Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch, one third of the Beastie Boys, was a man behind many great things: music that fuelled a generation, documentary filmmaking, activism on issues that ranged from Tibetan freedom to American politics. He was a cool, down-to-earth dude despite having an impact on millions everywhere.

This magazine is, on many levels, inspired by him and the Beasties: 'An Open Letter to NYC' (epic anti-racism tune), Fight for Your Right (rejecting the ‘civilising’ force of markets, of growing the fuck up), Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! (we’re all media makers now).

But more than anything, it’s at an aesthetic level that we connect. The music ('So What’cha Want', 'Shake Your Rump', 'Ch-Check It Out'); the videos (Sabotage, man, hand-held doc mayhem!). It's all both innocent and wild. It speaks the language of partying and having a great time. As in, stay young, rock hard, but keep an eye out for shit cuz it’s getting weirder by the minute, and the egotists are taking over – MCA was a Buddhist, after all.

I saw him at the Rose Garden in Portland at a Beasties gig. It was 1999, I think. Pre 9/11, American imperial innocence untouched. It was fun. They rocked like they were kids. I never made it to any more gigs, but we had the pleasure of speaking to MCA in HUCK#003.

I remember we spoke about happiness at one point. He mentioned that on a basic level (family, health, friends), it doesn’t take much. And he added to it here, with full eloquence, in a recent interview with Project Happiness: “Short-term happiness could be almost anything…. But the lasting happiness you experience in life is the result of constructive things, things that benefit other people.”

RIP MCA. We will miss you, man.

HUCK magazine.

Spoek Mathambo puffs out his cheeks and lets the question hang for a second, as if to underline its absurdity. “What am I gonna talk about otherwise?” he sighs. “Eating pussy? It’s just stuff I think people should hear, stuff I think I should be doing personally.”

We’ve come to London’s South Bank to ask Spoek about Father Creeper, his second album and debut for Sub Pop, which draws on a magpie’s repertoire of globe-trotting sounds — ghettotech, electro, dubstep and rock — to assemble a portrait of his native South Africa in which the smell of apocalypse hangs heavy in the air.

So we thought we should ask why he felt it necessary to address politically potent issues, from the country’s exploited natural resources to ‘affirmative action’ policies, which critics would argue have hindered rather than helped poor black communities post-Apartheid. But in a country where history continues to haunt the present in unexpected ways, it seems the personal is always political.

Born Nthato Mokgata in 1985 in the township district of Soweto, Johannesburg, Spoek (his stage name translates roughly as ‘ghost of bones’, but Mathambo is also the site of a Zulu massacre) moved to Sandton in the mid-nineties, a well-heeled suburb that was off limits to black people until the fall of Apartheid. But, from an early age, all Spoek wanted to do was escape the city altogether.

“All the stuff I was into, no one else cared about,” he says of his hip hop-obsessed youth. “Johannesburg has a big mall culture. A lot of stuff moved out of the city centre for my generation; people didn’t want to go there because they thought it was dingy and full of slums... Property prices were dipping so [businesses] had to move to secure loans. It just seemed like the worst fate to stay in this city of mall rats. People were very materialistic, like, the Louis Vuitton store really meant something, you know?”

Spoek’s resentment of the consumerist culture surfaces on ‘Put Some Red On It’, a track on the record co-written with his wife Ana Rab, aka Swedish emcee Gnucci Banana. “That song was about relating the conflict diamond situation to a sense of romance, and the importance that people place on material stuff to solidify relationships... For me personally, the impact of companies like [diamond conglomerate] De Beers is crazy. [The country] has been raped by those companies. My sister works in speech and hearing therapy; she works with a lot of miners with head wounds, and the kind of care that they get, or don’t get... It’s fucked up that all that can happen for the sake of valuing currency or romance.”

Spoek is lucid on the topic of South African culture in general and fights a losing battle to remain diplomatic when drawn on the subject of Die Antwoord, whose phenomenal recent success has attracted criticism for its sensationalised parody of working-class stereotypes. “I’ve known them for a long time,” he says. “My first tour in Europe was with Watkin [Tudor Jones, aka Ninja]. They do what they do, it’s not my kind of music. They’re sending up a certain section of South African society, but to me the music’s half-baked. They’re acting, and it’s hugely exploitative and fucked up in a lot of ways. But the majority of the population isn’t politically correct, so that’s what their success is based on.”

Though he has now relocated to Sweden with his wife, Spoek believes that travelling to other countries as a young musician helped him appreciate the merits of his home. “As a teenager I’d always be looking snobbishly out of South Africa [for inspiration]. But at one point I realised, ‘Fuck it, there’s always been amazing stuff happening at home that I can proudly keep my head on my shoulders and represent.’”

That ‘amazing stuff’ included South Africa’s vibrant dance music scene, which took root in Johannesburg when deejays began spinning slowed-down house music tracks at township clubs in the early nineties, and became a youth culture force in the post-apartheid era. “I’d be standing in a club in Shoreditch or Berlin,” he says. “And it would be absolutely shit. No one’s dancing ’cause everyone’s worried about how they look, and then you compare that with the vitality back home - there’s a difference in energy I wanted to hone in on.”

The result was a sound, aired on 2010 debut Mshini Wam, that Spoek himself dubbed ‘township tech’, which also included a darkly electric house reworking of Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’, plus a delicious pair of zombiefied vids for that song and ‘War On Words’. With Father Creeper, however, the plot has thickened once again to keep pace with its author’s genre-vaulting ambition. The result is a thrilling new hybrid of Afro-futurist, post-colonial pop that sounds like someone trying to master a language that hasn’t been invented yet.

And Spoek, you can’t help thinking, has plenty more inventions bubbling away.

“I love Evel Knievel. I think he's one of the greatest American heroes of all time but I don't think I'm like him. I ride skateboards: he rode motorcycles. He spent his life jumping from point A to point B: I skateboard for a living and have jumped from point A to point B a couple of times as an extra-curricular challenge,” says a jet-lagged Danny Way in a penthouse bar in London's Leicester Square. “It's not to be a daredevil or stuntman, but just to give skateboarding a bigger platform of exposure and push the boundaries and see where they lie in our sport.”

Whether he likes it or not, this thirty-eight-year-old from Vista, California has cemented himself in skateboarding's history books as a man who likes to do big stunts. Let's face it, dropping in to a giant halfpipe from a helicopter or jumping over the Great Wall of China on a skateboard will stick around a lot longer in people's memories than being Thrasher magazine 1991 Skater Of The Year or being the guy who reanimated Plan B Skateboards.

But his latest venture, Waiting for Lightning – a documentary of his life that takes stock of his achievements and explores what led Danny to forge such a career path – looks set to add some detail to the Danny Way story.

“[Telling my story] wasn't a huge priority for me but felt like it was a good time to do it,” says Danny at this the start of a European premiere tour. “The opportunity presented itself more or less and I took advantage of it. I thought there was enough content in my story to entertain an audience.”

Alongside director and long-time friend Jacob Rosenberg and writer Bret Johnston, they pieced together the story of a young boy finding an emotional release in skateboarding and pushing himself to new limits for his own personal fulfilment. Cutting in throughout this narrative is the lead up to his Great Wall of China megaramp jump in 2005. But curiously it's something, today at least, Danny would rather play down.

“I'm not out there trying to be the guy jumping these things and wanting to be known as that guy,” he says, eager not to have his twenty-five-year career defined by the actions of a few days. “I took advantage of an amazing opportunity I dreamed of. It wasn't about doing anything more than what felt right at that time. But not to keep jumping things – I don't even like to use the word 'jump' in skateboarding.”

It seems what Danny is most proud of is the fact that at his age, he can still be 'relevant' to skateboarding. Something, it seems, he's achieved thanks to his latest appearance on the cover of Thrasher that sees him flipping a giant eurogap on his new megaramp in Kauai, Hawaii - a feat which appears as the film's finale.

“My longevity in the community of skateboarding is what I feel most accomplished about, that I still manage to have relevance in one way or another in the skateboard world – on or off the board,” he says. “Plan B is a recognition that at some point, I will be too old to skate [...] I've been eating, sleeping and breathing this sport – or lifestyle – since I was a little kid. So I can lend a lot of insight and do a lot of good things for the guys coming up below us, [like] the guys who did stuff for me.”

Despite this, the generation gap still exists in the perceptions of progression. While Danny's vision for testing the limits of skateboarding is about carefully designed constructions and a general defiance of gravity, the younger generation prefers to push things in a less-controlled environment, choosing increasingly technical games of one-upmanship at renowned street spots. So who does he think is pushing the limits the most?

“I think there's a lot more people that would flip off El Toro [a giant 20-stair set in Lake Forest, California] than drop in on the megaramp. So you tell me? It depends where your comfort zone is,” says Danny. “If you sent a decent skateboarder out there and said 'megaramp or El Toro?', they would lean towards El Toro. You don't have to go 45 miles an hour to figure than one out. […] I feel comfortable in [the megaramp] environment so it's hard for me to judge. I don't like landing on flat ground from big heights either. I think it's fucking retarded to be honest.”

When I pull into Thomas Campbell’s secluded driveway in Bonny Doon, a minimally populated area nestled in the mountains above Santa Cruz, his greeting sets the tone for the day. I exit my car and crouch down to pet his Australian Shepard, Muddy, who bypasses all niceties to give my mouth a sloppy lick. “That’s the perfect way to greet her,” says Thomas. “She loves to make out. Want to see the highlight of the property?”

Thomas leads me towards the quaint cabin-style house that he shares with his filmmaker wife, Tiffany, whose influential Dear and Yonder (2009) raised the all-female surf movie to an artful place. A few steps away rises a majestic fairy-ring of redwood trees. In the middle is an artfully-designed wooden platform built by Jay Nelson, the artist behind the whimsical tree houses and colourful window displays of San Francisco’s Mollusk Surf Shop. We walk up the steps into the centre of the ring - or, as Thomas calls it, “the redwood cathedral” - and stare up at a gasp of blue sky framed by a sphere of hundred-foot trees.

