CuratorPitch

CuratorPitch

New Frontiers, the Oceans within Us by howLAB

About howLAB

how Life Art to Be (howLAB) is a cross-disciplinary open source collective. It is equipped to create internal work and also to consult for external projects. howLAB invites collaboration with willful persons of all specialties to compose upon the boundaries of experimental work. Contact howLAB: thehowlab@gmail.com William Dickie: 1.508.439.3363 Walter Woodington: TBA The howLAB Collective has organized its first show titled New Frontiers: the Oceans within Us, based upon the idea of cyclic connectedness. A cyclic connection can be visualized as two sentient mirrors facing each other. Either mirror will reflect an interpretation of an image the other mirror creates. When man perceives a new frontier in the environment or in another man, the frontier is truly created in himself. This exhibition focuses on the ocean reflected in humanity and vice versa. Through sculpture, installation, painting, photography, sound, video, and interactive exhibits, New Frontiers combines contemporary art with traditional art, the serious with the silly, the mundane with the absurd, and the actions of yesterday with those of tomorrow, without condemning or promoting. New Frontiers: the Oceans within Us includes a broad range of works, such as levitating fast food, Beef Ceiling, howLABs first use of decaying material; a new navigational tool for the Boston public transit system, Sub-City Swells, based on ancient Pacific Islander mapping technology; a live lyrical improvisation project, Contemporary Whale Music, giving oceanic music a popular sound; and bread as sculpture in Klein Bread.

The Exhibition

Presentation

New Frontiers is a representation from companies that use the world's Oceans to do business. We ask the audience to "re-think" their disgust with pollution and see how it is a natural part of our world, one Holy enough to eat from and to live upon. It is out of the realm of many peoples day to day lives. New Frontiers wishes to bring the Ocean to the forefront and to illustrate what the frontier of our civilization will look like. This should create an atmosphere of shock and disgust at first. But the aim is the rigorous acceptance of current Earth-science-realities. Certain tools and opportunities will be provided to those particularly moved to change their earth-related attitudes.

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=13Ny71RT47aTTI2A1JCX9BqI6E2lhf08rBvTV6WoOLrk[9/27/11 4:22:30 PM]

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Organizers Statement

The Ocean is something we sometimes use, forget or fear. It connects the majority of the world population, acts as a food source, as a method of transportation, generates power, used for leisure, for bloodshed, and for many civilizations, used as a sewer for all types of waste. The industrial revolution has left ice continents melting and filling the Ocean up. Pressure has built up in the system. Soon the Ocean will have nowhere to go but up the shore. Americans and perhaps other peoples have knowingly and at times hideously neglected their environments, bodies, and culture. Dumping toxic solvents into ground water, eating food loaded with carcinogens and preservatives, and smoke-screening their communications with yelling-across-a-rivermaterialism. Constant social and technological progress has required older lands and resources to be located and stripped, from the European discovery of the Americas to the outsourcing of jobs to third world countries. To which New Frontier will progress take humanity next? Ocean is inhabited by microbes, plants, fish, and life of all sorts. The waters tides and winds and veins shape the lands we take residence on. Just as the organisms and sands and water creates an ecosystem, the molecules, muscles, and organs of the body create their own ocean. The mind itself is an ocean, composed of physical, conscious, and subconscious parts. Civilizations are oceans, composed of sub-cultures, languages, customs, and traditions. Some of these dark, ignored places will strike back at us. howLAB aims to explore the oceans of which we are a part as well as the Oceans within Us. We wish to reorient the cultural beliefs about the ocean. Before we can begin resetting our interface with the Ocean, we must sense our role in it. This exhibit shall serve as a preliminary vision of a habitable New Frontier and as a virtual experience of living consciously with the ebb and flow of the Ocean.

Philosophy

New Frontiers promotes the concept that everything flows, in the universe, and on earth in all of its ecosystems. All thingsincluding those we think are quite stableare continually changing, developing and transforming over time. Shamanistic practice is at One with that concept. Shamanistic practices include Taoism, Toltec, Shinto and other traditions, ancient and contemporary of myth and belief. These practices rely on a mutual relationship with the environment. These thinkers try to understand how the world works rather than devising ways to work the world. The underlying idea of everything flows is that the Universe has a force, expressed through all things, called the Tao, Prana or Kia or Nature, etc of the Universe. To become one with this Force, beliefs in morality and immorality, good and evil, must be revised. To pursue virtue is to ignore the desire for vice, which eventually leads to vice. In order to live honestly one must harness the dualities inherent in everything. Lament not that men suffer war, fear, pain, and death, for these are but the inevitable accompaniment to love, desire, pleasure and sex. Only laughter can be gotten away with for free (Liber Null). We choose to laugh at the vice and the virtue and discover the means to live upon the New Frontiers as channels for that force. Of course, the monotheistic pursuit of virtue has been quite taken over by a movement of atheistic or deist, scientific materialism. But the collective consciousness of the human species is not excluded in the cycling changes. In Liber Null, it is professed that human consciousness has evolved though a few major Aeons. Some cultures and subcultures have remained in one Aeon while others have moved on. The Aeons of consciousness are Shamanism, Paganism, Polytheism, Monotheism, and Atheism/Nihilism. In the Shamanistic Aeon, puny naked men had to be attuned to the environment, to read the Kia, to capitalize and survive. Meaning was not in self-awareness or self-satisfaction but in unity with Kia. In the Paegan Aeon, when men had begun to build civilizations, gods, spirits and superstition filled the loss of connection to the environment (conceits to follow as rules of that past connection). Meaning began to shift to self-awareness, but was still focused on a balance with the gods. In the Monotheistic Aeon, men had been living indirectly with Kia for so long that self-awareness became the main focus of meaning. How could one find union with God and Jesus? As men were created in Gods image, mans meaning came from a singular, idealised form of themselves. Meaning was accessed through cultural conceits of virtue + piety, which were also indirect (but of course, obligatory!) communion with one half of Kia. The Aetheistic Aeon arose within some Western monotheistic cultures and contained the idea that the universe can be understood and manipulated by careful observation of the behavior of material things. Men look toward their own emotional experiences and their ritual observations as the only ground for meaning. The collapse of monotheistic, human-centric kingdoms and religious traditions coincided with the medieval Dark Ages. As the Age of Reason blossomed in the 1600s, and scientific divinity began to infiltrate mainstream thought, the Atheistic Aeon was born. Perhaps we can consider our consumer secularism and Atomic Age thinking to be the decline atheistic consciousness. As disillusionment with a godless, meaningless world begins to wear on us, the successor Aeon arises in our minds. New Frontiers delivers a view of this new Aeon,
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and a view of its environmental context.

Bibliography: The Te of Piglet (Taoism), Liber Null (Chaos Magic), The Wind is My Mother (Cherokee), The Four Agreements (Toltec), List of Works
Interactive Butt Songs Body Microphones that you can distort with pedals/ knobs Poop Spoons Ocean of Sound - Crowd source lyrics prompter Audio Contemporary Whale Music Performance Ocean of Sound (Summer of Aden with crowed sourced lyrics) Photography Stuffed animals in tree Beasleys oilrig photos Collage Sailing with JFK gone wrong? Painting Butt harbor Anus-eats-face Sculpture Beef Ceiling (meat ceiling) When will we reach it? Circulation (fans and blue newspaper) Sub-City Swells - Stick chart (or trash) of public transit in Boston Some slides under a microscope Plastic bottle chandelier with red light bulb Info Grafix Japan reactor Deer Island Poop tunnel flow model (from NOAA) Big trash island Marshall Islands Stick Chart (at MFA) Deep Horizon oil spill Videos Japanese Poop Meat Red Dwarf: Urine-Recyc Deer Island Poop Tunnel Flow Model (from NOAA) Miscellaneous Shells, Sea Glass, etc (from beach) Quotes from famous people Miller-Urey Experiment (primordial soup) Team of Rivals in your minds ocean Diabetes Taoist relationship Direct Building Recycling Using the trash island as a foundation

Opening Celebration

Tuesday, September, 7:00 - 11pm

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=13Ny71RT47aTTI2A1JCX9BqI6E2lhf08rBvTV6WoOLrk[9/27/11 4:22:30 PM]

CuratorPitch

The opening reception and celebration will take place at Ground Zero Basement beginning at 7:00 on Tuesday Interactive exhibits. Refreshments. Live music, Summer of Aden. Highlight talks. Free of charge.
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https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=13Ny71RT47aTTI2A1JCX9BqI6E2lhf08rBvTV6WoOLrk[9/27/11 4:22:30 PM]