Then, sometimes, someone comes along and does something which doesn't fit into the "hey-look-what-i-can-do" category, nor into the "i-believe-this-is-what-you-call-art" arena of creativity. On the rarest of occasions in history do you get someone like James Turrell.

I have been thinking often of James Turrell's work, at least since I first went to a skyspace in Seattle at the Henry. A skyspace is a room, often only able to hold about 15 people, which has a large hole in the ceiling, opening to the sky. As you sit in the room, there is only one place to look: up. Heavenwards. Towards the vibrant colors of the dome which sits above and around us.

There isn't anything quite like the atmosphere and the interaction between it and light. The terrestrial field shows us beauty in its complexity, but the sky - it shows its beauty in a serenity of the purest spirituality. The only connection I can make between viewing James Turrell's skyspaces and my experience is that of spirituality. Sadly, there aren't enough James Turrell pieces in the world. Maybe that's for the better: would we take lightly the sanctity of space if that space became a Benjaminian Spectacle? Probably not. But I think more of them need to come, and possibly from other hands than just Turrell's.

It is finally summer time and what that means here is time to destroy paintings. We have a second bedroom full of works of art that will either go one of two places: to your house or to the fire. Literally.

So, I have compiled a gallery online of all the works of art on death row along with their sizes and materials. Please take this opportunity to look through and claim anything you want. We can talk about exchanging/pricing details once I hear from you about which ones you want.

Obviously this is a limited time thing. Please contact me at wayne(at)waynemadsen.com. Thanks.

• View album

My grasp on the language has improved, but doesn't reach beyond a first year student. I am almost completely illiterate, but I am beginning to be able to comprehend the uses of the Java API and how to appropriately use it. This step into the grammar database of Java marks a step into experimentation with the vocabulary I have gained.

package inputOutput;

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;

public class TestingGroups {
//global variables, only so i don't have to instantiate them into the doGroups method
static int value, groups = 0;
static Scanner myScan = new Scanner(System.in);

//method for running the numbers to the text file
public static void doGroups(File p_myFile) throws IOException{
//identify the number of times to run the while loop
int students, limit = 1;
System.out.println("How many students are in this group?: ");
students = myScan.nextInt();

//appendable buffered writing, so we can continue to build our stats
FileWriter fstream = new FileWriter (p_myFile, true);
BufferedWriter myBuffer = new BufferedWriter(fstream);

//print how many students per this group
myBuffer.write(" " + students);

//loop to get all the students' scores
while (limit <= students){
System.out.print("Enter student "+ limit + "'s score: ");
value = myScan.nextInt();
myBuffer.write("\t" + value);
limit++;
}

//formatting so we can open this file in excel later
myBuffer.write("\n");
myBuffer.close();
}

public static void main (String[] args)throws IOException{
//access and open file
String myString = new String();
Scanner myScan = new Scanner (System.in);
System.out.println("What file do you want to use?: ");
myString = myScan.nextLine().trim();
File myFile = new File(myString + ".txt");

//determine how many groups
while (!myString.equals("y")) {
System.out.println("How many groups are you working with today?: ");
System.out.println("[Hint: enter zero to see current scores]");
groups = myScan.nextInt();
System.out.println("You have decided to work with " + groups + " groups today. Is this correct? (y/n)");
myString = myScan.next().trim();
}

//run data entry
for (int i = 1; i <= groups; i++){
System.out.print("For group " + i +": ");
doGroups(myFile);
}

//reading the external text file
Scanner fileScan = new Scanner (myFile);
int groupcount = 1;

//loop for determining the absolute average values of all separate groups
while(fileScan.hasNextInt()){
groups = fileScan.nextInt();
int count = 0;
int average = 0;
for (int l=1; l <= groups; l++){
value = fileScan.nextInt();
count += value;
}
average = count/groups;
System.out.println("The average score for group number " + groupcount + " is " + average);
groupcount ++;
}

}

}

I keep calling java "javascript." Rebecca explained that javascript is for web pages; she doesn't know javascript. I think it is a remnant of calling the code for flash design "actionscripting." This problem, along with many other communication problems, reveals that my language isn't entrenched into the world of java. Let's review the process of what I learned this past week.

Initially, I explained to Rebecca that I wanted to learn how to create, access, write and read to external files. Eventually, I would like to learn some good data mining skills, but for now I need to get the basics down. She then referred me to several sites which went over some of the basic principles of the IO interface java uses. What does IO interface mean? I have no idea. Possible I I[n] - O[ut], but your guess is as good as mine. Rebecca is pressuring me to get used to the "Java API," which is the online database of java commands and an explanation of what each class/method does; however, since it reads worse than stereo instructions, I haven't been able to figure out how to make sense of what the Java API says. I have come to the understanding that the Java API is a real semiotic threshold for making sense of the community of programmers who use java.

This first group of code follows very accurately to the examples given to me. Mostly, I copied the code directly from the websites and then posthumously figuring out what the code had done. Rebecca has convinced me (another threshold, in my opinion) that much of learning how to use code revolves around the copying of other code posted on the internet and then deciphering the language meaning afterwards. This teaching method, not through understanding first and then correct usage afterwards but through mimicking, creates an interesting parallel for language development in children: adoption and then comprehension.

package fileReader

public class MainCode {
public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException {
File file = new File ("myData.txt");
Scanner scan = new Scanner (file);
int num, square;

while (scan.hasNextInt()){
num = scan.nextInt();
square = num * num;
System.out.println("The square of " + num + " is equal to "+ square);
}
}

}

The previous block of code accesses the external file, myData.txt, which had been created on my computer prior to running the code. This code would not create the file, to my knowledge, but only read it for integers. Many of the features used in this block of code I had already used in my earlier lessons, such as printing to the console and creating a scanner. In fact, the only two new symbols of language I "learned" from java in this block was the class object File and the parsing method hasNext, both of which are immeasurably important in reading information. I had to verify with Rebecca if I understood correctly about File objects and hasNext methods. I'm still a bit hazy on when something is an object and when I am calling a method.

