Mysticism Step 5: Union with the Other
Project: Branding the Species

The union of the other is a perpetual bridge formed by the person once they cross over and experience their ecstatic moment in heaven. If they are a serious mystic they will form a powerful alliance between heaven & earth. Thus heaven (blue) comingles with a little bit of earth (green). Also, this color goes hand in hand with Mysticism Step 4, thus the similar color choices.

Poem:

All my occupation now is the practice of love of God,
all the powers of soul and body, memory, understanding,
and will, interior and exterior senses, the desires of spirit
and sense, all work in and by love. All I do is done in love,
all I suffer, I suffer in the sweetness.

Thu, Jun 12, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

Mysticism Step 4: Dark Night of the Soul
Project: Branding the Species

The Dark Night is, unsurprisingly, represented by a cobalt blue & its tints, which give both a dark and a melancholy tone to the loss of God following an ecstatic experience.

Poem:

I no longer live within myself and I cannot live without God,
for having neither him nor myself what will life be?
It will be a thousand deaths, longhing for my true life
and dying because I die.

Thu, Jun 12, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

Mysticism Step 3: Illumination
Project: Branding the Species

Illumination, represented by a fierce dark red to signify an ecstatic moment full of vibrancy & weight.

Poem:

I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

Thu, Jun 12, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

Mysticism Step 2: Purgation
Project: Branding the Species

Purgation, represented by vomit green. The body rids itself physically & spiritually of everything that they give up their own identiy.

Poem, by St. John of the Cross:

He who truly arrives there cuts free from himself;
all that he knew before now seems worthless,
and his knowledge so soars that he is left
in unknowing transcending all knowledge.

Thu, Jun 12, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

Mysticism Step 1: Awakening
Project: Branding the Species

Awakening, represented by bright yellow and its tints, to signify morning. The darker tints are more earthy and/or reminiscent of human skin.

Poem, by St. John of the Cross:

A thousand graces
diffusing He passed
through the groves
in haste, And merely
regarding them as
He passed Clothed
them with His beauty

{image 3}

Thu, Jun 12, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

Visualizing Mysticism
Project: Branding the Species

The five steps of mysticism visualized for your viewing pleasure & knowledge. Photographs credits go to Andrew Z. Glickman, [self-portrait], Larry Clark, and Duane Michals. Poetic quotes come from St. John of the Cross. Descriptions of steps are paraphrased from Evelyn Underhill's work.

Tue, Jun 3, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

Idea Brewing Up...
Project: Branding the Species

The other night I was reading Naomi Klein's No Logo hoping to bore myself to sleep (it didn't work). Not really thinking about my project, I nevertheless stumbled upon an interesting bit that has opened a wide new direction for me I hadn't considered before. Here are the parts I found interesting:

"In an essay appropriately titled 'How to Brand Sand', advertising executives Sam I. Hill, et al. team up to tell the corporate world that with the right marketing plan, nobody has to stay stuck in the stuff business. 'Based on extensive reserach, we would argue that you can indeed brand not just sand, but also wheat, beef, brick, metals, concrete chemicals, corn grits, collard greens, and an endless variety of commodities traditionally considered immune to the process.'"

Earlier, she had said something somewhat related:

"With the wave of brand mania has come a new breed of businessman, one who will proudly inform you that Brand X is not a product but a way of life, an attitude, a set of values, a look, an idea. And it sounds really great —way better than that Brand X is a screwdriver, or a hamburer chain, or a pair of jeans..." [Emphasis mine]

When I read the word "screwdriver", I had a mini-ecstatic moment, so to speak. Instantly a light bulb turned on above my head, as I remembered something from the past which very much related to what I was carelessly just reading. The previous quarter I was enrolled in 21, which was Vasa Mihich's color class. One of our last assignments was to take an existing photograph of an object, turn it black & white, assign a color to it, paint a square on a canvas colored that particular color, and paste the object at the center of the square. The color was supposed to "evoke" a feeling to the B&W photograph and give it "life". As an example of that, Professor Mihich showed us the work of a previous student, which was a hex nut (used in construction) with the background color red. Now when I was reading Klein and I saw the word "screwdriver", my mind immediately jumped to that picture in my head of the hex nut, since both are items used in construction.

Now, you may ask yourself, what does any of this have to do within the context of my project? Crazy to think that hex nuts, screwdrivers, and colors have anything to do with branding the human species, eh?

Thinking about what way to present my project, in what visual language to present my research findings, I believe that my previous project in Color class will lend itself perfectly to branding the human species. I mean, going back to the original Klein quotes, it is clear that she is talking about taking things that are very mundane & ordinary (such as screwdrivers & hex nuts), and using branding magic (i.e. the use of color to evoke an "emotion") to display it in a different light. How cool would it to have the color represent what I'm trying to say about the human species, what I'm trying to say about the marriage of ecstasy & fear, and what I'm trying to say about mysticism, eroticism, and flow. It is, I believe, very minimalistic, to-the-point (hopefully), and a creative & personal way to do my project.

The issue then became, well...how many of these do I make? How many is enough? How do I determine the number, and the content of them? Surely my instructors were going to nail me on that, I thought.

I ruminated on the answer to that question for a day, until just a few hours ago, reading through my previous research, I came up with a concrete answer to my dilemma: an illustration of the Five Steps to Mysticism. Each of my images will be a representation of each step to mysticism, with a different color assigned to each. Perhaps even a quotation from poetry to further illustrate the concept.

This post was meant primarily to explain my thought process regarding this tentative direction where I'm headed towards. Hopefully with this new idea I'll be able to redeem myself from the hot mess of my previous idea, as this one I believe is grounded concretely in my research, and stands well against the rubric I have created for myself.

My assignments for Professor Mihich's class:

Tue, Jun 3, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

The Sum Of All Research
Project: Branding the Species

As a complement to my last post, which was a rubric that I'm going to use for my purposes of evaluating how appropriate my project is, this post is a succint summary of all the conclusions from my research. Like my last post, it is meant to be a quick guide to help me make decisions on how my project can best reflect what I found out through my research.

Basically the basics are about the marriage between ecstasy & fear and the similarities between various concepts including but not limited to mysticism, eroticism, and flow, all of which have in relation to one another the ecstatic moment of which I'm trying to represent in my final project.

There is ecstasy to be found in what we fear the most. Meaning that in order to arrive at a point of total ecstasy, one must first give up all presuppositions about God and the divine. Doing that will put one in a state of fear, for one will have given up their most elemental beliefs about where we came from. It is at this point, when all hope seems to be lost, that one is elevated into an ecstatic moment.
Proposed by Georges Bataille

Mysticism & Its 5 Steps The notion that there is a methodogical way to be at one with God, divinity, truth, etc. First one awakens to the presence of a divine being, then a purgation of the soul happens where one loses their identity, followed by the illumination of the union of heaven & earth; after this the mystic comes down from their ecstatic bliss and feels hopeless & void in the mundane world, and finally the person finds themselves in perpetual union with the Other.
Proposed by Evelyn Underhill

Eroticism A very similar concet to mysticism, the concept of eroticism to Georges Bataille was the desire for us to go beyond the limits of subjectivity & humanity and enter into a transgression of the ephemeral. This, done through sexual foreplay & intercourse. The feeling of undressing oneself and the idea of playing sexual roles is elemental in Bataille's eroticism.
Proposed, again, by Georges Bataille

Flow A state of mind in which a person is totally concentrated in an activity and is and is at an optimum level of performance. At its core, flow is autotelic, meaning a person that is in flow is internally driven, and he/she does whatever activity they are doing in flow, for the sake of the activity itself. A person who is in flow experiences selflessness, meaning they lose preoccupation with their ego; concentration, meaning they are totally immersed in the activity; and challenge, where they find a balance between performing too easily or too difficult.
Proposed by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

That, in a nutshell, are my research findings on which I'll base my final project (deliverables). From now on, I shall concentrate on finding a concrete & implicit idea for my project, and executing it. PROMISE THIS IS MY LAST RESEARCH POST! From here on out I'll only be posting deliverables, or deliverable-related content.

Tue, Jun 3, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

Rubric
Project: Branding the Species

My project was totally massacred this past Thursday by my instructors. Part of the reason why things didn't go so well is because I didn't have a clear way of telling them how I arrived at my conclusions. They asked me questions and I just sat there blankly without good argumentative responses. Indeed, it could have been the best, most appropriate project for my research, but without being able to communicate to them my thinking, they still would have tanked it.

It is important, therefore, to have a set of guidelines to guide me through picking & creating the most appropriate project in light of my research. I mean, my research has been mapped out already; I can read it all I want, but it is necessary to have a simple, straight forward set of rules that I can look at pretty quickly so that I can make decisions on the fly about what works and what doesn't. I have come up with four key points for my rubric of evaluating my project's worthiness. They are listed below:

• How does this brand the human species? This entire class has been about finding an interesting way of portraying something that is uniquely human, so does my project reflect an aspect of humanity, such as vulnerability, joy, or irony?
• What does it communicate about ecstasy & fear? My big conclusion from my research has been that there is ecstasy to be found in what we fear the most. Does my project depict something that I, or somebody else, fears the most? And is there ecstasy to be found in that?
• Appropriateness of content. I'm most likely to pick a poem, part of a poem, or parts of different poems, and pair them up with images. So how do I make sure that the poem or poems reflect the above two points? In the same way, how do my visuals do justice not only to the above two points, but to the poem itself as well?
• Juxtaposition of content. Somewhat related to the previous point, is how do I make for an interesting combination of, say, my poem(s) and images? Do I want them to directly relate, or for a relationship to be implied, hinted at, or totally be different but still make sense together and make people think?

Using this rubric, I can be more confident about my work and when my instructors ask something about my work, I'll be able to confidently reply using my set of guidelines as principles to justify everything I did, and what I chose not to do.

Sun, Jun 1, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species

Fiercetography
Project: Branding the Species

I am taking the project into a different direction than what had been previously said. Where before I wanted to match up arresting photographs (such as that of people in disaster situations such as the recent earthquake in central China or 9/11) with quotes from people that I interviewed asking what their most ecstatic moment was, instead now I am doing the opposite actually. I am taking photographs of the most mundane situations and of people at their most commonplace, and overimposing quotes from poets that have been in their most ecstatic.

My image research is below. From my previous idea I "recycled" a book that I had borrowed about Chinese photography, and then the Professor gave me a German photography book. I also did new research of my own and found a fiercetographer who specializes in capturing the mundane. His name is Andrew Z. Glickman.

Click on a picture to see it enlarged.

Contemporary Chinese Photography

Contemporary German Photography

Andrew Z. Glickman's D.C. Metro series

Andrew Z. Glickman's Oaxaca series

Wed, May 28, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Branding the Species