the open steppe

life problems - part 2

2011-10-09T12:47:00.000-07:00

where were we? ah, yes. broad and not-so-deep skillset. that's the problem. let me give you an idea of what we're dealing with:

i can draw pretty well. good grasp of human anatomy for drawing. pretty good, expressive, dynamic figure drawing. pretty good at observational drawing.
i'm pretty fluent in Photoshop. dealing with RAW files, image manipulation, etc. pretty much can do anything i want in there.
Illustrator, too. anything i can think of i can do.
i can do some pretty cool stuff in Flash. i know actionscript 3 pretty ok, but i'm never in that world long enough to be fluent in it. every time i go in there i have to relearn a lot of stuff. animation in flash i have pretty down. i can make some pretty cool websites with neat interactivity, albeit a little lacking in functionality.
i can technically do video editing. i'm not awesome at it, but i have an okay eye for it, i think, and i know the software pretty ok, although i'm aware i still have a lot to learn. but i do ok in Premiere and Final Cut Pro - well enough for my own personal means. on a professional level, not so much.
After Effects i'm getting pretty awesome at, technically. i'm still learning new stuff, of course, but it happens to be what i do to make money, so i'm doing it every day and am pretty fluent in it.
i'm laying out my comic book in Indesign, so i can work in that well enough for my own purposes.
i'm getting better at 3d modeling in Cinema 4D. i'm excited about this.
i can paint ok. i haven't done it in a while, but i miss it sometimes. i actually still like the last series of paintings i did way back when.
i can do some plumbing. not well enough to get paid for it, but i can install a toilet without more than a couple hiccups.
i can weld. oxy-acetylene and arc. i haven't done it in a while, but with a little bit of a refresher, i can probably do it ok.
i'm pretty good at sculpting in clay. i can achieve a likeness in a portrait.
i'm pretty good with carpentry. nothing super fancy, but i can build simple furniture and walls and shelves and stuff and make it look decent. i know my way around a table saw and band saw and mitre saw and panel saw and sanders and routers and stuff. i built a deck at my mom's house.
i'm pretty good at fixing computers. i built my first PC from parts. i'm not certified or anything, but i can figure out 95% of any issues i have with my or my friends' computers, Mac or PC. wish i knew Linux.
i'm somewhere between a beginner and an intermediate level hacker. i know how to use a hex editor. i hack my registry sometimes. i hack savestates for games.
i'm ok at photography. i know how to use an SLR. i can develop and print film in a darkroom. with digital, though, it's hardly relevant. even SLR usability is hardly a noteworthy skill anymore.
i know how to make a cast for metal or plaster
i think i'm an okay writer. i think i can express myself well, and in a way that's hopefully not boring. i think i can come up with a decent story and tell it well.
i've been told that i'm a good teacher. i think i have a good grasp of things i teach and i'm good at communicating that knowledge clearly and in a way other people can understand. i'm pretty good at making analogies, so i use this skill a lot when i teach.
i play music. i play mostly guitar, but i can also play simple stuff on the violin, drums, keyboards, and i can use Ableton to make compositions and beats and manipulate samples and stuff. i can use a sequencer, a drum machine, synthesizer, etc. well enough to do what i want with it.

anyway, you get the idea. i'm awesome at figuring out how to do stuff. but i get to a certain level and then fall off with it. but here's my main thing: i think i'm really good at coming up with ideas. it takes a long time, but given enough of it, i can come up with a good idea for anything. the problem lies in implementation. i have like two and a half ideas for awesome video games, but no way to make them myself, and no connections to help me make them. i have ideas for software, new art media, big sculptures, etc. but no way to make them real. i neither have the technical know-how to do it myself nor the knowledge of how to get it done through networking or grants, or some other means. i'm passionate about all these ideas. but i'm as unfocused as i am passionate - which is really the source of my implementation problem. i simply can't stick with anything long enough to put up with a certain level of frustration before i go "ok, this isn't working - i guess i'll switch to this other thing i'm also really passionate about and try that" and then the cycle begins again. nothing gets finished this way.

so what do i do with this? what kind of role could i play in this society? how am i supposed to choose in which field i make my "break"? Steve Jobs said "just do what you love." what if you, like me, love everything? i love film, i love music, i love comics and video games and software. how am i supposed to pick? i'm going to sound completely arrogant in saying this, but i think somewhere in me is the potential to be a Steve Jobs or a John Lasseter or a Duchamp or an Einstein. i mean, don't we all think this, in some way? isn't that why we're all, deep down, disappointed with ourselves? because we know what a person can be, and we're not that?

don't get me wrong. i have a job that i fucking LOVE now. honestly, there's not a single day that i walk into the lobby at work and look around and don't think "fuck, i really can't believe they let me in here. this is awesome. i really can't believe this." but as much as i love what i do there, i can't say that that's what i'm destined for, you know?

but yes. i am thankful. i'm thankful for everything that happened, everything that fell into place so i can have these problems. but wouldn't i be doing a disservice to all those things that happened, all the shit my parents went through, all the trust people put in me to do things for them, just to rest on my laurels and say "yeah, this is pretty ok. i can stop here." i feel like the only way to honor life is to want more from it. and achieve it.

so i dunno, is there some job or civic role out there that i don't know about for somebody who's "generally a pretty intelligent guy" or a "renaissance guy" or something? "idea dude"? i dunno. think of this as my resume.

for anybody reading this, i'd love your feedback. email me with your similar notions/predicaments.

life problems (part 1?)

2011-10-09T11:40:00.000-07:00

so i read this thing somewhere about how the knowledge we have nowadays is working differently than it did, say, before the internet. or maybe even before that. the knowledge we used to have was narrow, but deep: we would know about a limited amount of subjects, but be very well-versed in the few subjects we knew about. now it's more of a broad and shallow thing: we know about a LOT of subjects, but we're not super well-versed in any of them. i'm generalizing, but you get the idea. i found this interesting, because subject knowledge seems to be following a different trend than skillsets. i feel like skillsets, as in, people things do to make money, are getting more and more specific. like, job descriptions seem to be getting unimaginably narrow and focused. you can't be just a filmmaker these days, it seems. you're probably specifically a cinematographer, or an editor, or an effects director. whatever. even within those things, it's super specialized - you're really good with these certain types of effects, and not as much with these other ones, etc.

so anyway, that kind of sets the stage for my life situation, so here's an intro to that:

i'm not really good at doing anything. i mean, i do okay in a ton of different things, but i'm not awesome at any single one. my skillset is super broad, but only moderately deep. not SHALLOW, mind you, but not super-super deep, either. in this way, it reflects my knowledge set. so because of this, i feel like an anomaly these days.

so that's the intro, now for a big footnote:

in the middle of writing this, i took a break to go drop off my laundry. there i saw a guy with one arm doing his own laundry. i thought "fuck, here i am bitching about my life when this guy is an arm short and doing his own laundry..." so yeah, i know what you're thinking: white boy problems. but here's the thing: my problems are, in a way, no less valid than that guy's at the laundromat. my parents turned their lives upside down and brought my infant ass to america so i could have a better life. they worked their asses off to feed and raise me so i could go to college here. basically, the deal is this: we have to get the food and shelter shit sorted out, and then we move on to other shit, like (in no particular order) laundry, getting an education, getting into a good relationship and then stuff like contributing to society. it's a constant string of "ok, we got this figured out, what's the next thing?" this is how civilization gets better. so, in that way, it's sort of ok that i have these problems in my life and that guy has his. i'm not "further up" than he is or any kind of nonsense like that. just different...

...uh, right?

anyway, this is long, so i'll break this up into parts to make it more digestible. thanks.

feedback is appreciated.

(in)formal show - part 4

2011-06-24T21:45:00.000-07:00

finally - the last part of this series on my show i had (last fall already! jeez!)

anyway:

"a while back i made an interactive drawing that was Flash-based, and i just wanted to represent it here, although it ultimately fails in this relatively less temporal and interactive format. the idea was that will (expressed by a string of “high-energy naked singularities” - sorry for the nerdspeak) is moved around the screen with the mouse in realtime, and then the parts of the corporeal body follow it, albeit sluggishly and with a delay, from the center mass and eventually out to the wings and talons - the extremities."

i actually put this up (had to do some digging in old files) for you to check out. it's pretty crappy, and it gets broken a lot (like if you move the mouse out of the window a lot, sometimes body parts get stuck), but in my defense, i whipped it up really quickly one night for a drawing show at Art Crating, Inc. http://www.k-foo.com/will.html

"this is a sample of the book i’m working on. we see Kelly (or Kel, as she prefers to be called) and P just hanging out on her roof. there’s a lot of dialogue, but i didn’t do the lettering yet. but, see? P’s just a normal guy!"

a lot of my friends know about this "comic book" i'm "working on", which is slowly becoming this imaginary friend everyone just humors me about. well, here's actual proof that the project does, indeed, exist. this page is actually further along than this now, but this is how it looked at the time of the show.

"here’s some portraits of other characters in my book series (titled NORN). these are the most developed portraits i had available, and it so happens that they were portraits i did for skateboard deck designs i’d like to make. i don’t know if you can see it, but i tried to make the smoke trail a common element in all of them. anyway, Kel is smoking, as usual, Ren, the girl with the gun, is just a gun nut, not a criminal, though that line tends to blur with her.... she’s probably just in her backyard shooting off her M1911 for kicks. and P seems to be up to his reality-bending shenanigans again."

this is a little misleading - the portraits and designs i have are actually in full color, but this was a black and white show, so i just kept with the theme. i while back i had this fantasy of having a store on boardpusher.com and having my friends put their artwork on decks and sell them online. long story short, i lack the html/css technical know-how to make the site look good (the default templates are pretty crappy looking), so i kind of gave up on it. yet another failed attempt at trying to integrate myself into skateboard culture.

i remember being 12, and starting to skateboard, and shortly afterwards moving to rural PA, where i lived on a dirt road. my skateboarding career ended there. ever since, i always kind of felt bad about missing out on the whole skateboarding experience - i feel like it's linked to so many things i care about aesthetically, but it ended up being this club i could never join. a parallel story happened with graffiti - i started drawing those "S" things and some Keith-Haring-looking dudes around, but in PA, it seems kind of futile to draw on trees with paint markers. so i missed out on that whole thing, too. i find myself trying to emulate that street aesthetic in my work, but i ultimately fail - i just have to accept that as much as i'm a city kid, as much as i love that stuff, it's still a foreign part of my visual vocabulary. and now here i am, at 31, going out in the middle of the night to teach myself to skateboard. pretty sad.

