St. Boniface, mutant biomechanoid and cyberphilosopher,
speculates on the fragility of Emergent Mind and its place in the cosmos.
St. Boniface, mutant biomechanoid and cyberphilosopher,
speculates on the fragility of Emergent Mind and its place in the cosmos.
Only now is the creativity both
latent and implicit within human intelligence beginning to be observed in
a cosmic context. Matter and energy throughout the universe is in a constant
imbroglio of intelligent evolution. Our universe and the grander Creation
of which it may be only an ephemeral part are in perpetual experimentation
with force and materiality; from the howling quasars and blasting galactic
cores to the silent microcontinuum that lies beneath the active levels of
quarks and gluons.
Nearly all the matter of the cosmos exists in stars
at superheated temperatures; the many planets that must exist and the biospheres
that must also spin about and warm to other suns are coarse lumps of protozyme
in comparison. Yet on them matter and energy conspire to form organic life;
it must take many bizarre forms in many weird environments. The ultimate
refinement of biological life is conciousness. And so the universe is a
pulsating engine that creates intelligence; incubates it, nurtures it, and
challenges it with an infinity that stretches away in every direction beyond
the limits of imagination.
Emergent Mind awakens to a terrifying fragility in its
lonely isolation. Imagination and will transcend all reality and infinity.
Only the shackles of biology and the limitations of the organism prevent
Mind from attaining its rightful cosmic destiny.Our physical evolution is
near to attempting its convergence with the vast zones of innerspace and
effervescent dream; and it is this that will be the supreme issue and struggle
of the Twenty-First Century.
Our roots in this struggle lie deep, and originate in
a melancholy that has haunted the human race since it scrabbled out of the
bleak hinterlands of blank unconscious existence. The paradox of what we
can envision and the reality of what we can accomplish in our limited circumstances
has oppressed our species since the dawn of time. Plagued by magnificent
hallucinations, eerie mirages and fantastically sensual transmutations in
our nights and reveries, we awaken to cold barriers and numbing impossibilities.
And so the Artist evolved.
Our beings are split in the dimensionalities of existence
that seethe all around us. Crude physical matter imprisons a spirit that
touches strange and elastic planes of dramatically amplified vividness,
sound-colour and emotional depth. We live our lives within a narrow interval
between the interplay of forces in the universe. Just above the deadness
of condensed matter, part of us reaches high into spheres where time and
space and the corporeal disintegrate into a stunning quicksilver reality
of spectacular massmorphing impressions. A purer, more liberated order of
being is lived by us there; yet we cannot hold onto it for long.The three
dimensions encroach around the spirit and imprison us again. The magical
sunlight dims and collapses into the ugly monochromes and harshness of the
matterworld.
The artists and mystics among us try to capture that
imagery.They seek a light within. And it is not impossible that the light
of inner vision is part of the creative radiance that is the Sun. Sol is
our creator; nearly every particle of us originated there; our whole planet
and atmosphere. We exist at its whim. If the Earth itself may have a kind
of life in breaths of a thousand years duration, the stars are even more
likely to have beings unto themselves. We imagine too often that we are
and could be the only form of sentience.We are bacteria on our planet and
less than that to the godlike Sun. Illuminated voices and indescribeable
colours amid groaning radiations that stimulate receptive minds could blaze
out from the solar metabolism just as its physical light kindles photosynthesis
activity and hormonal excitations in biological life.
The thought-pulses of such a being would be as mighty
as its roaring plasma fires. They may have composed dreams and ethereal
pilgrimages since the beginning of our race - unleashed upon us a cosmic
creativity which seeks to capture and realize those exhilarating, mercurial
phantasms on the astral frontiers of sleep. The creative urgency that manifests
and smoulders in so many of us takes innumerable forms - music, architecture,
mathematics, painting, literature, cinema, engineering, oratory, chemistry,
medicine and lives lived that illustrate the deep archetypes of persona
and essence that make us what we are. The design of the most complex metropolises
and the most common domestic objects mold our thoughtforms and patterns
of behaviour, evolving in parallel with us. Art and design and geometrical
plasticity have never been more important to our culture as new sciences
and materials and necessities warp and reintegrate the basic contours of
our lives. Vast streams of avant-garde concepts and explosive webworks of
new urban patterns and technologies impact on our overloaded lives. Physical
and inner spaces contort violently with swift and splintering change now;
a volcanic liquefaction of environment and psychospatiality transforming
and rebuilding with an insanely schizoid polymorphing velocity.
Art in all its forms is integral, from baroque statuary
to Art Deco architecture to the digital paintings of David Em to techno-trance
symphonies and the intelligent ductile ceramics being pioneered by materials
science in the process of realizing a more and more changeable environment;
one strewn with combinations of the most varied auditory and visual interplays.
Past and future mingle, the structure of civilization becomes ever more
motile and mutable; richly tinctured mindscapes crash through the walls
of dream and insubstance. Art and science in fusion; evolving furiously
under the invisible beams of neurodynamism that coruscate from our colossal
primary and dazzle the soft electrochemical bioprisms through which we sense
the merest fraction of time and space. Rococco splendour and futuristic
majesty flow together and generate a stunning daymare hybrid with a million
other influences, from the starkest Fluxus\Bauhaus to the most gorgeous
primitivism; cities and screens alive with the blastquakes of exhilarating
vision hewn in video and shapeshifting architectures. A maddened and sublime
reality full of the impossible realized. And among it we shall be psuedohuman
images screaming unheard and metamorphing and changing as hysterically as
the rest; hollow polychrome transforming features bathed in the lurid, mind-twisting
solarian Rays of Creation.
lurks somewhere in England, seeking refuge from the post-industrial gothic apocalypse. Occasionally, his desperate messages, often scribbled hastily on the shattered debris of the modern age, slip through the censorious nets of the postal service and wind up on my desk. His mind may or may not be as unstable as his e-mail address, but if you wish to help him overcome his paramechanoid delusions, you may send your condolences care of this publication.
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Copyright Circuit Traces Communications 1995