Official Declaration of Production-Year 2020–2021
- (*Know that this is going to be a document-in-formation, so keep coming back for updates);
- Every year, I publish an “Official Declaration of Production-Year”, serving to give “forward-looking statements” with regard to my art-research practice, for the coming “Production-Year”;
- Here are 4 of my previous Official Declarations:
Production-Year 2016–2017
Official Declaration of The Production-Year 2017–2018
Official Declaration of The Production-Year 2018–2019
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2019–2020
- I am an interdisciplinary artist-researcher; The Historiotheque is the name of my art studio-research center, which is also an archive and fieldsite;
- I am what I call a “Field artist”; that is, I work “in the field”, collecting data which I then work on in the studio-research center;
- I believe in the concept of the Artist-as-Interface;
The artist is like the interface in computing. You don’t want the user to “feel” the interface, to “sense” it in the sense that it is some discrete thing he/she has to manage, alongside whatever he/she is doing via the interface. At least that’s my position. No one wants to see the artist in the work, they don’t want to see the work either, they want to see a part of themselves, hopefully in a new way. I can only accomplish that if I, the author, am invisible. Anything in the work that can distract the viewer from just being present to/with themselves, must be removed. It’s not about me, it’s about them. — Portrait of the Artist in the 21st Century
- This year, things risk getting metaphysical, phenomenological, perceptual/sensual; I realize more and more that I myself am the HISTORIOTHEQUE, which I define as “Witness-Box”, from ἵστωρ (hístōr, “witness”) + θήκη (thḗkē, “box, chest”);
- To me, the brain is made up of Sensonic Matter, which is a kind of new phase of matter; Epigenetically, I believe that we possess what is called Genosense in our genes; We are also born primed/prepared for what I call Geo-Grammatical Forms or just Geo-Grammar for short;
- I came up with these theories, in part, in my novels, which were what I came to call “novelistic phenomenologies”;
- The Datatypes-Project remains an ongoing, unfinished series of works where I try to vulgarize concepts in theoretical computer science;
- Major upcoming themes this Production-Year will be Movement, Integration, the Anticalculus; SEE ALSO: The Risk-Project; The Anti-Project as adversarial example/adversarial perturbation; (i.e. Every Project has its own unique Anti-Project; Every Project is a Risk-Project;
- This coming period in my general art practice will have much to do with ACCOUNTING, mostly conceptually; The idea is that the artist is basically just a fancy ACCOUNTANT; art practices / art production have everything to do with ACCOUNTING/ACCOUNTANCY; This will be shown through my art in the coming Production-Year;
- It’s all about keeping — and weaving — TABLES; (woven text);
- Thinking How Everyone is Hallucinating To Some Degree; Reading Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, I realized how faulty our brains are, how profoundly illogical and irrational we are in our judgements; I want to include this in my art-research practice;
- […]
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NOTES FROM Autumn 2018:
SEE ALSO: Neural Style Transfer For Artists
- A short while ago, I began playing with something that is called “neural style transfer”; That is, you take a “content image” and a “style image” and you transpose the style of the style image onto the content of the content image;
- The process is a little more complicated than that, but today there are apps that exist that do this for you;
- The problem is the same problem we always face in artistic creation, namely the problem of finding elegant solutions to “aesthetic problems”; That is to say, the apps don’t do all the work for you, they only do some of the heavy lifting; The rest is for you to do, with your own hard-won artistry;
— Ste-Anne street, located in the Old Village of St-Hilaire, where I live, is one of my favorite subjects for a landscape; At all times of the day, in every season around the year, this angle, looking UP Ste-Anne street, the view is always splendid; It married itself naturally with the techniques of neural style transfer;
— This is also on Ste-Anne Street, a little further down, looking up; Here we see the Mont-Saint-Hilaire mountain at a time of day called “L’Heure mauve” or “The Purple Hour”; The namesake should be obvious, i.e. the mountain is of a distinct violet hue;
— This view is on St-Henri street looking towards the river; It happens to be a few steps away from my apartment; Again, the view here is always amazing, especially when the sun is setting, as it hits the houses on the right at just the right angle, and the light is of a yellowish hue;
— A visual artist can’t really go without making self-portraits; Here I was able to give the photo a nice pastel-hued look & feel;
— Another self-portrait, except here I am playing with the Pointillist style;
— This is a view from the St-Hilaire side of the Richelieu River (in the “Old Village”); These are buildings found to the left of the Church of Beloeil;
— The bridge between St-Hilaire and Beloeil is beautiful at any time of day and at any time throughout the year; It lends itself well to neural style transfers;
— Here we have the Presbytery by the Church of St-Hilaire; I gave it a “rustic” look just to put the historical architecture in prominence;
— So far, this has been my most popular neural style transfer, the Church of Beloeil seen from the Old Village of St-Hilaire, across the Richelieu River;
— The Church of St-Hilaire, in the Old Village, seen from the back, on St-Hyppolite Street; This is one of my favorite “angles” of the architecture of the site of the Church of St-Hilaire; Paul-Émile Borduas, a famous Québécois painter and public intellectual, once made a painting of the same location from a similar angle; This is a “hat tip” to him; The house he was born in happens to be on my street, St-Henri Street in the Old Village, which I am told was once a commercial center in the parish of Mont-Saint-Hilaire, of which this is the origial parish Church;
— A bushel of lemons taken at a market in Montreal, near the Lafontaine Park, in Mont Royal;
— Another “rustic” look & feel, this time of a small barn near my apartment;
- Yet another view from Ste-Anne Street in the Old Village of St-Hilaire; As stated above, this particular view is beautiful all year round, at any time of day;
— There is a marina on the Beloeil side of the Richelieu River; Here we see the Mont-Saint-Hilaire mountain which is always visually delicious;
— Another view of the Jordi Bonet Bridge, between the towns of Beloeil and St-Hilaire;
— The Manoir Rouville-Campbell is closer to the town of Otterburn Park; It’s a special location in the history of Quebec, a real historic building which was once the “Manor-House” in colonial times;
- Last but not least, a view of the Church of Beloeil at sunset; The sun sets behind the Church, giving it a darkened feel, with the full palette of the “Daylight Series” visible in the sky above;
- And… a bonus image: The Nightwalker; It speaks for itself;
- More to come on neural style transfer in another article.
A.G. © 2019. All Rights Reserved.
