Freedom, Beauty, Truth and Love. The four indisputable cornerstones of the Bohemian ideal as upheld in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001). A film which so skilfully wove together pop culture and artistic sentiment, and cinematically described how it would have felt to have been immersed in the fizz of the Belle Epoque.

Then as now, art reflects its society. Caught within the eddies of Postmodernism, we’re floating, directionless – spinning around in nauseating circles. The steam powered forward thrust of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has long since petered out. Replaced by the 4K illusion of progress, stoked with Ego and mediated by “fact-checkers” and the first five google search results.

More than a generation of people have come to misguidedly view The State as their benevolent provider. Distracted and comatose by a constant drip feed of total banality and tawdry television programmes whilst shovelling shit bike-couriered food into their gaping mouths; One eye on the gogglebox the other skipping through an equally execrable stream of narcissistic slurry. Nah, don’t bother getting dressed to nip to the chippy, you’re fine to go in your polyester jammies. Just make sure you don’t plant your Tinkerbelle slippers in the pile of dog mess on the corner. Karl Lagerfeld had it right when he declared, “sweatpants are a sign of defeat”. Der Kreig ist aus, Karl. Well and fuckin’ truly. This deplorable existential malaise seems to have trickled its way into art’s water supply.

Artists were supposed to turn a mirror on society but instead most of them turned a mirror on themselves, and it became a ‘selfie’. … Now most writers, artists, poets sold out. Too scared to challenge in case they lost the corporate sponsor or some Government grant.

Truth is an energy. You can feel it. That feeling in your gut. Your Intuition; That’s truth. Knowing without knowledge. And Truth is Goodness. The Ancient Egyptians knew this. They called it “Ma’at” (pronounced May-et). Ma’at was the Universal force of truth, justice harmony and balance, most often depicted as a single white Ostrich feather, and deified as a seated goddess.

In the Palace of Truth, the soul of a deceased person would arrive to be interrogated about their Earthly life by forty-two judges, the Assessors of Ma’at, and undergo a simple trial; The seat of their existence, the human heart, was weighed against the Feather of Truth. Should it be found to be heavier, the mendacious organ was unceremoniously cast to the floor to be devoured by the monster Ammut. You would simply cease to exist, at all. Instant complete and total oblivion. If you hadn’t lived a truthful, harmonious and balanced life, you were unworthy of existence on Earth or within the spiritual realm. Pass the test, and you would be led through to the Field of Reeds, an eternal facsimile of the physical world devoted to pleasure.

What you need to bear in mind with the truth is that it is singular. No amount of subterfuge, censorship or distraction can dilute it. There are no versions nor revisions. However uncomfortable. Truth is constant. And it will always come to light.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us that the meaning of life is a cryptic, “42”. Was Adams referring to ancient pantheon? That the meaning of our life on Earth is to uphold truth and justice? An action which magnifies another eternal and Universal force – Love.

“Step right up folks. Step right up. Have we got a show for you to see!”

I’m sorry to break it to you but “virtual environments” that you can view on the internet are just websites. Plain and simple. And viewing a website on your phone is not an “experience”; You’d have to be a few tabs short of a browser to think otherwise.

The same is true for augmented reality in the art world. I can say that full of conviction; having conceived, developed and coded the first augmented reality art exhibition in the UK funded by a public gallery: In Sheffield, back in 2011. Sure it’s fun, but at the most, augmented reality is an illusion. Twenty-first century trompe-l’oeil. A clumsy pixelated gimmick; To be held at arms length.

Along with Non-Fungible Tokens. This creeping crypto-currency stuff is coming from a Finance Industry whose traditional bubble is about burst in a major way. But as in Vegas, the House always wins. The art world isn’t appropriating it for itself and redefining it, it’s buying into someone else’s idea. Supplanting one system with another. It’s a sideways shift, not a reinvention. And context is everything. Why now? Cryptocurrency has been around since 2008! The Hedge-funders are hedging their bets.

“All the World’s a stage. And all the Men and Women merely players;” – So begins line 139 of Act 2, Scene 7, of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599) – A play about political corruption, folly and redemption.

In that first line, Jaques (an outcast Lord wandering about the woods), is effectively breaking the fourth wall. And in my interpretation, declaring that what’s happening on stage is as real as what was happening in the lives of the groundlings surrounding the stage. And vice-versa.

That the World around us is theatre. Shadowy figures watch from the wings, nothing is as it seems, and most likely isn’t what you were told.

Bearing in mind that Jaques and his master, Duke Senior have just been ousted in a political coup-d’etat, more than one contemporary parallel can be drawn with those sentiments.

Turns out I was remembering “The Uncertainty of the Poet.” (1913).

Hello. My name is Chris, and I’m addicted to country houses.

Screens. We seem to spend our lives looking at them. From the ones at the train station, to the black mirrors we carry around with us everyday. Out of all of them, the best ones have to be movie screens.

Film maker and analyst Rob Ager has a brilliant theory surrounding the interpretation of one of Cinema’s masterpieces: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, particularly the meaning behind the iconic “Monolith”.

Kubrick was insistent that the movie be filmed in “Super Panavision 70”, which required spherical lenses and 65mm film, double the size of regular filmstock. This unconventional combination provided an aspect ratio of 2.20:1, much wider than the widescreen formats used now. But incredibly close to that of the mysterious monochrome slab, rotated ninety degrees.

In the two reel theatre version, Kubrick inserted one minute of darkness at the beginning of the second half; And berated the BBC when they cropped the footage for broadcast. It was imperative the film be shown as intended.

Good morning! How did you sleep? Well, I hope. No nightmares? I only ask because the Hopi tribe of Native Americans believe that our dreams are as real as our waking life.

They have lived in the deserts of north-eastern Arizona for thousands of years and are reputed to be the oldest, longest surviving people on Earth. Their name means, “People of Peace.”

According to Hopi tradition, we have been through two worlds already and currently stand on the edge of a fourth. An asteroid destroyed the first world and ice claimed the second. This, the third world, will be destroyed by mankind because of our avaristic lust for technology and dominion over the natural world. Forsaking our spiritual selves for science and technology.

At “Prophecy Rock” near Oraibi, Arizona, the future is clearly mapped out in ancient petroglyphs. All three worlds are carved as circles watched over by the god Maasaw, sworn guardian of Mother Earth. The third circle is incomplete, as if the clock stands at five minutes to midnight. Forwards in time, Maasaw is shown clutching an ear of corn within the fourth world indicating that when the hour strikes, nature will reclaim what was hers all along.

I once had breakfast with Eeyore, and no, I wasn’t on drugs. I was at Disney World. The happiest place on Earth.

You’d think that the hyper-Americana of Main Street at the Magic Kingdom would wear pretty thin, pretty quickly. But it doesn’t. It’s difficult to describe – The whole place is so artificial that it actually supplants reality. It becomes brilliantly real. An immaculately presented technicolor transcendence. Like what Jeff Koons is after. Maybe it’s the Floridian sun, maybe it’s pixie dust? Who knows.

Even the American flags at Disney World aren’t real. Not much else is either, but that’s the beauty of it. The Stars and Stripes contain only slight differences exempting them from the strict laws and regulations surrounding the reverent treatment of the US national flag. The one in this image has 49 stars.

No one knows how pigeons find their way home. But they do, even if you blindfold them – not that I’ve ever tried it.

I’ll leave that to Dr Rupert Sheldrake of Trinity College, Cambridge, whose research examines the possible existence of multiple energetic or “morphic” fields connecting all things, animal, mineral and vegetable. “Morphic Resonance” is a sort of collective global subconscious through which all thought flows; And could explain bird murmurations, human intuition, simultaneous thought and other more esoteric things like psychic mediumship.

He and his research team conducted a number of experiments with humanely disoriented Pigeons where everything was done to impede their ability to navigate. Blindfolds, blocking their nasal cavities, releasing them halfway around the world – you name it, they tried it. And still they came back.

Another series of slightly more grisly experiments involved two distinct populations of fish (I think they were Bass), in two separate lakes some 25 miles apart. A fishing lure was designed which would be incredibly painful once the Bass had succumbed to it’s glittery charms. It was only ever used in the first lake and over time those fish learned to avoid it. What’s crazy is, once it was introduced to the other lake some months later, the fish there already knew it was something to steer clear of, and didn’t take the bait.

Mornin’! Listen, I know it’s early: I just need to tell you about the “One Electron Theory”.

In 1940 Physicist John Wheeler called his mate Richard Feynman to run something by him, something he’d been working on for a while and which had been keeping him up at night.

He posited that there is only one singular electron in the entire known and unknown Universe, and that it is in everything, everywhere, all at once. Even moving backwards and forwards in “time”. [mindblown]. I’ll say that again – one electron, which is in absolutely every-thing, every-where, simultaneously; And connects past, present and probably even future together as one big eternal NOW.

What’s more, the maths apparently checks out. [double mindblown].

It’s always been assumed that Neanderthals were brutish, dumb and uncultured, but recent discoveries have cast serious doubt on that. What is known, is that they existed for 300,000 years and throughout that time remained a nomadic species of expert hunters and survivalists. Family cohorts would meet annually at specific sites to swap females and broaden the gene pool. Perhaps evidence of a rudimentary understanding that incest wouldn’t do anybody any favours. It is estimated that only around 100,000 Neanderthals inhabited continental Europe, before they dissolved into the Homo Sapien population through interbreeding some 12,000 years ago.

Their physiology was such that they most likely could make vocal sounds; Surprisingly much more highly pitched than you would imagine. It’s thought that if a spoken language didn’t develop, music dance and art are the most likely forms of communication they could have employed, to gain trust and strengthen tribal bonds. Although not much Neanderthal “stuff” has survived.

Ralph Solceki threw a Mammoth sized spanner into the works of accepted paleo-anthropology when in 1960, he and his team came across “Shanidar 4” the well preserved remains of one of our palaeolithic ancestors in a cave, in Iraqi Kurdistan, which seemed to have been purposefully buried.

Fast forward to 2018 and the first fully articulated Neanderthal remains to be found for two decades were discovered in the same cave, known as “Shanidar D”. As it turned out, very close to where the other had been interred.