the art assignment fake flyer

Fake Flyer - Nathaniel Russell

Today we meet with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell. Nat's work plays with the divide between real and imagined, making posters and flyers for events that may or may not exist. His assignment asks you to make a fake flyer and share it with the world too.

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Fake flyer - nathaniel russell.

Today we meet with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell. Nat's work plays with the divide between real and imagined, making posters and flyers for events that may or may not exist. His assignment asks you to make a fake flyer and share it with the world too.

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Fake Flyer - Nathaniel Russell

About the episode.

Today we meet with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell. Nat's work plays with the divide between real and imagined, making posters and flyers for events that may or may not exist. His assignment asks you to make a fake flyer and share it with the world too.

{ Look Wonder Discover }

Cultivating Curiosity Since 2010.

The Art Assignment: Fake Flyer

What can you image the world needs? What are you looking for? Have you (figuratively) lost something? Want to invite the universe to image with you?

Thanks to our friends at The Art Assignment*, we have an assignment for you by artist Nat Russell, we’re invited to Make a Fake Flyer.

“Today we meet with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell . Nat’s work plays with the divide between real and imagined, making posters and flyers for events that may or may not exist. His assignment asks you to make a fake flyer and share it with the world too.” Source: The Art Assignment.

Make a flyer that gives advice, shares something about your life, or promotes an imagined event. Put it out in to the world. Bonus points for uploading a photo of the flyer posted in the real world, share it with the #ArtAssignment #YouAreAnArtist and @lookwonderdiscover.

*coming soon our interview with The Art Assignment and You are an Artist creator Sarah Urist Green

Look Wonder Discover is a 501c3 nonprofit, Gen Z driven organization. The project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License .

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Make a fake flyer. | Nathaniel Russell

Today we meet with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell. Nat's work plays with the divide between real and imagined, making posters and flyers for events that may or may not exist. His assignment asks you to make a fake flyer and share it with the world too.

• Originally Aired October 8, 2015
• Runtime 8 minutes
• Created September 14, 2021 by TVDB-Editor123
• Modified September 14, 2021 by TVDB-Editor123

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Learn more about Nathaniel's job.

Currently we meet to artist and musician Nicholas Russell. Nat's work plays with the split between realistic and imagined, making posters and flyers for occurrences that may or may not exist. His assignment ask you toward make ampere fake brochure and share it with the worldwide too. 

Instructions.

1. Making a flyer that gives advice, shares something regarding your life, or promotes the invented event 2. Placement it out in till the world 3. Upload a printable copy using #theartassignment. Bonus points for uploading a photo of the flyer posted in the real world. 4. Reputation and glory (Your labor might be in a future episode) Google, Windows, & Mac-friendly!All resources are editable the meet your school Boardwalktel.com activities can be taught in the classroom instead online.Product Details: That is a HUGE step-by-step (with pictures) assignment for students to procedure and demonstrate their skills with Google Docs. Students ...

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The Art Assignment

Fake Flyer - Nathaniel Russell

Season 2 Episode 21 | 8m 23s  |  Video has closed captioning.

Today we meet with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell. Nat's work plays with the divide between real and imagined, making posters and flyers for events that may or may not exist. His assignment asks you to make a fake flyer and share it with the world too.

Aired: 07/07/16

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[music playing] Today we're meeting up with artist and musician Nathaniel Russell.

He's originally from Indianapolis, spent a long time in the San Francisco Bay Area, and only recently moved back here.

Drawing is really at the core of everything Nathaniel does.

Making prints, posters, zines, paintings, murals, and books, among other things.

And his style is often deceptively simple.

Pairing line drawing and text in a way that's often very funny, but is also able to conjure other worlds and re-imagine our own.

He's made flyers for events that don't exist, and sculptures of books never published.

But he also make posters for events that do exist, and art for real album covers.

It's that back and forth between real and imagined that gives Nathaniel's works tremendous resonance.

And you're just as likely to encounter Nathaniel's work out in the world, on a t-shirt or tacked to a telephone pole, as you are in a gallery.

And today he's going to give us an assignment that asks you to put your work out in the world too.

I'm Nathaniel Russell.

And this is your art assignment.

I really do love commercial work.

There's a lot of things in my life that I've seen that has a commercial application, whether it's a record cover, a book cover, or a box of popcorn, or product design, or something like that that has affected me and stuck with me my entire life, much more so than a Marc Chagall painting.

Which, I love Marc Chagall.

And I love a lot of classic, wonderful modern art.

But I want to make all that stuff, you know?

I want to make a good painting.

I want to make a box of popcorn.

I want to write a book.

I want to make a flyer.

I feel like I want to do all of those things, because I love all those things, and I get something out of all of those things.

NATHANIEL (VOICEOVER): I would try to make something everyday.

And get these little ideas out of the sketchbook, out of my head, just to make it real and move on.

And one of these things I had a couple ideas for some fliers that I just thought would be funny to come across.

There was one I did, it was a portrait of this poodle.

This fluffy, French poodle-y looking little fancy boy.

I sort of saw him as a leader of the resistance, in a way, of this dog versus owner.

I thought it was just really funny.

And I just wanted to make it.

So I would make some every morning.

And then it sort of veered off into just from a joke into these more abstract ideas of how I feel about the Earth and my connection to it and other people, and how to communicate with other people, or communicate these ideas, in a way that's kind of more casual.

And it's not about, I made this painting.

I worked six months on it.

Where you need to really appreciate this and give me $5,000 for this painting.

It's like, I just went and drew this.

And I put a photo on it.

And I'm gonna go Xerox it.

And I'm gonna put it up on this pole, or I'm gonna email it to you.

Your assignment is to make a flyer that gives advice, shares something about your everyday life, or promotes an imagined event.

Go out into the world and put it up on a light pole, or a bulletin board, or wherever you see fliers.

Send us a printable copy.

And bonus points if you have photos of your flyer out in the real world.

So Sara, as you know, one of my favorite things is the fake protest sign.

Like there's a bunch of angry placards.

And there's one person holding up a sign that says, Obama Bring Back Arrested Development.

Or What Do We Want?

Time Travel.

When Do We Want It?

That's Irrelevant.

I actually think that's a really good precedent, John.

Because like there's an example of being surrounded by signs that want something from you.

They want to sway your opinion.

Or they want your vote.

And then you insert this message that doesn't really want anything from you.

That's kind of playing with that genre.

It's like a gift instead of a solicitation.

And in this image-drenched culture, most of the images that we see are asking something of us.

And I really like this assignment because it's about like making a gift for people.

And what a wonderful metaphor for art in general.

An image that isn't asking you for money except that are costs money sometimes.

But let's say if you're in a museum-- except admission.

Maybe this isn't so good.

Oh, there's no way out of this capitalistic society.

So aside from Obama Bring Back Arrested Development, there are some other precedents for this activity.

Like Nat is very much influenced by wood cut artists like Antonio Frasconi, and Ben Shahn.

But I think the Bay Area history, the history of the Mission School, is very much palpable in his work.

And that's what I'd like to talk about today.

SARA (VOICEOVER): Nat remembers walking past a closed gallery in New York, and seeing through the glass a huge 20-foot mural that completely blew him away.

It was by Margaret Kilgallen, who had painted the gallery floor-to-ceiling with her signature assemblage of storefront lettering and cartoon-like images of mostly women.

Kilgallen was based in San Francisco, and was inspired by the signage on the streets of the Mission District where she lived and was associated with a loose group of artists who came up in the '90s, referred to as the Mission School.

She painted hundreds of murals around the city, mixing surplus paint from recycling centers, and bringing together the influence of folk art, graffiti, traditional mural painting, and underground comics.

Kilgallen's work was shown in galleries, but mostly lived out in the world.

Nat was struck by the complex emotions and textures that came through in her flat shapes.

He was influenced by Kilgallen's approach, but found his own visual and material language that also values the personal and handmade, celebrates the power of the line, and lives with us out in the world.

I say fake flyer.

But it's a real thing.

I put it up and it's a flyer.

It's real.

But these things that I'm advertising or promoting or writing up, they're fake because you can't come to my garage.

The garage sale isn't real.

The fundraiser isn't real.

It's about this the idea is way more important than the reality of it existing in a physical realm.

