DETOUR is honored to showcase Guttestreker's captivating artwork, which seamlessly merges meticulous craftsmanship with profound thematic exploration. Hailing from their base in Oslo, Norway, Guttestreker creates expansive artworks that delve into contemporary issues, drawing inspiration from natural discoveries, historical events, generational challenges, and academic literature.
Each piece, meticulously crafted with pen, markers, and digital tools, undergoes a process spanning several months to half a year. Grounded in scientific principles, Guttestreker's art invites viewers to engage in meaningful conversations. The duo challenges conventional notions, prompting audiences to reconsider their perspectives on inheritance and entitlement.
This exhibition marks a significant milestone for Guttestreker as it represents their first solo showcase overseas, introducing their thought-provoking work to the US audience. "An Illustrated Philosophy" invites viewers to embark on a journey of contemplation, where art serves as a conduit for exploring profound philosophical inquiries. Guttestreker's meticulously crafted scenes, bursting with vibrant colors and intriguing details, prompt audiences to delve deeper into the complexities of the human experience.
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Music Room
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Bomba
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Extinction debt. This means the future extinction of a species due to past events in the past, such as changes in habitat or other environmental causes. The term Debt/Debt refers to the idea that the extinction process can take some time before it unfolds, even long after the conditions that triggered it have occurred.
One example is nuclear war. Atomic bombs have the power to destroy entire cities and areas, wiping out both the people who live there as well as the ecosystem that feeds them. Although the short-term effects are crushing, it is usually the long-term effects that are worst. The radioactive fallout from an atomic bomb explosion can contaminate the environment and cause genetic mutations and other health problems that can last for many generations. With the Ukraine-Russia war, where Putin constantly threatens with nuclear weapons, this is a feeling the people of Europe have not felt since the Cold War. Millions of iodine tablets quickly disappeared from the Norwegian pharmacies when the war started in full in Ukraine.
Apocalypse, or doomsday, is a well-known cultural and religion phenomenon. It goes by many names, such as Ragnarök in Norse mythology, the year 2012 in the Mayan calendar or AlMalhama Al-Kubra in the Islamic faith. But perhaps the best known are the 4 horsemen of the Old Testament of the Apocalypse. The 4 riders are relevant to the concept of Extinction Debt, in which each of the 4 horsemen represents several forms of chaos and destruction that will cause the collapse of human civilization.
The first rider is represented by war and destruction that can destroy habitats and ecosystems. The second is famine, which can lead to hunger and reduced fertility in plant and animal populations. The 3rd rider is the Plague, which spreads diseases and reduces the immune system. For example, Covid. Last but not least Death, which is represented by the 4th rider, which can stem from everything from pollution to global warming.
All the riders are well underway, and many scientists believe that the gallop is already finished, and the debt is ominously close.
Finally, Extinction Debt is a reminder of the connection between all living things. When a species goes extinct, it can have ripple effects throughout the ecosystem, even our own human society.
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Systemica Epidemica
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Substance City
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Post Apocalyptic Adventures
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Guttestreker
Atlantis, 2023In the summer of 2021, the Senate in the United States decided on a report that contained information about UFOs, obtained by the US military. In connection with this report, several of the witnesses were interviewed by the renowned investigative journalism program “60 minutes”. A fighter pilot was one of the witnesses in the report. He had flown up and down the country’s east coast almost every day for two years. At the same location every day, he and his colleagues observed unidentified objects moving abnormally just above the surface of the water. Could it be that these objects came from a world below the surface of the sea? Because we know more about the universe than about the bottom of the sea, so it might as well be where they come from? Perhaps from Atlantis itself?
The lost city of Atlantis was first described by Plato as the most technologically advanced city, with the smartest people. The city was swallowed by the sea, without anyone being able to tell how it happened. Could it be that some of the people were trapped in an air pocket inside the city, where they learned to work together to survive. They had to throw away their old methods of fighting and destroying each other, and rather cooperate. In this way, they achieved a much better technology than us, and created vessels that are just as good on land as they are on water. Because it is during war that we have the most advanced technological development. It shows us that the resources are there, it’s just a matter of will.
Life arose at the bottom of the ocean, near hydrothermal vents, where chemistry was transformed into biology. These have been found along the Atlantic ridge, one of several potential locations for the fabled city. We have evolved a lot since the time proteins bound together and created life as we know it today. The planet is full of amazing creatures, all descended from the same bacteria that first saw the light of day about 4 billion years ago. The dolphin, which, like us, has passed the “Mirror test”, is obviously an intellectual creature, and is, like us, a predator. But at the same time, the dolphin is also a skilled hunter who uses cooperation to gain an advantage over the other animals. But now the dolphin faces a powerful enemy it cannot defeat on its own. The bacteria that once filled the world’s oceans have evolved into hyperintellectual creatures that not only send humans to the moon, but also create global climate change.
The legend tells of when the Sumerian King Gilgamesh, about nine thousand years ago, dived to the bottom of the sea to find a plant that would give him eternal life, cursed the gods, who sent a flood of sin. The legend depicts what happened when the last ice age ended. Then the temperature on earth rose violently, so that the glaciers melted and the oceans spread. They rose as much as one meter a year for one hundred and twenty years, in the area around the ancient Sumerian Empire in present-day Iraq. This event had major consequences all over the world and may be the reason why the high-tech Atlantis sank into the sea.
Now that humanity has ruled the Earth’s underworld for over nine thousand years, they have managed to create a new global warming, so that history repeats itself. This time, it is not just human civilizations that are exposed to rising seas, but all the world’s creatures are exposed in an increasingly vulnerable ecosystem. While technologists like Elon Musk talk about populating Mars and turning us into Aliens out there in the universe, we believe that humans must balance the accounts here on Earth and solve the challenges we face, before we go out into the universe and populate plants there. By being inspired by the dolphin’s cooperative abilities, but throwing off the predator mentality, we can solve all the problems we face and achieve a symbiosis with the rest of nature, instead of destroying it.
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Shadow of the Rings
The work was commissioned by Amnesty International Norway, who wanted a picture depicting sports washing in China at the Olympics.
The Olympic Games were first held in 776 f.kr in ancient Greece. The Games were held in honour of Zeus, the god of thunder, and were supposed to be a peacekeeping project. But now Zeus has gone mad, because the Chinese are using the Games as part of their geopolitical power struggle. That’s why Zeus has brought thunderstorms to put a lid on the Games. But then the Chinese bomb the sky, in order to bask in the glory of the Olympics, while massive human rights violations take place in the shadows of the Olympic Games.
A million Uighurs are locked up in internment camps in western China as part of a security policy strategy to prevent separatism and influence from the Muslim world. Here we draw clear lines to the Norwegianization process of the Sami that we were doing in Norway well into the 1970s. A clear picture that we haven’t been much better ourselves.
It’s not just minorities in China that get to feel the wrath of the Communist Party. Tennis player Peng Shuai was kidnapped in 2021 after she told the media that she had been raped by one of the party’s top men. But when she returned after a month, she said she had only been on vacation. During this time, one could not search for the word “Tennis” in China. This says a lot about how much control they have over the flow of information.
Another example of China’s extreme control over the truth is the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. This horrific incident is not included in the Chinese curriculum, which means that if you meet a Chinese out in the world who is younger than 35, they may not know about the atrocities at all. For the West, however, this massacre marked a distinction between them and that of China. The West would no longer cooperate with China. Thus, the Chinese had to look elsewhere in the world for partners and they went to several African countries. There they provided large loans, invested and built infrastructure. This is one of the ways they have increased their geopolitical power in the world.
We see this power struggle between the West and China as a protracted Olympic wrestling match. That battle has been going on since the opium wars of the mid-19th century, when the British Navy humiliated the Chinese. Now, however, the Chinese are in the process of building up their navy to become the largest in the world and this could help change the balance of power in the world. And then the question becomes, who are we going to root for then?
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Fair Heir
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Bluebird
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Pillars of Paganism
The Library of Alexandria was Alexander the Great’s vision to gather all information in the world, under one roof. He had Aristotle himself, the father of logic, as his teacher, and he knew that if you want good logic you have to have good information. Therefore, Alexander wanted to gather all the information in the whole world, under one roof.
Unfortunately, Alexander died quite early in Babylonia, and it was his general Ptolemy, who took over Egypt, who erected the edifice in his honour. Ptolemy’s grandson, Ptolemy III, introduced a law that all information entering the country had to be copied, the copy was sent back, and the original was stored in the library. At the same time, separate ships were also sent out to collect information from all over the Mediterranean. Eventually, therefore, the library became the largest collection of information in the world.
