Summertime means not a lot of updates from me. I have been working on things, just not getting around to posting them. But I have some new pics that I am going to post.

In the meantime, here is a self-portrait after my latest seizure.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know why yet, but I like to document the injuries that I have been accumulating as a result of my epilepsy, such as this one and a previous one. For the past year and half/two years, I have also been collecting the bottles of anti-convulsants that I have to take every day. To what end, I’m not sure. I’m sure that at some point, it will allow me some perspective, but in the immediate, I think that it allows me to work through a lot of things. I will be sure to post something if I figure any of this out.

I ran across this article, and one quote caught my attention.

By turning the personal into the public, an entirely new aesthetic is coming into being — and a huge proportion of the invisible social interaction of a generation is being recorded forever. As Charles Stross notes, we are living at the end of “pre-history” — the last days of a patchwork human history. Tomorrow’s lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.

I take issue with this because it is not a generation at-large who is being recorded, but those privileged enough to be on the prosperous side of the digital divide. I don’t take issue with the fact that the internet will be a recorded history, but who is being recorded and what is being taken as history. History is powerful weapon, and is not something to be taken lightly.

True, those who partake in online communities are forever having their social interactions recorded, but taking that as history does so at the expense of those who do not have the means to access the technology. We must remember that at this point, technologies such as the internet, while increasingly important, is still a privilege–of class, education, access–and to not use that privilege as a means of exclusion of others.

We are just recently moving away from the model of a Western-centric, patriarchal driven version of history, and it would be a big step back to fall back into this model again. Columbus did not discover America, and the internet is not an accurate, as of yet, historian of human history.

I was at the downtown San Francisco Nordstrom today (believe it or not, I am actually not there on a regular basis) and ran across an interesting holiday addition. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but the strings of lights cascading down the center of the store bear a remarkable to the work of Félix González-Torres, specifically his 1994 piece, Untitled (America) that was featured at the U.S. pavilion in this year’s Venice Biennale.

Below are photos of the two. Judge for yourself.

The Nordstrom lights
Photo Credit: Ian Bartholomew

A few years back, I lost my record/CD collection (it’s a long and heartbreaking story that I am not going to get into) and since then, I have taken that as an opportunity to rebuild my collection, digitally, from the ground up. In that time, I have amassed a collection of 10,000 songs, which translates to about 1,100 albums. Not bad. Of course, the upkeep on a collection like that is fairly daunting, if you want to keep artist names, album names, song titles, and play order correct. (I do. One of the quirks of being an artist myself is that I respect how other artists title and order their work)

One of the things that I have really latched onto though is the cover art, and more specifically the iTunes feature, CoverFlow. It allows for a digital copy of the artist’s work to be identified with the unique artwork that they create for the music. Since the 1960’s, cover art has been inseparable from the music that it represents, becoming a part of the musical experience. Except now as we move to a time when music files exist on their own, sans artwork. Of course, CoverFlow is a great step forward by allowing us to have a visual connection to the aural experience, but it by no means replaces the experience of physical packaging. (Think of Led Zepplin’s Physical Graffiti, the vinyl version) That, however, will be sorely missed. But we were already on a downhill slide, as far as packaging is concerned, from records (which had the most real estate), to CDs, and throw cassettes in there where ever you like. (Although, if you remember, the first CDs to come out had large packaging, and a lot of real estate for artwork, but those got a lot of static from environmentalists who were concerned about waste, and were phased out of production in favor of the packaging we have now. And you had to throw the exterior packaging away anyway.)

Design Observer had an article relating to this awhile back that is worth a read too, although it is a bit pessimistic. Personally, I am happy with CoverFlow (although there a few quirks with the program) in theory, as I am able to have that connection between the music and the visuals. My hope is that we will be able to also have liner notes, production notes, etc. along side the cover art at some point, completing the experience.

I have finally had time to get some shooting in after a couple of weeks of pretty intense work.  The frustrating thing about practicing art is that for the majority of people, it is usually something that you do in addition to other things.  So even though I am in art school, sometimes finding the time to actually do art with all the other things that school and work require can be hard.  But such is life.

We had a going away party for my buddy TC who is moving back to NY today, and I have to say that after being here for a little over two years, I am a bit jealous of him.  If I didn’t have such a nice thing going for me at such great school, I would probably be doing the same.  Which isn’t to say that SF isn’t a great or beautiful city, because it is.  But lately I have been missing the East Coast, and want to go back.

At any rate, TC is a good friend, and I know that I will see him again.  And the circle of friends becomes even more spread out.

Anyways, on a technical note I also played with the page formatting so now I can (hopefully) post larger images without running into formatting issues.

I have been playing around with both the the new Lightroom and CS3 and I have to say that I am quite enamored with both of them.  Grated there are a couple of quirks with CS3, it is still the beta I am working with.  I wish that there were some more play in between the two however (a la Photoshop and Imageready), because there are some features that I need to use that are only in Photoshop, so I end up jumping in between the two a lot.  But Lightroom does a great job at providing the tools and a workflow for digital photography.  I’m loving these new programs.

Now to find time to go shoot more…

I have been thinking of Walter Benjamin a lot of late, owning to the the fact that I have been dividing my time between painting and drawing, and purely digital work. Working with this binary set of media I have been thinking about Benjamin’s “aura of the original” in terms of the work that I have been producing, and how, despite my initial rejection of his ideas, I have come around to agree, at least in part, with what he was saying.

In my own egalitarian belief system, art and knowledge should be open to everyone, and reproducibility allows for that. Through the means of books and the internet, information is passed from the few to the many. Although, in terms of art, the passing of pure information can be enlightening, we loose the “aura of the original.”

For Benjamin however, the loss of the aura does not necessarily have negative connotations, as it is tied to art’s fetishistic impulses, and to primitive, feudal or bourgeois power structures; reproduction brings art to the view and control of the masses, leading to the shattering of it’s aura.

While I can agree that the creation of an original creates in it a value that leaves it susceptible to fetish and ritual, there is something to be said for an original where the hand of its creator is visible. As not only its aura, but its connection to the artist are in intact, in a way that is not possible with digital work, original pieces create a connection with the viewer, an immediacy, that is not possible with reproduction.

In the end, I can see a duality setting in, where artists work in two modes: the first, where artist work in traditional, tightly controlled originals. In the second, artists give up that control over their work for reproducible work that is easily disseminated among the masses.

Jean Baudrillard died yesterday.  He was a great thinker and a great intellectual inspiration of mine.  There is a quote of his that has stayed with me, and changed my thinking about the creative process:

“There are thousands of ways to express the same idea, but if you do not find the ideal compression between a form and an idea, then you have nothing.”