ANTILOG_18July26a

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ANTILOG_18July26a

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2026-07-18 04:44:23

- I wrote last time about an academic paper I was working on which was on THE PHENOMENON OF PAINTING or whatnot; I discovered a book that already does exactly what I was trying to do; it's called THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAINTING, by Nigel Wentworth;
- This kind of threw me off-guard; I was forced to start all over to try to find something worthwhile that I could actually contribute to the field; I wanted to write a phenomenological essay, on painting at first, and then thought maybe I could do it on the artist's workspace; I was going to take a phenomenological view of the Bateau-Lavoir, the space where Picasso had his studio in the early 20th century and many others, "la bande à Picasso" as they are often called, or "Picasso and friends"; I wanted to reconstruct the space with all of its ambient, atmospheric qualities; this proved difficult as I couldn't find enough sources that talked about the actual space qua space; usually it's mostly talked about in terms of Picasso's studio and what he painted while he was living there; his then-girlfriend Fernande Olivier documented a great deal of it, I just haven't gotten around to finishing the book;
- I have been working hard on new pieces of ambient, experimental sound design, which is what I call what I do, even when it's not digital work, like my works for piano and organ and whatnot; it's just what I've always called it; I took a piece of music, a famous, old medieval Gregorian chant known as Dies Irae, took just a section of it and looped it and added virtual instruments; I layered the instruments and then in the final mix, I added the sound of a Blackhawk military helicopter; I called it IN SEARCH OF SATIE: HISTORICAL RESCUE MISSION; as part of my ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM series of sound designs, I created this piece by Satie and several others; I made one with Mussorgsky's Meditation, another with Satie's Gnossienne No. 3; I just created one with Franz Liszt's Totentanz; the idea is a kind of Spectral Music; I take pieces of classical music and make a "re-arrangement", I call it, focusing mainly on the spectral qualities of the piece; I create layer upon layer upon layer of virtual instruments, often with slight effects like reverb, or some slight distorsion; then I work on the actual audio file of this, adding ambient/atmospheric elements, like the sounds of birds singing in the morning for the Gnossienne piece, a crowd of people chatting for the Mussorgsky piece; I plan on continuing this sound design series indefinitely;
- I'm  basically making a form of Sound Collage, but the fact that I focus on spectral qualities, the timbre of the overall sound, plus the extensive use of layering, makes it, I think, into something unique; I am calling them "variations", though they are only really variations in the spectral domain; I am also mostly using samples from the actual music that I loop in FruityLoops; in any case, here is the first piece I made the other day, called IN SEARCH OF SATIE: HISTORICAL RESCUE MISSION, which is a variation on the Dies Irae theme:

- The piece about the Bateau-Lavoir I mentioned above ended up turning into something else, a story about a researcher who finds some old journals written by an "unknown painter" who lived at the time that Picasso was at the Bateau-Lavoir, who actually lived IN the building, but who was entirely lost to history; I named him Gabriel Finch and he was a young Englishman; I also had an idea before that for a book I called The Cubist House which was a kind of comedy about the Bateau-Lavoir, with characters being on these sets with cardboard cut-outs or whatnot, something inspired by my many readings of the novels of William S. Burroughs, who often did the same thing or something similar; a friend of mine I was talking about it with at the time said it would make a great play and they were even willing to volunteer to play a part in it; this was, to me, proof that my idea was a good idea, but the concept behind it kept changing;
- I realize that what I call "design concepts for novels" keep transforming from one concept to another; I start working on a new book and it continuously keeps transforming into something else; I ended up with so many ideas for so many new books that it kind of paralyzed me; that's when I decided it would perhaps best be a selection of short stories, which are much easier to write in many ways, though also in some ways more difficult; the basic idea is that I figured no one would ever really read all my theoretical, philosophical writings, so it was better to "show" it through short fiction and whatnot, painting series, musical series, than to try to "tell" it via said very abstract philosophy;
- The story about the researcher discovering the journals I was tentatively calling THE WASHBOAT PAINTINGS, as the name of the Bateau-Lavoir in English translates to "washboat" or else "laundry boat" is perhaps a more common term; the researcher was actually researching the history in painting of representations of laundry boats/laundry ships when they found the private journals of Gabriel Finch in an old estate sale in London; anyway, I wrote a bunch of stuff and now am kind of moving onto something else, though I don't really know what exactly; I'm more or less working on several other novels I started recently, like THE CHRONOTOPIUM, THE NTH CRUSADE,  a book of short stories that I was talking about called HISTORIOPHANY, and a theoretical book called ABSTRACT CHARACTEROLOGY, which I thought I had talked about on here before, though it appears I haven't yet; the book of short stories, HISTORIOPHANY, is basically made up of stories where the main character has their own unique "historiophanic experience"; the first story, about the researcher finding the journals and whatnot, ends with a mystical-ecstatic experience where the main character has a vision of being in the Bateau-Lavoir, a very bizarre, and of course absurd, visionary experience, kind of like a Surrealist dream; I actually talked a lot to my friend about these recurring dreams I had in my life of this kind of "Cubist Dream-House"; my recent experience at the Abbaye Saint-Benoît-du-Lac had an influence on this idea of characters walking endlessly through the dark corridors of the Bateau-Lavoir; I didn't talk much about that experience on this antilog I don't think, I think I just mentioned it briefly in passing; in any case, it was a pretty powerful experience which I should probably get into at some point, as it has influenced by work a great deal in the last few weeks since I spent the weekend there;
- Here is the second piece I made in the series of sound designs of spectral sound collages of classical music; it is called ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM: MUSSORGSKY'S MEDITATION and is a variation on - you guessed it! - Mussorgsky's Meditation, though I only used the first 25 measures or so, if I remember correctly (Note: I used a field recording of a busy crowd of people talking in the sound collage):

- I was going over my Picasso notes the other day, notes that I began writing 25 years ago when I was studying Picasso's Demoiselles painting and subsequently studying Cubism; I spent two years studying just Picasso's painting and then another two years studying Cubism; I took several hundred pages of notes; this whole project, ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM started last month, give or take, when I started studying modern art again, modernism in particular, and Cubism also more specifically; I made a series of about five Portraits of Picasso, then several Portraits of Erik Satie, which was at the point I started thinking about the concept for a IN SEARCH OF SATIE series; that's what I called the Satie Portraits, which later became the series of musical pieces/sound designs; this was at the time I was working on THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES (of paintings), which I have mentioned here before (I believe I said at one point that the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM project was actually a "subproject" of THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT; here, for the record, is the last piece I published online from the IN SEARCH OF SATIE series of Sound Collages, with the same title as the previous one, it's just version 2.0 ("v.2.0"):

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2026-07-18 06:32:06

- I mentioned above one of my new books which I am calling ABSTRACT CHARACTEROLOGY; I created a new GitHub Repository a short while ago which is dedicated to "Design Concepts for Novelistic Phenomenologies"; the basic premise thus far is that there was a fatal flaw in the system by which I wrote novels, or tried to write novels, over the course of the last 30 years; in the README.md file for this new GitHub Repository, I began writing about the need for having an abstract characterology; here is a short excerpt from that repo:

2026-06-15 14:19:37

One needs to have a complete characterology if one wants to get ahead in life; the behaviors that you will see people engage in around you in your life will never make sense without a proper characterology; each character comes with its own aesthetic/design problem; you need to work out that problem in your head if you ever want to truly understand someone; we ARE "naked problems, white signs on a blackboard", as André Salmon said of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon painting, which is probably, or so they say, the work of art that has been most written about after the Mona Lisa.

