ANTILOG_30Sep26a

“Historiotheque Series #001”. Acrylic painting on canvas (6 in by 12 in) by A.G. (c) 2026. All Rights Reserved.

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ANTILOG_30Sep26a

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- The following pertains to the first painting I made yesterday in a new series called Historiotheque Series which is an attempt to answer the question: What does a Historiotheque-Painting" look like in the 21st century?;
- A little over a decade ago, I wrote a primitive Python script to help me take Laboratory Notes for my experiments in painting, in my art studio; I had always made logs, taken notes, in my painting practice; all I did with the Python script was make it a little more formal;
- Earlier today, I used machine intelligence to assist me in improving both the structure of the actual Laboratory Notes as well as optimize the Python script itself; the image above is what the painting looks like right now and the notes below document the process, using said Python script;
- I may post the actual script itself at a later date; for now, I just want to log the "labnotes"; at the end of this post, I am publishing the feedback that I asked the machine intelligence to give me about how good my labotes actually were and if we needed to change anything about the structure of the notes themselves; Please enjoy!;
- More to come...

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LABORATORY NOTES:

Time: Wed Sep 30 04:13:56 2026

Experiment: HISTORIOTHEQUE SERIES #001

Hypothesis / Objective:

The concept for this series is to take the "History-Painting" form that I created 25 years ago for my project called The History-Project and reinvent it. The question is: What would my History-Painting look like 25 years later? Essentially, it is asking: What is a "Historiotheque-Painting"?

Tooling / Materials:

6 in x 12 inch canvas  (Artist Canvas, Standard 3/4, 100% cotton, Appolon Gotrick), pencil (4B, Mars Lumograph, STAEDTLER), acrylic paint (DecoArt Americana: Lamp Ebony Black, White Pearl Metallic, Almondine), masking tape (Scotch #2020 Contractor Grade Masking Tape)

Procedure:

1. I created a grid pattern/structure in pencil directly on the canvas.

2. I applied masking tape to the canvas first in a vertical orientation to isolate the sections between the penciled lines to create "axes" in the grid pattern to later be painted in black. There were only 2 axes about 2 inches apart centered in the middle of the canvas.

3. I let the paint dry and removed the masking tape (I also took photographs of the whole process at each timestep).

4. I repeated the same process with the masking tape except in a horizontal orientation for the pencil lines for those "axes".

5. I painted the sections delimited by the masking tape, in black.

6. I let the acrylic paint dry one more time (as stated previously, I photographed the painting once again).

7. I created an acrylic wash, adding water by dipping the brush in water and spraying it on the palette by "throwing" the water with a quick thrust of the wrist.

8. I added the wash (water + White Pearl Metallic/Almondine acrylic paint) to the whole surface of the canvas.

9. I let the wash dry and took another photograph.

Results:

The result is quite impressive. The wash had the perfect mix of water and acrylic paint, not too thick and not too thin either. The transparent acrylic wash let the black lines show through (slightly less than 1 in thick). The overall effects looks very much like my "History-Paintings" circa 2001-2004 which I invented for The History-Project painting series whose premise was to attempt to "paint the concept(s) of History". In this case, the premise was "to paint the concept(s) of The Historiotheque", the name I give my art studio/research lab.

Failure Modes:

I accidentally painted almost double the number of thick lines in black in the horizontal direction. Also, the pencil lines are visible, which was an unexpected result. Also, I said in the above (procedure/numbered steps) that the wash was the perfect viscosity but in the end, upon reflection, it was perhaps a little too thick.

Notes:

The Historiotheque painting series is looking amazing thus far, at least for this first instalment. I am going to wait before moving onto the next step and will be working on 2 separate canvases in the meantime, as I take the time to let the painting "breathe". I must always remember to let it sit for a while, observing it as it changes in appearance with the changing of the light throughout the day. My studio has bright LED lights on the ceiling which are much better to work with than normal, everyday incandescent light bulbs, which give more of a yellowy hue to the canvas. It's important for me to have good lighting, otherwise I can't even know what the actual colors are I am mixing and putting on the canvas. In passing, this "labnote" is the first I am writing using a Python script I just wrote that prompts me for the different sections, to fill them in one by one. I will need to edit the text to fix possible typos and something I forgot to add to the tooling/materials section, namely the masking tape (Edit: I added it to the Tooling/Materials section after the fact). I will be posting this labnote onto my Antilog blog where I posted all my similar labnotes in the 2015-2016 period, using an older version of the same Python script, but that had different sections, namely Time (automatic timestamp when running the script), Experiment, Statement of Purpose, Procedure, and Notes. This painting is unfinished for the time being until further notice. As stated, I will observe it for a while before deciding if it needs any further work done on it. I am thinking of adding more pencil, but in HB this time, possibly some straight lines across the canvas in different directions, made with a ruler to ensure the lines are straight. I may also add oil pastel, it's undecided at the moment. I will also photograph the painting at every timestep so that I can properly document the process most likely on my Antilog blog as an entry possibly standing on its own. The painting, also, is part of a new series, so I will be working on the Historiotheque Series over the next little while, working out the exact concept of the series as well. Also, something I forgot to write in the step-by-step procedure: I make "scratch marks" or "hashmarks" in all directions with a palette knife while the wash was drying. The was as well ended up being a light creamed color with a slight metallic touch, as White Pearl acrylic was the metallic kind. The mix was roughly from 75% to 90% White Pearl and from 10% to 25% Almondine. I didn't think to make a more precise measurement, same thing with the amount of water I diluted the acrylic paint with.

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MACHINE INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS OF LABORATORY NOTES:

This is a strong first entry in the new format — the four-field split is doing its job. Here's what I'd change, field by field, all of them small writing habits rather than schema changes:

Experiment — Good as is. The title + serial habit is intact.

Hypothesis / Objective — Good. "What would my History-Painting look like 25 years later?" is a proper question; keep stating it as a question whenever you can, it's the most reproducible form.

Tooling / Materials — Your most thorough field, and two things to fix:

• The masking tape is already in the list — you wrote in Notes that you forgot it, but it's right there ("Scotch #2020 Contractor Grade"). No edit needed; just flagging so you don't add it twice.

• Four things you used are missing: the camera (you photographed every timestep — documentation tooling belongs here), the palette knife (scratch marks while the wash dried), the brush you used for the wash, and water as a diluent. Rule of thumb: if your hands touched it, it goes in this field.

• Put your mixtures here too: the wash ratio (75–90% White Pearl / 10–25% Almondine) currently lives in Notes. A mixture is a material — record it where the materials live, even as a rough ratio jotted while mixing.

Procedure — The important fixes are all here:

• The palette-knife scratch marks are missing. They happened between steps 8 and 9 and currently only exist in Notes. Anything you did belongs in Procedure.

