patterntology

Topography Infographic

2011-11-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

This one was a real challenge in a few ways. I needed to visualize actual terrain in 3D and show how that relates in 3D with a topological map. I scanned the map, found the shader files from GIS (to define the elevation in the 3D program), and a satellite image of the Grand Canyon to colorize it. Getting the three to align perfectly was a bunch of Photoshop scaling and nudging with transparent layers to get things just right. My eyes started to cross but the result came out just as I wanted. A simple demonstration, but I learned a little about the maps I carry with me on hiking and camping trips. Another plus of creating info graphics.

Some Science Illustration

2011-10-16T23:42:00.000-07:00

I'm so into scientific illustration. These two are some simple concepts, for the wee people among us. Infographics and educational material are really interesting design problems. Seems to pull from many perceptual faculties at once. You can never talk to yourself. Always from the point of view of someone who wants to learn. Very similar process to designing any layout actually. And these days, you have to keep up a variety of aesthetics to keep visual interest. So I went pirate mappy with the map concepts. With the fossils, I wanted something more museum display. Sometimes a clean presentation is a nice background to a rather dirty old subject.

Personal Deities

2011-09-03T01:29:00.000-07:00

Really love this pen and ink. Reminds me of etching. That hard black line. Did some drawings, inked, hand tinted, and then finished with some digital colorization.

Interested in this idea of a magical book called the "Sutra of Tranquility." Apparently this book appears to those ready to study out of thin air when summoned. Filled with abstract patterns, complex diagrams, strange characters, and indecipherable text, the reader comes away with a sense of calm they can call upon the rest of their life. A fantasy object I can't tear my mind away from.

Working with sketches of the "Demons and Deities" series, I studied these more closely and did the ancient pen and ink ritual on them. Quadrix, Alchemix, and Digitix. Names end in "ix," it's a noun. Noun to me, pronoun to you.

My common theme is a full spectrum gradient in the eyes. To me, this is a symbol of an all seeing soul. Any figure with a face; mess with the eyes, you mess with it's total meaning. On train platforms in Chicago, I noticed the behind-the-bench billboard ads (usually 8ft by 4ft) and how people would take a knife and cut the paper around the eyes and tear it away as if stealing the soul. White, blank eyes starring back at you.

Quadrix
There is a horny, doll-like, kitty kat, transexual, disco, stardust, mesmerizing, strobe light meaning to this. If all art is an expression of an inner self, yes, part of me wants to dress up in silver glitter covered platform shoes... and you don't really need to know the rest. "Quad" because a second layer of eyes sees another plane of existence. Cat because it's cute and doll parts because that's kiddo mondo anime sexy... and artificial. I'm talking about a sexual attraction void of the act itself: tiny penis.

Alchemix
Thinking about Magick and it's fear effect. This is a witch. Western, Christian, Angelic symbols create a halo. Alchemical symbols floating about the head of a veiled (possibly) Muslim woman. I see power in the veil like a mask just as confrontational as the naked body. Magick mystery is the confusion of being confronted with something that you can't put a face to or link an emotion to. This figure comes to you raw and concealed at the same time, open to your own interpretation.

Digitix
I wondered what was so alarming about this figure. The robot is a child. Not only that, the head resembles a "Peanuts" cartoon head. An amped up evil Linus. There is a projected psychic wave of communication broadcast from it's head (Twitter!) The robots are in constant conspiratorial communication. I put him in a Moonscape to amplify the robots' superiority to mammals and it's ability to thrive in desolate environments and it's loneliness from doing so. In my own life, I do a lot of communing with this one.

Personal Narratives

2011-08-29T23:46:00.000-07:00

So, whenever I start doing representational art, I start adding it to my life narrative. Last project I did was called "Infinite Swing," a cyberpunk-far-future-coming-of-age novel that I only explored 50 pages into but defined the whole world. When I realized it needed to be an illustrated novel, I cut to the chase, cut out the plot and decided to do a field book guide to the world. This morphed into a simplified "The Future Primitive Guide" teaser. So, an animated, interactive experience, with music (by Kyle Bronsdon.) So I never finished the actual novel. Wish I did. Maybe I should now that I have a sequel.

My protagonist, "Quota Soon," is a tongue in cheek joke about my life as a graphic artist... everyone always needs it now. Also my name in Second Life. He always wears a virtual reality suit and goggles that plug him into the virtual world as well as the real world.

In Infinite Swing, most of humanity has left earth for Vegas styled space stations. The remaining people on Earth are in underground cities going to school via virtual reality. Ancient cities are being leveled to return them to their original natural state. Some people are left behind. Amish, southern pacific islanders, and luddites resisting virtual reality take on a primitive role scavenging and becoming hunter gatherers like humans were 10's of thousands of years ago. Future Primitives.

Quota is a freelance videographer with an expensive anti-gravity video camera that he makes his money off of. In his underground virtual control center, he flies his video camera around Earth's surface for differing jobs until, one day, his job is to record primitive people still living on the surface. He finds one and moves in close. Seen as a threat, the future primitive spears Quotas' camera floating above his head like it was a dumb bird. Quota, losing his only livelihood, leaves the underground city and walks along the surface of the planet looking for his damaged camera.

Long story short, he befriends the primitives, learns that they are kept like game animals by the "others," and helps completely free them from the established technology society.

The Sequel: Ultima Thule

Too bad you come up with a sequel when the original isn't completely written.

So, Quota goes on. A wilderness exploration freak, he gets to a distant shore and finds a boat. He gets in the boat and starts paddling North. A storm happens and he loses all connection to GPS, internet and virtual reality. He finds an island. Exploring the island, he finds many mythical creatures and strange scenarios that seem to teach him. Witches, Cthulhu, half-man half-animal creatures, and glowing pixie-like entities. After a while, he starts to doubt if these mythical creatures are real or being projected into his virtual reality gear. Testing gives mixed results. Then he finds evidence of tiny, highly advanced projectors hidden in the forests, fields and waters of the island suggesting some kind of hoax.

Triangulating the projector signals, Quota finds a downed spacecraft from another world. His VR equipment helps him unravel a higher intelligence behind the projectors via the readouts in the craft. An alien approaches him and telepathically communicates their aims. The alien explains that throughout history they have approached lone humans, aboriginals on walkabout, shamans on vision quests and lone hermits. They barrage them with a projected world of their own mythological making to create a base belief. Once this mythology is considered "real" by the subject, they can transmit the more advanced levels of teaching that involve multidimensional thought, quantum reality and time travel. Apparently the mysteries of the universe are unlocked through imagination and belief.

It is the aliens' aim to educate only those that are ready to receive the knowledge. Only those available to accept an alternative reality are ready to evolve.

-In my own life, Quota's coming of age story of the Future Primitives is done. I'm now into how the mind works, mythologies, quantum physics, and higher intelligences. After achievement, there is a period of questioning reality. That's where I've been for the last few years. Adulthood doesn't make things easier, it just makes things different and should make you wonder even more...

Laws of Simplicity in Web Design: Part 1

2011-08-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

Basically, it's very complex. Making things simple, that is. When developing an information rich website the task is about organizing and presenting data in the simplest, fastest way possible. Creating a site architecture and design draws on the cognitive powers of librarian, cartographer, writer, and visual scientist. For advice in these matters, it's always a good call to ask the experts.

I've followed John Maeda's career since his ground-breaking research at MIT Media Lab. Now President of the Rhode Island School of Design, Maeda is the leading expert in the simplicity of interface in the information age. His book, The Laws of Simplicity, outlines 10 laws to follow when designing almost any complex system.

The following list is Maeda's 10 laws, followed with techniques I've used in web design to keep things simple.

Law 1: Reduce
Crowded copy is difficult to look at. Giving information on a page plenty of breathing room with ample margins is a first step. Fewer things on a page are easier to take in. Hiding information until the moment it's needed, for instance, when filling out a complex form, makes a task seem less overwhelming. Drop-down menus, instructions that popup on mouse-over, or using an accordion technique keeps the user focused.

Law 2: Organize
Obviously, an alphabetized list is easier to read than one that isn't. Categorizing content should feel the same way as alphabetizing: logical, sequential ordering with every topic included. "Miscellaneous" or "Info" categories are symptoms of lazy organizing. Sensitivity to the user's point of view should lead the categorizing process. Too often, organizations end up "talking to themselves" with their own vocabulary, rather than talking to their audience. Some visitors to your site are novices, some are experts, but all of them are looking for something they don't know. Put yourself in their shoes.

Law 3: Time
"Skip Intro" flash animation jokes aside, anything that makes you wait becomes a complication. If your site offers good content, chances are that you'll have repeat visitors. Do those folks a favor and make it easy for them to come back. Technologies like Flash, and sometimes dynamically generated pages (content that changes as things are added or subtracted over time) make it impossible to bookmark content and force the user to go through a series of clicks to rediscover where they were before. I'll put "Spotlight" links with a nice big graphic on the home page for the most hit areas of the site. If you have a lot of dynamically-driven content, a "Search" box is a must for every page. If they have to wait, a progress bar or loading graphic helps take the worry out of waiting.

Law 4: Learn
It's easier to use knowledge that a user already has rather than teach them a whole new way of doing things. This is never more true when it comes to navigating a web page. Everyone knows green means go and red means stop. Everyone knows that blue highlighted text is a link. A right pointing triangle means "play." A button that looks like something you can press in the real world, with drop shadow and light source in the graphic, doesn't present any confusion about its function. If you need to change link colors for aesthetic reasons, keep it consistent throughout the site so the user only has to "learn" once.

Law 5: Differences
Using contrast and color to delineate headings, topics, and subtopics helps the eye make sense of information. If two topics side-by-side are different, making them also look different reinforces the idea. Intuitive, unconscious trickery! Subtle differences can also make all the difference. A wall of text can be easier to scan if broken up in sections using varying backgrounds, boxes, or margin changes. A table of data is always easier to read if alternating rows have a different color.
Continue to Part 2. Part Two

Laws of Simplicity in Web Design: Part 2

2011-08-18T22:57:00.000-07:00

(Continuation of Part 1.)
Law 6: Context
Use print media like magazine and newspaper layout as an example of how to highlight the meat of your copy. Carefully picking a pull-quote piques reader interest and also saves them time determining the relevancy of your page. "Helpful Tip" or "Did You Know?" boxes embedded in your page abbreviate your content and can lead users to related pages of your site. The more care you take in aiding the user through your site, the more at ease they will be. This type of treatment also communicates your understanding of the content, making you a more trusted source.

Law 7: Emotion
Call it tone. Call it look and feel. Communicating emotion through your online materials goes a long way. A graphic look can convey ideas like quality, trust, professionalism, security, love, family, or charity. Setting the stage like this for users helps them envision what they are in store for. I would add to emotion, the game-like joy that comes from a simple, intuitive website. Take for instance the clean design of Flickr.com . Searching, uploading, and cataloging photos is made so simple you feel a mastery over the content. Tasks don't feel like tasks anymore.

Law 8: Trust
We've all been to a website that led us down a path and suddenly abandoned us without finding the answer we were looking for, making us dig through our history to get back to familiar territory. Always give an easy way to get back and always let the user know where they are. Nine times out of 10, the logo at the top of the page is a link to home page, but not everyone knows that. I've learned my lesson and always include a "Home" button in the navigation. Although "Breadcrumbs," or a line of links that appear on each page as you dig down layers into a site, can be achieved with some quick ASP code, I prefer doing this in the page title itself, big and bold. For instance, the Italian Roast page on the hot beverage site might be titled "Coffees: Italian Roast."

Law 9: Failure
Sometimes your simplification process actually complicates things. Sometimes one big page that scrolls is simpler than clicking through multiple levels to get to the content. Sometimes the content just can't become simpler and that's OK. Recognizing this is the hard part.

Law 10: The One
Maeda gets kind of Zen in this chapter - "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful." In life and in design it seems to work. Get rid of redundancy, cut out the multiple actions, define ideas and pull them out of the cloud of confusion. As a web developer, it is your job to end the confusion and create clear, concise and meaningful experiences.
I highly suggest John Maeda's book, "The Laws of Simplicity," even if you apply the laws to merely reorganizing your closet. Some excerpts from his book can be found here.

Mac OS X Lion, OMG!

2011-08-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

I saw the Steve Jobs developer stage show about Lion a month or two ago, and started to get excited about touch technology, and the 200+ new features of Lion that were going to come out. I prepared myself and hit Amazon for an Apple Magic Touch Pad ($70) so I could do cool Lion things. I downloaded and had "Install Lion" sitting in my tool bar last week until I could research which of my apps would die when it installs. Tonight I dove off the cliff and pressed the button.

I have never had a system software change the way I use a computer this much, ever. It's melding touch tech (phones and pads) with the desktop. Best thing is, the old way is still there too. I know a lot of people's main computer is a laptop and you're already divorced yourself from the mouse, but this is getting closer to Minority Report type interfacing.

The touch pad notices 1-4 fingers. Some things I've seen in the last hour:

• 2 fingers scroll anything
• 2 fingers in Safari left to right scrolls webpage history
• 4 fingers up shows you all the windows you have open (Mission Control)
• 4 fingers down in an Text Edit shows you icons of the last 10 docs you opened
• photos rotate, zoom with pinch etc just like touch tech (yes in Photoshop!!!)
• the infamous mac right click (control w/ mouse click) is now just two finger down on the pad!

I've tried to take screen shots of these effects but whatever animation mode it's in wants to complete before I can screen shot it. : (

Mac Mail is visually very different. Takes some getting used to. It's a three column approach and is better in full screen. Messages appear to the right instead of below the list of you mails.

My tool bar at the bottom of the screen may become obsolete with "Launch Pad" that just fills the screen with super-sized icons and allows you to scroll sideways through app icons like searching for a phone or tablet app.

It's just too cool and my hand has already grown accustomed to the whole pad thing. Must be a new theory in scrolling because my mouse rollerball has reversed polarity.

Growing Pains:

I use and buy a lot of software. Most of my cheapo audio software died. All of my pre-intel Microsoft Office Suite died. Other than that, the expensive 3d program I got just for exporting organic shapes to Second Life died. Mindmanager, which warned it wouldn't work, does work. I opened an old file. There might be other issues I'm not seeing.

Deer Head Painting

2011-07-08T23:38:00.000-07:00

Just how much life intrudes on the one part of my life, painting, the products of which will probably outlast any single thing I ever produce creatively. Based on recent comments I realized I hadn't shared the small amount of progress made on this painting. So here it is. Figure, elusive and malleable with every brush stroke. The highest level of scrutiny placed on the figure because everyone has an acute judgement, memory of the the figure. There is a plan of 10 and a second painting is planned: fragile female figure with birds' head. I have the pose down. Getting a bit sad at this point realizing how long this may take with life's current demands. Looking forward to being a pure imagist.

Earth Knowledge: Wicked Good

2011-06-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

Science! That's what my part time gig is all about. I've been a contributer to this group for a while, doing their website generations and branding over the years while I was with Ridgewood. These days I'm working closer with them on their marketing materials, website graphics, presentations and data visualization. Coming on board in April, I felt like I was putting frosting on the cake of years of development and research they had already put into this technology.

What's Earth Knowledge?
The simple explanation: taking the thousand page reports and complex data models scientists produce in earth science and boiling it down to simple English, Google Earth layers, and infographics so that legislators and the general public can understand the data enough to make informed decisions about the environment.

What's in it for you?
The public side of Earth Knowledge is, in the words of social media guru Paul Gillin, "A great example of content curation." Using artificial intelligence to organize sources of earth science from around the world, customized feeds can be read through the traditional Portal news feed or by location through the Virtual Globe. These are big time sources: Reuters, BBC, NASA, NOAA, USDA, USGS, DOI, Science Daily, Green Peace, Nature Conservancy, Monga Bay, ARKive, Global Heritage Fund, United Nations, European Environmental Agency.

My ulterior motive here is to show off my web graphics. Also to show off the exciting field of infographics I've been working in. Thinking about the graphics in the text books of my youth and how long I would stare at them wondering how they were achieved. Now I'm making them. There is something very satisfying about using the mix of my skills in this way... and working with scientists. Fun!

Orange Design LLC

2011-04-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

I've been a regular blogger since 2006 and have never gone this long without a blog. Sorry!

I started my own company. I'm officially Orange Design of Tucson, Arizona. Why orange? Just seem to like that color with all its' vibrancy, action, brightness, Zen monk robe color... I saw this Science Channel show about insulation (yes, I'll watch a show about insulation) and there was this aero foam used to insulate the space shuttle body on re-entry. Put into a kiln and heated to 2500 degrees you could pick up this cube of aero foam with your bare hands as it glowed orange from the inside. That's the orange I want. All that amazing energy comfortably at your fingertips. Just look at this blog! It's all orange!

What do I do? Pretty much everything I always did: HTML, CSS, Flash, Video, 3d Illustration, print, Joomla and Wordpress.

People always tell me, "Now that you're the boss, you can make your own schedule." Ha! Ok, well maybe... Two months out, I've spent most of the time working through weekends and waiting for that day off to come by. Now I'm settling in. Got some good funnels of work, got my book keeping down and if I keep my head level, it will be the best year I've ever had.

I've learned a lot in the past decade, have much to consult on. Design-wise, if my portfolio isn't extremely talented in one direction or another, I can confidently say I have RANGE (get it? just add an "O") because I can design for a variety of situations.

Orange Design LLC

Quantum Mechanics In Four Sentences

2010-11-05T23:07:00.000-07:00

The Four Sentences:
Quantum means "an amount," and mechanics means "the motion of that amount." Newtonian physics resembles cause and effect like a machine and works with things in human size, like balls on the ground, or larger things like planets and stars: push a ball on the ground with "X" amount of force and it will go "Y" far. When we get to subatomic particles, Newtonian physics doesn't work because an "X" amount of force may send 30% of the energy in the "A" direction and 70% of the energy in direction "B." We are forced to create a new mathematics that deals with probabilities instead of Newtonian machine-like mathematics with absolute outcomes, so we created Quantum Mechanics only for subatomic things.

Einstein Knew
Einstein's theory of general relativity worked on our scale and the astrophysics scale. It did not work on a subatomic scale because of a simple experiment that proves light acts like a wave and a particle. Nothing in Newtonian physics does that: energy moves through matter as a wave (radio waves, heat, microwaves) or is self contained in a particle. Einstein became the biggest opponent of Quantum Mechanics because he wanted to answer the holes in his own theory. If something fails at being proven wrong, it's right.

New Developments
I love this :) After his Phd in physics, Antony Garrett Lisi moves to Maui and teaches surfing. On the side he pursues physics problems, coming up with his "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything." His theory includes Einsteins theory of general relativity, explains gravity's weakness with 8 dimensions, includes Quantum Mechanics and predicts undiscovered elements in the periodic chart. Doesn't work with string theory though. So, gravity is weak because it only exists in our dimension a small amount. Being tested (proven) on the super collider at CERN right now. This is his diagram of how it all fits together. This guy could be the next Einstein. Then I'll be looking for my "Exeptionally Simple Explaination" of his theory.

What Comes Out Of This?
Einstein's theory of general relativity brought us the atom bomb. "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everthing" may bring us power over gravity, abilities to create any type of material ourselves, multidimensional travel, teleportation... that sort of thing. Probably some really great weapons...

Rant About How Long It Took To Learn This
You be the judge of whether Wikipedia does a better job of explaining. Better yet, do you're own web search and see if you aren't bogged down by multiple unrelated facts and still no answer.

So, I read some books. Hawking tells me if I travel to the edge of the universe I'll end up on the other side and if I get near a black hole I'll be stretched into an infinitely long string. New media icon Michio Kaku, who's area of expertise is String Theory, is telling me it's all waves and strings which will probably be disproved soon anyway. I was able to boil down four sentences after 375 pages of Gary Zukav's, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters," skipping the parts about photons being sentient.

Watch the science channel and you'll be bombarded with physics shows where the host appears with multiple copies of himself at a bar and then a humpback whale appears spontaneously in Times Square*. Holding his hands together in a prayer-like manner he somberly states to the camera, "That's the new physics." Wha??! I hold this wizardish, magical David Copperfield presentation of science personally responsible for things like the movie, "What The Bleep Do We Know." Imagine something that you want to happen, see if it happens. That's the "Bleep" experiment. It's called wishful thinking.

*At the big bang with all that energy released, anything could happen. Billions of years later, after energy organized itself into atoms, elements, stars, planets, and galaxies, the cascading organization of "stuff" in the universe means things like Humpback Whales falling out of the sky just won't happen.

Deerman Started

2010-10-31T21:43:00.000-07:00

My goodness, with all thats going on, I got some painting in this weekend. 3-4hrs worth, not much. The job is more intense and I'm also into this house renovation big time. Sometimes I think I should stop painting and just finish the house, but balanced life, balanced time schedule and everything will work out.

First off, haven't done figure painting in 20 yrs. Got the colors down but now it's all about figure shape. Knowledge is power here. To me, it's the pinnacle of artistic knowledge and if I can master this, I can do all. Believe me, the imagination is pushing me to portray all. So, here you see my first baby steps... Does a deer god deity have a circumcised or uncircumcised penis?

Flesh Tone Test

2010-10-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

Yet more warming up for the "DeerMan" painting. I haven't worked with the figure in paint forever. Did my research on flesh tones, dropped some bills on the missing pigments in my palette and did a small study to test things out. I keep imagining Shatner holding his hand this way and shouting to the sky, "Khannnn!"

Painting Finished!

2010-10-06T19:26:00.000-07:00

Just had to show it off. The Louis Sullivan architectural detail warmup painting. 16" x 32" fits on my drafting table nicely. Framing will come later. Got some good ideas...

New Painting: Deerman

2010-09-28T22:32:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm warmed up with painting again, subject matter comes into play. I'm never without new ideas. So many interests, so many needs, so many aesthetics, so many techniques, so many historical rootings... Like musician Brian Eno said about music in the digital age which really cuts to the core of the artistic dilemma: "Presented with every sound studio gadget under the sun with a virtual infinity of sounds you could produce, it's very difficult to create an individual style." In the same manner, painting is never dead, already having every gadget under the sun.

I'm very into the new revolution in art that is coming: stuff made by hand. Recently in Tucson, Daniel Martin Diaz has opened a "museum" that features world class painters. Very interesting that he names it a museum. An idea that the market place decides which art is best rather than the academic arena. Low Brow. LOL Really, that's been the tradition for 30,000 years. Good art is what people want to live with and will shell out hard currency for. Best example, "Low Brow" Ron English who sells his work for hundreds of thousands. Feeling the pinch making your money off government grants to create your academically legitimized installation art? (in this case the chicken was there before your egg was) Sick of arts administrators being gate keepers to your dream with piles of paperwork? Pick up the brush motherfucker. Show them who's boss.

I knew I wanted to do characters. The figure. Worked on some digital sketches in my "of Dieties and Demons," series. As I chipped away at the idea, I started thinking the work was immature. The elaborate detailed frames, symbol filled backgrounds... Toys, wizardry, diversions. What is it about paintings like this that I like so much? There's no clutter. It's modern. It's just the figure. It's a sampling, like science data. Not a new idea either because it reminded me of paintings in the Charles Peale Museum built 1786 in Baltimore. At the time, it was more of a museum of natural history.

Working on the sketch of "Deerman," I had fleshed out the pose using Poser software which cuts out the middle man of finding a stock photo, or finding a model, lighting the model and photographing a model all in one fell swoop. Then I began formulating backgrounds, frames, symbols etc... Jane pointed out that it looked fine as it was. I have to agree. All the bang in a figure painting is the figure. Very mature. Simple.

Seems like little stuff. When you embark on planning a painting that will take 30-40 hrs, you need to strategize something that's going to carry you through. Not just one painting but a series. We'll see how I do with the figure... I'm up for the challenge. Feels like an evolutionary jump for me.

Cheap Software

2010-09-19T00:10:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting years for software companies like Adobe to come up with some kind of "rent our services" package so I don't have to pay $2,599 just because I know EVERY one of their applications under the sun. Software companies justified their prices because EVERYONE was pirating their software. Then they came up with impossible to break security and the price stayed the same. "Companies make money with our software..." Companies make $300,000 homes with a $20 hammer.

Software should be $50 a pop. Come on. "Costs a lot to develop software..." When is a video game, with Hollywood level budgets ever $250? Dreamweaver... $250. Adobe Flash is $350!!!! WTF? You know Adobe, the less people that can afford that, the less people will know how to use it. I'm not pulling the greed card, but I just saw Adobe stock jump 9% last week. Not losing money. Time to loosen the noose a bit.

Wasn't I delighted this year when I investigated a couple fringe pieces of software that are integral in my commercial digital artist world. I believe I convinced my employer back in 2003 to buy a 3d app called Carrara Studio for $350. This summer, I bought it for $50. As powerful as motion picture level rendering like Maya, yet easy to learn and perfectly good for short animation and illustration. Again, Poser. Great program with all sorts of applications whenever you need a 3D figure, usually $250. If you buy the latest to the most recent version... $50. That's the way it should work!

I love it, love it love it! Maybe it's the recession, maybe it's a way to fire-sale to us smaller budget folk. Some kind of strategy to make money off old software sounds good to me. I think it's brilliant. If Industrial Light and Magic needs that latest filter, let them pay for it. Otherwise, don't leave me in the dust, I've got $50.

Painting With A Maulstick

2010-08-19T23:39:00.000-07:00

I'm painting again. I know! When I'm painting, it draws me into a love affair inserting itself as meaning in life. I'd been playing a couple months before this with ink on paper, kicking ideas around, knowing inevitably I need to switch to paint.

When I got the paints out, I realized I might need to "warm up" with a study. I chose a doozy. I've really been appreciating the architectural details of architect Louis Sullivan. He drew from classical decoration, influenced by the likes of Mucha and the Art Nouveau movement, and ramped everything up into a tasty, king unicorn temple wall, swirling 3d ecstasy. I thought, "I want that." That's what studies are for. By time I finish this piece, I'll be well warmed up for the much more challenging paintings I'm intending on doing. The plan being, to never stop painting from here on out. (Death do us part, until some young, red-haired digital idea entices me.)

For Christmas, I gifted myself with some new audio-technica headphones and a tutorial dvd set by master painter Donato. I met Donato at Comic Con San Diego back in 2008. He's very open with his techniques and like me, works sitting down at a drafting type table. He also uses a maulstick. Historically (like Rembrandt historically), a maulstick was a stick maybe 18" long with a padded end. Probably cotton or cloth bunched in a ball covered in soft leather and tied off on the end of the stick. The padded end would rest against a dry part of your painting held in your left hand while your right hand could rest on the stick and paint over wetter areas without smudging. Donato had one that was hinged at the top of his drafting table that appeared to work quite well.

Doing some home renovation, I had some oak laying around, got out the router and made myself a first class maulstick with adjustable height. It eases the process so much, I wouldn't paint without it now. I've completed in 2 weeks what it used to take two months for me to do. Although, I'm finding much more available time to paint in the new house with new studio. After work, late in the evening and early in the morning. I'm about 15hrs into this 30hr piece.

Um. OK. Perhaps the alterior motive here was to publicly prove I'm painting and give some snaps of my studio. Done.

Big Lake Arizona: Easy

2010-07-29T23:36:00.000-07:00

You've got to start your own family traditions in life. You've got to find your own favorite places.

I thought when I moved to Arizona I had left behind the mossy, wet, boggy, lake filled land of Northern Wisconsin I had vacationed to in youth with mom and dad. I thought I had left behind the pristine Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota and Canada I'd taken canoe camping trips to over the years totaling 7 weeks in that rugged wilderness. I thought I had to travel days to get to wide grassy alpine valleys with herds of elk and Ponderosa Pine and Aspen topped mountains like I had camped in Eastern Oregon. I thought I had to be in Vail Colorado to see a mountain sheep strut choppily across the road. I thought I had to be on Isle Royale in Lake Superior I backpacked solo 20yrs ago to hear wolves chanting yowls late at night. All of these places are miraculously summed up in the Eastern White Mountains of Arizona; the areas surrounding the towns of Eager, Showlow, Pinetop and Greer.

I'm still in disbelief. For ten years I've traveled through the western segment of the White Mountains through areas like Payson, Prescott and Jerome. I'd describe those forests as arid pine. Widely spaced white pines with few water features. At the same latitude in New Mexico north of Silver City along the Gila river: arid pine.

I and Jane's mission was to explore. Our long range plan, once we finish with our house, is to save and start building a cabin in the mountains. Somewhere close that we can take weekend trips to during the hot summer here. That paradise studio cabin writers and artists wish for. For us desert dwellers, a high temp of 70 and low of 50 degrees was paradise.

We took a chance on group camping at Big Lake. When you don't know an area, you need to start somewhere. The campsites were widespread, we had a lake view, 10 pm quiet time, ice and firewood at the harbor store, toilet facilities, and if we wanted, hot showers at the special 'gated community' campground. Most people were out to fish. It's only trout in this lake. Apache, Lake, Cutthroat Trout. I won't bore you with all the wildlife I saw but I did see an amanita muscaria mushroom whose top must have been 10 inches in diameter. I thought it was a stranded red frisbee from afar.

I think we may have the only Toyota Scion that ever made the trip to this lake. 15 miles of gravel road. Well maintained road you don't need 4WD for (chuckles inwardly.) Everyone had giant diesel pickups or hardier SUV's. On the drive home, we could gauge how close we were to civilization by how many sedans we spotted.

Anyway, it was great fun and really easy camping. Lot's of open space for the dogs to run around, great facilities but lot's of rain. Be prepared for that if you go this time of year, it pretty much rains everyday (never bought firewood in my life, had to this time, everything in the woods was soaked to the bone.) Big brilliant thunderstorms that creep up on the 9000 ft altitude quickly. My most magical moment was late at night in the field near our campsite, full moon glowing behind the clouds so I could just make out my dogs frolicking silhouettes and the strobe-light lightening of a passing thunderstorm periodically lighting up everything like day.

Just a note: my 100th blog since 11/20/06

Spillapalooza Tucson

2010-07-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

Gulf Disaster Benefit Concert, August 1st, 5pm, The Hut, Tucson Arizona

I like to volunteer once in a while. Last year was branding the Tucson Historic Preservation Society. Demion Clinco is a powerhouse of Tucson action and I'd do anything to help him out. Good people.

When friend Kevin Henderson of the Swigs stopped by one June night over some drinkies, we were kicking around the lack of action happening over the Gulf Disaster. At that point the direness of the situation hadn't quite sunk into public awareness. Everyone was holding their breath that the 'junk load' or whatever was going to stop marine armageddon.

Then the brainstorm began in true Tucson grassroots style. Make a benefit concert. Why hadn't anyone done it yet? Turns out, probably through some kind of global Gaia brainwave we weren't the only ones to come up with the name. But hey, it's all about the cause isn't it. I started working on graphics, got a logo, put up a website, made a web ad banner. That's what I do. Mine was the easy part. The rest was all Kevin.

Kevin found someone to benefit. The Center For Biological Diversity. A nation-wide organization, that started in Tucson! They aren't the ones that go out and put banners on stuff to get on TV. These are the guys with lawyers that fight environmental issues in the courts and they have a burning need to stop offshore oil drilling pronto.

Then Kevin found a friendly venue, The Hut, that would donate all proceeds. Then he tied down some great Tucson talent to volunteer their music for the occasion. Al Perry, The Swigs, Fish Karma and the Love Generation, Loren Dirckes and Gila Bend, The Modeens, The El Camino Royales, The Wayback Machine, The Dusty Buskers, The Fisters, The Possibles, Vanessa Lundon, Aaron Gilmartin.

So, you're going to be there right! Should be lots of fun on 4th Avenue for a great cause. Honestly, watching Kevin during this process, I think he has a second career in activism. We can probably see more of this from him in the future.

Comfortable With Infinity

2010-07-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

Is there a god? Dunno. Is there not a god? Dunno. Those things I can't observe I don't sweat about. But please, if you all become atheists and stop fighting about god, go do that. I'm sure you'll find something else to fight about anyway. That's what you do.

I'm sure about infinity. Why aren't you? You don't have to get all stoned and metaphysical n' shit and go do peyote in a sweat hut to see it. Look at anything, look at a tree. The leaves with their thousands of microscopic mouths opening and closing to exchange gases. Cellular systems organizing into energy collectors, structural cellulose tube structures of branches that double as conveyor belts of energy. Aging bark peeling off years of layers of dead outer growth one cell thick at a time. Roots feeling around the soil with miniscule tendrals wrapping around pebbles looking for pockets of moisture and doubling as surface area anchors forming an organic foundation that supports a multiple ton above ground structure.

In such detail adding the time element and the fluid dynamics of wind, the heat transfer of day and night. Think about the shape of the air around the tree. The vacuum it makes in space. Incredibly detailed. Fathomless infinity. And it's just a tree.

In kindergarten terms, as large or as small as we look, there is no end. Right in front of you. Proof. It's you and you are a part of it all. You and I are infinity. Not just another pattern, a part of the whole IT.

The awe and power can be frightening. Now I just have to get comfortable with that idea.

The Original Art Act

2010-06-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

What is foreign, is interesting. Recently read Cory Doctorow's "Craphound" where a technologically advanced alien race visits Earth and trades important technology like weather control units and artificial photosynthesis chemistry for basically yard sale finds of historic Americana like cowboy related antiques, Betty Boop coffee mugs, abandoned shopping malls, and defunct amusement parks. Reminded me of Bruce Sterling's aliens in "Schismatrix Plus" who upon encountering humans were all business. The main thing they wanted from us was art. Advanced aliens don't want our technology, only the thing that makes us unique. Jane reminds me this is a common theme in historic science fiction.

This is a common theme in humanity also. Any advanced civilization "discovering" a more primitive one isn't all that interested in their technology. Wood and stone spears are no treasure to a civilization that has harnessed steam power and metal casting. Discoverers are interested in their art or culture. Art and culture is the shadow DNA of people. Helps us understand how consciousness defines the cold, vast universe and reinforces our own definition of it. Comfort. Comfortable and I'd say beautiful too.

That original art act is the idea I'm after. The one that happens in the caves of Lascaux. The one that is seen in the artwork of Aboriginals in Australia and the more refined examples in the plains and Southwest Indian artwork in America. Simple stick-like figures of tree, man, bison, hunting spear, moon, stars, sun. These are examples of the original art act. Looking at the environment and reproducing it in graphic form.

I love those wood carvings of the Northwest Indians. Obvious influence from Polynesia. I love the characters of the Mississippi valley Indians but I see Central and South American influence ala Mayans and Aztecs. Sequestered, like the Aboriginals who had their own undiscovered continent for so long, were the Indians of plains and Southwest in America. The same primitive characters on pottery, textiles and on hides brought to a higher level of graphic perfection. Beyond that, an abstract language of geometric shapes arose. Original is the key word I'm going for here. I'm not the only one that considers this valuable i.e. the Ute Navajo chiefs blanket found in 2009 worth half a million dollars composed of black and white stripes.

iEmbellish

2010-04-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

Thought games. That's what Einstein called them. I'll call them imagination games. Walter Mitty wanted to live other lives. I don't. I just wish it were all a little more interesting.

A little game I've played since I was a kid is to gaze upon an everyday object and project decoration onto it. With my mind! Wooo, look out! Detour around the dangerous boredom. Bordering a door in a waiting room, on the tile wall above the bathtub or the side of a mundane building. What if these ordinary objects were completely covered in the most ornate, detailed and perhaps bejeweled surface? In an audience, listening to perhaps not the most interesting speaker, rays of iridescent designs may start animating out of their head. Not particularly amused with modernist / minimalist architecture, somehow I impress upon the visual vacuum some soul. Not meaning, just some decoration. A little more experience in my experience please! Shake me out of the Zen-like trance of gray existential being with floor to ceiling glass windows and fluorescent lighting. I'm not always unit P4752.

So then I started thinking, this little game could be a sci-fi app of the future. You know the one where we wear our own personal computers (cell phones) and access the world we walk through using video goggles (already here.) Augmented reality. So my app is called iEmbellish. Choose a texture, choose a historic genre, choose a favorite painter and the whole world is rendered to look like that through your goggles. Decorative overlay. Ahh, all the cars and skyscrapers are the same brushed Delorean stainless steel delicately etched in arabesques of Persian fractal tiled goodness. Or gold leaf Baroque floral motif and light blue satin everything and people rendered in moody rich dark Dutch master colors. Perhaps a nightmarish Van Gogh world with sidewalks rendered in thick blobs of yellow uhg. The world rendered ala Mondrian, an infinite plane of grid and colored squares. Perhaps you render all the buildings and clothing around you to match a different time period. Time travel now! Perhaps spoken words are translated into Shakespearean prose.

How completely different our experiences are, and how completely different people may become if they walk in a world of their own making.

Die Antwoord - NSFW

2010-03-09T22:04:00.000-08:00

Weird thing is I chickened out writing this two weeks ago when it was cutting edge. But it's stuck with me. Really bad. I'm obligated now. I'm not supposed to like it. A little history: "Ninja" does rap music in Cape Town South Africa for the last ten years, does a number of rebirths and finds his "Zef" or "Zen" self and creates Die Antwoord (The Answer) band that skits along through 2009 until a Feb 3rd 2010 entry on Boing Boing. THEN comes the Puma ads, then comes the contract with Sony, then comes EMI (largest concert promoter in the world) to schedule a European and American tour. They are coming.

Are they a joke via Ali G? Kind of. Are they a parody of 80's electronica, house music, video games? Sort of. Are they pornographic? Yes, and every third word is fuckin'. And, what the fuck are they saying? ...most of the time. Dutch, French, uhh? There is no review of them that has even attempted at interpreting where this dialect comes from. I love the language barrier like I love "Fever Ray," formerly "The Knife." Are they downplaying their skills? Yes. There is more here than meets the marketing. DJ "Hi Tech" has more than a pee cee cumpooter that he makes next level beats on, and who lives with his granny. Sex-Pot "Yo-Landi" is more than the childhood neighbor across the street. Do I care?

What is a real letdown is the change on their website of the "W - Vogue" magazine level color photography that said "white trash South African." Now it's arty? DieAntwoord

The music stands. Signature dis piece "Jou Ma Poes In 'N Fishpaste Jar," the ultimate South African dis unless you're a friend, "your mom's pussy in a fishpaste jar." The songs range from 80's house music, 90's P-Diddy R&B, raw Cape Town rap, Pass the Dutchie, karate film spy clips, video game samples, gansta anthems, Russian drinking dirges, anime school-girl backup singing, hyperbolic beat-box and the epic "Beat Boy" multi-scene porno, LSD trip. Ninja jumps his weiner up and down in his "Dark Side of the Moon" boxers in that video. And, I just want to have sex with her hair (among other things.) It's just so cool.

Poised to look naive, postured as vicious, I can't deny I just like it.

More educated review: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7766-die-antwoord/

Premium from Patterntology! Download the whole album for yourself (offered free earlier): http://www.patterntology.com/Die Antwoord - $O$.zip

That's some energy:

Taxijam presents Die Antwoord from taxijam on Vimeo.

Psionic Powers

2010-02-03T20:45:00.000-08:00

Total geek. Standing in front of the role playing game manuals at the used book store. Then... sitting on the ground in front of the stacks paging through some. And... avoiding eye contact with anyone. I just love these things. I don't play role playing games. I just love the manuals to monsters, wizards and the sort. Don't turn your nose up. There is a diaper-load of imagination that goes into these games. Here's a description of a prestige character you can play in Dungeons and Dragons:

Alienist
"Ah––it all becomes clearer now. I can see... I can see!"
Alienists deal with powers and entities from terrifyingly remote reaches of space and time. For them, magical power is the triumph of the mind over the rude boundaries of dimension, distance, and often, sanity. With knowledge and determination, they pierce the barrier at the edge of time itself. In the Far Realm, outside of time, Herculean minds drift, absorbed in the contemplations of madness. Unspeakable beings whisper terrifying secrets to those who dare communication. These secrets were not meant for mortals, but the alienist plunges into abysses of chaos and entropy that would blast a weaker mind.

Role playing games are collective stories written by players and a healthy dose of the dice. These manuals are guides to imaginary worlds yet to be written. As an early teen, I gathered together the sickly and bookish boys of the neighborhood to play a few games of D & D. Never got past, "A rotting stench emanates from the wet dungeon walls. 3 trolls attack you." Even then, I was more interested in the illustrations and descriptions of magical beasts in the manuals than actual play.

In my recent nostalgia under the guise of anthropological research, I've found some points of fascination. Magic, mind you, the type wizards use, are powers over aspects of the physical world. Summoning fire, creating storms, wielding lightening bolts. Psionic powers aren't magic like this at all. No no no. Psionic powers originate from inside the mind itself. You see, the mind, through visualization techniques, taps into a dimension of psi energy. Control of psi energy can be powerful enough to effect the real world.

Ho ho. This got me going. Magical techniques depending on ones own strength of visualization. How does one do this? I hit the internet. A basic exercise is the energy ball. Moving your hands with palms facing each other as if molding or creating a ball. Concentrate and perhaps you will start to feel some warmth emanating from the ball. : ) Moving on, this type of collected 'psi' energy can be programmed. Yes, like a robot or a software routine. This is called a "construct." Constructs can be simple like placing one outside your window and programming it to make your elbow itch if someone walks by. Constructs can be a shield that surrounds your body. Constructs can also be programmed like living beings that seek out places or people or things in the ether.

Breaking psionic power down to it's bare logic, control over your life originates in the mind. Psi energy is brain. Visualization (imagination) is an obvious tool of thinking. Really, this is like some kind of metaphorical folklore of thinking. Fascinating!

Run of the mill telekinesis, ha! Get your Latin book out because there is an encyclopedia of things you can have psionic power over: LINK

The believing practitioners also want you to see this: LINK

Studio (Command Center) Tour

2010-01-29T22:56:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I blogged. •••It's been busy••• Took 11 full days over 3 weeks to move and then renovation started. Knocking out walls, building walls, putting in doors, wiring sockets, wiring switches, wiring outlets. When I take some good photos, I'll blog about what I've done to the new house over roughly 6 weeks.

One of my thoughts was that I could take 'snaps' of my paintings and drawings as they progress. Then I thought of doing that with a webcam. I started testing out the webcam and decided to do a little video of my studio. The audio slips up when I'm talking about the drywall patch that used to be a closet opening. My bad, it's a 12' x 15' room.

Lost Love: The Saddest Music

2009-11-27T20:28:00.000-08:00

Remember mix tapes? I do. Something friends did for friends before file sharing and the 21st Century copyright laws hysteria. Back when you bought an album and let friends record it on their "tape to tape" boom box? You'd get really creative with the cover art n' shit. I have hand made tape inserts given to me by friends of meticulously cut-out and glued together porn mag pics, glitter, photocopied hand drawn art, bark (yeah tree bark worked for that acoustic guitar album) and christmas wrapping paper. It used to be the gift that meant a lot because it took some thought and enterprise to produce. Now it's a crime.

My mix tape is called, "Lost Love." My greatest collection of sad songs I've accumulated in my long sad life. : ) Perhaps trite and dated, perhaps too classical, perhaps too EMO, perhaps too wall of sound, I don't care. I'm too spun-out into the cosmos of unhappiness and despair to notice and I'm happy with that. I love when I'm there. It touches me deeply. You feel it like nothing else when you are feeling low.

There are actually 4 parts to the mix. Lament, anger, sadness, and rebound. The penultimate breakup story. My best shot at a concept. I just couldn't make an album of sadness and end it with sadness. It never does. The demarcations are revealed in the cover art. Please, put away the razor blades until you hear the whole thing through because, my sensitive soul-mate, we all are creatures of love and refuse to be destroyed by it.

Download the saddest bunch of music you've ever heard: HERE

Space Gothic

2009-11-25T22:33:00.000-08:00

Getting back to basics is always fun. Adobe Illustrator is like working in the lab for a designer. All the powers of symmetry, rotation, and duplication at your fingertips. I'm not talking about photo-realistic vector work, just primitive patterntology. Working in black in white is bliss because there is no leaning on photo technique, just shape and pattern. In vector form, I can use these designs most anywhere. I've been trying to bridge this gap between Gothic style and a future vision I had in my head for a long time. I'll call it, "Space Gothic."

Starting by tracing some architectural details, I quickly lost that mode and started reducing things to geometric shapes and introducing my own. When you study historic design closely, you can learn the logic of how they built things. Soon, I had the basics down and just started inventing. For the first time, I played with negative space and the lines it can create. Western architectural geometry isn't too difficult: squares, octagons, triangles and hexagons. Eastern geometry is more complicated.

The Persians were very advanced in the decorative arena. Their design model reflected their mathematics so closely that the shapes found in their tile work have fractal possibilities much like the Mandelbrot set. I've played with these shapes but don't understand the scaling. I'm never unimpressed with this work especially when curves are introduced. Next project!

Living In New House!

