“No doubt about it, the mind can change the universe. (…) The power of imagination within our mind, combined with the abilities of our hands to make that imagination reality, has given us a power that we are scarcely able to master.

But how is it for that other mind, the mind in the waters? How is it for these enormous, alien brains that traverse the oceans, whose songs ring out, which dream, which dwell on distant memories, which school one another in decency and morals? What are things like in the spiritual world of a creature whose brain is bigger and quite possibly more complex than ours, and which is unable to convert its will into world-changing action – and is this merely because it has no hands?

I believe we can immerse ourselves in the mind of the whale as we immerse ourselves in water. Be it a warm, lapping tropical sea or a powerful, cold swell at higher latitudes – water is the cradle of the whale’s consciousness.

Anyone who enters the sphere of the water can see immediately how close the relationship between mind and body is that the sea imposes on its creatures. Without alienating possessions and equipment, alone with the naked body that surrounds the suspended mind, mind and body again become one. The mind penetrates a new sphere, in which it experiences time, gravity and its own self as a whole.

Just to try it out, I imagine I am in the water, in a world of ever-changing currents, revolving days and nights, in which I am just as aware of the gravitational pull of the moon on my body as of the call of my children next to me. Living there, where the world stirs and moves, minute by minute – recognizable across the centuries for me and my kind – I float and breathe and think and allow the water to wash over me and the sun to fill my eyes with silver sparkle.”

This “sequence of thoughts” by Joan McIntyre came to mind when I was writing the last article on the free-diving adventures of Guillaume Nery. “Mind in the Waters” is the book she first published in 1974, from which the above extract comes. Even after nearly forty years, it remains a source of realization and of intellectual pleasure.

Joan McIntyre: Mind in the Waters. A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins. 1974 by The Yolla Bolly Press in cooperation with Project Jonah, Sausalito, California. Earnings from this book go to Project Jonah and its campaigne for a worldwide moratorium about the killing of whales and dolphins.

A man stands barefoot in the white sand of the seabed. His body is submerged in water to the very tips of his hair. He wears a nose clip and diving goggles, but no breathing apparatus, no compressed-air bottle – because he isn’t breathing. He stands calmly on the edge of a yawning chasm looking over – over into the darkness of a sheer 200-meter drop directly before his feet. It is the edge of a “blue hole”. And he isn’t breathing.

After a brief moment of concentration, he bends his knees slightly and prepares to jump from this position to then launch apparently weightless in free fall, down to the bottom of this chasm whose floor is hidden in the darkness. He disappears from view in an instant.

He glides down ever deeper. High above him in the distance, the waves beating against the coastline shimmer, while all around him the darkness grows with every meter that he dives. It’s as if a magic attraction is drawing him irresistibly into its power so that he can only submit to the pull and in this gliding free fall he merges completely with the elements and forces at play.

His feet then touch the seabed. Having arrived at the bottom and still holding his breath, he begins his journey back to the sun-flooded waves of the reef on the coast of Long Island on the Bahamas. He nimbly climbs the last stretch of the steep, rocky edge of the hole called Dean’s Hole, the world’s largest ocean hole so far discovered. Now at the surface, his head comes above water for the first time and after a seemingly eternal moment of complete inner and outer calm, he takes his first breath and returns to life.

Certainly an extreme experience of boundless freedom! Close to death and drawn down by a magical hand that even casts an inescapable spell on those who have only watched French freediver Guillaume Néry on this adventure in Dean’s Hole virtually on a screen.

I was also unable to resist this unbelievable, downright infuriating fascination the first time I saw the film recently. I was told about Guillaume Néry by a good friend and partner in the OUBEY project, who is just as much at home in our oceans as he is on land, and who knows about OUBEY’s love of water, the oceans and their inhabitants, and about its deep passion for diving. Since at the time my thoughts were in any case on an intensive journey through the marine architecture of Jacques Rougerie, the first-hand exploration of the seabed by a human diver without the protective shell of a Sea Orbiter, without any technical aids, with net and double floor, appeared to me to be the logical extension of these architectural fantasies. The investigation of uncharted worlds and borderline exploration of self rolled into one.

The fascinating effect of this near-death diving adventure for the outside world is as extreme as the dive itself. The excitement on the edge of a blue hole in the ocean is perhaps similar to the exhilarating singularity on the edge of a black hole in the universe from which there is no escaping once a certain point of approach has been passed. Possibly it is the same yearning in both adventures that has filled our dreams since we first gazed upward to the night sky, the dream of drifting through the endless space above us in an attempt to discover the secret of our true origin.

You can watch the videos concerning this post here and here.

It takes an effort to believe your eyes the first time you lay them on the sketches of Jacques Rougerie. The French architect presents us a futuristic city concept that follows the trail of the great Jules Verne into the freedom of the watery deep, of an entirely different shape from Fritz Haller’s Integral Urban. Architecture and literature appear to cross paths in science fiction in an extraordinarily creative and fascinating way, fertilizing each other again and again. Indeed, Rougerie makes no bones about his enthusiasm for the fantastic adventures of Captain Nemo and his Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.

In contrast to Haller’s global settlement model, Rougerie’s Underwater Village is a flirtatious “one-off” whose elements are more reminiscent of exotic plant and animal life from the depths of the ocean in their design and architecture rather than actual habitable buildings.

The firmly anchored yet free-moving enclosure to the Seaspace underwater observatory also bears striking similarities to living sea creatures or mutations of fish and gigantic crustaceans.

The spectacular Sea Orbiter capsule resembles a giant seahorse or the muzzle of a gigantic white shark striking out of the water with full force. It offers enough space for a crew of 18 and the launch is planned for 2013. The Sea Orbiter is able to travel noiselessly in water because it is driven by the ocean current. More than half of the 51-meter-high building is under water, with five storeys worth providing a free view of the underwater world from huge windows. It opens up entirely new realms for experiences and realisations to the people on board – and that over weeks or even months. Previously unknown and undreamt-of possibilities of observation are there for the taking and we can finally add to our scant knowledge of this alien world. Apparently, 80 per cent of the oceans are currently uncharted.

And anyone lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this “ship” on a journey of discovery through the oceans one day will trust their eyes even less than they did when they looked at the model in diagrams. What’s more, the amazement will be a lingering one.

The images to this article appear on Jacques Rougerie’s must-see website.

It would be no exaggeration to label Fritz Haller’s audacious concept for an “Integral Urban” of the 1960s and ’70s as utopian. It sketches a megalopolitan living space in which new dimensions are opened up primarily through the scales he thinks in. This is not about tens or hundreds of thousands, but about billions of residents who would populate cities of gigantic proportions scattered about the Earth.

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Their individual and social needs are also taken care of, as are infrastructure requirements of all kinds and, most importantly, the needs of Nature. There are no private cars in this vision; instead an environmentally-friendly rail system perpetually transports the population backwards and forwards between nodal points on short and medium trajectories, with the journey from home to work taking a maximum of 45 minutes. Long hauls will either be in high-speed trains or, when global distances are involved, by aircraft of the next generation, whisking passengers between New York and Frankfurt in just two and a half hours.

click image to enlarge

It is a holistic, ecological approach, the dimensions of which are capable of arousing a mixture of fascination and frightening, right up to the drawings that visualise a grandiose geometrical and geographical order, whose aesthetics appear as functional as frightening. And yet what always appealed to OUBEY and to me as well in Haller’s global settlement concept was the wide expanse taken by nature, and with it the conscious self-limitation placed by man on his living space in favour of his natural environment.

As in any genuine utopia, this plan sets aside subsidiary problems, focuses on the basics and first and foremost challenges the powers of imagination. Yet, with his typical modesty, Haller admits in the first of his two volumes: “The significance of the work as a whole is no greater than a narrow path in a huge forest of unexplored possibilities.”

The drawings are taken from “Fritz Haller: Integral Urban – A Global Model.” Walter-Verlag Olten, 1975. The quote is taken from “Fritz Haller: Integral Urban – A Model.” Walter-Verlag Olten, 1968.

The modular USM Haller furniture system is famous around the world. Yet the name of architect and visionary Fritz Haller, who designed it, is only known to a few. The reason for this could be that his style of thinking and the concepts were far ahead of their time when they arised. It should therefore come as no surprise then that Haller’s free spirit was hugely appealing to OUBEY.

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It was not only the radical consistency that has always ensured Haller’s constructions and concepts have stood out due to their modular systematics, but above all his clear and uncompromising focus on the needs of Planet Earth and its inhabitants that have served as the foundation of OUBEY’s close spiritual connection with Fritz Haller. The fact is that Haller has not only designed industrial and purpose-built constructions and the furniture system that bears his name and follows the same modular principle as his houses. Sometimes collaborating with his students, he also developed such futuristic concepts as “Integral Urban” and “Prototypical Space Colonies”. The indiscriminate habitation of Earth due to the ruthless, unsystematic appropriation of the planet by humans challenged him to take an all-encompassing view from which he developed fascinating visions for more intelligent lifestyles. The universe is always at the focus of his work – as regained space for nature on Earth and, beyond this, as an extraterrestrial living space for those people withdrawing entirely from Earth and removing their lives to space colonies.

Although not intended by Haller for actual realisation, these concepts are still a strong starting point for worthwhile discussion. Architecture integrates building and living – always, in good and bad senses. Architecture as an expression of free thinking that recognises the problems of the future and counters them with bold designs is a rare thing. And all the more precious for that. A symposium will now celebrate the life’s work of Fritz Haller, now 87. In homage, the spotlight will be thrown on the various aspects of his work at the ETH in Zurich on 15 and 16 March. More information here.

“Science begins with wonder”, said Aristotle. We come to wonder via curiosity and through the yearning to discover. Following on from this wonder, we arrive at unique moments of insight, awareness and thought.

Wonder appears to be a very special source of insight. We are inspired by respect and admiration for the unusual, unexpected and surprising, which does not appear to be too unbelievable to take it to be real or at least possible. Wonder presupposes the faith that what amazes us actually exists. And for this very reason, it may drive us beyond our conventional perception of life and catapult us into new experiential dimensions. Like a springboard. OUBEYs pictures whisk those who view them into new raptures of amazement every time.

Wonder in itself is a wonderful thing. Enjoying one’s personal wonder, though, is another thing altogether. “If you have lost the ability to be amazed, you’re actually already dead”, said Einstein. Someone who has lost the capacity to be amazed thinks they know everything or no longer wants to learn and has agreed to a fatal limitation in their opportunities in life. Wonder has all the seductive power of enthusiasm. To allow oneself to be amazed is to set off an exciting spiritual adventure. Children are amazed most of the time and are not shy of it. Everything is new for them. Through them we experience in uncontrolled immediacy the joy that wonder can trigger in a person and the powerful emotions tied up in it.

Wonder is the beginning of insight, not its end. The smallest things can ignite our sense of wonder, as can the largest. Like a key opening a door, it opens up a path which takes us into unexplored, unknown and inexplicable territory. The further we penetrate and the more we learn about ourselves and the cosmos we inhabit, the greater our wonder. Our amazement grows with every advance in science.

“Immediacy is crucial for my pictures. Immediacy is something which can only be reached through feelings. Ideally the picture should go straight into the eye or into the heart like a sound or a ray of light. With all the considerations that may be behind it, ultimately emotion is crucial. Because emotion is something that speaks to everyone, everyone! Feeling is thinking ahead and also thinking it over. Emotion is like a rubber band, a springboard, a catapult. The higher the space is, in which emotion can develop, the better.”

OUBEY

It does truly seem that OUBEYs pictures reach the hearts of many viewers immediately, like a sound, or a ray of light. They always not only evoke a variety of associations and ideas, but also trigger emotions.

“It´s a sort of an earth language that has been painted”

Mezzo-sopranist Liz Howard, for example, experienced during her encounter, how OUBEY opens up a space of emotions, as high and large as possibly imaginable. You can watch this video here.

Recently, someone asked me why I write so much about all kinds of issues instead of telling more about my experiences concerning the MINDKISS project or my personal thoughts on OUBEYs images.

OUBEY himself layed the path for my answer, stating: “My art simply reflects the joy of insight“. The MINDKISS project follows this track. It sends impulses, opens doors, initiates encounters and makes new discoveries possible – triggered by OUBEYs art and its spirit. Anyone can take a walk on the wild side of this terrain, discovering the habitat where OUBEYs mind was at home, just for the joy of finding, as I enjoy doing, too. That’s what I call the MINDKISS track.

Further, the encounter videos of individuals with OUBEYs pictures, which I publish online, follow the MINDKISS track, too. They open up surprising perspectives, and new ways of thinking – moments of discovery for all who partake. The whole thing is like an ever growing puzzle, its parts composing different pictures in every mind, not following a defined set of patterns.

Pieces of a puzzle:Twelve encounter videos are already online.

If you like OUBEY and his art, you may also be interested in monads, strings and quanta, prototypical space colonies and (under)water worlds, Perry Rhodan, Prigogine, Tschaikowsky and Stanley Kubrick, in waves, rays and sounds, and alot more of these topics, which I write about on OUBEYs blog. Therein, similar to the encounter videos, a part of the primal ground can be found, where OUBEYs art derives from. To enable this, I consider to be part of my role in this project.

Of course I still enjoy writing about my experiences within the MINDKISS project every now and then. Perhaps I will do so again soon, as I will be going on another “encounters tour“ with some of OUBEYs originals. But in the end, I enjoy writing about the topics that OUBEY and I, too, always found to be most interesting and amazing, because they entwine his art with the cosmos, and thereby with all of us, too. From the comments received on OUBEYs blog, I know that some of you have come up with very own findings, and do enjoy this a lot. That is why I like to write the blog as I do.

Although string theory is supported by famous scientists such as Professor Brian Greene of Columbia University in New York, the fact remains that many others still view it as adventurous and unconfirmed. This might have to do with the basic assumptions that form the prerequisites for string theory, and inherently its verification. These adventurous-sounding assumptions surely stretch our capability of imagination.

Amongst these prerequisites, is the assumption, that the universe is not only comprised of the four dimensions of space-time, as they are known to most of us, but rather a baffling total of eleven dimensions. Linked to this, a further assumption states that our universe would be not the only one in the cosmos. The concrete ideas of a multiverse have many forms. Could our universe, with its three dimensions, lie like a plain valley in an elevendimensional cosmic mountain range comprised of several universes? Could it look like a bubble, interconnected with other bubbles by wormholes? Perhaps it looks totally different; nobody can say for sure. David Deutsch of Oxford University, creator of the quantum computer, however is convinced of the existence of a multiverse.

cubes, bubbles or other shapes – nobody knows yet what the multiverse looks like

A human imagination that radically defies the boundaries of conventional thinking, yet is combined with, and obeys the laws of exact sciences such as mathematics and astrophysics – that is science fiction at heart. Intellectual adventures such as these, as an expression of unrestrained freedom of thought combined with a precise scientific approach at the highest level, cause and also express what OUBEY once called “the joy of insight”.

What we believe to be impossible today, may soon be reality. The gaps between these extremes decrease more and more, and we will see how the evolutionary capability and speed of the overall system of mankind, will be able to keep pace with the rapidly growing outcome of its brain, in the long term.

Following the ideas of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in their joint preface of “2001 – A Space Odyssey”, one could see it like this: The truth will, in the end, be far more surprising than we can possibly imagine today.

Amongst other sources, you can also find the original quotation of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in OUBEY MINDKISS: StarPixels. Also you can find out more about the multiverse here.

Interestingly, a considerable overlap exists between the exploration of the question of what music really is, and what meaning it may have in interacting with the cosmos. This overlap includes investigations into various sciences such as astrophysics, mathematics, brain research and music research. The complexity of being and becoming in the cosmos is a subject that may only be studied interdisciplinarily. The idea, that something as basic as music may hold the key to new insights on this topic baffles many. When following OUBEYs mental and artistical tracks, this does not come surprisingly.

Upon asking the simple question, how basic tones and noises differ from what we would call sound and music, we find ourselves searching for an answer in the midst of these different sciences. From tone comes sound, when the oscillation of a tone triggers several overtones, as is the case, when the keys of a piano strike the strings, or when the bow of a violin is stroked over its strings. What is created, is a whole series of resonance, that follows strict mathematical rules. Such an oscillation can be described as mathematics, which – with the aid of our brains – turns into music.

Brain research shows, that the auditory cortex is arranged according to pitch, similar to a piano. Different neural areas decipher different aspects of music: High notes, low notes, rhythm, etc. It is claimed, that no cognitive function in our brain has nothing to do with music.

Also, astrophysics now begins to ask the question, if music might possibly be the heart of all material. It is said, that even the black holes create tones, but they lie 57 octaves below what the human ear can hear. When following the string theory, then strings are the smallest building blocks of the universe; inconceivably tiny strings of energy, which are in constant vibration, much like the strings of a violin or a piano, when they are stroked.

Free-floating strings – a computer animation from the Video “What Einstein Did Not Know Yet”

Is it possible, that our universe is simply a grand cosmic symphony, composed of the vibration of these strings?

Video Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si8erALNaHE