Michael Anthony Bohacz - Website Index

Mike's picture My name created with my own hand

Hello and welcome to my World Wide Website. I'm a resident of the city of Chicago, Illinois, a state in the United States of America.

I consider myself a fringe transmedia conceptual artist and have experimented with all kinds of media: drawing, performance, writing, music, painting, moviemaking, game design. I'd love it if you would check out what I've got going here. This site will serve to put my work into some kind of order and I will continually update it until I die.

I'd also like to say a word here about global climate change brought about by humanity. In the mid-1980s I became a nonscientist member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. I was made aware of what we then called the greenhouse effect. I've been communicating with everyone I can about this situation since that time.

1/21/2024

I feel really good about the music that Ralph Warchol, Mike Davis and I recorded back in the late 1970s / early 1980s. I've made the recordings public. You can hear them at this link for my audio work in progress: My Audio Autobiography Part 3: Adult Years.

10/8/2023

This morning I woke up dreaming a dream that I had dreamt the morning before but had forgotten. That I dreamt this dream yesterday could, of course, only be part of this morning’s dream seeing as I couldn’t remember what I dreamt yesterday morning.

My dream occurs in the Star Trek universe where a game, akin to Bucky Fuller’s World Game, takes hold of enough beings in the universe that it leads to peace and harmony everywhere. Those that reject the game become rogue elements akin to the pirates I envisioned in the Alter Boy universe. As I’m waking and still groggy, I note that the game could affect the Star Wars universe as well and perhaps any other?

8/1/2023

I asked ChatGPT Timothy Leary’s “ultimate” question. The question was “What is the question for which life is the answer?” Dr. Leary has extraterrestrials ask the residents of Earth this question in his novel What Does WoMan Want? The Earth hangs in the balance based on the answer. ChatGPT’s answer:

The question for which "life" is often considered the answer is the philosophical concept known as "the meaning of life." People have contemplated this question for centuries, and it remains a subject of ongoing debate and introspection. The quest to find meaning in life is deeply rooted in the human experience, and various religions, philosophies, and belief systems offer different perspectives on this fundamental question. Some argue that life's meaning is to find happiness and fulfillment, others believe it is to serve a higher purpose or to seek knowledge and understanding. Ultimately, the answer to this question may vary from person to person, depending on their beliefs, values, and individual experiences.

My video What Is The Question For Which Life Is The Answer? which I shot as a student at SAIC in 1980, has people with much more interesting answers.

7/17/2023

My video The Machines Possessed Me (v1.5) won Best U.S. Experimental Short in the July 2023 Austin International Art Festival. YAY!

7/4/2023

I got up at 4:30AM to use the bathroom. On the way I noticed our cat Goji staring intently out a back window of Trish's studio. I entered the room to get closer to see what he might be staring at. Usually, he'd sense I was in the room and at least break his attention to check out what I'm doing. This time he did not. He was riveted to whatever he was looking at. I didn't see anything like an animal or moth, just the regular stuff on our back porch. If memory serves, he was still staring out the window when I went to bed. Later that day I'm pleased to discover that an episode of "Abductions" finally gets some recognition, YAY!:

My videos Abductions with the Alter Boy: Robot Taboo Module 3, Arise Robot Minds (v1.2) and The Machines Possessed Me (v1.5) all came in as semi-finalists in the Austin International Art Festival.

6/29/2023

Trish notices Goji staring at the fireplace again. He loses interest quicker this time.

6/8/2023

Our new cat, Gojira Panther, seemed to be strangely attracted to our nonused fireplace. I checked the flue to see if some animal was rooting around up there. We couldn't pick up anything out of the ordinary with our own eyes nor ears. Goji, however, was entranced with something. He spent many hours in rapt attention to something in that fireplace, even going so far as to recline in it to be nearer to whatever. He didn't seem to be interested in any odor but his eyes and ears were riveted. After many hours he did finally lose interest.

5/26/2023

Escherichia coli infected me with a painfully debilitating, near 2 month long illness.

3/3/2023

My music video Arise Robot Minds (v1.2) ran in the 2023 MidWest WeirdFest.

