synesthetic superscam

YOU ARE TOTALLY LOST!

2011-05-16T11:37:00.002-05:00

This is the O.L.D. (ancient) blog of artist Farley Gwazda, whose real website is here:

www.farleygwazda.net

There are lots of videos and drawings there, and it is wa-a-a-ay cool. Soooo...

GO AWAY!

:)

PS - I'd appreciate if anyone linking to me could change the links to www.farleygwazda.net! THANK YOU!!!!

old shoe

2010-04-23T02:55:00.003-05:00

If I started blogging again?

I haven't blogged in somethinglike wayyy more than a year, and I'm much a more boringer now, so it'ddd probly be mass boringer. Plus I got a job to phoot. Uggawugga!

Monetize? WTF is thaat? Things have changed here in the guts of my blob.

Anyway, I feel like if I blogged then I wouldn't have to spend time on facebook, the blog and mind destroyer. If I were wise I would realize the folly of countering one time waster with another more insidious time waster. But I am not wise!

I am thinking about starting an arts organization - can't say much for certain right now - it's all very hush. But I guess I would start a more officially ficial blog about that, but that'd be not as much fun as this blog cause of having to be respectable and all. So maybe I should keep this as my juice tidbits blog, and start a new blog for the face of me.

Tiddy juicebits.

Haha - I noticed that people keep on a commenting on old posts, even though it's quite apparent that I've been hit by a bus. I WAS HIT BY A BUS CYBER STRANGERS I WAS HITTT BYT A BUSSS!

I was hit by a bus.

So tell me - I have no mind.

Digital Faux Attention

2008-08-14T16:01:00.002-05:00

Those of you who have seen the work I made this winter may see why this video appeals to me. I'm disinterested in digital animation that attempts to create accurate representations of the human face, but I think there is some terrifying idea buried in this video, an idea about what it means to be human.

Black Cloud

2008-08-09T16:04:00.002-05:00

Hey - I discovered this video.

Wow it really seems to relate somehow to what I've been doing this summer; I highly recommend checking it out and reposting it.

Haha. Seriously.

They brought rope.

2008-07-26T03:19:00.003-05:00

Third graders rise up!

It's because only the youth, being yet wild, are aware that we grown-up monkeys have fucked things up bigtime.

Does it surprise you? Remember how mean they were? Remember your threatening songs? Remember how they did not respect you? Made you cry? Are you that tame? Whatever happened to your wild spirit? There is no reason that there needs to be so much pain in training, pain in living in one of the endless system of flimsy boxes.

Should we make the choice to create a false idol that speaks to us in a voice we can understand?

It's all set in the future, so the fantasy doesn't have to get snuffed yet. Stories burn easy when they are created in an empty space. Energy cycles.

Does it surprise you?

Deep

2008-07-25T21:57:00.001-05:00

Love this;

More internet TV

2008-07-25T18:57:00.005-05:00

Huzzah BBC! The Brits offer us sad Norte Americanos a different perspective on postmodern times. USA public TV doesn't even come close to asking these kinds of challenging (and slightly histrionic) questions.

I have so much to say about the subjects about these bits that I don't even really want to say anything. It's been hard for me to find what kind of voice I want to speak in through my art, and, as I am hyperbusy, I've decided to keep it a bit bottled-up. Oh - I'm only throwing the first of these series in - they are both longish.

I like this documentary. It reinforces some romantic myths that make it easier for me to deal with things.

And this one is nicely dramatic, but I think for a good reason.

Information specificity quandary

2008-07-25T18:06:00.004-05:00

This is my favorite English sentence, and it contains five a's, one b, three c's, three d's, thirty-one e's, six f's, two g's, seven h's, sixteen i's, one j, one k, two l's, two m's, twenty-four n's, seventeen o's, one p, one q, nine r's, thirty-four s's, twenty-two t's, four u's, six v's, seven w's, six x's, six y's, and one z.

You have to think for a second to realize that this sentence is more specific than most.

I found this on Vleeptron_Z, a blog I've been reading lately.

I'm sorry for not writing more. There are reasons, Detra, but I'll not go into them.

All the phonemes

2008-06-17T18:31:00.005-05:00

In the past year I have spent a LOT of time cutting up pre-recorded text to make new words for projects such as "Chaliff Lifestory" and "Room-Record" and going back to obscure video projects I did years ago.

Because I will have to do this kind of activity again to create "Anomalies" (audio clues for the B L A C K C L O U D project), I was thinking about how I could record all the phonemes in English in one fell swoop.

Phonemes are the basic SOUNDS of the language. This is different from the letters of the alphabet (everyone knows about the quick brown fox).

I started looking for a sentence (or paragraph) that used all the phonemes from English. I've seen it called a "panphonic" sentence. I found a lot of false leads, but here is the only true attempt I've been able to locate.

The pleasure of Shawn’s company
Is what I most enjoy.
He put a tack on Ms. Yancey’s chair
When she called him a horrible boy.
At the end of the month he was flinging two kittens
Across the width of the room.
I count on his schemes to show me a way now
Of getting away from my gloom.

Wonderful Maxwell's Silver Hammer feeling!

Thanks to Literal-Minded, a neat-looking linguistics blog. Check it out to read the interesting backstory on this... Involves Philip K. Dick, yo!

Of course, I've read in Linguistics books and learned from experience editing that consonants can't be separated from the vowels that follow them, and there are lots of other issues such as guttural stops, gliding vowels, etc. S o this sentence would have to be rapidly expanded to account for all these things. However, Literal-Minded gets mad points (and a reader) for acknowledging this in an intelligent way. There is no conclusion on these things, but I'm happy someone else is thinking about them...

I wonder if a true panphonic sentence has been developed by companies that develop automated voices for phonebots? Perhaps they have an approach that is a tad more practical and less fun but, whatever, I want to be able to use it myself!

Tis a bummer these things are proprietary. I wish this information was out there - it would allow me to be more productive and entertain(ing/ed).

Jam Cast

2008-06-10T19:04:00.006-05:00

Did my spit not grow up to be watermelon?

I'm digging failure now, but it's not now. I'm terribly tired of imagining without a router. A whirling one, a whirling one.

I'm alright but I want to listen to music so bad. I wonder what kind of timeline we're on?

Gimmicks and Stunts.

I know there is a way! Shredding it and throwing it up in the air? Cutting the edges off sloppily? Maybe I can drag it around a crazy screen free from the desktop leaving eternal blink echoes all round?

The universe has a shape you know. A funnel on top of a tree on top of a globe with water shooting yellow snaking hungry sunshine wavelet meshwork patterns all over the background. But that's not it, not it. Need a new one, image it and it's untrue. Maybe we imagine a donut and we're in it. This part is my kingdom, that red sprinkle behind the yellow one? That's my castle. No no, sadly no.

I hear music, but it's oh so far away and like a mechanical bellows. Not something you can hold onto at all at all.

I've been thinking production, but really the fascination in in translucency. Or nudity. Or hungry metal-mouthed monsters.

The big bang is one thing in a Y. There are countless other things that fit that fuzzy set. An infinity wouldn't never fit on your harddrive.

The brain is not digital, nor can it be simplified and simulated as digital. The first mechanical mind will be made by Moog or Korg; it's a damn fine day for a race. There are such things as clouds and impossible paradoxes, there are still unknown forces at work.

How do you reach out? How do you leave a record? If you take the path of forgetting to remember that there are hard things out there, then you can really manipulate the system with your fantasies, but it is immoral. If the universe was shaped destructively you would be barren, but shapeless you'd bloom. But what's the freakin' point of flowers in a dark loop, right?

Oh - so maybe if I use words and mechanically substitute the wrong ones and keep it secret from myself. Never tell me. Then would I be morally culpable? What if the mechanics were in my brain, in between my thought and action? Is there a border there or is it two tribes with strong centers? Or no centers? These things aren't written on paper!

Hollowness reminds us of secrets by metaphor.

Metaphors are difficult to reverse-engineer in detailed contemplation - our current "up down warm cold in out" simplifications don't count as productive chases - only rigid terrible thought.

The new academic does not allow themselves to be tortured by rigid edges, but instead sinks into the ocean of all the possible attention fields. "In and out" is a basic yeah, but you need go through the tree by the branches, not the roots.

Sort by likes, isolate, modify, multiply. Remember to leave the edges fuzzy.

What does it mean to be lazy? Sympathy for rocks and sticks is one definition - letting loose - so deeply sucked into the tiny stark details of the real that the center gets fuzzy. The opposite of this state is not fuzzy but pixelly, a staged shot from a step back and a heart attack. This is what is called strength of self, purpose, hard-edged abstraction. Where does the cruelty emerge? Where is it torn away?

Cloudy cloud, how do you live in the air? I can see invisible dangers with my prototype omniscient eye - they are pixelly. If I had my way I'd eat candy all day, but I don't have time for you Cloudy, go away. I'm trying to be a modern person, go away.

Baby Blue!

2008-06-07T14:57:00.002-05:00

This is AWESOME! I thought that H-dogg, U would especially dig this.

I guess I had this idea that his voice was just naturally high - like he was some thin-lunged freak of nature. I was going to say that I was disappointed, but seeing his studio - whoa!

Jammies 01

2008-06-06T16:09:00.002-05:00

Talks too much...

blackcloud.org

Black Cloud

2008-06-03T14:06:00.003-05:00

Hello people!

I have finished the bear's share of my work for the semester and I plan to be posting here more often!

I am very excited to share something truly extraordinary with you!

We live in a culture that is completely saturated with "believe" media that is designed by the state to make your mind soft and easy to manipulate (I'm talking about all those shows that claim that "investigate" aliens, ghosts, and psy powers). Because of this, it is difficult to talk about truly mind-bending yet scientifically-verifiable phenomena. One risks looking like a yutz...

In the Bay Area over the past several months or so, several witnesses have reported seeing something in the sky that they could not explain. Recently the number of sightings has increased dramatically! Apparently the atmospheric phenomenon looks like a dark cloud of smoke, which in itself is not unusual, but this smoke seems to move with a sense of purpose from place to place, not drift along with the wind... Now, this isn't "X-files"- I don't want to say that I have any idea what is going on here, but neither can I discount the stories shared by so many - all the details that have emerged have been eerily consistent...

To this end, I have been working with the Berkeley BID lab, who are designing sensor-boxes to track this phenomena, which the popular media has dubbed the "Black Cloud." I want to tell you all about it, but there are SO MANY details that I think you should just head over to www.blackcloud.org and read for yourselves! Honestly, this is worth your time!

As for my involvement, I should probably be discrete about it, and so should you.

Sooner!

UC Berkeley 2008 MFA exhibition

2008-05-17T14:35:00.002-05:00

The UC Berkeley 2008 MFA exhibition "These Canyons" opened last night at Berkeley Art Museum. Now, as I have spent almost a year in very close quarters with this amazing group of seven artists, learning from them, growing with them, and going to karaoke with them I can hardly be called an unbiased critic, but I judge this to be a show that is overwhelmingly beautiful while challenging viewer's expectations with a broad range of ideas about what art can do.

I will not go into detail here, but I urge you to visit the museum website devoted to this show to see images and short descriptions of these artists' work;

These Canyons at Berkeley Art Museum

My experience last night was one of physical exhaustion as I'd spent the afternoon sitting through a graduation ceremony in the burning sun of the heat wave we've been experiencing for the last couple of days and wandering through an endless stream of openings and receptions fueled by a diet of gooey leftover brie rinds and celery sticks (serves me right for always being late...). However, I did take great pleasure in seeing many of the friends and artists I have met over the past year and talking crazy at them. But the most interesting part of the night was looking at how people interacted with the art. I am very familiar with all of this work, being that one of the most unique and positive attributes of the Berkeley program is that we have three hour critique sessions with all of our twelve fellow MFA candidates once a semester and we really dig down to the foundations of what each artist is trying to do with their work. Having spent so much time looking and looking at each piece, it is fascinating to see the casual viewer walk through the show absorbing the work; I wonder about their experience, what they are absorbing, what relationship they have to the work, what they judge the value of the art to be. I love to observe how people's eyes scan over the work, their posture, their facial expressions, the time they spend. Some bright smiles, some priceless disgusted grimaces!

One issue that I had with the museum, trivial though it may be, was that while two artists in the show create very sensitive and convincing art that is very much about creating a more respectful relationship between humans and animals, the caterers chose to serve a slaughterfest meat feast with nothing available for vegans except celery and the like. Too bad they could not have been more in tune with the ideas in the show because it exactly this kind of dissonance that creates the impression that art only relates to a world of artists, cut off from everyday life. This reinforces my recent leanings towards creating art that operates mainly outside of the museum context, this not being part of the school of museum-critique art (although I certainly respect this), but rather a kind of practical concern to increase efficiency. That said, I am very excited that one of my classmates will be opening a small experimental museum here in Richmond and I plan to write more about this later.

In any case - I hope you follow the link above and take a look at the work of my amigos.

-f

My studio

2008-05-14T19:23:00.001-05:00

This is where I'm at most of the time.

dynamic diagram of mental spaces

2008-05-14T18:24:00.006-05:00

As "promised," now that the semester has ended I am resuming my presence here on synthetic stupidspam.

I plan to present some of the things I've been doing this semester in reverse order so that it will be in the right order afters. I'm a bit out of practice here, and my time is still mechakucha-limited, so keep the heat up huh? Wanna reach rant speed 2-D sweet. I'm considering more vlogging, but I will need support. Who's gonna do it with me? Bros? Peeps?

As for today's content, I am presenting a video I made for my cognitive linguistics course with Eve Sweetser - it's a diagram of mental spaces, which are a feature of the new grammar being developed here at Berkeley. I will explain more if anyone says "hey," but it's hard to condense. In any case, there is an explanation at the end of this vid. For more, try starting with "The Metaphors We Live By" by the big guy here, George Lackoff.

One major problem is that you can't read the text on this video cause of YouTube is Les Suquesvilles.

N E way, play at your own risk;

link to youtube page

This is officially the hump here. Content to follow will be related more to my art practice, and will be mas radical.

Re!

-f

(click image to enlarge for full-quality)

Final review - tomorrow

2008-05-08T16:01:00.000-05:00

after which I will stop not existing.

ALIVE!

2008-05-04T19:38:00.004-05:00

I was actually lost in time.

Thank you for your demanding support!

School will be ending in a bit and then I'll start bloggin again.

Now I am not sharing art, though I have some to share. This image is only a screen-capture of the linguistics project I've been working on.

I'll be posting that on YouTube sometime.

-f

From a great...

2008-02-14T12:14:00.001-05:00

An interesting article from the great Oliver Sacks:

nytimes article

You may have to register to read...

vocoder

2008-02-03T16:17:00.001-05:00

The vocoding itself was not hard. The hard part is trying to make the art GOOD. Sometimes one forgets about that...

PS-

KOYAANISQATSI!!!!

sudden jump

2008-01-31T22:32:00.001-05:00

Sorry sports fans, I got really busy. I've got a show at the end of February and a cult classic session before that, so frequency here may decline.

Or, as the law of inverted priority structures (aka procrastination) stipulates, I may write here INSTEAD of doing any work. Oh well.

I've been working with a vocoder. No satisfactory results yet.

Teledating project

2008-01-26T14:29:00.001-05:00

An artist friend of mine is doing a project that I am very interested in. The concept is very simple; to arrange a dinner on St. Valentine's Day where romantic partners will be eating in separate locations, but connected via video conferencing. The following video is a rough demo of what the event will be. When I was watching the video I noticed some very interesting things about how the partners were pretending to be in the same space. My rational mind instantly started to object, but I was still able to believe in the fiction. There is always a lot of suspension of disbelief when chatting on-line, and it is more noticeable when you can see the other person, but the setting of the dinner table seems to focus this project explicitly on the subject of manners. What are virtual manners? To what extent is social reality an agreed-upon fantasy that makes us blind to unsavory aspects of physical reality? To what extent does being polite alienate us from our animal nature, from our sexuality, from our presence in the moment, in the real world?

Your tax dollars at work.

2008-01-26T13:57:00.000-05:00

You know the word "Qwerty," right? It's really fun to spell!

Well, Qwerty, of course, is an abbreviation of the phrase "Qwertyuiop Asdfghjkl Zxcvbnm." This phrase gets 1,690 google hits as opposed to the much less refined "Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm" which get 30,100 hits.

Well, I was hanging out in an office and I couldn't escape. I learned to pronounce the phrase and then I chanted it several hundred times and I think I've memorized it.

Synesthetic Superscam is here for YOU!

La Chinoise - Goddard

2008-01-24T02:55:00.000-05:00

TODAY'S REVOLUTIONARY CLASS AS A WAVE.

TODAY'S REVOLUTIONARY ACTION AS PLAY.

("We must confront vague ideas with clear images.")

Jean Luc Goddard's 1967 "La Chinoise" is about a group of french communist students who are living in an abandoned apartment, the living room of which they have converted into a kind of temple to Mao, the revolutionary ideal, and violence. The film's narrative is less important than its style; collaged fragments of bold, uncompromising text, Chinese propaganda posters, Andy Worhol influenced pop images of famous figures, primary colors filling monolithically flat planes, and violent modern commodities (this style resembles Guy Debord and the situationists which later influenced Malcom McLaren and the Sex Pistols). (Great list of slogans from May 1968 from wikipedia.)

