KAIDIE DIES: Variation 16 (Happy Aprilsss Foolsss)
Discovered buried alive and burdened to death under layers and layers of her compulsive hoarding of mappings. Every mapping is unique; each mapping is capable of yet more mappings. There's simply no bleeding end to it because everything is connected to everything else. Huffed and puffed, overloaded, hence Kaidie kabooms, has a headache and heartburn and cold sores and piles under all these piles, implodes, as a rather happy April's Fool, smiling.
ANOTHER RUNDOWN (as of 2011 August)
- The big picture (as of 2011 August 9; dynamic and ever-changing, of course!) (Click to zoom in!)
2011 August 9, by Yours Truly, Kai Syng Tan and the still-ongoing-ly-dead Kaidie:
HOW TRANS-DIMENSIONAL RUNNING IS A SMART WAY FOR US TO RUN (NAVIGATE, NEGOTIATE, GOVERN AND PLAY IN) OUR (PHYSICAL, VIRTUAL AND HYBRID DIMENSIONS OF OUR) COSMOS:
How to outwit the 10,000 CCTV cameras in London shadowing your every single move? We run, and register as nothing more than blurs! Choking in a tiny tropical regime run by a powerful Big Brother – or ‘Neo-Confucianist’ Dear Father that insists on treating citizens like children, how do you register your contempt for the status quo? We run, to reclaim and govern our country, and reclaim and govern our own lives again! How to outrun the encroaching Colonisers? Do we easily give up and give in? No! We run, like the Tarahumaras, who ran, and ran –120 miles a pop, barefoot – to resist the Spaniards from running – ruling – them in the 16th century. Sick of traffic jams? Zip past vehicles, reduce your carbon footprints and lose a few pounds – weight-wise and money wise! – by running, the way Alan Turing commuted! Follow his footsteps, and you may even conceptualise the computer – or some other equally amazing invention since that has already been invented – as the Father of Computer Science did!
So, don’t you dare say that running is stupid! For, you would know better if only you’d run! Get your magnificent arses off the chair, as Daniel Shiffman says (which we have rephrased). As the creator of programming software Processing says, ‘I do all my best programming while jogging’. Look – even the most talented computer geeks run to think, too. So, to all our oh-so-precious-highfalutin-armchair critics cloaking their flabby bodies in layers and layers of fat and fabric and fabrication of so-called intellectualism, get a life (or two, or three, or more, as you will learn when you read our explosive thesis). And let it be known that the running process is thinking and ‘inherently philosophical’, as runner-philosopher (YES, WE DO EXIST!! GET OUT OF YOUR LITTLE ROOMS AND BRAINS AND YOU WILL FIND YOURSELF SURROUNDED BY US EVERYWHERE!!) Ross C. Reed says, for, what else is there to do with those hours and hours, when we are running long distances!? When we run, we are not filling in, but replacing the flimsy dandy shoes of the situationists, with our serious, strong running ones – as well as our thinking caps! It is when we run that we alter our consciousness, not from cheap and trashy and oh-so-low-brow and dirty tricks as opium, hashish or alcohol as Walter Benjamin and the two Charles (Baudeliare and Dickens) had had to resort to in order to ‘walk on the wild side’, but from the ‘natural morphins’, or endorphins produced by our brain (PS: Lest you jump into the conclusion that we are some ascetic-anti-hedonist, let us come clean and say that we do so very much enjoy a glass of extra dry crisp white wine or bubbly, or two, or threeeeeeeee, or thirty-threeeeeeeeeeeeee). Not only that – the brains of running nuts in the form of ultra-runners (who run more than 26miles a pop) generate a stimulation of neurotransmitters that is akin to the ‘mystical/mythical state’ otherwise only attained via meditation and certain rituals, as ultra-runner-anthropologist Peter N. Jones proposes. When we run, we are undertaking what nomad-writer Bruce Chatwin calls ‘journeys of the body and mind’. When we run, we hit 1 foot on the ground, and the other in blue skies, in lala land, like Don Quixote on his mad and marvellous trip / trips. When we run, we let our imagination run wild, while fully embodied (far from being seen as limitations/problems/obstacles, we do LOVE our bodies, blemishes and all, so all them so-called enlightened cyborgs and transhumans and posthumans and the church who think our bodies are filthy and sinful and etc, get real). Of course you wouldn’t know that when we run, we are meditating in motion, like the Daoist arts of taiji – minus the exotica. After all, the Chinese character of dao [?] – a path or way – is composed of the human head and the feet. (By the way, that wasn’t too exotic for you, was it?). And the Chinese sure understand the importance of the feet (wasn’t that also why their silly males bound the women’s??), as the source of our well-being (just look at the popularity of foot reflexology to this day)! With our body as the centre and our feet as the groundwork of our being, we are grounded against over-intellectualisation, and subvert the limitations of language with what Daoism scholar Kuang-Ming Wu terms ‘playfulness and indirection’, as Lao Zi and runner-physician-writer George Sheehan teach us. Not only do our bodies form a correlation, a network, a path, a way – a dao – with our minds, it is directly mapped with the environment in which we dwell. With running, especially long-distance running, outdoors, we understand more profoundly the Daoist formula that our body is our cosmos, and our cosmos is us. It is only when we have a healthy body, that our mind, society, state, and world, too, is healthy. Hence, when we run, we can ‘dominate and transform’ our world, and not just the other way around, as Daoism scholar Kristofer Schipper tells us.
