In Search of A/The Point of Life

Archive for November, 2010

DO COME TO OUR 2 (OUT OF 4) OF OUR GIGS IN NONDON THIS WEEK!

This week, we are conducting 4 presentations – 2 of which you are cordially invited to! As for the other 2, we will tell you about them later – depending on how they go, that is. At press time, however, these other 2 gigs are state secrets…

** LATEST: We are running the 2011 Nondon Marathon on the 17th of April for Shelter, and will need YOUR help to raise £1600! ! TO MAKE A DONATION CONTACT US at <dislocation@3rdlifekaidie.com> THIS AND ONLY THIS CAN SECURE OUR FRIENDSHIP (or ‘friendship’)  – we will run FOR YOU  – what more can you ask of us?? **

Image from Timeout / First Thursdays site

1) Private View and after party: Wednesday 1 December 18:00hrs – 02 December at 01:00. Printnomenon, group. Exhibition at Oblong: 69A Southgate Road, Nondon N1 3JS. After party at Haggerston: 438 Kingsland Road, Nondon E8 4AA **APART FROM THE OPENING, DO COME BY TO THE XMAS EVENTS ON 17 DECEMBER 18:00-21:00hrs, and 18 DECEMBER 12:00-18:00hrs! **

Facebook friends Mathew Humphrey – an Aries- and Kaidie Nondon – a Sagittarius– collaborate for the first time in this Christmas show. Wearing a Global Positioning System (GPS) device, Kaidie,  a semi-fictional figure trans-dimensional runner, runs (on a bloody cold November Monday morning at 6am) along the shopping streets of Nondon, tracing the constellation shapes of the Aries and Sagittarius over the existing grid. The work explore the tensions between: a sense of dreaminess and vastness associated with constellations versus the dense urban grid that Kaidie runs in real life; the ‘high-tech’ and contemporary (GPS) versus the timeless (celestial space); the digital (GPS) versus the analogue (printmaking process); this world (where we are) versus (views from) other worlds (such as celestial space); fictions and near fictions (Kaidie and astrology) versus the non-fictional (astronomy, for instance), real life (running in London) versus otherwise (how Mathew and Kaidie had only ‘met’ on the evil social networking site prior to this collaboration), as well as the end-of-the-year Christmas excess of nostlagia versus spending splurge on the high streets of London.

2) Performance: Saturday 3 December 11:30hrs-12:30hrs. Part of the Sexuate Subjects Conference 2-4 December.

We are putting up a short ‘live’ performance at Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics, held at the University College Nondon. This conference brings together high-profile speakers from all over the world, to response to feminist Luce Irigaray‘s ideas. There is an entry fee to participate in this conference – to register please look here.

There you go. Hope to see you– soon(er) or later.

By hook or by crook.

One way or another.

This way or that.

Every now and then.

Here or there.

Online or off.

This year or the next.

This life, or the next.

Till then.


UPDATABLE GLOSSARY: TRAVELLERS & TROUPE

Swimming across time and space.

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

* Traveller

* Time-traveller

* Tourist

* Transmigrant

* Sight-seer

* Passenger

* Passer-by

* Psychonaut

* Cybernaut

* Nomad

* Digital nomad

* Dervish swirler

* Hitchhiker

* Runner

* Trans-dimensional runner

Do you travel? Why do you travel? How do you travel? Where are you going? Where have you come from? Which type of traveller are you?


Walk the talk / run the dmc: WE PAID UP FOR OUR 18948km NONDON-SAO-PAULO OF CARBON FOOTPRINTS WITH OUR FOOT+FOOT (=FEET) RUNNING 189.48km IN OCTOBER.

Rundown of our runs, 3-30 October, as documented by our Garmin Forerunner 405.

As you know (you do, don’t you?), we visited Sao Paulo, Brazil last month to present a paper of our of-and-out-of-this-and-other-worlds theory, Trans-dimensional Running for our Lives! A Rough Guide To A Critical Strategy for our technologically-layered Multiverse, at Soft Borders, Upgrade! Before we flew, we also came up with a plan to make up for our carbon footprints from the return journey, and decided that to pay back for our 18948km of travelling, we had to run 189.48km in Life 1.0 .

We are happy to announce that we reached our target on 30 October. From 3 – 30 October, we ran a total of 191.11km. This includes, unfortunately, one week of NO RUNNING while we were in Brazil for several reasons. So, in reality, the task was accomplished in 17 days, which works out to be an average of 11.24km each time we ran during this period.

Our next flight is a long-haul flight which is at least 10,000km one way. If we go by the same rules we have set up for our Nondon-Sao-Paulo journey, of moving 2 decimal places of a given distance, we deduce that we will have to run at least 200km, to make up for our dirty flight. Again we will aim to do that within the period of one month.

While we are at it, we want to tell you of our plan that we have been harbouring for the past 11 months of our existence, since we came into being: it consist of 2 runs in a certain city-state. One is a run running North-South (22.5km) of the country, and the other running West-East (41.8km) of the country. The former translates to slightly more than a half-marathon, which we can estimate we can run within approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes (and hopefully less) under humid conditions, the other a full-marathon, which we estimate taking us 5 hours, or less, hopefully. With these two runs, Kaidie, the partially-imaginary figure, runs the entire country. Read this statement in any way you wish. We will complete this exercise wthin our lifetime, this life. When we do realise this endeavour, do recall that you read it here, first, my Dear Reader.

While we are at it, some of you may also recall a stubborn shin splint and tendonitis that we experienced for a couple of months over Summer, on our right leg. You may be pleased to know that they are not so lonely any more, as we have introduced them to our left leg as well. We now have very well-balanced limps (and Lives). As they say, life goes on, or rather, Lives go on.

Our GPS track (in green) records of our locomotion in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with the image on the right as the most detailed.


WE ARE PRESENTING OUR COLLABORATIVE WORK WITH DR. JAMIE O’BRIEN on 16 NOVEMBER.

Image taken from DH website

On Tuesday 16 November, we are making a 10-minute presentation with Dr Jamie O’Brien (aka Majei!) on our ongoing research, at the Slade School of Dine Art, University College  Nondon. (We are also making a short, 7-minute power-fruit-punched presentation of our work before that!). Led by Dr O’Brien, an artist who is also a Research Fellow of the Digital Humanities of University College Nondon, the research aims to create a conceptual prototype of a (new kind of) collaborative space, with the final aim of the creation of an ‘augmented reality guidebook’ that would be useful for both members of Headway East London, as well as all other Nondoners at large! Jamie works closely with the leader of the Discovery Programme at Headway East, psychologist Ben Graham, who has been responsible for new and innovative work under the Discovery Progamme with the members of Headway East London. Ben was also the one who took the picture below, which shows ourselves (in blue, pretending to look very, very hard at work, knowing that the camera was looking), Dr O’Brien (in check shirt), Firoza (in white), Joshua (in stripes) and Byron (who is very shy and hence, hiding behind Jamie, in blue), in the midst of generating a series of maps, caught in a video shoot in July 2010 for Social Care TV.

Picture and words by Ben Graham from the Discovery Blog.

Please click here to have a look at the video commissioned by Social Care TV, from which you can learn more about the excellent work of Headway East, as well as other organisations working with people with learning difficulties. You can see details of this mapping session, as well as other mapping exercises by members of Headway East here. To attend the 16 November presentation, please register here. See you soon/see you later/see you sooner or later!

Image from Social Care TV website.

You can see a documentation of the evening’s presentation on artist Laura Cinti’s site! Laura herself also made a presentation that evening on her research with live organisms (Thank you Laura!)

Composite image by artist Laura Cinti, published in her websitsite. As you can see, we are quite vertically-challenged behind the lecturn that we cannot fully prove our presence that evening.


WE TURN 11-MONTHS OLD ON 12 NOVEMBER 2010. 667 more days to go/come/run, before we expire on the last day of the Nondon Olympics on 09.09.2012.

We turn 11-months-old today. BRAVA! Well done us, to have come this far. To celebrate we went to buy a glorious bunch of Brussel Sprouts from the market during our morning run. We are also chomping down the sprouts, which is one of our favourite Xmas vegetables, in anticipation of a nice Xmas 2010 and end of our ear. The smiley vegetable seller gave us an avocado for free when we told him that it’s our 11-month-old birthday. Wonderfullymushilycreamy comfort food indeed, but that brusselling bundle of joy was rather hefty as we lugged it on our run back. As an incentive to ourselves to carry on running, we held the bundle like so in the picture, in front of our face, to entice and lure us to carry our feet forward, one step at a time. With this tactic, we ran and reached home without any problems.

We ate the sprouts plain without relish, but with tremendous relish. In the face of so much green-ness, we don a green (well, turquoise, to be pedantic, but on the same wavelength, surely) top in this photograph. Our tongue is turning green with envy at our own very meaningful life, as we speak.

And my Dear Readers, how do you think we could mark our 1st-year anniversary on 12.12.2010 in a meaningful fashion? Wolf down an intense and big 70% intense cake? Bungee-jump from the Gherkin? Run 12 rounds at Regents Fark? Do 365 star jumps? Swim 12 km in an outdoor chlorinated pool? Do 12 good deeds? Save money for our next lives? Save the world? Get ourselves a new wardrobe of pink (or green?) running clothes? Get a life?  Eat more greens, as Popeye-fuel for the next laps of our amazing Lives?, etc.

My Dear Conspirators of Pleasure, as you have in the past 11 months, do write in if you come up with wonderful ideas. Let’s see where we can go, together.



WHERE ARE WE, AND WHERE ARE WE GOING?? Running about in Nondon today, we ran into a sea of people who are LIVID about the Coalition cuts to education.

The demonstration is happening as we speak (However, we are hearing of violent clashes, which certainly does not sound good for anybody). Students, lecturers and education workers from all over the UK are stopping traffic in Central Nondon, in response to the Coalition Government’s announcement of drastic cuts all across education, including up to a 100% cut in funding for the Arts and Humanities, as we heard. We took pictures of the furious crowd as we ran into them in the middle of our running about in Nondon. We even ran into UK artists Susan Collins, Andrew Stahl and Jon Thomson!

We ask the same questions that we first raised in May: What now, brown cow??


ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF KAIDIE IN A MINUTE: 7 September 2010 Nondon.

What did Kaidie do on 7 September 2010, Tuesday in Nondon? Or rather, what did we see when we were going about our business on 7 September 2010 Tuesday in Nondon, our favourite city on earth and beyond? Wearing a small camera on our chest (which has been lent to us by Urbantick of the Centre of Advanced Spatial Analysis of University College Nondon), this is a 1-minute time-lapse record of what happened that day, including: walking amongst large crowds in the streets as tube workers went on a strike in Nondon (as usual); attending a panel discussion – with Stelarc in-world in Second Life; presenting our 50-minute performance AUTHOR slash ACTOR slash AUDIENCE at the DRHA conference at the Brunel University; travelling to and from Uxbridge.

And, with all due respect to the dwellers and denizens of Uxbridge, no, we would not/never/ever want to live in Uxbridge in a house with a spouse/family/kids/pets/cars. No thanks very much.


FOLLOWING THE FOOTSTEPS OF WALID RAAD / THE ATLAS GROUP at the Whitechapel Gallery!

Place: Nondon. Date: 2 November 2010. Time: from 13:00hr GMT. Starting point/point of departure: Central Nondon. Loop point: Whitechapel Art Gallery. What for: To see Walid Raad's show. Route: via the City. How was it, then: Crowded. Nice Gherkin you've got. Pet peeves: 1) Shoveling past people dangling cigarettes in their fingers. 2) Women/very large people who walk slowly but occupying entire pavements 3) Women/'girls' (sic) who are in a large group but walking very slowly or giggling and chatting away in the middle of the pavement believing that they look cute and are drawing attention - indeed, from an angry runner 4) Children/babies/prams with young parents with same level of entitlement as the chatty women and fat bastards who block entire pavements and roads, as if they are the first people on earth who have given birth and hence demand special treatment and that the rest of the world have been created from playdoh. We don't blame the kids but we blame their smugly parents. GET OUT OF OUR £k*fING FACE!!!! Attire: Short-sleeved T-shirt and shorts. Temperature: 14 degrees celsius (sweaty run). Smell: Not So Terribly Good for an art gallery (or elsewhere). Quality of outward-bound run: Painful now with not one, but BOTH legs with shin splints. Could not get a comfortable gait. At least our limp is balanced now. Run back was easier and even sweatier.

On 2 November, we awoke from a 12-hour sleep (after none the previous night) to run through the City to the Whitechapel Gallery. There are many, many artists we admire (Chris Marker, Marc Chagall, AES+F, Tarkovsky, Fernando Pessoa et al). Walid Raad/Atlas Group is one of these people whose footsteps we (attempt to) follow. In a previous life we had the privilege of experiencing his performance-lecture in a workshop we attended. Already conflating fact with fiction, objectivity with subjectivity, history with memory, ‘official’ grand narratives with micronarrative in our own work, and already familiar with the genres of the essay film, performance as practitioner, lecturer and sometime writer, Raad’s performance-lecture made an impact.

At this Whitechapel show, Raad’s appropriation of museum aesthetics in a trademark clinical austerity in his approach is chillingly disturbing as it is dead funny. We particularly love the small model of a gallery which contains tiny precise replica of his work.

We realised that there was another source of chilliness, and that came from our exposed legs. Another observation: except for primary school kids, not many other gallery-goers wear shorts. Was that why we received some interesting looks from the gallery-sitters, as we did when we visited the Wolfgang Tillmans show after a 30km run in Hyde Park? Will spandex and leg warmers have saved us from the faux pas (if it was indeed one), and also help us look ‘tuned in’ onto the retro ’80s look (or at the very least, an artistically clever and ironic wink/nod, that the artistically clever and ironic art world would approve of)? As usual, suggestions and advice welcome.

The above is the GPS track of our run to the gallery and back, totaling about 8.9km. For a detailed version of this and other GPS tracks of ours in Life 1.0, look here.

Anyhow. Go run with Walid Raad. He’s not bad at all.


HAPLESS STEVEDORE IS A WINNER OF OUR LONDONER QUIZ 2! YOU can be a winner too!

The following is a set of response we received from Hapless Stevedore to our LONDON QUIZ 2. THANK YOU Hapless for the terrific feedback! Thanks for your advice too! We will check out London Barrier, for instance, and thank you for naming us your favourite Fictional Character/Personality of London. All your answers are brilliant no doubt, but it is because of this single outstanding response, that makes you a winner of the quiz. Here, we have attached a photograph that we took at one of our favourite roads on London, Farringdon Road. We hope that you like it!

As for the rest of YOU, DO participate in the rolling/running quiz, and you can be a winner too, and receive another SECRET PRIZE from us! Our secret prize is so secretive that we cannot reveal it just yet…

SO , HERE ARE HAPLESS’ RESPONSES:

1. WHAT DO YOU DO DURING WEEKENDS IN LONDON?

Walk around dreamily looking at things, get asked the way by strangers, get lost. Get home again somehow.

2. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE MEANINGFUL PURSUITS FOR KAIDIE IN LONDON? WHAT RECOMMENDATIONS HAVE YOU GOT FOR KAIDIE TO DO IN LONDON?

Arise early with coffee and bacon sandwiches, go see the Thames Barrier rise from the waves.

3.HOW AND WHERE IN LONDON DO YOU WANT TO DIE (WHEN YOU DIE)? Tip: Mugged, at UCH(‘s waiting list) with swine flu, run over by the tube, hit by a taser gun, etc.

I imagine I will be mugged by a Euston Zombie, taken to UCH where I am infected by swine flu, stagger out of the ward to try have a cigarette at the very moment that a disgruntled tube train emerges from mouth of Euston Square station running me over as it careers south, staggering back into the hospital to get even more medical treatment (I love it!) I am hit by a taser gun wielded by red-eyed Peelers mistaking me for another of the Euston Zombies out to lunch on human flesh.

By this point I die happily, knowing that if life is unfair, death is just as bad.

So, Euston Road, outside UCH tasered in a case of mistaken identity after a series of calamities.

4. WOULD YOU WISH TO BE BACK IN LONDON THE NEXT TIME ROUND? (IN YOUR NEXT LIFE, THAT IS)

Yes

5. IF YOU WERE THE MAYOR OF LONDON, WHAT IS THE FIRST THING THAT YOU WOULD CHANGE?

I would give free transport (Oyster, Congestion Charge, the Works!) to all flamboyantly dressed people.

6. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FILM/BOOK/SONG/ARTISTIC REPRESENTATION OF LONDON, AND WHY?

Oooooooh, so many delicious tings.

Frenzy by Hitchcock. Sailing ships moored by Tower Bridge and Covent Garden as a flower market.

Plus, lots and lots of ‘orrible murder!

7. WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE LONDON PERSONALITY/FICTITIOUS CHARACTER, AND WHY?

Kaidie Nondon. Because she is both a personality and fictitious and she was and is unexpected.

8. DO YOU DRINK LONDON’S TAP WATER? WHY / WHY NOT?

Yes. Unfiltered and straight from the tap.

Why? Why not? There are no health benefits, or even, most of the time, flavour benefits to drinking bottled water. It costs a lot and you have to carry it home from the supermarche. Why would I drink anything but good old London Tap?

9. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FESTIVAL/HOLIDAY IN LONDON? WHERE DO CELEBRATIONS TAKE PLACE?

Every night we celebrate the end of the working day.

Every Friday we celebrate the end of the working week.

This takes place in a pubilc house, eg the Dog and Duck or a bar, eg Bar Italia. Often it takes place at home. The end of the working week is my favourite celebration.

10. WHERE WOULD YOU BE/ WHAT WOULD YOU BE DOING DURING THE 2012 OLYMPICS?

I will travelling in foreign lands. I will be travelling through Nepal, China, Vietnam and aim to be in Singapore on the closing day so that I will be on the opposite side of the world from Kaidie. That day I will bake a cake.