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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.