"i’ve never done a drawing of a horse before this, and i have to say, i was pretty pleased with the result. it’s been my fantasy for a long time now to break away on horseback across the Mongolian steppe, wielding a weapon (for what purpose the weapon is being wielded, i don’t really know). the secondary fantasy is to make a video game about it."

the idea for the game that this might exist in is to recreate the sense of wonder that comes with simply moving from one place to another. big, open spaces, cities of wonder, seeing a landmark on the horizon and being able to ride to it, things like that. games rarely feel vast anymore - there's always some invisible wall to keep you in a narrative. which is fine - i understand people complain about games being "too open", but i think it's time for a shift - games need to start rewarding things like creativity and imagination, not just resource management, pattern recognition, rote memorization, and manual dexterity. and more steeds.

"i’m thinking of doing a children’s book, and this is the first sketch i did for the main character. the character is a doll come to life. the story is about how the doll is separated from its owner, and subsequently becomes lost. in the world of the story, when loved things are lost, they are taken to a fantastic realm, and that is the place where the doll comes to life and tries to make its way home again. for as long as i can remember, i could never deal with loss very well. to this day, i’ve made little progress on that front - my mind simply refuses to accept it. so i’d rather make a world where the things we all miss are trying to find us."

i remember being little, and my parents taking me to a beach, and i had a beach ball. i was playing with it in the water, and got distracted and got out of the water to play in the sand or eat a sandwich or something. it came time to leave, and i looked around for my beach ball, and saw it out in the ocean, a tiny dot floating out towards the horizon. of course, we had to leave it - it was impossible to swim out that far to retrieve it. i remember screaming and bawling my eyes out - it was there, i could see it, but it was gone, forever. i think i cried the whole way home. (my poor parents - i was such a nutcase.) i still think about that beach ball sometimes. i wonder how far it got before getting popped by some errant seagull, bleached pure white - maybe it made its way to that giant plastic continent in the middle of the pacific, among other lost things.

(in)formal show - part 3

2011-05-14T17:27:00.000-07:00

"this is P again (sorry - i might be writing these in a different order than you are viewing them). he seems to be charging up some ball of energy in his hand to release onto something, but he doesn’t mean any real harm - he’s just having a bit of fun. i’m afraid i keep portraying him as this menacing being, but he’s really just a normal guy, but with the means to act on his fantasies. it just happens to be more fun to draw him in this state as opposed to drawing him taking a nap or eating breakfast or playing video games. (and i have done this, so i know.)"

so here's the deal with this character: he's basically me, or, more specifically, the me that i want to be. he is omnipotent, as in whatever he wills to happen, happens. he's not a superhero, he doesn't get his powers from anything, he doesn't have a kryptonite, he's just that way. he's kind of a manifestation of a belief i have: the thing that determines what happens in the universe is, ultimately, will. now, i mean "will" in the broadest sense - another word could be "tendency". the "will" of a table is to hold things up. the "will" of an object is to fall. whichever "will" is greater determines what happens when that object is placed on that table. well, it's actually a lot more complicated than that - but i'm using the simplest example i could think of. anyway, P's will just happens to be greater than everything around him (save for the "will" of the universe - which can't be surpassed).

"this is a form created by starting with a regular polygonal shape and distorting it through multiple iterations. it’s a great example of how something can appear chaotic, and yet also be understood by a mathematical equation. (what’s also funny about this is that “Newtonian” means can describe this form, but it ultimately fails.) i like to think this is a metaphor for how the universe works: on a human scale, things seem completely bonkers, but there is an order to it - it’s just hidden from us."

i probably should have used "Euclidian" instead of "Newtonian", but i'm fine with either one, i suppose. you get the idea, right? i had an argument a while back with some friends about Alan Watts (well, i was the only one arguing, actually...), who said that nature is "wiggly" and that humans were lesser for making things in Euclidian forms, and for using things like math to figure nature out. i basically said we was a hippie moron, which i guess wasn't fair - not all white guys in san francisco who are into eastern philosophy are necessarily hippies.

"i don’t find myself doing creature designs very often, but when i do, i always have a lot of fun. this is a muarg, the premier form of arctic transportation. i apologize for not putting a human beside him for scale reference, but they tend to be about 5 or 6 feet at the shoulder. they can ride up to two, smell awful, and are voraciously affectionate. i always have to do some smaller action doodles to accompany these, because creatures have to be designed not only in 3, but also the 4th dimension. i need to see how it runs and moves to make sure it works right. the ghosty form on his back is a saddle."

i guess i could just give more details about these guys: they're native to arctic climates, are usually seen in packs of about 4-12 induviduals, but meet at their ancestral mating grounds once a year, at which can be tens of thousands of induviduals present. at these meetings, individuals may couple up and leave their original packs in favor of their mate's pack. they usually partner up for life, but have been known to split once their young reach maturity. the nomads of the north have domesticated them for use as beasts of burden and steeds.

