“Nothing is positive about art except that it is a word.” 

Willem de Kooning

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"I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree…and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are and we have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.” 

Werner Herzog

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"The radical act of [the] techno rebels was that they entered an inhuman network of machinery and found a voice within it….nothing less than the human spirit, somewhere in a vast, inscrutable universe, daring to exist.”

Shuja Haider, Detroit Techno, New York Magazine, 2017

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“The Luddites’ mistake was that they failed to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they were used.” 

Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

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Although all forms are eternal, the question remains: what forms, and it is easy to become distracted in pondering whether a rhombus or milk bottle, meso-morph 

Contains divinity if divinity is to be found in that which never changes, like a letter upon reflection, sheet, deck, thought, pile, crumpet, bog

Seen through the wrong end of the telescope, as if from a great height, or glimpsed from a speeding train for a second, recognized and abandoned as quickly as it was 

Forgotten by the train that brought it, ploughing on through the night, pushing buckets of air, sending sounds out like handcuffs to the phenomenal world

Which, through remaining unchanged and thereby uncontingent, resists the embrace of time upon which all notion of the possibility of transformation depends

Tim Atkins, Written Never Meaning

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“Technology is a way of revealing.”

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology,Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1954

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“’Phase’ is a concept that helps us see the variable synchronicity of art and technology. Bach imagined music beyond what his instruments could play. Now we have instruments that can play beyond what can be imagined.” 

Gene Youngblood

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"Artists in the modern period were driven by a radical and forward thinking approach, ideas that included technological positivity and a grand narrative of progress. The reaction against this mindset came to be known as postmodernism."

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"Postmodernism is Modernism with the optimism taken out."

Robert Hewison

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"I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra"

Ishmael Reed

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 “TECHNÉ is an ancient Greek epistemological term that integrated beauty, art, expertise, technical knowledge, skill and industry: In Aristotle's time, artistic creativity and technology were not divided.” 

Victor Burgin

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“Poetic Logic’ is the sensuous apprehension of what we do not yet understand in the presence of reality.” 

Frederick Sommer

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 "Collage was a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in this century."

Clement Greenburg, 1959 •

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"The word "gesture", originates in the Latin "gerere" (to carry, conduct oneself, act) becoming in medieval Latin "gestura" (bodily movement conveying a particular message). The study of the origins of both spoken and written language find the gesture, as an abstract, symbolic form, a precursor to speech and writing. In the visual arts, the word "gestural" refers to the artist's hand and bodily movement as recorded in paint or surface modulation. This gestural evidence is like a signature, as unique for each artist as a thumb print or DNA sample.

As an artist creating work with computers, I find myself operating in a machine/human hybrid. This of course is nothing new, but "gesture" becomes an interesting notion in the mix of electronic imaging and mathematics. One might say that an algorithm is as profoundly individual, in a sense as gestural, as the swelling volumes and sensuous rhythms of a freehand line."

MH

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“He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings—all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end.” —The Town and the City- Jack Kerouac

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"As with all my work, I begin with a primitive line or drop of sweat, or pixel cluster and then...respond to the possibilities inherent in that mark. The story knows how to tell itself."

"The mistake...the holy accident...and the moment of recognition...the intention of the universe revealed"

"Stepping in...stepping out. Exerting complete control...losing control entirely. Pulling back on the reins...being dragged through the brush."

Michael Holcomb

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The dog trots freely in the street

