Creative Cogitation

Part of my think­ing about Social Media revolves around the fringe ele­ment.  I think we all are fringy at times. Here’s a fringe the­ory from me. Please explain oth­er­wise why kit­tens are a per­rienial favorite post­ing in all forms of social media? I think it’s their secret power — I’d reach for for my tin foil hat but my cat is send­ing rays to me bend­ing me to her will… I… must… pet my cat.  Just jok­ing — but I think you get the drift. 

I have been hear­ing about the end of time (accord­ing to the Mayan Cal­en­der) since I was a teenager.  My mom is a go to source for all things fringy.  I love my mom, but she did expose me to every­thing from Nos­tro­damus, to the­o­ries of Atlantis so I have known about fringe ele­ment the­o­ries for quite some time.  I am sure the mod­ern day Mayans (yes they are still around) are sick of hear­ing about the end of the 13th b’aktun as they know the 14th b’aktun starts the next day. To them I am sure its just a flip­ping of the cal­en­dar like Jan­u­ary 1, 2000.  If you want to find out more about the Mayan Cal­en­dar, read my post dis­cussing the wheel of time that appears in the paint­ings below.

Any­way, from what I have read, it seems the Mayans would view the flip­ping over of their cal­en­dar as an aus­pi­cious event, a time for cel­e­bra­tion.  “Hey folks, we made it another 400 years.  Lets Party!”  Of course you really don’t need an excuse to party, “Happy Wednes­day!” Any­one?  But flip­ping a 400-year cal­en­dar seems to be a good a rea­son as any.

So when I was con­tem­plat­ing my Binary Birds paint­ing on the sub­ject and fig­ur­ing out how I was going to depict the the long count cal­en­dar, I decided the paint­ings would reflect this more joy­ous take on the end of the 13 b’aktun.  I decided to use a red-crested par­rot as the bird in the paint­ings as this dis­tinc­tive bird is a native of Mex­ico; after all it is their cel­e­bra­tion… no? 

But a some­thing hap­pened when I went to paint.  I could not decide how many birds to put in the paint­ing so I came up with two ver­sions.  The first sim­ply enti­tled 12/20/2012 has a happy par­rot danc­ing on the outer most cog of my wheel of time; the paint­ing is dom­i­nated by the entire cal­en­dar.   By the way any­one else notice the end of the 13th b’aktun as num­ber is kind of the same for­ward and backward? See how easy it is to point out spu­ri­ous coin­ci­dence and build some fringe the­ory around it? Of course true to Binary Birds theme there is ASCII binary which reads right to left & top to bot­tom 12/20/2012. 

12/20/2012 by Jake Beck­man. A red crested par­rot dance in Jake;s con­cep­tion of Mayan Long Count Calendar.

The sec­ond paint­ing I think expresses the cel­bra­tion aspect a bit better.  The wheel is still pretty large, but my par­ty­ing par­rots are def­i­nitely more com­pelling.  The title is Party like its CJJHJ!  Which is of course a take on Party like is 1999! reflect­ing on the par­ties that occured at the end of the last cen­tury (of course some like to point out that the new cen­tury didn’t begin until 2001, but I am going with the major­ity on this one-even if they are not tech­ni­cally cor­rect).  The binary reads Party like its CJJHJ from left to right & top to bottom. By the way, is it just me or do par­rots have ugly feet? If you are won­der­ing about CJJHJ, read more about my rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Mayan long-count cal­en­dar in my blog post on the subject. 

Party Like its CJJHJ, by Jake Beck­man. Three red-crested par­rots cel­e­brate the end of the 13th b’aktun of the Mayan long-count calendar.

So thats the story of my paint­ings on the sub­ject of 2012 as relates to Binary Birds & social media.  I hope you like them.  If you want to find out more about these paint­ings or buy one or both check out their pages on my web­site: 12/20/2012 and Party like its CJJHJ

By the way I have con­firmed my par­tic­i­pa­tion in the End of the World Face­book party on 12/20/2012.  Have you?

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.