Flux Without Pause

While doing my dissertation I came across the term intersectionality which definition is described as the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities.

This term captured the process of my project as I was exploring an unidentified metaphysical moment in a mainly physical driven world. The first output from exploring project 5am was creating a series of sound pieces, which were based on the feeling that I had during in time, which resulted in releasing a net label album, which I name Quixote’s Of Moons Fight The Windmills Of Brixton.

The title was a play on a phrase the poet John Cleveland wrote in 1644, in his book The character of a London diurnall:

“The Quixote’s of this Age fight with the Wind-mills of their owned Heads”

By including the moon where imagery and ideas are formed via dreams and the day to day working life to which was captured by the then newly found surreal knowledge that Brixton had a windmill, captured my challenges in combining the physical and the metaphysical. Another factor was my previous music pieces before project 5am came under the name of Quixotic. This name was inspired by the notion of Don Quito idealistic ambitions, which is captured in the song “the impossible dream”. The tracks were instrumental ethereal mood pieces clashed against hard synths bass lines with no song structures such a verse or choruses which felt like an imaginary headphone flight or walk.

In one of the reviews of the album it was mentioned that Project 5am is best taken with a clear mind and a pair of headphones. His latest album, Quixotes of Moons fights the Windmills of Brixton, is a beautiful and moving piece of work. This is music for audio spacemen.

The two reason for making this project was to find out what was this moment and if anyone else had shared this experience. The closest thing that I have found that captures what I’m exploring has come in the term Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism is cultural aesthetic that intersects between black history, myths and future technological ideas and theories via creative acts.

“Language play and humour is part of the Afrofuturism tool kit, but if you step back, the darkness and despair is unbearable. The Afrofuturist escape to the future, whether folkloric, artistic or mythic, should tell us something. As strange as it may seem, a malady can be discovered through and even defined by its antidote.”

Afrofuturism Arrives — With Sun Ra! January 7, 2014 by John Perreault

While the term “Afrofuturism” originated with cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, the idea behind it has existed for far longer, and the genre has expanded into all mediums as both an aesthetic and an expression of critical race theory. Afrofuturism is a way to project blackness into the future—not merely as existing, but as a critical and significant part of it.- Alley Pezanoski

Afrofuturism artist have included

Wangechi Mutu (artist)

Jean Michel Basquiat (artist)

Ellen Gallagher (artist)

Octavia E. Butler (writer)

Outkasts (musicians)

Erykah Badu (musician)

George Clinton (musician)

The artist who has been the embodiment of what Afrofuturism represents has been the musician Sun Ra.

“Even before his alleged trip to Saturn and subsequent name change, Sun Ra was an outsider among his fellow humans. By taking on an alien identity, he was able to cut ties (even if only theatrically) with his “humanity,” a brotherhood of man that hardly looks appealing marred by a history of slavery, oppression and war.”

Why have so many black musicians been obsessed with outer space? By Jonah Weiner

Afrofuturism seems to be a term more used in the afro American culture than the Black British culture which I feel is more because of the country’s direct link to slavery. In Mark Dery 1993 article, which was the first piece to define the term “Afrofuturism” compared science fiction narratives to slavery in the way of being alienated in a different culture.

I can see how technology has been a way of capturing the essence of black thought.

In the 70s and 80s, hip hop evolved from people who didn’t have access to musical instruments and used equipment like record players and vinyl to explore new techniques in sound.

In the documentary The Last Angel of History it mention how 18th century slaves like Phillis Wheatley wrote poetry to prove that they were human and not just a piece of furniture.

Over 100 years on just like Wheatley, making an album like Quixotes of Moons fights the Windmills of Brixton was a point for me to show that I was a human and not a tool just for work.

The Last Angel of History

The fuel that have kept me engrossed over the years of exploring project 5am has been that this fleeting moment was the first time that I had experience the state of “being” in its purest form. “Before” that my perception of being had stemmed from my parents culture which in turn came from my surroundings that I grew up in. Being black British of the last of the first generation of the wind rush that came to the UK meant that my childhood was lived through the late 80s 90s. My football team was Liverpool F.C mainly because my favourite player was John Barnes. I saw Liverpool play Birmingham city in 1995 and I was in the city and I always remember when the game kicked of and Barnes got the ball a voice from behind me bellowing “get the black bastard”. A guy next to me said ignore him he’s an idiot but inside I was raging but at the same time powerless. Being in a minority back then meant you had to take it. I was always on the fringes of things. At school I was the only black kid in my year in a mainly Asian culture then in my late teens when moving to London. I was living in a Black culture with a mainly Asian background. This has become a great advantage for me because I got to see cultures from a different perception which opened up my mind to a lot of things but at the time it was hard because I felt I was fitting into other peoples worlds and not my own. When I found a passion for video editing and working in the postproduction field without a degree I felt once again on the fringes of people that had been to uni. I would of gone to uni before but a the time I didn’t have a subject in mind to study and after dropping out of a few college courses before doing an access course in multimedia I had decided to work from the knowledge I had gained. The interest in sound and video came from the advice that I got from my best friend my sister who told me to do the thing you love. She had an interest in art but our parents talked her out of pursuing it. Their fears came from their own experiences and not wishing it one their own children. In his early years my father had hope to be a writer but life for him at the time didn’t give him the doors to go through with that. So for them playing safe was the best option with a career in computers or business. One of the legacies from slavery has been a subordinated mindset, which is slowly being eradicated from generation to generation.Larger groups accelerate that process but the African diaspora have reduced those larger groups so visible racism or more importantly invisible racism has hampered the individual from knowing their pure true being. In the recent films “The Butler” and “12 years a slave” the common theme in both film was how the black person were shown with their heads down when within the company of their masters or employees.

In the late Nelson Mandela’s moving inaugural speech it included the quote:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?. as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

What my five am peak experience did for me was to let myself see the totality of myself in the universe, which was beyond form, color, and gender. A way of being that was exclusively mine and not filtered by history or the cultural surroundings that I was bought up into.

From this base, my output comes from how I see the world from my eyes which was one of the reason why I choose explored project 5am via a fine art degree as the artist creates works from their own observations in how they see the world.

Realtime movie: short film made in conjunction with Polish artist Pawel Althamer for Tate Modern featuring the actor and star Jude Law, alerting people to a live performance event at Borough market

I was asked to give a talk at the Ipswich Art society about my work. The event came at a good time for me as I was about to start my blog and this would a good opportunity to have a retrospective take on my 5am journey. I looked back on any past documentation like e-mails to see where my project started. I found a sent submission email in 2009 which captured where I was at in my work

“2007 was when Jason Haye had the idea for project 5am. After 6 years of crafting his sound he found out about the wonderful poetry of rumi where music played an important role in his words, it gave him, a new energy and a fresh perspective on how Haye saw music and sound and life. One week in May, Haye had just come back from Paris and the amazing Printemps de Bourges festival. He fell in love with a place called Jarules and he wanted to describe how he felt about the area in sound. When Haye finished making the track around 5am He had thought to Google 5am and then the first thing Haye saw was this Allen Ginsberg poem called 5am. That was the moment when everything came together, this was moment Haye had been waiting for. When reading about Ginsberg life he had a defining moment when had an auditory hallucination of William Blake when reading his poems “Ah sunflower”, “The sick rose”, and “Little Girl Lost”.

The next day Haye did further checks to see if anyone else around the world was doing this project and came across an artist called Borut Peterlin who made a photography project about 5am. Haye e-mailed him about what was going to do. He wrote these words in his blog.”It felt like Ginsberg and Peterlin had passed the torch on to Jason Haye.

Reading the e-mails back reminded me of how hard it was to describe my five am experience and project to most people how I could turn a metaphysical event visible to others. Over the years I had found similar connections to that moment via religions such as Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam but those are also concepts can be also difficult to explain. Last Christmas I came across Abraham Maslow theories of the peak experience. This was a perfect way to explain to people what my 5am experience was an aware knowing of a moment of perfection.

Another thing that came out of looking my work was the theme of walking.

The person I contacted about the 5am project Borut Peterlin walked the streets at that time to capture the moment of the surroundings.

One of the people that I discovered on my 5am Journey was the story of Arthur Stace who for 35 years left his house at 5am to write the word eternity all over the streets of Sydney. After having a peak experience. In a way without knowing at the time, Stace was one of the first graffiti artists.

The other theme of walking comes from the fact that the poet William Blake who inspired Allen Ginsberg’s peak experience was one of the first psychogeographers as mentioned in a previous post.

In my own work before I had made a series of images titled the way after uni where I was walking in to an horzion in Feilxstowe. In 2013 I juxtaposed a minute slowed down footage of walking into the fog horzion against 7 years of ephemeral social media statues which put togther created a 1000 word poem.

With other pieces like “found me a stone and it told me to smile which I also discussed in the previous post

To do my final project based on that theme would be a fitting way of finnishing uni, a course I went into in order to understand my project more in depth.

As for the talk I wasn’t the best due to techincal problems but I was the best for me in looking back in order to go forward.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot

On A Day Like This – Project 5am

Found a stone and told me to smile

Part 2

Brooklyn subway

2 days later on a busy New York subway, I saw a woman wearing the same seed on a chain placed on her neck. I was shocked as I had never seen this seed before, it felt like I being guided and my eyes was already seeing things a new light. When I came back after being inspired in such a creative space like Brooklyn, within a month I decided to quit my job and move to Ipswich. I had wanted to quit my job for months but with the fear of the recession over the past year frozen my desires to wait until I had found something. But what was that something This was my second job in the media sector I knew by the end of my first job that the post production field was not as creative as I thought it would be despite meeting some great people and working in the west end. My second job had been more of a do add while I was exploring my 5am experience via sound, poetry, photography this was my purpose at the time I didn’t know why but it felt right to explore it. So by the end of my second media job I had taken my project to its limit while being in an environment that I have come into with a passion for sound and video. Over the 6 years I had transformed and now I needed a place that reflected that. I had been toying with the idea of making an installation piece but that felt like a distance away with no arts background. Everything felt away including a new career or chapter in my life. Somehow I had lost that sense of fear after meeting half of me was he a trickster? I don’t know half of me felt yes the other half said no but he did do two things. The first thing he did was that he gave me a choice to believe or not to believe. The second thing was that by giving me the seed and then seeing someone wear the seed he changed my perception on seeing. Around that time I came across a video clip of beat poet Gregory Corso talking about being a poet and how I can be a hard path but how it is all worth it for those rare moments of incite. Seeing this clip was like writing the first sentence on a blank page of a new chapter.

The floating signify and the trickster go hand in hand as they are amoral figures who perform their task no matter how it affects others which could cause bad or good luck. For me it was good luck as I write these words for a degree in fine art blog. The encounter with the yogi was an major catalyst in ending of a chapter in order to start a new chapter of exploring project 5am in depth an finding a langue to describe it others. Since that moment when ever I’ve seen a stone that stands out for some reason, I’d unconsciously pick it up. It reminds me for a moment of a connection with the universe and act almost like a restart button of awareness. Over the four years I picked up stones all over the country. A lot of the times I given the stones to friends or people I’ve just met over a night as a gesture of a moment. It has been amazing to see those people again who have kept the stone. The idea to collect all the stones and put them in a jar came from the term psychogeography where you approach landscapes with an awareness of walking Russian theorist Mikhail bakhtin concept chronotope, a temporal space for a meeting to take place. In the jar each stone captures footsteps space and time and memories and stones that were passed on to others. “Found a stone and it told me to smile” comes full circle in my 5am journey as the beat poet Allen Ginsberg who wrote the 5am am poem that inspired me was inspired by the poems of William Blake who performed psychogeography when walking the streets of London and describing it in his poetry. .. maybe the yogi did help me get to know more about my 5am project after all.

Gregory Corso discusses choice

Found a stone and told me to smile

Part 1:

2010 London Victoria

I was in the area on my day off from work buying travel items for a trip to Brooklyn a day later. I was crossing a zebra crossing full of people then I saw what looked like a yogi walking towards my direction. Our eyes meet for a moment then he said to me that “There is something about you”

Normally I would of said “whatever” and walked on but what he said intrigued me so I asked him what he meant by that. We went to on to the pavement and he pulled out a card which had a picture of him sitting under a tree I guess it was his business card. He spoke broken English and looked a bit dishevelled but there was a presence about him that I had not experience before. He went on to say that there was something special about me and that he could help harness this power/gift. While he was saying he was performing magic tricks making pieces of paper disappear in his hand. My sense where split down the line, half of me feel that this was bloody awesome while the other half thought this is a big wind up. He asked me what was I’m seeking? Money, fame, love, I said I wanted to know more about my 5am project then I told him about my experience. I wasn’t expecting that response but he said he would help me. The yogi went one to say that I wasn’t happy in my job and that I was surrounded by bad energy. This was true, I wanted to leave my job and some of the people who I worked with were projecting a bad atmosphere which mad the job even worst. I knew that there was an option to move to Ipswich but I was not sure what to do. But everybody hates their job. Half of me was impressed of half not. The yogi went on to say that there was a bad energy inside me and that he would help me get rid of it if I performed a ritual and repeated his words. This was exciting so a Wednesday afternoon so I went along with it.

For the ritual I had to walk 140 steps and back carry a red string in my hand at the front of Victoria cathedral. As I was walking, my other half thought I this a channel 4 prank show then I am done for. I returned back to the yogi he took the string from my hand put it in his mouth, pulled it out and it was white. The things that he said to me to recite are a blur now but for those moments it felt like he knew me more than anyone knew me in my life all starting from that one glance. He then gave me rudraksha seed to keep and I was to wear it at all times while keep on praying for me. Then he hit me with the following words that he would need so money to help him get the materials to pray. My other half said to myself I knew it, How much I said “£100” he said. No way I laughed but then I looked at him, I thought I he had given my an experience that I had never shared before and looked like he need money and I had some holiday money on me…so I begrudgingly gave him £40. I took my number (yogi have mobile phones) and he said he would call me when I got back. I knew that I would not be seeing him again we thanked each other and went our separate ways.

The encounter lasted around 20 mins but I felt like we were in no time like something out of the matrix. Then everything went back to normal with the hustle bussle atmosphere of the London streets in effect. I sat on the tube look at this seed thinking I paid £40 for a seed. half of me was buzzing the other half repeated the word you idiot.