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
