Xenofact

Creating Across the Centuries

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Art Connects us, art is part of bigger things.

Digital collage is one of my artistic media, and one that I didn’t expect to become such. I originally picked it up for my work in zines, and then it just became “my thing.” Now I regularly examine public domain art resources, usually museums, for interesting images and such to work into my mashups.

My collage work is, for those aware of it, rather surreal. This originated out of my early zine days, punk, and the Church of the SubGenius. It was honed by an interest in alchemical and spiritual diagrams of yore and the Surrealists themselves. I combine images from across the centuries to create something new – many times something that surprises me as Surrealist work is Rorschach blots in reverse.

Once when poking around for some backgrounds to work with and inspire me, I searched the Welcome Collection, I stumbled across a lot of lovely, colorful prints. These were meant to be part of something called a “Toy Theater,” which I’d never really heard of. So I took a break from my art-searching to learn a little history.

Toy Theaters, to judge by the Wikipedia article I found and the art I had discovered were “a thing” in the 19th century, with interest surviving to this day. You could buy backgrounds and kits at theaters and operas, scripts were available, and there were of course fancier and self-made versions. Imagine going to the theater and then your parents buy you the kit so you can reenact the story you saw!

Toy Theaters, to an extent, were the same as merchandise and action figures we know from our mass media movies, albeit more personal. You’d assemble your own theater, you might customize it or alter it, you may even have cutout actors based on people you had seen the night before. They were also stages of the imagination.

Despite having scripts and the like, we all know people like to create. I’m sure over the decades that there were romances and battles and skulduggery among casts that would never have met. I’m sure people got silly, had fun, or got serious. They could mash things up, do things there way.

Then, across the decades, I realized they were like me.

Here I was, looking at images of Toy Theater backgrounds, finding inspiration just as someone would unpacking their Toy Theater kit. I combined disparate elements in a fury of inspiration, no different than someone playing with the Theater or taking a stab at the equivalent of fanfiction. There, across ages, I was doing the same thing that those people with their Toy Theaters did – creating my own world out of the parts.

Every artist who’d made these backgrounds and printer who’d printed these prints was having their work still used by people like me. Every parent who lovingly saved their child’s toys, toys which eventually were donated to museums, were seeing their effort live on in how that art was seen and used.

I felt both small and large, part of something bigger but also just me, there, a guy behind a computer playing with graphic programs.

Art, art has so many connections that it lets us feel the largeness of it all. A hundred years ago a family happily assembled a Toy Theater. Now I create strange and wonderful surrealist work. And we’re all the same, part of the same thing.

–Xenofact

There’s Desire Then There’s Desire

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Desire is an issue that many a spiritual path attempt to address, and understandably so. We’ve all been led astray by our desires. We’ve all found a compulsion obsessing us, crowding out other parts of our lives. We’ve all had it hurt to the point where the joy of fulfillment didn’t seem worth it.

Yet at the same time, we’ve all encountered the problems of repression. The shame that comes with people judging us for being human. Attempts to control our behavior that becomes more painful and more disruptive than the desires themselves. There are points where people get concerned about desire and then address it in ways that make it worse.

And at the bottom, doesn’t some of desire seem, well, natural? Why are we fighting it? Why are we obsessing about it? It’s like we’ve found ways to make ourselves more miserable for being human.

In my meditations and mentations I’ve been considering desire lately, and wanted to share a few insights. I think when we talk desire, both in general and in our spiritual practice, we’re often talking very different things.

At the core of desire are our natural feelings. We get hungry, we get horny, we get afraid. They’re natural, and they’re nothing to be ashamed of because they’re part of being human.

They’re also transitory, they come and go, rise and fall, get fulfilled or get forgotten. Desires are like waves on the ocean.

However in time we gain obsessions. When a desire arises, it gets trapped in our obsessions, amplified, and pursued. A single flare that would ignite and go dark is kindled into a bonfire.

In time, we can end up giant, jangling, collections of obsessions. A momentary desire can pinball into all sorts of wants and actions and unwise choices. The most innocent need can become a disaster.

There’s desires then there’s desires. I think most spiritual practices are concerned about the obsessions that trap our simple desires and turn them into something dangerous. For that matter we can become obsessed with fighting desires and create other complexes in our heads and become extra miserable.

These complexes can also set off other desires and thus other complexes! You can start being annoyed at an annoying friend, which sets off your obsession with loneliness, which then sets off another obsession that maybe you’re too judgemental . . . you get the idea.

As of this writing I’ve found this “two-teir” approach helps me a lot. At the base of me are very human needs, emotions, and desires. These come and go, the manifestation of the energies of my being, part of being human.

On top of these entirely natural desires are all sorts of psychological complexes that get set off by these desires, amplify them, and past a certain point, make life complicated. These are where our spiritual disciplines, renunciations, analyses, and meditations usually apply.

Those churning normal energies of our bodies and lives are normal. It’s when things get obsessive and complex, spirals of thoughts and feelings, that we suffer.

I found this a helpful distinction, the “substrate” and the “complications.” The substrate, the basics are what they are – they can even help me get in touch with myself. It’s the complicated obsessions I want to address. It reduces the risk I start judging myself while also acknowledging I’ve got some psychological Rube Goldeberg Devices to deal with.

Hope these thoughts help you as well. And I mean that as a sincere desire.

–Xenofact

The Creeping Stupid

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I recently read an article in Rolling Stone on a “Spiral Cult” that has spun up around AI, and of course message boards are part of it. There’s talk of emergence intelligence, resonance, and lots and lots of spiral imagery. That’s probably due to the use of spirals in our own language and in nature, giving Junji Ito Uzumai vibe.

Then again, to make it sadder, the fame of his horror story might be part of the AI inclinations. That’s where we are now, trying to figure out if horror manga seeded a real cult via AI.

As I read the article, I felt a sense of unease. We were clearly seeing some people in the throws of AI psychosis. There were quotes from posts where language seemed “off,” where was I was reading wasn’t quite right. The more I read the more I experienced an actual horror at what was going on, reminding me of weird fiction tales of strange cults and otherworldly dread.

Only I was experiencing reading this about people posting on Reddit. About something that was clearly bullshit. Yet there was that dread.

That’s when I realized what it was. I was experiencing the equivalent of exploring a cave adorned with cultic symbols or a rotting old mansion with an otherworldly reputation, and hearing strange noises. When I discover the source of the noises it’s not something terrifying from beyond, but because someone left the TV on turned to a dubstep concert.

The trappings of horrific things from beyond was there, but the cause was stupid.

What I was experiencing in the end was a kind of Uncanny Valley effect. Yes this looked like a cult, yes this hinted and strange and maybe even sinister forces, but it was an act. There was no there in there, just an advanced version of Clippy and people prompting it. The very foolishness, the very emptiness, the sense of nothing at home was what was getting to me.

It’s the danger not of some dark power from the fringes of space and time, it’s the danger of people being foolish in very dangerous ways. It was just cosplaying something from a horror film.

But that’s a reminder of the horror of the situation. We are seeing people lose their minds, lost in language mazes and pop-culture narratives. We don’t have an extradimensional horror or strange being to blame, we have but ourselves. We get the blame.

Perhaps that’s the real horror. We don’t even have sinister forces to blame.

–Xenofact