#artist note: FUCK drawing all that dialogue you get text brain.

[brain-bompyr]

Is the blog still alive? If so, I'd like to ask the following:

In a scale of 1 to 10 how [See list below] are you?

Sadistic

Morally questionable

Narcissistic

Manipulative

Likely to experiment on someone

Close to Max (1= Havent met, 10= Actually know each other a bit.)

Knowledgeable on bombers

Likely to throw hands with another Dastardly

Willing to help another Dastardly

Kinky

You can answer whichever you feel like.

"Ah, what a straightforward list of questions," Brain flashed an amused smile through his eyes, as he read through the list. " Although, a simple 1-10 scale may not cut it for some questions, ill be sure to let such special cases known. Just dont be surprised if i score a high median."

"I dont think any of the others would dispute me saying 10 here."

"read the rest of this list, you tell me. No rating."

"Assuming you dont mean the traits of NPD, and mean the more... Common usage of self-centeredness. If i am wrong, correct me. i am going to awnser 7, being generous to myself."

"8. At least an 8, i enjoy playing with the minds of others, for no reason sometimes. This whole list could be lies, and a lowly lifeform such as.. a human wouldnt know~."

"it depends on the person... It ranges from a 5 to a 9.5, granted thats if i had the opportunity."

"1. I have no idea who you are talking about."

"About... 9.5. Chances are, if i dont know something... Ill learn one way or another, i assure you."

"I'll go for a median of 5 for the whole team. The data on who i am the most willing to actually get my gloves dirty over is quite skewed. Plasma mostly, everyone besides golem at least once."

"most definitely i help most for my own gain... And theres a minimum to keep my title as a team member, i rarely ever help without a deeper motive. put that one down as a 6."

"mm.. what an interesting final question... Im not vanilla by any stretch, but its difficult to quantify that on a simple scaling system... As kink is quite relative from one individual to another. So dont mind ne playing coy with the numbers on this one. No rating."

"Hopefully that curiousity has been sated for now, hmm? Bear in mind this is simply how id rate myself, the artist may have other opinions."

[stdio2020]

NICOLAS BOURRIAUD POSTPRODUCTION CULTURE AS SCREENPLAY: HOW ART REPROGRAMS THE WORLD

This book fucking rocks and affirms many things about my practice. Good to know I am on a good path. Written in 2002, the text could not take into account the level of postproduction that would ensue in the following twenty years. This is the age of the consumer-producer. Everything is consumed and produced multiple times over. Bourriaud thought that artists processing their own consumption would take on liberatory pollitical effects. Unfortunately late capitalism has simply developed such that we no longer need ‘power’ to satiate us with entertainment, we are given the tools to satiate one another.... Below are really haphazard notes, not very well structured but all very important. 

p7“Pop Art was born of a conjunction between the phenomenon of mass production and the birth of visual marketing, under the aegis of a new era of consumption” (p2)

“the works of Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, or Rirkrit Tiravanija deeply reexamine notions of creation, authorship, and originality through a problematics of the use of cultural artifacts - which, by the way, is absolutely new.” (p4)

“When artists find material in objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, the work of art takes on a script-like value: "when screenplays become form," in a sense.” (p4)

“Postproduction apprehends the forms of knowledge generated by the appearance of the Net (how to find one's bearings in the cultural chaos and how to extract new modes of production from it).Indeed, it is striking that the tools most often used by artists today in order to produce these relational models are preexisting works or formal structures, as if the world of cultural products and artworks constituted an autonomous strata that could provide tools of connection between individuals; as if the establishment of new forms of sociality and a true critique of contemporary forms of life involved a different attitude in relation to artistic patrimony, through the production of new relationships to culture in general and to the artwork in particular.” (p7) <<So important

It is no longer a matter of starting with a "blank slate" or creating meaning on the basis of virgin material but of finding a means of insertion into the innumerable flows of production. "Things and thoughts," Gilles Deleuze writes, "advance or grow out from the middle, and that's where you have to get to work, that's where everything unfolds."01 The artistic question is no longer: "what can we make that is new?" but "how can we make do with what we have?" In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life? (p8) BINGBINGBING 

The activities of DJs, Web surfers, and postproduction artists imply a similar configuration of knowledge, which is characterized by the invention of paths through culture.  Finding a way through, finding bearings, the endless trace through culture...

By using television, books, or records, the user of culture deploys a rhetoric of practices and "ruses" that has to do with enunciation and therefore with language whose figures and codes may be catalogued.

Commerce is above all a form of human relations, indeed, a pretext destined to produce a relationsship. Any transaction may be defined as "a successful encounter of histories,  affinities, wishes, constraints, habits, threats, skins, tensions."(p15) << Reminds me of the andy warhol quote, “ Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

Art tends to give shape and weight to the most invisible processes. When entire sections of our existence spiral into abstraction as a result of economic globalization, when the basic functions of our daily lives are slowly transformed into products of consumption (including human relations, which are becoming a full-fledged industrial concern), it seems highly logical that artists might seek to rematerialize these functions and processes, to give shape to what is disappearing before our eyes. Not as objects, which would be to fall into the trap of reification, but as mediums of experience: by striving to shatter the logic of the spectacle, art restores the world to us as an experience to be lived.

ARTISTIC DETOURNEMENT (DIVERSION) - DJing

A pollitcal application of duchampian readymade (using a rembrandt as an ironing board or erasing a De Kooning drawing) 

The DJ’s work consists both of proposing a personal orbit through a musical universe (a playlist) and in paying attention to their sequence as well as the construction of atmosphere.  One can recognize a DJ's style in the ability to inhabit an open network (the history of sound) and in the logic that organizes the links between the samples he or she plays. Deejaying implies a culture of the use of forms, which connects rap, techno, and all their subsequent by-products.

The curatorial process is an artistic one we know that already! But it can be tighter, more specific, weilded masterfully. 

"Sometimes," Godard writes, "the class struggle is the struggle of one image against another image and one sound against another sound."

We must stop interpreting the world, stop playing walk-on parts in a script written by power. We must become its actors or co-writers. The same goes for works of art except now, the ‘power’ has given us the tools of creation such that we socially govern one another. The best marketing is user generated. pollitical agendas are spread through memesis. This is not the liberating scenario Bourriaud thought it would be in the early 2000′s

we are not saturated with images, but subjected to the lack of certain images, which must be produced to fill in the blanks of the official image of the community.

We are then very close to the "equivalence of everything, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the insignificant and the distinctive"

to signify that everything was equal because everything could be consumed

Roland Barthes, asserts that culture is an infinite palimpsest. Considering each book to consist of "multiple writings, proceeding from several cultures and entering into dialogue, into parody, into protest," Barthes accords the writer the status of scriptor, an intertextual operator: the only place where this multiplicity of sources converges is in the brain of the reader-postproducer.

Boycotts, detournement, and piracy belong to this culture of activity. When Allen Ruppersberg recopied Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray on canvas (1974), he took a literary text and considered himself responsible for it: he rewrote it.

No public image should benefit from impunity, for whatever reason: a logo belongs to public space, since it exists in the streets and appears on the objects we use, A legal battle is underway that places artists at the forefront: no sign must remain inert, no image must remain untouchable. Art represents a counterpower. Not that the task of artists consists in denouncing, mobilizing, or protesting: all art is engaged, whatever its nature and its goals. Today there is a quarrel over representation that sets art and the official image of reality against each other; it is propagated by advertising discourse, relayed by the media, organized by an ultralight ideology of consumption and social competition. In our daily lives, we come across fictions, representations, and forms that sustain this collective imaginary whose contents are dictated by power. BOOM

[krakenator]

Chapter 11 aka “Welcome to Chili’s”

SPOILERS are sprinkled around extremely liberally for The Property of Hate

Masterpost here

Oh damn alright that answers my earlier question of “what will cause RGB to make like a cuttlefish”. He can fiddle with his colors at any time, but he’ll fritz and settle on colors after power surges as well

And he DODGES the black button question. Look at that anxious cane fiddling!

White knob handles color, black knob brightness, he’s just shown that the white panel opens to adjust brightness/saturation/color… is the black button just plain off?

“I lose you I leave you” is such a damned lie lmao

Let’s see what kind of Stuff people trade here!

Moments manifest as clocks, har-har

I’m in love with the borzoi vender bc I love borzois they’re such ridiculously ethereal dogs

Don’t like your current eye? Trade it for a better eye!

or you dont care about eyes, just revenge-feelings

Kisses of varying flavors, all shaped like X’s

STOP RIGHT THERE crimincal scum. RGB stole a farewell kiss (HAR HAR). But seriously, does the Market have law enforcement for this kind of thing?

I’m sorry but my shit fandom brain see’s discussion about trading body parts and my mind immediately goes to Skulduggery “lost his original skull when sleeping and replaced it by winning another one in a poker game” Pleasant

Incidentally ALSO a story about a standoffish dapper non-human taking a young girl on Adventures

uh oh

Lmao he ends up dropping his cane in panic

I love the movement in this panel. RGB just scooping her up with one arm

Goodbye New Suit we barely knew ye

RGB’s able to fine tune his pallet extremely specifically for just 3 sliders

This might be my favorite interaction in the entire damn comic

CAREFUL RGB YOUR ATTACHMENT IS SHOWING

I love how RGB decided “you know what i like what that quick camouflage did for my trousers, I’m going to coordinate my upper half to match it”

Interesting visual and sound effect- we saw a character swap out heads earlier without that CRACK. Considering Assok’s had trouble twice now with static cling to RGB’s face, is this an electric spark of sorts?

I like the detail that Watcher only speaks in one word sentences

God but that cane is convenient. What I wouldn’t give to have possessions that are impossible to lose

I love RGB quietly, actually checking in with Assok after accidentally knocking them off Hero’s head

And now for something completely different!

WHOLESOME ASSOK HUG

RGB’s starting to poke her towards her epiphany about the Make Believe

As a someone who spent a long time being a short person that’s such short people talk RGB

Dude I skimmed over Dial’s dialogue this page last time because, really. Look at it. So lets actually read this sucker

Oh shit Dial actually mentions the Elastic Valley way before we get there ourselves

He’s got to what now. TOby is there on a JOB? Someone put him here on PURPOSE? I thought he just ended up there and was so surly to every fucking thing and everyone passing by was like “ok u can stay there rudepants”. What’s he on watch for?? Unless it’s far more punishment than it is useful assignment

Bad puns, go to jail

Oh shit does Watcher have another pair of eyes on his wings? Damn! For a guy with 4 eyes he sure is not very helpful at his job later on!!

Hooo does his boss make Dial nervous. Lookit that stutter and devolution to muttering

When Dial says TOby took his eye off things, is he referring to letting RGB+Hero pass by (how would he stop them)? Is it that the wind blew him over and blocked his vision (THAT IS LITERALLY NOT HIS FAULT)?

And what the hell has TOBy done to defy Hate previously? What does he have opinions that Hate/Dial would have him change his mind about?

See you space cowboy…

And because I can’t make up my mind on what to meme here: “mm whatcha saaay”

A thought on Dial’s design… his head says “ON AIR”. Later we know that Hate can listen in on him. D’you figure he ever makes himself “OFF AIR” other than when he sleeps?

Now this little here combined textbox gives me some thoughts…

I haven’t paid attention to the color of character text beyond Hero’s voice getting eroded by sand, but… boxes can be any color and shape, its not uncommon for characters to have separate fonts, but words themselves? Only ever black and white. Now this could be for the sake of no eyestrain against backgrounds, but... consider the dichotomy TPoH is building up over its story

white in this comic is associated with bad things quite often. Lies, [-----], Hate’s realm. The blinding, scorching, destructive light of the unmasked Sun. meanwhile, darkness hides the Market from danger, and nighttime is tied intrinsically with dreaming. in fact, we JUST had an entire chapter dedicated to framing the Dark as good, protective, and aligned with trees and water, other positive entities

For a minute I got all excited because Dial and the Butterfly both have white text, thinking “oh, my god. do all Hate-aligned characters have white text?” this gets jossed pretty hard by Julienne’s white text, as well as Cell and Tailor.

but while THINKING on that, I jumped back to Storytime in chapter 10 and check this out: the moment RGB starts his story, text is suddenly white. Most of it continues to be in white… except for these two sentences

AND CHECK THIS SHIT OUT: THE TEXT COLOR/SCENERY CHANGE COLOR TO THE FIVE COLORS OF RGB’S SCREEN. HOW DID I MISS THAT??

(flips table) WHAT DOES IT ALL MEEEEEEAN

… y’know, the only character to have a white bubble color for their speech is RGB, who speaks in black

He’s both. He’s NEUTRAL.

Considering my talent for creating OCs but chronic deficiency in building coherent and decisive stories for them, they’re all probably wandering this Market and world right now. at the very least most of them have spent a DAMN long time here before becoming realized (im so sorry guys im trying)

The ones that are complete as themselves but their stories are unstarted/uncertain? That’s like. most of them. whoops. maybe this will be the kick in the pants i need

But on a brighter note: Fosters Home for Unfinished OCs

BUT by the rules of this world, RGB doesn’t have a story… yet this is his story.

Assok’s newest position of travel is adorable and im dying

Y’know… Hero and RGB have very different ways of solving things. A little obvious, but- RGB’s solutions are always convoluted, require multiple steps, and are a little ridiculous. Or, he at least FRAMES them as complex. See: Click escape, train escape, entire scheme to find a Hero to right the world. Hero’s far more straightforward but her solutions are also more, like… sensible than RGB’s if that makes sense. If it was just RGB up on the burning heart his plan would have probably involved more "im very intelligent” and pizzaz, while Hero went for the comparatively simple “lets zipline” (versus RGB’s upcoming Click escape clusterfuck)

All of which to say, I got thinking on that with RGB being like “it’s a very complex topic I can’t possibly boil it down to anything smaller” and Hero describing what the Make Believe acts as in one word

So if this worlds objects come from the sea, the sea is connected to other worlds? And it was confirmed early on that ‘stuff’ and ‘thought’ are basically synonyms- these foreign objects can exist in the Make Believe because they’re infused with enough Stuff!

Hero and presumably all of the other Heroes came from outside the Make Believe… they are not unrealized characters, or they didn’t start out as such. To exist here like this, they must then be imbued with enough Stuff/Thought… if we specify Stuff as equivalent to creative thought… by jove! I’ve hit on (another) theory!

Haven’t all past Heroes been artists? Julienne is a dancer, Melody a musician, Dial works radio, Ticker is a craftsman, and Tailor works with textiles. TOby and Assok don’t have anything obvious, but if I was Hate, I’d turn puppeteers into motionless dolls and empty-voiced sock puppets.

oh yeah, and Click. betcha he was a toymaker

I wonder what kind of artist Hero would grow up to be? She clearly draws, we saw her work taped to her bedroom wall

Of note… RGB is also an artist. It looked like that alternate human-self we glimpse later was involved with TV production, or perhaps script writing.

Tfw your ex walks past and doesn’t even hesitate like wow Magnus be a stone cold bitch like that

also like how his speech tail loops around his neck like a noose upon seeing Maggie

ALSO, that conveniently timed mention of hands when giving examples of what makes Stuff valuable in the Market- the nostalgia and undertones of regret are strong in this one

(watches this character die) oh jesus Christ. (looks at list of decommissioned ocs) ... oops

So this is what it looks like when a character dies… what does it look like when one is realized

do you like puns? want some more quality RGB roasting? like clothes shopping? the next chapter is for you