Something in mind . . . .

Winter Light

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It's Milk Toof

When It Matters

There is a school of thought that when in a situation of subservience, such as a teacher/student relationship, one should "go along to get along."

How one should go along depends on what the teacher wants or your goal.

If taking the the class to reach a larger goal - like a degree or a certain GPA, going along means studying the teacher, figuring out what that teacher most values and doing it, modifying ( but not compromising) what you most value until they fit.

That is valuable. It teaches you a life skill and lets you learn, both what the teacher has to offer and what you can do to work with others who are not exactly like you. Because no one is exactly like you. Ever. No matter how hard you try, or how much nothing you have done is new -- no one is ever, ever exactly like you.

Sometimes that can be very lonely if you think about it too long, which is why people daydream about having a twin, or a perfect mate, or a magic hat that knows you better than you know yourself.

But sometimes what the teacher wants is thinking and open debate and that of course is where the trouble starts . . . . .

There is a Book - inside the book is a chapter that describes interactivity. I do not disagree with the book, but I strongly disagree with it's tone.

That tone indicates that one should not really pay attention to what non-designers say - they are just BSing because they don't understand what you are saying. It glorifies the fact that everything is NEW and even LANGUAGE is changing. Students and youth will see solutions that experienced designers will never ever see. Because they are "Designosaurs".

No really. The only sop to the poor, old, decrepit, artists and designers who work in traditional media is something where these evangelicals of digital design concede that the usage of the term "conventional designers" is somewhat condescending ( and a term I've never heard used in a professional context "traditional" being the term I've heard used when referrring to non-digital media. )

Understood. Youth, anarchy and open source software tools for creating digital media is where "all" the "credibility" is. But that's not design to me - that's masturbation. The most I will give it is that it is public masturbation.

Here is the thing, design, and please understand that I mean DESIGN not ART is about interaction. A designer is creating something to be used, a form, an application, an object, a theory, and the goal is for PEOPLE to use it. If they don't, or can't, or won't; it might be beautiful, it might even be art, but it fails as design.

Design - what does it mean anyway - let's get long and referencey about it - Design according to the Oxford Dictionary is about planning and the act of planning - it references art but is not art

Pronunciation:

/dɪˈzʌɪn/

noun

1 a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is made: he has just unveiled his design for the new museum



[mass noun] the art or action of conceiving of and producing a plan or drawing of something before it is made: good design can help the reader understand complicated information



[mass noun] the arrangement of the features of an artefact, as produced from following a plan or drawing:inside , the design reverts to turn-of-the-century luxe



2 a decorative pattern: pottery with a lovely blue and white design



3 [mass noun] purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object: the appearance of design in the universe



Nope - no part there where one of the things you should be learning about is how it's OK if "some people just don't get it".

So what about when design is a verb - is that the part where we look for the higher ground of artistic integrity?

verb

[with object]

1. decide upon the look and functioning of (a building, garment, or other object), by making a detailed drawing of it:a number of architectural students were designing a factory

(as adjective, with submodifier designed) specially designed buildings


2. do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind:[with object and infinitive] :the tax changes were designed to stimulate economic growth



Ummn nope - not there either.

So gentle readers, artists, and consumers - because I know that design is the incredibly unsexy thing you have to do to execute art for mass consumption and digital design in particular must be meant to be seen by unexpected audiences you will forgive me for making the mistake of thinking an example given in my textbook of the effects of a piece of interactive art was an example of design having unpredictable as opposed to desirable effects.

There is an artists group called Antenna and they created the Power Flower art installation. It's really really cool. It goes for a certain length of space and as you walk past your movement and energy activate a flower and it glows blue. When they first put it up as the book describes it a small child understood it very quickly and started interacting (playing) with the art right away but this poor old lady never understood the connection between her movement and proximity to the light because she wasn't moving in a speed or manner that connected the sudden glowing blue light with anything at all and was just irritated by what seemed to her to be a sporadic bath of blue light for no apparent reason.

Now the book went out of it's way to point out the ages of the participants in this early version of the installation - and perhaps it wouldn't have seemed so ageist (see old people don't get it!) if it hadn't been glorifying the young every fourth sentence or so. But even with that I thought - Awesome! It's obviously a design issue - if the goal is to "create delight" and there's a problem with getting some group to interact with it then how could you change the design so that it would reach a wider group to create that effect?

Because that's what you should do in a design class right?

