yes chess programming is much further along, but there's still more i want to do
at 6:30 decided finishing it tonight was a false deadline, and went for a walk (11.2 miles), along the river while the sun was setting
but i didn't take any pictures of the sunset
yesterday, if you had told me "you'll be able to show different points in time, and positive or negative, in a patterned mask, in layers" i would have been thrilled, and thought yes, that's enough. but i would have been wrong. made that happen this morning, and all of a sudden, feel the lack of functioning transparency.
once you achieve whatever was blocking you and you push past it, there's something else, immediately following, which isn't quite the way you want it. is it solvable? all i can say is, by tomorrow night i should have a second working prototype of chess, constructed entirely differently, which should be a lot closer to what i want to do. if i can't get it all the way there by tomorrow night, maybe it will take another week, or maybe i have to build it differently. but i believe there's a way and i'm getting closer to finding it.
well, this might not look chess-related
but i'm still trying to figure some things out. none of this stuff necessarily comes naturally to me, it's not really what i long to do, but the result usually makes it worthwhile. definitely learning, so even if it's slow going, knowledge and skills being built.
if this stuff looks simple, let me know if you want me to explain some of it to me. if not, we're in the same boat, this is what i was working on today, trying to get some code-based things i want chess to be able to do working, trying to figure out what approach might actually work.
sometimes it's a bit of a struggle, knowing that there are more intuitive things i could be doing, but if this is what the art i want to make requires, it's part of the deal. try to appreciate that it pushes me, but there's a bit of yearning, to just paint something, or shoot some video, or take a picture...
and if i wanted to write something, it would go here
but it would be superfluous
a recent study found that brain activity increases dramatically when there's a pause in a piece of music. tonight's ape meeting (aesthetic purposes exploration) had fits and starts, quiet moments, and thoughts were churning. tough discussion sometimes equals learning.
not such clear notes, but feel gained some conviction, bad art often gets labeled gratuitous, lacking in purpose, senseless. so, good art must have a purpose, right? and "powerful" - eliciting an emotional/mental response - bad art can do that too, nausea, revulsion - that's pretty brief, seems a little obvious, we veered off into some side topics and there were many picky sticking points, trying to be honest and considered, is this really important? am i convinced this is what i believe?
what can something i make do for you?
matthew and i had a little memory-based disagreement this evening. luckily the evidence was at hand.
back in the day, i'm guessing late ninety-six, he started teaching me about the situationists, and we talked a lot about art that wasn't art, or living in a way that was where art is meant to take you. i think. this is back in the day, after all.
anyway, the situationists used to do these wanders, i think they were called. very much about games, and living an aware life, and making the absurd apparent (i think).
matthew and i used to engage in some activities which seem overly mundane but became ritualistic, i think that was another part of it, we were already trying to do things, not just hang out and talk, but take silly or strange pictures, etc. anyway, i think, again this is all memory, as a result of both years of messing around with paint, drawing, collage, photography and video, and then the introduction of the situationalists, we decided to invent a "game" which was sort of a participatory art piece. most of this was probably his instigation.
it was called, eventually, lookin' for cats. it involved cards, and i forget what else. i do remember that if we saw a cat we all had to race back to home base (my apartment).
what sparked the memory, though, was our discussion of the art project aspect of our kisokaido journey. defining tasks to be completed each day is something we're both excited about, for a number of reasons. i like the "feels-like-work-yet-fun-and-absurd" aspect. matthew likes the "we're-not-necessarily-creating-a-product-or-engaged-in-artifact-making" feeling, rather the sensation that it's something we're engaged in purely to enrich our experience (and perhaps other people's lives as well, particularly if we interact with them, or document and share the tasks). one task he proposed for consideration is helping someone every day. i think this is already done as a matter of course in some cultures. doesn't feel like art, but definitely feels like something we both want to do, so yes, this is a way we're very very likely to go (not excluding anything or committing to anything yet). as a high school student in china for a few weeks, out running one morning with two friends, we helped push a stone-laden cart up a long hill, i don't know how long it would have taken those guys otherwise, that's maybe my most enduring (and favorite) memory from that whole trip.
anyway the disagreement. i remembered my favorite rule of the game (probably it was my rule right?). oh yes, in addition to cards and wandering, a clown nose was involved. i forget the rules involving the clown nose (wouldn't surprise me if i do have this notated somewhere, but want to go to sleep rather than hunt for it). anyway, whoever drew a certain card, or whatever happened that triggered the role-status or change of situation, one of the players was allowed to pose the other players as he wished and take a picture. (matthew had no memory of this part of the game. well, brother, hope this reminds you.)
saw this sign.
when it was my turn to wield the camera, i asked matthew and michie to strike the pose illustrated in the sign.
this task-definition is really feeling like something we're both going to get very involved in. it's the big question of everything, really. what exactly is it that you want to do? right now? every day? what do you want to do?
matthew even said asking for suggestions might be an interesting approach. anything you want us to do, taking less than one minute, once per day, while we walk from kyoto to tokyo? all ideas welcome, to be seized or deemed not-something-we-want-to-do. definitely open, though.
if you can figure out a way to relate it to hiroshige or woodblock prints, that's a bonus.
during chess rendering
was thinking about the nature of different activities, and how we define them. bob and bob used to set up rodeo rodeo, i read in a book. little plastic action figures, a rodeo, when they were living in i think beverly hills, rodeo drive. daily. matthew and i used to make lists. when i visited new zealand maybe two years ago, we would make up a list in the morning, and cross the things off during the day. maybe this will be something we're both keen about. sixty-nine tasks, something we need to do at each stop on the kisokaido. observe the sun for a minute, or pick up all the litter we see for five minutes, or do six thirty-second sketches - don't want to speculate about the nature of the activity, but defining an activity, to be performed together, as a ritual maybe is one way to think of it, which will work towards developing a piece of art which we can create and share, might be something we're both keen on.
then i saw the shadow people.
this isn't photoshopped, the sun was hitting buildings beyond the reservoir while joggers ran by closer to me down below. we can all become as flat as we want, completely shallow, two-dimensional. if we want. or we can choose a different way, fill up ourselves, our lives, expand. find new dimensions. shadow people became shallow people. and i thought matthew and i are really going to want to make this trip meaningful. all this planning, training, feels fairly ambitious, what are we going to learn? i think it will be deepening no flattening no matter what. but a bit of thought and effort and the degree could increase. so variable. i don't want to be flat. i'm afraid of being defined by tasks, but i don't know how else to create something. maybe definition, which is limiting, is a precondition to further freethinking, which is enlightening. paradox. limits = freedom. we will do x, which will occasionally prevent us from doing y or z, but which will teach us about q and k, which we otherwise would never have considered. and years from now, we'll still benefit from the lessons of q and k. maybe someone else will as well. that's the hope of today.
leery of peaking too early, and unwilling to commit so much time, had cut back on the walking a bit. now we're under three months before beginning our trek, getting into shape and building up endurance a priority again. 10 miles yesterday, along with chess progress which will continue today and tomorrow.
last night, thought "beauty unimportant. truth and beauty no. truth important. beauty irrelevant." might free me up a bit (and result in something more beautiful).
