Anarchic Design cover

Anarchic Design cover
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This is just a test cover, it made an enjoyable break in planning and writing!

After about eighteen months of planning and working on my material, everything is coming together now and now all I need to do is write it. It will include both texts and images, some of which appear in this blog, and cover some of the practical aspects in learning to be more innovative and the kind of mental blocks which society is so good at placing before us.

Earlier I sorted through this blog as it had some entries not relevant to the subject, while other blog entries had to be imprted from another blog. However, while time consuming, it has been interesting and I know now how to save my blog on my own computer. It would also help if I went through this blog and tidied it up a little (a lot).

Anyway, I have set myself six months to get it written, which should mean I will be ready around the start of May 2010. Not long at all, really.

058 - Giraffe

058 - Giraffe, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

When I was a child I had a hobby horse, rather tired and secondhand, which given the lack of local horse riding in my village in the 1960s was a rather pointless toy, or so it seemed. If a squire had still been living in the big house and regularly mounted, or had I seen the local hunt from close quarters, the story may have been different. Hobby horses are a child's version of a real world wood and sackcloth scary horse, sometimes known as a 'hooden horse' that in earlier times had been used for traditional festivities, and reputedly a fearsome object with a large and clacking mouth. By my time, the only hooden horse I know was a dusty exhibit in Folkestone museum.

Other children from other backgrounds and times have found hobby horses a source of great pleasure, although I wonder how many are bought because of a soft spot for society's dream time of a yesteryear that never really existed, but for me running around with a stick between my legs was akin to you doing the same with a button in your pocket. What is or was the point? A plastic horse and cart was more fun, or a tractor with leaky batteries, or even a story book about a woman who polished a blackbird and painted his beak gold.

Horses arrived in my life at a much later, adult period, when I learnt to ride inside a ring and jump over small fences. Part of the pleasure was doing it together with people who I had never met before and who I would never meet again, and yet for a few months our paths ran side by side. While I could not be described as a confident horseperson, I feel I know the kind of people who are and how they view the world to some extent.

As to giraffes, I have no idea if anyone has ever ridden one, although I would be more surprised to learn that no one had than that someone had, but here I can ride one in my imagination. This is an important concept, although I am sure many people would regard it as childish, but here I can involve both my mind and body in a task I lack either the means or the skill to carry out in reality.

057 - all-growed-up

057 - all-growed-up, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today I managed to get into contact with a friend from university, who I miss a great deal.

I like to try things that are new, but I do not see what is wrong with going back and trying some things from when we were much younger. It was quite fun to sit in the wash basin, although my was basin was far too small as we only intended it for washing hands and cleaning teeth.

054 - Society is a Dictator

054 - Society is a Dictator, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Society protects the conformists, the non-conformists are the enemy.

What is so fragile about the conformists that they need protecting, everything they love they have taken from the non-conformists. If the non-conformists never existed, the human race would never have existed.

So, why are non-conformists treated so badly?

Don't believe me? Dress like this at age 50 and walk down your high street and then go into work.

One interesting fact is that many people would be envious, because they only conform because they lack the confidence to be any different. so, who are the ones who lack confidence, and who genuinely cannot deal with change? Perhaps, rather than waiting for those who lack the confidence to change suffer from disease through having to live a life that isn't them we should be considering the inability to accept change as a mental disease, something imbued by society and education. If we continue to do nothing, nothing will change.

051 - Rock Guitarist

051 - Rock Guitarist, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Ah, what fun one can have on a sunday night with some cardboard and a roll of adhesive tape. I was sitting thinking, in the special thinking room on that special thinking seat and wondered whether, if i had any sort of voice for singing, I could have been the front man for a group.

The guitar really is just cut up and taped together from a cardboard box I had brought home from the supermarket a few months ago for another project, and it has been acting as a stand in the wardrobe for another box I brought home at the same time but which my wife now keeps her supply of funky new belts in. Of course, in the excitement of taking the picture, I actually held it the wrong way around, so some editing was necessary - and while I was at it I gave it a very 1970s flare, and went green this time.

As I have mentioned before, I don't buy props, I just use what is around me. I might add that the guitar looks a LOT better in the picture than it does in reality, it's cardboard color for a start, and doesn't have any knobs on.

If you are going to make prop, don't make it perfect as the eye is good at spotting imperfections in detail: while a few broad strokes to indicate something and the brain fills in the details itself. The chances are, if I had not mentioned the guitar but talked about something else, you would have assumed I really had a guitar. You might also have assumed that I could play the guitar, which I can't. I could have just posted these rocker images and said that I had a jamming session, and you would have believed that as well, if you didn't know me. Remarkable, but true.

050 - Rocker Screensaver

050 - Rocker Screensaver, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Having taken a piece of my art and abused it to achieve a description of the art -craft divide, I decided to use it as a screensaver, but because the image was so big only this amount showed on screen. Another unexpected view on my image through taking an action. At the same time Iggy Pop was singing away in the background (he just popped around for a coffee, he said), and something else clicked. Now I have a new screensaver for work, with parts of the lyrics of that song in the image.

The more you do, the more you find you can do. When I don't take pictures, nothing much happens, but I just decided to take one this weekend and now I have a whole series. This is a general principal you can apply to anything (but use it wisely, said the master), and it only gets better with practice.

049 - F is for ...artist

049 - F is for ...artist, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I wouldn't normally show the images I take with my camera that I use to create the final image, it is rather like asking to see the contents of my laundry basket. Or, if you buy a painting, you are probably not that interested in first been shown the blank canvas before the artist applies any paint.

However, in my quest to try and demonstrate what I believe is the difference between art and craft, between skill with tools and the idea behind what one attempts to create with those tools, I need some examples.

If you built a house, you are unlikely to tell everyone that you used a Thompson No. 2 hammer, or that you believe a house built with the cheaper Samson Powerforce hammer would be in any way inferior. What is important is the house, its quality. A good craftsman would know the limitations of the Samson, and work round them.

I used Gimp to edit the image because I understand the limitations of my camera and the wall I use as a studio, but mostly because I am not interested in photography but the images themselves. At that point it really doesn't matter what tools I use, as long as I am comfortable with them.

047 - D is for getting older Disgracefully

047 - D is for getting older Disgracefully, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Sometimes I wonder why the people around me are getting older so quickly, what happened to those promises they made when they were young? I know what they say now, but what will they say when they retire and can no longer remember the way back?

Often the issue is confidence versus the expectations of the society we live in. Follow the plan society lays down and you will have a happy, fulfilling life, but what if the plan is wrong for you, the way you think is different, what then? Does this make you a danger to society, might you point out some fatal flaw and the whole edifice will come tumbling down.

If you are secure in the system of society, you may be afraid that you will not be able to cope with the change, but the reality is that change does not come from the rebellious thinkers but those working societies knobs for their own gains, trying to put there power group at the top politically or taking risks with mortgage lending to make vast quantities of money.

Rebelious thinkers seem more often to say, hey, have you any idea how much pain you are doing to certain segments of society who lack the ability to fend for themselves.

Think about the kind of person who brings about war or stock market crashes, and then think about who brings changes in thinking that create equality for more people.

040 - F is for Fashion not Cashion

040 - F is for Fashion not Cashion, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

As you will see over the next few blogs, Ania has been taking a more central role in my images, altghough often I have to struggle with her wish to have only socially acceptable 'perfect' images shown iregardless of the power of the image we have produced.

Scarves are generally wound people's necks in a small number of ways, but I thought it is time to reconsider how we do it, bring back some former methods and even use some elements designed for other purposes.

Here I have used belt buckles, bangles and even a hair clip, and I am even considering using a ring for lighter scarves. This is rather pleasing as, like amny other people, my mum had a box of buttons and old belt buckles, very few of which ever got re-used. Here we do not have such a stock, but Poland has small shops selling these little items everywhere - and the plastic belt buckles shown here are plastic, bought from such shops for little money, and being plastic are light enough not to pull down the material.

Similarly to button collections, how many old rings and bangles do you have at home - have you really got the most out of them?

039 - W is for What you think is not What you see

039 - W is for What you think is not What you see, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is a variation of an earlier picture, the original being the top left image of this one. This time I wanted to push the boundaries of what is acceptable in terms of dress within Western norms, and in particulr Polish norms. In fact, the result has me in a skirt which resembles native dress for males from hot climes combined with a t-shirt, which is the whole point since I first and foremost regard myself as a human being than as a national of some state.

Your time on this planet is short, do you really want to continue living someone else's narrow dream of society, or is it time that you embraced what you really are, whatever that is?

What with an incredibly exhausting work schedule, I have been lagging in the impetus to produce fresh images, or even to find the energy to blog them when I do create them. Now that I have a vacation, I will be filling in the missing images and creating new.

037 - D is for unnecessary Division

037 - D is for unnecessary Division, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I remember Lech Walesa, former president of Poland and leader of Solidarity at the Gdansk shipyards in the 1980s, during an attempted political comeback in about 2000 using the slogan 'black is black, white is white". For all his remarkable efforts with Solidarity, he had made a poor president, which to my mind is no shame, and there were not many people left in Poland who would trust him as their leader by this time. Still, the slogan was a wise move - for there are many people who believe in Right and Wrong, Law and Chaos, etc.

The reality is that Right/Wrong/Law/Chaos/etc are [i]limits[/i] - unattainable concepts of perfect in two opposite directions - infinity and negative infinity.

035 - L is for Learning

035 - L is for Learning, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Tools are nothing more than a manifestation of our imaginations, which we choose to use in order to make specific tasks easier or more comprehensible. The guiding force behind the use of all tools, including our own hands, is philosophy, that mental, sharable manifestation of our innermost selves.

Philosophy to many is something divorced from the practical world, something engaged in by lofty intellectuals either while wearing a white sheet and sandals or a tweedy jacket with a pipe hanging from the mouth, ready to be used to point out relevant facts.

Philosophy was once part and parcel of the whole learning thing, but somewhere along the way it lost contact with the sciences and barely remained in anything more than a nodding acquaintance of the arts. Philosophy forgot one of its own - if you step into a river today, then if you step into it tomorrow, it won't be the same river. Philosophy tried to remain the same river, not really noticing that the science had cut a whole new channel of its own.

If philosophers fail to keep in regular enough contact with science and its companion, business, can science and business at least keep an eye on philosophy? The answer is, generally no, because philosphy appears largely irrelevant. I mean, who cares whether the river today is or is not the same as it was yesterday, it's a just river, isn't it?

Actually, no, imagine if instead of a river, the example had been a market. This leads to two thoughts - the fiorst of which is that the market today is not the same as it was yesterday, even though it might not appear to have changed. Business, therefore, must continue to monitor the market day after day to see how it is changing in order to decide when the business must change its prices, products, internal procedures and so on. The second is that by putting your foot in a river, you change the river - and by entering a market, you change the market, either slightly or significantly, depending on how big one's business foot is.

I chose this well known piece of philosophy merely to illustrate a point - and that is philosophy is relevant, it is a special tool for managing our knowledge to relate it to our understanding. River, market, HR, family - the philosophic principal works all over the place, a general tool no different to a screwdriver.

If I were to hand you an unfamiliar tool and asked you to use it, you might be concerned - how is it supposed to be used, and when should one use it? A car is a good example of a special transport tool that you know how it is useful, and that special training will be needed in order to use it. With philosophy, on the other hand, no one thinks twice about needing special training in how to use it, hence most people cannot use it effectively and therefore it must be of little or no use.

I see this process every day - the philosophy of creation, for example, is taken for granted, is consequently done badly when attempted, and then when the result fails to meet expectations, the eventual users are blamed. Often the solution is to take more time at the initiation of the process, and to see the process as trying to find the best-fit solution and not the best-fit tradition to wrap around the process like a tired and over-size suit.

All tools are equal if they are equal to the task, and all tools effect whatever they are used on, even if only for observation. Your image of your own language is affected by the grammar you have been taught in relation to it, if you have learned a foriegn language then you are even more affected by the grammar you have been taught, while your image of an unlearned language is almost completely unaffected because you haven't learned any grammar for it. If you were to assess someone else's writings, then writings in your own language, your school-learned language and your unlearned language would all be different. You assessments would be unreliable, no matter how well trained you are, especially in your school-learned language, your assessment of that one is the least likely to be of any practical use them moment you meet a native. Your assessment of the unlearned language would at least have a chance of being safely curtailed by the lack of any understanding. This is the purpose of philosophy - to give you insight into processes without actually touching the processes with the inevitable changes to the processes, and to predict processes that as yet do not exist.

All tools need practice, and all tools need respect. If you cannot get the desired result with a tool then the4 first place to look for a fault is inside our heads.

Imagine you

034 (1/52) - S is for Save the Humans

034 (1/52) - S is for Save the Humans, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I remember being quite surprised while teaching English to a class of university students here in Lublin, Poland, when one of the students told me there were no more philosophers. I cannot now remember whether this student attended the local state (i.e. former communist) university or the local catholic equivalent. Ah, Lublin - where communist and fascist universities abide peacably side-by-side!

Whichever, I soon discovered that this is a common opinion, philosophers are a thing of the past, people gaining degrees in philosophy these days, including professors, are simply unable to be philosophers. Imagine studying physics and being unable to become an physicist! I would not say this is a majority view, nor do i wish universities to become places of rote learning with carefully proscribed views. But - no philosophers? No dangerously exciting interplay of concepts and reality? Everything consigned to the dry pages of university texts like last summer's pressed flowers?

In my idea of the universe, anyone can be a philosopher as long as one takes the time to ponder life. A beer or two with friends is enough to trigger the philosopher among many of us - the results do not have to stun the world, they merely have to be perceptive. And since life is ever changing, especially those that we have influence over, the need for new philosophy is always with us.

My own philosophy, which like any philosophy can sound a little irrelevant to many, is always practical in the way that a screwdriver is eminently practical once you learn how to use one and can recognise those situations in which it can be used. One would not expect to be able to walk into a tool shop and buy the most complex tool and expect to know how to use it effectively without some experience or training, and yet the world is full of people flippant about the impracticality of philosophic tools they lack the skill to use. I would say that all philosophy is practical, but like physical tools, we do not all have the ability or training to use them or to use them effectively.

now i lay me down to sleep

now i lay me down to sleep, originally uploaded by nutmeghan.

Actually, this is not my photo at all, but you can click on it to take it to it's source on flikr, where you can read all the notes she has added to the picture to explain all those symbols down the left-hand side. Anyway, I have blogged it to show my answer to her image. First up is her comment to the picture:

i'm so stressed out. i'm not actually, you know, doing anything about it, like, say, working on any of the assignments, etc, that have me stressed out. because i'm also too apathetic to care. does that make sense? i hope it does, because i feel like i'm going crazy.
i can't take this weather anymore.

And now my answer:

You seem to be up against that old wall of infinity, nothing is simple, nothing readily compartmentalizes itself into easy-to-do tasks you can achieve one after another, everything is there, spread out, intertwined, just there, a seemingly infinite number of things to do in a finite amount of time. Is this what it feels like?

I had this feeling many times, but slowly I began to realize that this wall of infinity is also a wall of opportunity, it doesn't really matter where you start and, more importantly, that wall is feeding you inspiration, like to create this seemingly average photo with a built-in wham from the left hand side images coordinated with hammer blow texts. Would you, I ask myself, have created this high level total piece of work if you had been cruising through life on a dreamboat?

By forcing your thoughts and concerns out of your head and into some other format lets you see yourself and your concerns differently. My choice is to write things on lots of bits of paper, and then after a while review them and shuffle them into new orders to try and see connections between them I had never noticed before, or I take photos and heavily edit them and put them on Flikr, and then blog them. This allows me to pull things off that wall of infinity, process them and then I can look at them and think about each separately.

Funnily enough, it does put some money in the bank - by practicing creativity in this way it gives me practice in seeing things in different ways I can solve problems other people cannot - because they rely on tradition, on learnt knowledge, while I rely on all of me and my experience. Everything relates somewhere, and every year I earn some kind of bonus for solving work problems in new ways. Life is still hard, but it helps to learn your way to using those 'negative' feelings as an opportunity to create.

So-called negativity is a great route to creativity!

025-Measuring Experience

025-Measuring Experience, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

One of the frustrating things in life is when other people refuse to believe your ideas without first going through a confirmation process to prove you right or wrong. We all need to have confidence to trust and believe, but some people put themselves in the position of arbiter of everyone's experience.

This is often expected when one has a new concept in art or science, but, for example, my wife never dyes her hair, and her friends and colleagues generally refuse to believe this. They are teachers. They know best. They are her age - they have to dye their hair and therefore my wife must dye hers.

What are they afraid of that they must refute something so simple? Are they dishonest and by implication assume that others are the same?

I conceptualise without first counting bodies, and this is beyond belief for many people that I work with.

Imagine that you are a linguist - any theory can be checked by assembling a suitable array of books and counting words and phrases.

Imagine that you are a psycholgist - any theory can be checked by assembling a suitable array of people and counting their experiences.

Imagine that you are an engineer and you conceive of a new product - since you have yet to build an example, you cannot go out and collect a representative sample to count, nothing yet exists.

It can make a difference, people without objects or people to count have to learn to trust what cannot yet be counted. However, if you always have the luxury of counting, your loss is belief.

We love - but we do not have to love like our neighbours simply to ensure that what we have is love. And it is love, no matter what your experience is.

022-The Development Process 1

022-The Development Process 1, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This was just supposed to be used to make a larger image, but it came out strikingly enough to be worthy of its own existence. The top part is very much like many adverts I have seen in magazines over the years.

I attempted to separate the graphical from the more picturesque elements, to put two very much different ways of expressing the same graph background.

I use these little cars, which are rubbery and cheap from my local branch of Tesco (a grocery supermarket change in Europe), to express more complex issues at work as I see many projects fail to meet their full potential because the team members are selected by department rather than by their ability to manage different parts of the project process.

The green car on the left is open top, and symbolises the go-anywhere, open mind needed when change is required. At the other end of the scale is the truck, the result of the development process, the vehicle that actually earns the money. In between are two closed cars, each driven fast with little thought beyond the destination - results now and solution implemented tomorrow.

I need to do a little more work on this image, but I am so busy with work related stuff that it will have to wait.

023 the art - craft divide

023 the art - craft divide, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There is always more way than one of achieving anything, and part of what I want to do is to show the very different ways that people believe we can or should live our lives. The reality is that, as a human, you have choices, you decide which is the most appropriate way of doing the things that you want to do.

The problem is that a large proportion of the kind of people who get to make the decisions and apply social pressure are the craft-type people, and so we have education and work environments that are alien to the basic precepts of another large chunk of the population.

I have seen people in different Flikr groups endlessly going on about how important craft is, rejecting or restricting therefore their own ability to create art - and thereby conditioning other people to fail as well. You haven't got the right camera? You are not a Photoshop expert? You want to take pictures of yourself, your family or your pets?

The list is endless, but I am fighting back, taking the battle to where it needs to go - right in the face of the craft controllers.

After all, the world really is a beautiful place, and our lives are limited. Let's find ways we can explore it.

Anyway, when i posted this on flikr I had quite a few insulting posts from someone who seemed to see that I had demonstrated what he was doing as being craft, and not art. When I checked out his photostream the images were well produced but lacking in anything that could be said to be original. He even deleted the comment I left on one of his images - so not only could he not deal with my concept, he could not deal with a slightly negative comment on his images. Such is life.

021-Self Portrait Quality

021-Self Portrait Quality, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

When you see the pictures people take that other people like, often they react to the youthfulness, and the 'norms' of Body Mass Index and Beauty. What is easier for the shapely 20 year old to take a shot of their legs and think they have created Art? Try doing the same when you are 50 or if you are considered medically overleaf!


BTW: this is not a graph in the traditional sense, this is an expression of my Art. As a result I am not going to give you a full explanation, that is not the purpose of Art.

The further away from the 20 norm you are, the harder it is to find an appreciative audience, and you have to put more in to your Art to achieve anything like the same level of acceptance. That's good - if you can do that then you are a lot further down the road of Art than the 20-norms.

If you are a 20, then, sorry, but you are going to have to try a helluva lot harder than flashing your cleavage or wardrobe to impress me.