The marathon typesetting session is done on the freelance book project (for now), which frees up more time for sketches and plans:

Well who am I to resist a self-aggrandizing vanity link? Oh, and middle-aged? Speak for yourself, Chris.

Another successful meeting of "the group" was had tonight. I floated the idea of calling ourselves "Mutationists," interested as we are in mutation, malleable technologies, and freakishness. Bea wasn't having the whole -ism thing and we spent a good couple of hours brainstorming, googling, dictionary harvesting, plowing through medical books, cosmology books, physics books, mythology books, trying to come up with viable alternatives, only to end up saying: let's sleep on it.

I floated the theory that the answer was already out there somewhere in all our chaotic notes, but that we were just overcritical at the moment.

Oh, it is so nice to get together with artists and talk about actual ideas. Not gimmicks, publicity stunts or schemes, but always first and last, the ideas we all want our work to be about. That should be a given, but in fact sometimes you have to drag ideas kicking and screaming into the shallow, shallow art world.

Racing against a deadline for getting this textbook paged, including 28 hours of computer time in the last 2 days. This is the high-pressure part of the freelance life that's the downside to having large stretches of creative time. Anyway, Greg was right: Adobe's InDesign eats Quark for breakfast, even for long books, for which Adobe claims InDesign is not optimized. But with nested stylesheets, the story editor, the glyph palette and an interface that's about a zillion times more intuitive than Quark, InDesign wins hands down. It's worth the investment just for the way it sets tabs. [end geek transmission]

I did manage to sneak in a viewing of Ghost in the Shell. The visuals are unparalleled by anything else I've seen so far, though the storytelling is a little clunky.

current music: Sondre Lerche, Faces Down

I stayed up until 4am or so last night drawing and experimenting with watercolors (my experience with watercolors is almost zero). Then I tried to get up and start working on the book production project at 8am. That lasted for about 3 hours then I was shot for the rest of the day.

Gone are the days when 4 hours would have been plenty of sleep. Those days are long gone!

Here is a recent sketchbook page. It's a portrait of a temponaut, or time traveller, just inside the event horizon of a black hole, where the metric signatures of all coordinates are reversed, turning time into space and space into time. The diagram at the bottom left is a Penrose diagram and maps out how to get from one universe to another.

It's been about a year now that I've been tinkering with these new interests in making art, the science, the science fiction. I didn't think it would take so long for something to gel. But then again, this is unknown territory for me.

I realize I'm interested in 2 things most strongly now:

1) Complexity. Of natural and artificial systems: neural networks, cosmology, corporate org charts, maps, and how these things are metaphors for the complexity of personal identity and the complexity of social relationships.

2) The Transmitters. The human-machine hybrids that consists mainly of radio waves wrapped around strands of human DNA. The Transmitters are constantly receiving messages from the past and future. The chatter in their heads drives them crazy. Actually, they don't receive messages, but rather are themselves messages in constant fluctuation. They are a metaphor for all of us.

current music: iTunes random shuffle

I was hoping to do an all day session and get masses of work accomplished on the book project, but never really got on a roll. So I gave up in the middle of the afternoon with one of my famous pledges to really hit it hard tomorrow.

So I went drawing instead. Drawing and writing. Been nailing down some more ideas about this group I'm involved with forming. Seems the connecting strand between us all is that we all share an interest in freakishnes and a kind of aberration or deviance that is highly personal and yet has some political ramifications.

You know, me with my time travel and whatnot. We are planning on writing some kind of manifesto. I think it should start out something like this: "We believe that the wellspring of the future of black art is to be found in our own freakishness. We celebrate the fiercely independent, the freakish, the nonconformist and the aberrant. In short we celebrate the mutant."

current music: Coco Mbassi, Sepia