2009-11-25T20:47:00.000-08:00

Just a note that yes, I am in my new house. Not totally moved yet. Thanksgiving weekend will still involve moving stuff. My to-do list is growing. Demolition, construction, repairs, paperwork... No time for pictures yet but I took some way back in July of our weird, close to work, at the edge of industry, with an observation deck house: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=santarita&w=8357530%40N06

Is Blobject Dead?

2009-10-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

Blobject, part millenial malaise, part pop-culture futurism, and mostly computer aided prototyping, we hardly knew ye. What is a blobject? It's roundish, fluid, a reductionist version, might fit the hand better, made of plastic in most cases and certainly suggests the future. Target features a lot of this sort of thing in lamps, furniture, translucent vases, kitchen utensils. Saw the original iMac? That's a blobject.

Y2K might have scared you, but there were a lot of safe, roundish, and organic looking things that would ease the passage you could buy. You could outfit yourself for life on the space station, your next home. Did I say translucent, neon colored and plastic? Good.

Looking at nature for inspiration is nothing new. Organics in design makes sense. We are DNA. Ergonomics works and looks good. In the case of the blobject, history happens. What happened was the advent of mathematically perfect Bézier curves achievable in design programs in the last couple decades. Instead of carving a perfectly aerodynamic form in modeling clay, a computer program could hit that perfect curve with infinite accuracy in a second. Introduce this to 3D CAD programs, add the "less is more" modernist aesthetic, and you've got a design movement. Costs less, anyone can make one. History happens.

Many have tried to take credit for being the first (again) to be inspired by nature, and many have tried to take credit for the tools that made this new design possible. Some were the first to popularize them.

Karim Rashid has certianly embodied the blobject in the same way Alexander Calder took his own design theory and made furniture, knives, forks, spoons, and pretty much everything around him a "Calder" object. Rashid does interiors, wall coverings, chess pieces, chairs, drinking glasses, you name it. More fashion for fashion sake, his work doesn't delve too deeply into simplifying function but suggests it a lot. He suggests future.

Ross Lovegrove or "Captain Organic," is inspired by bone structure. Convinced that the organic in design will change the world, his efforts span the gamut of table lights (photo at top), one piece stair cases and a concept of hanging your car on a sidewalk pole to cut down on parking space. I'm awed by his passionate love for nature but after hearing the somewhat horrific description of producing and installing his staircase project, am not convinced organic is better in construction. Nor do I see the power of the organic shape having any relevance at all to his parking idea other than the cars are teardrop shaped.

Visionary science fiction author, Bruce Sterling, saw the propaganda power of design and started the "Viridian" design movement. Basically, design of human tools and objects based on nature. He even claimed something along the lines of, "The blobject will take over the world." His thinking was that if you harnessed the imagination of designers, you could change the world. At the end of Viridian, Bruce claimed, "The world has moved on to something different."

Anish Kapoor. You might know his Chicago Millennium Park sculpture, "Cloud Gate," or more commonly known as, "The Bean." His blobjects are just blobjects. Just the future feeling. The pure math of the curve and the perfection of making that large scale. This is the love of the future without propaganda, without promises or expectations on the viewer. It's just art and it's beautiful. Sitting in Millennium Park.... perfect. When his sculpture looks old fashioned, then we'll know we are in the future.

Much to the frustration of scientists, the term organic is abused and can't be reduced to a single aesthetic. Fluid design is a more appropriate definition. The blobject was a baby step in the direction of what is to come. We are moving on. Like large, colorful, geometric designs of the 60's that suggested a future. Blobjects did a pop-culture-future-spoon-feed. Visualizing data is more complex these days and it's effecting design. It doesn't have symmetry, it's dense and it resembles nature more because we are nature. Modernism sought an artificial world, postmodernism broke it down, now is the time to put it back together. Now we can be honest with ourselves. Maybe now we can see we are nature.

Augmented Reality

2009-10-19T23:06:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I wrote a science fiction story where real locations with real people would interact with virtual people that were accessing the space remotely. Amazingly, we have the tools to do it now. This is one of the most exciting things going on with internet, wireless, and hand-held tech. Why, in my opinion? Because it's easy, incredibly useful and everyone has a cell phone. It will change the world. Still in it's infancy, here's how:

Cell phones such as the iPhone 3gs have built in GPS, the kind that reads signals directly from satellites to tell your position on Earth's surface. The iPhone also has a little known magnetometer, or compass built in. Swing the hand that is holding the phone around quickly, it knows which way you are facing. Very quickly.
Cell phones have built in cameras. You hold the phone up in front of you and you get a live camera image like a video camera.
Cell phones accept video goggles. Video goggles, most resembling sunglasses, some wireless via Bluetooth, overlay what is on your phone's screen with reality. Video goggles also have tiny cameras that can replace the phone camera.
Cell phones interact with the 3G internet network.

The possibilities of this simple combination are endless. Enhanced night vision comes to mind, but here's some things that are happening now, not necessarily with goggles:

Only on the Android phone in the Netherlands, SPRXmobile has created a travel app called "Layer" allowing users to tag points of interest at their actual location. Much like "layers" in Google Earth, photos, comments, etc appear in your line of vision if you hold up your phone in that direction. They are developing for iPhone. I imagine graffiti on buildings, or notes posted on restaurant front doors left by past patrons saying what to order, or to run away.

"Fairy Trails" , out for a few months now, by Freeverse, a maker of many fine iPhone apps, has a game where you walk around with your phone and catch fairies planted in the environment around you. I can only imagine this expanding to role playing or first person shooter games. Brace yourself for bands of goggled kids running around shooting imaginary foes in the mall.

A very exciting use of augmented reality is adaptation of the 2D bar code. You've seen these on some products you've bought. The more info given, the smaller the squares get in the design. For instance, my drivers license has a bar code that includes all the information on my card. Kimberly Spreen at Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, uses 2D bar code on playing cards to animate a virtual pet game. This could create augmented experiences for printed matter: magazines, brochures, newspapers, and cereal boxes. I imagine you could put a 2D bar code on your building that would trigger an augmented experience for cell phone users. Here's a demonstration of Kimberly's amazing work:

It's not too hard to see what is coming from this. Imagine most people having these video enabled digital sunglasses on. Imagine a virtual world, like Second Life , where augmented reality is already being used, that interfaces with the real world. You could have a real world meeting with virtual avatars attending. Everyone wearing goggles, remote participants would occupy real chairs in your conference room. Really exciting, probably years off in the future, but I love the idea of having a friend appear in front of me even though it's just a phone call.

What Am I Missing?

2009-10-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

When Christopher Columbus hit the Americas, he anchored his ships off shore and landed a few rowboats on the beach. Natives that met them on the beach wondered where they had come from. Columbus and his crew pointed out to sea at the large wooden vessels that brought them across the ocean. Curiously, the natives saw no ships, only open ocean. Given the task, because he was known as a 'seer', the shaman of the tribe spent long hours staring out to sea to try to see the ships. After apparently days, he eventually saw the ships and through his coaxing influence on the tribe, was able to get other natives to see the ships also. Heard this story? The going idea is that they couldn't see the ships because ships were so far from the natives concept of what was real, their minds rejected the image completely. Some kind of survival mechanism.

(Interesting concept, but there is no proof this actually happened, and is probably an exaggeration of log entries by Captain James Cook, not Columbus, that talked about natives not having fear of his ship while most newly contacted humans did.)

Still, an interesting concept.

I'm a great fan of "Where's Waldo?" and the Sunday comics section, "Find Six Differences Between These Two Pictures." Being a veteran of this "What's Different?" game, I've noticed that while searching for a difference I almost always get a strange feeling about a section of the picture before I find the specific difference. But I know it's there. Does this mean some part of my mind saw the difference before my conscious mind did? How many times a day do I get 'feelings' about something I see? Would I remember? Would I even notice if I wasn't told there was something to find in the first place? How much of my daily focus doesn't allow for anything else?

Watch this video:

Apparently advertising takes advantage of this. Skulls and naked women airbrushed into ice cubes of some alcoholic drink. Mostly a forgotten issue in the media, me wonders if this isn't still going on. I remember a commercial break during a news cast just before the Gulf War. A split second of jet fighters flying maneuvers in-between commercials happened. A half second or less. I thought, "What the hell is that?" A mistake of the master controller at NBC? No jet fighter footage appeared in the rest of the broadcast so it wasn't an already cued tape. Four days later, we were at war. Not saying anything, just reporting.

So, what am I really seeing? How much control do I have over these subliminal images? They must be everywhere. Very few are intentional, most unintentional. All the time you have your eyes open. Do I have a bad day if I see more graffiti and trash, and have no idea why? Is this why people are obsessed with keeping a clean car? Your eyes aren't the video camera you thought they were, but there is a lot that's being recorded you aren't aware of.

Maybe that's why your dreams are so strange.

Levi van Veluw

2009-10-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

You get extra points if you make an old thing new. You get extra points if you make a new thing newer. You get extra-extra points if you make a new thing and do new stuff with it.

Extra-extra points go to Levi van Veluw.

I'm totally into this concept of sculpture, performance moments that can only be captured on film. If I were a photographer, it would all be about creating the next scene that would tell the whole story. Realize the character, find the motivation in the pose, create a backdrop, find the props, find the costume, do some makeup, adjust the lighting and walla... you have one frame of a film. That frame can define an entire plot if it's good enough. Good enough: an expression or motion that is out of control and unexpected. Photographers, spare me your allusions to genre, spare me the after effects and processing. Hollywood baby! Hollywood! Be your own producer.

But I'm getting off topic from Levi, who, decided to turn his head into a sculpture. Photography for him is just a delivery device. Sticking to laws of consistency required in modern art, it's the same three-quarter pose every time. Perhaps an alienated, and remote pose. Perhaps it's gray and un-biased. Like a mannequin. I might be reading too far, but I see a little victimization in the eyes (when you can see them) along the lines of, "the senses, they overwhelm me."

I don't think this is about Levi and how he treats himself. I think these are statements on humanity and his head became the most convenient canvas to work with. The simplicity is humbling, and the graphic impact is astounding. It's a breath of fresh air to see an artist doing something so conceptual without ignoring the fact that the image MUST be awe-inspiring.

The hair pieces caught my eye first. I love an eyeless figure for some reason but a hair covered face brings up Cousin It, Chewbacca. Unlike those lovable characters, Levi's hair is oiled and greasy and pasted on the face like a trap. There seems to be a suffacation possible, or perhaps this is a mummification process.

Turning your head into a landscape in genius. Every man is an island, we are our environment, we are our own ecosystem, we have our own seasons. Not to mention allusions to Robert Blake and the Green Man.

I think it was 5th grade when I witnessed a classmate write on himself with ballpoint pen, chewing the end of it so ink stained his lips and his tongue turned blue. I was fascinated. The act seemed to break all bounds of social acceptance and challenged the adult world. My classmates ignored his behavior like he was some homeless crazy. If Levi is doing things to himself, sometimes, I'm beginning to see where this is coming from.

Media is so primitive, but the ideas flow even without a proper vehicle. Turning into an element or being transformed by nature is so hard to illustrate but here he does it with the ease of a magician. Transmogrification, post human avatar skinning, or a bunch of glue and chips of wood pain-stakingly formed to the face, the effect is the same and we humans use what we have to make it work.

There is so much more. Candy is too good to be true. Do check out the work: Levi Van Veluw

Codex Seraphinianus

2009-09-24T22:47:00.000-07:00

I've been on the hunt for this book for easily ten years.

I have a special place in my soul for mysterious objects. The perfect cube of advanced metal alloy found hundreds of feet beneath the Earths' surface embedded in a layer of coal comes to mind. There is something about no explanation that brings more focus and analyzation to a subject than it may or may not deserve. For me, it's like a virus. The challenge of finding, not necessarily, a complete answer, but something close will plunge me into a delightful referential mania.

The Codex Seraphinianus, written (drawn) by Italian artist-designer-architect Luigi Serafini, is a hard book to find. Published in 1978, the original 370 page volume, is bound in black satin with embossed silver lettering and a color 'paste down' graphic on the cover. The pages are printed on handmade Italian paper. The original 5000 can go from anywhere between $400 to $13,000. Small runs, in later years were paperback and go for $200-$700. All the pages are hand drawn in what looks like ink and gouche. Completed in 30 months, he was producing a page every 2.5 days.

Over the last ten years, scans of the pages available on the web have grown gradually. My curiosity grew exponentially the more I saw. The book appears to be a natural history encyclopedia of the geology, physics, molecular structure, plant life, microscopic life, and animal life of a different planet. A planet not much unlike ours. It is written in an unknown language. The glyphs of this alphabet have challenged a number of code breakers to no avail even though there is an illustration that appears to show the author standing next to a 7ft Rosetta Stone type object with a number of symbol conventions displayed on it. There is A LOT of writing in this book. Enough writing that my ideas of it being jibberish faded away quickly. There is also enough cadence to the sentence length and structure that I'm sure there is meaning behind those symbols. Still a mystery. Luigi is still alive, and apparently he's not talking.

The illustrations in this book are so fantastical, carefully detailed, and soberly scientific, I began to wonder if Luigi had some kind of alien connection or other dimensional portal he was accessing. Perhaps he was visiting another world and journaling ala Darwin. Until recently. Somehow, perhaps because of lapse copyright, the entire book has been scanned. There is another half of the book that is an obvious commentary on human existence. Pollution, out of control industry, war and other general human foolishness is gaffed. Serafini also takes advantage of our captive audience by introducing his whimsical architecture ideas and 'green' Rube Goldberg-like inventions. Now the mystery is not as deep for me. The human motivation is obvious: 60's utopian rainbow subjects and anti-war political statements, though it does not detract from the masterpiece of the entire work. Herculean in achievement and truly epic in its' consistency, it's hard for me to criticize this piece of art in the least.

BUT, if I were to create such a work, I might take strategic advantage of not explaining too much. I might keep it mysterious. Like the Voynich manuscript. I might bury it deep in the ground so future generations, upon discovering it, could ponder its' unexplainable features. It's hard to make something unexplainable. It's hard to make a mysterious object.

If you like this stuff, you might also like Walmor Corréa.

Negative Space

2009-09-22T21:58:00.001-07:00

Ain't life grand? My goodness what a complete gift to be alive and have senses. The miracle of the mind is fathomless. Those in-between times when it's just you and the universe, and you look down at the raindrops hitting the sidewalk pushing a piece of broken leaf, it's only your moment, like you're the first person to witness a bloody crime scene. Personal, just you and it, like death.

I was driving and my vision opened up as if I were looking from behind me. I saw the road, I saw the hills around, I saw my arms, I saw the dashboard. I studied the shadow of the car on the road and realized the position of the sun and then I was outside the car watching it move along and inside the car watching my hands move the steering wheel a the same time. So simple. Moments of inconsequence to anyone else, moments I can grab by the collar and shake some meaning out of.

Negative space has been on my mind. The shape of air around a pine tree. Hugging every needle to it's thousand pores. Slipping under flaking bark with razor sharp exactness. Pushing into every microscopic crack of the splintered stump of a broken off branch.

How many plants are in a square yard? How many blades of grass? How many perfect circular holes are punched in the imaginary surface of the earth? How many stones float beneath my feet suspended like clouds in solid earth? It all seems familiar. So simple.

My Little House: Not a Done Deal Yet

2009-09-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

I think I get along ok, in my little way. Little is the way I like it. Some may question my motives, but none can question my happiness. It's hard to talk to me sometimes. I try my best to use eyebrow semaphore to communicate, "Are you about to bore me? You better think it through a bit before the jowls start flapping." Usually fails. Public knowledge of me buying a house opened me up to all kinds of social angles, invited and not. And it's FASCINATING. You homeowners all have a story, and let me tell you... I wouldn't write it down. Most amounts to either bragging or fear. I know, I know, there is so much mystery, tricks of the trade, possible disasters, putting in track lights tripled your house value, people you know got a mansion for pennies...

Because your eyebrow kung fu has no power over my blog, let me bore YOU for a bit:

I'm buying a house at 50% of the appraised value of my neighbors (only 2 neighbors.) I'm 10 minutes bike ride from work, I have 1500 sq ft with 16ft ceilings, and an observation deck. The property is urban but fenced and walled on all sides including secure parking. A fortress. The house has 3 bedrooms and 2 full baths. New kitchen cabinets. It's adjacent to an abandoned industrial area, perfect for dog walking that will eventually become a "greenway" paved bike trail.

After investigation, the history of this strange box-like house revealed itself. It was first built to be an industrial 4 car garage. Concrete pad out front, ramped concrete that meets the front of house, brick block on 3 sides, pillars in the front, and a scissor-truss roof that is totally self supported (I could take out all the interior walls if I wanted.) At some point, it was walled in and divided into rooms. Looks like a house. Smells like a house. Was a garage!

It was a garage for the neighbors who at one point subdivided their lot, made it a house and gave it to a relative. As a result, the water supply is shared from the neighbor. The house, on the market in various forms for 2 yrs (no one normal wants this house), now being sold to an outside buyer, needs it's own water supply. That water supply will cost 20K. 200ft of trenching required.

Now, all inspections, appraisals and agreements are done. We are just waiting for the water issue to be scheduled so we can get a closing date. We are in limbo. 7 weeks. Limbo hurts. We've packed 100 boxes. We can't start projects... we can't do anything really until we move. We spend a lot of time thinking of how we will remodel the house. I spend a lot of time living there in my brain.

Rooms will be connected for a giant studio, skylights in kitchen and studio, deck will become an Arizona room, air conditioning installed, water harvesting tank will be installed (900 gallons per inch of rain,) tiled floors will be poured over with stained concrete, etc.

Surprises:
Buying a house is tedious and for the most part boring.
My mate Jane, a lover all things antique, is in love with an 80's stucco covered box.
My mate Jane talked today about putting in a weather station and a blaze orange wind sock on the roof.
My mortgage will be lower then rent I payed 20 yrs ago.

Deities and Demons: the extended dance mix

2009-09-04T21:54:00.000-07:00

I've received a number of compliments on the Deities and Demons series. All digital artwork mind you, although the thought has occurred to me to paint these things. I was working on and off this summer on an angel series. Interest trailed off a bit, but not before I knocked off 4 nice new characters, rounding the collection off to an even ten. So, I've simply added them to the demons mix. Enjoy!

Art I Like

2009-08-25T20:26:00.000-07:00

I can't stop thinking about paint. "New house... new studio.... come to me..." Painting (the type that requires skill) is alive and well. Are art schools still teaching it? Last couple weeks I've been pouring over painting blogs and getting a good taste of the conversations going on via canvas. The following are not necessarily new painters, but my favorites:

I've never been a huge fan of pop images, but I can't get this out of my mind. A vision of Charlie Brown on acid. The surface somewhat Pixar, the glow, the eminations, and the sudden realization of death are stirring something embedded in my spine. The vibrations of paper comics evoking an evil being. I'm still not brave enough to make it a desktop, but I keep googling it. Ron English has been around a while lending us sadistic versions of childrens cartoon icons although thats not all he lampoons. You might have seen his Abraham Obama ala Warhol.

I've followed Mars-1 (Mario Martinez) for a couple years. I was drawn to his sci-fi robots on exotic planets. Now, he doesn't seem tied down to his imagineerings being a place inhabited by things. There is maturing and freedom in his latest work that is more markedly abstract than it is surreal. I've been a fan of this kind of abstraction, one that doesn't need to be flat. He has a consistent focus to create a detailed experience and the process is open enough that each time he goes to canvas, he can add something new, and not get bored. The product is psychedelic but not in a way I've seen before. I like his palette too, it's toned down enough that you can experience the forms more thoroughly. Love it!

Mark Ryden is pretty much the master of the creepy, doll-like, big eyed character. The palette of of hand colored photos, science text book illustration and geography litho 'plates' you might find with a vellum coversheet in an old book. Here again, an artist playing sadistically with childrens book metaphors, some of which creep me out! The kind of creep that makes you keep looking. I especially like his Santa with a gold crown. These paintings tell a kind of story, with mysterious symbols urging you to explore deeper. Idyllic, clean, artificial, there is no portion of the surface that dips into 'expression.' You have to respect this kind of attention to detail.

I'm a sucker for this 70's pin up erotica. Sweet-tender faces in porn poses. Socks! Sexalicious! LOL Lisa Yuskavage hits the genre with all its blur and dreaminess. In the same ballpark as John Currin. Something in the way she does her landscapes reminds me of Frazetta. (included photo excluded) Yet, she also seems torn about the objectification of women in the images as illustrated by some portraits where the model's face is covered pie. Either way, there is no denying the graphic impact and questions that keep arising.

I met Jeremy Bastian at the 2008 Comicon in San Diego. I have two of his prints framed and hanging in my office. Ok, he's not a painter, but I just want show off his work. First edition of his "Cursed Pirate Girl" comic book is available, and he continues to sell portfolios of prints. There seems no end to the characters in his imagination. His dedication to ink seems out of time and makes me continue to wonder how the hell one develops such an antiquated style in the age of silicon.

Waiting for Universe

2009-08-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

I love those unimportant moments in life. Within a busy schedule it can be just walking from the car to house and back, a moments pause on the sidewalk, staring out into the sky at the gas pump, crunching a stone under my shoe in the supermarket parking lot, staring at the scratched and smeared buttons on the elevator, a noisy bird unaware in a tree... the unscheduled breaks. The inbetween times. This is where I go fishing. I throw out the net and wait. Sometimes it happens.

Sometimes a door opens up and a rock becomes an ancient, heavy smoke frozen in solid form. Sometimes the air around me jumps from gas to liquid to the vacuum of space. Sometimes I catch my hand at an angle that makes it appear completely foreign and the memory of owning it blurrily melts back till its mine again. Sometimes gravity pulls me into a vertical awareness reaching the heights of thinning atmosphere miles above and plunges into the aggregate layers beneath my feet filled with roots and stones and pipes and broken chunks of urban past. Is it possible that this piece of paper just transferred a quick history of it's life to me? Energies pulverized wood to such tiny bits, boiled and smashed and bleached and pressed and dried it into a new object with properties totally contrary to tree. Sometimes I'm pushing buttons that manipulate groupings of dots that represent symbols on a flat screen lightbulb.

One Stop Rock Opera

2009-08-15T01:14:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so it's one in the morning and I've been looking through my music collection for a couple hours. Stopping here and there for a longer listen. Started building a nice playlist. Then I hit a land mine I set for myself a couple years ago. This one song I heard when I was like 8 yrs old in St. Louis on K-SHE 95 radio and the dj ALWAYS made the comment, "those are water drums in the intro." Like a black hole it sucked me in. It's so absurdly 'rockin' it had me riding a chrome stallion in outer space jousting asteroids. If there were other songs on the album, does it matter? This song is an epic unto itself. And yes, just after the blog where I proclaimed to be bored with rock. Then again, this might prove my point.

