An unhealthy amount of my daydreaming time involves categorizing things*. For example, I’ve recently started thinking about getting a business card along these lines:

The odd title is down to another bit of musing: the more I learn about Music the more I think it’s actually the same art as Film and that Game Design is a more-general version of that super-art. Roughly: games are about making NP-hard decisions. Film/Music could be an immense graph of mathematical/physical relationships with individual works as traversals. Music, then, could be a particular problem space within the set of possible Games, which might be why Rock Band works so well.

“Aleatoric” because I like incorporating nondeterminism into things. “Bit” because everything I do is digital. “Sequencing” because everything involves an ordering in time.

* Buddhism says you might not want to spend time making up more illusions to layer over reality. Or, as Marvin the Paranoid Android put it: “Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

My friend Jennifer pointed me to this yearly art show based on the Christmas tree symbol. Here are my 12 favourites in no particular order (another best of list):

An artist signing themselves as “Jody Gray” recently sent me this mixed-media work, unsolicited. I have decided, in my curatorial wisdom, to publish it here:

The Mentalpolyphonics Gallery is currently accepting critical essays on the meaning and significance of The Johnson Lake Project. Please submit them below.

Someone posted this photo on Reddit today with the caption “Our bathroom at the art co-op got tagged, so we commissioned the piece“:

Anonymous
Lincoln, NE. 1996

I lack creativity. 2011
Sharpie on drywall: 35 x 48 cm

In an attempt to abandon aesthetics, I lack creativity by Anonymous showcases an antiquated hieroglyph that has remained unchanged since the late 70s. Here, Anon makes a fascinating plea to retard human evolution and remind us what it may have been like to use a public restroom in 1983.

The commentors criticized the original poster for not understanding the technical skill, subcultural significance and artness of the tag. I’d really like to think that the original poster was trolling given that it’s a cooperative and street art has been pretty widely accepted in the art theory community but the label is just so snarky I can’t be that generous. Anyway, I think it’s a nice tag.

I believe that art should be challenging, not just entertaining or aesthetically pleasing. If art reflects the author’s condition, then it should give readers insight into their own condition which they would not have had without the art. The best art challenges our ideas about society, and is therefore “political”.

Andrew Potter makes an argument that at least 100 years of political art in the West has achieved its purpose – our society no longer needs social conformity to function:

The theory that underlies the various forms of countercultural art—Dadaism, the situationists, shock art—is that our system only works through strict social conformity. The authorities maintain control by enforcing cultural norms, especially those relating to sex and religion. The job of the artist is to create works that expose the coercive nature of the system. But the effect of a hundred years of subversion has been to inoculate us against this sort of iconoclasm.

Rather than overthrowing society, which was the goal of Dadaism and situationism, it created a more resilient society that can include counter-cultures – like how antibiotics create antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

So what is art good for now besides training society’s immune system? Well, it can probably still be used to shift things around in society if not overthrow it: Perhaps by capturing the plight of disadvantaged members of society and critiquing advantaged members, art can help balance things? Perhaps replacing the professional shock artist model with everyone-is-an-artist could increase the functioning of individuals (as cogs in the machine)? Or maybe I’m wrong and art should be judged solely on aesthetic merits?

Magritte’s point was that the signifier is not the signified, not just a clever lie. I’m not entirely sure Maddow gets that (or maybe the Semioticians are all wrong). Also: her locutions are becoming more and more propagandistic (“Republicans versus Wisconsin” -> Wisconsin ?= Democrats).

I used to be a giant fan, but I’ve stopped watching. And don’t get me wrong: Scott Walker is a dick.

Just updated VFAF’s site with a new show, Outside.rs

Via Kara, an anti-piracy film contest supported by the various quasi-governmental PPPs that rule the CanCon/tax-loophole industry here.

Note to contestants: every producer you work with in the future should now be aware that you DON’T UNDERSTAND CONTEMPORARY FILM ECONOMICS, congrats. Piracy hurts distributors, not creators — the distributors hurt the creators. The enemy of my enemy is my… ? Plus, piracy is a defacto education subsidy. I would be broke right now if I paid for all the AV content I consume (and, as pirate partiers like to point out, as a fan I pay disproportionately more for this stuff anyway, shelling out ducats for art/cult/festival film screenings, concerts, online eyeballs, V/A shows, etc).

I was thinking of submitting a pro-piracy film, but I’m a) overloaded and b) not interested in investing in losing propositions to prove a point. Maybe I should c) start my own contest?

I wonder how one does that? Government funding? Canada has a glorious tradition of using government arts money to criticize the government. It’s one of the best parts of our country, and something to think about every time the government announces another funding cut — support for the arts is a barometer of government transparency.

I have been working on an essay about Asylum‘s film-theoretic grounding FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE. It is seriously becoming a giant panic-attack-inducing slog… and I blame blogging.

Most of what I write on here is a first draft, and I’m sure it shows. My blogging output, for better or worse, is prolific. But I hate going back and doing revisions for some reason. I have pages of notes that I find it impossible to piece together into a written flow.

Maybe that’s it though. Looking some of my notes I have no idea WTF I was thinking, and it seems that the moment to shape the prose is lost, the state of flow has passed:

AAA Is partly a film about cultural practices, and is necessarily insufficient wrt context, as is QVM. did aaa become an exotic backdrop for my own exploration? sadism / victorian repression

Good writing, supposedly, is like sculpture — you start with raw materials and hack away until you have an elephant. Except I don’t even sculpt like that… I make things from smaller pieces, not larger.

Or maybe it’s software that’s ruined me? The idea of writing a program by typing every line of code that pops into my head and then cutting it down to just those that work seems ridiculous. Except that’s kinda how you are supposed to code — premature etc is the root of all whatever?

Maybe I’m not broken though — I can do this, back to it. But where do you start when every thought is half-complete? TODO: Finish this and this and this. Argh. When is it appropriate to expand the notes into thoughts!!1!!!!eleven PaNicK

I can only write the words “sexual dialectic” so many times before I feel the onset of a kind of terminology-based-insanity; wondering if, in fact, I’ve gone around the bend and am just scrolling around my sixteen pages, randomly inserting gibberish.

Episodes held together with the corridor sequence — progressing towards the light — just as QVM is episodic, and held together with a birth-death symbolic structure of sexual dialectic

Argh.

One thing I like about /b/ is that, as an imageboard, its jokes actually require a fair amount of literacy… in the retarded *chan sense.

For example, verts. They’re comics made from film stills, and in order to create them you need to understand something about visual jokes, especially reaction shots…

… and, in this case, you need to be in on the in-jokes about:

1) The Triforce,
2) ASCII art, and
3) /b/ calling everyone fags.