Mindscape In Cyberspace

Venereal Kittens is a collective, conceptualized and edited by artist-poet Matina L. Stamatakis and dedicated to archiving and preserving innovative works by writers and artists of the 21st century, with a strong preference for experimental, avant-garde,post modern poetry and art. They say very clearly that they are not interested in mainstream writing or art.

They have already featured great artists and writers like, Alexander Jorgensen, Kane X. Faucher, Theoni Tambaki, ek rzepka, Carmen Racovitza, Ted Warnell, John Moore Williams, Angela Genusa, Javier Kronauer, Marco Giovenale, Raymond Farr, Anna Christina, Mauricette Beaussart, Drew Kunz, Nico Vassilakis, Linh Dinh, Robert Chrysler, Catherine M. Bennett, Michelle Detorie, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Mark Lamoureux, Bruna Mori, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Philip Jenks, Diana Magallon, Jeff Crouch, etc.

Recently they have added my digital paintings and visual poetry to their archive. It feels really nice to be featured on a journal with all those great artists who are shaping the art and literature of 21^st century.

Find the thumbnails of my paintings and vispos that are featured on Venereal Kittens, below:

Entangled

… and Birds and Birds

Comics

Park Street Junction

Watching TV - Emotinally Red

Take a look at my works on Venereal Kittens at following locations:
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/10/samit-roy.html
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/02/samit-roy-continued.html

Few months back while flipping through the pages on Flickr, I bumped upon a series of nice line drawings, said to be drawn by The Scribbler. I explored more and found this small but lots-of-fun-to-do tool, The Scribbler - an on-line application that allows user to draw freehand simple line drawings, and create a complex and interesting line drawing, automatically, from that.

The Scribbler, created by ZeFrank, takes simple vector based input and creates its own drawing on top of it based on a number of simple rules. When a new scribble line is created it chooses a few numbers at random that eventually determine what sort of line it will draw. As it begins to draw it fine tunes those values to the type of drawing that you’ve made. Because there is randomness built into the program, each scribble is unique.

In the on-line version, user can adjust some of the values that Scribbler would normally choose at random, such as line thickness, line color, and the maximum length of a scribble line.

Once drawing is reached at the desired stage, the user needs to ‘Pause’ Scribbler and take a screen shot. Well, it seems, that this is the only way to save your Scribbler art. Take a look at Scribbler gallery to check Scribbler art created by people at the Scribbler gallery. Some images are really impressive.

I could not resist myself to try my hands on fun toy and found that this small tool can create amazing results, if one can collaborate with the application. If you follow the logic that the application is using to create the complex lines and eventually form a complex texture from those lines, it will be easy for you to draw the right curves, that might create a nice output, once Scribbled.

Following are a series called Scribbler Earth, that I have created using images generated through The Scribbler. I was trying to doodle on the application, and thinking about earth. These are what came out, after I manipulated those scribble screen shots and added some color on them. Of course, being a first-timer my scribble skills are not so well, but I think I will improve and come up with more Scribbler arts.

Scribbler Earth 01

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Scribbler Earth 02

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Scribbler Earth 03

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Scribbler Earth 04

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Scribbler Earth 05

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Death of A Mustache
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When I saw the news of Veerappan’s death in a police encounter on the news paper, along with a photo of the deceased brigand, the first thing I noticed was the absence of his great mustache. I was not sure how Veerappan lost his legendary mustache, but I thought, ‘It’s not a death of a man or a sandalwood smuggler or a notorious bandit or the infamous brigand; it is actually a death of a great mustache!’ I might sound funny or weird but I was very much impressed by his mustache, since I have seen his picture on a newspaper when I was in high school!

Within next few days, I came up with this work!

Rampage
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Being an avid gamer I used to spend lots of time on various versions of famous game series GTA – scheming a ‘rampage’, planning ‘bomb blasts’, executing a ‘mall shootout’ or simply ‘riding’ through the city ‘killing gang members’. This image is a kind of extension of my visual memories of those virtual images of deaths and blood and blasts, juxtaposed against our real context – a blasting population, often threatened, disturbed by deaths and murders, mass killings and genocides. It’s all about our time - restless and anxious, like the central character of GTA, standing in the middle of the blood and bodies of ‘wasted gang members’.

The Bengali text on the image says, ‘Our time’, repeatedly.

This work has been featured on the cover of Autumn 2007 issue of International Journal, published by Canadian Institute of International Affair (CIIA, Toronto), currently known as Canadian International Council (CIC). Thanks to CIC and IJ.

Comics
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Since my childhood, I have always been mesmerized by the magical world of images and text of comic books and the bikini-clad girlfriends of the super heroes with their funny speech baloons, crossing the boundaries of those small boxy frames and rigid panels. I have always wanted to create a comic strip, but it did not get done. The only thing that I could do is to bring together one of my unfinished poems about a weekend trip with a rejected photograph from the same trip, and make a conscious effort to simulate the eerie ambience of the first cell of a dark, action comics strip - still without a story, waiting for a hostile moment to begin its journey through the pages of our childhood fears.

The text on the image can be roughly translated as,

There are trucks and trucks and trucks, and more trucks, more and more trucks, truck after truck, standing still beside the yellow seat, before us, and the dark sleeves of their t-shirts wipe off from the dark, gloomy, night, the vaporized sodium of Highway no. 7!

Wild Pepper Forest (2006) - The work is inspired by a line from a Bengali poem by one of my favorite Bengali poets, Kamal Chakraborty (’80 – ‘90). The sentence goes like this, “… tomake dekhate partum buno maricher jongole thyangare ghumiye porechhe …” .

A rough translation of the line would go like this, “… I wish I could show you how the brigand has fallen asleep in the wild pepper forest …”.

The image was  used as the cover for 14th issue of Kaurab Online, the on-line edition of Kaurab, a Bengali Literature magazine founded by Kamal Chakraborty, which he also edited for 30 years.

I have written a prose piece in Bengali, along with this image, as a part of my response to this line. Rather, my work is a textual and visual tribute to the poet, Kamal Chakraborty, who has inspired me to experiment with the form and content of Bengali prose in my writings.

• Read this Bengali prose piece, “Tomake Dekhate Partum (I wish I could show you)” in Bangla UNICODE font
• Read this Bangla Prose Piece, as GIF

French and English transposition of the first paragraph of the Bengali piece has been done by Rouflaquettes.

French transposition:

Je pourrais te montrer
et je veux tellement te faire montrerles
les grattes ciels depuis les frontières de la cité… …
bric à bric
sable, bois
pierre à pierre
sur plafonds blanchis
vignes coulantes formidables de piments sauvages … …
dont l’ombre endorme le brigand faire à mesure
tel que le soleil de thésaures de notre parole
dictionnaires
examens et leurs cahiers verts
ainsi que le stylo à balle en rouges …

English transposition:

I could have shown you
and I would have wanted so much to show you
the skyscrapers beyond the city’s frontiers,
brick after brick
sand, wood
on lime-washed ceilings
flowing vines of elegant wild pepper
whose shadow shelters the sleeping brigand
like the sun of the thesaurus
and dictionaries of our speech,
exams and their green notebooks,
marked in red ball-point ink …

Later, in 2007, I reworked the image to create a cover for the printed edition of Kaurab.

The reworked image can be viewed here »

I always like these aimless, apparently meaningless, untitled images that I generate while playing with or scribling on my old, dumped or unfinished works on a lazy Sunday morning or lone Saturday nights! I never wanted to achieve something or preach some messages through these works. They are just visual expressions of a particular state of my subconscious mind and they are never conscious constructions with specific goals. I just let the colors and lines flow as they want, resulting these images that talk about themselves, not about me or my consciuos thought process.Most of the cases these images are lost. Only a few are saved and stored and archived in my hard disk.

I have started putting them on my Digital Art Blogalleria. Recently, I have added another aimless, untitled graphics on my Blogalleria. One of these aimless images can be viewed here.

I came across an impressive on-line exhibition called ‘Comic Abstraction‘, presented by MOMA. The full title of the exhibition is ‘Comic Abstraction - Image-Breaking, Image-Making‘. The exhibition physically took place at the Museum Of Modern Art, from March 4 to June 11, 2007. It was organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, MOMA. It featured famous artists, illustrator, animators like Arturo Herrera, Takashi Murakami, Polly Apfelbaum, Ellen Gallagher, Sue Williams, Michael Majerus, Inka Essenhigh, Juan Munoz, Julie Mehretu, Franz West, Garry Simmons, Phileppe Parreno and Rivane Neuenschwander. The website - Comic Abstraction is a nice and comprehensive on-line representation of the exhibition.

I liked the work by Rivane Neuenschwander and the way she tackled and questioned the political agenda of a canonical work in comic book history. In her ‘The Return of Ze Carioca’ (1960), she consciously tries to disassemble a historic edition of a popular comic book featuring, Ze Carioca aka Jose Carioca, the famous Brazilian parrot and a popular ‘Disney’ character, created in 1941, during World War II, when Walt Disney was visiting Brazil to support American relations with this region. She feels that Jose Carioca, the character created by Disney, is actually based on the ’stereotypical cliché of the Brazilians’ and helps to ‘crystallize the national image of a Malandro or a rascal in local language and confronts this ‘implicit political and racial undertone’ by over-painting the figures with bright flat colors and the text, with blank opaque white.

It reminds me the famous book of a baby-faced European comic book hero - in which, he goes to South America, preaches ‘morals and ethics’, ‘enlightens’ the local guerrillas with ’social values’ and ‘teaches’ them about revolution. It also reminds me, the dumb and expressionless faces of Africans or Asians, as they are pictured in this particular comics series.

I also liked, ‘Speech Bubbles’ (1997) by Phileppe Parreno, because of the subtle reference of political undertone it carries along. Parreno’s work is not an image but an installation with clusters of helium-filled balloons with shapes of the speech bubbles of a comic book. Parreno’s idea of a ‘good image’ is also very interesting. According to him, “A good image is always a social moment.’ I agree with him!

The On-line Exhibition can be viewed here »