Billy Thorpe is in rocker heaven and his band the Aztecs may very well be too, and no disrespect to the dead but... I'm going to go out on a limb here and defy the music powers. I remember downloading this from some Thorpe fan site anyway. You've just GOT to hear this.

Download Here

Tom Baumgartner

A Sometimes Classical Pussy

2009-08-07T23:29:00.000-07:00

I don't claim to be an expert by any means in classical music or cooking. I created a mean lobster bisque on the first try, and I listen to music with an open mind. But I call it like I hear it. Rock n' Roll, don't you ever get bored? Rocking was never my 'first choice.' Guess that makes me a pussy. Music is about matching a mood but my mood is rarely a bouncy, aggressive, revving of chrome plated rock engine cock. Industrial, noise, groove, lounge, jazz, atonal, electronic, ambient. Something interesting happening here... More specific. Give me more.

Classical? When you listen to enough classical, and I'll ingest the modern as well as the old stuff, a part of you begins to think, "Am I the only one that knows what music is?" Is it possible that 3 minutes doesn't have just have 3 repeating cords, a solo and a bridge section in it? Or maybe just a long noodling section... for the intense listeners. What if the 3 minutes had 10 parts, each distinct from the other, each being a subtle variation on theme, but its' entire composition resembled more of a plot than a repeating tune? A story, finished, solid, and complete. What if it involved 50 highly trained musicians rather than 3 to 4?

Well, sometimes I like to hear that. It's quality, which is lacking in our life. Beauty, kicking ass. Symphonic composers usually appreciate beauty (when not trying to be rock stars) and the dead ones were immersed in a culture of it.

Vivaldi's Winter: Allegro

What is Patterntology?

2009-08-06T21:55:00.000-07:00

"The Patternists specialized in cerebral asymmetry. With grossly expanded right-brain hemispheres, they were highly intuitive, given to metaphors, parallels, and sudden cognitive leaps. Their inventive minds and quick, unpredictable genius had given them a competitive edge at first. But with these advantages had come grave weaknesses: autism, fugue states, and paranoia. Patternists grew out of control and became grotesque webs of fantasy." - Bruce Sterling Schismatrix Plus

Why do I always need a reason? I swivel the focus of the spotlight onto the branding I've given myself for the last ten years, patterntology. Meant to look like a pseudo-scientific term, the study of patterns, is exactly right. I don't pretend to be a scientist but I know the human experience can be broken neatly down into this kind of metaphor. This grew out of the abstract painting I pursued for 18yrs which I tried to make look as much like something but not look like something. I looked hard at the masters of abstraction and followed, with historic meaning, in their footsteps.

Looking at a microscopic slide photo in a science magazine; you have no idea what it is unless you read the caption. I like to guess before I read the caption. I love that moment of wonder. It's a great Zen equalizer, "Could be anything." You get a taste of universe in that moment. Familiar but not and could be any scale, material, time. Patterns repeat in all those dimensions. I get fascinated with a certain form and then imagine what would happen if it multiplied and became an entire world onto itself with an entirely different physics founded solely on that form. I've treated the picture plane much like a 'sample' for years, inspired by the square microscope slip. Painting within a square canvas pulled me out of classic ideas of composition and forced me to mix things up, much like nature tends to randomize gracefully no matter how you cut it up. I end up looking harder rather than satiating a formulaic scene.

After painting realistic subjects for a year I realize I could meld the abstract process with realism. Textures become notes of music that can be interwoven to create a complete piece of music. Real life visions take the place of percussion, rhythm, lead riffs, keyboards, vocals... Overlapped and entwined into one symphonic visual piece. Everything I've ever seen or imagined can play a part in a painting.

I love the random process of abstraction because it allows you to change the whole painting every time you approach it. I love the solid recognizable detail of realism because it celebrates the sensual quality of seeing. If I can mix both, I will have found my art. A truly infinite vocabulary. Exciting new territory to explore, with total freedom.

Best CG I've Ever Seen

2009-08-06T17:01:00.000-07:00

Someday, in our wildest virtual reality dreams when we have terabyte processors, goggles and gloves, we'll be able to walk into a world that very much resembles our own. For now, image scientists modeling in laboratories like Max, Zbrush and Maya push the envelope of ray tracing and radiosity as close to reality as they can.

There is tons of great, great work out there but when I came upon this image I was stunned. (click image to enlarge) The human face is something we are all very familiar with, making it one of the hardest things to approximate. The eyes, the hair, the skin, the fuzz on the sweater add up to something totally believable. Until I read it was CG, I would have thought it was a real photo of a real girl.

My props to Viki Yeo , a video game character modeler in South Korea. She's found that line of perfection that fools us.

House: The Hunt Continues

2009-07-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

Since we've last spoken, Jane and I have traveled hundreds of miles and looked at many fine locations to center our life for years to come. We considered small towns far outside the Tucson city center. We have an accepted offer on one in Tucson. On the forgotten edge of a nice neighborhood, minutes from work, 1500sq ft., 3 beds, 2 baths, a newly built outbuilding in the back, security gates, and an observation deck! I don't need to go into how inexpensive it is, and I don't have to go into how unattractive it is either. The location has a very Ballardian taste near an abandoned industrial area that nature is reclaiming. To Jane and I, this is a diamond in the rough we will transform into a shining jewel. In classic Tucson fashion of the compound, we will probably build a giant wall around it. More pics here.

Of course, there has to be complications. This week will be very interesting. The owner is dealing with some utility issues that might end up being expensive. Hopefully this doesn't skew the deal. With every twist in this winding road towards abodum, I get more and more underlaying jitters. I will be counting the days until I have a nice, spacious studio to paint in.

Freak O' Nature

2009-06-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

My second mother has called me to her kitchen for some refreshment of the soul. Maybe she sent me to my bookshelf and urged my hand to pick up Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Maybe she winked at my inner child that started stacking stones on my morning dog walk in the wash. Maybe she had me going through my topographic maps looking for a new area of discovery to plumb. Maybe she spoke through my dog Scout and gave me that forlorn look.

Most people know I live in the desert but I really live in Arizona which is an incredibly diverse group of bioms only part of which are desert. Southern Arizona is criss-crossed by 'sky islands.' These are large mountain ranges that rise out of the hot dry valleys and sport all the ecosystems you would find in places like the Rockies of Colorado and Utah. The Catalina Mountains define the northern boundary of Tucson. When it's in the hundreds down here in the valley, you can count on some escape up in the Catalinas where the alpine temps will be in the 60's or 70's. An hour and 10 minute drive from my house I can be up at 8000 ft in a totally different world. One of the great reasons I love living in Tucson!

Not sure what has entered me but I have made my journey to mountain tops 3 times in a week! Each time entrances me more and I can see the allure is becoming addictive. There is a relationship starting. Scout isn't sad about it either. As soon as he sees the pack come out, he starts milling around in anticipation. I had him hiking when he was just a pup and he's totally at home on the trail. I gave him that name because of his skill at finding an easier path. He really does!

My painting thoughts have also started gravitating towards that last one I started then stopped more than a year ago. "Earth Island" was based on natural subjects but in an abstract way. (link) Might have to wait till I have the new studio set up in the new house. There's always the sketchbook....

I took these photos with my iphone so not that great. Is that Scout at the edge of the Grand Canyon? Nope, looking north towards the White Mountains. Also, new boots. Wore out the last ones.

Looking for a House

2009-06-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I was working out with Jane how we would rearrange the workspace so that I could paint again. Clean out storage to make room for more important stuff? A shelving system with pulleys that pull things towards the ceiling? Then I thought, why don't we just get a house?

Could I get a house? I dunno. On Monday I met with an agent. On Wednesday I had the paperwork. On Thursday I was approved for a loan. On Friday I had a long list of properties to look at. It's Sunday and our group of 3 has boiled down to one. For now. So, we'll have to go look inside soon.

House hunting is supposed to be a fun thing to do. For me it's been very stressful to boil down what exactly I cannot live without. Size became the most important thing. We need a studio for painting, room for the computers, a yard for the animals and room for Jane to store and work on her vintage and designer clothing. Would be nice to take my shop tools out of storage and have them available. Then there is location. I like to take the dogs to the wash or desert trails for a before breakfast hike. I'm so spoiled by my 10 minute commute I don't want to let go of it. I'm also used to my side of town. Feels like home.

Driving by one house, we noticed the door was open and walked in uninvited with our morning hair and weekend clothes. The agent was a bit alarmed and followed us around shooting us dubious looks. Turns out that although a nice deal can be found in a suburb, we don't want it. I really have nothing to worry about. I have the construction skills to work with most any property. So now it's all about fishing and waiting. And yes, it really is a good time to buy! : )

Meatspaceweb.com is Live!

2009-06-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

With only 3 weeks from idea to completion, there is a community website for Kyle Beltran (Kyle Bronsdon) and Quota Soon's (Tom Baumgartner) virtual reality music club and gallery in Second Life. It seemed only right to create a website for the 600+ members of the "Meatspace" group, where they can contribute, share and keep up to date with each other and events.

The site features all the social media web 2.0 widgets you need to keep up these days: Google Calendar, a forum, Flickr pool, Twitter, and IRC chat. Members can also advertise for free on the site! Visit

I like it because anyone interested in my artwork can get to know me a little better. It is also a logical place for people interested in purchasing my artwork to learn more. I'm glad to be completed with this missing link to my virtual gallery. Now on to making more artwork!

Second Life Art Show: of Deities and Demons

2009-05-03T14:14:00.000-07:00

Second Life is getting some good press lately: Second Life is Dead. Reuters Pulls Journalist Out of Second Life. Second Life Rampant with Prostitution and Gambling. Corporations Leaving Second Life. Harvard Business School Model Fails in Second Life. What-Ever!

Gives me time to get my game on. Saturday May 2nd, I got some game on. I put on an art show. Yup, in Second Life. I have a virtual gallery called "patterntology". Put up some framed work. Biz partner Kyle Beltran put his piano in the gallery and treated folks to a 2hr set. My avatar "Quota Soon" (my inworld name) fielded questions from the crowd and joined in the shin-dig.

Did I make money? Hells yeah. I wasn't really intending to though. You can buy one of my virtual works of art for about $1.25. I made about $10. Not shabby. BUT, I also sealed a deal for one of those pieces to be printed and installed in one of my lightbox constructions and shipped off to a happy customer. In real life. Previously, I've sold two paintings in real life through exposure in Second Life.

Now, I'm not much of a pro at marketing in Second Life but my friends Kyle Beltran and Callipygian Christensen (Second Life photographer) are. They pretty much made it happen. I'm thinking, more or less to prove something to me. Callipygian was able to use her connections and got me in "New World News" by the official CNN reporter in Second Life. Most people showing up at the opening were showing up to see Kyle who already has a decent following but some did come to see the art. One was a gallery owner who would like to show my work in his gallery soon.

Named "of Deities and Demons," the show was comprised of six dark characters I had been working on. Exploring my dark side. We all have a collection in our psyche. Think Tarot Cards. I'm inspired to develop more characters though not necessarily dark.

All in all, it made feel like an artist again. I haven't really been trying too hard either. How much easier can it get? No gallery fees, no printing costs, no snacks and drinks to buy, yet there is an audience from all over the world. I just sat in front of my computer for 2hrs. The world is overlooking the possibilities of virtual reality. I have a feeling though, not for very long.

Float Tank Session #22

2009-03-16T17:53:00.000-07:00

I've been in a wildly creative upswing lately. In pursuit of the strange. This float session reflects some strange! Yes it's my twenty second float in a sensory deprivation tank in Tucson.

Visions seen while in the tank:

Banquet, and I'm the Table
So I'm at the head of a long royal banquet table. Am I king? A royal feast is underway with all order of gold and ruby encrusted goblets, plates, trays, and bowls. The table is filled with a number of strange guests (see next sections) all laughing and cavorting. Then my field of vision lowers and I realize I'm the banquet table. How did I know this? I felt each of the plates, goblets etc, lifting and being placed back down. I felt everyone drinking my wine as if it were one of my bodily fluids. I was a banquet table cow with gold and ruby encrusted utters in the shape of a feast!

I just have to pause a minute here for reflection. I have NEVER in my wildest imagination ever become an inanimate object. This is certainly a first of strange for me!

Monkey Headed God
One of the feast participants was a monkey-headed man dressed in 18th century swashbuckler clothing. Sword and lace collar included. If having a monkey head weren't enough, he also sported some ample deer antlers. Quite charming. I added some deer antlers to Matt Coiffi's brilliant CG work for this posts illustration. Check his site, he's pretty masterful.

Jackal Headed God
Anubis? I've seen him before in dreams. This time he ate at the banquet that was me. He wore some eastern robes of gold threads and red velvet. Some paisley in that robe. One of the more demure guests, he held a relaxed gaze being more of an observer. I could feel his super natural intelligence leaking off into the air.

Float Tank Session #21

2009-03-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning to think that floating in a sensory deprivation tank is something you can get better at much like meditation. I'm also beginning to think that music can greatly steer your experience while floating. The tank I float in has underwater speakers that you can control via a large rubber button on the side. For the second half of my 90 minute float, I listened to some of the house music featuring Buddhist monk flute and singing meditation bowls. Classic New Age sounds? I experienced some classic new age imagery.

Visions Seen While In The Tank:

Flaming Lotus
I was circling my body which turned dark, hollow and tar-like. Then it became like ash. Arising from the hollowness of my skull (LOL) appeared a glowing lotus. New Age imagery! The lotus turned to dark pink and vivid blue flame and rose out of my head into the aether.

Bamboo Sign Post
Walking a path through a forest, I came to a crossroads. In the center of the converging paths I saw a bamboo post. Bands of pink, blue, orange and yellow dyed string wrapped around the post at eye level. Something told me what this meant. Each wrapping ended in a knot that pointed down one of the paths. The number of times the string was wrapped around the post was proportionate to how far down the path you had to go to get to the next destination. I apparently went down the blue path.

Zen Temple Fence
As I approached the temple, I never looked up. The only part of the temple I saw were dark wooden steps leading up into it. I couldn't bring my gaze up from examining the temple barrier. Large, smooth, white river stones about a meter high each and set 4 meters apart ringed the building. Towards the top of each stone was drilled a 3in hole. Threaded through the holes was a bright blue rope 3in thick. The outside of the rope was wound in thousands of threads in a criss-cross pattern. I just could not take my eyes off the simplicity and beauty of the 'fence' construction.

Artwork by Elena Colombo

Float Tank Session #20

2009-03-01T19:01:00.000-08:00

Float #20! Twenty times depriving my senses of this world and entering another one. I've earned my floatist merit badge. Yup, still floating at Still Waters in Tucson. One day I'll have my own float tank, but for now this does just fine. My visions in the tank will probably continue to be SCI-FI futuristic. Guess that's where my mind is!

Visions Seen While Floating In The Tank:

Jewelry Level Female Android
I'd been gawking at Scott Kays jewelry design the day before noticing it's sometimes asymmetrical, sometimes organic qualities. The image for this entry shows some of Scotts work (and a sexy android.) In the tank, I examined the details of a sterling silver female android as if it were designed by master Kay. Tooled, cast or etched, I'm not sure. Every surface of her body was coated in fine detail. Around the naval and nipples were gold inlay. She did some slightly ballerina moves displaying her facets. This was accompanied by a subtle ringing sound. You know, the sound when metal bends but the silver rang at a higher pitch.

Crude Oil Planet
Perhaps an interplanetary oil spill? (ridiculous, I know) Imagine a giant sphere of liquid crude oil large enough to walk on and have it's own gravity. This planet never rotated, so the side facing its' sun grew a hardened shell you could walk on. When I hit the surface in my space suit (see next vision) I didn't know what to expect. The surface was a waxy brown substance that gave under your foot and left dull prints. I walked to an outcropping. It was made of brown crystallized blades sticking out at regular angles. The ends of the feathery blades were paper thin and nearly white.

Space Suit with Bell Shaped Helmet
On approach to the crude oil planet, I did a space walk. My space suit was so simple. The entire body was made of one seamless piece of material, black, textured like rip stop Gortex, and very thin. The pads of hands and feet had a thin rubbery material on them. My helmet was one piece of clear material, glass thin and shaped like a bell. It fit to the suit by an eighth inch metal ring with a simple latch to clamp it tight. In orbit around the crude oil planet were smaller globs of crude oil. I touched one with my hand. I could feel the weight of the glob and watched it break apart and parts of it stick to my suit when I pulled my hand away. Little black BB-sized globes shooting off everywhere.

Crystal CPU with Liquid Circuits
Briefly, my mind revolved around a clear, cut crystal diamond shaped object. As I zoomed in on the image I noticed thousands of little channels inside with a bluish liquid flowing. Channels near the surface fanned out and took on pink or yellow hues. I wondered how that would happen? Temperature changes within? Now that I think about it, rather than a CPU, it might have been some kind of crystal life form!

I'm doing a little experiment. I'm offering this blog entry as an audio file. Maybe you like it? Easier to listen to than read?

Music Is Math

2009-02-13T21:08:00.000-08:00

Music Is Math from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

Try to view fullscreen if you can!

There is a truth in this animation you can't turn away from. Simple, yet entropically complex to keep your attention for that long.

Friend Matt Routh turned me onto this video produced with open source software called Processing. I've been a big fan of John Maeda, teacher of the originators of Processing, during his humble beginnings at Aesthetics and Computation Group MIT (was the most interesting thing on the web for years), his Absolut Vodka ad, his Reebok shoes, his current position as President of Rhode Island School of Design, and his book, "Laws of Simplicity," of which I own and cherish. John is the perfect mix of work ethic, experimentation, digital beauty, concept and computer science. Having that math mind would be greatly appreciated by this patterntologist. I'd give my legs.

I downloaded and worked with Processing once. I learned two things: this custom graphics/math compiler could do almost anything, AND this would require God-Level math skills I don't have. On one hand, I know I have better drawing and painting skills than a designer like Maeda, on the other hand, I know Maeda is the new type of creative for this millenium. Designers with this set of skills, can communicate things I can only imagine. Things I can only suggest in my art.

Tucson Art I Like

2009-01-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I did an "Art I like" post. I'm pretty blessed to know or be associated with some talent in Tucson. So, I think I'll talk about them in my fuddly duddly manner. I also see I'm an "art blog" in Tucson Scene. There are plenty of artists I like in Tucson. These are a few whose art I also like.

Amy Novelli
It's hard to be a girl! It's hard to be a girl that loves to paint and draw horses. It's hard to be a girl who paints and draws horses and has a 'high faluten' art degree with New York friends telling her she should be modern, conceptual, abstract, minimalistic, and avant-garde. It's hard to take having hundreds of public art pieces, grants, projects, paintings sold, dozens of television interviews, nation-wide gallery placement, awards and a hard fought placement in Southwest Arts Magazine and ignore it. And to think, community arts galleries wouldn't consider hanging her stuff. Subject matter, too... where we all live and breathe.

The catch 22 is that beyond Amy being a masterful painter, she also really is an avid horsey girl; has a ranch, rides a rescued mustang, is at the county fair for the Mustang Rescue, and has more public art in our city than, aye, pretty much most anyone. Ever been to Congress hotel on Halloween? It's all her paint. Rodeo parade? Her costume wins first prize. Fan of Obama? She's driving the public arts projects.

In a world that gets more artificial, more academic and less real, Amy is authentic. Authentic cowgirl, authentic Southwest, authentic Tucson. She's as real as it gets.
See some Amy!

Chris Rush

I'm more a fan with great connections. Jane has been nearly lifelong friends with Chris. In the words of somewhat reclusive local art collector John Wells, "Chris is the cities greatest renderer of the human form." I concur. Everyone loves a realist. Like Michelangelo, he gives figurative realism his own style.

What keeps his work edgy and alive is his sense of the weird. He's picky about his subjects. There's a uniqueness he's finding in humanity. A pack-rat that collects anything old, unique and strange, he incorporates these objects into his art and adds to them with his own oil based commentary, commentary made through the face. I think Chris is looking for the people behind the objects of the long dead and wishes them to glow large in a new life. In other pure canvas works, he is looking for the alien, or the perfectly modern take on "getting your photo taken," and the sudden juxtaposition of old and new. Or old and kitsch. Or new and kitsch. He breaks his own laws a lot. Spin art vs. old mans face made a good impression on me a couple years back. His recent show at Etherton Gallery is more proof of an artistic youth that refuses to die.

A prodigy of mentor Bailey Doogen, Chris began with an amazing graphic talent, particularly focused on silk screen. Too big for graphics, he made the jump to fine artist and never looked back. Listen closely, quality and strangeness is king.
Visit Chris.

Mauricio Toussaint
For the years I've known Mauricio, including being involved with Dinnerware Contemporary Arts together during a year of turmoil, he never gave up as the ultimate salesman and perfect shop keep of the organization. Undaunted by the digital world, he seems to have hacked the Facebook application and has a wikipedia entry! Admirable considering his 6th century painting technique of encaustic. Today the technique allows for multi-layered versions of painting that have background and foreground, blurriness and surface rubbed etching techniques. Also, in the world of oils, a surface that dries and can be worked on immediately.

I admit that I only keep up with him when he is in town, but between Guadalajara, Arizona, Santa Fe, he's growing a strong presence. Recently a US citizen, skies the limit.

Mauricio is a symbolist. Trees, boys heads, mazes, houses, ladders, ravens. The symbols are presented without preconception, in a humble plain way. There is a puzzle there though. There is a complexity and sometimes hidden messages. Something that reminds me of life lessons and school book illustrations. At no point do you consider naive in the mix as applied to technique. Mauricio will remind you with a fully finished face and enlightened shading that there is a wizard behind the curtain, who is afraid to scare you off and decides to remain humble. And it just looks cool!
Visit Mauricio.

Matthew Yates
My uncle worked as a photographer for the Chicago Tribune for something like 20 yrs. Most complaining man I know. Made the most money for working the least that I know. He said photography is dead. Yeah man, the journalists are taking the photos now.

Matthew Yates doesn't complain. I've hired him a couple times for (cough) not the most interesting commercial jobs. Matt makes it interesting. Matt is just interesting. His imagination works itself into whatever is in the moment.

His art starts at the idea, begins with a model and a scene and really gets going when it goes into the darkroom. Obsessed with vintage photography, elegant damage to negatives, faulty printing events and aged frames, each print is an event upon itself. If it's too perfect, he stains it with tea or coffee to age the paper and make it more real. He lives in the moment and sees 150 years ago.

