The manifestation and technical manifestation of the interactive ‘Universal Embrace’.

Starting out:

The Universal Embrace started out on paper and in my mind-so it was hard to foresee where it may have ended up manifesting even though I had envisaged it being on a web page. The candidature proposal was written, with the aim of the project appearing online for a maximum audience. As I started to piece together the way in which I record and publish narrative though, it began to be clear to me that I did not have the  technical skills to put a complex HTML site together online.

The online project however, was shaping up. I had decided on www.blogger.com from google to be embedded in my web page for an ongoing narrative. This was quite easily designable to place into the template for my website www.theuniversalembrace.com that was put together under the auspice of www.wix.com.

I had already had the building blocks of the project, indeed the candidature proposal was quite like a template to follow when designing and writing my work. I had my research question and statements of significance.

When I started to put together images and words on the website, I had anticipated that if I designed an interactive site, I could host it on one of my servers and place it within the website much like I had with my blog from www.blogger.com. However, there were other ways forwards.

During my journey doing my masters, I had published a book on the iTunes store, ‘Recent Drawing, Towards A/r/tography’, which had included within it some moving designs, and traditional art presented in a digital medium, much like the work I intended to do. This was a very interesting process, and although there was quite a lot of technical issues to go through, including getting my own iPad to test the book on, I persevered, and the book was published.

The software to put an iBook together for the iBook store is ‘iBooks Author’, and there is another program, ‘iTunes Producer’, that you need to use in order to finally publish your work to be considered for the Apple iBooks store.

The software is quite intuitive to use, and with an iPad, you can instantly see your work on how it will appear as an iBook on the iPad. It’s exciting to see words and images come to life on this contemporary new medium. So, why not consider putting a copy of ‘The Universal Embrace’, on it?

I considered the idea, and moved forward with the many technical issues that I was faced with. I had already put a copy of the Universal embrace online, so I would be repeating myself, that was problem number one. But there was another distinct advantage of doing this.

When I had put my visual candidature proposal together, I used Keynote, which is for presentations. Luckily for me I had become quite familiar with this software, and its potential for interactivity was there-I could easily design something with forwards and backwards buttons, or run a presentation and make a button to go anywhere on a document.

I had also started with the final design of the universal embrace. Like the proposal said, it was to occur on the template of a golden rectangle. So I had illustrated one for this purpose. Slowly, after a few weeks, I began to build a photoshop document in ‘layers’, items that I could turn off and on, to be guided through the complexities of the embrace whilst keeping it visually simple.

My problem was that somehow, I needed to animate the layers that I had saved in Photoshop. This is where keynote came to the rescue. I re-sized the photoshop file with the layers in it to fit an iPad dimension. Then, I placed all the slides into keynote whereby I could add sound, and an interactive forwards and backwards button that was simple and elegant in design. It was beginning to take form.

After putting together the information that I already had into iBooks Author, such as statement, candidature proposal, etc, I then had the option to design how this book would work. Without realising it, I had started to work on the final presentation of the Universal Embrace! It was not online like I had earlier anticipated, (well, finished anyway), but it still had the means to be electronically distributed for a wide audience through the Apple platform. I was excited that the publishable iBook idea was a very contemporary way of presenting a Masters piece, and had support from supervisors Maureen and Neil that this would be acceptable to present. I felt like it was a very cutting edge way of presenting what used to be presented traditionally, and was extremely exited by this.

I looked at ways I could reference my literature review and other quotes and this was acceptable. I had divided up my iBook into sections, and it all seemed to flow very nicely. I had left space to fill in on the major distilled narratives of subjects like Phi, Spirit, and Society as relates to my work. Then, I was able to embed my Keynote presentation, an additional interactive design, into the iBook itself.

When I showed this to my supervisors, I was thrilled to find out that I might be submitting the idea much earlier than anticipated for marking and assessment, cutting my study time down by nearly two years! It was thrilling to think it was moving so fast, and now the challenge lay ahead to produce more of the writing and references that I would need to do to fill out the body of text to go with my overall interactive iBook.

In terms of the website, this could still exist, and I could easily animate a movie of the embrace with a link to the anticipated finished iBook, so this was not in vain.

Notes and thoughts on Phi

Considering Phi, Spirit and Society; all broad themes and arrived at through intuition and a desire for storytelling in images and words.

Here in this section, I’m going to discuss the distilled themes in relation to the creative project, ‘The Universal Embrace’.

Phi

Upon explaining the creative component of the universal embraces concept to Neil Hooley, supervisor, he said he understood, but what does it mean, in broader terms? I forget what I said but I wish I had have recorded it. It followed along the lines of creating something macroscopic and microscopic, through divisions and references to divinity and banality, creating tensions between the two, and re-creating the self through an ongoing narrative. We were getting somewhere.

In my early twenties I would read the work of Paul Davies ‘The Mind of God’, about fractals and the genesis of patterns in maths, how this was extricably linked to the universe, physical matter and its outer worlds.

I enjoyed that type of philosophy and have always had a fascination with shapes, mathematics, and free energy, as described in the animation accompanying this project. What I was really interested in was ‘the sweet spot’ of a cricket bat-the ideal resonant state of things that ended up in the manifestation of reality as we know it. Even to go further, as someone experiencing high levels of anxiety and a diagnosis of schizophrenia, I was interested in the mind and how it worked-so at that time I would leap from written work like Davies, and onto Carl Jung. I marveled at his theories of synchronicity and archetypes, and related it to the art I had studied-suddenly, every piece of art slipped into a dimension of an archetype, both visually and thematically. Art back then was a cathartic attempt and a method to understanding mind.

I felt like I had discovered a blanket ethos I could place over art-and further understand and push my own art to its extremities. In relation to phi, this old feeling that there is a base, a template, for everything that is and ever was and ever will be-fascinated me. As an avid observer of nature I saw this mechanism in the plants and the world around me as a child.

When I started planning this narrative, I came up with a drawing on which an interactivity would be placed, and because life experience has shown both the dark and light sides of reality and emotion, phi was something I felt I could work with because under that all encompassing template, I could construct or design anything at all, and it would fit comfortably under that all encompassing auspice.

In this way, metaphotically, anything was possible to describe in this space. Possibility was an is important.

What I chose to describe, is an embrace between two men, diaristically my partner and I. This was a real turn for me, in the many years I have made art sexuality was suggested, pained over, distorted and feared, yet here at age 40 I feel that a celebration of the narrative of my comfort in this relationship was a good way to keep the project positive and optimistic, and contribute to the well being and greater good of society.

I have had quite a few partners in my life, and the transient nature of relationships for me personally has happened over and over. Yet despite how solid I feel in my relationship now, the universal embrace focuses on an event-a thing that occurs in a particular environment, in a sliver of time. Interestingly though, the focus on this moment visually and philosophically has awakened the feeling of timelessness to all experiences.

Within this environment, there is a moment, and during the interactivity, different themes are pursued.

During writing my narrative, I have come across confronting the self, and also re-creating the self. Re-creating the self (Beattie) in terms of A/r/tography has been wonderfully liberating. This is a celebration of life and love, in all its dimensional qualities. It also pushes schizophrenia, to a lesser extent, into the past, to a degree lesser considered, which I feel very comfortable with.

Even in terms of the universal embraces structure, the genesis of the present is in the past, yet the unfolding past that results in the largest square where the embrace occurs fades into the background, a smaller, but all together necessary component.

Phi as relates to resonance is the celebration of love and commitment-a divine energy that has found its essence at this time in my relationship. However phi was not always celebrated as a sacred number. In his book ‘The Golden Ratio,’, Mario Livio describes pythagoras’ school and philosophy as the study of whole numbers and their ratios, and that the discovery of the magical number phi was considered a ‘cosmic error’; and was suppressed.

Blessing for myself, mindfulness from 2010

I wrote this text in 2010 and put it on my wall where I light candles every night.

I think its quite poetic and thought I might post it here as part of a narrative from around three years ago.

Take from it what you will!

I bless myself.

Leave the Ego behind, a prayer to spirit.

I have emotions; yet I am not the sum of those emotions.

I have shared creations, yet they remain a record of the time-I am not only those creations.

I have a body, but I am greater then my physical body suggests.

I have an illness, and I suffer, but I would not trade the pain for what I've learnt.

I have fears, but I am not those fears.

I have some money, but that money does not make me.

I will pass over, and I accept this.

I have an ego and identity, 'Richard William McLean', but the ego is corruptible and to be dis-assembled.

I ask for spiritual, physical, and emotional protection for myself and those I love and touch every day and give thanks everyday.

I am kind, and give thanks to something greater than myself for that kindness.

I have kinks in my armor, and accept faith to amend them.

I am sorry. As my toe touches the ground and the earth be my witness, and the reply is, you are forgiven.

I love you, and the reply is: 'You are loved!'

I am lots of things, but no section or element of them is me.

I bless myself.

Thank you.

I am.

Animation design

I've been working on the slides for the concept of explaining 'The Universal Embrace', and its themes of the emotional, physical, spiritual, and political aspects of an embrace.

Today I put the frames into a multimedia program and animated it, and I really like how it presents, so I thought I would post it.

This YouTube video will most likely appear in similar form in the iBook version of this project as introductory media.

I hope you enjoy looking and listening to this ongoing project.

New developmental image of The Universal Embrace

I am loving the process of this narrative visual document growing in textures, colours, and metaphorical concepts.

As I progress through the important step of playing, (Stasko), I am finding a richness of expression in describing the two men hugging.

It has taken on quite a cosmic quality, and I am finding elements of the relationship, such as its sacredness, is being described visually, and I hope other people can relate this to their own relationships.

I dont even know where the idea of the golden section came from-apart from starting with something thats divine, and contrasting it with the simplifying and complicating of which can happen within that plane.

Tonight, I'll animate another GIG to put on The Universal Embrace's website for some idea as to where it is going.

Also, I have been experimenting with presenting the final presentation as an iBook to be published on the Apple iBook store. In this, I will have to consult with supervisors in that it is going to be an accepted format for my Masters.

I have managed to work out some level of interactivity and sound on the iBook, and to this end it actually does consider and express the interactivity of the piece.

In an ideal world, I would have the skills to make this a total web based interactive design, but my skills in designing something more epic than I can do is limiting my creative expression. Perhaps I can do some courses or ask some tech savvy friends.

I have found that apart from the body of the work I am having to be the technical person as well in the online and / or iBook manifestation of this project, and thats the silent part that I engage with that is separate from the concept. It is important and absolutely necessary though, to be able to express the digitised work in this way.

Here is a still from the interactive design, which I am very excited about! I can't wait to develop this idea further and start adding the interactive component of an audio narrative.

I love how the seen and unseen worlds are starting to resolve visually in the sacredness of a relationship, despite sometimes stormy weather!

Early notes on resonance

There is something macroscopic and microscopic about my visual narrative that utilises a golden rectangle and concurrent spiral emanating from it.  It speaks of the moment of an embrace people at a Buddhist temple, as it has evolved. One of those persons is myself-the other is actually my partner.

It is quite a departure from other dark or disturbing art I have produced in the past. Gone is the angst and worry and isolation. Here it reveals something I cherish-hugging, and especially with my life partner.

In the past, isolation and sexual ambiguity were pivotal in my work, yet this is a celebration, of lived experience that is present. I’m literally re-creating something positive and rewarding in my life-probably the most rewarding thing ever, the affection between my partner and I.

I can not really recall in my artistic past the celebration of being queer in any form, I guess as you get older, you do grow into who you are and become comfortable with directly expressing gay lovers instead of meandering and symbolic frustrations and turmoil.

I have just turned 40, and I was having a drink last night with friends-I have to say that I told them I love being this age. I love to know who I am and its so comforting to be in a mature relationship that makes me whole.

I think the unfolding of the spiral in the interactive design speaks of the infiniteness from which you came from, the journeys and the experiences that led me to this point. It feels nice to be celebratory in this way.

The largest square in the design is the focus of this unravelling, in that the all important heart chakras of us are meeting exactly in the centre. This was pivotal to the design. It cemented the focus on all that’s good about a healthy relationship.

