I love the ICA. Ever since Charlie introduced me to London’s underground mainstream arts centre I’ve been a regular visitor, in awe of the £15 magazines and the often insane exhibitions that they put on. Though the gallery has had some difficulties in the past few years, mainly involving losing lots and lots of money, there has been some good news. For one, it’s now open on Tuesdays.

Sadly, though after visiting the gallery on a recent Tuesday it seems that opening hours may be the least of the ICA’s worries. Unlike when I first visited five years ago, the ICA feels more like a museum than a contemporary art gallery. Their current exhibition: ‘Remote Control’ explores the way that television changed the art world. Great, right? The only problem is that all the videos shown were recorded circa 1979. I guess it’s not a problem if a gallery wants to focus on the past; but the ICA feels out of touch, rather than offering a considered retrospective. Gallery visitors watch the videos as a novelty- often only watching each video for 15 seconds or so. And, to be honest, who cares about TV when art is facing its biggest challenges today from the Internet and modern technology. Though there is some engagement with these new technologies, it is limited to one of the most cynical pieces I’ve seen in some time. Called ‘Red Alert’ it is three apple branded screens side by side, all showing red. Just red.

The ICA’s new pride and joy, the studio, is meant to be the engine room of the gallery, igniting and encouraging debate. To understand the problems with the ICA and to an extent the problems with contemporary art in general you only need to have one look at it ; lying empty and bare, with 1970s press cuttings describing how radical and free thinking the establishment is. In essence, the gallery’s past success has prevented it from being radical today. Today, they cater mainly for tourists and old Guardian readers, pretty much as bourgeois as it gets.

Looking at the side of the Edan Dolly homepage, it suddenly dawned on me that Ed and I have been posting on this blog for three years. When we started we were 18, and by the end of this month we will both be 21. Though it doesn’t seem like 3 years when I look back it seems like an eternity. I know I’m wrong, because I study psychology, but it feels as if the last three years have been the most eventful of my life. In February 2009 I knew I was going to Cambridge, but I was still at school, wondering what the point of life was and in love with a girl who didn’t love me back (worst thing ever….!). Though excited about the future I didn’t really see the point: if everything ends and life has no meaning then why bother. Better never to have been born, huh? Now, in February 2012, I am in my final year of university, have a job for September, and am in love with a girl who loves me back. And though I’m still as unsure of the real point of life, and whether I am doing the right thing, I can safely say that I am the happiest I have ever been.

The happiness isn’t because everything is OK, though. I miss Jonny and my grandparents every day. People I loved have left, and at the time it was really difficult to deal with. But, I guess, what the past three years has taught me is that life isn’t about what happens to you, but how you feel about what happens to you. Being able to study the Negativity Bias for my dissertation has confirmed this: people aren’t happy because good things happen to them, they are happy because they have a positive mindset and believe in getting the most out of life. Every day I try to remember how lucky I am, to be studying with great people, to have so many amazing friends and to have a brilliant family. And though life and the future is scary, really really scary, I know that because of them I will do the right thing. The memories I have of Jonny and my Grandparents mean that they’re not gone. They’re as alive in my mind as they could be. I know exactly what Jonny would say about everything I do: mostly ‘dude…’, and I can imagine sitting endlessly with my Grandfather in front of the fire talking about the meaning of things, and making meringues with my Granny.

What else has changed? I still don’t know what I want to do, though I think now I know the sort of thing I want to do. It’s stupid, really, because I knew it all along but just never realised it. Though Compelling Illusions, looking back, was devastatingly pretentious, the aim was to make people realise how similar they are to everyone else. You are not alone. In Cambridge I just keep doing this again and again. I love anonymity because it means you don’t have to be afraid being who you are; it means you can be honest without being judged. And when people are totally honest they show that we all are scared of the same things. We all have the same hopes and dreams, and we all want the best out of life.

Most importantly, though, these three years have proved to me that being alive is absolutely incredible. It can be incredibly depressing and awful, but it gets better. Things change and things get better. Three years ago, when I started this blog with Ed, I could never have imagined that things would be like this now. And now they are, I couldn’t be more grateful to everything and everyone who made it so, and continue to make it so.

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.

I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do—what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so fortunate. Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects on other people have interested me very little. I have not written and published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.

You need to remember to have fun while you’re young, I’m not saying don’t follow a dream or don’t try hard at what you do, but remember as cliche as it sounds, to make sure you keep your friends close and enjoy every moment of your life. Always make new memories and go outside, take a massive breath of fresh air and experience the world and find small things that make you smile. Share good times with people out in the sun or just being inside and having good chats and making memories, because nothing is certain and you can never tell what will happen not only in the distant future, but even tomorrow. By having dreams and trying hard to achieve those dreams you aren’t wasting time but will make yourself happier; don’t think about it like working towards something so much as doing things right now which you can enjoy, with the added benefit of it making something better in the future. Don’t think about anything as a chore, see the good in it and enjoy it, it’s important in life. And always keep in touch with old friends and keep in touch with family because they’re easy to overlook but so important. My thoughts right now are with Jonny’s family, who are amazing people, everyone who knew Jonny should be thankful to have had the pleasure of knowing such a solid, honest, real guy. I miss you man.

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings,
but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the
cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music and then people
crowd about the poet and say to him: “Sing for us soon again;” that
is as much as to say, “May new sufferings torment your soul.”

Soren Kierkegaard

A new project called ‘Those Questions’ which poses life’s big questions to a Buddhist Monk. Questions asked by Olly and filmed by Ed. See it here.

I think that if you had shown anyone a camera before 1817 then they would have thought that you had some sort of magical ability to steal moments from time. When Nicéphore Niépce took the first photo in 1817, it slowly faded away, and it took him 10 years to develop the first ever permanent photograph. Though a blurry, grainy, black and white replica of a full-colour moment it marked a significant advance in our ability to remember. And not only simply remembering- reliving.  Sometimes when you see a photograph that you took, or a photograph taken of you, your mind instantly transports you back to that moment, the feelings you had and all the irrelevant contexts that come with it.

Even stranger than the actual photograph – the fact that a memory is frozen in time – is the fact that you can’t just jump back into that photo. If we are able to capture what our eyes see, why can’t we capture what our ears hear (WE CAN), and why can’t we capture what we felt at the time (WE CAN). But there is always something missing. After Jonny died Ed sent me a message saying “looking at that photo, he is almost tangible,” and looking at photos I’ve taken I can feel the heat of the sun at Hop Farm and I can feel the spray of the sea on the coast of Ireland. But your mind can only go so far, I guess. Because though a photo can capture an essence of the moment you can’t jump into it – no matter how much you want to.