as a celebration of solstice, Heliosfera exhibition just got extended until 27 june. be sure to catch this last week @ laboratório galeria in center lisbon! a finissage will happen on the 27th june, if you're around, drop by for a live set of solar exploration, circa 23pm. also, Thomas Behrens lovely text for the exhibition is uploaded fully into this post.
HELIOSFERA André Sier
texto: Thomas Behrens
morada: Laboratório Galeria, R. da Graça 168, Lisboa
horário: quarta, sexta e sábado 19h-02h e segunda, terça e quinta 22-02h
(outros horários disponíveis por marcação através do 918117777 ou u@urinol.pt)
produção: s373.net/x, Laboratório Galeria
www: http://piantadelmondo.info/heliosfera
Heliosfera http://piantadelmondo.info/heliosfera/
works
Heliades http://piantadelmondo.info/heliosfera/heliades.html
Sol http://piantadelmondo.info/heliosfera/sol.html
Heliosfera http://piantadelmondo.info/heliosfera/heliosfera.html
Iquohizi http://piantadelmondo.info/heliosfera/iquohizi.html
Iquohizi (real-virtual) http://piantadelmondo.info/heliosfera/iquohizi-realvirtual.html
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Hubris and Debris
Six cities are under attack.The super-ego empire takes the bird's eye view and strikes out.You are the defense mechanism: You are controlling the Atari Missile commander. You are more than human and less than human at the same time.You are everything but human.
McLuhan said that media is the extension of man.You know he was wrong: Man is the extension of media.You are the Arcade game project.You are starting over with every new coin inserted.You are repeating the pattern, over and over, relentlessly, compulsively. You are trying hard not to repeat the same mistakes.
The six cities, made out of hubris, have to be defended. At all cost. The medium imposes a certain ‘pace’,‘scale’ and ‘pattern’ on you – full spectrum dominance – a medium is not a bodiless milieu but a substance for the transmission of force, power and energy. For McLuhan, the media environment is a ‘vortex’ or ‘maelstrom’ of material and immaterial forces, corporeal and incorporeal effects: a ‘whirlwind of violence. In light of the revolution in implants and micro machines under way today, not to mention the trillions of telematic devices sustaining our wired world, we may well indeed wonder if man is becoming the ‘sex organs of the machine world’. In the end, McLuhan came to realize that the advent of electric media spells the end of the human body itself.‘At the speed of light,’ McLuhan observes,‘everybody tends to become a nobody’
André Sier launches the artwork beyond aesthetics and into ballistics, the question that poses itself is: What is there to be defended? Why all the fuss (fuzz) with compulsive repressing, denial, splitting, control, blaming ...? André Sier does not recommend training in philosophy, rhetoric, media studies and literature as ‘civil defense’ against the mass media and its ‘fall-out’ on the social body.That is soooooo humanism.
He recommends building new cities. He builds new cities, from debris. The six cities are the six senses. Look at them.Touch them.They are real.Are you?
You can also go on your own clandestine operation "Hotel California", if you like: André Sier provides a new instrument for entering un-charted territory, now that planet earth has been over- exposed on all levels and the stars are out of reach.With this instrument (Heliosphere, play it like a Harp) representations are decomposable into constituent parts, and these decomposed representations are built into new strings - Harpers, beware of the posture of the arms, the shape of the hand and always allow the left arm to move more freely:These Harp strings may be made of gut !
André Sier endeavors to create the possibility of giving the suffcient conditions for which a piece of the world is relative to (expresses, represents, is true of) another piece in non-intentional and non-semantic terms, call it naturalization of the mental, if you like.
Just remember, you are programmed to receive, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. By a simple swipe of the hand, you jump from one mental faculty to another specifc physical area of your mind. If you happen to fnd a strange object there in the mountainous desert, never mind, it's just an indicator of your level of intelligence: It can literally be "read off" from the size of a particular bump on your posterior parietal lobe.
Heliosphere operates by the neuronal mapping of experience, and linking them with other loops of mappings. Every memory trace is a complex of recorded mapping loops. As the complexity of connecting loops of maps with loops of maps increases, the brain creates symbolic form.The tree, the elephant, the sun ... Do you know what you're talking about? THE SUN!
The purpose of symbolic form is to reduce incredibly large units of information into bite sized pieces. Higher and higher levels of symbolic form create representational images in consciousness. Once a high level of symbolic form is established in the cortex, the brain operates by top down functioning. That is to say it replicates and repeats its representational illusion. It repeats what it has already learned. It imposes (projects) its images (symbolic images, that is) on reality (the real, that is) over and over. It is a fractal.
However, there's still the beast you just can't kill: spirit.And if you thought that you hadn't had that spirit here since Hegel was tarrying with the negative, think twice: The SUN, dude, the SUN. No matter what you say or think or do, buddy: You're synced!
Thomas Behrens
Psychogeographer