If Kaidie comes back from her death and performs in front of SOCIOLOGISTS, who will be more scared?? Who will run off first?
Kaidie rises from down below in hell to run way up north...
- This page has been plagiarised from the Lancaster University’s Centre for Mobilities Research’s (CeMoRe) site which you should visit, especially if you can’t come and join us in the scary affair.
KAIDIE TRANS-MIGRATING? 2
Has the dead risen to do a zombie walk, or rather, zombie run? And - god forbid - picked up steam/speed and is re-incarnating into a speedy runner caught midmotion here?
** The Creative Process of Running: A 22-minute Discourse (2012 January 25) ** (Happy deathday, 1 year on)
This is a 22-minute discourse on how the process of running – physically and metaphorically – can be creative.
Several of the points in the first part of this work (on how running physically can be creative) have been inspired by the points raised by Dr Alan Latham in his lecture The Zen of Running. You can learn more about the geographer – and hardcore runner – here.
A presentation of this as a slide show was first held on 2012 January 25 at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and exhibited as a video at the Making Space PhD exhibition at the Slade Research Centre at the Woburn Square, February 2012. As with all uploads, this is an ongoing research and subject to change. For more of such inconclusive ‘moving images’, run to Kaidie’s channel.
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.
** You are invited to the Private View of the Making Space Exhibition 22 February 6-8:30pm WC1H 0AB**
While Kaidie remains dead, she may well conjure up a thing or two at this annual PhD event at the Slade School of Fine Art’s Research Centre in Nondon, UK. In any case, many other artists are involved in this exhibition Making Space, including a few big names. You are invited to the PV on the 22nd, and if you have already acquired tickets for the conference on the 25th, count yourself very lucky. The rather delightful Grayson Perry will be speaking – having caught his very wonderful exhibition at the British Museum recently, coming face to face with the great Perry may well be the impetus for Kaidie to stop playing dead and come back to life.
**2010 December performance-lecture at the Slade School of Dine Art**
Yes we are still rather dead. So here is a mini-retrospective of sorts.
This is a performance-lecture held 2010 December 1 at the Slade School of DIne Art, Nondon, UK. In the ‘live’ version, we would be reading the script ‘live’; in this recorded version, you can hear us (flipping the pages of the script).
What is crucial to note that, all this was so (very nearly) impeccable and mindblowing at that point in time, ie 2010 December 1. Yet, restless beings that we are, that you know we are, this is not fixed in stone (is any? Even stones are not fixed [in stone], for they move, do they not??). We have (clearly) moved on, specifically, improved, in leaps and bounds of course. As you know we are simply incapable of producing anything run of the mill, but evolution-believers (and practitioners) that we are, many of the points raised in this performance have shifted, and many of the imageries have also been transformed. For ever-newer-better-higher-faster-good-better-best rundowns/out-lines/maps/cosmologies and other configurations, come back here often though even that can be slower than what we think while we are on the run etc etc. And, we all know that there can never be a ‘final’ version – even as we reach the ‘final’, for, so long as our stamina (speed and endurance) lasts, we will keep on running.
And the more we run, the better we can run, the further we can run. So, each variation is as ‘final’ as they get.
Point is, run, and you will find your own way. Or rather, ways. So, there you go. Here we are.
This performance-lecture was undertaken as part of our MPhil upgrade to PhD status at the Slade School of Dine Art, University College Nondon, UK. The opening and closing musical accompaniment is created by our usual Co-Runner, PHILIP TAN
** GOODBYE 2011, HELLO 2012**
Hello there!
We hope that you have had a fruitful 2011 as we have. Thus far,
1) … approximately 475,000 unique visitors have (allegedly) visited our running blog since 12.12.2009
2) … in our search for the/a ‘Meaning of Life’, we have run at least 6000km in the past 750 days in the primary world, including having completed 2 fool marathons (Nondon, Farnham Pilgrims), 2 half marathons (Safra Bay Run, Uxbridge Grand Canal), as well as other smaller races (Friends of MSF, PAssion), while raising some money for charity along the way (many thanks to many of you who had responded to our emotional blackmail!)
3) … we have made nearly 2500 ‘friends’ on Facebook, including turning some of them into wondrous collaborators (such as Jeremy Hight, who curated us on an online exhibition on Leonardo Electronic Almanac; James Odling Smee who baked us a heart-stoppingly-mind-shifting chocolate cake that sent us on the mostest moistest magnificently heavenly sugar-high; Chico (a many-pawed cat owned by Anji Reyner) who has just passed away from real life, and who is now accompanying us on our astral runs…
… Indeed, we have been dead since 24th of April, when Kai Syng reached her Chinese age of 37, which was a week after Kaidie hit 4:24:37 at the Nondon Marathon 2011. Yet, there is no stopping us from coming back to life (or is there?)! How, indeed, will we spend the final 250 days before we finally hit the bucket on 09.09.2012, on the last day of the Nondon Paralympics? Will we catch Kaidie impersonating a 2012 Nondon Ambassador at the Kings Cross Station come Summer 2012? Before that, will we catch someone who resembles Kaidie as a Cultural Bloomsbury guide on the topic of Art & Society, and running the Bath Half Marathon, KNI Waltham Forest Borough Run, and a midnight sun run in Norway? And, last but not least, will we finally find the/a Meaning of Life? … Boundless questions abound…
Come run our last laps with us.
Happy New Year 2012.
Yours Sincerely,
Kai-die
KAIDIE DIES: Variation 12. Happy 2-year birth-day (and deaths-days), Kai-die.
Circle of lives-deaths. Life as a reflection of death and vice versa. As we continue turning in our grave, we have, un-wittingly, turned two years of age, on 12.12.2011.
KAIDIE DIES: Variation 9. Rest in Peace Chico! Carry on running.
We also found a note, that says ‘Many, many thanks to ANJI REYNER, Kaidie’s Facebook friend, for Chico’.
** KAIDIE MOMENTARILY RISES FROM HER GRAVE ON 1 AUGUST 2011 IN LIFE 2.0 ON LEONARDO ONLINE **
Kaidie has been momentarily woken up from her ongoing death on 1 August, with her participation in Re-drawing Boundaries, a LEA New Media Exhibition online. And it is completely the fault of curator-artist-writer-theorist-photographer-musician-weathernerd-cat-dad-all-rounded-all-rounder Jeremy Hight (whom Kaidie is acquainted with only via the evil Facebook). Hight’s senior conspirators are Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul. Do visit the show and experience other locative media works by Teri Reub, Jeremy Wood amongst others! Kaidie thanks Hight, Aceti and Paul, and returns to her astral journeys.
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.
KAIDIE DIES: Variation 5.
Photograph by the same Trespasser on his mobile phone after he drove Kaidie to an early grave, after he realised that Kaidie was gone, and when he saw Kaidie's corpse, and when he concluded that she was dead, and thereafter carried on with his walk at Jacks Rake, or is it Jake's Rack, while Kaidie continued with her own astral journey/journeys across dimensions.
KAIDIE DIES: Variation 4.
… THIS PICTURE (with the caption ‘After this attempt to run the country-city-company, Kaidie went missing and is presumed dead’) HAS BEEN REMOVED…
KAIDIE DIES: Variation 3.
Photograph by Trespasser on his mobile phone as he ran into this death scene while on his morning run this morning. After he twat this picture, it went viral, because of the e-coli pandemic, because of the poisonous mung beans, because of the flimsy wire holding Kaidie's neck, because of suffocation, because of tension, because of coughing, because of hiccuppings and hiccdownings. Trespasser's site has since been closed. Nonetheless, the photograph still survives, stubborn as the bacteria, which thrives in warm feces (cold ones turn white and hard, like corpses, like carcasses, like that of Kaidie's).