"this is a 3d sketch of a sculpture concept i want to do. i’m really into the moai statues of Easter Island, and wanted to make a contemporary version. the guy is just in there for scale. if i had an unlimited budget, i’d have them tilt in the ground with the axial tilt of the earth, and they would have aeolian harps in their mouths so they could sing. i’d also like them to be mass produced, and collaborate with other artists, a la Munny."

the idea of these came to me in a dream. it was like that scene at the end of close encounters of the third kind, except instead of coming from space, they came from under the ground in a field by my house in PA. it was beautiful - glowing towers and faces, all singing to me.

"so i’m working on a Thundercats script. but whenever i write, i need to accompany it with something visual, so i sketched out these character designs. i’m trying to make them more ethnicnally diverse - Tygra being more Indian, Cheetara more Asian, etc. the script will be a Freudian exploration of sexual maturity (control of the Sword of Omens = control over the erectile function) interspersed with slowmo Cheetara kung-fu, jet scooter chases, and giant worm battles. it’s going to be friggin EPIC."

ok, so the script hasn't moved in a long time, and the movie will probably be made before it does again, but it's still there, and will be better than any movie that comes out.

(in)formal show - part 2

2011-04-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

"some time ago i gave in to my deepest formalist desires. i wanted to shed any notion of concept or idea and focus only on making shapes i loved. i think alar forms in nature are pretty great, so i wanted to make some of my own. the mythology i tacked on to these is that when P bends reality to his will, sometimes reality itself tears, and the result is these “Foils of Aerok”."

i know the word "alar" from doing crosswords. it's a real word, meaning winglike. the idea of stripping something we make of any meaning, leaving only pure form, is, of course, an idea in and of itself, but i find the endeavor not only interesting, but necessary. to me it's about removing the audience from the equation, leaving only a direct line between me and the system that is the universe, some call it God, some, like Patrick Walsh, call it "the Big Up". it's occurred to me only recently that while i have no audience in mind when i make some things, that doesn't mean i can't share it with others - hence this blog!

"another “wing” form. i did this freehand, but my hand’s movements were interpreted by Adobe Illustrator’s vectorization. again, you’re looking at a math equation. but what i love is the dialog that happens between me and the software.
Illustrator: “is this what you meant?”
Me (smiling): “haha, yeah, sure!”
i’ve discovered that i value less what’s lost in translation than what is found."

some would argue that software's interpretation of things (read: digitization) is "crude" and "soulless". to me, it's simply a matter of trying to say the same thing in a different language. it's like analog audio vinyl vs. digital files. BOTH formats exhibit information loss from the original recorded soundwaves, just in different ways. it's like saying english is better than japanese. they both communicate in their own way, and both languages have aspects that can't transfer properly to the other. language is fundamentally flawed - but in the best way, because it allows for interpretation. new things happen that weren't there before. what is more beautiful than that?

"these are character design sketches for storyboarding a film my good friend Eileen Brennan is putting together. the designs ultimately weren’t used, but i grew fond of these drawings - firstly, because i whipped them up in an insanely short amount of time (i usually labor for days on a drawing) and secondly, because the style that came out of me was pleasantly new to me, and something i really resonated with. oh, and if you’re designing a group of friends, you have to do a height comparison."

facebook friends of mine have noticed a recent surge in my character design hobby, so it seemed appropriate to post this. i'm not great at it, but it sure is fun!

"these are some sketches i did of the main heroine in a game concept i’m working on. i did it to push what i could do with the brush settings in Photoshop, after seeing some amazing character art videos on youtube. (in retrospect, i kind of wish i blew these up more - the textures you can get from Photoshop brushes are pretty great.) there are 3 stages of development, in order, but i find myself actually preferring the middle one. this is the beauty of sketching on a computer: Undo. Undo makes for some truly fearless drawing, and while it’s true that irrevocability forces us to move forward, i’m perfectly happy with cheating that system for now."

the character follows what i call the "Miyazaki girl" mold. Hayao Miyazaki's heroines are always strong-willed, slightly tomboyish, and good-souled. is it possible to have a crush on an archetype? oh and now that it's on the web, you CAN blow them up more!

(in)formal show - part 1

2010-12-19T20:09:00.000-08:00

back in september, Andrea Talarico of Anthology New & Used Books (scranthology.com) in scranton, pa, graciously permitted me to put up a show of drawings i did in her store.

the title of the show was (in)formal, because it was a combination of ultimately formal drawings and an attempt at informal discourse. i was never good at creating an air of mystery around my work, so i've given up on it and instead went the other way - to be generous with talking about my work, because i'm not going to pretend that my work can or should "stand on its own" in any way. and so every drawing in the show was accompanied with a little written piece that told a little bit about it, and hopefully enriched its experience. in this blog, i'll provide the images and written pieces that were in the show, and maybe expand on the ideas for each piece. i hope you enjoy it. there were 17 in total, so i'll split them into multiple blog posts so as to make it more digestible.

