FRAGMENTS

Selected fragments of experience recorded and my current obsessions.

Oct 2004b
Sometime very soon this 'blog' is going to grow up and have its own domain. It will continue to cover the same ground, generative and computational art, experimental film and video, edge mathematics but will likely contain longer articles that have been building up in a txt file for quite a while. Watch this (browser)space!

Oct 2004a
A search on google for 'Stan Brakhage' brings up the page of fredcamper.com an excellent site of writing and reviews on experiemntal film with a huge and illuminating section on the work of Stan Brakhage. Theres lots of excellent reading here and a wonderous page of stills taken from Stans films.

Barter - swap - trade. Will trade a used copy of the faces of death part 2 for your washing and ironing 15 shirts or 4 home cooked dinners. More esoteric Ads here

Sept 2004d
Thanx to john for alerting me to the Sky Ear event in Greenwich on Thursday. Helium filled balloons in clusters pulsating different colours like cellular automata! Telephone numbers were projected onto the ground enabling the audience to call the balloon clusters thereby affecting their colours.

I first came across the 'Voynich Manuscript' whilst reading Terrence Mckenna's 'Archaic Revival'... Its a mysterious collection of uknown celestial diagrams,
exotic plants and cryptic writing whos author is unknown. Again i come across it via almaleh, a site dedicated to books written with a complex structure, secret writings, ambigrams, Oulipo, palimpsestes, micrographies...


Sept 2004c
Dont really get to read that much these days. But one thing i do, habitually, is buy and read each new copy of the WIRE magazine. This month has an article on Kenneth Anger and his films. I have the 'Magick lantern cycle' set of films on VHS and particualrly love 'Lucifer Rising' & 'Invocation of my demon brother'. The Modern Art gallery has an exhibtion of stills taken from his films running at this present moment, if your not in london or cant make it to the gallery have a look at these alchemical/magickal/orgiastic visions here.

Sept 2004b
Ive had my head stuck inside After Effects for the last few days working concurrently on two different projects. Im not saying much till their done and i can at least post some stills, but one is of an erotic psychedelic temperature and the other is about psychogeographical signage!

Sept 2004a
Check out my Jared Tarbell interview at actionscript.com

shhhh at the V&A was worth the visit, if only for the party in its beautiful courtyard.


August 2004b
TOXIC CULTURE & the mental enviroment Part 1 :
Toxic culture - the US is a petri dish par excellence for ongoing mental, physical, psychic and spiritual degredation, but the UK is close on its heels thats for sure.
The bibliography of toxic culture - a catalogue of deceit from the power pushing megacorps, food industries and drug companies.
Shopping fucks up you mind - oh but dont worry, you have a disease, its called 'compulsive shopping disorder' and the pharmaceutical companies want to SELL you a cure.

August 2004a
Data visualization - information as art & info-aesthetics is up at actionscript.com. A collation and exploration of my favourite data visualizations done in flash.


July 2004d
SYNERGETICS - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking By R. Buckminster Fuller. I twice had the good fortune of staying with friends in Pensylvania in a geodesic dome, which is what Fuller is popularly known as the inventor of. This online version of synergetics looks absolutely stunning, particularly because of his idiosyncratic use of poetic language mixed with scientific and mathematical ideas. Check out the beautiful plates too.

July 2004c.
Fractal Botany and the Art of Recursion. My second article in a series looking at techniques and philosphies for making art with actionscript.

July 2004b.
Computational Art made with ActionScript, written by your host. Theres going to be some interviews with my favourite actionscript alchemists coming to that space soon too, so keep your eye and eye on it!


July 2004a.
Whats been going on? No fragments since late april. The very concept of busy needs an upgrade! What has Metic been doing? Well.... his been frantically working on a number of personal projects and also doing some actionscript for a Smithsonian project that chronicles the history of the Lakota Indian Winter Counts. Winter Counts are the name given to the collective body of Artworks from the Lakota. His also been doing some writing for a new Flash magazine that should go live any time soon. Im going to be presenting a set of articles dealing with the methodolgies and philosophies of artists who use actionscript as a raw material for producing art. This fragments section should be flowing once again from now on.

April 2004b.
In amsterdam we saw a coot collecting rubbish in the canals - it seems its nesting time for these odd, sometimes hermetic, idiosyncratic water birds. This particular bird had aquired a range of discarded human debris and built its stylish nest entirely from it. In the middle of this nest peices of an amsterdam tourist map had been used and ingeneously folded into the structure. A psychogeographic coot no less! - obviously using the cut-up technique to ensure a random deep navigational experience on the canals. Pretty appropriate, for me, for a city whose center and red light district forms the shape of a brain (upside-down), its roads and canals connecting axons allowing its own akashic memory to be traced through the paths of inhabitants. Unfortunately i have no picture.

April 2004b
Fantasy Architecture is a an exhibition i would love to see. See some drafts for some amazing imagined constructions. Part of the exhibtion contains works by Archigram. Check out some of these drafts, sketches and plans by Peter Cook i found searching for images on the web. The 'Plug-in-city reminds me of some of the work you used to find on designgraphik.com before it turned into a big shop. The walking city would certainly be fun when its inabitants decide to go on a collective vacation! Heres another nice picture. Buidlings or not - the schematics and colour are beautiful.


