Arturo's Themes

Click on any image

A Year of Not Living Langourously

Early octogenarian years are for testing out how you'll function as a doddering geezer down the road, as you've never been old before, at least not in your current cosmic configuration, while you still possess truly dependably functioning wits about you. It helps to map your geezerness. The comparison images readily reveal the celerity of your return to elemental material fundament. [Photo: Bob Patterson, 2012]

Concentrating the Mind:
The Geezer Obsession

Waiting for checkout, wondering how it'll happen, concentrates the mind on whether to nod out in a wheelchair collecting pension and social security checks or stay busy attempting to look busy scrolling busily on your iPad communicating in geek speak.

Class of 1947, Tappan Zee High School, Piermont NY.

Six members of this class were from the House: 1) Alfredo de la Rosa; 2) Robert Battles;
3) Philip Chiaravalle; 4) Richard Feldmann; 5) Bernard De Santis; and 6) Jack Hennessey.

Grammar of Aging: Visualizing Memory

An octogenarian conceptual artist attempts a visual pictorialization of Arthur Miller's response to the interviewer Charlie Rose's question about whether he, Miller, then in his eighties, thinks at all about death.

Portrait of the Artist as a Jung Dork

Portrayed At the Art Fest As A Young Dog. Headline writers resist a punning attitude lifting news stories of a cold dog in need of a permanent vacation, the portended direction ...of old school news writing. News organizations would serve themselves well to employ engineers rather then IT experts, web designers, tech savvy journalists, traffic managers in figuring out how to deal with the digital delivery of product. Portrayed At the Art Fest As A Young Dog.

Mapping a Future From the Past

In this panel I recontextualized an image of myself into a setting in which the Dalai Lama and I are discussing copies of a late 19th Century photograph. Online I tag all images as satire and parody, which are covered under Fair Use in the Copyright law. It is also useful to admit upfront that the image is a fake.

Ways Information Works In the World

Condy Rice today cites situation concerning intelligence coming from different
sources providing incongruent assessments.

This is a Robert Frank layout I employ in mitigating the ennui of old-school photo album approach to uploading photos to the site, combining black and white images and color, including the overlapping of images. -Alfredo de la Rosa, Berkeley CA

The Grammar of Dissent: Just Say No

Politicians, most being lawyers inured in precedent, retreat to the successfully applied partisan dogma from past historically heroic leaders of their party.

TAKING INFORMATION SERIOUSLY:
When you whisper sweet nothings in my ear,
this is what I see in my head

When Gudrun said of me that I am twice the man as an octogenarian
than I was when younger, this is how I pictured in my head what she was telling me.

Rare Books: Obsolete Centuries Old Information Delivery

An octogenarian conceptual artist, formerly a bookbinder, book restorer, conservator of rare books and works of art on paper, is reminded of his unheralded efforts in preserving information formerly delivered in and by obsolete technology data transmission.

Information At Work: The Pro-Life View of the Corporation As A Person

SCOTUS' Alice In Wonderland iteration of the American person.

Freedom From Information: My Last Picture Show

Upon receiving a generous five-figure grant for painting, the conceptualist uses the money
to retire from painting to make digital pictorializations of the phenomenology of information
unfettered by regulation nor fidelity to accuracy.

Disappeared Information and Its Virtual Existence

The conceptual artist revisits an old painting of his that no longer exists, its having been destroyed 15 years ago at the time the artist used a generous grant to retire from painting to make art digitally. Slides of the painting were also destroyed after they were digitized. This data no longer exists in reality, only virtually.

Writing Autobiography and the Actual Book of Me

Pubic figures willingly agree to have others pen their autobiography, ever alert to George Orwell's pronouncement, "Autobiography is the most egegious form of fiction." They invest enormous trust in their biographer for who in their right mind wants to look foolish in history?

Framing Information (with Emphasis)

Repetition, as Gertrude Stein instructed Hemingway,
is the best form of emphasis (cf.,The Killers).

21st Century Post-Postmodern Information Download Experience

A useful text on what a closed network entails in swimming against the social media tide is Post-Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Just In Time Capitalism, by Jeffrey T. Nealon. This text examines relations between economic production > culture production.