Glen Allan

Cult of Ego

Cult of Ego was two different shows that I put together. As stated in my gallery of works video, these were a critique of the primacy of early social media self-focusing and promotion. These are extreme and iconoclastic dismantlings of the ego concept.

One show was up at the Firehouse Gallery in the mid-aughts, and the second show actually made it around to a few galleries in the 2010s.

Cult of Ego I

When I did this first one, it was around the time that MySpace was actually hitting pretty damn big, before selfies were even considered a thing.

I had an idea. Why not overemphasize a representation of ego? It seemed pretty obvious this was going to become something, seeing how everybody was constantly self-promoting. Nobody knew exactly what it is that they were doing. But everybody was putting everything they had about who they were up on MySpace. Images, photos, artwork, songs, GIFs, you name it. Whatever MySpace would accept. It was the beginning of everything about 'me', all in one space. And with MySpace in particular, everyone picked the group of the top people who showed up in their collection of friends. This made for an interesting presentation of not only whatever you were representing as a part of your identity, but who you were connecting to that identity as well. Everything about this was the social media explosion of the ego.

As a side note: This is probably also the beginning or near the beginning of what led to the gig economy.

It was an interesting show. Everything was hung in kind of a nice way too, by chains, suspended off the gallery walls slightly on two wood strips. I distinctly remember hanging out during a house meeting in the front gallery at The Firehouse, while quite literally building my show by screwing together chains and wood hangar pieces, that was going to be hung on those walls that very night, and the next, for the next month.

Take a read through each one of the images and next section for more comments and a deeper context.

Ego — Decoded binary: multidimensional synaptic constructs of delusion become me... open your perceptive awareness and you will see... i am the universe seen from one point of view... look into these tainted eyes and see in them a reflection of you.

Ego Full — Decoded binary: swinger, fatalist, deviant, extremist, atheist, antagonist, perverter. Words used to demonize instead of understand.

Meditation — A piece designed to simultaneously look like peace, and being kind of creepy and grotesque.

Tormented — Created during a contentious time in a strange relationship that had boundaries that were being stepped on with very little regard for the other's state of being, me being the other.

Evil Incarnate — A very old piece, back from the 90s. I scanned my face on a scanner directly. I made two different things with this. One was a little piece of artwork of my face on a dollar bill, which is another one in this collection, and this one, which I tried to make as dark and sinister as I could visually, just to experiment with the kind of feeling you could get out of a piece.

Madness — A very simple piece that I came up with, relatively early on. Only a few different effects on it. But it looked so existentially extreme. I had to keep it. A person bought this at this show, and at a later point said it freaked them out too much, and traded me back for some other piece of artwork. So I think it did its job.

Static Insanity — These are actually frames taken from a video that you can find in the video section. An experiment in madness, or in this case, static insanity. Just another exploration of what it means to live in existential horror.

Cult of Ego I | Show Photos

This was my first solo show at the Firehouse, and I wanted to do something slightly different. Largely when it came to presentation, which I'm a big fan of. I wanted a concept, something I hadn’t seen before.

I'm a big fan of the digital, so all the tags are binary. The titles themselves even are written out in binary. And the way it's hung, I was not liking the traditional method of a photo or an image in a glass frame with a mask cut to a 45-degree angle. It's a boring concept that I'd used previously that most people consider to be the high-end version of how one presents their works. I went a different route. I found a place that would do foam core poster prints. I used a matte coating to dim down on the shine, which inevitably led to slightly less detail, but that was inconsequential. Then I requested four grommets, one in each corner, so that I had a place to connect an S-hook. Next I purchased wood dowels, square ones, some eye hooks, some chain, and I formulated a chain suspension mounting system for the entire show. For all pieces except for the ones that were related to 'Static Insanity', I went with horizontal mounting with tension. It gave the best impressin of the pieces as floating.

I would screw one side into the wall first, then I would mount all four of the chains, crimp the S-hooksto the grommets on the piece art itself, and the secondary vertical piece of painted wood, and I would pull it tight. Then when it was pulled tight, drill into the wall straight through the mounting bracket (wood square dowel) to get my positioning, and then screw the secondary post in. There is a slight bit of sag, but it's very minimal, and I think the effect I was going for is quite excellent. The materials themselves dissalowed any more tension than they had without causing actual damage to the foam core. It looked as good as it could possibly look, considering.

This is still something I've never seen before and since, and I'd like to figure out an updated version of it. Same concept, still suspended and still hanging, but with some higher-end materials. Nonetheless, as my first gallery show at the Firehouse, a focus on the ridiculousness of ego focus. I thought this was elegant and quite tasteful, even given the subject matter and however much there was any kind of visceral offense from the images themselves.

Meditation | Gallery Photo — Meditation... I always felt like this one was wanting. Like, I figured what I designed was probably disturbing, but it also felt a little bit pointless. I think the idea being the contrast between being infected by things that people very much viscerally feel disgust or abhorrence to, while somebody is absolutely calm and unaffected. So the dichotomy works, but yeah, I don't know. But I hung it anyway. And I think it looks excellent.

Tormented | Gallery Photo — Ah yes, Tormented. I feel conflicted about this one as well. For one, it feels too simplistic in maybe the wrong way. I've even updated the original, which you'll see in the previous gallery. But, not sure if it really does what I want it to. Nonetheless, for its intended purpose in a show about ego, I think it's pretty impactful.

Evil Incarnate | Gallery Photo — I really enjoyed the fact that I was able to put this up in a gallery show somewhere. Partly because it was such an old piece, and it is so viscerally revolting on so many levels, just an absolute distortion of a human figure. And it really, literally is just my face pressed directly against a standard image scanner. But considering how many people allow themselves to become monsters in their struggle to find relevance in the public eye, I think it's definitely doing exactly what it's supposed to when you see it in a show like this in a gallery.

Static Insanity | Gallery Photo — This setup I really, really enjoyed. It's not perfect, but it is so close to perfect. As you can see, the video doesn't actually go all the way to the edges of the suspended blank frame, but it's kind of whatever. These ones are suspended by chains, but in a vertical format, kind of reminding me of some Japanese artwork look, but still using a crossbar and chains with candles at each end. This part of the gallery was kept dark so that the shitty projector could actually project a decent image.

Static Insanity | Gallery Photo — A few shots of this particular installation just to give it a feel for how the suspension pulls the frames off of the wall and cast shadows. I really do wonder what people thought when they looked at what this is and what it means.

Static Insanity | Gallery Photo — What is effectively the exact same shot, but with a different exposure setting in camera. This isn't a post effects change. Just highlighting the film and the light from the candle. Kind of a neat differential to highlight.

Madness | Gallery Photo — As I think I mentioned in the standard photo of this, a local friend in the arts community bought this after the show, and at a later point, ended up returning it because it freaked him out too much. This is a very simple Photoshop exercise, but the impact is just bizarrely extreme. I love the way this turned out, and I love the fact that it is rudimentary skill-wise, because that's not all that counts when it comes to what you're trying to get across.

Cult of Ego | Installation Photo — Just a shot here showing presentation against a 90-degree boundary and two walls, giving you an idea of how these things looked hanging up in the gallery.

Cult of Ego | Installation Photo — Zooming back out a bit, showing three of the pieces. The rest of the pieces shown framed with horizontal mounting instead of vertical. I like the idea of the tension of something hanging with gravity coming in on them. I'm still stoked at this presentation and would love to do an upgraded version in a future installation.

Cult of Ego | Installation Photo — Side shot of three of the pieces in the show to give more of a sense of depth and how they are suspended off of the wall, casting very nice shadows, floating. Yeah, like said in the last one, I'm still tickled at how this simple technique really upscaled the presentation.

Cult of Ego | Installation Photo — Reverse side, side shot again, showing depth in the suspension. Just some perspective to remember what this installation looked like.

Cult of Ego | Installation Photo — The final shot in this gallery. You'll see here that when you follow the different pieces from left to right, the final piece is the last one before it jumps over to a completely different wall. I felt like this piece tied the most into the pieces in the background. And either way, this gives more of a sense of how the one side was lit and the other side was dark, and the flow in the gallery of the entire show and installation.

Cult of Ego II - Ego

Cult of Ego II, my side. Effectively, another variation of the first show. Skill level upped quite a bit. Not in every one of them, but I think the technique is much more refined and interesting. Still going for iconoclasm and intensity, or strange depth.

A lot of these pieces were created during an extremely intense period of time. I was going through a massive breakup with the person you'll see in the next section during the creation of quite a few of the pieces in this show overall, although I’d also been creating others for months. Life was intense, extremely outrageously intense at this point. Barely tolerable. It's not fun to be a person who has that kind of internal reaction. Emotions are not my favorite thing, never have been when they are this strong. And when I feel abandoned at that kind of level, it's existentially crippling. As you'll learn at a later point in this site, I have developed a number of survival strategies and processing mechanisms to cope with these things, as this level of intense emotion is not new for me, but while you're in the middle of it, it doesn't feel like anything you're doing is helping even slightly, outside of chemical help, which is only ever temporary and, more often than not, probably not the best idea for anything other than an extremely short stint. A few combinations of strategies did what they had to do to get me through this, including part of the process of creating some of these pieces of artworks, especially the ones that you might even feel have the most intense effect on what they bring out, and what you might find in them reflected in yourself, if it does that for you.

As before, read the comments in the photos for specific context and the story as they go.

Goggle Pain — Just a strange self-portrait while I was sitting at my laptop, taking a picture with my webcam, heavily affected with chrome effects and a bit of enlargening of my right goggle eye.

Comic Spiral — A simple self-portrait experiment. A photo taken of myself in my room at the arts collective that I lived at, the Firehouse, with my sculpture and some of my artwork in the background, and a spiral going to my right eye, with me in black and white.

Deconstruction — I had good hopes for this one. I liked the angle with me reaching out over the top of the camera to give an exaggerated feel of perspective. But it turned out to not be one of my favorites. But I wanted to show my process, my failures a bit. And now that I've looked back on this after a number of years, I think I like it more than I used to.

Glen!!!!!! — A one-color transformation of myself pointing at a piece of artwork from someone who was a girlfriend at the time. Or maybe we had broken up. I don't remember exactly.

Chained — Another reflection on existential madness. Me calmly in the middle, a couple of incarnations of myself to the right screaming, and three symbols to the left, which had to do with a failing relationship, with a chain-link fence transposed over the scene. There's a lot of despair in this one.

Ego Explosion — I think this one was made for the gallery show I did for this series of artwork. Just another one color cutout and a lot of replication and playing with layers and blending effects.

Blinds — I had taken a selfie of myself while I was looking out a window. When I looked at the picture, I saw how dramatically the blinds looked in my glasses. I thought it to be a very good candidate for a one-color transformation. And that it is.

Temporal & Transitory — The feeling of being in someone's life temporarily, and parts of you fading away until they don't even realize you exist anymore. This is part of a process that I went through in this series to deal with a major breakup.

Digital Shadow — Four one-color transformations overlaid with circuit boards and some reflections, with a bit of drop shadow. Very simple, very effective. I really like this one.

Intent — A strange self-portrait. Green eyes, purple chrome-looking skin, and some hair reminiscent of Dragon Ball Z. Just another experiment in how intense I could look in a piece of artwork.

Vision Quest — During a very difficult breakup, took this photo in the mirror, tore it into a bunch of pieces in Photoshop, threw a bunch of textures on it. In the right goggle, there's a ton of screaming faces. And the eye, chaos symbols. Over the face, tendrils coming out at you, plus other textures. Trying to see a way out of the existential horror I was dealing with at the time.

Breaking Through — Trying as hard as I could to graphically represent the extremeness of the emotional state that I was carrying pretty much every single moment, going through intense emotions, feelings of abandonment and loss, trying to break through to something new, to something else, anything but what I felt.

Reflection — I went through a phase of wearing fedoras and dress shirts. And in this one, I threw on a pair of goggles as well. And in the eye, in the goggles, what you're seeing is my obsession's eye, not mine. Floating in space, a symbol of love in the other eye, wanting, pained, trying to get through.

Gateway to the Soul — Digging a little deeper into heavy edits of every part of a photograph, pulling every single thing apart, affecting real things in digital ways, compositing them back over, replacing skin texture, adding patterns and symbols, eyes in the goggles, a symbol in the strap between the goggles, and all kinds of textures otherwise. Quite a little experiment. One of my favorites.

Indirection — Took a different approach with this one. Primarily used real-world textures that I photographed, along with my face repeated multiple times, with a heavy shadow-cast light on it. Some of my symbols in there as well with hearts around, the three arrows you can see. Another sense of shattered ego and a broken heart.

xXx - x3 — A doom and gloom, dark, dark place, with a symbol of love embedded into my forehead. Feeling multiplicitous and kind of insane.

Cult of Ego II - Obsession

Obsession may seem like a strong word, but it was the kind of word that 'we' had bantered around, half jokingly, half seriously. This relationship was kind of nuts, just like her, and I was unreasonably attracted to her at the time. My prefrontal cortex, my emotions, my subconscious mind, everything in me, was entirely hijacked by instinct and desire. It's not a place I want to ever be again. Not when it makes somebody (me) that unreasonably irrational.

While I appreciate having experienced what it's like to be so thoroughly driven by my baser self, and it, in effect, completely fogging up my capacity to see through the distortions that were apparent in every other respect. Unless what it is that is going to be the outcome is the best choice I’ve ever made, it is one of the most disempowering things I have ever experienced. The fight to gain back my fully reasonable and rational self took years. Considering how much I had come to depend on that part of myself to keep measured and mitigated my emotions, maintaining a kind of stoicism no matter what, while some of that remained regardless, enough of it was suppressed that it feels quite literally like you are under a spell... Which, in a sense, chemically, instinctively, you absolutely are.

However, as I have experienced at other points in my life, it does give a person, at least in my case, a ridiculous amount of energy that you need to do something with without exploding, erupting, going emotionally nuclear on everyone and everthing around you otherwise. That quite literally was not as option. And so I put a lot of that energy into artwork. To be fair, not every single one of these pieces was made when I was feeling that way (as with the other half). The first maybe four were during the relationship, and one further in the middle was at a time when we hooked up again and then 'broke up' again.

It's a strange thing to have these memories, but I think it's important not to hide from things like this and to be reminded of all of the things you went through in life, however much they may be embarrassing or overwhelming to look at again. This kind of thing needs to be able to be faced down, because it puts you in a position of far too much vulnerability, and it literally makes you make stupid, out-of-character decisions that go against who you are, and ultimately contribute to the failure of the thing you're in the middle of, while you're in the middle of it. If I had had my senses about me, I don't know that that would have saved anything so much as I would have had a lot more of the kind of understanding I would have needed to be the one to cut it off long before it degraded into something as damaging as it became.

Luckily, in my case, because of the way my survival strategy works, I've yet to experience trauma damage that persists in a way that has turned into a kind of sustained dysfunction that has disrupted my life chronically. I have always felt things far too intensely, and if I hadn't developed the kinds of strategies I did, I simply think that I would have been entirely non-functional as a human being. Instead of going down that path, I've learned to dismantle absolutely everything. This will be covered again in a few different ways throughout this website.

Yet again, look through each image, read the comment for more context.

Fractured Beauty — I had just gotten together in this photo with this person, a self-described mentally ill, intense person, drop-dead gorgeous, total life wrecker, and I was obsessed.

Chaos — We shared an affinity for the concept of chaos. How similar we meant what chaos was to each other, I'm not really sure. But she did name her first child Chaos. Found an old lovely photo of her and threw a strange chaos symbol on her forehead with a bunch of texture. Still experimenting with what to do with portraiture of her.

Solipsist Universe — She claimed she was a solipsist. Not an odd thing to hear coming from her. So I made her the universe. In art. It seemed fitting.

Transparency — She was a massive proponent for inappropriate levels of transparency that gave me access to pretty much all of her personal emails. At one point, when things were going strange, I made this piece. She was also very much into the idea of basically being pregnant always. So this piece, which I had printed out for a gallery show at four by four feet, has her textured in a zebra pattern with a bunch of quotes of her own, and a baby in her womb. Kind of an intense piece. She posed in front of it when I showed it.

Eyes that Kill — Originally a full face shot. Simple half-toning, coloration, removing color, and intensifying. And then when I cropped it to just get this side shot, it felt intense.

Never Give Up — A post-relationship photo edit. The binary code probably says "never give up," just as the title does, with symbols overlaid to the right of my affection and love. Attempts to woo that didn't work, at least not permanently. At least I got some good artwork out of it.

Skin on Skin — After we were broken up, she sent me a photo of her sphynx cat laying on her bare chest. So, I made some artwork out of it. Still trying to use my skills to charm her.

Sex Period — Just think about what those two words mean. Maybe flip them around the other way. And think about what it is that I'm taking a photo of. And then look at the floor. And then I took that and made it into a piece of artwork. This was after we had gotten back together for a little while, after having been apart for a considerable amount of time.

Summer Dream I — One day I ended up back at her house. We were still not getting along. There were a number of guests around, and she decided to walk out of her room completely naked and go into the backyard and lay down to sun. It looked quite nice, so I took a photo, turned it into art. Multiple textures, backgrounds, some other artwork of mine in the lenses of the sunglasses she's wearing.

Summer Dream II — Just an alternate version of the other one. Different overlay. Probably some kind of shout out to Cosmos, with different things in the glasses.

Burning Out — From my limited perspective and her posts, she appeared to be kind of making her life into a disaster at the time. She's also a quirky one. She took this photo and posted it to social media. I've been developing my compositing skills and came up with this one from it. I think it's pretty fantastic.

New Life — I think a part of me was fully starting to grok the idea that I was not gonna be in the picture anymore. So I went kind of hardcore on this one, hoping my artistic magic would maybe have an effect, and I think I came up with one of the best digital art portraits I've done. I'm still quite taken aback when I see this one.

Cult of Ego II | Show Photos

This was a severely bizarre time of my life. I had just, relatively recently, gotten out the incredibly intense relationship illustrated above. As I've mentioned and will mention, one who was called 'Mecca' was someone who I felt a unnaturally severe attraction and attachment to. In my delusional efforts to try to reverse some of the failings, my impulse was to take the art that I had created, given the intense drive I had to be creative due to the loss, and after having all of it printed out (at an extremely high quality due to a connection I had as a resource at the time), and show it publicly. Some part of me believing that in doing so, and in her seeing it through whatever online grapevine (or my profile that perhaps she may have looked at, or not), it would somehow 'magically’, through the universe, give her some reason to want to re-engage. I'm quite literally not joking.

This story may look entirely different depending on circumstances, people, etc. With my previous major relationship, I think this would have likely worked. But that one's dead now, and had been for quite some time at this point. This was a person looking for specific things that I was not in a position to offer, even though I'm pretty convinced that what I did have to offer was a level of acceptance that she had never, ever experienced previously, which ironically and dysfunctionally, caused her a great deal of confusion and discomfort. If you've had experience with some types of mental illness, this may make sense to you. For most, it may seem completely backwards. It's not exactly simple to explain, and the point here is not to open up and expose everything about somebody else's life.

So, check out three (3) different samplings from four (4) different gallery shows that I put my work up at. There are other pieces that I showed as well, because I wasn't just working on artwork of her and myself for the Cult of Ego show. But check out what it looks like when an artist is in a very strangely desperate and kind of peaking as an artist that multiple galleries were interested in putting up art of on display on their walls. It's not something I can easily communicate the feeling of being desired by the arts community for art display, and also in what I can only describe as pretty much consistent and constant existential torment quite literally causing the feeling that every cell in my body wanted to leap outward at high velocity, close to 24 hours a day without literal exhaustion or chemical medicine to shut up at least a portion of the noise.

Strange things come from pain in life. This is a great showing of skill and radical emotion, and it seemed pretty clear that others saw and felt it as well. All of these galleries were in Phoenix, AZ.

Burnt Sky Studios

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Burnt Sky | Breaking Through — Something I tried differently for this show was a technique of hanging my tags from the main piece itself. A bit different from the last show we saw. I had, initially had more funding for framing, but it got eaten up in other things, and I will tell you that doing pieces of artwork this size is not exactly cheap. Either way, this is what we're going to see through the next three galleries. Quarter-inch MDF, extremely high-quality Epson digital print, and here we have it on a brick wall in a little gallery about a block south of Roosevelt Row.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Burnt Sky | Sex Period — I think this was the first time I publicly showed this piece. I'm a strange one, and I still find this one bizarre to deliberately go out of my way to put up and display publicly. Like I said in the main gallery, it is quite literally the title. Reverse the words and look at the red shadow in the paint splatter that I superimposed on top of it, and then there you have it. This during a short-ish reconnection period with the ex. Any time that there was some reason to capture a moment, I did, and in this case, it inspired me to make a bizarre piece of digital art.

Side Bar

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Sky Bar | Burning Out — I was known in two different large communities, the downtown Phoenix art community and the Phoenix burner community. And Sidebar was one of the bars and galleries that both communities would show up to, at least some members. And when the pieces were up, I do remember somebody asking, is that her? i.e., Mecca. And I said yes. It's a weird feeling to be post-relationship and have multiple pieces of someone you used to be with that you're still overwhelmingly attached to up as artwork in a gallery show where people from both communities that you're a part of witness what you're doing. I can't really articulate how that feels. I do love this piece though.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Sky Bar | Gateway to the Soul — It's much easier when it's just yourself being displayed, even though to communicate what it was that you feel and you felt that inspired what any given piece is, is in most cases quite literally impossible. This one is full of eyes, obviously, and lots of intensity meant to look into you and show lots of presence. Keep in mind too that this piece is, I believe, at least two feet by two feet. So it may look a bit smaller there, but in reality that's not a tiny piece of artwork on that pillar.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Sky Bar | Digital Shadow — I didn't mention before either that this was the first show that I did with Cult of Ego II, and I asked the person I connected with who offered me the opportunity to show here what pieces he was interested in. I gave him digital files, he picked out the entire show from the files I gave him. Those files plus a couple more that I did are what made it into all the different galleries. I had enough that it would be too much to just do all of them for no reason. I'm glad this one was a part of the show. It's one of those ultra simple yet very impactful pieces.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Sky Bar | Breaking Through — I don't know how well I described what this piece is actually meant to convey in the gallery previously that this is in, but especially when you're showing it off publicly as a print, it has a different kind of meaning to it. There was a ridiculous intensity to life at this point that I'm sure many of you can relate to when it comes to ideas like death and loss. And this was an attempt at least to capture, in as best a way I could with digital art, my attempts to cross a boundary between feeling completely trapped by the emotions that I had and the other side that I wanted to get to.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Sky Bar | New Life — In a strange way, all I wanted was for whatever she wanted to be and do to be as successful as possible. Whether or not any of the artwork or our previous life did anything or not to help that, I thought showing her in what I think is the best way that I could represent through my abilities couldn't do anything other than help. Maybe she didn't like the association, but I really doubt she didn't like the art.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Sky Bar | Eyes that Kill — Sometimes I feel conflicted about pieces. I don't know that I would have picked this one to show for my first choices out of the collection that I had created. I think this one is too simple, even though I am a huge fan of halftones and that it was 90% monochrome. It had a great intensity to it. But hey, it is certainly one of those pieces that I don't know if you can help but get some kind of feeling from, whether you know what it is or not. And holy crap, those lips. I didn't exaggerate them. That's what they look like, obviously through artistic interpretation.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Sky Bar | Panorama — I think this was taken on an iPhone 4S. The ability to do panoramic shots had just recently come out-ish. I like the idea of getting an atmosphere shot. Realistically, this is far too small dimensionally to actually work as a full wraparound panorama, but it's still kind of a cool shot, given the idea of what the overall bar looked like. This side of the bar only had these two pieces, though. The rest of them were in the back that you can see all the way to the left, where the actual bar is, up on the left side on all the pillars next to the windows. It was a cool spot.

Lost Leaf

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Lost Leaf — These shots were taken before they opened up for business on that day. I was given the opportunity to come in early and hang all the pieces before the crowds came in, so I got some clear shots. Now that I think about it, I might have preferred to have waited and actually got these shots when it was busy. It would have given it a different air. Regardless, this show hung well in this space.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Lost Leaf — I think this is the only regular wall they had in the space for hanging artwork. It almost doesn't look as good. It's kind of boring. Which is funny, since it's a bar and not a gallery. Although, every place in downtown Phoenix put their walls up for artists to hang in. Man, that's some personal crap up on the wall there. And the first two of those, I certainly made them abstract enough so that you might not know what the hell it is you're looking at. But those are pretty explicit if you do know what you're looking at.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Lost Leaf — A final angle, with all the gallery lighting, out to the little front nook room that they had. A couple of pieces flanking the entrance to it. Now that I look at it again, not sure that that wide piece should have been mounted right there. It's not exactly framed well on the sides, but, still looks good. And yeah, writing these captions brings back a ton of memories.

Bud's Glass Joint

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Bud's Glass Joint — As this was a place of business selling what can only be described as weed paraphernalia before it was fully socially acceptable, although right on the cusp, so not that unusual. They had a couple of shelves. Kind of funny that I basically put up the tags for it as their own small pieces of artwork on the third shelf. Makes me giggle a little bit to look at this.

Cult of Ego II | Gallery Photo | Bud's Glass Joint — And here we have another panoramic shot, because why not? Small little room to show pieces in, for sure. But I managed to fit seven pieces in. The one all the way to the right (the 8th) is actually a poster that I created, designed to sell posters of my work. I think I mentioned something about that in another image. But yeah, these are some of the places that I showed my work at that time. Definitely a trip to look back on this.

Abstracts

I had this concept at one point to create a pseudonym, which I called 'Infinity Flame', and to only create abstract artwork. The idea was that I was thinking the stuff that I generally tend to create is a bit intense and dark, doesn't really have a lot of mass or commercial appeal. And that creating things that were more abstract and using textures I may or may not normally have tended to use might be more appealing, along with a pseudonym that wasn't representative of my normal identity, might be a vehicle towards a line of work that, if I put more attention into it and continued efforts along this line, had the potential of opening up, asking for higher prices, and potentially getting into more established and upscale galleries than one might normally find within the Phoenix art scene.

Ultimately, this is as far as I went with this project. Not that there's anything wrong with these. I just wasn't able to push an entire ghost version of myself to the forefront in order to become successful, because for me, that's a disingenuous way to exist. Now that I'm looking at them again, and probably knew as much then, these aren't exactly positive, although they are abstract. There's only really any direct symbology in the last one, and it'll be discussed in that one's comments. So, I'm not so sure I really achieved what I was going for.

However, I do like these, and I think they would look fantastic on a wall. Just not sure how many people would want to put them on theirs. Maybe I'll take this up again to do another series just to expand on this concept, except, of course, as myself. I've never actually shown these either, so it might make for an interesting gallery show to have... 4 more, nine total? Hmmm...

Fluid Chaos — An experiment with rope randomly tossed on the floor, photographed and used as the outline for a textured overlay, with some kind of water droplet and other random textures. I don't hold the information for all of these things when I make them, I just know my process and create.

Black Sun — A composite of the sun covered up by clouds with clouds in the sky. And in the background, what looks like a pegboard is actually a very large scale Cruse artwork scanner for scanning pieces that are tens of feet wide. Another abstract piece for the fun of it.

Into the Light — Using real-world photography sources and completely obscuring them digitally is an interesting thing. The U-shaped object, middle left, is the filament in a can light, and the rings are reflections of light off the can. The rest are other textures and perhaps clouds. Again, I don't remember everything I use when I do.

Supernal — At the place I was living, there was a old, rather large piece of knotted tree just sitting on the ground. This is a photograph of it, heavily affected with some overlays and textures. It gave me the feeling of the supernatural, but from a book I had read, the word supernal fit it better.

The Artifice and the Dream — A composite of technology and nature, a bunch of roots and plant matter, all twisted and woven, growing over a circuit board. Just showing the dichotomy between the natural and the created and artificial. I'd like to do a newer version of this.

3D Worlds

This is an interesting collection. All of these were made in the 90s, using Bryce 3D through 4D and various versions of Ray Dream Designer, two programs that ultimately, basically stopped existing, which is kind of disappointing.

I very much enjoyed the way Ray Dream Designer worked. In effect, it had three planes, and you could edit your 3D object by going to any one of those planes and altering different attributes on it. This was a novel approach to 3D design that I hadn't seen before and haven’t heard of since. I have yet to fully engage with newer 3D suites, but that's just a matter of sitting down and actually investing some time in learning a new system, as I do. The obvious choice would, of course, be Blender. So, hopefully, we'll see something coming from me at some point regarding these types of creations. I tend to forget how good they actually look and how readily they integrate in with 2D digital art (either as part of the source material used to texturize the objects within them, or as part of the overall piece of artwork they are used in). The only downside is that all of my Ray Dream Designer files, which hold this 3D information i’ve previously created, are no longer accessible. Although, if I'm lucky, I could see about opening them up in BBEdit and check to see if they actually contain any of that vector information, or potentially even find an older Mac and somebody who kept archives of this old software like I should have (since I had an amazing archive of old Mac software), and figure out how to trace the technology forward to the point it's at now where the files would be still usable. Or, I'll simply have to redesign all of them, build them all from scratch. To be honest, as a part of the practice of getting to know something along the lines of Blender now, that's probably the better path to take anyway.

Bryce on the other hand was just simply drop dead gorgeous. Plus, technically I could design things in Ray Dream Designer and bring those objects into Bryce and put them inside of, you know, a real world looking place. Yeah, I miss this kind of creation. I should definitely get back into it. To be fair to myself, I did introduce people to Bryce, and I showed them what it was that I was doing, and watched them attempt to create their own versions of 3D worlds. I even recently saw an episode of something from Corridor Crew, where they brought up an ancient version of Bryce to test the crew on, and see if anybody could grok the interface well enough to create something compelling. You know, honestly, most examples of what my friends did and a good amount of the people, even on the Corridor Crew, kind of came up with trash. I find this a bit confusing given the nature of how the interface was designed, because once you fully appreciate what it is that it's doing, you should be able to hone and craft things into anything you want, environmentally. Maybe it's the kind of thing that was just way too ahead of its time, and an interface which, in a sense, was too simple, if that's even a thing? I don't know. But I found it to be incredibly intuitive to use. And, as you'll see in this gallery (and as you already saw animated in the 'Gallery of Works' video, the very first video you saw on this website), I came up with quite a few worlds that are pretty fantastic.

All that said, this is what I came up with at that time overall in the 3D space, exploring building worlds, building symbols, creating spaces that I'd like to inhabit (in a fantastical way, obviously). Imagined worlds, but as something I could actually render. Is that not something most people do (imagine worlds)? Maybe that's just a dreamer type of thing, but it's kinda cool when you have the ability to actually produce some variation of what it is that you'd like to make into a real thing that can be visited, if only virtually. I gotta say, after all this time, I think these things have aged extremely well. Now you decide if you agree...

Ball Sphere — I believe this was created in Bryce 3D. I wanted to experiment with what it would look like to put a bunch of semi-transparent spheres and lines down a mirror tube with a green light cast on it, and see how it would render all of the reflections. And this is what I ended up with.

binary-chaos Mirrored — As with the experiment in Bryce with reflections, this one was done in Ray Dream Designer. In this case, the reflections involve the interior walls of a cube, which looks like it's inverted from what it actually is. I don't actually remember how many real objects were in this. And I can't open those files anymore. But I have this to remember it.

Chaos Spikes — Figuring out how to bring a number of objects in, align them, duplicate them, move them around. And created a new version of a Chaos symbol. Texturized it with some of my favorite color combos. Had it float in space. Feels like a piece of me from a long time ago.

Spiked Atomic Multitorus — Went more 3D with this one. Effectively a six-pointed chaos star in all directions. Green and purple textures with fire spikes coming out of the ends, floating in space. Just building my skills back in the day. Making worlds floating in space.

Blinding Light — While the last few were built in Ray Dream Designer. I think this one was built in Bryce 3D. I was trying to use Bryce in a different way than it was usually used. So I captured a sphere of fiery light inside of four toruses, with a sphere at either side. It has a dramatic feel to it. Looks like a space I'd like.

Ice & Glass — Another Bryce world, but no atmosphere, no outside. Cold. Basically looks like a glacier and a wall of ice. Just an experiment in environment, texture, and feel.

Emerald Closeup — An early experiment in Bryce, trying out transparency of water, texture of the mountains, different colors in the sky. Part of my developmental phase, but I thought it looked nice.

Purple Gold Skytowers — Starting to get the hang of how Brice worked with light and color. The mountains themselves are primarily purple, and the gold is actually from the light of the sun hitting them from above the clouds. I think I was hitting a little bit of a stride at this point.

Lava — I imagined this could be a portal. The center sphere represented more or less the world you were in, and all the spheres around it were portals to other worlds. This world obviously is full of mist and lava and has a pyramid and dark clouds, but it's pretty well lit. Kind of intense. These are the things a fantastical mind comes up with.

The Gate — Another experiment in using Bryce in a strange way, creating a sphere that's completely reflective in the center, a purple and green torus at the base of it with a cloud texture, and the same lava you saw from the last image altered to be surrounding this. I then took and cut out the rest of it, and then in Photoshop composited in some stars behind it. Another portal of sorts.

Snail Scene — The love of my life when I was young, in a very long-lasting relationship, was a big fan of snails. So I went in a different direction with Bryce and built something that looked more realistic and from the perspective of a snail on a rock in a lake with leaves shading it. A little land in the background with some trees and mountains in the background, cloudy sky off to the right. I think it's lovely.

Moon in the Stars — A simple perspective scene in Bryce with stars in the background, looking directly at the moon. An extremely bright moon, so bright you can't see any of its features, and all you get is some lens flaring.

Cancer Nights — A place in a world in Bryce that I created, reflecting the ideas of the astrological sign Cancer, which I am. I'm not huge into astrology, but it was around me enough at the time, and this was reflecting some of the attributes I thought represented it in a nighttime environment, with of course the full moon in the sky, a bit of a sheath around the mountains, but a bit more open than it would be in the day. That mountain is me.

Cancer Nights — Slightly different perspective on the same scene. Much more vertical. Specifically designed because I thought it would be really nice as a print, and I still do.

Cancer Days — And here's the dichotomy. Cancer days, with the protective shell, in this case a force field around a mountain. Technically not the same mountain, but that doesn't matter. In fact, there are multiples. Just another take at the ideas of what it means to be a cancer and who I am, and a world I'd like to visit.

Pyramid Mountain — Starting to get a little more serious in this one. Developing a whole world. We have a chaos symbol laying flat down in a sea with what I think is a cloud texture and a highly reflective liquid, water. Clouds up above with a mountain poking through them. Colors that I like, purple, green, fire. It's a good start.

Pyramid Mountain 2 — Now we're starting to get somewhere. Same scene basically, but with a ring of mountains. Fills it out quite nicely. Good step in developing this world.

Pyramid Mountain 3 — Decided to go with a different texture for the mountains and add a purple cloud textured torus around the chaos pyramid sphere mountain. Just showing the development of this world. There's more to come.

Pyramid Mountain Panorama — This is as far as I took it. And this is a true panorama, with the correct perspective. If you were to wrap this completely around and look at it in VR, you'd see an entire world in 3D all the way around you. There's the addition of what is effectively a sphere, chopped in half, floating and a ring around it as well. Go to the video section and my Gallery of Works to see what this looks like in motion.

Chaos Vortex — And back in Ray Dream Designer, the preliminary development of a floating space station. A bit of a vortex. A flat chaos symbol with multiple toruses embedded in it. A twisted object textured in clouds, spinning down like a tornado. A textured green torus around there. Four floating spheres with spikes in them, and a 3D chaos symbol floating above it. Early stages, but it was feeling like it was getting somewhere.

The Vortex — And here's the space station. Instead of there being a vortex of clouds behind it, it is the vortex. It is the place everything comes to. A space I'd like to inhabit, a place I'd like to be. Too much to describe in so little text. But I really like the feel, the aesthetics, the colors.

The Vortex II — Same vortex space, different render, newer version of the program. Much bigger render. Fully printable. Lovely space.

The Vortex Sphered — Doesn't your personal space station need a protective shell? Some kind of defense system? Well, in this case, there's a sphere, a force field of some sort, being generated by the three toruses. Interesting how the light bends things around a little bit too.

The Vortex | Firey Bars — Why not make your bars out of fire? Adds to the aesthetic. Gives it a bit more of an intimidating feel. You can always generate that force field whenever you want to as well.

The Chaos System

While there was chaos symbology in the previous gallery, in this next section we start with a lot of chaos symbol stuff, specifically, the development of the very first version of a chaos symbol I came up with entirely on my own. The one that was to be associated with, from then, and on forward, The Chaos System. The Chaos System in particular originally referred to, as you already know, the sound system that I bought from BASSBOSS when I got a little bit of early inheritance money (which I may not have mentioned). An amazing sound system comprised of four 18-inch subwoofers, each that could go down to 23 hertz, or 21 hertz in pairs. This symbol you'll see in the first gallery was the grill design that I came up with for the tops, and also eventually was added to the subs. The full story regarding that system and other things related to it will reveal itself fully on the audio page.

But in this section, we're going to look at the evolution of this symbol and the way that, with a lot of things that I create, how they evolve over time, how I iterate on them, and how I end up making many different kinds of treatments or expressions of the same idea. It's a practice I enjoy and I think is a useful skill building exercise, both as a part of my artwork, along with getting symbolic artwork out through a bunch of different interpretations. It simultaneously shows my skill and aesthetic interest and ability while simultaneously reinforcing the symbolic power of the thing that I've designed/created.

I iterated the design, and you'll go on a journey to check that out. I have lots of plans for The Chaos System. It's now also a custom GPT, which you'll read about in the AI section of the website, along with other things yet to be fully revealed. It's about how I think. Not just chaotically in the layman's definition, but pulling from the chaos to create order.

I'm a systems person, and I like to create. This sounds like a simple statement, but as I've mentioned and as will throughout all of this website be mentioned, this way of thinking is in everything I do. See if you notice it in the different things that are being written about as you continue on your journey.

Main

So this is about the development of the symbol itself, iterating on the basic symbol with a few variations, and using it for events and using the symbology that was connected to the system itself (The Chaos System).

Then I continued to iterate the look and design years later with the last image in this particular gallery before two major jumps in its use elsewhere, one coming up in just a minute. Stay tuned in!

Chaos Split — An exercise in contrasts. The symbol itself is dark. But on one side, it's got fire behind it with a drop shadow, and the opposite side is outlined in white. Just a nice way to make something pop.

Hip Hop at the Fountain — Another graphic I designed for a Pan Productions party. On the left and right is the actual speaker grille from The Chaos System BASSBOSS subwoofers. A guy dancing in the middle, a couple sound waves, some rings of sound, textures, just something visually interesting.

The Chaos System | Purple Green Madness — One of the things I like most about design is when you operate within constraints. In this, it's just a combination of gradients, strokes, and blending effects along with two colors only. Well, three if you count black. But black's not a color. These are complicated gradients, but that's all.

Chaos Circuit Eye

Chaos Circuit Eye, the newest incarnation of The Chaos System logo. It shouldn't take much effort to realize that what it is you're looking at in the center of this logo is, or is at least a version of, the same symbol/logo you were just looking at.

As this symbol has impressed itself on me, it very easily ended up being the new version of the symbol for The Chaos System. However, not the basic version of the central logo with the eye instead of the circle being the only difference, but the secondary version of it that you'll see as you progress through this gallery, that you might simply be able to spot right now, looking below. With this most recent base vector variation, all of the updates, the tentacles/circuit traces, the metaphors connected to what this symbol represents; consciousness, connectedness, networking, a life form physically reaching out in every direction, a kind of more-than-octopus, etc. This symbol to me has a living presence in pretty much every variation it is in, and the more I have worked it and done more treatments of it I’ve created, and found ways to express it, the more I have appreciated how it has done nothing but expressed more of itself and how much presence it really has, especially, as you'll see, when I had AI turn it to flesh.

This, this symbol means a lot to me now. It’s Powerful. It's my current representation for what I think The Chaos System is... A networked, connected, tentacled, reaching out system. It's organic, it's striking, and I've had a lot of fun developing all the variations of what this can look like and express as. It'll be curious to see how much further I go with this one.

Please read through the captions for each of the images to get all of the specific context necessary to see how the symbol has changed and evolved and adapted through all of the different versions in front of you.

Chaos Circuit Eye | O.G. Wide — Continuing to develop the concept, I found a circuit board design that I liked online and recreated something similar from scratch in Keynote using the line drawing tool so that I could also animate it, which you'll see in my video section, and created a wallpaper-style version.

Chaos Circuit Eye | O.G. 2 Wide — Same idea as the previous one, but with an updated gradient style. Still just exploring.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Purple-Green Psychadelic — If you followed all of these in order, I previously talked about operating within constraints on purpose. That's what this was. Outside of black, which isn't a color, I limited myself to purple and green exclusively, and just looked to see how I could make it interesting by chopping things up and using strokes and shadows and gradients.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Purple-Green Psychadelic Wide — Naturally, I put it on the same circuit background to have a nice big desktop image, also formatted for video.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Purple-Green Psychadelic | Circuit Overlay — As I often do, I went in search of some other circuit patterns that might be interesting to use for blending layer effects as overlays. This theme will repeat a few times in this series.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega — When I originally talked about creating the symbol, I mentioned it was actually for an aluminum faceplate to put on a speaker. I had come up with another design that I wanted to update those faceplates on my speaker with, and this is a version of that, which I really liked as a variation on the chaos symbol. So I thought this was an interesting evolution of the design, and I've stuck with it since.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega — Same name as the previous, but now colorized. Trying to work out what color palette I actually wanted to use going forward.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Wide — As with the other two, put it on the same background. All part of the process.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Prime | Circuit Overlay — Using the same circuit overlay from a couple of images back, I updated the color scheme. You'll see the original a little bit later in this series.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Prime | Circuit Overlay 2 — These are the kinds of explorations I do with color, texture, gradients, shadows, and I was really starting to push the boundaries with my understanding of Pixelmator Pro at this point.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Prime | Circuit Overlay 3 — Probably the most extreme of the Omega Prime variants, especially with the glowing strokes around the edges. Definitely a favorite, with the circuit overlay.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Prime — And here's the base level Omega Prime version that was the source in the last three. I landed on this color scheme over the other one that had a better feel, and I liked how the angled set of arrows had the outline.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Prime Wide — No surprise here. I wanted to put this one on the same background I've been using. And I updated my intro animation for videos using this version as well, which you'll notice if you've seen the video section as well.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Zero Wide — And predictably, of course, updated onto the same background. That should have been obvious at this point.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Flesh — As with the origin of the design, I incorporated the help of AI with this one. Because of the fact that the circuit traces also look like tentacles, I had it render a version of this that looked like an octopus, except for with the exact form of the symbol. I then took and recolorized everything to match my primary symbol. Lots of layer effects, blending effects, gradients, shadows, strokes, color overlays, and a chaos field background with multiple gradients at different angles and blending effects to give the effect you see.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Flesh 2 — And then I was curious about a border, which originally was just me with an Apple Pencil on my iPad drawing around. But then I thought, what if it was also octopus limbs? So I had the AI generate that, and then did the overlays and effects that I liked.

Chaos Circuit Eye | Omega Flesh Wide — Going into variations on a theme, bringing back the background circuitry, but keeping the chaos field and the background plus texture overlays. Starting to develop a different aesthetic for this particular incarnation.

GPT-0Ω

I've touched on it a bit in the video page, and I'm touching on it a bit here, but everything about what this Custom GPT is capable of doing has only grown in capacity the more I have developed ideas about it, even in the development of the existence of this very website. This gallery isn't as much about what it does, but about how the logo looks, as a static object used to represent what it is. The properties it takes from The Chaos System, the very GPT I partnered with to create it, and where aspects of its logo were derived from, and how its inherent purpose and meaning are embedded in the logo itself.

From the beginning (zero) to the ending (omega) of this process, it will connect you (circuit traces/tentacles reaching out) with the ideas neccesary to give you the knowledge needed to build a Custom GPT for yourself. With help of course!

There will be a much deeper dive into the concepts that are built into the functionality of this custom GPT when you get to the AI page. So, please continue your journey and check out this simple reveal of these treatments of the static logo I created for it for now and as more is revealed, ideally these primers will seed enough into your brain that when it's time to go deep into this idea, it'll be far less intimidating to absorb what will be presented.

Logos

Logos are hard. Maybe some of the hardest things to come up with, design-wise, that there are. The most effective ones are the simplest ones. The ones that leave an impression, that take just a split second to recognize, and stick with you. The people who design some of the most iconic logos in the world are some of the most well-paid graphic designers and artists that have ever existed. I’m a slightly different kind of animal when it comes to approaching logo design.

I've tried making logos for other people when I didn't really fully grasp what they were trying to get across. I realized that I probably should take a bit of a different approach to understanding what it is that they're looking for. Kind of like something I have a knack for, and that's a counseling approach. Get them to talk, get them to dig deep into the meaning that they want. Get them to build all of the associations that what it is their business or idea is. And slowly begin to build a kind of map with words and whatever tools are necessary, and bring these ideas together until what the logo should be ends up emerging as a function of what that is attempting to communicate.

That said, these are all logos I made for my own projects. What I find most fascinating is that these didn't really take a lot of effort to build, conceptually. One was partially collaborative (the Pan’s Chaos logo), but because I was involved in that operation as a partner, and began as a close friend to them, I was able to kind of dig into the concept pretty readily and come up with something far better than I initially expected. With the first one, my own personal logo, in a way it's still my favorite. But it's pretty complicated. That may also be because it also represents the meaning of life, and a literal theory of everything, the idea of binary-association and chaos-theory.

But overall, I like logos & symbols and how they affect the human psyche. I like them as symbols for people or companies. And of course, in this gallery I'm only showing the most basic versions. This is just the stripped version of the logos (the word) in isolation, the basic premise, one color, to show the essential form every logo has to be able to exist in before any other representation of what it could end up being is created. You've already seen some of these. You will see the rest of these represented elsewhere, if not. I just wanted to put all of these together in their most basic form, in one place as well, because there's a different kind of significance in this kind of gallery.

These are in order chronologically, so you can see a kind of movement back and forth between simplicity and complexity. Will I make many more? I don't know. This is 30 years plus of logo creation. Maybe I'll try to take on building some for another person again and see if I'm successful next time. Or maybe I'll find other ventures or apps or nodes or projects for the various things that ideas like The Chaos System will end up needing as a part of itself. I'm certainly not closed to it...

Operation Noise Toaster

One of the two main projects that I've used my audio system 'The Chaos system' for, is 'Operation Noise Toaster'. Meeting up with a couple of people in the community initially to discuss the idea, we decided to start a monthly event. The philosophy for me was that I wanted to be able to offer up to other people in the local arts community in Phoenix in general, the ability to play on one of the most impressive sound systems that they would ever get to access for live audio (I'm sure this is starting to sound familiar, as it was also stated in either one or two other ways on the video page. Well, this is an obvious reflection of that same sentiment related to the same event). As you now probably understand, It is important to me to be able to give back with the equipment that I have as much as use it for just myself.

In these galleries, we see the evolution of a very different kind of logo concept, something that certainly started far more complicated than I would have thought would normally make sense. However, a funny thing also can happen in logo development. As you put on more shows, as you develop more treatments of what that logo can look like, as you attempt to simplify it down to its most basic version, it begins to, in effect, build in its own sense and understanding into itself, because, as is especially the case here, it became a reflection of what the community was doing with the sound system itself and the logo is the reflection of that use.

It's an experimental noise event. We use the word toaster as a part of it, plus make it sound official and give it some chutzpah and oomph by attaching the word operation to the beginning of it. And then I go to work translating quite literally different elements of what the words are representing, noise and a toaster, and figuring out what that should look like. There are two galleries here. One is pretty small, but neat, and the other is an exercise in extreme treatment expression. You see if this logo ended up meeting up to the job it had or not, and judge that for yourself.

Logo Variations

The Operation Noise Toaster logo. It's a strange one to try to figure out how to design. It was, as you can tell, very attractive to go as literally as possible. A toaster with toast made out of noise! But I knew eventually I would have to translate it into a one-color image because if a logo isn't reducible to one color, then it can't be used on all different kinds of print media. It's a literal fundamental requirement of any logo to pass this capacity test.

I'd say out of all the logos that you saw in the previous logo gallery, this one certainly pushes the boundaries a bit further than others for this reducibility. But ultimately, I think it ends up achieving the goal it was designed for.

So here's how my evolution went. This shorter gallery is just to show some of the basics of the logo evolution. It went pretty quickly, with the last couple in this gallery being a bit more playful and brining in external symbol presense it has to share space with, but I think they are actually the most representative of the feeling i was most looking for it to give me.

It should probably also be noted that there were actually quite a few other animation treatments that were done outside of the video and static ones you've already seen that were used on Facebook and in web design that aren't represented here. This is due to the fact that I think the basic premise and all of the ways that I went about expressing it were all effectively through the use of some kind of static, and repeatedly showing you various incarnations and formats for the same kind of expression would probably be more visually assaulting than it would be helpful in understanding the evolution of the design and its use.

ONT Video Thumbnails

In this gallery we have an ass-load (an officially recognized measurement, I assure you) of treatments of the logo. These are a mixture of whole show thumbnails and individual artist thumbnails. Any kind of aesthetic I was developing in my post-processing formulation for the video editing that I was doing to give my part creatively to the output for the show was then translated into a thumbnail for that event and for that artist or specific performace (if it was more that one artist).

I kept trying to do something different every time. Some of them are more hit, some of them are more miss, but it's pretty cool to see all the variations. Every one of these were created on an iPad Pro using Affinity Designer with or with the help of an Apple Pencil. I limited myself to that on purpose to learn something other than exclusively Photoshop. I'm mostly satisfied with the results. Let's see if you are.

As a note regarding the captions: Again, when it comes to the way that I develop processes for any given piece of work, or in this case, large set of treatments for the same logo, when I pull from my archives and bring up all of these variations, I have no way of telling you exactly what it was that I did to create any one of these. There certainly are obvious things that I could point out if I wanted to, but they're the same thing anyone who understands tools like Affinity Designer, Photoshop, Illustrator, Pixelmator, etc., understands about what you can do in most graphic design and illustration programs. That being the case, these all have the same exact comment repeated throughout all of them. I just don't see the point in trying to invent a different caption for each one when I would quite literally be pulling it out of nowhere, and it would do nothing in particular to help with a description of what exactly it is that I used to accomplish each of these looks. What might actually be more helpful is figuring out which event each one of these is associated with. That could be something I might throw into each caption at some point, but it's not currently in there.

Chaos

The oldest of the chaos art. A lot of this gallery shows Photoshop work from way, way, way back in the day, 30 years ago plus. A lot of process and development photos I added into this one as well. I realized it would make more sense to see how I went from my simplistic understanding to more advanced layering and compositing. And there's a pretty big time span covered overall in all of these galleries, all the way up until the 2010s. So this is 30 years worth of chaos-based art that isn't thematically in a different section.

1. Out of the various forms of what people were into when it came to the idea of chaos, one quote I always liked, and what I like to call definition 1: You might say, is that chaos is "the vacant, unfathomable void from which everything arose". Basically, the primordial chaos that the universe was formed from, a creation space.

2. ,Of course Chaos Theory itself, which in this section I might call definition 2: What can effectively be described as a process whereby, in a universe with an arrow of time defined by the second law of thermodynamics and the fact that entropy is always increasing, chaos is an engine that can create complexity from that entropy engine and reformulate it into something, anything from weather to life itself. Because, as is understood in science, yes, in the overall system, entropy does and has to necessarily always increase inside of that greater system. However by borrowing energy from the greater system, you can create, in smaller systems using this fantastic capability of chaos, something which does not always increase in entropy. There is no contradiction here, overall entropy does exacctly what it must. There are the other more pop culture understandings as well, which I do appreciate, like the butterfly effect. Also, the simple scientific understanding of initial conditions and the complete impossibility to predict what the outcome will be. These are things that go towards creating a universe that isn't rigid and mechanistic, without any life or variation. It's something that nature itself found, that fully obeys the laws of physics, and yet is able to accomplish something seemingly completely improbable. It's an amazing idea.

3. Finally, what I’ve come to realize has greater importance to others than it has enough substance to me to be meaningful enough to care all that much about could called definition 3: Chaos Magick, is another one some are very into. I find that one a bit flippant and less than responsible than i’d prefer, I guess. A bit, I don't know. Non-committal. From what I gather, it makes a very different kind of reality claim, and that is that all belief is valid, and you can choose to inhabit whatever belief serves the purpose or serves a function to get you to whatever you need to understand about the nature of how to accomplish whatever purpose or task it is that you need to.

First of all, it ignores something fundamental about human nature. You can't halfway believe in something. Sure, you can be in the process of believing, but ultimately, if the function of a belief as expressed in Chaos Magick is that you're fully taking on "temporarily" the entirety of that belief in order to gain whatever power it's supposed to give you, then you necessarily, during that time period, must actually believe it, fully. I am absolutely not convinced any human is capable of such a thing. I'm not saying that they can't delude themselves into thinking they believe in it, or believe it enough. Maybe that's all that's required. Maybe that's as much as is necessary in order to engage in Chaos Magick. I don't know. It just feels and looks on the face of it to appear to be incoherent, honestly.

I've certainly had people who would really have preferred that I respected them for their engagement with Chaos Magick. Honestly, it kind of ended up doing the opposite. They were making claims about their own capabilities that I just don't think they were capable of (and not because them specifically, because human nature regarding how belief actually works), even if they had convinced themselves they were. That's a difficult thing for me to respect. And it's kind of made me, while maybe fascinated with the idea, never really interested in engaging with it beyond an aesthetic.

I also happen to not be a very big fan of belief itself. That includes ideology, religion, hard political affiliation, basically attachment to any rigid kind of worldview that excludes other ways of understanding reality for the sake of the belief itself. While, when it comes to in-group connection, it can act to increase survival probability within a group that has specific beliefs. In general, when that isn't necessary, the only thing I find that it really does for a human is fool them into thinking the world is something that it isn't. Yet, you know, on an entirely different level, that in and of itself can act as a security blanket against uncertainty and the cruel reality of the universe and what it is.

