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.

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):

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)

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.

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.

“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.”