Bridging Worlds

What follows is a transcript of the talk I gave at the opening of my solo exhibition "Bridging Worlds" in the Spatial metaverse:

Welcome again everyone and thank you all for coming to this wonderful celebration.  My exhibition, “Bridging Worlds” opens today in the Maro Dori Sky Palace and can be viewed there for the months of April and May.  I invite you all to visit it. 

I would like to thank Maro Dori and Kojima for inviting me to exhibit in the Palace. I am especially excited to share that for today they are giving me the opportunity to share my exhibition with you in this newly opened space, Ambient Canvas. I am sure you will all agree how beautiful this space is.  Congratulations and Arigato.  

The posters that were up when we arrived have now been replaced with my artworks and I ask you to follow me there. 

We’re going to cross two bridges to get there and I ask that we go slowly, we go mindfully, we go in silence, I’ll lead the way and we think about the words “Bridging Worlds”. So let’s make our way there slowly.

Thank you all for crossing those bridges with me.  Let’s just wait for everybody to get here. 

I am going to share a few words about why I chose “Bridging Worlds” as the title for this exhibition. 

Firstly - those of you that have been there will know - the Maro Dori Sky Palace is truly an architectural wonder of the Spatial metaverse. It has many floating bridges connecting its various galleries so it was very important to me to include the word bridge in the title.

That’s the first reason.  And the second reason is I believe that entering the metaverse is like crossing a bridge from the physical world into the virtual world. When we cross this bridge we encounter people with different ideas, different opinions and worldviews. It’s almost like walking along one of the floating bridges in the Sky Palace - one never knows who one will meet there. 

If you look around you now, we have a number of people from Japan - Maro Dori, Kojima, Chibimaru, Michio and many others. I’m from Canada.  I see standing close to me Galleria Shubert, and  I think I saw Leonardo earlier.  They’re from Italy.  Shmerz is from Italy. I see Ira from the US, I think Meta Coach as well.  Little Madam, if I am not mistaken you’re from the UK. Teekay you’re from India. Am I missing any other countries? But already that’s quite a few countries that we have with us.  

Oh I’ve missed out Lisbet. She’s from South Africa. Yes 7plus is from Thailand, that’s right, and Lisbet you’re from South Africa. And at this point I’d like to give a shout out to Lisbet, because if you look at my dress, you will see that on my dress is one of the artworks in this exhibition.  So she has enabled me to wear my art.  Thanks very much Lisbet.

To illustrate further this idea of meeting all these different people in the metaverse, if you look at the artworks in the exhibition, you will notice that they are of people from different countries and cultures. You will be able to see this from what they are wearing,  but also I hope you’ll be able to see it from the energy that is coming  from them. 

Which brings me to what I do. I photograph energy. My artworks are created entirely on my iPhone. When I am out photographing I focus not so much on the people that I am seeing, but rather on the energy all around them. I capture this energy using a slow shutter technique on my iPhone. I then paint on my iPhone screen using my finger, after which I use various apps to create different textures and blends. So my iPhone art is a combination of photography, painting and digital manipulation.

Let’s move to this work called “Contemplation”.

I believe that art, just like architecture, is a bridge that is able to move one emotionally. But what we’ll see and how we’re moved is going to be different for each one of us. So what I’m doing today is not going to tell you what each artwork is about, but rather I’m going to give you some of the reasons I included the pieces in the exhibition, “Bridging Worlds’.

If you look at the artworks you’ll see that the figures appear to be standing still  but they also appear to be moving in a dimension beyond normal space and time. I am portraying stillness and movement happening at the same time. The figures are inviting us to be rooted, grounded, and mindful as we move through our busy lives and make use of all the technological tools at our disposal. 

If you look carefully there is not only stillness in movement. There also seems to be a movement into stillness.  It’s as if the figures are inviting us to cross a bridge from the busy world into the quiet world of contemplation.

The piece that I have moved to now is called “Inter-being”.  The word inter, i n t e r, a little hypen, and then being. 

As we start reflecting and contemplating, we start to realize that we’re all interconnected - not only with one another but with all of life.   The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn came up with this term inter-being. When I look at the two ladies, I see there is something joining them down at the bottom and even the hyphen in the word is reminding us of a bridge and reminding us of all these ways that we’re connected to each other. I sometimes think that there are all these little bridges between us but we can’t see them until we realize how interconnected we truly are.

I was born in South Africa and there we have a philosophy called “Ubuntu”. I don’t know if you have heard of it before. Ubuntu - I am because you are. I am because you are, and this also speaks to the fact that we are all connected.

Archbishop Tutu, who led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in 1996 after the end of apartheid, said that we all think about ourselves as being just individuals, that we are separate from one another. But he says you are connected and what you do affects the whole world.

Those words are very powerful for me, and when I use modern technology to create and send out my iPhone artworks into borderless realms, I always try to keep these words very close to my heart.

We’re in a space called Ambient Canvas. The word ambient refers to an aspect of the environment that completely surrounds us in a very gentle way.  Today we’re surrounded by a canvas of art, so I’m going to ask you to move with me to the next set of artworks on the other side. 

When I look at the woman in the artwork, she appears to me to be from Africa, but the word "Yutori" is a Japanese word that refers to spaciousness.  

It’s an invitation to move through life very slowly, while we stop along the way to enjoy all the small things that we encounter. So for me again there’s the bridge concept - we’re moving from busyness to living life slowly.

It’s also an invitation to make space in our hearts, and to hold space in our hearts for those that we think are different to ourselves.  

The more we begin to do that, the more we realize how alike we all are. The artworks featuring people from different cultures and from all walks of life are really a reminder of our common humanity. We all want to be happy, we all want to be loved, we all want to take care of our families.  We all go to sleep at night and we all wake up in the morning. 

I’m going to move to the piece called "Transformation".

The rise of the internet and the Information age enabled us to learn about people from different cultures who had different religions, different nationalities and different ways of doing things.  And I think that because these people seemed different to ourselves, it was easy to see them as ‘the other”. And I think if you look around us in the world right now, all the problems that we are seeing are because we see people as “the other”. 

But we’ve left the Information age. We’re not in the Information age anymore, with its huge sense of overload. We’ve moved to the Transformation age.  We are going to need to transform if we are to make our way through all the crises we are facing in the world around us at this moment in time.

And this is what is important for me.  I believe that the Metaverse is going to  play a huge role in the Transformation age. I no longer am simply learning about someone, I am actually going to get to meet them and to know them in an immersive environment. 

So again there’s this bridge idea - from learning about to meeting and knowing.

The metaverse is truly changing the world by dissolving physical barriers. This will enable intercultural connection and collaboration on a scale unheard of before.

The artwork “Transformation” is a call to value our interactions with others with the same intensity that we seek to interact with the technological tools at our disposal.

As you walk through the exhibition, I ask you to please note that each figure is inviting you to walk in their shoes and to see the world through their eyes.  Each figure is also inviting you to cross a bridge and see the story and the world that is waiting to unfold for you.