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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:
