I am very interested in showing how the tale that we have told about the world through our changing technologies has completely transformed the conditions in which we live our lives. But I’m less interested in the hall of mirrors fiction, the fiction that disappears into endless recursion, than I am with a kind of fiction that would somehow, in an almost ineffable moment, make consciousness take itself as its object, in the way that it takes the world as its object.

Richard Powers, from a Bookworm interview

Vincent Van Gogh, Self Portrait as an Artist (detail)

“Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.”

Vincent Van Gogh

Inky finger sketch of Sarah (Sara?) from the other night at Beulahland. She’s less creepy in real life.

Work night in the studio

Andy, John McCain, David Altmejd sculpture, Dante’s Inferno

So I’m in the middle of a new series code-named Brown Sunday. Who knows how it’ll turn out, but right now I think what’s really driving the project is some kind of weird conversion narrative. I’m thinking Confessions and Njal’s Saga, except with visual layers that connote some kind of parallel sexual agenda at play. Something about how shifts in physical, political or religious identity — the process of transformation itself — can contain gestures (e.g., kneeling to pray) that might be construed as sexual. I don’t know, I just like the idea of really basic, primal urges finding form in huge overly-complex structures fueled by the creation of myths. The myth of the prophet. The politician as prophet. Whatever.

From there, the question of whether the depiction of the conversion narrative might be a form of conversion narrative itself. I really hope so! Okay, I should get back to work.

Love, Ed.

Studio

I feel like throwing up my arms and shouting out things of unheard-of savagery, exchanging words with the high mysteries, proclaiming to the vast spaces of empty matter the existence of a new expansive personality.

But I pull myself together and calm myself. ’I am equal in size to whatever I see!’ The phrase still fills my whole soul, I rest every emotion I have on it, and the indecipherable peace of the harsh moonlight that begins to spread as night comes, falls on me, into me, as it does on the city beyond.

Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet

Fra Angelico, Lamenation (detail), from San Marco altarpiece predella

Three from the archive: David Bowie, Solaris poster, photo by Richard Kern, painting by Barnaby Furnas.

No theme or anything. Just some stuff we’re looking at tonight.

In my view, there have been no masterpieces yet in the online world, my own work included… With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said.

Jonathan Harris from a recent talk

The Desperate Travels of Francis Muscle, Panel 6

Hey. The sixth panel of The Desperate Travels of Francis Muscle the First is now live over at the Francis Muscle website. Sorry if this guy is unraveling a little slowly. Life in this project seems to be stuck in some kind of unanticipated sex loop. Yikes.