Convictions, Clarity, and Purpose: A Guide to Powerful art

I’m pretty aimless as an artist. I have specific interests that I’ve been pursuing laetly in my art (poorly I believe).. I don’t think I have a clear goal in my art but if I got to choose it would be to help wage class war… And I do get to choose so what does that say about me. (I’m a lazy apathetic coward?)

I'm asking myself why I make art

I'm drawn to the representations of reality. Concrete manifestations of perception

I make art to vent... quiet my mind and fill my head when i'm in pain and to help me feel something when I can't... 

 

or do I just like attention

I've always been obsessed with photographing things. Earlier because of my fear of forgetting. later for reasons i've recently attributed to an interest in modes of replicating/representing realiy. And wondering how that affects perceptions of reality. .. but who knows.. Both impulses direct how i photograph and record my life now... Theres dread and coveting in the photos I take.... I remember one night I was on vacation in colorado.  Earlier that summer my Grandma had let me pick any book out of barnes and noble and I picked one that was a diary of a zombie apocalypse survivor and on the last page he was eaten and the page was covered in blood.. I developed a profound fear of the coming apocolypse and I was very afraid that my mother, left at home, would be eaten before I could get back.. Me and my older sister were walking in the dark back to our cabin at the YMCA camp in the Rocky Mountains and I lamented the fact that we would never remember any of this in ten years, at least not faithfully.

I save locations on google maps after passing it in a car
 when I want to return to a place to photograph or film
 or just revisit or remember why it intrigued me. I almost never do.

I have developed an interest in the aesthetics and ethics of mass media, surveillance, documentary... and the intersections. and the affects on our perceptions.. I have a doc in progress.

I've very recently become intrigued by the act of talking to the internet and how that affects me and the way it changes my perceptions of the ppl around me. I’ve been posting a lot on my first draft of this blog and pretty quickly decided not to show it to anyone and have it as a kind of diary or place that I vent. There was something interesting where I could send my anxieties into a void that is completely public and yet inaccessible because of the amount of information on the web. I type words on a machine and send it out to something that I don’t understand at all..          

I had this idea about google maps as an analogy to documentary film.. both using a kind of photographic surveillance–atomized propositions of reality–sutured together creating a new reality that is consumed as realer than the world we move through... we'll work on it...

Scars in the simulacrum - screen grab from google streetview

I guess I make art because I don't know what else to do... 

I don't even think that I see what I've been doing as art... 
Art seems like a weird way to categorize it at the moment right now and I can't even begin to know why...




I like my secret blog better....