Diggin' up Da Vinci

"Albert McLouds"
study for an environmental animation
digital collage  10.66" x 8"  2012

If you could bring Leonardo through the wormhole into the present
(he's all agog at your ipod)
would he have lived all these years?
Will he be prime Da Vinci?
What can a shadow know?
But No you want to go into the past and fuck around with it.
You want to tell him he's on the right track and give him the plans for internal combustion.
Send a message to the little boy
and change the present, improve your knowledge; rewrite history.
No really imagine you could have an actual time portal- and you went back and messed around
(which you would do simply by breathing).
You cannot go back (to the same future) because of that nasty thing you did to your great etc grandad.
If nothing else, your knowledge of events past would change the future (ah, the ever enfuzzinating many time branches).
But you would be the only one who knew that things were different.
No, really, in this other universe, you didn't have a beard!
Even you, the traveler, might forget that things had been any different (on account of it would be just too fuckin weird- the cognitive dissonance would feel too distressful, akin to paranoid schizophrenia- having multiple versions of reality competing for dominance).
In order to repair cognitive functioning your brain maybe would self enforce a healing of the rift.
Maybe you would begin to doubt that you had ever traveled into the past at all.
You know, that "time machine" did look a little like a closet lined with aluminum foil, LED's and speakers stuck all over the walls.
...and that special "wormhole suit" was a mite absurd...  

APTS ALIEN ARMS

"APTS ALIEN ARMS"
collage on wood with pencil and screws  7" x 8.5" x 2"  2012

This piece had to be repaired recently due to an adhesive failure, and may have been altered slightly.  It originally was from the 'two hour series' back in 2010 (to each work I devoted 2 hours time- approximately).   So there you have the 2012 date.  It was the only collage in the series, but otherwise similar- the slab on base, simple or central subjects and outlines.  I feel this has a certain identification with the stream of modern cartoon inspired/infused art-   In the Democratic Republic of Web, any and every cultural era is currently in resurgence.  Ho hum.  Dynamo hum.  This shit is post- apocalyptic.  It's all upside down.  The low, the high,   the hum.

Gas Giants

"Gas Giants"
digital collage  11" x 8"  2012

folks who have got their immediate material needs covered-
who have leisure time-
can spend that time in idle entertainments-
can rest and dream.
Dream and sort patterns and make fit with disparate elements- the night brain knows no bounds of stupidity- all is fair game.
And what is remembered is what is remembered again and again.
Alignments with waking input re- members the member of the set of things seen.
With enough members the neural pathway persists and becomes belief.
A strong experience (also called a vision) can create a lasting trace in a short time, while weaker reinforcements repeated over time also make their marks.
From the teeny ephemeral notion motions of mundane experience to the coronal mass ejections of ecstatic vision is the common fluid geometry of dreaming mind.

Sometime when the autoscanner is robofucking you, remember the tune to "bicycle built for two" and smile mischievously.  

minnieboom

"minnieboom"
digital collage  11.59" x 7.09"  2012

the great thing about Surrealism is (ants aside) that if you start seriously asking the question "why is there a watermelon (or side of beef) there?" there will be no shortage of answers.  You can begin to take a mental journey starting inside your underwear and continuing into outer space.

"Ain't you a wee bit too old to be believin' in Leprechauns now, laddie?"

And also Surrealism has lived on since the 1930's, only becoming more pervasive and insidious.  It could even be argued that instead of being merely a symptom, Surrealism caused the collapse of society that we see today.  What further corruption of our precious bodily fluids are Skittles ads perpetrating now?  -and speaking of underwear, have you noticed how much there is?

to get what is going on with this picture, imagine that each one of those kitties is one of those California Mystery Booms: “Boom, boom, boom, boom just like that”  just keep doing that.  put it on your wallpaper.  

ART

owlemma
digital collage  8.8" x 11"  2012

...is the physical rearrangement of patterns, and creating (or discovering) new patterns.

The patterns themselves are both physical, i.e., the atomic structure of clay, and informational, i.e., the Madonna's breast and also the arrangement of bits in the machine that displays Her breast.

In this way a chemist is an artist.

The commonality of science, art, music, speech and writing is in this shuffling of patterns.

What enables these activities is the non-stop operation of the brain.  These neural operations can be seen in everyday (and night) experiences.  The brain orders the sensory input in various pattern manipulation modules.  Ordinary waking visual experience is composed of a vast cutting and pasting and pattern fitting production.  It's how you recognize faces or can name colors.  There's a brain app for that.  What delights (and disturbs) us about dreams (or cutting edge artworks) is their creative, surprising nature.  It's a pattern mash.  These processes can be seen more nakedly in dreams, hallucinations, visions, and in pareidolia (seeing faces in clouds, e.g.)  They can be seen in your life in the form of memories, aspirations, fears and convictions.   Your brain writes the environmental script.
An artist is a dreamer attempting to control the dream, or to wake up.
But wake up to what?
Ordinary attention is a dream- of another order.
She blinded me with Science.
Central to attention is the ability to discard the irrelevant, but if we could witness our own internal creative processes, we would be bewildered by their complexity.  The artist is the one who attempts to pay attention to the cognitive dissonances of our scene-building machinery, and say "look here, a new pattern!"
Pump it, Baby.