was in order. After a couple of videos, I was up to speed—and in the process came to realize that portions of an exported MySQL database could coincide terrifically with an otherwise generated aesthetic. Plus, what better way could there be to list all accompanying data? It was then time to create thumbnails for each of the MDLs. This was done by importing each MDL into Photoshop and running a quick action. “Cake.” With the MDLs and their thumbnails in order, it was just a matter of uploading those players and making sure they all worked. And, well, after a nice li'l learning curve, and a considerable amount of time and patience, I had all the MDLs working complete with accurate measurements. The rest of this WBSTE was formulaic: match UNDR RPBLC while making necessary adjustments for color. “What’s next?”
       ““Oh yeah, the MGZN. Right.” With the MDLs sized, shaped and textured to a tee, it was time to knock out the rest. This was done by importing each particular MDL into Photoshop again, shimmying its placement to “perfection”, and exporting it as an image file. The resulting image files were then combined with their corresponding exported MySQL database counterparts, to complete the creation of the issue’s ads, title pages and cover. Then came the lengthy process of linking all corresponding things to their assignments. The rest of general feature layout was, more or less, stumbled upon through my usual workflow of play, with special attention to color, numerical value, measurement and placement. Since each of the ARTSTs FTRD in this issue provided me with such tremendous material to work with, the rest was a walk in the park. I tried my best to accentuate their work and INTVWs with the recently established theme of the MGZN. I hope you enjoy.
       A huge debt of gratitude goes out to Jeff Thompson, $ha Hef, Anthony Lister, Gustavo Torres, Joonghyun Cho, Nicolas Barrome, Scott Teplin, Swag Toof, _unfun, All Seeing, Doomsday1973, Luna Park, Neron One, petalum, Potatoe, and to everyone who has helped make UNDR RPBLC possible. Thank you very much.
-Jacob Grossman