All I really needed was to start working.
And everything fell into place. The anxiety that has been plaguing me since day 1 here in New York - the uncertainty of what I can and cannot do, the insecurity of my works' irrelevance to contemporary art discourses, my lack of confidence in handling my time and resources during my residency - all of that seemed de trop, unnecessary once my hands felt the solidity of wood and the certainty of the blade cutting off shapes. How can I explain these things? How can I use as justification the comfort I feel when the wood releases its smell at the first cut of the chisel? Because often this is what I truly look forward to: to inhale the wood, the primary material, and the rest just follows. What plagues me now is the worry that I might not find enough wood here in this concrete jungle to work on. But that is something I must find a way to cope with. Perhaps I can still make something with the material that is available and inexpensive.
---
I have also been doing a lot of reading and research on hyperspace; non-Eucliedean geometry and Riemann metric tensors. I have no math in my system, therefore anything to do with complex equations describing phenomena is a source of awe for me. My main reference is the wonderful Michio Kaku of CUNY, an expert on string theory, a popularizer of theoretical physics. Kaku's introduction to the idea of the fourth dimension and the hypercube made me sit up and pay attention. I read his work on the subway to and from LMCC on Governor's Island. Among his claims were that the idea of the fourth dimension was quite revolutionary it provided the spur of a new way of thinking about the world in the 1890's and 1900's because it provided a physical realm for paranormal phenomena to take up residence and even influenced modern art through Cubism and Surrealism.
My immediate reaction to the idea of hyperspace is profound respect for the universe. And my deepest emotion is that of sadness, because back home, our sense of cosmology, dominated as it is by Catholicism, is still the tripartite division of earth, heaven and hell, the last two being located in the realm of myth and dogma. In other words, worlds that can be seen and those that cannot and the eternal primacy given to the unseen as the powers that be over the seen. I now understood the idea behind Philip Pullman's trilogy that starts with the Golden Compass. The fourth dimension, and the other dimensions that follow it in a succession of worlds, can be understood as the key to understanding transcendent phenomena. It is a liberating concept, and I bewail the fact that while it was already understood in the 1900's, Philippine cosmology is still structured in feudal, medieval and possibly prehistoric terms. There is nothing mystical about the geometry of the cosmos- it simply is.
Now I find myself a new challenge. How can I possibly express the idea of hyperspace through my rebultos, now that I have in my ken a paradigm to do away with these worlds-behind-the-scenes? How can I use the modality of the figure to illustrate this insight that I have now? Suddenly, I feel that I have been thrown into a new vista. Suddenly I do not have to resort to religious codes to explain what Taoism had intuited thousands of years ago.
---
In hyperspace all my interests seem to unite: cosmology, the paranormal, multiverses, theoretical physics, phenomenology and the mind. What if consciousness itself is a trans-corporal phenomena? Then it could only mean that consciousness exists in different states of vibrations, and therefore of existence? How do we know that galaxies are NOT conscious, or sentient in their own way? Or is sentience a variation of feedback mechanisms inherent in the laws of physics?
A new vision. Totally rocking my world.
And everything fell into place. The anxiety that has been plaguing me since day 1 here in New York - the uncertainty of what I can and cannot do, the insecurity of my works' irrelevance to contemporary art discourses, my lack of confidence in handling my time and resources during my residency - all of that seemed de trop, unnecessary once my hands felt the solidity of wood and the certainty of the blade cutting off shapes. How can I explain these things? How can I use as justification the comfort I feel when the wood releases its smell at the first cut of the chisel? Because often this is what I truly look forward to: to inhale the wood, the primary material, and the rest just follows. What plagues me now is the worry that I might not find enough wood here in this concrete jungle to work on. But that is something I must find a way to cope with. Perhaps I can still make something with the material that is available and inexpensive.
---
I have also been doing a lot of reading and research on hyperspace; non-Eucliedean geometry and Riemann metric tensors. I have no math in my system, therefore anything to do with complex equations describing phenomena is a source of awe for me. My main reference is the wonderful Michio Kaku of CUNY, an expert on string theory, a popularizer of theoretical physics. Kaku's introduction to the idea of the fourth dimension and the hypercube made me sit up and pay attention. I read his work on the subway to and from LMCC on Governor's Island. Among his claims were that the idea of the fourth dimension was quite revolutionary it provided the spur of a new way of thinking about the world in the 1890's and 1900's because it provided a physical realm for paranormal phenomena to take up residence and even influenced modern art through Cubism and Surrealism.
My immediate reaction to the idea of hyperspace is profound respect for the universe. And my deepest emotion is that of sadness, because back home, our sense of cosmology, dominated as it is by Catholicism, is still the tripartite division of earth, heaven and hell, the last two being located in the realm of myth and dogma. In other words, worlds that can be seen and those that cannot and the eternal primacy given to the unseen as the powers that be over the seen. I now understood the idea behind Philip Pullman's trilogy that starts with the Golden Compass. The fourth dimension, and the other dimensions that follow it in a succession of worlds, can be understood as the key to understanding transcendent phenomena. It is a liberating concept, and I bewail the fact that while it was already understood in the 1900's, Philippine cosmology is still structured in feudal, medieval and possibly prehistoric terms. There is nothing mystical about the geometry of the cosmos- it simply is.
Now I find myself a new challenge. How can I possibly express the idea of hyperspace through my rebultos, now that I have in my ken a paradigm to do away with these worlds-behind-the-scenes? How can I use the modality of the figure to illustrate this insight that I have now? Suddenly, I feel that I have been thrown into a new vista. Suddenly I do not have to resort to religious codes to explain what Taoism had intuited thousands of years ago.
---
In hyperspace all my interests seem to unite: cosmology, the paranormal, multiverses, theoretical physics, phenomenology and the mind. What if consciousness itself is a trans-corporal phenomena? Then it could only mean that consciousness exists in different states of vibrations, and therefore of existence? How do we know that galaxies are NOT conscious, or sentient in their own way? Or is sentience a variation of feedback mechanisms inherent in the laws of physics?
A new vision. Totally rocking my world.
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