ANTILOG_30Sep26a

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

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ANTILOG_30Sep26a

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

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LABORATORY NOTES:

Time: Wed Sep 30 04:13:56 2026

Experiment: HISTORIOTHEQUE SERIES #001

Hypothesis / Objective:

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

Tooling / Materials:

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

Procedure:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results:

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

Failure Modes:

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

Notes:

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

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MACHINE INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS OF LABORATORY NOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Procedure — The important fixes are all here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANTILOG_24Sep26a

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ANTILOG_24Sep26a

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2026-09-25 08:16:26

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

ANTILOG_19Sep26a

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ANTILOG_19Sep26a

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2026-09-19 00:04:04

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

2026-09-19 01:22:12

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

2026-09-19 07:33:54

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

ANTILOG_06Aug26a

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ANTILOG_06Aug26a

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2026-08-06 08:57:33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • The Core Theory

    • Key Conceptual Components

        ◦ Coded "Dream-Language"

        ◦ Abstract Characterology & Algorithmic Being

        ◦ The History-Machine

        ◦ Nonlinearity

    • Theoretical Frameworks & Media Methodologies

    • Media Archaeology & Historical Materialism

    • Combinatory Literature & Algorithmic Engines

    • Constructivism as Aesthetic Proof

    • The Agency of the Cluster

    • Intermedia Phenomenology

    • Flagship Artistic Projects & Trilogies

    • The Revolt of Fiction Trilogy

        ◦ The History-Project (Historiogenesis)

        ◦ The Archives-Project (Archivogenesis)

        ◦ The Chronotopium / The Algorithms-Project (Algorithmogenesis)

    • Anatomy of an Aesthetic Problem

    • Historiotronics & Historionautics

    • Deep-Archive Project & Refcards-System

    • Computational & Software Systems

    • Python Combinatorial Suite

        ◦ Text Engine Pipeline

        ◦ External Integration

    • Prompt Engineering Meta-Workflow

    • Code/Art Governance

    • Primary Theoretical Reading Matrix

    • Literary Architecture & Poetics

    • Phenomenology & Hermeneutics

    • Semiology, Dialogics & Relation

    • Systems & Cybernetics

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

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

Primary Artistic & Literary Projects

    • The History-Project

    • The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema

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

    • The Novelistic Phenomenologies & The "Surrealist Textbook"

    • Zigidooism (Architextures / Quadrilateral Existence)

        ◦ Architextures

        ◦ The 4-Fold Cycle

    • Taxi Windows / Order of Ginnetho

    • Core Theoretical Frameworks & Research Paradigms

    • Amodal Schemas & Structural Isomorphism

        ◦ Amodal Schema

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

        ◦ Strategic Intermedia

    • Historiophany & Historiotherapeusis

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

    • Noise & Noise Theory

    • Generatology & Generative-Polymorphic Philosophy

    • Key Conceptual & Analytical Syntheses

    • The Conscious Bottleneck (Experience Throughput)

    • Intermedia Genealogies & Intellectual Lineages

    • Key References & Textual Sources Cited in Log

    • Philosophy & Aesthetics

    • Literary & Social Critique

    • Art History & Media Theory

    • Theology & Contemplative Practices

2026-08-06 21:08:01

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2026-08-06 22:24:45

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

ANTILOG_28July26a

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2026-07-28 08:51:00

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

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

2026-07-28 10:54:54

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

2026-07-28 20:19:35

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

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

ANTILOG_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_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: