Project: Prototype Illustration Books

Having successfully completed several process/art books for my assessment in spring (here), I decided to follow-up two of those books with more complete ones. One book was a collection of watercolour and ink location sketches, and since my assessment I completed several more sketches that I wanted to add to the set. The other was a collection of my life drawing sketches, but only covered the period of concern for my assessment, and not wanting to leave my earlier life drawings stranded, I felt that incorporating the bulk of them into one book would be desirable.

In addition there were a number of issues with my previous books that I wanted to correct. For one the stitching was poorly done as I was very new to the process, in a rush to get them done at that point, and using a much too fine string (although I didn't know it at the time). The end result was that the books were loosely bound and would unsatisfactorily slide around in the hand. The books felt always on the verge of falling apart. The other problems included slight page alignment errors (front and back printing) and the vertical misalignment of a few pages in the figure drawing book. New books then would correct these errors, bringing forth more complete and less error-filled revisions.

Little did I know what difficulties I would encounter on the way...

Project: Spitmap

Spitmap is the name that I ultimately gave to my end-of-year project at Camberwell College of Arts. The project was my contribution to the "PITCH" collaboration between Old Spitalfields Market and the college which occurred on June 11th-13th of this year. I experienced the project as a series of successive failures and frustrations, so documenting it here may help me to take some lessons away from the project.

Project: Making Sketchbooks

Following on from my completion of process books in May of this year (here), I undertook to make some sketchbooks that I could use with my newfound skills. These I completed in late May and early June to tag along with me as I did some travelling around Europe.

Unlike a "proper" book, there turned out to be a lot of advantages to making my own sketchbooks. I needed a new watercolour sketchbook, and when searching for such a book that is affordable one becomes quite limited in terms of paper selection as well as format. It is also rare to find a sketchbook that will lay flat without resorting to a hideous spiral-ring binding. Combining all that with a hardcover? Apparently out of the question.

Project: Making Process Books

As part of my end-of-year assessment at Camberwell College of Arts back in May of this year, I undertook to make some process books as a means of presenting some of my work. I was dissatisfied with how I had previously collected and presented my work and I determined that a more formal approach was required if the process was to be of much value to me. I started by scanning a series of on-site location sketches that I had undertaken starting in March. As I went over the sketches, I recognized that I could make some notes about the development of my approach and technique and so the book format suggested itself to me as an appropriate fit. While I was at it I decided to make two other process books: one covering the figure drawing sketches I had done earlier in the year, and the other covering the major course project, the development of which was scattered across loose sheets and several sketchbooks.

In Search of Philip K. Dick's Authentic Human

Reading through Philip K. Dick's speech How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days (Dick, 1978) back in September I realised that I had read it before. Not recently, as I know that I read portions of it as referenced in N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman (Hayles, 1999) (or even more recently just before in excerpts detailed on Maria Popova's blog (Popova, 2013)), or as detailed in the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode on the subject of Dick's exegesis (Molinsky, 2018)¹, but deeper in the past. In some forgotten corner I had sought this out by Dick and had consumed it, letting it lay dormant in my mind. It occurred to me to ask myself whether in some private thoughts I may have merely recapitulated ideas I had read from Dick, having forgotten the attribution, and mistaken them for my own? This process, known as cryptomnesia, whereby one experiences a memory but mistakes it for something genuinely original or inspired, pressed especially on my mind because of Dick's own accounting of his experiences, experiences that led him to some bizarre beliefs.

On Reading More and Reading Better

Throughout 2017 and continuing through 2018 I have attempted to drastically increase the quantity of reading that I do. For both years I have kept in mind a general goal of completing 52 books in one year - one book per week. This is a common challenge as any Internet search will quickly reveal. The reasons for wanting to undertake such a challenge are numerous: as a means to expand one's vocabulary, improve one's writing through familiarization of different styles and techniques, to increase one's knowledge and understanding, and as a way of improving organization and scheduling skills. That last one is important; despite the vast amount of time that is doubtless consumed in reading this much, the argument is generally made that it can be safely taken away from all the time that we generally waste in a day: the idle Internet browsing, the Netflix binge-watching, playing games or fiddling with apps. While I believe I've benefited from significantly expanding my reading, I have mixed feelings about the project.

Feels Like Summer and Late Capitalism

On September 1, 2018, Ivan Dixon and Greg Sharp released the music video for Childish Gambino's (aka Donald Glover) recent track Feels Like Summer. A low-key animation, the video unites numerous figures in the hip-hop community into the stale and familiar setting of lower middle-class suburbia. It's the neighbourhood of Boyz n the Hood, one of elevated bungalows and screen doors, one that manages to always feel like nowhere no matter what happens there. The neighbourhood is in fact modeled after Atlanta rather than Los Angeles, but what's important is that it conveys the everywhere nowhere-ness of suburbia, rather than depicting an actual place. What I find compelling in the video is its relation to the larger cultural moment within the context of late capitalism.

You’re Eating The Wrong Political Agenda

Concomitant with the evacuation of economics from the political sphere and the subsequent colonisation of politics by cultural ideology - so thoroughly embodied throughout the culture as the discourse of identity politics - has been the offloading of ethical decision-making by the state and the shift to that of a choice to be made by the consumer. We don’t demand that our clothes are made ethically with our voices and our votes, but with our wallets. And in fact we don’t even do that, as the signifiers of ethical decisions will substitute just fine for the real thing and we settle for the appearance of an increase in justice - a saccharine smearing over of societal problems that enables uncritical enjoyment of one’s daily latte.

The influence we can wield as consumers is ineffectual against the systemic a-morality of unrestrained capitalism, as it reframes ethical decision-making in terms of market exchange when it is precisely the opposite that should be occurring. That is not to say that consumers should not be aware of what they consume, that they should not research them, but all this extensive research for the minutiae of every small transaction becomes far too taxing on one’s time and energy and only further entrenches the capitalist frame.

Thoughts On: Superintelligence

As with my previous post relating to Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis (available here), these notes are long overdue, having originated with my reading of Bostrom's Superintelligence and coming up on being almost a year old at this point, having been jotted down in August and September of 2017. As I noted in my simulation hypothesis post and in my summation of my reading for 2017 (that post is here), I found Bostrom's coverage of the topic of superintelligence to be a lot less thorough than I had expected and it left me with a slew of unanswered questions and challenges to Bostrom's thinking which developed into these notes. I've tried to tidy up the notes into something a little more cohesive and comprehensible than their raw form, and have revised them where I was quite unsatisfied with them, so they may reflect some updates to my thinking in the year since I initially jotted them down. But enough introduction, on to the notes!

Our Worringly Undemocratic Future

During a talk on nationalism and globalism, historian and author Yuval Noah Harari makes clear what he perceives as the need for effective global governance. Particularly in dealing with the looming existential threat of ecological collapse posed by climate change, he notes that as it is a lose-lose as opposed to a win-win scenario, there are not workable solutions by which separate national authorities can come to an effective agreement. Harari admits that there is no guarantee that effective global governance will be democratic and that it may end up looking more like ancient China than modern Denmark. But Harari's position is clear: democracy is simply a luxury we can ill afford on such issues (TED, 2017).

Harari is a historian but as evidenced by his writing (Harari, 2015) he is quite concerned with the future. Harari attempts to foresee, at least in broad outline, where humanity might be going and to encourage some thought about what options may be open to us. Harari's recent books have been very large international bestsellers, so for such an influential thinker to be so unimaginative and pessimistic about the ability of democracy to grapple with the challenges of the future is both worrying and telling.

Technologies Are Themselves Logic Bombs

They bring with them all of the ideological baggage of any idea, but contain no arguments for us to consider. They coerce us to modes of thinking through our use of them. Without an ability to foresee what we are being coerced into, we blindly follow wherever technologies take us. What is vital then, is knowing how to read technology.

Thinking Through Your Limbs

I’ve been playing with an idea recently that goes to discussions of images and text, and of how we think. Because language is how we articulate thoughts, that is how we reproduce them for others, many people hold that we think through language, so that language shapes our thoughts. In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker argues against at least the strong form of this view, proposing that we think in a more abstract language - Mentalese - and then translate from this to the concrete expressions of verbal and written communication (Pinker, 1994). Both of these views set aside the power of imagery in thoughts, and many will attest that not only are they able to better express themselves visually but also that they are able to conceive of extremely detailed, vivid, and clear image-thoughts which may be extremely difficult and perhaps on occasion impossible to translate into words. I think that the widespread experience of image-thoughts gives us a clue that the linguistic paradigm to thought is too limiting.

Proliferating Replicants

In Blade Runner 2049, the technologist and mega-corporation CEO Niander Wallace is obsessed with improving upon his creation of artificial humans - called replicants - by imbuing them with the ability to reproduce of their own accord, to give birth. This is a deficiency of all replicants, and the film's plot revolves around the miraculous discovery of a replicant birth. In the real world we find ourselves also awash with replicants, and while these replicants proliferate - more and more of them arrive everyday - they are also seemingly unable of being a source of real originality.

Creeping Capitalist Subsumption of Values

Cold capitalistic logic is everywhere. It drives the engines of the global economic infrastructure. Further, as capitalism continues on its relentless march, devouring the political arena and supplanting the social superstructure, capitalist logic has infiltrated its way into the common sense of morality and justice.

