So, does it ruin it or what?
These may be unclear even to yours truly…
0. Is Howwa we Anna. This is actually a current concern, so I can’t possibly begin to go into it… But I would like to explain how it relates. I mean, other than through a true path of right-feelingness. The point is that art tries to expand into other territories, and when it does, that is when the excitement occurs. So, like I have been saying, in the act of creation one can be entirely self-absorbed, and that act, that is the art because every thought might have maximum detail, maximum weight, maximum expansive velocity. But the hand moves slower than the eye, so the artifact is of course less-than-infinite. And the viewer is often left feeling left out. Though of course everyone has the key to an in – the one known as “the most specific art is the most generally understandable, the most personal is the most universal.” But I don’t think that most people are crazy enough to use it. But you can do work, shallow work, and that sets up a SHOW, a calculated piece so that the act of absorbing becomes the infinitely detailed act. The art. Therefore the artist is doing the work. No no. This piece is not that. This piece is just another attempt to unlock the door. But working at set-ups is part of it. And the main point being that in recent work I’ve been “using” other people, but not approaching it closely enough – I’ve been looking at GROUPS, but this is dumb, because there is no such thing as a group. There is only room for one other person in the world actually. Not in the world – in the mind. A feeling place. It’s another case of expansion by limitation. I’m not saying anything about this piece. This is another case of “distance confusion.” For YOU, dear reader, not for me. I always intended this list to be pretty close and therefore ununderstandable.
1. Adaptation of China Readings – where I go to library (as I recall doing when last I had a studio at Bard. A lot.), photocopy various diagrams from books, collage them, no break them down, no copy them by hand, and then put them on single pages, on an overhead? On a bluescreen weathermap? Then contact various educated “experts” – this project is about expertise, no it is about anti-expertise, no it is the opposite of wikipedia too, and it’s cut-up, or organized by something smarter, no it is narrative. Then they talk about what it means to them, or answer specific questions, yes on screen, with, how? The image plays big. Is there a thumbnail? P.I.P. (from Nova). Then it gets cut-up. Perhaps there is an organizing informational factor. This shows a secret – noises only – voice hums, that’s antiexpertise too – shhhh - cuts into similarities, or difference. Agreement like stitches of thread go through cloth, but it’s always this way with nonlinear editing, but still, what is smart? What about pure cut-ups as divination, I-Ching slash Burroughs style, or the constant process of rejuxtapositioning of pakuried elements into “new” ideas? What about editing? What about using a programme to automatically sort the info?
2. (Top secret) - RELAY of pure attention. What if you try to imitate someone in real time as they are talking? As they are moving? This takes maximum concentration, maximum attention. And attention is the same as consciousness, in cognitive science and in zen thought. Now what if the face is on a screen (this might take a teleprompter type setup so the face can be cameraed. Now, there are several (9?) of these in a row, thus like RELAY. And finally they are displayed in a line of tv screens with sound, a chorus. What about time? Is it simultaneous? Cut-up with errors, but always re-cued.. So what kinds of activities? Copying words, will be hard, sung to music easier. What about tricks – i.e. closing eyes – - can’t see - trust – leading statements? Then sounds? What about abilities? i.e. high notes, low notes? Foreign languages? Physical activities – twisting the tongue? This will be a joke. What about activities with an eye towards the final chorus effect? i.e. minimal notes – the held note will surely waves, the click or simple rhythm will do what? Coordinated movements? A thousand ideas here. It functions as a wetware computer because there is rebirth and correct, which is the automatic functioning of the muscles of the expressive elements of the face and throat’s instincts and habits – a face will not turn to mush because it is a face, not mush.
3. I would like to keep treated zinc or copper plates in my studio as a place to sketch – this way I can go back into the sketches and rework the “states.” I think this added layer of change would transform the sketches into finished work. I just, it is disheartening to throw EVERYTHING away. Thousands of pages I have sitting here. No. Literally. Plus etching is a pleasure. So it’s simple. So sue me.
