Though all of my Neon Abstracts are numbered rather than named, I was tempted to call this one “Nova Swing” in reference to a brilliant science fiction novel that somehow reminds me of this image. The novel in question, what I’d call the authentic Nova Swing, is the most-recent (to my knowledge) piece of science fiction by the British writer, M. John Harrison. It’s the quirky, wildly inventive, and snazzy follow-up to the quirky, wildly inventive and snazzy novel Light. Harrison has been around for a while, but I’ve known of his works for only a short time. He’s quite well known for a series of interconnected and oddly recursive short novels that take place in the fictional city of Viriconium. Though well-known (and apparently well-loved by UK audiences) Viriconium did not reach American attention until the omnibus collection, known simply as Viriconium appeared with little fanfare on the shelves of Borders Books in the USA. Viriconium as an omnibus collection is essentially Harrison’s large-scale introduction to American readers, and a nice re-introduction to UK readers, as this omnibus contains a number of shorter, and previously unpublished Viriconium works. Also, for those interested, Viriconium is one of those marvelous and phantasmagorical world-cities that takes its rightful place beside New Crubozon, Bellona (the Samuel R. Delany Bellona and not the real one) and…yeah, I’ll just go on and say it, Pekkur (or Agara, the country stretched around Pekkur like…well…whatever Agara is like.) Where Viriconium is dark and oddly recursive, Light is as brilliant as its name implies, and its follow-up, Nova Swing is a wonderful noir-ish SF bebop fever-dream on steroids, laughing gas, and a touch of something vaguely radioactive. It’s my kinda book. I can’t say that this particular Neon Abstract has very much to do with the work of M. John Harrison. It has nothing to do with Nova Swing. The name, however, seems to fit—at least in my brain. The image itself, is derived from light-streaks I’d created a couple of weeks ago, while wandering around (at night) with Corey. I’d gotten it into my mind to create a number of such abstracts, but I needed more stock. I was tired of night-time neon, sodium-vapor streetlight, and the headlights/tail-lights of cars, and so I decided to shift my focus to something else: mercury vapor parking lot lights, fluorescent light from various windows, and whatever other light sources I could find and substantially blur. As I tweaked and layered and layered and tweaked this image, I thought of Nova Swing simply because the pattern emerging from the large amount of postwork came to remind me of a variable star throwing off it’s outer layers. That’s where the nova bit came in. The hypothetical star in question wasn’t swinging, but oh well…Nova Swing stuck in my mind and so there you have it: the officially unofficial name of this image. I liked the complexity that emerged from the number of layer-copies I’d stacked one on top of the other—rotating, rotating, and rotating each successive layer, and though I liked the initial color combination, I decided to “warm it up” a bit, though I’m glad I kept it cooler than the first couple of images in this particular category. (The only real postwork in this image is layer-repetition, layer-mode tweaking, and a bit of contrast/saturation twiddling...and not much else. The idea in this series is to let the camera and jiggling motion do most of the work.) As always, I hope that you enjoy this image (at least half as much as I enjoyed making it) and I hope that you’re all having a great week. And again, a BIG thank you for the birthday greetings and dedications I’ve received, and for any comments this little neon doohickey gets.