August 2004 Archives

From Zombie Zombie's last show at Monkey Mania:

I climbed on the back rafter and took these shots with a shutter speed of about eight seconds without a flash or a tripod - just shoved the camera into the I-beam with a flyer wedged into the back to direct the camera a little bit more downwards, completely blind.

Flashes suck unless there aren't yours and they go off in darkened places when you're taking long exposures.

This is a photo I took of Amy Bennet's "Wonder Bread Trees" installation at the Andenken.

It's made of pipe cleaners and pom poms. This photo, taken by myself appeared in the Westword - Denver's alterna-rag. It's the third photo I've taken for the Artbeat section that has appeared in this paper since April.

And since April, I've been in six art shows, which is an incredible number to be in. Not one has been reviewed in the Westword and featured in the Art Beat section.

This is not the fault of the Westword, but it is casually unpleasant for me to think about - three photos have been published by myself, but without any sort of credit given to them. I've been more successful as a photographer of art, then as an artist when it comes to press.

The next show I'll be in will be of my photographs. Wonder what's going to happen then...

Since being out of school, I've found that my life has no real structure to it. I've been waking up at 3:00 pm (much too late) and going to sleep sometime right before morning. I fill my time with much too much mindless work.

To counter all this, I've decided to give myself quotas to fill for the week - things I should do anyways like: eat at least twice a day, but may completely forget to do. Hopefully, this will make me feel much less listless come Sunday morning, wondering what I'm doing.

Discipline 1: Figure Draw at least once a week (to be extended to twice a week)

I am not a "figurative" artist (I'm not any sort of x-ive artist!), but being able to draw is important to me; it makes me feel, honestly, less of a fraud. I don't believe much that all artists should be able to draw, but I believe I should be able to draw, and draw really well.

I'm very rusty, but salvagable, it's been at least eight months, or even longer since I really sat down and drew a figure.

I wrote in one of my little notebooks that I should take a picture of what was in front of me, every hour, on the hour, for a complete day. So Saturday I did just that. I missed midnight - I must have been on the road, driving to Thorton.

I realized, even though this idea is completely self evident, that ANY story that you write or tell or read is just sort of a selection of the events that may have unfolded. It's quite surreal to see a movie that takes about an hour and a half of viewing time, that encapsulates perhaps twenty years of time!

Using just time, you can skew events in any way that you want; you could take complete events out, extend certain events in comparrison, it's very flexibly in that one dimension - it's a subtractive process... like carving marble. And this is what every story is basically. If it weren't for this distillation, you'd have what would be analogous to a map that was as large as the area it was mapping out.

I read recently that we're about ten to fifteen years away from having the technology to store enough information to document one's life completely. What happens to the Story then?

Below shots are sort of a forced perspective of events that unfolded on Saturday - it's none more true or false than if I told you a straight out story of what happened to me that night; it's just simply different - I've given up much of what I want to tell you about the events; I will only tell you about what's in the shot.

11:00 am - I got up and went back to sleep until about 11:30 am, where I was awakened by the vinyl tile kitchen guys.

12:00 pm - I stayed in the bedroom as all the appliances were moved from the kitchen, into the living area

1:00 pm - I took my car to the Jiffy Lube on Leetsdale to top off the fluids and had breakfeast at a Starbucks next door. Prince was on the cover of the Arts/Culture newspaper insert.

2:00 pm - I worked the Andenken Gallery; not many people come into Art Galleries in the summer; I mostly do my own work; checking email, answering questions, bs'ing with the people who rent out studios. In the background is a giant white painting by Jerimiah, and a sculpture to the left from alex Beard.

3:00 pm - Calan is moving out of the studios soon; I may rent out his studio, but I'm a little wary living/working at Andenken. He's very frustrated and seemed to want to hang out with me, talk and continue to punch me in the shoulder. I don't much mind.

4:00 pm - Calan still hanging out, talking to me and punching me in the shoulder.

5:00 pm - Calan left, but I have no drive do much of anything.

6:00 pm - Taking a walk to Illegal Pete's to get some dinner, around the 16th street Bus Station

7:00 pm - Walking back from Illegal Pete's to the gallery, full.

8:00 pm - Wasting time, no drive to do any work, meeting Jack soon to go see Slim Sessna

9:00 pm - Mandy and I on my studio's balcony; waiting for Jack who is late, so we can all go see Slim Cessna's CD release party. Mandy is Calan's fiancŽ; she's frustrated too and I try to get advice from her about relationships.

10:00 pm - The opening act for Slim Cessna was a TV talk show Thing, featuring Mr. Pink as the host; Get Your Going just sang along to songs about Ford Cars and is getting interviewed at the moment. It was sort of a boring act.

11:00 pm - Slim Cessna's playing, although I'm more intrigued by the fact that Jello Biafra (of all people) is in the crowd, wearing the magenta Cowboy outfit. His face is being blocked by Jack. " This is how we do things in the Country", says Slim.

1:00 am - Went to Rollermania! after the show; 1:00 am saw me taking a quick piss.

2:00 am - The back of Harry C. Walter's head. Apparently, the "inventor" of Electroclash is the last DJ to play Rollermania, but Jack, Harry and myself leave, as do most everyone else.

3:00 am - back at my studio, looking down at where my computer just was.

4:00 am - brushing my teeth. Good night!

One thing I know and that is that I know nothing.

- Socrates

I've been reading "Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter for kicks. It was on my Girlfriend's bookcase, it's Big and Thick - enough reason for me to read anything.

In one of the first chapters, it has a sort of puzzle to solve, that I will describe below. I like puzzles. We'll call it, the "MU" puzzle for lack of a better name. In simplified terms, you start with a string of words, in this case, we get to start with, "MIU" and with four different thingies, called rules, we want to try to change the string, "MIU", to "MU". Neat. Here are the rules:

• If any string ends in I, you can append U
  
  Example: MUI -> MUIU
  
  

• If any string begins with M, you can duplicate the string after M,
  
  Example: MUI -> MUIUI
  
  

• If any string contains III, you can replace the III with U
  
  Example: MUIII -> MUU
  
  

•  If any string contains UU,  you can delete the UU

            Example: MIUU -> MI

So, beginning with, "MUI", we can use any of these rules, in any order, for as many times as we like to transform "MUI" into, "MU". Well, can it be done? It seems simple enough; similar to a RubikÔ³ cube. If you fiddle about with it enough, something is sure to come about.

Since I'm lazy, I created a simple program, written in Perl to do the task for me. Perl stands for, Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, although it is never written as an acronym. Basically, it's perfect for taking thingies in, twiddling them about and sputtering something back.

The little program I made goes through every possible way of solving this problem recursively. It's similar to guessing a password by trying every single combination of letters and numbers, starting with, "a" and working from there.

It's the stupidest way of solving a problem, but computers are real smart at being stupid - and fast. Here's the listing of what the program looks like:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict; 


my %tried = (); 

main(); 

sub main { 

	my @rules = (
				 \&rule_one, 
				 \&rule_two,
				 \&rule_three, 
				 \&rule_four,
				); 

	my $axiom = 'MI';
		
	my @path; 
	my @tries; 
	
	 solve($axiom, \@rules); 
}


sub solve { 

	my @app; 
	
	
	my ($axiom, $rules) = @_; 
	my $i = 0; 
	
	foreach(@$rules){ 
		my $tmp =  $_->($axiom);
		push(@app, $tmp) if $tmp;
	}
	
	foreach(@app){ 

		next if $tried{$_};
		next unless (length($_) < 1000); 
		
		print $_ . "\n";
		
		$tried{$_} = 1; 
		
		if($_ eq 'MU'){ 
			print "YES!\n\n\n"; 
			exit;
		}
		solve($_, $rules); 
	}
	
}



sub rule_one { 
	# If any string ends in I, you can append U
	
	my $str = shift; 
	
	if ($str =~ m/I$/){ 
		return $str . 'U'; 	
	}else{ 
		return undef; 
	}
}




sub rule_two { 
	# If any string begins with M, 
	# you can duplicate the string after M,	
	
	my $str = shift; 

	if($str =~ /^M/){ 
		return 'M' . substr($str, 1) . substr($str, 1); 
	}else{ 
		return undef;
	}
}




sub rule_three { 
	# If any string contains III, 
	# you can replace the III with U
	
	my $str = shift; 
	if($str =~ /III/){ 
		$str =~ s/III/U/g;
		return $str; 
	}else{ 
		return undef; 	
	}
}




sub rule_four { 
	#If any string contains UU, 
	# you can delete the UU
	
	my $str = shift; 

	if($str =~ /UU/){ 
		$str =~ s/UU//g; 
		return $str;
	}else{ 
		return undef; 
	}
	
	

Running this program takes less than a second and never comes to a conclusion. In all, it goes through 506 different tries in an attempt to get to the string, "MU".

Now, I'll come clean. I did put limitations into the program. One limitation I put in was to not attempt to try to solve the problem if using a rule creates the same string as what had been created before. This is more of an optimization – if we’ve figur’d something ain’t hot, let’s not beat the dead thing.

The second limitation was to limit how large the string was to 1000 characters - not quite every single possibility, but enough to give me a good Idea.

For kicks, I changed the size the string could be to 1,000,000 characters and ran the program again. It took about the length of time one with a relatively short attention span (i.e. Me) could stand, plus the act of asking and receiving a bagel at the local coffee shop (toasted) and innocently flirting with a friend of a friend before coming back to my laptop.

In total, the program then created 505 Megabytes worth of results, but only 3338 unique incorrect outcomes to the solution. Again, I couldn't find a way to get to, "MU". I'm somewhat at the limits on what I want to torture my laptop at, so I'm fairly sure there's no way to get, "MU", given the rules I've been given - yet it's quite possible that there isn't a way to actually test this to completion!

Being lazy (again) I double checked my work with someone more smarterer than myself and they came to the same conclusion, using Number Theory, which I really know, nothing about (officially, as in, "I officially don't live in my painting studio")

This is somewhat unnerving to myself: I ran a determinate test to see if something is true and have come to a conclusion that I think I know what I’m talking about, but have no real way of making absolutely sure without being given infinity as a timeframe. I have determinately found something indeterminate. Well, why is that so important?

I created a series of paintings that somewhat deals with the idea of Free Will in a determinant system. Each one of three paintings had six different paths created using, like the “MU” problem, a bunch of simple rules. I saw each path as a lifespan; the longer the path, the longer the life.

Points were put upon the canvas, with which you can connect to make paths (lines). You started drawing these lines from the perimeter of the canvas and continued inside. You could not make a path cross itself and you could not have a path go again outside of the canvas (something akin to suicide in my painting).

As the path was created, random choices were made as to which point the path should go next in the canvas. Inevitably, the path would knot itself up and have nowhere to go and essentially, 'Dies'. Here's just one path, for clarity:

In this example, the path is"birthed" in the bottom left and "dies" in the top left.

My whole idea was that there was no way, given the previous steps, to know how "old" a life path would be. Thus, any decision you made, except completely obvious decisions like jumping off a cliff (or drawing off the canvas), would not have an affect on your future.  In other words you have no real choice; no real free will.

I  personally feel a bit silly having a computer program act as a model on how reality may be unfolding in my mind Î and perhaps thatÔ³ the point. My free will and this determinacy may be somewhat like of apples and oranges.  Free will is not indeterminacy and thus, isnÔ´ the opposite of determinacy.

It's difficult for me, at present, to make complete sense to my own self on all this; but I leave you with this quote, as it will be what I will be thinking of this night:

"Now you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will.

You ask me how thought and wish are formed in us. I answer you that I have not the remotest idea. I do not know how ideas are made any more than how the world was made. All that is given to us is to grope for what passes in our incomprehensible machine.

The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated."