There are days when you feel like you can conquer the world, and then there are days..  Lately, I have found, that better than any alarm clock, the consideration of a great artist springs me out of bed.  I like to think about James Turrell in the morning, and whenever I find myself on Facebook for too long, Woody Allen. I imagine for Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman, John Baldessari is one of those people.

Check out this great video that my dear friend and collaborator, Peter Buntaine created for his youngest sister, Olivia. He drove her down the tree-lined and gold lit streets of their home-town, while she played and sang along with her own song on the radio. I am sucker for a good one shot music video, especially ones that feel like a home-cooked meal.

Once a Catholic, always a Catholic – or so they say. I get into a lot of trouble for using Catholic metaphors to explain philosophical ideas about the material universe. But I don’t really care. Its just poetry, and there’s no reason not to reclaim the wild, blood-lusty ceremonies that sculpted my youth and offer them back “reactivated” toward a joyous, ecstatic, and thankful engagement with all the matter that surrounds me.

Why post about Catholic Holy Communion on a site dedicated to visual art & design? Why post it in the inspiration column? Well, because as artists, every single person on this site and every artist we gleefully post in the right-hand column here, is a participator in the act of communion — a holy warrior planting their flag in the ground, kneeling to something bigger, and offering, humbly, our own rendition of the universe.

Communion defined:

1. The sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, esp. when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level.

Every time we experience a work of art, we partake in communion. For those that may not know, Communion is the Catholic practice of ritual blood drinking and body eating, based around the story of Christ’s Last Supper. He broke bread and said, this is my body. He poured wine and said, this is my blood. He asked his disciples to drink and eat. This idea to INGEST the physical material of another being is tremendous to me. Let’s, for a moment, think of “Christ” in this story, not as a singular human being, not as any thing, but as all of the material of the universe, all matter, all light, all energy – every wave and every string, pulsing and generating for just as much reason as there is laughter.

Surely there must be a system to all this. I believe, wholly, in the universal network of pure potential. And I believe wholly, that Music (whatever music is) is the sonification of this network. And how fucking incredible is it that we get to experience this network sonification through the medium of another human’s mind? That we get to COMMUNE with them like this. Their minds and ours can literally, physically intermingle, and we can speak to each other, we can commune.

Good Friday is New Year’s Eve as far as I’m concerned. This is the one weekend a year I allow myself to be a “Catholic”. I go to Easter mass, I take communion, and I think about what it means to make every day a ritual like this. What it means to partake in the joy of the material universe, to ingest its body, to drink its blood, and to leave behind whatever crumbs I can for the next. The joy of art is the joy of humanity, and the joy of the sonic arts is to allow this massive pulse to actually enter our bodies and escape back out through tingles in our toes. Pick up that tambourine, fellow traveler, and note that on the third day he rose again. Its all here, and its all for you, and for us, to dance to.

[The video above is for the track Hymn Eola, by Tonstartssbandht. You can check out more of their music HERE, and I highly suggest you do.]

Self Portrait at 28, by Albrecht Dürer. 1500.

I’ve been doing a lot of research into the “Christ Pose”, you know the one: Christ gazes into your eyes, offering compassion and his blessing. Until recent history, human beings only experienced representational eye-contact with icons of devotion. In my ongoing worship of earthly human beings via motion-picture portraiture, I wanted to start to experiment with both chiaroscuro lighting techniques, as well the lexicon of holy poses found throughout Christian, as well as Buddhist and Hindu devotional art.

Albrecht Dürer famously and controversially, one might say “mocked” or emulated Christ by painting himself with a similar pose in his Self Portrait at 28 (above), which has always been one of favorite paintings. And so in homage to Dürer’s homage to Christ, I asked my subjects to sit with “Christ Pose” as well as run through some very beautiful Buddhist Mudras. The results were fantastic, and I can’t wait to share them with you. Here in this post find some of the images from what served as a kind of “look book” for this new incarnation (pun intended) of the motion-picture portraiture project; wherein we treat all humans as holy beings, meriting worship and capable of transcendence, observing their DNA through the nuance of their movements, and unity of form. Plus, they are just wild, evocative, beautiful-creepy images that merit video activation.

Christ Giving His Blessing, by Hans Memling. 1478

Buddha Statue.

Christ the Pantocrator, circa 6th century, Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai, Egypt.

The gesture of debate, the gesture warding off evil, and the gesture of fearlessness.

The ladies were also prompted to evoke the “Christ Pose”, and Mudras, however we also played with maternal, “Mary”-like poses, as well as the slight tilt of head.

Madonna and Child, by Giovanni Bellini. 1480

Madonna and Child with Two Angels, Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1284

A stunning, and telling piece by Melanie Aronson on the inimitable Douglas Turnbaugh. Douglas is a tender, enigmatic character whom I first met when editing the film Keep Dancing in 2010, which he produced. Douglas’ life is a work of art in and of itself – having jeté’d from late 1950′s/early 60′s Paris to 1970′s London to New York in the 80′s and there ever since. He’s angered many and delighted more, always keeping his lens on the world honed in on constant fascination. He has for countless hours regaled me with stories and walked me through the erotic art collection contextualized gingerly by Aronson in this piece. I have jokingly called it “The Penis Palace”, but it’s so much more than that; the collection’s countless decades of construction have mapped a sentimental möbius strip of experiences, obessions, fascinations.. paintings and photographs that are the only “living” relics of many men’s lives and what drove them to live, the art they made; some acknowledged & praised by many, some created in darkness with eyes met by few.

