fact:jill.bolte.taylor

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is the woman I'm basing my fact project on. There's one week to go and I have not gotten very far at all. But it'll come to me. I'm thinking of doing the narrative as a series of illustrations that become less and less clear, and annotations that become clearer and clearer. I find it interesting that Bolte Taylor would never be able to share to notion of a collective consciousness (right hemisphere) without language (left hemisphere).

For those of you who don't have 20 minutes, here's the prelude to Bolte Taylor's story:

If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. [Thanks.] So, this is a real human brain... And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor. While our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each hemisphere thinks about different things, they care about different things, and dare I say, they have very different personalities. [Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy.]

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

My left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment. And start picking details and more details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information. Associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home, and eat 'em in the morning." It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you.

And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

phoebe

Demo2010

MASTERCARD

artist:gerhard.richter

Gerhard Richter's multi-step processes of representation start with photographs he takes himself. The figurative image is altered and displayed as a fragile illusion:

Working with his own photographs printed as 10 x 15 cm quick prints as anyone would get from a commercially developed roll of film, he uses left over paint from a day's work scraped from canvasses and applies it to the photographs via pallete knives and doctor's blades. The application is done in an instant, the works are completed with spontaneity and with irreversible gestures. Those judged unsuccessful are immediately destroyed. - 5B4

books:the.conversation.series.

Collected conversations between curator and cultural activator Hans Ulrich Obrist and seminal and emerging names in the worlds of art, architecture and ideas. The books are designed by paris graphic design company M/M. I'm drawn to the repeated base image and the superimposed illustrations.

artist: Dale.Frank

She was always illogically quite amorous and horny during her Period. Thankfully she produced an dour odor, a smell caught between week old gazpacho and wet dead rodent always a few days prior, which was a kind of warning, a signal that triggered the self preservation tactics of her house mates.

More abstractions and colour, from Dale Frank's paint swirls. I love the long-winded titles. It's so refreshing after coming across so many untitled works.

Pound for pound paradoxically bowels reflect character charisma

Envy, envy, she was saying seemingly to herself, as she entered from out of the darkness of the adjoining room carrying unopened plastic wine glasses. He took a few steps towards the bowl where the carton usually lay momentarily forgetting he had decided to give them up two days earlier.

Marigolds and science and love billpay

artist:Andy.Denzler

Looking into how to blend figures into environments to depict energy and colour rather than form. These paintings by Andy Denzler work quite effectively.

fact-le.corbusier

Looking into le Corbusier. This swiss born architect was also an incredible artist, and he used the golden ratio in his Modular system for the scale of architectural proportion. Looking into the intersection of art and maths; the anthropometric modular scale he devised was developed as a visual bridge between the metric and the imperial system.

fiction-murakami.images

This is the sequence for the fiction project, I worked on Haruki Murakami's 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World'. The narrative is a duel one: an information shuffler in roughly modern day Tokyo (hard boiled wonderland) is a man defined by his interests and is at the mercy of a series of twisting events. It's got rather a crime/mystery sort of pace. The second, alternate narrative is set in 'the end of the world', a town with no memory, only routine, seasons and landscape. This narrative's got a more contemplative kafkaesque feel to it. I worked with a base in oil pastels and acrylic on top.