Words and Pictures

Michael Harold

Four postmodern prologues: 1) Two thought police are sitting side by side observing a suspect. One says to the other, What do you think he’s thinking? The other one replies, What do you think I think he’s thinking? 2) All empires, without exception, have been built on slavery. That is not at question. The real question, especially in a democracy, is, where can you find a lot of volunteer slaves? 3) Everything of real importance has already been said by someone who had no idea what they were talking about. 4) Call me Ishmael. . . . (Reed).

From the beginning, my primary intellectual preoccupation has been with language in all its forms -- as image, as word, as sound, as idea, as thing-in-itself. It is a great mystery in my life, but not the greatest mystery. It is the fourth greatest mystery.

The greatest mystery in my life is the relationship of love to gravity. The second greatest mystery is the fact that I exist at all. I have never gotten over it. I am still boggled by it. Following that is the belief that there is order in the universe, something infinitely greater than the sum of any and all parts, something capable of originating infinities of infinities of universes, the whole thing blinking and popping in the darkness like some illimitable expanse of paparazzi. I personally use the word “god” to describe it, which brings me to language. What does it mean to name something, to give or have an identity? How is it possible to juggle all the things in the universe with one hand while holding the ineffable, indivisible unity of being in the other? Language in one hand, Atman in the other, per se, vis-à-vis, as it were. How is it possible to create something with language and place that thing solidly in the world, perhaps even use it to change the world, to create something that wasn’t there and would never have been there if not for language? I knew from the beginning that I wanted to be a creator of language: a poet, a writer, a scientist, a visual artist. So that’s what I did.

I was twelve years old when I saw Paul Klee’s, Sinbad the Sailor, in my family counselor’s office. Before that I had seen many art images in books and magazines: Egyptian, Hellenistic, Gothic, Renaissance, Modernist, you name it, but nothing caught my imagination the way that particular picture did. On the wall over my bed I had a framed poster of Winslow Homer’s The Herring Net. In my bookcase I had the complete edition of The Junior Classics, peppered with lithographs. Although I drew and loved to look at pictures, it was this picture by Klee that showed me, for the first time, the language of an image. I was never the same after that. Even now, forty-one years later (i.e., 2005), I still believe Paul Klee to be (along with Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp) one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Like Matisse, he saw the page for what it was and summarily abandoned classical perspective, preferring to start over from nothing, to create a formal language of color and line and use it to paint faces, voices, music, myths, fantasies, landscapes and cities, artifacts of a high civilization. He was much more than a surrealist or fantasy painter. He said, “Art does not render the visible, it makes visible.” Like Duchamp, he was far ahead of his time, an iconographer of the first order. All the art and artists since have yet to add a single mote to either Klee or Duchamp.

Duchamp’s Étant donnés

I began to write poetry in high school and continued to write poetry and short stories in college, but for some reason I felt I had nothing to add to the idea of the book. After the original postmodern novel, Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern, followed over 150 years later by  Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Borges and their heirs, Barth, Nabokov, Pynchon, et al, where could you go, what was left to do? Literature was finished, at least as far as the novel was concerned. The same was the case with poetry. Rather than try to find my own “unique voice,” I contented myself with enjoying the works of other poets, my favorites being Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Berryman, e e cummings, Sexton, Plath, Kinnell, Ferlinghetti, Zukofsky, and all the prose poets. When it comes to poets, a list will not work. I like too many of them.  Where my poetry was concerned, I thought I might do well to follow Sherry Levine’s example. From college until a few years ago, I contented myself with writing poems that resembled as closely as possible, in form and style if not content, my favorite poems by my favorite poets. I did this because I believed that new forms of poetry were not possible. I have since changed my mind.

In the late 70s, I discovered computing. I want to say first of all that I have never been interested in computer graphics as art. My interest in computer art was purely conceptual. I was much more interested in the idea of a computer as a language machine capable of describing, in finite terms, what could or could not be known. I saw the computer, the way it was made and the way it operated, as a convergence of language, science, philosophy and art. I read Wittgenstein, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, Noam Chomsky, W.V.O. Quine and Claude Shannon, and realized that the computer was the place where I was most likely to discover the formal foundations and limits of language. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that language, seen as a type of computer, was the means whereby the potentiality of the unspeakable universe became the actuality of everyday life. Language was not a barrier, but a self-organized permeable membrane -- species specific, genetically coded. At the time, I was working as an urban planner. Once it became clear to me that computing was a means to a better understanding of language, art, technology (and through them, society), I made the jump. From that time to this, I have made my living in one way or another with computers.

In 1983, I began to paint again. I worked alone for several years before I met Sue Monday, who took an interest in what I was doing and insisted that I meet Bruce Allen. I did and found a lifelong friend. Sue also made introductions to the artists at Artist’s Transit and I took a studio with them. Bruce introduced me to other artists in the area, among them Lucille Reed and Clyde Connell, whose examples as artists had a profound effect on my own attitudes toward art and artists. There is no excuse for any artist to be competitive, petty or condescending where other artists are concerned. We are all in this together. Visual art is no longer about product, (if it ever was). It is about marketing and branding -- location, location, location. We are not in New York or London, vying for shows at MoMA or the Tate. We are in Shreveport, Louisiana and we should help each other every chance we get. If you are an artist practicing in the hinterlands and you are not doing art for its own sake and because you love it, you are probably in for a big disappointment sooner or later.

The first paintings I made were of binary data. The very first one, painted in 1983, was titled, “Random digits in binary.” The second one was titled, “The first sixty-nine prime numbers in binary.” At the same time I was making these paintings, I was also painting in a manner heavily influenced by Minimalism and early Modernism. I made these paintings because I believed that binary languages were the languages that would eventually provide a gateway or universal language for the translation of all other formal languages. (Binary languages are nothing new. If you know Morse Code you know a binary language.) In 1985, I began to paint larger pieces. Works from this period include, “God” in ASCII, “ART” in ASCII and “Meta-“ in ASCII. (ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.) The idea was to show that words and images are interchangeable, that one does not necessarily precede the other. I had already come to the understanding that all referents, regardless of form, are randomly accessible and infinite in their relations to other referents. In other words, we are wired for language in such a way that the deep structures, the cognitive structures, are finite, but the expression of language using those structures is infinite.

The first sixty-nine prime numbers in binary

The Outside, or The meaning of a word is its use

After Sherrie Levine, after Peter Burger, after . . .

Red Moon

Self-portrait

“God” in ASCII

“ART” in ASCII

“ART” in ASCII (detail)

“ART” in ASCII (detail)

“ART” in ASCII (detail)

"Meta-“ in ASCII

“Meta-“ in ASCII (detail)

In 1987, I began to write again. By this point, I understood that each word or symbol is part of a complex network of understanding, that there are infinite combinations of words and infinite relations among individual words and combinations of words, that meaning is both discovered and created, and that chaos and order are paradigms of choice. I also came to believe that a new (old) type of book was possible, a book that modeled life, not only as a narrative, but as a collection of every form of writing: poems, stories, dialogues, essays, short fictions, letters and pictures. The result was Red Moon, first completed in 1993. I know now that the novel is not the end of literature. The book is not dead. It is a perennial living thing, opening again and again to show itself changed into something new. If you want to know where the book is going, look at artist’s books, graphic novels, video games and other forms of interactive media that are precursors to a fully immersive and participative art of the book. Narrative is now part of hyperspace. This doesn’t mean that the book made of words and paper is going to disappear. It still has a long future ahead of it. Books have always been hypertexts. It’s just that now the links are not only on the page and in your head, but everywhere else as well.

Excerpts from Red Moon

Dataland

Memo for Record

Forty-six conceptual art pieces

Dialogue with M

As I changed in my understanding of the relation of language to the world, I moved away from painting and in the direction of performance, installation and process art. Initially, (around 1988), I wanted to create a network of computers that would take wind, water, solar and geothermal energy from natural sources and use it to power a computer network that would take images and sounds from the environment and images, texts and sounds from participating artists and translate them from one form to the other at the same time that they were being transmitted from one spot to another in the network, all in real time. It was a way to create a model of what I thought the world was becoming (or else had always been) -- a virtual image of the actual world, in turn a manifestation of the potential world. I have yet to create the network I just described as an art project. But that did not keep me from doing conceptual "poor man's" versions of the project. In 1989 the artist collective At-The-Loft invited me to do an installation. The piece, titled “MU” in ASCII, was comprised of a hypercube made of 2” x 4”s, on which I had suspended a computer. I had done a similar piece in 1987 at the Barnwell Center. My poems and ruminations on the relationship of language to ideas about god were coded to scroll slowly up the screen in a closed program loop. On the floor in one section of the hypercube I put sand (i.e., silicon) from the banks of the Red River and seeded it with grass. Over the course of several weeks the grass grew. I had taken an excerpt from Meister Eckhart’s Fourth Sermon, “On Eternal Birth,” and translated it to binary, which I then transferred onto clay tablets with a cuneiform tool. After I fired the clay, I arranged the clay tablets to spell the word “MU” in ASCII on the grass. The word “MU” is from a koan. A monk asks the Master: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” to which the Master replies, “Mu.” “Mu” is the Chinese ideogram for “nothing,” “no-thing,” or emptiness. When all the words and things in the world are taken away, no-thing remains, the core of all existence. (On a completely contradictory, romans a clef, sour grapes note, I showed this piece to Alan Sondheim and the next thing I know he’s promoting an almost identical computer video in an art films catalog. I guess I should be flattered.)

“MU” in ASCII

“MU” in ASCII (detail)

“MU” in ASCII (detail)

“MU” in ASCII (detail)

During the late 80s and early 90s I worked with Bruce Allen, Dorothy Hanna, Alan Dyson, Dan Garner and a number of other talented artists on a set of projects called Works in Progress, usually hosted at Princess Park. Bruce and Dorothy were the primary drivers for many of these collaborative performance-a-thons. In 1993, our collaboration resulted in a video titled, Dorothy’s Fourth Neon Dream, funded through a Regional Artists Project Grant. (When I’m not in my neurotic, reclusive, alien from another planet mode, which I have been for years now, I very much enjoy collaborating with other artists.)

By this time my art had become entirely conceptual. I had discovered a single class or set of binary data that I believed contained all other sets within it. I called it the class of N-Bits (where N equaled 1, 2, 3, …). I showed it to Bruce and he showed it to other people, several of whom took a business interest in it. The Internet was coming into the mainstream, the dot-com boom was on, and one of the biggest barriers to the distribution of content was bandwidth, the ability to move information quickly from one place to another. The discovery I had made offered a new way of looking at information, a way that could provide new forms of security, data compression, higher communication speeds and even new ways of doing mathematics. We met with investors and formed a company.

The Class of N-Bits (an essay excerpted from Red Moon) (pdf)

Some of the best times I have had in my life were when I was hanging out with my friends and fellow artists at universities and art studios. I went to Chicago a couple of times with Bruce to spend a week at Roy Tijerina’s place -- each visit a non-stop cavalcade of art museums, art movies, art bars, art parties, artists studios, etc. (The closest thing I can think of to compare it to is a Tom Robbins novel). On another occasion I got to go to James Surls’s giant wooden studio full of giant wooden statues and see the big treehouse he and his family had lived in for a while. I got to go to Clyde Connell’s house and hang out with her and listen to her stories and see her yard filled with sculpture. I got to have conversations with one of the most publicly naked and intelligent art critics in the world, Joanna Frueh. (People used to tell me I was a walking encyclopedia, but after Joanna I can only see myself as Cliff Notes.) I got to sit out on Bruce and Dorothy's patio for an hour face to face with Alan Ginsberg and say nothing. I got to do all sorts of things. As a result, one of my goals was to get an MFA in visual art so that, once I had blinded the world with science, I could either teach or become an artist-in-residence at a university. 

In the fall of 1995, with the help of Bruce Allen, Lucille Reed and Joanna Frueh, I was accepted into a low-residency MFA program at Vermont College. In my second semester I did paintings. In my third semester, I started a company named Transfinity and submitted the Articles of Incorporation and some promotional materials as coursework. For the most part, my professors were supportive, but I made the mistake of chasing faculty advisors and teachers who were young, ambitious and famous, (part of the Rosalind Krauss, October crowd). I was trying to get the hookup and it backfired. I did not yet realize that graduate studies in art (at least in American universities) are about politics and nothing else. If you think you are going to be studying art history in terms of painting, sculpture and architecture, forget it. Even so, a number of my teachers did everything they could to help me find my way. Only a few of them refused to see me as anything other than someone who believed that cultural relativism was ok in moderation, but taken to the extreme would create an intellectual schism in the liberal and moderate communities that would allow conservative elements to take control of our social institutions. (That’s pretty much what has happened by the way.) In other words, I expressed a strong belief in god and the possibility of truth and was dead-set against what I perceived as the self-indulgent radical secularism and dogmatic cultural relativism of many in the postmodernist crowd. I won’t go into it here, but the bottom line is, if you can’t prove a proposition (e.g., god exists) to be true or false, you can’t prove its opposite either. And it’s just as illogical, for similar reasons, to equate science with atheism. Science (i.e., facts) are one thing, atheism/theism (i.e., opinions and beliefs) are another. That’s what the Chinese Communist Party is doing right now in their efforts to propagandize natural science and atheism as a way of hanging on to Marxism. It didn’t work here or in Europe (except within the academic and scientific communities, where it is in direct contradiction to the way universities and research organizations actually work) and it won’t work in China either. I told my professors that hierarchy and equality are the two fundamental, countervailing forces underlying all forms of social order and that if you moved too far in one direction (e.g., communism) or the other (fascism aka corporatism) the society always becomes unstable and will re-establish equilibrium in one way (political or economic reform) or another (war and violence). I told them that the Fundamentalist foxes were circling the henhouse and they better quit arguing with their live-and-let-live, spiritual, liberal neighbors over whose “grand narrative” was or wasn’t dead. That didn’t go over very well. Some of my teachers even called me names like “late Modernist” and “our analytic philosopher friend,” that might have hurt my feelings if they weren’t true. My work was even referred to as “problematic,” until, during one residency, I took a metal bookcase, placed little stacks of critical theory in the center of each shelf, put a lava lamp on top of each stack and called the piece, “The Problematic.” I actually think that there is a lot to be gained from reading Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard and Barthes as long as you don’t try to apply it to social reform in the name of Marxism. Marxism doesn’t work. Neither does any other form of political or religious utopian idealism, liberal or conservative. Society is based on a balance of forces just like the physical world; an atom is one example, a galaxy is another. That’s not my opinion. That’s the way it is. It’s all about equilibrium. If one of the forces becomes too great relative to the others, the whole thing becomes unstable and breaks apart. There’s nothing wrong with being a Marxist, just like there’s nothing wrong with being a Baptist or a Capitalist. Just please don’t try to translate Marxist (or Fundamentalist Baptist or Corporate Capitalist) ideology into “democratic” ideology and end up a fascist neolib or neocon like the Darth Vaders currently running this country. They are the worst, and the ones most likely to get us all killed someday, whether we vote on it or not. In my last semester I left the program (a pretty self-destructive act when viewed in retrospect, since, even with all my whining, I very much wanted to practice art in a university) to devote all my attention to my work at FedEx.

The Class of N-Bits (painting)

The Class of N-Bits (detail)

Excerpt From Thus Spake Zarathustra in ASCII with Pogs (painting)

Transfinity Articles of Incorporation

Amendment to Articles of Incorporation

Transfinity promotional T-shirt by Micah Harold (Front)

Transfinity promotional T-shirt by Micah Harold (Back)

I went to work for FedEx in April of 1996 and in less than three months found myself in a position to influence the development of a global information system capable of taking information from any application, translating it into a shared language and using that language to create increasingly complex processes that, when tied together, could enable dozens or hundreds of companies to engage in larger and larger shared transactions. (Sound familiar?) For the next two years, as an employee of FedEx, I worked with a number of Internet software companies to build this system. The software architectures we designed and built became a de-facto standard for global logistics and supply chain management. I worked on this project until 1998 when I left FedEx to start two companies. One of them, GlobalESP, was created to provide software for the creation of virtual companies, that is, companies that outsource everything but the transaction. The big idea was to use the Internet to lower the barriers of entry for global trade to everyone in every nation in the world. The idea was good, but the multinationals seem to have gotten there first and are now using international politics in the form of military force, tariffs, subsidies and trade regulations to keep anyone else from taking advantage of this new business model. The second company was called Transfinity and was based on the N-Bit technology I mentioned earlier. Transfinity was the first company to offer dial-up Web acceleration using a combination of caching and compression. The whole idea behind Transfinity was to make Web content available to as many people as possible as cheaply as possible. It was a wild ride. Transfinity was sold to Everyone's Internet (EV1), a Houston-based firm. Eventually, EV1's dial-up ISP business was sold to PeoplePC Online. I considered what I was doing conceptual, process-oriented, interventionist art. I guess graduate school had an impact on me after all. I was talking less and less about god and more and more about global economics, geopolitics and money. Although we invented Web acceleration, we lost in the market. In case you think I’m rich from all this, I’m not. I’m broke at the moment, but I’m sure that things will get better soon. (ed. note 2008-09-28: they have)

Wired magazine article The Airline of the Internet

When the war in Iraq started, I almost went crazy with anger and despair. I know that the world is standing on the edge of a precipice, that we are facing another hundred years of war, misery and death for no reason whatsoever. I know that there are a group of religious fanatics in America who are actively working to make this happen and that the media is doing everything it can to help them. We have enough food to feed everyone. We have enough medicine. We have enough of almost everything. The problem is that we’re short on compassion and long on greed, and not just in America. But America should know better. America has yet to learn that marketing will only get you so far. Opinion is one thing. Fact is the other. And the facts of this world are about to create severe economic, social and moral privation for many Americans. In times like these, a combination of moderation and reason is the most radical political stance possible. Maybe that’s why no one is doing it. I, for one, would much rather live in an America that leads the world through its example, rather than an America that must be contained by the world because of it.

In an effort to cope with the barbarities of empire, I poured myself into my job during the day and spent my evenings writing. I completed several books in the period from 2002 to the present. They are Red Moon, somewords.com, Art and Technology, a short novel titled The Rapture and a longer novel containing 69169 words titled M, a book of poems titled thirty-two poems derived from random word selections and a tiny book titled The Great American Novel. I have also returned to making images: first drawings, then paintings. I also continue work, first begun in 1996, on the development of Transmedia Infrastructure that I have preemptively titled, Self-Portrait as a Holographic Corporate Artifact.

More Free Art

Excerpts from somewords.com

flash

genius

allover

accident

vacation

identity

fashion

pataphysics

sex

sonnet

palimpsest

library

Excerpt from Art and Technology

Art for Art’s Sake

Excerpt from The Rapture

Chapter 1 from The Rapture

I recently discovered that it is possible to merge quantum (truly random) events with traditional computer logic to create a new type of computer logic, a logic that is partly random and partly deterministic. I think this new form of logic will make it possible to create computer programs that mirror, almost exactly, the nature of events in the physical world, making the number of possibilities in even a small computer program almost infinite. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with it. (ed. note: I'm also working on several cell phone/wireless (infrastructure) related patents with which I hope to do something constructive.)

I’ll close with an excerpt from Art and Technology:

The greatest art is always made during that period when a high civilization has reached its peak and, through war or pestilence or moral failing, first begins its decline. If you are fortunate enough to be an artist living in such times, . . . sorry.