Soon available in various print sizes.

I’ve got a lead on a possible gig shooting for an upcoming trading card game. Has anyone worked on one of these before or knows someone who has? I’m trying to get an idea of how much they typically pay illustrators. If I can find someone who has done photography for a project like that, this would be even better.

Added to the website:

Greetings from Continuous Labs, Mother’s premiere Mesh-to-Internet (M2I) translation specialists. We want to offer a special welcome to our new subscribers who have joined since we published our free fiction preview in honor of Tellurian New Years.

* Continuous Coast fiction preview!

For those of you who still have not seen it, visit:
http://www.continuouscoast.com/
where we have stories from Reesa Brown, Kit O’Connell, and Steven Brust, three of our fictioneers.

* Mediators Log

The Rabbit Roamers, a team of mediators from Port Outreach, continue to share their E-band communications with the people of Tellus using the Twitter service. You can follow them on their duties at:
http://twitter.com/mediators/

* Recent Voices from Port Outreach

Voices from Port Outreach is a group blog created by the nagara of Port Outreach. In addition to reposting daily logs of the Twitter feed, Voices features regular original content such as the following:

o Who is leaving stencil art around Port Outreach?
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/12/ … the-canal/
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/12/ … -outreach/
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/12/ … -probably/

o An interview with JH Mediator, dispatch for the Rabbit Roamers:
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/12/ … ranscript/

o Folk tales, Gurge Riding, and Dolphins with Fali Rider:
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/12/ … folk-tale/
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/12/ … -and-mods/
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/12/ … -dolphins/
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/12/ … every-day/

o An update on some city politics:
http://portoutreach.com/voices/2008/11/ … the-point/

* The Future

Continuous Labs is actively developing the project for the enjoyment of Zayzans and Telurians alike! The future includes an expanded Port Outreach Tourism website, a wiki where Tellurians can learn about Mother, and exciting artifacts imported from Mother.

Thank you for supporting the cause of cross-world understanding in the multiverse!

–
Continuous Labs are Mother’s premiere Mesh-to-Internet (M2I) consultants. We proudly offer the highest quality, most reliable communications between the world known as Continuous Coast and the people of Tellus, Saeresh and Vikkir.

For the last several months I’ve been working with Continuous Labs on their not-exactly-secret CC project. I’m working as a consulting artist and translator on the Mediator twitter project. I’ve really enjoyed working with the M2I guys (that’s Mesh 2 Internet, a translation protocol) and look forward to sharing more of our work as it goes live here on Tellus. Er, Earth.

It’s still sort of odd to make that distinction.

If you’re a twitter person, you can check out the twitterfeed for the Port Outreach Mediators. It’s sort of typical of Continuous Labs, and most of their clients from what I’ve seen, for somebody like the Mediators to bubble up to the top of the project list. It’s the guys who care right f’ing now that get their stuff done. I bet there’s a lesson in that.

Thankfully, the M2I wordpress plugin isn’t my baby at all, since I heard they just came discovered a basic paradigm barrier. But you can check out the Port Outreach Tourism site in the meantime.

Spent a little time today working on the workshop I’ll be giving at DragonCon, entitled “Photographic Truth, Myth of.”

There are many thoughts that I’m trying to see if I can work into the conversation. While I was talking to Liz Galindorf about this, we got into a heated discussion about the validity of digital manipulation. Liz suggested that while digital manipulation is a useful skill to know, it is not generally needed. I, on the other hand, argue that the very act of photography is already a manipulation, and so you have a duty to finish manipulating it until it achieves your intention.

I hadn’t thought initially to include an argument for performing manipulations in the first place, but it seems like a good thing to include.

It seems to me that the first question we should ask is, “Why are you taking a photograph?” Why not draw it in pencil? Or paint it? Or record it as video? When the daguerreotype was first invented, it’s appeal was the degree of realism which it rendered. As additional technologies were developed which rendered a photographic image, the one which allowed for the greatest ease of reproducibility has consistently been the technology which became primary over other techniques. From the daguerrotype to the platinum print to the palladium print to the salt print, and all the way to the digital image. Another choice which has driven photographic methods has been portability. The civil war was photographed with cameras as large as a man which took ten minutes to set up. The most popular modern camera is so small it fits inside a device that has absolutely no relationship to visual imaging.

Are you taking photographs because you want to create images which are the easiest to share with others? Because it’s more portable than an easel, canvas and paintbrush? Because it is easier? Faster?

While there are many possible answers to that question, I think I could safely suggest that regardless of your “default” answer, that reason changes with each image you create. If that’s the case, then it stands to reason that there are times when “precisely recreating the scene as it was laid out” is not high on your agenda.

In those images whose purpose is other than attempting to reveal a “photographic truth” (a term I still think presumes far too much), why would we limit ourselves by what was laid out before us? It is a restraint we lay upon ourselves because we have a false belief in the inherent inviolability of the tool we have chosen to use.

This dovetails nicely into my original starting point, which is that when you make the effort of taking a photograph, you have limited your audience’s perception of the scene to only what is in the picture. The viewer assumes that you intended to make this image, and therefore supposes that every element of the image was intentional.

This, I think, is a strong argument for performing digital image manipulation.

I added an old Surreal Self Portrait that somehow never made it on to the site, as well as a new City Spirit photo (the Spirit of Milwaukee).

I’m having some severe issues with the newly implemented watermarking system. In order for it to work with the ecommerce plugins, I have to set all the albums so that the “full size” version does not get watermarked, and is never shown. Apparently, there is a “resized to 100%” option, but at that point the entire thing seems to break. Add to this that about a third of my images have been watermarked by hand directly onto the image, and things just go crazy.

