Meredith Finkelstein is a coder/programmer, poet/writer, filmmaker, teacher, herbologist, computational tarot card originator and importantly, a mother of two.

She’s known for these award winning films,  The Discreet Charm of the Hipster Class (2009), Video Out (2005), Lumia (2008), and for her work with the robot hactivism group the botmatrix, and build robots for theater (such as Heddatron 2006), and her conceptual economic system EI (202).

She lives in Kingston, NY.

thewitchofendor.com

Cropping Crit 

Vilem Flusser says something like we live in the age of context, or framing, or worldbuilding.  The AGE OF THE CROP.  

I paint freely and then I examine the canvas and select the painting/s - the painting multiverse. Then, like a photographer or a filmmaker, I crop! Is cropping wasteful? Is cropping a product of capitalism? industrialism? the patriarchy? Cropping creates an inside, an outside, a border/boundary, a public and a private. A crop is trauma - to the painting. I think of the origin of civilization, according to unpopular Freud, in the violent act of the sons killing the father - the crops. To crop is to strive for legibility/visibility. Cropping is political - but not propaganda. 

Is the crop REALITY collapse? I just learned this term - it is the great fear of AI. That AI will create alternative realities so convincing the we, the public, will not understand what is really real. So is the crop real?

I woke up one day and saw colors and shapes and then the world formed - I saw a lamp, a shade, a wall.  There was an order to my experience. 

The color of the crops are in these plants, calendula, rose, and blue lotus. Pigment comes from rocks, oil, plants. We process these materials to create paint or create something else - a balm - paint for the skin - invisible ink.  The crop is an imposition of form, the making of the balm is the creation of form - to be cropped into small metal containers.