"Let this whole horrible chapter of history convince you that money is fake, we can do anything with it we want, and that we do not want cryptoart."
- everest pipkin - here is the article you can send to people when they say “but the environmental issues with cryptoart will be solved soon, right?” [web]
oceans. 12" x 8", black 0.5mm pen
“Being pretentious is rarely harmful to anyone. Accusing others of it is. You can use the word ‘pretentious’ as a weapon with which to bludgeon other people’s creative efforts, but in shutting them down the accusation will shatter in your hand and out will bleed your own insecurities, prejudices and unquestioned assumptions. And that is why pretentiousness matters. It is a false note of objective judgement and when it rings we can hear what society values in culture, hear how we perceive our individual selves. Pretentiousness matters because of what it teaches us about the creative process."
- dan fox, pretentiousness: why it matters (2016)
we've been snowed in before, but for the first time we recently experienced the diabolical slushed in
6" x 4" two color.
"The guru is not exposed as a liar or a lech, a joker or a thief, but “only” a child laughing in the sun. The seeker’s mistake did not lay in identifying something special in this person, but in believing — hoping — that this specialness had something to do with knowing the truth. Instead, the numinous boils down to an ordinary state of radiant and childlike joy."
- erik davis, the burning shore (2021)
"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently."
- david graeber
this leads the introduction of can't get you out of my head, adam curtis (2021)
sometimes i think my favorite color is black, yet i keep painting these crystalline rainbows
behold, the great northern winter tomato
"The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
- speed of darkness, muriel rukeyser (1968)
everything is fine
today we ate the weird butternut squash that grew in the compost pile last summer
current research:
- decentralized communication platforms
- ham radio
- sauna/greenhouse/pool
"Our perceptions work in large part by expectation. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch."
- entangled life - merlin sheldrake (2020)
how many times can you say
this is the final time
in search of
isometric: having equal measure
isotropic: identical in all directions
isomorphic: similar appearance, different ancestry
isochromatic: same color
isochronal: having the same duration
(the image above started as an isometric projection of filtered noise.)
noise, filters, meaning.
arithmetic, pure number
geometry, number in space
music, number in time
astronomy, number in time and space
starting merlin sheldrake's entangled life (2020) and dreaming about spring. above, dried golden oyster from last fall.
today is september 10001 [web].
a dirge, for the death of the internet. this is the second movement of an unfinished collection.
eternal september ii [mp3]
study in layered ranges of equilateral triangles.
"'Primitive' cultures tend to combine all aspects of their lives-- religion, art, medicine, astronomy and farming-- in a single ritual framework. Construction of a circle must have been a communal effort which aided social cohesion."
- callanish - gerald ponting (2000)
art and meaning. no meaning is meaning.
or perhaps all channels of transmission are like old leaky wires full of static.
partial source code for wide awake from gnostics
this recent snow is peculiar.
robert macfarlane tells us there are lost words to describe such peculiarities--- cultures with a hundred words for different snow. this word-hoard sharpens attention. ways of seeing emerge.
it's a new day, lol
a public log is somewhat antithetical to my inclination towards ephemeral and personal.
recently thinking too much about digital hoarding: decades of invisible life reaching a threshold where it enters consciousness unexpectedly. photos, music collections, partially finished projects, decades of useless email.
perhaps given the modern ease of creation (including the amount of creation that happens unconsciously or against our will), erasure can be a more powerful action. to sharpen, clarify.
snow falls. machine drawn one dimensional cellular atomata. one of thirty-something. 6" x 4"
post-process, erasure of machine-drawn graphite guidelines.
we are new and we are the same.
years and years pass, still probably true.
"In 1973 Alexander Thom undertook the first accurate survey of Stonehenge. Having previously surveyed over 500 stone circles, he confirmed that a unit of 2.72 feet (0.829m) had been used by their builders, which he called the Megalithic yard."
- stonehenge - robin heath (2018)
new process. post plot hot water wash full immersion scrub. objectness emerges after attempted erasure.
we found this slab of old growth hemlock in the rafters of the building, forgotten in 1865. it is 22 inches wide, thrown down as simply something to walk on across the joists during construction: a portrait of past abundance and human shortsightedness. it is now a table, with renewed respect.
added a preliminary page regarding this site as an informational object.
see source.
paracelsus said "all things are concealed in all."
"When the unique is created, it also creates the creator.
The more finished goods become commodities, the fewer opportunities an individual has to generate new creation. The ability to mass-produce removes the opportunity for the great many to learn to produce at all. From such a thought, a future full of consumption-only hobbies might come as no surprise.
If you commoditize toys, you remove the toymaker. If you remove the toymaker, the toy is only an object of consumption. It ceases to be an object of wonder."
- that which is unique, breaks - simon sarris (2020) web
it is done. gnostics
currently reading megalith: studies in stone which is a collection of nine short books: stone circles, carnac, stonehenge, avebury, stanton drew, callanish, ancient british rock art, and surveys of stone circles. the diagrams and engravings are phenomenal.
related: julian cope's modern antiquarian BBC documentary (2000).
the breakthrough happened after adding constraints. watercolor and painting in general always felt intimidating, but it has become a joy after pushing some algorithms into the robot pencil mover.
this site is an exercise in small tech: using the computer on a fundamental level, always trying to distinguish between too-technical and too-dumb.
for example, the site generator sorts using the file's modification date instead of adding tag metadata. but then doing an after-edit requires a manual change to the date which is very easy to do, but specialized. even the idea of a "file" is starting to feel like uncommon knowledge given smartphones and cloud services. so (depending on who's looking) this is both too-technical and too-dumb.
it is wonderful.
"Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news."
- the carrier bag theory of fiction, ursula k. le guin (1988)
the best part is when perfect math hits messy reality with bleedy pens and bumpy paper. that's where the life is.
processing, plotter, white pen, arches paper, 10"x10"
the problem with subtractive process is that you typically have to start with something before you can make things disappear.
did you mean "then"?
this is what the search engine used to say. tehn has been around since the mid-nineties. the word has no meaning.
the thing that gets us to the thing
somehow "hello world" is no longer sufficient for self-actualization and this tiny assemblage of technical text has been played with for too long. months. computers, formatting, site generation: the former thing. so what is the latter thing?
journaling with pen and paper has been helpful over the years for maintaining momentum. it makes it easier not to "lose the plot" as erik davis would say, though i certainly acknowledge there have been moments where i've been searching in a daze.
choose a direction, go.