Dewi 16/365 - Windy Corner Toronto

Dewis stuff looks so great when you inspect it closely. This is the third piece that's come to my REAL wall HQ from Toronto

I received this one from Satu Kaikkonen
They look interesting.

Rani #5/365 - Bones

This piece, a 365 piece from Rani arrived today



There is a very strange story behind this. I imagine that this may have been inspired by Ruff Day or perhaps the other way round, but when I opened this piece (I love a bit of drama in mailart - thanks Rani!) I gasped because it felt like Rani had delved into my mind and pulled out a long forgotten incident from my childhood.

As a kid, I used to love buying practical jokes from a mail order company called Joke shop by post who used to advertise in the back of the Beano. You know the sort of thing, stink bombs, whoopee cushions that sort of thing.

One day, when I was about 10, I bought a pair of x-ray spex, which were exactly like this. They are basically a piece of card across a plastic frame with some strange red thread aross a small portion of the eyes.



So one night, I'm invited to a friends house for a sleepover. I took the x-ray specs with me, cynical as you like about their effectiveness.

All night we were messing about as 10 year olds do, and I put the specs on to see if they worked. Obviously I just saw a bunch of red in front of my eyes and nothing else.

Then, at about midnight (obviously my memory makes it midnight for effect) I held my hand up in front of the TV with the specs on and lo and behold for a fraction of a second I saw all the bones in my hand just like on this postcard! I jumped out of my skin!

I tried and tried to recreate this and swore blind that I saw the bones. I can still see them now in my minds eye. None of my friends believed me and to this day I wouldn't be able to convince anyone.

As I grew older, I became a physics teacher and learned about Roentgens discovery of the xray, which was quite by accident. He was using omething called a Cathode Ray tube, which is the thing that used to power old TVs (he lived before TVs)

Cathode Rays as they were known, are electrons produced by a hot wire. Electrons are negatively charged, so if you put electrons in an electric field they will be attracted to the positive side, so you can quite easily accelerate the electrons.



Now here's the thing. When you speed up cathode rays/electrons they gain energy and when cathode rays are abruptly stopped, i.e. when they collide with something, that energy has to go somewhere. In some cases, they produce x-rays as a byproduct of slowing down.

To this day, I'm still a little scared of walking too close to those fat TVs, and I'm convinced I saw the bones in my hand through some bizarre x-ray detector that may have been built by a joke shop.

I saw what I saw and no-one can tell me different

Mailart that rocked my world - Heleen Protest Post

Next in the series of mailartists that rocked my world - Heleen

Heleen is a dutch mailartist who has a style that instantly made me smile. When she makes mailart, her drawing and line style is very deliberate but playful.

This piece is so simple to look at but the size of the piece (it's larger than normal, about 8x6 in) but the effect always stands out when I look at the wall.

Here is an artist that draws too. Check out her pimped photo for pimp my photos.



The artwork was great, depicting her and her partner taking tea with us on a bench, but what made this work for me was how easy she made it look. Her assured lines and soft colours made the whole thing look not easy but achievable. She has an artistic style that inspired me to put pen to paper and that is how Heleen's mailart rocked my world

Pimp my photos by Dodo in Belgium

Wow! This is the most drastic pimping yet! I sent a batch of cards to Dodo and when they came back I didn't actually twig that these were the cards I had sent out untiln I looked VERY closely at the collage.

Not only were the photos integrated, but Dodo has actually taken the envelope apart and reconstructed it into his collage too. Qhat an effect!

This was the front of the original envelope

Elenas first artworks

I'm so proud of Elena - she's never thought to do art and only recently took up drawing. She's also taking part in mailart365. Here's one of the first things she has ever drawn.

She sent it to her favourite mailartist, the amazing Ubon, who I rate very highly indeed, and got a happy reply.

Read the comments on this on her flickr site (just click the pic it will take you there) - it warms my heart

Mailart call - Pester my council!

Hey my REAL wall fans I have an urgent mailart/postcard petition call that I need a quick response for, and I need your help!

As many of you know, recently I received a very strange demand letter from the local council, who seem to think that my REAL wall is a business, and have demanded that I send them some paperwork proving that I get my waste disposed of properly, or face a potential £5000 fine!

On the advice of Postmuse and with the support of my REAL fans, I decided not to bother to answer them straight away, but decided instead to send the story on to my local paper, the Hammersmith and Kensington Times, who sent around a photographer and put the story on page 3 of the print edition and headline on their website.

Another local magazine, Westside magazine caught a sniff of this story and sent me an email to send them more details and I got in touch with them. They emailed today to say that, instead of running it as the same story that HKtimes ran with, they wanted to print a ‘what’s happened since’ story in the news page of the December edition, and they asked me if I paid the fine.

Of course I haven't paid the fine, I have no intention of doing so as I've done nothing wrong, but I've been planning to send the council an intricate mailart postcard as they have demanded that I send them "paperwork related to the business" and the "business" I run produces large amounts of pretty paper and cool postcards, so I thought it was the most appropriate thing.

When I told the editor that this was my intention, she was delighted

"Send the intricate postcard to us please and I’ll use it as an image for the December issue!"

Sounds like a mailart call to me if I ever heard one!

So the call is this. Write the coolest, funniest prettiest piece of mailart or send a postcard of support to my REAL wall at the usual address to arrive by November 15th (please allow time for the postal strikes, so post early please), and I will put together a package for the council and send it on to them, via Westside Magazine, who will print your mailart as my official letter to the council.

Nothing horrible please, this isn't a nasty one, it's a friendly jab showing the ridiculousness of their demand, so please don't get mad, let's just get even! Grrrr!

Hopefully we'll wind em up a bit and they'll fine me or something.

The address for those of you who don't know it by heart is...

Andy Hoang
Manager
my REAL wall
PO Box 63138
LONDON
W14 4BR
UK

If you need to see the letters and paperwork, they are on my flickr site, here, here and here

Feel free to use these in whatever way you want, use whatever medium you like.

How to make your mailbox more interesting - a guide to getting started in REAL post

Do you hate going to your letterbox in the morning? Are you fed up with just receiving bills and adverts in the post? Has your facebook inbox become infinitely more interesting than your REAL inbox? Then you need this guide to getting started in REAL mail!

After closing my facebook account in February and trying to get my friends to revert to sending me REAL post for my REAL wall instead, it quickly became clear that not everyone is quite as enamoured with post as I am. Still desperate to receive some more interesting stuff in the mail, I decided that if my REAL friends weren't interested in sending me post then it must have been time to get a new set of friends!

The first step to take if you want to start receiving mail straight away, is the magnificent www.postcrossing.com. the idea of this site is very simple. When you sign up you have to send a postcard to a random member of the site with a reference number on it. When the receiver receives it, they will register the card on the site and you will get a nice message online from them and be in line to be the next recipient of a random card from somewhere else in the world. Beware this site is extremely addictive!

The next site you need to sign up for to make your mailbox sparkle a little is www.sendsomething.net. The site is very basic, but does a very simple task pretty well. You just register your name and address and what you are interested in, and then hit the Random Address button, and a profile will pop up with an address that you can send stuff to. This is a little like the Royal Mail Premium Bonds, in that you're not guaranteed to get anything most the time, but occasionally something will drop through the post and it really brightens up your day.

Remember that when you sign up for post sites like this it's good form to reply to messages and to send post. Keep the spirit alive by sending as well as receiving.

For more challenging mail try www.swap-bot.com. on this site, members arrange to swap all sorts of postal objects, from simple postcards to knitting, and photos and all manner of crafts.

Swap organisers arrange swaps with a certain number of people in, then assign partners and a deadline date that objects must be sent by. When items are received, members then rate each other and the swap coordinator and everyone recieves an item for every one sent. This is well worth checking out if you have some cool craft that you are in to, as you'll find people swapping all sorts of things and you'll discover there are some seriously talented people out there!

If you are artistic, try the mailart networks. The leading mailart site out there is www.iuoma-network.ning.com, which stands for International Union of Mailartists and is home to most of the worlds most creative mail geniuses. Go on there, make friends and start sending your art around the world. They say in mailart that senders receive, so the more mailart you put out the more you will get back and you find that after a while you can get a reputation if you are active.

To encourage more mailart, send out a mailart call, either on IUOMA or one of the numerous mailart websites like www.mail-art.de and post it on your own blog. Some examples of my own mailart calls can be seen on this blog and they were also put up on the previous 2 sites.

These are the main sites I use, as well as frequenting loads of blogs myself of mailartists and finding swap partners on twitter and flickr. There are networks out there of people swapping everything you can imagine, from knitting to chocolate, so with a little effort, google and some stamps you can change your postbox into something you really want to see in the mornings.

Send me your status

My new mailart call is a tip of the hat to Sam Potts and the great Twitter on paper experiment.

If you have facebook, Twitter, myspace or any other social network, I'd really like to see your Status update on a postcard. Obviously, I'd love for your postcard to be sort of relevant to your status as well, so soem artistry would be kinda cool too.

As usual, all mail to be sent to the usual place

Here's my status fool
c/o my REAL wall

PO Box 63138
LONDON
W14 4BR
UK

Here's one that I already got.



So what are you waiting for? Send me your status today!

Pimp my photos

Since I got a digital camera, I've started taking WAY too many photos. Anyone who's looked at my flickr stream knows that. I'm not the best photographer in the world either, and often I decide to go and print a load of photos out.

This means my house is now full of my crap photos and I can't do a great deal with them. And that, my dear reader is where YOU come in.

I would love to send you some of my photos, the REAL photos that is not the digital ones, and I hope that you can work your artistic magic on them and send them back. 

If you want to pimp my photos, just drop me a line in the comments below and sort me out with your address by email or post and I'll send you a bunch of photos and a little present!

Usual address please

Pimp my photos
c/o my REAL wall
PO Box 63138
LONDON
W14 4BR
UK

And here's one that came in earlier