yeah, so a couple days ago i promised a new post here… a ‘revelation’ [ or is it a revolution? ] that i had during our last critique… sorry about that… i had this rev… er, thought, and then i got into a long debate about the direction of a project and kind of forgot about posting and also had the wind taken out of what the thought was about… anyway, at long last i think i can write about it and if i haven’t built it up too much with all of that [ because it’s really not that spectacular ] i will kind of meld it with a personal reflection that followed shortly after the ‘thought’… okay, it was really after a long debate and sort of battle of wills and reflections about my work, my future, and myself… whatever, it goes something like this… we were looking at yuji’s work for a critique and it had been previously suggested that he start exploring processing or some other software visualization tool to help him progress from the primarily rotational variety in his projects that seemed to be a result of the software he was drawing things in [ illustrator or corel draw or something like that ], but this time bill suggested that the work wasn’t really about rotation, that it wasn’t being hampered by that process anyway, and that although he was using computer aided drawing and a laser cutter there was still a ‘quality of the hand’ in his work and that, oddly, that didn’t bother bill… we were talking about the difference between designing a system that could be set up to make something on it’s own versus using automated tools that are in our ‘hands’ each step of the way… [ i’m probably throwing a whole heap of personal interpretation on all of this, but i think i’m basically being true to the conversation… then again, i don’t suppose it really matters, it’s my blog and i’ll write it like i think it. ] and the implication was that because these works were not the result of a complex system that might be set up and put into action with only a rough idea of what might be produced, rather they were fully envisioned in his head and created [ perhaps modified along the way ] by employing tools that were understood or at the very least understood in each execution of them…. the vision of the project was the artist’s. i could ramble on more, but that’s really enough for me to remember the ‘lesson’ and you can take away something too i suppose… the second revolution ;) i had was that my ‘body of work’ [ i love to say that… i never thought about having a body of work before i came here…. ] is about identity. it’s about using hard science to quantify my existence… now, i don’t really know if that’s actually the case, but it sounded good to me the other night and i haven’t tried to break it down just yet. i think in some way i am attempting to view myself as a part of an understandable system rather than a system that requires a break in logic… maybe it’s not possible. maybe the method is flawed. maybe that’s the point. whatever the case, this idea of the unique vision of the artist and the search for self joined together in a certain way for me a couple days ago and made it possible to progress down a path that wasn’t part of my ‘end of the year goal’… so i guess that’s good?