A new drawing made during tonight's debate:

Other random stuff crowding my clipboard:

More inane ramblings of photography dinosaurs who get bent out of shape about the advent of digital photography. As though their indignation will change anything. Here's how this will go: after the initial panic wears off, artists will realize that this technology will neither doom us nor save us. We'll realize that a digital camera is a tool like any other tool; some people will use it well and a majority will use it crappily. Film will become the domain of a few nostalgic specialists who continue to make beautiful and rare work as they've always done. The general public meanwhile will no more miss film photography than we today miss the daguerreotype. Deep breath everyone. It's gonna be alright.

There are always new corners of the blogosphere to discover. Just when I thought no one else was talking about art in Austin, I find this blog. This should be your first stop for Austin art happenings.

Just when you thought the whole music download, copyright, lawsuit situation couldn't get any stupider, they've now gone and made it a criminal offense to share a music file with someone without including a valid email address appended to the file. This is a great use of taxpayer dollars within the same system designed to deal with rapists and terrorists.

I am enjoying the Lain series from Geneon Animation. This character commits suicide in the first episode and starts sending email from beyond the grave.

current music: Dr. John, Marie Laveaux

Bordering on exoticism, I drew this fictional writing system yesterday.

Here are a couple of other systems I drew back when I was doing more calligraphy.



On my drive home this afternoon, I started thinking about America's relationship to foreign cultures. I think that people who accuse Americans of being isolationist and xenophobic oversimplify the matter. Actually I think that many Americans expect to experience the world like a 5th grade culture fair; those safe and happy parties where the idea is to go around tasting safe little bite-sized samples of "exotic" foods that are actually just American foods in a different shape.

Many of us were taught to think of culture in this way. Is it any wonder then that most Americans seem completely unequipped to deal not only with the cultural complexity in the world, but even the cultural complexity here at home? They are eager, desperate even, to try some taste of a foreign culture, but it has to be safe, tidy and neutered. If it's too spicy and kicks back, Americans cry foul.

Another (clickable) page from a life drawing session. Tonight I accomplished the almost unprecedented feat of drawing a hand and a foot in the same drawing and being satisfied with both.

Meanwhile, being the usual stats tramp I am, here are the top 5 search terms that have landed people at this site (excluding my name and the name of the blog):

1. hernan bas
2. sleep haiku
3. zack simpson
4. new media artist
5. greg piwonka

Most bizarre and unrelated search phrase to date: "Jessica Simpson's butt can I see it."

I spent most of the day making stretchers and doing other similar chores, though I also did do some experimenting with acrylics. Also, here's a page o' sketches from today's sketchbook (click to enlarge). Off to work on the time machine!

current music: Govinda, Move Divine

Only in this country can you buy a deep-fried "croissant donut" at 7 in the morning! God bless America!

Even I assumed that my warning to collage artists represented a threat in the distant future. But now I read that Rosie O'Donnell is being sued for including pieces of reproductions of courtroom sketches in an autobiographical collage that she made and offered for sale. While hardly the paragon of contemporary art preactice, O'Donnell isn't doing anything a million other collage artists don't also do by definition.

Get a grip! Being included in Rosie's collage was the only hope those artists had for their otherwise completely mundane work to live on past the 12-second lifespan it enjoyed on the evening news. Jesus, who else is going to do anything with it?! If it doesn't end up in a Rosie O'Donnell collage, then the only other logical place for it is the trash. (left, Rosie O'Donnell's collage)

On the other hand, these people get it. The producers of Outfoxed are giving away the raw footage of the program for others to remix as they see fit. The future is open source. The future is the logic of cultural give-and-take for the vitality of all art and all artists.

I'm not advocating that painters go around giving their work away on the streets. I am advocating that they not sue when another artist has paid them the honor of sampling them and using quotations from them in the context of truly new work.

This is why spontaneous protests have already sprung up against the ludicrous ruling by the 6th Circuit Court against sampling, even when the sample is rendered completely unrecognizable. (By that logic, pulling the thread out of a thriftstore needlepoint napkin and gluing it into a painting should be illegal.)

In other news, here is a nice page from my recent designs for the time machine. "Tachyon-1" is a placeholder name, and it's likely that almost everything will change since these are just initial sketches to work out the parameters of the problems. Click for larger view.

current music: D'Angelo, Brown Sugar

I spoke too soon about the Stephen Hawking. I'm very whelmed.

I'll be watching this space very closely. (Thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.) Margo Jefferson will be writing occasional essays and criticism about the avant-garde in the New York Times, and already she's fallen into a bunch of clichés about the romanticism of the avant-garde, which she then turns right around and dismisses as nonexistent.

She almost gets out of the jam by changing "avant-garde" to "experimental," a term I like because it takes the pressure off. It admits as much the possibility of failure as of success, and potentially puts them on an equal footing as worth talking about. But I'm not sure how committed she is to that idea, if at all. I'm anticipating a stream of reviews of gallery-sanctioned pseudo-revolution designed to win tenure for some highbrow art academic. I hope I'm wrong about that.

