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.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been reading Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space these last couple of weeks’ worth of train commutes. I’m sure his thoughts will find there way into many postings – it’s just rich prose dealing broadly with inhabited spaces. This quote seemed linked to the topic of wilderness for me:

“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.

I’m about 30 pages in to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. I may just be overly involved in the link between spaces and imagination (and therefore blind to what a normal person would read), but this one looks like it’s going to be a “must” for our thinking. The main thing I’m getting so far – other than great ideas about how poetry happens – is about the imaginatively shaping work of our childhood homes. They are a sort of “first universe” for our imaginations – a place in which we learn to dream, and to which we often return in revery and thought. I see plenty of direct relation to our earlier post on Lewis’ ideas on medieval cosmos – an inhabitable universe. Both Lewis and Bachelard seem to be getting at an amazing idea: we cannot imagine and live within a void, even if it is more “real” than our value-laden experience of spaces.

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.

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.

Engadget has a sneak peak article about AMD’s efforts to bring the experience of gaming to a higher level – making it a truly cinematic experience, a played movie. This is their posting of June 17.

The whole issue of gaming is a huge one, for better or worse. There is great potential for truly powerful experiences in the gaming – those that would take the player beyond their limited experience into something larger that feeds back into a better life. However you slice it though, there is still an avatar running around experiencing things in your place. The main benefit I see is that a player can participate in the creation of their own knowledge. This depends to some extent on the balance between the space left open to a player’s imagination and the hard edges of the story and action set made available within the game. Searching through a new, purposeful world full of intriguing discoveries is quite a different thing than spraying meaningless amounts of bullets into polygonal targets.

This will need more attention later, perhaps in the realm of alternative reality games – the emerging conceptual crossroads of reality and fantasy.

“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.”