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passive attitude, the way the Buddhist meditators are doing, you
can have an experience of mental images which
are coming uninvited to your mind. Mental imagery is not always
a recollection of a perception made in the
past."
Chris: "And you try to freeze them in time."
Larry: "To coagulate them, if I can say so. Observation and
attention are very important. Mostly, because you
can extemporize and change all the time what's going on."
Chris: "Which you're trying to avoid."
Larry: "Yes, I do not need questions for answers I know already.
I am looking for a process, which is less
contaminated by what I know. Difficult to say, since everything
in that inner world belongs to me but there are so
many things I do not know about myself.
Chris: "Now you use a computer to do this work?"
Larry: "The paper and pencil work is still essential. It keeps
something of the human touch. However, the biggest
problem was trying to make my way out of this mess of
overlapping images. And then the computer became very
handy. Basically, it is a painting program, a digital tablet,
and pen, and e-glasses (virtual reality glasses). I see
only one luminous pixel. That's it. Which moves while I'm doing
the tracings of my mental object on the digital
tablet. I can't see the line. Everything is black on black.
Whenever I finish tracing one mental object, with a
keystroke I can change the page of the flip book. In this way, I
can have a recording of the sequences in which
the mental images are drawn. And also, I can do a printout, or
produce a small animation of the whole process."
Chris: "Are there any other artists doing work like this?"
Larry: "Most of the Visionary artists, Dada, or Surrealist
artists, are doing reconstructions of past mental events,
but the process I just described, it is done during the
hypnagogic experience. I am tracing live, in vivo, these
mental images. A visual stream of consciousness. Different from
the process where you sit down at the table,
you remember your last dream, or hallucination, and use all your
artistic means to describe the experience."
Chris: "Why are you so interested in doing away with your own
interpretations and getting right to the raw mental
object?"
Larry: "In this field interpretation are for palm readers. I am
gathering data and doing observations. Based on it, I
hope to find the invariables which are generating and
structuring the mental image. It is about space, time, color,
and the properties of mental images. Edgy, too. Because you have
to be very careful not to describe what you
think that you see related to the real world, and the experience
you have in the real world. My aim is to be able,
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one day, to devise a tool with which I could do a recording of
my mental images. This is probably the core of my
research."
Chris: "You're showing some of this work at the Around the
Coyote Arts Festival."
Larry: "Could be a brain pasteurizing experience to show some of
my ongoing experiments. Some of them have
to be patented. Therefore, I decided that The Coyote show would
be mostly a retrospective of old drawings and
some of the recent mental imagery. Along with them, I am selling
my personal collection of prints and works on
paper, done by European master print-makers from Picasso to
Claes Oldenburg, to raise money for my research
and equipment."
(This show was in 2004)
View the hypnagogic sketches of Larry Bonn Phoenix and meet the
artist at the upcoming Around the Coyote
Arts Festival, Studio 213, 2nd floor, Flatiron Building, 1579 N.
Milwaukee, Friday through Sunday, September
13-15.
