Ordinary Aura

harmon photos, etc

hey people, i am in the mix. believe it or not. i have enjoyed reading your entries and checking out the images and sites you've posted since the site went up. i can't begin to respond to it all right now, but will try to maintain regular contact from now on.

i'd like to label the photos that wolpa posted for me on the 25th (thanks). these photos alude to the "aura" nerve that i use to track my world, in addition to understanding or observing how others experience and express themselves. from a spiritual perspective, that is. here are the working titles for those shots (most taken in turkey and a few in uganda).

harmon1 evil eye
harmon2 there
harmon3 perfect
harmon4 night flight
harmon5 prostration (the rocks will cry out)
harmon6 blue mosque dross
harmon7 baraka
harmon8 your paradise

these photos are from a show that i'm currently scrounging to finish for the eleventh of june. this project primarily overlaps with ordinary aura...

...in regards to my recent studies on folk islam, and particularly the spiritual significance of specific places and objects within this worldview. for me, the aura concept is simply the common link between what we can see and what we can't. but not just the "otherworldliness" of things, but also the "truth behind the matter" (ok, that's bad) or in other words, how our beliefs affect daily life. here are is a blip from the statement for the show:

"the focus of my current project rests precariously on the boundary of two ancient paths, that of christianity and islam. i am not seeking political commentary, but simply tracking a margin shared by men and women of faith. together, these modern pilgrims listen to prophets, seek the transcendent, and receive the unseen. words of revelation, dreams of paradise, places of power, and prayers of influence all mark their course and my investigation. the relationships between sacred text, cultural symbol, illustrative vision, human mystery, and personal destiny provide the foundation for my work. nevertheless, the ultimate impact of these factors on daily life secures my lasting interest and should beckon our response as we seek to understand and reconcile the relationship between these people of God."

alan

interactive painting

Here's an interactive painting" project I just saw today. Nothing much to say about it so far. It's called Nocturne, and it requires the Shockwave plugin.

trying something new

conversations here spurred me to try something new this week - I've been working on putting together some ideas into a form I'm not so sure about -

I'm drawn to structural analyses, so much so that I have often forgotten to address content, and ended up with content i didn't want. So I've been trying to get more directly to content lately.

don't know if this will make sense at all. it's somewhere in the same world as tufte and stephanie brooks. i'm no designer, but i love information.

check it out here, if you're not sick of me yet.

workshop call

Adam,

So, I'm thinking that if there's an opening on Friday, a workshop could
follow on Saturday, making the best of the artists' time. Have you
heard back from anyone if they were interested?

An idea that comes to mind is the creation of stations, that featured
artists may set up in a certain area and people move from space to
space, but leave their creations behind. That might scare a lot of
people, of course.

It could also be a large piece that is created as a whole, but people
move from segment to segment of it, forcing them to give up ownership
to their own part and hopefully encouraging more creative action.

As you probably know these artists to some degree, what suggestions do
you have about a way to collaborate with outsiders? How would you pitch
a collaborative drawing/art making workshop to someone?

John

what should we do here
it seems like john would like to get an idea of what the workshop will be like
i like how he talks about leaving things behind, ownership
it speaks to the ritual element of aura
what do you think
will everyone be here for the weekend
some folks i think will come for the week before to install
you are all welcome
we will find lodging
let's move on this workshop idea soon
i will forward comments on this post to john
thanks wolpa

some epistemology

i've been interested for awhile in the work of historians of science and philosophers of knowledge who seek to criticize the enlightenment emphasis on the material without resorting to "un-scientific" reliances on the spiritual or hidden.

A big one for me in this area is the late Michael Polanyi, who was somewhat in the same room as Thomas Kuhn, who is more familiar to most as the origin of the much abused term, "paradigm." Polanyi devised a term "tacit knowledge" to describe a certain kind of extra-sensory knowledge that is crucial to science, to life, social functioning. He opposed this view to materialist science, in which meaning and knowledge arise from the division of the world into quantifiable parts.

Here is a an excerpt from a short essay where he explained this lifetime of work in a few paragraphs:

Unbridled detailing, the ideal advocated by Laplace and his modern followers, not only destroys our knowledge of things we most want to know; it clouds our understanding of elementary perception--our first contact with the world of inanimate matter and of living beings and our initial act of self-transcendence. Against the self-destructive commitment to ultimate lucidity, I propose the theory of tacit knowing. A theory of knowledge which endorses our capacities for understanding transcendence in the world will be found to establish self-transcendence.

