Cathal Lindsay

Dune -Frank Herbert

There is a feeling of directionless energy within me. I’m going to work my way through it. It’s due to positive changes in my llife. If I'm honest it scares me a little. A sea creature used to the crushing pressure of the midnight zone, I find my self emerging in to the sunlight zone. My form needs to adjust. Adjust to the new currents and pressures. There’s nothing unique in this, I think we all go through the same process.

I think it is the process of change; the energy it takes to put down roots, to stand in place that scares me.

When I put my poor mental health and unhelpful coping mechanisms in the past, I thought my growth was done. Heh it turns out I just cleared the chaff and weeds. Now the growth starts.

Combined with the challenges of the current state of the world and how to help my kids navigate it, it’s a lot. There’s the temptation to retreat to the familiar depths, to allow the weeds to take over again.

I truly no longer want that, but the depths and weeds, would be different this time. They promise. I know I don’t want that, so it’s one eye on my growth, one eye on the temptations and one eye on my mixed metaphors and biblically accurate eye count.

There is no option for me to add alt text so it’s here.

The above image is a fluid composition of text. The text is layered and written in different directions in a variety of media.

Some text is smudged out some is just about legible.

The negative space between unconnected words has been emphasised in places with zinc white oil paint.

I am trying to resolve a tension I see between my ideas, planning and completing a work. They all exist as integral parts of the whole, but not always given the same weight. Final image I just where I stop my process.

This is the thread of the intent of the text on display.

Above is another text composition. The same methodology as the previous image has been used.

The thoughts recored on this were a tangent to the previous image.

Here the thread of thought was information loss and thermodynamics. Just thoughts and wonderings. I gained no answers, I'm hoping my insights are on the way.

The negative spaces have again been emphasised but this time in paynes gray.

Does the process of emphasised negative space reveal what I seek?

The stage I’m at needs a review of my work and a dive into theory. The work will come. I’m thinking of books and visual research essays.

I have been very sporadically present on this site. As anyone who looks at it will most likely know me, there’s not much to tell that adds to that. Life has been very intense for the last few years. I lost my footing and fell. My mental health issues that I had no idea were issues came a calling. My marriage fell apart, I saw the woman I loved die a little day by day. I saw her become someone else. (I accept that I failed the marriage and her, but I won’t accept the totality of the blame of the situation. But all that is another bucket of thoughts I’m not getting into today.) My children suffered and needed more support, love and comfort than they were given. I was hit full on by the depth of my isolation and struggled to survive. I followed my heart. I followed my head. I helped my children cope with their immediate grief. I was ostracised by those whose support I could have used. I’m not proud, but glad to have survived 3 attempted suicides. I found security and care and lost it again. I felt heartbreak and grief that overwhelmed, I almost lost the care of my children and was almost sectioned. But I’m still here. Why this post, why now? It’s not all been pain and clouds of sorrow. If you could see my thoughts as I type this. There is a side of me that yells how dare I. How dare I complain when others have suffered more and are suffering more. I accept that they have suffered more and are suffering more, but I’m not in a suffering competition. My experience is worthy as any others. But I digress from my internal debate. I’m writing this for me and to me. It is the 14th of October 2024, and I am alive. I want (no wishes - wishes are for the benefit of the world, if wishes exist I shall not waste them on personal whims.) I want to use this as a journal

Learning from this week.

I'm going to watch more of my course and see what things I can glean from it to help me improve on my shading and tonal identification.

The lower jaw still irks me. The proportions are correct, or they seem so. But they are probably off by mils and that has a culminative effect of looking wrong. Anyway, it's the best I can do at the moment in terms of skill and patience.

I don’t have a studio, nor can i afford one. I don’t have space. I want to paint, but I have many barriers to that activity. Some self imposed, others imagined, some insurmountable.

I want to finish my MA; I want to move forward, but the barriers remain.

The drawings I make for practice and glitches I create scratch a creative ich but they rarely satisfy.

I made an image today. The image encapsulates what want to explore. Einsturzende Neubauten recorded a soundtrack to Faustmusik a play by Werner Schwab. The sound track was composed with the materials such as tables, pages, books, rulers and writing sounds . I need like Einstruzende Neubauten, to embrace the materals. I must use the mechanisms of writing. The forms and rituals.

My coding is coming on well, I wrote this as an array, using OOP in processing really really quickly. I’m really practicing the format of arrays and using classes. The more advanceed actually challenging stuff is coming up, using trigononmetery, and creating more complex sketches.

I don’t have a central theme to this post. It’s just a musing or a ramble. I like many others have been in lock down and suffering from mental helath issues. I have fourtunately had a good mental health team around me and they have ensured that I am getting medication. The difference a set of good eds makes is unbeliveable. This time last year I was struggling to get up in the morning and then spent the day struggling to think.The meds made me sluggish. The new meds have allowed me to be more motivated and helped to focus on getting stuff done. Like getting on with my coding learning. I had a hiccup with the meds last week and the difference is striking.

Today I put all of my coding knowledge together and coded this emulation of pong. It’s not finished but the difficult parts are done. The bats move and collision detection is sorted. I need to add scoring and to fancy it up with bell and whistles.

I’m on to learning about Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). This is the bit I have been looking forward to. From here I can programme a lot of things. My first goal is to rte code the not_Pong using OOP.

A more colourful sketch than I have been doing of late.

This uses FOR loops to draw the squares along the x axis; and another to draw the squares on the y axis.

The colour is controlled by the mouse movement. Long details below.

The colour in processing is by default set up as (red, green,blue). It's basically colour mixing with light.

The red component in the sketch is defined by the distance of the x co -ordinate of the mouse minus the x value of the square on the grid it is over , expressed as an absolute. ( which means its a positive number at all times. ).

The green component is defined by the y coordinate of the mouse minus the y value of the square it is over expressed as an absolute.

The blue component is defined by the mouse's x coordinate minus the width divided by two expressed as an absolute.

I’m making good progress with my learning in processing. Much to the irritation of my children. I like to advise them in great detail of how and why I have made such and such a coding decision and what happened and how I overcame the dreadful situation. They are 10 and 7 and really just want to play minecraft.

I’m trying to learn Processing . Again. Properly this time honest. I am coding a bit every day to get better. Covering old things I know nad things I thought I knew. As part of this learning I am also trying to communicate the code in pseudo -code. Hopefully this will make my methodology clear to everyone and help me to think in a sequential fashion to solve my coding problems. I’m currently using boolean TRUE/FALSE functions. Below is the pseudo-code and the link to the processing Sketch.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/901734

I found this very logical to code. The feeling I get from watching the sketch in action is oddly satisfying. It was the same for coding it.

It uses a truth table. There are main variables the X co-ordinate position and the Y co-ordinate position.

The square has to move in 4 directions. :

1 Left to Right;

2 Top to Bottom:

3 Right to Left;

4 Bottom to Top;

Let’s say the width is 200 and the height is 200. In the code the TOP RIGHT corner is (0,0) so X = 0 and Y = 0.

1.(X,Y) is at (0,0) to move LEFT to RIGHT

X is 0. Y is 0. X needs to increase from 0 to 200.

While the Y co-ordinate (height) remains at 0.

2. (X,Y) = (200,0) to move TOP to BOTTOM

X is now 200. Y is 0. Y needs to increase from 0 to 200.

While X remains at 200.

3. (X,Y) = (200,200) to move RIGHT to LEFT

X is 200. Y is 200. X needs to decrease from 200 to 0.

While Y remains at 200.

4.(X,Y) = (0,200) to move BOTTOM to TO.

X is 0. Y is 200. Y needs to decrease from 200 to 0.

While X remains at 0.

5. Go To 1.

I came here to talk art and chew gum, and I’m almost out of gum.

I started the MA in October officially. It’s a really really good course; so rich in information and the tutors are extremely talented. I had intended to blog about the lectures and my thoughts, but the lectures are so frequent and my thoughts are currently in a whirl and take too long settle, to allow for regular posts. So I will use this as a space to hopefully spew my thoughts out and refine my ideas over time. The big challenges ahead of me are: 1) Managing my mental health whilst on the course. 2) Managing my time between, Uni, some form of work, child care and being social.

On paper..um in pixel format that looks easy to my eyes, and I’m guessing your eyes too. In reality I know it’s going to be really tough. I’m only in week 2 of the course (it feels like week 5) and I’m back in the crisis house. So things are difficult on the mental health side of things. It might seem frivolous to you to want to be social, but my big issue (it’s not a magazine for me) is the feeling of isolation I have. It’s a constant sense of being alone, even in company. But if i start talking about it I’ll get myself down and side tracked. After week 2 where are my ideas at. The tutors are pushing us to look at our own practice and to treat our practice as a form of research. For me this currently entails the nature of creating work and I guess the nature of creativity. If we look at current technologies neural networks are creating works of art using deep learning. One has even created ‘The Next Rembrandt’ . In an environment like this where algorithms can learn to create artefacts and can exhibit creative tendencies I find myself drawn to the question of what exactly is creativity. I think as humans we baulk at the idea that a machine can create. That a series of instructions can result in a unique or creative response. That’s exactly what attracts me to the issue. I think of artists that explore algorithms, not that they would have thought of their work like that. Sol le Witt, and the conceptual artists spring to mind. They thought of the idea as the art, in which an artefact was only a solid form of the idea, not the actual art. My thoughts on this need refining and teasing out. Hopefully here is where I can do this. The other strands to my ideas are as follows ( I might not peruse these strand on the MA but they are elements I think about often.) 1) The illusion of choice. 2) Art that can never be seen in it’s final state; temporally, spatially or both. 3) The scaffolding that exist behind plastic and virtual structures. ( I use the term plastic to refer to physical things in the real world IE not solely digital.)

This probably could have used a better title, but I wanted to get as much of an initial impression of my first day at Hallam for an MA with little or no time to think about it. I’ll come back later to insert stuff less impression but that I fond funny. I’ve been upbeat most of the day, with the promise of new things and beginnings and the unknown which will build. A constructive unknown. Knowing I can do this because I've done it before when i was less prepared. The day was really just a run down of the ins and out of the course structure the main aspects of it. The assessment stuff and how the modules will unfold. We got to get a more informal feel for each other on the course and sense of where we ( well I did at least) we fit in. The module stuff I’ll come back to. The day culminated in a really informal meeting with the rest of the MA cohort ( there may be other students yet to arrive due to visa and travel stuff.) I got chatting to a few of the other people on the course; 4 teachers by my count which is interesting, and 3 / 4 straight from the BA and one from a non teaching background. I knew we were going to meet the other MA students, but it took me by surprise all the same and I think my mind had had enough just whirring from initial thoughts and ideas from off the basic introduction to the various elements f the course. I get a kind of nervous energy that I expel through chat in some situations, this was definitely one of those. I had lots of odd humorous thoughts that wanted to shout out, but I knew they were just annoying and not funny to anyone but my stupid head. (oh in slips some self loathing) At the end of the thing I stood around, feeling I don't know what. A need to do, I guess. But it was a dead zone in my head and all that was required of me was to either mingle or just go. Most people had just went anyway. I hung around for a bit said some banal shit and left. Leaving the room is where my head/mind/brain whatever my anxiety began to kick in. I was in a whirl, a mad beast in a head, looking for something to panic about. I asked my self what was bothering me. (other than getting work which definitely was not the source of the chaos in my head.)It was just my head my brain looking for an element; a threat to jump upon and blow out of proportion. A reason to say well this wasn’t right or that will be a problem. I’m aware of all the known problems and although I’m not yet on top of them all I have plans. Not great plans, but ways to at least begin dealing with the issues. If only I found my mental health as easy to deal with.

So none of theses things were in a problem. You’d think that realising this would help dissipate the noise and churning of my mind. No. Instead I found my self trying to not just break down in to tears. Having to control my self rigidly. I want a space where these things the tears the panic can just come to the surface and be done with. I'm not even sure it is a panic, it's just an intensity of everything, formless but urgently demanding; all consuming in my mind if I let it be. I’ve just had to bury it for dealing with at another time.