oddbill

A lot has happened over the past year, but not in an obvious way. Not in a way I can show you. That is likely to change as 2012 progresses. 2012 is shaping up to be the Year of the Gorgon, when then serpents grow out of my brain.

Last year I moved to a new apartment:

And started using it as a figure drawing studio again:

Which led to three things. First, a new friend, the model and artist Push, who I started off drawing and ended up renting an art workspace with:

Second, the space, which is a very cool loading dock with a semi trailer permanently parked at it:

Having that space allowed me to complete six new pastel pieces in time for a group show in December:

I didn’t sell any of them, but at least I got over the barrier of never having shown work in public.

Other things that got a start this year; I met a potential partner in the LofiSciFi Film Festival/Community project, and we’ve started the ball rolling on that, though it’s not rolling in a straight line at the moment. I spent the money to get a real camera, the Canon 60D, and have begun learning to use it, along with adobe’s suite of video editing tools:

So there will be more video coming in 2012.

I took a trip to Toronto and Manhattan and got caught in the hurricane. I met and made several friends, met a filmmaker I admire and watched his newest unreleased work.

Late in the year I painted a glow in the dark skeleton on a burlesque dancer, which resulted in this:

It was a fun year. Groundwork was laid.

That’s as much of a retrospective as I can manage. Stay tuned for new things.

Moving again, to a new apartment, so the website redesign and all the other projects are going to be a little delayed. Here is a sneak peak of the upcoming new layout:

(The Fibonacci spiral apocalypse in there is just for planning – they won’t be in the finished layout.)

I drew a portrait of someone:

And another sort of diagrammatic portrait of someone else’s tattoos and bodymods, arranged in graphic symmetry:

Started a 365 project on Flickr:

And had an interesting conversation about gender:

So, keeping busy. More to come. Happy New Year!

On the drawing board tonight, some letters.

These are going to be the font of the logo I’m designing for the big web-presence remake, in anticipation of transforming my online identity next year.

Self-reinvention is a thing I can’t stop doing. I’ve never really figured out how to be myself. In many ways I don’t know who I am at all. I keep refining the character, like an art director with an impossible brief.

2011 will be defined by activity and outward directed engagement. Maybe I’m out there, somewhere.

Here is what’s on the drawing board today. This creature is probably about 5 hours of work so far, but spread out over a year. It’s been accreting. Persistence is over half the key to getting anything done for me. Some day this will be done, and it will kick ass.

Or, I guess an octopus can’t really kick.

Some day it will slap ass.

My contribution to the Jenny Everywhere character design challenge over at Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel forum.

I’m enjoying playing around in a cel-shading style. Hope I can manage another one of these before my vacation is up.

Here is a keynote by videogame creator Will Wright to the 2010 Augmented Reality Event:

The Augmented Reality Event 2010 – Keynote by gaming legend Will Wright from Ori Inbar on Vimeo.

It’s about a half hour long, and there is a lot of meat in it.

What it has done to me though is make me anxious. All of this cool AR engineering, and the converging of technologically enhanced social creativity, that is unfolding all around us.

I listen to talks like this, or I read the squatter-futurist pamphleteering of Cory Doctorow, or Kurzweil’s boy’s-own singularity, or Aubrey De Grey’s mad attack on mortality, and these ideas excite me, they are fundamentally exciting, and I want aspects of all these futures so badly I can feel my ego bleed, but the basic act of even thinking about them also fills me with dread.

When the dread creeps in, they seem like children whistling past a cemetery. Every frivolous technological wonder described in these sources now gets this caveat appended to it in my head as I read:

If civilization doesn’t collapse before we get there.

Everything is very fragile, and all the best that we could make dangles over a chasm by a thread. I feel this more now than I ever have. Nuclear annihilation never seemed quite real, but a cascading collapse in global trust exacerbated by uneven suffering in the coming climate tumult, nation states withholding or encumbering trade as a weapon of retaliation to the point that the economy stagnates, fueling panic and depression, and grinding all technological progress to a halt over an excruciating decade or two… I do not find that hard to imagine at all.

I’m afraid that when I am old, we’ll be dependent on machinery that we have lost the skill or the will to build, and everything will slide into violence and parochial bigotry. And people will look back at the beautiful world we are losing now and see it not as beauty but as decadent weakness. In my lifetime.

We will never go back to the moon. We will never set foot on Mars. Our lifespans will shrink, our children will be poorer than we were, and because we keep better historical records now, everyone will see it happening and our confidence as a species will wither. We will never be what we might have been.

Then beautiful dreams like AR seem silly, and I worry about what we aren’t seeing.

