This recurrent creative conundrum guiding my ongoing creative investigation is what Manuel Delanda calls ‘non-human expressivity’ – the demonstrable premise that the world is capable of self-organization; that material is pregnant with the same potential for morphogenesis that our cerebral cortex enjoys... a motivation to articulate the awestruck awareness that we are literally toroidally continuous with the environment we inhabit, that all is seething with information and organization... a recognition that what we know about ourselves and our environment is still astonishingly limited - not only are we are not alone in this universe, we’re not alone on this planet, nor even in our 'own' bodies – Art achieves it's creative potential when it inspires that ‘holy @#$%!! ’ moment, an aesthetic shock of disorientation, disbelief, release and realization, recognition of something new which, confusingly, you knew for yourself all along - a burst of laughter - effusion of surprise, joy, amazement, energy - flash of consuming awe and befuddlement - reflex seisure of ridicule's insubordinate power - the spasm of hitting the known limits of your comprehensible dominion - enchanted hilarity of gazing uneasily on irreducible enigmas... an inversion, an eversion, an anti-hierarchical scheme, a proto-science of constraints opening surprising lateral design possibilities, immanent virtualities - amateur engineering probability attractors, word games and other oracular sorcery - where industry puts natural history to work, we let it loose to play - intricate landscapes of prodigious phantasmagoric deleria, endlessly and effortlessly, just like heaven... Drawing attention to the diffracting spectral edges of the spotlight of reason, in the teeming shadows crawling at the edges of visible light, where electrons leap valence in the edge-detecting polyharmonic-cloud of black/white on/off stabilities, sparkling across the hormone soup, stark differentials kick out a haze of photonic noise at the margins of incommensurability - the aura of the transforming mask in motion - the eyes see nothing without all the noisy prejudice of the brain... --- I endeavor to grant some 'patascientific repeatability to the speculative premise that generative procedures engender a peculiar and particular category of forces in the fractal topology of possibility, Intuiting twitchy arhythmic subharmonic repetitions, the first engine of creation, leveraging a general principle for how-things-take-shape, applying a vitalist morphogenesis... elusive formulae of conceptual comedy...
I found my first abstract machine in cloud gazing. Later, as a teenager in rapid, automatistic clay-modelling. Encountering surprise results with automatic drawing in college, I continued to research, experiment with and invent more and more drawing machines and techniques. I maintain a open-source committment to guilelessly sharing my discoveries - ideas are worth much more than money - information wants to be free, art wants audience and vice versa - we have more to fear from obscurity than from plagiarism - inflating a lateral vector in the probability cloud, the psycho-historian in me wants to produce some stable atemporal event-space in the high-uncertainty stream of memory. Books then, charged and encyphered with code-recipes for conjuring, possibly then even rehydrogenating: elves, aliens, ghosts, paraterrestrial entities and minor demons in your office copyroom... Compelled by rich speculative potentials and linguistic flexibility of graphic art, and deep evocative potencies latent in ink lines on paper, even their pixelated reproductions – edges traced --- those fill-in-the-blank ambiguous spaces that the viewer’s eye is compelled to investigate, and so to invest herself in articulating further - struggling to maintain the persistence of vision... in contrast, inconsistency, variations in density and composition, form and line ambiguate and spin conceptual abstractions, cognitive leaps, symbolic destabilizations – a truly strange and beautiful thing, graphic techne - the tendency of form to bend itself to what we can manage to comprehend, and vice versa - revealed in system after experimental system – generative feedback - the eye doesn’t like to see what it can't comprehend, so it projects the familiar, selects and fabricates an approximate reflection which it can tolerate – mimesis and the simulacra – compelled by mercurial sirens to wade in protean seas - narcissus seduced by the dyad, overcome and pushed in the pond by the little people – stare into the abyss long enough and you’ll find it staring back - figure-ground flash - image of the Other - the hunt also hunts the hunter – something entirely dissimilar, yet oddly identical to you - attractor repulsor, the mixer of metaphor, the matrix of becoming in which the subject, by observing, is both unknowing participant and agent animateur... when the accolyte is friendly, the paraclete is willing - work together and marvels emerge...
The long term intention for this project is to establish and substantiate a foundation of legitmation on which to argue for the development of an ongoing series of print editions and PDF publication ventures exploring generative themes. A discussion space and curatorial gathering node around a running theme: artists working with generative systems and procedural constraints, liimited operating parameters or arbitrary technical limitations, generally with a tendency to abstraction, process-orientation, obsessive processes, and other graphical research techniqes employing the common thematic of gratuitous rigor and surplus energy expenditure ...-– BMorg idealizes a print cooperative generating sizeable volumes of saleable product on a seasonal basis in the form of editioned prints, boxed bound or framed, available by subscription, specialty-shop, or print-on-demand...--- artists books for niche collectors - semi-annual graphic-novel publications with a stylized view towards meticulously constructing semi-coherent worlds of materialized imagination, true hallucinations marvelous in origin and implication… Collecting trajectories and affinities, the BMO models itself a lateral think tank, generating speculative ontologies - relational positions, sometimes absurd, informed by generative processes --- with procedural emphasis leveraged as unifying stylistic constraint --- mediating inspecific derives, formalist queerings, conceptual swerves, radical poetic licencings - a counter-aesthetics of restraint and resistance, aversion/attraction in a co-operative model --- selection-parameters as inscriptors of any ideology's self-reinforcing internal consistency - decryption keys for the joke in the abstract ... the whole nest unravels... Respecting the rigors and disciplines of procedure, all collectors select a bracketed set of stylistic and thematic parameters, unifying tropes and common conceptual terrains in which to map linkages and homologies. Symbolic referents become co-enfranchised within groups of users and co-producers - in loose affiliation, participants share, mutate and cross-pollinate these memes constantly; the results of their surveys and forays into whichever semantic fields... exploring the peculiar state-space of each artist's specific field of investigation, unpacking each artist's unique procedural prerogative in search of shared topologies, mapping them then into the vector-space of hyper-culture and history … nourishing the collective unconscious with a potlatch epistemology, feast with the distributed imagination, our shared consensual hallucination... Attributing, by underlying poetic conceit and purview, a virtual, artificial form of life or vitalism to codes inclined to self-replication - investing stories and languages with the analogical semblance of generational survival, even of evolving, self-determining agencies - material entelechies of non-human orders with whom we cohabitate... observing the negentropic tendency of some material systems, such as crystals, proteins, the human cerebral cortex, languages, planetary ecologies and civilizations, to complexify, diversify, deterritorialize, and tenaciously survive... 'non-living' systems sometimes behave in ways which are astonishingly 'life-like'...
My 'pataphysical bias advocates for the anomalous instance, the exception accenting conspicuous excesses at the margins of error, wabi sabi routinely producing evidence in defiance of an entropic thermodynamics where living systems are involved … Anomalies and improbabilities riddle the run-cycles of all paradigms and rule-based strategems - curiousity swerves as uncertainties tenaciously emerge in the noise of even relatively simple orders - interpretive ambiguities riddle selective attention, editing slips compounding other judgements in trials by error - internally consistent, false, patterns intricately interwoven, discord belligerently maintains the plus one of chaoid synergy ... Bachelor Machines is the present instantiation of Steve Calvert's enduring preoccupation with the wyrd'ning gyre. Someday again it will take another form entirely. For the immediate interim it serves as artists' assembly space for himself, his friends and colleagues, and all warmly invited guests - Bachelor Machines is cordially convened in convivial collegiality to facilitate discussion alluding to the unspeakable --- friends and friends of friends are each invited to participate - to augment individual reveries, and stimulate replication, mutation, and wild dissemination of our imaginary productions...
---S.Calvert - Vancouver - Feb 29, 2008 ---
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