A much needed change of color. Blues and oranges over smog and grey. The 798 gallery district was intriguing. Definitely walked on a glass roof over a gallery while in a rooftop cafe, and yes I hit my head on a tree. It really is all about me.
Also saw strange but fun land installations about tibet, and a guy who drank water from the yangtze river, from the ocean to somewhere far to the west. Then e crystallized is urine samples, should i continue. . .

Yes, I have been here. Did it feel real, no, not particularly. Did I want to ride my bike down the hillside, yes. Hope I was viewed by the russian space station, or is it now not in orbit; space is fake anyway.

This is the digital piece Wan Zi and I created. Not going to tell the meaning, only that it will most likely be different for everyone. The left part is photo that she created of people in her town/family and the right side are brush strokes that I made and then digitally transfered to the screen.

The great wall certainly has strange trolls which guard the passage ways. Luckily I fit in. Not to mention that I am big in japan.

Cant explain this, only that tis is a primary photo. Maybe this will influence my artistic style.

Maemph is international

Finally figured out how to post the photos i have been talking about. This photo is the piece which spells out china in sign language. Currently this style of mimming gets me no where.

Do i fight the urge to buy a mountain bike and ride in the mountains of china. Do i continue to enjoy the artistic culture of china? Will i get away with this becuase it is better than rachel's? Will Kaitlyn continue to fight the joker. . .

tune in again same bat time same bat channel

Overall i have mostly focused my experiences in china based on how i feel and when i get to eat. This is ridiculous, the time is now to do what you want and have no regrets.

Having said this, being in china is just the way i pictured it, that lasts for 15 seconds. The people are extremely warm and caring especially up in the hills. Smile and you will be smiled back at. The experience of traveling to a different part of the world will not fully hit me until i return back to oregon and california and washington. The time will come when i no longer miss home and i miss the actions and reponses of china. So what does that mean, should i still think back to grade school and playing kick ball. Or should one focus on the similarities and differences of two cultures. Or not think at all and non voluntarily react. For now i will continue to smile and breathe the fresh air and wander what my life would be like if i was born in a different part of the globe.

Matt Warren is international.






Working with the students in jinan was confusing and at times frustrating. My opinion is that they were too accomodating of our ideas and not willing to test our thoughts. Other students did not feel this to be true, so i guess that is that. Attempting to communicate to other artists in a different language calls for patience and spontaneity. Not to mention the cultural implications brought on by certain images and compositional aesthetics.

Have no idea if the pictures are showing up. This photo was taken at the Temple of Heaven in beijing. Yes, i am giving shelter to the stone serpent. And yes i am wearing festive swim trunks. --having not used the keyboard in a while, my typing skills are waning-- The idea was that the everyone on the grounds had an umbrella over their heads? Was this blocking the interaction of the rains and the heavens, am still not sure. One aspect is that the Temple did not give protection to the ordinary visitors, or that the feeling is always surrounding us. Either way a cultural rift is present dictating my lack knowledge in eastern and western religion. The trip to the temples did not explain this rift, only that i was at peace and mesmerized by the water reflecting off of the dark blue tiles and stone coutyards.

Sometimes in Shanghai I would aimlessly wander the streets at 5am and take pictures of walls that had paint splattered over graffiti. The paint was generally small, only about 8 to 10 inches on a diagonal. This style started me thinking about layers of color as well as covering over ideas; beginning new ones. Now i have 30 or so pictures of these such scenes and am not sure if i will use the photos or start my own conglomerate of glob.
I could link this doing to the stacking of buildings in shaghai and my reaction to the overwhleming urban jungle, but i can't do that. This is because i hardly looked up, if you did, a gray atmosphere absorbed your emotions. The scenery definitely did bring color out of my palette. I could taste greens and reds and blues, and no0t till a few days ago did i actually swallow any.

Tried to upload an image of my project in jinan, might be on the main page though. The piece spells out C-H-I-N-A in sign language. It represents all of our attempts to communicate in a foreign language which none of us could verbally speak. Hints the use of hands as imaging communication.

Yes i have used this style before, mostly to extend the action of feeling with my fingerprints over a landscape. And i will continue to do so until something else comes my way.

