[Too Late:] Done skirted back to the northwest for a split, a three-day hitch from Ohio cross the incessant homogeny of american stripmall landscape, had to eat a dog, grappled Romanian princesses, drug a one-legged baby from the roadside. Nebraska found a squeaky yellow animal pursed beside it’s screams readed to Spivak’s Grammatologies and Foucault’s Pendulum, Iowa 80, the biggest truck stop in the world (these days the worlds biggest inherit after the mammoths collapse). Boys hearta tacked inna hovel, he got drunk on pickle juice in Germany.
The Question of the Hymen.
Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet & I’m jonesin’ to get deep in Twilight/Trueblood together with that gurl….Film really up & away – Mimacs, Tristram Shandy a Cock and Bull Story, Rusalka, etc etc; I’ll plug a sidebar for these mothas soon, hawh? Collate….Envisioning the homes of our future, its goats-demon dog-skunks, hanging hallucinogenic gardens, precious escolar burgandies wordy inside the freedom-cake collective….wouldn’t an ecoterrorist superhero comic series cut the cake?
Bainbridge’s asylum eluded us this time by a swim but we shat in all the holes at the golf course, On Ugliness, Bruegel, Missy Elliot, and sang. So remember the CATASTROPHE from the sun? We’ll all die/where should we reunite? More Updates. P.S. does anyone know what this song is, here’s the intro?
All my worldly possessions and so much remains undone: The African Contractualist Sculpture Appropriations, Candy-Wrapper Shorts, Giant Phallic Towers, Sound Works, A Feature Film of My Life In A Post-Apocalyptic Urban Landscape Underground, The Oberlin Aluminum Photo Project, Director’s Cut Diorama Scenes, Making-Of Hansel and Grettel, that Decomposing Squirrel Stop-Animation Tea Party, the entire Spring of Performance Art, Projecting the naked Dancing onto it’s own Skinny Suit Screen…into the future with it.
After another week of research, a few visuals that fit the bill have made themselves apparent. The imagination tells of a film (40 minutes long by 15 deep and maybe 20 wide) about the Jungle Hell, a miniature protagonist, his literary theses and the union of psycho-illogical with visceral physical improblems and positions. Check out the trailer to the phenomenal 1922 Danish film Häxan which treats witches and witchcraft to the tune of the Danse Macabre, Constantine, etc.Looks like I’m hitchhiking to Seattle tomorrow to see somebody I’m in love with and then heading down to Austin to serve as a puppeteer on a hot air balloon traveling back north.
I’m done here for now. I’m heading West, then South. Plan’s to open an art collective/free school in Mexico City and later build an aircraft carrier and accompanying fleet of zeppelins out of garbage to sail the world with airborne puppet shows. Then Law School. The main Enormous Face site has some updates on it.
……EDIT: there’s a new blog, too – neon animist spaceship aporia, linked on the main site – i’ve moved some of the hell stuff over to there.
My Senior art show art Oberlin was called the Nomad Rhizome, and consists in a series of ideological and physical decentralizations, carts or statues, musical instruments, puppets, and performances meandering from place to place around the campus and town.
A new section on the main site will be the hub for processing the maps and date that come from the show. Click Here for that. Please do make maps and leave comments about you encounters or lack of encounters (absence and presence etc etc) with the Locomotive Meanderers.
Fundamentally, I’m interested in Ways Of Looking, in considering meaning as a cork board, from which items can be both taken and appended. There is of course by nature no central thesis for the show, but some in terms of a sounding board, I’m more than happy to offer a list of concepts:
Creation as Comparison, Anarcho-Primitivism (w/ the technology problem), Linguistics, Metaphysicalisation of the Physical, Race and the Yonic, Stations of the Cross, The Nomadic Imperative, Genesis out of the Discarded, Translation/Interpretation, Combination of Genre/Synaesthesia/Interdisciplinary Sonics as metaphorical thought, Physical and Ideological Mapping, The Derivative, Nihilist [non]Narratives, Valorization of Difference and Normativity, Discursive Otherness: Exotic, Shock Value, Attention Prostitution, Machines that Deconstruct (or De-Story?) Themselves, Return/Advance to Small Gods, Permissivity of the Performative Space, Taming the Vicious to Sooth, An Afterlife of Now, Automatic Contexts and De-Contextuals, Inherent Indispensable Contradiction…
More will, I’m sure, be coming. Whether you were “present” or “absent” for the events of the past week, I would be honored to join any kind of map you might make into the dynamic project of synthesizing an ongoing face for this project. Email, Snails, Telephone, Comment Here, whatever works.
Below are the primary plans for my upcoming show on April 26-28. It will be a mapping: of thought, space, time and body, spread out and set into constant motion over the area. I am eager to collaborate, and want to hear from interested persons.It will be nomadic, decentered, diffuse, polyvocal, textual, rhizomatic – a social and aesthetic critique and a kind of critical mass, the offering of an alternative mode or manner. More details to follow soon.
I’m working on a translation of this Dada poem for the upcoming translation symposium. Here are the plans as they stand. If I can get footage of the live translation, I will. Yesterday I dragged a lot of stuff around for a couple hours.
I am committed to envisioning and utilizing translation theory towards the progressive generation of innovative forms and itineraries, in considering the “lost in translation” as generative rather than reductive, realizing concepts of foreignization and transgression to combat unifying perspective of otherness and evading the monocularity of authorship. Nevertheless, especially because it is a translation of a translation (that is to say, very crudely that my source-text exists as an already translated animal), and I have no knowledge of German, have contacted Jean Boase-Beier, and hope that fruit is born from our exchange. In the initial steps of my translation, I dissected the micro-poem, drawing each described image and cataloging each action, and then using those fragments to construct the whole bodies of three puppets (a crocodile hairdresser, a walking-stick, and a super-marshmallow), guided by the title of the poem, out of the constitutive pieces of images, and then enacting the actions described from the perspective of the puppets. All of this below a painted sign for the “Dadadadadadada Vocab Lexicon: public theater company” – my corporate self. Since the translation was ‘originally’ composed by three authors, I have translated it into three languages and three modalities: English, Spanish, and Russian – Performance, Powerpoint, and (non-)Line. I included actual text in the translation both to evoke a multilingual paradigm of interdisciplinary expression and to hark back to the first form of this story. The words or phrases whose connotation I could not unravel through research (e.g. lagladdest, 4 eugens) I translated into Cyrillic-scripted spanish – doubly evasive and foreign – to hold up as stutters in the progression of the show. I decided to draw on the subplot near the end of the original as a double allegory – both a Marxist critique of chauvinistic or normative family structures and of patriarchal religion. Considering translation as a language in itself, and a zone for personal artistic expression in a dialog and cultural filter that, like a voice distorter, presents a self in similar content but differing form, I did not hesitate to invoke my personal demons and dogmas.
To enact the retranslation as a generative locale, I came to the adjustments of Slobodan Miloševic’s blue box, and the Super-Marshmallow character (one of the trinity) from millosvitschs and suppermarshells. I have further placed misleading, fictitious footnotes throughout the piece, and am presenting it neither as a litany of associative nihilistic lists nor as a political manifesto. At the macroscopic, this work must be permanently but meaninglessly allusive, 3 or 4 pronged, preserve a false poetic meter, an assault against traditional orders and logics.
Back to the hard cold facts ladies and ladies’-men. Here’s a couple idols I’ve been working on for a little while. One recent exploration for me is the idea of my work as de facto comparative – an always-already collage that functions by incorporation of as-yet constructed elements and the conversation between them as historical revisionism and regenerative geneses; but insofar as it is not really creative per se: but can be only at best synergistic. Right whatever. This one is about a phallocentric [spell checker wanted to correct this to heliocentric. hm!] god, and this one is about the wooden grammars of school-yard sexualities, and this one is about the impossibility of a homosexual whole, and this one is about the animal craving for linguistic potency, and this one is about the colorless reversals of our rigid liturgical/vocabularic masterpieces, and this one is about the impossibility to exist in a coked-out naive utopia, and this one is about the automatic reflection of seeing… Whatever. Look forward to cornucopia’s of churchgoing right around the bend.
For Literature: Besides Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Peter Zumthor (who in his allegiance with Walter Ong is questionably…ok sure) I’ve begun Alphabets Sublime: Contemporary Artists on Collage & Visual Literature by Georges Myers Jr. which holds interviews with a dozen folks who I share more than a few alleys with. It captivated me so much this morning, that couldn’t pry it away from my eyes even as I ran and biked all over town. Eve Sedgwick et al.
There’s lot of excitement in the wings these days it seems. Detroit has tons of wicked burgeoning community gardens, the whole rust belt feels about to turn on its post-apocalyptic heels. We’re bringing Derrick Jensen here to talk on the 22nd and he’s got several damn decent videos up on the ‘tube. Radical Discourse is going a Deep ecology show on the 18th if you wanna get up to date on that jazz.
I’m working on a transgressive and generative translation of Tzara/Arp/Serner’s Hyperbola of the Crocodile Hairdresser and the Walking Stick into a kind of puppet-show/powerpoint presentation for the translation symposium (flier below) on the 18th. It’d be nice to start a subsidiary music\photo blog.
Here are the plans for several In-Progess projects I’m working on. I’m happy to talk about any of them. At least one will come to fruition on Monday. As always, I am beleaguered by the possibility that the idea of a thing is just as good as the thing. So here’s the ideas. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post the Things Themselves soon enough, and we can take a tally. Again, click for high res images.
I helped organize a radio show this semester on WOBC that’s essentially functioning as a kind of 101 for radical perspectives on an array of issues. The site is dynamic and I hope people will comment, question, and open the discourse. We broadcast live Sundays at 7pm EST, but are also podcasting all shows and extra material. You can find the blog here:
The Long-Awaited. I’ve been digging now, researched and resurfaced, and I got the goods. Do try out Final Fantasy VI The Opera [cliquE] as a soundtrack for what follows.
Video Games fascinate me from a thousand perspectives, and I intend this memo to encapsulate just a few of the viewpoints and theories with which they can be approached. In Neil Stevenson’s The Diamond Age he presents his vision of a cross-modal book-game that acts at the ultimate educational nurturer for the book’s protagonist, who goes on to apply the critical thinking she learned ostensibly from this “game” to lead and save-the-world. The precept of the Educational Game as a tool with political relevancy by itself is titillating as is the question of powermongering, control, and achievement that gamers produce/have produced onto them in the action of gaming, along with considerations of the game as a narcotic conduit. Some off-center psychoanalyst somewhere [?] wrote once that video games are capable of fulfilling all sexual, physical, and emotional needs – can they be producers of love? Games are frequently attacked as “Wastes of Time,” while thousands spend equal care on Final Fantasy Fan-Art (Fan-Art!!!!) as I do carefully crafting miniature literary dioramas [1]. I am interested in considering video games also from a cultural studies perspective, as a heterogeneous border-space, where Japan meets Europe meets Korea Meets USA millions of times every day – also examining national internet insulation – in a Culture of Gaming, where “Nerd” and “Geek” diplomats negotiate and are implicated in wider polemics. What can be lifted and cross-disciplined from these? Making sequels, updated artworks in conversation with the “original versions”- cross-modal incarnations – creation in layers, with avatars, sprites, emulation systems – considering the automatic pornography of Games… What fertilizer can video games lend to more removed art modalities, what models of viewing, theorizing, knowing, seeing? To some extent I want to consider this post as a syllabus for a horizontally dynamic Web-University course – and as always I welcome collaboration.
Play; And we are always/are we always At Play in art. Much of contemporary Art Gaming evolved from basic aesthetic hacks to make Lara Croft show her all [x], or produce infinite gold for a tribe of Orks, and to a certain extent I think that the mass of Art gaming remains informed by a transgressive rebelish history that culminated in a new Renaissance with the Hero6 project [2]. But where is the divide? We can consider a well-executedthe Quest for Glory series or Half-Life [3] Performance Art Gaming – it can be an enormous, multi-faceted performance of Gaming-Acculturation. What about the commercial front? Representations of Imagination in gaming advertising push envelopes like none other – from Tetris as a Tsarist Propagana Document to the first commercials for Mario Brothers, packaging and box-art is nothing to be overlooked or under-indulged as a generative space for imaginary realisms and theoretical reinterpretations [4].
Capitalism and Video Games, however, has a more nefarious face. In 2008, an economist crunched some numbers and realized that after players had begun to sell in-game items on ebay and a dollar exchange rate developed with Norrath, the online fantasy RPG Everquest ranked 77th in world economies, on a par with Angola. Second-Life and other games have been generating Virtual Entrepreneurs, one of whom bought an asteroid for $1m and had broken even on it in eight months. [5] A side effect of this has been the creation of sweat-shop style factories in Mexico and China where workers are paid minuscule sums to perform the redundant in-game tasks that generate the base-line of the online economies, which even further complicates the line between art and politics, among that burgeoning genre ranging from Third World Farmer to The McDonalds and Shell Oil mini-games. The best of my discoveries are as follows:
CACTUS [!!!!] is an amazing freelance gamer/developer from Gothenberg Sweden, who works on really diverse, envelope-pushing stuff. Here’s quirky a half-hour lecture [6] he gave on making a game in four hours, and the accompanying commentary [8]. Another article [7] featuring CACTUS equates contemporary diasporic DIY programming to 90s zine culture.
Samorost [9] is a pretty thrilling piece from Amanita Design [10] which plays between film, gaming, and puppeteering (Where does cinema cross paths with interactivity? Where are we specative, where participatory?); There’s a cool interview with developer Jakub Dvorsky here [11] and I found this on his blog:
I’m also captivated by the reversion to “primitive” graphics in contemporary games like Dwarf Fortress, which allude to the original online role-playing game structures, and even more recent hacks and add-ons that allow visualizations of the basic code-built fortresses [12].
Reams of gorgeous pixelated iPhone games, like Sword & Sorcery [13] and Eliss [14] are arriving hand in hand with sexy returns to pixel media in other fronts – like BEIGE, the artist who removed everything but the slowly drifting clouds from Super Mario [15], entering the discourse of the unplayable game, the explosive or unapproachable nostalgia, the metaphoric placement of the video game as a fundamentally nihilistic premise – and Ben Fry’s equally brilliant mapping of the Nintendo Cartridge genome.
Mario is, of course, the bar, and it’s pleasant to bring about troubling conflations of the virtual with the “real” as Antoinette J Citizen’s Landscape [16]. And in a similar vein: Painstation [17] which affects its players quite bodily, and these Welsh men who play sheep (wasn’t there a pretty post-modern game about sheep-herding? Cat-herding?)
Play Pac Mondrian [18] if you have the plug-ins. It kept crashing me, but looked also like en exciting conflation of mapping canonical arts against cityscapes that lent me towards a rethinking of the world-map phenomena central to so many games, the panoramic zooming-in-and-out and easy formulation of cohesive world-views – is this a tracing? Do we have to share basic cartographical lexicons to engage with these worlds? [19] [20]
Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist is another gorgeously sarcastic comparative project I hope some day to be able to critically approach. You can find it for free on a number of abandonware databases [21].
Also, do make sure to take Matt’s advice and look into Monachrom [22] too. They still have some of the most avant takes I’ve been able to find.
Again, the untouched information is legion [23], and there’s mad more Art Game Ranking Countdowns: [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29], and Jason Rohrer [30] [31], Paolo Pedercini [32], and Cory Archangel [33] all want huge exploration. And lastly, the Wikipedia Software Art Article [34] is overflowing with a bounty of delectable links.
EDIT: another beautiful game is The Marraige [35], a very abstract piece about relationships.