Regardless, it is not representative of what is actually the case, and I don't know how to connect myself with something like that anymore. I've spent way too much time in my life, because of my own necessary survival strategy that I had to develop entirely independently, that these kinds of ideas never ended up actually being useful in reconstructing what I needed to after going through the dismantling that I had to in order to survive the previous experiences that I'd been through. Delusion always ends up leading to the creation of new false truths that end up falling apart and causing more trauma. The ultimate way around this is to avoid anything that attempts to veer in any kind of a direction towards preference instead of reality. Even though I'm painfully aware that reality itself is not something directly or fully accessible to us as humans. The pursuit of it and the tools that I've developed because of that pursuit are the only 100% reliable way that I've been able to repeatedly use the same survival strategy and not just dig myself back into the same holes over and over again.

~

Either way in general, the idea of “Chaos” as a concept, has stuck with me, and has been something I have attached myself to symbolically and express as a part of myself and my identity through much of my art. I think partially even as a minor filter.

Ideas like Chaos Theory really lent themselves to understanding how complexity in the universe arises, how entropy and equilibrium and the heat death of the universe and that ultimate fate, and the energy created by it, are what chaos uses to create complex systems and life as we know it. When you really dig into chaos, and you're not just stuck with the layman's view, it's something that you can go very deep with, and it can explain a lot about the universe around you.

And with all that ridiculous definitioning aside, let's move into how I've used this symbol in quite a lot of the artwork that I've created over the years...

The 90’s

This first chaos gallery shows mostly early works, with one from relatively recently (as in out of place technically), in a place that thematically doesn't really belong anywhere else. I mean, I could have put all those jester ones in their own series, but since I don't have the copyright on that, I didn't think that was appropriate. And this particular chaos symbol, up until the last two, isn't one that I came up with the original design for, but I did use it for a long time. As you can see in the penultimate one, that is one of the symbols you saw in my first logo. And in the last one, that's a symbol that will be upcoming. Lots of development, how to put versions of the symbology in different pieces and give the imagery some impact. I think it's a pretty powerful symbol with a lot of meaning and power.

Chaotic Nuclear AIDS — This is the original version of the chaos system design that I've used extensively. It was a design I got from somebody else, but it was so basic that I didn't see a problem using it in my artwork. I'm not even sure he originated it. This is very early Photoshop work, when I was still discovering how it worked. An AIDS virus in the middle, blobby skulls from the Nin video closer, nuclear bombs, and four variations with four background variations. Simple, impactful, striking imagery.

Chaos Web Template — Using the same chaos symbol, except for proportional, this is actually a web interface design with four subcategories and an info link in the middle. What's most fascinating is that once I learned about the fact that SVGs can be layered because they're XML-based and use naming conventions, layer names, as identifiers for different objects in the file, I could create an entire interface paradigm with a single SVG file. This is what turned into the current homepage paradigm. A single SVG that's under one megabyte and contains all the data necessary to bring all of those layers in and out with JavaScript and CSS applied on top to do all of the controlling.

Chaos Web Template New — A bit of a slicker variation of the previous one. Again, these are very early days in Photoshop. I was still learning, still developing my skills, understanding how everything worked. The two monitors that I had connected up to my Power Mac 9100/80AV, were 832 by 624 and 640 by 480. But I used what I had. Really, the efforts to make it slicker were, in effect, to try to compensate for the lack of interface technology and web coding at the time. By making it look more gorgeous, I was hoping it would make up for the fact that the only thing it could do at the most was change the state of the background rollover.

Jester Chaos — Very early stages of understanding of Photoshop. But you'll see an interesting progression. I was taking printing and graphics in high school in the 90s, and found this jester in a skater magazine, got it scanned, and decided to use it in some artwork. Plus the chaos symbol in the background, a sphereized version with some bricks as a pattern and a gradient in the back. Just learning how it works.

Jester Chaos Fire — The first version of Jester Chaos Fire. Developing my skills, my taste, my aesthetic. Tripled the jesters. Used a chaos symbol for a texture across the background. All red and black. Bit of white. It's progressing.

Chaos Fire — It didn't take long for me to develop a feel for Photoshop and start coming up with a look that was a lot more interesting, refined, with a higher attention to detail. And we see the chaos symbol replicated as a texture on top of a background with clouds overlaid, colors replacing the originals, and of course an outline of a twisted chaos symbol in the middle. The aesthetics are right in line with the feeling I was trying to get across.

Jester Chaos Fire II — And I learned something. Sometimes developing objects completely separately in their own space makes a big difference. Those egg-shaped jester skull sphere things, which were in another gallery, and then the twisted chaos fire objects which I duplicated that you saw in the previous image, and then some background elements, textures, clouds as the separator of red and black, and the central large sphere. A continuation of skill development.

binary-duality Snail — Bad breakups have always been an incredible inspiration for me artistically. A very long relationship I had in my twenties was in a bad place at this time, and we were separated. And this was a strange scene that I created to kind of show a sense of my feeling of abandonment. An interesting juxtaposition of elements in ways that I don't think I've ever replicated before or since.

binary⁃chaos

binary-chaos. Short for binary-association & chaos-theory. My theory of everything. A positive and negative symbol, an infinity symbol, a double pentagram, and a chaos star around the that, with the minor arrows as the astrological signs for the gender binary (a real and fundamental aspect of what it means to understand basic truth regarding the nature of the human animal). Actually, you'll notice in the early ones, they were all arrows, but I realized if I was going to fully pull off the duality aspect that I was going for, and I was going continue to go with a ring in those arrows, it would make sense to find some kind of symbology that would represent the idea much more specifically, and so that got developed and borrowed the obvious symbol from western astrology (not because I believe in it, because it’s a useful symbol). And these are four versions, developed through skill and time. The progression is in order, and even the earliest one I still think looks interesting and holds up to scrutiny.

What does this symbol actually mean? As far as I can tell, there is nothing I have found in the universe that this symbol cannot describe. It's the idea that using the concept of binary forces and chaos theory, everything that exists in the universe, every way it exists, every way it connects, every way it interacts, every way it creates, every way it destroys, can all be understood as binary-association & chaos-theory.

I'd have to go through a relatively long philosophical and scientific talk with someone in person to dig into the details of that in a way that can if successful break a persons grip on reality (at least temporarily). But let's just say, at the core of it was a strange revelation about the idea that the universe itself exists in a state between nothing and something, existence and non-existence, and that this tension itself is what makes all of existence possible. Not only possible, but that every possible thing that can happen has to happen. In effect, the universe we are in now is what happens when all of the possibilities that cancel each other out are eliminated and we're left with the remainder. So you can see, there's a lot embedded in this symbol.

Will I ever attempt to fully de-abstract the nature of this idea? I don't know really, because theories of everything end up being pretty much unfalsifiable, and therefore, not exactly usable in real life. So, I don't really need it to be understood at that level. It's not a belief system that I constantly attach myself to and re-acknowledge whenever I need to find security about my place in the universe. It's just an understanding I came to at one point that completely shattered what the entire universe was for me, and allowed for a complete rebuilding of everything I had ever understood previously. I'd say that is an incredibly impactful thing to have happen to anyone. This is what that symbol looks like...

binary-chaos | Composite — Still very early days in Photoshop, but as you saw with the last gallery, my game was really upping at this point, using the binary-chaos symbol in the center, green clouds, and the same blob skull textured background in purple with an organically drawn edge that was affected with double emboss, and a plastic-wrapped fiery background at the edges. Quite impactful.

binary-duality — In the previous picture, you couldn't see the left side. And one thing that was hidden is that the astrological symbols on the minor arrows were actually arrows. In this one, I rebuilt the symbol from scratch and corrected that, and put the feminine version on that side, which is appropriate in astrology. I'm not a big fan of astrology, but the symbology is what matters.

3D Chaos

The thing that inspired me to learn how to use Ray Dream Designer back in the day was a desire to build a 3D chaos symbol out of the version of the symbol that I learned how to make from a friend. And so, I did. And this is it. I've used these in a number of other pieces of artwork, as you've seen already in the 3D section, and actually in the next gallery as well. And it'll be in yet another.

At a later point, I even made a variation of this into two different sculptures and brought the concept into the real world. It's quite an object. You’ll see what I mean later.

3D Chaos — I finally figured out how to get the angle of the minor arrows to match up, and came up with this, using stone for the major arrows, and what was probably a cloud texture in black and green for the minor arrows. And this time, floating in space with a starfield background. I thought this was awesome.

3D Chaos | Fire — A variation on a theme. Scouring the internet to find a good image of fire. It may have been nuclear fire. Not sure. But used it as the texture for the 3D Chaos symbol. This one will make an appearance in the next gallery as well, along with the next one.

3D Chaos | Ice — Using the exact same fire texture as the previous, but turning it to blue and using a plastic wrap to give it more of an ice-like appearance, I came up with this variation. Another instance of duality representation, that being fire and ice.

3D Chaos | Green & Purple — In this treatment, I was curious about transparency. So I used my two favorite colors, green and purple. I was very delighted with the result.

Radioactive Chaos

A strange exploration. Pretty dark themes. Nuclear energy, radiation, mutation, chaos, death. Infinity symbols (one of my other favorite symbols along with the number 8, for obvious reasons). And the ubiquitous cloud texture that I am a fan of using because of its organic nature. I even used it in some of the videos that you’ve already seen in that area of the site.

But this one in particular, after I'd created the original, I always wanted to, when I had the capability, to build a newer version at a much higher quality level and literal size. I did. I talk more about that in the comments of each image.

This updated version, or one of the variations I did of it, also showed up in a gallery previously as part of one of my shows during the time when I was putting my art in a number of galleries, along with the Cult of Ego II pieces...

Radioactive Chaos — I always told myself I wanted to rebuild this one. So, probably 13, 14 years later, in the mid to late aughts, I did. I added the double pentagram in the center with the double-stacked chaos symbol, some binary code, likely says chaos, the same happy face, nuclear symbol, and as I said, those two fire and ice chaos symbols on the sides. Most other elements are the same, with some graphics added, and a scorpion that I found (not what I really wanted, but it worked. I'd prefer a 3D modeled mutant bug, but I didn't have those skills).

Pan's Chaos

So the full story of the development of this particular logo... When I got The Chaos System sound system initially, my friend Joe wanted to partner up with me to create a production company called Pan Productions. And as with any company, one wants to have a respectable logo. As at the core of this company was 'The Chaos System', it only made sense to integrate The Chaos System logo into the logo of this company as well. Joe was a big fan of the god Pan, he even went by the nickname Dagger Pan. And so I wanted to come up with a version of a logo that added in the attributes and symbology of the Pan concept as how the logo was designed.

It's strange. I wouldn't have really thought that I would have come up with something like this as easily as I did. But it just felt right, made sense, and here it is. You’ve already experienced an animated version of this same logo on the Video page.

A note about the cat's eye... I really wanted to go with a goat's eye because that is what the god Pan, represents: A humanoid goat man-god. But try to take a look at a goat's eye and tell me how you would represent that in a one-color graphic. It's an amorphous rectangle. It really doesn't have much of a shape, and therefore not much of an impact as far as logos go. So I proposed the idea of using the cat's eye instead. A universally appreciated pupil shape that's incredibly simple, yet impactful and symbolically much more powerful. He was okay with my reasoning. And this is, ultimately, what it was that I ended up creating. An attempt to represent all of the attributes I thought were connected to the idea of the god Pan, plus The Chaos System logo, and a variation on what kind of eye this incarnation was going to have.

I think it not only makes this logo impactful, just as with Chaos Circuit Eye, the newest version of The Chaos System logo, it also gives life to this logo. It makes it feel like it has real presence. And that is not an easy thing to accomplish in a logo. You probably now also understand why I carried that cat eye backward into the Chaos System logo itself in its newest incarnation. Because in combination with those tentacles, or circuit traces, depending on how one wants to interpret it, it has that same kind of presence. It's looking at you.

You may also be wondering why it's now called Pan's Chaos. I think I mentioned some of this in the comments of these images, but it was changed after Joe died a couple years ago. It was a concept that him and I talked about for how to do performance, how to bring bands together. And to me it felt more appropriate, and I have plans for it in the future which you can read a bit about in the PDF you'll find on the audio page...

Pan's Chaos Fire — Same idea with the double inversion, but instead of black and white, black and fire. I was just trying out some options. Bit of a drop shadow to give it a little bit of depth.

Pan's Chaos Chrome 02 — A different chrome effect with a chaos field. The chaos field having a treatment of gradients, outlines, and another gradient on top at different angles with blending effects to give it a feeling of depth and dimension.

Pan's Chaos Chrome 03 — Another chrome treatment. Slightly different style. For a number of these going on in the gallery, the description will simply say that, unless something is significantly different. Same for the ones with the chaos field background, as they're all the same. They're just variations. I like them, so I kept them, and I'm showing them.

Pan's Chaos Chrome 04 — Another chrome treatment. Slightly different style.

Pan's Chaos Chrome 05 — Another chrome treatment. Slightly different style.

Pan's Chaos Chrome 06 — Another chrome treatment. Slightly different style.

Pan's Chaos Chrome 07 — Another chrome treatment. Slightly different style.

Pan's Chaos Chrome | Chrome Glow — Another chrome treatment. Slightly different style. This time with a bit of a glow to it, for another variation.

Pan's Chaos | Chrome 8 | Stained Glass — My favorite number has always been eight, and for some reason I thought to put that in the center of this, on top of the eye. Plus I did a little stained glass texture, a Photoshop standard. Again, just another variation. There are a couple more like this, using the eight.

Pan's Chaos | Chrome 8 - 02 — And just stick with the theme from before, adding in the chaos field in the background. The center a little bit more stark, but still a bunch of purple in there, and chromed out as well.

Pan's Chaos | Halftone — I've always been a massive fan of halftones. And to get a halftone to work on an object that's just one color requires that you use a gradient in order for it to be interesting. You've seen halftones previously in my work, and you will see them in other work. And this is an interesting translation.

Pan's Chaos | Halftone Outline Fire — Another thing I really like to do with halftones is work with their stroke or outline and affect that. And that's what this is, using a bit of a fire overlay (reds, oranges, and yellows). Just another interesting treatment.

Pan Productions | Event Photos

Here we have the photo documentation from the different events that were put on with The Chaos System as a part of 'Pan Productions'. Many different types of events at different places. This was way in the beginning, first experiences. Some of these are the very first show that we ever did with this system. Definitely holds a lot of memories there.

And Joe, as I think I mentioned, who was my partner and is in a few of these photos with the Pan's Chaos logo on a red t-shirt, has (as mentioned) died and left a big hole in my life. But these are fantastic memories, and I'm glad to be offering them up to show the world.

For now, I won't be commenting on each individual photo, as there's a lot to comment on. But I may at some point begin filling them in. Click anywhere on the bar below to open up and view the gallery.

Pan Productions | Event Photos Accordion

Pan's Chaos | Pan Productions | Event Photos

©haos Gallery

©haos Gallery represents one of the most amazing, intense, and insane experiences I've had in my life, largely centered around the same relationship mentioned before with the one in the Cult of Ego 'Obsession' gallery. You've already seen both of these logos in their most basic form in the logo section as well. Now we'll see how I decided to interpret and treat these in different ways for this logo. Otherwise, this section is a mixture of a number of things that were developed graphically and photographically for ©haos, the gallery, with some other information as well.

An interesting lesson that I learned with this experiment as well was not to use things like a copyright symbol as a part of your name/logo, because it's incredibly difficult to type out, and search engines don't see it. While I thought it was clever at the time, and still do to a degree, it wasn't as prudent as one would want it to be. It defeated a lot of things that would have been helpful otherwise. I think in a lot of things, we just started spelling it normally so it would show up more easily and be searchable. But hey, experiment. See what hits the wall. Throw away what doesn’t stick. Or at least modify so that it’s not just stupid 😉.

What can I say? Moving from The Firehouse and opening one's own gallery in and of itself is kind of a big deal. Booking bands, having full art shows every month, all kinds of separate parties. Organizing and running all of it ourselves (mostly me). It was very fun, very intense, and a weird time that is going to basically be impossible to forget.

Logo

All the treatments of the ©haos Gallery logo. A fun one to make. I even did a giant stencil of it on the side of the gallery of the basic version, painted in glow-in-the-dark paint, with a blacklight hung up above it. And I put a sign up front, made out of wood, cut out with glow-in-the-dark paint, painted all on the inside of it, with black lights in it. It was actually kind of subtle, but very cool looking.

Most of these have their own stories behind them. So, check out the images and see what they have to say in the captions they contain...

Business Cards

Not a huge amount to say here, but these are the business cards of the two who ended up being the primaries, definitely the more dominant partners of the gallery, and some of the design work that I did. I'd still rock a business card that looks like this, although I would probably have The Chaos System logo instead. But who knows? It's still my logo. It's still pretty cool. I don’t hate anything about it.

©haos BC | Glen Woodford — Ah, so this is the first business card version I made for myself, using my legal last name. A simple design. I like it quite a lot, with the flame pants and the corona and the chaos field background.

©haos BC | Mecca Jean — And here's the full business card for Mecca Gene, my partner. Same design, nice and simple, with cool artwork on one side.

©haos BC | Glen Allan — And my favorite treatment used on a version of the card where I decided to stop using my last name as the name people know me by. So I switched over to my middle name, which I've stuck to ever since. Nothing against my family. It just sounds way too English. Purple and green and black. My favorite palette for art.

Vinyl Show

©haos was in downtown Phoenix right in the Arts District, right below 5th Street and off to the side, with an empty lot between us. And right across the lot was the very popular coffee shop and collective space called Conspire. At one point, Conspire had acquired a bunch of cardboard boxes full of 10 & 12-inch records that they were just giving away. So I grabbed a bunch of them, and we came up with the concept for a show, where we put out a call on Facebook to a bunch of artists in the community and said, hey, come by, pick up an album, and put some art on it, whatever kind you want. This is that entire show.

Initially, I was only going to show the three pieces that I created for the show. But my body of work is to show what I've done creatively through art and graphic design expression, and the presentation here for this gallery show that we put together is something that I put together and designed, including digitally cutting out every single vinyl piece that was submitted to be put in the show, which was not easy in every case. So have a look at a collection of artwork made by many different artists, all presented in a format I designed as a presentation for all of their works to be visible online. So what this really shows off is a combination of my promotional skills in presenting for the art space that we had established, photography and capturing the artwork in as archival a way as I could at the time, plus my Photoshop skills cutting out the pieces so they could be presented to the public in an online gallery for those who weren’t local or couldn’t get to the gallery for the show.

The vinyl show was a very cool one, a cool idea, and I think we had some pretty awesome submissions. Some are better than others, but I'm not going to say which are which. I will say though that other than mine, because whether it's weird or not, I like what I make the most. I also really enjoy that somebody thought to make the spider adapter for a 45 out of a 12-inch record. Not only that, but made two of them. That's pretty freaking rad. There are others I like most as well, but I’m not here to create a bias tier list, so i’m not expressing any more opinions outside of what you’ll find in the comments of each piece’s caption.

Dali! — Piece by Charles Nissen, Mixed Media. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together. Charles also had his own solo show at Chaos Gallery during the year that we had it open.

Abendarian Reverie — Piece by Cherise Cappella, Acrylic on Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Pinwheels — Piece by Cherise Cappella, Acrylic on Record. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

The Michael I Knew — Piece by Cone, Collage. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together. This is actually my mom's piece. She's a bit of a fan of collage work, and while I would not call this one of her most technically proficient ones, it is still interesting enough and worked well with the format.

ART — TRANSLATION FROM THE FRENCH OF JEAN-LOUIS INCOGNITEAU. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together. This one is from Danny, my mom's husband. Kind of a making fun of art, art piece. He's not really known much to be an artist, so I think he was participating in as crude a way as he could. He doesn't lack creativity. He is a musician, but this was his fuck you, I guess, to pretentiousness in art.

45 RPM — Effie Bouras, Cut Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together. I think this and the other one like it are absolutely a genius take on using a piece of a vinyl album to make a piece of artwork. I absolutely love this.

45 RPM [Orange] — Effie Bouras, Cut Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together. My favorite of the two. It just looks rad. And the fact that it's slightly transparent is great, which I replicated when I put it into this presentation, as you can see the chaos logos through it, even though this was done in Photoshop.

Rewound — Effie Bouras. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Technicolor Pond — Elizabeth Cappella, Acrylic on Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Solipsist | Universe — Glen / judas, Digital Art on Vinyl. Using one of the images that you first saw in the Cult of II, 'Obsession' gallery, we again have Solipsist Universe. This time, the treatment is on a record. The records mentioned in the previous gallery section. And this is how I laid out all of the records for the show to show off after the show online.

Oct — Janey Monster, Spray Paint. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Success — Janey Monster, Acrylic on Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

— Jenny Cash. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Helping Hand — Kerry Kennedy, Mixed Linocut Print . Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

WLP — Kerry Kennedy, Mixed Linocut Print.Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Cocktales — Liz Bryant, Acrylic on Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Release Me — Mecca Jean, Pen, Glue, Glitter. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together. If there's one thing I have to be open about when it came to Mecca, I was never honest about the fact that she kind of sucks as an artist. She's actually only come up with one thing that I thought was fantastic, and apparently it was entirely a fluke. But otherwise, I've never really liked any of her stuff. It looks half-assed and childish, but those aren't the kind of things that you tell somebody that you're banging constantly and trying to run an art gallery with.

Kait and the Octopus — Neal Johnson, Photography on Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together. This is the other piece that I mentioned that I assisted with from my friend at the time, Neal Johnson. I assume I just printed one of his photographs in whatever method I was using to print the other ones I put on my three pieces and applied it to the record and just put the credit in his name. It didn't need to be known at the time that I was the one who actually created the gallery piece for him. It was his photograph, and I think it looked awesome.

Idol - Cool — Sue Lawrence, Vinyl Mixed Media. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Idol - Hot — Sue Lawrence, Vinyl Mixed Media. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Rebel Yell — Sue Lawrence, Vinyl Mixed Media. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Skull - Multicolored — Sue Lawrence, Turntable Assemblage. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Wax — Sue Lawrence, Wax & Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Bill Hicks — The Mighty Human Race, Spray Paint. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Vintage Sewing Machine — The Mighty Human Race, Spray Paint. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Unknown Device 13c — Ziggy Kennedy, Sharpie / Acrylic, Vinyl. Part of the vinyl show, Chaos Gallery, shown in 2009 as a group show that I composed and put together.

Events & Info

This was the print collateral for the gallery. Primarily black and white, so that things are cheap to print, and so that you can print on colored paper. I think I was still developing a sense of what I wanted things to look like for a space that was mine, since, up until this point, pretty much everything I had been involved with was already branded and designed to some degree by other people, or I had worked for companies doing graphic design, which obviously means that I'm building artwork for clients.

This is the first art space that was really 'mine'. Of course, as a part of a partnership, but still mine. So, the expression of design changes over time, and when it comes to the detail and refinement in the design, it expresses differently when it really is mine. I absolutely swear when I started that sentence I had no intention of it rhyming that way. I don't know if it's a good thing or not, but now you're stuck with that.

It's basic, it's informational, it's clean. I think I'm a better designer now, but I still like and fully appreciate where I was at when I designed it.

©haos Info Tag — One of the things that I created for print to have on display in the gallery and hand out with some definitions and descriptions of what the gallery was about. All of our print material was done in black and white, because printing is expensive, and we were poor. And to make it interesting, we could then print it on whatever color paper we wanted to.

©haos 1st Ad Front — Basically the same thing as the last, except for used as one side of a double-sided ad for the gallery for upcoming shows. Our first one.

©haos 2nd Ad Back — Our second ad, same design. Check out the events on these if you like. Get an interesting idea of the kinds of things we did.

©haos 3rd Ad Back — And one more, showing a lot of repeated event types, which makes sense, with changes where they matter, and information updated for each event.

Beading Frenzy — For a period of time, there was a beading and metalsmith group that would come to the gallery to work on their jewelry. It's a skill that I have had surround me from a number of people throughout my life, and this is the ad that I created for it.

Art is Therapy — An ultra-simple graphic. My partner Mecca had requested some kind of a graphic that represented what she thought of as art and therapy mixed. As somebody with publicly self-proclaimed psychiatric issues, who has also worked in the psychiatric field, I believe her thought was to combine the concept of pills and art therapy. Not sure it was the best way to go, but I did it anyway.

Amped | Word — Our mildly successful attempt at a open mic / experimental sound event. We definitely had some interesting times, but I would for sure end up going on to create a much more successful event of this type with 'Operation Noise Toaster', which you can check out in the video section.

©haos Sign

So this is a gallery of some of the construction of me putting together a sign for ©haos (that I breifly mentioned elswhere in this section overall). Technically speaking, this wasn't legal to do, as Phoenix has quite strict sign laws. So, in order to avoid any problems, I built it to be a bit understated, yet still distinct. It was only hung, so no permanent mounting, and using black lights and a fluorescently responsive backdrop meant that it wasn't going to attract too much attention. We wanted a sign for the place of some sort, so this is what I ended up putting together. I quite like the way it came out.

It was not very bright, but I don't think it needed to be. This is when social media really started taking off, and I was promoting the hell out of this gallery with tons of documenting and posting on Facebook. We never had any problems keeping the place busy, so whether or not the sign actually had anything to do with that or not is kind of irrelevant.

Anyway, check out the short little process gallery here of me constructing a sign for my awesome gallery that I ran with a couple of other weirdos at around the year 2009.

©haos Gallery Sign — Like a weirdo, I decided I would model my sign and my work while wearing some goggles. Goes nicely with the flame pants, I guess. A mainstay for me at the time. I actually still have a pair of those. A new one. But yeah.

©haos Gallery Sign — Another modeling shot, framed a bit better, a little bit closer up. Those little edges coming around the small arrows were the most questionable part for sure. Luckily they never got knocked off or damaged, but having it out of people's ways, probably the secret to that.

©haos Gallery Sign — And a goofy version, a little bit of sideways holding with a little tongue out. You know, being an idiot human, as we do.

©haos Gallery Sign — Next phase of the build. Looks like I've got the back of it more or less built, or at least framed out, if not screwed together. There is still something I need to do to the back before it's fully all put together and adhered. And those gaps you see top and bottom are for things like cords and replacing light bulbs. So, bit of a utilitarian aspect to it.

©haos Gallery Sign — Looks like we've got the whole thing pretty much framed out, put together. I assume what I ended up doing was screwing it all together as is. I didn't really care about using glue and this kind of thing. And then the back I was just able to then unscrew in order to do treatment on it, which will come up in the following photos.

©haos Gallery Sign — And here is the treatment necessary for the back in order to accomplish the goal. The thing I was going for with this one was having black lights inside of the enclosure. And what you're seeing there is basically glow-in-the-dark paint or fluorescent paint. On the inside would be a black light constantly illuminating it for anyone who was out to the street to be able to see it as a sign for the gallery / artspace.

©haos Gallery Sign — Now it's night, and that's because paint needs to dry. So it was left out on top of the currently unused burn barrel, upside down, to do its thing in the Arizona heat. Gave it, I don't know, five or six hours, I think.

©haos Gallery Sign — And while the back was drying, the rest of it was also drying with black paint on it. Of course, the black would give the most contrast possible, as the thing is only being lit by black light, so it's not very bright.

©haos Gallery Sign — And there we have it. Dried and put together. It's a bit cool if I do say so myself. I know I mentioned those little spikes from the small arrows being problematic, but what else looks like it's a little bit fragile? Maybe the fact that entire C section in the middle is being held on just by the center of the letter H? Yeah, that's a bit precarious. I did use plywood, I think, for this. Not my normal MDF though, so it was more likely to hold together than it would have otherwise. Still.

©haos Gallery Sign — A little perspective angle there for it. And what looks like a cord going into the side, so maybe I remembered wrong and the holes that I created in the top and bottom are just for changing out the light bulb. I really don't remember. Whatever works.

©haos Gallery Sign — Opposite side perspective. Just getting some good shots of it before it's put up and mounted to the front of the house.

©haos Gallery Sign — A more or less top-down or front shot while it's laying down on its back. Kind of cool looking. Lots of shadows. I don't think that I could ever have used enough lights in it, though. But it did what it needed to.

©haos Gallery Sign — There you go. Hanging up on the front porch cage. A bit higher up so it's easier to see from a distance. That was officially the sign for our gallery.

©haos Gallery Sign — An obligatory nighttime shot, in order to give a bit of an understanding of how well it could be seen from a distance. Here would be probably halfway in the middle of the street, so about right about where a driver would be seeing it from.

©haos Gallery Sign — Another front shot. Little bit more light in the photo. It's still quite visible, even with all the street lights going.

©haos Gallery Sign — Here's a shot with a little bit less lighting, or at least a different setting on the camera. A bit clearer too. These older cameras did not have the best resolution on them, so, kind of need to get a bit closer to see it clearly. I think it looks great.

©haos Gallery Sign — A shot framed just to show the symbol itself, as best as the camera I had at the time was able to do so. Kind of looks like it's just floating in the dark.

©haos Gallery Sign — This was one of the primary photos for the gallery for social media. Shows the sign there on the porch cage, and on the front door, you also see another chaos symbol. And the reason why there's a diamond-shaped cutout in the middle of it is because that door just happened to have a peephole window there. So I customized that symbol to fit on that door, right around that section. Kind of miss that place.

Random ©haos

In a completely random order, here are photographic highlights from my time running, curating, organizing, and doing everything that I had to do with ©haos Gallery. As you can see, we had plenty of visitors. It was quite the social hub for a while. There are too many photos, at least initially, to comment on, so, what you see is what you get for the moment. Deal with it. Somehow I don't think it's going to put you in a bad place, so I think we're still gonna be okay.

It's more than likely that all of these photos at one point did exist online in one of my pages that had originally been associated with this gallery. Due to personal reasons, I ended up stripping out a lot of the content associated with this gallery because of the association it had with the aforementioned person, of course named 'Mecca'. And so while some of them may still exist on that page, this really is the best place to find all of the event photos associated with my time running this amazing gallery and experience.

Click on the accordion below to open up the gallery 😜.

Random ©haos Accordion

The Halftone Show

We often had group shows when I was living at The Firehouse, where the residents would put in their artwork, if they wanted to. You aren't always able to find other artists to come in, although often you can, but even then sometimes shows were reserved for us (the residents), which makes sense as kind of a fringe benefit of being a resident at a collective living space, gallery, performance venue, and store.

This is one I did, one series I did, of most of my roommates, with the last one being me.

As will, I'm sure, become more clear as you journey through the different galleries on this Design page, I am quite the fan of the use of halftones. I love how they work as a visual phenomena, and I've found many ways of bringing them into various pieces of art. I would tend to think the first place you saw this was in the Cult of Ego gallery, especially in the Obsession section. Regardless, it shows up everywhere.

Check out the comments for more specificity regarding each piece...

Record Head — When I was living at the Firehouse Gallery, which will come up again in the section on my professional work, and I mentioned in my video called 'Gallery of Works', we often had group shows. And in this one, I chose to focus on two elements. 1. Other members of the collective, 2. half-tones, while using elements from their personality, or what I thought to represent it. This is Daniel, and he was a DJ.

Whimsical — Another roommate at the firehouse named Pete, who was either currently or recently in a fling with a woman named Princess Anna. I took her body and put his head on it, and added a devil's tail, some horns, and a halo. I called it Whimsical, because recently we had done a show called Whimsical or Whimsy, and had an argument over if that even made sense. And so this was a little bit of a poke of fun at him.

Rock & Roll Alcoholic Death — Matt was one of my favorite people at the firehouse, and he liked to drink beer. And, honestly, I drank a lot of beer with him after work. He was also in a band called 'The Complainiacs' and had released a seven-inch record. I took a photo, cut that out, grabbed a photo of the beer, and a few images of him, and had the album pieces chopping through the beer. Kind of silly, kind of fun. I liked it.

The Archives

This section is basically where I'm putting all of the artwork that I don't really feel needs its own category. Some of the symbology will be in here that's in other sections. Some of it isn't. It's from all the way back in the 90s through till close to now. They all have their own story, and there's comments to read on all of them. But it's kind of a little mini-anthology, a progression through time. I split it up by ages, so to speak, which makes it interesting to see how different styles evolved and changed.

When I look at my own artwork, if I saw a lot of these pieces individually and at different times, and I didn't know who the artist was, I don't know that I would know that it was the same artist making all of them. I don't know that they have a feel or an identifiable style in that way. But when I look at all of them together, it does look like there's something about them that makes sense together. Maybe I'm just saying that because it's my work. I don't know.

What I can say is that with all of the artwork in this webpage, I don't really see much of anything like any of it out in the world. It's not that I think I'm special. I just think whatever techniques I've developed through self-teaching, through developing my own systems, through understanding how programs work, and how to dismantle imagery, iconography, people, objects, whatever it is, it's an interesting style. Or set of styles, whatever you want to call it.

I've also heard some people say that it's weird to like your own creations, I think in reference to music in particular. But I think that's ridiculously absurd. Isn't it the case that people make music that they would want to hear? I mean, I guess if you're purely commercial, that's not what you do. But that's always what I've done. I don't think I know what it means to create personal artwork only for other people, and do it in a way that I don't find attractive, therefore, outside of my aesthetic or style, that seems nonsensical and idiotic. So, this is what I've done, and the exact effort in the creation of every single one of these was to create something that I liked...

The 90’s

My early works. More examples. Still figuring out how to express the intensity that I'd always felt. Figuring out what symbology and iconography feels the most intense, gives the biggest impression, speaks the loudest, and trying to learn how to do it in the most refined way possible.

The earlier works, I still find pretty good. They were all, for the most part, on monitors no bigger than 832 by 624 pixels at the most. So I've had to upscale them to use them on modern systems, but it's still very much my aesthetic, and the upscaling, I don't think, did anything to destroy how the originals actually looked. I should know. I was the one that created them.

See what you think, read the comments...

Thinking — This is way back in the day. Early in my understanding of Photoshop, and this might be the first self-portrait I ever did. A photo somebody else took of me, smoking a cigarette, put into a background full of clouds, and affected with some kind of paintbrush effect. Simple, but I always liked the aesthetic.

One Dollar Glen — If you started at the beginning of this webpage and looked through the very first gallery, 'Cult of Ego I', this is the same image in the center, of me, that is in the one called 'Evil Incarnate'. I mentioned it would be in this one upcoming. In this one, I just take the place of George. If you want to see this animated, in the video section in my 'Gallery of Works', it is represented in there.

Glen Portrait — Using a photo of myself that I liked quite a lot, me with very long black hair, wearing red and black, and a pair of pants that I sewed myself, wearing moccasins that you can't see. I created a landscape in Bryce 3D, and then created a frame in Photoshop using four chaos symbols and the binary-chaos symbol (version 1), with some boundary edging effects. And with the center, in an attempt to blend in the two distinct spaces, I applied some kind of paintbrush effect. Not sure how effective it was, but it was something worth keeping.

Parental Advisory | Nuke Skulls — The idea that imagery or sound, music, could be something censorable, I found fascinating and offensive. And so I took that 'Parental Advisory Suggested' label, spherized it, added a nuclear bomb, and put skulls all over it.

Parental Advisory — I'd always loved the previous piece, but I was on my first computer at the time, so at a later point, I rebuilt it at a bit higher quality. Still, a commentary on the absurdity of telling people that they should or shouldn't be exposed to whatever they choose to be. Worth making a better version of it.

Skullz Jester Sphere — More early Photoshop days. Working with the jester that you've already seen previously in the Chaos section. Used in one of the pieces you saw in there as well. This is the separate piece in isolation.

Purple Cracked Jester — Learning to up my game a bit, using the same jester with the chaos symbol stretched wide and twisted a bit with some kind of swirly fire, wrapped on a sphere with a texture of cracked clay on top of a texture of clouds, and the background being clouds. The color palette, purple and fire. I knew I could never ultimately do anything with these pieces because I didn't own the copyright to the jester, but I still used it as a way to learn and advance my skills.

Rumplestiltskin — I've never been an illustrator, but for whatever reason I did learn this guy when I was in my pre-teens. And then in high school I drew this version of it. Brought back just for this gallery to show that I've had an active artistic interest for a very long time.

judas head — And one other illustrations that I came up with, originally pen on lined paper, I believe, brought into Photoshop, the background knocked out, and a slight bevel and emboss added to the lines that remained, with a purple tint to it. Never my main skill set, but I thought it worth keeping.

My Angelic Demoness — When times went rough with my first big relationship of six and a half years, and we became separated due to a death of my boss and a job that I had bet my future on, I kind of mentally crashed and crumbled, and wasn't there to support her, and so she went away. I took a bunch of skills that I had learned and combined them all together, and as best way I could, using a nude photograph of her, my skills in Bryce, a 3D model of a snail, a moon, half of my binary chaos symbol, gave her some wings and a halo, called it 'My Angelic Demoness'. Initially, she wasn't actually flattered by it, which took me aback a bit.

The 2000’s

Everything in this gallery is delineated by a move and completely different environments and multiple stages of different people, relationships, and things to say. I think my techniques are a lot more refined at this point. Some more basic and low res with the first one. But I'm still building a digital art/design language, as I don't think I'll ever not be doing.

It's all pretty full of expression and intensity. Read the comments for that deeper context connection with my inner artistic self...

Cracked — A relatively simple treatment, a photo I took or was taken of me at Burning Man 2006. Wearing a pair of goggles, a texture of cracked clay applied over my face and colored blue, and a glowing edges with a noise added to it. Simple, but seemed to make an impression.

I Hate Phoenix — When I was at the Firehouse Gallery, one of the themes that we came up with for a group show was "I hate Phoenix". Primarily regarding what it means to live in the middle of a desert, where it can get up to 115 - 120 degrees. As you can see, my face is melting. Also, it's vectorized, a bit of a chaos symbol around that, and a bunch of strands made out of something I cannot recall, designed in Illustrator and printed around 3 feet tall i think.

Zombie P — Sometimes art is opportunistic. This is Phil, husband to Mecca, at the time. The one that I was with. Before I was with them/her, they came to the Firehouse, and they had done makeup on their faces to look like zombies for Halloween. Phil had applied tissues and whatever else makeup, which made for a very good texture to then do some compositing with after. And this is a side shot of his face.

Aurora — Around the time that I was doing my gallery show for Cult of Ego II, I ended up with a fan who wanted to spend time with me. So I did a little. And she then commissioned a portrait of her daughter, because both her and her daughter apparently really liked all of the portraits I had done. And then I did this one of her daughter, and she liked it, but her daughter didn't. So she didn't buy it. But that's how this shit goes. I think it's rad!

Tendrils — When I was at Burning Man in 2006, I met someone called Erin. We hooked up, as happens at Burning Man, and sort of attempted to stay connected after the fact. I was still living at The Firehouse, and at some point she came down to visit and learned too much about the fact that I was kind of a bit of an odd person. Things kind of went bad, and I took it really hard, which is weird, because it really wasn't a real relationship yet. But I made this of her.

Muse — A bit after I moved to Phoenix, I met this person, Amber, and ended up moving in with her out of my mom's gallery. It was good and bad. Lots of sex. But she was a crazy person who was bipolar, and a therapist, and a sex addict. But we had some interesting times, and she introduced me to the downtown arts. Here's a piece of art I did of her.

Magical Forest — This was another odd fling that I got involved with while I was on a "break" from Mecca. Probably wasn't a good idea. But just to make sure it went to shit, I went with her on a drive all the way up to Nebraska from Arizona. At her parents' corn farm, they had wild hemp growing. I took some photos of her in it, and because she also loved to smoke weed so much, I made this. It kinda looks like she's doing a Nazi salute, which I actually think is funny, and kind of on character, not that she'd agree.

Vav! — This is Vav. He lived in a hall closet at The Firehouse. No, actually, really, that's where he lived. And he made sculptures. He made a pirate ship shopping cart. You can check out what that looked like in the video section at the bottom of the page. I don't remember who took this photo, but I liked it, and thought it was a good candidate for a one-color treatment plus the Zippo and a flame. It came out good.

We are all Anonymous — When Anonymous came around in the aughts and around Occupy Wall Street, it was a strange time. I was a little more left-leaning and anti-establishment. Well, I'm still anti-establishment. But I liked what they had to say, and I liked that they were saying we were all anonymous. So I made this.

Rebirth — A strange self-portrait for sure. This is just after I was with that girl Erin mentioned a few images back. The symbol in the center is a triquetra, and a mandala-type circular symbol around it with a flaming heart, and all of the different kinds of emotions I was feeling. A strange one-off that I did, a symbol I never used again.

Radioactive Happy — This is the radiation symbol with the happy faces that you saw as a part of the 'Radioactive Chaos' piece in the Chaos section. I liked it enough to make it its own piece as well and add it here. So here it is.

Tolerance — This is actually a sculpture. I was working at a company that did youth sports photography, and some of the younger kids had very crazy faces, so I took one, halftoned it, blew it up, printed it, glued it to a piece of wood, and then used wires to attach it to a wood frame, and then put wires over his eyes and mouth, representing some kind of censorship, and called it Tolerance. Fun.

Art is Dead — A weird piece. A bit dark, but dualistically clever. Both a commentary on the arts in Phoenix and the arts in general, and just a commentary on art, and also a bit of a fuck you to my ex, who I had felt extremely betrayed by, to the point of basically losing my mind for a while, although I got good art out of it. She ended up having a stillbirth of a kid she was going to call Artis with her new man. So I made this. Because that's how fucked up I was at the time.

Newer

And yet again, this represents an entirely different environment. Still in Phoenix, but not Phoenix the city. Living with somebody else, and having very different experiences outside of the arts community, developing different ideas.

It feels a little bit more random, but I think it's because I'm growing more, reaching out into different streams of consciousness and thinking, appreciating other systems, and developing my understanding of who I am in a bit more of a mature way. Don't worry. Disaster ends up hitting and screwing everything completely up. But, there is an incredible amount of value to be pulled from this phase of life as well. It was as good as any other time that was good.

As always, comments give you the context. Thumbnails leave you empty. As with all the others, click into the gallery. Activate the lightbox. Go deeper. It aligns more with who you are at a core level...

Painface Bastard — I don't even know what this was. I mean, I remember doing it, but I don't think I really, really liked how it came out. But it was a lot of work and it was weird. So I kept it. And now you get to look at it too, and ask yourself, why did he even make this?

Sad! — As with the last one, this is a bit weird. I had found a strange photo online. The original itself is even a bit off-putting. So I created this for some reason. I think I was just in a weird place at the time. Yeah. Bizarre.

Joe's Eyeballs — This is Joe, the one I did Pan Productions with. A friend from all the way back at The Firehouse. One of my favorite people ever. While living in Chandler, he came out to visit and had made strange eyes out of golf balls, and did some poses with them. We took some photos in portrait mode on an iPhone. He died not too much longer after, and I was really missing him. So I made this creepy-ass piece of art with his creepy-ass eyeballs. Because I liked him that much.

Bitcoin Not AI Coin — For a minute there, I got pretty heavily into educating myself on Bitcoin, which means educating yourself on libertarian thinking, Mises, Austrian economics, and how capitalism should actually work. And I get offended when people compare Bitcoin to other crypto assets. So I did a treatment and made my own version of the Bitcoin coin.

For the love of Bitcoin — And another treatment, a little bit different, more dimensional, more of an environment to it. I still love Bitcoin. I'm not as much into it, but I like these pieces.

Family Portrait — I was living in Chandler for quite some time with Sarah, her son Lukas, Little Cat, and an adopted cat, Sally. At some point, there had been a project that we had done relating to Mark Rober, and you were able to turn in something that he could print as well. So I made this to see if he would. That never happened. But this image did.

McSarason — I lived with Sarah for a long time and never did any artwork of her. I think that's because we didn't believe in relationships and I didn't have an obsession, which was healthier. But I took her meaning, and she had seen how I did my process on the Bitcoin pieces, and so I did this one while she sat there. It's kind of a trip. A bunch of textures, blending effects, overlays, knockouts, patterns. Neat stuff.

Lovely Planet — At one point, Apple had come out with their app called Freeform, and it was on Mac and iPad. So I decided to try it out on the iPad with the Apple Pencil, and I made this strange thing. A kind of chaos symbol. I used a bunch of symbols from the app, knocked a bunch of things out, added shadows and transparencies, a baby with radiation symbols and a syringe going into its butt, a skull with an atomic symbol and a syringe going into its eye, with a DNA strand coming out of it. It's a lot. It's bizarre. And now you get to look at it and wonder why.

Professional Work

Of course we need the obligatory professional work section, as this is my personal website and the design area of it. It is apparently essential to represent what you've done when working for other people, which makes sense. Kinda. It is important to show how I can translate what other people want into the design languages I've learned. So, that’s good enough I think to justify actually putting this section in.

This as well is broken up through different time periods progressively. So, check it out. It's certainly not extensive, but honestly, a lot of the stuff, while fine, I don't think really represents what I'm capable of as well as my own work does. Some of it as well is perfectly fine.

Old

This would be the few things that I have from what is, I guess, the 90s, effectively. Early development of my understanding in Photoshop and a little bit of Bryce 3D. It's a little bit more rudimentary, but part of what this site is for is to show how I've progressed, not just where I am.

Survive Iraq — Well, this one obviously dates me. Made during the time of the Iraq war. I was doing freelance work occasionally, I think because of clients that I met while working at CompUSA as a Mac salesman. And this was to be a design to go onto a t-shirt. Just putting it here to show my journey.

Fluid Films — Another client I may have got through meeting customers doing sales at CompUSA, selling Macs, who ran some kind of production company. I believe this was built using a combination of Ray Dream Designer and Bryce, along with Photoshop for the layout and effects. Probably not how I would do a business card now, but I thought it was cool at the time, and so did he.

Homes & Land Magazine

Homes & Land Magazine of Scottsdale & Phoenix. I worked there for, I don't know, three or four years. Technically, I was with the boss's daughter. So I kind of had an in when I had need of a job after having an issue at a previous one that wasn't creative. It was my first fully professional 'graphic design' job. I even made it up to the position of "Art Director” (I probably can't prove it though, because I didn't keep copies of the magazines that were printed with my name and that title. So, you'll just have to believe me on this one. It is true though.) Imagine that. Why? Because I have a knack for understanding how systems work. And when you're working for a magazine, you are working with a whole system of a bunch of different parts that are all trying to run and work together and mesh into a final product. The way all of that connects and works was no issue for the way that my brain connects and works.

These were all done in Quark XPress, not Photoshop. Not just, that doesn't mean I didn't use Photoshop for some design, but, especially the real estate layouts, were all done in Quark. They used automation software, and all of the resources would be stored separately from the design files. If you're familiar with magazine publishing, you know what I'm talking about. Right before we would go to print, we would run everything through a preflight check, and it would make sure all the graphical resources were available, all the right resolution, at the right size & color profile for print, fonts were where they should be for embedding, and do whatever final filters and effects that they thought appropriate for sending it to print at corporate before it left and went off to the printers. This is a small selection of some of the different advertisements and designs that I developed.

One thing which I think is quite interesting to note for anybody who's curious about how I work, at one point when I had taken over the position of Art Director, Homes & Land, the main company, had switched over to new production software. As the current Art Director I was flown out to their training headquarters, and I learned how to use that software within about four hours. They had allocated, I think, three whole days. The guy was quite impressed. But this is what I do. We took the opportunity to watch the most recent Macworld that was streaming on video to see what was happening with Apple announcements at the time. It was fun.

Things did end up going weird at the job, though, exactly for the reason that I was with the boss's daughter. Another lesson learned. I ended up moving on to the next company relatively soon after.

Georgia Newman — And this is another one. Pretty standard fare for the kind of generic layout you would see in a real estate magazine. Maybe a little bit more flair to it than some, but nothing too exceptional. It got the job done though and was fully approved by the client.

Snow-Ryan — This one at least has a little bit more dimensionality to it, with the frame and the background image where the different real estate listings are laid over, and then the black background. Still pretty boring, but it shows something.

Sandy Barrett — Not a whole lot more to this one, but I did like the way that I separated her name and title information using those lines with her contact info below it. Here and there I was able to add a little bit of flair into the designs in the magazine.

Victor Runkle — Different aesthetic and feel than just about anything else that was in the magazine. Much more veteran focused, as one can see with the kind of iconography that goes along with that. No real listings either. He was taking a different approach. So I made this for him. Again, approved by the client.

Homes & Land Airport Campaign — I think at this point I had moved into the Art Director position at Homes & Land of Scottsdale and Phoenix, and was working with the boss's son (my manager) to build out this ad for Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport to go in a few issues. The spacing at the bottom looks a little weird, but this is a magazine, and the bleeds are strange. I like this one quite a lot actually.

Shannon Cowell — I ended up liking this design a lot more than most. The curves lended to a different kind of aesthetic, plus the dark background with the inverted cactus. It had a better feel to it than a lot.

Kristy Huston — And here's a different approach as well. Lots of photography. A bit of inverted coloring for lettering with a map. Had a feel I like a little bit more than most.

Seton Capital — Building an ad for a company that wasn't selling homes, but was helping with mortgages, gave me a different kind of artistic freedom. Organizing data, more like traditional layout. I think this came out relatively well.

Stone Elements — Now this one I like a lot. More artistic, simpler, kind of a rustic feel, but also elegant. Nice photos. Minimal. And a two-page spread. I think this one came out nice.

Sensible Minds

Sensible Minds was a print broker in Tempe, Arizona, right on Mill Street. I was not technically hired to do graphic design, which initially put me off. I was hired as the Production Manager. Ultimately, I'm glad that's the position I had. I think it fit me a lot better.

It wasn't actually until developing this website and thinking about the history of my résumé that I actually understood why they hired me for the position that they did. And it's because of the main tagline that for many years I had continued to put in to my resume, which was for it to say, eventually as the very first thing:

"Main qualification is the ability to learn and adapt to any and all computer platforms and programs.
High proficiency and efficiency learning and working with new equipment, machines, and programs."

I then go on to list various other skills and abilities that I have that are more specific and concrete. But what became clear to me when thinking about this was that they actually hired me for what it was I said I was good at. And I just simply didn't fully appreciate that that was the case at the time. I didn't even really understand why they wanted me to be, instead of a graphic artist or something like an Art Director, the Production Manager. But as I learned more about the job, and I think about it now, and as I'm about to describe, it was absolutely the job I should have been hired for, and the one that I'm absolutely exactly the right person to hire for.

One thing I have to be very upfront about, I do not like designing on time pressure. I can do it, but it is not how I work at my best. The best designs I come up with are intuitive, and I kind of find the design over time, exploratorily. And yeah, it's just, it's not something that I'm attuned to. But my role as the production manager was very different.

My job was to take whatever was being created by the art department, and format it for whatever press we were sending it to. As a print broker, we printed on everything. Pens, shirts, all kinds of print collateral, posters, whatever. I called up all of the different companies that had the presses and the equipment to do that printing, and figured out exactly how they wanted every piece of art formatted. What kind of color profiles, what kind of separations. It was quite the learning experience. It's like learning how to format artwork for twenty different industries all in the same job.

As far as the kind of position that one would want to have in a company with those specific attributes, it does make sense that that's based on exactly what it was that I said at the very top of my résumé, the position that they asked me to come in and interview for. The fact that I didn't fully understand why they called me in for that, or what it was that made them think that it made sense to, didn't seem to matter. I got hired and stayed on until I chose to leave. It wasn't because of the job becoming boring or anything like that. I just realized there wasn't really any upward mobility left in the company, and in order to actually increase my income in some kind of meaningful way in a similar field, I would end up having to switch to another company.

Even with the responsibilities of my Production Manager job, I did find actual time to do some design, and this is a selection of those. You can check the comments in each to get a feel for what I think of them.

Radiance Postcard — This is the kind of ad where you look at other things that this company has used previously, and take elements that you have from their catalog, and put something together as a variation. And this is what I came up with. Decent enough.

Women's Health Poster — Well, an ad for ultrasound and women's health. Two variations. I think I like the one on the right more. It feels a little bit less crammed. I don't remember which one the client went with, or if they did both at different times.

The XX Files Full Page Ads — Not my color palette with all the pastels and pink. Reminds me of a baby shower. But I'm working for a print broker at the time, so my job is to reflect what the client wants. Outside of that, I actually like this design quite a bit. Images pop well, good contrast, information's laid out well. Yeah, I like these.

The XX Files Postcard — A variation on the theme. Same basic design elements, restructured to be used with a postcard, with a section of it left blank white for postal information to be stamped or printed on it. Again, I like it.

REMAX Jamie BC — I remember liking doing this one, and feeling good about figuring out how to shove that much information onto a business card without it feeling entirely cluttered and messy. I think it came out pretty nice.

Dirty Outline — Yes, this was the name the file was saved with. I don't recall why, but I believe this was designed to be screen printed on t-shirts for an event, which obviously involved a bunch of drunk people. As I was working for a print broker, we designed things for everything you could possibly print on. I came up with this, which apparently included having a Molotov cocktail in the design. Fascinating.

Dream Palace VIP 2 — You can probably guess what kind of client this was for. We weren't very discriminating or discriminatory, and pretty much serviced any clients who had the money to pay for it. I did like how these came out, though. It's got a nice simplicity to it, and a decent color palette.

Dream Palace VIP 1 — For a variation on a theme, we have what I believe was the more discreet version of their VIP card. A nice brushed metal texture and some purpley coloring to it. Classy enough, considering what it's for.

Olsen BC — This is one I actually really liked. The colors and the design, and the simplicity, that was nice. It's slightly odd, slightly off, but green and purple, even though it's a weird green and a weird purple. And a nice big spinal column. Who gets to put that on their business card unless they're a metal band or a chiropractor? That's rad. Plus, as you've seen, I like lines and circles, so I've been using them for quite some time. Even professionally!

2007 NAGAAA Softball — This is a fun one. They had a lot of elements to add, which is helpful. But still had to go out and find some of those clip art of a rainbow and a guy holding a bat, build out the rainbow on the backside, a few different layers, transparencies. I dig it. It worked. And it's for gay softball, whatever that means.

NBGT Vol 2 — A fun little piece to make. Finding an interesting font, gangster themed, Nothin' but a G thang. Offers the opportunity to go a little bit more stylish. Came out nice. Client liked it. Job done.

