Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Nice experimental sounds with pikachu.

Check it out here.

I'm late writing this, I know, but it always takes a bit to adjust to normal life after a long car trip. And then there was Halloween. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last week was our annual trip to the Oregon coast. I used my first PTO day, and we left Thursday night right after work/school. From our place to Florence is only a ten hour drive -- not too shabby -- but we thought since it is such a short trip and we would beat Jon and Faith there either way, we would split the trip up in half. So we planned on camping at the halfway point, which, conveniently enough, was around the Mount Shasta area and there were plenty of campgrounds to choose from.

We went with the campground that looked closest to the highway since it was almost midnight when we arrived and we didn't want to get too lost. It was a nice campground, though a bit close to the highway for my taste (i.e. noise from cars could be heard at the campsite). On the other hand, I do remember clinging to the reassuring thought that a major road was nearby in case we ran into any ax-murderers or escaped convicts..(we tried to scare each other because it's strange to be at a campground without anyone around you). :) And it was definitely nice not to feel exhausted from driving all night the next day! We packed up camp right after we woke up and continued our trip north. [It should be noted that we slept on hard gravel. I slept like a log, and Rebecca woke up with bruises. -wayne]

We arrived in Florence Friday afternoon and hung out on the beach for a few hours, got dinner, and read a book to each other while we waited for Jon and Faith and Brynna to arrive. We were glad they made better time than they estimated, because we almost fell asleep in our tent waiting for them! But we woke up quickly, mostly because we were excited to see them again, but also because we joked about the car on the dirt road being an axe-murderer and not our friends. We were warming up for Halloween with our silly scary jokes, I guess. :)

We continued our warm up by playing a game called AtmosFear several times while we were in Oregon, in addition to several of our more usual games. It was a good visit; we went to the jetty a couple of times, went to our favorite game and toy store in downtown Florence, and reflected on good memories and stories. We had Chinese food in Florence. On the coast. It was a strange thing to eat on the coast, I think, but we had a good waitress, so it's all good.

And Sunday we hung out until just after noon and began the drive home so we wouldn't be too exhausted for work and school Monday morning. It would have been nice to be able to visit longer, but we had the time we needed on the coast and in the car; it's nice to make long car trips every so often and take time to really think and reflect on things. I like good car trips.

So, I haven't posted any work lately on the blog, because most of my work in the past 8 months haven't been "image" or "object" based work. But since I was admitted to the 2D graduate program, I've been trying to be good and paint some "objects."

• View album

So, we took our annual trip to Florence, Oregon this past weekend. Here are some of our pictures from the trip. It was great to see Brynna after her mission and spend some time with Jon and Faith. Yay for fun trips.

• View album

I never smile if I can help it.... Showing one's teeth is a submission signal in primates. When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life.

-Dwight Schrute, from the TV show The Office

Well, since we moved into our new apartment here in sunny CA, Star has had several new experiences. For one, she had never seen a squirrel before in her life and she really enjoyed that sight. We often have squirrels jump past our windows and Star goes nuts over them. She also was very hesitant about our new piano. At first, she ran and hid every time Rebecca played it, but after some coaxing with treats, she'll play us a tune and when we play, she likes to lay on top of the piano.

We also recently aquired a stereo replacement so we can use our speakers. The first time we watched a movie, she batted at the tweeters because she thought they were making funny noises.

• View album

Rebecca and I need to learn a few things about throwing parties. First thing: we should invite more people. Not that having two people come over for a 'party' isn't fun - we had fun for our "Halloween Party," but I feel a bit guilty calling it a party when there are only four of us.

With that said, we had a Halloween party Monday night. It was good, even though all we did was talk and play one game of Atmosfear. Tuesday night (which was the real Halloween), Rebecca hoped to get some Trick-or-Treaters at our house: but for the third year we had none. Someday we'll live in a place which is "child friendly." But I don't think that kids go to apartment complexes to get candy.

Other news of the week: linux. I've been attempting to convert one of our computer systems to linux so I can force myself to learn it and the opportunity presented itself last week when our Windows desktop suddenly decided it no longer had a system file. Note to viewers: the smartest thing Rebecca and I ever did was to get a second hard drive for our storage needs. Every piece of data that we create (pictures, documents, etc.) we store on the second hard drive, which is NOT our operating system hard drive. Why, you ask? Because hard drives with operating systems on them eventually crash or get corrupted and then need to be wiped to repair them. It would be horribly tragic to loose all the information we store on our computers because operating systems are notoriously fallible.

Anyways, this is just the start of a pile of projects I've been wanting to struggle with to teach myself some new things. Like, what does one do with a perfectly functional laptop screen when the laptop itself no longer functions? Well, you have to figure out how to make that into a desktop monitor. Friends of mine at school have done it, why shouldn't I?

There are few things more disgusting to me than stepping on a snail with your bare foot in the dark. One of them has to be fleas and despite our efforts to quell the flea revolution with a flea collar, we have retreated and regrouped. And now it's time to vanquish our foes with some recommendations that our friends gave us. Unfortunately, living in a "non-cold" environment doesn't kill the fleas during winter time. So we have to dish out 40 bucks for a three month treatment. What is most upsetting about this whole disgusting experience is that we don't even let our cat outside. She's a completely indoor cat. Did this apartment complex sabotage us? I believe so...

