11:58:38 This live transcription,
11:58:42 just downloaded. Afterwards, and they'll start recording.
11:58:53 Afterwards, and they'll start recording. I'm going to make other people.
11:58:57 co hosts just
11:59:01 for sharing screen.
11:59:12 Thanks for doing this is no problem Jess, or the rain so far.
11:59:25 Ran seven men to build cars been outlets for a few minutes, only for a few seconds, then it came back on. Of course all the computers for off.
11:59:33 Does that happen a lot where you live. Yeah. Yeah.
11:59:38 Are you on the west coast of Vancouver Island yes oh east coast.
11:59:46 Yeah, it happens quite a bit here and Nova Scotia, but hopefully not today.
11:59:53 Hello, it is really, it's really dusty I'm watching all of the trees, bounce around outside the window. So, we've heard a couple of cracks out in the woods.
12:00:09 Francisco.
12:00:10 It's overcast and very cold, but nuts. Still, you know, a bit of shine through which we, which we like.
12:00:20 And then partners in Toronto, right now, and she comes back on Tuesday, which keeps telling me how it was still summer there much longer than it was summer in Vancouver.
12:00:30 We really pushed our luck, so nice. Now it's chilling your bones, not used to it.
12:00:38 No.
12:00:44 How's everything going.
12:00:45 Yeah, Yeah, I had a busy week I was at a conference like a zoom conference and to the presentation on Thursday and I'm in a group exhibition here, of people who have recently retired from teaching up at our college so there are seven of us who are showing
12:01:03 together at the art college gallery so I just got back a few hours ago from setting up my work so yes yeah so yeah yeah it'll be fun to see everybody we can have I think 46 people in the gallery at one time.
12:01:22 So, yeah, so I'll get to see a bunch of people. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, be really good. Did you retire during code. Yeah I retired last December.
12:01:33 Yeah. Yeah, so this this time last year I was on a half sabbatical like a half year.
12:01:40 So the spring before that I finished teaching the semester online. So I did the last five or six weeks online and then summer.
12:01:50 And then the fall was a sabbatical which was great.
12:01:54 And, Yeah, and I'd always plan to retire in you know at the end of that semester anyway.
12:02:01 So I did.
12:02:03 It's a weird day, like we think about, like the high school students or university students not getting the like the closure of their transition. Yeah, but I guess it's on the other side to you don't get your, you know, your dinners or your goodbyes.
12:02:18 Yeah, yeah, all that stuff. Yeah, I had to move out of my office by myself and pack everything up and didn't I didn't even see anyone around to wave goodbye to for anything was, it was kind of weird, but yeah but it's nice actually that they're doing
12:02:47 So now, that's been my week.
12:02:51 Others
12:02:58 going through severe case of writer's block or whatever block.
12:03:07 I think, with regard to this group but it is part of my problem is I'm not too sure what I supposed to do.
12:03:16 And I've had this problem before with with leaning out of Windows.
12:03:20 I sort of get lost in.
12:03:24 I feel like I ought to be doing some if you feel like I have writer's block.
12:03:28 You know, then there's something urgent that I should be doing, but I don't know what it is.
12:03:34 So, creativity, deficit.
12:03:38 Yeah, me too, but kind of on the other side of it it's like physics.
12:03:45 But you know how it all fits together so I think that's maybe just part of the situation.
12:03:53 But I have to say I really liked your chart, I really, I just had a chance to look at an hour or so ago and those very helpful. Actually,
12:04:03 it's kind of off putting because there are too many things that can cook.
12:04:07 Yeah.
12:04:12 Francisco, are you.
12:04:15 I, well, I, you did. I was gonna say you you wrote a whole thing, a really lovely kind of stupid as well, it did, it did remind me to find the bit on on on fetishism and thrown an altar in the, in the introduction of aesthetic education and just before
12:04:33 I forget what feedback is actually doing is she's, she's setting up her idea of aesthetic education by looking at Gregory Bateson notion of the double bind.
12:04:45 And how children, sort of learn to learn through, through the idea of play.
12:04:52 And in explaining that Gregory Bateson says that, you know, that an aesthetic education fails with thrown thrown an altar, and then she, she sort of remembers that for Freud fetishism was also this notion of, you know, the king and the Pope.
12:05:11 So it was useful to me I'm still making connections.
12:05:15 I'm good, I'm, I'm applying for PhDs, and maybe a teaching position, which is actually quite well it's a little bit like talk about science fiction it's a bit like projecting myself into alternate universes that are quite different.
12:05:33 Whatever allows me to do the most research is what I want to say, I want to do but, you know, once have one has to work.
12:05:41 I'm trying to write a paper in Spanish for a conference.
12:05:45 That's next month. And even though it's about my work it's actually, and even though I was raised in Spanish it's actually very very very hard. So, in many ways, the easiest thing for me to do has actually been sort of like, avoiding my work for that
12:06:03 conference and making connections for this, and I came up with both a kind of sketch for a sort of folded out form of the client diagram that relates specifically to the presentations, the first day.
12:06:28 couple of years ago, where I would take my compositions, and I would sort of explode them on to using Photoshop, which kind of started reminding reminding me of what I kind of understand the accelerator accelerator actually does the particles you know
12:06:37 by sort of like mashing them so I sort of remembered that I had been trying to do something like that with my compositions and then I tried it with a bunch more.
12:06:46 So this has been the easier part to do but only because I can't write in Spanish.
12:06:53 Yeah, I know the emotional labor that goes into both PhD applicants and teaching job applications.
12:06:59 Francisco so I know I know how exhausting that must be, but it's and it's crazy like talking about projecting yourself like seeing yourself in either a different city or a different program.
12:07:13 And then basically counting on it.
12:07:16 That's what I did for so many years, like every time I would apply to a job.
12:07:21 I would already be living in that space and doing that job. like while applying.
12:07:28 And then it didn't really happen too often, I definitely apply for many.
12:07:32 So I know that I know that exhaustion.
12:07:35 I was, I was on Vancouver Island Up until yesterday, just
12:07:42 is interfering.
12:07:44 Now Tofino to serve.
12:07:47 But everything was bad weather was bad for him through his back out of home two days early.
12:07:55 just before the storm.
12:07:58 And I know I this is like my preemptive apology. I didn't look too closely the requirements for this meeting and so the, like the iteration. I thought, you know the iteration would basically just be a continuation of the thinking that we had done, kind
12:08:11 of together, which is, I think what I've done, and I provide this piece of writing maybe an hour after this meeting ends but it's just, just kind of a list of kind of taking Jesus's lead and talking about particular stupidities in my life.
12:08:27 And then also thinking about how that can lead into like a group iteration or something that we can continue to talk about, because I do think like this collaborative structures, really productive.
12:08:44 To take like to generously take each other's suggestions and run with them so I kind of, I keep being impressed by Randy and Ingrid's structure, you know, especially over the years I imagined it was nuanced somewhat more this year than the previous years
12:09:03 but
12:09:03 I need to figure out a way that make this a permanent.
12:09:09 No Institute. Yeah, yeah, there's Institute.
12:09:14 That's a great idea. Yeah.
12:09:20 I should add to that, I do have visual stuff to share today and maybe like Francisco I also kind of not exploded things but thought a lot about the scattering and went back into some collage techniques that I had been using in other contexts and.
12:09:42 So I have a series of just they're just studies or, like, diagrams, but using collage, and I've just got them in preview I can go through the images and show you what what I was doing, but it's kind of like looking at my process as a sort of case study.
12:09:59 and like stupidity and chance randomness parameters, all of those things are kind of part of it.
12:10:08 That'd be great. Yeah.
12:10:14 So, yeah, it was just going to quickly ask, were either you either you Jess or Jamie were you close to that freight train that's burning. I just saw that this morning there's apparently off the coast of Vancouver Island there's like a freight train that's
12:10:27 like burning and Wade in the wind and things. It looked.
12:10:32 It looked serious. Yeah Yeahs know I had a cell phone because the tracks file The tracks are here there's nobody ever uses them.
12:10:44 It says, See it's on its own.
12:10:50 And I don't know how close to the shore will close to the coastline, it is but that's not great. That wasn't here but it looked it they said that there's no danger to anyone immediately but, yeah.
12:11:04 Watch out. It's not a British tend to leak oil. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah.
12:11:11 Well, fingers crossed. It's a cargo freighter or an empty one.
12:11:33 Right. And so I think every time something like this happens, there's just a whole group of people are like this is what we're talking about. Yeah.
12:11:49 Watch it a million years. Oh, yeah.
12:11:49 I heard her, there was a really interesting seminar a triumph. Earlier this week, which I almost never attend.
12:11:55 But this one was about, about dark matter.
12:12:02 I unfortunately I was late to it so I missed. I missed the easy parts, but it seems that there's, there's a model, about which particles, could be you know what kind of particle could be could have these properties of being stable and heavy.
12:12:24 At the same time, and it was very interesting to me because I've been trying to think about science fiction ideas.
12:12:31 There's a there. I had an idea for a science fiction concept, which would explain analysts dark matter if dark matter was alive.
12:12:44 That was completely covering animism everything would be, everything would be would be alive. Right.
12:12:50 We should be great.
12:12:52 Yeah.
12:12:53 There's um, I just read something briefly in the, in the Guardian yesterday was talking about premonitions and premonitions being like, they had this example of a young man that was in a, like a fast food restaurant and he just felt this like shiver come
12:13:10 over him.
12:13:11 And then a few hours later realized that his grandfather had died, around the exact same time.
12:13:18 And, you know, a lot of psychologists and humanists would say like it's, it's just confirmation bias people, like, go back and retroactively place more importance on these things.
12:13:28 But then there's just this off.
12:13:30 Like offhand reference to some scientists thinking, the quantum mechanics has something to do with it right so the quantum entanglement between, between people, which was kind of fascinating.
12:13:44 I don't know, I don't have the capacity to think through it but
12:13:49 there's a group, including some famous, famous physicists and famous fingers, which I've been invited to join their.
12:14:01 They're playing the quantum mechanics card to try to explain how biology is, you know,
12:14:10 the expression of the universal soul. It's got people like Christophe copyrighted also brand Chosen One a Nobel Prize when he was 21, or 22 I forget.
12:14:25 And also, branch Joseph's and what a Nobel Prize when he was 21, or 22 I forget. In and drove him crazy.
12:14:27 But the problem is, you know, these guys are also starting to say, and, you know, this sort of waving the magic word quantum around to justify all kinds of.
12:14:45 Whoo stuff.
12:14:45 Something that Capra has been doing for decades.
12:14:50 And now they're starting to include some comments about liberty and human freedom and, you know, it's, it's into the realm.
12:15:04 And I'm, I'm frankly I'm extremely disturbed by that because when I see people who are, you know, a little crazy but not stupid.
12:15:15 drifting into the same space.
12:15:21 It bothers me a lot.
12:15:23 Yeah.
12:15:26 I started, I started been relaxed.
12:15:28 Having this relaxed feeling that lol You know, is only for idiots you know you don't have to worry intelligent people will never fall for this crap.
12:15:37 But that's not true.
12:15:40 Yeah, it's really it's stunning actually in as, and especially when you read or hear of people who have training and education in science, believing this stuff so you know nurses who are anti boxers or doctors, you know people who are really knowledgeable
12:15:59 and some basic practices and beliefs about science but it just seems to get by them when it when it comes to these kinds of topics.
12:16:14 It was interesting to read Foushee, the last couple days I guess he's been doing interviews or media stuff and again he just reiterating that you know when scientists change their minds about things it's not because they're stupid or making things up
12:16:31 it's because it's because of science. Yeah.
12:16:39 Yeah.
12:16:39 you
12:16:39 know, scientists believe all scientists, right. That's the whole point.
12:16:44 That's how it works.
12:16:47 So, but when people say, with science, you said science said this and now it's now you're saying something else, so obviously I can't trust anything scientists say, well, you shouldn't.
12:17:09 doesn't mean that you're right. So it's it.
12:17:12 It's, I don't know I don't know what to say I'm feeling very depressed about this right now because it seems like we're, we're stuck stuck in a spiral down to, you know, primitive religions.
12:17:29 I think people are feeling a lot of pressure in the build up towards Glasgow as well there's so many expectations about what could happen should happen and might not happen there I think a lot of opinions are very heightened at the moment because of that,
12:17:53 about Facebook. Yeah. Yesterday I heard it heard a thing on the radio about how Facebook is planning to institute. The metaverse that is, instead of seeing a bunch of kids going around, you know tech dub dub dub dub dub, we're going to be going around
12:18:10 with Dr. Hill let's let me just won't see them.
12:18:15 They will come out of it.
12:18:17 Yeah, let's be in their basement. So you guys all seen. Ready Player One.
12:18:28 No, really should watch it.
12:18:28 It's, it's an excellent rendition of this novel about the not too distant future. Hmm.
12:18:41 Well, Bobby Do you want to share.
12:18:42 Yeah, sure.
12:18:45 Okay, so it might take me a minute to find them on my desktop but bear with me.
12:18:58 I was just gonna say that all I can think of is that if people would have that energy into getting clean water to Apollo it. Yeah. Yeah. But that's a, that's a hard sell.
12:19:15 That's such a good friend of mine, or a colleague of mine who's 95 or something like that he's really old, but he's one of the most brilliant, maybe the most brilliant person I've ever met.
12:19:24 He invented a way of making magnets work better.
12:19:31 Oh yes, it's kind of trivial, but it turns out he could get 30% more magnetic field out of the out of a permanent magnet, or out of a magnet. And this means that he can make 30% more powerful electric motors, which doesn't sound like much but we're talking
12:19:58 about a trillion dollar industry.
12:19:53 He came to a, an outfit in England. That makes water pumps on the condition that they would spend the extra money.
12:20:04 Giving water pumps to, to promote communities all over the world that needed to be able to get clean water.
12:20:12 So that was cool. I mean, I always think of the, the polio vaccine was it in the 50s maybe there was patented for $1 or given away for adult Yeah.
12:20:23 Because, again, you can't patent a son, you know, like why would you Yeah, and I was looking for that and in the coven response.
12:20:30 Yeah.
12:20:33 Merkel.
12:20:34 The guys at Oxford had planned to release to, you know, make this public public domain and Microsoft.
12:20:46 Probably Bill Gates, went to them and talk them out of it, say oh you can't do that, that's against that's against the basic principles of modern civilization intellectual property.
12:20:59 Yeah.
12:21:02 So gross, but I'm encouraged by your, your friend.
12:21:10 Yeah, me too.
12:21:09 Um, okay so are you seeing the image there now.
12:21:12 Okay, so
12:21:16 I made some notes at a certain point, while after I did a few of these but maybe I'll just talk through them.
12:21:25 So yeah, it's just a notebook with graph paper in it, and I decided to punch holes that have some used paper and try different ways of scattering the holes.
12:21:39 And I was interested in the fact that, you know, I refer to them as holes, but they're not holes actually there things are.
12:21:47 And the whole is what's left in the paper so already there was this kind of paradox that interested me.
12:21:53 So this was taking five of these holes and dropping them through a plastic funnel, three and three quarter inch diameter, so the top of the funnel going down to the bottom, at a height of three inches, and just wherever they landed I that's where I glued
12:22:11 them.
12:22:13 And then a high the two inches, and the paper is black, or has print dark printed ink on one side and white on the other.
12:22:26 So there was this interesting thing about, you know, why they landed white side or dark side up.
12:22:35 So this is at one inch,
12:22:39 and afterwards when I was reflecting on these I thought, some of the interesting things to me were clusters, and when things were clustered and then there you'll see some examples of where the holes overlap.
12:22:57 Looks like what go board.
12:23:00 Oh yeah, yeah.
12:23:04 Okay so and then at a certain point I realized it's hard to glue them all down.
12:23:10 You know when I just let them all fall at once, and then have to remember where they all land it so then I got into dropping them down one at a time.
12:23:27 Okay and then I turned the funnel upside down so the round the circle that you see as the outline of the top of the funnel so that's upside down and dropping the holes through the top
12:23:42 five hole dropped through consecutively.
12:23:47 So all from the same height just from the bottom of the funnel upside down, And then six starting to get overlaps.
12:23:58 Seven.
12:24:02 Eight.
12:24:05 I was really interested in parameters so the graph paper itself is is a set of parameters the size of the page but also the funnel when I had the funnel right on the paper obviously that's a constraint as well and in some cases like maybe this one, maybe
12:24:24 some of the holes hit the side and turned over bounced around, and does a nice cluster three there in the middle.
12:24:34 So here's one where you know it was resting right at the edge.
12:24:42 And in the process of doing all of this I lost two of them.
12:24:49 And I didn't want to stop what I was doing and you know, rub around on the floor so I just punched a couple of extra holes. And then when I was finished the whole thing and cleaning up I found the two extra holes so.
12:25:01 So I put them here on the paper outside the funnel.
12:25:08 And these are holes where the holes came from. So,
12:25:14 and there.
12:25:16 Well you'll see in a minute.
12:25:18 There, there, the circles are cut out of 10, the using a tin can. That is the 10 that I keep the holes in.
12:25:29 So it's about you know container inside of container and turning the paper, both sides.
12:25:39 And then I took the funnel and did an outline of the funnel and cut that circle out of a piece of paper that is like an off print from model printing project like 15 years ago, where I did rubbings of manifold covers that I found on the side of actually
12:25:59 Lakeshore Boulevard in Toronto. So those holes that you see the pattern of holes are are actually holes in a manifold cover but I also punched holes out of them.
12:26:13 in some places.
12:26:15 So holes and holes inside a funnel.
12:26:21 And the same thing with this one.
12:26:26 And then taking the 10 that a keep the holes in and cutting that hole out of the funnel shape, and then, you know, punching more also.
12:26:39 uh, so there's the 10 of the holes.
12:26:42 There's the funnel.
12:26:47 There's some more of the paper with the holes punched in this is paper that was from the print shop I was working in at the time and they were off prints, made by another printmakers they're not minder random.
12:27:02 And then just flipping it over.
12:27:06 I'm just going to look through my notes and see if there's anything else that I made notes about.
12:27:13 In what ways, if any, is this stupid.
12:27:18 Is this or how is this related to invisible forces is chance invisible force.
12:27:26 And then I thought about whether it was a narrative business a narrative or an animation is this is the drive to create or impose a narrative and invisible force.
12:27:40 And then the big question what does it mean that two of them went missing during the process and then I found them later time.
12:27:50 So that's what I've been goofing around with
12:27:57 wonderful, beautiful.
12:28:00 I'll stop sharing now
12:28:04 thinking that the connection, for me, is with with go in and go.
12:28:12 The placement of the stones mean and go it's black and white stones right yeah stones, go only on the interstices.
12:28:22 You know the places where the lines cross. Yeah, it's, it's the most orderly arrangement possible in the sense that, you know, people think, you know, hundred steps ahead to try to decide what they can do.
12:28:39 What will happen to stay puts the stone down there.
12:28:44 In the beginning of the go Game Master go game looks almost exactly like the first picture you showed, except the stones were not on the interstices.
12:28:58 We really were fascinated me to see the to somehow if they could capture the start with the, the most chaotic possible kind of a distribution of rules, and then gradually move them into a pattern, taken from a master go game and towards the end.
12:29:20 Oh, yeah. two eyes and zigzag flight.
12:29:25 Yeah guys do anything and don't go vaguely recall it but it's been decades, decades, this, this is interesting. also because you know that the new AI.
12:29:42 What's it called something Go, go, or something like that, which taught itself to play go in 24 hours playing against itself and then it defeated the world's champion.
12:29:55 Yeah, I think I remember reading that, yeah, This is really topical current stuff.
12:30:02 Do you play badly.
12:30:08 But it's, It's a really fun game.
12:30:11 So do you think it has like it's obviously about chance and probabilities and strategy and so on but are there other other principles that work in that or other forces at work in the game that interest you
12:30:33 know it's a game with excruciating Lee simple rules.
12:30:37 There was only like three or four rules.
12:30:40 And unlike chess.
12:30:42 But out of those rules emerges, all these all these patterns that are recognized as being as having
12:30:55 properties that are much more exotic than than the rules of the game.
12:31:02 It's a, it's an example of emergence, yes.
12:31:08 Chances, you know that i mean there's kind of a narrative aspect of chess as well. And obviously characters and characterizations and you know empathize and also antipathies and things like that better part of playing chess, do you is that all gone from
12:31:27 go, is it completely kind of abstract or non representational non narrative in that way.
12:31:36 Well it doesn't have the, the variety of moves.
12:31:41 But the first.
12:31:44 You start with an empty job board in the first person puts down the stone.
12:31:49 If you know the guy knows how to play, you know, he says, Hi, it's a little bit like the opening, like the Queen's gambit kind of thing. Right, Right.
12:31:58 And
12:32:00 within sometimes within you know 10 steps, one of the people will just concede.
12:32:08 Yeah, interesting, because you dominate parts of the board by putting the stone down in the right place.
12:32:18 Anyone that the. I can't think of how you could
12:32:26 continuously transform the, the stochastic method that you are using into the goal method.
12:32:40 The rule based method.
12:32:43 But it's that it's somehow.
12:32:47 Somehow it seems it seems like been great if you could because then, yeah, the stochastic sort of represent art.
12:32:55 Yeah, rules based thing I'm sort of represent physics.
12:32:59 And then you put them both on the same board.
12:33:02 Uh huh, huh.
12:33:04 It would certainly be exciting to score it in a way and handed over to other players, you know, like in that sort of beautiful from highest up that you know there's lots of kind of lovely Fluxus intuitions, not just around randomization but around, exploring
12:33:22 the full range of possibilities there's this really fantastic Spanish artist called Estefan who's actually come to Vancouver a couple times, who talks about the notion that all variations are valid, including the one which maybe there's some sort of echoes
12:33:38 of quantum physics there, but just in terms of possibilities I, it would be so fascinating for each of us to sort of you to create a score that allows it for example each of us to play the game and document those arrangements arrangements which will always
12:33:54 be different.
12:33:56 Either those or. I love, I really love the idea not to for work too much to the gallery show but I do, I do like I do like to think of galleries of specific sites rather than nowhere places, I feel like I feel like there's not enough sort of play in galleries,
12:34:15 or even just the possibility of, of having a conceptual structure that allows people to play out an article, rather witness it in the gallery, like we do with, you know, and you really have done this wonderfully out in the world but I like the notion
12:34:32 of bringing some of these things into the non site of the gallery.
12:34:39 Yeah, yeah, find that that interesting and yeah and also what you're saying about.
12:34:49 Oh, anyway if I lost it.
12:34:52 Yeah, I lost it rule rules based, I mean rules based work happens in in physics but it happens so much an art as well. sort of the basis of conceptual art, so.
12:35:07 Oh I know what I was going to ask you,
12:35:10 is the difference between a score, like a visual score, the score for visual work and
12:35:20 set of rules for a game might go like maybe only four rules.
12:35:24 I can they be the same thing or is there something essentially different between playing a game and
12:35:34 making a work of art from a score.
12:35:39 I don't, I still don't understand the score.
12:35:52 The score is like a set of not directions but a set of prompts I guess or
12:35:54 steps to take and in making a work of art and it could be music or dance, but it could be a visual work as well. And the score could be like a musical score where there's this kind of standard notation, but it could be other things as well so it could
12:36:12 be
12:36:15 spoken prompts for example or it could be a collage, where a lot of different colors are our sequence store are combined. And, and the sequence of the colors acts as a score for someone to create something new.
12:36:34 So, last, last year we had leaning out of windows that I was in a group eight, what we did for the show at the end, was we made up a bunch of cards that had instructions on them and then it says in one side it says this, these are your instructions you
12:36:55 don't have to do it if you don't want to but it says, if you want to participate. This is how I don't know where did it within any of us see that
12:37:05 things like pick somebody at random and stay on their left.
12:37:13 Yeah. Interesting.
12:37:15 Yeah.
12:37:18 So that's, that's sort of the sort of thing you mean by a score. Yeah, it can be an it could be in any form it could be an instruction, but it could be, you know, colors or numbers or anything really.
12:37:31 Yeah. For me, I think, when they're interesting to me is when they are specific enough that you understand very clearly what you have to do, flexible enough that you can do them while still be while still having different abilities or having very different
12:37:49 kinds of bodies like the best score I can think of, by this artist the stuff I write is a square called How to transfer square in every possible way.
12:38:00 So she, she has a series of that, the only instruction is transfers the square in every possible way. He has a series of diagrams of all the new directions you could go you know so there's a b c d, and then sort of going through it.
12:38:17 And so she can sometimes perform it for four hours. You know, sometimes it's a series of drawings.
12:38:24 I ended up working with her to do a version on all the cross ways in Toronto that have, you know, this sort of like crossing you know so that I would say that yes, any any instruction could be deemed a score.
12:38:39 Really good scores are both very very simple, very very flexible, but regardless of how simple or flexible they might be the idea still comes across like that's that's the really hard thing to do in a school right thing to have it not become something
12:39:10 but have it still be what the API is to cover this sequence or can they just be knows the rules of go are like
12:39:11 pretty much sounds like a score that
12:39:15 They're more like game instruction foot, in my mind, they're more like game instructions than not.
12:39:21 Except, nobody wins or loses. Maybe that's the main difference I can think of.
12:39:26 Yeah,
12:39:29 just, Oh, I thought I had her.
12:39:39 Yeah that's
12:39:39 cm the object of the game is.
12:39:43 The game is just to play the game.
12:39:45 Yeah. So there could be a score that takes you back to the beginning or loops you back to another point that were another score begins like there could be like a series of mo concentric or interest interlaced sequences I guess that connect it doesn't
12:40:09 have to be one thing that starts and ends right.
12:40:13 Yeah.
12:40:15 I'll have to look at her. Her work is so brilliant.
12:40:22 I could share some of my visual material that there might be some.
12:40:29 I haven't I make it all in, like, really bad PowerPoint so I apologize for that.
12:40:38 I do believe I made some notes.
12:40:41 Helping figure out what I would say.
12:40:45 So, iteration one sketches so there's two things that have been sort of ideas I've been working with one is picking up from a diagram that was, that was going to be a really big mural in the show I was supposed to have in Montreal, last year that did
12:41:00 not happen because of covert.
12:41:05 And I believe I was mentioned thing this mentioning this earlier, it's it's a kind of sabotaging of those mathematical mathematical Klein diagrams that Russell Crowe's users and sculpture in the expanded field, thinking so much about hearing you speak,
12:41:22 Barbara, where I replaced the sort of cross this speculations around, sculpture, breaking out into architecture and landscape with notions that to me where I guess just the speculative but perhaps much more abstract,
12:41:45 and that the thing that I've been interested in, there is the notion of sort of folding out or my misunderstanding of how to fold out, and an echo of what I understand to be the behavior of the particle accelerator.
12:42:04 The other the other echo that I think has also come through quite a lot in notions of randomization that that you've been speaking of our and Carson, always has this figure within her work within the animation of her texts school horrendous called the
12:42:19 random Iser.
12:42:21 In fact, her husband, helps her sort of stage, the performances, but she talks about it as a way to sort of reorganize for tax.
12:42:35 I guess, new arrangements for that.
12:42:39 And then the second thing I'll show and then I'll show them is, these, these small digital drawings that I made a couple of years ago, that have sometimes been shown as vinyl vinyl works architectural interventions such as vinyl that at some point I experimented
12:42:58 with using a function in Photoshop that uses artificial intelligence to guess, to sort of complete the image right up to the edge of it. A lot of positions the way that I did them originally were very stark in terms of figuring ground.
12:43:17 But then, but then using this sort of rent this randomization would would do very strange sort of exploded things to it and I did a couple more this week just because I realized they were quite a bit of fun, which may or may not be a reason to do anything
12:43:34 so for that. This is the original
12:43:40 graph from a sculpture in the expanded field and so what she basically does, you know, or what I understand her to do and if you have a more learned, understanding of this, please correct me, but she's looking at landscape, and not landscape and architecture
12:43:57 and not architecture and so what she what she does is she the find sculpture us.
12:44:01 The thing, traditional modern sculpture is the thing that is neither the landscape not the architecture, but rather than keeping that centralized definition what she does is she then wonders what happens with the combination between landscape and non
12:44:17 landscape, and she calls calls that are marked site landscape and architecture she calls that site construction architecture and not architecture. She calls that axiomatic structures which is kind of the most mysterious one in it she actually talks about
12:44:32 solar winds wallet pensions and she talks about Bruce Nauman corridors of video.
12:44:39 So, in my version.
12:44:44 For this project that I was working on sort of four things that I was interested in trying to follow that were eroticism mysticism.
12:44:54 Reason, and love. And maybe the thing that brings them together thinking about them retrospectively is that they can all be quite laden with stupidity and other one can be really stupid, what can what can become at least mysticism eroticism and love,
12:45:09 one can one can laden once a false self in stupidity trying to give in to those impulses and so it was the end and I think these things that I come up as, as the things in between are always movable but mysticism and reason consciousness reason and love
12:45:30 narrative.
12:45:32 Loving eroticism design, and then eroticism and mysticism abstraction.
12:45:38 I did a version in Spanish.
12:45:40 I did a version in French because this thing was supposed to happen in Montreal.
12:45:45 And then the, the version, sort of inspired by the by the first set of conversations, actually look that the it thinking off science. The generalizable, and the verifiable, and then thinking of the aesthetic, the singular and the unverifiable.
12:46:16 And so, you know, I just attempted to, to see well you know if the singular and the verifiable is the aesthetic, then is the singular and and generalizable fetish or Faith is the generalizable and verifiable, the scientific, as I understand it, and then
12:46:28 the hardest one actually just like in the original one is the verifiable and the unverifiable.
12:46:33 And the one thing I could think of to put there was capital.
12:46:37 You know, because it is both, it is both completely abstract and somehow quantified really quickly. These are some of the exploded abstractions.
12:46:51 So can you talk a little bit like maybe just take one of those, and just talk a little bit about what you start with and what the changes are what the processes in developing the image.
12:47:03 Absolutely. Let me find one where the so for example in this one.
12:47:07 If you can see my course or.
12:47:10 There are actually traces of the original outlines of the drawing.
12:47:16 And you can see how through that sort of AI randomization.
12:47:34 The computer starts to fill in, and guess what the outlines of the composition would be beyond the borders.
12:47:33 And maybe there's actually more of a relationship between this and the diagrams that I initially realized terms of guessing what's beyond.
12:47:44 You know this was actually a very linear composition with a strong diagonal that had, you know, geometric shapes at each end, and then the way it's randomized that as it's turned the blue inside the upper half into this pattern.
12:48:02 And then it's barely just bled out the orange at the bottom.
12:48:08 This was not Can I just ask about the colors like where I know that we talked about color before but just how important it is, in your work but how, when does the color come into it and why and how do you choose specific colors for these compositions,
12:48:26 most of them were done on a, on a phone app in half an hour or less. So, so they're primarily intuitive, by the time I get to some of the, the more recent stuff that I'm doing and being much more deliberate around, sort of like off primary triads
12:48:48 quote unquote skin tones versus GB tones for these particular ones, it was your intuition. Mm hmm. Which is what made the original compositions, interesting but kind of naive to me.
12:49:05 And why this randomization becomes.
12:49:09 In some ways more interesting.
12:49:15 So sorry.
12:49:15 Those are it.
12:49:20 I find there's an interesting tension between what looks to be like a various almost clinical approach to the diagramming, and the geometry of each composition and then you know this sense of color that's just kind of wild and and confined in a way so
12:49:41 I find that really interesting.
12:49:44 And another thing that I find interesting is your interest in abstraction and, but the fact that you start somewhere that's not actually abstract you start from something that's like a geometric form that you could relate to you know architecture for
12:50:01 example, or perspective level view of something, and then you abstract from that but it's not.
12:50:10 You go, you know, you go a certain way along that continuum and but you start somewhere and you go to their it's not completely
12:50:21 open, open ended in terms of that process of extraction abstraction and it made me curious about that diagram. I guess the second or third one where you've got abstraction on the left hand side, if you could explain a little bit more about where you think
12:50:38 abstraction comes from or where it fits in terms of that diagram attic.
12:50:44 Oh, that's a really good question in the in the diagram I think I placed it between, between eroticism and mysticism. Yeah, and the rationale for that has to do with the fact that it.
12:50:56 It is to some degree about the material or the perceptible.
12:51:03 And at the same time, it, it is, you know, that that guy up to speed that definition of the aesthetic I'm really obsessed with it because it really rings true to me.
12:51:13 It is about the singular and the unverifiable you know so it is both completely, completely sensual and RS insofar as it, especially something like color, color has some real effect
12:51:32 and completely kind of in articulable I think for me, I think for me that the notion of a minor abstraction, was it was a much more sort of vertical transcendental versions of abstraction that that I'm familiar with speaking English, being a person who
12:51:52 was educated in English, is that it for me.
12:51:58 Minor obstruction really arrived at the point where words were language, kind of falls off. It's maybe, you know, if I was to kind of speculate in relationship to some of our ideas here.
12:52:10 it's maybe the place where I be or off.
12:52:13 When, when I'm trying to avoid being completely stupid when I no longer know, and I don't want to keep talking, because they know well I can say is, if it's something completely stupid.
12:52:25 I have, maybe it's the place you veer in from like not where you Veer, away from something but easier in from this other place and it just made me think about
12:52:40 like what Connie and ideas about that.
12:52:59 That brings that rings true. I mean I think that there's also feminist intuitions in the sense that I try very hard not to make a painting.
12:53:09 And I think most of the tension for me comes from being someone who, who is a painter in the way that I was trained, but I'm working very hard to not make a thing that's that's called a painting, and that actually has to do with even conversations I've
12:53:24 had with feminist second wave feminist mentors of mine, who had these modernist dude bro, teachers, and talk about the fact that they, they were sort of like men with bad gender politics and trying to grapple with both their legacy, but also the resistance
12:53:45 that they, in some ways, performed to that, and how that actually allows me to come back into abstraction.
12:54:08 From a non transcendental place you know from a, you know, from from a place that, that can be, in some ways, imbued with a subjectivity that is that is not necessarily the sort of European.
12:54:14 Great American, you know, I think it's really interesting the way you phrased it back a few minutes ago about resisting making that thing called a painting, like you didn't say resisting painting or resisting making a painting.
12:54:30 It's making the thing called a painting it's about language and about that category of, of, of making.
12:54:40 That's very interesting. Will you be upset if they find a new invisible force know, part of what I feel like doing to these part of what I would be excited to think of doing with these things is to hand them over.
12:54:54 Yeah, I think, I think part of the sort of queer ethic of not making the thing called a painting is, is to veer away from certain expectations around somebody with my kind of body and what they make.
12:55:08 But another perhaps harder to talk about intuition around them is that I really want them to be promiscuous.
12:55:17 And I want to kind of celebrate their promiscuity.
12:55:21 I want them to maybe not even necessarily always be artworks, so no I would be happy to hand them over.
12:55:29 I think I kind of, I mean that's what struck me about the, the work through the Photoshop kind of accidents right like you play with it you explode it at a certain point something has happened with the various components of an algorithm that strikes you
12:55:46 as being beautiful or interesting. So I think there's that there's already that giving it over right to to that, invisible, but also very complex force of the computational vision modification.
12:56:01 Nothing was there and in yours as well Barbara's like giving it over to the gravity into the plastic funnel. Yeah.
12:56:09 And so it's something that that I'm really interested in, because I, I teach abstraction at a first year level but i don't i don't write about it or I don't investigate it much beyond that, so I'm interested in kind of learning from from both of you actually
12:56:25 about what the possibilities are when thinking through abstraction historically also like as a power sharing or or action sharing process. Yeah.
12:56:35 Yeah. And also as a kind of coding right and kind of.
12:56:40 It's a way of coding experience outside of a certain kind of language and so it can function in in society that can function, culturally, in a way, sort of outside of authorities in inside of xi to think it's there in science as well as in dresses like
12:57:02 a description of the, the experiment like that first experiment with the hydrogen atoms that are could transfer transcend the hydrogen field, my life.
12:57:16 I cannot grasp that language just so I get it when I read it, but I can't, I can't hold it in my body but was it kind of giving it over right setting up an experimental space and learning things from the competition, whether it be like Adams or cut a
12:57:32 piece of paper or computer colors in a program, right and shapes.
12:57:39 So maybe that'll that can kind of lead us into my own.
12:57:44 My iteration, whatever. I imagined to that to be. And I think it's just a series of stories that I've been thinking about when I think about this group and about invisible forces in the low project.
12:57:57 So the first. Do you know MailChimp revival field.
12:58:04 ml chin. Yeah, just you know this.
12:58:06 He's an artist, he's an American artists that had this idea of
12:58:11 plants as hyper accumulators, and he didn't have that idea he knew plants had the capacity to like different plants have the capacity to draw metals, out of the soils and and had this idea of one point where it's like, well, maybe we could use plants
12:58:27 to clean up toxic landscapes. So, where's this these heavy metals being spewed out by or smelting factories, and then just damage the like all the Rust Belt basically these dead landscapes where the, the plants and animals have disappeared from.
12:58:47 well if we could use plants to absorb the metals in the soil, then we could pull those plants out, and it's a way of detoxifying the soil and new plants and animals will come back, and it's cool it's kind of like a rewilding or rejuvenating landscape.
12:59:02 And he applied for an NBA grant he coordinated with the Department of Agriculture in the United States, and found a scientist who was like absolutely we could do this you know and I think they may be genetically modified.
12:59:15 Some plants to increase their capacity to draw those metals out.
12:59:19 And so he went to the FDA, everyone was all for it. Beautiful was going to get $10,000 in like the mid 80s to pursue it kind of got right to the last level which is the desk of a republican senator rejected it was like, I don't see how this is art, you
12:59:52 And so there's a story that MailChimp tells it like he actually went to Washington DC to meet with the senator against the advice of the NBA coordinator and against the advice of like his gallery.
12:59:48 I don't know if it was his galleries, but it's definitely against advice and you just walked in, and he had a conversation with the center and he came out of that, that meeting having explained that there's this thing called invisible aesthetics, right
13:00:00 and that we need to trust those aesthetics, these things that we can't see, but that contribute to our appreciation right so those like whether that be labor that's invisible or growth that's invisible.
13:00:13 The fact that the artwork is happening underground in the roots, and we can't see it doesn't mean that the artwork isn't happening.
13:00:20 And so I think I mean we can think about the idea of the, the visible aesthetic as operating in science but also in potentially this this group.
13:00:31 And as, Oh, maybe I'll send out a link with that just there's a short animation about no chance to Revival field that I'll say this also that he couldn't find anywhere to do it because nobody wanted to admit that they had to talk to five landscape.
13:00:45 And so he finally got this field in Minneapolis, St. Paul, through political connections. But he could only photograph it from above so that nobody could place it in the actual space.
13:00:56 And it worked and he he he shared the idea with the Department of Agriculture scientist, and then it went on and on so it's no longer an artwork, but it's a scientific method of rewilding or rejuvenating landscapes that began in an artistic experimentation.
13:01:12 So I think that's really nice kind of way to think about the past. Yeah.
13:01:22 Yeah, for us.
13:01:19 And then the other. The other thing I was thinking about was the situation as internationals dairy, like this idea of walking as, as a practice thinking about barbers previous projects.
13:01:31 But the situation is international. We're a group that I don't really even want to talk about anymore I talked about them a lot for a long time and moved on.
13:01:41 But I just thinking about the dairy, which was them.
13:01:46 Rejecting like gallery based artworks as as being the only space where creativity can live, you know, as this kind of modernist genius artist structure that was in Europe at the time, which still we kind of live with.
13:02:00 And then attaching it to the everyday and the everyday being this new space that Marcus were interested in, as it not being you know the grand historical gestures or moments of the everyday that actually makes history.
13:02:11 And so they kicked all the artists out of situation as an international they said if we want to make paintings, you can't be in this this group.
13:02:18 So we're going to make work in the every day and get aboard came up with this theory of the dairies, which is just paying attention to the forces of the city so you go into the city.
13:02:29 And whichever way looks interesting to you. You go that way so this is kind of counter efficiency, and he he drew on the sociologists work.
13:02:38 Shawn barber love, who just tracked this, the 17 year old Parisian girl, going from school to home to her piano teacher, you know, and that was it, like over a year, there were some deviations but they referred to it as a kind of modern poetry,
13:02:56 so sharp that it makes you sad that people actually live like that. Right. And so this idea and then we can think about our own.
13:03:03 And I did a project. Basically the track my own movements for a year.
13:03:10 Like 15 years ago or 20 years ago I think as a way to kind of debunk the promise of Vancouver in particular but cities in general like this idea that city offers so many things but we just use it basically to go to work and come home and rest from going
13:03:25 to work.
13:03:26 And so thinking about how invisible forces can operate within a city and then maybe route it to desire, like what our desires are in the city, and also maybe thinking about memory and ghosts of cities that we talked about, I think, in our first meeting
13:03:40 was another touchstone when I was thinking about possibilities, because i do and i mean i'm, i'm all for making abstract work I'm all for making a score I'm all for maybe challenging the idea that we're dealing with invisible forces and yet expected or
13:03:56 at least semi expected to to produce something visual right for an art exhibition.
13:04:04 And maybe there was something else we could do Could it be a record of a performance outside of an exhibition space or something. Now that I have any particular ideas about it but just to be open to it.
13:04:16 And then there are two stories.
13:04:20 I don't think I've shared the story about my looking at a photo of my grandmother was in black and white.
13:04:32 And I read about it somewhere else, but it's I caught myself, I was probably my late 20s, I got myself looking at a picture of my grandmother.
13:04:43 As a child, and the photo was obviously black and white. And I caught myself feeling sad that she grew up in a world that was black and white. Right. And I thought, not only that, I think, just her photographic media was black and white.
13:04:57 I thought her body was black and white, I thought the trees outside the photographic studio were black and white, I thought her whole world was black and white, and it's just one of those split section split second assumptions that you, you kind of stunned
13:05:10 yourself how stupid you can be. but it was.
13:05:13 It was one of those learnings stupid things right because I just assume that everything I see in the world in photographs exists. So that's my relationship to it I see it on a screen I see it in film and that's how I imagined it existing so if it's black
13:05:26 and white then I feel like it's not, it's not actually in colors not actually in the world.
13:05:33 So it was one of those like okay well obviously, it wasn't black and white but her world was different than mine. Because of the media that she related.
13:05:43 Right. So this is, that's, it's not a eventually getting to a project it's just a description of one of my stupidities that can that can teach.
13:05:51 And then there's this other moment as also around this.
13:05:55 Yeah.
13:05:57 A while ago I had an idea to do karaoke but for famous speeches, so like, like Robert F. Kennedy speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King, I would take the Robert F.
13:06:08 Kennedy's voice out and leave the, the crowd noise, or like Jesse Jackson's speech to the Democratic National Convention, same type of thing, just to put your, you know, not in the space of music celebrity but in the space of like political celebrity.
13:06:23 And so just have these crowds need the capacity to move a crowd.
13:06:26 And the way that I wanted to install it was on TVs, just basic monitors that I bought from future shop and plan to return before the 30 day return policy was up.
13:06:38 And I went into this music so I went along and McQuade in Vancouver, and it was like I want to I want to put the TV's on top of big like pa speakers you know so those will be the podiums.
13:06:48 And this guy looked at me like I was an idiot, and said you know speakers are just big magnets. So he put this TV on top of a speaker. It's just going to be, it's going to kill the TV like yeah, you're screwed.
13:07:01 And then I was like oh well I guess I can reconsider my podium then. And I looked back as I was leaving the store and I saw him kind of incredulously explaining how stupid I was to a co worker.
13:07:14 And I was like, I was ashamed, but also there's no reason why I would no big speaker is a magnet like I don't know how to make speakers.
13:07:21 So those are the kind of these two stupid moments where like one. You know I followed into a critique of media, and then the other the second actually happened first but the second one I talked about.
13:07:35 I think just made me valued people's knowledge in a particular way instead of relying on myself to understand every material and component and process, especially looking forward to kind of an interdisciplinary engagement with artwork or with with criticism
13:07:54 was just to to rely on an openness and admit the gaps and appreciate.
13:08:01 Other people right and what they can contribute to it so I think it's a really nice way of encouraging collaboration is to recognize though, your own limits.
13:08:16 I think
13:08:16 I think was going to end was just on this idea of abstraction, you know because I talked about abstraction and
13:08:25 Mike Malevich like the idea of supremacism as a complete rejection of a figurative tradition based on European traditions that ended up in World War One like technologist murder, but also Mondrians abstraction, which was, like, After about the medical
13:08:47 about case the check. What is that, yeah Sophie Theosophy right.
13:08:51 Yeah, Yeah, of going over.
13:08:54 And then I also talked about in a textual sense so I think about Gertrude Stein's abstraction in relation to Cubism, you know in her language and how kind of weird it is to be holed and to be in.
13:09:08 And then maybe thinking about lnc seems like a creature for me, like the idea that there needs to be a different language language that we use on a daily basis so that's, that's where my iteration was going, I was writing it.
13:09:20 I didn't get it done before 12pm.
13:09:23 But that's where that's where it'll end up, so I'm, I'm super excited to, to think about abstraction,
13:09:31 as having this possibility of going forward.
13:09:34 Going beyond. And then also thinking about how it operates in science, because we need to abstract things in order to have them operate cleanly within experiments.
13:09:46 What is that process involved. What has led us to within possibilities of thinking.
13:09:53 So that's where it's where my iteration and so I'll clean it up a bit.
13:09:57 Your distribution but that's great, Thanks.
13:10:02 I have a sense of to invisible forces sort of intention with each other.
13:10:08 One is the, the instinct to abstract to to generalize to take something and erase the thickness of it and try to find the essence that it represents. I was looking at Francisco's diagrams and it was a little north of five, you guys.
13:10:32 You guys remember North reprise genres. Yeah, yeah.
13:10:39 It was great.
13:10:40 Let's see positive real is comedy negative real is tragedy.
13:10:46 Oh no, negative, positive imaginary is.
13:10:52 Oh, I forgot.
13:10:53 The way I looked at it when I was in college and I said oh that's just that's just the complex plane going. Anyway, that's a that's a very mean it was, it was a very dramatic example of, of, you know, playing with abstractions and trying to trying to
13:11:11 trying to see how things that are abstract can be related to each other and made sense out of. That's pure physics, my point of view.
13:11:23 Yeah and.
13:11:23 And then the, the perceptible real material.
13:11:35 Unique
13:11:38 particulars of your, your painting your drawings, you're not.
13:11:44 You're not a paintings.
13:11:48 No that was, That was pulling in the other direction.
13:11:55 This, it's the same thing is true in physics I mean sort of like theory and experiment.
13:12:01 Experimental lyst wants to, you know, see how real things actually work.
13:12:10 The theorists wants to make an interpretation in terms of abstractions.
13:12:15 And in physics they work together quite well I mean there's a real good partnership. So,
13:12:22 some sense the, the art.
13:12:26 I think of art is it more being sort of the experimental side of human endeavor and in the philosophical theoretical making sense of it all.
13:12:39 part is, is the other end.
13:12:46 Losing my train of thought here. I'm trying to think about the link between abstraction and extraction, you know, just because, for, for physics experiments or scientific experiments you need these kind of other atoms or molecules that behave the same
13:12:59 way at all times right and you need to extract them from this physical world in which they are mixed with a bunch of other things.
13:13:08 And so that's, you need to extract in order to abstract potentially and then thinking about that could link it to an extractive economic state policy.
13:13:19 Yeah, it says it's really only interested in parks in the aspects of things that are reproducible, which are universal.
13:13:30 Right. And we I mean we've seen the violence of the universal for 400 years now.
13:13:38 And in that sense, I think, for me quite specifically obstruction is a space of capacity.
13:13:48 That can only ever hope to oppose the extractive, certainly, certainly, if you think about
13:13:57 somebody who's gone through two refugee hearings in their life. And the way that in order to save one's life.
13:14:06 You have to render your life itself as incontrovertibly legible narrative.
13:14:18 And that in itself, you know feat feels like an extract to practice you know like in the way that refugee hearings are like, sort of Kramer vs Kramer style Hollywood ask,
13:14:33 you know, themes, you know, eight hours of somebody being sort of product grilled, you know, scratched out for every bit of information for everything that doesn't folding folding someone out for anything that's outside of what's an entirely understandable.
13:14:54 There is.
13:14:57 There is something about.
13:15:00 For me, abstraction, as a, as a means to, to create a space of capacity that can stop the compulsion to extract or the compulsion to to for certain kinds of people to render themselves.
13:15:18 Logical ass understandable.
13:15:20 It which. And I think the other, the other thing for me is, does leaves out any kind of for me these. This leaves out politics like political action outside of the realm of one can claim as a social capital, if that makes, if that makes any sense so my
13:15:43 politics with regards to indigenous solidarity and the end the kinds of things that even an NDP government can seem to be able to stop in, in, in British Columbia, you know like, it's a really specific attempt at figuring out what a practice can be wise
13:16:04 to no longer claim those things within the.
13:16:07 And it's and it's completely, perhaps not just idiotic but idiosyncratic In my case, but but it is a kind of experiment both in, in, in capacity and, in, in figuring out what can you know how how obstruction can can open up for political action to exist
13:16:40 not not not as performance within a cultural arena, but as an actual performative in our everyday lives.
13:16:41 Do you think of Opacity is being solid, as well as it about physical tangibility visually for sure. I think I think linguistically I also go to that is poetry, you know, and,
13:17:02 or even, you know, tracks of that Bjork album from 2004 entirely made of of human voices, there's there's sort of, you know there's like more traditional songs and then there's very difficult, very opaque tracks that are all, you know, voice with no words.
13:17:24 Yeah, that's interesting. I was thinking a lot about words and language and also thinking about.
13:17:31 Jamie what you are recounting about the situation and remembering also about the mapping the maps that they made.
13:17:42 And, you know, the fact that they would make maps or the board would make maps by, you know, taking landmarks out and just connecting spaces in ways that represented the, the flow with a movement to and through and beyond those spaces so it's all, it's
13:17:58 about verbs it's not about things it's not about nouns and or any, any discernible or recognizable places. They're all non places.
13:18:21 Do you think I'm situationist map is like a score.
13:18:28 Think that's more of a recording a document. Yeah.
13:18:33 I think that's more of a recording a document. Yeah. And I think that it's retrospective rather than prospective right.
13:18:39 Despite there, I mean it's kind of meant to spur participation in action.
13:18:45 But not in the same way as a score.
13:18:57 So what our next steps.
13:19:02 And I guess we put our iterations in the big drive right.
13:19:12 And then we also have to kind of think bit about.
13:19:18 I hate to use the word outcomes but the fact that we're working towards something that will be situated in a gallery space in February, because it is, and might be useful instead of thinking about things or a thing to think more about the process of how,
13:19:40 how we will develop up to that point.
13:19:48 You guys have some pretty diverse media, as it were.
13:19:59 Jamie I take it you're sort of mainly planning.
13:20:03 Right.
13:20:16 Think so.
13:20:09 That's the November meeting notes, just put in the chat.
13:20:15 Right. Yeah. I think I'm, I'm kind of up for anything.
13:20:21 But I don't have something in mind, visually.
13:20:32 No, I could, I could participate in performance I could write I couldn't help
13:20:34 but.
13:20:44 Barbara You seem to be using to be the leader of the performance faction. I can put it that way.
13:20:47 doing stuff that that constitutes our
13:20:54 essence.
13:20:54 Yeah.
13:20:57 I think Francisco the same thing.
13:21:04 But yeah, I am have worked with ideas about scores like definitely scores for walking, walking activities are walking performances.
13:21:14 And I'm really interested in process obviously process based work.
13:21:26 And definitely interested in a very open ended kind of approach to, you know, just take a certain number of things and put them into motion and see what happens.
13:21:32 And also, not just what happens but what I think about it, and what it what it provokes in me in terms of.
13:21:42 Even when I think it's about.
13:21:47 I like the idea of abstraction as being something that's a kind of common interest and common concern.
13:22:06 So, to abstract or to make something at an abstraction is an activity or a process it's not just a
13:22:17 descriptive term.
13:22:20 It's something that we do.
13:22:22 And if I hear us correctly, it sounds like we're also, to some degree, saying that there is a potential, almost.
