Hardland/Heartland
A spiky dripping colorful landscape, a post-apocalyptic view of the midwest. It is beautiful and bleak, mysterious and mischievous, trying and true. We know this because we made it that way. It is our ongoing epic.
We felt unheard, unappreciated, unaccepted. We were already derivative before we began as humans or artists or people. That is how we used to feel.
-----------------------
A.) Why create something new?
B.) Why this need to escape from reality?
-----------------------
A.) We have to. Sometimes it is compulsive, a momentary magic that explodes from a precise extra fine tip onto a piece of eggshell paper. Sometimes it is an intellectual investigation of a sociological-experiment-of-sorts. Sometimes it is friendship and ridiculous fun and late night buzzed conversations. All opportunities are to be fucked with to the utmost degree. This question itself seems audaciously vague and stupid anyway. Fuck bullshit intellectuals 4EVA. Be smart but never alienate.
B.) We are making things with meaning and subtext in an world driven by commerce and collectability(sp?). We have been taught to struggle to survive, that success and sustainability are synonymous with inauthenticity and selling out. Those are ideals of a past generation, prisoners to punk rock ideals, has-beens and baby boomers. Is it possible these value systems have been hard wired into our brains to keep us dormant? To allow our masters to continue functioning as (now obsolete) primaries in the system? Where do we start piling up teh heads?
-----
We created this other reality because we are capable of understanding it. Video games and the internet allow for these multiple versions of ourselves. They introduced whole other worlds that exist in our minds. Books were the start but the level of protagonist customization why not incorporate it into our art? It is not an escape from reality but a different way of looking at it. We see HL/HL as a set of mirrors and lenses that reflect and distort our realities to help us understand and process our surroundings. This act can not be considered derivative, for we are drawing from our lives as source material for a work of fiction.
The created work itself is complicated. The normal lines of understanding and comprehension are intentionally blurred. "Hardland/Heartland" acts as the first obstacle to break through when viewing the work. It is meaningfully orchestrated to be misunderstood. All projects are esoterically systemized - for existence in the HL/HL timeline. Some projects are ongoing while others have already concluded, they can be revisited or crossover at any time. Ideally the work is hoped to be viewed as a whole, where viewers can be introduced to the story-line through a smaller piece or narrative, which leads them to a vast tangled web of image and story and life and energy.