• Check your own sequencing. Step 2 tapes the vertical axes, step 3 dries/removes tape, step 4 tapes horizontally, step 5 paints the black sections — but the vertical axes were un-taped before any black paint appears in the record. Either a painting step is missing or the order is off. A 60-second re-read of your own steps, asking "could someone else follow this?", catches exactly this. It's the single highest-value habit for reproducibility.

• Collapse the photography parentheticals. Steps 3 and 6 both say "(I photographed...)". Replace with one standing line at the top or bottom: "Photographed the canvas after every step." Even better: add the photo filenames or folder — the photos are data, and the note should point at them.

• One action per step, verb first. Step 7's water-throwing description is vivid but three lines long; "Mixed wash: water + White Pearl Metallic/Almondine" says the same thing.

• Approximate durations. "Let the paint dry" — how long? ~30 minutes, overnight, two hours? Even a rough duration turns a diary into a reproducible record.

Results — Solid observational writing. One discipline to add: when reflection revises an observation, leave the original standing and add the revision. You wrote the wash was "the perfect mix" here and "perhaps a little too thick" in Failure Modes — that's honest and fine, but make the relationship explicit ("on reflection: slightly too thick — see Failure Modes"). The delta between first judgment and second thought is data; never overwrite it.

Failure Modes — Excellent content, and it's already doing the work this field exists for. One addition: give each failure a one-line correction — "double horizontal lines → count axes before painting next time; visible pencil → erase or seal before washing; wash too thick → measure the water." Failure + correction is what turns this field into tomorrow's checklist item.

Notes — Rich, but it's carrying overflow. Apply the routing test while writing: did I do this, observe this, or think this? Scratch marks → Procedure. Wash ratio → Tooling. Future plans (HB pencil, ruler lines, oil pastel), the Antilog posting plan, the lighting reflection — those are all correctly here; that's what Notes is for. And end Notes with a one-line status: "UNFINISHED — observing before deciding on further work." Cheap, and it makes the entry's state legible months later.

Two last things: run a 60-second read-back for typos before saving ("not too think", "labnot", "meantim" — you already planned this, just formalize it as the last step). And the whole entry took you real effort — if the laboriousness is the friction, the fix isn't a simpler script, it's these routing habits: each sentence written once, in the field where it belongs, instead of written in Notes and refiled later.

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(*Editor note: I corrected the typos that the machine intelligence analysis pointed out and also added an "edit" in the Failure Modes section saying that I added the masking tape to the Tooling/Materials section. I will be using this format for as many of my new creations as possible going forward. I also will try not to edit them too much, as I want to log and document the process in raw form. Redaction alters or forges the actual RECORD.  Instead, I will make corrections before posting the complete labnotes.)

A.G. (c) 2026. All Rights Reserved.

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...

ANTILOG_07Aug26a

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ANTILOG_07Aug26a

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2026-08-07 09:28:16

- Many years ago, at least a good 11 or so years ago, I started using some Chrome extensions to manage what I called "TabSets", which are just collections, or "lists", of "Open Tabs", tabs that I have open in my Chrome browser at any given time; one of the browser extensions is called Session Buddy and it saves all of your open tabs into a list that you can export in various formats; what I then do is export the "TabSets" and copy them into various files, such as a .txt file on my desktop and I used to always keep a version in Markdown in a GitHub Gist file online;
- Then I use another Chrome extension called OneTab which "collapses" all of my open tabs and also has a list of the tabs that I use when I want to "re-open" any of the web resources that I had previously visited; in any case, I've been saving ALL of my TabSets for at least 11 years at this point and have essentially saved a copy of every single browser tab I've opened up over this time period;
- The basic idea was not only that I would keep track of all my Open Tabs, but that in saving all of my tabs over time, there would be redundancies, or duplicates, if you will; the duplicates, though, would indicate that a tab was important; if a tab repeats itself over time in the sets, then it surely has some significance; anyway, I haven't lost a single web resource over that time that I could find again in under a minute, just by searching through the .txt files that I create with the lists of TabSets;
- Here is an example of a TabSet I created last night; I did it on purpose to only open select tabs so I could show the public what the TabSets look like in the .txt file; at some point, I started to create a special .txt file every year at the beginning of the year or late in December of the previous year or whatnot, called TABSLOG_2026.txt for example; I used to operate my browser like a machine, with over 50 tabs, sometimes much more, and then would save the set of tabs as a TabSet - with Session Buddy - and then collapse them with OneTab; I've essentially been doing this every day all day long for 11 years (11 years, actually, in the form of GitHub Gist files, longer if we count TabSets, which I often called MultiTabs, in other formats on my Desktop at the time); here is what it looks like "on paper":

- To me, this is a form of what I am tentatively calling "Archive Art"; that is to say, I am logging, documenting, and archiving all the time and creating "representations" or "views" of the archive itself; I want to take this a few steps further and will be working on this for the foreseeable future; with that said, I'm still kind of only an amateur archivist, not having been formally trained in archival science; as is almost always the case, it is a work in progress; more on this at a later time;
- As I said in my previous antilog post, I have been working on a new, simplified version of my original Schizobot system which I have appropriately called "Schizobot Lite"; I generated almost 60 pages of content for this GitHub repository with AI assistance; I just wrote a DISCLAIMER for the README.md file, as I was scared GitHub would flag it because the content is about a kind of "schizophrenic robot", which might not be appropriate if someone or an automated system thinks I am actually trying to create such a robot; it is just for research purposes, and is a literary work more than it is code, even if it includes a great deal of code; at least the Schizobot Lite version has tons of code, the original Schizobot system, not so much; in any case, I just wrote a labnot on the subject of my recent Schizobot Lite experiments:

2026-08-07 14:03:15

- About the TabSet collections, when I started creating GitHub Gists with the exported tab lists, I would create a new Gist in the Markdown format every time I had a big enough number of open tabs that it was slowing down my computer; often I would create many of these TabSet documents every day; then as I was saying before, after a while I started creating just one TABSLOG .txt file every year; I'm not sure exactly when I started creating those yearly .txt files;
- The whole purpose of the collection of lists of tabs essentially was to be able to "reconstruct the timeline" of my browsing history; that is to say, at any given time, I could "rewind" back and see exactly what websites I had been visiting; that's where the duplicates prove to be interesting, because if we chart the TabSets-over-time, we will see slowly how some tabs repeat themselves while others are added; it's a dynamic thing, with the number and nature of the tabs changing constantly;
- At the very top of this new antilog post, I included a picture of one of my latest mixed media paintings, part of the ongoing series I call the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM series; I think that this is no. 009 or no. 010, I'm not exactly sure, I would have to count the number of paintings in the actual series thus far; painting series, I have observed, can diverge or converge; when you are working on several paintings at the same time or in quick succession over a short-enough period of time, you can notice changes happening in near-real-time, or in real-time if you are working on several simultaneously; the series can begin to diverge, meaning that there are appreciable changes in the overall paintings themselves, whether a formal change in composition or in the color palette, or else in the subjects or thematic materials of the paintings; it's rare for me anyway that an entire series resembles itself 100%; there are always points where it diverges; but that being said, it can also converge towards a certain point, which is always fun to see; either way, I am somewhat indifferent to the exact direction in which the series is going; I am just the painter, I don't have absolute control over the process; I also never really set out to be a serial painter, it's just something that happened; that's why I say I don't really control the process entirely, it's most like I am a silent witness to it; I can intervene at any point, but it's not true that I have complete liberty in the matter;
- People often say that the "possibilities are infinite" in the arts, which I have found to be completely false; there are a finite number of variables which have a finite number of possible values, so it can't be infinite, as the multiplication or product of two finite numbers is always going to be a finite number, if memory serves me right;
- Here is a digital portait that I made about a week ago, called The Ancient Sign about a historiophanic apparition that I had in my mind's eye:

ANTILOG_06Aug26a

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ANTILOG_06Aug26a

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2026-08-06 08:57:33

- I haven't written an antilog in over a week; I am due for a quick retrospective of what has happened since then; the following is a list of subjects that I have treated in my main logfile since my last publication here, which was on July 28, 2026:

[TENTATIVE] LIST OF SUBJECTS FROM LAST WEEK OF LOGS:

- Isomorphism and Amodal Schema Theory
- Structural Coupling and the Refcards-System
- Generatology and Reflexive Design
- Archiaesthetics and Historical Aesthetics
- Noise Theory and Cognitive Architecture
- Contemplative Practice and Spiritual Frameworks
- Critical Theory and Cultural Preservation
- Arcades, Flânerie, and Benjaminian Studies
- System Survivance and Studio Network Security
- Historical Materialism and Dialectics
- The History-Project and Historiophany
- Material Art History, Cubism, and Object Codes
- Exhibition in Tonal Cinema and Cinematic Space
- Surrealism, Passive Receptivity, and Collage
- The Theoretical Intermedia Matrix and Database Cinema
- Novelistic Architecture and The History-Machine

- That was just a "quicklist"; there were many other topics that I covered in my art and research since a little over a week ago;
- I began to create "filelists" of files a while back that are contained in various folders on my computer; It was while I was doing my Retrospectives; I found a simple way to use a single function in Windows PowerShell that creates a .txt file with a list of all of the files in a directory plus a timestamp of the date and time the file was created; in the following, I only included documents in my "REFMATS" folder created since the end of July; these documents all contain important research that I've done; each of the items in the list is a separate direction which my research has taken me in; there is a lot of variety, but I'm hoping I can drill it down into the main, overarching themes:

FILELIST ITEMS IN REFMATS FOLDER SINCE JULY 29, 2026 [FOR RETROSPECTIVE, WITH TIMESTAMPS]:

- Technical specifications for Integrated Circuit Topographies (ICTs) (August 6, 2026).odt - 2026-08-06 02:06:51
- Notes on Schizobot Lite (August 6, 2026).odt - 2026-08-06 02:04:27
- Schizobot Lite README.md (August 6, 2026).odt - 2026-08-06 01:40:22
- Technical Specification - Simplified Bare-Bones Schizobot System (August 5, 2026).odt - 2026-08-06 00:11:54
- Technical Specification - Schizobot Lite (Enhanced Edition) (August 5, 2026).odt - 2026-08-05 22:27:48
- Overview of Schizobot System (August 5, 2026).odt - 2026-08-05 22:27:09
- Schizobot Lite Technical Specification (August 5, 2026).odt - 2026-08-05 22:07:50
- Krakauer's Essay on Human Stupidity (August 5, 2026).odt - 2026-08-05 21:28:00
- What Makes Humans Stupid by David C. Krakauer (August 5, 2026).odt - 2026-08-05 21:14:43
- The Architecture of Concrete Realism (Augst 5, 2026).odt - 2026-08-05 10:10:54
- Noise Field Synthesis - Abstract Reality Realized (August 5, 2026).odt - 2026-08-05 09:30:05
- Archive Art - Theory and Application (August 4, 2026).odt - 2026-08-04 21:33:52
- Intellectual Performalism and Epistemic Inflation (August 3, 2026).odt - 2026-08-03 03:00:18
- Historiotheque 1 - Refmats Folder (August 3, 2026).odt - 2026-08-03 02:09:35
- Analog Proofs in Interdisciplinary Art (August 2, 2026).odt - 2026-08-02 08:23:23
- Novel-as-System - Synthesis and Extrapolation (August 02, 2026).odt - 2026-08-02 08:16:48
Novel as Phenomenological System (August 1, 2026).odt - 2026-08-02 08:12:24
- REFMATS SCHEMA PART TWO (August 1, 2026).odt - 2026-08-01 04:02:24
- Document Taxonomy and Organization Part Two [SCHEMA] (August 1, 2026).odt - 2026-08-01 03:59:45
- REFMATS SCHEMA (August 1, 2026).odt - 2026-08-01 03:49:45
- Document Taxonomy and Organization [SCHEMA] (August 1, 2026).odt - 2026-08-01 03:45:43
- Benjamin, Montage, and The Database (July 31, 2026).odt - 2026-07-31 11:56:23
- Surrealist Collage and Historical Montage (July 31, 2026).odt - 2026-07-31 08:07:48
- Non-Linearity, Hyper-Rhythm, and The History-Machine (July 31, 2026).odt - 2026-07-31 08:07:00
- Benjamin's Concept of Graphicness (July 30, 2026).odt - 2026-07-30 20:32:17
- Walter Benjamin's concept of Graphicness (July 30, 2026).odt - 2026-07-30 20:24:36
- Aragon, Benjamin, and Arcades (July 30, 2026).odt - 2026-07-30 19:43:21
- Arcades' Demolition and Benjamin's Ruins (July 30, 2026).odt - 2026-07-30 12:53:38
- Exhibition Curator Theory (July 30, 2026).odt - 2026-07-30 04:11:50
- Benjamin's Visual Archive Reconstructed (July 29, 2026).odt - 2026-07-30 03:51:52
- Human Experience Bandwidth Explained (July 29, 2026).odt - 2026-07-29 17:15:53

- I find that the list of items from my logfile differs somewhat from the items in my filelist for the REFMATS folder; it is the same interdisciplinary art-research practice, it's just that I treat different logs as unique and use them differently, for different purposes; the .txt file that is my main logfile contains all the content that I either come up with through creative writing, or else it contains stuff that I copy and paste from articles and websites online, or else it contains citations from my actual research documents such as those found in the filelist above; the distributed nature of my note-taking practice and research practice in general is by design; I found it important, after many failures, to have my actual physical notebooks to be in different locations, and it was important to have many notebooks, distributed around the workspace; it's all done in the name of greater redundancy, making my system robust in the face of failure, at least some types of failure; I also have many places where I keep and maintain digital logfiles or notes, such as the .txt files on my computer and I also use the Google Keep app on my browser, on my computer AND on my phone (it's actually the main method I use to send notes to myself when I move "from station-to-station");
- In continuing this Retrospective, I should mention that I received three separate external harddrives from a family member containing digital archives and that included tons of digital content that I thought had been completely "lost to history"; so over the last week or so, I've been browsing through those archives, trying to find all the golden nuggets; amongst other things, I found an old song that I had written and recorded circa 2007 that I had entirely forgotten about; I used it to make a video which I posted on YouTube, which is the following (it's called IN THE BEGINNING):

