kvnrgn

You're not real, girl.

2011-09-24T17:44:00.001-05:00

This is my favorite St. Vincent song

2011-08-26T09:38:00.001-05:00

2011-06-10T01:45:00.000-05:00

2010-10-24T21:55:00.000-05:00

And All Across America
The Poison Fires Glow
And In The Blood Of Our Procreation
...Annihilation Grows
Yes Love Was Made For Slaves Like Us
Designed To Fetishize
Consumption, Waste And An Identity
Based On A Dying Lie
So God Forgive America
The End Of History Is Now
And God May Save The Victim
But Only The Murderer Holds Real Power

We Came Across The Seas
We'd Fill With Offal And Disgust
And Any Object Industry Required
We Bought, Enslaved, Or We Crushed
And Now Our Minds Are As Naked
As The Paradise We Stripped
And Our Reward Is Our Entropy
Our Emptiness Is Our Gift
So God Forgive America
And Every Human On This Earth
And God Forgive The Ruined Lives
And Nothing Is What It's Worth

This article intrigues me.

2010-10-19T13:55:00.003-05:00

This article intrigues me: it has some very deep life lessons.

:::::

2010-08-12T22:18:00.002-05:00

Alex Bogusky is an interesting guy.

A really, really, really bad trip...

2010-06-11T20:03:00.008-05:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1282647/US-cage-fighter-Jarrod-Wyatt-rips-training-partner-Taylor-Powells-heart.html

http://www.times-standard.com/ci_15174272

2010-05-22T15:14:00.000-05:00

curating/creating

2010-05-22T11:25:00.008-05:00

These two blogs are listed as referrers on my Flickr account. They're both collections of found images. This is one of the ways people use Flickr too, as a place to collect or archive found images. This is what some of my favorite Flickr streams do. It's the internet equivalent of collecting magazine and newspaper images. But what intrigues me is the magnification/escalation/acceleration of the activity — and that it's visible. We're peeking in one another's photo albums and scrap books. We're looking through the photos, newspaper clippings, letters and porn each of us keeps stashed in a box under the bed.

*http://crotchbuffet.blogspot.com/

*http://lookcaitlin.tumblr.com/page/2

Digital Natives

2010-04-24T10:37:00.007-05:00

I'm completely intrigued by this article. You can see the outline of an entirely new media apparatus coming into sharp focus. It makes Gregory Ulmer's theorizing (which I know mostly from classes with him at University of Florida and his book Teletheory) seem unbelievably prescient. I'm thinking, in particular, of his concept of 'electracy', his notion of electronic media literacy. What made me think of this are the comments in the article about how the college students under scrutiny get their news in a 'disaggregated' way. They pay almost no attention to the big 20th Century forms of mass media (television and newspapers). This is a kind of media engagement, an electronic media apparatus, that, as theorized by Ulmer owes as much to pre-Gutenberg oral cultures as it does to post-Gutenberg print ones. Mcluhan was not fooling around when he coined term "Global Village." And I feel like now, more than ever, I need to go back and not just read more Ulmer, but Walter J. Ong and Marshall Mcluhan as well.

I like this too...

2010-04-05T12:13:00.010-05:00

SSION: WOMAN from john dretzka on Vimeo.

I like this but if you lived through the 80s, if it was thee formative period of your life, it just doesn't seem all that original. It's a collection of footnotes and references. It's a good example of how the footnote — or hyperlink perhaps — has become the prevailing content of our time. And, the funny thing about this is that the vanguard period for this (the footnote as content) also goes back to the 80s: to post-structuralist experiments in writing. It always intrigued me that these experiments (with their obsession with the footnote and the comment in the margin) presaged the hypertext and the rise of internet. So this video is good (especially the body-faces) — just not all that original. The never ending end of history... Everything has already happened... No future... And the end of history more or less coincides with the rise of youth culture — in the Sixties. "Don't trust anyone over 30" — which morphed, in our time, into an endless succession of "blah blah is the new 20s" ("the 40s is the new 20s", "the 50s is the new 20", "the 60s is the new 20s"). We live in culture that's obsessed with youth, one that's hysterically obsessed with getting old, of being outdated. So in the future of no future there are no old people and the present is an endless nostalgia for the recent past. Heaven is a place where nothing — and hence everything — ever happens. And the kids these days, the youths, are vanguarding it.

Welcome to Griddleville

2010-04-04T10:18:00.004-05:00

I want to see more Griddleville. Is there more? Is there only 14 minutes? Go here and watch these 14 amazing minutes, now, man.

2010-01-15T00:13:00.001-05:00

Design is fucking with something for a while. It's not a negative thing.

All you need is authoritraian-style capitalism

2010-01-12T09:10:00.003-05:00

China's "economic miracle, the newspaper People’s Daily boasted last week, exists because its leaders — unlike those in other, unnamed nations — can make quick decisions and ensure underlings carry them out. The Great Recession, the newspaper said, has laid bare cracks in plodding Western-style capitalism."

[source: "As China Rises, Fears Grow on Whether Boom Can Endure", Michael Wines, January 11, 2009]

"Antennas of the Race..."

2010-01-11T23:06:00.003-05:00

I don't know why but, for some reason, I thought it wasn't published... "Antennas of the Race: Kevin Regan vs. Radek Szczesny" was done for FreeWilliamsburg in conjunction with the Bushwick Biennial. It was a bunch of fun doing studio visits with Radek. First we drank beer at his studio and then at mine. The recorded discussion was done via email in the days after that.

James Kalm Frames New York episode on Drippy at Famous Accountants

2010-01-10T19:16:00.003-05:00

I talk a lot.

United States of Art

2009-12-16T20:18:00.006-05:00

Because I think the last sentence in what I wrote is hilarious, and I get the feeling no one saw it, I'm copying a comment I made in the discussion/thread on Jerry Saltz's Facebook Wall today and pasting it here. I think my comment is the 95th one in the thread.

______________________________________

Jerry Saltz: "My esteemd friend Howard Halle says “It’s a widely held belief ... that painting is dead.” Come on! No one has actually believed this since at least the Nixon administration! The 'P. is D.' canard is dead rhetoric, a way to keep art boxed in. Mediums don’t die until all of the problems they were invented to solve are s...olved. If anyone can prove that P. is D. I will give them a $10,000 ‘Jerry Saltz Tautology Prize.’"

______________________________________

Kevin Regan: "I think the p is d camp just wanted to undermine the privileged status of painting. Just look at the controversy caused by the Richard Tuttle show at the Whitney back in the mid 70s (not really all that long ago). And even if those aforementioned POMO critics blew the door open for other forms, other media, more often than not, if I tell someone I'm an artist they assume I'm a painter. And, not only that, painting sells better (and for more money) than any other medium. In other words, painting is the United States of art."