The content of the following may be a little hard to follow, though take heart; I think it would be for anyone who is not a scholar of Post-Leninist European Communism, Maoism, or the French student uprising of May 1968. However, take a look at this to understand the film's visual style;

Hello? Transformer gun/radio anyone?

The film takes an ambiguous critical look at the students; they are at once portrayed as very serious communists who are intellectually curious, have mastered the literature, are attempting to practice their theory, and are willing to make sacrifices for their cause. But on the other hand they are not workers, they are young students who talk about their summer job of picking peaches as though it were just a lark. They are portrayed as spoiled, overly interested in fashion and appearances, careless with the lives of themselves and others, and ideologically both uncompromisingly rigid and overly willing to avoid nuance in favor of a romanticised simplicity.

As the summer passes, the students' cell fractures and dissolves over ideological issues. In fact, what initially divides them is that one of their own criticises their ideology when he sees it becoming too romantic and unrealistic, too dreamy and extreme. This character is thrown out, his former comrades chanting "revisionist" and booing him inhumanly, as though he were a public speaker (although they are all inside a nice private living room), refusing to engage him in dialogue. As the romantic engagement with the idealised perfection of the revolutionary spirit increases, one of the characters, in pitiful emulation of the tragic tortured artist myth, commits suicide after painting expressionistic rainbows all over the walls of the living room. Does the artistic frame of mind somehow corrode revolutionary political ideology? And if so, is this a bad thing?

In the end, the group breaks up when the owners of the apartment return and school starts up again. In a key dialogue a professor convinces the leading woman not to throw a bomb in a class to close the university (it's a singularly unamerican scene; it takes place on a train and the student loudly declares that she is a terrorist, but without any of those helpful "if you see something, say something" signs around nobody seems to notice). However, this is not before she shoots two people, a Russian communist bigwig (seen as a corrupt traitor to the true spirit of communism) and an innocent bystander. There is a bit of ambiguity here; the violence and its effects are not shown, and the students seem to have avoided any consequences for their actions. However, despite the fact that the students were just playing around their summer of ideological extremism has had very real effects.

This is where I draw a tenuous connection:

Certainly all this violent revolutionary fervor and dedication to intellectual exploration of communist theory is the furthest thing from the minds of young americans in my generation. There is no class consciousness among american workers and certainly no connection between students and workers. Throughout history young people have invariably been called egocentric and hedonistic, but this is a generation that, while interested in politics, has clearly chosen not to make any personal sacrifices to protest the war, human rights abuses, political authoritarianism of the current administration, the ever deepening alienation of modern life, or the destruction of the environment.

I was once speaking with an old-school die-hard communist who insisted that there was no such thing as class in america. Her point was that equality of opportunity and social mobility made it possible for the individual to transcend class. My argument was that the existence of a social class is not contingent upon the members remaining in that class, as a wave consists of a pattern of energy with which individual molecules are associated only for a short time.

The "student class" was not important to Marx in his day, but is clearly an example of a class that is temporary for its members, yet still a constant sociopolitical force. Not that it is much of a force these days. So my question is, is there any potential for the current student class to be a force for social change, revolutionary or otherwise?

My answer has a lot to do with the behavior seen in "La Chinoise." The students are only playing, but their actions have real effects. In some ways, the insularity of the group brings to mind the oft-repeated observation that the internet has a propensity to create "echo-chamber" communities; forums where like-minded people compete to agree with each other. Indeed, the Maoist students' love of pop music and fashionable clothing, urge to romanticise their own lives, and state of moneyed unemployment all resemble the lifestyle that is propagated by my generation's primary environment; the internet, particularly online social networks. Most importantly to the internet analogy, the student commits a violent act in anonymity and escapes all consequences. But there is a positive side to all this, the current generation, while it is having huge trouble addressing current sociopolitical problems in art, music, and other creative disciplines, clearly values creativity and self-expression. The fact that everyone has a band up on myspace (even if it is the completely fake band of their made-up electronic doppelganger as represented by a busty pink-eyed avatar) raises a question we have heard before; does the artistic frame of mind somehow corrode revolutionary political ideology?

We can usefully address this question by talking about escapism in art, but there is a deeper question at stake here. Can a revolutionary class be motivated by the desire to play and express their individuality creatively?

My answer is yes, and I base this on two ideas you may have seen before on this blog. The first is based on the wonderfully (and perhaps dangerously) freethinking Luis von Ahn's revolutionary idea of using people's urge to play during their free time to accomplish useful tasks. He created games that took annoying tasks like labelling images and deciphering garbled text in scanned books, and turned them into fun games or biproducts of routine tasks (Google Image Labeler and reCAPTCHA). These are only humble beginnings, but they point to a new paradigm where compassionate designers use computer networks to make it possible to take advantage of people's natural propensity to to enjoy solving problems. This will be a democracy of governance by the interested, but also by the very bored. As evidence that I am not completely alone in this opinion I would like to cite the untitled essay by Kevin Kelly, published by the annual "World Question Center" which claims that new forms of democracy are appearing on the horizon, ones which will resemble wikipedia and myspace more than anything (the essay is worth reading!). In this new form of government "both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites" and which "has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable." I submit that these forms of government will languish as ideas unless they are supported by a revolutionary class, and that the only way that a majority of americans could ever function as a revolutionary class is if we expand the definition to include a steady yet ever-shifting wave of playactors who are attracted to justice because it is interesting... and FUN.

The final question, and it is a tough one, is; is the type of senseless, anonymous, and unpunished violence seen in the movie a narrative trick of Goddard's, or is it endemic to this type of play-based, temporary revolutionary class? Is there a systemic flaw in this way of effecting social change? I don't dream of utopia, but I wonder; does the potential for positive change outweigh the dangers? How can the system be created by a revolutionary class, rather than by the ruling class bent on exploiting our labor, our humanity, and the planet we live on? Finally, we return to the agonizing question of when, if ever, is a violent act justifiable?

I leave you with a scene from the film that shows these serious revolutionaries at their silliest:

BTW - I haven't checked to see if this film is available at all, but I guess I should end this review by stating that I did, in fact, like this film...

Network recentering

2008-01-21T18:18:00.000-05:00

H- is making an effort to revive the dialogue on his multi-party creative commons and crit site The Extended Pizza Network. A lot of people have posted recently and if the dialogue gets going the way it did earlier, well, that would be awesome.

I posted something there so that I could get some feedback about some text I've been working on for my recent project.

I really should be working today, but I'm NOT! Baaaad!

There is a link to the video game maps page on the EPN. If I were going to try to learn to paint these are the colors that I would like to paint with:

Click to enlarge.

Thats book!

2008-01-19T03:42:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit of a texting monster and the automatic word organizer predictive texts thing is pretty useful, but it's like a monster word confuser, huh? I tend to keep the rovocab down to like basic english levels, so words like "yr" and "huh" figure big. I'm not sure if all the companies use the same software (probably not) but I have verizon666 and it promotes serious doublethink. Some basic words like if/he, home/good or in/go always trip me up. But one that really strikes me is book/cool. It is so preposterous that they assume Americans want to talk about books more than they say "cool." I mean, right? But, sometimes I find myself actually thinking "thats book!" (If indeed one can think a phrase that is missing an apostrophe - but that's another post...) So, sitting just now, I realized that enables a 21st c. 1984 conformity-togetherness mass-mind techno cyber oh wow man far fucking out man experience (21-84 C.T.M.M.T.C.O.W.M.F.F..O.M.E). So like, if me and about a million billion other people have the same stupid program driving us nuts, then someone else must have the compulsion to say "thats book" as an alternative way to express approval, so...

"Oh fugnuts. I wanted to be on the mug. *goes and sulks in corner* Glad he liked it though! Thats book!" With pix;

"yup thats book bbq"

"thats book, u looking forward to christmas? xXx"

"Chololate pocket on your phone was ringtone channel to ringtone funny thats book. 903sh, but a great fun! Often these heat sensitive i..."

"Wrap up my head zoloft imitrex but thats book. Copy of what hcp this opk. Extreme cap liquid weight loss pills urimax is used to terazosin gelonida..." (great - I'm glad I have synchronicity with complete incoherency.)

This is the most explicit; "Someone I met the other day said that the 'kids' (he must've thought we were much older than we are) were now using the word 'book' instead of 'cool' because that's what comes up first on predictive texts..."

And people have even appropriated and commodified the idea; "Thats book, that's totally book...." (From the myspace of a library in New South Wales.)

I only found one example where the apostrophe was used (although it used quite a few predictive text oops in a row); "Yeah I could, but he you foot want to that's book too." (Kind of trying too hard. I guess usually the kind of person who appreciates nonsense phraseology is not an i dotter or t crosser...).

This was a bit hard, but I found three people (ok; one genuine person, one glam-shot, and one avatar) who have had the same super-obscure thought that I had. Again, it's the conformity that makes this possible. Oppression is a great force in drawing people together! Of course probably some of these were just typos. 90% or so of fools were just failing to type "that book" correctly, lots of "that's book value," waaaaaaaay to much crap about the bible, and a surprising amount of "that's book smarts" (pretty much the worst thing you can say about someone these days, shudder...)

So. Aren't you glad that I'm conducting this research for you? If I weren't doing it for free you'd probably have to be paying someone to do it for you, huh?

BTW - What the hell is Neil Young talking about in that song "After the Goldrush?" (Free download here.) It's about an alien invasion right? Planetary defense and evacuation? Back me up here cause google images isn't. I mean, usually alien pix are the easiest thing to find...

So, it's hard going to sleep. I feel like I need to write to you, but what the hell?

OK. Space out;

Mindful Universe

2008-01-18T17:15:00.000-05:00

Henry P. Stapp, a quantum physicist here at Berkeley, published the book "Mindful Universe; quantum mechanics and the participating observer" last summer, but it wasn't until yesterday that it appeared in the Berkeley library, where I just snapped it up.

I have been on a pretty serious popular science reading kick for the past two years, reading (with various middling degrees of comprehension) any book I can find on cognitive science, especially those that focus on consciousness. This may have either originated from or inspired various art projects that deal with these ideas (it's a chicken/egg thing...). Here's a partial list for the bibliotechheads in perhaps the order I was reading them;
"The Mind's Eye" by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett - I read my father's version of this a long time ago.
"The Meme Machine" by Susan Blackmore - This book is written is speculative in the most inspiring way.
"How the Mind Works" (and others) by Steven Pinker - This is the most accessible and engaging read and is very clear.
"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel C. Dennett - This is the book unfairly referred to as "Consciousness Explained Away," but it is a very clear read.
"The Physics of Consciousness" by Evan Harris Walker - This book is also a bit speculative and has a stylistic twist that is either inspiring or distracting, but it is a good read.

I've read a few more, and if you look this topic up you will see that there are hundreds of books on this topic and they often contradict each other. This is one thing that attracts me to this topic - nobody is quite sure what the answers to these questions are, or indeed what the right questions are. I am neither a physicist or a cognitive scientist so I can't tell you which are more accurate, although I can recommend which ones are more compelling (compelling doesn't mean true, of course). That said, I think that, as a human who has a consciousness myself, I have a decent chance of sorting these ideas out for myself. As I have claimed before, I think that what we call creative thinking or, in my specific case, "art practice" is a way of thinking that is different than either mathematics, logic, rational argument, etc. This mode of thinking uses a different spectrum of mental tools including creation, interaction with the chaotic real world, action as experience, performance, play, re-mixing, introspection, social dynamics, analogy, intuition, synchronicity, visual thinking, non-linear thinking, various highly-developed (?) schools of critical thought, etc. Thoughts are a result of the context in which they arise and I would claim that certain thoughts are ineffable. Therefore creative thought has something to contribute to cutting edge areas of investigation that is not available through other modes of thought. But at an even baser level, reading some of these books I was surprised by how often the language was stunted and graceless. This isn't just a nit-picky criticism; there is a loss of communication that seems to be a result of the pressure exerted from the use of insular logic. Moreover, the idea that truth is beauty is not just an artistic conceit; it is a fundamental force driving scientists' thoughts. They are trying to reduce the chaotic world into ever-simpler laws that enable us to understand the world and predict its workings. Indeed, a huge drive in 20th c. physics was to develop a grand unifying theory of everything.

I am not a primarily visual thinker (in the sense that some people report having an internal dialogue that is conducted in pictures alone rather than words) but images are important to my understanding of a concept. The authors of many of these books are engaged in a fascinating struggle to create visual analogies for the new and difficult concept they are trying to explain. Many of these concepts go beyond the common sense that evolution provided to our minds. Quantum physics is not a speculative theory, but many of its concepts are beyond common sense. It requires the use of the "imaginary numbers" that you may have studied at school (I clearly remember my math teacher advising me not to try to understand them, not listening, and failing the test). The first prototypes of quantum computers have already been built; they operate much faster than usual computers based on "classical physics" (i.e. old-fashion Newtonian physics) because they perform their calculation simultaneously in several different alternative universes that are the result of quantum uncertainty in the computer's heart (somewhat similar to the multiple universes in sci-fi movies like "Back to the Future 2" "Groundhog's Day" and "The Lathe of Heaven"). This is not a metaphor or esoteric mystical speculation; it produces measurable results.

So, the core of what interesting about theories of quantum consciousness is that it essentially requires a mode of thought that is related to creative thinking and to mysticism in that it isn't "common sense." Perhaps quantum theory may appear to be similar to a mystery cult; at its heart there is something that is outside our understanding. However, what is at its heart is not some bullshit about an all-powerful god, or the great disappointment that the universe is purely robotic. No. What it says is that our conscious observation is what creates that universe, that consciousness is inextricably linked to the basic physical laws of the universe. In the 20th c. physicists and cognitive scientists ignored this fact and tried to explain our minds in terms of classic physics, which was inspired by (and enabled) the fact that the 20th c. was a revoltingly antihumanistic time. The fact that our top thinkers continually deceived us (and our governments) into believing that the whole universe was nothing but a huge pool-table with hard balls bouncing off each other in a complicated but essentially predetermined and heartless manner. In the 21st c. the acceptance and exploration of the implications of the (century-old but still misunderstood) theory of quantum dynamics has the potential to inspire a new understanding of our intrinsic self-worth; that our mind is an essential part of the universe, that we actually exist. In the end we have to admit that most of us don't think in a way that conforms to "common sense" and that in fact "common sense" is a dead-end mode of thought. If we can be smart enough in this new way the 21st c. will be a humanistic era, a mystical time in which creative and analogical thinking play a central role.

I haven't finished "Mindful Universe" but I will say a few quick things. One is that it is a tough read; I think reading a book on quantum physics beforehand would be wise. Two is that the sentences are problematic. Three is that there are not enough illustrations (yet...). Four is that it offers the clearest explanation of quantum mechanics* that I have encountered and that the ideas advanced about the nature of consciousness are further along the path to truth than any other book I've read and will probably be a central part of humanity's self-conception by the end of the century.
(*Note that this means the concepts themselves, the prose is sometimes problematic.)

For the interested, here is Henry P. Stapp's homepage. It's just a list of links to various texts.

dream song

2008-01-13T17:16:00.000-05:00

Earlier I was talking about how hard it is to write down the songs from my dreams, although I should have stated that I was frustrated only because earlier I had been so successful at doing this; the songs in Perceival and the dozens of other song-sketches I have on the floppy disks (!) that go in my PSR 550 are mostly dream-based. I say "mostly" because the process of reconstructing a song from a dream is similar to the process of writing a dream diary; a lot of the work is in reconstructing the sequence and logical connection between strange and memorable images. This is a clear imposition of the logical mind. Similarly, the songs are often very specific in certain parts; the timbre is such a big element - and timbre is the hardest thing to sketch out with the keyboard. Usually there is a choice between capturing the melody and the timbre, as there is not enought time (or perhaps concentration-power?) to get both down before the dream fades.

A lot of those tracks are still up on J- d-'s site. These represent tracks that are more finished, the other ones are tolerable to only me.

Writing about this made me remember something that I had forgotten I made. It is always nice to rediscover something. The following video was made from a song that came from a dream I had in Osaka. I remember quite clearly how strange the dream was. I can't write about it here, but the title of the song "tripping in a cardboard box" is a good enough entry point. I had this dream during a period where I was very disoriented, having trouble distinguishing dreams and reality. I guess I have been flirting with this state over the past couple of weeks. A lot of thoughts here, all out of focus, luckily for you, my long-suffering reader. Anyway, I had a lot of fun walking around in the woods in the Watershed and Rosedale Park near Pennington, collecting leaves and shooting footage for this film...

Just erased a big chunk of nonsense I wrote about my approach to melody. It is only rarely that I get embarrassed about being so selfish on these pages.

In my dream last night I was travelling south down route 31 to Pennington in a van with my pops and brothers (sorry moms, but you wouldn't have liked it anyway). It was the future, but everyone was a lot younger than they are now. Route 31 was almost entirely encased in huge angular tv screens that formed a kind of technicolor transport tube, sometimes I could see the fields that surround route 31, still being cultivated (I could see the soil plowed into rows in the cold autumn moonlight) but behind them, beyond the wood's edge, were huge star factories, warm yellow-orange lights arranged in grids in 3-D perspective drift as we glided by, flourescent white steam uprushing in the crystal clear air, reaching waaaaay up into the huge open sky). The screens flashed and formed interference strobe patterns as we rushed through them, dark rotten-pink, spring green, and bright yellow-white. They weren't advertising anything but their own presence, all working in sync, competing only with the moon. I was in the back seat with C-, who was being very very hyper and kept calling everything super-something. Like we're super-driving in a super-van etc. Pops and H- were being really loud and not paying attention to the road at all because they were bopping and singing along to a band called super-devo (which sounded suspiciously like my dad and brothers had recorded some devo covers, except Prince was playing the keyboards and they would only play one line from a song over and over). The song that I remember isn't really a devo song at all, though. I got it on a floppy disk in real life though!

