Migraine Brain Drain in Progress

So I’m still dealing with frequent migraines, the headaches along with all of the other fantastic symptoms that surround it–nausea, disorientation, lack of focus, sinus pressure, light sensitivity, depression, a worse memory than usual, the occasional beatitude, soreness throughout my body similar to what follows seizures, almost no sense of time.

The meds I’m on might be a problem too, since it seems the nortriptyline isn’t helping to prevent them much anymore, and the side effects are becoming more pronounced. A visit to the neurologist this week might improve this at least. It’s hard to tell what the eletriptan is doing to my head too.

Anyway, I wrote a poem about migraine. Maybe I’ll make a habit of it.

MIGRAINE

My head has been cloned on top of itself.
Each eye has its own head each with its other eye.
Like a Ven diagram where it all overlaps?
There is no easy way to describe it.
Looking, I see.
Seeing, I understand.
There is suffering.
There is a cause to it.
There will be an end to it.
But I do not see the way.

The man rubs his head into the pavement.
Children had drawn a beautiful landscape in chalk all over it.
The man rubs it transparent, his head is a transparent chalk eraser.
People watch but they cannot help him.
The man opens a portal in his suffering and falls in.
There is no record of this event.

GIMP Art Project – y8vis1t5l6tn5jrg Series

I’m just about finished with my first series of GIMP art images, made with GIMP version 2.6 for Ubuntu Linux 12.04. Using only the filters which come loaded with the program, I apply different filters and settings intuitively until I am satisfied with each image. It is very much exploratory, obsessive and satisfying work.

I started this series with a single image downloaded from some Google Image search – don’t remember what I searched for. This is what I usually do now. Maybe I feel like looking at images of furniture or living rooms, or maybe it’s Craigslist pictures. I find an image and begin to work on it.

Here’s y8vis1t5l6tn5jrg:

I turned it after a while into this:

I’m not really satisfied with this image any more, but I liked a lot of the shapes I was seeing at high magnification, so I grabbed 30 or so screenshots from it to work with as a series. I’ve produce about 20 finished works and I think the series is done.

Here’s Numbers 10, 20 and 4, with HQ closeups:

I’ll be posting more. If you like them, let me know. I may be uploading them for sale soon.

The Adjunct Project @ The Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Adjunct Project. This very much concerns me as a limited-term lecturer, one of several names for adjunct faculty. If you’re an adjunct bothered by the impact of faculty casualization to higher ed, I suggest you check it out.

New work up @ opon Issue One

Read it!

The journal is focused on the writing process and features long submissions from six poets. You can read some of my poems from same: a Stein wreader, along with archival poetry, Dead Sea poetry, clay box poetry, footnote poetry and visual poetry. A great assortment of goodies!

Enjoy!

SARS Coronavirus GIMP art

Sometimes an image just captures the eye and I have to do something with it. An image of the newly emerging SARS Coronavirus from a BBC article this week looked beautiful to me, so I googled and found a larger image of it to work with:

After the continuous application and reapplication of filters, I turned it into what you see below. The full resolution image is very large, so I have a low-res version of the whole image along with some screenshots of the work at full resolution so you may see the details.

Another Self-Portrait (Processing + GIMP)

Self-Portraits created in Processing + GIMP

I’ve begun learning a programming language again. This time its Processing, and I’m finally getting serious about it. I just received a copy of Matt Pearson’s Genarative Art last month, but I’m working through the examples in Generative Design: Visualize, Program and Create with Processing by Hartmut Bohnacker, Benedikt Gross, Julia Laub and Claudius Lazzeroni first.

These self-portraits were the result of applying sketch P_4_3_2_01 (with text and character attributes tweaked a bit in the code) to a profile picture of mine. As the process used was typographic, and this is a self-portrait, I used my first name as the text to be repeated. The shapes of the large letters, stacked into elongated cylinders, distort the features and colors of my face into strangely evocative curves and knives. The images captured from the processing session were then enlarged and passed through many filters until they came out as they have.

I haven’t learned enough to really create my own generative art / digital poetry code, but tweaking other people’s code has always been the best way for me to figure out what’s going on in the code. I’ll keep plugging away, and coding my heart out.

Enjoy!

Note: They look better at full size, so click on them to view them at 100%.

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The image file used as input in Processing.

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My Review of C. T. Funkhouser’s New Directions in Digital Poetry @ TriQuarterly

Read it.

It’s not a critical review, since I’m not scholar in the field. Think of it as a recommendation for others like me: aware of digital poetry from the periphery, not too studied in the digital humanities, and working slowly to become a practitioner of digital poetry and other digital arts.

A great book for anyone interested in digital poetry. It covers a wide range of works from many contemporary artists working in this ever-evolving field.

My Interview with Mary Flanagan, now up @ Sycamore Review

‘Insert the poetic where we’d least expect it’: An Interview with artist and poet Mary Flanagan @ Sycamore Review

Digital poet, artist, game designer, etc., responds to my questions about her entrance into + works of digital poetry, her current projects, the state of publication today, and gives some sagely advice for new digipoets. Many thanks to Sycamore Review for setting the whole thing up and for asking me to conduct it.

GIMP Art – 12.6.12