Coors Flyer — Not sure why the file was labeled "Coors Flyer" instead of "1st Annual Breast Cancer Awareness Ride", but I was the Production Manager, not the Art Director, so that's how I got the file. I like it. It kind of lines up with some of the styles I would use. I like the transparent, lower transparency on the graphics in the background behind the text, little side logos, the lines coming out from the side on the back to denote the different sections. That's definitely my style. Yeah, this is a good one. Gets the job done well.

Suburban Underground — I do remember this one. It was fun to create. Kind of a gritty look, obviously, especially the front. The back is quite busy, but, you know, a lot of items being mentioned. Gritty ads are cool.

The Firehouse

While I was working at Homes & Land magazine, I had moved into The Firehouse, and then lost my job at Homes & Land magazine, and started working at Sensible Minds. So this section would overlap with the previous 2 in some ways.

This is an arts collective, and it's full of artists. Funny enough, not very many of them are actually graphic artists. And also interestingly, most graphic artists don't make artwork you would show in a gallery, which I find bizarre. They are not creating anything for themselves… … That. I. Don’t. Get At. All.

Anyway, as a part of the collective, we would start our own events, and I figured I understood graphic design well enough. And like with ©haos Gallery, which you saw previously, which technically happened after this, these are all also effectively monochrome in order to make printing cheap. For the most part, these are all broken up into regular events and a movie night.

The movie night was started by me and one other person, and every month we would pick different movies. The designs don't alter too much, but what this does, is give you a sense of the kind of culture that I was around, experiencing, and also proactively creating. The design is what it is, but it's kind of ancillary to my life experience there. One of the things I'm trying to get across in these galleries is who I am, the story behind things. So I thought it made sense to show these ads for The Firehouse. It shows how I was using the skills that I had developed through time and the past two jobs I had just gone through, applying those understandings now to the creation and development of an active arts scene in Phoenix, more specifically to one of the most notorious and well-known art spaces in the entire district, which is, of course, The Firehouse.

Check out the movies and what the events were about as well, in the image comments. You might just be a bit entertained...

Nov 2006 Flyer — Pretty standard fare, as all these are. Lots of fonts used, one different for the header for each event. Fun clip art. A lot of it will be repeated throughout. The neat thing about these is we picked the movies for the movie night section. On this one, I picked the first one, The Root of All Evil, when I was on a bit of a more puristic atheism kick, which I have different views on now.

Dec 2006 Flyer — I didn't pick out the movies for this one, but two of these, at the very least, are very good. It's interesting the kinds of things that come up when you live in an arts collective. Jesus Camp is kind of intense, and if you haven't seen Night Watch, it is a very, very good vampire movie, although it is in Russian. And How to Draw a Bunny, not bad either, but whatever.

Jan 2007 Flyer — And if you're paying attention, you'll notice that some of the borders around the elements of clip art and images in the top half of the ads have been changing. As for the movies this month? Pretty good selection here. I picked the first one. I was definitely emphatically interested in the second one as Pink Floyd is still my favorite band. The third one was great. The last one was okay.

Feb 2007 Flyer — Not as many events this month for the first half of the flyer, so a little bit more space to work with. As for the movies, I don't remember the first three, but I do remember the last one, and thought it was good.

April 2007 Flyer — Design-wise, a return to a bit like the first one, I think. Some interesting names for the bands, local Phoenix stuff. As for the movies, I think I picked the first one. It is an old favorite. The second one's good. Who wouldn't be interested in the third? And I don't really remember the last one. Still interesting stuff.

May 2007 Flyer — I guess I got a little bit lazy with design. Kind of stuck to a theme on the first half. As for the movies, I don't remember the first one. The second one, a classic, if you're into cults. I don't remember the third. And the fourth, quite an interesting one. It's a strange thing when an arts collective picks movies for a movie night.

Aug 2007 — I'm not even sure this was for August 2007, or Friday, May 25th. I think this was just an alternative design that I came up with but was perhaps never used. However, I had it in my archives and I like the way it looks, so I'm including it. The only thing that I would change for sure is that the outer borders where the images are should be the same thickness as the main bar going around. Otherwise, I think it's good.

Misc

While being a part of the arts, I also occasionally did design work for other people outside of The Firehouse or ©haos Gallery or whatever other thing I was involved with. Here are a few examples. Kind of a random assortment, all with their own stories. Designs that I think are pretty decent and worth showing.

Art Detour 19 Phoenix — While living at the firehouse, the head person, Michael 23, took on the responsibilities as the chair of Art Detour and built out the full-color map that was used for this event, at the time, the largest art scene in the United States. I laid out the front cover. The phoenix was designed by his wife, Joanne 23, and became an actual large wood sculpture that we would burn every year in an empty lot near The Firehouse for years.

Rave Flyer — Once people know you can do graphic design, when you live in an arts community, you sometimes get asked to help out, building ads and things for others. Someone was throwing a rave and came to me, and I worked with them and we came up with this. Interesting enough.

The After | Flyer — Using the artwork of the first artist in this list, Robert Walker, on the left side of the ad who was putting on this event, and just trying to come up with something looking a bit post-apocalyptic otherwise... This is the design I came up with for a date and time that we should all remember as pretty close to being predicted as the end of the world, or just about. I showed a lot of pieces. It was an intense show. Things were weird for me at that point.

Desert Hydrogen — Some freelance work I was doing. I don't remember where I met this client. Still around the time that I was living at The Firehouse, maybe just a bit after. But I like it. All done in Illustrator. I like to challenge myself sometimes with building some things entirely in a vector format, and trying to achieve the same kind of refinement and detail I can accomplish in a raster-based program like Photoshop. The client liked it. Job well done.

Druidian Arts

This was a strange opportunity that I had while living at The Firehouse. My mom hooked me up with this guy who owned a stupidly expensive, extremely high-end art scanner and some very high-end printers. So I dropped the job I had doing photo editing for a youth sports company and that i’d developed a Photoshop Actions based workflow for that entirely replaced the commercial solution they had used for years up till the time I replaced it, and tried to do what I could to help this guy I’d just been introduced to by my mom, and attempted to help him build a bit of a business. I think I was under the impression he knew what he was doing quite a bit more than he did, in a business sense.

How often do you think when you're introduced to someone with equipment that's at that kind of high-end level, that they don't actually know how to successfully run their own business? Well, in quick order, I ended up discovering why this was the case.

It ended up being apparent he was also a particular kind of neurodivergent that made keeping clients a bit difficult, as he would talk far too much and take up far too much time, not getting anywhere near as much done as could be done. Simultaneously, (And of course this one gets to now jump right into this exact other issue, right at this exact time, with this exact opportunity after having just left a previous job, and these exact problems.) I was also still dealing with my breakup with Mecca, the one in the Cult of Ego series, and mentioned elsewhere.

Working with Matt as a part of Druidian Archival Service was not a negative experience. He is, as far as I can tell, an absolutely ethical person. His intentions were absolutely top-notch. His skills were great, and I know this because he taught them to me, and I quite literally used them to run all of this ridiculously expensive equipment successfully. So, more than anything, this was one of many strange experiences that I've had with different people who have different neurotypical expressions.

The thing I was really hoping is that what would end up being the fruit of this new partnership would have been something quite lucrative, as it, at the time, would probably actually have put me in a position that very well could have changed the nature of my relationship with this 'woman'. At this point in my life, I'm kind of glad Matt wasn't aware of how difficult he is to actually work with, because if we had been successful, I think I might have ended up severely screwing my life up, far worse than it had been, because of that toxic connection with my ex.

So, we live and we learn from all of these experiences. I have carried through from then on, every different neurotype I have had any kind of meaningful long-term communication or relationships with, and there's always something entirely different about all of them. I am, in fact, also one of them, self-described, and not nearly as dysfunctional as many, although I can't always say that I would have claimed that part.

Either way, this is definitely the most impressive art scanner I've ever experienced, and although I'm not the kind of artist that would generally benefit directly from this kind of scanner. I did find some interesting uses for it. However, when it came to the printers, those were industry top of the line large format beasts. My Cult of Ego II show, plus a couple of other prints, never would have happened without this connection.

Ultimately what happened with this relationship is that, while I was able to more mostly tolerate his extreme neurodivergence and OCD, it was quite stressful. And, as I am also my own version of such a thing as well (not the same expression at all), and had been going through an ongoing, overwhelming part of a relationship that effectively temporarily destroyed me for a few years, of which this was technically a part of the beginning of, the behaviors that I had, that I resorted to in order to cope, while not actually detracting from what was possible for us to build in reality, ended up being too much for him to want to deal with. Now there is a reversal of issues for you.

I don't believe the business progressed beyond that point. But that's not necessarily because what we tried to build didn't work. He also had other major life changes happen to him, like his father dying, which was, to be honest, both a major negative and a positive. And I mean emotionally, and then financially. So, if he wasn't able to figure it out, maybe he's just waiting for the right time to try again. He certainly doesn't need to do it.

I should say he still attempts to maintain a friendship. I find it difficult to reciprocate, more often than just a bit here and there. It's just a lot to take, and I'm not in the same place I was. Maybe when I don't have so much focus on other things, I'll attempt to reciprocate a bit more. Who knows.

Druidian Info Sheet — My aesthetic is white on black, but, given black on white, this is definitely how I like to lay things out. And while working with Matthew at 'Druidian Archival Service', and 'Fine Canvas Prints', whichever one he wanted to call it at the time, this is what I put together. That scanner was amazing.

Druidian BC Glen — Matthew, the guy I was working with, was definitely into the Druids. He liked the lore, and I think he talked about a history of them being into archiving. I can't say as though I'm not a fan of interesting symbology. So, this is the simple design I came up with for our business cards. It's minimal, but nice.

Druidian | Fine Canvas Prints | Info — Did I mention that scanner was amazing? It was also a hard sell, because it was so frickin' high-end that you really had to convince people they needed to use it. We got clients, but it was an expensive ask, and an expensive scanner. The printers were amazing too. Check out the specs on everything. And yes, my layout as well for this info sheet.

This is the only place these ones made sense for me to put them in. I comment a bit on that in the image comments. These are all the things that I've designed for promotion of my own things or things I wanted to sell. I guess you could say the aesthetic that I would go with for print collateral, for art or material goods. This is absolutely an expression of how I presented myself professionally. And so, along with the sales listings, I think this is and are multiple aesthetics that are definitely aligned with what I would use when it comes to professional expression.

To be honest, two of the gallery show ones and one of the poster ones, are so on point with the kind of design that I like that it's ridiculous. Check them out. More details in the comments.

Glen Art Show | Lost Leaf — Yes, I'm throwing ads that I made to promote my own shows into the professional work section, because I was showing my art in gallery shows and offering it up for sale. I had quite a lot of shows at the time, and I dig this kind of layout a lot. The lines with the circles, the completely invented chaos symbol in the upper left, the strange layout, binary-chaos symbol, the two ©haos Gallery symbols (bacause I didn't yet have the chaos system). I dig it. And yes, this is for Cult of Ego 2 at the Lost Leaf in Phoenix.

Glen Art Show | Sidebar Flyer — And another place I had the Cult of Ego II show at, Sidebar, showing off a few of the pieces. Like in the other ad, small form, and a complete redesign of the layout. I was driven, and I was trying to make an impression on my ex. But I think I just pissed her off. Oh well. I got a shit ton of good art out of it. Although I was going nuts internally at the time.

Glen Poster | Art Sales — I attempted to sell posters and prints at Bud's Glass Joint, down in the Arts District in downtown Phoenix. They were cool with me putting my stuff in there, but I got a little miffed at them, because I was advertising the shit out of their place, and I never saw them say a damn thing about what I had there. So I went and grabbed my shit. But the ads, okay. A little crammed. Not my best, not my worst.

Glen Poster | POP Print Info — Another version of an attempt at creating a point of purchase print ad to sell posters. Read the previous comment to see how that went. Otherwise, regarding the design, I absolutely love this design. Mainly the lines, the symbol, and how colorful my art is. Although I think I should probably have shrunk the sizes of each of those a little bit to make it slightly less crammed. But overall, I dig it.

Seagate Nytro 480 | FB Marketplace Listing — So I created these graphics to add to my Facebook Marketplace listing for some SSDs I was getting rid of. Is this professional work? Well, I was certainly trying to look a lot more slick than anyone else who was selling stuff, and add a lot more information than I see on almost any other marketplace listing. These sold, so it worked.

Seagate Nytro 960 | FB Marketplace Listing — Same design, different size SSDs for a parallel listing. I dig the design. Obviously my style, I created it. And yes, this one sold as well. So, I'd say it did what it was supposed to.

OWC ThunderBay Flex 8 | FB Marketplace Listing — This one hurt to sell. This was a beast of an enclosure, with a great dock. I hope to be in a position soon to be able to get another one. Hopefully an updated version, if they come out with one. This is actually just a still frame from a keynote presentation. But I thought to put it in here, because I like the way it looks. If you want to see what it looks like animated, check out the video section.

Micron 9300 Max Stats | FB Marketplace Listing — Variation on a theme, more basic version. Kind of looks like a tree, or at least something with branches. Some pretty impressive SSDs that I was looking to get rid of. I only ended up selling one of them, of which I'm actually pretty glad, because the two I have remaining have been invaluable in my creative pursuits to make this website, especially with all of the video editing I did.

Micron 9300 & 9200 Stats | FB Marketplace Listing — Basically the same design, just with a slightly earlier model mixed in with the current model that I was putting here. I thought these would look good in a listing on Facebook. But these are the ones I still have. And I'm glad I do.

Black & White Arts

Designing an Economic Ecology for an Arts Community

In 2011, after roughly six years embedded in Phoenix’s arts community, I developed Black & White Arts as the final project for a business class I was taking while reconsidering my own relationship with money, business, and economic stability. The class gave me useful formal structure and, more importantly, a teacher who encouraged me to take the project seriously. But the system itself came from somewhere else: years spent inside the community, watching artists, galleries, small businesses, cultural organizations, and the surrounding city interact—and watching the same vulnerabilities repeatedly threaten the culture they collectively produced.

There was also a much more personal source of pressure behind it. I was in a relationship that mattered enormously to me (and was still in a stable place. mostly), and I believed that becoming more economically capable—and proving to myself that I could build something genuinely viable—would help stabilize the future I imagined with that person (to be blunt, the same person I now realize would have caused far more damage if I had been successful in this venture. you know who I mean). At the same time, she was deeply connected to the same arts community I cared about. Those motivations converged. Rather than solve only for myself, I attempted to solve for the surrounding community as well.

What came out was not really a plan for a single business.

It was an attempt to design an economic ecology.

The model begins with individual artists and asks how shared infrastructure could reduce the cost and difficulty of producing, documenting, reproducing, marketing, distributing, and selling their work. From there, it expands outward: specialized services become businesses; businesses support additional businesses; shared resources reduce duplicated overhead; different components develop according to different scaling requirements; and the resulting network creates multiple paths through which economic activity can circulate back into the community. Eventually, the structure expands beyond the original locality through a replication and franchise model rather than requiring every function to grow as one centralized organization.

One principle buried inside the document now reads almost like an early statement of something I would spend years learning to describe more explicitly:

Failure of a part does not hurt the whole, and being a part of the whole reduces the likelihood of failure.

I did not have my later vocabulary for distributed systems, nodes, fault tolerance, dependency reduction, or boundary conditions. But the operational instinct was already there. Different components were allowed to remain distinct because they performed different functions. Failure was meant to remain local. Strength came from relationships between participants rather than from making every participant dependent upon a central authority.

Looking at the document now, I recognize something else I could not have articulated in 2011. Much of my own survival strategy had developed through a similar operation: when something was overwhelming, dismantle it; determine what the individual pieces actually do; map their relationships; identify where power and vulnerability really exist; and rearrange those relationships until the whole becomes more survivable.

Black & White Arts appears to be that same operation externalized into a community-scale problem.

Instead of asking only how an individual survives instability, I was asking how an arts culture could become less vulnerable to it. Economic precarity, fragmented resources, unstable businesses, disappearing spaces, limited access to professional infrastructure, and dependence on forces outside the community became components that could be mapped and reorganized. The objective was not simply to make artists richer. It was to change the surrounding conditions so that individual fragility was less capable of destroying the people—and therefore the culture—inside the system.

Where the Model Broke

I originally understood the project’s failure primarily through the resistance I encountered trying to deploy it. With distance, I think the more interesting failure occurred one layer deeper.

Individual artists were not the problem. Some understood the model immediately. Some wanted to participate. Even people whose politics made them deeply suspicious of conventional capitalism could understand, through conversation, that the structure was designed to increase artist agency rather than remove it. I deliberately approached artists first partly because I already understood that broader adoption would be difficult to potentially entirely pointless to even try; I attempted to pre-mitigate this issue by first building a functioning base of participants that could demonstrate the model before I had to cross the more difficult social boundaries surrounding it.

What I underestimated was how consequential those boundaries were.

I had distributed many of the model’s operational points of failure, but its adoption still contained social legitimacy bottlenecks. A relatively small number of culturally important participants could prevent the larger network from assembling simply by refusing to engage with the structure at all.

That produces what I now think is the most important lesson contained in the project:

A system can operationally optimize for values a community professes while symbolically resembling structures that community defines itself against.

The distinction matters.

The model attempted to preserve local culture, distribute economic power, increase individual autonomy, share expensive resources, protect vulnerable participants, and reduce dependence on outside institutions. Yet its formal organization—business plans, interconnected companies, revenue structures, scaling strategies, replication and franchise models—could resemble precisely the kinds of economic and hierarchical structures portions of that culture were entirely unable to find any kind of alignment with.

The participant does not experience the system diagram directly.

They experience their interpretation of the system diagram.

No amount of mechanical elegance makes that layer disappear.

That does not mean the economic assumptions in this document would all have survived contact with reality. In some cases, perhaps more than I could understand at the time, would not have. A living system of this complexity would have required continual adaptation as participants, technologies, markets, and local conditions changed. I understood the model itself as something capable of adaptation, rather than as thirty pages of instructions that reality was required to obey.

But that wasn’t the decisive problem I encountered. That can all Be mitigated.

I had modeled what participants materially needed more successfully than I had modeled the conditions under which the community as a coordinated 'organism' would recognize the resulting structure as legitimate.

That distinction would become enormously important in my later work.

Why I’m Preserving the Original Document

I considered cleaning up the original PDF before putting it here. I decided against it.

There are spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, awkward passages, and places where the speed at which the model was developing is plainly visible. None materially alter what the document is describing. Correcting them now would produce a cleaner artifact, but a less useful one.

This is the document substantially as it existed in 2011.

That matters because it predates my use of generative AI by more than a decade.

Elsewhere on this site are considerably more developed systems models created with AI functioning as a cognitive extension: helping me externalize dependencies, maintain larger conceptual structures, interrogate assumptions, and iterate through complexity faster than I could reasonably do alone. Black & White Arts provides a useful earlier reference point because none of that infrastructure existed here.

The complexity is already present.

So are the distributed relationships, differentiated scaling logic, attempts to localize failure, community architecture, resource sharing, and the tendency to begin with one apparently bounded problem and progressively model the ecology surrounding it.

What changes later is not the sudden appearance of that way of thinking.

What changes are the tools available to express it, the language available to understand it, and—perhaps most importantly—the number of layers of the system I had learned to see.

Why This Appears Here

Although Black & White Arts is not graphic design in the conventional sense, it is design. The object being designed is simply different: A social and economic structure rather than a visual one. Placing it directly after my professional design work creates a natural transition from examples of designing within existing production systems to an example of attempting to design the surrounding system itself.

It also belongs here chronologically. The ideas in this document represent what I understood—and how I was capable of modeling problems—at this particular point in my development. Moving it later because its subject matter overlaps with systems thinking elsewhere on the site would distort that progression. Its value is partly in encountering it here, where it actually occurred: as an early expression of a way of thinking that becomes considerably more explicit in the work that follows.

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Sculptures & Builds

I thought it important to include some of my real life creative pursuits in this design part of the website, as I've been working with my hands and building things for many decades. In fact, if given the resources and opportunity, I have a number of large-scale sculpture projects that I would love to pour time and energy into. Things that would probably go over very well at Burning Man or some galleries that allow for bigger installations. I could see myself living a life as a sculpture artist, along with doing digital art and video editing and motion graphics and whatever for fun.

So… here are some examples of builds that I've done at different times. This is all since I've been in Phoenix. I didn't own any cameras or have any real ability to document things in the real world very much through the 80s & 90s, as I was born at a time where I grew up before the internet and cell phones with cameras were readily available at all times.

These were all things I've invented from scratch and had to think up of on my own. One ability I've always had is being able to visualize full 3D objects pretty close to completion, rotate them around in my head, blow them apart, put them back together. Nothing is exactly ever what it looks like in my head when I build it, but to some degree that depends on the constraints that I have. So, check them out, see what you think.

Chaos Sculpture I

This one in particular was an interesting exercise in constraints, as mentioned before on this page in the 3D gallery, I was very interested in figuring out how to turn the chaos symbol I developed into 3D also into a real-world object.

So… I was living at The Firehouse at the time. A show was coming up, and I wanted to make a sculpture. A friend of mine challenged me to just use whatever there was around that wasn’t important or needed. So, I found, I think, what was a futon frame with wood slats. Something like that. Very soft wood. And that is what the black part of this chaos symbol is made out of. The back panel is a square piece of some kind of plywood. Otherwise, just screws. I don't even think I used glue. And the piece is still totally held together to this day.

I would design it differently now, but I always want to iterate on design. Primarily cutting the big arrow aspect of the back panel a little bit different so that it actually cuts thinner instead of moving out around the edges of the outside arrows. Otherwise, it's an interesting variation on a theme, and I was pretty stoked when I finished it. I think other people liked it quite a lot as well. It's cool to bring ideas out of the computer and into the real world, you know?

Chaos Scuplture I — Straight on shot of the sculpture. Great contrast. Multiple gallery lights lends to impressive shadowing. Quite a look.

Chaos Scuplture I — Right side shot, just to give you some more dimension.

Chaos Scuplture I — Left side shot, the other perspective.

Chaos Scuplture I — Dramatic underside shot from an angle. Intense!

Chaos Scuplture I — Ooh. A slightly downward pointing shot. Just keeping it interesting.

Chaos Scuplture I — Moving a little closer here. Getting a little bit more detail.

Chaos Sculpture II

This was designed while I was living at ©haos Gallery. I know I said it was an amazing time, but this was one of the low points. Things with Mecca were not going as well as they could be. We had a very intense and dysfunctional relationship, as alluded to previously on this page. So what did I do? I poured my energy into a creative project. I invested in some materials and used some of the tools we had bought for the gallery. And since I was, at least for a time, living at the gallery by myself, built this new Chaos sculpture, bigger and better.

Ultimately, I'd like to make this into multiple versions in different materials, as this isn't the greatest one. It's made out of MDF, and it's still in okay shape, but ideally, I'd like to make it out of metal and glass. Not at the same time, two different versions. And by glass, it might be plexi, something that you can frost the edges on so that when you add lighting or LED strips, the whole thing will light the edges up. Perhaps maybe frosted like a glass brick instead of totally opaque frosting so that some of the light beams can shine out if you have a smoke machine going. Blah blah...

The other version out of metal, the initial one that I had a concept for, was because I wanted to have it be electrified in some way. Conceptually, I even wanted to do a much larger one, something around eight or ten feet at the largest dimensions, and have it spin because of convection and gravity. The way electricity works when you've generate it into metal in an atmosphere is it wants to travel upward. So by perforating the double metal sheets that you can see would be represented by how everything was built in doubles on here, it would be possible to potentially see a bunch of arcs forming in between those slats. I'd have to experiment to see how wide they would have to be to be visually interesting. But then I also imagined one of those, I don't know if it's a carnival ride, but the thing somebody gets into where they have their legs spread and their arms reaching out in a circle, and then the thing rotates in two dimensions, something like that, with this in it instead of a person and a massive amount of electricity going through it. Along with that, I imagined a number of performers at different stations around the sculpture with staffs that were also connected to an electrical source where they would arc from the staff to the ground onto different metal plates.

Yeah, those are just the sculptures ideas that I have, at a large scale or not, that have to do with this sculpture.

This ended being a prototype for those kinds of ideas, but those things would take some serious funding. So maybe one day. Regardless, this sculpture came out quite well and impressed just about everyone who saw it in person. Se comments for context on individual photos...

Chaos Scuplture II — My second chaos sculpture hung out in front of ©haos Gallery, in the front porch, and hung quite precariously from rather small eye hooks. At least there were four of them, and it did last the night, but I did end up figuring out a different way to hang it with a much bigger eye hook going sideways through one of the panels. I think we'll see that later.

Chaos Scuplture II — Still hung in the same place, at ©haos, on the front porch. Tried to get a few angles. These weren't the best shots, but it's what I got.

Chaos Scuplture II — A bit of a zoomed in shot, giving it bit of an exaggerated perspective, a lot of dimensionality. It's quite an intimidating sculpture.

Chaos Scuplture II — And now, still at the same place, shot from the other side of the porch. Different lighting, different perspective.

Chaos Scuplture II — Now hung from a chain by two eye hooks. This is at the Ice House in downtown Phoenix, during a big group show, where I had a bunch of art on the wall and the sculpture hanging from the ceiling. I also installed a light bulb in the center of it, an idea which led me to think that I want to make this out of either glass or some kind of plastic sheeting that with frosted edges, that will gather the light and look like a big chaos lamp.

Chaos Scuplture II — A different angle at that same show at the Ice House. I probably should have shot it after a bit of setup so a ladder wouldn't have been in the background, but it is what it is.

Chaos Scuplture II — And a shot while the show was on, with people walking around and artwork on the walls. No, that's not my artwork. My artwork is to the left of that. I don't know if I actually framed my artwork into a shot with it. What a strange thing to not do. It was a weird time.

Chaos Scuplture II — Now we see it with the other two pieces that I had submitted to this show at the IceHouse in Phoenix. One called Tolerance, and the other called Transparency. Both printed pieces that are also turned into sculptures by suspending them either within or on top of the frame that they're a part of. Made for an interesting trio of submission to this show.

Chaos Scuplture II — More of a straight on shot with the sculpture in both pieces in it. Three sculptures, really.

Chaos Scuplture II — Slightly different angle. It's a bit difficult to easily frame a piece hanging in the middle of a gallery from the ceiling, and two pieces on the wall in the same photo. The composition is a bit difficult.

Chaos Scuplture II — And a much better shot of all three pieces during the show, giving a good idea of what kind of atmosphere it had and the flow of the place.

Chaos Sculpture II ⁃ Process

For this particular project, and as I mention in the photo comments elsewhere on this page probably in the ©haos Gallery section, at this time while I was at this gallery, one thing that I was very big on was as much documenting as possible. And so while working on this project, I managed to grab a few shots, which showed a bit of the process.

This design, not just the finished product, but what I figured out about how to cut the wood, is a trip. Check out the photo comments to understand what I mean...

Chaos Sculpture II | Drawing Cuts 1 — Something you don't really get to do too much in the same way with digital art is show your process. And for some reason, when I was basically running ©haos Gallery, I was very, very big on documentation. So, I documented building this sculpture, and here's the first part. A square cut with everything that needs to be cut into it, drawn out, ready to be cut.

Chaos Sculpture II | Drawing Cuts 1 — Part of the drawing cuts, cut out for to see in all of the wood sheets. I still have yet to do the smaller arrows, and then horizontally cut the whole thing in half, which would give me all the big arrows and small arrows in a single square. The design is a bit ingenious.

Chaos Sculpture II | Unfinished 1 — Here's a shot of all of the big arrow pieces fully cut out, with the small arrows removed from inside of them. Just another part of doing something with as many pieces as this has, replicating the same shape in three dimensions.

Chaos Sculpture II | Unfinished 2 — Those same pieces laid out on the floor, because why not. This time there are holes drilled in them for elbow brackets to connect those pieces to each other.

Chaos Sculpture II | Unfinished 3 — I think the point in me doing this particular layout was to show how that same original cut then gets laid out as the arrows of the chaos symbol. Trying to show how I took quite a while to design and figure out how to make the cuts that efficient.

Chaos Sculpture II | Unfinished 4 — And since I'm documenting the process as I drill all those small holes and laying them down, may as well take another shot of them with this whole setup. It looks cool, so why not?

Chaos Sculpture II | Unfinished 5 — Now, I've attached the smaller arrows. Probably a combination of glue and screws, I assume. It's been a while, so I don't remember.

Chaos Sculpture II | Unfinished 6 — Well, look at that, making some real progress here. I'd have to count all of those to understand how close I actually was at this point, but I'd say I'm getting pretty close.

Chaos Sculpture II | Unfinished 7 — Now the attaching hardware is beginning to get installed, and the three-dimensionality is beginning to be understood.

Chaos Sculpture II | Installing Hardware 1 — More of a direct focus on the hardware used, all of the tools and hardware on the table, showing a bit of all the bits and pieces.

Chaos Sculpture II | Installing Hardware 2 — An angle to give you an idea of the spacing between the pieces that make up each arrow part. I went with dual pieces because a single piece of wood for each of the panels for the arrow felt like it would just be a bit insubstantial. And the way that it came out, I thought was pretty impressive. So I think I made the right choice to double up.

Chaos Sculpture II | Painting 1 — Now we're outside on the stage in the front yard at the gallery. I guess I didn't take too many process shots of painting itself, but here you get to see all of the finished painted pieces laying out and drying. Black on the flat parts, white on the edges. Made sense to me to give it the most contrast.

Chaos Sculpture II | Painting 2 — Of course, I had to get other edges as well that I didn't have access to while they were all laying down. So, now they're tilted up and drying after being painted. And in the background, you can see a whole bunch of the connecting L-bracket hardware, all painted white, drying on the side that they're on.

Chaos Sculpture II | Painting 3 — A shot from the other perspective, showing the connecting hardware and the white painting of it, more close up, with the rest of the sculpture all set up and drying away.

Chaos Sculpture II | Painting 4 — I guess I put these out of order. But I'm gonna leave it. Here's a shot before the outer white edges were painted.

Chaos Sculpture II | Starting Assembly — And now back in the gallery, the assembly is beginning. At the time, I decided to add little eye hooks with wires connecting between them, running along the underside, in between all of the connecting arrows. I was considering the idea of trying to arc electricity along between those lines. One design I was very interested in is a variation of this where electricity arcs in between the doubled sheets, obviously made of metal in that context. That will hopefully come one day in the future.

Chaos Subwoofer

I do go into this a bit in the photo comments, so there's some redundancies in a few of these titles, but here's a lifelong passion of mine, bass, and a subwoofer design that I think turned out pretty nice for a 10-inch. Something I had originally prototyped at my mom's gallery, which was off of Grand Avenue in downtown Phoenix, called Cone Gallery. You've seen the logo treatment that I came up with in the 3D Worlds section, these are flat plane 3D chaos symbols designed to live in the real world.

I didn't have any kind of good amplification at that point, so it was an experiment, but I ended up buying what I needed and built this little monster at ©haos Gallery.

Somebody even asked me what I would sell it for, because it was shaking the hell out of the place in a very nice way. I quoted about $600, and for some reason they thought that that would be too expensive. Given the amount of labor and how badass it worked, and honestly, if you look at the cost of decent subwoofers out there, I definitely think that was an okay price.

Interestingly, I've been kind of disincentivized to continue in my previous "passion" of building subwoofer boxes for a couple of reasons. One, math has never been my strongest point. I can build sculptures and figure out geometry, but I think I had bad math teachers growing up, and they didn't do a good job of keeping me interested or progressing my understanding, which is a bit of a shame. And as you know, or maybe not, the brain develops how it does. Secondly, I now have such an absurdly amazing sound system with four 18-inch subs that go down to 21 hertz (and lower), it's hard to compete with something like that, that you already own. But who knows? It could be fun to play around in this arena again. Either way, I do still have this, although it does need a new amp, this time not Class AB, Class D.

See comments as always for the rest of the context...

Chaos Subwoofer — Another angle, more or less straight on, but from a top angle. Clean view of the front chaos symbol, and the top's chaos symbol with the handle hole cut out of it. I thought it was a slick design.

Chaos Subwoofer — Side view showing the Twisted Chaos variant. I'm pretty sure I created these in either Photoshop or Illustrator, and then printed it out and used that as a template. I had been doing this kind of thing at The Firehouse for simple sculptures, and it just seemed to fit decorating a sub. As long as it's screwed in enough and doesn't rattle, which it probably won't on carpet, it really adds to the aesthetic.

Chaos Subwoofer — And what do we have here? Anything look familiar? I took a design, and I decided I wanted to do a variant of it instead. But this time, in the physical world. And so I took that top chaos symbol, redesigned it, chopped it up a bit, and put it back together as a new chaos symbol on the top. I think that adds a bit of refinement.

Chaos Subwoofer — I don't know for sure, but I think maybe one of the reasons I changed the design on the top is because regardless of the angle now, it looks more like a full chaos symbol in a better way, whereas it only looked good diagonally previously. You decide.

Chaos Subwoofer — Different lighting in the gallery, better framing, just a nice shot of all the designs. It's a nice looking box.

Chaos Subwoofer — And of course, it makes sense to actually show how the sub is mounted. You can see it there now, with the sub upside down and the bottom unscrewed. The sub is down firing. I believe it's an Infinity 10W30, and it wallops. I do need a new amp for it, though. It's an old class AB amp, and it just couldn't handle the brutal bass I put through it. I need a class D amp for it.

Transparency & Tolerance

Transparency & Tolerance. Two different pieces that aren't really related in meaning, but are related in form. As in, they're both hung from frames, although by completely different means.

Tolerance: A photo from a kid that I grabbed from a place of employment working for a youth sports photography company that I developed processes for to do their green screen editing better than the commercial software they had available (yeah, i’ve mentioned that before. It won’t be the last time either). It dawned on me, I couldn't help but think, why does a kid make faces like this? It's a ridiculous face. That's because it has yet to have society and the culture impose conditioning on it, other wise described as cultural programming. There's no embarrassment, there's no sense of self-awareness or shame or fear of social rejection. Meaning this kid is still truly free and uncorrupted. And so I took that photo and turned it into a representation of what will become of a human being after this developmental stage, once the world kills your real expression of liberty. I wired it to a frame, wired its mouth shut with crisscrossing wires, and the same with the eyes. I called it "Tolerance". As a completely unrelated choice in the creation of this piece, the upper left-hand corner of it has a miniature suspended piece of information about the artwork. What is it? The halftone details. Just a technical note which has no relation whatsoever to the concept behind the piece. I don't even know why. It's just the kind of strange touch that I find myself doing here and there.

Transparency: Imagine you end up in a strange relationship with a person who has a history in the mental health field, both from being a patient and also a worker, in the end, to become a therapist (not the first time i’ve been on this rodeo either). She believed in as much transparency as possible to what most people would believe to be an unhealthy level. This included exposure to her email account and her personal emails, which I believe she texted to herself regarding things that she was going through dealing with me and the relationship. At some point, I decided to put those into something interesting. And along with the fact that she seems to have or did have a "fetish"* with being pregnant all the time, I also found an image of a fetus in a womb and put that into her belly. One of her favorite patterns was zebra print. And what goes good with black and white? Red. So then you get this piece, her in underwear, nude otherwise, covered in a zebra skin pattern with a red embryo, red nipples, and red lips outlined with red. Some patterns behind that and all of those messages written along the sides of her body. All extremely personal. Not the kinds of things you would normally want exposed to anyone, especially publicly. These are the kinds of thoughts most people only say to themselves in their private diaries. And yet, as you will see, when I put this down into a piece of artwork and made it into a sculpture and then displayed it in a show...? Out she came, the subject of the artwork, to show herself off with it. What a bizarre, bizarre person. Is this mental illness as art? Possibly. It certainly is me finding out if the reality of this lack of boundaries that were set were actually true. And it appears that they were. This of course again would be the one who called herself ‘Mecca'.

And so, along with the 3D chaos symbol you saw just a couple of galleries previously, this was a show that I had as part of a big group show at the Ice House in downtown Phoenix, one of many group shows I was a part of around that time. Whether or not you appreciate the content itself on display in these two pieces, I do have to say, they presented as very high-quality artwork. Well-designed, well-thought-out, well-executed.

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