notes from underground

Character names:
Waltham Madak: Young, Debonair, Adventurous
Prosigonia Priety: Proper, Prudish, Scandalized

The most important people at any social event are the tailors and dressmakers. Discuss.

“That would be an interesting paper topic.” Over, and over, and over again.

Yay being the token humanities guy in a CS house!

(art too…)

I just returned from drawing class and Tealuxe, where I had one of the most fulfilling conversations of my entire time here at Brown. More on that later, still turning the ideas over in my head, but a related thought:

The statement that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it seems misleading. I do not in any way mean to demean the study of history, but rather that history should be one of the most celebratory fields in the world: The study of humanity’s past actions doesn’t just teach us what lead to Nazism, but also contains the memories and stories of the combined sum of humanity’s success thus far in history. Perhaps a more justifiable way to phrase the point would be that those who study history are blessed with the greatest treasury of past success, and have the strongest foundation ever for the structuring of future endeavors.

To justify the title of this post, Anachromancy is my own term to indicate to myself the notion of predicting and structuring future action from the vantage point of a comprehensive view of the past. Obviously the future is created through a continual dialectic between the existing structure and new ideas, but far too often the new is overemphasized.

Therefore, history should be a required course. Next time on Nova, nodal points and the coming cultural event horizon!

A chance look at an animation project somebody in the List MML was working on simultaneously reminded me how much I like Chinese painting and also lead me to discover more about 20th century Chinese painting. The guy who was working on that project was animating on top of an ink sketch by Wu Guanzhong, and I poked around online until I found a biography with some of his work. I like a lot of it– there is more at the following sites:

• Wu Guanzhong at Fernando Botero Art, including some more abstract works
• A painting of Wu’s at Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery
• Another webpage devoted to Wu — the bottom ink painting is the one the guy in the MML was working with.
• More Wu paintings

On a broader Chinese painting note, here is a site focused on contemporary Chinese art, and how the painting tradition has changed (I particularly like the top image, by Zao Wou-ki): Transformation of Tradition: Chinese Painting. I am beginning to seriously consider trying to track somebody down in the EAS department who would work with me on a brush painting independent study next year, both Sumi-e style and traditional Chinese. I wish I could pronounce these names, though… maybe I’ll vagabond the first few weeks of Chinese 10. Great idea, eh? ^_^

Not because it has anything directly to do with Wu Guanzhong, but because I discovered this site through searching for Wu’s painting: Song Li’s website: “Anyway, this is a personal website about what I paint, what I think and what I XXX. It’s just from an ordinary Chinese person.” He’s got some nice stuff, and I’m putting the link in this post so I can remember it.

It’s not anywhere close to digital painting in terms of the problems it presents, but a quote from this week’s New Yorker (4/9/07) brings up yet another problem with the computer vis-a-vis the creative process:

On the P.C., we use the same skills that we used on the typewriter, but the contact is not the same. We run our fingers lightly over the keys, making a gentle, pitter-patter sound. On the typewriter, by contrast, we had to stab, and the machine recorded our action with a great big clack. We liked that… The noise told us that we had accomplished something.

. . .

Which brings us to the white page. Mallarmé spoke of the uncertainty with which we face a clean sheet of paper and try, in vain, to record our thoughts on it with some precision. As long as we were feeding paper into the typewriter, this anxiety was still present to our mings, and was revealed in the pointillism of Wite-Out, or even in the dapple of letters that were darker, pressed in conficende, as opposed to the lighter ones, pressed more hesitantly. A page produced on a manual typewriter was like a record of the torture of thought.

The article goes on to note that the “effortlessly and undetectably erasable” text we produce on computers “buries the evidence of our struggle, asserting that what we said was what we thought all along.” Regardless of whether typewriters spoke to the previous generation of authors in the way the Muses spoke to Virgil, something has been lost in the departure from the tactile. This echoes my own feelings about digital painting, and how frustrating it is to work for hours on something that looks so clean and digital that surely it was done faster than that? At Siggraph I got to try a force-feedback 3D modeling tool, that let you mould CG meshes as you would with clay, to extraordinary results. Wacom tablets have adjustable heads to control the feeling of the pen against the screen. We’re moving in the right direction, but that heavy clacking sound, and its artistic analogue of the friction between loaded brush and rough canvas, are still beyond our grasp on the computer. Maybe that’s how it should be; maybe the two worlds are best kept separated. I’d hope not, though.

