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!

Bookmark to:

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.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

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…)

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to:

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.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

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-.

Bookmark to:

Graphic from a project I’m working on right now. You’ll note the obvious debt to Battlestar Galactica, my current favorite show.

Bookmark to:

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.)

Bookmark to:

Momus has just written a post on his experience of the Alexa mall in Berlin I looked at a few months ago. Apparently, Mr. Currie doesn’t like the “me” that is produced by the mall that he visits. He instead gravitates towards the “radical, liberal, sexy” self that is produced by the hip, experimental art events common in Berlin (i.e. the recent “9 Evenings Reconsidered” show at Tesla, which was very interesting).

Fortunately, however, he is self-aware enough to recognize that this hipster self-image is yet another Romantic ideology, and that he is simply produced by an alternate “mall”: the constellation of record shops, book stores, small markets, galleries , and cafés that people like him (and myself) patronize.

But is this still enough to make us “other” to the Spectro-Capitalist Consumachine? Or are we simply its avant-garde, its purest practitioners, out-running the Jones with our very special (and very particular) buying habits?

Comic by Natalie Dee 

This is the thesis of Heath and Potter’s The Rebel Sell, which takes the entire No Logo/Adbusters set of “anti-consumerist” liberal urban aesthetes to task. Rather than being anathema to the daily churn of the product-machine, goes their thesis, this “rebellion” is the very engine of capitalism itself. When people like Momus or myself blog about the latest noise bands, it is not so much in an effort to assert an alternative worldview as it is a move for status and distinction as the most educated of consumers.

To quote the Wiki entry:

“Since most goods depend on exclusivity for their value, especially goods which are said to decry mainstream life, a purchasing ‘arms race’ is created whenever others begin to follow the same tendencies: if you lag, you become mainstream.”

Alexa, then, is a grand Art Deco monument dedicated to consumer laggards, those who fail to keep up with the leading edges of consumer consumption currently being developed in the R&D labs of the avant-”margins”. Underground clubs, unnamed galleries, obscure websites, and strange video productions — far from being Alexa’s antitheses — are where the Alexa goods of the future are created and made palpable for future use. (Anyone who has noticed the strange migration of the term “indie rock” from economic category to descriptor of a single genre of whiteboy corporate guitar-jangle could not possibly argue otherwise.)

What The Rebel Sell makes clear is that no amount of “culture jamming” and “conscious shopping” is going to have much of an effect on what is inherently an institutional problem . What is instead needed to combat conspicuous over-consumption are legislative solutions, such as eliminating tax deductions for advertising.

Which is, of course, a very un-sexy thing to say.

Bookmark to: