DEM PASSWORDS

And/Or Gallery and Dem Passwords are pleased to present solo exhibitions of Olia Lialina and Kathleen Daniel.

The front gallery exhibition is a survey of Olia Lialina's recent digital artworks from 2008-2020. Moscow-born Lialina is a staple of digital art history, starting in the 90s with her HTML-based experimental narratives, which were groundbreaking in their use of the web for avant-garde artistic expression. Through participation in early internet culture and deep study of archives of old web communities like Geocities, she has become an expert and champion of free-form early net culture and aesthetics. In her influential essay "A Vernacular Web," (2005) Lialina describes the internet of the 90s:

...it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous...or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts."

And in her newest text "From My to Me" (2020):

"Webmasters of the 1990s built homes, worlds and universes. But also, outside of intergalactic ambitions, they strongly pushed the concept of something being mine. The first-person possessive determiner "my" took on a very strong meaning — "my" because I build it, I control this presentation; my interests, my competences, my obsessions."

Her interest in the invisible and disappearing personal culture of Web 1.0 led to new work starting in the 2000s that is almost like a hybrid of art making and archiving. The work has similarities to Joseph Cornell's process of assembling forgotten materials and objects in frames, yet is more formal and photographic like Bernd and Hilla Becher's grids of water tower photographs and other unnoticed infrastructure. An animated GIF can be downloaded, but it can't be literally placed in the gallery like Joseph Cornell's works because it has no default or physical form. Film processing and development is similar to the process of displaying a GIF in a gallery space in terms of the kinds of decisions and transformations that are made.

"A Vernacular Web" also discusses how these forgotten parts of the internet sometimes cycle back into popularity as throwback styles and take on new layers of meaning. Lialina's Online Newspapers series (2004-2018) comprised of newspaper scans with Web 1.0 Javascript and GIFs had originally seemed like an anachronistic and impossible merging, but today they almost seem contemporary since newspapers now sometimes use old-style GIFs and even occasionally use design elements that engage in the unique interactive language of the web. Also included in the exhibition via projection is False Memories (2020), a tribute to the loved and hated Internet Explorer 6 web browser and its interface elements. On the opposite wall is Lossless (2022), the latest in an ongoing series of animated GIF triptychs on LED panels. These are part of the "blingy" aesthetic, a second-wave Web 1.0 style that often included reworked instances of early Web 1.0 GIFs in larger and more sparkly graphics. On display are a type of GIF called "stamps" by influential Blingee.com user Irina Kuleshova (ivk), who passed to Lialina her archive of animated graphics she made for the platform from 2006 to 2018. Projected below the LED panels is Peeman (2014), an animated GIF on dual video projectors that was typically originally paired on a webpage with another image or GIF that the Peeman was peeing onto. At the back of the gallery running on two slide projectors is Give Me Time/This Page Is No More (2015) which documents 80 pairs of key moments in a Geocities webpage's existence: the point at which the author realizes they haven't been updating their webpage and promises to update soon, and the point where they eventually shut down their page. And finally, in the front entry is 640x480 (2014), a study of Web 1.0 tiled backgrounds whose title references the fact that webpages originally were all designed for VGA monitor resolution, which was 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels tall.

Lialina's work has been exhibited extensively online and at venues including the New Museum, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Transmediale, Berlin; Western Front, Vancouver; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ABC Gallery, Moscow; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Barbican, London; LEAP, Berlin; MOTI, Breda; HEK, Basel; and Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Kathleen Daniel's Panorama video artworks occupy the back room.

Ripped from Daniel's long-standing website duh-real.com are five recent tunes illuminated into unique webpage music videos made with 3D computer graphics software.

Spread across five flat-screens in a nod to the immersion of a virtual reality headset experience — an installation architecture devised by this gallery — Daniel's latest works build on her legacy of music video making that came into public view in 2006 via her YouTube page, adding a new element to the spectrum created by her channel history both in form and execution.

The music contained here, "Move on," "Loving Myself," and "Silence" from Daniel's 2020 album Imagine, and "A Thrilled" and "No Better" from her 2019 albums Singles and Gumbo-ish, respectively, is that "neo-soul" we know so well from Daniel — music that an adventurous listener should instantly identify as extraordinary. And the visual component captures Daniel's stitched housescapes (marked most notably by her surrealist paintings) and exteriors in 360 degree rotations from a first-person perspective, slowly unrolling kind of like a 19th century panoramic painting, extending Daniel's narrative universe into new territory. "A Thrilled," for example, adds an air disaster to Daniel's list of calamities.