Speaking of sabotage, that's how we felt at Home Depot on Thursday. We got to HD early in the morning so we could pick out all the wood I need for an upcoming show (over $300) and rent a truck to make our drop off at home and school before Rebecca needed to be at work. Before we bought the wood, I made sure with the customer service department that they did indeed have a truck around for us to rent. They assured me they did. They lied. Someone from that store had made a "quick run" to pick up some materials and after 15 minutes waiting for them to unload that truck, the customer service rep decided to make an executive decision and give us a free delivery. Sounds good? Well, how do you explain to the Home Depot delivery guys to deliver a huge pile of wood to room number 304 in the Art building on the SJSU campus (which has NO visitor parking, I might add)? So they delivered it to our house. And we took the wood to campus in our car through multiple trips over the past couple days. Everything turned out alright.

Last thing I learned this week: a promise is a promise is a promise. It was late one Thursday night when we saw a show and someone was eating a slice of pizza. Rebecca promptly said, "I like pizza," to which I responded by describing every wonderful thing about pizza. We then went on a 11 o'clock at night hunt for pizza, which is apparently a doomed hunt. So I promised that the next day we could have pizza - I didn't want her crying over pizza ;) [or spilled milk...whatever the metaphor is... -bec] . Well, the next day she held me to that promise. [i hold that wayne did promise, after all, and it's certainly not my fault he went on and on about the splendid attributes of pizza in minute detail! -bec] So for date night, we curled up and watched Nacho Libre. It was an okay film, but definitely not of the caliber of Napoleon Dynamite.

That's about it for our week - a bundle full of laughs. Until next time...

I have two upcoming shows on campus: one on the week of Thanksgiving in gallery 3 and another in the white gallery on the first week of December.

Well. We went to campus a lot this week; not just Wayne, but I did as well. I would go home, grab some food and a picnic basket, grab a book or the laptop, and run meet him in his studio so he could keep painting in the evening. We did this several nights, and made a trip Saturday afternoon/evening as well. He has a show to put up this Friday and is trying to finish up the large painting that is in progress right now. I think he'll be done in time, but we'll see what this week holds. [I think that I'm finally feeling like I'm in a Masters program. -wayne]

The rest of our week was not too remarkable. We had adventures with fleas two days -- one to apply the flea medication on Star (which stopped her itching completely within 24 hours and then we found dead or mostly dead fleas on her for the next two days). The second adventure was requesting that our apartment management fix the problem with fleas in our apartment itself. They were quite nice to flea fog our apartment Saturday morning while we did laundry (and Star hung out in our car!). By the time the laundry was done, we still had a little bit of time to kill before airing out our apartment, so we put our feet in the hot tub and wished we had had the foresight to bring our swimsuits down.

Primary went well. I'm starting to figure out most of the kids names, but I have to be prompted on a couple of the quieter ones still. I didn't teach today, since I alternate with the other CTR-5b class. One of the kids that is supposedly "one of the two hyper-active CTR-5's" is moving at the end of the month. I'm surprisingly a little disappointed to learn this; I had just figured out that though he is the most vocal/obvious child in the class about when he is bored (by climbing under or over the seats or something of the sort), he was a good gauge about when I probably had lost the attention of the other kids as well. And even when he looks like he isn't paying attention at all because he's climbing all over the place, he knows the answers to every question you ask. Still, his mom was shocked when I told her I will miss having him in the class. :)

My dad is in town for a business trip, so we got to hang out with him tonight. Hopefully we will see more of him throughout the week. We drove up to Skyline Blvd and saw a beautiful sunset to the west, and then minutes later found a fabulous lookout point to see the city lights of the bay area to our east. What a good place to be at sunset.

This is better than going for a walk!

-One of the five-year olds when the other teacher put in a movie about Jesus bible stories

Isn't it over yet?

-The same five-year old when the movie was still going twenty minutes later

package ralph;

/**
* My first java file.
* @author wayne
*
*/

public class TheCode {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("monkey " + getNumber());
System.out.println(getNumber());
}

public static int getNumber() {
return 3;
}

}

This was my "first" written java class taught to me by my wife, Rebecca.

I am an artist. Or a non-artist. Or whatever. My wife got her master's degree in computer science and programs full time in java programming language for Magma Design Automation. When we moved out here, she specifically wanted a job that used java because it is her favorite computer language. Me? Besides my brief career in programming with actionscripting for flash presentations to children, I don't understand anything about computer programming.

My last "real" job was designing flash language tutorials. Six months before I left the job, they installed flex 2.0 on my computer at work and asked that I start programming my activities in flex. I spent 6 months hating work because I couldn't teach myself flex. The funny thing about learning anything in today's world is that it should be all on the internet. I strongly believe that everything is on the internet - all information exists somewhere in digital form and can be transferred through bits, insignificant ones and zeros. However, as I have found, it is next to impossible to find anything anymore because the internet has become so massive and the search algorithms for major search engines are outdated beyond resolving the burgeoning world wide web.

I realized that the only way to learn anything is by going back to the most basic elements of learning - passing information from one person to another. The personal touch. It has become out-of-style in the information age to get information directly from one person, but I am realizing that it is essential in order to learn anything. I'm not just talking about the personal touch in a physical realm - one of the greatest beauties of a digital world is the non-presence of others through digital means. I am hoping that this experience I am putting myself through can be a part of myself - my learning - which I have plugged into the internet and exists as a personal one on one learning process which might help others.

Realistically, I don't expect anyone to learn anything from this documentation. I do, however, expect to get something from it besides a better understanding and ability to program in java: I just want to understand what my wife is talking about when she explains her job.

My head hurts after today's session. I think I understand what classes are now. I vaguely knew what objects were before. I am still frightened by trying to find code to do what I want. Rebecca told me that what I need to do is first decide what I want to do in java and then work backwards to learn how to do it. That seems easy enough. I'm used to the way things were in flash coding: I knew a good chunk of the commands that existed so I could easily call them to memory to write my code.

Session one:

Set up eclipse. This is easy to do on both windows and linux platforms. We had some problems getting java 5 working on eclipse in linux. We're still working on it.

Create a project. I named my project "helloworld" because that was the name of the exercise. The java libraries are loaded into this project.

Create a package. I remember strange names. I named the package "ralph." See attached files for .class and .java files.

In the package, create the code .java file "TheCode." Make a main method "public static void main..." within which we call a method from the java library.

System.out.println("whatever your message is")

[see the code at the beginning of this post]

The video follows our session; I learned how to print "monkey."

Now my cat wants to play. I don't have time for this. But in order to make "better quality time" for my wife, I need to do this.

• View video (needs quicktime 7)

I think I should write down a small entry about "what-I've-learned-this-semester" and to "explain-what-I'm-doing-by-not-painting."

Sometime last year, I started a project based on my personal identity and the exploration of role reversal and parenthood. I took a large number of old family slide photographs of myself as a child and digitally added myself as an adult. The work was supposed to play on the ideas of becoming a parent and reflections of my own limitations in preparing for such a major shift in my life. Although my wife and I could talk about it, we don't have pre-knowledge of what our children will be like: we only know ourselves. After I had gotten knee deep into this project, my professor at the time decided that I needed to put together a "working installation" of the project as it would appear to a gallery; a "mock-up." Although I went through with this presentation on one hellish weekend, I was incensed to be forced into a presentation that I didn't think truly related to the project I was working on. In fact, it was only a hollow shell to fit my project into an object-oriented view of the art world - one which feeds on aesthetics and not conceptual gains.

So I was bitter. But I didn't know why at the time.

Also, for the past year, it had come to my attention that most of my projects weren't based on objects or installations or locations or anything "aesthetic" but based on social circumstances and the interaction of social networks. It wasn't the first time I had worked in this fashion. While studying psychology, I wanted to create social experiments to study and research, but not in the ways which the IRB approved or which statistics were important. After taking Dr. Brent Slife's class on critical issues in the social sciences, I really began to question the nature and importance of using the scientific method in research. Qualitative research was much more interesting to me than quantitatively defining things which were non-quantitive. When Jamin Hall discussed with me the Knights of the North Park project, I viewed it as an art experience: not the video as a project, but documentation of the project. The project wasn't an object: it was a social experiment.

I never had definitions for these things until graduate school in the CADRE program. That's going to be the only praise I hand out, because I'm not much of a suck-up. At least, I try not to be a groupie, but it's so dang hard not to be a Joel Slayton groupie. Despite that point, I want to focus in on collaboration and non-object oriented art.

I'm sick of painting. I'm not sick of myself painting, I rather enjoy it: too much so, in fact. Painting is a guilty self-indulgent pleasure. It is selfish of me to sit in a studio working my heart out on a painting while my wife slaves away at a programming job to make ends meet. I have begun to think to myself that I am a grown man and I still do not have a market for painting. I came to graduate school to change that.

I consider myself a pretty intelligent person. I always was able to easily get good grades. In fact, I wish I was more challenged in school because it never taught me to work hard. I was always lazy and still got high marks. Not my fault my parents gave me good genes. But why did I choose art as a profession? There was a time when I was manical enough to believe that I was worth the attention. I'm sure, somwhere inside, I still am that manical. Now that I have a family, I realize that the selfishness that comes with object oriented art is ludicrous. And I'm so tired of listening to other artists talking about how great my work is while I'm not selling my work. What's the point of doing great things if you can't be great or at least support your family?

I think I'm getting off topic here. Let me clear some things up. The average artist has a stereotype: they are self-indulgent, they are hard working, they are terrible selfish, they are isolated and they are narcissistic. I only want to be one of these. Any guesses as to which? The problem is that since abstract expressionism (heck, go back to impressionists and cubists) these stereotypes have been the norm due to a relationship between the artist and the isolated studio space. Artists isolate themselves from the rest of the world despite their duty as "purveyors of culture" to interface with society. They have all completely lost touch with the world they are meant to be in touch with. Which is where collaboration comes in.

