vendredi 28 mars 2014

What My Feldenkrais Teacher Taught Me Over The Years

[Reference Card: Pointers to keep in mind during Somatic Education Meetings]

- Pay attention to your Lived/Living Body, the Felt/Feeling Body
- Slow down
- Rest and pause often
- Reduce effort (Proceed Softly)
- Move up to but NOT INCLUDING the threshold of The Stretch/Stretching
- Same but with Threshold of Fatigue
- Same but with Threshold of Pain
- Interpret movements in your own way, how you conceive the movements proposed. You are not watching a demonstration (Recall all these pointers work best when applied together as a group)
- Observe Sensations, Emotions, Thoughts, Images
- Be comfortable with novelty/newness
- Remember your Breathing is a support and index of quality of the session of somatic education
- Find your own rhythm, go at your own pace (Personalized rhythm)


https://chumly.com/n/246735a

My Confession To All God's Children

I must confess. Often, I am petulant. I willfully antagonize others, for only a few specific reasons. I am not paranoid when I am actually, truly being persecuted by others. I am often the butt of others' jokes, I am often the victim of their overt antagonism and manipulation. As the Lord is my witness, I always try to let these abusers do what they seemingly desire most to do. That is, I let them try to do what seems to me, and to others also at times, to be their deepest desire, their most profound aspiration: To do harm unto others, i.e. To Tresspass, Transgress, for reasons I shall never know, not now, not in an eternity of time after this point - this Point of Perplexity for little old me.

I am fed up of being lied to. Not by those who truly care for me, who love me and cherish me, for they are never lying to me, never, not in a million years. They cherish me and I am stronger precisely because of their love and support. I never question them on that, EVER. I never will, either. I am a Loyal person.

In any case, to keep this short, I will state that in a few very specific "unique special cases", Anger can be a gift, in fact Anger IS a Gift in those rather limited few - yet amazing! - circumstances when anger is a gift.

I no longer even think to care about athesists, agnostics, anti-theists, anti-clerics and so on who tell me I am stupid for being willing to offer up my very life, in the name of the Lord and so forth.

Sorry but I have to confess. The Lord the Christ-Jesus does not like me to speak in such a way as I have done here. But I can't sleep these days. I know why, it's because a family member is on the verge of dying, and no, it is not who everyone things it is. It is someone else, the last of our lineage, well into her 90s. I fear she was neglected and that she may die soon. I hope I am wrong, but I am never wrong about these things. She is my Great-Aunt. Pray for her, her name is Rita. I fear in my heart of hearts that she is weary. She deserves the respect one might give to Saints, though she is merely a Citizen such as myself. But she is the person closest to God that I know of currently in this world, who is still living. And so I must pray for Rita, who experiences pains I can never hope to even imagine. Pax vobiscum. Amen.


https://chumly.com/n/2464abf

jeudi 27 mars 2014

STATUS REPORT - On Datatypes / Abstract Assembly Project

Things are going well with the Data Types Project that I started almost exactly one year ago, in the beginning of March, 2013. Truth be told, it had begun before that, that was just when I officially (publicly) launched the project, with this blog post on Tumblr:

The Datatypes Project: Abstract Assembly - datatypes.tumblr.com/post/44556530995/the-datatype...embly

Lest I forget, I also launched the accompanying Repository on Github:

DataTypes Repository on Github - github.com/antiface/DataTypes

DataTypes - The Initial Commit (Master) on Github - github.com/antiface/DataTypes/commit/f79e73131b72b...9cc93

That should already show you what progress has been made, but for lay-persons, I will try to give a Universal Status Report in only a few lines:

- First of all, you can see how the Repositories keep adding up. I made a special Repo that is an Index of my Personal Public Repositories on Github:

github.com/antiface/Index

In a little over a year, I was able to also officially (pubicly) launch The Archives-Project, which I think was similar to The History-Project I launched in the Summer of 2001, in that it was bound to fail at the outset. In other words, some projects that I launch are based on the Worst Anti-Patterns imaginable and are so wrong, so "impossibly Impossible" that I get to fail so profoundly so beautifully, and so masterfully, that the Projects become wicked testaments to the more beautiful and enduring qualities of being a human, i.e. Error is Human.

So as an artist, I start Series, I build Collections, and I work on Projects. Current project list:

- The History-Project
- The Writing-Without-Writing Project
- The DataTypes Project
- The Archives-Project
- And I'm thinking of launching The Inhibition-Painting Project next, in one form or another.

There are others, but those are the ones on the RADAR at the moment, the ones I'm actively working on. Once a Project is launched, is begun, it never ends. They are essentially Infinite Regresses, yet designed using Technics of Failure and other Alex Brand innovations so that there is proper Exception Handling, Error detection, Stigma management, Garbage-Collection, all of the above and more.

I'm writing a short novel (novella) called The Venice Of The City part III, evidently following parts I & II which date back to the 1998-2002 period. So everything is going according to plan. If you really want proof that I'm always telling the truth and that I really AM that amazing, like a time-tested and true Modern Renaissance Man, than I suggest you go straight to the repositories. They are on Github precisely because I can now use them to prove that all of the above and more, is now and forever:

A.G. (c) 2014

PS: So help me God - I found a way to make things public on public repositories on Github and not lose my All Rights Reserved Copyright, because it's all based on work that started before the Internet existed, which has all been continuously documented and archived. These are just Digital Versions of the Manual/Analog Distributed Revision Control System that I invented before Personal Computers were mainstream, in the work I did as an artist, as a child. If I cherish and treasure confidentiality and the fact that I like to lead a discreet life and also refuse to let people call me names, like a hermit and whatnot... Now perhaps you can realize that I am a Force of Nature as an artist and a force to be reckoned with. Yet people will continue to insult my intelligence, throw sticks and stones at me. But I'm on the side of the Good Guys. I grew up with World War I vets AND WWII vets, truckers, dispatchers, police officers, emergency personnel... My hometown had an air-raid siren, and I'm only 36 years old. It just goes to show you.. Hard work, discipline, self-reliance, all that stuff, even the whole God and Country thing, it is absolutely the Truest thing I know, in fact, it is the ONLY thing I truly know. Be good, and only do good things, contribute to doing goo and only doing good things, and people will hate you and spit in your face... But you will experience Joys Supreme.. You will experience terrible pains too, lots of grief, but with some healthy Works of Grief done in a controlled environment, you too can be a prolific contemporary artist with a practise that can instantaneously scale UP OR DOWN, where everything can be started and stopped at any given time. That is what artistic control really means, that's the true meaning, the reason we have copyright and patent systems. It's so that I can "recuse" myself, so that I can "remove" some content if I have a valid reason to and want to make it disappear.. That often happens, maybe I did a portrait of someone and then something happens that causes that painting to be a liability to me or to someone else, perhaps even the individual of who I made that portrait. I need to be able to make the painting disappear instantly, and not out of any cowardice or laziness, but precisely so that I can HOLD MYSELF ACCOUNTABLE.. So that I can make a public statement announcing to everyone that I had made this portrait, then I removed it, and if anyone has any questions about it, please file a report with my secretary. I will attend to it immediately.

All based on the soundest practises in art-making and culture-building, good works of preservation, conservation, that go all the way back to Vermeer, through the other Golden Ages, in Copenhagen in the early 1800s, to the work art collectors and gallery-owners did in the late 19th century and early to mid-20th century.. I am merely continuing in their tradition...


https://chumly.com/n/245ec70

VANITAS - Vanity of Vanities; Or, Memento Mori, A Reminder of Death

[Still Life Composition by A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/245cc34

mardi 25 mars 2014

Hey Rudy by A.G. (c) 2001-2014


https://chumly.com/n/24559cb

March 25th, 421 A.D.

[Venice is founded at twelve o'clock noon, according to legend.]


https://chumly.com/n/2450ac3

lundi 24 mars 2014

[PAINTER A. - STRATEGIC INTERMEDIA]

S1: No Face; S2: Face; ~S1: Face; ~S2: Antiface. [A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/244ce79

[Antisynthesis]

S1: Noise; S2: Signal; ~S1: Antinoise; ~S2: Antisignal. [A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/244cc73

IN THE MANNER OF SYNTHETIC CUBISM

[Mixed media on canvas. 7 in x 9 in. A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/24464e4

THE REBIRTH OF THE ORIGINAL HISTORY-PAINTING

[Mixed media on canvas. 6 in x 8 in. A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/24464e3

dimanche 23 mars 2014

samedi 22 mars 2014

What Doesn't Work

Things that don't work. Things that end up costing me days, weeks, months, even years of work. Things that could easily be fixed but that no one seems to care about, either out of neglect or because they are ignorant of the fact such problems exist.

No. 1. Autosave. Autosave doesn't work half the time. You know saving sucks. Saving to disk sucks, saving to the cloud sucks. You would rather you never had to save anything. This goes for users and programmers/developers. I/O sucks, is costly. So you invented Autosave. Awesome. Amazing, when can I start using it? Autosave fails because it's never quick enough. Since computer screens are filled up most of the time with a bunch of useless buttons, you KNOW that you WILL absolutely have a finger spasm or whatnot and DELETE your own work. It's going to happen, and sorry but no Autosave function in the world is going to save you, since it needed to be able to predict your random finger spasm, which I can confirm to you with utmost certainty, It did not predict your random spasm that deleted your day's work. And the last time it saved, It never saved enough basically.

No. 2, or maybe No. 0. Why all the buttons so close together? This is true of computers like desktops and laptops, computers with large monitors, small monitors. This is true of tablets, of smart phones, or eReaders. Too many buttons, at least too many buttons too close together. Hello, Mr. Designer, why do you put the SAVE EVERYTHING button next to the DELETE EVERYTHING button? You never heard of random finger spasms? Those buttons need to be AT OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE SCREEN. One can never "accidentally" delete something on purpose. One can never "accidentally" do ANYTHING. It means you either never tested your software properly, WITH REAL PEOPLE, or else you just didn't care. Either way, neglect AND/OR ignorance is key here.

No. 3. I don't buy that crap people say about the way Keyboards are layed out. They don't have the same keyboard layout in other parts of the world, so you can't use the excuse or justification that "That's just the way things settled." No, cause it settled DIFFERENTLY in different parts of the world.. I want a keyboard that has the keys I need, AND, get this... I want a keyboard where the DELETE and ENTER keys and F12 or whatnot, I want a keyboard where HOTKEYS or key-presses linked to serious functions, to NOT be side-by-side on the keyboard. Keyboards are not all the same dimensions, so when you're used to a standard keyboard and you get a different one with lighter keys or whatnot, if you're a speed-typer like me, you accidentally delete everything half the time because you hit the wrong key. You hit one of the F1-F12 keys and it deleted everything. Then when you tried to save it, you clicked DELETE EVERYTHING, or FORMAT DRIVE by accident cause you had a random finger spasm.

Anyway, my name is Alex Gagnon and I'm going to fix these serious problems one after the other over the course of the next 40-50 years. I won't retire or stop until every last one of those problems is fixed. It has to work for people with disabilities too. Imagine this, I am having constant problems of this nature over the course of say 20 years, and I have pretty good or at least "okay" fine motor control.

What if I didn't have perfect fine motor control? What would happen then? Could I even use a computer properly, to my liking? Ah, you never thought of that. Well, sir, you shouldn't be building things, cause you're building things for people like you, people who are super PRIVILEGED. Get with the program, man. There are billions of people not so privileged as we are. Get with the F$%& program.

So like I said, I will take the time necessary to solve every last one of these problems, one by one. Right now I'm working on an operating system as well as a new integrated circuit topography that should solve at least half of the problems I encounter and have encountered daily for the last 20 years.

So see you on the other side of PURE GENIUS, folks. Let me know when you get there, I already have a plaque with your name on it, waiting for you to arrive. Oh, and did I say, Get with the Fing program already? Thought so. Sorry but it's like pissing on Steve Jobs' grave and every other engineer, designer, building, maker that ever lived that tried to make the world a better place. Yes, it starts with your damn keyboard, with your damn integrated circuit topographies and with your damn operating systems. And no, Chromebook and Android etc. is NOT the solution. That's the solution for rich kids without disabilities. That doesn't work for people who have no potable water. Hey, if the drought is bad enough, you won't be able to use your iPhone and iPad and iPod anyway. Everything shuts down when that sort of thing goes on for long enough. Nobody told you that because few people truly care to study 100-Year-Flood type events that make the most pessimistic black swan events look like Christmas morning. Few of us, though, do think about the real worst-case scenarios, and prepare for them.

And my thesis is that if people had actually solved problems they tried to solve and even had the gall to say they solved, but didn't actual solve, then the world would be a much better place. So I am holding the entire computing community, the technology community, the telecommunications, networking, and other related communities from the invention of the very first Technical Media to the present, I am holding everyone responsible for me constantly losing my work no matter what I do. Apparently, I work faster than your super-speed computers are able to function at. Funny thing is, I have younger relatives that work even faster than I do, make me look like a really slow snail amongst the slowest of the snails. Moore's law didn't predict that humans would be faster generation after generation. So if in 20 years, computing technology did NOT catch up, then sorry but Houston we have a problem.

You pretty much built it all just plain WRONG. In any case, I will try to fix as many of those problems as I can in my lifetime. It will take a good 40-50 years, but that's okay. I'm healthy and able-bodied, and I happen to care a great deal about getting things right. But your chips are all wrong, your OSes are all wrong, the whole damn Shithouse is all wrong. You know, if the Shithouse is all wrong, you don't have to wait for it to crumble. Tear it down and build something better.

Perfect example of the kind of sentiment I am trying to convey here. Prof. Stephen Hawking just won a bet with a colleague on gravitational waves. He worked on something roughly 30 years ago and basically he was just proved right by the precision cosmology community. That's the simple way to put it. At any rate, Stephen Hawking is interviewed about the gravitational wave thing, and guess what? As always, he is using the same speech-generating device (SGD) that he's always used. I am led to believe that there haven't been any real improvements made, or real innovations, in electronic augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems in what, the last 40 years?

Get with the program. That's just not acceptable. The technology exists to make Prof. Stephen Hawking communicate with his thoughts. Apparently, though, nobody cares. They are too busy living privileged lives. So be it. I'll fix it all myself. Given enough time and health providing, I will fix things. Alex has entered the building. Watch out.
https://chumly.com/n/243b96b

samedi 15 mars 2014

Moral Virtue Says...

Pax vobiscum, Peace be with you.
[Acrylic on canvas. 5 in x 7 in. A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/23f4d5b

The Incredible Crankeur-in-a-Box

[Digital image. Self-portrait by A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/23f0b78

vendredi 14 mars 2014

Will The Real A. Einstein Please Stand up?

[When I was a child, I wanted to be Einsteinian when I grew up.]


https://chumly.com/n/23e808e

mercredi 12 mars 2014

What's Going On w/ Alex?

Hi. Here is what is going on with me, with A.G. I am somewhat made to feel a little sorrow when I think of the situation in the world today, the situation in general, that is. While humankind has made such great strides forward in recent time, I cannot but help feeling that we will never do enough to reconcile ourselves with our very ancient past.

Remember, human beings, our very humanity here, is a very ancient thing, and quite sacred, if you ask me. I do not want to give it up away, my Dignity that is, the dignity that I have as a human being.

But, alas, I cannot always preserve my own dignity. In a perfect world, this might not be the case, but I am an imperfect person anyhow, and so technically, it would be far worse if I were the only imperfect thing in a perfect universe. I think I would feel quite alone here in this place, with everything else completely and utterly perfect.

Thankfully, that is not the case. Only God is perfect, if one really wanted to get into the thick of theological doctrines and dogmatism, which no one really seems like they want to do anyway. So thus far I can safely say, everything is okay, more or less. Things are good with Alex.

Hope you are having a good day. I am recovering from a slight medical embarassment, doing some early Spring cleaning. If you feel that things are "not exactly right" at the moment, be patient and persevere. Things are just fine and will continue to be just fine. But, hey, I panic too sometimes, I have racing thoughts, heart palpitations, and whatnot. Not a serious problem, not an emergency really, except in the moment one doubts whether any of this is real and then falls into a sort of mental trap, thinking everything in the universe, the Universe Itself, has become an existential threat to us...

Ouch! Talk about that! How Brilliantly, Beautifully, and Profoundly Catastrophizing can one be?!!


https://chumly.com/n/23d429c

LITHIC TECHNOLOGY - From Sharp Stones To Smart Phones

[Modern Clay Tablet w/ Asemic Writing by A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/23d3e32

mardi 11 mars 2014

lundi 10 mars 2014

Man Walker - Walker Man

[Digital art by A.g. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/23c2fff
Gunk: In F-Sharp by A.G. (c) 2014


https://chumly.com/n/23c2d4b
B-minor: In The Key Of by A.G. (c) 2014


https://chumly.com/n/23c2cf8

The Social Contortionist - All We Acrobats Is

[CARNIVAL_CARD_10Mar14b by A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/23c1e86

AntiCommonsCards, Early Spring Competing

[MORALTEMPCARD_10Mar14a. A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/23c1ddd

The Truth About On-Line Communities

I will try to be brief. The truth of the matter is that on-line communities have been suprisingly consistent over the last 30 years or so (since the 1980s). Before you go and begin investing time in trying to join and become integrated and so forth in a new on-line community, there are a few things you should know beforehand. It may save you much by way of wasted time and space resources.

First and foremost, an on-line community is only a real community if and only if it is a reflection of an already (pre-)existing community in the natural, physical world. This is generally the rule, though there may be some unique special case exceptions (exemptions from the general rule).

For example, if you live in a small town and have a neighborhood Theater Club, you might also have a Facebook Page or Google+ Community on-line, or even a Twitter account and so forth. As was just stated, this is an example of a genuine, real community pre-existing in the outside world that found a "Third Place" on-line.

