Excerpts from Inquiry Journals and Process Journals:

"It is the question that drives us?" (Trinity, The Matrix)

Questions are how we push through the darkness of the ignorance that enslaves us. 

Right: "Home Studio, Charlotte" 

Cover of Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light by Leonard Shlain.  The title image is René Magritte’s “The Glasshouse” Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

which had a really cool quote:

Matisse Quote from Schlain’s Art of Physics.

Ziggy on Art and Physics

BELOW: Four photos of a modified Wal-Mart lamp with salvaged mirror tiles—2006, Columbia, SC.

Vitamins are crucial to good thinking, especially if your diet is lacking in them….

Superstitious use of the moonstone with aventurine stones to inspire creativity and imagination.

Vibram 5-finger shoes. 

Early Morning Studio Light

Broken Timepiece

Money and Measurements

Gesture Study with Paintbrushes

Decisions

Eighteen Words on Inventory

Aquariums contain small, aesthetically-pleasing, heterogeneous representations of a larger natural environment in order to provide outsiders with a spectacle to engage imaginatively in moments of idleness. They are characterized by having walls of glass--transparent walls creating a publicly viewable interior. This transparency changes the threshold between the two worlds into a limit--there is no longer an opening up of one environment into another, but a distinct dividing line, an impermeable barrier, between two different worlds that require two different modes of navigation, rely on two different sets of rules, requiring different things of their inhabitants; thus the spectacle that one witnesses when gazing into an aquarium is not only the perspective of relative vagrancy in relation to the contained situation before them and the hyper awareness of dwelling it invites us to entertain, but by existing as a "world in miniature" (AP 31)--a world separate from that in which the spectator dwells--it enables viewers to embrace the notion that the world which they inhabit is somehow less contained, more "natural" (whatever that word means), and thus somehow . . . . one in which the spectator can enjoy a kind of freedom from the constraints s/he can so readily perceive containing the "other world."

Crickenberger, H. M. The Arcades Project Project. “Aquariums.” (2002-2007)

http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/aquariums.html

"your life is yours to create"

“Exercise your human mind as full as possible knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts; solve problems; explore the secrets of the physical universe; savor the input from all the senses” (1:03:50)

Questions posed at my hour-intermission:  Do you WANT control?  Or would you rather be “tasked” or “charged” “selected”

I wrote a bit at this point, about how the philosophical talk is a bit dense to listen to at this pace.  The talk is of a quick velocity—the image speaks much more quickly and directly…art makes its point without language…visual art, at least.

Do you want to wake up?  Do you want to write your own story?

Isn’t going into the collective a kind of death. Baudrillard talks about the flattening of existence in his book Seduction…and when I read that book I did not see how 2-d we would become (experiencing everything through screens)…now we’re moving into 36—immersion—digital environments.  In the time of this film, the background scenes are augmented more by analogue sources than digital…static sources, like books and signs….candy wrappers… 2-D is the new 3-D

 “our eyesight is a test to se if we can see beyond it” 1:13

“and on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion”

“the iguana will bite those who do not dream” TIE TO REPTILLIAN

“and as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person’s dream—that is self-awareness” (1:14) 

Philip K. Dick  -  The Book of Acts - Time is an illusion – the veil of time – connect to Gnosticism -- illusion of time created by a demon trying to make us forget that god’s coming is imminent (the year is something like 50AD)

Life is 1 moment: between the NO and the YES (1:31) CONNECT TO SUMI TECHNIQUE

“How do you really wake up?”

SOURCE:

WAKING LIFE. Written and directed by Richard Linklater

http://www.solarmovie.ac/watch-waking-life-2001-online.html 

What other works has Waking Life influenced…what do others have to say about it? THIS PORTFOLIO? 

UNLIKELY SOURCES

Okay, I just wrote all of that and now I’ve realized I haven’t even touched the prompt—unlikely sources of inspiration:

1. Commercials/billboards/adverts/t-shirts/bumperstickers/etc

2. Spatial configuration – how is physical space contrived so as to inform/steer our experience

3. Random snippets of conversation – everything connects to everything else if you follow the path far enough.  Sometimes a random comment made by a friend during an unrelated conversation will spark a new direction of thought. The important thing to think about while engaged in inquiry is how everything can be relevant in some way.

4. Connecting to the news – staying current on major world events can be an inspiration and a good way to keep your topic relevant to the ever-changing times.

5. Animals – always an inspiration to me – how honest they seem in their feelings compare to humans, the masters of artifice CONNECT TO CHATTER PAINTING

6. Good lighting – I will always come back to this – lighting controls the way we see the world…it can be an inspiration or a distraction.   Seek out the good lighting and your thoughts will flow unimpeded and undarkened by the miserable fluorescence that is taking over our world! 

7. Material Configurations:  The ironic combinations of things in our world can sometimes give us the philosophical nudge that we need to tear through to the next level of inquiry: see the image below

IMAGE:

A dirty coin and a dirty ruler—prompts the question, how do we measure wealth in experience?

I did an interesting experiment.

1. Located the .vr.jpg files on my phone—super easy as they were listed with all my other images

2. Emailed the .vrjpg of our classroom to myself and saved it on my desktop:

360 image of our classroom

1. I imported it into photoshop and added a few things:

360 image of our classroom with Van Gogh paintings, and drawings added – a type of 2D augmented reality

1. Then I wanted to see the effects would show up when viewed through CARDBOARD.

Interestingly, the added material only shows up one one side of the CARDBOARD stereoscopic display.  The effect is ghostly—one eye sees something that the other does not.  In this case, the left-eye display contained the added information.

1. Since I’ve been watching Waking Life lately, I thought it might be interesting to try out some of these rotoscopic renderings – taking real life images and rendering them as drawings/cartoons—layering color and other animation effects, etc.  I wanted to see if I could use a photoshop filter on the 360 image.  In the image below, I ran CHARCOAL FILTER and, to my surprise, it worked:

2.  

Photoshop charcoal filter on 360-image of classroom.

1. When I viewed this one, you could see that on the left-eye image, the image had been filtered but on the right-eye image the photo remained unchanged.

2. When I looked at the image through CARDBOARD, I saw only the Charcoal version.  When I looked again, I noticed that some of the shading of the unedited version was coming through, and if I closed one eye at a time, the image would shift. 

3. About a half hour after performing this test, I noticed eye discomfort and nausea. The effects lasted for several hours after and return if I even think about the experience of viewing the image.

4. This led me to research possible health effects of VR.  See blog post of sources here: http://hcricken.wix.com/inquiry-project-home#!Further-Reading/y16si/569e4b090cf2ca1e5ff664b2 

NOTES:

MEDICAL TERM FOR HEALTH ISSUE ASSOCIATED WITH VR:

Vergence-Accommodation Conflict (VAC):

See article: 

Gregory Kramida and Amitabh Varshney. “Resolving the Vergence-Accommodation Conflict in Head Mounted Displays: A review of problem assessments, potential solutions, and evaluation methods.” SOURCE? https://www.cs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/scholarly_papers/Kramidarev.pdf

Hardcopy versions of VR:

            Panorama:

            Viewmaster:

            Zoetrope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope

            Rotoscopic Animation:

            Artistic Installation:

            Haunted House:

            Architecture:  follow up on Claude Bragdon’s tesseract in Rochester

            Novels/Short Stories/Films

What is VIRTUAL?

            Who has tried to answer this question?

                        (Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulations: http://www.bconradwilliams.com/files/7313/9690/1991/Baudrillard-Jean-Simulacra-And-Simulation2.pdf and Seduction -- pdf downloaded)

I look at the list of movies I started with (see NOTES).  I think there are a lot of vision-based media in that list—but there’s a reason that film is so invested in this conversation. Movie theater screens were the first artificial retinae for humanity—life-like moving images—vr is the next step….or was the theatre the first retina?  THEATRE…..drama….the telling of stories…it always some how winds back to the narrative for me. A PAINTING IS A RETINA?

But then I and so many others have asked: isn’t it all “virtual”? Aren’t all of us subject to limitations of perception? 

The great project of the Borg in Star Trek was to unify consciousness—it was the act of sharing ultimately realized…it captured experience as thought and memory—but here we go—Cartesian MIND-BODY separation…focusing on thought and memory is only paying attention to part of the mind….what about the part we didn’t directly perceive through our senses?  What about the external stimuli that buzz silently in the background.  My memories are always a little higher in contrast than the real—dreams too—outlines seem harder—details fewer…it seems to become more and more like this as I get older.  LIKE  A PAINTING—IN THE BACKGROUND….

The questions it left me with were those concerning IMAGINATION.  If thoughts could be “screened” in the way that they are portrayed here—how would the screening profess distinguish the real from the imaginary—or the fictional?

The Romantic Poets, who many have dismissed as being silly-headed hippies running around naked with butterfly nets, were actual very serious thinkers and interpreters of new technology.  They came to be at a time when science was taking a leap forward with writers like Isaac Newton.  Newton’s Optics brought the whole notion of SEEING into question.  I could return to this. 

The problem with virtual reality when achieved using VR tech as it currently stands—is that the computer is having to focus the image for you.  It’s having to bypass a million-year-old hardwired faculty developed by evolution….I still cannot justify subjecting myself to this kind of risk, but Im still interested in it as a technology.

Videodrome

Tron

The Matrix

Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations

Deleuze-Guatarri A Thousand Plateaus

Waking Life

I’m ignoring my own prompt—don’t think I gave one this time actually.  I’ve been documenting a lot of process stuff in the sketchbook. I figure I can skip on to recent developments.

I abandoned google cardboard until today.  There was something vaguely magical about the cardboard viewer where I left it sitting on my art table.  Its like a portal to another universe.  I think the seductive power of the virtual is a very real danger to our “natural selves”

Today I rendered another cardboard image and looked at it through the cardboard viewfinder and after only five seconds, I had that strange wide-eyed feeling return and my head began to feel dull.

It may be purely psychosomatic, but I feel like VR is an unpleasant trigger for me. Still, I am fascinated by its possibilities as a medium for making people SEE in a way they’ve never seen before.

New lenses—new ways of seeing—is a paradigm shifter.  We’ve seen this evolution in the visual arts—the different ways an artistic creation can change the way we see. It happens in technology too—

Think:

Cave painting

Framed painting

Mural

Statue

Installation

Structure

Performance

Interactives

Experimentals

Documentaries

Speculative

Historical

Magnification

Telescoping

Participatory Documentation

Fantasy

Horror

My fiancée and I have been trying to redesign our backyard for many years.  Last night, we had a breakthrough.  For years, I’ve been sketching out possible arrangements geometrically with an areal view—like a map or a blueprint.  Last night, I sketched out the design from the perspective a someone who was just walking out of the house. He was shocked: “It’s beautiful,” he said.  It was the change in perspective that was what made him see it.  He wasn’t making the imaginative connection between the areal view and the on-ground or in-the-scene view. I’m able to do that and take for granted others can too, but apparently its not a common faculty to possess. 

That got me thinking to this idea of the visual artist—how they use VISION to teach people something or to make them SEE something in a new way.  Writers use LANGUAGE.  Dancers and athletes use the BODY. Musicians and Film makers use SOUND—builders and architects and installation artists use SPACE….videogame programmers use THE GESTURE…engineers use…perfumeries use SMELL…furniture makers use TOUGH…rollercoaster designers use PROPRIOCEPTION…the list goes on forever.

Sketch in Sumi Ink – photographed in multiple stages – this was one of its better moments.

So I’m in my studio—working on a new painting today in the dark grey light of what was supposed to be a winter storm but wasn’t.  I had a printed robe a couple years back—one which didn’t suit me but of which I adored the colors—very Japanese—pale pinkish grey and muted light blue on a coral orange background with a heavy black border.  I still have the pajamas bottoms that go, so I brought them into the studio and used them to pick a pallet for a painting I was painting over, one that already had that same coral red orange as its base—already some pale blue and lighter shades peaking out. 