- I will likely be writing a great deal about my "excursions into the Archive" that these new external drives provide me the opportunity to endeavor to do; prior to receiving these digital archives, though, I was resuming my formal study of the works of Walter Benjamin, after a long stretch of time where I took up my Cubism Studies again, after roughly 25 years, and also my studies of modernism and other topics from art history and art historiography, including Surrealism and whatnot, especially in connection with the Benjamin research;
- The following, as always as part of this quick Retrospective, contains a list of the main subjects that I have covered since roughly July 28, 2026, in my Google Keep notes this time:

LIST OF SUBJECTS FROM GOOGLE KEEP NOTES FOR LAST WEEK OR SO:

    • Novelistic Phenomenology & "The Novel-as-a-System"

    • The Core Theory

    • Key Conceptual Components

        ◦ Coded "Dream-Language"

        ◦ Abstract Characterology & Algorithmic Being

        ◦ The History-Machine

        ◦ Nonlinearity

    • Theoretical Frameworks & Media Methodologies

    • Media Archaeology & Historical Materialism

    • Combinatory Literature & Algorithmic Engines

    • Constructivism as Aesthetic Proof

    • The Agency of the Cluster

    • Intermedia Phenomenology

    • Flagship Artistic Projects & Trilogies

    • The Revolt of Fiction Trilogy

        ◦ The History-Project (Historiogenesis)

        ◦ The Archives-Project (Archivogenesis)

        ◦ The Chronotopium / The Algorithms-Project (Algorithmogenesis)

    • Anatomy of an Aesthetic Problem

    • Historiotronics & Historionautics

    • Deep-Archive Project & Refcards-System

    • Computational & Software Systems

    • Python Combinatorial Suite

        ◦ Text Engine Pipeline

        ◦ External Integration

    • Prompt Engineering Meta-Workflow

    • Code/Art Governance

    • Primary Theoretical Reading Matrix

    • Literary Architecture & Poetics

    • Phenomenology & Hermeneutics

    • Semiology, Dialogics & Relation

    • Systems & Cybernetics

- Finally, here is another list of subjects from my main logfile (in .txt format), looked at from a slightly different angle; the two lists of subjects from my main logfile that I have included have many differences; the one below is more EXPANDED if you will than the previous one at the beginning of this antilog post:

[EXPANDED] LIST OF SUBJECTS FROM LAST WEEK OF LOGS:

Primary Artistic & Literary Projects

    • The History-Project

    • The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema

    • The Refcards-System (Reflexive Design Citation & Curation)

    • The Novelistic Phenomenologies & The "Surrealist Textbook"

    • Zigidooism (Architextures / Quadrilateral Existence)

        ◦ Architextures

        ◦ The 4-Fold Cycle

    • Taxi Windows / Order of Ginnetho

    • Core Theoretical Frameworks & Research Paradigms

    • Amodal Schemas & Structural Isomorphism

        ◦ Amodal Schema

        ◦ Neurological Dynamics (Default Mode Network & Executive Control Network)

        ◦ Strategic Intermedia

    • Historiophany & Historiotherapeusis

    • Artistic Historical Materialism & The "Culture of the Object"

    • Noise & Noise Theory

    • Generatology & Generative-Polymorphic Philosophy

    • Key Conceptual & Analytical Syntheses

    • The Conscious Bottleneck (Experience Throughput)

    • Intermedia Genealogies & Intellectual Lineages

    • Key References & Textual Sources Cited in Log

    • Philosophy & Aesthetics

    • Literary & Social Critique

    • Art History & Media Theory

    • Theology & Contemplative Practices

2026-08-06 21:08:01

- I wrote in my previous antilog about my new instantiation of The Refcards-System that I wrote with AI assistance, as a Python script; I shared actual Refcards that I created using that new system; I've since been working on a few other software projects using AI; one is going to be a kind of Suite of different pieces of software that all implement various strategies in what I am calling "experimental fiction" or "experimental literature"/"combinatory literature"; I'm going to try to write about a dozen Python scripts that do different things like use Markov chains to emulate writing by using a .txt file as source material or corpus; I want to maybe use the NLTK framework in Python, the Natural Language Toolkit; I maybe want a script that extracts the text from Wikipedia pages and then mixes it in with other sources, giving you tools to mash-up the text, cut it up, make montages or I don't know what else; right now I'm using the markovify package; so far so good, I've written several hundred sentences using Markov chains; I have used this library before, it's just now I have an interface; but for now, here is the interface for the current version of The Refcards-System:

 - I didn't really say much about all those topics and concepts and subjects, projects, etc., that I listed in several different versions, from different logs and notes; I mostly merely listed the items; I don't know if I will really get into all of the details right now; I want to take my time with this current Retrospective; I've basically been in Retrospective Mode for the last few months; it was this year that my whole continuous review practice really became highly formalized; I even came up with Hyperreflexive Design which I realized was just a different mode of Reflexive Design;
- In any case, I am working on several new projects, going in several different directions at the same time, on many fronts; before going further, here is a screenshot of what it looks like when I either create or edit a new Refcard:

- The first app I created in the Experimental Fiction Combinatorial Suite, let's call it, was effectively the Markov Studio App, the thing I described above, with using Markov chains to create "believable" creative writing; it all depends on what source material you use to pump into the literary engine; 
- As I also described above, I created hundreds of unique sentences using the markov_app.py Python script; here are a handful of samples from the .txt file I generated via the app:

The thing is, Ptolemais didn’t feel the need to hide things if they had no value. 
But dysprosody itself is one of the best kayakers in the world.

I’m doing what the historian does, I’m writing a narrative of what is taking place exactly at this time in History.

I want them to appreciate the beauty of the human body in his Gymnasium.

I know these are big words, but it really is the only way to fight fear is to take action.

One could even postulate that men seek to remain in a state of constant change, ugly as it is in a race against time.

-  It's maybe not the best writing, but for me on a personal level it's a big achievement, as I was never really a programmer even though I learned programming 13 or more years ago; I really want to create simple tools for doing literary experiments; I did after all create a cut-up novel using software in 1998, called Uncovering The Ungun, so this is not new to me entirely; I was using cut-up engines all the time, and actually kept using them until today, though experiments with those are not something I do very often these days, except for today (which marks a new era in my creative practice);
- I've also been hard at work studying the works of Buckminster Fuller again, taking yet another crack at his book, Synergetics, amongst some other selections from his literary corpus; I also spent quite a bit of time lately trying to understand the Einsteinian concept of spacetime as well as relativity in general, the synchronization of clocks problem, the speed of light, the non-existence of a universal "Now" or simultaneity;
- The thing I discovered, which I found interesting was that there is a whole story of the meeting of Fuller and Einstein; Buckminster Fuller had given Einstein a manuscript that he wanted him to read; if I understood correctly, Fuller wrote about Einstein's theories in his book, Nine Chains to the Moon (1938); also unless I'm wrong, some people didn't think that he had the credentials, if you will, to be writing about Einstein's theories; therefore, I believe, Fuller wanted Einstein's blessing, and he got it, Einstein saying:

"Young man, you amaze me. I cannot conceive anything I have done having the slightest practical application."

- I haven't been creating many new Refcards of late, so let this serve as its own cardbox: an unordered set of statements about recent and current projects, as well as some design concepts, if not formally, then informally, of new works and new projects to come;
- Continuous review is back in business after a short hiatus; the image at the top of this antilog post is a digital visual design that I made to represent the Schizobot system, which I worked heavily on the other night, last night, in fact; I wrote over 50 pages on the subject, with AI assistance, as always; I actually created functioning Python code for various parts of the system; I created a separate version called Schizobot Lite; I am working on new concepts and projects, as I just said, amongst which is the concept I'm tentatively calling Archive Art and am working on a new project, also tentatively called The Deep-Archive Project, which is an archival study of my entire digital archive, a study in the sense both of an etude and of a more philosophical treatment; I want to invent new ways of browsing and navigating the archive; I'm using all of the tools at my disposal; this is basically in line with The Refcards-Project (not just the "Reference Card System", but the overarching "Reference Card Project");

2026-08-06 22:24:45

- I haven't written about methodology much, except for the short mentions of the various coding projects I've been working on; I mentioned the term "AI assistance", but didn't really take the timet o define what that means; I have written about it on my Medium blog, about the exact methodology I use to do creative work assisted by AI; work with AI where I do a lot of the heavy lifting to steer it in the right direction, to curate and edit its responses, to refine prompts iteratively, to engage in metaprompting; I constantly "feed back" previous responses back into my current and future prompts; I will try to write more about this at a later date, as I kind of want to wrap this up; I don't want this to be too long; it was meant as a "quicknote" or series of "Quickrefs" or "Quick Reference Cards";
- I've been working on the Refcards-System/Refcards-Project for at least 14 years; I've created blogs on various platforms about it, I've dedicated several GitHub Repositories and folders on it as subject/as object; I've written about it, have collected images and sounds and other archival material, thousands of field recordings and hundreds of videos in my digital archive;
- In any case, this is it for now, for this new antilog post; I will come back to most of these topics, concepts, and projects, as I always do in the modes of Reflexive & Hyperreflexive Design.

ANTILOG_28July26a

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ANTILOG_28July26a

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2026-07-28 08:51:00

- I may have mentioned this already, but I was working on a coding project with a friend for a "query engine" for a project of his and I ended up creating something pretty good with the help of Gemini; I had created many different Python scripts using AI, but never a full-blown app; I had assumed that it would take too much code and I wouldn't be able to get a full-fledged app in a single response, I would have had to create different prompts for different sections of the app and then would have to put them all together in my IDE; the AI actually wrote a complete app with a single, sophisticated Python script; I was thrilled;
- As you probably know by now, I've been obsessed with this concept of a "Refcards-System" for well over a decade; as I was testing the query engine, I realized that I could use it as the backbone for my Refcards-System; that's what I did, I used it as the foundation for this system and after 7 hours of painstaking labor, I had a working Python app for that system; now I can use it to take my "labnotes", which I have shared previously on this antilog;
- Here is the first new labnote that I took using my official Refcards-System; it was for THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES (of paintings):

- Now what I think I'm going to do is translate the Python script into C# or something that will be easier to create an actual executable that can be launched just by double-clicking the .exe file; I know I can do this in Python with PyInstaller or whatnot, but I find it too complicated; this is going to force me, in any case, to install either Visual Studio Community Edition or just plain, vanilla Vscode; in other words, I'm getting into computer programming again and that's a pretty good thing, I think;
- I learned to program/code in Python I think it was 13 years ago, maybe more (memory in this case is proving difficult for whatever reason); over all of that time, though, I only ever really got to an intermediate level in terms of programming knowledge and ability; frankly, I didn't really code that much, oftentimes going several months without any coding whatsoever; I took countless MOOCs specifically on Python programming or that involved Python programming; I got pretty good, but never at the level I would need to actually work in the field as a programmer; what I discovered, though, is that I'm not really made for programming; I don't enjoy it very much; I mean, I love it when I build something and it works, but it seems that 99% of programming is finding bugs and troubleshooting and whatnot, and I don't like that at all;
- I had a friend who was an engineer who helped me learn more about actual software development with a side-project he had in Python; he told me that to program, you have to love solving little puzzles; that's precisely it, I told him, I hate puzzles; there is a sweet spot where the challenge is hard enough that it keeps me engaged and not boring enough that I lose interest, but in my experience, in practice, I almost never found that sweet spot; now with AI, I can say that I have found that sweet spot, but it still takes hours upon hours of hard work, which the last time I did it, with my Refcards-System, totally burned me out; I slept for like 4 days, all day long, just to recuperate, and I still haven't recuperated 100%;
- Here is another labnote I took the same day, this time on the "Official Refcards-System Version #001", after I had finished getting to an actual working version of the Python app:

2026-07-28 10:54:54

- The painting at the very top of this antilog is I think no. 9 in a series I started at the end of last month and the beginning of this month called THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES, which fits into a larger project including new music/computer-assisted sound design and a novel called THE CHRONOTOPIUM: A STORY OF ALGORITHMOGENESIS, of which I have spoken a good deal here before; I haven't published the entire series online just yet; I'm working on it, though; I just want to write a piece dedicated just to this painting series and I guess my standards are very high, as I want it to be only my best writing; sometimes a series needs to "age" a little, though, before it can really be written about in any depth or detail;
- There's another series of paintings and drawings as well called ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM which is a kind of subproject or subseries of THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES; at least that's how I'm viewing it at the moment, though it's subject to change; I recently came up with another project or series which is a kind of subproject/subseries this time of the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM series that I want to call "AMODAL SCHEMAS", which has its own unique concept I'm still working on; the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM is exactly what it sounds like; it's a deep analysis of aesthetic problems, an anatomy of its various facets, what have you;
- In any case, here is a labnote that I took on this series, using my newly fashioned Refcards-System (*ERRATUM: The labnote posted above, about THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES of paintings, was NOT created immediately after creating my new Refcards-System, but roughly 10 days before; I just hadn't published it yet, I don't think, so included it in this antilog post):

