Τρίτη 27 Δεκεμβρίου 2011

Tu vas a Tuva?








Tu vas a Tuva?*
oui, je vais a Ithaki

Text by Polyxene Kasda

 Ithaca you are always in my mind


Introduction 
At the end of his life, R Feynman has lended a playful actuality to our primordial drive for adventure that pushes us to device Ulyssian ways to reach the ever receding Hercules' columns.
For Feynman, this drive for perpetual navigation took the name of Tuva, a strange land in Mongolia trying out different ways, to reach it. When things were made easy for him to visit this far away land, he died ”still roaming with a hungry heart”
His was a highly playful contemporary version of the transtemporal Homeric Ithaca, that has inspired poets, artists and writers throughout the ages, to create epics and chef d'oeuvres, driven by this Something Essential Missing..
This SEM element *is the agony that pushes us out of our skin,,“peeling our image from the mirror”, as we grow out of ourselves,heading towards Being. This self transcendent process gives rise to the creation of culture within civilization. Civilization is based on survival issues, while culture is the act of challenging survival itself.
In this context, artists are asked to present their own version of Ithaki; their strategy for reaching this vital and lethal somewhere, that is and is not, avoiding any rationalizations that would undermine the inherent, in our human core, mystery.
In our age of self scrutinization, where the very cognitive processes that shape our perception are highlighted to the point of being externalized and manipulated in the fields of genetics and artificial intelligence, this SEM element, engrailed in language,  haunting us from the deepest recesses of our cognitive structure, that differentiates us from the animal kingdom and connects us to the stars, deserves our full attention
What is it? a negative presence?* a positive absence? a black swan information of extra terrestral origin? An extended phenotype virus? A secret “même” imbedded in language itself?
In our eonic age, in our meta-space of extended present, contemporary Ithaki can no more be a far away place, but, could be reached immediately through our tuning to the Here and Now.


Ithaca gave you a marvellous journey without her you would not have set out
She has nothing left to give you now Constantin Cavafy
 This project can be considered as an open end experimental research in depth psychology and syncretic sociology.
The destination for the realization of this Idea is the island of Ithaca
For the moment we can ride on the wave created by the formulation of the idea and follow its unfolding in the insufficiencies of spacetime.



Project description
A group of artists and writers are challenged to formulate their Odyssey, giving a modern version of their voyage. Symbolically, the project workshop takes the form of a voyage to Ithaki where they are asked to tune in the energies of this mythical site and to produce texts and works which will be presented after 10 days in the Ionian center of Kefalonia. They will be asked to produce a collective Map of the secret treasure on this island, having as a guide Odysseus, the Outis (the Nobody), a name bearing pain, happiness and this peculiar, polyform, predictive, intelligence called Mêtis.







1-Inspired by R. Feynman's “ the quest for Tenna Tuva” (Utube video)
2-S.E.M term coined, in 1990, by Poly Kasda to denote the essential human drive for quest, not to be confused with Structural Equation Modeling
3. Lucian Blaga, Trilogie de la Connaissance, 
 
***Tu vas a Tuva Project is copyrighted by Polyxene Kasda and PrimoPianoLivinGallery in Lecce, Italy.

Πέμπτη 15 Δεκεμβρίου 2011

Project Miorita, Melusina and the Sphinx of Thebes 2007




Miorita/ Melusina and the Sphinx of Thebes
Artooth team Project Kasda-Angelou 2007







Article by Polyxene Kasda, dedicated to the memory of Vasiile Avram of Sibiu.


Arscenic, French cultural association for the promotion and the diffusion of digital arts, in the context of its wider project Areas of Conflu(x)ence, had selected our telecommunications project, Miorita, Melusina and the Sphinx of Thebes to be realized simultaneously in the twin capitals of Europe 2007 Sibiu and Luxembourg, meeting in Thebes of Greece


Brief description of the 2007 project
In order to soothe the crash and to facilitate communication at a subliminal level, we thought that an interchange should begin at the level of their respective nursery songs and folk tales.
Miorita, the Romanian pastoral ballad gave rise to the concept of the Mioritic space; the unconscious space shared by a culture that is shaped by its natural landscape.
Miorita the ewe and Melusina the mermaid {Luxembourg} meet in she –who- binds, the hybrid Sphinx of Thebes, as the passers by- who are exposed to the sound of the folk tale of the other city- are asked to answer, via an info kiosk, the question:
What is ANTHROPOS?.
The project consists of two similar installations of pictures of human faces and screens, one in each city. The participants are seen and heard on the screens of the installation in the other city.
The responses are collected, via the info kiosk, directly, in our site which acts as one more area of confluence for the project.



Miorita
In the Romanian pastoral folk poem Miorita, its most enduring cultural text with 900 variants, a shepherd boy is warned by his beloved ewe, Miorita, that his fellow shepherds plan to murder him and take his flock. Instead of resisting, he accepts his fate, asking only that Miorita go in search of his mother and tell her the story, not of how he was betrayed, but of how he was married to the daughter of a powerful King. Thereafter, wherever the ewe wanders, across the rivers of the Carpathian Mountains to the Black Sea, she tells the story-not the true, unadorned facts of death and betrayal- but a beautiful fiction of a transcendent wedding αnd telling the story, she causes geography to spring from myth. She is the storytelling shifting border whose story is borderless and cosmic.



Melusina
Melusina,the wife of the founder of Luxembourg Count Siegfried had one particular request, namely, that Siegfried must leave her alone for one full day and night every month. All went well for years and years, when on the first Wednesday of the month, Melusina would retire into her chambers in the ‘casemates’; a network of caverns underneath the city, not to be seen again until early light on Thursday. But one day, Siegfried's peeped through the keyhole and saw Melusina lying, as a mermaid, in the bathtub with a fishtail hanging over the rim. Melusina recognised her husband through the door and jumped out of the window into the river Alzette below, never to be seen again.



Mioritic Space
“spatiul mioritic

Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga argued that the ballads of Miorita were reflected in the Romanian landscape, with the alternations of accented and unaccented syllables representing the layout of the Romanian environment He established the term "Mioritic Space" for the Romanian character as defined by its geography.
An exile of Ceausescu's Romania, Andre Codrescu sought to redefine what Lucian Blaga called Mioritic Space into the idea that thought is its own nation and the poet, forever in exile, is the only creator of its shifting borders.


The Hybrid
In our project, the two folk legends/ Pastoral and Gothic spaces, interact and interchange their characteristics, via cyberspace, creating a hybrid cultural being, made of the interpenetration of the two cultures. This unstable hybrid takes refuge in the ancient, well established superhybrid: the Sphinx of Thebes, projecting back to her Oedipus’ answer to her riddle and thus, converting her enigma.


What is the human being?
What is that which has one voice and becomes four-footed, two- footed and three- footed?".
To the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus answered: Anthropos {the human being}, destroying the all powerful Hybrid with this word. His answer is “insoluble in concrete logic” as Lucian Blaga would say; the human being remains an unsolved mystery which renews itself continuously, keeping us in a constant state of creative crisis and while trying to solve it, each nation develops the specific culture within its civilization, which is shaped by its Mioritic space.



Nowadays, all the nations of the world, as if swallowed by the mouth of Zeus {Dias}, migrate and crash in cyberspace {Diadiktion in Greek means net of Zeus/ internet}, peeling off their skin, searching for their common core; “le noyau se debarasse de son ecorce” {L. Blaga}


The confluence of nations is a crash and interpenetration of worlds of different spacetime perception and this differentiation generates a “polystylistic universe”.


The world- on- the- make, with the bits and pieces of all cultures is the ultimate work of art of the 21st c. and we want to participate in its creation.


Once more Man, who is undergoing a “mutational switch from a cultural paradigm to another”, is called forth to redefine his identity in a global nation, through an interchange of cultural landscapes.















Synchretic European Topology
The Sphinx project 2014
by Kasda & Angelou
in order to express the symbiotic aspirations of european thinking engulfed in the chaotic remix of its diverging temporalities, we propose the creation of a real/virtual ludic territory moulded by the exchange of legendary elements characteristic of its regional spaciotemporalities.
 For example, Melusina the legendary siren of gothic Luxemburg, meets Miorita the lamb of the pastoral Romanian topology to generate a gargoyle with a lamb's head and a siren's tail that questions the stability of the hybrid european identity.
As area of confluence of these disparate elements we propose She-who-binds antinomies in an indestructible formula; the mythical Sphinx, guardian of Thebes, the city founded by Cadmus, on his quest of his sister EUROPE
Thebes; deep ontological topology cemented clumsily in a sick oblivion that obliterates deliberately the ontological nature of the human being.
What is ANTHROPOS?
We reflect back Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx' lethal riddle, intensifying it with this echo
Our answer will open or close the fantasmic gates to Thebes, city founded on the quest of Europe.




topologie syncretique europeenne

Vers une topologie syncretique Europeenne 2014

Pour exprimer les aspirations de symbiose profondes de la pensee europeenne engouffree dans le remixage chaotique de temporalites divergentes, la communication devrait être restoree au niveau subliminal.
L' idee serait de creer un territoire ludique, virtuel et reel, moule par un echange d'elements legendaires, characteristiques aux diverses regions spaciotemporelles.
Par example, Melusine, la sirene legendaire de l'espace gothique Luxemburgois et Miorita, la brebis de la ballade pastorale Roumaine, se rencontrent dans une gargouille a la tête de brebis et queue de poisson, qui questionne la stabilite de la configuration, hybride, europeenne..
On propose, comme point de fusion, de ces elements, celle-qui-renoue les antinomies dans une formule indestructible, la Sphinx mythique qui garde l'entree de Thebes, cite fondee par Cadmus, en recherchant sa soeur EUROPE-
Thebes, topologie ontologique, cementee dans un oubli malade impose par le 'Procuste etatique', qui, selon Blaga, “poursuit deliberement la defiguration ontologique de l 'Homme.”
Qu'est ce que l'Homme?
On renvoie la reponse d' Oedipe a l Enigme fatale du Sphinx l' intensifiant avec cet echo.
Qu'est ce 'Anthropos'?
Etons-nous prets a devoiler l'Idee profonde que Thebes, fondee sur la recherche d'Europe, porte dans ses entrailles, comme un Enfant; l' Enfant qui assiste la naissance de l'Homme Primordial dans ses rites Cabiriques. L'archetype de l 'Enfant, organe psychique, selon Young, se devoile aux temps eoniques, transitoires, pour relier notre present a nos racines spirituelles et nous guerir.
L Eon est un Enfant qui joue “. (Heraclete) ...



 

Τρίτη 12 Ιουλίου 2011

PXK recycling old staff with recycled 'emballage' patches

I found in the recycling trash an old chair and an old tripod relic from a small table
I placed a rectangular glass on the tripod and covered it with a layer of PXK extension
then I added more layers pf PXK patches
then, I covered the chair with PXK extensions
and there was my PXK precious chair
PXK recycled corner


PXK extensions patches
PXK, is recycled aluminum foil, handcarved and processed to look like the fossilized surface of rocks, sunk in the sea bed of time, as detected from some point in the future. The repeated spiral pattern is hypnotic in its creation and in its immersive aura effect.
PXK is flexible enough to become a dress and resistant enough to withstand extreme weather conditions as an open air monument. It is very light, ideal for travelling big distances and once unrolled, it can cover huge surfaces.
PXK makes ordinary trash objects look much older, transforming them, into unique and precious, calcified remnants of a civilization, which has underwent a self-trespassing leap, to 'anywhere else'..
PXK material has numerous applications; it can be used in mending shoes, jackets etc. For e.g. my PXK gilet was part of the Tashkent Biennale 07, my PXK dress was in the Olympic Fine Arts, Beijing 08, or, it can be used to create open air monuments
like my Chrysalis Monument in Flisvos, Athens, 2004.
PXK recycled items can be re-recycled to suit other installations. PXK installations are, usually, slightly, changing colors and texture, as they are mended with new PXK extensions, adding to the concept, the lively factor of corrosion.
Apart from being the initials of my name, PXK happens to be the scientific name of a homo sapiens mutation- related gene. PXK stands for the skin shed behind, in a self-surpassment leap.

PXK Route 2004-2012 World installation
PXK ROUTE world installation is realized through my participation in big international events. It is an anti-system, tunnelling in the real world, through the system. Thus, each local PXK presentation is part of the wider planetary installation PXK ROUTE 2004-2012, extending on the 'geographical palette of different cities'.
Each PXK installation is a stimulus for research in the cultural uniqueness of each landscape. It is also a research tool in its social system of communication and projects realization and an opportunity to trigger local participation. 
 



PXK ROUTE global installation {2004-11- } is extending from the Olympic Chrysalis monument, Athens 04, to Italy {Βiennale di Poesia di Alessandria 04}, Cyprus { Chrysalis monument, N. Leucosia 05}, China {2nd Biennale of Beijing 05}, Syria { FMC 06}, Uzbekistan {4rth Biennale of Tashkent 07}, France {Nuit Blanche, Anvers-aux-Abesses, Paris 07}, China {Olympic Fine Arts 08}, Greece (Municipal Collection Gargling Sky Crete 09, DESIGN 11 Municipal Pinacotheque of Athens)... 
 




Δευτέρα 4 Ιουλίου 2011

Code Lexomorphes; iconic dimension of Greek language.



CODE LEXOMORPHE 
Numerical modelling of Greek words
on the edge of truth and deceit
by
POLYXENE KASDA

Could a word swallow you in its invisible orbits, toss you up and down until it empties you, structure you according to its image and throw you out, while it remains indifferent, unchanged?

End of the eighties. I had just published my interdisciplinary essay The Conscious Eye, an eye that sees itself seeing, thinking itself thinking as it undergoes the crisis of self consciousness that sealed the arts and sciences of the XXth c. and revealed the linguistic sub-scaffold of visual reality
I was left with a sense of dissatisfaction: something deeper was still exerting its irresistible attraction on me, something essential was missing (SEM, as I call it)) and I knew that I had to go through it in order to go beyond it and be delivered from its insisting pressure. Only through 'methexis' can you comprehend, without undestanding, those matters of the soul and my art allows me to give tangible form to those unreachable states of being, on the edges of logic, where I breathe more freely. 
 performance Persephone in the temple in the bottom of the Lake of Mornos 1990
photo doc. Stefanos Samios
I decided to surrender to this SEM irresistible attraction and it dragged me in the bottom of a Lake. I found myself inside my own reflection, trapped in the other side of the mirror. The scenery was the bottom of the Lake of Mornos (in Lidoriki, on the way to Delphes) which had surfaced, for a while, in 1990, because of the drought, revealing an ancient city, a village and a sumptuous stone church, all dressed in oysters. 
Instinctively, I headed to the altar and I started digging in the mud as though I were looking, blindly, for something in the dark. My tentative movements gave rise to hundreds of primordial earth sculptures, which I instinctively named Chrysalii. I did not know it then, but I was dunk inside a vortex; a warped dimension, that was about to change my life.
My internal and external landscape had fused and I had the impression of stepping inside myself in a soft, spongelike, space of presence; In fact, I was captured in the force field of the word Chrysalis, which had, imperceptibly, swallowed  me like a shark hiding behind its own light.

Chrysalii installation in the bottom of the Lake of Mornos 1990. photo Samios
 This performance was followed by a series of parallel installations of the Chrysalii mud sculptures, around the globe with the creative interaction of artists and scientists, who installed them in around 300 spots around the world, in 27 countries (project launched in the Meeting of the Worlds in Joensu, Finland 91). The Chrysalii were fractal clones of the same Chrysalis which had demonstrated the 'butterfly effect'; the power of its own entelechy.
Soon, the resulting biodegradable, global, 'geocaching' installation melted in the rain, leaving behind the spectral dimension of its transformative name Chrysalis. Thus, I moved, in 1990, from the bottom of a lake, into the planetary dimension, without the use of high technology; without the help of internet (in  early nineties, the fax was still considered as a breakthrough). The magnetic word  was carrying me, like a spaceship, from the bottom of the waters to the aeronautic dimension of the future present. 
In the context of the structural exhibition, in the Municipality of Athens, titled Concept/Form, in 1991, I knailed the letters of the Greek word ΧΡΥΣΑΛΛΙΣ, on a horizontal board laying on a mirror and I pulled out of each letter, strings, with lengths analogous to their ancient numerical charge.  “number is the wisest of beings and second in wisdom is the name-maker”, according to Pythagoras. At the quantum level there are only numbers, anyway.
Lexomorphe Chrysalis ΧΡΥΣΑΛΛΙΣ (Homage a Stazewski, Concept/Form, 1991}photo S.Samios
Horizontal configuration
The vertical geometrical configuration of the word Chrysalis
 breeds the momentous form of the Grail 
is language growing  space points connected with the gravity of the word?

Continuing my experimentation, I lifted the board with the word ΧΡΥΣΑΛΛΙΣ in a vertical position, I pivoted the constructionand the form of the Grail emerged. 
Was the archetype of eternal quest shrouded in the numerical orbits of a Greek name which, according to Anaxagoras, is a “Speaking Sculpture”? Was it the very archetype of eternal quest that had hurled me in this quest?
 True or false, in my self-consistent story, it made sense; archetypes are the generic source of  ideas, that may, or, may not find their way in the insufficiencies of spacetime. The weird thing is that you cannot be conscious of their workings unless you recreate them from  inside out, swallowed in their vibrational belly. Archetypes are ever promiscuous and ever virgin; they are always new.
Lexomorphe Chrysalis was to become, 14 years later, in 2004, an Olympic, logocentric monument,  which connected vertically, the event of the return of the Olympic games to their seed principle of Dionysian regeneration, seeded in 14th BC Arcadia Lykaia games, in which, the champion, like a chrysalis, on the verge of life and death, trespassed, with a leap of self- hypervasis, his mortal condition and was venerated as an Immortal, regenerating, through resonance, the natural world with this act.The olympic games are not games of survival, but, contests of trespassing the instinct of survival itself. In Greek they are called Olympic Agones; the agony of striving towards Being.
In the internal coherence of my system, the whole 'Grail' adventure (1990-2004-   ) was encapsulated in my ritual performance, in the sunken altar of Mornos lake, in 1990.
 The Word itself seemed to be endowed with the power to stretch the idea from its atemporal inkbed into the insufficiencies of spacetime. 
Was the word Chrysalis a warped passage to our  fourth dimension? Was its Grail-like shape analogous to its 'spectral dimension' while touching the building blocks of spacetime?  
Through art I could play and tinker concretely with abstract ideas and get insights into the true nature of things "which likes to hide"(Heraclites).  

the word monument Chrysalis hosts the Olympic Flame, Floisvos, Athens 2004
peformance Persephone in the temple in the bottom of the lake 1990



The numerical scaffold of the word ΧΡΥΣΑΛΛΙΣ 2004 was dressed, for the Olympiade, with my innovative material PXK; a lace-like, flexible and light, aluminum-based material, named after the initials of my name, which, coincidentally, turned out to be the scientific name of a homo sapiens gene connected to mutation. It was the Human Genome year 2003.

The next five years I was busy realizing the open-ended  planetary installation PXK ROUTE 2004-09-. The planet had shrunk to the size of my home: I was starting a PXK installation in the Biennial of Beijing 05, to continue it, after a few days in the Biennial of Poetry in Italy, to extend it to the Biennial of Tashkent 07 and the next day to continue the installation in the White Night event, in Paris 07.....It was a thrilling, skin-shedding adventure, carrying rolls of PXK under my arm, travelling throughout the globe,  leaving behind, PXK extensions, converting old things, into still older and precious works of art, like the Midas touch. PXK became the symbol of the Biennial of Poetry in Alessandria, Italy 04, titled Truth and Deceit and in 2008 my PXK dress was awarded a golden medal in the Olympic Fine Arts of Beijing. The whole installation PXK ROUTE, which looked like a fossilized remnant of a lost civilization, detected in the sea bed of time, from some point in the future, was presented in the international symposium organized by the Biennial of Beijing 2008.
It was obvious to me, by then, that whatever was related to the word Chrysalis had the winged dimension of the butterfly; the Logos (reason to be) which gave meaning to the Chrysalis' life and  death. Is language the career of our entelechy?
In the same way, the Greek word Psyche/ ΨΥΧΗ revealed, through its numerical modelling the form of a butterfly, the word ΜΈΔΟΥΣΑ/Medusa generated a spinning wheel, image of mental acceleration (Gorgon). The word ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣ generated an Eagle, symbol of the Spirit. The word ΟΝΟΜΑ/Name took the form of an amphora; the container that gives form to the void .
DAKRY (teardrop)
ANTHROPOS
 MEDOUSA

Always on the edge of truth and deceit, like all this story, the Lexomorphes have something of the Troubadours' Gai Savoir, with the double ambivalent meaning. They feed the elusive Erotimatikon which snowballs, like its derivative Eros, keeping us in creative tension.
The Lexomorphes are a polysemantic code that could be carved on rocks, just in case of, God forbid, nuclear disaster, or, on space-communication plates. It is a meaningful information system tool, which can be easily programmed in the computers, maybe as a tribute to the ancient Greek computer of Antikythera. 
Code Lexomorphes is an elegant information code, deeply rooted in our Pythagorean cultural heritage. True or false it is a way to create a self-consistent system that generates ontological and formalistic questions..  

ΟΝΟΜΑ, ΕΛΠΙΔΑ, ΨΥΧΗ, ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣ/ name, hope, psyche, anthropos
Lexomorphes applications by P. Kasda, A. Papantoniou, A. Sitra
Number sets, according to Banach -Tarsky, can cross dimensions, re-scaling without losing their characteristics. The Lexomorphes are number configurations that help us understand the gravity of words.
According to Heraclites «the name is uttered from the invisible and it is a physical law".
Fred Hoyle compares the letters of the alphabet to genes of cosmic origin which contribute in the evolution of life. For Burroughs, language is an extraterrestrial virus which tortures us but saves us from entropy.
Could language be an extra-dimensional virus; the Virus of MAN which transmutes us from animals to human beings? In Greek language, a process of self -birth is latent, a drive pushing us to  self-surpassing heroic fits, that challenge our own survival needs. 


Architectural simulation applications of  the numerical modelling of the  word ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣ
Poly Kasda -Anna Sitra (architect)
The Lexomorphes are elegant logocentric structures, which could be embedded in the urban architecture, for a renormalization of our rhythm, which is systematically, disrupted by the systems of power .
Walter Benjamin had sustained that the seat of ontological experience is language.
Here, I deposit a parcel of my adventure in the morphic fields of a word-that-swallowed me; a game of hide and seek with the Zopyron; the 'Fire' that makes us grow out of ourselves, creating culture within civilization; Culture is based on open possibilities and self -hypervasis, Civilization is based on self maintenance and survival needs (L. Blaga). In Greek language these two words coincide: 'Politismos'.
Survival without self-supercedence, is not possible, in Greek culture
Truth/ αλήθεια means fishing for the divine/ «θεία άλη». Greece follows, incessantly, the muddy steps of God. Our language reflects the Horrible Mystery of the fractal fission of this 'indescribable Logos' from Α το Ω, in which Being, or, PAI, dies and is, uninterruptedly, reborn.

synthesis of Lexomorphes ONOMA, PSYCHE, ELPIDA, ANTHROPOS
(Kasda-Sitra- Papantoniou)
On August 22 NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has left a dot Morse code track on Martian soil.
Here, I propose an elegant code rooted in ancient Greek Pythagorean tradition. 

 

In the Australian Kalkatoungou aborigine dialect, the word for ‘eye’ stands also for ‘seed/ star/ raindrop’, that is the analogical way the aborigine embed themselves in the world. This netlike approach was similar to what was happening in the Magistrus kitchen, around the table covered with plums, olives, bread and endless coffees; we were treating the void as solid water: Huge word-structures, were rising like alien ship prows, opening up into other word structures; the world was transformed into a holographic acropolis of talking sculptures, sliding on infinite layers, which started from the everyday things to reach a realm of ideas in the depths of my memory, lying anywhere else, outside my brain. In fact, we were creating a meta- space, with transcendental coordinates, hovering above the usual space”. P. Kasda {extract from The word that swallowed me, unedited}


-Code Lexomorphes was first presented in Greece in the congress on Greek language 2009, organized by the Chamber of Visual Arts ΕΕΤΕ in the ancient Parliament, with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture.
- In the congress Urania's Gardens, for the Year of Astronomy 09, in the Cultural Center of the Municipality of Athens, Code Lexomorphes was proposed as a code for interspace communication 
- Project-research Lexomorphes was  first published in Poesia e Spiritualita, Italian review, issue 1. 
- The digital illustrations of the Lexomorphes were made by gameimager Antonis Papantoniou.

