ANTILOG_24Sep26a

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ANTILOG_24Sep26a

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2026-09-25 08:16:26

- A lot has happened since my last Antilog post, even though it was just 5 days ago; I've been doing a great deal of research and also a great deal of organization of my whole art-research practice; I created a new GitHub Organization for my art studio, The Historiotheque; I have been busy laying the foundation for how I plan to use GitHub repositories to basically run my whole operation from the command line;
- I also spent a lot of time trying to set everything up online so that I can have a maximum of what I call verifiability in my research; what that means concretely is that I publish repositories on my Organization on GitHub and then get Digital Object Identifiers or DOIs on Zenodo for said repositories; then I link those projects to my ORCID ID profile; this "loop" helps link my identity to my work, something that is hard to do at times when you're an independent researcher; at least, it's something that one never really learns as an independent researcher, or something that one doesn't even know exists;
- There's a whole methodology to this form of verifiability, and I have been setting it up as best I can, using agentic AI to help with the management and coordination of everything it entails; I have been working long hours, but it's going to pay off in the end;
- The abstract digital painting you are seeing at the top of this post is a new creation from late last night called "OPERATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY: SEED NOISE", which is meant to have the look & feel partly of a digtal collage; it was also a bit of a homage to Cubism, after spending days going over my Cubism Studies research from the 2001-2004 period when I lived in the NDF borough in Montreal, Quebec; I will be making many more of these kinds of digital paintings;
- I have modified my social media strategy also; I've decided to make Bluesky my main hub; I'm still publishing on all the other platforms, but am breaking it down differently than what I've been doing for many years; I am posting everything I do in The Historiotheque on my Bluesky account, the new repositories I create for my GitHub Organization, my studio logs I am calling them now;
- My studio logs are all being published directly to the main Historiotheque repository; if I'm still writing these Antilogs, it's that I find the studio logs, while they are being written in a comprehensive and rigorous manner, are not necessarily enough; I find that for now, at least, I still need to fill in the gaps with these Antilog entries; it will all make sense at some point, for those who may be following me and aren't sure exactly where I'm going with all of this;
- Documentation is never going to be perfect; what I call "logging, documenting, and archiving" is never perfect, as you can't possibly put absolutely everything you do and think and so forth on paper; you need to pick and choose WHAT to write down, WHAT to log and so forth, it can't just be "everything", there is no such thing;
- The main goal for me is to make my experiments reproducible" and also to make it all publicly available to anyone with a web browser and an internet connection; for that, the reproducibility, people need to know exactly what the process was that I went through during my experiments; concretely, for a painting, let's say, they need to know everything I did in a clear, step-by-step procedure; that means what kind of paint I'm using on a given canvas, what colors, what type of paintbrush, what type of canvas, what size, etc.; I'm trying to do this at a great level of granularity, but as I said, it's impossible to document absolutely EVERYTHING and still have time to make the actual art or do the research; that's the trade-off, you do as much documentation as is feasible for someone who also spends a great deal of time actually MAKING STUFF;
- I've been looking at the whole "Docs as Code" paradigm, which I find I have already been doing all this time; also, Literate Programming is something I want to learn more about, also because I think I've been trying to do something similar since I started learning to code in Python 14 years ago; I'm also reading about technical writing, as I find that I need to "up my game" on that, as I like to say;
- I've done a great deal of research lately, writing a lot about Cubism, going over the research on the subject that I did in the past, trying to further my research by focusing precisely on my research questions, am plannning also a literature review of the field, which I already did in 2001-2004, but need to pursue anew, as much has been written since;
- I talked a lot about continuous delivery in the past, how I have been trying to implement something like that in my art-research practice; the thing is, it was more of of the conceptual foundation of what I was trying to do, at least in part; I hadn't built out the theory entirely, and was only actually practicing it at a more or less superficial level; now I'm going to formally study the whole CI/CD process, trying to implement it at a much deeper level;
- That's it for now, it's a short update; I am reviewing the latest Official Declaration and Official Release documents, reviewing progress on the first Prospective document, all an integral part of The New Documentaiton; More to come, stay tuned!

ANTILOG_19Sep26a

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ANTILOG_19Sep26a

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2026-09-19 00:04:04

- It's been over a month since I've written in this Antilog; much has happened since; I wasn't sure if I would talk about personal affairs on this Antilog, but I guess I will say a few things; my father passed away three weeks ago; before that, for about a month or so, he had become very sick; I couldn't really do any art or research because I was taking care of him almost daily; in any case, he ended up being diagnosed with terminal cancer and died 9 days later;
- I am slowly starting to get back into art creation, though on the research front, I've still been doing a good deal of research, though maybe slighly less than before; this happens, anyway, in the summer usually; I have a slower period and then the creative juices start flowing again by the time autumn comes around; it is going to be autumn in a few days and I'm already feeling more creative; granted, my thoughts aren't always as clear as they could be, given that I have just lost someone who was very close to me;
- Above is the latest mixed media painting in my CHRONOTOPIUM SERIES; I numbered it no. 11 in the series, though technically it might be no. 10; anyway, I lost count at some point in my filenames and don't know where I'm at, though it doesn't really matter; these are just "quick-sketches", meant to sketch out basic ideas rapidly; (I counted them again and I do believe this was no. 11 in the series, after all! Sorry for the mishap!);
- In my last entry into this Antilog, I mentioned a new art form I was calling "Archive Art", which ended up becoming the "Archival Arts", though I found mentions of this term online and need to differentiate my concept of it from those pre-existing ones I found; it doesn't really matter what it's called, so long as I have a well-defined, new concept; now, I am thinking of all sorts of new art forms, something for instance that I want to call "disaster art", which also may already exist.