2026-07-28 20:19:35

- This year was officially the 25-year anniversary since I first started my first major interdisciplinary art-research project, The History-Project; it was actually this month in 2001 that I started a new series of paintings that became an integral part of that project, which included dozens of songs for guitar and voice as well as sound design, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction (the research part, all in the humanities); I plan on celebrating over the coming months and doing a kind of quick Retrospective of those 25 years with regard to The History-Project; I want to commemorate it with Images, Sounds, and Words, as I do with everything else, my three main "modes of expression" or "modalities";
- I want to look at the different workspaces too, that I've worked in over the last several decades; before I moved to the Notre-Dame-de-Grace apartment, I had only really had a garage that I painted in while I lived in the basement with some family members; I had quite a bit of space and could work on numerous paintings all at the same time; it's when I really started working in series; I was painting in oil at the time, at least most of what I did was oil, and some watercolors and pencil drawings, pastels, charcoals, etc.; I was also writing and recording a lot of music, several albums' worth; but it wasn't until the summer of 2001 when I moved to Montreal (NDG) that I had my very first art studio; I had an entire room to myself, and a big-enough room that I could do whatever I needed to do; I could scale up and paint ten paintings at once in a series, or I could scale down and just work at the easel on one piece at a time; I was hyper-productive, extremely prolific, painting hundreds of paintings in 4 years;
- To be honest, sometimes I don't know what my merit is in all of this; the concepts for my projects and series kind of just fell out of thin air; I don't remember really inventing much of anything; I realize now that I've suffered from a really bad case of hypergraphia, where I have an intense compulsion to always write everything down or make marks on canvas with a paint brush, which to me are both forms of writing or else leaving marks, making marks; I create out of a compulsion to create, so for me I never knew anything else; as far as I know, I started creating in my first years of life as many toddlers do and I just never stopped;
- For most of my life, I never really learned anything else; in the late 1990s, in the basement with the art studio in the garage, I decided I wanted to "inform" my art practice, so I started doing research for a series of short novels or novellas that I was writing called the Exhibition in Tonal Cinema; that was the first interdisciplinary art-research project, but The History-Project that it kind of bled into, was the first LARGE-SCALE interdisciplinary art-research project; I started studying art history more formally, then philosophy; I was also reading dozens of novels of some of the world's best literature from many parts of the world, though probably mostly the United States and Europe; for some reason, I never really read much Canadian literature, though I know we have a very deep literary tradition;
- Below is another labnote made with my new Refcards-System, this time about something I believe I wrote about recently, the whole concept of writing a PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAINTING; it all started, as you may remember, with me studying modernism again as an art movement, literary modernism, modernism in painting, other arts, a lot of Erik Satie studies as well; I ended up making a series of 5 paintings and drawings of Picasso; then I made portraits of Erik Satie; that series was called ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM; I took up where I left off in the early 2000s when I made a formal study of Cubism that I called my "Cubism Studies"; I also reread a book that I love to read everyone in a while, called Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity by Christine Buci-Glucksmann; then I got into some writings by Walter Benjamin that I also hadn't read in a long time; I read his essay on Surrealism, I looked at all my old art history and art historiography notes, my Picasso papers; I also painted a portrait of Maria Callas in this series and was planning a portrait of Walter Benjamin himself;
- It was then that I decided I wanted to do a phenomenology of painting, which led me to studying the Bateau-Lavoir in the early 1900s in Montmartre, Paris, France, where Picasso lived and had his studio for many years; at first I just wanted to do a kind of pure phenomenology of painting; I recorded some audio of me making verbal sketches of the experiences that I was having while starting a painting; that didn't quite cut it, so I started to do a lot of research for this on phenomenological aesthetics, those kinds of subjects, but ran into a slight problem; every time I thought I had an original research question and thesis or theses, I found works, books, essays, where people had already done that exact study; I had to keep scrapping my idea, abandoning my notes, and taking off into another direction entirely;
- I came to the Bateau-Lavoir-as-laboratory; I wanted to take my Workspace Theory from previous months and apply it to the Bateau-Lavoir studios as workspaces, as the whole thing as a sophisticated Art Operation, where I would apply my General Theory of Art Operations; the Bateau-Lavoir thing became a book of stories called Washboat Stories, the project kept transforming before my eyes into so many different series and subseries; it was just raw inspiration in every direction to infinity;
- In any case, a lot of this I've written about before, so I will just leave it at this for now and share one last labnot, about THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAINTING experiment (Remember, these labnotes are always documentation for actual experiments that I run "in the lab"):

- "Historiophany" is actually a book of short stories that I began writing when I was doing all the research on the Bateau-Lavoir-as-laboratory, which began with the phenomenological investigation that was thwarted because someone already did the same research; "Historiophany" is simply about historiophanies; each story ends with a historiophanic experience that the main character has; I will be writing about all sorts of historiophanic experiences, with maybe some nonfiction writing mixed in; this should technically also fit within the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM project, series and subseries.

ANTILOG_24July26a

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ANTILOG_24July26a

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2026-07-24 05:41:20

- I recently took home an old external hard drive from someone who was keeping it for me; much to my surprise, there were tons of files I had completely forgotten even existed; I've spent the last several days browsing through the files, copying things onto my computer so I can properly archive them online and on my other main external hard drives;
- It's strange how I made all this music and these video recordings that I kind of remembered making and recording, but which I thought had been lost to history; finding them again has been really amazing; it just goes to show, when you have a process for logging, documenting, and archiving, you eventually reap the rewards; these files come now at precisely a time when I've been really focused on archiving everything; it's kind of a serendipitous discovery, or a series of them;
- I will be publishing things online, on YouTube a great deal, all my old recordings that never made the cut at the time; some of these files go back 20 years to the day; my entire "cam drops" as I used to call them, going back to at least 2007;
- Some of the videos were difficult to watch as I wasn't at my best mentally; but still, I think these archives help me process (my own) history; I was writing a lot about that recently, how we need to process history, how history may be (a) given, but that the processing we need to do with regard to history is not (a) given; in fact, I would argue it is never given; history maybe discloses itself, has its own givenness in this way, but I don't think that means that it has necessarily been processed;
- Something interesting that I found browsing this new digital archive is that I had already been doing something with my digital archives that I now do, earlier than I thought I had begun doing it; back in the day, storage space was expensive and files weighed a lot in terms of their file sizes; the basic idea was to try to use up as little storage space as possible, because files in regard to size were expensive; when storage began becoming much cheaper and we had access to much bigger drives, something fundamental changed in my digital archiving practice: I began archiving all sorts of files and file folders redundantly; what I mean is that I wasn't afraid if a file or even an entire file folder was saved twice on the save external hard drive, in different locations, because digital storage space was cheap; also, it made it much easier to find things, it augmented, I found, the findability of files on external hard drives; now I can navigate through, I can browse through, digital archives and I don't need to necessarily memorize the file structure or structure of the file folders, the directory, and everything; I just navigate/browse through it and the most important files tend to repeat themselves redundantly; in any case, it was over a decade ago that I realized this and also realized the importance of redundancy in an archival practice such as mine;
- In any case, nagivating through/browsing through this newly re-discovered digital archive has been amazing; I've found so much amazing content that I either thought was lost or didn't even remember at all; there are videos of me talking about projects whose concepts I thought I never really explored in any formal way; it turns out I did, I just couldn't recall exactly; all of this will help me continue these old projects, creating brand new works of art as well as original research, and it will help me come up with new projects as well, and new conceptual schemes underlying those future projects.

