mark von rosenstiel is present.

 

When leaving my residence I have to use an electronic keycard to exit the lobby. This means that upon locking my apartment door behind me, I have to go to to the elevator, push the proper keys to call it and tell it where to go ("first floor please", I usually say under my breath. It's not actually voice operational, but ever since reading The Intuitionist a while back, I can't help but see the time in elevators as being somewhat detached from my current timeline. Meaning that the possible outcomes while in an elevator are unbounded.), and then walk to the electronic pad to tap my key to exit the building. What agitates me on every expedition from my apartment is where to put my keys while waiting to reach the lobby. In my one pocket I have my wallet, in the other an iPod and spare change. Throwing my key in the iPod side causes a tangle with the headphones that I don't really appreciate, and throwing it on the wallet side can cause it to be tucked in between various folds -- almost as if my wallet has become a particularly heavy subject of a Lucian Freud painting -- requiring removing everything from that pocket in order to rescue my key. As a small side note about the iPod/Change pocket: my change in general is usually an unhelpful tag-a-long to my iPod pocket, spilling out when not needed, and remaining hidden when bills are not the type of money needed. Change is basically the friend that offers advice to watch out for a puddle after already stepping in it, or staying silent on the bus as you accidentally pass your usual stop. 

Let me be the first to acknowledge that merely holding my keys in my hand for the journey to the lobby is an option. But it makes me feel like I'm on a date and being forced to hold a drink for a partner that has decided their trip to the bathroom also requires countless social niceties on both legs of their journey. 

To the bigger point of all this!

This made me start thinking about things that are in parallel versus things that are in serial. I mean this in a pretty loose way, but, for example, with my pockets they are pretty serial: dump some things in the left pocket until it's full and useless, then move on to the other pocket and dump some things. There's no simple modification of my pockets that allow them to take on a new role. I mean this in a very serious way. Take for example a Murphy bed. In a room with a Murphy bed, I can literally have a dance party where people would not have the sensation of being in what is essentially my bedroom. The room acts in parallel. This is a stupid example, but if you think about the idea in a more subtle way it allows for two different ways to approach how we interact with a created stimulus and more importantly how we create objects (art, buildings, roads, etc) for others. We can either choose to create serial objects -- those objects that step someone through the experience of using it -- or parallel objects -- objects that take someones expectations and offers a facet of itself to that experience. I don't necessarily think one is better than the other, but I think we often think in a serial manner to what we create. Take a painting that is made using a very structured technique: it is only reasonable that as a viewer I will approach this in a serial fashion; my brain will fall in line with what it sees as part of the foundation of the object.

Oh. And the picture that goes with this is because I've been reading a lot about the possible proof to the ABC conjecture and this whole loose serial/parellel idea struck me like addition and multiplication where there seems like there should be this deeper connection between the two if I could just look at it the right way.

Objects become like leaders if they capture the imagination of a scene. This requires a particular contrast in the scene between the object and its environment; an environment that sets the object above what is in most ways typical for it. It belongs but it doesn't; the subtleness is a gentle swedish massage on ones brain. Take a bathtub for instance: we can make it mystical in appearance by perhaps filling it with marbles and setting it among wheat grass in a perfectly still and open plain. Contrast is in the eye of the beholder. Contrast is the compliment to the majority of a perspective. Making the perfect contrast is creating the perfect complimentary sub-perspective. Add the complimentary sub-perspective and the rest together and there is perfect unity; a nothingness with depth and energy, bounding along like kangaroos made of pure color. Red, or green, or blue; whatever your color preference is. The perspective of expectation with the perspective of an object forced from its default place: this is perfect contrast.

   

 

This is the view from the balcony of my room. As you can see, there are a couple of skyscrapers and a couple of satellite dishes present. I've found that satellite dishes add a certain dimensionality to landscape scenes. It's like an optical illusion of a cube, where my brain flips between seeing the cube inside-out or rightside-in; if I stare out at a landscape long enough -- a landscape that contains a certain threshold of satellites -- I either see a set of geometric structures stacking together into the urban scene, or a multitude of satellite dishes perched around like hopeless butterflies (or maybe pheasants or some bird that runs instead of flying to evade attackers). It is one or the other, but never both. In optical illusions our brain is trying to battle itself to create a norm from given visual stimulus. It is clear, if this is true, that satellite dishes must cause a battle of some sorts in my brain under some circumstances.

 

I read this short story once about a man who eats a bunch of blue paint to try and commit suicide. His wife (girlfriend?) divorces (leaves?) him after she sees what he has done. I don't know if it's obvious, but I don't remember much about this story. I think it was part of a short story collection in which there is another story (maybe) about a highway and a diner. What's strange about both of those stories is that they still pop into my head today, yet I have no recollection what the point of them was. The story about eating paint pops into my head whenever I see ultramarine blue paint in stores (I'm not sure in the story if he ever makes a point of discussing the exact shade of blue, which makes me a bit baffled why ultramarine is my trigger AND it makes me think that this was a missed opportunity in the stories narrative), and it dawns on me that I would never commit suicide by paint, but I guess if I did I'd use a lighter blue; probably something more along the lines of a brandeis blue. And I'd definitely use an acrylic; oils are bad for you, don't you know? As for the story about the highway (maybe a truck stop is in it?), it makes me think of this diner that was a half hour away from where I grew up as a kid. It sat along a stretch of road that sold a lot of RV's and cars; tucked away next to some gas station it was curled up in neon and breakfast specials. I always drove by, but never went in. For some reason I always felt (do feel) connected to this diner, as if it's had a significant part of my life. When I consciously know it has had nothing to do with my life.

 

 

The brain is said to be the creator of visions of our expectations. Our senses -- ears, eyes, and whatnot -- kick in to moderate those expectations. We watch waterfalls for long enough and everything looks like it is crawling uphill; stationary or not. I think it's called the Waterfall Effect, or something like that, where our motion detecting neurons get put into a sort of loop watching moving water for a while, so once we look away from a large moving field (water or otherwise, but something uniform), we only see things as moving. This overlap where everything does not seem as it is (i.e. where the majority of observers would indicate that all is stationary) is just the brain being pulled back, not to reality, but in line with a set of electronic pulses coming from our eyeballs. And that's the part that really sticks in my head: the part where our senses are at best backseat drivers and at worst movie goers yelling at the screen. 

It makes me wonder a bit about aesthetics and what we feel good about seeing/experiencing. It would seem that that which is most pleasant to see/hear/taste/touch/smell is what our brain expects -- our senses perfectly confirm and amplify that which was expected. Like two waves briefly overlapping while traveling in the same direction. It's as if a beautiful experience is when the brain is expecting a dollop of red paint, and we instead treat it to a room bathed in cadmium. The creativity that touches on this or creates this experience -- the creativity that pulls out a masterful painting, writes a piece of prose that seems to be drawn from somewhere on the first few pages of our instruction manual -- is something that reaches past our senses. In other words: part of creativity is touching on that which was never meant to be perceived by the senses.

 

There's a short essay in David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, reviewing a translation of Dostoevsky (I think this is what the essay was about… maybe it wasn't a translation, but a new compilation of all the works of Dostoevsky. It's not too important for this detail to be accurate in order for the content of what I'm about to say to be relevant). Wallace devotes a large portion of the essay talking about how the sort of deep, introspective portions of any of Dostoevsky's work seems so over the top now. Almost trite. Wallace, of course, plays on this by interjecting his own existential musings about the purpose of art and connection to emotions through creative means, while talking about how it is impossible to actually come out and say anything of emotional substance anymore without inducing cringes in ones audience; that a touch of irony is expected in all things of depth. (At this point I could add in a long parenthetical about a conversation I once witnessed -- a PAINFUL conversation -- between two music critics, who were arguing over whether irony was dead or not. I still am not sure if the conversation had a point or not, but I remember desperately wanting to leave the room, yet being unable to gracefully remove myself from the situation.) That we must distance ourselves from poignancy in order to create something of poignancy. I took away mostly how it seems to me that our culture makes us observers to the things that matter, versus a participant to the things that matter.

I was riding around on a bus today and this essay popped into my mind. I guess part of it comes from being self conscious about writing things out in the open for the first time and wondering if certain things come across like drunk musings with friends after a first year away at college, but I think it also had something to do with a conversation I had with a friend about the elitism that seems to dog the culture of art. Here I am as as an artist capturing a version of truth in output -- casting my own light into the darkness I see around me -- and all that I do and make will typically get boxed up in specific spaces and/or contained in lengthy writings referencing other artists and conceptual frameworks. The community starts to create a vocabulary that isolates. A way of being that isolates.

A lot of art contains objects. These objects are easy to set in an empty room and stare at; to shuffle around and stare. But I think it is through our connection to the objects that the piece is understood and brings forward its content; the the presence of object and viewer together creates something new and outside of the moment. Like Schrodinger's cat: through observation the object takes on a specific state. Or a chaotic system where a certain threshold is met and suddenly the system takes a very recognizable form. Or maybe were truth is the infinite sum of a Taylor Series and object and viewer are each their own terms.

Maybe I'll come back and update this so that I can wrap all these pieces up pretty. But the point is to realize the pull of certain words/ideas that play with each other. The sinusoidal wave that the expression of emotion takes with time: where sentiments, like words themselves, go through a cyclical history of meaning. I like to hope that the age of participation in emotion is coming back. Or be told that I've just been missing it by a mere ignorance of dimension.

 

What is it that I want? I think there's an inclination to view wants in terms of specific goals. Wants aren't elements of a set, they're all derivative of Want. I think if you start writing down Want in terms of words it starts to sound a lot like a Hallmark card, "Happy Birthday Love/Truth/Presence, to our future together again.". To dissect what want is, is to feel tidal currents in the quiet moments of the day when there is no beach near. It is something that requires less words, not more. I think at its heart, want is a conduit to a persons fundamental truth. With the crude tools that we have been given to excavate truth from the world around us, we wield want like a hammer in a place with no nails. I would like to not want anything.