The following block of code is a simple file writing program which introduced me to the printStream class.

package fileWriter;

public class MainCodeWrite {
public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException{
File file = new File ("myData.txt");
PrintStream print = new PrintStream (file);

Scanner user = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.print("Enter your text here: ");
String finaltext;
finaltext = user.nextLine().trim();
print.println (finaltext);

}

}

package filereader;

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.text.*;
import java.lang.*;

public class MainCode {
public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException {
int num, square;
Scanner user = new Scanner (System.in);
String fileName;
System.out.print("Please type file name to access: ");
fileName = user.nextLine().trim() + ".txt";
File file = new File(fileName);
Scanner scan = new Scanner (file);

while (scan.hasNext()){
if (scan.hasNextInt()){
num = scan.nextInt();
square = num * num;
System.out.println("The square of " + num + " is " + square);
}
else{
scan.next();
}
}
}
}

package readWrite;

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;

public class MainCode {
public static void main (String[] args)throws IOException{
// this is where I declare my little variables
double num, square;
String user;

//this is the first declaration of the scanner, also determining the name for the file to be created
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.print("Enter the name of the file you wish to create: ");
user = scan.nextLine().trim() + ".txt";

//the file is then created by using the data in the string, user
File myFile = new File (user);
myFile.createNewFile();

//I then open a printstream IO interface to write to the file, using the data now put in the string, user
PrintStream myPrintStream = new PrintStream (myFile);
System.out.print("Enter data to process: ");
user = scan.nextLine().trim();
myPrintStream.println(user);
myPrintStream.close();

//redefine the scanner, scan, to read information from the external file, myFile
scan = new Scanner (myFile);

//loop, to read each clump of data, see if it is a number and then do some math with it
while(scan.hasNext()){
if(scan.hasNextDouble()){
num = scan.nextDouble();
square = num * num;
System.out.println("The square of " + num + " is " + square);
}
else{
scan.next();
}
}
scan.close();
}
}

I believe I am from the group of people who believe painting is dead. Or at least, only alive in a postmodern re-assessing sort of way. If there is anyway to resurrect painting, I'm sure it's through a re-evaluating by critiquing what the modernists did to painting. But what I wanted to discuss doesn't deal with Marden's work, but with some comments made by Clemente and Wool.

Clemente started his presentation by claiming that he isn't a part of the contemporary scene of ideas and instead concerns himself with form. I want to be a part of the culture of ideas and have thought about how the museum culture fits into this culture. Museums are places where history is archived and debated over. Ultimately, the ideas behind history are catalogued and labeled, organized and given organizational structures. Museums, as they exist for art communities, are about what is dead - history. Not to claim that history is dead in the sense of being immaterial and unalive, but dead in the sense that historical ideas are points on which we hang contemporary ideas. Much like a funeral, where everyone talks about how wonderful the person is, now that we have hindsight to their many good points, a historical retrospective attempts to label the dialectics of a previous generation - something not of the now. This labeling is a process whereby ideas are come to be known in the now and hold their presence in the now. It is the process of collecting.

Ultimately, museum art is about ideas and giving meaning to otherwise complacent meaning-items. Ideas from the past existed and had their meaning in their contemporary circles. We, through museums, attempt to possess these ideas and give them our own explanations and objective forms. This is why I have been reaching out to collecting and archiving as my art forms - this realm of ideas is where we get "ideas" from: they are labeled by us, for us, through the process of organization.

There was something else I heard in the discussion of Brice Marden which interested me. Francisco Clemente said that "artwork of our time is dedicated to the celebration of the fact that human experience is something we can not reach." I am reminded of Zen koans and that the dialectic of "never reaching knowledge" have been around for much longer than postmodernist thought, but it is a resurfacing of the postmodernist attempting to return to preEnlightenment thought. Ultimately, I'm reminded of David Ireland and John Cage. More and more, I think about David Ireland.

To explain Postmodern Theory, it is very important to explain when Modern Theory began and ended in order to help quantify what characteristics construct Modern Theory (hereafter Modern theory). Modern theory was the age of reason and enlightenment, a period of time when western civilization strove to attain a utopian ideal through reason and truth. This age began after the upset of the imposed truth through the Catholic church during the age of Enlightenment, when characters like Rousseau and Descartes defined truth as attainable through Aristotelian systems of inquiry. As we see in the writings of the Modern age, there was a standard lifted up by Reason and this standard was the ultimate goal for society to reach peace and universality through science and facts and a Marxist socialist dream.

Then came the World Wars and the cynicism of the 1960s to authority and traditional methods of understanding the world around us. This was the beginning of the Postmodern age for most, because of the obvious breakdown of the Modern theory to function without killing millions of people.

Why Postmodern? There isn't any coherent Postmodern theory which encompasses the past 70 years (or more, depending on which historian you talk to), but currently the recurring theme which threads between all Postmodern theories is the attack on Modern theories of totality, universalism and macrosystemic understanding. Instead, the Postmodernist focuses on evaluating a micropolitical way of life, a Nietzschean system of paradoxes and a cynical evaluation of "what went wrong." There also exists a number of Postmodern theorists who talk about society as a system where the currency is language systems. This is where most of my interests lie.

I'm not certain how I could break down Postmodern theory or Modern theory anymore than this. One of my last (and by far, favorite) classes during my undergraduate degree was a critical thinking class in Psychology which compared the possible theoretical approaches to psychology - the postmodern and the modern - in an attempt to help us see how the modern influences much of our society's thinking as biases, not conscious decisions. Now that I understand better the holistic approaches to both, I'm pretty sure that neither theory functions as an adequate model.

Here is a breakdown of some interesting points:

I disagree with Loytard (as well as some others) about hermeneutics. I am definitely a (partial) hermeneuticist, in that I believe that some events have significance despite culture and beyond microsystems of thought: if a child is suddenly hit by a bus and killed, that event has inherent meaning which breaches micropolitical systems (even sadists feel the same thing, but they only enjoy that sensation and crave more of it, whereas "normal" people desire to avoid that sensation at all costs...at any rate, it's the same inherent meaning which is placed on certain events). That being said, there are very few experiences/events which can be chalked up to universality; even those events which have communal meaning across language-sign borders contain minute differences due to the philosophical base rooted within the language-system (see Derrida). I hate to be a fence-hopper on this one, but the reality of many of these theories is their limited ability to appropriately model much of the human condition - things are much more complex than any simplified model can give credit for.

