my social interaction: what a kingmaker would want to know

As an employee, my fate is determined by local politics. As a business, my fate is determined by kingmakers.

A kingmaker will want to know a little about me, how I act socially.

I am very concerned, in my social interactions, with the different education levels and how people react to each other from that point of view. I have given some thought to how to relate to people based on their level of education, and how to determine what that is with a minimum of words. Once I get some idea of a person's education level I can choose my agenda with them, if you'll pardon the expression. For a relatively uneducated person I might ask him, in as discrete a manner as I can, whether he ever uses the word, "agenda". This gives me a great deal of information on which to build a conversation, and how this person might fit into the set of relationships I have built already. If I succeed in getting a thoughtful conversation going, no matter what the level of education, I try to work in a suggestion that we put agenda on the agenda. This gives the person some idea of how I handle a whole range of topics, and creates a large volume of space in which to view each other's ability to adjust to each other's deeply felt positions on matters they consider fair game for discussion.

Sense of humor is very important. I like to relate to people, once we have gotten some of the more serious issues out of the way, with a good deal of frivolity. It widens the basis of our meeting, and solidifies what we have said to each other in earnest.

With the mentally ill in particular, and these are the people who are my living companions, it is possible to make ground by approaching them with general all-aroundedness, if I can put it that way, in the sense of where I am coming from in the conversational setting. The mentally ill suffer from what I call a "coordinated distraction." Events in the fixed place in space where they view them from come at them without a firm anchor in a consolidated world view up to the moment. Somehow they have been knocked out of this anchored condition and as a result they are the objects of distractions that occur within the existing coordinates of space which normal people build on from moment to moment and day to day. It is important, in coming at them with general all-roundedness, to be fair and to be truly universal in viewpoint, not being normative in the way that the mental health industry does. The mental health industry takes the approach of being generous in its judgment of the mentally ill, but it does not go looking for professional good practice among their numbers. As a result, when I crack open the formidable sheer surface of mental illness's veneer, and discover merriment in a very normal sense, fully professional, it is immediately interpreted by the mental health industry, in its adjacency to my dealings, as a violation of conduct standards, because the mentally ill are not acknowledged to have a potential for truly normal behavior. So that, in one recent case, I engage in a whimsical monologue in the presence of some of my comrades, and use the appropriate level of amplitude of my voice, staff runs to see what "the disturbance is" and I have to retreat from the social position I have created with great pains, in order to deflate the threat of being disciplined by staff for what in a different setting, among normal people, would be considered normal behavior serving to put everyone at ease to see such merriment. The stark compromise between the setting where this behavior "pus everyone at ease" and the setting where it "causes a disciplining threat" is extremely dissociative to the human mind. It is an obstacle to progress on my agenda for the mentally ill that this potential is a constant, omnipresent danger.

The transformation of English transformation art into a solely manufactured product without a signature

The creation of a work of English transformation art, once the color schemes have been determined, is a matter of careful computer work. It is all work that follows a formula and therefore can be completely automated. Today there is general acceptance of the idea of digital art--work generated completely by a computer--and English transformation art is a cousin to that. This is the basis on which I, the artist, justify placing my signature on the work and selling it as art rather than an object solely of manufacture.

However, while the signature adds a certain value to the art it does not affect the aesthetic qualities of the art itself. Why not then operate as a manufacturer by omitting the signature and placing an imprint of a trademark on the work instead? Production of a work would in that case not require the imposition, at a key place in the manufacturing process, of the natural hand of the artist, making of the whole a manufacturing business rather than a craft business, and establishing the artist as the owner of that business with full power to hire a staff which would design systems of manufacture according to engineering standards based on the general aesthetic principle of English transformation art. The price a work produced in this manner could command would be less than the price a signed work could expect, but the labor required to produce the work, and thus its cost of production, would be less also. Profit margin would be roughly preserved and the owner of the business would be faced with business challenges rather than craft challenges.

As for the sense one would get from a manufactured item, the machine-like nature of this art is not the sort of thing that makes one look for the hand of a human author. It is the thinking up of the idea for the art, and the sharp simplicity of its expression, that impresses the viewer, not some consideration of craft, whether strongly to the technical side or strongly to the manual side. A signature speaks to craft among the general body of craftsmen while a trademark speaks to thought among the general body of thinkers. Certainly good aesthetic judgment plays a part in the formation of the business and would never be relegated to a minor role. But like other items that have been transformed by modern industrial capabilities into mass markets, to the benefit of the whole population, so would cheap English transformation art make a novel and attractive form of self-expression available to the masses at an affordable cost. Design savvy is as much a part of the industrial revolution as is engineering.

Price would depend on volume so it would be strictly conjectural what the price of manufactured English transformation art would be. Going to manufacture would only be possible if first the work proves to have a market as signed art. The first milestone was sale of one item and that has been passed. It is a new, and in a sense risky, art investment, a hurdle which every new artist faces, but made especially tricky by the somewhat intelligence-driven effectiveness of the product to make an impression on both the owner, who chooses the text and more than anyone else feels its impact, and others, who presumably have little or no investment in the text and react to the work as is in purely abstract terms. Jumping past this hurdle, especially the one of the owner, is the biggest challenge the business faces at this stage of its development.

These are the considerations that will guide the development of the business from top to bottom. Only sales and profit will prove them to have value, for the artist, for the client, and for the public at large.

starting out on an art marketing site

I have been moving on setting up a presence on a site that markets artwork.

I plan to upload images of my code art, as I have been calling it. I am changing my name for it to "english transformation art, an art/product of inventor james batek".

I will be able to conduct business on the site, explaining the idea, arranging deals, collecting payment, etc.