Steve Calvert - Bachelor Machines

STEVE [-nW.] CALVERT engages in pataphysical visual-poetics research, improvisational electro-acoustic noisic, emergence studies in procedural systems, generative feedback, and material autopoesis. His work aims at the conundrum of authorship and collaboration, challenging both the construction and refutation of systems in which knowledge exists as intellectual property or as a limited and manageable resource. He also pursues operations in collaborative community building.

Calvert holds undergraduate degrees in InterMedia Arts from ECU, and in Art History/Religious Studies from UBC. Steve was also a founding member of the InterMission Artists Society, serving as a contributing creative producer, recording archivist, community outreach agent, and collaborative drawing event series organizer. He now directs and administrates the online art gallery Bachelor Machines, and its reproductive armature, Mechanical Brides. He lives in Strathcona

DRAWINGBOARD : Presently on the laboratory worktable, a series of non-narrative experimental graphic novels, eternally coming-soon... Most recent developments include refining actionscript-macros for color and vector treatments of back-catalogued black-and-white work, and exploratory adaptations of drawing aesthetics to treated digital photography... The present condition of these in-process projects are previewable as follows:

Abstractions -- summer 2009 - Further explorations in abstracted and asymbolic surfaces, fresh textures generated by variations on my new favourite filter combinations: extracting reduced forms in generations of layered edge-effects - digital photos provide the seed culture, as more and more I lean in on the camera as a drawing tool, and to computers for my paint kit... The procedure continues to produce surprising results, we are pleased to report... please let me know if it moves you...

Aperatures -- early 2009 experiments with a new-to-me vector-graphic trick, applied reflexively to the object of my workplace's desire; fetishizing the cinematic collapse of opposites; the television inside-out, darkside of the advertising torus...

MEKBOK - prototype page breakdown of the Endomechanics series. 2009 introduces fresh color formulations, presently under development... collaborative coloring projects are warmly invited... presently seeking eager digital color artists, or a suitably motivated army of young primates equipped with crayons or graphics tablets, bed-scanners and ftp access...

GLYPBOK - page cuts of art-by-the-meter scrolling photocopier-based generative feedback assemblages -- this project, begun in 2000, is forever asymptotically approaching a resolvable print formulation...

Olympian Ritournelle - return the younger titans - autumn 2008 collage series fusing the quizzical metamagical Svartalfaheim feedback figures I'd made last season, mashed in with some fresh, still damp even, tricks I'm working out for treating photographic portraits and landscapes ... results remain uncertain, but the exploratory venture is serving its purpose; a comic-book diversionary aside from the more brain-and-eye-straining Mek and Glyp projects...

ARCHIVES - selected visual works, circa 1998-2008 - some material overlaps the current projects...

Wyrdseid - Svartalfaheim - Having resited figurative impulses throughout the mechanist project, I endulged a playful impulse to investigate kawaii, c.autumn 2007. I'd noticed that in cutting along existing grain-lines in the feedback images, pieces separated which in many cases resembled body parts: arms and legs, torsos, certainly heads and faces... i began to select for, cut, hunt and assemble these characters, partly imagining they could be animated, mapped to motion capture like shadow puppets... this extended project is still lingering in the between ... friendly animators are invited to offer ...

Dimensions Variable - A selection of drawing-machine productions, scanned with simple digital treatments of same, spanning 1998-2006... First is Betweeners, an attempt to sketch out material for a graphic novel using the automatic paintbrush - a lock of my own hair attached to a battery-operated hand-fan. Next, the early machine drawings, derived from hand-compositing photographs of smashed cars.

Mechscapes - first instance of the MEK scrolls, c.2007. Refinished again and represented here in cropped dual-page-form, as MEKBOK.

Xeroglyphy - early instantiations of the GLYP series, using the photocopier feedback technique - produced intermittently from the moment of discovery c. 2000, first posted online circa 2007.

Event - photographs of incidental drawings, ink splashes on my drawing table, side effect of the Betweeners series - presented in the Intermission photography exhibition of the same name, in association with Blim...

Collège des Collages - Ongoing lark project, utilizing simple hand-cut magazine-collage, in effort to maintain a level of levity and satire. Contents accumulating between 1996 and 2008.

Sketchbooks - Selections from the sketchbooks, first eight from summer 09, next set culled from years past...

Photography on flickr - Taking the transliteration of 'Light Drawing' seriously, presented here are several phenomenological studies conducted with my trusty Canon Elph S410.

All content presented in trust to the creative commons, copyleft 1998-2009 StevenWCalvert, Vancouver BC. Prints are available on demand, dimensions variable, scale and costs negotiable per order. Proposals, invitations, contracts and commissions all, naturally, are welcome ... please contact me directly by :

Text - Collected annual plagiarist assemblage texts - following a selectively cut-up Gysin/Burroughts line, reading the voice of the present future in oracular compressions of aphoristic phrases lifted from the public discourse in all mediums -- memetic fragments bejeweled by the year's intellectual adventuring -- excisions from the enveloping zeitgeist, idea-contagions de-and-re-scrambled with a paranoid-critical internal monologue -- ongoing experiment in long-term psychohistorical sedimentation, search pattern of selective metanarrative... no authorship claimed nor attributed.. to be read in the disembodied fractalline voice of the Demi-Urge Myriad Legion...

Sound - imperative to the Calvair agenda: keeping fingers in all pies , and sound most joyfully of all frivolous acts -- experimental and semi-conventional sound-art has proccupied for now twenty years, through waves of variable intensity --music is vital to any comprehension of art, as is dance to it's practice... risking dilettantism with multiple directionalities, relishing the steady digital convergence of shamanic humanities, singularity hovering ahead in resonant hyperspatial futurity... Hosted here are solo recordings spanning 1996 to present, under several subtitles and alter-egos.... also linked are collaborative improvisational electro-acoustic orchestral recordings made with Intermission Stereo, spanning 2001-2006...

With a myriad endogenous aliases, allies, and countervailing splinter factions, we have taken up a special and sustained interest in the feedback system as an operational metaphor, suitable in turn for describing the Calvair entelechy itself. I am a strange loop. Pursued as navigational model and tactical means to extract imagination from its imaginary condition, we open a register of speculative creative research and hyperbolic pseudoscience; we aspire to expand the collegial index, of 'pataphysics, and of generative, procedural and emergence art; to feed the ongoing potlatch, and to demand no less than the total reenchantment of the world...

postmodern weird science is cut loose by the multiplicity -- conceptual art is like like any viral lifeform, these memes want only to replicate and be seen, be emulated, dimensions variable... much like the internet, generative systems are by nature open source and creative commons... we have the same dream, we think the same things at the same time...

I am interested in economies of attention. I consider this attraction of familiars in the library of networked thought to be an implicit property of generative, fractal, and emergence thinking. This contagious idea of free association, the right to share remains a potent revolutionary and already-long-underway political and cognitive catalyst for humanity -- that creativity, and as it follows intellectual property, is itself an autopoetic property of nature, takes us ever closer to the inevitable tipping point of conventional paradigms...

Improvisation requires a deferral to collective and permeable identities, dissolving the singlar individual will to [arrogantly] assert a personal narrative and make claims on creative control -- the improvisateur enters an intuitive, faster-than-thought state, which bizzarrely quite regularly demonstrates itself to be a much better artist/musician/skateboarder than 'you' are -- there the reunification of the self and the world-spirit begins, and the illusion does not return...

I try to make art sideways, to let art, rather than push it - its the force that grows my toenails, much less the ego that is speaking to you now, that makes 'my' 'art'... in effort to speak to and for more than one gasping self, I insist, I'm but one of many... and you are too...

The author bears a hauntly slippery authorship - the generative process and feedback system are themselves a 'bachelor machine', speaking without teather to rationalizations. The venture articulates its own artificial life, and it's often unclear which 'creator' is in precession of whom - SC is commonly present when materilaization occurs, SC initiates and records their transient conditions, notes the emergence of anomalies, observes and made corrective adjustments, speculating on wild impulse - from this a material emerges -- he has difficulty thinking of this emergent as 'mine', in any conventional sort of authorship -- i aim to build soft machines of language, conduct them as a reflecting medium, in a neoplatonic and shamanic sense... as the concrete poets would...

Re that : I'm always interested in collaboration. I am particularly keen to find a colorist, and invite coloring-book lovers of all ages to play with some of my black and white works. Please be invited to copy, color, and bounce past your kids some of the MEK or GLYP images... Email a photo/scan of the results and any other feedback you might care to offer, to:

Looping outputs back into inputs with a half-twist, we had set out to build a series of bachelor machines; vision-engine automata of formal exploration which would in their way choose their own path, run feral, reconstitute themselves autonomously elsewhere, exceeding the artist's authority as a kind of benevolent contagion... quickly it was realized that serendipity had devised in the problem a riddle for ingratiating the alchemist with the clever architect-gnomes of heaven to help repurpose and redesign our factories of thought, given agency to exise and inscribe fresh formal vocabularies endogenous to the means of electronic reproduction...

Harnessing negentropic energies within a temporarily suspended state of controlled instability, a pocket universe unwinds, unfolds and begins, itself, metabolizing -- instrumental graphemetrics present these in an uncertain probability space, unpredictable cloud in-formation crystallizingsteadily, under intense observational attention, and subsequent filtration -- over time, the source line-noise levels out, begins to take on the eerie characteristics of 'signal' -- navigating a maelstrom of buffeting noise, the operator must physically intuit a balancing-act, twiddling knobs and levels, betwixt echo-silence and the exponentially-reactive threshold-manifolds of algorithmic chaoplexity, a pattern exists......

From here, magic commences -- qualitatively strange, figuratively uncanny autonomous articulations of an extraordinarily life-like artificial life-form emerge - the procedure appears to traces edges on electronic artifacts which generationally lend themselves toward the distinct impression of a whimsical intentionality at work - an alien presence pressing itself up against the glass, making silly faces ...

The spectator begins to clamour, stammering to fabricate explanations, grasping backwards at no-longer-nearby assurances, each crumbling handhold further eroding the fracatlline edges of comprehension - presumptions unraveling, a moment of panic, of cognitive freefall -- jarring the tail-brain against existential bedrock of partial knowledge, our protagonist is offered a cold cybernetic pseudopod - still trembling, we are lifted to stand and face the Glimmung...

Where attention and intention, in tension, diffuse into a cascade of gestures too quick to predict, the functions of morphic resonance, which occur naturally at high speeds, can indulge their tendency to leak out sideways - encoding information in rapid decompressions of time, which relax the tedious illusion of the arbitrary, providing instead a lingering flash portrait of the uncanny inside/between -- the crowded energetic noosphere ---

A distinctly eerie sense of an autonomous, playful, creative, attentive, and very much living force of nature, deliberately messing with your head... perhaps some angelic-future-self gazing back at its/elf through the protean abyss of ink, immortal Gaian oracle, actively prodding and poking fun at the creator's game of habituated forgetfulness... faced with incalculable unknowability, the incomprehensibly complex object again shifts masks, transforms to accommodate the perceptual powers and interpretive schemata of the viewer, compounding deficiencies with those inherent limitations and filtrations latent to tools available for the capture, preservation and analysis of these curious bioelectrical paraterrestrial entelechies and their ilk...

An attempt has been made to orient and sustain a practice of inquiry around what Manuel Delanda calls ‘non-human expressivity’ – a radical materialist premise that the earth itself is capable of self-organization: that the world is latent, overburdened, teeming and pregnant with the same morphogenetic potential that our cerebral cortex enjoys... Indeed it might likely be aware and responsive to our attention... Awestruck and mystified by this and other riddles of embodiment, a curious compulsion has arisen, motivating a continuous attempt at speculative articulations and experperimental observations of that consciousness - mind as a literal topological invagination of the world, toroidally continuous with the living environment inhabited. Art permits medium for demonstrating that all material is folded energy, seething with information and organization... in dreams, stones, plants, insects, as in art and elsewhere, form eerily rises, responds and replies to the gaze and interpretion of each individuated observer...

Shuddering with recognition that what we know about ourselves and our ecology is astonishingly limited, childishly naive, these technological toys we use to interface, and interfere, with a mistakenly 'external' 'imaginary' 'alien' 'other' -- by the most gentle means possible, we're satisfied to call our activities 'art'... --- not only are we are not alone in the universe, we aren't alone on this planet, neither in our bodies nor minds - nowhere is the self not also and simultaneously immersed in and an extension of the multitude... literally we are endosymbionts, aswarm with ubuntu in the rhizome of mutualism, teeming with the myriad memes of the zeitgeist - we are all and only multiple...

This 'art', approached with an unreasonably irreverent sentiment suited to the approaching centenary of Dada, will achieve its only intentional functional directive if it succeeds in adding some volley of transferrable momentum to the trembling vector of post-human becoming - perhaps we may slightly accellerate a fractal unfolding of novelty to buttress the collapse of history elsewhere and otherwise ... -- We are in pursuit of a pan--narrative, trans-literate form of visual-literature yet too complex for operations of the present order to conceive, and yet which does, and will, exist. -- Shadows of that impossible object, glimmering in hyperspace, echoing backwards in time and haunt our dreaming present - we recieve the transmission, and follow its attractive impulses to reunite the alchemical twin with our becoming future selves, to reinstantiate the great work, and complete the puzzle ...

When each reader is herself inspired, struck to that stunned moment of exasperated exclamation: flash misfiring of self-recognition, disrupting ordinary experience, aesthetic shock of disoriented surprise, disbelief, triggering a burst of laughter, release of expectations; the momentary realization of having easily transgressed existing presumptions, finding oneself suddenly well outside the zones of comfort - a lucid moment of unbounded confusion, strobe-flashes of awe flickering aperiodically between shrouds of bemused befuddlement -- re-cognition of something obviously new, and yet, cleaned and bathed in clear light, emerges born again, as new, an endlessly repeatable discovery, reconstituted fresh for every player of every new game; the dead rise from the archives, releiving the amnesia of the species -- you know confidently, self-evidently, that this vast depth was once known to you, probably in childhood, and certainly now, as long before...

By contagious example, inspiring further heroic gestures of experimentation and superfluous play improvisational - on the hunt for serendipity : incorporating random public effusions of glee, unqualified sharing of joys, habits of general amazement, and amusement - dancing always with conspicuos natural energy and enthusiasm - harnessing the reflex seizure of ridicule's insubordinate power, the absurdist's spasmodic "holy-fuck!" evokes a cascadomg "eureka" fugue of neurological feedback-loops, echo-reflections slapping off the comprehensible limit of one's known dominion - enchanting divine hilarity, gazing uneasily on irreducible enigmas, incomplete maps, laughably partial knowledge...

'Pataphysics: a religion in the 'making' -- cut-up word games, kybernetic feedback mechanisms, conceit schemas, parlor magic, simple illusions, chance games and other oracular sorceries lost to antiquity - where industry has put natural history to work, we have cut her loose to play, free to hunt and devour her captors; liberating art to invent her own conceptual-linguistic machines - intricate lacework landscapes of prodigious phantasmagoric deleria, endlessly and effortlessly, just like heaven; an active dialogue with the angels of history, falling backward through time, juggernaut coincidence engine of dharmic becoming...

Pursuing an inversion/eversion of sympathetic counter-hierarchical schemas, sublimating existing industrial aversions into a parodically rigorous and comparably liberatory imaginary science - generative constraints, framing devices, portal-matrices opened for charting lateral, para-dimensional and mathematizable parameter-domains with remarkably fluid morphic potentials; complex forms emerge, developing complex habits which accord yet to simple rules; sprawling immanent virtualities, probability attractors open-sourced for amateure-engineering...

Drawing attentions to diffraction's spectral edges fraying the spotlight of reason, in refraction, crystallography of language bends the medium of communication to its own imperative self-replication - the eyes see nothing without the noisy prejudices of the brain - charting these tremulous shadows seething at the edges of visible light - electrons leap valences in polyharmonic clouds of contrasting charges -- edge-detection flickers with in-stabilities, black/white on/off rods and cones sparkling across the hormone soup, stark charge-differentials bolting between receptors, kick off a haze of photonic noise at the margins of incommensurability - auras blur the transforming mask in motion - first locus of the word-virus - babbling thought-form entities, parasites of the spirit...

Art endeavors to grant some reproducible consistency to the speculative premise that generative procedures indeed manifest a peculiar and particular category of forces in the fractal topology of novelty - that artists may scientifically stimulate emergent potentiations. by physical means... intuiting the twitchy subharmonic fractal-arhythm, cyclings of the slow-hand reveal epi-genetic repetitions, archetypes, the earliest engines of creation -- leveraging the soup toward a provocative synthesis of opposites -- hammering out a unifying hypothesis on how-things-take-shape, we've applied feedback cycles toward a speculative vitalist memetic morphogenetics... our artifical-life formulae and aperiodic seasonal wetware updates will help catalyze the self-transfroming differentiations of countless concrete comedies, already underway...

Mimesis makes its first harrowing pronouncements in children's cloud gazing. Later, in paint splashes, then rorsharch-fold - eventually, in more or less deliberate stochastic play, with rapid and distracted automatistic clay-modelling, and expressionist gestural painting, spazz dancing - impressed by experiements in subduing ego-control during high-speed creative activities, learning to employ the body's distributed awareness, it's muscular intelligence, our research reuslts continue to bifurcate wildly -- reliance on synchronicity provides an endless invention less and less reminiscent of chance - scripting techniques leading to more and faster drawing machines ... Generation becomes nearly instantaneous, and only re-processing and distribution requires human-scale time periods for reflection... our operating dimensions, future scope and scale, appear infinitely variable...

We maintain an open-source committment to guilelessly sharing our discoveries with the curious - to creative people, ideas are worth much more than money, and obscurity is far more menacing than plagiarism - information wants to be free, art needs an interested audience -- attention-economists soaking the wedge, shattering lateral vectors across the probability cloud --- psycho-historians of the myriad desire to produce and engage in some artificially stable, atemporal event-space - and to defend against the caloric high-uncertainty involved in mainting string-streams of biological memory. Books then, and electronic records - on-demand, charged and encyphered with code-recipes for conjuring the betweeners, rehydrogenating the elves, aliens, ghosts, paraterrestrial ancestors, entities and minor demons loitering in your office copyroom...

Compelled by the flexibile speculative potentials and robust variety and historical richness of graphic arts, the mechanically reproducible polysemic multiplyer -- evocative latencies and deep linguisitc potencies of ink markings on paper, poetic potentials and virulence magnified and mutated by pixelation's redistribution – edges traced by innumerable homonymical eyes --- fill-in-the-blank ambiguous spaces that the viewers' gaze is compelled to investigate, and so to invest herself in articulating further, to engage with, so to fabricate for herself the missing linkages - struggling to maintain the persistence of vision... the desired illusion of coherency... in contrast, inconsistency, variations in density and composition, form and line dis-ambiguate and spin out conceptual abstractions, punctuating cognitive leaps with parenthesized symbolic restabilizations – ... A truly strange and beautiful thing, graphical techne - terribly amusing form of cybernetic shamanism - the tendency of form to bend itself to what we can manage to comprehend, and vice versa - revealed in system after experimental system – generative feedback producing patterns approaching signal in the reflective observer - the eye/ear doesn’t like to see/hear what it can't comprehend, so it projects the familiar; selects and fabricates an approximate reflection of itself, an image which it can better tolerate – a mimesis of the simulacra, engaging the automaton ...

Enchanted by mercurial sirens to wade in protean seas - narcissus seduced by the dyad, overcome and pushed over into the reflecting pool by a mischievous gang of ittle people ... stare into the abyss long enough and you’ll find it staring back - a figure-ground flash - recognizing the reflecting image of the Other - the hunt also hunts the hunter – something entirely dissimilar, yet oddly identical to you - attractor repulsor, the mixer of metaphor, the matrix of becoming in which the subject, by observing, is both unknowing participant and agent animateur... when the accolyte is friendly, the paraclete is willing - work together and marvels unfold...

The long term intention for this project is to establish and substantiate some foundation of legitmation upon which to argue for the development of an ongoing Research Consortium. The web convieninetly removes nearly all production expense and profit calculations. All work will one day be available in handsome collectors-edition box-set prints. In the impatient interim, online pdf publication, and participation in dvd-rom ventures exploring generative themes is our most optimal and humble ambition. A discussion space and curatorial gathering node to orbit this running theme: artists working with semi or pseudo-autonomous generative systems and/or procedural constraints, liimited operating parameters, chance or arbitrary technical limitations, with a general preferential tendency toward abstraction, process-orientation, obsessive processes, and other fringe and epi-graphical research... collections and annotated bibliographies of noonautical explorers and the innovative conceptual technologies they devised - celebrating the common problematic of creatively repurposing, recuperating, mechanical labour - engaging with the mechanical bride in gratuitously joyful rigors, the conspicuous expenditure of surplus energies ...

BMorg imagines an inter-media cooperative generating sizeable volumes of cultural speculation - manufacturing media by the meter, released on a seasonal basis in the form of editioned prints, boxed sets, bound/mountedframed prints, available by subscription, specialty-shop, or print-on-demand...--- artists books for niche collectors - semi-annual graphic-novel publications and animation anthologies with a stylized view towards meticulously constructing semi-coherent expressions of material imagination; true hallucinations, marvelous in origin and implication. Collecting trajectories and affinities, the BMO imagines itself a lateral think tank for the generation of speculative ontologies - relational counter-positions, sometimes absurd, informed by generative processes and emergent systemics --- mediating inspecific derivatives, derives, with procedural emphasis leveraged as unifying stylistic constraints - formalist queerings, conceptual swerves, radical poetic licencings - a counter-aesthetics of restraint and resistance, aversion/attraction in a co-operative model --- selection-parameters as inscriptors of any ideology's self-reinforcing internal consistency - decryption keys for the joke in the abstract ... the whole nest unravels... Respecting the rigors and disciplines of procedure, all collectors select a bracketed set of stylistic and thematic parameters, unifying tropes and common conceptual terrains in which to map linkages and homologies. Symbolic referents become co-enfranchised within groups of users and co-producers - in loose affiliation, participants share, mutate and cross-pollinate these memes constantly; the results of their surveys and forays into whichever semantic fields... exploring the peculiar state-space of each artist's specific field of investigation, unpacking each artist's unique procedural prerogative in search of shared topologies, mapping them then into the vector-space of hyper-culture and history … nourishing the collective unconscious with a potlatch epistemology, feast with the distributed imagination, our shared consensual hallucination... Attributing, by underlying poetic conceit and purview, a virtual, artificial form of life or vitalism to codes inclined to self-replication - investing stories and languages with the analogical semblance of generational survival, even of evolving, self-determining agencies - material entelechies of non-human orders with whom we cohabitate... observing the negentropic tendency of some material systems, such as crystals, proteins, the human cerebral cortex, languages, planetary ecologies and civilizations, to complexify, diversify, deterritorialize, and tenaciously survive... 'non-living' systems sometimes behave in ways which are astonishingly 'life-like'...

My 'pataphysical bias advocates for the anomalous instance, the exempted exception. ascending in shadow with conspicuous accelleration toward the margins of error -- wabi sabi, rasa lila, routinely producing chance evidence in defiance of any entropic thermodynamics, wherever living systems are involved … Anomalies and improbabilities riddle the run-cycles of all rule-based paradigm trategems - curiousity swerves as uncertainties tenaciously emerge in the noise of even relatively simple orders - interpretive ambiguities riddle selective attention, editing slips compounding other judgements in trials by error - internally consistent, false, patterns intricately interwoven, discord belligerently maintains the plus one of chaoid synergy ...

Bachelor Machines is the present instantiation of Steve Calvert's enduring preoccupation with the wyrd'ning gyre. Someday again it will take another form entirely. For the immediate interim it serves as artists' assembly space for himself, his friends and colleagues, and all warmly invited guests - Bachelor Machines is cordially convened in convivial collegiality to facilitate discussion alluding to the unspeakable --- friends and friends of friends are each invited to participate - to augment individual reveries, and stimulate replication, mutation, and wild dissemination of all our imaginary productions...