@ Polyxene Kasda



Δευτέρα 28 Μαρτίου 2011

Polyxene Doodling Perturbations of a probabilistic mind

PAI 2010 EPOFE Collection for the Municipality of Samothrace
Olympic Doodling, Third Biennale of Beijing collection 2008

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Doodling
My Doodles are magnified notebook, automatic, insightful sketches, which I fevereshly create when I am in this (usually unconscious) in-between state of things, in-between projects, in the subtle field of open possibilities and dancing probabilitlies. In these sketches, I can detect secret unconscious processes, reaching, sometimes, deep, atemporal levels lurking in the suggestive hum of my life. The selected doodles are, then, processed, intuitionally, with bright colors in Photoshop. They are, finally, printed on frameless transluscent membranes, stressing their in-between, unfinished, dynamic, momentus state. Doodling is a relaxing, authentic technique of self-revealing fun.
Greenfeast 275cmX300cm
Croisees d'Arts 2009, Municipality of Chateau-Landon, France
Design 2009, House of Cyprus, Athens
PrimoPiano LivinGallery 2010, Lecce, Italy
Flag exhibition UNESCO 2012, Beirut, Lebanon 



Doodling during my phone discussions with AI man 2014


Κυριακή 9 Ιανουαρίου 2011

Treasure-hunt cultural game PAI 2011




 Illustrations by gameimager Antonis Papantoniou




ΠΑΙ


«The aeon is a child (ΠΑΙ) playing (chess);' the kingdom is the child's". (Heraclites, fg.52)

Sometimes, a word opens its gargling ‘mouth’ in the midst of our ordinary reality, swallowing us in its resonant belly, in which we shed our skin, peeling and molting according to its image. Thus, the word is incarnated over and over again.
My obsession with the word ΠAI started in the nineties, when I surrendered to SEM; this irresistible attraction of Something Essential Missing; sort of a wound, grafted deep inside me, so deep it was touching the stars and even more. SEM was infiltrating, in my recurrent dreams, in the form of a tiny child; a little prince, pulling me with its little hands out of my comfort, waving me in a game of hide and seek, throwing me into continuous self-shedding adventures and wonders, in the abysmal spongy fields of legends and myth; its natural landscape.
My desire to share this fascinating mythical dimension, softly, overlapping our conventional reality, led me to create the Maps of the Hidden Treasure in the nineties, in which, ancient symbols, names, and natural elements, sprouting in mythical sites of Greece, were interconnected in meaningful experimental itineraries, in which, the participating poets, each “looking for himself” (101), was entering the self-referential riddle of "true nature which likes to hide”(123), feeling the pleasure of “God that transmutes like fire, which, when mingled with incenses, is named according to the perfume of each” (67). There are exceptional gaps in our time texture, which escape from the censorship of our perceptual system, shortcuts to the undetectable background hum of our existence. Those maps were described by D. Bisutti as “landscape semiotics...opening doors to unimaginable dimensions” (La Clessidra.n.1, 1995).
In this map-making process, I was attracted, in 1998, to Samothrace, the legendary island of the Great Gods, where, the mysteries of Ierogamia (sacred wedding) and conception/ birth of the divine Child were at the core of the Cabirian Mysteries. In this sacred site, I recognized the mythical confirmation of a deeply emotional, visceral experience I had in the nineties, as I was painting on old tiles while tuned to SEM: this unknown source of magnetism.
I witnessed ΠAI, the Child,, traversing, the multidimensional forest of my consciousness, landing in our dimension, while, I was Mother/Kore/Child in the Father, at the same time. It was an intense, wordless, poignant experience, objective and subjective at the same time and I was feeling deeply unworthy of the inner vision of that, unconscious, undetectable emanation which is at the root of our irresistible longing for self -surpassement, for love, for birth, for eternity in time..
According to C. Jung, the archetype of the Child is a psychological organ deep in the human body; a human law which contrives us to perform acts of self knowledge. As a 'bordeline phenomenon', its function depends on our connection with the remote past; its malfunction leads, to the destruction of our conscious mind, by its unconscious content, as we are left, rootless, prone to any external suggestion. On the west of his Bollingen tower which represented, for him, the structure of the psyche, C.Jumg set up, in 1975, a stone cube, with the Greek inscription of Heraclites' fragment 52: “The aeon is ΠAI playing...”.
In the museum of Palaiopolis, in Samothrace, I found the inscription ΠAI carved on a votive clay utensil- or, had I carved it myself, sometime, in order to recover it, someday, at the end of the game? I dared to think in a monumental insightful moment of time collapse- The inside out recreation of symbols is the only way to decipher the enigmatic landmarks of memory and the Child/PAI in me was opening hermetic ancient symbols, feeding itself with their core, growing from inside me, as I was diminishing, willingly, surrendered to its infatuation
Through this secretive, pineal experience, that had preceded my voyage to Samothrace, I had, somewhat, conceived, in my own way, the transtemporary mystery of the Great Gods: Axieros (Demetra/Mother), Axiokersa (Persephone/ Kore), Axiokersos (Dionysus/PAI), distinctively blending in Kadmelos (Hermes, or, the consciousness of the initate himself?).
The tentative approach to these 'matters of the soul' requires, what Lucian Blaga calls, an 'ekstatic' state of mind that transcends antinomies; a state of self-hypervasis which is the contemporary trend: “The simultaneous introduction of the continuous and the discontinuous seems, now, necessary in a form that is not understandable” stated Louis de Broglie in the beginnings of the XXc, referring to the wave/ particle structure of matter.
The antinomic fragments of Heraclites, the ancient Greek thinker, known as the Dark one, or, as the Riddler, are in line with the contemporary quantomechanical view of the world. Their very antinomic structure, triggers in us a fundamental intuition of opposites, that leads to transfiguration and produces presence (Parontopoisis). They “do not conceal, nor do they reveal; they mean (simainei)” (93). Heraclites gives us a clue as to their approach with fragment 122 'agchivassiin'/ “ΑΓΧΙΒΑΣΙΗΝ “, ie. moving like a crab, in all directions, simultaneously, around the hermetic paradoxical nucleus, that keeps us stretched in the high frequencies of Agchinoia which means tension of the mind - Agchinoe, nymph of the running waters, is Cabiro's mother and Cabiro is the Cabirs' mother! Greek language contains a vital, fractal, self-referential puzzle, in which the question is the answer?
““What I undestood is important and what I did not understand is important as well “ commented Socrates on the Riddler's fragments, who captured the image of the aeon as the primordial Child playing and tossing in the theater of time, delivered through us “Mortals/ Immortals, Immortals/ Mortals interchanging, living each other's death, dying each other's life” (62). During the sacred conjunction of mortal-immortal in the Cabirian Mysteries, in the temple of Aphrodite in Palaiopolis, Alexander the Great ( al Acbar or Cabir) was conceived. He was venerated as the son of Aphrodite's priestess Olympias and of Ammon-Zeus. He is an historical facet of ΠAI who has founded the Hellenistic cornerstone of the present age, where like children, we play with the contents of culture; the fundamental blocks of the civilization, of all ages.
It was in Palaiopolis, that the legendary Heracleian Stone was said to transmit its magnetism to the iron rings of the initiates and they, in turn, transmitted to the other rings the enthusiasm of the Stone, creating a transtemporal long chain of lodestones, extending to our days. Was this magnetic Lapis, referred to by Socrates as the Spirit of the Age to which poets are first exposed, at the root of my irresistible SEM attraction, that had pulled me in this vertical adventure?
In 2010, a set of circumstances allowed my return to Samothrace for the ΠAI 2010 events, inspired by my poetic text ΠAI, published in 1996. It seemed like the archetype of the Child was ripe to manifest itself, in this critical time of co-resonance of Being (Tauton) with Becoming (Eteron) as described by Plato in Timaeus; necessary, conjunction of Mortals/Immortal for the rejuvenation of the aeon, which is ΠAI playing, tossing, the theater of time. The cascading landscapes of Samothrace captivate you inside their vibrant waterwalls. All thoughts and fears are reverberating back to you. The only way out, of this intensified echo, is to burst, vertically, out of yourself allowing the revelation of wholeness.
For ΠAI 2011, I prepared the concept for a new Treasure Hunt game, in which, the participants, by shuffling a deck of cards illustrated with the sites and symbols to be discovered, confect their own path, “each, growing according to his missing” (126b), looking for Πai inside/ outside himself, ”disentangled from the estrangement that occurs through the constant intercourse with things' (72), hoping for the unhoped, because if you do not hope you will not explore the unhoped, which is unexplored (18)
They are meant to discover hidden clues while tuned to the Riddler's antinomic fragments which topple our conceptual bed and lead to 'awakening'. The object is perceived as a visible expression of the universal, waving us in the poetic hyperspace that embraces the 'sleepers', unexamined, space, opening ourselves to 'evarestissis'; the universal pleasure of Wisdom “that rules everything through everything”(41), “that is apart from everything“(108).
Listen to the Logos (Word) not to me” (50) advices the Dark one.
In this stochastic project of self/ environmental ecology, we open the challenge for a perceptual shift from an Egocentric to a Logocentric mode of existence.
The Treasure to be or not to be found is ΠAI, the Lapis Exilis,'“that is resting in its change(84a). The neglected cornerstone, which is 'despised by fools and cherished by the wise' (Rosarium Philosophorum) will remain on the island, as a long-now tribute to the legendary Heraclean Lodestone; in the hope that it will attract, in its fields of resonance, future generations, challenging them to investigate anew that ever-promiscuous/ ever- virgin landscape, where “the sun is new everyday” (6), where “you cannot step in the same river twice”, actually, not even once; “we are and we are not”!! (49a).
I write this text in Patmos, five minutes walk from the Apocalypse Cave. On the entrance of the little church, there is an inscription from the book of Revelation: “In the beginning is Logos.” and the Enigma deepens, giving birth to more and more questions. In Greek, 'I question' is 'Eroto', derivative of the word 'Eros', which is an anagram of the word 'Ores' meaning 'hours' (time). The winged PAI is the eternal fugitive in our never ending quest for truth, in our lifelong, timebound, fascinating,Treasure Hunt that makes us human .
Patmos, Art 4 View studio, September 2011
Notes
  • ΠAI /Pai means Child. ΖΩ /Zo means I live, ΠΑΙΖΩ/ Paizo means I play (I live like a child).
All the numbers in parentheses stand for the fragments by Heraclites, as numbered by Diels-Kranz, 1956
  • Π is the mathematical essence of circularity that describes the manifestation of our physical world. It is derived by the ratio of the circle periphery to its diameter, as in the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet Θ, initial of ΘΕΟΣ/Theos (God). Θ is carved on sacred utensils of the island, which belongs to the Gods.
  • hic lapis exilis extat, pretio quoque vilis, spernitur a stultis, amatur plus ab Rosarium philosophorumedoctis ("this stone is poor, and cheap in price; it is disdained by fools, but it is loved all the more by the wise"), Lapis Exilis dedication and Greek Inscription of fragment 52 .on C. Jung's Cube stone at his Bollingen Tower, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollingen_Tower
-The PAI 2010 events in Samothrace were organized by the Union of the Cultural Associations of Evros,
Useful bibliography
K. Axelos, Heraclite et la Philosophie, Les Editions de Minuit, 1962.
L. Blaga, Trilogie de la Connaissance, Librairie du Savoir, Paris, 1992.
C. Jung, C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, Princeton UniversityPress, 1969.
P. Kasda, ΠAI (Les Sept Dormants, coed. Lucian Blaga University press, 1997).

Selected articles
- D. Bisutti, Polyxene Kasda,La Clessidra magazine, 1/1995 Joker, Italy
-. V. Avram,”Sa surprinzi mitul in starea sa originara”, Tribuna Culturala newspaper, 16/5/97 no. 1918, Sibiu, Romania
- E. Van Itterbeek, « ΠAI Toi et moi», Avant-Propos, n. 159 Cahiers Europeens de Poesie, 1997.
- V. Avram, «Spatiul primordial», Transilvania review 1-2-3, 1996, Cultura Nationala, Sibiu, Romania.
  • E. Koscielak «Μyth/Network 5», Arti magazine', Athens 95.
  • P.Kasda, Il Bambino, Poesia e Spiritualita, Milan, Ιtaly.2009
  • - P.Kasda, Progetto Myth/Network 6 Sulla soglia del tempo, La Clessidra n2. Joker'96
- P. Kasda, Myth/Network 5: The Gate of Fire, Euphorion journal, VI, n. 55.56.57, Romania1995
- P. Kasda, Progetto Myth/Network 1-5 La Clessidra n.1 Joker, 1995

- P. Kasda, Cer si pamant, Transilvania 1-2-3, Cultura Nationala, Romania, 1996
- P. Kasda Myht/Network6: Arkteia. Tradition et Modernite Les Sept Dormants n4 et Universite Lucian Blaga press, 1995

ΠAI 2011
Tinkering with the Riddler's 'dark' fragments in the primordial landscapes of Samothrace
Treasure hunt cultural game


Looking for ΠA, the Tracers cross a deep landscape made of fire, earth, air and water exchanges, while exposed to Heraclites' riddles.They are encouraged to experience the ancient symbols as trans-temporal activators of their brain/ psychic functions, through which subtle unconscious processes are made visible, inducing an extraordinary, unified, awareness of the surrounding world, that involves our whole being, while, tuning to the plantworld's time zone, climbing on mountains, crossing woods of cross-woods (taxus baccata), wild olive trees, protogenic oaks, chestnut, wild maple and pear, cedar, plane trees, smelling hundreds of varieties of bushes and herbs. They navigate under Hanging Waters, they dive in iced lakes, lagoons and waterfalls springing at an altitude of 1400m and bath in warm, sulfurous waters.
Inspired by the PAI concept, a group of local residents created the cultural association IDEA to this end. They shared their living experience in selected locations, with A. Papantoniou/VimViva, who illustrated the spots and the clues to be discovered, on a series of playing cards.The Treasure clues, are magnified, beyond proportion, in these surrealistic images that move between the real thing and the idea we make of that thing while searching for something. They also devised a popular Samothrace Game, based on the illustrated deck, dedicated to the building of a local amphitheatre.
The Treasure is the Lapis Exilis, a stone collected in the island of Aphrodite, Melos, which P. Kasda had used in her performance ΠAI, in the ancient theatre of Megalopoles, Arcadia,in 1997. It is meant to be the foundation stone (Themele) for this new theatre; image of the Child playing in the theater of time.. .
"The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense - he is "collective man," a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind." (C.Jung, 'Psychology and Literature', 1930)