2017: Year in Review

2017 was very much a year of writing for me, well, of reading and writing. Having been accepted into studying illustration at Camberwell, I put aside working on my portfolio and decided to work more on further developing my ideas. I returned to the manuscript that I had aimed to complete in November and set about finishing it.

To be sure, not all went to plan...

A Year's Reading: 2017

I fell into reading a fair amount early this year and that put me on the track to wanting to continue and finish the year strong, with a good amount of reading under my belt. When I consider the handful of books I ordinarily pick my way through over the course of a year it is evident that I am not a prolific reader. In fact it would be difficult to say that I do much reading at all. Even so, the number of books that I want to read, that I tell myself I will read one day, only continues to grow in number.

What do you figure?

This is a coursework motivated post, with the aim of describing and analysing three different approaches to depicting figures/beings of my choosing (from a curated set).

The figure is an endlessly interesting subject for art, and as such has been subjected to seemingly endless treatments. As much as we may take an interest in the world around us, such is the condition of our self-obsession that we must seek to experience this world through the lenses and sensory inputs of other beings, even if those beings are merely figments of our imagination. The presence of the figure makes explicit what otherwise is only implicit: our relation to the external world.

For this post I'm interested in the depictions of figures by Antony Gormley, Christoph Niemann, and Robert Weaver.

A Few Thoughts on the Enlightenment

I took a visit to the British Museum and spent a good amount of time in the Enlightenment room. There one will find all manner of objects and books relating to the earliest period of the Museum's history, along with placards explaining and describing the thinking and knowledge of the time. There are weighty tomes sealed behind glass, some of which appear as though they might crumble if improperly handled, along with various scientific instruments, orrerys and collected artefacts from around the world. It very clearly creates the impression of a collection, as if some wealthy child grown tired of postage stamps had set out and gobbled up whatever he could find to catch his interest from the furthest reaches of the globe. What follows are a few jumbled thoughts of mine on this habit of collecting and the need to organise.

On Brutalism

Brutalist buildings are stark, dramatic, and austere. They are striking, stunning even. And how could they not be? Brutalist architecture exists not so much within its environment as it is opposed to it. It rejects the natural, replaces it with exacting artifice and confidently opposes all of the processes that made its own existence possible. The natural world is the natural enemy of brutalism, and by extension, so are humans.

Architecture

Architecture is the material actualization of a preferred system. It articulates how we feel the world ought to be. That it expresses a preference is a necessary consequence of its form: an architected form is a space transformed, a space replaced.

Orientation around Covent Garden and the West End

Another coursework motivated post. The task was to explore around the Covent Garden and West End areas of London, trying to visit as many key locations as possible, while producing written, photographic and drawn records. As well I was to find and collect things of interest from the environment. This exercise essentially familiarised me with a general research approach for exploring and documenting an area.

A lot of the places I was tasked with documenting were locations that would be relevant to illustration (art supply shops, galleries). Being plopped in the middle of Covent Garden I didn't exactly hit the ground running. When I first arrive in a place I find I'm not really ready to start seeking things out and constructing a mental model, rather first I aim to get a feel for things, to listen and let the place speak to me and then gradually build up a set of associations. This approach came crashing against my time constraint and instead I found myself rushing from spot to spot, hurriedly jotting down the most immediate of impressions like some twisted impersonation of a tourist. In any event, here follows what I managed to scrape together.

Chords of Canada

Another coursework-motivated post. The task is to find three examples each of Design, Illustration, and Art from my country of origin - Canada. These should be interesting and relevant to me and to Canada. Being not particularly well tuned in to art - especially that which might be considered culturally relevant - nor being in touch necessarily with Canadian culture, I found the task a bit of a challenge. In any event, here follows my attempt.

Pick 10: Images of Interest

The following post is rather simply motivated. It is part of my required pre-course work - a school assignment. The goal is simply to pick 10 images that I find interesting and to explain my picks. What follow are simply what happens to interest me at the moment of this posting.

A Geometric Offering: GEB-EGB Trip-let

Having come to the end (finally!) of the voluminous tome that is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, I decided to try my hand at reproducing the GEB-EGB trip-let that forms the cover image (at least on the copy of the book that I was reading). This self-imposed exercise came as a welcome change of pace from the mathematical-typographical exercises that Hofstadter presents (punishes?) his readers with. Hofstadter describes the cover image thus:

Cover: A "GEB" and an "EGB" trip-let suspended in space, casting their symbolic shadows on three planes that meet at the corner of a room. ("Trip-let" is the name which I have given to blocks shaped in such a way that their shadows in three orthogonal directions are three different letters. The trip-let idea came to me in a flash one evening as I was trying to think how best to symbolize the unity of Gödel, Escher, and Bach by somehow fusing their names in a striking design. The two trip-lets shown on the cover were designed and made by me, using mainly a band saw, with an end mill for the holes; they are redwood, and are just under 4 inches on a side.)

GEB-EGB trip-let as depicted on the cover of my copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach

Don't Ignore The Origin of the Species

If you haven't read Charles Darwin's seminal work then that is really something you need to correct. Perhaps you think that you know all about evolution and natural selection and see little value in going back to such an old book that must surely be outdated by now. Or perhaps you feel intimidated by the science of evolution, see it as encroaching too much on your worldview or simply dealing with ideas beyond the prowess of your feeble intellect. Both such positions are indefensible. Some 158 years on from its initial publication, Darwin's Origin remains essential reading for those who aspire to understand the world around them. It is accessible to any educated person regardless of one's lack of technical knowledge in biology, geology, taxonomy, etc. But you don't have to see reading Origin as a chore, something to be endured so that you can maintain your small modicum of credibility among the intelligentsia. Rather, reading Origin should be seen as a delight, akin to watching a new season of Planet Earth as narrated by David Attenborough.

Game Pitch: Rectifier

"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

The above quote from The Terminator is spoken by the character of Kyle Reese to Sarah Connor. It has in a way become iconic, the perfect descriptor for the terminator, the titular killing machine. In Rectifier, this quote describes not your enemy, but you.

Which Quake?

Quake II was never meant to be a Quake game. In the wake of Quake, a groundbreaking first-person shooter that suffered from a tumultuous development, id software viewed the final product as haphazard and schizophrenic. Its mix of Lovecraftian horror, the arcane and the occult, alongside the techno-futuristic, all wrapped in the mechanical devices of a shooter was seen not as a unique property to be celebrated, but rather a disjointed collection of ideas that needed to be tamed in order to better conform to expectations. Was Quake fantasy or science-fiction? Was it heavy metal or gothic horror? Of course id had been down this route before. Wolfenstein 3D combined the occult with more modern firearms to create an alt-historical take on the Third Reich. Doom more clearly juxtaposed elements with its admixture of an Alien-inspired used-future alongside the ancient horrors spilling out from Hell. But Quake was different. It wasn't simply fusing two different elements: it wasn't simply a peanut-butter and chocolate combination. It's elements were more varied and drawn with a looser brush. The cohesion between elements became subtler, and the abstractness of the elements themselves grew to fill the void. Quake was not merely different, it was odd.

Lo-Fi Games Seen Right

Or: Low Resolution and Low Frame-rate as Integral Aspects of the Art-style of Low-Fidelity Graphics

When one puts on one's NostalgiaVision (TM), one recalls how the games of years past seemed to wow with their graphical prowess. How they seemed so life-like at the time! Or rather how they provided a compelling and consistent simulation that was easy to become adsorbed in. When one returns to such games, one is amazed at how bad they look, it seems we are incapable of correctly remembering their low-fidelity. However, rarely are we actually properly returning to these games. Games intended for low-resolution CRT screens are instead played on high-resolution LCDs, where possible the rendering resolutions and frame-rates are increased, behind these changes is the implicit assumption that improving the clarity of the image can only be beneficial, that it is separate from and not intrinsic to the art. Here I would like to argue that this is misguided, and that the aesthetic of old games is only properly appreciated when they are experienced in their rightful context.

Thoughts On: Syndicate

In 2012, Electronic Arts published the first-person shooter Syndicate intended as a sort of franchise reboot of the 1993 title of the same name. Developed by Starbreeze Studios, the game shares many mechanical similarities with their prior efforts, chiefly The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay.

The story was written by Richard Morgan, perhaps best known as the author of Altered Carbon, a futuristic cyberpunk-ian tale where human consciousness is stored on a stack and the surrounding body is often regarded as only so much "meat". So devalued is human life (at least the aspects of life not contained on a chip) in the novel that murder not damaging the stacks of the victims is referred to as "organic damage".

The world of Syndicate is a cyberpunk dystopia where multinational mega-corporations (the so-called Syndicates), unfettered by such pesky considerations as anti-trust laws come to dominate and carve up the globe, becoming in effect new breeds of empires, complete with their own military might and consumer bases. Into this world Morgan seems a natural fit, but ultimately the story of Syndicate doesn't quite work, and I will attempt to articulate why.

Power and Politics

The primary occupation of the political class is just that - political. They are concerned with the business of achieving and maintaining their power, for politics is the art and science of power dynamics. This is tacitly admitted by the political class, who often speak of communication to their constituencies as their primary concern. That their constituents believe they serve their best interests is of primary importance, whether this is true is secondary or not important at all if the means of communication are effective enough. That they must appeal to constituents - to the public - is not at all a characteristic of democratic systems. It is inherent in all political systems, for there is always power in numeracy. The degree to which they must appeal however is regulated by the means of control they have at their disposal and varies by the type of system.