- I've actually been working on the characterology for a while, at least in some form I've been working on it for decades; it has to do with the phenomenology of the novel or novelistic phenomenology itself insofar as it involves the creation of authentic characters; my characters are an extension of myself in many ways; anyhow, I want to build this characterology from the ground up and deal with these many "design concepts" for novels in a formal way, and phenomenologically; here is a slightly longer citation from my recent writings in the NOVELS REPOSITORY on GitHub where I talk more about the problem and problematique which is at the heart of the novels but also which is the foundation for each and every character I create:

2026-07-15 18:54:23

- The abstract characterology has to do with defining each character's problem space which is connected with a solution space in that the P-Space generates the S-Space;
- A novel is just one of many possible "elegant solutions to aesthetic problems", to the aesthetic problem at the heart of the novel; so the story is an elegant solution to an aesthetic problem and each character also has another type of aesthetic problem linked to them; even the settings pose yet another kind of problem; everything is problematic, the novel is a problematique;
- As I said, the characters also have their own unique problems, one or more per character; usually the character actually also has, and is, a problematique, a (meta-)system of problems; the characters are what I like to call naked problems, they are walking, talking problems.
- The "character-as-problem" is also the "character-as-hypothesis";
- The character "makes a testable and reproducible prediction about reality", about its own reality as fictional object and device in the novel;
- The Novel-as-a-System is first and foremost a system; it has parts, moving parts, components, that are "nodes" in a complex network, connected by "interactions" between these parts, or the network's "edges";
- The character "interacts" with the fictional universe, with its objects and places and with other characters, and interacts as well with the Author's mind and the "mental furniture" that inhabit his mental space (of ideas);
- The metafictional character is self-aware, is aware of his existence as object, or subject, of fiction; he has sensations, feelings, and thoughts, and is always moving; in this way, the character is a "moving target" for the Author, is never quite where he's supposed to be, is always getting stuck in the margins, in the periphery.

- That's it for now; I want to get into some of the metafictional elements for my new stories and new novels, stuff that I've been working out in my head; as I was saying, the design concepts for all of these things keep transforming continuously in my imagination; it's hard to even put it down on paper at the speed that I experience the invention of new narrative material; I do my best, but a lot of it I can't quite capture just yet; I am really experiencing the novelistic phenomenology more than ever; I've been writing about it for at least 25 years, if not longer, but it feels like I am only now just experiencing it at a deep level; I always experienced it as I worked on my novels, but now it has really been formalized and integrated in a way that essentially was maybe not possible before; one lives and one learns, and this whole Art Operation of mine is always a work in progress;
- I leave you for now with one of the works I made in my series of Picasso Portraits as part of the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM "subproject" as I called it; it is pencil on paper and meant to look as though it were a Transfiguration of Picasso:

ANTILOG_13July26a

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ANTILOG_13July26a

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2026-07-13 05:45

- I've been pretty productive lately even though I haven't written any antilogs; I've been working on a few projects, have been painting a series for a project which I already mentioned called THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT, which also consists of a new novel called THE CHRONOTOPIUM: A STORY OF ALGORITHMOGENESIS; another project I start back in the spring is called ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM; within that project, I've worked on a series of paintings as well as some music and a new piece I am trying to write on PAINTING-AS-PHENOMENON or THE PHENOMENON OF PAINTING, which is what it sounds like, a phenomenological approach to making a painting, which I'm trying to formulate as an actual academic paper;
- I also started working on a model I'm calling Operative Historiography which is a new approach to art history and art historography; the idea is to focus on art movements "from the inside", is an endogenous approach rather than an exogenous one, which would be a study of art movements "from the outside"; basically, I want to use my expertise in the studio arts to try to interpret art movements, styles, genres, etc., from the perspective of the artists who worked in studios, from the perspective again of the actual work in their actual workspaces; I find that art history and art historiography tend to just list facts and also often plain anecdotal histories, but never really talk about the actual workspaces and the experimentation that occurs there; to me, this is almost entirely lacking in these disciplines and my new Operative Historiography is seeking to fill that gap;
- For the phenomenological essay on the art of painting, I recorded several audio recordings of myself actually starting a painting, trying to log everything in meticulous detail, from the perspective of the actual lived experience of painting; I then took those recordings and listened to them on the computer; then I had them transcribed by an AI service called audionotes; then I fed those into Gemini and asked it to turn the audio notes into a more formal essay-structure, asking it to make it of a particularly phenomenological variety; then I took some of that and created a robotic voice in FruityLoops and made the voice read out a bunch of that text, accompanied by original music; I created a .wav file with that piece of sound design and listened to it; then I went back to the actual painting;
- I realized that this approach of conversion if you will, from one format to another, from one medium to another, one discipline to another, is at the very heart of what I do as an interdisciplinary artist-researcher; it's here that I launched another project tentatively called THE METAMORPHOSIS-PROJECT, though that name already exists for various projects online, meaning I may need to call it something else, may just call it simply METAMORPHOSES; the basic concept is the concept of how art to me is essentially that, it is made up of transformations, metamorphoses; I don't know why I never thought of it in this way before, because that's really what it is; in the phenomenology of a painting, that's what I realized; I realized also that what I engage in is really a refinement process; I could just sit down and write an essay on the phenomenology of painting, but instead, I take audio notes, I transcribe them, I feed them into AI, I have a robotic voice read it out with music, I keep transforming the basic data into other forms, other formats, across many disciplines; it's almost akin to a kind of data transformation as well as a form of data wrangling;
- Last month, I think it was, I was working on a series of portraits within the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM series; I made maybe 5 different portraits of Pablo Picasso, another 4 or 5 portraits of Erik Satie, a portrait of Maria Callas, a few other portraits; here is one of the final versions of my portraits of Satie, which will be a subseries within the series of the ANATOMY project; I am calling my works on the subject of Satie, IN SEARCH OF SATIE, which include and will continue to include works of music inspired by his work, or actual renditions of his work in my ambient, experimental style of sound design:

- I'm planning on making an entire series of collages like this, not merely of Satie, but of all sorts of other people, including some self-portraits; the art of portraiture is something I've been doing all my life, mainly self-portraits since I never really had anyone who could sit for me as a model; I was once told to stop making portraits as my portraits were not good; I took that as a reason to keep making portraits, to even up the ante on the portrait-making enterprise; whenever I receive negative criticism like that, when someone tells me I SHOULD NOT do something in my art practice, I do the exact opposite of what they said; often I have been told that working on cardboard is bad because pieces of cardboard are worthless; I started almost always working on cardboard and have since made hundreds of works on cardboard which are all in my archives; we'll see what is valuable in the end, whether my pieces of cardboard are "worthless" when I'm in my 70s or 80s, should I be lucky enough to live that long; here is another portrait in the same style:

- I've been taking long morning walks every day or almost every day; these are my morning constitutionals and I like to take photographs, make audio recordings, or else videos of myself giving short discourses; I have also done some urban sketching of the Old Village & environs; these are meditative walks in nature much of the time, in the cemetery or on the bike path which are in a natural setting; sometimes, though, I'm just walking around the Old Village, which is very small, but full of so many beautiful scenes; every walk reveals new aspects of the Village that I had never seen before; I especially love the colors in the early morning light, everything seemingly being bathed in a light that has a blueish tint to it;
- I've also continued making my field recordings of what I call Atmospheric Tone; it's the sound of an ambient space outside the studio which I find gives me a "moral temperature reading" I like to call it; for me, these especially in the early morning give me a kind of "temperature" as I just said, of what the day is going to look like, what the workday also will look like;
- I've also worked on many new concepts in my Historiomics framework, which is kind of a fictional pseudo-science which I invented for a series of novels I was working on, something I had the characters talk about in their dialogue; THE CHRONOTOPIUM novel is actually the third instalment in a series which is going to be a trilogy; the first two novels in the series were THE HISTORY-PROJECT and THE ARCHIVES-PROJECT novels; my new novel-writing enterprises have led me to work on a document I am calling ABSTRACT CHARACTEROLOGY, which is a characterology in the style let's say of a Reichian characterology, except it's abstract; in essense, it has to do with all of the characterological sketches that I've made over the course of my 30-year career as an author of fiction; the same basic characters keeping coming back around, keep haunting my consciousness; I want to also build up an actual characterology which will define and describe these abstract characters; I discovered that a fictional character is basically a kind of "naked problem", that each character is defined in large part by an aesthetic problem; the development of the character in the prose is really just trying to "find elegant solutions to (the) aesthetic problems";
- I've also been working on an Important Update to my Official Declaration of Production-Year 2028-2029, which I published not too long ago, back around the middle of May; I also want to add an Important Update to the new Official Release of The Historiotheque which I published last month, I think it was; I'm always working on these two types of documents, the Official Declarations and Official Releases; they are fundamental documents in my practice that aim to make my work dependable, as I always stick strictly to what I've said in those two documents, which I publish regularly; I generally only make on Declaration document per year, and publish Official Releases whenever there have been minor or major changes, or just patches, in The Historiotheque as Cultural Software;
- I've been thinking of writing a new kind of document I want to call a Prospective (not to be confused with a "Prospectus", though it may resemble this in some ways); for instance, I want to write a document called something like Prospective 2027-2037 or something like that where I go over the "prospects" of what this period should in theory be characterized by in my art practice; these documents will differ somewhat from the Official Declarations of Production-Year in that they will not necessarily consist of the "forward-looking statements for potential future stakeholders" that the Official Declarations consist of; no, the Prospective documents will be more of a general possible timeline or trajectory that the practice might potentially follow; I will paint the "big lines", like the "arcs", not necessarily specific projects I should be working on in that period, as it's kind of impossible for me to tell you what I'll be doing in 2037, as I'm not even sure I'll still be painting then and doing my art-research, or whether I'll even be alive (though I also don't know that I'll be alive in Production-Year 2028-2029); in any case, I'm working on design concepts for these Prospectives;
- I've also continued to write and record music and sound design; I've been recording compositions for piano and organ as part of my Seasons of The Heart Project, which as I've repeated endlessly, is a year-long secular liturgical song-cycle; it is meant to contain hundreds of musical pieces to accompany people all through the year, with music for any and ideally everything situation one might find oneself in; often they have to do with specific moments in the day and in that sense are kind of a form of usical haiku; I'm not exactly a Zen artist, though there are definitely some similarities in a lot of my musical work, which tends these days to be pretty simple and minimalistic; here is a piece I wrote a while back called Solitude, a version of which I recorded recently on the piano; this one, however, is less for the Seasons of The Heart Project and more for a new album I've been working on of late, called DAYBREAK:

2026-07-13 08:30

- As mentioned in the above, I've worked out some new concepts for my Historiomics framework; I've given myself the permission to ask Gemini to provide short definitions of the concepts; I gave it several pages of my own original notes on these concepts which I have written over the last week or so and asked it to extract their definitions; I try not to publish content generated by AI without any interventions, but am making an exception now because it is much quicker than trying to define them myself, though I do know what the terms mean; anyway I think this will do just fine for now, until I can sit down and write more about the specifics of the concepts I've invented;
- Also, a note on the use of neologisms in my work; I only began inventing my own terms in my philosophical writings when I came across concepts that had no name in any of the source materials that I have studied and researched; if there were existing concepts and terms that refer to them, I absolutely would have used those; I would have preferred using existing terms, but as I said, since there were none, I had to invent them; at the same time, I've been trying to limit my use of all of these "historio-" terms, and even don't really like speaking in terms of "Historiomics" anymore, as a fictional pseudo-science from my trilogy of novels; in any case, here is a list of the new concepts and their definitions, generated via machine intelligence:

 1. Historiomania

• Definition: An obsessive, compulsive over-investment in historical narrative to construct collective identity.

• Dynamic: The Primary Inflation of historical consciousness, where a society ceases to view the past as a messy sequence of cause and effect and instead elevates it into a sacred, immutable myth. It directly fuels ultranationalism.

2. Autohistoriophilia

• Definition: The narcissistic idealization, adoration, and idolization of one’s own personal or national lineage.

• Dynamic: The Secondary Inflation stemming from historiomania. It is the personalized psychological vanity that blinds an individual or culture to their own historical flaws, rewriting the past as a flawless epic of self-justification.

3. Historiophobia

• Definition: An acute, paralyzing dread of history, characterized by the existential anxiety that the past is an inescapable prison or an unappeasable judge.

• Dynamic: The psychological retreat from time. It represents the terror of a false historiophany, where the weight of historical trauma and accumulated guilt paralyzes a culture's ability to act creatively in the present.

4. Historioclasm

• Definition: The violent, destructive impulse to physically smash, erase, or reset the historical record in a desperate bid for liberation.

• Dynamic: The active, behavioral climax of historiophobia. It is a radical attempt to "murder the ghost" of the past, often manifesting as cultural iconoclasm or the forced implementation of a fictitious "Year Zero."

5. Historiophany (True vs. False / Logopathic)

• True Historiophany: A healthy, grounded revelation of historical truth; an open, clear-eyed reckoning with the past that brings wisdom and integration.

• False / Logopathic Historiophany: A delusional, haunting manifestation of history that feels profoundly "wrong." Like the Uncanny Valley, it occurs when a culture interacts with a sterile, automated, or propagandized simulation of the past—a dead narrative artificially reanimated to control the present.

6. The Phantom

• Definition: The raw, unmediated, and unhealed trauma of time passing without meaning.

• Dynamic: When history is stripped of its healthy teleology (the hopeful belief that we are progressing toward something better), it curdles into a ghoulish specter. It is the terrifying realization of infinite, empty temporality—manifesting as a "shrieking voice over the dark hills" that haunts a culture with the sheer weight of its forgotten dead.

- I think that today I will go print out some materials at the library since I the cartridge for my new printer has run empty; it's expensive to replace and doesn't print out even remotely the number of pages it says it's supposed to print out; I think it said it should be able to print something like 1600 pages and it only printed a small fraction of that; so that's why I'm going to print things out at the library instead, even though it costs 25 cents per copy, which is an exorbitant price;
- I also want to work some more on my PHEMONENON OF PAINTING piece; I will start a new painting and go through every step of the process, moment-to-moment, in meticulous detail, from a the phenomenological perspective of the "lived experience of painting"; I realized that I was in a kind of state of apprehension before the painting the other day when I did a first pass on the phenomenology of painting work; I was at the canvas, or piece of cardboard in this case, and I came face to face with the "problem", what I called the "naked problem" of painting; there was a certain feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty, that sort of thing; I want to call it a "problematique", it's just it's of an aesthetic kind;
- I also have some new pieces of music for piano and organ that I want to turn into videos and post to YouTube, which I will then post on social media and potentially in this antilog or the next one in coming days or weeks; there is also THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES of paintings that I have continued to work on since my last antilog which I want to write about, share the actual paintings as well; I am on painting no. #009 in the series; the series is coming out nicely and has been marked by a nice divergence, meaning that the series itself has diverged, both physically as a work and as a concept also, the concept of the series; it's great to be able to witness this first-hand, how a series develops over time, how it diverges, converges, everything; I just hope I can turn it all into a phenomenological essay; I will try and we'll see where it goes from here; I have a lot of documentation to do about all that I have talked about today on this antilog; I find the whole process of continuous review/continuous adversarial review as well as what I call the "logging, documenting, and archiving" process or practice, is an excruciating, paint-staking process; it really does go at the speed of words, which has an important bottleneck, since it is a process of "reducing", if you will, a high-dimensional experience into an essentially 1-dimensional medium, of writing; as I worked on the phenomenology of painting the other day, I came to see the painting really as a kind of "unveiling" or else a "revelation"; essentially, I am only a witness to this unveiling and revelation, what I have come to call a "primary historiophany"; there are also "secondary" and "tertiary" historiophanies in my model which I am tentatively calling Operative Historiography, an endogenous form, distinguishing/differentiating itself from a more exogenous form of historiography; actually, I was reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 1945 essay, "Cézanne's Doubt" from his work "Sense and Non-Sense", which is considered a foundational text of phenomenological aesthetics, and was seeing how my work differs from his; I will be returning to Merleau-Ponty's essay, though, in my own work of what could essentially be considered a similar form of phenomenological aesthetics;
- Moreover, I've been making countless observations of nature, of the external world, especially the world outside my studio, The Historiotheque; these days it mostly has to do with color; I have a close collaborator who has been a visual artist/painting for like 70 years and we've talked about color a great deal over the years; his observations on color harmony have helped me a great deal in my practice; I notice now that I maybe hadn't developed that aspect in my practice, even though I've been painting for the past 30 years; color to me is subjective, in the sense that I attach certain emotions, if you will, to color, my own meanings; when I paint, when I mix color I mean, I do it in an intuitive manner; I should maybe say color is intuitive for me and not necessarily subjective, intuitive being a better term to express/communicate what I mean; this is all going into my PHENOMENON OF THE ARTIST'S WORKSPACE/PHENOMENON OF PAINTING work, which essentially is part of my ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM project, which I maybe already mentioned in the above.

2026-07-13 15:51

- I went to the library to print out some documents I needed in physical form to really dig into them, be able to highlight important passages; I then read through them when I got back home, taking ample notes; after that, I started researching for my PHENOMENON OF PAINTING essay, trying to break down what I need to do exactly, how to structure it, what source materials to use as reference materials or #Refmats; So far, I've got severa key texts by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre that I need to read, some others, especially by Mikel Dufrenne ("The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience") and Nigel Wentworth ("The Phenomenology of Painting"); I also am finding Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei's book, "The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature" is really relevant to what I'm trying to do phenomenologically, with my concept of historiophany and all that; I have 20 or so books I want to read for this project, though I will start writing the actual essay long before I read all of these works, going on what I've already researched on the subject; the critical idea here is that I do something unique, that I contribute something to the field, to the discourse, even if it's not necessarily earth-shattering, visionary genius;
- In any case, I find that I really have my work cut out for me on this particular project, which technically is a subproject of the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM project, which in many ways is maybe more of a Program than a Project; I can maybe get into that later, the Program/Project link in my art-research practice (TL;DR => I am in the process of attempting to organize my dozens of projects into separate "programs" that advance the strategic aims of The Art Operation at The Historiotheque);
- Before I go on to do some of the reading I need to do for the PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAINTING, here is a piece of music I wrote recently after witnessing a sparrow die in mid-flight and crash onto the street, right before my eyes; I decided to write a piece of music that became a kind of REQUIEM for it, though it is somewhat joyful in mood; it wasn't a REQUIEM outright, it was meant as A PRAYERFUL MORNING PAUSE and designed as light; it was an afterthought, though, that the prayerful part had to do with what I witnessed and could be a REQUIEM, though sometimes a song is just a song and doesn't have a deeper meaning; here it is in any case:

ANTILOG_01July26a

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ANTILOG_01July26a

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2026-07-01 06:30

- I just ran a new experiment for my old project from over a decade ago called the "WHITE POINT PROJECT", which I have written a good deal about in this antilog; I took a photograph of my wall, then added a box on the right side where I incuded two hues that I sampled from it that I considered to be the two main colors I could see with my eye, in said image; I then wrote a text called "ÉTUDE ON ATMOSPHERICS OF THE INTERIOR", where I go into more details on the specifics of the experiment and how it connects to my "WHITE POINT PROJECT", whose objective is to try to get people to start to observe and notice subtle changes in the colors of surfaces in interior settings in order, I hope, to deepen their appreciation of the poetic quality of these ambient spaces they inhabit; here are the labnotes I just took after running the experiment and posting all of it online; I keep the labnotes on my antilog because I don't think they are necessarily all that interesting for the average person; the text I shared, alongside the picture, is all anyone really needs to know; here are the labnotes:

2026-07-01 12:54

- I ended up making another field recording of Atmospheric Tone, turning it into a video, publishing it on YouTube, and sharing it on all my social media sites, or most of them; I am going to try to keep making these semi-regularly; I think it's an important addition to my daily practice; I know that most people won't "get" it, but if I only produced art and research that people "get", I wouldn't be very prolific;
- I also just recorded another video discourse and published it again on YouTube; it is called "THE LUMINOUS HISTORIOTOPE: THE UNIVERSE AS SELF-INSCRIBING CANVAS"; I presented it as either a neo- or a post-Einsteinian vision or revolution; the idea was to take my new Atmospherics Theory and present it as "earth-shattering", as much as Einstein's theories changed the way the world viewed the universe and everything in it; it was meant to be similar to Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution;
- Last weekend, I was at the Abbaye Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, spending my days in silence and solitude; I had many powerful experiences that continue several days after I left the Abbaye and I predict will continue to inhabit me, shaping the direction of the next several months and even years;
- I now have a much better design concept for my new novel, The Chronotopium; I wrote the following abstract if you will the other day as part of the process of really developing the design concept for the novel:

The novel is called "THE CHRONOTOPIUM: A STORY OF ALGORITHMOGENESIS" and has to do with our civilization in the future where civilization is backed up and built upon a massive, planet-wide computer system called ARCHIVILLUS, which is basically the personification of a massive distributed database which holds the "complete human archive" going back to pre-hominid times, an archive that contains all of the errors and failures and whatnot, conflicts, historiopathies and the rest, that have ever occurred on planet earth, on what is called "The Historiosphere". It is used to ensure that "The Chronotopium" continues to run smoothly. Why it's called The Chronotopium is that there are really no more conflicts among humans, they are running perfectly smoothly, everything is in perfect order and perfectly synchronized. They are more like an "eusocial species" like ants or whatnot. Everything is governed by the laws of sacred geometry, and it is a "temporal utopia" if you will, where all "chronosystems" are perfectly aligned and in sync. Why it's a story or book of "Algorithmogenesis" is that long before the current status of the world founded on the ARCHIVILLUS SYSTEM and running in perfect synchrony everywhere all the time, humans began to change fundamentally as a species. They began becoming more and more engaged in procedural generation, in the use of machine intelligence for everything. Unbeknownst to them, they were in the process of becoming what we call "algorithmic beings". Algorithmic being presents itself to society as a kind of "global historiophany" and the process just accelerates from that point on. There are no unclean spirits, no contamination of the mind, no one has any trauma, there is no intergenerational trauma left, everything is clean, and the action in the novel runs as smoothly as ARCHIVILLUS in keeping everything perfectly in check.

