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Truth and Infinity
Sunday, March 28, 2004
 
"Ideas are the most mysterious things in a mysterious world . . . They are beyond prediction. They appear to have a life of their own, independent of space and time, and to come and go at their own pleasure . . . Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world."
William MacNeile Dixon

"One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth?"
William Morris
 
 
"...a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase."
Bertrand Russell
 
 
"The happy man is the man...whose personality is neither divided against itself or pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found."
Bertrand Russell
 
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
 
SECRET SOCIETY presents a guide for how to spend Friday 19th March 2004.

After your day of work or loafing; in the following order...

Load up on cheap grub and soak up the atmosphere of the beautiful surroundings and people of Cafe Bell

Sink a few cold ones in the back room of The Stags Head

Check out Dennis McNulty at Temple bar Gallery from 8pm

Witness the DJ skills of Stephen Rennicks, Toirse and Pauly at 'Repeater', Bodkins from 10pm

Bail at some point to the ground-level bar of Traffic for the latest sounds from 'FullStop' DJs Emmet Greene and Mark Clarke till 3am

Jump in a cab and head for the Airport, go to the top floor of the car park and think about life and your place in it

Only when you feel the time is right, go home.

Whether you do none of the above or all and more, remember, Friday 19th March 2004 will never be again, spend it wisely.


Please pass this message on to your friends and newsgroups.
 
Saturday, March 13, 2004
 
A public artwork based in Dublin that is based on the idea that cars get parked in sometimes interesting and apparently non-random patterns, and connects it to the phenomenon of synchronicity.
Check it out here
 
Friday, March 12, 2004
 
Covert Activities: JUNK OUT OF CONTEXT
Beginning in March 2004 Secret Society will deposit specially recorded audio cassette tapes, CDRs and VHS tapes into various charity shops throughout Dublin but also anywhere else they or their friends may be over the next 12 months. The new merchandise will be added directly to the stock on display without consultation with staff, put into the basket of unboxed cassettes on the floor, onto the shelf with the stack of home-taped videos and into the box on the counter full of flopped CD singles and free PC software. It will be shoplifting in reverse with all money going to charity. Each one will be identified only by a small hand written sticker reading secretsocietyinfo@eircom.net and the title of the piece.
Each piece will embrace its format and will explore the feeling of experiencing something out of context. Perhaps an audio cassette with part of a scratchy Leonard Cohen album on one side with what sounds like a child's birthday party coming in half way through. A film of a burnt out tractor originally recorded for an insurance claim, but now nothingless than bizarre, bringing with it questions never to be resolved. The pieces, once given up to the shop are lost to the artist but found by the buyer, that sense of losing something, not knowing where it might be, has it survived intact, has it been discovered, all these questions will be reflected in the pieces themselves.

format/discipline/theme
Audio cassette/Tape collage/Context
CDR/Ambient electronics/Loss
VHS/Hand-held Hi8 footage/mystery

As a society we have already produced a colossal body of work in various durable formats. To take just one of the more recent; the millions of CDRs that must already exist with no information written on them, a live recording of a professional band or a bands first gig, a lost gem from a renowned composer or a students class project, an enactment of a funeral in a play or an actual funeral service? Remove context and you lose understanding, sometimes not a bad thing.
I want these pieces to follow wherever this kind of junk finally goes, perhaps the piece will be taped over and never discovered by its new owner but the object itself goes on. These things are the axe heads of our time, having the potential to outlive us all, that home video of Christmas dinner, what is its destiny, to be part of a house clearance sale, or to be inside your stolen camcorder, where does it all go?
In concentrating on the less tangible human records of our age I must say that when enough time passes even The Beatles will be forgotten, their music heard at best as an historical reference only. You can imagine for yourself the fate that awaits whatever does not reach that standard of reverence.
If not obviously broken when does someone decide an object has reached the end of the line, to be finally thrown-away. Even then who's to say someone-else won't find it in a bin and decide they could use it or even sell it. Only if something is finally broken up or incinerated is it actually gone. After-all, to put something in landfill is to put it only a future archeological dig away. I think that might be the ultimate context to hear these pieces again, but would they be seen as art?
So to all the future archaeologists I give you junk out of context.
Stephen Rennicks
 
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
 
I don't know sometimes, we all fool ourselves into believing we know what the right way to live is, me more than most. All I know is what works for me, that I have to make the best of my life without spoiling someone elses, to remain optimistic, be grateful for what I have and most importantly of all, to keep going, keep living each day, meeting every challenge. Perhaps, as Emerson believed, man is a god in ruins, having the potential to rebuild but facing such an enormous task the best we can hope for is to mend something of ourselves every now and again.
 
Monday, March 08, 2004
 
Covert Activities:

Secret Society stickered public spaces across Dublin during January 2004 with the following message .

FOR SALE: Dignity. All offers considered, also
willing to swap for a nice house or place in boyband.
Will entertain time-wasters.
dignityforsale@eircom.net

Printed up but never used - due to the speed at which most of the originals were removed - was the second message.

LOST: Dignity. In attempting to sell my dignity it was found
to be no longer in my possession. Could be anywhere.
Small cash reward offered.
dignityforsale@eircom.net

At some point personal dignity was devalued and sold off. Then somebody, possibly the buyer or ourselves, made us believe we still owned it afterall. In time we forgot what the concept of dignity even meant. That is the point we now find ourselves.

 
Friday, March 05, 2004
 
"In the movies..Everett Sloane was a tycoon. He would get his gun off disillusioning Joel McCrea, who wanted to publish a newspaper that would make a statement, and telling him: 'M'boy, you'll see when you get old that it's all a game.' And I used to think. 'No it's not that way, this cynical old bastard is bullshitting, there are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, the liars and truth-tellers.' But Everett Sloane was right. There is only what is. The what-should-be never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is only what is."
Lenny Bruce
 
www.stephenrennicks.webs.com www.truthandinfinity.webs.com

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