I look at my hand, another face, or a machine. I recognize its area by its enclosed contours, by the relation between the object itself and its background within my field of vision. While I attend to the object itself I am relying on multiple clues-shapes, colours, extensions, perhaps in changing relations to each other. But I do not focus directly on each aspect of the object in its field. I have awareness of many of these aspects of the whole. In the case of the human face I rely on an awareness of its many features for attending to the characteristic appearance of a particular physiognomy. Attending to the details implicitly while focally addressing myself to the whole, I integrate the features into the cast they jointly form. The act of perception, therefore, comprises two types of awareness. I have subsidiary awareness of multiple facial features while I integrate these aspects into the face as a whole to which I attend focally. I perceive things through the dual activity of subsidiary and focal awareness. This is, in outline, the theory of tacit knowing.

Subsidiary awareness is controlled by focal awareness. The first type of awareness leaves itself open to the integrating function of the second. I am not able to specify with distinctness the particulars of a comprehensive entity. In this sense I know more than I can tell. I rely on my subsidiary awareness of the details of an object for attending to the coherent entity which is their meaning. There is, then, a from-to movement in all knowing. If, in allegiance to the ideal of total lucidity, I claim to know directly and distinctly aspects I actually only rely on subsidiarily, all comprehensive entities are destroyed, a program of self-and world-destruction results, a "world" composed of bits of matter in motion in which nobody lives. I rely not only on the several aspects of an object as I attend from these to a coherent view of the whole; I also rely on my body with its multiple and complex levels of functioning as I perceive things away from my body in the external world.

My body is the only thing in the world I normally never experience as an object. Instead I experience my body in terms of the world to which I am attending from my body. I continuously rely on my body as a subsidiary means for observing objects and other comprehensive entities outside and for using these entities for my own purposes.

The kind of knowledge I have of my body by dwelling in it is the paradigm of knowing particulars subsidiarily with a bearing on the comprehensive entity formed by them. Hence when I rely on my awareness of particulars for attending to a whole I handle things as I handle my body. In this sense I know comprehensive entities by indwelling their functional parts, as if they were parts of my body. Such is my conception of knowing by indwelling.

Through indwelling I participate in comprehensive entities, from my own body and the objects I perceive, to the lives of my companions, and the theories we employ to understand inanimate matter and living beings. I partly transform myself in that which I am observing and thereby extend my range of knowing to include knowledge of all the hierarchies--from inanimate matter to the frameworks of our convivial settings and the firmament of obligations which supervene the operations of our intelligence within these frameworks.

This is why a commitment to unbridled lucidity tends to destroy understanding of complex matters. Focus only on the particulars of a comprehensive entity and their joint meaning is effaced. Our conception of the entity is destroyed, leaving us only with bits and pieces scattered about in random meaninglessness.

Our view of life must account for how we know life; biological theories must allow for their own discovery and employment. Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence. Beginning with our own embodiment our theory of knowledge must endorse the ways we manifestly transcend our embodiment by acts of indwelling and extension into more subtle and intangible realms of being, where we meet our ultimate ends.

Aura - definition

I looked "aura" up in the old Webster's Collegiate dictionary. I will go ahead and post my copy for the terms and a few others that relate.

Aura 1a. a subtle sensory stimulus (as an aroma) b. a distinctive atmosphere surrounding a given source (the place had an aura of mystery) 2. a luminous radiation; NIMBUS 3. a subjective sensation (as of lights) esperienced before an attack of some nervous disorders.

related term NIMBUS Check it out in the extended entry

nimbus 1a. a luminous vapor cloud or atmosphere about a god or goddess when on earth. b. a cloud or atmosphere (as of romance) about a person or thing. 2. an indication (as a circle) of a radiant light or glory about the head of a drawn or sculpted divinity, saint, or sovereign. 3a. a raincloud that is of uniform grayness and extends over the entire sky. b. a cloud from which rain is falling.

