521. Emerging Collection of Photography "Biologically Incorrect's Photographic Compilation of Crazy Signs"

Caption: Emerging Collection of Photography "Biologically Incorrect's Photographic Compilation of Crazy Signs"
Emerging Photography "Biologically Incorrect's Collection of Crazy Signs." Sometimes I go buy that epic indie signage (or grafiti?) that I wished were distributed on national billboards... The least I can do is place them on this here blog. Sigh.... (This collection used to be on my StokastikaPortfolio Picasaweb album, but then came to realize how in appropriate the location was).

494. Photography from World's Easiest Catch ::: The Zen of the Grocery Store ::: The Values of Food

Continuing from
Blog 145, BLURB INCLUDED WITH PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION: The Zen of the Grocery Store (World's Easiest Catch Images, Processed in Time Lag). As I had been processing images, I stumbled across an image set during my frantic videography spree in the Lazy Acres market in quasi-downtown Santa Barbara. I had waited two weeks to receive a go-ahead from the store manager in order to take some footage. It was the first time I ever took pictures in a grocery store, though I seem to go there every single day. I suppose my main epiphany was (1) when I usually enter the grocery store, I am so preoccupied with a to-do list that I completely disregard the (2) sheer QUANTITY of food in an entire store, the FACTORY essence of the store... but placed in this aesthetic ambiance "store front," that you come to forget that you yourself are a part of the machine operation. To me, with a rock crab film or not, these images are timely in the evolution of thinking in my own life, so they are worth showcasing with or without a larger-scaled film. Some of these images can couple the poem / song "Where Stuff Comes From, Where Stuff Goes."

And speaking of which, an old demon comes to mind. I had wanted to make a to-do list, or The Ultimate List of the Values of Food. The first time this thought came up was derived from a conversation between Bahareh, Barry Spacks, and me, over lunch in spring of 2009. Very relaxing occasion, actually. And Bahareh made this excellent "performance poem" meditating on a tea leaf, in which the leaf, and the process of preparing the leaf in the morning was a very solemn sacred process compared to the chaos and rush of the rest of the day, which includes junk information, junk food (well, what's the difference). I told Bahareh that I have a very systematic point of view with food. My relationship with food varies with space and time, and content of my stomach along with the content of the food. So, the most important thing is to have conscious recognition of my relationship with food at the time in order to prevent any form of negative activities to occur (rushed eating, binging-purging, excessive eating of junk food). Then the idea reoccurred to me in Mike Davis' course on writing and landscapes. Ultimately I would like this poem to be VISPO a systematic list on the values of food. Values are not always mutually exclusive; some overlap and intertwine.

The Values of Food
and the Intricate Coupling of Physical and Mental Consumption, Metabolism, and Excretion.
A Meal for Thought.

Why I eat food. A question every "anorexic" will eventually have to grapple with.

>> Medieval Torture. Being gluttonous at the buffet every Saturday afternoon. Your mother forces you to gargle raw garlic and let it sit in your throat for ten minutes. "The pain is there because it's killing all the bacteria!" (age 10, starting off on the wrong foot, hence the beginning of a very severed, sour relationship with food)

>> Survival-Replication. If you don't eat (for a month), you die. If you do eat, then you can survive, grow, and replicate on to the next generation. [reptilian, preservation, reproduction] (age 17, first-hand experience)

>> Origins-Evolution. Your body and mind evolved to eat so your body can stay in one piece to grow and reproduce... and die at a later date, but your progeny continue on [existential] (age 19, Sam Sweet's evolution course)

>> Hunting and Gathering. Food tastes good if you earn it. You went through the labor of catching your own prey instead of mosing into a grocery store and purchasing some human catc chow (I started becoming a fisher girl in February of 2009, age 27, though I went duck hunting once at age 26)

>> Environment-Ecology. You are the summation of elements of your environment. Your body and mind is a unique aggregation and assemblage of elements derived from your environment and you need to continue replenishing the assemblage with more new elements to stay as one large chemical sack [existential] (age 19, Miriam Polne-Fuller's Shoreline Preservation course)

>> Hunger. Your more basal "primitive" part of your mind contains a subliminal neurophysiological "sensor" that beckons the state of "hunger," if your mind is actually operating normally (my sensor shut off and did not experience hunger, until around age 22, my appetite came back)

>> Medicinal-Digestive-Medical. Drinking tea for your cold. Drinking coffee after a rough meal at the Hometown Buffet (my parents still do it!). Making home-made chicken noodle soup to deal with your throat infection. Drinking Gatorade for lost electrolytes after a throw-up incident (age 22)

>> Mind Alteration. Stimulation. Depression. Though I'm more drunk when I'm not drunk, I am a pretty altered state simply being normal, or on coffee. I become boring, open, and vulnerable when I'm on beer, but my thoughts slow down with weed. Recreational drugs were never of interest because starvation provided the highest of highs. Starvation + lack of sleep + lack of exercise + computer in your own room = 5days-1week intellectual trance, enlightenment, altered state of reality. Starvation also places my body in a "fighting, hungry lion-tiger syndrome, so my body and mind wants to keep chugging and performing for over 10-12 hours of the day) (starting age 19)

>> The Sleeping Pill. Using food to slow down your conscious mind and transform your body into a more visceral, mind-numbing state in the evening. Konks out the brain for sleeping (starting age 19)

>> Exercise Prevention, But I Don't Want to Sit on My Xss in Front of the Computer Syndrome. Eating a splendid morning breakfast, like strawberry waffles at Mimi's cafe on a Saturday morning will prevent you from being able to sit down and do any work for the rest of the day. Lazy activity. (starting age 24)

>> Study-o-holicism. Particular low calorie, high caffeine food that allows one to consume all day like insulin IV drip, and clench your jaw (like with bubble gum), allowing long-term "intellectual trance." Three-meals-a-day-syndrome does not exist! Coffee, soda, bubble gum, wrthers original, and the like. (starting age 18)

>> Safetys and Comforts. Eating foods that are familiar and similar to your known universe of taste buds when placed in a foreign environment, like another country, or even your neighbor's house. (starting age 18)

>> Rewards. Pavlov's Dog. Rewarding yourself with a sweet item to symbolize that you made it through the day... for example yesterday, I had a hot chocolate at Starbucks! (starting age 22)

>> Subconscious Stress Diversion, Divulsion, Amplification. Stress and fast-paced lifestyles can construct a sloppy mentality with all habits. Binging on an entire half gallon of ice scream late in the night is a great likelihood (which was my entire year at UCLA age 22-23).

>> Social Gatherings. Food foraging and consumption as a common endeavor; an opportunity to catch up with family and friends during this window of time, especially during the holidays! (The first time I could sit down and have a meal with friends at a restaurant was around age 21)

>> Diversity. Since most of American prepared food has become "one giant cafeteria of dormfood" to my tastebuds, I have come to appreciate home-made cooking, and the meals of local restaurants, bakeries.

>> An Art Form. Cuisine. The pleasure of extra time devoted to preparation. The subtleties of flavors, tastes, aromas, and the aesthetic of preparation and presentation.

>> An Exact Science. Ecologists tend to be those who like to study their food a bit too much before they eat their meals. Hence, very bad table manners, a laboratory of poking around as an intermediate stage (age 22)

484. New Media Studio (NMS / NMRI) Photography Gig for the NASA Data Visualization Conference at the Upham Hotel (SB, CA, Oct 27, 2009)

Blurb for the Photography Portfolio Above: NASA Data Visualization Conference Hosted by the New Media Studio (http://nmri.org) at the Upham, Santa Barbara, California. October 27, 2009. Conference participants include: Bruce Caron, Marty Landsfeld, John Moreland, David Nadeau, Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, Jeff McWhirter, Chris Torrence, Tommy Jasmin, Suresh Santhanavannan, Kevin Ward (out sick?), Eric Russell, Robert Simmon, and Tom Rink.

