Everything is sculpture.
"Any idea born into space I consider sculpture;" Isamu Noguchi said.
Everything is sculpture.
"Any idea born into space I consider sculpture;" Isamu Noguchi said.
ポール・ラ・ロイ・スネルソン IIポール・ラ・ロイ・スネルソン II : بابلو حبيبي الثان
Modus Operandi
Modus Operandi
Modus Operandi
The United States military uses technology to profile an Arabic face to determine whether or not to shoot him or her. This was the crowning achievement of the University of Texas at Dallas Arts and Technology program: ATEC.
In sharp contrast I proposed that we use technology to construct love around the globe.
Reunion Tower symbolizes love
The United States military uses technology to profile an Arabic face to determine whether or not to shoot him or her. This was the crowning achievement of the University of Texas at Dallas Arts and Technology program: ATEC.
In sharp contrast I proposed that we use technology to construct love around the globe.
Reunion Tower symbolizes love and global unity in my opinion.
I went to jail and mental hospitals for my beliefs because I am not a Christian and I'm not a Republican.
I am a citizen of the world and a tax paying cobalt blue sapphire gemstone democratic American.
Through the universal language of sculpture I entreat you to consider the validity of my point of view.
Stop the polarization of art against lethal violence.
HE+ART=HEART
To sum it up it's in the lyrics of your national anthem and I quote:
"and the rockets red glare the bombs bursting in air gave proof;"
Which hypnotizes you to believe that it was God's plan that we bombed Japan look see there's the flag.
Please consider me an agent of construction and creativity.
I have ideas and seek to offer solutions for the sustainability of this spaceship earth or what's left of it.
Polarization will never bring Harmony.
I've metaphysically constructed love around the globe.
I am begging you to please not harm me anymore.
The irony is Texas etymologically means friend I challenge you all to prove it.
My art is energy captured into two three and four dimensions cybernetically.
The grid is a universal form that connects all thought.
One concrete example would be a library with the data arranged in rows and columns stacks and stacks of thoughts.
Another example of the use of a grid in two dimensions would be the canvas of a painting with the threads woven over and under into a tiny grid or the pixels on this screen itself arranged in rows and columns very tightly to form another grid.
When we add depth the third dimension and you're plotting in space. In three dimensional terms a 'voxel' as in architecture and sculpture.
Suddenly you see the relationship between two three dimensions.
Now the fourth dimension is the dimension of time like a comic book arranged in rows and columns a storyboard.
Notice that time itself can be plotted on a grid such as a musical staff and all of musically syncopated seemingly random chaos can be monitored on a staff or grid.
Picture your very own heartbeat monitored like life itself which is contained within a grid.
We learn from the cybernetic scholarship of Norbert Weiner who wrote that all change can be plotted on a matrix therefore the matrix is the only thing that doesn't change.
In fact it enables us to navigate through all types of chaotic seemingly chaotic diversity and random happenings without the grid we are lost. Quite actually lost in space and time
Therefore, one could state that the grid itself is indeed an orientation device for life and creativity it enables the artist to navigate and translate through several different mediums all at the same time.
Two-dimensional mediums such as painting can be easily translated into three-dimensional meetings mediums such as sculpture or four dimensional time based abstract mediums as poetry and music.
These are four dimensional mediums.
While when we circle back graphically return two dimensions monitor brush strokes that form characters within a fixed system.
Some other more obvious examples of alphabet structures demonstrative of this fact include the ancient language of Chinese characters brushed on rice paper Egyptian hieroglyphics carved in Stone tablets cuneiform also carved on Stone tablets contained within a grid in rows and columns.
Language itself exists within a grid this page itself is contained within a rectangular format there's no denying it it's right in front of your face the place you're standing in now is plotted on a three-dimensional graph.
The longitude and latitude lines at right angles circumscribing the globe.
You're caught in it be aware of it find the infinite possibilities within the parameters.
Between the two points of life and death there are infinite possibilities uncountable within the box of our seemingly finite life itself.
There's no such thing as outside the box everything is contained within another structure there's no denying it.
We can't even measure a light year without a navigation system of measurement graph.
The matrix without the mathematical structure of The matrix.
We cannot imagine constructively in fact you can't imagine at all without it borders that enable the sculptor's awareness; or a sense of form.
Otherwise it's just pure energy as liquid lightning and how do you capture that with a camera the cybernetic art matrix era is The CAM -era.
Therefore: you're in it now Say: "Cheese." Think about it; in the way who moved mine?
Modus Operandi
A Libretto in Two Acts
-Paul L. Snelson, II
Pablo Habibi Deuxieme, PhD
'A priori'
Act I
This story started in 1968 around the time of the mini skirt, the moon landing, JFK's assassination, just about the time that Valerie Solanis shot Andy Warhol, the rise of the notoriously infamous ‘Velvet Underground’, Lee Harvey Oswald's suicide, the song by the Temptations: 'Papa was a Rolling Stone' -which opens with "It was the third of September..." That was the day I was born. Since that day, things have never been the same to me.
There is all this light, the images of cartoons, the invention of Sesame Street that beckons children to New York City, like pilgrims to Mecca; the seemingly innocent theme song lyrics "Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?" Flip the channel on your Cable TV and then there is 'Dragnet.' Telling the adults in all of the rest of the States of America, all of them outside ‘The Big Apple’ to stay away.
So these two televised subliminal messages can really do a number on a child’s developing brain. On the one hand, you have New York as the Emerald City of dreams, the center of American culture but on the other hand it is an underground sewer of crime, danger and death. My journey started out several thousand miles to the South and West near the sand dunes of Monahans, Texas the open flat lunar landscape interrupted only subtly by Mesquite bushes and the rhythmic bobbing of pump jacks lining the highways, and pumping black gold right out of the ground and into the pipelines and factories of America. The story, not unlike anyone else's is filled with great joy and great disappointment and despair. I liked to draw. I still do.
I drew a lot of clowns on paper bags as a young child. I would start out with a bright Crayola red nose, like the Japanese flag Red like Superman's Cape. Red like Paul Revere's midnight ride screaming: "The Red coats are coming!" Red like a big Chief Tablet in the First Grade. Red Crayola crayon Red, like Raggedy Ann and Andy's Triangle noses, Red like Campbell's Tomato Soup, Red like a box of Sun Maid Raisins, Fire Engine Red, Stop light Red, Red like Jesus' blood dripping from his crown of thorns, Red like my grandmother's taillights on her Red Cadillac,
Red like the sun rising in the desert, Red like a Tootsie Pop, the little Red Corvette, red like the Pope's shoes, Red like Paloma Picasso's lipstick, the Red rose of Sharon, The Scarlet letter, Dorothy’s Ruby Red slippers, Red, like my spelling errors circled in Red, Red like the Republican party splitting the country in two right through the heartland, Strawberries, Cranberries at Christmas, Santa Claus in his bright Red suit, Rudolph the Red nose reindeer, Red like a laser pointer, Red like Mickey Mouse's tongue, Red like Tabasco, Red Tomato Salsa at Chili's Bar and Grill, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cinnamon Red Hot Tamales candy, Cherry pie red,
Red as the blood shot eyes of staying up late writing, red like debt rising, being the red, pomegranate red. After the red nose, I would begin to build out the makeup and expression, blue circus clown turquoise eye treatments, with big wide open eyes glaring in glee and wild pink and orange hair.
It was like a Zen ritual mixed with a little witchcraft for me, sketching out the ‘me’, that I hoped to be. It was an early form of self-actualization. I never stopped. I continued to draw and paint in water colors and acrylics, bright colors and eventually the iPad became my canvas. I like to realize the imaginary personas in my mind and draw myself blind.
It is a good use of my time. At an early age, my mom, gave me a book on Picasso. Not long later, he died. I was devastated but I got over it. I was a big kid with a small child's character. A sixth grade body with a kindergarten soul. I had to learn early to keep my feelings to myself. I just kept drawing while smiling like Bozo, or Ronald McDonald or Crusty. Walt Disney was one of my big heroes too.
I loved the Sunday night shows from the Magic Kingdom. As a young child, I had sparkling, bright Technicolor cartoon dreams. My view of the world was as insular and narrow as a crayon drawing and as wide open as the blank sheet of paper as the West Texas landscape in a car on highway 80;
lit up with a bright magenta and pink sunset like God's bowl of Raspberry and Orange Sherbet slowly melting into dark Levi Strauss Navy Blue Jeans night sky generously sprinkled and glitterized with a few bright sparkling stars on Orion's belt.
That sense of focus, purpose and absolute awe and wonder about the world, is how I felt. I can't tell you where I was going but I knew that when I got there I would know in my heart that this must be the place. I wanted to go to into the deep blue ocean and up into outer space.
