List of Craters w/ map links.
July 30, 2010
Overgrown Craters
Having now looked at every certified crater on Earth, I can tell you a few things. One - most craters are in deserts (cause that's where it's easiest to find them) and two - most craters are pretty old and don't look like much. I wanted to find craters that match Earth's life aesthetic. Here is one, but ironically it was discovered only recently because it was revealed by deforestation.
List of Craters w/ map links.
List of Craters w/ map links.
July 28, 2010
July 26, 2010
Cat o' Nine Tail Records
You may have noticed that Dan Gibson screwed up recently. I certainly did! Well, thanks to my vigilance and because I tirelessly lobbied big corporate media, the CoIXT Records site is back up, and you can now download the Buttmops albums again. So stop pestering me.
HERE!
HERE!
July 25, 2010
July 24, 2010
FREE DVD OFFER!!!
A perceived need;
I am going to publish this "promo" in a few days - what do you think, invisible audience?
I'd better finish the DVD it's talking about!!!
MOTIVATED!
I am going to publish this "promo" in a few days - what do you think, invisible audience?
I'd better finish the DVD it's talking about!!!
MOTIVATED!
EEESTR ERRYWHR
EEESTR ERRYWHR is my brother's blog. It's basically just a bunch of interesting stuff that will make your time go pfft. But it's a good pfft.
Check it out!
Check it out!
WHICH DOOYOO LIKE??
For a couple of years I've been collecting images that are used to illustrate scientific concepts. I am not going to go into why I am fascinated with these images, or what the logic is behind my collection at this point. A mishmash of ideas is simmering on the backburner, not yet ready to taste.
However I would like to make this an ongoing series here - cooool pix...
^1^
^2^
^3^
^4^
^5^
^6^
As always, click 'em to make 'em BIG...
However I would like to make this an ongoing series here - cooool pix...
^1^
^2^
^3^
^4^
^5^
^6^
As always, click 'em to make 'em BIG...
Ancient Chinese Characters
I studied Japanese after college, and learning to read and write Kanji - Chinese characters - was a huge influence on how I think as an artist. I was always so curious about how these supposedly pictographic characters depicted the world - I was fascinated with the (rather mythical) idea that there is a systematized form of communication somewhere between the physical, nonlinear mode of art and the linear logic of language. I think a great part of my drawing is an attempt to reconstruct this myth into which I'd once dreamed myself.
There is so much misinformation out there about the origins and logic of Chinese characters, both as presented to those learning Japanese as a foreign language, and stories that Japanese teachers tell their students that are passively received and accepted as true by most people (this applies equally well to all East Asian cultures). In actuality, the history of the characters is hugely rich and fascinating. I don't have time to write that book today, but, oh man, that is a book I'd really like to write...
The main problem is that the history of this writing is always begins with the present characters and tries to trace their roots to the earliest appearance of the character. The earliest examples are always from the (admittedly fascinating) oracle bone script. There are two problems with this. First of all, there were many different ways of writing in early China, only some of which survived to evolve into modern writing. Secondly, there is a huge prehistory of neolithic symbolic and ceremonial imagery that is usually ignored.
Too bad indeed, because clearly the most exciting moment in the history of writing is when it is crossing the threshold from drawing to a system that refers to the spoken word.
Interesting, yes, but moreover BEAUTIFUL!
In my research I had to resort to pulling rather dusty old books to find out the truth.
Isn't it strange how in this "information age that there is still a scarcity of meaningful information when you are looking for it? I photocopied these pages during a whirlwind period of my life and have lost the reference, but I think it is this book. Of course this google book doesn't have the relevant pages, so I feel compelled to share a few of my favorite pages from all the art history I've ever read.
Click on an image to make it BIG...
Note that in some of the later writing in this series, which is oracle bone script, you can see that the ancient script is formally related to the modern characters printed next to them. If you can't see this immediately, take the time to figure out what I am referring to. The human mind has an incredible ability to compare differing forms, decide on a logic to structure the comparison, and categorize things together.
There is so much misinformation out there about the origins and logic of Chinese characters, both as presented to those learning Japanese as a foreign language, and stories that Japanese teachers tell their students that are passively received and accepted as true by most people (this applies equally well to all East Asian cultures). In actuality, the history of the characters is hugely rich and fascinating. I don't have time to write that book today, but, oh man, that is a book I'd really like to write...
The main problem is that the history of this writing is always begins with the present characters and tries to trace their roots to the earliest appearance of the character. The earliest examples are always from the (admittedly fascinating) oracle bone script. There are two problems with this. First of all, there were many different ways of writing in early China, only some of which survived to evolve into modern writing. Secondly, there is a huge prehistory of neolithic symbolic and ceremonial imagery that is usually ignored.