Drippy

2009-12-11T12:58:00.006-05:00

Drippy is the second show at Famous Accountants. I should have posted images of the first one. We got a great response for the first one but, I think because the content was so personal, so close to me, I spent less time trying to get the word out on it. Whateva. I came up with the idea for Drippy. Ellen Letcher, my partner at Famous Accountants, and I painted the blood dripping down the walls. Ben Godward made the amazing, colorful sculpture on the floor. Ellen took the two photos of the show here. They were taken the night before the opening. One of the photos features Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and my self. I designed the flyer for the show but Ellen made the illustration. Word.

It's weird how the blog theme is clipping off the edges of the photos. Click on them to see the whole image. I don't feel like figuring it out.

"Living in a State of Permanent Recession"

2009-12-11T12:51:00.004-05:00

Hrag Vartanian wrote this cool article, "Living in a State of Permanent Recession", for NYFA Currents. I was one of the artists he talked to. It's an interesting read.

Clearing

2009-12-11T12:41:00.005-05:00

I don't trust the government any more than I trust corporations. In my opinion, neither has my best interest at heart. And I'd prefer that both leave me alone and have as little as possible to say about how I live my life or spend my money. Not to mention, the government -- especially the federal government -- is really just some sort of über corporation anyway. And, despite what the fools say, no law will change this fact. It's just the way it is. That's why, as my high school English teacher liked to say, less is more (of course, she was talking about writing and not government). But, all that said, in my honest and very pessimistic opinion, some sort of techno-feudalism is what the future holds. Our only hope is that society is wealthy enough that it just doesn't matter. Wars tend to be fought over scarcity not surplus.

I hope this clears a few things up for ya! Thanks.

One thing about and one thing by

2009-11-11T17:46:00.005-05:00

Stephen Truax wrote an article about Famous Accountants for BushwickBK, "Meaning IS Inevitable".

And I wrote this review/article for Hyperallergic about a show called Reaganography.

The zombie rides a unicorn into the mirage...

2009-11-04T09:35:00.006-05:00

"The promise of the public plan is a mirage. Its political brilliance is to use free-market rhetoric (more "choice" and "competition") to expand government power."

from "Public Plan Mirage", The Washington Post, October 26, 2009

"A public plan is likely to damage competition. A government insurer has some big advantages over a private one; its financing costs would be lower because the government can borrow cheaply; it would not have to worry too much about future liabilities since it could never go bust; and its economies of scale would be larger than those of the competition. Those using the public plan would benefit in the short term, but the scheme might very well squeeze private insurers out of business, which would be bad news for the other half of Americans that have them—and, according to opinion polls, are generally happy about that."

from "Back from the Dead", The Economist, October 29, 2009

Hyperreality

2009-11-03T17:38:00.003-05:00

"A few years ago, however, the health-care economists Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider recalculated the numbers after controlling for deaths from homicides and traffic accidents. Because these things tend to strike very young people, they can have an outsize impact on mortality statistics. Those deaths reflect America’s crime policy and its driving habits more than the effectiveness of its health-care system. And if you remove them from the picture, say Ohsfeldt and Schneider, America jumps to the top of the life-expectancy tables."

from "Misleading Indicator" by Megan McArdle

Mostly Motion Graphics Classics

2009-09-13T20:29:00.005-05:00

Kyle Cooper, 2004

Saul Bass, 1963

James Whitney, Permutations, 1966

Len Lye, Free Radicals, 1958

Maurice Binder, 1973

Nando Costa

Norman McLaren, A Phantasy, 1952

Pablo Ferro, 1964

Ed Tannenbaum and Paul Pfeiffer

2009-09-13T19:03:00.004-05:00

I dig the music in the Tannenbaum video. It's credited to Might Dog. Who's that? It makes me think of ESG. It kicks a a similar early 80s, New Wave funk vibe. The primitive computer graphic effects (the video dates from 1982) jive well with it. Compare this video with Paul Pfeiffer's "Live Evil" (2003).

Ed Tannenbaum, "Digital Dance", 1982

Paul Pfeiffer, "Live Evil", 2003

Bushwick Biennial, 2009

2009-07-10T09:46:00.005-05:00

1.
James Kalm's Brooklyn Rail article: http://brooklynrail.org/2009/07/artseen/brooklyn-dispatches-new

2.
Hrag Vartanian’s BushwickBK.com article: http://bushwickbk.com/2009/07/07/serious-omissions-but-biennial-brings-good-focus/

Nature versus Nurture

2009-01-30T10:40:00.010-05:00

120 generations — from now back to Plato and Socrates

500 generations — from now back to the invention of writing, agriculture and the first cities

80,000 generations — from now back to the Plestocene (the dawn of Homo Sapiens).

I found this in Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct (pg 23-24). He uses it to explain why evolutionary psychologists (and Komar & Melamid) have discovered that every human culture, everywhere in the whole world, finds the same type of painting most pleasing: landscape.

The systemite view regarding the Contraction of 2008-2009

2009-01-28T08:39:00.003-05:00

1. The world governments must spend 2% of GDP on stimulus packages (the IMF recommendation).

2. "...the global contraction will last several years...if governments don't complement fiscal stimulus with equally ambitious plans to clear banks' books of bad assets..."

[Source: "Global Search for Growth Will Turn to U.S.", WSJ, January 28, 2009]

There’s always room for more government

2009-01-27T09:34:00.005-05:00

Total government spending — federal, state and local — as a share of the economy throughout the 1930s was just under 20 percent.

Current total government spending is more than 35 percent of the total economy.

[Source: "F.D.R’s Example Offers Obama Cautionary Lessons",NYT, January 27, 2009]

An Extremely Short History of Copyright Law

2009-01-23T08:23:00.004-05:00

”As the authors of the [United States] Constitution knew, copyright was created in Great Britain by the Statute of Anne in 1710 for the purpose of curbing the monopolistic practices of the London Stationers' Company and also, as its title proclaimed, "for the encouragement of learning." At that time, Parliament set the length of copyright at fourteen years, renewable only once. The Stationers attempted to defend their monopoly of publishing and the book trade by arguing for perpetual copyright in a long series of court cases. But they lost in the definitive ruling of Donaldson v. Becket in 1774.

”When the Americans gathered to draft a constitution thirteen years later, they generally favored the view that had predominated in Britain. Twenty-eight years seemed long enough to protect the interests of authors and publishers. Beyond that limit, the interest of the public should prevail. In 1790, the first copyright act—also dedicated to "the encouragement of learning"—followed British practice by adopting a limit of fourteen years renewable for another fourteen.

