Located at 510B Waverly Avenue in Fort Green, Brooklyn. 646-552-6763

 

In a famous Japanese tale called Rashomon, each person is convinced of the truth of his or her own vision. I like to relate this myth to the rationality of Descartes, as he reiterates Plato's distinction between the "inner eye of the imagination and the external world of things". These are two distinct spaces, and reality is conceived of somewhere in between. As an artist witnessing the cohesion of physical and virtual, I imagine the space, more complex now than a mosaic (which was introduced around the time when Christianity tried to solve all of the questions of Greek philosophy through a form of myth.) Our inability to know the world directly is one of the central existential dilemmas in the human condition.

In <The Tower of Babel>, humans attempt to build a tower that reaches the heavens. As punishment for attempting to act as a God (humans can not reach heaven without being invited), Yahweh punished the workers, who at the time were privileged with a single, universal language, garbling their ability to use language so that they could no longer communicate with each other. Then, though not mentioned by name, the Qur'an has a story with similarities to < the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel >, set in the Egypt of Moses. In Suras 28:38 and 40:36-37 Pharaoh asks Haman to build him a clay tower so that he can mount up to heaven and confront the God of Moses. Another example of the power of language from the bible is the story of Adam and Eve. When Adam arrived at the Garden of Eden, God told him to name the animals, and that would give him control over them. In medieval times, when Christianity became the new rational thought, there was a giant period if illiteracy (around 800AD), most people, including kings, did not know how to read. It was not until everyday people again learned to read did they regain their individuality, even within the church, and did progressive thought become a renewed possibility. Years later, Gutenberg invented the printing press, putting primacy onto the written word and stabilizing the importance of language. Now the stunted growth of a few hundred years is long gone, and we are currently on an upwardly mobile track- sometimes we are even ahead of the track-builders! I call this "Constant Acceleration". Constant Acceleration is similar to but opposite of Moore's Law. CA states that compounded knowledge and fracticular patterns will work together at a rapid rate, and unlike the stock market with a theoretically finite quotient of money, will never need to crash in a traditional sense, but violence and anxiety will cause clashes as society attempts to reach a final state of an accelerated globality. (A posthumanist state?) CA does not stop, but it loses people along the way (who have no choice but to eventually concede.) WW1V is fought because we are re-attempting to build a Tower of Babel. The teams are nomadic but remain connected via technology. Here our civilization once thought we were immune to the inherent failings of empires built on the presupposition and need for endless growth. After all, while loss of place at the local, personal level is (literally) unsettling, even devastating, loss of place at the global level is catastrophic.

One of the first artists to make a significant sculpture, as society was abandoning its medieval thought process, was Michelangelo. Michelangelo's "David" was only armed with a slingshot and courage. In WW1V, the weapons that we will have at our use include plain < sticks, stones > and slingshots; homemade devices ranging from the sacred to the profane, laser technology, and (of course) the nanobot.

Several large tower projects have evoked Babel in their designs. The unbuilt Palace of Soviets in Moscow, with its receding tiers of cylindrical masses, was to have held the World Congress of Soviets. The Burj Dubai, which is currently under construction, is also reminiscent.

Ophelia - A character in Hamlet, she killed herself for the loss of love. Ophelia is now known for continuously rotating around Uranus in the Milky Way.

The three fates are: Lachesis, who guarded what had been. Clotho, who guards what is. Atropos who oversees what is yet to come.

The bioterrorist, Claudius, poisoned King Hamlet by pouring the poison Hebenon into his ear.

There are 6 main teams. The teams will be whittled down to the remaining six from the following nine as the time progresses. The Civil Defense Force, The G8, The G-77, Nestle Waters, Disney, Bechtel, The World Economic Forum, The United Nations, and The International Criminal Court. All of the team logos are Black and Gold, predominate colors of uniforms are < Beige and Khaki >.

 

A prediction by United Nations University estimates 50 mil. environmental refugees worldwide by the year 2010. What is this saying about the vast and fragile economic pyramid that ultimately depends, precariously, on the resources in soil and water?
THE NEW WORLD ORDER: WW1V is a result of clashes that will naturally occur during the process of globalization, until the players homogenize culture - which CAN happen, with the skill of the best in the advertising market, the best sociologists, psychologists, an interconnected desire, and a slow-forming Global Brain. WW1V is also an effect of deforestation, poisoned food, air, soil and water, nuclear tension, chemical sabotage and bioterrorism, Pandemic Disease, Global Warming, and the resulting misery that will be inflicted on millions.

The six elemental constructs:

SPACE, TIME, ENERGY, MATTER, LIGHT, AND TRANSCENDENTAL CONSTRUCTS.

Our six balanced selves:
our athletic self
our engineering self
our practical self
our community self
our spiritual self
our artistic self

The six stages of life:
Infancy: In this stage he is dependent on others and needs to be constantly attended to.
Childhood: It is in this stage that he begins to go to school. He is reluctant to leave the protected environment of his home as he is still not confident enough to exercise his own discretion.
The lover: In this stage, comparable to modern day adolescence, he is always remorseful due to some reason or other, especially the loss of love. He tries to express feelings through song or some other cultural activity.
The soldier: It is in this age, comparable to modern day young adult, that he thinks less of himself and begins to think more of others. He is very easily aroused and is hot headed. He is always working towards making a reputation for himself and gaining recognition, however shortlived it may be, even at the cost of his own life.
The justice: In this stage, comparable to modern day adult, he has acquired wisdom through the many experiences he has had in life. He has reached a stage where he has gained prosperity and social status. He becomes very attentive of his looks and begins to enjoy the finer things of life.
Old age: He begins to lose his charm — both physical and mental. He begins to become the brunt of others' jokes. He loses his firmness and assertiveness, and shrinks in stature and personality. He is unable to make an impact on people. www.wikipedia.org

The Six Repetitions

The four turnings comprise a quaternal social cycle of growth, maturation, entropy, and death (and then rebirth). In a springlike High, a society fortifies and builds and converges in an era of promise. In a summerlike Awakening, it dreams and plays and exults in an era of euphoria. In an autumnal Unraveling, it harvests and consumes and diverges in an era of anxiety. In a hibernal Crisis, it focuses and struggles and sacrifices in an era of survival. When the saeculum is in motion, therefore, no long human lifetime can go by without a society confronting its deepest spiritual and worldly needs. Modernity has thus far produced six repetitions of each turning, each repetition lasting roughly the duration of a phase of life and corresponding to an identical constellation of generational archetypes. Each sequential set of four turnings constitutes a saeculum. The Anglo-American saeculum dates back to the waning of the Middle Ages in the middle of the fifteenth century. In this lineage, there have been seven saecula:
* Late Medieval (1435-1487)
* Reformation (1487-1594)
* New World (1594-1704)
* Revolutionary (1704-1794)
* Civil War (1794-1865)
* Great Power (1866-1946)
* Millennial (1946-2026?)
America is presently in the Third Turning of the Millennial Saeculum and giving birth to the 24th generation of the post-medieval era.

 

Albert Einstein’s impact on war:

Einstein began speaking out against war and violence before World War I, but after experiments during a solar eclipse proved general relativity in 1919 (“Einstein Theory Triumphs,” said a sub-headline on the story in The New York Times), he became an overnight star.
As the “winner in this contest with Newton,” Schulmann said, Einstein was a media sensation. Front-page headlines followed him across America when he arrived for a tour in 1921, and his pronouncements on peace were already leading to his being seen as the “conscience of the world.”
Once he was compelled to abandon Germany during the rise of Hitler, Einstein emerged as a leading symbol of pacifism in the 20th century, held by some thinkers on a par with Mohandes K. Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer.
But Einstein’s commitment to pacifism was never absolute, as was publicly thought. In 1939, six months after the discovery of uranium fission, he began work on a letter urging President Franklin D. Roosevelt to build the atomic bomb, for fear that Germany would get there first. “In view of this situation, you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America,” he wrote in August, going on to recommend specific sources of uranium ore in the former Czechoslovakia, Canada and the Belgian Congo.
Years later he called the entreaty the “one great mistake in my life” and said in a letter to President Harry S. Truman: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

In a letter exchange with Sigmund Freud, Einstein expresses the following thoughts:
The only possible solution Einstein sees, is for the nations of the world to create a legislative and legal body that will be called upon in all matters of conflict that may arise between them. A sort of Supreme Court of all nations. All nations would agree to call upon this court when conflict arises and to follow the decisions and directives of this court. Of course, he states, that this is an institution created by people. Such a court will be all the more prone to influences from outside the court if its own power is insufficient to enforce its decisions in practice. The decisions of a court will be closest to the ideas of justice within the society for which it acts, the more power this society can invest in enforcing respect for those ideas. "We are far from creating an organization with sufficient power to enforce the laws it decrees", Einstein says. His first conclusion is, that it will be necessary for nations to give up a certain amount of their sovereignty. It is without doubt the only way to security.
So far, all attempts in this direction during the last decades have failed. Obviously strong psychological mechanisms with the human psyche are working against these attempts. Some of these mechanisms can be identified. The minority in power, within any given society, will resist any infringements upon its power. Einstein notes that this striving for power is driven by materialistic and economic wishes. He refers to the minority within any society which will stop at nothing to gain advantages for itself and will not stop at war or weapons deals in order to increase its own power and influence.
As their conversation continues, the question arises, "why does the majority allow itself to be used by the minority in power?"
The minority stands to gain and the majority stands to suffer and to lose. Einstein states that the minority in power rules over the schools and the press, and also has influence over the religious organisations. The minority in power uses these institutions to manipulate and channel the feelings of the masses in order to use people for their own gain.
This however, he claims, cannot be the only reason that the majority lets itself be used in these ways, and will indeed let itself be driven to the extent of frenzy and self-sacrifice. Einstein concludes that there must be a force within humans, a wish to hate and destroy. A force that during normal times is dormant, only showing itself in the abnormal. It can however, easily be awakened, and increased to the extent of mass-psychosis.

Ref: Albert Einstein: Why War? and The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein

The Van. Searching for locations. May 29, 2006.

Topographic maps of CT.

Somers, CT.

Stafford, CT.

West Stafford, CT.

Approximately ten years ago, the World Bank VP Ismail Serageldin said "If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water."

About a quarter of the world's population lives in areas of "physical water shortage", where natural forces, over-use and poor agricultural practices have led to falling groundwater levels and rivers drying up. According to the UN World Water Development Report, 70% of all water use is for agricultural irrigation. Expected population growth in the next thirty years will require global agriculture to double its production. The inefficiency in irrigation today is huge. Lack of infrastructure in developing countries, water rights laws that discourage change in the developed world, all enforce todays situation. Changing water rights laws, sharing in transboundary water areas (currently, 45% of the world's population live in internationally shared river basins), adapting drip, greywater, or surface irrigation, adapting a watering schedule according to plant type, mulching, growing more grains and sustaining less cattle will all be necessary changes in the not-so-far-future. However, these solutions are never that simple. Changing diets and the implications for water, land, and farmers livelihoods are all important considerations.

PREDICTIONS: THE NEW ECONOMIC WORLD ORDER

The desire to rule the world has been a part of the human experience throughout recorded history. Alexander the Great led Greece to dominance of the known world, only to become the victim of Rome's quest for world dominance. The Roman Empire, built on bloody battlefields across the land, was swallowed up by the Holy Roman Empire, built on the fear and hopes of helpless people. History is a record of the competition for global dominance. In every age, there has always been a force somewhere, conniving to conquer the world with ideas clothed in promises imposed by military might. The 20th century is no different from any other: Marx, Lenin, and Hitler reflect some of the ideas which competed for world dominance in the 1900s. The competition is still underway. The key players change from time to time, as do the words that describe the various battlefields, but the competing ideas remain the same.

 

The United Nations (1925 - 1950)
While Stalin reigned over “The Great Terror,” in which an estimated 20 million Russians were executed, and instituted the first of a series of “five-year plans

Prohibition brought organized crime, Federal Reserve policies brought a stock market crash, drought brought a dust bowl to the bread basket, and a nation-wide depression brought crushing poverty to most Americans.

The “New Deal” delivered by Roosevelt.

 

UNESCO was created to construct a world-wide education program to prepare the world for global governance. UNESCO advisor, Bertrand Russell, writing for the UNESCO Journal, The Impact of Science on Society, said:
“Every government that has been in control of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen . . . .” A year later in London, the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education called for a United Nations Bureau of Education. UNESCO became the Board of Education for the world.

Three distinct NGO influences were clear by the end of the 1960s: the CFR and its assortment of affiliated spin-off organizations; the mystic, occult, or “new-age” spiritual movement; and the growing number of organizations affiliated with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In 1968, the IUCN led a lobbying effort with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (headed by Robert Muller) to adopt Resolution 1296 which grants “consultative” status to certain NGOs. This resolution paved the highway for global governance.

(1973); conducted a UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 1974); developed a Global Frame-work for Environmental Education (1975); established the International Environmental Education Program (IEEP); set up a Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS); set up a World Conservation Monitoring Center at Cambridge, England (1975 as a joint project with the IUCN and the WWF); implemented the Human Exposure Assessment Location Program (HEAL — 1976); conducted a UN Conference on Desertification (1977); organized the Designated Officials for Environmental Matters (DOEM); and in 1980, published World Conservation Strategy jointly with the IUCN and the WWF. The DOEM is an organizational structure that requires every UN agency and organization to designate an official to UNEP in order to coordinate all UN activity with the UNEP agenda. UNEP was well positioned to interject the environment into the argument for global governance. Russell Train, the President of WWF-usA, secured more than $25 million in grants from MacArthur Foundation, Andrew K. Mellon Foundation, and from “US and Foreign governments, international agencies, and individual gifts,” to launch a new NGO — the World Resources Institute (WRI) headquartered in Washington, D.C. James Gustave Speth was chosen as President. The USSR, which Reagan dubbed "the evil empire,” did assume a new attitude about arms reduction and disarmament. Gorbachev announced "glasnost,” a new policy of openness, and "perestroika” a restructuring program which featured measured "free market” opportunities. The NGOs, coordinated by the IUCN/WWF/WRI triumvirate, and funded by the Rockefeller-coordinated Environmental Grantmakers Association, launched a world-wide campaign to convince the world that the planet stood at the brink of environmental disaster. It could be averted only by a massive transformation of human societies which would require all people to accept their spiritual and moral responsibility to embrace their common global heritage and conform to a system of international law that integrates environmental, economic, and equity issues under the watchful, regulatory authority of a new system of global governance.

From New York to Rio (1992)
A heat wave and an extended period of drought the last few years of the decade gave credence to a coordinated media campaign of global environmental disaster. The Union of Concerned Scientists published a "Warning to Humanity". The annual "State of the Planet" report, issued by the WorldWatch Institute, predicted progressively worsening environmental disasters.

From Vienna to Uruguay (1994)
On April 15, The New York Times carried a full-page ad that hailed the World Trade Organization as "the third pillar of the new world order."86 The World Trade Organization (WTO) sailed through the Senate in the closing days of the 103rd Congress, handing over to the UN system the authority and the mechanism to impose and enforce its agenda on America. The WTO Charter requires "the optimal use of the world resources'' in accordance with the objective of sustainable development (Preamble). It requires the WTO to "make appropriate arrangement for effective cooperation" with NGOs and intergovernmental organizations (Article V). It requires member nations to change their laws to conform to the WTO: "each member shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures with its obligations as provided in the annexed Agreements" (Article XVI). Although the U.S. must pay a disproportionate share of the WTO cost, it has only one vote and no veto (Article IX).

The WTO may impose trade sanctions on a nation that it determines is not in compliance with any international treaty. It may impose sanctions, fines, and penalties on a nation, or on an industry. Members are bound by the dispute resolutions dictated by the WTO (Section 2, Annex 2). Bilateral trade deals must meet the approval of the WTO. Bilateral or multilateral trade agreements can be changed by a vote of the members of the WTO (Article X (4)). Article XVI says: "No reservations may be made in respect to any provision of the Agreement."87
The WTO could not have survived without the U.S. The UN could not have controlled world trade without the WTO. But now the facility is in place and the bureaucracy is gearing up to become the first-line enforcement mechanism of global governance. The Global Biodiversity Assessment concludes that:
“A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 1 to 3 billion would be possible. An 'agricultural world,' in which most human beings are peasants, should be able to support 5 to 7 billion people . . . .”