FW: Pink Dolphin

This extremely rare and beautiful "pink dolphin" was spotted and photographed by Capt. Erik Rue of Calcasieu Charter Service on June 24th, 2007 during a charter fishing trip on Calcasieu Lake south of Lake Charles, LA.

It appears to be an uncanny freak of nature, an albino dolphin, with reddish eyes and glossy pink skin. It is small in comparison to the others it is traveling with and appears to be a youngster traveling with mama. After spotting the beautiful mammal cruising with a pod of four other dolphins, Rue and his guests Randy and Peyton Smith and Greg and Sam Elias of Monroe, LA idled nearby while watching and photographing the unusual sight for more than an hour.

Our expectations are high that we will see this amazing mammal again as it was in an area frequented by the gentle mammals and one confirmed report has it being spotted at least a month earlier in a nearby location. If it does turn up again, it will be a welcome surprise to our guests.

Ammonites

Paul McLean: NOTES ON DIMENSIONAL TIME [BONE artist statement (Title Sequence)]

BONE [SEGMENT 1]: Title Sequence
(moving image)
NOTES ON DIMENSIONAL TIME
ARTIST STATEMENT
by Paul McLean



For the first time in @5 years of posting to YouTube, I included copyrighted material in an AFH-prodution piece (the Waylon song), as a test of corp-media response. This video was immediately flagged by YT and blocked in Germany. I believe I can argue for fair usage, although I do intend to contact SONY and the owners to request the usual permissions & to discover the fee schedules, if there are any. Apparently, SONY has leased such content to YT in an ad-scheme arrangement for most of the major markets. I find the double standard for "CONTENT" worth a response, given the hundreds of 1000s of AFH views/downloads we've provided, including posting-reposting features on the AFH site array. The corp-media vehicles promote a broad agenda for protecting "art" properties they "possess," while building features into their distribution networks that ensure profit/market share for them, without embedded reparations for all "content-providers." For amplification: FB/Google/Myspace, etc., have generated Billions $ selling their services on a secondary market either using ad-models or other means (e.g., stocks), or by compiling huge databases of personal information which they sell/monetize or otherwise "share" to dataminers (gov't or econ).

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FUCK THE SUCK! - MILO

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When I first moved to Nashville in the mid-90s, after a 10-year stint in Santa amassing artist chops and a working-artist art-market praxis, I would introduce myself and, as the common social inquisition goes, my new acquaintance would usually ask me what I did for a living. I would reply, "I'm an artist." In Santa Fe, since, as the saying goes, "you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an artist," I would be operating under the assumption that the inquisitor would have an idea what an artist is. That assumption, in Nashville, would prove incorrect. When one claims to be an artist in Santa Fe, if the response weren't a cagey eye-roll (you could never be sure whether you might be talking to world-class A-lister or a stoner wannabe living in a trailer in Pecos, Galisteo, Madrid... or a tourist on the make for a City Different rep), the conversation routinely would evolve into a discussion of mediums, aesthetics or gallery affiliations, since nearly always the person asking what you did for a living was an artist of some variety, too. In Nashville, though, the inquisitor (about your "living") would cagey eye-roll (you could never be sure whether you might be talking to world-class A-lister singer-songwriter/producer/agent etc., or a stoner wannabe living in a beat-down shack in Dixon, Belleview, East Nashville... or a tourist on the make for a Music City rep) and ask you what instrument you play, or whether you were a vocalist. Artist had come to mean "musician" in Nashville, thanks largely to the corporate music industry. In Nashville, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a "muso."

