High Contrast Grey.

  Perhaps the line "The 20th C. was a mistake" is a bit inflammatory as there were some very good things to come out of the century (progress for civil rights, a change in attitudes towards colonization, medical breakthroughs, etc.). The ways in which our societies in the West function though seem to have taken a poor turn. I think that a lot of the progress of the 20th C. falls prey to the idea that all progress must be a positive, when in fact some progress could be seen as a side step or a backwards step.   In this idea of Hauntology and that media consumed in our youth helps plant the seeds for how we continue to think about ideas, there was one summer in my youth that I picked up a book from the library. I never finished the book, but I think that some of the ideas that it helped inspire me to think about have continued in my mind. The book was The Great War: Walk in Hell by Harry Turtledove. (If an earworm is a song that we can't get out of our head because we didn...

  Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher begins with a passage about a British sci-fi television programme called Sapphire and Steel that was shown on ITV from 1979 to 1982. The premise of the series is that there are two characters, Sapphire and Steel, who are sent to fix problems with time breaking down. They are not quite human with special abilities like telekinesis, reading the history of objects, and the two of them being able to communicate mentally. As Fisher puts it, “Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down.  In one of the earlier assignments, Steel complains that these temporal anomalies are triggered by human beings’ predilection for the mixing of artefacts from different eras.” (pg5) The first story was about how the saying of nursery rhymes worked as an incantation across time. This was because they have been said over and over again throughout time that these words become t...

The sprawl of Eastern Montana.  When I was a teenager, I was introduced to the concept of mediation. I would attend weekly meditation meetings at a local Buddhist dharma center. This was in Eastern Montana in an old large home that had once belonged to a local furniture dealer when things like furniture were still something that shops would have made locally/regionally. Because of where this was located, the meditations were led by old former hippies from the 60s. They would start the meetings with a parable that, for some reason, would always have connections to hamburgers being a basis of society. For example, one parable was about a poor beggar begging for money, so he could eat a hamburger to stave off starvation. He ended up discovering that his favorite warm coat that his mother had given him had money sewn into the lining. His precious warm coat, upon becoming worn enough to tatter the fabric, provided him with the money to purchase a new coat and begin climbing out of pover...

Liverpool.  When I arrived in Liverpool, the YouTube algorithm decided to introduce me to the concept of Hauntology. Hauntology comes from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book The Specters of Marx from 1993. A quick definition being : "Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost." Wikipedia This is to say that the failed ideas and concepts of the past still haunt us today, like how the collapse of the USSR didn't lead to the end of communism. Instead, the ghost of communism haunts capitalism with the notion that there is an alternative to the system that we are currently in. The motivational fear of the Cold War and communists has been internalized (at least in the US and perhaps the UK) to any leftist political movements, with the fear that it is the ghost of Marx that will be resurrected.  This initial video that I ...

  When I was studying French literature, I took a course on literature from the Antilles. One of the literary devices that we were studying was that the people of the Antilles don't always think of time in a linear line, but as a web of causes and effects that blend together. One of the books we read was a detective story where the lead detective would talk to the suspects to trace after the clues. The direction of the dialogue with the suspects was always them sharing their life story with the deceased and how their interactions over time shaped them. It was this idea that actions in the past influence reactions in the future. As well as the idea that a person is not a solitary individual, but a composite of the surrounding society. Walruses of the Arctic Hotel.   Later, when I was studying architecture in graduate school, I liked to think of this concept when designing buildings how the past of the area could inform designs for the present that could direct images of the fut...

"God is in the details." The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. (wikipedia)   This was something that was said by my first art history prof in university. She was using it to explain the high level of detail used in a Christian painting we were looking at. Or perhaps it was that sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. I had grown up atheist, so I struggled with knowing the art history depictions of stories from the Bible and trying to keep track of saints. But it also meant that I interpreted this phrase differently. In my godless eyes this meant to me that the process of creation through repetition and the application of intricate detail was not dissimilar to meditation where the labor leads to deep self-contemplative thought. When I was in high school, I began to attend a Buddhist center in town once a week for a weekly meditation. Their meditation consisted of listening to a repetitive drumbeat while we focused on clearing our minds. This led me to thinking of...

Hey. C'est moi.  It has been a few years. Since I last discussed into the void here I attended grad school for architecture at the University of Washington, finished the Master's program by the skin of my teeth, graduated into a global pandemic (I would not recommend this), gave away most of my worldly possessions, and am now flâneur-ing around Europe on the slim budget of my life savings. Allow me to reintroduce myself : I am the artist, Gaston. My interests include ; architecture, sustainability, art, vintage fashions, antiques, and flâneries. All while consuming massive quantities of tea. “I know where I'm from, but I don't know where I'm going.” I recently heard this line at a video playing at the Tate Museum in Liverpool, and it rang strong in me. In the film Casablanca, when Rick is questioned on his nationality he responds that his is a “drunkard,” insinuating that he has renounced his American nationality for that of someone who owns and runs a bar. From ...