”How long does copyright extend today? According to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also known as "the Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because Mickey was about to fall into the public domain), it lasts as long as the life of the author plus seventy years. In practice, that normally would mean more than a century. Most books published in the twentieth century have not yet entered the public domain. When it comes to digitization, access to our cultural heritage generally ends on January 1, 1923, the date from which great numbers of books are subject to copyright laws. It will remain there—unless private interests take over the digitizing, package it for consumers, tie the packages up by means of legal deals, and sell them for the profit of the shareholders. As things stand now, for example, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, published in 1922, is in the public domain, whereas Lewis's Elmer Gantry, published in 1927, will not enter the public domain until 2022.“

[The above three paragraphs are from the article "Google & the Future of Books", Robert Darnton, The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 2, February 12, 2009]

On Giving Up Your Soul

2009-01-11T13:03:00.001-05:00

"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy says philosophically. "I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

[From the NYT interview/article about Cormac McCarthy]

Wall Dancer

2008-12-04T20:02:00.003-05:00

Comparison (this is insane)

2008-09-22T12:22:00.006-05:00

This is an interesting snapshot of 2007.

The economy of New York (the greater metropolitan area) was 1.1 trillion in 2007.

The economy of Russia was 1.28 trillion in 2007.

The economy of India was 1.09 trillion in 2007.

That's the greater metropolitan New York area not what is geographically considered New York.

.

Flaming Lips flyer, Gainesville, Fla, 1989

2008-09-14T17:24:00.015-05:00

I was at this show. It was 1989. The Flaming Lips had a fog machine and a cheesy, cheap laser light show. I remember it all very fondly. It was also the first time ever in my life I took MDMA. I did not stick with the Flaming Lips through the years. I was really into them around the time of this show and that was pretty much it. But I saw them three times and this was the first. With some bands there is only one album for me. The rest of their career has no bearing. They may very well have gone on to much grander things. R.E.M. is an example of this sort of band and Murmur, which I discovered the year it was released, was the album. Husker Dü is another one and New Day Rising was the album. Well, Flaming Lips is one of these bands too and with them the album was Oh My Gawd!!!...The Flaming Lips.

[I found this on The Gainesville Scene (1980s).]

cover of the fourth and final issue if the Surrealist journal VVV (New York), Roberto Matta, 1944

2008-09-06T18:25:00.007-05:00

I was surprised to come across this. It looks incredibly contemporary and not at all like Matta’s paintings. It makes me think of Le Dernier Cri

I'm in the background of this paparazzi photo

2008-09-05T16:28:00.005-05:00

My summer reading, 2008.

2008-08-31T21:06:00.003-05:00

Theft Is Vision
Bob Nickas (2008)
Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. And All That
Joe Carducci (2007)
Not Without My Sister
Kristina Jones, Celeste Jones, Juliana Buhring (2007)
Heaven’s Harlot: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult
Mirriam Williams (1999)
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion
Mircea Eliade (1957)
Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today
Dan Lattin (2004)
A Secret History of Consciousness
Gary Lachman (2003)
Rogue Messiahs: Tales of Self-Proclaimed Saviors
Colin Wilson (2000)
The Secret Chief Revealed
Myron J. Stolaroff (revised edition 2005)
Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing
René Daumal (1952, English translation 1979)
A Serious Night of Drinking
René Daumal (1938, English translation 2004)

SHOWPAPER 33

2008-08-12T22:54:00.005-05:00

Came out yesterday. Curated by Desert Island.

SHOWPAPER [Facebook]

SHOWPAPER [MySpace]

this and that

2008-08-11T10:39:00.001-05:00

this (2008)

that (1996)

Links

2008-08-10T23:48:00.001-05:00

I got posted in three different places recently. On Streetsy they were not sure who I was but they used my Flickr name. On the other two they did not mention my name at all! -- even though they got the stuff from my YouTube account. They might have used kvvn rggn... This seemed a little odd. Of course, you can click through to my YouTube account since they were embedded from there. And lest it sounds like I'm being ungrateful for the attention, while that's not true at all. I just wondered why they obscured the authorship of the work (er, my work). Is this the way of social networking and web 2.0? The death of the author... Well, nevertheless, thanks for posting me.

1. (*\***

2. that-unsound

3. Streetsy

Unintentional Rory Hayes Birthday Tribute

2008-08-09T11:42:00.015-05:00

Rory Hayes, 1971

It did not occur to me until this morning, when I was reading the Edwin Pouncey essay in When the Demented Wented that I'd posted the Rory Hayes piece on Enantiomorphic Chamber on his birthday, which was yesterday, August 8th. I did not know who he was until yesterday evening. They actually mentioned that it was his birthday at the book release event at Desert Island but it did not register. I made plans to go to this event not because I knew of Hayes but because Kim Deitch was supposed to be a part of it. He, however, was MIA. I wondered why legends such as Kim Deitch and Bill Griffith were involved in this, giving a talk about this guy, Rory Hayes. After a quick scan of the book I decided he was contemporary. I was then surprised to learn he died in 1984. The most interesting thing was that he was on the periphery of the original underground comix scene in San Francisco going back to the late 60s. Hayes first comic was published in 1969. Bill Griffith's stories intrigued me so much I got up this morning burning to read the Pouncey essay. Gary Panter, who it seems is a Hayes fan, was in the audience.

Six Six Sixties, Throbbing Gristle, 1979

2008-07-09T07:15:00.004-05:00

I am one of the injured
A tear blurs flesh
Dissolving
Like an injured dog
Like wasted limbs
Get smaller
Pain is the stimulus of pain
But then of course nothing is cured
This is the world now
Move a fin and the world turns
Sit in a chair and pictures change
Try to eat us
And get trapped
Or injured
Just

Jane Birkin (is hot!)

2008-07-03T22:24:00.014-05:00

Scanners (draft)

2008-06-16T19:22:00.011-05:00

Scanners
David Cronenberg
1981

Andrea Portrait 1
James Juron
2008

Channeling Dorothea Rockburne
Kevin Regan
2008

Jonathan Hartshorn
2007

Stan Narten
Ketchup and Plastic
2008

The Praxis of Art in the early 21st Century

2008-05-28T18:29:00.005-05:00

Before I realized that I was being targeted for some reason, I used to get a lot of odd damage and stains appearing in my house, but I chalked it up to having a child. There would be no way of knowing what he might have spilled. When the drain pipes from the roof kept repeatedly getting crushed or pulled apart (so that the basement would get water when it rained), I knew it wasn't my son doing it, but I thought maybe it was some kids in the neighbourhood who liked to dismantle drain pipes.

When the screen doors developed tears in them right next to the door handles (which I locked at night), I felt slightly suspicious. When the door locks themselves went askew and my keys didn't work quite as well, I had no idea at the time that this was an indication that my locks had been tampered with.

Looking back, I realize that there was sabotage going on a fair amount. The stains were some kind of engine oil, spread all over the house, including on my son's bed under his sheets. He's not a baby, so he wasn't throwing motor oil around.

Drips

2008-05-27T19:01:00.014-05:00

Carolana Parlato
The Kiss
2007

Eric Sall
Icy Hot
2008

Christina Sucgang
Someday Maybe
2007

Wallace Whitney
no caption info

Jasmine Justice
Big Rock Candy
2006

Michael Cody Drury
Untitled
2006

Elizabeth Cooper
(no caption info)

Mary Heilmann
Go Ask Alice
oil on canvas
2006

One of my favorite things about Mary Heilmann's paintings are those fucked up drips. They communicate a kind of resignation. They're a shrug, an "oh well," a "sorry, I just couldn't help that..." It is a gesture without drama, not uptight, but, rather, in a casual, almost flippant, manner. This is a kind of giving up that accepts that it's giving up and learns to live with itself. It’s completely unheroic. It is not about "I am nature." It's simply nature, the nature of gravity. Nothing else. Paint drips. If you load the brush with too much paint it drips. And here is where the thing reverses itself. You see it is in this way that it's a form of trying too hard. The kind of trying too hard that usually fails, that comes on too strong, that, well, acts like a drip.

Enantiomorphic Chamber afterparty

2008-02-16T01:46:00.000-05:00

Enantiomorphic Chamber [video screening], an unfinished draft

2008-02-04T21:18:00.005-05:00

Enantiomorphic Chamber [video screening] is the proposed third part of of a trio of curatorial exercises. The other projects include a gallery show at (NURTUREart, February 15 to March 23, 2008) and an online curatorial experiment (a blog as a gallery show).

This trio of projects begins with a desire to index what appears to be an unrecognized iconographic phenomenon in contemporary art: reflected figures. Figures in which each half is a mirror reflection of the other. We also propose a label for this figure: enantiomorph. Strictly speaking an enantiomorph is a pair of assymetrical figures that are mirror images of one another. Our stance is looser. And we’ve often approached this project at tangents to the above stated aims.

This project is named after a Robert Smithson’s sculpture from 1965, Enantiomorphic Chambers.

One Second
1996
1:59
Kevin Regan

Pleasure Principle
1996
2:42
Kevin Regan

9/11 Smoke Demons
Daughters of God
2:54
2001

Obloy Syndrome: Sprince (Dog Divengrin)
5:33
2007
Alan Cordell

Friendly Fire
3:07
2006
Martha Colburn

Not Yet
1:00
2006
DesertArktist

Psychedleic Amy
2:26
2006
Frog

Obloy Syndrome: Insanity “ritual” vol. (23)
0:25
2007
Allen Cordell

Wrong Time Capsule by Deerhoof
3:03
2007
Martha Colburn

Handwalker
1:15
2007
Brian Bress

Gunplay
3:00
2001
Rico Gatson

Entanglement
5:00
2002
Marc Travanti

Angels Chant Like Witches
4:20
2006
Kelly Sears

Toys Flipped
0:45
2008
John Cason

P-UNIT-2 !!PART TWO!!
9:21
2007
Paperrad

Lightening Strikes
4:09
2007
The White tiger prepade

Total Running Time
Approx
69:50 min

Enantiomorphic Chamber [gallery show brochure]

2008-02-03T16:26:00.000-05:00

cover

inside

Kaliflower, 2008, 77" x 60"

2008-02-02T12:35:00.000-05:00

The Center of the Cyclone, 2007, 44" x 55"

2008-02-01T12:39:00.000-05:00

MFA Thesis Show Install

2008-01-23T18:19:00.001-05:00

\/

2008-01-05T21:24:00.000-05:00

2008-01-05T12:12:00.000-05:00

Notes written in my notebook by an esteemed studio visitor

2008-01-04T07:56:00.000-05:00

Ok. I get Matt Keegan. He works with collage and text. Some might say his work looks design-y. This is something that I sometimes get too (usually from painters). He does not, it seems, use found photos which is my preference. Some of his procedures relate to the stuff I saw by Collier Schorr at the Contemporary Arts Museum Denver over the Holidays: printing multiple photos, cutting out parts of some photos, laying them loosely over the top of one another. This is an approach to form and material I am messing with too. (What I did not like about Schorr's work is that it reminded me of Wolfgang Tillman.) Keegan's infinite regression piece.... WTF! What can I say about this? I'm currently working on something similar. Fucker. The problem with my found photos is that they are too borrowed. Is Matt Keegan gay? Sam Cady clearly thought I was gay after that studio visit I had with him. That artist he told me about, John O'Reilly, is totally gay. Cady made O'Reilly's work sound better than it is (in my opinion). Cady told me I had to be careful about being too cute. What I don't like about O'Reilly's work is that it is too deliberately "Art" -- and in a literary kind of way too! It makes me think of the side of Jess that I don't like, the poetry side. But anyway, it amuses me that I sometimes get mistaken for being gay. It's all that post-feminist male stuff (and I am certainly a post-feminist male (we are the sons of Alan Alda)). And I know I sometimes tease this mistake out of people. My desire to do this has made me wonder at times if there is something I do not exactly understand about myself but if I'm gay I'm so closeted that I'm not at all in touch with it. But I do love gay culture. Who doesn't? I mean we're talking about the Velvet Underground and the Factory and Andy Warhol and Paul Morrisey films and Lou Reed and John Waters and David Bowie and all of glam (just to name some of the obvious stuff)... Now who doesn't like that stuff? It's a massive part of what constitutes the present.

Rob Pruitt. Oh yeah... I've heard people talk about Rob Pruitt's "101 Art Ideas You Can Do Your Self" (1999) but I had never looked at it. In my opinion it's an updated version of Fluxus -- just provide the score. Fluxus was all about musical scores. I like it this way better than the gallery exhibit version. The e-flux version is also very "net art." It's funny but just now Pruitt's work made me think of Jennifer Sullivan's Powerpoint project, "The Annual Report of My Feelings." Pruitt is clever whereas Sullivan is sincere. But anyway... Rob Pruitt's story may have been a well known one but I did not know it. It's interesting that he was also a victim of Political Correctness Nazis. This of course makes me think of Marilyn Minter. Pruitt's crime however was racism not sexism. I'd seen images of Pruitt's "Cocaine Buffet" but I had no idea it involved real cocaine! Amazing! And this was his comeback, in 1998... It was right after I moved to New York. I was too clueless then to know of this. It's an excellent stunt. Does Aaron Young's "High Performance" refer to "Cocaine Buffet"? Terence Koh's work owes something to this. I'm not sure what I think of Mr. Pruitt's work since "Cocaine Buffet" and "101 Art Ideas." I don't think I buy the whole panda thing or the glitter. Is this work really supposed to be personal? Either there is a huge risk in letting your work become too personal -- despite the fact that we keep being told to do this. It may be that the personal has to be inflected through the public (in other words, Gregory Ulmer's popular register). But merely doing this is not enough. It still has to be done in an interesting way. Or, if not this, Pruitt's panda's are kitsch. And kitsch in the end just ends up being kitsch. And boring kitsch just ends up being boring kitsch. It's just too flat (too much surface). This is a digression but there's a funny line in that Artforum review of Pruitt's show from 2001: "Indeed, if one wanted a material metaphor for an art world about to collapse under the weight of its own fabulous excess, glitter would be the perfect choice." That was 2001! It's 2008 and the collapse has yet to happen still. And glitter keeps on showing up. It's everywhere. Anna Parkina, Meredyth Sparks and Jonathan Hartshorn are three recent artists I've seen playing with it.

