Montevideo (part 7)
Project: Polytopia

Within our mythological sphere an epic-edge is unfolding, disclosing the current narration: we as humans are re-positioning ourselves. Re-placing our location and standing in the crossroads of a cosmos. That is the myth of our times. On the fresh brink of myriad new narratives with which to re-array our collective and personal mythological arches. And if I were an artist, then the portrait of the human is an iterative open-ended myth, exposing each moment in a close-up, veiling not the iceberg of void.


Close-Up is an Erotic Irregularity

It was many years ago when I became aware of that sense and taste of mind arising while being engulfed in the ritual that cinema proposes. Sitting and floating in a dark space, in front of the wide screen that becomes as if the very surface of my mind, upon which an image in motion arises and shapes a moment into a close-up.


A mind-arousal of intense sense and intimacy provoking and animating the silhouette of indefinite paths ahead of me, negating the mundane, the known, the repetition of my self. That which till a moment ago was out of the frame (of perception), out ‘there’, suddenly becomes the star of my thought and the champion of my emotions.

Absorbed and penetrated by the immediate sense of exposure, i recognize the urge to place myself in the narrative, to take a stand, to redescribe myself. And while narration lures the plot of becoming into presence, I shift towards a close-up into the sense of mind that is arising.

What is a good narrative, if not the arena in which a close-up situation can emerge in the mind as a potent ground for self-reflection? Isn’t that very sense of exposure and unfamiliar the urge that provokes cracks and turns, that opens sudden passageways between universes?

It was and is a close-up inciting mind that changes my life. An erotic irregularity, negating the lines of distinction and embracing differences as corridors of expansion. It is a close-up in which I catch the future of me as a present in the act of becoming.

And again, it is a close up of the aesthetic epic of art, a blow-up into the open negotiation of placing art within human narrative, which exposes the way art punctuatedly re-portray us anew. Critical junctions co-emerge with a difference in the image we hold and behold; a non familiar close-up; a passageway for self-reflection to cross over into the arisal of new narratives.

So I ask, is art the window to human nature? Is art the tool to shape human nature? Or is it a live crack around which human nature is continuously composing itself?

All of which, I read as narration silhouettes, propositions for a close-up. Each close-up leads, in the immediacy, to the emergence of a different beholder. Who shall be the guests at the live edge of your myth?

The Forgotten Power of Close-Up

In “The Forgotten Power of the Close-up” Kevin Johns writes: “As hard as it is to believe, someone had to invent the close-up, and that someone - like most early narrative film techniques - was director D.W. Griffith”.


In exploring the fine line between the evolution of technology, visual language and the conceptualization of cinema, the old masters of cinema and of silent movie, tied themselves to the inspiring process of “placing” cinema as art. Each one of them created a binding parallel in between the subjective act of placing themselves, placing cinema and the carving of the place of cinema in humanity.

In 1928 Carl Theodor Dreyer, with “The Passion of Joan Arc” provided cinema with a poetical stance. Through meticulously crafted aesthetics, he situated the close-up itself at the heart of cinema. Most of the movie is a silent exposure (through close-ups) of the inner life of a human, a woman, in a situation of trial.

So yesterday night I took my eyes and balls and watch again the movie, at eighty years from its release, the amazing thing was, it left its marks on me.

It was indeed a reflection into our mind. The mounting progression of close-ups manages to animate an awake-space in which the movie is being re-created in the act of beholding.

Taking the aesthetic line enfolded in the close-up, Dreyer manages to avoid imposing upon the flow of images his a-priori trends of judgment, allowing the act of beholding rare latitude.

Dreyer succeeds in actually opening the reflective event of a trial, burdened with competing mythos unto naked and clean exposure of the primal intersection of self-reflection with contradicting frames of narration, by that placing the beholder in a situation of a close-up.

It is the recursive situation of close-up, leading the beholder breathlessly from one intense face to the next, which addresses the subjective discourse as the one setting the context, much before the place, space and time. It is about me, you and our internal reflections when coming to merge with an interesting other, when placing our selves in an interesting narrative.

It is through the close up that the so called inner life of the character crosses over to enter my space of existence, and seduces me to do the same. It is at these reflective turns, that I am incited emotionally both to expand and to include. I came out from this night with the understanding that close up, when masterfully used, is in our human mind a system of inter-penetration.

Close-up is an aesthetic exposure

For Bela Balazs, who wrote the first major work in silent film aesthetics, the close-up was "the technical condition of the art of film". Jean Epstein, a film director and early film theoretician, described the close-up as the "soul of the cinema - the invocation of an otherwise unknown dimension, a radically defamiliarized alterity”.

