About WhyTheAlgarve

About the author

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Justus Hayes is a Vancouver-based artist, musician, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of creative practice and conceptual inquiry. He holds a Master's degree in Forensic Psychology from the University of British Columbia, where his research examined the emotional processing of language in psychopathic individuals - an early encounter with the gap between form and meaning that has informed his thinking ever since.

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For fifteen years he worked as head of the paint department at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, where the craft of faux finishing - making surfaces appear to be something they are not, calibrated to the distance of the audience - gave him a working vocabulary for deception, perception, and the negotiated nature of reality that would eventually find its way into the theoretical framework presented here.

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His engagement with liminal environments is not merely theoretical. Over two decades he has sought them out deliberately - in abandoned psychiatric institutions and decommissioned coal mines in Belgium, in Vancouver's decaying industrial buildings, in service corridors and empty theatres at one in the morning. 

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He has been making breaks-driven music since the late 1990s, initially under the name the Opponent Process - a reference to the opponent process theory of psychology that sits at the heart of his account of the liminal -  and more recently as the creator of Pink Eye, a multimedia art project expressed through music, visual design, and writing. The Liminal Internet is a major branch of that project.

 

His music is available at youtube.com@shoesonwires.

 

The project's landing page is at whythealgarve.com/pinkeye.

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He has been sober since December 19, 2019.