About
This third and final part of my Strange Attractor series was initially inspired by the book, Future Memory & Time: A New Skill of Mind (1996) by Dr. Sean O'Donnell, who has also conducted a course on the same subject at University College Galway, The Nature of Time (1988 - 2000). He continues to write, keep a website and give public talks about his bold new theory of time: that the future can be predicted in scientific terms.
With his core belief firmly in mind and using my intuition (what he describes as Pre-Call), I tried to 'see' my finished project before I really began it. Over a period of time I managed to visualise, attract, discover and stumble on a number of sites, objects and images that appeared to belong together. As unscientific and imaginative as this method would turn out to be, it was an honest attempt nonetheless.
At this stage of our understanding, Future Memory will be as subjective as conventional memory, with many possibilities and interpretations to consider. This would make it similar to the pre-cognitive abilities imagined by the science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. Of course, throughout history ordinary people have claimed to have experienced the future in dreams, premonitions and déjà vu, so this isn't really anything new. It’s also not too dissimilar to how I work already to some degree and I think that most artists will have an instinctive understanding of this concept. Where do ideas and inspiration come from, might future memory be one source?
The first and most pure stage of my process was simply the photographs you find here, some of which I 'saw' (pre-called) and then tried to recreate as best I could; the others are locations and objects I randomly encountered. While they are all presented here with titles and text, this was really part of the second stage. As I wanted to put them in some sort of order, I decided to use a narrative to do this. I presented this as a series of questions from and fragments of an imagined science fiction story that explores my own interpretation of this new theory of time. Many of the images have additional notes and links.
Stephen Rennicks
This is the third and final part of my Strange Attractor series. The previous parts were Strange Attractor: Myth, Mystery and the Miraculous (2015) and Searching for The White Room (2016). I am very open to discussing ways to exhibit these projects, alone or in combination.
You can purchase a copy of Future Memory & Time by Sean O’Donnell here.