New Cycle

It’s been almost 2 years since I came to Singapore to start my PhD, what has been of it so far is a lot of reading and writing and I miss the less analytical mindset in which I usually perform a creative act. This website is going to be my virtual temple where I can retreat and let the ideas flow as they come. This post starts that new cycle! and with it a “web illustration” of how I feel about spending infinite hours in the process pre-planning, planning, post-planning and never getting to the actual work. Is a self consuming process, eventually losing sight of what to do next, overwhelmed with information and no space to perform. Time to get out that downward spiral through the act of making…

This website is in the process of consuming itself right now and simultaneously draining all your computer memory…

– Time for me to reboot. –

“Antropofagia”

(Edit) Randall Packer May 8th, 2014

In the 21st century of endless possibilities, it may very well be that the recursive spiral you find yourself caught in is simply the creative predicament of our time. What you describe is the state of our mediated experience: constantly following the elusive trail of ideas, chasing dreams in every direction, but feeling as though there is no center to the action. When you embrace non-linearity as your holy grail of narrative, you give up the clean lines of the linear act, in which you move methodically from point A to point B. When every impulse might lead to the next big idea, you lose the initial thread that instigated the impulse in the first place. When you follow the trail of associations wherever it may lead, you find yourself in a labyrinthine maze of possibilities, each credible, each important, until everything takes on the same level of urgency: in which it seems that nothing matters any longer. The key is to embrace this predicament, make it your mission. Drawing can instigate the same crisis, particularly when it comes intuitively and without clear direction. You learn to rely on intuition, instinct, until you gain confidence with the mark, then it becomes a pleasure and takes on a driving force of its own. The database narrative must have its own inner necessity despite infinite possibilities. Trusting in the process is the key: and noting that with each mark, or in this case, each entry into the database, you are gaining traction, momentum, force, and energy. And that with every entry, you are building something that might not be entirely clear at the start, but you know you are moving, where, it may be not clear, but you are moving forward. In the end, the creative act does in fact perform an analytical function, it just may not be so obvious. There may not be a clear resolution to a problem until you have challenged and re-challenged the idea over and over and over again, which may be at the heart of the recursive dilemma. But the key is to take action, to embrace the (blog) feed as you would embrace the canvas. The feed is your canvas, it's where ideas take form, are given shape, gain clarity. That is the analytical process of the artistic act, using the medium (in this case the feed) systematically to work out your thoughts, and as each thought is entered into the medium, tagged and archived, it becomes part of the larger body of the work: exactly like a drawing.

“Antropofagia”

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