Well apparently my fellow students felt that this example was "proof that you can't please everyone all the time".

No. No it wasn't.

And so because we were required to actually engage each other in an online discussion board I engaged - politely and explained that public art shouldn't be cutting out an entire segment of the public on purpose and was getting angrier and angrier that the consensus was that maybe "women over 60" weren't part of the target audience, so there was nothing wrong with the design.

Ladies and Gentlemen - the work was commissioned for the windows of Bloomingdales in New York City, I propose that the target audience is DISPROPORTIONATELY women over 60.

The artists I might point out - changed the design and added a musical tone which creates more of a point of connectivity so the connection of progressive sound becomes another point of entry into the work to create "unexpected delight".

Here is the work:

And I am happy to report that the actual artists have a much better attitude than the "artists" in my design class:

But I wonder - if the young and artistic are continously told there is more value in their point of view than the older and more experienced designer how will they ever manage to reach anyone with empathy if they also hold the idea that either art or design is meant to be exclusionary.

It matters.

It matters enough to speak out in class and run the risk of offending someone's comfort zone and being "that guy".

If the old lady realizes that the flowers interact with her movement and thinks "that's lame" then she doesn't like the art. That's OK - you really can't please everyone. If she never figures out that her actions have anything to do with the flowers or the light then she doesn't have an opinion on the art all - she never experienced it to have one.

It's the designer's job to make sure that she can form an opinion.

Sigh. There really wasn't a choice, but now I am absolutely "that guy". And that was before this week's mangling of the "Hockey Stick" graphic and Climategate to make it seem like graphic designers were accused fo taking bribes because visual design is THAT POWERFUL.

But the gentleman in the discussion insisted that nothing was wrong with the installation if it didn't reach people and even when given the location and the fact that it was public defended the idea of it just being the "fault" of the audience demographic and left off with "we'll just have to respectfully disagree".

No we won't - we can politely disagree.

But the respect is pretty much gone.

The gentleman in question had none for the public and reserved it for the artist, which much eroded mine. I don't know any working artists with that attitude.

But the exchange was polite - and tempered with the fact that he doesn't see it as disrespect and there's nothing in the book to convince him to respect those poor beleaguered people who are not new or anarchistic or devoted to blowing off management.

That was the compromise - the going along to get along - because had he been my friend or co-worker I would have called him out on it - and less politely than I did online.

I'm going to go play the interview with the artists again so I can remember the really important stuff in art and design.

Every Spellcaster Needs a Workroom

When we read about fantastic places and other worlds it's sometimes with a very deep longing. We wish we could be surrounded by the magic being described not knowing that we are surrounded by it now.

Wizards always have a mysterious workroom to study arcana and practice casting their spells. It is in the upper corner where the light that comes in has to be blocked because sometimes you need the light and sometimes the light can ruin the spells.

Witches have workrooms too, they're exactly like wizards that way, and almost every other way except they happend to be female and therefore are both scarier and supposedly more evil. Where a short tempered magic user who brooks no nonsense named "Christopher" is an eccentric but powerful wizard, the same magic user behaving the same way named "Grace" will be an evil witch who will eat your children and is jealous of your staid and normal life doing anything she can to disrupt it.

But they do the same things - cast the same spells. Handsome or pretty magic users are considered more dangerous than ugly ones. If they look a little odd, you know who they are. If they're too pretty something is wrong. No one ever considers the ones exactly in the middle. But we never notice anyone who isn't odd or pretty anyway so I suppose that's the same for spellcasters.

In the workroom is a set of shelves with arcane tomes written in many languages, with arcane symbols and the writing of ancients. There are other books with secrets to manipulate humans into making things the spellcaster needs. There are books to sell invisible things, create things that aren't there, books on how to manipulate light. Books of the past and the future. Books that will drive you insane if you make it past the preface.

On the wall there are two sigils in metallic gold, olive green and dusky blood red and black. One is the symbol of "Emptiness" and the other is the symbol for "Chaos" . The spellcaster will never tell you what the symbols are, but they can be read more easily on the other side of the world. Here they are pretty and balanced and perhaps a little odd or unnerving since color is scary on this side of the world where browns and beige and golds are sacred.

Green grasses are woven like rows and rows of tiny baskets on the wall. The floor is a pile of cut threads of some blued green covering the wood .

There is a bench that a visitor or petitioner can sit on that with the right somatic components turns into cabinet, and a piece of paper on the door to the materials cupboard that becomes new no matter how many times it is written on. It is a limited spell - what's written on it is gone when something new is needed, but the spellcasters will tell you there is a need for that.