Jonathan Horowitz and Rob Pruitt's project "Extreme Houses Visits Peacock Hill," in which they purchased an old house, decorated it and then "exhibited it" (put it up for sale at Gavin Brown Enterprises) is a funny idea. Ken Johnson gave it a bad review though. The devil is in the details. This project, exhibited in 2003, makes me think that the real influence on the the current scene in New York, the whole "Black and Silver Boys" thing is really these artists. They may only precede this scene by a few years but it seems like a glam-style continuation of the same aesthetic. As already noted, Terence Koh clearly owes something to Pruitt but "Extreme Houses" seems like a parody of Banks Violette BEFORE THE FACT. Or, rather, perhaps things are just not changing much and New York really is over. I would have credited Cady Noland and Steven Perrino as being the godmother and godfather of the "Black and Silver Boys" crowd. But now I wonder if Cady Noland owes something to Pruitt's Early work...? Or is it vice versa? Rob Pruitt did an ArtForum top 10 list in 2000. It's clever and cute (too clever perhaps). It's cosmically strange that there is now another Robert Pruitt (Robert A. Pruitt) who has emerged. The new one shows at Clementine Gallery. And he was even in the Whitney Biennial 2006! I don't think the elder Rob Pruitt has been in a Whitney Biennial either. The new Pruitt was one of the shrine people of Whitney Biennial 2006. Is it just me or were there a bunch of shrines in that show? The new Pruitt's work apparently deals with race relations. My guess is that he's African-American. All I have to say is this: strange karma. Actually, I feel kind of bad for Rob Pruitt.

I actually don't get why my esteemed guest compared my work to Rob Pruitt and Jonathan Horowitz. (Maybe he meant the new Pruitt?) Yes, there's the humor... But what else is there? Maybe it was a warning... Matt Keegan makes more sense to me but not these two guys. I would say the same thing about Jim Lambie. One thing that I see is that aesthetic thing we all have in common with Mike Kelley. Mike Kelley is the elder artist of recent times that I've obsessed over. I still do. And it seems to me every white male dude who wasted his youth as a record collector and/or playing in punk bands and then decided to become an artist is also totally into Mike Kelley. It's a problem.

I think I like the humor in Jonathan Horowitz work more than Rob Pruitt's. Pruitt is more of a clown. Horowitz is more of a wit. I would be very interested in seeing some of Horowitz's video work. His aesthetic reminds me of Seth Price's. They both like to employ bad design. They like bad typography. And it usually looks bad because it's totally dated. There is a general anti-aesthetic look to their work. It is clearly supposed to not look like art. Sorry about the repetition here but the more I look at Horowitz and Pruitt's work online, the more I think the "Boys in Black and Silver" are really the new version of what they are/were. They are the next step, the next rung on the ladder (the next car on the night train). The obsession with black and silver in the new kid's work is one of the more distinguishing differences. The new kids are cooler. Horowitz and Pruitt are funnier. The new kids are more overtly glam. And this is really probably the whole retro-80s thing that's raging across the culture (the latest stuttering repetition of culture). Oh, and they are all into partying. Perhaps Horowitz and Pruitt could be described as being somewhere between the smart set (Walker/Price/Guyton/the Reena Spauling's people) and the cocaine crowd (Terence Koh and Banks Violette)-- but with a bigger sense of humor. Considering their association with Gavin Brown (i.e., the bar Passerby) this makes psycho-socio-politico sense. All of these artists are "conceptual" in a similar way. And they all pride themselves in knowing a lot about art since 1966.

I saw Sara VanDerBeek show in the project room at D'Amelio Terras. It was okay. I was actually not too crazy about her work. This is a perfect example of the sort of work that I pay attention to because someone is pointing their finger at it. (For example, go where many people are gathered and flamboyantly point at nothing; you can get a lot of people to look at nothing; it's funny.) Formally it looked a bit too familiar to me. The content was too opaque. It seemed to have a bunch of references to art history. If pressed to say what the work is about, I would say, "art history." Joao Ribas in a lecture to the MFA Fine Arts Program at SVA argued that one of the main reasons there is so much political art is because artists think that if they refer to "the political" it will make their art seem more serious. I think he is totally right on with this. But there is another way artists gesture towards their seriousness. Perhaps it is the new way (the cool kids definitely tend to use it). They show how serious they are with references to art history. The more obscure the references are, the smarter the artist is (natch).

Tom Friedman is the only artist on this list whose work I am into. His work amazes me. Friedman and Pruitt might be the older brothers to the "Boys and Black and Silver"'s younger brothers. In terms of age, well, I'm one of the middle brothers.

Did Piotr Uklanski move from Gavin Brown to Gagosian Gallery? If so then three of these artists used to be associated with Gavin Brown (Pruitt, Horowitz (both of whom still are)) and Uklanski. Keegan and VanDerBeek have associations with D'Amelio Terras. Jim Lambie is with Anton Kern. Tom Friedman used to show at Feature (a gallery that fascinates me more than most -- even though I do not always like what they show) but now he moved over to the Gagosian Gallery as well.

Not counting Tom Friedman (because he is in a special class for me) esthetically I am most attracted to Jim Lambie's work. What I am talking about is the part of his aesthetic that overlaps with the Pierogi aesthetic. Jim Lambie is the collision of a Banks Violette-ish iconography with the Pierogi obsessive/compulsive thing.

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2007-12-17T21:16:00.000-05:00

Some ideas for a screening at this gallery and maybe something else...

2007-12-03T08:38:00.000-05:00

Showbeast, Crazy Wave

Kevin Regan, Standardized Generalized Symbol Language

Art of Bleeding, Introducting Art of Bleeding

Showbeast, Mountain of Skulls

Jimmy Joe Roche, YouTube Apocalypse

Martha Colburn, Dispell (excerpt)

Frog, Peeair and the Pill Poppers, 2007

Kevin Regan, Receiver, 2001

Alan Cordell, Obloy Syndrome: "Bluh Bleh" (Bone Gunner), 2007

Paperrad, Umbrella zombie datamosh mistake, 2007

Frog, The Amazing Mr. Slug Performs Stand Up"

Baltimore Shopping Network, Excalibur Remix, 2007

2007-10-03T22:39:00.000-05:00

2007-09-27T19:54:00.000-05:00

open studio, Fall 2007

2007-08-23T06:25:00.000-05:00

Jim Nastics took these pictures. I just came across 'em. He hadn't mentioned that they were online. You never think about all the photos of you out there. There are so many photos of you that you don't know about. How many photos of you are out there in the world? Many of them belong to people you know but what about the ones that belong to people you don't know? Or people you only at best sort of know? What about the times you ended up walking into the background of some stranger's snapshot? When I was in high-school I spent some time playing a game of intentionally doing this. And what about that time some friend of a friend (or the sister of some friend of a friend) took a picture of you when you passed out, drunk, at a party, and they drew a penis on your face with a Sharpie? And what about all the "official" or documentary photos? Photos taken for identification purposes, insurance purposes, legal reasons? And how many of those photos are online? Even if they're online if they're unlabeled it's unlikely you will ever know of them. It's possible that someone, right now, somewhere, is looking at a photo of you. A photo you know nothing about...

That's me on the left in the top picture. I'm talking to Eleanor. I'm glad she came by. With this picture I'm inclined to fixate on my hair more than anything else. I cut my hair off at the end of the year. I'm growing it long again. It will look like this come December. You can spend as much as you want on a haircut when you only get one a year. I'm not sure the stylists like it because it's more work for them and they are getting only a single tip for the effort. So you have to tip well. I know all about this.

In the third photo Chris has his back to the camera. He's talking to Brody whom you can barely see.

Boswijck BBQ

2007-08-11T09:37:00.000-05:00

2007-08-10T10:37:00.000-05:00

2007-08-07T22:29:00.000-05:00

2007-08-04T18:12:00.001-05:00

2007-08-02T23:50:00.001-05:00

2007-08-02T23:38:00.000-05:00

A short note for A. on the topic of circuit bending

2007-08-02T12:26:00.000-05:00

Egad! You probably know more about this than I do. I thought people just hack open electronic devices, old synthesizers, toys, things that produce sound and tweak the circuits. I would think you need a minimal knowledge of electronics and soldering. It's low fi engineering, it's hacking, it's rigging. It seems comparable to game hacking to me. You have to be able to deal with the code some but you don't have to be an expert. It's more about breaking things in an interesting way. It's cut and past in a way. It's seems like it comes out of a desire to personalize things. This makes me think of torn jeans in punk or the hippie adornment of jeans or other clothing. But circuit bending seems to overlap with game hacking and maybe that kooky midi instrument stuff (which is all about customizing (personalizing) stuff too but the interface rather, triggers, inputs and outputs). Definitely a nerd scene. All this stuff, I feel, owes something to Brian Eno who owes something to John Cage. It may be the same aesthetic underpinning as prepared instrument music (Keith Rowe, guitar playing for example). And on the West Coast they have the more macho machine sculpture thing that's been kicking since at least SRL. But it is still kind of geeky because you have to know how to do stuff which means you are figuring stuff out and not hanging out. I guess the fact machine sculpture is so much bigger on the West Coast (than on the East Coast) makes total sense. Look at, I suppose, California's history of car culture. Perhaps this is the geographical point where all this stuff overlaps with surfer and skater culture. This is the sort of stuff they are starting to teach in art school (circuit bending, machine sculpture) — since it is more about creative uses of the technology than anything else. I had a class as an undergrad called Machine Sculpture. This stuff is about seeing what you can do with the little you know or can figure out (and not re-inventing the wheel). And that, in a nutshell, is the punk DIY attitude, circa 1977 but applied to other stuff (than bands, fanzines and fashion).

I Saw Genesis P-Orridge Walking Down the Street Last Night

2007-07-29T10:57:00.000-05:00

[Genesis was here.]

It was dusk, about 7:45 PM. We were on our way to McCarren Park to listen to Sonic Youth play Daydream Nation to a gigantic empty pool full of cool people. We had waited until earlier this week to try to get tickets so we missed it. It was sold out. We were on our way to the park where we were gonna sit on the grass outside the pool and listen to the show with Chris and a bunch of his friends. (By the way, it sounded good.) But anyway, my wife and I were stopped on Knickerbocker, at the light on Johnson (where Knickerbocker merges with Morgan) and Genesis P-Orridge walked in front of my wife's black car. He looked at us. He looked into my eyes. Should I say he or she? S/he looked sort of like he did on that recent Wire cover, but less like a hooker, and more like that cool old lady that lives down the street who sells you pot and has all these amazing obscure, scary books and stories of living in Morocco and what not. But all the normal kids say she's an evil witch and she likes it like that. It still kind of bothers you though because you are a neophyte and you want everyone to like everyone (even though you are a total freak). Where s/he was walking is technically the East Williamsburg Industrial Park not Bushwick. It's where the loft scene growing up around the Morgan stop is but it spills across Flushing into Bushwick (where we live, a few blocks up Knickerbocker). I wonder where s/he was going? This was my second P-Orridge sighting in the part of Brooklyn that those kids told me is "the wrong part of town, dude" (they barked it at me after spraying me from the fire hydrant as I biked by 'em). The other sighting was while we were switching to the M train from the J train around midnight. P-Orridge and his small entourage sat across from Ivan and I on an empty M train car. They took it two stops to the Myrtle Ave stop and got off. The L train intersects with the M train at Myrtle. I wondered then where they lived. I figured they must live somewhere out here, Bushwick or East Williamsburg, if they were riding the train that far out, to the limits of hipster-land. I doubt I would have recognized him that time but earlier that evening we had attended the COUM Transmissions presentation that was part of that Performa Biennial. They showed some footage of COUM Transmissions performances from the early 70s. It was a casual event. Genesis sat in a chair and talked off the top of his head over what seemed like raw footage.

From 9:45 PM, 7/27/07 to 2:43 AM, 7/28/07

2007-07-27T21:45:00.000-05:00

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2007-07-11T21:23:00.000-05:00

The thing for me is to try and make things, try and do things and show them to people -- that's what I get excited about.

There is a game afoot here and if enough time goes by I won't remember what it was.

