Statistical Analysis by Ray Ogar

>>> COPYRIGHT 2005

Analog Statistics

NAME, ray ogar
FIXED PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES, blue eyes, sandy brown hair, 5’9”, glasses
VARIABLE PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES, weight fluctuates between 212–240 pounds, at times facial hair
FIXED RESIDENCE, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
ANALOG PHONE, XXX.XXX.XXXX
CELL PHONE, XXX.XXX.XXXX

Digital Statistics

LAST KNOWN EMAIL ADDRESS, cetapath@hotmail.com
SOME KNOWN ALTERNATE EGOS, demo, shapethrower, dot wreck, the rap shrew, dael, cichli, cetapath
ALTERNATE PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS, sometimes tattooed male youth living twenty years in the future, gender usually depends on context or need, occasionally long blond hair or dark oily hair cut short

SOME ALTERNATE DIGITAL RESIDENCES AND HANGOUTS, http://rayogar.com, http://cetapath.com, http://www.soundclick.com/rayogar, http://ducttapepress.com, http://uh.edu, http://collagemania.blogspot.com/2005/06/ray-ogar.html, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1419610929/qid=1125949757/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-8006272-9771050?v=glance&s=books, http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/xopher/product/tales/aphasia.html, http://www.math.uh.edu/~mike/patterns/pdf2000/rayogar/index.html, http://www.kathykelley.net/uhsite/alumni.htm, http://www.lorenholyoke.com/links.html, http://www.talkaboutalternative.com/group/alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, http://23channel.sub.jp/blog/archives/2005/06/post_125.html, http://ampdistro.serveftp.net/cetapath_recordings/cr042_ray_ogar_-_again,_last_time,_destroy_you_(2004)/, http://alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo

Statistical Analysis

I was born in 1973 in southern Illinois. Fortunately, my attachment to this single physical location didn’t last very long. Shortly thereafter I was equipped with a yellow plastic suitcase and began to move around with my parents until we wound up stationed along the Texas coast. It wasn’t until later that I began to make a few overt motions outside the house that has become my thirty year anchor. Sometimes my movements were specific and locatable via credit card use or transactions I had incurred by purchasing something using a debit card. For a few weeks in 1999 a GPS satellite would have found me near an archealogical dig in Wyoming or ancient Pueblo architecture in New Mexico. At one point I was driving at 115 miles per hour in Utah during a great power outage on the west coast. I was merely a dot on a line waiting to find an endpoint big enough to put me up for the night.

Despite my ties to the analog world and despite occasionally needing to acknowledge the needs of my physical form, I deliberated to make an alternate life for myself online. As many people understand, the internet is a slightly different realm of geometry—for me it appears to contextually curl in on itself like a celebrity waiting to relate to the next great tragedy of reality. Over the last fifteen years of my conscious awareness I have watched the internet evolve from a series of two-dimensional screens composed of crude graphics (this was information crawling between mainframes with geologic speed), to its more contemporary, lithe form–always on, mobile and trying to take over the world by piggybacking itself onto cell phones. For me, the internet is THE attempt to simulate reality.

Early on I tried out different ways of controlling the analog world. At a young age, science seemed the best method. First, I steeped myself in the codes and ciphers of math formulae. But I got so lost that I discovered I was abstracting into somebody other than myself. Each time I used science in school, I found I reacted by making a collage or piece of art. I was cutting pieces of the world down around me and reshaping them into some version I could handle, control and manipulate at my casual whim. So I forgot math, it had too many rules, too many protocols and I began to step sideways into graphic design. At this time, I of course was still hunting for the heart of the internet. Unfortunately this billion headed serpent continued to elude me. It quietly slickened itself. The online world slowly began simulating the analog world in a bad way. Shortly thereafter I began creating new identities to explore the beast. Sometimes I was Shapethrower, a rough male youth and music maker bent on turning graffiti into sound; at other times, I was Demo, an improper blond female made of ceramic and mostly modeled after an artist friend of mine. These were personalities that would let me slip around the online world half-noticed. This was the 1990s, and this was when design was vacillating like the improbability of tying down an electron’s speed and position at the same time. What was I to do? I look back and realize that at that time I was hunting the roots of me more than the internet. So I fell further into the idea that design could be my tool to change the world. Yet I always crawl back to science. A few years later my desire to understand genetics flourished as well as my grasp of the audio sample and music making software. If you look real close, if you strain to make the connections, you will see that for each new idea I pick up on, I am really only doing the same thing over and over again. Sampling the world around me to remake it into my vision. When I think about it, I may only have one story to tell, it is about a hacker/musician that uses genetics to capture the meaning of the internet through cell phone technology.

I try to think of each piece of design I have ever done. Each project, each stage seems to be a tiny tool that I have created for my own use at a later time. For each thing that I make, I am really only tweaking the way I want to see the world. I am a designer stuck and ever-fixed in my own version of the future. I want to reshape tomorrow. But I want the future to remain analog. When I look back, all my design is me sewing objects into reality—making sure something attaches my idea to the physical world. As a designer, my desire is to make things, objects. Whether it is a book or a poster or perhaps a piece of clothing, I always manage to render my ideas into a material form. I watch movies with fascination, I love to listen to music, but each of these durational events evaporates like speech; I still desire their analog forms, cds and dvds. Perhaps I am stuck in transition, in neither yesterday nor tomorrow. Perhaps I am the little pixelated ball that passes between the rectangular rackets in the video game Pong. Most of the time I just bounce back and forth. Of course, I fear that moment when I will actually go off the playing field and get lost in the nothing between the television screen and the power cord.

So the internet is my enemy. It is my nemesis. It stands for all that is virtual, all that is broken and facile. I take on alternate egos to infiltrate it and to spy on how it tries to model the world. As a creature, the internet always gathers information, absorbs reality and catalogs the present. But, as a designer I have the power to simulate what might be. Though I have the ability to make new things, I do best at supposing and suggesting. What will the internet become? Is the cell phone its secret pawn? Sometimes around two in the morning, barely asleep, I find myself in a state of half-way, nearly and almost. The not-quite tickles at my mind; project ideas constantly bake in my brain. And I realize this affords me the ability to make design that comments. I critique. For I fear technology and its unconsidered consequences. I fear that the internet may already have uploaded the world into its own brand of nothingness.