Astral Quilting

Three Weeks in (Love) Apocalypse Boot Camp

2012-03-05T17:19:00.002-08:00

Photographs by Lily

*12th photograph from top by J.Ward

2012-02-26T14:11:00.039-08:00

The mask encrypts the dancer, but the dance itself rises off the page.
Each drop of the surface holds the secrets to the whole world.
Penetrate it, and the translation is time itself.
History unfolds through dimensionality. Choose a form.
The key resides in your very skin, become an accurate description.

1. The manufacture of illusion is a game that involves diplomacy between two worlds, interior and exterior. It is a game involving boundaries, and the horizon where a perspective shift takes place. One must decide whether she is audience or performer, but both exist simultaneously, and truly are one. Here in Los Angeles, we live perpetually on the boundary--a twilight junction where worlds divide. A curtain falls between backstage and show, and one must decide which part to play in the grand participatory illusion. The show itself is a completely different story, depending on where you stand.

_{It is in this relationship between observer and observed, between conjurer and enchantment, between material and presentation, that a strange, incomprehensible thing takes place. In a willful gathering and focusing of light, loosely-spun energy comes to occupy space, identity takes dimension. The act we perform here is like the creation of a hologram, and it is through this process that we become manifest. Like sacrifices to a great mirror in the sky, we beam self-descriptive messages into the ether on loop, projecting images on our screens, hoping for pleasurable responses in return that agree with our initial self-concepts. We always seem surprised when the images come back reversed, looking nothing like what we'd imagined. We modify and try again, arranging our faces with friendlier smiles, practicing pleasant formations, then recirculating these newer versions--like psychic headshots. We always seem to forget the transformative nature of the Great Mirror.}

And this is where we find ourselves in Los Angeles--somewhere in the midst of an interference pattern between the light in which we are seen and our own projections of ourselves. Never a solid identity, you become a probability amplitude--a likelihood of possible yous at any given moment, defined only in the presence of an observer, by the many screens that capture you, echoing your attempts at self-assertion in diminishing forms through the outer shells of smaller and less important worlds.

2. Like a hungry ocean colliding with a stoic coast, you can exist as a process here, but never as a result. You will be subject to the colossal revision that’s come to define us, as one intricately-detailed set is torn down to erect another. That was almost indistinguishable from reality, you say, but how strange, suddenly you’ve woken up in Act Two, still surrounded by costumes and exaggerated facial expressions. You consider breaking character, wandering off stage, demanding to speak with the director, but instead you stay. You already seem to know your lines.

_{What exists here in Los Angeles is limited only by our capacity to imagine it, and we are so far down the road of conceived dreams that we cannot find our way back to what is real. As a city we've abandoned our history and predictability. This is improv. The script rewrites itself with each new act.}

_{Physically arid canyon, psychically fertile crescent, we've discovered a rich, fantastical vein where every rumor, however vague, is given the chance to be true. Every story comes alive, living and walking in a bright parody of its own skin. Naive, young, untouched by the scrubbed hands of puritan ethics, this land is spiritual frontier; a nugget in the rock, burning in the eyes of claim jumpers. As around any treasure, in any good story, there is a fight for control; the waters are brimming with pirate ships and the sky is darkening. There is psychic gunslinging in the sunset. They want the jewel in the heart of the lotus, they want to steer you into dark parts of the sea.}

_{One night, in frustration, feeling uncertain and unable to navigate by this mess of stars, you took a candle and burned a hole right through the center of your maps--to create a passage. It is through this dim vignette that you now see a stranger boarding your ship, carefully crossing the deck, making his way slowly towards the helm. Recognize this man, become familiar with his disguises. Often a healer with a blade, always an orator, he arrives in virtue and rags. Ultimately a fear wrangler, he is the product of the management system of your mind. His goal is mutiny. Will you be led?}

So who will guide us now that we're set adrift? This is a ghost ship, its steering column a Lorenz wheel. We are free-floating now, watchful of would-be captains. We sail on a string of events adhering only to each other. We cannot trust the integrity of the past, the future is incalculable from every divergence. What will become of us?

Like a shadow outside a diorama, you watch yourself performing from an audience, but you feel the emotions of the character. Like a cruise ship crashed ashore, you drift through gaudy wreckage, no memory of the wave of fugue that brought you here. You pick up pieces, turning them in your hands and holding them next to each other, remembering something, but unable to assemble a plot.

If an observer were to stand outside a black hole and watch an object getting sucked in, the object would appear to move infinitely more slowly; it would appear to stop, frozen just on the edge of the black hole forever. But if the observer were strapped to that very object, it would perceive and have the experience of falling into the singularity. This perceptual boundary caused by a gravitational warping of spacetime is called an event horizon. In Los Angeles, we call it a sunset.

