Sonic Driving
2018-2021, commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale
*work in progress
So I've mentioned that one of my close school friends was James T. Hong - he moved back to Taiwan, where his family is from. He had met and married a fellow artist - also living in the U.S. at the time.
shamanism or in Chinese, "Wu" (巫). For shamans, our ordinary consciousness is not the only consciousness we have, and our visible world is not the only world that exists. Shamans expand or alter their consciousnesses to enter to the spiritual worlds for various purposes -- mostly to heal people.
Sonic Driving visualizes this tripartite reality: the shaman’s upper world (video), middle world (drumbeat sound), and lower world (drawings).
From historical evidence found in the Blombos Cave of South Africa, the history of ASC dates back to 70,000 to 100,000 years. Researchers have found the evidence of ASC worldwide.
So I get hits from Taiwan on my blog sometimes - James stopped responding to my emails a long time ago. haha. But I think he still may read my blog from time to time. When he did respond before it was always to say he as traveling and busy - so I assume he's using his phone to respond as a text message.
Before he wanted me to use Facebook and he said no one reads blogs - "blogs are dead." But as a shaman - I like transcending death a bit. haha. The Truth is not a popularity contest. Meanwhile his facebook account is shut down.
Sonic Drumming Icaros Singing - based on the psychedelic experience - vid
Please also refer to Sonic Driving for my practice of altered state of consciousness
So as I blogged before - when James returned to visit Taiwan - he brought me back the Buddhist Swastika - reversed - from the temple. I was very intrigued by this gift. When I first met James he said he was vegetarian based on solidarity for Tibet. This was around 1987 - so I also became vegetarian and I stayed vegetarian longer than he did! He later told me he ate meat because Chinese people eat meat. haha.
So I stayed vegetarian up through my intensive qigong training - and I was even mainly vegan for those 13 years. And then I became a scavenger dumpster diver crazy Zen diet - with anaerobic bacteria leaching out of my gums as I did tantra practice. haha. I used up my Yang Qi energy and now I still rely on a meat diet but then I do intensive fasting meditation in the mini-forest....
So I'm very happy to see James' wife - I assume they are still married - doing this shamanic practice. James first introduced me to an altered state via special "brownies" - eating under a bridge - but they did not work - as I guess happens the "First time." But James and I did perform music together very much as an altered state shamanic practice - Jesus and the Mary Chain was our "special" subversive attempt at NOISE to get our Christian school to hold dances (where the vertical leads to the horizontal and thus dancing was not allowed). amazingly - even though one of our friends Chickened Out - and I did my trance chant - and the President/Vice President and Principal all glared at us in the front of the stage - the next year the school held their FIRST school dance! Better to avoid such a noise scenario (my fellow school mates stopped talking to me after that - but it was close to the end of our final year anyway). haha.
Yep that was a REAL - what's that movie? Not FlashDance - oh well. Footloose! yeah. Real Footloose experience.
Right now I am pedaling my bicycle to power the DVD player in the garage to watch the origins of Gospel Music - this is an amazing Documentary.
this is a different doc - on youtube on origins of Gospel
So Brad Keeney focused on the San Bushmen also focuses on Gospel Music as altered state shamanic healing music.
So the idea is DEEP DOWN from the HEART -
is what I quote from Master Nan, Huai-chin as happening to me during my Formosayahausca experience.
https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Formosahuasca
f you do a very strong DMT-based plant medicine - like formosayahuasca while in full lotus for 4 hours nonstop there is a very loud AUM sound that is spontaneously heard emanating from the heart.
This AUM sound is called by Master Nan, Huai-chin, the "conversion of jing to qi" as the opening of the 2nd chakra.
t is the sound of OHMKARA - the heart accessing the Yuan Qi on the right side from the formless awareness energy of the universe.
So that is why it is said AUM is the sound of the universe.
Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality calls it the Tiger's Roar - and so the left ear is the Yuan Qi as it is the right side vagus nerve that goes to the right side of the heart from the reproductive organs - the unmyelinated vagus nerve that is the reptilian vagus nerve.
So then the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum - means "Jewel in the lotus" - and that is the secret of the fire in the water of the qi within the jing - as yang qi is yin shen.
https://www.artsy.net/show/empty-gallery-james-t-hong-the-thing
James T. Hong: The Thing
The Thing takes his idiosyncratic reading of John Carpenter’s cult 1982 science-fiction horror film as a point of departure, exhuming and assimilating diverse theories of “thingness” from the history of Western philosophy within a series of new sculptures, video and sound works.
The exhibition is accompanied by The Book of the Thing: Remarks on Politics, Art, Morality, and Taiwan, a short publication cum manifesto in which Hong addresses the aforementioned subjects through a series of sardonic, topical, and occasionally self-lacerating aphorisms.
Despite the efforts of countless thinkers, the simple everyday question of “thingness” - or the means by which an external object can manifest itself to consciousness - has remained contested ground for millennia. For Hong, the perpetually inaccessible object haunts the history of Western thought - like a scab which can be picked at, but never entirely healed. This state of affairs finds its logical parallel in our contemporary climate of misinformation, in which our field of perception is so clouded, manipulated, and narrowed by the dubious truth claims of various media that we can react only by doubting everything, or more commonly, retreating into false certitude; unable to distinguish truth from fiction or to address our own complicity in the maintenance of the status quo. Everyday life has thus come to resemble an intractable philosophical problem; but what responsibility does the average person have to try and solve this problem?
The primary means that Hong has chosen to articulate these questions are a series of three sculptures - The Thing and two Other Things - interspersed throughout the 18th floor gallery. Recalling a glass-walled cubicle, a biological specimen container, or a museum display case, these locked vitrines each contain and obscure a mysterious object whose identity remains unknown to all but the artist. Experienced only as enigmatic silhouettes - quietly menacing presences lurking beyond membranes of glass and stainless steel - the “things” effectively function as symbolic vacuums. Containing both everything and nothing - or precisely whatever content the viewer projects into them - they invite the beholder to speculate not so much on their actual identity as objects, but on their own perceptual inavailability and the limits of knowledge. These themes are mirrored in an accompanying video work entitled Video of The Thing (2019) in which Hong obfuscates and processes footage from his own early work, The Spear of Destiny: A Film For Everyone and No One (2003).
Reanimating the occidental fixation on the inaccessible, opaque and fundamentally misrecognized object of consciousness for a contemporary moment suffused by paranoia, misinformation, and cynicism, The Thing attempts to speculate on the difficulty, (perhaps impossibility) of genuine knowledge or moral action under the increasingly bleak conditions of global modernity. As with elsewhere in his oeuvre, Hong’s work can sometimes seem to be a deliberate exercise in viewer frustration. However, by provoking this frustration, he perhaps aims to instantiate, albeit negatively, a grasping or searching beyond received knowledge and a critical reflection on the “truths” which have formed us.
So not mentioned is his first film - short - the Thing which Thinks - I joked that this was his "best" film in my opinion because I haven't seen most of his other works. haha. But also because the philosophy was the best and glad to see James returning to this.
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