The Anthroposphere and Timespace

People (the anthroposphere) affect timespace.

EXAMPLE 1 (In Travel):

If you want to go fast, go alone.

If you want to go far, go together.

This is a reminder, not in that large groups are more robust, thus giving them further staying power, but rather, large groups are slow. The more people there are, the slower it is.

EXAMPLE 2 (At a Restaurant):

A party of five takes about 1-2hrs to eat, drink and be merry. A party of ten takes over 2hrs, and a party of thirteen almost 3hrs. The more the merrier (and the longer they take).

Makes one consider civilization and its relationship to the exponential growth of technology, but most importantly, that people exert some type of force on timespace.

I Prefer Tactility

“The Internet is great but I prefer things that are tactile.”

-Jamie Reed interview, Juxtapoz Magazine, Apr2011, n123, p79

The importance of the tactility of a visual message becomes everstrengthening in an era of digital dematerialization. To see the message in your environment, your real environment, is to make a more holistic, visceral, direct connection.

The Illusion

[Thursday, February 10, 2011]

It is the year 2100. The world is in flux. Large numbers of people are being redistributed, both by choice and by the manipulation of the vast social engineering apparatus, or, as those who know call it – The Illusion. There are those who live outside the illusion and those who live inside. Cultures are designed. Long ago, cultures were fermented over time. Now, time does not exist, at least in that sense.

In the illusion things don’t progress in a simple trajectory, they don’t ebb and flow like the tides. Instead, this life is a repetition of the same thing over and over. The façade changes, tastes change, neighborhoods and relationships change, but they do so only to uphold the illusion of the passing of time. Beyond the façade, the system remains in a state of static equilibrium. No revolutions, no triumph. No hindsight, no dreams. People experience conflict, but only that which is designed as such. True conflict does not exist. The fluctuation of reality, of Activity versus Dormancy, Aggression versus Cooperation, Love versus Hate, and Right versus Wrong, as they push and pull on the path of time, have been reduced to an unwavering horizontal line. All life continues unchanged by the unfolding of events.

But this is not life. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows that we must see night and day in order to maintain mental stability. Everyone knows that we must slumber and awaken to maintain physical cohesion. Just as this is known, so it is for the vicissitudes of life. For this reason, it is engineered into the daily ongoings of the life of the submitting population.

In a sense, they choose to live this way. They understand the necessity for cyclical change and submit to the illusions that have been so thoughtfully articulated for their well-being. It is not blissful paradise, though some choose a more seductive version of the illusion. It is not base destitution, though some are cunningly diverted into the upper realms of poverty. For the most part, it is life as usual. Unthinkable crime and horror have been minimized, though with it, unforeseeable epiphanies and ecstasy. That is not to say that these do not exist, just that they are managed, controlled. Ultimately, they, none of them, ever happen. Nothing happens. Plants grow, wind blows, and insects crawl in crooked lines, but all of this has been arranged. This has all been done for the betterment of humankind, for the Greater Good.

Now, there are some who deny the illusion. That is not to say that they deny one illusion for another, as most do – that is, in itself, a false choice. But no, these others, they live, painfully, in the Constant Now. This Now does not supply spirit-nourishing change. Love is not made stronger by the vanquishing of hate. Silence does not exist, for there is no unrest. These others, they choose this life, this non-life, again and again, moment after moment, in a battle of self preservation vs. self destruction.

Life outside the illusion is not long. Those who walk away face hardships for which the coping mechanisms required have been bred out of them for generations. Those who turn their backs also lose their connectivity to the anthroposphere, the collective will to live that people propagate amongst themselves and which is the fuel that propels human life through the barrier of time and into the future.

These are those who orbit the anthroposphere, who surround it in a web of purpose supported only by their own belief in an underlying force – a threat. They claim to feel its danger, to see its light coming on the horizon. They are dismissed. “They feel too much”, it is said. They are known to travel throughout space in the way memories slide through our minds. The population at large is told to stay away from them, both physically and mentally, for they creep. They create thought, but not full thoughts as we are used to – fragmented thoughts, half-thoughts that require another human like themselves to come together into a fully formed idea, but at the risk of remaining forever unfinished and unanswered. Their creeping thoughts represent a bubble rising to the surface, bursting and rippling its wake outwards to crash on the shores of the collective consciousness. They are disruptive.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about them at this time. They disrupt our way of life and their numbers grow with the passing of the days, more creeping, feeling, thinking people. They leave us because they are afraid, and they make us afraid.

On Second Thought

(…After all,) Abstract Expressionism is just an extension of Abstraction. A similar connection between the two can be found in the relation of graffiti to the greater street art movement. Graffiti was a total abstraction of a concept crystallized in Abstract Art: the painting was the art itself, not the image portrayed by that painting. As CEPT determines in his 2011 Juxtapoz interview, “Writing graffiti is just actually signing the landscape and declaring it art. As Duchamp did with the urinal…” If Abstract Art released artists of the obligation to make art out of the visual representation of physical reality, then Street Art rendered impotent the social enforcement of art as a thing at all. Street Art is no longer just one separation away from its environment, just as Abstract Art, by lack of its representational quality, was no longer two separations away. Evaporate the narrative or representational quality of the pre-modern era and you have left the art as an object – an empty object, but a thing nonetheless. It’s a vessel for nothing. Abstract Art says, “Go ahead, art is just a vessel for your ideas. Put whatever you want in there. Put nothing at all. Go ahead, it’s ok”.

Graffiti, on the other hand, totally dematerializes the temple of art. You sign the landscape, I look at the wall you wrote it on, and the window above, and the building adjacent, and I zoom further, and see the whole block, and etc. The art is no longer a non-representational, ethereal entity presented in a vessel of human intent. The tag, the signature of the graffiti artists, says, “Look at this, all of it. I own this. I am this. This is what I feel”. Logically, the street artist of the 21^st century says, “If this is all mine, let me play with it”. And so, the need for art to be contained and presented is negated. No need for that. In fact, real street art can’t even be bought and sold; it is nearly integrated into us; it barely exists.

NOTES

Mike Ballard – CEPT interview in Juxtapoz, Jan 2011 n 120 p100.

http://www.juxtapoz.com/

Socialism and Abstract Art vs. Capitalism and the Street Art/Uncommissioned Art Movement

The revolution has not been televised.

In an interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Michael Gondry (artist, filmmaker) talks about growing up in France watching Bulgarian/Russian cartoons, how communism was good for art and that the free world doesn’t make very good art because they have to be so concerned with its commercial aspect. He points out that they have to sustain their viewing audience, whereas in the communist world the audience has no choice of which cartoons to watch. This gives the artists more creative freedom.

Concerning the art of our time, this poses a conflict. It’s now 2011, and Capitalism is the dominant socioeconomic system of our global society, not Communism. In this system, artists can only create what sells. In contrast, the role of the artist in society is to show people the way, to uncover the future. More precisely, they focus the zeitgeist, presenting it in a way that can be understood by the non-artist citizenry. Art is a coping mechanism, a medicine. If this is so, then how can artists give people only what they want if what they deliver is that which people do not yet know they need?

In a socialist society, people do not choose their art. Instead, the governing body takes care of the funding, and the artists do their job. Only in such a system could Abstract Art have been born. There is no way the people would have chosen such an insane premise as this: Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915). If this is so, then how does a revolutionary art movement take form out of the Capitalist ether?

Perhaps some discourse on Abstract Expressionism is in order; but that is too easy, and becoming less relevant to the real question at hand. Instead, we turn to the street art phenomenon of the 21^st century. The 1990’s suburban American youth still had to trek out to New York City to get graffiti magazines. Then Nicholas Ganz publishes Graffiti World (2004), a graffiti artist’s bible. What was more impressive – the art within or the fact that such a compendium could be published in the first place? Street Art From Five Continents? Then Bansky. He redefines (or perhaps succinctly defines for the first time) the Street Art movement we now know. He releases Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), and writes the preface to Trespass (2010), a 320-page fullcolor book by behemoth art publisher Taschen. What’s happening here? Artists are straightup tagging canvases, putting them in galleries, and selling them to celebrities. Shepard Fairey will probably have his own reality TV show by the end of this year. We’re saturated.

