brain day

BRAIN DAY

sam & chlo // dec 20-31

“Chloe we should make a zine at some point” “Dude let’s do it rn over break” “Okay word”

Hey there This is a compilation of some of our thoughts and some of the stuff we were up to this year, creatively speaking.

We try to make stuff when we have time, which (let’s be honest) was not as often as we’d have liked this term.

Usually what we end up doing is having long, excited convos about anything from creative processes to mediums to art we saw to art we wanna do.

Fun fact: We met in an escape room.

TOO MANY IDEAS! NOT ENOUGH TIME!

2022: we were obsessed with Are.na (a creative networking site, kinda a more meditative, idea-based Pinterest)

(a long text i sent to chloe abt spotify 7/6/22) -sam According to William reckless’s control theory, people have an inner and outer control system to keep them from deviating from society’s norm; the internal controls our conscience and internalized feelings, while the outer controls include those who influence us. If I were to subjectify different “social media” into either control I would categorize Spotify in the former and Instagram in the latter. So let’s talk abt it! And by it, I mean the nuances of Spotify as a social media that is a manifestation of our internal controls (sorry i don’t use apple music:/), and by talk, I mean rambling to myself. Okay so before anything else, Spotify is a music streaming platform but I underestimated the impact it had on me as a way to peer into others' lives or be perceived. For context, I am a stalker (on spotify lol) and I am not ashamed to admit this; I just consider it honing my investigative skills and strengthening interpersonal relations by understanding more deeply how people exert themselves in the world and also what music they like. Although to me, it’s not the music they listen to that’s most fascinating but HOW they chose to do it. Self-made laylists?

Albums? Generated Spotify playlist? Shuffling an artist? Discover weekly? ANYWAYS, when I opened my Spotify on my desktop and, suddenly, to my surprise, my friend listening activity was GONE i was DEEPLY uncomfortable. My whole Spotify experience derailed. What’s up with that?

Yeah, i love looking at what other people are listening to, especially, the playlists they make and the playlists they chose to listen to. I imagine scenarios of people having back-to-back unsaid convos between playlists; which playlist was in response to a playlist they FELT like was about them and so on. And i know for most people it ain’t that deep, but sometimes it IS that deep and my intuition is right and i watch relationships unfold in real-time after I called it through some Spotify deep diving (breakups are the easiest to spot). Also, Spotify followers are the weirdest conglomerate of people that is oftentimes so unrelated to the actual people that matter in your life.

So how do friends' listening activity change how you actually LISTEN to music? I mean, i know nothing at all times so i can’t say. But knowing that sometimes you are actually being perceived by the music you are playing in real-time is a crazy thought. Maybe you start listening to certain music in hopes a certain person will see that you do. Music is so much more abstract than images of yourself or just posting anything that you produce but it is so deeply connected to who we are and how we feel. I feel like i could go on and on about this but i’m just going to end it here even though i have come to no conclusions.

(Chlo’s response 7/7/22) Ok so here is how i would outline everything you just said plus some extra thoughts as a video essay script A meditation on spotify // Lesson 1. Spotify is a mode of communication. (You decide how much you want to share, but the way our generation uses it, it is a form of interaction – ear to ear. Discuss friend listening activity) Lesson 2. Spotify is a dating app. (music forming connections, interaction between playlists, taking songs from other people, etc. friend dating, not necessarily romantic. case studies -- reallife connections formed through spotify)

Lesson 3. Spotify is an internal control system/machine. (reckless’ control theory, talk about performatism. performativism. lol) Lesson 4. Spotify is a self-branding machine. (music is so abstract – and therefore a deeper/ diffeent representation of ourselves. And it is a reflection of the outer parts of the world that we have incorporated into ourselves. We eat food; we drink water; we listen to music. If music makes up a large part of who we are, how we think, and even (most simply) is the soundtrack to our movement through the world, then spotify is the ultimate self-branding machine. It exposes our organs, without even showing our faces. ) Lesson 5. Spotify plays with the space-time continuum. (screws up time, invisibility – can’t see who liked your playlists – and invisible podcasts.) (...Go deep. Take it home.)

WAIT SO WHAT IF WE PROJECT CHUNGKING EXPRESS ONTO THE WALL AND DANCE IN IT

SAM: There was a moment in mid-June when Chloe and I were the only two people living in Eugene.

So long story short, Chloe got a projector and that was peak play. Like wow, what should we project? Where should we project? How do we interact with the projection? Oh, we have two mirrors facing each other? We can project INFINITY?? KUSAMA (look up Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrors if confused) ???

Well, that’s just how it felt, like not literally, you silly goose. My roommates were gone and hers were too and everyone was everywhere but not near, and with real responsibilities put on hold, we could play like children. Major emphasis on “play” as opposed to “hang,” “chill” or any other derivative of word used to describe spending time together. It was playing.

Brain play. what a weird fucking word, play. Or word-play. Now that’s entirely different.

Wait, am I doing wordplay right now? Play is almost plate but not quite; the open vowel represents the openness of what play entails. Okay, I’m being tangential. Anyways, our physical space and brain space were thoroughly investigated through this circumstantial freedom.

Nooks and crannies of our neighborhood were discovered. We analyzed words and their origins and sounds (which I clearly like doing) until they seem made up and I guess words are exactly that…made up…

The sweet spot was projecting a clip of the “Chungking Express” (one of my fav movies that i made chloe watch); the scene where the cranberries are playing.

Something about the visuals and the song together was so visceral and hit a feral spot in me and my brain. And then we took lots and lots of photos. And videos.

My hair was flaming red and likewise, my mind burned (i miss red hair sam sometimes).

For a brief moment in time, it felt like we created a new world within the confinements of the small bathroom. That the bathroom wasn’t a place to use the toilet, wash your hands, and shower but to dance in a realm of infinite reflections and colors while music melted your thoughts away.

It’s crazy how FUN it is to be creative. When you get to create your own personalized immersive experience. And when two brains work together the end results are that much better. We had the best dance party ever within the realm we created (sober too and in the early morning mind you) and those memories are the sweetest part of the process.

BRAIN DAY

SAM x CHLO x ACTUAL, REAL-LIFE FREE TIME PHOTO EDITION

FILM STILLS

THOUGHT THE 22ND ANIMATIO OF SHOW (walking home) C: alright so we just went to the – what was it called?

S: The Animation Show of Shows. There were ten different animations made from different countries. Some were short, some were longer.

Lots of different styles.

C: The first was this insane flickering of lots of different masks they photographed. About five seconds in Samantha goes– S: I said, I don’t think I like this. But then I started to enjoy it more when I let my eyes start to blur. I was like, I’m seeing a lot of things right now, this is very visually stimulating.

C: It's funny we both altered our vision because I was closing one eye the entire time. It was kinda intense.

S: I guess it was cool to see the different cultures, and they were photographed at museums so it’s an accurate representation, but concept-wise, I did not really care for it.

C: The second [Empty Places] was probably my favorite.

S: The second was good.

C: It started out as these super zoomed-in images, like disco balls, in this beautiful style.

S: Yeah.

C: It was focused on the way the light was moving across these different objects, but with no context. As the film went on it zoomed further and further back, and you start to see that these are machines like copy machines or lawn sprinklers, all these artifacts of human life, but there’s no humans. They’re just scattered and churning away. There's clearly been some apocalypse. It’s built on – S: Beethoven Moonlight Sonata! But in the soundtrack there were multiple artists.

C: Number three I liked a lot but you did not like that one.

S: What was number three?

C: It was these line people set to a French song.

S: Oh that one! I didn’t hate it, I just wasn’t that into it.

C: I think I didn’t start liking it til I saw the text and the images together.

TS ON D ANNUAL ON SHOW WS S: Like the lyrics?

C: Yeah.

S: I just couln't take the images and text in at the same time.

C: I think what I liked was there was this disembodiment. Like all these human parts splintered within themselves. So I was like, it's an accurate representation...

S: Yeah, I did like the style. And the energy.

S: Average Happiness was cool. It almost reminded me of that Pixar movie with the piano player, Soul. I think it was the narration maybe.

C: That chorus sound, and the way the graphs turned into a city... It was so much information that it turned into no information at all. Which was kind of the point, I guess. I don’t usually say that I get relaxed by a large conglomeration of graphs but I loved it.

S: I loved when the individual charts were pushing through the different graphs. I want to see that one again.