Thoughts On: Homo Deus

Historian Yuval Noah Harari’s second book, Homo Deus, offers a historical narrative that is used to frame speculation for the future of humanity. I have yet to read his first book, Sapiens, so I don’t know how much ground is perhaps repeated here, but much of the book does involve a brisk covering of human historical developments. Of particular interest to me are the trends that Harari sees as having unfolded over the twentieth century and what he views as the emerging worldview in the twenty-first.

Mind Children: A Terrifying Future and Our Present Roadmap

Written in 1988, Hans Moravec's Mind Children is an at times breathless exultation of the march of cybernetics and an exhortation of techno-humanism. Thirty years on from its publication, it does not appear as a curious detour in thinking or terribly outdated in its claims. Instead its values seem to have encroached further into the culture, taking deeper root within the echelons of power in Silicon Valley and disseminating themselves through the technology used by millions of consumers. We find ourselves living in the future so predicted, part of the transition phase toward species-wide extinction. After a prolonged dark age, artificial intelligence has produced startling breakthroughs and is now being deployed in the service of mindless capitalism, threatening to eliminate whole sectors of human work while virtual worlds grasp for ever-more-accurate replications of reality to reassure us of falsehoods as we do next to nothing to solve our looming ecological crisis. Mind Children remains an instructive introduction to the destructive thinking that underlies much of the development and investment unfolding today.

Some Rough Notes on a Moral Theory

A little over a year ago I started sketching out some rough notes towards a theory of morality. These notes were done without any research into moral and ethical philosophy on my part and as such seem quite unlikely to prove of much interest to someone well acquainted with the relevant fields. At best they point to some possible avenues of investigation that I could revisit after becoming better educated on the topics. While I initially left them incomplete and unpublished with the thought that I would further develop them, I am instead publishing them now as a snapshot and as noted a potential reference.

Thoughts On: King City

I had been picking my way through Brandon Graham's King City for what seemed like ages. For sure it is a hefty volume, collecting what I think was originally 12 issues, and it is also quite dense. But that alone doesn't quite explain why it took me from December of 2017 through to May of this year to get through it. King City's loosely plotted structure made it difficult for me to read through in extensive sittings, so it always ended up being what I read when I managed to get through my other readings for the day. I can't offer much of an overall opinion on it, I think I need a re-read for that, but here I will collect some of my thoughts, particularly to point out those things in the novel that I found to be standouts in comics. As a comic full of playful inventiveness, there certainly is a lot to choose from...

A Simulated Hypothesis: Thoughts on Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument

This piece is actually quite a long time coming. Back in August of 2017 I had recently completed reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and became interested in seeking out his Simulation Argument for myself. I did so, and found it to be rather less sound than I would have expected given the attention it has garnered throughout the years and eager proclamations of the non-scientific that "The Matrix is Real". I sketched out my thoughts then, but considered them incomplete and shelved them and am only now getting around to pulling them together.

Bostrom lays out his position in a short paper (Bostrom, 2003), which argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) humans will go extinct before reaching a "post-human" stage (alternatively, no such "stage" is likely to ever occur, with or without extinction, although this view is not expressed by Bostrom), (2) any post-human civilization is extremely unlikely to run any significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history, and (3) we are living in a computer simulation.

The Revenge of the Hand-Made Object

Far from being an irrelevant product of a bygone era, the hand-made object is set to return to the fold of consumer goods with force, indeed in many ways it already has, and its significance is only growing. While we live in an age of mass reproduction, we are also in a transitional societal phase, and the uniform, endlessly reproduced status quo brought about by mechanisation is giving way to the personalized, the fragmented and the tribalized. The hand-made object responds to the need of the individual in the current age to express an identity; the individual no longer finding any identification within the large and uniform context of public culture. With electric media we find ourselves more and more connected to each other and to our objects, and find that we are forced to demand an accounting of where every item in our lives has come from and where it is going. The hand-made object is a reaction against the dehumanising effects of mechanisation, a mode of operation that now appears terribly outmoded and doomed to obsolescence.

Thoughts On: Gursky at Southbank Centre

On April 8th I took a visit to the Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre to check out the Andreas Gursky exhibition that was running from the 25th of January until the 22nd of April. Being generally unfamiliar with Gursky's work but finding some of it of a certain appeal, I entered the exhibition with little in the way of expectations. The exhibition covered some four decades worth of work by Gursky, whose signature style is perhaps his monumental photographs: a distant viewpoint of large structures or crowds of people at massive size, teaming with detail and clarity. Incidentally, that last bit is the first thing I want to talk about.

