One of our guys found this the other day. Really amazing sense of changing space, placement, and movement. The blurring effects are really intriguing to me. From creative agency Superbien, for some sort of mobile phone promotion (but only slightly less interesting because of it).

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.

That phrase really struck me as I was reading Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing by Kierkegaard recently. As I’ve meditated on it further, I’ve found it to be a real challenge personally and artistically: personally, in that it demands a level of particularity and focus that I’ve allowed to be diluted with constant distractions; artistically, in that it calls me to dig deep rather than cast wide – the anti-internet, if you will.

Many of the light and space artists that have deeply impressed some of us in this journey create experiences that are notable for their singular nature – the one-dimensionality of the experience, like Olafur Eliasson’s 360 Room for All Colors:

It is one thing to notice that our culture is in a hysterical pattern of diversionary consumption of tidbits of interest. It is quite another thing to create spaces where that reality is not only called out, but powerfully controverted in action and environment.

A typical art gallery or exhibition can unintentionally tend in the direction of diversion and distraction if it is not arranged to provide one experience at a time. When artworks are placed within the same visual space, yet are meant to be experienced singularly, the viewer (especially one trained by the interface of the internet) can flit from one to another, never really letting the art take root in the mind. This is one of the reasons that the Cube is going to be immersive: not to overwhelm the viewer, but to allow the mental freedom from Manyness, from distraction, from the experience of “doing” the museum without taking anything in.

This could probably become an enormously long post if I’m not careful – reason being, that James Turrell is working on so many projects that are relevant to the work we hope to do, and for reasons that are so much in tune with ours. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to simply lay out a tour of his work for your enjoyment. The videos you can see here are from the excellent PBS series Art:21:

The Light Inside

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

The Roden Crater Project:

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

The picture below is one I took while in Paris a few years back. I had just been thinking to myself, Oh no, I’m trapped in tourist perdition! Without going anywhere else, I just started to look through my lens, seeing if there was something I was missing. The hulk of steel above me, seemingly ready to collapse at any moment into a flood of kitschy miniatures of itself, because a source of contemplation and repose. In thinking of the question What should we make?, I can’t help but go straight to another, related question: How should we see?

…to be the fad it already was. Roger Ebert, my Chicago favorite in film criticism, lays out a powerful slate of reasons for the medium’s irrelevance to the actual development of new and better cinematic experiences. You can read the entire Newsweek article here, but I’ve quoted the follow section as of particular food for thought for Artistic Energies:

Whenever Hollywood has felt threatened, it has turned to technology: sound, color, widescreen, cinerama, 3-D stereophonic sound, and now 3-D again. In marketing terms, this means offering an experience that can’t be had at home. With the advent of Blu-ray discs, HD cable, and home digital projectors, the gap between the theater and home experience has been narrowed. 3-D widened it again. Now home 3-D TV set may narrow that gap as well.

This last line is especially salient as we wrestle with how to develop new technology that isn’t just a marketing gimmick:

What Hollywood needs is a “premium” experience that is obviously, dramatically better than anything at home, suitable for films aimed at all ages, and worth a surcharge.

Pascal: “The only thing that consoles us in our miseries is diversion, and yet it is the greatest of our miseries” (Pensées, 414)

There is a world of difference between seeking newness and seeking novelty: the first is a kind of search for personal renewal as an individual or community to whom the current state of affairs is clearly in error – the second is a search for effective means of escaping that reality. In a sense, diversion is despair in action.

But, you might ask, what’s all this talk about otherness and surprise and sensory engagement all about if not diversion?

I’ve been considering this problem as I’ve been finishing Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. In his chapter called “Intimate Immensity” (isn’t that perfect for our work here?), he writes that in the desert, “we can experience concentration of wandering” – an existential state not available to a habitual diversion seeker, a state of knowing ourselves as addicts to the artistic equivalents of pain killers. In the best sense, wilderness can induce withdrawal.

Bachelard goes on to describe the concentration available in the deep ocean: a singularity of experience, an external one-dimensionality which precipitates intense inward realization in the explorer (reminding me of Eliasson’s artwork and mantra: “devices for the experience of reality”). Bachelard’s connection of intimacy and immensity is so interesting to me because of this type of image. He’s describing and advocating imagination-strengthening experiences which are simultaneously non-addictive, partly because they are laying bare personal realities rather than covering them up, as with diversion. This type of approach is of enormous importance to our thinking about the films we make for the Cube. If a digital medium is to be used at a large scale, yet “against” dominant/addictive models, the intensity of the wilderness is one paradigm in which we can work.

