IMHO (text)

IMHO by Michael Atavar The advantage of being a tourist is that I can float in a kind of bubble, seeing things for the first time, invisible to the usual pressures of work, existing in a place that doesn't yet have a name. And crucially I can have new ideas that I wouldn't have thought about at home. I'm sitting on the beach in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro, at 7:00 on a Tuesday morning, watching the long horizon, the ozone rising, putting on my sunglasses and preparing my eyes for a new look at things. Something I've never seen before. As Robert M. Pirsig says at the beginning of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', talking about riding a motorbike, 'On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.' This sums up where I've been for the last few years. Trying to get inside the scene. And the scene is myself. I'm in Brasília, staying at Hotel Casablanca, looking out from the breakfast room onto the four lane freeway that passes directly by the building. There aren't really any pavements in the centre of Brasília, or any that feel more than temporary pathways, because the city is built completely around the car with no underpasses or walkways that pedestrians can use to cross the large open spaces that connect the north and south sides of the city. It's not uncommon to see people running across the wide roads in the face of oncoming traffic, the 30 degree heat burning down directly on their heads. Today, before 8:00, as I sip my coffee, I see a man walking along the side of the highway, carrying a large floating bundle of pink balloons – which I later realise are bags of brightly coloured candy floss, carried aloft on a pole. The sight of this human interference into what is a very concrete scene, the merging of the Modernist and the pre-modern, takes me completely by surprise. It's these anomalies that really make Brasília a city worth visiting. I sip my coffee and wonder what it all means. Of course nothing here is what it seems. I'm staying at the Casablanca, just around the corner from Hotel Mirage. I'm in the desert, under the intense blue sky, with only the occasional cloud breaking the surface. anything might appear – a white VW van, a space rocket, a yellow house, a batman kite, pink balloons. And of course they do. Clouds cross over the sky, drifting or suspended in the blue. One looks like a flying saucer, a planet, another a hand. Then there's a barking dog and a car. I shade my eyes from the sun. The digital display says 34 degrees. I'm the only one walking up the highway. I see the glitter of the rodoferroviária in the distance, the dust, the shimmer of uncompromising light and I decide to turn back. Where am I? I'm on a long, long road at night, a road that seems to be going somewhere, right to the centre of some great metropolis, the heart of the city. A beautiful road, so straight it could have been measured by a ruler and found to be centimetre perfect. It reminds me of a long line of 11111s and 00000s, a piece of binary code, the pulse of life. Outside the car window, the sky is blue-black, no stars. I'm suddenly walking down the highway, bare feet, the soles cool to the warm tar of the road. In fact I'm centuries old, twenty floors high, made of wind, air and dust coming in from the desert. And back in the car I glide through the apocryphal night, bare hands and feet. The taxi driver and me, we both took off our shoes. On either side of the road, in perfect symmetrical construction, lifted on Le Corbusier-like pilotis, are the superquadras, blocks of housing, little lights. Rows and rows in beautifully complete night-time harmony. I remember something Klaus Dinger said about the drum beat of Neu! He said that it was like a pulse, like a life, like driving down a long straight road to the future. I smile because I'm exactly there. The pulse of Neu! and the melodies of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Cluster. The beautiful cadences of music built by machines. I'm a pink balloon man twenty foot night floating up into the night sky. I'm puzzled by the fact that I want less and less in my work. The progress from .sciis (2001) to iamme (2003) is one of reduction. I'm happy with a long line, a road, a linear narrative, a series of colours, a screen, narrowband. really pared down to the absolute minimum that's necessary to be visually interesting. IMHO Four letters that seem to say it all. In my humble opinion. An 'I' straight as myself, an 'M' that stands for my name, an 'H' like a rugby post to kick a ball straight through and an 'O' for a mouth speaking. Eight straight lines