One of the main ones is certainly that particular mixture of astuteness and audacity that can be found in the person of George Lucas himself. In the mid 1970s – a dogs-day period for the cinema in general – he recognized that the time wasn’t ripe for the actual Part 1 and that its chances of success were minimal. But he didn’t shelve the project but rather decided to bring Part Four of the saga to the cinema screen instead of Part One – under the official name of Star Wars 1. This decision is probably one of the key reasons for the tearaway success of the whole series. After all, who has ever heard of parts one to three of a saga being published after parts four to six? That’s something really exceptional and probably unique – a really clever, canny move.
Nowadays of course it’s become standard practice. After series like Batman and X-Men proved smash hits at the box office, their prequels began to appear with titles like Batman Begins and X-Men – The Origins.
Just what makes Star Wars such an evergreen all time classic was shown in the full-length documentary movie “StarWars – The Legacy Revealed” by Kevin Burns recently screened on the German French TV channel ARTE. This film brings to light and illustrates the particular quality of this movie saga that doesn’t just harken back to and incorporate countless references to myths and sagas from Ancient Greece to the Middle Ages, from religion and psychology but also resonates with the great transformations in history and society like the demise of Samurai culture or the existential clash between democracy and totalitarianism, between republican love of liberty and fascist systems obsessed by power and war. Star Wars is revealed in its true quality as a phenomenal object lesson incorporating the quintessence of over two and a half thousand years of human experience transformed into a world that is neither past nor future because it is beyond time. Wonderfully and lovingly embedded in the heroic journey of Luke Skywalker through a world so fantastic that anything can happen – including the final hard-won victory of good over evil.
The victory of good over evil has its essential root in the extraordinary teachings of a green midget with long sideways protruding pointed ears and his own speech syntax which is now understood across the whole world and sometimes even used when something particularly clever needs to be said. Grand Jedi Master Yoda takes the young Luke Skywalker back to the sources of his Force, and teaches him to recognize, steer and control his extraordinary abilities. So many of the characters in the Star Wars saga are glamorous, fascinating and unforgettable figures. The character of Master Yoda reconciles a huge range of contradictions: strength and softness, perseverance and patience, humor and strictness, crowned with an unerringly clear sighted view of things coupled with profound wisdom. Visually cast in the mold of an anti-hero, he is the true Master behind all.
The deeply perceptive understanding way in which he instructs the young Skywalker in the swamps of Dagobah is an example of an ideal pedagogy in the sense Plato intended. He recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of his young Jedi pupil, encourages him to make his own experiences and learn from his own mistakes whilst never ceasing to believe in himself and trust in the Force with which he is endowed. Unfortunately the ways our own kids receive their education are light years removed from such ideals. But should they be?
STAR WARS: EPISODE V – THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Frank Oz, Mark Hamill, 1980. ©Lucasfilm Ltd./courtesy Everett Collection
The award-winning magazine WIRED has recently featured an article on this very topic in answer to this question. To open it up to our readership, we’re pleased to pass on the link here. Incidentally, this question was and still is one of the very many areas of agreement in thinking and feeling between OUBEY and myself. They were already there in the time before we first met and in the time afterwards they came together and evolved still further – also thanks to inspiration from the work of people like George Lucas.
Exceptionally gifted thinkers and extraordinarily creative artists and inventors can be found in all ages but many of them whose names are household words today had a very difficult time of it when they were alive. Think of Socrates finally condemned to drink a cup of poison or Galileo persecuted by the Inquisition and forced to renounce his own discoveries.
One of the most drastic stories of a man truly gifted with extraordinary powers of mind has only recently come to public attention, long after his still mysterious death in 1954. It’s a story that is drastic, dramatic and extraordinary in quite a number of ways. It unfolds in the most existential war of the 20th century, the Second World War. And it’s doubly shrouded in secrecy. Firstly because it plays out under the seal of the Official Secrets Act to which the military counter-intelligence services of the British Army were sworn. And then because it took place at a time when homosexuality was still a crime, something best kept under wraps if you didn’t want to do time in jail.
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An English mathematician, whose own mother called him an “odd fish”, had been fascinated by codes and cryptanalysis since earliest boyhood. Later on he possessed the uncanny ability to imagine a machine that could decipher codes previously deemed undecipherable. The machine he built really did crack the formidable Enigma Code of the National Socialists and by so doing played a decisive role in securing an Allied victory and bringing the Second World War to an early close. The Turing Machine was also the very first real computer in history, a device without which modern life as we know it would be simply inconceivable.
Nothing of what Alan Turing had achieved was allowed to survive its time. All of the documents and the machine itself were destroyed at the end of the war. What did remain, however, was Turing´s homosexuality. For which he was later prosecuted and confronted with the choice of either a prison sentence or hormonal therapy (commonly known as chemical castration) because at that time homosexuality was a criminal offense. His early death aged 41 in the year 1954 seems to point to suicide but still has not been satisfactorily explained. More than fifty years later, just under two years ago in 2013 Turing was granted a posthumous royal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II for something that was largely decriminalized in England already in 1967. And Turing’s great achievements have still to receive official recognition.
This story speaks for itself. I find it deeply moving but I knew nothing about it until I heard of “The Imitation Game”, the film about Alan Turing, which is right now in the cinemas. He was a man to whom we owe an enormous debt of gratitude yet whose work has been largely neglected and almost forgotten over the years. Even worse, he was a man branded criminal for being different in a way that harmed nobody. Such is the ferocity with which conformity deals with those who don’t conform, sweeping them ruthlessly aside when living – and celebrating them when they’re safely dead.
It is also thanks to the computer that another of the great minds of our time, Stephen Hawking, can continue to communicate his brilliant thoughts in a way that would have been impossible for him before this invention came along. How strange that the films about him and Alan Turing have been released almost simultaneously! And how strange too that Stephen Hawking of all people through his mouthpiece of an intelligent machine is now issuing warnings against the further development of intelligent machines.
The stories of these two pioneers of genius have become a talking point at a time when whole hordes of marketing specialists across the world are doing their level best to create strategies that strongly suggest the extra-ordinary. We’re surrounded by countless unreal constructions of reality in which something quite ordinary and mundane is packaged so professionally that it seems quite extraordinary and unique. And whether intentionally or not, psychology and brain research also lend a hand in furthering this game. Some of it indeed might be special or even unique. Most of it however is anything but. It’s flashy, crowd-pleasing and short lived. It’s attention-grabbing but more shallow than truly exceptional. We’ll see how much remains.
In case you are wondering what all this has to do with OUBEY and the MINDKISS Project, I might touch on it again later in another place.
We can thank the stars for the beginning of all forms of life, including our own, on our planet Earth. Or more precisely we can thank those stars which have died since the beginning of our universe several billion years ago and whose process of extinction released those chemical building blocks on which our life is built. This makes the tie connecting stars to people one of truly existential importance.
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| Tycho Supernova | Stellar post-mortem |
And as soon as we begin to gain even an elementary understanding of the cosmic dimensions of the conditions underpinning our existence as human beings on this planet, these true worlds reveal themselves and open up to us. They’re not only true because by now we’ve accumulated a considerable body of scientific evidence showing that they exist. They’re true because they give us a new perspective on the cosmic metabolism of which we are a part. A perspective that extends much further than what we usually take as the meaning of life.
Just one of the many reasons why we are capable of knowing and understanding this in the first place is that cosmic evolution has surrounded our planet with a thin shell of atmosphere that doesn’t just protect us from the deadly part of the sun’s radiation. This atmosphere is also transparent and its transparency allows us an open view of the sky and the universe that surrounds us.
If the Earth were surrounded by clouds and vapor like its sister planet Venus either we wouldn’t exist or we wouldn’t be able to gaze into the star-filled night sky and would probably never hit on the idea of exploring the universe surrounding us. We wouldn’t even know that there was such a thing as a universe.
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Since time immemorial poets, writers and singers have each in their own way celebrated the thoughts and feelings that came to them when contemplating the star-studded night sky. Seven hundred years ago, ancestors like the Maori were guided by the movement of the constellations in the night sky on their journey in their legendary Waka canoes from the Polynesian islands over the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand. And by following the stars, they reached their destination. What a deeply poetic relationship of love and trust we have developed with the stars – even when knowing nothing about science! What a strange sense of bliss whelms up in us when in the evening or night we look up and see the canopy of heaven spangled with stars hung over us! Yet if someone was to ask us why we were feeling so happy, we probably wouldn’t say, “Because of the unobstructed view of the night sky filled with stars.” And yet that is precisely what causes such emotion.
One thousand stars were what OUBEY wanted to paint as he announced in early 2004 without any premonition that this would be the last year of his life. Never before had he announced his intention to do something before doing it and up to then it was unthinkable that he would ever predict a specific number of paintings that he wanted to paint, let alone a number of such magnitude! It’s only when you understand the existential bond uniting stars and humans and know just how keenly OUBEY was aware of this connectedness and how well he understood its implications, that you can begin to see the grandiose, all embracing scale on which he conceived his StarPixels project – like a magnificent tribute to our “Star Brothers and Sisters”, as the Maori violinist Elena called them in her encounter with one of OUBEYs paintings.
That this project, interrupted by his untimely death, never reached its proclaimed goal of one thousand stars in no way diminishes its significance. Because, incomplete or not, it still leads us deep into the process of our own origins and creation. Perhaps this is why so many people are so strangely moved by OUBEYs Star Pixels. And perhaps this is also why we should soon take time and consider how in the process of publishing OUBEYs art we can give this part of OUBEYs work the space it needs where all the myriad elements contained in it can develop their full potential.
Image 1: The Tycho supernova remnant. This type of structure is all that remains after a massive star dies, releasing the chemical building blocks of life and planetary systems into space. Credit: NASA/CXC/Chinese Academy of Sciences/F. Lu et al.
Image 2: Astronomers have spotted a new object emerging from the ashes of a recently deceased star. The stellar post-mortem, which is recounted in two new videos, may also solve a mystery surrounding the unexpected shape of the star’s explosive remains, scientists say. Watch the video here: http://buff.ly/1rmn393
Image 3: The Sun sizzles in high-energy X-rays captured by NuSTAR. Source: http://astronomynow.com/2014/12/23/sun-sizzles-in-high-energy-x-rays/
What fascinates me though is that original question “Are we alone?”. Who hasn’t wondered at some point if we’re the only intelligent life form in the universe? It’s a question which is inevitable as soon as you seriously start to investigate the universe and its mind-boggling phenomena. Nobody knows the answer but a concerted effort to try and find a possible answer is just as existentially important for us as our attempts to investigate the life and death of stars and galaxies, black holes and dark matter about which we already know quite a lot.
What thoughts went through the minds of our ancestors 3,000 and more years back when they gazed up into the night sky and marveled at the cosmos? Given the extremely limited nature of the technology they had, the discoveries they made and the knowledge they arrived at back then seem more than astonishing and impressive from our present-day scientific point of view.
Did this same question occur to the Mayans and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks? Did the idea of a world of gods which they posited to “explain” the workings of extraterrestrial influences on human life perhaps derive from the idea of intelligent life existing out there in the universe – even though they never named it as such? Could this be the origin of this nagging suspicion we’ve carried with us throughout the ages that we’re not “alone” in the universe?
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We cannot give an answer to this question but it is one that we must address. And this is precisely what a symposium, held at the NASA/Library in September this year involving philosophers, theologians, scientists from a wide range of disciplines and three researchers from the SETI Institute as speakers, set out to do. One of the speakers was Dr. Seth Shostak. Interdisciplinary discussions aired the question of how we can deal with and accept new findings on the existence of extraterrestrial life, and how we as the human race can arrive at a new definition of our place is the cosmos.
From early childhood onwards OUBEY always held a cosmos-centered view of life. Any other was inconceivable to him. I fully shared his view and still do. That a symposium is now being held at the NASA/Library on this very issue that involves such a rich and distinguished cast of thinkers is very encouraging and would have been a great source of gratification for him. It shows that critical points in our collective worldview are now shifting from a geo-centric and homo-centric view of the world to a cosmos-centered one.
John Carpenter’s 1984 sci-fi movie STARMAN illustrates the tremendous challenges to our fixed view of life and where we belong in it that are thrown up when a (more) intelligent form of life from another cosmic system comes to our Earth and just how far away we are from responding with anything like intelligence to possible forms of extraterrestrial life. The movie was made over 30 years ago so its effects may seem a little antiquated. But its message was far head of its time and is still as fresh today as ever.
I really love the idea that this freshly minted term embodies so well because I think that it really does go straight to the heart of one vital aspect of OUBEYs creative drive. I would never by any stretch of the imagination have hit on such a happy neologism to describe what OUBEY reveals to us in his works, and I was thunderstruck with astonishment when I read it. Does it need any explanation? Now, explanations are not my strong point but I can’t resist the temptation to unravel this thought and take it a little further.
The microscope and the telescope show views of the smallest and the largest beings and structures in our universe and on this earth. What OUBEY reveals to us in his painting are the mysteries that lie behind the structures. His paintings open up a new way of viewing ourselves and our here and now on earth as part of a gigantic cosmic system. Such a perspective is neither pathetic nor romantic and certainly not dramatic. It’s simply there. And this is exactly how his paintings work. Like a channel that guides us past the tangled thickets of life and takes us through the portals of our innermost thoughts and feelings – paired with the new knowledge that research and science constantly gives. Such a trajectory has been my own experience, repeated again and again in the course of over 30 years, whenever I look at his paintings.
In the run-up to the fifth stopover of the Global Encounter Tour which will take place at the Central European University in Budapest tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, we posted all the paintings on show there on the social Web. One painting a day. And we companioned them with the videos of the encounters with the paintings made by people whose lives are dedicated to investigation of the same issues and areas of interest that were of such passionate concern to OUBEY. Extraordinary, wonderful individuals – just like OUBEY himself was.
And so once more I felt a particular closeness to these paintings. And once more the insights, associations and reactions of people encountering one of OUBEYs paintings on video sank deep into my mind. The joyful dance of past recollections and new insights they stirred in me was fascinating and astounding. Fritjof Capra once spoke of a “Cosmic Dance“.
The dance begins with the gaze through this burning glass that – to use OUBEYs own words – shows his paintings as “islands in the sea of thoughts and feelings.” Through his paintings you can not only see these islands but also visit and inhabit them in mind. From this perspective too, the neologism of the Oubeyscope in its own idiosyncratic way exactly hits the mark.
My grateful thanks to Charles Savage for his inspired neologism.
Yet the fact is that in the beginning at least it was a state the very opposite of perfection that first set the conditions that led to the existence of life and ultimately to the existence of human life in the gigantic reaches of the cosmos where we have our home. The evidence seems to show that we primarily owe our existence to a state very far from perfection, a state lacking order. This, in any case, is how Stephen Hawking views it in a new series of documentaries he’s made for the Discovery Channel entitled “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking”.
Matter, he argues, proved stronger than anti-matter and boiling furnaces of hydrogen gas formed thick clouds of fog. Yet if some 13 billion years ago all these clouds of hydrogen gas had formed themselves in a perfect symmetric order at equal distances from one another in the vast spaces of the cosmos, such equilibrium would have been permanent and never changing. But since – for whatever reason – they did not form a perfectly symmetrical order but moved in a state of disequilibrium, this gave rise to gaps. And gaps are not merely the mark of imperfection but are also always free spaces. And as such these free spaces were exposed to the workings of the force of gravity to which we owe the whole of the subsequent development of the cosmos.
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Gravity exerted its immense forces on these gaps creating heat capable of turning hydrogen atoms into helium – the first stage in the creation of stars and galaxies. Over the course of billions of years the dust of dead stars gave birth to the more auspicious conditions of our own solar system under which life emerged. Some 14 billion years after what we call the BIG Bang life made its first appearance on planet Earth. This is where we have come from.
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Now I am in no position to judge whether Stephen Hawking’s views are correct. I can’t even say with any certainty that I’ve given an exact account of what he presents in the documentary. Yet I would venture to say that his viewpoint seems very plausible. And I think that it’s also got a great deal to say about how we are living and acting today on this earth. Order is vital and invaluable when it follows the proper logic at the right time. Yet the lack of order creates room in which new things can develop. Lack of order is not just a characteristic expression of life but the very source from which it springs. Chaos and order are indissolubly linked together and are twins. Lack of order means that room for evolution and development is given. Absence of chaos means stasis, a gridlocked state of standstill. The gaps in order enable emergence of what’s new. And that should give our anxiety-ridden species grounds for hope, I find.
The American Ray Kurzweil (author of The Singularity Is Near), who has spent many years developing and following a systematic regime to prolong his own life, believes that relative immortality will be within the grasp of some eight billion people as early as 2030. Other scientists are more modestly confining their efforts to research on methods to prolong human longevity by up to 150 years. Yet I very much doubt that this will have any effect on most people’s basic feeling that life is actually too short.
But the really interesting question hidden away behind this gut feeling about the shortness of life is why do we feel that our lives are too short? In other words, what is it precisely that we think we can’t do because our life-spans are too limited?
Obviously, nobody lives long enough to fulfill each and every one of their dreams. Somebody living in the twelfth century might have dreamt of flying around the world, but this dream could never have been realized during their lifetime. But would they have been happier if they could have lived another 800 years to board a plane and fly round the world? Simone de Beauvoir has explored this question poignantly in her wonderful novel Tous les Hommes sont Mortels (All Men are Mortal). “It takes the whole of life to learn how to die.” wrote the Roman philosopher Seneca. Death is just as much a vital part of life as procreation and birth.
But what about those wishes, dreams and plans that we can realize? What do we put things off till tomorrow or the day after or some undefined point of future time although we could do them today if we really wanted to? Isn’t the notion that we would do it if only life were a little longer just a fatal piece of self-deception? Especially since none of us knows when our lives will come to an end. Isn’t the real key to happiness knowing what really is important in this life and using our own allocated time so that the really important things have precedence – day after day? Isn’t the question of with what and with whom I spend my time more important than the question of how much time I have? The first question I can control; the second one I can’t.
It’s the qualitative side of life, not the quantitative, that shapes and colors our sense of happiness, and decides whether we view life as being (too) long or (too) short. “Life is long if you know how to use it” said Seneca over two thousand years ago. And his wisdom is just as relevant today as it was then. And this could also be the sense of Brian Eno’s and David Byrne’s song Life Is Long on their marvelous album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. Click below to hear it:
Each single, subjective, individual person in their limited lifespan is always also part of a World-time being and thus endowed with immortality. From this perspective we can see the series of successive human generations as one identical person who never ceases to exist and as such represents a single great World-experience.
As soon as the present becomes the past it becomes part of this collective memory. What this means is that in each moment of history, we can reach out beyond our own individual finite lifespan to the past but also to the future as well.
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This applies objectively to each person as part of an integrated Total Subject, in other words it applies to the whole of humankind from its beginnings onwards. However, it by no means seeks to imply that this is something that every living human being is aware of, or that as subjective individual entities in their own limited lifespans they have any notion of themselves as infinite beings or at least as beings forming part of World-time. And it certainly doesn’t mean that they behave as Universal Beings. Only a very few people can do this, and, as the length of the past continues to extend, it becomes increasingly difficult for the individual human to actively integrate the knowledge and experience of the “Ancients” into their present activities not merely with the aim of knowing and understanding it but with the aim of driving it forward and enriching it with the power and plenitude of their own spiritual and mental development.
Those people who are capable of such feats, use, during the time they are on earth, the progress accomplished in World-time as a bounty that gives something like an atemporal dimension to human existence. The experience of the past, the present and the future is equally at their disposition in their efforts to create something which, in its own turn, will serve to enrich the collective pool.
These and many other related thoughts are to be found in the book of the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, which draws, among other sources of inspiration, on the works of Fontenelle and Pascal, two French philosophers of the seventeenth century. The attempt to imagine one single integrated Total Subject composed of an aggregation of all human experience lived by people since the dawn of humankind is indeed an extraordinarily fascinating venture.
The decisive questions for each single individual are in the first place whether they can grasp what all this means; how they can access the collective memory of World-time and how they themselves can add to the integrated Total Subject during their own limited life-times. Personally, I believe that this idea can have a positive effect on the quality of our own lives because it shows that, over and beyond the limited temporal nature of our own lives, there is an atemporal dimension of which we also form part. This could be seen as a consolation but actually it’s much more of a challenge. To be able to deal with such a challenge what we need is a bon esprit cultivé as Fontenelle put it, a good and cultivated mind. OUBEY was such a mind. This is one of the major reasons why his works – in which this well cultivated mind created such a unique and individual form of expression – speak something like a universally understandable language.
The film OUBEY – An Element of the Universal which was premiered last week is an attempt to discover why OUBEYs art seems to speak a universal language that can be understood by people from all around the world. His work embodies the knowledge of “seven million years of human history” as the paleoanthropologist Professor Friedemann Schrenk commented in his Encounter with one of OUBEYs paintings. His paintings “transcend time” was what one of the visitors to the Maori school festival said during her Open Encounter with another of his paintings. Both of them figure in the film. To get a foretaste of what’s in store, click here to view the one-minute trailer.
The wide range of figures from all walks of life who’ve been interviewed by the internet portalGALORE over the past few years includes such names as Brian Eno, Quentin Tarantino, Garri Kasparow und Stanislaw Lem, Leo DiCaprio and Hans-Dietrich Genscher. In May 2014 the magazine dropped by OUBEYs studio in Karlsruhe to hold a long conversation with Dagmar Woyde-Koehler
The talk turned to “art, chaos, entrepreneurship, a great love and the many shades of meaning in between” as the introduction to the interview puts it which will shortly be published online in GALORE. During the interview Dagmar Woyde-Koehler talks for the first time about her idea for an interdisciplinary OUBEY Experience Space –a place where OUBEYs original works can be seen and experienced in intimate communion with the knowledge and ideas of science, astronomy, and philosophy – forward-looking knowledge and ideas that are shaping tomorrow’s world. A place of discovery and understanding, and above all a place dedicated to “joy in the realization that everything is connected to everything else”, as OUBEY himself once described the mainspring of his creative drive.
The German version of the interview is exclusively available on the GALORE portal. The English translation of the complete interview can be found here.
An intelligent man with whom I once had the occasion to hold a long conversation about OUBEY, his extraordinary life and equally extraordinary work, summed up his thoughts in a nutshell when he told me that OUBEY was an example of entelechy because he resolutely and unerringly followed his own calling. Regardless of what other people might say, he did what he held to be right and what was really important for him. He held fast to his own way and wouldn’t be distracted from it by the opinions and comments of the outside world no matter how forceful or enticing they might be. Thankfully, he refused to be seduced by a world which would have sapped and vitiated the very basic creative source and impulse by which he lived.
Aristotle coined the term entelechy for this kind of strong identity, empowered by a strong energy, focused on a clear inner destination. Not the least of the reasons why this term is no longer in common usage and indeed is now confined to scholarly publications is that the ways of thinking and acting implied in it are scarcely in high demand on today‘s vainglorious markets. The quickest most direct way to the spotlight of public attention, gaining reputation, fame and riches on the way – by whatever means possible – are elements of a career model that has certainly been seen here and there across past decades and centuries, too. Yet it’s only recently that such a stance has expanded to take on the dimensions of a mass phenomenon. The rules by which the games of the established art and media industries are played have long been conducive to such stances – indeed in some cases have directly nurtured them.
OUBEY recognized the danger of outside influences in the hour of his first success and consciously put himself beyond their reach. He is a counter-model, if you like. Not because a counter-model was what he wanted to be or become but because he was as he was. And had been like that from earliest childhood. He couldn’t be anything else. His decision to remove himself from outside influences to continue imperturbably to follow what he had to do, to paint the pictures that formed inside his head undisturbed by the mechanisms of the art business was a decision of existential importance for him. In this sense we really can see his life as a modern-day enactment of entelechy.
And now after OUBEYs untimely death, in bringing his work to the attention of a broader audience, it’s this power of a free spirit that I try to follow. Viewed from the perspective of entelechy, questions of what kind of high or low prices his paintings might fetch on the art market are completely drained of meaning. Just like questions of where and how his work might be assigned its place in the canons of art history. Because the whole point is not to give his works a material value nor their “rightful” place in art history. This would restrict them within boundaries that OUBEY strove his whole life to overcome. And it would seriously limit the potential of possibilities inherent in his work.
Perhaps the encounter OUBEYs paintings made with the Maori people in March of this year could only have come about because the OUBEY MINDKISS Project has remained just as free of and unaffected by the blandishments of a materially oriented culture industry as OUBEY himself was. In his paintings his free spirit found a form of expression in a non-verbal language that everybody who bears a trace of such a spirit within them may recognize and respond to. Naturally such companion spirits are not limited to the Maori people alone.
Yet the spirit is the central component that infuses the whole of Maori culture. In conserving and tending their original culture they feel themselves intimately connected with their “ancient ancestors” in the midst of their modern life and are acutely aware that the spirit is the only thing that endures while everything material is subject to the laws of mutability. The Maori who have seen OUBEYs original paintings have recognized this fellow spirit in them – which could lead us to think that in Aoteroa these paintings have found something like their ultimate destination. But that would be to take too limited a view.
Because time and again in very different settings and locations OUBEYs paintings have now shown that they are capable of articulating this spirit so powerfully that people from very different cultural backgrounds and value systems can also recognize and respond to it. “This picture makes me happy when I look at it” somebody wrote on one of the Tweet Sheets laid out at the Vienna stopover of the Global Tour in November last year on which visitors could jot down their thoughts and reactions. The picture in question was OUBEYs “Journey of the Monads” which he dedicated to the Monadology of Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz. At the end of his encounter with this painting in August 2010 in Geneva, Professor Alexander Deichsel, a celebrated expert on Leibniz’s theory of monads exclaimed “Monads never die!” And if someone of the caliber of Erwin Schrödinger once said that the spirit cannot be destroyed by time, the mere linkage of these three facets opens up an avenue of discovery of new and previously unsuspected possibilities in OUBEYs art.
This is why it’s only fitting that the Global Encounter Tour doesn’t terminate with this extraordinary illuminating encounter with the Maori people but continues to journey to different places in quite different regions of the world, to create further resonance, collect it and spread what OUBEY called his “joy of insight that everything is connected with everything else”.
Like almost no other writer Asimov put the “science” in “fiction“. In his novels we meet technical developments and intelligent machines which at that time belonged purely to the realm of fiction but which nowadays in many respects are part and parcel of our everyday lives. Artificial intelligence, for instance, has long been around and is now being researched and developed at a level of specificity that most people 80 years ago would have regarded as more than utopian – most people, with the possible exception of those like Asimov. He was the one who anticipated what it would be like if robots developed not just feelings but also a solid sense of moral values. OUBEY was so keen to see the film version of „I, robot“, but then, when it appeared in August 2004, he had to miss it forever.
When it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to attend this year’s „Asimov Memorial Debate“ at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, almost by way of consolation I went out and bought Asimov’s collection of autobiographical writings It´s Been a Good Life edited by Janet Asimov, his second wife.
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Obviously Asimov’s work deals with questions of science but in fact it’s just as concerned with the investigation of deep philosophical questions of fundamental importance. His Three Laws of Robotics“ is a prime example of this. As is “The Last Question” which was Asimov´s personal favorite among his stories as I discovered when I read the autobiography. It was also OUBEYs personal favorite too. And it speaks for itself. You simply have to read it to understand how important it is.
The roots of the close knit bonds between science and fiction in Asimov´s works go way back to his childhood. In his autobiographical writings he talks about how as a small child he first came into contact with science fiction magazines where they were laid out for sale in the candy stores owned by his parents in the late 1920s in New York at the time of the Great Depression. “It was science fiction that introduced me to the universe, in particular to the solar system and the planets. Even if I had already come across them in my reading of science books, it was science fiction that fixed them in my mind, dramatically and forever …”
When as a young boy he delved into the worlds opened up by the stories he was reading – and this certainly doesn’t just apply to sci-fi novels alone – the interplay of rational thought and fantastic imaginings filled him with an extraordinary sense of happiness which stayed with him for the rest of his life. For sure, he shares this sense of happiness born of reading with a great many other people across the world no matter what age they might be. Even so, in Asimov’s case, such deep immersion at such an early age in the border worlds between scientific technical exploration and fantastical imaginings of the possibilities inherent in the future led to his unique ability in later life to make connections undreamt of by anybody else.
In many places reading Asimov´s autobiography I was forcibly reminded of OUBEY. From early childhood onwards, science fiction also played a central role in his life. It wasn’t just a place of refuge for someone whose way of thinking and feeling was far ahead of his time; it also laid the early foundations for that “ Interplay between Thought and Imagination“, as Asimov so marvelously puts it. OUBEYs work too is a unique and impressive expression of such forces at work – though on a distinctly non-verbal level.
“These pictures start speaking to you once you start looking at them“, exclaimed a Maori woman in Aotearoa/New Zealand when she recently saw OUBEYs paintings for the first time. His paintings are neither abstract nor figurative but rather tell stories of the origins and finality of our existence in this cosmos that people on all the continents of this planet can “read” and understand, and perhaps some day – who knows? – even beings at home in other galaxies of our universe. Of course today such a view is pure speculation – but it’s speculation that could become reality in the course of the next century.
By the way, one of the distinguished speakers at last year’s Asimov Memorial Debate was Prof. Lawrence Krauss, the world famous astrophysicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University. He researches the origins of the universe and has a remarkable gift for communicating his knowledge in a way that’s both illuminating and entertaining. The previous year I met him in his office at the university with one of OUBEYs paintings for the OUBEY Encounter Project. It was a personal and highly idiosyncratic meeting. You can view the video of this encounter here.
I knew straight away that Lawrence Krauss was just as a big a fan of science fiction as OUBEY from the number of Star Trek figures, some of them in imposing life-size, dotted around his office. And through his encounter with OUBEYS painting I learnt that he liked it so much that he would love to have it hanging in his own home. The fact that one year later he appeared on the podium at the Asimov Memorial Debate 2013, finally opened up a spiritual connection for me of the kind I would say that animated OUBEYs work and has lost none of its power even today.
It’s only a pity that the limited time span of human life means that a personal encounter between Asimov, Krauss and OUBEY can never take place – at least not on this planet.
Here you may find the complete debate from 2013 about „“The Existence of Nothing“, featuring Prof. Lawrence Krauss.
Text source: Janet Jeppson Asimov: It´s Been a Good Life. 2002
Some of videos and posts on the social web are real shooting stars that top the million mark in next to no time. Others, like the videos and post of the American Museum of Natural History, gain a large audience due to the international prestige of the institution that produces them. Still others that belong to neither of these two categories, reach deadlock after a certain time.
OUBEY in the internet belongs to none of these categories. From a starting position of total obscurity, ever since the website launch at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, there have been signs of a steadily growing worldwide interest that accelerates and deepens as time goes by.
This is exactly what we had hoped for and wished to achieve – to use our own initiative and the communication platforms of the internet to gain the interest of increasing numbers of people for OUBEY, his art and this project without any form of advertising, without relying on established institutions and speculative spectacular actions and campaigns.
We send our sincere and heartfelt thanks to all those who have accompanied us on our journey and supported us in all manner of ways. The feedback we receive from many unknown people in the social web is a valuable incentive that encourages us to continue on our chosen path with renewed and unflagging determination.
Some 1.8 million years ago the evolutionary history of humankind reached a watershed moment which with hindsight can only be seen as revolutionary. This was the moment when humankind first learnt to stand on its own two feet and walk upright – not for an instant or a short time the way monkeys, bears, cats and horses can still do today when they rear up on their hind legs – but permanently, making the upright bipedal gait an essential human characteristic.
This evolutionary change was indeed revolutionary and from a long term perspective has had consequences that have changed the world. The front legs became arms, the front paws turned into hands. They were no longer needed for forward motion and in their new found freedom were gradually used to solve ever more problems of everyday life on a totally new level of sophistication. Hands and fingers acquired the abilities of precision engineering instruments that with the help of the simplest technical aids could engineer yet more tools. Use of these tools didn’t just make life easier but also marked the beginning of the brain’s development and a cultural line in the history of evolution that even today is unrivalled by any other species.
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The pace of this development has continually accelerated over the course of many thousands of years. Starting out in cycles which stretch for more than a thousand years, today we have reached a pace of cultural development that is so rapid that it far outstrips our ability to perceive, let alone comprehend it.
That a physical mechanical act first led to this momentous watershed in the history of human evolution might seem surprising at first sight. But a second glance reveals that in fact it’s highly probable and this is a view that paleoanthropologists such as Professor Friedemann Schrenk of theSenckenberg Institute in Frankfurt subscribe to with conviction. He discusses his views in the extremely interesting conversation he had with Alexander Kluge and which is now being screened in the 70,000 Years Just Like One Day exhibition at the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum for Film and Television in Berlin. If you haven’t yet seen Professor Schrenk’s encounter with one of OUBEYs paintings, you can view it here.
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Incidentally, this revolutionary step in evolution is now firmly inscribed in the genetic makeup of each and every one of us. Admittedly, hardly any of us can remember the intense feeling of joy of standing upright for the very first time nor the first hesitant, but still independent, steps walking on two feet. But the parents of children aged around one to one and a half years who experience this all important life stage will have an idea of the tremendous changes it signals. Previously unknown energies are liberated with this first elementary step into independence and freedom.
Once a person reaches this decisive moment in their genetic program, nothing within their reach is safe from their inquiring mind. The growth of their (self)awareness is matched only by the development of their ability to learn. What finally emerges from these processes in terms of the individual person is just as open as the final results of human evolution which none of us knows.
“We’re more than pleased to be supporting such an original idea for such a good cause” was the spontaneous answer given by Dagmar Woyde-Koehler when asked whether she’d be prepared to contribute an artboard by OUBEY to the auction.
A delicate drawing made by OUBEY in 1981 ornamented the skateboard which on 27 March was auctioned for the considerable sum of $ 1,625. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei also contributed a board to the auction. Given the highly prominent profile of this world-famous artist, the fact that OUBEYs artboard came a close second in terms of price and had even more bidders pitching for it, is something we can feel justifiably proud of.
Even so, at the end of the day it’s the overall result of the auction that counts, not the success of any single board. Who knows … perhaps one day some of OUBEYS paintings will travel to this skatepark in India where they’ll make new and surprising encounters.
Today we have documentary films showing the amazing flocking behavior of birds threatened by a raptor from which we can read that we as humans need to develop a collective intelligence akin to that developed by birds with their swarm intelligence.
Only if we humans were able to behave as thousands of birds instinctively do when they follow the natural rules of swarm intelligence to save their lives, we would be birds, not people.
Evolution has endowed us humans with a brain whose intelligence doesn’t necessarily subscribe to the dictums of swarm intelligence. The freedom of the spirit to make its own individual decisions is a hallmark of humankind on this planet – with all its advantages and drawbacks.
If we want to behave in a collectively intelligent way, what we need to do is draw up our own patterns and rules which favor and promote such behavior. This would by no means rest on rational enlightenment but would much rather be a matter of the energy that grows out of emotional consensus. One of the principles human behavior has always followed up to present is – I will do what I want to do for as long as I can do it in one way or another.
If we believe that the patterns and rules governing our behavior must be geared to exploitation of our potential collective intelligence, then this process of change must begin by asking and addressing such questions. I must know precisely why I am doing this and not something else – even when at first glance and in the first instance it might seem that I am neglecting my own interests in favor of the survival of the majority – which, after all, and ultimately includes me at the end of the chain of action. Is this the hurdle of evolutionary consciousness that we need to cross in order to behave in a collectively intelligent way?
One question which continually occupies me when I watch the daily behavior of birds is how comfortable is a species like birds in adapting to the radically changed life conditions we humans have imposed over the past hundred years.
On the weekends when I’m in the country, as twilight gathers I see how all the birds, even the big birds like ravens, magpies and herons, always congregate in the trees or remote places and stop their chatter. But during the week when I’m in town and step out onto my balcony in the dark I see that birds in the city stay active deep into the night – droves of ravens still very wide awake fly over the rooftops and perch on the gables and cables of the street lights.
And I ask myself if these city birds are feeling fine flying around so energetically in the dark? When do they get rest? Is there a limit to the amount of noise and artificial light they have to endure? Or are they mutating together with us into a world that has nothing to do with the world they came from?
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The Archaeopteryx is the earliest known bird ever to have been found. It lived during the Upper Juassic period about 147 million years ago. It had clawed fingers, wings and toothed jaws – part dinosaur, part bird.
As far as I know, birds are descendants of the extinct dinosaurs which makes them pretty resilient- as we say today – in terms of evolutionary history. But perhaps we’ll reach a point where they as a species have had enough of being resilient. I wonder if some such similar thought didn’t cross Hitchcock’s mind when he was planning his film “The Birds”?
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