Category: Doodles

Went to the doctor today to get my anual vegan probing. I get bloodwork done to determin if my morally correct habits have left me with crippling disabilities on the insides; B12 deficiencies, tumours, wheat penis, etc. As usual, I try to pack as many things into this meeting as possible, so I do my best to get sick just before I go.

I’ve had this stabbing pain in one ear for a month, but after much poking and peering, the young Dr. Benjamin folded his arms and did a meh, concluding that since he couldn’t find anything let’s wait until the symptoms become worse, or better. It will be a consolidation if I end up with half my head amputated because of his wait-and-see strategy, but then again maybe it would be even better if the pain would just leave me the fuck alone.

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Also, I thought I’d get some theraphy out of it. As long as you get a remittal from a doctor, you can get theraphy (cognitive, psychodynamic, whatever) rather cheaply. So I figure since I have horrid mood swings during which I consider kicking dogs in the head (not that there’s anything morally wrong with disliking dogs, the filthy creatures) and often stare blankly into space at the slightest provocation, I might get some state sponsored theraphy to deal with it. No can do. The interview was short, and I’m way too normal to be cookoo.

— So, how long are these apathetic attacks that you get?
— Oh, a day or two. I just stare at the screen, worry about wasting my life away.
— Yeah, that’s perfectly normal. How about sleep, is it giving you any trouble?
— Oh yeah, I sleep very lightly and grind my teeth.
— How many hours of sleep do you get each night?
— Lately between four to eight hours.
— Yeah, perfectly normal.
— But can’t you put me on the list? I need some help here!
— Right, I’ll “put you on the list” right away.

Even though most people are at least as neurotic as I, and the fact that one in ten Swedes is on psychoactive drugs, it can’t possibly be good to feel this way. Goddammit, I want to concentrate my self-centeredness to one session every two weeks, not have it as my main hobby. There are no two ways to go about this I guess: Some dogs are going to wish they never barked in my direction…

For an inexplicable reason I love generative projects. Maybe it’s the appearance of magic that I like, or maybe the embodiment of an abstract idea seemingly discorporated from a human mover. A ghost in the machine for as long as you can suspend disbelief. The Perpetual Storyteller Apparatus by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus is one such project where the you could be forgiven for staring at the machine, trying to get some meaning out of its scribblings.

Because magic is about diverting your viewers attention, much of generative art leaves you trying to decipher how something is made or what the internal mechanism is. Once you realise that the stunning graphics that you see are pulsating in rhythm to a certain noise, there is little but aesthetics and perhaps admiration for the technical skill of the artist left. And while technical skills are important to have, we don’t make art to show them off but rather hope to tell a story or present information in a way or setting that is enlightening or amusing.

Back when I lived in London, I saw Scott Draves in a pub where he presented a beta of what would become the famous Electric Sheep project. By having abstract patterns — “sheep” — swap genes with each other from one online computer to another, and having users pass judgement on which sheep they liked most, an ecology of sheep was formed, pretty and less so. It’s an excellent example of a generative project where the process (strings of software that communicate and mutate while your computer is “sleeping”) gives us a new take on computers and their relationship to each other, while the end product speaks leagues of the end users aesthetic sensibilities. (The individual sheep which we’ve voted up or down, thereby influencing their reproductive ability)

But this is an old project, epochs ago in Internet years, and I have a hard time finding interesting generative art made today. I’ve been poking a bit at Processing, a programming language geared towards artists and similar folk, which is perfectly suited to take any data and muck about with it. Since it’s relatively simple and accessible it has generated a lot of projects that are half baked and conceptually weak; This is fine as long as we view the projects as stepping stones, as experiments in visualisation. But it’s so easy to get stuck with fiddling the knobs of random parameters that you end up spending you time changing hues instead of a coming up with a reason for why you’re doing it in the first place.

