NEW MEDIA ART! FINALLY GETTING AROUND TO THIS.

And just in time for the year to be over. It seems that I'm constantly doing things, playing, making art, finding art, but never writing about it. It just doesn't fit into the scheme of experiencing things, and is mostly explanatory, and external, though certainly useful.  It amazes me to find people who have a new status on facebook every two hours. Is it a conscious decision to log on to write to the world what you just thought/heard? I change my status whenever I get tired of seeing the little button that says What's on your mind? or whatever it says. But I'm digressing a lot.

So for the first project in the New Media Art class, we were to create some work involving the idea of weaving. I really love generative art, glitch art, and other forms that allow for and even rely on chance input. Where the artist gives up control over the piece and allows it to live on its own.

That said, my weaving piece was a poem I wrote. Mostly lines that came to mind, scratching some out, moving to a second column or other places when I ran out of room, and then recompiling it based on the appearance on the page rather than the order which I wrote it and it was most clear. But I think the subject and the chaotic order work hand in hand.

I never did get to read it in class:

Today

Tomorrow

Tomorrow

Unfolding Infinity

Yesterday

Fold

Lines

Turn

Planes

Fold

Intersecting, combining.

Turn

Connecting chaos

Fold

Disordered Order

Turn

Harmonic Discord

Fold

Blending into beautiful.

Patterns

Turn

A to Z

Fold

One to Three

Turn

One or One

Fold

One

Turn

Answer

Fold

One Point

Future

Past

Present

One One

All everything.

There are many directions that I would love to explore, but it seems they all require some amount of money. That's pretty much everything. One day I was in Wallgreens with my mom recently. She always takes for ever in every establishment where there are things to be purchased, ignored, or viewed. Mostly she's really into the last one, but sometimes the first as well becomes an ugly result, but the result is always the same, excruciating.

But I happened on the card section and then in the musical card section, where I spent so much time that I actually won the game and it was she who was ready to leave and not me. Their tiny speakers, playing clips of songs, playing four of the same card together, some of their batteries dying and warping the pitch. Mr. Roboto, fittingly enough was stammering and seemed to glitch until the card was closed, never finishing like all the others, spewing fragments of at times recognizable song. Mixing up songs, and just plain playing. Fun times.

I wanted to rip out the speakers, allow the tabs to dangle freely, pulled and pushed at random in a small doorway, like a mobile, allowing people's bodies to create songs as they pass through, but that idea that sounds so good, would cost so much money, enough $5.oo cards to create it would break me.

The Moonlight Sonata was particularly beautiful in its dying breaths of life, slowing and playing as though the notes were falling over a piece of plywood, left out in the rain for days.

I suppose finally it might be good to reflect on my final piece. I love objects and performances and installation, where the piece is clearly distinguishable, rather than a video on a laptop posted on youtube or a song that could be listened to in any setting, an object that exists in one place, and coupling that with ideas of fluidity, simultaneity and a weaving omnipresence took a little, or quite a bit of thought. Finally I found myself turning to sculpture, mixing visual and auditory media into its being. Allowing the video and sound, playing from the same sheet music, to slip past one another in their own time, without concern for the other, I was rather shocked when I came back to it at a point and both had come together as though they knew they were being viewed in order to play synchronized for a few moments, before they parted and went their separate ways.

The piece certainly reminded me of ideas of simultaneity, reflexivity, and the idea of everything being everywhere, all at once. Of course the piece was in one location, but the subject matter spans beyond location and time into the timeless voids of the universe, combining ideas of death and immortality, evolution, inputs and outputs, the technological, and the organic. Physics, Metaphysics, and Religion. I cannot claim all of those ideas and their combinations as my own, but I feel that the project, given the opportunity to view it on one's own time, certainly brings those ideas to be present.

Now on to the real stuff

I went to visit the Georgia Aquarium yesterday, they have the Titanic in there, or so I hear. But when we got there There was a huge crowd outside waiting to get in and some loudspeaker voice squawking at it. It was like a cross between an airport and the steal-all-your-money, can't-win-the-big-stuffed-animals games at King's Dominion. But after we were part of the crowd and the loudspeaker was partially squawking at us, we found out that for some reason the doors don't open again for another 2 hours, leaving us an hour to see some Tiger Lily sharks and maybe half a blue whale.