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Over a 5- to 7- year run in Nashville, I enjoyed a rare confluence of artistic support and opportunity. I've written about this elsewhere in detail. With regards the 4D collective schema: DDDD could not have evolved into the successful and ongoing praxis-as-proof for dimensional multi-disciplinary, multimedia presentation anyplace other than Nashville, in my estimation. The culture of Nashville's musical community and the city's largely "open" (as in "open range") infrastructure was the fertile turf for our explorations, and provided most of the seminal informatics required to modify the de-finition of "artist" to make space for "4D artist." Nashville's converging and burgeoning arts system during that period benefited from many emergent or embedded facets. From the huge wealth generated from managed-health-care giant HCA to the pre-Civil War ideologies adhering to Classicism, to the globalization of country music and fundamentalist Christianity (and Christian culture/publishing), Nashville with its neo-demographic (rich in yuppie itinerant knowledge workers) pushed briefly forward into the "Creative Class" near-future as a media leader on several important fronts. The potential for Nashville to surpass other established US and world culture-centers came (and went) in a temporal flash. Unfortunately, as with many great Western Art stories, Nashville's ends in tragedy, to be slightly hyperbolic or hyperreal. Call it the legacy of the Greeks and Baudrillard. I tore out of Nashville in 2002-3 - on a professional basis - like a rat off a sinking ship. I would like to at some point relate the depth and the breadth of the tale - meaning, the 4D analysis - as I would for any of the locations where I've set up a studio over the past 25 years [Beckley, Santa Fe, Scotland, Nashville, Eureka, Austin, LA, NYC (the World-Wide-Web)]. For now, though, in composing an artist statement for BONE [Notes on Dimensional Time], I'll be brief and cryptic. Nashville sold out, AND was dragged down by the weight of its corporate orders.

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What a waste. - Zeelio

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BONE (the video on YouTube) is not art. It is dimensional and exists in numerous locations, both virtual and real. The movie is animated by narrative and content (and, not least, myself). As an "object lesson" BONE illuminates the power of the timeline in software. The arrangement of components is not a design. In fact, it is design's antithesis. The most important notation for the viewer is: inspect the communication between the video as it appears and the CONTEXT, which is served to you by (PJM/AFH) via YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr and the AFH Blog, with multiple linkages to funnel-programs like Twitter. Pay attention to the ad scheme, brought to you by VIVAKI. Notice how the ad-content collaborates with any data pushed in the upload notes in real-time to generate a "cloud" of useless clickable shite, even interrupting or interfering with your viewing of the video, requiring action on your part to mitigate the intervention. Until the mid-2000's, publishing a video involved a skill-set and bandwith/software/hardware requisites that were "involved" but proprietary by degree and choice. Not to mention other ware-ops, which allowed the economically-challenged hacker to get the tools and tricks he needed to succeed as an operator from sources other than the proscribed ones. Now, your experience of "art" as "content" on a platform on your mobile or home "device" is mediated substantively beyond your means to contravene, depending on your desire to "reach" the "consumer." Which has nothing at all to do with art.

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It should be telling that with a remote click a corporate operative, in conjunction with protectionist legal protocols, can "ban" BONE for every German national, because I chose to include (a modified digital version of) a track downloaded from a purchased CD [the movie soundtrack for "Crazy Heart"][an "ancient" but supremely relevant song by Waylon Jennings that speaks to the selling of Nashville and the realities of touring-musician life, in the early stages of the consumer-portable corporate takeover of "the music industry"]. This case illustrates one of the real attainments and aspirations of the corporate media monopolies and their "cloud:" the enforced mediation of the de-finition of art. Waylon, though he is no less of an outlaw bad ass today than he was when he recorded "I Don't Think Hank Done It This Way," is not an artist. He is, in percentages, an artificial person, too, serving the aims, the anti-art goals, of a global media monopoly made of artificial persons that practice their "governance" at the moment through artificial nations serving as corporate ordinaries, or proxies. As an aside, one of the founders of DDDD was Ellen Rudick, who during her tenure in our collective, at her day-job at Team Design in Nashville, managed the assemblage of the Grammy-winning Hank Williams Boxed Set. That's the "Hank" to which Waylon refers.

