In the future, a cold thing will be the most valuable thing.
In the future, everything will be the same temperature, no energy differentials. The only valuable thing will be a cold place to dump your heat. Or a hot place from which to fill your cold. A vector, any vector in a sea of maximal entropy.
In the run-up to a new attempt at the 52 project, I’ve asked Arashi to write about her 365Days project, the photographic journey that inspired me to write not once, not twice, but every damn week for a year.
The 365days Project
Before I had come across the 365days project I was embarrassed to call myself an artist. Embarrassed because I was the most loathsome type of artist to walk the earth. I was an artist who never made any art.
I desperately wanted to claim to be an artist but I was fearful of doing the actual work involved. When I was a child, art was easy and fun, but as I grew up, they idea of being an artist was loaded with expectation. Before I found this project, I was in a depressive funk in my early twenties. The promise of an interesting job after college had fallen apart as my humanities degree prepared me for a career as an underpaid administrative assistant. I bought a DSLR camera practically on impulse, and yet it laid dormant with a pile of other creative tools hanging around.
Stumbling through creative blogs on the Internet I read about the 365days project. The 365days project is a photography project where one is supposed to take a self portrait every day, rain or shine, no matter what. This project was hosted at the 365days flickr group.
Immediately I was drawn to the idea for many reasons. My DSLR was gathering dust while I stressed to remember the relationship between shutter speed, iso, and aperture. My own relationship with being photographed was dogged by self consciousness and camera shyness. The wild card was the accountability aspect, that I would publicly display my pictures, my successes and failures. These things made up an overlapping Venn diagram of fear. It took less than a day of internal debate before signing up and taking my first shot.
From this fairly ordinary beginning, I began to branch off and explore. Since every day was a new opportunity, I could try out as many styles as I wanted. I did long exposures, diptychs, and triptychs.
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Long exposure blink and a Triptych[/caption]
A desire to crop pictures brought me to use GIMP, the open source image editing software program. Soon I was getting into layer styles, selective colorization, and cloning. The project took a turn from a simple documentation of the self to a full on exploration in the world of digital techniques.
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An example of cloning and a recursive image.[/caption]
I can easily say that the 365days project changed my life as an artist. I had never been as productive or fearless in my life. I learned that an important part of making art is making mistakes, and making a lot of them. I realized that I had been paralysed by the fear of failure which in turn made me fail. There is no time to ponder failure when you are forcing yourself to be creative every day. You only have time to accept it, move on and try to learn from the mistakes.
I may not have loved every single day. Too often there were days where I just needed to get the shot in and I would worry about it later. But those days were worth it to make up for the days when inspiration would occur.
The image below is from Day 365, marking a whole year of taking a picture every day. The large head was shot on that day but the rest of the images are a montage of days throughout the year and how they coordinate to different sections of the brain according to the pseudo science of Phrenology.
Once upon a time, a man was busy moving. He worked hard all week, hauling big heavy boxes, piles of wood and woodworking tools, and even an anvil. While he was moving, exhausted and dusty, he lost track of time and didn’t realize that a very important deadline was approaching fast. After one particularly long day of moving heavy equipment and sorting through a very dusty, dirty workshop, he suddenly realized that his deadline was only half an hour away and he had not written the story he had promised to write before the deadline was up. Even worse, he was in his new house, which didn’t even have an Internet connection yet! How would he upload his story? The old house still had an Internet connection, but it was all the way across town, there was only half an hour left, and he was so tired he was already in bed. Everything seemed lost.
Then, as if by magic, a wondrous and amazing thing happened. But it didn’t happen to him, sadly. He had to drive across town after all.
Did I mention I am starting a church?
Perhaps church isn’t exactly the right word, but its the one that seems to fit best. I will be posting my more philosophical and socially-minded thoughts over there.
“There” being passionatemind.org.
So what is it exactly? Something like a athiest’s rational analysis of what humanity wants and needs out of religion, and and attempt to provide those things without all the tedious mucking about with supernatural beings.
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“A great man once told me, on a dark night, in a terrible storm – he said ‘Son, live every moment of your life like it is the very last one you’ll ever get’. Well, I’ve been in this cell for a week now, and damned if I’m not beginning to wonder about that advice.”
I’ve been enjoying this webcomic lately:
I Drew This
Despite the rather philosophical bent of recent posts, I’ve been thinking politics a lot recently, and this one sums up well a lot of my own gut reactions to what I hear in the news.
I’ve always wanted to draw my own strip, but I know I don’t have the drawing chops, nor the devotion to keep it up. I respect those who can consistently turn out good comics, and if you are curious, here are a few like to read:
I should also mention Goats, but with a caveat – I’ve only found the storyline interesting in the last few months, but there have been good comic moments throughout.
You might detect a pattern here, you might not…
What do you like?
The last post got some interesting feedback.
The question still nags me, though, I feel like I haven’t gotten yet to the meat of it. If you could change the world, would you? For fun, for ideals, out duty or out of boredom? Don’t we all have some kind of super-power, something we can use to change the world? A brain, an idea, two arms and two legs and a mouth. Or two mouths, if you were especially blessed? Given the power, a lot of us would do good, but not feel obligated to… A lot of us don’t know we can change the world as without super powers… A lot of us feel like being a caretaker/diety/paternalistic figure is a bad idea, maybe even immoral on some level… Most of us would have a fantastic party if we were superman. This just isn’t answering my question, somehow.
Click to continue reading “Megalomania and socio-economic feedback”
So I am obviously spending a bit more time in front of the computer lately, as you can see by the volume of posts. While writing, and considering things others have written, I realized (not for the first time) what an incredibly lucky person I am to have what I have in my life. I know only about three people read this blog, despite my efforts, and thats pretty frustrating sometimes, but at least two of those readers are people I am incredibly lucky to have in my life. A little too lucky, it seems. Without listing a pile of things that are similarly beyond what I feel I should be able to expect from life, lets just say things feel a bit unbalanced sometimes. It makes me feel like I owe the universe something.
Now for the record, I don’t owe the universe anything. It is not a conscious entity, and the concept of owing simply doesn’t apply. Nor is there any cosmic karmic scorecard keeping track of my good deeds. In fact the word luck here is simply a descriptive word describing my personal opinion of what I have managed to get away with in life, it is not any kind of mystic force that influences or can be influenced.
Still, I feel like I need to be doing things in the world. Good things (by my lights, since I don’t have anyone elses to use). Things that will make the world a better place for the species, and perhaps things that will make the species better for the world. Would I feel this desire/obligation if I didn’t find my situation so “lucky”? I like to think so, since this notion has come to me via more philosophical/logical routes, but who knows. I suppose if I felt hard done by, I might also feel a need to change the world.
So here’s the question. Leaving aside the why’s and wherefores, what do you feel obligated to do in this world? Anything? If not obligated, what do you think is a good thing to try and accomplish? Is there anything you would consider a worthwhile purpose?
In theory, practice is the same as theory, but in practice, it isn’t. I need to write more. Every time I pick up a book, a thousand stories well up in me, and I have to fight them down just to read the one in front of me. A lifetime of reading has precipitated an ocean of ideas that wants to slosh over the sides of my mind at the first hint of imbalance.