3. People like to talk about the lack of a physical center here in L.A., how it shapes the psychic landscape. In a sense it's true. The clusters of energy that gather to form this city--both the observable and tactile, and those invisibly congregated in our collective thoughts--are like the opposing sides of a Rorschach. Following a haphazard curve, hunched and malformed, they reach crookedly into the distance through space and time, jutting and retreating, clinging always to the highest peaks, mirroring each other over miles and years of convex plotlines and dramatic outcroppings. But though they appear to run parallel, there is a crossing--a junction at which conventions blur and boundaries go strange. Bending around a great body of darkness within, the mirror begins to distort. The relationship between the physical city and its imagined rendering becomes unpredictable, and can no longer be measured or traced. The boundary becomes porous; the two sides fuse into an ongoing process of mutual translation. It is not that we have no center, but that we revolve around a dense and heavy absence. 

Boundless and shifting, etheric Los Angeles is an open mouth feeding on the rest of the world, growing in size and influence. Its perimeter is impossible to define.  It swallows towns, cultures, dreams, histories and behaviors into its vacuous shape, then regurgitates them as flatter versions, suitable for the screen. Newcomers are tentative at first; they occupy what they imagine are the edges of the dark silhouette of the city, considering themselves spectators. Unknowingly, they're already standing onstage. Everyone is in on the act. In supporting roles for the city's emergence, we build the framework for her reveal; each night as if it were the first, a startling debut. With a jeweled mask and a wave of a feathered fan, with flair, seduction and a pulling of wool, Los Angeles exerts herself beyond all proposed boundaries, geographic and emotional. With a simple formula that always delivers, she conjures novelty from the scraps of recycled culture and wears it like a rare fur. Upstaged, we are relegated to the corners and left in doubt, questioning our own star power. Displaced, we are forced to stand outside ourselves.

Now this thing we've created is beyond the sums of our imaginations, and it grows. Mystified, we watch in awe and sometimes terror as our bodies mimic and trace the outline of this monstrous figure in frightening detail. What is it? The Blob, The Thing, Them. 

French theorist Jean Baudrillard said of Los Angeles that it is a “network of incessant, unreal circulation—a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension.” Like a black hole? My friend Scott claims this is a fact. "Los Angeles is a supermassive black hole eating and and destroying everything it touches," he says. 

I think about this often. There is indeed a great amount of distortion here, something unnatural in the way reality comes together, a crux in the way the dimensional axes intersect. Space, time, depth, nothing works as expected. The lines collapse in on one another here, the consequent spaces cannot be trusted; the walls of reality are made like cheap paneling. I try to imagine this literally,--LA as a black hole. I picture the city from above: the shimmering cartesian grid of L.A. at night is suddenly swallowed, bending to an impossible degree around a giant void, as the lights blink out one by one. It’s a romantic thought but, of course, not the way it would work. If the etheric monster we’ve made from our city is the great gravitational body from which nothing can escape, then the physical city must be the event horizon, bending our perceptions in a dimensional warp around its core. In other words, we are purespun illusion, leftover light, a phantom halo forever hung on the eve of destruction while the real city is already long gone, obliterated by its own infinite density. 

If you want to know about Los Angeles, follow the life of a star. A radiant giant hellbent on burning brighter and hotter than the rest, she consumes everything around her with an insatiable hunger that will lead her to slowly eat herself. Los Angeles is the model of karmic energy debt the rest of the world is starving to follow. We are the prototype for twice as bright / half as long, and we describe where civilization might find itself in the next few decades as, like a dying sun, we burn through our fuel and resources and are forced to finally bear the weight of ourselves. A body in the grips of starvation begins to lose muscle mass. The heart begins to shrink, and eventually fails. The freeways and highways cross and cross each other, traffic clogs in endless orbit around nothing, attempting to get closer to---nothing—the destructive center we are somehow drawn to. 

The world is closing in, getting smaller, hotter, denser, faster, more crowded. But the strange thing is, while the rest of the world follows our example into consumptive suicide, we in Los Angeles are one step ahead down the path of chasing limitless desires; we have already reached the point of no return (superluminal escape velocity) and somehow we're still here, in one form or another. Following this analogy to its natural end, one would conclude that perhaps it is not death we are hurtling towards--as we draw closer to the initial collapse of a civilization going supernova--but simply adaptation. 

So, what sort of adaptation? What happens to a physical mass when it enters a singularity? Well, no one can be entirely sure, but after much debate, experts now agree that even in a black hole total and complete annihilation is not possible. Information still escapes, and proliferates through time in ever-increasing complexity. According to the holographic principle (a prominent physics theory sprung from the study of black hole thermodynamics), an event horizon bears on its surface the gravitational description of everything that could have existed inside. As the black hole absorbs mass and energy, the horizon increases in units of Planck area. In this way, the horizon scales with the increase in entropy; information about the interior states of the black hole is entirely encoded two-dimensionally on its outer boundary. A reduction in dimensionality takes place, whereby four-dimensional information is translated, or fully encrypted in two dimensions. In accordance with the known laws of the universe, even a great and powerful body of incredible gravity that warps space and time around it cannot erase history. There is only translation, and an ongoing interpreting and re-interpreting of the story through different lenses, or from different perspectives.

What does this mean for L.A. and for the future? Well, perhaps it means that something will remain, even as we destroy ourselves. As we approach this great unknown, this tipping point in history at which our need for domination requires us to dominate our own humanity, we may be forced to move into the next phase of existence, and to take on another form.  As information proliferates and physical reality grows thin, perhaps we will be forced to create ways to store ourselves in compact regions of space. A light particle entering a singularity, from the perspective of the particle, is destroyed. But from the point of view of one observing from outside the horizon, the particle is stretched over the horizon and exists there forever. This is what is happening as we abandon our bodies and become our representations of ourselves.  

Here in L.A., with the rest of the world in tow, we've become experts at representation, masters of the plausible fake. We are winning the game of creating pictures, populating our screens, creating images and recordings and snippets and relics and fervent renditions of ourselves. Why? Are these newer versions of ourselves more adapted to live in the dimensional matrix of our future, where space may be sparse and the natural resources we require for physical survival have long been obliterated? Will the world of the imagination be the only fertile frontier left to claim? These secondary images, these digital flatlanders--existing from bits and pixels and remnants of sound and light, like classic flatlanders, have no digestive tracts, need nothing, subsist on pure nothing. In L.A. we thrive on nothing; we are experts at creating pictures in light--from nothing. 

So perhaps the identity crises we now undergo as we scale and compress ourselves to fit the world we're creating will serve a useful purpose after all. But we should be wary of our verve and cautious of turning ourselves into ghosts. In the onion skin of representations--from God (or essence) to human to shadow to lonely sun that once made shadows of living things, we should be leery of anything that places us further out in the layers. Before we obliterate ourselves, we might try striving to be human again; it might not be too late.

As I write this, I'm hoping you'll listen and offer me some space closer to the center. I present this image of myself--thin and impotent, a collection of words on a screen, a cut-and-pasted rendition, a collection of pictures and clips and ideas I picked up here and there and assembled into some form--in another attempt to hold your attention. With your approval, I could be human again. With your attention, I could be unfolded and begin to take up real time and space--beyond the screen you're reading this on. 

As it is, we exist on a boundary.  No one knows which side you stand on. There is no clear distinction between observer and observed. It is only with your observation and attention that I occupy a form. And even if I were to move, and step across a boundary into another world, from the eyes of those watching, I may hover on the edge for eternity. If I cross the threshold, no one will see me go. My image will stay behind in an illusory circle of light--smiling, drinking, laughing, attending pool parties--while I, myself, plunge into an infinite void. 

Books that were referenced or were influential in the above piece: The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking, The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman, Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Dideon, Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott 

images, top to bottom: 
1: cityscape by Dennis Ekstedt 
2: unknown  
3: geometries by Dan McPharlin
4: string installation by Sébastian Preschoux 
5: mannequins from Alexander McQueen retrospective at The Met, unknown photographer on right. 
6: partially taken from the cover of the book The Master Game by Robert S. De Ropp 
7: unknown 
8: unknown
9: unknown 
10: unknown 
11: cityscape by Dennis Ekstedt 
12: unknown 
13: Dan McPharlin 
14: collage of unknown artists 
15: unknown artists 
16: Enceladus by unknown 
17: city reposted from the blog Post Traumatic Urbanism, artist unknown 
18: Hollywood sign, unknown, 
16: unknown 
17: painting by Susan Chrysler White

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

2012-02-18T02:06:00.003-08:00

Little Story

From particle to hurricane, life is built on the expansion of information.

From the miniscule to the monstrous, creator and created abstract

A dream within a dream within a dream, one dimension parallels another to define you.

Graceful hologram with your grieving and seeking, little child with your tear-streaked face turned up to the stars,

you want to know why everything suffers, you want a hand to hold in the black, black night.  

Listen. There is only one message, but it must be worded exactly for you.

It will spend your life translating itself to reach you.  

It will conjure heavens, demons, just to catch your eye. 

You turn page after page, finding them blank.

 This must be the wrong book.

 The imps surround the castle, the path is overgrown.

You escape into the garden, a hall of mirrors.

Clever girl, you outsmarted them, to your detriment.

Your language is so strange, it would take a masterpiece to touch you now.

Veiled in layers coiled in serpentine layers

Who could find the words?

Now as accidents and hardships chase you around the world,

you simply keep running from one side of the maze to the other 

like a bird trapped in a room, unable to remember the open window.

Little animal, you claimed you wanted God.  

Now your world is like an electric fence and there is only one direction permitted.  

The voltage increases with each misstep.  

This last cycle you wandered

far from any shepherds 

In some distant rooms a nightmare enclosed you.
In a red light, you woke to someone dying.

You held his wrist without a pulse, you had no words to guide him.  

The medics and police and priest and firemen made frantic circles on the ground,  

all of us helpless in the shadow of a rising soul.  

The grieving resonated in the yard, the trees grew crooked wings.

Into the bowl of darkness we threw ourselves.

Little creatures, so confused
playing games with each other

trading blame while the real work goes undone.  

No one told the spirit how flee.

No one held the keys or illuminated the gate.
No one untied the path. 
And what if he stays forever in the garden,
folded in time like a boy trapped in a mirror?