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BONE consists of stills [digitized photographs, "pure" digital files built in Photoshop, downloaded and transformed files from the web, etc], that have been animated, and video shot on location or in set studio vignettes. The non-CP audio: such as Percy Person's beautiful and lyrical improvisational piano piece for "Heartless01," tracked into "Central Park Diamond Bouquet" (my condolences to the victims of 9-11 executed in October 2001), recorded at a major Nashville studio by famed engineer King Williams; such as the Preacher soundtrack "hidden" under the conversations of West Virginians in the title NoDT sequence; or "underwater," the bed for the "SWIMMERS" symmetric pattern video concluding the segment - are typical of the sound sculptures AFH/PJM projects incorporate both online in virtual spaces and in actual exhibit spaces, usually presented in multi-source or layered arrays in the architectural environments, for effect. BONE encourages comparison between the "tune" and the dimensional sound framework. The fact is, as a lead artist and preparator of many dimensional exhibits, I can suggest from experience that "tunes" do not hold real space. Tunes are not real art. Even when they happen to be great tunes.

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"Crazy Heart" provided a moving cinematic experience for me, personally. Some of the set locations used to shoot the film pack a punch in my history, like the Thunderbird Inn in Santa Fe. The story-line also resonates deeply. I won't explain how, here. Watching ten seconds in passing while riding a stationary cycle at the gym, of Jeff Bridges receiving various awards for his performance in that film, I couldn't help but juxtapose the Avatar push with the Crazy Heart response. Me, I'll take real actors any time. Congratulations, Jeff! Still, Jeff Bridges and James Cameron are not artists, and what they do is not art, anymore than the Avatar XBOX game is art, anymore than Jeff Bridges is a real Nashville singer-songwriter. Not that SONY would likely agree with me. Or any of the other Billionaire beneficiaries of either of those two multi-platform media "vehicles" would agree with me, either artificially or in a court of law. Not that the professional (or unpaid) "critics" who championed or poo-pooed either movie would concur. And so on. On to the next "Indie." On to the next "Blockbuster." Get it at NetFlix. Download it at iTunes. Play it on your computer. Subscribe to it through your cable provider. Get the ringer. Put it on your desktop. Get it at Amazon. Watch the making of- on E! See the interviews on the official website. Check the returns in Variety. Read the review in the New York Times. Own it now on DVD. Then ask yourself, which part of this is art?

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A few comments. Tyler Green recently celebrated a biography of Chuck Close and put forth the proposition that his self-portrait might be the best contemporary iteration of that artist-genre in the domain. Chuck Close sat on the Intelligence Squared panel on the ethics of the art market and proclaimed that - I'm paraphrasing, more or less, decidedly as a dimensional contextualization in reference to BONE [the video] - that there were no undiscovered artist geniuses currently. I can't help but think of that young fruit loop who ODed - when was it? Last year, the year before? ...Who was pushed by Peres Projects and others in the SUCK market as the next artist-genius. What was his name? Deitch would know. CHUCK: you're a great technician, and a true innovator in the studio, a real dedicated painter. You're also a SUCK hack. You're a commercial artist who tiptoes that fine line between filling orders and doing the next best "Chuck Close painting." You are the status quo. As for comparisons, your work looks flat and boring and big now, but not enough. Thanks for your indelible and important contributions to American art, but like all Heavyweight champions, you're coming, you shine in the dirty corrupt spotlight, and then you're going, and in a while, gone, but for the paintings. In the end, the paintings are what tell the truth. Right, Rembrandt? With respect to advancing dimensional aesthetics, you certainly played your part. The grid-work was excellent. The pixelization reference - whether you intended it or not - was good. Your studio creativity, mechanically-speaking, was dynamic, especially early on. As a factory director, your dedication to quality is outstanding. Without the industry leverage, though, you're still a one-trick pony. That's good for Sotheby's, and your important SUCK collectors. As for art and genius in the perceptual evolution from 3D-4D, dude, you failed to plug in. What's more [N + 1], the sick inflation of your worth in the market makes you and your paintings a central cog in the SUCK-corp machine that has oppressed and continues to oppress the generations who have come after you, and will, until the Close-pushing artificial market is permanently displaced. I thought about putting one of your portraits or self-portraits [shot at LA Art Show 2009] in the video, but decided against it. Whatever. Seen one. Seen'm all, an' a' that. I integrated a couple of (multitudinous) better examples (Napoleon and Remmie's autoportrait - now there was a mechanic, and monoptical, like me - and if I recall correctly, you too! What a coincidence, dimensionally, I mean!).

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Finally, a few words about Google, mountaintop removal, the Massey Montcoal mining disaster, the de-humanization of the subject, the endless revenge on [corporate-artificially-designated] "terrorists," the artlessness of VIVAKI's pool... The good guys always win in the end. Real nature will crush artificial "nature," and "persons," [unfortunately taking most or all real ones in the action], or die trying. Which I guess, in the big Universe, happens. Art doesn't "happen." ART and PROPERTY are not compatible concepts. Art is not a stuffed animal carcass behind glass, anymore than life is. In a free society, a human life is not "owned." No one, including YouTube, owns "BONE." I shared it. You get what you get when you steal the gift. An' a' 'at.

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NOTE: When I return from the summer course at EGS, I am considering the Web 2.0 rollback, starting with the AFH Nings, but likely also the YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Blogger, Google Reader, Delicious, etc., platforms, once again reclaiming the locus for AFH in a closed, meaningful system of distribution. One of my goals in the summer work, facilitated by some accomplished media/communications philosophers, is to explore the proposition that there is no ethical means left for continued artist investment in the corporation-mediated and -monopolized CONTENT field, except in free radical opposition. I look forward to sharing the results with you, dear real people, here or there.

- PJM May 20, 2010
16:19 PM PST

Segment one of the BONE sequence for Notes on Dimensional Time

Animation/video by Paul McLean. Some editing by Lee Harris Tucker [Ground Zero (Nashville), "Central Park Diamond Bouquet"]. Audio includes samples from the Library of Congress and Waylon.

Civilization

Those are the people who do complicated things.

they'll grab us by the thousands

and put us to work.

World's going to hell, with all these

villages and trails.

Wild duck flocks aren't

what they used to be.

Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

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A small cricket

on the typescript page of

"Kyoto born in spring song"

grooms himself

in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.

I quit typing and watch him through a glass.

How well articulated! How neat!

Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.

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When creeks are full

The poems flow

When creeks are down

We heap stones.

Gary Snyder

An email from the late 90s

Subject: You should know this!!

This is a true story...

About a week or so ago, a mother took her eager 3 year old son to Burger King for lunch. After they ate their lunch the mother said that the son could go and play on the playground for awhile since he ate all his lunch.

She watched as the boy played in the tunnels, slide and in the ball-pit. The boy played for about 10 minutes when he started to whimper slightly.

The mother asks the boy what had happened and he mearly replied, "Hurt mommy." The mother assumed that the little boy had banged his elbow or something while playing.

They left to return home. A half and hour after they were home, the mother noticed some big red welts on the little boys arms and legs. Not being able to figure out what they were, the mother started to look at them closer. Could be red ant bites...she did not know.

An hour later, the little boy died. Come to find out, when returning to Burger King to see if there were red ants in the play area, in case the little boy had an allergic reaction. Burger King employees and herself discovered that there was a family of baby rattlesnakes living underneath the balls in the ball-pit area. She has since found out that this happens more frequently than not. The snakes will crawl into the ball pit because it is dark and warm in there. She knows for a fact that another death has occurred because of this in South Carolina. Please use caution when letting any children play in an outside play area of a fast food restaurant, this could happen anywhere. Burger Kings are now building their play areas inside the buildings for a safer environment.

[Robert Dean]

PJM GP Production Notes [5/2010]

GP Notes [PJM]: My initial contributions to the collective project include two sets of still images [BONE 1 + 2], which juxtapose the domains that currently occupy or inform "NATURAL HISTORY" and "CONTEMPORARY ART" and "ARTIST." ...The initial photo shoot happened due to an invite by GP Lead Artist Joe Merrell to a pre-production meeting, which we scheduled in early May 2010 at LA NHM. I found the NHM to be incredible as a dimensional site. A presentation I had done for a course with Carmine Iannacone at Claremont Grad. U [on Lee Bontecue & the origins of the Museum, the Wunderkammer, their relations to colonialism/neo-colonialism, and reinterpretation in the modern art genre (in 2007)] had provided much of the backstory that was animated by a real-time exploration of NHM, camera in-hand, with Joe as guide. ...After digitally processing/finishing @80 of the resulting photos as the 1st BONE sequence, I hit on a next thread, which entailed mining a seam or narrative I'd been after since @2000: the documentation of art environments, with emphasis on camera usage there [although the personalities of art workers, the types of presentation modes, refining of curatorial choices to "fit" economic and architectural parameters, the economic "patina" of these socio-topologies or -ecologies and other concerns (N +1 is the dim. notation) are also in play]. Because my approach is dimensional, the domain analysis is ongoing and longstanding, providing an ample database of content and context to draw upon. GP is proving to be a terrific catalyst for bracketing a very important subject [the de-finition of art in the Western tradition] in the locus of its origination: the "wonder cabinet." The comparative elements at this phase [i.e., a juxtaposition of white-cube exhibit of 3D or "specific objects" with the bones of dinosaurs assembled with tremendous artifice into an "animated" still life (pose)] are rich, and very useful as illustration or for Points of Origination (PoO) for further threading. The collective narrative of GP adds a beautiful and poetic layer to a performance-based practicum (the museum exhibit or art-fair/salon hang) with variable time-lines - e.g., the dioramas at NHM, some of which have been on view for decades / as compared to the up-down reality of the mobile presentation at the Armory Show. Gary Snyder's poetry, Thoreau, this is the stuff of American nostalgia and romance for the individuated "nature" experience, as indicative of a refined inner life, in some essential aspects "superior" to a civilized sensibilities and perceptions. For me, the production is an opportunity to visualize some important facets of Notes on Dimensional Time, for which the 4D artwork I'm contributing to GP provides illumination. The central thesis for NoDT is a proposition for the nature of dimensional time. To summarize, the past rolls up behind us like a rip tide and the future crashes on the Now like a big Hawaiian curling tube. The artist has a special role in the sideways 8 of dimensional time, and my current work involves not only claiming value for the artist operations, but pushing the meme that the ethics of vision are hardly abstract. The working notion might be, "Our sustained existence is contingent on what we do with what we see." ART can be a prime indicator of our collective and individual options and choices, as they appear and diminish in the currents of past, present and future. For a recent amplification, see the pre-doctoral essay, "Can Thinkers Kill Art?"

-PJM 05.18.2010
www.artforhumans.com

From The Birth of Tragedy

Now the Olympian magic mountain opens itself before us, showing us its very roots. The Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all they had to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians. Their tremendous distrust of the titanic forces of nature: Moira [fate], mercilessly enthroned beyond the knowable world; the vulture which fed upon the great philanthropist Prometheus; the terrible lot drawn by wise Oedipus; the curse on the house of Atreus which brought Orestes to the murder of his mother: that whole Panic philosophy, in short, with its mythic examples, by which the gloomy Etruscans perished, the Greeks conquered—or at least hid from view—again and again by means of this artificial Olympus [Mittelwelt der Olympier]. In order to live at all the Greeks had to construct these deities.

[Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy - Francis Golffing and Walter Kaufmann, tr.]

Urban legend...

A woman from La Mesa, California [a city east of San Diego], went to Tijuana, Mexico, to do some shopping. As any visitor to this border town knows, the streets near the shopping areas are populated with stray dogs. The woman took pity on one little stray and offered it a few bites of her lunch, after which it followed her around for the rest of the afternoon.

When it came time to return home, the woman had become so attached to her little friend that she couldn’t bear to leave him behind. Knowing that it was illegal to bring a dog across the international border, she hid him among some packages on the seat of her car and managed to pass through the border checkpoint without incident. After arriving home, she gave the dog a bath, brushed his fur, then retired for the night with her newfound pet curled up at the foot of her bed.

When she awoke the next morning, the woman noticed that there was an oozing mucus around the dog’s eyes, and a slight foaming at the mouth. Afraid that the dog might be sick, she rushed him to a nearby veterinarian and returned home to await word on her pet’s condition.

The call soon came. “I have just one question,” said the vet. “Where did you get this dog?”

The woman didn’t want to get into trouble, so she told the vet that she had found the dog running loose in the street near her home in La Mesa.

But the vet didn’t buy it. “You did not find this dog in La Mesa. Where did you get this dog?”

The woman nervously admitted having brought the dog across the border from Tijuana. “But tell me, doctor, ” she said. “What’s wrong with my dog?”

His reply was brief and to the point: “First of all, it’s not a dog—it's a Mexican sewer rat. And second, it's dying.”

From Jan Brunvand

A pagan conversion story

I trembled, my heart jumped and beat rapidly, and the wreath, which gleamed with the lovely roses woven into it, I took up with greedy mouth and, eager for the promised results, most eagerly devoured. The heavenly promise did not fail me: at once my ugly animal form slipped from me. First my coarse bristles disappeared, the my thick hide thinned, my fat belly contracted, and the soles of my feet grew out through their hoofs into toes; my hands were no longer feet, but were extended for their upright functions; my long neck shrank, my face and head rounded, and my enormous ears returned to their original smallness; my rock-like teeth went back to their minute human scale; and the thing which had tortured me most of all before, my tail, no longer existed.

The crowd was amazed, and the devout paid homage to this clear manifestation of the power of the mighty deity, to her grandeur which exactly matched my dream revelations, and to the ease of my transformation. With one clear voice, stretching their hands toward heaven, they bore witness to the marvelous beneficence of the goddess.

[Apuleius, The Metamorphosis – Loeb volume 453 – J. Arthur Hanson tr., p. 317]

Urban legend...

An elderly woman brings her beloved pet canary in to the student-run free clinic of a veterinary college for treatment of its seriously broken wing. The students decide they should cauterize the region as part of their treatment. First they anesthetize the bird with ether, then they reach for an electric cautery, forgetting that the bird’s bones are hollow. The highly flammable ether has entered the broken bones, and when the tool is applied the bird immediately bursts into a ball of flame, leaving nothing behind but a small pile of scorched feathers.

From Jan Brunvand

Urban legend...

Some boys went swimming in Piney Creek. They got out of the car and one yelled, “Last one in is a rotten egg!” He jumped in first, but he yelled “Go back, go back!” Later, when they got him out, they found that he had been bitten by many snakes. My father used to tell this to me as a warning about just jumping in to swim.

From Jan Brunvand

From a comment card

your museum is tight bangin homie

From Philosophy of Nature lecture

When you look at the patterns of clouds or the patterns of foam on the water – isn’t it astounding? They never make an aesthetic mistake. Look at the way stars are arranged. Well, they’re not arranged! They seem to be scattered through the sky like spray – but would you ever criticize the stars for being in poor taste? When you look at a mountain range… it’s perfect. But somehow this spontaneous wiggly arrangement of nature is quite different from anything we would call a mess.

Look at some modern painting where people have gone out of their way to create expensive messes. You see? They’re different. And this is the whole joke – that we can’t put our finger on what the difference is although we jolly well know it.

-Alan Watts