and one curve. If I can't say everything with eight straight lines and one curve – then nothing is possible. I'm interested in Colour Bars, spots of light onto bare concrete, IBM batch processing cards, the line of the horizon as it moves towards dusk, 11111s and 00000s and a long straight road going nowhere. I'm sitting on the second floor of the Grand Bittar Hotel, by the swimming pool, which is empty and deserted – white plastic lounge chairs and an 'S' shaped pool, overlooking the TV tower on the Eixo Monumental. Dusk is coming fast, in minutes. The steady stream of cars on the highway turns from dim light to brightness as car headlights come on and everything turns into a glittering river of light. Everything merges. The red sun like a bomb disappears behind the TV tower, which is soon engulfed in light. As I watch the sky turns suddenly dark and miraculously night comes to the world one more time. Brasília's only bat flutters above the pool, flying upwards to join the owls, eagles and silent shadowy forces of the night world that I feel sweeping across the Exio after hours. I'm sitting in London, Camden Town. It's 19:00, dusk. listening to 'Weissensee' by Neu!, the white roses in the garden burning through the twilight. Oscar Niemeyer is the master of the squiggle – I don't mean that in any way disrespectfully. The squiggle is the highest form of art. Niemeyer has it. Picasso had it – paying his restaurant bill by a squiggle on a napkin, the maître d' bowing respectfully in the Mediterranean sunlight. The squiggle is Japanese calligraphy, it is zero, it is Zen master, it is holder of the world, it is inside life. If Oscar Niemeyer is 97 year old, there are 97 years of preparation in the quick expressive movement of the pen across the paper, 97 years in the line. To be truly plastic the creative arts have to engage completely in the presence of now and that's what Niemeyer does in his drawings. Sometimes when I see a Niemeyer building I feel like laughing. It feels so audacious, takes so many risks in form, seems incredible that it can even exist. I understand that all the space of now is suddenly and completely taken over. It's 11:30. A few puffy clouds have appeared in the blue sky over the Parque Sara Kubitschek. Very small desert clouds, giving no cover, almost evaporating as they form. Taxi 3233900 Maranata UNB Bloco Apartment 15 10:00. An eagle floats high up in the still blue sky, a dog barks in the distance, a housewife can't find her key. VW beetle, dark blue. The countryside hums appropriately. It's 10:00, Thursday. I'm in Rio de Janeiro on a tour of the MEC building (Ministry of Education and Culture), Rua da Imprensa 16, 20030. Designed by a committee of architects headed by Lúcio Costa. LC invited Le Corbusier to come to rio to act as a consultant on the project and Corbusier's influence is so pervasive and so powerful that he often receives credit for the design of the whole building. I'm being given a tour of the building by Ivan Pascarelli, assisted by my Portuguese interpreter. Taking photographs, listening, looking and walking around. On the ground floor is an auditorium with brown leather seats there's a small stage with a 1930s state-of-the-art projection screen for showing movies. Currently it's invisible but I'm told it emerges out of the floor when it needs to be used for a screening. Warm yellow wood panelling, very Brazilian, a colour not at all Northern-European. In my mind my next technology piece will be shown here on this screen and because it's invisible when I first see it, its blankness allows me to project all kinds of ideas onto its surface. All kinds of fantasies. Colour, light, voices – in an endless 24 hour projection. A blank white screen for the cinema running in my head. With Niemeyer you're always looking. I know that seems obvious but I sense it strongly. A De Chirico space, empty of time, suspended in the spotless white light of midday. Monument to Latin America, orange plastic chairs throwing shadows on bare concrete. Different screens lift and form. Palm trees, dust, water pools, mirrored wall. When I look through my digital photographs of Brasília it's the light I miss the most. The light is dazzling, so bright. The dark grey skies of northern Europe have a lot of advantages but when I look back at the sun, the sky and the yellow of Brazil, the range of light experience is what I notice. It's as if my eyesight was allowed to expand to 360 degrees. There seems to be a level of cynicism in London that might be connected with a loss of light. A reductionism. folded down, compressed, held onto – that comes directly out of a lack of access to sky. It's interesting to compare Lúcio Costa blue with Yves Klein IKB blue, the southern vs. the northern hemisphere. Here's a picture of LC blue from the wall Antônio Grassi's office in the MEC building in Rio. The desert is all around me, inside me. I'm a bear, a deer, the call of the quero-quero, the whisper of the wind. In 'Mirror' Andrei Tarkovsky's film of childhood, the wind disturbs the bushes like the spirits are pushing through them. I feel that force here at night. something coming in from the desert, something emboldened by night and the cover of darkness. I see a prostitute in a doorway her bare breasts exposed to the cars driving by. Walking north-west up the freeway, past the Juscelino Kubitschek (JK) memorial, there's a cross marking the highest point in Brasília. which is funny because Brasília is almost completely flat. Brasília is a plane. Not only is a shaped like an airplane or bird, with the north and south arms of the city forming its wings, but it's a plane of meaning, folded out of the desert, a concept, an expanding and shrinkable space of ideas built out of sand. And it flies like a bird over of our expectations of what a city is. Like the parachute kite I see at the market, flying high in the blue sky, the city floats on meaning. A woman asks me do I know anything about Carlos Castaneda. We talk for a while about the chaparral, psychoactive drugs, shamanism and the forces of nature. My Portuguese is limited to 'tudo bem’, 'obrigado' and 'bom dia' plus the thumbs up sign, a hand gesture which I've never used so much as in the last two weeks. It's like I'm permanently hitch-hiking. Is everything OK? In the internet cafes and the hotels, I can only get narrowband. And there's a large picture file in my in-box which I can't delete, making it even more slow going. This is interesting because it reminds me that not everyone has universal fast computer access. I start to recall the kinds of equipment I was making my early computer pieces on – very limited range, few choices, narrow bandwidth and hardly any websafe colours. Yet I managed to make things. Also, on this trip I changed my camera from a SONY DSC-F1 with the possibility of recording only 59 photographs, mode 640 x 480 pixels, to a SONY Cyber-shot DSC-P100 with millions of choices. Although the access to more memory is great, I'm not sure that the artistic quality of the pictures is better, in fact it's probably slightly worse. Previously with only a limited range of 59 choices, I had to be totally confident of a photograph before I committed it to disc. That made the choices better. Now I can afford to be a little sloppier and edit down the selection later – hoping for the best. This situation has made me aware of the likely narrowband nature of my next piece where I'd like to get the file size down to practically nothing. Just a series of 11111s and 00000s, making portability and access much easier. (I'm using 'narrowband' here in a generic sense here to mean the possibility of few choices). It won't alter the artistic quality and identity, it'll just make the piece work a little bit harder at achieving its results. I want to base the idea on complexity theory, taking a very small amount of information and continually processing it until the material achieves a level of intelligence independent of me. It's a bit like this sushi that I'm eating here in São Paulo at Tendai, Al. Jau, 1.842 - Jardins, SP 3088-6690. A special deal, eat as much as you like for $R27. The sushi keeps coming and it's all the same, sort of. It has the same basic structure – rice, seaweed, fish, pickle, but within those parameters endless interesting variations emerge. That's what I want from my work, less content but more impact. I'm after the Holy Grail of all Artificial lifers – making something out of nothing. Von Neumann, Conway, Wolfram, Kauffman, Langton, Farmer, Holland, Hillis, Ray, Lindenmayer, Wilson and Brooks. These scientists and Artificial Life researchers are for me the carriers of the flame. I judiciously dip another piece of sushi in wasabi and shoyu and put it in my mouth. Delicious. I'm interested in watching the horizon and how it changes. Colours move, change, night comes. I just sit and look out at the future coming at one million miles a second. Slowly. Pow! ‘Autobahn’, 'Ohm Sweet Ohm’, 'Fur Immer’, ‘Uranium’, 'Radioactivity' – these are the records I'm listening to whilst writing this e-say. I'm at that age where all films tend to merge into one giant movie. So a scene from 'Radio On' turns out not to be in that film at all but in another completely different piece – 'Kings of the Road' perhaps? Or an image I thought was in Tarkovsky's 'Mirror' turns up unexpectedly in Antonioni's 'Red Desert'. So my life splinters and gets embedded into a thousand objects. A knife, a slice of bread and butter, toast, a car, a kettle, a photograph. All obscure and opaque. And people turn up from nowhere and say the most extraordinary things like 'I recognise colours – orange turning to red. can you see them?' Of course every journey to any place, from London to Brasília, from A to B, is not outward toward the road, but inwards towards ourselves. I suppose what I really want to say is that this journey to Brazil was a journey towards the centre of me. The step on the pavement, the waiting for a bus, the light, the luggage snaking round on one long black conveyor belt – must inevitably be a study in the self. The winding road of our bloodstream pouring us into ourselves. We are going nowhere and everywhere. In Piccadilly the rain pours down to down the ground in vibrating sheets of light. If I half close my eyes everything – all the dirt, rain, light and sound do become one with me. I wonder if staying in the same place is where interior travel really begins? I'm walking though the Superquadras in Brasília with Fernando. Asa Sul 308. Lush verdant gardens, shining bright polished floors, mosaics and a Niemeyer Catholic church like a pointed hat, simple as folded paper. The colour in these buildings is so different from Europe – blue, brown, yellow. Niemeyer uses yellow in completely audacious way. Perhaps it's the light, the palm trees, the Modernist setting – but he pulls it off in a way no European architect could. This yellow colour reminds me of the wood in the MEC building in Rio, warm, soft, generous, open. Set next to the industrial lines it makes the concrete warmly glow. I drink a bottle of water and pick up the packed $R1.60 bus to the centre of town The shutters in Brasília are painted different tones of the same colour and spread out over the whole surface of the building. So whether open or shut, bright blue or dark blue, through these two very simple means the surface maintains a moving complexity that will always be different. I'm reminded of John Cage's message in 'Lecture on Nothing' from 'Silence'. 'I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it'. In Brasília there's nothing I can see but – 'bright blue' 'open' 
'bright blue' 'shut' 
'dark blue' 'open' 
'dark blue' 'shut'
 'open' 'bright blue' 
'shut' 'bright blue' 
'open' 'dark blue' 
'shut' 'dark blue'
 'bright blue' 'dark blue'
 'dark blue' 'bright blue' 
'bright blue' 'bright blue'
 'dark blue' 'dark blue' (rearrange to suit your preferences) and out of that perhaps I can create my poetry. Splodges of blue on a dark blue sky. The contours of this interior surface shift like planes of meaning. The heat of the day, the dust of night. The wind blows in off the desert bringing with it UFOs, the shadow, black magic. The people close all the windows tight at night keeping everything locked out. The men in their gleaming silver machines are coming. They're going to speed through the black desert night at warp factor 99999, over all the stunted desert trees and shrieking crows, until they come to the centre of the world. The UFO in our culture is a kind of cave, the self, the black hole, the machine. It will take you wherever you want or need to go. in 'Journey to Ixtlan' the protagonist in Carlos Castaneda's book is shocked to find out that after his journey is over he cannot go back to his home city. 'There is no way to go back to Los Angeles. What you left there is lost forever.' When you change the world changes with you. Whether to A or B, whether to X, whether to Rio or Los Angeles, Brasília or São Paulo, the world will not be the same place and things you loved and cherished before might not be there or not be the same as when you left. That's the pain of change. The secret desert wind brings in new things, blows darkness and light into the superquadras, the bus shelters, the shopping precincts and homes. The long line of the highway – – – – is coming to a close. This wind through the bushes, that light, this desert sun, those windows. The pulse of the road is slowly stopping, like a white van coming to a halt. The blank silver screen I saw at the MEC building in Rio is calling me to write something on it. The movie in my head whirring into action. I squiggle on a napkin whatever comes into my head first. IMHO. Just like in Tarkovsky's 'Mirror' the spirits are moving rapidly through the bushes and trees. So what's next on the blank screen? (c) Michael Atavar 2005-2026