Water:Pillow

 

 .

For many years I collaborated with Tim Wilson (a.k.a undule; a.k.a. .sWineDriveR.) on several artistic projects.  We were roommates for a time and took some classes together.  We finished each other's homework, journals, and added our touches to each other's paintings (He is an infinitely more skilled artist than I, but he was always very generous with his encouragement and feedback; he even gave me my first set of brushes and tubes of Liquitex).  

 

One of our largest collaborations was Plastic Tub, which is, as far as I know, the first, if not only, work of fiction using Wiki software.

We shared (share?) a lot of ideas in common, but we have very different personalities and beliefs.  After our first rift, I reached out a few years later and it was great to speak to him again, because some of my most productive conversations about art and literature were with Tim.  Never a dull or derivative idea.  

For a man who loved pseudonyms, he was always honest, sometimes brutally so.  Not always an easy guy to get along with, especially when liquor entered into the equation.  And the same is to be said of me.  I don't get so wild anymore, but back in the day I drank in order to get dronk, with Rimbaud's "derangement of the senses" firmly and pretentiously in mind.  I could get pretty deranged and become an insufferable and boorish twat.  I'd calmed down by the time my wife left me, but the grief of our separation was the final nail in the coffin in which time and the trail of wounded laid that youthful, exaggerated exuberance to rest.

The Tub played a part in Tim and I falling out:  different levels of commitment, different ideas of where it should go, alcohol.  Pity, because the Tub is a genuinely strange, funny, and intelligent work of satire and yet also a "serious" aesthetic manifesto.  There were four core writers, including The Gid and Steven Vogeler, and I think three other people added some passages.  While lacking heft in some parts, it's a pretty thorough praxis of the ideas we developed into a "high-modernist '-ism'" we called "AA" (pun intended), or "Accidental Associationalism."  

Surrealism, Discordianism, Gnosticism, Alchemy, détournement, and whimsy....aficionados of each will find something to love in the depths of the Tub....

It seems I write a little blurb about the Tub every few years because I think it deserves to be recognized as a unique and early example of the collaborative artistic possibilities facilitated by the internet.  Not HTML fiction but Wiki fiction.  A collaborative assemblage of ideas is intrinsic to the Wiki concept....

 

Tim is real smart, extremely well-read, and is a deep well of original and creative works of art across many media, from painting to film-making, collage, and video game design.  He taught himself how to make add-on modules for video games and ended up working for some industry leaders on big projects, including Borderlands and Duke Nukem Forever.

Despite our acrimonious parting of ways, I can't deny the man's big influence on my artistic endeavors....which can't be said of another collaborator he worked with, a guy who based whole shows on one of Tim's ideas and never once tipped his hat -- sadly endemic in art circles.  Tim encouraged me to pick up a paintbrush and helped me to liberate my poetry from undue influences.  I owe him a lot, lit-wise, and everything, painting-wise.  Anger and sadness aside, I still am glad I met the guy; he literally changed my life.

The clip above is from a film he made titled Water:Pillow.  I think it was first screened in 1994, when I was 24.  I'm the guy in the fedora, and The Gid is the guy with the head wound.  This was a fun project to work on, and Tim really worked the medium of 16mm with all kinds of experimental techniques I had never even imagined.  It's a weird and funny film, and the clip is a good representation of the kind of "dark whimsy" that pops up in his oeuvre from time to time.

 

Anyway, I just wanted to share this clip, because it was a big part of my life for an academic year or so, and it features your LoS authors.

His YouTube page has other snippets for your perusal.