One of the strongest points of postmodern theory is the recontextualizing of known ideas, by critiquing the Aristotelian systems which have governed Western society since the Enlightenment. With this re-evaluation of thought (from 'what is beauty?' to 'can we even prove the scientific method works?') comes a harsh criticism of the utopian ideals that come with the dialectic of Knowledge-as-Truth. One of the most profound thoughts I was given by a professor was the heretical notion that laws possibly don't exist (physical, not societarian): but what if matter acts as it does because it chooses to. Sound crazy? I still think it really is nuts, but it is a liberating thought because it questions our belief in the system of physical normatives. What if we only know what is going on around us because we are limited to our semiotically-based belief system which requires the physical laws to be fact? I know many religious people would concur with this idea and as a result many Enlightenment-based-Aristotelian thinkers would respond counteractively to it. This postmodern idea of critiquing our thoughts by evaluating where they came from is a very pertinent direction that postmodernism offers us.

On tolerance:

One of the greatest exemplifications of postmodern theory in society is the notion of tolerance for "differing lifestyles." The postmodernists are big on the idea of tearing down a Marxist belief in utopian ideals and class/culture systems' unity. Whether we adopted this belief as a society through an organic response to the forces which created postmodernism or whether we have taken a liking to tolerance because of the postmodern academic influences could be debated. Either way, tolerance is still yet to be seen if it will avoid the consequences viewed through the postmodernists as caused by modernist and Marxist ideologies (i.e. World Wars, nationhood strife). Sixty years after World War II, we can postulate very little about the causes of war. According to many postmodern theorists, utopian ideals of uniformication and homogeneity led to nations attacking other nations; ergo, to avoid conflict, we need to be accepting of all choices made by all people.

I think that tolerance has its positives, but also some clear negatives. We do need to be accepting of other lifestyles and forms of life, other than our own because they have the justified right to life and control of their life, just as we do. However, by propagating the acceptance of other lifestyles, that means you are accepting of belief systems which are in direct conflict with your own. And those two belief systems believe that they are both correct. And this leads to war.

I don't believe the 'war on terror' can ever be won for many reasons, most of which are obvious in the field of anthropology. But this system of accepting beliefs which are in direct conflict with our own, these two diametrically opposed forces collide to produce war. So instead of overcoming the glaring shortcoming of Modernist thought, the postmoderns have created a new reason for people to kill each other.

As far as tolerance goes, there is not going to be peace on Earth. I'm sorry to all of those people who believe in Peace on Earth, and may you be comforted in finding your own small slice of Peace on Earth. But peace has no place in a world society like ours. You ultimately have a few choices about how to respond to our global social atmosphere: you can be a jerk and tear other people down, you can be a nice person and not tear other people down. Me, I'm non-confrontational. But that's just my off-topic rambling.

"Postmodern theory in its more extreme forms tends to be exactly what it accuses modern theory of being: one-sided, reductionist, essentializing, excessively prohibitive, and politically disabling."

My name is Wayne Madsen and I am a cross platform artist and this is my first semester in the graduate program here at San Jose State. In this class I have previously discussed my primary work in oil paintings. Today, I will be encompassing the entire perspective of my work, dealing with my investigations into language, the philosophical differences between culture systems and the transversal of the out-group to the in-group.

Language can be defined as a body of words and the systems for their use common to a people who are of the same community or nation, the same geographical area, or the same cultural tradition. Language traditionally consists of two sub-set groups: speech and a set a pictorial symbols which convey constructs. The principle use of language is debated over continually, but for the sake of understanding my work, we will be evaluating language as a system used for the conveyance of thought.

I became interested in language after reading one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminal works: Philosophical Grammar, translated into English. Wittgenstein was a philosopher from the early 20th century generally accredited with the foundations of the philosophy of language and the ontological approach to literature and language. In response to Wittgenstein’s work, there necessitated in the philosophical community an evolution on the philosophy of language and there emerged two schools of thought on the matter. The first approach to language is that language precedes conscious thought and that thought can’t be formed without language. The opposing school on language and thought is that thought doesn’t require language. I am, along with Wittgenstein, a believer in the former school – the school of continental philosophy – rather than the latter. Language is not only a tool for conveying thought, but also its fundamental medium. By using language, we transmit ideas between parties and the ideas are thus limited by the language used.

Language, as I have investigated it, is interwoven with the culture which uses it. In 2002, Jacques Derrida, a more contemporary philosopher, gave one of his final addresses to UNESCO about the language basis for a culture’s philosophical thought. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Its duties are to set up programs to sponsor international collaboration between the scientific and cultural communities in order to preserve human rights and the “fundamental freedoms” proclaimed in the UN Charter. Jacques Derrida, in his address to UNESCO, attacked the blanket belief that a world-wide universal philosophy could be attained, due to language systems. Since each language comes with a set group of parameters, albeit one which evolves over time by introducing new words and eliminating others, Derrida argued that due to the western civilization’s root in Greco-Roman language, we also share a communal bond in Greco-Roman philosophy because of the features and constraints of our language, excluding those societies which root in different language traditions. This creates cultural in-groups and out-groups with other societies which have distinct properties due to their language.

Within a social stratosphere, there exists in-groups and out-groups. Within our in-group of inner social confidants, we usually have our intimate family members – perhaps not those people we like best but with whom we share an intimate bond that has been created because of time and proximity. Outside this group, usually lies the second tier of intimacy – often times this is our relationship partners and closest friends. Usually this includes the people with whom we share everything but who don’t know us as long or as well as our families do. Next we approach the close friends group, then possibly good co-workers, colleagues, fellow graduate students, and as we go out from our inner group we reach professors, acquaintances, and finally the people who you see around and you only connect to them through eye contact (commonly known as familiar faces). This sphere consists of our social in-group. Within the out-group, lies everyone else, commonly referred to as “The Public.” The distinct division of communication between the out-group and the in-group is one of the primary investigations I’m interested in. In order for communication to happen between these two groups, a vast library of information must be translated from one culture system to the next. Although the language divide between these systems can easily be breached, as a system becomes more specialized, it distances itself further from being understood.