It’s an idyllic setting - the one place he “most likes to hang out”. But as we head for the house, a powerful vibration emanates from a cherry blossom tree. “They’re psyched,” says Thomas of the thousands of bees buzzing above our heads, “it’s kind of scary.” He starts to talk me through his plans for a bee box and chicken coop, at which point his friend Roger Mihalko shows up to scan some film negatives. The Northern California skater, known for his barefooted misadventures, is typical of the creative creed of stylists who have gathered around Thomas over the years.

“Feel free to check out the place while I get Roger set up,” says Thomas. “Try some well water or there’s juice in the fridge.”

I’m here today to try and make an artist who doesn’t particularly like to talk about his art, talk about his art. “I don’t really think about it” seems to be Thomas Campbell’s motto. “People are always trying to get me to explain everything,” says the forty-two-year-old, “but that kind of ruins it.”

In many ways this mantra is the most telling thing he says. Because, beneath a mellow exterior and tendency to downplay his celebrity, the wheels of a multi-coloured, amorphous machine are churning out ideas left and right. And yet, like the sewing machine he uses to piece together his colourful pinwheels, Thomas exudes only a quiet hum.

The Thomas Campbell aesthetic - as captured in film, photography, sculpture and fine art - has seeped beyond the barrier that segregates surfing from the world to the point where demands for explanations are pelted from all sides. Art aficionados want to know where his genderless pieces - quilt-like pinwheels, whimsical bronzes and cartoonish feats of inventive carpentry - draw inspiration from; surfers and skaters want to know more about his roots. It’s hard to please everyone with the same tale, so it’s understandable when he says that he’d sooner plead the fifth, before guiding your eyes back to his multimedia work. Each piece, suggests Thomas without saying a word, should ideally speak for itself.

So, what’s the message? His surf filmography includes a neat triptych of art-docs - The Seedling (1999), Sprout (2004) and The Present (2009) - which together breached core boundaries to explore waveriding’s every countercultural verge. The trilogy became a creative counterpoint to the punk-versus-jock dualism perpetuated by surf media, leaving an enduring platform for the aesthetic freaks who had always been an essential but marginalised element of Californian surf culture. It was always cool to be a surfer; post-Campbell, it was cooler to be a surfer who also produced art.

His art (a body of work he prefers to “keep separate” from his surfing life) took root in the 1990s, when curator Aaron Rose drew together a misfit crew - Ed Templeton, Steve Powers and Mike Mills to name a few - put on a series of ad-hoc shows at Alleged Gallery in the Lower East Side, took those outsiders around the world and, in 2008, mythologised their work in his Beautiful Losers film. On the West Coast, meanwhile, Mission School artists like Barry McGee and Chris Johanson were congregating around galleries like Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, creating work that thrived in both public and private spaces. Thomas’s folksy homegrown style slid effortlessly into this niche.

“We were just a group of friends making different stuff,” says Thomas. “Some were younger and less evolved, like Chris Johanson was only a kid back then, but something was slowly... percolating. Were we ‘a scene’? Um... yeah. It was definitely a movement.”

Today, a Thomas Campbell original commands a pretty price tag. His most recent solo show - Capture and Release at Half Gallery in New York - brought together his brand new bronzes, recent paintings and ‘sewn paper stuff’, all on offer for $2,500-$30,000. While his ubiquitous style hangs in galleries the world over, at home Thomas does his best to put a shroud of anonymity over a level of fame that, twenty years in the making, he still finds “startling”.

“In my life I’ve created a scenario where it doesn’t reflect back to me very much, because I don’t want it to,” says Thomas of his stature in the art world. “We’re all just trying to find some kind of path that feels good.”

Thomas lives a secluded lifestyle in the mountains above Santa Cruz but travels the globe for well-publicised art events, and tries to temper his role of influential artist with his desire to achieve “balance and happiness, however that’s found”. When asked how he feels about being touted as an influential beacon of surf and skate culture, and a bastion of the DIY aesthetic, he replies simply: “For me it’s about making it. That’s what I’m interested in. I just do it. I love it.”

Countless short films show Thomas documenting the moments that culminate in art, but putting that process into words is another thing. So, how do you get an artist who doesn’t like to talk about his art, talk about his art? Sometimes the best way to understand a person’s story is to wander through the world they’ve created. Thomas’ is more colourful than most.

Back in the Campbell kitchen, above a stripped-down wooden table, is a wall of framed art. Alongside a photo by iconic 1960s surf photographer Ron Stoner are drawings and paintings by artists Kyle Field, Evan Hecox and Simone Shubuck. Two Jim Marshall photographs from 1963 – one of Bob Dylan, the other of legendary pianist Bill Evans – hang by their side. There’s an Ed Templeton piece and a print and holiday card from Barry McGee and his late wife, Margaret Kilgallen. Thomas takes a piece from all of these worlds.

“Are you hungry?” he asks walking into the kitchen, finding me staring at the mini museum. My two-hour window-down drive from San Francisco has spurred an appetite, so we hop in his big white van, outfitted with a bed in the back and covered in stickers, and head down to Bonny Doon’s one-block “town”. Turned off by the “crowds”, Thomas has a change of heart and we head twenty minutes south to local Santa Cruz favourite, Brazil Café. But it’s a Sunday and this brightly decorated hole in the wall isn’t any less packed. Resigned to the twenty-minute wait, he puts our name on the list and finds a bench outside, away from the throngs of weekend lunchers.

“Living around this area, people don’t really put off an air of whether they have money or don’t, you can’t really tell,” says Thomas, as we are greeted hello by a kid hosing down his wetsuit in his front yard. “I really enjoy not having that hiccup of talking to people and them then looking at you like you’re fucking weird or judging you. The acceptance level is high here.”

It would be easy to typecast Thomas Campbell as laid-back and easygoing, but there is a depth to his calm that goes beyond the surfer stereotype. “I came from a very kinetically, energetically, low-frequency sleepy beach town, and that’s where I register,” says Thomas, who grew up skating and surfing in Dana Point, Orange County. Art was not a huge part of his childhood, but like any kid he dabbled in different mediums. The one indicator of his future career was a love for ceramics class, which he took every year throughout high school.

At seventeen, already creating popular fanzines from home, he started shooting for Transworld Skateboarding, and spent the next eleven years juggling slots at core titles like Big Brother and PowerEdge, eventually finding himself as photo editor at SkateBoarder Magazine when Tony Hawk was editor. At nineteen, Thomas left Southern California for Santa Cruz. But six months later, in 1989, the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake hit with an epicentre just twelve miles from his home.

“It was really crazy,” he says, gesturing and making sound effects. “Cars were bouncing like a foot off the ground.” The intensity prompted him to leave the mainland for the surfing Mecca of Kauai. But at twenty-one, he realised that the little island wasn’t culturally vital enough for, nor conducive to, the things he wanted to see and do.

Keeping Santa Cruz and San Francisco as home bases, Thomas spent the next five years travelling. He began taking his art more seriously and, in 1994, hosted his first solo show at Arcanes Gallery in Morocco. He hitchhiked across America, lived for a year in Europe, and timed his travels to match the surf seasons in spots across the globe, all the while shooting and painting in tandem. “The whole time I was taking photos, I was trying and trying to figure out art,” says Thomas, “kind of like a skateboarder would approach a ledge; you don’t always succeed, but you gotta keep going.”

In 1995, he followed a girl to New York City and put on his first show at Alleged Gallery. But the transition from lackadaisical Bay Area to big-city hustle was something of a shock. ”It was almost like a moth to the flame and I was the flame,” recalls Thomas, of how New Yorkers treated the novelty of his calm energy. But the dog-eat-dog hyperactivity of the city eventually got to him and he headed back west to San Diego. “Some people need chaos to get motivated,” he explains. “I'm just naturally motivated. A lot of stimuli just confuses me.” In 2000, he moved back to Santa Cruz and last year he and his wife bought the property in Bonny Doon. “I didn’t understand it at first but when the kinetic energy lowered, then I could hear myself,” he explains. “It didn’t come to my mind that if I moved out into the country, I could hear myself all the time. Maybe perceptively I’m influenced more than other people, but it seems like living in the country is really grounding.”

Thomas may not wax lyrical about the emotions behind a painting, but that may simply be because he’s too busy contributing to the zeitgeist. Right now he’s working on a 16mm skateboard movie and preparing for an August show at Baronian Francey in Belgium. But he seems most excited about Um Yeah Press, an indie publishing arm launching in May that will be “a vehicle” for his work. “It’s an opportunity to create all the different books I’ve wanted to make for a while, alone and with different friends,” says Thomas. His first offering, From Ummm To Der, is an almanac of recent artwork in collaboration with Gingko Press, while a longer-term project, which he’s excited to work on “for the next few years”, is a series of bi-annual photo-books pulled from his prolific surf archives. Each book will “have the same feel and format” but explore different topics and locations with the first installment, Slide Your Brains Out: Surfing and General 1997-2012, setting the tone.

“I’ve just got so much stuff from those early days,” says Thomas, “and I don’t want any of it to go to waste.”

"I’m not a surf artist. I made these kind of influential surf films, so people try to co-opt me into that culture.”

Over lunch, Thomas dodges questions about his art. Instead, with his gift for subtly turning an interviewer into an interviewee, we talk about me. But it doesn’t feel like evasion. One question after the other, Thomas asks about my own work, what kind of music I make and listen to, my childhood spent on Kauai. In turns encouraging and instructive, he says things like “I'm excited for you” and “I'm imparting this to you because I think it will help”.

If you research Thomas, it becomes clear that this curiosity about other people’s interests has shaped many lives. When Dane Reynolds turns his back on the professional circus to immortalise freesurfing on grainy Polaroids and self-made films; when Kassia Meador throws up a little photo exhibition alongside a longboarding comp; when Alex Knost channels his wave-sliding roots into another genre-less band - a nod to Thomas Campbell’s transgressive innovations is never far behind.

“Thomas does a million things all the time, it’s so inspiring,” says Roger Mihalko, the skater who dropped by Thomas’ house. “I remember watching Sprout and thinking, ‘Oh you don't have to ride a regular skateboard!’ I always rode weird boards anyway, but Thomas’ movie made it feel like that was okay.” Encouraging people to diversify and embrace their outer-talents is, for Thomas, just the logical thing to do. “All those Beautiful Loser guys, we were all just friends, you know?” he remembers. “Me and Ed Templeton knew each other because we shot skate photos together. One day he showed me a closet full of paintings. He was just shooting photos back then and never showed anybody his art. I was like, ‘What the fuck are these doing in your closet? Hang them up, give them away - do whatever you have to to get them out!’ He would paint on my photos, or Tobin Yelland would shoot something for him to draw on. We just all started doing stuff together.”

It is fitting that Beautiful Losers shares its moniker with a Leonard Cohen novel, for Thomas’s greatest passion projects, outside of art, are musical. Not only has he influenced the careers of countless artists, but with his small twenty-year-old label, Galaxia Records, many musicians as well. Galaxia has become a home for the structureless sounds of Tommy Guerrero and Ray Barbee, skateboarding alumni who both turned to jazz. Later, on my drive home, I will put in a CD Thomas makes for me (“I just like to craft these super-slow mixes across a bunch of different genres, but I can’t remember what’s on this one”) and come to the conclusion that his art is just like the jazz on the mix: repeated patterns embellished with improvised departures. But he’s not quite ready to get into that kind of analysis just yet. Our names are finally called, so first we must eat.

As we look over the menu, the conversation turns to my current (and his past) veganism. “I’m not saying that it’s all true, because history to me is folkloric anyway,” he says, before launching into a ten-minute recap of the history of mankind’s eating habits, as garnered from a book he read recently about blood-type diets. “Every single person is a different chemistry experiment,” he adds - and suddenly I feel like he’s not just talking about food. “Anything can be right for anyone. It’s dialling into yourself and seeing where you’re at, finding out what feels right. Our culture doesn’t really instruct us how to feel.”

After lunch we talk obsessively about music, comparing favourite records and favourite shows. We both commiserate the years that we snobbishly listened to one type of music (punk for him, folk for me) before opening up to the bounties of other genres. He recounts the time he saw the Grateful Dead and consciously stayed sober to have an unhindered experience. “It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen,” he says. He stops at the post office for a moment, pausing in the open door of the driver’s seat because, when it’s a subject he’s enthusiastic about, he just can’t cut a conversation short.

I joke that it’s time to stop tricking me into talking about myself. I want to understand why he uses 16mm instead of digital, ancient lost-wax bronzing techniques instead of 3D modelling, sewing machines and scissors instead of laser-cutting. “My creative process definitely came from skateboarding and being in that culture,” says Thomas, who ‘launched’ his first Xeroxed ‘zine at the age of thirteen. “In the 1980s, when I was growing up, you made fanzines and took pictures and tried to paint. That was just a part of it. I’m not a surf artist. I made these kind of influential surf films, so people try to co-opt me into that culture. Sure, those other things are a part of what I do, but I like to keep things separate.”

Back at his studio, Thomas introduces me to several pieces he is working on. Full of multicoloured projects at varying stages of completion, it’s like walking into a stained glass cave, littered with gourds, paint cans, piles of wood, found objects and endless scraps of paper. Revealing his affinity for African art, Thomas lugs out one of his most recent creations. Made from wood, ropes, cardboard, clay, fibreglass and gourds, then cast and bronzed, ‘Der’ is an eighty-five-pound sculpture named, in Thomas’s humorous way, in honour of the expression, ‘Duh!’

He starts to tell me about the months it took to create the sculpture. Right before the patina specialist was going to add the finishing touches, Thomas exclaimed, “Holy shit that looks horrible! The communication sucks. It looks like it’s in pain and I don’t want that.” So he moved the mouth and added some pimple-like texture to the face. “This one I really like because it’s almost like this entity, or person, or whatever it is, is really communicating,” he says. “It didn’t all come together easy. You’re kind of moving with it in a jazz-like way.”

From his energy to the paint on his fingertips, Thomas's need to keep making things by hand is palpable. In much the same way that he petted Muddy a few minutes before, he affectionately wipes dust from Der's expressive face.

“I do think I have a romantic aesthetic idea about what I do, an older-world idea of art. Not extremely conceptual, but more generally expressive,” he explains. “I have a language that I’ve developed and I’m expressing through that language. I work in bronze and sculpture and traditional painting because I like the aesthetic of those types of things. In my photography and movies I only use film because I feel like it has a warmth, depth, dimension and a dance in the grains. You can tell when it was made. I understand the applicable aspects of digital photography and filmmaking; I see how it can work. But for me, film is a more viable path, and I think a more impactful path. I find digital ephemeral.”

He goes on: “Film is like a dancer. You’re dancing, you’re over here and you shoot something, and you dance over to the middle and the film dances. You don’t really know what the film is going to do exactly, but it has its own cool dance and you can do your dance and you meet somewhere in the middle. What I find with digital film is that the medium’s dancing over there and you have to dance all the way across the room; you have to do big-time dance to get it. I’m not saying you can’t get it to somewhere interesting, but it doesn’t meet you in the middle of the room. If I’m going to spend the time to capture something, I want to honour the scenario, the activity, the people, the emotion, and get the most out of it.”

So, is permanence part of the allure? “Very much so,” he says. “I shoot Super 16mm film because if I’m going to try to honour these things, I want this reference piece to be around.” The same goes with bronze. “It’s a long journey to get them to be dynamic on a level where there’s an interplay and they function. If you’re going to really go through that process and get somewhere, it’s nice that that thing can stick around.”

He pauses. “[Then again] there's almost a Mad Max idea to some of the art,” he says. “People worry it’s gonna get messed up, but that’s part of it. I don’t think it’s supposed to last forever.” He goes on to explain how he can work on a painting for seven years, paint over things he doesn’t like, covering up places where it fell and got beat up, or eventually even toss it if he doesn’t like the outcome. You can see this layered aspect in much of his work: the three-dimensional objects that juxtapose shape, colour and texture; the tapestries that are stitched, sketched and sewn; and even the films themselves where clear shots are bled with light from analogue process and directionally driven music is threaded through with atmosphere. Thomas’ creative output is a deepening palimpsest in constant flux. “I'm not super attached to my work,” he adds. “I don’t need to have it around me and be the centre of everything. I like doing it but then I like getting away from it as well.”

He says he doesn’t “get away” as much as he used to. In the last six months, trips to New York, Hawaii, Berlin, Chile and New Zealand are all considered “light travel”. For Thomas, working in different mediums provides a similar release. “They all come in in a different registry on meditative levels,” he says. “The sewing is interesting. Sometimes I’ll go away for a few weeks or a month and a lot of times the first thing I’ll do when I get home is just prepare a bunch of those paper flowers. I’ll just make like ten of them and it’s crazy grounding. It helps me re-enter and reconnect."

Known affectionately to his friends and fans as T.muck or T.moeski - signing off emails with T.cam, T.moe and every version in between - Thomas infuses a sense of humour into everything he does. The landing page of his website frames his work as ‘creative dribble’, ‘art faggery’ or simply ‘umm yeah’. It’s a vernacular that pops up in his paintings, usually alongside semi-human characters who say things like, ‘Fuck yeah’, ‘Yep’ or ‘Ummmm’ in balloon-like speech bubbles.

“It’s funny, but also has depth if you want it to,” he explains. “I try to access more positive references. I think it’s a lot harder. Sure, we all have darker parts of ourselves. Accessing dark shit is really easy. It’s all around you and everyone does it. But it’s kinda boring. Besides, ‘um’ is probably the most common, repeated term from all people. I find that mid-thought really interesting. To me it’s the most relatable idea.”

Inspired by the customary robes of Morocco called jellabas, the genderless humanoids in Thomas’ work are designed, he says, to float outside of context - free from the confines of gender and race, and without a backstory - so that they can slip by unnoticed, no questions asked.

“I’ve gone out of my way to stay under the radar,” says Thomas, revealing something of himself in those little human forms.

As our day together draws to a close, Thomas grabs his computer and a couple of blank CDs, and asks me to follow him out to the garage. He starts grabbing colourful scraps of paper from the dishevelled mountains of materials piled around his studio. What follows is probably best imagined as a sped-up time-lapse video, with Thomas cutting, folding and sewing at lightning speed two impeccably crafted covers for the mix CDs he’s just burned for me. Then, with a striking combination of focus and frenzy, he pulls up a chair, crouches over his desk, and starts drawing, stamping and personalising a copy of his book. I spent the day chasing soundbites from a man who refused to bite. But as he works, his reluctance to philosophise is replaced with something real. He is driven, in that frenetic moment, by an indescribable force.

Before I make off with my pile of handmade gifts, something Thomas says at the opening of Sprout springs to mind: “This is a film about the exploration of the riding of water mountains and mole hills. The idea behind Sprout is to show how many different ways we have to access our ocean's existence using whatever shape or sized equipment it might take to have a more connected ride.”

Though he was talking about longboards, shortboards and weird logs in between, the same manifesto could apply to his art - and, for that matter to his life as well. I can’t help but think that, by slipping seamlessly between all mediums, from old-world bronzes to 16mm film, Thomas is proving that there are endless ways to access our own existence - infinite tools we can use to create a more connected ride.

So, is that the message we should take from his work? “It's not really about my story,” says Thomas. “It's about your experience with it.”

And on that final note I walk away from Thomas feeling like he’s told me all I need to know. In our interview, he wanted to talk about my experiences. In his art, he wants to talk about yours.

Caledonia Dance Currie is learning how to be a human again. She’s spent the last decade working at a preternatural pace, so for her thirty-fourth birthday, as a treat to herself, she took a break from being invincible and went for a walk. “I was so busy, I wasn’t sleeping and every time I got off an aeroplane I would get the flu,” she says. “I was like, ‘But I’m a superhero, I can do this!’ and my body was like, ‘Actually, you’re thirty-four now - stop.’”

The Brooklyn-based artist landed in London a month ago with “a giant backpack full of bits of paper” and has spent every waking hour crouched over on the floor or dangling from a ladder, so that she could chisel, hammer, paint and build a walk-in installation at Black Rat Projects. The cavernous gallery space under the railway arches of Shoreditch has long been a home to street art’s elite, and Murmuration - a show that takes its name from a flock of starlings, and features lace-like papercuts and a twenty-foot goddess called Thalassa - is the culmination of four years of hard slog. So a little downtime, you’d think, would be no big deal. “I just did a big hike in Ireland, and previously I would never have done that,” she says, scooping heavy locks off her face with ink-stained hands. “I would have been like, ‘I have to stay and finish 30,000 paintings after the show opens.’ Now I just think, ‘Please be a human being and stop doing that.’”

It’s a bright, chilly morning in post-gentrified East London, and the hip cognoscenti are still nowhere to be seen. Despite having “stayed up real late to hang out with a buddy”, Caledonia Currie - or Callie, as she’s known to her troubadour band of collaborators and friends - is clearly feeling the benefits of her Irish sojourn. Fresh-faced and chirpy, she free-pours sugar into her coffee and looks the polar opposite of annoyed when she pauses to say, “I wish Abba would die.” After a series of re-arranged plans, we’ve met for breakfast at an American-style diner that serves Huevos Rancheros and, despite the mini jukeboxes and rockabilly vibes, plays a whole lot of Abba. On a torturous loop.

“It reminds me of a café I worked in when I first moved to New York and all they fucking played was Abba,” says Callie, slicing eggs and mushrooms into a forkable mince. “People are like, ‘What have you got against Abba? They’re so cheerful!’ But I kinda wanted to go back in time and murder them.”

On paper, this statement is a little misleading. But throw in the schoolgirl giggles and excitable hand gestures (complete with waving knife and fork), and you soon get the picture: Callie was joking. People who hug like an old-school friend don’t really want to murder Abba - no matter how much you wish they would.

Caledonia Dance Currie is, amazingly, the real name of street artist Swoon, as given to her by her “non-traditional, wild-child” parents in 1977. Her childhood home in Daytona Beach, Florida, was a Petri dish of countercultural beliefs where the creative chaos of self-discovery was always met with praise. Every painting was deemed “amazing”; every drawing proof that she could dodge a prescriptive path. So, naturally, she became an artist at the age of ten.

“I was into oil painting, which had all the trappings of being serious and real,” laughs Callie, sprinkling salt onto her tomatoes for the gazillionth time. “Everyone was like, ‘You can do this!’ So, I was like, ‘That’s it, I’m an artist!’ Not too many people have that from that age. A lot of people would have been like, ‘You’re gonna lose your mind and end up on drugs,’ but my parents were like, ‘Well, we already did that so you probably won’t.’”

With the support of her teacher dad and stay-at-home mom, Callie came to understand that “having that amount of self-confidence as a young woman is a tremendous thing”. But ‘tremendous’, in this context, under-eggs the facts. Today, Swoon’s delicate aesthetic - all expressive line-work and heartfelt human forms - is a defining thread of street art’s evolving narrative and her name is dropped, next to Banksy and Shepard Fairey, everywhere its told. Her outdoor work has been brought inside by influential curators like Jeffrey Deitch, with pieces selling for $20,000 or more. She’s done a TED Talk; her work hangs in MoMA; even your mom could spot a Swoon.

But in 1996, aged nineteen, she was just another fine art student at Pratt in New York, struggling to work out where she slotted in. “I remember being in painting class and drawing this deadening blank like, ‘I have nothing to give,’” she says. “I could feel there was something ill-fitting, so I just had to look harder and dig deeper to find something that felt meaningful to me.” That search took her to Eastern Europe and the Netherlands where she spent her time on exchange immersed in the library, soaking up the work of Expressionist artists Schiele and Klimt. “When I talk to students I have to explain, ‘I grew up before the Internet, that’s kind of a big deal,’” she laughs. “All I had were books about Vincent Van Gogh.”

Back in Brooklyn, her anarchist art friends were getting into graffiti, but Callie couldn’t see herself in the tagging world. Then lightning struck. “Discovering Revs - having friends say, ‘Did you know that he wrote his entire life story on the New York subway system?’ - it blew the top off my understanding of graffiti. It felt more like this constant interaction with the city - that feeling of tricksterness, like something has been implanted in the fabric of the city.” Another revelation was Gordon Matta-Clark, whose site-specific ‘Anarchitecture’ captured the decay of the American Dream. “He’d carve abandoned houses in half, turning the city into a sculpture, then leave them to be destroyed,” says Callie. “I felt an emotional connection and knew I had to make something that embodied those principles.”

In 1999, combining her classic portraiture skills with papercut and printmaking, Callie started pasting intricate figures around New York, embedding familiar faces into the blank spaces of her world. “It was about addressing that feeling like there’s no place for you in the city,” says Callie, who prints everything at home by carving into lino-block, pressing the image into paper by walking on it with bare feet. “I needed to see my life reflected back to me.” But she wasn’t just planting something for herself. As she explains in her TED Talk: “By putting a little tiny change in an environment you can change all those associations people have, and create an opportunity for connection.”

Today, these ephemeral silhouettes, usually in varying stages of decay, have left an imprint on cities across the globe; they are the people that leave an impression on Callie’s life. “I can work on the expression of a human face for days and days and days,” she says. “I have an infinite patience for that.” A week after we share breakfast, Callie will drop by The Bank of Ideas - an abandoned UBS office block taken over by Occupy London - to give an impromptu talk to a dozen or so protesters. “I’m interested in travelling to places where people are organising themselves and just kinda figuring out the daily thing of how to survive,” she’ll say, pointing to a drawing inspired by the female sewing collectives of Oaxaca, Mexico. No one quite knows who’s inspiring who. (The following day, an email will circulate among that same group of activists that reads, ‘Post-Swoon meet up: Come with your ideas. No matter how impossible they may seem in your head.’)

In 2004, this belief in mass action manifested as the Toyshop collective, a group Callie founded with her dumpster-diving outsider-artist friends to stage colourful interventions in the name of ‘psychogeography’ - defined by Marxist theorist Guy Debord as “the effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”. They pasted kids’ drawings over commercial billboards and paraded down Houston Street in Manhattan, wearing paper tutus and clanging instruments made of junk, like a band of post-apocalyptic anarchist faeries. “We weren’t doing anything amazingly new, as the conversation around public space was already intense,” admits Callie, who drew inspiration from the anti-M11 highway protest camps in East London - a stone’s throw from where we’re sat eating scrambled eggs - which later grew into Reclaim The Streets. “I remember learning about that and it sparked a curiosity about how people could work together to make change.”

Toyshop became a honeypot for a swarm of outliers - performance artists, carpenters, musicians and “people who make things” - eager to get their hands dirty and build their own statement. With Callie at the helm (and Jeffrey Deitch stoking the fire) they embarked on a series of progressively ambitious junkyard raft projects starting, in the summer of 2006, with Miss Rockaway Armada - a two-year-long “collective living experiment in communication and smaller footprints” that sent a flotilla of dystopian Waterworld rafts, built from construction site scraps, down the Mississippi.

“At the time we were going into all these wars and I was like, ‘Who is supporting this presidency? Who are Americans? What the fuck is going on here?’ I felt totally disconnected to the point that I wanted to leave the country,” says Callie. “I was like, ‘I either can’t be an American in this situation, or I can do what I know, mobilise an art collective, channel the entirety of our culture, and travel with it into the interior. You can’t wage a war for resources by withdrawing from the centre, and only communicating with people in your own city is stifling to the point that it loses all meaning. It was very much about, ‘How do we communicate and learn from America?’ There were these amazing moments when people spotted the boats and were like, ‘What are you?’ It sparked a conversation like, ‘This is who we are, this is what we’re doing - who are you?’”

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea brought an aesthetic lilt to the ‘living experiment’ that was much more distinctly Swoon. When seven scrapyard vessels came floating down the Hudson River in the summer of 2008 - seemingly straight out of a Neverland New Orleans - Callie’s alter-ego revealed herself in the labyrinthine layers of intricate woodwork, weathered paint palettes and whimsical treehouse forms. They were floating, functioning works of art. In 2009, The Swimming Seas of Serenissima sent a similar flotilla drifting through Venice. Inspired by raft-builder Poppa Neutrino - who ‘scraprafted’ the Atlantic from New York City to Ireland - they traversed the Adriatic Sea, “always hugging the coast”, eventually dropping anchor at the Venice Biennale.

But even in a buoyant Bohemia, consensus is tricky. “That shit is fucking tiring,” says Callie, to the diverse group of activists at The Bank of Ideas. “But when you have an idea, and people say you’re going to fail, a lot of times its because they haven’t seen it happen before. And all that means is that there’s not a precedent for it. It doesn’t really mean it’s not possible, it just means that there isn’t an understanding for it and you need to create that understanding... When you are trying to do something and people tell you, ‘No,’ it’s not because they’re gonna stop you; they just don’t wanna be the one who gave you permission. Like, ‘I don’t wanna be the one who told you assholes that you could crash into a fucking bridge.’”

Callie balances her collaborative outdoor projects with solo installations in private spaces, and has spent years coming to terms with the code of ethics underpinning both approaches. “It’s amazing to bring people together in one place and draw dots between different ideas,” she explains. “But when I started to take people up on gallery invitations, I started to dream about building-out installations in a very complicated way. For that, you need a very safe, protected space – you need tools and all these things that being outside, or being on a boat on a river, doesn’t provide. You need that little bit of preciousness. Working inside is like a thought laboratory for me; it’s a really nurturing way to grow your ideas whereas when you’re out in the world, everything is challenging. It consumes so much of your mind and energy that you lose your ability to have this dreamy delicate thought process, and I would be lost without that.”

In world of self-promoting Twitter-heads, Callie doesn’t have a website; she is the best type of enigma – everywhere and nowhere all at once. As a character, Swoon may be a swashbuckling rebel - a Pied Piper figure to a crew of Lost Boys - but Caledonia Currie (who’s not afraid to tell her Occupy audience that she subsidises her projects with “really expensive artwork”) has a more tempered take. “I feel uncomfortable saying I’m definitely countercultural, because you just immediately become aware of the thousands of ways in which you’re totally part of the culture,” says Callie, pouring more sugar into coffee that’s now turned cold. “Most thoughtful people have this constant battle between trying to be happy in simple daily ways - appreciating things like a good meal, clean drinking water and a taxi ride somewhere - while understanding how something like the disaster in the Gulf and the oil industry leads back to our way of life. That feeling like your culture is implicitly, explicitly in every way just ravaging the earth and every culture that isn’t living like you do.”

She recently returned from central Brazil, where indigenous collectives are protesting the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, a $10bn project that could displace 50,000 people. “There are massive amounts of chemicals being dumped into the rivers, their indigenous way of life is at stake - they’re being suffocated. Knowing that in the city you feel great because you can turn up the heat - I can’t recognise myself as not participating in that lifestyle but I’m constantly thinking, ‘I have to find a way to live differently.’ It’s not working yet, I can’t figure it out - it’s like not being able to think outside of this box. I’m really struggling with it, but I feel like that process maybe leads you somewhere – it’s just about trying to figure shit out.”

“That feeling like your culture is implicitly, explicitly in every way just ravaging the earth and every culture that isn’t living like you do.”

Brazil was one of many field trips Callie regularly undertakes anywhere the survival instinct brings people together: from the Umoja Village in Miami (a homeless settlement founded by Take The Land Back) to a group of bereaved mothers fighting female homicide in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. “We have to think about how [this epidemic] is connected to our lives,” says tee-total Callie. “In the sense that it’s connected to the drug trade - just think about how that’s directed towards the US and Europe and our consumption. We can be so unaware of what goes into the things that are brought to us.” Working alongside the collective Nuestras Hijas de Regreso (‘May Our Daughters Return Home’), Swoon’s response was a portrait of victim Silvia Elena, surrounded by a rabble of papercut butterflies (symbolic of lost souls) and sound-tracked by audio interviews with many bereaved mothers.

But Callie’s not one to stand by and take notes. “Portraits like that are about raising awareness,” she says, “but I felt this need to make something that has a tangible impact.” In 2010, while studying architecture, she “hatched a plan” with collaborator Ben Wolf (whose scrapyard structures buttress many of Swoon’s shows) and started the Konbit Shelter project in post-earthquake Haiti. Using architect Nader Khalili’s Superadobe domes - a resource-light ‘earthbag’ construction used in humanitarian housing - they helped the local community construct their own buildings.

But as an outsider proposing a local solution, the learning curve was steeper than Callie foresaw. “We had to step back and remember, ‘You’re providing a service,” she says, deep furrows in her brow, “you’re learning something and then giving back. If at any point it feels wrong, then you don’t do it.’ Whereas on the river if people said, ‘You’re wrong,’ we were like, ‘Hell now, we can do this.’” After erecting a communal space, they embarked on a dome for a local woman called Monique, who was living under a tarpaulin with her newborn baby. “There are so many dangers with this process,” explains Callie. “It provides jobs and excitement and the local community is really gung-ho, but at the same time it’s one house for one person and you have to ask, ‘Is that weird? Will that single her out? And what does that mean about our relationship with her?’ There is all this stuff that I feel quite unresolved about that can only be resolved through our continued relationship. Now that we know each other better, we can ask, ‘Do you really like this style of architecture? What should the next step be? And how can it not include us as outsiders?’ In the end, it’s not really empowering for us to keep doing things - it’s about teaching and giving independence as a solution.”

Soon after we meet Callie will return to Haiti to “ask more questions and get real answers”, but she’s also applying these lessons closer to home. Before Haiti, she’ll stop in New Orleans to work on a “musical house” in a Hurricane-ravaged neighbourhood. And in Braddock, Pennsylvania, she and four other artists - “the same women who marched through Manhattan in paper tutus” - have taken over an abandoned church to start Transformazium, a community arts project in a poverty-line area that was largely abandoned after the steel industry collapsed, with the population falling from 15,000 to 5,000 since the 1940s. “I feel like I’m trying to get a hands-on understanding of how various communities are struggling for survival,” explains Callie. “The house in New Orleans is very much about psychological survival – being soulfully and spiritually stimulated by music and beautiful things. With Transformazium, it’s a question of, ‘What can we create in the wreckage of this situation that is beneficial to the community?’ The guys who live there full-time are pretty amazing in their dedication to create small responses and to really fit and be integral to the community - they are the community at this point. Next, we want to talk actively to people about their vision for the space. I would like to just start hundreds of conversations and not try to stick to any one thing.”

Having cleared our plates an hour ago, we decide it’s time to bid Abba farewell. Back at Black Rat Projects, a power-dressed art magazine editor stops by for a look, while a kid outside shouts something like, ‘Look, it’s a Swoon!’ Callie rolls up her sleeves, crouches down, and starts rolling up giant papercuts on the dust-covered floor.

For a woman who wants to start hundreds of conversations, Caledonia Currie and her invincible other half seem charmingly unaware of the trellis of charged dominoes they leave everywhere they go. “The idea of success has always been kind of nebulous to me,” she says. “When I was young, it seemed so unlikely that it was more freeing to not invest in that myth by saying, ‘Do what you want, whatever happens will happen, and let the things you make be your thing.’” Days before this article goes to press, an email will pop into my inbox entitled, ‘Do, make and create together meet up.’ The Occupy London activists are planning their next Swoon-inspired attack. And with that, the latticework grows.

We’re living in noisy times. From Tahrir Square to Wall Street and from student protests to all-out riots, the air’s become filled with fearsome chanting and beating drums. It’s a good thing – a great thing, in fact. But can a single human voice still lift above the roar?

Outside the Bank of England a gentle breeze stirs. A modest scrap of fabric undulates against the railings, creating not so much as a whisper. Here embroidery thread and cotton have joined forces, and together they silently announce their little message. ‘There is a gap in the clouds of unbridled capitalism,’ they affirm in earnest cross-stitch. ‘Now’s the time to act for justice.’ A label like one you might find in a handmade jumper reads: ‘Love from, Craftivist Collective.’

So who exactly are the Craftivist Collective? The group got its start when founder Sarah Corbett moved to London. “I joined lots of activist groups and didn’t feel like I fitted in,” she explains. “A lot of them are quite extrovert and like to dress up and chant. A lot are very black and white; you have to be vegan and ride a bike and you can’t like Vogue. And I quite like Vogue. I didn’t enjoy going on marches and shouting things. I felt quite shy and stressed out.”

Ever so quietly, she started learning about craftivism. Betsy Greer, who coined the term in 2003, defines this marriage of craft and activism as “a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper and your quest for justice more infinite”. This resonated with Sarah. “So I just started this little blog,” she remembers. “And all of these quiet, creative people started going, ‘Could I join in? I’m a bit shy. Would you let me?’” It wasn’t long before Sarah’s blog, A Lonely Craftivist, naturally morphed into a community hub and, by January 2009, the Craftivist Collective was born.

There’s a steady hum in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall, where the collective holds a Stitch-In once a month. People bring their own craftivism projects, or buy a kit they can make on the night. Together, their pieces will contribute to projects designed by core members to address all manner of issues. One co-project, in collaboration with WI group Shoreditch Sisters, sees craftivists creating embroidered vaginas for an awareness-raising campaign targeting female genital cutting.

Tonight some craftivists are at work on mini protest banners, transmitting inspiring quotes, or hard-hitting facts, one cross-stitch at a time. Others are embroidering ‘Don’t Blow It’ handkerchiefs with personal messages to their MPs. The aim, according to their website, is to remind politicians “that you are holding them to account if they go against the demands of their constituents”.

With its focus on advocacy and awareness-raising projects, Craftivism offers a softly-softly contrast to hardcore militance. The group’s slogan – ‘A spoonful of craft helps the activism go down’ – sums this up in typically upbeat language. “We’re not campaigners,” Sarah emphasises. “We make it really clear that we provoke people to discuss issues and we hope what comes out of that is a positive thing.”

The work aims to stimulate discussion not just within the walls of a Stitch-In, but out on the street, too. “If something’s small people have to find it,” says Sarah, “and they’re more likely to go up to it with an open mind and think, ‘Oh this is special, what does it say?’ And then you can hit them with something controversial.” Craftivists are encouraged to snap photos of their work in situ to include in the collective’s website and on Facebook, but it’s the casual passerby that really helps the message to go viral, by sharing photos of craftivist creations via Instagram and Twitter.

This nonviolent, subversive approach appeals to Margo Howie, who took refuge in craftivism after becoming disillusioned with the “shouting, screaming, throwing placards” of other activist circles. “I mean, great work can be done, but I was finding the same arguments and I hated a lot of the aggression. There were so many times I was just turned off by a lot of the stuff I found in protest movements. What I like about craftivism is the fact that it’s non-confrontational and it’s creative,” she says. “This is totally more my speed: slow, deliberate, forgiving, with cake and sitting down.”

The tactile nature of handcrafted items reaches audiences in a way that oral messages can’t. As many craftivists are keen to point out, the natural inclination when you’re shouted at is to inch backwards, but if you see a handmade badge on a stranger’s jacket, you’re inclined to lean forward for a closer look. And in a world where so much is temporary and virtual, a contribution that is real and lasting takes on a certain resonance.

“The output makes people think about the issues in a slightly different way from other forms of activism,” explains Erica Carroll. “The fact that you worked on it and took a long time to make it will hopefully make people think about it a little bit more. Hopefully it has a longer lasting effect; it gets to people and it gets them thinking.”

It isn’t only now, nor is it only in Britain, that craft has been used to creatively express political discontent. Sarah points to the women of Chile who, during the Pinochet dictatorship, used handcrafted tapestries called Arpilleras to draw attention to their dire situation. “The Catholic church and NGOs smuggled these Arpilleras out of the country to raise international awareness of the brutality of the Pinochet regime,” she wrote on the British Museum’s blog last year. “Not only that, the craft of these women also encouraged a powerful grassroots political movement by providing them with an opportunity to express and record their grief and emotional turmoil about the death or disappearance of their loved ones, something that the regime and the poverty they lived in didn’t allow.”

Carrie Reichardt is a core member of the Craftivist Collective, and a new project she’s designing has taken inspiration from the AIDS Memorial Quilt. “It’s the most popular piece of community art that’s ever existed,” she says of the project founded in the earliest years of the epidemic to immortalise victims it seemed history would forget. “It was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But it’s a bit of sewing!” Since 1987, over 14 million people have visited the quilt at thousands of events worldwide, raising $3 million for AIDS service organisations. With 45,000 panels now in the quilt, it’s a gripping illustration of the breadth of the disease that many people in the 1980s were very keen to ignore. “That was craftivism before craftivism was given the term by Betsy Greer.”

Carrie’s cause is death penalty injustice, and she’s creating a moving – and moveable – tribute to executed Death Row inmates. With a nod to the old court tradition of the judge placing a handkerchief on his head while reading out a death sentence, the Hankie for Hope project invites supporters to stitch the name of deceased prisoners on handkerchiefs. These will be stitched together to create an ephemeral banner, a visual testimony that can forcefully but silently communicate the humanity of those condemned by the state.

She maintains that craftivism offers a form of catharsis, giving you something physical to do in the face of hugely frustrating and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And it’s also a useful tool for creating conversation about tough topics. “For me as a person, I’m very forthright,” Carrie says. “I have very strong views. If I were to talk to people I’m likely to get into an argument. I know that if I were to set up a stall, the only people who would come up to talk to me are those people who are already on side. Or you might have someone come up and be rude to you. There isn’t much engagement.”

When she mosaicked a car as a tribute to her friend who was executed on death row, she realised her days of setting out stalls were over. “I don’t have to do anything because people come up to me and naturally ask me questions. As soon as people start to ask questions, it enables that dialogue to happen. The fact that it’s been painstakingly, labour-intensively mosaicked means that even if people don’t like the style or the image, most people can appreciate the craft,” she says. “I think it makes your voice louder; I think it enables people to hear what you’re saying.”

There’s a gentle murmur as the circle widens to make room for more craftivists arriving for the Stitch-In. “When you’re doing it with people you feel a part of some community,” says Sarah. “You feel you’re all in it together. And I really love that it’s a safe space for people of all different backgrounds. We have some really interesting discussions and debates. You don’t solve them, but it gets people having politics as part of their lifestyle.”

Tonight, much Earl Grey is consumed, the US presidential elections are discussed and new projects are plotted. All the while, these unassuming activists steadily bend wayward threads to their crafty will and weave new strands of political thought into the heart of everyday experience.

Jamie Thomas’ rolling career is synonymous with the evolution of skateboarding itself. As team manager of Ed Templeton’s Toy Machine, he helped breathe new life into nineties skate culture. But it’s through his own companies - Zero Skateboards (1996) and Fallen Footwear (2003) – that his creative legacy continues to manifest. As owner and president of Black Box Distribution, he’s busier than ever.

But take a gander through Jamie’s prolific Instagram offerings (followed by thousands) and you’ll find an intimate, artistic portrait of a life behind the scenes. HUCK caught up with the thirty-seven-year-old skate rat to find out why this digital platform has captured his imagination.

When did you start using Instagram and why?
I started about a year and a half ago. I was always kinda disgruntled about Twitter and begrudgingly started an account, but never really liked it. I thought it was really over dramatising what I was thinking or doing and didn't feel like [my updates] were justified or validated as newsworthy. But when I caught wind of Instagram, and saw that it was the visual version of Twitter, where you shoot a photograph and your caption is second to the actual image, I thought, ‘Well that's the way it should be!’ It’s the [social network] with the least bullshit. Instagram, in its purity, is just an update of what your friends, and people that you're into, are up to. And you can be artistic - you can express yourself. I’ve always been into photography on one level or another - it’s a hobby and I shot some of the Zero ads a long time ago. Through making skateboarding videos, I got a real feel for composition.

Some photography purists say Apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic are a cheat’s tool. What would you say to such sceptics?
Anyone can take a picture on a camera phone, but if someone can take a photo that everyone is going to be inspired by, then that's a different challenge. I try and make every photo that I post on Instagram worth clicking the 'like' button. I want to represent myself and the scene well and hopefully show an artistic view of whatever I'm looking at. It’s not rocket science, anybody could do it, but I've got a pretty decent following on Instagram somehow, and I don't want to disappoint those followers. I try to do quality over quantity. If I wouldn’t click the ‘like’ button myself, I don’t put a photo up.

Who do you think engages with your shots and why?
I think initially it started off as skateboarders and fans, but I’m into nature and landscape, too. A lot of the skaters got bored like, 'Too many sunsets! Too many landscapes!' But I just take photos of anything I’m inspired by and try to get a good balance of skate, family and landscape. I try to make every photo special and I think if you do that you get a reputation, and people want to follow you. If people are into it that’s cool, and if not then I don’t really care. It’s just what I’m seeing, y’know? It’s what I’m inspired by.

Anyone can get involved with Instagram. Is technology like this a new democratising force?
Absolutely. I think that’s where all the followers come from. If it was an elitist thing, then it wouldn't have the community. It’s like that game Othello [Reversi]: ‘Takes a minute to learn how to play, but a lifetime to master.’ It’s something that anyone can do, but that doesn't mean you’ll be able to do it as good as the best people doing it. You can develop your own style and you can develop your own identity through your photos. Young teenage kids are doing it and I think that’s really cool, because it’s cultivating them having an opinion, having a style, thinking about what they're creating and getting feedback on that creation. My wife thinks that too many things are judged and need self-reassurance in this day and age, but it’s just about that ability to have feedback very rapidly and then change your course of direction. If you want to. If you don’t, you can just stay on course and say, ‘Eff the feedback!’ But I think it’s really cool that it’s so accessible. That’s what makes the community so exciting.

I guess, in that way, it’s a similar process to skateboarding?
It is, totally. It really is like skateboarding. Anyone can start doing it and if you wanna be good at it, yeah, you have to devote yourself to the craft, just like anything in this world.

Could a platform like Instagram make magazines a bit redundant, as more people are creating awesome content and sharing it for free? Especially those pockets of media who still see themselves as ‘dictators of cool’? 
Yeah, for sure. If people are serious about their Instagram, then it could be their end-all source for putting information out. But people still want to keep [magazines] relevant. The going creed right now is that you can’t post a skate photo from a skate spot when there’s a photographer there. If you do, you’re an asshole, because you’re not leaving any story for them to tell. The only time you see a skate photo on my Instagram is when there’s no skate photographer there, or we don’t have access to their photos, or it’s the warm-up trick or whatever. In China, for example, I was taking skate photos because there were no other photographers. I also used the same treatment on all my photos from that trip so when you flip through my Instagram you’ll get to that section and you’ll know that it’s a mini [contained] article, y’know? I think I’m going to try and do that more - develop a look that really works with the weather and environment of a trip in order to depict a certain mood and style. The China trip was an experiment. It was winter in Asia and really overcast and cloudy, so I kind of made this moody, dark, China look – like an old Chinese film!

As a skateboarder, and someone who travels a lot in search of new spots, do you think you see things that many people overlook?
I think so. I think too, just having Instagram, you’re always looking for a photo. You’re always looking for the hidden treasure in whatever you’re encountering, because you want to tell your friends a story about what you’re doing. But at the same time, there are so many cliches that so many people fall into, so you’re trying to look for your own angle. I think there are a lot of hidden treasures to be seen out there. I don’t know that I see things differently because of skateboarding, but I’m showing a different side to things because skateboarding’s what I’m into. Our skateboarding journey ends up being the story I’m telling.

In the fifth episode of your Let The Good Times Roll series, you go through your epic collection of magazines, videos, tees and decks. Why is archiving important to you?
I’ve saved everything that’s had value to me at one point in my life that I thought maybe, later on, I’d want to wear, cherish or give away. I don't know, I’ve always felt that memorabilia and collectibles are taken for granted; people just kind of disregard that stuff. But I always knew that I was building a career and that I would someday wanna look back and reflect on all the stuff that I’d done. So, I tried to save mementos along the way, consistently picking and choosing what I really wanted to keep. Now I'm filtering through those things and giving them away. I’m actually opening an eBay account because I’m trying to get a skatepark built in my hometown in Alabama and I’m going to put all of the money from the eBay sales towards that fund. So people can contribute to that as well as have a piece of my history, or their own skateboard history; original things that they may have been influenced by.

Can online archives, like Instagram, ever replace tangible collections?
I think elements of it are the same, y’know? Because you’re basically documenting your travels and the mementos of your life by archiving photographs. And these photographs will live on; they’ll live in a small space on the web, but they’ll live on. They’re archived. I’m starting a website called ‘Thrill Of It All’, which will be a hub for my Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Let The Good Times Roll videos, as well as a space to share my personal influences and inspirations. I'm going to archive all my old video parts and interviews as well as all my current travels. Thrill Of It All was the name of the first Zero video and it’s also pretty much why we do what we do; it’s all just for the thrill of it all.

In a world that moves so fast, are all these things – blogs and online archives - a way to slow down and reflect?
I totally think so. If not, you basically don’t have a road map of where you’ve come from. I think Instagram is a great product of that. Some days I don’t Instagram at all - if I’m hanging out with my family and it feels like it cheapens the moment that I’m living in. But when the timing’s right and a situation presents itself - when it looks like time is standing still for a moment, and I can spare the time to shoot a photo, then I do.

The doors to London’s Central Mosque are open to visitors, but few outsiders cross the threshold to witness Friday prayers. Just around the corner, tourists queue to have their pictures taken with a costumed Victorian policeman outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street, oblivious to the muttered greetings of Muslims gathering in socked feet beneath the great blue dome. As the clock strikes 1pm the first office workers begin filing into local pubs for lunch, unaware of the masses arranging themselves in rows for the jummah – old beside young, waiters beside slick city brokers, foreheads sinking to the carpet while their voices rise in a chorus as old as any of the capital’s churches.

Their prayers completed, some descend to the basement for a canteen lunch; others slip upstairs to study scripture in the library. Most head out into the stone court, chatting on phones, embracing friends, catching up on the week’s news and making plans for the week to come. “We don’t drink, so we can’t get together in pubs like most people,” says thirty-one-year-old Mohammed Yahya. “The mosque is a place for social as well as spiritual gathering."

With his spotless trainers and sleeveless puffa, baseball cap and colourful headphones, Mohammed stands out amid the mostly sober clothing of his peers. It’s a fitting nod to his position as one of the figureheads of a movement of British Muslims channelling their faith in the form of hip hop, and a reminder of his impressive roster of recordings and performances – the former including a prolific solo career and collaborative projects like Blind Alphabetz and Native Sun, and the latter encompassing live slots at major US festivals and clubs across the UK.

Mohammed wasn’t raised a Muslim. Born in war-torn Mozambique, he spent his early years living as a refugee in a crumbling tenement block in the slums of racially segregated Lisbon, a building without electricity in which drug users defecated in elevators and left needles for kids to play doctor with on stairwells. After repeatedly being passed over for demeaning jobs on the grounds of his ethnicity, his father finally found work in the UK; Mohammed’s parents separated soon after, and the eleven-year-old followed his dad to London. Feelings of cultural isolation and sadness at the separation were things Mohammed tried to make sense of through poetry – until he discovered hip hop, at which point his life changed almost overnight.

“To see rappers like Public Enemy, who were not only black but celebrating their blackness by wearing African colours and pendants, that was very affecting and empowering for me,” says Mohammed. We’re chatting over coffee in the north London flat he shares with his wife, the shelves lined with books on Islam, the walls with framed quotes from the Qu’ran in calligraphic Arabic script. “Back then hip hop was about social oppression, and the topics they spoke about – poverty, police brutality, racism – those were things I could relate to. So when my poetry began to turn into lyrics, I found myself heavily influenced by those artists.”

Mohammed’s was a search for spiritual as well as social change. He became a born-again Christian aged thirteen, but left the church after voicing doubts that his pastor wasn’t able to dispel. He then studied several religions before discovering Islam on a trip to Gambia aged twenty-four, his first reconnection with Africa since his parents’ flight more than twenty years earlier.

“I went with dreadlocks and an Afrocentric world view, and I came across a very beautiful, very humble Muslim community,” explains Mohammed. “The people were poor but giving – if you visited a family and they were eating a simple plate of rice and tomato, they would insist on sharing whatever they had with you. Everything worked in perfect harmony: I’d come back from a club in the early hours, and I’d hear the sound of the morning call to prayer, and it occurred to me how beautiful, how balanced everything was in this culture. I got back to the UK and began reading about Islam, and once I felt I understood the religion better I cut off my dreadlocks and decided to convert.”

Mohammed was already signed as a rap artist to the label Silent Soundz; on his return he formed Blind Alphabetz with Abdul Rahman and began exploring his relationship with Islam in a series of tracks that grew into the album Luvolution in 2007. Lead single ‘Change’ was a hit despite its religious overtones (‘Saw a vivid new vision based on balance and peace / Finally adopted one ideology that to me felt complete’), and the group went on to support artists as established as Dead Prez, RZA from Wu Tang Clan and – more than ten years after Mohammed first felt the power of their message – Public Enemy.

All of which is testament to how far things have developed in the three decades since hip hop first reached British shores and the ears of a schoolboy named Rakin Fetuga. Now forty-one, Rakin juggles his career as a rapper with a day job teaching religious studies in a north London school, but growing up in Ladbroke Grove – the epicentre of the capital’s first hip hop scene – he fell powerfully under the sway of this new sound. He formed a breakdance crew, Supreme Rockers, which in time turned into a rap outfit called Cash Crew, and from day one he used hip hop as a means of learning more about his place in the world.

“The amazing thing about hip hop at that time was that it was all about knowledge,” says Rakin, picking at a box of grilled chicken in a north London branch of halal fast food chain Chicken Cottage. “KRS-One’s tune ‘You Must Learn’ sounds strange now, but back then that’s what hip hop was. It was about empowering black people, about exploring African history and the true story of slavery – stuff that wasn’t being taught in schools.”

In keeping with such ideals, Cash Crew would descend on Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park every Sunday to unleash new lyrics on an unsuspecting public. Afterwards they would wander between speakers and listen to fragments of speeches and sermons, and in doing so they first heard the tenets of Islam, embarking on a journey that would see all three of them converting in the early nineties. They subsequently started their own label, Street Ministry, and began releasing hip hop singles heavily infused with their new beliefs – ‘The Light’, for example, which opens with a Muslim prayer and features Rakin invoking the words: ‘There’s no superpower / Only Allah is power / And all will be revealed in the last hour.’

Not that everyone was listening to the lyrics – many were swayed by the beats alone, and tracks like ‘The Provider’ became radio hits thanks to support from deejays like Richie Rich at a then embryonic Kiss FM. In the Muslim community, however, Cash Crew’s words were being taken very seriously indeed.

“What we were doing had never been heard of back then,” explains Rakin. “Even America didn’t have openly Muslim rappers for another couple of years, and when they did they were members of westernised groups like Nation Of Islam. We were orthodox Muslims rapping about orthodox beliefs, and we came under a lot of fire from traditionalists saying that what we were doing was haram, the devil’s work. It was a massive blow.”

Rakin eventually took a break from music, only returning on the advice of a Sufi sheikh who insisted that rapping was his best means of spreading the word of Islam. Rakin formed Mecca2Medina in 1996 with fellow Muslim Ishmael Lea South, and began recording Islamic hip hop that aimed to save as much as sway listeners – ‘Life After Death’, for example, with its references to the eternal punishment awaiting sinners, and ‘Settle Down’, an ode to the powers of a strong Islamic marriage. Needless to say such messages didn’t always sit well with secular listeners, but Rakin rejects accusations that he was making religious propaganda, or that hip hop was an unsuitable forum for promoting such ideas.

“We weren’t setting out to convert non-believers to Islam,” he says. “Instead we were trying to find those people who were already questioning conventional wisdom and offering them an alternative to a secular way of life – which is nothing more than a belief system in itself, although secularism is promoted in the modern world as the only way of living. To me, that’s propoganda. What we were doing was giving people an alternative: if they wanted to look into it further, then fine. If they weren’t interested, that was fine too. And hip hop is the perfect medium for those messages: it’s always had a spiritual undercurrent, it’s always sought to express issues that were outside the mainstream, to critique conventional ways of thinking and offer a platform for revolutionary movements.”

The duo still received criticism from hardliners within the Muslim community – until 9/11, after which they were seen as diplomats capable of showing another side to a religion being demonised by the media, and called to perform for young people in schools and colleges across the country.

Ten years on, and the playing field is very different. In the UK a new generation of young Muslim rappers – many of whom were children at the time of Mecca2Medina’s post-9/11 schools tour – are repurposing the rugged beats and rapid fire vocals of grime music, fusing a love of Allah with an angry disavowal of western capitalism in keeping with the Occupy generation they’ve been born into.

One artist exemplifying that movement is twenty-one-year-old Melissa Melodee, a fiery part-Jamaican, part-Irish girl with a background in gospel singing and grime emceeing, a weekend job in a club cloakroom and a notebook filled with lyrics on feminism, the struggle for Palestine and everything in between. Melissa has had flirtations with major labels, but refused to be recast in the eyes of record executives. After converting to Islam three years ago – following a dream from which she says she awoke capable of reciting prayers in Arabic – it became all the more important for her to celebrate her identity and use her music as an agent for change.

“I’ve been working in clubs for years, and I’m constantly being told that I should cross over into mainstream dance music,” says Melissa, surrounded by framed family photographs in the east London flat that she’s lived in alone since her father passed away from cancer last year. “But there’s no way that kind of music will deliver the sort of message I’m trying to put across. I love the fact that hip hop has its roots in the idea of overcoming struggle, and the way it allows you to create such a powerful connection with your audience. I honestly think hip hop can help educate kids, but they need to be hearing music that isn’t just about guns and knife crime, about drugs and materialism.”

Despite her positive ideas, Melissa has faced criticism from females in the Muslim community, many of whom see her as betraying her duty as a Muslim woman. “I often go to the mosque and the sisters will come up and ask if I’m still making music,” explains Melissa. “I’ll say, ‘Yes.’ And they’ll say, ‘Inshallah you’ll give it up soon, inshallah you’ll pray for guidance.’ And I tell them that my mind is made up. I’m spreading a positive message: I’m trying to dispel some of the stereotypes about Islam as a violent religion, when at its heart Islam promotes a peaceful way of life. There are still problems with sexism in Islam, but there are also people like Mohammed and Rakin trying to move things forward, and I’m helping encourage that more progressive way of thinking with my music. This is part of my journey as a Muslim, so it’s frustrating when I encounter opposition from sisters in the mosque.”

All of which suggests that, for all the progress made since Rakin first encountered opposition to mixing rap with religion, there is still some way to go. It’s arguably significant that the majority of young Muslim rappers seem to be converts – orthodox Islam may still be too closed a community to foster aspiring rappers within its hallowed halls. The doors to the mosque may be open to visitors, but Mohammed Yahya believes that the gatekeepers need to do more to encourage cross-pollination with the culture that exists outside its walls.

“There’s still a lot of misrepresentation, and part of that’s to do with what the media propagates,” explains Mohammed, “but I think Muslims are partly to blame for not reaching out, for not opening up and allowing people to learn more about Islam. A lot of Muslims, the more religious and self-righteous they become, the more they want to move away from the outside world and all that they see as wrong with society. And I don’t think that’s what Islam is about. The teachings of the Prophet Mohammad were about serving the community – not about what you can gain from society, but what positive input you can give back. And if people start seeing more positive Muslim role models, then perhaps Islam as a whole will be seen in a more positive light.”

The click as the tape goes in. The weighty clunk as the spindles set in motion. The crackle as the dusty opening notes bounce through the speakers. The tingle down your spine...

There was something very special about these tangible qualities of the cassette tape. And one label, Kissability – founded by BBC Radio One deejay and new music champion Jen Long and indie label Transgressive Records – is helping reawaken this poignant pleasure in the digital age.

“I love cassettes, it’s kind of a nostalgia thing. I grew up listening to cassette tapes and buying cassettes tapes,” explains Jen of this now-unconventional format. “I feel like people, if they buy a CD, just put it straight on their iTunes and then put it in a pile and forget about it. So if you’re going to put out a physical copy of something I don’t think the format matters, so we may as well keep the tape generation alive!”

“We thought it'd be hilarious to buck the digital trend and start a tape label,” adds Toby L from Transgressive Records, who helped Jen realise her dream. “Kissability appeals to us because to have something more flexible and instinctive or impulsive means that we can move a bit more quickly, and support brand-new music at earlier stages.”

The label has put out singles from the likes of Cut Ribbons, a neat little five-piece from Llanelli, Wales running on guts and a thrashing ocean of guitars, and Australian thrash poppers, DZ Deathrays. But when you order a cassette, you get more than just a tape made with love. You also get a QR code gifting you the track as a free download as well as other exclusive content such EP artwork, live tracks or an EP remix.

Jen explains: “It’s about engaging with bands. The things we do with the digital side - with the free downloads and recording the live set, it’s just different. It’s not just a track that you download – there are a band that you can go and see play, you can buy their merch. It’s just about being involved in the scene and being more open to thinking of bands not just as an MP3.”

Such an approach is unsurprising considering that Jen is no stranger to filling her time with creative projects. When not on the airwaves, she's putting together Zero Core magazine, putting on bands at her club night Flux=Rad and even making music herself with her band Effort.

Kissability's tapes may well be an exercise in vintage nostalgia but isn’t just about a nod to the past. The ways in which we consume music have changed so dramatically over the last few years that sometimes it’s easy to click through tracks without much thought. It’s about taking a love of music and holding it in your palm and treasuring it.

“Brilliance can be found on your doorstep, and you should do everything you can as a music fan to support it,” muses Toby. “Kissability has a punk heart and a genuine DIY ethic. It's not about competing with anyone or trying to be the coolest thing in the world - it just wants to put out good, honest music out from good, honest people.”

Craig Stecyk is a tall, gangly man of cartoonish proportions. He speaks in dense prose, as though he’s just memorised an entire countercultural encyclopaedia and is now regurgitating its cryptic text, line for line, without a hitch. It’s the voice of a historian. Having spent the best part of four decades documenting the ebb and flow of Californian skate history – as a writer, photographer, filmmaker and artist – C.R. Stecyk III boasts bylines aplenty. He co-founded Zephyr Surfboards and Skateboards, co-wrote Dogtown And Z-Boys, and has participated in over 300 international art shows. But everything to this point comes naturally, he says.

“You’re drawing lines when you’re skating,” says Stecyk. “You’re applying a certain cognitive structure to skating a five-block stretch. You’re constantly redefining what your trajectory will be, redefining your goals, and figuring it out all the way through. You’re making conscious decisions, and those are aesthetic decisions. So, I think the rest of the art world comes naturally to [skateboarders].”

As one of skateboarding’s original documentarians, Stecyk helped chronicle its beginnings, capturing the antics of pioneers like Stacy Peralta, Tony Alva and Jay Adams in photos and words - known as the ’Dogtown Articles’ - for Skateboarder magazine in the mid-to-late 1970s. His gonzo journalistic style, brutally honest yet wildly aggressive in spirit and tone, pushed skateboarding away from its all-American, beachfront roots into a counterculture that embraced rebellion and danger — a lifestyle suited to misfits and fuck-ups. While his contemporaries opted for corny Endless Summer beach scenes, Stecyk’s board graphics – all skulls and bones and gothic crosses - cemented an outlaw aesthetic that still resonates today. In fact, a surfboard hand-shaped and painted by Stecyk himself even resides in the Smithsonian’s permanent archive.

It’s a balmy February eve and we’re chatting in a peripheral building at Hurley’s headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, before the global premiere of Stecyk’s new short film FIN. The makeshift theatre is adorned with red plastic milk crates, some of which hang from the ceiling re-purposed as chandeliers, with the rest flipped upside down to provide seating of questionable comfort. It seems only fitting that a man who helped build the West Coast DIY skate-surf-punk aesthetic will see his project premiere in a cobbled-together space.

But what does he make of hosting a premiere at a brand’s HQ — presumably the unholy belly of the beast for do-it-alone purists, and one that will no doubt profit from his sweat? “I’ve never felt particularly compromised or conflicted,” Stecyk says. “People will offer to support or underwrite something like this - how they don’t charge admission, I don’t understand. Hurley has built this theatre just to endow a principle or an experiment. And I suppose that they benefit as a brand because they get to see what people are doing. But I wouldn’t see any conflict in that.”

That ‘experiment’ - a seven-minute opus of minimal plot line and maximum experimentalism - is as convoluted as Stecyk’s tongue. With a mission statement to ‘investigate artisan garage culture’ and ‘offer insights into an assortment of individuals who incorporate traditional do-it-yourself garaged methodology into differing pursuits’, FIN sees Stecyk embarking on vague misadventures with some motorcycle-fixing, board-shaping friends. It’s a ‘day in the life’ of sorts.

Tonight, draped in a loose, nondescript jacket topped off with a plain baseball cap, the sixty-one-year-old filmmaker looks more like an anonymous middle-aged dad stumbling about the crowd than an icon tied to the myth of Dogtown. But that’s just the way he likes it. “You’ve gotta keep going forward, because it’s impossible to go backwards,” says Stecyk, about the myriad forms his work has taken since those early skate days - from commercial collaborations with Roland Sands motorcycles, to directing photography on a video documenting MoCA’s recent Art In The Streets show. “Appreciating the past and understanding what came up until this point is extremely important. You can learn how things didn’t work before - you can incorporate those, draft and go forward - but trying to replicate the past would be folly. You’re doomed to live in the future, whether you like it or not.”

Growing up in Santa Monica in the 1950s, Stecyk’s skateboarding initiation set the tone for things to come. “I started skateboarding in probably 1957-58,” he recalls. “The front of my two-by-four fruit box wooden crate scooter came off, and there I was stuck in that eureka moment, going downhill.” Although he makes it clear he doesn’t consider anything he does ‘art’, Stecyk says he approaches all his projects with that same spontaneity - whether he’s creating surfboard graphics for Joel Tudor, silk-screening posters for Hurley, or working in film. “I’m excited by stuff where I have no idea how it’s going to turn out,” he explains. “So, making this film was interesting because I had no idea what the content was, or who the next person involved would be. Not knowing where it’s going to go and how it’s going to turn out is the interesting part… The best time of my day is when I wake up in the morning and I don’t know where I am. I’m fascinated, like, ‘Wow, what’s this?’ And then you go forward from there.”

Kustom Kulture hot-rodder Von Dutch, surfboard shaper Tyler Hatzikian and Social Distortion’s energetic frontman Mike Ness all pop up in FIN to show us around their self-made worlds, which revolve largely around the home garage. Over the years, the garage has served as an improvised studio for creative experimentation. Whether it’s building custom choppers, crafting punk rock albums, shaping boards, or screen-printing tees, many of America’s most revered art forms can be traced back to that carbon monoxide-infested space. And while the garage artisans featured in his film come from diverse disciplines, Stecyk sees a commonality in their roots.

“It’s fun to have to make spontaneous decisions that matter,” he says. “To a certain extent it’s motivational. Especially if you’ve got a steep learning curve [ahead of you] - it inspires you to innovate if there are real consequences involved. Which is one of the reasons why surfing or skateboarding or riding motorcycles or going fast in vehicles - responsibly - is so inspiring. Take the biggest hill in your town: you try to draw a good line on it and you get schooled real quick if you don’t have a good exit strategy. The bottom line is you can screw yourself up real bad, but it also teaches you to take care of other people, because you have a certain responsibility. You can choose to jump off a cliff, but make sure there’s nobody at the bottom because you might take somebody out through your lack of planning.”

“Trying to replicate the past would be folly. You’re doomed to live in the future, whether you like it or not.”

Suddenly Stecyk’s phone rings. He pulls it out, silences it, and then tucks it back into the pocket of his baggy blue jeans. I can’t help but wonder how he engages with technology, especially as Editor-At-Large of Juxtapoz, a leading art magazine championing self-taught talent.

Has technology shifted the rules of DIY, by changing how artists get their work out into the world?

“I think the best thing about living now is that the media’s completely controlled by the individual,” he says. “Any person with a phone can make a movie and you can edit it on a tabletop, and you can download it and link to it and several million people can see it in twenty-four hours time. This is the only time in history that’s been possible. It used to be the technologically elite who had access to it, but now everybody has an equal playing field. And we all profit because we can participate in these peoples’ endeavours. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, even twenty months ago, we wouldn’t have known that these guys even existed or were doing that.

“I like watching that sort of trickle-down effect of technology,” he adds, “seeing all the people who are able to make some sort of amazing post-media, post-network statement. [There are] a lot of unaligned people making great content right now, and that’s the artwork of the moment. It’s not about rethinking Renaissance painting, although that’s an aspect of it. And it’s not about making shiny, large bobbles to sit outside public buildings.”

And what about the future? In 2012, the prophetic year of the Mayan apocalypse, it feels apt to ask: is our obsession with technology destroying our capacity to make real-world stuff? More importantly, will tomorrow’s kids still turn old fruit boxes into something they can skate? “When the big power failure comes we’ll get to adapt and improvise,” Stecyk says cheerfully, as if he’s waiting for the day the lights go out. “That will probably be the peak of western civilisation. I think all the innovation that comes out of re-contextualising, reworking and reimagining [without resources we take for granted] will be the apex of whatever civilisation it is, whether it’s ‘western’ or otherwise.”

And with that Stecyk diligently shakes my hand, before hurriedly shuffling toward the theatre’s backroom. You get the distinct impression that he’s already thinking about what comes next. “Ideally you’re always evolving,” he says before he leaves. “If you’re lucky enough to be around talented people, they raise the bar constantly. That forces you to progress and go forward. Stewing in your own juices would be a particular kind of hell.”