gutai group

hi there,
adam invited me to join the conversation about the show. as a brief introduction: i live in chicago, preparing to go to the SAIC for an MA in art history. i'm a christian and am not particularly interested in christian art [for similar reasons mentioned by kevin]. if i have a faith interest in art, it's more in terms of how the spirit manifests itself, as opposed to how the artist has tried to manifest it.
there are a number of conversations i'd like to join in here, but for now, i thought i'd mention the Gutai group. There a post WWII group from japan that was concerned with the everyday as it relates to an eastern traditional perspecitve on the earth/spirituality/ancestors,etc. apparently, they were quite the break through for the country's art scene, there was a lot of abstract expressionism mimcry going on. the shock of wwII brought these artists to rethink their approach [away from a western perspective].
Gutai art does not alter matter; it gives matter life... In Gutai art, the human spirit and matter, opposed as they are, shake hands... My respect goes out to the works of Pollock and Mathieu. Their works are the cries uttered by matter: by oil paint and enamel themselves." (Yoshihara, Gutai manifesto, 1956)

you might have seen some of their other work; tightly stretched plastic between trees filled with red-dyed water, a bright colored cloth suspended just above the ground interacting with wind. or a favorite, some big magazine like Time found out about them and flew over for an interview. upon arrival they were shown the work: three painted [live] chickens. they put away their cameras and went home.
the gutai group were explicitly a-political and held onto objecthood. i'm not sure, but this seems to be a bit of a break from most artists concerned with the 'ordinary'. a lot of this type of work seems to deal with politics or the practice of an exchange with the audience.
political: dadaist anarchistic events, guerilla girls, etc.
in terms of exchange: artists like manzoni [sp? sold his shit in a can/signed people]. or public art groups providing some social service in order to improve/mystify the everyday or to create a formerly non-existent community.
i hope this is making some sense. i haven't read all the postings, but it seems that the notion of exchange or politics aren't a large part of the show. personally, i find it refreshing that neither are a priority in the show, considering the times, politics and religion are horribly tiring.

rowley

definitions

i wanna get more philosophical than I perhaps have the right too here for a minute. (I don't have a great command of the language, I'm kinda homegrown here.)

what do we mean by aura? i haven't seen much in the posts here about that yet, maybe i missed it in the original emails, before i came along.

are we using it as a substitute/surrogate for "divine?"

thinking about what i know of the word aura -

if something has an intangible essence, then it has an aura. here the essential nature of the thing is unseen, not perceived, but known through extrasensory means. not empirically verifiable.

aura is present, but not empirically knowable. enlightenment science would have us define the aura as a matter of FAITH, or perhaps BELIEF, where faith is defined as belief without any reason to believe.

and probably most science would say there is no "essence" or aura of a thing anyway - the thing is there in front of us, what you see is what you get. (except in maybe quantum physics, I guess.)

two questions here:

- why should the essential nature of the thing not exist in the realm of the sensory?
- why must senses be the only source for real knowledge?

immediacy captured

Speaking of presence, sort of. This was done on the wall of a cave in Argentina sometime between 9000 and 7000 BC. I find this image incredibly moving; the most immediate traces of the physical. Also, a lot of the handprints are actually negative images.

yet another tree

This one is the Tree of the Virtues and the Vices, from a 12th-century manuscript. Virtues on the left (arbor bona).

harmon1

harmon2

harmon3

harmon4

harmon5

harmon6

harmon7

harmon8

boom

i love these drawings by chris vassell
featured at shane campbell's gallery, boom
vassell

also these paintings were called to mind by a small drawing in chris' sketchbook
grotjahn

kevin, did you see these at artchicago?

also

after talking with chris earlier
it seems like we could now proceed more specifically
by talking about the space
and what we all are thinking about in terms of projects
and what might go where
and how we might work together on certain things
could we all post some sort of current artist statement
relating to conceptual interests and current studio practice
also we could photoshop the images of the monroe space to suggest possible works or series
what does this course of the next 3 months look like in terms of this show
also any thoughts on the live feed of a remote installation in the heartland
let's begin to talk about specific works and the installation
i'm going to sleep
wolpa

shaker tree in text

Here's a lateish-night experiment I just did in the last half-hour, building the image of the Shaker Tree of Life out of randomly generated text. It rapidly gets illegible, and is perhaps not so impressive in itself, but this is an idea that I've been thinking a lot about the last couple of days, mashing text and symbols into a sort of robo-stencil.

