In association with the Drucker Society Europe, in November 2013 the GLOBAL ENCOUNTER TOUR is showing original works by OUBEY in Vienna – including several pictures that have never been placed on public display. This exhibition forms part of the “Global Peter Drucker Forum” which this year is dedicated to Managing Complexity.
On Thursday, 14 November from 19:00 to 22:00 hrs the exhibition is also open to the general public. This evening offers a special opportunity to all interested people, friends and partners of OUBEY MINDKISS who are not taking part in the conference to make their own immediate unfiltered encounter with a very different kind of complexity – one to which OUBEY in his paintings gave a singularly powerful and unique expression.
Complexity was a theme of enduring fascination for OUBEY and one to which he dedicated over twenty years of his life in exploring its scientific, philosophical and aesthetic aspects and implications. Influenced in particular by his reading of Ilya Prigogine´s pioneering works, at an early stage he arrived at the conclusion that by its very nature complexity cannot be controlled.
“The aim of my art is definitely not to prune the high complexity of reality down to some underlying elementary order but to preserve the bloom of magic cast by the world in all its complexity and uncontrollability.”
OUBEY MINDKISS is delighted to be partnering with the Drucker Society Europe and warmly welcomes its decision to enrich this year’s Global Drucker Forum on Managing Complexity with an exhibition of OUBEYs art that offers a new and highly unusual vantage point on the theme under discussion. We look forward to seeing what influences the dynamics of such different approaches to complexity exert on one another during the course of the conference, and what new effects and synergies they generate – in the sense of a complex and fluid process.
You can find more information on this topic here, in the current blog post or right here at the end of October.
This is why I’m using this blogpost to outline some of the tracks I’ve come across so far in my exploration of what the Zero Point Field might mean. These are tracks that do not converge to give one clear and unambiguous meaning. And certainly not a definite explanation or extrapolation. The field for further discoveries is huge and wide open.
Track 1
“The beam’s soft light illuminates that far-off layer
And slow as honey flows the quantum stream”
Lines from OUBEYs 1979 poem “Nullfeld”
Track 2
“You can sense infinity in it”
From the unfiltered encounter of the whale filmmaker and ocean diver Daniel Opitz with OUBEYs painting Nullfeld in May 2013 on Maui/Hawaii.
Track 3
“A Zero Field is a closed modified hyperfield from the spectrum above hypergravitation. (…) The fundamental principles of the Absolute Zero Field were developed by the Terrans in collaboration with the Haluterns who even as far back as the 25th century had learned to recognize and harness its capabilities.”
From the Perrypedia, the encyclopedic reference work on Perry Rhodan in the internet.
Zero Point Fields are often encountered in the Perry Rhodan series of science fiction novellas that OUBEY first read as a boy. Take Volume 264, for instance where the Terran spaceship CREST III flies into the Absolute Zero Field of the planet Vario on 26 April 2404 and travels back 52,392 years in time. A Zero Time Deformer can generate an Absolute Zero Field which envelops an object and enables it to travel in time.
Track 4
“What we tend to think of as a sheer void if all of space were emptied of all matter and energy and you examined even the space between stars is, in subatomic terms, a hive of activity … This subatomic tango (…) when added across the universe, gives rise to enormous energy, more than is contained in all matter in the entire world. Also referred to by physicists as ‘the vacuum’, the Zero Point Field was called ‘zero’ because fluctuations in the field are still detectable in temperatures of absolute zero, the lowest possible energy state where all matter has been removed and nothing is supposedly left to make any motion.”
Lynn McTaggert, The Field: The Quest For The Secret Force Of The Universe, 2003, p. 31
Track 5
According to speculative interpretations of the findings of quantum research, the Zero Field or Zero Point Field is an all encompassing field of energy connecting everything. Sometimes this is referred to as the collective memory of the universe. Such views are based on the observation that when two interconnected elementary particles are separated from one another, they continue to behave in exactly the same manner without the slightest time difference even over the most extreme distances.
Track 6
Since Einstein we know that space and time are not absolute but relative. A great deal is possible that we can only “picture” today with the help of our imagination.
“The universal constant of the speed of light separates us humans from a physical experience of the universe. This constant puts us in a kind of quarantine which we can only leave through the power of our imagination.”
OUBEY in conversation 1992
This is a quarantine in which we find ourselves for as long as we live on this earth. And this is why our ideas of what the Zero Point Field might be must remain purely speculative.
Possibly it is death which will liberate us one day from this quarantine and let us experience what now in the midst of life we call the Zero Point Field. This would be something like the solution to a paradox.
It was in December 2009 that Dagmar Woyde-Koehler first took to the road with one of OUBEYs paintings to travel to an Encounter. Since then, over twenty five encounters have taken place – in Germany, Europe, New Zealand and the USA – and fifteen of the videos documenting them can now be viewed online at oubey.com/journey.
The most recent encounters with one of the world’s best giant wave surfers Robby Seeger, and the whale filmmaker and ocean diver Daniel Opitz took place only a couple of weeks ago on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
“What really counts for me are the encounters themselves,” says Dagmar Woyde-Koehler. “Being there, directly on the spot when people so close to OUBEYs spirit in their ways of thinking and inquiry, their passion and their sense of connectedness with the Universe, come face to face with one of his paintings is always a very intense, deeply stirring experience. And the possibility we now have of sharing these experiences as films on the internet is also taking on an increasingly important meaning for the entire MINDKISS Project. With the totally unprecedented communication medium of the Encounter, OUBEYs art has found a resonance space that is unique and that never stops growing. Despite all the huge effort that goes into the Journey Project, this is why I am still eager to continue it and develop it even further.”
Just what goes on in the background in the preparation for an Encounter and the follow-up work it involves is shown in the film OUBEY Encounters – The Journey, first presented to the public during the Berlin stopover of the Global Encounters Tour, and which now can be seen in its English version.
Because the fact is that our brain continues to operate in dream territory when we’re asleep. It creates the most amazing connections between all the knowledge and experience we have stored up in its folds. It can connect up events from the past, and even remote events from the collective memory of which we have no direct experience, with immediate events we have just experienced as easily and effortlessly as it can use these connections to throw up constructions of future reality that seem so real to us (in our dream state) that they seem not just possible but actually there. And it takes these constructions and weaves them into everything else that we might dream.
Are dreams a kind of reality? Is reality a kind of dream? There’s nothing new about these questions and attempts to answer them have provided the stuff of countless novels and poems, science fiction speculations and films like the fantastic movie Inception (“the dream is real”).
Encounters with certain types of music and certain types of painting give listeners and viewers the chance to float effortlessly in a conscious or semi-conscious state between these layers of reality – just like in a dream. And it is this “poised realm between the possible and the actual” – as Stuart Kauffman called it in his encounter with one of OUBEYs paintings – that opens up a particular space for freedom.
Art can fascinate us and cast a spell over us and in so doing it also offers us the freedom of a third level in the mind. Perhaps even more than the dreams we dream when asleep, art opens up a space for us on the other side of thinking which we would otherwise not be able to enter. And perhaps this is one of the reasons why recently in Berlin a visitor standing in front of one of OUBEYs paintings said that it reminded him of things that had never happened – an astonishing statement which has never ceased to haunt me. Many of OUBEYs unpublished drawings are a fresh exploration of this other side of his thinking which also finds expression in his paintings. Once the Global Encounters Tour is over, we will consider publication of this previously undiscovered part of his work.
You can watch the panel discussion here: [part one], [part two].
Perhaps in the light of the experiences I’ve made in my MINDKISS Encounters Project, my expectations about this event were pitched a little too high. At least as far as I saw it, the evening was less about the spirit of art and much more about documentable reactions to art in the human brain through to MRI-assisted calibration of reactions to a variety of photos of works of art in the different regions of test persons brains, and the psychological interpretation of such reactions. This is all very well, but after all mind and brain represent two very different levels of human perception.
Basically the panel was more interested in discovering how people reacted to the pictorial representation of figures in a variety of different situational contexts. This seemed obvious because all experiments only used famous paintings from periods from the 15th to the 19th century that showed people in a variety of clear and unambiguous emotional contexts. This kind of attempt to present an objective view of subjective reactions to art does have a certain kind of limited interest. Only it strikes me as not very illuminating when it comes to discovering new insights into the spiritual bond between the human mind and painting – particularly since the investigation relied solely on photos of paintings which completely fail to give the format and convey the particular aura of the original work.
In the Encounters with OUBEYs art what we do have is the expressly desired subjectivity of perception in the immediacy of exposure to a previously unknown original work of art. And this is a work of art that doesn’t shown any specific human “motif” in a readily understandable emotional context but rather is more of a snapshot of a on-going process of intellectual and emotional enquiry into the fundamental questions of human life. This is why the Encounters Project explicitly shuns any kind of evaluation, classification or interpretation of the encounters documented on film. Its principle is “Experience for yourself what OUBEY called a MINDKISS”. Let it happen. Open yourself up. And take as much time as you want.
Without wanting in any way to disparage the scientific value of the findings presented by the panel, I felt a wave of relief when psychologist David Freedberg summed up the discussion after one and a half hours by saying that fortunately just how and why people react to art the way they do will remain shrouded in mystery.
When looking at this painting by OUBEY in Berlin, a young eleven year old girl found that what it showed was “the search for lost memories”. What an amazing association!
Another visitor remarked that a lot of OUBEYs paintings reminded him of things he had never seen before. And that he had now experienced a MINDKISS in the truest and most authentic sense of the term.
In an encounter with OUBEYs art there is no right and wrong. There is only the subjective authentic experience of the direct encounter itself with its overriding all-important freedom of discovery.
Everyone has their own thoughts and feelings; everyone finds their own entirely personal gateway to the pictures. Look at some of the paintings and they seem to develop a kind of spiritual magnetism which leads to a more or less explainable sense of understanding. Yet other paintings, while no less lacking in powerful attraction, remain so mysterious that they defy understanding. Perhaps all we can do is to speak of recognition and mirror-like reflection.
Possibly there’s something like a collective memory of the universe which – quite unlike the individual human being’s memory – unites past, present and future in one. This is something our own memories cannot do because we all live in the quarantine imposed on us by the speed of light. Such a restriction does not exist in the far-flung regions of outer space, as the latest findings of astrophysics have indicated.
Perhaps in OUBEYs paintings there is a glimmer of premonition that crossing the barriers of time is indeed conceivable and fundamentally possible. Certainly, such a premonition haunted and illuminated the artist’s mind. If he really has succeeded in capturing this spark in his paintings and making it visible for all to see, it would well worthwhile to think about sending one of his pictures on a journey in the near future or coming decades that goes far beyond the outer reaches of our own galaxy. I for one would be willing to offer one of his paintings for such a mission.
If you’re interested in the Encounter made by Prof. Lawrence Krauss, one of the leading and most famous Astrophysicists of our time, with the painting about the “Search for Lost Memories”, here is the link.
Dick Fosbury was the first high jumper to use this particular technique which consists of a rapid approach to the bar with the final steps being run in a curve producing rotation of the jumper’s body on take-off which gives the now characteristic “backwards over the bar” appearance. At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, his fellow competitors were smiling at Fosbury with a mixture of compassion and amusement just one hour before he jumped his way clean to Olympic Gold.
Yet after he won the Olympic Gold medal by being the only athlete in the competition to clear the 2.24 meter bar with the “crazy”, idiosyncratic technique he himself had developed, the amused pity of his fellow athletes turned to jaw-dropping amazement. And the crowd in the stadium rose to their feet and roared their approval.
If I understand his talk correctly, I think that Peter Kruse used this example to show that the autonomy of discovery needs to strike out in new directions and engage with new possibilities that free it from conventional ways of perception and thinking. Independence is a key condition for a free-ranging inquiring endlessly curious mind, because without autonomy there can be no successful crossing of mental frontiers and established borderlines.
In his own particular way of thinking and acting, OUBEY was one such fiercely independent free-ranging traveler between different worlds. Now this is nothing new and Professor Kruse had already remarked on it over three years ago in his
Encounter with one of OUBEYs paintings. What is new and has come to the fore since Kruse‘s talk in Berlin is the striking similarity that exists between the approaches taken by Dick Fosbury and OUBEY, even though the two of them were active in completely different disciplines and completely different contexts.
Obviously unlike Fosbury, OUBEY was not intent on setting a new world record and winning Olympic Gold. But what they both have in common is that neither of them was prepared to submit to the dictates of established value systems that lay down the law on “how you’ve got to jump”. Both of them marked out their own individual territory free of the rules and mechanisms that govern the established worlds of their chosen disciplines – athletics on the one hand, art on the other. OUBEY too, if you like, jumped backwards over the bar – only his leaps were not physically measurable and didn’t take place in the public gaze of a crowded stadium but in the seclusion of his own studio where he himself was the only judge and jury. It’s only today, posthumously, that the quality of his intellectual and artistic prowess is gradually becoming apparent to the world outside.
“This is a milestone for OUBEY MINDKISS” said Dagmar Woyde-Koehler, the initiator of the OUBEY MINDKISS project and director of the Global Encounters Tour. “The concept we’ve evolved is a totally new and unparalleled way of bringing art to people and spreading the joy of discovery – which is such a strong element in OUBYs art – across the whole world. The first two stopovers in San Francisco and Berlin have clearly shown that we’re on the right track which is leading us to places we never knew before. And that really is exciting!”
In the Direktorenhaus’s packed movie theater, she greeted Prof. Dr. Peter Kruse as the special guest and key note speaker of the evening together with that lucky number of guests who’d managed to secure standing room only!
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“The increasing complexity and dynamism of our world makes it pretty evident that the traditional types of decision-making processes used by leaders in government and business have now reached their limits.” argued Prof. Dr. Peter Kruse in his brilliant and entertaining introductory talk.“What we now need are free-ranging inquiring spirits like OUBEY who are capable of giving dynamic complexity a recognizable shape.”
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His talk put its finger on one of the fundamental issues of our times and was followed with keen interest by the attentive audience in the movie theater. It provided a rich smogasbord of talking points for further animated discussions in the course of the evening.
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“OUBEY grants us insights into the mind of a man who travels between two worlds” wrote the leading Berlin broadsheet Der Tagesspiegel in its review lof 23 March, linking in what Prof. Kruse said in his keynote address.
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The eight original works on view in Berlin were framed on both sides by sets of headphones and screens which showed the companion Encounter Videos for each painting. Dagmar Woyde-Koehler filmed these videos on her travels with OUBEYs paintings throughout the world, and posted them on the internet.
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“The Encounters show that you don’t have to be an art expert to fall under the spell of OUBEYs paintings. There’s a timeless quality about them that we all find moving” wrote the critic from Der Tagesspiegel at the end of her glowing review.
A short documentary showing the background work that goes into setting up an Encounter and all the logistics involved before an Encounter Video finally goes online was also premiered in Berlin.OUBEY Encounters – The Journey is now on the internet and can be viewed by clicking here. Note that an English version of this video will be released in May. It will be made available here.
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Berlin visitors also had the opportunity of making their own personal encounter before the camera with an unknown painting by OUBEY standing veiled in a separate room. It was an opportunity eagerly seized by a great many visitors including children from two school classes who visited the exhibition. The videos from this set of Open Encounters will go online in 2014.
Not the least of the delightful surprises was the unexpected flying visit of the Governing Mayor of Berlin Klaus Wowereit to the exhibition.
“I am impressed and deeply moved, and only now that I’ve had the chance to see some of OUBEYs paintings in the original for the very first time can I understand what MINDKISS really means” one visitor commented as she was leaving. And she certainly wasn’t alone in her opinion!
Opening: March 21 at 7 pm
Open on March 22-23 from 11:30 am until 8:30 pm
Click here to view the brand new trailer. For more information click here.
The paintings are on show at the Direktorenhaus, Am Krögel 2, in Berlin-Mitte on the 22 and 23 March 2013. The exhibition opens on 21 March at 19:00 hrs.
The GLOBAL ENCOUNTER TOUR stages unusual “encounters” between people and the art of the painter OUBEY which are videoed and presented as short films. A whole series of such encounters have been filmed over the past few years in all parts of world, and the Berlin stopover of the tour will be presenting a selection of them.
To view the brand-new Berlin trailer click here.
This is an exhibition where the paintings don’t just hang on the wall but are companioned by their own ENCOUNTER videos. In a special highlight of the Berlin show, visitors can discover the art of OUBEY in their own personal ENCOUNTER with a painting. There’s also a cross-section of previous ENCOUNTERS on view filmed in many parts of the world where the paintings meet a broad range of people from scientists and artists to schoolchildren. These include ENCOUNTERS with such figures as Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Mountain View; Prof. Stuart Kauffman, one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute, Cecilia Scorza, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, and Prof. Peter Kruse, who will also be present as the keynote speaker at the opening.
We would be happy to see you there! The OUBEY MINDKISS Team.
The title of this painting refers not just to Albert Einstein and his unfulfilled dream of creating one single unified theory of physics to explain the universe, a theory in which relativity theory and quantum physics would be united. It equally refers to William Voltz, the novella author of the Perry Rhodan series who died prematurely in 1984 and whose last novella was published as booklet 1165 in the series as Einstein’s Tears.
Sadly, OUBEY and William Voltz never met one another. But a posthumous encounter between one of OUBEYs paintings and the present Perry Rhodan novella author Uwe Anton took place in 2010. Click here to see the video of the encounter.
And for the past few years, this is exactly what they have been doing. At first it was just particular pictures that travelled exclusively to meet particular people from Bremen and Vienna to Boston and Santa Fe.
The “hosts” of these encounters were excellent scientists from a broad range of disciplines but also such people as a musician, a singer, and a science fiction author. Their encounters with the paintings were documented and can be viewed online as short films on YouTube and OUBEYs Website.
This series of exclusive one-to-one Encounters is still on-going. Only now it’s been extended by the Global Encounters Tour which presents a much bigger number of original works and their Encounter Videos to a much bigger audience.
What’s more, there’s now also a totally new variation of the individual encounter format.
The tour kicked off last October in San Francisco with a symposium entitled “VISIONS: Through Art to Science” and it will take five years to travel the world with stopovers staged not in museums and galleries but wherever possible in places that aren’t usually associated with art. In this way a great many people around the world will have the opportunity to see the original paintings in close up.
From 21-23 March it can be seen in Berlin as “The Joy of Insight” in a title drawn from OUBEYs remark that “My art is simply a reflection of the joy of insight. It is like an ode to it, a poem”.
And there in a room will be a covered painting waiting to be visited and “discovered”. And this offers the opportunity for anyone interested to make their own personal encounter with OUBEY – on their own or with other people but always live on camera!
More details of the program will be published here soon. I wish all of you encountering OUBEY in BERLIN much joy and inspiration in exploring the world of his art.
“The Joy of Insight” – OUBEY in Berlin +++ Direktorenhaus, Am Krögel 2, Berlin-Mitte ++ ++ March 21-23. +++ Opening on March 21 at 7 pm +++ Open on March 22 and 23 from 11 am to 8.30 pm.
On 22 and 23 March original works by OUBEY can be seen together with the Encounter Videos at Berlin’s Direktorenhaus. The picture below is a screenshot from the encounter with Prof. Peter Kruse.
The Opening is on 21 March at 19:00 hrs, and we are pleased to announce that Prof. Kruse himself will be attending as a special guest.
More details of the program will be given at the end of February.
The development of agriculture brought with it not only the rise of settled communities, but crucially the development of the “agricultural consciousness” in which Homo sapiens developed the notion of a future that could be actively shaped and planned for.
The continuously repeated cycle of the sowing, harvesting and selling or storing of foodstuffs changed the mode of thinking and gave rise to a huge array of cultural artifacts including social classes, formation of the (city) state and kingdoms, methods of organization and social control but above all differentiation of the spoken language through to the invention of the first written characters. This must have been one of the most radical transformations of consciousness, if not the most radical, that our species has ever seen. It laid the foundations on which our modern world is built.
Time and money became the key determinants of power and thus the most important factors influencing human action. And the desire for everlasting life which was the subject of the last blogpost, increasingly found its ultimate expression in the material world of power – in the hoarding of gold bars, and the piling of stone upon stone to build palaces, monuments and mausoleums. The Egyptian pharaohs’ cult of power and cult of the dead with its gigantic pyramids is one of the most compelling examples of such an apotheosis.
Yet although in many ways we have obviously made great progress since then, even today we still have not really progressed beyond the level of consciousness first formed in those times. Just like our forebears, we are still striving to gain time and money, and the power and influence that go with them. And – at least in our collectivity as a species – we still not have really accepted our mortality for what it truly is – the essential condition which allows us to live. The greater part of our consciousness is still that of individuals who perceive and experience themselves as something separate from the rest of nature, not as integral parts of a great cosmic system. The best we can say is that we are now at the “halftime of evolution” of our potential consciousness as human beings.
But possibly today, ten to fifteen thousand years later – which on the evolutionary time scale is less than the batting of an eyelid – we have reached a stage of history where there is the chance of the next watershed of consciousness. Our knowledge of the cosmos in which our own planet and our solar system are only a minute particle in an infinitely greater order, and our knowledge of possible future developments and the impact of our present actions in shaping the future has taken a tremendous leap forward over the past two decades. Yet on the other hand, there has been no corresponding change in our ability to visualize the consequences of our behavior in such clear and forceful scenarios that we compelled to take quick and drastic action to change the way we live. Yet the practical predictable consequences of the way we are now living have reached an order of magnitude where they appear to pose a serious threat to our continued existence on this planet. Our ability to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat carries with it the potential of a kind of New Age future shock which could perhaps act as a catalyst for the next transformation of our consciousness, a watershed every bit as momentous as the development of the agricultural consciousness twelve thousand years ago.
The title and two quoted words are taken from Ken Wilber’s book Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution.
When did the dream of paradise first enter the consciousness of our ancestors? Who dreamed this dream for the very first time? From what fountainhead of inspiration did this idea first spring many thousands of years ago into the minds of our ancestors? Was it a flash of sudden inspiration on the part of one single person, was it indeed a process that anything to do with individuals or was it more a slowly dawning collective realization that brought forth this idea?
Or is this dream wired into our genome? Is it part and parcel of the genetic makeup of Homo sapiens? Did the Neanderthals, our earlier ancestors, also have a dream of this kind? And if they did, did they dream of something quite different or was it the same dream as ours?
All the evidence seems to indicate that this dream first arose some twenty to thirty thousand years ago in the dawning awareness of an irredeemable loss. Christian Scriptures speak of a loss of innocence and the expulsion from Paradise as the punishment for having tasted the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, the first original sin. What a martial and truly terrifying scenario this is and how fitting to warn people away from the desire to explore and discover and the joy that knowledge can bring. An insidious scenario that almost incidentally sends the message that it was Eve, the woman, who couldn’t resist temptation and whose frailty brought woe into the world.
In actual fact it seems much more likely that this particular awareness was first created by powerful evolutionary forces – whether this happened in a blinding flash or as the result of incremental irreversible change. Human beings arrived at a new level of awareness of the world and their place in it by developing a consciousness of their own existence as something separate from that of the world of nature and the cosmos. Such a realization gave a tremendous thrust of revolutionary transformational power to the course of further development on our planet – and possibly to the development of life far beyond it. Here are where the roots lie of our race as sentient beings who observe, forage, inquire, measure, calculate and prove, beings who experience nature and the cosmos as distinct and separate entities which they believe they can rationally understand and dominate.
This evolutionary leap has always been of fundamental importance for individuals throughout history and continues to be so to the present day. Because awareness of life also brings with it awareness of death – the certainty that at some inevitable point your life will reach its end. At least your physical life on this earth as the individual person you are at this point in time. Death entered human consciousness and became the major marker against which the feeling for life could be measured.
What could it have been like before this transformation took place and human consciousness was born? Living from one day to the next, gathering and hunting what you needed in a simple world of the continuous present without knowledge and awareness of your own mortality? Is this the memory of paradise that has remained in the sedimentary folds of our sub-consciousness as an unfulfillable yearning of which we still dream today? Or is it life without end in itself that we yearn for when we now dream of paradise?