i was looking at some design sites and noticing how reminiscent some of the new, cutting edge design is of Tanguy's work... and i saw one such design at www.dreamless.org entitled camouflage (from french word camoufler, to disguise). this sparked in me an intrigue in the idea of camouflage...
army camouflage, depending on the intended terrain, is traditionally drab or a pattern of grey or brown or olive green tones. but what would camouflage in a 21st century city look like? what would its pattern be? what would its colors be? and would they perhaps even need to somehow constantly shift and mutate to match their environment? perhaps one would need to wear a suit of television screens playing a random mix of the channels in their area. what is the look of camouflage? how would it change in different levels of reality? what is the sound of it? if a giant chamelon creature were to lay over a modern city, how would it fade in; what would it look like? how does one disguise? and taken into a personal, metaphorical context, what is the camouflage of our own subjective emotive landscapes? what would that look like as a sort of self-portraiture? for the definition of "camouflage" is not only "the disguising of troops, ships, guns, etc. to conceal them from the enemy, as by the use of paint, nets, leaves, etc. in patterns merging with the background" but "any device or action used to conceal or mislead; deception" what camouflage exists within the collective psyche to obscure truth? and what is the enemy we are protecting ourselves from?i am inspired by this line of questioning and am going to focus some creative energy on producing some visual descriptions of it...
but also, i thought of it today when i looked in the mirror. i thought, 'hm, does that really look like me?' i wonder if it's even possible to look like me in a human body.
baby creatures, small children... do they look more like themselves in their fresh, pure, unburdened state? newly created and spawning from the love that procreated them...
little me:
our aging and becoming "weathered" is a reflection of the effects of the process we endure... but it amazes me how the human body is a manifestation of the human soul. i am interested in other ways of visually representing it.
if i were an abstract form, what would i look like? how would i be shaped? i can't imagine being one static shape... so perhaps i would be in a state of perpetual metamorphosis... yet still generally constraining to the qualities of that shape. i wonder what a "before" and "after" picture would look like in that regard. i hate delimiting things and holding them to finite categories... (which could be a nice excuse for my pesky habit of leaving things unfinished). but when it comes to art, i feel a need to maintain the dimensionality and motion of things. 2-dimensional, still images don't capture enough. so how would i create a true self-portrait? and what "self" would i reference? without a body, i am an awareness, an energy wavelength, a dynamic reflection (or something). with a brain and senses i am bundles of thoughts and feelings and observations. are my creations then all self-portraits in a way?what i really want to do is create portraits of other people. not just to sketch their beautiful faces, but to capture more using multimedia. how they look physically, an idea of their abstracted form, capturing their general operating patterns, their sounds, their words. a true interview... the portrait as a sight providing insight through interview.
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art is the closest thing to a spiritual record. captured testaments to progress. mementos left for posterity for the future.
pictures are records of the outer manifestations of things. i am fascinated by how things grow, how they evolve.
using stop-motion effects, slowing down and speeding up time, i want to visually juxtapose a growing tree with a growing body with a growing city sprawling up and out with growing storms ebbing and flowing and growing cells and bacteria in multiplication and division...
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ok, time for me to simmer down and get some sleep......
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