Soul-Shards Douglas Hofstadter ONE gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, “What meaning does that photograph have?” "None at all. It's just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It's useless." The bleakness of my mother's grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way l felt the photograph should be considered. After a few minutes of emotional pondering - soul-searching, quite literally - I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following ...
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The Irrelivance of Blogs (TLDR)
Why am I writing a blog? Blogs used to be a lot more common, but now they are less so. I imagine people don't want to read blogs anymore because most people today prefer their information in bite-sized, easy to swallow, "fun-size" packets. The following is a hackneyed explanation of what I think is the cause of this. People want their information like they want their fast food, ready to gorge on and consume quickly. Because of the speed at which information is exponentially increasing, most people don't feel that they want to read anything but "fun sized" bites of information. Granted, a lot of people's learning styles are better at receiving their information in "chunking". What is chunking? Chunking allows people to more easily retain the information in short-term memory. It also condenses large bits of information condensed into something entertaining, without depth on context. Then news becomes rumor,and rumor becomes truth. Fun size chun...
"What You See in the Iron Receptacle of a Caduceus Dad ∄"
Manic insomniac early morning scans August 1st, 2022. Source: Webster's new world dictionary, 1966. Final Image for screenprinting Final digital collage. Title "What You See in the Iron Receptacle of a Caduceus Dad ∄" Alchemical rantings during project. alb fiord anaconda ant caduceus fingerprint headset GON 200 Caduceus dada Can Of Iron Inside the Giant Iron Can of Dadacaduceus, nothing exists. The ♂ can. The recepticle. The recepticle of Dadacaduceus. His alchemical retort. That which you see in the retort of Dadacaduceus does not exist. "What you see in the iron recepticle of Dadacaduceus ∄" A Caduceus Dad θOθ
Mirroribis Versus Kinkos, Denver, 1996.
Mirroribis Versus Kinkos, Denver, 1996. (Nineties Post-Punk Zine/Pre-digital art) I was 25 at the time, and living in Denver with my then-girlfriend (and now wife) Heather Marx. In my spare alone time, between exploring 1990 Denver's myriad old used book and record stores and poring over ancient, out-of-print Dadaist texts, I made art and music, just like now. I was intent to make art and express my self to a neurotic degree (still am), but I had no real technical art skills beyond high school and my experience working in print/copy shops. In 1996, digital art was just starting. Unless you had an inside, or Megabucks, you couldn't get access to the computers and programs for digital art. So I experimented. I used weird materials that weren't supposed to go in the machines, running them through multiple times with multiple images, hard-stopping the machines in mid run and altering the toner before it was fused. Color copying wasn't quite right y...
An Antlered Cynocephalus in the Hall of Obelisks.
An Antlered Cynocephalus in the Hall of Obelisks. I woke up and took bibliomantic (random page flip sortilege) scans of old Webster's Universal Unabridged Dictionary from 1996 at a half conscious four AM. I used active alchemical imaginal imagination with underlying glitched western esoterics and weird fiction narrative to envoke Apophenia, make signal from the noise and use technical art to make this: The Title is: "An Antlered Cynocephalus in the Hall of Obelisks." Here is a detail of the Antlered Cynocephalus in question: Here's the story/philosophy behind the meaning of the image. The word Cynocephalus means a dogheaded being or baboon. This succession of quotes in a row sums up the philosophy of it: "... it was seen from very early times that the use of speech, or writing, meant the introduction of ambiguity at the best, and falsehood at the worst; they therefore represented Thoth as followed by an ape, the cynocepha...
"The Divine Intersex With Writer's block (Atu XIV Baulked)"
Mistake year cultured "The Divine Intersex With Writer's block (Atu XIV Baulked)" Sitting proud hubris i am but a window a nerve an eye ego has no say the psyche moves as it will and hir name is arte. Comparision Of Atu XIV with Thoth, Rider/Waite, Mirroribis decks.