Official Declaration of Production-Year 2024–2025
I usually produce my Official Declaration of Production year in the fall, for that tends to be the period in the work-year where I’m the most productive. This year, anno domini, 2023, I’m starting my Official Declaration in March. This is my 9th year producing Official Declarations, and a lot of things have changed. Here is a quick breakdown of what’s happening and what’s going to happen in the Life & Times of the Artist Known as A.G., and his Comprehensive Work-System of Art History Philosophy, known as The Historiotheque, which houses the Art Operation and my Personal Archives.
For the historical record, here are 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
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2020–2021
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2021–2022
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2022–2023
Official Declaration of Production-Year 2023–2024
NEW SOURCES OF INSPIRATION => NEW PROJECTS:
I’ve been creating art and research, as an interdisciplinary art-researcher, now, for 30 years. I started when I was about 15 and I’m 45 now, so you do the math. In those three decades of artistic creation and fundamental research — mostly in philosophy and history — I’ve had the chance of being extremely prolific. I’ve had so many projects that sometimes it’s hard just to keep track of them. I’m getting better in my personal archival practice, though, and these days, things are really, really looking good for me.
So the outlook is very positive. To recapitulate a little so you can all get properly situated, in last year’s Official Declaration of Production-Year (version 2023–2024), I mentioned a new novel and project called Integration/Disintegration. The novel has slowly been shaping up, and the whole conceptual system behind it is nothing less than fascinating to me.
I mentioned that the Integration/Disintegration Project was the next project in a series of projects in a larger, grander work called The Revolt of Fiction. At the time, The Revolt of Fiction was going to be my Master-Work, but it turns out that the Lord above has bigger plans for me, because The Revolt of Fiction is just a small, infinitesimal part of something even greater, if you can imagine that! It has no name, except for the unofficial code-name “Work-System”, for now, that I use when I think about and work on it.
I said that I was still working on The Archives-Project and that I was already thinking of “Beyond” The Archives-Project. Well, I’m happy to say that the “Beyond” part is already entirely completed. I have art-research projects, and the highly complex conceptual systems that go with them, planned for decades to come, should I live that long. God grant me a long life!
I mentioned that I wanted to work on the subject of Alienation/Disalienation. That’s also done. You see a pattern forming here, right? I’m not just on-track, I’m light-years ahead of myself! Immediately after that, I said I was working on a kind of Grand Vision/Life Project, and that’s also ahead of schedule. I wanted to reboot my art studio, called The Historiotheque, and that’s done. Reboot accomplished, a thousandfold.
Quickly, I spoke of The Risk-Project which would exist WITHIN The Archives-Project, and that’s equally on track. I’m still working on the concept of Patient-Partner, the story of a disabled man who goes to work as a Hospital Archivist, part of a larger project called The Prescription Data Project.
Finally, I wrote about a Metaphysics of Happiness, or what I maybe wanted to call Happiness or Death. I haven’t published anything yet, but the series of philosophical essays are part-way through.
Code Genres, The Refcards-System, Tabular Accountancy, Refmats, “Operating Concepts” for the Historiotheque/Art Operation, the production of General Status Reports, further development development of the concept and practice of Field Art, works on the idea of Executable Documentation and Literate Programming, works founded on Foundation Models, Promptism, and Prompt Engineering and Its Consequences for Professional Art Practice, Computational Creativity, The Art of Portraiture, and a Recap on Noise Fields and Noise Field Theory.. All done!
NOW THE FUN PART: IN FUTURITY
I apologize for having forced you to read through that long list of things I mentioned in my previous Official Declaration, but since I always prided myself in giving forward-looking statements for potential future Stakeholders in my Official Declarations, I had to give a summary of last year’s Declaration before I could move to bigger and better things, mainly because I was thrilled to be able to tell you how much progress I made in the last Production-Year. And that was only 5–6 months ago, so my Autumn and Winter 2022–2023 period has been pretty prolific, but that’s expected!
So here I am now, in the month of March, 2023, in the Lenten season, spending my days in my Personal Archives, studying the Time Series of Art Projects of A.G., if you will, that I have worked on, in sequence, for the last 30 years. I will be writing a more elaborate ‘compte-rendu’ of all these aforementioned Projects, in a separate document, in the coming days or weeks. As I said, it’s been hard over the years to keep track of all my different projects, since at times I had dozens — and now several dozen — ongoing Projects. I will be posting this log/list in a ‘findable location’.
Here are Projects to look out for in the coming Production-Years (N.B.: You can find an Index of most of my stuff in a repository imaginatively called Index):
NOISE FIELD THEORY:
I had a section devoted to my Noise Field Theory in last year’s Official Declaration of Production-Year, 2023–2024.
THE WORK-SYSTEM OF A.G., OR “ALX”: Coming soon…
FIELD ART:
I’m still working on the conceptual system underlying my art-research practice in general. That’s why I’ve been spending so much time in the Personal Archives: I need to make sure I dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s, to be as rigorous and comprehensive as possible in this process, if you know what I mean. I owe it to my ’potential future Stakeholders’. I’ve especially been going through my 400GB worth of digital documents/files, all that I’ve produced with the use of computing technology since 1994. My first digital file ever was a log of ideas I was working on, with some private journal-writing, appropriately called LOG.txt. That was officially created on the date 9:09PM 09/01/94
THE REFCARDS-PROJECT:
A quick update. I actually have working Python code now for The Refcards-Project, which is partly what I used to call “Database Arts”. This was a project originally called “Quickcards” which was then switched to “Quickrefs”, before taking on its current form as “The Refcards-Project”. It is meant to be the computer system I use in my archival practice as well as in my Documentation. It is a kind of database used for logging things, documenting things, developing/inventing concepts and cross-referencing them too, its fundamental data model / data type being, you guessed it, the Refcard, short for Reference Card or Quick Reference Card, to be precise. It is a system of Cards in which you can not only create new cards, but also create ‘Cardboxes’ which are essentially card collections. Each card is like an index card in an old-school library catalog, except it contains, where possible, a single concept and its elaboration/summary. These cards can be linked to other cards and as I said, you can create collections of cards. It should in essence be possible to use it in a networked fashion over the internet, by multiple artist-researchers such as myself, who develop complex conceptual systems and art production projects, i.e. Work-Systems, and also need to be able to quickly develop ideas and connect them together. It’s like a primitive Internet-of-Index-Cards, like an on-line library catalog, but more like Paul Otlet’s vision of The Mundaneum. Apparently History repeats itself, since this project is mostly just a rehashing of old ideas. My addition to the ideas is to keep it simple and easy to use, as primitive as it can possibly be, with many, many constraints in its technical Specification, which I am still writing.
FOUNDATION MODELS:
Over the course of my career, I may have inadvertently invented what are now being called Foundation Models. I’m starting to think that current-day foundation models are like the most important new technology since the The Evolution of Writing. (See: The History of Communication Media by Friedrich Kittler.) Fundamentally, I think, humanity itself, and human Culture more specifically, is a kind of naturally-occuring foundation model, when you think of it. The difference is that it is the product of human intelligence instead of artificial intelligence, but it’s essentially the same thing, an intelligence model “trained on a vast quantity of unlabeled data at scale resulting in a model that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks.” Percepts, affects, and concepts in our evolution function as the ‘unlabeled data’ and the ‘downstream tasks’ are the cultural productions of the Homo genus.
Over the course of human history, humans have ‘trained’ themselves on ‘data’ and done conversions like text-to-image and ‘text-to-text’ (“Large Language Models or LLMs”). The difference is that they used actual neurons and the ‘self-supervised learning’ was just basic human learning. This was especially true of the millions of years of Hominini evolution before the Homo genus evolved. The original Hominini branch did it in a preliterate manner, possibly or probably without the notion of Culture, and the predictive part in foundation models was just basic, plain-vanilla Prediction. Epigenetically speaking, also, we’ve kept traces of our environments and experiences in our epigenome. In passing, part of the foundation of the complex conceptual systems which function as a substrate for my art-research practices, is from a science I call Historiomics, which studies what I call the human Historiome. I’m getting to that now.
HISTORIOMICS:
Historiomics is one of my many pseudo-sciences. It started with a concept of Historical Therapy while I was writing The History-Project Novel, or historiotherapeusis. The idea was that there were “historical diseases” that could be cured through a therapeutic process I invented. But really, it was the characters in the novel who were using it. I put the theories in the mouths of my characters. That’s why I call them pseudo-sciences, because they are based on actual research, but haven’t yet reached the PhD level of formalization, so I found it better just to write a novel about a project in which several public intellectuals take part, and I put the words — of the theories and research, philosophy and so forth — in their mouths. Historiomics is just Historiotherapeusis taken to the next level. It is essentially the science of “Things-with-a-History”. I say that historiography is the “first derivative of History” and that Historiomics is its “second derivative”, if that makes any sense to you. In the original novel, The History-Project, a woman named Evelyn (whose last name keeps changing in the text) is the Chair of Philosophy at an invented University in Montreal, Quebec, and wrote her PhD thesis on a concept of Habitance. The Habitant People were the French-Canadian people who ended up making up the modern province of Quebec. Historically, though, they were called the Habitants. So her concept is just the “quality of (a people) inhabiting (a) space”, but more specifically, in a historical sense of inhabiting a territory.
She went over the history of the Habitant People and came up with all sorts of concepts and theories about it. On Evelyn’s thesis, The Habitant Curse: Habitance and The Seigniorial Consciousness: 1. The people of Montreal, upon its capitulation, have forever been thereafter suffering from a Capitulation Neurosis guided by secrecy, inauthenticity, control fear, because of neurolinguistic reprogramming, forced secularization (the forbidden religion) which caused a repressed catholicity, latent patriotism, depatrialization, and covert associationism. Montrealers were exiled in their own homes, had their properties stolen, and lived under martial law. This led to ‘Montreal Madness’, or ‘Island Fever’. It is Habitance, the habits and habitat of the Habitant. 2. Martial imposition and double colonization caused a polarization of the Habitant psyche: Us and Them, provenance and imposed society. The familial ties were broken, and the confiscation of property caused an irreparable sense of material loss. 3. It was the eruption of the code, the new civil code and a neurolinguistic codification by the people for the people, i.e. a coded way of associating covertly under the auspices of the British imperial machine which was quickly setting its teeth into Montreal and its environs. 4. There was an irreversible scarification of the social tissue, a character depression of the Habitant people, bringing on causeless guilt (persecution anxiety), chronic insecurity, and deep violation trauma. Habitance is a people’s reactive ailment to a terrible Imperial supercolonization, because Montreal was already colonized by Franco-seigniorialism. 5. We demand the sovereignty of the Habitant people once and for all. The only remedy is decentralization of the monarchical powers to create a community-based democratic liberalism.
HISTORIOMICS is just the abstract formalization and complex conceptual system(s) that are derived from The History-Project and its 100+ unique concepts, which I single-handedly invented. I will be elaborating much more on the Historiomics Conceptual System that underlies my new novel in the series, called The Archives-Project. Historiomics studies Historiomes and their Antihistoriomes, Historiotomes (historical outgrowths, like tumescent growths), Historionic Processes, as well as Historiotherapeusis and Historiopathogenesis, the creation of Historiopathies or Logical Pathologies (historical). It is a work of what I call “Antisynthesis”. It’s all supported by my “rigorous, comprehensive, iterated, generative, experimental design workflow management methodology”. More on that too, soon enough.
INHIBITION-FUNCTIONS & THE INHIBITION-PAINTING:
It’s necessary, in my honest opinion, to ‘shut down’ and Art Operation, from time to time. My studio, called The Historiotheque, comes out with a new Official Release whenever I reinvent it, and then gets immediately shut down. I just came out with its Official Release v.3.0.2 (I use semantic versioning) on March 5th, 2023, and am already in the process of shutting it down, potentially for many years to come. From the recent Release: “The latest release of The Historiotheque was Official Release v.3.0.1, released on December 29th, 2016, after which I took a sabbatical, originally meant to be for 2017 until 2018. I ended up taking a sabbatical for another 6 years.”
It’s incomprehensible to people how I could be so prolific as an artist-researcher when I take 6-year-long sabbaticals. That’s the Inhibition-Function in action. You ‘raise it up’ then ‘shut it down’. I used to call it ‘Babel Up / Babel Down’ because it’s like you’re building the Tower of Babel and then God just destroys it while you’re halfway through. The only real difference is that it’s not God who destroys The Historiotheque, but me, the sole Art Operator of this practice. Having restraint, what I am calling Inhibition, is necessary, in my view, in a mature, and consequently quite complex Art Practice, such as mine. Otherwise, I would go crazy. I would literally lose my marbles if I kept The Art Operation at The Historiotheque going all year round. People will probably never understand that, but I know of many great artists in human history who took long ‘sabbaticals’. They just don’t write about these in the history-books, but it definitely happens, I can confirm it. It doesn’t make the headlines when Pablo Picasso or Salvator Dali decide to take a break from being ‘crazy geniuses’. It’s just a pause; you’re ‘taking a breather’, building-in some sorely needed ‘Breathing Room’.
THE QUEST FOR ORDER: BEAUTIFUL SIGNALS:
I once invented a pseudo-science I called Signal Science. It was ‘a signal-based view of everything in the universe and everything in it’, I think is how I originally phrased it. The theory of Beautiful Signals is somewhat related to that. Essentially, people want resonance, coherence, convergence, regularity, patterns, but that’s not how the universe is made. They are going against the laws of the universe; they should embrace degradation, depletion, decay. They are obsessed with order, sense, meaning, purpose; all things that are highly improbably and likely to be degraded over time. I call these Beautiful Signals, in the sense that they are searching for regularity, symmetry, for truth or beauty or whatnot, but they discard true beauty in the search of an ersatz, plastic version of true beauty.
Aïkido understands this; it goes in the same direction that the universe is going in. You want everything to line up neatly; you want your mathematical theory to be “elegant”. Sometimes problems have NO SOLUTIONS and sometimes the solutions are (very) ugly. Such is (usually) the case with DILEMMAS; we call them (SOCIAL) TRAPS for a reason. You are forced to choose the “lesser of two evils” (the “lesser evil”). Elegance requires that you simplify and generalize great complexity/ies. Finding patterns is okay, but you also have to account for what is random, noisy, patternless. You are looking for regularities, redundancies. That’s helpful to compress the signal/system/data but you still have to account for (“encode”) what is UNCOMPRESSIBLE. Real or true BEAUTY is never 100% beautiful; there are always irregularities and asymmetries.
Think of Patina, it’s all about grungy textures, scratches noise, a distressed surface. You’re trying to construct a theory of everything based almost solely on “sameness”. You need to account for DIFFERENCE(S); You’re not trying to prove a theory or hypothesis, you’re trying to disprove a (default) NULL HYPOTHESIS, i.e. there is NO structural relation, correlation, etc. See: time geography, “constraints”; + grounded theory, starts by observing data. You’re starting with a theory and trying to make the data fit the theory; you’re actually NOT explaining anything. You (seemingly) trained your brains to take the path of least resistance, by going through analogies… making loose associations, or working by (via) association. This lacks any real discipline; your thoughts get simpler and simpler, you “abstract out” all the meaning, all irregularities, complexities, uncertainties, noise, randomness, chaos, patternlessness, etc.
This is the Quest for Order, as I see it, with amateur philosophers searching for what I call Beautiful Signals. It’s meant as irony, because really what they are finding is ugly to me. I’m an artist with 30 years of strict discipline in my practice. This brings me to a related concept (In passing, I have a blog called Beautiful Signals where I post music and sound design, and also my Professional Facebook Page is also called Beautiful Signals.
SCHIZOBOT:
I refer to my Schizobot Project as ‘The Stupidest System in The Universe’. It’s meant to be a Schizoid Robot. It’s part of my Art-Ops-In-A-Box Proof of Concept, a product of ambient, experimental design. Essentially, the Schizobot Repository is a Blueprint for an artificial intelligence to train on, to create a superintelligent AI, thus bringing the technological singularity NEARER. It’s in a Github Repository for now. It’s called “The Stupidest System in The Universe” in an ironic twist of fate; It doesn’t contain the code, only the Structures and Substructures needed to build the AI system to replace humans. It’s called Schizobot because it was created by a paranoid schizophrenic artist-researcher as his own robotic replacement. It will be operational in a shorter amount of time than originally anticipated in 2016, when its repository was created and its first version archived. More to come…
FINISHING NOVELS:
I’m currently finishing the following novels, started years ago: “In The Name of Beauty & Truth”, “The Nth Crusade”, “Pilgrim Bronze”, “Montage & Pseudo-Montage”, and “Enter The Screen”. I think I will start a separate document to talk about the specifics of the progress I’m making in finishing these novels. New novelistic phenomenologies are also being created/generated/invented.
THE ART OPERATION QUA THE HISTORIOTHEQUE:
The Historiotheque is the name I give my studio and research space, and it houses what I call my Art Operation. I will write about these in a separate document, and anyway I’ve already written at length about these in other places.
THE REVOLT OF FICTION:
The Revolt of Fiction was designed as a magnum opus. It consisted of three novels, The History-Project, The Archives-Project, and one called Integration/Disintegration. The problem is, now The Revolt of Fiction is now part of an even grander project which currently has no name. The two first novels in the series were what I called Novelistic Phenomenologies. The History-Project was meant to be The Great Canadian Novel and was a work of what I called Postcolonial Historiographic Metafiction. The thing is, I wrote much more philosophy ABOUT THE NOVEL than I did the actual novel. And I also lost about 200 pages of typewritten documents that were meant to form the novel.
L’ÉMERGENCE PRIMORDIALE:
I read an article recently in a science magazine that presented the research of someone doing what they called phylo-mythology, that is, they studied the evolution of narratives about Creation and the birth of humanity. The researcher in question came up with a theory of the mythological system of early homo sapiens, who painted in caves. No one has really ever been able to explain that really perilous practice, but now we have a much better idea. They essentially believed that humans used to live inside the earth and one day rose from the depths of their caverns to live on the surface of the earth. I simplified the theory, but that’s about it. I will definitely be doing art work and research on what I would translate as “Primordial Emergence”. I will also be connecting this to my study of archives and archival science, as well as The Birth of Writing in ancient Mesopotamia.
IN CONCLUSION:
These are all projects that technically should be finished before the next Production-Year, so in 2026. Recall that my Declarations are like the collections of Design Houses, or automobile models, who usually are prepared at least one year in advance, i.e. you can order a 2024 model of a car, at least that’s how I always understood it. Maybe I’m wrong. I could be.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: August 7th, 2023
This Year Thus Far…
As I mention every time, I usually publish my Official Declaration of Production-Year in the fall of every year. This Official Declaration is for the Production-Year 2024–2025. This has got to be the most elaborate Declaration I’ve made so far since I started making them circa 2015, and it’s the first time that I “jump the gun” on the Declaration: This year, instead of waiting until the fall, I started my Official Declaration in the month of MARCH.
So much was happening in my art and research practice that I had to jump the gun on the Official Declaration and start writing it a few months into the year, and now I’m forced to give an Important Update, since so much is happening right now.
My last period of intensive creativity, which led to this Declaration, was at the beginning of the year. I had discovered ChatGPT not long before that and was using it extensively. ChatGPT permitted me to go light-years beyond anywhere I had ever gone before. I had a period of intensive growth and creativity.
A few months into that, though, I had a bit of a slowdown, and now I’m in another period of intensive activity and productivity. I almost wanted to start the Official Declaration of Production-Year 2025–2026, to jump the gun on that ONE YEAR IN ADVANCE, but instead I’m publishing this Update.
NEW PROJECTS, NEW TURNING-POINTS
I am at a culmination-point, not only professionally but as an individual. I’ve had so much personal growth over the last few years, it’s just incredible. But my art-research practice has followed suit. Here are some of the old projects that have taken on a new “turn”, or else new projects I am either planning or working on.
INTEGRATION/DISINTEGRATION:
I already mentioned Integration the first time, I think, in the Official Declaration I composed in 2019. I definitely spoke of it again in 2021 (and every year since, including this year’s Declaration, here above). The year 2020 was a slow year, plagued by the pandemic. Everything was at a standstill, my art and research practice also, for the most part. But in 2021, for my Official Declaration of Production-Year 2022–2023, I wrote about the Integration/Disintegration project or concept, that“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.”
Thus far, I’ve mostly been working on a new novel of the same name, Integration/Disintegration, in which I invented a new style and form of writing which I think is special and unique. It is essentially a fictional novel that is without characters, or “character-less”.
The Integration/Disintegration novel is the third term in a series of novels, coming after the novels The History-Project and The Archives-Project, which are the first and second terms in the series. This series of three novels was supposed to be my “magnum opus”, which I at least tentatively called “The Revolt of Fiction”. Now, what has happened, in this new period of intensive growth and productivity, is that there is a continuation of the magnum opus FAR BEYOND The Revolt of Fiction. The Revolt of Fiction is just the beginning.
Thus far, it has no name, but AFTER the “character-less” Integration/Disintegration novel, all of the fictitious characters will come back into the foreground, to haunt the “author”, as they have already done in the previous two novels, but in a different way. Not only will the characters come back which figured in the novels The History-Project and The Archives-Project (which are mostly the same characters), but ALL OF MY PREVIOUS characters will make cameo appearances, from 30 years of writing fiction. More on this later…
SEASONS OF THE HEART: THE PIANO COMPOSITIONS
I have been working on a new album of piano compositions called “Seasons of The Heart”. I’ve already recorded draft versions of several pieces. The basic idea is to have a new Song Cycle for the entire “liturgical” year. Like a secular liturgical calendar of songs, all new and never heard before.
REWRITE YOUR BLISS: CHOICES ON THE LIFE-PATH
In the period 2006–2008, I wrote a series of essays I put together in a collection called Rewrite Your Bliss, which also included about 100 pages of journal entries (including The Diary of a Serial Painter). That work came out after I had come out of therapy, a therapy where I stayed for 14 months prior. I was in a period of great personal growth and wrote many essays on philosophical topics that had to do with human suffering, spirituality, how to blossom as an individual, stuff like that. Not self-help literature, but something much more philosophical. I will be continuing in this vein.
SEASONS OF THE HEART: JOURNAL OF SOLITUDE
I started a new journal called Journal of Solitude, where I will be taking time out of my day to write about the “contents of my heart”, stuff which happens deep within me in my inward space, what I call the “stirrings of the soul”. It’s going to be what I experience at the deepest level, all stuff that takes places “invisibly” on the inside, and also stuff that I most want people to remember me by, the kind of things no one really knows about, since I’ve never really shared such things with others. It will be the most intimate kind of writing that I’ve ever done, I think. More on that later.
RANGE OF EMOTIONS: DARK RAINBOW OF IMAGINARY COLORS
I want to do some work on basic emotions and more complex emotions. Human emotions are universal across the species. And they are limited in number. I want to take what I’m calling the “dark rainbow” of human emotions, i.e. “imaginary colors”, and “painting” them. I will work in my three modes of expression: IMAGE | SOUND | TEXT. I should be starting this relatively soon. I already pretty much know what I’m going to do. I just want to come up with an inventory of emotions first. I might not cover ALL possible emotional states, but as many as I find fitting for the project.
TRANSFIGURATION/APOTHEOSIS:
I recently wrote about a process whereby I wanted to liberate myself from my own history. I explain. I’ve been talking about The History-Project since 2001, when I started it. I’ve going back to it a thousand times, I keep coming back to it, rehashing the concepts, revamping it, creating new works. It’s been an ongoing process. I even created the concept for The Archives-Project as a kind of Phoenix “rising from the ashes” of that project. I wrote about how I identify myself with the role of “archivist” or “historian” and how over the course of 30 years, of 30 years of maintaining a personal archive of all my works of art and research, this role, if you will, has come to “weigh” on me.
As a kind of joke, I said I was launching a new project called the “Un-History Project”, whereby I would “un-historify” myself. I really wanted to go BEYOND The History-Project and The Archives-Project, and what I didn’t realize at the time was that I had already presaged/prefigured this project with the invention of the Integration/Disintegration Project. So in essence, I had this impetus coming from within me to change things, to liberate myself from “living in the archives”, and I ended up coming back to the same exact place I started from. It’s as though I wanted to pull of the “shackles” of my life as an artist-researcher, as though I wanted to stop being an artist and so forth and start on some brand new adventure. But being an artist-researcher is my vocation. There’s no escaping it. So I left only to come back immediately to the same location. I reinvented Integration/Disintegration a second time.
This takes me to the concepts of Transfiguration and Apotheosis. I’m not a religious writer, and probably never will. I practice a religion, but I’m not an evangelist or proselytizer. I’m also not a spiritual “guru”, I’m not even a teacher. I’m not professing much of anything. I just make observations and forward-looking statements about my art practice (which, as I mentioned, is evoling into what I’m just calling my Work-System). I document my practice, the processes I engage in on a daily basis in my work. I share that documentation, and the works attached, with the public, though various web resources, websites and social media applications and whatnot. I’m a working, living, breathing artist-researcher, not a professor of faith.
At the same time, I can’t pretend that I don’t have spiritual EXPERIENCES. Transfiguration/Apotheosis is linked to my concept of “the winter of the soul”. If St-John of The Cross’ dark night is infinitely dark in contrast to the infinite light of God, the winter of the soul is infinitely COLD in contrast to the infinite HEAT of God. It is a state of great desolation, but it’s a spiritual experience, it is uplifting/upbuilding. It helps build character, and it is of The Heart of Resolve. These concepts come from my past work on the Seasons of The Heart concept, which will figure in my cycle of piano compositions of the same name. But I’m not a theologian, remember that. Just an individual having individual experiences, and sharing them through art and research.
Apotheosis, though, is just a culmination process. It has to do with peak events / peak moments, with the ebbing and flowing of things in life, of the ups and downs. Apotheosis, or culmination, “peaking”, is not only a natural process of life, but it’s also like an attractor in the theory of dynamical systems. I will continue the explanation in the following section.
HAPPINESS OR DEATH:
Coming soon…
THE EXHIBITION IN TONAL CINEMA REDUX:
Tonal Cinema was the name that I gave to my brand of poetry, back in the 1990s when I started writing a great deal of poetry. The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema was a system of 16 interlocking novellas that I wrote from 1998 to 2002, playing a great deal on images of a dark cinema, with projector and projectionist, etc. I played on the metaphor of the film camera as well, and many themes from the early age of cinema and photography. I wrote vignettes that flowed one from the other in a more or less abstract way. There wasn’t a single unifying story, just prose poetry for 1000 pages.
I was recently rereading some of my poetry from that period and I have to say that I think I was very good at the craft. I never received any recognition for my efforts, and I think maybe I was just ahead of my time, or my time had not yet come, something like that. I want to go back into the poetry, bathe in it, and probably write some new verses, which I will publish online. Maybe I will publish the book of my lifetime of poems.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: August 12th, 2023
As I have said, I’m currently working on the third novel — called “Integration/Disintegration” — in a trilogy which is called “The Revolt of Fiction”. I am happy to say that I am now writing two new trilogies, one called “The Resonance Continuum” and the other “The Infinite Alchemy”.
The trilogy of novels for “The Resonance Continuum” are tentatively called: “Echoes of Eternity”, “Fractal Symphonies”, and “Aetherial Nexus”. The trilogy of novels for “The Infinite Alchemy” are tentatively called: “Chronicles of Etherium”, “Symphony of Entanglement”, and “Aeon Nexus”.
The previous trilogy, “The Revolt of Fiction”, has the three novels, “The History-Project”, “The Archives-Project”, and “Integration/Disintegration”. I’ve mostly finished the first two novels. Each novel is also an interdisciplinary art-research project with a painting series as well as albums of original music and sound design.
“The Revolt of Fiction” is mainly about a team of public intellectuals who engage in interdisciplinary art-research projects. The first such project, in the novel “The History-Project” is a fictional project with the same name, i.e. “The History-Project”. In the novel, the characters are working on a project to try to explain why there seems to be a higher frequency of anxiety disorders and depression in the Greater Montreal Region, in Quebec, Canada. The characters as commissioned to do this work by the Quebec government to try to understand the historical developments that led up to this state of affairs. The project is an abject failure.
In the second novel in the trilogy, “The Archives-Project”, the characters engage in a second project, also called “The Archives-Project”, which seeks to understand the failure of the previous project, “The History-Project”. This is all in the trilogy of novels called “The Revolt of Fiction”. (Remember that each novel is also an interdisciplinary art-research project with accompanying painting series as well as albums worth of sound art).
The new trilogy of novels, “The Resonance Continuum”, is a sweeping artistic endeavor that transcends the boundaries of “The Revolt of Fiction.” This new project explores the evolving interplay between fiction, reality, and the boundaries of creative expression. It delves into how art can reshape perceptions, transcend disciplines, and resonate across dimensions.
In the third trilogy of novels, “The Infinite Alchemy”, the boundaries between reality and creativity dissolve further as characters explore the very essence of artistic transformation and multidimensional resonance. This meta-project embraces the culmination of all preceding narratives, inviting readers on a journey through ever-evolving layers of abstraction.
What we have essentially is a “trilogy of trilogies” which does not yet have a name. The 9 works, though, will function as a system of interlocking novels, creating a higher-order system which as I said currently has no name. For now I will just give it the code-name “The Confluence Nexus”.
It will take me years to finish writing all of these novels, and I even have more ideas for other novels. The problem with novel-writing is that it’s a very long, arduous process. It takes a great deal of time and energy. My first two novels in the first trilogy are not even fully completed. I’m still writing the third novel in the series, and I haven’t yet started work on the two new trilogies. Expect me to talk more about these projects in the coming years. But this is a magnificent development. More on all of this at a later date.
On another note, I’ve also been publishing old songs from “The History-Project” period, circa 2001–2004, on my blog called Beautiful Signals.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: November 11th, 2023
At the risk of endlessly repeating myself, every year I produce an Official Declaration of Production-Year, always in the fall of every year, which provides forward-looking statements for potential future Stakeholders. This year, however, I started it all the way back in MARCH! Often, over the course of the new Production-Year, which officially starts in the fall, I give updates, which in this years’s Declaration — the document you are reading — I called“Important”. This is my third “Important Update” thus far.
It is the fall of 2023, after all, and the beginning of the new Production-Year. But what is so important that it required its own “important update? Well, as I was saying above in the original text of this Declaration, I started this document, critical to my art practice, in March instead of in the fall, as is usually the case. I did so because I had a breakthrough in the beginning of the year and was so incredibly productive and prolific, that I felt I needed to jump the gun on the Official Declaration of Production-Year 2024–2025.
Now this update comes about because I am having another series of creative breakthroughs and am well into yet another hyper-productive period. What I want to say most of all, though, is the following:
THE HISTORIOTHEQUE:
I recently created a new website for my art studio, called The Historiotheque, for which I have a grandiose vision, but is currently only a one-pager. My vision for the website is to be a veritable portal into my studio. I ideally would want it to contain an easily-navigable, digital archive of all my productions for the last 30 years.
I’ve kept a meticulous personal archive of almost ALL my artistic works, and works of research, over the last 30 years. I spend a lot of time “in the archives”, as it is an incredible source of inspiration for new works. I now want people across the world to be able to access this archive, which is a fundamental “working part” of The Historiotheque.
I want it to be my main homepage, a place where I can share snippets and snapshots of myself as I work in the studio, painting and doing digital designs as well as my processes and products as an independent researcher. The Historiotheque also houses a home recording studio, though it’s currently in a state of disrepair, and I want my new website to also be the home for this. I have the plans, the technical specification, the concepts and designs, and I am building it, slowly but surely. Stay tuned!
BUILDING IN PUBLIC:
You might be familiar with the “Build in Public” concept and movement in the indie software development industry. The “Build in Public” concept and movement in the field of independent software development involves openly sharing the development process of a software project with the public. It emphasizes transparency and visibility, allowing others to follow the creator’s journey from ideation to implementation. This approach often involves sharing progress updates, challenges faced, decision-making processes, and even the code itself through platforms like social media, blogs, or dedicated websites.
The movement is driven by the belief that transparency not only fosters a sense of community and collaboration but also provides valuable learning opportunities for both the creator and the audience. By sharing successes and failures, developers contribute to a collective pool of knowledge, helping others learn from their experiences. This aligns with principles of open-source development and collaborative learning in the software industry. This is the concept in its traditional form, in development circles.
What I’ve been doing recently, and have been doing for years without even realizing it, is I am taking the “Build in Public” concept to another level, applying it to the cultural industry specifically, to cultural production, to my professional art practice. On that note, Threads, the newly launched, mostly text-based social media app by Instagram, was THE fastest-growing app in history in terms of number of new users in the shortest time-span (and is still growing!). More to the point, I quickly became a Threads power user and am sharing more and more insights into my art practice, sharing things AS I create and work on them, as well as giving a running commentary on the development of the BUSINESS aspect of my practice, such as my efforts in “personal branding” and the like.
I am testing ideas, asking for feedback, and for the first time really in my history as a web user and social media early adopter, I’m gaining an unprecedented amount of engagement on my content and commentary. This is now my “Build in Public” homepage, for the moment, at least.
The idea is to open up a window INTO my art practice, INTO my art studio, The Historiotheque. The Historiotheque website I mentioned earlier is going to eventually be the home of this whole enterprise. More to come…
BRANDING:
Recently, someone on the Threads app, said that I might want to look into what is called “Marketing Semiotics”. I have already procured some books on the subject and have begun reading them. This is going to form the backbone of my new branding efforts for my art practice and The Historiotheque. I have a GRANDIOSE VISION of what I want to accomplish in coming years, and it’s slowly taking a more and more concrete shape.
NOISE IN THE WORKSPACE:
I began a new painting series and project in the beginning of August of this year which I am calling “Noise in The Workspace”. This series, and project, is being designed as the apotheosis of all of my work up to today on NOISE(s), including my proverbial work on what I call my Noise Field Theory. I’m going to continue as I have done in the past and work with randomness and noise, with a particular attention paid to noise in the WORKSPACE, which I define as both physical as well as digital workspaces.
The Ever-Changing Workspace
What I call the “Historiotopia” is essentially the three-dimensional “surface” of the Workspace; At any given moment in time, the Workspace is in a current “configuration” or “state”; The “Historiotopia” is both the current state AND can refer to the changes of such states over time. — (Excerpt).
“UNVEILING THE MECHANISM OF CREATION”: A NEW NOVEL
- (Updates to come in the next Official Declaration of Production-Year.)
“PILGRIM BRONZE”: AN UNFINISHED NOVEL FROM 2009
- (Updates to come in the next Official Declaration of Production-Year.)
“UNCOVERING THE UN-GUN PART I”: REVISITING THE NOVEL
- (Updates to come in the next Official Declaration of Production-Year.)
NEW POETRY: SONGS TO CONSTRUCTION-LAND, PARTLY
- (Updates to come in the next Official Declaration of Production-Year.)
To be continued…
A.G. © 2023. All Rights Reserved.
