Sunday, December 21, 2008

Merry Christmas


MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

I want to take this opportunity to wish everyone all the best for the Holidays!

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Longing for Summer

Being caught in a deep-freeze right now, I fondly look back to the summer months spent in Vienna and surroundings, and later in Montreal:

AUSTRIA SUMMER 2008


FAMYLY RAPP IN AUSTRIA, SUMMER 2008


MONTREAL SUMMER 2008

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

De Es Schwertberger

De Es

A few days ago, my friend De Es had been featured with a page on facebook by someone unknown.
Since De Es has no control over that page, both Leo Plaw and myself, on behalf of De Es whom we were in contact with, reported the unauthorized page to Facebook Administration and I am happy to announce that the page was deleted. De Es has since joined our group of Visionary Artists on facebook.

Please visit his website:

De Es Schwertberger

http://www.dees.at/

Personal Information:

De Es Schwertberger (born Dieter Schwertberger 1942, Gresten, Austria), commonly known simply as De Es (since 1972), is an Austrian artist, painter and modeller. His work has been shown in exhibitions in New York City, where he lived for a short time, and Switzerland.
In 1973 De Es went on to serve as the assistant to Ernst Fuchs, at the Summer Academy in Reichenau. It was in this time that De Es went through the Stone Period, in which his art work consisted mainly of objects and people made from cracked rock and stone. De Es moved to SoHo, New York City in 1975, continuing his Stone Period of art work. In the 1979 he opened his own Gallery, Studio Planet Earth, before ending the Stone Period with a series of 'Time-Portals' paintings.
De Es' 1980s period of work opened with his work on the vast Transformation cycle of paintings, depicting 'Planetarians' (fictional beings invented by De Es), which were displayed at the Dome of Peace exhibition in 1980.
In the early 1990s he continued with the Planetarian sculptures, with an outdoor exhibition of forty Planetarians at Gurten Mountain, near Bern, Switzerland, marking the 800th 'birthday' anniversary of the city. In 1993 he published his book Heavy Light, a selection of his work from throughout his life. He also started work on another book, Prime Matter, which covered his Stone Period, which was published over the following years.
He lives and continues to work in Austria.


The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken





In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope took the image of a millenium, an image that shows our place in the universe. Anyone who understands what this image represents, is forever changed by it.

Go to the Hubble Website for a wealth of fascinating facts and images:

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Germaine Greer on Hirst critic Robert Hughes | Art and design | The Guardian

Note to Robert Hughes: Bob, dear, Damien Hirst is just one of many artists you don't get!


Hirst has his defenders. Germaine Greer thinks Hughes (and the rest of us poor and unwashed masses) simply "don't get it". My question to Greer would be: "What is there not to get?" Nothing he does is really very clever (other than his uncanny ability to bilk nouveau rich people and con curators) - I believe the 'work' is simplistic to the point of childish exhibitionism, and perhaps that is the appeal for Greer and the moneyed Lemmings, much like the stockmarket investors getting fleeced by BRE-X Fools Gold (the then corporate Headquarters Sign in Calgary looked as if designed by bling-artist Hirst).
Post-Modernism is gasping it's last breath, with Guillermo Vargas Habacuc and Piero Manzoni as 'fine' examples of it's decline. Hello Tate Gallery: How about a group show with Hirst?
Greer lectures us from a podium of superiority, the "illuminati literati", which is laughable and sad at the same time.
The Guardian also ran a poll, titled: An artistic licence to print money? And guess what: 87.7% thought Hirst was a Huckster.
But Greer and her ilk know better, of course.
I wonder if former BRE-X VP John Felderhof owns a Hirst - naw, he is to smart for that. But what is conceivable is that they could probably be neighbors in the Cayman Islands (as long as Hirst and his rotting fish are located downwind, I guess).

Germaine Greer on Hirst critic Robert Hughes Art and design The Guardian

Manmade Monster - The art of Roman Signer - OR IS IT?



Manmade Monster - The art of Roman Signer



Interesting images - they tickle my surreal sentiments!



Here is another one:



MECHANIC SYMBIOSIS





And here is the background story: No less surreal than the 'REAL' Roman Signer:



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Dear mr. Rapp,
Firstly I'd like to thank you for the kind reaction you left on my website (www.olislagers.net/surreal)
Perhaps this website needs a little explanation.Okay, where to begin.I am a student Communication & Multimedia Design at Zuyd University in Maastricht, the Netherlands.For a school module called "The Narrative" I was required to make an interactive walk in the city of Maastricht, which had to begin at the Bonnefanten Museum.
I've always had a passion for art, and especially surreal art, among several other art styles, so this led me to a specific concept and context for my project.My concept for this interactive walk was that the user, the person walking the tour with headphones on, was drawn into a surreal world, which played entirely inside the Bonnefanten Museum.This surreal world was created by a surreal artist, who wanted to create the ultimate surreal art piece wherein his subconscious mind played the most important role.In order to do this the artist drugged himself, let himself get hypnotised, erased his memory and planted a few mind suggestions into his brain, after which he was dropped off at the Bonnefanten Museum to awake there.This is when the story begin.It turns out in the end that the user of the interactive tour is the artist himself and regains his memories and identiy. This is both the end of the audio tour, as well as the resolution and completion of the work of art.
Anyway, to make a long story short. The website itself is not the real website of Roman Signer, it is merely a hoax to stimulate people to walk the tour and give a feeling of authenticity.This audio tour is not a real audio tour which can be taken in the Bonnefanten museum, it is merely an assignment I made for school.I've added some work of accomplished surreal artists on the site to further stimulate the feeling of authenticity, among which is work of yours.If you wish it to be removed, I will honour your request immediately.I am also very touched by your positive comment.
I've included both the spoken script aswell as the general concept in case you would like some indepth information on the project.
If you wish to contact me you can do so on this email address. You can also see a little more about me on http://www.vincentolislagers.nl/ although I must say this is a work in progress (this site has only been up for 1 week now)
Kind regards,
Vincent Olislagers



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And here is a link to a relevant Jon Beinart blog about one of the above images:



http://beinart.org/modules/Word-Press/2007/05/18/an-suit-of-plastic-baby-dolls/



The above picture of the 'Manmade Monster' actually comes from the album of the photographer Philip Toledano:



http://mrtoledano.com/frame_hopeandfear.php







Thursday, December 11, 2008

Damien Hirst - The Rijksmuseum - and the Ultimate Bling | Leo Plaw - Fantastic and Visionary Artwork

Damien Hirst - The Rijksmuseum - and the Ultimate Bling

Today's News Item by my friend Leo Plaw shows what is wrong in the Artmarket. Is he alone with his opinion? Hardly! Just check out my PREVIOUS BLOG

December 11th, 2008

Damian Hirst - For the Love of God

Damien Hirst - For the Love of God

I came to Amsterdam for the Dreamscapes exhibition. With a few hours to spare before the opening, where I would be viewing modern painting masters, I would pay a visit to the Rijksmuseum and see some of the Old Masters.

Much to my surprise and disappointment, I found the entrance dominated by Damien Hirst and a queue. I don’t ever recall having to queue for the Rijksmuseum. The queue was one of those artifical queues you see often see in front of those superficial night clubs, that rate style above substance, continually keeping a queue of people outside for “security” reasons, while also again putting appearance before all else, fabricating a false sense of exclusitivity and popularity.

I made my way about the museum looking at all of the fine artwork and historical museum pieces, until I came acros another queue. This time inside the museum, people queued for the special room where Hirst’s diamond skull was on display.

Hirst’s skull is suposedly the world’s most expensive artwork, but this is rather suspect, when you consider that he bought back from himself. Stranger still, according to the Guardian, up to twenty workers who make his works will not have their contracts renewed even though Hirst’s gallery breaking auction earned him 130 million euro at Sotheby’s in September. Nevertheless, about half his London-based staff were told this week that their contracts will not be renewed.

“It was unexpected, especially after Hirst made a killing from the Sotheby’s sale”, a source told the Guardian.

Whether sacking staff will have much of an impact on the financial health of Hirst’s art-producing company is unclear. The workers are said to be paid only £19,000 (22,600 euro) a year. That amount pales in comparison with the prices paid for works by Hirst.

While I was curious to see Hirst’s ultimate bling, the queue looked rather dismal as well as the prospect of participating in the hype. The Netherlands have been inundated by the propaganda. It seems that not all are sold on the fanfare, especially amoungst some of the Dutch museums competing against the Hirst Rijksmuseum media machine.

I circumnavigated the clot of people ignoring the art about them waiting to be admitted into Hirst’s sanctum of superficiality and progressed to the next room. Superficial is the catch frase here, as superficially the room appeared to be a continuation of museum’s permanant collection. However this was the curator’s attempt to make some relavance with Hirst’s bling by allowing him to select from their collection at his whim. Hello? What is the curator being paid to do?

Hirst seems to be astutely aware of this also, as he seized upon the opportunity presented by curator for him to make any inane comment he desires regarding the artwork he’s selected from Rijksmuseum collection. Is not the curator embaressed, or do they find him so witty. It would seem to be that Hirst his provocative best to insult the museum and its curator bald faced, and have them love it. “I will tell you are fools, and have you agree and tell me how genius I am for telling you so.” The same tatic with his artwork.

Before finally departing the Rijksmuseum shaking my head, I made a last stop by the Hirst space setup in the garden. Here you can buy all manner of diamond skull merchandise, and if you feel so inclined, leave your comments about the exhibition. Perhaps the museum, was being cautious and testing the waters. Perhaps they weren’t really so confident about their dispaly. Why else ask for visitor feedback?

I left my comments, asking why they feel the need to copy all of the other museums. As a museum for Dutch cultural heiratage, this made them unique. As museum of modern “block buster” exhibitions, they are like all of the other me too Mc Donalds museums francised across the world.

Damien Hirst - The Rijksmuseum - and the Ultimate Bling Leo Plaw - Fantastic and Visionary Artwork

Robert Hughes on Damien Hirst's upcoming Sotheby's auction | Art and design | The Guardian

And just when you thought colorful, satyrical (and in my opinion RIGHT ON) art criticism is dead, here is a well written piece by Robert Hughes:

Damien Hirst at Sotheby's auction rooms this morning to promote Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, an auction of his work

'A pirate' ... Damien Hirst at Sotheby's to promote Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. Photograph: Felix Clay

By now, with the enormous hype that has been spun around it, there probably isn't an earthworm between John O'Groats and Land's End that hasn't heard about the auction of Damien Hirst's work at Sotheby's on Monday and Tuesday - the special character of the event being that the artist is offering the work directly for sale, not through a dealer. This, of course, is persiflage. Christie's and Sotheby's are now scarcely distinguishable from private dealers anyway: they in effect manage and represent living artists, and the Hirst auction is merely another step in cutting gallery dealers out of the loop.

If there is anything special about this event, it lies in the extreme disproportion between Hirst's expected prices and his actual talent. Hirst is basically a pirate, and his skill is shown by the way in which he has managed to bluff so many art-related people, from museum personnel such as Tate's Nicholas Serota to billionaires in the New York real-estate trade, into giving credence to his originality and the importance of his "ideas". This skill at manipulation is his real success as an artist. He has manoeuvred himself into the sweet spot where wannabe collectors, no matter how dumb (indeed, the dumber the better), feel somehow ignorable without a Hirst or two.

Actually, the presence of a Hirst in a collection is a sure sign of dullness of taste. What serious person could want those collages of dead butterflies, which are nothing more than replays of Victorian decor? What is there to those empty spin paintings, enlarged versions of the pseudo-art made in funfairs? Who can look for long at his silly sub-Bridget Riley spot paintings, or at the pointless imitations of drug bottles on pharmacy shelves? No wonder so many business big-shots go for Hirst: his work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free. Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons's balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat's stoned scribbles, Richard Prince's feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform message from our fin-de-siècle decadence.

Hirst's fatuous religious references don't hurt either. "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever", the sale is titled. One might as well be in Forest Lawn, contemplating a loved one - which, in effect, Hirst's embalmed dumb friends are, bisected though they may be. Consider the Golden Calf in this auction, pickled, with a gold disc on its head and its hoofs made of real gold. For these bozos, gold is religion, Volpone-style. "Good morning to the day; and next, my gold! Open the shrine, that I may see my saint!"

His far-famed shark with its pretentious title, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is "nature" for those who have no conception of nature, in whose life nature plays no real part except as a shallow emblem, a still from Jaws. It might have had a little more point if Hirst had caught it himself. But of course he didn't and couldn't; the job was done by a pro fisherman in Australia, and paid for by Charles Saatchi, that untiring patron of the briefly new.