One important influence for my work is the theorist and clinical psychologist Dr. Brent Slife. Dr. Slife’s main work is centered on questioning the psychological emphasis of using quantitative research for assessing qualitative non-objective values. Through the past century and a half, psychology has attempted to place itself as being a hard science through fundamentally altering its language and philosophical approach to evaluating constructs. Non-objective constructs, such as love, are thus quantified in order to put this discipline into the scientific community. As specialization occurs within a discipline, the outsiders from that community understand less and less of what that community is talking about, ostracizing them. For example, my wife got her master’s degree in computer science and I have realized that, despite my technical skill, I understand little of what she says about her work anymore.

I began, in the summer of 2005, to access a database of codified graphic symbols used throughout all walks of life called the Symbol Sourcebook by Henry Dreyfuss. This book was compiled in order to “identify symbols out of context and to aide designers in developing new symbols.” As I was fascinated by the miscommunication between disciplines, I wanted to create a set of paintings which used these coded messages which couldn’t be read except by the individuals within that walk of life – disciplines outside of the art community.

Although I felt these coded messages questioned the narrative nature of painting and the codified presence of language, the visual quality of the paintings felt hollow.

I explored my other personal interests and found the image of the “cute” robot surfacing in free form image paintings I did.

Cute imagery, along with the pop-art tradition it follows, comes from a history of looking at the popular vernacular of a culture. By touching the vein of a culture’s iconographic media, something can be shown about our culture in the language of the banal.

My imagery comes from the reproduction of a cartoon-like quality, appropriating style and characters from contemporary so-called digital popular artists.

I have been highly influenced by Jeff Koons’ contemporary approach to the disgusting nature of kitsch and questioning its place within high art.

Many of the images I use are those which are welcomed by popular digital culture – such as Pokemon, Nintendo style video game imagery, and artists who only display their work through internet sites, often reminiscent of physical graffiti. The vocabulary of popular culture is obviously vast and often unintelligible. The overpowering nature of such kitsch becomes more potent with the over stimulative nature of the artwork.

The more I saturated my works with individual cute characters, the more I realized my affinity for the horrific qualities these characters have. I do appreciate their cuteness, but I also appreciate these works for the horrific nature of the cute characters. The increase of size of the canvas and figures emulates the way our culture glorifies these icons. I worry about a culture which glorifies something so innocent and naïve. But at the same time, I find myself glorifying these characters and being pulled in by their seductive qualities.

Earlier this year, I had a show where the audience misread the meanings in many of these pieces, causing me to end my show early. This experience made me reflect more on the medium I was using to investigate the border between the out-group and the in-group. Oil painting was obviously limited in its ability to investigate this phenomenon on the transversal from the out-group to the in-group.

One of the in-groups my wife and I have considered entering is parenthood. My wife and I have recently been discussing having children. The idea of becoming a parent is a great fear of mine because I don’t know how to be a good parent. I realized that an enormous part of my identity stems from the experiences I had as a child with my family and this is the only perspective I have on childrearing.

In order to vicariously experience myself as a parent, I inserted my adult self into almost a hundred digitized slides which were taken of me as a young child. Becoming a parent includes learning things and language about that experience which changes your identity.

By becoming a parent, I would be crossing the boundary of the out-group (non-parents) into the in-group (parents).

I had hoped that these visual images would give me a comforting sense of myself in the role of parenthood, almost as if looking into a future mirror. At that time, my professor wanted to see a working installation using the images from this project. Despite my hesitations to make an installation space, I created a slide show presentation with couches and ambient sound including the display of this set of images. And I hated it. The question of medium tying integrally to presentation is at the heart of the questions I ask myself about my work. I couldn’t justify the installation I made because it had nothing to do with the experience of being a parent or trying to learn how to be a parent. Instead, it was only a heartless attempt to make an object out of a non-objectified construct.

If my previous project taught me one thing, it was how I needed to adopt more than a visual persona in order to understand the new social group. My next social experiment involved a group of medieval fighting enthusiasts. Some friends of mine and I would drive by a local park every Thursday evening and see, to our surprise, a group of grown adults fighting each other with foam swords while dressed in tunics and armor. Stunned by the unique nature of their club, I concluded that the experience of becoming one of the members of this club would be my next project.

We began our journey by reading the group rule books in order to assimilate ourselves to the language and society’s social norms. What we found out was that not only did we need to understand the rules of the “sport”, but we needed to look like the others within the group by dressing in medieval clothing, carrying weapons. But most importantly developing a backhistory for the character we acted out. Over several months, we assimilated ourselves in this group, fighting alongside people with character names such as “Gobo,” “Andric the King,” “Thornbrier,” and “Bacchaus, Rider of Rohan.”

We created character names and came to identify ourselves in relationship to this fighting society because we had taken upon ourselves the language and norms of this culture. What evolved from this set of experiences was documentation on film of the art project. Beyond this single documentation, though, unfortunately not much exists as evidence of this passing from the out-group into the in-group of this strange group.

I have recently become interested in “Do It Yourself” online cultures. Over the past several years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of online website communities which purport to instruct how to do things – all sorts of things, from computer hacking to knitting. What I noticed with many of these “so-called” Do-It-Yourself sites is there are necessary preconditions which are required in order to understand anything they are saying.

I am not able to go into Hack-a-Day.com and know how to recover my mp3 flash data without obvious experience in electrical engineering, not to mention programming abilities. As I stated before, my wife finished her master’s degree in computer science. I don’t understand what she is telling me anymore about her work.

I am currently attempting to go from the out-group to the in-group of computer programmers who write in java. It is fascinating that in the computer sciences, there is a distinct emphasis on the communication of language, between man and machine, as one of the essential processes behind this discipline. Much of what my wife does is a translation between English language ideas into a language which the computer can read and understand. The other half is a logical deduction of structures and open systems, much like what I have been interested in investigating through my work.

So, my wife is teaching me the java programming language. In order to maintain documentation of this work as it progresses, and especially to document my frustration in learning the language and symbols of programming, I have attempted to document as much valid data as I can while experiencing this project. Each session that my wife sits down and explains things to me, I document the session on film. These hour long sessions are then posted on a weblog I am maintaining for this project.