The only way to combat this is to get out and do. Be doing. Civilization is nothing more than a mutually assured confabulation, an impossibly complex layered mesh of just-so stories dressing up the absurd miracle of empty space vibrating into a planet covered in monkeys wearing hats for no good reason. It rained on our heads for seven million years and it rains on our heads today, and the hats aren’t much, really, after all. But they sure are natty. And that one looks fabulous on you.

Hello new readers! I’m Bill, and I get like this sometimes. Do stick around!

Top to bottom: Omar’s Mission Photos 01 by monkey mafia : Water Meadows Panorama by monkey mafia : OIL RIG by honkfu : Click the pictures to visit the artist’s Deviant Art pages.

ArtMash posts are quick blasts of imagery, probably from other people’s Deviant Art or Flickr accounts. I like them. So I show them to you.

I love looking at pictures in this kind of dynamically flat geometrically caricatured style. It’s something I’ve never been able to do well myself, a way of seeing shapes that is a lot more difficult than it seems. Eighty percent of drawing skill is learning how to translate the three dimensional world you see around you into a two dimensional abstraction. Even representational drawing is an almost unbelievable abstraction, when you think about it. As Magritte reminds us, this is not a pipe. But the extra step of extracting raw geometry from living shapes and deploying it with personality and dynamism is a form of genius not well enough respected.

Look at those lovely angles up there! Just look at them!

This is a self portrait by Annie Wu, who’s site you should visit right now!

Fresh out of the Maryland Institute College of Art with a major magazine ad campaign already executed and a mature and considered obsession with the creative output of Astro-Base Go.

Plus look at her design-fu on these hypothetical Hitchhiker’s Guide covers (from a school assignment):

Do you not wish your copies looked like that? Of course you do. Now go to her site and buy things from her.

That wasn’t a suggestion. Why are you still here? Go. Now.

I’m Bill. You probably know me. This is the Occasional Bitslice, a newsletter about interesting or unusual things that came my way recently that I think you might enjoy.

Partly I just wanted to play with this new service called tinyletter, a website to make generating email newsletters very simple.

This is a re-posting of content from the first newsletter, to give you an idea of what’s inside. If you are interested, you can subscribe by entering your email address in the form at the bottom of this post.

Things to Watch

Unfold your Brain

Between the Folds is a brilliant little hour long documentary about origami.

The film begins with a handful of quite unbelievably wonderful representational masters and gets to a point where you can’t really believe it could show you anything more astounding. Then it ventures into abstraction and kinesthetics, and I promise you your brain will unfold into an impossible n dimensional living sheet of implausible actuality.

It’s a much more mind-bending piece than it seems like it’s going to be at first. It’s also full of surprisingly lovely human minds. You can buy it or stream it from Netflix.

Anarchy on the Open Sea

Hold Fast is a punk lofi documentary about DIY sailing.

You can watch the entire 1hr 16min film here on Vimeo:

Hold Fast from Moxie Marlinspike on Vimeo.

Three train hopping young punk sailors buy a broken plastic and fiberglass yacht shell sitting moored in a Florida backyard for $1,000. Then in a series of entertainingly no-budget exploits they make it seaworthy and take it out to cruise the Bahamas. They are grinning, filthy, bruised and dreadlocked, recklessly skillful sailors. Their diesel motor hates them. They anchor themselves gracefully under sail. Their boat is named Pestilence.

This self-produced documentary plays like a well produced segment of Ira Glass’ This American Life. It’s never less than fascinating. There is real danger in this shoestring adventure that makes portions of it riveting. One fish is definitely injured in the making of this film. There is a close encounter with a waterspout. It’s a grimy, salty, respectable piece of filmmaking and the closest you are going to get to what sailing was probably like in the 18th Century.

Edward Teach would be proud.

Time is the Fire in which we Burn

Context and temporal exclusivity have been on my mind a lot lately.

It started with my finishing Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, the first of his books that I genuinely enjoyed. Maybe because it’s concerned with a time period I lived through and remember, where V and Gravity’s Rainbow wander through what was already history by the time I was born. I think it matters quite a bit that you’ve lived in and have memories of the culture in the era in which a Pynchon book is set. His oblique and offhand references to lyrics, phrases and events just aren’t something you will ever get if you don’t already know them, and if you have to have them explained to you, then their brilliance really flattens. Like jokes in Shakespeare, they’re just not really funny anymore.

Then, a couple of weeks later, an old friend sent me a snapshot from a play we performed back in college, and I realized that other than a hat that was made for me as a costume piece from that show, I have no other record of it. No video, no pictures. Nothing is left. That play was a high point in my career as an actor, but time has erased it, mostly, from the world.