	STEVE CALVERT
			COLLECTIONS
	STEVE [-nW.] CALVERT engages in pataphysical visual-poetics research, improvisational electro-acoustic noisic, emergence studies in procedural systems, generative feedback, and material autopoesis. His work aims at the conundrum of authorship and collaboration, challenging both the construction and refutation of systems in which knowledge exists as intellectual property or as a limited and manageable resource. He also pursues operations in collaborative community building. Calvert holds undergraduate degrees in InterMedia Arts from ECU, and in Art History/Religious Studies from UBC. Steve was also a founding member of the InterMission Artists Society, serving as a contributing creative producer, recording archivist, community outreach agent, and collaborative drawing event series organizer. He now directs and administrates the online art gallery Bachelor Machines, and its reproductive armature, Mechanical Brides. He lives in Strathcona .................... NEW Material Behaviouralism Studies - photographic research [links in sidebar] ... DRAWINGBOARD : Presently on the laboratory worktable, a series of non-narrative experimental graphic novels, eternally coming-soon... Most recent developments include refining actionscript-macros for color and vector treatments of back-catalogued black-and-white work, and exploratory adaptations of drawing aesthetics to treated digital photography... The present condition of these in-process projects are previewable as follows: Collaborations - treated collaborative drawings with extraordinary illustrator and dear comrade Corey Senderov-Jackson. Lettrism -- Accumulated approximations of a Concretist visual poetics... Abstractions -- summer 2009 - Further explorations in abstracted and asymbolic surfaces, fresh textures generated by variations on my new favourite filter combinations: extracting reduced forms in generations of layered edge-effects - digital photos provide the seed culture, as more and more I lean in on the camera as a drawing tool, and to computers for my paint kit... The procedure continues to produce surprising results, we are pleased to report... please let me know if it moves you... Aperatures -- early 2009 experiments with a new-to-me vector-graphic trick, applied reflexively to the object of my workplace's desire; fetishizing the cinematic collapse of opposites; the television inside-out, darkside of the advertising torus... MEKBOK - prototype page breakdown of the Endomechanics series. 2009 introduces fresh color formulations, presently under development... collaborative coloring projects are warmly invited... presently seeking eager digital color artists, or a suitably motivated army of young primates equipped with crayons or graphics tablets, bed-scanners and ftp access... GLYPBOK - page cuts of art-by-the-meter scrolling photocopier-based generative feedback assemblages -- this project, begun in 2000, is forever asymptotically approaching a resolvable print formulation... Olympian Ritournelle - return the younger titans - autumn 2008 collage series fusing the quizzical metamagical Svartalfaheim feedback figures I'd made last season, mashed in with some fresh, still damp even, tricks I'm working out for treating photographic portraits and landscapes ... results remain uncertain, but the exploratory venture is serving its purpose; a comic-book diversionary aside from the more brain-and-eye-straining Mek and Glyp projects... ARCHIVES - selected visual works, circa 1998-2008 - some material overlaps the current projects... Wyrdseid - Svartalfaheim - Having resited figurative impulses throughout the mechanist project, I endulged a playful impulse to investigate kawaii, c.autumn 2007. I'd noticed that in cutting along existing grain-lines in the feedback images, pieces separated which in many cases resembled body parts: arms and legs, torsos, certainly heads and faces... i began to select for, cut, hunt and assemble these characters, partly imagining they could be animated, mapped to motion capture like shadow puppets... this extended project is still lingering in the between ... friendly animators are invited to offer ... Dimensions Variable - A selection of drawing-machine productions, scanned with simple digital treatments of same, spanning 1998-2006... First is Betweeners, an attempt to sketch out material for a graphic novel using the automatic paintbrush - a lock of my own hair attached to a battery-operated hand-fan. Next, the early machine drawings, derived from hand-compositing photographs of smashed cars. Mechscapes - first instance of the MEK scrolls, c.2007. Refinished again and represented here in cropped dual-page-form, as MEKBOK. Xeroglyphy - early instantiations of the GLYP series, using the photocopier feedback technique - produced intermittently from the moment of discovery c. 2000, first posted online circa 2007. Event - photographs of incidental drawings, ink splashes on my drawing table, side effect of the Betweeners series - presented in the Intermission photography exhibition of the same name, in association with Blim... Collège des Collages - Ongoing lark project, utilizing simple hand-cut magazine-collage, in effort to maintain a level of levity and satire. Contents accumulating between 1996 and 2008. Sketchbooks - Selections from the sketchbooks, first eight from summer 09, next set culled from years past... Photography on flickr - Taking the transliteration of 'Light Drawing' seriously, presented here are several phenomenological studies conducted with my trusty Canon Elph S410. .................. All content presented in trust to the creative commons, copyleft 1998-2009 StevenWCalvert, Vancouver BC. Prints are available on demand, dimensions variable, scale and costs negotiable per order. Proposals, invitations, contracts and commissions all, naturally, are welcome ... please contact me directly by : calvair [at] gmail [dot] com ............... Text - Collected annual plagiarist assemblage texts - following a selectively cut-up Gysin/Burroughts line, reading the voice of the present future in oracular compressions of aphoristic phrases lifted from the public discourse in all mediums -- memetic fragments bejeweled by the year's intellectual adventuring -- excisions from the enveloping zeitgeist, idea-contagions de-and-re-scrambled with a paranoid-critical internal monologue -- ongoing experiment in long-term psychohistorical sedimentation, search pattern of selective metanarrative... no authorship claimed nor attributed.. to be read in the disembodied fractalline voice of the Demi-Urge Myriad Legion... Sound - imperative to the Calvair agenda: keeping fingers in all pies , and sound most joyfully of all frivolous acts -- experimental and semi-conventional sound-art has proccupied for now twenty years, through waves of variable intensity --music is vital to any comprehension of art, as is dance to it's practice... risking dilettantism with multiple directionalities, relishing the steady digital convergence of shamanic humanities, singularity hovering ahead in resonant hyperspatial futurity... Hosted here are solo recordings spanning 1996 to present, under several subtitles and alter-egos.... also linked are collaborative improvisational electro-acoustic orchestral recordings made with Intermission Stereo, spanning 2001-2006... ................ Artist's CV ......... v.2009.02.14 Artists Statement With a myriad endogenous aliases, allies, and countervailing splinter factions, we have taken up a special and sustained interest in the feedback system as an operational metaphor, suitable in turn for describing the Calvair entelechy itself. I am a strange loop. Pursued as navigational model and tactical means to extract imagination from its imaginary condition, we open a register of speculative creative research and hyperbolic pseudoscience; we aspire to expand the collegial index, of 'pataphysics, and of generative, procedural and emergence art; to feed the ongoing potlatch, and to demand no less than the total reenchantment of the world... postmodern weird science is cut loose by the multiplicity -- conceptual art is like like any viral lifeform, these memes want only to replicate and be seen, be emulated, dimensions variable... much like the internet, generative systems are by nature open source and creative commons... we have the same dream, we think the same things at the same time... I am interested in economies of attention. I consider this attraction of familiars in the library of networked thought to be an implicit property of generative, fractal, and emergence thinking. This contagious idea of free association, the right to share remains a potent revolutionary and already-long-underway political and cognitive catalyst for humanity -- that creativity, and as it follows intellectual property, is itself an autopoetic property of nature, takes us ever closer to the inevitable tipping point of conventional paradigms... Improvisation requires a deferral to collective and permeable identities, dissolving the singlar individual will to [arrogantly] assert a personal narrative and make claims on creative control -- the improvisateur enters an intuitive, faster-than-thought state, which bizzarrely quite regularly demonstrates itself to be a much better artist/musician/skateboarder than 'you' are -- there the reunification of the self and the world-spirit begins, and the illusion does not return... I try to make art sideways, to let art, rather than push it - its the force that grows my toenails, much less the ego that is speaking to you now, that makes 'my' 'art'... in effort to speak to and for more than one gasping self, I insist, I'm but one of many... and you are too... The author bears a hauntly slippery authorship - the generative process and feedback system are themselves a 'bachelor machine', speaking without teather to rationalizations. The venture articulates its own artificial life, and it's often unclear which 'creator' is in precession of whom - SC is commonly present when materilaization occurs, SC initiates and records their transient conditions, notes the emergence of anomalies, observes and made corrective adjustments, speculating on wild impulse - from this a material emerges -- he has difficulty thinking of this emergent as 'mine', in any conventional sort of authorship -- i aim to build soft machines of language, conduct them as a reflecting medium, in a neoplatonic and shamanic sense... as the concrete poets would... Re that : I'm always interested in collaboration. I am particularly keen to find a colorist, and invite coloring-book lovers of all ages to play with some of my black and white works. Please be invited to copy, color, and bounce past your kids some of the MEK or GLYP images... Email a photo/scan of the results and any other feedback you might care to offer, to: calvair [at] gmail [dot] com ................ v.2009/02/02 Looping outputs back into inputs with a half-twist, we had set out to build a series of bachelor machines; vision-engine automata of formal exploration which would in their way choose their own path, run feral, reconstitute themselves autonomously elsewhere, exceeding the artist's authority as a kind of benevolent contagion... quickly it was realized that serendipity had devised in the problem a riddle for ingratiating the alchemist with the clever architect-gnomes of heaven to help repurpose and redesign our factories of thought, given agency to exise and inscribe fresh formal vocabularies endogenous to the means of electronic reproduction... Harnessing negentropic energies within a temporarily suspended state of controlled instability, a pocket universe unwinds, unfolds and begins, itself, metabolizing -- instrumental graphemetrics present these in an uncertain probability space, unpredictable cloud in-formation crystallizingsteadily, under intense observational attention, and subsequent filtration -- over time, the source line-noise levels out, begins to take on the eerie characteristics of 'signal' -- navigating a maelstrom of buffeting noise, the operator must physically intuit a balancing-act, twiddling knobs and levels, betwixt echo-silence and the exponentially-reactive threshold-manifolds of algorithmic chaoplexity, a pattern exists...... From here, magic commences -- qualitatively strange, figuratively uncanny autonomous articulations of an extraordinarily life-like artificial life-form emerge - the procedure appears to traces edges on electronic artifacts which generationally lend themselves toward the distinct impression of a whimsical intentionality at work - an alien presence pressing itself up against the glass, making silly faces ... The spectator begins to clamour, stammering to fabricate explanations, grasping backwards at no-longer-nearby assurances, each crumbling handhold further eroding the fracatlline edges of comprehension - presumptions unraveling, a moment of panic, of cognitive freefall -- jarring the tail-brain against existential bedrock of partial knowledge, our protagonist is offered a cold cybernetic pseudopod - still trembling, we are lifted to stand and face the Glimmung... Where attention and intention, in tension, diffuse into a cascade of gestures too quick to predict, the functions of morphic resonance, which occur naturally at high speeds, can indulge their tendency to leak out sideways - encoding information in rapid decompressions of time, which relax the tedious illusion of the arbitrary, providing instead a lingering flash portrait of the uncanny inside/between -- the crowded energetic noosphere --- A distinctly eerie sense of an autonomous, playful, creative, attentive, and very much living force of nature, deliberately messing with your head... perhaps some angelic-future-self gazing back at its/elf through the protean abyss of ink, immortal Gaian oracle, actively prodding and poking fun at the creator's game of habituated forgetfulness... faced with incalculable unknowability, the incomprehensibly complex object again shifts masks, transforms to accommodate the perceptual powers and interpretive schemata of the viewer, compounding deficiencies with those inherent limitations and filtrations latent to tools available for the capture, preservation and analysis of these curious bioelectrical paraterrestrial entelechies and their ilk... ................ 2008/02/29 An attempt has been made to orient and sustain a practice of inquiry around what Manuel Delanda calls ‘non-human expressivity’ – a radical materialist premise that the earth itself is capable of self-organization: that the world is latent, overburdened, teeming and pregnant with the same morphogenetic potential that our cerebral cortex enjoys... Indeed it might likely be aware and responsive to our attention... Awestruck and mystified by this and other riddles of embodiment, a curious compulsion has arisen, motivating a continuous attempt at speculative articulations and experperimental observations of that consciousness - mind as a literal topological invagination of the world, toroidally continuous with the living environment inhabited. Art permits medium for demonstrating that all material is folded energy, seething with information and organization... in dreams, stones, plants, insects, as in art and elsewhere, form eerily rises, responds and replies to the gaze and interpretion of each individuated observer... Shuddering with recognition that what we know about ourselves and our ecology is astonishingly limited, childishly naive, these technological toys we use to interface, and interfere, with a mistakenly 'external' 'imaginary' 'alien' 'other' -- by the most gentle means possible, we're satisfied to call our activities 'art'... --- not only are we are not alone in the universe, we aren't alone on this planet, neither in our bodies nor minds - nowhere is the self not also and simultaneously immersed in and an extension of the multitude... literally we are endosymbionts, aswarm with ubuntu in the rhizome of mutualism, teeming with the myriad memes of the zeitgeist - we are all and only multiple... This 'art', approached with an unreasonably irreverent sentiment suited to the approaching centenary of Dada, will achieve its only intentional functional directive if it succeeds in adding some volley of transferrable momentum to the trembling vector of post-human becoming - perhaps we may slightly accellerate a fractal unfolding of novelty to buttress the collapse of history elsewhere and otherwise ... -- We are in pursuit of a pan--narrative, trans-literate form of visual-literature yet too complex for operations of the present order to conceive, and yet which does, and will, exist. -- Shadows of that impossible object, glimmering in hyperspace, echoing backwards in time and haunt our dreaming present - we recieve the transmission, and follow its attractive impulses to reunite the alchemical twin with our becoming future selves, to reinstantiate the great work, and complete the puzzle ... When each reader is herself inspired, struck to that stunned moment of exasperated exclamation: flash misfiring of self-recognition, disrupting ordinary experience, aesthetic shock of disoriented surprise, disbelief, triggering a burst of laughter, release of expectations; the momentary realization of having easily transgressed existing presumptions, finding oneself suddenly well outside the zones of comfort - a lucid moment of unbounded confusion, strobe-flashes of awe flickering aperiodically between shrouds of bemused befuddlement -- re-cognition of something obviously new, and yet, cleaned and bathed in clear light, emerges born again, as new, an endlessly repeatable discovery, reconstituted fresh for every player of every new game; the dead rise from the archives, releiving the amnesia of the species -- you know confidently, self-evidently, that this vast depth was once known to you, probably in childhood, and certainly now, as long before... By contagious example, inspiring further heroic gestures of experimentation and superfluous play improvisational - on the hunt for serendipity : incorporating random public effusions of glee, unqualified sharing of joys, habits of general amazement, and amusement - dancing always with conspicuos natural energy and enthusiasm - harnessing the reflex seizure of ridicule's insubordinate power, the absurdist's spasmodic "holy-fuck!" evokes a cascadomg "eureka" fugue of neurological feedback-loops, echo-reflections slapping off the comprehensible limit of one's known dominion - enchanting divine hilarity, gazing uneasily on irreducible enigmas, incomplete maps, laughably partial knowledge... 'Pataphysics: a religion in the 'making' -- cut-up word games, kybernetic feedback mechanisms, conceit schemas, parlor magic, simple illusions, chance games and other oracular sorceries lost to antiquity - where industry has put natural history to work, we have cut her loose to play, free to hunt and devour her captors; liberating art to invent her own conceptual-linguistic machines - intricate lacework landscapes of prodigious phantasmagoric deleria, endlessly and effortlessly, just like heaven; an active dialogue with the angels of history, falling backward through time, juggernaut coincidence engine of dharmic becoming... Pursuing an inversion/eversion of sympathetic counter-hierarchical schemas, sublimating existing industrial aversions into a parodically rigorous and comparably liberatory imaginary science - generative constraints, framing devices, portal-matrices opened for charting lateral, para-dimensional and mathematizable parameter-domains with remarkably fluid morphic potentials; complex forms emerge, developing complex habits which accord yet to simple rules; sprawling immanent virtualities, probability attractors open-sourced for amateure-engineering... Drawing attentions to diffraction's spectral edges fraying the spotlight of reason, in refraction, crystallography of language bends the medium of communication to its own imperative self-replication - the eyes see nothing without the noisy prejudices of the brain - charting these tremulous shadows seething at the edges of visible light - electrons leap valences in polyharmonic clouds of contrasting charges -- edge-detection flickers with in-stabilities, black/white on/off rods and cones sparkling across the hormone soup, stark charge-differentials bolting between receptors, kick off a haze of photonic noise at the margins of incommensurability - auras blur the transforming mask in motion - first locus of the word-virus - babbling thought-form entities, parasites of the spirit... Art endeavors to grant some reproducible consistency to the speculative premise that generative procedures indeed manifest a peculiar and particular category of forces in the fractal topology of novelty - that artists may scientifically stimulate emergent potentiations. by physical means... intuiting the twitchy subharmonic fractal-arhythm, cyclings of the slow-hand reveal epi-genetic repetitions, archetypes, the earliest engines of creation -- leveraging the soup toward a provocative synthesis of opposites -- hammering out a unifying hypothesis on how-things-take-shape, we've applied feedback cycles toward a speculative vitalist memetic morphogenetics... our artifical-life formulae and aperiodic seasonal wetware updates will help catalyze the self-transfroming differentiations of countless concrete comedies, already underway... Mimesis makes its first harrowing pronouncements in children's cloud gazing. Later, in paint splashes, then rorsharch-fold - eventually, in more or less deliberate stochastic play, with rapid and distracted automatistic clay-modelling, and expressionist gestural painting, spazz dancing - impressed by experiements in subduing ego-control during high-speed creative activities, learning to employ the body's distributed awareness, it's muscular intelligence, our research reuslts continue to bifurcate wildly -- reliance on synchronicity provides an endless invention less and less reminiscent of chance - scripting techniques leading to more and faster drawing machines ... Generation becomes nearly instantaneous, and only re-processing and distribution requires human-scale time periods for reflection... our operating dimensions, future scope and scale, appear infinitely variable... We maintain an open-source committment to guilelessly sharing our discoveries with the curious - to creative people, ideas are worth much more than money, and obscurity is far more menacing than plagiarism - information wants to be free, art needs an interested audience -- attention-economists soaking the wedge, shattering lateral vectors across the probability cloud --- psycho-historians of the myriad desire to produce and engage in some artificially stable, atemporal event-space - and to defend against the caloric high-uncertainty involved in mainting string-streams of biological memory. Books then, and electronic records - on-demand, charged and encyphered with code-recipes for conjuring the betweeners, rehydrogenating the elves, aliens, ghosts, paraterrestrial ancestors, entities and minor demons loitering in your office copyroom... Compelled by the flexibile speculative potentials and robust variety and historical richness of graphic arts, the mechanically reproducible polysemic multiplyer -- evocative latencies and deep linguisitc potencies of ink markings on paper, poetic potentials and virulence magnified and mutated by pixelation's redistribution – edges traced by innumerable homonymical eyes --- fill-in-the-blank ambiguous spaces that the viewers' gaze is compelled to investigate, and so to invest herself in articulating further, to engage with, so to fabricate for herself the missing linkages - struggling to maintain the persistence of vision... the desired illusion of coherency... in