The publicity over the shark created the illusion that danger had somehow been confronted by Hirst, and come swimming into the gallery, gnashing its incisors. Having caught a few large sharks myself off Sydney, Montauk and elsewhere, and seen quite a few more over a lifetime of recreational fishing, I am underwhelmed by the blither and rubbish churned out by critics, publicists and other art-world denizens about Hirst's fish and the existential risks it allegedly symbolises.

One might as well get excited about seeing a dead halibut on a slab in Harrods food hall. Living sharks are among the most beautiful creatures in the world, but the idea that the American hedge fund broker Steve Cohen, out of a hypnotised form of culture-snobbery, would pay an alleged $12m for a third of a tonne of shark, far gone in decay, is so risible that it beggars the imagination. As for the implied danger, it is worth remembering that the number of people recorded as killed by sharks worldwide in 2007 was exactly one. By comparison, a housefly is a ravening murderous beast. Maybe Hirst should pickle one, and throw in a magnifying glass or two.

Of course, $12m would be nothing to Cohen, but the thought of paying that price for a rotten fish is an outright obscenity. And there are plenty more where it came from. For future customers, Hirst has a number of smaller sharks waiting in large refrigerators, and one of them is currently on show in its tank of formalin in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inert, wretched and wrinkled, and already leaking the telltale juices of its decay, it is a dismal trophy of - what? Nothing beyond the fatuity of art-world greed. The Met should be ashamed. If this is the way America's greatest museum brings itself into line with late modernist decadence, then heaven help it, for the god Neptune will not.

The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the unverifiable claims about its cash value, and are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.

It certainly suggests where Hirst's own cranium is that his latest trick with the skull is to show photos of the thing in London's White Cube gallery, just ordinary photo reproductions made into 100cm x 75cm silkscreen prints and then sprinkled (yay, Tinkerbell, go for it!) with diamond dust, and to charge an outrageous $10,000 each for them. The edition size is 250. You do the maths. But, given the tastes of the collectoriat, he may well get away with this - in the short run. Even if his auction makes the expected tonne of money, it will bid fair to be one of the less interesting cultural events of 2008.

Robert Hughes on Damien Hirst's upcoming Sotheby's auction Art and design The Guardian

And don't miss this brillant piece by Maclean Magazine's Andrew Potter: Snarkiness about sharkiness misses the point

Robert Venosa Interviews Peter Gric | Leo Plaw - Fantastic and Visionary Artwork

Robert Venosa Interviews Peter Gric | Leo Plaw - Fantastic and Visionary Artwork

Monday, November 24, 2008

The Universe as a Hologram





The Universe as a Hologram
by Michael Talbot

talbotcrp

Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.
Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smellisin part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the-holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.
It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolvedpuzzles in psychology.
In particular, Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as "reality".
Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

ELLIE'S THEORIES OF CREATION AS A HOLOGRAM

ARTICLE FROM SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

talbotbook




The Universe as a Hologram

Additional Videos:

Holographic Universe (Part 1 of 2 ) its all illusion.

Holographic Universe ( Part 2 0f 2 ) its all illusion

Additional links of interest:

Brian Greene: The universe on a string

Rob Bryanton: The 10th Dimension - Part 1

Rob Bryanton: The 10th Dimension - Part 2

Rob Bryanton's Blog

Sunday, November 9, 2008

A History of God

embedded on my website, find the video based on Karen Armstrong's best selling book.

Also embedded on my page is the entire book to read at your leisure.

http://www.telusplanet.net/public/ottorapp/page107.html

Thursday, November 6, 2008

IIAAProject on deviantART


IIAA: International Imaginative Artists Association



Stefan Kindermann - Dead Fish Me - digital artwork

This will serves as the official DeviantArt Site for our proposed "International Imaginative Art Exhibit 2009(open for date change)"