If I were to draw you a map, my friend,
a thread that led like a shortcut out of the story

like a dozen blades slicing through the fabric of space, like parting water,
like a drill bit through each page of the book itself

I would reach through your ceiling into your reverie
and in a fervent whisper, in a sinister tongue,

with the threat of horrors unnameable in my range--loud enough to make every fool a believer,
and every believer the most precious kind of fool,
I'd tell you

Love deeply while you can.

The sea eats the sand, the forests burn.

Everything vanishes.
Still this matters.

I open another book, this one about surrender.

It's an instruction manual featuring poorly drawn pictures

of figures rising and reclining in poorly constructed beds

with dusty curtains parted to reveal meager circle moons

this one is a palindrome

and this one is a Russian doll

with ancient scripts for hair

they all end the same,

with a beginning:

Oh Mother,

What can I offer you that is worthy of the gift of this world?  
All I ever had was a handful of laughter and fist full of tears.

When the day unravels and time winks out,

when I finally return from play in the currents and poppy fields,  

I will bring you the prize of the game--
A jewel wrought in the carving wheels of life,
all my dreams and memories captured inside--shining on each surface--
its facets the shape of everything I was:
a divine exchange of love and fear

in every color and combination the raw dust of this universe provides
 at play, for you.  

We’ll laugh together at how we did this.
We'll make up new rules to the game,
just as we once did, so long ago.

For now,
if you must hold me by the hair, my head under the water,  still choking after all these years
how can I resign myself to be the passage and the bridge?  

I want my arms to make a tunnel, the telegraph wires for your disembodied message,
 clicking in the dark.

string theory & buddhism, a crooked rorschach

2011-08-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

Left: a two-dimensional schematic representation of a Calabi-Yau Manifold,
the space some string theorists believe holds six unseen spatial dimensions,
curled up on themselves. As drawn by Harvard physicist Andy Friedman.

Right: A Tibetan mandala from the 16th century.

The Temple, or Memory Palace

2011-07-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

Mapping the events of the shared unconscious, the space between worlds, with a dream cryptography made of tunnels, rooms, passages, stairs, hallways, and towers.

Once in a while, the internet births a fruit so juicy, that one little taste redeems the whole dying tree.

2011-07-11T02:15:00.000-07:00

HTTP://SYNAPSE-ARCHIVE.COM

"I find myself trapped in a self-actualizing history, in which the chronicling of the events causes them happen, or more accurately, causes them to have already happened."

dreams and visions

2011-06-06T20:40:00.000-07:00

*

2011-06-06T20:33:00.000-07:00

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."   - Albert Einstein

Wild Ideas on the Mysteries of the Universe

Dimensional Linguistics: Art Class for Creator Gods and Aspiring Dr. Frankensteins
------------by Lily

Recently, I watched the Ted Talk on the E8 symmetry group by rockstar surfing physicist Garrett Lisi. Mr. Lisi has proposed a unified field theory that uses the E8 lie algebra as a geometric model describing the interactions of elementary particles. I was intrigued by some of the topics he touched on in his video, and felt compelled to write him a letter. I asked him some questions I’ve been mulling over for months that seemed related, at least vaguely, to his research. Is it possible that humans have an innate ability to intuit energy patterns, or recognize geometric structure or symmetry in the universe’s organizing principles? Could this be the reason we see the same archetypal imagery repeated again and again historically across such a wide range of visual cultures? I’d been thinking about this since last year, when I'd read a theory proposing that humans use innate symmetry recognition in their visual/neural perception to differentiate between objects and living organisms.

Mr. Lisi wrote back promptly, and generously delivered a thoughtful, well-considered response to my letter. He said my guess sounded likely, but that since there was no evidence yet to back it up, it could be nothing more than a wild guess. It seemed, to my discomfort, that he’d also picked up on my precarious position as an obsessive back-and-forth tightrope walker between scientific and magical thinking—-two opposed circuses, in my opinion both equally limited in their capacity to describe the universe. He said he wanted to clarify my position before we continued to correspond on the subject of physics. What do I believe happens when a person dies? Could I imagine consciousness ceasing to exist in a mound of decomposing dirt or not?

His words:
“People, you see, are terrified of the truth: that they inhabit bodies made out of meat that will inevitably fail and cease to exist. This fact is perhaps the most terrifying truth we have to confront in our lives. It's completely amazing that we exist as conscious and aware beings, and it's absurd that this consciousness exists as the functioning of our meat brains, but it is so. We are delusional animals, not so much better than chimps, but with just a smidgeon more awareness, and a mind that likes to fool us that we're immortal.”

I didn’t return the letter; I had to think about this for a while. I consider myself a logical person, open-minded, but sound in judgment. My typical belief system could be summed up as a Socratic stance of disclosing my ignorance at every opportunity, whilst aggressively attempting to prove that no one else knows anything of merit either. The truth is though, the idea of consciousness as strictly a function of the brain has always frightened me. I felt obligated, when asked directly, to provide a truly honest answer. This involved revisiting and reinvestigating my thoughts on the subject to see if I held any deep-seated secret beliefs.

