A Thing Is as It Does: Notes Towards a Process Aesethetics

The art work is, however, an act – it is an action, performed by an artist, that persists through time, the medium of its transmission into the future as a vehicle for the artwork. They are the means by which it becomes accessible to other people, and the vector along which it travels through time.

Which Grain Will Grow, and Which Will Not: On Syntax, Paradigm, and Myth

I think that narratives are important to understand for the same reason that I write about postmodernism so much: as chaotic and unpredictable as the world-at-large can be, we have to remember that the human brain is the most advanced pattern-recognition organ on the planet. We look at the world and we find stories and then we share those stories. If you look at how we talk about memory, then that’s a story to, and in a very real sense, it means that each and every one of us is made out of narrative in a very real way.

An Anger Bigger than the World: Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör and the Specter of Discipline

I’m generally not a fan of mixing comedy and horror. Mixing the two can have the disastrous effect of collapsing the horror into mere farce. I’m delighted to say that Horrorstör doesn’t do that: the comedy is found in the perspectives and reactions of the characters instead of the absurdity of events that surround them. It achieves its goal by placing a comic perspective within the context of horrific events.

Doing Art: Some Ways to Unshackle Creativity

These are not the steps to creativity, nor are they merely tools that you use as you proceed in your own acts of creation. They are options that I hope you can make use of as you work on your art. Anyone who purports to offer you a foolproof guide to creativity is just as suspect as someone who is offering you a foolproof guide to critical thinking. Anyone you believe on this topic is going to (unintentionally?) sabotage you.

Lessons from Architecture: What not to do with Paradigm and Syntax

For us, this is the end result of an unconsidered aesthetic: a building is not a sculpture. It is something that actual people have to use, and if it makes them feel anxious or depressed to be there, then it's a failure as an artistic project. It makes it so that they can't function, because a building envelopes the people within it – it becomes the totality of their environment. If it's bad, then they don't have a choice but to feel bad because we don't get to choose jobs based on the architecture.