I remember the faces smiling in my childhood and the occasional furrowed brows of coaches, and teachers, disappointed in my classroom answers or lackadaisical left field performance. I kept drawing and my feelings to myself until the perfect moment came and went, like the tidal wave, of hurricane Katrina, a Tsunami with all my time and money spent.
I felt through my childlike mind I was developing that universal language of the arts where there is no distinction between words, pictures, or music. It is just one huge Multiverse.
It is the language of the arts and it is one that I cultivate both in my mind and in my heart. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would leave behind me, to guide me along the path as everyone laughed, at the wannabe 'artist as a young man.'
I never thought that this was such a diabolical plan. The young artist boy seeking to become one. I saw myself as 'The Artist as a Young Man.' I found a fond link between pictorial designs, architecture, music and sculpture all summed up in ‘Kanji’ - the Japanese alphabet. To be a monk with an inked bamboo brush devising brand new characters, icons that represent ideas and ideals really appeals to me still; and when I take up the brush, or the mouse it is always such a genuine thrill.
I still look at faces and expressions but I limit these sessions too. I try to smile and nod a lot.
The cosmic clown in my heart is always with me. I see shopping as a creative exercise or exorcism. Snuffalupagus always eludes Big Bird. Oscar is always a grouch. Cookie Monster eats everything. Burt and Ernie sleep in separate monogrammed twinned beds linked together in one syllable their initials say it all: "BE."
So how do you explain a life? You don't. You just live it and keep moving forward. It all works out in the end and if it doesn't work out; it isn't the end.
So just before my twelfth year on earth, my father asked me at the fence post of the cow pen, if I would like to move to Saudi Arabia and start over.
I said yes. So we packed up all of our belongings and moved to Ras Tanura, Arabia in the summer of 1980. My adolescence was developed in a sort of 'It's a Small World' type of Internationally American School. My friends were from all over the world. I developed a homogenized accent. I continued to draw and to seek. I developed my own cartoon alphabet, a hieroglyphic, form of portraiture that was an amalgam of a person's name, with its letter forms made of the symbols of their interests in ink pen and watercolor. I skipped classes to work on these drawings and charge five dollars per letter.
This was quite a lucrative little cottage industry for me and I rarely had to ever ask my parents for money. I always had the latest Walkman, the waterproof kind. I kept my money in a blue Danish Cookie Tin under my bed for safe keeping. The currency in Saudi Arabia is called a Riyal. In the 1980’s there were about three and a half Riyals per American dollar. Riyals are in larger than life size and in bright colors and feature a silver thread, woven into the bill. So in their culture, there truly is a silver lining. I thought that the ‘Artist’ was the ultimate genie, the public servant, the one who makes dreams come true. I still do.
The thing is, there is a constant conflict in the artist's endeavor between the want and the need and the urgency to create something new. Once, in the library in Dhahran, while my father was in the hospital with a collapsed lung at the time, I was studying Japanese with a woman named Temmoku Dykes and Algebra that summer and still seeking to develop my language and voice as an artist. I was trying to find a synthetic unity between the mathematical and the forces of nature. The three dimensional map that would illuminate the images in my mind.
What we seek, so shall we find. I stumbled upon a book about Isamu Noguchi. He was a sculptor, living at the time, in New York City. His work was at once the crystallization of my thoughts buried deep in my heart. A marriage of ancient Eastern craftsmanship with modern form.
The organic with the geometric; structure and motion, measured time coupled with the winds, tides and currents. I was enchanted. I doubled my efforts in Japanese class and developed a real affinity with writing. I wrote an essay for Yale University about the marriage of form and content, the synthetic unity of Japanese composition principles that in my naive mind, were inextricably linked with those of Mondrian and Picasso simultaneously and my latest hero, Isamu Noguchi seemed to embody the best of all of these worlds. His first name means courage. When I graduated from high school I became an apprentice to a sculptor in Connecticut.
I longed and secretly sought to leave and become Isamu Noguchi's assistant. Yale rejected my application. I sent a photocopy of the identical essay to Carnegie Mellon University and was accepted there even with the 'Yale' code on the headers of each page. When my job was completed in Connecticut, I made my way to the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum and there, at eighteen years of age in 1987, the year that Andy Warhol died, I met Alexandra Snyder and asked her if Mr. Noguchi needed an assistant. She said: "If the stars are right..."
This statement lit a little fire in my mind and heart and ignited an urgency like lighting a fuse, like a kergillion fireflies, like candles in Saint Paul's Cathedral all simultaneously burning, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like the sunrise over the ocean reflecting fire on the waves of the sea, fire of rage, heat like summer in the Arabian desert burning your feet, fire like Godzilla's breath, fire like the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center Towers, fire like the space shuttle exploding, the fire that burned the West Texas landscape from Alpine to Fort Davis and Presidio, the fire at the end of your slowly burning cherry red Marlboro Red cigarette.
When I got to Carnegie Mellon, in the frenetic chaos that is 'registration' of a fledgling Freshman Art program. I met Orville Winsand, the Art department head at the time and asked him to sign the form that would grant me permission to study Japanese concurrently while following the Art program.
He said: "Look, I know you are driven; but some things we just can't do." He made a distasteful grimace when he spoke. This conflict was the spark that would change my life forever and nothing would ever be the same again. I got angry. I was angry about the money that my family was pouring in to an education that was not at all what I had signed up for.
I had chosen Carnegie Mellon University. Not the narrow confines of Carnegie Tech; after all, if I had merely wanted to pursue a one sided education in the Visual Arts alone, I would have gone to Cooper Union in New York City with all my friends. I snapped. I literally snapped and snapped again like a metronome, a ticking time bomb and in the office of the Dean of Student Affairs, I exploded in rage. This experience has caused me to doubt myself as an artist ever since and castrated with caution my bold original, or inventive, thought provoking ideas.
I was ashamed.
I came home to Texas. My father had been 'surplussed', a 'reduction in force' from his job in Saudi Arabia and a few days later, my grandmother read me the story from the Odessa American Newspaper on the front page she told me that Isamu Noguchi had died. I sent him a white lily in a gold box.
I slowly rebuilt my confidence and character and after nine years of study I finally completed the requirements needed to complete my Bachelor's of Fine Arts degree from Carnegie Mellon. PAGE 8 I taught Visual Art in a Catholic summer arts program and got fired after a misunderstanding. I finally surrendered and eventually, just gave up on trying to make it in the Northeast all together and came home West Texas and reinvented my career as an All Level Art Instructor and retook several of the classes that I had failed at Carnegie Mellon University at Sul Ross State University and procured my lifetime certification as an All Level K-12 Art instructor.
I was hired in the summer of 1998 in a little town near the New Mexico border called Denver City. Toward the end of my first and last year the students would gather around one of the few stoplights in town and throw rocks at my silver 1998 Mustang. The weekend of the Columbine incident a rock shattered my driver's side window.
I thought I had been shot. From then on, I just showed video tapes and often called in sick on Fridays and let them not renew my contract. I took my summer money and came to Dallas and lived with my sister in Addison. I got a job as a security guard and worked the night shift from 7-7. Then I started seeking employment as an entry level graphic designer and got an interview in Irving, where Lee Harvey Oswald was born.
The interview was with a two toned platinum and dark haired girl at Verizon Information Services also known as the yellow pages. As an entry level graphic designer for the Verizon Superpages print product. I was making yellow page ads. I had to make at least eight ads per day. It was a great job. After five years, I was promoted to the graphics training department as a documentation specialist and moved to the corporate office and made friends with graphic designers all over the country. It was a great distance from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
By 2008, the audience began to go to Google and smartphones became more and more ubiquitous and the company outsourced my job to India. I went to work for Barnes and Noble and back to school to get my Masters of Fine Arts degree in Art and Technology from the University of Texas at Dallas and still couldn't get a job.
I continued working for Barnes and Noble until the health insurance ran out and now I am working full time for the State of Texas as an 'office associate' and accountant at Texas A&M Agrilife Research and Extension Center on Coit and Campbell. This job has enabled me to start school again, time after time to pursue my life long dream of being a doctor of the fine arts, in Aesthetics. I am still clinging with a stainless steel grip to the ideas 'behind the scenes' that I had in 1987 about the nature of the language of structure in the arts and sciences.
It has been an exciting and challenging journey and it has not worked out yet, but one way or the other it will, in the end and if it doesn't work out; it isn't the end.
Modus Operandi
A Libretto in Two Acts
-Paul L. Snelson, II
'A posteriori'
Act II
Isamu means courage.
Isamu Noguchi was born on November 17th, 1904 in Los Angeles, California. In his lifetime, he expressed through sculpture, ideas that resonate with enduring relevance.
This paper explores the origin and progressive evolution and function of the graph, the grid, the net, the intricate matrix that governs all civilization from the East to the West and into the global mindset.
This mindset is a tool to navigate, document and create useful works of art that balance form and content, structure and spontaneity for the generations that will follow. All phenomena exist within a three dimensional system of coordinates that contain reality. Think of it as a graph that forms a scaffolding, an ordered system of boxes, a rectilinear framework, or simply a three dimensional array. It forms a kind of skyscraper, an infinite network of interlocking Rubik’s cubes that contain and enable us to imagine everything down to the molecule and up into the Milky Way galaxy and beyond.
A sense of structure clarifies thought and allows the imagination to communicate. I am a structuralist. As a structuralist, I intend to balance a firm sense of control with an improvised spontaneity, in order to capture energy. This is an important metaphor for my work and my life as an artist. Experimentation with electronic media led me to discover an important principle: the intriguing effect of stillness versus motion when opposing forces complement one another. This idea of complementary components applies to all languages of art.
It is this fascination for the static combined with kinetic elements that integrates art and amplifies all of its contrasts, variations, and subtleties, geometric and organic qualities. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that structure in art and in life is crucial; it is an orientation device for creativity.
It allows one to articulate one’s deepest convictions and to translate dreams into reality. It is a map, or geography of the mind that allows one to contemplate many facets of meaning at the same time. It is old fashioned to think in terms of my family or my nation. One must work together with mutual respect and toward the common goal of peace.
Humanity needs more genuine cooperation. Each individual possesses his or her own unique and separate version of reality or point of view based on experience and memory. Each of these separate realities are valid based on the individual and should be respected and acknowledged during communication.
There are times when individuals share an experience.
When each individual’s separate reality encounters the same phenomenon such as a song, painting or a film, and so on, it is a landmark in the memory that offers an opportunity to connect to another individual and yet each individual’s experience is unique and therefore of value. “Oh, so you like Picasso too?”
When individuals share an experience they feel connected in some way. Recently there seems to be evolving a new network of collective consciousness where each individual shares so much that an individual’s memories and products become part of the contemporary culture and then are archived in the vast memory databases the ‘libraries and museums’ of the digital future online.
Compartmentalization is everywhere. Everything comes in a box. Like shoes, eggs, even people live in boxes and when they die, they are buried in boxes. When looking at the calendar, or the periodic table, we see squares everywhere. In the bathroom tiles and miles and miles of endless streets, highways, runways and train tracks crisscrossing at right angles all over the globe. At the dawn of human history, many years ago, we find that writing - (Or was it drawing? What is the difference between drawing and writing? When did these two activities become separate practices?
When did we stop inventing letters or sounds and characters to represent them? In English for example, who decided that twenty six letters were enough?) - was probably invented with a stick scratching onto the earth, images were painted on the walls of caves and then carved into stones then onto skin then later plant fibers were pressed into paper and fibers were woven into a fabric, a network, a matrix, a graph, a flowing curtain, a tapestry, quilt, a screen, a back drop, a cloth, grid of thread, a flag waving in the wind, and planted on the moon.
Consider all the books and the written words, it doesn’t matter what language it is, it is essentially just arbitrary combinations of fixed symbols into patterns arranged in one direction or another within a rectangular space, graphically, on pages and bound either on the right or left with a title on the spine in a rectilinear configuration. The grid is an image, a symbol, an underlying structural imaginary force that underwrites art, music, dance, poetry, sculpture, architecture, science, and all languages of all of human thought.
It is from this foundation of graphic order that we can begin to see similarities and patterns in thoughts both in the flat two dimensions of vertical and horizontal flat composition and the third dimension depth of sculptural and architectural space and the fourth dimension of time. These concepts are the building blocks of the creative imagination.
This matrix mindset, this structure of the map, the geography, the periodic table, the calendar, the microchip, the chess board, the blue print, the three dimensional array that where unique shapes are only able to be imagined within the confines of structure, on the screen, within the picture frame, the system of coordinates, the scaffolding, the musical staff of the longitude and latitude lines that circumscribe the earth with that ancient grid that governs and holds the key to united imaginations. As artists, the goal should be to help our planet and its inhabitants work together with united imaginations for the good and prosperity of the future.
Now is the time for all men, women and children and all those in between to come to the aid of our planet. Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, California on November 17th, 1904, to an American mother and a Japanese father. Imagine an individual human-being with the genes of the freedom of America with all its possibilities and the ancient graphic structural order of Japan encapsulated in his DNA. His first name means courage.
His first sculpture was a ceramic wave with a bright blue glaze. It was not long into his early childhood that his mother had him help design their new house that was being built in Japan in Chigasaki. It is the dichotomy of these two creative forces, the freedom and motion of the blue wave with the graphic structural architecture and planning and straight lines of carpentry that inform some of the most thought provoking work of his career.
It is his tenacious grasp of his original creativity that inspires us most. He really never strayed from the idea of waves and grids throughout his career. The natural and the man-made are at the heart of all his work. Early in his creative development he invented the assemblage of flat slab stones with slots cut precisely that carefully balance organic biomorphic forms within essentially a cubic format and structure.
In his assembled stone sculptures toward the end of his career the vertical stones feature slick industrial carved surfaces coupled with the raw uncarved blocks of natural stone. The idea of a system of order and all the variables within it could be applied to music, poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture; virtually all things known exist within another structure. The idea of random action versus geometric form still illustrates the irony and brevity of life. It is a vision where even the most mundane happening seems to resonate in accord with a universal song. There is also the idea of language. The language of form is one that Noguchi articulates visually in the most direct and economical yet very generous means of expression.
This juxtaposition of these simple principles leads one, on an associative level to understand language as an arbitrarily constructed system of order. PAGE 15 This is the structure of united imaginations. There should be an international forum discussing the origins of art and the direction of progress.
I would build a structure for the conference. It would be made of shiny, stainless steel tubes arranged in a grid to form scaffolding, simple cubic scaffolding that would function not only as a sculpture but as architecture, a musical instrument, a slide, film and video screen, a theatrical set and backdrop. Essentially, the scaffolding would be the central focus of a performance piece, an opera of sorts about civilization, creative thought, music, art, literature, science and technology. The opera would also be a kind of ritual ceremony, an unveiling of an extremely Spartan literally bare bones piece of art.
The opera ritual would help the viewer see the grid as I see it, as a kind of universal form that connects all thought. The unveiling would begin with a film about the dawn of time, the initial spark, that ignites the big bang where the universe as we know it came to be and then a little cartoon that would feature the image of the earth from outer space. Its surface, oceans and continents would be circumscribed with lines of longitude and latitude. These lines would then be peeled off like an orange and then stretched into cubic scaffolding.
Then cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, numbers, calendars, graphs, maps and then a myriad of images and transformations would appear frame by frame to illustrate the concept of the grid and its function as a universal thought connecting form until the audience is so bombarded with images that the screen eventually blurs and explodes, not actually, but the film would end with the image of an explosion.
The screen then moves forward after the film and is slowly revealed as actual scaffolding and within it is one very dark person in the shadows and with a stick they tap on the stainless steel PAGE 16 structure and achieve a sound that would be bell-like yet percussive and would serve as the metronome for the entire piece. Later, other artists would join at different levels, intervals and areas, which would light up while orators, philosophers, scientists and poets would speak and their speech would be an integral part of the action.
Then dancers would appear to be woven in among everyone else and break out of their cells and climb over and crawl through and dance all around the structure. At one point two singers would sing in two different languages and couples would join them in pairs of other languages until everyone was singing in his or her own language. This song would sound like a harmonic cacophony of chaotic consonants and vowels that would turn into a make-believe language and then dissolve into "ah's" and "mmm's" and everyone on stage would hold hands and encircle the structure as if it were an idyllic shrine representing united imaginations.
Finally lights, lasers and fog would merge in a kind of electronic, red pulsing digital rhapsody and the thing of stainless steel would rise up and be re-veiled in an opaque white scrim and move to the back once again to become a part of the theater, the screen, the backdrop, simply vanishing into an invisible ordinary wall.
And before the audience realizes it, before the song is done without any applause or pause, an immediate change of scenery with instant transition, the conference begins. The speaker is an artist, a poet, a physicist or astronomer talking about creativity using video, slides and an electronic pointer and the audience will watch intently. They will watch the screen because they will know; they will have seen the beauty that is behind it. PAGE 17 Isamu Noguchi's first name means courage and that is what he has given us.
His art reaches back to the originally constructed thoughtful creativity of his childhood and forward into the future of space and the steely finesse of the technological era.
find it no coincidence that both he and Andy Warhol's studios both had the interiors painted silver to allow no shadows. Surely Isamu left a path that we as individuals should all follow, a creative journey without borders back to our true selves and into the future with courage.
With the recent disasters, the earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, now is the time for all mankind to summon both the courage and creativity to face the problems of coexisting with the forces of nature in the future constructively. Structure both visible and metaphorical governs all thought.
The goal is to arm the viewer with tools to discover, navigate, invent, and reevaluate the idea of freedom in the twenty first century. George Orwell's "1984" seems to have become not just a warning but now a blueprint. True freedom now lies only within the confines of the sketchbooks and skulls of the global creative collective community.
How will structure and parameters evolve, be recreated, be pushed against and redefined in the future? Creative efforts always involve parameters and limitations. The arena of the Arts is a safety zone for inquiry where anything can happen.
Infinite possibilities lie within parameters. To imagine and visualize each individual human being as an artist, empowers us and gives us all infinite freedom, vast in scope and scale, within the miniature, finite, time and space of our lives.
We are born into boxes called cradles, live in boxes called buildings, drive around in boxes called cars, fly around in boxes called planes and blast off in boxes called space shuttles and are buried in boxes called coffins.
The ultimate aim in each and every individual artist's epic opera of life is to think not just ‘outside the box’ but also of the infinite possibilities within it.
Style
Modus Operandi
Modus Operandi
Any idea created in space I call cybernetic sculpture.
Andy Warhol was a cybernetic sculptor and an iconoclastic prescient painter and predictor of the future who said: “I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do. I think everybody should be a machine.” - Andy Warhol, Life Magazine, Nove
Any idea created in space I call cybernetic sculpture.
Andy Warhol was a cybernetic sculptor and an iconoclastic prescient painter and predictor of the future who said: “I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do. I think everybody should be a machine.” - Andy Warhol, Life Magazine, November 1963.
Andy Warhol once said: "I want to be a machine." In 1963, a time when cybernetic technology was slowly, methodically just beginning to take over the public consciousness; Warhol was at the apex of his career and seemed to be at the top of his game and the center of the Avant Garde Art world of New York City.
Now let’s turn back time; Andrew Warhola was born on August 6, 1928 had just turned twenty years old as this quasi-fledgling, still enigmatic concept of a vital cybernetic philosophy was still being presciently developed in the late 1940’s, by the visionary cyberneticist, Norbert Weiner who coined the original term "cybernetics" in 1948.[ Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: Wiley, 1948.]
Norbert Wiener intended the concept of cybernetics to include any measurable, repeated and expected behavior as a control mechanism. Meanwhile in Andy’s world, he just landed an illustration gig with his pen and ink drawings. He drew in his signature blotted line style for an article in Vogue magazine entitled: “Success is a Job in New York.”
He developed a production style of ink drawing called “the blotted line technique” which cybernetically allowed for multiple drawings to be traced and printed from one image and featured a myriad of colorful results each slightly different, yet similar to the first. Andy had a strong sense of leadership of steering the media and his systematic approach was reflected in his later serigraphic works of multiple Marilyn’s and Elvis paintings as mechanical reproductions that were done by hand with a squeegee. Warhol’s work was holistic, systemic, high tech and at its root cybernetic.
The term cybernetics is etymologically credited to Plato, the Greek philosopher in the Fourth Century BC who invented the term in Greek - Kubernetes which means “to steer” or “to govern.” It is a word that is associated with a leader, pilot, captain, steersman or governor. Recently, the data hegemony, Google chose the same term - Kubernetes to name its data management software.
Since data management software has a comprehensive coding component that features a container system of pods or cubes like a virtual cubic scaffolding, it can be compared conceptually to the time capsules that Warhol created from the mid 1970’s right up until his death on February 22, 1987.
These time capsules are identical cardboard office copy paper boxes that contained whatever Warhol and his staff deemed worthy of saving. That often included a bit of every aspect of The Factory, which soon became The Office after his shooting and near assassination in 1968.
The term cybernetics is a particularly useful term in naming art of vital dynamic systemic shapes of life like genetic structures as they realize energy as a total encompassing force in unison with the biosphere.
The changing winds, tides and currents, migratory patterns, autopoietic life in motion.[ Romesín, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980.]" Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?" Warhol said, “If I had a good computer I could catch up with my thoughts over the weekend if I ever got behind myself.
A computer would be a very qualified boss.”[ Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. London: Pan Books, 1976.] Andy Warhol’s work predicted cybernetics and coincided with its development.
The concept of modular components or structural modal systems thinking in cybernetics involves the idea of geometric forms such as the modular structural components, in this case the classic “cubes.” The grid modular component system that utilizes a matrix montage is perhaps most obvious in his “Society Portraits” series where each mediated canvas was created to measure exactly forty by forty inches in order for each of them to fit together into one huge monumental interlocking portrait of society that he intended to be ultimately displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City featuring one of each and every person he painted. Andy Warhol was quoted once saying: “If everybody is not a beauty, then no one is.”[ Ibid.]
This framing system of containment is also brought into high relief with Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules. His time capsules mirror and reflect the container system of Googles Kubernetes software and data that fits into grids and rows and columns of a monumental matrices of data. The difference is virtual. On the digital side you have coded binary data contained in a matrix. On the analogue or Warhol Time Capsule side, you have actual historical three-dimensional objects of significant data. Both systems are contained within the parameters of a box like a poem on a page, or musical measure of notes on a staff. Cybernetics as a visual philosophical paradigm, enables the understanding of complexity in multiple biological, and mechanical systems that overlap and give us feedback in life.
We begin to realize and perceive systemic holism. It’s like the city is a symphony. Cybernetics is a term that can intimidate, and it often alienates a lot of people. Its aim is quite the opposite.
Cybernetics, at its root is from the Ancient Greek term meaning “to steer.” It is a word that means dynamic systems of communication, in nature and technology and is a useful term to describe the study of life, biology, and its holistic, systemic, self-regulating processes as an organism in a constant state of flux, of transformation autopoietically maintaining and autonomously living, thinking and feeling for itself.
Cybernetics is a vision of the whole and is a vital vision for the artist. Warhol saw himself as a creator of an open system and that art is an arena of experimentation where anything can happen. Open systems allow for creative multiple solutions, freedom, individuality and change.
Ashby, Wiener and Warhol presciently saw the future of cybernetics, and its impact on our culture and asked difficult questions regarding our future. In 1957 W. Ross Ashby wrote his groundbreaking An Introduction to Cybernetics. Ashby argued that Cybernetics is a methodology to map and understand change. Cybernetics mirror the mind and the machine as complex systemic devices. Cybernetics is a useful formal linguistic vocabulary for understanding the complexity and varying states of transformation.[ Ashby, William Ross. An Introduction to Cybernetics / W. Ross Ashby. London: Chapman and Hall, 1957.]
Andy Warhol’s art philosophically harmonizes and coincides with the cybernetic pioneers Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby.
These three artists and scientists asked questions before anyone had dared to think. What is the function of human beings in a fully automated society? Where does the artist fit in the new world? Since the new automation is on the horizon. The thought of cybernetic systemic, holistic visual multimedia art is of timely relevance. Both scientists and artists continually self-regulate and adapt.
Art is at its root is both an introspective therapy and a synthesis of fantasy and reality, gravity and levity that results in new discoveries that change popular perceptions of life over time.
The roots of Cybernetics Art begin with Structuralism.[]
Jean Piaget’s definition of Structuralism and the Structuralist’s approach is made up of three primary components. The first structuralist part is the existence of wholes, and these are complete systems are something more significant than the integral parts. That means that these structures are not mere aggregates; they are dynamic.[ Piaget, Jean. Structuralism. Paris: Taylor & Francis, 1968.]
Transformation existentially defines them. They are autonomous and self-regulatory. They are not static. Piaget then demonstrates the various uses of this concept of structuralism to mathematical, logical, biological, psychological, linguistic, social, and philosophical thought. Piaget explains the general theory in a nuanced way, very delicately, asserting that all good structuralism must be fundamentally constructive and that it should aim at and move towards a new type of objectivity.
Cybernetics is a holistic system, a unifying thread that vitalizes the imagination. As Buckminster Fuller said: “Thoughts travel at the speed of light.” The evolutionary trajectory of mediation starts with paint. The trajectory then ends conceptually with the disembodied art of pure thought. The idea transmitted through data cybernetically through space and time at the speed of light is carried within the audience.
These are the ideas that the viewer takes home in their memory after the movie or gallery exhibition. Ideas empower the proletariat with a wealth of knowledge. Therefore, demographically equalizing the masses of classes into one globally unified human race. Art is a ticket to immortality.
If the artist or scientist is lucky, they might have a break through that slips through time and even after their death, the break through idea makes an imprint on the collective cultural historical memory. Photography functions as the primary mechanism of memory used in order to immortalize an image of the self. There is a circuitous line between likeness and identity.
Photography is a way for an artist to reconstruct reality systematically and cybernetically. The camera is a great liar. Ask anyone who can take the ideal selfie.
Warhol seized technology, particularly the camera as a tool to document and overtly shout his point of view silently. Andy Warhol personified the self-actualized artist and was a celebrity of great light and humor yet hyper-aware of the shadow of death. He was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. With a neurological disorder called Saint Vitus” Dance and blotches on his skin, he was a child with special needs that particular unfortunate circumstance enabled the development of a strange, powerful gift of focus and singularity while exerting a quiet persistence covered with a shy sense of humor. His mother, Julia Warhola, encouraged and rewarded her son with bars of Hershey’s chocolate to make his best drawings even better. This began an engraving on his heart a maternal inscription.
He was trained that his art was making his love visible and if done well would then be rewarded. For Warhol, his art is a synthetic unity of seriousness and playfulness. He often combined the high and the low at significant volume and scale. His mother’s close involvement and training are the key components of that inspired his vast, maniacal cybernetic output. It galvanized his belief in work.[ Evans, Thomas Morgan. 3D Warhol: Andy Warhol and Sculpture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.]
He left home after graduation from Carnegie Tech for New York City where he became a commercial illustrator and window dresser, saved up his earnings and bought a townhouse on Lexington Avenue. He developed his signature iconoclast take on the Pop Art style of the time and broke through the barriers between Fine Art and commerce with his darkly humorous Campbell Soup Can paintings that still baffle audiences as they mysteriously glorify poverty. His images of comically tragic portraits of life and death were shaming and entertaining us in full frontal cybernetic depictions as fine art of comics, cans, and celebrities.
He produced a rock band called The Velvet Underground, and their first self-titled album cover. Andy foresaw the future of the performance art rock concerts as a virtual cybernetic immersion environment with a fusion of brightly colored projected images and strobe lights and sounds pulsing to the beat of The Velvet Underground in his iconoclast shows called "Exploding Plastic Inevitable."
He also made a large body of notorious films that some would say are better talked about than seen. And on June 3, 1968, he was shot by actress and playwright Valerie Solanis one of his “Superstars,” The word Superstar was term he himself invented. He was pronounced dead and then resuscitated at the apex and highest peak of his fame and notoriety. In a flash, he fell with a shock to the rock bottom brush with death. After the shooting and coming back from the dead. Post humus Andy Warhol was never quite the same.
Instead he was never quite the elfish, wizard, impresario again. Since he had come so close to death; and come back again, work and money were his primary concerns.
In 1968, he published Interview Magazine, and a became a high society and celebrity portrait artist. He worked for the next nineteen years to redeem and reinvent himself. His last works, perhaps the most powerful, were of religious imagery yet still, retained his signature twist, of dark irony and humor.
The Last Supper Paintings of monumental proportions were exhibited in January of 1987 in Italy. Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987, leaving behind a foundation and legacy of over six hundred million dollars. His greatest creation was his persona, which is larger than life, that outlasts his time, and has resulted in his internationally renowned museum: The Andy Warhol Museum in his native hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Andy Warhol himself sought to become the cybernetic output machine that makes Art with a primary focus and laser sharp precision. Warhol wanted to be a recording machine and an epic painting cybernetic output production machine.
Art is a result of a great deal thought. It is the metadata, the idea, the concept and how it changes the inner mindscape as a tool of visualization and imagination skills which is the vital piece to take away and apply to our everyday lives. This visualization of space built of modular systemic components as manifestations of cybernetic output is the foundation of Warhol’s “Shadow Series.”
Tan Lin describes the “Shadow Series” by Andy Warhol as computational output and the synesthetic act of painting as a machine. Logic and pleasure are synced by the electronic disco track and the strobe as a flash of an idea that is automatically generative and pleasurable, high pitched and ephemeral as in, the moment of right now. Lin unveils a cybernetic artistic output of resonance within a matrix through his interpretation of “The Shadows” series that revitalizes the cybernetic oeuvre of Warhol and makes it relevant again.
Warhol embodies cybernetics and demonstrates its omniscient relevance. Each canvas in “Shadows” by Andy Warhol can be viewed as cybernetic digital video output as a frame or a single container of data, a slide, a cell[ Lin, Tan. "Disco, Cybernetics, and the Migration of Warhol's Shadows into Computation." Criticism 56, no. 3 (2014): 481.].
Each canvas is an identical photo-synthetic silk-screened frame depicting a single repeating moment, a flash of a strobe against a mysterious triangular shadow that suggests an interior space of perhaps a box of some kind. The brightly colored canvases are each one unique in the color scheme and of high contrast to each subsequent iteration composed on a graph like musical notes on a staff.
These canvases can be viewed as measures of an operatic melody conceived in sync to a disco beat in high day glow fluorescent celebratory colors that gyrate and pop leaving an afterimage that seems to pulsate on the back of the viewers” eyelids over and over in sequence dancing around the gallery like musical data.
Andy Warhol’s “The Time Capsules” series transformed ephemera of the moment into artifacts worth examining not alone but in contrast and groups with their respective capsule, cell or frame, which brings the idea of the ubiquitous, systemic Cybernetic Art Matrix into high relief. Rows and columns of identical boxes were carefully dated and stored in a sequence containing the personally selected ephemeral souvenir temporal representative objects of the moment such as photographs, souvenirs, gifts from celebrities, receipts that capture events, gifts, newspaper clippings, mail and a myriad objects of memory.
[ Görner, Klaus, and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol's Time Capsule 21: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Am Main; Ausstellung in Frankfurt: 27. September 2003-29. February 2004. Ausstellung in Pittsburgh: Herbst 2004. Köln: DuMont, 2003.]
The time capsules are a formal realization of the Cybernetic Art Matrix just like a Japanese Kanji Character of a fixed number of strokes within a perfect square; these capsules are the foundation of Warhol’s inner language of thought. His inner world is at its roots cybernetic and organically aligned with the creative systemic cyclical renewal biological process of regulation and self-preservation as modes of practicality and survival. The planet earth is one organism in a perceptibly complex cybernetic system of universal life.[ Romesín, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980.]
The practice of saving and thus transforming keepsakes, souvenirs, ephemera and memorabilia and into artifacts of all kinds. Things of his public and private life are contained in each and every identical time capsule which was carefully taped and sealed up with a number and date, typically, usually a month and year that designates the timeframe that the objects within were collected and a close estimate of the time that they represent.
[ Görner, Klaus, and Andy Warhol. Ibid.] This is a powerful metaphor for the cybernetic art matrix as a kind of filter. A mysterious process when one chooses and philosophically places an object, much like Marcel Duchamp might choose a shovel, and place it within the gallery or art context, it then permanently resides under the umbrella or framed in the context of Art with a capital letter A.
Does the object then immediately develop qualities and meaning that before it did not have? The concept is fascinating. Warhol was an artist of recognizable impact who was so shrewd and self-aware that he developed a machine for transfiguring what might just be thrown away as garbage and instead, he saw its archival value as a representative valuable piece of history and therefore, a way to make even more money.
In the same way that he took the factory concept of production into the realm of sculpture with his iconic Brillo Box series that were wooden imitation facsimiles of Brillo grocery boxes.
Here we see in actuality the magic filter at work philosophically again is it just a clean Brillo Box placed in the arena of the Art world, on a pedestal and is the context what makes it art?
The fact that it is a trompe l’oeil representation of a Brillo Box made in wood and paint rather than the actual card board Brillo Box and is this distinction of media and materials what defines the Brillo Box sculptures as works of Art.[ Evans, Thomas Morgan. 3D Warhol: Andy Warhol and Sculpture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.] This opens up the definition of life and art into a totally new realm and animates the mundane with new life. This man automatically through his mere selection and association turned trash to treasure. Here is the mythological King Midas personified and empowered through the crystal ball of Pop.
Warhol was catapulted in his trajectory to the realm of the blessed. This radical notion of The Time Capsules brings the definition of art itself close up, under the microscope and into our discussion as to the nature of Andy’s life and art. There is a slippery specious fuzzy boundary between the artist, his life, his work and his art and when his presence or fame makes for a type of performance the definition and distinction between art and life becomes intrinsically deeply embedded and amalgamated into one another in such a bold and permanent way that it is no longer possible to distinguish them. Is it life or is it art?
For Warhol as an early creator and producer of systemically driven cybernetic art produced mechanically and with a high degree of technological finesse and bold originality. Andy was well known for being iconoclast and an intimate knowledge of media both of what the art is made from and the vehicle through which the message is transmitted.
For Warhol, the term Media itself has an etymological double entendre as a buzz-word term with a high strobe light sense of pop and revelatory relevance that Andy himself revered. He once said that, "The idea is not to live forever but to create something that will."