Absurd, perverse, mysterious. All things not associated with the early silver tone stoic poses with models that had to sit still for 60 seconds to make an exposure. No wonder they all look so unhappy! Matt is steam punk and doesn't know it. With a worldwide resume as long as your arm, numerous awards, won grants and brushes with greatness that want a call back, Matt is Tucson's most hidden gem of international fame.
Check out Matts work

Float Tank Session #19

2009-01-24T22:23:00.000-08:00

I think I've found the formula for floating. Bit of coffee in the hours before, plenty of sleep during the days before, little bit of exercise, and some self-programmed pressure (note to self: lets come up with some ideas.) Floating in a sensory deprivation tank is a lot like meditation except it's easier. My meditations were 90% forget about external stimulus and 10% lets get to the bottom of life, existence and everything. With floating, it's 10% get rid of external stimulus and mind chatter and 90% what are you gonna do now that you have all the powers of the universe? I'm liking this a lot and it's becoming my special weekly creative session.

I've been wanting a lucid dream experience from the first day I started floating. Today I did it in a full blown, extremely detailed way. Finally!

Visions I saw while in the tank:

Nanite Planet
So I'm walking on a planet that is not Earth and who's surface is hard like rock and gently black rolling hills. Pretty much an uneventful sphere as far as I can see. There is no sky, just an overcast fog that lights everything from every direction. The rock surface isn't rock. It's black like graphite and made of billions of centimeter wide hexagonal rods packed tightly at varying heights to make up the surface. It still has an organic land feel as I walk in my black rubber boots over rises and dips. Squeek, squeet. I see a small dark bit of fog coming my way. As it passes me by, I reach out my hand and try to grab some of it. As the fog hits my cheek I can feel a grittiness to the air. I look down in my hand and see hundreds of nanites (microscopic robots, or barely visible robots.) Each is a tiniest pin prick of a black sphere with 3 hair-thin "legs" coming off of it. They move. Some of them link together in a line and start to crawl like a worm off the edge of my palm. They are all light as air as I wave my hand and they are sent slowly floating down to the ground. I rub my eyes that itch along the edges and figure some nanites stuck in wet edges of my eyes and are working their way out with their tiny tripod legs.

I get a telepathic message that the nanites are trying to build a planet that invites humans to live on it. Possibly a sinister invitation, but for now

I walk on.

Before me is what looks like a puddle. It's a shade of dark gray surrounded by the black, more dense 'rock' I've been walking on. I step into the puddle. It gives way like quicksand a few inches and then the nanites below my feet create a solid surface and start to elevator me up.

I walk on.

I see pillows of lighter colored material hugging the ground ahead of me. When I step on them they are soft like thick moss. I kneel down and examine the nanites interconnected in an open organic weave that must allow more light in and reflect a lighter shade of gray. Laying down, it's comfortable!

Forest Speeder
Remember the Star Wars speeder bike? I had the small industrial version shorter than a bicycle. Like a small titanium rocking horse, The saddle and hand grips were caste of bright orange industrial plastic. A basket hooked on the back. Riding it wasn't easy. Being an anti-grav device, it had no bounce. It gave only a small stiff amount when I sat in the saddle. And it wasn't fast. I wound myself through the trees a twice as fast as walking, in a forest much like a Washington State Coast rain forest, and found a small clearing. I dismounted and pulled out of the storage rack mounted on the back of the speeder:

Fusion Powered Shovel/Auger
I'm going to have to start drawing diagrams. It's getting hard to describe these things but here goes. Imagine a shovel that has a 10 inch egg beater on the end. Imagine the top of the shovel isn't a handle but bicycle handle bars with two bicycle hand grips. Where the 'shaft' meets the 'handlebars' is a small cylinder with multiple rings and a small blue glowing disc in the middle (fusion motor.) This drives the shaft at the end of which is a group of titanium blades resembling an egg beater. Above that is a half sphere of heavier alloy on a flywheel that rolls in the opposite direction of the egg beater to counter weight the spinning action. The incredible power in the small motor, the strength of the metal in the parts made for digging made for an effortless hole in the forest floor.

p.s. Didn't look in the hole, just dug one.

Float Tank Sessions #10 - #18

2009-01-22T20:10:00.000-08:00

Yes, I'm STILL floating in a sensory deprivation tank as regularly as I can at Still Waters in Tucson. Never gave it up. I aim for 90 minutes weekly. I really like it! One of those integral parts of my life now. It's so perfectly strange in one way, and so perfectly meditative and indifferent in another. Zen doesn't care. Sometime in the future I'll have my own tank. A strange thing happened on floats 10 through 17; nothing happened. I didn't have any mind blowing visions. No amazing insights or lucid experiences. I'm not sure where I went. I know I was shooting for deeper levels. Trying for total blackout. A deep blue chill zone that warms you in universal acceptance. It feels healthy to touch base with something so inside and still and knowing and calm you didn't know you had. I would like to learn to sleep in the tank. Teresa says it may take a year to be able to sleep.

#18 was like the first 9 because I decided to ask the float of something. "Float, make me a pony!" And it delivered.

Visions seen in the tank:

Flesh Battery
It was made of flesh! It was covered in smooth hairless skin! About the dimensions of a Websters Dictionary. On a corner of one end, the skin gets redder and more wrinkled like a nipple. Attached is a white plastic connector with a wire trailing off. (Must be where the television plugs in.) My mind peals away the layers of flesh in the object to reveal the inner workings. There is a set of 8 cylinder shaped organs with a slightly metallic sheen like oil on water. Between the cylinders are a myriad of veins and connecting tissue. With layers of the flesh peeled away, I recognize the yellow bubbly fat tissue that surrounds all the 'battery cell' cylinders. Seems to me a genetically engineered organ that has simulated a battery with metalic membranes. Matrix?

Antenna of Everything
I walked along a Nevada desert landscape carrying an object. A basketball shaped aluminum ball, like Sputnik, with a gazillion antennas sprouting out at every angle. Some antenna were like telescoping radio antenna and some had fiber-optic thin stems with shiny black ends the size of b-b's. I walked to an open level space and placed the sphere on a tripod. I was a surveyor of sorts. I was telepathically told it was an an antenna that sensed everything. Understanding that everything is waves, light frequencies slow down and eventually become radio waves, and even solid objects emit a wave signature, seemed plausible at the time. Looking back at the thought, an everything antenna would probably just be a simple sphere. Satiates my 1950's sci-fi fantasy. : )

One more plug for Still Waters, the floatation spa I go to in Tucson. Teresa has a newly renovated one bedroom apartment adjoined to the float spa in case you want a get away weekend with full private access to the tank. Kitchen, bedroom, private porch. I'm considering a concentrated stay-cation. $90 a night with unlimited buffet access to the float tank.

Photo (graphic) Credit: Chris McMurray

Second Life Is A Game You Make!

2009-01-12T20:29:00.000-08:00

2009 is going to be all about learning for me. Instead of debating (whining) whether to learn actionscript/flash/php or master css positioning or Second Life Linden Scripting.... I'm just going to learn it all. This blog is about the Second Life part.

Virtual Reality is coming to a web experience near you. Whenever Sun Microsystems markets the universal VR platform, there's going to be a huge need for VR developers. For now, you can play in the sandbox with the early adapters in Second Life. I've dabbled in the place for 2 years but now I'm focused on learning some serious world building skills.

I've played a few video games. I suck. More than excelling at playing games like Myst, Quake, or Battlefield 2142, I just wanted to look at the graphics and experience the artificial worlds. I want to make worlds myself. Second Life is a game where you make the world! It's fun and there are many, many other creatives in there to talk to.

Quick Game Synopsis:
You enter the world for free. You can make yourself (avatar) look like anything you want. You have all control over your body parts, shape, color, hair, clothing, accessories. You can build anything you want: buildings, cars, planes, televisions, trees, clouds, fish, etc. These can be animated, and interactive. You can morph landforms into snow covered mountains, beaches or underwater reefs. You can stream video and live sound into the world so, like my biz partner Kyle Bronsdon, you can put on live music concerts. You can make movies and take photos in Second Life using real (avatar) actors. You can make real money selling these things. That's right! Second Life currency, Linden Dollars, can be taken out of Second Life and plopped right in your account.

Alien Now
I've been holding back one major fact. My real breakthrough with Second Life was the purchase of a new imac with a good video card. The last two years I've sort of dabbled with achingly slow hardware. Now the game runs like butter! I've been obcessed with aliens for some reason so in order to free my inner alien, I made an alien avatar and have begun building a flying saucer for myself. Will flying saucers sell on the open market? Would be nice. I do all my work on a floating island, away from spectators and with my head in the upper atmosphere.

Currently I (my name in world is "Quota Soon") have a gallery in conjunction with Kyle Brondson (aka Kyle Beltran) on the island of Puli. My gallery is called "patterntology" and Kyles club is "Meatspace Lounge." The term "meatspace" is adapted from Gibsons cyberpunk classic "Neuromancer" meaning "the area that isn't in cyberspace."

Published in Baltimore Examiner!

2008-12-02T21:24:00.000-08:00

Good friend and fellow appreciator of all interesting things in life, Juliette Goodwin, talented painter and suddenly wonderful mother of twins, has been kind enough to guest host some of my writing about the substance psyllium. Psyllium being something you eat. Only after MAJOR edits and omissions was my gutter sense of humor allowed to be featured in the Baltimore Food Examiner. Perfectly understandable. Matters of taste concerning humor must be strictly upheld. Words like, "ass," shall be replaced with words such as, "bottom." I put on my most uppity English accented inner voice to rewrite the piece.

Given the uncensored freedom of expression exercised at patterntology.blogspot.com, I must point out the ORIGINAL, more adult version of this essay entitled, "Bran Blowing Out Your Butt." The original including the well crafted, "list of the things that came out of my ass," after a healthy ingesting of the mentioned substance.

Do take a look.

See the original.

Tom Baumgartner: I.Q.=135

2008-11-26T19:32:00.000-08:00

Feeling dumb happens to a brain once in a while. My reaction was to go find out how dumb I really am. I wanted to know my I.Q. score. The tagline for iqtest.com says, you're "Smarter Than You Think." (padded results gauranteed?) I did pretty average on the SAT's so I wasn't expecting much.

Iqtest.com has 267k visitors per month. That's a pretty good pool of data. The test is a timed true/false quiz that challenges you in multiple ways. Geometry, vocabulary, arithmetic, memory, spatial thinking... While taking the test, you can see yourself being hit from many different directions.

How did Tom do?
I did better than 99% of all the test takers in most categories.
My computational speed really pulled the curve down on my results. I only did better than 42% of all the test takers! Guess I'm "slow." Nothing a bit of cybernetics couldn't solve. My geometric and spatial scores are the stars of my intelligence. (pulls suspender straps out by the thumbs)

From iqtest.com:

"Your General IQ Score of 135 shows how able your mind is in general. Anyone with a General IQ Score this high is considered to be gifted. This score is better than 99.02% of all persons taking this test. Virtually all occupations can be comprehended with a General IQ this high. You should be able to handle almost all academic challenges.

Geometric:
How well one can comprehend geometric relationships of lines, sides, planes, angles, and topological properties strongly determines one's ability to make sense of visual information. The strength of one's geometric ability can strongly determine how quickly knowledge can be absorbed if it is presented visually.

Your Geometric IQ score of 147 is exceptionally higher than your General IQ score.This score is better than 99.91% of all persons taking this test.

Computational Speed:
Your Computational Speed IQ score of 97 is significantly lower than your General IQ score.This score is better than 42.07% of all persons taking this test.

While speed cannot be the sole factor in determining overall superiority in one mental operations, in general faster computational speed will often indicate that a problem's comprehension was more complete. With everything else being equal, a person with faster computational speed than another person's will be better at tasks that require the synthesis of many bits of information."

To conclude, I feel smart, but not THAT smart. Not smart enough to wear the smarty pants. Being an IT and graphics professional, I think I'm challenged on a daily basis to learn quickly and solve problems quickly. (see most stressful jobs) Ask me to compute something, it's going to take a while!

Bran Blowing Out Your Butt

2008-11-06T21:08:00.000-08:00

Turning 40, my doctor gave me the wake up call. Eat less salt, exercise, more fiber. So, I watch salt on the labels and exercise. Fiber! I eat fiber. Apparently I can eat a lot more. Friend Matt turns me onto a miracle fiber powder called psyllium. Husks from the seed of "plantago ovato." It's basically a super-powered fiber laxative like Metamucil. Taken in great quantities, it will make you lose weight.

Like every nature based products' marketing will tell you, it also makes you shed "toxins." I don't go for the "toxins" line of bull. Intestines constantly move stuff out, the liver and kidneys convert poisons. Maybe... maybe fat stores toxins when the liver can't deal with the load of work. Trace.

So I took some. I'm a skeptic no more. I can personally attest to its' rocket powered effects.

Here's a list of the things that came out of my ass:

- unopened jar of kosher borscht beets, label intact and in mint condition

- "My Little Pony" plastic action figure horse with blue hair mane and tiny comb

- 1940 buffalo nickel (grandpa chided me for losing it)

- Fender Telecaster (some of the strings are rusted and need replacing) I know a guy if you want to tune it.

- 3 month old kitten, brown in color

- 15 ounces of Nutrasweet in the shape of 'Che' Guevara

- "Who Farted?" bumper sticker, wax paper backing intact

As you can see, I'm a happy customer to get all that out of my system. I'm going to make a killing on Ebay!

What D & D Character Are You?

2008-10-14T21:24:00.000-07:00

Am I a Democrat? Am I a Republican? After 2 yrs of campaigning? Well sir, if you don't know that, let's just put the fate of the country in your hands. You're obviously well suited for the duty of making educated judgments and decisions.

On a lighter note, and one that might be even more concrete, what Dungeons and Dragons character would you be if you chose to spend most of your free time playing a fantasy role playing game that has near to nothing to do with reality? Or... Does it???? Are you a human? Are you a dwarf? Are you of the transcendent race of elf or the primitive orc? Are you a barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer or wizard? Are you good? Are you evil? These are things that common polls cannot reveal.

Readers, I present a challenge to you. Reveal your true Middle Earth self: What Kind of D&D Character Would You Be?

The 129 questions seem to be loosely based on employee psyche tests but I haven't done enough to know. Some questions are hard and some that don't apply. All in all, I have found this to be pretty accurate.

What am I? I'm a lawful neutral human sorcerer. I have skills of illusion, creativity, charisma and tools that are close at hand. I can use my well practiced skills immediately. My alignment (evil vs. good) makes me flexible but not able to access completely evil or completely good powers.

Jane also undertook the 129 question exam. She is a wizard! (knew it) She's a true neutral human wizard. Jane decides if laws are good enough to follow. As a wizard, she has access to much more knowledge and powerful spells. Wizards have better powers of concentration, less spontaneity, but much more knowledge.

Beware! Those who enter Suite 125, you enter a hall of magic and mystery inhabited by beings of magical powers!

Paisley Painting

2008-09-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

The joys of oil paint persist! Haven't painted all summer but finally got around to scanning my last completed piece. My painting philosophy has been lately: square in shape and anything you want to paint. 'Cause I'm a patterntologist if you didn't know and pretty much everything comes under the caption "pattern." I made up that word by the way, just to further my self-made-original-ego principle. It's an artist prerogative to adapt any order of language and make it their own. It jives with the square, microscope slip, perfect science sample idea.

This particular square was inspired by a REAL paisley textile. Jane got her clever little secondary market hands on a real, hand woven paisley at least 150yrs old (1880's), from India, and still in excellent condition. I was completely blown away by the fact that it had black in the design. A handmade, cultural hand-me-down design that resembles a Mandlebrot set. As I basically "copied" the design to learn it's inner workings, I started uncovering the motives of the originators of the paisley which has evolved from one weaver to another. The paisley also was adopted by the English and French who put their own influence on it.

Over the 24.5hrs I sloppily spent on this (I keep track on the back of my paintings), I couldn't even imagine the patience and intent required to hand weave this piece. This is only a small portion of the entire textile. I'm in awe.

Float Tank Session #9

2008-09-07T13:31:00.000-07:00

Number nine... number nine.... number nine... I've now done my ninth sensory deprivation / float tank session. I'm still floating (doing absolutely nothing) for 90 minutes at a time in the big giant salty bathtub about once a week. This time, I drank some coffee before I went to "relax." Although that might not be the best thing to do, it did keep my mind alert.

Visions seen while in the tank:

Black Hole Jewel
There on a turning pedestal covered in white satin was the celestial home shopping networks signature broach. Roughly 3 inches around, the broach sported a giant jewel (1in. diameter) in the center that didn't glint, didn't sparkle and in fact reflected no light at all. Inky black. As it turned, the profile revealed its shape to be a flattened sphere. Surrounded by gold work tooled into spiraling swirls that were encrusted with tiny white, pink and blue jewels; the main jewel resembled a black hole with stars being sucked in. I've read about a paint being developed that reflects no light. Perhaps the subconscious plopped the idea to me in the form of jewelry. I'm still marveling at this void in space in my mind.

Spring Boots
I was climbing a craggy rock peak of a mountain in search of geological markers. I had incredible traction and with each step seemed to spring upward. Climbing was effortless and I didn't feel any strain on my legs. When I arrived at the top, I examined my boots. The uppers were one piece and made of a tough black rubbery substance. The soles of the boots were about 1 inch thick and made of a gray synthetic felt. I suspect nanotechnology.

Virtual Workroom
I've talked about the infinite white or black rooms where objects seem to build themselves in front of me. This one was in a futuristic room like on a space station. White glossy plastic walls. This room was telepathic. It picked up my thoughts and grew a 3 dimensional design in front of me. The design was made of black lines and curves like a geometrically perfect vine-plant. The air was divided into 6 inch cubes and the cube where something was being built kind of lit up brighter than the rest of the room. The design grew to match my thoughts without any hand motions or button pushing. I know because my 'entity' was outside of my body watching myself. Much like the game Second Life where you can leave the vantage point of your avatar and go look from other perspectives.

The REALLY Long Bridge
I walked along a trail in Appalachian type mountain terrain. It was an overcast day with fog settling in. The trail forked and I discovered a foot bridge. It was about 6 feet wide and probably 10 miles long. The bridge went across a large valley to another mountain. The material it was made of looked like solid cardboard varnished shiny. Light and strong. The structure underneath was a parabolic curve and some of the struts went down a thousand feet.

-I'm amazed. Where is all this science fiction stuff coming from?

Float Tank Session #8

2008-09-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

My eighth trip into the frighteningly awe-inspiring mind space of the sensory deprivation tank, void of external stimulus, freed from laws that govern being human, exploring other worlds never seen, reprogramming my own psychic makeup, meeting mythical gods personally, touching the edge of infinity and.... My Little Pony?

Visions seen while in the tank:

My Little Pony Butter Grid
Inside of an infinite lavender space, I approached a grid of light yellow dots. I've decided to name these infinite spaces "workrooms" where things are built virtually like in a 3d program. Zooming into the grid, the yellow dots came into focus as 2 inch castings of butter in the shape of the popular girls toy "My Little Pony" by Hasbro. Surprisingly, I didn't come out of the tank hungry for toast.

Ultra-violet Chamber of Liquid Light
Finally, an experience that was more than a vision, and something along the lines of a normal everyday new age sort of thing. My body, or entity was floating in a clear walled chamber filled with watery florescent pink and purple waves of warm light. The waves intersected much like the light patterns you see at the bottom of a swimming pool, except all around me. The light intersecting with my body was bright and warm and pleasurable.

Escape Pod
I was on a space ship, in a hallway lined with square windows like a passenger jet. I knelt down next to the exterior wall and saw a plastic hatch ringed by black rubber. I pulled a finger latch and popped the door out. I climbed down into a tiny, one passenger cockpit and sat down. Gravity was a little less here. Three oval shaped and blue tinted windows made up the windshield. The interior was completely ultra white with small glassy black readouts. I powered up. Blue and yellow text, data and diagrams came up on the screens. I examined the seat belts, and the fabric pads of the interior. This was a routine systems check.

Funky Forest

2008-08-21T00:32:00.000-07:00

The film is "Funky Forest," directed by Katsuhito Ishii. I haven't actually seen it! I'm just so excited by the previews on youtube I had to blog about it. I'm getting the same excitement when I saw some of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle in internet previews.

I don't follow film closely so this might be old news. It appears to be made of many 2-10 minute shorts that are loosely strung into some kind of social commentary. Or absurdist nonsense! I have to admit, some of the symbolism is lost on me because I'm not Japanese. The level of fantasy, outlandish costuming, and dream state surrealism, is DEFCON 1! I ordered it from Amazon so I'll let you know if it lives up to my expectations.

See for yourself:

Float Tank Session #7

2008-08-16T23:17:00.000-07:00

Number seven... I feel the benefit of floating. A more settled, centered calm core to my inner self. It's like the benefits of intense meditation. I'm glad I'm doing this regularly because there are things I haven't broken through with that I would like to. I still haven't pushed through to a full blown lucid experience. Just flickers and small samplings.

Visions in the tank:

Three Dimensional Grid in Space

I was floating without gravity in what appeared to be outer space, I approached a 3d grid. Lines of the grid would light up as I touched them but the golf ball sized intersections of the grid were solid and metallic. The aluminum-like "nodes" were each different and looked like number symbols up close. They were solidly anchored in space allowing me to grab them and pull myself along.

Odd Digital Tone

What the? For a moment a tiny red glowing dot appeared to the upper left of my vision accompanied by a single musical tone. Like an alert tone. Was my unknown chip implant rebooting? So strange.

Woodland Future Civilization
I was wearing brown leather combat pants with cargo pockets and various gadgets on my belt and thighs. I had a thick cotton shirt the color of deep indigo/forest green. I walked along a gravel path and could see a building through the pines in the distance. There was a corrugated metal roof. I walked the path till it met a bridge that crossed a small steep canyon. I marveled at the craftsmanship of the bridge. Cut stone and metal work that extended beyond the support columns underneath. The metal looked forged, not welded. Somehow a cross between something elvin and something Frank Lloyd Wright. There was a stone kiosk with a tiny golden video screen! It blinked and animated the same design motif as the architecture of the bridge.

Alien Message: Refine

My alien friend from my second float appeared. He had a message for me. I heard a partial vocalization, and then the word "Refine" entered my mind. Hmmmm. Talk about mysterious! I have to wonder about this one. Could mean anything.

Image by "Josh Miller" on flickr. Rendered in Secondlife.

Sensory Deprivation #5 & #6, Float Tank Sessions

2008-08-09T21:28:00.000-07:00

I continue "tanking." This is the diary entry of my fifth and six venture into a sensory deprivation or floatation tank. I float at stillwaters.

I'm experiencing much more control and the 90 minute sessions are taking the pressure off having time to get things done. It's possible that sometimes it may take me as much as 30 minutes to get to a totally relaxed state so I like the added time to guarantee an hour of mind play.

Visions seen in the floats:

Goddess Kali
Either the goddess of "death and destruction" or "time and change," have it your way. There she was with rust black (as if cooked) skin standing on one leg facing me with crazed bulging eyes. Muscular yet round and shiny. Behind her head and shoulders was a floating circular feather fan of ivory, ebony and seemingly bloodstained surfaces. Her exposed breasts had necklaces and longer strands of ivory, ebony and blood red coral adorning them. Her genitals were large, red, wet and swollen! She eyed me with vanity, disgust and lust.

Spider Web Pagoda
In a bright morning forest of aspen I found a simple pagoda of raw pine. Hanging from the center instead of a gong or a Buddha sculpture was a finely carved wooden mandala. As thin as a couple millimeters at points, it resembled an intricate spiders web with embedded symbols and vaguely kanji characters. Touching it was out of the question because it was so frail and so infinitely detailed.

Future Magma Power Station
The atmosphere of this earth-like place was thicker, the clouds were lower and fog drifted close to the ground and through the trees. Flying over a pine forest I noticed a white dome structure. I came closer and noticed shiny metal pipings coming off the dome and branching off in different directions. Gaining x-ray vision, I saw inside that it was a geothermic power station sitting over an artificially drilled hole in the earths crust. Magma from the earths core had risen in the hole and the power station was mining and routing that energy to other locations.

Mega Tree Creature
Still flying over the same 'planet,' I noticed a strange formation of coniferous trees. It turned out to be an entire forest that was one interconnected tree. Like a cell in the body with a nucleus, the central part was made of sequoia sized trees having branches that connected with other trees. A thick interwoven branch structure that spread out from the center to smaller normal sized trees and ones that hadn't yet connected with the main structure. Maybe they did in the root system.

Earth Sheltered City
Flying yet further over this 'planet,' I saw a city. I found the humans. From the air it looked like a hill that had been cut with canals into a grid. When I landed in one of these street canals I realized that all the buildings were merely roofed with 4ft of soil but kept the same contour of the original natural land shape. The buildings were modern with glass walls but there was substantial custom metal structure to hold up the heavy soil roof. These structures appeared to be metal and organically shaped. There were streets and plazas that let in plenty of light. I was thinking about the constant 55 degrees 4ft underground and how this was a sort of open air cave architecture.

Harley Davidson Spacecraft
I had some leather pants with buckles and some giant greasy boots that came up to my knees on. I walked a catwalk through a galley in the center of the craft and observed the walls that beveled out and away to the sides. Every surface seemed to be filled to the gills with chrome pipes, caps, bolts, wires, and finned structures. Everything had a purpose as if this was a combustion based spaceship! The temperature was hot. There was a dull thud of repeating bass vibrating through everything from outside. I felt there was an element of indulgence. This was a showpiece craft that was one of a kind.

Illustration credit: Syd Mead
Lucus said he was inspired by the San Francisco dock loading structures for his Empire Strikes Back snow walkers. I'm thinking it was Syd, master futurist.

Some Art I Like

2008-08-01T22:13:00.000-07:00

Interesting enough, last August I created an identical blog entry called, "Some Art I Like." I shall do it again. This time, however, the powers of the internet are betraying me and I'm not able to totally tie down the ownership and creators of some of the works! I'm also a bit behind the times but the things I remember stuck with me. Most were tagged in blogs that raced by and were deleted too soon for me to capture the facts for. I'm slow.

I ask my meager collection of blog watchers to help identify some of the artists that I wasn't able to. I'll update my blog with mucho credit and accolades to you if you can.

My favorite art of the last year includes two photographers, a sculptor, a painter and a designer.

Johnathan Weiner
When you fall in love with a painting you fall fast and hard. I did for Weiner's, "The Attacker's Move." A tip of the hat to the Juxtapoz underground movement, influence from classical posing ala Caravaggio, the shading and brushwork of Sargeant and a thoroughly original version of the subtle palette of the 90's. The painting, with it's nearly surreal point of perspective, incorporates lines of composition based on 15 degrees, 30 degrees that are close to my heart. The cartoon-ish freeze-frame of the falling duck, the fever dream angle of the trees, the mastery of stroke, this is a piece that even Johnathan must consider one of his finest. After reading an interview of him in Hi-Fructose, I was inspired by his sense of history and focus on making a new meaningful art for our time.

Alison Jackson
It must be 2 yrs since she hit Art Forum, but I'm slow on the uptake. I re-discovered her through one of her talks at ted.com. Alison is infatuated with paparazzi photography to the point that she started making her own. She hires look-alike celebrity models to pose in her photos involving compromising celebrity situations. This allows her the power to make social commentary as well as undermine the power of the media. How brilliant! So here's a pic of the Marilyn Monroe porno shots and Tony Blair having a sauna with Beckham.

Les Deux Garcons
What an incredible composition! What an incredible mix of taboo and symbolism!

This is a mystery. Is it a group that created this sculpture? Les Deux Garcons means, "The two boys." So, yes, must be two boys that created this. Seems like I saw this image over and over a year to two years ago but it stuck in my mind. Taxidermy is used well and sometimes bad. In this case it's respected so well, that it makes one second guess the usual motive. The symbolism seems easy but turns out to be difficult. I like it. It continues to pose questions. Perhaps it's nonsense. I can't turn away from an engaging image. Everyone I show it to gets excited.

Stephan Sagmeister
Designers will exhale over the hype, but he's the first designer in a long time to bridge the gap between art and design so well. His major feat is typography which he spells out in the real world ala grass tied in a fence to spell out words (done here in Tucson), different colored books stacked in a wall to spell out words, or inkless tattooing into flesh to spell out words and then he photographs it. Graphic design is pretty much done if there is a good photograph. Sagmeister does it all in the photo. When communication gets personal and involves this much staging, I consider it art. A hero of mine and especially as a speaker at ted.com with his talk about happiness and the source of his book.

artist?
This is the mystery to me. A couple years ago this photographer captured my passing interest. The imagery stayed with me beyond my memory of the artist's name. Things roll on, time travels and I and the media forgot who this artist is. As I look back, I realize what a wonder this photographer is and I haven't been touched so well in a long time. Slightly lesbo, well posed, smart girls ready to take over the world. The photos here don't do the ones I remember justice. The ones I remember oozed woman power. In an intimidating and sexy way. I loved the powerplay.

My internet investigations of this photographer lead me to one place: the wit of staircase. I'd email the author of the blog but Theresa Duncan and designer Jeremy Blake had an infamous dual suicide relationship. Two amazing young talents gone before their time. Theresa included many of my mystery photographers images in her blog (obsessed with girls in libraries), but never gave credit to the creator. She also didn't choose the best of the artists works in her blog (my opinion.) Maybe she took the photos?

Average looking, smart girls, in an ivy league place artist? I love the subject matter and the poignant posing. I'd be so happy if you know who this is doing the photos....

And finally, oh shit! I'm done.

Comicon 2008 San Diego

2008-07-28T20:49:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, Jane and I packed up the Scion and headed for San Diego to attend the International Comic Book Convention in San Diego. If anyone has noticed, they are blessed with the absolute greatest climate on the continent. Hands down. The place looks like an urban tropical jungle: palm trees, beaches, fruit and flowers, highway overpasses dripping with leafy vines, yet there is always one of those cool breezes hitting you. As I get older, I appreciate a cool breeze. "That's a one out of hundred cool breeze." You know the ones. Yeah, I caught a bunch of top ten cool breezes.

Can I sum up Comicon quickly? Let me try. Although it might have started with comic books, it's not just that anymore. It's an entertainment nerd mecca. Comic books, magazines, video games, movies, televisions shows, celebrities, action figures, t-shirts... It's also an industry networking event as I eavesdropped on many conversations involving programmers and gaming, script writing, artists working deals, and copyright. Basically the mile long first floor of the convention center is a giant shopping mall and the second floor is special rooms dedicated to seminars and sessions by famous artists, television stars etc.. In two days, we never made it to a scheduled event on the second floor. People would line up for hours to get into those rooms.

Celebrities? I saw: Marvel comics originator Stan Lee, Lori Petty aka Tank Girl, Wilma from Buck Rogers, Lou Ferrigno aka Hulk, Peter Mayhew aka Chewbacca, Jonathan Frakes from Star Trek Next Generation, Avery Brooks from Deep Space Nine, Robert Picardo the holographic doctor from Voyager, Bill Ward of Playboy magazine, and Mad magazines's Al Feldstein. Most of them we found by just wandered into the wrong place turned around and they were there! Or suddenly there was a group of photographers and you looked to see who they were taking photos of.

I can describe San Diego as cool and moist but I'd describe the Comicon as crowded. There were sooo many people. Stats are really bad on the website but 125,000 for the weekend? Seemed like 125,000 a day. If I wanted to take a picture of something, there were 5 other people doing the same thing. If I said, "Hey Jane, look at that," we'd have to wait for the people standing in front of "that" to move and then we could see it for a brief second until someone else jumped in front of us.

Costumed people really take the cake at this event. Storm troopers, Boba Fet, Bender, Steam Punkers, Manga, Japanese schoolgirls, Zena, everthing.. I can't complain about the bevy of young ladies willing to paint there bodies and bare next to nothing to approximate their favorite comic book hero. Geeky ladies and men obsessed with getting laid apparently. They will stop to pose and the cameras collect like bees to honey. One group put on a vigorous protest concerning some villain/scientist in a fantasy world domination thing. Maybe you can explain it to me. They marched in costume all around with signs shouting "down with blah.." I thought to myself, all this energy directed to fantasy... There's a war to protest!

Did I have fun? Yeah! We had no idea there was so much art there. Vintage everything, original artwork, and posters galore. We picked up some great vintage movie posters and some prints by original artists.

My mission was to find my perfect comic book and I found it. But it's not published yet! I bought two limited edition prints from him which I will frame. He's an absolute master. If you've ever seen an old illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland, or Wizard of OZ, or ever wavered over some of that older etched scientific illustration and loved it, well this guy does it in 2008 with the same feel. And he doesn't reduce his art, he does it actual size without a pen. He uses a 2 hair brush in ink. Looking at one of his panels is like looking at lines drawn with a needle. It's so exact and so perfect and it seems like he's traveled through time to visit us. I love the steam punk movement but this guy has that era of illustration down.

He's Jeremy Bastian and look at his blog. I bought the small walruses and a giant version of the armored bat faerie.

For the most part, I can conclude that there are segments of our populace that are "Over Entertained." Junkies of it. I'm not there yet.

Check out my FLICKR pics.

Sensory Deprivation #4

2008-07-20T22:59:00.000-07:00

This is the fourth chapter in my exploration of sensory deprivation and or floatation tanks.

This time, I decided to go for the gold. I floated for 90 minutes. I could have gone 2-3hrs. I am convinced of something greater I have only briefly touched on. There is a mystery I just want to get a feel for. When I float, I lose all sense of body and worldly/human issues. I'm in a total silent black space. Like in a cartoon when the lights go out and you only see two eyes... There is something left after the body goes away. When I touch 'it,' I'm not sure if it's nothing or something. I'm looking for a color, flavor, or texture to hang onto. Something to aspire to. Something laying under my common experience I haven't noticed before. Something pure, genuine, perfect, flawless. I want something to hit me like a diamond bullet right through the forehead. This time, no diamond bullets.

There is no way you can't relax in the bath. People who know me can sense that I'm calmer. I can handle more things in my schedule, I haven't become flaky, less things bother me and I have kept my detail oriented mind. I've been told that things like handwriting can change. I've been told that it cures cancer. If stress ages the body, uses up organs... The only thing I can say for sure is that it relaxes you.

I'm familiar with my dream states. I explored those in the last few floats. This time I went exploring for something deeper. I didn't find it. I found an hour of mind chatter and a half hour of quiet place. I'm not discouraged. I'm going to change my life with this. I'll keep you posted.

The Crucible Fire Arts Festival

2008-07-15T00:10:00.000-07:00

It is rare in my adult life that I attend a "Festival" or "Event" of any kind that, in the words of David Cross, "blows the shit out of your ass, into the toilet and flushes itself." The Crucible Fire Arts Festival this past weekend in Oakland California did that for me. At the urging and charity of my old friend and Art Institute of Chicago school mate Pierre Riche, I flew to Oakland and attended. The event turned out to be 100 times larger and more entertaining than I had expected.

The Crucible is a world renowned metal artists workshop that is also intertwined with the Burning Man Project as many of the artists are also funded through grants from that event.

This is pure Gen X, sideshow, Rockabilly-Betty, alternative circus. Why this sort of thing isn't in Vegas permanently, is beyond me. Fire art involves a lot of metal. Almost every artist or group of artists are welders/metal workers/robotics expert with a second self taught major in pyrotechnics. Apparently, once the initial knowledge of how to build a flamethrower became a little more widespread, artists branched off in many directions to expand the technology. The result is a fairground filled with fire. I mean BIG fire. Fire that explodes with such intensity over your head you feel the "Whoomp" of the event hitting your chest. Fire of such heat you need to back up. Yet, as the cool wet fog of the bay moved in, being close to fire seemed a good idea.

Highlights:

The Fire Vortex by Nate Smith
So, you rig 10 giant fans in a circle, like the ones the fire department uses to clear smoke out of a building, put vents on it to direct the air flow better, wear one of those silver suits the steel foundry workers / volcanologists wear and squirt copious amounts of flame from a hose into the air at the center of the fan-driven centerfuge. What you get is a 30ft tornado of fire. Absolutely awe inspiring.

Giant Tesla Coil by Omega Recoil
I love Tesla Coils and this is the largest I've seen. The bolts of electricity produced by this thing created an un-godly noise and near lightening bolt sized fingers of light reaching out into the air. I was hypnotized by the almost evil searching the electricity would do fanning out into purplish pink branches into the air a few feet from me. Can that be topped? Try thinking about a man in a metallic-mesh suit with a metal birdcage over his head wandering into the electricity field and "playing" with the bolts of small lightening over his head. Yup, it happened.

The Healing Eye by Pierre Riche
Apart from the pure spectacle of flame and noise is a symbolic sculpture by Pierre. The healing eye is a pyramid with flames, a water fall, lighted details, and video projection all controlled by a separate button filled control module manipulated by the public. The symbolism of the Staff of Caduceus is a natural draw and the personable Pierre is eager to develop the ideas of healing for you.

Also in the show:

A 1920's steam engine kept alive and periodically spouting a whistle driven expelling of steam.
The completely metal Steampunk Treehouse with elevator to visit and get a birds eye view of the festival.
A glass and crystal buddha statue with swirling lights inside that instigate rays of light and fire.
An interactive bubble machine that fills soap bubbles with propane that can be popped explosively by participants.
A piano keyboard that triggers a row of flames that coincide with the keys as you play.
A spinning sculpture that creates an actual 'ball of flame"
Tractor treaded robots that heat up and glow red.
Insect alien sculptures controlled by a dj that whistle and bang from internal build-ups of flame and gas. Loud!
An ice sculpture with drilled holes that channel gas to metal 'burn points' that melt through the ice.
Fire dancers.
Trapeze artists.

So much amazement that I wandered about for 3-4hrs and kept discovering new stuff. Like a kid in a candy store. Anyone into making stuff, anyone into steam punk, anyone into fire, anyone into art... What will these people be doing 20 yrs from now? Making lots of money putting on a fire festival.

Float Tank Session #3

2008-07-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

July 4th I did my 3rd floatation tank session. Now I'm really getting into this! I am far from mastering this imagination tool but I am progressing with shorter "relax" periods till I get to dream state. I'm still not at a point of lucidity where I take control. Things are just appearing to me. Apparently my subconscious is working overtime on science fiction concepts because that's what a majority of my visions this time were:

Laser Rifle:
There in infinite black space, a weapon appeared. Doesn't it make sense that a laser gun would be made of optical equipment? It was heavy and about 30 inches long. The barrel looked like many telephoto camera lenses hooked up end to end. The surfaces had rings and ridges for adjusting just like that criss-cross pattern etched into a camera lens focusing ring. The grip was made of well worn leather. At the rear 'stock' part of the weapon was a rounded corner box with some hex head bolts holding the sides together that looked like the powerplant and laser housing. Some half-torn yellow/black diagonally striped hazard tape on it. A giant leather shoulder strap hinged from the center of the gun. All the parts looked used and a bit worn. Or maybe it was a really high powered flashlight!

Artic Alien Mantas Queen:
This was just a short clip of a vision but I concentrated to develop it a bit. I was visiting what looked like the royal igloo ice court of a human sized white praying mantas. I was really taken by the cleanliness of her white exoskeleton with a pearly white gloss surface almost glass-like. As she moved, the light would glint slight hints of pink and cyan from the edges. Her head had mouth parts and skull sections that fit together perfectly. The mouth parts moved with great fluidity and came to rest as if a robot. Her eyes were the only thing not white, they were huge and black with nearly no reflection. She wore a gray fur cape that came up and curved over the back of her skull to a sharp point over the top of her head. In the room there was something red and something yellow but I remember how nice it went with the black and white of everything else.

Computer With Organic Shape Interface:
Apparently I knew how to use this computer and was tweeking a program. Before me were an almost infinity of cellular shapes, like you might see through a microscope at organic tissue. Some sections were black on white and some were white on black. When my vision zoomed in, I saw that the organic shapes where made of infinite combinations of triangles, diamonds stars, squares. The way I manipulated the program was through a stylus. With it's point, I would tear parts of one shape and pull it to group with others. Double tapping would make them disappear. Double tapping in a different location made them appear. It was a total 2d experience and I pretty much just had to watch myself do it.

My next float is going to be closer to 10 days rather than a week from now. Illustration from Cris Vector.

Float Tank #2, Sensory Deprivation

2008-06-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

I did my second hour in a sensory deprivation tank today.

This time I had no preconceptions, and no novel experiences to pull me apart from the true meat of the total relaxation awaiting me in the tub. I took off my clothes, took a quick shower and stepped into the bath, turned off the lights, closed the door and was in no-space. Getting over having a body and the twitching and itches and relaxing happened much faster this time. I got into it really fast. The body disappeared. You don't have any track of time there but I guessed it took 10 minutes.

The swirls that happen before your eyes, and in the tank even with eyes open, changed abruptly to a more liquid hi-rez form. Hypnogogic images start to take shape. I started jumping in and out of realities:

Forest fly-throughs:
I was small, maybe a foot from the ground zooming and pausing through a rainy wet forest. At times I stopped and would look at my arm which had wet bits of bark and dirt on it. I recall the bright young green color of ferns and new plants against a fertile forest floor.

Arabesque design:
Sudden, awe inspiring sights of huge walls made of golden arabesque geometric interwoven designs appeared. I didn't zoom into these, I just flew over them like a landscape.

Ivory City:
I saw a city made of an organic, white bone-like material. Most buildings were cylindrical towers, but the joints of the white material were decorated with incredibly ornate gold rings reminding me of some kind of indian white elephant gold ring ornament place on their tusks.

Artificial metallic ocean reef:
I swam like a sea diver over an incredibly detailed reef. Every barnacle, every anemone, every crustacean was fashioned of metal. The long arms of the anenome's were segmented tubes of silver, polyps where little flowers of tin-foil thin petals opening and closing. Waving hairs of metal strings pulsed with the current.

Alien me?
A figure appeared before me. An alien I somehow knew very well. Maybe 6.5ft tall. No nose, enlarged eyes but not bubbles like the traditional alien 'grey.' The eyes were pretty much the size and shape of a human skulls' empty eye sockets. Small, fish-like mouth. The skin was dull gray with a pattern on the face like freckles and lichen at the same time. The alien wore a jumpsuit of a curious white suede criss-crossed by a rubbery seam system. The feet were like shortened black rubber flippers.

I observed the being with some awe. I sensed a foreign grace and intelligence. Then I was it. I was wearing the jumpsuit. I was the alien.

Conclusion:
I don't consider anything I do in the tank real. These are very special dream visions. Please don't talk to me about your 'spirit' ideas. I'm still working this one out. And I love the side-effects.

Sensory Deprivation Tank

2008-06-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I floated in a sensory deprivation tank at a private spa in Tucson. If you're in Tucson, Teresa Wilke-Oved, at Still Waters is detail oriented and just the best guide for a first timer. The experience was so wide ranging in it's effects, I'm still digesting what happened during that hour.

Sensory deprivation tanks were developed by John C. Lilly M.D. in the 60's to examine the effects of the mind in isolation. Called a sensory deprivation tank, isolation tank, or floatation tank, the enclosed tank is fashioned with air circulation and a water/salt solution bath kept at 94F, or skin temperature. 750lbs of epsom salts dissolved in the water makes your body float higher than you would in a jacuzzi or swimming pool. The effect is like floating weightless through space. When the mind isn't irritated by the constant stimilous from the skin, eyes, ears, etc. it is totally free to exist on it's own. Although it is used for drug rehabilitation, stress relief or pain management, some use it as a creative tool. That's what I'm interested in.

So what was it like?
It took me a while to relax and get used to the environment. My arms and legs felt large and solid and then I couldn't feel them at all. I lost all sense of time which made me sometimes anxious. Once I relaxed, my visions ranged all over the place. There is no way you can't totally relax in this thing. At one point, I was floating above houses and streets. At one point I was looking down through clouds at a mountain top. At one point I was in a 50's modernly finished apartment building on about the 10th floor. At one point I was hovering near some sort of futuristic/gothic cathedral ala H. R. Giger. I specifically saw the detail of the architecture which was detailed infinitely complex like precious metal jewelry. At one point, err, lets just say things were erotic. At one point I had a flash of absolute fear and vertigo. Maybe I forgot where I was? Maybe I glimpsed a little death?

It's amazing that the mind can have these kind of experiences without the use of drugs. I am returning next Saturday, hoping the novelty of the experience will wear off and I have some more control over my exploration. I'm interested in exploring lucid states and using the experience as a creative tool. My plan is to float weekly until I sort of 'level out' my stress and can develop a controlled plan of exploration. Go into other worlds and bring back some imagination booty! Like a psychonaut pirate!

Even a couple days after the float, I feel more in the moment and relaxed. My creative mojo is also pumped up and I'm sketching some new imagery as a result.

Just as a little P.S.
Joe Rogan, not the person I would expect to be open to these sort of things, has a kind of video where he 'advertises' float tanks and is giving one away online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7tq0IwPao0
He has this other less finished video that is probably more descriptive of what you can expect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEjTXX2rHgA

Bought a 2006 Toyota Scion Today

2008-06-02T23:16:00.000-07:00

The drama of saving for a car and getting our car stolen... returned unusable... renting a car and then buying a car is over. Given this introduction, I realize this may be a very boring blog entry. I'll summarize.

The Toyota Scion is perhaps the most ugly vehicle on the road. "The Box on Wheels"

It's a very "Hip Hop" car. A graffiti artists' wheels. Which I can identify with. Because I'm from the streets...

With 33mpg, 4 doors, automatic, and plenty of cargo, it's the small SUV with the cargo we need and we can take passengers. For the same price we could have purchased something HUGE given the plummeting value of larger vehicles. I felt like some kind of dwarf wandering around the backlot of the dearlership filled with Sequoias and full-sized Tundras.

We bought new "used" with 31k miles on it.

I now have a virtually new car, with adult insurance that covers so much that if I accidentally poop my pants, I'm going to get some money for that. Really, I deserve it. Poop doesn't grow on trees. (apparently cardboard does)

So, edging 40, I have adult insurance, and near perfect credit. I spent my 20's ruining my credit and my 30's repairing it.

It's a Toyota. We're going to drive it into the ground and squeeze out every penny.

I can do road trips again without something blowing out in mid-New Mexico.

So I'm promising to make this short. It hasn't really settled in after the 8 hours of test driving, credit checks, insurance inspections, mechanic inspections and forms to fill out. We have a new car. I like it. I don't have to worry anymore. Nuff said.

Nirvana on an Airplane

2008-06-01T20:18:00.000-07:00

I experienced Nirvana on a commuter airline flight.

Every comedian has some kind of routine complaining about the peanuts, the crying babies, passengers with too much carry-on luggage, the big sweaty guy that sits in the middle, white hairs with WAY too much perfume, the stewardess that thinks they are God, or the First Class - Coach schism. I recall a 1987 flight, under-age, in a window seat, sipping on a Tanqueray and tonic smoking a Camel cigarette watching the clouds swoosh beneath the aircraft wing in what I could only describe as a Frank Sinatra moment. Back when the last 3 rows were for smokers and we actually used the ashtrays built into the seat arms now only inhabited by the stray glob of occasional chewing gum. As nice as 1987 was, it wasn't Nirvana.

I'm going to save you some time and dive right into my definition of Nirvana: A state of not fearing death, not fearing being uncomfortable, expecting that something completely unexpected will occur, most moments are disguised as boredom, it always gets better, and whatever happens might be the last time it happens so savor it. Much of the human drama is meaningless so don't get wrapped up in the hype.

OK, not the most colorful definition of Nirvana, but I revel in the fact that it's right in front of me right now and I haven't even sky-dived from a satellite, surfaced from my trip to the bottom of the ocean or walked around on the moon. Sitting right in front of me is the fact that I will be dead some day. Perhaps now, perhaps tomorrow. I'm OK with that. I just don't want to be scared. I want to watch with a macabre sort of suspense. What might happen?

As far as my experience on the airplane, I realized how personal it was. Visions of infinities, other worlds, unfathomably complex designs, the incredible beauty, the incredible light, the skin, the tongue, the fingers. My minds eye floated outside the aircraft and watched the miracle of us 200 passengers whizzing through the air in a metal tube. With our giant brains and our indifferent genes, and all our shocking similarities. Sometimes it just seems so impossible that this is all happening.

The suspense is killing me. I hope it will last.

Dude, Where's My Car?

2008-05-21T19:49:00.000-07:00

Someone stole my car. I don't really take it personally. I would question their judgement of cars though. I bought the beauty in 2000 with 80,000 miles on it for $4000. It has served me well on cross-country trips, gravel roads I shouldn't have taken it on, through a tunnel carved in a giant redwood tree, and as a constant companion as a metro shuttle about town. It's been packed to the gills with boxes, had windows smashed, antenna ripped off, numerous tires blown out.

Recently, I think the car knew the end was near. The past year has been spent in and out of mechanics intensive care. The tow truck drivers know me by name. We've saved and started shopping for a new one but were hoping to have a little more time looking for that special deal.

Perhaps it's joyriding around town right now. Perhaps it's on it's way to Mexico. Perhaps it's being set on fire in the middle of the desert. Perhaps I'll get a call from the Tucson Police that it's safely parked on a side street without any damage and I just have to go pick it up...

Addendum:
The Tucson Police found the car with the ignition trashed and most of the interior torn apart. Looking for drugs? Old car=drug car? Many questions but it's undrivable. My much trusted mechanic, Jim Mabry at Quantum Mechanics in Tucson, (best mechanic in Tucson according to Click and Clack) asked if I would donate it to one of his customers, a single mother, that recently lost her car. Apparently the color wasn't right. OK, this car is looking like it's hard to even give away! We called two junkyards to tow it and they don't even want it. Well, the charity that will take the car is none other than "The American Lung Association." For two smokers, this is quite a little possible signal of Kharma or something I'm not quite prepared to accept. Thank you American Lung Association.

Experiments In Core Design

2008-05-13T23:05:00.000-07:00

I can still say I'm amused by the muse. Withering away, nearly 40, not much in terms of real-estate, cars or investment portfolios to show, no kids, too many pets, but I'm pretty amused and comfortably pursuing becoming as eccentric as I can. Sometimes to an almost fugue state that hits me like lightening and scares me a wee little bit. Life is a challenge of dealing with one's brain chemistry.

I like the idea of pure black and white design. Shapes on a background. Problem: make that interesting. Jane calls it plotting. Plotting being the placement of repeating shapes. Jane pointed out to me, "Ah, you've discovered the magic of plotting! Symmetry and repeating patterns set up deeper levels of composition you never considered."

If you know me, I've been considering it for a while. That's where the Tao comes in. Nature is symmetrical. Nature jigs and jags all over the place randomly, but is still perfect and at rest. We love it because we are Tao also.

Every natural system could have a whole new design concept that follows that system. Even completely foreign ones. Bone structures of whales could be morphed via the rules of lightening paths. Leaf veins could follow the design of land formations. ie: trees made of railroad tracks.

Nature has some loose math behind it. I'm not interested in purely computed designs which hit me as a little dry, although I'm floored by the complexity. Looking at spirals, the golden section, fractal math in my ongoing research. (Yes, the pic is my own design.)

Instamatic Panoramics

2008-05-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

For probably 10 yrs I carried around a Kodak Instamatic 110 camera. Cheap to develop and print, I had it everywhere. Fit great in my cargo pocket pants. Not the best quality in the world so when I saw a sight to see, I blew a bunch of frames to make a larger photo.

In various degrees of decay due to poor storage and proximity to art supplies, it's a wonder they live till today. Many of them are incomplete. Many of them are weathered and adorned by yellowing Scotch Tape. Many of them I still have to find... somewhere packed away.

Check out the flickr set.

EarthKnowledge.net

2008-04-23T22:40:00.001-07:00

I designed that!

I get involved with a variety of projects while I work at Ridgewood Associates, the largest PR firm in Tucson Arizona. I know that if I had stayed in Chicago, I'd be working for a flashy small boutique agency with huge clients or maybe be a contract lackey in a larger but more prestigious firm.

Not all of our clients are into cutting edge stuff, but sometimes we get those special clients with passion. I've been with EarthKnowledge from the beginning when I did their branding and logo 5 yrs ago. My first impression of them was, "These people are going to be rich." They are a consulting firm on Earth science projects ranging from whether Las Vegas should get water anymore to why Hugo Chavez shouldn't dredge the Venezuelian Amazan for oil. Consulting on large, public court cases. They've decided they should go web too.

Partnered with Google, they not only are creating a news portal for all science concerns on the Earth front, but also a bunch of stuff I realize I can't talk about just yet. But, it's all amazing, believe me. Cutting edge and coming to a popular web portal near you. Really familiar web portals. The big ones (not naming any names.) Just look at the giant widget Newsgator.com created that is embedded in the first page.

So, they asked for their website to look like the iPhone interface and I gave it to them. Take a look! Web 2.0.... all the way.

Technology, Entertainment, Design -ted.com-

2008-04-20T01:27:00.000-07:00

Every once and a while, you find something on the internet and think, "this is what the internet is for." I found this yesterday. I would have been watching it all day today but Jane was doing her Ebay stuff so I spent the day: walking dogs, shopping, cooking stir fry, watching tv and picking my toes. (time for a another computer so we can both geek out at the same time.) That's why I'm blogging at 1:30 in the morning after spending a couple hours on ted.com. I feel obligated.

Ted.com is what the internet was made for. I feel like I've created some repetitive web surfing habits and am regretting not finding this site sooner. Apparently the conferences have been around, gaining popularity in the last 5 yrs.

I don't know when they started open-sourcing the keynote speakers of their conferences, but this is the greatest collection of scientists, artists, engineers, developers, designers, performers, and thinkers of our time! All presented via a smooth video interface in excerpts 15-20 minutes long. I'm not sure how long the speakers actually have on stage but every one of them has been rapid fire presentations as if they don't have nearly enough time to say what they have to. For the viewer, enough to rip the lid off your brain. Stick a fork in it, turn it over, it's done.

I've only been watching the "inspired by nature" and the "design" themes. The list of speakers is awe inspiring. I've read their books, I've read interviews with them, I've seen their work, I've heard of that thing... But here they are, on stage, usually with nice visuals to back them up, in all of their glory and power and passion over the subject they invented and know best. All of the speakers have the same thing in common, changing the world with ideas.

I've watched presentations on organic design, happy design, underwater life, food industry diversity, why ants work so well together, simplicity, human evolution and technology, Spore the game. I'm seeing my heroes up close and discovering scores of others.

Have I sold it enough? Gonna watch a couple more before I fade off to bed. link

Pissing on a Kitten

2008-04-03T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm no judge as to what is blog worthy. You know, that guy that cut 3 lanes over, slowed down in front of you to 5 miles an hour to make his final left turn with no signal, that might be blog worthy. But it happens everyday. Those are everyday aggravations. Blog worthy is something out of the ordinary. At least in my case.

So we have some kittens we want to give away, who reside in our bathroom nursery. (I'll FED EX, Next Day if you want one.)

So, as humans do, they have to urinate, which I did, not 20 minutes ago. Yet, I urinated on a 1 month old kitten. How did I do that? It just simply jumped in mid-stream. She wanted to know about all the action going on in the toilet. Curiousity killed the cat but my piss isn't made of laser beams. So, it just got kinda wet... with pee.

It just jumped in, like a flea. From the ground right into the yellow toilet pond... Boing! Splash! And then, I was peeing on a kitten.

Shock, surprise, splattered pants and floor. No one really wants to pee on a kitten. It just happens sometimes.

P.S. - I washed the kitten off and all is forgotten in her little kitten life.

------As a follow-up to this story. We put the the kittens up on Craiglist, received a phone call 30 minutes later interested in one. The following day we received 10 phone calls. All kittens are now safe and sound in fabulous new homes with loving owners.

Mission / Nogales Trip Fantastic

2008-03-24T23:48:00.000-07:00

Check out my flickr set for all the photos!

Jane and I have been happy the last couple days to help entertain the photographer guests of our neighbors and friends Matt and Rosanna. Marie, from Paris, Oliff and Katherine from Norway are some adventurous souls for sure. And alot of fun. And all very accomplished.

The mission today was to visit Tucson's oldest attraction, the San Xavier Mission Church and the city of Nogales on Mexico side.

The "Mission" was the 18th century Franciscan version of a European cathedral made of local materials like adobe. The architecture is imposing and regionally affected but the decoration and sculpture is on the whole a naive version of what could be found in Europe at the time giving it a homey and hand-made feel.

Nogales is the border town closest to Tucson about 50 miles south. The US side is pretty small but the Mexico side is probably 3-400,000 strong. Nogales has a lot of economy based on tourist trade. I think the confusion about homeland security and proper identification to re-enter the US must have had some kind of effect on Nogales. There have been some closures of restaurants and bars that used to be there. At the present time, you officially need a drivers license and birth certificate to get back although Matt was able to cross back with just a drivers license. In early 2009, all will be required to have a passport.

Shopping is great in Nogales. I'm a fan of the Mexican shoe company "Flexi." Now I have two pairs. Leather... There is a tourist area surrounding the border that involves tons of shop-keepers and street vendors hawking thier goods and aggressively trying to get your attention. If you walk out of this area, you find a calm, polite and friendly town. The food is incredible! Very cheap! Jane and I led the group to our favorite restaurant discovery, "The Oasis." Just simply the best! Seafood is fresh because it's shipped in daily from the Sea of Cortez. At least for me, the biggest attraction to Nogales is the food!

Apocalypse How?

2008-03-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

During this time of year, especially in the northern climes where everyone is forced inside by the bitter cold, and for us especially down here in the desert, the winter has lingered weeks beyond what we usually expect. This morning I had frost on my car windows and there was snow on the ground 20 miles all around the city. Yes it's cold here... but it's a dry cold.

This may wander ones imagination into ideas of palm skirted beaches in the warm sun, surfboards, tequila and the total extermination of all humans on the planet through some kind of un-foreseen virus or planetary h-bomb war. Not so far fetched. Except that Jane(my girlfriend) and I are the only ones left on earth. That's probably not your fantasy. I don't blame you. But really, we are just trying to being realistic here. Jane and I have skills, you don't. (The Apocalypse fantasy always starts with "I'm special.")

I know for a fact you've investigated this fantasy. Really, best outcome available to this is that everyone else is gone. Yup, and incredibly, there are no zombies or infected wildlife trying to defile you with that deadly virus. Everyone is simply gone and you have all the canned goods ever to keep you afloat (unless you're a stickler for the expiration dates.) You can get around on Airforce One, sail the seas in an empty oil tanker, and take a trip in the space shuttle if you can find a way to press all the buttons at the same time. Oh, shit, there's no electricity. Well, there's a lot of matches and lighters laying around.

So what would you do? Surround yourself with jewels? Move into the royal palace if you could get across the ocean? Collect Picasso paintings and wipe your ass with them? Well probably something smaller. Sailing the ocean for someone inexperienced would probably spell out doom. So, staying with our continent. Move north in the summer and south in the winter. You need a car. Maybe you live in it. You'd have time to become a master mechanic. In nature, living by the shore is easy living. You'd want to do that. Mussels, clams, fish, etc. Maybe just stay near the equator. Oh shit, we're back at that island paradise again! Maybe we just all want to live on a deserted island in paradise. Get away from the pollution. The people pollution. (goes to store to buy dark aviator sunglasses and a hoodie sweatshirt.)

EarthIsland Painting: Am I Brain Me?

2008-03-10T21:57:00.000-07:00

As I get older some things get easier and some things get harder. Life doesn't really progress, it just gets different or maybe stranger. Since I went camping with friend Kyle Bronsdon last weekend, something has happened to me. Maybe it was the dead silence and utter remoteness of Kofa Wilderness in western Arizona that amplified it. Maybe staring into a fire of mesquite and ironwood logs drew it out of me. Or maybe it was the copious amounts of whiskey. Only the mother-ship knows... (or Carl Sagan)

Staring up into that fathomless collection of stars, I realized I had never really seen the stars. The night sky had always been like a tv screen or an image in a book. Something so un-comprehensible it wasn't worth even trying. That night I saw the Milky Way in 3 dimensions. It had depth. We are remote hill-billies stationed on its outer ring. I saw the stars above and below us and looked into the heart of the galaxy. I felt vulnerable in my own gravity, precarious in my position on the surface of our planet yet comforted by the air I was breathing. We are practically swimming in the thickness of gas on our planets surface. Go ahead, wave you hand around above your head, you'll feel the water we swim in.

So then I begin to feel like a brain. Yes! a kind of a disembodied brain inside of my own body. Intellectually, I know I am a brain, but to realize it is something else. I have this strange visualization of a type of octopus with thousands of thin tentacles. Because, really, I am. This octopus creature pushes out through flesh and muscle to drive a car, pushes levers and buttons on a computer screen, fries up eggs, does some math, and throws a ball to my dog. Just so you know, I am octopus creature right now! Don't want to alarm you.

For me at least, this fits perfectly with my new painting. Kind of. I call it "EarthIsland." It's the first step into my life long battle over whether to do realism or abstraction. It's my first step in combining the two as well as adding in a graphic element so dear to my heart. We'll see where it goes but I just started on the 3' x 3' panel today. 9 times larger than I've been working on the last year. The pic by the way is just a photoshop sketch. I imagine the painting will evolve way beyond it.

My Brush with the Law

2008-02-27T22:15:00.000-08:00

So, I'm a law abiding citizen. I pay my taxes. I rarely give the finger. I don't spit. I'm an Eagle Scout. I helped a lady in a wheel chair get a six pack from the liquor store freezer room that wasn't so accessible. I give motorcycles a bunch of room to breath in traffic, and I break for kittens. I'm not such a bad guy, not Mother Theresa, yet, I broke the law and made a criminal violation.

Was it speeding? Public belligerence? Excessive excelleration? Crack cocaine possession? Bad breath? No my friends it is much much worse. I will always remember the moment the awful truth shook my reeling brain, I, Tom Baumgartner, was a J-Walker.

It seemed innocent enough. I looked both ways at the corner. 4-5 blocks in the oncoming direction there were no cars. I looked up at the flashing red hand meaning, "don't walk," looked back up at the empty street and thought, ok, time for me to walk, no traffic to worry about. My fatal error had been cast. I had not heeded the warning. Not only had I made that plumment off of the curb into a legally busy street, I had also unwittingly written my own small death warrant according to my out of no-where attending motorcycle officer who was only there to protect me from being "smooshed." Yes, his actual words.

The officer scanned my drivers license with some kind of blackberry thing and before I knew it he was printing me out a ticket from his behind-the-seat wireless printer. Unsure of the actual price of the fine due to its obscureness, he instructed me to do some "footwork" to find out what I actually owed the city for my infraction. After some research, I found that crossing the street would cost me $88. A small cost in comparison to most traffic fines. Interestingly, I also found out, if you hit and run resulting in death and are caught, the fine is $400. 4.5 times worse than J-Walking. That means KILLING someone with your car and driving away. Don't do that, it'll cost you plenty.

Pedestrians beware, you are probably breaking the law. Be kind, re-wind, and never, ever cross the street against the traffic light. Apparently, it's against the law. And no spitting please. This isn't Russia.

Little Golden Nature Guides

2008-02-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

Check out the cover scans on my flickr account!

I've been collecting these books for 20 years. I don't care what condition they are in. I love the fact that all the illustrations are painted. Such quality little gems of nature appreciation you just know were carried around in someone's rucksack or sat next to their rock collection.

Some are more valuable than others but I really just want the greatest variety I can find. I'm constantly surprised when I find new ones that I couldn't imagine existed.

I have tons of doubles of the more common ones and have generally scanned only the oldest of each edition.

El Bulli

2008-01-16T18:51:00.000-08:00

So, you're a creative person and you look out on the interwebs and you see so much superior talent. Should I be more innovative? Should I put the nose to the grindstone and shutup? How exactly do I aspire to the mastery I know that is inside me? How do I keep true to my own originality? Where do I find heroes to emulate?

I know I won't do a couple things on the interwebs as a creative person. One being: posing in front of my artwork with that ,"I'm looking into your soul and I'm master of it," look. You know the one. Good god! How many artists pose in front of their artwork with that elitist, sour, upward glance at you as if the fact that you are even looking at their photo mildly disgusts them. "I dare you not to like my work." They must be good... (don't look at my profile pic. Guilty as charged.)

Ok, so onto the blog subject at hand. I am not a master of haute couture, arts connoisseur, or a food gourmand. I have an opinion and my own taste. I can appreciate the movements, choices and concepts that try to put structure to the chaos of the creative world. I'm also a big fan of the cross contamination of artistic disciplines. For years I only friended musicians, because I received so much more from watching their process and feeding it into my own than I would a fellow painter who I might trip toes over. And, musicians have all the drugs. (I kid!)

Ferran Adrià Acosta, may.... may be the greatest living artist on the planet and he's a chef. I've done reductions, bisques, souffles, but jeez, my medieval alchemy is nothing compared to the high-tech culinary universe Ferran offers at his El Bulli restaurant. (Love the Helvetica) Despite my ignorance, it is voted the greatest restaurant in the world for 3 yrs running.

His art has been called, "molecular gastronomy," but he prefers, "reductionism." He's most known for offering merely a plate of foamy substance consisting of only taste. Using kryogenics, distillation, and a host of scientific processes, he collects only the essence of taste from foods. 50 lbs of white aparagaus may only create 2 cups of liquid that he whips and creams into a few dabs of fluff that reside on your plate. He is all about originality. Every dish is a unique gutsy experiment that is presented on a plate and photographed by an in-house photographer. Every dish photo goes into his books that garner a price rivaling high end art books. My check on ebay had these books at $200 or more. Well, you could spend $300 on a book or $400 and actually eat there if you reserve more than a year ahead of time.

Isn't there that joke about gourmet food and how the serving size gets smaller and the price gets bigger? So, how many courses do you expect for $400? 6? 10? Ohhh, no, not at Bulli. The average number of courses at El Bulli is 30! This person was kind enough to photograph all of his courses, despite the evil looks and sneers coming from nearby tables as his flash went off. Also, obviously a gourmand, had issues with the "fishy tasting seafood." :)

Interesting. A creative philosophy that matches unexpected tastes against unexpected tastes as a matter of experiment. My mind reels with the idea of doing the same thing in the visual realm. Textures, colors and depth. Delicious vision, delicious taste. It's a different way of looking at things but very patterntology. I must begin collecting!

Carl Sagans Cosmos

2008-01-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

Science channel started showing some Cosmos episodes and I was immediately drawn to them. When first presented on PBS, I was too young to appreciate it. Today I find the straight-forward, easily understandable use of segway in his scripts delightful. The dimensional jumps are more physical science yet just as entertaining as the quirks of discovery and social history presented in James Burkes TV series, "Connections." I think Sagan was trying to single handedly create a "New Age" of science thinking in a world of metaphysics and psuedoscience growing up around him in a religious manner. He was trying to make science itself cool. Over the years I think I had declined a gift of one of his books to me based purely on his overwrought magnanimous personality and the running joke of , "Billions and Billions."

