juxtapose this

Michael Gorman - President of the American Library Association, February, 2005:
"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web...
Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs".

Robert McHenry - Former editor in chief, Encyclopaedia Britannica:
"The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him".

David Wienberger - Everything is Miscellaneous:
"If these experts of the second order sound a bit hysterical, it is understandable...Authorities have long filtered and organized information for us, protecting us from what isn't worth our time and helping us find what we need to give our beliefs a sturdy foundation. But with the miscellaneous, it's all available to us, unfiltered".

Howard Bloom - Author, Visiting Scholar at New York University, member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Political Science, and the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, as well as the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project:
"...two kinds of conformity enforcers: those which shape brains to work in harmony, synching our vision, hearing, and attention so that we share the same "reality";and others which goad us to tailor our public behavior and appearance to the standards of our tribe. Conformity gives the complex adaptive system called a social group stability. But to adapt, the system needs a hefty dollop of something else: originality. The ability to bend, stretch, and create comes not from conformity enforcers but from their indispensable opposites: diversity generators".

Radical Constructionism:
"There can be no such thing as an objective fact, because the observer is the source of all reality".

Another Dead Hero

Albert Hoffman, inventor of LSD, has passed away at his home in Basel, Switzerland at the age of 102. Many people owe their inspiration and creativity to his invention, and the revolution of the 1960's counterculture would not have happened without him.

i met the walrus

one of the most beautiful animations i've seen recently.

The Internet

Kyle - “We thought we could make money off the internet, but while the internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that once you trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue. It will be a few years before digital distribution of media on the internet can be monetized to an extent that necessitates content producers to forgo their fair value in more traditional media”. Southpark - Episode 1204

Randy - “And so what have we learned from this ordeal, the internet went away, it came back, but for how long? We cannot take the internet for granted any longer. We as a country must stop over logging…on. We must use the internet only when we need it. It’s easy for us to think we can just use up all the internet we want. But if we don’t treat the internet with the respect…that it deserves it may one day be gone forever. So let us learn to live with the internet not for it. No more browsing for no apparent reason, no more mindlessly browsing on our laptops while watching television; and finally, we must learn to use the internet for porn twice a day, max.” Southpark - Episode 1206

Food for thoughts on current debates on Web 2.0 and our dependence on the internet.

I'll show you the god particle

Just read about a person in Indonesia who suffers from a rare disease. A skin condition where root like structures grow out of your body, branches that can grow up to 5cp a year and which protrude from his hands and feet, and welts covering the whole body (qtd). Then they say tree-people from the Lord of the Rings were fictional. Prove me wrong, I dare you.



At the time where people are dying of hunger and war, babies born with four eyes, become trees and some suffer from the insanity of over-consumption and endless market growth, some people are trying to emulate the big bang. Thus the scientists will discover the 'god particle'. Quote: "This technological netherworld is one very big scientific instrument, specifically, a particle accelerator-an atomic peashooter more powerful than any ever built. It's called the Large Hadron Collider, and its purpose is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things". Another article from the Guardian can be found here.

goo goo g'joob

Watched "They Live". A great concept wrapped in a cliché way. An ex-convict discovers a pair of sunglasses by which he can see the true nature of reality. The world is being bombarded with subliminal messages through the media and government with such phrases as "Obey", "Do not question authority", "marry and reproduce". The fight scene really made me laugh with its bad choreography and sounds but it was a nice break. The concept behind it is not something new of course, and nowadays considered to be much of a conspiracy theory. Couldn't help but see a reflection of the great masters who preached about it, fictional or not.
Wrote about Alchemy yesterday, and have been looking at some of the concepts raised by Carl Jung regarding it. Evidently Jung was fascinated by the ideas behind Alchemy. When his first publication on the subject came out most books on Alchemy referred to it as fraudulent and an inefficient forerunner of modern chemistry (quote). Nowadays it is well respected in the academic world and many people dedicate their lives in understanding and deciphering their drawings and illustrations often filled with double meanings. Were the Alchemists attempting to turn basic metal into gold? Or was it a metaphor in turning the basic human into God? What does the Caduceus symbol really mean? I find this shroud of mystery behind their work fascinating. "Take the grey wolf, the child of Saturn (...) and throw him the body of the King. And when he has swallowed him, build a big fire and throw the wolf into it, so that he burns up, and then the King will be liberated again". Would you have thought that this is a paragraph for creating magnet? That the King stands for the purification of gold?
On a different note, I have been thinking of doing an animation (or interactive storytelling) relating with Entheogenic journeys. Widely used in ancient tribes and at some point lost their meaning due to the whole hippy culture, Entheogens offer their user a spiritual and/or mystic journey. The whole psychedelic movement includes respected figures such as Terence and Dennis McKenna, Alex Grey, Timothy Leary and the list goes on, indefinitely. The use of hallucinogens is traced back to the beginning of human history and many theories support that consciousness was triggered due to the use of psychedelic drugs. One solid example can be found in the book "Maya Cosmogenesis:2012". The author states a research conducted which shows that the first Mayan area was filled with statues depicting mushrooms. It was evaluated that before the Mayans built those amazing structures they experimented with hallucinogenic mushrooms for a period of 300 years. Personal opinion but this makes a lot of sense unless another theory on how we jumped from being primates to building massive structures such as the Pyramids of Giza or the Mayan Pyramids. In addition consider how the Mayans had the intelligence at the time to transcript all planetary movements, facts that we only came to possess the last centuries. My favorite concept around mushrooms comes from McKenna. It's a theory that says that magic mushrooms are alien organisms which travel the universe in the form of spores, in search for an organism that is capable of intelligence. They will be consumed by that organism in order to create consciousness and facilitate evolution. Yes, not the most popular idea out there but hey, at least I can see the mushrooms unlike some other deities I can think of.
Yet again jumping on a completely different subject: Mandala. Symbolizing both the Microcosm and the Macrocosm a Mandala might take weeks to be created. After it's creation, and to symbolize impermanence, the Mandala is destroyed. I found a time-lapse animation of Tibetan monks creating one which you can watch here. Carl Jung was also fascinated with Mandalas, believing that they represented the unconscious self. In his book 'Archetypes and the collective unconscious' there are many illustrations of Jung and his patients based on Mandalas. Some were seen in dreams, drawn and taken to Jung for interpretation, which, most of the times, was very close to the truth. The idea behind geometric patterns whose creation induces a meditative state is again very interesting to me. 'A little book of coincidence in the solar system', a small, pocket-size book shows the amazing accuracy and relationships between planetary movements. Fascinating to see how the movements in our solar system actually create perfect geometric patterns, in a way the universe is creating its own Mandalas; maybe in an attempt to become aware of itself.
Here it is then, an accumulation of my ideas regarding the final major project. In relation to Digital Media, it is a matter of finding new ways to portray such theories. Using digital media would be, in my opinion, an excellent way to manifest these theories in abstract worlds, animations or interactive stories. The concepts themselves require a variety of mediums to be expressed, such as symbols and words. I would say that perhaps it's just me that finds the connections or would be fascinated to see alchemical drawings in motions. Then again the theory of the collective disagrees. Whether I will be able to marry the ideas or focus only on one I have to investigate further. But overall, this is where I am at the moment.

First image done for Fishbone Records website and the other two for a friend who works as a civil engineer. He sent me the cad files and asked me to turn it into a 3d image. I found it quite challenging as this was my first attempt at an architectural construction; trying to interpret what yellow lines over white or pink ones, and looking at flat drawings was quite hard for me to actually imagine them as 3d. I did this as the guy offered me more work if I managed to produce the first one as a sample. Since this is a building they've already made, and one of the apartments my friends future home, I got a chance to see it during Easter break. That means I had some help from memory. I wonder how the next one will go. I also redesigned the already given template for BandsFest 2008 for Fishbone Records. I find it quite irritating working in other people's templates as everyone designs in their own way. Looking at a hundred or so layers titled very conveniently as 'layer001' and 'layer002' and so on, is frustrating but after a couple of days I was able to take all the elements and built a new one. This will help me with future updates the client might ask for.
Evidently I've been keeping myself busy perhaps to avoid starting either the final major project or dissertation. Been struggling with ideas on the project but nothing solid as yet. Thinking of following down the same lines as the interactivity project. One idea is for Monsieur Bouton to discover more on Alchemy. I have a book called Alchemy and Mysticism which contain a collection of alchemical and masonic illustrations. Perhaps they could be created with clay to create a surreal environment for Bouton to travel? Considering whether to have a story behind it or being just an abstract journey.
Zach mentioned the other day a book on Buffy and Philosophy and Micheál added that there was a South Park one as well. Being a South Park-aner myself I searched for it on Amazon and found two books related to it. One was not available so I got hold of this. Started reading it and was fascinated with the approach the authors take on South Park. Quite funny and insightful. I also got 'the art of looking sideways' which I found to be a treasure. Just finding Brian Eno's speech on the Turner Prize inside was a joyous moment.

pass me the shovel

A very insightful talk by Micheál today on Baudrillards 'Simulacra and Simulation'. Baudrillard's thoughts seem appealing to me in some peculiar way. Apart from the whole bestiality in having a pet thought, which I'm struggling with since I have a cat. Even though making connections between 'Simulacra and Simulation' and other works, especially after the whole 'Matrix' situation is not advised, I couldn't help but do so. The first connection I made while reading the text was with one of the new episodes of South Park titles 'Britney's new look'. I suggest people see it before reading onwards, wouldn't want to spoil the fun. The episode is based around the media hype and Britney Spears. After a frantic chase of reporters to capture Britney, and the boys attempt to save her from publicity before it drives her to suicide, we find out that people actually need her to die. The reason being that throughout history people have engaged in human sacrifice. An example being in ancient civilizations where they would take one of the children and raise it as queen or king, only to be sacrificed as an offering to the deities. The correlation being that in our modern times we simulate that process through the media. Raising a child from being a 'nobody' to 'stardom' then tearing them down. Many will disagree with this theory, but really looking at the facts, is the hypothesis of the episode far from the truth? I need to cross-reference this but just looking at people like Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix etc really makes you think about it. So I'm not sure on this but just something I had in my mind after watching the episode. Then yesterday going through Baudrillard's text he mentions on the essay 'the strategy of the real' on the simulation of murder. The author argues that all succeeding presidents after Kennedy are paying the price of his assassination as if it was their own fault. A process he calls 'the ritualistic murder of power', Baudrillard continues to say that Watergate was the mechanism by which Nixon's death was simulated. He also makes a contrast with ancient times where the king or chief of a tribe would be officially sacrificed. Not that Baudrillard has anything to do with South Park just a connection I made.
Micheál also mentioned the fear of duplication in the Tasaday tribe I think it was. Tribes that feared twins for example. I don't know whether anyone has seen it yet but I came across this news story about a baby born in India that has a rare disease called "craniofacial duplication". The infant has 2 pairs of eyes, 2 mouths, and 2 noses. Although this disease is fatal most of the times, the child is drinking milk from both mouths, does not need an operation and is very healthy. People across India are traveling to pay tribute to the child as they consider it to be a reincarnation of Genesha the Hindu Goddess. Now unless Micheál had seen this news story before class I'd say this, according to Jung, is definitely a synergy.
And speaking of India, Baudrillard's ideas on nihilism reminded me of a book by Nisargadatta Maharaj called "I AM THAT". It is a collection of conversations between the master and his students or visitors on the nature of self, consciousness, and so on. I quote from the first page of his book: Give up all questions except one: 'who am i?' After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The 'I am' is certain. The 'I am this' is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality. To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not. Discover all that you are not - body, feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that - nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The clearer you understand that on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being". I came across many books in my research on consciousness that in some way or another have a very nihilistic approach. Most enlightened people actually tend to teach that the only thing there is in life are experiences. Actually even Zen can be seen as nihilistic from certain perspectives.
I would also continue to say that it reminded me of 'Thus spake Zarathustra' but I see now it's the last note in Baudrillard's book.