She's right in implying that the avant-garde as historically understood doesn't exist. A real avant-garde art movement will exist when and only when there is a wider social movement that supports it, that finds its voice through it. Avant-garde art can't make a revolution; a revolution makes avant-garde art.

Until then, what is often called "avant-garde" is really just one style in a whole flea market of art styles. Which is fine, just don't confuse it for the same thing as Thelonious Monk or Stravinsky blowing minds. There is the experimental, however, and that I hope will sustain us.

I freaked out one my best friends by informing him that I recently realized that I am a Transmitter; a being from the future, essentially composed of radio waves wrapped around a few spare strands of human DNA. More on this later.

In my off time, I am still giving lots of thought to the problem of time travel and have begun plans for a time machine design. Here is one of the pages of initial notes wherein I posit the existence of tachyons--particles that can travel at superluminal speeds--and work out the implications for time flexion based on this.

Meanwhile, I've started Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time, but so far remain underwhelmed. It's a little bit generalist.

Here's Dana 2 finished:

This was not my original vision for the piece, though I learned a lot. Instead of it engaging with its digital source, it comes across as a knock-off fauvist piece done about a century too late. Still, here's a detail I'm particularly happy with:

By popular demand, here are a few more images from Peat Duggins's current installation at Fresh Up Club. Click on the thumbnails for full size pics.

Many artists take a tiny idea, or no idea at all, and blow it up with the most complicated and yet imprecise expression they can muster. Peat Duggins's current installation at the Fresh Up Club is the exact opposite of this trend. It's fresh, perceptive and packed with ideas that still mean something outside the gallery context.

The work is essentially a work of narrative fiction in which an architect has designed a cookie-cutter subdivision, developed it, witnessed an air battle overhead and sold the movie rights to the whole affair. We see the architect's desk in one corner and the rest of the space is devoted to the subdivision (in miniature) laid out with roads, driveways, monopoly-style houses and lots of cars. The blimps and planes are suspended above.

It's all precision-fabricated with cardboard, speaking to the kind of pre-fab disposability of this neighborhood. The cars are strewn around chaotically--and there are clearly too many for the number of houses--but they all look alike. Peat avoids that hackneyed "suburbia is creepy" treatment you see a lot by keeping the focus on the architecture and the neighborhood planning aspect. If the people living here are creepy its only because of the inhumane conditions they live under. Salomón Huerta's house paintings do something similar, as opposed to, say, the film American Beauty, which is all about creepy people. (right, Salomon Huerta)

Anyway, it's worth a trip out to FUC.

current music: Handsome Boy Modeling School, So...How's Your Girl?

Every painting--every piece of art I make--goes through a hundred deaths and rebirths. Just as it breathes life I make one more stroke and the entire piece dies. Then I work at it some more and I resuscitate it. This will happen many, many times over the course of a single work.

current music: The Aluminum Group, Pedals

Next stage:

The composition is coming along nicely, but the color is looking tepid and needs to be pulled into shape.

Here's the first stage of the latest painting in progress. My idea this time is to let the painting tell its own story about the digital color a little more organically. Normally I manipulate my source images quite a bit.

current music: Cibo Matto, Stereotype A

"Voyeur," new in the digital sketchbook:

I've finally finished the redesign on the web site (at last!) but there is no rest for the weary as I am forced to blast the pinheads at the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, who have shown their collective ignorance and their willingness to shill for the record industry, whose track record of anti-artist arm-twisting is more pronounced than in any other industry.

In short, they have ruled all sampling of music illegal without payment of licensing fees, "even minor, unrecognizable snippets of music" (quote from the Associated Press).

Weirdly, when I talk to people about this, they expect that as an artist I would applaud this decision as some sort of victory for artists, but it is not that at all. It is a stifling of legitimate artistic expression, an appalling lack of subtlety in understanding about how culture develops and is loaded with racist overtones to boot.

Artists have been pulling pieces out of the sea of cultural flotsam as long as we've been making art. Hip-hop is the pre-eminent expression of that particular form of cultural logic, one that has shown itself to be one of the most resonant and salient of our day. (left, DJ Spooky and Ryuichi Sakamoto make art)

What hip-hop artists and mixologists do is only the moral equivalent of tearing out scraps of magazine pages and advertisements and putting them down on canvas as a new piece of art. Picasso anyone? Rauschenberg? Not to mention Gerhard Richter, Roy Lichtenstein, Vik Muniz, Thomas Ruff, and a whole host of others who have entire bodies of work based on taking an existing cultural artifact and basically re-rendering it, fully recognizable. (right, Robert Rauschenberg "#62 Features from Currents," 1970, Hey Bob, did you pay licensing fees to all those newspapers, writers and photographers?)