NATHANIEL (VOICEOVER): The number one thing for me about this is just getting people out of the digital un-real life, and back into the physical world.

There's not a lot of just lurking going on anymore.

There's not a lot of people just loitering anymore.

People are like walking to somewhere, or going over here, or they're hanging out on the corner and checking their phone until the crosswalk changes, so they can keep going.

If they're even walking.

So I just made a batch of these flyers for this event in Seattle.

And I did a couple.

But I just put like, Analog Twitter.

And I just wrote like, had breakfast this morning.

It was OK. LOL.

And like a picture of a hot dog or something.

And just putting it up, because to me, that's what you're doing with Twitter and Instagram and everything.

It's like, look at my dog, you know.

But to actually go through the idea of, I'm gonna go to the coffee shop and print this out.

That level of perspective that you're giving people on your life, like you're willingly, like, check it out.

This is what I want the world to see.

Anyone with a computer.

It's funny to think about on a local level.

And like, really isolated and see that perspective as wonder what ol' Linda over here had for lunch.

I think I'm gonna walk down to the light pole and see how that tuna casserole turned out.

Hopefully it will get you to think about some ideas in different ways, and get you out of the house, and make you brave enough to try to put these ideas out in the world for other people to see.

And just do it and move on, and see what happens.

[music playing] Friends and I always talked about this band that we were gonna have.

But we never-- two of them aren't even musicians.

And we would just pretend that we had this band.

And we'd tell people we had this band.

It even got written up in the school paper as a high school band.

And I remember I made t-shirts for a band one time.

It was called Dolomite Jr. [music playing]

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A Fake Conspiracy Theorist’s Second Act

What do you do after you convince gen z “birds aren’t real” go into politics, naturally..

Peter McIndoe spent the first several years of his 20s traveling across the country, being insulted by strangers. In retrospect, it was fieldwork.

Between 2018 and 2021, McIndoe, now 25, went from state to state, playacting the role of radicalized cult leader pushing an absurd conspiracy theory—that, as he put it, “birds aren’t real.” Avian creatures, McIndoe warned, were being systematically massacred and replaced by deep state–operated drones, designed for widespread surveillance of the populace.

The conceit was satire: a metacommentary on the countless eccentric and convoluted conspiracy theories that were ripping through the country in the aftermath of Trump’s election and the dawn of the QAnon age. But for years McIndoe played it straight, declining to publicly acknowledge the humor or performance art behind the “movement.” Soon, his campaign had attracted thousands of Gen Z “followers” who were delighted to be in on the joke. These fellow “bird truthers” founded their own autonomous local Birds Aren’t Real chapters, posting flyers and holding rallies in their own communities. (McIndoe eventually outed himself as a method actor in December 2021, on the front page of the New York Times.)

The obvious bunk-ness of the idea that birds are being replaced en masse by feathered espionage technology didn’t stop many, many people—even members of the media—from taking the act at face value. Several news stations reported that Birds Aren’t Real was a bona fide conspiracy theory that had been circulating among genuine believers for decades. And some people McIndoe encountered on the road were so rude, or downright hostile, in their attempts to help him understand that birds are in fact real that McIndoe found himself beginning to sympathize with the tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists he had set out to parody.

McIndoe’s commitment as a performer ended up giving him a unique view into the minds and experiences of many Americans. It’s that surprising, empathy-fueled understanding of the modern conspiracy theorist that has inspired his next project: political action.

The secret to McIndoe’s success might be that it’s almost impossible to tell when he’s acting. At least for the uninitiated. And he relishes the opportunity to slip back into his role as a conspiracy theorist whenever he gets the chance. This June, Macmillan will publish his book about the movement, written entirely in character with his collaborator and friend Connor Gaydos, entitled: Birds Aren’t Real: The True Story of Mass Avian Murder and the Largest Surveillance Campaign in US History . On the TED stage last April, when he gave a talk at a five-day thought leadership event, McIndoe performed as the conspiracy theorist alter ego for a full five minutes before letting audience members—many laughing uncomfortably or visibly alarmed—in on the shtick. In September, Fox producers took his claims at face value, both on Jesse Watters Primetime and in a streaming, 25-minute Fox Nation documentary.

To back up a bit: Shortly after the inauguration of President Trump, McIndoe, then 19, was attending a women’s rights march when he scrawled “Birds aren’t real” on the back of a poster. It was just an off-the-cuff absurdism, a phrase that had popped into his head. He never expected the idea to go viral, but viral it went: first with high school students across Memphis, who were writing the phrase on classroom chalkboards within days of the protest, then with hundreds of thousands of young people across the U.S. on social media.

McIndoe leaned into it. Soon, he was selling “Birds Aren’t Real” T-shirts and, within months, dropped out of college in his home state of Arkansas and moved to Memphis to “follow the energy” of the movement he’d “accidentally” launched.

By 2020, McIndoe and team had erected multiple billboards in cities including Birmingham and Los Angeles. McIndoe bought a “conspiracy van,” which allowed him to more easily tour the country in character, espousing his “belief” that, since 1959, the U.S. government had been committing mass avicide and replacing live birds with drones designed to surveil the American people.

Some days, McIndoe would roam the streets, handing out flyers that said things like “If it flies it spies” and “Birdwatching goes both ways.” Other days, he would simply pull into a new city, park in a public space with his van—“WAKE UP, BIRDS AREN’T REAL” plastered across the side —and wait for people to approach. And they did, looking him right in the eye and telling him that he was unhinged, uneducated, stupid, idiotic, and wrong.

Of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of these encounters, one—in Branson, Missouri—stands out. A man disagreed with McIndoe, and his approach was to yell. “This guy walked up to me and started not just calling me crazy or stupid, but started saying, ‘You’re schizophrenic. You need help,’ ” McIndoe told Slate. This guy’s anger—and his approach—really crystallized the dire state of cross-party relations in a fractured America. “If we’re to a point where you’re not even having empathy for someone that you think is schizophrenic, then we’re at a really bad point,” he said.

McIndoe grew up near Little Rock, Arkansas, and was home-schooled, closed off from mainstream culture, he said, without access to “normal media” and surrounded by “hyperconservative” Christian ideals. When, around age 10, he questioned the logic behind the Bible stories he was being taught, he was treated as though he had been “possessed by a demon,” he recalled. Channeling the characters he remembered from childhood, acting the part of Birds Aren’t Real true believer, came naturally.

But when people—like the guy in Branson—told him he was “the problem with this country,” he didn’t feel like someone who was in control, someone who was playing the audience. He felt sad, judged, and dismissed—even emboldened to double down. On the outside, he’d be reasoning with naysayers about all the evidence that pigeons, crows, and starlings were the pawns of government agents. Inside, he recalled, he was thinking: My God, could these people be any more ineffective? His argument was absurd. And yet, the people arguing with him, the people with whom he actually agreed, were not winning.

After his time embedded in radical America, McIndoe has become an evangelist for “trying to reduce loneliness, [on] whatever scale we can.” His target audience is basically the left, and the TED audience that he spoke to last spring was a tactical place to try that out : “If our goal is to live in a shared reality with our neighbors,” he said, we need fewer people disappearing into echo chambers where dangerous ideas proliferate, often in ways that are incomprehensible to outsiders. “Let’s direct our energy toward the crisis of belonging,” including people in our communities instead of condemning them, he said. “Maybe then we can understand the crisis of belief.”

Take how McIndoe says he eventually swayed his own father on the issue of corporate evil. His initial instinct was to share Bernie Sanders talking points. Instead, in their conversations together, he kept dropping references to the Book of Mark. “Bringing up the Scripture and getting on his level changed his mind,” McIndoe said. “It was about ‘How can I unkink the hose of this conversation and create a bridge in a common language?’ ”

In such a polarized nation, having been trained in that “common language” is a rare thing. But McIndoe thinks his personal experience—during his childhood and while on the road—might show others the value in learning it.

Though McIndoe speaks to the left, this isn’t just about left vs. right. The split between who got the joke about Birds Aren’t Real wasn’t ever about political affiliation. Mostly, McIndoe sees a “massive generational divide” in how people react to the bit.

“I think for people who didn’t grow up with the internet, they see and they assume that it is real,” McIndoe said of the Birds Aren’t Real movement. “Anyone from Gen Z sees the idea and, pretty much immediately, assumes it’s a joke.”

There’s a sardonic sensibility there that is worth mining. Next year will see between 7 million and 9 million potential new Gen Z voters, compared with 2020. This November, the 2024 presidential election, almost half the electorate will be under the age of 45, according to data from the Brookings Institution.

And McIndoe has seen firsthand the potential for activism among his cohort. Across the U.S., 19-year-olds McIndoe had never met slid into his DMs to ask permission to launch chapters of Birds Aren’t Real in their own cities and states, sporting the merch, launching their own social channels, and handing out flyers at their local farmers markets. Thousands have turned up for massive rallies, including in Washington Square Park, where protesters booed pigeons that flew overhead. At a demonstration beneath the Gateway Arch, McIndoe put down his megaphone to symbolically set fire to a St. Louis Cardinals flag (because of the cardinal) as the crowd cheered. In November 2021, hundreds of “bird truthers” encircled the then-Twitter headquarters (in protest of its bird logo), marching around the structure three times as if it were Jericho, “in an attempt to get the building to crumble down,” McIndoe said. (One has to wonder: Did they succeed? In July, when Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as X, he posted, to the newly deplumed platform, “I knew birds weren’t real .”)

“We made it local and tangible,” McIndoe said, “and we created systems where people could feel like it was their own.”

Now the question is: If young people will turn up in such massive numbers with such unflagging energy for a fake cause, can McIndoe help turn them out for a real one?

McIndoe and his friend Adam Faze, who produces shows for TikTok and recently raised a $750,000 seed round for his new content production company, are attempting to harness this type of enthusiasm with a political network they’ve called Fifty Stars.

“The right has a very strong engine ecosystem that is communicating with Gen Z, from the Daily Wire, to [MAGA YouTubers] the NELK Boys, to the Joe ‘Roganverse,’ to the Jordan Petersons and the Andrew Tates,” McIndoe said. Not Fox News commentators but comedians, fitness influencers, and lowly podcasters are “influencing the future of the right more than anyone,” he said. “The left doesn’t have anything comparable.”

What Fifty Stars will be is a little bit nebulous—perhaps a consultancy, perhaps a digital media channel for TikTok shows like the ones Faze produces. It will certainly be some kind of organizing tool; “Birds Aren’t Real” has already become that. Last March, along with Faze collaborator Ari Cagan, the young men pushed their followers to “take over” Truth Social, Trump’s social media network, rallying thousands of TikTok followers to get the hashtag #Desantis2024 trending in order to taunt the former president close to the time of his arrest in New York.

“Birds Aren’t Real” activists have been known to flash-mob anti-abortion rallies and other right-wing demonstrations; often, they show up not to counterprotest but to delegitimize actual political radicals by marching alongside them.

And last year, Fifty Stars worked with Chi Ossé, a 26-year-old council member representing parts of Brooklyn, to amplify the impact of Ossé’s work to minimize rent increases in his district.

“I basically just kind of, you know, made sure he had a megaphone, made sure people were equipped with signs for a pop-up rally, making sure we have people RSVP and we’re following up with a newsletter—just, like, really organizing something,” McIndoe said. It had a real effect. The usual constituent turnout is almost none, according to an official familiar with these types of meetings. But after hearing about it largely via Instagram and TikTok, nearly 1,000 people turned up for the Rent Guidelines Board meeting, Ossé reported via his social media at the time.

“The line just wrapped around the block—around multiple blocks—of people waiting to enter; the building’s spilling out with people, with every seat taken up by people with signs,” McIndoe recalled.

Before the meeting, the board had proposed increases of as much as 16 percent. After the resounding show of dissent, the number ultimately landed at 3 percent.

In other words, McIndoe’s tactics can help politicians get results. “I think a lot of my generation feels disaffected,” McIndoe said, and campaigns and movements full of “amorphous messaging” in which young people always seem to be “giving to something that never gives anything back” don’t help. 2024 has been called “a Groundhog Day for disillusioned young voters,” but the next presidential election could hinge on the turnout of young people—and Birds Aren’t Real could be a case study in getting them involved. “I’m so excited about and hopeful about the future,” McIndoe said. “I can apply more of these ideas to things in the real, public sphere.”