contrast, inconsistency, variations in density and composition, form and line dis-ambiguate and spin out conceptual abstractions, punctuating cognitive leaps with parenthesized symbolic restabilizations – ... A truly strange and beautiful thing, graphical techne - terribly amusing form of cybernetic shamanism - the tendency of form to bend itself to what we can manage to comprehend, and vice versa - revealed in system after experimental system – generative feedback producing patterns approaching signal in the reflective observer - the eye/ear doesn’t like to see/hear what it can't comprehend, so it projects the familiar; selects and fabricates an approximate reflection of itself, an image which it can better tolerate – a mimesis of the simulacra, engaging the automaton ... Enchanted by mercurial sirens to wade in protean seas - narcissus seduced by the dyad, overcome and pushed over into the reflecting pool by a mischievous gang of ittle people ... stare into the abyss long enough and you’ll find it staring back - a figure-ground flash - recognizing the reflecting image of the Other - the hunt also hunts the hunter – something entirely dissimilar, yet oddly identical to you - attractor repulsor, the mixer of metaphor, the matrix of becoming in which the subject, by observing, is both unknowing participant and agent animateur... when the accolyte is friendly, the paraclete is willing - work together and marvels unfold... The long term intention for this project is to establish and substantiate some foundation of legitmation upon which to argue for the development of an ongoing Research Consortium. The web convieninetly removes nearly all production expense and profit calculations. All work will one day be available in handsome collectors-edition box-set prints. In the impatient interim, online pdf publication, and participation in dvd-rom ventures exploring generative themes is our most optimal and humble ambition. A discussion space and curatorial gathering node to orbit this running theme: artists working with semi or pseudo-autonomous generative systems and/or procedural constraints, liimited operating parameters, chance or arbitrary technical limitations, with a general preferential tendency toward abstraction, process-orientation, obsessive processes, and other fringe and epi-graphical research... collections and annotated bibliographies of noonautical explorers and the innovative conceptual technologies they devised - celebrating the common problematic of creatively repurposing, recuperating, mechanical labour - engaging with the mechanical bride in gratuitously joyful rigors, the conspicuous expenditure of surplus energies ... BMorg imagines an inter-media cooperative generating sizeable volumes of cultural speculation - manufacturing media by the meter, released on a seasonal basis in the form of editioned prints, boxed sets, bound/mountedframed prints, available by subscription, specialty-shop, or print-on-demand...--- artists books for niche collectors - semi-annual graphic-novel publications and animation anthologies with a stylized view towards meticulously constructing semi-coherent expressions of material imagination; true hallucinations, marvelous in origin and implication. Collecting trajectories and affinities, the BMO imagines itself a lateral think tank for the generation of speculative ontologies - relational counter-positions, sometimes absurd, informed by generative processes and emergent systemics --- mediating inspecific derivatives, derives, with procedural emphasis leveraged as unifying stylistic constraints - formalist queerings, conceptual swerves, radical poetic licencings - a counter-aesthetics of restraint and resistance, aversion/attraction in a co-operative model --- selection-parameters as inscriptors of any ideology's self-reinforcing internal consistency - decryption keys for the joke in the abstract ... the whole nest unravels... Respecting the rigors and disciplines of procedure, all collectors select a bracketed set of stylistic and thematic parameters, unifying tropes and common conceptual terrains in which to map linkages and homologies. Symbolic referents become co-enfranchised within groups of users and co-producers - in loose affiliation, participants share, mutate and cross-pollinate these memes constantly; the results of their surveys and forays into whichever semantic fields... exploring the peculiar state-space of each artist's specific field of investigation, unpacking each artist's unique procedural prerogative in search of shared topologies, mapping them then into the vector-space of hyper-culture and history … nourishing the collective unconscious with a potlatch epistemology, feast with the distributed imagination, our shared consensual hallucination... Attributing, by underlying poetic conceit and purview, a virtual, artificial form of life or vitalism to codes inclined to self-replication - investing stories and languages with the analogical semblance of generational survival, even of evolving, self-determining agencies - material entelechies of non-human orders with whom we cohabitate... observing the negentropic tendency of some material systems, such as crystals, proteins, the human cerebral cortex, languages, planetary ecologies and civilizations, to complexify, diversify, deterritorialize, and tenaciously survive... 'non-living' systems sometimes behave in ways which are astonishingly 'life-like'... My 'pataphysical bias advocates for the anomalous instance, the exempted exception. ascending in shadow with conspicuous accelleration toward the margins of error -- wabi sabi, rasa lila, routinely producing chance evidence in defiance of any entropic thermodynamics, wherever living systems are involved … Anomalies and improbabilities riddle the run-cycles of all rule-based paradigm trategems - curiousity swerves as uncertainties tenaciously emerge in the noise of even relatively simple orders - interpretive ambiguities riddle selective attention, editing slips compounding other judgements in trials by error - internally consistent, false, patterns intricately interwoven, discord belligerently maintains the plus one of chaoid synergy ... Bachelor Machines is the present instantiation of Steve Calvert's enduring preoccupation with the wyrd'ning gyre. Someday again it will take another form entirely. For the immediate interim it serves as artists' assembly space for himself, his friends and colleagues, and all warmly invited guests - Bachelor Machines is cordially convened in convivial collegiality to facilitate discussion alluding to the unspeakable --- friends and friends of friends are each invited to participate - to augment individual reveries, and stimulate replication, mutation, and wild dissemination of all our imaginary productions... ---S.Calvert - Vancouver - Feb 29, 2008 ---		CV 2009 - Authentic Replica 2008 - Theatre of Operations 2007 - Just Is 2006 - Maintain Your Enthusiasm 2005 - 'Pataphysics 2004 - ATCG 2002 - Middle Worlds 1999 - EXP Drawingboard: Collaborations - w/ Corey Jackson Lettrism - asemic typography Abstractions - photo FX studies MEK-BOK - b/w pagetests GLYP-BOK - b/w pagetests Archive: Olympians Return Wyrd Seid - Svartalfaheim Mechscape Xeroglyphy Dimensions Variable Collège des Collages Betweeners Sketchbooks Apertures Event Photography: material behaviouralism studies:: Of Water : new: Surface of the Membrane Palace of the Ice Queen Foaming Nebulae accumulating: Base Elements of Form Atmospheric Studies Of Cities: Palimpsest Vancouver Palimpsest Toronto Architexture Ruins Apparatus of Illusions Of Metabolics: Gastronomic Study Mycological Survey Other photosets on flickr: solo audio: AUXIN Jotunheim Olympians SteppenLocust with Intermission: Intermission Stereo Mercury Theatre Orchestra MoSK WEB: Elsewhere and Otherwise Insubordinate Automata Intermission Collaborative Drawing flickr myspace youtube delicious
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