So we went across the street to get hopped up on all the free coke we could drink/snort, but the deal was basically the same. So we went back to the parking lot where we haggled the lady into letting us park there for 8 USD instead of 10, and we asked her how to get to the Bodies Exhibit, and so like any parking attendant would, she led us to a shady warehouse and let us use her computer.

If you ever get a chance, go see Bodies.

Every time I try to create a new post, I have to figure out how to log on again.

It pretty much sums it up right there, but I never use my google acount for anything else so I'm constantly forgetting my password and having to reset it, just to forget the new one. Nothing like struggling for art... or to write about it... or just to write... or bitch about blogs.

Room Service

So I find myself in a hotel room for a month. At first glance, I say it's pretty damn nice. The best hotel room I've stayed in. But then I remember that I have to live here for a month and that all those things that you take for granted while your on vacation are really important for those guys who wear suits and go to the continental breakfast in the morning and read the paper they slide under your door and condition their hair with one-use bottles. Families only come to hotels for vacation 2 months of the year. They're built for the workaholic businessmen who live off of job training powerpoint conventions.

But enough on that. The first day I stayed here, when I came back, I was surprised -- and delighted -- to find that the room looked exactly like it had the night before. The bed was made and they even stood the card up next to the pillows. And the weird things they do to your toilet paper and tissues they did.

So before I left for the day, I figured I'd test just how detailed they are. Flipped paper cover off the mouth-wash glass, ruffled up one towel, left the other slightly askew, and hid the card in a drawer. Would they find everything? Would they find the card, or just place a new one?

No, I realized they are not robots with scanners. For some reason I expected them to catch everything, and they failed. I thought if I switched the two chairs at the table, they'd put them back, even though they are absolutely identical and only the chairs no their difference.

I jumped in too fast. Next time I'll ease them into it. Start smaller.

You and Me

I was watching the Discovery Channel or History or whatnot the other day and at first I thought it was just another repeat of some Nostradomus prediction special, but then I realized that it was a cannibalization of that terrible stock footage and built into something new -- more about a contemporary mathematician who has developed a secret algorithm to predict outcomes on mathematical terms, and his predictions seem to be 90% accurate according to his claims. Applying his formula backwards to various situations including the rise of Hitler and the second world war, his results were accurate to the outcomes.

The ability of robots to evolve and function based on random and chaotic actions I think is similar to that in a very lose way. I think much less separates our thoughts and our progressions and evolution from nonconcious systems than we think.

Just in terms of the amount of parallels you can find between your internal processes and the world that you suppose to be external. I am losing the sense of self that we briefly discussed today. Where do I end and the external world begins? I don't know.

My b log that I wrote last night corresponds frighteningly closely with some of Dean's thoughts in class, his mention of binary, while in a somewhat different context, I nearly wrote a blog about binary code, and Bran and Dean had a conversation over the aesthetics of bridges that Dean braught up in class, and just the night before, I was talking with Joe and some other people about the aesthetics of architecture in Europe versus America, and the main example of my thought was the bridge of Europe versus the bridge of America, and when Dean mentioned it and pointed in our general direction, I thought for a moment that he was referencing our conversation the night prior, which I quickly realized Dean was not a part of.

landscaping

Some time ago, a man's pick axe worked at chipping away the walls separating Good and Bad, Moral and Immoral, Meaningful and Meaningless. He thought for whatever reason that they needed to go. Either they were in the way,  or maybe he just thought they were ugly. But he hadn't had much training in the use of pick axes against walls, and he went about it in a rather haphazard fashion, and as a result of his work, all the walls collapsed together into giant heaps, clogging up the paths, and obscuring the horizons in mounds of rubble. If only those walls were still standing, he could look at the mess and view the present state as bad and chaotic and work to sort it out into a more harmonious and ordered landscape, but now that they're down, he no longer sees any advantage in harmony and order over discord and chaos, so he sits in the center, not working because there is nothing to accomplish. He views work as rests equal. He has no reason to work and no reason to rest but that resting is less tiring than working.

Here's to the man, and hoping he makes something cool with the rubble.