2026-09-19 01:22:12

- I just did a Quick Retrospective of what I call my Refmats which I have generated and collected since my last Antilog entry, from August 7, 2026; something interesting popped out, a manifesto I wrote called "MANIFESTO OF LATENT REALISM", which was my vision of what art should be for the 21st century; it's strange because in it, I talk about "the physical hybridization of synthetic outputs with high-friction mediums—heavy impasto oil, hand-cut collage, organic decay, and analog film"; what is strange about that is that just a few days ago, or maybe a week ago or so, I reset the algorithm on my Instagram account and started looking up collage work;
- I found dozens of accounts of amazing artists doing both digital and analog collage work; I was inspired by what my father was working on before he got sick and passed away; he had been a visual artist for the last 70 years and had a hybrid practice mixing analog and digtal mediums; he had taken a step back from the work he was sharing on the web and started working on a new collage which was going to be a portrait of Frida Kahlo; it's interesting that he chose her as a subject for a portrait done as a collage, since we know how much Frida suffered in her life and how he himself was suffering; it was kind of prophetic also, as though he had a premonition of what was going to transpire; he had collected all of the materials and printed out a large portrait of Frida Kahlo that he made digitally and that he was going to reproduce with actual analog collage; it is kind of in homage to my father's unrealized magnun opus that I am so interested in doing collage work now and possibly for the foreseeable future;
- What is doubly strange, too, is that I had already been doing a series of collages since last July, what I have talked about at length in this Antilog and was called THE CHRONOTOPIUM-SERIES; as I have shown above in the opening image and in the text that follows, I am currently at no. 11 in said series; but it's as though I didn't realize what I was doing until much later; I have worked a great deal on the concept for this series since I started it in July, and now I keep having serendipitous experiences going through the archives or searching for things online; everything always goes full circle with me, with my work; it's why I've written and thought so much about continuous review as well as what I call Hyperreflexive Design; it's all about the hyperreflexivity.

2026-09-19 07:33:54

- As I said, through my father's sudden illness and then death, I was still able to do quite a bit of research on my downtime, though I didn't make very much art; I tried making a few, but I felt I couldn't really post very much online, especially after he died; I felt it would have been precipitous; I also don't know what I'm going to do with my all my social media posting; my dad was also questioning himself about that near the end, whether he would keep posting on Facebook since mostly people weren't engaging very much with his stuff;
- I've been doing the same thing for years; I make art and post it online usually with an accompanying text, at least with the text on Facebook on my personal and professional Facebook pages; the thing is, I was also cross-posting the same content - without the text, just the title - on X, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn; I recently found out that my posting behavior was probably getting the algorithms on these platforms to penalize me; apparently, they don't like it when you cross-post within the same couple of minutes, usually under a minute, though sometimes my posts might have had different timestamps with a couple of hours difference; also, my posting was very regular, like once a day a lot of the times for many years; I took breaks here and there, some longer than others, but mostly I posted at a very rapid cadence; it does seem like I was being penalized by the algorithms, though, that my posts were not really reaching a whole lot of people; now I'm questioning my use of social media as a whole, wondering if I shouldn't just stop using all of these platforms; I think if I do choose to stop posting online, I will still post on Bluesky because it doesn't have the same kind of algorithms as Facebook et al; we'll see, I'm doing an experiment on Bluesky to see if I can reach people; if it doesn't work, it's quite possible that I just stop posting altogether; I would just post one last thing explaining what's happening, explaining how I just can't invest the time and energy to do something that's a losing battle; the algorithms are penalizing me and my posts are reaching almost no one, so it's kind of a waste of time;
- I was climbing the local mountain yesterday with a close one and we talked about what artists have to do to have success in the art market; at first, he asked me what my basic strategy was or if I had any success on the web; I said no and then we talked about what an artist has to do to have success; I told him about a video I had seen by Albert-László Barabási that talked about success in the arts; he found it interesting; we talked about my father too who was a visual artist all his life and how he maybe didn't want to "play the game", at least not later in life;
- This in part has led me to questioning the role of the artist and of art, and their meaning, for the 21st century; I realized that I actually ended up being one of the very first painters, composers, and authors of the New Millennium; I kind of have a vision of what art could be for the New Millenium and I will continue to try to realize that vision and do everything I can to promote the arts & culture; I'm a big fan of the work UNESCO has done over the years for the arts & culture;
- I also think that we are in danger of losing culture as less and less people actually seem to have any culture to speak of; I know that this may make me seem like a cultural elitist, but what can I say?; people do not seem to exhibit the features or signs of people who have a deep culture or cultural tradition, unless of course you count pop culture, which I do not consider is the same thing as having Culture with a capital C;
- As I have said ten thousand times, I am an interdisciplinary artist-researcher with 30 years of experience; the thing is, I have mostly focused on the art aspect over the years; I have focused a great deal on the research aspect, just not really as much as on the art one; now, I want to focus more on my research; I want to try to publish in academic journals, specifically ones dedicated to art-research in some form or another, or are Open Access or otherwise would accept me publishing even though I don't have the academic background or credentials; I think it would be a good thing if I strove to write actual essays and published them onlie, but also just kept them to myself and tried to publish them in these academic journals, as they usually require your research to not have been published elsewhere;
- So I'm going to start a few new projects in this direction and will keep upping my game on the research front; there is still a lot I need to learn and I might actually try to take some University courses if I can, or at the CEGEP level if I have to, that would help me become a better researcher, like learning all of the methodologies I need to know to be able to truly, as I said, up my research game.
- More to come...