We performed at PURE this past weekend.

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pre>Darius Trevino
<kgovernor@gearwest.com> to me 7:31 am (7 hours ago)

will more often be forced to conceive and work on his ideas in changed the way in which society views and values visual art. talk on how important it is!”

To the ruoriJews reading this: Shanah Tovah, and I hope you had a meaningful fast. To everyone else: Happy Monday.

My Yom Kippur was very hectic – I compressed this year’s atonement into a few hours this morning. Then for the afternoon, I headed over to the softpixel/ruori megalab to convert snack foods into mental energy and mental energy into a set of chaotic probability-driven sonatas for three theremin-like light-sensing instruments we’re almost done building.

So I guess I sacrificed my sacrifice for my art.

Wir haben ein neues Kätzchenpaar.

I meandered from Digg through some rabbit holes to this Roughtype post on the “amorality” of “Web 2.0” by Nicholas Carr.

This is what I read:

“INTERACTIVITY IS TURNING THE INTERNET EVIL! Now Digg my post plz!”

For someone trying to remind us of the “objectivity” of the Web, Carr seems just as hysterical as the ecstatic self-styled e-prophets this article seeks to rebutt.

He also misses the point of Wikipedia as well as overvaluing print materials as a general information source. (I have noticed that one side effect of the era of the Internet and T.V. is that anything with a binding is automatically uncritically revered, but that is a subject for another blogpost.)

So, a while ago I met the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson in a corn maze. He was chasing some kids around that appeared to be in his care in between muttering things like “This is like a Republican conundrum!”

Today at SIGGRAPH 2006 the phantom of Spalding Gray appeared in front of the booth in which Steve and I are functioning as ornaments. He was wearing 3-D glasses and delivered a short monologue about how he was from a suburb of Ohio. When asked where in Ohio, he said, “Manhattan”.

A moment after he left, Steve realized our mistake in not talking to him so I went after him armed with a DIY ruori sticker (the ruori URL and the words “You are a Winner!” written on a stolen Lufthansa baggage sticker) and explained that he had impressed us with his impromptu performance technique at our booth and after assuring him that I was not selling anything (nor was the website), and – after answering his inquiries about whether I was old enough to be admitted to SIGGRAPH (the minimum age is 16) – I gave him the sticker, accepted his obviously sarcastic thanks and handshake, and retreated, terrified and exhilirated, to the safe boringness of the booth.

Oranienburgerstrasse 38 is a good hotel.

But there is something terribly creepy about the GIANT RED CURTAIN barricading the hallway after room 18.

Whatever lies beyond is clearly some kind of perilous heterotope, but for the mere mortal the curtain holds both the finality and the mystery of an interrobang and the menacing eerieness of the deepest abysmal realms of time.

Tonight we will lock the door.

M2: It’s funny that you mention mouths appearing where there were not mouths before. It was scary — when I was like, I don’t know, eight, nine, ten years old I had a recurring dream. This LITERALLY lasted for the better part of five or six YEARS, well into my adolescence, and it was always EXACTLY the same, as if were just a TAPE replaying every time.

The WORLD was FILLED with FACELESS CREATURES. Pretty much everything that was… mammalian… uh, was completely and totally FACEless – except these ROUND MOUTHS – perfectly round mouths – would appear from nowhere, generally in the forehead region, just LINED with these RAZOR-SHARP TEETH –

F3: That’s TERRIFYING!

M2: – LAMPREY-like.

F3: Yeah, I used to be obsessed with echinoderms because they have creepy little mouths like that.

M2: OH YEAH! And, and, like, the, this dream, like, basically, I was surrounded by these things, and some of them were like, vaguely recognizeable as like, people or creatures or animals that I KNEW throughout my life, and, and, there was no real sense of malice for the first good HALF of the dream; they were just kind of, AROUND. And then they started, like – but they stayed at a relative distance. Then, uh, in, er, uh, the, uh, middle-ish, uh, uh, uh, of the dream, or so, they started, uh, just, getting CLOSER. As I was going through all these different places they’re MUCH, MUCH CLOSER, and these MOUTHS start appearing. And they start coming TOWARD me.

F3: This sounds like the zombies in Zelda.

M2: Wuaouh, UEH, I, uh, maybe. This was BEFORE I ever played Zelda, so, but yeah, crazy-crazy.

But th- uh, the DREAM always ended the SAME WAY; uh, like, this MAN and, we-, uh, he’s in, like, a BOWLER hat, and he’s FACEless. And he takes off the bowler hat-

F3: Magritte! Your whole dream was about Magritte!

M2: Well, yeah, it IS very Magritte in that regard but- well, there’s no apple, but instead of an apple there’s this BIG FUCKING MOUTH, and he just, like, LEANS TOWARDS me, and I close my eyes and scream, and I open my eyes, and I’m on this LITTLE GREEN WOODEN DINGHY on the middle of an OCEAN, like, just, OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. And my MOM’S DOG, he was-

F3: Dinghy! (Laughs uncontrollably) Sorry!

M2: He was a BELOVED FAMILY PET. His name was Machette – my mom had THREE STANDARD POODLES named Machette. She brought her first one back-

F3: Like “machette”?

M2: Uh, well, uh, yes. FRENCH pronounciation of “like the word ‘machette’ ”.

Uh, she brought it back, uh, in the 1960s when she moved back – she’d been living in Paris and she moved back to the United States. She’d been working, uh, in the US NATO office, and uh, she was good friends with one of the French ambassadors, and when he moved to a new apartment he couldn’t keep his standard poodle, Machette, so he gave it to my mom; my mom kept her for a couple of years, moved back to the states, and she flew Machette back with her. And every time Machette died, she would get a new Machette.

So I always knew a black standard poodle, female, named Machette. This was like a staple… like a pinnacle… like a PILLAR of my CHILDHOOD, like, the ULTIMATE SAFETY, ‘cause there was always a dog named Machette.

And at the end of this dream, I’m in the middle of this OCean, no land in SIGHT, no sun, no clouds, just OMNIDIRECTIONAL LIGHT. And this faceless Machette comes up out of the water, puts both front legs on the edge of the boat, and this BIG MOUTH appears, and I was like WOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!!!!! and then I wake up.

And I literally had that dream once a month for five years.

Yeah. Fucked up. “Mouths appearing where there were not mouths before”… something so specific has to be in some… it has to hit on some eventual – some insecurity or something. I don’t know.

(Fin)

[M2 === Aaron] [F3 === Beth]