Prozac: One-a-day.

So with about a month and a half left until the show and the completion of my kickstarter project, I've decided I will post one sculpture a day from the project, until the day of the show. Granted, I'm not always up on my blogging game, so I may lag behind or miss some days, but for the most part I will be posting a picture of a completed sculpture each day alongside the photo which the sculpture is based off of. I'll be taking pictures in strange and unusual settings, and even doing some creative editing to try and turn the pictures into interesting little diptychs [two-pictures-next-to-eachother] .

So I'm gonna start you off with two today, and then it'll be one a day for the next month and half.

This is the story of a Hurricane

There is a strange feeling before a hurricane. Especially in a place that isn't accustomed to hurricanes. It feels as if I'm in some sort of an echo chamber, where the weather's tendencies are amplified, to the point where every whistle and whimper of the air is a cacophonous scream. It's not so much that each piece of weather on it's own is surprisingly jarring, it's that the build up around the entire weather system makes each drop of rain and gust of wind feel like the harbinger of a great whirling weather system; a consuming goliath slowly marching it's way up the coast line, taking note of the areas to our immediate south, but only as casual acquaintances on the way to it's ultimate destination: right here.

That's right. This storm has come to knock loose a branch upon the hood of my car while I drive briskly to safety on a country road and leave me paralyzed or dead. Of course this isn't what's going to happen. Nor is it the reality I live with in the moments leading up to this storm, but the pulse of the world around me is something to this effect. I can't say the storm won't do damage. Quite the contrary, I can say it's already done damage. Whatever fear and worry and foreshadowed notions of the storm to come, of subways flooding (causing rats to swarm the streets), of trees being plucked out of the moist soil like rotting weeds, of cars being blown off the grown like windswept umbrellas, is probably doing more damage to our nerves than the storm will to any of the surrounding area. I wish I was being facetious with my accounts of what people presume the oncoming storm to impend, but all of these things have been voiced to me by the people around me. Now certainly I don't know what's going to happen, and taking precautions seems like a good idea, but the air… there is something to the air before this storm, which feels like I am not watching the coming of a level 1 hurricane, but rather there is a tingling vibration like the nuclear pulse of an ever uncertain cold war.

Oh and updates on the show, new pictures of the latest kickstarter projects, a video, some t-shirt designs, stickers, postcards, and a glimpse into the next (massive) project I plan on undertaking, all coming very very soon. (seriously).

The Human Particle

[Disclaimer: It is generally frowned upon to take the ideas of quantum physics and mathematics and use them philosophically. So instead I'm trying to work my way backwards and take standard philosophical concepts such as the self and ideas and thoughts and interpret them through quantum physics and mathematics.]

What if, hypothetically speaking, we are like the particles of quantum mechanics. We are corpuscular (that is to say, we are particles), which is easily stated, because we are single objects. Mathematically speaking we are topologically equivalent to a sphere or any other object of genus 0 (one could argue that our orifices would make us more akin to a torus or double torus, but this argument is fairly immaterial). But we don't need mathematics to see our particulate nature, we can do a much simpler exercise, we can zoom out. We can zoom out far enough that we still see people, but we see them as tiny little specs, dots, moving around chaotically like some confused liquid. So the idea that humanity is corpuscular is not extremely hard to wrap your brain around, it may be somewhat abstract but it's fairly easy to grasp. Now in order for me to make my supposition that we are like the particles of quantum mechanics, that is to say both wave and particle, I must now elucidate how we are like the wave.

The conscious mind is a very mysterious entity, the subject of thousands of years of debate, and I certainly don't attest to have solved any of those mysteries. But I would say that what arises from consciousness and the human mind are some very wave like qualities. For one thing, the activity of the mind is an ever fluctuating thing, a series of ons and offs, of peaks and crests. We have moments of inspiration, during which many areas of our mind our light up with neural (electrical) activity, and we have periods of sleep (specifically stage 3 and 4) during which our mind is quiet and restful. But this analogy to the wave form is fairly weak, for it is more of a two dimension comparison than it is an actual mapping. What I would like to attempt, is to successfully transpose the concept of a wave on to the concept of humanity (or vice versa) and even on to the individual person. First let's think about waves for a moment. Imagine the surface of the earth to be one single tranquil sheet of water. Just a perfect blue sphere floating in space, held together by gravity, and for the moment it is completely calm, not a single ripple on its surface. Now imagine a massive meteor crashes into the sphere and disrupts its perfect surface. We watch as a huge wave will form, emanating from that focal point of the meteor crash, growing in size as it heads towards it's peak. The wave is so massive that the ripple goes around the entirety of the earth until it meets itself on the other side of the planet, crashing with tremendous force and sending smaller waves that crest and crash and strike each other and send out more smaller waves. So we see from the initial impact, the entire system is now in a state of flux and activity, and the whole of the surface is disrupted with waves and ripples and motion, all of them rising and falling, cresting and crashing. This is the action of a wave in three dimensional spherical geometry. Now something similar to this is happening every day but the medium I'm speaking of is not simple water molecules, comprised of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, rather it is a drastically more complex molecule which interacts in drastically more complex ways: The Human Molecule. The wave form is the idea; a development of the conscious mind. And the medium through which it travels is sight and sound (waves), and it is received by other human molecules, where it picks up steam and it grows and it crests and it crashes, and again subsequent ripples are formed. But this time there is a new dimension, the axis of time is added for the ideas exist not just in the present moment, but they linger on as wave cresting through our linear progression of time, rising and falling with the trends of humanity in what could conceptually be called an infinite number of times. Like a religion, or an economy, or a song or a social movement: like war and peace, like love and hate, they are dips and troughs on a wave rippling through the liquid surface of humanity.

And so at the same time as we are walking physical objects we are also ideas and waves which ripple through humanity: such is my conception of the dual wave-particle nature of man.

Hello again.

So I've been an absentee blogger for quite some time now, I've had a strange couple months, to say the least. To put it simply I liked this girl and things didn't work out. You know how that goes. Anyway, as is common of that situation I've been at low ebb, and so blogging goes by the way side. But this is no time to be at low ebb! I have 148 kickstarter orders (thank you all!) to fulfill, a garden full of cherry tomatoes and I've joined my first ever soccer league, though my team always loses... So yeah! I will be updating the website in the next few days, adding a whole bunch of writings, possibly streamlining the site a bit (if you guys have any suggestions, I'm welcome to them). I also have some announcements! The world has continued to turn ceaselessly (that's not the announcement) and things are certainly happening, certainly. The kickstarter project, as I've already mentioned, demands 148 sculptures (ranging from 3 to 10 inches), which I will be building over the course of the next two months, and when I'm finished there will be an epic show (if I may say so myself). The exact date and location of the show will be announced at the beginning of next week (it'll probably be somewhere around mid October). Also new apparel coming soon! And stickers! And I while I'm at it I could use some help. So I'm planning a camp out at the end of this month, and you're all invited, so if you want to escape the urban jungle and get your hands dirty, you may be in luck.

More soon. Here's some food for thought.