Street Art has taken over as the dominant art form of the young 21^st Century just as Abstract Art had done in the 20^th, but this time Capitalist society is the breeding ground. Restating the original question: How can artists, whose role it is to give the public an understanding of a world which they have yet to comprehend, how can they deliver in a Capitalist society which requires investment based on speculated success and consumer demand? The answer is simple. Street artists are forcing a quasi-socialist system upon us by creating the art for free.

That’s it. You won’t invest? You won’t take our medicine? No problem (just remember what happened to Nurse Rached). And so, here comes art, like it or not, just as it always has, in your face and against your will. The empty space left by the fallen wall of Berlin was first shown to us as a Black Square. “Do you want to fall not knowing who took you?” (That's more of a threat than a question).

NOTES:

“Do you want to fall…?”, Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays in Trespass…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Holzer

Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art

Carlo McCormick (author), Marc and Sara Schiller (curators), Ethel Seno (editor)

Taschen 2010, 320 pages

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/art/all/05719/facts.trespass_a_history_of_uncommissioned_urban_art.htm

Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010

http://www.banksyfilm.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop

Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents, Nicholas Ganz. Abrams, 2004.

http://www.amazon.com/Graffiti-World-Street-Five-Continents/dp/0810949792

Michael Gondry interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Jan 2011 n 120 pp 66-75.

http://www.juxtapoz.com/

The Game of Life: Virtual Entities in Collectively-Simulated Environments

In response to a recent TED video on gaming, I had a vision. The presenter mentioned things like how the gaming industry is huge, and as a form of media, its use/consumption has been growing at a rate four times faster than any other. Also stated was the fact that games are designed to take maximum advantage of the human psyche in regards to motivation. I recall also an article on microtasking – the act of breaking menial tasks into microchunks that could then be crowdsourced.

I imagined a future where everything we do is reverse engineered into a game – by us, for us. Somehow, taking out the garbage becomes more like flying a dragon to a secret floating mountain cave. I imagine, as our lives become more automated, that many of the things we manipulate physically today, will tomorrow be done via some other system independent of our physical actions (in other words, a practicable psychokinetics). Yet, we will always have those menial tasks and chores that seem to do nothing but take the time out of our day. Also we will always face the challenges and adventures that make life worth living.

In this automated future we create an interface which is immersed in the virtual world. Why would GoogleEarth show you the way things really look when you can instead recreate your entire neighborhood into a 15th century medieval village? Why wouldn’t you put on a mask (or, more feasibly, intercept the connections between your eyes and your visual cortex via some less cumbersome apparatus) that superimposes your virtual world on top of the real one in real time, real space.

But furthermore, you could program virtual entities, ones which could respond to you via kinetic controls. Virtual entities could pop up to remind you to pick up a gallon of milk (a golden amulet) from the corner store (the dragon’s lair). Characters interact with you, and you with them, via your virtual entity interface. Situations which are virtual representations of pre-programmed errands, tasks and ideas would take the mundane out of your daily chores.

But this future would never happen this way. In the extremely abstracted, transformed and reverse engineered world, you would not exist alone. Every person would bring with them every other virtual entity until the whole world, yours included, would interact with each other. You would, in the course of a singe day, engage in, struggle with, and triumph over the very obstacles and unfinished business of the rest of the world.

Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world

TEDXBoston, 2010

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html

Jesse Schell: When games invade real life

DICE Summit, 2010

http://www.ted.com/talks/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real_life.html

When the Assembly Line Moves Online, RANDALL STROSS

NYTimes October 30, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/business/31digi.html

Chaos is Illusion

Chaos is an illusion.

It is but order disguised in complexity.

When we thoroughly understand a system, we call it order. Yet there are always parts of the system that we fail to understand and in those parts, we see only chaos. Through organization, through knowledge and understanding, we lift the veil of chaos, to reveal another layer of our ordered system. But like so many layers of the onion, we, as if trapped in an ever-expanding sphere of our own protection, shed one skin only to find another blurring our view.

No matter how big the system, it will always be surrounded in chaos. Chaos is the fertile ground of knowledge, the ground from which knowledge grows to understanding, and from which that understanding grows into the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the inside and the outside, the organism and its environment. As life accelerates on its path towards more life, it crystallizes the unsure footing of chaos that lay before it. The firmness upon which we stand is built out of thin air.