I removed the “number of views” and rating system since I felt that they were taking up too much visual space — they kept the audience from focusing on the images themselves. With the addition of watermarks, the visual clutter was just way too much. I think the easiest thing for me to do would be to just re-upload every single image, now that I have the parameters set the way they need to be. But that is one of those projects that takes up way too much time, especially since it’s only to soothe my perfectionist obsessions. The cost/benefit just isn’t there.

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After reading M. Yu’s post on The Idea of Erotic Art, Art, Expression and Creativity, including the excellent reference to another blog entry from the Little Red Day Spa, I find myself once again coming back to the notion of duality in western culture, and it’s impact on erotic art.

Through my high school experiences with formal debate, I’ve learned to resort to dictionary definitions when I find myself adrift in my own thoughts. Merriam Webster defines erotic, among the more common definitions, as “of or pertaining to eros,” which leads to the definition of eros as “love conceived in the philosophy of Plato as a fundamental creative impulse having a sensual element.”

From here, I have tripped happily down the rabbit hole into a world of my own devising. Duality, again. I wonder if eastern philosophy could ever have devised the binary computer, a device firmly steeped in the notions of Is or Isn’t. Heaven and Hell, good and evil, patriarchy versus matriarchy, elves and orcs, there are so many absolutes in western thought, and many fewer in eastern thought. Only a culture which insists on defining moral choices as Right or Wrong could come up with binary.

Flowing through this is my recent exploration of the history of Tantra. In the west, we think of Tantra as a style of sex. Tantric philosophy, however, began as a form of rebellion.

(I’ve lost all my notes during a system cleaning, so I can’t offer any sort of authoritarian confirmation of these facts, nor support my own suppositions and biases.)

Previous to the Islamic invasions of Early Middle Ages, there is much evidence to suggest that Hindu culture embraced the physical world as an aspect of spiritual growth. As Islamic culture, with its roots in Judeo-Christian morality, impacted Hindu society, the philosophical rejection of the material world extended into the religious practices of India. At this time, Hindu philosophy was maintained and expanded in a series of texts collectively known as the Vedas, and the philosophies contained therein were called Vedanta.

The Islamic invaders brought with them greater cohesion across geography, and I believe that the need to govern the larger resulting society increased the need to codify not just the laws, but all practices. This ended the notion of religion as an evolving force, and so ended the practice of writing further Vedas. Certain Vedas were also de-emphasized, these primarily beings the texts which suggested that spirituality and the world of physical sensation could be connected. When a religious rebellion sprung up, it could not call itself a new Veda, and so had to define itself as a philosophy independent of previous religious thought, even though many of the writings were predicated on Vedantic beliefs.

This new philosophy, Tantra, is succinctly described by Wikipedia. “The Tantric method is to sublimate rather than negate relative reality.” It embraced kama, that which Buddha rejected as an obstacle, and Islam rejected as a sin. At the time, Vedantic philosophers argued against Tantric beliefs, but within two or three centuries, tantric practices became intertwined with Vedantic philosophy, accepted as a parallel course to spiritual enlightenment – you could practice one, the other, or both.

Put another way, nondualism re-emerged as a cultural precept, and religious philosophers once again accepted kama as a necessary facet of human existence.

There are similar efforts in modern American beliefs, but they are stymied by the western belief in dualism, among other forces. In order for us to say Yes to one set of beliefs, we feel that we must say No to all others. I’ve particularly noticed this problem in political and sexual sub-cultures here in Chicago: Republican or Democrat, gay or straight, with us or against us. There seems to be a strong urge in the human psyche to oppose that which rejects our own beliefs. The result is that we accept only that which is contrary to the rejected belief.

Another force which redefines our intentions is what I tend to call the McNuggest Principle, which reduces our explanations to the most quickly digestible chunks, thereby reducing other people’s understanding of what we believe in. In this way, the tantric exploration of the physical self as a path to enlightenment becomes simply the exploration of sex. Identification with a philosophy becomes synonymous with definition by that philosophy. If we are gay, or a republican, or feminist, then we must be obsessed with that aspect of ourselves. If we are not ashamed of our bodies, then we must revel in only the most obvious aspect of having a body.

It is a strangely common practice to reject through opposition. If the rejection of a particular belief can only be achieved by the promotion of its antithesis, and if we limit our understanding of opposing beliefs to what can be conveyed in 30 seconds, then it is the duality itself that we must reject.

Have you forgotten my original point? I nearly have. These are all threads in the tapestry of beliefs which lead me to my sensual photography. Tainted by popular preconception, I object to calling these works Erotic, since popular culture will mislabel that exploration as focused on the sexual nature of human beings. So strong is this force that I will even forget myself that this is not the focus of my intent. I focus instead on the concept of sensuality, of encouraging the senses.

These works are an attempt to engage the other senses, to try with imagery to invoke touch and taste, smell and sound, and other, less definable ways in which we perceive the world around us. Yet, in the same way that Tantra can so easily be diminished to Tantric Sex, both the creation and viewing of these pieces are easily reduced to a judgment of their value based on degree of sexual titillation.

These thoughts, and others which I will discuss later, are impacting my understanding of the feminine form as a photographic object. Next time, I hope to provide some crunchy URL goodness along with my thoughts.

Still can’t figure out what to do about the reflection that should be there. Does anyone besides me even notice?

That’s right, only a single year after I visited my good friends at Moonhowler Productions, I finally put the photos from the trip up.

Hong Kong 2006

Also, two new Emphasis Mine photos:
and

The Emphasis Mine photos are new pieces from an old shoot with Jayda (Chapter 5), whom I sorely miss this holiday season.