4. The project I wanted to do for ARCUS. Or what was it anyway? It was a secret project – the sculpture forms are like Faberge eggs, like charms at a temple, lost on the street, with a www address. This stems from just the desire to create tiny plastic molded sculpture – something I’d like to learn how to do partially because that’s the kind of sculptural form I was dealing with as a kid, and because my drawings suggest it. But the thing would be to lose them on the street, and create a virtual hole for them, so each would function as a key, to create a secret underground network of people whose eyes scan the ground. This would be fun to do with the 3d modeling I think I saw, and shiny stuff like fake bling, but only on the inside, lenses, stickers, rhinestones, chimes, unfolding? Those crazy magical spinning tops toys on a stick that unfold to reveal, now, what did they ever reveal? It was a religious experience. But what if it were a connective experience. Cheap beauty leads to real beauty. Leading meaning really so. Exclusive networks could be good if the gatekeeper were set right – what kind of oblique standards could be imagined? Discrimination in the sense that this wine is good and that’s vinegar.
5. The tactile interface, does it work with the sculpture ideas stolen from “Lathe of Heaven?” I mean, these machines… um… This expertise is in hidden knowledge of body systeming. Homunculus type bodies, flow of chi and other imaginary spirits, chakras, etc. Old lost knowledge that doesn’t make any sense really, but that serves as a useful metaphor to feeling. Because that is the true core of the lost arts, is that they reference what feels right, not what is verifiably true. Which is more useful sometimes. But the machines, they are based on pseudo-scientific machines – i.e. chromatherapy. To teach the system by experience, um, immersive. To provide a psychosomatic cure – the placebo effect as amplified through performance and sculpture. What I mean is that it is important that they look feel and sound good. To study the art of imaginative futurism, utopian focus on the body as interface. To work on them being ultra convincing. Bright lights, loud sounds, feedback, self-propelled work, filtration, visual body doubles, false mirroring, simulated positive thought echo feedback loops.
6. Web site that, with user interface, sorts through drawings as placed in an environment, that is, that in RELAY there was no adaptation, there was no survival of the fittest not only because there was no death but because there was no challenge to be met. It’s like, well, like I was saying, imagine if you took a YouTubesque environment and combined it with a series of conditions, like, say, the curriculum for classes in a high school, and designed a way for the videos to be rated that was well designed, i.e. related to their fitness in the system, and of course you would have to allow copying, huh, and then it would just kind of be automatic. And therefore better than Mr. Bighead (Bush’s brother’s conspiracy). So the thing is, that’s too advanced. The best would be to start easy – just with simple pictures and, I don’t know, descriptors? Like channels – what they are supposed to symbolize or illustrate. As a way to invent more subtle visual metaphors. As a way to make something smarter than me. But I need to learn more, both in terms of the technology used, and I guess I should figure out what the hell I’m talking about. Then I can move on to applying this idea larger – reform reform, game democracy, etc.
7. I like the idea of combining sci-fi stories with fake art documentation. That when I have a truly wild idea, but one that is pure fantasy that I can just write it down and then produce a modicum of faux documentation. OK, so I know that the writing in sci-fi is not so good. And I know it’s dorky. And even trendy. But two things really. One is that I can’t deny it – I read a lot of sci-fi back in the day. Two is that I think sci-fi makes great sense for artists. Because you take imagination (even though we might not have quite figured out what this means yet) and that alone would mean fantasy (which is basically sci-fi with dragons minus... something) and then you throw it HARD against materials. Because that’s what art is all about, your huge imagined world smashing up hard against things like what parts they do and don’t have at hardware stores, how smoothly it is possible to sand something, how much weight a certain piece can hold, how some paint always stays sticky and other paint curdles up, and time time time plenty of time constraints. That’s material. And sci-fi is just any fantasy that considers the practical side of the fantasy, the workings of the fantasy world, the failings, the systematics. This project is also good because I don’t want to change my life entirely, or, you know, I’m embedded in this particular fantasy which is… I was going to say good. And this frees me up to expand borders, or rather colonize lands I will never reach, and actually, doesn’t it also have it’s own internal self-contradiction that is the hallmark of all great a.k.a. self-collapsing art, which is that it removes the real world against which I claim that being banged fixes you up? And, then I’m kind of doing it now, but poorly.