Gilles Deleuze, citing Bela Balazs, claims that "the close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, of which it would be a part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity”.


It brings me to reflect upon the tunneling effect between the heart of cinema and the core of thought-sensation, the expression of art and the reflection of mind, it lies I believe in the power of interpenetration shared by both, the open-end exposure of a moment and the rising sense of mind while in a state of close up.

Extending the analogy, one may say that the act of placing oneself in a narrative is an act of self-description – a situation of close-up, a moment perceived as out of time.

Moving an open reflective space into an eventful space of mind is primarily an act of minding through narration, of coming into close up via narration. For however poetically-strange, it is this very act performed in luring the narrative to the surface and placing ourselves within it that makes us, and simultaneously renders us mysterious to ourselves, opening the infinite fields with which we harvest becoming.

Narration itself is the concurring aspect in the arising of self-reflection. Not one specific narrative itself, as much as the effectiveness each provokes in continuously shaping the moment into a close up.

We moved beyond the paradigm of reducing all narration to one book, one truth, one god, one set of images or facts. It is the multiplicity of subjective spaces engaging the journey towards a more complex and yet effective architecture of co-existence.


We walk the fine line of evolution of technology, language and meaning with the latent knowledge that if, in the days of old, placing the human in a narrative was an act performed once in a thousand years, today we develop the muscle to perform it more than once in a lifetime.

It is the editing room of our open-end, placing and re-placing ourselves in the proliferation of new narratives that is portrayed as the ‘mise en scene’ of humanness. In it one finds not the one exclusive image of man but rather image in motion.

The aesthetic of close-up is ‘bringing in’ that which is out of the frame of perception, that which is always in presence, yet, empty from image. As if to say that the soul of art is a close-up into a substantial absence.

Faces of myth

And now that the future becomes the stirring element of consciousness, it is the montage between placing self-reflection and replacing narration rafts that rises into the forefront. We are as if hacking an open end to our mythos to accommodate the myriad of styles of narratives exposing ‘being’ in a situation of close-up.


By that we sculpt the space for a Polytopic-myth, no more myth versus myth, in a hall extruded from our immediacy and yet impinging upon our life for centuries, rather an aware-space (as culture is) in which thousands of fresh mythological arches can carve ways and eventually co-exist.


And so I ask, what is narration? It is the break-through we need now to accommodate the sight of our-multifaceted-selves; the intimate leverage resolving a strip of furious chaos into a multi-voiced sea of possibilities. It is the future of us captured as a present in becoming.

*

An epic edge is unfolding, a mythological provocation transporting myth into the evolutive fields. It is an iterative open edge upholding itself without excuses, an aesthetic close-up into a polytopic-myth in becoming.

It is Now

10:34/27/09/09/PSE

To be continued..

Sun, Sep 27, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: art, , Narrative, Close-up, Cinema
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Montevideo (part 2)
Project: Polytopia

"I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe." R. Buckminster Fuller

***

Suddenly it is cold, so cold that for a glimpse of a moment motion is frozen, the sight utters warm and fancy, the moment irregularity is clearly a Blue-Moon happenstance. Between the old forgotten hypothesis of Prometheus and the new evolved version called AI, it is humanness that comes to rise up, pulling itself out by the future landing into the paths of past.


Poiesis and Puting

I love words, the story of words, the history of a word, and though I am familiar with the notion that words themselves are empty (but then what is not?), a word becomes an entity when in composition; it has a character, a taste and a sense. As an artist, I know words as matter, as color, as sound, as flow.

Yet, above all, words are like doors. In timing they open a space, a crack in the matrix of interdependence, for intelligence, through consciousness, to adopt a new configuration, a new pattern that connects.

The right word, in the right timing, in the right place… and the sense of opening is overwhelming. While in my studio, I know this when am hunting for colour. The right colour does the magic, the magic of transcending being into a flow.

And so, I enter this virtual studio with a question - what is the verb of being?

And we know the fallacy in the question. There is no verb to being, there is however a question, a pattern of relations that correlate the space of us/me with the space of all and everything.
Now, I throw the question into that ‘pattern’. It is a personal question made of the stuff of intimacy. I am not here in search of the universal, I am however on the track of self-discovery.

The state, the mind state, is changing in correspondence, matter is opening, undressing from a particular description and moving to a superimposed descriptive state, the ‘distance’ between potentiality to actuality gradually disappearing.

While the silence is quickening I realize that actually the question is simple, as much as it is personal. In essence, I am asking what is the contextual action of the substance of me? What is the ‘middle’ of my longing?

Two words are emerging. The first is ancient, the second is new, the ‘milieu’ of intelligence is changing, and now comes the work.

The verb of being is Poiesis,

The axis of Poiesis is Puting.

Poïesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω, which means, "to make". This word, the root of our modern "poetry", was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world.

Poiesis here means:

The process of bringing a becoming into presence.

Or in other words, the poietic-work of exposing the dynamics of thought-sensation to the spectrum of its possible actuations.

Pute is etymologically derived from Latin, from the ancient term Putare, which means to cut, to clear, to clarify and to think. This word, the roots of our modern “computing”, is in short the act of making sense through calculation, the act of creating sense through re-iteration of correlations.

Pute here means:

In essence, the creative moment, the moment of puting brings forth a new sense into existence, that is a Mindful Creative Pregnancy.

Poiesis

Poiesis, as the event of being, is the poietic work of exposing the dynamics of thought-sensation to the spectrum of its potentialities of actuation. The poietic work is that of bringing the dynamics of thought-sensation all the way, as changing states, from and through the possible, to the probable and the actual, via capturing, articulating and realizing. Poiesis if so is the artful ‘action’ of being, through which unpredictable becoming is exposed via a mindful creative moment. It is a love affair always fresh from tunneling the un-known while distilling the knowledge.

Pute – A Mindful Creative Moment

In the movie “Modigliani”, (2004), Director and Writer - Mick Davis, there is an interesting scene presenting seven artists standing in front of an empty Canvas full of the passion to paint a masterpiece that will take part in the Paris annual art competition. Modigliani tackles this work with the hope of creating a masterpiece, and knows that all the artists of Paris are doing the same. The scene unfolds in cinematographic language, the happenstance of a creative artistic moment seen through the drama between the artist and the empty Canvas.

For many years I have been exploring the nature of those creative artistic moments, which though belonging to multiple landscapes and different contextual representations, have much in common. Whether it be an artist, a philosopher, a scientist, an engineer or a mystic, within his or her curriculum vitae of flow of cognitive-emotional life, we may find descriptions, stories and products of the creative moment.

In my exploration whether by investigating others or within my experimental contour, I came to the understanding that such a moment is an axial property of being a human. Poiesis, the verb of being, the poietic work of exposing thought-sensations to their potentialities, is brought forth via the creative moment into an unpredictable becoming.

The verb of this creative moment I call to pute,

I like the sound of it, the taste of it on the tong, the flow of it,

Pute, Puting,To pute,

Pute in general is a mindful creative moment and pregnancy. It by all means does not belong exclusively to art, but to all domains of human intense activity. It is in this sense a property of being a human and a higher cognitive-emotional phenomenon. It will be sane to say that the consequences of those durational moments of Puting did play a momentous role in the life of giants in humanity and as a consequence in the life of others.

Pute – Index of Being

Definition - Pute is the verb of a Mindful Creative moment.

Telos – Puting converges into a fragile, special and unique instance of knowing while riding an aesthetical sense.

Nature – state of mindfulness riding oriented passion into the un-known at the edge of chaos.

Being - Apex of puting is conception, through which being re-articulates itself, or expresses itself anew.

Meta – Inputing is the keyhole for emergence of insightful thinking, creative articulation and the spectrum of rare moments that punctuate equilibrium - high lands of sight, epiphanies, vision and emotional awakenings.

Dynamics - Merging into computational and intuitive composition of forces that awake a becoming which is unpredictable.

Esthetics – asymmetry of interest coagulated with the symmetry of openness.

Poetic – Puting is a Renaissance Machine of being.

Example: To coin the word Pute I enter into a state of puting.

Collective Puting (the future?)

Cinema is an interesting case of collective-puting, a dynamic complex orchestration of masters at work. The movie is happening in the relations, overlapping multidimensional relations. The significant notion here is the criteria of the relation – adding dimensions to the collective – puting event.

The movie making procedure is a collaboration of Puting-stations, to which each individual station is a unique and characterized mastership, yet, each station carries the precious knowledge of how it connects (in proximity) to all other stations.

The movie emerges piece by piece in the middle, the dynamic intersection in which and through which the bottom-up interacts with the top-down; that is the ‘milieu’ at realization.

I do know that there are a poly-manner ways of making a movie; in some, like in the case of Alfred Hitchcock, the actual making of the movie does not change the shape of the movie significantly. In others, like Federico Fellini, the making is where the movie is being shaped.
This way or that way, there are many ways and different proportions, in which the individual puting station is related to collective-puting and vice versa. My point here is that exponential growth in connectivity via technology is leading us most probably to co-puting.

Which puts us closer than ever in our shared poiesis, the exposure of a better us to its possibilities of actuation, in a better future in a better world.

I do not come here for a moment to undermine the ultimate criticality of the individual puting station, rather, am pointing and hinting towards a unique and special case, that of collective-puting as an indication of the future and the future mind.

It seems, that for the first time in human history we, as a collective, are converging into co-puting. We are collectively in a creative pregnancy entwined with the emergence of a new mind.

Ensembles of puting stations are emerging. These ensembles are not homogeneous (as in the topos of polytopia); they are not exclusively related to one discipline, but they are animating in proximity in the same kind of frequency, they are pushing the same mind wave forward in proximity.

Montevideo

It is dawn, now, caressed by the far rhythm of ocean waves, it is crisp and yet it is pregnant with thick and moist mist. It feels like being taken out of a context, the context of being my self. I know that sense quite intimately. I practiced it for many years and still the act of self-denial always on a balancing scale, never on solid ground. And so, I am increasing the volume of emotion and move bare footed from sensation to sensation, gathering the emotional sleeve pointing to an open ended horizon. I am slowly activating the organs of thought and steering the tension, I log into consciousness and silently observe the change in the ‘milieu’ of intelligence, and here, exactly here and again, I understand that I am not alone, a flaming wave, yes, but inseparable, and the memory is fast and hits me, it is:

12:36/4/12/08/PSE

I am one moment into the Post Singularity Era (PSE).
I am almost dis-qualified from being my self,
Emergence of a future mind is the plan.

To be continued…

Fri, Dec 5, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: future, art, Poiesis, Polytopia, Singularuty
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Montevideo
Project: Polytopia

We listen to the voice, the tune of acceleration distributed in million labs, the undercurrent wave is pulsating, growing, aggregating life and potency. I am listening to its tremendous voice of the very now, in millions interconnected computing stations. I am listening as an artist does; it is a wide almost wild voice, I merge till merging loses its bottom line, a mind sets to a pure tension. It starts to gather, atom to atom, to letters, to words…

The Singularity Indeed Has Already Happened

Montevideo
The first word that sparks in my mind when coming to the raw articulation of that sense emerging in me is “Montevideo”.
It’s like in the story that I recall from my childhood, about a Spanish ship of the 16th Century that had been sailing around for months, no land crossing its way, when at a sudden moment the sailor on the mast, with his very last few breaths started shouting – Montevideo… Montevideo (…I see a mountain).
And so, I see a mountain… Like to say, I see a future… standing right here, on our way to the there.

A Letter to my self

The amazing thing about the singularity, the Story of the singularity that is, is the way it affects us.
When projecting it on the line of our event horizon, the singularity is a story that brings us into deconstruction and moves us into composing ourselves anew.
The human today lives in a radical time, actually an extremely radical time; the future is rushing at us, proposing for the first time the idea and reality of a better platform, distinctively different from the imperfect outcome of natural selection.
It is the beginning of an accelerating change that is starting to gain a confident and attractive position, projecting the human over an open horizon. Changing the very meaning of what, who and how a human is.
We as contemporary humans are crossing ways with this complex intersection and possible evolutionary event; we may gain some of the fruits of it and we may not.

And so I open eyes to a landing perspective, and once more my reflection is, that the amazing thing about the singularity, the Story of the singularity that is, is the way it affects us.
In all of its possible doors of emergence, the story of the singularity, this modern mythology to my eyes is a catalyst, before anything else, a catalyst for self- definition and a vehicle of transformation.

A catalyst for self-definition and a vehicle of transformation

Alongside with what we know as our drama of being – which lays in defining the ‘constant’, the very sense of our selves, while allowing all the rest to be continuously transformed – alongside with that, for us, initially nothing actually really changes, in encountering such a story as the story of the singularity.
Yet, it is eventually taking us, A potent wave of projection, demanding from us a fresh definition of our constant – the spark of our knowledge of being – if we wish to provide the case for our continuity through rushing transformation, encompassing both the closest and farthest levels of our existence.
And slowly the act of inclusion of such a story, gains in us the subtle knowledge of why. The unquenched desire to unfold our sense of universality, through distillation of being, as the continuous factor across evolutionary intersections that bear with them the very sense of dis-continuity.
The usage of the story of the singularity as a playground for an inner and straightforward narrative is in a way organic.
And so, this is the first angle through which I see a future, a home for a pulsing heart of substance. A subtle bridge between our core sense of being and this exploding evolutionary intersection, providing a fresh edge for our humane evolutive adventure.

Our Humane evolutive adventure

The pattern of our event of self-reflection as humans- the core approximating itself within continuous metamorphosis - is a vision in itself. And it is always navigating in search of an activating story, the one that connects the dots.
And so, we can… we can afford to include and weave that story as a playground for swift iteration. We may also disclose our poetry of self-description for a better tomorrow towards the possibility of designing ourselves a direction within the storytelling of an evolutionary crack.
In that, the act of inclusion may provide a potent horizon within which the procedure of cultivating intelligence and of articulation of intelligence do find a correspondence.
Observing again and again the spectrum of countable moments in my log, I find, among many, a thread that weaves it all into one growing sense. Now, how to call it? Is it intimacy in action? An intimacy that makes the stuff of everything mine?

Making it personal

We love life, strongly and passionately; we love till it erases the distinction, while providing us the momentum to make it personal and distinctive.
Making it personal means to make it ours, not in the sense of possession, which would really be a poor thing, but rather to make it ours in the pure subjective sense.
This is, in a manner of speaking, where our universality is to be found. All of our kinds and styles of minding, before being about something, are about minding.
The quality of minding, meaning, minding the mind in the appropriate fashion, results, as in Art, in an emerging substantial sense of unification - that of infinite uniqueness and infinite openness.

In Substance as in Art

In Art as in Substance, a universe, or a verse is inflated to such a degree that it comes out so to say, it comes into being, standing on its own account.
The question then is: IS an expression of being like an expression of Art? If it is, then, the art of being and the substance of art are strongly related.
The world of art passes the stage of breaking through its limitations, by emptying the question of “what is Art?” allowing in that act an explosion of creativity and fertility.
And yet, we still carry the intimate knowing of what art is, as it reflects our core sense of pure subjectivity – the ultimate unification of openness and uniqueness.
Today I find a correlation between art, substance and the story of the singularity. And by all means there is an essential property that defines our activity as humans, our minding, and our tremendous effort to remain effective and affective as long as we breathe.
It is a sense, a taste, and a reflective experience that emanates the smell of our sweat and yet we are not there, actually nothing is there.
And in that sense the story of the singularity is no less and no more then a means, a better platform for the art of being and the substance of Art to approximate itself.
And on the same token, as art frees itself from essentiality, and by that act opens itself for an explosion of the creative force, the story of the singularity does the same to the Human, emptying the question of “what is a human?” opening by this act a door for occurrence of a new mind and forcing us humans to cultivate the sense of ourselves in alter dimensions.
Is this a crack, or am I hallucinating? A crack for a new story? For a fresh tradition? It is through this window of understanding that I draw again the very confidence in what and how I am: an evolutive adventure.

A crack, for what? Remains the key question

We do love life and if so we do love the idea of a singularly rushing crack for upturning non-negotiable set-ups.
And here, exactly here, there is a space, a room, a crack calling for dreamers, visionaries, storytellers, designers, philosophers to step forward and to take this crumbling world of man upon the wings and waves of their tales.
We love the singularity, the story of the singularity, and as in the beginning and end of days we care for one thing, that which optimizes our singular sensation – that which approximates us to the flow of pure subjectivity in which universals are being born.
We can call it “A brave mind singularity” as Wildcat put it, and this is after all a narrative we do know intimately. In that extending the moment of now, making the future our home and shaping space, seems for a moment a sane poetry.
And so when facing the so called fact of being mortal and a possible incoming sense of immortality, I remind my self, that this way or that way I am the same.
And yet, that sameness when wound deep within the emerging contemporary mind wave, that distilled sense, yields the very freedom to embrace, to partake, in a life, which becomes no more and no less then art.

Towards a unified horizon?

In simple terms, either we make this emerging future our home, our Polytopia, or we will most probably slow the realization of our visions and diverge from where the flow at the edges of humanity is gathering and pointing.
This way or that a new platform of initial conditions of being, with less and less limiting factors, will eventually arise, somewhere.
It is a process of re-birth we should adapt to, shaping our edge in relation, while creating our location in correspondence.
It seems an inevitable matter of time that we make this radical intersection as a fitting medium for our minding. Extending our playground to include that intersection and the mind-wave that corresponds with it… and allow ourselves a re-birth.

And so I open eyes to a landing perspective, and once more my reflection is, that the amazing thing about the singularity, the Story of the singularity that is, is in the way it affects us.
And from this landing perspective the singularity indeed has already happened. We are now at the first stage of the post mind singularity era and the curve of accelerating change is indeed accelerating but the context of it happening, aside of technology, is us and the mind of us.

The Singularity Has Indeed Already Happened


And so, in a manner of speaking this is my Montevideo, with which I begin to count anew my log.
16:55/6/11/08/ PSE*
Now




*PSE: Post Singularity Era

Thu, Nov 6, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: future, Singularity, art, Polytopia
Sent to project: Polytopia

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