- And here is the video I mentioned above, "THE LUMINOUS HISTORIOTOPE: THE UNIVERSE AS SELF-INSCRIBING CANVAS"; I will get into the conceptual framework I am using for this, which is all part of a new project called "THE CHRONOTOPIUM", which includes a novel by the same name that I've been working on full-time at this point after my very inspiring trip to the Abbaye Saint-Benoit-du-Lac:

2026-07-01 14:51

- I kind of had an interruption, or I wouldn't call it that exactly, call it inspiration; I ended up making some other videos, two of them, the first being a video of me taking apart a cardboard box while reflecting on The History-Project which I actually started almost 25 years ago; the second video is of me actually doing the first pass as I call it, on a new painting in a new painting series for THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT, as I am now calling it; essentially, it's what I call a "history-machine"; before I get further into that, though, I want to share with you the Atmospheric Tone field recording I made earlier this morning, just for the record/for future reference:

2026-07-01 16:14

- In passing, I just realized that at least one group of artists already used the name Chronotopium for one of their projects; since they can't copyright the term, since it is essentially the term Chronotope just with a different ending, and they can't copyright Chronotope, I am taking the liberty to keep using the name for my new novel and the new project which houses that novel; if ever there are copyright issues, I will just change it to THE CHRONOTOPE-PROJECT and then no one can ever say anything, since that's a term used in the work of Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin; I may just switch it to that anyway just in case;
- In any case, I just recorded a few other videos as I was saying and now they are online; here is the first, called "OVERTURE TO THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT":

- The video I just posted above is just me taking a cardboard box apart and talking about my interdisciplinary art-research project, The History-Project, which I started almost exactly 25 years ago; I go into some details on the process that led to the project, where I had just moved to the NDG borough of Montreal, Quebec, and needed to keep painting not to lose what I call operational continuity; I needed canvases so I took apart the boxes I had just moved into our new place and painted on the cardboard; I have been told many times that I shouldn't paint on cardboard because my paintings are valueless, because cardboard is valueless; I think I painted almost solely on cardboard after I was first told that; you can't force me to do anything, the more you try, the more I will do the opposite; here is the second video in this series, this time, on "THE BIRTH OF THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES" where I do an actual demonstration of how I work on my mixed media pieces with collage elements nowadays; what I find hilarious, hilarious to me anyway, is that all these artists nowadays are making videos of themselves painting or else showing the inside of their massive, luxurious art studios and I'm making these shitty little videos in my kitchen taking apart cardboard boxes and painting on "valueless cardboard"; I'll show them; this is how you create original art, isolated from the universe, in what I like to call "a crucible of hellfire":

- And here is the first official painting of THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES; I may just keep it at this for today's antilog; I could go into much finer detail on everything that I did today, everything that transpired in The Historiotheque and outside it too; I just want to keep it short and sweet for today, and anyway it's already been quite long; I'm still just getting acclimated again to life outside the Abbaye; I have a lot of work to do, lots of writing, I have an incredible amount of reading to do, reading too; so many books to read, things to write, and now an entirely new series of paintings to paint;
- I was already working on a new series of paintings, mostly portraits, before I took my weekend trip this weekend; I will be continuing those too; that project was called "ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM" and had a lot to do with the work of Walter Benjamin, his Arcades Project as well as his writings on Surrealism; also I was just going over works by modernist authors as well, and painters, where I took up my Cubism studies after an almost 25-year hiatus, as I was saying above; that series can run concurrently with this new series; the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM I guess is a subproject of THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT, part of the research that is going into it, that is going to be the foundation it's founded on; the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLLEM also includes a lot of music I need to write for piano, organ, and orchestra; more on that soon, as I will be making some ambient, experimental sound design, possibly tonight, but in the coming weeks, and recording more and more pieces of piano and organ for my Seasons of The Heart Project; to conclude at least for now, if not for today, here is the first official CHRONOTOPE-PAINTING; much will need to be written on the subject, and I think for now at least I will call it THE CHRONOTOPE-PROJECT and only mention the actual Chronotopium in the novel itself, which is fictional, so no one can stop me from using any term I want in a fictional novel:

ANTILOG_25June26a

 

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ANTILOG_25June26a

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2026-06-25 00:32:26

- I wrote a pretty extensive antilog post yesterday on this blog; I went over everything I did since I started my official Spring Retrospective a few days ago; I had already begun doing a retrospective of May, 2026, at some point in June, I can't remember the exact date;
- This latest experiment in logging, documenting, and archiving has been extremely fruitful, fruitful for my art-research practice as well as for myself personally; it permitted me to go deep into the archives and make all sorts of amazing discoveries; I also feel that I was able to process some more difficult periods in my life in the last several decades of professional activity; I tend to focus only on my work and workspace in what I publish online, but it remains true that I am an individual at the heart of it all, I am a person; I go through my own "seasons", and they aren't always jolly or what I have been calling "Seasons of Joyful Being";
- As far as the archives are concerned, the next phase in its development will be to implement better standards, actual professional standards in archival practice; that is, I want to improve the way I create filenames, also I might be changing the format of my timestamps so I can order lists of files in an optimal way; I am creating these "filelist_YYYY-MM-DD.txt" files which I include now in my important file folders; these lists are organized so that the "filelist" has more recent items at the top, older ones at the bottom, and I show the filename followed by "Date modified"; that's all I really need to know to be able to "reconstruct the timeline" of when I created those files; that way I can easily search for the timestamps of any given work that I may want to refer back to in writings, or in video discourses, or whatnot; I also will try to include a kind of improvized "data dictionary" in my folders that describe the formats that I am using; more on this at a later time.

2026-06-25 02:20:20

- I have written quite a bit about my Atmospheric Tone field recordings; below, I am embedding the latest of these that I have published on YouTube since the last ones I referred to here in recent antilogs; I continue to work out my Atmospherics Theory; at the moment, I am working out the actual theory, what it is trying to say, what problem it is tackling, what the "job" is that it does; it has a lot to do with my fieldwork/field recordings, but also to just a conception of work and life in terms of atmospheres, of the overall "World of Sound" I call it, of any given ambient space;
- I realized the other day that every location has a unique environmental soundscape that changes constantly minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and at other time scales; so at any given, specific location and time of day, you get a unique sound; the birds, for instance, are in different numbers, of different species; the time of day matters, are the birds feeding or just socializing?; season or time of year matters as well, are they in their respective mating seasons?; also, it matters what the environing sounds are, the human sounds, called "anthrophony"/"anthropophony", or non-biological, earth-generated sounds, called "geophony"; the different ambient spaces in ecological terms are niches and every niche has a unique sound, and all the unique "soundmarks" if you will, create the "music of the environment", as a kind of musical composition; I got this from R. Murray Schafer, I believe, the "world soundscape"; here is one of my latest Atmospheric Tone field recordings:

- The second Atmospheric Tone recording I want to share with you was recorded a little further up the hill than strictly the Old Village; I was on my way to a family member's place to bring them the newspaper and some bottles of water and had to wait a few minutes before the grocery store opened, so I found it an opportune moment to make a fresh, new field recording;
- Atmospherics Theory treats of many subjects, one of which to me is of critical importance and relevance to my interdisciplinary art-research practice, namely, the fact that our inward space has its own "atmosphere" with a unique "atmospheric tone", similar to the ambient spaces I visit outside the studio/laboratory; also, the inner milieu connects directly to the outside one in that we are completely immersed in the "World of Sound"; our hearing is not like our vision in that you are not hearing the sound of the environment as though from a distant point of view; you are not like a observer observing with a sort of distance, I don't know how else to say it; the sound is immediate, the acoustic environment is immediate; the concept though is that inner and outer world connect and form a single atmosphere I call a "multi-space"; more on this at a later time; in any case, here is the second Atmospheric Tone video:

- The latest video I just finished uploading to YouTube is basically an overview of summaries of the transcripts of my previous 13 or more video discourses; it is called "Hyperreflexive Design Retrospective: Spring, 2026"; I will be using these types of "Retrospective Videos" in the future as part of my documentation practice, what I call The New Documentation, which I will try to get into at some point in future antilogs; this is all becoming an integral part of my continuous review process, with what I have otherwised called Hyperreflexive Design; it's part of the "hyperreflexive" aspect of the basic methodology;

2026-06-25 22:57:22

- I was able to download my data for the Google Keep app using Google Takeout; I was therefore able to extract all the text from the Keep notes that I created in March, April, May, and June thus far; then I created PDFs of each and uploaded them into a Gemini conversational thread where I asked it to give me detailed, thorough, and in depth summaries of the contexts of the documents I uploaded; then I copied all of those summaries into separate text files; now I have yet another "time series" or "timeline" of documents I produced last Spring, 2026, that I can use as I continue with my Spring Retrospective for Spring, 2026; in any case, I have mostly already done my Spring Retrospective, with the summaries I created of the video transcripts of all my video discourses since the beginning of May, 2026, as well as the video discourse I recorded and published, which I included in this anilog above;
- On another note, I realized the other day that I suffer from what is called Low Latent Inhibition (LLI), which "is a cognitive trait where the brain filters fewer environmental stimuli, causing individuals to continuously process a larger volume of irrelevant sensory and mental information." (Ref. AI OVERVIEW). It also said that "Depending on a person's intelligence and environment, it can lead to either heightened creativity or severe sensory overload." [Ref. "AI OVERVIEW"];
- This explains why I can never stop hearing and how my hearing and my brain's auditory centers are constantly analyzing ALL SOUND that comes through my ears; it's why I can't ignore the sound when people are talking and how I can't concentrate on anything when I hear human speech, even often when it's just the lyrics to songs playing on my speaker, computer, or radio; even when I'm in a room or hall or whatnot with lots of people talking, I hear every single conversation as though separately, but all combined into a single AUDIO STREAM that my brain also processes at a very high level; I suppose that my brain just doesn't have any FILTERS when it comes to the overall audio stream coming through my senses, or what I like to call the "World of Sound";
- I can also concur that in my case it leads to "heightened creativity" though a lot of the time, it also can lead to "severe sensory overload"; in any case, it mostly seems to be with my hearing, my sight doesn't tend to be that way, though sometimes it is in "episodes" that I have called "visual disturbances" or VDs; that's when I see absolutely every single detail in the visual field, stuff that the average person and even myself the rest of the time don't see; I literally see the "reality pixels" as I used to call them when I was working on writing my Exhibition in Tonal Cinema novellas;
- This all fits into my Atmospherics Theory in a powerful way, as it explains why I am so attentive to and aware of the "atmospheric tone" that I keep talking about; more on this at a later date.

ANTILOG_24June26a

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ANTILOG_24June26a

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2026-06-24 02:46:12

- I've been doing an official "Spring Retrospective", a retrospective of the past season of art production and research; that is, I've been going over the "archives", trying to see what I've been doing exactly in The Historiotheque over the course of this past Spring; I went over the logs & documentation, trying to figure out what actually happened, trying to "reconstruct the timeline"; the main objective or purpose of this kind of seasonal retrospective is to find hidden gemstones in the archive;
- I must say that I have found many from this period, which was extremely productive and prolific; I will get to that in a bit; first, during this process, I had many realizations about why I've been doing all this logging, documenting, and archiving over the course of the last few decades; sometimes it seems like complete overkill, as you can surely see in my previous antilogs where I am meticulously going from a physical notebook, to Refcards (index cards) where I transcribed content from something I just printed out, then taking the Refcards to another workstation and transcribing those into a text editor or note-taking application, then starting the process all over again; also, I compulsively timestamp everything; I have been reaping the rewards, though, of this methodology which at this point is integral to my interdisciplinary art-research practice;
- I realized that, when doing a major retrospective such as this, every season or so, I can do a retrospective of just one specific medium; that is, I can view the archive from different angles; for example, yesterday in the process of doing the retrospective of last spring, I looked at the 13 videos of discourses on my Art Operation that I made since the beginning of May and posted on YouTube; I copied out all the transcripts and used AI to write detailed summaries of each; I printed them out and went to the main desk to read them and highlight salient points; then I tried to reconstruct the timeline of events during this period, connecting each video to other works in other mediums that I was working on at the same time, artworks as well as research; I did a separate "micro-retrospective" of all the paintings and drawings I made in the same period, again trying to connect the different logs together, the time series, if you will, or sequence of videos, paintings, and other media;
- Going through this process of trying to reconstruct the time series of all my creations and research for Spring, 2026, showed how these different series across different disciplines and media, are like "interwoven streams"/"interweaving streams"; I saw this as a kind of faceted approach as well, of separating out each stream, then recombining them, separating and recombining; I saw the aesthetic truth, if I can use such a term, of the hyperreflexive design practice, of hyperreflexive design retrospectives;
- One of the goals of this was to make a new video discourse called "Hyperreflexive Design Retrospective: Spring, 2026", which I still plan on doing, where I actually go through the contents of all my previous videos, going back at least as far as the beginning of May, 2026; the reason I was starting my retrospective in May was that in the Spring before that, I was still in a prolonged fallow period which started in winter in November or December, 2025; it was a very long winter of much less activity in the studio/labs than my usual levels of high productivity;
- In any case, I came to realize that not only is my art practice an intermedia practice, but my documentation is also; I had many realizations just in one day of officially doing a seasonal review, which I started because Summer just started; I found that the method of continuous review was necessary to feel the "rhythm" and "pulse" of history and ride the "wave(s) of History" too;
- I then looked at some of the previous posts that I made on my Historiotheque account on Medium, my "Unofficial Release"/"Soft Release" from May 1, 2026, and my latest "Official Release", semantic version 5.0.0. from May 21, 2026; I am actually preparing to write another Official Release of The Historiotheque, of the art studio/research lab treated, as always, as Cultural Software; so I was trying to reconstruct the timeline, went over the video transcripts since May, 2026, then looked at my paintings and drawings since May also, and as I said, I looked at my various releases, including my Official Declaration of Production-Year 2028-2029 that I published on May 18, 2026; then I started looking at my notes in my notebook over the same period as well as my notes in the Google Keep app, which I always timestamp, or try to; actually, some of the paintings and drawings were never timestamped, which caused a bit of a problem; but I usually always take a photograph of my visual art right after I finish it, when I set it aside to observe it for a while; I take a photo at that point and all the photographs on my phone are timestamped; you can see it in the photo's metadata;
- This helps greatly in reconstructing the time series/timeline; another thing, though, was that in looking over my physical notebooks, I noticed that one of them was either lost or misplaced; I looked absolutely everywhere for it, like 4-5 times over, I searched through my filing cabinets and every corner of my studio/laboratory where it possibly could have been tucked away or else fallen behind something, in the cracks between two pieces of furniture or whatnot, but to no avail; then I realized that my documentation/archiving system is founded in part on the principle of redundancy; as it turns out, it's possible for me to lose an entire notebook and not lose any important content from it, as I had already copied out the salient points onto index cards (Refcards) and copied the contents of those Refcards onto my computer in two places, a file called LOG_2026.txt where I log absolutely everything, and in my note-taking app on my computer and my phone (I use Google Keep);
- In essence, I can reconstruct the NOTEBOOK itself; on the subject of that notebook, though, I distinctly remember hiding a few of my notebooks in the filing cabinets somewhere in I don't know what, a flight of fancy, in an altered state from continuously reviewing everything, the logs, documentation, archives, etc.; when I reach a "culmination-point" or "saturation-point" in the hyperreflexive design practice, I often am in an altered state, which is actually conducive to the kind of work I do, which can be extremely abstract and "heavy-duty" in terms of cognition and whatnot; the work requires a great deal of attention to detail and the meticulous, systematic application of principles and methodologies; but yesterday, I proved the NECESSITY AND UTILITY of these practices;
- The redundancy is a necessary part, a fundamental, integral part of the design practice, and even though as I just said, I am meticulous and sytematic in my implementation of it, there are still holes and fatal flaws in the system; what I saw was that I officially formalized the nonlinear practice in the beginning of May, 2026, or at some time in May; it actually wasn't 100% clear what happened in Spring, 2026, even though as I keep saying, I followed the process of continuous review and hyperreflexivity of the design practice TO THE LETTER; but still, it always takes work to reconstrut things, which is why Retrospectives can be such a grueling, painful exercise;
- Before going any further in today's antilog, here is a labnote I made on June 21, 2026, of the experiments that I had been running of my field recordings of Atmospheric Tone; I will come back to this Spring Retrospective afterwards, though in essence the taking of labnotes IS "retrospective" in nature, as it is part of the continuous review process; it will all make sense in the end, I promise you:

2026-06-24 03:46:57

- I actually had a vision while working on this Spring Retrospective yesterday, what I call an artistic vision; I saw what I called the "stitch in time" through this process and saw how all of my different practices fit together, the art production, the research, the logging, documenting, and archiving of everything; the archive and work inside the archive is fundamental to what I do as an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, in fact, I couldn't do what I do, accomplish what I accomplish, if I didn't do things this way; it's not enough just to create innovative cultural artifacts; one has to constantly reinvent and renew oneself, start new projects, invent new concepts, and generally surpass oneself; the archival work serves this purpose perfectly; I wish I could just paint and not have to worry about all of this history; what I experienced, though, the vision of history as a stitch in the fabric of time, helped me with my design concepts for my new novel, THE CHRONOTOPIUM; it has to do with something I am calling "being-in-time" which I can perhaps get into later in another antilog;
- This stitch, I will add, reminded me of my history-paintings circa 2001-2004, the hashmarks, one could call them; the image I saw may just become another type of painting, the "documentation-painting"; SEE: history-paintings, technique-paintings, process-paintings, inhibition-paintings, archives-paintings, etc. (there are paintings of all sorts of occasions, visions of an innumerable variety;
- I decided that I will buy one of those Accounts & Ledger books, something more professional, to keep a formal log of all productive events inside The Historiotheque; also, to conclude on all of this, the retrospective process is NOT about the past or dwelling in the past; it is about the sacred art of time travel and cultural innovation, true cultural innovation; I don't mean time travel as in actually visiting different eras with some sort of time machine; no, it's an ontological and phenomenological time travel of experiencing the ways of seeing, if you will, of artists and researchers from different times; for instance, after reading an essay on Surrealism by Walter Benjamin the other day, I was transported into the Surrealist period in art history and was able to grasp, to truly, deeply grok what it was all about; I had already studied it greatly in the 1998-2002 period or thereabouts, but never understood it in the way that I did the other day while reading Benjamin's essay; it also made me realize for the first time what Benjamin meant by profane illumination; it's essentially the same as my concept of historiophany or historical revelation, though I would argue that Benjamin's profane illumination is one of the many types of historiophanies that one can have, is one of its fundamental types;
- N.B.: The physical notebook that I lost or misplaced will show up again at some point while I rummage and browse through my personal archive and it will happen at precisely the most critical point and will be one of the many spontaneous discoveries that I make while going through this review process; on this subject, I want to share an old video I made 15 years ago, in 2011, called The Art of The Found, where I talk about a new metaphor for this type of search/research/discovery that was inspired by something Microsoft implemented, which I first expermented in its Vista OS, called System Restore:

- To conclude on the progress of my Spring Retrospective thus far, I think it's important to get the movements and sequences - of the "Living Symphony" - right; how exactly did it happen, occur, or transpire?; has it occured like this before?; is it a vision, a dream-image, or an archetype that is surfacing/resurfacing?; we need to know how the experiments went down with utmost/utter exactitude; we don't just write labnotes for the hell of it;
- Whenever I'm working "in the archives", I invent new algorithms, that is, I spontaneously come up with new procedures, whether it's for browsing through the archive, or doing what I call "folder-compression" or just "dismantling the archive" in whatever way; I have my highly formalized methods of doing this kind of work, which I practice continuously, but every now and then a "naked problem" arises in the process that I need to "solve"; therefore, I try to "find an elegant solution to the problem"; this happens as a spontaneous discovery; I make these discoveries continuously in my interdisciplinary art-research practice;
- One of the aspects of this practice which became clearer and clearer back in May of this year, was that it is fundamentally a nonlinear practice; it was through the "enhanced practice" of this nonlinearity that I came up with hyperreflexive design, which I later realized was just a mode of reflexive design, which I can get into in a later antilog; suffice to say that spending hours in a fundamentally nonlinear practice every day can not only be exhilarating, but it can easily lead to decompensation and disorganization; also, sometimes when rummaging through the archive, I stumble across a folder or whatnot or just some loose leafs of some notes I took that happen to come from a more "difficult" time or period in my life; I find that the key in such cases is to properly, and systematically as with everything else, "process" the experience; that is, I take the folder let's say of jottings-down from the 2008-2009 period, which was particularly trying for me, and I meticulously go over every page, trying to put them back in their original order, i.e. reconstructing the timeline, and then I try to access the trajectories that my mind was going through at the time; my autobiographical memory is phenomenal, though not at the level of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), also known as hyperthymesia; my memory allows me, however, to access exact memories of my thought processes over the course literally of decades of time; I can access what I was thinking of, what projects and concepts I was working through, and also what the state of my archives were at that time, of my art-research practice in general;
- Anyway, one can't rely merely on inspiration being there to do this type of work, what I call "The Great Work"; one needs, requires, a methodology; what I am slowly moving towards is having an actual Accounts & Ledger book where I log everything in a precise time series or sequence, but also I think I may need different ledgers for different mediums, different disciplines, in my Strategic Intermedia practice; the distributed ledger system that I think might fit nicely with all of this, with separate ledgers and whatnot, would force me, when continuously reviewing, to have to reconstruct the timeline, or to make a single "global timeline", if you will; I believe that it's important to do the cognitive work of RECONSTRUCTION; otherwise, one isn't flexing the muscles of one's memory, and one will not have the amazing chance of making those spontaneous discoveries that make my practice so worthwhile; one must choose one's battles; SEE: "choosing one's battles" in wisdom literature;
- I need to keep doing this "reconstruction" work; I will be adding more about it either to today's antilog or in tomorrow's or the next day's, as I try to complete my Spring Retrospective; I am seeing, though, how all these streams are "interwoven"/"interweaving", and that in and of itself is the perfect kind of gemstone, which is what this retrospective process is all about: FINDING THE HIDDEN TREASURE WITHIN THE ARCHIVES!

