A Voyage Beyond Stars

-Summer 2009

How My Friend and I Arrived at the Other End Of The Universe pt2

We found the alien eyes of a cosmic angel, and stared into it.

We found ourselves still consciously intact but in another dimension.

After turning a few corners through the Halls of What we found our metaphysical navigating spaceship. It was upside down though.

There we GO

-We found the Shrine of Infinity in this combined essence of the guider and the destination. Then everything dissappeared. The End?

All photos taken by Alex Gaesser, Summer 2008

-Boards of Canada, ‘I Saw Drones’

The Beach Trip and Tales of the Electric Forest

-Egypt calling, 2007

(note: all St. Pete beach photos below were stolen from the internet for poetic purposes)

-The chairs for lifting off

-Ocean Star

An arrival on an unexpected edge of the world
Where sunsets paint beautiful visions across the sky
And honeycomb magic begin to foreshadow
Of the night of the hivemind wonder to come
Orange told pink not to be so yellow
While the clouds yelled, “look over at the purple flashing lightning bolts
that are striking the sand at the corner of your eyes”
And to my amazement the electricity appeared everywhere
As I watched safely in ocean field of dreams
A basking combination of water and wind flowing through
To the point where body and ocean combined
Towards endless vastness of waves and forms
“This is where it ends?” a return to a vacuum of hydricity
Where all things of the land and sky are forgotten
Until from the plunges of the deep, matter is released
And brought into new form back onto shore
And this is how I got back after turning around

-the Robot Tower overlord that was “looking out for us”

As an emitting, flashing light glowed the new sands in front of me
Buildings along the shore, pulsing with club colors in their every window
Straight into the pupil of my eye, leading towards the teachings of the electric forest
“Insight me, enlighten me, energize me, electrify me”
Never let these trees of energy stop growing
Parallel to this were the inner workings towards inner land
Where things are going on, but does it know what’s going “on?”
It seems to be that maybe the edge of the world is always calling
To give every individual a piece of it’s own mind away from fabrications
And as birds turned shooting stars stroked across the midnight sky
I came to the thought, that maybe matter should return towards a greater edge
Towards stars and other systems beyond our own fabrics of understanding
For no other purpose other than being a part of a bigger vacuum of space/time
Slowly gazing back down, looking at humanoid formations in sand dunes
I realized I was not ready to get sucked into this ocean portal quite yet
I returned back home since it was all I had left to fully understand

Soothsayers and Stargazers

Starting this summer you’ll see some posts of an online comic I’m working on called ‘Soothsayers and Stargazers.’ I’d like to consider it as a mix between the Metroid videogame series with Lewis Carrol’s ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ and themes of nature/order (yin and yang), dystopias, rebirth, growth, evolution, and universal concepts all inspire the direction of the story, all through the eyes of a little girl, named Realm. Environments will be from digital photos or scanned magazine landscapes and characters and objects will be drawn out and combined.

Realm and her only friend Geist, a highly advanced spaceship with AI and transformational powers, have each other but feel really alone in the universe and are clueless about their own origins. They search throughout the Milky Way galaxy for life on other worlds and often find ruins of a past civilation on planets and space colonies. It isn’t until they come across an ancient yet advanced relic on Earth (which Geist can interpret a virtual reality simulation from the planet’s past) that they begin to find other destinations where life or other answers are to be discovered. More similar relics are found and virtual prophets reveal to Realm not only how a planet’s self destruction came to be but also helps her grow and learn from an entire race’s fallout.

Realm – main character/heroine; a young girl who is unfamiliar with her past who travels throughout space and lifeless planets with her only friend, a highly advanced spaceship equipped with a high level of AI. She is curious, adventurous, glowing and kind. Throughout the story as she grows up, she wants to learn what it is to be human, how to love and the backbone of life and the universe. She becomes more mature and calm as she becomes older yet still possesses a will to find other life besides herself. She’s somewhat of an inspiration from Final Fantasy 6’s character Relm, a little girl that can make anything she paints come to life.

Geist – ‘sidekick;’ an advanced spaceship built with a high level of AI that allows it (him) to communicate with Realm and understand her and her emotions, although he cannot process these feelings and same ambitions himself. That being said, both Geist’s systematic, ordered thinking and Realm’s emotion driven, instinctual motives and curiosity help balance each other out; they only have each other, therefore they need each other. Similar  to Realm, Geist also doesn’t have a detailed background of his origins, although at least was programmed to carry out a very important mission involving Realm (as a form of babysitting at first in a way) to collect relics among once life thriving planets in order to give “lessons” to Realm, which not even Geist can comprehend by himself.

More characters? Maybe. Or maybe not…. you’ll have to find out to see. I’m done with the story’s main premise, so unless you get me inebriated and ask me about the comic’s whole story, I’ll have a post for ‘Soothsayers and Stargazers’ hopefully every week, so keep your eyes peeled for it sometime soon! If I’m running behind I’ll at least have some sketches and character/planet profiles to post, since everything’s still in a very early stage. Enjoy some Brian Eno and Robert Fripp for now>>>>