That got me thinking about certain performers, mostly musicians, who are better heard live than in recording. Ani DiFranco is one of these. So were the Barenaked Ladies. Their recordings are good, but even in their off shows, their ability to actually connect with an audience and improvise within their own compositions hooks their art to the points in time in which it is performed. If you weren’t there, too bad, it’s gone. New moments will happen, but they will be different. Their genius is mortal, it burns in the fire of time. When they are gone, that flame will go out, and only the inferior ash of recordings will remain.

Easy digital replication has gutted the value of recorded art, but the flip side to that, maybe, is that it is amplifying the value of events that exist in an exclusive place and time. Or, another way to state it more boldly:

I think art is worthless, and artistry is a delight to behold.

The reason is that art lasts, it comes unstuck from time, and so it becomes irrelevant. Stripped of context, doomed to academic preservation. Artistry, on the other hand, is always dying. It’s there the moment it happens and then it’s gone. The only disturbances it leaves are inside the living brains of witnesses, and those brains are always dying also.

If you want a career in art in the 21st Century, you need to build it around unique, non-repeatable events. You need a reputation for transcendent improvisation. Proximity to you in actual space and time needs to be expensive, and you need to be the one collecting. You won’t make your fortune on the actual art, but on the elevated experience that being present with you creates. You need to be a celebrity, even a very narrowly defined one.

And you need to be fundamentally incomprehensible to the future.

Reasons why Emily was the most Badass Bronte

• Wuthering Heights is a Shakespearean grade revenge tragedy with trust and guilt and emotion used as murder weapons instead of swords and poison.
• Wuthering Heights is more fun if you root for Heathcliff as he grinds that family up.
• Wuthering Heights starts with one of the best ghost scenes in English lit – one that ultimately gave us this Kate Bush song.

END BITSLICE

Reading a bunch of books on a related theme all at the same time and thinking in public.

So a while back I was writing posts about trying to figure out what genuine new forms of wealth creation might be, as the things touched on in the book Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin and Heidi Toffler seemed to be very superficial and not very new at all.

As we’ve gone through a dramatic global economic downturn, and have seen exuberance chastised, it seems important to keep trying to figure this out. When I look at books that are built around these issues, these days I always check when it was first published. If it is more than three years old I generally think it’s too dated to be relevant – and in that I don’t mean there is no relevant thought older than three years, but rather that I can probably find those thoughts more succinctly expressed online, or in some real classic. These kinds of books tend to be shallow but interesting thought provokers, and don’t age tremendously well.

The books in question at the moment are:

A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink (2005) – This one is a bit old, but the author is Daniel Pink, who gave the talk behind this wonderful thing:

The book is an argument that the cognitive style that predisposes a person to success is changing. I’m predisposed to disagree, but willing to be convinced. At a gloss it seems to be saying that reductive, linear and analytic thought styles that have formed the undercurrent of civilization throughout the scientific/industrial era are giving way to a more intuitive, holistic and creative approach. I think that the collapse of the stock market recently has been a repudiation of creative excess in enterprises that, by their nature, are best guided by reductive, linear analysis. It’s easy to look at who is the most flamboyantly successful in the US, Europe and Japan and extrapolate a trend, but the greater portion of the world is nowhere near engaging in this sort of rock-star mystique in business. Possibly the fact that a lot of the old traditional foundation of science and industry has shifted to places with extreme poverty to follow cheap labor is distorting our self perception. Are lucrative conceptual acrobatics even possible without the massive support of grinding, linear industry?

Deep Economy, Bill McKibben (2007) – This one is a bit more recent, but probably will hold up better over time. What role do markets play in a stable economy that serves its community? It’s not a simple question. It seems to me often that companies traded publicly get trapped in insanity, constantly required to increase profit quarterly regardless of whether or not that is advisable for the long term health of the enterprise or even possible at all. To behave sanely as a corporate entity, and to contribute to the health and substance of the community in which you do business, I think you almost have to stay a private concern and focus on long term goals, keeping the company healthy first, seeking profit increases second. I’m guessing this book will make a similar argument, but with more facts and imagination.

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Matt Miller (2009) – This is the most recent, but the one I have the weakest bead on. From the jacket it looks like it deals with presumptions about the economy and always increasing prosperity that are likely to be disastrous if maintained in the face of real upheaval.

Rocketeers, Michael Belfiore (2007) – A book about the recent boom in private space ventures, which is just generally an interesting subject. I think it may dovetail nicely with the above list though, as the nascent private space industry is a nice example of more current thought styles being applied in a field dominated by the old style of deliberate, scrupulous engineering. The fact that the old style has produced spectacular successes here, and the new style is struggling to meet achievements long surpassed by the old, may be interesting to consider while thinking through these topics.

That’s the lineup. More posts to come as reading progresses!