April 2004a
Back from Amsterdam! and before that La Gomera ( a small lesser know island of the Canaries ). Pleasure is good!

Mar 2004a
Object Orientated Psychogeography! using object orientated programming metaphors to allow null-pointerless cityspace derivations!

Mar 2004a
Fractals! Beflix has a great and funny anti-fractal essay which captures my feelings entirely. But fractals aint all dodgey, for example - what about these fluid monochrome clifford attractors? They remind me of global data-density visualisations. This L-system strain on Paul Bourkes site is very similar to some feedback fractals i generated with my digital camera a few years ago, and beautiful they are too, visually demonstrating the fractalcality of ferns. Feedback fractals are it seems not as rare as I previously thought and are quite easy make thanks to some instructions given by Paul Henry King. Look for a more detailed video feedback post soon. The Buddhabrot Technique by Melinda Green details a method for making fractals in the image of the enlightened one! Again, beleive it or not, i discovered this technique myself by experimentation and accident some years back! Allthough Fractals are invariably mapped using mathematical equations, they dont have to be made using mathematical equations: the method, decalcomania ( which to me sounds like an obssessive sexual predilection for stickers ) popularised by max ernst ( incidently a favourite of mine aswell!) can be used to make branching dendrites with only paper and some paint. So get to it!

Feb 2004c
I just went on a little journey. After passing through the Oort cloud, a quick 1-2-3 skip via the Dumbell, Trifid and Eagle Nebulas I landed at the Corna Cluster a little way past the Great Attractor! After a small break i wandered through the Zone of Avoidance eventually reaching the Comoving Future Visibilty Limit. Heres my map.

Feb 2004b
So the sound and visuals went well at kArabesque last sat and soon ill post some pictures of itinerant belly dancers sending shadow waves into the photon haze! The music to accompany the live visual installation included a range of dronal work and charged up magickal noise with some spoken word and poems mixed in for good measure. Allthough it was all pretty much obscure stuff, ppl still came to me and said things like, 'oh thats angus maclise', or 'heh isn't that ira cohen, what disc is that from?'. Its good to know there are wild children out there who are plugged into the same matrix.

Here Ira Cohen gives account of the poetry scene in katmandu in the 70s, the types of paper and the printing methods used. Here you can see the artifacts he and others on the scene produced.

This week transphormetic was hunted down using search engines with the following keywords:-

data from nature
javatronik
math creativity
flash math code
maat
gnomons
flash lab
patterns in nature
patterns nature geometric
geometric nature
flash math creativity
interactive animated flash - freaky flash
art interface
geometric patterns nature

glad someone is thinking along the lines of 'art interface', or artiface as i call it.

Feb 2004a
In the days before i bullied my computer into recursing itself into infinite nested for loops to make my art i used to use a lot of black biro ink in the construction of pictures that look quite a lot like this, this or this. If you dont believe me ill post a scan or two - but you'll have to dare me! Also check out this blokes tip.

I imagine of the 200 or so average distinct hosts that view this site daily about 20 of them, looking at the stats, check this blog type thing that i write, i wonder how many people actually come back on a regular basis? For me personally there are a couple of obscure bog/journals that i have to peek back at even though the content only updates maybe once a week - the obscurity and specialisation of posts that are so dear to metic epicenter means thats its almost as if the words and links were chosen by me, perhaps while i was asleep in computational dreams. If there are afficianados of this little place - please put your hands up now (mail me) and ill post you a limited edition artwork! i bet you cant wait!

Of the two ppl that live on london that regularly visit this part of the site - you can come see some of my live video 'installation' work tomorrow nite at the 419 gallery in stratford.

Jan 2004c
Just reading Italo calvino's 'Invisible Cities', something thats been on the reading list for a few years but for one reason or another never got round to it. The first pages were read on the tube between embankment and hammersmith tube stations this morning. It struck me that in the meloncholy, surreal and at times fantastical discriptions of these imaginary cities his writing conjurs distinct recollections of Georgio de Chiricos great metaphysical landscapes of longing. Some time back conversing with a friend who did a lot of research on the subject of art and social history i learned that situationists had a penchant for dear old de Chirico in their psychogeographical derivations and thus these three points are equaliterally connected nodes in my mind.

jan 2004b
Nearly every day i hear stories of planatary degradation caused by humans mainly in the name of profit! The Salmon in Scottish rivers are now so full of dioxins that they are unfit for human consumption. The weather is completely fucked up and the predicted results of this are that many hundreds of animal species are facing complete extinction. Silent Running is an awesome 'sci-fi' film taking a look at a now highly plausible possibilty of the earth being so polluted in the future that it cannot sustain plant or animal life at all. This film works on many levels; ecological concerns, the humanisation of robots and the neurosis resulting from deep routed priciples that have been attacked by 'so-called' reason.