Copyright, originally meant to balance the needs of individual artists with the need for society to exchange ideas freely, has been completely perverted to serve some kind of "mine-all-mine" mentality. We're so paranoid that we're afraid someone might take a single chord from a piece of music, recontextualize it, transform it, in short make it sublime and that we might not get our 26 cents for it. We'd rather that art not get made at all. As a cultural society, we have lost all sense of artistic generosity, and have let ourselves be tricked into thinking that the logic of capitalist opportunism is the only viable way of thinking about our art.

Unfortunately, there is a long history of mainstream society seeing primarily black artforms as threatening to the social order. Drums were outlawed on plantations. Radio stations had strict policies against playing R&B music in the 50s. Displaced racial anxiety even had a lot to do with the violent late-70s anti-disco fervor, which took on the sanctimonious glow of a religious crusade, though that was equally about hating women, too. (left, talking drum, feared as communication device)

The court has set artists way back on this one. The so-called aggrieved musicians will see precious little remuneration, as most of it will go to industry lawyers, and the art of sampling will simply go back underground. Meanwhile we'll all be missing out on a lot of great art. Oh and watch out collage artists; you're next.

For unknown reasons, I have an inverterate need to redesign my web site about once a year. That's fine in theory, but I invariably go through a dozen different design options, trying to make each design solve every possible problem. I now believe I'll be done by Friday. In the meantime, if I ever mention that I'm redesigning my site, someone please stop me!

current music: Steve Earle, The Revolution Starts Now

Went to Half Price Books again for another round of reading and research materials, including "The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual," which tells you exactly how to fly a space shuttle. At 2 minutes to takeoff, for example, the APU auto shut down switch (which can be found on panel R2) should be set to Inhibit, just after which the External Tank hydrogen vents close and the tank pressure starts to build up. Just one example of the myriad helpful tips in this book.

current music: Joni Mitchell, Shadows and Light

I'm about halfway through Paul Davies' How to Build a Time Machine. Starting from an application of Einstein's general theory of relativity (GTR), Davies talks about how it's possible to move forward and backward in time, and to some extent not just in theory but in practice.


I'd known that moving forward in time is actually pretty easy. All you have to do is accelerate yourself to near the speed of light so that you sort of hide out in a little fold in spacetime. Then let the world go about its business. Then pop out of your little fold and voila you've time traveled forward. You're still young and smooth while everyone else has grown back hair. And contrary to popular belief you don't have to go out into space to do it. You can just drive around the block really fast. Really, really, really fast.


The harder trick is going backward. But according to Davies that too is possible. This I didn't know. It takes wormholes and the looping of light around spinning cylinders, but can be done.


What I like most about the GTR and its effects on space, is that it turns out that time is not singular. There is a measurable difference in the spacetime at the bottom of a skyscraper as compared with the top. When you fly on a plane you travel through time a couple of nanoseconds faster than people on the ground.

This means that even our bodies exist in a range of time spaces rather than at a point in time. Your head and feet experience time in slight disjunction with each other. And of course, as is well known, matter itself is only a kind of energy. This means that our bodies are fuzzy coincidences of energy inhabiting ambiguous space in ambiguous time.

I had forgotten how much I dig hard science.

Those with a good memory for cultural trivia will recognize the title of this entry as a reference to that installation piece in Sweden that caused such a flap earlier this year. Some mistakenly accused it of being offensive in its anti-semitism when it was really just offensive in its bad artness.

This past weekend I was messing around with some digital technique experiments and some of the same issues came up for me that I imagine must have come up for Dror and Gunilla as they shopped around Stockholm for a substance suitable for use as a pool of blood. In a small way at least.


First, I wanted to do some more variations with these portraiture techniques. I started with a blank canvas in Photoshop and then just started layering on swatches of transparent color, layer after layer, almost identically to what I would do with paint. The results are at right (click on it to see the full size version.) As a model, I had come across a photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers and just used it because it seemed so rich, though I didn't know what to make of it at the time. I was moving intuitively, which I want to do more often.


So I finished and the results were very saccharine, almost candylike. What does it mean to aestheticize a hijacker--a murderer basically--that way? I added some type over it, again moving intuitively, not really knowing what I was getting at. The words read, "Every Single Fucking One of You," and seems to refer in a violent way to the mutual sort of accusatory, paranoid, antagonistic web of political relationships that both led to and resulted from 9/11. Fine. But that seemed sort of clunky, not to mention derivative of Kruger, though her slogan would have been even clunkier and less interesting.


So I overlaid a fine web of type over the whole image that if you get up close you can read it as saying, "what if we all already knew?" Even more ambiguous, more subtle, but also weaker and probably dopier. So that was that. I took the type off and am entering it in my (soon to be released) digital sketchbook sans type. But the ethical questions remain: what does it mean to do a portrait of a hijacker, without commentary, without some kind of meta analysis attached to it that attempts to give some kind of meaning or context to it? I didn't know while I was making it and I still don't know.

Meanwhile, I'm proud to announce my first book deal. It's not as glamorous as it sounds. I'll be producing a book for rehabilitation of stroke victims and other adults with speech problems. It'll do some good in the world and the royalties will be paying me for the next 10 years.