30 images in 30 days

2/14 the Studio Is Ready
We got the keys November 23, started construction December 2, and now that the house project is done I've got 30 days to knock out 5 pieces.

2/15 Flying in Dreams:
glass-board-glass w/ ceramic tile, lenses and pulleys exploring fascination with/25 years of various techniques used in flying. Initially this began with flapping of arms, then running and leaping then taking off; the with a jump forward and falling forward into flying; and the last few years flying with fingertip control and will. Early on I was embarrassed to be seen; later i would swoop through cityscapes and around buildings, sort of showing off. I often fly inside of buildings. By far the most amazing of these dreams was the time swooping over a landscape of rolling green hills and flying between the dozen or so tornadoes flitting around...

2/16 Exploding Tempered Glass:

One of the pieces of glass shown in the photo above exploded when it bumped the table as I was measuring out the positioning where the drilled holes will be. Lesson learned: don't use tempered glass; explore the best techniques for drilling glass.

2/17 Iterations:

The steam from a bath (meant to sooth the back injury I got from falling down the stairs Thursday) taken at our old apartment on Bloemgracht left a writing surface on the window.

2/18 Muybridge: 
At 2am it - the answer to the question of how to depict the various flying techniques used over the years - finally came!! : Muybridge's study of motion!

2/19 Putting it to Work: 
i had Olga shoot 3 series of me "flying" and here is one of them - dropped into the grid:

2/20 Version 2: 
As the dreaming advanced the technique became more fluid.

2/21 The Physical Substrate 

I'm starting to feel strung out and stringy from too many nights until 2am and not enough sleep (or sleep punctuated by frequent wake-ups as some other detail of one piece or another gets crunched and processed (last night it had to do with the method of display text for the disease/Dirty piece. And from falling down the stairs last Tuesday - everything feels out of whack. So I ran down to Amsterdamse Bos today...and back. 7 miles or so. It hurt. It felt great.

2/22 The Tornado Scene 

Here's the composite landscape.

2/23 All Over the City

A trip to Java Island to a place that Elisa Keir or Dave McManus would have felt at home in what with the special effects materials - fake foam, fake blood, rubber, rubber moulds - all about; then over to Westerpark to return the casting resin (the heat will crack the glass...better to use either transparent rubber or epoxy. A customer tries out the goods. The place kind of has the feel of The Art Coop (Champaign, IL).

2/24 Dirty

After tossing all 24 syringes onto the curved glass bowl they're soon to be embedded in and unthinkingly moving them about i become disturbed by the possibility of a cap of one of them coming off and pricking my finger. How do i know they haven't been used? What if they were used by an IV drug user, somebody with diseases? What if they are dirty? 

2/25 Un-Dirty

Prepping the syringes for their immersion experience.

2/26 The Announcement

Finally...

2/27 Components

The guy at Glashandel Actief - a family operation - says the glass-with-drilled-holes will be ready at 1. It ends up being 1 - the next day. Gradually I adjust expectations. Today - the 6th trip there - was only 5 hours after the 5th trip: he'd cut the oval mirror in record time.

2/28 "It's just Photoshopped"

It's certainly the practice of lucid dreaming that made it possible to take the wildly exciting and unexpected first flying dream back into waking then to begin to channel and shape it through the 30 years that have followed. Aside from the sheer delight of the experience itself is its evolution: early attempts at flight were rudimentary at best - awkward, almost embarrassing - as I flapped and floundered, feeling ponderous and weighted down. One of the stages incorporated running with longer-and-ridiculously-longer leaping strides until a feeling of giddy weightlessness would take over then I would fall forward and - with more expertise - use minimal flapping to gain height and soar. Early on I would steer away from crowds - still feeling kind of embarrassed by the whole thing - but then came to love watching the faces of kids especially, though I have yet to be joined in flight. I came to like soaring above/through trees and, later, through open windows into cavernous interiors or buildings under construction. Now the flying still takes place horizontally with slight fingertip movements to steer, just wanting to move and it happens with arms stretched. Wondering where this leads to next - flying while sleeping on the airplane? Leaving Earth orbit? Flying without clothing? (the feeling is clothing - if at all - is minimal (as shown here, see Figs. 1-3) 
Instructions; pull gently downward on the two silver weights to lift the blue panel and lower the green «tornado dream» panel into view

Background fontography for "Flying in Dreams"

3/1 The Flipside

A composite of all the images used for Figure 1 and Figure 2. Just fucking disturbing, if you ask me - and I know the person well.

3/2 A Finished Piece: "Flying in Dreams"

100-or-so hours later...

The moving parts were a little bit of a nightmare

3/3 Detail from "Dirty"

3/4 Triptic
Left: Holy parts not yet together
Middle: running self-portrait
Right: A marionette sits in a last rites box next to Drowning In A Sea of Bliss (possible 7th piece)

3/5 The Lost Child

 A visit to the 17th c cemetery behind the house on the Schinkel Gracht. This lost child's  image that will be used within the water in Drowning in a Sea of Melacholy, explaining it. 

 Henry Buttons Big Game Cat. Outside. Spring.

3/6 Concept for Holy

3/6 Polder (Mentality)
A polder is a low-lying tract of land enclosed by embankments (barriers) known as dikes that forms an artificial hydrological entity, meaning it has no connection with outside water other than through manually operated devices.
Like Dirty, Drowning in a Sea of Melancholy and Holy both will use a transparent rubber/epoxy for creating a matrix in which to embed objects, text, images and artifacts but - unlike them - they won't be filled completely. So today - drawing on 3 years of living below sea level - I built 2 dikes to restrain the rubbery sea: for the former piece there will end up being 2 polders allowing a clear view to the medical illustrations at the bottom; for the latter a dyke was built to separate upper (where the bereft, childless couple's torsos are visible) from lower (where their bodies are submerged in water).

3/6 Let's keep the church out of this
This piece is taking a look at the gradations of images between medical illustration, on one end, pornography on the other and various shades of eroticism in between. Originally the idea incorporated "sacred" vs "profane" (see the sketch from 3/6), with pornography (in this instance) meant to show the sacred (pleasure) and religious imagery (in this instance) meant to show the profane (punishment, self loathing of the body)...

Until Sezneva stepped in with "That's kind of 80's," and even though I'm really grouchy today from too many nights until 4 or 5am, I realized she had a point. When we sat on the canal yesterday evening near Vondelpark something far more interesting came out of my red-wined mouth: what if the pornography occupies the perimeter and you move into the center through eroticism (vintage porn, historical porn, erotic photos, advertisements, drawings) until you wind up at medical art in the center...but the vertical sides of the shaft leading down to the medical images get plastered with hardcore porn (so you see a gradation....kind of confusing in its transitions from one thing to another...on the horizontal plane, but a sharp contrast in the vertical. Ha!