Thoughts On: Nature Morte at the Guildhall Art Gallery

Saturday morning I hopped over to the Guildhall Art Gallery to take a look at the Nature Morte exhibition. The exhibition is premised on illustrating the genre of still life as it has been reinvigorated by artists of the 21st century. In practice I found there was a mix of traditional and conventional still life paintings alongside the contemporary and more thought-provoking pieces.

Sci-Fi in Comics: Transmetropolitan and Hard Boiled

Back in around mid-December of last year I read through Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson and Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. Transmetropolitan is a comic book series from the late nineties and early noughties (it ran from 1997 through 2002) and Lust for Life collects issues 4 through 12 into a single edition. I dived into it without really realising all this, thinking that it was a single graphic novel and that I was starting at the beginning (oh well). There are some ten volumes (collected editions) of Transmetropolitan, so what I read is admittedly simply a slice of what forms the 'complete work'. Hard Boiled is a three-issue comic book that ran in the early nineties (from 1990 through 1992) and is collected in a single volume. Needless to say I was able to get a hold of and read the entirety of Hard Boiled.

Transmetropolitan Vol. 2: Lust for Life [Source]

Hard Boiled [Source]

Both Transmetropolitan and Hard Boiled present sort of retro-futurist visions, that is ideas of the future that remain very rooted in the present. Hard Boiled is more cyberpunk in its aesthetic, with a narrow scope and middle America focus that makes it feel like the premise of a Philip K. Dick short story, while Transmetropolitan is more expansive and transhumanist. Reading them one after the other it was impossible to not compare and contrast their styles and their different approaches to portraying the future. Further, I was primarily interested in their stylistic conventions, the language of comics that they employed, and how these methods were put to work for storytelling. Herein follows a few of my thoughts.

The Incredible Non-Informational Art of Daniel Zeller

Delusional Encapsulation, Graphite on Paper, 22 x 30", 2014, Daniel Zeller [Source]

Incredibly, implausibly, the above image is not a photograph. It is not a computer augmented satellite aerial image or the output of a scanning electron microscope across a varied surface. It is simply the work of one man working with pencil and paper, working steadily away, without so much as a concrete plan of what he is creating. It is the work of Daniel Zeller.

What's Good About All the Stars Video?

Released on February 6, 2018 was the music video for Kendrick Lamar & SZA's All the Stars, directed by Dave Meyers & the little homies. Done as part of an album of music inspired by the film Black Panther, it could be seen as simply a piece of marketing trying to cloak itself in cultural relevance. However, the very existence of Black Panther is culturally relevant and in contrast to essentially all prior Marvel films it has something to achieve besides get people excited for the next film. And the video for All the Stars is absolutely something in its own right.

Some Interesting Animation

A look at some animations and some brief thoughts and analysis on them.

On Talent

Talent is simply habit that has been well cultivated.

Thoughts On: Understanding Media

Having read Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan I have to admit to finding it both dated and still ahead of its time in many ways. McLuhan asserts that each new media influences and eventually changes the culture, and that these effects are not only not understood, but not even documented.

Pornify This!

Everywhere there is the pornification of a subject. The horror film genre birthed the sub genre of torture porn on the back of the success of the Saw franchise. In torture porn films the aim is not so much to scare, surprise, or terrify the audience, but rather to titillate by means of the macabre. Audiences are unnerved by imagery of hooks in flesh, of peeling skin, and all manner of contusions. Thereby they are invited to empathise with the image and so they find themselves stimulated. In the same way in which the viewer of a pornographic film may feel him or herself lightly goaded into reaching for his or her genitalia, so too does the viewer of torture porn find him or herself clutching the skin, or reaching for the ear to assure of its continued attachment. Pornography (in practice though certainly not in principle), is ritualistic. It inculcates a mechanical attitude toward sex and torture porn extends this mechanisation to bodily mutilation. Consumption of pornography leads to lack of sensitivity, a heightened threshold for arousal and a devaluing of sex and similarly torture porn cultivates a numbness to violence. Far from being a malapropism, the term torture porn is quite apt - it succinctly describes the real nature of such media: a pornification of horror.

Issues Endemic to Class-Based Thinking

In economic and political thinking of the twentieth century, Marxist theory looms large. It is trotted out with regularity and with reverence, creating both a framework and a shorthand for describing social relations. Marxist theory casts the world into a class struggle, and in this paradigm the resolution of this struggle becomes the ultimate goal.

However, such a view hardly seems durable in the face of a long view on history nor is it particularly resonant among the working class with whom it is supposedly so sympathetic. It attributes societal composition as entirely due to arbitrary cultural impositions and humanity as endlessly fungible under culture’s influence. Meanwhile biology sits quietly but comfortably in the room, daring anyone brave enough to reckon with it.