Dr. Bruce Caron of the New Media Studio asked me if I wanted to engage in some photography and errand-running for a conference on data visualization funded by NASA, and of course, as curious as I am, I said "yes"! This conference or "data summit" was quite a unique and humbling experience in several respects:

(1). The group was very small and interactive, in the "sherettes" format; people worked in groups of three, and these groups were rotated throughout the day based on a mix of numbers, shapes, and colors designated to each individual; participants were given problems and challenge questions, and they were encouraged to write answers on a webiste as well as brainstorm on sheets of papers, which were posted up on walls around the room; this sherettes conference format is quite unusual--compared to the routine 15-minute conference powerpoint talk that allows very minimal two-way street interactivity that can be displayed in a tangible format--I think that if this style of conferece were adopted at a much wider scale then research collaborations would end up being a lot more meaningful.

(2). The meat of the conference--Technical Issues in Data Visualization--was pretty much way over my head and made me realize how much I don't know. I am an "environmental media" graduate student, but I'm as primitive as "paper and pencil scanned into photoshop" (I'm so primitive I even DRAW out my maps rather than use GIS!) whereas the people around me are individuals who... who... design weather maps that my dad and my fishermen friends stare at all the time! It's fantastic! I also heard several concerns about "data compatibility issues" and "the structure of grant funding sources." The group was clearly interdisciplinary, and they were frustrated on how funding sources "frame" the way how research is directed and is preventing true "interdisciplinary" pursuits to address fundamental issues such as data compatibility. Funding sources are limiting the capacities of advancing research simply by constructing arbitrary boundaries on disciplines and projects.

(3). I was encouraged to create a Twitter account for this NASA data summit conference.... It's very limited... only two posts... http://www.twitter.com/stokastika... I'm not so sure how I feel about USING Twitter yet. All I know for sure is that I think that Twitter continues to promote ADHD thinking. I like to express myself in larger chunks of information rather than trying to continuously and compulsively sell myself in a sensationalizingly smack-dabbing 140 characters.... Okay, all novel things intimidate me. If I were truly open-minded, I would be experimental with Twitter.... Okay, okay... another day....

(4). I have to admit, I was nicely paid to help out! And I had a stock of doughnuts and cookies for the week which I tried to distribute to my housematies. I had so many sweet things myself that I ended up not wanting to eat any sugar for 3 weeks.... I couldn't even enjoy Halloween!!!

From a photographer's point of view, it was an "ideal" photographic setting for me. Low, soft light... reflections in windows... it reminded me of several shoots during my short-term apprenticeship with Mark Robert Halper over the summer; I think even he himself would have been intrigued by the lighting in the conference room. Since my internship with Mark, I met 3 or 4 photographers from renowned newspapers in southern California. Honestly, there's no comparison in quality. Mark's work is just a step, significant leap beyond the standard. Honestly, a vast majority of news journalism photography isn't all that great... unless you get into the National Geographic big leagues. It's funny to think how a short-term internship can profoundly impact me; I hear Mark's voice in my head almost all the time when I shoot: "Create something that doesn't necessarily exist in the world outside" and "Build a photograph from the ground up, from scratch, from a blank slate" are notions that keep coming back to haunt me....

Dr. Caron is organizing a book surrounding this conference, which I think is fantastic! It will be nice to see what research may turn out of such a conference. I also admit that there were a lot of "cool buzz words" floating around... it was a jarble of a semantic jungle to my ears, to my brain... goes to show how much I need to learn... and surely another bout of inspiration for a semantic jungle cartoon!

Chaotic Verbiage of the NASA Data Viz Jargon Jungle: geoscience ~ pagerank ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 1 ~ red ~ green ~ blue ~ triangle ~ circle ~ square ~ data visualisers ~ dataviz ~ bridge science-outreach divide ~ social networking ~ IPD ~ proprietary versus open source ~ pure Java script ~ AJAX ~ Spring ~ HTML 5 ~ canvas object ~ AJAX on server ~ compatibility issues ~ fragmented government funding programs ~ Google javascript ~ file format issues ~ Flex / Flash ~ Java-Spring-AJAX versus Flex-Flash, what will rule? ~ GIS ~ mapping data on landscapes ~ arcGIS ~ data versus visual representation of data ~ 2D-3D-4D-5D ~ underserved user groups? ~ writing / editing book ~ data and video ~ animations ~ video distribution ~ book content ~ gridded data ~ grid to grid fusion capabilities ~ science-public ~ the perfect earth data remote sensing visualization tool-system ~ main components? ~ book audience ~ viewing Earth data ~ jpg 2000 ~ geo TIFF? KML ~ grid data talk to GIS ~ smart maps ~ GIS point and polygon data and grid and satellite data ~ open source COTS versus custom tools ~ write plug-ins for existing packages ~ repertoire of software ~ durable URLs ~ sources of error ~ tool kits ~ component frameworks ~ different presentations of the same data ~ html-Flash-CMS ~ wiki "build your own web page" ~ NSF promote science-society divide through funding structure, before 1950s science had private funding structure ~ social media ~ emerging technologies ~ data CMS ~ RAMADDA ~ visualization IS conveying information ~ teacher knows answer, needs to convey, scientist is exploring the question, needs to convey ~ outreach programs too top-down with no feedback ~ "public doesn't understand science"? ~ two-way motivation of science and community ~ features for tools ~ embedded description ~ error tracking ~ error propagation during data fusion ~ resample data for fusion ~ facilitate data fusion ~ raw data, processed-regridded-data ~ algorithm-tools-gridding are data-dependent ~ embed data units, scaling, offsets ~ standards for data fusion ~ openDAP to OGC ~ acquisition-calibration ~ storage precision ~ omission ~ measurement ~ interpolation in gridding ~ reprojection ~ visualization ~ round off of floating points ~ error or uncertainty ~ flagging ~ data quality levels ~ confidence intervals ~ plot results of model ensembles ~ COTS as effective software engineering and management ~ software engineering perspective ~ data processing ~ spatial and temporal resolution ~ time distance from desired date ~ quality of metadata ~ provenance (birth place) ~ lowest error ~ data provider ~ credibility of curator ~ consistency ~ outlier detection ~ overview, zoom and filter, details on demand ~ strop screwing around with the multiplicity of data formats ~ lack of data convention, though standard format ~ data and metadata ~ enhanced semantics ~uniform tools for translating data ~ education for data providers ~ teckies ~ enthusiasm to contribute ~ user-friendly book for dabblers with data visualization ~ politics major driver, motivation to take credit for tangible results, branding ~ status quo likely to continue ~ proliferation of semi-redundant software ~ refinement ~ reinforces success ~ future: Google Earth, but with data ~ immersive technology: 2D image contour, 3D volume surface, 4D 3D + time, animated videogame, 5D multiple parameters ~ show data in multiple ways, visually and analytically, not just "pretty pictures" ~ data aesthetic ~ probing ~ transects through data ~ scatter plot ~ slice and dice ~ lumping and splitting ~ time series analysis ~ multiple linked views into the same data 4-up ~ geographic displays with charts ~ 3D has problem with perspective ~ exploration capability ~ 2D control pixel color, transparency, glyph ~ domains create grid data from point-observation data ~ parameterizations ~ large-scale grids, tiling ~ integrated data systems ~ client applications ~ Barnes objective analysis ~ resampling ~ irregular and unstructured grids ~ server ~ NCEP ~ single 3D-field ~ community-based-large-social-media ~ relationship meningitis outbreak and precipitation patterns of sub-Saharan Africa ~ all data can be mapped on Google Earth (real-time movie), down to resolution of people doing activities in real time, loss of privacy? ~ Carl Sagan Cosmos visual signals with narrative ~ planet walks ~ painted lines ~ hierarchizing, prioritizing data highlight and representation, filtering ~ verisimilitude ~ make systems appear as audience expects to appear ~ Google Earth discontinuous boundaries ~ image sweet spot, make data discoverable ~ enable system monitoring ~ processing pipeline ~ thumbnail ~ data formatting ~ complete metadata ~ lightweight animated image ~ lossless versus lossy compression ~ how much do users care? ~ grids sample a continuous function of reality ~ sampling has aliasing artifacts ~ interpolation to reduce aliasing artifacts ~ track propagation of error ~ file format, files often store the result, but not the path to that result and the error function ~ floating-point representation as text ~ change resolution ~ incomplete or inconsistent metadata ~ undocumented data satellite correction ~ incorrect math (floor versus ceil versus trunk) ~ color code uncertainty ~ data-software-hardware different dimensionality ~ 3D spatial dimension displays ~ interactive displays ~ iPhone location app ~ real world drives 2D representation ~ single user versus collaborative displays ~ detail optimization ~ eye level ~ facilitate discovery of data and its provenance ~ no "black boxes" ~ monolithic GUI ~ social media share workflow artifacts facilitate iterative collaboration ~ heavy weight but not on the web Java ~ AJAX overly complex ~ Flash Silverlight proprietary ~ lack well-defined toolkits for building user interfaces ~ weak standard support among browsers ~ browser quirks ~ sandboxing ~ client-side GUI ~ desktop and iPhone platforms ~ API ~ extension for customization ~ COTS proprietary data formats a problem ~ UI level to rendering level ~ future data display ~ 2D and 2.5D most useful, 3D and beyond no return for efforts ~ humans poor perceiving depth, humans perceive 6 depths at most at one time ~ human eyes rarely same strength ~ computer technology poor illusion of deptch ~ holideck data collection? ~ human perception at Z plane is 10% of our 2D strength ~ domain conflicts ~ perception, cultural constructs of colors (e.g. red = hot, blue = cold), dimension-independent issues versus problems specific to 2D or 3D data ~ calibration ~ canonical, didactic, apogee ~ cross-referencing ~ incentivize sharing of data ~ on-line community ~ build the best tool ~ audience of funding sources, tool-makers, program managers ~ basecamp ~ netCDF ~ flexible syntax ~ sound-on-sound tutorials ~ NYT graphics ~ IEEE