The text is all taken from Job 38:19-21.

tree

ordinary

the build up to summer 2004
has come from a simmer to a boil,
it's boiling, ladies and gentlemen,
let's strike the hot iron.
things are really happening these days
the water is ready

i was really fascinated with the days activities/conversation on this blog
and enjoyed this feeling of engagement i witnessed
chris and i spoke briefly on the phone today, planning to talk more later
i was in the shop today sending out grades, and thowing things out.
home depot. taco bell.
also i had to sumit my grades by wednesday, which is the first day of summer session 2004. so i did that today, still needing to prepare a syllabus, order materials, and dial in the shop. also i took some photo files from alan harmon over to be printed at instructional graphics. 8 images, from turkey, mostly, and uganda. we spoke about several of them on the phone earlier today. the evil eye, wings, rugs, pieces of metal, paradise paintings, walls. alan talked about posting those images, which i may get up before he does.
it turns out a 21x29 print costs about 26 dollars.
friday, i am closing on the mayfield house. i will be moving over the month of june. also planned: garage demolition party, swingset removal, painting rooms, a small class of six making big heads, puppets, unlocking the calvin print shop, making a design for the 2005 festival of faith and music booklet, and perhaps a yard sale.
it has been raining quite a bit here lately, and was cool today.
yesterday i went for a moped ride with rowley kennerk and ryan thompson.
we had ice cream and arrived at home, the last minute raining.
we saw roads flooded
rowley was hoping to post something ealier.
seth, can he gain access to post?

tonight i am going to the debut of dynamite's monday night at the avenue. ryan, phil, matt playing music and videos.
there are new shows up at uica, which i have not seen yet.
the monroe show, loop & snip, has some sculptural sweaters, quilts, and collages.
chris and i talked a little bit about the mailer. we were thinking perhaps the size of the circular ruins postcars, a double. what are some thoughts on the design?
chris mentioned schwitters when we talked.
i am always excited about the postcard, i must say. it sees the world.

more later
wolpa

tech question

hey seth

is there a way to list on one page all comments in order of posting?
i feel like it's harder to keep track of comments than of posts, cause after they're off the "recent comments" list you have to look at old posts to see new comments.

the comments and posts seem to serve equally as branch-nodes, so it would seem to make sense to allow equal access.

thanks

sketchbook 2

double oriole/Holy Spirit

NODL

sketchbook 3

sketchbook 1

A Shaker tree. I like the "eyes" that form in this very simple, systematic pattern.
Also, a "touch drawing" thinking about Robert Morris' blind drawings. Preliminary.

Bower of Mulberries

Shaker/CS Lewis

‘Tis the gift to be simple
‘tis the gift to be free,
‘tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d.
To bow and to bend we shan’t be sham’d
To turn, turn will be our delight
Till by turning we come round right

“Simple Gifts”

““You have art; we have prayer.” His observation expresses the Shaker point of view that although there are myriad forms of spiritual expression in the world, all are ultimately manifestations of the same gift from God.”

“Life itself, and each of the activities that comprise it, whether it be working, singing, eating, dancing, or sleeping, is regarded as a gift from the Spirit- not a duty to be accomplished, but an offering to God tantamount to prayer.”

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I do not want you to be uninformed… Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another the gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.

The Divorce of Heaven and Hell by C.S. Lewis

Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant. But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like tor etain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the center: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles forks into two, and each of those two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

diter rot

in relation to Everyday as Dieter is and whirling as the Shakers

current work

in the category of current interests/work:

here's a thing i made that's not a piece yet but I can't stop looking at it:

times rectangle

you might need to resize your browser window to get better resolution - i don't mind it pixellated, but it might displease you. i have plans to build this into another piece or two soon.

all for now

i'll put some posts together in the next day or two.

for now i just went through and tried to comment a bunch of places - sorry, maybe too much time has gone by for my comments to make sense.

a list for now:

1 - wiki wiki wiki
2 - subject matter is far from the only problem with trapperkeeper-art
3 - presence/absence and sound
4 - i'm really freaked out about iraq and those prison photos and our leaders and the christian support for them. i've been freaked out since 9/11, but I'm getting more worried all the time, and it's not just the harper's magazine talking. what the xxxx is going on???!!!
5 - acknowledging signal interference without fetishizing it
6 - can i upload mp3's to this site? if not I can put them elsewhere and then link them. i'd like to share some things.
7 - the village, by shyamalan. comes out in july, looks good. looks like some things adam might be interested in. the TERROR of what is OUT THERE

uhhh that's all. sorry. i'm blurting irresponsibly.

