X marks X mass X

let Ks = Gz = Ksh = Z = silence

X = the unknown. René Descartes (1596-1650) popularized the use of "X" as a variable in his mathematical equations (like x + 7 = 12), as the thing that is not yet known and needs to be resolved.

The X (or cross) symbol is one of the oldest abstract shapes depicted by human beings, as found on the Blombos Cave walls in South Africa, dated to about 73,000 years ago.

The Greeks, influenced by the Phoenician alphabet, were the first to use X as an actual letter, (around 900 BC), and called it “Chi” (pronounced by them as Kh, as in Bach). The Etruscans eventually adopted the letter, and passed it on to the Romans (who changed the sound to Ks, as in Box,) who passed it on to the Californians, (who changed the sound to Kash, as in Ch-ching! — X-rated, X-box, X-files, X-men, Lil Nas X, X (Twitter), X-planes, xtc).

The letter X has various pronunciations in contemporary English, such as in: exit (ks sound), xenophobia (z), luxurious (ksh), exam (gz), as well as being completely silent in loan-words, like in faux fur. (Combining all of those, Elon Musk’s future grandson’s likely inexorable name, “XXXX-13”, would sound as if vocalized by a jazz beat-boxer: Ks(silence)Gz-Ksh-Thirteen!).

The letter X has various negative symbolic meanings and uses, like the crossbones on a pirate flag, or the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope. A cross — tee or ex orientation — for a thousand years to the persecuted meant torture, pain, and death by crucifixion. Especially if you happened to be politically-incorrect in 519 BCE and living in Babylon when it was expropriated by Darius the First, who holds the world record for the execrable activity. (Those same Babylonians, in their ancient texts, describe a celestial body or “crossing point” called Nibiru which periodically enters our solar system and wreaks havoc, causing pole shifts and mass extinctions on Earth. That rogue planet-of-doom is today colloquially called “Planet X”).

You could extinct just yourself from Earth by willfully ignoring any XX labeling on liquid product packaging, because it means poison — so however daring, don’t use it as the 6th ingredient in your Xanadu cocktail. Two Xes replacing the pupils of a cartoon character mean he’s stunned or dead, and the triple-Xes written on a jug of moonshine mean 180 proof and you might end up just like that cartoon character if you drink from it…. CONT’D*

*SEE THE REST OF THE “X” IMAGES/TEXT AT THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK: HERE (and subscribe!)

tulips to crypto (cash fetish)

(bags, shoes, bins, & bits of money)

Commodities that had intrinsic value like grain, livestock, salt (Roman Empire), shells (Africa and Asia), and raw gold were the earliest form of money, used about 5000 years ago. Coins were first minted about 2500 years after that (in what is now Turkey) and made of electrum, a natural alloy of silver and gold.

A few hundred years after that China invented paper money, (around the same time as moveable type, see the last post), which became widely used around the 10th century. (Europe didn’t use paper money for another 600 years).

Sneaker-dealers speculate on limited edition runs of hype shoes. Provenance and condition for them are just as important as it is for high-end art. Shoe aficionados use insider jargon like “very near deadstock,” which refers to sneakers that are barely worn. I watched the buyer on the right inspect, for about 15 minutes, the treads, laces, insoles, and even the tissue in the box. (I was surprised he didn’t pull out an Air Jordan© jeweller’s loupe). The thick-soled thicc-soled shoes (by satanist Rick Owens) worn by the guy in the image below retailed new for $1000; on the resale market a year later, $4000+ . (If unworn. Never. Wear. The. Shoes). Limited edition sneakers are very hard to understand.

Paper money was always backed by gold, all the way up to the 1970s, when the US decoupled from it, turning the US dollar into a fiat currency (backed only by the “full faith and credit” of the government, not by precious metal reserves).

Fashion is backed by the full faith and credit of the consumer. Bathing Ape (above) is a Japanese streetwear company. To get their most-coveted limited edition clothes you have to first own a BAPE NFT. An NFT is a non-fungible token, which is basically a visual digital asset, like a jpeg of a funky Ape (as with crypto, the NFT’s blockchain code creates scarcity and provenance). You buy an NFT using a digital currency like Bitcoin. (Bitcoin is not backed by gold; nor by the full faith and credit of any government).

