Artist's Statement
Hi, I’m Victor Acevedo. I’ve been a visual artist since 1977 and a digital artist since 1983. Many of you have known me for a long time -- and some of you have met me more recently in the Real-World or on Social Media.
I want to tell you about my IndieGoGo Campaign. I am launching it to raise the funds to self-publish a book.
The book will be called Acevedo in Context. It will be a 40-year Art career retrospective; an illustrated chronology about my life and art - with an emphasis on the Art.
It will contain about 250 pages and include many documentary photographs and over 150 reproductions of my paintings, drawings and prints. It will also address my recent ‘visual music’ video work. It will include essays by two well-known art writers, who are also historians. Their names will be revealed after the campaign wraps and the commission agreements are signed.
The book will cover my work in Traditional media; painting & drawing, starting in 1977 and then into Digital media from 1983, leading up to the present.
The book is called Acevedo in Context because it’s not just about me. It is also about the milieu from where I’ve have come; my early influences and the community around the early digital art movement as it continued to grow and evolve at the dawn of personal computing.
It has been said that my artwork reflects that time; the transition from the 20th century into the 21st. That unique ‘moment’ when our collective cybernetic future was being born.
Acevedo in Context will be published as an eBook and if we raise enough money, it will also be issued as limited-edition soft-cover Print Book.
I hope to raise $25,000 dollars, which will fund every aspect of the project from beginning to end. Some-of-which will include:
• Converting the original Manuscript to eBook format, for both the iBook and Kindle.
• Executing the first press run for the hardcopy Print Book.
• Commissioning the 2 writers to write the essays.
• Hiring an editor to double-check the copy & formatting and to sculpt the final flow of the book.
• Cover the fees for 3rd party IP (intellectual property) which will be important for telling the story in its complete form.
These are just some of the main expenses. To see the complete list, please check out the itemized budget which is posted below.
We’ve got a good solid plan and strategy for Success!
We have a lot of great perks at every donation level. Please check them out here on the Campaign page.
I hope that you will join-me in this venture and lend your support with a donation-to-the-project. Of-course donations at any level will be helpful toward reaching the funding goal. And who knows, with your help maybe we can
even surpass it!
As well as donating monetarily, I would like to ask you to help out by spreading the word to your friends. Please share this IndieGoGo-campaign with those who might want to be part of it. Please spread the word by email and sharing on your favorite Social Media. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
I really need your help to make this campaign go viral! The truth is, it is imperative to get the word out beyond my own mailing list!
Thank you all in advance, for any and all support that you can bring! Cheers! - Victor
The Plan
Production:
Once the funds are raised, the commissioned essays will be ‘green lit’ and begun. Simultaneous to this work, all the images and other written material will be formatted in a master inDesign manuscript file. In fact, i have already started collecting together and organizing all this material. You can get a glimpse of this in the video above.
Once the essays are added and the document’s format is fine-tuned. It will be outsourced to two ebook converters. One for iBook format (Apple platform) and one for (Amazon) Kindle which are the 2 formats with the widest distribution channels.
Apart from the eBooks, the first edition of Acevedo in Context will also be issued as a Print book. The quantity for all 3 formats of the first edition will be 3000 each. The Print book edition will be printed gradually on a print-on-demand (POD) basis 25–100 a time, unless demand warrants larger quantities. I plan to use the POD company called Bookbaby. The print book will be in soft cover and its trim size will be 8.5x11" landscape. The first edition eBooks will be distributed online, on demand, one-at-a-time, as needed, up to 3000 copies in each format.
Distribution:
The first edition of Acevedo in Context as an iBook will be uploaded to the Apple iBooks store.
The first edition of Acevedo in Context in Kindle format will be uploaded to Amazon Books
The first hardcopy book print run of Acevedo in Context will be made available for sale online through Amazon Books.
If all goes well these will be issued by December 2018.
Promotion: Sales and Marketing Efforts:
After the book published, i will be spending as much time as possible, promoting the book in person and online in an all-out grass-roots DIY campaign. If the total funding goal is met I will be able to retain a small PR Firm to help me promote the book for a short time in order to maximize and expand its audience.
Where your donations will go:
Your contributions are absolutely vital to the execution of this project. We hope to raise $25,000 USD through this campaign.
Here is the current projected budget:
$4500 Two critical art historical essays $2250 each
$2500 Editor copy + line
$1000 ebook conversion to MOBI (kindle)
$1000 ebook conversion to ePUB (iBook)
$3000 First Print book press run toward complete the Limited edition quantity.
$_295 ISBN numbers and barcodes 10 + 5 barcodes. Each published format of the book will need a unique ISBN number. This is the most economical way to buy ISBNs; the extra ones will not go to waste, they can be used for a future 2nd edition of the book in each format.
$_550 Copyright registration book itself plus 9 sets of images registered separately
$4000 IP rights permission to reproduce work: Escher, Dali, Picasso, Fuller, others (these 3rd party images will greatly enhance the authority and power of the narrative.)
$3355 To retain a PR Firm for a short time to help promote the book.
$1500 Project manager honorarium.
$1000 Production for the Digital Print perks in all sizes: printing, packaging and shipping fees (projected)
$_750 Credit card charges 3% of total of all money raised = 3% of $25000
$_300 Credit card projected 30¢/transaction (30¢ x 1000 projected transactions)
$1250 IndieGoGo platform fee 5% of $25000
$25,000
Plan B strategy – funding short fall
As you can see, the budget is well thought out and it will indeed cover the costs of the entire project and the cost of the campaign itself. With your help we will raise the full amount required to produce the book in its deluxe form on 3 platforms. The campaign is in flex-funding mode, so whatever amount that is raised I will put toward the project. However, should we fall short of the total target goal, I will adjust the project’s specifications accordingly. In any case, i plan to still issue an eBook; however, one that the raised funds can support. It will most likely be a Kindle eBook. By the way Kindle (mobi) format ebooks can be read on Mac or PCs on IOS and Android tablet Devices, you just need to download the Kindle app to do so.
Plan C Strategy – exceeding our initial Goal!
Given the range of Donation Levels and Perks, and if we all help to share and endorse the Acevedo in Context IndieGoiGo Campaign, there's a good chance that together we will reach the target Goal, and possibly even exceed it!
If that is the case, it will be great for all of us! Depending on how much extra money we raise, i will look seriously into publishing the first print edition in Hard cover and/or increasing the quantity of the first Softcover print run.
Artist’s Short Biography
Victor Acevedo is an artist best known for his digital work involving printmaking and photography. However, since 2007 his primary focus has been working with video and producing visual music works. As an ongoing practice, selected still images from the videos are made available as archival signed limited edition prints.
Acevedo is considered a desktop computer art pioneer as he was an early adopter of pre-Windows personal computer (PC) software to create fine art, in the early 1980s. He now works primarily on the Apple Macintosh platform.
The arc of Acevedo’s career is noteworthy in that it begins in his student phase in 1977 with traditional (analog) media painting and drawing and then shifts starting in 1983 over a three year period to exclusively digital media.
The 3 main periods of Victor Acevedo’s work to date are as follows:
1977- 87: Analog Art: traditional media, painting, drawing & film
1983 to 2007: Digital Art: archival inkjet and photo prints
2007 to present: Visual Music: Digital Video and Digital Prints
Acevedo grew up in Los Angeles, California and attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena 1979-81.
In early 1995 Victor moved to New York City and became a digital artist in residence in the BFA Computer Art Department at the School of Visual Arts. He began teaching there in 1997 and moved to the Masters level (MFA) program three years later.
In 1996 he created one of his most well know images called The Lacemaker, which he named after the same-titled painting by Johannes Vermeer (1665). This is the image he has chosen for the cover of his book, Acevedo in Context.
Acevedo is now based in Los Angeles having returned to his hometown in the Spring of 2009.
After settling back into LA life, he explored the application of his motion graphic work to live-mix video projection for electronic dance music events, primarily in night club settings. In doing so, he combined his interest in contemporary Electronic Bass music with concepts in Digital Cinema and Synergetic Geometry. His music video work and live visual (VJ) performances were informed by a synthesis of these traditions, disciplines, phenomenologies.
Since 2014, Acevedo has been exploring the realm of pure abstraction to a greater degree. Thus, establishing a new body of work in parallel to that which addresses figurative subjects.
In late 2015, slipping easily back into the fine-art community, he began showing fairly regularly at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA) in Downtown Los Angeles. Overall, he has shown his work in well over 100 group and solo art exhibitions since 1982.
Acevedo’s work has been featured in several recent art history books. Highlighting a few of them: Acevedo’s image called 4D Memory Cluster was reproduced in the book called “Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation” (Tom Sito, MIT Press, 2013); The Acevedo image called Eric in Orense is reproduced in the book called, “Art of the Digital Age”, (edited by Bruce Wands Thames and Hudson, 2006) This image was also featured in the book’s UK online promotional announcements.
"Art of the Digital Age" has been described as “The first major illustrated survey of this exciting, new, and experimental field”. Acevedo’s work was discussed at some length in the important and influential book called “From Technological to Virtual Art”, written by art historian Frank Popper, (MIT Press 2007).
His image called Springside Cynthesis and a descriptive blurb about his work was included in the books called "Digital Art" (Ullmann/Tandem, 2009) and “The World of Digital Art” (h.f.Ullman, 2010) Both are edited by the well-known digital art authority and gallerist, Wolf Lieser. He founded The Digital Art Museum (DAM) Gallery in 1998. It is now located in Berlin.
A self-penned article and several Acevedo images were included in the book and accompanying CD called “Escher’s Legacy: A Centennial Celebration” (Doris Schattschneider and Michelle Emmer eds., Springer-Verlag 2002)
As of 2017 he has been slowly venturing into Virtual Reality (VR) working and studying with the well-known and brilliant young underground film director, Michael Woods.