Too bad indeed, because clearly the most exciting moment in the history of writing is when it is crossing the threshold from drawing to a system that refers to the spoken word.
Interesting, yes, but moreover BEAUTIFUL!
In my research I had to resort to pulling rather dusty old books to find out the truth.
Isn't it strange how in this "information age that there is still a scarcity of meaningful information when you are looking for it? I photocopied these pages during a whirlwind period of my life and have lost the reference, but I think it is this book. Of course this google book doesn't have the relevant pages, so I feel compelled to share a few of my favorite pages from all the art history I've ever read.
Click on an image to make it BIG...
Note that in some of the later writing in this series, which is oracle bone script, you can see that the ancient script is formally related to the modern characters printed next to them. If you can't see this immediately, take the time to figure out what I am referring to. The human mind has an incredible ability to compare differing forms, decide on a logic to structure the comparison, and categorize things together.
The End of Greatness
At a certain scale - a rather large scale - everything looks the same. This is referred to as "The End of Greatness."
How big? Scientifically speaking, really really really big. From what I've read the best analogy for the way the universe appears at the very largest scale is somewhere between the appearance of the brain at the cellular level and the appearance of a bathtub full of soap bubbles, except the structure of these very large objects consists of many tiny tiny points, each one being a galaxy. Where the neuron cell body is, or where the soap bubbles get smaller and more dense, is analogous to a "supercluster," Between the forms are empty bubbles analogous to vast empty areas called "voids," the axons of the neurons reaching out in a network are analogous to "filaments" (like houses clustered along a road as seen from an airplane at night, to mix metaphors), and finally, sometimes the galaxies align in long, broad "walls" like the membrane between soap bubbles.
You can see these forms in the map above, which focuses on the Virgo Supercluster in the map of the observable universe at the top. The map at top shows approximately 10,000 times more space than the map above. Note that the map at top shows only the sphere of the universe that we can observe - many cosmologists believe that the universe is infinitely large. It also shows the universe as it would appear today if we could somehow zip about at an infinite speed to make the map. I think this is hugely problematic in that it contributes to our misunderstanding. More accurate and interesting (and I've never seen a map like this) would be to show the edges as they appear to us - closer to the edge, in the early in the universe, things were more homologous - galaxies just forming, the large scale structure not as defined. Even closer, the universe is too hot for matter to have formed at all - all is burningly hot plasma and radiation, then right at the edge of the map the universe becomes opaque to light as all matter changes phase. The period of inflation is on the other side of the edge of the map, and the big bang lies off the map and all around us in a perfectly unobservable sphere.
I suppose the End of Greatness interests me as an artist who is attracted to drawing and form. At a certain scale, the whole universe is just a kind of 3D salt and pepper, a bowl full of static. If you were looking at this scale (and you don't have a microscope - that's changing scale) every part would look the same as all the other parts - essentially featureless.
How big? Scientifically speaking, really really really big. From what I've read the best analogy for the way the universe appears at the very largest scale is somewhere between the appearance of the brain at the cellular level and the appearance of a bathtub full of soap bubbles, except the structure of these very large objects consists of many tiny tiny points, each one being a galaxy. Where the neuron cell body is, or where the soap bubbles get smaller and more dense, is analogous to a "supercluster," Between the forms are empty bubbles analogous to vast empty areas called "voids," the axons of the neurons reaching out in a network are analogous to "filaments" (like houses clustered along a road as seen from an airplane at night, to mix metaphors), and finally, sometimes the galaxies align in long, broad "walls" like the membrane between soap bubbles.
You can see these forms in the map above, which focuses on the Virgo Supercluster in the map of the observable universe at the top. The map at top shows approximately 10,000 times more space than the map above. Note that the map at top shows only the sphere of the universe that we can observe - many cosmologists believe that the universe is infinitely large. It also shows the universe as it would appear today if we could somehow zip about at an infinite speed to make the map. I think this is hugely problematic in that it contributes to our misunderstanding. More accurate and interesting (and I've never seen a map like this) would be to show the edges as they appear to us - closer to the edge, in the early in the universe, things were more homologous - galaxies just forming, the large scale structure not as defined. Even closer, the universe is too hot for matter to have formed at all - all is burningly hot plasma and radiation, then right at the edge of the map the universe becomes opaque to light as all matter changes phase. The period of inflation is on the other side of the edge of the map, and the big bang lies off the map and all around us in a perfectly unobservable sphere.
I suppose the End of Greatness interests me as an artist who is attracted to drawing and form. At a certain scale, the whole universe is just a kind of 3D salt and pepper, a bowl full of static. If you were looking at this scale (and you don't have a microscope - that's changing scale) every part would look the same as all the other parts - essentially featureless.
ROOM RECORD
After encountering an absence in the video compendium entry below, I decided to upload a very strange and obsessive video that I made at school in 2008 that has been ripening in a hard drive somewhere.
It's a lot easier to understand these things with headphones.
ONE/TWO:
TWO/TWO:
Here's what I wrote in the video description;
"An experiment in using the collective consciousness as expressed by the (mis)translation inherent in machine translation to predict what it will be like to be a sentient being of Earth origin in the future. It is my prediction that this project will make sense in 50 years.
I started with an original text in English in which I made my best attempt to "channel" my future self via a process akin to a shamanic vision quest. I then "tuned" this pauvre original by using google translate (circa 2007) to translate it back and forth from English to Greek, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. I iterated this process five times for each language to produce five highly devolved and dissimilar parallel texts.
I then used my judgment to edit together a video that incorporated all the elements that I did not understand, the elements that fit the least with my intentions, the elements that seemed the most overwhelming to my minds tiny demands for logic. I edited in this fashion because I figure that the massively parallel cybernetic mind of the future will communicate in a manner well-nigh indecipherable to our primitive animal minds.
Finally, I used a low-mixed vocoder tuned to a typical traditional Japanese scale to signal these different "voices."
It's a lot easier to understand these things with headphones.
ONE/TWO:
TWO/TWO:
Here's what I wrote in the video description;
"An experiment in using the collective consciousness as expressed by the (mis)translation inherent in machine translation to predict what it will be like to be a sentient being of Earth origin in the future. It is my prediction that this project will make sense in 50 years.
I started with an original text in English in which I made my best attempt to "channel" my future self via a process akin to a shamanic vision quest. I then "tuned" this pauvre original by using google translate (circa 2007) to translate it back and forth from English to Greek, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. I iterated this process five times for each language to produce five highly devolved and dissimilar parallel texts.
I then used my judgment to edit together a video that incorporated all the elements that I did not understand, the elements that fit the least with my intentions, the elements that seemed the most overwhelming to my minds tiny demands for logic. I edited in this fashion because I figure that the massively parallel cybernetic mind of the future will communicate in a manner well-nigh indecipherable to our primitive animal minds.
Finally, I used a low-mixed vocoder tuned to a typical traditional Japanese scale to signal these different "voices."
Redo - Note to self...
Actually, when I set off to write the previous post I'd intended to copy a note I'd written to myself about how to edit a video I've been working on. But staying on task is a loathsome business...
So without further ado (or contextualization);
-
HYPERBURGER
SLow down - more time to see serpent slither shapes
perspective suggests... UPSIDE DOWN yes
CIRCLE WITH X -
what if this were rotated 45 degrees so the cross shows up?
Rot BEFORE applying filters to concatenation?
WAVE WITH BALL - INVERT, But Keep Blue (Key blue IN), work with fade edges
note compression artefacts hold interest - saturation up, blacks
WAVX
ELIM SYMBOLIQ COMM
DENDRITIC - They should be more true to original, moving from L to R
In skinny proportion, with change each time, but repeating, maybe lines but certainly no labels
ZAPPPP - what if outside of zig-zag was orange to match the inside of the particles - the purple seems,,, arbitrary
NANOGR - what if the colory interferey shtuff only showed up when the nanoparticles are in a state of entropy (read disorganized)
THen the absence of the fairy dust may be related to the gear shape
PWAVE LINE
Is there any way I can tighten up the focus on those black graph lines?
FLASHES OF PEOPLE
WHat if the movement were to be reversed every other loop so the cycle
would appear to pass through the middle and reverse direction
Perhaps it could pause on the (!)hand,
flip over a central axis as though turning a page over, so it appears to originate on the second side
then the appearance of the hand becomes more overtly metaphorically resonant
CYCLEFACE
What if this were upside-down and a little bit slower? yes
END?
So without further ado (or contextualization);
-
HYPERBURGER
SLow down - more time to see serpent slither shapes
perspective suggests... UPSIDE DOWN yes
CIRCLE WITH X -
what if this were rotated 45 degrees so the cross shows up?
Rot BEFORE applying filters to concatenation?
WAVE WITH BALL - INVERT, But Keep Blue (Key blue IN), work with fade edges
note compression artefacts hold interest - saturation up, blacks
WAVX
ELIM SYMBOLIQ COMM
DENDRITIC - They should be more true to original, moving from L to R
In skinny proportion, with change each time, but repeating, maybe lines but certainly no labels
ZAPPPP - what if outside of zig-zag was orange to match the inside of the particles - the purple seems,,, arbitrary
NANOGR - what if the colory interferey shtuff only showed up when the nanoparticles are in a state of entropy (read disorganized)
THen the absence of the fairy dust may be related to the gear shape
PWAVE LINE
Is there any way I can tighten up the focus on those black graph lines?
