Thoughts form

Some days ago I felt happy. A little glimpse or a flash frame or something of how things could be. It felt obscene really, given the state of things, but it felt important; happiness as defiance, rebellion in laughter.

Mostly I’ve felt a fog over me lately. Not so much the black dog as something more like psychological decline. Whether it’s burnout or aging, I can’t be sure. Long blessed with a sharp memory, a clear eye for facts and specifics, lately I can’t remember things. I forget names of people I know, the basic details of life and events day to day.

James Murphy wrote about losing his edge whilst barely into his thirties, and according to this super legit seeming website, is now the highest paid DJ in the world.

So maybe there’s hope for us all.

I promised us both I’d try and keep the solipsism to a minimum and just share what I’ve been up to, so here it is.

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Mostly Fantavision, a gloriously minimal distraction from the memory straining pressure of my day job. Both freeing and fussy, frustrating and brilliant, I’ve been using it in its browser emulator form for a while, where I can only save animations as screen recordings, so I get a bit lost in the weeds trying to mask out the quicktimey- ness after the fact. But it’s fun.

I have mostly tired of Deluxe Paint, at least for now. Despite summoning Proustian ghosts of my teenage Amiga years, I can’t seem to use the animation mode without killing my Mac. There are already many DPaint savants out there, and with artists like Sabato Visconti making such layered and thoughtful work, it invites a little too much comparison in for me. As I’ve no precedent for Fantavision its all just fun, trying to bend my island drawings into new forms.

I used it to make a few things for objkt4objkt. Now in its 4th year and 5th iteration, this practically free, online art swap, is a phenomenal outpouring of multifaceted creativity from artists around the world. The breadth and originally of the Tezos digital art community never ceases to astound me.

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My friend Santiago invited me to take part in a group show exploring zombie formalism, and what it could mean for us.

I’d only previously read about this brief, market focused not quite ‘ism before: a sort of analogue precursor to the maniacal 2021 era of blue chip CryptoArt ™, but I’d never explored any of its actual artists until now.

Of the few remaining, Alex Israel is a purveyor of a defiantly identical wave logo available in endless colorways, yours for 100k an edition. Seemingly a kind of industry insider slash branding savvy film director, his surfacey vacuity could also be his virtue.

Is he saying something deep and important about the artifice of LA culture or is this just a vaguely pleasing graphic, spectrum ad infinitum?

“How the sausage gets made … “

The more I reinterpreted the waves series the more they impressed me; the embossing, the strange gradients, the vapid niceness of it all. It was fun to animate in as few frames as I could, pared down and minimal. I threw a simple black and white animation at various channel swapping and dither processes to see how far it kept changing the colours, and the outputs felt limitless in a sense; I guess for these kinds of well connected and market savvy artists these are huge economies of scale - test to see what resonates and lean in to the Collectors Only In Name.

In an extra layer of esoterica that quite honestly I think few know or care for, the rock I have added is a massive boulder on the Welsh coastline called Maen Dylan, spiritual home of its namesake Dylan ail Don, which translates as "Dylan the Second Wave."

Via the fortuitous serendipity of a new Jeff Mills record, I finally got myself a copy of Thought Forms, in this beautiful replica edition from Sacred Bones.

Along with a broad swathe of animistic and theosophical research, the plates of this book I referenced a lot when I first started drawing the islands, so it feels timely and fitting it’s popped back up again on my radar, and good it was via the sleeve of a housey piano chugger.

I made a Spring mixtape here, Star Child is out there toward the end.

https://www.mixcloud.com/ruralidyll/fools-spring/

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This quote from Constantin Brancusi, spoke to me on many levels.

“Simplicity is complexity resolved”