I started mixing the colors—the yellow, the pink, the white, the red and orange…using a cheap thumb pallet covered in aluminum foil. It was then that I noticed the roses I’d received for Valentines day—and I thought, how strange the way we fixate on a pallet sometimes.  I think those roses somehow directed my eye to that pallet in other areas of life—and the arts, they tap in to all that is intuitive, emotional—all the information that surrounds us unfiltered that does not fit anywhere else in terms of the structures of our thinking.

I went back over an article written by my dissertation director many years ago that addressed the ancient greek idea of the sophist—in my sketchbook, I’d written down the following quote:

“No doubt, as Plato consistently shows us through the figure of Socrates, thought always requires a guide.”

My teacher, found the form of that guide to be style. He argued that what teachers really do is they teach through demonstrating ways of connecting and interacting with thought—it reminds me of how styles function I the martial arts. The student inherits their teacher’s style and all her teachers before her…and hopefully, as that student masters the art, they develop their own style—one that is in a sense a commentary on her teachers or her teacher’s teachers etc. 

Although I have never read the Sophist by Plate, I have read his “Allegory of the Cave.” In it, he describes what very well could be a first form of the simulacrum—or is it a simulation? The shadows of objects dancing on the cave walls—only virtual approximations of the ideals—the man made sphere that is never perfect—the fact that all in our world somehow falls short….i think about these as I imagine designing art forms for a vr headset—which world is the ideal?  Is it the world in the artist’s mind that the art only approximates?  Is it the virtual world as it takes up life in millions of miles of cables and hard drives—the series of 0’s and 1’s? Is it the world of color and light produced in the headset or is it those colors and lights as they are processed into electrochemical sensations in the mind—is it the memories and thoughts these sensations summon up—from memories and half forgotten dreams? 

SOURCES: 

Valentines day roses

Description:

Two dozen light pink, hot pink, yellow, ivory, coral, red and white, red and yellow roses in a glass vase in my studio.  Their colors closely resemble the colors in a pair of pajamas whose color scheme I have keyed to a painting I’m working on. I received them on Friday, February 12th. They are beautiful.

Relevance:

These flowers got me thinking about what it means to be virtual—approximating the ‘real’.  Are gmo flowers virtual?  If so, what about those that are cultivated by humans to produce certain properties.  Are those gmo?  Is Match.com and other dating services a form of GMO modification of human beings?  I also started thinking about the way that color schemes will stay with us.  We will seek out those constellations of colors in other objects, the ones that signal good things to us. 

NOTES:

Muckelbauer, John. “Sophistic Travel: Inheriting the Simulacrum Through Plato’s The Sophist.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.3 (2001) 225-244.

Waking Life

Plato, The Sophist and “The Allegory of the Cave”

Darpa on Youtube—robots that look like animals

This structure is kind of a guide for my thinking too—I know I have to do these journals and this process documentary and introduction thing for my exhibition and these journals will give me something to look back on—I may not use all this stuff, but I can certainly sum it up in my introduction—or take out the really interesting ones and possibly make something of it—make art of it.

Flowers, painting and robe mentioned in Inquiry Journal 9 – note repetition art-everyday-nature

I still have my series of procrastination paintings. I did a new one this weekend.  I also

Above Procrastination painting—another elephant I the room….this one appeared almost magically, only needed a little help with the trunk

Above: Procrastination painting. I think I want to sleep. At this point, it is still wet. The color you are seeing is the sky reflecting into the sumi ink.  Same color pallet as before minus the green which did find its way in by the end….

So, one thing I noticed is that, when I associated painting with procrastination, it became a lot more fun.  I’ve done several paintings over the past couple weeks.  (PS: I just realized that I’ve already done 2 of the journals due tomorrow so that was good news!) Here’s a picture of one done sumi style, all in one movement. I signed it wet so I wouldn’t be tempted to go back and edit.  As much as I value editing in the writing process, I do not think it always works out great in the painting process.  It breaks the flow every time…not every time, but mostly. Here’s a pic of the painting I did this morning.

Photo of morning painting. Sumi ink on paper. 3-16-16

I did this painting in my studio this morning (same morning as above) with coffee, no music but the storm door open to let in the sounds of the birds.  I think I see some flying fish in it that I tried to pull out—some crashing rocks…

That’s it.  As I look at it now, I’m not as thrilled, but who cares?  The watercolor journal that I bought for the class is half full now. I think if I did 17 more paintings, I would have the entire thing filled.  There are some great ones in there that I love, but there is also a lot of crap.  So goes the creative process!

PROCESS 16

A couple of images from my Procrastination series over break:

Mandala in sumi style—sumi on acrylic on canvas—March 2016

I never know what these look like until they are completely dried—paper warps when it’s wet and creates canyons and crevices for the ink to drain into.  The process is totally unpredictable, even on canvas which is what I used to make the mandala. I started with an old school compass and drew out some circles then just added some plant-like structures and some spirally curlyqueues.

I started getting interested in mandalas when my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer.  They are associated with healing and meditation and we colored mandalas in a coloring book when we were sitting through her chemo session together. There is something very meditative about art—something soothing about it. 

Below is another painting I worked on over break.  I have since finished it but I only photographed this stage of the process.

Sumi ink and acrylic on paper—unfinished—mid-process.  Has been called a scared child, but I see something more contemplative thank scared.

For years and years—since Spring of 2006 in fact—10 years—I have returned to the subject of oranges in my paintings. I recently turned my attention to lemons.

Oranges, for me, symbolize travel.

Lemons…I haven’t quite figured out yet. I’ve always loved the appearance of a bowl full of lemons, the yellow is like no other.  I tried painting some lemons too, but I’m not sure if I’ll do anything with this piece or not (also unfinished):

Suggestions of lemons—unfinished—playing with color.

Yellow and Light blue reminds me of The Lemming, an art ezine I ran in the early 2000’s…a bit of light brown in there and we’d have issue #1’s color palate.

As for my inquiry project, I’m wondering if there is a way I can combine all this work I’ve done with VR with the painting—perhaps make a virtual art gallery? 

I wonder if I can make a virtual space of some kind that could serve as a gallery

Perhaps hang the stuff and create a PANO file? One that can be viewed in a VR viewer or swiped around in on screen…not sure.

I think I will be taking a break from Process journals for a while because I’ve fallen really behind in my research and I’m thinking the Inquiry Journals will really help.

I want to do some more reading on the colportage phenomenon—this idea of layered time and space that comes from the 18th century pamphlet distributers (colporteurs).  I think it’s a nice old-school way of describing how we see in layers of time and space.

So back to the train window. It’s still light enough to see.  Lots of tree roots flying by in long smears of ash grey…I’m shocked at how close the houses are to the tracks. That must be loud.  So, I just realized I haven’t asked any questions yet and I need to do that in order to give myself credit for this journal.  So, what are my questions?  (There’s one!)  Right now, I’m really feeling a bit in limbo. I’m happy that I have all these new Google Cardboard files to work with…I haven’t seen them through the viewer yet, but I’m wondering, will I be able to post these in Instagram or something?  What will people see when they look at the files from their phones?  What if they don’t have the Cardboard device…will they still be able to get a sense of the space?  I wonder if writing a description of my install would conjure any images in the mind of a reader…of course it would…but would it conjure the right ones? I’m not really sure how I could render that space in language.

I feel like writing is not like the world as viewed from the window of a moving train…unless that’s what you’re writing about.  Writing PRESERVES. It is not ephemeral…unless you are doing it in Moodle and not backing up your work…try that a few times and don’t be surprised when your entire essay disappears (learned that the hard way—still make the same mistake).

We are in Burlington now.  Burlington looks kinda boring from the train, though its station is much nicer than that of Charlotte and Raleigh both. 

I think this journal was a good way into reminding myself of the importance of writing. It speaks when we are absent.  Your words can remain for centuries after your death and then some living person can read them and get some insight into what you were thinking…a stark contrast to the medium of installation art.