Confession of Faith

I Got Dibs on Creepy Doll Head Swaps

There was an interesting post on Whiskey Shots yesterday about the line between imitation and innovation. Whiskey wrote:

We are each influenced by everything we see. Taking inspiration from everything, including other artists, is a natural part of the creative process. Inspiration is essential, and it can come from anywhere. An artist incorporates that inspiration into their own vision (pardon my artsy fartsy lingo here) and creates a work that, while influenced and inspired by other things, is still truly an original work of art.

In music, it's the difference between tribute band versions of a song and covers by artists who reinterpret it through their own voice. A dozen authentic artists can create vastly different versions of a single song even though the chord progression, basic melody and lyrics are the same.

Nevertheless, there is a joy in performing or recreating faithful versions of songs we love. And in visual art, imitation is often step on the way to artistic reinterpretation. Such rote exercises seldom made it out of the studio before the internet. But since LOLCats, shared visual riffs on unoriginal themes has become common and part of the connected culture.

It ain't art, but that's okay. With one exception. I got dibs on creepy doll head swaps.

Shira and Mira Returning in New Star Trek Parody

I've started building sets for two planned Love Toy sequels. Action will take place both on the Starship Enterprise and in Shira and Mira's cute and deadly little apartment. Here are a few of the living room props coming together on my work table.

Latest Zombie Doll Story

New Flesh Eating Terror Strikes USA

Cliché Necromancy

 

Since Whiskey Day is embracing the cliché, I thought I'd love up a few myself. Creativity is like playing a slot machine. Place a bet. Pull the lever. Watch the clichés spin. Pray to the Muse for a winning combination. Spin again.

A Girl and Her Dinosaur

A 100 Word Story

Down the stairs. Through the door. To the far corner of the dimly lit room. Toys and dolls barely discernable on row after row of stacked shelves. Silent. Unmoving. Inanimate.

I turn on a lamp. Colors and shapes resolve into discernable forms. Inanimate objects reify into living being. They call to me through a quantum sea of stories. Rising and falling. Waiting to be born.

I drift for a timeless time. Surfing along the multi-dimensional infinity of the ghost-filled wave. It instantly collapses as I make my choice. Two characters. One sweet story. A girl and her dinosaur.

Santorum's warnings . . .

Bad Santa?

One of the most valuable things I've learned from virtual worlds is that our conception of reality is based as much upon imaginary projection as objective perception. In a virtual world such as Second Life we can easily remember that there is software behind the beautiful sky we see. With a little more effort and attention we can even keep in mind that there is a human of unknown age, gender and appearance behind the avtar we're interacting with.

Being able to shift awareness in and out of immersion in virtual life is a great exercise for awakening to the analogous phenomenon in the atomic world. Our experience of physical life is no less a construction of our minds. The dome of Earth's sky is actually blue light scattered across the atmosphere. Although we can't read other people's minds, we usually act as if we know exactly what they're thinking.

For the past year or so, I've been playing around with using dolls and action figures to expose how our minds reflexively construct personality, identity and story. For instance, the toys in the image above weren't posed. The were just sitting on a shelf at an antique mall. But one glance was all it took for my mind to reflexively translate the sensory impressions into an evocative story. By noticing and capturing this mental process with toys, my hope is that I'll have an easier time remembering it with people. Someday.

I Am Not Playing!

Cindy's Inner Child

Buffy is Exhausted

After having a lot of fun with 100 Word Stories, I recently stumbled onto an even more condensed micro-tale format in The Tiny Book of Stories. It's an anthology of 67 works that combine a few lines of text and an illustration. It's likely you'll see a lot more of these here over the next few weeks while I'm busy working on a new long-form comic, "The Death of Botgirl." (Yes. That was a teaser.)