An Introductory Note

Just as industrialisation began to take over, Dara Okat began planting the seeds of Earth-Realisation, a 14-volume, 150,000-word document on the consideration and the understanding of our mother earth and the wonderful harmony of its existential elements. These detailed descriptions and handdrawn sketches of his artworks titled Schema-Livitus were displayed at the Okat Lab, circa 1955, and were conceived on a windy night in December when Okat was stranded at the Paris Convention on sustainable societies.

It was around this time he began with the conceptual drawings of Hinterland, a place, according to him, "for everyone and no one". Alongside he started writing his second full-length thesis on the emergence of a new consciousness. He titled this work The Psychograph of Dara Okat. In his initial studies and research, he developed the floating room where he conducted exhibitions and talks with imminent philosophers, activists, musicians, filmmakers and dancers. These sessions were documented by The Vision Controller in detail and an analysis of current scenarios was archived in analog and tape format at Arc-Eye.

Hinterland, figuratively defined as an area lying beyond what is visible and known, was a place that Okat saw as a collective of kindred spirits. The make-up ie fabric of their internal textures were cut from the same cloth. They wore Vision Controllers, a silly metaphor to the ever confined lives of the others, those in externalities and personalities. The essence of these things was baffling to the human eye. The island, the sun-eye, was the heart of Hinterland. People visited, walked the visceral path* (originally sketched by Dara Okat, circa 1950), bought the funny gadgets of H10,000/-, tried out the DaraOkatSubliminal T-shirts from Quro, sampled some fresh basil at Tea Tree, walked the "D" bridge cross Alpha Channel and unto the wildernests that followed.The Ellipses was the communion of three friends, film, music and architecture.

Tangent, sometimes also called Transition, was Okat's den. He projected messages from his ethereal room in the trees. He would come down dressed in a beautiful bear costume monkeying around looking for honey. These were the little signposts in his cave. His tavern, his carnival, his terra.

His remote-controlled channel Okat TV projected those flickering images of the cult superseries "The Moons of Randox 12". Those still images of a nape bearing the fruit of Okat's brain, the seeing eye. I wont forget those last hours we spent at Arc-eye sifting through videos and still images, analog feeds from The Vision Controller, a post-modern eye-videocamera that comes in three models - black, white and mirror. Discreetly becoming the nemesis of the seeing eye, the antithesis, the antagonist. Eyeless, yet witnessing everything, documenting everything, live feeds right into the nerve cells of the heart of Arc-Eye. That ginger tea Okat sent us at sunset was unforgettable. I wont forget the strawberry specially hand-picked by Okat, like he quietly sent us a bit of his energy, a sneak-peak of the oracle that he is. Kingsize.