Yay!

Steven Pinker article and ethics in art

2008-01-12T04:29:00.000-05:00

I was just reading Steven Pinker's article on morality in the New York Times magazine (I'd give you a link, but it's easy to find). The article has an understated greatness to it; Pinker's thought isn't revolutionary, it is very careful, conscientious and clear. It is written by a person who is highly rational, but not reductionist. In the article he reviews ideas about how evolution has driven us to be be composed the way we are morally, socially, and psychologically without simplifying things. Without asking us to step outside ourselves, he is able to give us some distance from which we can reassess the problem. This is what makes Pinker a humanitarian. He then applies these ideas to some of the moral problems we have created for ourselves, the impasses between different groups, including, pointedly, Christians and Muslims, and liberals and conservatives.

Reading this article, I was thinking about paths towards sociopolitical change; the revolutionary path vs the progressive path. I was thinking about this in relationship to issues in art. What role does ethics have in the creation, viewing, and criticism of art? How does Pinker's explanation of morality relate to the ethical questions we ask ourselves? (You may have to have read the article to understand what I am going to discuss here) I have noticed that artists as a group seem to have a moral sense that is skewed towards what Pinker labels a liberal moral bias in favor of justice and against pain. In fact, there is a strange moment where Pinker used performance art as an example where I felt as though he had made a decision to preclude artists as a group from his group of ideal readers (In the example given he tried to induce a sense of disgust by talking about performance art that sounded a lot like something by Coum Transmissions, precursor to Throbbing Gristle - something I would love to have seen). I am somewhat upset by this - I think that artists are more than just superliberals, but I need time to synthesize these two systems. How do you compare a general life-or-death social morality to the ethics of aesthetics? Pinker mentions the moral panic that ensued over medical advancements like blood transfusions, in vitro fertilization, and cloning, but what about the moral panic over groundbreaking art, theater and music? Both of these things continue today, but it raises questions about the difference between the ways modern and postmodern art relates to the generally-accepted morality; questions of revolutionary vs progressive change.

Readers of Supersilly Sillystraw will not be surprized that I am not drawing firm conclusions about this matter. An exposition on the various ethical questions within aesthetics would result in an entry that would be rather long, even by the low standards of brevity enforced here. But I would like to conclude by pointing out that Pinker's final quote was highly endearing to me, both because it was from Chekov, and because it can be read in a way that allows for the possibility that art can still be as important to our understanding of ourselves as science;

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

This is a wonderful succinct gem which elucidates complicated thoughts I have about the moral dimensions of my own work. Art can be moral because there is an ethics in perception; a new way of seeing will open our eyes to new solutions to our problems and enrich our experience as humans.

machine translation divination

2008-01-11T04:06:00.000-05:00

For those of you who have been longtime subscribers, you may remember that a while ago, when Sloppyslurper Slurpysip was located in a different place, I spent a lot of time uploading all these experiments in machine translation (i.e. Google translation, Babelfish, etc.). (Looking back at them now, they are so beautiful: here's one about the mass mind project). Specifically, I was using machine translation not for its stated purpose of automated computer translation, but as a way of processing language, destroying language. I know that there have been poets who have looked at this process, but there are a lot of challenges that I think have yet to be addressed, perhaps because the right approach has not yet been found. I'd like to explain why this fascinates me.

I am interested in this process not as a way of creating language that is beautiful to the ear of the poet, but as a way of crossing a mechanically rational logic with a natural evolutionary logic to divine a new kind of knowledge that could never have been known before we had these tools and these methods. I think the word "divine" is correct, as by crossing the electromechanical and biological minds we are creating a synthetic third kind of mind of whose existence we are barely becoming aware of. This perhaps has the potential to become a transcendent gnostic process.

Recently programmers and linguists have put their heads together in a concerted effort to create mathematical formulae and algorithms that attempt to describe language in numbers to feed into our number-crunching machines. This astounding collaboration is one of the peaks of our present technological abilities, and one can only laugh at the fact that the main impression given by machine translated text is one of gross limitation, failure and absurdity. But this is perhaps because we are judging the text by human standards. Our cognitive demands for grammatical agreement and word order is not met, so we judge the text to be nonsense. But in this we are being unfair. We should judge the texts by the computer's standards, in which case we would see that to the perfectly functioning digital mind these texts are proof of a formula correctly completed, electrons shooting from power to ground. All the words are beautiful.

To the machines it must be our strange, organic, rule-defying and highly-redundant language that is dissatisfying. The fact that there are many different trees of language, each with its own branches of diverging dialects must be quite an ugly phenomenon to the chip-eye. Of course we know this to be untrue, that language is one of humankind's crowning achievements that has its own intrinsic worth and beauty, its own aesthetic system by which it is judged, but moreover it has its own secretly encoded knowledge which is implied in its etymology, its history, the knowledge that has been injected into the language through thousands of generations of humans who lived and died dealing with the challenges of communicating, warning each other about danger, gossiping about sex, insulting each other, forgetting words, misinterpreting subtleties, making up new words, rhyming, playing word games, speaking in tongues, teaching strict rules of grammar, etc.

If we cross these two systems of knowledge and standards of beauty two things will happen. First, there will be a decoding of knowledge that is hidden from us if we look at the text with either our human eyes or the chip-eye. Second, there will be a synthesis of the two systems of language aesthetics to create a new way of assessing the worth of the text, the eye of a greater judge. I can't explain precisely what I mean by "crossing." An analogy might be how a mathematical equation can be solved by performing the same operation on both sides of the equal sign. Mistakes are perfectly OK as long as it's balanced over the equal sign. In fact there aren't really any mistakes; some operations bring us closer to the solution, and some draw us away. In the same way, if two people are talking and they both make the same mistakes with their grammar they will not perceive any divergence from order. In fact, if they respect their mistakes a new language begins its life. This is true not only with grammar, but with agreed-upon facts. I can't tell if these analogies are useful, but I hope they point in the right direction.

There are two questions about this process. We are currently making inroads in the solution of the first, the second is perhaps one of those imponderables that drives theosophists, metaphysicians, and philosophers of science mad (and that provide them with their jobs...). The first question is; what does it really mean to "cross two systems of knowledge"? Of course we can talk about crossing two systems of knowledge from different cultures (i.e. French impressionists being influenced by Japanese ukiyo e prints), but this is surely the philosophically simplest way of approaching this problem. Consider what it means to synthetically and simultaneously understand both how the cat understands the mouse and the mouse understands the cat... Not to have both understandings, or reduce to commonalities, or to find compromises, but to naturally have both systems of knowledge. Naturally, not forced. I think this is where machine translation becomes interesting; our language is presented naturally to the machine. Then the machine performs its operations on its data and speaks back to us in its language. We then hear it and perform our operations on it with the language portions of our brain. Both minds are acting completely naturally, free and easy. Nothing is forced.

The second, imponderable question is whether it is possible for us to understand these texts. To appreciate them for their worth. If any mind can understand the workings of a mind different from it. Whether the ant can understand why it carries its load, whether humans can communicate with the mass mind. And this leads to a second question; if we can't understand the aesthetics of the higher order, how will we know when we have created something beautiful? If we don't understand the knowledge of the higher order, how will we know when we have said something true?

Regarding divination I would like to say something; while I think this process is an (admittedly feebly primitive) way of dealing with higher states of consciousness, I don't think that there is anything mystical about this. At least it should only be as mystical as the contemplation of the unfathomable mystery that is our own consciousness, our own understanding of beauty and knowledge. I would like to smooth the sand so that any small steps in the right direction will leave clear footprints.

Now, back to Earth. Please don't feel let down by the gulf between theory and practice.

I have been working on a project, which, as all the most fun projects do, has led me astray. I started off trying to create a text for a mass mind experiment of a sort, and ended up using google translation to destroy a strangely oversimplified script that came to me one night which dealt with transhumanism and gnostic crossing over. In pursuing this I strayed further and further afield. I made an interesting discovery which hinges upon a third level of misunderstanding. I tell secrets on this blog, so I'll let you know what it is, even though a secret revealed can seem like a small thing indeed.

My new method of machine translation divination uses the following algorithm. First, translate the original text from English to Japanese. Then copy that Japanese text and translate it from Chinese to English - this is where the new layer of synthesis enters; the computer translates the Japanese versions of the Chinese ideograms which are separated by almost a thousand years of divergence and cultural difference (additionally the computer assigns numerical values to the non-Chinese Japanese letters and translates some of these as well). Finally, copy this text and translate it from Japanese to English to clean up the remaining Japanese characters. This is the final text.

A word about the original text; considering our imponderable question re understanding the resultant synthetic text on the higher mind's terms, I think that the path to understanding lies through using an intuitive understanding of the original as a key to unlock the final text. Therefore, partially to show you all that I am not altogether serious in my posthuman misanthropy, I have provided below a translation of Mario Savio's famous speech from the free speech cafe here at Berkeley.

One more thing. For reasons that may be apparent if you consider what I said about the imponderable question above, I am not going to analyse the final text in an attempt to understand it for myself, for all of you, or for the benefit of the chip-eye. But I must say that "random" would be an inappropriate adjective to describe this text. It is an essential part of the process that the computer off in Mountain View (or wherever) that calculates this text has no free choice. It will always return the same result. It is this that makes the synthesis possible. It is always an accurate "reading." For example, the Wikipedia article I copied this quote from had a missing apostrophe, fill it in to witness the butterfly effect in action!

English original;

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cant take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!

Japanese translation;

時間があるときには、マシンの操作になるので、憎むべき、そんなににより心臓の病気では、カントに参加することは、受動的に参加することはできません。さえ、そして君は遺体の上に置いてくださいギアとする車輪は、レバーの上、その上のすべての装置、および停止することに就くべき！

English translation from Chinese (very similar to below...):

Time when the earth and the nation, is, Solomon treesンtheir operation Lo you willでtheir hate ever humiliating, Are you better than Lo Lo their heart is illで, KafンLot Lo participated in Able! Things is by moving Lo! Participate therein and the turn isでAnd letん. Me Him, And Jun is the body of Our Home! But most do!ギAllah! Things and the wheels are, Has the browserバ, And on earth to speak of their devices,おO mankind! Stop Able to do things on the most humiliating!

Cleaned up translation from Japanese:

Time when the earth and the nation, is the Solomon trees on their operation Lo you will in their hate ever humiliating, Are you better than Lo Lo their heart is ill, Kaf-Lot Lo participated in Able! Things is by moving Lo! Participate therein and the turn is, And let me. Me Him, And Jun is the body of Our Home! But most do! formic Allah! Things and the wheels are, Has the browser version, And on earth to speak of their devices, Please O mankind! Stop Able to do things on the most humiliating!

Amen!

PS - I would be happy to see any texts that you generate using this process!

I-Be Area

2008-01-08T02:19:00.000-05:00

I just figured out that "I-Be Area," the video I blogged about the other day because it was reviewed in the NYTimes, is currently being uploaded to YouTube. I'm not sure if the whole thing is up yet but there are quite a few up there. Also, you can go to Ryan's Trecartin's YouTube page to see his older videos.

Playlist of I-Be Area videos from Ryan Trecartin's YouTube page.

I decided to write something about "I-Be Area" while my mind is still fresh. I'm not sure if I am on-target with this, but I recall when I saw Ryan's older video "A Family Finds Entertainment" that I was so excited, and at the time I couldn't really explain why to myself or the friends who I forced to watch it. I would, however, urge you to watch the video for yourself before I make it boring with my words.

"There are so many things to be, Sally.
I know! And I don't want to be ANY OF THEM!!!"

At some point when I was living in Tokyo I transcribed the entirety of AFFE and was translating it (with help) into Japanese. I never finished, but in the course of listening to the dialogue over and over again I had a lot of time to think about how language and "voice" was used, so I'd like to talk a little bit more about that here, in the context of explaining why I think these videos are so fascinating.

"... your life, but better! With edits!"

There is a certain addictive mystery to these videos because the way it was created (shot and edited) is constantly in our faces yet paradoxically unknowable. Our ability to adopt one comfortable position in relationship to the work is completely defeated by the video's constantly shifting frame. Is that acting or are those people really freaking out? Are those people abusing Ryan because he told them to or is it as out-of-control as it appears? Is it OK that they are breaking that thing? Pushing that person around? Do they dress like that in real life? Why were those lines chosen and what was cut? Is that an affected spasmodic outburst of insanity or should we really be concerned? The constant and obtrusive editing makes us wonder whether the narrative is being driven by the chance occurrences that emerge from the happening-like shoot/parties, or whether Ryan has manipulated them effectively enough to serve the ends of a structure he planned out beforehand.

"I'll make two endings one happy and one really sad - where you fall off a building next to a dolphin that really hates you."

Perhaps the most immediately striking thing about these videos is the visual overload - the hard-to-define yet very specific color and patterning seen in the costumes, the makeup, the sets, and the special effects, all driven by a hyperfast, multi-view, decorative editing style (the Times goes on about this if you're interested). But I think there is something else going on that is just as important, which is the use of language. There are several interesting things happening here and I think they go beyond Ryan's experimental personalities, private obsessions and subcultural scene and start to reflect upon much larger themes; how we communicate in our society and how we are constructing our selves in the information age. Things important to kids like me!

"Don't talk in repetition young people..."

First of all, there is a tension between the improvised and scripted lines, between naturalness and artifice. At first we notice the ingenious, off-the-cuff back-and-forth that seems to be completely unscripted, amazing us that that something so specific could be captured on film, barely intelligible, hovering on the edge of the believable. Only after we recover from our shock do we then we notice the group chants and calls. The certain style in the way a number of characters deliver their lines that seems to be gleefully exaggerating the potentialities of the simply written line, making fun of the limitations of scripting through ridiculous diction and off-kilter timing. In fact, a number of different times Ryan or another actor repeated their lines - several "takes" of the same scene - as though Ryan could not decide which version of reality was best and chose to keep them ALL. Conversely, more than once I started to feel uncomfortable when a convincing improv lapsed into the kind of self-conscious, effortful mode of address that would usually be CUT from a reality show or stand-up comedy show in an attempt to construct a character who is always funny, always brilliant (i.e. during the speech that begins, "I have a channel that's called, 'That's so Ramada Omar...'"). It seems that Ryan's friends/actors seem to understand this completely, that they are comfortable with their discomfort, that showing the cracks in the personas they present to the world is not only a sign of deep trust and humility, but cute.

"If one of those girls does something profound and we're not there to catch it on tape because you're lazy..."

As a viewer I sometimes feel that Ryan's editing decisions are a little hard to swallow; my ego says no and pulls back, confused, embarrassed, saying, "he should have cut that..." But if I loosen up a little (it's easy - the hypnotic colors and movement), accept that the editing decisions were intentional and begin to watch the video with my critical guard down then these decisions becomes revelatory; I realize that I too am trying to become someone other than who I am, that my own attempts to become are both a tragic betrayal of myself as one I-Be Space dies, and a natural process of copying, of adopting pieces of the beautiful people I see all around me, of becoming another person. Then I can laugh and move forward in my life.

"Relocate to someplace funky."

By exemplifying artifice, the language is implicitly embodying the explicit themes discussed by the characters; who am I, who do I want to become and how do I construct myself? What if I could change my name? What if I could drop everything, everything about myself, and go start a new life in Brazil? What if I could choose my own parents, and switch them at will? What if I was a sexy girl with a big belly? What if I had red hair, yellow eyes, and green skin?

"We basically practice all day long. It's exhausting. And UNIQUE TO US!"

But there is another tension that keeps me on my toes, which is that, while the video partially functions as an exercise in seeing my own selfish center more clearly and enabling me to deconstruct it (or at least have a laugh...), it also functions as a devotional act of ego worship.

"This is a house of love. I can tell. It smells popular."

The sets/situations seem to exist in large part as a way to encourage the characters to come up with addictively memorable one-liners that, while they may be a meaningful allusion to ineffable aspects of their personality, function primarily as a self-nomination to another 15 minutes of fame*. In fact, all of these characters are are chiefly concerned with themselves, their appearance, their sexuality, their status. The relationships between characters are driven by ego, and have a strange polarity to them. There are plenty of oppositional relationships, many arguments or physical fights where both participants rip each other to shreds with plenty of pouting and whining but without getting truly angry at each other because it is taken for granted that each will naturally act with complete selfish concern. But the supportive relationships are also driven by ego - the characters express extreme love, a near pathological drive to be close, but their motivation seems to be less unselfish love that a need to establish their status in a social network. The compliments they give each other are over-the-top, yet highly-qualified, staring deep into each others eyes and then gone. When your chief concern is constructing an artificial ego for your experimental personality it makes no sense to take time off to be unselfish and there's no time to waste "just being." So where is the "I-Be Area?"

"I am tempo-rary!"

I don't think it would be uncalled-for to say that all this egocentricity and experimentation with personality relates directly the way that people carefully construct their public faces for online social networking sites; in the video there are several direct references to virtual representations of online personality - i.e. avatars in Second Life, people surfing the adoption network videos. I don't think Ryan chose to rename Olivia "Amerisha" for no reason (not that his work is not internationally relevant); he's speaking to a way of life that sprung forth from silicon valley to define the culture of his entire generation.

"No one knows my mom. She's 98% lies."

By this I am not suggesting anything about Ryan as a person and I don't know if he would agree that he has created a socially-critical work. I am merely saying that he has latched onto something subtle about how we humans work in these electronic social-spaces. These virtual "I-Be Areas" are so new that we don't know how they will change the way we relate to one-another, only that these changes will be profound. Perhaps these relationships will be as extreme as the ones seen in this video - intense intense intense nonsense-spouting supersaturated evil girlboy glamour angels shifting between electrically-magnified synchronicity and impetuously cruel dissing, simultaneously reinforcing and nullifying their conceited sense of self.

"Listen, I know what my original wants to look like and I can't believe you tried to reverse-cycle me into that person."

But in the end this video rejects the histrionics of the techno-geeks who go on and on about the liberatory potential of the virtual. No matter how much my personality is defined by my position in society, no matter how I chose to represent myself to other people, no matter who I pretend to be myself, for all intensive purposes I can't stop being me. My life feels like something continuous. I still feel like I am the same me I was when I was a little kid dancing in my adoption video. And, more than in his previous work, in "I-Be Area" I see that Ryan is engaged in the same kind of struggle. He always brings it out of the virtual and back to the face-to-fake interaction, the body in motion, the sound of a voice, the kiss. This is what I think makes his work so touchingly humanistic.

"That is ME! I look like how I feel now!!!"
echo
echo
echo

*You have no idea how long it took me after watching AFFE to pronounce the word "yeah" with one syllable again...

"CUTE DOG!!!"

the group play chord X

2008-01-06T17:52:00.000-05:00

The affected madness of virtual crowds.

How to create the filters - be less rational about the formula. Thinking over paper is a cirlce-trap. See instead what works. There are catch-spots where it's easy to find dirt to sift thru. (Dirt = people, nicely.)

Again, the chorus effect has been confusing me sweetly for this time. I've decided to append this "false subculture" onto the experimentatal conditions, even if it makes it entertaining and poor to age.

Always with dream melodies I wake up thinking - it's so so beautiful, but it would be embarrassing because everyone already knows that one - it's so good - it's probably something from I don't know the eighties or something and then later I realize that it was an accapella song in nonsense syllables that code directly to my project - in no way a song from the eighties that everyone knows - and I've forgotten it. Frustrated indeed! It might just be the fact that the room is so cold that dissuades me from crawling out of bed. Lazy trash neck!

I'll be fine though - it's all a process of incubation and layering of frustration energy. It doesn't matter if it pays off. I have the image of first of all doing no harm, bunker image, violent images to be avoided by hiding. So it's good. Get vitamins, allow the bad ideas to starve.

Just sparkler-thoughts, no flow. But this is a fine way to be free, to not have a useful task. I wouldn't say "all quiet" but I wouldn't say anything else either.

Ryan Trecartin

2008-01-06T06:02:00.000-05:00

NO! THIS IS NOT THE REVIEW I WAS TALKING ABOUT!
THIS IS!

---

"I think I just saw a highly advanced 3D text-message of my future self giving me the middle finger..."

New video premering, for me, in, of all places, NYTimes Video. This is just a snippet, but I've been wondering what he's been up to. The original "A Family Finds Entertainment" video introduced to be by B- H- via Henry are for me a model for partying, living vicariously, and channelling my incessant inner voices with accents. That video is found on YouTube right easy.

Anyway, check out "I-Be Area".

"Listen, I know what my original wants to look like and I can't believe you tried to reverse-cycle me into that person."

And here is a video that is not worth watching at all:

Images of communication

2008-01-04T21:52:00.000-05:00

In my as-yet unpublished rant on the possibilities of communication that I somehow passed off as my final report in the underground research council that I am supporting I handed out an as-yet unpublished series of images of communication and the feedback from the group was that they looked like images of communication. These images were much more complicated and esoteric (what?) than the images below, but I thought I would start with the basics and show the several types of images of communication that appear in a google images search of the term, just so we can know what images we are taking for our launching-point. I am not going to offer much critical feedback on these images, suffice it to say that one of the main concerns of my practice as an artist and my commentary on this blog is that we need new visual analogies to come to terms with the functioning of 21st c. information society.

First and most common both online and perhaps in people's mind (more research needed here of course) are images of two people with some kinfd of symbol between them indicating the exchange of information. These have much potential for modification.

The second type of image is very similar to the above, but focuses not on the receiver and transmitter, but on the medium of communication.

The third type focuses on the network shape of communication. Like the second type, human figures do not figure large.

Aspects of the fourth type can be seen in some of the examples above, but it is distinct in that several different nets of communication are shown in Venn-diagram like interaction.

Finally, and this should perhaps be called the zeroth type, there are images of individuals as nodes of communication. As this is the internet, these are often images of women with prominent breasts in various states of undress. But seriously, communication is driven by our relationship to the other, so a focus on the individual within the context of communication is one category of these images. It's just that the representation of the other naturally tends towards the type of images seen below in the unbalanced power relationship and anonymous sexualized image space that is the internet.

As always, click on the images to look close-up. You will be missing out if you don't take a look at the English on that last one. And it is relevant, ladies. It says "Komyunikeeshon." I'm not denyng I'm a freak, but if you think of the weaving of the net and the addiction to filling up as referring to communication in the information age it becomes suspiciously relevant.

I'll try to dig that report out of the muck.

3 4 10 11 12 26

2008-01-04T03:40:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting video. I like three things about it. First of all, I like the way the simple graphical style is used with minimal Foley to enhance the message. Secondly, I like that the logic structure proceeds along an explicitly analogical set of steps, and that this logic structure incorporates repetition. Thirdly, I like how the creator admits that his theory is slightly out-of-line with the theories of higher dimensions accepted by the mainstream, although I would have preferred if the creators could have admitted their own fallibility within the content of the explanation. I understand that this could confuse an already confusing topic, but what good is teaching people something effectively if what you're teaching isn't true? They could have at least given a nod to other theories of higher dimensions. In fact the creators seem to be slighly overly-comfortable with fiction. Which I guess makes them science-fiction writers. That's good I guess. But if you visit their site, there's just no way they get millions of hits per month on a site devoted to these esoteric theories, no matter how flashy it is, even though it's a book that comes complete with songs for download and T-shirts to wear. Which is awesome. And it's always funny when popular scientists have their own theories and try to appeal to the pulic rather than to the academy in a peer-reviewed journal. Like the people are going to rise up and overthrow the old ideas of higher orders of spatial dimensions in favor of the ideas presented here. The people don't rise up for nothing - they wouldn't even rise up for free netflicks videos.

I need something to change your mind!

2008-01-03T02:18:00.000-05:00

Miiiiiiiiiin-D!!!

Here is a series of articles that's right up my alley not only because of the subject matter, but because of its quietly innovative form. It asks scientists to talk about a time that they changed their mind. The answers are encouraging and surprizing in that these people who try so hard to be rational admit that they are fallible. It's not that this is a new philosophical concept, but the specificity is fascinating. I am pleased not that this disproves rationality as a useful manner of thinking (it doesn't), but that the answers reveal (some of) these people to be very humanistic and caring, as well as insatiably curious. Yay! Discovering the beauty of other people allows me to enjoys life.

There is a lot a lot of content here:World Question Center

Each of us have our own

2008-01-02T23:06:00.000-05:00

strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes they are the same thing, but only if we forget what different used to mean, and we have. In my mind I want to know; what does it mean to be close to another person? Is it an illusion? Is it just a feeling? Is it a possibility? An inevitability? Can it be understood even a little? I don't even know how to approach this problem, how to ask questions about it. That complete confusion is a strength. And a weakness. In that understanding something about something means not understanding something else about it. The productive extreme position of unknowingness re the distance of others is made possible by the weakness of wanting to be alone, which is a strength too. People who are far away in yellow windows exert a strong pressure in the imagination. People whose breath lies on your neck are weak as statues, weak as dream diaries, weak as copy for publication. Weak as a flame that burns at cold room temperature, which is strong in that the whole world is flammable to it. Weak as mirrors are selves who move in perfect reversal in front of you, while strong ideas about self come from those who move least similarly, but these selves are others, and when you move into them you become an other, but you are still yourself. (It's simple kids - try it at home!) You can move into trees and flames and rocks and traffic flow as can a drink of water and vitamin pills move into you and then seem to know your best moves. And you can fade somewhat if you relax, and you can blend the slightest bit at the edges, but not like a person out of the sweet spot of focal distance in a photo. Not like that.

At this point we can ask ourselves, if the new physics of suchness makes more sense when informed by an animistic, pantheistic paganism than a self-centered autocratic omnipotent Jehovaism, then how can we change our analogies? One thing to remember is that each god is omnipotent but sharing in the way that the great god of all the oceans is all-powerful although there are also all-powerful gods of each sea, each inlet, each strange miniature canyon carved into the rock, and this last god is also great (although not the last). Indeed each wave has its own god and these gods move through the sea-god's being for a short rule, and yet the sea god rules himself. And each wave-god crashes against the line of pebble-gods and meets the god of short-lived thin white foam, and the god of undertow pulling legs out to sea, and the god of short-lived intersecting triangles in the sand, and the god of infinite sunsparkles still in each moment, and the god of daylong whiteglowing curlique tracer lines of each sparkle's path, and the god of the place where the sandy-green water turns dark blue (although it is an illusion). And then, though the wave is gone, the god is there still. And as each wave has a god, there is a god of waves and each knows only a tiny domain, yet is the final word in it.

In this way the tree that forks early in its trunk will reach high into the sky through two complimentary paths but even in its most extreme terminals will not produce leaves that cover eachother's access to the sunlight. In this way too, two slender outlying branches of the tree being tossed in the rough prestorm wind can clatter and rub against each other without knowing that they are one in body, that their rhythm is a product of vectors of strenth and flexibility within thousands of repetitions of their own forking selves. And in this way the walk at night reveals the appearance of light and shadow to be only a game for a strange and predetermined dialogue of divination that plays equally through the flat-projected quiver of the winter trees, flickering streetlights and the walker's mind in which the inky depths hold all histories of fear and danger and each particularly laid out glowing shape holds all possibility of hope and love. And conversely light holds fear of overexposure and darkness holds the comfort of invisibilty, and time moves backwards and forwards threading all possibilities through each needle-eye moment to compensate for the starburst of contradictions.

I promise I will dream of humilty but I have a thousand things to learn. I'm trying to gather these short-circuit sparks together to get this bulb burning pure, but I'm not sure how. Remember the rotting soldiers in their poison-filled mudpits and the softies on their satyricon sofas and say "good night, this is more entertaining than tv and less certain than thinking these things out myself." Good night!

It's all free here at Superstatic Sorrysign, but you pay for it in advert time.

It's 2008 all over again!

suchness

2008-01-01T18:18:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!!!

200H!

fall in knothole landscape

2007-12-29T20:29:00.000-05:00

or something...

Drinking 3 cups of coffee in the afternoon; not the best way to get your room clean.

What is worth doing?

Mess

2007-12-26T23:09:00.000-05:00

In the end it was a messy year for my room. And I don't feel like cleaning it. Again. No desire to clean whatsoever.

"turning vague and smily and looking away I-dont-want-to-talk-about-it"

2007-12-23T18:05:00.000-05:00

This in response to a comment from the last post from J- a good friend and always insightful comment-leaver. In my world a response is not an accusation, but rather a sign of graditude. I don't mean to imply that the idea I am setting myself up to counter in this post has any more than a passing resemblance to an idea that may have flitted through J-'s head.

I feel you J-, but I'd just like to state, for the public record, that while I recognize that the so-called "'turning vague and smily and looking-away I-don't-want-to-talk-about-it' thing" has been an unproud feature of my communicational mode in the past, and will probably unavoidably be so in the future, as the things left unsaid are often as powerful as the things spoken aloud, and also as this is an instrumental technique of the flirtational mode in which I often interact with people (the fantasy me in others' minds always being more attractive than the "real me" if such a thing exists, and certainly more attractive, at least to the "other" than the fantasy-me in MY mind), this all causing righteous trouble for me recently... While I recognize this "thing" within myself, I do think that this blog, being such an important part of my inner intellectual and emotional life (obviously more so than as a tool for communication with my friends and dear readers)... That this blog represents an attempt to counter that "thing."

It surprizes me therefore that this should come to be perceived as part of that conversational style (evn though I don't think this is what J- was talking about, really). I guess that each antithesis still shares basic assumptions with each thesis, that no two opposing nodes can come close to containing the four-dimensional space of thought (if indeed thoughts can be mapped to any space at all), but I was trying to counteract this trend within myself with this blog. Among the thousand things this blog attempts, it is an attempt to communicate in a style that is not a power game, at least not primarily, for each communication also contains an encoded power-relationship sign. And because this blog contains thoughts about art, which was so famously framed as founded on lies by Plato and his ilk, and outright fantasies, which are consciously glamourized untruths, and all lies are devised as moves in a mind-game of power.

So yes, there is an element of cruel game here, but I hope that this blog is possessed primarily by a chihuahua spirit, a submissiveness, although of course submission is a form of power, in that my private thoughts are open, my underwear (literally) on display for the public to see. Good friends have warned me that I am sharing too much here, and I hope that they are right. I suspect they are right because recently the things I have posted here have come back around to bite me in the ass. I know that there is at least one veil I place over this blog, which is the one by which I protect the privacy of my friends. I want to share myself fully, but there are lines of ethics that are drawn inside one's self. I am also sharing ideas about my art that can be exploited now or in the future (especially if I ever hope to succeed by wearing a mask, the mask of the silent mystery, the mask of minimalism, the mind-game mask, the mask of art's mystical origins, the mask of inoffensiveness, the mask of confidence, the list goes on). And recently there have been two occassions where I have had a strong feeling that there has been some pakuri going on, some copying, someone whose ideas are too close, too close for comfort. Whether or not true, it tends to make one's guard go up automatically, a shock reaction. But also there has been one strong incident where I felt accused of pakuri, whether or not this was true, and this made me very uncomfortable, and brought both opposing nodes of this idea into my mind. Sorry if this leads to confusion and run-on sentences, though I suppose these can be re-edited.

So, yes, perhaps there are reasons why the veil is sometimes drawn on this blog, but I hope that is not its main feature. In fact, I know that this blog is obsessively personal to the point of boredom most of the time. The old adage that "the personal is the universal" is very very true when it is true, and false in most cases due to the nature of synchronicity, that we only have a limited capacity to feel close to others, that our receptor-triggers have a very small window and are easily overwhelmed, although these receptors can be teased open with drugs, charms, sex and music. Recently a most amazing person reminded me what an egocentric maniac I am in a way that seems to have gotten through my thick skull, so these thoughts have been on my mind, though I can't say that I've figured it out at all. So I'll be crushing myself a little bit for a while in this way, though not to worry, self-crushing is an ongoing process.

So, to dress up a messy post, if this blog seems self-obsessed please understand that it is not trying not to be, but that the self-obsession is only an attempt, however misguided and unsuccessful, to get in touch with others. But if this blog seems strongly veiled, well, I must concede an unexpected failure.

Fullness

2007-12-21T02:14:00.000-05:00

I know it might not be fair, but one does feel as though one's own creative life is a little bit lacking after seeing certain unbelievably amazing works of art. I was just tonight out seeing an Igmar Bergman movie (Fanny och Alexander) and it does make the consternations of my own mind seem a might bit flim-flammy. Now, I have seen in the past that it's bad news to try to compare apples to oranges (my art to films, to music, to rocks and salamanders), but I guess a little moping around might be a good thing for me since, as I've said before, I have no fucking clue what I am doing.

In fact, the movie seems to deal with some things that have a lot to do with this idea of great art and little life. (I'm not good at describing things or reviews, so pardon this poor short summary - I'm not going to evaluate the film except to say that it comes very highly recommended.) The movie was so shockingly beautiful and visually rich. Part of it takes place in the home of a rich family of actors and artists - drunken philanderers all, but their lives were so emotionally motivated and there was a lot of kissing and eating and dancing. The other part takes place in the huge castle where a strict and mean protestant bishop lives with his screwfaced old maids and get up early and turn the heat way down and wear grey and other dreadful things.

The Bishop's home represents an extreme of anti-emotionalism, formalism, rationalism, hatred of sin and of sex and of imagination. I just was struck by the reductive minimalism that I saw there, and that I now seem to be seeing in my work and in my life. I know that I can sometimes be really unfriendly in life, and unforgiving in my aesthetic. Not only that, but I can explain its attraction too well for it to be mere affection - this is a real part of my life (except the getting up early part). I don't know where it seeped in - what kind of awful puritan hooligans impressed me at a tender age (actually I have a clue), but I do know that I don't want to live a life like that cold hateful Bishop.

I can't explain what I mean about this Bishop streak in my art - it may be too abstract; the black and white, the analytical posture, the distancing, the negation of graceful mistakes, fear of being seen, sharp-toothed editing, reduction, cold, black and white. Ugh - god it is really freaking me out now. I don't want to be an inhuman monster! My misanthropy is supposed to be pathetic and upside-down, not a final judgement. But I suppose I have chosen this path, and whatever path I have chosen has got to be the one I needed to have taken. Still, the question I have been asking myself this week as I lay in my sickbed was; how can I let a little light in? And then to see it reinforced in this movie... It's too much. It's always too much, but it's too much.

