It has been too long since we have reciprocated our minds and I have begun to feel a familiar emptiness creep up inside by the hole left from our inter-necessitated wholeness. My side aches with our umbilical scar so I rub the chroma wound and determine to send you a sail carrying a ripple of voice and a mist of hulled emotion from the valley in which I sit here at the edgy end of civilization. I also will be the first to admit that I need to do some thinking, profound deep undulatory silence-form meditations, but also exclamatory exultations screaming towards the sunshine kind of smooth-rined condensations, so this letter perhaps will be a way of venting my ego into the vapor of language while also orienting my consciousness towards your coordinates thereby sharing my inner softnesses with my outer softness (you) and percolating the effervescent wellspring boiling up within me, drawn forth from the froth of the fjords of the eastern iced lands.

I am sitting in a room.

I am sitting on a gray sofa of thick soft canvas, my gray-wooled toes sliding on a shiny cement floor, my periphery glinted with slate and iron. I am sitting at the hearth of a house in the navel of the town of Seyðisfjörður, the home of Dieter Roth whom has strewn his wares throughout every corner, a quiet somnambulist fishing village dangling by a gutted filament on the rough precipice of the known world, a flowering mineral deposit vibrating a gentle coo to the cool slow metonymic hum of the mountain wall scrawling up the peripheries of vision on all sides, ancient stone masonry washing up on all hides like petrified knives slicing through the multi-tiered cake of time and palpable clouds and glass syrup sapphire ocean. Walking up into the hills at night or in the morning or at any time of the day - which always feels like the same time of day because the sun is in the same place and the moisture wicks at the same tempo - one can observe vast fields of prehistoric mosses dancing a spore ballet with pure color flames camouflaged as lichens, nests of wild blueberries that are still pink in the cold summer glow and also little black berries that promise yet undiscovered sweetness, invasive flowers from Alaska that colonized the mountain with their purple-death flower penises spreading the cancers of the mainlands over the face of the sleeping giant. Everywhere there are waterfalls sliding down to the center, great veins bleeding iron liquid life of waning glaciers that never deplete, hidden up beyond view.

((( A silence settles as I look out the house port to observe the mineral manifold spread out over my field of eyes, a curtain shading the window of my perception, a mirror of the mind made opaque with silty knowledge and the ashes of cindered ontologies. )))

I have been traveling and working hard in Stockholm in the weeks leading up to this moment from which I am writing to you. I was busy with many things which seem so trivial in the present stillness, and a few things which seem so much more important now that I am isolated on this other plane of existence. I was in Berlin, Hamburg, Kiel, Copenhagen... each had a certain charm but I have no desire to live in any of these cities. On May 13^th^ I was dropped off in the Swedish avian kingdom for a month -- we spoke briefly while I was there -- where I attempted to rebuild myself into some semblance of the creature I once was while maintaining the possibility of unfolding into an as-of-yet unpredictable form. It was in Skåne that I reconnected with 'making' as a primary focus after what seems many years of distracted melancholy. I reengaged with the action of mindful remembrance, rehabilitated my hands as direct tendrils of my eyes which in turn shimmer the invisible forces of the intangible ocean through the deep black pools of my mind which is me and not me also. I learned how to make collages again, in the same way but also in the new way, and it was like a wonderful cliché of being reintroduced to an old friend that knows you better than you know yourself. There were also many walks conducted into rolling fields of raps, forests of an archaic density, phosphorescent marshlands of wind sculptured rocks and matted blankets of ferns, and vast fields of birds, so many birds, a grand garden of aviary chatter, a conference of flying sages congregating on the plush sandy knolls to exchange tastes of the solar currents. The landscape in this land was long and flat, so wide that one could rest easy upon its surface, quiet and gentle and blissfully boring. This time and space and silence and solitude were very important for me in uncovering some essential facets of my art practice. Let me tell you:

1. I have come to understand the digestive processes of my collage practice so thoroughly that I can no longer compartmentalize it to the medium of books. BOOKS or more accurately THE BOOK used to emanate such profundity for me -- and in a way always will -- but slowly, initiated by my psychotropic expansion in the desert of Joshua Tree in July 2013, I have come to understand that the process is more dynamic and integral than the musty foxed pages can maintain. (I remember you mentioning a similar observation of me, that I should leave the book behind to explore more fertile pastures, but I needed to process this more in order to understand why). So, I will attempt to chart the coordinates of the process and free it from its materiality so I might begin to apply it to other processes and techniques thereby dissolving into the continuum of the primary plenum of existence and map a new existential cartography.

