Noah Conopask / Pathogen
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He currently resides in Chicago working as a Creative Lead for Digital Kitchen. His clients include Coca-Cola, McDonald's, A&E, Merck Records, Narita Records, ESPN, Nokia, & Target. He divides his spare time between snowboarding & riding his bike during daylight hours and getting blotto on tequilla and vodka in the evening. He likes the sun but prefers the night and is looking forward to warmer weather. He plays Kate Bush's "Running up that Hill" every Friday at work.
Q&A
PSST! uses a collaborative process that is based on the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. How has participating in this project made you look at your own work differently?
I'm not sure if it has made me look at my work differently, as much as make me wanna collaborate even more than I did before. It has definitely increased my interest in the human component of what we do...meeting new people & discovering new ideas in a creative forum.
PSST! is a project in which the outcome is also left up to a certain amount of chance – because the whole process is detemined by the successive artist's reactions to the previous work. How do you feel about losing some of the "control" over your final work?
Its cool to see the way others pick up your vibe and either run with it or destroy it. It's all good in my book. I respect the process and the desire to make work...to put yourself out there and just express yourself. I'm not always diggin the direction, but someone else will for sure. So in losing control over the final piece im for it, its liberating. I can think more loosely and less finitely.
Who would you "Pass it on..." to if you had a chance?
I would have loved to work with Kate Bush. Do a music video or whatever. She was so totally crazy! I always loved the simplicity of storytelling that Hemingway used in his writing... It would be amazing to work on a screenplay with someone like that. Richard Misrach's photography is so beautiful and really inspiring to me. His Chronologies book is amazing. The person I would ultimately love to collaborate with would be David Lynch... not much explanation needed there.
PSST! is also intended to showcase the personal work of designers and artists that generally work in relative anonymity or within a studio system in which credit is applied to a company rather than individual artists. How do you view this in relation to your client-driven work?
I think its great that there are platforms like PSST! with which artists can get some burn... it can be difficult sometimes in the "professional" world if you work for a studio cuz you can lose your identity as an artist.
What keeps you motivated from project to project?
The hope and desire to create something i never have before, and to work with friends and others that inspire me. I think artists in general have a powerful compulsion to be heard and to express themselves, whatever that expression is. The biggest motivation is probably to just have a good time really...if you're not having fun, what's the point. Paying bills isn't bad either though.
What's next for you? Any cool projects coming up?
Right now I'm finishing up a video for Narita Records artist Arctic Hospital. It should be done in the next few weeks. I just finished
directing some spots for Target through Digital Kitchen which turned out rad. They will be posted soon on the DK website as well as on my site Pathogen (pathogenplus.com). After that there are a few other artists / musicians that im interested in collaborating on some short film / music video work with. Then of course there is always the occasional album artwork & record sleeves.
pathogenplus.com
d-kitchen.com
Noah worked on DRIFT SLICYCLE POPPED!