Every java file that I create, the code and the instructions for how to recreate it are also posted on this blog. My wife has even taken to giving me homework, where most of my time for this project is spent. In response to these homework readings, I write lengthy entries about what I understand of the terms used in the text. This project is currently in progress and will continue until I am acclimated into the java programming community experience.

In conclusion, my artwork investigates the experiences of language, and the effects it has on the individual. I have attempted to examine my experience in crossing the bridge between being apart of one cultural group and entering into a new one.

These are images from a show in the White Gallery. I worked with six other artists in collecting all the receipts from every transaction we made. This show was an analysis of that experiment and the resulting data.

Artist Statement:
The process of a transaction, in America, usually involves the transfer of currency for goods or services. These transactions are then logged in small pieces of paper called receipts. Most receipts come with specific data printed on them, commonly including the value of the goods transferred and the time and location where these goods exchanged hands. More often than not, a receipt will include sensitive data of the two parties involved.

The process of collecting receipts results in a system of data which can be mined for information about the transactions taking place. Often economic analysts will collect immeasurable amounts of data from a producer to evaluate the demographics of spending within a company. Although most people no longer collect receipts in an age of digital monetary transactions, for every physical transfer of goods or services for money, a receipt is still provided as proof of that transaction. It is this proof which I have collected during the past three months from six consenting artists.

This installation space is documentation of the artwork of collecting receipts and mining the data from these receipts in order to show the spending trends of the six artists involved. Through this collection, I am showing a system of data and order made from six separate expenditures. Systems are created from labels and the organization of data. As an archivist, I searched through the data and have investigated our spending habits through an analysis of this benign object, the receipt.

These receipts mark our experience within a currency economy. As artist we have spent the past several months collecting the receipts in this room.

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You talked a bit about the art world having a language that those outside it wouldn't necessarily understand, in your work, you use symbols and icons that many people (possibly a lot of those in the art world) wouldn't understand. What statement are you making with this? (or is this a statement you are making?)

in psychology, there is always a lot of talk about how psychology wants to be seen as "a hard science," as opposed to a soft science. hard sciences are those sciences which rely on concrete facts and "evidence" which have been "derived" from the scientific method. ultimately, the debate hinges on whether or not definitions within the discipline of psychology clarify things within the terms that include it in "hard sciences." Each discipline has their own internal set of language, definitions and symbols, just like cultures. in essence, disciplines are cultures: they maintain strict boundaries of who exists within the "in group" and who is the "out group" and in a way this is defined by the understanding of the social/cultural rules and the social/cultural language. at the time of starting these paintings, i was really upset at how art (despite being a discipline which is supposed to be FOR the masses) couldn't be understood by the masses because of the language and history which had defined art theory outside of the public's understanding. the irony of this situation fueled the use of using abstract symbols from other disciplines to communicate secretly to people who are from those discplines - i especially used symbols from agriculture (farming, animal husbandry) and engineering because in my bias i veiwed these disciplines as being the furthest from "understanding" painting (particularly modernist painting).

Do you make up the symbols you use? Or are most of the ones you use ones that are in some of the material you've looked at (Henry DreHeyfuss)? (by the way, on my painting there is a pink circle with an "R" in it, what does that mean? I was thinking it could possibly be for Rebecca, but I'm not sure. I've had two dreams now where that thing showed up in it! )

now that you mention it, i think i did make up a good deal of symbols. but usually they were just things that were abstractions of basic objects that hold cultural weight, such as pills, or monkeys, robots, or mario - (mario led me into dealing with these "larger symbols" for a different type of culture). the r symbol is in the symbol sourcebook (if i remember correctly, it has something to do with engineering). if you would like, i could show it to you, it is in my studio at all times. it's the same symbol sourcebook that jean-michel basquiat used to make many of his paintings. i've often been told that my paintings remind some people of some of his work: while i admire his work greatly, he and i are dealing with VERY different things, despite using similar source materials.

How do you select the "icons" / characters / symbols you are going to paint? Why only paint the ones you find horrific? (we talked a little about this with Sesame Street, but I wanted to know more about your selection process). Why is it important for them to have a sinister, yet cutesy quality?

a lot of the symbols came from personal selection as being visually interesting. the characters are just personal choice. i wanted things that were very saccharinely "cute," almost naively so. Sesame street is an interesting example of something that i have always viewed as being very honest and not trying to be "cute" to cater to children, at least in a very different way. or perhaps the difference is in cartoon characters versus "stuffed animals." i still don't think i have an answer to this. the bottom line for me is that i never was abhorred by sesame street, whereas pikachu/hello kitty/ the rest bug me for being "uneducational" and mindless.

You said that the work isn't a specific narrative per se. Does the work possess untold hidden depth?

the flash animation dealt with the idea of creating a "random" narrative which can't possibly be random because although the computer is coming up with "random" numbers they have been pre-existingly defined by the programmers who wrote the code to create random numbers. i don't believe anything is truly random or can be. the order for the narrative was built on visual relationships and my intuitive sense for what visually needed to happen between objects, not for the content. this was easier for me because most of the symbols, i couldn't keep track of their cultural meaning. the ones that i did know what they mean probably were selected more often.

Is it important for your work to transcend nationalistic boundaries?

i'd like that, yes.

Questions about line: Why are all the objects in your paintings outlined?

it is a very cartoon-like quality.

Are you using line to divide the spaces?

yeah, this reminds me that i saw some paintings by david salle and i liked the way he broke up space using lines and different structures. but then i realized he was basically stealing his ideas and style from james rosenquist and i've always liked his work, so really i was just reflecting HIS work.

There is a consistency in your line, not varied, is this intentional? If so, why?

you know... i really like "bad" art: art which is really loose and isn't uptightly about the craft of the piece. I mean, basquiat could vaguely be put into the neo-expressionist movement of the 1980's. although i don't like a great deal of the neo-expressionists work from that time period, i appreciate their use of loose line.

In the earlier work, the viewer gets a sense that they are looking into a slice of a world, not a contained world......some of the work you had in Gallery 3 focussed on a single object in the painting. Why the switch from repetition to single icons in the paintings? This seems to be moving away from saturation and going into some sort of glorification or perhaps hierarchy of some of the icons.

yeah, i think glorification is a good word. in fact, it's more of a personal astonishment, questioning why we glorify these characters.

Why did you choose the colors you did?

originally, i was tired (from previous paintings) of trying to work with multiple colors and decide which colors meant and reacted a certain way. i also noticed that "technology devices" such as computers, cellular phones, handheld devices all use a limited grey pallete. so, i tried to incorporate this while maintaining the beauty of a grissaille painting: with the simple underpainting of browns and whites, you can reach both cool (greens) and warm (reds) by the use of location and relationships between values. I believed that these colors gave the paintings a neutral feel so the subject wasn't weighted by the colors but instead on the ideas and the semantic/semiotic value. looking at high renaissance paintings, i was impressed with the simple beauty of the underpaintings.

then i got bored with that and started dealing more with the "figure" and the "cute" characters and so color became more important.

What do the symbols have to do with language?

Jacques Derrida and Wittgenstein - i was reading a lot on these two philosophers while i was working through this body of work. wittgenstein is a philosopher from the 1950s who discusses the nature of language. if you read this article on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein, specifically the paragraphs on philosophical investigation, you'll get a feel for his work. ultimately, he talks about how language and the construction of grammar lie at the root of the understanding of something. Jacques Derrida takes it a step further (and what more interests me) to the point of stating that a culture's gramatical and semiotical base is intricately intertwined with the philosophical groundwork of a culture. because we have a language that is based in greek/germanic/latin language, we share similar philosophical bases with other cultures of similar sematic backgrounds. the reason for this basis is that language allows a person to "think" about something; wittgenstein and derrida both have this one principle fundamental belief: conscious thought begins with language. language permits conscious thought.

One question is on the email, but I also mentioned it on the phone...seems like the work is going from a lot of information on the canvas to a single image.

earlier in this work, i was dealing with overstimulation, especially as it relates to understanding the language that has developed within a discipline (as an outsider looking in). it is especially apparent looking at our suped-up ADHD culture that we overstimulate ourselves (think MTV and japanese cartoons). i think that for the earlier works, i was really trying to push the envelope in how much i included in the singular image, but these works were also meant to be viewed as an entire body of work, increasing the oppressive nature of the "overloaded" images. the presence of three dozen of these paintings crammed full of symbols and "language" was meant to make the viewer claustrophobic and yet spend hours at a time trying to decypher the messages. now that i've gone into the "cute" stage, i'm dealing with this image-phobia in a different method: i'm trying to create larger images which overwhelm the viewer in their saccharine cuteness; i'm hoping that the scale deals a powerful enough punch - being confronted with a huge adorable pikachu is enough to make my stomach churn.

import edu.byu.phun.*;
import edu.byu.phun.body.*;

/**
* @author Wayne
*
*/
public class TutorialMain {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
Win3D win = new Win3D ("Tutorial", 100, 200, 400, 300);
Floor monkeydancefloor = new Floor (10);
SphereObj monkeysphere = new SphereObj();
Axes myaxes= new Axes();
win.add(myaxes);
win.add(monkeydancefloor);
win.add(monkeysphere);
monkeysphere.setLocation(1, 2, 0);
win.setLookFrom(10,1,10);
}
}

I'm still not sure I understand what a class is. Or what an object is.

Method makes sense to me. A method is a group of code which is called with a single line of code anywhere else after the declaration of the method. I used a lot of functions (the equivalent of a method in actionscript) when I did flash designing.

The beginnning of a cultural introduction revolves a great deal around language. And rightfully so, according to Jacques Derrida. Over the summer, I read a translation of his speech and discussion of his speech entitled Ethics, institutions, and the right to philosophy, among other books on the philosophy of language/grammar. I've become more interested in the cultural structure of a language and the symbols which that culture takes on which give support to conscious philosophy.

I don't understand the language of the programming community, thus I am on the out group. I got a little frustrated with this because my wife and I don't talk the same way about code and although I thought I was asking a clear question, I obviously wasn't because her answers weren't clear to me. This is very important to note because communication between the in-group and communication from the in-group to the out-group is one of the primary keys to understand how to become apart of the in-group.

I get really frustrated because she says "directory" and I have no idea what that means.

• View video (needs quicktime 7)

import java.util.Scanner;

/**
* @author wayne
*
*/
public class TheCodeB {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);
double pounds, kilos;
System.out.println("Please enter amount of pounds:");
pounds = scan.nextDouble();
kilos = pounds * .45359237;
System.out.println("You currently have " + kilos + " kilograms of stuff.");

}

}

Rebecca gave me homework. It was the only way.

Most of learning comes from plugging away at something and playing with it, of course with the fastidious guidance of a tutor. I've thought a great deal about tutors over the past couple of days since my last lesson. In grade school, when you fall behind your studies you are recommended to take on a tutor. This person acts as a mediator to maintain personal contact and guidance in training your mind and studies to understand the skills that are being taught. I believe that I once had a tutor for math when I was in high school. Amanda Gambino. A friend who was in advanced math who was willing to help me out. I wasn't in trouble of flunking: I just felt behind because I was in the advanced classes and didn't grasp math as fast as my brother might have.

Interesting in looking back that my tutor then performed her great charity to me in part because she wanted to date me. Here I am, getting tutoring lessons from my wife, the person who I want to spend all my time with.

Rebecca gave me some twenty pages of text in our "textbook," Lewis & Loftus' 5th edition Java Software Solutions text. I believe she used a similar text when she went through her studies of early java. A couple of confessions for those of you reading this, hoping to learn a bit of java along the way: I think I had a headstart. My limited actionscripting knowledge has transferred easily to the basic skills we're dealing with here. Since I know what a string is and the difference between a string an integer, I can't say that my reading was terribly enlightening. I read pages 42 - 90; truthfully, I skimmed most of them. However, a few pages before the discussion on scanning data, I got really lost and had to do the work in order to understand what was going on.

While reading this, I thought about the Battleguard group I infiltrated earlier this year and how similar this experience is to that experience. There is a limit/threshold which I was able to go up to comfortably, without experiencing any conflict with previous personal experience - or lack thereof. I could go to the practices and pick up a sword, but the moment I was considering becoming more engaged than that, it plunged me into a social experience I wasn't prepared for. This is an experience that we all go through by crossing thresholds between our inner social matrix and the outside matrix which includes the greater public sphere. Somehow, I'm trying to reach that sphere and chip away at it, by learning scanning in java. After a couple of attempts with using the scanner method to input data, I eventually fulfilled the requirements to create a conversion from pounds to kilograms (see TheCodeb.java).

Scanning is an input to the code. System.in.
Scanning isn't actually a string/text/number, but an object. It must be converted to a string or number.

Why shouldn't I get in the habit of always using double for a numerical value, and then choose from the other possible options when those limitations are necessary?

I had a show in Gallery III on campus during the Thanksgiving week. This displays the painting work I did this semester, along with some previous stuff I didn't include in my graduate application portfolio. This was supposed to be a "get to know professors and expose my work to professors."

Artist Statement:

Jacques Derrida writes that a culture’s philosophy can be rooted in the linguistic structure of that culture. I started these works as a study on language and the deconstructionist approach to understanding literary theory.

As I have learned more about art history, I developed a distaste for the separation between public understanding of art and art practice/theory. By my view, the specialization of art theory has distanced the public from understanding art, very similar to other disciplines which have their internal set of symbols, communication and iconography. Many of the symbols in this body of work are taken from various disciplines, which have meaning within those disciplines.

I then began to appropriate the “cute” imagery which my generation grew up with representing our philosophical basis. These images bother me. I feel like these cuddly and cutesy characters are polluting our visual experience and I am terrified by it. I view these pieces as an addition to the kitsch dialogue in fine art.

My compositions are intuitively created from images which either reflect or were appropriated from the lexicon of digital “street culture.” I am not trying to be a part of that culture, but be aware of how this culture affects us.

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DIY-ers are an interesting breed. For starters, most of us fit into that category of specialization. You and I know people who have specialized in something beyond our own understanding. What is interesting is the DIY-ers who have reached hyperspecialization. Their communication on their abilities breaks down and no longer can they communicate with people outside the loop. Traditionally, this is when people get careers relating to their hyperspecialization. Which puts the rest of us outside their sphere of communication.

This came to my attention a while ago when I realized I understood less and less of what my wife was talking about when she'd tell me how her day went. I tried. I tried very hard to understand it and it helped that I was fascinated by natural language processing. But there is a point which she crossed that I couldn't follow with a layman's perspective. The reverse is true for her understanding art. In fact, the masses don't understand visual arts (and haven't for the past 50 years) because of this hyperspecialization which resulted in the distancing of art from it's suckle: the community.

For several months, I tried to approach this system in painting. I used departmentally specific symbols which communicated only to those within fields outside of the art community. The piece was abuot disfunction in communication. Ironically, because it was about miscommunication, it was a misrepresented body of work and being misread was taken down prematurely.

But returning to DIY-ers, I noticed that because of Web 2.0 models DIY communities had taken the place of hobbist communities and physical social groups. Someone commented the other day that if you truly wanted to become an attorney in California, all you needed was to study the information to pass the bar online and then pass the test. There is no requirement for law school. Save yourself some money: teach yourself online! So, why doesn't it work like that?

I have a couple theories. First, the internet has become too large. According to Google, Inc, during the year of 2005 the number of websites surpassed 8.5 billion. Web 2.0 platform feeds that number. This surplus of information requires a precision of search which can't be reached with outdated search algorithms. Personally, I'd like to see NLP taken beyond the theoretically academic institutions into a processing locale where it could make a difference in this area.

Second theory: learning from DIY-ers requires you to already be "in the know." There are dozens of projects I want to do (anyone know how to make a LCD laptop monitor into something worthwhile?) which I can't do because studying online help guides makes about as much sense as stereo instructions. This is really the point of the beast - DIY is only as helpful as what you already learned. Stereo instructions mean a great deal to someone who knows audio equipment, but where did they attain that information?

I decided to mimic the DIY community by documenting my process of learning skills which I have wanted to learn: java, linux, etc. The list will grow as I learn and learn what other people around me know. But there's one important catch: I need to learn it from someone I know, one-on-one. If I fail miserably... well, maybe I wasn't meant to learn something. The art project is to analyze the social interaction between teacher and learner - between the experience of learning and the experience of adapting to new information. It is very similar to my social art project on the Battleguard group. My art experiences social processes. I will post documentation on this work.

Sometime last year, I started a project based on my personal identity and the exploration of role reversal and parenthood. I took a large number of old family slide photographs of myself as a child and digitally added myself as an adult. The work was supposed to play on the ideas of becoming a parent and reflections of my own limitations in preparing for such a major shift in my life. Although my wife and I could talk about it, we don't have pre-knowledge of what our children will be like: we only know ourselves. After I had gotten knee deep into this project, my professor at the time decided that I needed to put together a "working installation" of the project as it would appear to a gallery; a "mock-up." Although I went through with this presentation on one hellish weekend, I was incensed to be forced into a presentation that I didn't think truly related to the project I was working on. In fact, it was only a hollow shell to fit my project into an object-oriented view of the art world - one which feeds on aesthetics and not conceptual gains.

So I was bitter. But I didn't know why at the time.

Also, for the past year, it had come to my attention that most of my projects weren't based on objects or installations or locations or anything "aesthetic" but based on social circumstances and the interaction of social networks. It wasn't the first time I had worked in this fashion. While studying psychology, I wanted to create social experiments to study and research, but not in the ways which the IRB approved or which statistics were important. After taking Dr. Brent Slife's class on critical issues in the social sciences, I really began to question the nature and importance of using the scientific method in research. Qualitative research was much more interesting to me than quantitatively defining things which were non-quantitive. When Jamin Hall discussed with me the Knights of the North Park project, I viewed it as an art experience: not the video as a project, but documentation of the project. The project wasn't an object: it was a social experiment.