458. Dramatic Changes at the Whereabouts of 207 Hillview Drive... Blog Entry (Book Volume) #3

Picasaweb Blurb: Two Year Photoessay of 207 Hillview Drive; Not Your Stereotypical Graduate Student Household! What can I say?! Too much change all at once. Karl's moving out. Tina's moving in. Kyle and Lisa are getting married. Bentley the Ambassador Dog and Beastly Jacumba are around, and cancel out the effects of peace, order, and chaos around the house (;-). I am ending my fellowship and am in the exciting, edgy media job market because UCSB played with my psychology for TAships long enough. Dxmn Governator! And I say it's about time I reflect! Time to honor the place that has housed me in a two year roller coaster change in my life!



Picasaweb Blurb: Two Year Photoessay of 207 Hillview Drive; Let's Go Fly a Kite! It was the great alignment of all the stars, all the planetary systems, the Milankovitch cycles, the El Ninos, the spring burns of the sage brush... and somehow all these elements of the universe aligned such that all housemates co-existed within the same house in the closest of proximities and were all free to take a break all at the same time... to merely and most wonderfully enjoy the flying of a unicorn horse kite at the nearby park, most eagerly contributed to 207 Hillview Drive by Karl's father (I think)? What a witty man! He must know that graduate students are simply adult bodies with kid minds. We just are five year old kids flying kites underneath all the showiness of academic red-tape-prestige. The university exists so we can fly kites, and somehow, ironically, the university doesn't give us a lot of time to do that! (Featuring Karl, Kyle, Lisa, Michaela, and Joe!)

452. Photographic Collection: Celebration of Papu Ray's Memorial and the Minnich Family, 2009, 2008, 2003 (Literature Discussion Leaked In)

Photographic Collection from Ray's Memorial (Riverside and Mount Baldy, California, July 12, 2009, as well as Ray's 96th Birthday in Corona July 2008 and a happy summer back in 2003.

The Blurb that I Wrote in Picasaweb:
Ever since my grandfather Ray's passing, I felt like a strong current in my mind and life had stopped flowing, a string of attachment to this world had been cut. But it's funny; though Ray has metamorphosed into new life and planetary cycles, the past flows of this mental river of Ray never seemed erased--perhaps now even more vibrant than ever. [Paradoxically chopped up, severaged, and reconverging into a new order] I returned to Riverside shielded by video cameras, digital cameras, voice recorders... knowing that this familiar home is somewhat foreign, now that one major character in my life has been removed... or altered into another state. Through loss, or perhaps, strange transformations (for me), I feel I have gained new, stronger currents... more closeness to my family than I had ever detected in myself before. Anyhow, the least I can do is construct a collage of the memorial and highlighted past adventures, which reflects a heightened consciousness and appreciation of family, as well as acknowledgment of inevitable change.

I emailed several of my family members--I don't have everyone's email, but whatever emails I could scrounge for--and I sent a long email to my aunt Jeri Lyn in Sebastopol. She vamped up her website http://www.dillindesign.com, and I can't wait to tell Barry Spacks about her work!!! Jeri Lyn had this funny line concerning her life-long moodswings as well as her attempts to differentiate "nothingness" and "pointlessness." That's SOOO funny. SOOO Beckettsonian, and something I SOOO get. My Ph.D. question is "What's the point?" in the first place.

I'm glad I performed this task of photo compilations. I feel I have delved deeper into the psyche of my grandfather Ray, preparing me for writing an upcoming story, "The Mountain's Last Flower," concerning the story of a scientist with a troubled history with personal walls and universal walls of perception and action. And due to these internal walls and borders and failure to address them and break them down, he defied his own childlike commonsense and his adult antirationality took his own life. The main character is not a mirror of Papu Ray, but certain elements mimick his circumstances, especially in terms of retroactivity of perception of the condition of his son John--the retroactive diagnosis of Asburgers.

Well, shxtso! I'm ruining the story! I better write it SOONER than LATER! Okay, I'll shut up now. I invented the story on the fly in a car drive, and through my conversations with Barry Spacks, I discovered I was crafting a character that summed my fundamental troubled relationship with science and scientists, as well as my attempts to understand the inner world of Ray. It was all very subconscious creativity... now taken into full blown consciousness. I am actually kind of shocked at myself.

Barry Spacks mentioned two things to me and the class. He noted in one of my poems in which "my writing became smarter than my own self," which I agree. And we also talked about the IMPORTANCE OF READING versus THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE. I argued that if I spent most of my life reading litrary classics, then reading would become my experience, and then there is no possibility of injecting novel input to the field of literature. And if I lived a life strictly of experience (without being well-read), then I can be majorly detached from the gestalt of human history (except for the stories told by people in real life). My combination of life is (1) experience, mostly with mountain and ocean boys and chics (2) reading scientific literature, being taught scientific ideas (3) barfing everything out in literature-art mode (4) retroactively being informed that I sound like Samuel Beckett. I told Barry that we have to unplug ourselves from the Matrix to bring new ideas into the matrix. If we read strictly classic literature, the field would be self contained, and the likelihood of anything new coming out of younger generations is close to minimal--especially if experience constitutes of being locked up in a classroom for 20 years (so I raise my hand, claiming to be victim of that). And then I argued, another horrible part about modern experience is that most of it is INDIRECT, as opposed to DIRECT. If you ask someone, "how did you spend your day?" they discuss the news they watched and this movie star did that, and that pro athlete took this type of dope, but did not talk about their own personal lives or experiences, like I talked with my neighbor about the tides and had an adventure up in the mountain and worked all day trying to make a gadget to improve fuel efficiency for my car. I could not write a glorious piece on tennis (for another person baseball), because I feel insulted that this society has come to glorify the most absurd sport of swinging at a ball to hit over the net with a stick of high surface area. Professional tennis players get paid more than teachers, etcetera. Society has made absurdity a CONVENTION. Granted sports is all about exercise of primal aspects of our brain, like socially acceptable forms of competition beside bloody warfare, but to make it the centrality of entertainment?! Come flipping on! I would rather go in my backyard with my friends and figure out, and invent a new sport. That would be more self amusing. And to think the psychological damage tennis was for the entire family, and so many familes who's mommies and daddies who want their little kids to become the next Venus Williams or Roger Federer. Like flipping whatever. Okay, okay. I'll shut up. The point is, I would be mortified to write a more rudimentary memoir of my life simply because the first 19 years of it, I was trapped, drowning in a largely consumerist mentality, largely consumerist society, physically and mentally. By the time I entered CCS, I started carving out a universe of my own. I was 19 years old, and that's when I felt like I was born, when my "self" and my "surroundings" was born to its truer state of consciousness. Right now I'm in a fiction phase in which I construct alternative fictional realities based on oversimplification of components of the current universe I live in, and through this fictional universe--I seek to discover new and greater truths about the world we currently live in. Tadah!

459. Proseish Poem "Unthrough the Soul"

"Unthrough the Soul" Prosey Poem Page 1.

"Unthrough the Soul" Prosey Poem Page 2.

PDF of the poem found here: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/unthroughthesoulpoem.pdf

When someone hurts you, and you have no authority to fight back, nor express it in a direct manner, poetry has served as perhaps the most therapeutic practice of releasing these emotions, as well as stabbing the person, without him or her even knowing it.

421. Jenny Minnich: My Beauoootiful Sister (Commercial Print / Basic Photoshoot / Zed Card)

CAPTION IN PICASAWEB:
My sister, Jenny, is a most beauoootiful sister in the whole wide world (she's my only one, but wow, what a lucky person I am!) and so I decided to do my second official zed-card-like photoshoot with her (my first photoshoot was with Patricia, a Santa Barbarbarian local, who was referred to me by Kent, the one-and-only rock crab distributor). This photoshoot at Hansen Dam (near by Sunland, CA) was taken two days before spring quarter started, in which I had a school-related panic attack and decided to do anything that was not for myself but for the benefit of others. Given that this was an impromptu photoshoot (without any preparation, additional equipment other than a camera with two lenses, nor directed theme), I feel quite proud of myself for this tiny body of work--in the field and in the photoshop digital dark room! Jenny was pissed off that I started to take pictures of her in a "professional way" and she HATED posing! I made up this Torture by my doing the Imitation Crazy Doggie Dance Video for her cell phone ring tone. The video was passed along all the way to Greece! Ahhh! Now that I look like a complete fool, I think we are both even.

Other Notes: **it was at one location **three different settings (by the lake, on the open road, and in an eroding gully with red-brown rocks) **late afternoon lighting, approaching golden hour, but not quite **since it was impromptu, my sister was not psychologically prepared, I had to delete several photos because of awkward (unnatural) posing **delt with one change of clothes / make up / hairdo **I could say the purpose of the photoshoot could be (1) establish the zed card / portfolio of my sister (2) sell some natural skin care (3) advertise some high end, casual grunge-geobum-field work clothes (Gap / Old Navyesque) ** Zoom in to Zoom out: facial, 1/4 body, 1/2 body, 3/4 body, full body, full body with context,

403. Mike Dillin Appreciation Day: Victoria's Designed Business Card for Mike's Birthday!!!

Vic's Birthday Present to cousin Mike. A new business card design! FRONT.

Vic's Birthday Present to cousin Mike. A new business card design! BACK.

Today, March 29, 2009, is my cousin Mike Dillin's birthday! About TWO YEARS AGO, Mike asked me to create a business card for him. Today, I am fulfilling this task, in honor of his birthday. In one way, I feel ashamed that it took me this long to do something. To fulfill a task. I am in immense backlog, as you can see. Yet in a certain way, I am glad I waited because I garnered several skills that allowed me to create the business card above, which I would have not been able to create otherwise. I also admit that Mike showed me about a month ago a business card that someone else made for him. I became very jealous and competitive, and I decided to outdo the existing card in quality. I only act egotistically when it comes to artistic creativity! Though the card I designed is very colorful and Mike thinks I'm a Bollywood type, I sincerely hope he likes it! *Ah!* He's a critic, but I don't mind. I know it's out of TLC.

NOTE that regular size business cards are 2 inches by 3.5 inches.

385. "Mindfield" Procrastination Project and "The Bower of Santa Barbara" for Coastal Fund Photography Contest / Spectrum / Wind-Teeth Submissions

Sunset Wave of Curiosity. Submitted to the Coastal Fund Photography Contest. "At the brink of sunset, the waves of curiosity overpower the ocean's waves as two students probe in the nooks and crannies of ephemeral tidepools during a low tide near by Coal Oil Point."

Mindfield. Also submitted to the Coastal Fund Photography Contest. "This image sequence entitled 'Mindfield' is the coupling of a distinctive, fog-riddled sunset along the bluffs of Del Playa and the outline of an 'eye' that is intensely watching this spectacle. We, as students and members of the UCSB community, are very fortunate to be immersed in an environment that awakens curiosity, beckons open-mindedness, and asks us to call attention to the details, within our surroundings, as well as inside ourselves--such fundamental elements of life that can be easily bypassed and shoved aside in the hustle and bustle of most California communities."

PDF to the Mindfield Poem:
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/mindfield1.pdf

PDF to the Mindfield Lyrics / Chords / Song:
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/mindfield2.pdf

MP3 Sample to the Mindfield Song:
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/mindfieldfragmentpresentable.mp3

"Mindfield" is a small-scale multi-media project I had undertaken under the guidance and encouragement of Dr. Barry Spacks (poetry and art guru, among other things) through a College of Creative Studies (CCS) Poetry Course. "Mindfield" has essentially become my "procrastination project" when I do not want to directly face my "major projects" that typically require more emotionally-stunted non-artistic endeavors. *Sigh* I will soon be submitting this multi-media work into a photography contest for Coastal Fund, a poetry contest for CCS' Spectrum literary magazine, and/or a submission to "Into the Teeth of the Wind"--also a literary journal formalized in CCS.



"Under your nose. Beneath your feet. Through the scopes. What can you see?" Lucky lucky me. I wear a beautiful bower. A beautiful mental coat called Santa Barbara--and more specifically, UC Santa Barbara. I am immersed in such splendor of an ecosystem 24-7 that I can dive in close to full-time into the ecosystem of my head, knowing that when I attempt to escape, All Things Beautiful await me. I had been considering in making such a photography collection for quite a while, but UCSB's Coastal Fund has a deadline this week for a photography contest, so I decided to gather a baseline of imagery that embodied the Distinct Details of Santa Barbara. (Several photographs I took in this series were from my undergraduate days, 2002-2003, with my first primitive Olympus Camedia digital camera).

Hmmm, I even had some promising photographs way back then!

Small projects can become very large... very fast. I just finished a fish presentation. Then evolving to just a poem. Then went to song lyrics. Then into a demo of the song with simple voice and piano. Now seeking a guitar player. And I won't jinx myself ahead of that!

370. The Prism and the Mirror Box (Stokastika Photography Shoot)

It's funny how a bunch of little ideas just lay around unfinished, undone, all over the place. I just have one long trail of unfinished ideas, to which I am slowly accumulating, organizing, and cleaning up. Such was the case when I attempted to transport a 'mirror box' and 'prism' to the car upon return to Santa Barbara in December 31, 2008. I picked up the mirror box, remembering how I made it during the time I was visiting Tariel, and then I realized I performed a photoshoot with the mirror box, but never finished it! I never placed it on line! And so it goes.

The mirror box and prism are fundamental metaphors in perception of a common system--for example stakeholder perceptions of a common set of resources, or a common landscape, a common environment. The mirror box represents multiple different perceptions of the same system, but the prism not only reflects, but has transluscence. Transparency. The goal is to find common grounds--extract the common stuff that represents all of our core needs for existence.

This is what it says on my Stokastika Portfolio:
"I came back to Santa Barbara the day before New Years, only to realize I needed to move the mirror box and the prism to the car. I made the mirror box and purchased the prism in downtown Santa Barbara (back in May of 2008). I was inspired that my friend Tariel had a prism, so I was determined to have my own!"

367. Industrial Ecology of Graduate School, Part 1 "Mass Produced Individual Identity" Photography (Picasaweb)

I created this photography series in Fall of 2007. The protocol for generating such images is to consume a hamburger from the ampm mini-market gas station 2am in the morning, make sure you feel sick the "next day," then attempt to clean your room and attempt to take pictures of yourself while at it. This is how I feel every single time I clean up the trash from my room: "Mass-produced Individual Identity. Self-System Identification. Am I more than just the summation of receipts? bills? credit card company mail? Am I just a NUMBER to all of you? Just a dollar bill? Just some random molecular human? "It's not that we don't care. It's just that we as humans don't have the CAPACITY to care." Why don't you create your own Mental Microcosmos of Humanity."

I suppose this can be called The State of Technological Interdependence. This is also called Physical/Mental Carrying Capacity-Saturation / Pseudo-autism / Eusocial Ecological Niche Space.

I am writing this in response to my frequent bouts of trash accumulation, combined with "purges" of this trash. I am establishing a philosophy of Accumulations and Purges.

359. Environmental Defense Center (EDC) Thank Goodness It's Friday (TGIF)! Fall Feast, October 10, 2008, Part 2

Photography has the capacity to capture subjects and objects in such a manner that is un-apparent to the human eye at the moment of creation--but only perceived through retroactive scrutiny and photoshop modification.

The above image was possibly the best and most peculiar image I took at the Environmental Defense Center (EDC) Thank Goodness It's Friday (TGIF) Fall Feast Event. I had jotted these notes down at the time: "Best lighting, optimal distribution of pigeonholes, capturing a mesmerizing stare of an unknown human being of optimal aesthetics. Some kind of mise-en-scene effect." So, here's some follow-up.

I am intrigued by my mind's ability to construct a "deep order" of an image that is still surrounded and immersed in chaos: the intense, seemingly meaningful stare of some random male... embedded within a matrix of white noise perturbations. I find this picture fascinating in terms of the evolutionary implications of a female mind's construction of reality in the presence of males. As if intense backdrop falls out like bunch of fumigated flies.

I don't know who the guy is--and it is beside the point--nor do I desire to know, but he is most certainly qualitifed to do high-end model shoots in Los Angeles (lucky him his genes played out to render a biological sculpture of optimal proportions). And it seemed like the ladies of the table were kind of responding: "Oh ya. Sure! Point the camera in THAT direction." It's an evolutionary instinctive tendency, isn't it?But as a photographer, I have a sense of empowerment to have the ability to pristinely capture such a moment--the ephemeral, dynamic positioning of elements crystallized and sorted to centrality by a yearning stare--captured forever?! Bingo!

The other elements surrounding this man are in great part distracting, but the peculiar sincerity and directness of the stare--topped off with a seemingly "knowing smile"?! Perhaps not in a male mind, but in a female mind, these factors allow the hierarchization and fading-away of these distractions. Very kind smile. An attempt at sincerity, if not sincere in real life. That picture made my night. Capturing ephemerality... forever!

Gawdzeeks, talk about my, random-walk, non-academic criticisms and reflections! Flippin' A! Such is the essence of EcoCritique? Eegots!

I suppose it's one of those images you wished that everyone you encountered in your daily life... you wish you could stare at each other in the face in a meaningful, penetrating manner--as if you were taking a whirlwind adventure into their minds--rather than with the gloss of an eye, as if two moving objects were blindly passing each other without any sense of motive, purpose, or conscious existence. Such is the case most of the time.

All this wine and dine, I kind of felt "caring for the environment" was in part an elitist intellectual luxury, which made me feel in part very guilty for thinking about what I do. I wouldn't be thinking about this kind of stuff on the condition that I was a starving, mal-nutritioned child in Africa. I would be thinking about my mom and my next meal. That's it. But no. In Santa Barbara, on the condition of being well-fed and having all basic resources accessible in an instantly gratifying way... there is a group of individuals who have come to care about "the environment" much farther beyond the immediate proximity of their own lives. Talk about Maslow's Ladder! It's not that it's good. Not that it's bad. It just is. I have 12 free hours of the day to think about something after my basic needs are met. I could be rotting at a dead-end job, getting addicted to tweaking whenever I had a chance. Or it's not like it's "better" to go out half-naked in the forest and beat on some drums! Or I could think and do something that is beneficial to myself, to others, to the community, and to the overall environment. So, such is an Intellectual Luxury of meditating on "the environment." At least 80% of my clothes come from Goodwill. I am surrounded by people with similar values. That is all that matters. So? Whatever--

Scrap Notes, Part 2.

In continuation of the poetic theme: "The world is going to hxll. Might as well mess with people's minds about it. The world is going to hxll. Not going to let it take me down with it."

I have encountered an intriguing, charismatic group of people who are all interested in "the environment." Yes, this amorphous thing called "the environment," whether they want to or need to "save it," or "conserve it," or "manage it," or no--err "optimally manage it," or "play and roll in it," or "lightly tread on it," or "mitigate it"--you mean "bulldoze-a-marsh-and-save-a-pond-it," or "consume it," or "produce it," or "extract it," or "distribute it," or "dump-your-less-toxic-waste-in-it," or "restore it," or "reconstruct it"--you mean "Designer-Ecosystem-It" --physically and mentally, within moderation, to whatever baseline they desire it to be--whether it is a baseline of necessity of human survival shifting along a spectrum to a mere baseline of visuacoustic emotional, "spiritual" aesthetic, to the exclusion or fusion of humanly-manufactured values and baselines in between. Everything, of course, is in moderation, even Moderation itself.

But for sure, it's a community of people who don't want to be "detached" from this thing called "the environment." These individuals are trying to find meaning, to connect with this "environment," whatever an amorphous internal TV-box-video-game construct each individual mind creates "the environment" to be.

As so we all come together to commune: "To the Environment!" As if we are all speaking the same language. As if we have some form of common perception. Which still remains a mystery to me as to whether this has been achieved, or remains a Cloak of Vagueness, Masked through the baseline of our own Verbage--err Verbosities. That, in result, can go emotionally and valuistically only so deep.

Well then. I guess I see the emergence of a few Ph.D. questions here....

Pardon my "snappy criticism" in this passage. Honestly, my attendance at EDC-TGIF did NOT inspire such a critical thought pattern, but I do say, perhaps the last dozen or so "for-the-environment" parties and shin-digs felt much like what I described above. When people communicate about environmental issues, are they really "communicating"? Or is there a barebone struggle in communication due to the fundamental vagueness of words used--nature, culture, environment, diversity, etcetera. It's a chronic problem I see ALL the time.

Three More Random Thoughts.

1. The mind is an internal landscape of interacting software and hardware programs. The challenge is to learn how to pick apart all the operations, and figure out which operations are working when and where, in resposne to what particular elements of environmental stimulation are present in your mind's construction of its surrounding environment. Why your mind tunes in, processes, and interacts with certain forms of environmental elements, and why other elements are tuned out. When and where and how your mind reaches environmental saturation in multi-tasking.

2. One time, I briefly stayed in an art lecture through the College of Creative Studies, and the instructor Graham Wakefield posed the question: is our perception of reality come in Discrete Packages of information, or is it more in a Continuum? Physics has described reality in a dualist manner--the dual-wave particle theory. One more deterministic and one more probablistic. You would think that this duality would scale out to our entire perception and interaction with reality. In part order, in part chaos, in part deterministic, in part probablistic. But not exclusively one or the other. The mind can process information in multiple different ways. Shallow processing. Deep processing. All depends on where you are at. What you will have the capacity to perceive. What you cannot perceive. My mind can process long, big chunks in the morning, but that becomes a futile endeavor later on in the day.

3. It's best to write everything out. Otherwise the ideas will come back to haunt you. ROUTINELY.

358. Environmental Defense Center: Thank Goodness It's Friday! Fall Feast, October 10, 2008, Part I

Portfolio of Best Photographs for the Environmental Defense Center "Thank Goodness It's Friday!" Fall Feast, October 10, 2008. Please see the next set of blogs for narrative embellishment of the event--and my own thoughts about environmental media, integrating the personal with the universal....

356. Chez Mike Dillin: Une Nouvelle Maison (A Big Hug, Long Overdue)

Last night, I decided before I left to Riverside to spend a couple of "peaceful" days with my parents, that I would finally go and visit Mike Dillin, my "acquired third cousin." But, such a title is a bit too harsh and unrepresentative of our relationship. To me, Mike is more like a protective, witty (super-intelligent), rebellious older brother that I never had, but could only dream of having. But now I have him, and I sincerly felt that I took his presence for granted--especially ever since he left to New Orleans for a lengthy period of time (since Fall of 2007, I clearly remember).

Ever since Mike left, I went through Los Angeles and Santa Monica feeling empty, withdrawal. Not only I missed Mike, but I missed his experience of reality: his abode near by the Santa Monica pier, his stories working on TV and movie sets, his deep knowledge of Los Angeles, which to me I probably can play the Los Angeles Video Game at Level 2. And Mike plays Level 10, or Level 20. I don't know how to calibrate his knowledge of the area. To me, this city is a daunting, unmanageable, graspable zoo... still to this day. I also missed Mike's unique character: insane problem-solving intelligence not channeled through the university--but a little bit anti-university through the lens of his grandmother--who attempted to go to UCLA for graduate school but was discriminated back in the day because she was a female. Such stupidity of thought. I can barely imagine such a day. My being a female in the university was never really an issue--until I saw all these strange funding and scholarship opportunities that were catered toward "women in science." What's the big deal about "women in science"? I suppose I am to take a science / history of science course to understand the gorey details of misrepresentation of brains in science.

I also missed Mike as a mentor in the media business. Mike guided me towards signing up with Central Casting (http://www.centralcasting.org) in order to be an extra on the Giant Movie Sets. I must say that 95% of businesses revolving around "make-it-in-the-movies-and-get-famous" are scams, and 5% are true in terms of having a working job as an extra. But once you know what are the "true gigs" from the scam, you are connected to 95% of all the movie production in Los Angeles. "You're in," so to speak.

I had two Extras experiences for "Made of Honor", a cheezy CHEEZY film with Patrick Dempsey (I did an airport scene and a Halloween scence, in which I was a punk rock hippi in the middle of spring 2007 at Occidental College, worked well, met an intelligent, thoughtful guy by the name of Matt Something-err-other, good guitarist and singer, has the whole Nick Drake feel to him). Never even hit the movie theaters. Just sold as a silly love flick in the front stand of Vons Grocery Stories. Patrick Dempsey is SO SHORT and SO YESTERDAY. I saw Patrick twice--live. He seems really cool as a human being, and in the end, that is all that matters. You are a human being at the core and whatever society makes you to be is an illusion just so society can make money off of you. Society's biological puppet, so to speak--what most actors are. Anyhoo. Mike also got me quite a few resume items to enter into the UCSB Environmental Media Program. Which reminds me, I never finished off making his business card, which I should make ASAP.

One time Mike even offered me a Production Assistant job, which... in the near future... I may actually pursue (as an internship experience for the summer, so to speak, during my Ph.D. ness). During Spring of 2007--during my horrible year of "Medieval Dark Period," being rejected by my family and academia (at least UC Riverside Academia) for being a scientist breaking out into pursuing art (I was also a housekeeper and caretaker for Momma, a Persian grandmother with severe arthritis in Mission Viejo, California, where my cousin Jennifer Harber lives). What I was doing--integrating science and art--made sense to me, but there was no place for this type of endeavor in the family or in society--where I could be "institutionally accepted for my individual identity"--but Mike Dillin always cared about me and helped me out during those trying times of extreme dichotomy between exploring individual identity despite the lack of support in society. Mike has his photography business shooting off--skyrocketing in terms of a very cool job with nice salary--he most certainly has a financially-well-to-do audience in Los Angeles, through the movie industry. Mike has a Nikon D100 and D200 (he may have a D80 or D90 now), which inspired me to get my first SLR camera, the Nikon D80 (graduated from the Nikon Coolpix 5700, which I used for a couple of years, but started to feel stifled). I remember Mike vividly telling me, "What is the difference between a talented paid photographer versus unpaid photographer? You don't need a certificate or degree. All you need is a big-chunky SLR camera. The equipment gives you credentials--automatically. You are in a position of media authority by the mere equipment of you use." About a month after stating this, I bought a Nikon D80 package deal (with two lenses) at a Costco out in Ontario or China (despite my desperate financial situation), and soon after that Mike hired me as his assistant for a few photography shoots. We did a string of events that revolved around "little girls one-year-old birthday parties" which was a riot act, taking pix of drooling kids having a blast with toys, living in immense happiness with major ignorance to the full scope of Reality. It was at these events that Mike trained me on using the SB-800 flash and the Gary Fong diffuser. Just last year I finally made a purchase of my own SB-800 flash and imitation diffuser from China (saved 20 bucks in the process!). Mike also hooked me up with an Alcoholics Anonymous Photography gig "Ride to Recovery," which was a lot of fun.

I also remember Mike telling me "You become what you label yourself on your business card. If you want to be a producer or director, place producer or director on your business card. You can fabricate your professional identity just through a business card. You don't necessarily need credentials stampled on your forehead. More so experience, a portfolio, references and contacts." So the message is that you essentially can become what you envision yourself to become. You label yourself and grow into your label. Don't let society label you. So, then, on those terms, I have become a Commonsenseologist and an Ecopistemologist. Which society doesn't really know what it is, so I am still very liberal and free to define myself generalistically in a world of specialists.

After attending my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with Mike, he also fed me chili burgers and french fries at local restaurants off the Third Street Promenade (as well as checking out the Macintosh store). He still goes after ten years of being sober because apparently AA is a massive Social Sphere, and you don't necessarily want to break the bonds of relationships. A cult to some degree, I suppose. Mike said that consuming alcohol makes him angry, and I said that consuming alcohol makes me feel vulnerable: I want to crawl into a fetal position--much like a rolly polly ball and melt in the corner of a party--if I have consumed too much (which is usually over one can of Guinness; my tolerance level is low. One day after attending my first AA meeting (I felt like Mike's and my life are like some kind of Fight Club, continued, you can get addicted to self-help groups quickly because you have an automatically attentive audience: only desperate people truly listen), I drove back to Orange County and coined the new term for AA. It's called Alternative Addictions Program. It's all about consciously identifying any "bad habits," and finding Alternative Addictions to pursue to replace these "bad habits." I told this idea to Jesse Wright, a music engineer and great friend at California Sound Studios (Orange County) and he said that was a BRILLIANT idea, and I should start a non-profit group. He had to attend the formalized AA due to some driving mishap I don't have the full details on.

So, as you can see, through this extensive timeline, Mike Dillin and I have had quite a few adventures together. We both acquired our roles in our shared photography shoots. Mike was very good director and did an all-encompassing job, but as an assistant, I was able to frame some photographs that had a unique artistic flare. I also remember excitedly coming home after these shoots and we both had our little subliminal competitive wars about "who took the cooler shots," as we were frantically comparing our photographs of the day!

We didn't need any training in school or any advanced degrees: we were learning by doing, and we were getting paid for it too. We were living a College of Creative Studies lifestyle that actually paid money. What a concept! We just needed to help and support each other out. We just needed to help and support each other. We had a feedback going and we learned a lot from each other, though I do admit Mike really helped me in equipment training--because he's got all this equipment I can barely afford myself. But through these experiences, I have come to realize the power of teamwork and mentorship, and that two people can do amazing things that one individual could not possibly do. So, my sense of desiring to be "independent" is being challenged by the existence of a superorganismic synergism with a few individuals in the world--one being Mike Dillin. I wouldn't be where I am today as an environmental media Ph.D. student if it weren't for my cousin Mike.

I first met Mike Dillin in the Fall of 2005, accidentally, a day after Thanksgiving, at my aunt-and-uncle Jean's and Chuck's house in Corona, California. During one of the first two times I met him (I think also on Christmas day), he took an amazing picture of me (which reflected my worrisomeness and seriousness at the time, I was one stressed out cookie as a grad student at UC Riverside), to which Jery Lyn printed out, framed, and gave this signature picture to my parents as a Christmas present (I think just last year). That picture is still at home in Riverside. My parents hung it up on the wall near by my father's seat at the kitchen table.

