I didn’t start the fire. But I did enjoy it.
Every time your life gets shaken to its core, it’s a welcome blessing. Just don’t expect to know where it will throw you.
A year ago, I had an inkling that I might be getting married in 2007. This didn’t pan out. I also thought I was done as a designer, and would dedicate the new year to making art. Instead, this was the most design-centered year of my adult life. I created more new logos in the time between May and August than I did during the previous three years combined.
This was all done as part of the business I started in April with my friend Gwen, Plunge Artist. I didn’t set out to start a business in 2007, but this too happened. But at least the business was in the realm of possibility. Watching said business burn to the ground was not.
The night of May 29 was important for two reasons: it showed me the awesome power of nature, which looks on at trendy human concerns like Facebook or Twitter the way a bear considers a toothpick — with ignorance and contempt. It also showed me how contingent and arbitrary our material environments are.
I had spent the previous year building up a wardrobe, a work space, and a collection of furniture I thought would last me for years. Ha. Instead, following the fire, I sold off everything that remained and packed a single suitcase for Europe. To do what? Why? I didn’t know.
My first few months in Berlin were a welcome respite from the craziness of the previous year. Starting with simple things like transportation — in Boulder I dared the highways not to kill me in my Chevy, in Berlin I simply sit on a bench and let the S-bahn take me where it wants to — and on up to larger concerns like ontology and the meaning/use of existence, in Berlin I’ve learned to take it a bit easier. It’s ok not to live every second with a goal in mind. It’s ok to view existence as inherently pointless, and one’s life as a collection as seemingly random systems slapped together and held with a belt.
But the time has come to move on from that indirection. This can be done without reverting to a crude ideology like a “purpose-driven existence”. The same emptiness can still reside at the core, and around this void may accrue all sorts of weirdness and magic.
And that, to me, is the point of this whole Berlin adventure: on the other side of emptiness, past the stains of time and the mass suffering of horrible deeds and accidents, lies a very fragile, very confused, very hopeless yet nonetheless ambulatory field of objects (as the Italian radical Antonio Gramsci dubbed it: “Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will”). These things can’t think of anything better to do than go somewhere.
And so should you.
Holidays + work + visa application process + travel = blog slowdown. In the meantime, of course, you may find me on Tableau Terrible, or Vectorobot. Frohe Feiertage!
UPDATE: My new design portfolio is now online!
It was exactly one year ago today that I and nine others resigned from Integral Institute in a blaze of glory which would come to be known as “Black Tuesday”. I had been working up until then as a graphic designer for the non-profit organization, which was founded by philosopher Ken Wilber in the late 90s to develop an inclusive, post-postmodern approach to the problems of the world. I had been reading his books since 1999, and was hired to work full-time in November 2003.
Continue reading ‘Black Tuesday: One Year Later’
Apologies for the blog slowdown: I am scrambling to get my papers in order to extend my stay in Germany, and have just taken on two large (and paying!) design projects which will keep me very busy. In the meantime, I suggest the following:
- Volume 2 of Tableau Terrible: my webcomic has now become a traditional 3-panel strip series.
- Ongoing “experimental design” updates at Vectorobot.
- Daniel’s review of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment & Extinction, which might save you the trouble of actually having to read one of the most difficult (yet interesting, and perhaps even important) philosophy books to come out in a long time.
- Kpunk’s Marxist take on Supernanny, including some interesting thoughts on blogging, Spinoza, and the problem with Facebook.
Bis späte… (Until later…)
For the past three months I’ve been making great strides in the formal complexity of my design work. I owe this to the regularity of the open-ended “exploration” sessions I’ve made time for since coming to Berlin. These sessions are beginning to bear fruit.
Meet VECTOROBOT, a new blog dedicated to sharing these formal developments on an ongoing basis. Here you will find glimpses into the mind of an artist at work, pursuing new truths at the liminal edges between man and machine. These will include work created with Photoshop, Illustrator (my fave, and hence the blog’s title), 3D, photography, hand drawing, and others, along with instructions on how to do them, and links.
In other words, go here for pixel crack.
Like most nerds, I grew up playing with Legos. Not the big, prepackaged theme sets, mind you, but piles and piles of generic bricks. My brothers and I would spend hours and hours erecting elaborate fortifications, only to summarily destroy them through the use of equally elaborate artillery.
Other toy systems — GI Joes, Transformers, He-Man and Starriors — were only interesting to the extent that their action figures could be taken apart and reconfigured. Stick a phillip’s head screwdriver in the back of a GI Joe, for instance, and you could remove his breastplate, exposing the system of rubber bands which held his limbs in place. You could now mix-and-match multicolored Joe limbs at will, giving the all-black Snake Eyes the bright white arms of Snow-Job, or putting Roadblock’s thick biceps on the femme-frame of The Baroness. Whole new worlds of narrative opened up with this one simple tweak.
Lego art by Nathan Sawaya, GI Joes by Hasbro
Barring this, a toy system was functionally useless. I had no interest in the rubber dolls of the WWF wrestling series, for example, which maintained their corporal integrity and never became parts of something grander. I was, in other words, not interested in coherent identities, or the inviolate sovereignty of the self. I was, even at the age of 6, an inveterate post-humanist.
Continue reading ‘Lego Bricks and Wolfram’s Theory of Everything’
It seems you can’t go anywhere in Pop Culture these days without running into some variation of the Post-Human Scenario. From The Matrix to Houellebecq to Battlestar Galactica, the idea that humanity will soon be overrun by its immortal, A.I.-enhanced offspring is rampant.
Yet not all scenarios are alike. There seem to be, in fact, four main themes, which can be broken down by their location on a grid created by the intersection of two axes: the Hostility vs. Peace axis, and the Replacement vs. Co-dependence axis (see diagram).
The typical scenario (and the one embraced by Battlestar Galactica) looks something like this: humanity creates a race of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) entities, the A.I.s run amok and attempt to drive humanity into extinction. But this is just one of the four types: a Hostile Replacement scenario.
The Matrix Trilogy would appear similiar at first glance, but in fact it is on the other end of the Replacement vs. Co-dependence axis. Unlike BSG’s Cylons, who seem to be doing just fine without reliance on humanity, the Machines in the Matrix depend on humanity as a power source. The Machines make war on humans not so much to destroy them, but to keep them in line. The Matrix, then, is a Hostile Co-dependence scenario.
But what about the Peace scenarios?
In the novels The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island, French novelist Michel Houellebecq profiles an exhausted, depressed humanity voluntarily giving way to its technologically-superior offspring: immortal, asexual clones. This happens without much conflict (although there are some allusions to extermination efforts in Island), which makes it the most scandalous of any scenario: Peaceful Replacement.
But like the two Hostility scenarios, Houellebecq’s bleak vision isn’t the one necessarily embraced by our technological elites today, is it?
THE FOURTH, AND HOPEFULLY MOST LIKELY, SCENARIO
What one finds instead is some variation on the Peaceful Co-dependence schema, or what we might call the “Flying Car” scenario: humanity aided and enhanced by machines, but never in competition with them. This runs the gamut from the ultra-banal — the “consumers will have more buying options” narrative of mainstream tech companies — to the ultra-religious, such as Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” doctrine.
At first glance, this seems a bit too good to be true. Despite the giddy rhetoric of “We Are the Web” and Silicon Valley, on the whole humanity is fucking everything up. We have more wars than ever before, and the gap between rich and poor is ever-increasing, right?
Actually, no. Statistically-speaking, things appear to be getting better.
Despite the current War on Terror, for instance, the general trend throughout history has been a gradual decrease in violence (best seen when comparing the proportions of adult males killed in combat across eras), as reported by Steven Pinker, Howard Bloom, and others. Additionally, as Swedish global health expert Hans Rosling makes clear, there is a general trend in the so-called “developing” world towards health and prosperity equal to the West’s.
Even global warming, the favorite human extinction bugaboo of the eco-left, appears to be solvable, especially if we bring nuclear power back online.
Much of this we can attribute to an increase in technology and machinic-dependence, rather than a decrease. As infrastructures are modernized and more societies are brought “online” (to use the favored IT terminology of Thomas PM Barnett), poverty and war diminish. Opportunity in the global market relieves the pressure of war-making, science dissolves the ethnic superstitions of religion, and mass media makes it possible to sympathize with people from distant lands and dialects.
It follows, then, that the more machine-like and machine-dependent we are, paradoxically, the more human and humane we become. Which means that the only true humans are the Post-Humans, and everyone before was Pre-.
Graphic from a project I’m working on right now. You’ll note the obvious debt to Battlestar Galactica, my current favorite show.
Photo of my painting space from this evening. Sometimes it’s good to unplug and just kick it analog-style. Thanks to Rands for the diatribe about the “nerd cave”, by the way: suits me to a T.
(And yes, that is Lyotard book on the shelf. No, I haven’t read it.)
