Outside the Asylum: The Intimacy of Art

I know plenty of you are still stupid enough to titter at the thought of the word intimacy, and I'm okay with that. Its the stupid part of the brain that I find most interesting, and while I have an abundance of raw material to study, sometimes, other peoples stupid is so exciting that it casts light on my own.

People who are offended by art confuse me. Art is an exercise in creating a dialog between people. It is an intimate experience that warrants more involvement than a passing glance at a wall or a buildings facade. Art is about touching and being touched in a visceral way. It is about showing common understandings of a theme and dancing around that theme with an open mind.

My use of language is art. I flog a letter into perverse contortions that emulate the idea of an asshole eating itself because cognitive assonance is a tool for others to control you. I discard the illusion of taboo. What I say to you is spelled out blood red illustrations of weapons of a new age. That makes me an artist... maybe. Or a Wizard, or a craftsman of some other genre some people aren't prepared to engage in.

The trick to raising awareness about the human condition is to ask a human. Artists tend to know some of those. They actually live in a world where hearts break when a mortgage package is refused. They actually have to watch the faces of you mindless drones, who labor day after day in the salt mines and wonder how you keep your souls. Artists have to ask these questions, because they live inside us every day.

You are an artist. The only way to feed that part of yourself is to engage art and share in it. Love someone and show them that love with the trait you think is best in yourself. Carve a better world by sharing your love with another person in a way that gets your hands dirty. Make love with your skin off and share art with the people you love. Wonder at it and fantasize about the feelings of the subjects... because art is fucking with you and you can't even find the buckle on your straight jacket to get involved.

Museums are the natural area on the asylum grounds... feel free to play naked in them. Fuck each other in public over a Rembrandt. Lick her ears over Monet. Grab his cock in front of a Degas. Be sensual when you experience the art. Imagine the painter was rock hard every time his brush hit the canvas. Imagine Mozart throwing away ink under the piano. Books and rhymes are foreplay... take your lover in public, where everyone can see it.

Outside the Asylum: The Problem with Borders

I can't understand why you patients are constantly declaring the existence of new and different wards. Seem's that you think skin color or clan name is some sort of "phrenology" for the value of individuals and their potential. For some reason, the concept of legitimate liberty escapes large portions of you. Allow me to illustrate with a point from contemporary history.

Slavery is a touchy subject. The meaning of the word has changed over time, and people like to draw lines around where they believe it existed in history... but an honest examination of the concept of slavery clearly demonstrates that it is an ever present yet abhorrent under current of the reality we live in.

In the 21st century, we have countries who are going to war over the right to gather rain;government contractors affiliated with the U.S. and the U.N., participating in human trafficking in regions they are supposed to be "stabilizing"; most of the world's tech addiction is being fed by a human breaking machine; and American companies using slaves instead of hiring domestic labor I'm forced to ask what sort of people you've entrusted with decisions about the well being of the world. Let's talk about THESE binders full of women.

The watchmen go unwatched while we shovel faces full of rom/coms and surreality TV. I'm guilty. You're guilty. The person running that brothel 2 miles from your house is guilty...

You think all this abuse is taking place over seas? How naive are you? Don't you ever read the arrest logs in the local paper... sure, some of those hookers chose the life. Some of them don't even know what country they woke up in. How many of the workers in that mill are legal? How many hands in that field are picking to keep out of jail.

We get caught up in the changing of the guard when an election comes, but some problems live past the last administration... and some live past the point of reason. As much as I love the spectacle of politics, the specter of real human problems pretty much crushes any interest I have in listening about how we're going to manipulate the tax code to favor one group or another. How about we address real issues, like how companies that participate in this kind of trade can remain partners in our communities? That might hurt campaign funding though.

We all have a shot at attaining perfect misery in this life. There is no reason to help each other find the bottom. Gravity will do that for you. If we're going to put up boundaries that define how far we are allowed to pursue happiness, lets not gerrymander ourselves into hell. Some crimes ignore borders. Resolving them requires recognition of their scope. Dig deeper.

Outside the Asylum: Tools of the Trade

One of the biggest problems you inmates run into is communicating across your diverse delusions. For some reason, you all seem to have your own personal languages in order to communicate. While I realize each of you bounces off of reality at a different angle, my greatest dream is to create an means by which you can share your unique imaginary view of reality with each other, so you can all align yourselves properly. To that end, I've pulled together a map towards the idea.

I realize that in the digital age, the ability to share experiences has been... abused. The bandwidth necessary to share that picture of your bagel this morning could have been dedicated to more beneficial duty, but if we're going to have the ability, lets TRULY capitalize on it.

With the emergence of products like ProjectGlass from Google and the advancements in augmented reality gaming it won't be long before Second Life and your first life are bumping up against each other. You're going to be able to skin your friends and decorate your house using purely digital sources combined with 3D Printers.

But the really exciting part is what sort of interfaces are coming to help us manage all the data more efficiently. Spatially aware gaming sensors have adapted people to the idea of using their body as a controller, but we are chasing the dream of the brain-computer interface.

There are several different approaches currently being examined, and each has its own benefits and limitations. Emotiv is a company that is pursuing electroencephalography as a means to interface with a computer. Berkley is using MRI technology to project images from your brain into a digital reality. Potentially the most useful, although simultaneously prohibitive non-invasive method would utilize MEG which has the potential to give the most precise reading of neural activity in real time, but is severely limited in utility because of its sensitivity.

Then, we have the people at Braingate, who are in the early stages of clinical testing for a chip that implants directly into the motor cortex of the brain, which allows you to control the computer cursor or a robot arm using the same thoughts you would for natural muscle movement.

The goal is to gather as much detailed information about brain activity and map that activity to the experiences that create it. Every person is going to have a unique biological reaction when trying to mentally execute a task, so all of these methods require software that learns to connect your brain activity with another event. The software has to learn how we think so that it can act like an extension of us.

Knowing humans and technology, how long do you think it will be before we're trading experiences like sky-diving in our data streams the way we share pictures of biscuits and tea today?

Outside The Asylum: Chemical attractions

I’ve decided that the most interesting job in the world would be to be the guy at the sanitarium, who stares at the rest of the world, wide eyed in horror, while you all do terrible things to each other. What else can I do, but document the ways you could be looking into yourself more deeply and finding more beauty in each moment. So here I am... the metatron, at the junction between reality and dreams... watching beautiful moments pass you buy.

Being the warden gives me the opportunity to plan the education program for the inmates, but no one is required to attend, since wrangling you inmates towards any single purpose is such a chore, I’ve decided to leave this here for you. Think of it as an explanation of why you don’t realize you’re insane.

The first stop on our tour is going to be your head. Most of you haven’t figured out how to use it yet, so I’m going to go ahead and highlight some of the good parts.
Human biology is a complex tempest in a tiny teapot, cosmically speaking... (Back of the Book) From our point of view, the interactions that make us are vast and complex... until you realize that all the pieces are connected to you, inside and out. You can’t move without the rest of reality moving with you. I know, some of you don’t like to think about being connected, because it scares you. It’s okay. There are people giving away free hugs. Find one and hold on until you understand that connections are a good thing.

One of the most important “sets” of connections for you is your brain. Magic happens here... okay, maybe not magic, but a lot of confusion. Philosophers and scientists can't agree on what consciousness means, let alone how to quantify it. We do know that without a brain, you are clearly going to be at a disadvantage... and a few other things.

Science is working on building models of the interactions in the brain that influence mood and perception and how we can control and benefit from these interactions. The chemistry in your brain is more delicate than an award winning dessert recipe... tinkering with it should be handled responsibly.

We're starting to gain some real ground on methods of watching it function, but we still haven't gotten all of our lines sorted out. It's a delicate mixture of chemicals and electricity. Playing with the chemical combinations effects the brains abilities in some pretty interesting ways LIKE...

Hallucinogens. Admit it... you were all thinking about them anyway. No need to pitch a fit over it. Everyone who was whispering about it 10 years ago is talking about it out loud today. In fact, they're talking about it in laboratories equipped to track how hallucinogens impact activity in the brain on a pretty amazing scale.

The main actors in this arena are a series of enzymes that impact the transmission of signals between brain cells. Hallucinogenic compounds demonstrably increase the flow of these chemicals by interfering with the regulatory process inside the cells of the brain. The chemicals in the hallucinogen plug gaps in enzyme sequences, causing production enzyme switches to remain on longer than a normal "healthy" brain would.

The downside to the artificially induced activity is that it deprives the body of those same neurotransmitters later. Beware of mood crashes. A normal body will take time to replace the raw materials that were used.

Brain chemistry is a deep rabbit hole... the fringes of the sciences of the mind... but there does appear to be evidence that psychoactives that stimulate the release of enzymes in the brain are part of shamanic rituals for a reason. These drugs alter the way that your mind and reality intersect in ways that are hard to describe to anyone who has never experienced it. Jill Bolte Taylor takes a stab... and my personal experiences as someone with a schizotypal disorder resonate with her description.

But as it turns out, this typical dissolving of self appears to have certain benefits for individuals who have trauma in their past. There is a growing body of evidence that seems to support the benefits of a combined use of personal counseling and hallucinogens under a doctors supervision. It may turn out that the best therapy for trauma is prying open the third eye and allowing sunlight to act as disinfectant.

I'm looking forward to the day when doctors can use these drugs to clean out the skeletons in your closet in a hurry, rather than keeping you on a trickle dose of SSRIs for the rest of your life.

If you want to dig into the world of scholarly works regarding hallucinogens, psychosis, and fun in the brain try these. Don't be afraid of the words. They're here to heal.