Jan 2004a
longtime no updateAfterEvent().
Hardly put a foot outside the flat since the 30th of 2003. Total cutoff. Spent time loving sugumi, watching dvds, listening to music and playing proEvolution Soccer! Watched, re-watched Tetsuo - Iron man, Erasearhead, Pi, Tron, and Wings of Desire on the big projector screen amongst a larger pile that i wont mention. Amazing the common link between the first three, not just the methods of filming and camerawork but also the fascination with the future-past industrial landscape and the dreams, nightmares and discoveries it conjures.

Berlin trip was just as. Kreuzberg, Casino, 2ci, berlin haiku, alexanderplatz radio mask, community squats, stencils, street art, s-bahn reflections, rem koolhaas exhibition. pink telephone love. botschaftn T.

Dec 2003c
Off to Berlin tomorrow (13th) , if anyone happens to read this and knows what i should not miss while i'm there, ping me!

Dec 2003b
Since I've been mainly involving myself recently with the hypnotic, hypnogogic, trance-inducing qualities of the interplay of light and sound (using resolume mixing video to a beamer ) i thought it was high time I paid a revisit to the work of Brion Gysin. Me and a friend once built a dream machine from a set of plans we found on the web, way back when the web was full of jewels and great things and not much else.

Dec 2003a
'The Palace of Wisdom', the William Blake event was a brilliant success. Edge poets from the London scene cranked up the visionary incantations for 24hours non stop. I was lucky to be given a fine room in which to project lightbeam mantras all night long. I layered flash animations of illuminated eyescans of Blakes poems against personal dv experiments. 20 loops phasing in and out creating unexpected combinations and permutations. For the soundtrack i choose Coil's 'Astral disaster', an amazing visionary drone work. Aswell as a multitude of bohemian types, some academics from the blake society came along - hopefully the photons encoded them. Expect to see stills up on the site soon.

Shhhh, look what i've been nurturing. These Mexican Cubensis were remarkable easy to grow. This crop was havested last week, they took about two weeks to reach full size and i guess weighed in at around 250gms! When they were seperated and layed out to dry on opened pages of a large sketchbook they reminded me of these beautiful fungus illustrations.

Nov 2003c
Ah, The usual deal - so many things to explore, read, do, work on and hardly any time to do just one thing to the level I'd like to. This week I've been researching William Blake, particularly his illustrations and engravings. Friday is his birthday and to commerate ill be showing some video mixes, layered evocations and invocations of his great poems at a special do in Hoxton, London. There is a particualrly brilliant repository of plates of blakes work at blakearchive.org. Here is a plate of my favourite blake Poem, The Sick Rose.

Ok, then what? well outside of getting my head down and making something with Proce55ing and producing some print artwork for Rojo Magazine, i want to produce an isometric tile game in flash! Inspiration comes via the excellent tutorials by klas kroon at OutsideOfSociety and these by tonypa.

Nov 2003b
I bought a fractal cauliflower on saturday. Infact all cauliflowers are fractal in shape and construct, each florette contains many little florettes and each little florette even smaller ones. All these florettes are indentical in shape and form. I think you know the story. Its not that easy to see the fractal nature of standard cauliflowers, but if you get hold of a romanesque cauliflower, as i did, you will be amazed at its fractal form. The woman who sold me it assured me that it tasted just like an ordinary cauliflower as if i might be worried by its non-conformist geometrical complexity. Ofcourse, i let her know i was after the alluring taste of fractal self-replicating structures, then cycled off with recursive romanesque recipes spinning around in my mind.

Nov 2003a
Earlier in the summer i made a short film, 'The fired dance'. You can check out some stills here.
On friday Samhain was correctly spent watching john crow and his gang perform the superb southwark mysteries.
Saturday was spent at the Tate Modern. I dont care too much for the exhibitions - asphyxiating while walls and too many people, but i love the main turbine room - an enormous cathedral station! Right now in this room you can see a massive orange sun setting in heavy mist.

Oct 2003b
Do you give a fuck?
The Corporate Fallout detector reads barcodes off of consumer products, and makes a noise similar to a gieger counter of varying intensity based on the social or environmental record of the company that produces the product. Do you want to Save or Delete?
elsewhere : greenpeace + ethical consumer + adbusters
If you think im not doing my job perhaps you should do yours :)

Oct 2003a
Just returned from an exceptional Crete camping expedition- photos to follow shortly.

sept 2003
Blockhead and Daddies Bighead
These incredible 100 ft high grotesque inflatable sculptures by Paul Mccarthy are humorous monuments to the stupidity of man.
Enrique "El Nino" Metinides
Around 40 paces from my current work place in London's west end is the photographers gallery on Great Newport St. Right now check the amazing compositions of disasters by Enrique "El Nino" Metinides. ' Enrique Metinides continues to live in Mexico City where his attention has turned from photography to video. From his apartment, equipped with numerous cable and satellite TVs, Metinides sits day and night monitoring the unfolding of world events, and cataloguing different orders of disaster - from hurricanes to suicide bombing - into a rapidly growing archive'.