patrick van caeckenbergh

"In his mysterious, baroque oeuvre Patrick Van Caeckenbergh (°1960, Aalst, Belgium) depicts the world and his own environment. His sculptures, collages, models and drawings connect small, everyday objects with all-encompassing frameworks, systems and great world discoveries. Van Caeckenbergh’s artwork stimulates the imagination and often reminds one of fables and fairytales.
The detailed collages from the 1980s incorporate wallpaper from his home, numerous references to the environment in which he grew up as well as to his own oeuvre. At the same time, they bear witness to an overwhelming desire to capture and store all the knowledge in the world. Relying on the insights he had gleaned from books, movies and art history, he tried to grasp the world with his own systems and models. He connected mundane elements from the everyday world with comprehensive global systems and grand discoveries. In the 90′s Van Caeckenbergh began to explore his own life and attempted to portray the multitude of complexities of the human condition. The process of germination, flowering and decay are contained in magnificent sculptures. Motifs such as the tree of life, beetles, the procession of caterpillars, and cuttings of bits of bare skin now make their appearance, and the everyday processes of rotting and decay are increasingly employed as metaphors.
The artist’s current work coincides with his move to the rural village of Sint-Kornelis-Horebeke. This work exudes a new sense of peace. It is a reflection of the soothing rhythm of the Flemish countryside. The world is now depicted less complexly, and the focus has shifted to recognisability. The artist has retreated into a chock-full studio that is described as a cigar box and that is now on display in the exhibition. In 2010, he embarked on a project known as The Old in Years, an ever-expanding series of drawings based on pictures of old trees, a detailed record of wise trees of life drawn with seemingly photographic realism."  (from e-flux,  here)

harry smith

Smith explains: The first part depicts the heroine's toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.

john whitney

ed emshwiller

ilya prigogine

"you need more anarchy in your times! more various, multiple activities!"

the winds

In my Father's house are many rooms;

if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.

John, 14:2

romanticism

bachelard

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” 

“Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.” 

embarrassing how i always fall prey to falling in love with dead philosophers, making shrines for them on my shelf and being a quixotic adulator instead of a critical thinker. oh well... but how can you not love a melancholy, critical, tired of positivist progress-believing and blinded science dreamer, someone who turns to the attics, nooks and hideaways and not the representative big saloons, someone who talks as fast as him and takes a random baker-poet from a time and place lost just as serious as a so-called acclaimed thinker, someone who looks back to look forward, who sees places as living memories and the other way around. i don't know. i think one must love bachelard.

not living in the house of one's dreams

 

"Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality"

(Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space)

a mineral collection

proto breathing apparatus for tunneling endeavours

"During World War I miners often dug tunnels, and placed mines in them. The main objective of these mines was to destroy part of an enemy trench, and then attack during the confusion. Soldiers eventually developed strategies for discovering enemy tunnels. One method was to put one end of a stick in the ground, and the other end on your teeth to feel vibrations. Another method was to sink a water-filled oil drum into the floor of the trench, and lower your ear into the water to listen to noise being made by people tunnelling.

It took a long time to dig a tunnel. Sometimes it took a year. Occasionally miners would dig into their enemy's tunnels, starting an underground fight.

Typically there would be 4 tunnellers working at the face (one of whom would be resting), plus 2 tunnellers mates handling trolley, air pumping and preparation of timber. Generally infantry working parties were employed to remove the spoil from the shaft heads and dispose of it. (One foot run of subway created 70 sandbags of spoil). At any time a Tunnelling Coy would have several digging parties working towards each other." 

-John Lumsdon

silica polymorphs

paul thek

the magic carpet

canoeing in oceania

The akashic records

(akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning "sky", "space" or "aether") is a term used in theosophy (and Anthroposophy) to describe a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence. These records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. They are metaphorically described as a library; other analogies commonly found in discourse on the subject include a "universal supercomputer" and the "Mind of God". People who describe the records assert that they are constantly updated automatically and that they can be accessed through astral projection or when someone is placed under deep hypnosis. The concept was popularized in the theosophical movements of the 19th century and is derived from Hindu philosophy of Samkhya. It is promulgated in the Samkhya philosophy that the Akashic records are automatically recorded in the elements of akasha one of the five types of elements visualized as existing in the elemental theory of Ancient India, called Mahabhuta. (wiki)

cloudbuster

Кола Бельды-Ханина Ранина

الحقيقة ملك الوجود

un-drum

telluris theoria sacra by thomas burnet

reading the surface of the world as a "a gigantic and hideous ruin ... a broke and confused heap of bodies".
feeling offended by the ugliness of the mountains, burnet sees as wrinkles, scars and fractures.
the earth as an aged face, with cracks and traumas and concussions.
reading landscapes symbolically, like a detective, looking for signs and hints of a time and paradise lost.
making sense of structures beyond sense.
a theory of the WORLD.

odilon redon

"I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased." Odilon Redon