Peak Postmodernity: Peak As in 'Peak Oil'?

The present moment is characterised by peak postmodernity. 'The Death of God', what Nietzsche foresaw as an event that had occurred and yet was still on the way (Roderick, 1991), has come seeping into the culture at large, so that its engulfing damp has become unavoidable. What starts at the boundaries of the organism comes to reside within it, before being incorporated, integrated, and accepted into the body proper. The nihilism that Nietzsche feared as gripping a culture that had begun to realise the 'Death of God' and yet failed to put anything of worth in its place was in full evidence on the Internet 4chan board /b/ and other marginal subcultures that would soon give rise to the alt-right (Nagle, 2017). Within these subcultures nihilism had come to reside as a sort of default, and the appeal of fascist totalitarian solutions began to permeate the consciousnesses of those who feared the spilling out of the attitudes of the Internet onto behaviour in the "real-world".

Ancient Modernity

All my life I've dwelt among the creaking frames of ancient modernity. The world of callous institutional lighting along with the requisite always-flickering-but-never-to-be-replaced fluorescent tubes, paint-slathered brickwork in heavy desperate coats – trying to cover it up… always covering things up – drab brown-brick exteriors and the mediocre monotony of seventh-generation xeroxes of so-called exemplary modern architecture, worn thin by the necessary concessions to cost-consciousness; utopian ideals yoked and made subservient to capital. A world that can only inculcate a vague ambivalence, for feeling too is made hazy and indistinct by the replications of the cultural photoreceptors. A world that is holographic, hollowed out, and made so oblivious by the lobotomization that it cannot comprehend its own irrelevance. A world that can only pantomime to the march of progress in a somnambulant stupor while feasting on the remains of its own rotting flesh.

Don't worry folks, we can make things better, and that's exactly what we are doing and what we're going to do! And don't fret about those ideas floating around in the air, they never happened! We can have it all, we can be modern and anti-modern all the same. No contradiction there, no siree!

Project: Return to Sender "Top-Level" Development

Back in Fall of 2017 I started work on Return to Sender¹. This was to be a very short comic that I would incorporate into a larger set of comics as part of a personal project. I won't go into the details of that project here (perhaps another post), but instead I simply want to detail the development of what I refer to as the "top-level domain" within the comic.

Some background is perhaps in order though. Return to Sender is an idea for a short story I came up with: a visual narrative of a woman coming upon a lab not intended for her eyes, discovering tanks with brains hooked up to computers and having the startling and unnerving realization that if those brains are simulated people then she too might be simulated, and on and on. To illustrate this I intended to depict four different levels of reality: that of the woman, a lab environment above her, an industrial environment above that, and finally a seemingly alien environment as the top-level domain.

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.