It's good and it gets me out of that white box where I don't learn anything. This isn't why I want to work with other people, but this is a retrospective explanation.

We like having visitors. Especially since we are living on the other side of the continent from all our family. So we were happy this week to visit with Rebecca's father who came out for a class that his employer offered to pay for. The visit, however, could not have come at a worse time for me. I was rarely home before 8:30 (or 9:30...) this week.

My monday class took a field trip to San Francisco for the day. Although I wasn't impressed with the visit to some non-profit exhibition spaces (I'd like to visit more), there were several good new works up at the SFMOMA. Afterwards, we got lost trying to find a studio in lower San Francisco and then waited outside a pizza place for over an hour to get some food. It was a long day, but the show at the SFMOMA on collecting was fantastic.

Because I got home late most nights, Rebecca cooked dinner (more often than usual) for her dad. She kept calling and asking questions about the recipe to make sure she was doing it right [more often it was the "recipes" for which we, or wayne, normally don't *have* recipes...that's why i had questions. i can follow a recipe when there *is* one! -beck]. By the end of the week, I finally had things under control for the show I put up this weekend. Thursday evening, we took Rebecca's dad out to Fry's electronics to look at toys. A couple funny things about our trip. First, when we got there, there was a line of people camped outside the store waiting for the new Sony Playstation to be released. We giggled at the craziness of people taking off work and camping for days waiting for a game system. While in the store, we found some freeze dried astronaut ice cream for sale and since Rebecca has never tried it before, we got some. I grew up with this stuff but somehow she missed the astronaut ice cream era. I really don't think she liked it; but I'm really not sure I like it either. [at first it is chalky, but then you leave it in your mouth to absorb liquid, and then it is warm...warm ice cream is just weird... -beck]

Also, Rebecca bought a super bouncy ball from a vending machine. And wouldn't put it down for a couple days. She took it everywhere with her and bounced it all through work. Silly girl.

Friday evening, even though I wasn't feeling well, we stayed on campus until midnight hanging some paintings for a show next week. Nothing much to report on the works, but since the opening is Tuesday night, I can tell you more about that later.

Church was good today. No more so than usual. Poor Rebecca had a hard time teaching the 5 year olds. They were very wiggly and to get them to calm down, she tried doing some wiggle exercises (to get the wiggles out of them), but unfortunately, this time it only made them more wiggly.

It happens.

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

-Dorothy Parker

Do It Yourself sites (or DIY for short) have run their course. It seems that almost everyone now has posted a blog on creating, controlling and doing at home. From homespun wool to hacking the latest gaming system into a laptop, DIY-ers have sprouted across the internet like wild flowers. Or weeds, depending on your opinion.

DIY-ers are an interesting breed. For starters, most of us fit into that category of specialization. You and I know people who have specialized in something beyond our own understanding. What is interesting is the DIY-ers who have reached hyperspecialization. Their communication on their abilities breaks down and no longer can they communicate with people outside the loop. Traditionally, this is when people get careers relating to their hyperspecialization. Which puts the rest of us outside their sphere of communication.

This came to my attention a while ago when I realized I understood less and less of what my wife was talking about when she'd tell me how her day went. I tried. I tried very hard to understand it and it helped that I was fascinated by natural language processing. But there is a point which she crossed that I couldn't follow with a layman's perspective. The reverse is true for her understanding art. In fact, the masses don't understand visual arts (and haven't for the past 50 years) because of this hyperspecialization which resulted in the distancing of art from it's suckle: the community.

For several months, I tried to approach this system in painting. I used departmentally specific symbols which communicated only to those within fields outside of the art community. The piece was abuot disfunction in communication. Ironically, because it was about miscommunication, it was a misrepresented body of work and being misread was taken down prematurely.

But returning to DIY-ers, I noticed that because of Web 2.0 models DIY communities had taken the place of hobbist communities and physical social groups. Someone commented the other day that if you truly wanted to become an attorney in California, all you needed was to study the information to pass the bar online and then pass the test. There is no requirement for law school. Save yourself some money: teach yourself online! So, why doesn't it work like that?

I have a couple theories. First, the internet has become too large. According to Google, Inc, during the year of 2005 the number of websites surpassed 8.5 billion. Web 2.0 platform feeds that number. This surplus of information requires a precision of search which can't be reached with outdated search algorithms. Personally, I'd like to see NLP taken beyond the theoretically academic institutions into a processing locale where it could make a difference in this area.

Second theory: learning from DIY-ers requires you to already be "in the know." There are dozens of projects I want to do (anyone know how to make a LCD laptop monitor into something worthwhile?) which I can't do because studying online help guides makes about as much sense as stereo instructions. This is really the point of the beast - DIY is only as helpful as what you already learned. Stereo instructions mean a great deal to someone who knows audio equipment, but where did they attain that information?

I decided to mimic the DIY community by documenting my process of learning skills which I have wanted to learn: java, linux, etc. The list will grow as I learn and learn what other people around me know. But there's one important catch: I need to learn it from someone I know, one-on-one. If I fail miserably... well, maybe I wasn't meant to learn something. The art project is to analyze the social interaction between teacher and learner - between the experience of learning and the experience of adapting to new information. It is very similar to my social art project on the Battleguard group. My art experiences social processes. I will post documentation on this work.

I was recommended this book by some friends and after the first chapter I was terrified. And captivated. But by the middle of book, I was tired and honestly stopped reading.

Let's just say, I got the point early on: people who have children and have two incomes are in trouble for no fault of their own. Well, sort-of not their own. But a fascinating study nonetheless. Here's a break down of their analysis.

At some point in time in the past 30 years (due mostly to the feminist movement), women started flooding the workplace. Although this is a great thing to expect equality in the workplace, what happened is that families with two incomes from both parents were able to outbid their counterparts on a housing market to get into the best schools and the safest locations. This resulted in a housing market (for good schools and safe neighborhoods) which has overincreased above inflation and the possibility of not having two incomes. So, now it is a "requirement" to have two incomes to supplement a good lifestyle and appropriate headstart for children. And what happens when one of the two parents loose their jobs? Bankruptcy.

Now I come to my two problems with this book. First, a lot of finger pointing without any well thought through solutions. I give it to them that they are economists and not governemental systems analysts because they can see the problem but the solution truly evades them - especially when it deals with "everyone just needs to..." solutions. Second problem is that this isn't an economic journal, but a light read meant for the public. I've always disliked so-called self-help books and popular systems analysis books for this reason. Stephen Hawking, in his landmark book A Brief History of Time, stated that "someone told [him] that each equation [he] included in the book would halve the sales." Albeit an honest assessment of popular reading attention span, it shows for a poorly documented book when figures and facts are not present when scientific claims are being reviewed. Hawking could get away with not presenting facts because he was presenting a review of time and space; I should be reading about economic studies in an economic journal, which has been peer reviewed and all speculation removed.

This book did however strengthen my resolve to homeschool our children and live where ever we darn well please.

We liked Shannon Hale's The Princess Academy, so on Melissa's recommendation we picked up The Goose Girl to read to each other on our trip to Oregon.

The book was good. I was really worried it was going to turn out to be a "coming of age story" (bleech), but I was actually quite captivated the whole book through. Moreso because Rebecca was reading it to me and that always makes a book better.

I should have never read the interview with the author at the end of the book, though. It has been a while since I have seen that much narcissism in an author (think L. Ron Hubbard's introduction to Battlefield Earth) that it almost ruined the good book for me. No author should ever state that their favorite story is "their own."

So, that being said, you should ignore it and go read this book because it truly is a charming tale.

I had a show in Gallery III on campus during the Thanksgiving week. This displays the painting work I did this semester, along with some previous stuff I didn't include in my graduate application portfolio. This was supposed to be a "get to know professors and expose my work to professors."

Artist Statement:

Jacques Derrida writes that a culture’s philosophy can be rooted in the linguistic structure of that culture. I started these works as a study on language and the deconstructionist approach to understanding literary theory.

As I have learned more about art history, I developed a distaste for the separation between public understanding of art and art practice/theory. By my view, the specialization of art theory has distanced the public from understanding art, very similar to other disciplines which have their internal set of symbols, communication and iconography. Many of the symbols in this body of work are taken from various disciplines, which have meaning within those disciplines.

I then began to appropriate the “cute” imagery which my generation grew up with representing our philosophical basis. These images bother me. I feel like these cuddly and cutesy characters are polluting our visual experience and I am terrified by it. I view these pieces as an addition to the kitsch dialogue in fine art.

My compositions are intuitively created from images which either reflect or were appropriated from the lexicon of digital “street culture.” I am not trying to be a part of that culture, but be aware of how this culture affects us.

• View album
• View map of album

/** * */ package echo;

import java.util.Scanner;

/**
* @author wayne
*
*/
public class TheCodeB {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);
double pounds, kilos;
System.out.println("Please enter amount of pounds:");
pounds = scan.nextDouble();
kilos = pounds * .45359237;
System.out.println("You currently have " + kilos + " kilograms of stuff.");

}

}

Rebecca gave me homework. It was the only way.

Most of learning comes from plugging away at something and playing with it, of course with the fastidious guidance of a tutor. I've thought a great deal about tutors over the past couple of days since my last lesson. In grade school, when you fall behind your studies you are recommended to take on a tutor. This person acts as a mediator to maintain personal contact and guidance in training your mind and studies to understand the skills that are being taught. I believe that I once had a tutor for math when I was in high school. Amanda Gambino. A friend who was in advanced math who was willing to help me out. I wasn't in trouble of flunking: I just felt behind because I was in the advanced classes and didn't grasp math as fast as my brother might have.

Interesting in looking back that my tutor then performed her great charity to me in part because she wanted to date me. Here I am, getting tutoring lessons from my wife, the person who I want to spend all my time with.

Rebecca gave me some twenty pages of text in our "textbook," Lewis & Loftus' 5th edition Java Software Solutions text. I believe she used a similar text when she went through her studies of early java. A couple of confessions for those of you reading this, hoping to learn a bit of java along the way: I think I had a headstart. My limited actionscripting knowledge has transferred easily to the basic skills we're dealing with here. Since I know what a string is and the difference between a string an integer, I can't say that my reading was terribly enlightening. I read pages 42 - 90; truthfully, I skimmed most of them. However, a few pages before the discussion on scanning data, I got really lost and had to do the work in order to understand what was going on.

While reading this, I thought about the Battleguard group I infiltrated earlier this year and how similar this experience is to that experience. There is a limit/threshold which I was able to go up to comfortably, without experiencing any conflict with previous personal experience - or lack thereof. I could go to the practices and pick up a sword, but the moment I was considering becoming more engaged than that, it plunged me into a social experience I wasn't prepared for. This is an experience that we all go through by crossing thresholds between our inner social matrix and the outside matrix which includes the greater public sphere. Somehow, I'm trying to reach that sphere and chip away at it, by learning scanning in java. After a couple of attempts with using the scanner method to input data, I eventually fulfilled the requirements to create a conversion from pounds to kilograms (see TheCodeb.java).

Scanning is an input to the code. System.in.
Scanning isn't actually a string/text/number, but an object. It must be converted to a string or number.

Why shouldn't I get in the habit of always using double for a numerical value, and then choose from the other possible options when those limitations are necessary?

White Chicken Chili
------------------------
2 cups diced onions
2 cups diced celery
5 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 pound chicken breast, cooked and diced
8 cups water
1 bay leaf
1 (7-ounce) can chopped green chilies
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon basil
1/2 teaspoon Old Bay seasoning
1/4 teaspoon Cajun seasoning
1/3 of a 7-ounce can chipotle in adobo, chopped
4 tablespoons chicken base
1 pickled jalapeno, chopped
2 pounds white beans, soaked overnight
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 cup shredded carrots
16 ounces sour cream

Saute onion, celery, and garlic in oil until tender, about 5 minutes. In a large stockpot add chicken, water, bay leaf, chiles, oregano, cumin, dry mustard, basil, Old Bay, Cajun seasoning, chipotle, chicken base, and pickled jalapeno and simmer for 1 1/2 hours. Add the drained beans and heavy cream and simmer for 1 hour, or until the beans are tender. Garnish soup with carrots and sour cream.

Makes enough for an army. Or 6-8 people, probably.

Birthday Cake Frosting
-------------------
1 cup shortening (decorator shortening or Crisco)
1 TBS glycerine (you buy this in the drug store section of the store—the label says not to eat it but it is edible)
1 lb. Powdered sugar (a package)
1/4 tsp Butter flavoring
1 tsp Flavoring (any kind or combinations)
3 TBS cold water
pinch salt

Beat shortening and glycerine on high speed for about 2 minutes. Add remaining ingredients and beat for 5 minutes. You can double recipe but this takes a bigger mixer than a hand held one.

Divide up frosting and add food coloring as desired afterwards. To add the frosting to the cake, use a metal frosting knife, dip in cold water and then smooth over the cake; the rich buttery texture makes it easy to get a smooth surface.

It's raining, it's pouring;
The old man is snoring.
He went to bed,
and bumped his head
And he couldn't get up in the morning.

-somebody clever

The main event of the week was Thanksgiving, of course. It was the first Thanksgiving I've ever had that wasn't with family of some sort. We were invited to the house of one of Wayne's colleagues. Julie had 12 people over, including us, most of the people having some connection to art. I was a little stressed before we got there, because for some reason I felt like the cake I made needed to look really professional, and I thought it just looked messy (the frosting was dripping everywhere...). But I guess the ring of raspberries around it saved it, because everyone thought it looked and tasted great. Whew. It was a good day, with tasty food and interesting conversation. We did miss having leftover turkey though, so we're making a turkey today too. :)

Friday morning we actually ventured out at 7am to "experience Black Friday" at the stores (partly because we wanted to pick up a replacement hard drive for the one we had that died, and partly so we could see what it was really like...). We went to Fry's, and the place was already well picked over. We did find the good deal on a hard drive we were hoping to find, and had fun exclaiming in our sleepy state over how many people there really were. I'm sure if we had been there when they opened we would have been even more amazed, but I'm not sure we'll feel a need to experience Black Friday a second time. [I guess I would much rather pay more money and get more sleep and not have to deal with the crowds than to camp out all night just to get forty dollars off an item; and since we don't even need the items, we won't buy it at regular price. I'd just like to know how Karl gets away every year with little things... there was NOTHING left at Fry's. - wayne]

The rest of the weekend we spent working on Wayne's projects for school. We went to campus so Wayne could catch up some in his figure painting assignment (he put it on hold while preparing for the show he had last week). We spent Saturday cataloguing receipts for the show he'll have next week. We're entering in a spreadsheet information and items from the receipts he and some classmates have been collecting all semester. There are a lot of receipts. And we had a second "tutorial" in Java for another art project.

