Creative Cogitation

Do you ever find your­self sud­denly swear­ing at some­one who just did some­thing stu­pid while dri­ving down the road?

I am prob­a­bly one of those “idiots” you have been swear­ing at.  I have a muse who takes over my brain at the wrong time, and who occu­pies at least part of my brain most of the time.  I admit that I am not con­cen­trat­ing 100% on dri­ving when I am behind the wheel; I do not even think I am even capa­ble of it.  For this rea­son the most advanced activ­ity I will under­take while dri­ving, is tak­ing a swig off my go cup; all other activ­i­ties, such as chang­ing the radio sta­tion, have to wait until I am stopped at a light or pulled over in a park­ing lot to do it.  When I do some­thing idi­otic behind the wheel, it is never out of mal­ice, just my lack of skill at dri­ving.  Dri­ving is one of those venues where I prob­a­bly score on the low end of the spec­trum of “aver­age.“
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Do you have a muse?  Is it some­how sep­a­rate from you or part of you?

I fre­quently talk about parts of me as though they are some­how sep­a­rate crea­tures from me.

I have Lit­tle Retrieval Dude, a small gnome-like crea­ture for­ever bound to search­ing the dusty stacks that are the vast library of knowl­edge and trivia inside my head.  Some­times Lit­tle Retrieval Dude is on the ball and gets me the answer imme­di­ately. Some­times he tells me he’ll get back to me later, and he does; I will blurt out this ran­dom answer min­utes, hours or days after the fact.  I actu­ally visu­al­ize him resid­ing in this giant cylin­dri­cal place, with sto­ries and sto­ries of books; my lit­tle gnome end­lessly climbs stairs and lad­ders to get at the infor­ma­tion then reveals it to me in my mind’s eye-while simul­ta­ne­ously oper­at­ing my mouth.  (more…)

There have been sev­eral recent “events” that have me pon­der­ing this sub­ject.  The first one is a law passed in my state by our leg­is­la­tors called SB1070; Joe aver­age voter didn’t pass this law, our rep­re­sen­ta­tives did.  It has inflamed a lot of pas­sion on both sides of the debate, which is fine.  How­ever, a local artist I know and respect put out a poster por­tray­ing our state as a fas­cist and my first thought was, “Hey bro, you live here too.”   The sec­ond event involved a won­der­ful woman who runs and art mar­ket­ing group.  She employs new age speak­ers to help artists find their inner authen­tic voices.  Appar­ently a Chris­t­ian artist took offense to the new age speaker and basi­cally said “Remove her from your classes, she offends me.”  For sev­eral years after this pro­nounce­ment, this teacher allowed this one polar­iz­ing voice to sti­fle her own authen­tic voice, and has finally come to real­ize that is what hap­pened.  My sec­ond thought is “Words can hurt, but only if you let them.”  Finally we are all aware of the man­made eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter of unprece­dented pro­por­tions that is hap­pen­ing right now.  I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, sure hubris and greed played a role in this deba­cle, but pri­mar­ily I find it was caused by a fail­ure of sim­ple ethics, which would have told any­one, “If you are doing some­thing dan­ger­ous, don’t com­pound it by doing some­thing stu­pid just for a lit­tle bit of money.”  But now the unthink­able has hap­pened. My thought is “We have a large intractable prob­lem that will not be solved by the blame game; we really do not even have the lux­ury of the blame game.   It is going to take a lot of peo­ple to fix this, if we can.”

It doesn’t mat­ter where you are, cor­po­rate Amer­ica, Face­Book, an art mar­ket­ing class, not to men­tion places where polar­iza­tion is actu­ally socially accept­able, such as base­ball game, there are always peo­ple talk­ing about them.  Them refers to any­body who has an ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence, phys­i­cal dif­fer­ence, intel­lec­tual dif­fer­ence or hell, is a such a pub­lic and colos­sal screw-up that any­one can den­i­grate them and feel bet­ter about them­selves based on a per­ceive moral, intel­lec­tual, phys­i­cal or other “superiority.”

I would like to point out that we all are “that guy” at some time or another; we have all been the per­son who is the butt of the cur­rent joke and we have all been the per­son laugh­ing at another’s prat­fall.  Whereas this may be the nat­ural state of being, being nat­ural does not always reflect the bet­ter part of us.  We all stopped poop­ing in our pants at a very young age, and many of us have learned if you don’t have some­thing nice to say, don’t say any­thing at all. I am not say­ing all dia­logue has to be Polit­i­cally Cor­rect, but we should have per­sonal edi­tors which keep us from cross­ing the blurry line between free expres­sion and purely destruc­tive voice.  Face it, if they knew every­thing we knew about a given topic, that does not mean that they would agree with us; and the con­verse is also true.

As for our lit­tle rock-throwing ids, we do have places to enter­tain our us ver­sus them demons; sports com­pe­ti­tions and other “games” where the goal is to be the best with­out really hurt­ing any­one else in the process.  I think we devel­oped games as a species because we rec­og­nized injur­ing our best and bright­est in a match where they are not the very best or very bright­est at the moment is not a viable sur­vival strat­egy for the group.  Games and sports also should teach another les­son that is often lost, and that is, you win some, you lose some. 

 I guess what I am try­ing to say is once we have made our point, it may be time to mod­er­ate our inner fire­brand and do some­thing con­struc­tive instead; com­mu­ni­cate in the lan­guage of co-operation, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and, yes, even com­pro­mise.  Prob­lems are usu­ally not solved while both sides are still throw­ing rocks at each other.

My two bits. Back in my hole now. 

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.

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.