Creative Cogitation

In my cur­rent Series, Binary Birds, I am explor­ing social media in all of its vari­a­tions.  But the thing about mod­ern social inter­ac­tions is that gen­er­ally we are all com­mu­ni­cat­ing elec­tron­i­cally, via cell phone, face­book, tweets, down­loads, web­sites, emails, inter­net searches, etc.  as opposed to face-to-face.  In my paint­ings I have cho­sen to rep­re­sent all this elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion using the Amer­i­can Stan­dard Code for Infor­ma­tion Inter­change (ASCII). It is a character-encoding scheme that rep­re­sents text in com­put­ers, com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment, and other devices that use text. Most mod­ern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they sup­port many more char­ac­ters than did ASCII. 

Nev­er­the­less I have cho­sen rep­re­sen­ta­tions of words, rather than the words them­selves, there­fore their inter­pre­ta­tion is still very much up to the viewer.  If you have a bet­ter story to go with a given paint­ing, by all means use it. 

One of the ques­tions I am asked over an over again is what is with all those zeros and ones.   Some peo­ple are aston­ished to learn they actu­ally form words. ASCII Binary is a 2-state rep­re­sen­ta­tion sys­tem.  In elec­tron­ics, a lot of oper­a­tions are pred­i­cated on whether some­thing is off or on.  Off or On are two dis­tinct pos­si­ble states and binary encod­ing is specif­i­cally related to this 2-state sys­tem.   ASCII uses groups of 8 2-state bits, either zeros or ones, to rep­re­sent the let­ters of the alpha­bet.  It is a very spe­cific cod­ing sys­tem, which is dis­tinct from other binary cod­ing sys­tems; there are oth­ers.  In my works, each group of 8 zeros and ones also rep­re­sent a sin­gle let­ter of the alpha­bet, or a num­ber, or a char­ac­ter space  or punc­tu­a­tion.  This coded mes­sage is gen­er­ally related to the sub­ject of the paint­ing and fre­quently rep­re­sents the name of the painting. 

Very often peo­ple think binary is exclu­sively rep­re­sented by zeros and ones.  But step out­side the box; binary can be rep­re­sented by any 2 states that are dis­tinct.  In my paint­ing ASCII Bird I rep­re­sent 2 states using birds three dif­fer­ent ways to con­vey three mes­sages coded into the paint­ing itself.  In 2nd Story Job I use rota­tions of b, and the color of b to rep­re­sent three 2-state sys­tems to con­vey three mes­sages in the same string of characters. 

ASCII Binary rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Jake Beckman’s Binary Birds Paintings

In the image above I have taken the top line of code from ASCII Bird to show how, depend­ing on what you are look­ing at, the birds rep­re­sent “A”, “3” or “n”.  I also have pulled binary from the paint­ing, Avatar, to show the first let­ter in Avatar, “A”, is exactly the same rep­re­sen­ta­tion as the Sitting/Flying of “A” in ACSII Bird.  Finally I detail the third char­ac­ter from Avatar, “a” to show a lower case “a” has a dif­fer­ent 8-bit rep­re­sen­ta­tion than cap­i­tal “A”. 

So that is what is with all those zeros and ones in my paint­ings.  I hope this helps a lit­tle bit. 

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

The Mayans actu­ally had sev­eral cal­en­dars: a 52 “year” cal­en­dar round, bro­ken into 20 day / 13 “month”  seg­ments, a long-count cal­en­dar for trac­ing long peri­ods of time, a cal­en­dar for track­ing the phases of the moon, a cal­en­dar of the heli­a­cal cycle of Venus etc.  Your aver­age Mayan prob­a­bly mostly paid atten­tion to the cal­en­dar round, but prob­a­bly didn’t track long peri­ods of time as the cal­en­dar round was appre­hen­si­ble in terms of a human life-span at the time. 

The one you keep hear­ing about with respect to 2012 is the Long-Count cal­en­dar.  It appar­ently was used to mark events, and aus­pi­cious days on which to do mon­u­men­tal things– from what I can tell it is largely asso­ci­ated with archi­tec­ture – you know pyra­mids, stella etc.  Just as we count time from before and after J.C., the Mayan long count cal­en­dar counts from zero around August 11 –3113 on the Julian Cal­en­dar, and about a month later if you go Gre­go­rian (yes, that is more than 5000 years ago)

The Mayans used a veg­isi­mal sys­tem of count­ing (base-20).  We use base-10, maybe Mayans counted on their fin­gers and their toes.  :)  They also seemed to like the num­ber 13 too.  Any­way, the long count cal­en­dar is just Base 20 mul­ti­ples with a one wrinkle-since a solar year is around 365 days, they dropped the sec­ond place holder to base-18 instead of 20 to make it match the solar year a bit bet­ter. See 20 x 20 is 400 which is about 10% longer than a year, but 18 x 20 is 360, which only misses the mark by about 2%, so the sec­ond place holder in the Mayan Long Count Cal­en­dar only counts to 17 instead of 19.  Before you won­der about the Mayans fudg­ing their cal­en­der, remem­ber, every four years we add a day to Feb­ru­ary to fudge our cal­en­dar.  The Mayan Long-Count cal­en­dar usu­ally dis­re­gards the 5 extra “unlucky” days (the dif­fer­ence between 365 and 360) in the solar year-they didn’t fudge for them; I guess they decided 360 days was close enough and kept on counting.   

The cur­rent hype about Decem­ber 21, 2010 is very much like the Y2K hype about going from Decem­ber 31, 1999 to Jan­u­ary 1, 2000.  It’s just a flip­ping of a bunch of veg­isi­mal places to 0, while the high­est place holder incre­ments up one.  One ques­tion is whether the cur­rent cycle ends at 13th b’aktun (remem­ber the Mayans had a thing for the num­ber 13) or whether the b’aktun  keeps on count­ing to 19.   See Decem­ber 20, 2012 is the very last day of the 13th b’aktun:  12.19.19.17.19 in terms of the Mayan system-if the high­est place holder base twenty then the next day is merely the start of the 14^th b’aktun.  13.0.0.0.0, but if the high­est place holder is base-13 then the long count must add another place­holder 1.0.0.0.0.0 and start count­ing b’aktun from zero too. 

 My under­stand­ing is that most stella and other things depict­ing the Long-Count Cal­en­dar do use base-20 for the b’aktun, the 5th place holder that counts the num­ber of 400-year spans. The glyphs on some stella even pre­dict events after the begin­ning of the 14^th b’aktun.  There is noth­ing to sug­gest the begin­ning of the 14^th b’aktun por­tends disaster-in fact it seems that flip­ping over of a b’aktun, which hap­pens roughly every 400 years, would be con­sid­ered aus­pi­cious and prob­a­bly accom­pa­nied by celebration. 

One final note.  As I said the Mayan sys­tem is higher than base-10, so in order to depicted it prop­erly you need a sym­bol for each new pos­si­ble digit.  Com­puter engi­neers resolved this ques­tion eas­ily sub­sti­tut­ing let­ters to sym­bol­ize dig­its higher than nine (some com­put­ing goes on with Base 16 – hexa­dec­i­mal). Fol­low­ing the same pro­ce­dure 12.19.19.17.19 becomes CJJHJ. E.g. 10 becomes A, 11 becomes B, 12 becomes C … 17 becomes H and 19 becomes J. 

Jake Beckman’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Mayan Long Count Calendar.

And that is how I arrived at CJJHJ – because the next day will be either D0000 or 100000 depend­ing on whether you thing the b’aktun is base-20 or base-13, but the 13^th b’aktun will be over. In my paint­ings on the sub­ject I depict each place holder with a cog.  The place hold­ers count out from the cen­ter. The ver­ti­cal from the cen­ter to the top shows the “cur­rent” count, in this case CJJHJ the last day of the 13th B’aktun, which will occur Decem­ber 20, 2012.  My rep­re­sen­ta­tion uses base-13 for the B’aktun cog.  The very next click on the wheel of time would set each ring back to zero.

At the moment I am work­ing on two dif­fer­ent paint­ings which will con­tain this sym­bol, and indeed this image is a photo from one of the in-progress works.  The com­plex­ity of this sym­bol war­ranted a lit­tle extra explaina­tion in my opin­ion.  Enjoy.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

I have been read­ing a Linked-In thread (lurk­ing really) about art mar­ket­ing; it headed off on this tan­gent that I found near and dear to my heart:  Char­i­ties that solicit art dona­tions.  This topic brings up a very unpleas­ant memory.

I par­tic­i­pated in a  juried art show/art mar­ket.  They required a jury fee, booth fee, and a dona­tion of art­work to the silent auc­tion.  They asked for the value of the art­work donated and required it be sim­i­lar to what I would have on dis­play for sale in my booth. Because they asked the artwork’s value I assumed they would use the infor­ma­tion. It was my first time par­tic­i­pat­ing in such an event so I for­give myself my ignorance.

I was unaware they did not set a min­i­mum price, had I known I would have pur­chased by big beau­ti­ful piece myself, or just donated some­thing that I needed to clean out of my closet.  By the time I knew what was going on the auc­tion was over; they sold a 18x24 inch mat­ted and framed orig­i­nal paint­ing for $15.00.  The value of mate­ri­als alone was close to $100 and at the time I rou­tinely sold pieces in that size for $400.  On top if it all, the orga­ni­za­tion did not want to give me the name of the per­son who pur­chased my art at that bar­gain base­ment price.

I didn’t sell much of any­thing at the art mar­ket either.  Why would some­body pay full price when they could bid on the equiv­a­lent silently and pick it up for a song? I was offended on sev­eral lev­els: first they severely deval­ued my art­work for me and my col­lec­tors by sell­ing it at such a cheap price, sec­ondly they com­peted unfairly with me, a pay­ing ven­dor.  Ever since then I will not par­tic­i­pate in a char­i­ta­ble event if I am not allowed to set a min­i­mum bid, unfor­tu­nately a large num­ber of char­i­ties will not allow an artist to do this.

So what’s the problem?

• When an artist donates their own art, they are only allowed to write off the cost of mate­ri­als for tax pur­poses.  The tax­man gives you, the artist,  no value for your time. And if your mate­ri­als exceed $500 you will have to get extra doc­u­men­ta­tion for your records from the char­ity to write off an amount greater than $500.  There is a severe inequity in the way art dona­tions from artists are treated from other types of dona­tions.  But most char­i­ties seem com­pletely obliv­i­ous to this fact.
• Some say an artist gets expo­sure from char­i­ties, but in my expe­ri­ence, unless the char­ity lists the artists in  the brochure and in their mar­ket­ing, some­thing that rarely hap­pens, the artist don’t get any mar­ket­ing value for their dona­tion.  Go ahead look at the spam email for the next black tie art auc­tion — do you see the con­tribut­ing artists’ names anywhere?
• Many char­i­ties will not give you a por­tion of the pro­ceeds from the sale, so you are out your any income you might have derived from the sale of the art­work, but also time and mate­ri­als as well.  You really are giv­ing it all away.  Maybe you are bet­ter of just writ­ing a check for $20 instead? Its prob­a­bly a cheaper way to get a warm fuzzy if you feel you need one.
• Finally if the char­ity severely under­cuts your stan­dard pric­ing they are devalu­ing your art’s value for you and your col­lec­tors.  You must defend your rep­u­ta­tion. You must be allowed to set a min­i­mum price such that your art does not sell well below mar­ket value.

So how does this play out in the real world? When a char­ity does not allow a min­i­mum price and does not share pro­ceeds, some artists will sup­ply some­thing com­pletely rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the best that they have to offer, but other par­tic­i­pants may chose to clean out their closet instead. This means the char­ity winds up with a mix of good work and kicked-in-the-corner ama­teurism, which will drive down auc­tion prices.  Sec­ond the col­lec­tors that show for a bar­gain base­ment auc­tion are not going to be fork­ing over big bucks to the char­ity any­way. Allow­ing the artists to set a min­i­mum price raises the bar. Face it, ama­teur work and black tie affairs are not a good match; when a char­ity sets a stan­dard such that patrons know they will see­ing qual­ity art­work, the char­ity will develop rep­u­ta­tion as a place to go to for great art­work, which is win/win for the artist and the charity.

Resist the urge to clean out your closet.  Remem­ber you have a rep­u­ta­tion to build and maintain.

There is a sea­son when I am lit­er­ally bom­barded by requests to donate art.  Obvi­ously you can’t give it all away for free, no mat­ter how much you believe in a given charity’s cause.  Assum­ing you do decide to donate your art you should be very thought­ful about it-chose wor­thy causes that will play win/win with you.  If you donate 3 paint­ings a year and pro­duce 50 — you are giv­ing away 6% of your out­put and what­ever income that rep­re­sents as well as the mate­ri­als and time atten­dant to the pro­duc­tion, can you afford to give that much away?  You should never donate money or goods when you can’t afford to-you do not want to become a char­ity yourself.

Back to this forum thread I was read­ing on linked in… I ran across this canned response for char­i­ties seek­ing art and I found it to be per­fect.  An artist named Drew Bro­phy who paints surf­boards came up with it and I think its a per­fect response for char­i­ties who want artists to donate art.

“<Artist’s Name> CHARITABLE DONATION GUIDELINES

Thank you for the oppor­tu­nity to donate art to your orga­ni­za­tion.  <Artist’s Name> would be hon­ored to have his/her art­work and his/her name asso­ci­ated with yours.

Due to the extremely heavy vol­ume of requests from many impor­tant char­i­ties, we’ve devel­oped guide­lines that enable us to donate art­work at less than retail cost.

These require­ments also help us reduce losses since cur­rent U.S.  tax laws are unfa­vor­able to artist dona­tions.  (There is lit­tle to no write-off for donated artwork.)

Please con­sider that by offer­ing these terms for all artist dona­tions, your orga­ni­za­tion will: Attract top qual­ity, high value art­work and over time will become known as the go-to-organization for unique and valu­able art.

Our dona­tion guide­lines are:

• The orga­ni­za­tion agrees to split the pro­ceeds from the sale or auc­tion 50/50 (50% to <Artist’s Name> and 50% to the orga­ni­za­tion). (You can require less of a per­cent­age, but in gen­eral you should require some­thing of the sale’s price be paid to you)
• We ask for pay­ment within 5 busi­ness days of the sale.
• The name, address, phone and e-mail of the buyer will be pro­vided to <Artist’s Name> for his/her “collector’s club” records.
• A min­i­mum or a reserve price will be set and will be des­ig­nated by <Artist’s Name>.  (This is required to honor the value of the art­work for our exist­ing col­lec­tors and our part­ner galleries.)
• In the event the art­work does not sell, it will be returned by the orga­ni­za­tion to <Artist’s Name>‘s stu­dio City, State within 9 busi­ness days.

If these guide­lines are agree­able to you, please sign below and return this form via e-mail to <artists email address> We agree to the above terms:

Sig­na­ture __________________________________
Name, Title______________________ Date _______ ”

Together artists and char­i­ties can cre­ate a sce­nario that is win/win/win for the artist, the char­ity and the artist’s collectors.

What do you think?  Do you have a char­ity art dona­tion hor­ror story?  Do you know of a char­ity that “does it right?”  Speak up and be heard.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

For a while I have been think­ing Social Media Birds was not the best title, and then I am talk­ing it over with some­one at the Sun­nys­lope Art­walk and the phrase Binary Birds pops out.  At least its allit­er­a­tive, so I think that is going to stick.

Tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties dis­tracted me from paint­ing, as well as the end of tax sea­son & some out of town com­pany (which was fun, but not pro­duc­tive).  Then it was imme­di­ately back to doing Spring shows, but in Phoenix AZ USA it is start­ing to get pretty hot; yes­ter­day was around 96 F & it was prob­a­bly a lot warmer on the black top. I have one more show on May 20th, then noth­ing else sched­uled until Sep­tem­ber in New York City.   Here is a pic­ture of me schmooz­ing patrons at the Val Vista Lakes Com­mu­nity Mar­ket Sat­ur­day May 8, 2010.

Jake Beck­man with patrons at the Val Vista Lakes Com­mu­nity Mar­ket May 8, 2010. Photo by Kristina Konen.

Yes, I am work­ing it.  I used to say, “My art had bet­ter speak for itself, because I stink at it.” At this last show, one patron com­mented that I com­mu­ni­cated my abstract sub­ject mat­ter very well. Even I can learn. 

I call my lat­est paint­ing iPod Tweety.  It is such an obvi­ous deriva­tion I am sur­prised it did not occur to me imme­di­ately.   I think music shar­ing is one of the fore­run­ners of social media.  Remem­ber peo­ple cre­at­ing and hand­ing out CDs of their favorite tunes?  I know some peo­ple with hun­dreds of songs on their iPods, but these days an iPod is so much more than a music player, it’s and enter­tain­ment device,but my paint­ing ref­er­ences the music usage.

iPod Tweety by Jake Beck­man. One of Jake Beckman’s sig­na­ture Binary Birds dances to tunes on its iPod.

In addi­tion to the title, iPod Tweety, which is the ASCII binary string at the extreme right, the code also reads: iTunes, eMu­sic, Rhap­sody, Nap­ster, Ama­zon, MP3, Zune, down­load, Songs from right to left and top to bot­tom.  When I debuted this work at the April Sun­sets on the Plaza a young woman was plead­ing with her par­ents to buy it, but they did not relent so it is still available-for now.

For more details about iPod Tweety see  its art page at AKAJake.com.

What do you all think? Do you like it? Hate it? Think it’s deriv­a­tive dreck or haute pop?  Inquis­i­tive minds must know.  I have two more Binary Birds in the works.  Stay tuned.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

OK tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties had me down for a while. My 2-year old lap­top started shut­ting down ran­domly.  It would appear to be an over heat­ing issue with the moth­er­board.  Any­way, I had to pur­chase a new lap­top and migrate over to it, right at the end of tax sea­son (my day job) and just before some friends blew into to town.  Need­less to say, I barely got the new machine up and run­ning before I dis­ap­peared to the toolies with my guests (no cell ser­vice or inter­net).   My apologies. Still work­ing the bugs out even now, but I think I am back up to speed for the most part now. 

So I get back online and find over 100 spam com­ments, many with links to sites that really have noth­ing to do with a given subject. A lot of the spam just says some­thing generic like, “thx for the post,” but at least one was insult­ing (as if that is going to get them past my mod­er­a­tion).  Many are absolute gib­ber­ish, with ran­dom let­ters for their user id, and ran­dom words with tons of links.  After weed­ing through them I was left with a few com­ments that might be some­thing but, which are too vague to deter­mine for sure. 

After going through all that I went to see what I had hang­ing around in my drafts folder and found this one.  This next paint­ing debuted at the Sun­nys­lope art­walk where it was well received.  Again the color gamut of the pho­to­graph really does not do jus­tice to the real thing, but you should be able to get at least a sense of what it might look like.  Of course see­ing it in per­son it always better. 

When I did Born of Fire,  I was very happy with the result, but I was aim­ing for some­thing a lit­tle more fluid and abstract and less con­crete than that paint­ing turned out. I revis­ited the con­cept this time try­ing to keep it looser.  I still have not reached for what I am aim­ing for, so there will prob­a­bly be a few more incar­na­tions before the vision in my mind’s eye is met.

Infer­nal Instinct. A dragon dances in vol­canic fire.

For me fire drag­ons and fire­birds kind of merge.  My drag­ons do tend to have bird-like ele­ments.  So if you ask me if this is a Phoenix or a Dragon, the answer is, yes. 

In the west­ern lex­i­con a dragon is an evil, war­like thing per­haps drawn from the ser­pent in the gar­den of Eden, where as the Phoenix, because of its immor­tal­ity & rebirth has been asso­ci­ated with the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ. 

Of course drag­ons sym­bol­ize gen­er­ally pos­i­tive attrib­utes in Asian cul­tures; drag­ons have power over water, floods and rain and can sym­bol­ize hid­den wisdom. 

One of my thoughts: The ser­pent in the gar­den of Eden gave mankind the gift of knowl­edge — so was the ser­pent really evil? Is our myth­i­cal ser­pent all that dif­fer­ent from the ori­en­tal ones? To me drag­ons seem more like Prometheus, giv­ing the gift of fire to man. 

The world over drag­ons do seem to sym­bol­ize a pro­tec­tive power-even in west­ern mythol­ogy they were guardians of great treasure.

So my take on drag­ons is that they are divine crea­tures with gen­er­ally pos­i­tive attributes.  I espe­cially like the idea that they can fly.

As for fire­birds, Phoenix were gen­er­ally con­sid­ered benev­o­lent, although some­times haz­ardous to mankind. Many leg­ends speak to the note only the glory of its plumage but also the beauty of its song.  In Chi­nese mythol­ogy, some­times the Phoenix is con­sider the fem­i­nine coun­ter­part to the mas­cu­line dragon, therefore my thought that they are dif­fer­ent faces to the same thing is not nec­es­sar­ily unheard of.  

Finally I note that in evo­lu­tion­ary terms, birds arose from rep­tiles at some point in the remote past, a final con­nec­tion between dragon and bird. 

For more details about Infer­nal Instinct see  its art page at AKAJake.com.

Any com­ments? Do you think drag­ons and phoenix have sim­i­lar qualities?  Do you think of them as good, evil, or neu­tral? I am curi­ous as to what oth­ers think about this subject. 

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.