"this is the main character from my book, whose working name is simply “P”, in his Devourer form. when in this form, he becomes what is essentially a black hole, sucking everything around him into his maw. while this may seem violent, it actually stems from the frustration he experiences from loving existence so much. he wants to envelop it completely and surround it, and have it within him, everything and all at once."

P started out as a working name (see so i started a blog/what's in a name?), but is starting to settle into his actual name. not much else to say about this, except that the last phrase is a Lungs of a Giant quote.

"ah, robots. i’ve been drawing robots since i was 4, and they’re still not out of my system. i constantly look to manga and gaming as sources for truly inspired interpretations of human and animal forms. you want to see real deconstruction of the human form? look at Toru Nakayama’s designs for Mega Man Zero."

this is Berthold. he is a relic of a bygone civilization, and was found by a little girl in some ancient ruins, long since deactivated. originally intended for war, he has since forgotten his programming and is now the little girl's best friend. they go on adventures together, and he protects her. she is also a mechanical genius and she uses her skills to keep him repaired and in top functional capacity. i totally bit the story off of chrono trigger, but i don't care. and i TOTALLY did my version before the movie iron giant came out. so there's that. between chrono trigger, iron giant, tetsujin 28/gigantor, and appleseed, the giant robot/little human best friend relationship has become a bit of an archetype in my mind, and this is just my version of it. so maybe that relationship is just another campbellian myth structure we've only yet to discover, eh?

"i started messing around with 3d modeling software this year, and i love it. here i took a cube and applied a relatively simple trig distortion function to it. you can see in the second iteration that it’s still recognizable as a cube, but the third iteration, amazingly enough, was achieved by simply changing one coefficient in the function! as i raised that coefficient, there was definitely a point where my brain went “ok, cube, cube, sorta cube...aaaand what the hell is that?” i love that something can look “wrong” to us but to the computer, is a perfectly “rational” form. i believe that “wrong event horizon” is continually expanding as our species develops. eventually we will be able to look at the third form and say “yeah. a cube...so?”"

sorry, i'm too lazy to substitute the double quotes for single quotes within my double quotes. you get the idea. anyway, the cube acts as a metaphor for our understanding of the world, i guess - i still believe, much to most of my friends' disagreement, that everything in the universe will be understood by a sentient being sometime in the distant future. it's sad to know that i probably won't live to see the day i could look up the stars and see a perfect, divine pattern in all of it. i guess chaos can be interesting. though i can't help but think of this old sneaky chinese curse in disguise: "may you have an interesting life."

i "do art" - part 4: on innovation

2010-12-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

the way of the future.

in the last part of this series (finally - i know we all want to move on), and hopefully the shortest (double-thankfully), i'd like to briefly touch on the relationship between innovations in technology and the arts.

there's really not much i can say on this that ted.com hasn't thoroughly done so already, so i'd like to just add my two cents to the vast moneypot that is ted. like the printing press to the written word, like digital manipulation to film, and yes, like multi-colored pens to squid drawings, innovations in technology have driven innovations in the arts since forever. this works the other way around as well - the aforementioned innovations were a result of creative impulses needing to be met. the byproducts of these reactions gave rise to uses nobody ever expected.

i know none of this is news to you. so why bother saying it? because i'm using this idea to illustrate my faith in innovation to bring us to heights of cosmic scale:

art and tech are like two cranes tag-team lifting each other to build the next tower of Babel - one we may never finish, but nevertheless one we can't help but build, especially now that language is no longer a barrier between us (take THAT, God - you jerk). it may collapse in on itself, but life will survive, hopefully learn from the flaws of the previous design, and start again. until we (maybe not as the organisms we are now, but as living beings nonetheless) get it right.

i "do art" - part 3: on learning

2010-09-25T23:34:00.000-07:00

sound idea. poor design.

so it's been exactly 3 months since my last post. i've been busy putting together a drawing show, among other things, and i totally intend to post the work from the show and write at length about it (yay for you). but first, i just wanted to tie up this one loose end:

i mentioned in a previous post that from a young age, it was apparent to me that i had poor visual design instincts. in the image above, you can see that in working from left to right, my font size bit off more than my page size could chew, and this might even be true of the drawing itself - it looks like when i got to the tail of the shark, there was a "whoops - there's the end of the page" moment. but it was good enough for me because, hey, it's all in there, and the viewer will get what i was trying to do, right? not that i was thinking much about my audience back then...

anyway, i work at a job doing motion graphics now, where a basic design sense is crucial. and while i still struggle sometimes with it, i can feel my design sense forming as i spend more time in this environment. this leads me to think: is a design sense something that some people have, and some don't? or can it be learned, like any other skill? and how does this affect the idea of "fated" careers, as in there's something we're "meant" to do, and others that we're not?