Sagan was not without ego issues and openly aware of his marketing worth. He defended his name with a humorous 21st century copyright vigor (from his Wikipedia entry):

In 1994, Apple Computer began developing the Power Macintosh 7100. They chose the internal code name "Carl Sagan", the in-joke being that the mid-range PowerMac 7100 would make Apple "billions and billions." Though the project name was strictly internal and never used in public marketing, when Sagan learned of this internal usage he sued Apple Computer to force the use of a different project name. Other models released conjointly had code names such as "Cold fusion" and "Piltdown Man", and he was displeased at being associated with what he considered pseudoscience. (He was at the time writing a book debunking pseudoscience.) Though Sagan lost the suit, Apple engineers complied with his demands anyway, renaming the project "BHA" (for Butt-Head Astronomer). Sagan promptly sued Apple for libel over the new name, claiming that it subjected him to contempt and ridicule, but he lost this lawsuit as well. Still, the 7100 saw another name change: it was finally referred to internally as "LAW" (Lawyers Are Wimps).^[15]^[16]

In his own mind being a warrior of truth, and smoking pot, he succeeded in making a very interesting body of video work. Today, the physicists and astronomers are seen as the most enlightened science thinkers of the time. Why not the biologists? Why not the botanists? Why not material engineers? Surely their intense study of the universe might also bring them to a point of seeing things in large interlocking concepts and relationships of how everything falls together. Perhaps the sciences with the most questions and religious concepts breed the best television personalities. To me, the smallest details, the largest picture, and the infinite complexity is enough of a mystery to keep me from making up stories. Make your own conclusions.

Still trying to find that really good deal on ebay for the entire dvd set, obviously avoiding cracking an actual book, there are some gems in the public interwebs. Here's one if you have 9 minutes:

Learning PHP

2008-01-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

As Jane has told me many times before, if you have a problem with education and it's system, there's always the library card. And indeed it's especially true in the age of internet.

When it comes to computer languages, and in my case, web client scripts, there aren't a lot of people that know it. Especially anything that deals with database. Contrary to this knowledge, when I want to learn PHP and am thinking of paying someone to teach me, I find, of course, brought to you by open source n' shit theology, a website called, "www.learnphpfree.com." Considering the power of PHP and it's widespread use, I can easily say that the "everyone has a library card," idea is in full throttle on the internet. Amazing. Really, you could make Hotmail or Amazon knowing this.

At this point I'd like to change the direction of this blog entry into the theme of, "wonders of education," and in my case, self education. Having done html, css and design work for the web for almost 10 yrs,(self taught), I'm the perfect candidate to learn php. In my first lesson I've learned what variables are and their different types: boolean, integer, floating point and string. I have come in contact with these magical terms before but until now haven't known what they were. One small step for Tom. The clouds are lifting. I'm amazed at the logic of computer science, the most logical of all! Why am I so amazed? Perhaps my round thinking didn't interpret the perfectly square geometry. Maybe I've been away from school too long but I'm really motivated by the ah-ha principle now.

Gotta wrap this and get back to tutorials, yes, that's what 'exciting me' is doing on a Friday night. As opposed to 'domestic' me, 'lumberjack' me, 'sexy me' (which I don't wish upon anyone), and the ever lovable, 'leave me the fuck alone and why did you cut me off in traffic' me. How do I wrap this up? Well.... Ahh... Looking for a big bang of an ending... Perhaps you should choose:

1) Look out M*therf*ckers, I'm about to own your information technology's ass.
2) Genius is at it again, time to call the investment banker.
3) Tom found one more diversion that will keep his attention for a week.
4) I'm going to turn off my phone for the next couple months so Tom doesn't call me with questions about, ";"
5) Why exactly am I'm reading this?

Godhead

2008-01-03T20:37:00.000-08:00

I hear a lot of hype and ownership over the topic of spirituality, usually by someone who feels they are the expert and is trying to sell you something. Sometimes they are academics with degrees and knowledge of the history of others that talked about "it." I promise not to use the word "spirituality," again in this blog. If I do, I will probably have an eight DVD set that will create friends, improve your sex life, give you economic security and make you famous in 4 easy payments.

The most mysterious and amazing thing is that you exist. Isn't that what we are all bugged about? If it is all one, why am I me? Science can't tell me. Religion can guess. We just have to live with this astounding fact.

I'm comfortable with mystery. I'm not a huge stickler for the facts. They seem to stick for a bit and then fall randomly out of my brain if not used right away. Most of my conversations are a game of charades trying to get the word or person or fact I'm looking for out of the people I'm talking to so I can continue onto my point. Perhaps most things are irrelevant to me. Perhaps I'm using external storage devices for my memory! Perhaps I have a visual mind and a sort of dyslexia of the verbal.

I deal with amorphous ideas as a designer. Putting emotional spins on common concepts. I'm always trying to make connections between things that haven't been connected before. The originality problem.

When I'm painting, I'm always trying to lose myself in the details. The magic zone where the understanding of your subject is great enough that you actually start making nature itself.

Whole universes are blowing through us like wind. Somewhere on the insides of rocks, somewhere in the twitch reaction of muscle tissue, somewhere in the chip of the cell phone, somewhere in the shape of a tree is "it." Somewhere in everything else is the reason I exist. Connect.

Utopian Wishes

2008-01-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

I've spent the holidays dealing with family obligations, airports, long term decisions, creative debacles, searching for harmony and contemplating death. Yes! I had a nuke-mare dream! A little too close to a nuclear test site and blammo... 3 days to live. Witnessing and being overcome by the shockwave was actually pretty beautiful and had all kinds of sparkling details I wasn't expecting. The sudden appearance of weaping burn marks on my skin wasn't so nice. The weight of life and that I'm not ready to die hit me like an anvil on the chest. Then I woke up and went directly to a dream interpretation Web-site that said, "To dream of your own death, indicates a transitional phase in your life. You are becoming more enlightened or spiritual. Alternatively, you are trying desperately to escape the demands of your daily life."

Well, if the interpretation said otherwise, I probably wouldn't believe any "expert" who said they knew better. In this case, yeah, right on, I am changing and thinking of moving in different directions. Doesn't help that I'm presently reading "Islandia" by Austin Tappan Wright. A 900 page tome that I'm 300 pages through. Suggested to me by Jane, it's the Utopian novel to end all Utopian novels based in history around 1910.

To appreciate Utopian novels, you really have to appreciate life. Life sans war, life sans religion, life sans intolerance. I'm not talking about a leftist, tofu eating, nudist colony on the beach either. I'm talking about a society that rewards hard work. Hard work meaning love of life, your place in it, and the quality of your environment. Based in a agrarian economy, farming is the richest life you can pursue. It connects you with the land, natural rythms, and the responsibility of the human as 'husbander' of nature. Beyond that is architecture that lasts generations, textiles that are beautiful and comfortable, exquisite fresh food, quality works of art, education that is rich and varied, and a time schedule that is in harmony with nature. So, it's a Utopian society 100 yrs ago. Tappan saw the downward spiral of capitalism and consumer greed, which to us is God, but is detrimental to the quality of life. How complicated it is to have a simple life today.

Looking at my own life, this simplicity is still very hard to achieve and I have a simple situation. No kids, no mortgage. Perhaps I just haven't been taking the type of vacations I need to. Drifting down a lazy river on the deck of a small boat in the sunshine, dipping my toe in the water and wondering at the shore and it's secret stories as I pass by. When my mind is most blank, and most perceptive, I'm at harmony with my surroundings. I've met people that possess this inner peace and I can only hope that when I am old that I have a decade or two to wander through time with that kind of wisdom, always at harmony, always appreciative and ready at any moment to let go and die, because for long enough, it all was perfect.

I still have some twisted hope that I can wrangle my skills and the technology available today to create my own Utopian bubble. Hope that I can create some kind of harmonic flow in life that lets me work remotely, have a place in the country, a great house, good fresh food, keep good contact with friends, create great pieces of art, and have time to just enjoy life.

Real Life Artwork Sold in Second Life!

2007-12-13T21:40:00.000-08:00

I actually sold a real painting for real money from marketing in Second Life. I'm awaiting a check for $300 in the mail and will ship it off right away. I sold blueberries!

There is a birthday I didn't realize I had until recently. My "Rezzing" birthday. Yes, I (Quota Soon) and partner Kyle Beltran (aka Kyle Bronsdon) in Second Life, have been in virtual reality for a full year. This birthday also coincided with our accepting the generous gift of being hosted on the island of Pulaski Fizz (Second Life celebrity). A week of furious designing and building ensued with a grand opening of our new club/gallery in Second Life called Meatspace. So, four club moves and redesigns in one year. We also make a profit with each move as real estate has real monetary value.

I will admit that my general attitude towards this venture has been less than positive in most respects. Second Life had a crucial pr problem with over estimating it's member growth rate. Second Life is in continual Beta creating a sort of "connectivity weather" for its users. You never know what isn't going to work. But it isn't going away. Linden Labs is partnering with Sun Microsystems to create a universal VR platform. I feel like I am in the Beta of what will be the future of VR. The accomplishments thus far are astounding: a real world based on real money with real commerce, a revolutionary 3d creation tool available to every user, 3d tools including organic nurb tech, a scripting language (animation, etc.) applicable to any object or avatar in the world, streaming music, streaming video and voice chat. Everything is going to change once internet and database applications can be connected to Second Life. It will then be the VR it's promising the world.

There are a lot of budding entrepreneurs in Second Life. Designed to cater to the creative, most are terminally un-talented. If you spend 50-60hrs a week in-world, you're going to get good at something. Being a chronic gamer does not necessarily make you creative. If you're like me, a real world artist trying to sell real art in the virtual world, you get discouraged. But then again, I never tried selling, I am just there.

Then I sold a piece of art. In the real world. A real painting someone only saw in Second Life.

Let me clarify. In Secondlife I have a gallery with images of my artwork. Secondlife patrons can visit my gallery and buy my Secondlife images for $300 Lindens (about one US $1.) They usually go put this in their Second Life house. In a year, I've sold maybe 30 this way. Marketing... I also link all these images to my website and advertise the fact that you can buy the actual paintings. Someone did.

In Second Life I have a huge gallery I designed myself. I can show tons of work. Customers also get to see me and talk with me whenever I am there. I can sell the work, like I would sell the work in a real gallery. My avatar (or doll) appears as a real person and there is a real discourse that happens.

So with sale #1 in Second Life, I'm starting to get interested in marketing myself seriously there. There is a vibrant and educated audience hungry for culture. As so many people are getting their culture from media these days, I'm kind of doing a reverse hack, bringing culture into the media. In my painting, it's weird, I'm always thinking about what the Second Life audience will say...

Steam Punk

2007-11-11T22:53:00.000-08:00

It's always interesting how history makes it's mark on the future. In terms of techno-culture today via wireless technology, alternative fuel searches, software we use everyday, entertainment achievements in CGI, and virtual reality communities, the form that it usually takes is "ultra modern." Streamline and simple is the plan. Of, course. Unless you have some romance in your soul.

Am I comforted by the spare interface and simplicity of my surroundings? Do I find a home there? Is the deconstructivist aspect to technology really the way I feel about my life? I certainly don't want my digital tools to become more complicated. As these things become more standardized, couldn't we make them a little more interesting? That is the question that Steam Punk culture answers in a 19th century way. There was a time when tech was small and decoration was big; a quality crafted object meant it did something great. The objects pumped out by industry today a hundred years ago would have required thousands of hours of carving, shaping, and sculpting to resemble an object worthy of what the tech does. Shouldn't a laptop be made of copper and precious metals, minerals and gems? Something permanent? Something solid and real? Something we keep for decades rather than throw out in five years?

I, like most of you, haven't done so much Victorian age reading. But, I have read, "The Difference Engine," by Gibson and Sterling. An "Alternative History," it describes a world where we made computers but they weren't silicon, rather, computers were a warehouse-sized series of brass gears with hundreds of lab coated techs to service them. This is based on an actutal gear driven computer developed by Charles Babbage. Neal Stephensons, "Diamond Age" is also considered Steam Punk, but adds the oddity of nanotechnology to the loop. The animation "Steamboy" takes the imaginary world of the Victorian age and creates a science fiction thriller out of it with a Japamation bent.

What deepens the cultural interest in this subject is that it binds the Goth-Vampire-Magic world, aka HP Lovecraft and Alastair Crawley with the Sci-Fi world aka Jules Verne. Two great tastes that go good together. Today, with our spare techo life and tools, we have to look at the past for something to fill the soul of our the amazing machines. I'm giving this movement of fantasy more cultural weight than other fringe movements restricted to insulated segments of the populace such as: Rennaissance Festival attendies, Star Trek convention costumers, and Star Wars enthusiasts. Why? Because although the fiction collection is small, the idea has spawned thousands of home-spun artisans to create aspects of the fiction even though it isn't written. The fans are writing the world and making everything in it.

How are they discovering the details of this history? The internet. Most of those crumbly hard-bound books of the era have been long ago tossed out. Art and design further back than 70 yrs ago is considered class structure decoration and not personally empowering in the schools. The fashion considered over-wrought and decadent. An entire century has been blotted out but rediscovered through the internet. The oddity collectors, the antique fetishists and history fanatics have offered up their wares in electronic form.

Artists need to be celebrated, not feared and loathed by it's elitist and uninterpretable political commentary. (You know, being an artist is a mighty political stance in itself.) Like the low-brow artworld of Juxtapoz, there is an underground rebellion to the academic art world. People are seeking an art of the imagination. A world of quality objects and a need for the ornate in everyday life. The Art Nouvou movement was a way to find meaning through the nature wisdom of classical Roman and Greek mythology as a rebuttal to the industrial revolution. Steam Punk accepts technology and is finding meaning in information technology by comparison to the industrial revolution!

People making things 100 yrs ago had the lay person ability to make incredibly intricate inventions with only basic material skills. Nearly any technology could be made of gears, steam engines, pulleys, cables, glue, leather, glass, brass, wheels, hinges. Today, no. To make anything cutting edge requires a team of engineers. There died the crazed inventor in his basement.

So, as masters of our own universes, we have the power and free time in the 21st century to create alternative histories. The best known, and not before Newsweek found him, is DOC and he shows you how he makes his Steam Punk computer keyboards: Steam Punk Workshop In SecondLife, there are whole worlds and everything you can imagine to build buildings and clothe yourself with in a Steam Punk way.

On Ebay, there are artists creating "Science Kits" and artifacts that can only be described as faux historical art. Like stage props. Fictional objects for a fiction imagined as a group, not the direct result of a movie or a book. Shadowboxes of images and objects that suggest a fiction. The photos are of "The Lost Dinosaur" but I've also seen werewolf hunting kits etc. I love it! The imagination just runs wild at this point..

Added: Steampunk Treehouse, Steampunk Band

World Building

2007-11-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia: Worldbuilding is a technique widely used by authors to create diverse and believable constructed worlds in which to base their stories, the process usually involves the creation of maps, listing the backstory of the world and the people of the world, amongst other features. Worldbuilding - though primarily the tool of fantasy and science fiction authors - is also a helpful tool to authors of any genre. Worldbuilding allows the creator to add a depth of realism that they might not have been able to achieve otherwise, having a guide to the created world that can be easily referred to will help to avoid simple mistakes in the lore of the world.

I began building a world through the unsung and unseen Future Primitive Guide project. If you know me you know I burnt out on the whole idea and escaped back into my painting for a bit. You also know that I change my creative direction once a week. At the Moment™, I'm thinking that making the guidebook could only do good and fill my portfolio with illustration.

So, yes, world building! I've always been interested in the idea. Started when grandma bought me the book "Gnomes." So thorough, beautifully illustrated and believable. I dipped into world building with Dungeons and Dragons which is a great because the dice tell the story but the world is built by the dungeon master. Myst, the video game, leaves nothing to the imagination and I was blown away when I first experienced it. I am just one person though, not a team of paid artists and wish I had the time to flesh out something so completely. As Laurie Anderson said, "Use what you have right now." So, guidebooks to imaginary worlds is pretty cool by me. I can write and illustrate.

Not having to come up with an award winning story, but just the world is very freeing. I have no problem imagining and walking into worlds of my own creation. I've read some books on creating new worlds like, "Aliens and Alien Societies," by Ben Bova. I don't construct that way but there really isn't any guide to building a world. It's more of a process of making sure every "law" makes sense and every detail is covered somehow. I seem to imagine a place and time and work my way backwards from there to justify my fantasy. The process for me is less about willing the world into existence than collecting daily encounters that have something to do with the world. An ipod in the year 3005 might be used to mash a tuber for dinner or sealed under glass at the Smithsonian for historical meaning. How did this come to be?

If I actually start working in this medium it has all kinds of possibilities: video games, novels, movies...

My three world building ideas to date:

Future Primitive Guide - Primitives in a post human, post earth world

Victorian Utopia - How high could our quality of life be right now if we just believed? A day dream of agrarian society and technology that makes it all so easy. No industry, no greed, no mass production.

Alien - From their perspective. And no subtitles. Just them being like forest rangers testing, managing, and adjusting our environment to keep their human experiment alive and growing.

Using some project software, I've come up with this outline for the Future Primitive Guidebook –>

I imagine a pile of guidebooks to different worlds at the foot of my deathbed. This week at least.

Heraldry and Finding a Perfect Art

2007-10-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

As Jane says, "Art these days needs to be either provocative or grotesque." I recently discovered that although I have the chops and patience, landscape painting is not for me. That was an easy one; deciding I was completely bored with approximating desert flora and fauna. Now I understand what Kyle was talking about when he didn't want to play jazz standards at resorts in Tucson. I'm good at it, but it just makes my butt itch. I'll still complete the painting and it is pretty good, I keep looking over at it.

I'm a victim of flights of fancy. Two weeks ago I concocted an idea to create an anonymous AI online that made random artworks. I'd program one of those open source AI programs to answer any art question on my website and then use random generators in Flash to create prints. Then the prints would start showing up on Ebay. Very "Mona Lisa Overdrive." Then the lawsuits would roll in when buyers realized it was a hoax and not an AI making the art...

My latest flight of fancy is heraldry. You know, the shields and coats of arms of knights of yore. When Europeans were all serfs to lords and some of us strapped on armor plating and needed to know who to hack up but we couldn't unless they had brightly colored shields of the enemy. A complex code of fields and colors and patterns arose that would define and anger you even more to hack them up or bludgeon them to death. "I just hate those black jacks on a yellow field so much. Those wheat laurels arched on each side... what arrogance! We obviously have the best wheat in all of the countryside!" The academia and expertise of our modern heraldic masters is something I wish not to mock. It is very nearly a science of symbolism.

Like my piers who will smear some paint and entitle it, "Quantum Mechanics: The Adventure of Young Quark Begins," much to the chagrin of physicists, I propose to trounce the discipline of heraldry, steal, twist, distort and appropriate it's symbols and create a completely new visual vocabulary. I'm a modern artist with an equally modern disregard for history. It's a rubbery medium ripe for exploitation. As cigar boxes exemplify, the genre can also be vaguely ornamental and include whole landscapes within.

As a concept, it's completely open ended. I can choose to decorate and rise up to the status of royalty in my design any humble subject I feel fit. "The Royal Academy of Electric Blenders," or, "The Mighty Oak Scrub," or, "The Knighted Ensemble of Combustion Engines," or the, "Descendants of King Squirrel." It's just not royalty I have to admonish. In fact imitation can take infinite forms in this concept. Laurels can become iPods, ribbony banners can become LED displays, steel helmet armor can become hockey goalie masks.

I'm especially attracted to the logo making aspect of the concept. Trained in marketing symbols, my pieces of art become complex logos. I love the idea as it brings my graphic life into my artistic life. It also is easily translated into paint as well as the graphic light boxes.

I'm well aware of the last design world year or two and the resurgence of these classical Edwardian forms. Coats of arms and the most abused "standing stag" motif. Most of this graphic use is not inventive and 2d "messes" of clip art. Really, it pretty much was a product of Adobe Illustrator creating the "Symbol" tool that lets you spray-paint vector "symbols" willy nilly.

I am, however, excited by the renewed use of these European symbols. There is some kind of sense that the future would appreciate these intricate antique "craft" forms when ultra modernism is turning us away from anything ornate. Well, I have my own theory of Freud, the rising power of the individual and the spartan, simplistic take on interior architecture. Basically, we are meant to fill it up ourselves. Doesn't mean your art needs to be bland and boring to match. It's just that architects are giving you room to breath rather than centuries past where they filled up all the space with moulding, cherubs, columns and decoration that defined and "oppressed" the individual. Only the very rich had perfectly decorated spaces.

Well, at this point, I'm all talk although I have done some work like this in the past. That's what blogs are for right? Playing with an idea n' shit and letting you all know what I'm thinking about. It's my next painting so we'll see what Tom does. We'll see if he gets bored with that too.

New Apple Keyboard

2007-08-23T23:12:00.000-07:00

I'm not even a big enough Steve Jobs fan to download his stage show anymore at the openings of the new products but I used to be. He lost me at the, "iPhone is incredible, 9 months from now" show. His shows used to make tears come to my eyes and fill me with patriotic Apple loyalty.

So I'm not sure why I'm writing this blog.

Maybe it's the same reason someone asks you if you've seen a new movie you haven't seen and when you say, "Haven't caught that one yet," they immediately jet into an overtly gushing diatribe of what an incredibly great movie it was and too bad you weren't so creatively sensitive to notice it. It's that consumer competition we are all involved in. Of course, if you did see the movie and responded with something like, "It was so formulaic and wasn't that the plot from Lawn Mower Man?" Then, their response is something like, "Yeah, I saw that in it too, it was lame."

Now that I've expunged all consumer competition driven guilt from my critique of the new Apple keyboard... I'll continue.

I bought it first motherfuckers! And it's awesome!

3 days after it was out, I braved the suburban traffic and breast implants venturing to the Tucson Apple store in fabulous La Encantada shopping mall luxury complex of pure decadence. I tested the sucker out.

• Thin. Really thin. Almost like typing directly on your desk.
• Aluminum board with white keys. Nothing else in a frighteningly minimal way.
• USB connections aren't flaunted, they are hidden under the keyboard. Just non-descript wires flow from underneath unless you get the wireless version.
• Very small keystroke. I thought at first that old keyboards were more ergonomic. Then I went to the ergonomics page on the Apple site and typed out a couple thousand words from their description. This keyboard is like typing on air. I even tried out some of the 4 key shortcuts required in Photoshop. There was no "cranking" or over pressure needed to make sure all the keys are pressed. Someone has painstakingly figured out the smallest amount of pressure needed to define a key being pressed.
• It's $49
• The packaging was great. It was labeled, "Keyboard," with a picture of it and the Apple logo.

I'm completely sold on this keyboard. It's a revolution. I love it, love it, love it. And I just bought it this afternoon. I typed this whole blog with it and there were no animals hurt in the process.