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