just a minute ago i was reminded of tryingsohard.net by angelo plessas.

what a wonderful piece, so beautiful, so powerful.

everybody’s hope in this short messy existence is that we make something so people can forgive us all the shit we have done.

everybody wants redemption.

tryingsohard.net is angelo’s redemption. it is that good.

what have you done to redeem yourself? what have i done? huh… :)

angelo asked me to model for his photo over a webcam for his silver couch series.

angelo always wants me to take my shirt off, whatever it is we do he is always saying: please be half naked.

sometimes i think he just wants me to get half naked and invents these projects. i mean he is gay and i am not, but of course i do not mind it, i spend most of the time half naked as i do sports and sleep and all that. i have spent last 5 years in constant summer so i am more into half naked than full clothed.

i like the screenshot i made while he spoke. i always like to record angelo when he does not know. i have collection of chats with him from like 5 years ago. i will keep them forever.

here’s the result.

when i was a kid i read a lot of psychology books. i read about phobias and tried to learn them by heart. i do not remember the name but there is a symptom when people see shapes of people in everyday stuff. some are terrified by this and it is a phobia.

i do not know much about angelo plessas’ mental health and i do not really believe much in classifications of psychological symptoms (reading about illnesses is retarded and useless) but angelo’s work with portraits is fun.

check it out on flickr.com.

so angelo is a bit of a sculptor and a bit of a photographer in this case.

i remember there was an ad campaign with same concept few years ago for one of the mobile phones with a camera, but its still nice to see this stuff.

sea shells sea shells on the sea shore (stuartbarnes.net) by stuart barnes

angelo says (angeloplessas.com) by angelo plessas

vi-r-us.com by nic roope

andreasangelidakis.blogspot.com by andreas angelidakis

tagbanger.com by jonathan maghem and rafael rozendaal

here is some pulp psychology:

i had several careers in my life, or maybe i have several parallel things that i do, and from time to time one is more dominant than others. this can change over days, weeks, months or years. i am multitasking always and over time i learned to spread my energy and equally develop things also making sure that each helps the other. it took a lot of time to get this system going. it is not easy but it pays off as i can not imagine myself being one thing person.

i heard somewhere karl marx was super frustrated by the fact that people were forced to be one thing person in capitalism (at least capitalism the way he saw it back than) and therefore he considered it a bad solution. i do not like karl marx, i do not have anything against communism and i do not like stupid generalizations like this, obviously made for the sake of cheap marketing, but that statement has some small truth to it, at least for me. i do not feel happy doing one thing. it does not fulfill me.

what i like is that when i talk to rafael or angelo or someone like that i am like this artists with my websites and art poems and such stuff and thats awesome… then i talk to my clients and work partners and i am this guy who charges for telling people how to do stuff online and i enjoy that very much… then i come to stellenbosch and i am surrounded by world class athletes (what a cheesy phrase) and i can finally be, after five years of training, some sort of an athlete… theres more but i will stop here.

today i was an athlete mostly even though i did little training and i did work and thought about million other things.

identity is a strange thing, it is hard to build it nowdays, or maybe it was always hard. but today there are a lot of options and it takes a lot of work to really carve yourself into something stable. takes decades. i think a lot of people quit on that and submit to various pressures and choose pre-made identities. this is not necessarily bad (what is bad anyway?) but i think it does in a lot of cases cause unhappiness.

i think it is definitely worth developing (discovering) your own identity for a bit longer than rushing into it.

anyway… figuring it out is hard and never complete…

my work rulesofthecomuterlab.com and my live skype poetry reading will be part of the show what we know at the school of the art institute of chicago. also rafael rozendaal, miltos manetas and angelo plessas will take part. show is organized by nate hitchcock.

i made this piece specially for this show – nate asked me to make something that can be on the wall of a computer lab, i do not remember if he suggested the idea of rules. i hope you like it and you can also buy it as a poster from my cafepress.com account.

also i will do a live skype poetry reading at 6:45pm Chicago time – i will focus on early and some late nikola tosic classics like “thank you mr. death” or “miltos manetas”.

be there or be square!

thanks to nate for putting it together.

more info at whatweknow.info.

ivan jureta (jureta.net), a friend of mine involved in something about math and software, emailed me regarding the machine email to angelo plessas. ivan says that it should be easy to program machines to wish but he also admitted that there is an issue with the definition of the idea of “wish”.

