In Search of A/The Point of Life

Archive for September, 2010

MOVING ON: GOODBYE KINGS KROSS, GOODBYE SUMMER

Now that it is October, now that we have to start replacing our running singlets and shorts with running tights and over our dri-fit singlet a long sleeved T-shirt that is removable mid-run when we are sufficiently warmed up, now that the humidity is fading, now that the sweating has ceased, now that hot soups provide more comfort than raw food, now that we are layering ourselves with jumpers and scarfs, now that we wear socks again, now that the sandals are put away because the toes are cold in those, now that we do not want to commit the fashion faux pas of teaming socks with sandals (even in matching or interesting colour combinations), now that when we go out we put our fingers in our pockets, now that we have moved, now that we have moved on, now that Kings Kross, and photographs of Kings Kross captured on our memory machines are but things of a/the past, now that these people captured one August afternoon on a Sunday have left, now that Sundays have no sun, now that there is no difference between Sundays, Saturdays, Fridays, ThursWedsTuesMondays, now that there is no difference between day/night,  now that the windows are shut, now that the duvets are out, now that when we wash our hands we turn on the tap with the red mark too and then because water from it is always too hot as if 60 degrees celsius or so we have to do a to-&-fro-ing between this and the other tap with a blue mark, now that we want to run more so that we stop feeling cold, now that we are entering our 10th month of existence, even though being afloat at the the outdoor heated pool feels like being in an oasis even more than before perhaps in defiance of the changing weather, even though the clocks are still on British Summer Time, even though our Summer and Summery restlessness is still around perhaps more again in defiance or because it really is season-and-weather-resistant, even though Regents Fark remains our Favourite Fark, even though we may say this till the cows come home, even though our relationship with cows are limited to the supermarket and sometimes with human animals whom we may not favour and hence call them by that name, even though we are reluctant, we hereby officially declare (our) official Summer as officially over, and welcome Fall.

Unofficially, however, we are open for negotiations.

If you think you’ve got a good deal.


Talk ‘live’ with Kaidie on Skype on 7th, 9th and 10th October at ART Singapore 2010!

As you are aware, we are going to be virtualy a-live at ART Singapore 2010. Directed by Meena Mylvaganam, who is also one of our co-runners in our grandiouse quest, this is an annual event of contemporary art from Asia. We will be presenting a 50-minute film and prints for sale. In addition, we will also talk with YOU, our dear Conspirators of Pleasure, at the following times (Singapore time, followed by British Summer Time): Thursday 7 oct 20:00 Singapore at the Gala opening dinner of the show (13:00hrs BST); 9 October Saturday 16:00 Singapore (09:00hrs BST); 10 October Sunday 18:30hrs Singapore (11:30hrs BST). Come grab us and have a chat with us! The following is an article published in the Business Times Singapore, following an interview with us – via Skype of course – on 16 September.


This article has been cropped  – and you CAN NO LONGER read the original here!! Unless you pay a subscription fee… How terribly interesting! Not. And, as usual, there are inaccuracies in the article at different levels, factual (for instance we are only 10 months old, not already 3 years old as reported) and otherwise (We are not Kaidie ‘because’ of the necessity of following our own footsteps of having generated a traveler persona; we run, and we are Kaidie, and we travel, and we have been travelling for twenty years, because we are against stagnancy, complacency, passivity and the status quo, including our own. We say this as we remove cobwebs from our hair, eyebrows, armpits, nostrils, legs and toes, having been sitting at the library combing our way slowly and painfully, over a Chapter that we are writing…). But as usual, let us not nitpick. See you soon. Not. Maybe.


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 cityPrior 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.



WE HAVE RUN AND COMPLETED OUR FIRST LIFE 1.0 MARATHON, FOLLOWING THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE PILGRIMS. Thank you all for your support and donations! BIG THANK YOU to the organisers too!

PS We must also congratulate Team Carter, led by one of the organisers, HILLARY CARTER who was running with his son Henry and wife Trisha. This was Trisha’s first marathon, and Hillary’s ONE HUNDREDTH!! Hence qualifying him to the prestigious 100 marathon club. How very inspiring indeed. Watch out Hillary, HERE WE COME! 99 more for us to go (hopefully within this lifetime?)! We also put up a review in Runner’s World and note that we are definitely not alone in our appraisal of the amazing event!


PARTLY IMAGINARY CHARACTERS THAT WE ARE, OUR BRUISES ARE FOR REAL: An ongoing catalogue of our Miss Haps (+insults to our injuries). Having come thus far, we will still do our best this Sunday. Fingers (and eyes, and toes) crossed. Watch this space. Don’t move (for we will).


UPDATABLE GLOSSARY: THEATRE OF KAIDIES

Stuck in the bathtub.

GLOSSARY/ WIKI ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OF KAIDIE / LIFE 3.0, ?AND THE THEATRE OF CHARACTERS (ongoing). SEEKING DEFINITIONS AND MULTIPLE+ ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS! CONTRIBUTE NOW!

VARIATIONS OF KAIDIE:

* Kaidie / Kaidie 3.0 / 3rdlifekaidie/Kaidie3rdlife/Kaidie Nondon:

* Kaidie 1.0: One of a kind (kind of)

* Kaidie 2.0: The doubledecker bus.

* Kaidie 4.0:

* Kaidie -1.0:

* Kaidie 13.2:

* Other Kaidie-s:

* Kailive: Audience member who interviewed Kaidie at a Q&A session at the DRHA conference 7 September, Nondon, UK.

* Kailives: Kaidie’s stand in at Nondon College of Communication and Off The Shelf when Kaidie went missing.

* Kaiis:

*Kaiisnt:

* Heidi: Whose name rhymes with Kaidie’s, and whom Kaidie visited in January in Heidiland in Switzerland, but who was not at home at that time, which was for the better, for it only allowed Kaidie to continue to inhabit Heidi – or a notion of ‘Heidi’ – in Kaidie’s Life 2.0, in the realm of imagination.

* Kai Syng Tan: Father and mother and midwife of Kaidie. Fernando Pessoa: “As Alvaro De Campos, another one of Pessoa’s heteronyms, tells us: ‘Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, does not exist.’”


IS A CIRCLE ALSO A LINE? CAN A LINE ALSO BE(COME) A CIRCLE? The Bras Basah Station permanent public art work post #5.

In our final post about our permanent public video installation at the award-winning Bras Basah Mass Rapid Transit station in Singapore, we share an external coverage of the work at Today newspaper by Mayo Martin, who has told us that this is his favourite of the art works commissioned by the Land Transport Authority of the Circle Line. Do let us take us for a ride on The Amazing Never-ending Underwater Adventures!


Our Bras Basah Station permanent public art work post #4: 2 RE-PRESENTATIONS

Above: A trailer of the 29-minute video cycle; below: a re-presentation of Desyphus in-action on the site in Singapore, by wacky Singapore filmmaker Chew Tze Chuan. As we have not seen the work ourselves, do upload it if you run into it, and tag it ‘bbs’!


CAN WE GET OUT OF THIS CIRCLE, OR ARE WE BACK TO SQUARE ONE? The Bras Basah Station permanent public art work post #3.


WERE YOU RIDING THE TRAIN ON THE SAME CIRCLE LINE IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION? The Bras Basah Station permanent public art work post #2.


KAIDIE WILL BE INTERVIEWED BY AN AUDIENCE MEMBER AT THE DRHA CONFERENCE 7 SEPT- but will the confrontation come to blows?

On Tuesday, Kaidie will be at the DRHA 2010 conference at the Brunel University, Nondon. In this new 60-minute performance, Kaidie will be interviewed by a member of the audience, played by Kai Syng Tan, in Author Slash Actor Slash Audience: A Lecture Performance. Several illustrious names in the new media arts field are present – on the opening day of the conference, Stelarc – yes the legendary (hirsute) man with an (hirsute) arm onto which an (hirsute??) ear has been planted – will perform. As we speak, we are making our way to Uxbridge now. With the threats of tube strikes, we might have to run there. If we know where Uxbridge is. If it is even in Nondon. Please visit website for cost and programme details about attending the conference. See you around.


WHERE DOES KAIDIE DO HER WORLDCHANGINGearthshatteringTEETHCLENCHING WRITING? Nondon on the run: Summer 2010 #2

I am certain that by now, you, My Dear Collaborator, are on no uncertain terms the level of our unsurpassable intelligence. That said, we decide that even for a near-impeccable being, there is always room for self-improvement, in this Life 3.0 of ours. In the attempt to look and, indeed, be(come) brainier by way of osmosis and association, we have been running about the Reading Rooms in the British Library this summer. Oh, we feel sehr brainy. (And yes, what a fabulous summer it has been! We can’t help but clap and smile and slap our thunderandlightning thighs in smug satisfaction. Well done us!)

Given the gravely serious nature of the work that we undertake at the BL (is any body smiling in any of these pictures??) these expeditions are generally uneventful, except that we dropped our Garmin Forerunner 405 GPS device sometime in May, or rather, it decided to slip off our wrist, as the strap was broken. Apparently, someone picked it up and returned it to Security. We were lucky that it was the British Library and not, say, the zoo, a pub, public loo, childcare centre (how all the terrible kids would have trampled on, or even eaten the device! Luckily we do not visit such nightmarish places and meet screamy spoilt tots with mini-me-s!!), swimming pool, or our Fark. Our saviour must have been some old (0r pretend-old- have you met those men who are not yet middle-aged but dress up to be such, in tweed jackets, brown shoes and full beards – as if looking middle-aged lends them authority or wisdom? Perhaps we should try this too, in case only hanging out at the BL reading rooms does not suffice), wealthy academic type on high moral grounds, or an ignorant prick who thought that that was a ‘mere’ ‘watch’.

As several of you know, Kaidie is a guinea pig of a ground-shaking, earth(s)-shattering, mind-boggling, world(s)-changing, nostrilflaring thesis, (Trans-dimensional) Running for Our Lives! A Rough Guide. This is a 80,000-word paper (and book, someday) that we have been working on the past 11 months. We have been born as a case study of that thesis. So far we have about 15,000 sturdy words done, but we have also written more than 150,000 in the past year that may never, ever see any public light (and we are NOT talking about anything from this amazing running log / travel blog!). So, 2 parallel lives / works: of embodying and living out for 1000-days as a trans-dimensional runner, and theorising our grand thesis of ‘trans-dimensional running’ as a critical strategy to run our 21st century technologically-layered multiverse, at the same time. Although there are rich overlaps and interplays, and that there is much writing that already occurs on this site, that of the thesis is dead straight and bloody serious, with clear lines of argument running through. Not all that easy for a non-linear thinker… Each also should to be self-sufficient and self-standing. It would have been easy to do one or the other – sit on our fatarses and fantasise something that works out perfectly on paper, or focus on being a strong practitioner, which is (relatively) easy as chickpeas and frogfleece – and decadently fun and glam as well. The challenge/trick of this game is the dialogue/quarrel of the two. So that is where we are running: in the chaosmos of practice/theory, embodiment/detachment, actor/author/audience at the same time.  Dot dot dot (ellipsis). To be continued.