Bon Self Portrait Variations

Haiku 116 - Bon Self Portrait #1 (00:13)

Haiku 117 -  Bon Self Portrait #2 (00:13)

Haiku 118 - Bon Self Portrait #3 (00:13)

Haiku 119 Bon Self Portrait #4 (00:13)

Sample Haikus from Buddhaverse Variations ©2020-21

[Please turn on audio to hear chant/soundtrack] 

--- WATCH FULL SET OF HAIKUS AT HOME --- 

https://vimeo.com/showcase/7916179 

Select thumbnails to view on Vimeo Showcase page, or click thumbnail title (ex: v001) to watch & enable autoplay.

Haiku 71 - Prayer Wheel with Blue Yamataka

Haiku71 Prayer Wheel with Blue Yamataka (00:19)

Sample Haikus from Buddhaverse Variations ©2020-21

[Please turn on audio to hear didgeridoo soundtrack] 

--- WATCH FULL SET OF HAIKUS AT HOME --- 

https://vimeo.com/showcase/7916179 

Select thumbnails to view on Vimeo Showcase page, or click thumbnail title (ex: v001) to watch & enable autoplay.

Haiku 36 - Green Tara with Open Arms in Energy Matrix

Haiku 36 - Green Tara with Open Arms in Energy Matrix (00:23)

Sample Haikus from Buddhaverse Variations ©2020-21

[Please turn on audio to hear chant soundtrack] 

--- WATCH FULL SET OF HAIKUS AT HOME --- 

https://vimeo.com/showcase/7916179 

Select thumbnails to view on Vimeo Showcase page, or click thumbnail title (ex: v001) to watch & enable autoplay.

Buddhaverse Variations: Chod Dakini Tara Portrait

As my last "before and after" posting showing a source / reference "static" image used as the basis for a video haiku, I chose to offer one of my favorite Buddhaverse Variations to serve as a catchy lead-in to this batch of posts about my new series of short video animations.

The source image (from 2014-15) is a diptych showing Tara (on the right) and a Chod Dakini (on the left). 

Chod Dakini & Tara 

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Buddaverse Variations: Jewel Tree

This post is a "before and after" showing source images and one of the haiku animations inspired by them. The "before" images (from 2010) take the form of a protective Thangka referred to as a 'Jewel Tree' - a graphical lineage tree depicting a personalized chain of ancestors and teachers. (In this case, the first  image - Jewel Tree 2 - includes my parents, my grandmother, and teachers such a the Dalai Lama and Terence McKenna. The second image - Jewel Tree 1 - shows me embodied as a teaching Buddha in the form of Avalokiteshavara.) 

Jewel Tree 2

Jewel Tree 1

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As a matter of interest, please check out earlier static work (from 2017) where I first started to "glitch the image." I feel the animated haiku versions are more effective / interesting with the individual visual components being independently processed before layering, and with the inclusion of a meditative sound track. What do you think?

BUddhaverse Variations: 21 Taras

This post is another "before and after" showing the source image and one of the haiku animations inspired by it. The "before" is a healing  and protective Thangka from 2005 showing a gathering of 21 Taras (of various colors: red, white, blue, green, yellow).

21 Taras

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Buddhaverse Variations: Vajrayogini

This post is a "before and after" showing the source image and one of the haiku animations inspired by it. The "before" is a Thangka from 2008 showing Vajrayogini drinking blood within a 6 pointed yantra (3d merkaba) surrounded by protective entities and other symbols.

Vajrayogini Medicine Thangka

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Buddhaverse Variations: Medicine Buddha

I created a number of "static" versions of the Medicine Buddha in the past. I especially liked the use of the golden frame with imprints of herbal remedies used on the square formatted Medicine Buddha portrait. I decided that this could serve as the framework for some video haikus in my Buddhaverse Variations series. 

The square Medicine Buddha is shown surrounded by Dakinis and other protective beings. In front lie a number of offerings, some typical (such as the 'good luck' balls and medicine urn), others more esoteric  and shamanistic (skull, mushroom, merkaba) included with a nod toward Tantric practice and its Bon roots. The offering items shown here have been used as visual elements throughout the new haikus.

Medicine Buddha With Offerings

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haiku 123

Buddaverse Variations: In The Beginning

As I began to work on my new set of Tibetan inspired digital glitch animations ('haikus'), it seemed like a natural starting point to harken back to some of the Forest Guardian anims from last year as a starting point. Below are a couple of early Buddhaverse Variations haikus paired with examples of the Forest Guardian anim(s) that they derived from.

haiku 2

haiku 6

Forest Gods 11

haiku 18

Forest Gods 12

Forest Protectors Revealed

After completing the panoramic "Hidden Nature" series, I continued to wonder about the issue of invisibility/hiding and exactly how far I had taken that - such that the figures perhaps have become a too-faint hallucination against the jungle foliage pattern. Had the background itself became the subjective foreground overwhelming a viewer's ability to decipher / discover the (intentionally concealed) subjects?

I set out to make work that in some ways was a visual simplification of "Hidden Nature." In these new pieces, the Forest Protectors would be less concealed, faces revealed within the chaotic canopy leaves and branches.

Forest Spirits 01

Forest Spirits 02

Forest Spirits 03

Forest Spirits 04

Follow-on note: for the Upstream Gallery's "Small Works 2020" show in January, I had these images output onto a metallic white paper, creating quite a nice optical depth.

Forest Protectors Embodied

I liked the faces of the Forest Spirit protectors emerging through the leaf canopy of the forest. I started to think about how in reality, the leaves and branches would be swaying or shuffling in the wind, constantly changing the appearance and visibility of the Forest Protectors. With an eye towards earlier forest Goddess animations, I played around with similar a layered approach, with the addition of sound, to build new animations (saved as short .mp4 videos). Here is a sample of a few:

Note that the SW tools I use included IOS apps including D'efect, GlitchArt, and Hyperspektiv. Final layering and sequencing is done in PS on my Mac.

More Glitch Tests

I wanted to play around with a larger, more complex image to apply the various glitch processing upon. I chose a Jewel Tree image as the base with the following results:

This is the original unmodified image:

Vajrayogini Glitches

Been playing around with some glitch FX techniques in Photoshop. Here are samples applied to a Vajrayogini image from my library of composited Buddhist figures.

The original composit image:

Bill Tavis has performed his fractal halftone mapping on my Tara / Dakini diptych resulting in a wonderful GIF animation. Thanks again!

You can read about the source artwork here: Tara Variations.

See more of Bill Tavis's stuff on his Tumblr.

Deep Dreaming on the Fractal Ocean of Being

There is a web interface to the DeepDreamBot processing engine which is currently being run "gratis" by a research group in Japan. (Note, however, there is an extensive queue of images waiting to be processed. Not surprising.) One can also surf back thru previously processed images - 300 per page. It's interesting to see so many examples of what works and what does not work with the neural net.

I decided to try out the Deep Dreaming neural net processor with a couple of my own images. I selected some from the Fractal Ocean of Being series which make use of a fractal dimensional space (what else?) encompassing an emergent Green Tara, around whom various enlightened beings and Protectors emerge and disappear in the quantum foam of spacetime.

Below are the BEFORE and AFTER results of being processed by Deep Dreaming software. (Click to enlarge for better detail.)

Original

Dreamed

Original

Dreamed

Original

Dreamed

Fractal Ocean of Being

OK, so I renamed this series from when I worked on the first image... As originally posted last January (1/30/14), I had been playing around with a new fractal generator (for iPad from Kai of Kai Power Tools fame) and got very intrigued by the idea that the infinite froth of space / edges within a fractal map might be a great visual metaphor for the for the unseen particle froth of the quantum realm. From that, it was a short step to thinking about the infinite expression of Tara throughout space & time as being like the quantum foam.

Below is the original image from this series and a follow-on images using essentially the same elements ('deity particles') but a different space/time foam.

Green Tara Emerging From Ocean of Being #1

Green Tara Emerging From Ocean of Being #2

This image (below) from the fractal series is a "close up" of Tara's energetic self-manifestation and blessings for all beings.

Green Tara Self-Manifestation

Dakini Redux

Early in December I had my 60th birthday. One thought that bothered me concerned what would happen to my artwork when I'm dead and gone? Would anyone really be able to trundle through endless directories of work on my computer to discover everything? True, a lot of stuff is posted on my various websites, but... So, over the holidays I printed out a bunch of my images and organized them into presentation binders.

Well, some older images bothered me greatly and I decided to go back in to rework them. Below is an example of the before and after state of one of my Dakini images. By removing a lot of the background (photo of a golden geometric pattern from a ornamental door) and remixing the figure's layers, I think the newest version is much more dynamic and allows the Dakini figure to be read better.

Dakini "before"

Dakini "after"

Fractal Foam of Being

I started playing with a fractal app for the iPad. Shades of 1980s! As I fooled around, I happened across a few interesting rendering settings that made me think of quantum energy fields. That got me wanting to create an image of emergent space filled with manifestations of Tara, Medicine Buddha, Mahakala, Dakinis and other protectors.

So this is the first image I came up with. At low rez (screen rez) it's hard to see the fine detail in the various "atoms" of Medicine Buddha who follow the sweeping curves of the fractal spaces. But there is a sense of pattern and energy exchange / flow in any case.

Can't wait to get this printed out LARGE (30"x36") to reveal the full details!

Green Tara in Field of Self-Manifestation

Triptychs!!!

I was rummaging around some work from a few years ago and decided that I wanted to see if it might be interesting to combine a few pieces into triptychs panels. Below are 2 of the resulting compositions. What do you think? The results are surprisingly powerful! Definitely something to explore more...

Durga Altar Triptych ©2012

Lady One Death Yantra Triptych ©2012

Nirvana in climate chaos and peak oil

February 28, 2011 By Andrew Durling

http://transitionvoice.com/2011/02/nirvana-in-climate-chaos-and-peak-oil/

Medicine Wheel

How can Buddhism help us deal with fear and anxiety as we face of the converging issues of peak oil and climate change?

One way is to understand that the reality of climate change is inseparable from the actual, specific experiences of living beings here and now.

Climate change is not some external, impersonal phenomenon that exists separately from all other phenomena, and especially from people. It’s actually a dimension of our daily experience, an aspect of the suffering that is an inexorable part of our lives.

In recognizing that climate change is suffering, and that climate change is a pervasive and an increasingly pressing part of our lives, then we have to face up to it in the same way that we have to face up to that ultimate dimension of our suffering: our own death and the loss of all we are and have.

Death be not proud

Facing up to our own death is a good analogy for how we have to learn to face up to climate chaos.

Recognizing the reality of global warming and the horror and fear that it induces offers a moment of clarity. We can then use that clear-eyed recognition to strip away what is meaningless and trivial from our lives and re-focus on what will help us to move with a renewed sense of purpose, beyond the fear, to meaningful action.

So many people who find out that they have a terminal illness go on to fill what time they have left doing what they always really wanted but never got around to. Ironically, overcoming the often overly suppressed (but often mentally disruptive) fear of death can be the prelude to a more joyful and fulfilling life, as philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers have told us through the ages.

In the same way, helping ourselves and others to overcome the denial or suppression of the reality of climate change can help to create the motivation to engage in ways of living that are more fulfilling and creative than before.

Read more ->