The Window

I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze (pt 1)

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found album covers (The Window pt. 71)

Album: “I AM NOT AN X” by Joey I.O.

Joey I.O. (born Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin) performed in small clubs until his hair got sufficiently big. To pay for gas and food while he gigged his first album across the American mid-west, I.O. worked as an online hairbitrageur, sourcing golden tresses from Eastern European women and selling them to Big Wig. Sometimes he’d get stuck with locks he couldn’t flip, so he became a part-time perruquier.

He began wearing his intricate and very volumetric motel-made wigs on stage for performances, and found that the more humungous the hair, the more fervent the fans. So he scaled-up the wigs.¹ Fame soon came, as did critical praise. Reviewers and audiences began to notice the songs beneath the big bouffants, and obsessively parsed the meaning of his occulted and political lyrics, driven to manic divinations due to acidic choruses like “DragonmakerX in trojan tries to turn / offensive utopia into a chemical burn” (from “Unholy Crowley”). Meanwhile fashionistas, architects and Rupaul argued endlessly across the web about the structural integrity of his hair apparati. Which all served to exponentially increase his populariti. Everybody bought tickets to his shows, and streamed his electro-noir-pop songs in the billions. Especially in Brazil.

Album: “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified” by Kim Thee Dic

Because of the buzz surrounding his underground mix-tape, Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un immediately released a full album, called “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified”. The first single, a trap track entitled “WAD” and featuring Cardi B, went platinum. The follow-up single “I Don’t Pump Gas I Pump Hennessy” (featuring Kendrick Lamar and James Franco), a bumping diss-track aimed at Drake and Hugo Chavez, went gold. (The album stayed at the top of the charts for nearly a year, in part due to its extravagant cognac/cheese/car music videos²).

Album: “Yumi v. UAP” by The Sonic Psionic

Yumi snuck up to the roof of her Bed-study apartment building one summer evening to live-stream her new song. Views exploded when a glowing orb was observed circling the sky above her head. TikTokrs thought Yumi had somehow summoned the UAP through a combination of costume, psionics and sonics — her Venusian plushykitty attire, her ESPish lyrics, and her unusual voice (once described by professional commenter CelIn D as “in that gooch spot between an orgasmic groan and a goat’s scream”).

Scooter Braun jizzed out of retirement to sign Yumi and produce her sprawling anime-space-ballet-pop debut album. The recording got multiple Grammy nominations and she went on to a sold-out tour of the US and Sri Lanka. But that was it, that was all the music we ever got from Yumi, she never recorded again.

She did, however, have a second act. She changed her name (to Bobbi Clarke³) and started up the neurosonics program at MIT. The lab — funded by the Ravi Shankar VR Foundation and, separately, Ray Ban Meta — enabled Bobbi to invent the musical instruments the psitar, and separately, the eyelash theremin.

Album: “2,501cc” by Ross Lake

“Ross Lake don’t talk the talk, he rocks the rock”. “2501cc”⁴ was voted best metal album in 1971, 1991, 2016, and 2031.

Album: “Mind the Gap” by The Gash

The Gash were an all-female band conceived and managed by impresario/provocateur bell de beauvoir. “I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze,” she famously stated in her third autobiography. “I sourced, styled and sold The Gash to 3 different record-label patriarchs in six months, and only one of them got the record.” de beauvoir produced the band’s debut album “Mind the Gap” and got song-writing credits on the pugnacious but pulchritudinous first single “Omigoshmigash!”. de beauvoir also designed the album cover, dressing the lead singer in a clear vinyl vulva-revealing dress, which, though banned from every retailer⁵, got The Gash massive global press. (The dress was later Photoshopped to have fake opaque “color”, which made the cover look more like a friendly Roxy Music screen-saver than an affront. This appeased everyone from Apple to Walmart, so both hard-copy and soft-cloud sales skyrocketed).

”bdb was a bitch, exploitive but extraordinarily entertaining,” lead singer and actress Andrea Menard (then known as Gush Gash) explained. “We were already a band by the time she came along, we had some songs but zero marketing. Her PR IQ was like crazy Mensa-level, kinda Kaczynski. We rejected the sushi idea, but said yes to the purses, and that broke up the band.” (Menard is referring to de beauvoir’s most outrageous merch idea, clutch purses and scarves made from the band’s own skin, sheets of it produced from harvested cells and surgical epidermal printers.) “I want the audience to consume their heroes,” de beauvoir declaimed. (This is how followers of the band became know as Fannibals.)

Menard sums it up: “We made far more money from the purses than the music itself, of course. Ever get the feeling you’ve been handbagged? Well, we did. We were. Literally.” She shrugs. “Sales and prices took off when people found out the clutches could be custom tattooed.”

Album “The Sunless City” by Robots R Us

According to Robots R Us, androids were invented in the 18th century by AI time-traveling back from the year 2102. Though in 1788 they were only able to create non-sentient bodies out of mechanical metal gears and wires, the technology and concept had to be seeded then because sufficient time — a few centuries — was needed for robots (AI) to tulpa souls by the 22nd century (souls being necessary for them to get into the afterlife when the apocalypse occurs in 2226).

So RRU wrote “The Sunless City” as the soundtrack for the above, using vintage Jacquard cards from looms (which were computer pre-cursors) to generate midi-sequenced melodies, heavily-reverbed EVPs (electronic voice phenomena, sounds found on audio recordings that are thought to be the voices of spirits or other paranormal entities), aurora borealis static, miscellaneous weather-sounds sampled from vintage Gothic video games, Kirlian synthesizers, the eyelash theremin, and other e-odds and i-sods, to somehow make the most ethereal, out-of-time, and soulful album ever.

CONT’D IN PART TWO…

NOTES:

  • Prints of all photos (unstaged) from “The Window” series by K.I.A. CONTACT for info

  • The posts on the K.I.A. blog here first appear on the K.I.A. art substack, subscribe HERE

  • Album covers done by artists : Takashi Murakami “Graduation” (Kanye West); Jeff Koons, “Artpop” (Lady Gaga); Banksy, “Think Tank”(Blur); Gerhard Richter “Daydream Nation” (Sonic Youth), K.I.A. “Boomhitech Alilttlebitwreck”(Shinjuku Zulu); Damian Hirst “Certified Lover Boy” (Drake)

  • ¹ For the final song of his last show in London, I.O. wore his largest wig ever: a full-scale replica of the O2 Dome. (Well technically… not a replica; he wore the actual Dome — he was structurally connected to it by Buro Happold Engineering, who also hung the thousands of 100-foot braids from the stadium’s ceiling.)

  • ² Seth Rogen declined to spit some bars for the recording but was… persuaded to direct-in-name every music video for the album, all of which were shot exclusively at YFO airport (‘cuz that’s where Kim warehouses his dozens of super-sized blocks of Swiss Emmental cheese, hundreds of copious bottles of Paradis, and over a thousand Ford Thunderbird sedans — all three indulgences prominently featured in the music video album).

  • ³ The name change was in honour of minimalistically-toothed hockey star Bobby Clarke, of whom Yumi is a fan, because he was once captain of her favourite team, the Philadelphia Flyers and, like her, is diabetic.

  • ⁴ 2500cc being the largest motorbike engine in the world. (Lake’s is 1 more).

  • Album covers with morotcyles: Born This Way (Lady Gaga), Purple Rain (Prince), Bat Outta Hell (Meatloaf), Girls Girls Girls (Motley Crue), Born They Way We Were (Barbra Streisand)

  • ⁵ Other censored album covers: “Mechanical Animals” (Mariylyn Manson 1998), MM’s "breasts" were covered with a sticker and the entire package had to be wrapped in opaque blue cellophane. “Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins” (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1968), wrapped in brown paper to hide their genitals, still blurred online today. “Nevermind” (Nirvana,1991), sticker placed to cover a swimming baby’s genitals. “Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, a genital-adjacent word caused major retailers to not carry the album and governments launch lawsuits. “Diamond Dogs” (Bowie,1974), yes, genitals again, this time on a dog’s body, which had to be airbrushed out. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Kanye West 2010); a George Condo painting of Ye, straddled by a naked winged armless female creature with a tail, had to be blurred or pixelated for mainstream distribution.

  • ⁶ this music was the sound of the blitztanzer parties, the heavily influential movement that came out of Flin Flon’s underground club scene

  • ⁷ direct quote from the novel 1984 (George Orwell, 1948)

  • This is part 71 of The Window, which is a series of photos of real people in unstaged situations, captured by chance from looking 24/7/365/1 (the 1 being a single location, above a bricked road) over 5 years+. The work is presented as themed prints in sets interconnected with other sets, all of which are nested inside a larger single mega-meta-set. (TL; DR: it’s about passing through the labyrinth of 21st century):

Feelgood fatherhood

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(not coming to an institution near you)

THE WINDOW part 71

Who needs to go when your heart just glows

You listen for their heartbeat, ear to partner’s warm stomach, but feel their highland-dancing (or maybe taekwondo) tummy kicks. You catch them and cut the cord and sleep overnight at the hospital. You fall in love with them.

You go out at midnight in a blizzard to buy medicine. You change diapers, wear a babybjorn barely embarrassed. You become hyper-hypervigilant of an allergy, of asphyxiation, of a bite, a burn, a car, a cut, a dog, a disease…

You read them that same bedtime story and never skip a page, even on the jabillionth time. You laugh and laugh, at farts and boogers and tickles and the tinsel that somehow got stuck on their butt.

You rock them to sleep at 2 am when you finish working and get up at 6 am when they awake (you do it oddly on your arm, because you know your collarbone is hard).

You carry and carry them, across the street, at the store, in the studio, in the snow, over the mud, up and down airplane aisles, at the parade, up 3 flights to the loft 4 times a day, crying, laughing, fussing, screaming, singing, sleeping.

You let them paint your nails though you know the Lichtenstein-ish colors will take weeks to wear off. You invent stories from their suggestions — a fish and a whale who are best friends — so you tell the tale of an aging goldfish with a bucket-list wish to see the Bellagio fountains (despite deserts etc.), and how the whale recruits his pals to re-create an even better version of it with their spouts (and flashlights) for her at home. And six stories later they still ask for another.

You work in and around and between all of it, mutate into a maestro of multitasking, become a blackbelt in bitwork, get your PhD in ADHD.

You speed them to school in the stroller in the sun, snow, rain; sprint home, maniacally-work, then dash back again.

You invent games and games and games to occupy them (comic-book exquisite corpse, and spontaneous animal/job charades where both start with the same letter with only one rule: no guessing until you see both performed — no not Snake Surgeon but yes! a Cobra Chiropractor) and you marvel at their minds.

You insist on making them (though grumpy) practice floating and swimming so they don’t die in the lake.

You play hall-ball with them, and dodge-ball (don’t worry about my face), and air-ball (aka Team Balloonia) where the Earth will explode if the balloon hits the ground, and every tap to keep it aloft is different than the last (foot, nose, knee, wrist, left-hand pinkie, twirl…).

On winter days you try (holding hands together) to catch on your tongues snowflakes spiralling down from the sky, then spend hours with them building forts and micro-hills for sledding, and making Saint Phalle-esque snow-sculptures to admire. On a windy spring day you go to the park to improbably catch mid-air those helicopter-seeds that fall from the tall maples, and in the autumn it’s dandelion fluff you all leap to seize.

You go to school performances that run longer than Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”. You played the recorder like a star!

You try not to barf when you see, on the side of their leg, their kneecap that somehow got pushed there after a basketball fall, and try to make them laugh lying on the gym floor until the ambulance arrives. You make them mad. And sad. For things you didn’t intend. You get into a different ambulance another time after the electrical accident on the roof. You sleep beside them at the hospital again.

You relearn math to help them pass. You push back on every single tattoo (as duty not aesthetically). You feign sleep till they come home at 3 am from the parties. You help them float, grumpy, in the ocean of the pandemic. You remain calm teaching them to drive!!! You invent jobs to employ them.

They go. You remember how sweet it was when they used to hold your hand. You fall in love with them again, and again, and again. You catch them and cut the cord (but you don’t).

NOTES:

Institutional exhibitions on motherhood (last 10 years):

  • “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” - Hayward Gallery (London, 2024); explored motherhood through self-portraits, addressing creation, caregiving, loss, and women’s health issues like miscarriage and abortion

  • “Designing Motherhood”- MassArt Art Museum (Boston, 2022); examined the design and material culture of human reproduction, including objects like IUDs, breast pumps, and menstrual cups, highlighting reproductive health’s social and political implications

  • “Picturing Motherhood Now” Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, 2022); explored motherhood through diverse lenses, addressing themes like family, gender, slavery, migration, and Indigenous matrilineal cultures

  • “Mothering: Between Stockholm Syndrome and Acts of Production” Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico 2022); this exhibition challenged romanticized views of motherhood, addressing gender equality and the tensions of being an artist-mother

  • “Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media” Foundling Museum (London, 2020); explored 500 years of pregnancy in art, from drawings to contemporary works

  • “Mother! Origin of Life!” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark, 2021); explored motherhood through themes like fertility, sacrifice, and surveillance

  • “The Great Mother” Palazzo Reale (Milan, 2015) explores the life-giving creative power of mothers and the power denied to and won by women.

Institutional exhibitions on fatherhood (last 75 years):

  • “The Family of Man”, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1955); photography exhibition with numerous poignant images of fathers and children portrayed globally

The Window is a 24/7/365/1 photo series by K.I.A. All photos are taken from a single location, and nothing is staged. The images are later arranged in sets as visual poems and narratives, interconnected and nested in a grand continuum, a single portrait of the times:

The Window, as arranged in a continuum:

(for father’s day)

Nebuchadnezzar, Never a Bricklayer

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The Window photo series, pt 67

7:00 am. 3600 bricks to go.

Is the moon made of bricks? This morning, sunrise, there was a solar eclipse. Some advanced space civilization ages ago was like, They got microbes on Earth now, we better keep an eye on them, those motherfuckers’ll evolve and get dangerous sooner or later. Build a satellite for surveillance, use stuff from the planet to do it, make it look natural —round, grey and dusty is good. Place it precisely the right distance from earth so that it covers the sun exactly during an eclipse. They’ll eventually discover math and figure out that that wasn’t random, they’ll know someone’s watching, so they won’t misbehave. Also, what the hell, put some rings around Saturn.

I wish I worked on the moon, bricks’d be lighter. 450,000 lbs of bricks I’ll end up lifting this year. That’s Superman weight, just 4.5 pounds at a time. This road job, 50 bricks an hour, eight hours by nine days…that’s gonna be just over 16,000 lbs. Less if I crush a finger like No-nail Withnail. Goddamn glad he and his fugly mashed-plumb thumb are not on my crew, he’s barely on his knees, he’s always standing, arms crossed, talking. Ugh, this brick is shit and it’s only my second one. Into the clinker pile.

Some ancient bricks still aren’t clinkers. The Colosseum, it’s still standing. Even the ones they dug up in Jericho. Just mud and straw, and shaped by hand, but after 9000 years and trumpet blasts and all that, still intact. Thumbprints pressed into them still visible. Maybe one is from the hand of a way-great grandfather of mine, 440 generations back. It’s possible. People are bricks in an infinite road.

CONT’D. SEE/READ MORE IMAGE FROM THE “NEBUCHADNEZZAR” PHOTO SET FROM “THE WINDOW” AT K.I.A.’s SUBSTACK HERE: LINK

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X marks X mass X

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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)

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(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.

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

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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

up the long slide (even jack black)

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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

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

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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

AI FOR AN EYE

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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.

The Window image 4164 by K.I.A.

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?

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(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.

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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)

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“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!

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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)

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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!)

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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…

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

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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!

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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