Locale

This is a cgi video phantogram (I think it’s a first).  I don’t look at it as a film – experimental or otherwise.  The 3D effect projected horizontally leaves the viewers with the impression that they are looking at animated models or dioramas.  The thinglike (couldn’t think of a better word) aspect of the piece runs counter to the time-based ephemeral quality of film or video.

Locale was inspired by the writings of Robert Monroe – founder of the Monroe Institute and most famous for his book about out-of-body experiences published in the early 70s.

As an undergraduate, my thesis project dealt with the esoteric aspects of WB Yeats’ writings – primarily in his book, “A Vision.”  Yeats developed a cosmology (based upon his wife’s automatic writing) that was really striking in its depth and at the same time relevant to him as a poet – providing him with a rich source of inspiration in his later writings.  Since doing this project, I’ve been interested in the whole subject of cosmology and the implications different sorts of cosmologies have for human thought and behavior.

What struck me most in reading Monroe was the comprehensiveness of the cosmology he describes. The descriptions of his experiences are vivid and have uncanny, often frightening aspects.  Beyond providing inspiration for this piece, his work again brought the whole issue of cosmology to the fore.  It’s something that I plan exploring further in an artistic sense and it is an important issue in regards to the whole Gramática parda project.

Some Notes

The work in this inaugural show represents possible expressions of the concept of “Gramática parda” (tawny or earthy grammar, the grammar of nature).  And by extension (through Gary Snyder), the notion that the grammars of culture, civilization and nature are of the same order.  All of the work is concise in regards to these ideas - but in a poetic sense (rich, nonlinear).

I’m finishing up the videos for the show and am posting a few notes on each of them…  Opinions and thoughts are likely to expand/contract/change.

Homage to the Great Emitter

The source footage was shot in various locations: Santa Monica under water, Exposition Park, Griffith Park.

Made up of roughly 300 layers of video rendered as concentric rings scaled up from the center with each ring representing an individual frame.  The structure results in what looks like a continuous emanation.

It is part of a series of pieces that I describe as “spatialized time” (I’m putting the last of these in this show). I took as its base a standard moving image and restructured into a sort of timeline.

The title is from Robert Monroe (who was the inspiration behind the 3D piece I did for the show called “Locale”).

The piece (and the others in the series) is about visual perception and visual representation of time and dimensional space.  Fitting that it looks like an eye in this respect – the image of the eye is important in other work in the show as well.

There is a CGI bit in the middle that I use as a bridge to reverse the video into a loop.  Beyond its function as a transition, I think of it as representing a mental or perceptual leap (perhaps that’s too obvious).

HUMS

from Wired:

You can’t hear it, but the Earth is constantly humming. And some parts of the world sing louder than others.

After discovering the mysterious low-frequency buzz in 1998, scientists figured out that the Earth’s hum is caused not by earthquakes or atmospheric turbulence, but by ocean waves colliding with the seafloor. Now, researchers have pinpointed the source of the Earth’s “background noise,” and it looks like it’s coming primarily from the Pacific coast of North America.

When two waves of opposite direction but similar frequency collide, they create a special kind of pressure wave that carries energy to the ocean bottom. As these waves pound against the sea floor, they generate a constant vibration with a frequency of about 10 millihertz, much too low for humans to hear but easily detectable with seismometers. By comparing the intensity of the hum with the height of waves around the world, scientists can track where the buzz is coming from.

Previous studies suggested that waves from both shallow continental shelves and the deep ocean contribute to the Earth’s hum, but new data indicates otherwise. Based on measurements from a seismic observatory called the USArray EarthScope, most of the hum appears to originate from the Pacific coast of North America, with a smaller contribution from the west coast of Europe. Waves from the deep ocean don’t seem to make much hum at all.

Listen to a version sped up enough for human ears. Courtesy of UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory.

There are other unexplained HUMS around the globe that are audible to the human ear as well. The Taos (New Mexico) Hum is well known amongst many residents, but the Auckland Hum from the North shore of NZ is well documented and more importantly well recorded. Listen to this uncompressed wav file. And another. - sounds from T.J. Moir

Phantogram

Phantograms, also known as Phantaglyphs, Op-Ups, free-standing anaglyphs, levitated images, and book anaglyphs, are a form of optical illusion. Phantograms use perspectival anamorphosis to produce a 2D image that is distorted in a particular way so as to appear, to a viewer at a particular vantage point, three dimensional, standing above or recessed into a flat surface. The illusion of depth and perspective is heightened by stereoscopy techniques; a combination of two images, most typically but not necessarily an anaglyph (color filtered stereo image). With common (red-cyan) 3D glasses, the viewer's vision is segregated so that each eye sees a different image.

Phantograms can be created using drawn images, photographs, or computer-generated images. Phantograms are usually placed horizontally and are intended to be viewed standing back from the image, though they can also be placed vertically and viewed at an angle from above or below.

The Uncanny

The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.^[1] (See Uncanny valley)

Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.

Photo by John Guider

Moving is an INCREDIBLE THING. -ZEELIO

PDF Invite

Opening Reception Invitation

La Llareta

In Chile - parts of this plant are more than 3,000 years old.

Bloop

from CNN.com

Scientists have revealed a mysterious recording that they say could be the sound of a giant beast lurking in the depths of the ocean.

Researchers have nicknamed the strange unidentified sound picked up by undersea microphones "Bloop."

While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth, Britain's New Scientist reported on Thursday.

It is too big for a whale and one theory is that it is a deep sea monster, possibly a many-tentacled giant squid.

In 1997, Bloop was detected by U.S. Navy "spy" sensors 3,000 miles apart that had been put there to detect the movement of Soviet submarines, the magazine reports.

Listen here.

mycelium.model

source by Jared Tarbell

Rishma Dunlop

In Search of Tawny Grammar:
Poetics, Landscape, and Embodied Ways of Knowing

Abstract:

In this article, the researcher explores Thoreau’s notion of gramatica parda, a dark and dusky knowledge inspired by the natural world as the concept relates to embodied knowing, alternative, artistic forms of research representation, and education. The approaches are interdisciplinary, drawing from perspectives of feminist geography, literary and aesthetic theories, theories of embodiment, perception, and ecology. Through these multiple lenses, poetry, fiction, and narrative forms are introduced as possibilities for epistemologies and ontologies. In this work, the researcher draws on her own work as poet/fiction-writer/researcher and teacher. The narrative explorations aresites that envision ecology,landscape,and poetic “story- telling” as sites of pedagogical possibilities.

PDF of full paper

Merleau-Ponty

Language is the very voice of the trees, the waves, the forest.

The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes - p. 155

Excerpt from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.

On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or KEDGER, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.

Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application.

As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.

Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.

At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with "HANDS OFF!" you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.

In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges.

Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.

Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.

With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

Draft 2

Trial of Jim Dandy, Chapter 5

>>

I’m struggling with language right now, with pictures, and with the pictures that the words can create. There are buddhas like Gary Snyder who know the beauty of the American Language [Gramatica Parda - Ed.], how it can be a vehicle for the beauty of the Land. The American Language in rare cases can be a Touch, like Ginsberg’s sunflower, witnessed by Kerouac, or van Gogh’s Roses. I wish I could be a Buddha. I am Wish….

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- Jim Dandy, as told to John Law [THE TRIAL OF JIM DANDY, Chapter 5 (NOTES ON DIMENSIONAL TIME)][PJM]

The Olympian Creation Myth

At the beginning of all things Mother Earth emerged from Chaos and bore her son Uranus as she slept.  Gazing down fondly at her from the mountains, he showered fertile rain upon her secret clefts, and she bore grass, flowers, and trees, with the beasts and birds proper to each.  This same rain made the rivers flow and filled the hollow places with water, so that lakes and seas came into being.

Her first children of semi-human form were the hundred-handed giants Briareus, Gyges, and Cottus.  Next appeared the three wild, one-eyed Cyclopes, builders of gigantic walls and master-smiths, formerly of Thrace, afterwards of Crete and Lycia, whose sons Odysseus encountered in Sicily.  Their names were Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, and their ghosts have dwelt in the caverns of the volcano Aetna since Apollo killed them in revenge for the death of Asclepius.

-Robert Graves