| School or College | College of Fine Arts |
| Department | Art & Art History |
| Creator | Watson, Justin |
| Title | Automatic processing pitfalls |
| Date | 2016 |
| Description | I used this text to examine processes by mirroring the internal structures of my mental processes. |
| Publisher | University of Utah |
| Subject | art; artists |
| Language | eng |
| Rights Management | © Justin Watson |
| ARK | ark:/87278/s69k7hcz |
| Setname | ir_mfafp |
| ID | 215240 |
| OCR Text | Show AUTOMATIC PROCESSING PITFALLS MFA Project Paper Justin Watson University of Utah College of Fine Arts Copyright Justin Watson 2016© Abstract I used this text to examine processes by mirroring the internal structures of my mental processes. This paper is arbitrary to the source of the experience examined, although this arbitrariness is also an impetus to the survival mechanisms depicted. When we elucidate our meanings we grow more lost. Meandering and searching as transmitted through this paper exemplifies the impenetrable search for answers and carries with it all of the trappings and pitfalls established in such a system due to the pre-coded directives and expectations of what this paper should entail. I have no answers as an artist. I only have questions. Answers are for the satiated and I am always hungry. I ARTIST STATEMENT an auto-interview: preface for a video audio recorded 10/3/2014 Via Macbook Pro, 2014 edition Software: Audacity 2.0.5, Safari 7.0.6, MAC OS X 10.9.4 WHY ARE YOU AN ARTIST? I have all these ideas that have, kind of, populated my mind, and then, you know, they try to colonize or replicate or reproduce. It is within this framework that I operate. WHY ARE YOU AN ARTIST? Because I have a feeling, um, a convergence of a feeling that stems from some interior monologue that's ongoing, it seems to recursively follow itself in this endless cycle. Repetitions, a pattern, a computational line that just keeps going and going and going. WHY ARE YOU AN ARTIST? Because I have a feeling. WHY ARE YOU AN ARTIST? Because I have these EMOTIONAL THOUGHT GESTURES that I'm trying to figure out. WHY ARE YOU AN ARTIST? [sound clip of a toaster activating] [sound clip from Jim Croce's seminal Operator] [sound clip of a toaster popping] [sound clip of a microwave completing its cycle] [sound clip of Pachelbel's Canon in D Minor slowed by 50%] WHY ARE YOU AN ARTIST? [sound sample from World War II bombing raid] [sound clip from Pachelbel's Canon in D Minor] WHY ARE YOU AN ARTIST? [Voiceover:] and the interruptions and overthinking initiates its long dreaded cycle. II Artist Statement An Auto-Interview: preface for a video, version 5.1.2015 Audio Recorded 5/1/2015 Macbook Pro, 2014 Edition Software: Adobe Audition CC 7.2.0.52, Safari 8.0.4, Mac OS X 10.10.2 Why are you an artist? I have a compulsion with internet searches. I am recalling a memory from grade school when a teacher wrote the 5W's and H of journalism on the wall: who, what, when, why, where and how. I still use this rudimentary system to investigate content and I view an artist as an entity who explores the convergence between everyday life, culture, and philosophy and manifests this information into immersive audiovisual experiences. I am an artist because I had no other possibility of merging these various data-sets and interests into one sequence or pattern. I grew up grafted to internet culture, so a majority of my process is akin to navigating the open waters of the internet with my sail open. I am always searching, hunting, learning. When I stop learning, I instill changes and evoke systems of chance to allow for modifications to arise. What do you make? Metaphors distilled from dreams, memories and real-time experiences. Is a performance an act of making or is it an unwinding of a moment? I ultimately make questions and use contemporary technology to activate or point to these questions. I do not prescribe answers. More specifically, I am interested in pointing out cultural artifacts, and in my case, I grew up connected to the internet, playing video games, reading literature and exploring the natural world via swamplands that used to exist near my father's house. I also memorized entire books of scientific classifications of dinosaurs and animals, subscribed to National Geographic, etc, etc, so I'm equally interested in what goes on within and outside the online network I pair the virtual with "in real life" content. When making a work, I investigate the common underlying strategies, technology and processes used for that format. For example, the infusion of a seemingly conversational interview between two beings establishes a proximate reality of engagement. III Can you be more specific? You did not establish a clear image. I tend to over extrapolate the cerebral contexts of my work practice. As I specified earlier, I use technology that matches the content. In my case, I am mirroring my life experience and interests through the lens of internet culture, video games and the natural world. I use a broad variety of tools ranging from imaging software, game engines, microscopes, digital film recordings and real-time computer screencasts. For example, I am currently working on a project involving the killing of Hydra species, an act that I'm not all too comfortable engaging with, but nonetheless curious about exploring due to the mythological associations of this creature. I'm essentially recreating the myth of the hydra and my first experience of using a microscope-we looked at a brown hydra in a biology class in middle school-and applying this memory to a larger mythological and metaphorical structure. The signification of the hydra is now often equated with the regenerative potential of the internet. The consideration that is more important to establish here is that everyday life inherits myth systems outside of what we consider the pantheon of classical mythology. My goal is to blur our distinctions of history, memory and time. What do you mean by "blur our distinctions of history, memory and time"? In relationship to what? Derrida wrote about a concept he labeled as "Hauntology." Hauntology is a concept that hinges on the impossibility of a culture (usually associated with Neoliberal Capitalism) to escape a memory vacuum: its history has collapsed due to an expectation of a utopian idealism that never occurred. What results is a society stuck in a culture obsessed with direct revisionism and replication of the past; nostalgia, sequel and anachronism are the tools of this amnesiac society. Information and ideas are recycled as opposed to generated and critically engaged. I feel this concept, in many ways, greatly correlates to contemporary society and the problems of the internet and the postmodern. So when I speak of collapsing history, memory and time, I'm speaking of not only pointing out these issues, but also regenerating new ideas from otherwise exhausted content to illuminate new connections and understanding. In my most recent case, recycling the myth of Herakles and the Lernaean Hydra, but IV using contemporary technology and the inversion of power dynamics to make a philosophical and metaphorical pivot in a new direction. Artist Statement An Auto-Interview: preface for a video, version 8.10.2015 Audio Recorded 8/10/2015 Windows 8.1 Software: Adobe Audition CC 7.2.0.5 Why are you an artist? Haven't we moved beyond this question? I mean, isn't it a rather DULL question to be asking? Here we are, nearly a decade into this process and we are asking ourselves the same questions. It's completely mad, a smashing one's head against the proverbial brick wall sort of scenario. I refuse to answer this question any further. What do you think of altered states of consciousness? It appears throughout your work in sprinkles, such as the appropriated John McCracken piece that you created while surfing the web and, from what I've heard, intentionally drinking to augment the construction of this idea of spatiality and distort your cognitive overlap of both reference and also this new collage of ideas. Isn't there problem with this overlap? Considering this question is a multi-tiered hydra of possible responses, I'll attempt a brief reiteration of my thought process while recreating this and other pieces with what you consider an "altered state of consciousness," a ridiculous connotation because I simply cannot exist outside my Self. The first question: It had less to do with altered states of consciousness and more to do with belligerence. However, the metaphysics of a plank is as ludicrous within my frame of logic as that of art markets and the larger systems of organization that swarm about it. This is not a Duchamp exercise, but rather a negative Duchamp exercise. A negative of an imprint. The output is clearly a half sized copy of McCracken's seminal [dual meanings here] "Plank" which ultimately acts as a kind of penis extension and phenomenological wormhole. The signification of a space. My appropriation, however, also involved a ghostly offspring that was hung from a chandelier; the image duplicated through laser etching and the size effectively halved from the copy. V This also serves as a metaphor for the shrinking and disintegrative effects of our memory of a thing, and, neuro-biologically, how the translocation of a memory is never equated to the source of origin. The "non-site" performance, which is really me growing belligerent through alcohol consumption, also offers even further distancing from this supposed origin and how it interrelates to this artifact of the past. The most interesting aspect of this piece, for me, is actually as a result of the installation. The form, when using proper lighting situations, optically creates a sort of triangle, or, in my interests, a delta symbol, and the mirror on the floor tethers the illusion of shadow with the stability of the floor. These optical tricks are what addresses these seemingly dystopic images