- A few ways (daos) of the way (dao)!
And what a world we live in, with so many exciting stages to play in, especially today. Apart from the physical dimensions of the cosmos (which we term ‘Life 1.0’), we can now run our brave new technological worlds, which philosopher Michael Heim has described as nothing short of an ‘ontological shift’. Online (which we call ‘Life 2.0’), we can run wild, run amok, from site to site, window to window. After all, as Sherry Turkle says, reality is ‘just one more window’. Give birth to yourself with (a) Second Life! Or Ninth! Or Ninetieth! Sick of one? Simply type up an other virtual one! After all, like in a video game, we can live, and die, and live, and die, to our hearts’ desire. Run the gamut of personalities that you can never be! That you (believe that you) have yet to become! That you have left behind! Play different roles! Run and leave confusing traces at every stage, so that neither online companies, crooks nor cops could ever shadow and profile you! Run your Internet lives as you would run a show – from a remote, critical distance! Like what Daoist sage Zhuang Zi and his butterfly dream teaches us, be attached to neither the dimension of the virtual nor the real. That way, we will be sucked into neither William Gibson’s ‘consensual hallucination’ of Cyberspace, nor be overly seduced by meatspace, for that matter. This double vision is vital especially today, when the internet spills all over to the physical world (what we call ‘Life 3.0’). With your smartphones and computer tablets, we are emancipated from the desk and room, and are mobile once again. With the whole (virtual) world in your hands, we return to our bodies, and the physical worlds, and run, even further, as digital nomads, reconnecting the digits of our feet with the ones and zeroes in the ‘ether’. Like the playful and anarchic Lao Zi and other Daoist sages, we traverse the hybrid worlds, freely. And why restrict yourselves to only running within each dimension (what we call ‘intra-dimensional running’)? Run across, to- and fro-, in the ‘chaosmos’ (as we appropriate from Daoism scholar Norman Girardot) of our physical, virtual and hybrid realities (which we christen ‘inter-dimensional running’)! Thrive in what Daoism Scholar James Miller calls a ‘creative, dynamic harmony’ and enjoy the best of both, or more worlds. And, if you have really good stamina – and, trust us, you will, with all your training! – we can even run beyond (what we call ‘Life 4.0’) these stages, and go on ecstatic journeys, like the Daoist poet Qu Yuan and the marathon monks of Japan who run 40,000km in 1000 days, to seek enlightenment!
- A diagram illustrating how we run the virtual dimensions of our cosmos (chapter, or Lap IIB, of our amazing thesis).
‘Trans-dimensional running’ (= our amazing ‘intra-dimensional running’ + ‘inter-dimensional running’, ie, running within + running to-and-fro dimensions) is a way for us to ‘run’ – navigate, negotiate, govern and play in – our cosmos, today. With trans-dimensional running, we run a line, a wire, a fibre-optic cable, a meridian, a vein, a path, a way, a pathway, a dao, between mind with body, thinking with writing, theory with practice. In the process, we map diverse disciplines to generate new knowledge and new pathways, linking philosophy with technology, science with art, the popular (what Sheehan terms ‘running mania’) with the so-called esoteric (insofar as ‘the west’ is concerned, that is) (Daoism), old with the new, our past with future, the East with West, analogue with digital. The no-technology locomotion of running, informed by the ancient way-of-life of Daoism, is re-contextualised in our technology-saturated age, allowing us to re-examine our current condition afresh. No, no excuses! YOU can run! We are born to run! Don’t you recall how, soon after you could walk as a toddler, you ran? Happy days! Wasn’t that fun! Weren’t we free! That was why they – our parents, teachers, the adults – shouted: ‘Don’t run! Walk!’ In fact, runner-anthropologist Daniel Lieberman (together with biologist Dennis Bramble) has uncovered evolutionary evidence to say that our bodies are built to run (such as the nuchal ligament on our neck, our large posteriors and tendons, and ability to sweat), and that running has ensured our survival as human beings, in the form of endurance hunting, for 2 million years! As philosopher Blasé Pascal proposes, and what Bruce Chatwin, runner-physician Mike Stroud, and Daoism scholars Livia Kohn and Kristofer Schipper confirm in so many ways, it is when we stopped moving, settled down, began farming, and built rooms (and cities, and states), that explains all human beings’ unhappiness; it is when we stop moving and stop aligning our internal systems with that of nature – be it the revolutions