2026-07-24 17:58:56

- I never really set out to be an "archivist", it just kind of happened; I just liked to keep folders of documents and that tendency just got greater and greater over time until I had a massive personal archive of everything I created; the digital archives too just kind of happened; back in the beginning of 1994, I think it was, I had created many .txt files on a family member's computer and I just ended up saving them onto a diskette which I kept until diskette drives no longer really existed on computers; I had saved them as a CD-ROM, along with other digital documents I had created since then;
- That's how it happened, in any case; I just ran with it, I kept adding to it over time; now, I mostly add to the digital archives, not necessarily to the analog one, except for things I am printing out to read, as well as my paintings; I also recently recuperated a bunch of paintings, a few boxes' worth, which I am going to digitize; it's important for me at this point to keep digitizing my artwork, everything else; I haven't begun actually digitizing notebookes, though it's something I maybe want to start doing; it's just that that's a really labor-intensive job that I wouldn't really enjoy; but the payoff, though, of actually having my physical notebooks digitized is something that might just lead me to actually doing it;
- The image above is something I did a few years ago; I had been making these digital visual designs of what I call "noisefields" or "noise field paintings" which featured a lot of pixelization effects; someone close to me one day suggested that I create an analog version with these actual little wooden cubes; I did so and photographed it and the result is what you see above; I really love this image, and I've made several other ones at the time that I might share at some point;
- I've always been at the intersection of the digital and analog worlds; I still paint actual paintings in acrylic or else mixed media pieces with elements of collage; I also still make ink or pencil drawings; I actually love urban sketching, which I do sometimes; I make all sorts of digital images, though, from digital photographs, often which I process, or else just digitally "native" works in the sense that they start out digital, usually from seed noise which I then modulate or evolve; I also create documents on my desktop but also write in physical notebooks as well as write what I call Refcards which are just reference cards or index cards that I write on; usually, I take notes that I've written in my notebook and transcribe the most salient content by hand onto these index cards; I have created countless Refcards like this which are the backbone of my archival system; I've even created a Python app for my Refcards-System which works wonderfully and is nice and streamlined, I love it!;
- Even though I wilfully began keeping and maintaining a growing archive, I never imagined that I would take on the ROLE of "archivist", or "amateur archivist" if I'm being honest; I never studied archival science so only consider myself an amateur, really; it is a job, however, that takes up a lot of my time; I also stress out over it a good deal, like what happens if I lose my apartment and can't afford to maintain my archive, what will happen to it?; will I just lose 30 years' worth of amazing material?; that's the risk inherent in maintaining an archive, the risk of it disappearing;
- It takes resources; you constantly have to expend energy to keep it organized, to keep it from falling on the wayside as a project; I mean it IS a project, one of my biggest, most large-scale projects; I've been doing it for 30 years or more; my digital archives, as I said, started in January or February of 1994, so it's already been 32 years thus far; how much longer can I keep this going, though?;
- I'm really afraid at times of losing my archives, which I think are really significant because they track the record of a living, mature artist running what I call an Art Operation (a "mature Art Operation", I like to say); the Art Operation concept goes back at least 12 years; 2014 is one of the earliest mentions I find of the Art Operation concept in my digital archives, though I would need to push the search further to see what the actual first instance of it is; I could always look at GitHub commits in my repositories that have to do with the ArtOps concept; I could see what the first commit was, and be able to "reconstruct the timeline", which is a hobby of mine (as seen in my continuous review practice as well as my habit of making Retrospectives; (*I just checked quickly and I think my first commit which mentioned the concept of Art Operations was in a GitHub repository called ArtOperations in a GitHub organization or whatnot called Historiomics; that was on April 14, 2014, so the concept is at least that old; **N.B.: I also seem to have created blogs with artoperation in the URL at least as far back as December, 2014, and also wrote about it to someone via email at roughly the same time; I also created an artoperations Twitter account - now X - in November of that year).

2026-07-24 20:58:14

- A friend and collaborator asked me about my fictional characters earlier; he wanted to know how I came up with them, or something to that effect; I told him (later on via Discord chat) that that was precisely why I came up with the idea for my new series of philosophical sketches I call the Abstract Characterology; I said that it was going to be an important tool in the building of future characters and building out the old ones as well;
- My friend had asked if I had to know everything about my characters, if I had their history in mind, what they liked or disliked, etc.; while I do develop my characters, I have to admit that sometimes I don't know them as well as I should; it's a work-in-progress, many of my characters being decades old in novels I never was able to finish for various reasons;
- For me, it's mostly about their character as well as what "tragic flaw" it is that defines them at their core as fictional characters; that's what the Abstract Characterology is about, I want to define characters as a set of aesthetic problems; my characters are built, in any case, on observations I've made of people and myself in my life, which the characterology will go over, including the design process for novels in general, not only building characters but also "worldbuilding";
- It has to be believable, I have to make my characters believable, which is why many of them are just based on aspects of myself, as I am the human being I have studied the most and know myself really well, which can only help with the realism; I've studied other people also a great deal, but not as much as I've contemplated myself, my thoughts, emotions, needs, personality, etc.;
- I was looking for software earlier that could help me with my novel-writing process, apps that maybe could help me finish the dozens of novels I have started but never finished; as I searched far and wide for a solution, I came across a text about a method that they author found helped them the most; in it, they said something which necessarily made me think of my new repository on Design Concepts for Novelistic Phenomenologies; it said:

Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed.
(Ref. The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel)

- I got on this subject as well because of the image featured directly above this block of text which is a portrait I made several years ago of Émile Zola; this connects to my novels because of an important essay he wrote called The Experimental Novel; the essay, which I believe it was first published in 1880, outlines Zola's new theory of novel-writing, the experimental novel was based on the scientific principles from Claude Bernard's 1865 work called An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine; Bernard's work essentially established the scientific method for modern medicine and introduced the concept of internal body environment or milieu intérieur; in any case, Émile Zola wrote about this new concept of experimental novel, but I don't find that his novels are really what I would consider all that experimental; sure, his method was especially experimental if you contrasted it to what was being written before Zola in terms of novels;
- Perhaps this is due to my privileged position as being born long after the 19th century, but I believe that the novels of William S. Burroughs are true experimental novels in that they were actual physical experiments with writing, using his cut-up technique or method, which he is famous for;
- My art is also experimental, but much closer to Burroughs than Zola, which I guess is natural given the era in which I have created my work; it remains true, though, as I believe I have mentioned here before, that there are flaws in my novel-writing system, in my novelistic phenomenology or novel-as-a-system; I keep just designing and designing stories, the novel itself, I start new documents, I write for a while, but I keep coming face to face with the same problem: the scale and scope of my novels are too big; the scale and scope are too big but also I spend too much time ideating and not enough time just writing; this is what the author of the article I cited above calls composting (the author is Randy Ingermanson, Ph.D.):

