This photo is from a series of images I made during my trip to China in 2018. This photo is a panoramic image taken on a highspeed train from Shenyang to Beijing. I love how the camera "brain" is trying to process the intensely moving image. I especially appreciate this processing relative to the slow-moving rain droplets across the window. 

You are looking at the two property borders of the same house spliced together to appear as neighbors. The border spaces have taken center stage. They suggest the kind of neighbor this household would be to itself.  The outer boundary has become the interior, an internalized identity.

​I'm interested in midwest suburban lawns and property boundaries. There seems to be a standard language of visual connective tissues between properties. So standard are the conventions of this vocabulary that I can take images of almost any two properties (even at significantly different eye levels) and splice them together with very little disruption. I know that most of these lawns are cookie-cutter concepts, but I have recently become more aware of the non-verbal, territorial-marking languages that occur at the borders. 

Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), physicist and early psychologist, set out to prove that plants have souls; he couldn't. I was reflecting on Fechner's idea, as of late, in relation to my new beekeeping hobby. I allowed myself to imagine, just for a little while, that bees were like sweet (pun intended) little vampires that fly around sucking the souls out of flowers. To me the above image is a poetic utterance, a glorious pool of regurgitated flower souls. 

So here are some typical transitions between lawns in my suburban neighborhood. I think it is interesting that we are all so accepting of the very ugly cable and telephone service boxes that are on borders. 

There are several factors that differentiate my digital and analog works. The digital works rely more on concepts of space generated by gradients, light conditions, and perspective. The paintings, by contrast,  are generally flatter and materially intensive. Make a painting that has both the photographic thin modulation contrasting the intense materiality

​I made the image above sometime in the early 2000s. I like it to this day. The two inspirations were the work of James Casebere, and the film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Casebere creates meticulous small-scale models of environments and/or architecture. He subsequently photographs the models resulting in powerful imagery. I used craft-store pompoms and scrapbooking paper to suggest the temple, Indy, and his idol. The result was just so-so imagery.

Artists go about the virtuous task of bringing new things to the world for others to consider and enjoy. The most common method of doing this is to combine or juxtapose different things.  These combinations and juxtapositions may spark novel contrasts, new units of consciousness.  A humorous example of this is Daimaou Kosaka's PPAP (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen), a song  made popular by the attentions of Mr. Justin Bieber (or so I'm told). In the song and video (watch here, almost 390M views!) Kosaka combines and recombines words to generate new meaning. 

"I have a pen, I have an apple.
Uh! Apple Pen
I have a pen, I have pineapple.
Uh! Pineapple Pen
Apple pen...
Pineapple pen... uh!
Pen Pineapple Apple Pen!
Pen Pineapple Apple Pen!"

Taking a similar approach I created Automatic Swiping by combining two existing concepts, one historic (the surrealistic practice of automatic writing) and one contemporary (the swipe keyboard function on my cell phone). Practically, this means that I rapidly swiped the keyboard without the intension to form specific words. The resulting poem above intrigues me for a couple reasons.  First, the vocabulary that shows up from automatic swiping is linked to my everyday keyboard use i.e. the software recognizes letter combinations I have used, even if they are not words. For example, in the second line the term "rso"  appears. RSO is an acronym for "registered student organization". I have recently typed this term multiple times over the past month.  It makes me feel as though my phone, in some very real  and unexpected way, is a physical extension of my memories and subconscious mind. This is a happy discovery that relates much more closely with the spirit of automatism than I could have imagined. Another aspect that I appreciate, one that also aligns well with the classic notions of automatism, is that the chance or subconscious syntax creates novel juxtapositions, new contrasts. For example the line, "Kingship burbs without synthetic angora", stimulates me in a way that I can't help but to try to make it sensical. I know angora is a type of fur or wool. It doesn't seem like a stretch to say "synthetic angora". Why state that an unknown product doesn't exist? Finally, in reading Automatic Swiping I can't help be reminded of reading AI generated text that doesn't quite  make sense. I hope that you try your own automatic swiping.

Resources (links):
Automatism (Tate.org)
Swipe/Quickpath (youtube)

I wrote this sad poem about adult life on my cell phone during an evening pandemic walk in 2020.
Send me your ideas and I may add them to another list poem. 

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