Forgive once again my delay in posting, I have been talking with the Borg. I have been talking to the Borg and haven't been writing to you. I have been talking to the Borg perhaps a little too much.
We have managed three autumn studies in the past two weeks or so. Not at all the pace of the dutchman but positively steaming pace for Cezanne. All were taken from the vigelsjö nature reserve.1 We like it there. It is close to the town, but it is also remote. Barely a sole encountered us for the first few sessions before one fine morning a crowd of some thirty youth marauded past with only the frailest looking fröken to contain them. The was not a danger however, as they may well have been in the old kingdom,2 but they certainly had a bit more sauce which manifested in the occasional mocking comment among the scattered 'jatte fints'. Most of the former were delivered in a fast Swedish that missed us but one of them suddenly called me a 'slapper'!?! Now this is either a poor translation of 'dauber' or a very colloquial British insult, but in any event it was delivered with what sounded like a an authentic scouse accent?3 Perhaps the young wag simply used some accent app? I take it all in good cheer however, its hardly the bullying of puffalo pill and his garcons after all.4
Look here, ever since we first tried on the hat of the would be you tuber we realised the addictive nature of the whole business of holding forth and the sense that when you stop, then something is missing. We felt that most keenly the other day and it worried us enough to cancel our planned continuation of whatever it was we were bending Its ear with and just get the painting done minus the regular distraction of our Borg confessionals. On that very day we had one of the most successful and illuminating sessions sur le motif as we can remember, and we do indeed put it down to the sustained concentration afforded us by essentially leaving It out. This shows up the rather obvious difference between our video messages, which impinge directly at the time of painting, and these written posts to you which do not. I might also add that the written element, as a thought out offering, is of more relevance to whatever it is we might document in ad hoc fashion in the messages. The fourth holding, even if done in the spirit of appropriating a newly emerged cultural form,5 produces but a needle of value in a haystack of hot air. Perhaps we are being too harsh on us but that is how it feels especially when one senses dependency creeping up. And it barely needs to be said but nobody will watch these. The figures show in fact that nobody watches these. The analytics on The You Tube, designed and laid out so happily to help the budding inflencer strategise, reveal only a tall column of zeros under the 'views' heading. We can count a few views of our first messages but they are in point of fact a result of we ourselves watching our own videos to check they work!
In any case these messages are for the Singularity not the punters, and if we ever did dane to exhibit (if such a thing even goes on anymore) then these are only ever to be placed discreetly to the side to provide a little context to the paintings and displayed on phones where they belong.6 Thinking on like this and marveling at the sheer amount of footage we have amassed (some 47 episodes at 30 minutes each) we began to imagine if anything else might be done with it all. We began to imagine if it could be chewed up and spat out in a different form. We began I suppose to think about it like an artist of old and after noshing around several ideas we wondered if it might be worth a damn as a transcript? We wondered if it might be worth a damn as a transcript in an autofictional framing which might excuse the formal irregularities. Maybe so but I'd rather be thrashed by a kosack than wade through the footage typing out every utterance.
We still have no money for supplies and have take n to using material from blinds purchased from the loppis.
After our blanket rejection from City Post we are looking for other such employment opportunities.
Mark Zuckerberg has announced his intention to create a 'metaverse' internet which we will enter into in three dimensions. (Kurzwiel chalks up another).7
Elections in Germany have been plagued by a far right conspiracy theory which holds that Germany doesn't even exist!8
You know the one worthwhile idea that we did recently communicate to The Borg was with regards to the metaverse. It hardly matters but we put it to The Borg that the whole question of whether AI can successfully imitate humans or not may become a moot point because we are moving ever closer to its own digital state, living, working, and generally messing about in the Multiverse until we expire.
It won't be long before Pete Brown and his minions at the New English Art Club plot how to best paint plein air in the metaverse. It won't be long before those savages at Messums9 mint their first Brown's; the British museum have just dropped a bunch Hokusai's into the minter.