crawling out

hey everybody
sorry i've been absent. aint nothing holy about my days of late, the ordinary consisted this month of nothing so rich as the grass - ordinary was plodding through a fast schedule without looking anywhere but the next step in front of me. after final crits and dept politics and handwringing about everything i'm crawling back out from the shadow. gonna read up on all your posts this next day or two, post some things myself. need to do some reading elsewhere too.
i met jared last week at his open studios in nyc, that was great.

Tough Life Diary

Nancy Grossman, '73?

paul celan poems

WHITEGRAY of
shafted, steep
feeling.

Landinwards, hither
drifted sea-oats blow
sand patterns over
the smoke of wellchants.

An ear, severed, listens.

An eye, cut in strips,
does justice to all this.

THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.

BRIGHTNESSHUNGER-- with it
I walked up the bread-
step, under
the blindness-
bell:

it, water-
clear,
claps itself over
the freedom that climbed with
me, that with me climbed
too high, on which
one of the heavens gorged itself,
that I let vault above
the worddrenched
image orbit, blood orbit.

HALF-GNAWED, mask-
miened corbel stone,
deep
in the eyeslit-crypt:

Inward, upward
into skull's inside,
where you break up heaven, again and again,
into furrow and convolution
he plants his image,
which outgrows and outgrows itself.

another shaker tree

I've been doing a little more research into Shaker tree designs. There's one particular drawing that is apparently the Ur-shaker-tree, called the Tree of Life:

It was drawn in 1854 by Hannah Cohoon. You can't make out the writing underneath the drawing, but it says in part: "I received a draft of a beautiful Tree pencil’d on a sheet of white paper bearing ripe fruit ... I have since learned that this tree grows in the Spirit Land... I entreated Mother Ann to tell me the name of this tree: which she did by moving the hand of a medium to write twice over, Your Tree is the Tree of Life."

The Tree of Life has since become the symbol of Shaker unity.

Verses and thoughts

I had intended to post the verses from Luke under chris's blazing tree, but I had some difficulty--my computer's fault. So just consider these verses in light of the discussion about tree imagery...

Then Jesus asked, what is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree and the birds of the air perched in its branches. Luke 13:18-19

Secondly, I read the following note in a Coleman Barks introduction to the organization of a book of Rumi poems. I think this says better what I attempted to pinpoint yesterday about the triking qualities of Shaker and Ethiopian drawings...in the conversation Seth and Chris initiated surrounding the Shaker trumpet drawing.

"...these poems are not monumental in the Western sense of memorializing moments; they are not discrete entities but a fluid, continuiously self-revising, self-interrupting MEDIUM. They are not so much ABOUT anything as spoken from WITHIN something."

Of course now that I write this I think of Seth's project.

ethiopian healing scrolls

I posted this earlier today, but it vanished, so I'll try again.

These are healing scrolls from Ethiopia, a combination of Christian religious artefact and magical invocation. Ethiopia has been Christian since the 4th century AD, longer than much of Europe, but it's a very different mode of Christianity than we're used to seeing. These scrolls are made to heall someone who's gravely ill. They're made out of parchment from a single goat or lamb, cut to be exactly as tall as the sick person. Ideally the sick person is also bathed in the blood of the goat or lamb from which the parchment is taken; thus the parchment scroll is standing in for the person themselves. The scroll is then covered with religious iconography and texts.

These images are from the catalogue of a show at the Museum for African Art in New York several years ago.

This is a detail of one scroll. The figures top left are a monk and a demon; the abstract faces with eyes are cherubim.

Another cherubim:

And either an angel or a saint:

workshop

Hi Adam,

I've been looking over the fall exhibition schedule to see if anything
jumps out as a learning experience. "Ordinary Aura" absolutely does
just that.

I was already hoping to create a kind of collaborative process class or
workshop before I saw the show information. What these artists are
working with in terms of materials and processes seems likely to
translate into an inspired collaborative project created locally.
Potential ramifications would include area artists and students in
various disciplines working together and communicating more often even
after the project is completed.