So I just got back from Connecticon, and it was AWESOME. Met a ton of really cool people, saw some incredible art, and generally had a blast for the three days I was there. I’ll find somewhere to upload the photos a bit later… I got to meet a bunch of amazing artists and have the snapshots to prove it, not to mention the fantastic cosplay I saw!

A few of the people I met really impressed me, both by being really open and friendly about their work, and also by being fantastically talented and skilled. I have a helluvalot of business cards from different artists, comics and companies, it’ll take a while to visit all the links and remember who they all are, but these were the webcomics and artists that I liked talking to the most:

• Shelli Paroline was an artist I met in the Artist’s Colony who flagged me down when she saw that my badge said I was from Providence. I’d passed her table a few times but she’d never been there, there was a really interesting poster right at the front of her table that I really liked but I didn’t get a chance to actually meet the artist herself until Sunday. In addition to doing some great fanart for shows like One Piece, she is working on a comic (or several, from the looks of her website) called The Trouble Is that features some truly spectacular characters and artwork. I ended up picking up two prints, and she gave me the teaser booklet for The Trouble Is. It’s kind of sad at the beginning, but I’m very interested in finding more of her stuff, it looks like a really cool world she’s creating! (Plus it can’t hurt that she’s from the Boston/RI circuit, so comparatively local… we joked about restaurants on Thayer, among other things!)
• Stan from Wasteland (Parasomniac.com) is the other kickass person I met at Artist’s Colony. Again, didn’t meet the artist until after I’d seen her work, but it looked so cool and graphic that I spent a long time talking to her friends and flipping through the work she had on display anyway. Met Stan herself a bit later… her art has major FLCL style influences, both anime and manga, but given that I love FLCL this is entirely a good thing, and she’s done really interesting work with it. I wish I could draw like she can! Of all the doodles I got from artists at the Con, INCLUDING people like Hawk and Ananth, I think hers was my favorite. So cute! May try to post a picture later, have no scanner at the moment.
• Scott Wegener absolutely deserves a mention. He was sharing Brian Clevinger’s table in the Dealer’s Room, and if I recall correctly he said his book ought to be available on the nuklearpower website later this year. Amazing comic art, check out this badass-ery, and a nice guy on top of that! He showed me some of his work from his project Killer of Demons, a cool project with an interesting premise.
• Last but Not Least, a HUGE amount of love to spread for CHUGWORTH ACADEMY! I’d never really read their comic online before, although I’d definately noticed Dave Cheung’s art… I started talking Dave and his writer Jamal in the dealer’s room, and before I’d left I’d talked myself into buying their book, essentially sight unseen. Oh man, was it funny! Not for the young or faint of morals, it’s a bit risqué at times, but… soooo funny! At the Iron Webcomic event (which I shall rant about AFTER painting tonight) I started reading it while drawings were being judged, and couldn’t stop laughing. The art’s good, the characters are absolutely nuts, and the writing is really random and entertaining. I have no idea why I didn’t read it sooner!

I have a ton more cards to go through, and a ton of fun panels and events to describe, but for now I need to sprint to the art building… I’m on the verge of falling asleep here, if I don’t get to work soon I’ll have shot my night of work all to hell. Not ideal. G’night for now, more to follow later!

Hung out with Chen tonight, which was really fun…. at some point we ended up looking through old spam emails we’d gotten, reading the subject lines that struck us as particularly amusing. It really would have been fun to have an assignment for Electronic Writing II, “Take the subject line of a spam email, then write a story based on it.” I may try anyway, or do some kind of artistic response to spam. The cream of the crop from the messages in my spam folder today (each of these are a subject line):

Samurai Stock Info
Just published I think, yes.
Full of health? Then don’t click!
The Stock Trading Gunslinger
angrily
You don’t have to sacrifice
concentrated massage
Message Subject
Your health, no man
Flare left field
test wok
Your health, nose-pulled
unmoved black

Nuts, there was one really great phrase that I can’t find… maybe Chen got it. Oh well. Anyway, it sounds like a rediculous way to spend an evening, but we also went for a walk and managed to find a coffeeshop that was still open on Wickenden, so it was not entirely unusual, just consistently fun and interesting. She’s a cool person to talk to.

And now, goodnight, world!