DIGITAL LITERARY ART
"In the twenty-first century,
the world again appears as a book (though
this time a digital one)." -A Avenessian, Future Metaphysics.
Look Homeward Ody (2023-2024)
This project regenerates for the 21st Century some themes The Odyssey rehearsed.
Being Earth (2021-2023)
We are not only approaching the limits of the planet’s largesse, and how much of our waste it can metabolize, “it is (also) possible that the earth delimits the infinite of language.”
Leaving the Anthropocene (2019-2021)
"In 1945, Russian biochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky wrote, 'In the twentieth century, man (Anthropos), for the first time in the history of the earth, knew and embraced the whole biosphere, completed the geographic map of the planet Earth, and colonized its whole surface.'”
Cosmography (2014-2018)
Like their precursors, modern cosmologists draw meaning from an embodied sky. In this spirit, Cosmography invokes seven planets in our celestial neighborhood; plus The Sun, The Moon; and Terra Incognita, with its "revelation of hidden things."
"Notes on Cosmography" https://weishaus.unm.edu/Cosmography/Notes on Cosmography.pdf
Poetica (2009-2015)
Twenty-Four Illustraited Critiques and Reviews of Poetry and Poetics:: Frances Presley, Vincent Tripi, Peter Pereira, Michael McClure, Sarah Rosenthal, Editor, Don McKay, Shin Yu Pai, Peter O'Leary, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Editors, Michael Whan, Susan Rowland, Ko Un, Harriet Tarlo, Editor, Miroslav Holub, Lew Welch, Margaret Chula, dg nanouk okpik, Etta Blum, Daniel Simko, Allan Burns, Editor, Loren Eiseley. Michael McKimm, Arthur Sze.
Beginner's Mind (2014)
First thoughts are inspired, an in-breath of molecules that have circulated through all forms of life on Earth for millions of years. We breathe in the essence of their being, and breathe out our own way of seeing. With each breath, we begin again.
Writing Home (2012-2013)
"Along with pursuing a 'style of old age' for digital literary art, one that may appear in a precocious youth, the arduous transitions of middle-age, or as an elder's hard-won wisdom, Writing Home continues my work toward composing a 'deeper kind of literacy, even when consumed on an e-reader or tablet.' As with several preceding projects, I've shed the adoration of multimedia, to meditate on the granular text and the silent flow of its accompanying image."
The Lost Way of Stones (2011-2012)
"The Lost Way of Stones seeks to contribute to rock art studies what, because of specialization, most archaeologists cannot. Proceeding from the assumption that all honest endeavors add to our knowledge of who we are, thus, who we may someday be, this work can only begin to explore the vast range of research and scholarship being generated in rock art studies and accordant fields."
Entanglement WITH SUSAN ROWLAND (2011)
These are twelve images for poems by Susan Rowland, an extension of Rowland's book, The Ecocritical Psyche. (Routledge, 2012)
Of Place Itself (2010-2011)
"Not feeling at home at any one place for any length of time has prevailed throughout my life. Whenever I thought I had moved to my "own place," a small wave would appear on the horizon that would slowly grow larger until it moved me to cross an unknown threshold again."
Digital Lascaux (rev 2011)
This is a small project originally made for Jennifer Ley's "Incubation for Digital Lascaux.": http://www.heelstone.com/lascaux/about.html (Last accessed April 2110)
The Gateless Gate (2009-2010 )
"For much of my life I've been preparing for a project that has no destination, and as most of my work during the past twenty years has been in the form of a journal, I want to take this work on a walk for the sake of walking about the rugged trails of existence-non-existence, switchbacking the sacred and profane."
“The Gateless Gate. An Interview with Joel Weishaus” https://weishaus.unm.edu/Gateless Gate/The Gateless Gate.pdf
Splitting the Stone (2009)
"Toward a Lithopoetics." A single page meditation on stones in text and images.
Reality Too (2008)
"This is a one-year log of thoughts pondered, dreams exposed, of books, essays, poems, with photographs, whole or collaged, carried forth by conjoining what's happening in my life with the life of the planet. In essence, it is what neo-Jungian theorist Susan Rowland calls, 'reading reality aesthetically.'”
Haunting the Prehistoric (2007)
"How can this be? I see myself, the whole world, a specter of every thing walking, crawling, running, swimming, flying, as if what I am conscious of is already extinct."
Confusations (2007)
"Recently, after photographing the amazing forest that grows in midst of this city, I began to walk the streets, which naturally brought me to looking at windows, surfaces seen through even while reflecting the world around them, a bricolage of substance and illusion. Unlike mirrors, they are not portals, or occasions for narcissism, but present possibilities for reorganizing one's seeing into various dimensions and depths."
Interdependency (2007)
"Eight pictures taken inside a forest, accompanied by eight short texts. The texts take the form of e-mails to different individuals, but written in densely poetic language, and all on the theme of man's relationship with the natural environment. The pictures are big and intricate, crowded with detail, wet, chilly-looking, full of growth and decomposition. A sense of profundity and otherness emerges." -Edward Picot.
The Way North (2006-2007)
"This is a time of preparation, of sorting through myths and motifs, old and new, too heavy to carry across vast inhospitable spaces. Man-made structures buckle under the irony of thawing permafrost, releasing more heat-capturing gases into the swelter of lengthening summers, creating a circle of stories disappearing along with human ways of life 'the way in which archetypes link actual symbolism to psychic functioning through time and space.'"
Artist's Statement [.pdf]
Review by Edward Picot [.pdf]
Adam[i]n Paradise (2005)
This is a scroll that derives its name from the Italian artist, Valerio Adami, and explores the Adamic myth through various literary means.
Moving Toward Haiga (2005)
Moving Toward Haiga "shares a strategy that preserves the spirit of wabi, elegant simplicity, programming words to randomly appear and disappear around an image on a background that reminds us of the Void from which all creation appears."
Myoe's Big Dream (2005)
"The Japanese priest Myoe Koben (1173-1232) was initiated into the Kegon and Shingon Buddhist sects. Although both originated in China, they trace their lineage, through historical teachers, to the mythical Indian Buddha, Vairocana, 'the most cosmic expression of this vast web of interpenetration.' ot only did her keep a 'Chronicle of Dreams,' for 35 years, also, 'He was the first in Japan to engage in an examination of highly individual non-ordinary inner experiences from an existential standpoint of inner reflection.'"-Mark Unno
Forest Park: A Journal (2004-2005)
This journal encompasses the city of Portland, Oregon and its urban forest.
Traces of the Catacombes (2004)
"Traces of the Catacombes takes its name from the 'hollow (hallowed) ground' of Early Christianity, excavated in what was then the suburbs of Rome. But there are other catacombs, such as those beneath Paris, and other issues to be uncovered; so that the title plays on the name of French artist Mireille W. Descombes."
Reviewed by Regina Célla Pinto, et al. [.pdf]
Cybermidrash WITH Alan Sondheim (2004)
A collaborative project that appropiates the Hebrew Midrash in a hermeneutic model.
The Silence of Sasquatch (2003-2004)
"Part-animal, part-human who can hypnotize, ventriloquise, make himself invisible: Dzuteh, Meh-teh, O-mah, Nsana, Alma, Yeti, Ban Jhakri, Skunk Ape, upslope person...Sasquatch speaks, we do not hear. Our deafness is his silence. In a clearing, he emerges as a trace of the enormous being we are when we are one click away from the missing link."
Come Here Leave Me Alone (2002)
Come Here Leave Me Alone is a Digital Art project centered around a sculpture made during the early 1980s—high-fired clay, painted with acrylics, mounted on a wood base—with Brancusi in mind.
Inside the Skull-House (1998-2002)
"Inside the Skull-House is a journey cast in the epic mode. Brain, its hero/heroine, is perhaps the most complex and elegant achievement of this universe. Brain's quest to unravel the chemistry of its circuits and the mystery of their projections, including the "hard problem" of consciousness, adds humor to the science, and relief that my path is not pathology, but metaphor, mythology, etymology, hierology, and devices of electracy."
Threading the Petrified Glyph (1997)
First conceived as an Artist's Book, with an introductory poem, ten original drawings, and ten triptychs, each of whose right-hand page folds out, in this electronic form the titles of the ten drawings link to sample panels, each of which links to its respective text.
Hinging the Parallax (1996)
Consisting of three panels hinged together, each approximately 5'X30", Hinging the Parallax was conceived as a standing screen for the living room of a home.The text of the central panel was culled from a journal I kept in Albuquerque NM, to which were added dreams, quotes, and fragments of quotes within quotes, the trope I call "invagination." The left-hand panel is a poem, a "refiguration," made by scrambling the words of the main text using an algorithm written for me by Australian artist Luke Pellen. By using the same words in a different order (not leaving as is, as some Dadists did, but re-grammatized), not only would a new text emerge, but, in an act of etymological faith, the aura of the original work would remain. The right-hand panel is a paratext, a repository of keyed citations, and some further remarks.
As the project was conceived for panels linked by hinges, this electronic version does not consist of hyperlinks. Instead, it begins as sample of the three panels placed side-by-side, with each panel is linked to its full-size.
Zoography (1995)
A hypertexted poem made at the Rio Grande Zoo, Albuquerque, NM.