like in any kind of abstract/philosophical discussion all participants in the discussion must have a clear idea of what the words they use mean. they all have to agree not only on the common understanding of terminology but even to the most basic words otherwise there is a mess because they will not completely understand each other. this is the basis of philosophy, i guess, and this is why it takes so much time to be a professional philosopher and we who are not professional philosophers can not really get involved in serious discussions because we are not trained to handle the main tools of philosophy (words) properly.

apart form philosophy there is a much more abstract and deregulated form of communication/truth discovery between people – art – which, from one point of view, is philosophy without “technical” restrictions of philosophy. art also has a big “problem” with results and therefore it can not be anywhere close to science or philosophy. i think i do ok with art although commercially i am a complete failure (why aren’t you buying my art posters?).

anyway, since both ivan and i are not trained in the art of such abstract discussing we can only entertain ourselves with this email chit chat and try to figure out things ourselves. luckily ivan is officially a genius, he has read and studied a lot and has solved many problems in his short yet successful academic career. also i do not think i am a complete retard, so we can maybe bring the discussion to a decent level however without any ambitions it will actually solve much.

his proposal is that machines can be programmed to wish but he admits that the definition of “wish” is loose.

i answered that, in my experience, languages (we emailed in serbian but my comments apply to english as well) underestimate and simply the spectre of emotions we can feel. for example wishing is one word that defines maybe hundreds of different emotions. same goes for love and even pain. i always had a problem with the word love as it is so general and therefore so confusing for me.

i also realized that the word hate makes no sense to me because i have never felt this emotion and i can not relate to it nor imagine it. not that i am a saint-kind-of-person. i just think that if in 30 years of my life i have never felt something everybody talks about that it probably means that people do not know what they are talking about. that the idea of hate could easily be a big mistake, a projection – bullshit (definition of word bullshit again is complex but i will not get into that now). i realized i do not believe in the existence of hate as an emotion especially because this word originates long before people started seriously thinking about emotions so it is kind of simple and old. huh… i think this could be a whole book here so i will stop.

ivan and i have a problem defining what does it mean for a machine to wish.

since google.com is a machine will it one day actually wish?

for wishing it would not need any people. the main reason machines do need people is because people wish and machines do not. machines are not ambitious, if they are left alone they only repeat their task, they do not get better or grow out of their predesigned purpose. actually it should not be hard to program the machine to grow but than again this is still within the predesigned programming and machine is not being creative in realizing its ambitions, it is not wishing.

anyway you get the problem we are in… it is like trying to figure out what was first: chicken or the egg.

as i said it is entertaining chit chat.

imagine if one day google.com could actually have a personality. or does it have it already. in any case google.com search engine is the biggest influence of one machine of the human kind ever. and it is growing. but i would not worry so much, i am sure that it’s power will soon decentralize.

i am enjoying this whole machine-google.com-philosophy-emotions discorse.

your post about my poster is the first result, so its good not to have full text there

its a long story to explain, just trust me when it comes to seo, ive been doing it for a while and some bad moves can cause you problems in pr and some good moves can make it very easy for people to understand you

we want to be seen and understood, but we depend upon stupid machines for other people to find us (google is a machine), so you need to speak machine language and act the way machines understand you so other people can communicate with you

its very matrix, who controls who?

actually its not matrix because machines in matrix want but in reality only we want, but machine does not want anything, we can only imagine it wants something

if machine wanted something it would not be a machine but it would be something else, a new word

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angelo skyped me this in response: iwanttobeamachine.com

vi-r-us.com

a blog by nic roope.it is not the best of the best blogs but he does publish few interesting things from time to time. obviously this blog has no real purpose but is just an impulsive way for him to document a nice link and share it. sometimes i think how nice it would be if he would take it more seriously but i think that would end up boring. he already works a lot so it is good he does something like this – although his work does sometimes get into this blog – he is a business owner so he can not escape it. nice blog.

angelosays.com

angelo plessas and i have a hate/love relationship. actually lately we do not have much of a relationship. i think he likes me only until we actually get in contact. when we are in contact of any sort than he hates me. i however am always constantly equally impressed or unimpressed by him. that has nothing to do with him, it is only that i am more interested in myself than him and therefore he is a constant stable element of my perception. his blog is part of this mess.

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/richardspencer

i have never met richard spencer but i have met his parents. they hosted me during my ironman uk race and i had a great time in their home. they are so very proud of their son and they collect every one of his articles telegraph publishes. they also follow his blog very closely and know all the commentators and everything that is happening. they are so very proud of their son so this inspired me to follow richard spencer’s blog although i have no interest in china or telegraph.

if you are not mentioned here and you are my friend and you have a blog and you know i read it – do not take it personally. for this particular post i made a weird selection, that’s all. and this is not an apology but an explanation.