So much wisdom in Anita Amirrezvani’s Blood of Flowers, and especially pp 350-351:

“I did not reveal that I was the carpet’s designer and knotter. I thought if she saw my callused fingers or looked closely at my tired red eyes–if she understood the fearsome work that a carpet demanded–its beauties would be forever tarnished in her eyes. Better for her to imagine it being made by a carefree young girl who skipped across hillsides plucking flowers for dyes before settling down to tie a few relaxing knots in between sips of pomegranate juice.”

My personal analogue: Delivering custom art creation orders on Second Life, and the sort of prejudice that often comes with the package… “Oh, so you’re proprietor-creator (pity tone)?”

“I knew otherwise: my back ached, my limbs were stiff, and I had not slept enough for a month. I thought about all the labor and suffering that were hidden beneath a carpet, starting with the materials. Vast fields of flowers had to be murdered for their dye, innocent worms boiled alive for their silk–and what about knotters? Must we sacrifice ourselves for the sake of rugs?

It’s for the obsession.

“I had heard stories about women who became deformed by long hours of sitting at the loom so that when they tried to deliver a child, their bones formed a prison locking the baby inside. In such cases, mother and child would die after many hours of anguish. Even the youngest knotters suffered aching backs, bent limbs, tired fingers, exhausted eyes. All our labors were in service of beauty, but sometimes it seemed as if every thread in a carpet had been dipped in the blood of flowers.

“These were things that Maryam would never know…”

And similarly, these are things that most people would never know… synthetic beauty is created not only at a price, but at the expense of life — the devotion of an individual to the solidification of an abstract image, the enormous amount of self discipline involved to not only work on the task but to continue–instead of running around out in the physical open… sometimes just for the heck of it and sometimes because you’re living in poverty and do need the money or because you’ve foolishly wound yourself up in demanding financial obligations…

In many respects, I’m lucky that I get to take time out to experience this sort of self-imprisonment and to explore its potential as a creative outlet. I think my ideal fate would doom me to “luxuriate in the most immaculate of prisons (358).” As I’m doing now in my YoS… carpeting weaving in a digital world in my own prison.

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The Blood of Flowers (hardcover, reviewer’s ed, sent to me par avon ages ago), as I was reading about a somewhat stereotypical scenario of sweatshop worker-carpet children-weavers, how their hands grew disproportional and their legs became un-useable due to how they spend their whole days knotting carpets… for some reason I thought of the similarity between that and computers, the whole modern analogue of chained to a terminal. I’m also starting to realize I’ve put myself in a self-ordained sweatshop in my YOS. I literally wake up, turn on the computer (or screen), spend outrageous hours glued to the terminal, and sleep maybe 3 days later, and cycle-repeat +5 hours later.

Incidentally, as with most of my blog postings, the YoS list is totally ephemera… must have written it and totally forgotten about the list. Some things on the list I haven’t even touched, while others not quite at the originally planned dates, and then others have evolved into something totally different.

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Shooting stars are brilliantly beautiful, and the aphorism is more often a praise than the fatality it represents… It’s the death of a celestial body in the truest of sense–at its end it spontaneously decomposes into things that don’t even represent its brilliant existence before its fall.

I wish I have the time to develop this motif in more detail. But, alas, too many earthly tasks take their toll on my time…

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So, for the next few weeks, I am going to be watching every single episode of the X-Files prior to the release of the new X-Files movie. (Is this yet another thing that clearly betrays my age?)

Just saw episodes 1 thru 5 tonight. Actually haven’t seen all of them - actually don’t remember much of them. Some interesting paranormal motifs… but mostly, it’s interesting to note the traditional mystery/detective story plot technique of information loss applies. That is, Gov doesn’t actually have eyes *everywhere* (albeit they do in most places).

The salient thought is that once upon a time, I thought they would just attempt the simple solution of axing out the people completely. But now, after SL, I guess I can understand why that isn’t possible. It’s interesting that even in a theoretically controlled environment - i.e., where communication can essentially be filtered by a central system - a lot goes on that escapes the view. There’s also the tales of MS tech’s draining out to Google due to the tech behemoth’s increasing inefficiency as it gets to become a more of a megacorp. Information loss and people not knowing the right thing… and basically not knowing the right person to axe out - and the solution of axing out everyone wouldn’t work (lol) since I guess the point of power (the petty kind that people seem to go for) is really to control people.

For me though, it is really about knowledge. Not just encyclopedic knowledge, since I’ve found out firsthand that I can’t seem to access all of that at once - even if I do have all of it in me… rather, memory seems more easily accessed through epiphany. Similar to Hume’s argument about a person’s concluding in a decision based on a spike in emotion…

There’s also the part about going back and watching these after having suffered the toils of a sci-eng deg with a focus more on theory than the other misc items. A lot of the science doesn’t really seem as cool anymore to my kid eyes when I first saw them, and some just seem unlikely. Episode 4’s Conduit, where you have the toddler seeing binary on the static TV screen and constructing complicated segments of messages… really not sure if he can write all that *by hand*, and also whether he can keep organized enough so that they can later decode it (and how are they decoding it, what metric are they using, etc. o.O). Nevertheless, there are some interesting ideas integrated with a good storyline.

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I’m thinking of the RFL prom - the immersive virtual prom event on Second Life created by the passion of numerous designers, to benefit ACS through Relay for Life. I’m also thinking of data loss, oil paintings, and quantum mechanics… the ephemeralness of everything coherent.  

A younger me used to find it apalling and infuriating that great canvases of oil paintings would burn in a building fire. And be lost forever. I used to regard cases like that with the naive innocence of someone with too much pride in her own era’s distinction. I’d scoff and think — had they done that digitally, it would exist forever. And yet…

The great works of art from the ancient past will outlive the great works of this era. Modern art is relative, and in the eye of the beholder. Digital data is ephemeral. Hard drives fail, CD’s fail, DVD’s fail, flash drives get lost. Simulators on Second life get wiped because their maintenance fees are far too great.

It’s amazing the amount of passion and love people put into Second Life - and the beauty of some of the work is just wow… The insane amount of time and tendency to details the creator puts in… just defies good reason… especiallly when the details won’t survive after its creation - the creator, galvanized by more things to create would never look at it again… the detail, being to subtle and fine, would get overlooked by others, especially when there are a thousand others. (”The greater you are, the less of each of your works.”) And yet, I guess the only thing that really matters is the experience. There’s no gaurantee that the end product will survive or what sorts of freak accidents would prevent it from successfully reaching its destination. It is as Eshi says. It is all about the process of creating it. It is not about the end product, and yet the process of creating it is often unbearable in the horrible way - and while creating it you’re thinking about the end product. But, in the end, it is only about you. There’s a high chance no one will see it beyond you. And a high chance you’d never look at it after you’re done with it. It’s the process, and yet…

I guess that’s why in the middle of my personal life experiment in Second Life I start pursuing live theatre. I’d always strayed away from it after I “developed” my philosophy of life. Really, I studied physics thinking that knowing physics I would be able to understand everything else, and that really wasn’t it. Philosophy was more rhetoric and tenure politics than truth. And bioengineering was just unrigorous physics and luckiness. I used to pity people who spent their time doing art and that sort of stuff, since I thought they were so deep into their own niche they were “shallow” — savants, in a way… and yet, what I wanted to be was a savant too, actually a savant polymath, if that makes sense… Anyway though, live theatre is often not recorded not because of technical reasons but because of politics - recording rights and all. In Second Life, live theatre can’t always be recorded “live” because of lag and “ruthing” and gray-unrezzed-textures - they often render the view not as optimal, and a substantial amount of postwork becomes necessary. Thus, in Second Life, you’re lucky if you see things “in the eye of the creator,” textures rezzed and sculpties rezzed and everything as beautiful as intended.

The other element of a live event involving multiple people is that it isn’t always easy to get all of them together simultaneously. Some things only happen once in a lifetime - once in all of creation and existence. The extreme amount of anti-entropy required and butterfly effect and the mess that might precipitate an event. It’s a miracle it happened. And even if the medium has limited reach due to technological lackings… I guess I was lucky to have taken a part in it.

And then back to data. The loss of it. The capital necessary to maintain it. And even then there’s the possibility of these digital bytes succumbing to its own butterfly effect as random cables suffer random effects to sudden blow up a huge data center. I’m thinking about the no-cloning theorem in quantum computing. And I’m thinking of paintings, the massive oil canvases. They can’t really be cloned either - taking a photo just isn’t the same, and even so-called restorations where a lesser paints over the work of the master…

But I’m thinking about simulators on Second Life again, and the beautiful things created on them… and then destroyed on them because of the cost to maintain these simulators. It’s just such a pity when copying data is so easy in other digital mediums, and yet so hard in the infrastructure of Second Life. Why isn’t there an archive.org for Second Life?

I dunno, I guess I have a super-weak weak spot for beauty. If told that the only way I can immortalize beauty if only for the span of another’s lifetime were to lose my own, yet pass on what transpires of it, I would… You live and then you die.

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In RL, I turned 24 today, and although I’m still not done writing the bio of “Ina Centaur” (and far from finishing the full one) I guess you can read the bit of it here. I would request only that you not be ageist about my real-self – I didn’t mean to deceive you by not telling you straight ahead that I’m not the 50-year old “business maven” that you’ve somehow painted me as, nor do I want you to believe that because I am so young, I must necessarily be naive and cannot possibly understand you. I hope that actions speak louder than prejudices… And understand that few young people have the mental discipline and purpose to undergo a long period of seclusion; and that, although others may be less mature, I am different in my own way.  

I decided to take the day off from SL to read a story a friend (whom I thought never read) forwarded me. Eudeamon. I really wasn’t expecting much from the story, but the first three pages really — I mean really — pulled me into it. The structure of the story is formulaic, and the bildungsroman is really only notable because of a series of deux ex machinas… the protagonist suffers the usual syndrome of appearing “clueless” in spite of her heroic feats and leaps to danger… but yet, that’s somehow realistic (to me, at least) in that jumping into a burning building to save a baby really is just “something to do” when the scenario is encountered. But, really, the content and the ideas and the world of Eudeamon - Eudemonia - they’re simply transcendental.

Eudemonia is a planned city that enforces a new form of punishment — one that Banished criminals by forcing them to wear stark black anonymizing suits hooked up to their neurophysiology and body that deliver punishments automatically for each transgression. These “Banished” are allowed to walk through the city, but would be punished if they contact civilians or enter houses or handle cash or if they pursue a number of other “common luxuries”. The public is told to ignore their existence (and although you’d probably cite more optimistic authors’ fic in how the public can’t be told to do things, from experience and RL, you would know full well that it really is the other way around… in reality, the public believes in whatever the state-muddled media and mind-controlling PR tells them), and the Banes’ punishment is supposedly further enhanced by their being in medias reas, and yet ostracized from both “everyday luxuries” and also the normal flow of society.

But honestly though my description really does not do the story justice *at all.* There is just so much more to it. Reading it and savoring every word, letting the story carry you to its climax is really a transcendental experience.

…

In other news, we finally got divorced today. In hindsight, I guess the relationship had been doomed to failure from the beginning. There’s the fact that he would risk hurting me just to save his “reputation”; he’d wreck a chunk of a city just out of dumbness; he doesn’t get the idea of “talking things through”; he’d really rather involve everyone in the world with his own personal drama… He typically demands that I look at every miniscule thing he makes immediately, and would throw this most outrageous childish tantrum otherwise – even if I am busy multitasking some major conference. (It’s hardly true the other way around. I’ll make something and — whether I’m shamelessly-self-ad about it or in my typically lowkey way — he’d basically just ignore it because it’s something *I* did… I’m generally prolific, but I don’t really have the time to tell people about *everything* I do… just the occasional stuff I find interesting.) He’d start a project, get me involved to do the art part of it and also to publicize it… and then belittle my work, abandoning it after I’ve invested not only painstaking hours, but also thousands of dollars… saying things like he can’t work all the time without pay (what the heck am I doing then?). He knows full well that I really can’t afford to pay him, nor did he mention *anything* about pay prior to the project, not unless I break out of this independent artist phase.  

I keep on thinking of this character from my urban fantasy. Her father had warned her that if she married a paid goon, she’d eventually have to pay for sex. Quoting Alzarius: “The man doesn’t care about you. He cares only about your money–ahhh don’t interrupt me saying you’re not well-endowed like your cousins. He wants you for yourself. No, not that. I mean your intrinsic value. He sees you as a commodity to rip off one day, after he’s drained you of your talent, energy, and zeal for life. No, don’t turn away from me like that… The point is, eventually he will force you to pay for sex–you’re far more in love with him than he is with you… Stop it. Don’t you see? He’s impoverished out of will. He wants to constantly have to work for money–and if there’s something he does that won’t get him money, he’s going to eventually stop doing it. Yes, he will eventually stop loving you.”

But, honestly, for me it really doesn’t matter. He’s twelve years older than me, but I won’t get the chance to live to his age. As much as it pains me to think about it this way, I really can’t avoid it. More than anything else, I feel like a Bane — although I guess I’m stuck in Katrina (from Eudeamon)’s boat in that I wound up a Bane without actually commiting a major transgression. I’m divorced from the world, really, because unlike all its other denizens, I have the bittersweet lust for it, and making something out of it, but don’t have the luxury of time. I can’t have the external world define my value anymore. I have to find my eudeamon.

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Right now I’m eating a late breakfast of ?? - supposedly “limited edition” as made by the owner of a famous Taiwanese ?? store.  (Made once a year for Dragon Day.) I’m already in the mood for drawing day… and I can almost hear the sounds of the nostalgic beach from memory where I spent the precious hours of one summer doing beach-side sketches on-the-spot for the passer-by’s… as I ran away from the research I should have been doing for NSF/REU…

I’m thinking about Primtings and pieces I want to interpret in 3d. I woke up at 3 AM and one of the first sites I visited forced a popup of google.com’s homepage with:

This might just be the primting I’ll make.

Well, more importantly, I’m thinking about my vision for Primtings and defining a new art movement. So Duchamp launched the “readymade” art movement, and everyone on SL takes snapshots that blend their own figures and interpretation into a 3d piece… now what would it be like if people can obtain parts of a painting to do what they want with it and create their own interpretive extensions? That’s sort of the trend with the web nowadays - it’s all about mashup’s and what you create from the new interpretation of old information. There’s the old “open source” referring to source code, and then there’s “open (source) knowledge” (Wikipedia) and… might the new thing be “open (source) art”?

“If everyone contributes to something, then the piece belongs to everyone.”

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Somewhat heart-pained by the needless and superstitious discrimination against megaprims and also Sidewinder’s earlier comment about mega creator’s to be terminated  by tomorrow… and then WarKirby’s warcry in AWG (or was it Adv Scripters)… I finally got about to grabbing the Nicholez viewer to… spawn megaprims!

I think I was inspired by Eshi Otawara’s vision of “performance art,” although it really wasn’t clear to me what I was doing the whole time of the event… until much later.  At the end of it, the right words to call this event just spontaneously arose: once-in-a-sLifetime interactive temporal performance art.