He was successful in capturing and encapsulating a moment and freezing a flame in a way that endures, lasts and demands consideration as we move deeper and deeper into the simulacrum;[ Baudrillard, Jean, and Sheila Faria. Glaser. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.] that is further and further from nature and into counter-culture and cyber-culture[ Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008.] and the realm of thoughts as actions and the boundaries between reality and fantasy are becoming less and less distinct in the cyber-cultural spheres that are beginning to shape our notion of reality.
Warhol made efforts to expose the mainstream culture to gender and transgender issues. Today’s generation of youth are choosing their own pronouns to refer to their own sexual identity. In New York the birth certificates now have an option for the child to choose their own gender. Perhaps one day equality will be the reality and gender will be obsolete. We are in a new timeframe where the individual is in focus and simultaneously fading fast depending on their class and geography. Andy said: "Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years, it may be the other way around.
Someday everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that."[ Swenson, G.R. "What is Pop Art?" Answers from 8 Painters," Part II Art News (February 1964)]
Andy Warhol was a child of poor immigrant parents born in the Slavic Ghettos of Pittsburgh and grew up on Dawson Street to remarkably begin college on the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima took the world by storm. We are still reassembling the pieces and finding echoes of meaning and the impact of his amazing trajectory that forever altered the tapestry of life still in the twenty first century one of the pioneers of cybernetic art embodying his own actuality and a fresh open view of the world.
“They say that time changes things but actually you have to change them yourself.” Andy Warhol left behind a legacy and empowered many marginalized and previously ignored people who became known as artists like Jean Michele Basquiat and others who shared his aura into the realm of the blessed and historical memory.[ Evans, Thomas Morgan. 3D Warhol: Andy Warhol and Sculpture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.]
Warhol was a man who made his dreams come true, not only for himself but for many other people as well and became a part of the star making machine in New York City and fashion coming from ink and water color, to a photosynthesis of painting, sculpture, lights, cameras and action that included a myriad of found objects selected for his time capsules series and endless experiments with serigraphy and photography of cinematic seriality cybernetic output. There is joy in repetition and Warhol proved that from A to B and back again. He turned his weaknesses into strengths and documented the world as he saw it in all its silver sparkling splendor and graphic strobe lightning flash bulb epic spectacle.
He saw the value in an honest structured scheduled working life and the joy of keeping busy and developed a cybernetic systemic philosophy that enabled him to work on many projects in tandem and with a very large staff to keep producing monumental works of art, an iconic magazine publication and movies that still challenge the status quo as in typical Warholique style. He lived his ideal. He said: “They say that time changes things but actually you have to change them yourself."[ Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. London: Pan Books, 1976.] Warhol never stopped. He found a voice and an extended family and developed a work ethic that still impacts the Artist’s definition philosophically even today and elevates the role of the artist into the contemporary lexicon. Warhol impacted the culture in a way that changed the world, permanently breaching the walls between art, life and commerce ad infinitum.
He singlehandedly drew himself out of the slums and Slavic ghettos of Pittsburgh up into the realm of the upper crust and a luxurious town home at 1342 Lexington Avenue in chic Uptown New York City making regularly scheduled tours to Europe, Paris and even a trip to China with a pen, paper and water color. With Warhol, we see an artist of authenticity and humility but ultimately and hyperawareness of technology and color that like a laser, fuses the image into our collective and virtual memory and intrigue that often returns to the mind for consideration again and again over time. "Time is. Time was." Andy Warhol.[ Ibid.]
Every transformation can be shown on a matrix.[ Ashby, William Ross. An Introduction to Cybernetics / W. Ross Ashby. London: Chapman and Hall, 1957.] Warhol saw a way to harness the tension between a gridlocked urban matrix concrete terrain such as New York City’s Manhattan and make it fascinating, pulsing with lights and sound in his Exploding Plastic Inevitable concert series where he projected brilliant colors and shapes onto the band “The Velvet Underground” as they played their primordial early raunchy Pop music that became the inspiration for many bands to come and even into the eighties bands like Talking Heads owe their roots to Lou Reed, John Cale and Andy Warhol’s progeny: The Velvet Underground. Andy Warhol was the multimedia cybernetic artist embodied and personified.
Even Andy Warhol’s written diary has a cybernetic rhythmic pulse to it as it reveals the real Andy underneath the wig. Each entry is honest and raw but always documented on a date with a timestamp, methodically, systematically as with the time capsules to enable the reader to keep their bearings and pin point temporally and geographically when and where each episode of the magic frenzy of Warhol’s iconic trajectory took place. The author and curator Donna DeSalvo said that once Warhol fused the photograph to the painting; that he married form and content in a magical kind of photosynthesis; you cannot pull them apart.
That is what we want from great artists and Warhol did that. Tan Lin postulates that Warhol’s Shadow Series of high-pitched color and strobe light imagery are actually cybernetic output. His idea is that the canvasses are a kind of coded notation and that the sequence is a mirror to the frenetic energy of the discotheque “Studio 54” as dancing musical data as neon images on a graph like musical notes on a staff.
There are thus obvious similarities and the comparisons to a cubic data container system that Google calls Kubernetes and to extend the cybernetic and symbiotic metaphor a little further; if we compare the box of the time capsule to the square where an individual Kanji is composed on Japanese rice paper for example, we can see that the configuration of seemingly random brush strokes literally form a character of notation in the Chinese and Japanese alphabet. We can compare these seemingly random brushstrokes to the selected objects to be saved in the time capsule boxes and we can then begin to intuit the actual language of Andy Warhol’s inner world and his interior imagination or personal mythological language.
This comparison of Kanji to the Time Capsule[ Görner, Klaus, and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol's Time Capsule 21: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Am Main; Ausstellung in Frankfurt: 27. September 2003-29. February 2004. Ausstellung in Pittsburgh: Herbst 2004. Köln: DuMont, 2003.]
- as a metaphor for language can help one to intuit the value, vitality and ubiquity of the function of Art in an individual’s life and the need for in the arts. They say that memories are galvanized with music and are guarded when associated with music against dementia. Therefore, we should invest in music and art if only for memories sake. The musical data that flows through Warhol’s work is a testament to his faith and his insurmountable joy of life. Certainly, with all his media and as he grew throughout his lifetime, he found a way to always make life interesting and inspire generations of artists and patrons for years to come.[ Ibid.]
Andy Warhol was not an idle man. Even after recovering from his near assassination he kept making art and video and publishing Interview and always moving forward with strong conviction and determination. He inhabited the urban matrix city simulacrum[ Baudrillard, Jean, and Sheila Faria. Glaser. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.] environment that is downtown and uptown Manhattan, made of rows and columns and squares sparkle and shine with his downtown superstars and video and big bold colorful shocking canvases that encapsulate a stellar moment and the energy of the day captured in a photosynthesis of serigraphy and giant brushstrokes.
Baudrillard argues that the map, suburbia, the theme park, the Post-Modern constructed reality, has replaced the authentic with the simulation. We have lost all sense of what is real and genuine and what we are left with ultimately is merely a simulation. What remains is a constructed order, abstract, and far removed from reality. We have lost the ability to discern the distinction between reality and artifice.
The image is a counterfeit of authenticity. Artifice is a new reality. In the Post Modern, psyche media culture keeps us distanced from the realities of our bodies and the world around us. Money has become the universal equivalent and the measure of everything in the post-modern life. The natural has been replaced with the artificial. Things have lost their materialism. The sweat of the laborer, the real-world idea of use has vanished. All is capital. It is the capital that now defines our identities, the price of personal fulfillment has a number attached to it.[ Baudrillard, Jean, and Sheila Faria. Glaser. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
]
We have completely lost touch with the laborer. Makers are now increasingly invisible and divorced from the consumer experience of the retail outlet or the even more complex experience of the internet. An example of this dilemma is that consumers, for the most part, do not know where their products originate. A Starbucks customer cannot even visualize a coffee bean plant. Urbanization results in an entirely new species removed from nature. When buying a pair of socks, no one visualizes a cotton field. We have lost all sense of use value. The concept of 'real' is in a state of flux. Language and ideology prevent us from accessing "reality."
We are dependent on the language of artifice to visualize postmodern reality that is an empty shell, merely an arbitrary construction of simulacra and simulation.
Warhol was well aware of the simulacra and simulation and the blue-collar maker’s plight. He sought to inject a sense of irony, humor and celebrate the simulation with a sense of spectacular, joy and wonder. With Warhol often we are confronted with a full-frontal image flattened with a message such as “Vote McGovern” over a green monstrous Richard Nixon image. Donna DeSalvo credited Andy Warhol for this formula as the origin of the current Social Media Pop Art form: The Meme. In his later imagery his concern was not only what makes an image communicate but also what it can shield, encode, hide, abstract or subvert.[ Brooks, Xan. "Pop's Dark Star: The Return of Andy Warhol." The Guardian. November 12, 2018. Accessed February 25, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/12/pops-dark-star-why-warhol-matters-now.]
