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

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The Roden Crater Project:

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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.

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.

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.

“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.

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 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.