So getting back to the multiple levels of inter-related allusions. Megaprims (aka mega’s)’s are discriminated against, and thus their lifetimes are limited — temporal like live theatre… susceptible to deletion through not time’s scythe but that of politics and misunderstanding. Poor mega’s! Poor, poor mega’s…

Performance art is about creating visual art, one part of which is both created and dies in the process of performance, and the other part survives. In this case, the artform is interactive. Visitors can drop by and request which mega to spawn. Atlas would spawn and place the prim somewhere… and after the first series of plywood prims, the usage of coloring started to become necessary to distinguish between where one prim ends and the other begins. After a while, the colors became a whole entire array covering more or less a sim — Primtings Museum. It became living modern art as more and more visitors swelled in a differential equation equal to a constant 50 for the duration of over two hours… and even after Atlas and the sim crashed and didn’t get back on until an hour later at like 1 am … people continued to come in. 

The people are told to spread the mega’s, spread, spread, spread. They are the sole witness of this event. They are the only people who can bring this event’s memory onwards — as well as the mega’s generated… although

The mega’s are packed in a 2×2x13.5 “totem” on Primtings Campus.

Anyway though, In this case, Atlas’ last-minute idea to turn this collective community’s striving to spread mega’s into an artform is, perhaps, her last opus before her account is banned (RIP Gene Replacement, bless his soul. RIP Charles Fauna, bless his soul).  Her performance, like the megaprims, is temporal… ephemeral… and her account far likely gone by the time you finish reading this. Fin. (RIP Ina Atlas, bless her soul.)

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 If Michelangeo painted the Sistine Chapels anywhere but in that one well-funded church endeavor, it would be akin to a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.

I think I have discovered that it’s not the beauty or merit of a piece that gets it the support it needs, but the level of publicity it attains. Having to both self-publicize, direct, and produce a piece makes it triply difficult – and funding as well is enervating. It takes precious life from art — and I do mean that both ways. After giving out a funding spiel describing SLSC initiatives, all I want to do is log out and poof — literally. And having to self-publicize just means I can spend that much less time on the actual art itself. Which defies the purpose of working on my own project…

If Michelangeo painted the Sistine Chapels in the streets of Sicily, people would walk all over it, and its colors and vibrancy would be stolen on the soles of countless travellers.  

In school, I used to think that missing an earned point there and here due to random grading errors didn’t matter. That was also what the prof’s said. But, the truth is that a few points missed here and there add up. It’s like in an old friend’s reminisces of AP Spanish, where extra credit was granted “randomly” to students who shout out “pointa, pointa!” for answering random hodge-podge. And in the end, it was this one extra credit point she missed that made the difference between an A and a B. For her, it meant losing out on being valedictorian. Microecon is life, really. A dollar saved here and there every day multiplied by 356 days becomes a size-able fortune. Similarly, being unlucky enough to receive grades on the borderline for dozens of courses, and not having the heart to fight for the next…

And then there are stories that you’d think were published on The Onion, rather than CNN, that, although AP-style, is just so full of… story. Take this one, for example, where a judge is accused of falling asleep during a trial, requiring treatment like a queen, among other things… and the fact that she can still stand all that personal invective-type drama against her really does illustrate an extremely strong character. 

It really is all about the guts and bull to fight, to get the word out.

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For the first time in a long time, I took a break from it all and actually watched through a whole movie (after devouring a profligate amount of… fruit coffee cake!). 300 was the movie, as championed by Frank Miller.

 Somewhere during the movie I had the oddest of epiphanies — and I’m not sure whether it’s because moviemakers tend to come from this sort of background or whether the same mentality actually applies one and the same… but, basically, the conjecture goes like this: advertising professionals are the modern analogues of religious idols.

So, the Persians had these Immortals, the personal army of the alleged God, the Persian King. They had their mysticism and magic and all that glitter (literally). They make people fear them, believe that aluminum is steal and all that… and thus sway them to kneel to them. 

Similarly, advertisers have these Innocents, the open-minded modern public, who can be led to believe in anything were a “solid” line of reasoning “provided.” They have their tricks and campaigns and all that flattery. They make people buy things, become things, and turn into things…. and thus sway them to make others pay for them. (No one cares about kneeling nowadays. Modern homage is about getting paid from effort other than your own.)

Coffee has the same effect on me as margaritas would have on others. I’m collapsing. Good night!

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