In the time of Flash 1.0 I was in awe of what Joshua Davis was doing over at Praystation.com, and most of that was only him fiddling with autonomous processes and the possibilities of Actionscript. Today we have Flickrvision and We Feel Fine, which take their data from the cloud and present them in a new way. This is good stuff, but it’s the exception to most other art or “new media” projects that show up. Computer art too often lacks either in technology or theory, and it ages miserably.

(My mum stopped accepting “hand-made presents” some time ago, so one should hope that artists would be self-critical enough not to show every ashtray they’ve created.)

But perhaps there is a truth to get at behind a generative, or random, process (not that the two are interchangable, but they are similar enough for this topic) if by a “controlled randomness” we utilise a background noise to decide the outcome. Maybe it reveals an underlying truth about the universe or somesuch. That would certainly be in line with numerology and astrology; Trying to discern a pattern. Perhaps the cosmic microwave background radiation is interferring with our world and by looking long enough at the noise of a tv showing static we discover the pattern of God. The movie Π comes to mind, as does the ramblings of any number of nutters who’ve stared into the sun long enough.

I’ve included this here mostly for completeness sake and because it’s an old and interesting sci-fi idea: If the universe is deterministic there can be no true randomness. The “real” that shines through, the almost invisible hand of the maker, will show in everything — why it should appear more in “beautiful” works of art is another matter — and there is a Truth in there. Thank Goodness for the uncertainty principle I say. There is randomness, so there doesn’t have to be a pattern for us to find, and maybe what we enjoy is randomness. Whatever.

What Duchamp did with his 3 Standard Stoppages was interesting because it spoke about our relationship to art. It’s not the result, nor the process in itself that was interesting, but audience going “oooh” at the audacity.

So a goal of using magic where you are allowed to see what the magician is doing could be that the end result is valuable, not the process itself. Someone mixing flour, yeast, water and salt will make a bread – itself an extraordinary transformation of the starting material – but they’re not doing it because the process is awesome but because bread is a good thing. And it’s not art, or at least not interesting art; The latter is a worse offence.

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In the above video, made for Delinquest, I dick around with After Effects: The horizontal blur reacting to the music. I haven’t made the effect, but I control the parameters. It’s a nonsensical example, but still an example of a generative process. It always starts with someone telling someone else to do the work, and then you end up with instructions being the work and suddenly you’re back at the screen, watching the iTunes visualizer, experiencing beauty like a child and patting yourself on the back for choosing this particular song.

I’m not saying the end product is irrelevant or – heaven forfend – isn’t art, but one has to realise that even though aesthetics can be appreciated as something good, they’re not a discreet phenomena but at one end of a sliding scale which has “abstract beauty” at the other end. Or maybe “being a smart-ass.”

I don’t know why, but I’m channeling Attenborough at least once a month lately; It’s my own romantic period. Imagine his voice when reading this post and see if it makes more sense. I almost guarantee it.

Rachel Sussman has photographed the oldest living organisms that we know of, and the pictures are available here. The pictures themselves are unassuming, and even though one might be disappointed with the blandness of some of the flora, perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there; To not judge a book by its cover, or something equally profound and boring. [Via Wakaba, who just got back to Japan]

While working in London I tried to occupy my time thinking up websites and community projects. One of those ideas that never took off was Tree of the Month, a website where I imagined that people would document a particular tree that they had a relationship to. While researching the subject I stumbled upon a book by Thomas Pakenham called Meetings with Remarkable Trees, wherein he tells stories associated with 60 trees in the UK. It’s a fascinating book if you have a penchant for contemplating the vastness of the universe and the short span of human life. In other words, if you’ve ever found yourself staring at a yew, crying because you’ll be dead and buried before it will grow out of childhood, you might like that book. Apparently, there are plenty treehuggers about since he’s published two more books in the series. You are encouraged to buy Remarkable Trees of the World and send me a copy.

By the way, seeing as the domain for Tree of the Month is still available, does anyone know of an arborist who’d be interested in working on this? The idea needs to be fleshed out, but still. Trees, dude.

