(collecting things and not loving them — drawing things and not making things — making things and not using them)
Creativity requires research. No matter the material, process, scale, intent, effect, or other category of activity — nothing is made of vacuum and ignorance. Research objects are built of data. And those data have sources that vary according to the question or premise to test. Some of my queries or ideas are small and specific, some grand and general. If my default is set, it is set to ask “what letters, words, and grammar do I want to use and to say what?”
“The act of reading itself is anything but natural. Human brains weren’t designed to read: There is no “reading center” of the brain, and there are no “reading genes.” Instead, in order to read, each brain must fashion new circuits between parts originally designed to do other things, like retrieving the names for objects. These new circuits must not only combine many processes from different areas of the brain to form a specialized circuit just for reading — in order to become a fluent reader, the circuit also needs to run lightning-fast, nearly automatic.”1 While words are as important as words, and for what they lend the sentence, I am primarily interested in the image and the object — so I’m using language about objects as proxy for the non-textual object — replacing letter and words for shape, line, and value; analogically linking grammar for visual composition, emphasis, balance.
I took the presentations I gave in graduate school way too seriously. The first few times you do anything you tend to both be terrible at it and give it too much importance. In the more than ten years since, I’ve mythologized these presentations, invented constraints that didn’t necessarily exist, and replaced a student exercise with a semi-pro dogma; swapping a spark for an inferno. And one that sometimes threatens to consume the very thing it was meant to illuminate.
The sources for the sources I am in the habit of collecting vary according to the period and the question. When I was starting out they included:
The stuff other metalsmiths made
The stuff people in other countries wore
The stuff sculptors made
The stuff great designers drew and manufacturers made
The stuff around me in the studio
The stuff painters made
The stuff I found in UofM and UW’s Property Disposition; mainly medical tools and supplies
The stuff that people wrote about some of the above
The stuff that people wrote about culture, specifically the history of the West
And fifteen years later they have shifted and have been refined, primarily to include:
Popular stuff
Toys that teach
Fetishelectronica
Organics
Signs and sign making
Borders and interfaces
In the visual arts, we see a number of students who are drawing (and writing) fixated; covering every centimeter of any paper with iterative silhouettes, nouns on repeat, and glyphs of unknown destination. These hypergraphics are covering the white with noise, or are anxiously processing what they’re hearing with a task to keep time from passing or are just working through large constructs writ small. My notebook pages and Post-Its® are dumbbell curls and bench presses; things involved in the process of building muscle but never to be confused for the bicep or pectorals. There is a similous routine for those of us looking at the world through a viewfinder. Photomanics capture the world to avoid having to deal with it. But we also have a sortable record that is, at once, a great quantity to search and sort and easier to sort into useful albums.
What’s the difference between curiosity and obsession, between rigorous research and hackneyed habit, between unveiling the ignored beauty of the designed world and indulging a pointless idiosyncrasy? I’ve been composing a new world in a camera’s rectangle for twenty years now, and these data have survived transfiguration from grain to pixels. They’ve accelerated from a slow, careful, stewarding of precious cans of film to the near oppressive freedom of being able to take and store thousands of consequenceless images at a time; on cheaper and better devices that can zoom across buildings or focus on bees that rest on a lens.
I’ve managed to backup one hundred four thousand, three hundred eight photographs as of 9:10pm tonight. They are on Flickr, in my Dropbox, and on two external LaCie 1TB Firewire hard drives. And then there are the gigabytes of RAW and edited TIFF files, layouts of postcard designs and other assets I’ve used images to make. They are loosely cared for, but mainly as a mass; most of them have their EXIF data, but many lack titles and tags and discrete albums that could be said to give this photomass any immediately useful form — to transform the data into information. This is the evidence of more than a hundred thousand minute decisions while traveling, shopping, walking, working out, studying, tending animals, working on cars, and randomly focused on the second of four screws with a hex head rather than a slotted cap.
Recent studies that have shown that people who take photographs of their activities remember them less well than people who concentrate on the moment.2 This makes sense, and I’m sure sustains experimental scrutiny as long as a few conditions are met: the images are not later reviewed (or needed,) the photographer is not also concentrating (but near randomly composing and shooting,) and the non-photographer is skilled at paying attention without documenting. No one ever thinks a study applies to them, but this one doesn’t apply to me. While photography has all kinds of differences from sketching or journaling — it has the same potential — and it’s hard to argue that putting items in a list (compressing things) makes the listmaker less aware of the listed. Putting items into an order and reviewing them in a new context enriches memory — it is memory. As long as the order is reviewed. I review (and am in the process of going back through my images for this writing), and I pay close attention (at least to the parts I want to learn from.) Almost each of the images in my knowledge base is something I captured — and each represents something I witnessed, took note of, and remember (although not with photographic precision, paradoxically.)
