camminando | Quantifying My Geospatial Self at Portarlington

My first visit to Portarlington brought memorable walks from the fishing pier to the ramp about two kilometer west from the historic town of Portarlington (early 1800).

performances | Geelong, "1984" at GPAC

A multimedia rendering of  the "1984" novel opened on Thursday at the Geelong Performing Art Center GPAC. The dystopian novel by George Orwell is yet a dark rendering of the many facets of surveillance and lost of privacy almost all of us are facing today. Even if, hopefully in a positive bright way, the connection with remote places brought by social networks, GPS, smartphones and cameras, are not far from the invasive "big brother" of 1949 novel. Food for thought, and sensory dark and obsessive feast for the eye, was brought by the towering screens in the set design, where technology of the remote video images was in contrast with the set portraying the real squalid places of the action.

Shake and Stir theater company cast portraying Winston Smith and O'Brien

camminando | Quantifying My Geospatial Self While Viewing the Sun Rising at Eastern Beach

 

Dealing with the stress created by the School of Architecture during my PhD journey has become an endurance test. Walking and enjoyment of the natural beauty of Geelong offers some comfort, especially in witnessing the sun rising after a sleepless night. I continue quantifying my geospatial presence -and related biosensing- with Google My Tracks.

camminando | Geelong Sunrise: Same Place, Different Time

Walking took me today to witness one of the most spectacular rising of the sun. The Corio Bay calm water encouraged the sun-sky/water mirroring, where almost the blues hue were transitioning from the blurring horizon line, where the water meets the sky. I am again trying to find visual altered perception of the backbending panoramas, the top of the photos is the bottom of the place.

Locations range:

-38.144207, 144.363473

-38.129637, 144.356957

Time range:

7:10-9:23 AEST

Chronological sequence ending with a view from above

Vernissages | Kinderhook: Nick Cave at Jack Shainman

The Hudson Valley sleepy town of Kinderhook (Dutch for "kids corner"), NY, woke up to wild art interventions. Thanks to the investments of New York based gallerist Jack Shainman, an old school building in the center of town turned into a minimalist white-box exhibition space, hosting sculptural costumes; the opening event was a performance orchestrated by American artist Nick Cave, who also authored the work on display – not to be confused with the homonymous Australian musician.

exhibitions | Michael Morgan "Impermanent Vessels - Rebirth"

One of the fifty head/vessels. Photo by Michael Morgan

During my daily walk to the Waterfront Campus I encountered Michael Morgan's "Impermanent Vessels - Rebirth" an exhibition important for its content and remarkable for the beautiful multimedia installation. A very unusual dialogue of video projections, sculpture and sound installation (the Muslim Call to Prayer) brings to life the notion of replication of the self (the artist's head) subject to time in space. The two-year project  (2012 to 2014) is a an artist meditation on "the transient and evolutionary nature of all aspects of existence and life."  

More from the artist statement: 
The Story of Vessels
50 copies of the artist's head produced in raku clay, significant through its use in Japanese tea ceremony, were placed in five locations along Corio Bay and Port Philip Bay - Swan Bay, Wedge, Point Lillias, Welsh's Jetty and Point Henry Back Lead. The vessels were subject to nature's forces to transform them through interaction with underwater environment.One year later, the artist began to recover the vessels leaving at least one at each site to symbolize the ultimate return of all things to nature. A total of 38 vessels have been recovered, while others were missing or left to continue their journey.
The Exhibition 
The exhibition presents the recovered vessels and the existence (or non-existence) of the lost vessels by the coordinates of their sites.The small screens rotate the images of vessels at four stages of their evolution: upon production, just as they were placed underwater, then a year after placement underwater, and finally after recovery in their present state.The vessels reflect the unavoidable change in the light of fundamental connectedness of all things as described in Zen Buddhist teachings. Fragile and impermanent- they are also the 'vessels of life' and part of something beautiful. The Muslim Call to Prayer is the spiritual reference to the sound resonating in vessels. A digital projection onto sculpture features the artist wearing hard hat diving equipment with the sound overlay of breathing and heartbeat as the helmet represents the 'vessel sustaining life'.'Impermanent Vessels - Rebirth' is artist's dedication to his late wife Carolyn.

The heads/vessels in the artist's studio. Photo by Michael Morgan

Excerpts from the opening address by Dr. Felicity Spear:

The entire cosmos is a cooperative. Lord Buddha was spot on when he made this observation all those hundreds of years ago, and while contemporary science also finds this to be true, and Michael and I would agree, sadly the politicians who run our lives mostly ignore it. Michael has had enough experience of life to understand something of the nature of this cooperative interconnectedness between things, but also the way things always change, how nothing stays the same,'how everything is in a state of flux. This exhibition Impermanent Vessels- Rebirth could be described as an autobiography in which Michael. through the experience of the tragic loss of his wife Carolyn, attempts to come to terms with the fragility and impermanence of life. His fifty vessels pay homage to the journey he has made in coming to understand the underlying web of connections between all things and their transient nature.Working with his own image, Michael has created what could be described as self portraits, fifty of them, one for each year of his life. He refers to them as vessels of life, fragile, subject to change, impermanent. He draws together the strands of time, memory and transformation in a process which he likens to archaeology, where objects scarred and marked by time are rediscovered, retrieved and rebirthed in another time. The transformative elements in Michaels' work are expressed through the tactile materiality of raku clay, its weathering over time beneath the sea by the flow of water and weed, and the experience of diving in a silent womb-like world.Beneath the sea he returns to an intimate world, connected like an umbilicus to a life line above, hearing only the sound of his own breath and heartbeat, and the flow of water over his body. Retrieving these vessels after a year in their underwater locations enabled their rediscovery, their reinterpretation and their rebirth. They reveal the changes that time has wrought on their surfaces by the process of chance. They are the material evidence for the inevitability of change and its unpredictability.To be an artist takes courage and perseverance. Artists who push the boundaries step outside the mainstream and dare to see the world with other eyes. This can be challenging or fascinating for we cultural consumers depending on what we bring of ourselves to the experience. But for an artist it is not only about courage. It's about a certain sensibility and sensitivity, it's about being attuned to things, and it's about the need to transform experiences into images while drawing attention to different ways of viewing the world. Michael's work raises our awareness of something absolutely fundamental about the cosmos and our own experience. It reminds us that we are more alike than different. We are all in the same boat. He engages with and celebrates the Buddhist observation of the cosmos as a cooperative, the melancholy beauty of the Muslim call to prayer, and the rationality of western science which demystifies the physical world. In doing this he pays respect to cultures other than our own and acknowledges our shared human experiences. This is the legacy of these thoughtful and beautiful vessels as they interact with each other and play with light, our medium of contact with the cosmos. They reflect Michael's courage, his determination and his talent.

Michael Morgan "Impermanent Vessels - Rebirth"

Deakin University Geelong Waterfront Campus

9-25 May 2014