Work by amazing 25-year-old British female artist Iri5 has been making the rounds in my extended creative community, from Richard Metzger’s post on Boing Boing to Yosi Sergant’s link on Facebook. The creator has done some amazing portraits of gone-by rock stars and album art using old cassette tapes. This particular series is called “Ghosts in the Machine,” and it’s pretty phenomenal, including greats like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. Check out Iri5’s Flicker page and try to buy something while you still can. These things have a way of Damien Hirstisizing.

Yesterday, all the news sources were reporting on the latest Wall Street drama. The head of AIG told the U.S. Congress that he was hesitant to reveal the names of the employees who took bonuses, because of the death threats AIG has been receiving.  The–particularly Scorsesian–one that was highlighted: “All the executives and their families should be executed with piano wire around their necks.”

Kind of extreme, to say the least. But the natives are growing restless and the bastille is about to be stormed any day. It’s even apparent in the art world. Last month I showed the work of Kevin McSherry–who creates his own illustrative versions of “eat the rich,” on Pop Psychic. This week, I just received an exhibition announcement from Sara Techia Roma gallery in New York. The exhibit, entitled “Tiger Economy + Wallpaper Sculptures and Mixed Media Installations by Lodovica Gioscia” features one piece (above) called “Beheaded Monarchs” by Gioscia. Regardless of its background (it looks like there are Asian influences at work), I certainly found it fitting with the current “down with the moneymakers” zeitgeist. I’m sure art historians will look back on our “pre-teens” decade and note with an air of pomp and circumstance, that quite a few artists took it upon themselves to tackle the haves vs. have-nots theme that hit a boiling point during the “Crash of ‘08.”

Image: a model wearing one of Jean-Charles de Castelbajac’s Autumn/Winter 2009 creations in Paris (Getty Images)

As if frog’s legs weren’t enough, leave it to the French to involve ”Kermit,” in their fashion statements. Yes, yes, yes, green is so in right now…so finally Kermit’s time has come…again. I remember the first Castelbajac piece I saw in the late ’80s/early ’90s, the infamous teddy bear coat. Not to be libellous, but I’m sensing “furry” energy here.   

Yesterday, while grabbing a Chai tea, I was privy to a piece of information that I have yet to ascertain as true or false. It scares me nevertheless so I need to put it out there. One of the coffee customers divulged that she knew a guy (some wealthy financier) who knew of another wealthy financier who had put money into the Large Hadron Collider project. To refresh your memory, this is the largest particle accelerator in history, nicknamed “The Doomsday Machine,” which will try to simulate the Big Bang so it can identify the Higgs Boson particle (a.k.a. The God Particle which appeared immediately following the Big Bang). It is being conducted in Switzerland by CERN labs and was supposedly temporarily halted late last year due to technical problems. Beyond tech issues, a group of Greek renegaded (heroes, as far as I’m concerned) calling itself “2600″ hacked into the LHC system proving that it was not completely secure and fail-safe.

As you might imagine, news of the LHC was not universally received with joy since there is a possibility that this entire experiment could go awry causing black holes to form. The LHC team claims that if this happened they would be so tiny they wouldn’t have any impact on the world. Everyone–including my friends on the Facebook group “Stop the LHC” wondered how these scientists could be so flip with something so monumental and potentially life-altering (interestingly enough so close to the Mayan Calendar “end of time” date of 2012). Summary: many people were rightfully pissed, scared and felt disenfranchised.

Back to the coffee conversation I overheard. Apparently, this LHC financier told his friend that the giant nightmare machine had in fact never been turned off. They had fed the press this nugget of false info to quell all the hysteria going around. According to him the LHC has been on this whole time.

I did a quick Google search of this and could not find a shred of evidence, even on the conspiracy sites, to support this. Yet the source seemed accurate and well-connected enough to be telling the truth. Still, all I saw on Google was info about the Collider’s resumption in September. If anyone has any tips, please email me here.

This is one in a series of ongoing blah blah’s on 2012, the Mayan Calendar end-date–a topic I’ve been researching since 2001, and which has gained popularity as we near it. I was recently struck by the notion that nothing specific is going to happen–outwardly–on December 21, 2012. The Mayans place the start date for their calendar of time at 3114 BC. So that’s about five thousand years ago. In that grand scheme, one single day (December 21st) is but a stitch in time’s quilt. We are in fact already living in the arc of influence of the 2012 energy. So to discover what 2012 is all about we need to face the present moment.

Mayan scholars like Carl Johan Calleman believe that an acceleration of time is taking place (which you could visually/energetically parallel to a pyramid as you get to the top point–it symbolizes God/creation energy from the “heavens” concentrated on one tiny point, a wormhole into the divine). The frequency of cultural and technological change today is hundreds of times faster than it was say during Christ’s time. This means that–following the manifestation principle–the time between thought and its outward manifestation into “thing” is small. If you think of a fantastical invention, for instance, chances are it’s already been created or is being tested in a lab, or is going to imminently be created. That’s how fast our consciousness is operating at the moment.

Then there’s the little scientific fact of the Universe being in a perpetual state of expansion since the Big Bang. Planets have been moving away from each other. But this affects humans as well–vis-a-vis the manifestation principle again. Manifesting is expansion. It’s the idea that if we think a thought, that thought expands. If we visualize something enough, it will eventually expand into physical reality. So our thoughts and spiritual energy are a result of post-Big Bang metaphysics as well.

Conclusion, what if 2012 exists somewhere at the four-point nexus of that sideways figure-eight we call infinity? What if we are now turning the corner and no longer expanding but hitting a contraction point of conscious and physical deceleration. Right before we get to that point, we are at the height of our acceleration. Ask me what this means to us here on physical tangible terrain and I’m not sure I can explain it…at least not in words.

Anyway, just throwing that “middle of the night” thought out there. Maybe some of you can add to it and theorize what the near of the “knot” point on the infinity symbol means. It’s obviously the end of one great cycle. It’s the Yang going inward to become Yin again. So does that mean we all fall into silent density again–an epoch of Dark Matter…only to await another Big Bang?