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Impressive and Powerful Welcome: The Traditional Powhiri Ceremony

The Aotearoa MINDKISS Team are officially welcomed as members of the community of the Te Kura Kaupapa Maori O Nga Mokopuna Maori school through the traditional powhiri ceremony – an acknowledgement of one hour and an expression of high regard.

Ladies first – the powhiri begins with a powerful “female part”: Maori women shout and sing while the guests enter the school area and walk to the assembly hall “Te Marae” – step by step.

Unusual and Unexpected: Maori Words Spoken by a Non-Maori Woman at the Powhiri

It doesn´t accord to the rules of the powhiri that a woman may speak in the second, the “male part” of the ceremony. The fact that even though Dagmar Woyde-Koehler was allowed to do so is a rare exception and an expression of highest regard and respect.

For her part she shows her esteem and respect for the school community through the words she speaks to them in the Maori language. So she not only earns the sympathy of her young hosts but also raises their interest to see OUBEYs paintings.

WOW: “Te Marae”, the Simple School Assembly Hall, Gets a Makeover

To hang OUBEYs paintings, it is necessary to give the inside of the simple school assembly hall, Te Marae, a complete makeover.

The black draped partitions create a marvelous atmosphere in which OUBEYs paintings can develop their full impact.

The transformation of the hall finds enthusiastic response: Wow! Wow! Wow! Once everything is ready, the first young visitors come in – curious to see the paintings and Encounter Videos.

A Different Kind of Universal Language: Maori Kids Also Know What’s Cool!

These two smart lads are especially delighted to see the spontaneous reaction of Luise Neukirch – “That’s cool!”- to OUBEYs painting LeeRoy in the „About Encounters“ video. Because “cool” is the word they too used to describe it! To see Luise´s Encounter video click here.

Simple But Effective: A Homemade Sign Shows the Way to OUBEY

During the preparations one of the teachers makes this laminated computer print with OUBEYs portrait and signature and sticks it to the doorframe opening into the assembly hall. Thanks to this sign guests at the Te Ra O Kupe have no difficulty in finding their way to OUBEYs pictures.

Fascinating: OUBEYs Paintings Entice to Linger

On this hot late summer Sunday in Wellington, some guests perhaps first come to the darkened and peaceful assembly hall Te Marae in search of a little shade and quiet.

But then they discover OUBEYs paintings, become involved in the Encounter Videos, want to know more, want to talk about the discoveries they had made and end up staying much longer than initially intended.

Intruiging and Encouraging: OUBEYs Art Awakens the Zest to Discover

Each stopover of the Global Encounter Tour offers the visitors the opportunity to do an “Open Encounter” with one of OUBEYs original paintings. On Sunday at “Te Ra O Kupe” it stands covered in a classroom waiting to encounter people and hear them talk freely and spontaneously about the ideas and associations it awakes in them.

Many people take this opportunity. “It looks like the tree of life stretching far out into the cosmos”, said Elena on seeing this picture. Two years ago, the Maori violinist made her own encounter with another one of OUBEYs paintings that can be seen on the Encounter Video in the assembly hall.

Despite her busy schedule, she takes the time to come to Te Ra O Kupe for a wonderful reunion – with her very own Encounter painting by OUBEY, and Dagmar Woyde-Koehler.

Sensitive and inspirational: Dallas Seymour Encounters OUBEYs Samurai

Dallas Seymour is a living legend in New Zealand and not just among rugby fans. This descendant of the Maori has had an incredibly successful career of nearly twenty years playing in the national team and with the famous All Blacks, too.

His encounter with OUBEYs Samurai was a special experience of great intense and sensitivity. OUBEY would certainly have been delighted. The video of the encounter will go online later this year.

Thanks to Tanemahuta Gray, who did an encounter himself two years ago, this encounter with Dallas Seymour could happen at all. The Maori dancer played rugby himself when he was a boy and contacted us with Dallas.

The Day After – Questions and Answers While Driving on the Left-Hand Side

How did the idea of a Global Tour stopover in New Zealand first arise? How did the first contact with Maori on Aotearoa come about? How come that the Maori school was willing to exhibit OUBEYs art at its Te Ra O Kupe? Why is this stopover of the Global Tour so crucial for OUBEYs idea of the significance of his art? And why is the exhibition subtitled “An Element of the Universal?”

These and many other questions were discussed during a last trip in the truck around the Peninsula of Miramar and Seatoun where Te Kura Kaupapa Maori O Nga Mokopuna is located, the Maori school where all of this happened.

The answers to these questions form part of the video documentary about this stopover of the Global Encounters Tour in Aotearoa New Zealand which will go online at the end of May.

“It was a bold and exciting adventure whose outcome was by no means certain”, says Dagmar Woyde-Koehler, who sent a few weeks ago six of OUBEYs paintings on a very long journey to encounter the students, teachers and guests of the Te Kura Kaupapa Maori O Nga Mokopuna Maori school in Wellington/New Zealand on 9 March during the school’s annual festival.

The resonance was overwhelmingly positive. That OUBEYs paintings proved to be fascinating, exciting and comprehensible for the Maori, a people with their own strong cultural traditions, is more than encouraging for the OUBEY Encounters Project. Wherever they may travel in future, the memory of this extraordinary unique encounter with the Maori will accompany them on their way.

You can find more information about this fourth stopover of the Global Encounters Tour in New Zealand on facebook. At the end of May a special documentary video will also go online

I am continually amazed to find how in OUBEYs paintings even the most disparate and seemingly irreconcilable elements are balanced in a relationship of equality and merge into one organic unity: reality and fantasy, intellect and emotion, gravitation and weightlessness, science and spirituality, the playful and the serious (playful spontaneity and serious intent), desire and pain, life and death, dream and reality. For me this organic unity in his paintings evokes something that I usually find more in music than the visual arts: the echo of the cosmos in my soul.

Perhaps this is one of the hallmarks of the universal language which is expressed in his art and which makes it understandable to people all across the world.

Someone once asked me if the mission of the Global Tour wasn’t to document the different responses of disparate cultures to OUBEYs art. Even if this was the case, at this present point of time we can now state with confidence that the real cultural and other differences that exist between the people who encounter the paintings at different points on the globe simply fade into the background during the encounter or disappear altogether.

This is not so surprising if we think in terms of deep time because ultimately people everywhere share the same evolutionary roots.The linguistic, cultural and physiognomic differences that have emerged in the course of the past 20,000 years are all relatively recent, which means that they are by no means as deeply embedded as we would like to think today. Such a credo has been largely instrumental in coloring and shaping the course of human history over the past three thousand years, far into the 20th century with all its horrific and inhuman excesses and pogroms.

And it’s a belief that we have still not fully shed. But we have now succeeded, for instance, in replacing our old ideas about the Neanderthals as a kind of half-ape with a new understanding of them as near relatives of ours. Science and technology are also helping us develop a new understanding of what we hold in common and what might separate and distinguish us from one another. There is now a slight but justified shimmer of hope that we will not need another three thousand years to recognize the universal elements of our species – the things that we share in common, the things that bring us together – and make much better use of them. If only we have the will to do so.

In this regard, the words of a visitor to the OUBEYs studio many years ago open throw an interesting light on this line of thought. He said, “These paintings are like archeological excavations of the future”. If the paintings really do possess such a quality, the Encounter Project still holds a great reservoir of fascinating untapped potential that it’s well worth discovering. Perhaps in the coming years the project will find some new partner who would support it in this way in a professional capacity.

The next stopover of the tour in New Zealand promises to open the way to encounters that will further illuminate and enrich this theme. That’s why it’s been subtitled “An Element of the Universal”. There’ll be more about this in my next post.

It’s the universal language of OUBEYs paintings that makes them understandable to everybody without any need for explanation. This has been proven again and again at each stopover of the Global Encounter Tour in widely different places across the world, so far.

Aotearoa New Zealand promises to be a very special affirmation of this universal quality in OUBEYs art. Click here to go to full background report on the tour’s New Zealand stopover.

Read more at www.oubey.com/AotearoaNewZealand and on Facebook soon.

In fact Professor Peter Kruse expressed similar sentiments in his opening address for the OUBEY Global Tour stopover in Berlin in March 2013 (blogpost about this in April 2013). And the blog entitled Best Fitted to Cope with Complexity written for the Drucker Society Europe in November 2013 makes explicit links between OUBEYs art and his unbridled free-ranging creativity and the demands management has to meet in times of ever increasing complexity. This is exactly the point where Wolf Lotter takes up the gauntlet in his introduction to the latest issue of brand eins where he does a wonderfully refreshing job of demolishing those established and degenerate notions of originality we’re all so familiar with.

“Originality is an irritant. It’s seen as idiosyncratic – in the sense of peculiar, funny, facetious. Yes, it’s quite nice. But also a bit over the top. This is the old familiar strain we’ve all learnt. But just where have we learnt it?

The high priests of this school of thought are those who have been telling us what is what ever since the 19th century: politicians and managers from the caste of civil servants whose thinking is rooted in fixed patterns and routines. In this world originality is seen as disturbing and those who produce original work are viewed as disturbed.” (pages 42-50)

So far so good: this is all so clear and logical that we might be forgiven for thinking it’s more in the nature of a leisurely stroll than a venture fraught with risk. The danger zone comes when this exploration of originality includes a detailed article on OUBEY and the origins of the MINDKISS Project. With the subtitle: A Love Story. A love story in a business magazine? About originality? About OUBEY? Would this article really be able to express what from my point of view is essential when talking about OUBEYs originality? There was no guarantee. But I said to myself, if the people on this magazine can’t do it, then who can? But they did!

The love story is a private story of course that for almost ten years I was only prepared to talk about in private conversation, certainly never to a magazine. And now it’s gone public. The response I’ve received shows a good deal of respect, great sympathy and much deep feeling. It reassures me that all my fears were unfounded. Because the story of OUBEY and me has a great deal to do with respect and love for the originality of human existence. With the love of freedom, independence of mind, individuality, the right to be different, the right to be uncompromising. In its own highly unconventional and idiosyncratic way, brand eins has succeeded in creating a genuinely authentic expression of what lies at the roots of OUBEYs art and the approach that shapes the MINDKISS Project. My compliments and thanks to Erwin Koch, the author.

 

Yet whoever wishes to discover and understand the unique quality of OUBEYs originality and the richness of its spiritual and artistic dimensions must delve much deeper into the issues and questions that drove him to do what he did and drove him to do it in his own inimitable way. This is precisely what the MINDKISS Project seeks to do. Nurturing such understanding and facilitating such discovery is one of the central aims of the project. And it’s something that shines through between the lines of the brand eins story as well. Could this possibly mark the next phase of growth in the evolution of the project? We shall see.

Source: www.brandeins.de

The 9 March is the day when “Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Nga Mokopuna”, a Maori school at Seatoun/Wellington in New Zealand, will be the place of open encounters for five of OUBEYs paintings.

School students, teachers, parents and a host of guests from Wellington and the surrounding district will gather on this Sunday at the “Kura Kaupapa Maori” for fundraising activities in aid of the school. OUBEYs pictures will be right in the thick of things, making their own particular contribution to the great day.

More details will be given in the next OUBEY Newsletter. Click here to add you name to the Newsletter mailing list. And if you want to be more involved, go to Facebook for a glimpse of what’s going on behind the scenes.

It’s about the origins of the MINDKISS Project and its sources of inspiration. It’s about love, art and death. And it’s about “originality” which is the special theme of this January edition.

It’s not just the outstanding quality of OUBEY’s work that makes him a truly distinctive and original artist. His consistent refusal to be assimilated by the established art world and his persistent rejection of its blandishments also make him a symbol of independence and the freedom of dissenting thought. Such freedom is the essential condition that first makes possible work of such quality.

Click here to see the full article. An English translation and a special blogpost on it will be published in late January.

Also highly recommended is the introduction to the special issue on originality in which Wolf Lotter examines and demolishes established and degenerate notions of what originality is, what it means and what value it has. A refreshing “original” piece of writing!

Today we know that many of the technical and social scenarios dreamed up in the quality science fiction novels of the past century by authors such as Isaac Asimov (himself a distinguished scientist) have long become accepted parts of our everyday life. The ability of the human brain to imagine solutions far beyond the seemingly impossible is more than astonishing. And there’s no shortage of trailblazers who have proven this.

In our time the leaps and bounds made by artificial intelligence go almost unnoticed even though its development is proceeding at breath-taking speeds. While simple computer-controlled robots were first used mainly for heavy and hazardous work, they are now increasingly being deployed for highly sophisticated tasks like controlling jet planes in autopilot mode or exploration of the surface of the planet Mars. Only recently the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) ruled that in cases of doubt, pilots should ignore the orders of human air traffic controls and follow the instructions of the computer-controlled warning system to avoid collisions in the air and on the ground. In other words, when it comes to a critical life-or-death situation, we now place more faith in the decisions of a machine than those of our own kind.

Forecasts by serious research scientists predict that within the next 10 to 15 years we will have produced forms of artificial intelligence that are capable of self-reproduction – artificial intelligence that can generate still more artificial intelligence. We are now well on the path to androids that can think and act autonomously – even though such independence will at first be programmable. But at some future point machines will probably be capable of re-programming themselves. Like the sensitive Sunny in Isaac Asimov‘s novel I, Robot, will they then be superior to human beings?

What will our world be like if one day artificial intelligence is capable of self-reproduction? What will be left for us humans to do? What role will we play? What contribution can we make? What will we do with our day? How can we stand it all? Freed from their need for memory recall and number crunching, for what spiritual objectives will our brains use their every increasing amounts of free capacity? Will this all serve as a kind of springboard with which people can reach a new level of consciousness?

And finally: why has evolution brought forth a form of life like human beings who are so intelligent that they can probably create an intelligence that is equal, if not superior, to their own? Is this evolution’s answer to the fact that ever since the extinction of Neanderthal man, Homo sapiens has been the only being on this planet without competitors because he is the only one of his species? Has mankind now reached a point in its evolution where it creates a model that can compete with it, a model that might possibly spell its doom? Could such man-made beings colonize space – much better than any human ever could? Is this the next stage of evolutionary development?

Or is such a development simply part of a gigantic game played out across hundreds of billions of years? “God does not throw dice” Einstein once famously declared. And when somebody of his caliber thinks so, it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s the way things are.

On 14-15 November a number of OUBEYs paintings were on view at the Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna, a prestigious international management conference. The central issue dealt with by this year’s conference was Managing Complexity.

From his early years OUBEY always had a passionate interest in complexity, what it actually is and what significance it holds for the world and the cosmos. In his art he strove “specifically not to reduce the complexity of reality to a hidden simplicity following an elementary order but to leave the world in the enchantment of its complexity and uncontrollability.” The three minute film “OUBEY Complexity is a vivid expression of such an understanding at work.

 

Showing OUBEYs art in the context of the Drucker Forum posed three main questions or rather three major challenges:

• The question of how to manage complexity, the main issue dealt with by the Drucker Forum, and the basic understanding of complexity as expressed in OUBEYs art seem to stand at diametrically opposite poles. So what would happen if these radically different attitudes – the “desire to preserve the enchantment of uncontrollability” on the one hand and “the desire to manage complexity” on the other – were brought as close together as the limits of such a conference would permit?
• The second question was whether in the intellectual verbal tightly packed conference program with its rounds of talks and discussions, the silent immediate universal language of OUBEYs paintings would be strong enough to gain a hearing on its own terms. In other words, whether, without being an explicit theme of the conference, it could gain the attention and excite the interest of the manager delegates.
  This question was all the more compelling because the time available for viewing was limited to the conference breaks, and in aggregate only came to around five hours over the two day period. Distribution of time blocks made this issue a real challenge.
• And finally the interior architecture of the Haus der Industrie where the conference was held, with its splendid marble floors, ornate pillars and portraits of Austrian emperors was a lavish and omnipresent neo-classical backdrop rivaling for attention with OUBEYs paintings.

Art exhibitions are usually held in settings whose sole purpose is to promote and facilitate undivided attention on the works of art on display. In Vienna, however, the context of the conference and the conference schedule brought a whole host of interrelated issues and factors into play, all clamoring for the attention of the conference participants. And it was impossible to say how all this would color the ways participants viewed OUBEYs art. In short, there was all the stuff for a potentially unsettling situation.

Once during the preparing for the exhibition, I wondered whether it really was such a good idea to expose OUBEYs art to such a three-pronged challenge. Now with hindsight I can only say that I’m very glad to have gone ahead with my decision. Not only did OUBEYs paintings hold their own against competition from the lush and lavish backdrop but over the course of the two days excited an ever keener interest on the part of the managers. On the first day this interest first went for the paintings themselves and then expanded to include their companion Encounter Videos. The encounter model on film seemed to inspire many people to venture and make their own Open Encounter with an unknown painting by OUBEY. On the second day the interest increased rapidly and in fact there wasn’t enough time to give everyone the opportunity to do an Encounter themselves, which is very much to be regretted, but an amazing and impressive resonance as well.

I’m also especially pleased that I went ahead with my idea because the conscious decision not to make OUBEYs art part of the official conference program meant that it had the chance to prove its power of attraction in a more subversive manner outside the conference rooms. Commenting on this at the end of the conference, one manager told me, “When I first managed to snatch a few minutes to look at the paintings during yesterday’s lunch break, I found that they drew me in completely and wouldn’t let go of me in a nice way. So I took more time out during the next break and now I’ve just made my own Encounter. It was a fantastic experience with a fantastic painting. And I think that I now have a much better understanding of what complexity actually is.” OUBEYs art seems to awake inquiring free-ranging minds – one of the key conditions for a constructive approach to complexity.

We’d be delighted to see you on the page and read your comments, questions and suggestions – and of course we’d be really pleased if you recommend us to your friends. Just use #oubey.

Only now, just one year later, we’re even more delighted to announce a fourfold increase in the number of page views: Traffic analysis in April 2013 has recorded over two million page views from all parts of the globe. This is truly amazing and exceeds even our wildest expectations!

And what we’re especially pleased to report is that with Berlin – which was the second stopover of the Global Encounters Tour in March 2013 – a German city now finally figures in the top three cities worldwide with the most hits on oubey.com.

This is really inspiring and encourages us to continue on our path of linking up the on-going and continually wider presentation of OUBEY on the internet with the sporadic presentation of original works at different points on the globe in the Global Encounters Tour.

This was one of the key points made by Prof. Peter Kruse in his address at the opening of the Berlin exhibition of the OUBEY Global Encounter Tour in March 2013.

Peter Kruse is well known in Germany for his research into how self-organizing systems and intelligent networks perform and function, and for his perceptive cultural analysis – as well as for his at times provoking and highly controversial ideas. From his own fresh and unfamiliar vantage point, he cast new light on OUBEY and the idiosyncratic maturation process that gave birth to his art, a process, as he underlined, that was shaped and molded by the instincts and capabilities of an inquiring free-ranging mind.

OUBEYs art is now presented at this year’s Drucker Forum in an exceptional setting that at the same time offers a special kind of resonance space. People from all over the world concerned with the problems of complexity management are gathering in Vienna for two days of sophisticated debate and exchange on the level of written and spoken communication. They will be discussing new approaches, models and concepts in an effort to identify what can be done to enable managers to deal more successfully and more efficiently with the challenges of increasing complexity and dynamics. In the midst of these encounters and exchanges a number of OUBEYs paintings will make their own silent contribution, in a universal language that has no need of words, to an understanding of what complexity is and how it affects us. Inviting us all to free-ranging inquiry across set frontiers and boundaries.

At first sight it might seem that there is no obvious connection neither between art and management in general nor between management and OUBEYs art in particular. In this context the decisive link is furnished by the theme of complexity which was of passionate interest to OUBEY and a theme which he explored throughout his lifetime, and certainly not in his art alone, ever since he first laid hands on Ilya Prigogine’s Order out of Chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature in 1981. An intellectual inquiry into complexity, holistic systems and networking that opened up entirely new perspectives in its time.

It might seem obvious to say that it’s much easier for an artist to find solutions for dealing with complexity and much more difficult for a manager to do the same. Yet, artists embark on the free creative process in the sense of an inquiring exploration across the boundaries of different worlds just as any other person would begin it – by the power of their own decision, consequently and continuously strengthening their personal autonomy and their ability to expand their scope.

Our very life on this planet is something we owe to the complexity of a system we call the cosmos. Galaxies and stars are highly dynamic complex structures in constant evolution and change over countless billions of years – from their birth to their death. Our own chemical periodic system and the building blocks of our own life have their origins in the disintegrating complexity of dying stars.

Complexity has surrounded us for as long as we’ve been on this planet. Water, oceans, waves and tsunamis. Wind and clouds, storms, gales, hurricanes. Snow flakes, ice crystals and much much more. Complexity creates life and destroys life too. The furious outbreaks of natural complexity and the primeval forces they unleash never fail to fill us with fear and horror. We try to protect ourselves by learning how to predict them. But there are forms of life that can feel an approaching earthquake with their sensors before our seismographs pick up the warning signs and certainly long before we can with our limited senses.

For the past twenty to thirty years people and organizations have been moving in a field of increasing – and increasingly man-made – complexity and process dynamics. The exponential rise in connectivity and networking in global communications driven by the opportunities offered by the Internet is one compelling example of this. The need to feel secure by controlling and mastering such complexity is greater than ever. Yet complexity cannot be reduced nor can it be mastered.

It is neither good nor bad. Complexity is simple.

We can fear it; we can try to control it. Or we can try to move in it and by so doing familiarize ourselves with it and learn to understand it better. And to a certain extent we can also use the leverage of the interrelated effects of dynamic complexity to propel ourselves forward and develop ourselves – even though the possibility of failure is omnipresent.