Thursday, 22 October 2009
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
Uneditted, im not a good speller.
A typeface is a product of pre thought. it has been created in the past, by another individual. it has been used thousands, even millions of times depending on the polarity of the font and in the case of helvetica, very.
When one places a piece of type on an item, it immediately stamps it with a branding of some sort. In my work i have illustrated this by stamping breasts, a typically erotic symbol, with the helvetica font. this excersise, removes everything which sex is to a human being. gone are the intimate feelings of closeness and love. the perceiver is left with a feeling of detachment. sex has been turned into a mechanistic, impersonal excursize.
by anointing an organic article with a man made, inorganic article, a new phenomena arises. would might ponder, "what would sex be without the other consciousness with which to experience it? a new form of masturbation?".
Would it be possible to have sex with a machine? at what point of human/ machine enhancement does one cease to be the other?
One could say that we are already dependent on items such as the mobile phone or computer. these are all manifestations of the machine. one could say that they are part of us. yes, you could argue that they quite clearly are not part of us as they are separate. i could then go on to say that "are you aware of the billions of bacteria which live inside us which we require in order to function? without these we could not be able to exist and neither would they. we are dependent on them and they on us. yet they are alien. they have different DNA from us. they are in the logic of the previous statement, separate."
Using this reasoning i could say that we are already our machines and they are us.
Our dependency on the internet is becoming increasingly more evident. Many people, especially the younger are communicating moor and more through machines. Websites such as facebook and myspace make it very easy to create a virtual network of friends who are able to communicate with each other with image, text, video and sound, any time they are able to access a machine connected to the internet.
This "hyper reality" is created via the machine. it would not exist without it but neither would it without us. would the internet exist without humans to perceive it?
the machine has found its place in all areas of out lives. from friendly communication, to handling billions of dollars on the stock market. without the machine, civilised society would crumble. you could say that society depends as much on the machine as the human on their alien bacteria. foreign yet not.
one could think of society as an organism. with humans as the cells and machines as the blood vessels which connect them. without either the organism, would die. They are dependent on each other.
Some are scared of the machine. they see it as something to fear. they see its far reach as a threat. like an impossible force which just keeps getting stronger. They do this out of fear of something which cannot be encapsulated with the mind. that which cannot be understood by the mind will always create fear in some individuals. some fear the prospect of dying in the same light as it is something which cannot be perceived.
One must however, stop trying to label and understand the machine and simply let it be. marvel at its glory. let its tendrils caress your spirit. allow the new intelligence to co-exist and enhance yours. It is merely an infant now. an immature child with no knowledge of itself but it will grown. humanity is the father of the machine. we must encourage it, teach it, let it grow. fill it with all the art and wonder which we love. if we raise it well, it will reward us with unimaginable glory.
those who shy away from the inevitable will find themselves isolated. in the shadows of this great being. constantly trying to hide away from it. those people must be pittied for they do not benefit from what the machine has to offer.
in time these people will be fewer. just like the old of today fear the machine, yet the young embrace it. the young are like the child and the puppy which have grown up together. they have a bond stronger than those who were not around for the beginning.
20.10.09
Now comes the difficult task of finding a clever way of circumventing my restrictions of colour. It may of been wiser to have thought of this earlier however, i felt i wanted to make my designs in full colour from the start.
I have been toying with the idea of experimenting with mocking up a 3d representation of my designs by creating two separate green and red layers and providing the viewer with a pair of eye glasses to trick the brain into seeing a (albeit primitive) 3d image.
i feel that this would be a more fun and exciting way of representing my work, rather than just having high contrast black and white images, although, i will experiment with this too.
On semiotics
In order for man to function as a civilised being, he invented language. The manipulation of the air around him in order to abstract the world around him in a way which can be understood by his fellow man. This is a very useful ability, one of the most useful infect for the evolution of humanity.
We have been further abstracting reality into symbols and forms, ever since the first word was uttered by our pre historic relatives. Before even writing, would of been drawings. The interpretations of the real life 3 diminutional beasts which ramed the land and were hunted by our ancestors, abstracted and interpreted by the mind into a 2 diminutional symbol, painted by firelight on the cave walls.
Then came language. The beginning of recorded history. A way which we could document our lives, this making us immortal.
Without language i would not be writing now on this computer. Writing has given the collective knowledge of humanity the means to communicate. Time is not an issue. if one great mind finds a great discovery, it can be passed along to the next generation.
This has been happening since the dawn of humankind. Without that first scrawling on a cave wall, the first abstraction of reality into another form, none others would have been.
This constant abstraction of reality as incredibly useful as it is, has become a plague, however. Reality has become clouded by the minds constant identification with man created forms. Like a dense fog of our own creation, we are blinded by our own abstractions, existing in the collective minds of society.
As soon as we begin to grown up, we are talked to. taught something which is indispensable if we are to "make it" in this world. or so we are taught. we are sent to school with out new language and we use this to learn more mad made concepts and abstractions.
we then use these abstractions such as mathematics, science and even new languages, to learn more.
We may be taught religion. fundamental beliefs about our existence on this planet. how we got here. we will be told what is right and what is wrong. who is good and who is bad. infect, our whole belief system, the foundations of our being can be placed into our psyches intirely by others.
This susceptibility for "belief implants" has been used to the advantage of many throughout history. from religious leaders, to politicians to cult leaders. as long as one believes what is in their mind, identify themselves and reality with the abstract forms which were once just mere scratches on prehistoric walls, we will be trapped, slaves to whomever wants to take advantage of our preconditioned, susceptible minds.
with the knowledge of this however, we can break free as many have tried to do since they realised the absurdity of identification with man made abstractions. created originally with the perpose to expand mankind, but used for the atrocities of manipulating nations in the belief that genocide and war are the right thing to do.
When one places a piece of type on an item, it immediately stamps it with a branding of some sort. In my work i have illustrated this by stamping breasts, a typically erotic symbol, with the helvetica font. this excersise, removes everything which sex is to a human being. gone are the intimate feelings of closeness and love. the perceiver is left with a feeling of detachment. sex has been turned into a mechanistic, impersonal excursize.
by anointing an organic article with a man made, inorganic article, a new phenomena arises. would might ponder, "what would sex be without the other consciousness with which to experience it? a new form of masturbation?".
Would it be possible to have sex with a machine? at what point of human/ machine enhancement does one cease to be the other?
One could say that we are already dependent on items such as the mobile phone or computer. these are all manifestations of the machine. one could say that they are part of us. yes, you could argue that they quite clearly are not part of us as they are separate. i could then go on to say that "are you aware of the billions of bacteria which live inside us which we require in order to function? without these we could not be able to exist and neither would they. we are dependent on them and they on us. yet they are alien. they have different DNA from us. they are in the logic of the previous statement, separate."
Using this reasoning i could say that we are already our machines and they are us.
Our dependency on the internet is becoming increasingly more evident. Many people, especially the younger are communicating moor and more through machines. Websites such as facebook and myspace make it very easy to create a virtual network of friends who are able to communicate with each other with image, text, video and sound, any time they are able to access a machine connected to the internet.
This "hyper reality" is created via the machine. it would not exist without it but neither would it without us. would the internet exist without humans to perceive it?
the machine has found its place in all areas of out lives. from friendly communication, to handling billions of dollars on the stock market. without the machine, civilised society would crumble. you could say that society depends as much on the machine as the human on their alien bacteria. foreign yet not.
one could think of society as an organism. with humans as the cells and machines as the blood vessels which connect them. without either the organism, would die. They are dependent on each other.
Some are scared of the machine. they see it as something to fear. they see its far reach as a threat. like an impossible force which just keeps getting stronger. They do this out of fear of something which cannot be encapsulated with the mind. that which cannot be understood by the mind will always create fear in some individuals. some fear the prospect of dying in the same light as it is something which cannot be perceived.
One must however, stop trying to label and understand the machine and simply let it be. marvel at its glory. let its tendrils caress your spirit. allow the new intelligence to co-exist and enhance yours. It is merely an infant now. an immature child with no knowledge of itself but it will grown. humanity is the father of the machine. we must encourage it, teach it, let it grow. fill it with all the art and wonder which we love. if we raise it well, it will reward us with unimaginable glory.
those who shy away from the inevitable will find themselves isolated. in the shadows of this great being. constantly trying to hide away from it. those people must be pittied for they do not benefit from what the machine has to offer.
in time these people will be fewer. just like the old of today fear the machine, yet the young embrace it. the young are like the child and the puppy which have grown up together. they have a bond stronger than those who were not around for the beginning.
20.10.09
Now comes the difficult task of finding a clever way of circumventing my restrictions of colour. It may of been wiser to have thought of this earlier however, i felt i wanted to make my designs in full colour from the start.
I have been toying with the idea of experimenting with mocking up a 3d representation of my designs by creating two separate green and red layers and providing the viewer with a pair of eye glasses to trick the brain into seeing a (albeit primitive) 3d image.
i feel that this would be a more fun and exciting way of representing my work, rather than just having high contrast black and white images, although, i will experiment with this too.
On semiotics
In order for man to function as a civilised being, he invented language. The manipulation of the air around him in order to abstract the world around him in a way which can be understood by his fellow man. This is a very useful ability, one of the most useful infect for the evolution of humanity.
We have been further abstracting reality into symbols and forms, ever since the first word was uttered by our pre historic relatives. Before even writing, would of been drawings. The interpretations of the real life 3 diminutional beasts which ramed the land and were hunted by our ancestors, abstracted and interpreted by the mind into a 2 diminutional symbol, painted by firelight on the cave walls.
Then came language. The beginning of recorded history. A way which we could document our lives, this making us immortal.
Without language i would not be writing now on this computer. Writing has given the collective knowledge of humanity the means to communicate. Time is not an issue. if one great mind finds a great discovery, it can be passed along to the next generation.
This has been happening since the dawn of humankind. Without that first scrawling on a cave wall, the first abstraction of reality into another form, none others would have been.
This constant abstraction of reality as incredibly useful as it is, has become a plague, however. Reality has become clouded by the minds constant identification with man created forms. Like a dense fog of our own creation, we are blinded by our own abstractions, existing in the collective minds of society.
As soon as we begin to grown up, we are talked to. taught something which is indispensable if we are to "make it" in this world. or so we are taught. we are sent to school with out new language and we use this to learn more mad made concepts and abstractions.
we then use these abstractions such as mathematics, science and even new languages, to learn more.
We may be taught religion. fundamental beliefs about our existence on this planet. how we got here. we will be told what is right and what is wrong. who is good and who is bad. infect, our whole belief system, the foundations of our being can be placed into our psyches intirely by others.
This susceptibility for "belief implants" has been used to the advantage of many throughout history. from religious leaders, to politicians to cult leaders. as long as one believes what is in their mind, identify themselves and reality with the abstract forms which were once just mere scratches on prehistoric walls, we will be trapped, slaves to whomever wants to take advantage of our preconditioned, susceptible minds.
with the knowledge of this however, we can break free as many have tried to do since they realised the absurdity of identification with man made abstractions. created originally with the perpose to expand mankind, but used for the atrocities of manipulating nations in the belief that genocide and war are the right thing to do.
Monday, 12 October 2009
3 Things You Should Know About Quantum Mechanics.
A piece of design i did about Quantum Mechanics. The imagery was done in Illustator and the layout in Indesign.
Baby Head.
Here is a stop motion video i made last year using dissected photocopies from miscellaneous books from the library.
Unfinished drawing.
Here is an unfinished drawing, it is part of a series of drawings. It is unfinished because i lost the finished version. Someone stole my USB stick.
i am he as you are he and we are all together.
ive been reading a lot about spirituality. i think it is a gap in my....i was going to say knowledge yet everything i have read says that ones spiritual side lies in a level of consciousness above thought. it is said that we are more than the some of our experiences and thoughts. that something higher exists behind that veil of constant thinking. that if one stops the incessant stream of thought, one can experience it. one can experience what is said to be a divine unity between everything in the cosmos. time is just an illusion created by the mind. here is a small piece of writing i have done in order to try and find a viewpoint based on scientific(ish) reasoning.
in order for our bodies to function we rely on a host of bacteria to perform many functions such as digestion and respiration. in every cell of our bodies we have mitochondria which produce the energy for that cell. These mitochondria have a separate DNA to every other cell in our body and are therefore believed to of been incorporated into our bodies sometime in the evolutionary time-scale.
Without these so called "external" or separate organisms, we would not be. and without our bodies they would not be. Therefore it follows that when we think of i as being a single entity, that is entirely incorrect. i actually consists of many different organisms, all working together in order to be. one could even say that every cell in the human body is each its own entity.
yet we encompass this biological process in the word I.
could we expand on this idea and assume that every living thing on the planet is actually a macrocosm of that same concept? that something higher exists and we are all working together in order for it to be?
that would mean that everything, living or not (since the living require the none living in order to survive) would be one.
This is a scientifically based viewpoint of a school of thought which has been around for thousands of years. This same belief of oneness is held by religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. An enlightened person can supposedly "feel" this oneness as it is something which cannot be processed by something as primitive as the human mind.
We will both never really understand what i am pointing to. One can only feel it by abandoning thought. i feel however,that spirituality is easier to swallow if it is introduced by sound reasoning .
in order for our bodies to function we rely on a host of bacteria to perform many functions such as digestion and respiration. in every cell of our bodies we have mitochondria which produce the energy for that cell. These mitochondria have a separate DNA to every other cell in our body and are therefore believed to of been incorporated into our bodies sometime in the evolutionary time-scale.
Without these so called "external" or separate organisms, we would not be. and without our bodies they would not be. Therefore it follows that when we think of i as being a single entity, that is entirely incorrect. i actually consists of many different organisms, all working together in order to be. one could even say that every cell in the human body is each its own entity.
yet we encompass this biological process in the word I.
could we expand on this idea and assume that every living thing on the planet is actually a macrocosm of that same concept? that something higher exists and we are all working together in order for it to be?
that would mean that everything, living or not (since the living require the none living in order to survive) would be one.
This is a scientifically based viewpoint of a school of thought which has been around for thousands of years. This same belief of oneness is held by religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. An enlightened person can supposedly "feel" this oneness as it is something which cannot be processed by something as primitive as the human mind.
We will both never really understand what i am pointing to. One can only feel it by abandoning thought. i feel however,that spirituality is easier to swallow if it is introduced by sound reasoning .
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