M Drawing Project
M
Drawing Project
drawing the net from which she may escape...
Jorge Roby Misium info at misium.com © 2008-23 MISIUM™, Zen Gorilla™, Puerto Vida™, Juan Luna™, artemisium™, Robito™
The M in the project stands for Magic and Mother and Matrix and Milliard and Meaning and Mission and Misium and Membrane and Madness and Monster and Mystery and Manifold, and like in M-theory the ultimate meaning of M is still unclear.
The M Drawing Project started in New York City in 2010 with a commitment to drawing daily and to making at least a thousand drawings each year. In November 2019, the drawing count reached 10,000 in Venezia. 2020 brought all practices together while living and working in the Amazonia during the Covid pandemic. Since then, it has taken a couple of years to digitize all individual drawings, as well as making composite drawings, videos and other digital means for showing the drawings.
The drawings have gone from sketches driven by ideas to drawings fostered by the making process itself. The mark making exploration has taken multiple turns with marks being made increasingly with every day tools and objects.
The drawing project has been a joyful journey. First, as an ideation practice departing from my inventor background. Later, as a tool in a resistance project in Puerto Vida, Uruguay [http://PuertoVida.org/]. Finally, as a magic means to connect it all. There have been many surprising turns in this journey such as the departure from ideas, the range of mark-making, the publication of drawings through books and manifestos, the inverting of drawings into celestial black, and the creation of "cosmic bubbles."
Clik on BIO for more on the artist.From a curatorial perspective, multiple approaches have been pursued to access all the drawings, as described below: Scripts, Walls, Videos, Books, Manifestos...
Let's start then from the ending: the moment the river reaches the sea while starting anew from her headwaters...
Cosmic Bubbles
A wonderful surprise came about in 2019 in Venezia when
I was trying to put the drawings together for making manifestos (posters).
I used software to randomly stitch and then project the drawings together.
By tweaking the parameters, I was finally able to make the drawings come together
and form blobs, orbs, cosmic bubbles...
The paragraph above is a partial transcript of a
conversation
about one drawing for the Drawing Center in NYC.
The drawings coming together and forming a self-contained universe
is magical to me.
Inverting into Celestial Black
Here we have traditional drawings consisting of black marks on white paper.
We usually work black-on-white because of material traditions
even though we know about this push-pull effect
where white comes forward and black recedes to the background.
We end up with this massive white screaming at our faces and black receding.
By inverting the drawings, we now have a majority of black and the white marks come forward. Through this inversion, there is an immediate cosmic effect where this void feels like the universe and the marks acquire a celestial quality. This void with a trillion trees, as I would feel at night in the Amazonia.
This universe humming with joy.
By the way, "invertir" in Spanish has two meanings: invert like in English, but also invest.
En comunidad invertimos.
Speaking of double meanings in Spanish, "explotar" means "to exploit" and "to explode" reflecting our inability to move past our predatory ways.
Get this, "tierra" has a full range of meanings from "dust" to "earth" through "land." Yup, I know.
Drawing No. 9480:
Transformations. Mark-Making. Cosmic Bubbles. Manifestos.
Here is one drawing, but this drawing by itself doesn't really make any sense to me.
This drawing has a history and this drawing has undergone transformations...
Web Scripts
The
opening
for this website utilizes a script that shows the drawings in a cinematic manner.
The appearance is that of a video,
but the script has built in multiple random processes making for a changing viewing experience.
There is randomization from selecting the drawings to the timing of each drawing
through the effects utilized for displaying each drawing (e.g. zoom out) and for transitioning between drawings.
A small version of the script randomly looping through a set of twenty-three drawings is just
above
on this page.
Several displays might be used in an exhibit for showing the drawings as a multiplicity of moving images by using videos and web scripts.
A
sixteen-display arrangment
follows:
Drawing Walls
The traditional approach to curating drawing exhibits is to place a selection of elements on a physical or virtual wall.
The large number of drawings makes showing all of them as objects on the wall rather difficult.
Placing the drawings in three vertical rows would still require a wall over one kilometer long.