I’ve never finished reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, but I have read the first book, Swann’s Way.3 If there is one narrative thread I held through those pages it is that memory is complicated, interconnected, fallible. It’s hard for me to believe in fixed memory, rather I accumulate things that will become memory elements, mements; things that ‘succumb by yielding to nervous impulses’ to bond to other elements they come upon.4 I await the impulse to start recalling in ecstatic images ‘the vicissitudes of life.’ But I don’t have Proust’s patience, or faith that toast or a cookie, soaked in tea, will suppress my feelings of mediocrity or mortality, as it did for him.
My study collection and photographs are columns in a data set that parallels the sum of my experience, which in turn forms the neural wiring where my evolving theory of design is encoded. Other columns contain elements with fixed values, those maximal references that I entered at some early point in my education, and then columns (like images and objects) that have quantitative values — which are then qualified with an evaluative flag when reviewed. These types of columns are continuously added to the set, but only reviewed when a subsequent entry sufficiently overlaps the rows. Duplication compounds interest in the subject or detail; and raises the possibility not only that the reference will be sticky, but that a
‘confused by’
‘frustrated by’
‘ignorant of’
‘check back in’
‘there is something there, but’
‘how was this made’
‘where have I seen this before’
‘I love this’
‘I have never seen anything like this’
‘how does it work’
‘how much did it cost’
‘who was this designed for’
‘what were they thinking’
‘that has to be an accident’
‘that looks fragile’
‘I could use that’ or just
‘that’s beautiful’
flag will be placed when floating sums are reached.
While my first presentation using materials of this type was while earning my MFA, the basic exercise was first practiced in my (short lived) vocational Advertising Design training in high school. For three hours a day we would conceive, draw and pitch ideas to sell products without the benefit of a single Macintosh. These campaigns were fabricated from pieces broken off of television and from magazines that were similar to those we were mock designing for. We talked and wrote, sketched, pulled rough references, composed mood boards, critiqued, developed rough composites, and then painstakingly rendered our final designs with markers on board. At first National Geographic, Time, and Car and Driver supplied almost everything — we were remixing before we knew the term. By the middle of our first year, however, we were asked to use our primitive cameras to do primary research/to collect original assets.
Because of the cost of film, our sophomoric technical and aesthetic skills, and our lack of discipline in finding good locations and subjects — most of us continued using stolen imagery to layer into our ‘original’ work. But we still wished we had crafted more of the story ourselves. By the time I entered college the seed of becoming proficient at capturing things I could later exploit was a weed.
This curve has circled in the years since — the technical and storage and transportation and organizational aspects are no longer crippling, even as the body of images has become grotesquely obese. So I horde them because I can. I collect and covet images of things that I’m thinking about, dump them into publicly available or private sets on Flickr — holding onto them for futures that may one day come. McLuhan observed that “far from regarding our pictures as incentives to mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation, or as a form of deferred payment by daydreaming.”5
I use pictures to argue, to share with students who need images of experiences we’ve had together for their presentations, as examples of materials, processes, forms, or ideas for lectures. I use discrete images as particular references for works in process, I use groups of them to choose palettes and consider details, and I use them to develop source videos every year or so. Images are the world.
“Picture a 13-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”6
This purple diatribe was published in the Washington Post in 1987, and my grandmother read it, along with the eventual book that this seed would germinate into, The Closing of the American Mind. She wasn’t much of an intellectual, but she did consider herself a classicist — at least when this conformed to Catholic dogma. Because I was born in 1974, I was the thirteen year old being talked about. When she made me read it at her kitchen table I was transitioning from Michael Jackson to punk rock — and would much rather listen to David Bowie than watch a piano recital on PBS. I didn’t understand all of the words, but with the aid of a dictionary was able to get through and make out the theme. Allan Bloom can suck an old pimpled dick, but this was pretty powerful writing. I loved its form, though I never agreed with it — because I was inside the body he was writing about.
I was seduced by music and the characters that created and were created by it. I watched Sinead O’Connor cover Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U on near repeat on MTV a few years after Bloom’s essay was written. And not only did I enjoy it, not only did I ‘throb with orgasmic rhythms,’ but I was transformed by it. Those lyrics helped me get through my first teenage romantic relationships without implosion, and learn (slowly) to hear, make sense of and use poetry. Without them I would have been ‘like a bird without a song.’7
I survived drowning in my onanistic music habits, and about the time Jane’s Addiction was replacing Perry’s papier-mâché sculpture with a copy of the first amendment on the cover of their second major album, I was learning to make aesthetic judgments. Writing terrible poems and short stories, painting punky self-portraits and taking artsy photographs with me in the center.
A few years later, finally at a university (and an art major,) I saw an already obsolete Video Toaster in a decrepit computer lab and was transfixed. At first I thought of recording and editing a video for my then band, Midori — but getting time in the studio was difficult for students that weren’t in the School of Communications. And then the band broke up — so that star never shone. But I did eventually find the Mac lab upstairs, and scored a beta version of what would become Final Cut Pro that one of my professors got from Macromedia/Apple that he wouldn’t find the time to use.
Every year, a few months out from an opportunity to share what I’ve been doing with some audience I cut together new ninety secondish videos about my sources; some aspect of my process, or the coming together of a particular piece. In each there are dozens to hundreds of stills and short videos — usually being digitally panned and zoomed, rotated and transitioned into one another. Some depict breaking waves on the California shore, some the bulb of a sphygmomanometer, some a group of Pepsi bottles on a shelf, some slow motion streams of snow on a stream while yellow lines pass, some the front right quarter of a Pontiac Trans Am and some the latch mechanism on a Powerbook 2400c. The images are kind of about those things, or my view on those things, but they are also about water, blood, sugar, speed, light and transition. They are sex, death, hyperactivity, sadness and procrastination. And paradise, cancer, marketing, affectation, youth and transparency. Each image conjuring, for me, the concrete and the abstract. I have immediate and delayed reactions to each, and to the associations of the fading agglomerations, that I could not know except by reaction.
These videos are mine, for me. They are how I periodically check in and concentrate on some of the things I’ve paid attention to. Each has a soundtrack — usually a snippet of a song I have on repeat in my studio. And this soundtrack is one of the many things people have reacted to after my artist lecture. I’ve had some positive feedback — but I’ve also had a nagging complaint, expressed primarily in private that ‘the music is distracting.’ Especially the music I choose; contemporary and with a human voice.
I understand that people have a hard time parsing new information when it is heavily layered — that hearing a song you don’t know, or know well, or are surprised to know, makes it difficult to follow a fast paced stream of animated images in the center of a 45 minute lecture by a cursing, gesticulating Italian American guy. But Boy Sets Fire and Li’l Wayne and The Weeknd are not just there to keep the silence from masticating us, they are there to give context to the search and the sorting these videos represent — they are one of the sources; primarily standing in for the word without the rhythm-breaking spectacle of me reading quotations in the middle of my lecture. And they are everpresent sources in my life — I hear music even when my headphones are off. David Ulin remarked that “to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.”8 I agree — but would qualify certain silence as not necessarily being about sound, but the filter. The important thing is that I can find a way to engage with ideas that happen to be in the form of books, in the case of Ulin’s example. If I find that something about my world is noisy in the distracting sense — I need to find a way to cancel it out or ignore it. And the noise that fades when I’m reading or writing is actually the very music I set my presentations to. Once I know the work, I prefer the bold cacophony Of Monsters and Men to the breathing of the guy sitting behind me at the library, or the spiral patterns and tree branches of the wallpaper, or the bird shit on the trunk of the Ford Focus out the window. Music is soundtrack — even without being composed explicitly for the events I am experiencing, it helps bring whatever I’m working on into sharpness and pushes the rest into the back of a relatively narrow depth of field.
The former president of the college where I teach, Oliver Evans, wrote a book about the minor writer George Henry Boker in 1984. In a passage setting up Boker’s critical analysis of ‘what makes for an appropriate subject,’ Evans wrote “An artist needed to escape the present not only because the present is distracting, but also because it lacks the materials for art.” With Boker supporting, “Get out of your age as much as you can.”9 But, as he fleshes out characters in one of his plays, it’s hard not to see Boker talking about his preoccupation with subject making “These mental weeds grow on the surface of inactive peace. I’m haunted by myself. Thought preys on thought. My mind seems crowded in the hideous mold that shaped my body.”10
My ‘hideous mold’ is not just my body, but the things I’ve stuffed it with; the relationships, books, podcasts, artworks, movies, music, articles, television, blog posts, social media and near panoramic views of daily life. My short video projects help me to make sense of these things in situ, and communicate same to others. I am conscious that the standards of representation in my field and the ‘blood of the martyrs’ that Bloom talked about are a little out of step with my practice. And I’m working to revere them a little less, to turn the music up a little louder (and make sure there is a subwoofer present.)