Storm Calming Festival

You have found the online home of The Silent Academy Storm Calming Festival. Commencing 21.05.23 and running for twenty-one days the Storm Calming Festival website will be regularly updated for the duration of the installation and continue to exist as a record of objects and activities created by Andrew Shaw and Philip Newcombe.  A print media catalogue of the Storm Calming Festival will be made available online at the Silent Academy website and via select galleries in Europe and the USA.

To follow progress visit every day and navigate via the bardos at the top of the page.

The Silent Academy Storm Calming Festival is an exploration of the bardos - it is a place of dreams that have forgotten that they are dreams. It is an exploration of objects and ideas that express non-duality. The objects are without centre and without edge. Objects, projections, performances and writings will appear for twenty-one days. The locations of these objects will create a line that is neither straight nor curved, but a shadow meridian. 

Imagine you have an excellent box. Nothing can enter and nothing can leave the box - but you place an apple inside. Eventually the apple will break down. Beyond the obvious biological decomposition, billions and billions of years later neutrons will decay into protons and other fundamental particles. If there is 10 to the power of 24 particles in an apple there is something like 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 24 different states that those particles can be in. That’s a big number, but it is not infinite - which means that if you leave the box for an infinite amount of time, time will use up all of the variable states that the apple can be. Eventually infinity will have to reuse all of the states that the apple has been in before.

Eventually, if you wait long enough, the power of infinity over the finite means that you will open the box and your exact same apple will reappear billions upon billions of years after you first placed it into your box. Eventually hot gas has to turn into an apple. In fact, every possible thing that could exist inside the box will exist, and they will each exist an infinite number of times.

In any finite region of space - like the place that we inhabit - there are limits of energy carried by a finite number of particles, and that finite amount of particles can only be arranged in a finite number of distinct ways. In this way we live inside a box.

Now - imagine the limited way you sense and perceive your tiny sliver of reality. We can make the concession that you are an individual with a pulse and a variety of preferences - but in ultimate reality you are consciousness in the constant state of connection, corruption and reconstitution. An apple, a banana, a pink dot, a particle, a wave. You are all things and you are nothing. You can create dreams inside of dreams and make your own measures hold meaning. 

The Storm Calming Festival is an amorphous map of the metaphysical. It is where we place our fingers down onto the page.