January 2009 – Taking a Closer Look

First of all, we at Synchronized Chaos welcome our family of readers to the New Year and send best wishes for creativity, prosperity, and a fertile imagination. Thank you all very much for your feedback, comments, submissions, and thoughts – and we welcome anyone new to the project. Hopefully you will find much to fascinate and encourage you within this site, as well as inspiration for your own creative projects.

This first month of the year saw fewer submissions than usual, but what we received is unique and distinctive. Our artists and writers chose to study our world in greater detail, stopping to take a closer look at everyday or unique phenomena.

M.R.C. of Chaos Creations takes some concepts common to much of poetry (conflicts between the creative individual and society, rejection, peace, death/tombstones) but explores them in fresh ways through unusual plays on words and linkages between ideas. Her speaker poses the question of how far communication can go towards combating brutality and social injustice…and questions whether fragmenting oneself and one’s painful memories can truly bring inner peace or psychological survival for those who must live through violence.

Mateo Jaimes attempts to convey specific, immediate physical realities through abstracting exactly what is most noticeable – and most changeable – about the scenes he represents.  Momentary light and color combinations come through in his oil and acrylic renderings of eucalyptus forests. He also explores what communication might look like to people developing language and symbols on their own without influence from larger cultures…a high concept thought experiment taking the form of physical symbols grounded in the subjects’ possible everyday world. Plenty of artists have looked at forests, nature, even the South Seas – yet the immediacy and the ability to abstract the essence of a subject without losing touch with its physicality and placement in time sets Jaimes apart.

Mark Fischer translates whale and bird song recordings into visual pieces based on their frequencies through a detailed mathematical process. His work looks at what is at once everyday (many people claim to love nature, go whale watching, visit the beach, draw or buy whale/bird images) yet foreign (how much do we truly know, even the best scientific minds among us, about the life within our sky and oceans, beyond the terrestrial plane humans inhabit?) He represents natural phenomena in a unique way that reflects the  physical properties of the sound, taking a closer look at the animal recordings to discover possible patterns, order, and beauty.

We encourage you to further explore the natural and psychological landscapes conveyed by Fischer, M.R.C. Creations and Jaimes this month, and to leave comments and feedback for our contributors. Marcel Proust believed the process of discovery was more a matter of having new eyes (greater awareness of different aspects of our world) than necessarily new surroundings. These works beg to be explored with ‘new eyes’ and their creators hope to enhance our appreciation and our sense of wonder for our multifaceted universe.