There is a fatalistic dimension to the design, where have these people come from to arrive at this point? The description does not need to be long, for the instant of the embrace is the here-and-now. It’s a dimension that I find myself in real life, and I couldn’t be more grateful. The spiral speaks of a winding past leading to the love sharing of the event, that makes it easy to consider the present more effectively, whilst still validating a long narrative in life and experience to this point. The emphasis though, is on the love between two people.

The self reflexivity and the growing more and more to the concept of self-actualisation has never presented itself more in a positive way in my work, its quite a joy to work on.

Resonance is a concept that is integral to this event. The whole dimension of the interactive frame is underpinned by the golden rectangle, which is realised of the concept of Phi. Philosophically, this means that this instant, this moment, is perfect and complete-it is also the sum of its past, and an affirmation for the future.

I just love the idea and strive to be more mindful of my thoughts as I go about my day, in that I try and catch negative thoughts, record them, and turn them into positive ones. Worry is such a wasted emotion - which I grapple with, but this reflection relies on thinking about the self in all its dimensions.

It is quite startling that in the animation in which I can ‘turn off’ my partner, the image of me hugging no one looks ridiculous! I read an article lately of when research comes to a halt because of a subject being lost. My partner knows my paranoias well, ‘No, Maureen is not saying we are going to break up!’, as Maureen my supervisor had suggested the article.

Being resonant with each others thoughts, so close, is something I have experienced with select people in my life. My partner does not consider himself spiritual, but whenever the TV is on, or I have a slight look in my eye, sometimes he guesses the thoughts I am having at that moment. Its quite funny and extremely intuitive. I want to talk more about intuition later, in where do ideas come from? How are they stored/caught-where do your thoughts go?

The concept of resonance I think also relates to the way how reality unfolds, the unfurling ‘spirit spiral’, you can see across nature in things like fern trees and in ammotite fossils. For example, I was considering a background that had to be exactly half sky, and half earth, to fit the dimensions of the design, representing earth and sky, maybe dark and light, or ethereal and tangible.

I was looking through some photos I had taken on my iPhone from this year and the Buddhist temple struck me so solidly as the one to use! There was no need to go to an airport and take a photo, as I originally planned to represent the transient nature of relationships over a lifetime. There it was on my computer! I love Buddhism and its poetic Zen nature, and although not religious, use the Dalai Lamas words, ‘Don’t use Buddhism to be a Buddhist, use it to better what you already are’.

In all the event is a positive one, and I cant wait to begin analysing it with creative intuition that is yet unmapped.

Meeting with Maureen and Neil (Supervisors)

I met with Maureen and Neil, my supervisors again and was excited to gain the impression that Maureen thinks my whole of Masters work and writing will be online. Neil asked if this was for the purpose of marking and presentation, and Maureen encouraged that it should be.

I think there is a cutting edge way I am studying and recording my narrative because it is live, unfolding, and unfettered, albeit with some problems about the discourse of revealing all scribblings publicly.

There arose the issue that blogger.com and wix.com were problematic in that if they were hacked or fell offline, is there a way to back up my work? We all would not want it to be for nil, so I will try and send an email to gague how secure these platforms are should such an event occur, and how to 'back them up' digtally.

I am already aware that HTML5 is the 'new way' of the web, and that the universal embrace site will last longer in this format which is why I chose wix.com.

I'll have to look into it.

Development of still interactive layers...(cont)

I love playing with the endless opportunities to express this moment physically, emotionally, spiritually, and politically while playing and having so much fun with it. How will I ever get the complexities of the interactive design to work!? Bring in the programmers perhaps?

Experimenting with laters of interactivity

Here is an image from the final interactive slide which could change over time. After my last post of talking about the Dalai Lama and his views on practicing love and compassion, I came up with this image.

The image is a combination of 'layers' that can be turned off and on in Photoshop. In it, I have described a few things; firstly, there is the Buddhist temple, so relavant to this week. I've also included the 6 chakras described in popular culture and spiritual teachings, for simplicity. This is heightened by what might be the currency of heat radiating off my body, inviting the viewer to construct and deconstruct the image in their mind to see the visible, and also the invisible.

The Playing part that Stasko describes and a philosophy I adhere to is very much happening here, and it's quite exciting to see it unfold before my eyes.

More on this later but for now here is a still:

Its a delightful construction in my view, with the 50% land and 50% sky, all in tune to a mathematical fibonacci spiral, and the buddhist temple just seems to fit nicely! I love how the invisibles I'm wanting to describe are coming to life visually.

His Holiness on Education.

18/06/2013

Hearing the Dalai Lama speak.

On Tuesday 18th of June, I went to see the Dalai Lama speak in Melbourne.

His teachings on the relationship to education and non violence, compassion and a secular society bought comfort to me, while I say t there, my usually jittery legs quiet as I concentrated on the screen, and watched him stand up, to talk for over an hour before he answered some questions.

What I liked about the talk, is the compassion I felt, the resonant feeling of the willing audience to listen, the welcome to country from an indigenous elder.

It filled me with a sense of hop, that in the direness of the planet and the problems for people worldwide, that someone, whom did seem very humble, and ‘like an old friend’, spoke with such elegance and simplicity.

When he did not know the answer to a question, he imply stated, ‘I don’t know!’. How wonderful if our politicians oozed the same honesty, instead of trying to save face.

In the Universal Embrace, the location is at a buddhist temple, a place of worship, and symbolising the state of flux of change, and also past history, of building, and of the link in the photo between the symbolic bridge in Footscray to an ancient past and a celebratory moment in the present.

His holiness was very present, very confident to speak, light hearted, often, he giggled and cracked jokes, which delighted the audience.

My project describes a loving present for me personally, and celebrates compassion, and tolerance, and follows in the expression of this in terms of its queer ideology. The description of tolerance in a secular society, especially in terms of education, was paramount to his speech, and although he jokes ‘people call me a buddhist’, as if to throw that idea away, he teaches beyond buddhism, beyond religion.

He spoke highly of christian, muslim, and hindu faiths and said the core of those religions was love.

In my project, it focusses on love. I like to think that a gay embrace can be used in a secular way to exhibit all love between people, and across faiths.

I have had a lot to go though in my time as a person on the planet, including schizophrenia, drugs abuse, some bad decisions, and sexuality issues, including the many philosophical/metaphysical ones.  I have just read in some of my notes, that to practice forgiveness leads to tolerance. I feel a lot of the time I beat myself up for mistakes in the past, and that I should learn to be tolerant of my own past actions. He was saying too-that karmically, when you become aware, you can change actions that have negative outcomes by the practice of self forgiveness and forgiveness of others. In this context, he refers to taking responsibility for who you are and where you are. Its quite a heavy philosophical statement, but the way he described it was simple and easy to understand.

Be kind to yourself, and kind to others, for it is always possible.

He described that across religions, that the secular ethics of human values is strong, and that everyone can contribute to a better world. It was quite funny when he said ‘raise your hands if you’re under 15’, and a few hands went up. Then, 20-50, and lots of hands went up.

He jokingly suggested that the last century is past and that the people inhabiting last century are ‘on the way out’, and you cannot do anything to change it, and that the young people, through the secular values of society via the base of world religions compassion and tolerance, that peace is possible this century-with good education. 

I delighted in the word. Education. For a long time, without realising it, I have been an educator, and also someone whom has made a lot of mistakes! Still, you learn through these, and although my narrative will follow through with a snapshot of my unfolding fibonacci spiral life until now, its nice to know that metaphorical bridge is there between the past and the present.

He reminded us that the Buddah clearly stated that ‘You are your own master!’. I find some excitement and also some fear in this. I’m reminded of two buddhist quotes too: ‘After enlightenment, the laundry’, and that ‘If you are on the path, things are as they are, if you are not on the path, things are as they are’. It seems no matter how enlightened you are, of course there is much work to do! I am here now with what I know and feel, doing what I do, recording a narrative in words and art.

This narrative is a sort of a symbolic path, that will eventually distil themes from my life and through my research that crystalize into new knowledge, and for that I’m most excited.

I'll definitely write some more notes on this soon with reference to the talk. I feel very lucky to have attended-it was a 40th birthday present from my parents, bless them.

The nosebleed section!

A seagull came to visit me whilst having a coffee while waiting to attend the Dalai Lamas talk. I was waiting for a friend, and the seagull landed to look at me, most likely wanting food-but I did not have any. By the time I got my phone out and took a pic, he was flying away, in impermanence.