FLASHES OF PEOPLE
WHat if the movement were to be reversed every other loop so the cycle
would appear to pass through the middle and reverse direction
Perhaps it could pause on the (!)hand,
flip over a central axis as though turning a page over, so it appears to originate on the second side
then the appearance of the hand becomes more overtly metaphorically resonant
CYCLEFACE
What if this were upside-down and a little bit slower? yes
END?
Note to self...
I love seeing the notes people write to themselves. Anything is interesting - grocery lists, notes from phone conversations, etc. But best of all are notes for creative projects. Strangely, diaries do not interest me - people seem so self-conscious when writing about themselves, and it ruins the kind of honesty and weird specificity that comes out when people need to communicate to themselves in the heat of the moment.
I have somewhere a huge number of text files that I downloaded from people's computers without them knowing. No - it was nobody that I know... This process was all very legal, but ethically not OK, in an I don't care kind of way - those foolish people left their private documents in their public "shared" folder when they were trying to download pirated mp3s, so they're suckers. Mostly I just searched for the words "Hello" or "Dear" or "letter."
Mostly this process was just exhausting and boring. 99% of the stuff I downloaded was just depressing generic lifeless rottenbrain bullshit - who are these androids that have infiltrated our society?
I read and recorded some of the ones that I really like:
(Note that the image in this video is just filler.)
There is something about reading other people's writing when you're not supposed to be doing so, but when it's inconsequential, irrelevant, everyday stuff. It's very different from learning a secret from someone - information that has meaning and value to you. It's more like reading a novel - the hyper-real resembles fiction.
Also, reading this made me feel like I was quickly jumping from inhabiting one replaceable hyper-real identity to another to another. A voice inside my voice imitating my voice, a spirit possession, an electronically stolen moment, an endless series of replaceable selves that make me feel replaceable myself, which is one of my favorite feelings.
I guess this is hard to convey with just the short sample above. I like LOOOOOOOOOOONG things. Things that are so long that you can walk in and out. It's all the same.
In my art practice I really haven't finished investigating this idea - part of all these projects where I ask people to interpret things for me is this process of sifting through piles of copy to uncover the secret stowaway gifts inside of the given gifts, the obscure pearls of the unconscious, the true spirit obscured by oodles of noodles.
I have somewhere a huge number of text files that I downloaded from people's computers without them knowing. No - it was nobody that I know... This process was all very legal, but ethically not OK, in an I don't care kind of way - those foolish people left their private documents in their public "shared" folder when they were trying to download pirated mp3s, so they're suckers. Mostly I just searched for the words "Hello" or "Dear" or "letter."
Mostly this process was just exhausting and boring. 99% of the stuff I downloaded was just depressing generic lifeless rottenbrain bullshit - who are these androids that have infiltrated our society?
I read and recorded some of the ones that I really like:
(Note that the image in this video is just filler.)
There is something about reading other people's writing when you're not supposed to be doing so, but when it's inconsequential, irrelevant, everyday stuff. It's very different from learning a secret from someone - information that has meaning and value to you. It's more like reading a novel - the hyper-real resembles fiction.
Also, reading this made me feel like I was quickly jumping from inhabiting one replaceable hyper-real identity to another to another. A voice inside my voice imitating my voice, a spirit possession, an electronically stolen moment, an endless series of replaceable selves that make me feel replaceable myself, which is one of my favorite feelings.
I guess this is hard to convey with just the short sample above. I like LOOOOOOOOOOONG things. Things that are so long that you can walk in and out. It's all the same.
In my art practice I really haven't finished investigating this idea - part of all these projects where I ask people to interpret things for me is this process of sifting through piles of copy to uncover the secret stowaway gifts inside of the given gifts, the obscure pearls of the unconscious, the true spirit obscured by oodles of noodles.
July 23, 2010
Video Compendium
I am currently "between websites" so this post represents the easiest place to find a bunch of videos I've done over the past few years. These videos are ones that are part of my art practice, not just videos of me dancing on a table...
I can't tell whether this is under or over-whelming. Sadly, this is only a "select few" of the various videos I've made. Sometimes I think the only advantage to being an artist is that you can say - there! - THAT's how I frittered away my time...
-
First in today's series is "Parsing the Panoptic Fugue, the Visuo-Cognitive Disambiguation of a Figurative Array Drawn Through a Loop." (I can't believe I still remember that whole title.) There's two more hours just like this...
Here's another formative project, made in China, where I asked people to describe what they saw. I think I started to realize something, cause I'm still way into that old trick...
The video is really compressed - here's the image they are talking about:
Then there was this next unfinished thing. Sigh...
Then I was learning to animate and set things to music. There's been a lot of music. This video was uploaded so early in the history of youtube, it's just a mess.
The "stars" in the background of this video are made of mold growing on the ceiling of the shower in my Mom and Dad's house:
The above video lead directly to the "Perceival" animated videos. See also:this website where actual comments may be read.
Here is the ever-popular one where Dina Danish and I try to dance each other's dances by only reading each others' choreography;
The following video I am still pretty involved with. It relates to some drawing work I've done about copying the copy, but this is a video post, so I'll not go into that. Can you tell how this was made?
I can't tell whether this is under or over-whelming. Sadly, this is only a "select few" of the various videos I've made. Sometimes I think the only advantage to being an artist is that you can say - there! - THAT's how I frittered away my time...
-
First in today's series is "Parsing the Panoptic Fugue, the Visuo-Cognitive Disambiguation of a Figurative Array Drawn Through a Loop." (I can't believe I still remember that whole title.) There's two more hours just like this...
Here's another formative project, made in China, where I asked people to describe what they saw. I think I started to realize something, cause I'm still way into that old trick...
The video is really compressed - here's the image they are talking about:
Then there was this next unfinished thing. Sigh...
Then I was learning to animate and set things to music. There's been a lot of music. This video was uploaded so early in the history of youtube, it's just a mess.
The "stars" in the background of this video are made of mold growing on the ceiling of the shower in my Mom and Dad's house:
The above video lead directly to the "Perceival" animated videos. See also:this website where actual comments may be read.
Here is the ever-popular one where Dina Danish and I try to dance each other's dances by only reading each others' choreography;
The following video I am still pretty involved with. It relates to some drawing work I've done about copying the copy, but this is a video post, so I'll not go into that. Can you tell how this was made?
Enter the studio...
Ha!
Once I had a blog and I was in the habit of writing pretty often. But now, for a couple of reasons, I'm finding it difficult to publish.
First of all, at this point in my life I'm less interested in sharing intimate details about my private goings-on and thoughts. Or maybe I have just come to understand that these details are not as interesting as I once believed them to be. Huh-ha, maybe I'm just a sold-out old fart.
Secondly, I'm moderately busy and I'm not 100% sure about my strategy of using a blog - one of the world's most mercilessly efficient time-wasters - to motivate myself to get more work done in the studio. What was I thinking?
In any case, I've been putting together a few posts to start me off and I was thinking about publishing them to get myself into the swing of things.
By the way, if you read all the way to the end of this article just to find a link to the full discography of my band, "The Buttmops" - well, forget about it. A very mean man named Danny is responsible for your chagrin.
Once I had a blog and I was in the habit of writing pretty often. But now, for a couple of reasons, I'm finding it difficult to publish.
First of all, at this point in my life I'm less interested in sharing intimate details about my private goings-on and thoughts. Or maybe I have just come to understand that these details are not as interesting as I once believed them to be. Huh-ha, maybe I'm just a sold-out old fart.
Secondly, I'm moderately busy and I'm not 100% sure about my strategy of using a blog - one of the world's most mercilessly efficient time-wasters - to motivate myself to get more work done in the studio. What was I thinking?
In any case, I've been putting together a few posts to start me off and I was thinking about publishing them to get myself into the swing of things.
By the way, if you read all the way to the end of this article just to find a link to the full discography of my band, "The Buttmops" - well, forget about it. A very mean man named Danny is responsible for your chagrin.
July 11, 2010
Imagine your way through this screen.
Hi there!
I've been busy cutting creeping trumpet vine off the peach tree, rendering a client's video on my laptop (occupying my computer's resources 100%), communicating with a family of raccoons, taking notes on house finches' fruit-eating preferences, and such, so it's been hard to write. Sorry about that, invisible audience.
My friend Lydia, whose link is to the right (your right, my left - I'm IN your computer), recommended me a movie that is really up my alley. I am including it as a link, not embedded, because it is really beautiful and worth some time waiting to watch the individual crystals fall.
Grizzly Bear Movie by Allison Schulnik
In my distracted wait time re this endless render I've been doing some drawing, and intend to find time soon to post. It's always a struggle though of course. But I was thinking about detail and why to draw instead of just doing something else or nothing and I wasn't really thinking that at all. Then I read an article about cryogenics and there was a line that stuck in me;
"Peggy asked Robin to read “The Brothers Karamazov,” and he asked her to read “The Lord of the Rings.” She hated it. “I asked him why he loved it, and he said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. This guy has invented this whole world.’ He asked me why I hated it, and I said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. There was nowhere for the reader to imagine her own interpretation.’"
Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about interpretation and the freedom of the viewer, and there's been a lot of concern about things being too full up. I didn't like "Lord of the Rings" that much either when I read it. I'm not a very passive viewer of art or of movies. I think respecting an author's ability to build a whole world is also to defer to his authority, to acknowledge that the world that you are experiencing belongs to someone else. Maybe in my most lethargically doe eyed moments I can become a true couch potato, 100% separate from the world, a witnessing non-being, but I think that this state of consciousness, though a great luxury, is corrosive and disempowering.
But simply underdefining is not enough. An unfinished sentence itself is inert; it is the act of filling in the blanks that becomes the content, the appreciation, the active sensing, the external world as always residing in the imagination.
Does this make sense? (All of my opinions are test pieces.)
I've been busy cutting creeping trumpet vine off the peach tree, rendering a client's video on my laptop (occupying my computer's resources 100%), communicating with a family of raccoons, taking notes on house finches' fruit-eating preferences, and such, so it's been hard to write. Sorry about that, invisible audience.
My friend Lydia, whose link is to the right (your right, my left - I'm IN your computer), recommended me a movie that is really up my alley. I am including it as a link, not embedded, because it is really beautiful and worth some time waiting to watch the individual crystals fall.
Grizzly Bear Movie by Allison Schulnik
In my distracted wait time re this endless render I've been doing some drawing, and intend to find time soon to post. It's always a struggle though of course. But I was thinking about detail and why to draw instead of just doing something else or nothing and I wasn't really thinking that at all. Then I read an article about cryogenics and there was a line that stuck in me;
"Peggy asked Robin to read “The Brothers Karamazov,” and he asked her to read “The Lord of the Rings.” She hated it. “I asked him why he loved it, and he said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. This guy has invented this whole world.’ He asked me why I hated it, and I said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. There was nowhere for the reader to imagine her own interpretation.’"
Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about interpretation and the freedom of the viewer, and there's been a lot of concern about things being too full up. I didn't like "Lord of the Rings" that much either when I read it. I'm not a very passive viewer of art or of movies. I think respecting an author's ability to build a whole world is also to defer to his authority, to acknowledge that the world that you are experiencing belongs to someone else. Maybe in my most lethargically doe eyed moments I can become a true couch potato, 100% separate from the world, a witnessing non-being, but I think that this state of consciousness, though a great luxury, is corrosive and disempowering.
But simply underdefining is not enough. An unfinished sentence itself is inert; it is the act of filling in the blanks that becomes the content, the appreciation, the active sensing, the external world as always residing in the imagination.
Does this make sense? (All of my opinions are test pieces.)
July 7, 2010
Alan Watts
"Nature is wiggly - everything wiggles!" - A.W.
How's that for an intro to Drawing 101?
I am reading "Psychotherapy East and West" by Alan Watts. Masked as a straightforward investigation into the parallels between Psychotherapy and Zen Buddhism, it is a very personal and free ranging meditation on the self, empiricism, and the limits of knowledge, with some beautiful writing at times.
For the past year or so I have been working on a project in which I am using images appropriated from the sciences, mostly animations, to question how it is we know things and how we share what we know. Er... big topic, I know.
I have been using the experience of reading this book to help myself understand the reasons I am interested in this subject before I move on to THE NEXT STAGE, as will be reported in a forthcoming post. I mean, other than the fact that the images LOOK COOL, which is probably most important...
"Natural science is concerned only with the observer's experience of things. Never with the way things experience us."
R.D. Laing, "The Politics of Experience" p.9
"Truths of the physical order may possess much external significance, but internal significance they have none."
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Human Nature" p.1
"The more we understand of particular things, the more we understand of God" - Baruch Spinoza, "Ethics" Part 5, Prop. 24
I don't intend to go too deeply into the subject right now; the reason I chose to be an artist instead of a writer is that I prefer to allow images to do the communicating for me - they don't force me to put everything in a line. Whenever I get to the end of a sentence I always want to go in a dozen different directions, but I have to chose just one. What a frustration language can be! In some ways writing this blog represents an effort to participate in this game, to use language more precisely, but I don't intend to fully submit to the restrictions of linguistic form!
"We understand everything in terms of words or numbers, and they're stretched out in rows and lines. And our eyes have to scan those lines in order to understand them. But when I scan this view I don't do it line by line by line. I see the whole thing at once.... We have lamentably one-tracked minds in an infinitely tracked universe." -A.W.
In any case - I would have liked to meet Alan Watts, but this video is kind of the next best thing.
How's that for an intro to Drawing 101?
I am reading "Psychotherapy East and West" by Alan Watts. Masked as a straightforward investigation into the parallels between Psychotherapy and Zen Buddhism, it is a very personal and free ranging meditation on the self, empiricism, and the limits of knowledge, with some beautiful writing at times.
For the past year or so I have been working on a project in which I am using images appropriated from the sciences, mostly animations, to question how it is we know things and how we share what we know. Er... big topic, I know.
I have been using the experience of reading this book to help myself understand the reasons I am interested in this subject before I move on to THE NEXT STAGE, as will be reported in a forthcoming post. I mean, other than the fact that the images LOOK COOL, which is probably most important...
"Natural science is concerned only with the observer's experience of things. Never with the way things experience us."
R.D. Laing, "The Politics of Experience" p.9
"Truths of the physical order may possess much external significance, but internal significance they have none."
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Human Nature" p.1
"The more we understand of particular things, the more we understand of God" - Baruch Spinoza, "Ethics" Part 5, Prop. 24
I don't intend to go too deeply into the subject right now; the reason I chose to be an artist instead of a writer is that I prefer to allow images to do the communicating for me - they don't force me to put everything in a line. Whenever I get to the end of a sentence I always want to go in a dozen different directions, but I have to chose just one. What a frustration language can be! In some ways writing this blog represents an effort to participate in this game, to use language more precisely, but I don't intend to fully submit to the restrictions of linguistic form!
"We understand everything in terms of words or numbers, and they're stretched out in rows and lines. And our eyes have to scan those lines in order to understand them. But when I scan this view I don't do it line by line by line. I see the whole thing at once.... We have lamentably one-tracked minds in an infinitely tracked universe." -A.W.
In any case - I would have liked to meet Alan Watts, but this video is kind of the next best thing.
July 4, 2010
Proposal
Today I turned in a proposal for a piece to be shown this Fall as part of a project called "Individual Cities Audio Tours" a.k.a. "Heliography." More information on the project can be found here.
With the exception of when I create improvised drawings, I tend to create elaborate and fully formed project ideas in my head. Sometimes I realize the projects as envisioned, sometimes they change bigtime.
I am posting my proposal now so that later I can report on the process of change. This may be a foolish thing to do. What do you think?
My proposal is inspired by the peculiar disconnection from social space that is the product of MacArthur BART Station's function as a transfer point. Everyday thousands of people pass through this spatial location but are severely limited in their experience of the local environment. Their rigidly scheduled movements have no connection to local time. The culture of the act of transfer is one in which experience is disposable and the people one interacts with are interchangeable. In some ways this represents a bleak scene of post-industrial alienation, yet the anonymity of public transportation is liberating; there is freedom to experiment with the performance of one's self in these peculiar "neither here nor there" spaces.
This dissociative location and ambiguous social space have parallels in Dan Sanders' story about the MacArthur BART Station. The readers are told of of an architect's attempts to convince the City of Oakland to build an enormously overambitious building on the site. The way in which the story does not divulge whether it is fictional or historical fact is compounded by the main character's refusal to acknowledge the need for truth about whether or not the building has been realized. This character has the potential to defuse the issues embodied by another stymied architect, Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead," often cited by those who place individuality over all other moral values. This inspires me to create a monument to the grace and humility which are the under-recognized opportunities inherent in the process of depersonalization.
For my contribution to the artist's tour I propose creating a process piece that will result in documentation in the form of objects and a video. For one day, from the time the BART opens until it closes, I will remain in the BART system, transferring as many times as I can through the MacArthur Station, walking West to East so as to capture the unique skyline of the mountains over Oakland. I will film the process of walking from the moment the doors open on one train car, until I arrive at the far wall of the other train car. While walking I will attempt to film the mountains and the people around me with the shutter speed set to low so as to emphasize the blur between separate sources of light.
I will also gather from the area immediately outside the BART Station small, humble, discarded objects (limited to non-reactive solids). These I will film in such a way as to appreciate the detail of their unique form.
The two scenes will be edited together so the footage of each transfer experience is followed by the footage of a discarded object. This video is intended to be displayed at the gallery during the period of the exhibition. Sound is not an essential element of this video, although I may include the ambient sounds recorded while transferring.
Furthermore, I will create "souvenir" objects consisting of a stencil of the Oakland skyline in black on white, a still image of a person from the footage of the transfer experience, and one of the discarded objects. Please see the attached image "macarthur proposal.jpg."
I am open to refining this idea with the input of others involved in the Invisible Cities Audio Tour, and reserve the right to make changes based on discoveries made during the process of creation.
With the exception of when I create improvised drawings, I tend to create elaborate and fully formed project ideas in my head. Sometimes I realize the projects as envisioned, sometimes they change bigtime.
I am posting my proposal now so that later I can report on the process of change. This may be a foolish thing to do. What do you think?
My proposal is inspired by the peculiar disconnection from social space that is the product of MacArthur BART Station's function as a transfer point. Everyday thousands of people pass through this spatial location but are severely limited in their experience of the local environment. Their rigidly scheduled movements have no connection to local time. The culture of the act of transfer is one in which experience is disposable and the people one interacts with are interchangeable. In some ways this represents a bleak scene of post-industrial alienation, yet the anonymity of public transportation is liberating; there is freedom to experiment with the performance of one's self in these peculiar "neither here nor there" spaces.
This dissociative location and ambiguous social space have parallels in Dan Sanders' story about the MacArthur BART Station. The readers are told of of an architect's attempts to convince the City of Oakland to build an enormously overambitious building on the site. The way in which the story does not divulge whether it is fictional or historical fact is compounded by the main character's refusal to acknowledge the need for truth about whether or not the building has been realized. This character has the potential to defuse the issues embodied by another stymied architect, Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead," often cited by those who place individuality over all other moral values. This inspires me to create a monument to the grace and humility which are the under-recognized opportunities inherent in the process of depersonalization.
For my contribution to the artist's tour I propose creating a process piece that will result in documentation in the form of objects and a video. For one day, from the time the BART opens until it closes, I will remain in the BART system, transferring as many times as I can through the MacArthur Station, walking West to East so as to capture the unique skyline of the mountains over Oakland. I will film the process of walking from the moment the doors open on one train car, until I arrive at the far wall of the other train car. While walking I will attempt to film the mountains and the people around me with the shutter speed set to low so as to emphasize the blur between separate sources of light.
I will also gather from the area immediately outside the BART Station small, humble, discarded objects (limited to non-reactive solids). These I will film in such a way as to appreciate the detail of their unique form.
The two scenes will be edited together so the footage of each transfer experience is followed by the footage of a discarded object. This video is intended to be displayed at the gallery during the period of the exhibition. Sound is not an essential element of this video, although I may include the ambient sounds recorded while transferring.
Furthermore, I will create "souvenir" objects consisting of a stencil of the Oakland skyline in black on white, a still image of a person from the footage of the transfer experience, and one of the discarded objects. Please see the attached image "macarthur proposal.jpg."
I am open to refining this idea with the input of others involved in the Invisible Cities Audio Tour, and reserve the right to make changes based on discoveries made during the process of creation.
Modern Gwazda
Hello people of Earth!
Let's pretend you already know me.
Many moons ago I kept a blog called SYNESTHETIC SUPERSCAM. It was a lot of fun, but now I want to start blogging again. Reading some of those old posts, I realize that I can't just pick up where I left off; I want to do things differently now. THAT Blog was very inner-directed, in an "In my room" kind of way.
THIS Blog is about my engagement with the community through my art practice. I am writing this as a way to make the time I spend working on art in the studio (or on public transportation, or in bed, or in the shower) more about engagement with the world. I want to SHARE what I am working on, looking at, reading and thinking about with a community that is located somewhere outside my own brain pan.
I don't know yet exactly what the aesthetics of this blog are going to be, or exactly how I'm going to write. Beginning this endeavor represents a promise to myself to focus on realizing some of the projects that I have been working on, to spend a little bit more time working in the studio, to be more engaged with the community, and to support my friends and peers.
I'm also going to try to keep things a little more succinct.
Good bye people of Earth!
Let's pretend you already know me.
Many moons ago I kept a blog called SYNESTHETIC SUPERSCAM. It was a lot of fun, but now I want to start blogging again. Reading some of those old posts, I realize that I can't just pick up where I left off; I want to do things differently now. THAT Blog was very inner-directed, in an "In my room" kind of way.
THIS Blog is about my engagement with the community through my art practice. I am writing this as a way to make the time I spend working on art in the studio (or on public transportation, or in bed, or in the shower) more about engagement with the world. I want to SHARE what I am working on, looking at, reading and thinking about with a community that is located somewhere outside my own brain pan.
I don't know yet exactly what the aesthetics of this blog are going to be, or exactly how I'm going to write. Beginning this endeavor represents a promise to myself to focus on realizing some of the projects that I have been working on, to spend a little bit more time working in the studio, to be more engaged with the community, and to support my friends and peers.
I'm also going to try to keep things a little more succinct.
Good bye people of Earth!
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