Hey, friends! It’s John and this time I’m talking about using Inkscape to illustrate a Zen quote. This quote is “To set up what you like against what you don’t like — this is the disease of the mind ~ Seng-Ts’an” If we can find compassion, especially with those we disagree with, we make progress.
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disease of the mind cc-by lemasney
“The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry. Edited by Stephen Mitchell. Harper and Row, NY. 1989 The Mind of Absolute Trust The great way isn’t difficult for those who are unattached to their preferences. Let go of longing and aversion, and everything will be perfectly clear. When you cling to a hairbreadth of distinction, heaven and earth are set apart. If you want to realize the truth, don’t be for or against. The struggle between good and evil is the primal disease of the mind. Not grasping the deeper meaning, you just trouble your minds serenity. As vast as infinite space, it is perfect and lacks nothing. But because you select and reject, you can’t perceive its true nature. Don’t get entangled in the world; don’t lose yourself in emptiness. Be at peace in the oneness of things, and all errors will disappear by themselves. If you don’t live the Tao, you fall into assertion or denial. Asserting that the world is real, you are blind to its deeper reality; denying that the world is real, you are blind to the selflessness of all things. The more you think about these matters, the farther you are from the truth. Step aside from all thinking, and there is nowhere you can’t go. Returning to the root, you find the meaning; chasing appearances, you lose there source. At the moment of profound insight, you transcend both appearance and emptiness. Don’t keep searching for the truth; just let go of your opinions. For the mind in harmony with the Tao, all selfishness disappears. With not even a trace of self-doubt, you can trust the universe completely. All at once you are free, with nothing left to hold on to. All is empty, brilliant, perfect in its own being. In the world of things as they are, there is no self, no non self. If you want to describe its essence, the best you can say is “Not-two.” In this “Not-two” nothing is separate, and nothing in the world is excluded. The enlightened of all times and places have entered into this truth. In it there is no gain or loss; one instant is ten thousand years. There is no here, no there; infinity is right before your eyes. The tiny is as large as the vast when objective boundaries have vanished; the vast is as small as the tiny when you don’t have external limits. Being is an aspect of non-being; non-being is no different from being. Until you understand this truth, you won’t see anything clearly. One is all; all are one. When you realize this, what reason for holiness or wisdom? The mind of absolute trust is beyond all thought, all striving, is perfectly at peace, for in it there is no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow.”
Kubrick revealed? The Dawn of Man superimposed over Dave’s dawn as a space traveler.
Origins and Explanation or Why Kubrick is a Genius
This project, in which I arranged Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001 to play both backwards and forwards simultaneously, was inspired by the beautiful and enlightening documentary on Kubrick’s The Shining named Room 237 by Rodney Ascher. I was dumbstruck by the section that explained a theory of how to watch The Shining properly – Backwards and forwards. Here’s an introduction to that idea:
“Analysis and awe sit side by side in the parts of our brains that engage in pattern recognition. The Shining Forwards And Backwards feeds both of them at once. Last year some folks at a Brooklyn theater – likely highly stoned folks – got the idea in their heads to play Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining forwards while projecting the movie backwards at the same time on the same screen. What was shocking was that it worked. That’s not to say that Kubrick intended the film to be seen this way, but it worked nonetheless.” curated by lemasney from Fantastic Fest Review: THE SHINING FORWARDS AND BACKWARDS | Birth.Movies.Death. at http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/10/01/fantastic-fest-review-the-shining-forwards-and-backwards
And perhaps my favorite way to introduce this idea that even if Kubrick didn’t do this purposefully, it’s still fascinating:
“(T)he film’s framing lends itself to this kind of an experiment. Kubrick is so precise about placement within the frame that you can overlay random images and find juxtapositions and reverberations in imagery. Whether or not this is purposeful is besides the point – what matters is how it’s experienced.” curated by lemasney from Fantastic Fest Review: THE SHINING FORWARDS AND BACKWARDS | Birth.Movies.Death. at http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/10/01/fantastic-fest-review-the-shining-forwards-and-backwards
I was so moved by the idea possibly applying to other films of Kubrick’s, that I rushed to my machine, ripped a copy, and started playing. This post is an invitation for you to do that play too. It’s easy for you to argue that it was not Stanley’s intention to do all of this extra work so that just a few might see it. Once you see it, it’s harder to argue against that idea. So, how does one do it?
Methodology
Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey, backwards and forwards. (lemasney)
I don’t have access to projectors or film reels as The Shining theorists did. I did this right on my computer, and so can you. In fact, it’s likely the only way you’ll get to see it in all of its glory because of the copyright infringement of the product if broadcast without permission. I’ve had a few short clips taken down so far and rightfully so. I do not have copyright rights to the material. Because I am using this for the purposes of extending the content through critique and analysis, I feel I’m free to post this imagery, and have seen other examples, such as in the project that inspired this one:
“On Wednesday, March 9th, 2011, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, The Spectacle Theater screened Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining forwards and backwards simultaneously, superimposed. This experiment in projection was inspired by the analysis of The Shining by MSTRMND, and one line in particular: The Shining is a film meant to be watched both forwards and backwards. We took the MSTRMND gambit at face value. We put the US DVD version into Final Cut, removed all corporate logos and leaders at the beginning, and cut all credits at the end. The entire film image sequence was then copied, reversed and superimposed over the original forwards version. (For clarity’s sake we screened the forwards/backwards superimposition with the forwards audio only.)” curated by lemasney from KDK12 | The Shining: Forwards and Backwards at http://kdk12.tumblr.com/post/4879566957/the-shining-forwards-and-backwards
I believe I’d be able to argue that I did this without expectation of malice, but rather homage, to Stanley, nor personal monetary gain, while hopefully extending the film’s value through critical observation.
I still won’t post the whole rearranged film here, because it would easily be arguable that I had not done enough to change it, and I’d rather not have a showing with my voice over it, etc. You should see it in its true form, and that means you’ll probably have to do it or contact me for help, which I welcome. I am however sharing a lot of GIFs, the first of which are below. Please feel free to share at your own risk. I have a fantasy where I get the Paramount in Charlottesville, Virginia to do a screening for us on the big screen, but I doubt that I could afford the rights.
How to make your own Forwards and Backwards movies:
You have to have a non-protected version of the film in an editable format like MP4, which may mean getting the DVD and backing it up to a file, as I did. (If this is a new concept to you, check out this cool HowTo). You might get it some other way too.
Open the MP4 in a video editor (I use the open source video editor KDEnlive on Ubuntu Studio, you might use Adobe Premiere or something similar) on track one.
Open a second copy on track two and mute and reverse it. In KDEnlive, you can just right click on your original project clip and make a reversed copy. (Here’s the HowTo for that).
We mute the second copy because the audio weaves together the narrative of the two directions.
In order to see the second track ‘through’ the first, you have to add a transition between tracks to act as a layer mode for the video. I used Screen mode, which worked perfectly. (Here’s the HowTo for that.)
Render your edit, and begin watching. In the mean time, check out some of the short animations below to get some sense of what you will see.
I’ll explain more below and in future posts, but I can not see how the timing of the cuts and positions are anything but designed. Kubrick seems perfectly capable of going scene by scene, second by second, and arranging image A and image B to coincide. I feel certain of it, but others may not believe. I also believe in The Dark Side of Oz, where Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon replaces the soundtrack of the classic film The Wizard of Oz. If you can believe that was by design, this is easy, comparatively.
Introduction and Exit
Please click on the images to see them full size. You can navigate through them by opening any of them and clicking on the arrows left or right.
The Dawn of Man
Dave and the desert
Introduction and Title
The human issue of eating
Enrobed in light
Obelisk encounters
The introduction and exit of the film are fascinating to watch simultaneously. Having read Clarke’s entire series of books on this universe, the obelisk is an alien intelligence, allowing humanity to flourish by giving insight to technology unknown before through contact. This happens to the missing link men in the first scenes, to the men on the moon, and to Dave, becoming the space baby, a newly born time-traveling entity. Some impressions and narrative for the GIFs above:
Click on Introduction and Title to see the perfect choreography of space baby Dave’s eye, moon, sun, and earth.
The Dawn of Man plays with the idea of burial (Dave passing from human form to time traveler) in the ground of the reverse scene.
The obelisk contains light (symbolizing intelligence) often in this version of the film. Eating becomes a recurring, overlapping theme for ideological acceptance, and in The human issue of eating, we get a glimpse of the hogs lying about Dave’s purgatory room, and Dave eating an alien meal for sustenance.
In Enrobed in light, and Obelisk encounters the intense landscapes of the time travel Dave screams through are set against the landscape of early man. Also, notice how the light surrounds, follows, and amplifies the brutal emotion of early man, and how the light splatters and spits around these newly murderous human ancestors, shining with new and powerful intelligence.
Bright light (as intelligence, but not always kind) constantly reveals itself in the backwards and forwards play, like HAL’s red-eye over faces or objects of intense importance or intimate intelligence in other scenes.
In my next post, I’ll talk about the next scenes and my impressions. I hope you liked this introduction to the project, and I’d love to help you to do this kind of thing too, discovering new tools along the way. If I can help you, please give me a call at 609 553 9498 or email me at lemasney@gmail.com. There’s even a feedback form below. If it’s something especially nice, it might go in the testimonials! I’m John. Thanks!
Hi, I’m John LeMasney, a father, artist, photographer, and new resident in Charlottesville, Virginia. I have the honor of announcing that Jefferson-Madison Regional Library (JMRL) has agreed to let me speak in a free technology series in their beautiful downtown location. I love technology, and want to share what I love about it, continuing the work I’ve done for 20 years in the Northeastern part of our country. If you have a topic or a venue that you’d like covered, please contact me, and let’s make that happen. Let’s do something great together!
John LeMasney cc-by lemasney
Making Photos Great for Free.
Wednesday January 4th from 6-7pm
In this session, come and learn about how to take your digital photos and transform them into art with Virginia based artist, designer, and photographer John LeMasney. With great free tools for photo manipulation, illustration, and catalog management, you can do what the professionals do without the costs. Come and learn about photo technique, lighting, and more, while growing your toolbox beyond point and shoot.
Okay google, what year is it cc-by lemasney
Introduction to Internet of Things and Home Ecosystems.
February 1st from 6-7pm
In this session led by Virginia based artist, designer, and photographer John LeMasney, come and learn about the leading ecosystems that have emerged as AI assistants in the home. We will discuss all the major platforms like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple Siri, but we will focus deeply on the present and future state of Google Home, Google Now, ChromeCast, Chromebook, and related items in the Google Ecosystem in a in-session demonstration. If you are interested in having your lights blink when your partner leaves work, having an always listening all intelligent assistant in your home, or learning automatically that you need to leave a little early due to local traffic, you should join us!
wordpress statistics and analytics
Analytics, or the art of discovering your audience.
March 1st from 6-7pm
If you have a web site or presence in social media, that’s great! How many people visited it today? How about last week? Where did they live? Were they 15, 30, or 50? How many people saw that Instagram post? What is your most popular pin on Pinterest? What browser were they using? Analytics is any system that gives you insight about the way that your content was used. Let Virginia based artist, designer, and photographer John LeMasney help you answer all of those questions and others when you learn about analytics tools in social media, publishing platforms, and other places. We will discuss many platforms for analytics, including Google, social media, and more.
IFLL initial logo study by lemasney
Design for the Non-Designer.
Saturday April 1st from 1pm-2pm
In this session, come learn about digital visual communication with Virginia based artist, designer, and photographer John LeMasney. You likely did not encounter a lot of visual communication training in school, if you went to school in the US. The problem there is that successful contemporary mass communication is expressed today by artists and designers with specialized skills like visual literacy, software tools, and a sense of brand and audience awareness that graphic design can amplify. Design is important today, and if you are not sure where to start, here is a good place.
Culinary knife cuts poster by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Speed drawing of a nakiri knife.
“Nakiris are double bevel knives designed specifically for working with vegetables. Nakiris are characterized by their flat profiles and squared off tips. This profile makes these knives ideal for push cutting and chopping but awkward for rock cutting. Nakiris are often ground thin to optimize performance and they benefit from a refined cutting edge. A similar design is the traditional single bevel usuba which is also designed specifically for use on vegetables. Nakiri enthusiasts may also want to consider the Chinese cleaver which performs a similar function with a somewhat similar profile.” – Nakiris from http://www.chefknivestogo.com/nakiri-knives.html
“Nakiri bōchō (菜切り包丁, translation: knife for cutting greens) and usuba bōchō (薄刃包丁, thin knife) are Japanese-style vegetable knives. They differ from the deba bōchō in their shape, as they have a straight blade edge suitable for cutting all the way to the cutting board without the need for a horizontal pull or push.[1] These knives are also much thinner. While the deba bōchō is a heavy blade for easy cutting through thin bones, the blade is not suitable for chopping vegetables, as the thicker blade can break the vegetable slice. The nakiri bōchō and the usuba bōchō have a much thinner blade. This does not help with cutting small bones in fish or meat, but is useful for cutting vegetables. Nakiri bōchō are knives for home use, and usually have a black blade. The shape of the nakiri bōchō differs according to the region of origin, with knives in the Tokyo area being rectangular in shape, whereas the knives in the Osaka area are called kamagata nakiri and have a rounded corner on the far blunt side. There are also kamagata usuba. The cutting edge is angled from both sides, called ryōba in Japanese. This makes it easier to cut straight slices. Usuba bōchō are vegetable knives used by professionals. They differ from the Nakiri bōchō in the shape of the cutting edge. While the nakiri bōchō is sharpened from both sides, the usuba bōchō is sharpened only from one side, a style known as kataba in Japanese. The highest quality kataba blades have a slight depression on the flat side. This kataba style edge gives better cuts and allows for the cutting of thinner slices than the ryōba used for nakiri bōchō, but requires more skill to use. The sharpened side is usually the right side for a right hand use of the knife, but knives sharpened on the left side are available for left hand use. The usuba bōchō is heavier than a nakiri bōchō, although still much lighter than a deba bōchō.[2]” – Nakiri bōchō – Wikipedia from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakiri_b%C5%8Dch%C5%8D
If you like it please thumbs-up or share! If you like them, please subscribe for more! I’m always looking for ways to connect with people about tech, design, teaching, and lots of other topics. If you think we should talk, connect with me at https://about.me/lemasney
This is a speed design of a social image for my new page (Open Creative Toolkit) at http://bit.ly/2hphHd1 where I describe the software choices I make in my small design business.
