John Dimatos
John Dimatos was born in Boston, grew up in Athens, but comes from Kefalonia and is scheduled to return there in about 40 years or so. John graduated from Georgetown in ’00 with a BS in International Relations, and worked at Modem Media and CCG MetaMedia for clients such as Delta Airlines, Merck and Pfizer. Afterwards, he diverged to sell fine handmade silk oriental rugs to retail stores across America where he learned the art of lamenting about how the business is slow these days. John is currently in the middle of his ITP degree working for the summer in Glendale under a large neon Coca Cola sign. You may also call him Giannis.
it’s food day here in sunny Burbank California for 5-in-5, with a modified Salazar: the peacemaker. A Salazar is a historically fantastic, gorgeous, and satisfying sandwich. It was created 2 years ago at mawopi HQ with Mehmet and Charles, in a desperate moment of severe hunger as a testament to collaborative cooking and fortifying friendship.
A Salazar consists of a a huge turkish bun with some sour cherry spread, a fried egg lying on top of moist roast beef, and armenian string cheese. Delicious, hits all the major food groups, and includes enough tartness to get ya going real good.
Our project today was not a Salazar. This is definitely not the Salazar. I mean, there’s no roast beef. This is a modified Salazar. See, the way it works is that any sandwich that isn’t a Salazar but is made in the original spirit and with some of the original ingredients, is a modified Salazar. Some are good, some are not. Failures are generally named after shamed latin american dictators, such as the Pinochet, a rather disgusting sandwich with turkish kefte and pita bread. This is the peacemaker, a sandwich created to resolve conflict. Don’t believe me? try a fresh august fig with a piece of feta cheese. If you have any fight, argument, or pride left in you afterward I’ll be surprised.
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August 1st, 2008
The idea of a serialized novel hit it’s peak in the Victorian Era, and has always been something that interested me, for the particular challenge it poses in terms of always keeping the reader at a heightened state of interest. With a normal end to end novel or story, authors can indulge themselves with lengthy imagery, character building, or in the case of David Foster Wallace hundreds of pages of footnotes. But besides creating unforgiving regular deadlines for writers (a surefire anathema amongst the more petulant of them), there was also the equally unforgiving quota of words, a yardstick by which writers to this day get paid.
The idea that Twitter and text messaging lends itself to a short form serialization of a story over a predetermined length of time is not a paradigm shattering idea; In Japan serialized novels via texting have been making the top 10 sales consistently for over a year now. My specific goal for this project was to create a platform that would allow me work within the twitter parameters in an automated fashion.
Imagine my surprise when I turned to Google spreadsheets to create that platform.
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July 31st, 2008
StopMotionCasting from john dimatos on Vimeo.
A few months ago, I noticed that it was quite mesmerizing to flip through all my photos in Adobe Lightroom by holding down the right arrow and just letting it go crazy. I thought it would be fun for my second project to use that fascination as the jumping point for a stop motion movie using a years worth of photos.
I have a habit of taking a whole mess of photographs with different exposures and focal lengths especially when I’m using old manual lenses. Because of that, there are sets within the lot that amount to teeny shorts of time lapse animation. But since I’m using a years worth of photographs (3773 photos), the time lapse doesn’t carry throught-out. Instead, it transitions to representing the intended chronology and the photographer behind the camera as the unifying themes.
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July 30th, 2008
For my first day, I’m putting together a story, as told by my friends over voicemail. Last week, I asked two of my closest friends, Luis and Vitto to do something simple for me: call and leave voicemails about each other on my phone. I’ve wanted to do a narrative story using voicemails for a long time, because the lo fi fuzzy sound of voice over the limited frequency range of 300 to 3400 Hz on POTS is something I associate with great stories from friends waiting for me on my voicemail.The second premise of the day, and my general theme for the week, is how to make creative projects at work by picking a project and using resources you can split up into 5 minute stretches of action.
Luis And Vitto (mp3)
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July 28th, 2008
John Dimatos was born in Boston, grew up in Athens, but comes from Kefalonia and is scheduled to return there in about 40 years or so. John graduated from Georgetown in ’00 with a BS in International Relations, and worked at Modem Media and CCG MetaMedia for clients such as Delta Airlines, Merck and Pfizer. Afterwards, he diverged to sell fine handmade silk oriental rugs to retail stores across America where he learned the art of lamenting about how the business is slow these days. John is currently in the middle of his ITP degree working for the summer in Glendale under a large neon Coca Cola sign. You may also call him Giannis.
Day 