For the actual composition, click here.

this one took a bit more concentration to bring over, even though it looks very simple. we’re still in 2016 here, and much like 2 this one is difficult to cohere, reads more like a bad thought. but it is clear that this was another attempt to construct a visual blog.

there is, unavoidably, AI art in this blog. this was 2016 AI art, so it was far simpler and still required my direction to a large degree. that was a weird experimental year for me. I don’t really want to talk about it, even though if I were to that probably would clarify this blog. I was not proud of using AI art, and ultimately I saw it as a possible technology that might inspire me. it didn’t. in the end I just took some of the better experiments and put them in this blog. appropriately enough, the compositions of the art are entirely mine; it is the texture that is borrowed (though still from sources I chose). ultimately I wanted to use these pieces in the blog because they felt empty. this is a blog of depression, a very empty feeling of being lost.

anyway, unlike for the first two compositions, this time, for 3, I actually elected to do some editing. I replaced some of the art with actual experiments, more recent ones, that I put more effort into. but you have to do some digging to find them.

there are two “main” posts here. hidden within the post “beyond alive” you will find three hyperlinks, each leading to a hidden post. the hidden posts contain new art. (with one exception. but I did hide a third New Art Piece elsewhere.)

you gotta work for it. if it takes effort to make art, then it takes effort to consume it. it’s gotta be that way.

but okay, so, if I had to interpret the text, and possibly even the theme of the visual art used? then what is composition no. 3 about?

…….actually, shit. no hang on. this is actually kinda coherent. there’s motifs here, there’s themes, there’s a unity between the goal in the visuals and in the text.

it’s something about art and how we view it. a dichotomy between art as commodity (songs in a jukebox) and art as something more mystic. there’s intertextuality here, references to the first composition no. and also to Viceking’s Graab. composition no. 3 is placed in the middle of some sort of dialogue that we were having but that everyone kinda gave up on. it is a frustrated art piece telling us the source of all meaning: an abyss where nothing resides but primordial colors and shapes. it is frustrated with the pressures art is placed under. as the first composition told us, if you do not write it down it will disappear forever. but 3 adds the painful counterpoint: if you do write it down, it will be read. it will belong entirely to the reader, and you cannot choose your readers. it will be free to pillage, ravage, turn inside out, interpret, misinterpret, weaponize, fortify.

the syberberg allusion is telling as well. we the children of Hell recall the age of the Grail. we, in the present, are the children of Hell. and we recall an age long gone, even if we don’t mean to we still assume there was one. that text is aligned to justify, rendering it a rectangular block of text, like a wall, or the immense ground. this makes me think of the past buried in the ground, impenetrable, possibly excavatable but that will surround us with words. the past was all words, too many words, and it gave birth to a Hell of words that we now live in.

so there’s something about how.. depression, at least as I experience it, is to be acutely aware of ourselves moving through a Hell of words. navigating the words. having to weaponize them ourselves. and in my more depressed art, I play with words, as I’m performing my depression– I’m fixated on the active process of tinkering with words. like swimming in the stuff. trudging through it like through a fog.

this blog is deceptively fertile. I like this one when I actually look at it.

it’s actually.. pretty. and not as bleak as I expected.

(aside: “so jordan.” yes, hypothetical You? “it sounds a lot like you’re saying your obsession with Finnegans Wake ruined you. surrounded you with words and made you see them as a Hell.” I mean that’s possible. I don’t think it happened like that, though. Finnegans Wake is heaven to me. I mean, the contents of the Wake are almost explicitly a purgatory, but as a work of art it is heaven to me. I was getting overwhelmed by the world anyway, and the Wake gave me a mirror to it, but a mirror whose deliberate mechanical order is detectable entirely using words, rather than the real world, where words alone cannot make sense of the mechanisms despite being oversaturated and combative.
(I’m grateful to the Wake. I’m ride or die with it for a reason. it truly did help me. my depression in the 2010s was.. bleak. the Wake helped keep me alive, it helped keep my brain alive, and my memories. I would store my memories away in the Wake, inevitably, through reading it, and then when weed wiped my brain clean I’d read the Wake and remember. reorganize. keep trying and trying at the puzzle of Putting It All Together Again, until I actually made progress.
(I’ve.. destroyed and rebuilt my mind. and I say that with horror and shame. weed was really fucking bad for me. maybe it’s just because of how I specifically used it, but, it was fucking bad for me.)

anyway. yeah.

composition no. 3. I was able to.. make that. during my weed years. the creations I managed to make from those days are precious to me, even if they hide some scary existential trauma.

this one is cool. this one gets at the dichotomy of art. I think the AI art was necessary for that, even if I would never use that again with AI in its current form.

two of the hidden posts are very obvious. you will see the links very easily. the third one is hidden pretty well! I actually completely forgot it existed until I took a look at the html. it's hidden in periods. certain periods.