I never had definitions for these things until graduate school in the CADRE program. That's going to be the only praise I hand out, because I'm not much of a suck-up. At least, I try not to be a groupie, but it's so dang hard not to be a Joel Slayton groupie. Despite that point, I want to focus in on collaboration and non-object oriented art.

I'm sick of painting. I'm not sick of myself painting, I rather enjoy it: too much so, in fact. Painting is a guilty self-indulgent pleasure. It is selfish of me to sit in a studio working my heart out on a painting while my wife slaves away at a programming job to make ends meet. I have begun to think to myself that I am a grown man and I still do not have a market for painting. I came to graduate school to change that.

I consider myself a pretty intelligent person. I always was able to easily get good grades. In fact, I wish I was more challenged in school because it never taught me to work hard. I was always lazy and still got high marks. Not my fault my parents gave me good genes. But why did I choose art as a profession? There was a time when I was manical enough to believe that I was worth the attention. I'm sure, somwhere inside, I still am that manical. Now that I have a family, I realize that the selfishness that comes with object oriented art is ludicrous. And I'm so tired of listening to other artists talking about how great my work is while I'm not selling my work. What's the point of doing great things if you can't be great or at least support your family?

I think I'm getting off topic here. Let me clear some things up. The average artist has a stereotype: they are self-indulgent, they are hard working, they are terrible selfish, they are isolated and they are narcissistic. I only want to be one of these. Any guesses as to which? The problem is that since abstract expressionism (heck, go back to impressionists and cubists) these stereotypes have been the norm due to a relationship between the artist and the isolated studio space. Artists isolate themselves from the rest of the world despite their duty as "purveyors of culture" to interface with society. They have all completely lost touch with the world they are meant to be in touch with. Which is where collaboration comes in.

It's good and it gets me out of that white box where I don't learn anything. This isn't why I want to work with other people, but this is a retrospective explanation.

/**
* My first java file.
* @author wayne
*
*/

public class TheCode {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("monkey " + getNumber());
System.out.println(getNumber());
}

public static int getNumber() {
return 3;
}

}

This was my "first" written java class taught to me by my wife, Rebecca.

I am an artist. Or a non-artist. Or whatever. My wife got her master's degree in computer science and programs full time in java programming language for Magma Design Automation. When we moved out here, she specifically wanted a job that used java because it is her favorite computer language. Me? Besides my brief career in programming with actionscripting for flash presentations to children, I don't understand anything about computer programming.

My last "real" job was designing flash language tutorials. Six months before I left the job, they installed flex 2.0 on my computer at work and asked that I start programming my activities in flex. I spent 6 months hating work because I couldn't teach myself flex. The funny thing about learning anything in today's world is that it should be all on the internet. I strongly believe that everything is on the internet - all information exists somewhere in digital form and can be transferred through bits, insignificant ones and zeros. However, as I have found, it is next to impossible to find anything anymore because the internet has become so massive and the search algorithms for major search engines are outdated beyond resolving the burgeoning world wide web.

I realized that the only way to learn anything is by going back to the most basic elements of learning - passing information from one person to another. The personal touch. It has become out-of-style in the information age to get information directly from one person, but I am realizing that it is essential in order to learn anything. I'm not just talking about the personal touch in a physical realm - one of the greatest beauties of a digital world is the non-presence of others through digital means. I am hoping that this experience I am putting myself through can be a part of myself - my learning - which I have plugged into the internet and exists as a personal one on one learning process which might help others.

Realistically, I don't expect anyone to learn anything from this documentation. I do, however, expect to get something from it besides a better understanding and ability to program in java: I just want to understand what my wife is talking about when she explains her job.

My head hurts after today's session. I think I understand what classes are now. I vaguely knew what objects were before. I am still frightened by trying to find code to do what I want. Rebecca told me that what I need to do is first decide what I want to do in java and then work backwards to learn how to do it. That seems easy enough. I'm used to the way things were in flash coding: I knew a good chunk of the commands that existed so I could easily call them to memory to write my code.

Session one:

Set up eclipse. This is easy to do on both windows and linux platforms. We had some problems getting java 5 working on eclipse in linux. We're still working on it.

Create a project. I named my project "helloworld" because that was the name of the exercise. The java libraries are loaded into this project.

Create a package. I remember strange names. I named the package "ralph." See attached files for .class and .java files.

In the package, create the code .java file "TheCode." Make a main method "public static void main..." within which we call a method from the java library.

System.out.println("whatever your message is")

[see the code at the beginning of this post]

The video follows our session; I learned how to print "monkey."

Now my cat wants to play. I don't have time for this. But in order to make "better quality time" for my wife, I need to do this.

• View video (needs quicktime 7)

So, I haven't posted any work lately on the blog, because most of my work in the past 8 months haven't been "image" or "object" based work. But since I was admitted to the 2D graduate program, I've been trying to be good and paint some "objects."

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This piece I started a couple days ago, and since the progression of a work still fascinates me much more than the final piece, I will continue to take pictures of this work in progress.

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While living in Seattle, I did a large amount of these figurative ink paintings. To capture the vibrant quality of life and metabolism, the restructuring of life, I painted with natural elements, using twigs, leaves and stones for brushes.

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I've been working on painting more portraits lately (do you remember those paintings I did of kids from my church last year). Painting people is HARD WORK. I'm so embarrassed to even post pictures of this painting in progress because it doesn't look good at all. But Emily asked me to, so I will. She is willing to sit staring at the wall for me, so I figured the least I can do is share my mediocrity with the world. ;)

I think that I have a great deal to learn about painting portraits. I was looking at some Rembrandt works last night and was amazed with the quality and life he put into his male portraits. What's interesting about Rembrandt, however, is that the paintings of men are vibrant and masterful while his female portraits are hideously ugly. I guess the guy didn't like painting women or something. He just never showed as much concern with that kind of work.

UPDATE: I finally had a free half hour to put some more work into this. Hopefully, I'll finish it soon.

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Another installment of work on my robot/symbol paintings. This is probably the last group of pictures I'll take of the paintings in progress. Most of them are finished now, so maybe I'll post them on my portfolio page. Hopefully this group of work is strong enough to get me into a good MFA program. Sorry for the poor quality, but I don't want people stealing my images! ;)

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