In the same vein of “the universe is wicked, yo!” NASA and MTU has been publishing Astronomical Picture of the Day since 1995, and if you read space fare (Like Peter Hamilton, Iain M. Banks or the brilliant Ursula K. Le Guin) you’ll have no trouble whatever imagining yourself in them, the laptop screen a porthole onto the galaxy. Some of the colours might be false, but look at the size of those space clouds! I’m a huge space weenie, as explained previously.

While on the topic of future: Why not learn Esperanto instead of farting into your chair? Or are you happy to make do with Europanto, the hodgepodge language that all Europeans speak whenever we’re talking to someone we don’t understand? Willen you vielleicht desert haben efter food oder vamos to playa direct?

Although meant as a pisstake on Esperanto, the idea of a common language that you grow aggressively by using what little you know of your listeners vocabulary is interesting. It’s easily dismissed as nonsense, and much of it reads like gibberish, but instead of looking at every language that you need as a discreet set of rules, you take a modular approach and just use words in whatever syntax you think is appropriate. Adaptive tourist linguistics.

Closer to home, there’s plenty to be fascinated by. WTF Nature! is a Livejournal dedicated to crazy stuff that surround us. Again, reading science fiction or fantasy you grow accustomed to descriptions of strange creatures and places, but if you take a detached look at your surroundings you might cultivate some wonder at how bizarre yet together our planet is. Why don’t you nip outside and ponder a bush or fondle a beetroot, hmm? Let that inner hippie out and feel as one with the cosmos for a bit. It’ll do you good.

On Sunday I fly to Warsaw and then get on a buss to Sanok for my grandmothers funeral. I will need to borrow a shirt and black pants when I get there, as well as visit a barbershop. I don’t do funerals so don’t know how to dress or behave. I guess I’ll take my queues from the rest of the family.

A couple of days later I’ll fly from Warsaw to Copenhagen for the alt_cph 2009 where we’re participating with SKUP PALET. Having an ambulatory career is part and parcel of the romantic notion of the artistic life but I don’t feel all that much enthusiasm about it. If I had a car or a boat I guess slow migration wouldn’t be bad, but these shit airlines are so far removed from any romantic ideals that only the movement remains, none of the glamour.

We need to bring back zeppelins or slow trains. There is no dignity to travel today. I don’t think this is me whining about the lack of comfort — remembering that the cheap flights of today were pipe dreams ten years ago — but there’s no fun in just going somewhere. A five day trip would require you to prepare mentally for moving somewhere; You’ll be more fluid and maybe less stuck in one place, paradoxically because travel would be more difficult.

Whatever, I’m just bummed about the reason for the trip. I’ll occupy my time taking pictures of Poland to show folks back home later, as per Wakabas request. Maybe I’ll do a slideshow and commentary. Who would be up for an hours worth of lecture on travel in Poland?

In order to keep the neighbourhood pretty and motivate the costly housing, we’ve had peeping toms on both sides the yard the past weeks. They’re painting and hammering and doing stuff that Real Men® do.

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Besides dreaming about taking a spaceship boat into the great unknown, another popular escapist fantasy is gardening. Back to the hoe and the illusion of self-sufficiency. Annas brother Andy has gone nuts with the two plots he’s running and generously shares his veggies and thoughts on gardening. Apparently planting in “mixed squares” is what the cool kids are doing these days.

So we’re sitting in a bar, me, Olle and a couple of his friends, when someone starts talking about how there’s this one gardening collective nearby that gives out new plots to people based on who’s there earliest on a particular day. Because we’re drinking beer it seems like an awesome idea to show up on that day and sign up. There’s talk of bringing a tent and camping outside to ensure a good place, and the more beer we have the more enthusiastic we are about the enterprise. We’re gonna grow carrots and beans and flowers and that salad thingy whaddaya callit, oh yeah “chard,” chard is awesome, gotta grow it hey who’s more beer want?

I had already beed offered to share a plot with Anna and Andy a while back, so I can’t really put the finger on why I thought this was a good – or new – idea. Maybe it’s nest building; I own a bed and a laptop, and have nothing but student loans and library cards in my own name. I have no material sense of belonging, so perhaps a 7×7 metre plot of land holds an allure of homesteading? (Technically it wouldn’t be my plot since I’d be sharing it with Olle, but it would be my name on the deed.)

Or maybe it’s the peripheral stuff that appeals to me. Unlike other projects I’ve been enthusiastic about, this one happens to involve someone else which gave it enough momentum to be carried through. The project would in that case obviously be “queue early in the morning” and not “gardening.” Anyway.

Like many ideas that are spawned while merry, this one was blissfully forgotten until I happened upon Sara and she reminded me. It turned out that the signup occasion was just around the corner, so me and Olle decided to spend Friday sober and stand in line before eight on Saturday morning. Waking up early is always painful unless there’s someone with a cup of coffee or a my dick in hand, but I drag myself into a pair of shoes and onto a bike. Olle was standing with a very manly scarf by Röda Sten, scanning the river and trying to come up with a clever remark on my tardiness.

Instead of looking at a map and learning the proper road to get there, we lock our bikes and take the same goat path that Olle had walked on the evening when we first spawned the idea. “Not the fastest way but we’ll get there” is the sentiment which has us struggling up a mountain. We’re walking up the the crags by Röda Sten – where the dub party took place a while back – and at half seven in the morning it makes for unsteady and whining progress.

A small trail leads us through the patch of wood and we emerge onto a parking lot next to a community garden. It’s not the one we’re heading for, but just around the corner there’s another garden and we can see people milling about. Unless they’re the gardening undead, they’re there for the same purpose as we. Someone has posted a bill with numbers, and we pull our tab. It’s not even eight o’clock and there’s already 14 numbers gone before ours; Some have been there half the night and the mood is subdued albeit cheerful.

We settle in, wait for the sun and drink coffee from a thermos. Had me and Olle been gay it would have been romantic; Others are sitting on benches or walking through the different gardens and it’s indeed very pretty. 120 small plots of land are being cultivated in as many ways; From a distance I can only recognise the sunflowers.

One of the guys who’d originally informed us about this event shows up. He’d been there at six, but took off once he had his number secured. He showed us around and I get to eat raw borlotti beans. Someone shows up with a portable beehive and is describing its function to some kids who are delighted and frightened. More and more people come and before you know it it’s ten o’clock and we’re signing our names on a list.

That’s it. There’s no certainty that we’ll get the plot, but I and Olle are now officially #15 on a waiting list, hoping for a call in November or thereabout. I haven’t started in on the seed catalogues yet, but I’ll get there I’m sure.

We saunter back down the hill – Olle would badly sprain his ankle on the same slope a few days later – and I go home to start a productive, although comatose, Saturday. There’s much more to say about the whole nesting thing, and should we get started with growing stuff I’m certain that I’ll be dumping all manner of ambitions here, but until then this post might serve as a reminder of how things get started – not with a great plan but for the hell of it, with a fuzzy idea based on nothing but a hunch.

It just struck me that I’m not the only one who is nourishing make-believe escapist ambitions among my acquaintances; is this an age thing? Is 31 the age at which you want to find meaning in life and feel the dirt beneath your fingernails and whatever? Maybe I just ought to compost myself on the plot and fertilise someone’s produce; I’m sure “corpse potatoes” would fetch a good price on eBay.

Post title from Depressing Comic Week over at Explosm. They’re already famous, but I bet you don’t read it.

So me and Wakaba were discussing the finer points of Family Guy references when she pointed out that the crack I have on my Macbook might be covered by extended warranty. I’d like to think that the gaffers tape I’m using lends my laptop a certain patina – an anti-shine of cool – but called Apple up just to check. Turns out that I qualify for a replacement so what the hell, might as well prolong the life of my beloved companion.

I think that the support drone at Apple had just started working there. He was adorable: Nervous as hell, he was humming under his breath before deciding on which line on his screen to read. There was silence ten seconds at the time and I imagined a guy who frantically is reminding himself “Don’t read the stage notes aloud, don’t read the stage notes aloud!”