As I thought about death and the brain and body, I also began to consider human perception in general: inherently unreliable, rooted in the seemingly insurmountable subjectivity of our perceptual apparatus—one that allows us no objective perspective on our place in the universe. Philosophical questions about human life are difficult to approach using a scientific framework for this very reason. It always boils down to the same old problem: how can we purport to objectively determine the laws or principles of something that we can only experience subjectively? How can any inferences on the nature of life and consciousness be considered anything but speculation, when there is still so much we cannot explain about reality and our universe, about time and space, perception, dimensionality, the interaction of forces, or the workings of our own brains?

Until we fully understand these subjects—which I believe will eventually become the same field of research—what do we really have but wild speculation? When dealing with questions of physics, philosophy, biology, and even representation (language or art), it is important to keep the problems of subjectivity and relativity in mind, and to remember that we still do not have a verifiable big picture of our universe. How can we make statements about the mortality of consciousness, when our concepts of time and reality in general are still so young and incomplete?

That being said, and recognizing fully that we are in the realm of guesswork, logic and intuition, I also have some wild yet reasonable speculation about the nature of consciousness.

In Garrett’s video, he uses polyps on coral as an analogy to describe the behavior of quantum particles (he declares that each genetically identical polyp is actually one manifestation of the whole creature, which one could say exists in multiple locations at once). I believe that when viewed in the light of a dimensionally-holistic perspective, this same metaphor could be extrapolated to describe the essence of any living creature regardless of genetic variation: one big entity, simultaneously one and many. But because our perceptual apparatus is divided, it is extremely difficult for us to perceive this. We are stuck in a flawed understanding of the dimensional structure of our universe—one that leads us to believe we are completely separated individuals. This separated individual perspective leads to a flawed understanding of the nature of time, to formidable alienation and suffering, and to gross misconceptions about our own identities and the nature of reality.

In other words, we are all one creature. It is only from a perspective of differentiated observation, one that incorrectly dissects the dimensional geometry of our universe, that we perceive ourselves as separate beings. The idea that we are all fundamentally connected is obviously nothing new, but it should be treated more seriously outside the realms of religion and spirituality. If you think about it logically, it is really not weird or unbelievable.

Consider your DNA.

Your body, your entire physical existence, could be described as a code executed in the raw material of the universe in three spatial dimensions and time.
This code patterns your cells, defines your physical parameters, and propels your growth and movement through your dimensional world.

But you inherited your genes, and they will live on in your children.

If you view your body as one of many hosts of an evolving, self-replicating code—one that evolved in complexity from acids and algae to Ammachi and Einstein--which one is the actual life form?

Is it your body, with its energy metabolism and dying and regenerating cells, or the information that defines and forms the body--a strain of genetic material that existed since the beginning of life on this planet and continues to propagate itself in an ever-increasing population of hosts?

When you have a child you are physically transferring very small parts of yourself, living information that has mass and takes up physical space, into your child. These small bits grow into the physical shape and attributes of the child over time. Where exactly then does your life end and another life begin?

The child separates from you by gaining physical distance over time, but you yourself may have also gained physical distance from your prior self from say, twenty years ago. In fact, you could say the only thing connecting yourself now to your prior self, when your body is growing and moving and changing, occupying different locations in space and time, may be your ability to hold onto memories of lost spacetime events and assemble them to form an imagined chronology. Like a string of pearls, this assemblage of memories gathers to construct a somewhat haphazard strand that is your history and identity. Obviously, you have your own organs, your own body, but do these necessarily define you as a separate creature from others, or just as an aspect?

The thing that makes us so sure that we are completely separate people is that we view the world from our own perspectives and have different sets of memories. The real difference between you and your child is more starkly marked by a difference in observational frames of reference than by a difference in physicality. In the same way that your cells have their own functions and are separated physically, but remain units of the same creature, your brain, heart, lungs, or epidermis would not necessarily define you as a separate creature--except for the fact that this is where we place the linguistic parameters for our definition of a human being. However, this definition may be the result of the very human way that we view reality. It may be a definition based on the need to communicate easily in our native language—which describes the world from the perspective of 3D with a direction. It is an agreed-upon perspective, but not necessarily a valid one, and in no way could we claim it is based on an objectively accurate view.

Because we all share the same genealogical ancestry, on a long enough time axis, when looked at four-dimensionally from the perspective of an outside objective observer (if there were such a perspective), would we not all be the same entity—one that continues to branch off into self-similar parts as time goes on?

What would this entity that began at the start of life, perhaps the start of the universe, and continued to branch out and expand and evolve through an increasing number of hosts look like if you could plot its 3D shape on a linear time line? On an infinitely-long time axis, would its parts not embody every possible three-dimensional shape? If you scaled your graph to a manageable finite length of time and plotted the entire entity three-dimensionally, what would it look like then?

If you were trying to draw accurate conclusions about human consciousness, would it not make sense to question an assumption that you are an independent individual creature in your body, when that assumption has been drawn strictly from observing the world through the lens of your own individual memories and subjective self-ideation? In other words, instead of viewing yourself and others from one point inside this four-dimensional graph or field, would it not make sense to at least attempt to imagine what we might look like from the 'outside'?

