#a lot of bleach narrative is full of IR

[tae-shimura-is-my-wife]

A fan made an ask to Kubo about how I//H got together and the answer...

"They were about to date in the university, but only start dating serious when both were working. Since Bleach isn't a romance manga, this is just a complementary thing"

What the hell is this answer 😭? Still, nothing on Ichigo's feelings for her... this isn't answering anything important, because we still don't know HOW they got together just WHEN,

Bleach isn't a romance manga, but still this is one of the main selling points for this franchise and the narrative is full of romantic coded elements... people just question this stuff because it didn't have a proper build up, other mangaka with exception for naruto kinda didn't have to keep explaining how the prota got with the girl like in Bleach. They need to stop trying to justify I//H because they always fail on it, since it will never have a good explanation to what happened.

[granite-slab]

Foreign Quarry

here is the text from the formative assessment that caused such ire on my part, it explains a lot of my ideas more clearly than i have been writing on this blog, plus my decision for the title of the body of work:

The broad un un title of the body of the work, the wider body, is FOREIGN QUARRY, the body in meatspace swiped by greasy fingerprint pathways, the meaning, FOREIGN meaning OTHER, a politically loaded word, overburdened by meaning, in a country currently ruled by xenophobia. QUARRY as site of material, of production, of control, of labour, who died to find the silicon used in the chips in your pocket, on your lap, in your hand. QUARRY also as prey, an animal pursued by a hunter, a target pursued by police, predator and prey. From the latin word for SQUARE, four sides, a frame, a couple steps of atomic manipulation away from a QUARREL.

I think the work, the body, operates around a visual language recycled from film, from Kubrick, from science fiction, from the monolith, and inherits its anxiety from there also. The original concept of destroying technology with natural or with prehistoric material, of breaking free from shackles, of my anger, of my hatred towards my relationship to screens, has now been shed, the work feels wider.

The standings stones of Dartmoor like bones, like phones, like my phone melted into my hand, like missiles, like a full cycle.

I was thinking on blood. On lifeblood, on splatter, pure blood, the source code, the warm blood in my fingertip that activates my screen through my touch, through my outreach, my connection to the violent transfer of voltage happening invisible in the material within. Is it all built on violence? They’re not images on screens. I’ve reconstructed the screen. The light from behind the image felt more important than the material they were printed on so I’ve moved away from assemblage.

From the liquid crystal blood came imaginations of space, imaginations of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film SOLARIS. The work started to feel nihilistic, to feel lost, to feel deeply concerned with our pending extinction. My thoughts kept moving to space, to the microscope.

Where could I find hope? I looked into crystal diffraction patterns, when light is shone through and split into mathematical shapes. That’s where these drawings came from. Mathematics and patterns as the building blocks of life. Some cringeworthy thoughts on simulation theory I would never want my work to address head on. How do I reckon with these interests? I read a scientific essay theorising on liquid crystals as the primordial soup that life emerged from. Words broken down into subatomic form would be letters. But fuck. Letters still have meaning. Atoms represented as letters. Even atoms can be cut apart, split, collided, destroyed.

Ed Atkin’s videos work in ways I wish I could, through metaphor, visual allusions, structuralist tendencies like focus pulling and lens flares that make the viewer aware of the artifice of digital video. Would this be what the space inside a file would look like? Bare, white, dusty, a hole leaking light, a flicker, a tortured boy weeping. I became aware I was also interested in these ideas, the abject, the uncanny, the posthuman body.

Alicja Kwade’s sculptures are more effective than mine could ever be. At this point I knew the images had reached their natural conclusion. I might change my mind. I am in a constant state of doubt.

Getting blood from a stone, like trying to squeeze out information, like bjork’s song about relationship troubles stonemilker, you’re not as emotionally available as you used to be, like being stoned as a permanent state, as a coping mechanism, numbness, confusion, stoning, a cruel and unusual punishment. Kids in glass houses should not throw stones. Don’t talk politics. The stones in the screen space are given life by mathematics, this is a running simulation, but they can’t make an impact, a crater, a site of death, of destruction, rebirth, of particle collision, they can’t change anything. Me and colin, we’re still working on this, the sounds aren’t quite right, some paths the stones fly are wrong, are broken. I’m not sure about the way the stones are bleached out by distance, I want them more crisp, they will be higher definition, it’s a long process making software, these things will change.

I’m afraid of language being my crutch. I… when it doesn’t work a… a rock…and…  a general feeling of brokenness… I wrote this presentation deliberately awkwardly, deliberately cumbersome, deliberately avoiding talking about certain aspects of the work, deliberately avoiding talking about my feeling that something is seriously very wrong, with me, with the world. I have a tendency to not explain enough. I have a tendency to over explain. The small video here reduces my destruction to subatomic embossings. A lone rotating Q is the only piece of language present. A three dimensional Q turning like a stone, become an object, even as it is here overburdened by meaning, Q being the scientific symbol for heat, or the measure of electrical charge. The sound, of course, is of ice thawing. I said I’d never make work about plastic in the ocean. I want the textures to feel microscopic, the opposite of, the mirror to, the companion of the galaxy of dust and grease smears that came out not as clear or crisp when printed as I had wanted, as I had hoped, maybe from a distance it is ok.

I want to continue testing the presentation of these works. I’ve been a bit lazy about it so far. I want to nail the images into the lightboxes. Broken glass should be physically present, I feel, but working out how much assemblage plays a part is tricky. I also want to move into more allegorical, narrative video work. I feel the visual language developed across these works is accomplished, but it needs something to juxtapose it. I’m figuring this out at the moment, planning, writing, figuring out a film that would be shown with these pieces. I want the work to avoid the word, to avoid language. I feel this work, so far, is successful but a bit sterile. I want to make something truly affecting, upsetting, sad, scary, and I’m not there yet. That’s what I want the film to do, to add to the work, but I don’t want to talk about it until i’ve made some more progress and have something to show. Thanks.