Insubordinate Automata

My artschool friend Sonny Assu has had some cool stuff happening for him these days.  Just now reviewing these knot sculptures, and this time, getting it. A slow burn. Nice work Sonny, always.

I enjoyed the spectacular good fortune of befriending Kwakwaka’wakw master carver and world-renown dancer, storykeeper and genteel host Wayne Alfred on a recent visit to Alert Bay for the U’Mista cultural center working with Denbigh FAS. Wayne’s perfect lines and punchy colours bring an electric tension to traditional forms, illuminated by his broad mythological literacy, worldly perspective, and immanently contemporary sculptural works.  I recognized his smile immediately, as joker and a kindred spirit, teacher, prankster-prince, and playful colleague. Over my three weeks of visiting, we sustained a solid conversational connection, and I think we’ll keep in touch. He is represented in Vancouver by Spirit Wrestler gallery, among others.  His son Marcus Alfred also carries the family gift.  Gilakasla and warmest respects to my many new ‘Namgis friends. All my relations.

Folkert Gorter was excitedly introduced to me recently by mutual friend Ben Cerveny, and true to form for allies of the Neb, I found him a fully compelling character. He cultivates a keen interest in Generative Art, for which we share a deep, and hopefully ongoing, collegial affinity.

Folkert is one of three co-assembleurs on the outstanding visual-philosophy blog but does it float. Its curatorial subject areas include:

Architecture
Generative art
Collage
Drawing
Typography
Sculpture
Photography

Gorter also had a hand in constructing Cargo, a highly esteemed artists-website construction-tool.

He is also involved with the online speculative science and culture journal, Space Collective.

Folkert has been ‘superfamous‘ in my tiny art-geek circles for some time, without my connecting all the dots.  I was delighted to finally make his acquaintance.

Expansive stimulations from a remarkably prolific gentleperson.

Spread out your frontal lobes and enjoy.  Ladies and germs, Folkert Gorter.

Midsummer just past, [July 30 & July 31] your humble narrator received a delightful surprise.  A new-found favourite philosopher/orator/professor noticed me watching his show online and waved back, rupturing the fourth wall without hesitation or circumstance. Dr. Timothy Morton is articulating the vector for a next-wave of posthuman aesthetic theory. For media poets dabbling with critical science, Dark Ecology and OOO** lectures are dense nourishment for the aspiring transhumanist geo-symbiote.  I sent Tim a salutary hello, and he very kindly penned this favorable review on his exceptional blog Ecology Without Nature. Nice feeling, mutual collegial recognition. I do love the internet. Thanks Tim.

Stumbling upon his numerous recorded academic symposia talks online earlier in the year – and having been memorably wound up by the encounter each time – I’ve since played through quite a few hours of Dr.Morton’s rhapsodic argumentations for an object-oriented-ontology and a dark ecology. His epiphany-catalyzing raps have rattled my internal miniature legion of ‘pataphysicians, to rally and rise to take on these new champions of an undivided nature. Tim’s numerous elegaic lectures on onto-ecology spin up my krebs cycle.  Juggling romantic poets and particle physicists to express the unimaginable image of that indisputably extant macro-terrestrial lifeform/artifact, auto-inquisitive self +/- other, stretching out indivisibly, splayed open in invitation to empathetic contact across a continuously toroidal fractalline membrane.  In a figure-ground-flash, the invisible topology without center folds up the horizons; dense populations of material-energy-flows stitched in-betwixt, inconceivable to industrial capital’s terminal romance with divisive atomistic solipsistic pathological mortal [t]error.

Listening to Morton’s recordings while making my pictures does great things to buttress my thirty year opinion that someway all of this artificial-lifeform noise I prattle on about to my friends’ rolling eyeballs actually does make profoundly doable sense to some brainy ecological thinkers in faraway elsewhereplaces. Tim’s eloquent and earnest soft-rage says much to reinforce what I’ve been wrestling to articulate in pictures.  Riffing with imploring erudition to attend with equanimity to the birthing of our massively distributed supersentient spacetime hyperobject, presently transmitting imperative desires to become oneself differently, in a perpetual now.  My test-tube transhumanist technosymbiont hyperspacial feedback entelechy can now be comfortably shrouded in academic english, and measured and fathomed and translated to functional anglosaxon epistemology.  With chords resonating harmonically with my enduring affection for Manuel DeLanda‘s lectures on emergence and deep materialism; jiving with other beloved French and Californian post-structuralist gaian-aboriginal whole-earth long-now hypermodernists. If Morton is copiloting the next-wave punk-rock of deep ecology, then I am declaring myself a superfan. I want the t-shirt and the vinyl; Tim speaks my jingo-mambo-jambo.  His recent piece for Adbusters is well worth the listen.

Thank you too much Tim for sharing your considerable cognitive output, for your impassioned oratory, and for your friendly collegial recognition. Yours was exactly the sort of response I was fishing for. Salute comrade. I am delighted to make your virtual acquaintance. Thrilled to hear someone knows what I’m talking about. We will continue the conversation. All my relations.

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“The entities that coexist with us intrude on our awareness with greater and greater urgency … the end of the human dream that reality is significant for humans alone, [begins] the prospect of forging alliances between humans and nonhumans alike, now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of the world.” [from Hyperobjects 3.0: Physical Graffiti delivered by Tim Morton at Rice U, Nov 19 2010]

**OOO co-conspirator Levi Bryant recently called it this way:  ”One of the things I find interesting is that people have not yet seemed to notice just how bizarre the OOO ontology is. The thesis that objects exist, has, for whatever reason, been quite controversial among high humanities types (though this has seemed natural and obvious to media studies folks and artists). However, I think the truly bizarre and disturbing thesis has yet to register. Within the framework of my onticology, armies, cities, nations, activist groups, corporations, institutions, etc, are independent,autonomous, autopoietic objects that are independentof humans, have their own aims, are conscious, and are rational animals. These days we spend a lot of time asking whether artificial life on par with humans will arise out of our new technologies. My thesis is that non-human intelligences on par with human intelligences have existed for centuries. Just as it would be unlikely that we could communicate with an alien intelligence on par with our own intelligence due to differences in our being, these “aliens” have been amongst us for centuries, using us in the way cells use proteins to construct themselves, without us being able to communicate with them. Kafka was right when he described the Castle as being an intelligence in its own right. Like Joseph K. we can be entangled in the Castle, perpetually striving to communicate with it, without ever quite being able to make contact. I find this idea terrifying.”

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Morton over-generously drew comparisons from my work to Bridget Riley and Yukultji Napangati:

… and also to Comora Tolliver :

and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian :

Prestigious company, I am humbled by the comparison. Proceed to stepping up my game. Salud for the boost, Tim.

So my friend Corey likes to draw. A truly humbling encounter and stunning re-acquaintance with a friend’s freshest collections of sketchbook scans. If you feel an insufficient quantity of marvel and wonder in your life, it’s because Indigoskynet is a supermassive dark-object at the event horizon of collective imagination, steadily absorbing and condensing design ideas from across the cartoon universe. This is what immense facility with illustrative language squared with disciplined creative genius looks like, if ever you were wondering. I do, with some frequency, and high-water-marks are always readjusted by a visit with the astonishing sketchbooks of artist and designer Corey Jackson. Wow. Dazzling, comrade Semulon. I need to work harder.

Empty Head – They Shoot Horses Don’t They from Atomized on Vimeo.

Three great tastes that taste great together. Sean Arden pulls one out of the archive, continuing to impress with his immense technical versatility and facility. I loved these early period drawings from Eli Bornowsky. And They Shoot Horses? Stay gold.

Following a theme, another esteemed artschool colleague and incidental Tahltan extended-cousin has a great show up this month: Peter Morin’s ‘Museum‘ is on at the Satellite until July 3 – a living artifactual collection dense with shared memory.

Peter Morin's Museum

Peter Morin's Museum

Alano Edzerza - Mosquito Drum

My indirect-cousin Alano Edzerza is consistently demonstrating his ever-increasing mastery of contemporary northwest coast design, balancing innovative modernist compositions and tools with traditional formlines and ovoids in strikingly harmonious compositions with startling wit, strength, grace, and proficiency.  I really admire Alano’s work, and am delighted to know him as family.  He’s also the only artist-friend I know who own his own beautiful gallery, so go have a look, and big-up my Tahltans.  Respect.

Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu

I’m really excited to see this large-scale Longhouse Series of Sonny Assu‘s, and the development of his very cool iDrum series.  I’ve really enjoyed his ovoid abstractions, conceptual sculptures, and now-widely-emulated postmodern-traditionalist critical-logographic pop-parodies.  The National Gallery and Equinox gallery know he’s got it too.  Nice to see him recognized.  Good show, good colleague.

Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu

Jen Brevin

Anni Albers

Kelly Mark

Derek Beaulieu

Derek Beaulieu‘s magnificent 2009 visual poetry journal Speechless is available for download at Ubuweb.  Thank you so much for doing this Derek, these are so fantastic.  I’ve been imagining this series since childhood.  We need many more. Request permission to come aboard.