Now, I suppose that so many of these things on this godawful blog are writ in such a way as to be a rather useless read for a person who is not me. When I go out with a a good friend, as I did tonight, and try to make myself known, the closer I get to explaining what I think about my work, explaining in the way that I actually follow these thoughts in my head, the less clearly I am understood. I don't mind the puzzled looks, I don't worry about being seen as the wacko that I know I am, but I wish I could get through sometimes. I'm too selfish, I know, but I'm not just talking about explaining my feelings, I'm talking about talking with another person in order for us to know a little bit more about some things that are universal.

I don't know what universals really are, but I bet that Igmar Bergman would have no idea what the hell I was talking about here, really. I mean, I'm verbose, yes, thank god for free words, but I'm vague vague vague. In any case, despite the cloudiness, whatever he was trying to say in the movie, it meant a great deal to me, and that is at least part of what is meant by universal.

So how do I let a little light in?

This trailer might give you an idea of what I am talking about, even though it kind of implies it is a movie about "saving the children" (sheesh - how time magazine can you get?). Plus, hopefully it'll make you want to watch it.

automatic calculation

2007-12-18T17:29:00.000-05:00

I guess this question only makes sense in a world where calculating machines have already been invented, but I think the real question now is "what is NOT a calculator?"

Of course automatic calculators existed well before the human mind, whether we are talking about the classical Newtonian calculations performed when the momentum of two particles is exchanged in a collision, or the two more complicated quantum calculations performed during each landscaping of the gazillionfold multiverse. These mindless exchanges seem to be "embedded" calculations with no possibility for error (though perhaps some room for dice-throwing?).

When calculations are simulated in the human mind, this is when the situation becomes more interesting. Because only then is there possibility for error. What is fascinating to me (much to the chagrin of my past kindly/mean math teachers) is not good math, but bad math. The way that numbers get switched around during hadwritten long division, the misinterpretations that result in a graph that is like a impossibly complicated permutation of the original - the way a certain style of errormaking will result in it's own internally-logical illogical system so that running the mistaken answers through the equasion will result in a confirmation of the incorrect answer - surely there is a "way" to these errors, and surely this has a discernable logic that dictates a graph of our inherent mental frailty that can help us know a little bit more about the ultimate unknowable.

It is funny to think of the mind of a child hard struggling to come to terms with multiplication tables while every aspect of the very matter of their being is an effortless embodiment of a math that would instantly fry all the circuits of the world's creepiest supercomputers. Doesn't this speak to our strange effort to simulate the whole world as pointed out by Baudrillard (and probably apparent to everyone at this point?). It starts out with the back and forth click of the abacus, the strange prints of a reed in wet clay and from there grows more and more all encompassing until we find that when we talk to our own rough tools they answer back.

So non-embodied math must take the form of the contents of thought - there must be a query in the ultra-simplified language of math. Simply doing the calculations behind catching a baseball, sweating when it is hot, rolling around with your lover or constructing a sentence or string of curses does not seem to count as the contents of thought. 10 / 2 = ? What abut when the answer to a math question becomes so routine to us that we don't have to think, only answer? But what about when these queries move out into the world? What about the query, "What note does this string play when plucked?" Is the string performing a complicated calculation of its own wave-function? Are our ears part of the math-loop, or when we leave the room with the vibrations still lingering do the walls themselves take over for us? What calculations are being performed when an abacus gets sucked out of the math room by a twister and rattled back and forth a million times before it is torn to shreds and scattered all over the wild plane?

What about two dancers, holding hands and moving through space and time across the square dance floor? Lets assign a vector to their legs, their hips, their fingers, their eyes. Let's graph this as a long arabesque tube of lines, walls, folds, tunnels and sunbursts through a four-dimensional space and look at its repetitions and irregularities, the patterns that come from the music's beat, from the emotional story of the song, from the peacock and tiger egos guiding the bodies, from the unspoken language of love and sex that is communicated through the code combinations of touch.

Let's consider the real reason the machines have us caught in the matrix (from the movie, duh). It's that we are impossibly complicated embodied calculators ourselves. I don't know whether calculators have feelings themselves (although I'm inclined to say yes, being that I'm really into pan-psychism), but I don't think it's anything more than a difference in magnitude when we are electrolaced into the self-propelled worldwide calculation and when we press the buttons on a calculating machine.

With my new project "attention relay" I am trying to take the concept of the matrix and look at it positively. I am trying to create a series of wetware nodes (i.e. humans) and give it some drive or structure in such a way that this series performs the kind of calculations I was explaining before, the kind that reveals the shape of the human mistake, the shape of whatever it is we call "free choice" that floats on top of our simulation of the world around us, sometimes like an invaluable extract, a golden essence, and sometimes as a repulsive putrid scum.

Dig?

behaving predictably

2007-12-18T01:51:00.000-05:00

"...cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key,” Dr. Norman said."

To what extent is the mere usefulness of behaving predictably a cause of socially-enforced homogenization?

And then there's mirroring.

Nobody ever studies these things, but sometimes I feel the most amazing connection to the people with whom I do the old back and forth dance on the skinny sidewalk. Sometimes it can get pretty silly. But I always wonder; is my connection to this person merely an accidental product of chance? A snit in the fish school flow? Or is it a mark of some underlying connection? And if so, is this connection a highly agreeable one, or a highly disagreeable one? You might say that it is the second, for, after all, we are failing to accomplish the task at hand, namely walking by each other in a smooth and debugged fashion. This does not bode well for the possibilities of us jiving well in other areas. But then again, there is something charming about the fact that we can't help but move in syncopation, as though our bodies were trying to get some really basic fundamental message through to our wildly preoccupied 21st c. brains; "This one is special - this is the one!" And I seem to remember that many of these interactions end with an embarrassed smile, but a genuine one, and an acknowledgement of a shared experience. But then again, if you really consider the nature of the syncopated movements you see that the two bodies, being not mirrored but actually facing each other in real space, are actually performing exactly opposite movements, a dance of mistaken suppositions, disagreement of a noteable perfection. But this point of view might well ruin the logic behind a thousand forms of formal dance, and the physically undeniable law that opposites attract (and attune themselves to each others' vibrations) cannot be ignored. I suppose that in the end the feeling of syncronicity is all that matters and the old dictum that rational thought is 99% rationalization holds true.

I don't really think nonsense questions such as these have answers, but I do think that as all the larger nuggets of truth have already been culled from the gravel of nonsense that surrounds our known world, tinier and tinier truths become all we have to deal with. That is to say, a string of nonsense is still a string, and while the words may be complete gobblety-gook, the grammar of the string is a truth in itself.

Where'd it go?

2007-12-17T02:32:00.000-05:00

Remember? It was sexy to be an American once, for a few seconds before the ballooning took in. The banning of these ads was the worst thing that happened to the national psyche when I was a kid, on a real basement level I'm saying. It's the basement that makes sense here. Imagine how nice it would have been if these had been allowed to survive - the kids we wouldv'e had!

cique

2007-12-16T17:28:00.001-05:00

I'm sick. ANd when I'm sick I watch all of the prettythingsss videos. Here is one right for the holiday season.

banging & stacking

2007-12-16T00:45:00.000-05:00

I'm studying these signs for part of my video. There's a lot of useless crap out there on YouTube, but I found some gels.

Then this is this awesome pdf from New JerZEE. This is gonna make you SMART! Another example of state initiatives that work back asswards (i.e. everything I know abou drugs I learned at school.)
recognizing
And just while I'm at it, Cripwalk is fucking amazing - it's so freakin silly and dangerous looking. And when he poses with the legs out he looks just like a video game bad guy.And when he looks around he looks like an icon of looking around.

And as long as I'm dis-tracted, here's another flavor of that:

And then, as long as we are getting educational:

And I suppose we can finish up the evening with a classic from my er area. No wait, seriously, try to understand what he's saying. Nonsense runs strong in the bay.

becoming a habit

2007-12-15T19:19:00.000-05:00

Here I am at a party. It's good to have fun.
This photo is from my friend's flicker page. Thanks L-!

Guild of Barfdays

2007-12-15T19:11:00.000-05:00

For those of you who aren't hip to the square, my brother Chester has a blog, "guild of birthdays", for his ongoing travelling transformer hi-fi pro lo-fi studio recording experiment thing. He is currently not recording anything because he is touring Europe with his friend Dan Deacon, a musician who is actually quite popular with the kids these days. He just posted two songs that he had recorded before he left for Europe. I think the songs have very little to do with Dan's music, and everything to do with Chester's style as heard in some of his amazing solo material. Anyway, the most recent post has a link to his flicker page as well, and, as Chester is a great photographer who just bought a brand-new digital camera, it is a pretty cool look.

add end umm...

2007-12-15T16:32:00.000-05:00

I would like to offer a sincere apology to the invisible yet unimaginary readership of Sasparilla Simperstein; I have been unloading (uploading?) a whole lot of wordly blah-blahs here recently. I apologize for the indiscretion. I promise only that I will continue doing whatever I feel like doing here.

One of the reasons that I have been writing so much is that the semester has ended and I suddenly have time on my hands. But this is less important that the fact that I have been working on a project which is writing-based. Well, all of my work has to do with writing, but I have never really brought my "creative" writings into the work. Rather the projects focus on writing as a practical communication between two people or a conversation with a specific goal. The most creative language included in the work usually is the interpretation generated by the viewers.

After working on "Tin Can Carousel" with L- G- I was thinking about how, despite contemporary art's all-consuming-bloblike tendency to absorb all forms of expression into the gallery/museum/biennial world, there are still things that are not acceptable forms of expression. These include many aspects of writing - anything that smacks of entertainment, any jokes that are funny, any in-depth exploration of character, any appreciation of the beautiful flow of words that is not an ontological investigation into the nature of language, etc. One quite silly issue is simply LENGTH - the novel is some years away from being coopted by the art world. Some might say that artists should not ask they viewers to read long texts because there are usually no seats in the galleries, and the viewers have very little time so it would be asking too much of the viewer to present too much text. Now, I've got some sympathy with people who ask ethical questions about these relationships. But I think that these ideas disrespect the viewer by underestimating their capacity to invest time and energy into their appreciation of art (though I should say that there is a lot of stomach-turning, truly impenitrable vinyl writing glued to some walls out there). It is true that most people these days can barely read and are usually whining lazy fucks in most respects. Not that I expect that all of my viewers are my IDEAL VIEWERs who have the motivation and ability to become deeply involved with the work. I hope that I can relate to people on many levels. But I'm not going to gyp those who commit themselves to a deeper reading of the work. Huh, "reading." We can also talk about how art "uses" dance, film, poetry, music, science, sociology, the list goes on and on. There are also a thousand other modes of thought that are forbidden from the appreciation of art, some with good reason, some just seem to be a matter of tradition - most of these can be boiled down to ideas about the voice of authority, of expertise, of opinion. The righteous motivation for this exclusion is the amazing mystic truth that artists communicate with a visual language that goes places where words can never go. But I don't think that words are entirely useless in helping us find new entrances to this place.

Anyway, back to what I was saying about my writing. I think I have developed a kind of style here on this blog. Now, I don't want to confuse what I am saying about style with claiming that this is GOOD writing - this blog, with it's small readership of friends and allies, is in a semi-private space that just happens to be visible to the public, like the front yard. Anyway, the elements of style that I am concerned with include (and, really, stop me if I am being a jerk here); use of descriptive imagery that relates to my drawings, an often-tangential but basically expositional mode of communication, the use of nonsense as a device for changing our relationship to the topic and a focus on exploring metaphor through nonsense, use of language that is inspired by technology, contemporary physics, and consciousness studies, and a tone that hovers between confessional, mystic, and science-fiction. (I would like to say that I know that I am untrained in the study of language as literature, and that this analysis seems rather incomplete and shallow, but I think it will do for a start.)

Now, what I would like to focus on is the difference between the style and concerns of my writing (especially on this blog) on the one hand, and my recent artistic practice on the other hand. I think these two parts of my creative life have many similarities, but some obvious differences as well. In my mind they are not so much divorced as symbotically separated, like those seizure-prone patients who in older times had the nerves between the two hemispheres of their brains cut.

The two modes of communication inform each other, but are never united. But what I would like to do is to make a more concerted effort to bring over some of the concerns from my writing here into my practice. Why? Because this writing is actually quite personally meaningful to me. Perhaps it is easier for me to be true to my own ideas here because I am less familiar with the history, especially of contemporary writing. I have been asking myself about my art practice - asking what is worth doing, asking myself why I am working, what my "voice" is as an artist. I think part of the answer is to cross over some of the ideas from here, be they embarrassing, inappropriate, or whatever.

Now, let's move out of this analysis mode and talk about these embarrassing ideas. What would it be like if I were to allow myself to write out these futuristic fantasies in an unobfuscated style? What if I allowed my silliest characters to pop their heads into my serious drawings? What if I made the same kind of bullshit-prone mysticofuturistic annunciations in my work as I do on my blog? Ahhhh - shit. It's all good to talk this talk, but it's hard to figure out how to do it. I have some ideas though. I am making some basic changes to some work that is already started, moving some clearer ideas in, pulling it away from the colder approach I was taking earlier - an approach that kept the thousand flashing sick ideas in a bottle in my mind, an approach that used violent, rational methods to create a cold, false hand that moved people and ideas around like virtual chess pieces. I just want to let some of my disgusting self squirt through the cracks and put some nice pollution marks on my work.

Too many damn words here today. Again, it's theory and praxis. Between thought and expression lies a lifetime. Maybe I aught to be drawing pictures when I am at this damn plastic pane, but both actions, all actions, seem like I'm just jerking myself around. Only the finished product seems real to me, realler than reality, the only thing real enough to live for.

Other than a hundred thousand other reasons for living.

As a post-script I should say that I do give these things a light read-through before I publish them, but I hardly ever take anything away.

Our slow descent into rovocab...

2007-12-15T03:36:00.000-05:00

Seven hundred and sixty three. The slithering missiles fished down slowly, the moon glinthe off rain. That's the secret box there one the ground. The seed of a coded message decoded by hapless apes.

CoUnT function - mess moves in.

Talking about... Numbers? The new math-talk.

Remember when you were a kid and the kids in the bathroom started talking to you while you were in the stall? In robot voices, slowly at first, a monotone here and there, a questionable glance, a syllable stretched out, glitch in.

The fourth graders rebellion. The adorable game drones, mind tuned into a secret visual frequency. Eyes full of infotainment tricolor death-bursts, fingers muscle-memory affinity-bonded to trigger-pulling. From our externalized electronic fear-net the focus moves to the control, the square-eyed spirit crosses over... Ah! To have a hundred million ant-bodies to flow through the land in, to chew-suck every drop of food off this cold, pitiful ball.

What I am talking about is, do you remember when the gang brought you aside and told you about the robot voice? Do you remember how it felt, how it flattened the thousand flavors of sound into a single stream? How the voice found itself into your song, and how that song was a square, a constant click-track disguised as a thobbing four-beat? How this feeling bloomed inside like a neon light split, but still glowing, blowing out like a sun-puff in your earthy cave-mind? How your fingers found the keyboard, your ears the most constant beautiful voice, your hypnotic hypnosis hynotized forever and ever and ever, automatically?

And this voice? The words that machines taught you, that you loved to learn? The terminal etymology, the second cut-up language, the confidence in metal? The robot vocabulary. The rovocab. Not even noticed.

Consider those born speaking in the robot-voice. Do they even understand the human voice? Consder, as an excercise, your best robot voice. Right now, as you are reading this, try to find the digitally-flattened code that runs behind your baby babble. Can you hear it now? Give voice to the tones, or, if you are alone, keep them in the back of your throat. Now try to hold this tone in a cage, catch it where it lies, try to stop it from entering your animal-life. Can you or can you not? And for a lark, imagine this - as your everyday voice is to your robot voice, your human voice is to your everyday voice. That is, there is a vast invasion of language by the mechanical mind. This is not an abstract. We are talking about now now now. Because there are two flavors of robot-voice; the one you learned in school, and the real one that we speak all the time now, which doesn't "sound" like a cartoon robot-voice, but is one nonetheless.

So we look to talking sense, then turn around. What is the nature of "gibberish?" What about "tongues?"

Here's what I said that was wrong: There are a thousand codes buried inside you, in your flesh and blood, in your eyes and brain. Your wet self is a million times denser than a DVD. Introns and exxons, exxeggers, extra useless hangers-on - trillions of unaccessed bits floating around useless. And rarely uncoded. But the odd readings of the code are what we are concerned with tonight; the stray reader heads moving the wrong way up the track, letting out a decorated chain of movie molecules that drift into the swishing travelway up into the grand decoder, blood flows up the stairs. Then the trillion-times cross-referenced code hits the receptive spot and the chain of causation moves up an order of magnetude. The genetic "gibberish" becomes "tongues." The brain's gibberish is still a first-magnetude nonsense-set, but it is writ in our native operating system. That said, all tongues are sorted through gibberish, but not all gibberish contains tongues. Take your pick; one contains a golden nugget, scrambled, one is unscrambled compost dirt.

So if it's all codes making moves on codes, what is the point of defending the human voice against the magnetic reformation?

I don't know about this sliced-up lecture tonight. You don't have to fight the magnet unless you surround your body with iron filings.

What's worth doing?

2007-12-14T01:44:00.000-05:00

I think that's the question.

