part of the mindkiss project

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What is this next stage about? What does “Art of Resonance” mean?

“How did you do all this?” is one of the questions that I’m often asked as initiator of the project. There is certainly no recepy, but maybe some answers to this question.

Find the right partners

The first and perhaps most straightforward answer is that I always find the right partners who share an equal enthusiasm for OUBEYs art and the project itself. Partners who understand the spirit in which the project is conceived which is the same spirit in which OUBEY created his body of work in the short time of his life. People who aren’t interested in fame or riches. People who find a keen pleasure in putting their remarkable talents at the service of a project that represents a special kind of challenge for everybody who joins it. But one that also offers possibilities of co-determination and way-setting that are rarely found elsewhere. Precisely because it questions and turns upside down everything usually considered as normal.

Do it like OUBEY

When I called the MINDKISS Project into life I was alone. Alone in a different and yet similar way to the way OUBEY was also alone when he painted his pictures over a period of twelve years. He needed seclusion from the public gaze in order to paint the pictures that arose in his mind – independently of what any outsider thought or even the idea of selling them on the art market.

After his death I too sequestered myself, surrounded myself with his works and immersed myself in them. That was good, important and the right thing to do. Yet at some point there was a moment when I realised that I wanted to go public with his paintings to do what he himself intended to do at the end of his period of seclusion but now no longer could. I was very conscious that at this particular point in time I was the only one who harboured such a wish. So as a “one woman enterprise” I was going to need allies. But even so OUBEYs statements, his wishes, hopes and expectations were always my compass – and remain so today.

To have always found such partners over the long period of fifteen years and even now after my three and a half years’ time-out is something that I see as a huge stroke of luck.

Don´t care about the ignorant

Particularly because in the first couple of years I sometimes encountered incomprehension, ignorance and even downright hostility. Fortunately I never made the mistake at that time of looking for the reason of what went wrong in OUBEY or myself but only there where it really lay – in the blinkered vision and meagre understanding of those people who could place no confidence in me because they had no confidence in themselves, caught up and limited as they were by the rut of their conventional operationalised professional lives. These were experiences I shall never forget. Yet they never discouraged me, they rather made me strong and resilient at a time when the aftershocks of OUBEYs accidental death were manifesting themselves on a daily basis.

Take your time

My steadfastness and perseverance paid off. At the beginning it wasn’t the “big” names but people I knew from different contexts in my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances whom I’d talked to about my ideas and who began to become fired up with enthusiasm about the project. At some point I knew exactly just what I wanted and made the monumental decision I have never regretted to strike out on my own way independent of the established institutions of the art market and to go my own way with the internet, the only medium that allows me to do exactly what I want to and to follow ways that OUBEY himself might well have taken. Others took their own keen pleasure in this radical decision and began to support me and help me cut paths in the jungle of what was for me a completely unknown world. This too I have not forgotten. It was the start of a joint endeavour that I would now like to celebrate publically on the unofficial 15th anniversary of the MINDKISS Project.

Dare to ask

This group of quiet sympathisers in the background were gradually joined by an increasing number of professional partners. For the next five years I worked together with them behind the scenes on what we then celebrated in 2010 with the launch of the first public event in the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. What happened in its aftermath was a veritable explosion of cooperation.

People from all over the world came forward to support the project either by being prepared to encounter one of OUBEYs paintings in front of running cameras or by helping me to find further partners for another stopover of the Global Encounter Tour anywhere from San Francisco to New Zealand and Uganda. People whom I never imagined would be prepared to take part in something so experimental and make their own personal contribution. Even so I did ask them and the vast majority readily agreed. The 25 Encounter Videos which came together in this way are and will remain one of the constituent parts of the project as they show instantly and with no need for any further explanation what the project really is about.

Embrace the unexpected and use your chances

I’d almost given up hope of ever making an Encounter with one of the indigenous people of Australia. Then one morning on my way to work I heard on the radio a report about the Maori people’s struggle for the return of the shrunken heads of their ancestors from the museums of the world back to New Zealand. Never before had I even thought about asking a Maori whether he or she would be prepared to encounter OUBEYs art. But with the help of the radio reporter whom I tracked down three Encounters were staged and six months later even a stopover of the Global Tour in a Maori school.

Likewise the idea for a stopover of the Global Tour in Uganda came about at an international conference on human rights in Oslo. A friend of mine who was taking part in the forum was talking to a Norwegian delegate in a break about the MINDKISS Project, and the man spontaneously invited me to visit Uganda where he’d long been running an art and professional training project for young people. I admit that I did hesitate a moment or two before accepting as I had my doubts about whether anything good would come of it. But my doubts turned out to be baseless and the outcome was simply wonderful.

Love what you do and appreciate the contribution of others

The MINDKISS Project could never have become what it is today without the loving collaboration of such a broad spectrum of brilliant partners and supporters that the space here is not sufficient to name them all. Our inspirational collaboration never bore the stamp of a business relationship. It was more by way of what I would call a heartfelt commitment. And finding a heartfelt commitment in the collaborative partnership of the project is something that for me at least is by no means self-evident. Especially since in these kinds of cooperation there’s always a kind of three way relationship – at first glance between the respective partner and myself but always also including OUBEY. This is why a feeling for OUBEY is the absolutely essential condition for a successful outcome to collaborative work. And thus far it has always led to very good and sometimes even extraordinarily good results.

Don’t stand still

Ever since I recommenced work on the project last year after my time-out, the spirit of a joint endeavour in collaboration with current partners has become more and more tangible. We don’t merely come together from time to time to work on individual projects for Virtual Reality Experiences, Emotional Resonance Pictures of OUBEYs art or on an OUBEY Explorer. We also see ourselves as cooperating partners for the Roadshow which will kick off in September at the Science Fiction/Science & Art Festival in Moscow – COVID-19 always permitting.

Let it happen

Some things have to be planned. But the basic source of quality is an open and interactive cooperative process. Based on such a process we are standing on the threshold of a new stage of the project which more than ever before will embody a shared spirit of creative cooperation. That´s what makes this project so interesting and exciting for everyone involved. We let it happen. And I look forward to whatever will happen throughout the roadshow ahead of us.

Richard Feynman, great American physicist,

She herself gives a first answer to this question in the video filmed of this encounter when she says, “We still haven’t reached the stage when we can see all this with our present generation of telescopes. Perhaps in two or three years’ time.“ She said this in 2010. Even twenty four years after the picture was painted it still showed a view of the depths of outer space that nobody could possibly have seen. Only OUBEY could. In this painting he revealed something that no human eye up to then had ever seen. That’s what she found so daring.

OUBEY painted this picture in 1986. That was the year when the Hubble Space Telescope was set to commence operations. Yet the start of this mission was postponed by four years because the tragic accident of the Space Shuttle Challenger on 28 January 1986 in which seven astronauts lost their lives. And when the telescope finally began transmitting images back to earth in 1990, they turned out to be disappointingly bad or even unusable. This was due to a flaw in the polishing of the telescope’s primary mirror which could only be rectified in 1993 when two courageous astronauts floating in zero-gravity installed corrective optics. Ever since then the Hubble Space Telescope has been sharing its view of the universe with us. Its images of the birth of stars, black holes and gigantic iridescent nebulae bathed in light are breath-taking and thrillingly beautiful. And now celebrated across the whole world.

So in 1986 when Einstein’s Tears was painted – it was first given its title much later on – there was no telescope and no human eye that could have given such a view of the universe. OUBEY was painting nothing that he could have seen with his own eyes. In this painting he was revealing to the outside world what had crystallised in his innermost being from his exhaustive study of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and elementary particle physics. By processing an incredible amount of data, facts and figures about the universe, his brain generate an image of what this universe must have looked like in its very beginnings some 13 billion years ago.

Such a way of proceeding is, so to speak, the very reverse of what we usually understand by “seeing”. When we speak about seeing something, we generally mean that we perceive something visible that falls within our field of vision. And by using optical aids like magnifying glasses, binoculars and telescopes we can even see and recognise the tiniest and most far removed objects. The path through which light-born information from the outside reaches our brain lies through our eyes. They are the outpost of the human brain as someone once said.  Our eyes collect information which they send to the brain which forms it into an image. Yet for OUBEY – as he himself once remarked, this process tended to run in the reverse direction: “I want to blast them out of my eyes against the canvas, my pictures”.

A ten year old boy from Uganda who encountered quite a different picture by OUBEY marvellously expressed this particular quality of OUBEYs art when he said, “He didn´t draw what he saw but what he thought.“

From his deep understanding of physics, astrophysics and astronomy, OUBEYs mind created an image of the beginnings of the universe which is astonishingly similar to that which the Hubble Space Telescope gave us many years later. And he did this, as it were, all by himself in pursuit of his own spiritual and intellectual adventure.

What he created is no visualisation of scientific data. It’s the aesthetic flowering of the processing of science-based facts and data in conjunction with the philosophical issues that haunted the brain of a man who was as familiar with philosophy and science as he was with art. And who was capable of turning such a picture formed in his innermost being into a work of art that could withstand his rigorous critical scrutiny. I am quite sure that OUBEY would have rejoiced to have been there in person when Dr Cecilia Scorza encountered his painting.

But what do we actually mean by normality and who gets to decide what normal is? It’s a question that you might already have wondered about and it’s a question that is fiendishly difficult to answer. Yet because it’s of such pressing importance nowadays, it’s a question that I would like to try and address.

What’s considered as normal is subject to constant change

Science and technology work with constant norms.  The length of a metre is not up for debate nor are the measurements of weight and speed. The German Industrial Norm (DIN) ensures uniform standards for all kinds of objects. Such uniform standards are good to have because they really make our lives much easier.

It’s a different matter though when it comes to the variable parameters of normality. For instance, up to a hundred years ago it was considered normal that women in Germany had no right to vote. And even fifty years ago the law still laid down that a woman who wanted to go to work first had to seek permission from her husband. States of normality that would be unthinkable today. And in the same way things which we now accept as normal will be seen as unimaginable in twenty or fifty years’ time.

A project in India recently succeeded in bringing together people living in the same place but in different and mutually exclusive castes into a form of cooperative coexistence so that they now ask themselves why they clung so long to a belief that such a venture was impossible. They shed one normality and adapted a new normality of togetherness.

This example shows just how repressive and destructive deeply rooted culturally set collective norms can be. But it also shows that such norms are not set in stone for all eternity but can be changed – if there is motivation to set the ball rolling.

Individual normality

In an open society every one lives their life as they wish to within the bounds of set values and norms. On such a basis everyone can live their own individual normality which can be very similar to that of their neighbours or other people, but which may also significantly differ.  Normality unfolds in a context of tolerance.

The day-to-day normality of someone working in a company is very different from that of the freelance self-employed or indeed the creative artist for whom a ten hour working day or night is normal. If the normality of a working day was defined according to how the majority of people work, it would be a set 9 to 5 working day with a steady income. The working life of a creative artist or a freelance self-employed entrepreneur has never fitted in such a mould. But the people who lead such lives still consider them as normal.

The same is true of individual relationships. No matter whether somebody lives alone as a single, lives in a heterosexual or homosexual partnership, lives with or without children, lives with their own parents or in a commune – all these relationships are now accepted as normal by present-day law and conventional norms. And we should be thankful that they are. However, this was certainly not always the case.

Collective normality

In totalitarian societies a certain way of thinking and living is declared as the binding norm. Even when there might be a broad variety of individual lifestyles in the background, the foreground is still very much a façade that constrains people to displays of sameness and uniformity, and embodies the normative power of the majority which has nothing to do with the principle of majority rule that holds sway in a democratic society.

In an open society based on intelligence and the creative power of diversity, the majority never claims the right to determine how minorities should think and act. On the contrary, the majority respects the opinions of minorities so long as they both share common values. And in particular it protects minorities who need the protection afforded by a community.

A common normality is created through interpersonal relationships and specific collaborative ways of work and action. It is based on the principle that everybody is free to do whatever they please as long as they don’t impact on the freedom of other people or adversely affect them. The essential condition for establishing such a form of common shared normality is that one person’s own lifestyle cannot become the norm that everybody else has to subscribe to. In this kind of normality it’s “normal” that other people are look and dress differently from one’s self. In a country of immigration a thoughtful zone of tolerance is essential for a commonly lived, value-based normality.

History teaches us to be careful when dealing with normality

Norms are the glue that holds society together. The history of the last few centuries up to our present day shows us where it can lead when such social cohesion is misused for ideological purposes to isolate, dominate or even destroy everything that doesn’t fit in the prescribed mould. Whoever doesn’t conform to the norm is declared an enemy.

For centuries European colonialism made itself the standard for all the rest of the world, and still wouldn’t recoil from committing the vilest crimes against humanity, even when the enlightenment had long been spreading the ideals of liberty, progress, toleration and fraternity, if they served the purpose of imposing its own standards for its own advantage.

Just one hundred years ago people were still being shipped from Africa to Germany where they were put on display as abnormal exotics in a kind of human zoo. Some circus companies which are still around today earned a great deal of money from this kind of definition of what is and is not normal.

For centuries the rule of what is considered normal in this world asserted itself as the rule of white supremacy – from the attempt to exterminate the indigenous peoples of North and South America to the missionary zeal for converting the “savages” in Africa. The consequences of such self-glorification can still be felt today. The everyday normality of brutal police violence against the Afro-American population of North America has been thrown into unprecedented sharp relief over the past few weeks and has entered the consciousness of people who don’t experience it on a daily basis.  It’s a normality that needs to be tackled and changed everywhere it has taken root. “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed”, said Will Smith, one of the most famous and successful Afro-American actors of our time. What is normal must not be what is right which is why it’s important to continually challenge every kind of normality.

Who decides what’s normal?

Back in the 1950s an intelligence test was developed to answer the then topical question of what exactly intelligence was. Such a test lead to the definition that intelligence is what the intelligence test measures. Even today many people still believe this without ever enquiring who developed such tests and what kind of questions and exercises were used to establish a person’s intelligence. At the end of the test came a person’s IQ – a magical figure that claims to measure a person’s intelligence.

Fortunately so far no normality test has appeared that gives an “NQ”. But just imagine for a second that there were such a test and you instantly know in what kind of a social scenario it would be used. Each in its own manner, totalitarian systems have always defined and violently imposed their paranoid regimes in the name of normality.  Stalinism and National Socialism are two such fearful examples from the 20th century.

A glance at present-day reality in the People’s Republic of China shows how state-of-the-art digital surveillance technology is being used to monitor the public everyday behaviour of people, control it and order it within a normative value system. The state then uses the results of such assessments to exert a corrective or rewarding influence over the lives of its citizens. Given the power relationships in present-day China, such surveillance of people’s everyday lives will come to be seen as normal in the next few years. Yet normality is not intrinsically good, it can only be good when based on the values of a humane and democratic society.

Normality in a time of corona

At first glance, it seems that it was always the powerful in history who tried to determine what the majority should think and what is and is not normal, and who made it their mission to combat what they had defined as not normal. In the age of the internet we now have seen the rise of novel types of powerful people – influencers and opinion-makers, both overt and covert.  This doesn’t make things any easier. They create normalities in the minds of people that have very little to do with the way they actually lead their lives.

And now all of a sudden a virus appears and from one day to the next turns everything considered normal upside down and creates a “new normal”. What a massive intervention in our system of what we hold to be normal!

Whether and when we should leave our homes, see friends or visit our parents in a care home, whether we should shake hands or hug one another – the spread of the corona virus has brought a new normality into our everyday lives as we struggle to find answers to such questions. The experience of emotional loss we suffer as a consequence is drastic.

In the meantime the lockdown regulations have been relaxed. Even so, this does not mean that the normality we used to know just a few months ago has now returned. Yet even in these tumultuous times, at the end of the day it’s up to each and every one of us to decide what we consider as normal and good. We can all inform ourselves and know what makes sound sense even when it stands in contradiction to the normality of how we used to behave. And in doing so we also define the dimensions of our own humanity and fellow-feeling. As long as we have no vaccine against this virus, we need to take care, we need to be considerate. Anybody can infect anybody, and nobody knows whether another person is infected or not. Perhaps these times we are now living through will make us realise how important it is for each of us to decide what belongs in the tolerance zone of normality and what doesn’t. Defining the parameters of this tolerance zone for oneself is part and parcel of the new normality.

It’s good for all of us to keep our physical distance and comply with the prescription to wear a mask. These are norms whose sense is not difficult to grasp, especially as by complying with them we are actively helping to further the easing of more restrictions. What’s more, by doing so we are also learning how to set new priorities. The first priority goes to our parents, grandparents and our children. Discos, cinemas, concerts and restaurants are not unimportant but in times like these they no longer stand at the top of the list as they might have done in the old norm. And I say this as someone who used to go to the cinema at least once a week.

At some point the day will come when going to the cinema will again become part of my normality. And I’m looking forward to it like a kid looks forward to Christmas.

 

It would be impossible, foolhardy and presumptuous of me to try and give an answer to such a question in just a few paragraphs. Across the centuries the greatest thinkers have devoted all their powers to answering it and yet it still remains an open question that continually needs to be reformulated and asked anew.

If today on Pentecost I now take it as the subject of these Thoughts & Insights, I do so not least of all in loving memory of my friend Annemarie Monteil. She was already eighty years old when I first met her through Fritz Haller, the visionary architect and erstwhile mentor of OUBEY, during work on the MINDKISS Project following OUBEYs death and Pentecost was her favorite feast. She was a thoughtful and sharp-minded woman who remained active even in old age and was respected and honored as Switzerland’s “grande dame of art criticism”. Our first encounter in 2005 happily led to a friendship that endured until her death eighteen months ago. A friendship that not only endured but deepened into a profound intellectual and spiritual affinity through our mutual visits, our ever longer intimate conversations and our personal correspondence of a kind not often seen today.

The story of a rushing mighty wind from heaven filling the house where the Apostles were gathered, setting cloven tongues of fire on them and filling them with the Holy Spirit, as recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, is an interesting example of early storytelling which had an impact at its time and still is celebrated even today by a public holiday in some European countries. It´s told that it was in this Spirit that the early Church was founded. Yet more than two thousand years later and we still haven’t got a Church that is truly imbued with such a Spirit. At least thanks to the spread of the questioning spirit of the enlightenment we can say that it’s pointing more and more in the right direction nowadays.

Given the present propagation of the most absurd and preposterous conspiracy theories which spring from the feverish brains of the unenlightened and work their malice in the wider world, clarity of spirit appears a most desirable commodity. And a more philosophical slant to our everyday thinking would also be most helpful.

Science is quite right in claiming “clarity of spirit” for itself as it is a research, analysis and evidence-based discipline of human thought. But as it continually ventures into new and previously undiscovered worlds which it seeks to understand and explain, it can never be free of error. Many scientific discoveries which were long and rightly considered as unimpeachable have now been revealed to be at least dubious if not totally false by new research. This is why clarity of spirit in each science also includes awareness of one’s own fallibility to errors and false conclusions.

It’s different with art. Art can be neither right nor wrong when it’s art that is truly free and serves no kind of interests, neither ideological, political nor monetary. “In my art I have always tried to create a clear space for the Spirit”, said Henri Matisse who continually stimulated his own spirit by travelling the world as few artists of his time did, discovering its great diversity – always in the quest for light.

Yet it doesn’t have to be the travels of an artist around the world. Every one of us who keeps their spirit lively and open for things new, different and surprising can always embark on a journey into their innermost being or equally into the possibilities of a brighter future. This spirit doesn’t need the seal of holiness to bring people forward.

Dass sich ausgerechnet am heutigen Pfingstsonntag, nach fünf Tagen und Nächten des Protests in vielen nordamerikanischen Städten ein neuer Geist offenbart, ist wohl das, was man einen Zufall nennt. Er zeigte sich im Handeln eines einzelnen Menschen, des Sheriffs von Flint in Minnesota, Chris Swanson. Er machte das unmöglich scheinende möglich, indem er die protestierenden Demonstranten, die nach dem Tod des Afro-Amerikaners George Lloyd durch brutale Polizeigewalt in Minneapolis fünf Tage zuvor Respekt, Gerechtigkeit und das Ende der Rassenjustiz in den USA forderten, was er ihrer Meinung nach tun soll. Ihre Antwort: “Geh´mit uns”. Das tat er und forderte die anwesenden Polizisten, es ihm gleich zu tun. Und sie taten es. So einfach kann es sein, wenn der Geist klar und das Herz offen ist. Möge dieser klare Geist ansteckend sein, von Dauer und nachhaltiger Wirkung.

That a new mindset should finally have revealed itself on this very Whitsunday after five days and nights of protest in many North American cities is showed itself in the behavior of a single man, the sheriff of Flint, Minnesota, Chris Swanson. He made the seemingly impossible possible by asking the protesters who were demanding respect, justice and an end to racism in the USA in the wake of the brutal murder of the Afro-American George Floyd at the hands of the police: what they want him to do. Their answer was: “Walk with us”. He did. And he requested the assembled police force to join with him. And they did. It can be as simple as that. If the spirit is clear and the heart open. May this spirit be infectious on long term and of sustainable impact.

Living is learning to die, said the Roman philosopher Seneca more than two thousand years ago. You can hardly imagine a better way of putting these two opposites of existential importance in context. Yet while we cannot get enough of life, we have increasingly been averting our gaze from death and dying over the past seventy years in our modern world. In many places death has been excluded from everyday life and everyday consciousness. Average life expectancy has steadily risen in affluent societies and has now reached the 80 year mark. Everyone wants to live as long as possible yet nobody wants to die. Recently there’s been talk of research that can reverse the ageing process and make people ten to twenty years younger. The dream of eternal youth might always remain just a dream yet preventing the onset of age has become a realistic objective of life. Now although this might have to do with love of life – what is love of life that accepts the basic principle of the transitory nature of all things in this world for all beings except itself? It represses the fact that life is finite and that death is a part of life just as birth is.

What does love of life really mean? This is a question I’ve often asked myself during the course of my life and with particular intensity when someone I dearly loved has died and left the life of the body behind them. It was in my childhood through early experience of the death of people very close to me that I first became aware of ultimate irreversibility, that you can only live your life once and once only and that a day past can never come again. Ever since then I have borne this awareness with me – yet must immediately add that it has never been a burden to me, quite the contrary. The knowledge of the limited time of my own existence combined with the uncertainty about the point of my own ending has constantly nourished my appreciation of what is and of all that life itself has to offer. Instead of being annoyed about getting older – a ridiculous mood that befalls many people of a certain age on their birthdays – we should be happy and thankful that we’ve first seen the light of this world and are still alive to see it. Perhaps the meaning of life is simply in just living it, in leading a good fulfilling life and loving every new day because life makes it possible.

“Every day counts!” was the smart toast given by poor Jack Dawson who’d won a ticket for the maiden voyage of the Titanic to New York in a poker game in the harbour, and had been invited to dine first-class in the upper decks of the luxury steamer. The invitation came because the previous evening he’d saved the life of Rose, the young daughter of an upper class family. In the shortest of time he also awakened her love by freeing her from the golden but very narrow cage of a life of luxury in which she was trapped. Just a fictional story from the script of one of the most successful films of all time. If it reached people all over the world and moved and fascinated them this certainly has to do with the director, the music, and not least of all the actors. And yet at the heart of the film is a story celebrating real life. This is why it’s inevitably that death is ever present from the very beginning of the story and plays a role that’s just as important as love.

Some three hundred years before in its own way the well-known injunction Carpe diem was a similar expression of the knowledge that nothing in this life is certain and that tomorrow any life may end. It celebrates life just as it celebrates awareness of its fleeting transitory nature. This has nothing to do with hedonism or dolce vita. It’s an attitude born in the dark times of Thirty Years War which terrorised and traumatised the populations of Central Europe when huge swathes of countries were laid waste by religiously fuelled hunger for power, gold and land, and reduced to smoking ruins. For centuries political accounts of the war dealt with the events that caused it, the intrigues and battles, the great names. It was only much later that attention shifted to the psychological devastation wrought in the minds and souls of the people by massacres and plundering in the name of religion. And with it the issue of living and dying in its human, social and cultural dimensions. Who thinks of this time nowadays? OUBEY did. He once spent many weeks totally absorbed in his reading on this war and I still have a very vivid memory of the conversations on it we had together. Carpe diem is a mark of respect and humility to every single day we live.

With two world wars following in quick succession, the world’s first industrialised wars, the state terror of fascism and the historical nightmare of the Holocaust, the 20th century spread fear and horror among people on an unprecedented scale – only this time not in the name of religion but trumpeted as the forward march of the unleashed ideologies of the master race, nationalism and colonialism. Within 30 years these wars cost the lives of over 80 million people – an unimaginably horrifying number. The memory of my walk through the barracks of Buchenwald concentration camp is indelibly stamped on my mind as is my visit to the catacombs of the memorial to the battle of Verdun at Fort Douaumont in France where the bones of fallen soldiers are stacked meter-deep alongside and on top of one another.

All this happened at different times in the past. The more distant in the past things lie, the more they tend to slip into the inaccessible depths of collective forgetting in Europe’s consciousness. Yet even in unconsciousness trauma still unfolds its effects across multiple generations. Even now people with a particular sensitivity to the interconnectedness of all things can still feel the traumas of long vanished times.

And now in Europe and the western world we have been living in peace with one another for over seventy years. No other generations have been privileged to live so long in peace and liberty as those born after the end of the Second World War. Even if so far we in Europe have still not succeeded in forming a genuine community, in just a few decades we have succeeded in overcoming enmities that have endured for centuries, and this is indeed great progress – despite all the misgivings that many countries might still harbour about their neighbours. Processes of such historical dimensions need time. And above all they need robust goodwill carried by a love for life that is stronger than the readiness to risk death for the interests of others, but also by the awareness of how greatly we are dependent on and rely on one another even in the smallest details of our daily lives.

Over the past two months this has become more evident than ever before due to the pandemic triggered by a virus called COVID 19. Like a magnifying glass the virus reveals the strengths and weaknesses of our society and the interconnectedness of people all over the world. And not the least of its effects is that it has brought death and dying out of the shadow taboo zone and into the glare of public attention. It has brought us the horror of refrigerated trucks in the yards of New York hospitals in which the coffins of the dead are stored because the hospital mortuaries are overflowing, and the night-time columns of trucks bringing coffins from Bergamo in northern Italy to surrounding cities because all the cemeteries of Bergamo are full. A discourse on such horror seems to be emerging, a conversation about things that have never been talked about in this way in public before and talked about in a general tone that pays them fitting respect and reverence. In these times death looms before us closer than it has done for a very long time, simultaneously across the whole world for all people. And yet this also means – quite in the sense intended by Seneca – that life also comes closer to us than ever before, giving us a truer sense of its real meaning and making us seriously examine how we really want to live. Which leads to the question of whether we really do want to continue living “post-corona” exactly as we lived before. Here too the magnifying glass effect is apparent in the way we weigh the priorities that will set our future course. With what outcomes remains to be seen.

In the darkest and most difficult days of the pandemic in Italy I found a video on YouTube posted in March by the twelve year old twins Mirko and Valerio from Agrigento in Sicily during their quarantine. They played a masterly version of Coldplay´s song  Viva La Vida  on their violins and radiated such joy and warm-heartedness that life itself could have received no better tribute. Two wonderful boys whose performance brought a moment of brightness and hope into the lives of many people in these troubled times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A car driver in a bank of thick fog is a pretty accurate description of the situation in which each and every one of us now find ourselves, and particularly those decision-makers who bear tremendous responsibility in these times of the corona pandemic.

Driving by sight

Obviously such a metaphor, like many metaphors, has its weak point in that it doesn’t cover all the details of the situation. But if it at least manages to get at the core of the situation then it’s useful because it helps us better understand exactly where we now are.

Driving by sight is a skill that’s long been out of fashion in the countries of the industrialised world in which market and profit planning – sometimes against our better judgement, but based on faith in a plan of unlimited economic growth – has been elevated as one of the key credos of a future that’s controllable and manageable. In many places it’s a skill that’s been completely lost. At the same time a focus on a company’s quarterly results in the interests of shareholder value has encouraged and indeed promoted another kind of short-sightedness over the decades. Not just shareholders and supervisory boards but also highly paid management consultants have drawn great profit from the loss of skills and abilities that this engenders.

We need stamina

And so now after just a few weeks in which we have gained our very first insights into the mode of operation of this novel virus which is so extremely dangerous because we have neither medicine nor vaccine for it, the calls for a rapid return to “normal times” are becoming ever louder. “And quite right they are,” you might be thinking. Well, whether they are right is something that remains to be seen. But such calls are certainly understandable. Only precisely because they are so understandable those leaders in positions of responsibility need great courage and foresight not to give in to them. They need to slow down, take their time and ask people in the country to do the same before they make the next correct decision at the earliest possible point in time – which, with the benefit of hindsight, may turn out to be the wrong one. Right here and now what we need is resilience, reasonableness, a willingness to learn and stamina.

An equation of many unknowns

We are learning collectively just how difficult action and decision-making are in highly uncertain times. And when we look abroad we see how differently not just decision-makers but also the people are acting and reacting. This corona pandemic has plunged us into a situation of unprecedented complexity. It’s an equation whose factors are unknown, a jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of pieces that lacks a picture. We need to act rationally if we are to form these pieces into a picture – at least until medicine or a vaccine is found.

It’s about interfacing and harmonising medical or health aspects with economic and financial considerations, individual and family-related mental health issues, social psychology, and the whole not just on the national but the European and ultimately the global level.

A question of facts

We‘ve become accustomed to making decisions and forecasts based on the most exhaustive survey of the situation and the most precise knowledge of the data. We can form an opinion on almost anything using figures, facts and data, and base the determinations we make on such opinions. This holds true for the personal level, for instance when it comes to buying cars, electronic devices or mattresses, just as it equally applies to the political level for policy-making on the local, state and federal level. We’ve learnt to make plans and we feel safe when we’ve a plan in our pocket – even though we’re well aware that reality can sometimes intervene and make us change it. We’ve assimilated all this and have learnt how to deal with “residual uncertainty”. Only now we’re learning that we have to make decisions without having all the facts and data at our fingertips. We have to make sense of what we do know, of what seems plausible to us, and change our behaviour accordingly.

A false conclusion

Even so there are some people who have made a false interpretation of what has been done in Germany over the past few weeks. The early restrictive measures of lockdown and social distancing put in place against the pandemic have fortunately led to the comparatively mild progression of the pandemic. The healthcare system hasn’t teetered on the brink of collapse, there’s been no sudden spike in the numbers of the sick and dead. But if the spread of the pandemic has been mild, this is precisely because of the measures that were put in place. And yet amazingly this has led many people to conclude that after all it really isn’t all that bad and its effects have all been wildly exaggerated. It’s as though we’d jumped out of a falling plane and had just managed to activate our parachutes in the nick of time. And now impatient with our slow and safe descent to the ground, we decide to cut through the very chords that support us.

It would be instructive to turn our gaze to other countries like Spain, France, Italy, and not least of all the USA. What is happening there is part of the global granular evidence base and show what could also be happening here had we not reacted so smartly and so swiftly.

And when I see under the banner of freedom in North American states how healthcare workers are threatened and abused because they dare to stand as warnings in the way of a motorcade of hysterically honking, Stars and Stripes swinging protestors demanding their free right to die, then I could lose my faith in what we call basic common sense.

It’s about self-control

A lot of ink has flown and much breath has been spent on writing and talking about complexity and the management of complexity, and acting and decision-making in situations of uncertainty. Right here and now it’s a matter of resilience. It’s a matter of acting smartly and not taking the third step before the first. This calls for intelligence but also for the ability for self-control. To be in control of a situation we must first and foremost be in control of ourselves.

This is not merely a major challenge but also a great opportunity for us to learn and develop. Not just in terms of solidarity and willingness to help others – in our immediate neighbourhoods as well as our European neighbours and also in international cooperation. But also in terms of the challenges awaiting us in the coming years and decades.

When it comes to the complex interdependencies that are now changing the climate of our planet for the worse, this might even be a question of our very survival. Yet for that particular jigsaw puzzle we already have a picture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet it was only when an improved and much cheaper model of the Amiga 500 first appeared on the German market in 1987  that he could fulfill his wish.

Actually the Amiga 500 had been unveiled to an astonished public a year earlier in 1986 at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt before a celebrity audience of the good and great in an event moderated by the famous TV presenter Frank Elstner. Take a look at the video of this event that came online only a few years ago. Even if you don’t speak German, you can still get a good impression of the archaic state of technology at that time and a taste of how life was in the 80s.

And in its own way this video also shows how far OUBEY was in advance of his time since while others just stood gazing in awe at the new technology or simply used it for playing games, OUBEY harnessed its powers for himself as a new channel for his creative output.

Naturally OUBEY too spent countless hours playing around with the Amiga. Yet from the very start his playfulness was a way of probing and testing. He tested the graphic and all the other technical functions of the computer, pushing them to their extreme limits in service of his art. Playfully experimenting and improvising whichever way the spirit moved him was very much to OUBEYs heart. And so from 1987 to 1988 the first early pictures of the OUBEY COMPUTER ART (OCA) series were produced –the “Earlybirds. A selection of fifteen pictures from this series premiers online today to mark the 10^th Anniversary of the MINDKISS Project.

OUBEY was a true pioneer in the use of the Amiga 500 to create art. At first the monitor was like a sheet of paper or canvas to him, and the mouse like a pencil or paintbrush. But with his technical know-how and talent for improvisation he gradually turned the Amiga into his own high-tech artist’s studio. And from 1989 onwards he increasingly used the computer as a membrane through which he could merge a vast range of different fabrics, materials, colours and structures into highly individual pictures which he called PhotonPaintings. It was with these paintings and under the pseudonym Wendelin Koehler that he staged his first, only, and very successful exhibition in 1992.

 

In working with the Amiga OUBEY would never allow himself to be controlled or limited by the technical possibilities the computer offered; what he wanted to do was “to use them like a pencil” as he himself once said in a conversation in 1992. Click here to find his full statement. 

By 1993 this approach had been exhausted, especially since material reproduction of the virtual images had reached its limits. Laser projections or high-quality prints on large-scale plotters would have been interesting but were beyond his financial means.

One of the greatest technical challenges in the early phase of the MINDKISS Project was how to open hundreds of floppy discs and transfer the Amiga pictures stored on them to the personal computer so that they could be viewed and archived. After many weeks of work, the moment when we finally succeeded in bringing the stored pictures to the light of day was a moment of special joy. Not only because we had now revealed yet another part of the hidden treasures OUBEY left behind him, but because we could now present a selection of PhotonPaintings on the internet to mark the launch of the MINDKISS Project in 2010 and publish them for the first time in one of the five volumes of the award-winning MINDKISS Book (https://www.mindkiss.com/de/project/oubey-mindkiss-book/ ).

In 2017, twentyfive years after OUBEYs first and only exhibition, further pictures were published: all twenty PhotonPaintings from the 1992 catalogue of the MINDKISS exhibition.

And now they’re joined by fifteen other pictures – OUBEYs very first works with the Amiga 500. It’s a perfect match to the theme of the 10^th Anniversary Happening which is “OUBEYs Art in a Digital Resonance Space” and that will take place in autumn of this year at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. It means that we won’t just be presenting selected analogue works in the context of state-of-the-art digital technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence, but are even now spanning a digital arch that goes back to the beginnings of OUBEYs computer art in the 80s of the last century.

 

PS

Over 1000 further works from the still undiscovered treasures of OUBEYs art are patiently looking forward to the next opportunity to enter the public resonance space in the course of the coming years and decades.

Bis vor kurzem konnten wir uns darauf verlassen, dass es nahezu immer einen wirksamen Gegenstoff gibt, der solche Viren unschädlich macht. Das ist im Fall des Corona Virus nun seit langer Zeit zum ersten Mal anders.

 

Eine Geschichte von Macht und Ohnmacht

Erst seit rund einhundertzwanzig Jahren hat die Medizin Jahr für Jahr an neuen Impfstoffen und Medikamenten gegen nahezu alle bekannten Viruserkrankungen gearbeitet und immer wieder neue und noch bessere Präparate entwickelt. So sind Krankheiten wie zum Beispiel die Tuberkulose, an der Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts noch Abertausende allein in Deutschland gestorben sind, von der Bildfläche verschwunden.

In früheren Jahrhunderten rafften ansteckende Krankheiten innerhalb kürzester Zeit zigtausende von Menschenleben hinweg. Eine Seuche wie die Pest löschte in ihrer Hochzeit dereinst nahezu die Hälfte der Bevölkerung Europas aus. Eine Erfahrung kollektiver Ohnmacht, die jeden erfasste, gleich welchen Standes einer war.

An die Stelle medizinischer Hilfe, die es damals nicht gab, trat einerseits der Glaube, dass es sich bei derartigen Seuchen um eine Strafe Gottes handelt. Andererseits kam die Idee von einem Schuldigen auf dieser Erde auf, den es zu suchen und zu finden galt. Hier fand in dieser Zeit unter anderem auch die Dummheit des Antisemitismus neue Nahrung. Aus der Ohnmacht gegenüber der Seuche erwuchs das Machtbedürfnis gegenüber einem Feind – den vermeintlichen „Brunnenvergiftern“, die es anzuprangern und zu bestrafen galt.

Dass Albert Camus, einer der großen Philosophen und Schriftsteller der 40er bis 60er Jahre des letzten Jahrhunderts, seinen Roman „Die Pest“ genau diesem Thema gewidmet hat, verweist auf die existenzielle und soziale Bedeutung dieser Seuche, wenngleich er vor dem Hintergrund des gerade beendeten Zweiten Weltkriegs und der im ideologisch begründeten Fanatismus begangenen Verbrechen des Faschismus hier im übertragenen Sinn auch das Thema der geistigen und moralischen Infizierung einer Gesellschaft trifft.

 

Eine neue Herausforderung

Schuldzuweisungen dieser Art kennen wir heute bisher jedenfalls glücklicherweise nicht, wenngleich es kürzlich den seltsam irrationalen Versuch eines Präsidenten gab, gleich ganz Europa – mit Ausnahme Großbritanniens und Irlands – dafür verantwortlich machen zu wollen, dass das Corona Virus ins eigene Land eingereist ist. Dieser Versuch ist an seiner erkennbaren Irrationalität gescheitert.

Rational erkennbar ist, dass uns derzeit nun ein Virus herausfordert, das sich anders verhält als alle Viren, die wir zuletzt kannten, indem es sich unerkannt verbreitet, d.h. es sucht Körper auf, die dann keine Krankheitssymptome zeigen, obwohl sie infiziert sind. Die aber wohl dazu in der Lage sind, andere zu infizieren, deren Immunsystem nicht stark genug ist, um zu widerstehen. Ein Mensch ohne Symptome kann also infiziert sein und einen anderen anstecken. Wenn dessen Immunsystem nicht stark genug ist, erkrankt dieser Mensch, schlimmstenfalls mit tödlicher Folge. Genau diese zunächst harmlos scheindende Einnistung und die daraus resultierende Verbreitung macht dieses Virus so gefährlich, möglichst viele so lange wie möglich im Gefühl der eigenen Sicherheit wiegend.

 

Möglicher Schwachpunkt: Die Dummheit der Vielen

Bislang gibt es weder ein Medikament noch einen Impfstoff gegen dieses Virus. 35 Labore forschen derzeit mit Hochdruck weltweit daran, einen wirksamen Impfstoff zu entwickeln. Bis der einsatzbar ist, wird allerdings vermutlich ein Jahr vergehen. Insofern können wir von Glück reden, dass dieser Virus nicht jeden erkranken oder gar sterben lässt, den er befällt.

Es ist, wenngleich es mächtig in unser Leben eingreift und uns extrem herausfordert, ein eher freundliches Virus. Ein Virus, das nicht gleich jeden umbringt, den es befällt. Eines, das uns eine Chance lässt. Ein Virus, das uns nicht per se aufgrund seiner Wirkungsweise in Panik versetzt. In Panik versetzen können wir uns nur selbst, indem wir sein gefährliches Potenzial ignorieren und uns so verhalten als gäbe es diese Bedrohung gar nicht.

Wenn ich sehe, dass letzten Sonntag entgegen allen Empfehlungen die Menschen immer noch dicht an dicht in den Eiscafés und Restaurants gesessen oder vor zehn Tagen noch im Skiurlaub in Ischgl fröhliche Parties gefeiert haben, obwohl damals längst bekannt war, dass der Ort ein Infektionsherd der Sonderklasse ist – dann zweifle ich am Verstand und der Vernunft der Vielen.

Es wurde so viel von der “Schwarmintelligenz” der Vielen gesprochen und geschrieben in den letzten Jahren. Hier kann sie sich nun mal wirklich beweisen. Wir können diesem Virus etwas entgegensetzen. Aber wir müssen es wollen. Wir müssen alle anderen, verständlichen und berechtigten Interessen diesem Interesse unterordnen. Es hilft uns kein Medikament. Uns hilft nur unser eigenes intelligentes Verhalten.

 

Kollektive Disziplin im Zeitalter des Individualismus

Dieser exponentiell wachsende, um sich greifende Prozess der Ansteckung kann nur durch kollektive Disziplin gebremst werden. In einer Gesellschaft der Individualisten, die gewohnt sind in Freiheit zu leben und dass alles was auch immer sie brauchen oder sich wünschen grundsätzlich verfügbar ist, bedeutet dies nicht nur gravierende Einschränkungen im Alltagsleben wie es sie seit Ende des 2. Weltkriegs in Deutschland und nirgendwo in Europa gegeben hat. Es bedeutet ein radikales Umdenken. Und das quasi aus heiterem Himmel.

Denn dieses bösartige mikroskopisch kleine Teil wirft uns auf Fragen zurück, die viele sich vielleicht lange nicht mehr und manche vielleicht noch nie ernsthaft gestellt haben. Fragen wie z.B. „Was ist wirklich wichtig in meinem Leben?“, „Was brauche ich wirklich?“, „Halte ich es aus, zwei Wochen allein zu sein?“, „Kann und will ich Rücksicht auf andere nehmen?“ und nicht zuletzt „Wie beschäftige ich mich mit meinen Kindern über Tage und Wochen hinweg sinnvoll?“.

Auf einmal sind wir gezwungen und haben in der Quarantäne auch die Zeit, uns diesen Fragen zu stellen. Und wir können sie ja auch selbst beantworten. Das ist, aus meiner Sicht, ein Aspekt des Guten und der Chance in dieser Krise. Der schwierigere Teil der Bewältigung des Notstands liegt in der Frage der Existenzsicherung, insbesondere für Selbständige, deren Einnahmequellen nun auf nicht absehbare Zeit versiegen.

 

In der Krise zeigt sich der Charakter

Herausgefordert sind in Zeiten wie diesen deshalb nicht nur Medizin, Politik und Verwaltung, sondern auch Vernunft gepaart mit Herz, und das von einem jeden von uns. Panik ist kontraproduktiv. Wir brauchen Vorsicht für uns selbst, aber auch Umsicht und Rücksicht für einander im Alltag. Jeden Tag. “In der Krise zeigt sich der Charakter” sagte der frühere Bundeskanzler Helmut Schmidt einmal und er wusste wovon er sprach.
Wer glaubt, auf dem Vulkan tanzen zu müssen, in dieser Zeit nicht aufs Händeschütteln und Umarmen verzichtet oder in der Schlange nicht den Mindestabstand einhält, sondern drängelt; wer so tut, als sei er oder sie nicht betroffen oder gefährdet, zugleich aber die Regale leer kauft, der verkennt die Situation und hat nichts verstanden.

 

Respekt vor den Helden der Krise

Vor allem aber trägt er indirekt dazu bei, dass die Menschen, die in unseren Krankenhäusern tätig sind, in ein paar Tagen oder Wochen, wenn die Zahl der Schwererkrankten drastisch ansteigt, an die Grenzen ihrer Leistungsfähigkeit kommen werden. Und dann möglicherweise Entscheidungen treffen müssen, die kein Mensch in seinem Leben jemals treffen müssen sollte – wer Freunde oder Verwandte in Italien hat, weiß, wovon ich hier spreche. Sie sind die Helden dieser Krise und verdienen schon längst, aber heute mehr denn je, unseren größten Respekt. Und in Zukunft dann hoffentlich auch im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes die Wertschätzung ihres Tuns. Eine Corona-infizierte Frau, die sich zur Behandlung im Krankenhaus befindet, schrieb vor ein paar Tagen auf Twitter, dass sie allen ihren Pflegerinnen und Pflegern die Füße küssen wird, wenn sie hier gesund wieder rauskommt.

Am Ende dieser Zeit, wie lange sie auch immer dauert, wird vieles anders sein als jetzt und manches hoffentlich besser.

After all, it could well be that for some reason or other she couldn’t remember something she had seen in the past. This would be a likely explanation which has to do with the way our memory works.

When we speak about our memories what we generally mean is things we have experienced in our past that our memory casts up and makes so immediate that they seem to touch on our present as though they were actually happening in the moment that we remember them. Music, smells, pictures and landscapes are often triggers of such memories and they often bring with them certain feelings – feelings of happiness just as much as feelings of anxiety and fear. And yet our memory is never identical with what really happened in the past and what now resurfaces through our memory into our present.

Even when we sometimes dearly wish that a past moment would again be relivable in our present, it can never be the same as what we remember. Our present memory will always be different from the memory of exactly the same thing if we had it again tomorrow. We are caught in a state of permanent change where nothing remains the same as it was. In each moment everything begins anew. From one moment to the next everything can change, completely and radically. Even when the river of life is tranquil, it still remains that nobody can step twice into the self-same current.

Since the end of the 19th century photography has opened up a new dimension of memory when a transitory moment can be captured for all eternity. Free and independent of all the convolutions of memory. Our memory of the moment changes as we grow older whilst the photograph remains for ever the same. Nowadays it’s always easy to capture whatever crosses our way with the camera or on video. And this has given rise to the external memory.

But what about our internal endogenous memory? This is where a metamorphosis occurs in which the past, like a fundament or sediment retained over years and decades, expands, enriched by all that we’ve lived through and experienced, into a new entity in which the layers of forgetting connect with remembrance in the present moment. And so a memory becomes immediate without ever being a repetition of the moment of which it is the remembrance.

To take this yet a step further, our memories are even more expansive because every single thing that we have ever experienced, heard or seen in our lives is stored in our memory – no matter whether we can recollect it or not. The memory bank of our brains is gigantic and our memories are a living system that continuously connects our memories in new associations just as it connects them with what we experience in our present condition.

Under hypnosis people remember things they have once heard or seen without being aware of it. Once awakened from this exceptional mental state, they have as little memory of what they have recollected as they had before they entered it – even though under hypnosis they have voiced or given the most vivid descriptions. All our memories are latent, only few of them are accessible to us. Sometimes such submerged memories can be triggered by sensual catalysts such as smells or scents, sounds or music and many other things.

But what about the visual aspect? The young girl looking at the painting spoke about her memory of “things she’d never seen before”. When we speak about seeing, we generally mean seeing people, objects, landscapes and so on that really do exist. Yet our vision too is not quite as straightforward as we would like to think. When two people look at the same thing, it’s by no means certain that they are actually seeing the same thing. And when they remember what they’ve looked at, their descriptions of what they’ve seen can easily differ or even be wildly different from one another even though they’ve both had exactly the same physical experience of seeing. In such an act of perception some people will simply fail to notice what to others is blatantly, startlingly obvious.

So it’s certainly possible that OUBEYs pictures don’t just possess the quality of a catalyst for the senses that awakens dormant memories in the viewer. Perhaps when viewing his pictures something in the unconscious strikes a sympathetic chord with what we are seeing. And that’s an idea that’s as daring as it is seductive.

Collective impatience

As expectations rise, a growing collective impatience is becoming evident. Now obviously nobody likes sitting in a traffic jam or waiting in a long line at the supermarket check-out. Yet impatience in such situations is unhelpful. The invention of queueing in Anglo-Saxon countries has long put a curb on impatience.

In Germany the spread of impatience goes hand in hand with an increasing dissatisfaction when things take a bit longer than expected and don’t go quickly enough in the direction people want them to. Yet critically this also applies with equal force to many things you cannot buy – relationships, trust or recovery from a serious illness all need time to progress and develop.

 

The art of living

Yes, nowadays patience is often seen as a weakness, something synonymous with passivity, lack of engagement and even downright laziness. Yet true patience is anything but all that. True patience is a powerful force. It’s an expression of long-term thinking and the awareness that many things in life simply need to take their time. And when it’s paired the ability to recognise the right point in time to get moving and bring something to a successful conclusion, then it’s almost like an art – the art of living. .

A virtue in the young

There’s a saying that impatience is a prerogative of young people. And there’s some truth in this. Once more we have a young generation who are insistently giving a collective voice to their impatience. Even though I don’t agree with everything they’re saying and demanding, I still find their impatience fully justified. Without the zest and drive of young people who still have their whole life ahead of them and simply aren’t prepared to accept that everything is as it is and will stay as it is, no society can move forward. Such impatience in young people is like the force of spring that overcomes winter.

 

Thinking in processes

A glance into nature makes this clear: grass doesn’t grow any quicker if you pull and tweak it. It’s not overnight that a wine gets the maturity it needs to be a really good wine. And a new human life needs around nine months before it sees the light of day. Nature is no machine where all you have to do is step on the gas to makes things go quicker. It’s organised in processes interconnected with one another. And all these processes have their own rhythms and their own time. When the process is clear you can follow it and support it with patience.

The patience of nature

I know this might sound strange but in a certain way over the past one hundred and fifty years nature has shown a great deal of patience with us humans. Even though we ourselves are a part of nature, in our striving for prosperity we have disrupted natural cycles, and attacked and sometimes even decimated its valuable and limited resources. For a long time we have recklessly taken advantage of nature and for a long time the nature of this Earth has patiently tolerated our ignorant behaviour.

Yet the end of this patience is now in sight. The natural consequences of our behaviour are catching up on us. We are standing at the crossroads. Some of us want to continue just as before. This is ignorance, not patience.  Others succumb to blind activism – never mind what as long as something’s happening.

Smart action

We need to find intelligent solutions to the major problems and naturally must loose no time in finding them. And yet development of such solutions also takes time because the situation in which we find ourselves on this planet is complex. Activism doesn’t stand a chance against the complexity of such a system.

 

And even though activism often cuts a better figure in the public arena that the judicious weighing up of alternatives to find the best solution, it seldom leads to good results and frequently to the very reverse. Activism cannot offset the fact that for far too long we’ve neglected to do so much and have only started serious work on this or that issue at a very late hour. What we really need is smart and circumspect yet consistent action. And this requires both determination and patience. We must act quickly and effectively but also reasonably and patiently.

Perhaps you’re now thinking – how can that work? – what you’re saying is a blatant contradiction! And I’d agree that it does look like one. Only the whole point now is how to overcome such a contradiction. It’s a learning process of existential importance. And as we all know learning or relearning also takes time.

 

Being impatient won’t speed anything up

What applies to the macro level also applies here to the micro level, i.e. in our daily lives. Impatient striving for quick results gives no guarantee whatsoever of good results. Admittedly, sometimes it’s really important to be quick-off-the-mark. Yet impatience is anything but an acceleration factor. Impatience makes us hectic and nervous, it doesn’t make us quick.

How many mishaps and bad decisions happen simply because we haven‘t taken the time we need to sit back and make a well thought-through decision that also considers the long-term effects our decision will have. The really important things in life cannot be achieved on the quick and easy. There’s an old German proverb “Good things need time”. There’s a lot of truth in that, I find.

 

 

Interest in such questions is nothing new. It’s produced a great deal of speculation about how closely madness is allied with genius and what strange bed fellows pain and beauty make. The diaries and letters that we know, for instance, from Mozart and van Gogh can give us genuine insights. Only much more often our information comes from their friends or their children, people who knew the artist when he or she was living. Many biographies are so deeply immersed in the life story of the artist that you could believe that the authors had known them. And great empathy is a way of becoming closer to someone. Yet nothing more than that. After all, who really understands another person, let alone an artist?

 

Particularly when what’s important to an artist mustn’t necessarily be important to the rest of us. Some artists have been relentlessly encouraged and pushed from earliest childhood whilst others have had every possible hindrance set in their way to stop them from realising their gifts because their parents entertained quite other plans and expectations. They had to encounter and overcome the most bitter opposition. Yet by overcoming it they also freed themselves of the need to please others in what they did. The uncompromising pursuit of freedom is probably one of the main characteristics that most artists share.

 

And now brain research is trying to find out whether and indeed to what extent the brain of an artist differs from the brains of other people who are not. It’s an attempt to try and understand what makes or has made artists what they are. An attempt that goes beyond art to explain and understand the artist him or herself and even perhaps the very nature of an artist’s life. Yet will the path taken by comparative brain research lead to results that really do enrich our understanding of what an artist is? I very much doubt it.

 

Picasso is supposed to have said “Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of a bird?” – a statement that needs no explanation because it’s self-explanatory. It can be applied equally both to artists and art itself. Other artists withdraw from public life and seek seclusion where they can dedicate themselves to what is most important to them and what makes them most deeply human in their lives. They rarely give interviews and if they do they never speak about themselves.

 

All the more astounding then that Richard Tuttle, an artist well known for his subtle minimalist art recently gave an interview on the Louisiana Channel in which he talked about himself, the story of his life and the meaning of art both for himself and society – a rare interview that’s as authentic as it’s fascinating and certainly well worth watching. He sees artists as something akin to a natural phenomenon, like clouds that appear in the sky. “Artists, they´re from nature. They come out of nature. They´re like a cloud that happens“.

 

It’s a comparison that I think very much hits the mark. Even if we use all the resources of science to investigate and explain the phenomena of nature, they still remain natural phenomena. They simply happen, they suddenly appear, they’re there, uncontrollable and without the aid of any human agency. In the last analysis art and artists remain what they are, a phenomenon, a marvel and sometimes a puzzle. And this is how it should be for this is what creates necessary respect. What artists leave behind them are their works which continue to inspire us and enthral us and give us what we need – without any need for us to necessarily understand this or explain it. So it is with OUBEY and his artwork. And so is the ethos that the work of the MINDKISS project follows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In our business and professional lives electronic communication offers such a host of advantages that doing without out it is simply unthinkable. Electronic messages save paper, instantly reach the recipient, can simultaneously be sent to any number of people, and in marked contrast to so many people’s handwriting, are easily readable. But does the same apply to personal private correspondence?

Loss of the personal note

Instead of sending holiday greetings on postcards, we now send photos with or without a few words for friends and followers, and publish them for all the world to see on Facebook or Instagram where they’re just as publically answered with Likes or comments. Handwritten letters, long ago replaced by electronic mail, have now become a rarity. Does this also go with a loss of personal closeness and good writing style?

 

What you write not how you write is what matters

You might think that whether a greeting is personal or not depends much more on what it actually says and not on whether or not it’s handwritten, and I’d completely agree with you. Because what’s truly important is that you actually are writing and what you write – and not the means you chose to write. Empty phrases in beautiful handwriting remain just what they are – empty impersonal phrases. Sincere greetings, thoughts and expressions of sympathy are the ingredients that make a letter personal – regardless of whether it’s in handwriting or sent to us as an email.

 

 

Always an original

And yet: the handwriting of a person shows much more than just what it writes. At the same time it’s always the expression of a personality and as such is unique. This is one of the reasons why so many people dearly cherish the original autogramm they get from an artist they admire. And in painting the signature of the artist stands not just for the genuineness of the original but also for the artist’s particular style of painting. It’s understood as handwriting and gives the work its special value on the art market which even the most perfect copy cannot hope to achieve – as long as it’s recognised as a copy.

 

What does handwriting really tell us about a person?

Their handwriting distinguishes people from one and another and is recognisable like the sound of their voice. What it tells us about a person’s character is what a method of handwriting analysis called graphology claims to know. Whether it’s plain and simple or frilly, whether the letters are large and powerful or small and crushed, whether they’re disconnected and widely spaced or connected together in one continuous flow – graphologists claim that all this says something about the writer’s personality. And yet graphology is not a science.

I well remember a man who was gifted with an extraordinary sense of his own importance and a domineering unbending personality yet you would never have suspected such character traits from looking at his tiny unassuming handwriting. Even though graphanalysis can be used to verify the authenticity of handwriting, inferring the character of somebody from their handwriting is problematic and should be treated with great caution.

 

A shift away from graphology

Such a view has now been widely adopted by many human resources departments in companies and public authorities. They used to believe that a job applicant’s handwriting gave insight into their character and personality profile and factored this into their decision-making about which of the candidates to select for the job, and thus for a long time would only accept handwritten job applications. Only now in the digital age job applications are mainly online and no longer even require a photo or the name and gender of the applicant in order to make prior selection of candidates before the first face-to-face interview as objective, free from preconceptions and fair as possible. Here too renunciation of handwriting seems very meaningful move that by no means should be regretted.

 

And what does brain research say?

Writing on paper with a pen in your hand stimulates certain regions in the brain. It nurtures and preserves the brain’s fine-motor abilities and improves memory and concentration. What you’ve written by hand you don’t forget so quickly. The same goes for information as well as thoughts and feelings. And finally writing has a lot in common with drawing and therefore is also an act of design – no matter whether it’s calligraphy or just notes jotted down on a pad.

And so its development could have considerable long-term effects. This is why it’s particularly important to encourage children and young people to learn to write longhand and to show appreciation when they use it. There’s a huge difference here between those parents who write their shopping list and those who dictate it to Siri or Alexa and then read it in the supermarket on their smartphones.

And the handwriting process is particularly valuable for keeping a diary which must be the most personal and private form of communication with ourselves (not only) for young people. Because with handwriting the thoughts and feeling flow from the head through the heart and over the hand directly onto paper without any of the distancing effect that use of a computer involves.

I myself will continue to make draft versions of many of my texts in longhand and will still occasionally enjoy sending handwritten letters to people who are important to me. Now this might seem old fashioned but for me it’s got more to do with leisure hours than respect for tradition. And if there’s the odd power cut I can still continue to write because I’m not dependent on the computer. Analogue always works. Everywhere.

 

People can do much that’s astonishing. Yet whether they will ever be able to create such a fabric seems highly unlikely to say the very least. Even so, if only for the past few hundred years, people have been busy weaving a membrane of a quite different kind. Of a terrestrial, not cosmic nature. The stuff of which this membrane is woven is called civilisation. It consists of tiny doses of experience and insights that have been gained over countless thousands of years, handed down from generation to generation and again and ever again recklessly misused and squandered. Respect is the central thread of this human material. Weaving it is a long and laborious process. And the outcome is not predictable.

The cover of civilisation that protects us from the permutations of savagery and tyranny that we have known for thousands of years is just as thin as the Earth’s atmosphere which protects our planet from the deadly rays of the sun. Yet unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, this layer still does not cover the whole planet and all the various cultures and societies that exist on it.

People now growing up in democratic societies governed by the rule of law might tend to take their given status for granted. This is a dangerous attitude for it’s quite the reverse of that. It is and will remain only a wafer-thin fragile membrane that separates us from what generations of people in Europe have suffered from over the ages – deprivation of rights, oppression, earth soaked in blood. In other parts of the world today this is still the sad reality.

If we look over the horizon of the world we are now living in, we see that our civilisation still has no qualms about pursuing the disastrous course first embarked on in countries outside of Europe by missionary fanaticism in conjunction with a colonialism hungry for gold and power – then under cover of a mission to bring civilisation, now pursued by other means, with financial dealings and weapons at the forefront.

As scientific findings confirm, the life-threatening hole in the ozone layer of the Earth‘s atmosphere could be prevented over the course of the past forty years by concerted political and practical action. How would it be then if concerted political and practical action would at some point finally close the ever-widening hole of civilization on this Earth?

Even today many people still entertain serious doubts about the sense and purpose of space travel. Yet the fact that we do now share a collective awareness of the thin and fragile nature of the Earth’s atmosphere is solely due to the photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts almost 51 years ago to this very day which revealed it for the first time to the whole of humanity.

OUBEY was an enthusiastic proponent of the exploration of the Universe and space travel. “The more we know about the Universe, the more we know about ourselves”, he once said. The Universe for him, like the Earth, was part of his feeling for what it means to be at home. He was passionately interested in evolution, science and nature. And also in the history of the fundamental upheavals earlier societies had suffered through wars like the 30 Years War in Europe or the American Civil War. It was a heavy price that our ancestors paid in these and many other armed conflicts for what was finally achieved – peace and on the basis of peace an evolutionary movement to what we now call a civilized society, one that is supported by independent citizen under the rule of law.

Today we are on the threshold of the third decade of the 21^st century. Everything seems possible. Both regression and progress. Matching contending powers. Yet when were times ever easy?

If I myself who am standing on this threshold would wish for something for the coming eighty years of the century, it would be something akin to the dream that Martin Luther King spoke of in his time more than fifty years ago. It could all be so easy if only we weren’t who we are. But perhaps it could equally all just be possible precisely because we are who we are. It´s all possible.

History will tell.