Drawings might then be curated into small groups on physical or virtual walls.
We may choose as few as three drawings out of ten thousand. For example, drawings number 0092, 4700 and 9999:
(Note: All drawings have been scanned, mostly at 600 dpi.
The actual size of the drawings is in the 20x30 cm range for the first 9000 drawings
with a few exceptions.
The last 1000 drawings were made on A4-size paper or 29.7x42 cm.
Two sets of three drawings add depth:
Choosing ten drawings from 10,000 gives a little more perspective of the whole project.
The drawings might be curated by selecting one each thousand drawings, as follows:
Suites:
The possibilities are obviously endless with 10,000 drawings to choose from:
Videos
The making of videos where each frame corresponds to a single drawing or to a set of drawings is a compact and portable approach
to showing the drawings.
This page opens with a
sixteen-display video
capturing different approaches to showing the drawings.
The following 4k video shows all drawings under two minutes.
A hundred drawings per frame ending with a frame showing all 10,000 drawings.
Another 4k video shows 4x4 drawings on each frame at one frame per second:
Ten thousand drawings are shown as follows in ten minutes at 17 fps. Pausing at any time allows for seeing a single drawing:
The different video approaches to showing ten thousand drawings can then be
arranged as a set of displays as in this demo:
Suites have been arranged in 4k frames playing in this 17-minute video.
Pausing shows a single suite
(as described above Suite nnn includes drawings nnn, 1nnn, 2nnn... 9nnn):
The following video shows all 1,000 suites in about 3 hours,
drawing by drawing at 1fps (one second for each drawing):
Showing the suites of drawings can also be arranged as a set of displays:
Alternatively, a video may offer a time snapshot by displaying all drawings for a particular period.
For instance, the drawings have been organized in seasons or quarters with each seasonal group
having in most cases 273 drawings for 13 weeks with 21 drawings each.
The earliest drawings in "The Drawing Project" are displayed in the following video with a commentary:
The following is a video for the 2018 Spring or 2017-18 fourth quarter. The soundtrack reflects on the practice of chanting often parallel to that of drawing:
More recently a foray into the Amazonia entangled the drawings with the dictation of essays:
Here is a set of displays showing drawings for different periods of the project:
Puerto Vida, Amazonia, Venezia, and Brooklyn. Soundtrack from Puerto Vida:
Books
This is a photograph from an exhibit ("The Unspecific Index," NYC, 2012) with a display showing the drawings cinematically via a script
and with a table holding several books with all the drawings for a one-year period.
This allowed for visitors to have two different ways to see and explore the drawings:
watch a display showing drawings randomly or engage with a set of books organized linearly.
The opening script can be played as a loop
here.
Then, throughout this website, the drawing scans have been scaled to fit frames of the same size.
In the arrangement above for instance, the first two drawings are in the 20x30cm range
whereas the last drawing is A4 size or 29.7x42.0 cm.)
Selecting a small set of drawings might also be done by systematically seeing one drawing every one thousand or about one drawing for each year.
The drawings have then been organized into a thousand "Suites."
For instance, Suite No. 1 includes drawings 0001, 1001, 2001, 3001 and so on up to drawing 9001.
Viewing suites allows for a faster comprehension of the project and for the dispersion of the drawings into exhibits and collections.
These are examples of a few suites. Suite No. 222 looks like:
A 625-page book with 10,000 drawings has been completed (© 2020 Misium) by printing sixteen drawings on each page. The following is an abridged version of the book assembled from pages 001, 063, 125, 188, 250, 313, 375, 438, 500, 563 and 625:
If the booklet does not show in the above window, it can be opened separately.
A book with the thousand suites of drawings is also available (© 2020 Misium). An abridged ten-suite version of the book follows:
If the booklet does not show in the above window, it can be opened separately.
The drawings have been exhibited too in "quarterly reports" or "season summaries." That is, books mimicking corporate quarterly earnings reports and containing reproductions of all drawings for a three month period, quarter or season.
This is the quarterly report cover "for the quarterly period ended June 21, 2012" (CITI report):
Manifestos
The drawings have been reproduced as "manifestos" (manifesto also stands for poster in Italian) mostly in public spaces.
Manifestos allow for the displaying of a great deal of information economically and in a "non-art" medium.
The following 200x140 cm manifesto (© 2020 Misium, scaled down here) displays 10,000 drawings at 600 dpi.
That is about one and half billion pixels showing 10,000 drawings with ample details.
The upper left and lower right corners of the manifesto above are shown here:
In 2019, collateral to the Venice Biennale, a series of manifestos were placed around the city.
Each manifesto was composed weekly previous the biennale opening with the twenty-one drawings made each week.
The manifestos were mostly 100x70 cm with a few printed at 200x140 cm, as per the example below:
© 2008-22 MISIUM™, Zen Gorilla™, Puerto Vida™, Juan Luna™, artemisium™, Robito™ info at misium.com drawing the net from which she may escape...™
⋰⋱⋰⋱⋰⋱⋰⋱⋰⋱⋰⋱ ⋰⋱⋰⋱⋰⋱⋰⋱⋰⋱⋰⋱
BIO
I am a co-creator. As an artist, I am most proud of having married Drawing.
As a writer, I am working on the M-Theory for Everything.
As an inventor, I have worked on fields ranging from star making to microelectronics
leading to multiple patents being granted and many more pending including a set of glasses to let us see we are already in Paradise.
Who?
What?
My ultimate goal?
Achievements?
How? And Why?
MFA Body Mappings: Forms that captures the volume and surface of the human body.
Disclaimer:
JRM: Jorge Roby Misium @breathejoyin
I have used different names as a creator ranging from variations of my legal name
to pseudonyms such as Zen Gorilla or Juan and Juana Luna who were environmental activists.
Using different names was a form of protection when engaging into resistance projects.
Assuming a variety of personas also allowed me to remain an unestablished artist with the creative freedom that entailed.
Reach me via info at misium.com or @brathejoyin on social media.
I am a co-creator as an inventor and as an artist. I am a professor and I am a perennial student.
As an inventor, I got a bachelor's and a professional degree plus two masters and a PhD.
I have been an engineer, a scientist, a researcher, a patent agent, and an entrepreneur.
I am registered with the US Patent & Trademark Office as a patent practitioner.
You have to make a living after all.
As an artist I got my MFA with a focus on sculpture, which gravitated towards installation and ultimately drawing. I have been a drawer for the last ten years or so.
Find the love of my life and build nightly fires
or alternatively become infinite by putting together what I like to call an "M-Theory for Everything."
The M stands for Misium, but also stands for Magic and Mother and Matrix and Membrane and Madness and the head of M-16...
The M-Theory is a collection of drawings and writings taking shape through partial publications and exhibitions on the way to become the M-Book:
a very large format publication with a thousand and one pages of essays and drawings.
The essays started as "Amazonia Dictations" and several of them have been uploaded as videos randomly combining a set of drawings with a dictation.
See the playlist
Misium Writings
on YouTube.
There's the hard-earned education I enjoyed/endured for the sake of learning
and for being the social equalization path I found less jailable. I grew up in the slums of South America. My mother had attended just part of the first year of middle school and that made her the person with the most education in my family.
For me to go to high school and college was then trailblazing. I am proud of having made it from that little house by an oil refinery to schools like Rensselaer and Berkeley. I am sure my mother still beams hearing that. So does my father in his own way even though he would rather have seen me become a good communist.
I thought we could save humanity with some great idea or another so I joined the search for the making of a star on earth through plasma physics.
I'm proud of that even though now I believe change must come from within. Got a kick from working with super computers at several National Laboratories at the beginnings of the internet.
I'm proud of being an inventor, having seventeen granted patents and many pending, leading to the founding of an innovation startup (eNovus) in the 90's.
At art school, I worked on body mappings (forms that capture multiple physical attributes of the human body: we are giant worms) and organ making.
Just out of art school, I was invited to the Beijing Biennale where I played with its quirkiness by contributing an installation that arrived in China as parts in boxes with instructions mimicking a piece of furniture arriving from China to our shores. The results were predictably disastrous.
In 2009, I was part of an exhibit (Open 12, Venice) where the artist list went by country starting with my dear León Ferrari from Argentina and ending with yours truly, the Uruguay-USA invitee.
In 2012 in New York City, I was part of a prolonged exhibition, "The Unspecific Index," where the list of artists started with John Baldessari and ended with our friend Zen Gorilla who was referred to as "her" by the curator.
As an artist, I am most proud of having married Drawing in Brooklyn in 2010.
Drawing and I go back to grade school, but we didn't become one unit until we met again in Crown Heights.
The Caribbean-Kosher juxtaposition in our neighborhood drove us to say why not us.
We shared every day for ten years all around the world and had over ten thousand children.
I believe the universe hums with joy. I've seen magic at work. I believe the impossible can happen. Life is joy. Life is magic. Life is inescapable, never-ending.
"Breathe joy in" is my most basic tool and it often saves the day.
A bit more complicated is having experienced JRM or "Joy Resonance into Magic,"
which was hidden in the initials of my name from day one.
I am an Américan in that I am a dual-national holding passports from Uruguay and from the United States of America.
I'm therefore fluent in English y en español.
I also know kole kala means "ugly fish" and öö stands for "night" in Estonian.
A handy language in the Americas.
I have also been a long-term resident in Mexico and in Brazil as well as in Italy and in Germany.
My paternal family migrated from Uzbekistan to Uruguay via Europe.
In an alphabetical list of UN countries, you are going to find the following in order:
United States, Uruguay and Uzbekistan, which all run through me. There you have an impossibility happening.
Misium seems right as a family name since it means sent in Latin and gives us words like mission.
My maternal grandmother was a single-mom she-shaman Native (South) American who moved from the Brazil-Uruguay border to the capital city to work in a slaughter plant. She is my hero and I am hers.
I have searched for meaning all my life by seeking to connect it all as a way to escape fear. I have found the meaning of life but keep forgetting it.
This search for meaning made me a perennial student.
My education ended up spanning sixteen non-consecutive years of university work.
I graduated last with an MFA in 2007 when I was a tender fifty year old,
but I am still a student.
I have learned a great deal by living and working in Kassel and Venezia for the duration of several editions of documenta and the Biennale. I have even lived in the 798 Art Zone, Beijing's art district.
The following clip shows me in action speaking with Franz Walther
the day (May 13, 2017) he was awarded the Golden Lion award "for best artist of the exhibition" at the Venezia Biennale.
"I think as a young artist you can't be radical anymore.
Potentially everything is done.
That's a big problem."
He said it.
By the way, radical comes from radix in Latin, radice in Italian,
which stands for root.
Being radical is going after the root of an issue.
Clearly, I don't believe in standard art bios.
I have seen bios being used as a crutch in the art world.
I have worked with CV's and bios in other professions.
A scientific paper might gain some traction because of the authors' institutional affiliation, but the contents of the paper are paramount to reviewers.
A piece of writing is about the writing not the writer's list of publications and achievements.
Who cares what school the writer went to?
When it comes to the art world, we should be able to assess or judge a visual work by, well, looking at it. Yet the visual arts business is fixated on bios and CVs. Poor artists frenetically build their portfolios (same world used in the stock markets) not to be left out.
That stems from the visual arts being a perennial validator of wealth.
That also makes for a rather inbred art world.
For example, I've participated on committees for selecting MFA students where artists are quickly filtered by going down a decision tree, schools, exhibits, recommendations, etc. as opposed to their artwork.
I much admire the few artists who dare not to have a bio.
If you look at the 2012 documenta catalog, you will find a blank page for Tino Sehgal's bio.
Yes, he's an established artist now and it's very difficult for non-established artists to go out in the world naked, but nice example Tino.
I'd rather have a blank bio page and be appreciated for my visual artwork and for my writing.