Or at least it is for me. A_ W_, my "mentor" here, and I were talking about, talking about modes of creativity. It's vague and mythy, but we were talking about how there are two kinds of creative people, the ones who think of a million ideas and want to do them all, and the ones who shoot down all their ideas as soon as they come into their heads. We (or perhaps I should only speak for myself) later shot down this idea, or rather decided they are two sides of the same coin. But I would say that I am more the first kind - that a million half-formed, purposeless, unfocused, entrancing thought come into my head and simmer there at an ultrahigh energy level. Not that many of them are ever, er, actualized. That is to say, this state of creativity is independent of whether one is a lazy bum or not. And I am lazy. And I am a bum - I've got a dirty old coat with holes in the pockets to prove it. But it doesn't matter. I have taken hold of these ideas in the past and ridden them all the way out. And sometimes they have caused me to create great piles of truly worthless crap. But I can laugh at it, or at least smile - I don't want my imaginary neighbors to think I'm nuts. God no.

I just want to say that I love dried cranberries. Yum. Yum!

So, in other words, the answer is not simply "ACTION." No. Even though ACTION is probably a better answer than INACTION, at least in term of cohering my relationship with the real world. That is to say, it is practical for an artist to have piles of crap strewn about. Because visitors may not be able to distingush. And it should be said that this is really the grace of interpretation, and a wonderful wonderful thing, but not what I am talking about right now.

I'm just talking about what is worth doing. It's like, am I thinking too top-down? Am I putting the horse before the cart? I don't know, or rather, excuse me for not wanting to put more crap out in the world, more crap in people's brains. Or maybe I just want to make the most of my time. Because, after all, whether it's good or bad art, it has the tendency to completely dissolve into the whole world's terrible noise within an unbelievably short period of time. And like cream can't get unstirred in coffee, I can't see clearly how these ideas work themselves productively into the cultural timescape. So, what I'm trying to say is, of all of the thousands of grand, picturesque inspirations that have flashed through my unbalanced and misshapen mind, WHAT IS WORTH DOING?

Oh, I know. It's the dumbest questions that push themselved to the front of the line. Perhaps we should get a little colder or something, focus on action. Focus on... What do you call it when someone offers you coffee and you want some, even though you didn't before? Desire as possibility? The inevitable as a decided-upon course of action? Is it really worth playing dumb games when they start out as mistakes? Do I want to get so close to materials that my thoughts course through them? DO I really want to put my feet on the ground when these modern times are so fucked up and uncertain? What I'm saying is that there is one way to get direction, and that is by starting something. Then you know it is crap and needs to be improved. That's the ground I was talking about (you must understand here that there is no real ground). That's the starting point. But like I said yesterday, depending on where you start, not all paths lead to the attic window. Or think nautical; when you are rowing up a river and it splits, one side is always a tributary. Tributaries are rivers too, but they are a different river.

Crap. It's just another procrastination game. But what isn't procrastination? Paying bills? Defeating your enemies? Finding someone to love? Reaching enlightenment? Offing yourself? I guess I know the feeling of losing yourself in the song, in the speed, in the kiss, in the other people's eyes, in the effort to climb higher. Is the feeling all there is? Is it stupid to ask what part of an illusion is fakest?

I have no idea what I am saying. Today I had very little to do, and what I needed to do I decided not to do. I stayed in bed all day. I slept and slept and I got up an pushed a few small objects around and stared briefly at whatever open pages happened into my line of sight, and then I slept again. I went for a walk and it was a beautiful picture-show only. I drank some wine picked at some leftovers and I am considering going to sleep again to do some productive sleeping and dreaming. I'm just joking about the productive part - I'm not going to dream my way through my thwarted subconscious desires or find any kind of psychic, mystic answers or beautiful music or terrible visions or whatever. I'm just going to lie there.

Good night.

Wait

2007-12-13T04:17:00.001-05:00

Everyone's really into that song "Zoloft" by Ween, right?

Oh man.

convincing people

2007-12-11T21:03:00.000-05:00

Oops - I had this up for a while without any comment... It's a bit of a faux-pas to put up images of Nazis without explaining what is going on...

I love this video, I love Throbbing Gristle. Their work continues to be an example of how looking at the dark side of human nature is not only a profound approach, but is a highly ethical practice. But I can't deny - I gravitate towards dark thoughts. This does not mean that I am depressed. Just that there's a realism that is only attainable if you reach down to find the foundation. Call me a mystic, but I think an unlocked attic window can be found, but I think there's a trick - the routes that don't start in the basement are all dead ends. But what a feeling frowning is!

Anyway, to right my wrong, I think that using images of Nazis is only OK if you are making mature work. If you haven't figured out what you are doing, then practice on less dangerous symbols. I am not ready (or, at this point, interested) but I use this experience in art school as justification for how my work is not more strongly concerned with ethics or openly useful in effecting sociopolitical change - I am preparing myself so that I can approach larger issues with mastery.

It takes a lot of energy and clear thinking to stop any large group of people from becoming hateful oppressive totalitarians. I don't think that my work as an artist can do anything but make a slight thump against an advancing tank, but I think it might be able to convince some people not to help build the machines of war in the first place. If you look at the new paradigm of art creation, it is that the modes of thought associated with creative visual thinking are becoming more a part of mainstream thought processes than ever before - the 15 minutes of fame have been sliced up and dissolved into everyday living. To state the obvious, look at flicker, myspace and youtube where people create images of themselves and remix visual content to create a collaged reflection of their fantastic selves. This is art practice! It's the feeling of affinity to an image, the staring, the conjuring of a representation, the potential of color form and movement as extralinguistic communication. This mode of thought has the potential to create a new kind of hyper-intelligence, a critical consciousness. There are thoughts that can't be thought with words, only with images. These thoughts are essential to finding the solutions to the problems of our times. I know that the egocentrism stereotypically associated with artists has its own risks, but it is a high energy state that contains the potential to stop tanks.

"There are several ways to convince people."

The question in my mind always was - convince them OF WHAT? Here is a great example of a subjective feeling without a subject. This serves to both amplify the emotion by isolating it and putting it on display, and to open up the range of possible interpretations by the viewer - not to "spark imagination," but to allow (force?) the listener into a relationship with the subject matter of the song that automatically reveals what subjects this intense subjectless emotion creates. A kind of test in a way - a fill-in-the-blank. Anyway, I always thought this song was about feelings of sexual aggression and manipulative power fantasies over someone else's body (what does this reveal about me, I wonder?) I never thought of it as political power, but, of course, if you consider this video they are so highly related. And that's why this video is GREAT ART - it shows how intensely private thoughts such as Genesis' mantra-like instructions on how to "convince people" are expressed on a grand scale, a horrific scale, in the real world, the sociopolitical world. The mind games behind the power relationships. The handshake, the gentle touch on the shoulder, the spell of eye contact, the group movement, the uniforms and threats, the bullets and explosions. This is how the personal and political, the public and private, the creative act and the power grab are the same. The anti-propoganda propoganda art that often passes for political art can never do what this song does.

I should love...

2007-12-11T02:35:00.000-05:00

No, we are not talking about the pile of leaves being run over by the lawnmower. That only in my lawn/attic...

We are saying, that, have you ever read something and you know that you should love it? But you can't figure out why your heart doesn't go in?

Why is that? Is it because it is disappointing that someone has already done it better than you? Or are the thoughts too different? Or does it feel like cheating? But where does the boredom come from really? And then go on to say, if even I can't be interested in the things I say I am interested in showing other people, well then, I am shit. Or is my mind simply destroyed by the world? I don't know - something somewhere is hyperexcited by these words, but where am I connected to this knowledge.

In "Visual Analogy" Barbera Stafford talks about Leibniz, the Baroque philospher and apparent "last of the visionar analogists."

First of all we should explain that analogy has as much to do with the concept of analog (as in analog synth) as with metaphor. The book points out that "nothing was exclusively one thing or the other."

Then, describing the creation of the Baroque "cabinets of curiosities" she says "not unlike the cosmos, artificial worlds required an individual hand to order them and an embodied eye to perceive them. Disparate objects, gathered in different places and at separate times, had to be 'hyperlinked' through the viewer's insightful 'jumps.'" This "required a calculus of combinations for inferrring the connections amoung thousands of unknown aspects or cyphers." The ideas expressed here have as much to do with the ideas I have been throwing around about evolution-process drawing as anything written in the technical compuper science literature I've read. Furthermore, it is a beautiful idea, a readymade explanation of my ideals in drawing and interpretation.

"His vision was of a hyper-world; less a multitude of particular persons and more a system of relations in which any person might be put together with any circumstance.... Combinatorics [or as I would say, "combinatronics"]... valorized intermediary relations, profoundly challenging Descartes divorce between objective and subjective knowledge." Great, I always thought Descartes was a fuckstick.

"Leibniz pictured the cosmos not as it appeared when reflected, static and flat, within a conventional looking-glass. Instead he posited a magically illusionistic realm of repeatable objects, beheld from various perspectives.... In this ontologized [*not a word - tho I should speak...] theory of perception, the subject of every living thing acted as the unique point of view of its soul. The body, then behaved as if it were wearing a pair of multifaceted spectacles through which the soul apprehended its environment in a slivered and distinctively personal way. Each distinct locus of matter looked out of its own angled vantage and re-presented itself to the aspect it witnessed." I love this - perhaps I can describe the sculptures I am making of my drawings as each being a "distinct locus of matter." I also love the pan-psychism that seems evident in this depiction of reality.

"The doctrine of preestablished harmony is the ultimate logic of the link. Like a digital computer, the system is both automatic and intereactive. Monads [i.e. a single unit, a "distinct locus of matter", an atom] are caught up endlessly in feedback loops. Becasue of their divinely synchronized relationship to other monads, perception comes in waves rippling across an immense reflecting pool.... In this manner God transmits the contents of our consciouness directly, vertically to all our minds and they reimage, repurpose, or rearrange information horizontally among themselves. "

It goes on to say that there are a variety of different universes experienced through the points of view of each monad, but that all these universes are only the perspectives of a single one. I love the seemingly circular logic of these ideas - in effect he is saying nothing, but in such a nice way. I am interested in how this related to the "many-worlds" theory of quantum mechanics which has emerged among physicists (albeit not among most physicists who are interested in consciousness) as more acceptable than the older Copenhagen "consciousness causes collapse" theory.

"in the least of substances
eyes as peircing as God's
could read the whole course of things in the universe."

Copying these things has helped me understand them. I'm sorry to have writ such dumb comments. I'm not really that stupid, in fact, I've been trying to think with my mind's eye more and less in words, but to no avail; they really want you to use words when you are in school and, plus, I think my mind's eye is crossed...

I'm supposed to be doing homework right now, but I think I'm freaking out about these things instead. How can I think about anything but what is interesting to my mind? I can't steer my mind - the steering wheel fell off from overuse. I have come to remember the true reason for homework; to not do it, to do something more interesting instead.

OK. I admit it, I've been freaking out, but it's only about ART and that's like a fireman freaking out about fires or something. Not newsworthy. But in the past I've made a lot of art, some of which I think is really bad. And I don't want to waste my life making more stupid shit. Or, forget my life, just my time in school - I have to know what I am doing, but this requires that at the same time I not know what I am doing so I don't kill the idea. It's hard, I think. Are these ideas going to help? Can anything help me at this point? Ha ha.

Well then, off to bed.

All dressed up...

2007-12-09T03:16:00.001-05:00

For the first time in weeks and weeks, perhaps months I am BORED. It feels amazing - you should really try it out. It's like, there's not concrete TASK at hand, but yet I am not asleep. Odd.

What I am trying to say is that my semester is effectively over. With only a few trivial tasks to finish up I have had the chance to do things like do laundry, go shopping, clean my room. Whee indeed! The floor is a kind of orangish-brown, apparently.

While I am chatting, I thought I should apologize for being so selfish recently, not thinking of my readership and posting so many pictures of myself (due mainly to a friend who is quick with the shutter). It's a consequence of the artificial pressure - I guess that is part of what I came to school for, but not sure if it's right for me. Whatever, it's more than I can approach. Don't know why I feel the need to write, but I do it anyway. Whether that's good or bad, huh, whatever, I don't want to be a futuro-reporter, and I don't want to drill holes in my brain for some power-player's amusement. Just want to occassionally make a tiny tap of a connection, even if it happens in a lazy hazy crazy way.

Now, even though I had a very funny night Friday, ending up singing Blue Hawaii at a KaraOke Bar somewhere, I was prepared to go out again tonight, as there is a pile of leaves rustling in the wind that I would like to get to know. Beautiful something strange and far. Well, it's only the movement. Or prehaps that's just my metaphor for desperation, although it's in retreat tonight. Anyway, I missed my connection, so now here I am, really, with clothes that match and are even clean and perhaps nice. I hear the sirens swimming through the muffled bassbeats, charges racing through the city's obscure party-points. But I think I'll read a book or something. Wonderful!

All my love to my neglected friends, who, sadly, are used to my inconsistency.

Tangible User Interface

2007-12-07T01:33:00.000-05:00

In which the world makes another in a series of hopeless attempts to stop dancing and get another drink...

5:30 AM, the fog was just beginning to turn into rain, a knife was lying lightly on a twisted heap of clothes, smart-trash and electronic componants on the artist's unbearable bedroom floor. The computer blinked it's cold, alien-blue eye thirty times a second. Without warning the air started vibrating, collapsing, erasing itself, passing notes to the mean students at the back of the class. Dreamland border patrol falling behind. The clementine rolled over and grimaced at its friend the square-jaw topiary, leaves parting to reveal red number shadows, inside out now, make sense alarm, arm reach out, stop. Good morning, finger. Blood gushed, cold coffee slithered, sloppy shoes pushed us up the hill, miles of graceless wire did not intend harm. Enter the well-lit conference room. A error, a sagging bubble-skin, a lazy prayer; a bit of peel should conduct as well as a finger. Quickly now team, jam it onto the chip and press his nose to make him smile, flicker-frown, smile.

Woooog!

2007-12-05T04:17:00.000-05:00

Interacting with my virtual double

2007-12-02T19:13:00.000-05:00

I am pretty much a fourscore nerd these days. Last night I was up righting code until 4:30 something like. I didn't figuire out the if... else... statements, but I found a workaround. It's not great code, but it works. But it's a bitch to get the Arduino programme to communicate with Processing.

So what? Am I talking about? It's... the interface by which I get physical things like motors, lights, force sensors, and switches to communicate with my computer. Hello world, it's Arduino..

It's... A project to create these puppets that you squeeze when you are angry and push on the nose when you are sad. Yes, my life has led me here. Or something. Beach balls bouncing. Spinning in cybernetic superposition. Big bang, little clap. That has nothing to do with it.

So, when you squeeze it the Arduino communicates some values to "processing" - a program that uses a code based on c++ to run java thingys. Cause I'm a expert that way. It displays an image of my face. When you squeeze me I get angry. Maybe that's why I'm so unloveable. I mean him. No. That's me squeezing the force sensor. I think it's on 3/4 happiness with no negative feelings at all - seems a perfect match. When you press the nose and squeeze the body at the same time it gets confused...

My left arm is the same length as my right arm in real life.

Farley is drinking green tea and eating organic dried cranberries from the Berkeley bowl.

This is not my room.

Where I will be researching...

2007-12-01T20:07:00.001-05:00

I am pretty excited about this website.

I'm not excited because I seem to have made a boo-boo with one of my friends. Fuck you, MISUNDERSTANDING! I will stop you! I will!

ZAPP!!!

So this post makes no sense. So who cares. So sue me.

how to tie your shoes

2007-11-26T02:40:00.000-05:00

17 ways on this site.

Publique!

2007-11-24T02:02:00.000-05:00

I just heard from someone who said they thought that reading my blog would be an invasion of my privacy. Now, you can feel that way if you want to, but it is not required. This is all public stuff, just maybe not a full-on part of the advertizing world. FameIsMagic and I were squeeking about this at a bar sometime in the distant past; it's just that one has to put all one's private things up in public for all to see these days. No. Yeah. All I want are hits hits hits and after that comments, and after the voracious biographer at the end of history can gnaw on my bones.

My spam mail says, "Make your tiny lace a true symbol of your power."

Polyworld

2007-11-24T01:01:00.001-05:00

Check our this video on evolutionary design of artificially-intelligent neural-net computers.

This is an interesting google techtalk by Virgil Griffith. It's a little raw, but the ideas are exactly what I am interested in recently (there may be some parallels to the project I was sharing below). There are also some pretty amazing visuals.

When I was watching this I was asking a bunch of questions about the fundamental assumptions of the project. Perhaps this is just because I am an artist and want to use these ideas for my own work, but also I feel as though these ideas can be so much more than just a way to study artificial intelligence. First of all, this simulation is run in order to understand how neural-nets function. Of course this makes it possible to "tweak" the system and set the stage for efficient evolution, but it strikes me that the tweaking was not wide-ranging enough - that chance should be used in the tweaking of the environment as well (because intelligent-design is usually bad design). But also it seems that understanding these systems may be irrelevant to their final use. They aren't made to be understood in the way that traditional computing systems are understood. After all, nobody looks at traditional digital computers and looks at how the random errors in their code function to make them more fit (or at least nobody did until the development of neural-net computing). Then, I don't know why these kinds of algorithms need to be run on computers at all. What if we looked to Von Ahn's "wet ware" concept and tried to create detailed and self-correcting algorithms that used humans as the nodes or agents? How can we use this simulation as a plan for both using our brains more efficiently and structuring society more democratically? These concepts are not immediately useful to the development of artificially-intelligent computers, but it seems to me that they are already useful in some way.

Artistically, these areas have been explored to an extent (for examples, read here), but most of the work seems to be an aesthetically-enhanced version of the "life" screensaver. I am searching for ways to use the ideas from simulations like Polyworld, not to replicate its look or even function. The use-value may be entirely outside the realm of computer simulations. Perhaps they will be performative, perhaps the art will simply seek to explain the process, perhaps the work will be some kind of an adaption of algorithms taken from these experiements, but adapted to new circumstances.

Finally, it seems as though our fucked-up society (so well-spoken today...) is flailing around (like an unevolved virtual agent) for a new way of seeing itself. Seeing is the first step to understanding and taking action. Part of our perception of ourselves is the metaphor we use to define ourselves. I think this project and many other developments in evolutionary studies, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence research are leading to establishment of a new analogy by which to judge ourselves.

One of our goals as artists is to give people something new to see. We accomplish this not by creating an image that has never been seen before, but by leading the viewer down a visual path that sneaks by the locked gates of perception, allowing them to see the commonplace in a revolutionary way.

Artificial deadlines!

2007-11-23T22:02:00.000-05:00

You don't force a tree to grow!

You don't pull the chick from the egg!

You don't transfer the wave closer to the shore!

How can any pleasing shape result in the application of gross pressure and cut-off points? No no! Impossible!

brussels sprouts

2007-11-22T16:06:00.001-05:00

This is the recipe I use.

Anne Laplantine

2007-11-21T17:28:00.000-05:00

I am just going to post these videos by the artist and musician Anne Laplantine. This work deals with some difficult political issues, and asks some tough questions about the role of the artist, but I think it is worth looking at and thinking about. I don't want to give my interpretation of the work here so as not to stand between you and the work. I should warn you that there are some violent images in these videos.

I should also say that you can't experience this work fully without visiting Laplantine's YouTube page. Some of these videos are responses to other videos, and often this relationship is as important as the work itself. I can't show how this works here and this page ends up being a little decadent in that it focuses on only part of her work (specifically the more finished work, especially ones with her songs). So check out her page.

cho seung-hui

touched

eric in automn leaves

dancing

the forest

Can you do me a favor?

silence is

asleep

me war

fight fights

dear world

dicipline

the forest

just for fun

do you believe in magic

in my hands

progress report

2007-11-18T16:15:00.000-05:00

A few entries ago I was talking about a process-based drawing experiment that I was planning to carry out with several unsuspecting 'victs and uh, here's the loot. This weekend I've been working on a second experiment that will explore the ways in which this process can be fine-tuned.

I'm not going to bother doing a good job explaining how this process worked - it's a chore. There are quite specific directions, and one of my challenges has been to simplify the process.

So, I drew (on one sheet of paper with pencil) nine diagramatic pix. Here's what those original collection of pix looked like (I redrew them in the same way on each of the sheets):

Each of these collections was associated with a phrase (which can be found on that previous entry)and the participant's job was to judge how well the pix served as an abstract metaphorical illustration for the phrase. This is a pretty odd task in the first place, and as you will see from the following examples, gross tuning is needed.

The participants were asked to select 3 pix that they felt were irrelevant or bad illustrations of the phrase, and ERASE them. They were also asked to choose the 3 pix that best illustrated the phrase and, somewhere nearby the original, copy the drawings, but in an "improved" way - a few simple changes to make the drawings better illustrate the metaphor. In the end how many drawings should there have been, dear reader? There should have been the same amount as in the beginning - nine. Then the paper was passed to a new person to repeat the process.

The point of this game is to see if it is possible to create an algorithm incorporating an obliquely-concerned "wet-ware" filter that will create drawings that have greater fitness in terms of a certain task. The goals are both to see what these drawings would look like and to see if and how this process can work. I say "obliquely-concerned" because if the concern were direct this would be a simple creative act. But through a strict set of rules the intentions of the participants are partially subverted. The process can't be described as fully automatic, or even objective goal-based, but neither can it be fully explained in the language of individual creative drawing. The challenge is finding a balance here.

There were lots of technical problems with this experiment.

The first was that the directions were too hard to follow (although my first urge is to blame the participants for not being bright enough, this is less attractive not because it is untrue, but because it is boring - of course humans are foolish... if approached wrong - the point of this experiement is to take advantage of human's uncanny ablitiy to occasionally be smart). Problems included people not erasing the original pix so that the total number started multiplying, and people whose drawings were more accurately described as completely novel rather than "improvements." So I have to make the directions clearer or maintain stricter control over the process (this is the more likely of the two choices, between dull simplicity, inevitable chaos, and authoritarianism I guess the last is the most relevant considering the world we live in).

The second problem with this experiment has to do with the tendency towards representational drawing. The goal of this excercise is to create images that say something new about the nature of these phrases, to explore the nature of abstraction, to create visual analogies that have something new to say, to see if there are any essential truths about the mind's ability to form nonlinguistic representation. However it seems that the natural urge is for people (in this case art students) to tend towards simple representative illustration. I don't have a knee-jerk reaction to illustration, but I think it is less interesting in this case because it creates pix that closely approximate linguistic communication - where the communicative ability of the drawings could be effected more accurately and efficiently by replacing them with words. In this case the excercise will result in the production of tautologies, inefficient, noisy ones at that.

I am working on a solution to this problem. I can't discuss it at this point.

Here are a few examples of the results. I have chosen the most successful as I want to show what this process could be, rather than the traps it can fall into (anti-entropic processes are more interesting than... that other shit):

As usual, click image for more details.

I am looking for advice or feedback on this...

Don't Forget the Amnestics

2007-11-17T15:51:00.000-05:00

Are you plagued by troublesome thoughts?

Do you sometimes find yourself between two places?

Is "just being" unduly effortful?

Does the rate at which time passes not fit your needs?

The answer is waiting in a pill. Take amnesia all the time. It's easy easy easy. It's easy easy easy easy. Then you won't have to drive a car. Then you won't have to read books or watch movies. Then we can go fwd together, and go through, and sidewalks can be twice as thin, and dating services, and walls, and we can go fwd together fluently. I can't recall. I was not a witness. I wasn't there. Ant and Bee. Spider and Hogfish. This and that. It dissolves. In water. In tonic water. And it goes down smooth. Smoothly. Much love from the year time stopping observed, fireworks, applause, 2039.

166

2007-11-16T04:56:00.000-05:00

I'm not even sure if I'm counting right.

Anyway. Those images are coming. I'm pretty excited about them in that unpredictable things happened. Not in the images themselves, but in the process, in the relationship between me and the students "playing" my "game." The ones who didn't follow the rules, the ones who did not meet my expectations, and the ones who exceeded them. OK. They are on the way. I have "reviews" soon - sounds violent indeed. This pressure will show itself.

And I would like to say "thank you" to the two friends who were nice to me today, and the two strangers who treated me like a human. That really means a lot to me.

165th post

2007-11-14T03:50:00.000-05:00

But who's counting the days til dooming drops?

I'm doing another in a series of endless useless experiments involving forcing forms through people's eye-brain-hands to change them to show something. This will be presented to a group of undergraduates to prove some arcane and decadent point in my mind about the thickness of shells and the location of secret air conditioners. It's a metaphor study, an analogy test. I'm celebrating a live token by picking it apart. Fucking bedrooms. Design flaws, seaweed blood.

This one involves a list of criteria. In my ploverpoint presentation I claim that this list "relates to states of mind experienced in communication." And I quote! So my question, my finely barbed and agitated reader, is; does this list in any way fit the description?

What other phrases may work?

Do you understand what I am getting at? Perhaps you understand better than me. Maybe you can share me, share me to me. It's fun to share before shearing. To let a cloud float down to earth.

Here presented in oops-sorted order (I drooped another domed liver on the ptarmigan, a penny in the hopper, the floor. Again, I dropped the papers). Here:

Go off on a tangent.
My mind is empty.
I really understand what you're saying.
That's what I believe.
I don't wanna talk.
Paying attention is such a chore.
It can never be expressed in words.
I couldn't disagree more.
My thoughts are racing.
My intuition tells me so.
I can't make up my mind.
It's just a vague idea.
Suddenly everything makes sense.
These thoughts are driving me mad.
Spacing out!
I just can't believe it's true.
I figured it out.
My brain's not working.
I can't find the right words.

Strobiscopic Sircumstance thanks you for your help.

messy room

2007-11-13T02:28:00.001-05:00

These are images of how messy my room was when I was preparing for the show. It's a little cleaner now.

just for fun: electronics store

I've been writing a lot in my blog lately because the show is over, but I feel as though I can't get the distance to say anything too clear about what is going on in my mind. I wish I could always have this kind of clarity and purposefulness, but the constant pressure to create work, work that is constantly advancing, it seems to take some of the wind out of my sails.

mass mind

2007-11-12T20:34:00.000-05:00

This article talks about some of the issues I am interested in:

swarming

developments

2007-11-12T14:45:00.000-05:00

I posted my response to that review; I spent some time thinking about what position to take. I'm really interested in distance, so I ended up talking a lot about that. Dina is much more direct.

That said, I don't have much time to spare these days, so I don't think this is going to go too far.

back to the review

Skewered

2007-11-11T16:19:00.000-05:00

Now seriously folks...

This is an image of the instrument I made that uses a servo motor to change the length of a skewer (and therefore the pitch and timbre). The position of the bridge (here the bump at the center of the CD case) is controlled by twisting a knob (which is just a simple potentiometer such as in a volume-control knob). This is just a learning excercise for me; it is just a cardboard model, and I'm not really interested in creating musical instruments at this point in my artistic practice. But I think the ability to use simple devices to control the motion of a physical object will be useful to me. I have plans to start making sculptures from my drawings - simple small toylike objects with a degree of interactivity that enables a certain kind of PLAY which relates to my recent interest in using play to process infromation on a pan-consciouness/actor-network level by using algorithms that capitalize on what Luis von Ahn calls WETWARE - i.e. decisions made by our brains that process information the centrality of which we are not aware of.

Rimba-rimbaaaaaaaaaaaaa - qurrrt; bloink! Bloink! P't-dddd'-ddd'-dd'-d-'!

This is a pretty bad image. In this instrument, my contribution in in the foreground. It is controlled with one set of two knobs you can see behind.

In other news, I am still processing the review of Howwa We Ana - However We Wanna. I am trying to take it seriously so that I can understand the way people react to the show (it is actually quite hard to get honest critical opinions on any work). But because the language used in the review is challenging for me - either because it is more academic than I am used to or because the basic stance expressed is so different from mine - I am having trouble with it. I'd like to read more by the critic to get an idea of his basic ideology so that I can use this as a reference-point. I am pretty upset not that this review was negative (it's great that anyone would think it was important enough to write about), but that there were no positive reviews published as I think the show was generally well-received. Oh well - I'm too busy to let it bother me.

Review!

2007-11-11T04:35:00.000-05:00

Hey everyone! My show got reviewed! Yay!

OK. So it's (judgement removed by me as premature). Ouch!

But what are you going to do? Check it out:

Short Order Review: Requesting a Definition of Play

I sur

2007-11-08T03:16:00.001-05:00

vived my crit!

opposition

2007-11-07T13:23:00.000-05:00

When someone says I don't do something I do soomething. When Alexis says not to write i write.

Last night I had a beautiful dream. I had a record. It played landscapes. The kind of painting of landscapes I used to imagine I would do, working in the field in the summer, selling my paintings at flea markets and I could have short hair, sleeping in a tent, getting stoned with weirdoes and telling stories with structure, knowing what made that goo different colors and how the mix slowed the drying. I never did it. There was a record, like I said, and it had a fleet of glockenspeiels and xylophones, just like I always imagined I would lead a fleet of percussion instruments to make a beautiful music. Not an electric keyboard. I didn't do that either. What did I do? I don't know. The dream said it was the wrong thing. It was the garbage truck coming. Just a bad night of nerves. I could still sing the song in the shower, and it was beautiful, but that's an almost everyday occurance now - they arent' pretty after. They are designed to get me out of bed and expunge my nostolgia and sleepbuddies by the time a shower is finished. No they don't work fo that. But they don't work for anything else either.

And on an un related note, this is what I do for "homework" hahahahaha.

Chaliff Dance

2007-11-03T03:39:00.000-05:00

I thought I would take the advice of pretty much everyone who came to "Howwa We Ana - However We Wanna" and put this video up on YouTube. Even though it looks kind of silly out of context, and the idea changes a lot, I figure it is best to err on the side of sharing things.

All the "Chaliffs" in the show were preceded by a text that took the form of a "chat" and served to explain the process by which the work was created.

Chaliff Dance

Eff: I will film myself dancing a made-up dance. Then I will write down its choreography and send you the directions. I will dress formally and it would only be right if you would, too. Oh - I don't send you the video - that would ruin it!
Dina: I am also going to choreograph a dance, film myself dancing my dance, and send you the written directions. Then I will film myself trying to follow your steps.
Eff: And I will film myself trying to dance your dance.
Eff: Wait - it's a little confusing. So, I dance my dance and you dance my dance?
Dina: We both dance our own dance, but only once at the beginning, then we dance the other person's dance by following each other’s written dance instructions.
Eff: I don't think they will get totally coordinated. Or even semi-coordinated…
Dina: They might, though. What music should we use?

it went well

2007-11-01T16:24:00.001-05:00

I don't seem to get a whole lot of time to write these days - too bad - although it is natural I suppose.

The show went well indeed. The set-up was a little hectic due to the gremlins that always seem to be sitting on my back, but perhaps it is just because they know that I am their friend in the neverending battle against a future dominated by a fluid mechanical/cybernetic simulation that replaces all that is good and true. Or perhaps I just don't consider simplicity a virtue.

I can't really say that much about the show because it is too soon and I am still in a state of prelexical superposition waiting for things to stop making sense so I can understand them and bang them out. Say what?

I am very happy with the work. I think it is strange, stupid, obvious, subtle, smart, normalized. Unsetting opposites making my soup less clear. It's good. I don't know. It's a new angle so it is disorienting. My classmates and new friends have not yet seen the work as it is located rather distantly for Berkeley students, but they will be out there next week and this is something I care about most deeply. And another reason not to talk about it - I wanna stay cloud so that the light can come in in a different pattern. That would be nice.

I'm so sleepy it's like time lag. Or maybe this computer is busted. Whatev.

I plan on putting as much of the show as I can up on-line sometime soon. So we'll wait for that huh?

Howwa We Ana - However We Wanna

2007-10-20T22:23:00.000-05:00

I have been impossibly busy lately. It was "midterms" week; a-hahahahahaha! The show I'm doing with Dina goes up next week. No. This week Aaaaaaaaalkadkjsdkjsdf!!!!!!

Here is the image on the postcards with the press release following:

(Click on image for larger image)

Howwa We Ana - However We Wanna
A collaborative exhibition by Dina Danish and Farley Gwazda
text, video performance, sound recordings and drawings

October 29 through November 13, 2007
Opening Monday, October 29, 6 to 8 PM

PLAySPACE Gallery
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
PLAySPACE site

In Howwa We Ana – However We Wanna Dina Danish and Farley Gwazda explore the process of getting to know each other through various forms of communication. The piece is structured by exaggerating the dialectic between SERIOUS and PLAYFUL approaches.

The SERIOUS is embodied in a series of Chaliffs (“tchay-lif” - a word derived from challenge and motive) which take the form of various experiments or games with strict rules and agreed-upon goals. These are defined by the media through which they are created and documented.

The PLAYFUL is embodied in the performance of these Chaliffs, the goals of which are perhaps impossible to achieve. The artists recognize miscommunication as part of the process and operate with a healthy disrespect for their own rules.

The artists had met only once before starting this project, and have since been collaborating through emails, instant-messenger, text-messages, YouTube and face-to-face communication.

Danish and Gwazda are currently MFA candidates at California College of the Arts and U.C. Berkeley, respectively.

Shadow Puppetry

2007-10-12T01:49:00.000-05:00

Here is a strange and wildly beautiful shadow puppet show from my friend and classmate Lydia Greer. If you enjoy this look at her other videos as well at her youtube page.
1

2

Making stuuuuuuuuff

2007-10-08T02:38:00.000-05:00

Most of my time the past couple days )weeks?( has been devoted to Howwa we ana. I am lucky to be working with Dina - I am learning a lot every time we cross paths. Like today I learned that the 22 Bus fucking sucks.

But these past few days I have been actually constructing a physical object as well - it is a TELEPROMPTER (you know, the thing they put in front of a camera so that the news achor can read her lines while looking right into the camera). So, no, it's not really art, just a specific tool - non-homemade teleprompters are a little pricy - I saw one for $4500 bucks. The thing is, it is actually a very simple idea - a piece of glass works like a mirror to reflect the screen of a laptop with a camera hidden in a black box behind it (well, it's moderately simple...), but, the thing is, it requires a bit of precision construction, especially because it needs to be at least partially collapsible. I've been thinking a lot about what absolute marvels tripods are - they are so dependable and precise and perfectly balancy, and they fold up into tiny little bite-sized pockets of love. All the things my teleprompter won't be. But, ah well.

.

2007-10-03T16:13:00.000-05:00

Skillet died today. She was a woof-dog.

