My Niece fights sleep

My niece fights sleep. As if she were involved in a fantastic story where to fall asleep would herald the beginning of the changes. She does eventually sleep, she does change, but after her cereal she evens out and becomes human again.

We thought maybe she was just a nosy bastard. Didn’t want to miss anything. Lidded eyes forced open by sheer willpower and determination. It would be a good theory but she doesn’t really do anything exciting. She sorts her dolls clothes arranges them in categories and colors. Jeez I wouldn’t wanna miss a second of that.

If you have any theories please send them to me care off sleep theories at this blog.

That leaves fear. Is she having nightmares? Nightmares so insidious that she cant remember them yet her subconscious wont let her sleep? Is it something from her long and storied past. All four years of it coddled in the suburban California consumerist cradle?

Maybe a bad cheerio in the midst of cereal reverie damaged her tender psyche so much she dreams of that taste every night. Can you have a bad Cheerio? One with less sugar than the others. Faded color?

Maybe she sees the future in her sleep and isn’t ready for it yet. That first day of grade school. Finding her sandwich flattened and soggy at lunch time and no one to fluff it up. Surrounded by wet nosed grubby fingered humanoids after a lifetime of televideo tots with cute faces and clever lines. That would do it I suppose. it definitely qualifies as a nightmare in my book.

Maybe theres a pea in her mattress. A frozen pea. I always wondered how the princess could have noticed a pea. My peas were out the can. a kind of a soft khaki colored blob. My mattress was at least 6inches thick. I guess even princesses slept on thin straw mattresses. The pea was probly uncooked. I bet they still sold them that way at the castle store. Uncooked peas and she would have a servant to cook em in a giant pot over the fire. Too bad she didn’t have one to turn over the mattress.

Maybe her room is haunted, built over an indian burial ground. I bet the dead indians would be nice though. I don’t think they’d hold a grudge against a little girl with cowboy pajamas and boots and spurs.
Shes got a dream catcher that oughta take care of spirits and nightmares. The white noise machine of the spirit world.

I bet she hasn’t been taught to sleep. Her parents are so liberal they probly think she can learn to tie a shoe by throwing her in the water. When she gets tired she’ll sleep they say as she roams the house muttering about summer fashions. Leaving trails of Doll clothes and crumbs.

I wonder if anyone has ever stayed up all night watching her. Suppose she pulls out a bioplasma radio and contacts her home planet in the middle of the night to arrange the invasion. Its ok come on down any night after 10 they are all sleeping. We can play. Do you have any doll clothes?

Politics

* Carol Ann Duffy
* The Guardian, Saturday 13 June 2009

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,

clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue

an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand

a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh

a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs

hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice

that can throw no six. How it takes the breath

away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,

makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,

of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –

politics – to your education education education; shouts this –

Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your

conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.

Ms Duffy makes sarcastic use of phrases such as Tony Blair’s “education, education, education” and Gordon Brown’s “moral compass”.

Duffy is the first female poet laureate in the post’s 341-year history.

The poem aims to attack the effect of politics on idealism.

Aequitas June 2009

Social media has drawn together a group of international artists to New York for Aequitas, an exhibit of art based on childhood experiences.

Artspace OSA in New York City and the virtual community of Second Life will host a joint exhibition of international artists: paintings, digital work, and virtual world installations during the month of June 2009.

Artists can be a solitary lot but with the advent of virtual worlds and web 2.0 they are finding each other and communicating in the way they know best: making and exhibiting art together. This disparate group of artists, having never met face to face, nevertheless finds a common ground in exploring their childhood for art.
Sowa Mai, also known as the artist Stephen Beveridge, conceived and planned this exhibit as an extension of the relationships he had formed in the Second Life virtual world with artist/avatars from different time zones and cultural backgrounds.
The exhibit in Washington Heights, New York City will display paintings and digital work by the human artists. An exhibit in the Second Life virtual world will consist of (art) installations and scripted objects by the human artists’ avatar counterparts. Both exhibits are based around the theme of mining childhood experience for art.

Dekka Raymaker Andrew MacLachlan Penumbra Carter Beth Olds Nebulosus Severine CM Pauluh Sowa Mai Stephen Beveridge David Ferrando Banrion Constantine Robert Garlick Elif Arat

Aequitas
Artspace OSA
June 1 – June 30, 2009
Reception Friday June 19th. 6:30-8:30
178 Bennett Ave @ 189th St, NYC
1 train to 191st Street | A train to 190th Street

Second Life Version
Caerleon Art Collective
June 26 – July 3, 2009
Reception June 26th. 6:30-8:30slpm
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caerleon%20Art%20Collective2/108/48/24/

Contact:
Stephen Beveridge
212 928 8351
SowaMai@gmail.com

The passion for dumbness

Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One.

Whatever the case, it wasn’t that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought mainstream culture was lame as hell and a trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it. I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was…As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little bit about history, too–the history of a few nation states–and it was always the same pattern. Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart. I had no idea which one of these stages America was in. There was nobody to check with. A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though. It was pointless to think about it. Whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong.

