Spook Country

Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?”

“Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part.

“Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.”

Milg

Shombo, it is his art name

Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.

“Agency?”

“Blue Ant.”

under a coat of some pleasantly gray paint.

t’s more subtle. The expressions don’t look made-up, if you do that. I color them, then each surface in the model is wrapped with a texture. I collect textures. Some of my textures are real skin, scanned in. The River piece, I couldn’t get the skin right. Finally I sampled a very young Vietnamese girl. It worked. People who knew him, they said so.

Are you kidding? I model everything.”

“How?”

“I build virtual models, then cover them with skins, textures I’ve sampled, or created myself, usually for that specific piece. Each model has a virtual skeleton, so I can pose and position the figure in its environment. I use digital lights to add shadows and reflections.

Yeah. I get that a lot. All the work I have to do, it seems sort of old-fashioned, archaic.

“Cartographic attributes of the invisible,”

Someone who would’ve been in charge of something, in America, when grown-ups still ran things.