So imagine for a moment that you're an artist, a developer, or a god. You have the perspective of an outside observer on our universe. You want to express this entity that is the sum total of life on earth in a spacetime continuum as one three-dimensional shape, so that you can represent it to each little polyp, each separate frame of reference, in a format they can all see and grasp. It has at least four dimensions, but you have to compress it into three-dimensionality. How might you tackle this problem? How would you represent all of the states and positions it could occupy at once? Would you take a mathematic or a poetic approach?

Fundamentally, it is a problem of perspective. It is simple for us—humans--to imagine how something three-dimensional is represented in two dimensions—the way we can paint a barn to represent an actual barn. But how would we accurately represent something that varies spatially over time without actually giving it time? Would it be the sum of its spatial states? Would it be an average shape or location? None of these choices lead to an accurate representation. Like Plato’s cave dwellers who had to exit their cave in order to realize that they were actually living in three-dimensional reality while perceiving two-dimensional reality, in order for us to visualize four-dimensional reality in its entirety in our heads, for us to see its boundaries, we would have to be outside of it. In other words we would have to gain the perspective of one dimension ‘above’ in order for us to visualize time spatially.

Without that perspective, we can only model four-dimensionality abstractly in mathematics; poetically by showing its effects; by animating something two-dimensional and scaling its duration to suit a model; or by breaking it into moments or events (a slice of time chopped from the line and fit inside three spatial dimensions) and examining them separately, or stringing them together to make an assemblage-chronology. But there is always something lost in the representation. Our perception is dimensionally flawed. We cannot holistically describe the original geometry of this entity within the confines of our current perceptual environment. It’s like each of us are seeing the facets of a diamond and failing to see the shape.

Our flawed way of perceiving spacetime could be described conceptually as follows: imagine you are a set of eyes on the end of a tree branch on a growing tree. Movement or growth in some direction is not an option, you are propelled “forward.”
We could fork in several directions, but we make a choice, and when we grow in that direction, all other possibilities are lost to us. We cannot grow backwards to get to them, and we cannot see them. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other branches on the tree, each perceiving out in its own direction from its perspective, each with a set of choices that spring from a prior set of choices. And it also does not mean that the rest of the tree does not exist. Just because you are a tiny little branch, does not mean you aren’t connected to another tiny branch on the other side of the tree. But you cannot go backwards (back in time) down the trunk and through the other branches that connect you to the twig. In fact you don’t even know that the other twig is there--your eyes are on the very tip of your own branch.

Is it valid to assume, just because you are seeing from your own point, that the tree itself as a whole does not also have its own perception? Perhaps its vantage point would be entirely different, inclusive of all the possible perspectives of its branches, and also each possible alternate choice in spatial or temporal direction that each branch did not take. In other words, from the perspective of the tree itself, any x,y,z,w spacetime coordinate grid that would be the movement parameters available to each of its branches from their own vantage points at their normal rates of growth would be a completely useless and ineffective way to describe the dimensions of the universe-matrix available to the tree itself.

As a means for performing a perspective shift and as a way of illustrating this perspective problem, we were trying to imagine how to draw or graph our higher dimensional shape in a lower-dimensional environment. We want to gain a more realistic perspective on our tree, but we cannot move our eyes from our little branch, off the tree entirely, to look at the whole shape from the outside. How could we override this perceptual problem?

Well, let’s say this small branch that is your body very far down a chain of choices, decisions, and movements in spacetime is already the model or the graph of our higher-dimensional selves--our best attempt to reassemble our consciousness in lower-dimensionality, a representation, an aspect, a facet, a branch, a way of organizing information in our flawed native language—3D with a memory and velocity, perceiving a field of time from a directionally-restrictive trajectory through it.

To deconstruct this representation, you could reverse-engineer the body, study how it unfolds through a series of branching events, and decipher its language, tracing a broken geometrical symmetry state back to its original symmetry. You’d be attempting to understand the principles of information modeling in this universe with exact precision, to decode a lower-dimensional shape so that you could read its referent in a higher dimensionality. If you mastered the fundamentals of modeling in this way, you could “read” matter and what it refers to in its grander manifestation. You could slide any shape back and forth and around in spacetime, predict the forces that would act on it, and predict its shape, state and coordinates at any point in any time or realm of possible time points.

Imagine reading the wrinkles on a human face as they tell an exact story, not just of where one human has been, but of the entire history of our species back to the inception of energy in the universe. Or, imagine using a human face as evidence to project forward and gaze in the faces of mutant versions of ourselves three million years from now --in every possible future. Imagine this not as magic, but as future science.

To isolate the variable that is the body though--from its complex web of causal relationships with compound exterior forces—would be no easy task. First we would have to understand the nature of these environmental forces themselves well enough to accurately negate their influence. We would have to understand something of the formula nature uses in its modeling in order to have any hope to understand ourselves in this manner. Obviously, we are currently leagues away from this kind of mathematic description of life in relation to its environment. We are at such elementary levels in our pursuit of real about the universe that physics, biology, and the study of consciousness or the mind are still completely separate fields. It is conceivable, however, that if we continue to pursue an interdisciplinary path towards knowledge and self-awareness as a species, we might someday connect the dots and discover the exact formula, the exact language of representation (the relationship of information to form) used in nature for modeling in our reality. For now though, this type of deconstruction is not a realistic way to gain knowledge about ourselves.