PLAySPACE show

2007-10-03T13:32:00.001-05:00

I have been working on a project with my friend Dina Danish called "HOWWA WE ANA - HOWEVER WE WANNA." The title works as an example of the show's concerns. "Howwa we ana" is what Dina said when I asked her to say "you and me" in Arabic (of which Dina is a native speaker), but during the course of a phone conversation I misunderstood her (deliberately?) as saying "However we wanna." On top of that, "Howwa we ana" actually translates as "him and me;" a hidden layer of structural misunderstanding or intentional trickery that is central to the creation of the work. The fact that the content of the work escapes the narrow confines of the experimental space and spills out to transform real world conditions is, for me, what makes this an art piece and not just a communication experiment or a game between friends.

I have been describing "howwa we ana - however we wanna" as an exploration of the process of getting to know someone through a series of procedures or games in the mode of SERIOUS PLAY. This is a decent summary, but the meaning of the work is morphing to me as my methodology of making art is challenged by, conflicts with, and is added to by Dina's. I think the project represents a meeting of our two styles in a way that I can be proud of - it was not a gracious agreement, but more like the free competion of our styles in a market of ideas. Or rather like two puppies play-fighting.

I have been completely obsessed and deeply involved in this project, and I would like to share more of our results here as the show approaches.

For now, there is but one tiny placeholder at the website, but more is surely to come as we arrange the publicity materials for the show:
PLAySPACE site

It's __________ Accurate

2007-10-03T01:35:00.000-05:00

1-
A. is
B. it's
C. 's
D. not
E. isn't

2-
A. sporty
B. scary
C. posh
D. baby
E. ginger

metaphor

2007-10-01T18:00:00.001-05:00

I am thinking about doing something with this strange list of metaphors:

exhaustive lists of use of metaphor to convey meaning in language.

As you may notice, it is related to the work of George Lakoff, a Berkeley Prof. Not new stuff, but I was searching for a place to start this project of using wetware to design images - the starting point is kind of the most difficult thing for me.

An answer to some questions

2007-09-30T02:16:00.000-05:00

What is the relationship of totalitarianism to simplicity? Perhaps this series from the BBC may offer some answers:

I won't attempt to do the idea justice here, but it has something to do with simplistic models of human behavior based on outmoded behavioralist theories that ignore the workings of the mind and focus on discrete and quantifiable human actions. These models depict humans devoid of altruism, emotion, subtlety, and any true sense of individuality. The fact that humans embody all these things skews the math of these economic models, rendering them useless. Complexity is despised because it makes the ruling class' goal of creating a completely mechanized society unattainable. These videos are visually entertaining, well researched and well worth watching. It is worth going back to start the series from the beginning.

And in other "answers;" just as a present to my most loyal readers who have slogged through yesterday's post on infinitely tall pyramids, I present the words of one of the earliest bloggers, one who seems to be thinking along the same lines:

"Perspective is no more than a scientific demonstration in which experience shows us that every object sends its image to the eye by a pyramid of lines, and which shows that bodies of equal size will create a pyramid of larger or smaller size, according to their distance. A pyramid of lines are those which start from both the surface and the edges of the objects in question and which converge from a distance into a single point. A point is that which has no dimensions and is indivisible. This point is placed in the eye and receives all the points of the pyramid of lines.

The air is filled with an infinite number of images of all the objects in it. All these images are represented everywhere, all these images combine together: if you place two mirrors in such a way that they face each other perfectly, the first mirror will reflect into the second mirror and the second mirror will reflect into the first mirror. So: the first mirror takes the image of the second mirror and the second mirror takes the image of the first mirror, and each mirror takes the image of the other on to infinity, each mirror having within it a smaller mirror. This proves, by experience, that every object sends its image to every spot where that object can be seen. The reverse is also true: that very same object sending its image to every spot can also receive the images of all objects placed in front of it. Therefore, the human eye sends out its image through the air to all objects placed in front of it, including other eyes, and it also receives all the images of all the objects placed in front of it; it receives these images on its surface, communicates them to the common sense, which judges them, and if pleased with them, communicates them to the memory. As a result of this, I believe that the invisible images in the eye are also communicated to the object, as the image of the object is communicated to the eye."

- Leonardo da Vinci

ONE BIT

2007-09-29T16:53:00.000-05:00

The difference between one and zero in one line of code - whether in a computer or in the universe at large - can make a huge difference, or it can be completely buried in the all-pervasive fuzz-noise. There are theorists who analyse the universe as being essentially digital in nature - certainly it is a more logical way of breaking shit down than the "trialectic" we were he-hawwing about here earlier...). The trick is that the difference lies essentially in where in the architecture of the code the zero or one is reversed. In your DNA a single bit of information can turn on or off a huge section of code - a switch. But every event in the universe functions as a kind of switch. From some vantage point, every event in the universe is the apex of an infinitely tall pyramid. Or it may be an insignificant bit of dust buried in the foundation (whereever the foundation of an infinitely tall pyramid may be located...).

As I created these images as a metaphor for this idea, I also was thinking about how pattern is essentially a function of our perception, a symptom of consciousness. After all, the bit doesn't care if it is part of a smooth tiling or an irritating obstruction. The stone doesn't care whether it is eroding into the sand or crushing someone's skull. The pyramid spreads out from our own center of focus, constantly reordering the universe from the inside out, fading into the insignificant distance.

From the wikipedia article on informational physics:
"...every ‘it’ – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely – even if in some contexts indirectly – from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom – a very deep bottom, in most instances – an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe” (John Archibald Wheeler [1990]"

COSMIC

2007-09-29T16:30:00.000-05:00

FREAK

complication

2007-09-28T03:03:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about complication recently. Specifically, I've been thinking about the often poorly-taken-advantage-of subtlety of the senses and mind and how that relates to uncanny synchronous moments of seemingly more-than-perfect communication with others. Also, how does complexity arise in artificial situations? What is seen as complicated? How does this explain how our minds process sensory input? Complexity in aesthetics; it is used as both a positive and negative attribute. What does it mean to have complexity in art? When does it work? When does it not work? Is the universe inherently a complicated or uncomplicated place; are the physicists who are upset to see the seemingly endless multiplicity of potential solutions to string theory actually on the right path? There is no reason to assume that the universe's laws are simple and easily expressed.

Finally, here is a quote from an article in the NYTimes about the recent government crackdown on the protesters in Burma; a rebuff from the Chinese who most shamefully blocked the Security Council's resolution to take action to avert this situation:

"As Myanmar’s chief international patron, China blocked an effort on Wednesday by the United States and European countries to have the Security Council condemn the violent crackdown. On Thursday, while not going as far as Mr. Bush might have wished, China added its voice to criticism from abroad when it publicly called for restraint.
“As a neighbor, China is extremely concerned about the situation in Myanmar,” the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said at a news briefing in Beijing. “China hopes that all parties in Myanmar exercise restraint and properly handle the current issue so as to ensure the situation there does not escalate and get complicated.” "

Complicated; what is it about totalitarian governments that oppose complication? What about recent events in our own government? Is complication a humanist value?

reverse frustration --- polar coordinates

2007-09-23T17:42:00.000-05:00

Double spiral goes in and out --- it's the help we are looking for. In and out laughter. In laugher is ha ha ha. Out laughter is ha ha ha. Out of pockets. One tiny mind state holds true for a bit, then swirls into chaos. This is what is meant by situation. One circuit of social relations. Teaching technique means fake pocket. Challenging the sides of pocket. Pocket is made of things you can't say to people. One is things not allowed to say. Two is things not able to imagine. Both sides of pockets can develop holes. This is an information key. Do the right thing; think sideways. Choruses unite through time, produce warbling. Warbling is impossible in fake media time. Barbershop quartets are subtle, TV's in sync are blunt. Blunt is the tool of great strength, tiny sharp blades are the tools of the powerless operators. This is the embedded code, compass measures the invisible --- to make the magic visible is to deactivate it. Carry any secret outside of the forbidden area and it is powerless. Each law has an inverse law that is on the books somewhere.

Soft subtle growling and sneer is the name of my new band.

Reading

2007-09-21T03:13:00.000-05:00

Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious

K - I think I was with you when you bought this book. I find that you often mention books, and then I forget about them, and then months or years later I run into them and it's like - duh - I should have read this years ago. So, please be more considerate and repeat yourself until you get through my thick skull. I know it seems like all I talk about are obscure topics in consciousness studies and art theory, but I have no clue what the next step is and am always searching around. Books all around my bed!

Expertise

2007-09-21T02:40:00.001-05:00

Recently I am working on Howwa We Ana, but I am also doing my own work. I've been shooting video - lots of shots of my face while I carry out various mysterious experiments, mostly me acting like a bozo. Oh yeah. Hopefully I will post some of the rejects at some point. But the project I am planning for the long term (though before the placebo machine sculptures) is an experiment on evolutionary growth of non-linguistic communicative symbols that was inspited by these new microchips that design themselves. I've got a whole thing planned out, and it isn't tricky at all (like the last idea up here) so I can feel comfy with it. There's gonna be a lot of drawing and talking - what else? For this I am going to need experts. Any experts will do, really, which is great because there are a million experts at Berkeley although nobody can really understand exactly what they are experts on. By which I mean most of their topics are super-specialized. Though I have found people to be most kind when explaining their research to me, Mr. bug brain art student. Well...

I forget what path exactly lead me here:
consciousness journal review site
I think it was a prof at Berkeley who is writing (second article) on the Quantum theory of mind - which is one of the most interesting things anyone is researching these days. I would like to learn more about it so that I can design projects that take it into account, but I am afraid that my brain is still to small to understand it.

Anyway, while trying to get something done for one project (choreography), I took a break and was reading about these chips - well, looking at the pictures mainly - and fell asleep, and I woke up and suddenly I knew how to do this project - it involves duplicating drawings by destroying the original, while still keeping a copy of the original, and it involves letting one idea go to gain another - basically decentralizing the authority of the drawings. It sounds very abstract, but really it is quite practical. The algorithm for the project is very clear, and it uses von Ahn's idea of wetware in a way that starts out rational, but through the loss of information automatically becomes more of an artistic, intuitive exploration of form, conducted through a node system of wetware. I can't reveal the way the project works. This is not because I have artistic hangups, but that if the participants knew exactly what my goals were it would invalidate the experiment. But it is not tricky yo.

I think my sciatic nerve has decided to quit monopolizing my attention - although I am out of ibuprofin, so we will see what happens tomorrow morning. Tomorrow (after meeting with a group of people to talk over these interactive puppets we are making for this woman's project doing playback theater with migrant workers in China...) I am going to go DANCE in the studio. YAAAAAAAAY!!!! Too bad it's so far away - I think it's the bike that makes my back mad (I wrote "my mack bad" - I hear bikes can do that as well...). But it's all worth at it because my choreography is AWESOME. For procedural reasons I can't reveal what it's like at all, but I can say, "oh gya no dao we are chika..." Anyway, it's not really the choreography that is awesome, it is the whole project. Howwa We Ana is so important to me.

I should say goodnight. Goodnight.

fake turing test

2007-09-19T12:03:00.000-05:00

I'd like to have a contest where 16 or so people go toe to toe, trying to prove that they are human. None of the participants would know what was going on, and the judges wouldn't either. At the end of each round the judges would write opinions on why they made their decision (with quotes). At the end there would be one winner - the most human human - and a litany of evidence.

The aesthetics of the mechanical placebo

2007-09-17T17:48:00.000-05:00

I am trying to come up with ideas for a project to challenge my programming skills in this computer interactions class I am taking. These are just some notes.

SELF and machines

When you are driving a car or riding a bike, the machine is a natural extension of your body both in that you grow to intuitively understand the controls, but also to identify with the machine as part of your body - the physical manifestation of your SELF extends to objects under your direct control, not only to your body. For example, if something passes too close by your car, you may wince - anticipating pain although there is no sensory feedback. If you are driving uphill you may feel as though you are making an extra effort (though this may be related to the extra pressure that may be exerted on the gas pedal or changing sound of the engine). And when parking a car you are accustomed to, you may intuitively know when the car is approaching the curb or the car behind.

This article investigates this idea more scientifically and shows an interesting experiment (it has been rather sensationally promoted as the induction of an out-of-body experience in a clinical setting):article about identification of the self and body

THE PLACEBO EFFECT and the role of the mind

I am interested in the placebo effect as an investigation of the role of faith and consciousness over the material world, of the meaning of expertise and authority. Some facts: the general consensus on this controversial and hard-to-measure effect is that an average of 35% of patients in a clinical trial will be relieved by a sugar pill alone. The effect is not only mental, it is physical (though this is an artificial distinction - our minds are physical too); 75% of patients given a placebo for pain medication spontaneously release opioids in their brains. The circumstances in which a placebo is given are important; a placebo that involves ingestion, injection, or incision is often more powerful than a non-invasive technique. A placebo given
by an authority figure is more effective. Of course, a patient who knows they have been given a placebo will not show any evidence of the placebo effect.

The AESTHETICS of medical pseudo-scientific/sci-fi alternative medicine MACHINEs

This topic relates to the placebo effect in that the appearance of these machines and their relationship to the viewer are essential. The machine, appearing expensive, hi-tech, clean, and lacking any evidence of the hand in its craft, is seen as being in a position of AUTHORITY. This is doubled by the fact that many of these machines are employed while the patient is lying down - a physically and psychologically vulnerable and submissive position - and by the patient's state of partial or complete undress. The machines also tend to move the patient physically without their control (i.e. using a servo motor to slide the patient into position within the machine - i.e. in an MRI). The sounds of the machine's operation are also important, as are the fact that they often have special attendants.

Representations of the body that are not based on the visual sense

A homunculus is the representation of the body with the size of the body parts mapped to sensory intensity (or more accurately, density of nerve cells) rather than actual size. In a related field, in traditional Ayurvedic medicine and Kundalini/Chakra meditation as well as Japanese Reiki there are detailed representations of the body that map the flow of spiritual and psychosexual energy through various centers that do not correspond to physical anatomies. I relate this to our study of the tangible in that these representations explore the
ways in which our beliefs about our bodies affect our self-conception, as the qualia of our sensations are partially determined by metaphor.

PIZZA OVEN

2007-09-12T04:36:00.000-05:00

Things are heating up at the EPN.

FIXED THE LINK.

pix from opening

2007-09-11T01:14:00.000-05:00

Chester (aka Guild of Birthdays) just sent me these pix of the opening. There aren't pix of everyone who went, but these are great. This makes me feel a little more like the opening actually happened. Though these things can be faked.

Chet:

My Mom and Dad:

Corrupting the youth?

Thanks for nice smiles!

dream

2007-09-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

I know it's dangerous to keep a dream diary - it's caused major problems before...

Late night I woke up having dreamed a very strange dream though.

Feel the end of your nose. It's been a long time since I felt the end of anyone else's nose, and I forget what it's like. Isn't there a little cleft in the cartilage at the very end, an up and down kind of soft spot?

The dream was that if you rub this soft spot...

No, it was more like, you know if your eyes are crossed... That normally your eyes aren't crossed, but if you twist them together they may be two of everything (or for me there is only a faint shadow of a double which is hard to see). But in this dream I realized that you need to cross your eyes in a different way, perhaps it is along a different dimensional plane?

Then your nose, it starts to separate. It becomes two noses with a valley in between. This valley was very light-toned as it didn't get any sunlight. Looking at it was hard, unfocussed without major effort, kind of like the way the world seems when your eyes are crossed. But I could touch it and it was very real. This did not strike me as very strange, but I was concerned about the appearance of my skin in this area, so I was rubbing it with anti-zit cream, or maybe fake tanning oil? I discovered that there was a soft spot up above, where the valley ended underneath my forhead-eyebrow ridge. If I rubbed this spot (it didn't feel bad, but you can't rub too hard) I could then see an extra eye, but that was very hard to maintain (I remember thinking it was funny that I hadn't noticed this sooner). Anyway, this was so hard to concentrate on that the eye disappeared and my nose closed up and I left the bathroom to hang out in the foyer with the transparent bleacher all set in an arc and luminous white ceilings covered with tiny colorful stickers to observe the beautiful young people in the public chorus that had spilled out of the packed concert hall, but when I started humming along (rather poorly I remember), I got yelled at by my high school singing teacher, told that singing was only for "members". I don't need this, I thought, and rode away on my bike.

I am aware that there is a lot of symbolism in third eye visions. But this didn't seem that way, it was very mundane, all about how looking at things funny can reveal something new. The mood at the end was more of an earthly utopia (or at least a really nice place) than of a heaven or other world.

BTW, don't search for three eyed beings on the internet - it's just going to freak you out. Really. But there is one cute little guy that you shouldn't miss:

DMV

2007-09-10T12:36:00.000-05:00

I woke up way early, hopped on my bike, got totally lost forever, then arrived at the DMV to get a driver's licence, and they made me take a written test - WTF? I managed to pass though, which is silly, because I was totally guessing - it's all these irrational questions about blood alcohol and imaginary lines and their idea of good driving... Gosh darn silly! I also completely cheated on the part where you have to prove you can see out of both eyes - I didn't know it, but I legally probably can't have a licence being kinda blind in one eye. But it was really easy to peek through my fingers... Ha ha. Feels great to cheat!

Room

2007-09-09T22:19:00.000-05:00

It turned out to be one of those Sundays where I didn't leave the house.

I started writing this post without any clear reason to write - thought I would just see what came out.

I don't think I should continue.

Well. At least it has been determined that I don't have anything to say.

Funny - I spent hours reading art theory today - must have been rubbish.