Bits

Even today I can still well remember the excitement and enthusiasm with which OUBEY, back in the summer of 1985, talked about the presentation of a revolutionary new computer with – for that time - unheard of multimedia capability in the ritzy setting of New York’s Lincoln Center. The computer was the Commodore Amiga 1000, and it was presented by no other than Andy Warhol together with Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry. How dearly OUBEY would have loved to own his own Amiga back then.

Why does someone want to be an artist? What drives him or her to look inside themselves and want to or indeed have to create something called art? And how do they cope with such a form of life, because that’s what it is, a separate form of life? What distinguishes artists – apart from their special gifts – from all the other people who might love art but live in a completely different world to those who actually create it?

A wafer-thin membrane envelops our globe. We call it the Earth’s atmosphere. It protects us from the lethal rays of the Universe whilst letting through the life-giving beams of the central star in our solar system. It’s a unique composition of incalculable value created by the very agency that hasn’t exactly shown itself to be terribly friendly to human beings – the Universe. It’s a gift.

Over 500 years ago a number of courageous men of science put forward the momentous world-changing assertion that “And yet it does move”. By this they meant the earth. Such a view filled the potentates of the church of that time with horror and dismay. They believed that the Erth and mankind were the crowning glory in the divine scheme of things and thus must stand at the very centre of the universe. And they would bitterly persecute anyone who dared contradict them.

It took millions of years of evolutionary development before, some 35,000 years ago, our ancestors began to paint the walls of caves at Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira and a great many other places in Europe and North Africa, caves where they sought protection from enemies at night and shelter from bad weather during the day. With only the most elementary means they created their wall paintings to eternalise what moved them, what they seen and lived through and what seemed so important to them that they had to commemorate it in images.

Imagine a spaceship one kilometer long and 20 tons in weight just starting on its journey to a planet similar to our Earth in a solar system four and a half light years or 40 trillion kilometers away from our home planet, 700,000 times further from our Earth than the planet Mars. Planned duration of the journey: 50 years. Object and purpose: to find out if there really is extra-terrestrial life on this Earth-like planet. Is this just some crazy fantasy? Pure science-fiction? No, quite the reverse.

There are moments when chance and destiny touch for the fraction of a second. These are the moments of universal creation, change, decay and death for all things. Moments of perfect being-at-one with everything. Moments in which chance and destiny become a single whole.

"Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring, without the fear that after that will come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient who are there as though eternity laid for them. So unconcernedly, still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain for which I am grateful. Patience is everything."

In the last one hundred years, our knowledge of the cosmos, our world, and what happens in it, and our understanding of ourselves as part of life in this world and this universe, has expanded enormously. And in the last thirty years the rate at which we acquire new knowledge has grown at a breath-taking speed. All this has changed our view of the world and ourselves. Yet, even so, our consciousness still finds it difficult to grapple with the implications of what this newly acquired knowledge means and to adequately assimilate them.

Ever since our species first became sedentary, the creation and construction of stone monuments and purpose-built buildings has formed part of every culture. Many testimonials to human prowess in architecture from antiquity are still standing today and remind us of the astonishing achievements of our ancestors across the whole world – from the pyramids of Egypt and the temples of the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans to the gigantic statues on Easter Island and the ring of standing stones at Stonehenge.

When excavations in prehistoric caves unearthed a flute which palaeontologists dated as some 30,000 years old, it was apparent that not just fascinating cave paintings but the productions of sounds from such instruments as flutes was already part of the repertoire of cultural techniques possessed by our ancestors.