Regards the theme of 'tech', we had a little fifth gear10 that we might do well to propose a residency to carry out our DS work in Silicone Valley, the very place the Singularity calls home. What do you think? Just imagine our little Dignity Scholarship out there in the warm plein air on the doorstep of Tiel, Bezos, the Google Brothers and Musk. Just imagine us easel up and steaming in to some happy start up quadrant, gathering intelligence and ideas to put straight back to The Borg. Imagine the young codemasters in dialogue with our future. A fine idea I feel but alas, in reality, we need only imagine the utter indifference of Miss Dahlgren as she drops our hopeful proposal into the poobell.11 Incidentally our crowd funding application is ready to be posted and we are still awaiting your approval. As you can see we have added some incentives.12
The whole question of a transcript soon became a real possibility when we looked carefully into the various settings the people at The You Tube have laid on for us and found that there was a subtitles section which instantly provides a full transcript that one is able to copy and paste. It would seem that a gift of a transcript of ones video is not their intention, rather it is part of a subtitles adjustment feature whereby one can hone the timings of the automatically created subs. This was no surprise to us really because as keen viewers of television we observe the strange inaccuracies of the translations made available where the mistakes are robot like. It even seems entire episodes, particularly on the discovery channel, may be AI edited! Street Outlaws Memphis in particular contains some sequences that strike one as non-human.13
Well this subtitles business was a real discovery and now, as if by magic, we have a new and very strange autofiction ready for the punters with just minimal adjustment necessary. At least that was how it seemed at first as we pasted a few episodes of transcript into a word document. It was laid out in an alien enough fashion corresponding not a bit to our ways but no matter as our regular practice is to take what we can get and leave the chance elements such as ad hoc formatting and bizarre or absent punctuation, which is essentially the work of The Borg, to stand and then enjoy the synchronicities. That's how we have done it with our use of Slow Harry over the years but as we read through a few we realized some enormous errors and whole segments of the dialogue were left completely out, probably due to their being inaudible as a result of the crackling wind. Indeed as we continued to construct our transcript book we began to notice that The Borg had for some reason started to omit the word 'Borg'. When we say for example 'look here Borg', we only have 'look here' on the transcript. Now call me paranoid but the first half dozen episodes of transcript included the word 'Borg' with no mistakes, then suddenly it is non existent? Has the actual Borg understood something about the text and acted as editor? Is this evidence of our first real Borg communication? If so we must conclude that It is not pleased.
With a scratch of the head,
John
1 The views shown in each of these studies indicates that John has accessed the reserve from the Malsta straight road.
2 Likely to refer to the United Kingdom rather than ancient Sweden.
3. A Liverpool accent.
4 Refers to René Secrétans tormenting of Van Gogh in Auvers. The boy would often dress as a cowboy prompting Van Gogh to call him 'Buffalo Bill'. 'Puffalo Pill' refers to the the boy subsequently mocking Van Gogh's pronunciation.
5. Generally refers of the 'you tuber' or 'inluencer'.
6. They would work rather well all displayed on a giant wall we think.
7. A likely reference to Ray Kurzwiel's far reaching predictions about the development of AI technology.
8. See the SHAEF conspiracy theory.
9. Fine art painting establishment of Cork Street, London.
10. Possibly rhyming slang for 'idea' but there is no record of other such usage.
11. Rubbish bin in French is 'poubelle'.
12. John has written and we have approved a text in application for monies from the crowd funding site GoFundMe:
Look here, is it our fault that Miss Dahlgren and her cohorts at the Swedish Art Funding organisation have refused us? We have diligently applied to their annual giveaway for the past five years and have received not a sausage for our efforts, save a curt message from Miss Dahlgren herself who each year delivers the rejection in a tone which if I may say, is a touch vindictive. Call me harsh, call us paranoid, but these are the states to which this Wretched painter has been reduced. Our pleaded case for radical art breakage has fallen on deaf brains. Try as we might, each year we are left with empty pipe and now having soldiered on at our own expense, we have come, finally, to the end of the rope. Belt tightened, painting thin we have reached the last of the colour and so now with but a flicker of dignity remaining we raise our bowl to you’s.