Ahora mismo, i am in an internet cafe in tagon, sichuan. there are four native people in here, with tibetan clothes and they are trading turns playing video games on the internet. He just picked a purple lambourghini to race with. It was a beautiful bus ride to reach tagon from kanding. We saw the sunrise over large snow capped mountains and drove next to a rushing creek river for most of the ride. At one point we reached the top of the hills and were among tiny martian rocks and squishy grass.

The only downside was that the entire bus chain smoked about 350 cigarettes and for most of the ride it was too cold to open the window. But that adds to the experience, who knows china might make a smoker out of me yet.

The sky is still grey the clothes are still jade green. Grey is my favorite color, cloud grey. I feel comfortable in the world of green and grey. And yet I am still waiting for the smog to clear and clouds to roll in. And I keep focusing on my well-being instead of the similarities and differences of a culture. Tiny paintings of chunks are what I have been noticing though, with drips of black and white. The eye compositionally takes a large city and zooms down to tiny particles that I create. Here there is so much confusion that it all becomes orderly and one. Walking the streets becomes my way of losing my worries and feeling the path I have chose. Then a car whizzes by and nearly runs over your toes, here i do not need to exercise to raise my heart rate. Now that I am here, I will continue to be here and no where else until my mind takes me away and formulates the creative flow that extends outward.

yeah, my blog is unique

I now have a sign on my front door, stating No Soliciting, unless you are trying to spread religion into my life, or inflating my ego.

By the way I counted the pixels and picas in these characters, and yes I am an original creator, who will never create a typeface, because I am a lazy man who has everything done for him.

Now I want to put my personality into my hand writing a typing style, just so you know, I look very sexy when I type on the keyboard.

The Last Structured Comment

Who am I kidding, this post is going to hav nothing to do with structure. and yet to be strictly judgemental, I am using a template that someone else designed, and I am typing with a font, that we now know to have been designed by somebody else and I am using the computer and internet and blah blah blah. If this were a word document, I would have to capitalized the word internet to Internet becuaseit has the force of god and america and America and god. What I am getting at is that everything is a design element and everything is a decision. I do worship the internet, because I am afraid of meeting people and am ultimately afraid of people judging my design elements in person. No, no no you need feedback and not just on a discussion board or in a comment section of blogger. You need to be able to see peoples body language when adressing your work, and how people crane their necks and position their legs and point their fingers.

I live in a digital age, you live in a digital age, and we live in a digital age, but we need to embrace the technology, while still questioning and exploring with hands on themes and techniques. I do not want to stutter or not be able to spell check my writing, however accidents and personality and speech and drawn line are what sets humans apart from animals. Not opposable thumbs or the act of looking good in a bathing suit.

I would never use a computer again if I could get away with that. I have beautiful handwriting skill, I have an above average memory and my capabilities with 3-dimensional shapes and geometric forms rival that of a computer. But the precise record of being able to save exactly what a form looks like50 or 100 years from now is what sets me and the computer apart. But we all take for granted that computers will be able to save files for 50 or 100 years, because this has never been established, only the idea has.

I want to keep my ideas in my head, where if I lose them, only I can find them. The cycles of my brain can be trusted, just as the memory of a memory can be trusted. as for now, I have to hit the save button and use the reproduction option by burning a copy of this blog for my teacher. Which file is the strongest, and most clear, the file, the document, the disk, the thought I am having right now, or the hand off of ideas that may have come form reading this?

This One is Introverted


This summer, the big movis of the supposed "blockbuster" events center around movies I have yet to hear about. Although, in my last post I did swear off t.v. but I do enjoy watching strange movies and foreign/independent films. I might still have to hide my 27 inch television in my large expansive closet.

Anyway, last week I did watch a television show that talked about the animated movies coming out this summer. There were too many to mention, and I believe every major and non-major studio was participating. This is fair because of america being a capitalist society and everyone has the right to present. However, due to the enormous influx of digitally animated films, the art is lost and the political message and celebrity voices are coming back with a vengeance. I have only seen toy story and the incredibles to date. And their probably have ben 30 or so digitally animated movies since toy story hit with such a craze. I am not saying that digitally animated films are bad, I am just wondering where the experimental and cell animated films have gone? As an art student, I have seen Luxo Jr. and other early computer based animation, and those people work extremely hard and there is an art to it. I am just upset that one has to spend a lot of time searching on line for outlets of animated films that are not highly advertised on t.v. Some might say that this is good because they are not seeling out, however people these days are so lazy that going out of your way to find a film is troublesome; and I hate to fit in with the times of being lazy and spending money on entertainment that forces you to sit and be lazy, and hopefully you're mind is excercising.

