Ancient Warrior 3

Tagging, Clouds, Virtual Graffiti, Semantic Web, Metaverses

About five years ago or so I wrote an essay about "Virtual Graffiti".  I talked about contemporary graffiti artists etc. and how the commodifying of graffiti by nature transformed its cultural value and meaning.  I also talked about the visual and conceptual components of graffiti culture and their relationship to Internet, information technology and virtual worlds in general.  All of this created by a computer, I imagined that graffiti would leave the streets and the general physicality of it, and enter a virtual world completely free of these restraints.  I am not down on graffiti at all, I love the art form, but I am interested in seeing where it might be going and what this will mean.  Also, in my understanding that it is not literal, it is anticipated to be something completely transformed and other.  The concept of graffiti is a starting point that is about getting memes out in the public eye rapidly and effectively.  Shepard Fairey's "OBEY" represented the conceptual crossover (from literal to conceptual hive mind) in the streets starting a whole wave of copycats.  He was beyond a name or a crew, and prognosticating anonymity in the web.  Now the wall is a web page and a cloud.  Avoiding literal interpretations it remains new, as in neologism new, in spite of the ever increasing attempt to create a data structure that is more fluid, defined and intelligent.

My opinion is that this has happened.  I am not saying I predicted it, but perhaps in my own naive way had a sense of what was going to happen.  I think that hash tagging and tag clouds are an expression of this idea.  With W3C Semantic Web this is going to get even more translated in its virtuality by hyperlinking, data and ideational expressions with greater speed, relativity and revelatory presence.  Hacktivism too is its own version of graffiti mind, seeing the internet as a way to get information out quickly to the largest audience possible.

Street tagging aesthetically has been sort of prescient of the tag clouds that would eventually make their way onto web pages.  You might think it is not the same thing, but as we virtualize and cloud our collective consciousness through computing, we might not even be living in the "natural world" as it were.  I'm thinking something like Logan's Run,  in the sense that our hive mind will take us into another dimension through computing.  Therefore, the modes of expression, both legal and illegal will follow to these realms.  I do not know anything and I am not saying I know what it is, but this is what I see.  How we use it, will decide the next steps in our evolution as creators of metaverses.

Source Robot

ZZ

Chad Dugas, Alchemical Spectre

Trips to the quantum cosmic supermarket feeding back loops and twirls of consciousness spraying off the Christened waves of Oversoul.  Back flips through candy cane mind gardens and free falls into dark, twirling vortexes of Scorpion lairs.

My friend, brother, cohort, colleague, collaborator, co-inspirator, infinite jester on the checkerboard of life...Chad Dugas.  I don't know if you can call him an artist, a fool, a genius, an idiot savant, anarchic yogi or what?  I have never met anyone like him.  I would call him a Wizard Alchemist who dabbles in all of the above when it suits his fancy or he is conjuring up his tutelary spirits.  Either way, we started in the rave scene back to the old traditional college days to later years in Gotham, hashing it out in the bat cave.  Blessings brother from here to there.

UFO and Wondermountains

Felix Guattari's Interesting Assemblage of his 4 Ontological Functions

Montauk Alien

Plex Needs Cheese

Con $ Piracy

There is a dark side that seeks to control through manipulative means.  It lives within each and everyone of us, as well as without.  When we engage the world, we are in a conspiracy.  Con-Spirare.  Spirits living and breathing together.  The more light we become, the more aware we become of our psychic power.  We can use this to cut through the dark and shed light on an occult world.  There is nothing to really fear, but since we all have to pay a price, death awaits.  Make use of your time, fight the dark with peace, be creative, share your talents and ideas with others and bring something of true value to this world.

The forces that seek to control us are ultimately extensions of ourselves.  When we become more integrated and spiritual, we will watch these aspects fade away with time.

Universal Transformer Clown

Exits of the Heart

No stones left for the elders
I exit stages from the heart
a new beginning sets me free
from old chains of past woes
Once again children rain down to eternal shores
Linear places of solar bliss
no judgment comes from the One
only time and space
to contain you
like we have seen
again and again
our destiny is
time forgotten in
the shake of a tremoring
world

Montauk Project

Me in my studio at SVA 1997

Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt

Tommy in his apartment in Hell's Kitchen.  Tommy was my teacher at SVA.  I think he is a true artist.  Not a pedant per se, but someone who "walks the walk".  There were so many @$$wholes at SVA, but Tommy had the voice that said, "do it your own way!".  Not that any artist needs anyone to tell them that, but institutions are full of them and more and more the method is about total conformity.  The other extreme are people who quit and rebel and think it makes them somehow more "real".  SVA for me was a way to get into NYC.  Otherwise, I would have had to live on the street.  I was still trying to carve it out as a graffiti artist then, but I discovered early on, as much as I was influenced by graffiti, I did not want to just be another graffiti artist. 

Tommy was a protege of Jack Smith.

Meta Aranoidicus-Paul Laffoley

I talk about Paul pretty much all of the time in one way or another.  I have never met another artist like him.  For me, Paul is perhaps the greatest artistic genius I have ever met.  I think of him as a friend as well.  I have had at least the  pleasure of being in his studio and talking with him from time to time.  I have the highest respect for him and his influence is without question.

This is a design that for me takes Gaudi's spiritual leanings and brings to a scientifically visionary form of completion.  Paul is possibly our Leonardo da Vinci.

Virtual Baroque and World Wide Web

I am realizing more and more that this baroque nature in the arts is a "Virtual Baroque", because it is a reference to the pluralism in styles evident in the visual field and is deeply connected to technological orgy which supports it virtually.  The World Wide Web is a "virtual galaxy gallery" and assemblage of ideas and visual creations.

Very simply it is a feedback loop as well, as in the concept put forth by Cybernetics, which simultaneously creates a virtual realm that flowers and grows rhythmically.  However, it is loops within loops, all dispersed, interconnected like wires in some Brazilian favela.  It works somehow, but there is no way to decipher the "how".  I see a multitude of art/visual cultural galaxies, each one independent, yet connect to a larger picture.  There is always an interplay of dualities, however they forge chaos and order in such a way that the play-doh quality allows all potential formations.

Just go the mall today (in any suburban town for that matter) and look around you at the globalism that jumps out into your face.

There are so many styles, ideas and realities coming together, brands being melded, identities being forged, cultures "clashing".

It is a tessellated, fractalized field of sociocultural experience.

There is no beginning or end, only change.

It is evident that there would naturally be some psychosis developing as a result of this schizoid experience, but yet, it is being held together by technological bliss, the tap of texting or the next Twitter feed.

I sit back and watch and keep on drawing.

Homage to Joel Hodgson and MST3K

Life is a critique of a silly movie... Happy 2013.

Sailor Clown Lost at SEE

2013 is Psychic Clean Up Time

OK...now that is over, the so called, dreaded end date of 12.21.12, we are still here.

However, I wonder, what is the next creative step?

After listening to Michael Tsarion for the past 2000 hours, no just kidding :), I have come to the understanding that now more than ever it is time to step inside the mirror room of Self and stare deeply so that a new consciousness is at hand.

Also, it is time to open up the closet of the mind and and clean it thoroughly.  As MT says, going through the darkness and the cosmic tyranny is a part of the purging process so that one comes to their own sovereign self hood, untainted by the manipulations and conspiracies of others.

No need to do anything but just be your self.  Now if we could just solve the incessant money problem, then all would possibly be well.