Was up to four last night scanning pages for the Moby Dick animated book thing. It’s coming along fairly nicely. I should probably be goading you into bidding on the scrolls, but I trust you’ll do that on your own. Here’sa self portrait I’ve been working on for several months… probably will change again, but there’s something to be said for preserving various stages of things. There’s an earlier incarnation:here.

The auction on the scrolls is going to end on Thursday… so get your bids in. The video has been seen over twenty thousand times on Vimeo… moving a lot of people in ways they often can’t seem to describe or comprehend, but feel compelled to comment upon anyway. I must say it’s puzzling to me… now if I could only pay my bills, I’d be delighted. SO BID.

Meanwhile I’m tearing up pages of Moby Dick to build some sort of hairbrained animation…something to do with eyes and fish. The word billow is the first word I pointed to on the page I’m up to (The Sermon).

The more people look, the more I look to see how many people are looking.

This is an abstract I’ve been working on while doing the scrolls (along with a couple of paintings that probably aren’t finished, or maybe never will be). It’s been wild watching the outpouring of affection for the little crowd video on Vimeo. There is no doubt that I set out to make something that people might enjoy, but it’s always surprising when people actually seem to enjoy it…. a regular crowd pleaser.

The audience has inserted itself into the piece now… claiming certain characers at certain frame counts as “ME”… and weirdly, they are usually right! Also, I finally got a negative comment… restoring some sense of balance (negative comments of course weigh more than positive… or is it that they are further out from the fulcrum?).

This was interesting in a lot of different ways… the most obvious here is how do you describe a horizontal scroll on a vertical scroll. That’s one of the many conflicting impuses embodied in this crowd… all born out of monkeybook and being surrounded by a physical audience… who is my audience?… I think I’ll draw them and perform infront of the drawing. Today’s post also asks the guestion (more than most), which here is the real work of art? The drawing, or the film of the drawing, or the whole thing together on the blog, or what?

The scroll seemed to turn into some reverse time engineered self portrait. When writing in a Chinese bound book, you more or less have to start at the ending and work your way back to the beginning, which begs the question which is which? I’d like to make some more of these (I’m going to post a second experiment soon), so I’ve decided to offer this one for sale so I can buy more books and pay the storage people so all the rest of my art doesn’t get thrown out. Let’s say the starting bid is $150… book goes to the highest bidder by next week the 14th. Contact me. Larger image of the whole scroll: here

The faces have begun to morph into scenes…something to do with trying to get the architectural rendering of the Oxford Library to work as a portrait yesterday I think.

More faces from the folding scroll book

Working in a new Chinese bound scroll book and doing all faces… similar to this one: 1000 Monk Keys.