I was astonished that the first spontaneous association that flashed through the mind of an astronomer led not into the far reaches of the universe but delved deep into the treasure trove of one of the most powerful and creative phases in the development of life our planet has seen.
The Burgess Shale in Canada’s Yoho National Park is one of the world’s most celebrated fossil fields. Its thin layer of black shale is like a window through which we can gaze and marvel at early life forms on our planet. Yet the creatures that have come to rest in the Rocky Mountains of Canada are in fact far removed from their places of origin which were near the equator some 200 meters under the sea.
Over 30 different species of soft-part organisms, antropods and bristle worms were discovered in the Burgess Shale at the beginning of the last century. Deposited in rock layers of fine-grained shale sediment, even the delicate structures of their soft parts are in a remarkably good state of preservation.
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At the time and even today still continue to be a revelation of revolutionary importance for paleontology and paleoecology because they cast serious doubt on Darwin’s theory of the continuous evolution of species.
Imagine, for a moment, that the whole history of evolution is condensed into a singe 24 hour day. From midnight to 21:00 hrs everything stays the same. Then about 21:00 hrs with astonishing suddenness a two minute explosion erupts, throwing up an incredible diversity of perfect new creatures – creatures of a kind never seen before and which we humans never imagined until they were discovered some hundred years ago in the Burgess Shale. No continuity, no evolutionary development …. how could this be possible?
Whatever might have been going through OUBEYs mind when painting this picture, it’s certain that he would have taken great pleasure in talking to Seth Shostak about extraterrestrial intelligence and the fantastic diversity of weird and wonderful creatures engineered by Nature in the Cambrian Explosion, about what could have triggered this tremendous surge in creativity, and possibly also about the painting itself. It strikes me that this conversation actually did take place in its own very special way during Seth Shostak’s encounter with “Krypto” on 24 April 2012.
Click here to view an animation of the Cambrian underwater world, and here to learn why the Cambrian Explosion is such a serious challenge to Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species.
“Krypto” was the title OUBEY gave to the painting which travelled to Mountain View California in April this year to meet Dr. Seth Shostak, Chief Astronomer at the SETI Institute.
The video recording of the encounter marks the first in a new series of Encounter OUBEY-Videos. Click here to view it. Every three months another new Encounter Video will be posted online atoubey.com/journey.
For many of us today questions such as these still seem to belong securely in the realm of science fiction. And yet even so the mind-boggling speed at which scientific research has been advancing over the past few years, unbeknownst to us in the background of our lives, is bringing what we might be familiar with as science fiction fantasy ever closer to our reality and the future in the next decades of our lives.
And questions such as these were the issues dealt with by the outstanding group of scientists who contributed to the OUBEY Symposium held on 20 October 2012 at the Goethe Institute in San Francisco. Their inspirational talks were broadcast per livestream on the internet and gave not only the local audience but viewers across the whole world excitingly fresh insights which could lead to a new level of knowledge and hopefully also to joy in a new kind of understanding.
From left to right: Joe Betts-Lacroix, Dagmar Woyde-Koehler, Jeanette Neustadt (Moderator), Dr. Seth Shostak, Peter Erlenwein, Nina McCurdy
OUBEYs art was also produced in a permanent quest for answers to these kinds of questions. It always seemed obvious to him that there was not, nor could there ever be, one single final answer – that any answer to any one question would in its turn simply throw up the next question.
One of the questions which was dear to him as an artist was how could he express in art his own way of perception shaped by his study of (natural) sciences and philosophy, and in particular how could he express that deep sense of joy such new knowledge and understanding gave him, and express it in such a way that through a resilient, enduring and carefully planned process that he himself conceived, people encountering his art would gain an added level of insight and understanding that was both personal and pleasurable – and which mirrored his own voyage of discovery when painting his pictures.
When, impelled by the restless curiosity of their enquiring minds, outstanding scientists share their perspectives on the future with other people, and when they in common all link such views to OUBEYs art and share them with others across the globe via the internet, a collective spirit is born which – I would like to think – is very close to what OUBEY thought and felt when he coined the term MINDKISS as the title for his first and only exhibition. This at least was very much my feeling during the OUBEY Symposium in San Francisco and this event for me was one of the most beautiful, intense and encouraging experiences it has been my privilege to make in this project so far.
View the livestream of the symposium at oubey.com up from 20 November.
And “From Karlsruhe to San Francisco” was also the heading given by FOCUS online to its feature story covering the event:
Joe Betts-Lacroix, Peter Erlenwein, Nina McCurdy and Seth Shostak were the four outstanding scientists from a range of scientific disciplines whose fascinating talks ranging on the borderlines of science, science fiction and art made the symposium an event long to be remembered.
From the Left: Joe Betts-Lacroix, Dagmar Woyde-Koehler, Jeanette Neustadt (Moderator), Seth Shostak, Peter Erlenwein, Nina McCurdy
Click here for more information about the symposium. The recording of the Livestream will go online at oubey.com
In his universal thinking and enquiry, OUBEY always followed the path of such discovery. His radical refusal of commercial art business enabled him to strike out so resolutely in this new direction and develop his own uniquely personal form of expression for this way of conceiving and perceiving the world. OUBEYs pictures speak a universal language which people from all over the world can feel and understand when they encounter his paintings.
The OUBEY Encounter Project videotapes people’s immediate encounters with original works by OUBEY and publishes them on the Internet. Now for the first time this theatre of revalation will be staged in a broader setting at the:
“OUBEY Symposium „Visions: Through Art to Science“
at the Goethe Institut in San Francisco
20, October 2012
10.30 to 3.30 pm (local time)
Scientists from a broad range of disciplines will be reporting on their work and their encounters with OUBEYs art. Encounter Videos will be shown side by side with the original works featured in them and interested members of the public will be invited to make their own spontaneous encounters with the works. For full details of those taking part and the program, click here.
For everybody who’d like to attend the Symposium but can’t make it to San Francisco, there’s a full live video stream of the event broadcast on the internet at livestream.oubey.com.
Not only will original pictures be presented along with the corresponding Encounter videos, but also a personal, spontaneous Encounter will be hosted, for the participants of the symposium.
A real highlight are also the participating scientists, who are all conducting research in those fields, which OUBEY himself had been devoted to. They will show connections between their research, and the experience of encountering OUBEYs art.
The Symposium will be broadcast live via video streams. Tune in at encounter.oubey.com on 20 October between 10:30 AM and 3:30PM (PST). We would be more than happy to have you take part!
All Orbiter concepts dealing with permanent colonization of space by people are based on the idea of a hollow object floating freely in space that is home to the colonizing humans. This concept ties in not only physical, technical and architectonic challenges of a very special kind, but also radical elementary social and psychological challenges. This has less to do with floating through space in a sphere than with the daily real perception of the material limits of this living space within a sphere.
People who live as a huge societal unit within a materially limited hollow space, which is experienced daily as such, develop not only another relationship to themselves, but also to the universe, and one that is different from the one we currently know. Attempting to imagine the form that this change in awareness might have among the colonizers, and its impact in the distant future, may be bold since a limit is involved that, for practical purposes, we are unable to cross in any other form of daily experience. But the attempt is very exciting.
We of course know since Parmenides that the Earth is round and not flat, and this perception is anchored in our current awareness. Photographs taken by space travelers of planet Earth prove that this is really true. In our daily lives, however, we are still at the stage of believing that the Earth is flat. We perceive the surface that we walk on as flat and see the horizon at the edge of our field of vision as confirmation of this perception. The sky above us, meanwhile, suggests an endlessness that does not tally with reality.
The living conditions needed to exist on the outer surface of a sphere is necessarily linked to the human perception that it is a flat surface and not a sphere by the sphere’s very curvature. Our knowledge of the world’s convexity is abstract and mathematic, and does not tie in with our everyday experience. That was of course clear to Einstein when he spoke of our difficulties in presenting the “curved space” in his Theory of Relativity.
Only in absolutely exceptional moments have people so far been able to experience the material limits of their habitat on Earth. The highly recommended movie “The Right Stuff” shows just such a borderline situation when the jet fighter pilot penetrates the Earth’s atmosphere to its outer limits, in an extremely exciting sequence. Astronauts who have visited space have their own experiences with this limit. And the coming years and decades will see the number of people who share this experience grow.
But it will probably take another few decades until larger communities of people live permanently in space colonies and this borderline experience becomes part of everyday life.
Since we only need the results of this poll in October, when we decide which three stars will find their way to the presentation of OUBEYs art at the Goethe Institute in San Francisco, we decided to extend the voting period. If you would like to cast a vote for one or more of your favorite stars, feel free to do so until October 1st. Click here to vote.
Perhaps one day we humans will populate the reaches of outer space? Not just for some limited short stay on an ISS research station but in a permanent irreversible move? The question might need more precise phrasing – not perhaps humans will move but when will they move to colonize space?
The idea that we humans become familiar enough with the solar system in which our planet earth moves and orbits round the sun once a year, to travel in it and even inhabit it for a certain period is an ages old one. The fantastic visions of science fiction and the sober facts of scientific studies have constantly encouraged us not to reject such notions as overblown fantasies and entertaining delusions but to pin our faith on the hope that someday they will be actually realized. Science fiction is a medium in which both literature and architecture find a means of creative expression that perhaps emanates from our deep longing to travel back to the very origins of our existence, and thus in a certain way to return to them so we can know and research them.
Manned space flights have given us a premonition of what it’s like to defy gravity, leave the earth’s atmosphere and penetrate the reaches of our own solar system. And Fritz Haller back in the 70s of the last century is one of the visionaries who have given us an idea of what it could be like when people move into space and colonize it. Based on the findings of an MIT study, his “Space Colony” is designed as a permanent life environment in which 1,000 people can live and work. Getting to know Fritz Haller and his project for building Prototypes of Space Colonies was one of the things that inspired and enthused OUBEY in his early days as a student of architecture.
Haller’s project is not about setting up a permanent base on another planet like Mars. This opening is now being investigated by NASA, and according to a recent survey some 500 US citizens have already declared their readiness to move to such a colony – without any chance of returning to earth. What Fritz Haller envisaged was an “Orbital” a huge spaceship freely floating in space in which 1,000 people would find their new homes in a totally man-made environment.
What’s fascinating about the project is not only the issues it raises of how to build a totally artificial life environment but also the fact that this environment would be hermetically sealed with the human life space within having definite boundaries to the limitless space without. This poses a tremendous challenge not only in terms of the enabling technologies but also in terms of engineering an adequate social space and creating the social conditions for communal life on such an island in space.
When properly planned, such visions always tend to move in the border areas to social utopias which will probably come much closer to realization in the course of the next fifty to hundred years than many of us might care to think at the moment. From its very inception, the free design and formulation of such an artificial life environment would be a minor miracle of creation in which the collective intelligence of the human race and its ability to really take to heart the lessons learned from its own history would have to prove themselves in a way we have yet to see.
More information will be made available in September on oubey.com as well as the upcomingnewsletter.
But it was no coincidence that he had chosen this particular evening to call because this was the night when the skies were expected to erupt in a magic burst of cosmic activity. Thousands of shooting stars would fall, he told me, the whole night through, far more than on any other night of the year. And this is exactly what happened. I stood for a long while in the dark outside gazing spellbound into the endless depths of our universe, marveling at the exuberant shower of streaking, shooting, sparkling meteorites. I thought of Einstein’s Tears and OUBYs Stars and was glad that this unexpected phone call had given me the opportunity to experience such a magnificent nocturnal display.
Ever since then on August 11 – if the night sky is not obscured by clouds – I go out and watch this shower of meteorites. It’s a spectacle that returns regularly each year when the orbit of the earth around our own star, the sun, crosses the zone that intersects with the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle.
This comet carries a huge river of stone and dust in its tail. Thousands of tail particles, mainly millimeter-small tiny fragments of rock, hit the earth’s atmosphere at incredible speeds of 60 km per second or 216,000 km an hour – the kind of speed you’d need to reach the moon in just two hours. Heated by the friction of the atmosphere, they glow incandescent and vaporize in a belt 80 to 300 kilometers above the surface of the earth from where we can watch the shower of falling meteorites.
Isn’t it amazing that the sight of pure cosmic rock entering the earth’s atmosphere and being turned as though by a magic hand into dazzling bursts of fireworks is one that never fails to move us and uplift our soul?
Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star.
But everyone of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many – perhaps most – of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven – or hell.
How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times further away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.”
From: Arthur C. Clarke: 2001 – A Space Odyssey. Based on the screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. Foreword by A.C.C. and S.K. First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson 1968.
We’d like to let you decide which of the stars will go on the road. All you have to do is just chooseyour favorite star or stars from the array of nine StarPixels we’re presenting below:
Those stars that receive the most votes will accompany the tour. Click here for more information about voting.
Please note that the voting closes on 31 August 2012. We are looking forward to receiving your response and we are also very excited to see which way the voting swings – and will keep you posted about the results in September.
More detailed information on the tour will soon be posted on www.oubey.com/inside/news. But one thing is already certain: wherever the tour might go there will be at least one of OUBEYs StarPixels on view. And there’s a special reason for this:
When OUBEY started work on the StarPixels in March 2004 he wanted to paint a thousand stars. He had completed eighty stars when his life was cut short in August 2004. Nothing in his legacy seems more incomplete than the nine hundred and twenty stars he had already painted in his head but was unable to complete. And yet each of the eighty stars that he did manage to finish carries in it a premonition of the grandeur and scale of the completed series. This is why at least one of these StarPixels will always be included when OUBEYs pictures go on tour.
Which one is your favorite star?
Deciding which of the stars should accompany the tour is something that we want to invite you to take part in an online vote. Please choose your favorite star or stars from a pre-selection of nine stars:
Click here to see how you can vote.
Please note that voting closes on 1 October 2012. We are looking forward to receiving your response and we are also very excited to see which way the voting swings – and will keep you posted about the results in September.
I had the occasion to learn just what uninhibited directness can mean some two years ago when I was fortunate enough to be there when a group of small children encountered one of OUBEYs paintings. I was immensely struck by the uninhibited sense of childish curiosity, the capacity for astonishment and the sense of wonder they brought to the painting, the discoveries they made in it and the views they expressed. The encounter was filmed on video and can be seen online.
All of us have the ability to tap into the sense of wonder to rediscover the world anew. Children live out such a sense in a completely unimpeded, uninhibited way. It’s a very clever trick on the part of nature because if they didn’t they would never learn anything.
We know that such a sense of wonder disappears in many people as they grow into adults but we have no idea where it disappears to. Possibly it never disappears entirely but slips deep down into the dark regions of our slumbering talents.
Those grown-ups who still have the ability to re-invoke the wondering gaze of the child they once were are indeed fortunate people. I would say that the life-long ability to ask questions from a position of not-knowing, from a position of wonderment, – and thus the ability to step out of the shadows thrown by decades of accumulated experience and knowledge gathering – is an essential part of happiness. To move out of these shadows and constantly rediscover the world and yourself afresh. This was a part of happiness that was dear to OUBEY and that he would never part with. It’s there in many of his paintings. And in the one the children encountered too.
The encounter video can be seen here.