In Warhol’s day the power was in his neighborhood and he achieved a success and a name brand that continues to promote the visual arts and assisted young artists with health insurance even today in the twenty-first century. The Andy Warhol Foundation is a lasting testament to the love, life and vision of Warhol’s unified celebratory work ethic that continues to fund exploration and development in the visual arts. He once said that Art is what you can get away with but he pushed the envelope of the function of the artist as a mirror of the culture to producer of images and cybernetic output in media including video, TV shows, a magazine and music and films that inspire individuality and encourage a rainbow ethic of creative expression and free floating creativity. Soon after his death in 1987 Time magazine wrote that the greatest creation by Andy Warhol was Andy Warhol himself.[ Evans, Thomas Morgan. 3D Warhol: Andy Warhol and Sculpture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.]
Warhol’s achievement was to create not only art but completely create a persona from scratch that is forever recognizable and a brand awareness that outlived the physical body. Andy Warhol the Pictorial Design Major from Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania went on to become the person of his dreams that at once realized the American Dream and yet at the same time redefined it, reinvented it and called the very idea of the American Dream itself into question. By placing it in the context of larger inclusive cybernetic systems at work behind the scenes. Warhol was a pioneer with the concept of technologically uniting imaginations. Cybernetics like a nervous system that surrounds and binds the planet makes ideas dynamic and thoughts travel at the speed of light with immediate real-time results.
Beyond the art object into the realm of sculpture as an ideal, an interactive behavioral proponent of change is the realm of Roy Ascott.[ Ascott, Roy. Art, Technology, Consciousness Mind@large. Bristol: Intellect, 2000.] Cybernetic thoughts usher in a new era of global one world of unity and thought. Warhol’s trajectory is the blossoming growth like a chrysalis that began by focusing on the expressive properties of the pure materials of paint and language, algorithm, dreams, shock, commerce, geometry, idea and then the digital restructuring of information, now a butterfly of pure thought made entirely of light. The Record of Our Time: “Mediation” is measured by the trail left behind of the icy comet we call “Art” hurling through time and space into the realm of pure thought evolving at the speed of light. Cybernetic art is always the result of energy.[ Ascott, Roy, and Edward Shanken. Telematic Embrace. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.]
Often it is difficult to perceive the difference between actual event and artifact. Through the magic of mediation, the digital experience is considered an equalizing substitute for being there. Where does art end and life begin? Is it now just one global, cybernetic, super-structural, closed-circuit system held together by the loving arms of our military and electronic surveillance team where every click and keystroke are monitored for the almighty sake of demography and Dataism and the seemingly infinite collection of this data as fuel for the economic capitalist monetary engine of the “free” market system?
Cybernetic output is a dynamic rendering of motion. The medium is the material that an original art object or remaining artifact is made of paint, wood, photograph, film, video, text, sound or light. Media is the plural form of the word medium and refers simultaneously to the press, the news that shapes our changing opinion of current events, the editors, and spinners of information. Mediation is the magical translation of an idea into form, reality into pictures, events into films, data into pure thought.
Tan Lin proposed that Andy Warhol’s late Shadow paintings are manifestations of dynamic strobe-lit cybernetic output.[ Lin, Tan. "Disco, Cybernetics, and the Migration of Warhol's Shadows into Computation." Criticism 56, no. 3 (2014): 481.] Lin describes Warhol’s Shadow Series as computational output and the synesthetic act of painting as a machine and logic and pleasure synced electronically by the disco track and the strobe as a flash of an idea that is automatically generative and pleasurable, high pitched and ephemeral as in, the moment of right now. Each canvas in Shadows by Andy Warhol can be viewed as a single container of data, a cell.[ Lin, Tan. Ibid.]
Andy Warhol captured the ephemera of his life and transformed it into art when he created The Time Capsules series that transformed actual residual nostalgic garbage and detailed evidence of the moment in his life and turned them into treasured artifacts.[ Görner, Klaus, and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol's Time Capsule 21: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Am Main; Ausstellung in Frankfurt: 27. September 2003-29. February 2004. Ausstellung in Pittsburgh: Herbst 2004. Köln: DuMont, 2003.]
He transformed this ephemeral trash into evidence worth examining not only alone, but in contrast and groups with their respective capsule, cell or frame with a concrete date that brings the conceptual idea into high relief. We see it just like a Japanese Kanji Character of a fixed number of strokes within a perfect square. These capsules are the foundation of Warhol’s secret personal language. Lin unveils a cybernetic artist of relevant resonance within a matrix, through his interpretation of “The Shadows” painting series that revitalizes the oeuvre of Warhol and makes it relevant again.
We are now complicit interactants mechanical components in a planetary cybernetic virtual world of thoughts, images and sounds. Andy had himself realized as a cybernetic mechanical electronic entity in life-size proportions and scale as an animatronic robot designed to do all the things Warhol did in life is now preserved as a cybernetic facsimile of his greatest creation which was the persona of Andy Warhol himself.
Andy Warhol proved the notion that anything from our ephemeral residual moment could be contained and transfigured into art and relic as treasured artifacts and that they become part of our collective memorabilia in each time capsule is a framed vision of epic, resonating metaphorical proportions with a myriad of implications about the function of cybernetic art, thought and collective virtual memory.
“The idea is not to live forever…” he said, “but to create something that will.”
Donna De Salvo said: “...but if there is any lesson to be learned from it, and from the artists featured in this book, it is that a system is a human construction, and thus fallible and imperfect. This is why artists make “open systems.”[ Burton, Johanna, Mark Benjamin Godfrey, Boris Groys, and Donna De Salvo. Open Systems Rethinking Art C.1970. London: Tate Publishing, 2005.] Andy Warhol was a cybernetic multimedia pioneer and his legacy remains relevant.
Andy Warhol & Cybernetics Notes:
Ascott, Roy. Art, Technology, Consciousness Mind@large. Bristol: Intellect, 2000.
Art, Technology, Consciousness of the Mind at Large features a collection of voices in contrasting points of view. The group is seeking harmony and to understand the individual and our place in the universe. This collective is exploring and discovering new avenues of perception to understand our original collective purpose. This group seeks a balance of three geographies ‘biosphere’ with the ‘technosphere’ and the ‘neurosphere’ and to see them as superimposed.
In the context of technology and its ubiquity, the book outlines recent theories regarding the collective consciousness in its relation to subjective experience. The technological connecting metaphor that pervades the work is the cybernetic art matrix, and it resides behind the scenes and frames the discourse as an omniscient systemic governing thought.
Ascott, Roy, and Edward Shanken. Telematic Embrace. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
Telematic Embrace is a useful, progressive and prescient artistic resource. Ascott and Shanken have produced a volume of great intellectual resource and creative utility. Ascott describes his immersive vision of the future of art and technology as it evolves from dry code to moist biological forms where architecture is ‘seeded’ rather than built. In his vision, the artist is a creator of contexts for transformation and grand changes of perception and open-ended facilitators in the enterprise of meaning-making in cybernetic systems. For Ascott, the artist is an interactant as well as a director. He seeks to inform and probe how phenomena are all systemically interrelated at all-inclusive epic proportional levels of perception simultaneously.
The cybernetic constructions of change and behaviorist art involve systemic interactive scenarios where art synesthetic-ally begins to merge with reality. It is an intellectual landscape where the virtual and the biological begin to simultaneously evolve and exchange molecular data from the cybernetic to the noetic from the age of digital paranoia to universal tele-noia. Ascott defines the Cybernetic Art Matrix as the foundation for his structure of Art and Education with great detail and specificity. He sums up the artifact or the product of the artist as context creator as a matrix where the artist in a methodical cybernetic way promotes and to some extent controls the flow of change and the systemic flow of information and change through interactivity within a given system.
Ashby, William Ross. An Introduction to Cybernetics / W. Ross Ashby. London: Chapman and Hall, 1957.
In such cases, where all transformations can be shown by a single schema, therefore representation by the matrix is a particularly illuminating fact. The systems of change in the behavior of open or closed systems that accept input and can be quantified by a graph include psychological behaviors, economic trends, and biological transformations such as growth and decay. The methodology of cybernetics is similar to that of music where the matrix is the staff and all the points of change however infinitesimal are the notes of the movement of change.
Brooks, Xan. "Pop's Dark Star: The Return of Andy Warhol." The Guardian. November 12, 2018. Accessed February 25, 2019.
Delightful current article about the relevance of Warhol and his mystique in the Guardian.
Burton, Johanna, Mark Benjamin Godfrey, Boris Groys, and Donna De Salvo. Open Systems Rethinking Art C.1970. London: Tate Publishing, 2005.
Wonderful fresh catalogue show with excellent systemic documentation and Donna De Salvo is a fabulous curator and editor.
Evans, Thomas Morgan. 3D Warhol: Andy Warhol and Sculpture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.
