Presence fantastique – Creative research in ancient cultural arts, the energy of nature and the human field

INTRO

The Space Between Us

We see ourselves as ‘smarter’ now than our ancestors: our modern technology informed by science. But our confidence goes only about as deep as our understanding of the ‘space’ around us. We’re sure now, of course, that it’s not empty but rather a labyrinth of fields, weaving paths in the immaterial realm, holding riddles beyond our sensory perception.

These invisible fields are fields of influence. All material things have their own guiding fields, extending throughout all space perpetrating an intangible effect on whatever happens upon their zone of influence.

In contemporary culture, there’s no better signifier of the interface between the material world and the imperceptible world, beyond our senses, than the ubiquitous antenna. Antennas are intriguing structures – they’re just a bit of metal bent into various shapes, but they weave a kind of magic. Like a modern day oracle, they translate the language of the immaterial realm into pictures, messages, and voices.

Little more than 100 years ago there were only a few experimental antennas in the world. Now every house has many: wifi, TV, radio; we carry them with us everywhere we go: phones, computing devices, plastic cards; and with the growing use of radio-frequency ID tags, very soon every object will have its very own antenna. We are connected through space – invisibly… we’ve become very comfortable with the idea that a small geometrical pattern of metal lines printed on a surface can perform what would once have been mythological feats attributed to gods.

Ancient technology

To me it’s uncanny how miniature antennas are formed using a variety of geometric line patterns – rectangular and curved spirals, wavy lines and concentric circles/arcs, strip (bar) lines and fractals – that closely resemble patterns portrayed in ancient and tribal art all over the world: stone labyrinths, ground art, and motifs on buildings and objects.

Almost everything about labyrinths is still a mystery to us today, their ancient purpose unknown, but anthropologists suggest a common cultural theme – also symbolic of the border between this world and another immaterial world – sometimes connecting with the mythological realm of the dead, sometimes with the spirit world and walking the sacred paths to their deities, and sometimes ceremonial summoning of spiritual energies.

The ground paintings of the Australian Aborigines are typified by arcs and concentric circles, straight bar-lines and sinuous lines. During sacred ceremonial singing and dancing, the design elements themselves are believed to take on mythological forces that are passed onto the dancers and ritual objects, which become endowed with transient supernatural powers. The ground paintings can only be created by older men with extensive knowledge and competence in depicting the designs correctly.

Geometric shapes used in modern antennas require similar precision. The ‘tuning’ of length, angles and patterns to couple with the oscillations of the field of interest is a very precise art, and indeed the ‘immaterial’ forces are only imbued when the antenna has current flowing, at other times the metal lies dormant, just an ‘ordinary’ object again.

Perhaps we are just as entranced with the immaterial as the ancient and tribal cultures. A formidable number of antenna towers, those monuments dotted across the mountaintops, stand as sentinels over the ‘fields’ like the revered statutes of the gods of mythology. We gain entry into our modern magical lands, through our smart gadgets… our doors… wardrobe doors into a virtual Narnia – a world that’s not real, or is it?

Arts Research

My artwork explores our place, as humans, within these fields: the fields of nature and sound, the fields of the human body, and the virtual fields created by an information age. The human body continuously absorbs, converts and emits microscopic bits of information in the form of energy. We are human antennas. One feels a certain disquiet about the boundary between self and the imperceptible quantum world. Our heart and brain produce a field that slowly propagates throughout space, and we interact with other fields.

A vivid memory I have of this is when I saw my hand through the lens of a high powered infrared camera, wielded by a termite inspector. And as you’d expect the image glowed with the normally invisible field generated by my hand. What was unexpected though was what happened when he said to watch as I took my hand away. The image of infrared field of my hand didn’t disappear, like it would with a normal photo… it stayed there in the space for quite some moments, and not just a blob but a clear image of my hand, before it was slowly absorbed into the nothingness. I’m thinking ‘awesome’… here I am standing here looking at a part of me still over there long after the material body had moved. It makes you wonder doesn’t it?

The body radiates a broad electromagnetic spectrum (not just infrared), the heart generates a magnetic field that emanates about 8 feet. Just think, all the time we pass right though the fields left by others, they intermingle with our own fields and we are changed but on a quantum level below perception, where what’s possible, according to Einstein, gets very ‘weird’, very ‘spooky’ indeed.

… and we’re all a bit wary of ‘falling down the rabbit hole’:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here… but let me tell you something, the best people usually are.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

Welcome

I’m delighted that you’ve come to visit my web pages, as we map nature’s fantastique patterns.

On ancient maps, “Here be dragons” was marked to signify the edges of the known world. Gradually, through exploration, the ‘sea monsters’ disappeared, and as we map the mysterious natural fields in space, using modern science and technology, perhaps the ‘spookiness’ will disappear as well.