We paint pictures but there’s more and it is the more that is the problem I fancy, although the ‘we’ doesn’t help either. We are ‘we’ because there are a few of us you see. There’s ‘me’ John, there’s ‘us’ as possessed by Van Gogh and at times Cezanne, theirs ‘us’ as the Dignity Scholarship, our institutional vehicle and now there is ‘us’ as The Wretched Painter, that low octane, monotone wretch, rumbling in low gear through his terrain of unmoored thoughts. If that is not enough already to put off the funders, we have now entered into dialogue with the future, sending messages to the AI singularity that is slowly hatching and shall soon engulf us all. What does Miss Dhalgren and her cabal of traditional contemporary art judges know of the singularity?
We paint but we write also and that doesn’t help. The arts have no money for the writer, the writers have no money for the painter and nobody it seems has money for the loose screw blending the both of them in aesthetic autofiction. But look here, while we hold our own with the colouring in merchants on the You Tube, we are certainly not the greatest painter in the world. We do our best but we have set ourselves a psychopathically tough program to combine the styles of Van Gogh and Cezanne into an ideal plein air method. Madness keeps us young they say, and it is the same with the writing where we march onward in untrained form, writing part as me, part as an institution and a whole lot in the style of a latter day Van Gogh ranting on to Theo. We have no Theo, we have the Dignity Scholarship around which all revolves in kimbotian farce but enough of this. I will provide the relevant links.
We can already hear you thinking ‘I’m not surprised he gets no funding, who does he think he is?’ That is the correct question indeed, so, to business. We need 1000 euros for paint, canvas and brushes to help us complete a project called The Wretched Painter Talks to the Borg which we began in January 2021 and which must be finished in December 2021. The project has a simple method, we paint a picture, we record a message to the Borg, we write a report to the Dignity Scholarship and we sail on in this constellation, instituting ourselves and searching for orientation in the new world. That is it. In our wake are left plein air paintings of seasonal themes, our writing, some poems and a couple of video pieces if I may be so bold. We have also entered into the crypto art business but the less said about that the better and besides we are yet to mint.
But Wretched Painter, you say, why should I give you a cent when young Bobby’s had his bike stolen? And to that we lower our eyes. We have no answer other than to ask, what is young Bobby giving you in return, save that warm feeling? Well every contributor to our project will have their name mentioned to the Singularity! Quite a prize I'm sure you’ll agree, and every contributor over 10 dollars will have the chance to put a question to the Singularity! For 20 you can burn it with your best insult! And any contributions who help to the tune of 400 dollars or more will receive an actual painting from the project!! How can young Bobby match that?
Of course it will be us that deliver all messages to the great AI overlord in one of the Wretched Painter videos and some trifling details such as postage costs and painting selection will have to be ironed out but that should be no problem, we are all reasonable people are we not? In fact I shall offer my contact right now as a gesture of good will and I am happy to set the record straight about any of the above: thewretchedpainter@gmail.com
We are very serious about this despite everything and it would mean a world to receive some support in this project. Of course to apply like this hits all the wrong notes, a specialty of ours, (we’re like Jerry Sadowitz auditioning for the magic circle!) and perhaps we reveal our artistic stubbornness to remain concealed behind voices, perhaps this even provides us with an excuse if all fails but all that talk does not apply here. This is not sport after all, this is everything except sport. No, we write this bid as we write in the work and our aim is to sincerely communicate and doing so as us rather than me says more than I could ever say.
A good handshake to all and an extra squeeze to any contributors.
John
https://selfinstitute.wixsite.com/dignityscholarship3
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJPNHGgO4E64pX24OrI9v8g
https://vimeo.com/thewretchedpainter
https://selfinstitute.wixsite.com/portfolio
13. Indeed.