of the Earth or the creative, dynamic harmony of the Dao – that explains not only our physical and psychological ills, but that of our societies and states. For Chatwin, it is this same restlessness of misalignment, that propels such figures as Che Guevera to chase his proverbial antelope – run after his dream – and undertake revolutions. So, don’t worry if at first, you pant. Fulfilling the Daoist dictum of yangsheng (and the videogame dictum of ‘the more you play, the better you become’), the more you run, the further you can run, and the better you run! The more we run, the bigger our minds are (unlike that of Nelson Mandela’s captors’, which he has said were narrow because they were filled to the brim with hatred and bigotry and hence, like their prisoners, were themselves prisoners, of their own minds). Not only that, your heart pumps better, and physically, literally, really really grows bigger too, as runner-physician Mike Stroud tells us! Not only is your body better and stronger, so is your cosmos. With bigger hearts, we must agree with writer Haruki Murakami and Ethiopian long-distance champion Haile Gebrselassie that, if only the whole world was run by runners, it would be a better place!
- Another diagram from Lap IIB: of our body-thinker-artist-runner-Your-Rough-Guide-For-Our-Internet
Sit around and let them walk all over you? No way, for, we are action figures, who act, who are active, who activate. We are neither passive, paralysed or poorly! Walk out of unpleasant circumstances, jump into rabbit holes, allow things to come to a stand still, or take flight and be a coward? That’s all too easy, for, no pain, no gain! In contrast to graffiti, skateboarding, basejumping or parkour, running is not only legitimate but can be embedded in our everyday life. And, unlike the Kraftwerk-ers we need neither machines nor bicycles for our mission – simply put 1 foot ahead of the other, and there we go! Fulfilling the Daoist principle of wuwei, anyone can run, anytime, anywhere. And make sure that your ‘swift transient passages’ are faster than the situationists’ stroll! Build into a sweat, get your muscles warmed up, your heart racing, the ball rolling and your creative juices flowing! Want to create mindblowing, mindbending metaphysical novels? Then you must begin from the physical – with running, as Murakami did everyday he was writing his critically-acclaimed Kafka On The Shore! Hit by writer’s block? Run, as Joyce Carol Oates does. Hit by fallen rocks and imprisoned underground? Do you lie there and ‘wait to die’, or do you, like the angry young Chilean miner Edison Pena, get up and run, in defiance, to make the ‘mountain’ (the fallen 8 feet of soil) ‘bored’? Run, and be free, as Colin Smith, the angry young prisoner of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is. Run, and because running is more vigorous than walking, we lurch about, and when we lurch about we are stirring the stale, airconditioned air of prosperous tropical countries. Run, and hence generate your own maps to replace that saturated by the vulgar spectacle of shopping mall after shopping mall, casino after casino, built on tiny paradise-islands reclaimed again and again, that is otherwise too small to bury us after we die or house us while we are (hardly) alive. Be on the run, to continue our fight from a distance. No, we are not running away, but saying that we refuse to play to their rules. Run, and we not only tear ourselves from what Frederic Nietzsche has described as society’s ‘herd’, but the herders, Big Brothers, our captors, walkers, and other non-runners. Run, and break off from chains everywhere that Jean-Jacques Rousseau says we have been shackled. Run, like Lola of Run Lola Run, and defy and change your fate (or fates). When we run, we run our own fates, bruise our own toes, our feet not bound into ridiculously misshapen Chinese feet that the silly Chinese men have bound us in before. When we run, we are also no longer small, foreign objects fulfilling anybody’s laughably anachronistic orientalist fantasies, but standing – or rather, running – gigantic, proud locals sticking two enormous (sweaty) fingers up at their even more laughably minute organs of their minds (What, do you call that your organ?? Is that all you’ve got?? Try HARDER, won’t you!!). When we run, we outrun danger, the way no walkers can. When we run, we subvert their gaze – they are merely onlookers and bystanders, while we run the place. And no, we are not ‘a great way to fly’, who kneel down to serve you drinks midair, award-winningly, world-famously, in useless dainty faux-exotic costumes and slippers, that you can hardly walk in, let alone run. For fuxakes, we run, physically, metaphorically, metaphysically. We are runners.
Well, catch us, if you can, we tease.
No, they can’t!