3D Warhol documents and considers the vast array and variety of multidimensional, sculptural work created by the iconoclast Andy Warhol around the years of the mid nineteen fifties until his death in 1987. The three-dimensional works of sculpture that develop during this period originate decades prior to the first Pop breakthrough paintings and coincide strangely with the year of his death.
Thomas Morgan Evans argues that Warhol's preoccupation with sculpture and its traditional conceptual configurations of sculptures he produced and reproduced divided the expectancies, alliances and moral value within the art historical and societal realms as well as sites of embodied investment or territories heretofore unexplored by sculptors of the same era. This recent groundbreaking, the original book brings to the forefront a major, but overlooked aspect of Warhol's oeuvre, providing an essential surprisingly new perspective on the artist's legacy.
Sculpture in the work of Andy Warhol has largely been underscored or ignored entirely by the nature of his personae which seemed to eclipse his work.
After his near-assassination in 1968 by Valerie Solanis, the author of S.C.U.M. Society for Cutting Up Men and its manifesto, Andy seemed even more otherworldly after he literally came back from the dead. There is a phantasmal element, of the apparition the ghostly the likeness as in a fantasy that ru
Bio
Modus Operandi
Bio
I was born in Monahans, Texas. We moved to Saudi Arabia in elementary school at eleven years of age.
At fifteen I went to Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, a boarding school for High school, majoring in Visual Arts and Creative Writing. I graduated in 1987, that winter was when Andy Warhol died.
So, then I went to the College of Fine
I was born in Monahans, Texas. We moved to Saudi Arabia in elementary school at eleven years of age.
At fifteen I went to Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, a boarding school for High school, majoring in Visual Arts and Creative Writing. I graduated in 1987, that winter was when Andy Warhol died.
So, then I went to the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania too.
I graduated with my undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon University in Electronic Time Based Media and received my diploma in 1996.
I came back to Texas and got my All Level Art Teaching Certification and taught for a year in Denver City. Then I moved to Dallas in 1999 got hired at GTE as an entry level graphic designer. I worked there until 2008
I left and got my MFA in Arts and Technology at UTD. As of 2015 I completed my second masters degree also at UTD in Cybernetic Sculptural Studies.
In 1987 I was a candidate for Presidential Scholar, when Ronald Reagan was president and a First Level Award winner of the National Foundation for Advancement of the Arts Recognition and Talent Search.
I am in 'Who's Who Among American High school Students' in the 1987 edition. I eventually after many years of exploration of painting, drawing, sculpture, computer graphics and video completed my BFA at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA. I graduated in 1995 with a degree in Electronic Time Based Media.
I came home in 1996 and went to Sul Ross State University where I retook all of the core academic courses that I hadn't done so well at Carnegie Mellon University; previously and got my credentials as a Lifetime All Level Visual Arts Teaching Certification for the state of Texas for K-12. I taught high school art for one year in a small town outside of Lubbock, TX.
It was a really difficult role for me and the kids threw rocks at my little silver 1998 Mustang and when the driver's side window crashed in on me, I just left with my summer paycheck in 1998 and moved in with my sister in North Dallas.
Email was still brand new. I started calling everyone I could think of asking if they had an entry level graphic design job and an email address.
I finally began a small email campaign to find employment and got in touch with GTE and Susan Potter's Spec Art Department on Executive Drive in Irving, TX. I was interviewed by Michelle Condra and at the end of the meeting I asked:
"When can I start?"
I worked there as we became Verizon and in 2004 I was promoted to Graphics Methods and Procedures Training and Documentation and my supervisor and manager was Martha Elmali as we became Idearc. the department downsized to only me and James Olivas and then just me.
Then my job was outsourced to India so I took the package and went to work at Barnes and Noble as a book, digital e-reader and music seller.
I wrote a book entitled: 'The Lone Star State of Mind' about my experiences with Idearc Media and my love of structure and employment concurrently. I went to graduate school in 2009 and I got an MFA in Arts and Technology from the University of Texas at Dallas.
I was hired fairly soon after graduation at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension on Coit and Campbell as the assistant office manager and accounting associate. I worked there for three years until 2015. I reapplied to the Arts and Humanities and I just finished my second masters degree, also at the University of Texas at Dallas.
I have a cumulative GPA of 3.908 and I am a member now, as an adult, of the 'International Golden Key Honor Society.'
I have been to Paris, London and New York many times. I am saving up to go to Japan; I like traveling. I am an artist but everyone is too now; which is great now since today everyone has access to so much freedom of choice in their individual lives though many don't see their individual personal freedom of expression within the parameters of their time and space.
The focus of my thesis is the Cybernetic Art Matrix and its application to teach visualization skills, creativity and innovation.
My relative, Kenneth Snelson, is a sculptor who recently passed away. I was able to meet him via Skype in a presentation at UTD in an Art Science PhD lab class with the astrophysicist Roger Malina who facilitated the class and once took the NASA space shuttle to the space lab as part of his experience.
The class went well. We managed to capture the audio of our meeting but the video failed. Kenneth Snelson's work is in Washington DC outside the Hirschorn, called the 'Needle Tower.'
His focus is on the molecular structure and the intimate designs of the universe. He was friends with Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, who are key figures in my research.
The Cybernetic Art Matrix is a fancy name for a grid that enables the mapping of the geography of the imagination digitally and temporally and translations between poetry, sound and sculpture.
In 2015, I came back to Thryv, as a web consultant and then I became a copywriter and terminated as a Quality Analyst with the off-shore team in Delhi,India. They were delightful.
My desk was about three feet from where it was when I was in Graphics Training Methods and Procedures in 2008. I deeply believe in Karma and positive thinking skills. I try to always focus on the interconnections of things; that's what my hairstyle is all about.
I feel so fortunate to be a part of such an exciting company and feel so blessed with so many options that others don't have the same access or opportunities and for that I am so grateful. Hindsight is 2020
In 2000, our older established generation's national leadership in the 'United States'unconscionably betrayed my generation's voices. Our leadership choice was usurped, and instead, the one percent allowed George Bush to take over my country's leadership as an arbitrarily appointed President of the United States. When our national popular choice and voices were silenced in favor of an antiquated system based on real estate, geography, and the numbed out the perverted notion of false inequality of the rural and heartland, not only that, but then you attempted to successfully normalize this theft and castration of me and my fellow constituents’ votes and voices in the lower 99%.
On that day at that moment, that precisely is when the music died for me, and when I watched you sabotage, gerrymander, and steal my faith in our so-called democracy. My American Dream was erased, evaporated, and quickly vanished. While the stockholders of Haliburton featuring a deeply vested interest in fossil fuels and greed at the expense of all types of health of not only the biosphere, environmental and but the abhorrence at the expense of physical, mental, spiritual well-being of the constituents who you are charging through the nose in order not to support them in return as a government but to build your power as a weaponry industry leader and the propulsion of blind market control an imbalanced, unfair taxation system in favor of the one percent at the torturous crucifixion of the lower 99% working class with a secret slavery mythology like continuing daylight savings time designed to disrupt the flow for the common man and catch him off guard as derived from the time when you maximized the daylight to pick the most cotton, only one more cruel slavery mythic notion propelled forward and controlling popular opinion fueled by reputable and academically sited knowledgeable sources that the mass culture of the U.S. can rely on for truth like Fox News that will guide their thinking by the hysterical profit-based media and perverted 'look-at-me' popular culture.
At that time, Koreans were here visiting and dared to say:
"In our country, whoever gets the most votes wins."
Look around wake up to the undeniable fact that they have so mismanaged our budget that they cannot afford to pay your social security benefits, so they use a virus again and frame it falsely as an act of God in order to relinquish their responsibility to us.
To weaponize the virus as a tool of genocide to avoid their contract to pay us back for the investment we each paid as we worked for the government to pay for the defense that they taxed each and every one of us unconscionably unfairly given the comparable unfair disproportionately lower percentage the one percent actually pay. A percentage that is enormously unfair biased and rigged advantages that stem from their privilege of not paying their fair share nor percentage of income taxes.
While the remaining residents in the 99% and the awful corners of desperation that the super-rich have consciously marginalized the rest of us in the population. Then have the audacity to blame us for uneducated nor protected pregnancies and a perversion of preventative health care like Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood
again
Planned Parenthood.
Would you please really consider those two words?
So when the people planning this place, you urban designers and civil engineers consciously marginalized people of color, providing them with no vocational training with no education nor option of legal income when they resort to crime and drug dealing when there are no other options for them in this video game victim media focused 'look-at-me' type of a culture of xenophobic monochrome narcissism with zero global awareness and not only that but often only two instead of the actual four-time zones are often omitted. A place where the main business and main industry now in this country are weapons and jails. Hindsight is 2020.
