DIARY OF A SELF-PORTRAIT (May, 2024)
Where I tell the general story of my life and talk about what I’m most passionate about.
I was born in a smallish, suburban sector of the highly picturesque town of Mont-Saint-Hilaire, at the foot of the majestic Mont-Saint-Hilaire mountain, lounging the Richelieu River, in what is considered the Montérégie region on the South Shore of the city of Montréal, Québec, in what is considered the Greater Montreal Area. I grew up through long, arduous Canadian winters, lively springs, bright, beautiful and warm summers, and Autumns which were always special to me, since I was born in that season. I never had an Autumn that I didn’t like, which can’t quite be said of all the other seasons, except maybe the spring, which was my second-favorite season growing up.
I attended a nearby preschool, near my home in the tiny, adjacent town of Otterburn Park, where I moved to around age 3 and lived most of my youth. I also attended the English elementary school literally next to my house, though I first attended a French public school about a mile away for kindergarten and grade one.
I enjoyed school much of the time, but found the curriculum rather boring, except maybe for my mathematics classes. I learned to play the guitar and piano around age 15, started painting and writing a great deal of poetry and philosophy at the same time, activities which I am still doing almost 32 years later.
Here is a self-portrait of me that I just made, as I look presently, in all my glorious splendor (or uninspiring ordinariness, I should probably say, if I was being a little honest with myself!). In all my years of writing music, painting, and writing fiction and non-fiction, I never had a single day that I didn’t create something new and unique, if not on paper or canvas or on a musical instrument, and eventually on computers and so forth, then I definitely was inventing things in my mind and in my imagination. I have always spoken from the heart of what I was experiencing in the depths of my soul and what I was most passionate about.
I love the work I do, and though I haven’t had much financial success over the years, I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. I consider myself to be the luckiest man on earth, and I’m not even joking. I have been blessed with so many things, with talents for the arts and for research and a “dream team” of close friends and family who I enjoy spending time with and who always give me their undying moral support and good counsel, when counsel is required.
Things can’t go wrong. I mean, they have, they have absolutely gone wrong and been incredibly, and frighteningly catastrophic in the past. But as of today, nothing could possibly go wrong. I could literally die and go to heaven and I would have lived the very best life I possibly could have lived. My life has been a crazy dream! About dreams, I’ve realized most of my wildest dreams in only 46 years of existence. That’s no laughing matter! (Though I do laugh about it quite a bit a lot of the time, because some of it is quite absurd, even ironic, especially).
So, as stated above, here is my latest self-portrait. I’ve been making self-portraits ever since I was a kid, probably as soon as someone put a pencil or pen in my hand, when I first started drawing. I am constantly returning to the art of self-portraiture mainly because I’m the only real subject I know of that can sit for me long enough to make one and I love making them of myself. I think I actually invented the modern selfie. “Selfies” in some form had existed before that, but I turned it into an actual contemporary art form. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, or as old as 10, at maximum. I had a small camera that would generate photographs that were small and square in shape, similar to Instagram photos, maybe 3–4 inches square.
I’ve been very prolific as an interdisciplinary artist-researcher. Musically, I’ve composed well over a thousand songs, and countless other melodies and more “classical” compositions for various instruments, and for orchestra. I’ve made thousands of recordings, if not tens of thousands, of music and of sound design, as well as thousands of field recordings. I’ve made so many paintings, I can’t count them and I don’t even know what to do with them all! None of this is to brag, but I’ve also written tens of thousands of pages of poetry, novels, and philosophical essays, as well as hundreds of pages of documentation and many logs of various kinds.
I’ve been on all the main social media sites since the beginning, and have used them extensively, every day of the year. My phone and my computers, and tablet and so forth, are tools of the trade, apparatuses or machines, instruments that make my life easier and help make me more efficient and effective in my art-research practice. They also make my life all the more joyful and fulfilling. I have no qualms about any of that stuff. I regularly use artificial intelligence to generate content using my own unique, systematic, experimental workflow management methodology. Oh yes, I also began making visual digital designs about 15 years ago, and have made thousands upon thousands of those, and posted them online for all to see. (I absolutely love playing with noise and pixels, it’s my favorite thing in the world! I could say more about that at a later time.)
Is this just vainglory and pride? Not at all, I’m not that kind of person. I just thought I’d tell you all a little about myself, especially for those of you who might not have gotten to know me that well. My name is A.G., I’m an interdisciplinary artist-researcher and this is my life, this is what I do, and that’s about it. I think that this new self-portrait really captures and encapsulates what I am feeling these days. I feel that I am slowly “melding” with technology and becoming a form of “augmented human” or “cybernetic organism”/”cyborg”. I feel like Generative AI has given me a dozen or so extra IQ points. I feel as though I am 15 ago and just getting started in life. I have so much left that I want to do, my only hope is to live a long life and get to do at least some of the things I feel I still have left to do. And of course, I hope to maintain a healthy body, mind, and soul for as long as possible.
Thanks for taking this short journey with me today! Keep coming back! It works!
A.G. © 2024. All Rights Reserved.