Melanie perfectly captures the colorful melody of Turnbaugh’s voice, whose “hmmm”s and “uhmmm”s sound like orchestras tuning. Some of the photos are candid, showing odd corners of the apartment, revealing that there is not one inch of this place not covered in art, paired with moments of gesture. While others are posed but in the most delightful of ways showing the forever boy in a 77 year-old man.

Melanie Aronson is a photo-journalist based out of New York City, you can check out more of her work here: http://www.melaniearonson.com/.

Very excited for the Science Fiction program running this March at The Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn. This month will feature several stunning and bizarre films from the 1960′s – early 1980s from around the world. My day-to-day science fiction daydreams are increasing at a rapid rate… Been thinking a lot about ways of applying the “sci-fi visual lexicon” to non-fiction filmmaking, and thinking a lot too about constructing cinema which gives a way to look at the naturally occurring universe with the same wild, awe/love/fear of the surreal, philosophically frightening, and visually explosive tropes of sci-fi cinema.

Check out the trailer for Universe (above) playing three times in March alongside other features including IKARIE XB-1 (below) on March 9th. Check out the full schedule here, and see you there.

For Morton Feldman, by Francesco Clemente

2000, Oil on Linen 96 x 192 in.

Take a moment to meditate with this painting by Francesco Clemente, done in 2000 in honor of composer Morton Feldman. Constellations are something I think about a lot. The idea of plucking out a shape, a message, within a naturally occurring system, giving it poetry – or rather, adjusting one’s focus to let for the poetry to emerge. I love that both “compositions” exist upon a fabric; the fabric of the universe + the fabric of thought, reflected in golden symmetry, illuminated by the same light.

Feldman is by far one of my favorite composers, his “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” is a go-to for many long writing, thinking, and staring sessions; very well-suited for watching color seemingly emerge from my white ceilings.

Check out this killer, beautifully simple video of Hubble (Ben Greenberg) shredding on a Brooklyn rooftop in loving sunlight. Hubble is the solo guitar project of Ben Greenberg (Zs, Pygmy Shrews). In this video by Teresa Eggers watch him shred both himself and the guitar into a blanket of endless loops of glittering ions…

Here’s a second Hubble video utilizing the stellar imaging from which Greenberg borrows name.

Images: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Video: Sheena Callage, Tiffany Borders (STScI)
Music: Hubble – Hubble’s Hubble (from Hubble Drums LP/CD Northern Spy Records 2011)

Here is a great, albeit hokey, animation demonstrating the architecture of Bach’s Crab Cannon. How does one find ways to demonstrate structure that are both elucidating and graphically pleasing? Where this video is amazingly successful is in that it gives a very simple visual model which clearly shows the mind-blowing complexity of Bach’s composition in such a fashion that anyone with little or no musical knowledge can see, understand, and appreciate.

Though how can we convey information like this but perhaps use more natural graphic elements and textures to put it together visually?

Check out this beautiful short clip of Edward Tufte showing how he uses high definition video of different wavefields along with 3-D animation and motion graphics to create visually stunning representations of information.

Here’s another lovely music visualization by The Music Animation Machine, you may have come across some of these, they’ve been popping up more and more and are quite beautiful. However there’s still something lacking for me, something natural. They show the music “working” but they still don’t really show how it works.

And here’s a clip from a 3-2-1 Contact episode featuring Suzanne Ciani. I love this clip. This is completely different in that its PEOPLE discussing and explaining. There is a very specific, odd and tender quality to this clip; the interaction between the two girls is borderline erotic.

(embedding is “disabled” for this clip so please click HERE to watch.)

All of these clips look to elucidate information in different ways. There is so much stunning and incredible work happening with data right now — what I am interested in is a kind of cross between data visualization and narrative cinematic story-telling.

Here’s one more clip of a few different wonderful artists working with data and generative art:

I am hoping this post starts a bit of a conversation. Please do comment with any thoughts, clips, or images.

I’ve always been in love with portraiture. Every face is different, but almost more interestingly, every face moves differently. Every face has its own language, tendencies, ticks, nuance, shine, and blast. You can hear voice in a person’s facial expressions. What’s most beautiful is when you can see shifts, see the person actually thinking — see that wave of process, inquiry, discovery emerge as a whole landscape is mapped out for you through subtle shifts of eyes, in relation to mouth in relation to shoulders, and so forth.

I began this portraiture series about a year ago. I started with seven subjects, have added four more (including myself) and am slowly working toward a body of work made up entirely of the human face, in action. They are a collaborative effort between me and cinematographer James Fideler, (also the director of photography and my producing partner on Music of the Hemispheres). All of the subjects thus far are personal friends of mine, and I think that makes a big difference. The idea is to have candid conversation, shoot it all at high frame rates and then play with the palate of gestures they offer in moment-to-moment conversations. I loop different slices of gestures, suspend moments of time, and also just stare.

The clip above is my dear friend Silvia + Franz Schubert. We were having a hilarious conversation about a new boy she was dating at the time. I then select a song, purely on instinct: one face + one song, and cut from beginning to end. A dancer friend of mine once called it: choreography of the face.

Here is Jason + Edith Piaf:

My dream is to assemble enough portraits to put together a feature length musical, made up of all human faces… to construct a whole narrative of gesture.

Here is a kind of “mix tape” assembled from four portraits:

Courtney + Beat Happening, Jeff + Françoise Hardy, Tony + Glenn Branca, Jason + Edith Piaf