From the start, Daniel's music and art-making have addressed societal and psychic ills informed by a devastating personal history as detailed in her year 2000 self-published, names have been changed to protect the innocent memoir, "From the Womb to the Tomb."

From the back cover description:

Four Minneapolis black teenagers, bet: "Who'll end up living outside the slums, without paying rent, and can shop until she drops." But it's Danell, the most arrogant and high-strung, who steps through life as if in a minefield. And who runs into conflicts from New York to California. And after a New York rape, stumbles through the doors of Bellevue Hospital, and is detained for a month, against her will. Years later — and with child — she runs into an escaped con. But not until Los Angeles, does he show his real character — by then an United States Senator is killed. But later, her determination takes her to Las Vegas, Germany, Greece, Amsterdam, Spain and London... (Daniel) delivers a vivid tale of a black young woman's search for that rainbow, in a white, racist world...

Daniel maps this biography onto her work with her characters functioning as reflections of herself, as a vehicle to exorcise trauma and to close the distance between dreams and reality in the classic surrealist sense. Her Panoramas approach the post-dramatic and seek to produce an effect with absurdist exaggeration to express that tension between disillusionment and expectation; between her Otherness and normative society. They are phantasmagorical reconstructions of her past and a way to process the present for a woman always on the move — a self-described "butterfly."

And with respect to Lialina's work, the fact that Daniel has for decades worked in the "web pages as documents" mode having maintained such a strong home base of creation on her website, links Daniel's work to Lialina's central premise "that personal webpages are the conceptual and structural core of the WWW."

Yes, life is a trip. You can either play it safe by avoiding all humans or press on into uncertainty. ...The Supreme Being had blessed her with the ability to mentally escape. ...At this point in life, no one could ever convince her that the Supreme Being didn't exist. She felt Him through to her bones. How could she have made it through life without Him?¹

Kathleen Daniel was born in 1945 in Minneapolis and lives and works in Ponitz, Thuringia, Germany. Her work was featured in an online retrospective at the 9th Berlin Biennale curated by Dis Magazine (2016); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2013); Secret Project Robot (2011), Ramiken Crucible (2012) and New Museum in New York City (2012) and across the web.

¹ excerpted from "From the Womb to the Tomb" published in 2000 in paperback by Trafford Books.

And/Or Gallery in collaboration with Dem Passwords is pleased to present Show #35: See Beyond the Horizon © 2010 - 2021 The Kyoobur Company, an exhibition of audio-video works by Benjamin “Kyoobur9000” Kaufold and members of the logo editing community.

Logo editing is an experimental video remixing tradition where “users” alter video clips, or “sources,” using freeware and off-the-shelf editing software. Sources typically include production company idents, commercials, boot screens, logos of their own creation, and the like, that users edit, composite, color time and combine with applied audio and video effects to produce some novel result. Logo editing extends out of a broader video meme making community on YouTube creating YTP (YouTube Poop) and YTPMVs (YouTube Poop music videos) which are short, stylized video edits usually intended to be funny or unsettling.

Inspired in the early 2010’s by YTP editors, including Patch93 and Commander Gwonam, Kyoobur defined a sphere of influence within the logo editing community with an inventiveness, inclusiveness, and elegant design-centric approach that established him as a power user in the space. To “see beyond the horizon,” as Kyoobur puts it, is to see beyond the givens of a piece of media. It’s a call to find something else in the source, by a remapping of memory or a new wrapping of affect, or simply to “enjoy the light on the screen and the sound coming out of your speakers.”

On display in the main room is an excision of 400+ videos from Kyoobur’s “channel history” of nearly 1,900 uploads to YouTube. Removed from their noisier contexts, Kyoobur’s videos (Kyooburisms) are allowed to shine, to “shimmer” as he puts it, across 5 channels of video in all of their synesthetic splendor— and their surprisingly rigorous formalism. Categorized here by effect, by logo and by “season,” Kyoobur’s videos cut across 11 years of production under the umbrella of the Kyoobur Company, an imagined conglomerate that has come to define the activities of a large swathe of the logo editing community.

The north-facing wall contains Kyoobur’s channel logo history with all of their variations on a 50” flat screen monitor. Opposite that, across three 43” flat screens, are Kyoobur’s treatment of the 1998 Klasky Csupo ident, a reel of videos under the influence of his Diamond effect, and Kyoobur’s “revival season” consisting of recent works made to celebrate his 10th year anniversary on the YouTube platform. On a lone CRT display along the east-facing wall is a series of Kyoobur’s flips of the Windows OS boot screens entitled, “Giygosoft Wyndeaus,” a reference to the shapeless demon end boss of the 1989 Nintendo game EarthBound Beginnings. Kyoobur’s varied sources are subjected to dozens of unique effects— configurations that he’s branded with names like Kyoobavision, Night of the Living, Thoroughly Destroyed, Deep Major and D U H, among many others. And the results range from subtle audio harmonizing (DMA) to total abstraction (I Killed X) and to controlled maximalism (Comes Out to Show Them). In one edit, Kyoobur plays his 9K Hexametric 3-G Logo 2,859,599,056,870 times; in another, he applies every effect in Windows Live Movie Maker in alphabetical order to a clip from Disney’s Moana, then every effect in reverse alphabetical order for an alternate version; and for another, adds 50 layers of motion blur to the Warner Home Video ident. The work stress-tests its sources and software, and is beautiful, overstimulating, often funny, but always unswervingly systematic. Behind the scenes, Kyoobur moves in multiples and with a chemist’s precision. The design of his channel logos come out of the grid and into the raster. “My channel is the union of strict numerical thinking and kind of zany artistic fun,” says Kyoobur. “Fueled by a desire to merge history and technology,” he mixes old media with new tech, and his channel serves as a registry of more than a decade of general meme history, partly indexed by thumbnails that could frankly function as standalone artworks.

On the west-facing wall, we’ll be projecting a streamed playlist of videos from the wider community of logo editors, work by users from all over the world: Russia, Australia, Israel, UK, Philippines and the USA. In the back room, we’ll be projecting a durational piece by hitting PLAY ALL on Joeys Channel the Object Thingy’s upload history of nearly 26,000 videos. Joeys’ placement in the context of this gallery— a bit set off from the other Kyoobur Company affiliated editors— speaks to his numerous and varied output styles vis-a-vis the formal concerns of logo editing while acknowledging him as force in his own right, having established the largest footprint on the platform of any Kyoobur affiliated channel. Joeys Channel, currently Joeys Klasky Shuric Man Gonoodle Thingy 2021, may be the most prolific video artist of our time, with his 25K+ videos collecting 600+ million views across his 5+ year channel history. Likewise, the 1998 Klasky Csupo “Robot” logo may be the most remixed 6 seconds of video of all time; and the “Sparta Remix” (a favorite theme of the logo editors), the most remixed song of all time... Pretty serious numbers for the supposed fringes of the internet.

Logo editing is video art characterized by high-powered outputting that constantly teases the contours of intellectual property, attribution, and identity. Kyoobur and his affiliates disavow ownership of nearly all of their work, often explicitly with on-screen titling that reads “All Content Belongs to Everyone,” “I Own Nothing,” or Kyoobur’s own “Universal Disclaimer in Poem Form” that advertises that “all the 9K logos are the only things from me!” Such disavowals, of course, are more symbolic than effective so editors still strike forward, change their names, make back-up pages, and syndicate each other’s content in service of the community and continuity— as much as a creative practice as an evasionary tactic. And for this we’re thankful, preserving a phenomenon that is enthralling both in itself and for what it tells us about the broader reaches of contemporary hyperculture.

Below is an essay by Brandon Avery Joyce on logo editing’s relation to broader culture, followed by a long, informal interview with Kyoobur himself.

Benjamin “Kyoobur9000” Kaufold (b. 1996, New Hampshire) lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts as a chemical researcher and teaching assistant at Northeastern University where he is a candidate for a PhD in chemistry. Kaufold holds a BA in chemistry from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“See Beyond the Horizon” by Brandon Avery Joyce

Kyoobur deserves credit. Logo editing, everywhere, bears his mark. I mean this both in that it’s been greatly shaped by his influence and, more literally, because many of the big-league logo editors brand themselves as subsidiaries of the Kyoobur9000 company. But this thing, logo editing, is more significant than the output of any one editor— or for that matter, the sum of all its editors. It’s one of those weird cultural extrema that so distills the traditions from which it emerges (in this case: memes, shitposting, hyperculture more generally) that it starkly clarifies their inner forces and contradictions. Take memes, for example. Who would deny that memes are a defining form of the past decade? Memes are so powerful, so seductive, that non-memes struggle to escape the pull of meme-ification, particularly when it comes to online cultural production. But what’s the source of this power? What’s distinct about it? It’s not the individual meme. It’s not what you see on your screen: a “humorous or relatable pairing of image and text.” This has been a template of popular forms like comics, posters and illustrations long before mankind ever learned to shitpost. The power of memes, we’d probably all agree, lies rather in their crystallization of certain networks, both social and technological. However brilliant the individual meme (and there are some sluggers out there), we all recognize that they are but replies within a much larger, longer conversation. Despite the occasional watermarking of “original content,” we know— and can straight up observe— that this originality draws upon huge reservoirs of previous posts and efforts. Much of the real “content” of memes, the thing that makes them really hit, has been produced, aestheticized, and propagated in advance by an army of untold number.

In other words, memes make evident something that has always been the case: that culture is primarily social. It’s socially produced, socially circulated, socially evaluated, and always responding to a certain social understanding. Yet when push comes to shove, or when the histories get written, this social reality somehow gets suppressed by the codification of culture as a form of private property or the work or expression of the lone private individual. And I’m not just talking about NFTs or copyright infringement, about legal or institutional codification. It’s something that creeps into our instincts. It affects how we think about culture, reifying its production and mythologizing its producers. It’s not just about whether something is literally owned or not. It’s about a certain metaphysics of culture. Meme-making, as well as our more casual, daily meme-appreciation, partly undoes this privatizing instinct.

The social reality of it all is just too undeniable, too inviting. Nevertheless, other parts of meme culture can dull its edge pretty quickly. The relatability of the content (and even the “contentiness” of the content) makes memes easily put to service for lame or nefarious ends, and if we’re talking straight percentages here, most memes are either rank propaganda or chucklers your aunt posts to her Facebook wall, or both. And then, while in one sense the meme-content flows freely and the love is real, the actual semio-technical networks that they’re crystallizing could not be a more literal, disturbing example of privatization and systematic enclosure— and in ways only opaquely understood even by memelords and ladies.

With these two weakspots exposed, enter Kyoobur9000 and company. As the name implies, logo editing has two primary obsessions: the contours of intellectual property— emblematized by the logos they borrow or make— and a formalist concern with video-editing itself. Unlike a lot of other memetic and shitposting traditions, the “content” has been almost entirely twisted or hollowed out, usually consisting of cherished logo-tropes like the Klasky Csupo intro, station idents, defaults, or logos of their own design. Logo editors make or take logos as content, which from the vantage point of intellectual property, is a bit like throwing away the gift and keeping the box and wrapping. They also approach their edits with the same rigorous formalism that you’d expect from turtlenecked mid-century painters and sculptors, noting the slightest changes in color, sound, or arrangement. And it shows. Logo editing hardly deserves comparison with the shitposting of jokey predecessors like YTPMV (YouTube Poop Music Videos) which for the most part, I find pretty bad, if still amusing. Logo editing is drossless and precise, yet free of the pretensions associated with so many other formalisms. Sebastian remarked that even at its most maximalist, it has an almost soothing, therapeutic quality to it, and I agree. But then on its back end, logo editors also delight in aggressively testing the ownership of the networks they’re crystallizing— the YouTube networks hosting their output, the television networks that aired the original programs or commercials, and even the meaning of authorship inside the network of the logo editors themselves. Videos get copystricken, deleted, saved by others, copied, vandalized, desecrated, re-edited, and re- uploaded, and the resulting battlelines mark off the otherwise vague limits of use and ownership on these platforms. It’s as if logo editors, by some unerring instinct, located and then summarily lopped off the remaining deadweight of meme culture. They’re still memes, only ultralite. It’s this same instinct that has them swapping out their own usernames and blurring provenance faster than anybody can keep track, or de-mystifying their own production process by taking requests in the comments or posting tutorials with step-by-step instructions. What you get, in the final result, is this odd platypus of a cultural species that combines a Hans Haacke-ish critique of platform with an exacting, avant-gardish formalism, but counterintuitively, is wildly popular on YouTube and, by and large, made by teens who are just riffing and trying to make something that looks cool or scary.

Much of it was spurred by the tool itself, a program of choice among logo editors called Sony Vegas. This is a video editing program that allows users to swap out clips even while keeping the structure of the editing in place, much in the way that one can keep a melody in midi while swapping out different instruments. In so doing, Sony Vegas reproduces the logic of memes, only for video-clips; content is swapped in and out of certain formats, which are themselves open to riffing and recombination. The individual logo edits, like individual memes, are but an accumulation of steps or feedback loops created by an army of untold number. And in those many thousands of steps, some of them very tiny indeed, it’s difficult to say when and where they trespass the enclosures of private culture, the sharp differences of mine and yours and theirs. Sure, certain logo editors, like Kyoobur9000 or Trukhin Gleb, stand out and duly receive their glory. As opposed to the “veg-replacers” who simply plug content into the .VEG files, these .VEG creators are respected as innovators, legends even, as well they should be. But the esteem is never severed from a participation in the community— even if that participation is antagonistic or straight griefing. And judging by the sheer output, it certainly gives the lie to the notion that productivity (cultural and maybe otherwise) relies upon enclosure and private ownership, upon sharp distinctions between mine and yours and theirs.

It makes me wonder how much logo editing could serve as a model for other spheres of culture— for things like philosophy. Ideas belong to no one, we all know. Even the most brilliant thoughts and thinkers are just distillates of much larger, longer conversations. Great thinkers deserve some credit, but not all. Yet philosophy as a codified discipline has nearly always been, in actual practice, the study of “great minds.” You study Plato or Kant or whoever, and all subsequent ideas are treated as if they are just cocktails of these purer substances, Platonism or Kantianism or whatever. Again, we know this is ludicrous, that thought far exceeds the individual thinker, but it’s just how things are done around here, at least in the wings of the North Atlantic. It’s not so much privatized in the sense of thoughts being copyrighted (academic journals excepted), but in that it shares the form of private property or is treated as the work of the lone private individual— a metaphysics of culture in which thought is essentially private. With few exceptions, philosophy online has done little to correct this. Forums still give rise to their own little Platos and little Kants, and philosophy memes are basically namedrops or blurb-joke-clichNs. But philosophy could assume other forms online, forms closer in character to logo editing, in which thoughts are shopped and swapped like the Klasky Csupo intro or Kyoobur's beloved Diamond effect. The results would be more like a piece of open-source software than an awing monument to a solitary mind, and as a crystallization of a general intellect, it would be a better reflection of how thought actually works. So why doesn’t this exist? What's holding us back?

We cling to private or enclosed culture for a variety of reasons, some nobler than others. Less admirably, part of this clinginess is bound up with some hope for personal recognition. Maybe we fear that without the metaphorical watermark that says “I did this! It was all me,” there would be no ladder to success or specialness in art, music, philosophy, or whatever— and this is above and beyond the question of actually getting paid for our success or specialness. More understandable is the question of how we relate to culture. When we listen to a “great” song or crack open a “great” book, there’s often a sort of intimacy between you and the author, or you and the musician, that feels if not “private” then personal and dialogical in a way that doesn’t seem relevant when you’re talking about something like Linux. We jealously guard this intimacy, often willfully forgetting the broader social fact of the work as much as we possibly can: we want it to be just the two of us. Hyperculture brings even bigger crowds. So much literature and music, since the earliest records, has been happily acknowledged as the work of many hands, even when given final form by an individual. But with the internet and its ensemble of technologies, and its ability to quickly coordinate multitudes, this sense of the teeming millions can be pushed to new and sometimes alienating limits.

Sebastian makes the credible claim that “Sparta Remix,” a favorite musical theme among logo editors, is the most remixed song of all time, with some tens of thousands of remixes. This is mind-blowing in itself, as a curiosity. But even though the original melody and .VEG file is attributable, it’s more accurate to say that “Sparta Remix” is this collection of mixes, the corpus. Here, a difference of quantity turns into a difference of quality. Something sufficiently new is going on. This isn’t just one remix here, one remix there, always calling back to an “original.” This is music and video created fully, directly and evidently as a “crystallization of certain networks, both social and technological.” You feel it, and it’s both exciting and a little disconcerting, if for nothing else than for what it wordlessly suggests. What would it mean for an entire song, including the melody, lyrics, rhythms, arrangement, timbre, to be composed by an army of untold number? Or a novel with ten thousand authors, each adding a line or changing a word or two? Maybe your grandchildren will one day look at you funny when you ask them “who” wrote a certain book or song. Maybe, and probably more likely, this more distributed kind of culture-making will find a place alongside more “personable” works. Or, best case scenario, each individual work or creator will just be loved and understood within the mesh of their networks and social realities. For those worried, there’ll still be plenty of room and recognition for “individuals.” The virtue of logo editing, as I see it, isn’t that it’s some wholly de-individuated enterprise. It’s just one of those rarer internet-corners that promises us some aesthetic autonomy from the very opposite: total privatization, total enclosure. And in the context of hyperculture, where every power vector is becoming increasingly explicit, measured, and directed, and every form of control and compromise more available and swallowed, such autonomy feels like nothing short of a breakthrough. You put on a playlist of a Kyoobur9000 company, let it roll, and think to yourself: “ah, there it is— the pure shit.”

Kyoobur9000 interview

Drawing inspiration from underground comix and Chinese martial arts cinema, Cayro's development of what he calls the Infinity Style Fist refers to his ability to combine disparate elements and output styles into his horror vacui on one end and something more expressionistic at the other. The clash of these styles, the internal and the external like in Chinese martial arts and spatially in this cabinet display, show his mastery of feats of strength and spirit. But Cayro doesn't meld "high" and "low," though his skill level is virtuosic, he melds "low" and "lower" in search of unexplored territory -- that extra flip to a deep dive that no one with any good sense and even half the talent would bother with.

Pushing way past absurdity and the delineations of the panel in the crushed quality of his Finnas and in the bleed of his fabric works (which extend out of the scratch pad marginalia of his comics published under the alias Bald Eagles), it's the lines he leaves in, the "energy lines" which include the rough sketching he folds into the finished works with ink and marker that have become his hallmark.

Speaking to the plagues of celebrity worship, and vanity and consumption cultures in particular, Cayro's drawings (sanitized here in a rare public display) use and abuse Hollywood entertainment properties, crooks, clods and corporatists for laughs and for reflection through fan fiction on the American pathologies of self-absorption, power and paranoia.

Cayro's rogues' gallery includes:

Kanye West as the prideful vanity cultist with one eye on the self-improvement imperative and the other on his peerless status as the, "greatest artist God has ever created."*

Southern California attorney Jacob Emrani, familiar for his billboard advertising campaign, flipped here into a grifting adventure duo alongside Ronald "Ronny" McDonald.

Dora the Explorer as a chapeu-ed super consumer in what looks like a blasted page out of a coloring book.

A sloth in a way more vile hat pressing his long arms into service against government overreach.

Jason Statham as a revenge-bent ghost assassin in search of his lost love in the arms of Sylvester Stallone.

Felix the Cat entwined with another sex symbol, the wretched Internet icon of impotence.

And finally the Shaolin monks in their dual role as the angels in the art historical lineage of The Seven Deadly Sins, and as virtuous enforcers. And it is the monks who connect the stylistic quality of the heavily worked Finnas to the more open-ended fabric paintings within.

Cayro is in no way immune to the impulses he depicts and to the sins to which they lead -- he's striking at the heart of the entertainment industry in a way that's also self-destructive, with output that's always been autobiographical. Here he's infantilized among the monks, depicted as a drunk and his vulgarity is at home on the boulevard. Really, the work isn't that far off from what the caricature artists down the block are making for tourists. And we're selling souvenir t-shirts too.

Victor Cayro (b. 1980, Dubuque, Iowa) lives and works in Los Angeles. Cayro's work has been published in comics anthologies including Kramers Ergot, Legal Action Comics Vol. 1 & 2 and The Best American Comics 2014. He's exhibited at galleries including Synchronicity Space, Superchief and in self-produced solo showings.

*https://www.xxlmag.com/kanye-west-defends-joel-osteen/

Let me explain by way of a fun historical digression why "hermetic comics" make so much sense and why it's weird that it isn't more practiced. To begin with, take the Cathars. Catharism, or Albigensianism, was a dualist heresy flourishing in Southern France and Northern Italy in the 12th and 13th century. It was "dualist" in that it didn't believe in one ultimate source of the creation- God- but two. There was a spiritual world of good created by a good God and a material world created by a bad one. Our whole time here was a state of fallenness and our material world- our bodies- were forever irredeemable. This included, to the horror of the church fathers, the transubstantiated body of Christ, though this wasn't the only point of difference between Cathars and the papal authority. Cathar contempt for the material world meant that wealth was an ignominious pursuit, gender and status were meaningless accidents, the church's thirst for temporal power was sinful, and even having children was to be avoided altogether, at least for the Cathar holy men, the "perfects." And although their numbers were small, Cathars were a thorn for the ballooning influence of papal authority. There had been ascetic orders before, such as the Benedictines, as well as anticlerical movements criticizing the clergy's behavior in light of church doctrine. But Catharism contradicted the doctrine itself, a doctrine largely settled since the council of Nicea muzzled Gnosticism some thousand years earlier. Worst of all for the Church, Cathars were well-loved within their communities and, both by their virtue and their persecution, made the Church look like a bunch of assholes.

Plus, the timing was bad for Rome. Pope Innocent III was still enjoying the zenith of the "papal monarchy." After several skirmishes with Europe's monarchs, the Pope was effectively the leader of all Christendom. It was a supremacy maintained less by arms or treasure than by the power of belief alone, or what the sociologist Michael Mann describes as "ideological power." Think about how unique this is. The dominant mode of power over Europe was sheer belief. The most heated questions were matters of cosmology and meaning. Knights who went on crusades often bankrupted their families and perished in the attempt, and why? Primarily in order to defend Christianity and to absolve themselves of some pretty unchristian behavior back home. Popes humbled kings with excommunication. All of Europe, from the peasantry up to the royalty, feared for their souls and the orthodoxy was nearly universal... Nearly. Innocent III ordered the Cathars to be converted by the inquisitors or crushed by what's been called the "Albigensian crusade." In most respects, Catharism was soon no more. In other ways though, Cathars spelled the beginning of the end for the Church's hegemony, a medieval rehearsal of the Return of the Jedi. Papal powers were on the wane. After the first, each Crusade spelled greater and greater disaster, with the Islamic powers chewing up more of the East by the year. The Black Death wiped out a third of the continent and made Christendom wonder if, just maybe, they weren't really God's favorite. And clamp down as the Church might, the Renaissance and Reformation quickly eroded the rest of the Church's monopoly on thought.

So the Cathars mark a turning point. For all that, they remain somewhat mysterious. Their works were burned and most of what we know of them comes from the drawers of enemies and inquisitors, meaning that Cathar wisdom is partly a matter of speculation. This is what unleashes Ron's imaginative faculty. Through comics he scries the hermetic- which is far different than the "fantastic" of most comics. We could invent a world or story in which dualist mystics battle a universal hegemon against annihilation- again like the Jedis- or we could, panel by panel, give image to the lost thought and struggles of our own world. One way isn't any better than the other; they complement each other. While the Universal Goddess- the imago of feminine religious power- is officially subordinate to masculine images, Ron points out that she pops up in our stories and works with a surprising self-similarity: as a Wonder Woman, a Statue of Liberty, or as a sculpture on the side of Echo Park lake. "Look for the star over the forehead," he tells me. The hermetic is not hiding to be difficult; it's a survival mechanism. It was suppressed, crushed, forbidden, or burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori. But it always left a trail or signal. You just had to know where to look. The hermetic, in the best sense of the term, is always trying to reimagine what was lost and tell a story that was not dictated by the victors, a challenge that has rallied Ron's complete sympathies.

Comics, as a form, also seem more naturally conducive to this- how they're penned, swapped, xeroxed, discovered long-neglected in bins and basements, then read alone under lamplight- especially for someone like Ron who started producing comics while working in a copyshop and moving within New England underground circles. I can't help but think back to Giordano Bruno who, beginning as a young Dominican friar, was kicked out of the monastery when the fathers discovered his bedroom stash of hermetic texts and images. Bruno went on to write numerous works that ecstatically imagine an infinite universe neglected by the Church and what he saw as an oppressive Aristotelianism. And like Bruno, Ron's comics leap from intuition to intuition and depict a wide, unseen, shimmering world. Rather than streets, buildings, and rooms, his backgrounds wiggle, twinkle, and radiate energy. His characters are visible in both body and soul, and often at different stages of a metamorphosis. Rather than being breezy reads, though, you have to sit with each panel for a while, and let it sink in. From the Word of First Thought slows you down even more, parking you between large, bright hermetic icons and supplying you with some Nag Hammadi. Just to hang, and contemplate the power of counterbelief.

-- Text by Brandon Avery Joyce

Ron Rege, Jr., born 1969 in Quincy, Massachusetts, lives and works in Los Angeles. Rege, Jr. holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and has exhibited at galleries and museums including The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; 80 Washington Square East Gallery at NYU, New York; Regina Gouger Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Rege, Jr. began self publishing and distributing his own comics in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the early 1990's. His first graphic novel "Skibber Bee~Bye" was published by Highwater Books in 2000 and he's since published books with Drawn & Quarterly, McSweeney's, Buenaventura Press and Fantagraphics. Rege, Jr. has produced commercial illustrations for clients including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Believer Magazine and Nickelodeon and maintains a monthly mini-comic subscription series called "The Shell of the Self of the Senses" available at www.patreon.com/ronregejr .

With Willy's Wife, Daniel wrenches a deeply emotional dramatic narrative out of a soulless set of 3D animation software tools with her creative sensibility and technical expertise perfected over 5 decades. Where goofy Internet oddities made with these same tools fail to provide any significant utility, Daniel's works lay her soul bare and exposes those who lack spiritual understanding or ethics. Daniel revokes man's warrant for inflicting pain, turning the tables on oppressors and suppressors from cheating husbands to pimp bosses. In Willy's Wife, the women are the moral agents though not totally impervious to the same corrupting forces that overtake her male characters. Daniel's characters work through a complex set of pathologies that might best be defined by the Algonquian diagnosis of Wendigo (wetiko) psychosis. This condition is defined by the Algonquian Native Americans as a type of cannibalism that drives beings to insatiably consume one another and their environment to total destruction. The filmmaker humorously plays on her characters' pathological self-involvement to confront habitual corporate, sexual and chemical abuses along with the modern anomie that permit them to go untreated. Willy's Wife doesn't worship death but rather seeks to cultivate life with stories of death. This contemporary animated psychedelic thriller is a homemade remedy for what currently ails us.

Kathleen Daniel, born in 1945, lives and works in Ponitz, Thuringia, Germany. Daniel's dark, figurative imagery, music and animations have been lauded by Dis Magazine, Super Super and Rhizome and written about by Julie Dennis of the San Mateo Weekly. Her work has been shown in the Berlin Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Showcave and Night Gallery in Los Angeles; Secret Project Robot, Ramiken Crucible and New Museum in New York City; It's Liquid International in Venice and across the web. An early adopter of Youtube, Daniel has amassed over 3,500 subscribers to her channel racking up well over 145,000 views, and her voluminous output of music is available for instant download on iTunes, among other platforms.

Kathleen Daniel links --
www.duh-real.com
www.youtube.com/user/silicious
https://katd.bandcamp.com/

The tower dome's woodworked grid-motif is disrupted by little cut-out observation platforms and windows lined with light splitting diffraction grating recalling cathedral glass, with the artwork serving as a sort of parabolic reflector that collects and projects energies while standing as a symbol to the virtues of peace and positive thinking. The low wind load, open-ended design of the hive -- the balancing of negative and positive space -- allows energies to reach the attuned and deliver a consciousness expanding experience to who it will. Barton's heavy lifting is to the heavens despite mostly being a non-believer.

Connected psycho-geographically to the broader constellation of sacred sites in the Ojai Valley, the sculpture sits perched atop the rest of the property next to its own Live Oak like "Baba's Tree" on Meher Mount, and is meant to be considered alongside structures including tree-houses, grain silos and roadside shrines.

Matt Barton, 42, lives and works in Colorado Springs where he is the Co-Director of Visual Art at University of Colorado - Colorado Springs. Barton holds a Master's in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon and has exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe; and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh.