Category Archives: Petervan Ride

Petervan Studios – Update Nov 2020 – Intervals of Possibility

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Petervan memories from the 70ies – First artistic performances

It’s almost one year (!) since my previous Dec 2019 update. And what a year it was/still is! I basically stayed home for the whole period and had zero travel since Oct 2019.

I am publishing this on the day Belgium is entering its second Covid-19 lockdown. A forced pause-marathon starting on my 63th birthday on 1 Nov till at least mid-Dec 2020. But I am afraid the effort will have to run until deep into 2021 and I am preparing for it as an “interval of possibility”.

An interval of possibility is a temporal framing to see better what is and what can emerge. There is indeed still so much to read, to learn, to experiment, to play with. So many contexts to be architected. So many interesting people to (re)connect with (at least virtually). So much opportunity for spiritual, moral, and aesthetical advancement! Expect me to be quite generative in the coming weeks and months.

The Artschool Project

The Artschool academy year started again in Sep 2020, and I subscribed for a two-year curriculum labeled “specialization”.

“Professionalization” is probably a better title for what it is: a focus on getting the (art)work done, commitment, and ambition. We’ll learn to discover our own visual language starting from our personal frames and themes with the ambition to develop our own artistic maturity and identity. This is about personal reflection, self- and group-critique, evaluation, and research. About creative identity and creative disposition. And about how to create a portfolio, develop contacts with galleries, presenting your own work, setting up your own expo, etc.

From an artistic medium point of view, my main focus will remain painting on canvas, but I will keep experimenting with other (mainly digital) media.

I shared most of my recent work via my Facebook page, or on this blog under the heading “Sine Parole”. I also started selecting more straightforward subjects, such as vases, landscapes, cows, fruit, and everyday objects. In many cases the obvious and what is in front of you is interesting enough. Here is an example of some apples from our mini orchard:

Petervan Artwork © 2020 – Apples – Acryl on Canvas – 50x50cm

The upcoming Cow project

I have something with cows (pun intended). I met many during my summer bike tours. It feels it is going to become yet another a thematic series, like the prison windows, or the birds, or the boxers.

Petervan Artworks @ 2020 – Cow Project – Digital Try-out
Petervan Artworks @ 2020 – Cow Project – Sketch of the Intervals of Possibility

One option is to create a cow-sign-language and typography, or maybe see how I can get them generated through in-the-cloud AI neural networks.

Via Mario Klingeman (@quasimodo) -AI generated shapes

Exhibitions

Last year, I visited some art exhibitions, including:

  • There is no Planet B – S.M.A.K., Ghent, Dec 2019
  • Inge Decuypere – Ronse, Feb 2020
  • Dali-Magritte – Museum Fine Arts, Brussels, Feb 2020
  • Love-Hate – ING Gallery, Brussels, Feb 2020
  • Keith Haring – BOZAR, Brussels, Feb 2020
  • Van Eyck – Museum Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Feb 2020
  • Stephan VanFleteren – FOMU, Antwerp, July 2020
  • Writing Beyong – Axel Vervoordt, Wijnegem, July 2020
  • Dechamps, Panamarenko and Co – Deweer Gallery, Zwevegem, Oct 2020

There were many more, but due to Covid-19, many musea were closed or had restrictions.

Stephan VanFleteren – FOMU, Antwerp, July 2020

My own exhibition

I ran my first solo (100% virtual) exhibition during summer. Some unexpected fans actually bought some of my works. Thank you: this is very encouraging. For those who don’t know: I also do commissioned work. If interested – in buying or commissions – please send me a private message.

Some vernissage impressions here.

Outdoors

We had a great summer in Flanders. Since the start of the first lockdown on 13 March 2020 we had good to excellent weather till mid-September 2020. Plenty of opportunity for being outdoors, with the occasional bike tour or walk.

Freelance

Covid-19 is not kind to freelancers, especially if you target what some people call the “event industry”. With the exception of a small gig in 2020, I basically got no work since October 2019. Contact me in private if you’d like to hire me for “interesting” work.

BANI

Already in 2018, Jamais Cascio coined the term BANI. See my post from Aug 2019 and Jamais’ update from April 2020. As mentioned before, I am working with some partners on a virtual multimedia workshop based on this framework, with a specific focus on possible responses. We have an amazing cast on-board, and it looks that we’ll be able to make some announcements soon.

Design Unbound

I am blown away and intrigued by the insights in Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World. This is about having agency in a world that is constantly shifting under you. It is so refreshing after all those business-, management-, leadership-, and self-help-books. It has become a healthy addiction: I am basically reading and re-reading and deeply internalizing everything that Ann Pendleton has written in the last couple of years.

We are building a team to design and deliver a corporate curriculum on this topic. Stay tuned on the “we” and the “curriculum”.

Pirate TV

Most online events and conferences suck. I have some ideas on how to be more ambitious. See my earlier post on the ambition cube for virtual events.

Still from Pirate TV Trailer – Petervan Studios © 2020

I got the chance to do a commission for a client on this concept and we – the client, the team, myself – learned a lot on what works and what not.

There are now two Pirate TV channels in the pipeline: one more business focused and one more “artsy”.

New toys

For Pirate TV, I wanted to become more fluent in video and sound creation. As there was nothing else to do due to Covid-19, I followed some online courses on Ableton Live, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro X.

These are such rich software environments. Also, their user interfaces make me think differently: thinking in layers, connections, patterns, and harmonies.

Studio Oxygen project

An idea that has been hanging around since 2018, actually.

People are exhausted. Tired of online meetings. Tired of being locked up in their houses. Tired of all the negative news. People crave for oxygen. People crave for small safe groups where they can share, critique, ideate, play.

With a small on-line collective, we plan to come together regularly online to have slow-paced conversations on a topic/seed that I plant.  The seed can be the chapter of a book, an object, a poem, a job well done, or a failing forward.

With a no-frills focus on quality content, we hope these sparks of inspiration will give you “oxygen for the mind”.

Traveling Without Moving project

This will be a series of posts documenting my mental and philosophical journey in 2020.

Some spoiler keywords: silence, pause, play, anxiety, unbound, truth, inappropriateness, genre, and yellow.

Traveling Without Moving (TMW) is also somewhat related to Studio Oxygen and Pirate TV

Books

Check out my GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3085594-peter-auwera

Some highlights:

Also don’t forget Robert Poynton’s “Do Pause”. Together with Josie Gibson we made 8 podcast episodes, one for each chapter in this book. The last episode is here.

Petervan Rides

Since July 2019, I publish every month a Spotify List with new releases combined with some oldies from the 60ies, 70ies, and beyond. Search for “Petervan Ride” and select “playlists”. Subjective selection of course, as driven only by my personal taste (or lack thereof).

Petervan Rides on Spotify

So, what’s next?

I will officially retire from corporate life as from 1 Dec 2020. Not that I plan to stay idle, on the contrary. Within limits, I will stay available for interesting freelance work – I call it “paid play” –  and plan to stay very focused on my artwork.

The plan for the coming months is to work/play on (random order):

  • “Interesting” freelance work
  • Artwork
  • Studio Oxygen
  • Traveling Without Moving
  • Pickup Time Capsules again

So, that’s it for this edition. If there is something worth reporting, next update is for Apr 2021.

#STAYSAFE

#STAYCONNECTED

Warmest,

Moodscape-1 – Clockdust Astronauts

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Clockdust cover

Cover of Rustin Man's "Clockdust" Album

Let’s try something new here: a “mood-scape”, documenting a personal mood/world using words, visuals, and sound. And inviting you to build new worlds by participating on a 1-1 basis. Although “new” is relative: the term moodscape was initially coined in the seventies, and mixing media can hardly be labeled new or novel. But having a “calm” conversation may sound like an anachronism in these times where time itself is collapsing, where time itself has become exponential.

It started with discovering Rustin Man’s new album “Clockdust”. Rustin Man was in a previous life better known as Paul Webb, the bass player of the band Talk Talk. Check out his about page.

Listen to Night In Evening City

I immediately fell in love with the melancholic, nostalgic, slow pace sound of the album, in my opinion, a perfect soundscape for the disorienting times we live in. There is some sort of homesickness here, knowing deep inside that we have already said goodbye to a golden era, and era that I sometimes refer to as the Bowie-Era.

I added a couple of Clockdust songs to my Spotify March 2020 Ride playlist, and one of the songs happened to sit next to David Bowie’s Lazarus song from his Blackstar album. To make a long story short, I created a sub-set of the playlist, containing the songs that I felt best reflected my March 2020 “Mood”. There is one coming for April as well 😉

I suggest you let it play in the background in shuffle-mode whilst reading this blog post, as I believe it may augment what I am trying to share.

The cover is a picture from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), a choreography with costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body.

ballet black white

Ballet colour

There is also this wonderful video testimony of one of the early performances of that choreography

The video sent me back in time – clockdust time – when I was a 6-year old schoolboy. For the very first time in my life, I stood – proudly – in front of a huge whiteboard in the classroom – it was a blackboard with white chalk – and we were invited by the teacher to properly write the letters of the alphabet with white chalk on this blackboard.

It must have been my early creative juices, but I could not withhold myself drawing big white spirals instead of well-formed a’s and b’s, etc. on that black-black blackboard. Result: punishment and the lesson learned that a classroom is not a place for creativity and imagination.

In vain, the seeds were sown, and spirals, spheres, labyrinths, maps, and foams became – with hindsight – an obsession. I love the endlessness, and the recursiveness of these shapes and forms. Especially double, entangled spirals or labyrinths get me going…

This high-end Balenciaga Summer 2020 production, with music from BFRND, is a perfect timestamp of our times. Grim black coats, at times almost German SS uniform like Arial race,… our sleepwalking into fascism. One thinks The Matrix, hard as stone, sharp as a knife, and greyed out faces. Will we take the Red or Blue pill? Blue for sure is the backdrop for what Balenciaga call “Power Dressing”.

balenciaga moods

Balenciaga Summer 20 reimagines dressing for work: power dressing, no matter what one does as a job. Looks transform a wearer in the way a uniform can. Unlike their archetypes, though, garments and accessories are made using unconventional processes.

They talk about New Fashion Uniforms, Seamless Tailoring, New Trompe L’oeil, Super Plissé, Pillow Parkas, Fetish Gownsn, and Wearable Ballroom dresses.

Models of various career tracks interpret and play on beauty standards of today, the past, and the future.

Enter Masks, a new book by James Curcio, about Bowie and other artists of artifice. I spotted the book in a guest post by James Curcio on Ribbonfarm’s always excellent blog.

maskhrfinal-82106-290x400

The difference between a king and a beggar, a soldier and a murderer remains in the realm of performance, a kind of farcical mummers trick that we agree to play along with, if often unconsciously.

The bulk of the book is about Bowie’s unique conceptual art, his capability to create new coherent worlds and identities. I miss Bowie.

The post and book also refer to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation, apparently required reading for the actors of The Matrix before filming. According to Wikipedia, Baudrillard is “best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality.”

It cannot be happenstance that I find a reference to Simulacra and Simulation in “Design Unbound”, fantastic two-volume work on “Designing for Emergence in a White Water World”, by John Seely Brown and Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian, a print-only MIT Press publication. Chapter 14 is about “World Building”: “much more than just the setting for a story, word building creates coherent contexts that stories become to inhabit”

This is very much avant-garde, feels a lot like Cobra world-building practices like New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuis.

I feel like I am drifting into a thin timeline, and time is slipping through my fingers like clockdust. A shaken gravity, with no reference framework, unable to make U-turns, and affront reality with an open mind, heart, and will.

I need a new backdrop, a new backstory to make or break sense. I want to liberate myself from the harness of fixed time and space. An opening-up that leads to more vulnerability – and less power dress. With proximity, intimacy, and closeness – like the closeness and blissfulness that is evoked in “Two Sleepy People” in the March 2020 Mini-Ride.

In that sense, the from/to framing of before and after COVID-19 is misleading. I believe we have to start thinking of ourselves as analog/digital assets whose state is updated in real-time ànd asynchronously, our lives continuously evolving through space and time. We are indeed astronauts, in need of coherent world-building and navigating clockdust till eternity.

I have time. You have time. Both clock-time (Chronos) and experienced-time (Kairos). Ping me if you want to continue the conversation. I’d love to hear where your clockdust has settled these days.

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