Originally published at BlackhevaDotCom. You can comment here or there.
There’s a great article over on Textfiles.com by Jason Scott about computer camp in the 1980’s, more specifically the site author’s experiences. He’s also the gentleman responsible for the documentary that I drool over every time I see a mention of it online, BBS: The Documentary. He touches on a few things that I can relate to in growing up which may seem unrelated to most people but all seem to correlate some how in my brain. I always knew Santa Claus wasn’t real, have always managed to keep a detached viewpoint on matters, intuitively understood how most things work, or even what the problem with them is without really knowing the operation of it. He mentions “…I was actually the keeper of a sort of intelligence fog, a general sense of understanding things well but with no focus…”. This is generally how I feel. I really could not name the number of times that I’ve been approached with a question, or a problem and I’ve known what the issue is without quite understanding how. It all seems very wishy-washy and magic crystal sounding I know, but it’s something I’m observing with more and more frequency.
Is it just my attitude when I approach new things? I don’t fear climbing into a million dollar press made by 3M, to change out the exposure bulb for a solvent ink based print head. Or I’m handed a server with an OS I’ve never touched (much less heard of) and expected to just make it work. I think my real gift isn’t so much intelligence as it is coherence. I connect things together in my brain without even realizing I’m doing it. It’s hard to step back and try to pick apart my brain process, but I distinctly remember, when focusing on a task of getting tunnel vision, and the feeling of.. well.. like two giant disparate lenses floating in space suddenly converging, a flash of light… and I suddenly understand the problem. Or rather how to fix it. It seems to vary from issue to issue. I feel like I have a distributed application running in my brain. It’s interesting though thinking about the particularly analytical side of my personality and comparing it to when I create art. It’s fairly similar in feeling, yet my results (style?) are different every time. I think that is/was my biggest weakness as an artist. Consistency. So now, how to I temper my art, with these giant lenses? And will it burn out like a boy cooking ants with a magnifying glass?
I know this all seems pretty wierd. But Jason’s blog entry sparked all of that in a matter of a couple seconds.
