Creative Projects








Toilets of New York


Status: Ongoing

Format: Photographs

Medium: Tumblr

URL: nyctoilets.tumblr.com

Project Summary

Toilets of New York began in a bathroom. I came to notice that often, bar and restaurant bathrooms were heavily decorated, aesthetically pleasing experiences. Some person had spent hours choosing the objects, wallpapers, and style. I took photos.

I began amassing photos of bathrooms over the course of several weeks and eventually launched a tumblr to catalogue the images. I began to notice patterns emerging and bathrooms that fell into categorical experiences: graffiti covered bathrooms; highly curated bathrooms filled with object d'art; institutional bathrooms striving for ascetic cleanliness.

Each of these bathrooms participate in a narrative with the user and serve to indicate the type of experience that should be expected.

Press


Game of Thrones: New York City’s Most Filthy and Fascinating Bar Toilets, New York Observer 2.22.2013


What You Can Learn About Brooklyn By Looking at Its Bathrooms, The Atlantic Cities 3.5.2013


New NYC toilet blog delves into the dirty world of New York's bar bathrooms , New York Daily News 3.24.2013


Are these the world's most interesting toilets? Photographer goes on a quest to document the bathrooms of New York City, The Mail Online 3.24.2013


GUESS WHAT THE “TOILETS OF NEW YORK” TUMBLR FEATURES, Animal New York 2.25.2013


Visitez ... les toilettes de New York, Street-Art included !!!, Skeuds le Blog 2.26.2013










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East Willamsburg Secession

Status: Completed

Format: Text, Interactive

Medium: White House Petitions, Web

Former URL: PeopleForAnIndependentEastWilliamsburg.com

Project Summary

Following the 2012 Presidential election, people from across the United States flooded the White House's online petition system with requests to allow their states to secede from the Union. To satirize these petitions, I filed a petition not seeking to secede from the United States, but simply asking the President to support East Williamsburg's secession from Williamsburg, as two neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

The petition, written in a patronizing tone mimicking the existing state petitions, also touched on key words to attract attention in New York City: hipsters, real estate, Williamsburg. Gothamist reported on the petition the same day it was launched.

Shortly after the Gothamist article was published, the story appeared in other websites like The New York Observer, The New York Daily News, Curbed, Brokelyn, Free Williamsburg, and Brooklyn Vegan.

The Gothamist Article attracted attention across the internet.

The story even crossed into print media with a mention in New York Magazine's Neighborhood News.

New York Magazine included the secession movement in their neighborhood news class="img-fluid max-width:50% rounded">

The news also found an audience on twitter with common users expressing support or disdain depending on their preference. It also caught the attention of people like BuzzFeed Editor Mike Hayes.

News Coverage






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Coin-Op Rides of New York

Status: Ongoing

Format: Photographs / Text

Medium: Tumblr

URL: coinopnyc.tumblr.com

The inspiration for Coin-Op Rides of New York began with a walk. I was exploring the many varied neighborhoods of Brooklyn when I began to notice that laundromats and bodegas often had coin-operated children's rides out front. Even more interestingly, these rides all seemed to be wildly different. Some were animals that seemed an obvious fit for a coin-op ride, like a carousel horse. Others were less obvious, like a pelican, or not even animals at all.

I was not interested in merely cataloging the many varieties of coin-operated rides. Instead, each ride serves as an inspiration for a short narrative and often personifies the animals.






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Office Haiku

Status: Hiatus

Format: Text

Medium: Wordpress

URL: ianmacallen.com/officehaiku

Project Summary

Office Haiku began in the summer of 2003 chronicling the frustrations of a fictional office employees drawing inspiration from my own experiences as well as stories told to me by friends. While many of the haiku have a humorous ending, the best of them share a structure with traditional haiku: two lines of observation followed by a final line of epiphany.

In the early 2000s, themed haiku collections proliferated including Honku (road rage haiku), Redneck Haiku, Haiku for Jews, and Gay Haiku. Office Haiku was intended to grow into a publishable manuscript to join the ranks of pop culture haiku collections. The intention of the project was eventually to collect the poems into a manuscript. Unfortunately, an office haiku book written by James Rogauskas brought to market in 2006.

Example

One of the earliest Office Haiku, "Hourly Wages" remains the gold standard of the poems. The first two lines observe a condition while the third offers a humorous revelation of the narrative voice; staying at home would have been cheaper than working that day.

Hourly Wages
Fail to pay for gas and tolls.
Should have stayed at home.

"Hourly Wages" also received an audio and video treatment. I recorded myself reading haiku and then added frame by frame animations alongside the audio. The images were drawn electronically in Adobe Illustrator and combined in iMovie.




Created by Ian MacAllen