BAV-O-RAMA and RGB Signage

Antonella said the bav-o-rama with signage looks like a painting, and that is why I love her so!

This week I’ve been working on getting the DIY placards installed at the bava.studio and upping my LED light game. I worked with a friend of Miles’s, Ricci, to get the design of the RGB VHS tape and the BAV-O-RAMA label locked-in. Ricci has a great contact for printing the art as large stickers that we can then adhere to pre-cut laminated particle board—it’s a pretty slick solution for some down and dirty signage.

A look at the signage head-on in the day

I liked Dr. Garcia’s idea of keeping the store truly punk and leaving it signless, but my horror vacui is far too great to tolerate that for long. Once we got the signs installed, it was apparent that the RGB headliner needed light, so I got a 3 meter strip of warm white LED lights, and attached them to the windows frame, which provides a low-key Hollywood-like marquee outline. I also got a 5 meter strip of warm white LEDs and installed them on the inside of the window perimeter for the actual diorama to throw some more light on the Creepshow scene.

Inside view of bav-o-rama with extra lighting

The marquee lights bend into the diorama before they are totally hidden, which is not totally clean. I used some electrical tape to try and black them out, but if you are looking close it is a bit of an eyesore:

RGB sign marquee lighting covered with black electrical tape to make it look “cleaner”

The other side of the marquee lighting is a bit cleaner, but still not perfect. Given how much I obsessed over these two transitions I decided to leave it alone and remind myself it’s supposed to be DIY, so by definition less than perfect. The only real requirement is that it’s made with love 🙂

LED lights from marquee transitioning behind the sign

The last piece of the diorama was to install latches on the movable walls given they were not closing cleanly. Alberto happened to have perfect latches and now the diorama window is pretty damn finished, with signage and all!

Latch to secure the walls of the diorama

Wider shot of both latches installed on the back of the diorama walls

One of the things that is still floating around is the weird naming I got going on. Is it bava.studio or RGB? Also, what the hell is BAV-O-RAMA? These are all fair questions, and right now I kind of like the confusion, but in my mind the entire space as my office is bava.studio; RGB is the space as a VHS store/arcade; and BAV-O-RAMA is the window display. So, they’re all distinct pieces of the same thing, a kind of holy trinity that contains all three elements simultaneously—they’re all just a different faces of the same entity.

What’s more, they’re all working towards a common goal for me: re-imagining my vision for this blog in physical space. I could just as well refer to the studio as the bava, in fact I kind of do: bava.studio. This squares quite nicely with with a quote I came across from Olia Lialina recently, which is taken from a recently published history Digital Art: 1960s to Now:

NFTs suddenly became the biggest topic in digital art and especially in net art. In general, the crypto market has started to take over. Because I don’t want to take part in that market, it has made my life as a net artist quite difficult. At the moment I am looking for ways to be a net artist outside the crypto mining and minting. There are moments, I think, when its healthier for the net artist to go offline.

This idea of online artists finding inspiration away from the maddening market of crypto or AI seems healthy for a variety of reasons. It’s part of what I’m enjoying about the bava.studio, it allows me to take my blog offline. And when I do come online to share it’s often far more generative than chasing gold. I’ve been reminded these days why I started doing this thing: to have a creative way to reflect, draw connections, and share. I don’t need AI for that, and most likely you don’t either. Viva la bava both off and online!