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

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The Roden Crater Project:

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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.

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.

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.

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?

-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.

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):

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