So, come, run with us – Kaidie, Kai Syng Tan, writer, runner, performer, and your Guide, online and off, here, there, everywhere. We are not just any ordinary guide, mind you, but a Rough Guide. You see, this is but a guideline. You, as our Co-Runner and Co-producer, are free to make your own correlations. Run and generate your own paths, your own dao! Mobilise your feet, and generate our own GPS drawings and maps! Afterall, a discourse refers to refers to ‘a running from one place to another’ in the latin. Generate your own discourse, draw your own conclusions, and run your own lives! It’s urgent! We urge you! To Run! Now! Run for your lives! Run, and we are fit for life! Not just for this, but other lives! Trans-dimensional running is a visceral counterstrike and celebration of our Internet-expanded lives. Never pedestrian or prosaic, preachy or pedantic, our way of trans-dimensional running is a playful, philosophical, poetic, political, personal, phantastical, pragmatic ‘profitable exercise’ (Michel de Montaigne), for us to run – navigate, negotiate, govern and play in – our mad and marvellous cosmos today, as well as subsequent stages of lives to come. (Yes our fabulous thesis does sound a bit ppppppompous, but it’s certainly far from precious!) Are we ready for the best run of our lifetime(s)? Remember that it’s a long run, and it’s for the long run! It might get tough going, but you’ll be delighted to see the finishing line – which you will have to draw, and run to, yourself, of course!
Enough said. Let us now walk the talk, or rather, run the run!
- The itinerary of our dis-course to come (as of 2011August; dynamic and ever-changing, both the plan and the thesis, grand as they are, as you must know!) (Zoom in for grand details!)
As of 2011 August 9; this blurb is, obviously, dynamic and non-conclusive. (A question, for instance: Is the rioting in Nondon (and elsewhere) a symptom of Internet geek-entrepreneur Seth Priebatsch’s notion of the ‘gamification’ of our everyday life one step too far? Haven’t we been there with the situationists and Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange, but on a more pervasive, viral [in many senses of the word] manner as facilitated by social media? Can running be the legitimate – and civilised, and more playful, more interesting, more intelligent, more eloquent – alternative form of expression in this case?) Happy national day, by the way.
NONDON ON THE RUN: SUMMER 2010 #3: HYDRATED LINES OF DESIRE.
Water running in the city form their own lines of life, of thriving economic and cultural pasts and presence. When we follow the water when we run, we superimpose yet other lines in the city. Prior to our roaring (sic) success (sic) at the Farnham Pilgrim’s Marathon in Surrey on Sunday, and prior to acquiring our ugly injuries in the final month of training, we were training hard. The map above documents our runs along the Regents Park canal (15km Kings Kross-Victoria Park and back; 20km Kings Kross to Harrow Road and back) and River Thames (30km on a Sunday morning). For the trans-dimensional runner, running is extended beyond Life 1.0, to other layers of lives, including the realms of imagination, as well as the Web 2.0 worlds. Here are a couple of maps showing our trans-dimensional desire lines. These desire lines are ours – unique and subjective. Changeable as they are, they register our marks, our presence, our existence and our being in our technologically-layered multiverse.
HITS & MISSES, FITS & KISSES: Let’s agree not to run into each other, but won’t you let us take us for a ride? GAME FOR A COLLABORATION WITH US ON OUR EPIC QUIXOTIC QUEST?
The trans-dimensional runner of this quixotic life has at any one time one foot on the ground, pragmatic/rational/grounded in sturdily hardcore realism, and the other airborne, in cuckoo land and blue skies, with extra-terrestrial visionary eyes on each (swollen) toe, taken with skyscraper-tall mountains of heartattacky salt.
In this Web 2.0 Do-It-With-Others storytelling exercise, we have been privileged to have undertaken several collaborations with you, in our quest for the Meaning of Life 3.0. Here is an other idea for a collaboration (first conceived in early 2010):
As it is, we have not met 99.782 per cent of you, given that our interaction has been only in Life 2.0, ie, via the channels of this running blog, Facebook, Youtube, GPSies, Twitter and so on – and our imagination, of course. Also, given that we are partly an imaginary creation, meeting in real life is possibly an unimaginable task. (That said, we do not think that encounter in one dimension is of lesser or more significance than an other) In this idea of a project, to make the point that we want to maintain or create a critical distance between us, let us go out of our way to deliberately not meet in Life 1.0. The way to go about doing this is that one person shares her routine over a prescribed period of time. The other person – let us call them the/an ‘anti-stalker’ – will journey on the same route, but intentionally missing the previous person, by a few minutes/moments/metres/centimetres.
The thrill/beauty/cruelty/point of the game is to come so very close to have nearly met – but to just stop short of actually encountering the other. Afterwards, the pair could compare their GPS tracks and find out and plot, point by point, by exactly how much they have missed each other. (And of course, this sharing can be done remotely). As a consequence, one or both parties can derive (perverse / poetic) pleasure from the fact that they could theoretically have been in the same time and space, and could have had an encounter, but willfully and precisely do not. The deliberate orchestration of a denial of a run-in is the point of this project. Hence, we will never come face to face and whisper ‘Hi!’, ‘Nice to meet you!’, ‘Nice to meet you again!’, ‘And who are you?’; one may come close enough to catch a whiff of the other, or sneak a peek of the other’s shadow, or catch a dying footprint, but / and that is about it.
The game can be more fun if more participate. An orgy, not of presence, but absence, with participants who are missing – although we will hardly miss one another.
The great thing about this project is that it is of course hardly original, as many of us are already accomplished practitioners in some degree or an other, but, my Dear Conspirators of Pleasure, do you not think that it will be infinitely (more) enjoyable should we make this a studied and planned collaboration/game, with set parameters to play?
So, are you game? (Ah, the wonders of technology, to allow us to indulge, stretch and realise such fantasies…)
** Currently #5 in the War of Films contest: CLAUDIA TOMAZ’S film about KAIDIE AND HER MEANING OF LIFE 3.0. VOTE NOW!** Vote by clicking on + sign at the top of video player. ** Don’t forget to vote for Episode 2, Run Kaidie Run, too!**
WITH 755 DAYS LEFT ON OUR LIFE (or DEATH) SENTENCE (until the last day of the Nondon Olympics on 09.09.2012), HERE IS AN OTHER MINDMAP OF/FROM KAIDIE’S SEMBLANCE OF LIFE (3.0).
I trust not premonitions and I fear not omens. I flee / not from slander nor poison. / There is no death. / We are all immortal. All is immortal. Fear not / death at seventeen nor at seventy. / There is only reality and light. / There is neither dark nor death / in this, our world. / We have reached the beach and I / am one of those who pull the nets in when / immortality arrives in batches. Live / in a house and it will not crumble. I will summon / a century at will, enter / and build my house in it. That is why / your children and your wives all share my board, the table / serving forefather and grandson: the future is decided now.
As read by Arseni Tarkovsky in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, 1975
** Currently #5 in the War of Films contest: CLAUDIA TOMAZ’S film about KAIDIE AND HER MEANING OF LIFE 3.0. VOTE NOW!** Vote by clicking on + sign at the top of video player. ** Don’t forget to vote for Episode 2, Run Kaidie Run, too!**
KAIDIE PAYS HOMAGE TO SOME OF HER VIRTUAL RUNNING BUDDIES AT HER LIFE 1.0 SHOW! #8 YOU CAN BE KAIDIE’S COLLABORATOR TOO!
These are but a handful of Kaidie’s running buddies – real, virtual, imagined – so far, whom Kaidie has met in her Life 3.0 in the past 7 months. There are many, many more! YOU can play a role in Kaidie’s life/ lives! Kaidie’s is a collaborative, open(-ended?) quest for The Meaning of Life 3.0! RUN with her for the rest of the 790 days! Here are just a handful of outcomes Kaidie has created with YOU, My Dear Reader/Contributer/Collaborator/Conspirator of Pleasure, so far, including by some of these amazing Nondoners photographed here!. Contribute, by writing in, sending her feedback here, giving her suggestions, sending her images and sounds and ideas for her to jam with, with you! Add ‘Kaidie Nondon’ as your best Facebook Friend Forever! Friend ‘Kaidie3rdlife’ on Youtube! Follow Kaidie ‘live’ on Twitter! Track her Life 1.0 tracks on GPSies! Friend ‘Kaidie Absent’ in Second Life! Help us make this the best run of our lives!
NAVIGATING THIS BLOG LOG JOG
GETTING THE HANG OF GETTING LOST – HOW (NOT) TO NAVIGATE THIS BLOG
Many of you have complained endlessly about how impossible it is to navigate this blog. Well, allow me, the Grand Architect/Maestro/Mistress/Creator/Maker/Mastermind/Mistressmind of this blog, to enlighten you. You may be surprised, but it is not haphazard at all, and is actually awfully methodical. Many of you often judge that Kaidie and her lives are unstructured, but let me – get this from the horse’s mouth- tell you that every single move is actually calculated and carefully mapped out, and there is a grand structure in all of this. For real. Really. (Neigh. Grunt. Snort.) Or a few grand and grandious structures. That overlap and interact and interplay with one other and an other. So here is my be-all-end-all rough guide to the Rough Guide To The Meaning Of A Life 3.0, for all the lost souls out there and in here:
GETTING THERE 1:
There is a little arrow on the bottom left and right of each post. They bring you to the previous post or the next post, respectvely.
GETTING THERE 2:
Alternatively, use the site map, which gives you an overview.
GETTING THERE 3:
Scroll right down, there are 3 columns. For a chronological sequence, go to ‘KAIDIE’S PASTS, NOW’ in the middle column, and click on the archive, and just read how each day has developed since 12.12.2009.
GETTING THERE 4:
If you, like me, think in terms of ideas, you would enjoy surfing the blog using the tags/keywords (under ‘THEMES/VARIATIONS’) on the right column.
GETTING THERE 5:
Instead of tags, you can also go by categories (called ‘TOURS/DETOURS’), in the middle column.
GETTING THERE 6:
On the top, right under the title of the blog, says ‘(dis-)orientations’. You will find pages here. These pages are general notes about the blog which you can refer to for the 1000 days. This is a page. Hence you will not find the little arrows that I mentioned, which are found only in the posts. Kaidie publishes 1-7 posts per week.
GETTING THERE 7:
Well there is no ‘right’ way! Just get lost! And I am not being rude! Try it! (Or I guess most of you are already, without trying.)
FOLLOW KAIDIE ON THE BLACK PATH AND DISCOVER KAIDIE’S MULTILAYERED MIXED-REALITY: Navigating Kaidie’s Metamap Show #7
Installed at the PhD show (25-30 June, Nondon), our metamap consists of 120 images and maps that we have created so far. It attempts to draw relationships between the various maps. It is also a map/documentation of our trials and erros thus far to articulate our cosmology/cosmologies. The 14-metre map also itself becomes a landscape, with small cutouts of Kaidie (or Kaidie’s avatar) running all over the wall and floor. Hence, apart from tthe graphical representations of Kaidie on many of the A3 sheets of images, the paper cutouts of Kaidie-s ’emerge’, or rather, burst out into meatspace; and, apart from the 2D plane of the wall, Kaidie runs into the 3D real world of the Slade Research Centre (if the art world could be called ‘real’, that is), along the stairwell, lift, loo and even out into the streets. Here is one (more) map that maps Kaidie’s journeys. Follow the black lines and see where she leads you!
A LIFE 2.0 RE-PRESENTATION OF A LIFE 1.0 SHOW THAT IS ENDING IN A FEW HOURS: Kaidie’s metamap exhibition #6.
Where do statues go after they die? Statues die when people stop looking at them (Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, 1953). Kaidie’s metamap is of a less resilient material than bronze, and, like Kaidie, has a prescribed lifespan. It begins dying this evening 17:00hrs, and from 11:00hrs tomorrow (after our morning run), we will remove the papers, tapes, blu tacks, glue dots, marker pen marks, other marks, tracks, traces, bits, pieces, things, remnants, et ceteras. We will paint over the walls and floors where we had been, and leave the space as we found it, as if we had never been there, clearing all paths, as if it had never known existence in the first place (good for it) (for its own good).
That things die, that they die from one dimension, that they do not last, that they are one-offs, that they are transient and are not foolishly forever, that they can live on – if we so allow them to – in the realm of imagination, perhaps ever/even more animatedly, ferociously and zestfully, is a concept that we quite adore. (We – you, my Dear Readers, and us- have been there before, when we paid a pilgrimage to Heidiland in a bid to visit the legendary Heidi, who was all but absent, and how we were relieved that she could not be found in Life 1.0, for it only strengthens her presence in our Life 2.0). We relish in the cruelty of this, as we adore how it allows us to train and celebrate the/our power of imagination. (‘I’m wondering what this all means to you’, he asks. I am silent. ‘You are immaterial; you do not exist. In fact, you are already dead,’ I want to say, which to my mind is not negative, in our same Heidi-logic, but which would inevitably be taken to be otherwise. So I keep silent.)
The work dies from Life 1.0, our primary world, but/and migrates to / returns to / re-starts in Life 2.0, in the virtual and imaginary realm, and exists as if it has done all this while, independent of the one in the physical world. One is not lesser than the other. To be pedantic, the Life 1.0 metamap in the exhibition ‘came from’ Life 2.0 in the ‘first place’, with the 120 maps and images created on the screen, and having previously only existed in Cyberspace. Already, even as it is alive, we are re-creating Life 2.0 re-presentations of it, in a parallel realm. The work is the same work in either lives, but the Life 1.0 ‘version’ also completely differs and is independent of the Life 2.0 one. In fact, there is no ‘essential’ work. When we run restlessly between Life 1.0 and Life 2.0, we are re-creating the/a work again.
2nd row top left: photograph of Kaidie at work by fellow artist-exhibitor, Laura Malacart. Beside that is a sketch by Kaidie of the work, before she began. Middle: Kaidie, quite knackered by now, poses with fellow artists and exhibitors Deborah Padfield and Errol Francis at the end of the humid evening of the opening 25 June. in the next picture, Errol competes with Kaidie for Person With Most Number Of Countable and Accountable Teeth Award 2010. We are fighting neck to neck, shoulder to shoulder, and- of course we are expecting this- teeth to teeth, a tooth for a tooth, gum for gum. Who do you think should win? Bottom right: Pink poster Spillage indicates the title of the show. Bottom left: Kaidie’s hand-made wall text for her new hand-made wall-text-installation, 24 June 2010, 1 day before show opened. The masking tape on the wall were to be all licked up, of course. Kaidie’s Life 3.0 ecosystem tolerates no wastage (most of the time). Check out the ‘paper tippex’ on the right hand side of the wall text as well (since there is no undo button in Life 1.0).
LAST 2 DAYS TO CATCH KAIDIE’S FIRST LIFE 1.0 INSTALLATION! Slade Centre of Research, WC1H 0AB. Kaidie’s metamap exhibition #5.
Across a 14m-wide wall, Kaidie works on site across 9 days to create a metamap consisting of 120 maps and images, that attempts to map her transdimensional run. This show departs from Kaidie’s recent works in that it utilises no multimedia, and that Kaidie installed this by herselves, got down on all fours and was all hands-on and filthy, screaming at no assistants except herselves. Slade Centre 25-30 June 2010, Nondon.
The baby in the triptych in the middle fingers the trails and links of Kaidie’s wall map – good. Then she goes on to spill red wine and pringles on my floor – no good, but she’s a baby, and we are so magnanimous as to hold no grudges against babies. And then she cries loudly, as if she was the victim! – oh, NO GOOD, but still understandable in the scheme of things (yes we are rational beings). But that is not the punchline – the adults responsible for the tot did no thing to help clean up, and escaped! – NOOO GOOD. My Dear Readers, we are sure that you have encountered ultra-righteous people with a strong sense of entitlement, who act as if they are the only on earth to have ever reproduced (THE REST OF US – if you did not already know – ARE ORPHANS MADE FROM PLAYDOH). So we – speaking as self-righteous runners and figures of imagination – had to stoop on the floor and lick up the pringles+wine+the baby’s tears+dust+hairs (thick, thin, curly, straight, blond, red, brown, black, etc), being ever so keen to store up food and drinks in our system at every opportunity in the middle of the ‘we-are-all-in-this-together’ recession.
Image of Kaidie overstretching herself by Alexandra Gomes during private view 25 June 2010 Friday. (Yes – pink, and its shades, was the order of the evening. Why? Because we have for the past few lifetimes tired of the obligatory black attires at art openings.) THANK YOU ALL for coming to the exhibition thus far, and its opening. More images of opening and exhibition to come – look out if Kaidie has caught you on camera! Did you say and smell of cheese? So, watch this space. Do not move, for soon all this will disappear from Life 1.0. (We will film ourselves de-installing the work, which had taken 9 full days to install, on Thursday in time lapse, and play it backwards, and upload it on Youtube later. Rather terribly exciting isn’t it).
25-30 JUNE: Display of WHY RUN? (WHY NOT?) and other mind+mentalmaps. Slade Centre of Research, Nondon #4
NOTHING COMES FROM NOTHING, AND RUNNING HAS SEVERAL HISTORICAL THREADS.
RUNNING CONTEXTUALISED IN THE TRADITION OF TRAVELLING AND TRAVEL LITERATURE.
WITH THE INTERNET, KAIDIE HAS MORE RABBIT HOLES TO RUN IN(TO).
RUNNING AS A SIMPLE, VISCERAL COUNTERPOINT / CRITICAL STRATEGY FOR OUR TECHNOLOGICALLY-MEDIATED REALITY. (PLUS: HULA-HOOPING IN I AM FIT FOR LIFE 2000)
THE 'WHY RUN' MAP IN ITS FULL GLORY. SEE IT (RE-) CONTEXTUALISED IN THE INSTALLATION!
25-30 JUNE: KAIDIE SHARES A 14-METRE METAMAP OF 120 MAPS OF HER TRANSDIMENSIONAL RUN. Slade Centre of Research, Nondon #2
How would a map like this (created before Kaidie's birth in October 2009), be contextualised in Kaidie's wall-installation (June 2010)?
Private view: 25 June evening. Exhibition: 25-30 June. Location: Slade Research Centre Nondon WC1H UK. Opening hours: 9am – 5pm daily except Sunday. Kaidie exhibits her Multiple Mad Meandering Maps + Mandalas of her restless running across Life 1.0 (primary world), Life 2.0 (realm of imagination, Web 2.0 realities) and Life 3.0 (Web 3.0 AR+MR, hybrid reality). As we speak, Kaidie is creating a 14metre-wall-installation, a metamap of her maps of her intradimensional run. In this exhibition, there are 14 PhD and researchers on show with a wide-range of works including performance, sculpture, video installation and sound.
25-30 JUNE: KAIDIE SHARES HER MEANDERINGMADMAPS + MANDALAS. Slade Centre of Research, Nondon #1
What: In this exhibition, there are 13 PhD and researchers on show with a wide-range of works including performance, sculpture, video installation and sound. Private view: 25 June evening. Exhibition: 25-30 June. Location: Slade Research Centre Nondon WC1H UK. Opening hours: 9am – 5pm daily except Sunday.
Kaidie exhibits her Multiple Mad Meandering Maps + Mandalas of her restless running across Life 1.0 (primary world), Life 2.0 (realm of imagination, Web 2.0 realities) and Life 3.0 (Web 3.0 AR+MR, hybrid reality). As we speak, Kaidie is creating a 14metre-wall-installation, a metamap of her maps of her intradimensional run. And there is NO multimedia in this new work, only goodoldfashion 2D ‘stuffs’. Can you believe that? Me neither. Well, come see for yourself. (We would have used the adjective ‘Magnificent’, in conjunction with the brilliant Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library, but that would not have been very Modest of Me, would it?)
See you around. Literally. Being all-rounded we can bounce ideas off each other. Jolly well.
May 2010: ever-expandable layers of reality -cum-running tracks
March 2010: an appropriation of the yin-yang symbol - or/and an appropriation of the pepsi logo.
December 2009: picture-perfect simple/simplistic venn diagramme of the in-between.
RUNDOWN (as of June 2010)
Hello world. We are Kaidie, a trans-dimensional runner. We look for The/A Meaning of Life 3.0, by running for 1000 days across Life 1.0 (the primary world — including the city that we live in, Nondon, UK), Life 2.0 (the realm of imagination, as well as realities made possible by Web 2.0), Life 3.0 (the hybrid, mixed and augmented realities made possible by Web 3.0) as well as Life 4.0 (‘Web 4.0? and other future technologically-enabled realities, as well as other cycles of our lives to come, in the form of transmigration). Would you give us a hand on our quixotic quest? Whether we succeed or not, we must die on the last day of the Nondon Olympics, so hurry! Be our running buddy, write in, share with us ideas/images/sounds/thoughts. Let us take us for a heavenly hell of a rollercoaster ride of our lifetime(s) – come with us, go for it, live this Life as if the last, it is now or never, let go, trust us, believe us, we dare you. Let us have the best run of our Lives, every Life.
- One cosmology of this multiverse. Kaidie’s mandala/map/running tracks as of June 2010.
The work of artist/art curator/art educator Kai Syng Tan has been shown in more than 45 cities (Guangzhou Triennale, Biennale of Sydney, ICA London, Yamagata Internetional Documentary Film Festival). Kai Syng has won several awards (SFIFF merit award, Young Artist Award, Most Promising Young Artist Award aged 18), residencies (NIFCA, Japan Foundation) and grants. She is an advisor in a panel at the Media Development Authority of Singapore. For 7 years she was also a digital arts consultant and film lecturer, and ran a Video Art degree programme in an art university. Trained in Tokyo (MA in Fine Art, Excellence Award, Distinctions, top student, Musashino Art University), Chicago (School of Art Institute) and London (BA in Fine Art, 1st class Honours, top student, Slade School of Fine Art) on full scholarships, Kai Syng is currently a PhD researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art on scholarships from University College London and the National Arts Council of Singapore.
Kai Syng’s interdisciplinary work (performance, cine-essay, installation, text et al) examines the notion of ‘reality.’ In one of her previous lives, she had done this by viewing the world through a self-reflexive video camera of a restless tourist/traveller and had been named ‘one of Singapore’s foremost video artists’ (Dr Eugene TAN, 2007, in Contemporary Art In Singapore. Eds NADARARAJAN G, STORER, R. & TAN, E. Institute of Contemporary Arts. Singapore. 142.) Her current research, A Rough Guide To The Meaning of A Life 3.0: Kaidie’s Transdimensional 1000-day Run 12.12.2009 – 09.09.2012, is conducted as part of her PhD research at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK. Kai Syng’s written thesis, entitled (Trans-dimensional) Running for Our Lives! A Rough Guide, proposes the critical strategy of trans-dimensional running as a means of navigation and negotiation of our 21st century multiverse. Kai Syng’s studies are funded on scholarships from the University College London and the National Arts Council of Singapore.
