fall in knothole landscape

or something...

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

What is worth doing?

Mess

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"

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

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

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

"...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?

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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?

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

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

Oh man.

convincing people

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...

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...

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

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!

Interacting with my virtual double

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...

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

17 ways on this site.

Publique!

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

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!

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

This is the recipe I use.

Anne Laplantine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

swarming

developments

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

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!

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

vived my crit!

opposition

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

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

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

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

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.
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Making stuuuuuuuuff

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.

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Skillet died today. She was a woof-dog.

PLAySPACE show

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