SO EXCITED

Donald Trump

When he comes in, he's like a king, with trumpets sounding, and a carpet laid out already. He may not be god but everyone treats him that way, and even if they don't he will act that way. There an inevitability about anyone with so much power, the kind that comes from fake things revered. These things are money and allies with more, so that you form a sort of impenetrable blanket of influence. Impenetrable to anyone that thinks Donald Trump is doing the wrong thing, anyhow. And you see how her eyes glisten, leaning in towards his face, listening so carefully that words seem to have new meaning. For every word coming out of his face is gold to her, and she will sweat and scream and put out any one of her teammates in order to impress him. But nothing of the sort could impress a king. He is almighty, and her desperate attempts to win the attention of a royal body are all-too-obvious. She might as well give up. But such is a fool, who desires so much they throw away even their friends. But this fool knows how to wear makeup.
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Enters a face.
A smooth, white, porcelain face, with a gaze straight into the heart of yours. Beauty. Breathless. Pure. Swooping away a large dispenser pump appears in the upper left hand corner of the screen, effervescently pumping out a soft cream glistening like liquid gold, floating down into the fingertips of a most angelic hand; lifting softly and joining the angel's face the cream literally turns her already perfect skin into a heightened state of luminosity, threatening now to outshine even the lights of the tv, sending so much heat and energy to the point that the circuits burst and through the massive explosion in the center of your living room, this skin-angel is real and has been sent to you by Macy's in order to give you all that you've ever dreamed of - the perfect face and skin which bring you one step closer to power.

Back to the show.

The others pity him because he has it so hard; they have compassion, sorry-feelings in their hearts. Everyone is here because they are unemployed-but he has it worse. His anger and dreams make it hard for one to like him. As his takes a short break during the last hours of the final task, he pulls out his iPad and checks his email, his voicemail, hoping for the return message from a future employer. Hoping that his 15 minutes of fame have fooled someone into thinking: he is worth their money and time. When will he ever make it? he wonders. When will my efforts show? he doesn't know.

Until then, surround yourself with the artefacts of success, the accessories of divinity and privilege. Let it be known to the "others" that you are one step above the rest, not willing to rest, and ready for any challenge. Let them know, because these signs will lead you into . . .

State of Disbelief

I've been having a quite stressful three days. Things are failing out of plan. My level of frustration is at a high tide. It seems that everything I try to do I fail at. But I realize this morning that these feelings result from expectation, waiting, and the changing of life. I need to believe and have faith in my ability to succeed in every task, mentally feeding myself the proper nutrients of self-confidence in the form of verbal affirmation TO MY SELF. I always thought I needed that from others, but I realize at this juncture, about to leave for Chile and feeling antsy about it, this is the most important time to shine and love.

Deciding not to live at the Copycat has its pros and cons. Here I have mental clarity, the ability to focus, and the space to do so. But I lack my friends, the motivation/inspiration they offer in a renewable feedback loop, like the water cycle of the earth. And so it is with all cycles. It is especially sacred to me that I share such relationships: mutual and giving, with my close friends. I feel that level of respect with them, which is a truly meaningful thing, and something I will sorely miss while I'm gone.

I woke up this morning with an intense pain and cramp in my lower neck and right shoulder area. The pain abruptly drove me out of a dream where I was being scolded for eating too much jelly. In the dream I sat and spoon-fed myself, while my mother condescendingly scolded me like an tantruming child. I think the pain was a result from such a painful dream, my body reacting to stop the negative thoughts, the embedded self destruction that I must accept has been a part of me for much too long. I must accept and let go. I don't want to bring these aspects of myself to Chile.

I've also been reconsidering whether the immersion program is a good idea or not. My father says its much too expensive for a thing you would learn most easily: language. I think I'll go and see how I feel after a month or so of exploring, then decide on the program.

Here's to a better day and the loss of my neck cramp!

Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates project

A few years ago, 2007 I believe, artist.activist.farmer.social-interventionist Fritz Haeg came to Baltimore & the Contemporary Museum to stage his project Edible Estates, a nationwide project that took 9 different homes from 9 different cities & transformed their front/back yards into edible gardens. Every square inch of what was originally the typical American mowed Kentucky bluegrass greenscape became a biodiverse productive powerhouse of food & environment.

I came across documents from the exhibit itself, and thought a few quotes were especially inspirational.

"The act of eating is the moment in which we are most intimately connected to the world around us. We ingest into our bodies earthly matter that grew out of organic and environmental cycles happening all the time. We are all at the receiving end of dung and corpses decomposing, rainfall and evaporation, solar radiation, and so forth. What happens when the source of our food is far awat and hidden from us? In moving food great distances, we pollute and expend precious energy, but perhaps more important, we lose visible evidence of our humble place in the big food chain."

"A small garden of very modest means, humble materials, and little effort can have a radical effect on the life of a family, how they spend their time and relate to their environment, whom they see, and how they eat. This singular local response to global issues can become a model. It can be enacted by anyone in the world and can have a monumental impact."

"Most of us feel like we don't have any control over the direction in which out world is headed. As always, the newspapers are full of daily evidence for concern. Unlike the challenges of past generations, however, these struggles are no longer just localized or broadly regional; they are an interlaced web of planetary challenges. How, then, do we respond in the face of the impossible scale of issues such as global energy production, climate change, and the related political aggressions and instabilities that accompany them? One thing we can do is act where we have influence, and in a capitalist society, that would be our private property. Here we have the freedom to create in some small measure the world in which we want to live."

I think it's hard to admit that I BELIEVE THE WORLD SHOULD BE ANOTHER WAY. Should, could, would, if only everyone on the planet could see the same beauty as I, the same possibility;if only everyone contained the same desire for peace. The reconciliation of these quotes - a settling-on the capitalist reality we are given - can suffice, but I still need something more. Of course, my property, my person, my gender, my words can subvert and be subverted; this is a political act. But I wonder if we are so powerless as to only have power over ourselves. When does the power of individuals join? Where? When? For what? The elements of change I would like to see, I must be. PRONTO!

Preparing for Leaving, Waiting & Feeling

With one month to go, I have decided to reinvest time and posts to this blog. It will serve as a record of my experiences & mode of communication with all of my friends back here in the U.S., and hopefully also a journal of my journey through this amazing world.

It's strange to be leaving so soon. I finally feel at peace with it. For over 6 months I've been plotting, planning (sort - of) -- at least, I have been pontificating and anticipating the moment of my leave and arrival. Half of a year I will spend in pursuit of my father's language, knowing a family I left when so young. I look forward to these coming days, and making connections with the land, the people and their struggle. I hope that this time away from what is most familiar strengthens my will and my vision for life, gives me an added confidence to achieving my goals.

As of late, my mind has been scattered. I would say for about the past year I have been in an intense yet muddled mental fog, which stiltifies my passions through my own inability to have a clear mental environment. I feel that the fog is leaving, through an active reengagement with reading and focused activities. I must need cultivate focus.

Golan Levin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G0MzlfMPuM

My name is Golan Levin. I'm an artist and an engineer. Which is, increasingly, a more common kind of hybrid. But I still fall into this weird crack where people don't seem to understand me. And I was looking around and I found this wonderful picture. It's a letter from "Artforum" in 1967 saying "We can't imagine ever doing a special issue on electronics or computers in art." And they still haven't. And lest you think that you all, as the digerati, are more enlightened, I went to the Apple iPhone app store the other day. Where is art? I got productivity. I got sports. And somehow the idea that one would want to make art for the iPhone, which my friends and I are doing now, is still not reflected in our understanding of what computers are for. So, from both directions, there is kind of, I think, a lack of understanding about what it could mean to be an artist who uses the materials of his own day ( ), or her own day. Which I think artists are obliged to do, is to really explore the expressive potential of the new tools that we have ( ). In my own case, I'm an artist, and I'm really interested in expanding the vocabulary of human action ( ), and basically empowering people through interactivity. I want people to discover themselves as actors, as creative actors, by having interactive experiences ( ).

A lot of my work is about trying to get away from this. This a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine. And when I say desktop, I don't just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk. If you look carefully, you can even see a hint of the Apple menu, up here in the upper left, where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical. So this is, as Joy Mountford once said, "The mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try to suck all of human expression through."

And the thing I'm really trying to do is enabling people to have more rich kinds of interactive experiences ( ). How can we get away from the mouse and use our full bodies as a way of exploring aesthetic experiences ( ), not necessarily utilitarian ones. So I write software. And that's how I do it. And a lot of my experiences resemble mirrors in some way. Because this is, in some sense, the first way, that people discover their own potential as actors, and discover their own agency. By saying "Who is that person in the mirror? Oh it's actually me."

And so, to give an example, this is a project from last year. Which is called the Interstitial Fragment Processor. And it allows people to explore the negative shapes ( ) that they create when they're just going about their everyday business. So as people make shapes with their hands or their heads and so forth, or with each other, these shapes literally produce sounds and drop out of thin air. Basically taking what's often this, kind of, unseen space, or this undetected space, and making it something real, that people then can appreciate and become creative with ( ). So again, people discover their creative agency in this way. And their own personalities come out in totally unique ways ( ).

So in addition to using full-body input, something that I've explored now, for a while, has been the use of the voice. Which is an immensely expressive system for us, vocalizing. Song is one of our oldest ways of making ourselves heard and understood. And I came across this fantastic research by Wolfgang Köhler, the so-called father of gestalt psychology, from 1927, who submitted to an audience like yourselves the following two shapes. And he said one of them is called Maluma. And one of them is called Taketa. Which is which? Anyone want to hazard a guess? Maluma is on top. Yeah. So. As he says here, most people answer without any hesitation.

So what we're really seeing here is a phenomenon called phonaesthesia, which is a kind of synesthesia that all of you have. And so, where as Dr. Oliver Sacks has talked about how perhaps one person in a million actually has true synethesia, where they hear colors or taste shapes, and things like this, phonaesthesia is something we can all experience to some extent. It's about mappings between different perceptual domains ( ), like hardness, sharpness, brightness and darkness, and the phonemes that we're able to speak with.

So 70 years on, there's been some research where cognitive psychologists have actually sussed out the extent to which, you know, L, M and B are more associated with shapes that look like this, and P, T and K are perhaps more associated with shapes like this. And here we suddenly begin to have a mapping between curvature that we can exploit numerically, a relative mapping between curvature and speech ( ).

So it occurred to me, what happens if we could run these backwards? And thus was born the project called Remark. Which is a collaboration with Zachary Lieberman and the Ars Electronica Futurelab. And this is an interactive installation which presents the fiction that speech casts visible shadows ( ). So the idea is you step into a kind of a magic light. And as you do, you see the shadows of your own speech. And they sort of fly away, out of your head. If a computer speech recognition system is able to recognize what you're saying, then it spells it out. And if it isn't then it produces a shape which is very phonaesthetically tightly coupled to the sounds you made. So let's bring up a video of that.

Donkeys painted like Zebras

source: xinhua