Bitcoin was first mined (not minted) in 2009. In 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made the first real-world purchase using crypto. He bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins, at the time the equivalent of $41 in real cash. Bitcoin is not just a currency, it is also a stock. Somehow. You are not supposed to spend it, just invest in it, and hold on to it for dear life. Had Lazlo HODLed, that $41 dollars of Bitcoin today would be worth over a billion old-fashioned dollars — $1,027,379,668.16 USD to be exact, depending on when you are reading this. That’s more than 50 million pizzas. Crypto is hard to understand.

READ AND SEE THE REST OF THE 14 PHOTO SET AT THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE

earthling's signalings (The Window pt 60 by K.I.A.)

Signs (banners, flags, trucks and tees) of the times (Part 2 HERE):

Earthlings then

women raptors pornstars men

compare yourself to the person
bruised never broken

you were yesterday matters state
status because of take

yeehaw my country you know
changed my life where to will you go

FOR THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND THE “FOUND TEXT” POEM “EARTHLINGS SIGNALINGS” SEE THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE

SEE ALL 65+ OF “THE WINDOW” SETS AT THE SUBSTACK

Singing Pi (the long song)

FROM THE ORIGINAL K.I.A. substack HERE (with more images): LINK

Singing Pi:

Silence, still. He hasn’t sung for forever. No melodies, no lyrics have come to him for a very long time. No songs, so no singing. And so the days go. On and on.

One day, randomly, he comes across a website. A single page, very long: it shows the first million digits of pi. And suddenly… in his head he hears a faint melody. Using the numbers as the lyrics, at last he begins to sing.

A half hour later he’s interrupted by a call. (A job interview). Before he heads out to the meeting he downloads the pi page as a file to his phone. He bookmarks where he stopped singing.

A week later in a spare moment he opens the file, and, from where he left off, sings further along the number. Then over the days, here and there, he sings a bit more of the decimals. (Kind of loud when in the shower; sotto voce while in his tiny new office). His melodies and motifs evolve and circle and repeat, but the lyrics are always new — he only ever sings the next series of infinite digits.

He begins to sing them in the mornings, as a warm mantra to welcome the sun. And sometimes, as a muted melody, at night for the new moon. He tries the numbers out as a Christmas carol, as a hot dog jingle, and one New Year’s Eve at the uni pub (on a dare from a girl), he karaoke’s the next-in-line numbers to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.

For a Mardi Gras lark he tries some of the sequence out on the street with his brass band. To get his punk on he shouts pi out with his garage band. To do true justice to the number with hours-long jams he finally does the obvious and forms a math rock band. (Called “πhsh”. They gain an avid following. He is able to rest his vocal cords during the extended guitar solos, but he learns 0 to 9 in ASL because sometimes he loses his voice completely during their marathon performances, and so has to sign pi.)

And on. He croons a verse/chorus sequence of numbers as a love song to his wife (the darer) at their wedding. (She laughs). Increasingly life-busy he sings the number less-frequently, but he does yodel to his wife some epenthesized digits while in the mountains on their third-point-one-fourth anniversary. (She frowns).

He never yodels again.

But he does continue to sing pi over time. With a joyful series of the numbers he sirens his son out the womb. (As he catches their baby his wife frowns and laughs.) He also outsources the song — sometime on, he sponsors the uniforms for his son’s little league baseball team (the Pines) because they cheerfully agree to war-chant, at the start of each weekly game, a few more numbers down the line.

The song, now many, many decimal points in, is delivered (in French) as a jaunty chanson for the cancan encore of a local musical production that he directs. Also his favourite students (after checking where he is in the decimals in the updated file) include some numbers as the hook for their thesis rap.

Others of the numbers are sung for him in numerous ways: at a conference he coaxes a visiting member of the Tibetan Dge-lugs-pa sect into throat-singing a deep sequence, and a Swede to perform the next numbers as a high mountain herding-song. On March 14th he pays a singing-telegram man to herald the following figures while riding a skateboard throughout the campus. And so on, till a last one at work: a long set of digits, in Italian, is lovingly sung to him by a teary, barrel-chested colleague, an operatic lament for him on his final day of teaching before retirement.

After that, less. He does, intermittently and with only half a heart, scat some numerals with his latest band (a jazz trio), but before long they break up due to the complications. Then a rest on the unlimited digits. An interlude on that irrational number, for a while. A certain caesura. A grand pause, and on. Permanently, he thinks.
But at last he returns to it, at his wife’s request. He sings it to her as a lullaby in the evenings (as she lives out her last days in the hospital bed).

So on, and along. With aged ears, voice gone, and a slowing heart, the last lyrics he ever hears in the long song come from his son in the next room. He is serenading his own young daughter, teaching her to sing the infinite numbers. In his head, in repose in his bed as his eyes close, he sings along with them in soft harmony, and he knows he has sung forever.

THE WINDOW:

PRINTS FROM “THE WINDOW”: HERE

NOTES:

• one million digits of pi, printed in a single line, is one mile long (font size 8 point)

• it would take roughly 5.8 days (139 hours) of continuous speaking to recite the first million digits of pi, average speaking speed of 120 digits per minute without breaks (vocal font size 8 point)

• pi (3.14159 …) has been computed out to 10 trillion digits with no evident pattern. (but there is no mathematical proof yet showing there isn’t a pattern, so we don’t know for sure… maybe it all repeats after three hundred and a fourteen trillion)

• Possible “The Window” exhibition wall arrangement: a group of three (space) then one (space) then a group of four (space) the one (space) and so on….

• the above story came from a dream of mine where souls from different dimensions sing their pi to each other to signal where they are from — cuz time and space work differently in every dimension, and so circumference ÷ by diameter (the formula for π) is different for everyone’s home dimension. I also had a dream where music was my DNA. You could play it like a harp. (I made that song real; it’s prob. the aural equivalent of this post… if curious you can hear it here: Music Is My DNA (Spotify, Apple etc) listen for the hum that runs throughout all the changeups

• why pi? cuz it’s both random and infinite and impossible but actual— which are the themes (and/or working process) of The Window photo series. And also: music is eternal. Archeologists have found playable flutes that are 40,000 years old. The oldest known song (that can be reconstructed) is the Hurrian Hymn #6, from 1400 BCE, in Canaan (Syria), performed on the lyre (a small harp). Greensleeves — a pop song, still sung today — is nearly 500 years old.

• math rock is a real thing. math rock makes use of more non-standard, frequently changing time signatures such as 13/8 . Some bands are: King Crimson, Game Theory, Weapons Factory, with hints of Pearl Jam, and other two-word groups. (There’s even one from Taiwan: Elephant Gym.) a subgenre of it is mathcore. like, harder math. calculus rock. none of the bands, to my knowledge (and a halfhearted google search) have ever recorded pi, or used a 3.14/8 time signature, so maybe only they are only mathsoftcore…

• obv. every shot in this set of pics is a musician - unposed, candid, and caught by chance, improv jazz, like all photos in The Window series. (music is another sub theme of the project — each photo like an individual note in a bigger song. the various sets/groupings that resonate with each other I suppose are the chords). anyway the guy on the skateboard has an operatic voice and sings beautifully as he shoots through traffic on his skateboard. you can hear him for blocks and blocks. as for the 2nd last photo (b&w): not sure if the guy on the left is a “somebody” in the music world, but the guy on the right hustled across the street to shake his hand and enthusiastically ask him lots of questions — that’s why he’s playing air guitar. and as for the last photo, as she danced on the chessboard playing with her dad, the little girl sang away in some language only she understood. maybe singing out her home dimension.

• …The Window , for the noobs, is one massive infinitely recombinant portrait of the times composed of sub-portraits (grouped sets by theme) composed of single portraits — individual photos of people shot randomly in unstaged ephemeral-but-eternal moments:

  The Window : the long view

up the long slide (even jack black)

TL; DR: below the surface & to the sun (Verticality, Part Two, by K.I.A.)

The original “Verticality” image arrangement (post) became concrete because of a synchronicity. I’d selected a series of photos of ephemeral moments — of disparate content, and taken with separate intents — which were captured over the course of a year, and then grouped them by elevation (how far the subject was from the ground). A vertical visual poem.

Just after I’d curated that grouping, by chance, I came across the poem “High Windows” by Philip Larkin. Here’s its last stanza:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The poem’s last stanza resonates with the themes of The Window (continuity, infinity, with hints perhaps of both despair and transcendence… ). And, of course, the main hook was that all the photos in this series (of series) are, literally, taken from a high window.

So I used the poem as the connecting thread for that first post some time ago, but for a while now I’ve wanted to do a Verticality sequel. (Or… or maybe a franchise, at some point merchandising the IP with toys, maybe a gin or a tequila line, and possibly a cologne or a perfume — with signature top notes of transcendence, and base notes of despair). But I’ve held off for dittophobia.

Then a few days ago, out of nowhere, this famous line popped into my head:

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND READ MORE (SUBSCRIBE!) AT THE K.I.A. SUBSSTACK HERE

Balenciaga Winners

(Holiday) At bottom is a stack of ‘stacks from over this year, in case you missed some; many have also been refined post-post, i.e. the Dick Cheney bit re: Cthulhu prompt in the Notes of the AI for an Eyesubstack.

But before that listicle, some silent “product placement”* shots: Balenciaga, Ferrari, Porsche, Enfants Riches Déprimés, iPhone, Anthropologie, Ford, Roger Dubuis, Winners.

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES (AND SUBSCRIBE) HERE: K.I.A. SUBSTACK

never hold snow (an ode via images) by K.I.A.

“Winter’s my favourite though. Stars are snow. Flakes that haven’t yet fallen to earth, tiny white frozen fires descending from the sky in lovely twirls. I joined them, in pirouettes and leaps across the yard, trying to get one to land in my opened hand — I imagined, the whole day, sitting inside, a wee girl looking out, all ways, always, even when it wasn’t a blizzard.”

“One winter night I dreamt of cold little suns landing on each of my fingertips — in slow motion I saw their icy coronas melting into every whorl. I woke up that morning to see sparkles in the thousands, a whole flattened galaxy, a snowy Milky Way on the ground and which I so longed to walk upon, like a wizard.”

“A wonder to walk, wipe a drip from lips after a summer ice cream… So I’ll never hold snow, now I know, or a baby or even a balloon, or ever hand out Easter eggs or unwrap a Halloween candy (my hands such terrible weather, tiny tornados), and there’s no catching a bouquet or leading a Mardi Gras parade (though take note of these gorgeous legs!), and of course no jumping about like a silly goat like the little ones.”

TO FIND OUT WHO THE SPEAKER IS, READ THE REST OF THE POEM, AND SEE MORE IMAGES, GO TO THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE: LINK

All The Hills Echo Ha Ha He He (The Window by K.I.A. pt 54)

An angst-antidote — excerpts from Songs of Innocence by William Blake, paired with images from The Window photo installation series:

Merry, merry sparrow!/Under leaves so green/A happy blossom/Sees you, swift as arrow,/Seek your cradle narrow, /Near my bosom
-THE BLOSSOM

Pretty joy! / Sweet joy, but two days old. / Sweet joy I call thee: / Thou dost smile, / I sing the while; / Sweet joy befall thee!
-JOY

When the meadows laugh with lively green, / And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene; / When Mary and Susan and Emily / With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha ha he!
-THE LAUGHING SONG

SEE THE REST OF THE POST AT THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK (and subscribe!): LINK

AI FOR AN EYE

TL; DR: cans and can’ts of text photography, censorship, and leg numeracy

(All images in this post available as signed and numbered prints, contact.)

Polymelia Man by K.I.A.

A dog wearing sunglasses is apparently so dangerous that some text-to-image A.I.’s won’t let you generate one due to their guidelines. So too a glass of champagne, at least when the prompt is “An older woman walking a dog in a stroller which has an attached basket with a champagne glass in it, and the dog is wearing sunglasses”. (For what nefarious reasons would you even ask to generate that, you may inquire? I mean, if you wanted to make something reallydisturbing, you’d request something like “a man wearing a cat on his shoulder like a parrot*”). The very same artificial intelligence’s safety-ism didn’t stop the image creation (above) of “a man in costume with a cane, on a brick sidewalk, photographed from above”… but then on its own dark whim the AI added a frightening — some might suggest nefarious — third leg on the fellow.

A skeleton hand was also OK to AI into a dumpster, but a handgun and dildo got a guideline warning and were not generated. “WARNING: some words do not match our guidelines and have been removed”:

“In his house at R'lyeh, dead cthulhu waits dreaming to move” by K.I.A. and K.A.I.

Text-to-image Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft’s ancient octopus-headed demon (who Wiki says is a “source of constant subconscious anxiety for all mankind”, and whose worshippers practice loathsome rituals), got an enthusiastic aye-aye from the AI, so below I am able to show you the Great Old One (at least as seen on the side of his her their new endeavour, a zero-carbon-emission** moving-van franchise):

I had to include some text photography for this series, since The Window project is kinda meta, and has touched upon many types of photography — appropriation, surveillance, rephotography, camera obscura, motion capture, Polaroid composites, etc., and the writing has name-checked various lens-based artists, from Adams to Bresson to Maier to Tilmans to Wall…

So as long as I used real The Window photographs as generation-reference (i.e. the Cthulhu image above uses an actual photo from the “U-Haul Psalms” series), it technically doesn’t break my 1 rule: all shots in the 24/7/365 project must be taken from a single location. (The text photography in this post’s grouping is also a type of “Artist steal thyself”, as it uses from scratch my own images and words, which is more interesting than sampling OPA — other people’s art — as inspiration, homage, outright theft, or via AI)…

TO SEE & READ THE REST OF THE POST “AI FOR AN EYE” , GO TO THE SUBSTACK: CLICK HERE

What's the Point?

(imperative, declarative and metonymic oh my!)

TL; DR: just see the point(s) ☟

Humans learn to point around 15 months of age (related to language development), first using their whole hand, then, three months later, by extending their index finger. Infants first do imperative pointing (i.e. to ask for a toy too far away or a sweet they want), and declarative pointing, (i.e. to indicate something new or interesting, like a dog entering the room.)

Animals don’t point. This includes mammals with fingers, like simians. However, even though they don’t point in the wild, when in captivity gorillas and chimpanzees learn how to do it from humans. Dogs understand pointing (from thousands of years of interacting with people — cats, also domesticated, just can’t be bothered), as do dolphins (perhaps because their echolocation “beam” is a sonic type of pointing).

There are numerous ways of pointing: semiotic primitive; pseudo-pointing; syntactic; cross-species litmus test… (see “Fifteen Ways of Looking at a Pointing Gesture” by Kensy Cooperrider for more of them.) Metonymic pointing is where you use the gesture to draw attention to an abstract concept — for example, a stressed staffer points to their watch to signal to the malapropping President answering questions it’s time to go; a heartless developer points to your home to indicate a proposed subway and condominium development… ):

Pointing can be difficult to interpret — for example, if you are wordlessly communicating with a person who doesn’t speak your language and you point to an apple, are you drawing attention to its color, its shape, your hunger? If you point to it three times, are you indicating a different attribute each time?

SEE THE REST OF THE “POINTING” SET, W/TEXT, HERE: https://nu4ya.substack.com

Nuns to Gnostics (Buddha, Baphomet, Jah, Jesus, Yahweh, Waheguru... ) The Window pt. 51 by K.I.A.

All the below so close (within a 15’ area), and not so far apart.

On the autumnal equinox the woman above and five others danced through the streets at sunset, wearing flower crowns, celebrating Mabon (“The Witch’s Thanksgiving”) in honour of nature’s abundance.

“May good thoughts come to us from all sides”, a Hindu prayer.

A Sikh principle is sarbat da bhala (“the welfare of all” or “may everyone prosper”)

This woman is going to a Powwow (an Indigenous gathering to celebrate culture, tell stories, sing, and perform traditional dances) somewhere downtown. On her regalia is the circular Four Directions symbol (white N, red S, yellow E, black W), one meaning of which is the interdependent relationship between all living things.

The tefillin is a small black box containing verses from the Torah, worn by Orthodox and traditional communities by wrapping the attached leather straps around the arm and forehead. The purpose is to keep one’s focus on spiritual development, not worldly desires.

An Apostle …...

READ AND SEE MORE ABOUT THIS SET OF IMAGES FROM THE WINDOW AT: SUBSTACK (and subscribe and share!)

Get the entire Nuns to Gnostics set HERE (and other sets HERE)

The Window as “networked” installation showing complex connections across images, time, people…

heart cave in (so much beauty in the world)

“I need to remember … Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.” — Ricky Fitts (American Beauty, plastic bag scene)

objectifying, fetishizing, aesthetizing, anesthetizing, romanticizing, othering, ignoring, apotheosizing, burlesquing, proselytizing presenting

Image 1 and final bookend image (14): Garbage Truck in Blue and Red taken 3 am, with found lighting from a strobing ambulance attending a close-by calamity

This post’s haiku:

white specks of snow fall
black bag shiny wrinkled worn
man wears to keep warm

Some bottles throughout art history: Roderick O’Conner (Still Life With Bottles), Cezanne (Still Life With Peppermint Bottle), Warhol (Green Coca-Cola Bottles), Ai Wei Wei’s Untitled 1993 (Song dynasty sculpture inside a whiskey bottle), and er, Jeff Koons’ Dom Perignon bottles (“some of the most affordable Koons works on the market”)

Title: Still Life, With Bottles

Title - After A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Jeff Wall ((After Hokusai))

The nightclub at the back of the alley stashed their empty bottles in a former apartment below us (the building was being vacated for condo demolition); they weren’t officially paying rent for the space, so it didn’t have locks…

SEE THE REST OF THE SUBSTACK HERE (AND SUBSCRIBE!): LINK

Protest! Antitest!

Signs & Flags & Tees & Trucks of the times

FOUND WORD POEM:

We stand
as one — we will not comply;
from the river to the sea,
just say,
no, don’t believe the lies —
essential liberty,
hugs, temporarily blocked,
50% off,
can’t we just all get along
(subject to court injunction),
we will fight in the court. Hibachi
…cont’d at the link below

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND POST AT THE K.I.A. ART SUBSTACK HERE

ᴉuʌǝɹsᴉou <-> inversion (a la Graham & because Baselitz)

TL; DR: if the sky were ground
(ʇɥǝ Mᴉupoʍ by K.I.A., p.50)

“New York City 1 (After Mondrian)”

For 75 years, the Mondrian painting “New York City I” (a grid of red, yellow, blue, and black linear adhesive tapes) was hung upside down. Research eventually proved that it should be shown the other way around. However, due to possible damage, the painting would continue to be displayed the wrong end up. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story,” said curator Meyer-Büser in 2022. “Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious” (italics mine):

“New York City 1” (Mondrian): Left: right; Right: wrong

Georg Baselitz is famous for exhibiting his paintings upside-down — or rather, right-side up, but with the subject matter inverted — to create unease and/or to make the content more difficult to interpret. His first inverted painting was in 1969, “The Wood on Its Head”. Flipping a traditional landscape of a tree made the work overcome representation, its artificiality highlighted, and left-brain analysis of it disrupted. The subject of the art was not as important as the work’s visual insight. It is immediately obvious that the tree, or in later works, the human being, is not the right way up. Genius, or gimmick? Bravado, or branding?

"Untitled" (Baselitz) - "Titled" (K.I.A.)

Rodney Graham is well-known for his photographs of trees hung upside down. (This presentation method evolved from his use of camera obscura, where a pinhole in a wall is used to isolate and cast the image —upside down and reversed, because light travels in a straight line — at large scale onto a facing wall). Of these works Graham said “I was also using a kind of readymade strategy based on the disputable assumption that a photograph is not art but an upside down photo is.”

"Welsh Oaks #1" (Graham) - "City Trees Two" (K.I.A.)

Some of the photos for The Window project/portrait/installation were shot upside-down. This was due to: 1) mistake, 2) the need to see around an obscuring object, like overhead wires, 3) not wanting the subjects to change their behaviour as a result of noticing the photographer’s movements 4) wanting to stay alive. (Meaning sticking the camera out the window without looking in order to avoid stray bullets from shootings, prevent rocks thrown from drug dealers or molotov cocktails from motorcycle gangs, and not garner a deadly look from that socialite after she stole flowers from a planter).

These images would usually be re-oriented when editing… unless visually it would enable two or more simultaneous readings — that is, a perceptual shift: is the skater dropping down into the flowerbed as if descending from a balcony above, or across it, launched towards the bottom of the photo from a crash…

READ & SEE MORE about the “Inversion Set” from The Window by K.I.A. (& SUBSCRIBE) AT THE SUBSTACK HERE

Grand Theft Photo (Appropriation, OK!)

A.I. poison & Prince-ly appropriation by K.I.A. (TL; DR: stolen shoots (The Window 47)
(PRINTS HERE & BY REQUEST)

In the ‘80s Richard Prince rephotographed a famous cigarette ad (the iconic cowboy riding a horse), cropped out the text, and presented it as his own work. By recontextualizing it, he transformed the shot into capital-A Art.

Appropriation art was not a new idea — Sturtevant’s painting repeats, Warhol’s soup cans, Duchamp’s urinal, and so on, probably back to the second-ever cave painting. But Prince’s appropriation did, and still does, stir up controversy.

Concerns of copyright, fair use, “added value” (changing the original enough to call it a new work), originality, authorship, ownership, effort, legacy, history, and of course acknowledgment and compensation are even more of a concern now that text-to-image A.I. can generate (appropriate) any style of art or artist you want. “Generate a Frank Lloyd Wright drawing”, “Make a painting in the style of Basquiat”.

Unlike Prince, all the photos in this post appropriate (hijack) the event not the shot. With the staging stolen, the images are recontextualized. They are candid pictures of other people’s mediated messages. They are meta-photos of a crime scene, an advertising campaign, a tv production, an Only Fans session, a fashion shoot, a text home, a family album, wedding photos, dating app pics, Instagram posts, TikToks (with faux paparazzi), and selfies, selfies, selfies…

READ AND SEE MORE IMAGES & SUBSCRIBE AT THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE!

The Girl. The Vampire. The Murder. The End. (The Window photo series pt 46)

TL; DR: serendipitous scenes for imagined movies (The Window pt 46)

PRINTS FOR ALL PHOTOS IN POSTS HERE: LINK

An animé character escapes from her simplistic cartoon into the real world to see a rainbow, fall in love, have sex, fart, and sword fight, not necessarily in that order, before she gets rewritten.

After a simple pitch goes horribly wrong, the surviving salesmen begin to suspect that one of them faked their Six Sigma sales-course certificate.

MORE — SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES FOR THE BELOW AT K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE: LINK

An influencer unwittingly records a murder in the window behind her and has to outsmart the criminals, the cops, the CIA, and social media to stay alive and get a brand sponsorship…

The motorbike. The heist. The woman. The betrayal. The chase. The roadblock. The discussion about Plato’s cave, simulation theory, and whether AI-generated virtual realities should be pre-decolonized by large language models rewriting user requests. The shootout. The end….

With a murder about to occur in the fishnet industry, six undercover policemen — one Black, one Indigenous, one white, one South Asian, four Women, two LGBTQ2SIA+, one Questioning, one and a half Deaf, and two from Quebec, one of them a curve model and the other Muslim — investigate.

Time-tourists travel back from the far future in their Chronobago only to find they are tiny in size compared to 21st century humans, and are also parked illegally. After their argument with the traffic cop goes viral on WorldStarHipHop, they must evade competing oligarchs muscling them to start a podcast, do a terrarium residency in Vegas, use their tiny hands in artisanal cobalt mines, and/or tell them how much Bitcoin is going to be worth in two years, not necessarily in that order, all before their impounded temporal recreational vehicle is sold off at a police auction, stranding them hundreds of years from home.

LL Cool J’s elite NSA vampire SEAL team secretly reunites to stop a shadowy cabal of NWO WEF scientists from using AI to hijack the CERN collider in order to flatten the Earth into a 15 minute city, but first they must trace some NFTs back to ISIS, battle UN undeads, avoid NASA NPCs, and race to stay ahead of international sunrises.*

An unemployed and depressed android comes to Earth to find work at Chick-fil-A, win at Chemin de Fer, and take up capoeira — oh, and stop the apocalypse with his rabo de arraia.

A man lives with no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,** necessarily in that order.

The angel Raguel comes to Earth to decide The End and sees that things are pretty good actually compared to every other era ever, so flies back to heaven.

NOTES:

-*Rotten Tomatoes review by RoyalWee2 for Vampires VS: IV — 🍅 “Good, but not spectacular enough, nor intimate enough, to really impress us. We get fatigued (although it is LL’s most relatable performance since episode 133 of NCIS: Hawai’i)”

-** from Thomas Hobbes' book Leviathan, 1651 (not coming soon to a theatre near you)

-for the international readers, the equation for Chronobago is: Time + Winnebago

-”Chemin de Fer” is a form of the gambling game baccarat, which is also known as punto banco; coincidently, all three have been used as nom de queere on Rupaul’s Drag Race; two by contestants, and one by a judge (Punto Banco.) “Rabo de arraia” is a capoeira kick, inverted and over the head, like a stingray’s strike. It was not used as a pseudonym on Drag Race. (It was used in “Pose” season 3 for a side character).

-good news: because the film has been pre-decolonized, the Academy has awarded the “Untitled Fishnet Crime” movie a 2025 Oscar

-”The chase. The desert. The shack. The girl. The roadblock. The end.” is the famous tagline on the original movie poster for the 1971 film Vanishing Point

-The angel. The descent. The judgement. The end.

-as always, all the photos are of real people caught in candid moments as they walk by The Window, (with no photoshopping, just color adjustments), and are the art, with the words (these words) always subordinate — especially when they are humorous. or "humorous”. (See the “How Far the Man” post for something more serious. Or “serious”.)

-the inspiration for this post came after seeing the above be-suited business guys walking just like:

Bonus image: (pinch up to magnify the billing block easter eggs):

The end.

happiness like motion!

TL; DR: bodies, rest & motion (The Window photos project by K.I.A. Part. 44)

golden shoes:

“Lie back…” says the meditation instructor. “Feel the weight of gravity on your shoulders…your spine… your legs. Take a long slow breath.” I do. “Become stillness.” I don’t. I mean, how could you — the planet* is spinning like an enormously torqued merry-go-round, trying to fling us off at 1000 miles per hour! The Earth is also racing around the sun at 67,000 mph, like a desperate-to-win interplanetary NASCAR driver on the final lap. Not only that:

night rider

Our solar system is careening around the centre of the galaxy like a meth-snorting dirt biker loop-de-looping inside a metal sphere at the county fair at 492,126 mph. Our galaxy is spinning like an overclocked whirling dervish at 600,000 mph, and oh, by the way also hurtling outwards at 372 mph. (Oops, wait, that’s per-second. It’s actually 1,300,000 mph**).

incredible lightness of wheelieing

And OMG, even space itself moves — the entire universe is expanding like a (well, like a universe expanding so insanely they measure it per million light years) at 357,000 miles per hour/mly………

SEE/READ THE REST HERE: LINK

PRINTS OF THE WINDOW AT THE STORE / inquire HERE: LINK

The Window: a portrait in a thousand parts

Below is a view of The Window art project installed as networked photographs, showing the connections across the images, subjects and themes (diversity, time, technology, velocity, beauty, movement, dance, Tarot, entanglement… etc).

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“The Window”, institutional installation view of themes branching and massing from linear spine (proposed)

The Window is a 24/7/365/1 photo project capturing life in the 21st century city. (See more of the images and ideas-behind: HERE). Above is just one of its many infinite arrangements.

Much of the art by K.I.A. is one larger work composed of smaller elements, allowing iterative presentations. Here’s an installation whose content changes according to setting and arrangement; here’s a painting whose 30 individual paintings are to be decentralized; here’s a recombinant sculpture composed from many discrete parts, and here’s an intercombinant wall installation (this same approach later arrived at by El-Anatsui).

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Battle (Ballet), from "The Window" by K.I.A.

Sidewalk soloists to internal symphonies… duo pas seul

Two people months apart, spontaneously doing the same gestures and movements as they dance…

All images in The Window are candid happenstance; the 24/7/365/1 project is about interconnections across the images.

More posts re: THE WINDOW (a 24/7/365/1 photo series):
Verticality
History Rhymes
Possible Pareidolia
Here Come the Future
Gravity/ Antigravity

Verticality (The Window Photos Pt. 9)

TL; DR: A photo poem, from zero to 1,261,161,417 feet.

An ‘ascending arrangement’ of some images selected from the meta-metropolis-mega-photo project The Window (LINK).

Earth to heaven (via influencers and window washers), and also some synchronicity — after thinking of connecting images vertically, by happenstance I came across the poem “High Windows” by Philip Larkin. The title, imagery, and the themes resonate somewhat. Here’s the last stanza from it (& all of it at bottom):

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

So rather than words:

NOTES:
• Besides verticality, other possible future sub-groupings of shots from The Window are: gravity, velocity, vanity, precarity, ethnicity, hilarity, historicity, U-haulicity…

• I heart “the sun-comprehending glass”. The window’s job is to let light pass through

• More posts from the Window (all ephemeral moments captured from one SUBSTACK location, pls. subscribe):
Possible Pareidolia
Here Come the Future
What’s the Story?

• K.I.A. website feat. recombinant sculptures, snow collages, gen mod paintings +

• HIGH WINDOWS by Phillip Larkin:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s   
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,   
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide   
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

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