He exuded a fear akin to the one you might experience when you’re being asked a question you’re supposed to know the answer to, mumbling something in response that might or not sound like something that maybe possibly is in the vicinity of a vague statement resembling an answer.

— Of course I remember your eye colour, baby; It’s brueen.

He hesitated on every word and only sounded confident reading whole sentences verbatim. “I would like you to know that we have extensive support available on our homepage” was the one time he didn’t finish a sentence with a question mark. Plainly adorable, like a puppy fighting a blanket.

You know that one time that you and a friend showed up for a marathon and realised too late that you’ve signed up for a competition for “special children” but can’t really back out cause you might win the chocolate trophy; Besides you already paid the fee and have running shoes on? Well, Bustler and Archinect ran a Michael Jackson Monument Design competition and the entries are now available for voting on, and they’re of mixed quality.

Some contenders didn’t bother to look up “monument” in the dictionary but lept straight for the lens flare filter, while others did cute conceptual pieces. A few are good: Permanently exploding atom bomb Michael Jackson and Anti-terrorist Golden Statue with Lasers go for the humour. Lift & Slide is the only installation which seems thought through and MJ Sperm Bank is cute, but the rest are mostly photoshops of Michaels feet and the moon.

Go vote for my anti-cancer nano-glove. Let the others get their “You’re also super!” diplomas. I want that chocolate trophy and special groupies.

They scratch their balls, take up your elbowroom and eat crisps with their face halfway down the bag. They keep their knees wide and their coats on should you be tempted to steal the smelly Canada Goose. Their cellphones are never muted and they let it ring instead of denying a call. They look at you over the rim of their Dan Brown novels with blank, unblinking eyes.

I had a perfectly good seat on the train back from Stockholm, but traded with a girl who wanted to sit next to her friend. I should have checked where she was seated before accepting. I spent two hours composing a diatribe against my new neighbours. I went over the top and felt rather judgmental afterwards, but fuck it, I was riding backwards which always makes me want to vomit and sleep at the same time. Minge minge.

Jonas has graciously spent time with us in Gothenburg and just got back to Stockholm, the town north of here. I’ve signed up for a few more dives and am looking forward to that. SKUP PALET, the art organisation that a bunch of us have started, is slowly getting its shit together and it looks like we’re going to represent at an art fair in Copenhagen. I visited Arcam today, the Gotheburg company that produces stuff in titanium that I wrote about in the post on rapid prototyping, and had a chat and a tour of their facilities; I got some insight into how specialised their buisiness model is, with only 50 machines worldwide.

As research before my MFA lockpicking presentation I interviewed Marc Weber Tobias. He had forwarded his Skype account to his cellphone and talked to me as he stopped for gas somewhere in a desert. The world felt just as small and awesome as when I was in high school and interviewed NASA for the radio show we were doing. (The feeling being “I can call anyone and ask anything!”) There’s an article on him and his doings over at Wired, which you might enjoy.

→ Wired, Charles Græber: The ultimate lock picker exposes weak military installations, corporate systems

What comes through in the article – beside his drive and intelligence – is the lack of patience with stupidity and a genuine fascination with stuff. It’s a quality that many nerds and other obsessive people share, and I sympathise with it. It’s this fascination that I was trying to gleam at my meeting with Patrik Ohldin at Arcam.

Of course, coming from a sci-fi reading background and with my head full of ideas on the end of stuff that rapid prototyping is hearalding, I felt much as the city kid staring in awe and disbelief at someone milking a cow. Patrik had a much more buisiness minded approach to the technology; He keeps abreast of what is happening in their sector, but the changing human perception of what originality implies in the face of CAD-to-production just isn’t part of their business. Making spare parts for humans and cars is.

It was nice to see what they were up to, and it’s always exiting to learn first hand about hight tech stuff, but now I feel I’d need to complement this excursion with a visit to the lo-fi end of the spectrum. Are there any home-fabbers in Gothenburg? Point them in my direction.