2. My work is focused upon both a cosmic expansion as well as a terrestrial condensation and my previous attempts to distill the entirety of the universe of relations into a single image, or set of images, or exhibition, or body of work, or ideological premise, has been foolish and misguided. Instead of assembling illustrative visions of an integrated universe which can so easily be misconstrued as moralistic topographies of utopian worlds, I have in fact always desired to build descriptions of the world in which we live -- a tooth with no root, a body without organs, a cavity which we endlessly fill with contraptions of perpetuated motion simulating epigenetic phenomena. The work I make from now on should be more narrow in focus, smaller slices of individuated particles that are refracted from the larger beams and shown as singular compounds, condensed specific articulate essays detailing the processes I observe. This will be my ongoing education -- always the motivation -- while also serving as a model pedagogic for social dissemination.

3. There is no inside and there is no outside. There can be activity for myself and for an other, and this might be the same activity. There can be multiple truths as a matter of scale but not everything must or should be revealed together. I am more interested in fostering inclusivity than prescribing exclusive pedagogics. I can contextualize some works as commodities and others as viruses without fear of computational corruption. I will be a shopkeeper in the marketplace and a visionary on the mountain -- these mustn't be mutually exclusive, but in fact there is a possible desirable achievable inclusion that I should be striving for.

4. There is an essential divide between me and the world, and the struggle to reconcile with it should be abandoned in favor of the more difficult and noble pursuit of occupying the interstice. The fortification of this heterotopia will become the material, the path leading to its gooey center will be my process, and the play required to pass between this place which is not no place but the only place I can inhabit will be the experiential unfurling of my sociality. I don't want to live in a world shrouded in mythology and magic -- I can't be a folk artist because I have no folk: I am a person of course but I have no people of which I can associate myself with and therefore I have no sociocultural corpus with which to justify my leger or enchant my incantations. I also cannot be a popular artist because the culture which contains such entities is a giant throbbing corpuscle of burgundy phlegm and acidic pus which thrives in the manner of cancer, whose meaning is washing off the pages of decaying old books written by foolish logicians and nepotistic egoists who call themselves gods but can't remember their own names, and of course because the result of the activity within this roman-esque arena is to circulate vessels of vacuity in order to proliferate an infinite insatiable desire for more where there can only ever be null. I want both of course: to be a mystic that believes with body and soul in order to fill heart hearths with warmth and the world with wonder, while also negotiating a socially-politically-culturally-epistemologically-ontologically-relevant practice wielding dynamic theoretical propulsions and hypertexted materiality in simple rhyming structures that folks can understand with an attention to meter that the dignitaries of the intelligentsia will pick up and play with in order to instigate an infectious attitude of platitude and crass worship.

So I've been making some things since March 13^th^, continuing to the present. Some things are connected and some are not, which is very pleasant and satisfying to consider. I will try to outline them for you, which is also admittedly for myself as a useful tool in delineating between the convoluted state of isolation and the revitalized centrifugal motions of foresight. And you are a wonderfully intelligent human being with brilliant depth and unpredictable complexities to your artistic endeavors, so maybe you will have some insights to offer me on my present follies.

So another list:

1. I recently completed a series of collages based on the form of the axis mundi and accentuated by the metaphorical dendrites of the cabalistic tree. I will now supplement these hand-cut paper collages with a series of web-gleaned digital collages that will attempt to utilize the same digestive process with slight modifications accounting for the level of information saturation that differentiates the book form from the medium of the internet data stream. As opposed to the book collages which maintain the scale of the medium from which they are derived these new collages can and should be printed on various materials and at different scales. These decisions need to be correlated to the manner in which they were created, but what that is exactly is as-of-yet undecided.

2. I also recently finished some material experiments with embedding local natural materials into polyester resin in the form of Reichian orgone generators. This work is problematic for me, but I knew it would be and I'm following through with it. I think of them as a kind of "literal" painting form through the utilization of chromatic material of the landscape suspended in a natural medium akin to the methods of manufacturing that artist pigments, so they are perhaps occupying some intermediary space between paint and painting and to that extent are more interesting to me as oscillating between the metaphorical picture plane and their inherent materiality than they would be as objects engaged in a purely sculptural or performative dialogue. Of course the metaphysical discourse circulating around Reich's articulated vision of the invisible orgone ocean is also very present in this work and something which I am trying not to shy away from but rather embrace and focus upon.

3. These two projects were made at the same time and over the course of my month-long residency and therefore I inevitably associate them together and now have begun to understand them as two divergent scales permeating out from the same central focus which is me, but more specifically is the me which is not me at the center of the universe, a universal human concerned with the universality of the universe. To be even more specific, I have realized something perhaps very obvious which is the fact that these two projects that I considered to be so very different are in fact very much related through their shared emphasis on the energy that circulates throughout a system by abstracting the representation of the system itself, and should therefore be joined through some kind of tertiary process or medium in order to allow me (or a viewer, or the me-as-universal-viewer) to more easily grasp this correlation. I will therefore design the documentation of these two bodies of work into two self-published books which will in fact be a single book in two parts aimed at articulating a more-and-less concise treatise on energy. The first component will dwell into the especially human-scale associations of energies as they apply, affect, absorb, and aspire within the human organism, while the second component will be oriented towards the larger ecology of intermingling planetary physics, cosmic mythologies, terrestrial magnetizations, and other extra-human forces that propel the movements of the extra-human world.

4. For the last 10 days I have been organizing and mixing the music I have been recording over the course of the last two years of my life into a kind of meta-album describing the melancholic affect of the Swedish landscape upon my psychology. What was originally conceived as quick sketches of many different song ideas has now become long-form sprawls of one song and perhaps the only song I am currently capable of playing depicted in various textural states. Like the orgone generators, I think that this album will exist as a kind of portrait of the landscape which itself must necessarily be represented in a gargantuan spatio-temporal scale, the difference being that this album of music aims to dwell upon the emotional resonances, psychological currents, and synesthetic idiosyncrasies of the place rather than the visual, physical, and energetic components. It currently exists as an album in 5 movements, each movement being further divided into three sections, in total forming a kind of calendric system alluding to the interconnected relations of meteorological seasons and associated shifts in movement, color, tone, and frequency. I hope to devise some kind of planetary system for the cover art: perhaps a poster of some kind that is divided into five parts which will hold visions and incantations associated with the different movements, or I was also considering something much more visually abstract. Just today I discovered that all of Dieter Roth's printing machines have been preserved at the local 'technical museum' and may be available for my use, so perhaps it would be nice to make a series of etchings, wood blocks, lithographs, or other kinds of print for the cover.

5. I just finished mixing and mastering the new Perpeteia album that ___ and I recorded during his 10 day visit to Stockholm in April. As much as I love the flowing Riley-esque continuity of Music for Mesmer I believe that this album has far surpassed my expectations of what I thought we were capable of making. We will begin some collaborative drawings for what will become the recover cover of this beast and probably release it as a cassette tape, but the fidelity is so richly saturated that it really needs to be released on vinyl or as a high quality digital album. This music -- which we loosely refer to as The Conference Table -- is based on an idea elucidated by ___ which in turn influenced a conversation between ___ and myself on the nature and characteristics of a frictive dialectic without pejorative connotations. More on that later if you want...

6. Connected to this album and also in collaboration with ___, I will be rehabilitating the VIDEOSCROLL series which has laid dormant for about 3 years now. This is for some reason the most exciting prospect on the table for me at the moment because it seems to be the axis of all of the previous involvements: it utilizes the digestive process articulated by the collage practice to collect, collate, and contextualize video material into a homogenous form; the result seems to be a kind of portrait of the landscape or essential material distillation from which it was spawned, which in this case is the public video archive of the internet; even though it has up until now been a solo endeavor that I have conducted by myself in a vacuum the project is ultimately motivated by the desire to interact with another -- at first ___, which was then diverted towards a more universal subject, and now back to ___-as-universal-subject -- which makes it the most obliquely social activity I am involved with; the videos seem so diaphanous to me, strange hybrids of philosophy-infused visual essays and animated abstract paintings.

So that's what I've been thinking about artistically from May until now. There's a few other things to sprinkle on top as well of course -- there always is. This idea of making large digital prints is pretty exciting to me as an opportunity of making cheap and affordable but still high-quality reproductions of my work so that it gets out there in the world as well as to deal in "print on demand" processes of high quality production to sell to rich people in Stockholm. On the other end of the spectrum the possibility of making some dry point etchings or perhaps photolithographs on Dieter Roth's printing presses is a very exciting prospect for me and maybe I will pursue this way of working a bit farther while I have access to the resource. Lastly, I'm trying to convince ___ to come to Iceland in the winter or early spring to spend a few weeks rehearsing a live Perpeteia performance for 4 channel audio and 2 channel HD video (projecting the VIDEOSCROLL into public space on custom projection screens) and then tour it around Iceland for a few weeks. This was really a kind of pipe dream until I arrived here and realized how accommodating the house, the people, and the society would be in manifesting this, so now I'm really pushing for it...