Just something interest-worthy from BLDG BLOG, as so often is the case (click picture to follow to posting):

The structure is a (primarily or secondarily?) a warehouse for thousands of seed varieties, each having it’s own acrylic spire jutting outward from the inner chamber. As the Cube develops, it will also literally take shape (and that probably won’t be as a square…) – so things like this are food for our imaginations.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been reading Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space these last couple of weeks’ worth of train commutes. I’m sure his thoughts will find there way into many postings – it’s just rich prose dealing broadly with inhabited spaces. This quote seemed linked to the topic of wilderness for me:

“At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dream” (page 137, 2nd edition, 1994, translated).

One of the readily apparent benefits of the wilderness, and an image of it, is simplicity. Sometimes, I experience simplicity as discomfort – almost a form of anxiety – concerning my accoutrements, technological or otherwise. That is the barrier that someone like myself needs to push through in order to reach into the simplicity. It’s a counterintuitive process to consider: that simplicity can be initially overwhelming.

As with Olafur Eliasson’s artwork (see earlier post), zeroing sensory experience onto as singular a focus as possible can prompt all sorts of surprises, epiphanies, and reconsiderations. This is perhaps hinted at by Elaine Scarry (earlier post) as well, when she claims that one of beauty’s evident effects is to let us suddenly but enjoyably into the experience of being wrong. She talks about having been wrong about palm trees. I’ve had similar experiences of being wrong about volcanoes, forests, hillsides, weddings, sporting events – all sorts of experiences and places that have (for me – I know, volcanoes too!) accumulated some amount of cultural “blah” in terms of discourse, but when experienced as new, as fresh, they can surprise and invigorate.

That’s another strong point that Bachelard seems to be making constantly as a phenomenologist of the imagination: the experience of something as new, as a first time, is uniquely to be prized; whereas the effort to logically reconstruct an experience starts to lose that sense, even more so when it is reconstructed in order to be classified as “done”, as “fully understood”, as something no longer in need of investigation. This is the error of learning from a stale setting (say, a textbook) things that have been originally learned by others as amazing encounters (though I’ve seen this error reversed without being corrected: presenting as amazing and sudden insights that were only gained through endless drudgery and formulation).

We’ll return to this soon.

This is only going to be a teaser – if that word even applies to a planned series of blog postings on a subject that might strike you as bleak and unpromising at first. Part of the essence of Artistic Energies has also been a love for the wilderness and what can happen in it. It’s strange, perhaps, to even say “in it” because what it contains is otherness – to be outside, in so many senses.

There are so many worthwhile questions to ask about the relationship between being in nature and being in technology – the ecology and psychology of each. I’ll try to get at a few of those questions that have intrigued us for years: Can technology be used as a means of escaping “back” toward reality? Do simulations of grandeur wrongly content us with simulation, or rightly extend our desires toward beauty? What beauty can we find as humans in inhuman places? And as a Benedictine monk recently asked me, Is the city itself the new wilderness? – a spiritual wasteland built on fear and self-protective distance against a super-powerful Nature and the possibility of either spiritual presence or spiritual absence.

Look for more on these topics in the days to come.

It’s in vogue to speak of the advancement of technology as a process that is simultaneously inevitable, and yet, without apparent awareness of contradiction, something which everyone needs to be on board with in order for progress to occur. Technology “wants” things, but relies on us to do its bidding, in the words of some commentators. I ran across these thoughts from W.H. Auden earlier today:

…it is our task to discover what everything in the universe, from electrons upwards, could, to its betterment, become, but cannot without our help. This means reintroducing into science the notion of teleology, long a dirty word. For our proper relation to nonliving things, the right analogy might be that of a sculptor. Every sculptor thinks of himself, not as someone who forcibly imposes a form on stone, but as someone who reveals a form already latent in it…

We have to realize that every time we make an ugly lampstand, we are torturing helpless metal., every time we make a nuclear bomb we are corrupting the morals of a host of innocent neutrons below the age of consent.

-from A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, 1970, New York: Viking, 282.

This may seem like a crazy idea – and it may turn out to be, seeing as it does not appear tested in practice yet – but BLDG BLOG has led me to an interesting project by some folks at MIT. The idea is to have tiny helicopters fly in sequence, emitting various colors and patterns of light, in order to form, basically, a large-scale, flying screen in the open air. See their video from youtube below:

I’m about 30 pages in to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. I may just be overly involved in the link between spaces and imagination (and therefore blind to what a normal person would read), but this one looks like it’s going to be a “must” for our thinking. The main thing I’m getting so far – other than great ideas about how poetry happens – is about the imaginatively shaping work of our childhood homes. They are a sort of “first universe” for our imaginations – a place in which we learn to dream, and to which we often return in revery and thought. I see plenty of direct relation to our earlier post on Lewis’ ideas on medieval cosmos – an inhabitable universe. Both Lewis and Bachelard seem to be getting at an amazing idea: we cannot imagine and live within a void, even if it is more “real” than our value-laden experience of spaces.

In Cube terms, this type of work gives us insight into what shapes our imagination – as well as some of the how and why (embodied, inhabited, childhood spaces versus those that we experience in general). In some ways, it perhaps is a work that offers some direction in terms of large-scale film: it can’t get “thin” in terms of physicality and what James Wood calls “thisness” – the quality of particularity that we look for in fiction. At the same time, with projects like Olafur Eliasson’s, it seems equally clear that experiences of extreme simplicity (say, a monochromatic room) can still meet this criterion (I think) by virtue of their focus and sensory particularity.

There is a somewhat recent TED talk we’ve come across and been intrigued by recently. The talk by Evan Grant is on cymatics: the visualization of sound waves, or modal phenomena. This is something that could be used by artists and engineers to create amazingly unified image-music performances.

Update: see comments section for a link to the art, machinery and people involved with the CymaScope

I’ve just had a chance to read and juxtapose two recently done articles: Remnants of the Biosphere (from BLDGBLOG) and Whatever Happened to Second Life? (from PC Pro).

The photo above (by Noah Sheldon – all of which are worth seeing) comes from the BLDGBLOG article – which might just be better to read than what I was going to say about it anyway. Suffice it to say, $200 million into a project to create a protected environment for life, things more or less went to pot.

I don’t have the estimate for how many millions have gone into the massive online environment Second Life, but it seems that it too is headed toward attrition of a certain kind. In the PC Pro article, Barry Collins argues that the promises of Second Life – among which that its ultimate-sandbox openness to invention would produce new and better ways of expressing humanity – have reduced somewhat since its creation. What Collins observes is that, given complete freedom to explore and create new ways of life, artistry and commerce, Second Life users have narrowed their energies onto real estate speculation, endless multiplication of needless possessions, and prostitution (of sorts that would be illegal in most places in “real life”) – the combination of which is now bringing in more money for the game than ever before.

Reading these articles together (which I hope you can find time to do), I was struck by the imagery of massive, technologically advanced structures built for the purpose of nurturing and guarding nascent and precious forms of life. A spirit of American enterprise and entrepreneurship fills both types of endeavors to the brim with optimism, pride and hope. Yet – anticlimactically – these projects have become (or are in the visible process of becoming) testaments to a spirit of waste, incoherence, self-focus, and social fragmentation. Cast as a place with no upper limits, Second Life seems to have come to be a place with no lower limits.

This is not as it somehow “must” be when it comes to grand projects – and this is not at all to say that there aren’t real, human interactions that can and do take place in virtual worlds and social networking: if either were true, this blog would neither be written nor read. But I still have to ask, what would it be like to see a massive means for artistic expression used well by a community of people – for each other’s sake?

Just watched two amazing films recently: Man on Wire, and Into Great Silence. The films could hardly be more different – what connection is there between a tight-rope walker and Carthusian monks? – but I felt a deep sense of affinity between them. Both films draw you in. Both films give a radical picture of a different, transcendent way of life. Both films depict intense individual and communal discipline and focus, and yet also, incredible fruitfulness and creativity.

In a sense, Man on Wire is the more artistically inspiring of the two. It is incredible to see someone do something so beautiful, so surprising, so dangerous. It becomes inconsequential that the act is illegal – in fact, that only contributes to the surprise and beauty in a positive way (even the NYPD and the district attorney at the time, 1974, had to admit this).

Into Great Silence also manages to capture some of the same spirit of radical, beautiful departure from the norms of society. At first, I had the thought How do they get anything done? There’s so much praying, silence, waiting, chore-doing. But by the end, I had changed my tune. There was a real sense of liberation in the monks’ ascetic lifestyle (at least in the film). They had the freedom to do things that mattered – all day, every day. It seemed the exact opposite of my obsession with “getting things done.”

The most significant commonality I was able to see between these two films was that both show a discipline of being overwhelmed and re-inspired toward the highest possible aims. Both the monks and Philip Petit (the wire-walker) displayed a lack of self-consciousness made possible by the hugeness of their aims and surroundings – the utter absence of false humility.

This poem, “The Man Watching” by Rainer Maria Rilke, really struck me this week. I’ve posted the Edward Snow translation below, from the North Point Press edition of The Book of Images:

__________

I can see that the storms are coming/ by the trees, which out of stale lukewarm days/ beat against my anxious windows,/ and I can hear the distances say things/ one can’t bear without a friend,/ can’t love without a sister.

Then the storm swirls, a rearranger,/ swirls through the woods and through time,/ and everything is as if without age:/ the landscape, like verse in the psalter,/ is weight and ardor and eternity.

How small that is, with which we wrestle,/ what wrestles with us, how immense;/ were we to let ourselves, the way things do,/ be conquered thus by the great storm,-/ we would become far-reaching and nameless.

What we triumph over is the Small,/ and the success itself makes of petty./ The Eternal and Unexampled/ will not be bent by us./ This is the Angel, who appeared/ to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:/ when his opponent’s sinews/ in that contest stretch like metal,/ he feels them under his fingers/ like strings making deep melodies.

Whomever this Angel overcame/ (who so often declined the fight),/ he walks erect and justified/ and great out of that hard hand/ which, as if sculpting, nestled round him./ Winning does not tempt him./ His growth is: to be the deeply defeated/ by ever greater things.

________

Not that Rilke had this in mind, per se, but I immediately thought of our different approaches to the world, divided rudely into use and wonder. (I suppose “domination” and “respect” could work too). There’s a way in which scientific pursuits can be fueled either by fear and risk management, or by the intrigue of nature itself.

As I mentioned in an earlier post on C.S. Lewis’ vision of medieval cosmology, there is a way in which we can acknowledge the hugeness and grandiosity of nature without ever inhabiting it, without having the experience of it because of distraction toward smaller things. Part of what we’re concerned with here is a personal and communal discipline, if you will, of being blown away by reality – “to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things.”

A friend was recently in Jerusalem and had the chance to see a show called The Night Spectacular. It’s an outdoor, projection-based show that takes place on the walls of the Tower of David museum. The projection and film work were done by a French company called Skertzo (you can see other interesting installations of theirs at their website – apologies to non-Francophones). The trailer is pretty over the top, which actually makes it harder to get a good idea of the experience. My hard-to-impress friend reports that it actually was quite good.

Is there Cube relevance here? At least in regards to the communal story experience, set in a spacious area, without all the gimmicks of air-jets and lurching floors (this is the type of thing you write when you just know you’ll never make any compromises – pre-foot-in-mouth prose). Probably the most exciting thing here is the ability of filmmakers to do a new kind of story on a new kind of canvas. There is something irreducible about the palette, something very enabling. What we’re ultimately going for is not the abstract advancement of technology, but rather, the right use of new technology to do good art in more and better ways – for more and better purposes, in other words.

This could be a great idea, or a terrible one. It’s actually kind of hard to tell the difference.

Reading bldgblog today, I was struck by images that came to mind as I thought further about the idea of an open-air planetarium, projected onto the low over-cast of London skies above Trafalgar Square. What kind of experience would that be? Amazing and inviting, perhaps (who wouldn’t like to have a window through that cloud cover to the deeps of space beyond?). I could picture a leisurely walk filled with usually invisible constellations and detailed views of deep space phenomena. These types of things would (and have, ever since humans had eyes and stayed awake past sundown) make for excellent viewing.

On the other hand, I had images of a less salutary sort come to mind as well: a complete digitization of the sky – one more source of light pollution, a buzz of projected activity always turned on whether welcome or not, a kind of pixelated graffiti painted over “boring” parts of nature. Though I’ve seen plenty of digital art that involves natural structures as part of the image (projections on mist, waterfalls, fog, etc.), I think the question I still have is in what manner nature gets to serve as inspiration, content, or medium for art.

We ought to keep exploring these types of things. My hunch is that nature will ultimately serve as our best source for thematic content for films in the Cube. Perhaps that’s too obvious – what besides nature do we have to work with? I guess what I’m driving at is that the wilderness – not just patches of grass next to bus stops – may be the place we all need to go, imaginatively speaking, for a renewal of our minds.

The other day, I was relating the experience I had last year: walking in moonlight out over cooled lava in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. My friend and I were trying to catch a glimpse of the place where the flowing, molten rock reached the ocean. It wasn’t a good night for viewing that, but that made no difference to us, because of what we did find: ourselves at the edge of the newly-formed land (you know, the part we’d been warned not to stand on) looking out at the largest waves we’d ever seen, 60 or 70 feet from trough to crest, almost silently rolling to the top of the cliffs – I say silent, but I mean something more like sublime; with a sound of elements moving the earth, not of splashing. I’m not sure that the earth has ever felt so real to me as for those glorious minutes when we couldn’t make ourselves move away from the sight and feel of danger.

I’m not so much a Hemingway disciple as to think of all this as man versus nature, nor so much a hippie to think of nature as a gentle, caring mother. Something else was happening. And I think that something else – the inexhaustible otherness, yet present to my senses – was a sacramental gift; but no less dangerous as such. This is different than a projection which is under our control (or simply a visual annoyance to the uninterested). Could something like this experience be brought inside a theater?

I had the pleasure last week of attending a lecture by scholar Michael Ward. He was talking about his new book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008). I haven’t read it yet, but have it sitting on my desk next to me, ready to go. The gist of the book is that the Lewis’ Narnia series is, in fact, organized around the classical/medieval cosmological model of the heavens – with the planets, sun and moon all exerting their own, peculiar “influence” over the content of each book, and the rest of the symbolism involved therein. That description may be, to you, one drawn out reason for a yawn, but I find it quite intriguing – particularly since no one has figured this out before, though it was there in plain sight. Dr. Ward spoke of Lewis’ method as “transferred classicism”: taking classical figures, symbolism, and, in this case astrological and cosmological models in order to tell a story about something quite different (a Christ-like salvation history in another world).

I’ve spent quite a bit of my own time and thought considering Lewis’ obsession with medieval cosmology – partly as it comes out in his Ransom Trilogy and partly in his scholarly writings on medieval and Renaissance literature (especially The Discarded Image). The interesting point Lewis continually brings out, both as a scholar and a fiction writer, is that, while not “accurate”, the medieval model of the universe was at least imaginatively engaging. Unlike the boundless void which comes to mind when we hear “space”, Lewis claims the medieval model was, clearly, a real place – vast, yet also comprehensible and meaningful. More contemporary theories of cosmology also tend to place emphasis on inter-connectedness and beauty, but the modernist damage is mostly done. Among other things, our human imagination (at least in places dominated by technological priority and scientism) is hopelessly alone and disconnected in a sea of empty space. That may be “deep” existentially speaking, but it doesn’t ultimately take you anywhere (unless you love slogging through H. P. Lovecraft novels – which some friends of mine do, to be honest).

One way or another, I think one key inspiration from Lewis’ work is that it is possible (and beneficial) to develop stories in such a way that their thematic structure supports their imaginative accessibility while remaining mostly invisible (indeed, invisible to scholars for decades). This, I believe, is different than pulling off a good illusion.

As for the Cube, I find all sorts of connections here. For one, the point that our imaginations reflect the universe in which we believe we live. This can be illusory or over-literal – to the point that we miss deeper meanings in scientific learning. One purpose of the original visions for the Cube was as a place where people’s view of the universe became expanded – but not toward the expanse of nothingness. Rather, to become more real, full, visibly beautiful, enjoyable, and thoroughly livable. That may sound entirely abstract, but the idea is rather in the opposite direction: to expound upon the mystery of the universe in a meaningful way rather than a “shock and awe” trip to the edge of a black hole (which doesn’t sound too bad as a visual story – just not the whole story).

I just read a very thought-provoking article by author Michael Chabon (pdf form here) on the idea of the future. Chabon was (2 years ago, in this case) writing about the Clock of the Long Now – a project of the Long Now Foundation: a group hoping to promote better long-term thinking in many areas. What Chabon writes is very interesting to me, for all sorts of reasons. I suppose it helps that I already enjoy his books, but his insights on this issue are very good, as well as being connected to some of our earlier posting about “alternative futures”. One thing that I automatically agreed with is that our imaginations lead us into our pursuits and inventions. Chabon makes the intriguing point, though, that “the future” – as it has come to be pursued – is really rather archaic (if you can call the 1950s that).

There is an oddness in realizing that, having done everything the “future” of the past wanted to accomplish (minus infinite food supplies and personal rocket packs), we are yet confronted by the same difficulties – and yet more deeply, perhaps we have lived out our past’s version of the future and now don’t know what to do next. There is no more future of the past to live out. So as we see the power of the imaginations of those from envisioned the future before, it should inspire us to re-envision for ourselves that future.

But part of the problem now is that “the future” previously envisioned hasn’t amounted to the utopia imagined – it’s just gotten filled with all of the gadgets and systematization we “always wanted”. The Clock that the Long Now Foundation is making reminds Chabon (and many others who think about this project) to take time to imagine life 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years from now. The incredible thing is, this can sometimes produce only a blank slate – forcing us to realize just how little vision we actually have, and how much “the future” of 60-year-old sci-fi is really a function of the past and present, rather than something we’re actively and creatively thinking about.