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?

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.

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

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.”

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?

It’s been a little too long – especially given all the great things to write about from the past few weeks. I suppose we’ll have to look back in bullet point form:

-Can’t stop talking about the Olafur Eliasson exhibit that just ended at the Chicago MCA

Other friends who’ve visited commented on the simplicity and accessibility of the experience, but also the surprises to be found there. Those type of comments remind me of the desert experiences that keep coming back to mind in our brainstorming meetings: Is there a way to simplify film (while also making it huge) that clears the mind of digital distraction, opening people to profound experiences of the world around them? That’s why I like the tagline for Eliasson’s exhibit so much: “devices for the experience of reality.” It’s not so much “fantasy” that we’re interested in, but a new way of seeing what’s really there, and imagining what could come next.

In Eliasson’s work, I kept being taken back to the experience of nature. That seems so obvious, in a sense, but it was striking on many levels. As Wittgenstein writes in his collection of aphorisms Culture and Value, “You must say something new and yet it must all be old….You have got to assemble old bits of material, but into a building.”

-Long Now Foundation meetup in Chicago on Rosetta Project and Global Lives Project

I’ve watched the presentation by Global Lives executive director David Evan Harris, and really enjoyed what I saw. If you’re interested in hearing him talk about the project, I’ve embedded the video below. You may find yourself skipping around a bit, but the most Cube-related material comes about 21 minutes into the video. Part of the goal of the Global Lives project is to make an art installation to allow viewers to wander through various 24-hour long films of interesting but non-famous people throughout the world. This is a great idea, in my book anyway – and seems to be something worth celebrating and keeping track of for future viewing (so long as it gets made).

David Evan Harris, Executive Director of Global Lives Project from long now chicago on Vimeo.

It’s been running for the whole summer, but I finally got to the Olafur Eliasson exhibit at Chicago’s MCA earlier today. The first photo below appears in a New York Times article on Eliasson from last year.

What I loved in the Take Your Time exhibit at the MCA was the actively pursued idea that nature itself, seen with new eyes, can provide for us endless supplies of beauty – especially when seen in new juxtapositions, compilations, singular sensory experiences, and the like. The various series of photographs (especially “Horizon series” – 2002) were particularly compelling to me. It was like watching a film, in that scenes were linked together in a logical, proportional way – but unlike a film, in that the scenes were not predictably placed. The mathematical beauty and nature’s patterns are discovered – or re-seen, I suppose. It’s not so much the artist as creative force, but as seeing creature. In any case, it made me so happy to wander around in these pieces today – experiencing light and natural forms in a bright new way.

This makes me wish I could have seen Eliasson’s “Weather project” (part of which is pictured below, as it appeared in the Tate Modern in 2003):

I wrote about Obscura Digital in a much earlier post – but they’ve really taken things to a new level with this immersive visual-auditory performance in Carnegie Hall. The music-film combination is very exciting to see, and completely relevant to our vision.

You can see the YouTube version below, but I prefer the version Obscura Digital has on their site.

Reading yesterday on defaults, I was reminded of several conversations about the “spiritual footprint” left in art by its creator. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, “writing” icons is as much about letting God work on you as an artist as it is about working with a material to produce some result. In a sense, an icon is not made, but received – partly from tradition, partly from the overflow of spiritual health given by God. A friend (Baker Galloway) who went on a pilgrimage to the monastic/artistic Orthodox enclave of Mt. Athos spoke at length with the monks there concerning this mode of artistry. Something that intrigued me about their perspective was the idea that the spiritual state of the artist automatically transfered itself through their artwork – and that no amount of intention could overcome this transfer. In this way, the only adequate preparation for producing something of value was through prayer, confession, and reception of grace. The result would not be the artist’s profound vision arriving through a heroic act of will, but rather, as clear a channel toward God as visual possible – a window into heaven. Nowhere in this model is the skill, insight, or fame of the artist brought to the forefront. The purpose and spiritual state of the artist, however, are present (presumably). Perhaps this is the connection to defaults: whether a work of art is a self-referential system, or something the points away from itself while taking the viewer inside at the same time. For icons, this happens in a variety of structural ways – inverted perspective being one example: the idea that the vanishing point for the painting is located on the viewer’s side, rather than within the painting, so that the viewer is included as a participant in the reality portrayed. How might other technologies (besides wood and pigment and hammered metal) be used to include participants in open, expansive systems of meaning and life (unlike a standard video game, or other such closed world)? This is a major question for our work. Plenty comes to mind, both for artists and viewers. A few preliminary ideas might be that artists be mindful of their role – not from the perspective of how important they are (or are not, yet), but knowing that their work overflows from their person with meaning and power of certain kinds, and not just what they had in mind. For viewers, the work of participation and reception – going beyond passivity in our intake of beauty, entertainment, and so forth.

On Orthodox icons generally, the following books have been helpful to me:

Leonid Ouspensky & Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons

Solrunn Nes, The Mystical Language of Icons

Hyperbolically, I wish more than anything that I could believe the second part of this story were completely incidental and poetically just, rather than contrived. Part 1: Artist Mike Bouchet floats a stereotypified McMansion – complete with mind-numbing taupe vinyl siding – through the canals of Venice as a performance piece as part of the Venice Biennale. Part 2: The house, called Watershed, sinks, to become embedded in a mythological aqua-architectural graveyard. See the video here (embedding disabled).

What does this thing (below) mean?

And what does it mean when it sinks – dying, yet becoming a permanent part of the underwater foundations of society? This is, somehow, contemporary splendor – an apex of accomplishment. But why? And what else might we pursue instead? We need renewed vision, healed imagination in order for our cultural products to be worth more than mockery. Our spaces have everything to do with the formation of these visions, while also being the barometers of the state of our collective imaginative virility.

(Thanks to bldgblog for this find – an excellent blog well worth looking into)

I’m almost always encouraged in this endeavor by reading Makoto Fujimura’s thoughts on art, culture and human flourishing – thoughts like this:

Art brings possibilities of re-creation back into the broken world. Artists are instinctively generative, and they are used to asking impossible questions. That’s why they are the first to enter dilapidated corners of the cities, and to see before anyone else, the potential for re-creation in an abandoned loft.

[Refractions 31]

May there no longer be physical space in which to experience an “outside” world unmediated by a technological interface? (at least, that’s what Jacques Ellul will argue in The Meaning of the City). Fujimura instead points to the genuine possibilities within an urban landscape that covers the nature beneath – possibilities driven by the enlivened imagination. There is an aspect of reclamation here, but more so, of recreation. Maybe the old reality is truly no longer with us – or maybe, and this might be harder, we no longer have the imaginative power to see life apart from the constructed shell. What artists like Fujimura seem to be saying is that, either way, we can still create something beautiful.

I’m constantly mesmerized by the various projects artists are doing these days that involve mailable light, intangible but luminous shapes and figures that respond to the touch of a user. Some good examples include “Composition on the Table” from the Intercommunication Center and the multi-touch sensor panel from Jeff Han (presented at the TED talks, like so many other interesting things):

The touchscreen is so fun because it has the power of a creative blank slate, but is so intuitive in use. I’d love to see this type of thing as public art – a canvas connected to anyone who has a creative impulse at the time, with the result of a spontaneous beautiful image for the rest of us, even if it only lasts a few seconds. What would happen if a city allowed its residents to walk up to a touch panel and create whatever they wanted – artwork which would be projected live into a huge public space for everyone’s enjoyment? (Setting aside the obvious misuses of this – which could be hilarious too).

“Imagination is to reality what poetry is to prose: the former will always think of objects as massive and vertical, the latter will always try to extend them horizontally.”

-Goethe

Throwing the old Art 21 DVD into the player is always a good time, but this spin was especially excellent because of the episode on Richard Serra. His sculptures without figure, landscape or likeness are always a joy to see. There’s something totally unique about the paradox of seeing a huge steel something, yet believing it to be elastic and free. A phrase he used during that episode has especially stuck with me though: when we’re engaging this type of art, we’re working the muscles of our imagination and creativity. Even as the works are being set up, Serra is already mining them for more ideas, letting his thoughts run out ahead onto future projects. This is a sure sign of valuable work – that it leads straight to even better things.

Image ran an article on Serra in its Spring ‘08 edition. I noticed some great quotes applying to our Cube work, at least tangentially: “What interests me is the opportunity to become something different from what we are by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.” Our vision for the Cube is, if nothing else, that it would be a place of expanding the personhood of the people who encounter beauty there.

Another line of thinking fom Serra that I found intriguing was the complex interaction of art with its surroundings: “I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the spaces and places where it is created in this sense. I am interested in work where the artist is a maker of “anti-environment” which takes its own places and makes its own situation, or divides and declares its own area.”