Cropped Will Cardini artwork

December 9th, 2008

Welcome Manifesto

Filed under: Manifestos — Tags: — William Cardini @ 12:35 pm

NOTE:This post was written to introduce a new blog which has since been merged into this blog.

My intention with this blog is to demarcate, describe, and discuss an aesthetic that I’m interested in and a producer of: Folk Sci Fi

The impetus for this comes from two places:

My work as a part of the art collective/publishing company/noise band the Gold County Paper Mill, where the term “Folk Sci Fi” originates from, and a discussion that I had with my fellow blogger and good friend Ivan Lozano.

We were talking about whether or not science fiction is pop culture. I think that although pop culture has appropriated geek culture (and how and why that has happened is another blog entirely) to the point where the two are almost synonymous, geek culture is not everything that science fiction is.

Geek culture is Star Wars, its space opera, its fantasy and super heroes. There are themes in science fiction that go beyond these things and take the long view.

This sci fi is a vast inhuman consciousness floating in the emptiness between galaxies.

This sci fi is manufacturing visions of the wind-swept rocks of dead Mars, of the slow collapse of civilizations, of vast unknowable structures.

This sci fi is about sluggish transformations and the future of humanity.

It is trying to portray the inhuman.

Pop culture, by definition, cannot encompass these themes: it’s pop, it’s a bubble, it’s of the moment and totally humanistic.

What I’m trying to catalogue here, with this blog, is when pop culture, or folk, briefly touches these themes. That liminal zone is where folk sci fi dwells.

But this blog is an experiment, a public environment for me to explore my ideas. Feedback is encouraged. Welcome, let’s see how this goes! I’m planning on posting every Tuesday.

September 17th, 2007

The Digital Warrior

Filed under: Artwork,Manifestos — Tags: — William Cardini @ 9:32 pm

Digital warriors exist outside of the state of solid things. They roll ephemeral, declaring that “Cartoon Life is Everlasting” and “The Digital Realm is Forever” while they laugh because they know neither to be true. They deny the truth of a thing for the use of it. Digital warriors have given up their bodily existence for mythic insistence, projecting their masked and costumed representations throughout the empire of images. The digital warrior denies representation, knowing that images are things in and of themselves.

Mark P. Hensel and his Blue Tarp

Filed under: Artwork,Manifestos — Tags: , , , , , — William Cardini @ 9:23 pm

The blue tarp interests me as a material and as a symbol. I first began to use it when I went on Land Arts, a study-abroad program between UT and the University of New Mexico where we went on two three-week-long camping trips throughout the Southwest and down into Mexico. Since everything we brought for camping and art-making had to fit into two duffel bags, the tarp had to double as part of my bedding and as an object for performances and sculptures.

photo of me lying down, wrapped up in a tarp, against a rock wall
This photo isn’t from Land Arts; rather, it’s from Nohegan art camp at McKinney Falls State Park just south of Austin, TX; but I’m wearing my Land Arts clothes and I have my Land Arts tarp. July 2006.

I am intrigued by the idea of making my sculptures into animate beings, because of a fascination with transformative processes: in folklore, clay becoming the golem; in science-fiction, machines and blobs becoming alive; and in the Catholic Church, wine and bread becoming the blood and body of Christ. Therefore, when we went to Utah’s salt flats or were camping near the edge of a mesa, I would set up the tarp with rope or by holding it up myself so that the wind in these environments would make it move and flail about as if alive.

video still of a tarp dancing in the wind on the Bonneville Salt Flats
Video still of a tarp dancing in the wind on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Fall 2004.

The reason that I use the tarp in particular rather than any other large of piece of fabric, synthesized or grown, is that it is a pre-packaged commodity, made in China from plastic and already cut to the size that I want, complete with grommets for easy fastening. It is ubiquitous but used for a variety of purposes related to sheltering and protecting things because it is resistant to weather and amorphous in form, foldable into any number of shapes. Its lack of specificity is what makes it useful; but it can also be menacing because one is never sure what is hidden beneath it.

After I returned to Austin from Land Arts, I began to take more advantage of these aspects of the tarp, taking a video where I wave the tarp in the air and animating over the footage so that the tarp seems to transform into different monstrous faces and abstract forms.


Fugue video. Fall 2005.

In my performance for the Grid show, I wanted to tackle the tarp from the opposite end: rather than the tarp becoming alive, I wanted something living to become the tarp. I used call-and-response so that it did not seem like I was a madman in my own world, pretending to be a tarp, rather the audience was with me and assisted me in this process. Also, up until that show I had always used the same tarp that I had taken with me on Land Arts; but because of the size restriction I bought another (the same brand because I prefer that particular shade of blue) and cut it and hand-sewed it with fishing line so that it was four by eight feet and still had its grommets in the right places for me to attach it to myself and the fan. I now plan the creation of a tarp monster, a mechanism that moves in ways unpredictable and independent of myself, a machine with an unknowable interior.

photo of me laying down in front of a box fan in an art gallery with a tarp attached to my body
close-up photo of me laying down in front of a box fan in an art gallery with a tarp attached to my body
Photos of my “Becoming Tarp” performance at the Grid show at the Creative Research Lab in Austin, TX. Jan 2006.

Manifesto #2

Filed under: Manifestos — Tags: — William Cardini @ 9:20 pm

We, the People of Space, call to the ears of all artonauts and astrotects:

Your eyes must be closed to the dread revelations of the sciences of space as they show the stars to be nothing more than dreary orbs of dry riverbeds or frozen gases. Open your inner eyes to the nite sky of the mind!

Never visit the all-too-real canals of Venice; rather, return again to the canals of Mars; let monsters climb back into the craters of the Moon; listen to Sun Ra, the only man to truly know Saturn; and remember, all artonauts and astrotects, the planets, those wandering stars, are named after Gods that once walked the world!