13:22:40 Use ability for abstraction that it has that kind of ability to, to be to become a model that can be embodied or to become a hypothesis that can be tested, you know it.
13:22:48 The way I'm sort of thinking about it's like obstruction is in the cloud, but one can, one can certainly download it into different context,
13:23:00 which that rings that certainly rings true to, to, to the way I feel about it like most of most of what most of what my work and abstraction has been over the last year has actually to mail things out to be you know to make to almost take that the principle
13:23:15 of that Yoko Ono piece from Tokyo where she took a whole piece of ceramics and smashed it you know to make a whole thing and then to distribute it to send pieces out to different people, which, you know, some people would tell me is not a performance
13:23:32 enough but you know that that I think of it as a performance, I think, I think, Oldham, the performance of mailing but also the performance of using Canada Post.
13:23:44 Yeah, state funded. That's right. 600 performance.
13:23:51 Maybe this is just completely off the top of my head but one thing we could do between now and then, you know, the next time we meet, it's November, whatever that is, would be for each of us to come up with a score for abstraction and circulate it you
13:24:14 know amongst our group.
13:24:18 And see, see what it, See what happens.
13:24:22 That sounds fun.
13:24:25 Yeah,
13:24:29 trying to think of the difference between the works that you show, Barbara and Francisco, just because I think, Barbara your work really absorb the scientific method, you know, including the, the notes and distances and the counting.
13:24:45 And it was open to the kind of like the disappearance of things without explanation.
13:24:51 And then I think Francisco so like idea of using a tool like computational tool to surprise there, I mean they're linked, they're definitely linked to the I liked the book, authors, the methods are quite starkly different, right.
13:25:09 Yeah, for me it's like putting on a costume or whatever it's performing. Yeah, you know, a method that I think has some relationship to to science, trying to think of one is data gathering and one is data dispersing exploding.
13:25:29 Right.
13:25:32 Yeah.
13:25:35 With your with the, what happened with the colors and shapes that were generated along edges and your compositions, or is that through the process of interpolation.
13:25:47 That Photoshop is doing that but it's get it's gathering information from everything around. Yeah, and attempting to sort of push right up to the limits guessing, though.
13:25:58 And this is not part of something I've been working on for this but you know the other thing I've been working on is actually a book that repeats the exact same score, that's interested in this idea of repeatability and difference that repeats the same
13:26:12 score every single day. I take two circles with different combinations of ink in them, or combinations.
13:26:23 And then play out the contact in different ways. So it's always exactly the same, but it will never it you know the score is always the same. So maybe this is the thing about scores of context.
13:26:37 The score is always exactly the same. Who circles in and and water.
13:26:44 But yeah and then I kept looking at i mean i think a kind of a kind of a kind of depth deck of some kind of depth of those would be so gorgeous I'd be honored.
13:27:10 But this is actually so this is the thing. This is actually a piece on a very old piece that I started in Randy's class 10 years ago, so it's a kind of give it an infinite edition of contact studies, dealing with the notion of, of the, the eroticism of
13:27:13 touch, at least, I was in my 20s.
13:27:18 You know, where no matter, no matter how many times you do the same score. The touch will always be different, you know, it's turned into this because I finally decided to turn it into a book.
13:27:28 And then, you know, have no idea what's gonna happen afterwards but I also, I also, when I saw your your your compositions I get really excited.
13:27:39 That's how I pretty much time making art these days I'm actually not making any new things I'm just in some, you know, a lot of cases I just punching holes and old things and then re reorganizing things are just combining things in different ways, it's
13:27:54 this completely sort of self
13:27:58 sufficient process right now.
13:28:01 Yeah.
13:28:03 They're already enough things in the world right, so I can just rework things already have.
13:28:11 I can just rework things I already have. Well, whether we're conscious of it or not I think that's something I've come to realize that I sometimes find things, and then like, Oh, I'm still asking that question.
13:28:19 Yeah, you know, and the funny thing about something like this is, I wasn't thinking about abstraction, the word abstraction was nowhere in my vocabulary.
13:28:30 Back then it really was, it was, yeah, it was, it was really kind of like an attempt that are kind of queer kinds of queer refusal.
13:28:39 I've been like, maybe, and I had a thing about not repeating myself at that. At that moment, which is maybe the way in which I become.
13:28:49 Certainly, older but but also, which in which I can completely understand the, the usefulness of scientific thinking as narrowing one scope and sort of deepening reach
13:29:09 that openness, that's in the construction of the abstractions, and also adjust as described experiment.
13:29:18 That is possibly a bridge between the physics and the artistic and the intellectual I guess.
13:29:30 So so so just nearest exactly the same thing they pay attention.
13:29:38 And you have to pay attention to the random stuff, the stuff that looks random. Yeah, sometimes it isn't.
13:29:44 I think that's where this stupid comes in.
13:29:50 Yeah.
13:29:53 So ready flickering lights here.
13:30:00 Okay.
13:30:00 Okay.
13:30:02 Well, what do you think about this idea of each of us writing or writing or making a score and circulating it you know to our group, which me, and maybe not doing not acting out your own score but doing the other three.
13:30:20 So we each do three studies basically based on scores from the other people in the group.
13:30:26 That sounds nice. Yeah.
13:30:28 And do we want to kind of center things on ideas about abstraction some of the things that we've talked about.
13:30:40 I really like that. It feels broad and rich enough that it could work. Yeah. At this point I think it'd be tough to do something without thinking about abstraction.
13:30:48 Yeah, given every reason.
13:31:01 I still say that there's two invisible forces is abstraction, in particular ization. That could be your where your score starts from.
13:31:06 That's really great.
13:31:08 is a great geometry.
13:31:11 Yeah.
13:31:13 So if we do this when should we have our, I'm just thinking back from the date that where we have to
13:31:23 be ready for the November seminar.
13:31:27 Kind of like when the November seminar is.
13:31:31 Oh, oh, I have something for November 19 at 930.
13:31:37 Yeah, that's what I have to. Okay.
13:31:46 Are we presenting our stuff to everybody and everybody's presenting to us.
13:31:53 Hey baby, with trepidation.
13:32:02 Yeah, participants to participants share work weather meeting one visual maps notes reader okay But wait, we got PowerPoints for days.
13:32:11 Yeah, and stories for days so.
13:32:16 So, too well presented on the, the stuff on the 19th, and we might want to touch base, like, a couple days before to kind of compile things put things in one one bucket or one folder.
13:32:34 So like the 17th.
13:32:38 And we want probably like a couple of weeks to work on the three studies that we're each going to do.
13:32:46 Yeah.
13:32:49 So, Do you think if we aim to each have our score done, a week from today, Halloween, the 31st and then we'd have like two weeks to work on the three of them, you're like, Okay.
13:33:08 Good 70s or early, so I can see what a squirrel looks like. You want me to write one right score to right.
13:33:15 Yeah.
13:33:20 Yeah. Certainly, you have to get the job boards.
13:33:26 Why not learn now.
13:33:28 I've got the graph paper.
13:33:30 I'm on my way.
13:33:33 Well, I'll make this recording available and I'll make the transcription available for sure I know how to download that.
13:33:42 But I'll make sure before I cancel things or stop the meeting.
13:33:49 And thanks folks, it's been really good.
13:33:53 Thanks for the show.
13:33:59 No problem.
13:33:59 You're going to see, you're going to put this someplace where we can access it. Yeah.
13:34:04 Dropbox or something. This will be like, close to a gigabyte of video. So, I'll compress it. Yeah. Oh, that'd be nice, and I'll send around an email with just our dates that highlight, you know the dates, we're going to aim for, or just roughly what we're
13:34:22 going to aim to do just to recap about. Great. I'll do that later tonight or tomorrow.