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.