Where one can find the Future.

Borges’ future

  “A Weary Man’s Utopia” by Borges is a beautiful short story in which the 70-year-old writer mysteriously encounters a man from a distant future. I don’t want to say much more as it is only a couple pages long… but here are some elements of Borges’ imagined future:

“No one cares about facts anymore. They are mere points of departure for speculation and exercises in creativity. In school we are taught Doubt, and the Art of Forgetting.”

Printing has been forbidden since it is “one of the worse evils of mankind, for it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to a dizzying degree”

Although painting is most definitely well and alive in that world, the colors on the canvas are indiscernible to our eyes (interesting to note that the writer was almost completely blind by the time he wrote that story).

Nightingale

                                                  NIGHTINGALE

 

 

 

If the future is circular and I keep missing the train, then I only need hang out a bit and the next one will come along. That is a fruitful thought. I am immersed in thinking and thinking and thinking on how to fulfil my next art obligation, you must know what I mean, you try hard to get into a show or be part of some amazing opportunity and you make it. Then you have to work out what in heavens name you should really be doing for that show or how to best fulfil that opportunity. Your thoughts, or mine at least, go round and round and round and ideas good bad and ugly appear. And that’s when you miss the train.

 

That’s what happened to me last week before I went to Italy with the promise of working on it there. No way, the weeds were high, the sun when it shone beckoned, the nightingale not only sang day and night but was nesting on the side of the loggia. I cooked, I shopped I haggled over the price of strawberries and left them at the market!! I recovered the sun chairs and paid the water bill. But did no thinking what so ever.

 

 When I got home last night, I caught that train, the one that I had missed the first time, took a look at my notes and my art work stuffed in my bag and knew which of the hundred ideas was the good one. 

 

 

 (I think!!!!!!!)

The future of Memphis is coming…

I recently found out about an up and coming project that could help bring about another arts revolution Memphis.

 

The Memphis Art Park would be a public art complex located downtown that would provide a public space for visual arts, music, dance, theater and film to work, and showcase artistic creativity.

 

While this idea is still only on paper, it is something that the city desperately needs and deserves.

 

Check out this link to a wonderful art park that is growing from idea to reality. 

http://memphisartpark.org/

Variation & Variation

From Sybian Sign Language, written by Jack, illustrated by Joe, published by Fartagnian, today.

“The Future Is Unwritten” – – – Joe Strummer

This post:

o is
o was
o will be
o should be

my last for The Microwave Project.

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Theme & Variation

From Indian Sign Languge, written and illustrated by Robert Hofsnide (Gray-Wolf), published by William Morrow & Co., New York, 1956.

a song from the past about the future by a great (song)writer & poet

The Future is When?

Possible ways to confront The Future:

Near Future– in the future, soon

Hodiernal Future– sometime today

Post-Hodiernal Future– sometime after today

Remote Future– in the more distant future

Predictive Future– expressions of prediction, rather than intentions

NonFuture– events in either the past or present (unclear which)

NonPast– events in the present or future (unclear which)

Not-Yet– neither past nor present, but expected to happen in the future

Future Perfect-by some time in the future, before some time in the future

Future-in-Future– at some time in the future, will still be in the future

Future-in-Past- at some time in the past, will be in the future

Future-Perfect-in-Past- by some time which is in the future of some time in the past

Time is Immeasurable

I’ve found a time warp, it is not a secret so I’ll tell you about it too. Open your cell phone, If you have a Samsung you can follow along exactly, if you have another phone you’ll have to improvise but it should be about the same. Go to the Settings and Tools menu, choose Tools, do not choose sound settings, display settings, phone settings, call settings, etc. Choose only Tools. Inside Tools you will see voice command, calculator, calender etc. Choose World Clock, and only Word Clock. Now you should see a screen with the whole world on it, and on this world you’ll see red dots representing cities, and two black lines intersecting at each setting representing latitude and longitudal location of these cities although none of this is exact and probably not to scale. Now scroll farthest over to the right and you will come to in my phone Wellington, New Zealand, but probably any city in New Zealand will do. Now lets imagine you were in Wellington New Zealand and you took a very long nap, you were very tired and you slipped into a deep deep sleep, almost like a hibernation but only for few hours. You started sleeping at 1:08 pm; while you’re sleeping, me or someone else, like perhaps the CIA comes and picks you up, they carry you to a small atoll, an island by the name of Midway. Scroll right on your phone to follow along with the story, you should now be on the farthest left of your screen, although you might have skipped straight to Samoa, also a territory of the US, it is the same story whether your latitude and longitude are on Somoa or Midway. (you may have already noticed the warp) So you wake up in this other city from taking a nap and its 3:08 pm, or maybe its even 3:15 am. The point is you go on with your life, as if everything is normal, you would never have any idea that it was actually Yesterday !! You are living the same day twice. There you have it: TIME_TRAVEL in its simplest form. I myself am hoping for cyber time-travel, I am actually writing this from the future and aiming it right into the past, yesterday April 7, 2009, the day when it is my responsibility to blog. At least I’m not in Wellington where it is already tomorrow.