say what you want about the human race, but the human brain is a fantastic and wonderful bit of engineering. it's been shown that there's a division of labor in the brain - this part handles the automatic processes (breathing, heartbeat, etc.) and this part handles language, and this part processes sensory input into something we understand, and so forth. but of course, the most important part of the brain isn't any one of these things - it's the network of neurons that connect them all, allowing them to all share information. i did a quick image search of "neural network" to illustrate this, and, not surprisingly, i came up with this:

the internet. of your MIND.

it's an image that illustrates a simple network that i found in an article about the internet. each dot is a different size and color, based on how many other dots it's directly connected to. the ones in the center are big and red, because they're each connected directly to 31 other dots. the dots at the outside are tiny and violet, because they're only connected directly to 1 other dot. it's also organized spatially - center = more connections, outside = less. so let's pretend each dot is a part of our brain. when we're born, the network connections are set up in a way that our dna says we need in order to survive. the internal sensory part senses that our body needs food, so it sends a message along its connection to the part that pulls the "hungry" lever, which in turn sends a message to the part that pulls the "cry" lever and sends that message to our lungs and vocal chords. as we grow, these connections change - while i'm still known to cry when i'm hungry, my brain knows that the more effective solution is to go check out the fridge, so it sends different messages and pulls different levers now.

what's important here is the strength of these connections - the more parts that are connected to more things, the more effective and efficient those processes tend to be. so let's say that in our picture of the network above with respect to eating, the big red dots in the middle represent the parts of the brain directly associated with food-getting (sensing nutrient levels in the body, smelling food, knowing what food looks like, chewing, saliva control, etc.), and the violet dots on the edge are parts that aren't as crucial to the process of getting food, but nevertheless still connected (remembering that one time you went for ice cream with your parents, your preference of one pizza place to another, etc.). obviously, eating is a universal thing that everyone has built a strong neural network for, but what about things like visual design, that aren't as prevalent across all human brains?

knowing what "good" design is is a matter of critically analyzing what you see and making it compelling. this process works different parts of the brain, like visual processing, empathy, inner visualization, personal experience, etc. how successful you are depends on the strength of the network between all these parts. so can this network be developed over time, become stronger and more effective? i think so. just like the process of eating changes from when we are born until we become mature, the process of designing can become similarly effective, provided it's cultivated in a certain environment. does this mean you can teach art? well, yes and no - you might not necessarily be able to tell someone directly how to be an artist, but you can provide an environment where neural networks for making art can be strengthened. in this way, i believe anyone can learn to be an artist, or a designer - it's just a matter of wanting to do it.

so if anyone can do anything, why is anyone a cook, painter, accountant, physicist, thief, priest? i think it's simply because certain networks in our brains are pretty strong from the get-go, and when we do those activities, they seem "easy" and enjoyable. i don't think anyone's "fated" to be an artist, just because they start out with those networks already being strong to begin with, it just happens to be the path of least resistance. but should the desire to be an artist come about in a person that wasn't born with these networks built particularly well, there's nothing to stop them from developing those networks to a more powerful level than even those who were born with relatively stronger networks. it' just a matter of wanting to do it, and being willing to fight through the frustration of learning.

so, yeah - some day i will be a good designer, even though it's not in my original nature. until then, i'll keep trying to fit stuff on a page until my brain figures out how to do it better...

i "do art" - part 2: on personhood

2010-06-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

monsters. you are what you make, apparently.

so i mentioned last blog that this drawing i did signified me becoming a "person". it's kind of a weird term, so i thought i'd put together a definition of personhood for the sake of this piece.

a person:

1. is a behavioral system, a "filter" through which stimuli are processed and from which responses are elicited. this processing is in concordance with a root tendency which can be found in all the processes that the behavioral system performs.

2. has the ability to perform actions that affect its enivronment. this assumes that any given being is, in fact, separate from its environment, which, in turn, is an "artificial" concept, but real nonetheless. more on this at a later date.

3. has the ability to care, one way or another, about things it senses and does. "caring" is obviously a vague term, but i mean it in the sense of being able to sense a relationship between what it's sensing/doing and the tendencies mentioned in no. 1.

4. is self-aware.

only upon having all four of these qualities can a being be considered a "person". i think the first three properties pretty much happen as soon as you're born, or maybe even before (i'm not going there), but i think the 4th property of personhood, self-awareness, is unique in that it happens at a later point in life. i believe this happens when a being is presented with a stimulus of its own making, and recognizes it as such. it is then when the being realizes that it is, indeed, there.

maybe the first being to become a person was walking down the beach, and happened to look behind them, and saw their own footprints in the sand, and realized that the shape of these things matched the shape of their own foot, and in some crazy instant, some never-before-fired neuron went off, and this being realized that if these footprints were indeed there because of them, then they must be there to have made them. they were there!

and afterwards, this new being, this "person" suddenly couldn't imagine not being there - it simply didn't compute. and so it made things. it made things simply to know it was there, to make evidence of itself. and every day, as sure as it had to eat, sleep, shit, and have sex, it had to make something.

a lot of people talk about the purpose of art, how it's used to express, to communicate, to connect with the spiritual, etc. it's true that art can conveniently fulfill these practical purposes, but i can't say that this is its purpose. it's purpose is to let us know we are here, because if we ceased to make things that let us know that we were here, we would indeed cease to be people. whether the first "art" was a line in the sand drawn by a finger, or a shout at nothing, it was us going "i am here".

a lot of people talk about art as if it's something separate from living - which is ridiculous. to say "i'm an artist" to me is like saying "hey, what's up? i'm into breathing. i'm a breathist. here's my card. i'm having a breathing show next week. you should come by."

i guess it's useful for some to say that this is art and that isn't. i'm not saying the distinction is worthless - it makes it possible to have a conversation about it - but people tend to forget that the distinction is an artifice. it's like the scientists that constantly have to redefine what is alive and what isn't: first we need to use oxygen to be alive, and then anaerobic bacteria were discovered, so we had to expand that set. then it was a full strand of dna - that's what it was to be alive - but then viruses were discovered without full strands, so, again, the definition had to be expanded to include those. only a fool looks at the finger, and not where it points, right? i dunno, maybe it's time we realized that everything is alive, from the largest elephants to the dust on their backs, to the atoms that make them up, and back up to the galaxy we live in, and indeed the universe.

but that's another blog altogether. ;)

i "do art" - part 1?

2010-06-13T20:47:00.000-07:00

so i thought i'd use this blog to show people what i'm up to in terms of stuff i make. so rather than start with what i'm doing now, i'd rather give people the whole story, so i'm starting with my first drawings ever. i called it part 1 "question mark" because i think these all bring up ideas i want to elaborate on, but i haven't decided yet whether to go there. we'll see. but probably.

and i'd just like to say: the reason this is even possible is that my mom SAVED EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF SHIT DRAWING I EVER MADE AND BOUND THEM INTO A BOOK. parents: do this. if your child is at all a human being, they will thank you with their entire soul for as long as they live. which i do. thanks, mom.

so yeah:

the start of a brilliant career.

my first drawing ever. apparently, when my mom asked what it was, i said "monsters". monsters. anyway, pretty damn good, i think. i wish i could draw half as good as this now. 3 years old. i like to think that this was the day i became a person.

me and my dad. notice i started a head on the left, but apparently i wasn't happy with it and started over. i've been drawing for 6 months, and already do i feel the sting of dissatisfaction with my own work. still haven't resolved that. also, my dad keeps bugging me to do a portrait of him - apparently he forgot about this. nice.

my mom. 3.5 years old. apparently belly buttons were important.

i like this. the idea is that cars go in a bunch of different directions, but always 90 degrees apart.

one of my favorites. it didn't matter to me that the train wasn't sitting on the tracks, i knew that one could figure out what was going on. the tracks were probably an afterthought, and i just wanted to let people know that the train does indeed go on tracks without obscuring them. so i just put them underneath it. the yellow paint is from a painting i did in college when i was into exploring these childhood drawings and making them into big paintings. as expected the "train flying over tracks - Special Edition" sucked. should have just left it. and now i got paint on my drawing. dumbass. anyway, later, the image of a train flying over tracks was so stuck in my head, that it started growing into a little animation series i want to do someday. i'll tell you about it later.

oh, fuck yes. fucking voltron. look at that shit! this is one of the first things from my "robot period", which, actually, is still happening now. i'll draw robots until i fucking die.

so yeah, i started doing my own designs. bigfoot here had claws with lasers. oh, and a big foot. i think he's just designed for destruction.

mr. clock. he follows you around to tell you the time. notice how i misjudged the placement of the numbers on his clock and had to put them in a spiral to fit them all. more on this phenomenon later. also, i put a pic up of a megaman character design for "time man". from 2006. obviously, capcom had spies looking into my ideas for a long time.

sticky. duh - he walks on walls. pavelka's first law of robotics: robots are supposed to be able to do things people can't. while bigfoot was simply badass, and mr. clock was simply helpful and friendly, i wanted sticky to be a little more mischievous. like "haha, i'm up on a wall! later!" and an afterthought laser attachment, just in case. and an image from a boss in megaman 4 that walks on walls. from 1992. but i can't hold it against them - you simply can't have a monopoly on the idea of a robot that uses suction cups to walk on walls.

i didn't show my first color drawings because i had to edit, but when first using colors, i only had a very short period of "it'll be better if there's more colors." i quickly developed the notion that certain things are certain colors. and that's that. and i thought breakfast was the best meal.

i remember this day. it was the day i found one of those pens that had the clickie things that let you change the color of the ink on the end of it. i was astounded. i had a book that showed how squids can change colors, and when i found this pen, i realized it was the perfect tool to realize this vision. i think it shows perfectly how technology can inspire ideas in other fields, like visual art, and how there's an unbreakable relationship between the two. to this day, i still get excited about how much i can do with my wacom pad and photoshop. more on this later.

