[ index | 1970 ]

TOWARD COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

"If you look back in history you'll find that the artist and the scientist are inseparable. In many ways the artist's work is identical with scientific exploration. The artist is able to focus more in the area of consciousness, but with the same scientific zeal. Yet cosmic consciousness is not limited to the scientist. In fact scientists are sometimes the last to know."
JORDAN BELSON

We've followed the evolution of image language to its limits: the endof fiction, drama, and realism as they have been traditionallyunderstood. Conventional cinema can be pushed no further. Toexplore new dimensions of awareness requires new technologicalextensions. Just as the term "man" is coming to mean man/plant/machine, so the definition of cinema must be expanded to includevideotronics, computer science, atomic light. Before discussingthose technologies, however, we must first ask ourselves what thesenew dimensions of awareness might be. In the language ofsynaesthetics we have our structural paradigm. What concepts arewe to explore with it?

We could say that art isn't truly contemporary until it relates to the world of cybernetics, game theory, the DNA molecule, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, theories of antimatter, transistorization, the breeder reactor, genocidal weaponry, the laser, pre-experiencing alternative futures. But this purely scientific portrait of modern existence is only partially drawn. As Louis Pauwels has observed: "We are living at a time when science has entered the spiritual universe. It has transformed the mind of the observer himself, raising it to a plane which is no longer that of scientific intelligence, now proved to be inadequate.'' (1) Man no longer is earthbound. We move now in sidereal time. We must expand our horizons beyond the point of infinity. We must move from oceanic consciousness to cosmic consciousness.

At their present limits astrophysics, biochemistry, and conceptual mathematics move into metaphysical territory. Mysticism is upon us: it arrives simultaneously from science and psilocybin. Pauwels: "Modern science, once freed from conformism, is seen to have ideas to exchange with the magicians, alchemists and wonder-workers of antiquity. A revolution is taking place before our eyes - the unexpected remarriage of reason and intuition."(2)

Art and science have achieved extremely sophisticated levels of abstraction. They have in fact reached that point at which the abstract becomes extra-objective. Post-Euclidean geometry, for example, precludes any exact visualization of a stable space grid. We are confronted with dynamic interaction between several transfinite space systems. Precise focusing is impossible. (John Cage: "A measurement measures measuring means.”) And the content of modern art tends increasingly toward the conceptual - i.e., decision-making, systems aesthetics, environmental problems of "impossible" art.

What we "know" conceptually has far outstripped what we experience empirically. We are finally beginning to accept the fact that our senses allow us to perceive only one-millionth of what we know to be reality - the electromagnetic spectrum. Ninety-nine percent of all vital forces affecting our life is invisible. Most of the fundamental rates of change can't be apprehended sensorially. Fuller: "Better than ninety-nine percent of modern technology occurs in the realm of physical phenomena that are sub or ultra to the range of human visibility. We can see the telephone wires but not the conversations taking place. We can see the varieties of metal parts of airplanes but there is nothing to tell us how relatively strong these metals are in comparison to other metals. None of these varieties can be told from the others by the human senses, not even by metallurgists when unaided by instruments. The differences are invisible. Yet world society has throughout its millions of years on earth made its judgments on visible, tangible, sensorially demonstrable criteria."(3)

So we see - that is, we don't see - that our physical environment itself has drastically altered the classical definition of artistic purpose as articulated by Conrad Fiedler: "Artistic activity begins when man finds himself face to face with the visible world as with something immensely enigmatical... In the creation of a work of art, man engages in a struggle with nature not for his physical but for his mental existence."(4)

It is the invisible and inconceivable that man finds immensely enigmatical and to which he has turned his conceptual capacities. Not only is drama obsolete but in a very real sense so is the finite world out of which drama traditionally has risen. The concerns of artist and scientist today are transfinite. McLuhan: "Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever."(5)

The Paleocybernetic Age witnesses the concretization of intuition and the secularization of religion through electronics. Nam June Paik: "Electronics is essentially Oriental... but don't confuse 'electronic' with 'electric' as McLuhan often does. Electricity deals with mass and weight; electronics deals with information: one is muscle, the other is nerve." This is to say that global man in the final third of the twentieth century is witnessing the power of the intangible over the tangible. "When Einstein wrote the equation E=mc2 , the metaphysical took the measure of, and mastered, the physical. Nothing in our experience suggests that energy could comprehend and write the equation of intellect... [Einstein's] equation is operating inexorably, and the metaphysical is now manifesting its ability to reign over the physical."(6)

In addition to a radical reassessment of inner space, the new age is characterized by the wholesale obsolescence of man's historical view of outer space. Lunar observatories and satellite telescopes, free from the blinders of earth's air-ocean, will effect a quantum leap in human knowledge comparable to that which the microscope provided at the end of the nineteenth century. Until 1966, for example, all of astronomy indicated that the planet Mercury did not rotate. Radar observations now reveal that it turns on its axis every fifty-nine days. Similar embarrassing reversals of generations-old opinions about Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and even our own moon have occurred within the last decade.(7)

We are entering a transfinite realm of physical and metaphysical mysteries that have nothing to do with fiction. It is now recognized that science has come closer to whatever God may be than has the church in all its tormented history. Science continually discovers and reaffirms the existence of what Fuller calls "an a priori metaphysical intelligence omni-operative in the Universe." Scientists find that a vast omni-present intellect pervades every atom of the universe, governing the structure and behavior of all physical phenomena. Yet this intelligence itself, which we identify as "the laws of nature," is purely metaphysical and is totally unpredicted by the behaviors of any of the physical parts. Einstein's E=mc2 is science's most comprehensive formulation of that intelligence. As J. B. S. Haldane once said, "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine."


1) Pauwels, Bergier, op. cit., p. 62.
2) Ibid., p. xxii.
3) R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, p. 64.
4) Conrad Fiedler, On Judging Works of Visual Art, trans. Henry Shaefer-Simmern and Fulmer Mood (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1949), p. 48.
5) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 80.
6) Fuller, Spaceship Earth, p. 36.
7) Arthur C. Clarke, "Next - The Planets," Playboy (March, 1969), p. 100.

-- Gene Youngblood: EXPANDED CINEMA, 1970, [PDF /4.6 Mb] pp.135-138.

[ index | 1969 ]