Kima Wheel, Roundhouse, Curtain Call and a Beautiful Heresy

Thus begins the beginning of that which I spoke in time recent past, for it seems now I am ready to begin, and thus do I begin …

I stand in Roundhouse – a kind of Globe – which is, as informing name tells, a circular place, where space is bent into curved form, and lying within there sits for some moments in time, another round construction known by the name of (Ron Arad’s) Curtain Call, creating an inner space and an outer one too, within the curved space that I have just entered into. And what appears is what you want to appear, made so by the projecting power of technology which is a means of displaying creation and seeing sounds, as you will soon, by these revealing words, find.

Kima Wheel is a wave from the imagination that comes forth specifically to fall upon the 360 degrees of canvas called Curtain Call, which unlike a normal curtain is not a barrier to freedom of movement of performers or audience, who move in time and space as this is not a strict classical Ancient Greek separation. The wave this time is a wheel of poetry, and comes by virtue of Anelema Group, which one might say, is a different way of looking at that which passes through our lives daily, often unnoticed, but without which there could be no life at all, which, if you care to see, is more than just science and technology, or art made with such.

Thus now I have set forth the scene in kind of Prologue form, befitting of the theatrical context which now before you will unfold.

It’s about emotions it seems – feelings, all very subjective and quite a contrast to most art-science and art-technology, being as they often are, though few can see, but manifestations of a certain strand of Enlightenment thinking, the stinking corpse of which lies rotting all about. Yet Enlightened minds sense only reek, and do not see that they are the corpse that decays, which is giving off the decomposing smell.

In the world – another Globe – here and there, come glimpses of a new and different age slowly taking form, being illuminated by light from eastern directions originating – some dare to call it the Age of Tao. That’s me, referring to myself. I am inclined to be self-referencing at times.

But there must surely be others as well, who can see that Europe’s time – the age of the West – is done, and to go with it too, must be those Abrahamic secular beliefs – that’s Western Capitalism and Western Science and Technology, if you are wondering. Western Communism is already just about gone, and what goes next, is the rest, and by my hand will their demise be hastened, and thus will strange beliefs be despatched to the past where they do belong. ’Tis about the power of the pen, which becomes even more powerful when combined with other forms of expression as you will see anon!

Now is the beginning of the age of the universality of humankind. So no more cultural colonialism please – are your listening you people in Brussels, Washington DC and all those other cities of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, where you still foolishly pursue those dated dreams of making all the world European? How does the thought of a Taoist Science and Technology make you feel? In the East there is the West, and in the West there is the East. It’s not a binary, or a duality, but a unity – a unity of opposites, which your fragmented minds cannot easily digest. That goes for art-science and art-technology too, which are ever so binary because of the dominance of Western minds that see only such separations. Everything is connected – can’t you see?

Where to look is the empty space so to speak, waiting to be filled by those who dare to pursue a different dream. You will also find that what comes forth will be very Kantian too! That’s another dimension to it. ’Tis a very beautiful heresy built on a different foundation to that which Western minds construct.

Back to the curved space and then comes the moment – it’s the aesthetics of participation – so the audience becomes, for a time, the creating force – let’s not here bother with the rhetoric and the postmodern ideology for this is already history, and I am very much alive. This is the moment to put the world back together again in different form, and so do I raise from the dead, theory too. To see, to know, to understand, to find something new, and in doing so to become different people – these are the goals that I pursue.

Continuing – I am back to the curved space again: hesitantly at first, I begin to speak those words that come from my own shaping hand and with eye I see, images formed, while being immersed in my own sound, and that of others too. This imaging of sound I discovered before appearing is made possible by virtue of technology, of neural networks, produced from research of the type that leads to PhDs. And the emotional moment is then transformed, and cognitive becomes, as I know that once again I am creating from words, visual images, for whatever reason do I in this strange scriptovisual process participate. It’s something to do with morphogenesis rather than morphostasis, if to cybernetic concepts you are inclined.

And then I am lost in my own world of the mind, afterwards thinking: was that the intention or is this serendipitous action? Interactive art is a place where the unexpected sometimes happens. To be or not to be that is the question, whether it is better to be highly scripted, or very open, or somewhere in between? It is after all, just like a play – Act 1, Scene 1, enters …(but not necessarily linear). It all depends upon what you want to achieve is the answer to the question.

Then I want a pen and desk and to start exploring, but this is not the venue for such things, yet evidently it becomes possible to compose images with words, hence my intuitions are confirmed, for: in the beginning was the image, and from the image came forth the word, and to image doth the word return. That’s what the image called Genesis in Reverse (on the homepage of my web site) is saying. But why is the question? As I said it’s something to do with morphogenesis and the making of something transformational – most art-science and art-technology is not, but I keep looking for something that might be, or have the potential for such. It is a long, long quest. Did I find sight of journey’s end in Kima? Only time will tell, but Kima in its many different manifestations, bringing together at different times, music, performance, immersion, dance, poetry, technology, sound, image and synaesthesia, does make for something very different to the normal explorations of an art space that is now at least six decades old. And being so old it has become a source of much dissatisfaction within me, as indeed has literature which is even older – thus another reason deep within for the quest that I have embarked upon.

Thus then finding that I am not anymore able to compose, I take on a different role, exploring through vicarious interaction that which lies around. Then it is done and I am gone to another place in London, where some conceptual art from the past lies waiting to be explored, and there I do find, more information about the image and the word combined – another serendipitous moment in time.

Intriguing possibilities is the ending phrase that comes forth from of this waltzing encounter with word and image, bound together in ways it seems that still lie unseen.

II.1

Enter Marshall McLuhan and Paul.

PAUL: Were DG CONNECT not listening? No they were not, for it is the funding of art that thou should do, not the development of unconventional and compelling products with under-funded afterthoughts, otherwise known as artists, in tow. And you get what you get, but you can get some interesting things if you know how to create the infrastructure to enable this. It seems I do and DG CONNECT do not, which is one of the reasons I engaged in critiquing DG CONNECT and what they did, and much more as well.

MARSHALL: I see many people do quote me – thus do they say, quite often, that the medium is the message. But it seems that is all they say. Do they not understand media? The point, most important, that I also made, is that our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. Feel free to quote me.

PAUL: And be it true that this thing that we now call STEM, that too is media?

MARSHALL: It be true as any truth be true. Art-science and art-technology too, for these are media as well. Better look therefore and see beyond the numb stance.

PAUL: We do.

Exeunt.

Enter Julia.

JULIA: Forgive us if we seem to be, that which you do not wish us to be, but the world of STEM, and its funding of art, are problems writ large for those who wish to see, for they have their own agenda grounded in morphostasis, and silent narratives too, which we are able to hear, for we walked among them unseen, and in preparation, spent much time while growing up, learning how to see – and what we see are little children playing in the rye, blindly unaware that they dance on the edge of doom. Now they dance with artists too. Better catch them lest they fall. So back to morphogenesis again! Thus we engage in a beautiful heresy and bid welcome to a time that surely must be what humanity will come to see as the inevitable turning, for no age lasts for an eternity.

Exit.

A change of direction

My first blog was published on 7^th July 2013. Since that date I have published a blog every Sunday without missing one entry. This constitutes a lot of writing, but the reasons that lay behind this activity have now become clear to me, and there is nothing further to be gained from this exercise. It is time to move on. Hence I will no longer be publishing a weekly blog. Instead I will only write blog entries when I feel the urge to do so. So now I am in the mode of producing occasional blogs.

This is the end. This is the beginning!

The aftermath of the UK’s EU Referendum: summing up

So to round up this business, what we can learn from our democratic exercise are the following:

• Many in the political class seem to be out of touch with the people and do not care.
• People who mislead while accusing other people of being misleading are hypocrites.
• EU leaders and the European Commission are the makers of their own woes.
• Many people in the UK do not like the EU including some of those who voted to remain.
• Some Scottish Nationalists voted to leave the EU, and some people who are not Scottish Nationalists voted to remain in the EU, and oil companies are beginning to close North Sea oil fields, all of which are the most expensive oil fields in the world to operate, so those who think the UK is about to disintegrate have little understanding of the complexities of the Scottish Nationals’ plight.
• Some people showed themselves to be inclined towards reducing complex situations to simple ones, and then on finding the evidence to support their simplified beliefs, arrived at the conclusion that those who did not agree with them, were wrong. This only happened of course to other people.
• You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.
• The age of the expert is dead and gone but some people still have to learn this fact.
• Loudmouthed politicians who interrupt other speakers on a platform are probably the verbal bullies this sort of behaviour suggests they are.
• Those politicians that make verbal attacks on others and engage in scaremongering do so because they are unable to convince people through the power of argument.
• There is no appetite among many British people for any more of the EU’s ideologically-driven political integration nonsense.
• Most people who express concerns about the effect immigration is having on communities and on the job market are not racist or xenophobic, and it is grossly insulting to such people to brand them as such; the people who should be condemned are those who exploit nationalistic sentiments to pursue their political agendas, whether they be English or Scottish.
• Most British people are not anti-European but they are against those who act without the consent of the people to construct that which the people do not want.
• The future is cooperation among all nations, not clubs formed around rich nations only concerned with making themselves even richer.
• The age of empires is over, but people in Brussels have yet to understand this.
• The treaty that created the European Economic Community was signed in Rome for a specific reason – it was the wrong reason.
• Continental Europeans should listen to what the British people are now telling them and change direction.
• Britain is not an inward looking country and those who say that it is are just bad losers or are seeking to distort the actual situation; the United Kingdom is open to the world and will continue to be so.
• UKIP is not a political party that we want to grow in popularity in the UK, and now there is an opportunity to ‘see the back of them’; perhaps they will move north to Scotland and form the Scottish Independence Party (SIP)!
• Unelected Presidents of the European Commission are worthy of being held in the utmost contempt especially when they claim to be elected and make threats to the British people.
• American Presidents about to leave office should not be telling the British people what a future President of the USA will do.
• Continental Europeans are so busy looking over their shoulder at their past they do not see that they are walking in a circle.
• People seem to have very short memories and only see what they want to see, for the young people of Greece would not share the young people of Britain’s disappointment at the idea of leaving the EU, having now little option, thanks to the EU, other than to be unemployed or to emigrate.
• People who live in glasshouses should not throw stones because Australian wine is as good as French wine, British cheese is as good as French cheese, Japanese cars are as good as German/French/Italian cars, South Korean consumer electronics are as good as Dutch consumer electronics, British bacon is a good as Danish bacon, British butter is as good as Irish butter, and so on; and British people have the right to use their wallets to send powerful messages to those who threaten them! Is that not so Comrade General Secretary Juncker (or perhaps you prefer the title Emperor Jean-Claude – has a nice sound to it!)?

I have 30 years worth of experiences now at my disposal as a result of the time I have spent in Brussels. For a writer it’s like discovering a diamond mine: Letters from an Exile; The Fable of the Chief Advisors; Tales of the Emperor’s Court; Adventures in Resource Efficiency Administration Wonderland; Inside the Union of Subservient State Republics; The War of European Union. Now I know why I went to Brussels!

I also now know that, the thought that came into my mind back in January 2011 while sitting in a meeting room in Brussels, that I should walk away from my involvement with the European Commission was the point when I recognised just how damaging the European Commission is, because they live in a make-believe world determined by their ideology, and not the real world. I will certainly be using the information that continually flows from Brussels for more satirical work about this deluded and ideological-driven organisation.

They say that the pen is far mightier than the sword. I say that the pen and the brush when combined are far mightier than that which is now taking shape in the world. It is surely time to build a different world to one that the European Union and other empires (Russia and the United States) are busy creating. And here is a foretaste of the books to come, which will START to show why the British people are right to reject technocracy, corruption and incompetence: STARTS – Science,Technology and the Arts: The Artistic Voices that DG CONNECT Silenced.

I have a report that I need to complete then …

I am done here. I am gone.