So enough already, every time I gripe about something it usually menas that I wish I were doing it so I should finish these last two posts and go draw on film and create narratives on canvas, but I do not want to copy anybody, do I?

Digital Television


Little did I know, television can now be output as digital. To me, I still do not know anything further on the matter concerning how digital television works. I do have slim experience in I once watched hi-definition television, and one time I even went to a house that had a tivo. But I do not know if those use digital connections, but I do know that calling it the tube, might not correlate anymore.

The Latin Trade magazine had an article in their sept. 2005 edition, entitled ''Image Makers: Brazil could chart its own course in age of Digital TV." The key points for me in this article were the numbers they through out in accordance with government investment towrds television outlets. The story quoted that Brazil was to invest the equivalent of 26 million dollars just to see which television style is better. The story also was quoted as saying that the industry of digital televison in America, was in the billions as far as marketing and research were concerned.

Bottom line, as someone who wishes to remain fairly imaginative and original, I should quit the television light from hitting my eye for good. Even if you watch educational tv or only sports, the mind altering ads and subliminal messages will get you.

I am not finished Yet


In talking about Norman McLaren. I began to notice that most art forms and technologies come from past techniques. I was curious if anybody had any ideas on hand drawn or sculpture techniques, where past influences played a role? Of course, past techniques influence new style, but the graphite pencil is still the graphite pencil with a wood casing. Clay pottery has employed a wheel and even a motorized wheel, but these transformations do not directly come from one person's dedication to their craft, such as in McLaren's case. I am not proclaiming that his style and ideas fed to the invention of digital animation, however if you view some of his films, you can definitely see the resemblance of technique.

I have become more and more fed up with digital animation. Especially with the mainstream studios. I have only viewed a few of these new animated films (ever since toy story) because I usually spend the first part of the movie trying to figure out what famous actor they have doing the voice over. That does seem like a petty reason not to see a film, but the animated films these days that are shown in movie theatres try to hard to wow with 500 million bit color and politiacl/social influences.

Again, the more I gripe the more I begin to understand that things change and people get tired of the same aesthetic. Because of this I will not sit on the couch and watch the next pointless movie that my roommate puts on. And maybe I will begin to lose all of the celebrity gossip that was enstilled in me at such a young age by watching television in the first place. TV should only be for fear and gross entertainment, like every show these days that portrays a murderer or child molestor or terrorist. Ripped from the headlines. I am 6 foot 2 inches and afraid to leave my house.

Experimental Mention


The more I tried to review new software and digital art techniques, the more I reminisced on the old techniques. I am feeling more and more that in order to learn something new one should look to the past for inspiration. This goes against most of my points in my past blogs, but nobody is perfect. Not to steal their ideas, but to use them as a starting point to appreciate the advantages we have in the year 2006.

The experimental film creator, Norman McLaren comes to mind when I think of animated movies and how computers mimiced his style for their advantages in creating animated film. McLaren lived from 1914 to 1987, so he did get a chance to see and probably used computers for something, just not to wow audiences with realistic pixel work. McLaren used experimental techniques such as drawing on film to create images and scratching and all kinds of intersting marks were created which then were projected onto a screen. He also used techniques like filming the motion of people and then backing up the film and recording again along with stop motion animation. He also created sound cards that had black and white lines on the cards. The cards that had thin lines produced high pitch sound, and the cards with thick lines produced low pitch sounds.

To connect to my above comment on looking to past work for inspiration, that was meant more as an appreciation to those who did not live in a digital age and had to explore and make their own technology in order to create what they wanted. I am also curious about film and digital animation, because, as someone who studies art at a university; more and more students are entering the digital arts programs. Is this due to money, jobs, and it being the new trend. Or does the attraction of easier publishing and sharing over the internet have an effect on this uptrend of digital art students. I will keep exploring the possiblities of digital designs, but you can always catch me with a pen and a piece of paper, thinking of my next idea.