and sees reality

and the things he sees

are bigger than himself

and the things he sees

are his reality

Drunks in doorways

Moons on trees

The dog trots freely thru the street

and the things he sees

are smaller than himself

Fish on newsprint

Ants in holes

Chickens in Chinatown windows

their heads a block away

The dog trots freely in the street

and the things he smells

smell something like himself

The dog trots freely in the street

past puddles and babies

cats and cigars

poolrooms and policemen

He doesn’t hate cops

He merely has no use for them

and he goes past them

and past the dead cows hung up whole

in front of the San Francisco Meat Market

He would rather eat a tender cow

than a tough policeman

though either might do

And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory

and past Coit’s Tower

and past Congressman Doyle

He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower

but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle

although what he hears is very discouraging

very depressing

very absurd

to a sad young dog like himself

to a serious dog like himself

But he has his own free world to live in

His own fleas to eat

He will not be muzzled

Congressman Doyle is just another

fire hydrant

to him

The dog trots freely in the street

and has his own dog’s life to live

and to think about

and to reflect upon

touching and tasting and testing everything

investigating everything

without benefit of perjury

a real realist

with a real tale to tell

and a real tail to tell it with

a real live

              barking

                         democratic dog

engaged in real

                      free enterprise

with something to say

                             about ontology

something to say

                        about reality

                                        and how to see it

                                                               and how to hear it

with his head cocked sideways

                                       at streetcorners

as if he is just about to have

                                       his picture taken

                                                             for Victor Records

                                  listening for

                                                   His Master’s Voice

                      and looking

                                       like a living questionmark

                                                                 into the

                                                              great gramaphone

                                                           of puzzling existence

                 with its wondrous hollow horn

                         which always seems

                     just about to spout forth

                                                      some Victorious answer

                                                              to everything

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Dog” from A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems. Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

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"Life is a process of invention and adaptation, most of it below the threshold of our ability to observe... always reaching for a more harmonious instanciation. What's left behind, if anything, are pieces of evidence, a record of a momentary state or manifestation of the process.

MH

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There is no failure. The only thing that really matters is the willingness and strength to begin again."

MH

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Chaos Theory is a mathematical sub-discipline that studies complex systems. Complex systems often appear too chaotic to recognize a pattern with the naked eye but the first Chaos theorists began to discover that complex systems often seem to run through some kind of cycle, even though the systems are rarely exactly duplicated. This tendency is called “self-similarity” and is the repetition of a shape, form or behavior on different levels of complexity- not as an identical copy, but as a variation of the same basic shape. A large number of particles will display a pattern that is near equal to the initial possibilities of a single particle.

MH

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Crowding objects together in a limited space causes formal mutations through algorithmic intelligence.

MH

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Beauty is its own reason. It may be described, analyzed and put to use but, in the end, these actions only serve to obscure what's actually there. Beauty doesn't care about intention, history or manners. It can be found in mathematics and nature, dance and cooking, science and sport or a life well-lived. It is, like a flower, the expression of something beyond simple desire, something more like an irrefutable need to exist.

MH

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The concept of “protologos” has to do with knowledge that is distinct from language. It is a form of knowing that co-exists now, in parallel with our very sophisticated systems of identifying, naming and quantifying. It is experiential rather than nominal and is the ancestor and basis for all understanding.

MH

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This documentary collection is an abstracted view of the variety and scope of Michael Holcomb's career. The documents, in no particular order, provide a small glimpse of the diverse initiatives required to forge a unique and successful practice in new territory where even the tools of discovery are being invented as one proceeds.

While still in his teens, the young painter, Michael Hocomb, was discovered by the Seattle writer, critic and activist Maxine Cushing Grey. As a result, his work was shown in Northwest galleries and museums in the early 1960's with celebrated artists like Mark Toby, Paul Horiuchi and Phillip McCraken. Soon, his restless curiosity and growing knowledge of the experimental initiatives in the wider art world led him to begin his own investigations into the new media tools and technologies appearing at this time.

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"I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage. 

i am inside of history. its hungrier than i thot."

Ishmael Reed

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"The confluence of technology and art has been my central interest since the 1960’s. I am a humanist with much curiosity; interested in pushing these very sophisticated computational tools to produce images they weren’t always intended to produce. I respond to the sensual surprises that result from setting up a number of formal and mathematical circumstances and revealing what was, heretofore, unknown. Then, like any other artist, it’s what I do with these discoveries that makes the work."

Michael Holcomb

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" One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going."

Goethe

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"The arts are constantly mutating, evolving and becoming something "different". The arts, like nature, don't care how we feel about this, and go where they will."

Michael Holcomb, speaking at TECHNO-GENESIS: Innovation Under the Influence, University of Arizona Museum of Art

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"When I saw an electro-magnet bending the beam of a cathode ray tube, electronic effects generators, multiple-source compositing...all creating more fluid and surprising opportunities for imaging than anything that could be accomplished with older media, I never looked back."

MH

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"L'art

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, 

Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes."

Ezra Pound

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"I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move 

Let the wind speak 

that is paradise. 

Let the Gods forgive

what I have made 

Let those I love try to forgive 

what I have made." 

Ezra Pound

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“In the formal game, the player sought to compose out of the objective content of every game, out of the mathematical, linguistic, musical and other elements, as dense, coherent, and formally perfect a unity as possible.”

Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi

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In a work of art, the various components are arranged in a system of relationships, an internal dialogue, an interdepedent, coherent conversation without words.

MH

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"The experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or facination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction. Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance..."

"I have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology. The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Dawinian adaptations... which we extend and intensify in the creation of works of art."

Denis Dutton