[p.35]

Balzac was pretty funny. His philosophy is plain and simple, says bascially that pure materialism is a recipe for madness. The only true knowledge for Balzac seems to be in superstition. Everything is subject to analysis. Horde your energy. That’s the secret of life. You can learn a lot from Mr. B. It’s funny to have him as a companion. He wears a monk’s robe and drinks endless cups of coffee. Too much sleep clogs his mind. One of his teeth falls out, and he says, “What does this mean?” He questions everything. His clothes catch fire on a candle. He wonders if fire is a good sign. Balzac is hilarious.

[p.46]

[I] went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door – a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness. Up until this time I’d been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot. Brando. James Dean. Milton Berle. Marilyn Monroe. Lucy. Earl Warren and Khruschchev, Castro. Little Rock and Peyton Place. Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio. J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse. The Nelsons. Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys. Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy. Levittown.

Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke. There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies. The stuff that could make you bugged-eyed. Books like Fox’s Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus. Pericles’ Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides’ The Athenian General – a narrative which would give you chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine.

Now lets hear from Thucydides himself

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence . . . and indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second. (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War III, 82, trans. Rex Warner, The Penguin Classics, pp. 209-210)

cooked goose?

Interesting post at NPIRL. I will provide a link to the article along with some of the key points for me. (I need to separate them from the text to facilitate my thinking due to ingrained self taught short attention span) (I was reading Bob Dylan’s bio last night and he talked about forcing himself to read long poems and memorize passages to offset or wean himself away from the tv, 45rpm, 3 min song lazy thought pattern.)

The Work of Art in the Age of Computational (Re)Production ***
Posted by Alpha Auer…

Key points (for my understanding)

a very vital component of artistic practice is no longer present with us today. Or at least not immediately and obviously so. Does artistic output still serve the intrinsic purposes of humanity? Or has art simply lost its cause?

For millenia art provided the visual narration of religious concepts.

(this is what I was doing with my “Choose Again” exhibit in New York last year and will continue with the Arena presentation January 27th. 2009)

With the advent of the Bourgeoisie in Europe after the 16th century yet another demand was charged upon artists: The newly individuated and wealthy Citizen no longer settled for just the glorification of religion, but sought personal glorification as well. The outcome was the genre of portrait painting, as well as interiors, landscapes and still lives, with which the European Burger adorned his estate.

the whole “business of art”, as it had been practiced for thousands of years found itself in a precarious position of re-evaluation. Of a need for creating personal agendas and purposes that would continue to provide an outlet for that intrinsically human attribute we call creativity.

Up until the early decades of the 20th century the research of the visual elements of art themselves – of light, of space and of object culminating in pure abstraction, served the bill. And it seems to me that the present day phenomenon of conceptual and indeed post-conceptual art is not faring much better.

Then came a brief dabble in an investigation of the human subconscious during the middle of the 20th century – but ultimately it was all self propelled, self instigated and could sustain its own momentum for only so long.

(These last two areas are the path of my abstract painting) (Ok so I am behind a wee bit sue me)

unless we provide an intrinsic purpose for it, and one which transcends that famed holy cow of “creative self expression” at that, our artistic goose is pretty much cooked! Overcooked, if anything, should you ask me… .

Personally, I have created Syncretia entirely by the credo of “livability” as opposed to “viewability” and my future efforts in metaverse creativity will follow along these lines as well, since to me this seems to be a thoroughly viable means of providing context to artistic endeavor today: The provision of usable objects and spaces serving the ritual of behavioral change and consequent self discovery through play.

Well what do you think? It looks to me like I am still rooting about in the subconscious for myself and for the viewer I am providing the visual narration of my spiritual concepts. But then what was “Ghost Story”?

Story of Stuff

Recommended viewing

The story of stuff

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.

Victor Lebow

The modern industrial economy works like this: resources are dug from a hole in the ground on one side of the planet, used for a few weeks, then dumped in a hole on the other side of the planet. This is known as the Creation of Value. The Creation of Value improves our quality of life. Improvements in our quality of life make us happier. The more we transfer from hole to hole, the happier we become.

Unfortunately, we are not yet transferring enough. According to the Worldwatch Institute, we have used more goods and services since 1950 than in all the rest of human history. But we still don’t seem to be happy. Indeed, over the same period, 25-year-olds in Britain have become ten times more likely to be afflicted by depression. One in four British adults now suffers from a chronic lack of sleep, and one fifth of schoolchildren have psychological problems. Over the past 13 years, mental health insurance claims have risen by 36 per cent. American studies suggest that between 40 and 60 per cent of the population suffers from mental illness in any one year. The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2010 depression will become the second commonest disease in the developed world. Unless we start consuming in earnest, we’ll never experience real joy.
George Monbiot

“Life is a Bowl of…” Multi-Artist Collaborative Exhibition at Caerleon Isle

Runs through Sunday, January 11, 2008

Location: Caerleon Isle

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caerleon%20Isle/80/221/2527

“Life is a Bowl of…” is a multi-artist collaborative conceptual art exhibition featuring a wide array of sculptural art created by 30 artists who were given the challenge to complete the phrase “Life is a bowl of…” using a 30m bowl and a set number of prims.

