January 10, 2022
My Medēn Art Project
The beauty of art – true art, where you simply don’t care about marketing, audience reception (or even intended audience), and the like – is that the artist can reach realms of unimaginable freedom. My Medēn art project is such an artistic work. It’s still in progress, and it will never finish – a project such as Medēn can never finish.
But that’s not the only peculiarity about it, as you’ll soon discover.
Part of true, liberated art, is that the artist can choose what to share, when, and in which shape. Should art be free? Should it be sense-making? Maybe true meaning is only sense-making when it doesn’t make immediate sense.
In any case, I’ve decided it’s time to turn on the faucet, allowing some colorful water to trickle down the canvas.
Stream-of-consciousness? Conceptual fusion? Perhaps no more (or less) than an experiment. Medēn is here and now, and yet it’s always been. Medēn is what it is, ultimately; we all are.
What Is Medēn?
There is no answer to this question. Medēn becomes what each of its experiencers wants it to be. The more prosaic answer, however, is this: Medēn consists of a never-ending (that is, until I end!) series of not-quite-prose-not-quite-poetry text that is structured in a randomized order.
Remember my poem shuffler program? The text of Medēn is something in that direction: Not having a strict linearity, it allows for multiple (probabilistically endless) interpretations. Yet, there is one more, crucial difference involved:
Each iteration of Medēn – reincarnations, as I call them – can only exist once.
I have chosen to offer the project to the world using a program that not only shuffles the lines, but keeps track of what combination has already been generated and never offers it again. All the details – the text itself as well as the number of generated combinations – are kept hidden on the server, and each visitor of the Medēn art project page only sees a small excerpt, a few lines long, and never the rest of the text.
If you visit the page and generate a combination, you can either immortalize it (save it as a text file) or annihilate it (refresh the page and make the particular combination disappear forever). The total number of possible combinations is currently about 1013.
Just like the art project itself, this post too is unorthodox; it is what I want it to be, and so, before I share with you the link to the project page, here are three generated excerpts accompanied by some of my photos – all taken on the island of Lemnos. On the actual project page, each reincarnation is accompanied by randomly generated art, uniquely paired to the textual content.
Medēn Art Project – Excerpts from a Never-Ending Nothingness
Reincarnation I
I’ll come with you, doomsayer; show me the way to the port where all the ships of Theseus lie. I’m not afraid to cry, so let truth shake me to the core. For I stand between silence and death, ready to set fire to the island, until the chthonic figures come to settle the score.
There is no truth that shall remain unknown, for all is here and now.
Has the night come already? I didn’t realize… I was too busy watching the white cat playing with the leaves.
If only I could die of disgust, this all would’ve ended long ago. The warmth of the carnation moistened my lips and soothed my breath. Another soft sigh, another sweet caress. Another anything, to vainly postpone my – that; dire, dreadful, defining and deafening.
We loved to speak.
Reincarnation II
Secrets and lores.
To you this pointless revelation might reek of time – it’s stale, you say; and more, it isn’t even mine. For, after all, the scope of any crime has long been laying forgotten, and any past transgressions are all absolved by… you guessed it; that precisely.
To live is to die.
It continues.
So I will, buy more, and kiss her.
Reincarnation III
The scent of your lover descending down your body like a misty morning.
Sibilant whispers trickle down the yellow leaves, the way one’s life flows not in rivers but in drops.
It’s already Thursday, tomorrow we must fly back – but can’t you feel this lack? Can’t you see we’ve wasted time on reality (the way it’s wasting it on us), and instead we ought to stay asleep so that we could dream?
Rosewood and pine surrounded me as I marched to the beach, another insignificant question mark among the rest.
Three fires, darkness, and the break of the keys opening a door.
Where to Experience Medēn
Medēn is free to experience on its project page. Remember that each time you refresh the page, you not only experience a unique combination of the text, but also expend it for everyone else. Use the power wisely.
2 Comments
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This level of art reminds me of many art gallery visits when I absorbed the beauty of creation without meaning attached to it. Some of the paintings or sculptures spoke to me on a subconscious level, unable to explain why I found them moving and enriching, so I never actually tried to do that. The examples you brought up (and my experimenting with the actual ‘project’) had the same enriching experience. Thanks, Chris!
Thank you, Francis!