(FILMS) Beyond Noh -- Patrick Smith/Kaori Ishida (U.S./Japan) Empty Places -- Geoffroy de Crecy (France) Beseder (Good and Better) -- Gil Alkabetz (Germany) Zoizoglyphe -- Jeanne Apergis (France) Rain (Deszcz) -- Piotr Milczarek (Poland) Average Happiness -- Maja Gehrig (Switzerland) Aurora -- Jo Meuris (U.S.) Yes-People -- Gísli Darri Halldórsson (Iceland) Ties -- Dina Velikovskaya (Germany/Russia) The Man Who Planted Trees -- Frédéric Back (Canada)

favorites from the fields and hills and forests of internet this year... -c

notes on stuff (chlo)

(1) My tea darkens the more time it spends in its teapot. Obviously. But people are surprised when I do that too: I have been steeping in the sun. Or in my room. If I have been steeping in my room, it is the inside of me that has darkened, become more thick with selfness, become more full-flavored, more embodied, more myself. I know the difference between a teapot that is full and one that is empty just by lifting it with two fingers, maybe even one, but I cannot do the same with myself.

Maybe it’s that there’s nothing in particular to fill. I am not always sure how different my body is from the air I breathe, how different my body is from my notebook and my mug of tea. They seem to contain me just as much as my body does. If my self can extend downwards five feet into the heels of my feet, surely it also extends five inches away into the ceramic mug filled with herby water i am about to consume. And then surely it extends into the bosch painting in front of my desk that I look at every day, and then into my lamplight – and the book I am reading – and the notes I have written – and my iron teapot that is hot to the touch and that, by now, has filled and refilled all the water inside my body multiple times. And then surely I extend into the music coming out of my computer’s speakers – and if what McLuhan says is true, that the medium is the message – it is not just the music I extend into but the speakers, and the internet conveying it to me, and the interface upon which I can see all the music my friends are listening to . and then i am all of their music too, and I feel myself pouring, and I feel them pouring too, and we are all pouring together, into no vessel in particular. Just pouring. // (2) If you asked about the morning here I would say: if it is foggy, brew peach green tea and swaddle it in a towel like m has taught you, and pour it over oat milk and drink it slowly, always slowly on a foggy morning. If you left your window open overnight and it smells like smoke and the light is too-golden, too-red, close it and light a vanilla candle and drink coffee with creamer. If it is sunny, or if it is tinged blue-green outside and there is a light mist coming through your window, drink black coffee, no creamer, and eat banana, breaking pieces off with your hand. If the mist is heavy, make black tea instead. And if you wake up and it is pitch black and there are headlights streaking across the opposite wall, go back to sleep, unless it is late fall. If it’s late fall, you get up despite the darkness. To spite it. // (3) I made cookies this morning. A cookie has the same chords as Comfortably Numb without the angsty thematic undertone. But the same roundness, the same accent notes.

The first note is the same: it emerges quickly and round out of nowhere, doubling over itself in sudden self-recognition.

// (4) When i see beauty I want to tell everybody about it. I want to cup my hands around it and let myself expand within it. I want to look at every grain so that I know it completely before it’s gone forever. And then I want to throw it upwards so it becomes the sky.

But it turns out – I think – that that’s not how beauty works. If you see something beautiful, you will keep seeing it. If other people find it beautiful, they will see it too. They usually do. And if you’re alone – it’s still beautiful if only you see it. It will last forever if you don’t try to pluck it up between your hands, and squinting at it won’t teach you anything more about the world. // (5) If we are made of words, then some other force is the punctuation. Or maybe the world is the words and we are the punctuation. Or maybe we are the spaces between the words, and even the spaces between the letters, or maybe we are the breath you use to say it all. // (6) I used to cast my consciousness when I was little. I would sit on the bus home from school and stare out the window and wind up a little line of self and throw it across the street to a person on the sidewalk. Suddenly my vision would be replaced by theirs, and I would see a line of cars and a bus passing in front of me, filled with the faces of middle schoolers, and I’d feel the rain on the hood of my coat. I stopped doing it at some point. It’s intoxicating to always be throwing your eyes and your feeling across rooms or streets or tables. You end up having to cast your consciousness back to your own body, and you forget to feel those things any differently than you feel the things the stranger on the

sidewalk feels. But now, sitting at my desk, more settled in myself than I’ve been for a long time, I want to cast myself into the bosch painting in front of me. There’s a little blue pond in the first panel with a deep and unknown reflection, and I want to put my face under the water and propel myself down to touch whatever is there. I wonder if it’s cold. I want to lay across the sun-drenched hill and look up into the face of a unicorn. I want to watch the lake ripples expand outwards, and i want to feel every part of the breaking water, and I want to imagine that I’m a bug and that the ripple is a tidal wave. I want to run my hands through the trees. There are too many things in this world to be experienced. I will probably never even run my hands through the tree right outside my bedroom window, because I will be too busy doing laundry, or I’ll be scrolling through the digital pdf ’d story of a Victorian woman who was so trapped in her domestic life that she had to imagine the overwhelming bliss of running through hills – a bliss so strong she couldn’t physically take it. // (7) “You are the spitting image of –” – my father.

– my mother.

– my teapot.

– a satsuma orange.

– the tree outside my window.

– the smell of clove.

– a huichol flower.

– a corn tortilla.

– a slightly over-kerned group of letters.

– a hummingbird.

– the handle of a ceramic mug.

– lowercase letters.

– small-petaled flowers.

– my wrists.

– my ribcage. // (8) When I listen to music, it is because I am holding it in my cupped hand. That’s why I listen to the same songs again and again: I am watching them grow. I am incorporating them into myself. Music is not gaseous, is it liquid, and you drink it until you are drunk.

what time of day are you most creative?

poems w no prose, journal entries, and snippets of writings. (sam)

Moon My adoration for you is an infatuation A steady, constant one; yes, that is hypocritical, My adoration for you is simply An adoration-albeit, I feel so enamored it has to be An infatuation right?

Because feelings wither Love bites surreptitiously And it bleeds and bleeds and Maybe I'm cynical but you Maybe the only thing i love forever At least you’re animate But who am i kidding You are more inanimate if anything Just a steady force The moon the moon the moon It’s a pleasure to fawn over you

Feelings wither; i bloom And i bleed.

With a glassy sheen My pupils wane into the abyss that’s what you’ll see

did you know? look at me and you’ll see-

an abyss. maybe you are the abyss. And I am just a vessel. maybe i am the abyss. And you are the vessel. maybe we are a conjoined abyss (scary) Maybe we are distinct vessels floating in the abyss that is the universe in timelines so vastly far apart but we catch a glimpse of another while catapulting through the sky, and that image casts onto our brains, and individually we will spend lifetimes with each other’s image screen printed in our souls and lasered in our brains.

Just maybe.

Maybe not.

I hope not.

I’ve been seeing images everywhere lately Especially in the river As it tosses and turns i see everyone who has ever held me An embrace from a stranger; An old friend Strangers that are now friends friends that are now strangers Life imitating nature In its cyclicity Everything washing away Distorting back to me

First to look away loses I don’t mind losing Albeit I am certain I won’t lose for you- you are my muse irises falter simultaneously Between us, the air is heavy Even in my made-up game I lose nobody wins I am Narcissus at the pond Crowned by Liriope for eternity i stare We fall in love; we even elope triumphantly, i drown; metamorphosis I win i think (?)

Messenger of gods; Iris She has a letter for me I gauge my eyes before i can even open it

i am crying. Not because i am unhappy. but because i perched my head out the car window and kept it there until my face became numb and my eyes gave away to protect themselves from the harshness of wind and velocity. I am not crying but my god tears are forming. And the dampness of my cheek feels so tender and I'm grinning cheek to cheek and all i can think about is how freeing being alive can feel in spare moments. I have never cried tears of happiness before. Does this count? Maybe. It can count it if i want it to count. I don’t think it counts though. That feels unfair to everyone who has cried tears of joy from within and without some physical force exerting it out of them. i guess I’m a fraud. I am now thinking of all the tears that have been shed on my shoulders in cars just like this one; caressing hair, circular motions on the opposing shoulder, and swiping tears away. Not to mention all the shoulders i’ve buried myself in return.

I hope one day i sob onto someone’s shoulders because i am so happy.

No wind nor velocity.

grocery list

(chlo)

coffee beans, bananas, avocados, cucumber, greens, black tea, creamer.

The French philosopher Georges Perec says to keep lists. They are transient, mundane, beautiful; they are a way to make sense and structure of our everyday. They reveal us in our rawest state.

A grocery list is our landscape. An inventory of the banal is a painting of our selves.

Coffee beans / Bananas / Avocados / Cucumber / Greens / Black tea / Creamer / the coffee beans and black tea become musical notes / we exist in granularity.

Taking inventory -Bread / more bananas / oranges / dark chocolate / spinach / almonds / eyes / ink / sheets / pages / jars of water I do not drink / offset window screens / I am losing air in my front bike tire / black tea on my windowsill, too hot to drink / blueberries, always / midday golden sunlight / there is fire in the air / the street looks different every time I sit on my roof, and today there is nobody but me and my phone call / I love it when the sun shines so hot on my skin I can barely touch it / Two weeks ago we sit on a blanket in the sun and tears come to our eyes, but strangely we feel closer now. Warm soup / salad bar / I miss eating beans and rice and lime every night / Four days ago, in the waiting room again. There is a beautiful fig tree arching into the light. Its leaves are strong and curious.

I am good with most plants, but I can never keep a fig tree alive. Even as the plants around it swell upwards and out, the fig stays small, unwilling, arms crossed, and clings dutifully to its three small leaves.

An updated grocery list: beans / rice / lime / fig tree. When I was little, I would watch my dad butter a corn tortilla, pat cinnamon and sugar in, roll it tight with his thumb and forefinger, and I would bounce up and down, taste it before I’d even touched it. It tasted like joy and like glorious hot sunlight. All good things are made of corn.

Why do lists always become prose?

I need to press enter more.

Life in general is just writing while pressing enter.

SELF PORTRAITS?!

(sam)

A self-portrait is a representation of the artist that has been created through any medium by that artist; drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, etc. The genre that is self-portraiture surprisingly only existed in the Renaissance when most renaissance artists had taken it upon themselves to produce self-portraits due to the newfound cheapness and quality of mirrors. This is surprising because mirrors have been around since 6000 BCE but there are no known records of selfportraits until WAYYY later.

Are we getting more narcissistic? Oh, probably. More on that later. However, self-portraits aren’t rooted in narcissism (unless you are literally a narcissist that is). A self-portrait in itself is a mirror adjacent; it is a portal revealing the artist’s mind and what they want to reveal or simply see or show themselves as. A self-portrait can be depicted very literally like through photorealism or anything more abstract. In regards to photography, the self-portrait can be a thoughtprovoking practice in order to hone your skills without the need for a model.

What is the difference between a self-portrait and a selfie (in photo)? Well, that is entirely up to you. The generalization is that a self-portrait is taken with an DSLR or an “actual camera”; so the difference is that the former is more pretentious (ha who would’ve thought). I would separate the two between the intent. Self-portraits are more known to be

an artistic depictions while selfies are usually more cursory and well you know…vain? I love them both though.

And I take a lot of both! Every self-portrait I’ve taken has been on impulse. Sometimes, I wish I had more structure to this practice, but when does my mind have any structure?

Are any minds structured? When I visually think of what’s going on up there it’s like a junk drawer of cotton balls filled with ambivalence with the occasional memory or thought.

Sometimes, I view my mind as a children’s puzzle (a lot thicker and bigger pieces) and I label each puzzle as separate compartments to.. compartmentalize.

And I picture memories, thoughts, and visual images shuffling around. But usually, it’s cotton balls.

It is a very visceral feeling of knowing exactly how you felt in that moment of time as the shutter clicks and you are alone but not quite, as the presence of the camera is imminent. For me, there is no art direction other than the instant location, outfit, and makeup decisions. It’s never that deep at the moment (it usually feels a little silly tbh) but over time having an archive of documentation of YOU capturing YOURSELF feels purposeful.

Digital

gardening (super cool! Also what the hell!)