1/20/2023

My videos The Machines Possessed Me (v1.5) and Arise Robot Minds (v1.2) both came in as semi-finalists in the Sicily Art Cinema Festival.

1/13/2023

My videos The Machines Possessed Me (v1.5) and Arise Robot Minds (v1.2) both came in as semi-finalists in the Berlin Shorts Award.

1/3/2023

Trish and I brought home our new cats from Paws. They estimated the black cat Mulligan was 2 years old and the orange cat Paxton was 7 months old. Trish renamed Paxton to Tang and his estimated birthday is June 3, 2022. I renamed Mulligan to Mr. Panther and his estimated birthday is January 3, 2021. We had to return Tang because he was making Mr. Panther miserable with his play.

12/19/2022

I’ve put many finished “Abductions with the Alter Boy” episodes on YouTube because we can more easily enter competitions from that platform. Here’s a link to the episodes: Robots and Reptiles Theater YouTube Playlist .

12/20/2022

My videos The Machines Possessed Me (v1.4) and Arise Robot Minds (v1.2) both came in as semi-finalists in the Paris International Short Festival.

11/29/2022

My music video Arise Robot Minds (v1.2) has won an Accolade Global Film Competition Award of Recognition in the Music Video and Remixes / Mashups and Concept categories. Also, my video The Machines Possessed Me (v1.5) was an Official Selection in the Experimental Short category.

11/18,20/2022

My music video Arise Robot Minds (v1.2) ran in The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival in the Best Sci-Fi/Horror and Psychedelic/Transpersonal Short categories.

6/2/2022

The Abductions with the Alter Boy show is now in high definition.

5/20/2022

This was the event day of the San Francisco Arthouse Short Festival. My video The Machines Possessed Me (v1.4) came in as a semi-finalist in the Best Experimental Short category.

5/8/2022

Happy 100th birthday to my mom Martha Bohacz! Virtually the whole family gathered to celebrate her life at the Old Route 66 Family Restaurant. It was wonderful to see everyone and I’m sure Mom was pleased that we were all together. The Zoom part didn't quite work, it was hard to hear.

3/16/2022

Trish tells me her dream she had last night. We own an old white cat and this cat was getting very thin from illness. The cat was with my mother for a while and it came back to health under her influence. It became happy, walking around with its tail in the air and eating very heartily. When she told me of her dream I related to her how of all the people I’ve known, my mother represented to me the truest ideal of the healing Christian. Tears came to my eyes when I related this.

12/4/2021

Today I feel I locked in my communications running on all cylinders. I bring online my email ‘alterboy@abductionswiththealterboy.com' about a month after putting ‘greenskull@skullclub.net' out (1st Skull Club meeting in decades occurred on Sat. 10/30/21).

5/24/2021

This morning I poured hot coffee from our coffee maker pot (that was still brewing) into Trish’s cup. She takes it black. Then I poured what I thought would be hot coffee into my cup with a little bit of creamer in the cup already. On the way to bringing Trish her cup I tasted my coffee and it was cold. Trish dipped her finger in and confirmed it. The cream, this amount, had never affected the temperature of my coffee before. Subsequent cups of mine that morning turned out hot. Trish and I are both mystified by this. She’s been able to explain away the other phenomenon I’ve told her about and that she saw herself (invisible fan blades) but this one stumps her.

5/23/2021

Trish has me read an article in the April 12 issue of The New Yorker titled “Ghost Walls” about Chinese reeducation camps in Xinjiang. On page 36 I read “To harness these disparate forms of surveillance, it was necessary to centralize them– a problem that had been foreseen at the outset of Xinjiang’s People’s War. In 2015, the Chinese state-security apparatus began building the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, where the streams of information could converge.” On page 48 I read “In the summer of 2017, the authorities unveiled the Ürümqi Cloud Computing Center, a supercomputer that ranked among the fastest in the world. With the new machine, they announced, image data that once took a month to process could be evaluated in less than a second. Its thousands of servers would integrate many forms of personal data. State media called the new machine “the most powerful brain.”

The term IJOP reminds me of the original The Outer Limits episode “O.B.I.T.” and the Ürümqi Cloud Computing Center reminds me of the original The Prisoner series episode “The General” in particular but the whole series in general.

5/17/2021 morning– EPIC DREAMERY

Dr. Timothy Leary visits my dream again. This time he is in the form of a very creepy bug-spider. He has the characteristics of a Scutigera coleoptrata, or house centipede. He’s being held captive by a lesbian and I am called to help him escape. He and his vehicle, a large, psychedelic camper, and I have pulled up to the lesbian’s gate at her compound and find it to be locked by a Gordian Knot. Timothy frightens and creeps me out by spreading the wide portion of his centipede legs very near my face. His legs don’t look like, but have the psychedelic feeling of, a beautiful peacock feather. He creeps me out further by crawling across my body to my left ear, where he tells me what to say to the lesbian at the gate. She’s eventually convinced by what I say to her via Timothy and she undoes the knot herself. We are now free to travel in Tim’s psychedelic camper across the continent to California, Tim’s destination.

At this juncture I feel that we are on an epic journey of adventure and I need to be sure that I’m ready for the commitment. I’m in a seat at the front of the camper and I’m not conscious of who’s driving. Timothy is hanging out in a web near my right shoulder. This installment of our episodic adventure has us stop at a roadside mall for provisions. We find ourselves trapped in the mall by a gate with a latch on it. This latch is overseen by three young women or girls that don’t seem very sexy. Timothy crawls to my ear to tell me what to say to the girls to have them free us by opening the latch. Three very sexy women walk by us as Timothy is speaking into my ear. I want to turn my head to gape at the three sexy women, then notice that Timothy is taking no notice of the women. This seems to me uncharacteristic of Timothy’s former self, as if getting the three non-sexy girls to open the latch is all he’s focused on this moment.

I wake and tell the dream to Trish. She found the dream fascinating and related to me it reminded her of the themes in the original The Outer Limits series that often presented ugly extraterrestrials as having their hearts in the right place. Last night she went to bed as I was staying up watching interviews on the making of the series on our bluray set.

4/19 or 20/2021

I stopped for lunch and turned on the TV. Deciding which channel, I thought “I’d like to see Tom Laughlin in one of his 1950s westerns” so I turned on MeTV. Wagon Train came on and there was Tom Laughlin starring as the Laramie Kid or something like that. He played Agnes Moorhead’s son and was killed off early in the episode but still, that was pretty bizarre.

4/17/2021

Niko was lying between Trish and I when she was dying on that last night. I was on my back looking up to the ceiling of the dark room as I usually do but a strange phenomenon took my attention. Our ceiling fan, which I’ve starred at innumerable times and has four fan blades, this time only showed 2. It never looked like this before. The right 2 blades of the 4 were showing normally, while the left 2 blades were missing. They were only suggested as being there lightly, as if someone had used Photoshop to lower the opacity of those blades to 5 or 10 percent. When I looked again the left 2 blades were back as I had always seen them. I thought Trish was asleep so I didn’t bother to point this out to her. The next day I brought this to Trish’s attention and she suspected something wrong with my vision. Then last night after I got into bed the phenomenon returned. This time it seemed to effect only 1 left blade. I was able to call Trish into our darkened bedroom (she was reading in the living room) and she saw it. Then suddenly, while she was in the room, it changed back to normal as if some lighting element coming through a window had changed. Then Trish was able to rationalize that something was infecting the light thru the window. If that’s what it is it only started the night of Neko on her deathbed. I had never noticed it before. We’ll be watching to see more evidence of what’s going on.

4/16/2021

Neko passed away this morning between 5am and 7:15am. No more suffering for our Cute Kitty!

4/12/2021

Dad legally adopted me 50 years ago today.

1/23/2021

It was before the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, that I read and studied about the fall of Babylon. The amazing book I’m studying is Craig R. Koester’s Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, one of the Yale Anchor Bible series. The fall of Babylon is from the Fifth Cycle page 696 “Interlude Continued: Fallen Is Babylon (18:1-24).” The next day ‘fallen, fallen, is Babylon the Great’ was reinforced in my mind by the attack on the Capitol. When I jumped the gun, threw together the 666 album by Aphrodite’s Child and uploaded it as my unfinished chronicles for June 1972, my old friend Mike Davis replied and wanted off the mailing list.