Tuesday 3 June 2014

Meeting after seeing supervisors

In 2007 I had enough funds behind me to publish a book myself. It was entitled, ‘Strange Currencies of Ego & Soul’. I named this book with some awareness of what it meant, but upon further reflection I note that the Ego in the title is the more earth bound pragmatic sufferance of life, and the Soul is the prana breath, the spirit and channeling of something broader than, but also including myself and the broader universe.

Likewise Einstein once said ‘The rational mind is a faithful servant, and the intuitive mind is a sacred gift. We have created a society, that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.’ Somehow, this statement oversees the book ‘Ego & Soul’.

In my masters work, this resonant idea of opposites (the science and the art, the pragmatic and the esoteric), has evolved again. I am using Phi as a mathematical concept to construct something that has a quite spiritual meaning. The opposites are there, which is the mathematically pragmatic, and also the channeled energy of the description of love and sometimes its occasional casualties.

One of the earliest images I remember seeing of this art vs science was in Michelangelos drawings of say, a helicopter idea. A drawing in which a screw like mechanism is conceptually drawn to rise up into the sky. This is a great example of when science meets intuition. It also bears the question, where do ideas come from and where do they go?

Many a time I have lied awake at night and thought of either a guitar riff or a piece of art or idea and thought, ‘Yes, I’ll remember that tomorrow’. Unfortunately in most cases, unless you act on those ideas and record them in some type of form, they are forgotten. It is in the recording of ideas and perceptions that the essence of art is born that happens within a context of time and place.

Interestingly, all of my work for this masters study has been presented on a screen via electricity and pixels on a computer screen or an iPad. There is something fascinating about this and the relationship to a wide audience in that the information can be ‘reproduced’ or screened in multiple places many times over. It reminds me of Warhols Pop Art qualities, in that to be accessible and relevant, there has to be something exciting, sexy, and fresh about it, yet on the other hand that is the way in its pure reproductions that its banality is exposed.

Art and science I think have been seen as different genres in the past, but more regularly, art has been made out of data. (ref). In my artwork there is a huge spectrum of ideas ranging across 4 or 5 distinct projects.

  1. The universal Embrace interactive display,
  2. The narrative of the project acting cumulatively that includes a narrative to my inner adolescent,
  3. The children's book ‘Grogan the Monster, in ‘What do you Love’,
  4. The Free energy Love Machine, Mark I and II,
  5. The data of all the imagery I have amassed to enrich these projects.

These items are not visually similar, but have rhizomatic links between each other.

Cover a lifetime

Accept the inner child, heals the inner adolescent

Frees the mind to not judge own ideas

Works with art and science in a harmonious way

Is self actualising in terms of encapsulating the whole person

Eccentricity of ideas is celebrated and not denied

Singular paths diversions is the path.

Art class notes


The eccentric is a mysterious creature
Peculiar behaviour is its notable feature
Lost and alone in a world of conformity
Where oddness is seen as a dreadful deformity.
Yet, of all the creatures, the true non-conformist
Is often the brightest, the boldest and warmest.


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