ONTOGENESIS - SOME DAY

I skipped a day - or a few? I can't recall how many. I'm losing track of time, that much is certain. Something switches off in my mind, in my brain. Perhaps it's purely chemical, or a decision, an application of will. I believe it is me but it feels outside of my self, a will not my own or an environmental influence which I succumb to. I am helpless to resist it.

I'm losing track of this information I'm collecting, of the purpose of these exercises. I question their truth, the sincerity of the project. I forgot the goal of this activity. I forgot what it is I am supposed to be showing. Already!? How can I forget so soon? Is my memory really so corrupted that I cannot maintain motivation for more than a few days without losing it again?

Of course it's always changing, my motivation that is, along with everything else. I'm filming my life here while attempting to stay present. All I want at the moment is to stay still it seems. This place, the location but also the close proximity of my parents, is completely debilitating to my practice, if I can even say that I'm making anything at all right now. And it seems like now is the time to explore this! I want to do nothing, so how do I make work about nothing? Is it about doing nothing or being nothing or the impossibility of nothing or some abstract voidinal nothingness, and really what's the difference? The real problem: how do I stay in the process when the process has become passive? Where does the activity take place, how does it occur? If I cannot locate it then how can I stay attentive to it?

Try to remember to remember!

Consider the primary elements:

• Video

  • Phone time-lapse: larger context, the environment/landscape, the bigger picture that all the subject and objects swirl around within

  • CPU time-lapse: tighter focus, lower fidelity, consistent distance from subject. Always capturing my face, necessarily. So far I've been oriented to no one: I'm not speaking or looking at any other, or even my self = image is passive. Begin applying this image with more intention = orient-in-relation.

  • Screen capture time-lapse: not sure but seems to be about attempting to document all the imperceptibly small movements of composing these ideas into a work. The movement on other screens (depicting bodies in scenes) is pedantic, mundane. All of the work is happening in the fingers, wrists, small localized movements of the arms serving as primary tools for the mind. I am dislocated from my body.

  • New Idea: bricolage other webcams into the screen capture vid. The screen-as-image-of-itself = an opportunity for streaming composition.

• Text

  • These daily notes to self: the material of memory. Continuous realignment of the project trajectory. Every morning I put it together to watch it unravel over the course of the day.

  • Letters to others: personal, anecdotal, subjective content. I'm not sure how useful/interesting this process is, but it certainly seems to fulfill the mandate of "processing processes" = a meta-process of sorts, of sorting. Makes me vulnerable: reveals everything. My concern = reveals too much!? Where is the limit set?

  • Bricolage: the not-yet apparent third mind, fabricated collaborations. Writing as a process of reading. How does this process work? How do I apply it? Is it working on me or do I work within it? How do I transfer/translate the impressions and content of reading into a written work? = the big question: how do I maintain focus on the activity of reading while also dedicating attention to the activity of gleaning useful libretto from the reading? Potential solution: software for photographing text and translating it as pdf file. I've used something like this before. Will this help? Requires the phone? Another kind of text scanner?

• Audio

  • Original music: still have this idea stuck in my head. Playing improvised music is fun and decidedly active = seems important for mind, if not for resulting product.

  • Sonic portraits: of objects and/or subjects. Translate video into sound? Frequency analysis? Synesthesia of vision and hearing: towards a cybernetic subjectivity...?

  • Remember! Colors pulled from environment to be translated to sonic frequency. Like sonic portraits but of the landscape/environment/context.

  • Voice design: modulated my speaking voice = towards an aesthetic of dissimulation. Also, downloadable voices for CPU, apps that add naturalized speaking, voice donation website or archive of other voices that can be put to use. I still really like this idea of every voice being my voice, perhaps with nuanced manipulation to amplify affect through tone and timbre.