What ever happened to Project Icarus?

What ever happened to Project Icarus?

When we left it, it started out with a want for a tattoo and an indecision as to what it should be. It turned into an art project driven by the myth of Daedalus and Icarus because a rendering of Icarus was on the cover on a book I liked called “Men in the Air”. There was Led Zeppelin and Drewcifer, Oriana, Marilyn, Emily and Robyn.

I couldn’t find a tattoo I liked and wanted to see what it felt like to buy art, I asked the five visual artists mentioned above to contribute something to the Icarus project and somehow from out of the primordial firmament of creative playdough would come the design for a tattoo.

If you think about art projects like you do in science lab, then it comes down to: formulating a hypothesis, conceiving an experiment, conducting it and examining the resultant data in the hopes that it will confirm your hypothesis.

If you think about science labs, they are meant to confirm or disprove a theory. Art projects can also. What’s different about art projects is that the sequence of events, don’t have to obey rules of Aristotelian logic. Despite that fact, they are chains of perceptible causality.

Half way through Icarus I got impatient and decided to get a tattoo. That tattoo consisted of four words: Wisdom, Strength, Benevolence, Power. The word that most resonates with me today is Benevolence. It often does. Since we were in the middle of the project, I thought: tattoo -> art -> tattoo -> art and asked an artist to paint Benevolence. I gave her a chain with wings. She gave me a painting.

Benevolence; Marilyn Glinka, 2008

Icarus isn’t over. I have not yet got a tattoo. I let you know when I do.