fuck, this is getting long. sorry. just a few more:

dinosaurs. insane looking sharks. i had a book with shark pictures, and when i saw this megamouth thing (a real thing that's actually called that - see photo), i totally freaked. but what i want to call attention to is the lettering. big letters on the left, and then i freak out and go "ah shit, this isn't gonna fit in the super huge font i'm using, and FUCK! ok, just scrunch them in therrre..." yeah. i still have problems with this. i have a freelance gig doing motion graphics for nickelodeon now doing their promo stuff, and i swear, if it wasn't for computers, all my titles would still look like this. i've come to the realization that design and layout is a major weak point for me. and then i saw these, and apparently, it's been a lifelong struggle. i've talked about this with my esteemed and incredibly patient art director at nick, Andrew Harrison. i've admitted to him that while i think i'm really good at forming compelling conceptual bases for designs, and problem solving, and learning new software to execute them, i can't lay a page out for my fucking life. this poor guy has to be over my shoulder and be all "a little left. smaller. too small. turn the kerning down. there." but i'm getting better. i believe anything can be learned. more on this later.

ok, a lot of "more on this later". that's because i'm trying to address bigger ideas here, and how my brain is constantly processing these ideas, even back when i was a toddler.

so that's it. there are shitloads more drawings, and it was hard to edit out some real gems, but, again, i'm going for the bigger messages here.

next time.

so i started a blog/what's in a name?

2010-06-07T01:41:00.000-07:00

never thought i'd start a blog, but i guess not many people who do, do. so i'm 30 now and figure it's time to start sharing more. we'll see how this goes.

so whenever i bring anything new into the world, there's always this thing about figuring out what to call it. this is always a problem for me. a lot of times things never see the light of day only because i can't find a suitable name for them. it sounds absurd, but a name is a sacred thing, and i can't bring myself to take it lightly.

some stories about names i use and how they came about:

st. 78: growing up, i played a lot of video games. i remember the legend of zelda as being the first game i ever played that required me to name my character. now, in the first zelda this was merely a reference to the gamesave file you used to play it, and had no consequence in the game whatsoever. nobody in the game ever called you by this name, but still, i remember sitting at the nes for a long time, waiting to start the game for the moment a cool name would pop into my head. usually, i just go with the default character name, in this case, Link, but i remember once i hurriedly put in "ST. 78" because the grid of characters you had to use to input the name were arranged in such a way that the letter S and T were placed right above the numbers 7 and 8. at first i thought this was dumb, but then when i pronounced it in my head - "saint seventy eight" or "saint seven eight", i liked the rhythm and the partial rhyme of it, so it stuck. i would then go on to use that as a default to go to in case i ever played a game whose main character didn't have a default setting for their name. i still use it to this day for my halo profiles and whatnot.

the first ever p twishus.

p-twishus: i often use this name to refer to myself. it's my user name for a lot of accounts on websites and whatnot, and a lot of people ask me what it is. when i was in college, i played final fantasy 7 extensively. after going through the game using all the default character names, i started another one using made up, weirder names, and these new names reflected the stream of consciousness/dada phase i was going through. Cloud, the main character, received my st. 78 moniker, but the other characters i had to make up. i told myself each one would be the first thing to pop into my head, so i remember Aeris being "+gratis+" and the other characters being named other weird things, and when i got to the Cait Sith character, he became "p twishus". i liked the Cait Sith character, because his character design was so out there compared to all the other characters - his body was artificial, and was actually made up of two bodies: a cat with a kerchief and megaphone riding a giant moogle. anyway, because we now shared an important letter, "P" (there were times when, if multiple people in the room were named Joe, i'd be joe p, because Pavelka is kind of a pain to pronounce, i guess. this ended up being simply "p"), this evolved to be synonymous with myself. if i ever had to pick a DJ name, it'd probably be p-twishus.

sleepgun: when i decided hotmail was bunk and gmail was the new thing for me, i spent MONTHS deliberating on my new email name. "rocketboy", my handle i picked for myself when i started my first email account in high school, was pretty tired. so i set myself up with criteria:

1.) it had to be two syllables. when people asked my email, my answer had to be short and sweet. ba-bam at gmail. done.

2.) it could not have any other way to spell it, so that i wouldn't have to spend time spelling it out after i said it, so no numbers, no homophones, no clever respellings.

of course, i wanted it to pop and all, but those criteria were crucial. so i spent all this time looking through obscure pavement song titles, lyrics, movies, etc. it got kinda nuts. i started to get sick of it, so i settled on "sleepgun". i'm actually not entirely happy with it, but sometimes you need to do something you can't take back just so you can move forward. sleepgun worked, because i liked the idea of something as violent as a gun, but the end result of that violence was something nice, like sleep. i realized later that there is such a thing as a tranquilizer gun, but hopefully people don't make that connection.

the open steppe: yeah, this thing. i woke up at 4am today and decided that i would start a blog. i set it up, and lo, another naming screen. sleepgun was taken. my head hit the keyboard, as i thought i was in for another few months of poring over possible names for my blog. i paced around my apartment for a bit, and this came up, and i just said fuck it. irrevocability allows us to move forward. a lot of people can guess it's from conan the barbarian, and i just wanted to give a shout out to the guy who got totally dissed at that one barbarian feast. and i guess it's about standing before a new frontier. or something. so yeah.

into the new frontier - the open steppe.