Artists participating in the exhibition are: Aequitas (Sowa Mai/Banrion Constantine), Artistide Despres, Blue Tsuki, Bryn Oh, Cheen Pitney, Deja Hax, Feathers Boa, Fran Benoir, Frao Ra, Glyph Graves, Jacque Keroauc, Jojorunoo Runo, Kanic Huldschinsky, Luce Laval, Misprint Thursday, Nonnatus Korhonen, Olza Koenkamp, PatriciaAnne Daviau, Phaon Johim, Pete Jiminy, Pixels Sideways, Poid Mahovlich, Rachel Breaker, Sabrinaa Nightfire, Soror Nishi, Spiral Walcher, Tezcatlipoca Bisiani, Trinity Halberstadt, Ub Yifu, WendyofNeverland Fussbudget and White Lebed.

“Life is a Bowl of…” is conceived and directed by Pixels Sideways and is part of the ongoing artist collaboration series at Caerleon Isle.

Caerleon Isle multi-artist collaborations include “Future Man,” “The Surrealist Dance Hall,” and “Stop Making Sense and Dream.” “Life is a Bowl of…” is Caerleon Isle’s fourth multi-artist collaboration and the third directed by Pixels Sideways.

Theatre of Cruelty

The Theatre of Cruelty is a concept in Antonin Artaud’s book The Theatre and its Double. “Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds” (Artaud, The Theatre and its Double). By cruelty, he meant not sadism or causing pain, but rather a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality which, he said, “lies like a shroud over our perceptions.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Cruelty

I sometimes think thats what i want my art to do. To shatter the false reality. To unsettle, expand, awaken the viewer. My own awakening has been in fits and starts often prompted by art most often by the written word. Something about the slow intake of information with the ability to pause, rewind, fast forward at any time with ease makes the written word more potent in the long run. Sure an image can shock and unsteady me but in all honesty books have had a longer lasting effect on my perceptions.

So what?

I dunno

Theatre of Cruelty
A Discworld short story
By Terry Pratchett

Copyright © Terry Pratchett 1993

Virtual Art

Magazine électronique du CIAC

Why Art in Virtual Worlds?
e-Happenings, Relational Milieux & “Second Sculpture”
by Patrick Lichty
(in English)

I keep returning to this article and mining its bibliography.  I thought it was time i shared it with you.

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG Reenactment of Marina Abramovic and Ulay's Imponderabilia

Marina Abramovic and Ulay Imponderabilia Galleria d'Arte Civica di Bologna 1977

The possibilities for exploration of ideas and communication with a wider , primed audience are exciting.

Don’t be fooled these experiences are very real no matter how much our preconceptions try to tell us differently.  The brain can not tell the difference.

The Face of Innocence

The face of innocence, the aspect acted on. It is this face that smiles and charms and even seems to love. It searches for companions and it looks, at times with pity, on the suffering, and sometimes offers solace. It believes that it is good within an evil world. This aspect can grow angry, for the world is wicked and unable to provide the love and shelter innocence deserves. And so this face is often wet with tears at the injustices the world accords to those who would be generous and good. This aspect never makes the first attack. But every day a hundred little things make small assaults upon its innocence, provoking it to irritation, and at last to open insult and abuse. The face of innocence the concept of the self so proudly wears can tolerate attack in self-defence, for is it not a well-known fact the world deals harshly with defenceless innocence? No one who makes a picture of himself omits this face, for he has need of it.

The other side he does not want to see. Yet it is here the learning of the world has set its sights, for it is here the world’s “reality” is set, to see to it the idol lasts.

Beneath the face of innocence there is a lesson that the concept of the self was made to teach. It is a lesson in a terrible displacement, and a fear so devastating that the face that smiles above it must forever look away, lest it perceive the treachery it hides. The lesson teaches this: “I am the thing you made of me, and as you look on me, you stand condemned because of what I am”. On this conception of the self the world smiles with approval, for it guarantees the pathways of the world are safely kept, and those who walk on them will not escape. Here is the central lesson that ensures your brother is condemned eternally. For what you are has now become his sin. For this is no forgiveness possible. No longer does it matter what he does, for your accusing finger points to him, unwavering and deadly in its aim. It points to you as well, but this is kept still deeper in the mists below the face of innocence. And in these shrouded vaults are all his sins and yours preserved and kept in darkness, where they cannot be perceived as errors, which the light would surely show. You can be neither blamed for what you are, nor can you change the things it makes you do. Your brother then is symbol of your sins to you who are but silently, and yet with ceaseless urgency, condemning still your brother for the hated thing you are.

Concepts are learned. They are not natural. Apart from learning they do not exist. They are not given, so they must be made. Not one of them is true, and many come from feverish imaginations, hot with hatred and distortions born of fear. What is a concept but a thought to which its maker gives a meaning of his own? Concepts maintain the world. But they can not be used to demonstrate the world is real. For all of them are made within the world, born in its shadow, growing in its ways and finally “maturing” in its thought. They are ideas of idols, painted with the brushes of the world, which cannot make a single picture representing truth.