W. Hornung - OUT OF MIND

…having had a real good lunch in one of the better japanese restaurants here in Paris and when it came to paying, took out the credit card weapon and …typed 2times a wrong code and the 3rd would be fatal -
No way to remember the right code among all those other codes you have to have in mind.
And the japanese know something about loosing one’s face.

At the end I found some cash, 2 euros short of what I had to pay and they accepted to give me some credit…
Now I’m walking around and try desperately to find my face again.

…this morning I got the following message from one of my friends:

“IF ADAM AND EVE WERE CHINESE, WE WOULD STILL BE IN PARADISE BECAUSE THEY WOULD HAVE IGNORED THE APPLE AND EATEN THE SNAKE.”

What a wonderful idea to start the day -

The good news is, they gave us a brand new year.

The bad news, they gave us one last year too and look what happened.

…what can I say, woke up this morning quite energized by a dream I had:

It was about this guy coming up to me saying: “Come to my library, I selected a couple of books and made a choice of images that would match perfectly into your paintings…”
Instantly I knew, don’t ask me how/why, it was the “devil” talking to me.
Extremely polite, quite young and with some black moustache in his face he made no fuss about his power. Some underlings next to him walked around only with their heads bowed.
Now, in this huge library filled with books to the ceiling like in some Harry Potter Film (which I didn’t saw) , those books were all in dark red leather covers. His selection for me consisted of three books that had small pieces of paper in between the pages to show me the way.
Nothing unusual at that point - but I’m still asthonished that I remember quite well those images while I’m writing this…

For example one of those images showed three people close to each other with very colorful clothes, don’t know if men or woman but their faces were all black without eyes, noses or mouths -
I remember looking at the pencil drawings inside and deciding which part would suit well into my images and wondering, as the drawings were quite small, if they were big enough to make some quality scan out of it.

Well, I guess the “devil” just gives a damn about such technical considerations…

ps
Publishing this took so long that I started wondering if he tried to a…

Did you ever buy a book because of its cover?
Well, I did. And now that I’m finished with reading I have to say I don’t regret it.

Friedman’s book is just a great read if you want to get prepared for what’s going to happen to us in the not so very far future.
But what I really wanted to write about here is something I remembered from my childhood and that came to my mind, once I put the book away.

Once a year an amusement-park came to our town and one of the more interesting attractions consisted of the following:
You got a round arena with seatings like in a circus and in the middle of this arena you had a wooden disk, about 20 meters wide and going a bit upwards towards its centre, let’s say like an umbrella.
Now what we paid for is this:
With a whistle blow the start signal was given and whoever wanted could run to this disk and take position on it, lying on it, standing, sitting, grapping at each other, whatever. .. the disk started to rotate, slowly in the beginning, and even at that slow rate people that couldn’t have made it to the center were thrown from the disk by the centrifuge power. .. faster and faster at the end you only got 1 or 2 people left, lying in the center quite safely for the moment…and when you thought you could stay there forever, a huge leather-bag like they use in boxing was thrown at you to push you from the disk. There was always a lot of crying and shouting and I liked this attraction a lot because you could get a grip at girls quite innocently…

This disk reminded me of our flat world, with countrys at the outer side being thrown out of the game and some fat and rich ones in the centre believing they could stay there forever, but beware of the huge leather-bag that will be thrown at you at least once in your life.

…this guy took a picture of me…while I was taking his picture, sounds fair.

If you go to this site: www.theaea.org/cec_cac/index.htm you will find the participants list of an interesting
event: The Carnival of e-Creativity taking place from january 27-29 2006 in New Delhi/India.
An impressing number of artists will show their work and discuss it.
My small contribution to the event consisted in designing the logo:

and showing some possible applications:

I’m really looking forward to this and there will be also a presentation of my work on a big screen. Again Europe looks like an very old continent compared to the open-mindedness other people in other regions of our world have concerning new mediums…

There’s a new book about Digital Art that is quite interesting. First of all because of its concept: “One premise of this book is that by restricting our featured artists to the same starting point - three pre-selected “seed images” - variations in individual styles and techniques become more transparent. In addition, by circumscribing their imaginations at the very beginning of the process, the artists were forced to craft their way toward an understanding of what these pictures meant to them.”

You got 14 artists describing their way till the final result.
And second because they put one of my paintings in the book as an example where Digital Art is going…

GOING DIGITAL by Joseph Nalven and JD Jarvis
THOMSON - Course Technology

…just to let everybody know that you can leave comments, even it doesn’t show immediately -
I have to edit them first…