Paratekton (open sculptural system)

Paratekton (Para – beside, tekton -the structure, gk)
Neo-Neo Gothic Project

laser-cut plywood modules, dimensions variable depending on installation
development shots of this new contextually responsive system that I am developing for shows and commissions in London, Portugal and Australia.

Urban Fragment,  Collyer Bristow Gallery, London – 26 May – 25 August 2010
Systems of Romance I, Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne Art Fair – 04-08  August 2010
Systems of Romance II, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane 18 August – 04 September

Paratekton (open sculptural system) has a large element of play in it, I described it as a Scalectrix for grownups designed by Augustus Pugin to a friend the other day! It is part of my Neo-Neo Gothic project updating the 19th century Neo-Gothic and Art and Craft aesthetics of Pugin, Morris, Jones and Ruskin with their utopian socialist programmes to the 21st century.

The ways in which Paratekton goes together are almost infinite, the randomness is part of the meaning as is letting go some of the authorship and sharing the possibility of creating a virtual infinitude of possibilities with the audience.

I am working on some boxed smaller kits with some straights, corners and ornaments. These could start simple e.g. an infinity loop and have some more numerous kits with more possibilities as well.

Ruskin in Art and Life argues passionately for empowered labour, meaningful and personally fulfilling production and a life free of slavery. Simone Weil in her experiences as a young factory worker was outraged at the system of quasi-indentured labour she encountered in pre war France where workers were tied to machines all day stamping out the same element, having no creative, moral or intellectual engagement in what they were doing.

At the other historical end of this liberation struggle for a proletarian paradise which was so dystopian in its most extreme manifestations my Neo-Neo-Gothic sculptural systems are demanding a meaningful productive life for all humans and animals involved in the system of production and creativity that characterises the evolving society that we are constantly creating, destroying and recreating.

Re-racinate the Deracinatariat!
Empower Labour!
Meaningful Production!

Go back to the creative source and start the processes of meaningful production and enquiry  at pre-school.

Paratekton is an ‘entelechic’ structure that is sufficient for its own purposes. Entelechy, ‘in-end-having’ is Aristotle’s term for what it is to be; the inner drive, principle or purpose.

In esoteric religious traditions the inmost soul of things, persons and entities is taken to be that which remains unchanged during the process of transformation which characterises a thing’s fleeting manifestation in the world, hence when Gertrude Stein says “a rose is a rose is a rose” I take it to mean that a rose is a rose is a rose whether bud, pollen, bloom or withered seed head. The changing phenomenal manifestation of the rose is not the substance (standing under) of the rose. So with my sculptural systems I am trying to get beneath their ‘thingyness’  and think of them as a process, a system. You might wonder whether sculpture is the best medium for such an apprehension, I do to! But there is a wonderful reassurance, solidity, concreteness in this thinginess which can only contain a glimpse of that elusive effulgence at the base of reality.  Paratekton is a river flowing through and underneath its vegetal nodes which could be seen as its phenomenal events. It is a carrier wave, a message carrying signal. It is not a thing, it is an event, a process of becoming, or it is a thing that lays its own substance (in the original Greek sense of that inner unchanging property that stands under illusory appearance) bare, it could be stripped of events and would be unaffected. The soul, or substance of a thing could be said to be topological, containing the properties of form within it that are prior to and will remain invariant during the distortions and transformations of the thing’s existence in the phenomenal world.

Cryptosphere in Objet Perdu, Plataforma Revolver, Lisbon

Cryptosphere (open sculptural system)
modular plywood components

Installation views at Objet Perdu, Plataforma Revolover, curated by Mario Caeiro

Plataforma at Artecapitale

Though the formal economy of Julião Sarmento seems not to be related to the ornamental dimension of a work which literally fills the eye, it is not so different to Simeon Nelson’s praxis. Cryptosphere [2008-2010] is, like Sarmento’s, a rhetorical reaction to the social constructo. It departs from an examination of a historical asset – the monumental collection of early modern maps of the Royal Geographical Society – to relativize, through a design exercise, a puissant cultural heritage which constitutes the graphical sum of world representation. The production of Cryptosphere resulted from an artistic residency lasting 15 months in the RGS, including much debate with scholars. The result is the ironic compaction of sequential philosophical and cultural mutations inherent in Western cartography during a period of more than a thousand years. It is a commentary on problems of the representation of space, for instance about the absurd localization of mythical places – El Dorado, Eden, Utopia, Hell. The piece is to a certain extent an anti-object, the sum of all withheld and hidden information in a given system .

By exercising the ornamental, the modular and a scientific beauty, Cryptsphere rejects in its kairotic rhetorics any superfluous elements, in order to counterpose to the vanity of cartography a cryptic modality of drawing and the conventions of western sculpture. Arguing for the validity of ornament (filtered out by minimalism) and the validity of art in the exclusive territory of science, it is about an interdisciplinarity which high culture hesitates to accept. Nelson’s cognition, just as Sarmento’s, is a shot into the dark…

excerpt from Mario Caeiro catalogue statement

Crystalline Theory of Consciousness

Infinitesimal – wall drawings

La Vie en Rond, H17, Brussels, 2008
Auxesis, Tactile Bosch, Cardiff 2009

“Our perception of depth is the product of complicated circuitry in the brain…but it does not mean that there aren’t real trees and cliffs out there, or that the world is as flat as a pancake.”
Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate, 2003

This wall drawing has been exhibited twice in different formats. In 2009 several thousand 40mm dots were arranged on a 100mm grid covering the wall through which the stairs emerge into the upstairs space of Tactile Bosch Gallery, Cardiff, UK. This strict geometric arrangement is occasionally interrupted by the insertion of an extra dot that pushes the immediately surrounding dots aside or a missing dot which pulls the immediately surrounding dots into toward the empty space. The viewer is confronted with a swirling universe of infinite perceptual possibilities. The slight imperfections in the grid send optical ripples over walls ceiling and floor, undermining the solidity of the architecture and inducing a vertigo and perceptual confusion in the viewer.

This grid of dots is based partly on the illustrations of crystal lattices found in a science textbook. These lattices are invariably contaminated with missing or extra molecules that disrupt the perfection of the grid. At the molecular scale there is no solidity, no ‘thing’ just atoms vibrating about their loci attracted and repelled by fundamental forces of nature. The idea for this installation comes out of my interest in how we see the world, how we negotiate our surroundings and how we believe what we see. The imperfections come out of the idea that that there is nothing perfect in nature.

http://www.h29brussels.com/ooo

http://www.tactilebosch.org/calender.asp

New Cosmological Drawings

I Can See You Looking Back at Me and Me Looking Back at You

This drawing tries to encode the idea of a loop of consciousness proposed by physicists like Erwin Schodinger, John Wheeler and David Bohm, the idea that the universe has somehow given rise to structures or patterns so complex (us) that these structures (we) have created second order patterns with which to mirror the universe back on itself (art, science, myth). So this drawing tries to give a sense of  the universe looking back at us looking at it so that the external and the internal worlds are fused.

I generated The CAD drawing below by intuitive geometry, a little arithmetic was used to provide the orbital distances. It came partly out of my conversations about the multiverse with astrophysicists Bernard Carr and Robert Priddey and to me it has a sense of a boundlessly creative field or matrix with possible worlds emerging at the points of concretion. I also see it as a diagram of being, with locations of being represented by the centres of the nets and connections between them spinning off in spiral vectors. there are vague interstices between them not quite of their geometry but not too far off. Crystal diffraction is much on my mind at the moment as I am shortlisted for a sculpture at St John’s College, Oxford to commemorate chemist John Kendrew and his Nobel Prize for determining the stucture of myoglobin with x-ray crystallography.

Sky, revolve not without me; moon, shine not without me;
earth travel not without me, and time, go not without me.
With you this world is joyous, and with you that world is joyous;
in this world dwell not without me, and to that world depart not without me.

Rumi

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it”

Simone Weil

Levitas-Gravitas Where is Happiness?

Is it in the green bud bursting from the withered bark?
Is it in the sun-flash of an ice-silhouetted winter tree?
Is it locked in the liquid glimmer of her eye?

Is it in Lord Surya burning away the morning mist?
Is it in the Pleiades glittering in a jewelled night sky?
Is it in those intimate enfoldments,
Of blood mingling blood in new life’s start?

Is it in the air breathed through the lung’s inverted tree,
In the rustling telegraph tautening gut, limb and brain?
Is it in the folding, curling proteins in muscles, nerves, blood?

Is it in the life-seeding stellar winds?
In the slowly widening drift of space?
Is it in the vibrant crystal’s pulsing atoms,
The infinitesimal flux at the bottom of matter,
The zero pivot of infinite density?
Is it in the 10 to-the-minus 43 on the day of creation?

Or is it in the diurnal flicker of life’s fleeting span?