Extra! Extra!

Just last week, Tim Schwartz got an e-mail inviting him or his “staff” to come hump a black H3 Hummer:

Nice, I have to say.

Though I would love, personally if you or your staff would hump my Hummer with me in the truck or in close proximity :) Yes I am very much looking forward to getting THAT on video. I live in Princeton, NJ, and I’m in NYC daily as well on Cape Cod during the summer. I have attached a pic of my truck for your convenience. Keep it real Bro.

Nothing but love,
Fusco

An unusual e-mail, for sure, but not for Schwartz. In 2006, while he was living in New York City, Schwartz and two friends created a website that not only inspired that e-mail, but also incited hundreds of people to hunt down Hummers on the streets, thrust their pelvises against them, record it and upload it to YouTube.

“Initially, the site was done as a form of protest,” Schwartz says. “It was the beginning of the backlash against the Hummer, and this became a popular activity for activists and environmentalists. But it was also so ambiguous that Hummer enthusiasts liked the site, too. They wanted to hump Hummers because they think they are sexy vehicles or something.”

Ihumpedyourhummer.com is just one of Schwartz’s website projects that have taken on strange lives of their own. The same year he uploaded a video of himself humping a Hummer, he also helped create a massively successful celebrity-analysis tool, the “Fame Game” (www.famegame.com), with the artist collective Fame Theory. The website is a fame-analysis system and social-networking site for those prominent enough to be photographed at red-carpet events. Using a computer program written by Schwartz, the site automatically evaluates online data from gossip pages and more reputable news sources and ranks celebrities’ relative fame, then shows how their fame can “rub off” on one another.

“We were trying to understand the cycle that creates attention and then, if there is sustained attention, turns it into fame.” Schwartz explains. “We were also trying to understand how fame is achieved. Paris Hilton, for example—she’s not an actress [or] singer; how can she become famous?”

In a subversive blend of practical joke and performance art, the folks behind Fame Theory invented a fictitious celebrity to mess with their own web creation. Max Dassler, whose true identity remains a secret, was just a regular guy whom they dressed up and inserted into the celebrity scene. He was given a back-story (heir to the Dassler fortune), a rented limo and his own faux paparazzi (Fame Theory and friends with cameras). When he arrived at a club with a sea of photographers, he was typically let into the party even without being on the guest list, and he was written up on Gawker when he jumped, fully clothed, into a swimming pool and yelled out, “Max Dassler for President.”
Dassler may be gone, but Fame Game is still online and running.

“It’s totally automated,” Schwartz says. “The site really doesn’t need much supervision. Every day, it analyzes last night’s events and rates everyone accordingly.”

Nowadays, Schwartz produces his work in La Jolla on the UCSD campus, where he’s partway through earning a master’s degree in visual arts. The degree wasn’t always part of his plans, mind you. In 2003, he graduated with honors from Wesleyan University with a degree in physics. He’s a competent computer programmer, but after developing wrist tendonitis, he realized he didn’t want to sit in front of a computer all day. Schwartz’s work has since moved off the computer screen and into the real world.

“I wanted to make work with my hands, and I have had that opportunity here,” he says, pointing to some of his more recent work. “Command Center” is a large, rusty-looking sculptural piece hanging from the wall of his studio. It seems like some kind of gauge system from a WWII submarine, but, in fact, it was fabricated by the artist with fiberglass that was coated in iron and then oxidized with acid. Thirteen circular meters with tiny, wavering arms are situated on the sculpture, along with one LED screen that cycles through numbers 1851 to 2008. Each meter holds a different word: War, Terror, Insurgents, Middle East, Oil, Guns, Weapons, Uranium, Russia, Democracy, Liberation, Revolution and Freedom. The tiny meters are tracking through a historical archive of the past 158 years’ worth of New York Times data. The LED screen holds the year (1851 through 2008), and the meters fluctuate to show the number of times that particular word was included in the Times during the year shown in the LED.

The spirit of “Command Center” is also on display in “America’s View of the World” at The New Children’s Museum, Downtown, now through July 24. For this piece, copies of the San Diego Union-Tribune, Los Angeles Times and New York Times are delivered to the museum each day, and then younger museum attendees cut out articles and affix them to a 10-by-20-foot wooden map. The articles are attached to the part of the world to which they relate. After being up for two months, the closing reception—open to the public, from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, July 23—should give a topographic perspective of America’s view of the world and which parts we, collectively, care about.

“It’s easy to grow up in the U.S. with a skewed perspective of the world,” Schwartz says. “This piece will hopefully bring attention to the disparity between countries the American media constantly covers and ones that are never mentioned.”