One of us recently had the immense (and probably unrepeatable) chance to spend a day at the Yves Klein retrospective With the Void: Full Powers at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn museum. I recommend Blake Gopnik’s review in the Washington Post. Gopnik has a pair of great lines that sum up the experience of Klein’s artwork: “They aren’t just a feast for sore eyes. They’re more like a lifetime’s worth of ocular nourishment.” Klein has been particular influential on our recent thinking, especially as we experiment with creating experiences that focus an observer onto the framing of singular experiences of beauty (see our earlier posts on laying aside “Manyness” as Kierkegaard calls it and entering the Wilderness).

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.

This is only going to be a teaser – if that word even applies to a planned series of blog postings on a subject that might strike you as bleak and unpromising at first. Part of the essence of Artistic Energies has also been a love for the wilderness and what can happen in it. It’s strange, perhaps, to even say “in it” because what it contains is otherness – to be outside, in so many senses.

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.