Official Declaration of Production-Year 2022–2023
I’ve been rather quiet these days on social media. I post my paintings and digital visual art on a weekly basis, and sometimes post music, but otherwise I’m not posting all that much material. That doesn’t mean that I’m not always creating, because I am. I’m working on many projects simultaneously.
As always, I’m producing my Official Declaration of Production-Year, this time for the year 2022–2023. Also as always, I produce the Declaration a year in advance, similar to designers’ collections that come out one season for the following year. I’ve been doing this for many years. It’s my seventh year.
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
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2020–2021
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2021–2022
OFFICIAL DECLARATION
I’ve been working behind the scenes with my band. COVID lockdown measures made it impossible for us to jam and work in the studio for a while, but we’ve started up again and it’s been really amazing. We should have an album soon enough to share on social media. I know I said pretty much the same thing last year, but we were in the middle of COVID and I didn’t know that everything would be locked down until the summer.
Last year, I wrote my Official Declaration and said I would be adding to it in coming months, but I never got around to it. That is because of COVID. I spent the winter basically hunkered down in my apartment, and part of the spring, when everything was in total lockdown. I only really started getting out and about in June of this year, when things started opening up again. I still produced art, I just didn’t keep a log of it in my Official Declaration. I may do the same thing this year. At least I’m touching base, letting you know that I’m still an active professional interdisciplinary artist-researcher.
I’ve done a lot of research on noise, on other things. I’m busy transcribing a manuscript from The History-Project onto the computer. I’m trying to assemble that novel, called The History-Project, so I can publish it and continue working on its sequel, The Archives-Project. I successfully transcribed the typewritten manuscript to The Archives-Project. I no longer write on the typewriter, so transcribing shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
Addendum from February, 2022:
I would say that the rest of this new Production-Year will consist of much work on a series of new novels that I have been designing in my mind. I have found new ways of writing narratives that I think are unique, original, innovative, and have never been tried before.
My main project is tentatively being called “Integration/Disintegration”. It has to do with metaphysical and ontological processes of global “integration” and “disintegration” of the Self on a spiritual level, in a phenomenological sense.
I will be dealing with aspects of happiness that to me are metaphysical, a kind of metaphysics of happiness in contradistinction to a more “utilitarian” view of happiness as an “optimization problem”. The idea is that the engineering of a design for a bridge is an “optimization problem” where optimal solutions can be found through rigorous scientific, mathematical, etc., analysis. Happiness, though, in my view, is not an optimization problem. One’s “mind” is not a designed, engineered “object” that can be “optimized” through mathematics. It is more “metaphysical” than “physical” in that regard.
Another thing that I want to write a great deal about is death. I wanted to write an essay called “Happiness or Death”. The main idea is kind of like the idea in the book “The Pain of Being Human” by Eugene Kennedy. It’s also the idea in Paul Diel’s work “La peur et l’angoisse”, where anxiety is treated as a motive force in life. In a sense, it is an engine of adaptation and evolution.
I wanted to treat of the concept of death, of death anxiety, of terror management and thanatophobia (“fear of death”) in general, as a kind of driving force in life. I don’t necessarily want to take up the same argument as Ernest Becker in “The Denial of Death”, though it has some similarities with it. It’s a similar take, though, except I’m not writing about an “immortality project” or “life project” in general, of the creation of meaning.
I’m taking a more pessimistic, fatalistic approach, maybe even nihilistic, of just “sitting” with the pain and grief of death. The idea is not to engage in any avoidant behavior or escapism and just face fear at its source, and find ways to overcome it, in a kind of “mindfulness” practice.
I’ve been plagued with thanatophobia for most of my life, since I was a little child. It has been omnipresent in my life, the obsession with sickness and death. I want to treat this subject in a new way, though. In a way it’s a kind of “Optimism-without-Hope”.
To be continued…
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