NATURE X DIGITAL // Among the bloggers I read I see a sort of love for connecting the natural and the digital, both literally and in metaphor…

CASE STUDY 1. THE DIGITAL GARDEN Here are some examples of digital gardens: https://docs.google.com/ spreadsheets/d/1VHrlB9u6RpGjZK_ SW-JKf7t-QehBdBF7EVF8Qd-j02s/ edit#gid=648567440 and this is super cool https://digitalgarden. hypha.coop/initial-seeds This article explains it https:// eyeondesign. aiga.org/ the-power-ofmapping-namingand-connectingblack-creatives/ The idea of a digital garden is that you connect images and words and thoughts into a garden… which, by virtue of it being made up of connections, can theoretically expand and grow infinitely. It also references the notion that whatever is in your garden somewhat mirrors something growing in yourself… as if you are planting things within yourself. In this way it is a sort of documenting process, ideally a real-time record of the things growing within you. You organize it however you want. The fantasy of a digital gardener is a seamless flow between mind and digital container. Like a two-way rubber stamp.

Because it is a garden, it's made up of things which came from

outside of you, so by nature it is also connected completely to the outside world, which is cool because it is a sort of model to the way your mind is implicitly connected to the world around you.

It implies some sort of mutuality with your environment. Collective databases with multiple active contributors like the one linked above are built on mutuality, a lack of hierarchy, etc. These directories become touchpoints, nodes in the network, entry points (portals if you will) for any individual to access any other part of the network.

The digital garden has become a form of resistance because its rhizomatic nature (Deleuze, ahem ->) is a direct challenge to the historical/ pedagogical/conventional (?) way of organizing information.

Western thought focuses on hyperindividualism. A rhizomatic database or digital garden is built to oppose this.

Another aspect of this, to my mind, is the idea of sustainability. Hyperindividualism is, to my mind, not very sustainable; whatever is being created grows rapidly based on a single story, and at some point in its creation it can become cut off from the rest of the word. A network grows sustainably, and implicitly takes into account a diverse understanding of what is going on in the world and community. A single person simply can’t do this.

Okay that was a lot about digital

gardens with a lot of theory and not much actual examples.

Something like Are.na lends itself to digital gardens. It is rhizomatic in nature, building off of connections. (also, side point, the UI is very simplistic, doesn’t try to crowd.)

(There’s some cringiness to the word "digital garden" too. It’s tipped a bit into a meme, just by virtue of its popularity on platforms like are.na. Everyone has a digital garden. Not two hours after I made my first one, it got added to a page called "SO MANY GARDENS." In the description: "No disrespect to your gardens.")

That was way more than i meant to write about digital gardens, especially given the fact that my whole point was that we love to connect nature and digital

systems. We love the nature metaphor, and we especially love it for our technology.

CASE STUDY 2. THE WEB AS AN ECOSYSTEM METAPHOR … we all know this one. http://feral.earth/. This is a cool website whose accessibility is moderated by ecological data at time of use.

We love to come up w terms like “digital ecomediaverse,” “rhizomatic digital networking,” etc. You can practically autogenerate terms connecting nature and the digital. we could write a bullshit generator for this, one of these.

These are some questions i have about the way we mirror (or say we mirror) (or use as a metaphor) (or project) nature onto technology.

Did we build our digital (eco)system to mimic our natural ecosystem? (if yes, then:) Is it inevitable that we do this since we are natural creatures? (do we naturally just model everything after nature? Everything we create mirrors nature?

OR everything CREATABLE mirrors nature?)

Or… are we imposing our understanding of the natural world onto the things we create?

If this is the case, are we just justifying the digital world to ourselves? Are we using our appreciation for the way nature unfolds to attempt to understand the mess and chaos we have generated through our technological innovations?

Yes

No

For instance, I just saw this article by microsoft… “can software model a natural ecosystem?”

This is either a super valid point or a completely idiotic one.

SCENARIO A: we built software based on nature.

Either intentionally or not intentionally. If not intentionally, it’s because we can’t help but build everything to look like nature. We literally can’t build software that doesn’t mimic nature… probably because nature is the law for everything.

Or maybe because we’re human, and we understand things and create things in one way.

SCENARIO B: we built this software, and now we’re trying to validate it or make sense of it through a metaphor we know well.

And through a metaphor that is very popular in the blogosphere.

What do we gain by comparing an ecosystem to our software?

What do we lose (do we become less critical of it? Do we like it more? Feel more connected to it?)

K i have more thoughts on this but this is already such a mess… and cut off from the actual world.

Might just be going down a hole

In joint notes app notes reckless emoji usage screenshots projectors drip coffee late night citrus fruits sleeping

Out "It's in the doc" style guides screenshots screens retouching Slack InDesign