Saturday, December 25, 2010

The Imaginal Cell

it was just another dinner in our house in christmas eve, about seven of us sitting by the rain with some leftovers and cheap wine, surrounded by our dog and cat running after our chickens and duck as usual.
not bad for me at all.

especially when Roland from AwkeningtheDreamer and FourYearsGo told me the story of imaginal cells, after I got a bit drunk and tried to explain the universe for him with my imagination about cocoons, what I said was probably:


Imagine our world is now a completed cocoon, as everyone waits impatiently inside the threads of constructions over the history, the threads of civilization and modernity; imagine our minds are cocoons as well, constructed, protected but blinded by our own threads of reasoning since the Renaissance, to weave ourselves with these threads into a culture, a history, a nation, an identity, into something to belong to and live within.

Now we have came to this stage, when we are still threading our cocoons to erase the emptiness from inside, narrowing down the void of unknown and imagination; our cocoons are narrow enough to blind and suffocate ourselves now, and we keep threading with matters of facts, which is against our instinct. It’s the stage of time to stop building and consuming what we have with our linear thinking, predicting what we don’t have outside for future consumption with our linear thinking, so we can pay some attention to the nonlinear but inspiring nature of ourselves, which is what we truly have been trying to figure out, predict, and protect, yet never been successful – with our linear thinking.

the connection, the common sense between our inner nature and the unknown outside our cocoons, allows us to be mature enough to break free, to live a new life with the void – the universe, the chaos, the space, the freedom, the peace.

as part of the chaos, part of the intangible creativity, human isn’t just the linear life-death or pleasure-pain, we are the abstract will of freedom, the indefinable poetry of life in between.

That’s why we have art and music to start with.





And then he went on:



The caterpillar’s new cells are called ‘imaginal cells,’ they are totally different from the caterpillar cells, so the immune system thinks these new cells are enemies, attacks them and gobbles them up.

But these new imaginal cells continue to appear. Pretty soon, the caterpillar’s immune system cannot destroy them fast enough.

More and more imaginal cells survive, and these tiny lonely cells start to clump together into friendly little groups, clustering together, forming a long string of imaginal cell, resonating at the same frequency, all passing information from one to another there inside the chrysalis.

Then at some point, the entire string of imaginal cells
suddenly realizes all together, that it is something different from the caterpillar.
and in that realization, is the shout of the birth of the butterfly.



And that’s what’s happeing on this planet.

(by zoe)

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Sunday, November 21, 2010

chaos experiment

the diagram was drawn for a discussion at digger street a few months ago.
while there's no control power over our chaotic behavior and creativity in this community, the evolution of the system is pushed forward by a collective consciousness to live as part of the whole.

it was a good chat.


zoe

Saturday, November 20, 2010

THE EFFECT OF STORY TELLING ON YOU

..The same effect could be seen in societies when myths were believed to be true facts, which enabled man to bridge the gap between image and action. This is a physical process which is common to all human behavior.

First, after perceiving the subject which we act upon, we come to possess an image (achieved instantaneously either through intuition or experience) of the perceived subject. At the same time, not only do we possess the image of the subject but also, to motivate our action, we possess the image of our action upon it as well. We carry out and simulate our actions according to such images, but we always perceive an unavoidable gap between our images and the result of our real action.

Man has always tried in various ways to subconsciously bridge this gap to maintain the meaning of experience, which is fundamental to us and requires continuity and repetitiveness of perception.

Myths provided man with complete stories that prescribed our images and perceptions which covered and erased the difference between the two. By filling the gap, man has forgotten the existence of the gap itself......(continue reading)

Andy Goldsworthy project

"Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there."

Friday, November 19, 2010

Another life in life

For the people who come to Digger Street because they want to live in this place, what's more important than the verb “live,” is the verb “want to live.”

Everyone came to this world without any choice; everyone is just another fragment of mirror, reflecting a segment of the continuous life of the whole.
numerous sparkles under the sun on the wave of time, the tide of eternal return, moving back and forth, up and down in history, though seldom realize that it's all driven by a distant enigmatic power of the moon, the universe.

Lives are tragically beautiful as sparkles; all the flashing excitement and pain are experienced over and over. beyond the control of individual, and should not be controlled by individual.
However, in the media and information explosion today, we are exposed to this overwhelming infinity of past and future, our vision is stretched further beyond the reach of individuals.
awaken to this new desire to avoid "the suffering of the whole," and the hope, the pain, the helplessness brought by this desire, are beyond the prison of individual
only to make individual prison a lighthouse, searching, communicating and sharing hope with other lights on the other side of the horizon; within the life cycle as part of the immutable implicit tide.

No matter how small it is at the moment, I imagine, this is a place where a few people choose to live, again - remain as individuals yet with a collective motivation to live, to enjoy lives.
we come, no matter who we already are. and stay, no matter what this place has already became. And we discover our instinct to change - ourselves and things around us.

Monday, November 8, 2010

The difference is the art that we make in this place are made for ourselves, there’s no right or wrong or good or bad, expensive or cheap, it’s almost out of instinct to realize beautiful things that are already in our mind.

For the audience, to appreciate this kind of art is almost to appreciate life, or the world as it is, without being influenced by the facade of the art world, of the market and fashion, what most young artists out there are being driven by

And we don’t follow this direction of the modern world, and not competing with one another shoulder next to shoulder, for the same destination of being the top of something…our creativity just grow everywhere and flower all by itself

If there’s a thread that brings everything together, not for certain purpose but for a stronger energy to improve ourselves, and maybe to be able to make a small impact in this world

What I think is that we’re part of the energy already, and we have the thread already, it’s a collective theme just like what aboriginal tribes have for their art and music, but it’s not shared by certain people but by the entire human race, even more, depending on how you define the word “art”

The art I see here is beyond media and forms, the way it can be presented can also be beyond existing rules of the art world. We can design our own way of presenting it, visual art can move around if we walk with it, decorate ourselves with it, make ourselves part of it, gigs do not have be limited by place and time, we don’t necessarily have to find audience, but to be among the audience somewhere; performance can be part of installations, public installations, still or live ones…
TO BE CONTINUED – BY YOU

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Ellie and Ri

you guys always know what you're doing...we were so lucky to have you :)

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Monday, November 1, 2010

our playground @ Enviro











What is art for an Artivist

I have been working for this guy - Ai Weiwei, an anti-china artist who's blog was shut down by the chinese government, and was beaten personally by police officers for his influence and popularity.

As an artist who sees the world, there are a million things to do. As a person who cares about the world, there are only a few things to do...within arms reach.

However, when internet was invented within arms reach, the possibility becomes infinite.

I've been working on his Twitter translations

Ai's latest work "Sunflower seeds" (which was also sent out for free for those who asked him for a few seeds on Twitter)







by zoe

Monday, October 25, 2010

This is our time capsule

which won't be wiped off for the next few decades...

Tuesday, October 19, 2010