Joey Crack and Chill Will

2007-07-05T07:57:00.000-05:00

Who is Joey Crack? I was on my way to the subway a few days ago when I heard all this honking behind me. I turned around to look and there were two hearses. But the honking was coming from the vehicle behind the hearses, an SUV. And behind that was another SUV, blasting music, with a woman hanging out the back seat, driver side window, shaking a Yankees shirt that said Joey Crack at me and this other dude walking down the sidewalk. The other guy was going the opposite direction down the sidewalk and we passed one another just as the woman slowly drove past me. She ignored me (perhaps because I am white, perhaps because I looked nervously away) and shook the shirt at the other dude and said "pick it up!" He sheepishly shook his shoulders at her, a "what do you want me to do" sort of gesture, smiled and kept on walking. The funeral entourage drove past me and I made a mental note to look Joey Crack up on the internet.

What I found on the internet is an article published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on July 2, 2007 which says that Joseph Vargas, known around the neighborhood as "Joey Crack", whose last known address was 353 Stockholm Street (I used to walk down that block all the time, for years, it's right by the DeKalb stop on the L train), Bushwick/Ridgewood, NY, was shot in the chest by Dandre Yelverton (of Hempstead, LI). Jaquan Petty was driving the car. All this happened when Joey Crack was at the car wash getting his 2007 Land Rover cleaned. Apparently he took his vehicle there every day. The article says there's a memorial for Joey Crack on the side of the car wash garage. It also says there is one on the corner of Stockholm and Irving, about six blocks from where I live.

My favorite part of the article is this: "A car wash customer who would not give his name added, 'No one’s going to talk. It’s Bushwick.'" And this: "Like many others in the neighborhood who did not want to speak about Vargas, Will said silence is a form of protection in the neighborhood. 'It’s a Bushwick thing,' he said." Will, according to the article, is known around the neighborhood as "Chill Will."

Chill Will and Joey Crack. I wonder if anyone who knows them will ever come across this? I was just walking down the street and using internet search engines...

(And if anyone tells you Bushwick is the new Williamsburg kick them. At best it's the new Williamsburg if you're talking about Williamsburg, circa 1991. In terms of what they mean, the person who says "this is the new that", Greenpoint is really the new Williamsburg. I know what I'm talking about, natch.)

2007-07-03T16:02:00.001-05:00

Just curious...

2007-06-26T13:57:00.000-05:00

So, I'm conducting a little experiment. It's rather stupid but I'm bored. Anyway, this is it: against my better judgment I posted a comment on the Matt and Kim photo I had made a favorite of on my Flickr account. I’m not sure how much I like Matt and Kim but they are so darned cute and cuddly looking that I keep wanting to pay attention. I mean their music is not bad. It just does not seem all that original to me and, besides that, it just does not suit my home use needs right now. Heavy, dark and droney does. Even though I have known of the Swans since the mid 80s, when I first read about them in Spin, when Spin was a radically different mag, that actually seemed really cool, originally (Bob Guccione's son started it! weird!), but which ultimately failed,(just ask those who know more about such matters than I to confirm, please), it was during the past two years that I fell in love with them, that is, the Swans. But back to Matt and Kim... I like that splatter video Matt and Kim made. It seems not quite totally original either but done with such gusto! The song is good but perhaps too twee for me. Fucking cuddlecore! Insane. Is that what Matt and Kim are? That makes the video even funnier. Jeez. “They’ve” thought of everything! Well, anyway, against my better judgment I posted that comment on one of my two favorite Matt and Kim photos and I am wondering how many more views on my Flickr account I will get in the next few days because of it. Right now it says 327. I just want to mark that down with a date here. Also, it says the Matt and Kim photo has been viewed 6,371 times. I’m curious at what rate these numbers might increase. Let's watch, me and, er, um, me. That's the first part of this experiment.

And, by the way, that Matt and Kim photo is a portal to something strange on Flickr that I did not know was there! But god bless 'em if they just let it be... But anyway (not that I am into that sort of stuff)... Look on the “x people call this photo a favorite”. There you will notice an account called “with Bikes”. Look at it. Look at “with Bikes” contacts. Browse around. Are these kinky photo swappers? One really appeared to be! It is like those trashy Yahoo groups (with Flickr's much nicer interface) but also oddly more real…? How would you even know? You wouldn’t! But this underscores the fact that I was wondering right from the start about Matt and Kim's Flickr account: did they put the Flickr photos up or their marketing firm? I can’t tell! Can you? What is real…? I have no idea.

Well, anyway, the other part of this experiment is this: if you happen to find your way to this “message in a bottle” from the Matt and Kim photo then post a comment, please. The only way to find this from that post is through a rather indirect route. I am not linking back to it. And I am not linking directly to this. Of course you could just end up here because you know me. In that case please do not mess with my experiment and post a message. I will hassle you and then delete it. I only want messages from someone who went to Matt and Kim, did not know me, and followed the links and ended up here. I don’t care if it takes a year. I am just curious if it could happen. And the reality... Well, anyway... (And I know no one looks at this blog because I’ve had, as of today, 30 profile views. Also, don’t get me wrong. I am totally ok with it. If I wanted to I could post messages on other people’s blogs and get more profile views. I know how it works. I don’t care about that shit here. I don’t care, man.)

2007-06-24T15:09:00.000-05:00

Flag Day (1985)

2007-06-14T12:33:00.003-05:00

Margaret Griffis took this photo. Isn't it wonderful? When did I meet Margaret? Four or five or so years after this show...? It was when I played in this stupid punk band in Gainesville with Brian and Ivan. I went to see this show with my stepbrother, Kevin. We drove to Ft. Lauderdale from Palm Beach Gardens, where we grew up and, at the time, I had just graduated from high school. This was the second punk rock show I ever saw -- in my entire life (man). The first was Husker Du on tour for New Day Rising at the same place, Fireman's Hall. I remember them playing the entire fucking album. I was in love with that album at the time. They played their hearts out. (I'm still talking about Husker Du). This Black Flag show, however, was incredibly hot. At one point Henry Rollins stopped the show so everyone could go outside and cool off. It was after all South Florida. And I guess the air conditioner was not working...? I hate the heat. I thought Black Flag was better the second time I saw them, in Gainesville, Fla. about six months later. Jill, who I would meet about three or so years later, in Gainesville, Fla., "ripped my tickets." We, as I mentioned on one prior instance in this particular forum, dated and drank barrels and barrels of sweet alcohol together. I was even arrested once! Ivan, who played in said stupid punk band with me as well as another even stupider punk band with me, it turns out was at both of these shows too. I met him three or four or so or something like that years later.

Same snake in both of these these collages...

2007-06-13T18:10:00.000-05:00

I made the first image. The second image is by Sebastian Hyde and Kevin Evans. Find a copy of Brian Doherty's book This Is Burning Man and read from bottom of pg 73 to pg 74. The table of contents is also useful. And then look here.

2007-06-10T21:18:00.000-05:00

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2007-05-26T18:31:00.000-05:00

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2007-05-25T17:19:00.000-05:00

2007-05-25T15:19:00.000-05:00

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2007-05-25T15:16:00.000-05:00

This bank was between the apartment I lived in and the Pizza Hut I worked at as a waiter. I lived in an apartment on N.W. 9th Avenue right off N.W. 13th St. The Pizza Hut was up on N.W. 16th (I think). I can't remember why I walked to work that summer. I think I was totally broke and something was wrong with my car. I definitely had my white Toyota Corolla station wagon by then. This was the summer of 1989. I made the above protest image that same summer too. I waited tables five nights a week, stayed up all night every night, and slept all day, every day. It's hot as hell in Gainesville during the summer. It's very humid there and the air is unusually still. I remember at the time thinking to myself that it had been a mild summer and then I realized I'd hardly been outside during the day for an entire summer.

I walked by that damned sign for weeks. At some point I started thinking about what sort of alternate sentences I could create using the letters they had used to make their statement. It originally had some sort of loan offer. So early one Sunday morning, on my way home from a Saturday night shift, at 2 a.m. or so, I altered the sign. It stayed that way all day that Sunday. Monday morning they discovered it and returned it to its original dignity -- with the addition of a locked plastic cover for good measure.

As I recall Phil took the picture. I may have a copy of it somewhere but I found it on Brian's MySpace page. And Tom had posted it there! What a trip.

I met Jill in September of 1988. She had a major lasting impact on me in two ways: I learned about the Fall from her and I discovered Re/Search #11 Pranks! because of her (her roommate had a copy of the book on the bookshelf in their living room).

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2007-05-19T12:40:00.000-05:00

-----------Accidents||||||||||||||||||

2007-05-19T12:39:00.000-05:00

I got this book from the garage of my step-mother's house on Ilex Circle in Palm Beach Gardens (circa 1983-5). I have no idea who it originally belonged to or where it came from. I carried the book around for years before doing anything with it and then in 1995, the last time I returned to school (when I finally finished) I did a project that used the above image. The image was a page or two inside front cover.

Basically I scanned the image and then converted it into vector art using a "tracing" program that came with CorelDraw. It made this incredibly complex object. I'm actually amazed that my old computer (my first computer) a Gateway pc (with the intel 486 processor) could handle such a complex vector file -- but it could. Was CorelDraw that good? Anyway, I turned the vector soup from the conversion into a bunch of discrete objects I could move around. I constructed the final animation out of this material. It was made one frame at a time in CorelDraw. I would move everything I wanted to move (figuring 15 frames per second) and click "Save As." I did this over and over again. I worked in the dark, mostly in my underwear, for a few days generating all the frames. I did little else while I was working on it. Move everything slightly, "Save As."

My original idea was a little bit different than the animation below. I had planned to create a poster-size printout for each frame and then find some public location to display the printout, one at a time, in succession. I figured it would take a year to "perform" the animation in this way. It would have been an animation with a frame rate of one frame per day (video is typically 30 frames per second and film is typically 24 frames per second). What I was interested in was the idea of the poster subtly changing every day. Would anyone notice these gradual, subtle changes?

I would have then documented this, every day (for the duration), and then turned these photos into another animation.

The final version, the animation below, was exhibited only once, in Los Angeles, 1997. I can never remember whether I made it in 1995 or 1996.

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2007-05-19T12:38:00.000-05:00

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2007-05-18T04:50:00.000-05:00

[[[[[[[(((((<<::::>>)))))]]]]]]]

2007-05-16T04:46:00.000-05:00

~_::_~.~_::_~.~_::_~.~_::_~.~_::_~.~_::_~.~_::_~.

2007-05-15T14:27:00.000-05:00

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2007-05-14T04:40:00.000-05:00

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2007-05-13T04:38:00.000-05:00

~((((((((((*))))))))))~~

2007-05-12T17:41:00.000-05:00

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2007-05-06T17:45:00.000-05:00

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2007-05-01T17:28:00.000-05:00

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

2007-04-24T15:09:00.000-05:00

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2007-04-18T11:35:00.000-05:00

Untitled

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I can't remember for sure what I was originally calling this project, when I actually did it. I probably called it my "Jack Chick booklet thing" or something like that. I eventually settled on Standardized Generalized Symbol Language. I designed it in 1997 when I was still living in Gainesville, Florida but I made and distributed it after moving to New York. It was the culmination of three or so years of playing with this very standard, very familiar set of icons. I found them in this gigantic collection of cheesy clip art that came with the vector illustration program CorelDRAW. (I thought CorelDRAW was an awesome program, by the way. It's a vector illustration program and it seemed way better than Illustrator. FreeHand, though, according to the cognoscenti, at least back then, was the best 2D vector illustration program. But, anyway...) By collaging the icons into one another I created a set of mutants. I then used them as material in other projects. Standardized Generalized Symbol Language was the last and probably most successful one.

One of my favorite details about Standardized Generalized Symbol Language is that it is designed to be reproduced using only a b/w laser printer and standard sheets of 8.5 x 11 office paper. Very importantly it is designed to use all of the paper. There is no trim. Three equally spaced out horizontal cuts are made to the vertical sheet to create the leaves which are arranged then stapled.

Using a b/w laser printer I made and distributed 2000 copies of Standardized Generalized Symbol Language. They were distributed the way Jack Chick booklets are distributed: I left them in telephone booths, benches, wherever in New York City and London, Winter,1997-98. I was entranced with the idea of someone experiencing the booklet with no context. It's fine with me if only one or two people had this experience.

I did get to witness someone's discovery of the booklet -- once. In fact, unintentionally, I was also a participant. It was late December and I was returning to New York from London (I was there for a week and I left the booklet pretty much everywhere I went). I just so happened to board the plane first so, after getting settled in my chair, I put one of the booklets in the magazine pouch in front of the seat next to mine. And then I forgot about it. I don't know why but for some reason I thought the cleaning crew would find. Well, two or three hours into the flight, I notice in the corner of my eye (I'm reading a book), that the passenger next to me is digging everything out of the magazine pouch. I mean everything. And then I notice that Standardized Generalized Symbol Language catches his attention. I watch out of the corner of my eye as he slowly looks through the entire booklet. I could not tell for sure but he seemed rather puzzled. A moment or two passed and then he turned to me and asked: "Do you know what this is?" And I of course said "No."But he handed the booklet to me so I pretended to look at the thing the way I might look at something I'd never seen before when it is being placed before my attention. I looked at it slowly. I slowly looked through the entire booklet and then I turned to him and said: "This is really strange." And he said: "Do you think someone is trying to scare me?" I said: "I don't know. I hope not." And he said: "Well, I know people in New York who know about languages and I'm going to show this to them." Earlier, when the flight first took off, we'd had a nice conversation about London and traveling in the U.K.