Future Organic

Flying Lotus’ “me Yesterday//Corded” off his new album Until the Quiet Comes. I’m the luckiest to have gotten to chill with Flylo and his crew after his Montreal show this past October: it is safe to say he is a wizard.

“If we should compare a poem to the make-up of some physical object it ought not to be a wall, but to something organic like a plant.”

Introduction to Understanding Poetry, page 19.

“The lamp hummed:

‘Regard the Moon,

La lune ne garde aucune racune’

She winks a feeble eye.

She smiles into corners.

She smooths her hair of the grass.

The moon has lost her memory.”

-excerpt from “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, TS Eliot

Clement Briend’s impressive photographs of 3D projections of gargoyles and ghostly figures onto trees and landscapes, from everyday Cambodian street corners to majestic castles in France. Almost as mystifying as Cher’s tweets from the last year.

The following are photographs of Pablo Picasso experimenting with his Light Drawings in 1949 (photographer Gjon Mili). So cool to actually see the master completely embodied in this work. What a find!

“Everything you can imagine is real”

-Pablo Picasso

The future is here. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Google’s “Project Glass”, you need to see this. What do you think would become of society with widespread use of a technology like this?

Artists featured: Jiri Kolar, Leif Podhajsky, CG Jung, Clement Briend, P. Picasso

Only Michael Jordan can stop you

Chrome Sparks.

Naturally, I feel as though the subject matter of my blog evolves with the many twists and turns of my life, i.e. growing up, living in a unique culture where language dictates the everyday realities of society, meeting characters such as those at Electric Forest who consistently expand my idea of what is normal or even possible, and reading academic discourse which, when linked together, begins to offer legitimate explanations of my far-out questions on the universe and how we’re all connected (and shit). Whereas I used to post these great questions like I was searching for a black cat in a dark room, this post is dedicated to the fact that I feel like I am starting to find answers. For example, the concept I used to vaguely describe as technicolor- a world without categories- is actually an established theory called “l’informe” coined by George Bataille. In this way, Katy’s Canvas is changing. Maybe it’s because I’m starting to not be so afraid of “the system”, order, tradition, etc. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen and experienced more diversity. Looking back at the year, here’s a summary of what I’ve learned:

• There’s no need to escape “the system”. Think of clocks, road signs, medical and academic institutions: systems are in place to make life easier to grow beyond the system. They are not meant to hold you back. Rules exist so people can be more efficient and know their own direction. So that they need not waste time on trivial matters.
• I think one should take full advantage of the system rather than rebelling against or escaping from it, for it does not control you if you can learn to control it. In other words, one needs to understand how and why the system works if one wants flexibility within the system.

• Knowledge of the system can be acquired by talking to as many people as possible, from as many vantage points as possible.

• Along these lines, knowing tradition is crucial to creating something original. As 20th century poet TS Eliot once said, “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it”. What we make in our generation, from art, film and fashion to writing, music and other cultural trends, will always be in conversation with past, present, and future creations. What is needed is a consideration of historical context, an understanding of the meaning of one’s creation in placement after other creations, if we want our additions to enlighten the ongoing conversation in new and expansive ways.

• While we kids generally associate tradition with black and white film, argyle sweaters, cooked carrots and Shakespeare, we need to realize that tradition need not be a restriction that our parents uphold us to. Rather, we should look at tradition as an open textbook of trial and error. Of what has been done and what should never happen again. For example, our generation saw the seductive shortcomings of men in bell-bottoms in the seventies and has been better off because of it (you don’t see them anymore). Ultimately, if one intends to do anything that hasn’t been done before, which many postmodern authors, artists and creators struggle with on the daily, one must first consult the textbook of tradition to make sure one is not accidentally replicating the unfortunate equivalent of fashion trends in the Disco era. See: NY Time’s article How To Live Without Irony, The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp
• Art is not what it looks like. It’s what it does to you.
• Whether we approach it from a physics, math or biology perspective, or a philosophical, psychological or historical perspective, I have learned that we are are all studying the same thing.
• BUT, life is an asymptote. The closer we get to objectivity, to reaching the definitive axis, the more we realize we will never quite reach it. See: Ignorance by Stuart Firestein
• And that’s why the world has so much to explore, such endless curiosity and mystery, no matter how much we would like to think we have ordered it all in objective systems. The systems of definition and order are not as rigid as I once as a teenager thought; they are malleable, subjective, and they ultimately help you if you work to improve them.

Magic surrealist paintings by Rob Gonsalves.

Make of this what you will.

^???? from David OReilly on Vimeo.

memory of a ghost

Hi again



“The first image was a portrait. In classical mythology, a lovely youth named Narcissus lay beside a pool gazing in adoration at his own reflection. Ignoring the loving attention of the nymph Echo, he wasted away, died and was metamorphosed into a flower bearing his name.”
-Joanna Woodall in “Portraiture: Facing the Subject”

pieces from Salvador Dali’s “Flower Suite” collection

play this song:

Memory of a Ghost by Virtual Boy

with this video:

About the “Unnamed Soundsculpture”:

“The body – constant and indefinite at the same time – ‘bursts’ the space already with its mere physicality, creating a first distinction between the self and its environment. Only the body movements create a reference to the otherwise invisible space, much like the dots bounce on the ground to give it a physical dimension. Thus, the sound-dance constellation in the video does not only simulate a purely virtual space. The complex dynamics of the body movements is also strongly self-referential. With the complex quasi-static, inconsistent forms the body is ‘painting’, a new reality space emerges whose simulated aesthetics goes far beyond numerical codes.

Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete the image seems. The more perfect and complex the ‘alternative worlds’ we project (Vilém Flusser) and the closer together their point elements, the more tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22,000 points, thus seems so real that it comes to life again.”

that is all, good night

artists pam et jenny and salvador dali

Revolve

Turkish Voodoo by Free the Robots

I walk in the world I create

-Wallace Stevens

Just a little segment of an essay I wrote this week, describing, among other things, the ways in which art has the power to induce social change:

Relational artworks which promote spectator participation emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to late-capitalism’s increasingly regulated and conformist systems of living produced by the mass media. This institutionalization and commodification of experience caused social unrest as blacks, homosexuals, women and Latinos began to fight the politics mapped onto their bodies with social action and multiple civil rights movements.

Seeing themselves as inseparable from the social conditions of their context, artists like laborers began to “challenge the role of the institution and the autonomy of art in a time of social crisis” (Bryan-Wilson 26).

In order to do so, artists of the time rejected Clement Greenberg’s notion of modernist formalism expressed in his essay “American Type Painting” of 1955 which excluded bodily processes from the reception and creation of the work.

In turn, they re-activated subjectivity in the consideration of artwork, often in the form of uncommodifiable, one-time experiences such as “happenings” which spilled from galleries onto the streets. This sort of art had to be done rather than paid for.

By refusing museums and other institutions (such as the traditions of art history) which dictated the value of art, the artists gave power and agency back to the spectators. In “An Introduction to the Do-It-Yourself Artwork”, Anna Dezueze notes the “liberatory potential of participation” in accordance with Guy Debord’s “influential idea…that passive modes of engagement encouraged by late-capitalist, consumer-driven economies can be countered with action and lived experience” (16).

Among other avant-garde movements of the time, Debord’s Situationist International presented participatory works or “Situations” which provided “alternative models for social or political interaction” with the hopes that participation would “encourage individuals and groups to take control of their own social and political existence” (Dezueze 15). In this way, art history’s shift to the rise of the spectator during this period illustrates how relational art can break down the barriers between art and life, and therefore be an impetus for social change.

In other words, “Doing is knowing”: the awareness of one’s body, and its power to contribute to the meaning of the work of art through embodied participation, makes the spectator an agent of social change instead of a passive consumer of culture.

La Dérive

Tim Reynolds

Yosi Horikawa’s “Bubbles”. Listen to with headphones on and enjoy.

In my contemporary art course I recently learned about psychogeography, defined by Guy Debord (leader of 60s avant-garde movement Situationist International) as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
Psychogeography, in parallel with Freud’s study of the subconscious, intends to reveal the way one’s environment affects one’s behavior simply by the way one feels, consciously or subconsciously, while immersed in it. In order to explore the effects of a geographic location on emotion, desire, interactions, and identity, the Situationists exercised what they call the dérive:
“A dérive is an unplanned tour through an urban landscape directed entirely by the feelings evoked in the individual by their surroundings.”
Basically, the dérive permits urban wandering, a riddance of all normal motivations for movement (including work and leisure), with the intention of creating a brand new, authentic experience. The wanderer has no destination and chooses his or her own path based on desire, instinct and spontaneity.
This exploration of space can be looked at as an exploration of oneself, one’s own subconscious, as one explores what draws them to certain places when there is no design or plan. No rational reason to go this way or that.
“The dérive grants a rare instance of pure chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and authentic experience of the different atmospheres and feelings generated by the urban landscape.”
On a larger ideological and political level, the Situationists considered dérives an essential tool to escape the mundane, robotic path of late-capitalist society:
“The need for the dérive is necessitated, according to Situationist theory, by the increasingly predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life trudged through every day by workers in advanced capitalism.

The term is literally translated into English as drift.”
(quotes via Wikipedia)

Yago Hortal

Jeff Soto

"My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me"

-CG Jung

http://neave.com/digital-graffiti/
http://i.imgur.com/FICyI.png

Interactions

Daft Punk (Pyramid Remix) of “Something About Us”

“I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself…
I am for an art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit…
I am for art covered with bandages. I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps…

I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair.
I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on.
I am for art from a pocket, from deep channels of the ear, from the edge of a knife, from the corners of the mouth, stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist…
I am for an art that is combed down, that is hung from each ear, that is laid on the lips and under the eyes, that is shaved from the legs, that is brushed on the teeth, that is fixed on the thighs, that is slipped on the foot.”

~Claes Oldenberg, 1967

Did you know that Disney and Dali collaborated creativity for this short? I present Destino.

Featured artists: Graham Caldwell, Adam Martinakis, James Jean