This almost always works to near-perfection. A healthy community can only maintain and preserve its health, even growing more healthy, by having a platform on-line that members of the community can use. That is, members of the community can interact face-to-face to resolve issues OR they can do it on-line. The on-line community is a huge Plus; But it COMPLEMENTS an already pre-existing community in the world of flesh and bones reality.

It is important that one know this going in, or else one will necessarily experience much pain and suffering, at least grief and hurt of some kind. For if the so-called on-line "community" is not physically attached or connected to a real community in the flesh and bones world of everyday work-a-day reality, then it will most likely fail in the near- to medium-term. Such communities will very rarely outlast the digital platforms that enabled them or made them possible, they aren't even likely to exist after the passing of the next winter or news cycle/business cycle.

People were not being held together by anything that they had in common, and so a kind of "dispersal of energy" if you will, ensued. That is, the universe does not like waste, yet waste is always being produced, and so the universe will usualy find a way to dispers crowds that are not being held together by any common purpose, or principles, or brick-and-mortar physical reality of some kind. The universe does not like virtual things, it likes physics; it is made of physics, not virtual communities. (Spoiler alert: Virtual communities still have to abide by the laws of physics, sorry to have to tell you!)

So that's one thing. If you are joining a community on-line, it is a good idea to try to see if you are a good fit for it. Chances are that you are not, because chances are that it's not a real community. Joining what is NOT a real community, yet appears to be one, is a risky even a dangerous thing to try to do. You essentially can only gain more grief and hurt and loss and expenditures of time, effort, energy, and heart, that will for all intents and purposes be a great liability to you - and by extension possibly a great liability to others around you as well (guilt-by-association).

As I just said, that's only one of the many things wrong with the world of on-line communities, and I will more or less keep it at that for now and come back to this at a later time. I think it is too important to know these things "going-in". There is hope, though! Do not fret! There is absolutely a great number of valid reasons to believe in the potential of communities, on-line and off-line! I have been part of a few genuinely real, authentic, life-changing communities that were seemingly 100% on-line. At least, I thought they were merely virtual communities until I realized that there was something stronger than all the computing power in the universe that held us together, something not very "virtual" to say the least.

I have been part of at least one community on-line where I have never ceased feeling welcome, needed, useful, respected, revered in a good, neighborly way, and it also happened to be a community where I was given liberty to express myself, my joys, my fears, and my woes, and last but not least, it was also a community where I was given great responsibilities and held accountable for my words and my actions in the world.

I know, it almost sounds as though I were describing some great Republic somewhere, a kind of Moore's Utopia. Well, in many ways, I am. To come back to what I said at the beginning, on-line communities will only really ever thrive if the individuals to be found therein are bound by something stronger and more powerful than a couple of wires and nuts and bolts. There has to be respect, and there has to be accountability. One does not always have to be transparent, there are times for both transparency and secrecy, confidentiality, things of that nature. One must have one's private life, one's own space, something one can own. But one must also be capable of "owning up to it", to be held accountable for one's words, actions, one's dealings in the world.

Otherwise, there can never be any trust in the universe, nor any faith in anything under the sun, for trust is only ever a kind of Promise of future "good faith" relations, if you will. One can only trust another person if one has faith that they will behave in a certain way. One must know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the other will be bound by the bonds of trust formed between both parties, which is always vice versa, for it can only ever go in both directions. That means there must be mutual understanding and reciprocity, a kind of "quid pro quo" if you will, but in a more general sense.

For that, my friends, is the social contract that has bound us together since day one. Without confidence, faith, and trust in one another, then Community itself, or Communities in the plural, cannot exist, or else will never persist, or PERSEVERE. So before joining the next Community you land in, what is it that you are looking for in a Community? What is it that you need? What are your worries, your joys, fears, and your woes, and what might help you find satisfaction and fulfilment in YOUR community? Think about it, and if you remember only one thing, remember to have faith in yourself and in others, and pray for wisdom and for strength, that we may all PERSEVERE TOGETHER now and forever. Amen. Please be good to one another.


https://chumly.com/n/23bc501

dimanche 9 mars 2014

Writing-Without-Writing - Ecrire-Sans-Ecrire

[Mixed media on corrugated cardboard. 6 in x 8 in. A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/23bb654

mercredi 5 mars 2014

FROM THE ARCHIVES -

[Analog Twitter Card. A.G. (c) 2012-2014]


https://chumly.com/n/23a0315

Test Antisignal -

[**START_SIGNAL**] <> [**STOP_SIGNAL**] [A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/239fd25

l'Antique Moderne - Museum of Modern Antiquity

[Digital image. Ash Wednesday, Montreal. A.G. (c) 2014]


https://chumly.com/n/239e17c