To gain a holistic perspective on our tree without the ability to move our eyes off the tree entirely, perhaps we could shift our perspective within the tree to move back to the center, back to a symmetric probability state from which we could move in any possible direction. But how would we get there from here?

Is it possible that there are ways to override one's perceptual framework? What if there were keys that could allow us to unlock the brain, to go deeper, to get under the operating system we are currently using, to then restructure the neural / perceptual interface to overhaul the way it organizes information? What if we could rebuild the entire dimensional framework with which we construct our view of reality? If so, where should we begin to look for these keys? What if self-awareness is simply a matter of changing the way we perceive spacetime, or reorganizing the geometric model that we use to categorize information?

The brain is very complex. When we look at the differences in the way a normal adult, a child, a schizophrenic person, an autistic person, or perhaps just people with different interests--say a painter and a musician--process sensory data and use it to construct a perspective of their environment, it becomes obvious that the brain is capable of constructing "reality" in a number of different ways. It is not at all implausible that the default operating system our brains use to manage and organize raw sensory data is not the only one at its disposal. It may simply be the standard one that we've developed over time to best serve our functioning needs. When thinking about why a characteristic evolved one way as opposed to another, we need to remember the purpose for the adaptation. If our neural interface developed in the way it did as a mode of organizing information to serve survival needs, it makes sense that a major part of its function would be to filter out a large portion of "unnecessary" information from conscious awareness.

In order for the whole tree to survive, each little branch only needs to know how to grow towards the light. Each cell in our bodies only needs to be programmed to serve a specific function. It does not need to know the entire purpose for our existence or what we are doing with our lives, it only needs to do its part. But if these aspects are indeed parts of a larger creature, might it be possible for us to change the filters we are using to gather the data with which we construct our perceptual environments, to perhaps gain a greater view, a less-limited perspective on ourselves and our universe?

If our brains were able to use three-dimensional information modeling with a confused/flawed time perspective as a way of filtering out a layer or dimension of reality in which we are all actually connected (perhaps for the purpose of security/survival) our resulting observable reality would be one in which we are not connected at all (unless we could somehow gain access to this hidden layer). But to assume that a general human perspective and a standard view of time are objectively truthful ways to view the universe--simply because they are the models we've adopted--seems like a presumption.

The real question we should be asking is this:
If we want to unlock our brains and perform a perspective shift, where should we look for the keys?

Digital Flowers and Data Protozoa in Zero Eden

2011-03-05T10:29:00.000-08:00

Below:

a curated selection of graph drawings from the University of Florida Sparse Matrix Collection and a general-audience synopsis of what they are/how they were made.

Here:

a link to download the software used, if you'd like to try this at home.

In image links:

information on the specific properties of the individual matrices.

Visualizing Sparse Matrices

by Tim Davis and Yifan Hu
(reposted from UFL website)

Scientific problems often lead to a system of equations to solve. One of us (Tim Davis) is an expert in methods for solving them, and he also collects equations from scientists with real problems to solve.

The pictures you see here are diagrams of some of those equations, created by Davis' colleague (Yifan Hu) who is an expert in visualizing them. Each dot, or intersection of two or more lines, is an equation for a particular unknown. A line is drawn between two equations if they share an unknown.

For example: (x): x+y=3, (y): x-y+z=0, (z): y+z=5 could be drawn as this picture:

x--y--z.
Not every equation involves every unknown. If it did, you would see this picture instead:

x---y
\ /
z
You've seen these kinds of figures before -- anytime you've looked an airline route map at the back of the magazine on an airplane. They're called graphs, as in "graph theory," with nodes (the dots) and edges (the lines between the dots).

To draw the dots and lines, we need to put the dots in place. But where?

Sometimes equations have a natural place. Take a helicopter and color it with dots, draw lines between the dots, and then remove the helicopter. You're left with just lines and dots, and the equations you've drawn might represent how the helicopter flies, or how it reacts to forces applied to it, or how it vibrates. Whatever they represent, the dots have a natural place in 3D space, so we can draw them there.

What if you forgot it was a helicopter, and all you had were the equations? Or what if your equations did not represent a physical object, but something intangible such as a financial portfolio optimization problem, in which the unknowns and equations don't have a place? If you drew a diagram of investment decisions, "where" is an asset? "Where" is a decision? "Where" is an equation? Anywhere, and nowhere, but to draw it we need to put it somewhere.
We use physics to solve this problem. Make each line a spring, and give each dot an electrical charge. Then let the diagram "wobble" around so that the energy of this physical system dissipates, and the system reaches a stable minimal energy position. The final positions of the nodes now gives us the "where". This gives a good way to draw the graph. The lines between the nodes are given a color based on their length: hot (red) colors for short ones, green for middle ones, and blue (cool) for long ones.
You can see an animated demo of the dots and lines moving into place here: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/sparse/matrices

If you do this to the equations for the helicopter, you'll find that the graph looks like a warped version of the helicopter, below. The five main rotors are to the top left, the nose to the bottom left, and the tail rotor to the right.

