Girl vs. Robot

I Wrote Some Things About Words (6 Months Ago)

Elissa — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:58:20 +0000

The contemporary human, even of the marginally literate variety, constructs her own metaphors. The phrase, “To coin a metaphor” seems useless now. There is no longer a limited supply of original metaphors, which run as clattering dogs through the messy streets of mainstream language, mixed mutts baying away at tired ears who want for simple pedigree. Rather, indeed, the metaphor is devalued by a swollen supply.

The existence of the phrase, “To coin a phrase” suggests that at one time that act was special enough to have a phrase of it’s very own. In these yellowed days the noble prole left metaphors to crazy writers and instead spoke to each other in references. Everyone had the bible at their hearth and the lucky had the classics at their disposal. With these as their mass-media they kept to parables and fables to express themselves, modeling after their pop heroes like Aesop and Jesus. References were an acceptable and proper way to argue a point.

All but the poets and philosophers, misfits who made one thing into another regularly and without discretion, disruptively artistic in their words. These were the punks who self destructed and left a beautiful residue behind. They wrecked lyres in inns and overdosed on ergot or opium, until the words they mortared brick to brick replaced the culture with pop, and poets are finally rock stars.

What’s the moral of that story?

Sexy Number Nine

Elissa — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:17:41 +0000

Before we invented math we counted on our fingers. I doubt that people frequently used their toes, or we’d have a base 20 system and not a base 10 system. It just isn’t practical.

Nine is a good number, I like it. It is one less than ten, a kind of pre decimal, pre decibel, a number that we could use before we could describe numbers. It is a pre post-digit digit. It is a digit that we had immediately before we had digits that didn’t correspond to digits.

It is where the body and the number threaten to separate. The tension in that is unbearably sexy.

Gifts or bombs

Elissa — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:04:16 +0000

I try to remember that I am not my ideas, that attaching myself to them or identifying with them is foolish. They are creatures that I harbor in the ecosystem of my mind. I can choose which ones I carry. I can kick out the really bad ones, but only if I remember that they are not me. Only a person who knows herself with no ideas can have a choice about which to harbor, surely.

The creative among us don’t only harbor them, but manipulate them. The charismatic share them with others like gifts or bombs, and spread them to people who attach and identify. But none of us are them. We’re all still someone when there’s nothing in our heads.

Learning Left Project

Elissa — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:00:13 +0000

I decided to try to become left-handed as a challenge to myself. I expected it to be very difficult and to be months of wiggly lines and trouble. I knew it must be possible, people switch hands under circumstances where they lose the use of their primary, but it came very easily and quickly to me. I discussed it with a neuroscientist friend who believes that I was left handed to begin with and encouraged to switch to my right hand. Regardless, I am now functionally ambidextrous.

The left-handed images have a greater sense of shadow and space, and the right handed images have a stronger sense of line. In all of them the emotional character of the subject is interpreted completely differently from each other.

I prefer my left-handed work. It takes more time and concentration but the result manages to be more precise at the same time as being imperfect and alive.

For the best examples and time lapse videos check here, and look at the tumblr I used to document the process if you want to see more.

I found myself right over here.

Elissa — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:09:28 +0000

People go off saying “I’m trying to find myself.” Me? I have the opposite problem. I know exactly who I am and I find myself wherever I look. People who say they are trying to find themselves, they never got lost. They just don’t like the self that they got.