Effective politicians are those who succeed in intensifying and consolidating their power. They do this by perceiving the most advantageous power bases with which to align themselves and so seizing the opportunity. In a capitalist society with unchecked corporate growth, corporate interests will grow to become a formidable power base. In such a system no politician can find success without strategic alignment and balance between corporate and public interests. Like seeks like, and so consolidated political power seeks out institutions of consolidated power with which to forge alliances and determine points of mutual interest. Large corporations, religions, and sprawling organizations become natural allies to consolidated hierarchical political power, which becomes increasingly incapable of interfacing with the individual.

The Tuning Problem in Physics

The tuning problem in physics is the question of why the constants of the laws of nature have assumed their values relative to one another that they have. In order to have a chance of answering the question we must rephrase it in a way that it could possibly be answered scientifically. That is, not why the values are what they are, but rather how it is that they are what they are. The distinction may seem subtle and unnecessary, but it shifts us from trying to assign a reason (an unscientific task) to one of understanding a process (an eminently scientific endeavour).

I say tuning problem because these constants appear as tunable parameters in the natural laws. Assuming they could assume any value relative to one another, for we have no knowledge of how they might be constrained, we find that there is an extremely narrow range in which a universe such as our own is made possible. But the term also suggests a process, one of adjustment - that of the parameters being tuned with respect to one another.

The Optimistic Dystopia of Brave New World

Reading Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World I was struck by how utopian his dystopia is. Huxley does not present a world that is obviously wrong from the inside, since the inhabitants suffer from the same corruption that plagues their society. It is only from the perspective of an outsider, or someone imperfectly adjusted to the system, that one can see just how out-of-sync the society is with human nature. This makes for an interesting angle and a welcome contrast from other dystopian fiction where the systemic problems are apparent to all yet the characters feel powerless to do anything about it. However, from the perspective of a prediction of the future, Brave New World comes across as overly optimistic. It should be noted however that Brave New World takes place so far in the future (around the seventh century A.F. - After Ford, Henry Ford that is) that any assignments of optimistic or pessimistic are in truth entirely useless. All is speculation, beyond that there is little we can say.

From Relativity to Rambling Thoughts

What follows are my own train of thoughts spurred on from reading Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. I use these ideas as jumping off points into the highly speculative which is not covered in the book.

In his book, Einstein explains how the special theory of relativity comes about after taking seriously two positions about the nature of reality and following both of them through to their logical conclusions. These are the constancy of the speed of light in vacuo and that of relativity: the idea that there is no preferred reference body of uniform motion in the universe, such that the physical laws are independent of such motion.

Thoughts On: Arrival

Much was made of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life. I thought it was OK, but I didn't really enjoy it as I hoped I would or as enthusiastic reviews had led me to believe I might. From a science-fiction aspect I found the movie interesting but unchallenging. Conversations with others after the film led me to believe that this may be mostly to do with an unusual familiarity on my part with some of the subjects the film deals with.

Hidden Lore in Avatar

James Cameron's Avatar is a bit of a forgotten pop-cultural relic. No doubt this will soon change with the eventual release of Avatar 2 and subsequent sequels. I say forgotten because outside of its impact at the box-office and on spearheading the 3D theatre experience, it is seldom discussed. In an age that has no shortage of big bombastic blockbuster spectacle franchises, this should not be unexpected. I don't think you can point to Avatar's lack of 'stickiness', for lack of a better term, in people's minds as a specific failing of the film in comparison to other franchises. Franchises like Star Wars became popular in a time where such films were an incredible rarity and more modern franchises like Harry Potter released films in quick succession after each other at regular intervals. And all of these 'sticky' franchises had countless merchandising: toys, cereals, lunchboxes, cartoon spin-offs, etc. that kept them present in the minds of the public. So Avatar's lack of 'stickiness' could easily be due to its self-imposed hibernation, rather than resulting from any lacking aspect of the film itself.

But because Avatar has been forgotten, there has been little digging into the lore of it that usually accompanies such large spectacle films (although admittedly such speculation tends to cluster around franchises after they have more than one film rather than around singular event-style films). Avatar was also saddled with a straightforward story that didn't give audiences much to chew on after the euphoria of the visual spectacle had worn off. This has caused many to ask what could possibly be worth exploring in the world of Avatar to warrant Avatars 2, 3, 4 and 5. However, as with any nascent imagined universe, there are countless possibilities still out there and avenues to be explored. In this space I want to pick up on a few interesting wrinkles hiding just under the surface of the world presented in Avatar that could make the world potentially worth revisiting.

Game Pitch: Grub

A distant planet.

Two competing species - predator and prey.

An unexpected visitor - man.