2026-06-24 08:45:52

- I just created another labnote that I wanted to include in the present antilog, for future reference as always:

ANTILOG_20June26a

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ANTILOG_20June26a

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2026-06-20 08:16:11

- I've been working on new research I am tentatively calling Atmospherics Theory or just Atmospherics; it builds on the foundation of 30 years of ambient, experimental sound design; I've been busy trying to read as much as possible on what you could call the precursors of this new line of research; there are the usual suspects like R. Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerkamp, but I've been able to identify several other artists and researchers that have done work that I find leads up to my Atmospherics Theory;
- I've kept on making regular Atmospheric Tone field recordings and posting them online; I have a vision of a kind of microblogging platform like X, but made specifically for posting field recordings of Atmospheric Tone, a global platform to create a kind of Soundmap, or Noisemap, that is distributed across the globe; I may never see this vision realized and in fact it's something I've been thinking about for over a decade, of what I called moraltempcards which are "moral temperature readings"; you could call it "social mood", as I find the term moral rings strangely to some people's ears;
- Talking about ears, I came up with an educational program almost 20 years ago that I called The Awakened Ear; basically, it's meant to help people awaken their ears, that goes without saying, but it's a really rigorous program of research that I find can really help people not only awaken to their HEARING, but awaken also to a more complete experience of the world, of their surroundings and their place within them; it's a humanistic program, as all my work is humanistic;
- Here is a recording I made of what I called Spontaneous Sorting Algorithms in the Archives; it is founded on something I started about 12 years ago, when I made a series of 9 videos of what at the time I called Experiment in Spontaneous Creation of Organization Heuristics; basically, I was trying to do some sorting and organizing in a dozen or so folders that had hundreds of pages of printed materials containing reference materials (#Refmats) and my own writing and research; I decided that I would just improvize my way through the problem; I identified the problem and found a solution in real-time; I recorded it and published it online; maybe the solution is not optimal in terms of efficiency, that is to say, maybe it takes longer to do it this way than it was if I used some professional standards in knowledge management or archival work; the thing is, it doesn't have to be optimal, it just has to be useful and adapted to my practice; what I did the other day was a similar kind of experiment, I took a dozen folders from the archives and went through them, I "processed" them page by page, creating new folders for current or new projects based on what I found across these folders; I call it "folder-compression", which is a way to downsize the archives, to keep it tidy, to reorganize it, because over time I find that the archive needs to be reorganized in different ways; old projects are retired, new ones need new folders, etc.; there are different "layers" too, to the archives; there's a filing cabinet for more current stuff and another more for long-term storage; the current folders are for projects that are ongoing, extant, and need to be reorganized and refreshed often; that is, as you will see in the video, that I must sort through the contents of the folders; then I sort of "shuffle" them, if you will; in any case here is what came out of this experiment; I will be doing more, as I've got many more folders to try to "compress":

2026-06-20 10:06:36

- I'm still busy working on documenting my whole approach to writing novels, or what I call novelistic phenomenologies, or the "novel-as-a-system", as a kind of simulation; I created a new GitHub Repository which will be dedicated to "Design Concepts for Novelistic Phenomenologies"; the basic premise thus far is that there was a fatal flaw in the system by which I wrote novels, or tried to write novels, over the course of the last 30 years; I need not get into it now, if you are interested, just check out my NOVELS repository; I also created a new folder on my computer called "The Experimental Novel" where I have begun an inventory of writings, art, and research over the last several years that were all inching me towards the conception that I have today of precisely that, The Experimental Novel, from Émile Zola to William S. Burroughs and beyond; so far my collection of artifacts is very inspiring;
- I've also been thinking about what I call The Podcast Circuit, that is, the phenomenon of everyone having a podcast now and inviting everyone else, who likely also have podcasts, onto their podcasts, for discussions that range from 1.5 hours to 3 hours, published weekly or biweekly; I think that it's just impossible to catch up, to stay current or up to date when there is more podcast content than can even fit in a single day; in this regard, I love what Gordon Brander wrote in one of his posts on his Squishy Substack, which was in the context of a piece on hypertext montage:

"When we talk together, we flatten our N-dimensional thoughts into 1D linear narratives, in order to fit them through the 1D bottleneck of words."

- In the context of The Podcast Circuit, I find that the conversation is truly 1-dimensional or 1D, whereas the reality they are speaking of, or the experiences of that reality or what have you, is distinctly MULTI-DIMENSIONAL; when everyone takes a turn talking, it's especially 1-dimensional; I recall when my mom used to have her cousins over to play cards or whatnot; they would basically all be talking at the same time, it wasn't a situation where each speaker took their turn to speak; reality is not like that, reality resembles a Martket, which is fundamentally POLYPHONIC; their conversations which I would overhear as a young boy, were interwoven like lines of music, and the overall sound of the conversation would rise and fall like a crescendo and decrescendo in music; there was a complex harmony to it, as each voice was pitched, voices as far as I know always being pitched; the pitches would change, have their own colorings, their own melodic patterns, and each melody would form a rich counterpoint and rhythm with all of the others; I mention this because I was on a walk earlier and heard 4 women talking and they were talking in the exact same manner, each one just throwing a line, their LINE, and the others doing the same; distinctly NOT each taking their own turn;
- How this relates to The Podcast Circuit and other places where these kinds of intellectual conversations are taking place, is not only that it is 1-dimensional but that it is MONOPHONIC, and totally unlike the sounds of the life of the market; markets are noisy and interwoven, there are recursive and nested structures, they are extremely high-dimensional and polyphonic;
- In any case, I have a totally different concept/conception of conversation; it has to be multi-dimensional like the events, experiences, and concepts or whatnot that we are speaking of; it's why my art is intermedial; it's because I am trying to make my work if not AS multi-dimensional or high-dimensional as my fundamental experience of the world, which is at least 4D if not 5D and beyond, then it should be no less than 3D or 3-dimensional; but conceptually and using the artistry of classical and modern rhetorical strateties, I think I can make it pretty high-dimensional; the problem is, as I have found, my work tends to cause what I call cognitive collapse, the complete collapse of one's mental frame at that moment, the moment of encounter; I find that even just my physical presence is usually enough to collapse people's cognitive frameworks; it is all designed that way, I mean I was born that way first and foremost, and then just kept building on those assets that I was born with, and also handed down from the line of artists in my family tree, who graciously taught me everything I know, so I could start 100 years ahead of everyone, should I decide to become a professional artist, which I did;

2026-06-20 19:00:53

- Lastly, I leave you with two more of my Atmospheric Tone field recordings which I made and published throughout the course of the day; the first was recorded early this morning at 03:32:

- The second Atmospheric Tone field recording was recorded at 07:14: