Bits

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.

Humans trust in their senses. We tend to believe what we see and to hold what we don't see for non-existent. We tend to hear what is loud and overhear what is quiet. We tend to assume that what is big or appears big is important, powerful and even threatening – as the case may be. We tend to take whatever is small as insignificant and harmless.

No one can see the wind. Wind is an invisible but extremely potent force. It shows its power in the far reaches of the universe just as on our planet by moving and transforming.
The mariners of former centuries steered huge sailing ships across the oceans of this world. They were experts in the wind and knew how to set their sails to extract maximum effect from its power.

Everything that exists in the cosmos will pass away eventually. Yet nothing that passes away will cease to exist. Our life on Earth is the result of extremely fortunate exceptional circumstances and was first made possible by the dust of dead stars. It was the dust of dead stars that gave birth to our chemical periodic system. A one-of-a-kind metabolism of absolutely vital importance.

Can artificial intelligence create art? It’s difficult to imagine that this will ever be the case. To create art you need the consciousness of a free spirit. Whether artificial intelligence will ever dispose of the consciousness of a free spirit seems to me highly unlikely. If this should happen then human intelligence and creative power as we know them today will have transitioned to a symbiotic coexistence with artificial intelligence. Will this ever happen? If it should then we shall have to wait at least a few more decades before it arrives.

The turbulence of gigantic ocean waves is an overwhelming display of what we call dynamic complexity – a theme that was dear to OUBEYs heart ever since the 1970s and which we continually encounter in his paintings in a variety of guises.

The brilliant film director Stanley Kubrick was convinced that every one of us has a “twin” in this world – perhaps even several. People whose spirits and souls are related and intimately connected even when they don’t know one another and will never actually meet. Such connections are of a purely spiritual nature which is why they defy not just geographical distance but separation over centuries of time itself. Whether these twins will ever discover, recognize or even find one another is something that can never be planned for. It simply happens or it doesn’t.

“The constant of the speed of light separates us humans from a physical experience of the universe. This constant puts us in a kind of quarantine whose frontiers we can only overcome with the help of imagination.” – OUBEY (1992)

Humankind is intoxicated with speed. Over the last three hundred years, as development cycles have become ever shorter, the development pace of our scientific discoveries and technical achievements has increased exponentially.

Despite the differences in our personal make-up, OUBEY and I were in perfect agreement when it came to what I’d call the main things in life.

One of these points of common understanding was our love of poetry and especially the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke which had reached and moved both of us very early on in our lives before we met.

We cannot stop time. But we can forget it.

On the deepest level time always means life-time and as such it is the most valuable property that any living creature in this world can have. Only the spirit (said Erwin Schrödinger) and unconditional free love (say I) stand above time.