Experimental work

After attending a Collective Task Performance at the MoMA featuring former professors, friends and huge influences of mine Kristen Gallagher and Chris Alexander, I decided I wanted to play with some of what the internet had to offer. I feel it would be better to give background to where this stuff is coming from a little later, but for now enjoy this strange and surreal product of my findings!

-Kev Bars




I was at the beach with some friends, and it started to kick in in maybe a few minutes. I was walking back along the beach and I felt very rolled up and stretchy, like I was wrapped in something and fuzzed out, but I was kinda weird and not sure where my arms and feet were. I walked by a lifeguard tower and wasn't sure if I was passing it, or had passed it...and could swear I had passed the same one at least three times. Then I started getting further out and everything sounded wet and far away, and the scenery looked crooked and tall or far away, and kinda jumping from place to place, though not moving...just seeming closer.

At somepoint I got really focused on the wetness and felt floating like in water and wasn't sure if I was walking or aware if I was able to walk. And then I was sort of fuzzy, not sure what was happening cause I was so in thought, but I felt stupid...like my thoughts moved fast but my understanding couldn't keep up. Later, I was walking the other direction (?) and wasn't on the beach anymore. I'm not sure if I checked out, or if that was an illusion. Eventually, I got back to my grandparent's place, and I was majorly numbed out and was seeing things that weren't quite real, but were hard to shake...like my friend at the table eating dinner slower and slower, until I could swear he stopped all together for what could have been a thousand years.

My other friend was really sweaty and red and I thought his skin was rubbery, and I saw it like it was swelling up like a boiled chicken. Thinking this, he seemed more and more chicken-like and I was convinced my grandparents would see him and my statue friend and know we were tripping and throw us out, and I got very very paranoid (I was in high school at this time). They didn't, and we somehow (I don't know if we talked about it, or if I could have understood if we did) decided to go to bed early (about 5:30). We all ended up sleeping for over 24 hours straight, and I felt more wrecked than I ever had before. I walked inside to take a piss, when the floor was a million miles away and I could barely see the toilet. Then I was seeing something like tracers from acid, but fuzzier, less distinct, and I felt my insides moving with the world around them. I don't know how the hell I got out of the bathroom but then I was in the living room. All browns and mahoganies like dirt and the ceiling seemed soooooo high and I seemed tiny with this great grandfather clock arced down toward me like staring...and I saw something like eyes and red something and I could feel bits pulsing through me, coarsing in all directions at once. Little balls or sharps or something of lead or steel metal and I knew I had been poisoned. I was dying, and the metal was flowing through my veins and my nerves and I was dying, going completely insane! I heard wet, garbled noises and I couldn't tell what direction they were coming from, nor what direction I was looking.

My perspective seemed to have nothing to do with any kind of movement, and I wasn't sure when I had moved or where I would go. The arc of the darkness of the wood and the clock and the metal was overwhelming and then suddenly I was out in the den.

My friend was there and it seemed like hours had gone by. He was speaking something but the sound seemed to come from nowhere distinct, flat, and too fast or too much to piece together. But I could hear something like my voice, distorted, unclear but some conversation was going on. The darkness outside the window was blazing black like I could get absorbed and I couldn't turn away. I remember thinking that everything seemed to be going a thousand million miles an hour but my brain was slowed to a crawl. The metal poison feeling was gone, but I was think, heavy and separated from my body, like watching myself move but unable to control or know where I would go. We went (somehow?) to another room and played Nintendo, and I seemed to be playing, though I couldn't tell who was playing, somehow it was happening. I looked over at my friend and he was so stiff, rigid and his skin seemed really tight, frozen, crystalized and like a rock, and the rocklikeness of him was so profound that he seemed totally concrete. Then a flash of a cheshire cat freak smile (did I imagine it?) totally blew me away, and floated apart from his face in the air for what seemed like minutes. The heaviness of him I felt in my brain, and the dirty concrete solidifying, contaminated inside me spreading throughout my body and I was sure I was going to be a statue too. And at this point I must have gotten stuck, because I lose what happened for a while.

When I came sort of back, I was in the den again and outside the window it was bright screaming daylight like mercury sky shimmering through my whole being. I got lost again in the brilliance, some sound bringing me back music I couldn't tell what it was and then...DAYLIGHT! Paranoia blazed and my heart was about to explode when I realized I had stood frozen in the den all night and it was day and my friend's parents had come home and they had found us and we were so busted and I couldn't come down and ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!! Then...nights. Black, not even shadows and thinking stars and little bits bits bits of metal in the sky and it was still the same night, could be minutes or years and I was so fuzzed out the paranoia was slipped down and I finally walked into the bedroom and laid down on the floor, seeing what I was thinking but not really, kind of glowing fuzz like an after image, but there was afterimages everywhere and what was here and what was there in my head?

And the motion all through the night, things moving, sinking, jumping big small close crooked like moving lightspeed in place, sinking huge on the floor and brain pieces fuzzed somethings and the everywhere sounds, warped sped and watery.

I woke up the next day after sleeping for maybe 8 hours and I was still fuzzed out really bad, with the afterimages and barely able to make sense of conversation. Things still didn't move right, stopping while I was still moving or not the same speed I was moving. I wouldn't even try to drive for over a week, and I was sure my brain had been permanently damaged. I'd see blazing mercury flashes out of nowhere and couldn't see anything, and my eyes were twitchy and weird and couldn't focus right at all. The weird sounds and movements and seeing afterimages of things I thought about lasted for weeks, in fits and starts, and I had flashbacks for a long time.

I don't remember much of the early experiences, but since I don't remember feelings of discomfort, which imprint in my memory much better, I assume it was a good time. The next thing I remember is staring at the wall. Well, not at the wall. That particular action comes later, I was almost looking through the wall, as if it served only as a medium for me to experience something else.

...if you have ever seen the 'making of' a CGI sequence or popular modeled video game, you are probably familiar with wireframes. As best I can explain a wireframe is, a stick figure, that is much more complicated, displaying a line every place a skin is to crease, forming a transparent model. Now picture a farmer. Now picture a pulsating, neon multi-colored wireframe farmer, complete with fence, field, I think a scarecrow, pitchfork and perhaps a pig. The farmer stood there and waved, as the various lines flashed different psychedelic colors. My head was spinning. I felt like I had been awash in a wet, cold fatigue. At this point, I prepared my bed. However, trying to gather bedding materials in this state left me with only a pillow, thin blanket, and plywood floor. I was standing under the rails of a roller coaster. As the coaster full of riders. I hear screaming, maybe laughing and some other horrible noises. If I closed my eyes, and pressed my nose against the pillow at a 45 degree angle, I experienced an auditory hallucination that sounded like a roller coaster was racing in and out of my head at intervals of but a few seconds, full on Doppler effect, with sounds increase in pitch as they approach the observer, and lower in pitch as they leave. As well as the pitch changing, the sounds got louder, and then fade.

At this point Kevin has told me he is hearing voices telling him he is near death, and then a viscious 'Boom! You're dead!'. He then instructs me to close the window we had left open, which is making the room very cold. I reply with 'I don't want to go in there. It's cold in there. I want to stay out here.' I think I was talking about not wanting to leave my cuccoon of a blanket, but I got confused and couldn't construct my sentance as I wanted to. Or maybe I was just downright fucked up. Somehow the window got closed (I vaguely remember Kevin's mother's 'friend' Jim entering the room, noticing us in our altered state and probably closing the window) By this point I was exhausted and I believe I went to sleep. Or Did I? The next thing I remember is the next morning, not waking up, not wondering what the hell happened, but simply staring at the wall, this time actually at the wall, and the knots in the wood panels resembled a deer of sorts. Had I slept? What did I do in the time between the open window and my blank, mouth wide, head cocked stare at the room that seemed my prison the night before? Long story short, I am alive today.

although.

It wasn't so bad really, once you let go, just the echoes and the warm swirly feeling. I regretted that I couldn't seem to move, and that my brother seemed so concerned, but it was okay. Being dead was really okay. The whole night was this really fast-paced, sweaty hallucination blur. I think I can't understand it in 'normal' consciousness. Every now and then I'd 'wake up' and my brother would still be sitting there next to the stereo, with an astonished look on his face. I think this is the anaesthetic part makes everyone's face relax and look really weird - big eyes and open mouth, not to mention what it looks like when the world is swirling - and it almost looks like your face is melting off your head. I would just try again to get up and fall back into being dead. All the angles were wrong, and the music sounded like it was coming through a long sewer pipe, and everything was just, well, not real.

It wasn't until daylight was coming in the basement windows - probably at least 6 hours later - that I finally managed to try to talk - I couldn't because my mouth wasn't human and I was just coming back from the dead. Between the hallucinations and the numbness and the dry throat it was like being an alien. It took a while, and after a little bit of wine we could communicate enough to turn off the stereo and just stare at each other, eyelids drooping from the anaesthetic, and just wonder what had really just happened.

The Prelims.

Most of the time, I find that when I end up in front of a keyboard with access to the minds of others, I turn out being the complete polar opposite of the usually quiet, more polite Kevin who gracefully makes limited eye contact and speaks only when spoken to. I thought for some of my lengthy thoughts and poetry experimentation, I would need something other than Facebook (a.k.a the place where people certainly do "think the most"). I'd like to keep the introduction to this at a minimum, so this is my blog.