Biting Through and Binding To, Assemblage, 1979, Analogos I Ching Site Number 13 (Traditional I Ching site number 41)
The 64 Multimedia eScapes (1960 -2000)
The 64 multimedia artworks that I have orchestrated in a contrapuntal relation with the 64 sites of the I Ching (eventually for the ORG project) were completed as a single body of work between 1960 and the end of the millennium.
Back in the nineteen-eighties, when I found that the issues emerging in my studio work were parallel to the ones rooted and elaborated in that most ancient of books (The I Ching), I began to set my artworks in contrapuntal relation to its 64 sites—sites that have withstood the test of time in both the East and the West. I became interested in the challenge of interrelating all the works so that they could fulfill their association with each other and at the same time fulfill their relation to the sites of the I Ching. By going this route, I imagined that the body of work would be able, like the I Ching, to represent a worldview—that as a whole the 64 works would be able to offer a perspective that could radiate thorough all the points of the compass. The iiae response proposal that advocates an in depth experience with a single work (rather than a surface look at many) is in keeping with this holisitc notion of a 'deep structure' interrelation between the works. The Reaching I Ching Project, as I began to call it, was completed in the year 2000, and the works are currently all framed and ready for the ORG project (Open Response Gallery) online and/or on site.
For a viewer to read the works and/or the I Ching, it is customary to go on a quest, (to ask a question), and then to go on a journey into one individual work, exploring what the outer image brings to one’s trip and what one’s own inner image, as a viewer, brings to the trip, and then what sort of strategy the personal reading and the I Ching offer to address the question asked. In order to do this one has to be able to select which of the available 64 sites is the appropriate one to focus on.
To locate the appropriate image/poem/text site, tradition recommends flipping three coins as an approach that prevents one from choosing in a contrived manner. While this is regarded as a reliable process, any other means imaginable can be used as long as it involves random chance, invokes synchronicity, and avoids the possibility of making a logical, contrived selection. The principle of synchronicity posits that all things are connected in any given moment in the universe, and that the use of an indirect method enables one to to tap into this precise energy. Once a specific number (between 1 and 64) is identified, the specific number identifies the relevant artwork.
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