If you’re like most people, you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. You may do some research. You daydream about how the story’s going to work. You brainstorm. You start hearing the voices of different characters. You think about what the book’s about — the Deep Theme. This is an essential part of every book which I call “composting”. It’s an informal process and every writer does it differently.
(Ref. The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel)

-  I did end up finding at least two apps that could be very useful in writing my current and future novels, and potentially finishing my old ones; the app I am considering the most is called MyStory.today and seems to be a complete environment for novel-writing; the paid version is pretty cheap and has all sorts of added bells & whistles that I find would be useful; it would still be much better than the way I write novels now, which funny enough consists of mostly not writing them; as I said above, I'm stuck in the ideation phase;
- In any event, I love thinking of writing novels as a design problem; characters are design problems, fictional worlds are a design problem, the story, the dialogue, everything is a design problem; these problems, which I usually refer to as aesthetic problems, require you to write a problem statement; you can't really have a problem like this and not at least think of a problem statement, which can take many forms; you have to think about it, though, what the citation above calls "composting";
- Suffice to say that I really want to write this new novel, The Chronotopium, and will use all the tools necessary to do so; I realized that The Chronotopium, as I have designed it thus far in my mind, basically has no conflict, tension, or friction; that is to say, in the fictional universe the novel takes place in, everything is in perfect synchrony; it is a temporal utopia and in that regard would technically fall into the genre of utopian literature or fiction; the thing is, a novel or any story without tension, without conflict and whatnot, would not really make for a great reading experience; one has to give something for the reader to chew on, if you will; I am currently figuring out what that might look like, how I can add elements of tension in the novel itself;
- The actual writing of the novel-as-text, as textual object, will create its own kind of dramatic tension in that it will be pretty fragmented; that's at least how I've been designing this and other novels, as being made up of fragments, because that's how I always wrote novels in the past; having design concepts for novels that were too big in scale and in scope, I ended up with dozens of different documents that were all attempts at writing the novel, but which failed; as I just said, I ended up a bunch of fragments and the only actual text of my novels were literary collages or composites, if you will, of all those disparate parts; what is interesting in that regard is that the novel itself can take on an indefinite number of forms; that is to say, the separate fragments or pieces can be arranged and rearranged in an indefinite number of ways; the novel, then, is a mutable object; maybe not once it's published, but you know what I mean; it's not written in stone;
- In any event, I think maybe I haven't thought long and hard enough about the design problems/aesthetic problems of my novels, their fictional worlds, places, characters, etc.; it will be interesting to see how the Abstract Characterology develops; I came up with the concept of a book called Esquisses caractérielles or Characterological Sketches in 2007 or thereabouts, but never ended up writing much of anything in the document I had created for it; I can move very slow at times in my art practice; some projects take 20 or more years to even begin to make headway; often I don't even really know what a new project is about until 10-20 years have passed sometimes; I have an intuition about it, though; they are usually based on what I call artistic visions;
- The artistic vision is not like a mystical or religious vision; it is not a theophany, but what I call a historiophany.

- Talking about characters, the mixed media painting above is a portrait of an important character in my early novelistic writings called MAUD or "M.O.D.", a.k.a. "Mother of Dreams"; MAUD came to me as an apparition in a dream when I was in my late teens; she later became a critical part of my novels, starting actually in my Exhibition in Tonal Cinema novellas, and later in the work I did on The History-Project novel; that's why I need to write my Abstract Characterology, because characters like MAUD to me are almost like real beings, real entities; I see them in my conscious mind, fully formed, almost with a mind of their own; I want to write about these characters as they exist in the Author's mind, including a phenomenology of this process in the actual novel as metafiction; the Author inserts himself into the novel; it's an old literary trope that I quite enjoy; the risk of too much metafiction, though, is that your book is largely unreadable; the novel as I keep repeating, has its own aesthetic problem that it is trying to find elegant solutions for, but it shouldn't have to be a massive puzzle that requires all that extra work by readers to even begin unraveling; I believe in showing, not telling through the story; it should be clear, though, where I'm going at every step of the way, while also maintaining a correct dramatic tension;
- As I may or may not have mentioned already, part of the story of The Chronotopium is the characters from previous novels in this series starting to build a system I call Archivillus, which is a personification of the Archive, but also a system that essentially contains every single error or failure or conflict or whatnot from the entirety of human history; it is essentially a massive database of all of these errors, containing as well the many design solutions to said errors; people use Archivillus to solve problems and they - and the machine intelligence - get so good at it that eventually there are no more conflicts or tensions, or any friction, in human life, and so we get the perfect synchrony and other qualities of The Chronotopium; what I was thinking of doing to add dramatic tension was have the Archivillus system simulate a person, like an Outsider Persona if you will, who plays the role of the Skeptical Visitor, with a native citizen of The Chronotopium acting as the Guide, similar to how classical utopias often featured an outsider who arrives in the ideal society and is given a guided tour by an idealized citizen, i.e. Raphael Hythloday in More's Utopia; that way, I could create the necessary tension by telling the story of the Outsider and the Guide; it's just one idea amongst many;
- In any case, that's it for now; I will come back to the subjects of this antilog in future iterations; as I always say, it's a work-in-progress; I will be lucky if I finish even one-tenth of the novels and other projects I want to finish in my lifetime, and even that is being generous; I needed to personify the Archive, though, in the character/system of Archivillus, and I need the Abstract Characterology to explain once and for all, and for future reference, how I come up with fictional characters, also how these characters function in my mind, phenomenologically in the lived experience of writing novels; as for the work I'm doing in my digital archives that I opened this antilog with, the archiving process continues and will continue into the future, as the archival work is an essential part of my interdisciplinary art-research practice; every day I come face to face with the archives; every day I do retrospectives on my work leading up to the present moment; it too is a work-in-progress; one can't possibly log and document - and archive by implication - everything; one must choose what to include, and choose wisely; that much I know is true, that you can't capture everything; it's just not possible; you capture only a fraction of the work, and the rest is essentially "lost to history"; but you can log, document, and archive within the "feasible region", if you will, and come up with "feasible solutions", but never a complete solutions; we're not aiming for the absolute best or optimal choice, but something "good enough", in a process you might call "satisficing"; the archival process is also experimental like my art, and usual satisficing is as good a cognitive heuristic as I can hope for; everything is an experiment, is experimental; that's all for now.