We did find some time Friday night to put up our Christmas tree (yay!) and have Chris and Alyssa over for a bit for games and good conversation. We stayed up later than normal most of the weekend since it was such a nice break from our usual routine. Busy, but in a different way so it still felt like a break to me.

The earlier part of the week centered on the art show Wayne put up. Monday I invited my coworkers to take a field trip during lunch and eat downtown so we could stop by Wayne's art show. I'm not sure they appreciated his work; the only comment I got from them was that they were impressed with how hard Wayne works. But not everyone has to like it; it was well received by professors and students. Tuesday night was the reception for Wayne's show, so I left work promptly at five to get to campus and help set up food before six. It took nearly an hour to get to campus; normally it only takes twenty minutes at the most. So we were a little stressed getting things ready at first, but we finished in time. Wayne says not many people came, but all the food was gone in less than an hour so I think we had enough. I had made over 80 cookies, and we had a cheese bowl and crackers and tons of orange slices! I went to Wayne's evening class with him after the show and learned about keyboard hacking and opengl and got to see Wayne's presentation on 3-d animation.

/** * */ package tutorial;

import edu.byu.phun.*;
import edu.byu.phun.body.*;

/**
* @author Wayne
*
*/
public class TutorialMain {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
Win3D win = new Win3D ("Tutorial", 100, 200, 400, 300);
Floor monkeydancefloor = new Floor (10);
SphereObj monkeysphere = new SphereObj();
Axes myaxes= new Axes();
win.add(myaxes);
win.add(monkeydancefloor);
win.add(monkeysphere);
monkeysphere.setLocation(1, 2, 0);
win.setLookFrom(10,1,10);
}
}

I'm still not sure I understand what a class is. Or what an object is.

Method makes sense to me. A method is a group of code which is called with a single line of code anywhere else after the declaration of the method. I used a lot of functions (the equivalent of a method in actionscript) when I did flash designing.

The beginnning of a cultural introduction revolves a great deal around language. And rightfully so, according to Jacques Derrida. Over the summer, I read a translation of his speech and discussion of his speech entitled Ethics, institutions, and the right to philosophy, among other books on the philosophy of language/grammar. I've become more interested in the cultural structure of a language and the symbols which that culture takes on which give support to conscious philosophy.

I don't understand the language of the programming community, thus I am on the out group. I got a little frustrated with this because my wife and I don't talk the same way about code and although I thought I was asking a clear question, I obviously wasn't because her answers weren't clear to me. This is very important to note because communication between the in-group and communication from the in-group to the out-group is one of the primary keys to understand how to become apart of the in-group.

I get really frustrated because she says "directory" and I have no idea what that means.

• View video (needs quicktime 7)

What follows are excerpts from a conversation with Julie Jacobson about my paintings at the beginning of graduate school. Her questions are highlighted and my answers are the responses.

You talked a bit about the art world having a language that those outside it wouldn't necessarily understand, in your work, you use symbols and icons that many people (possibly a lot of those in the art world) wouldn't understand. What statement are you making with this? (or is this a statement you are making?)

in psychology, there is always a lot of talk about how psychology wants to be seen as "a hard science," as opposed to a soft science. hard sciences are those sciences which rely on concrete facts and "evidence" which have been "derived" from the scientific method. ultimately, the debate hinges on whether or not definitions within the discipline of psychology clarify things within the terms that include it in "hard sciences." Each discipline has their own internal set of language, definitions and symbols, just like cultures. in essence, disciplines are cultures: they maintain strict boundaries of who exists within the "in group" and who is the "out group" and in a way this is defined by the understanding of the social/cultural rules and the social/cultural language. at the time of starting these paintings, i was really upset at how art (despite being a discipline which is supposed to be FOR the masses) couldn't be understood by the masses because of the language and history which had defined art theory outside of the public's understanding. the irony of this situation fueled the use of using abstract symbols from other disciplines to communicate secretly to people who are from those discplines - i especially used symbols from agriculture (farming, animal husbandry) and engineering because in my bias i veiwed these disciplines as being the furthest from "understanding" painting (particularly modernist painting).

Do you make up the symbols you use? Or are most of the ones you use ones that are in some of the material you've looked at (Henry DreHeyfuss)? (by the way, on my painting there is a pink circle with an "R" in it, what does that mean? I was thinking it could possibly be for Rebecca, but I'm not sure. I've had two dreams now where that thing showed up in it! )

now that you mention it, i think i did make up a good deal of symbols. but usually they were just things that were abstractions of basic objects that hold cultural weight, such as pills, or monkeys, robots, or mario - (mario led me into dealing with these "larger symbols" for a different type of culture). the r symbol is in the symbol sourcebook (if i remember correctly, it has something to do with engineering). if you would like, i could show it to you, it is in my studio at all times. it's the same symbol sourcebook that jean-michel basquiat used to make many of his paintings. i've often been told that my paintings remind some people of some of his work: while i admire his work greatly, he and i are dealing with VERY different things, despite using similar source materials.

How do you select the "icons" / characters / symbols you are going to paint? Why only paint the ones you find horrific? (we talked a little about this with Sesame Street, but I wanted to know more about your selection process). Why is it important for them to have a sinister, yet cutesy quality?

a lot of the symbols came from personal selection as being visually interesting. the characters are just personal choice. i wanted things that were very saccharinely "cute," almost naively so. Sesame street is an interesting example of something that i have always viewed as being very honest and not trying to be "cute" to cater to children, at least in a very different way. or perhaps the difference is in cartoon characters versus "stuffed animals." i still don't think i have an answer to this. the bottom line for me is that i never was abhorred by sesame street, whereas pikachu/hello kitty/ the rest bug me for being "uneducational" and mindless.

You said that the work isn't a specific narrative per se. Does the work possess untold hidden depth?

the flash animation dealt with the idea of creating a "random" narrative which can't possibly be random because although the computer is coming up with "random" numbers they have been pre-existingly defined by the programmers who wrote the code to create random numbers. i don't believe anything is truly random or can be. the order for the narrative was built on visual relationships and my intuitive sense for what visually needed to happen between objects, not for the content. this was easier for me because most of the symbols, i couldn't keep track of their cultural meaning. the ones that i did know what they mean probably were selected more often.

Is it important for your work to transcend nationalistic boundaries?

i'd like that, yes.

Questions about line: Why are all the objects in your paintings outlined?

it is a very cartoon-like quality.

Are you using line to divide the spaces?

yeah, this reminds me that i saw some paintings by david salle and i liked the way he broke up space using lines and different structures. but then i realized he was basically stealing his ideas and style from james rosenquist and i've always liked his work, so really i was just reflecting HIS work.

There is a consistency in your line, not varied, is this intentional? If so, why?

you know... i really like "bad" art: art which is really loose and isn't uptightly about the craft of the piece. I mean, basquiat could vaguely be put into the neo-expressionist movement of the 1980's. although i don't like a great deal of the neo-expressionists work from that time period, i appreciate their use of loose line.

In the earlier work, the viewer gets a sense that they are looking into a slice of a world, not a contained world......some of the work you had in Gallery 3 focussed on a single object in the painting. Why the switch from repetition to single icons in the paintings? This seems to be moving away from saturation and going into some sort of glorification or perhaps hierarchy of some of the icons.

yeah, i think glorification is a good word. in fact, it's more of a personal astonishment, questioning why we glorify these characters.

Why did you choose the colors you did?

originally, i was tired (from previous paintings) of trying to work with multiple colors and decide which colors meant and reacted a certain way. i also noticed that "technology devices" such as computers, cellular phones, handheld devices all use a limited grey pallete. so, i tried to incorporate this while maintaining the beauty of a grissaille painting: with the simple underpainting of browns and whites, you can reach both cool (greens) and warm (reds) by the use of location and relationships between values. I believed that these colors gave the paintings a neutral feel so the subject wasn't weighted by the colors but instead on the ideas and the semantic/semiotic value. looking at high renaissance paintings, i was impressed with the simple beauty of the underpaintings.

then i got bored with that and started dealing more with the "figure" and the "cute" characters and so color became more important.

What do the symbols have to do with language?

Jacques Derrida and Wittgenstein - i was reading a lot on these two philosophers while i was working through this body of work. wittgenstein is a philosopher from the 1950s who discusses the nature of language. if you read this article on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein, specifically the paragraphs on philosophical investigation, you'll get a feel for his work. ultimately, he talks about how language and the construction of grammar lie at the root of the understanding of something. Jacques Derrida takes it a step further (and what more interests me) to the point of stating that a culture's gramatical and semiotical base is intricately intertwined with the philosophical groundwork of a culture. because we have a language that is based in greek/germanic/latin language, we share similar philosophical bases with other cultures of similar sematic backgrounds. the reason for this basis is that language allows a person to "think" about something; wittgenstein and derrida both have this one principle fundamental belief: conscious thought begins with language. language permits conscious thought.

One question is on the email, but I also mentioned it on the phone...seems like the work is going from a lot of information on the canvas to a single image.

earlier in this work, i was dealing with overstimulation, especially as it relates to understanding the language that has developed within a discipline (as an outsider looking in). it is especially apparent looking at our suped-up ADHD culture that we overstimulate ourselves (think MTV and japanese cartoons). i think that for the earlier works, i was really trying to push the envelope in how much i included in the singular image, but these works were also meant to be viewed as an entire body of work, increasing the oppressive nature of the "overloaded" images. the presence of three dozen of these paintings crammed full of symbols and "language" was meant to make the viewer claustrophobic and yet spend hours at a time trying to decypher the messages. now that i've gone into the "cute" stage, i'm dealing with this image-phobia in a different method: i'm trying to create larger images which overwhelm the viewer in their saccharine cuteness; i'm hoping that the scale deals a powerful enough punch - being confronted with a huge adorable pikachu is enough to make my stomach churn.