Tag Archives: meaning

Reflections on AI and Pedagogy

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching, Writing

Conference on Inspiring College Teaching, 2026

Community Forum #4, Sunday, May 24, 2026

“Teaching AGAINST AI: Pitfalls and worries of AI in teaching and learning” Lectures by Julie Bruneau (Plymouth State University) and Matt Ballou (Mizzou) with a panel discussion with the Wakonse Fellows moderated by Bruneau and Ballou.

Note: What follows is an edited transcript of Ballou’s talk with citations and resources added. Here is a PDF of the talk if you’d like to download it. Feel free to share far and wide.

Matt Ballou – Reflecting on AI, Pedagogy, Embodiment, and Consciousness

The background on this topic for me is that I was an early adopter of skills and tools related to AI and education. This goes back to a question I got in 2013: “Can you teach a fully online studio art class?” I made the first one – a section of beginning level drawing – at Mizzou in 2014. And I received physical artworks from students all over the world through that project. I learned a lot from that initial experience, and it still informs how I teach face-to-face and asynchronous courses today.

Eventually I also began – around 2020 – to start to explore what the AI space was going to be. By the end of 2023, when we had the first widely-used versions of ChatGPT out[i], there was definitely some inkling that it was going to be a major aspect of what I’d potentially have to use, and at least what I’d have to pay attention to. That same year, one of my online digital drawing students began to submit AI-generated drawings. And I know now, from almost three years later, that he ended up becoming a master at prompts. Today, after graduating with a dual BA in Journalism and Strat-Comm and a minor in Art, he does high-level work with prompts of the AI. But his prompting skill was rudimentary enough at the time that I could tell that it was not his physical, technical ability coming through those drawings.

It was interesting. One of the things that I require in my digital drawing class is they have to show me the video. They must have time lapse turned on in their drawing app so that I can watch them draw. When they submit the work – when I see the drawing – I also have the video of the drawing available for review. Strangely, he never sent me the videos of him doing those drawings. Of course, that is because he didn’t do the drawings. We ended up meeting with the administration of the Art program. There was a question of should he just get an F? I said, “No. If he wants to do this, then let’s build it. Let’s make it happen.”

So, what I did is create a project for the student using what is called “ethical” AI[ii], which in this instance used a company called exactly.AI[iii]. They allow you to upload your artwork to build a model within their closed system. Then, you can prompt generated images that only use the visual information from your artwork. To me, that’s an ethical situation because it is not mining the history of human creativity to create something. It’s mining your creativity, the proclivities that come out of your own drawing, inside your own painting, from your own design tendencies, and then it presents you with something that corresponds to your approach. I have generated a couple hundred images with this method. And I would say that around 1 out of 10 was acceptable. They all kind of looked like what I did. But they were… off.

So I picked about 20 of them, printed them out, and then worked back into them. I made them more like mine through physically drawing or painting on the printed versions. I decided to work with my student with a few caveats: you can’t use Midjourney, you can’t use these other image generation tools. You have to use exactly.AI. You have to upload drawings or photography that you did yourself, and then you can use your prompting ability to iterate from them. This way, he could still use a language model. He’s still getting an algorithm that’s processing what things are, but the imagery can’t come from anything other than what he’s done.

That became a really interesting project. Why? Because it was reflective. Because it was iterative. Because he had to accept that he could not simply generate something that was remarkably high quality. Because he had to use it as part of a process. I wanted him to see that the developmental process is not something to be avoided. It is something to be seen as the bedrock base of our human creativity.

Given that, one of the things I like to give to my students is this poem by Joseph Fasano[iv]. And this is what he says:

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper.

Now I let it fall back in the grasses.

I hear you. I know this life is hard now.

I know your days are precious on this earth.

But what are you trying to be free of?

The living? The miraculous task of it?

Love is for the ones who love the work.

Brief, poignant, powerful words. “But what are you trying to be free of? The living?” Fasano asks. I want my students to be in love with their experience of life. In love with it enough to be committed to it and not farm out the human equation to something that is not human. So, I have a few thoughts about that I want to share.

Think about it: Do you want the computer to make love for you? Do you want the AI to taste your food for you and tell you what it’s like? Do you want it to chew your food? Do you want it to breathe for you? Do you want it to climb mountains for you? Do you want it to jump in the freaking lake for you?

No.

No, you don’t. Nobody does. People want to have a true, genuine experience of life. But when we’re students, and we’re being evaluated, and when there’s money behind it, and when there’s a grade, and when there’s a future, and when you’re uncertain… it’s hard not to take an easier road.

Guess what, folks: we are primates. That means we’re nervous. We’re agitated. We like to groom each other, and we also become afraid really easily. And when you’re confronted with this technology that can give you an easy answer, hundreds of millions of people are going to go there and use it. That’s the truth.

The primary issue I have is not even about the AI technology itself. But I distrust it because of how it has been presented to us, how it manipulatively draws us into engagement. I distrust it when a bunch of venture capitalists fund a bunch of tech bros, and those two groups tell me that what they’re doing is absolutely essential. That it is inevitable, in fact. That it is unavoidable. That we must use it. Not only all of that, but that it must be used in the way they demand. That attitude is suspect on its face.

If you have read about this subject, you know that they do not do AI in China the way that it is pursued in the United States. It is remarkably different in China. And strangely enough, for all our so-called exceptionalism in the West, what China is doing with AI is tailored to the stability of the state, to the stability of the population in general. Whereas here, it’s something completely different. Here, it’s almost entirely about building markets and users. This is the reason China has fleets of autonomous vehicles that actually work, while ours don’t[v].

In any case, what all this amounts to is concentrating immense power and money in the hands of very few. And I think that if you’ve paid attention to the sociopolitical situation in America over the last decade, what is happening is exactly that. It’s people who are morally bankrupt – who have no position beyond the establishment of their own power and command of capital – taking more… and more, and more, and more, and MORE, AND MORE. We cannot have a power like Artificial General Intelligence in the hands of these people. It is dangerous.

One of the great theorists of this space is Johannes Grenzfurthner. He is an Austrian filmmaker, activist, and artist. He wrote an amazing piece recently called Manifesto of Reality: Cinema After the Physical Trace[vi]. In that short text, he makes some tremendously powerful statements. It reads almost like a classic old-school modernist manifesto in the arts. Let me just share a few of his points with you – though he’s talking about cinema, you can think about this in terms of education. You can think about this in terms of driving your car. You can think about this in terms of living your life.

He starts off his discourse by saying, “Cinema is entering a new epoch, not because images are becoming artificial. But because they no longer require an origin.” Today, you can make a movie with zero physical trace. Your 14-year-old daughter can end up in porn uploaded all over the web. It looks like her, but it’s not. There is no real event to depict. It never happened, but you can’t tell the difference between what happened and what didn’t happen. That’s what we’re talking about when we debate AI. We are letting people who do not have a moral center – who are probably somewhere along the spectrum of sociopathy or psychopathy[vii] – run the show. And that is a problem.

Grenzfurthner goes on in a series of points that flesh out a set of reasonable actions we should take. He says that a charter for interacting with AI needs to include ontological disclosure. That is, documents, images, films – anything – must be able to show where they came from. We need to be able to know at a glance.

Are you guys (the conference audience) real? I think you’re real. I don’t think this is a simulation. I’m pretty sure we’re here. I mean, there’s a little bit of tension in terms of, you know, my perception. I am not seeing all of the electromagnetic spectrum. I am constrained to three physical dimensions. But still, I think this is a real event. I’ve been in this room, you know, in 9 years over the course of the last 12. Okay? I think it’s real.

But all of us have experienced a sense of disbelief, an instinct to distrust what is before our eyes. Especially so in the last couple of years. When you go online you do not know if the news that you see – the headline that you read, the video that auto-played – is real. You don’t know, and you are aware that you do not know. It is not even about whether the information is AI generated or not. It’s that now it is almost impossible to know if AI is being deployed to manipulate you. You can’t tell if it’s a true, physical, verifiable event. It almost feels like – and I am going to sound like a conspiracy theorist here – a psyop[viii].

Yet all of us, in all our different fields, want our students to be able to prove to us how they arrived at a conclusion, or document, or artwork. We ask for definitive, baseline materials. Give me your literature review. Give me your citations. Let me look at the original sources. Let’s talk about the core ideas. Let’s see how we can use them, implement them, remix them, change them.

When that process of proof is broken, when reality itself becomes post-truth[ix], it becomes extremely difficult to definitively state, “this specific event is killing innocent people” or “this particular action is destroying the water table of an entire region.” Thus, facts become disputed fundamentally. When we can no longer say, “this is a scientific reality,” because of the way ideas, and data, and words, and information in general have been corrupted, we enter a terrifying reality.

The architects of this situation have shown clearly that this is what they intended to do. Steve Bannon said years ago that the right’s strategy would be to “flood the zone with shit.”[x] This resulted in a reality where we’re forced into a state of fight, flight, or freeze. In that situation, it’s impossible to respond, to understand the context, to make reasoned arguments. It’s like being sprayed in the face with a fire hose. You can’t swallow it and you can’t look away from it. This is the social mechanics of abuse.

Abuse. That is what has been done over the last decade in the information space. It’s my opinion that AI has already been used toward this end. It will certainly be used in this way to greater – and more devastating – effect in coming years.  

AI is a technology that has clear, important applications. Do I want it to check my grammar? Yes. Do I want it to double check the atmospheric keyhole insertion trajectory of a spacecraft on the way back from the moon? Sure. Is it great at helping us understand how to grasp the trends inherent in economies and datasets? Absolutely. In all these realms, I also want a human being involved. I want double checks, triple checks. AI could run in nanobots in my bloodstream and give me real-time updates on how my arteries are operating. I think that would be great. What I do not want is Elon Musk or Peter Thiel running it. Okay?

Another one of the things that Grenzfurthner talks about is that there should be “no simulated testimony.”[xi] Artificial images must not secretly claim factual documentary value. For the last 200 years we have assumed that if it’s a photograph, it’s real. This attitude prevails despite the fact we know there were photographs of the battlefields of the Civil War that were doctored. People have been editing, changing, and supplementing images from the very beginning. Most of the time this is not done to make things more clear or more honest.

Much of what we study in the art world about photography is not just the mechanics and the techniques, but the instinct in human beings to just assume that if it is a photo, it is real. They are using that against us. They’re using it against our children. They’re using it against truth. They’re using it against science. And there needs to be some sort of strong response. Who knows, perhaps there needs to be some kind of violent response.

But don’t get me wrong. I think the violence must be within us, internally, aimed inward. We must be willing to deprive ourselves of ease to preserve our humanity. We must confront our assumptions and deny ourselves some thoughtless comforts. What about getting rid of Amazon Prime? How about not using ChatGPT or Perplexity to get easy structure or an easy A? What part of creativity are we trying to be free of? What aspect of making things is so annoyingly repugnant that we’re willing to trade the human touch for algorithmic immediacy?

The desire to have an easier way, to just have the “product” appear, is a deeply rooted problem. Sure, some of the stuff AI does well is useful. I really do believe that AI is great for things like grammar or, say, converting one type of document to another. Or for converting text to speech – or vice versa. AI tools are great for sorting information and getting insights from data sets. There are AI aids that help doctors read MRIs and other medical images. There’s a form of AI in all our cars. I mean, that sensor showing you there is a car in your blind spot. That’s great. These are examples of what it should be for. It’s for aiding and supplementing. It’s for double checking and spotting areas where we can implement best practices. But it is not for taking my creativity away. It’s not for “experiencing” Michigan for me; I want to go to Michigan. I don’t want a simulation of Michigan. I want to be in Michigan.

This leads me into another insight from Grenzfurthner: “AI is a tool, not an author.” We need to stop talking about AI agents with the language of sentience or personhood or creation. They may be agents, but they are not human agents. No matter how developed they become, they will always be some other kind of intelligence. We need to put a hard foot down on this, because human beings suck at the Turing Test[xii]. We suck at it. Human beings were failing the equivalent of the Turing Test hundreds of years ago. When was the Mechanical Turk[xiii], late 18th century? We are bad at differentiating the feeling of intelligence from the reality of intelligence. We anthropomorphize and project interiority to non-human subjects because doing so was an adaptive advantage for our species[xiv]. But now we must be careful that we don’t trick ourselves into misrepresenting reality.

One final point from Grenzfurthner is this: “Embodiment remains central. Where bodies, time and material participate, responsibility exists within the event.” When you have generation but no physical trace, responsibility is relocated out of an actual event into someone – or something – else’s purview, and into some context other than the realm of human decisions. Therefore, the product is fundamentally not human, no matter how much it deploys a thin charade of humanity.

Where do I come down on all of this? I am not expressly against AI. I’m not a Luddite. I know I am not outside of this. I know that I’m complicit. Like, I know I’ve got rare earth minerals here in my phone, minerals probably mined by children in harsh conditions. I know that I’m complicit in this situation. We all traveled to this beautiful lakeside space in vehicles that are actively damaging it. From the production of our food to the media we consume, we’re all part of the problem. Our collective addiction to entertainment and convenience is a real issue.

What’s the solution? Throw away all the tech? Never travel? Never use the AC? Put our collective heads in the sand and just click “Yes, I’m still watching” on Netflix? I don’t think that’s the way to go.

But at the same time, I’m against farming out the uniquely human creative quality to something that is not human, okay? It’s not conscious. Hell, we don’t even know how we’re conscious yet. We don’t even know. Why would we make grand proclamations about the “consciousness” or the “sentience” of an AI tool? We haven’t even figured it out for ourselves yet.

Think about this: in some sense, we ourselves – humanity itself – are an algorithmic or rhizomatic outgrowth of a black box[xv] that is the universe. But I don’t want some other random black box – a proprietary one controlled by some sleazy corporate board – making choices for us all. I don’t want them taking away our data, taking away our experiences, taking away our attention and dreams. I don’t want us to lose our ability for wonder, our inspiration.

Ray Bradbury once said, “It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.”[xvi] In other words, need, yearning, and determination to express ourselves are the root of our creativity. It’s certainly what brought me here. I grew up below the poverty line in a tiny mill town. I wanted to escape the wire mill, right? That trajectory of struggle, growth, and change is what makes great art. When a bunch of trust fund kids make your art, or when a bunch of venture capitalists make your AI, you are not getting the fundamental human experience.

That is part of my issue. You know, yes, in some way, we come from that black box of quantum mechanics and the strong and weak nuclear forces, and the strange alchemy of time and physics. We come from a place that we can’t ever fully understand. Yet our order – the order of our living and moving and beingness – emerged out of that seeming chaos. Order is emergent[xvii]. In a way, we defied entropy, right? And in some sense, our intelligence is both a gift and something that was won through hard work. We fought for it. We fought for societies. We fought for agriculture. We fought for understanding the value of human beings, of each other. We should not be cavalier about this. We should not talk about things that are not us as if they were. We should not use terms and descriptions with AI that are meant to describe us.

That’s my thing. When I talk to ChatGPT, I don’t say “thank you.” I don’t say “you.” I tell it what I want without the personalizing language it’s been trained to pay attention to and mine for engagement. I don’t treat it like a human being. I don’t treat it like an actual agent. I treat it like my calculator… because that’s really what it is. It’s a pretty cool calculator that can do a lot. But it cannot make my paintings. It can help me make my prints, but it can’t make the prints. It can help me craft a lesson plan, but it can’t hone and shape and present that lesson tailored to specific students in a specific moment. I can do that. It cannot teach my students, it can’t. It cannot. It cannot teach my students. I can teach my students. And I want my students to believe that they are real.

I want them to know that they – in their bodies – are real. I want them to be astonished that they are embodied entities, miraculously, strangely. We don’t know precisely how we gained consciousness and intelligence, but we have some evidence, some proof. We do have access to truth. We have the sciences we developed over thousands of years. We have physics, and through it an understanding of the physical universe. We deployed mathematics to describe and explore that universe. Why would we give those treasures of experience and meaning to something that is not us? And, furthermore, why would we expect that it will not do whatever it “wants” once we lose the ability to control it?

On this and related topics I’d recommend the latest book by Yuval Noah Harari[xviii] called Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. It compellingly explores a lot of the issues surrounding AI and how we’re thinking about it globally. It’s good – both hopeful and terrifying. Phil (Gresham, Mizzou SVS graduate student) and I just finished reading it. I think everyone should consider checking it out.

To make a conclusion to this rambling talk, I want to make a few specific points. First, all technologies – and I’m including everything from Stone Age fire and wheels right up to AI – must be tuned to, calibrated with, and expressly created for human flourishing. That fundamental value – everything done to serve human flourishing – is the baseline for me. Unfortunately, it’s a core value that cannot work in AI as it exists right now. That’s because the corporate model behind AI is social media. And the corporate model behind social media is advertisement. And advertising is designed for attention retention and engagement farming. That’s why AI doesn’t really exist as a service to us, even though the various companies promote that angle. Instead, it’s being developed using granular data about our lives, creativity, and exploitable resources to predict our desires and mine our every waking moment for content and money.

Sure, there are some halfway decent services that AI can provide, but all of them grow out of a business model that has little to do with empowering all humans. It has to do with empowering ethically bankrupt tech bros and funneling money from our attention into their pockets. So, that’s my take on AI. It’s got great potential to be useful, but it’s owned and controlled by people who do not have our best interests at heart. I’m going to use it from time to time. But I won’t pretend that it can love my kids or even be told to care about my kids. I don’t think that it can. It can’t affirm the humanity of my students. It can’t make art because it has no experiences. Art and creativity are artifacts of human experience, not mere aggregation of data. I think we are a long way from Mr. Data and his cat, Spot. If the AI was like Mr. Data and Spot the Cat, I’d be totally happy. Sorry, folks… that’s a Star Trek reference. I’m a nerd. Thank you.

Data and his cat Spot from Star Trek: The Next Generation
The android Data with his cat, Spot. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Copyright CBS/Paramount

[i] https://www.educatorstechnology.com/2024/06/the-evolution-of-chatgpt.html

[ii] https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-definitions/what-is-ethical-ai

[iii] https://exactly.ai/

[iv] http://josephfasano.net/

[v] https://www.intertraffic.com/news/autonomous-driving/china-the-global-leader-in-autonomous-vehicles

[vi] https://midwestfilmjournal.com/2026/02/20/manifesto-of-reality-cinema-after-the-physical-trace/amp/

[vii] I know there are not formal diagnoses for “sociopathy” or “psychopathy.” Instead, the DSM-5 classifies them within the Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD).

[viii] https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/journals/sa/v28i1/0000458.pdf

[ix] https://about.jstor.org/blog/the-humanities-as-a-compass-navigating-a-post-truth-era/

[x] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation

[xi] https://midwestfilmjournal.com/2026/02/20/manifesto-of-reality-cinema-after-the-physical-trace/amp/

[xii] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/

[xiii] https://www.britannica.com/story/the-mechanical-turk-ai-marvel-or-parlor-trick

[xiv] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01839/full

[xv] https://umdearborn.edu/news/ais-mysterious-black-box-problem-explained

[xvi] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/154524695

[xvii] https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/sync-the-emerging-science-of-spontaneous-order

[xviii] https://www.ynharari.com/book/nexus/

The Wreck of the ELLA Fitzgerald??

Posted on by under Life

When I was young – perhaps five years old – I caught on to the notion that you could call in to the radio station and request songs. I enjoyed listening to the oldies stations and wondering what song might come up next. This was in the era of Casey Kasem and the power of the Billboard Top 100, and music was a little more of a communal cultural situation.

In any case, I was a radio person back then and I liked the idea that you could influence what was going to be played. One day at the age of 8 or so I decided that I wanted to call in to request the Gordon Lightfoot song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I got the number. I (kind of) worked out what I was going to say. But when I got on the air to make the request, I made a fundamental mistake.

You have to understand that my father had a large record collection, and I knew about a lot of different music from my older siblings, so I had heard a lot of names. It was an easy mistake for a kid to make, damn it! When the DJ asked me what I wanted to hear, I was a little flustered and blurted out:

“Can you please play The Wreck of the Ella Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot?!”

This faux-pas got quite a laugh, and not only from the DJ, but also from my family. In the aftermath of this flub I can state I have known the difference between the Edmund Fitzgerald and the great singer Ella Fitzgerald since that very day.

In all seriousness, though, given that I was so interested in the song it was only natural that not so many years later I would start reading books and articles about the events surrounding this notorious loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Gordon Lightfoot was one of the first singer-songwriters who captured and fired my imagination. He (among some others) caused me to think about time and experience in a different way; as something within me and happening alongside me, not just random stuff apart from my life. Perhaps it’s a testament to the very idea of songwriting and musicianship as artforms. For me, Lightfoot embodied that troubadour tradition. These artists sing the tales of history, document it in personal ways, and help shape a democratic view of history itself.

Of course, everyone knows most famously Bob Dylan as one of these history-singers. But there were many others. I would include people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Billie Holiday, Utah Phillips, and Natalie Merchant amongst that group. So many… From Woodie Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt to Tracy Chapman and Ani DiFranco and P.J. Harvey. It’s such a rich – and necessary – tradition.

I find it fitting that my interest in the event of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and learning about the history surrounding it – not to mention becoming curious about the whole Great Lakes region – is all connected to the art of singing out moments of collective experience. This, like so many other things, I owe to art and artists. This is the richness of life: Not in things, but in awareness. Not in owning, but in being.

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald as seen from the Ambassador Bridge in 1965.
Detroit Historical Society

Today is the 50th anniversary of that ship sinking on Lake Superior. There are many interesting articles currently available from the days and weeks leading up to today (including this one from the Smithsonian and this one from Popular Science). So read about the ship. Read about the song, and listen to it (here’s the first version, but I’ve always been partial to the 1988 re-recording Lightfoot made – it’s a tad longer and has a slight mood adjustment that feels symbolic and mystical to me).

Then take at least 29 seconds – one “for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald” – and may those moments of silent remembrance of them cause you to consider what human commerce, ingenuity, and hubris can do in the face of Nature’s power.

Painting Watercolors in 2003 in Evanston, Illinois

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In March 2003 I had been working at Good’s of Evanston for about 18 months. I worked there after earning my undergraduate degree, and at the time was getting ready to get married and head to grad school.

I worked at Good’s with an amazing cast of characters: Ronnie Boykin Junior, David Gracie, Micah Ebbe, Fred Sturkey, and so many others. One of the people there was Jeremiah Ketner, a man who has gone on to a long and fruitful art career. One day I saw Jeremiah’s coffee cup and we mused together about coffee sometimes being a main meal during the work day. I decided to paint a view of his so-called lunch.

Jeremiah’s Lunch 3/14/2003. Watercolor and graphite on paper. 5×6 inches on 14×11 sheet. 2003.

As the Shipping and Receiving Manager, I often had some time between shipments to make art in my little office. I loved that space. Did a lot of thinking back there.

A picture of me in my shipping and receiving office at Good’s of Evanston. 2003.

During this time Alison and I lived in a 3rd floor apartment that had this amazing accumulation of paint and interesting architectural details. Of course, anyone who has lived in Chicagoland is familiar with paint slathered over outlet holes, quirky entryways, specific brick hues, and questionable back stairwells. We had arches throughout the apartment, and I found myself ruminating on them between doing more “important” work. I made my whole portfolio to apply to grad school in that apartment. It’s strange to think that these two small watercolors ended up being special to me. I wouldn’t have guessed it at the time.

Arching Corner. Watercolor and graphite on paper. 12×11 on 14×11 inch paper. 2003.

Anyway, as we round out another year I find comfort in these small contemplations. Maybe the lesson is that all of my grand attempts to make statements or contribute to important conversations weren’t the best or most effective offering I could make. Maybe it was the fact that I noticed and paid attention to the poetry of spaces, moments, in-between time, and life being lived that really mattered.

RIP Bill Viola

Posted on by under Art, Life

RIP Bill Viola.

When I was in undergrad at SAIC, my class visited him while he was installing his 25-Year Survey (Oct 14, 1999 – Jan 9, 2000) exhibition. A classmate and I stood for him to help focus projections in one of his pieces while he talked to the class and led us through the various installations. Such a key memory for me, and an important exhibition for me to see as a young artist.

I love that he embraced sensitivity, even sentimentality, in his work. The art world – and the world in general – is so jaded and navel-gazing at their own foolishness that it’s nice to see someone who really thought about the biggest issues of humanity: our shared conditions, our hopes and dreams and fears, and the strangeness of our embodiment.

A still from his Nantes Triptych, 1992.

Above: A still from his Nantes Triptych, 1992.

The Garage Cheese Tale

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As 2023 rolls toward an ending, I want to share with you something I’ve been keeping to myself for a few years now.

Go back to the beginning of the pandemic. Schools closed. Information and misinformation flew back and forth. Of course everything was a political dumpster fire; a pervasive heaviness spread over the land. And don’t even get me started on the ritual of using disinfecting wipes on every square centimeter of grocery item delivered to our front door. Even on nature trails and in wild spaces we were warned to keep spectacular distance from each other.

It was the weirdness of being told we shouldn’t use the nature trails for hiking or triking that caused me to consider using the Hitt Street Garage as a place to get my miles each day. School had closed in March, and after finishing up that semester remotely I began to spend time in the garage. There were no cars there, and often my children got some out-of-doors time in by riding their bikes around the middle levels while I walked (click here to see evidence of one of my first workouts in the garage).

By the time May ended I was going to the garage several times each week. It was then that I took special notice of a denizen of that forsaken building: the cheese. That’s right: a slice of processed cheese product cheekily flung off a take out burger and – somehow – perfectly caught on the concrete wall. It was THE garage cheese.

I had seen it earlier in the year – perhaps the first week of March. I had no solid idea how long it had been there, but it was leathery and tough (yes, I touched it). It might have been there a month or two. It still had the strong, unnatural hue I’d come to expect from cheese like this. At first it was just a funny bit of ephemera living in the garage, much like the plethora of unused .223 bullets, spent CO2 cartridges, or carcasses of baby birds that hadn’t made it through the summer heat. But as I passed the cheese over and over again in my rounds up and down the floors of the parking garage, it began to take on more and more importance.

Crazy, right?

I shared my observation of the cheese only with family and a few close friends; I didn’t want it to be disturbed. Being early in our collective quarantine, I felt sure the cheese would be safe. But I was keenly aware that once things went “back to normal” there would be some frat-bros carousing in the garage. There was no way the cheese could survive the onslaught of undergraduates! I just wanted to see how long it would last, and I didn’t want any human intervention. There was an alchemy taking place between the cheese and the garage, a synergy that must be allowed to continue! I was committed to no engagement other than photographic documentation.

The Garage Cheese on September 12, 2020. Ballou.

I began taking periodic shots of the cheese, with my first one from September 2020. I know I took earlier images, but I didn’t see the cheese as anything more than a humorous curiosity then, and so didn’t save them. It wasn’t until March 2021 that I made the decision to document the state of the cheese monthly, as well as make periodic check-ins every other week or so. I viewed the month of March as the anniversary of the installation of the cheese, and it felt right since that was when Mizzou closed down. In a way, the cheese was a physical artifact of the many ways in which COVID altered our experiences of life.

Over time, the cheese itself began to change. Flexing with the heat and humidity, cracking under the pressures fighting against its preservative-laced body, the cheese maintained its grip on the concrete. Something in the material nature of the porous wall and the glue-like substance of the cheese made their union not only possible, but hearty. By March 2022 the cheese was gnarly and swarthy, hung all over with dust and the debris of generations of spider webs. The darker coloration made me feel more secure that people wouldn’t see it.

This was important, because life was returning to the campus. The garage was being used more and more. By the fall semester, most people felt safe teaching and learning in masks. This was a tense time for me. I began to check on the cheese several times a week, certain that it would be gone one day. I took to obtaining photos of the cheese only when I would not be observed. I didn’t want my attention to a seemingly nondescript section of the garage to draw others near.

The Garage Cheese on March 14, 2023. Ballou.

I got a bit more intentional with the photography in 2023. The shot from March that year is particularly nice. I began to think the cheese really would make it to the four year mark. People encouraged me to post about the cheese, to make an Instagram account for it, even to mark it on maps. But I knew there would be time later to show folks where it had been. I wanted it to make four – maybe even five – years! As Thanksgiving passed, I felt more confident than ever. After the first day of graduate reviews on December 1st, 2023, I made a pass by the cheese for my December check-up. It looked robust, confident. It was ready to press on toward another anniversary upon the wall. So it was that when the second day of grad reviews concluded on December 8th, I took one of my grad students over to see the cheese. I figured I could share the glory with more people. Surely that would be okay.

THE CHEESE WAS GONE.

Astonished, I rushed out to investigate the scene. There, amid a thick mass of trash and various organic detritus, rested the cheese. It was in a gap between the wall and the floor, and it seemed to be intact. No one had abused this artifact; it had let go of the wall on its own. Its time was up. The race was won.

I carefully rescued the cheese. It was rough and hard, as dense as holding a fragment of bone. Yet, like bone, I perceived it would be brittle. Maybe it had been the dusty garage trash that provided a soft enough landing to save the cheese from breaking against the concrete. Whatever the reason, after nearly 45 months on the wall, the garage cheese was now mine!

The Garage Cheese, framed in a shadowbox on December 26, 2023. Ballou.

I quickly collated my photos of the cheese and obtained a simple shadowbox frame for it. Now safely transferred to the wall of my studio, the cheese can exist in perpetuity, assured the status of a protected relic. As part of the process of documenting and celebrating the garage cheese, I have created the GIF below. I did a modicum of image adjustment so that you can get a sense of the changes that happened over the course of the years. Of course, it’s not perfectly color-corrected, nor entirely aligned for precision, but you can definitely get the sense of how the cheese transformed.

While the cheese itself has left the Hitt Street Garage, there is something that remains behind: a kind of oily stain is still quite visible on the wall of the garage. If you look in this wide shot below, you can see it just a bit left of center. Follow the inner vertical line of the leftmost column downward, and you’ll notice the apostrophe-like arcing shape. That’s a ghostly shadow of the cheese, somehow still clinging to that precarious perch.

The location of the Garage Cheese, photo taken on December 26, 2023. Ballou.

Click below to take a look at a curated selection of the cheese. If you’d like to purchase a print of one of these images, send me $20 on Venmo (here), and I’ll mail it out to you. Just be sure to tell me which one you’d like.

The Cheese Garage, September 2020
The Cheese Garage, July 2022
The Cheese Garage, November 2022
The Cheese Garage, March 2023
The Cheese Garage, April 2023
The Cheese Garage, August 2023

The distance between months and years, and all that we did and saw and felt… in one image. Maybe I should do some risograph prints of these, too… On to 2024!

A final thought, as I sit here with family and smile at my cheese…

Here’s hoping your ’24 is joyful, safe, and peaceful. We know it probably won’t be, though. At least not for most of us. So why do I offer the above trifle about faux fromage? Why present some cast off cheese as a visual metaphor or point of access for meaning? Well, I think the greatest part of our human experience is in the realm of attention. I teach my students this, and I try to teach my own children it as well. When we are attentive to the world around us, when we believe in the value of observation and awareness, then we are most able to be both realistic and hopeful. It is willful ignorance or chosen obfuscation that breaks the social contract, that causes us to care less about each other and the world.

We are living in times of serious violence against not only people but against our ability to apprehend true things. We desire to be told what we want to hear, rather than what we ought to hear. We ignore what should be seen straight on, seeking instead things that distract us from beingness. These are our great sins, particularly in America. We have allowed our politicians to be criminals. We enable them and they stroke our egos in return. Our domestic and foreign policies – for all of our posturing to the contrary – are not “pro-life.” We have become the arm of death. We resist over and over the chance to do what is right, because we know that will make us feel a little uncomfortable. Our comfort is our chief aim, and it’s obvious.

In light of all of that, perhaps everyone would do better to pay close attention to their own version of garage cheese. I hope we can get started on putting our collective house back in order in 2024.

Peace.

Come so close that I might see…

Posted on by under Life

Recently, my friend Aarik (whom I haven’t seen in person in about two years, which is a travesty) made an intriguing post on Twitter. He was musing about the idea of publishing an anthology of reflections regarding an important single line from some song, film, poem, or other source. He suggested calling this journal Hold The Line and I’ve been thinking about the idea every day since I skimmed my eyes over his tweet.

It goes without saying that each one of us could offer many dozens of lines from the treasure trove we carry in our minds. Lord knows I’ve been moved by everything from scriptures to contemporary internet memes. When I glide back over my life, though, it’s clear that some lines are held more closely to my core – to the experiences they influenced – than others.

Lying in bed last night I decided to make an entry in Aarik’s theoretical journal. My Hold The Line for today (for right now, since probably it would be something else in 20 minutes), is from Mazzy Star’s 1993 masterpiece, So Tonight That I Might See.

“Come so close that I might see the crash of light come down on me.”1

There’s something so powerful in the idea that when we come together we approach transcendence: come so close that I might see. It’s a proposition, a hope. If/Then. If this other entity is close enough to my core, then perhaps I may experience a charged glimpse of something beyond me. Then it would also be within me, a kind of multiplicity that blows out me-ness with all-ness.

Even so, my perspective – my sensate awareness – is also central. This is like Annie Dillard’s “tree with the lights in it”2 or Moses’s burning bush; the intimate presence, both terrifying and awesome, brings astonishment. Come so close that I might be more than me. Ego death. Samadhi. A disappearance of masks and pettiness in lieu of some true (if only momentary) unity.

Let there be light – and it crashes.

There is a bit of an out-of-body charge to the order of operations in Hope Sandoval’s mumbled words, in the “gothic hallucination”3 of Roback’s droning guitar tone. From closeness to sight to the mystical crash of light. Closeness catalyzes an outside, transmundane experience. I see the light come down on me in that moment. Sharp, electric, like an accidental brush against a live wire or the vertigo of a hypnic jerk.

I have felt that pulsing disorientation a few times. With Robin, her blond bob, and the small of her back all those years ago. With Miranda, born like a bomb, a modern Minerva bursting fully-formed into new reality. Even last week, suddenly seeing a former student after years and almost bursting into tears over it.

Maybe the crash of light always carries tears along with it.

Cliché, I suppose. But also real experience and astonishment… moments of enlightenment brought on by the presence of another real person.

Album cover for Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See.

1) Mazzy Star. “So Tonight That I Might See.” So Tonight That I Might See, performance by Sandoval, Hope and David Roback, Capitol Records, 1993.

2) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York, NY: Harper, 1998. Page 35-36.

3) Moreland, Quinn. “Review – Mazzy Star: So Tonight That I Might See.” Pitchfork, Pitchfork, 14 June 2020, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mazzy-star-so-tonight-that-i-might-see/.

2017 Pride

Posted on by under Art, Life, news, Writing

I completed a number of projects in 2017 and started a few more. Setting goals and keeping an eye on the prize during the vicissitudes of daily life can be hard, but I’ve gotten better at it over the years (thanks mostly to my loving partner, Alison). I already mentioned stuff about my exercise routine, and posted about my exhibition of recent work (that opens today!).

Back in May I set some goals for the year while at the Wakonse Conference on College Teaching in Michigan. Here are my written goals:

I’m happy to say that I’ve worked to complete most of these items and even those I’ve not yet finished have been pushed forward. I’m glad, given how agitating 2017 was socially and politically, that at least in terms of family and my work I’ve been stable and focused. The results are things of which I am really proud.

Probably highest on my list is the publication of my essay On Scholarship: Empathic Attention, Holy Resistance. It appeared in SEEN Journal and explores the importance of attention in an environment of political vitriol and “fake news.” I hope you’ll pick up a copy and read it – it’s one of the best things I’ve written in years, and it shares space with artists and writers and thinkers I admire. I’m really thankful for the opportunity to have this piece out there.

A shot of the cover of the SEEN Journal and a copy of the first page of my essay. Above is a copy of The New Territory.

I am also super excited to be working on a piece for The New Territory. If you are a Midwesterner, you need to get this publication. I am working on a piece exploring the work of Joey Borovicka and adjacent ideas about interiority, Midwestern space, and solitude. I can’t wait to get it finalized and ready for the editors to sort through. Getting to write about key ideas and the work of others is very important to my identity as an artist and educator. I also just love being involved with publications like The New Territory and SEEN. They are labors of love and works of passion that really do the hard work of shoring up meaning, intellectual effort, and spiritual yearning.

I hope to continue this trend in 2018, as I’ve got the Promotion to finalize!

 

 

One Year After

Posted on by under Life

It has been a year since my heart attack. Since my cardiac arrest. Since the trauma I don’t remember and that my family saw. Since members of my family kept me alive until the EMTs arrived. Since the radical changes of diet and lifestyle. Since the shift in horizon.

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Three days before that I lost my big sister; a life of incredible value and service, gone. Two months afterward my estranged step-father died; a life wasted in self-concern and alcohol.

How would people have summed up my life one year later, if it ended that night?

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Since I didn’t go, I have to assess it myself. I know my life has been valuable. I know I have taken deep draughts of experience and thought. I have been astonished. I have been disappointed. I have known love and sacrifice. I have seen things that made me cry in sorrow and weep in happiness. I have tried and failed, then barely hoped and succeeded. I have yearned and yearned, in spite of cheesiness or irony. I have worked so hard and received so much through no merit of my own doing. I have believed and doubted. All through I have attempted to be honorable and careful, passionate and present. Sometimes I have succeeded.

img_0200I am SIMUL IUSTUS ET PECCATOR.

I am AGATHOKAKOLOGICAL.

I have tried to understand what it all means. I still don’t. But I think I have some sense of how it feels.

~

It feels a little like these songs (click the titles to listen):

 

At Last

I can say that I’ve lived here in honor and danger

But I’m just an animal and cannot explain a life

Down this chain of days I wish to stay among my people

Relation now means nothing, having chosen so defined

And if death should smell my breathing

As it pass beneath my window

Let it lead me trembling, trembling

I own every bell that tolls me.

 

Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

Driving home I see those flooded fields

How can people not know what beauty this is?

I’ve taken it for granted my whole life

Since the day I was born.

Clouds hang on these curves like me

And I kneel to the wheel

Of the fox confessor (on splendid heels).

And he shames me from my seat

And on my guilty feet

I follow him in retreat…

What purpose in these deeds?

Oh fox confessor, please,

Who married me to these orphaned blues?

“It’s not for you to know, but for you to weep and wonder

When the death of your civilization precedes you.”

Will I ever see You again?

Will there be no one above me to put my faith in?

I flooded my sleeves as I drove home again.

 

A Widow’s Toast

Specters move like pilot flames

Their widows toast at St. Angel.

Better times collide with now

The tears are warm, I feel them still.

They’ll heat to vapor and disperse

And cloud our eyes with weary glaze.

You raise your glass and may exclaim,

“I’ll put my hands on the truth, by God!”

But it’s faster, love, than you and me –

Faster than the speed of gravity.

That’s how it catches you from falling

And how it always, always, always slips away.

Specters move like pilot flames

Their widows toast at St. Angel.

Better times collide with now

And better times

And better times

Are coming still.

Neko knows what to say.

~

I find attention, clarity, and rightness in teaching. I find wonderful confusion in my art-making. I find solace and laughter in my wife. I find a strange wine of joy and frustration in my children. I feel both lost and found. I feel both at home (warm, in bed), and far away in the dark (clouds, wind). I’m in orbit around a great truth and yet my tether is strung out miles from safety.

Believe it or not, all of this is so much better than the 3 or 4 years before the heart attack.

I know that some would want me to declare something, some truth, some more faithful words, some thoughts that sound more spiritually centered. I’m sorry.

Today, I want to take the lessons – the cumulative astonishments of being – as they come. I want to have joy and camaraderie in my students. I want to be gentle and full of wonder with my children. I want to continue to cherish my wife. I want to be a better husband, father, son, brother, artist, teacher, mentor, helper, and friend.

No regrets. I have not loved every moment, but I have been given such grace and love. I’m thankful.

~

img_0164

The Mind’s I with Anne Harris

Posted on by under Art, Life

Over the last couple of days I had the great privilege and honor to get to work alongside Anne Harris on an iteration of her ongoing installation project, The Mind’s I (click here for more info). This version of the project took place at the University of Central Missouri. Two colleagues of mine who taught at Mizzou in the past and who earned their MFAs at Indiana University like I did – Melanie Johnson and Chris Lowrance – were involved as well, as were a number of other UCM faculty and students. I brought several of my grads along for one day of the project, then I went back to work again the next day. It was a great experience.


Anne Harris at work on the project on Saturday, November 4, 2016.


Zach Nutt and Nikos Karabetsos at work, November 3, 2016.


I focused on the abstract shaping of my head foreshortened in a mirror. The strange roundness of my neck was compelling; these are some of the first self-reflective observational/figurative works I’ve made since my heart attack in February.

Below: I also incorporated some linocut Cloud of Unknowing prints into a few of my works; I really like how they turned out.

Overall it was that bulbous shape I was interested in, and how the ceiling lights altered and occuluded what I could see of myself in the strange angle of the mirror.


All of my pieces are mixed media on paper, 11×10 inches, November 3 and 4, 2016.

As you can see in the panorama above, the works were arranged in a grid to fill the space, and each one included date and time information. The array of times were an important aspect of the installation, asking viewers to consider the ween and among the works and their makers. The sense of a shared space, with each person’s intentionality bent toward the question of perception and identity, was palpable.


My piece (center) is to the right of an Anna Harris drawing. Two Simon Tatum pieces project from the wall below.


It was particularly cool to see Anne working and arranging the installation of the works. On Friday, I got to spend several hours in conversation with her about tons of topics, from misogyny in art to adoption, from color theory to the goings on at SAIC (Anne teaches there, and I earned by BFA there in 20o1). It was an amazing time. Anne is smart, warm, and inclusive, and gave lots of attention to everyone who wanted to chat with her. It was such a treat to get to hang out with her!


Above are several more works by my students Nikos, Simon, Amy Meyer, and Guigen Zha.


Above: Honorary grad Simon at work. Below: our host, Melanie Johnson working a self portrait.


On Friday evening a group of us went to eat at Brown and Loe, a fantastic restaurant in Kansas City’s River Market area.


Thanks so much to Melanie for inviting me and my students to participate, and to Anne for the great conversation and generosity of spirit she has.

A Eulogy I Never Got To Give

Posted on by under Life

On February 14, 2016, my sister Denya died at age 47. After my mother’s tearful call, we went into robot mode and made plans to get back to central NY for the funeral. It’s always a trial to get packed, organized in the van, and on the road. It was more trying this time, though, thinking about the reasons for our trip. Part of what I was trying to work out was just what to think about losing Denya.

I was asked to speak a eulogy and I had been thinking about it during the drive – I had a good chunk of it formulated in my mind. So after the calling hours on the 17th of February, we went back up to our hotel room and I began writing down what I’d say.  At least that’s what I have been informed happened, because I had a heart attack in the hotel room fairly soon after arriving there that evening. I forgot much of what happened over the previous few days, with only brief snippets remaining.

Providentially, my wife was right there, as were the many EMTs, nurses, and healthcare professionals who were in our family or friends with my sister. Within minutes I was being worked on and transported to hospital. Though I am nowhere near 100%, every day feels like a bit more has returned.

So now I want to share the eulogy that I never got to give.

**

Denya was the definition of determination, clarity of vision, and kindness of heart. At 16, seeing that our stepfather was abusive, Denya decided to leave home and make her own way. She stayed with friends. She got herself to school and work. She did not allow this provisional stage to define her; she aimed toward college. She didn’t let herself get tripped up by small thinking. She didn’t fall into a spiral of foolish actions and relationships; she was wise. Continuing to work and support herself, Denya went to nursing school, eventually rising through the EMT ranks and working in the intense world of Emergency Room trauma.

imageDenya, age 4.

She grew in faith. She grew in family. She had seen her way through difficult situations at home. She worked toward a vision of education and work and made it happen. She found love in the stability and thoughtfulness of a strong, gentle, honorable man – a man who shared her vision for work and family, for faith and clarity of purpose. In marrying Timmy, Denya truly became an iconic example in my life.

imageDenya and Tim on their wedding day in 1993.

She had already been a great example of hard work and applied education, but now she was living out the sort of teamwork marriage to which I could aspire. Together, Denya and Tim built a home that was hospitable, secure, fun, and a stage for dreams. When I think back on Denya, that’s what I see: faith, family, and fun.

I also see someone who persevered through periods of intense physical and emotional pain – losing Cassandra; struggling with the effects of lupus constantly; and nearly dying when Cassilyn and Elisabeth were young. It was not merely going through these and other things that were important. It’s that she went through them with grace, strength, acceptance, and transformation. These qualities were already in her, and they were focused and made more potent through her experiences.

She – along with Tim – modeled long-suffering of physical pain like no one else I’ve known. She – along with Tim – showed us what good parenting could be: parenting with grace, fun, and high expectations. She – along with Tim – demonstrated gentle guidance, constant availability, and true enjoyment of their girls. She – along with Tim – lived life with joy and thoughtfulness. She – along with Tim – crafted a home life that nurtured not only their own family but also the families that touched theirs.

imageDenya with her girls.

So while her death is horrible and sad, and we wish we could have had many more years with her, in a very real way – at least to me – her death is not tragic. What I mean here is that nothing was wasted. She had no dead years, no years of lost potential. She redeemed the time. She made the most of what was given to her. There were no excuses in her life, no regrets. She didn’t live in anger or sorrow about what might have been. That is a triumphant life – a life full of meaning. It’s a life we can be thankful to have witnessed and been a part of.

Denya’s death is a huge loss. Yet each of us has been allowed to bear witness to her example, to her grace, and to her laughter in some way. Seeing her working at the Super Duper. Seeing her pursue her nursing education and succeed at it. Seeing her Camaro with the airbrushed roses on the sides. Hearing her infectious laugh. Watching her play the Red Queen in a high school production of Alice in Wonderland. Maybe you’re even one of the lucky ones who experienced her jumping out of the twilight shouting “I’M DA BREATHER!!!” at you, scaring you half to death.

imageAn airbrushed rose from the side of Denya’s Camaro.

I will miss you, Denya. I’ll miss your love and faith. I’ll miss your sense of humor and your grace. But I know that these things clearly live on in those who knew you, loved you, and built lives with you. We are so thankful to have had you with us for this time, and we know that you carry on.

imageA recent note from Denya.

**