and, for the deep looker, aligns with an ideological construct that is quite diametric to the presence portrayed. Perhaps it is this unification of order and belligerence, minimal and maximal, what makes creating these sort of works so appealing. VI To answer to part B) is ludicrous as to admit a problem with the logic of this construction would undermine the philosophical content within: ascriptions of rules are nearly as dull as Question 1 and thus impertinent to a reading. Artist Statement An Auto-Interview: a final preface for a video, version 1.11.2016 Audio Recorded 1/12/2016 MACBOOK PRO, 2016 Edition MAC OSX 10.11.5 Software: Adobe Audition CC 7.2.0.5 Where have you been? Elsewhere. I've been hallucinating the past two weeks due to a nasty bacterial infection that attacked my eyes, my sinuses, my ears and my lungs and left me with a near-constant high fever. The hallucinations were curiously mundane as they all centered on my experience within the borderline manic environment of our house, which is really a bunch of sticks propped up with nails. For example, I was peering at myself through the abstraction of steam accumulated on the bathroom mirror and thinking to myself that this image would be a wonderful replication (perhaps not?) Et cetera. And then of course the monstrous fear of death that eludes such an illness, when you are up at 4 AM and haven't slept in four days, it instilled in me a deeper realization of my mortality. Is it all coming to an end? What doesn't come to an end, I propose. What doesn't inherent properties of ending as though some sort of whisper in the dark could save us from the end. Everything must end and in this case the virtualization of my educational experience is indeed ending, though that in itself is a joke as it never ends. What will you do with yourself? What I do with myself and what I do with my self are two separate answers. At this point I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with creating more video work. I am beginning VII to feel pigeon-holed into a specific subsection of art and I'm rather disillusioned with labels. I've been mainly centering myself around the things that also bring me enjoyment that I've been neglecting: my family, writing, drawing, resting. What will you do with your self? Good question as I don't currently know. At times I feel as though leaping off a bridge would prove the ultimate solution, but then I consider the jail time I would have to pay if I survived, or the life insurance that my family would have to pay if I didn't. This is a joke, of course, but really I haven't any idea as I seem to constantly teeter away from self-confidence in both my work and in my ability to function as a human being. Where do you think this stems from, this lack of self-confidence? Look, I've never felt as though I've fit in with any sort of social normalcy. I've always questioned my own identity in relationship to the larger societal structure. For example, when I was young I played with girls in addition to boys when this was still considered a peculiar act (in grade school in Utah) and I think this correlated to not only a rejection of the stupidity of socially constructed expectations of who we are, but also a deeper, more shattered image of the self. My self is really a fragmentation of many other selves all blinking and sparkling like an awful Christmas tree. Even within online social systems I tend to disengage and keep my distance. What is the effect of these peculiarities? Most of the time I feel incredibly distant from everyone, as though I've been shipped out to the moon. So I suppose my mind is a kind of planet all on its own, for good or for bad and this artificial distance forms potential for even wider gaps of communication and potential moments of error. What has changed? I've begun to drop projects. X them out. Extinguish them. Assassinate them. One in particular, which I'm thoroughly saddened by, was a project taking place out in Wendover, Utah. The lease for the property I was going to rent, unfortunately, had way too many official stipulations in VIII addition to increasing the rent to make the project feasible for my intents and purposes. I need to write more often. I need to breathe more often. I need to think more often. I need to live more often. Artist Statement Extracted from the results of an automated online survey May 23, 2015 Justin Watson (°1984, Salt Lake City, United States) makes installations, photos, drawings and media art. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day-to-day context, Watson presents everyday objects as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Pompous writings and Utopian constructivist designs are juxtaposed with trivial objects. Categories are subtly reversed. His installations focus on the inability of communication which is used to visualize reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the dysfunctions of language. In short, the lack of clear references are key elements in the work. By using an ever-growing archive of found documents to create autonomous artworks, he uses a visual vocabulary that addresses many different social and political issues. The work incorporates time as well as space - a fictional and experiential universe that only emerges bit by bit. His work urges us to renegotiate installation art as being part of a reactive or - at times - autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, he creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position. His works bear strong political references. The possibility or the dream of the annulment of a (historically or socially) fixed identity is a constant focal point. By investigating language on a meta-level, he tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots IX of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface. His works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, he absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation. He creates situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function. By applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different functions and/or contexts are created. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, he reflects on the closely related subjects of archive and memory. This often results in an examination of both the human need for ‘conclusive' stories and the question whether anecdotes ‘fictionalise' history. His works are an investigation of concepts such as authenticity and objectivity by using an encyclopaedic approach and quasi-scientific precision and by referencing documentaries, ‘fact-fiction' and popular scientific equivalents. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, he wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation. His collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. X Acknowledgements To my wonderful wife, Andrea Gray, for your continued support, love, devotion, And putting up with my BS. I could not have finished any of this without sacrifices you made to help make this happen. To my son, Quentin Watson, for early morning dances, for calling me dad, And giving me more moments of smiles and happiness than I can remember. To my parents, Robert & Kris Watson, Kathy & Brian Kirk, for understanding my need to withdraw and center myself around my schoolwork and my practice and for supporting my decision to attend graduate school. To my dear friend Joseph Christensen: you have always showed up and helped me out when I most needed it, answered my calls when I'm freaking out about something going awry and, more than anything, been a great friend, colleague, artist and collaborator. To my graduate school colleagues: I will always cherish our conversations, the knowledge we obtained together and the experience we created together. I will never forget these moments. To Wendy Wischer: this journey has been long and throughout the process I've received an unthinkable amount of support and guidance from you on the processes of navigating through art as life; I have an enormous amount of respect for your commitment to your process, your goals and your teaching. I am gratefully indebted to the knowledge you passed on, the support you provided and the continued examples you provide. To Joe Marotta: Thank you for the wonderful conversations, the guidance and for listening. I hope to keep the conversations going. You provided many great questions arising from our need to be human; the essentiality of conversations, the physicality of conversations and the orbital nature of ideas. To Brian Snapp: Thank you for always confronting me with hard questions while also providing a stunning example of how to be an excellent mentor. I won't forget the conversations we had, the support you gave and the knowledge you shared. To Paul Stout: Thank you for all of your support throughout all these years from Sculpture Undergraduate through Graduate school, for all the time and work you have dedicated to making this the best experience possible and for always lending an ear for guidance, direction and sharing a joke. To Ed Bateman: I will remember those long nights of working that grew even longer due to the myriad of conversations we had. I will miss those labyrinths and the ideas that seeded as a result of those talks. XI To Beth Krensky: Your seminar class provided a stellar example of how to facilitate a classroom. Also, you provided a model to follow with which I have always found myself aligning. Your forwardness, honesty and multifaceted approach has inspired me. To John O'Connell: I connected with the concepts you were discussing about your own work and also the guidance you offered. The schedule of the class proved incredibly useful. Many great questions were raised throughout your class and you provided many great examples to follow. To Maureen O' Hara-Ure: You also approached me with difficult questions and to these I am indebted. I will never forget our seminar talks and those one on one conversations. I truly appreciated your directness, your continued support and your willingness to answer and seek out questions. To Mark Brest van Kempen: Your Warnock class was a wonderful experience and, as a result, I have ended up approaching my practice from a completely new angle. I will use the toolsets and insights you provided in this class throughout the rest of my career as an artist. To Richard Garet: for providing an amazing workshop, continued support and intriguing conversations. To the U of U Sculpture Club: I learned so many incredible things due to this club and met many wonderful people along the way. Keep in touch. To everyone else unmentioned: Thank you, thank you, thank you, I cannot express the gratitude I feel for the people in my life that have supported me, met with me, given me feedback, motivated me, made me think and given me a moment of pause. XII Α---------Ω XIII One day, while shoveling through the remnants of my wallet, I discovered a single slide wedged between an expired credit card and a business contact I never bothered to call back. I have no recollection of discovering this strange artifact; the origins are blurred and the longer I think about it, the more I find myself inventing how I placed it inside my wallet. The background is a cliché 1980's early 1990's design scheme of Helvetica text set over fading purple to black. I meditated on the meaning of the phrase for a while, figured it functioned as a meta-editing process for old film splicing. I slipped the slide back into my wallet and forgot about it. Nearly a year later, I was reading about a therapeutic process defined as EMDR- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing-and realized this phrase "Automatic Processing' was correlated to a concept embedded in cognitive psychology. Automatic processing is how we relate information defined within the bounds of three areas: those that occur prior to conscious awareness (preconscious); those that require some form of conscious processing but that produce an unintended outcome (post-conscious); and those that require a specific type of intentional, goal directed processing (goal-dependent). I approach the processing mechanism more directly through coping reenactments of my past-including laser etching the drawings that jettisoned my interest into the arts and a video simulating the EMDR process-and through machine-oriented learning processes. XIV XV XVI Spiders, snakes and even humans shed the entirety of their skin, their outer surfaces, but retain their physical composition and internal form. I will never shed myself of my patterns, of my processes, of my way of thinking, no more than I can shed the trauma from the world around me. In order to reconcile my experience with the past, the present and the future I must remove from my mind the artificial boundaries imposed by the past. Trauma is a liminal structure between remembrance and forgetting. The ego is as much an artifice as an artificial intelligence. We worry about such notions because we fear our own loss of ownership of the world. We are collapsing. The mind fragments, shifts and falls apart as do our bodies slowly disintegrate. XVII 1. The vivid visual image related to the memory. 2. A negative belief about self. 3. Related emotions and body sensations. In addition, the client identifies a positive belief. The therapist helps the client rate the positive belief as well as the intensity of the negative emotions. After this, the client is instructed to focus on the image, negative thought, and body sensations while simultaneously engaging in EMDR processing using sets of bilateral stimulation. These sets may include eye movements, taps, or tones. The type and length of these sets is different for each client. At this point, the EMDR client is instructed to just notice whatever spontaneously happens. After each set of stimulation, the clinician instructs the client to let his/her mind go blank and to notice whatever thought, feeling, image, memory, or sensation comes to mind. Depending upon the client's report, the clinician will choose the next focus of attention. These repeated sets with directed focused attention occur numerous times throughout the session. If the client becomes distressed or has difficulty in progressing, the therapist follows established procedures to help the client get back on track. When the client reports no distress related to the targeted memory, (s)he is asked to think of the preferred positive belief that was identified at the beginning of the session. At this time, the client may adjust the positive belief if necessary, and then focus on it during the next set of distressing events. XVIII PROXY 1: a measured variable used to infer the value of a variable of interest 2: a measured variable used to infer the value of a variable of interest in climate research 3: a software design pattern in computer programming, also known as a proxy class 4: a computer network service that allows clients to make indirect network connections to other network services 5: the authority to represent someone else, especially in voting 6: a figure that can be used to represent the value of something in a calculation. XIX Pink Floyd1, COMFORTABLY NUMB When I was a child I never spoke until I was five. I have discovered I cannot escape my own language. He descubierto que no puedo escapar de mi propia lengua. Je l'ai constaté que je ne peux pas échapper à ma propre langue. Ich fand , dass ich meine eigene Sprache nicht entkommen . I found that I could not escape my own language. The further I dig, the further the distance becomes from what I was. Cuanto más cavo el la distancia más se convierte a partir de lo que yo era. Le plus vous creusez plus devient la distance de ce que je faisais. Je mehr Sie graben wird der Abstand, was ich tat. The more you dig, the distance is what I did. Words translated with Google Translate. Present What are some of the themes underlying your work? When questioning why what one does and how it is interpreted through the facility of themes, I can only establish mnemonic markers of my history that coordinate to my own experience. There is no inner or outer; this is not a Schrodinger's thought experiment; it is an encapsulation of a moment in my time and the infinite expanse between myself and others. 1 Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb, 1980© by Harvest/EMI, compact disc. XX Inverted Mind Palace A negative print of palace blueprints become ‘something else.' XXI MNEMONICS February 2004 I found out she died while fishing for profits in the virtual world of Final Fantasy Online, an online multiplayer roleplaying game that is neither final nor original in the context of fantasy. I had this nonsensical idea to extract these caps from a virtual pond using a virtual fishing pole. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was able to generate a livable income (livable income to a nineteen-year-old who had no bills and lived in their parent's house) translating what are essentially data-bits into real-time US dollars. The problem arose this late evening when I was finalizing the process. I received a phone call from my mother: Me: Hello? Mother: Do you remember xxxx? (x = "high school sweetheart" wherein we learned through terrible examples of what art was; spending time drawing in art class; hiking up the slopes of cottonwood canyons; parking far out on the west side of town, under the magnanimous factory lights, kissing, talking, etc, etc). Me: Of course I remember xxxx. (My mother loves these games of comprehension). Mother: She died last month of a brain aneurism. Yyyy (my younger brother) saw a poster about it at school. Me: Oh. I hung up the phone. I can only remember typing into the game chat log, crying: OMG i just found out my X died XXII This intense longing for connection, coupled with the fact I have always felt socially awkward, is a complicated mental fixture stemming from a deeper instability of self-confidence and the spatial expanse I feel between us-us equating to me versus you versus the ever-revolving universe. In this example of loss, solitude becomes a mechanism in direct coordination to the ahistorical trauma that is mined, an aggressive and impossible task. Bodies, people, personalities suspended in the mind's eye become the ghosts of my mind and begin to inhabit the everyday. The virtual becomes a body extension of the mind and by proxy, memory. The memory is composed of semiotic ghosts2 that orbit around a condensation of past/present/future. 2 Novak, Amy. 2001. " Virtual Polterergeists and Memory: The Question of Ahistoricism in William Gibson's Neuromancer(1984)". Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11 (4 (44)). Temporary Publisher: 395-414. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308477. XXIII Slough 1: a place of deep mud or mire 2: a state of moral degradation or spiritual dejection 3: the cast-off skin of a snake 4: a mass of dead tissue separating from an ulcer 5: something that may be shed or cast off ######################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################## #### ############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################ 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###################################################################################################################################################################### ############################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################ ################################################################################################################################################################## Neuron Synapse Chart, ASCII Conversion Present Would you consider yourself adept? Adept? You mean skilled? I have always equated skill to a lineage of craft and a specific tradition and transmission of knowledge. No, I don't consider myself adept. I consider myself adaptive and resilient, but never adept. I have no lineage of craft, no tradition of craft. I am self-taught and thus overspecialized. Craft indicates an expanse in addition to the specific. According to Darwinian theory, I should be extinct. XXIV Pre-2004 A person can inhabit the structure of their theories and narratives.3 A person can manage them well, too, and, eventually cultivate such an expansive structure that the form manifests itself into an enormous escape as opposed to the core reality of questioning their sustaining sense of being. The inescapable prescience of the everyday correlates to this thought experiment. In my case, my memory supersedes any specific moment of being, but is instead relegated to an accumulation of traumatic events. Negating all specificity, as the function of this paper is not to establish psychoanalytic voyeurism, the events are tethered to concepts of family, and, even deeper, human networks. I am speaking of the everyday transactions that we often take for granted and how distorted versions of these environments (in my case, severe isolation) can arise when we fail to acknowledge our own historicity and confrontation of the past. One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. -Robert Smithson, extract from A Sedimentation of the Mind4 [In my instance, when I was a child I lived on a couch for what felt like the better part of a year with strict immobilization. I was to stay on the couch while in the presence of my sitter (the woman's house we were living at following the divorce of my parents.) I was later told this yearlong experience was actually restricted to a time frame of approximately four to five weeks. In my mind, a television is resting at a 75- degree angle towards a tufted green couch circa 1970's. To my right is a door with two adjoining windows covered over with lace-patterned sheets. The coffee table looks like a faux-antiqued purchase from a local furniture store. An image of an antique. Then, something funny happens. The desolation of those hours spent sitting, facing outward through day and night, resting on the arm of the 3 Ganoe, Cathy J. 1999. "Design as Narrative: A Theory of Inhabiting Interior Space." Journal of Interior Design 25 (2). Temporary Publisher: 1-15. http://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1939-1668.1999.tb00340.x/pdf. 4 Smithson, Robert. "A Sedimentation of the Mind." The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt, New York University Press, 1979. XXV chair while my mother and younger brother slept begin to alter. I internalized my thoughts and glared at the vacant television. Lights flash, the carpet becomes blue, no, it wasn't blue, it was brown, shaggy brown. There wasn't a coffee table at all. The walls were paneled wood, no, that was later, another house, but the two have now converged, become a distinctly new structure.] I have spent my entire life unraveling memories, building them up, taking them down and reassembling them: What if x equates to y in the instance of x differing their actions in direct relationship to z. If z's physical force used is that of the body weight of x, how much force is needed to shove them through a glass door when x is fourteen, or does the force not quite equate to a breakage and the entire door rattles and bows? La mente y la tierra están en un estado constante de la erosión, los ríos mentales desgastan bancos abstractas, ondas cerebrales socavan acantilados de pensamiento, las ideas se descomponen en piedras de desconocimiento y cristalizaciones conceptuales se rompen en los depósitos de la razón arenosa. -Robert Smithson, extracto de una sedimentación de la Mente A fully formed process of escape never developed. Time, history and the delicate moments of the past are all ingrained in the physical embodiment of my memory. The current replays in my head. The ideological impositions, the physical manifestations of power struggles within the dysfunctional situations guided me towards electric narratives-pre-coded conceptualizations in the form of video games that used predictable narrative arcs and boring story arc formulas. For some reason, however, an interest in this escape was oppositional to the "outer world" and this routine consumption of content became an apparatus of my living environment and a virtual pathway to fulfill the conversational needs present within a less dysfunctional environment. When routinely confronted with conflict, survival becomes the primary behavioral function.5 5 DePrince, Anne P., and Jennifer J. Freyd. 2004. "Forgetting Trauma Stimuli". Psychological Science 15 (7). Sage Publications, Inc.: 488-92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40064137. XXVI Present How did we get this far off track? What was the original purpose of this paper? What track? The point of origin for this paper equated to an analysis of Jacques Derrida's concept of Hauntology, which really stems from his book The Specters of Marx, a post-Cold War analysis of the complications of a neo-liberal society paralyzed by the notions of the return of, well, the ghosts of Marx6 lashing back to the possibility of communism through a direct opposite form of totalitarianism. Derrida uses this information as a metaphor for ghosts and hauntings through ideas, images and, more specifically the multiplicity and exponential duplication of identities through media and how experience embodies embedded knowledge or what he calls possession-the impossibility of unseating ourselves from the time stream of mutual experience. L'esprit et la terre sont dans un état constant d'érosion, rivières mentaux portent banques abstraites, les ondes cérébrales sapent falaises de la pensée, les idées se décomposent en pierres de cristallisations ignorants et conceptuelles briser le sable raison des dépôts. -Robert Smithson, extrait sédimentation of Mind Longing for the Other While a majority of my undergraduate work revolved around a ritualistic process of forming an Other, it more specifically attempted to reestablish a dialogue with my younger brother, who represents an extremely small population of delirium, addiction and homelessness. The work was about the formation of an Other, even going back as far as our time as children playing and developing ridiculous narratives. 6 Derrida, Jacques, The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994. XXVII A short list of books I have read that embody me or am I the vampire of their ideas? chronological based on age from memory in one 15-minute sitting 11/10/2015 10:43-10:58PM The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien Ribsy, Beverly Cleary The Lord of the Rings, Book I, J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings, Book II, J.R.R. Tolkien The Deathgate Series, Books I-VII, Margaret Weiss & Tracy Hickman Ramona the Pest, Beverly Cleary Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Full Volume, Douglas Adams Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics, Richard Feynman Tanks for the Memories: Floatation Tank Talk, John C Lilly The House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho Demian, Herman Hesse Journey to the East, Herman Hesse Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse Siddartha, Herman Hesse Thus Spoke Zarathrusta, Friedrich Nietzsche The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche A Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez A General in His Labyrinth, Garcia Marquez XXVIII Snow Country, Yusanari Kawabata The Old Capitol, Yusanari Kawabata A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe Hiroshima Notes, Kenzaburo Oe Soul Mountain, Gau Xingjian On Grammatology, Jacques Derrida Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth The Archeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault Suicide, Emile Durkheim Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard No Logo, Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein Complete Shakespeare, William Shakespeare Image, Music, Text, Roland Barthes Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida Shadow & Claw, Gene Wolfe Writing & Difference, Jacques Derrida The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction, Walter Benjamin On Photography, Susan Sontag Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, Gabriella Coleman A Seer Reader, Ed Atkins The spirit and earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought to break decompose ideas into stones of unknowing and conceptual crystallizations, because the sand deposits. -Robert Smithson, extracted sedimentation of Mind XXIX #include <chapter> Most of my dreams are conversations with ghosts. As I age, this population increases. Often, it is located in some hypnotic café or everyday site. Living rooms, outdoor terraces, smelly neon dive bars, upscale restaurants, in the back seats of cars swimming through fractal traffic lights, apartment complexes, high-rises, alleyways, in the visage of night and in the reliquary of day. Nothing is unordinary. The colors are a holographic hallucination, vivid recollections collated with a vibrant hum of language. An exchange of thoughts and ideas mirrored by an intense feeling of extensive lapses in time, as though a wormhole materialized in my mind's eye and I am peering into myself. When I wake up, the world becomes infinitely small, and I feel as though I'm the size of a bacterium nesting on an atom. #enable <memory_structure> if PRESENT=/=FALSE !important then PAST=M[(|time-t|*(.5)T/.5] XXX . . . MY MEMORY IS MINE MY MEMORY IS MY BIOLOGY MY MEMORY IS MY ARCHITECTURE MY MEMORY IS A HISTORICAL MARKER MY MEMORY IS A CULTURAL PERMUTATION MY MEMORY IS NO LONGER MY MEMORY MY MEMORY IS A SOCIAL PRINCIPLE MY MEMORY IS YOUR MEMORY MY MEMORY IS OUR MEMORY . . . XXXI >:) ANARCHAEOLOGIES (:< DIGGING I remember the first time I wandered into an internet art forum. XXXII Q Is the virtual act of finding equivalent to wandering or does this definition undermine or degrade the actualization of the act itself? When I was fourteen and I had already spent years hooked into the net playing online games, pirating songs from Napster and loading up my yahoo chat messenger. My father had inadvertently converted his basement into an oasis of digital content. We had CD presses, specialized printers devoted to printing iron-on graphics for T-shirts and more importantly, state of the art PC's maximized with graphics processors, RAM and stacks of burnable CD-ROMs. What I find more interesting about the structure of these memories is how my coming of age experience of childhood was essentially ritualized within the confines of this drab basement. My brother shared these quintessential explorations of the "Brave New World" and, oddly enough, this mutual experience of engaging with these technologies composed a majority of our time. Also, New Media was media. Everything was new. Our minds were developed and designed in direct relationship to the actualization and advancement of these technologies and our engagement with the social practices of these systems also caused for other complications to unfold. INTERNET ART FORUMS I discovered Wetcanvas.com back in 1998, when they first launched the site. I discovered it through a cousin who was the family artist (no one could ever match his ability to draw or compose a poem-or so I learned with great rapidity once I initiated this making process). I remember entering the domain name (this is pre-Google) and watching the information unfold over my retina as though a massive folder of information had been shoved through the film of my pupil. XXXIII THE 1998 ONLINE NET ART SCENE was mostly devoted to edifying a secondhand experience of flat physical experiences. Artists traded images of paintings and drawings, offered up democratic critiques that mirrored the open-source ethos of the time and exchanged casual comments that often led you down other tangential pathways. Thus leading me to the problem of the digital-oriented identity and its relationship to real-time experiences. According the essay entitled The Digital Self7, our use of digital technologies exponentiates the fracturing of our identities existing within the physical world. The brain, at an unconscious level, is unable to differentiate between the realness of a page or the flatness of a simulated word processor. First wave internet users became both a litmus test for the potentiality of the internet, but also a great human experiment. Devoid of expectations or the prescience of human nature, we pushed an entire generation into an undefined unprotected space. The democratization of this experience led to some fascinating surveys of human communication, but also allowed for a massive media structure to rise up and erase the presence of the present. Being, ejected from everyday consternations of my peers, quickly transmogrified into a distinct historical experience composed of feed updates, matrices of banal information and ideas governed by our own marginalization and cliquish associations. A culture of trolls spawned from this democratization. Trolls fill a role that has been contested from the beginning of philosophical thought, dating back to the Plato's free rider complex presented in The Republic, but in this case currency equated to communicative exchanges and trolls surfed through these currents intent on destroying this currency; they used the democratization as a means of catapulting their inner turmoil; criticism became a pronounced ideological practice equated to rhetorical bomb-tossing as opposed to debate. The function and purpose, however, eroded in this transition as new concepts of anonymity and avatars arose. The pertinence of these banal experiences inverted further. We no longer needed a critical method for disbursing information when we could more readily invent it ourselves; the population quickly learned that history in internet time was capable of rapid renovation. What was once a democratic process has become centralized around marketing evaluation algorithms and highly-tuned search engines that provide instantaneous feedback that are aligned with SEO, or search engine optimization, filtered through corporate owned search engines, such as BING, Google, Yahoo or Firefox. 7 Zhao, Shanyang. "The Digital Self." Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 28, Issue 3, pp. 387-405, ISSN 0195-6086, electronic ISSN 1533-8665. XXXIV CASE STUDY: NO LAND ISLAND No Land Island was created in response to the banal and oftentimes futile social desires we have created to engage with online systems as a means to simulate a conversational experience or human interaction. Our connection to the outside world has distanced. The first voiceover begins with "Home. [In reference to HOME pages or, more obviously, a basic shelter structure]." Later, the same voiceover comes in: "Thoughts are encrypted. You sit. The lines are two million pixels. With a click, you enter entropy. With a click you witness an island. The island is floating on the horizon of a neon ocean. You type, but query no responses." I wrote this script to directly correlate to the end-user experience of investigating a model or platform of information. In most cases, this is a banal search query that results in the highly popular (as presented by investigating the top Google searches) searches for pornography, celebrities, series recaps and social media trends. I decided to use the island as a metaphor for this specific property of searching due to the numerous literary associations we ascribe to islands. The narrative then arcs into a male version of the voiceover. This is intentional as it lends itself into the neutralized nature of online communication. XXXV Back then, digital avatars were not equated with profile images. We had no means of determining the actual reality of a person other than the information they decided to disclose. The narration leads us through a series of montages including a four gradient screen [in reference to Corey Arcangel's early work] with a seemingly banal, yet intrinsically deeper engagement with issues orbiting around these forms of communication. They are, at once, stripped of all meaning. A desertification of ideas and emotional responses. The narration is intentionally constructed between YOU and ME in order to break the fourth wall but also in reference to the Other; the infinite number of Others using the same processes, on the same chat rooms or social media platforms and uncovering the same situations. Eventually, an abstracted phoenix, floating alongside these ongoing chats, becomes a meteor that strikes the google earth in the sequence from the opening. The male voiceover returns, asks "I keep pondering this very question. What am I doing here? Why do I keep scrolling down liquid screens?" and transitions into a compilation of archival NASA footage showcasing the early global satellite systems. The final sequence unrolls like a Doppler radar of what we imagine as an island, but the image never fortifies. The voiceover offers one final summation: "When you think about it, the body its own compartmentalized island, shifting through space and time…our minds are our largest organs, massive continents drifting in both real-time and in our own personal thought time." In order to reinforce our perceptions of islands in relationship to the internet, I created a website online without any labels outside of the one specifically embedded in the video. I also included a very brief essay about the phenomenology of islands and how this phenomenological idea of how we experience an island in our mind's eye is easily related to the early developments of the great human experiment of internet architecture. XXXVI A Trolling is often equated to activism, or as conceptual artist Simon Denny supposes, one positive element realized by this movement was the concept of critical trolling, or critiques aimed with acute specificity with intent to create an oppositional force. The opposition, by rising up, is thus illuminated and an otherwise invisible structure, in the crosshairs of critique, is revealed. DEEP WEB The unconscious mind-our mental internal processing is already equivalent to our surrounding systems. XXXVII A relatively new concept is the idea of a deep web lurking beneath the surface of the current ‘surface' internet systems. While much of this process is devoted to illegal operations, such as sex trafficking or illegal drug purchases, the concept of a deep web was not a prevalent thought pattern prior to the last decade. A majority of sites were interlinked through a series of rings; end-users who banded together to form coalitions of shared knowledge or information access. The hierarchy of information was less normalized and allowed for chance ideas to spawn. The DEEP WEB acknowledges a greater expanse to these buried digital histories. Burial is linked with the concept of digging tools. Unfortunately, technological process allows us to bury much more readily than to unearth. Our tools for searching are incredibly difficult to use when attempting to reverse the process of resurrecting information. Instead, the DEEP WEB is much closer in to the physical processing of our minds. Nodes of information access are unequally distributed. Like memories, the DEEP WEB is as much a grave as it is a museum. While a section of the invisible web is devoted to bunkering illegal activities, a majority of the DEEP WEB, or inaccessible web, is devoted to the excremental excess of the a priori ‘shallow web.' Like the mind, the massive network shovels the decadence into the subconscious, inaccessible interior-Geocities is one example of a series of websites that were buried. Our subconscious and memory operates similarly to the deep web: we are casting information into a dark pool within our brains and always seeking to extract or pull out processes. The complication that arises from this practice is that the mechanics rely on a subterranean invisible structure from which to grasp. Conceptualization becomes codified after the creative act. Definitions emerge in a distinct after. XXXVIII ELECTRIC DREAMS & the altermodern The psychological experience of computer architecture is more fully realized in Google's latest neural network Deep Dream, a network trained on thousands of images of dogs. The network, when given an image, only uses these images of dogs as the signifier-reality is a construction of this point of origin: dogs. So the neural network embeds dog eyes everywhere. It looks for dog snouts in the curvature of an arm or a dog leg in the crevice of a couch cushion. The machine has established a reality centered around the image of dogs. Using this concept as a guide, machine memory is a relatively new (20-30yrs) concept and art work created within these constraints has paralleled the developments of this technology. One example from the Deep Dream Neural Network XXXIX IMPORT/EXPORT I created this while contemplating parabolic connections between images, shapes, histories, forms and ideas. XL Our experience prior to human integration with data-the obsession with harvesting data, collecting data, comparing data, contrasting data, drawing multi-tiered processes of evaluating data, entire enterprises and corporations that trade and deal in data, where the average human being in a developed country spends, on average, more time with data than human beings-contrasted with our omniscient contemporary engagement with data establishes a snapshot of our current cognition of data. We took a sacred oath with data, but we forgot the taxonomy of data counters human concepts of sanctity. With this idea established: We also must realize the nature of our technological conquest is a mirror of our objectives and suppressed social psychological processes. The network resurrected and opened portals to a hyper-flux of access that reconfigured our ideas of nowness and accelerated our perceptions of time. Slowness is a now a concept heralded in negative light. XLI Slowness, however, is found in hyper-focused subsidiaries of the network, both off-line and online. In example one, FINAL FANTASY 6, my first introduction to experiencing computer art and a computer-based practice to convey a complex (albeit often poorly translated/written script from the native Japanese) association with an electric narrative. I am now remembering the smirk my step-mother gave me when she discovered the name: Final Fantasy SIX? How can it be final if there are six of them? The game developer Square-Enix is currently developing the fifteenth iteration. The game follows the narrative of a lead female character, a rarity in its time (and still is), experiencing extreme self-doubt while approaching a town she is directed to destroy by a corporate empire. After facing an ethical dilemma, the end-user follows her journey through a world that is fraught with paranoia and verging on absolute destruction. Interestingly, the narrative uses technology as the ultimate destroyer and consumer of the surrounding environment and, within the game structure, an opportunist empire of greed is seeking to suck the souls from the earth. I ponder: The empire that leads to the destruction of the world has some interesting U.S. yankee cultural associations. Perhaps it is an underlying backlash to the post- World War II Japanese environment. The narrative was created in the mid 90s. XLII Technology integrates with spirituality and irreversibly destroys the world when the antagonist, Kefka, uploads into a larger spiritual data-structure. The story arc is oddly akin to current singularity organizations. I always found this troubling: the specific boundaries established between virtual and physical experiences and the polemics conjured up by issues of Utopia & Dystopia and yet we embrace these notions of savior-complexes within everyday Hollywood narratives. Heroes that triumph yield the largest economic returns. In this example, however, the villain wins and the heroes are merely attempting to thwart further destruction and expansionism of a nihilist philosophy. One should note that that this process of spiritual decay-the antagonist destroys the environment as opposed to the world and humans are left to live in desolation-is tied to Shinto, not Buddhist, belief systems in relationship to the world harboring unseen energy. The narratives, while oftentimes banal, still harbor many complex significations and concepts. XLIII APPROPRIATIONS < COPING > SURROGATES The intellectual constructions of my works are coordinated to the desire for subconscious coping mechanisms. The realization of this internal survival mechanism is directly linked to my necessity to use surrogate identities as philosophical representatives of my own personal experiences. Included in this notion is how we represent our motivations for being, how we share, transmit and convey information. Included in this process is a mechanic of understanding that curtails our experience of being within a space of influence or, in this case, a translation of "being under the influence" is comparable to a nonphysical synthetic, a drug or alcohol, having a sentience or responsibility over the user. The user is no longer a partaker but engaged in a symbiotic relationship. The internet proffers up verisimilitudes with how we devour belief systems. What do we believe? Do we have consequences for these serendipitous interactions? The viewer, when entering a space, undergoes a similar biosynthetic engagement. They cognitively take note of the details. The brain harvests structures, layout, color, arrangement, rhythm. The timing is embedded deep within the tissues of our response systems and thus recreates a pattern through appropriation as to invoke the inner muscle memory of a prior experience. Appropriation is the language of specters. Ghosts, embedded in the content, live on within the vessel of information and, due to the relative ease to access massive quantities of information, the question of authenticity and virtue are under great scrutiny. If we have no ideals to mirror, what is the responsibility of the artist within the contemporary(?) context outside of wafting their virtual hand in cyberspace and plucking out ripened fruits to devour; to allow the viewer to devour; to mutually devour? If appropriation is the language of specters, then the act of engaging with it is the act of devourers. We consume the past in eye blinks. We bat an eye over another century upturned and yet this overload of processing dissuades us from engagement. Alternatively, the virtualization of our culture has sped up this process of consumption and within my life, the virtual has evolved to provide both linear and, more importantly within my context, nonlinear opportunities of memory engagement. XLIV OUROBOROS DREAMS XLV AN EXHIBITION >>You enter the space. >>A video is projected on the wall before you. You hear Mondo Cane playing softly to the tune of a syringe injecting into exposed flesh. >>You sit. The music increases exponentially. You notice a heads up display appear on the screen. A title flashes: >>PARALLAX<< >>Screen fades to white. >>The music surrenders, but you hear voices, low whispers, behind you. You turn, two televisions are facing each other in the far corner, communicating. >>You stand. You walk over and lower yourself until your ear nearly touches the top of the screens. You can hear them, you say to yourself, and when you hear them you realize what they are saying is everything and nothing. XLVI AUTOMATIC PROCESSING PITFALLS XLVII 1. Mutual Influences 1A. Camille Henrot-Overlapping [Pale Blue __] Modified AMF Ingredients: 1 part gin 1 part vodka 1 part white rum 1 part blue Curaçao 4 parts sweet and sour mix Garnish: Lemon sugar Lemon twist Glass - stainless steel shot glass Directions: 1. Mix all ingredients together and carbonate 2. Rim shot glass with lemon sugar, fill shot glass with mixture, top with lemon peel 1B. Robert Smithson-Spiral Jetty [immaterial Diffusion] Ingredients: 1 egg white 2 oz. Gin 6 oz. Grapefruit Juice .5 oz. Simple Syrup 5 EPIC Spiral Jetty IPA Ice Cubes Directions: 1. Add ice to a shaker and shake the egg white 2. Add the gin, grapefruit juice, and simple syrup to shaker and shake vigorously 3. Put IPA ice cubes in a pint glass and top with shaker mixture 1C. Michael Craig-Martin-A Glass of Water Ingredients: 2 oz. Jackrabbit Oak Aged Gin Tonic Water Directions: Fill an 8 oz. highball glass with ice, poor in gin and top with tonic water. XLVIII XLIX 2. Molecular Programming [A Title Plate] 1080P HD Video, Two Channel Loop L 3. Cortex Series Nodes LI 3B. Node IV: Fall 2006 17"x22", Laser Etched Acrylic 3A. Node I: Spring 2005 17"x22", Laser Etched Acrylic LII 3C. Node V: Winter 2007 33"x22", Laser Etched Acrylic LIII 3D. Node III: Summer 2006 17"x22", Laser Etched Acrylic 3E. Node II: Summer 2005 17"x22", Laser Etched Acrylic LIV 4. Self-Awareness Series-Catacomb I 40" X 60" digital prints on Dibond, Sound exciters (attached to back) 4A. Nietzsche 4B. Woolf LV 5. Video Installation 5A. Parallax 1080P HD Video, Single Channel Loop Semiotic ghosts compose the overlapping elements of philosophical slants. The memory of my expedition through cyberspace is individually wrapped into the ideological content we see before us: a holographic representation of my own opinions, albeit funneled through extremities of virtual and ideological propositions. "Look hard at the television screen, really look at it," Alan Watts directs as he begins to deconstruct the physical process of perceiving.8 The output of the work is more, in principal, a curatorial process than a structuralist composition, though the hallucinogenic properties and the alignment of these layers intentionally veers away from the memory and time-intensive requirements of this act. As I trace my path through these archived memories, my thoughts entwine with them, question them and a polymorphic residue is left behind. 8 Watts, Alan, "Conversation with Myself." YouTube video, 28:06, posted by carpo719 on Oct 21st, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe2u9_eqLfA LVI 5B. #8A0707: A CORPSE Experience 1080P HD Video, Single Channel Loop I am a healthy being. I am a happy being. I know that I am going to die. I accept this knowledge. I have died before. LVII 5C. Looking for a Space 1080P HD Video, Single Channel Loop Are you ready to Die? Light Waves, Sound waves, Energy Condensed, Here it is. LVIII 5D. Two Entities Sharing Ideologies 1080P HD Video, Two Channel Loop LIX LX Nader Hitler Baker Watts Che Foucault Arendt Zizek Stalin McKenna Trotsky Churchill Ashdown Castro Rand Abdulaziz Lenin Mussolini Jinping Sartre Sung Gokce Lowy Baker Beauvoir Davis Derrida LXI RESPONSE & reflection LXII My main aim throughout this process of accumulating information and clashing it against one another is to provide a transformative experience. More specifically, an experience that uses the language of contemporary (i.e. present-tense) cultural technologies to shift the perceptions of the viewer towards a space of continuums. The same feeling you get when looking far out into the cosmos. Space. With this in mind, I am essentially codifying my philosophical processes through visualizations. What is my philosophy, then? Paradox. Vast distances. Collapsing time & memory. I do not think we exist in one place at one time, but instead live within multiple times simultaneously. The micro versus the macro. Ultimately, challenging the viewer, having a stance. Philosophy is mental combat and I spent the first fifteen years of my life training for combat. These combative processes can be seen in the aggressive male gaze of the modified Nietzsche portrait, as he is seen looking directly at the viewer, confronting the viewer, in the two televisions confronting one another and in the spirit guide formats of Parallax. My answer then is that I would find satisfaction if a viewer walked away remembering this experience, let it process within their minds and shifted their inner world a couple centimeters towards thinking about the vastness and multiplicity of realities around them-a more specific satisfaction is if they decode a small part of the axis around which all of these ideas rotate: looking at the world around them as a series of colliding rotational forces as opposed to a flat linear experience. This was a pretty good question, one I've given some thought to and have, for the most part, processed. The underlying subtext of presentations, be it the underlying male aggression prevalent in Parallax or the mapped decomposing corpse in A Corpse Experience, I feel, are only subplots within the main framework. Subtext is important as it adds sedimentary layers from which to dig, but the overarching themes of existence, I feel, are much more important considerations to focus on. What do you want the viewer to walk away with? On Subtext LXIII One example that has come up is the Kundalini master sequence: On one hand I've heard that the syringe sequence, which includes stock footage of a testosterone injection, directly following this sequence winds up as a critique of the belief systems that came before. On the other hand, I've seen viewers participate in this act, follow along and find comfort in mirroring this experience. While I personally find it impossible for me to directly engage with any systems of belief, I am aware of their benefits. After all, I am just another actor in this silly stage, another Oz sitting behind the digital curtains pulling levers. The subtext is just more information to dig out to inspire depth: for example, the relationship between the works of Nietzsche and Woolf are relatively unimportant in order for the viewer to decipher a sense of history due to the format of the photograph, but also a new history mapped over the old due to the glitch processes. If the viewer understands the subtexts, a couple more continents shift and they can create a new narrative. I feel this enables a broader spectrum of engagement. On a base level, my decision to include the audio became all the more imperative: the photographs become entities reciting their life story to the viewer. I'm reminded of a child at the opening who was putting his ear up to the image and said, "Hey dad these people are talking to us." Precisely, philosophers and novelists are speaking to us, but are also divergent on their solitary meanings. The singular poetic experience translates across the expansive gap of the singular. While philosophy is largely considered a particularly challenging area to process, I feel the basis of most philosophies, when articulated and crystallized, can be felt and experienced by most people on some level. While I, too, feel a majority of people are not engaging with these thought artifacts, in many ways this is the precise reason to make work using these ideas. I don't believe in the potential of shock and spectacle. If anything, our culture thrives on these tricks to the point where a majority of content has no value outside of marketing and packaging apparatuses. What is more shocking is a moment where you have to slow down, have a thought or be challenged and I view myself and other artists as providing these opportunities of engagement: body extensions of our own ideas, obsessions and images. LXIV REFLECTION Now that I've had a few weeks to settle back into a comfortable dread of having completed this thing, this six-year thing, though I realize the thing itself is only a manifestation of a beginning. I suppose the dread stems from beginnings. Foundations. Where am I going or where have I gone? Are there answers? We know there are always questions upon questions. The dread of completion, of having been completed. The dread of a fulfillment of acquisition. Acquiring a taste. Actuating a subset of thoughts. My expectations from this experience were muggy at best, hallucinatory at worst and yet, when I flood my mind's eye with the images I am hopeful for the first time in decades. Does anyone know what I am talking about(perhaps)? Does anyone know what I am feeling(likely)? Does anyone care to figure this thing out(sometimes)? Can they figure this thing out(probably)? Do I care(yes)? If I do care what influence am I casting? LXV I. Title Plate CAPTCHA. https://vimeo.com/174243547 I initially created a long version of my exhibition text as seen at the beginnings of this paper. For me, it was important to invoke the qualities of otherness into the wall text as opposed to having the viewer read a lengthy narrative. I included the pronouns YOU and ME as a way of establishing a third party conversation. I've played with wall texts before, as seen in Sculpture Club exhibition in 2012 A Priori, where I intentionally wrote a text using exorbitant art jargon as a means to infer meaning to an otherwise scattered arrangement of ideas. I view introductory text as the first page in a novel. Stances are created. Boundaries (or the absence of them) are formed and it becomes the first access point for viewers to engage or disengage. I feel using YOU feeds off of the narcissism so commonly transmitted through digital media and, in a way, establishes a clear position while, at the same time, the viewer is given enough distance to appear as a third party to some other distant process. The viewer also automatically assumes the role of YOU. LXVI II. Catacomb I. If YOU and ME establishes narrative expectations of engagement, Catacomb I becomes the emergence of a larger omniscient system at play. The two figures, clearly dated, almost cliché in their significance, hover over the viewer. Nietzsche, on the left, aggressively stares directly at the viewer, while Woolf, on the right, stares at Nietzsche. When the viewer puts their ear closer to the image, they can listen to two respective essays: Ecce homo and A Room of One's Own. I chose these essays specifically for their individual content and also the relational content and narratives that construct as a result of the process I used, but also in relationship to one another. Ecce homo [Also see: Behold the man, John 9:15] was the last book Nietzsche wrote in order to both demolish all perceptions of himself and to self-actualize the vastness and significance of his written works. Directly following this book, he fell into periods of dementia, anguish and mental ruin due to syphilis. LXVII A Room of One's Own is an essay written by Woolf in 1929 in order to raise the banners of the significance of woman creators, but also to identify the devastation brought on by the suppression, dominance and aggression brought onto them by their male colleagues. In this instance, Joe was correct when he acknowledged the interesting connection between this self-actualization-that one requires a room of one's own to create, but in this instance and in every instance of creation we are not alone. We are never alone. We are always haunted by the ideas of others. A more personal relationship comes from these two: The Mother and the Father. When I was nineteen I became enthralled with Woolf. I copied pages from To the Lighthouse verbatim to learn her linguistic patterns. In an early essay she mentioned her desire to become an impressionist writer due to an enormous influence by the French impressionists. Her writing surges with life and hums with the silence of death and yet it scatters across the page, just out of grasp. The images flow into one another, metaphors expand and contract and rotate around this physical and hallucinatory experience of the world. If Woolf was my literary mother, Nietzsche was my philosophical father. The attraction rose when I discovered Thus Spoke Zarathustra around this same time. The internal versus external experience of the narrative drew me in and the demolition of archetypes greatly impressed upon me the significance to counter our expectations of what a narrative should be. He wasn't afraid to write. He harbored no fear. He moved forward with confidence while understanding that our existence was a mere microsecond in relationship to universal experience while also infinitely important. The audio was modified using a granular synthesizer and Ableton Live. I fed the audiobooks into the synthesizer, had the software read the audio data-points and output these patterns with regard to location, length, volume, pitch and frequency. The circular nature of these modified audiobooks represents the circular narratives of the larger story arcs. LXVIII III. Nodes. Each image was created 10-11 years ago and rests in an artist portfolio in the basement of my mother's house. They have rested in this house for years because I never submitted them to exhibitions nor had intentions to submit them to exhibitions. I had no end goal with these images. I had no direction with these images, no expectations of what they should be. They came into being on their own accord and I translated them in real-time. They organically evolved into the finalized being; they became their own entity. Each of these drawings took well over 100 hours or three to five weeks of full time work. I can remember every stroke of the pen. I think I can remember every stroke of the pen. As the years roll over my eyes, a fog settles in, days shift. I can only remember them in relationship to the outside world so I cataloged them by seasons. I think I can remember what they were, what they meant. They provided me enormous therapy. A way of expressing the inner. No goals. No possessions. No fantasies of being something other than what it was. When I was making these, I was content. It was all I needed, but that changed. Now they are clouds of my past. I reach for them, but they evaporate from my mind's eye. I cannot reach them. LXIX IV. Parallax (12 min runtime). https://vimeo.com/142332283 As indicated prior, this piece was created to demonstrate the multiplicity and paradox of overlapping realities we engage with on a daily basis. What I have not specifically acknowledged is the backstory of the creation of the piece. To be clear, I was working on compositing the Alan Watts videos as I had this sudden urge to combine him with the Kundalini master, a buffer of sorts, when I received a phone call (noticing a trend here?). The night before, my cousin, drunk, had accidentally shot himself in the head with a rifle. He died instantly. I remember staring at the screen, dazed. I had grown up with him, spent most of my youth around him in some form, though he was much older. My YouTube window was on auto-play, a screencast of first person shooter video games came up and I oriented the connection; our cyclical engagement with how we perceive human nature is inherently flawed. Ultimately, I also view it as a conflicted and troubling encounter with how we perceive violence from a great distance and also the absurdity of how we utilize this violence LXX to perpetually fend off invisible enemies. The blasting of male testicles throughout this strip is specifically directed at the aggressive and pathetic way we use these virtual acts to mutate and replace adrenaline driven processes as a means to artificially reclaim masculinity and power. I am not critiquing belief systems within this system, I am merely demonstrating the complexity of doublespeak, of living within two oppositional frameworks of knowledge. Alan Watts, who I view as a spirit guide throughout this short film, is both counterpoint and revelatory to the imagery. The counterpoint, though, ends up challenging the viewer: he is telling YOU what is happening and YOU have to make a decision to either agree or step away. LXXI V. #84A0707: A Corpse Experience (five-minute runtime). https://vimeo.com/168728626 Buddhists engage in cemetery contemplations, Maranasati, in order to overcome, analyze and process their fear of death, the physical cycle of the body as it returns to the earth and to more fully understand the inner functions of the human body. I applied this concept to a expanding fractal by using #84A0707 as the title, the hexadecimal color code to in closest approximation to human blood, and by mapping a video time lapse of a decomposing human corpse I discovered on Liveleaks to the surface of the 3d Object. The narration is taken from an audio CD I purchased of a fairly known hypnotist who creates YouTube videos on affirmations, hypnosis and guided meditations. I specifically chose these experiences to create a virtual object of beauty while retaining the inner horror of our bodies. This attraction/repulsion is a continuance from the other content in the show, but I mainly created it as a space of calmness and a space to give the viewer positive affirmations while reminding them of the underlying theme of death. Perhaps this is a point where I could affirm that the subtext does not necessarily supersede the significance of the affirmations being transmitted. I feel these affirmations are similar to things we all often tell ourselves in order exist and cope with being. LXXII VI. Looking for a Space (six-minute runtime). https://vimeo.com/155244602 I included this clip as I felt it dovetailed nicely into the previous two works that inherently discussed the fabricated nature of our reality and how we engage within the construction of this reality. Looking for a Space had even more significance because the source material came directly from the University of Utah Archives. The original clips provided snippets of critique in regards to anti-drug use and promoting diversity (though the visuals of these clips often contradicted their function), but, in my opinion, more importantly offer up a lens into what we might consider very different era of U.S. culture, although we are still discussing the same exact issues and principles. The guided sequence, in this instance, is much more authoritarian that the two prior. Timothy O' Leary, 1960's rebel hippie leader, encounters some intriguing aspects I wanted to bring up: This section of the meditation, "Light Waves, Sound Waves, Energy, Here it is," was chosen for the specificity of the media I was portraying. In one sense, I was using the physics he was illustrating to transmit this information and, on the other hand, I particularly paid attention to the self-analytic process of the video itself. While the video works on the computer screen, within the installation space it transforms the environment. The color flashes begin with the color #84A0707 and then CMYK, the printing colors of newspapers and other mass distribution print media. LXXIII VIII. Two Entities Sharing Ideologies (30 min runtime). When I initiated graduate school I began forming these internal thought narratives-auto-interviews (see beginning of this paper)- and began to centralize much of my work around conversations. While the rest of the work uses this process in varying forms, the idea to create this piece came to me while I was contemplating artificial intelligence, the future of machine learning and how current media engages with itself. I ascribed the self-reflexivity of intelligence and the orator (speeches, expressions, announcements with no expectation of a clarifying response) to show the wide-ranging potentialities of ideologies. Archived representatives of these ideologies are perpetually transmitted through this media (set to random) and the viewer's relationship to these structures is an inversion of Catacomb I: they become omniscient, looking down at the mechanics of the world, the greatest minds and destroyers prostrating their motives. I feel this distance is significant; stepping back to look down at the world below allows one to also contemplate the larger context within which they live. I also turned the audio of these TV's down to a whisper so the viewer, when sitting to watch the projections, would have an indirect influence. Whispers behind them. I will apply this piece to future exhibitions on its own. Two TV's. Two sets of mounted speakers on opposing walls. LXXIV Other Installation Views LXXV LXXVI LXXVII LXXVIII LXXIX Works Cited DePrince, Anne P., and Jennifer J. Freyd. 2004. "Forgetting Trauma Stimuli". Psychological Science 15 (7). Sage Publications, Inc.: 488-92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40064137. Derrida, Jacques, The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994. Ganoe, Cathy J. 1999. "Design as Narrative: A Theory of Inhabiting Interior Space." Journal of Interior Design 25 (2). Temporary Publisher: 1-15. http://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1939- 1668.1999.tb00340.x/pdf. Novak, Amy. 2001. " Virtual Polterergeists and Memory: The Question of Ahistoricism in William Gibson's Neuromancer(1984)". Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11 (4 (44)). Temporary Publisher: 395-414. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308477. Oppenheimer, Joshua, Signe Byrge Sørensen, Joram Ten Brink, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, André Singer, Torstein Grude, et al. 2014. The act of killing. Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb, 1980© by Harvest/EMI, compact disc. Smithson, Robert. "A Sedimentation of the Mind." The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt, New York University Press, 1979. Watts, Alan, "Conversation with Myself." YouTube video, 28:06, posted by carpo719 on Oct 21st, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe2u9_eqLfA Zhao, Shanyang. 2005. "The Digital Self." Temple University. Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 28, Issue 3, pp. 387-405, ISSN 0195-6086, electronic ISSN 1533-8665. |
| Reference URL | https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s69k7hcz |