open creative toolkit
If you like it please thumbs-up or share! If you like them, please subscribe for more! I’m always looking for ways to connect with people about tech, design, teaching, and lots of other topics. If you think we should talk, connect with me at http://bit.ly/2hrI3Z3
“Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (published in paperback as Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity) is a 2004 book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license (by-nc 1.0) on March 25, 2004. This book documents how copyright power has expanded substantially since 1974 in five critical dimensions: duration (from 32 to 95 years), scope (from publishers to virtually everyone), reach (to every view on a computer), control (including “derivative works” defined so broadly that virtually any new content could be sued by some copyright holder as a “derivative work” of something), and concentration and integration of the media industry. It also documents how this industry has successfully used the legal system to limit competition to the major media corporations through legal action against: College students for close to $100 billion, because their improvements of search engines made it easier for people in a university intranet to find copyrighted music placed by others in their “public” folder. Lawyers who advised MP3.com that they had reasonable grounds to believe streaming an MP3 uploaded by a customer only to computers that the customer has logged-in on for the service is legal, and Venture Capitalists who funded Napster. The result is a legal and economic environment that stifles “the Progress of Science and useful Arts”, exactly the opposite of the purpose cited in the US Constitution. It may not be possible today to produce another Mickey Mouse, because many of its early cartoon themes might be considered “derivative works” of some existing copyrighted material (as indicated in the subtitle to the hardback edition and in numerous examples in this book).” curated by lemasney from Free Culture (book) – Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)
I wanted to illustrate what I thought the Google Home might be like in 10 years. I saw it as floating, hovering by way of low-energy drones. The device would be like an eye, always looking, listening, and recording. A disoriented human asks “Okay Google, what year is it?” in wonderment. This design is related to my concept for their future automated car.
open Inkscape, create a circle, duplicate it, add a linear pattern to the topmost dupe, convert to path, shape into a shadow, place over circle, done.
But when I started doing it, to test whether it was just that simple, I was surprised at how many steps were really involved. You have to find the right pattern, you have to try a few on, you have to realize that you can’t easily add color to your patterns. You get some neat benefits though — real, deep calls to pop-based modernism, paying ideological royalties to Warhol’s Brillo Boxen and Jasper Johns’ frisky template based stories. So I decided to take it somewhere. And this post is the result.
What am I doing here?
I wrote ‘To be honest,’ but I loathe when people say that. We may be honest always, but what a stark surprise that would be, and the resulting pain that would potentially be inflicted seems an easily avoidable horror. So here, I’ll offer some harmless honesty: I’m not sure what i am doing here. I want to be productive, create and publish things of value, but I think that the audience has to find the value in you doing what you love, if any value is to be found at all. This may the closest digital alternative we have to Busking, posting on tools like WordPress (or worse yet, Facebook). But today, as I write this, it feels right. This is what I feel I should be doing: Writing about, illustrating, and sharing my experiences and results and insights and outcomes in the hopes of feeding into the collective insight of humanity. I have no idea if anyone will care, or even respond. But maybe. Only by trying will we find out.
Okay Google, so, what year is it?
So I was working on the practice of creating cross hatching in Inkscape, finding the stark contrast of the linear elements a bright, sharp change in my style. I began to make the circle into a kind of orb. The cross hatching became a futuristic fin that both altered direction and provided thrust. Each overlapped circle added a new dimensional layer of electronics or protection, all perfectly interlocking and freely moving.
A pupil and iris emerged. A short story about the future that writes itself in one’s mind resulted. The title of that short story is “Okay Google, what year is it?”, and the orb you see is some nearby year’s equivalent to the amazing Amazon Echo, except it uses quiet drone and magnetic stops technologies to float about your house, answering any question, turning on and off million colored micro LEDs under your feet and overhead as you walk along the heavily corridored apartments of the future. All of our houses start as shipping containers in my version. The main character asks the title question and the orb responds “I don’t know how to answer that. “
At any rate, a fun trip in the mind and I hope you enjoyed it.