The room is filled with light from a single glowing disk on the ceiling. It was there before the wizardry, a sign of a different time with less magic, easily collecting dust but ensorcelled to put out four five times more light than it was designed to. A simple spell, they'll tell you how to do it, even show you the tools they used in one of the little compartments in their worktable.

It is the eternal problem of spellcasters that you need a great deal of stuff to cast spells, all sorts of papers and potions and special tools, like boards with buttons that make words from anywhere in the room, and magic sheets of metal to control the things on the other side of the glass in the other dimensions and worlds.

There are boxes of glues and clips and pins and odd little bits that look like squids and spirals and shooting stars. Things that mark the pages of books but leave no trace so the wizard's (or witch's) marks can remain there own. Most spellcasters don't really believe that everything is meant to be shared.

There are castles, and Magic, and a tower of tiny, complex, already-created spells. They make figures dance, hold celestial choirs frozen in time, perform the tasks of a full team of scribes and bureaucrats. They let artists paint with light and create colors with no pigments. They create maps of worlds that don't exist yet.

There is an astral tether wrapped in wire and glass and grounded in small glowing blue boxes that lets the spellcasters communicate with other wizards and witches all over the world. And sometimes ordinary people too, on tools that are uses more regularly, by people who consider themselves more regular. But the magic is insidious, as more spellcasters become interested in everyday things, everyday things become more like the tools of magicusers. Now many ordinary folk are using tiny boxes of light thinking they are just fancy versions of the things they are using before instead of the things that hang about in a wizards workroom.

Their own spellbooks are a mass of illegible scribbles bound with metal and leather for the important things and metal and pressed remains of books gone by for the others. There are shelves of these but most of their work is stored in their memory and extra memory, a tiny group of small chips barely the size of your thumbnail hold years and years of thoughts and work and dreams, tiny spirit jars with pieces of the spellcasters soul.

There is the usual assortment of owls and vultures and gargoyles, trophies of courts where the spellcaster served, pirate ships raided, journeys completed, adventures successfully survived, surveyors tools, a pen with no ink that can become any type of writing implement, or paint brush and paint any color, a giant glass pane to bring in the other worlds and cast the spells to send them out into the world, a tiny malevolent looking earthsprite gifted by an enemy attempting to look like a friend - it backfired the spellcaster and sprite took a liking to each other right away - the supposedly hidden insult turned into a gracious gift instead.

A tiny handmade crafted box of earthen clay, spirals dug into the exterior blue glass beads pressed in. The spirits of ancestors pressed under glass suspended by brackets. A small touch of a hell that specialized in graphic designs.

In the corner you can't see is a hint, a pinkfaced white haired witch in white whispers into the ear of a black clad greenfaced witch with a small smile and black unruly hair, their images surrounded by many many names the same dusky blood red behind them as the sigils on the opposite wall, underneath them in neat black portfolios and rolled paper tubes are hopes and dreams and passions all stored for future consumption.

The Spellcaster's workroom fully organized, because having recently gone up a level, knowing where your components are is mandatory, and the amount of time you spend working on those higher level spells and memorization for the next take will double if you aren't together.

The seven year old boy who had stumbled into the room by accident thought he recognized the witch on the wall but was in for a world of surprises when he left the room find the owners of the rest of the house . . . . nothing at all was the way things were at his house . . . .

The Dao of Cleaning out Closets

This picture was taken after the Poppet Gypsy Wagon had been shaken about by a silly human. It was of course an accident, but the Poppets then had to clean up.

And one of the rules of cleaning up is that sometimes you make a bigger mess first to make things cleaner later.

It is a time to reduce things and to empty things.

When I chose The House. I was a particular kind of person. I am a person who likes to arrange things, but almost all of the things I built were virtual, verbal or flat. I was not a person with small children, my children were exactly Big Enough Not to Worry. I was not a person who needed a big TV room, but I was a person with computers and books, and flat art made on a computer, and occasionally I might make a rug. But rugs always went away as soon as I was finished.

So I chose The House for a number of it's charms and potentials but did not buy it intending to have a sculpter/hacker/crafting mixed media artist, a mechanical engineer and a painter in it.

I didn't realize that I would have to reinvent myself every decade or so. All three of us have large scale work and large pieces. All four of us have paper intensive hobbies and two of us have record intensive professional lives. So I need a real workspace and the office which really had been started with on person playing games and the other person doing multimedia work needed to be restructured - the three artists all have to use technology we need centralized storage and systems to keep track of the peripherals, some of our supplies are outsized now. We are different than we were.

But the office holds things - the legal detrius of life and health and school and career. I'm clearing it out and it's been disorganized for some time. Now things have shaken us up so I'm making a bigger mess to have less mess in the future. I found drawings and stories and (God Help Me) poetry from my high school years - small betrayals of my claim not to be an artist - reinforcement of my position that if I am one, I'm really rather mediocre.

But they are valuable in some ways - they are baselines for ideas I will be developing for school so I won't have to get stuck in the now, I can improve what I started 20+ years ago.

There are things I've finally lived long enough to outlive their legal lives and I can throw them out into the giant shredder. There are things I was going to throw out that I realized I couldn't because they definitively mark some health concerns and therefore might be important later, since some of the members of the House might be special that way.

But one of the interesting things to me is that through 10 different moves in less than 20 years all of my worlds and the people I built in them are still with me - from junior high school through now. And they all have stories, and the stories are not bad to start, but might become better if I worked on them. It is very, very difficult for a multimedia artist to throw away anything because I have proven over the years that I do reuse it, physically and intellectually.

However, that's no excuse for it to be disorganized. If it's going to keep travelling with me, it's going to have to travel tighter and be more easily found.

Dao is a sword in Chinese - it is single edged and slices and chops

DAO is a data access object

dao is also when pronounced slightly differently "way" and "path" and "road" and represents a philosophy.

When you clean out your closets and look at your paper you cannot lie to yourself. You did this, you ignored this, you bought this, you called a lawyer about this. Here is the evidence. Do you hold on or do you shred.

And there is no one answer that holds for all of everything, not if you do it right. You need to deal with each piece honestly. Then you figure out which keeps going with you and what gets left behind until the next time silly humans shake up your wagon and you have to clean out all over again.

Then you'll look at all the pieces that got added from this time, and you'll look back at all the things you saved from before and that will most likely guide your way when you make the next choices.

And you'll shed (or shred) some more and travel on. It's just like that.

Cleaning closets out sometimes gets a little sad. But there will be room for all the chargers and tablets and canvases and photo boxes and cameras and tripods and portfolios.

Travelling on.

Holiday Briefing: Logic- The Destroyer

Does it seem odd to anyone else that the winter is when we have our Must See Them Holidays in our very, very scattered culture?

We seem so surprised when actual Winter gets in our way.

It's also odd that we put the first semester finals right smack dab inside the cluster of holidays. It pretty much presumes the traditional dependent student; as opposed to say the parent of children or head of household who is expected to create the feelings and events that are supposed to inform all of those fond associations with the season.

And thus the Holidays came.

The Taunting was impacted ( but not stopped - you cannot stop The Taunting). Unlike previous years the presents needed to be hidden only to be revealed on the day of. Part of that was practical - the theme this year was Chocolate. All Chocolate, all the time. Godiva, Hershey's Nestle's, Lindt, Mars, a little boutique outfit that made World Peace bars . . . every night a different chocolate ending with specialized chocolates for each of the Children ( who are not so Childish Anymore - as proven by the eighth candle's Bailey's infused chocolate bar for The Girl).

The secondary Taunting gifts involved clothing. Things delayed due to recession but needed anyway were made fun. Sales were shopped. Artisans were traded with. But we kept the holiday ridiculously low key, lower key even than the Cheapass Taunting of 2009. Last year it was because I was closing down my projects, and knew that things were ending. This year it is because I returned to school to create new beginnings, however the semester was ending.

Here is the catch - I thought I had taken a relatively balanced load but they were all production classes that had final projects before final exams. Although I sort of knew that, in practical terms it escaped me. There were 4 tests in rapid succession in Logic and in order to combat my LD it takes about two days to prep for a test, having done it in a very intense way this last month I discovered what I'm really doing is rewiring my brain temporarily; but so completely that after working on a logic test I was unable to use language properly for two to three days afterwards, creating amusing malapropisms for friends and family and actual Conduction Aphasia for me.

When I first took the Logic and Object Oriented programming classes I had this idea that I would develop strategies that would help other people with symbol processing disorders be able to take and pass the class, however about 2/3 of the way through I realized NO ONE with my disability is going to take these classes to this level - they'd have to be masochists and have unlimited time ( or a psychotic need to prove that they are able to pass the class anyway - at least that's what my mirror tells me) Instead I've developed a series of strategies that can help any number of other people with different LDs, or people who are not naturally adept at the structured thinking these classes require, but if you have a hard core symbol processing disorder, as my programming professor says: "There's nothing wrong with being a poet".

Everything was going well, although I was sleep deprived and then I thought - "I can modify this technique and maybe get some rest."

This was a huge mistake causing me to get a truly dismal grade on the one test I couldn't drop as the lowest score. How bad? 25. There's an average killer.

I found a scoring error and got an extra 13 points but it pretty much meant that I had to really, really invest in the final - 4 days of drills and prep. 4 hours of actual test.

But I did survive, and the Holidays happened without me speaking properly. The last final was on the 21. The trip to Grandma's House was determined to be an Xmas Day Trip. My Perfectly Normal Mother-in-Law was pronounced healthy enough to leave her house for Xmas Eve.

There was much rejoicing.

So really, everything was as good as it could be. And then finally my grades were posted - I'd gotten a 100 on the final and because of weighting managed to get an A for the class. Had I scored lower it would have been a scholarship affecting C.

Huzzah! But I was exhausted.

Anti Claus however had no patience for that sort of nonsense and broke in to make copies of our keys, and deliver a sonic screwdriver that actually is a screwdriver, kick ass motorcycle boots and small bombs of pixie dust to the Children. I think I was Found Boring this year.

I think I found myself a bit boring this year.

But I was not the only person in the family and some of the other had been waiting for Xmas day for some time. They had plans.

We travelled out to Grandma's house, where Grandma's Gingerbread Poppet had found the perfect tree, and the Perfectly Normal Husband brought all of his Holiday up with us. It is obvious that the family would like a return to things being arty.

New Poppets have joined the house - Aunti Claus brought some for the Children ( apparently she didn't approve of a Poppet-free holiday. They are Candy Cane Poppets but they look a little blood spattered - one wonders where they accompanied her first before landing in the stockings)

My parents gave me a photobox. My Perfectly Normal Husband gave me a vampire, a wizard, a literary Death and a Tinker. Someone got me a Magic Trackpad.

I just like saying I have a Magic Trackpad.

Now here's the thing about Grandma's House. It's pretty much the test model for "lake effect" snow. So before leaving, pretty much the only non syllogistic thing I understood was the weather report for Grandma's House. And the report was "There might be some snow" and no one thought it would be much, but we warned all of our fellow travelers to inform loved ones and offices that there was a chance we would be snowed in at Grandma's House.

Then we got all pre-occupied with The Boy getting sick and my amusing attempts to communicate. And so we went over the river and through the woods, as we do yearly and played with dancing trees and had yummy food and shared a few bottles of wine and sort of showed the youngsters what "keeping a weather eye out" looks like it in the digital age.

Things were moving along nicely but we were starting to go - "Hmmn . . . Gee. Might need to stay an extra day or two, " when all of a sudden the word "Blizzard" started popping up on our weather eye screens.

Well they weren't kidding. We played it hour by hour but had to leave Grandma's House in a flurry all of our own because they were calling for a Blizzard at the House too.

Grandma's got about 20 inches, we got about 10. We raced the storm home and won by an inch. The other 9 fell after we were settled back in, but it wasn't much of a visit. The poppets didn't even get to come out and play with Grandma's holiday decor.

But we did spend it together and the food was wonderful.

Here is the thing I learned last week. If I were not inherently logical, I would not have been able to succeed, but to immerse myself to much in logic damages me and everything around me. There is a reckoning. The Art part came easier to me, but there was no balance in that either. The two need to be combined instead of in opposition. There was not enough time with family and just being. 6 Days - but a microcosm of the year.

And on the 7th day the Poppets came out and said - "Wake up sleepyhead! You need to play with your toys."

Well. I suppose I'm not back into right thinking for Poppets yet, I just started playing with my toys today. However I am very grateful for my friends and my family and my project teammates at school, because I am thinking about things as though they might be fun again.

That's a pretty good way to mark the solstice I think.

No one makes graphic novels about the adventures of getting the family together for a photo, but there are all sorts of stories when you do. This year I'll bet there were all sorts of adventures behind all of the holiday photos. Stories that will be told each time the album opens.

A fictional version of ourselves for the Dreamtime:

New Year's coming . . . .