I've decided to change my work schedule, deciding this morning after a series of minor epiphanies that what I should be doing while living in Las Cruces is reorienting my self to the schedule of my parents. Since my father has been quite clear that he doesn't want his life to be disrupted - which is completely fair - I can accommodate his desire by choosing to adapt my life to his (which seems to be his insistence anyways, or else the horrible alternative that he wishes for no integration at all). I woke up this morning feeling groggy yet strangely mental refreshed, so I wrote some things down. The content of my focus should be my parents - recognize that they are the reason I am here so I should dissociate from this environment to convince myself that something else is more important. Rooted in my own psychology is a desire to escape, dissociate, get away from the horrible present, and I've been doing this my entire life. The OOFKAUU needs to be a practice of staying present in the accumulation of experience piling up before me, now. While I'm in LC I will focus on my parents, my specific, real, and lived relationship with my father and my mother, and I will trust in my determinism to turn this focus into something significant for my greater artistic practice even though it is not immediately clear. I must not allow myself to become too swept up in defining the specifics of use for this material.

Every day my parents wake up and sit at the kitchen table to eat salad and smoothies - respectively - and drink coffee and water plants. Father attends to his planner, his system of structure he erected for his life. I will do the same. I will wake up early, when they wake up, and sit down at the same table and engage with them. I must design my own planner in such a functional manner to continue thinking through the stages of the opera. Everyday over the next 2 months I will be able to meditate upon how the design and content of the planner interface and make fluid changes accordingly - of form representing the content of its flow - according to the needs and uses of the day, an archive of this present charting its own changes. I must make lists like my father, to-do lists, of what is happening today and next week and upcoming - the making of tasks to accomplish where they may not always be apparent, to invent the future - so that I can create a common ground to share with dad, to discuss our lists, to allow myself to be inspired by his work even if he doesn't consider it to be creative. The kitchen of their house might serve as the context for the first scene, although the danger is in the relation to "the domestic" in syndicated television, but perhaps it's not so terrible to associate to the theatrical comedy of Seinfeld, Louie, etc. (The interview with Louie CK discussing his aspirations for tragedy in his new work was surprisingly inspiring).

The morning breakfast table as the first table of the opera: the convening point of the parents as the first humans. The first table, the carbon table, the meta-tale: the primordial meeting place, a sculptural object designating a spot of significant in the landscape, permeating an attention of the invisible, a utility defined by drawing people towards the center to conduct a collision of attention and exchange across it, the table as the medium of interaction, and therefore inherent "social" (and would-be political) "value."

My parents sit there, watching the news as it bombards our attention with psychic tremors, and I feel helpless. Perhaps I could research and offer alternative news sources? Is it possible in a way which is not disruptive? Is the "disruption" described by my father in relation to this continuous inflow of propaganda? What is news worthy, how can we recognize it, why must we fortify against ideologies which modulate our ethics and steal our attention towards ends which do not serve our own aspirations? How to discuss such an idea with my parents with tact and poise, without causing disruption - does this imply a clandestine project, of covert infiltration or coercion? There is a profoundly important potential for a conversation here which must be negotiated.

The day unfolds after breakfast. They both fall into their daily routines - of cleaning and errands and all the other minutiae that fills their day - ricocheting off into their own personal projects against boredom. If the morning is focused upon the system of my father, then the middle of the day could be reorienting to my mother who has spent the morning being reserved - being quiet, passively absorbing, attending to the beauties proliferating upon the back porch. Simply, an opportunity to hang out together: going for walks, engaging with her interests in plants, animals, nature, asking her questions of her history - doesn't have to be ontological definitions of what and why she is. She, like my father, should be maintained as an unknown variable out of which an engagement will emerge, which is to say I must be careful not to impose my idealism upon them. The focus is on getting to understand her, perhaps with emphasis on the body and the outdoors as a way of observing her unique orientation to them, as a mother both literally and symbolically. How can we engage with each other more attentively, interesting for both of us?

Later in the day I will try to accompany dad to the gym. I will sacrifice my morning walk routine which is based in isolating myself, reclaiming some autonomy through communing with the elements and absorbing new information via podcasts, more than exercise. Perhaps in receding into my room I can force myself to be social, which means social on his terms, on route and return from the gym, if this is the only opportunity currently being presented.

I had a profound experience thinking about my relationship with my parents, rooted in attention and attending to each other, remembering to remember the focus upon a possible beginning, of origins, not of a autobiographical historical timeline so much as describing the psychic-philosophical space - not the house or NM or being born - founded in the relationships with the people crafting the fundament to my current being. Asking myself questions: how can this be conceptualize and how should it be handled? Is it me or something less than or more than or other than a self I identify with?

Remember the prologue: what is its content? Its not the beginning, it's what comes before the beginning, a prelude to the text to come, a overture introducing the musical themes as though a memory anticipating the thoughts not yet thought, an image of a thematic landscape not yet populated by characters, the a priori of an opera of attention. It amounts to an attempt to orchestrate the great nothingness, to make something out of a void without knowing how to conceive of the process - without history, about frustration and anxiety and fear and desperation endured while occupying the void, a soundtrack of the abyss representing the essential non-place. It was also about these specific people, from different background and histories and levels of familiarity with me as I attempt to articulate a specific-nonspecific and floundering in the process, having in turn their own unique articulations of being comingling in this interstitial zone of being. These 4 may become characters themselves, or at least be represented in their dynamics, perhaps visual/abstract. The prologue requires a more detail diagram - more fidelity towards the ontogenesis concept, which was left behind because I was so unprepared for how impactful the direct experience of the void would be felt in my being. Yet again in my life I was almost destroyed and have now recovered. I need to solidify this fundament so that I may proceed with articulating the first scene. I must be able to conduct these regular freakouts, paradigm shift, ontological gauntlets, and continue to maintain focus upon the work. How to act without being able to delve into action itself, how to write through theories of writing, how to compose music without being caught up in the performance of the work? Now I'm in my own void and I must continue playing, with whatever I have at my disposal.

Video component: ___'s video describes the immersion of the self into a primordial ecology, presenting an emergent being arising between the content of the lyric and the representations of "natural" life presented on screen. It was perfect for the prologue compositional experience, being based on the collective observation of this emergent potential, but is grossly inappropriate as a fundament for the first scene. The prologue was without space, without place, a nomadic stage. Iceland was not accounted for, served as a void, a zone of nothingness: a failure. There were no stage elements, no props, no costumes, just a void which was appropriate perhaps for the prior-to-beginning but now is no longer. The first scene requires a stage, a context, visual considerations for actors to be presented towards camera-audience. It can't be too specific because I don't know how or why: it's ambiguous: a mode of dress, in a place, at a table, without delineating too specifically any particular aesthetic.

My parents aren't characters, but facets of my self - my first others - which will become others as characters. They have voices which are not mine but mine is embedded within theirs, or rather theirs is embedded within mine. I can hear my father speak through me, feel the sensibilities of my mother through my actions, but how much of myself is in theirs? How are they influenced by me? This is the beginning perhaps: about me, my origins, and the entangled concept of family, moving away from the alienation of the prologue towards the confrontation of the original voices emerging (seemingly) out of nothing.

The map on the wall: a structure shifting alongside all this content I'm charting. My identity if being formed and reformed constantly - a character of the opera, the only (constant) character? The lyric is thinking about thinking, the details of my life turned into a project to produce meaning. It's literally me, myself made literal and literary. Alongside this are ruminations upon the structure of the opera itself, an outside of my being, a process of externalization. The OOFKAUU is the externalized container which expands to maintain all the content I pour into it, to a limit: where is the threshold of its containment and what will happen when that threshold is reached? Will it break, burst, spill, leak? By not containing, will it breach my own shorelines, become fused or confused with the self (my own self) composing its boundaries? What is the difference between considering it a vessel, or architecture, or pure instrument of scale? Its structure is blurry but not due to lack of fidelity, rather as a result of perpetual dynamism, the necessity of considering it through flux, the trace of charting the procession of time with static mechanisms always appearing as an elongated spectra of quasi-form. It evolves while revolving, a media focus upon focus itself. The media comprise the containers, yet they are contained with larger visual diagrammatic abstractions, nested within these linguistic articulations.

The OOFKAUU will be or is being performed, as theater and life, as spectral dramatic and comedic - if it's not a drama then it's a tragedy, but which is it? Life is too much drama, far too human-all-too-human, and must be made more comedic through distance, and ultimately suffer tragically from that distance. The one voice which splits into multiple: some may be humorous while others will remind (us) of the tragedy of this self-separation. ___'s love for total theater: dance and conduction of movements of awareness into the space of life itself, into the blurred realms of lack (of clarity) obscuring what is being performed and what is merely the continuing ever-through life being lived out with no end, and now no boundary. This is the future research of space/place/stage and movement/dance/choreography of attention. Is my parents house a real or theatrical place? Is it a set, or potentially so? The presence of a camera creates this separation, turns all places into theatrical representations of themselves, a flattening for the consideration of an audience, alienating the procession of being. The mere act of shooting video will distance me from the living-through of the life-space-sequence, and perhaps this will serve as a distinguished enough beginning in itself. The bedroom could serve as another possibility for a stage: an empty room, a bed, a desk, a closet archive. The emphasis isn't upon the result or the video document so much as the change which is caused within the present, during the moment of shifting attention of the lived-act-as-performance, the making-theatrical of existence.

The OOFKAUU is art, not life. I am the one doing all the living and I am not an opera. The OOFKAUU is not me, it is other, and hence always already disconnecting from that thing which it documents, myself. The OOFKAUU is an ontology of aesthetics, a definition in situ of artistic identity, that others may encounter as the transcendental or sublime experience of the artist aloof from the concerns of the world. Each aspect of articulating this structure is a profound opportunity for rigorous research. The content concerns appropriation, collage, taking that which already exists rather than attempting to create anything new - to this extent the internal mythopoietic concepts must be treated with skepticism rather than wonder, carefully and without indignation. The visual map is a drawing, a notation, a stage direction for the movements of the performance tracing them through the event-space of life-lived.

The music: chord progressions as affective time, feelings charted. This research is a collision of the philosophical and the technical: how chord modalities play upon human perspective. New tunings and novel chord structure will expand the sonic language for affective expressivity. Technical conversations - the music experiments in Iceland - for mutilating the natural tones into exciting new frequency spaces. Video = pure eye, kino-eye, a tension with the language-being being-written. Remember the procession of the VIDEOSCROLL: language to music to visual ID. Video serves as the imposition of the timeline upon the effluvial flow of the other media. Personal research vs objective research: different directions of observation, each with their own archives. Personal: the formation of my lived subjectivity in relation to my parents, the epicenter of the strange. Voice memos: the beginnings of mapping out the procession of the content moving from conception to action: how to write, how to research, how to work on the video, how to draw the diagrams: instigating a movement towards action out of pure thought, the primary externalization, the making-work of praxis.