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SCIENCE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES
ART WITHOUT FRAMES
HEALING WITHOUT WALLS
INTEGRATION WITHOUT TEARS
ASTRAL PERVASION
The Story Behind My Sites: Ionatopia Web Presence
I'm a polymath and artist, but my medium tends to drift from psychotherapy and healing, to cutting edge science, and bleeding edge art. My interests flow from sacred geometry fine art to psychotronic technoshamanism, to ephemeral and online performance art. I write extensively on healing practices, advances in science, and the artistic and spiritual experience. Once in a while an angel visits with a brilliant idea that flows through with blissful fluency.
My expertise is in creativity and extraordinary human development. For good or evil, I am a creative geyser. In past decades I have fallen in love with painting and collage, magick, archetypal and transpersonal psychology, hypnotherapy, subquantum physics, consciousness studies, multimedia, and chaos theory. I can't "marry" any theory, since there is no consensus in physics or consciousness studies, though I argue many points of view.
Still, I've always remained faithful to my main interest: the interface of psyche and matter ~ that point where psyche matters. As in chaos theory, all the creative action is at the boundary of any field, the creative threshold, the leading edge. It is in finding meaning and expressing that meaning that we exalt our humanity in our individuation. We don't actually change but our experience of reality does and this experience is largely outside of our "conscious" grasp. This is one source of the value and meaning of art, at least challenging art that goes beyond the boundaries of the frame and sofa wall. MAKE ART, NOT WAR.
-"Spooky" Miller
IONATOPIA WEB PRESENCE
The Revolution Will Be Televised: User As ContentInsight, Intuition, Self-Knowledge, Creativity
SCIENCE has made the Quantum Leap; ART has Jumped the Canvas in New Media; and HEALING has gone nonlocal with Virtual and Distance Healing.
By the time the Internet came on the scene, I already had a huge backlog of metaphysical, scientific, mythological, and therapeutic articles and fine arts graphics to share with the world. Out of the closet and into the digital archive they went at The Ionasphere, Synergetic Qabala and Asklepia. Since then I've continued building my webpresence, collaborating and publishing in a variety of venues, popular, artistic and scientific.
With the advent of the digital revolution art has jumped off the walls and into life. No longer is print art the preferred medium, as even in Soho permanent projector installations allow artists to display their art without the typical problems of shipping and receiving. Art without frames comes in a variety of multimedia formats.
When technology allowed cable tv to move from 12 channels to hundreds, the age of public access television became possible. In the '70s Sony produced inexpensive, portable video recorders, the PortaPack. Inspired by guerrilla theatre, people started seeing the possibilities of moving television out of corporate control.
Guerrilla TV has leapt forward to podcasting, producing our own radio shows with the help of mp3 players. We now have new video podcasting, iTunes selling tv reruns, TiVo to go, etc, for video distribution. Video can even be shot with a cellphone or any of the millions of digital cameras sold this past year. So there is an explosion of video production like what happened in the Guerrilla television days.
Art has jumped the canvas even further into real life modalities beyond our former concepts of performance art. Life itself becomes the artful act on an ongoing basis. The body and oeuvre are only spheres of influence that extend further and further from the realm of actual exhibition.
Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,’ including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.
The beginning of the history of modern man traces back to primordial art, such as that found in the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. From the beginning, art spoke of magic, of the supernatural, of imagination: the fantastic and disturbing. Always strong in content and aesthetic sophistication, it grew, hand in glove, with the emergence of technological skills.
The emergence of art was and continues to be an unparalleled innovation, confronting our psyches with a giant leap in human evolution whose transformative influence continues opening and exploring brave new worlds to this day. Art has been a driving force and living thread woven into the fabric of society since modern man emerged.
‘Homo Negentrop’
Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop. Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species’ of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.
Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown’ (Jung) has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, and even more arcane forms.
Chaos theory has its ‘strange attractors’ that never settle down into any normal rhythm. The strange attractor dances to the innovative beat of a different drummer. Artists, particularly edge artists, function much like these chaotic attractors whose boundaries are deterministic yet unpredictable. They draw from beyond the personality, from transpersonal resources, and the wellspring of the collective human unconscious.
One doesn’t have a Muse; one serves one’s Muse. She comes and goes. In a sense, the artist is ‘ridden’ by the creative daemon that possesses him or her. That daemon, according to Socrates is one’s genius, a compelling force urging us to create.
Passion (drive) and pathos are reflected in the fact that if this daemon isn’t served, the artist can even become physically ill. Images, ideas and inspirations cry out to become manifested. Order or form yearns to be born from chaos; and those very acts of creation breed destruction of old systems.
The artistic life is a chaotic arc of inspiration upon inspiration, following the Muse. Artists walk what for others is ‘the road not taken’ (chaos theory’s bifurcation or forking), sometimes going ‘where angels fear to tread.’ Their charismatic influence pulls others into their orbits, and the small effect of one personality potentially spreads its influence over the world (butterfly effect), sometimes over history. The history of art is one of the richest threads of our cultural heritage.
Artists wriggle among many possibilities before settling into a project. We might take poetic license calling artists ‘beautiful attractors’ (Wildman, 2004). The notion of a beautiful attractor draws on the dynamics of synergy. The power distribution of the artistic community is aimed at mutual aid and learning, much like the healing community. Sometimes artists even engage in deliberate public psychotherapy, impacting their immediate communities.
Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species’ of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance, an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.
Mana is personal power, also known as chi, prana, animal magnetism, or kundalini. Mana initiates the transformative process in individuals and society. Many artists have magnetic personalities. Exhibiting sensitivity to a certain kind of universal guidance, their influence emanates from their sphere of potentiality through synchronicity and serendipity, stimulating catharsis or breakthrough in others.
The effect is moreso when a movement or school of artistic expression is involved (complex feedback loops) as the reality morphing effect increases exponentially. Artists reflect and influence one another. Arguably, artists demonstrate where society may be heading. They haunt the psychic and perceptual frontiers, drawing the future into the now. How many cultural revolutions have begun in artists’ communities?
Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.
The Artistic Field of Influence
‘We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).
Artists, along with the other innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs, constitute only 1% of the population. We can imagine them at the top of a pyramid of influence, which trickles down to the most solidified or familial and industrial levels of society (see Appendix; Wildman, Table 1). This is clearly less true for the representational artist whose work is without symbolic value, and rather than progressive or transgressive is merely decorative or aesthetic.
Today, science and art aren’t as polarized in their aims as we might think. They are perennial venues for the emergence of discovery, invention, and creation. The argument is that although science and art are social phenomena, an innovation in either field occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity. Like art, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from the inside.
“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).
The objective and subjective mode are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that lies beyond the dialectic in the tension of opposites.
Thus, the metaphors of science have gained increasing relevance in the artworld. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines.
Gregory Bateson calls metaphor Nature’s language. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person.
We can draw from the organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts. Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature’s own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.
Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic.
Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.’ It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole. Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow.
Negentropy is implicated in the successful development of science, economics, technology, infoscience, and art. Negentropy is the degree of order, or function of a state. It relates to the organization of societies, including subcultures such as the artworld, determining the quantity and quality of creative work
That which was formerly unmanifest comes into being. Negentropy governs the spontaneous transmission and direction of flow of information among systems. The qualities of that information are timeless. It is synergistic in that what was formerly unconnected becomes so, creating something wholly optimal and new or futuristic. In the 1920s, Hungarian scientist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi coined the term syntropy for ‘negative entropy.’
In cybernetics, a meaningful interpretation of negentropy is a measurement of the complexity of a physical structure in which quantities of energy are invested, e.g., buildings, works, technical devices, and organisms which become more complex by feeding not on energy but on negentropy. Art facilitates negentropy by expanding our general field of experience. Negentropy facilitates artistic realization by creating something from nothing.
The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic, way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence.
The two worlds of science and art have married in the digital revolution. Art has from the beginning required a certain amount of technical expertise, the ability to create and use technology in its execution. Only the means and their complexity have changed, evolving over the years, culminating now in a revolution based on ‘ars electronica’: the electronic arts.
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WHAT INSPIRES ME
A Field Theory of Art and the Imagination
By Iona Miller 10-2005
Inspiration, noun
1: arousal of the mind to special unusual activity or
creativity
2: a product of your creative thinking and work; brainchild
3: a sudden intuition as part of solving a problem
4: arousing to a particular emotion or action
5: the act of inhaling [inhalation, breathing in]
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens. ~ Carl Jung
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. ~ Buddha
Sensual Culture
Inspiration should be a verb, not a noun; it is a complex dynamic, a force of Nature and our nature. When someone asks me what “inspires” me and my artwork, I can’t imagine naming any one thing, or list of “things”. It’s like asking my favorite color. I can’t help but answer, ALL, “all of the Above and Below”.
What doesn’t inspire the artistic eye that doesn’t merely “look at”, but “sees through” to the imaginal depth of any given perception or experience? Rather than the impressionistic senses informing the soul, the soul informs the multisensory experience of being. Inspiration means life, the opposite of death. It implies purpose, direction, meaning, ecstasy, creativity.
Any moment can be as inspirational as the next. Inspiration can come from an internal movement or sensation, a love affair with color and form, the awe of an incandescent moment, even the pain of a soul on fire struggling to express itself or the zeitgeist of the times. All ways of looking at reality are imaginative. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle.
The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. It is the hidden ground behind symbol, archetype, metaphor, image. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature.
Our imagination is not something possessed by our minds, but the fundamental conscious/unconscious field of our psyche, our soul. The imaginal field is not derivative, but the very ground of our existence, conditioning all of our experience. It is where the personal encounters the transpersonal and finds “I AM That”. Imagination is the primary irreducible activity of the soul.
The image-making psyche or soul is the primary creative capacity, not only in art. Yet, perhaps, this is what is meant when it is said an artist has ‘soul,’ the capacity to draw on the inspirational mythopoetic taproot to Source, the creative field. Imagination is the basis of soul. In fact, to live the artistic life is to live immersed consciously in that aesthetically-nuanced Reality, to find it virtually inescapable.
Imaginal Ground as Aesthetic Paradigm
The intrapersonal process of art and the products of art have different cultural meanings. However, the primary purpose of art as a culture is to externalize and concretize for some time that ephemeral ever-morphing field of the image-scape. It merges subjective and objective through an affective, aesthetic experience. Our cultivation of the soul restores the human dimension to experience, destigmatizing imagination as merely fantasy, illusion, dream, or delusory perception.
It is the mind that is perhaps a distorting lens, structured by beliefs, myths, and philosophies, even those of so-called rational science. This is so because the mind is in the Imagination, the Anima Mundi, rather than the reverse. We can’t think without images. Multisensory images constantly condition our meaningful perception of the world, inner and outer. They organize our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. our responses.
Our images condition our perception and perspective: the way we see. As artists, it isn’t what we see and depict, but how we see it. Traditional art promotes conformity. Interesting art, as distinct from what we could call “sofa art”, has something to say, a unique perspective or point of view that speaks to the observer or participant.
Art as a culture is a traditional means of confronting the imagination. Art as a process is not confined by rules of academic art. The digital revolution challenged the traditional world of painting, but computer-assisted art is no less human because the tool has changed from a brush to a program. In fact, it is the human dimension of this art that keeps it interesting, over-riding the sterility of mere technical perfection.
People turn to film and art to help them contextualize experience, personal and collective. The “art world” as a biased cultural force cannot predetermine how any generation will meet the imagination. Dogmatic expression of fantasy is an oxymoron. It discourages the genuinely novel, demoting it to novelty.
Thus, there is no “artform” today, because even “The Present” barely qualifies as such. Thus, “fame” has become a pseudo-artform superceding the importance of one’s ouvre in the public domain. The “artist”, a role-playing put on, becomes a mere novelty or element of the media spectacle, there to provide entertainment.
The more we attune to the imaginal field, the closer we come to the semantic idea of “inspiration”, as a lived and breathed reality, renewed in each instant. That ‘present’ can remake our past and forge our future. Why should inspiration or creativity be “unusual” when, in fact, it goes on all the time? It quickens, exercises, elevates and stimulates the intellect and emotions with passion, purpose, meaning.
Make friends of The Muses. Inspiration is simply the loving expression of a heightened and churning impulse toward creativity. What we believe conditions what we perceive, feel, and express. The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels.
If you want to be inspired, live a life undergird and informed by that inherent capacity. Quit fantasizing that you do not! Inspiration comes from the imaginal field: the zero-point of soul -- even if we are as unaware of it as the quantum field.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. Embrace the image. Soul mediates between mind and body, personality and world. Believe in the truth of images. Don’t institutionalize your imagination or experiences.
We “make soul” by living life, by irrepressibly imagining possibilities. Soul is rooted firmly in the mundane world. We cannot be in the physical world without demonstrating the archetypal or the imaginal. We might conclude that imaginative behaviour and physical behaviour exist in a symbiotic relationship
Quit falsely imagining that you are uninspired, that you are separate at all from the heartfelt Source of inspiration: the communication of Truth. Cultivate your soul, giving it a voice. Challenge your accepted, institutionalized way of perceiving, habitual forms, with an imaginative aesthetic response.
Beauty is the manifestation of the soul, reflecting the ways we are touched, psychically and sensually. We connect with objects through imagination and feeling, our heartfelt response to our senses. Imaging is an aesthetic activity that evokes human feeling. The value of images is their ability to evoke feeling, elaboration, speculation, and transformation. Engage process and inspiration flows. You become artist, not as a role but a vocation, when you return that heart and soul to the world.
Also see, The Relativity of Body and Soul,
http://mythicliving.chaosmagic.com/custom3.html
On the nature of spirit, soul and body.
_____________________
Iona Miller
Webpresence 2006: IONATOPIA
Google ‘Ionatopia + Iona Miller’ for the whole list
iona@ionamiller.org or iona_m@yahoo.com
Io Art Updates: http://ionamiller.50megs.com
General Updates: http://ionamiller.chaosmagic.com ___________________________________________________
WHAT’S NEW
1/1/06
NEW WEBSITE: IONATOPIA [YOU ARE HERE]
Comprehensive intro and updates for all writing and art.
http://ionatopia.50megs.com 4/06
NEW WEBSITE: KNOW BROW ART
http://knowbrowart.50megs.com
Neither High-brow nor Low-Brow, the Electronic Arts are "KNOW-Brow Art" born of our fusion with technology. In the middle of the forehead, neither high nor low is the Third Eye of inner or visionary sight. Electronic arts, by their very nature, require a great deal of technical knowledge to interface with computer-assisted media. Know Brow art respects and draws from both classical art and that of the underground or street. Digital Media include still frames, Flash, and desktop digital movies, often incorporated with other media, installation, and performance.
3/06
NEW WEBSITE: MIND CONTROL
http://mindcontrol.chaosmagic.com
Do It Yourself Mind Control. Self-care and Self-regulation is the antidote to corporate and sociopolitical mind control. Do it yourself, or somebody else will. Rototill your belief system; don’t be a sheeple, people. Paramedia Ecology; Paradigm Shift; Freestyling, Persuasion, Coercion, Hypnosis, etc.
Coming: MAY 2006; Memorial Day Weekend [CANCELLED]
ASSACON, May ’06 http://www.assacon.com
San Francisco, California; Memorial Day Weekend
Workshop Title: Altered States of Sex, Love, Intelligence
Co-facilitators:
Sobey Wing, Vancouver B.C. and Iona Miller, So. Oregon
The mixing of the psychedelic experience and the world of relationships can be a road to enlightenment or suffering. Love itself being considered a drug gives rise to possibilities of harm reduction approaches to the way we share energies. Neo-tribalist, Sobey Wing and Cybersybil, Iona Miller provide an inter-generational bridge in a culture lab investigating the potentialities of dyad voyages from preparation to post-integration of the entheogenic experience. Use of aphrodisiacs will also be touched upon. Looking at questions that hinder our intimacies and create armoring of the heart, we will seek ways to empower the resource states in ourselves. Applications draw on tools that including free writing, discussions and breakout groups, movement and self hypnosis as we explore ways to re-pattern mind states to anchor more sacredness in our love and sexuality. Also see more at http://digitaluniverse.50megs.com/custom2.html
2/7/06
NEW WEBSITE: DIGITAL UNIVERSE
http://digitaluniverse.50megs.com
VIRTUAL QABALAH art/music DVD with Merlyn Morgan;
Albert Hoffman 100th birthday party, Basel; Io digital media art
Media Ecology; Video Guru Nam June Paik’s Wake, NYC, more.
2/9/06
I've been asked to join the Board of Directors of MediGrace nonprofit, which continues my interest of institutionalizing meditation in complementary medicine, and development of human survival technologies. I've been working on this for some time with Dr. Marshall F. Gilula in Miami (heartstringsbook.50megs.com), but this local organization does both professional and public outreach, emphasizing self-care, which I find appealing. The Calm Birth book was released last season; Calm Healing has been written and includes some of my nonobjective artwork. It is wrapping up the publishing process now. http://medigrace.org/ and http://calmbirth.org/
1/15/06
NEW WEBSITE: PSIONA
Iona’s parapsychology/paraphysics history, writings, mentors, and collaborations, 1970s - 2006. PSIber Kult, Emergent Mind, Nexus, PsiOps, John Curtis Gowan, Stan Krippner, Heartstrings Nonlocal Healing, Asklepia Dreamhealing, Mankind Research Unlimited, Beyond MK Ultra, OAK, Inc., Nexus, more. 21st C. Psi Research, Holographic Concept, Co-consciousness, Quantum Bioholography, Multiverse, Chaosophy, Nonlocal Healing, etc.
http://psiona.50megs.com
12/2005
NEW WEBSITE: THE PHOTONIC HUMAN
From the Heart of Darkness springs the Light, and we are That. Virtual Photon Fluctuation is the Source of the photons that form and sustain our Being. We are truly Light Beings: Homo Lumen. We literally inhabit and embody a Temple of Living Light, which is interconnected with the deepest level of Cosmos. We are shiny Diamonds of Rainbow Light. We are made in the Images of that Brilliance. Shine On!
In the Effulgence of its Brilliance.
http://photonichuman.50megs.com
10/2005
NEW WEBSITE: KABBALAH LUMINATA
As a digital artist I paint with LIGHT; as a Qabalist I practice in the Temple of Living Light. Recently discontent with static and Flash imagery alone, I have begun venturing into the world of filmmaking. Comes see some of the art frames I have prepared for animation at my new Kabbalah Luminata Portal at
http://kabbalahluminata.50megs.com
Others
My quest began long ago in Ojai at Krotona and the Krishnamurti Foundation. I've been fortunate to have such great mentors and collaborators as Dr. Stanley Krippner www.stanleykrippner.com and John Curtis Gowan http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan in transpersonal theory and practice and Laurence Gartel in digital art www.gartelmuseum.com with Bob Judd in animation www.subcutaneous.org. There are many more, including Dr. Marshall Gilula, and some unwitting models who have fostered me too numerous to mention, some old and some relatively new. I continue friendly collaborations with ex-husband Richard Alan Miller, see http://nwbotanicals.org.
FREE STYLE
Art Without Frames;
Science Without Boundaries;
Healing Without Patients
By Iona Miller, 10/2004
“...to behave is to choose one pattern among many.” ~ Professor Jose Delgado, Yale
"meaning is not something that is attached to or floats between or behind things that can parade before one's mind but something that connects with something deeply embodied in our being." ~Wittgenstein (1973/1958)
"There was a passionate craving among all ... [intelligentsia] ... for a means to express their new concepts. They longed for philosophy, for synthesis. The erstwhile happiness of pure withdrawal each into his own discipline was now felt to be inadequate. Here and there a scholar broke through the barriers of his specialty and tried to advance into the terrain of universality. Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences."
~ Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
R. Buckminster Fuller pointed out that rulers in the past made it virtually mandatory through the rules of academic advancement that the smartest minds became specialists, thus missing the Big Picture. In this way they sought to suppress their own overthrow by those more intelligent than themselves by containing their thought-processes.
This system creates stricture in scientific and artistic freedom. Hermann Hesse not only wrote the classic introspective novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, but won the Nobel prize in Literature (1946) for his final masterwork published under two titles in English: The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi. This work (set in the 23rd Century) describes a cadre of individuals and their headmaster -- the Magister Ludi -- engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Hesse never forthrightly explained just how the game is played, but gave many hints to its structure for future aspirants seeking solutions to the critical predicament of mankind through Global Architectronics.
The Glass Bead Game requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy. The name Castaglia, the place of knowledge, is the Italian form of the Latin Castalia, which was the Roman name for the spring on Mount Parnassus where dwelt the mythical Muses. Castalia was also the name for the abstract realm of the intelligentsia. Let the game begin.
Introduction
Free Style is an improvisational aesthetic that uses one’s realtime local surroundings and (synthetic) synchronicities and virtualities from which to create new expressions in any medium or discipline. We can deal with and use “what comes up” in a creative and therapeutic manner; we can intuit, invent, and concoct from the nonlocal information that is at hand if we simply open to that, living artfully from that spontaneous place.
Free style is an intuitive act that is at once intentionally connective with source and presence, thus freeing and directing that which is inside desiring to emerge: meta-creativity. Freestyle breaks free from the vault of derivative, corporate, or audience-driven formula production. After all, it takes risk to either succeed or fail.
This is the source of artistic and scientific freedom. We must trust the process; trust our own vision, the womb of our subconscious that gives birth to full-blown ideas and inspirations. Freedom of expression means each artist is free to create their own style, weaving into the existing genres of expression, combining, contrasting and injecting their own unique rhythms, modulations, and vision by working at their dynamic edge.
Free style results may be concrete or ephemeral, but the drive comes from a commited perspective on the fundamental nature of reality and our nature. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic. The art of survival equals the survival of art.
Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness, “getting” the Big Picture, and perhaps doing something about it.
Creativity is a local embodiment, an essentially holistic process of a spontaneous non-local field of influence that can permeate the globe. The creative process, like a hologram encapsultes the entire gestalt at several levels of observation; each part reflects the whole if at lower resolution. In this way we find meaning in an idea, a piece of art, a performance, or a culturally revolutionary invention.
The thrust and dynamics of the creative process are such that intentionality encompasses multiple threads of creation simultaneously, rhapsodies of multi-tasking without drudgery. Therefore, there can be no “failure”, for a lost project is easily replaced by another project or process, another thread to weave, another melody to play.
“Free-styling” is a spontaneous eruption of the ever-renewing geyser of creativity; it means embodying the process of inspirational flow in each moment; artful living. This form of creativity can originate in the sciences/technology or the arts or any combination thereof (i.e., Hypermedia; Science-Art; Poetry Science; Nonlocal Healing; Global Architectronics). It describes the mutual interpenetration of life and art, a recurrent theme in contemporary art.
This negentropic energy leads to the embodiment of something intrinsically valuable and emotionally meaningful from essentially nothing. Therefore, free style is always breaking news; it cannot be anything but fresh.
Characterized mainly by deep feelings and heartfelt authenticity and intensity, freestyling creates a hyperreal random movement that nevertheless has its own tempo and internal cohesion, even when it moves in quantum leaps. A good example is an incredibly stimulating and cross-pollinating conversation or interview, where real rapport is established with context and depth allowed to emerge. It springs from an open-minded perspective based in authentic emergence rather than contrived product.
The medium may be people, behind-the-scenes influence, mentoring, cross-pollination, dreaming out loud, brainstorming, contributing to global dialogue on topical issues, technological shift, process-oriented therapies, Socratic method, or immersive experiences that transform those who experience them. There are many more.
The often unrecognized modalities are virtually infinite and range from formal to informal, academic and highly technical to “street”. All are means of influencing people and environments, through revealing meaning with little or no commercial or corporate interests. Freestyling tells it like it is. It is art that reveals Truth.
The significance or meaning of life is a central topic in philosophy, art, religion, medicine and psychology though any definitive answer remains elusive. Ethics or morals (personal accountability) should help us cooperate with one another. But there is no moral super-principle that undergirds us all besides humankind’s survival. It is clear, however, if humanity should cease to exist, it all becomes moot. We may be throwing away the entire arc of evolution through poor choices.
If we have values, we have to stand up and be counted and speak out for them. Moral agency and status are relative. Meta-ethics examines our notions about what constitutes ethics or morality relative to the position of others. Related issues are lifestyle choices, decisions, respect, impartiality, responsibility, identity, duty, principles, empathy, compassion, and conscience or consciousness.
The flattening of affect or emotional neutrality is the enemy, the aspect that conditions poor choices and ethical erosion as the acceleration or speed of cognition increases in our mindnumbing modern lives and we become dulled to the field of perception (Damasio 2004). Its been called information overload and future shock.
Ethics is Aesthetic
How can we rectify our guilt and shame for living so heavily on the planet? We are born and die consuming non-renewable resources, at least under current technological conditions. If there is any ‘original sin’, arguably the necessary evil of consumption is it. This fact of life has led our world into ecolo-nomic crisis, which has spawned multidimensional sociopolitical crisis where no one problem can be solved in isolation and change can wreak havoc in other domains.
Ethics relates to intentionality which means more than self-serving, so-called “good intentions,” individually and collectively. It means living deliberately, with global intentionality, which is an artform in itself: living with awareness and acting from that center.
It is an aesthetic choice for ‘artful living’, living life in an artful manner in harmony with flow and creativity, choosing enriching experiences over consumerism. Art, which has its roots in primal shamanic culture, has traditionally been associated with the optimistic ‘Bohemian’ ethos rooted in Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love.
HUMAN SURVIVAL TECHNOLOGIES and DIGITAL MEDIA: Marshall McLuhan pointed out the intrinsic connection between the arts, including the popular arts and the newer post-electronic media with the new techno-scientific world of the 20th century. New Media (Stahlman) is everything that replaces television. DIGITAL SERVICES that are likely to dominate our lives for the next decade or two. Before the next long-wave cycle can begin 1) the current cycle has to run its course, so that resources tied up with building the silicon-based global infrastructure can be freed for other purposes and 2) there needs to be an equivalent to the integrated circuit for the next cycle, recognizing that transistors were around for 20+ years before the IC. Both of these imply that it will be 20-or-so years before the molecular manufacturing long-wave cycle will start. It will then take another 30 years before that cycle reaches a phase that is comparable to the period somewhat like today, more-or-less. Nanotech and Cold fusion rely on molecular manufacturing which is the basis of the next long-wave economic cycle, meaning that this silicon-based cycle has to finish (another 20+ years) before that one can start. So, 50+ years.
Digital artists help provide the services of various environments we tune into, therefore functioning as cultural engineers, original thinkers.
"A common observation of European visitors to America is that life here is more collectivized and stereotyped than communists have ever aimed to achieve. It was always the central theme of Marx that direct political action was unnecessary. The machine was the revolutionary solvent of bourgeois society. Allow the dynamic logic of the machine full play in any kind of society and it will, said Marx, become communist automatically." -
Marshall McLuhan, REVOLUTIONARY CONSERVATISM, 1953, p.1
Think for your Self.
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DIGITAL UNIVERSE ART MANIFESTO
By Iona Miller 2/2006
“Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development." - Marshall McLuhan, Report on Project in Understanding New Media, Part VII(Exhibits), p.i, 1960.
"But the fact remains that, so recently that most people have not realized it, the Earth has become ONE place, instead of a romantic tribal patchwork of places.... What has fact on its side is still this strange synthesis of cultures and times (which we named Vorticism in England) and which is the first projection of a world-art, and also I think the clearest trail promising us delivery from the mechanical impasse." - Wyndham Lewis, "A World Art and Tradition", Drawing and Design Magazine, February, 1929.
"But I should perhaps add, before concluding, that just as eclecticism as a policy would find its justification in a new synthesis, so, in the case of an individual artist, his personality will all the time be creating a personal synthesis ...When all the cultures have been digested , we shall become a new cultural creature: an Earth Man."--Wyndham Lewis, Towards an Earth Culture, The Eclectic Culture of Transition, 1946
OBSOLETE REALITY TUNNELS: DigIOsophy. The digital universe consists of 1’s ad 0’s; Input and Output: I/O. Likewise, our subjective experience consists solely of Input and Output, even though as human beings we can’t be reduced to purely mechanistic descriptions. There is organic and mechanical logic that both hold true philosophically: garbage in, garbage out. But ‘self-organization' and ‘self-steering' provide an alternative dynamic perspective on the causal effects of conscious will. The structure of digital information is decentralized, heralding the end of cultural and individual control fantasies. Seeking a root in today’s creatively evolving culture, many look backward, recursively adopting an outdated philosophy: archaic revivalism. R.A. Wilson and Leary called them “reality tunnels”. They make us “see” in a certain way; create our often myopic beliefs about self, others and world at any time. They are belief wormholes that take us to potential universes that don’t necessarily match up with Reality. Physics and art face similar problems with imaginary universes that do not match up with this existant one. Even Renaissance art was trying to re-capture some values from the past, technologically.
It’s good to ask yourself just where you think you are going? Where do you go from here? Are you creating a unique reality tunnel reflecting your aesthetic like an artist, or a haphazard victim of dogmatic programming and conditioning? Those choices just buffer us in archaic perceptual cocoons, rather than drawing us into the vortex of developing future. Of course, it is good to root in tradition, but we can get caught in the web of living metaphors. But reality tunnels create tunnel vision, a subconscious filter of belief-congruent experience, confirmation bias. In the womb we recapitulate the phylogeny of species, and after birth our beliefs evolve historically. Yet, we never stop in our arc to live like a reptile, for example. The human mind is a competetive memescape.
BEYOND BELIEFS: Spirituality is a natural phenomena, hardwired into humans as a biosocial survival strategy that bonds groups with common beliefs and goals, personal and collctive. This current runs so deep that for the majority of people, nothing is more important. It infuses all life passages with Presence and meaning in animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism. We believe in belief even over uniformity of belief. But there is a deeper causal vector than beliefs, rituals, customs, commitments, and sacrifices: evolutionary value or fitness. It is the source of mythmaking, morality, sociality, and redemptive values. Memetic structures compel our attention; we propel and persuade one another toward them socially; sociocultural programming. Research methods include setting aside received wisdom, burrowing deep inside your subject and learning to think like your material. In BREAKING THE SPELL, Daniel Dennett Dennett takes a hard look at this phenomenon and asks: Where does our devotion to God come from and what purpose does it serve? Is religion a blind evolutionary compulsion or a rational choice? In a spirited investigation that ranges widely through history, philosophy, and psychology, Dennett explores how organized religion evolved from folk beliefs and why it is such a potent force today. He contends that the “belief in belief” has fogged any attempt to rationally consider the existence of God and the relationship between divinity and human need. Ask yourself how adaptive it is to remain spiritually, mentally, or emotionally stuck in the past, for whatever reason. In my written archive you can catch me at virtually every phase, yet never stuck in one. Most forms of ‘worship’ are either archetypes or cliches,perhaps both. Personal revelatory experiences are no measure; they are often fraught with strong emotional content, but faulty thinking built on a grain of Truth. Often it is a compensatory mechanism to help us maintain specialness, a trick of the mind and self-image. If you recycle a retrievalist reality tunnel you are blinded to other options. It’s like being a scientific or artistic specialist; you know more and more about less and less. What organic robotoid, parroting perennial philosophy is truly spiritual? Future-resistance stops the process of maturation, as well. What we procrastinate about can take on overwhelming dimensions. It is a way of not “letting go” of outmoded forms that stunt developmental potential. Be careful what models you let colonize your imagination. Are the terms you define yourself with irrelevant? Those whose cherished beliefs are challenged in the context of traumatic life events are likely to experience severe spiritual disequilibrium; manifesting chaos instead of self-organization. Spiritual disequilibrium can be a blessing, heralding rebirth: emergence from the destructuring of emergency, breakthrough from breakdown. The future draws us forward like a handshake reaching back from somewhere between our fate and destiny, the strange attractor of our own futurity. It does not squeeze us into a recycled mold, and send us down a dusty rabbithole of myopic vision. That is not focus, but self-deception, disinformation. You are probably not the “reincarnated alien-hybrid messiah of world peace and environmental restoration”. But you do make your own global contribution to the commonweal, especially through self-awareness, practice, service, and compassion. The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval mystic text, describes the human soul as embodied in one's memory, reason, will, imagination, and senses. Yet, all these faculties are falsifiable or easily subject to distortion. Unless USED artistically, rather than passively, media is an interruption of our internal narrative, our self talk; a detour in content and focal point. Is your phone more important than your movie, or your loved one? Interruption enables incoming messages by lending them shape and hijacking our attention, or they enter subliminally. Particularity is content and momentary truth. The goal is not to pick the right reality tunnel or be psychically tunnelled by obsolete beliefs but to live freestyle on the tunnelless edge of dissolving boundaries, the anticipatory/participatory fusion of NOW.
BOUNDARY FREE CREATIVE EDGE: In part, this is the source of the generation gap. The imaginative and adaptive faculties play a big role in what century (archaic revival) we choose to live in, according to our adopted beliefs, which condition our perceptions. Popular options include eclectic adaptations of the world’s religions, neo-tribalism, psychics, and gurus; even science and art have their own historical POVs. The so-called New Age of spiritual snake oil sales actually harbors the agenda of hijacking the Holy Grail of new paradigm thinking, as long your new vision resonates with a polyglot of poor research protocols, implausible assumptions and lack of critical thinking. Radical pointlessness is the least occupied position, having no POV the toughest to maintain. The poetic vision of Science-Art does not split the material base of Multiverse from the reflexive component of Spirit. It encourags mythopoesis but not literalization at the expense of common sense. There is a paradoxical dissonance between old and new ways of being in the environment; things that should be preserved and those that are emerging. Things that stay the same are isomorphic constants; but metamorphosis, metaphoric change creates a sense of of novelty and newness. Our own epistemological metaphors describe how we know what we know and what it is like. Harking back to the past for a point of reference helps us move from the known to the Unknown in our descriptions, but if we take our metaphors literally, our beliefs stay archaic. We continue to recapitulate the philosophical evolution of mankind, but not truly move forward into new territory. The same is seen in the iconography of “sofa” art which recycles the same tired themes and styles in the same media, over and over. ALL the creative juice of science and art is at the leading edge, the living edge. Chaos theory defines the “edge of chaos” as a special dynamical balance. Science has shown that order emerges from the critical paths of chaos. In psychology, it means sticking to the image as given in Imagination, rather than resorting to glib dream or symbol interpretations. Shamanic personalities work at the edge of chaos for healing. Talent expresses at the edge. Phase transitions occur here, state changes, quantum leaps of consciousness, complexity.
COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: Wyndham Lewis wrote that all "living art is the history of the future". The formula is we become what we behold. What our culture compels us to behold is the holographic ICONOSCOPE: all the new media that both virtually surround and contain, as well as permeate our lives, and comprise an intrinsic part of our environment. The mindnumbing rate of change in our society is so unprecedented it is called Futureshock. It’s a technological tsunami. Debord called it a Society of the Spectacle, emphasizing it's visual nature. Everyone is a player. Spectacle as a commodity is embodied in so-called Reality TV. The War on Terror is a materialized ideology, fighting an Idea. It is unwinable since you can’t wage war on an idea. Ideology is the problem, not the solution to human survival technology. Coercive ideas foster looting of natural resources, coercive institutional power and imported orthodoxies. The same dynamic produces trends, fads and memes, which permeate thinking as well as lifestyle.
YOU TURN ME I-ON-A: We literally have the electromagnetic capacity to broadcast our images if not ourselves to the stars. We broadcast our identities as a fusion of recombinant personae, cliches, and archetypes: infinite fractal use of finite iconography: technological self-amplification of our bodyminds. You turn me on; I turn you on in a fusion of knowner and known. I call my broadcast "Radio Free Qabala". coming to you from station IONA, sponsored by the Temple of Living Light. Channels may vary in your locale, that is, by your capacity to comprehend my essential nature. Hegel said, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that is, it exists only by being recognized and acknowledged.” Likewise, only relationships between objects are observable. Arguably, language was the first real technology, and all others mere extensions of our five senses. Metamagic, the original reality medium, is a hypercharged spiritual technology, driven by ritual and belief: active attention is synonymous with “worship”. We are a fractalization of collective history. We are carried forward by the anticipation of our own lives, their emergent qualities. Infinite mirroring and anticipation is beyond synchronicity; Xenochrony is the holomovement of Xenochronicity. Only the level of resolution changes, not the content.
LIFE IS A HOLOGRAPHIC PROJECTION: The team of physicist Peter Gariaev detected DNA Phantoms in their research and concluded that we are human biocomputers. The genome is a quasi-intelligent system, but the wave level of genetic coding programs and organizes our 3-D spatial/temporal organism. Gariaev describes DNA expression as a meaningful text which is read and projected by DNA in 3-D in a bioholographic process with sound and light, much like programs of DNA movies or video tape. The digital analogy is probably even closer to the process of development and maintenance. These movies get corrupted over time and produce aging and mutations. Wave genetics offers new healing and life extension possibilities. Morphogenic information is holographically transmitted and programmed. DNA is not 98% junk, but the formative and transmissive text. All the cells of our organism combine to form a unified informational space which functions as a DNA wave biocomputer regulating morphogenesis and metabolic information, activated by transduced coherent light and modulated sound. This is more fundamental than genetics or molecular biology. Disturbances in the field that presage disease can be treated. Healing information can be transmitted in wave form by resonance, sound and light, correcting error patterns or missing information. Video morphogenic information is regenerative, patterning a healing matrix. The bio-computer reads or scans the data and adapts according to the DNA-movie of healthy form and function. A weak field produces a powerful result. We are mutually linked material and nonlocal energy-informational substances that dynamically exchange energy and information. Soon we’ll be able to “change the movie” with quantum bioholography as the medium.
TECHNOTOPIA: Evolving technology resonates like feedback in our phenomenology. Buckminster Fuller did not view technology as separate from nature and our nature, biological intelligence and technological evolution, including speech. Our separateness has created the pursuit of infinite individual "reality wormholes" which reconnect us with collective unconscious, collective identity through "voluntary ESP". We no longer live as point-particles but in our waveforms, often spread simultaneously over several timezones. We can read the entire holographic timelog of the Akashic Records at our local theater or on DVD. In Dobb’s vernacular, “past times have become our passtimes”, including interests in deep nature as the province of science and art, and obsolete gnostic and spiritual technologies.
KINETIC FIELD OF DREAMS: The Digital Revolution is here and it IS being televised but not on your Grandmother's screen. For artists, the 21st Century is a Digital Universe. In the perceptual-space we now occupy, the gender of presence is neither male nor female, but discarnate! It is the era of the metamorph. Even conventional artists can manipulate their images into a myriad of morphs. Because of insurance problems, fine art has moved toward the giclee print where originals are printed onto canvas and overpainted with a topcoat of paint. But why even bother with the smelly stuff? High end galleries are installing projectors. Popular art is being displayed as virtual paintings on plasma screens in private homes.
NEW MEDIA: Media guru Mark Stahlman defines this term he coined as the media which replace the ‘cinesthesia’ of TELEVISION as the dominant environment in our lives and culture. Surround sound is already the medium that replaced television. Home theaters now dominate the consumer electronics business. They are simply big television sets with multi-channel sound added, replicating the experience of multi-channel sound in movie theaters. Acoustic space as surround sound replaced the "tactility" of television. Media analyst/cultural theorist, Marshall McLuhan stressed that ALL media are ultimately a matter of sensory balances and sensory biases. He believed that artists need to integrate, analyze and utilize rapid changes in technology, in order to truly have a mass impact on people in the modern age. But the electronic environment isn't limited to artists but is available to virtually everyone. No one escapes its influence. Rapid evolution of communication devices enables and future-shocks us at the same time.
cont. on MANIFESTO page.
Email Iona Miller
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