8. Oh and if sculpture can be very very small then it can be huge too, and glow and move and emit vibrations. But there are so many shapes. That’s my problem, like Alexis said, that I am useless. Which is good and not or whatev. By which I mean, well, some artists I’ve talked to, they have trouble drawing anything, in good way. They draw very few shapes and what they do draw means something to them. But not for me. Perhaps that is because their filter is installed properly. Whereas mine is not. I have no output filter. Or rather it is installed mucked up. So I guess that is good, right? Weakness is strength and all. I have to improvise, to figure out my own filter, and the idea is that certain forms are inviolable. This may be a little Jungian. And I was reading about it in F.C. Bartlett’s “Remembering,” which is the book he wrote about RELAY in 1937 – or rather it is a more advanced version of RELAY. Funny how time works. Tonikaku, that’s what I was talking about – forgotten knowledge. I mean, he was writing about von Ahn’s “wet-ware” without really knowing what he was writing at all. And it just was waiting on the street, right next to “The Gulag Archepelago.” Weird, but not more than weird I suppose. So what was I saying? But what Bartlett was writing about, with his old-fashioned out-moded Jungian ideas, actually seems like part of the solution to the entropy problem raised by the images in RELAY and what I was talking about in #6 here. That is that is the INVIOLABILITY of certain forms. Jung would have said it was something mysterious and spiritual in the subconscious. Now, the point is that these things would end up being like Least Common Denominator type Democracy if they were in a general field, but if they were in an environment some of them will show fitness. The more specific, the better. But what could form this environment? Perhaps just a word. A title. That might be enough. Non-linear selection, but how? Maybe I’ll just set up a card table on a nice day. “We want yr wetware.” Then I get to make the sculpture that is inviolable. And of course it will be based on the copies of copies and of course they will be simplified (and Bartlett lists several other features of this process), but then I will be using real materials, and the bump of the real world, that will of course increase specificity, huh? Then they can be shown together.
9. Faster
a. The idea of cut-up ads to make a story, plus verbal descriptors of ads inserted in, then layered with narration.
b. Tell us your life story cut-up, to questionnaire, same as 9a and 1.
c. Robot head sculpture and entertainment – or maybe this is just sci-fi.
d. More questionnaire-based neural-net mapping scifi crap.
e. Eye movement tracking machine – rainbow dots– again, attention as pre-verbal judgment.
f. A Macaulayesque book that illustrates the mind, with focus on neuroscience, cog-sci, mental illness, and psychotropic medication, created through a kind of wiki-illustration, post copyright, for our nation that is insane you know to create more accuracy and also to give young artists a leg up.
g. Shapes revealed in jpegs, in zooms and contrast, processing, blur and sharpen, saturation, these as almost a code almost a key, but it doesn’t drive me nuts, then these images, they are taken from online, they too match bits, interchangeable bits of drawings, it must be animated in, the viewer who has seen this has more knowledge of the black and white drawing than the one who has no, a mystery cult again, this can almost move into color - no no horror horror.
h. Knots as simple technology. What if they were really big? This is so dumb. I need more stupidity so my headaches go away.
i. Painting – can’t even go into this because it is so embarrassing that it is so buried, but the whole point is that I really really like drawing, but I have no idea how to make a painting that has anything to do with them, even though I love to paint, although then again, it’s messy and gross. However, a lot of people know how to paint, and maybe they can teach me how.
j. Sleeping, now, even though it is early afternoon, my brain is burning low.
