#laric

Mary Jane: She/her. A silver tabby looking very close to her mother with more white highlights on her face. Heterochromia with one bright green eye, and one teal blue. Lean and tall build for more of a trickery and agility approach when training for battle. A bit more distant and nihilistic than the others, and is very blunt as opposed to how shy and timid she used to be. Friendly but difficult to approach, and tends to be less social.

Sandy: She/her. A light sandy blonde, muscled cat with green eyes and dark marks scarring her ears, face, legs, tail and flank. Butch-femme girl, likes to get dirty and rough but enjoys feeling like a fancy princess. Sided most with Laric out of all 6 siblings during the fallout of heaven, but stands firmly with Mitten now. Likes to sing.

Rawmen: He/him. Light tan cat with faded, thin stripes and even lighter highlights blended between. Fattest of all of the group and is proud to be so, is the goofiest and most playful. Has always been torn on what decision he should make in all the fighting, and never thought he should be a soldier. Likes drums and wants to be in a band one day.

Caden: He/him. Faded brown tabby cat with lighter highlights and amber eyes. Small comparatively to the rest of his family but well built for manouvering on a battlefield. Used to compete for most kills and now enjoys pretending to play music in headspace. Wants to learn electric guitar one day

Rubin: He/him. Darker brown tabby cat with lighter highlights and green and amber eyes. Biggest of his family and most muscled. Most aggressive out of all and struggles with toxic masculinity. Has quieted and calmed down at the prospect of playing in a band with his siblings.

Mae: She/her. White wolf dog/husky with bright blue eyes and dark marks scarring her face and flank and a brown nose. Ominous and serious vibe from the start, god-coded. Appeared to me in a dream. Full name is Maya Arctic Eclipse, each name given to her by a different soul who cared for her, goes by acronym for short. Is now very accepting of all headmates but took a long time to accept recovery.

Kobe: She/her. White shepherd mutt with faded blue eyes and a bright brown nose, big pointed ears. Friendly and motherly spirit of a deceased pet of a family friend. Married to Barren in headspace, and was seen as a pack leader to the spirit group for years before her retirement at the fall of heaven.

Barren: He/him. Aged german shepherd dog. Stoic and fatherly figure of a pet my cousin had that passed away. Protector and guardian of the group and pack leader. One of the strongest guards our group ever had and always respected, though felt God's plan was correct for me but didn't fight Mitten as much as the others. He felt she would make a choice most fitting to us all. He is relieved and proud of her and our history now.

Huffy: He/him. Large black newfoundland dog. Lawful neutral part demon who used to guard the group while sometimes abusing it for his own gain. Dated Mitten for a bit before a bad break up, and he continues to cause problems when around. Though he spends most of his time away from everyone due to inability to control himself, he is heavily respected and not trusted much. Most understand he needs time and space for recovery and are happy to leave him to it.

Delilah: She/her. White husky with black coat and faded light blue eyes. Introject of Smile Dog creepypasta character. Used to be evil but changed paths to follow our group and seek recovery, before disappearing for a long time. Was found in the distant less visited lands with huffy and the wolves.

Process Video

Oliver Laric, Versions, 2012.

Online at: http://oliverlaric.com/versions2012.htm

Text transcript:

Oliver Laric, Versions, 2010.

Online at: http://oliverlaric.com/vvversions.htm

Text transcript:

Degradation followed display. Reified and emptied, the image was treated like the lowliest of things. Images were broken, burned, toppled, beheaded, and hanged. They were spat, pissed, and shat on, tossed into toilets, sewers, fountains, canals, rivers, rubble heaps, garbage dumps, pigsties, and charnel houses, and lewdly handled in brothels and inns. Stone statues were used as cobblestones, keystones and infill, or were modified to represent something new. Wooden statues became table ornaments and toys, or were sold on the markets as firewood, or distributed free to the poor.

A statue of the Virgin was turned into a personification of justice, simply by removing the Christ child and replacing him with scales. Images were taken from the church, broken and buried in a hole before the cathedral. There they would lie until Judgement Day.

It takes two to make a thing go right. With famous books, the first time is already the second, since we approach them already knowing them. The cautious comments saying rereading the classic turns out to be an innocent voracity. We are always somehow rereading a classic, because we have encountered some previous incarnation of it, a refraction, in other stories, texts, or versions. What are the many versions if not diverse perspectives of a moveable event, if not a long, experimental assortment of omissions and emphases?

Just about everything has been photoshopped. Precisely, it is about what five people think this reality consists of. How an incident happens may reflect nothing about the incident itself, but it must reflect something about the person involved in the happening and supplying the how. Five people interpret an action, and each interpretation is different because, in the telling and the retelling, the people reveal not the action but themselves.

For the first time several months ago, I spent hours looking at the facade of the cathedral. But only when I bought a book on the cathedral a week later did I really see it. The photographs enabled me to see in a way that my naked eye could not possibly see the cathedral.

If no one drawing should singly answer the personal taste, there will yet be found a variety of hints sufficient to construct a new one. I am confident I can convince all who will honor me with their commands that every design can be improved, both as to beauty and enrichment in the execution of it. Every writer creates his precursors. I express unlimited thanks to all the authors that have in the past, by compiling in the past remarkable instances of skill, provided us with abundant materials of different kinds. Drawing from them as it were water from springs and converting them to our own purposes, we find our own powers of writing rendered more fluent and easy. And relying upon such authorities, we venture to produce new systems of instruction.

The function proper to knowledge is interpreting. Scriptural commentary, commentaries on ancient authors, and the accounts of travelers are legends and fables. None of these forms of discourse is required to justify its claim to be expressing a truth before it is interpreted. All that is required of it is the possibility of talking about it. There is more work in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting things, and more books about books than any other subject.

A sculpture can not merely be copied but always only staged or performed. It begins to function like a piece of music whose score is not identical to the piece, the score being not audible but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed. The more images, mediations, intermediaries, icons are multiplied and overtly fabricated, explicitly and publicly constructed, the more respect I have for their capacities to welcome, to gather, to recollect meaning, and sanctity.

Flesh is a glebe, bones are rocks, veins great rivers, the bladder is the sea, and the seven principal organs are the metals hidden in the shafts of minds. Because four is better than one.

Same, same, but different. The multiverse is composed of a quantum superposition of infinitely many, increasingly divergent, non-communicating parallel universes or quantum worlds. Every historical “what if” compatible with the initial conditions in physical law is realized. All outcomes exist simultaneously but do not interfere further with each other, each single prior world having split into mutual unobservable, but equally real worlds.

Double the treat, double your pleasure, double your fun. Every lie creates a parallel world, the world in which it’s true.

It is a frequent habit when I discover several resemblances between two things to attribute to both equally, even on points in which they are in reality different, that which I have recognized to be true of only one of them. Combined with this is another perversity, an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one. The defect of the real one is so apt to be a lack of representation. I like things that appear, and one is sure. Whether they are or not is a subordinate, and almost always a profitless question.

Oliver Laric, Versions, 2009.

Online at: http://oliverlaric.com/versions.htm

Text transcript:

An image published by the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 2008 shows four missiles. The above illustration suggests that the second missile from the right is the sum of two other missiles in the image. The contours of the billowing smoke near the ground, and in the immediate wake of the missile, match perfectly. Three days after the initial doctored image was published, an alternate version was released, showing only three missiles. This exposed enhancement was followed by a public continuation of image manipulation. Anonymous authors, all over the world, played through numerous possibilities of missile potency. Variations spread with online forums, news blogs and imageboards acting as platforms for the communal call and response. When Googling this missile incident, different versions of the image appear. The initial four missile version coexists with the forty missile version. Authenticity is decided on by the viewer. The more often an image is viewed, the more likely it makes the top of search results. An image viewed often enough becomes part of collective memory.

When movies are released in cinemas, the first copies circulated online are renditions filmed off the screen, labelled "cam versions". Shown are two cam versions of the same movie, both succesfully spread via peer to peer networks, by unknown directors. The lifespan of this versions extend untill proper dvd or screening copies appear. Filming a film involves several variables: distance to the screen, angle, noise level of the audience and quality of recording's equipment all affect the peculiarity of the new film. This permutations however are not tolerated by Hollywood studios. Apart from economic reasons, aversion to these variations might have their origin in the monotheistic religions declaration of idolatry as a major sin. Passages prohibiting the depiction of God in the Coran, Torah and Bible negate the authenticity and validity of variations, and could be read as the original dogma of a copyright manifesto.

Idols are defied by an iconoclastic destruction that is also simultaneously productive. The modes of destruction resemble modification strategies in remix culture. Creations are based on the transformation of existing materials; previously relevant cultural production  is re-interpreted to match a more current ideology. Idols are punished by production of further idols. These images documenting statues in a Uthrecth cathedral, attacked with iconoclastic zeal during the Reformation in the 16th century, are tourists' photographs, all found online in the photography archive Flickr. Susan Sontag's statement from 1977 that "just about everything has been photographed" makes more sense than ever.

Celebrity fakes are unofficial modifications of porn, mixing two separate identities: celebrity faces's mounted on bodies of porn models. The body parts are modular, varying faces occasionally share a body and viceversa. Often visualizing forst person perspective porn has hosted videos a dual assimilation takes place: the assimilation of directive interaction with the porn model, and the assimilation of unrelaed body and face matching. Multiple realities co-exist: the hosted body, the guest's face. The temporary state of preparation for the combination. The combination of the hosted body and guest's face. Another logical reality is almost always admitted. The combination of porn model face, and celebrity's body.    

This ipod models have been collected from Google 3-D warehouse, an online archive for homemade 3-d models. Each ipod is produced and uploaded by a different author. The idea of an ipod works as a recepie, or musical score that can potentially lead to infinite variations. All manifestations, from physical to virtual act as performances of the idea. No particular variation has the monopoly of an authenticity, so the jurisdictional claim looses its control and consequently also loses relevance. The increase of duplicates does not diminish the concept or rather emphatizes it. The seemingly anonymous growth resembles  a living organism which encourages an animistic perception. Duplicates are dated themselves at greater speed than official objects, subject to economic and physical loss. The bootlegs aren't restrictive potential to develop, makes it a more viable entity.

The moment in which Zinedine Zidane gave Marco Materazzi a headbutt during the final of the 2006's soccer World Cup, grew into a popular meme. Hundreds of authors proposed variations of the iconic incident. Similar to "the many worlds theory" by quantuum physicists Hugh Everett, originally published in 1957, a mutiplicity of realities co-exists. According to Everett, we live in a multi-verse, composed of a quantuum superposition of very many, possibly infinitly many, increasingly divergent, non-communicating parallel universes, or quantuum worlds.

Every historical "What if" compatible with initial conditions and physical law is realized. All outcomes exist simultaneosly, but do not interfere further with each other. Each single prior world having split into mutually unobservable, but equally real worlds.