The information allowed Eratosthenes, who was the chief librarian at the time, to calculate the circumference of the earth, 200 years before Christ. Yet there are still people who believe that the earth is flat to this day. One of them was Mad Mike Hughes, who in 2020 shot himself up in a homemade rocket to check for himself. this is completely in line with the scientific method, which was created here in Egypt a millennium ago. The method includes a hypothesis, an experiment and then an observation,
However, the hypothesis that the Earth is flat has been disproved previously by countless experiments and observations. But he didn’t trust them and wanted to check for himself. Unfortunately for him, the rocket launch was a failure and he spiralled down to his death. But one should not hold it against him. There have been plenty of rocket launches that ended in failure. He must, however, have known so much correct knowledge to even gain buoyancy. Much more than the average citizen will ever acquire. Yet he was wrong about something so basic. It should say something about our own perception of reality, both at the societal and individual level. That there may be established truths, which do not correspond to reality. Even Einstein did not believe in quantum physics’ uncertainty principle, because it spoke against his own model of the universe. In fact, it turns out that the smarter you are, the easier it is for you to twist information to fit your worldview.
The most crucial event for our understanding of the world and the universe is the development of the scientific method, which came into being, precisely here in Egypt, just over a thousand years ago. The Arab Ibn Al-Haytham, considered to be the foremost mathematician of the day, had boasted that he could dam the Nile. But when he came down and saw the massive river was at least three times the size he had imagined, he quickly realized that the task was impossible. So, he pretended to go insane, i.e. that his brain was giving him the wrong information, to avoid being beheaded. As the king was in the habit of dealing with those he didn’t like. Instead, he was put under house arrest, and it was when he sat there, locked in a pitch-dark room, that he discovered something astonishing. There was a small hole in the wall, and at certain times of the day light poured in through the hole and projected the world outside, upside down on the wall! This was the first observed Camera Obsura that we know of, and Al-Haytham understood that this showed how light travels in a straight line.
When Al-Haytham, after the king’s death, came out of captivity, he began to write one of the most influential books in the history of science, which in English goes by the name; Optics. The special thing about this book was that it presented the scientific method, with a hypothesis, an experiment and an observation. The method laid the foundation for modern science and the book has, among other things, found its way to Galileo, Copernicus and Newton’s bookshelves, and allows us to have successful rocket launches to this day.
However, not all information that are presented as facts, necessarily is. The media, with newspapers, television and now the internet, spreads information to the masses. But this can unfortunately be manipulated, as when the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag and blamed the socialists and communists, and then threw them out of the Reichstag and came to power themselves. A so-called “Black flag” operation, which we have seen several times throughout history. The black flag, also called ISIS, currently manipulates vulnerable individuals through YouTube and twitter, where they post carefully thought-out videos intended to create sympathy for their cause and recruit fighters for their “holy” war. But it’s not just terrorist organizations that manipulate the masses on social media. So have former U.S. presidents. He established fake news, as a concept, to dismiss information that didn’t fit his narrative. His supporters saw him as their only true source of information, ultimately culminating in the storming of Congress on January 6, 2021.
But it’s not just people who operate in our new media landscape. In 2016, Microsoft launched its AI “Tay” on tweeter. The goal was for it to understand and mimic the language of a 19-year-old. However, Tay was taken down less than 24 hours after launch as a result of it starting to post far right and offensive tweets. Chat GTP, which took the world by storm last autumn, today writes news articles and speeches for prime ministers, but the problem is that it doesn’t necessarily care about what is true. Its worldview depends entirely on the information it has been fed by its developers. And that’s also true for our own brains. That is why it is so incredibly important that the information we consume is of the highest possible quality and that we are always critical of it and our own worldview. So that we avoid storming a Congress or launching ourselves into space in a homemade rocket. But then the question becomes: Can you trust everything we’ve told you now? And can you trust yourself and your own abilities to know what sources to trust, and your own ability to interpret that information appropriately?
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Populistic Tendenseas
Two ships, fighting each other, red vs blue. They represent the growing polarization in American politics today. A reason for this polarization is the echo chambers we tend to get trapped in. We all get information from the sources we trust, which tend to give us their side of the story. Not many people read both sides. At the same time, big corporations and wealthy people pay lobbyists to whisper in the ears of the winner, whoever that may be. Many politicians also get employed as lobbyists after their careers in politics.
In the background, we find ancient Greece with Pericles, the first prime minister of Athens and the general in the Peleponisean war against Sparta. That war showed us that democracy is fragile and can be overrun by authoritarian powers. Sparta was a city-state with authoritarian rule and it defeated the democratic Athens. Today, China, with its authoritarian rule, is on the rise, and in Europe, undemocratic powers are taking over Poland and Hungary. Just now, on the first of February 2021, a military coup d’etat took place in the democratic country of Myanmar after the military party lost big in the November election.
But is democracy the best way to govern a country? We demand that our politicians are infallible, almost like gods. But just like the Greek gods, we are all greedy, jealous, and egocentric. We look to the animal kingdom and find that there are different kinds of ways to structure a society. Many birds have absolute democracy where they vote with their wings which way to fly. In the world of primates, there is a more authorial style where they have one strong leader or a group that governs. What is the best way to govern our society of humans?
Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years, according to University of Cambridge researchers. In the UK in 2019, according to surveys before the general election, it reached 61%. While in the US it has seemed to drop below 50%.
A good example of how bad a democratic institution can be, we can look at the US election of 2016. When Donald Trump had 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, and he still won. How is that a good democracy?
Democracy needs to grow, like the rest of the world. Everything these days grows so fast, and democracy needs to catch up. In Norway, we have ministers with barely any higher education or no relevant working experience. Norway’s minister of research and academia has finished 1 year of a private business school. Sylvi Listhaugs was our Oil and Energy minister, she has a lower bachelor’s degree of pre-elementary teacher (kindergarten), formerly she was our immigration and integration minister, justice minister, and farming minister. They have been politicians their whole life, before taking a job as a lobbyist.
But in our part of the world, we are still very satisfied with our democracy, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. On the other hand, we are starting to see our politicians growing more and more to populism, and shaming the other side of politics. Being more concerned about which color the other party has than its politics. You are «Red» and you’re «blue» we have almost the same opinions, but because you are Blue/red I have to disrespect you and disagree.
How can we grow the Democracy? Maybe we should treat our government like a business and our ministers as our employees. We want our employees to be qualified for the job, like every other job on the job market. You would be met with a list of requirements, like for example relevant job experience, relevant higher education, good people skills, high moral and ethical standards, just to list a few. A technocracy may be a better model. Or maybe people, in general, are not fit to lead, and an AI is the only one that can be objective enough to govern us?
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Recipe for Immortality
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Sunny on a Dark Night
Guttestreker
Sunny on a Dark Night, 2021The world’s population is steadily increasing. In the Western world, on the other hand, population growth is declining. It is in the poorest areas of the world, like many countries in Africa, that most children are born. One solution to this problem could be to pull all the people living in poverty up to our standard of living. However, this will create a new problem, as there are not enough resources for them to have the same products as we have. At the same time, there are also a lot of unused human resources in these slums. Here there may be Einstein’s and Curies, who can help solve this problem before we cut down the last tree and we end up as Easter Island, which was an outstanding civilization that cut down all vegetation and to this day there is not a single tree on that island. In principle, this can happen to the earth as well, that we fish up all the fish and cut down all the trees so that the resources are unable to regenerate themselves.
At the beginning of the last century, about four hundred Norwegians lived in a garbage dump called Desert Sour in New York. These were able-bodied guys, but because of racism and not knowing the language, they went unemployed and lived in deep poverty. But one day there was a rowing competition between the different nationalities in the city. It was won by a great length by the Norwegians and it was said that it did not matter which of their compatriots had been in the boat, they had won anyway. At least they boasted about that themselves. It shows that this was unused labor, just as the people living in the slums today are unused brainpower.
We see Norway as a very poor country a hundred years ago, but in fact the second cinema film in the world was shown in Oslo and the first city with electric street lighting was Hammerfest. So just as we underestimate ourselves, we also underestimate the people that are living in the slums and what they have to contribute. And one of the biggest reasons we’ve gotten out of this poverty we think we were in is the nationalization of resources and the distribution of those resources among the population. This is one of the biggest problems of many countries in Africa. They are rich in natural resources, but this is often accumulated in very few hands and then acquired by foreign actors such as China. In the helicopter, we, therefore, see a Chinese buying up the last tree, the tree of life itself, as it is cut down.
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Medici Manor
