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.

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.