In any case, the more I looked into Redon, the more I found to impress and delight. For a grad class on the psychology and physiology of visual perception of art (they offer things that specific these days), I explored Redon’s work in dealing directly with new scientific realizations about the way the human visual system works. I’m not one to be very impressed with “optical illusions” as such, but something Redon was working on (at the same time as some of the Impressionists) was the creation of apparent motion in static images. Take a look at the following painting, and explore this idea for yourself (Flower Clouds, 1903):

The critical perspectives on Redon’s work all seem to resound with a common theme: he had discovered and occupied the “vague frontier” between known and unknown (Jodi Hauptman’s phrase). Jean Selz writes, “His work does in fact occupy a place between sight and vision…[A]s much a narrator of the imagination as an observer of nature,” he maintained “a steadfast desire to avoid breaking the bond that in his eyes made them inseparable.” For me, his work represents a fruitful melding of realms of artistic expression and technical knowledge, as well as artistic modes of knowing – simultaneously dealing with the Natural (as it is classically known), the natural (though unseen) physiological and psychological activity of the eye and brain, and the supernatural, as his art reaches through nature and beyond it. As he wrote toward the end of his life, this kind of art was meant to be a way of “putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.”

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

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.

The Light Inside

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

The Roden Crater Project:

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

The structure is (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.

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

__________

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.”

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?