First, do you know if any of the artists are planning to be in town for
the reception or any time during the show? And second, would you like
to brainstorm ideas for a one-day workshop?

Thanks for your help. I'm excited to see the show.

John Rich
Program Coordinator, Education and Literature

tents

these are some images from a recent drawing session

the house of david

lake george

presidents

A couple of links

Here's a link to a slideshow at nytimes.com of color photography from the Depression. It's always a strange cognitive dissonance to see color photos from the black&white era; a lot of the people in them look just like actual humans this way.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2004/05/07/magazine/20040509PORT_SLIDESHOW_1.html
(you may need to register; if so you can do it with id/password "cyberpunks/cyberpunks," as at most magazine sites.

This is an art student who makes a lot of books and comics. A lot of her books are accordion-fold things with strange Exquisite Corpse-like imagery, which I like a lot. I'm especially thinking of Compound Eye.
http://www.thingwithfeathers.com/

I just don't know what to make of this.
http://www.badmovies.org/movies/jesusvamp/index.html

another poem

Opening Words

I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.
Thou
unknown I know,
thou spirit,
giver,
lover of making, of the
wrought letter,
wrought flower,
iron, deed, dream.
Dust of the earth,
help thou my
unbelief. Drift
gray become gold, in the beam of
vision. I believe with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
beloved, threatened world.
Each minim
mote.
Not the poisonous
luminescence forced
out of its privacy,
The sacred lock of its cell
broken. No,
the ordinary glow
of common dust in ancient sunlight.
Be, that I may believe. Amen.
- Denise Levertov

dynamic text and trees

I've changed my original idea for an interactive web project;right now I'm thinking of restructuring the graphical interface, so I'll try to explain what I'm thinking. My apologies if it doesn't come across.

I've changed my original idea, to something that would allow any users to add a single word at a time. The result would be a big labyrinth of words, with an infinite number of possible paths from word to word. And any new user could choose to add a new word or words at any point. In the space, this would be projected; my idea is that the projection wouldn't be of a user in the space navigating the site, but of someone else at some remote location navigating, so that people in the space would be seeing someone else's experience of the text.

So far, I've been planning a navigation like this: the word your mouse pointer is over is largest, with the words linked to it a little smaller and greyer. When you roll over the next word in the chain, that in turn becomes foregrounded, like this:

When you're over a word, you can click on that little plus sign to add a word leading off from that word. Thus you can interject your own poetry into the existing storyline, or what have you.

For a mockup of how the adding of elements will work, with circles instead of words, check this out.

The problem I'm facing now, before I go too much further with the technical stuff, is that this will very quickly become a hugely complex structure, possible difficulty to navigate. It occurs to me now that Chris' Shaker tree might be a good visual metaphor to use, to organize all the words.

But the tree and the Spirit message makes me think that there could be more than one dynamic text project going on. For instance, it would be technologically much easier for me to make a tree shape out of words, each of which could be randomly changing over time into another word drawn from a story or Biblical verse or such.

For what it's worth, here's a small experiment I did with fading text a while ago. It's a very big flash file.

3 Poems by Hafiz

THE SCENT OF LIGHT

Like a great starving beast

My body is quivering

Fixed

On the scent

Of

Light

WHY AREN'T WE SCREAMING DRUNKS

The sun once glimpsed God's true nature
And has never been the same.

Thus that radiant sphere
Constantly pours its energy
Upon this earth
As does He from behind
The veil.

With a wonderful God like that
Why isn't everyone a screaming drunk?

Hafiz's guess is this:

Any though that you are better or less
Than another man

Quickly
Breaks the wine
Glass.

UNTIL

I think we are frightened every

Moment of our lives

Until we

Know

Him.

new nickel

what do you think of these new nickels

sacred roll

blazing tree

trumpet of declaration

Shaker-style, Fra and found

I am attempting to post a collection of images to address some aesthetics and ideas. Some jpegs refuse to cooperate which means I will have to finish this up tomorrow, but this should give you a sense of what I am thinking as I examine Shaker drawings, paintings of Fra Angelico's and relate found scraps of drawings to these.

Shaker drawings. Barb can talk about this more, but we have been taken in a big way by these drawings recently. In them you see a beautiful blend/blur of art and life. These things are made as invitations, notices regarding weddings and the like... to map the villages, to celebrate, to channel words delivered by angels. They are fascinating to me for aesthetic reasons, but especially the way they stem from daily activity which we continue to relate to our project. There is also something of the "unicorn style" drawing we talked about earlier... or what that type of simple drawing aspires to. In the Shaker work, though, there is great substance and well, PURPOSE. I really like the one that is the "Spirit Message" and the way it relates to Seth's idea for generating a story... bits and parts from disparate authors. I like the strange way typography functions here too. There is another image I will post later entitled, "Tree of Light/Blazing Tree" which is a gorgeous symmetrical tree made of stenciled (seemingly) leaves arranged and surrounded by wavy red lines. Simple, effective and very filled with potential for us, I think-- I see it as an image that could easily translate into a large wall painting. (For that matter, a whole treeline could surround the space, painted in muted colors, they would not compete with hung imagery but rather serve to encompass the space and organize the work. Additionally, Adam and I talked originally about the presence of live plants due to the size of the place and also the large front window) The tree also appears in a stylized manner to reinforce the image of NETWORK: parts into a whole. An easy analogy is the flowchart seen in the Peter Halley pic as well as the thinking of internet usage in the text piece, et al.

The Fra Angelico pictures are incredible simply as religious paintings. There are some strange things happening in them that I never saw before... the bloody head on the saint is gory as it is repeated in painting after painting, and the disembodied hands and heads of the mockers of Christ introduce TIME and action into a painted, frozen language in a way that startles me.

I liked that I happen to find a drawing of a trumpet on my walk the other day. Drawn on the back of a recital program along with the reminder to "call deana". The imagery is good, I think, but doubled with the person's sense of place and activity (the concert) and then my finding it and relocating it... there is something good about this archiving and imagery stemming from the everyday. Grocery lists would be another example of the cast off bits that serve purpose, contain text and typography, etc... I have been finding them a lot too, recently love the handwriting differences. There is also this desire I have to understand the person by what is on their list, but they all tend toward the banal of T.P. and bread.

Anyway, Seth just helped me sort out the jpeg problem and so I will post the other few pictures before I leave.

found trumpet

spirit message

song book page

shaker 1

christ mocked

i love the disembodies hands and head. I haven't seen this device used before.

bloody saint

book in process

Adam sent me an excellent pair of selections from his current sketchbook... ordinary aura work. Please remember, we hope to accumulate our thoughts and ideas, imagery and texts into an on-going book/catalog. Most likely this material will be levelled by scanning so, if it suits your working methods, keep a folder or book for your relevant work.

I am also making a book of portraits as well and ask that if you want to voluntter any people or "bodies" for inclusion, post them on this site or email them directly to me. I would especially like to get each of the participants up on the wall...

Thanks, gang.

keyboard

wall for jered

on floor and wall

ordinary portraits

current reading list

smattering of religious/cultural plus exploration to Antarctica and cinema theory

lil' ramblin'

Congratulations, Jered on what sounds like (and looks) like a solid showing in Chicago. I would love to hear you discuss the background for these works and any relations to Ordinary Aura that can be drawn out of these.

Adam and I did have a bit of a gripe session...

the other day when he left the Stray show. I feel like I have passed my stage of being interested in unicorn (Im actually not sure I ever had one) art and really feel like the glut of faux-naif work we are seeing is a reaction to the spotlight given to so many outsider artists as well as an accomodation ofyouth-oriented culture in art and, for that matter, a resurgence in "nostalgia" as subject matter. Lots of '80s stuff here in G'Boro.
It seems the results have been a lot of "trapper keeper" art as Adam described it... some of it, like Banks Violette touches on Gothic/Heavy Metal which is certainly linked to this adolescent dark side and which we are tapping into in this show with the intro of horror imagery. Our challenge will be to elevate and not use it simply as is which it seems so many artists are doing. My feeling about the violent images is that they are counterpoint to images that are NOT violent. In the portraits I am doing (and will post as soon as I get them over here to the computer lab) images from Evil Dead, Dracula, zombie flicks all reside alongside portraits of historic figures and friends... the idea being that a woman and her child next to a strangled victim speaks to our living in a FALLEN WORLD. They happen in parallel. Additionally, the horrific imagery comes always from pop culture/films which certain people will recognize overtly or through "collective memory" like the famous Christopher Lee Dracula. This bring up the fact that all of us have seen these things, filled our heads with this violence, Satanism, etc. and what does this mean? What choices do we make? We do agree that this exists, so now what?

Technically, as you will see, these portraits are being done 30" x 22", B+W with a sprayed gold oval border. Once you see them, please contribute ideas for me... or better yet, do some portraits yourselves. I think the more the better. Remember, they will be our "cloud of witnesses". Amidst the portraits will be drawings of birds... all kinds to tie in to the possibility of bird sounds filling the gallery. The birds are also witnesses.
The oval format will be repeated in "The City of Heaven" (What are we calling this installation at The Heartland?) in the form of peepholes in a wall. This sculpture will be a cardboard (outsider!) city that fills Adam's gallery and which will be viewed by remote access at the UICA. The layout of Adam's gallery allows for a walkway into the building to allow visitors to actually see the city in the flesh. However, they will do this only by peepholes in a wall that separates them from the sculpture. So again, the idea of parts vs. wholes and living at a remove comes in and makes us aware of our active looking. So far, Adam and I have talked about the prospect of his sculpture class and Calvin volunteers to orchestrate this construction. Any other ideas?

That's it for now.

sprecher no1

sprecher no2

sprecher no3

sprecher no4

sprecher no5

sprecher no6

sprecher no7

audio presence

Chris, Barbara and I talked about the show last night, and one thing we agreed is that so far, we're all thinking about presence as a big part of this show. Making people aware of their immediate presence, making them aware of the presence of possibly forgotten, mundane objects, what it means to be truly present. Coming out of that, we started thinking that audio should be a big part of the experience of this show; Chris in particular talked about the idea of making people aware of their own immediate presence in the space, which could be done perhaps with dissociative audio that would disorient the audience, make them pay attention to the space they're in.

I know this is something Kevin's thought about a lot in previous works -- we talked about his project "Alone Together" in particular -- so Kevin, when things lighten up for you a bit, we'd love to hear what you have to say about this. My own immediate brainstorming idea was of a sort of layered audio space -- recording sounds as they happen in the exhibition space and playing them back layered over each other, so that at any one moment you're hearing everything that's happened in that space over the past twenty-four hours.

HTML Wrasslin'

It might come in handy for people to know some basic HTML tags, so that we can all format text and links and such. So here's a quick rundown.

HTML is the code that tells web browsers how the text and images on a page will be laid out. Most tags have an opening and closing tag, affecting any text inbetween them:

<tag>text</tag>

The / in the tag means that you're closing whatever effect you're using. Some tags, like the tag for inserting an image, have no closing tag.

Here are some basic formatting tags:

<b>bold</b>
<i>italic</i>
<blockquote></blockquote> indents an entire paragraph or passage.

Link tag:

<a href="http://www.whatever.com">some text</a>

That will look like this: some text

Image insert:

<img src="image_filename.jpg">
This one has no closing tag. Also, it can exist in the same post as text; you don't have to comment on your own image to label it.

circle experiment

This is a thing I did more or less by accident while starting to work on my larger text-based idea. Since making it, I've become more interested in it that it's possibly worth, but as Chris pointed out the other day, it's an endless supply of cool T-shirt designs. Just keep rolling over circles.

circle thing

And here's another one, adjustable:

circle thing, with menu

I like the first one better.

job 38

I'm about to go back and comment on everybody else, but I'm going to post this link to Job 38 first. I second Chris' idea for a reading list, that is to say, and this is an interesting selection.

Job 38

My favorite bit, 19-21:

"What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!

I read this not just as God being snarky, but as a real description of human existence.

night

leatherface

hebrews12, 13

imagery for the city in Heartland--

For you have not come to the mountain that may be touched and that burned with fire, and to blackness and darkness and tempest, and to the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words, so that those who heard it begged that the word should not be spoken to them anymore. (For they could not endure what was commanded: "And if so much as a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned or thrust through with an arrow." And so terrifying was the sght that Moses said,
"I am exceedingly afraid and trembling."
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels...

Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.

glowing pink square

bone building

city-like body

halley 2

suspiria

black skull

printbars