I was intrigued and curious about Mike because he had a suitcase full of camera equipment and a fancy Sony HD video camera in the back of his SAV-like silky-colored Lexus (now it's great to think I have my own semi-pro Sony DVX camera). I learned that not only he is the the nephew of Steve Dillin--the new, totally cool, super-intelligent jack-of-all-trades electrician hubby of Jery Lyn (my super artist aunt of the family who lives in Sebastopol, California), Mike is also an eclectic employee of Warner Brothers Studios. He's met folks like Jim Carrey and Clint Eastwood, etc, etc, etc. His witty, savvy streak and managerial skills came out flaring since the day we met. The presence of Mike Dillin right then and there implanted some Deep Seeds in my head--which took a few years to manifest. And I am sure will take a long time or a lifetime of pursuits to manifest of the full potential meaning of acquiring a familial relationship with Mike Dillin.

This past quarter I have met probably 200 new people, and most of them I have weeded out from my life (more so, failed to maintain relationships with)--and then after getting exposed to all these new humans, you come to realize and value all those few people you come to associate and spend time with, and most certainly one of them is Mike Dillin. I am sure this is perhaps crude for me to say (from the academic point of view), but I strongly feel that my cousin Mike is more intelligent and real-world practical than half or more than half (or more than 3/4ths) of all the people I meet in the academic arena, undergraduates excluded. Mike's far beyond undergrad. Perhaps he is even beyond grad school. He's in his own class, his own world. Of creative pragmatism. I bet he would win the game of Survivor on an island. I would be on his team, of course.

Despite all of Mike's cynicism and skepticism with academia--which I am close to entire agreement with--except for the very few contacts I choose to maintain on the UCSB campus--I think he is proud of me for pursuing an environmental media Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara. Given the specifications of the programming. Lots of loose conditions at UC Santa Barbara at the moment.

This is the first time in my life I am able to mentally embrace Mike Dillin and all that he has done for me... through writing this blog. As if I had patched up an ailing, aching fragmented, part of my brain. Through carving out a rough sketch of a timeline of my own personal growth through his presence. Many short paragraphs here can essentially be transformed into epic stories on their own right, but those are for another day. I need a baseline timeline here, as if I were reconstructing some form of geologic history, he he. Yet a seeming geologic history in my own life. There are many pictures to follow the dense writing of this blog. Coming to think about it, Mike Dillin and Oscar Flores are my two most solid collaborators in media. I have failed to establish trustworthy, synergistic interactions with anyone else--even in Santa Barbara. Working mutualist synergisms are rare in life to find, achieve, maintain, and innovate. But once they are achieved, they are so beautiful to experience.

I truly took for granted Mike's presence in my life. Now he is back through New Orleans. I have re-acquired Mike, his cynically optimistic essense, his sense of place and spontaneous adventure. His mastery of a zoo called Los Angeles.

Last night I gave him a big hug, and this big hug encompassed all this--all this growth of identity--vaguely sketched and skimming the surface of this blog. It was a big, meaningful hug in my mind, and it was long overdue.

Mike is King of Spontaniety. Last night I called. I came. We hung out. We both crashed, and he had to work 3am to work on a production gig for gxd knows what film or TV show.

Mike is a fundamental building block to my multi-dimensional dualist life: science merged with art, a scientist desiring to have real world pragmatism. Mike is an Abyss of Adventure. Who knows what the future shall unfold--but all I know, it will be a very interesting ride.

Mike Dillin started a blog. I know about 5 people who started blogs this quarter, which is amazing. http://www.mikedillin.com is his Photography Website, which is much nicer than mine. *Sigh.* http://www.mikedillin.wordpress.com is his blog. He now lives on the "other side" of the Santa Monica Pier, from his original apartment--very crammed in space. It was one of the first apartments right on the beach, closest to the Santa Monica Pier from the west. Santa Monica is still the Homeless Capital of the World, to this day. I can testify.

Key Worlds: Mike Dillin, science-art, science and society, Central Casting, photography, iqr question reality website, Santa Monica, Made of Honor, medieval dark ages, Nikon D80, Alcoholics Anonymous, Alternative Addictions, Steve Dillin, Warner Brothers Studios.

333. Warm Welcome to the Donald Bren School, UC Santa Barbara: Paradoxical Existence in Transition

Above is a Picasaweb slideshow of images I took of the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UC Santa Barbara. My new academic home. I have close to nothing to complain about! I wrote a rough draft of an essay entitled "A Warm Welcome to Bren, UC Santa Barbara: Paradoxical Existence in Transition" but that will be another blog. This slideshow is almost like an advertisement for an Academic Resort. Essentially, UCSB is like an Academic Retirement Home for the Intellectually Rich and Famous. Aka a Sink for Nobel Laureates at the End of their Lives. I suppose that's why our school's hype has been going from stinkin' MTV party school to "The Nation's Most Intelligent Party School." The media makes me wanna puke.

I wrote a few captions to go along with the images, so here are some of the captions below:

Blurb 1: I am not particularly enthused about taking pictures of buildings--unless if they are taken from airplanes--or I consider buildings to be the "clothing" or "bower" to human creatures--much like a bryozoan colony or a coral reef or honey comb structure--but I took pictures of my new academic home at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management (UC Santa Barbara) for orientation and focusing purposes. These photographs are to compliment an essay I am currently writing entitled "A Warm Welcome to Bren, UC Santa Barbara: Paradoxical Existence in Transition."

Blurb 2: I love Oran Young’s lab! All the grad students are from very diverse backgrounds and are overall very chill people. The Young Lab is a “dry lab.” There is a Commons Table and lots of book shelves filled with interesting books on law and management and environment, etcetera. There are no strange pieces of equipment within the lab, like spectro-therma-pani-stetho-scopa-gadgeto thingamajigs that map atoms, measure protein reaction rates, record tissue metabolism, analyze water quality, design computers, map mountain ranges, or chart stars and galaxies. I guess our lab is outdoors mostly. We study human behavior… relative to the environment. If we need strange, expensive machines, we can borrow them from our friendly neighbors all over campus. I think Oran’s lab is question-driven, not machine-constrained. We will mix and match any possible machine that will give us the capacity to answer scientific questions, even a peculiar machine called the Common Sense of Our Own Brains.

Blurb 3: The Aesthetic Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UC Santa Barbara. Hollow Interior of the Building. Optimized Space for Socializing. As if I am psychologically analyzing the Interior Design of Starbucks! Talk about intense competition for Study Niche Space!

Blurb 4 (from an email with Maria Gordon):
Hi Maria! Thanks access to the office! Woohoo! Home away from Home! It’s nice to be out of my room (in Goleta) once in a while. It was getting very stuffy in my room today. Tomorrow will be orientation to the Bren computers around 10am and I will coordinate my retrieval of keys around that time.

I do say. My first year of graduate school at UCLA I lived in “the basement” aka “the dungeon” of the Botany building. It had no windows and the fumes from the construction across the street would give me headaches all year round. At UC Riverside, my office existed within a paleontology lab extension room called “the closet.” Again, there were no windows. Roberto, a graduate student who just moved out of the closet, claimed that were potentially unsafe materials free-floating in the air and suggested I didn’t spend too much time in there. Thankfully now the whole interior of the Geology Building at UCR is being gutted.

I feel so wonderfully upgraded to the fourth floor of the Bren Building: a beautiful view that knicks the ocean and even an extra work out for the upper legs with four flights of stairs! I don’t feel I deserve this, but in the end, it makes me feel like a human to have a window and fresh, salty ocean air. And the ocean view is just a giant strawberry on top a huge pile of whip cream!

I think this environment will enhance my productivity greatly!


PDF for "Room Without a Window" is found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/roomwithoutawindowpoem1.pdf.

PDF for "Dichotomous Environments" is found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/dichotomousenvironmentspoem1.pdf.

329. Evolution of the Biologically Incorrect and Ecology of Scale Logos

Picasaweb Slideshow of Elements and the Evolution of Layers of the Logo.

One of the best logos emerged from the exercise.
One of the best logos emerged from the exercise.
One of the best logos emerged from the exercise.
One of the best logos emerged from the exercise.
One of the best logos emerged from the exercise.

One of the best logos emerged from the exercise.

This weekend I performed a solo meditation at the downtown Kinkos (amen for being 24 hours) and finally cranked out some working logos for my pursuits in this blog and graduate school in general--"Ecology of Scale" and "Biologically Incorrect."

Thanks for a long stretch of time, I added multiple layers of information to this logo. Ranging from 10-20 layers, as if I were composing a full-blown classical music or jazz piece. Given that stretch of space and time, the question is WHY did I design the logos the way that I did. I myself pre-meditated a good deal of the logo (found scratch drawings lying all over my room, actually), but I am sure there is chance hapinstance elements within the logo that just happened to "look good" at the time, and discovered this aesthetic strictly by accident. I was just speaking to Dr. Suarez last night (EEMB Department UCSB) in concern of the proximate and ultimate causes of the design of organisms, just like there are proximate and ultimate causes in the spatial-temporal design of art. I think the main accidental discovery from the images above is the "gray bar" behind the primary font of the logo. I still think there can be some edits made. Oh well. Next round!

First of all, I made the logo because I am becoming (marginally) Institutionally Incorporated at UCSB--not just ANY university, JUST UCSB (plus Oran gave me the nickname of "scale girl," the pressure is truly on)--and I have to design some beautiful piece of conceptual art that embodies who I exactly am and what I exactly intend to do at that point in space and time. Visual artwork (and music) radiates more conceptualism and emotional drive than just pure words in 8-point Garamond font. I already created three primary logos and images, which I gave to Oran (1) The Box (Squirrel Trying to Get the Bird Out of the Cage) (2) Existence in Context (the girl portrayed in Van Gogh or Da Vinci context of Planet Earth) (3) and the Biomathematika Sunflower. So, let's expand this set of logos here.

Geeze, since this is my Ph.D. topic, I started to realize I could talk about these logos FOREVER. So, I better refrain and pace myself here and just etch out some reasons for the included elements within the picture.

(1). The two quizzical ants on different parts and scales of a branching network. These two curious little ants are in quest of the big picture. Based on my writing with The Elephant and the Oak Tree, these two creatures are both very confused about their identities and their perceptions of Reality. They are trying to figure out whether they are on an elephant or an oak tree.

(2). One ant is carrying a piece of equipment, more so a lens. This represents TECHNOLOGICAL-DEPENDENCE of COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION: how scientists are attempting to investigate multiple scales of reality through the medium of externalized tools (not incorporated or evolved from their bodies). It is of question as to what scientists would truly know if you stripped these tools from their collections. Perhaps they would be limited to perceiving certain narrow layers and scales of reality. Another huge problem is that scientists have become OBLIGATELY attached to technology in their thought processes and conclusions rather than FACULTATIVELY attached, aka TECHNOLOGICAL CRUTCHING. So, essentially, machines have taken over the power of human reasoning and the ability for the humans to connect the dots with their own brains, aka Common Sense for individual and collective survival.

(3). There are three boxes, each drawn at different scales. I saw this pattern of arrangement of boxes on the front cover of an Ecology textbook, perhaps from MIT Press. My father showed it to me sometime, and somehow it stuck in my head. (I talked to James, the science writer for Bren, a couple weeks back about how my brain works: my right brain is a sponge: it picks up elements from its surroundings without any necessary prompt or any motivation--e.g. grades--and then I combine these elements, tweak them, and form new products. I have been aware of this intrinsic process of my brain, ever since I stook up an art teacher in a GATE art class. Here is another case in point--sponging up "the boxes" and dumping them into my logo).

(4). The branching patterns transcending the boxes reflect my own "fractal" neurological processes of scale-based reasoning. I feel that the process of "natural selection" whether its organisms or ideas, leads to systems with patterns, chipped off with elements of uniqueness. I think that scientific construct of branching trees doesn't necessarily equate to patterns of our environment, but more so reflects our own fractal-like perception of our environment. We use branching networks as an organizing tool for organizing Reality. In this case, I overlaid branching networks (let's just say they are branches of an oak tree) because I am trying to investigate patterns of logic in scientific and scholarly thought across different scales in space and time--in concern of human-environmental problems. I also ask many scientists, "How can you navel gaze into your own specialized little niche (have a warped log-log view of Reality) if you have lost sight of the big picture?" Ultimately, some scientists have lost relative context of their own reductionist research.

(5). And finally, I added a subset of the Biomathematika sunflower as an unknown treacherous landscape for the two little creatures, yet this landscape is beautiful, due to the fractal properties of the arrangement of [seeds]?

(6). The sixth layer is, of course, my own handwriting "Biologically Incorrect," "Ecology of Scale," and "Scale in Biological and Human-Environmental Systems." The word continues to propagate that I am a "living font." Should sell my hand-writing to the successor of Bill Gates. Will be an interesting business venture! Right. Back up funds for graduate school. I am sure!

317. Three Introductory Images/Gifts I Provide to Summarize My Existence

Biomathematika Sunflower. Taken in Summer of 2002. My father's giant sunflower by the garage. My father was the PA or Photography Assistant, propping the flower more upright because it was collapsing upon its own weight. I took the picture with a measly Olympus Camedia camera. Usually the images are off-color... except for this one!
Out of the Box and Into the Bird. Part 2 in a three part series. Based on an image of an unhappy bird seemingly stuck in a cage when there are multiple ways to get out. The tiny squirrel is trying to get a giant bird out of the cage. The tiny squirrel modified its perceptions and definitions and language systems, which allowed it to perceive solutions to escape the cage. And now its trying to save the big big bird out of the cage. It is indeed a scaling problem. This little squirrel is definitely going to need some help! (That image is in Part 3 of the three-part series). Scaling is an interesting process in human communication systems. Because it seems like ideas spread more like an airborn virus or parasite wood. You have a single seed but it can spread like wildfire across many minds quite rapidly. Existing technology allows immense ease of transport, like some form of collective nervous system. Good stories are more like benevolent tumors, invited mutations, so to speak. The bad stories usually get weeded out--unless you have lots of money to keep perpetuating your bad stories throughout the system. :-0
This piece is called "Existence in Context." It's based off of Van Gogh's famous image of the naked man in a circle and a square. I told my advisor Oran that Van Gogh forgot that humans need a planet in order to exist, so the picture was incomplete. I started off with a vague outline of my own body (hence the long hair), then adding layers, like the planet Earth, behind, then adding the branching fractal network connections and feedback loops that represent my flowing connections with the environment--including the heart and the mind. Multiple layers of consciousness here, eh? Far beyond the consciousness of a tunicate. I mean, I was a bag of guts a long time ago. I mean, my ancestors. Long, long, long time ago. Maybe when I was an embryo, I was more so a bag of guts than a mental entity. And now my bag of guts is fine. My brain is hard to manage. I mave much more of a mental existence than I would like. Visceral existence would sometimes be wonderful as well. But my brain keeps consuming and processing information even though my guts are fine. Wish I could turn my brain off once in a while, eh?

Maybe it is a big deal that the body in the image is female, not male. Well, I'll be dxmmed. I am a female and I am going to give myself some credit. My friend George noted that many females and some males tend to think non-linearly and contextually, whereas many other people tend to focus on one system and think linearly. My friend Herschel said that females by default are very non-linear thinkers. Our corpus callosum is extremely interconnected and we can multi-task. Oh. Cool. How come some guys know me better than I know my own self? Strange thing. I'm catching up.

These three images tend to be the "routine" gifts I provide to people who I really care about and also give them a window to the world that I know and have come to build for myself and care about. This is the intellectual bower that I tend: integrating my biological and geological knowledge and its applications to re-interpretations of human-environmental problem solving. I gave these images to one of my advisors, Oran, about a week ago.

I am soon going to hit the road toward the Santa Barbara Harbour, in which our lab will be going on an "educational field trip" hosted by Julie Robinson's husband! Woohoo! I am super-excited to meet everyone and get to know everyone better. Our lab is so diverse in interests and topics, it's amazing! But mostly on the intersection of science and society, institutions and governance. Whether it's science-policy, science-media, whatever. I wish I could see my lab-mates more frequently. I will pose the question as to whether once a week we could all meet up casually just to talk about stuff that's been going on in their heads and ideas to throw out onto the table. Almost like a writer's group! I would LOVE that! We'll see!