If you do this for a more abstract system of equations, you'll get something that shows how the equations relate to each other.
And quite often, the pictures are simply beautiful.

For the full gallery, please visit: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/GALLERY/GRAPHS/index.html
For the full paper, visit: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~davis/techreports/matrices.pdf

hidden symmetry

2011-01-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

A google image search on "Hidden Symmetry" yields the following results.

Carefully chosen articles regarding the subject of symmetry have been meaningfully organized and attached to the images in such a way as to allude to specific conclusions. This post is an interdisciplinary idea collage, meant to incite inspiration and further inquiry. Please compare and contrast these concepts or bits, hold them next to each other, reorganize them, and throw away what you don't want or need.

Images are links to reading or more pictures, hover for titles.

crystals : time travel

2011-01-19T11:54:00.000-08:00

* * * * * *

2011-01-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

conscious humans apprehend an ordered system...mathematical arrangement, a geometry implicit in chance

Circumnavigating a Retrograde in 3 Easy Steps

2010-12-26T15:21:00.000-08:00

This may be useful if you are traveling in the next few days:

How to safely and effectively maintain your mobility and productivity during a retrograde:

1: Feel it Out.

If there is too much of a current going through the circuits at once, everything will short and you'll be completely immobilized, blocking all progress. You have to think of it like this: the universe's traffic signals have all shut down during rush hour. If you feel everything starting to clusterfuck, it is because you are moving into a bottleneck. You just have to step out and watch the flow, and wait until there is less of a load on the system before you re-enter the network. There will be off-peak hours even during the retrograde; you will have to watch for them and only attempt movement during those times. You will feel it when you have more room to move. Then proceed with caution and resolve, and do not second guess or back-track, or you could get caught in the mess again.

2. Don't Get Frustrated / Expect the Worst / Patience Young Jedi.

You have to accept that movement and progress during a retrograde are slow, difficult, clunky, disjointed, error-ridden, and involve a whole lot of required back-pedaling. Don't expect anything to be easy or to function properly, but it will function. The most important thing is to know when you can and cannot move, and not to push.

3. If Possible, Run, Hide, Duck & Cover

If you get caught in a fighting / arguing / emotional vortex, just back off and disappear until you feel things loosen and you know you're out of the funky orbit. Don't even think about the issue again, and refuse to communicate until after you are safely out of the zone. These types of emotional whirlpools spring up everywhere during these times, so if you really want to avoid the mess, keep your communications light and don't communicate with any single person too much--until you're in the safety zone.

And as always, keep silent, keep moving.....

puzzle

2010-12-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

I worked for a day at the Vorst National, a famous historic venue in Brussels, where the walls backstage are covered top-to-bottom in graffiti left from all the bands and shows that have visited over the past forty or so years. It's quite an amazing place, and I also wanted to leave something special behind.

So I thought up a puzzle, and I wrote it on the wall. I wanted it to have meaning on the surface, if someone glances at it briefly, and also a hidden meaning, were someone to take a closer look and decipher it.

The phrase is, "nature's secret pattern displays her elegance perfectly."
None of the other words or letters scrawled on the wall around it pertain to the answer.

Anyone?

Photography by Brian Doherty

Ink Blots

2010-12-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

Ｇ◕ Ɖ∋ɕῥə☈.ϟ

2010-12-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

2010-12-04T06:51:00.001-08:00

My flat-screen hotel TV turned on by itself at six this morning and began

flashing my full name and making noises, saying, "Time to wake up."

I thought this must be some sort of dreamworld poeticism. Then I realized it was real.

I went into panic mode, thinking some sort of time had come.

Then I realized it was my wake-up call. Snow was softly falling out the window.

Everything got quiet. I slowly fell back asleep.

2010-12-03T03:31:00.000-08:00

Who loves a dark imposter?

Never a great pretender, I left the theater before the reveal.

I heard the stranger never removed his mask;

they all left disappointed, fixing their makeup on the way out.

2010-09-09T12:01:00.001-07:00

ASHES

Nope, not happy at all

2010-08-14T15:36:00.000-07:00

Back in Lost Angels, experimenting w/ alcoholism and emotional weight management plans. Can a drama-free diet actually make you heavier? Living on salt soup, leery of surprise heart attacks.

Paintings by Retna.

2010-08-13T11:55:00.001-07:00

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510...

2010-08-06T11:32:00.000-07:00

If disasters only

multiply,

my door is open,

drop on by.

(swatches/vision---please click link above for pictures)

2010-08-05T00:14:00.001-07:00

Deadalus
Alice

☂☁♡

Is it possible to go through life playing only cooperative games ?

Why not try it and see what happens?

To do this, one might determine the goal or best possible outcome for each potential player at the outset of the game, and choose to only engage in the game if all players can attain their first or second most-desired outcomes. Even better, one might choose to only engage with players whose requirements for their best possible outcomes include that the other player(s) also “win.”

Obviously, the old rules are no longer working. Perhaps we can start small by restructuring our personal dynamics.