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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Between a dawn airport run and my 9 o’clock appointment in the loop, I killed a couple of hours watching a great film that’s been on my shortlist for a while: Tokyo! (dir. Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, & Bong Joon-ho – in three parts, each overseen by one of the directors).

View the trailer from youtube here:

The whole set of three made for an enjoyable experience, but especially the third, Shaking Tokyo (dir. Bong Joon-ho). The lead character (Teruyuki Kagawa) retreats away from the sight of other humans for a decade, until finally breaking out of his “perfect” world into the real, larger, brighter, but still frightening one, in pursuit of another extreme introvert (the pizza delivery girl – played by Yu Aoi). My favorite quote from this segment of the film comes after Teruyuki Kagawa’s character has finally rushed out into the city, only to find that everyone else in the city has fled in doors, into their isolated lives. As one of the characteristic earthquakes shakes the apartment building, a man yells out, “It’s collapsing! Everyone come out!” This isolation cannot continue, but is difficult as anything to escape from once it becomes more and more controlled, less painful.

Even as it participates in the technological world, our goal for the Cube is to find ways to re-connect people, to reverse the trend toward diseased isolation we can so easily see in increasingly mediated lifestyles. Tokyo! itself works this way, but also calls out for us to find more ways to break free from our fear of each other, of sunlight, of reality, of all things beyond our control. The movie’s tagline is instructive: “Do we shape cities, or do cities shape us?” It’s a both/and, but the exploration of that question is very important. It’s interesting that it is the incursion of the “real” environment (sunlight and other humans) that presents that greatest threat to our sense of control, yet also provides a pathway out – far enough to recognize the pallid, small, dirty place we’ve so long called ideal. One of the early inspirations for the Cube was to bring people (who might otherwise never leave the city) as close to the complete experience of nature as possible. Among so many other possible routes, this is still one that drives our vision.

I’ve started to pay more attention to things Kevin Kelly is writing, especially on the “non-neutrality” of technology. His Technium is going to be a very important piece as we consider the issue of alternative futures and the imaginative visions driving those possible directions (in fact, the Technium project seems to be Kelly’s direct response to Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near). The post that I’ve just been reading today is “Triumph of the Default” (June 22, 2009). Kelly is commenting on the hidden influence on users’ experience of technology as it comes from its makers loaded with biases and presumed ideals. I quote the posting at length here:

Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases.  We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.

Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that “no choice” is a choice itself. There’s is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don’t choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.

I think it becomes obvious that our “defaults” as producers and artists – while not controlling the use or interpretation of our work – definitely carry implications to audiences. We want people to take it a certain way, even if that certain way is “to keep an open mind and not assume it only has one meaning.” This is one of many ways in which the presentation space – physical, acoustic, visual, etc. – profoundly influences audience experiences. Think of the difference between taking in a movie passively on a small laptop screen while simultaneously facebooking/twittering/youtubing  around and actually taking the trek downtown to that little theater that plays the independent films on a huge screen with warm projected light beaming through always high-resolution analog film (thanks to Read Schuchardt from his thoughts on this topic). Each format “wants” something different from you – and your behavior as a viewer trends toward that demand, even or especially through inaction (as Kelly points out, on a more general basis). This relates directly to whether we will use technology as it is handed to us, or make something else out of it – whether we will shape the tool, or be shaped by it.

For more from Kevin Kelly, watch his TED talk from several years back on the evolution of technology:

One scholar who has been particularly helpful to me in exploring the idea of alternative futures is Dipesh Chakrabarty. As part of the subaltern studies group, Chakrabarty’s work explores some very exciting ideas (at least to me, the guy with the history degree). One of his arguments in Provincializing Europe (one of my top reads this year) is that a system of evaluating history from a deterministic perspective runs aground when applied to reality. The fact that people live in radically different ways now, and have lived in radically different ways in the past, gives a model of an alternative approach to reality – not just a “backward” or “undeveloped” one, since many of these approaches to reality are aimed at dealing with the contemporary world without being overcome by it.

In ae, a growing topic of conversation is how to learn to swim in the heavy seas of an environment of technology – to avoid being dragged underneath and made the slaves of whatever tides of invention and technologization come our way. Presuming that there is only one possible future (an androidic singularity of post-biological humanity bound together with self-perpetuating machinery) is precisely the type of assumption that, because it does not allow for alternatives, should make us extremely suspicious.

Then the question becomes How? The current drive toward “the” singularity is guided by the imaginations of many people – whether inventors, science fiction authors, theoreticians, etc. – who envision this goal, and work toward its inception. An alternative future would be one that begins with an alternative vision: a different hope for the direction of human life. We rely on artists and thinkers of great visionary capability to enable us to achieve expanded, multiform, adaptive, transcendent goals. One of the remarkable “functions” of art is to enable us to see differently, to recognize something for the first time that may have been in front of us our whole lives, or even to take us into completely uncharted territory – the unprecedented experiences which can only be compared to other unprecedented experiences (as Elaine Scarry beautifully writes about in On Beauty and Being Just). Analogous to Chakrabarty’s approach, Scarry sees a dual movement within a person in an encounter with beauty: “...the way beautiful things have a forward momentum, the way they incite the desire to bring new things into the world: infants, epics, sonnets, drawings, dances, laws, philosophic dialogues, theological tracts. But we soon found ourselves also turning backward, for the beautiful faces and songs that lift us forward onto new ground keep calling out to us as well, inciting us to rediscover and recover them in whatever new thing gets made” (page 46).

Into this conversation enters the Cube – or at least, its pre-conception form. How might we engage in visual and aural art that reconnects us to each other, and not just to a central computer? How might a massive, immersive film experience enable us to escape the deterministic vision of the future from within the same technology usually wedded to those ideological purposes? I suppose this makes it easy to see why this isn’t a direct-to-market idea! The means matter to such as extent that the ends have no existence without them. Part of the “fruit” imagined as a result of experiences in the Cube would be critical reflection on the mediated life – basically, on the technological experience just encountered, as contrasted with the artistic experience breathed through the technological. Without this vigorous paradox, the Cube will be uselessly swallowed into rising tide of gray goo.

Something that is core to what we’re doing with Artistic Energies is to engage in the conversation concerning the direction of humanity, broadly speaking, in relation to technology. To be frank, we’re very critical of the transhumanistic prophecy of the singularity. It’s not that we’re Luddites, per se (we’re working on immersive film technologies, for goodness sake), it’s just that any vision of the future that presumes to be total and inevitable fails the test of human creativity. It seems that, rather than the impersonal positivistic interpretations of scientific advancement, we ought to be acknowledging the personal, communal, imaginative interpretations (a la Thomas Kuhn’s Structures of Scientific Revolutions). In other words, we pursue in practice what we have discovered already in our imaginations.

Our vision of the future, based in our imaginations’ strength and breadth, will be the guide to our actions. Something that art and beauty do for us (in particular instances, not as abstract, free-floating concepts) is to enable us to recognize our errors about beauty and justice (Elaine Scarry), expand our consciousness in healthy ways (Harold Bloom – The Art of Reading Poetry), and serve as continually generative, life-giving, paradigm-challenging sources of renewal (Scott Cairns, and a bit of Bloom and Scarry too). In other words, beauty is one of the ways in which we re-evaluate what we’ve thought to be true. What if, for lack of “tough beauty”, our systems and our goals as human beings go completely unchallenged? This sounds like death to me, not life.

My recent conversations on this topic reminded me, for some reason, of Goethe’s Farbenkreis (see image above) – his alternative to Newton’s spectral theory of color. Our scientific instruments are, obviously and rightly, calibrated to deal with the spectrum of radiation. Goethe’s model, on the other hand, is “calibrated” to deal with the artistic phenomenon of pigment mixing – such that violet is included in the circle, rather than located on the extreme ends of the Newtonian spectrum. Which one is right? As scientists figuring out the chemical composition of stars, the Newtonian model (leaving aside the wave-particle duality issue); but as painters, designers, and so on, the Goethean model.

Sometimes I’ll see something being done in immersive media and think, “Oh, that’s kinda cool. Too bad it’s completely dumb too.” (The 3D Log Ride Adventure comes back to haunt me with its sheer inanity). Nothing could be further from my mind when I read about companies like San Francisco’s Obscura Digital. Fast Company has an excellent article that conveys not only the envelope-pushing technical creativity of Obscura, but also the personality and artistic ethos of (what sounds like) a great place to build amazing things.

Exploring Obscura’s work is a great way to start visualizing some of the possible visual art space possibilities of the Cube. Their image- and video-wrapping technologies mirror those of some other creators we’ve come across (like Zach Booth Simpson), but their marketing work positions them to push forward immersive visual spaces into the public imagination.

Remember the much-anticipated experience of stepping into a planetarium to watch the mysteries of the universe unfold with the rest of your whole 4th grade class? If that was in the 80s (as it was for me), the harsh reality of an underwhelming stumble through a second-rate animated solar system probably shook your astronautical aspirations to their fragile core. Well, it’s the 00s (?) and planetariums are movin’ on up. Maximum PC has an article about a good one, the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (which, coincidentally, recently underwent a remodel from notable architect Renzo Piano).

In imagining the Cube, it’s hard not to think of this type of visual experience (the space travel one). Perhaps of most relevance, the CAS project shows that digital rendering and display technology keeps on moving in the right direction (for us anyway).

Here’s a nice visual spectacle from Smashing Magazine – a ten-million pixel LED screen.

Scroll down through that page toward the bottom for the YouTube video. Something I noticed was the integration of real elements into the film space (yes, I know it’s just confetti – but so real!). The Cube could, perhaps, be built utilizing this sort of tech for filling a whole place with clear, powerful imagery.

Of course, the Beijing Olympics had a few contributions to make in the worlds of massive LED and LCD screens: the unraveling LCD “scroll” on the floor of the stadium during the opening ceremonies as well as the LED-based Zero Media Energy Wall (which some may not have seen during the Olympic coverage itself – I know I missed it). Check out the rest of the pictures from the 08.08.08 Blog for more in-depth views. This screen is interesting too for its energy usage: photovoltaic cells harnessing the sun’s rays.