Flux Without Pause

After finishing my dissertation in December I wanted to travel for a few days in a different country. I had been told about the Transmedia Festival for art & digital culture that takes place every year in Berlin. I had been to Berlin the previous year to see The Knife play. I fell in love with place so many reasons mainly because it is a city that literally speaks to you in so many different ways. There are ways which you can find in other cites in the form of a tourist observing how other cultures act but the thing that makes Berlin stand out is how the buildings speak to you becoming alive with the graffiti written on the walls. At first sight it was slightly intimidating for me because when you se that much graffiti that means your usually in a dodgy area but after a while it walking street after street pass building after building it became a sort of melody for me.

One day I went on the over ground yellow trains which had a curved upward train track which reminded me of a slow amusement park ride. This was great for looking at the graffiti from a closer viewpoint. The word that stood out for me was “Poet” It was in white paint on a high building and it stood out from the other tags. This was poignant for me because walking the street of Berlin was like a visual poem.

The other way the city spoke to me was in the form of the photoautomat booths, which were spread out over the city. There are phootbooths in Britain but I felt like they are more embraced over there. They felt like they where places to freeze time for a moment in the on-going movement of life. The whole process of getting inside the booth thinking of statue poses between 4 quick fire shots which you get caught out while readjusting a pose and then going back into the flux of the world while waiting of the booth using a traditional method that produces these stunning vintage sepia images. While waiting the view of shuffling feet behind the black curtain adds to the mystic of the multiple transactions taking place. Face to camera, image to hand.

The memories of my first visit enticed me to come back again

Footsteps in the dark bring home the light- Project 5am

The aspect of multiple screen work has appealed to me since taking part in the Lars Von trier crowdsourcing project Gesmat. My video was one of the 142 films selected from around the world to capture six interpretations of themes that were selected by Von Trier. The work had its premier at the 2012 Copenhagen Art Festival where it was displayed on four screen which was formed around a circle of benches The multiple screen gave the viewer a chance to look at a narrative from different points of view meaning that no viewing of the event was ever the same. I found the project very interesting because on of the main themes in my work is about looking from different points of view in a phenomenological aspect.

For my first installation seed, nature, grow 2011 focused on the London riots and which ways of action could help a disiinfransihed generation.

Liminal Love 2012 looked at effects of mental health via a family unit.

“There is another way 2012” was a visual take the on T.S Eliot play The cocktail party and The cocktail party effect, the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, That captured the theme of the piece which was about making a choice.

On top of my of my art work my dissertation focused on if crowdsourcing could provide socially engaged art where interdenpencey of inviduals and communities played a key role in discussing the themes stated.

For my last uni installation my aim is to look at using three screens to describe a narrative.

When attending the Isaac Julian 7 screen video installation “Playtime” it showed me how multiscreen can

*Open up the space of a screen

*Give incite into internal thoughts

* Can make the breaking the forth wall effect more dramatic

* Can give the viewer multiple views within one view

The cons of using multiscreen was that:

*So many screens can be distracting

*Some screen can be not as relevant as the other screens.

The themes of Julian’s work related to my project in the way of

* Double consciousness

* Reflections – of the past

* Doors into the unknown

* Making the invisible, visible

* Giving the visitor a choice

On of my lectures in my 1st year had recommended looking at Julian’s

work for my dissertation, so it kind of felt fitting that after 3 years, my work had naturally connected with Julian’s work.

For my last degree installation my aim is to look at using three screens to describe a narrative. Using three screens will able me to capture the theme of intersectionatillty in the way French philosopher Jacques Rancière used the French director jean luc Godard as an example of capturing collage in the form of mystery.

as well as the ability to

* expand a scene

* reflect internal thoughts

The subjects that I will be looking at to display in a multiple screen format will be theme of psychogeogeography

In the book the art of wandering by merlin coverley the contents features the list of types of walkers like.

The walker as a philosopher

The walker as pilgrim

The imaginary walker

The walker and the natural world

The walker as a visionary

The flaneur

Experimental walking

The aim will be to capture the essence of a music album by creating a series of Godard styled intertitles to focus on the different titles taken from the book.

The idea for treating it like a music album came from listening to Joni Mitchell hejira album. It was the first time I had heard it in 4 years time I notices the details that the artist made in the theme of the journey. The album title is a transliteration of the Arabic word hijra, which means “journey”, usually referring to the migration of the prophet Muhammad (and his companions) from Mecca to Medina.

Each track is a story about a character or a location on her journey and the album cover is a superimposed image of Mitchell over the highway landscape of her journey.

By taking that concept into a video art setting I will look to reproduce that in a video art format.

Last week I experimented by filming my walking to uni to see how it would look in multiscreen. I was happy with results and no ill be looking to expand on the idea.

The art of wandering -Project 5am test

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