Hand-cut wood art piece limited to 1,000,000 copies

Sighn says:

I just want to let you in on a project I'm working on. A hand cut edition of 1 million. No joke, this will probably take the next 30-60 years to finish.
I am now planting a tree for every piece sold off my site. I'm also planning a 24 cut-a-thon this summer, where I will see how many I can cut out in one day.

Link | Video

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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pork musket

The grammarian in me dislikes it because of the lack of apostrophe. Who owns the OK?
lf

#6 had the jewels to say it.
gabrielm

@Rob Cockerham,

I wonder how many people there are, alive today, who can say that they have produced made a million of some object.

Does hair count? I “produce” about a 100 of those every day!
Moon

Why limit it to a million? Let the market decide!

:D
Davin

I think this is kind of cool. As long as he enjoys it, why bash?

@Rob Cockerham:
I’m pretty sure I’ve produced a million sperm. And skin cells. I’m a god-damned overachiever!
satman

it’s a it’s a it’s a bomb
adammetal

If he can get it rolling, $20 is good money for cutting a shape and planting a tree. A lot of people have worse jobs than being dorky.
mkultra

this is high level internet buzz?
wordup

I bought 3 of these, and just got them in the mail. I have been watching Sighn’s work for sometime now, and can’t afford an original. (Pieces go from $500 upwards over a grand or two). With the value of his work increasing, I think it’s great that he’s created a project to keep artwork accessible!
Cefeida

It’s kind of cool, but why not make something pretty?
a_user

dunno when I saw this my first reaction was to sigh and shake my head – the whole concept is physical spam.

The product has no intrinsic artistic value unless he’s starting the ‘high school woodwork project’ movement and says nothing meaningful (in all senses of the word), even by today’s Damien Hirst post ironic irony standards. He can’t even get fake greenie points for making it out of waste materials.

Now if these things were being sold at cost – maybe, just maybe, I could see a deluded artist and his project.

But at $20 a pop, of which approx $5 will buy you bit wood + tree, to me this says he though about buying a bit of botnet and trying to convince you to buy junk bonds, but this was cheaper.

Compare his stuff to someone like Chris Yates (http://www.chrisyates.net/store/) who is an artist. Whether or not you like his stuff you don’t get the feeling he thinks the internet community is just a three year old and its credit card waiting to be separated.
atreus

I do believe that this is a really cool endeavor. However, wouldn’t it be better to spend the next 60 years carving out something that is grammatically correct? Sorry, just one of my pet peeves.
Patrick Dodds

Hard to read and not beautiful on its (sic) own, but the huge number of finished pieces and the mind-numbing / contemplative nature of the repetitive process add up to something else altogether. Shame they won’t ever be gathered together in one place (unless he’s not going to sell the first until he’s completed the last).
Like Paddysat, from looking at the video, I’m worried about his digits.
joe

Does that say “U SUK” ? Kinda looks that way.
Patrick Dodds

… particularly if he goes ahead with his 24 [hour, one assumes] “cut-a-thon”. Maybe all the cutting should be done at the beginning and the pushy-out stuff / packing at the end?
bsx

It actually says It’s ok; you suk. ;)
ThatOtherGirl

That’s what I was thinking…
Egypt Urnash

USIK?

UTSIK?

Oh, according to the site it says “ITS OK”. Well, I guess if I was gonna be carving something repeatedly for the rest of my life I’m sure the 75-year-old me would appreciate that ironic message from my younger self. I wonder how many of these he can crank out in an hour?
Adam Keck

What is the “it” and why does it own an “ok”? ;-)

Joking aside, I can’t think of a good way to do an apostrophe in a wooden cut-out. Can anyone think of one before (s)he gets to far into this project? Of course, perhaps the above interpretation is right though; an artist with 1,000,000 editions ahead of them presumably is damn sure of their design :).

-Adam
Sra

I thought it said U Suk at first too. So obviously, it’s not very good. Also, he left out the apostrophe, and that makes my face hurt. So let him waste his life by cutting a million ugly signs that can’t be read and are spelled incorrectly. That’s fine with me.
marqcogan

I applaud the effort, although I don’t care for the design, either. But here’s what I think people should know: “hand cut” here means “not milled using a CNC machine”, not “cut using hand tools” as I would expect. From looking at the video, the artist is doing the actual cutting using a photocopied template and a (powered) jigsaw. I personally wouldn’t call this “hand cut”.
swanlakers

if you can cut your hand doing it – it’s hand cut
gabrielm

I too was a little disappointed that “hand cut” did not mean “hand tools”. At that point why not use a cnc? You would still be “hand”ling the wood at some point…

At least he plants a tree for each one sold…
Michael R. Bernstein

If his time estimates are in the ballpark, at some point he should be able to start making them from the trees he’s planting now… Now *that* is a sustainable project.
romwell

If you’re going to mass produce stuff, you could as well use CNC machines/laser cut – that’s what they’re for. In the end, they’re still going to look the all the same. Usually you would do something by hand to give it appeal of uniqueness and to giv it personal touch – which I don’t exactly see happening here.
Rob Cockerham

I wonder how many people there are, alive today, who can say that they have produced made a million of some object. You need to have made 39 per day, every day for 70 years.

Maybe I’ve made that many keystrokes, but I don’t think that counts.
Gutierrez

It’s an interesting almost performance art concept to devote every waking moment of the rest of your life to the production of the piece. And image if you sold out your whole edition, that’s $20 million gross. I doubt that will happen or that that’s really the point. Still, as far as get rich quick schemes go this could rival the Million Dollar Homepage. If it gets enough high level internet buzz like this.
bellgong

Does anyone else question the idea of a power tool marathon?
:)
Mr DNA

Also, the ‘limited’ edition of 1 million has been done before:
Worldâ€™s largest signed and numbered limited edition artwork
Antinous

Does anyone else question the idea of a power tool marathon?

WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU! IT IS OFF! I STILL CAN’T HEAR YOU!
paddysat

I question the power tool marathon just for the way he was using that table saw. I image that some in the later editions will be made with one or two less fingers. Yikes!

But I hope not.

And instead of “ITS OK” I think he should of gone with something that can mean the same thing that reflects the times:

“Meh”