Historical Overview:
The International Imaginative Art Exhibit is a collaborative project of several international artists who collectively shared the common ideals for a new "declaration" of the word "Art" via a revolutionary Art Exhibition showcasing the current state of post post modern art...It began here in deviantArt after a monthlong proposal and exchanges of ideas between Gromyko Padilla Semper,Administrator of *the-surreal-arts, and recognized visionary-surreal-expressionist artist, writer, philosopher from the Philippines, and Hector Pineda, Co Admin of the surreal arts club, digital manipulator, art patron, and an avid supporter of the surreal/fantastic/visionary art genre.
They began considering the options for making this vision a reality after being convinced that this might be the next revolution in the art world.
They are joined by JohPaul Thornton, an acclaimed American artist, famed for his excellent works depicting "Missing Children". John Paul offered the duo his valued advices that molded the proposal into a solid idea based on simplicity.
Other artists who are of great help to the development of this project are Reinhard Schmidt, a visionary painter, co-contemporary of the like of Lukas Kandl, Brigid Marlin,etc, who shared his professional advices that benefited the conceptuals of this project.
Worth noting also are Joe Mc Gown, a neogothic surrealist, who gave his realistic outviews, Stefan Kinderman, who suggested a lot of conventional and revolutionary approaches to the planning of this show,Ben Tolman, who supported the ideals and showed support, shared his passion towards a positive hope that this project should become a reality, and recently Amanda Sage, famed fantastic-visionary artist in the tradition of Ernst Fuchs, who related strong commentaries that is of great help to the amendments of this proposal.
This project involved artists from around the world who are determined to make it a reality.
Without them this vision will remain submereged in the deep subconscious.
The IIAAPROJECT Team expresses their gratitude to those that continnually supported us, Together We Will Make This Dream A Reality!!!

Philosophy/Mission/Vision:

“To redefine the notion of art towards a higher aim, that is to show the different levels of reality (the physical(concrete, objective,natural, sensibilia), mental(subjective, fantastic, surreal, psychological, intelligibilia), spiritual (transcendental, visionary, mystical, transcendelia) “beyond” post decadent modern art, and to re-unite autonomous artists into one collective, one artistic culture that challenge tradition and move towards the future.”

Objectives:

We stand for
1.) The Individual and Universal right to express
2.) The right of the artist to be involved and recognized in the global scene respective of the subject/object of their art contra-imperialist, capitalist politics.
3.) The never-ending quest of humanity towards a meaningful world, the untainted, unfettered, utopia where art is a prime mover for change towards a brighter future.
4.) The universal artistic fraternity, a brotherhood and sisterhood of artists united into one common goal.

Theme:


Periscope
By definition: Of the word periscope (periskopein, to observe around): n. A periscope is an apparatus consisting of a tube attached to a set of mirrors or prisms, by which an observer (typically in a submerged submarine or behind a high obstacle) can see things that are otherwise out of sight.
To see things that is otherwise out of site. that is the point over which why the term delineates our common aims...the term surrealism is already a defunct and decadent movement, though as inheritors of this glorious movement we are not "surrealists" in context because we cannot create the same surreal image that the original group conceived...We are not surrealists, abstract expressionists, nor visionary artists but we look upon these past movements as our starting point towards a more higher aim, to look and see things(in our physical, mental, and spiritual selves) that are out of sight(knowledge, knowingness, revelation in relation to the current culture)...A periscope can see from below and beyond...yet it always brings out the best view unreachable by the unaided eye, as periscopic artists it is out duty to be the periscopes of post decadent modern art...we are no longer confined, we will reinterpret the meaning of art in a periscopic way!! A new revolution...A new definition, which is the very purpose of the Exhibit."



Artist Organizing Committee:
Gromyko Padilla Semper, Philippines
Hector Pineda, Mexico
John Paul Thornton, U.S.A.
Rheinard Schmidt, Germany
Joe Mc Gown, U.S.A.
Amanda Sage, Austria
Stefan Kindermann, Germany
:icongromyko: :iconelyphas: :iconjohnpaulthornton: :iconanubis46: :iconneogothic-jam: :iconasage: :iconstephanusembricanus:

List of Participants (Active):

Sandor Badacsonyi, Hungary
Piotr Zygmunt, Poland
Basia Wiewiorska, Poland
Wade Furlong, U.S.A.
Tassos Kouris, Greece
Danny Malbeouf, U.S.A.
Mathias Staber, Austria
Janelle McKain, U.S.A.
Otto Rapp, Canada
Ben Tolman, U.S.A.
Sheela Singla, U.S.A.
Andrzej Masiani, Poland
Ton Harring, The Netherlands
Nicholas Ivanenko, France
Nome Edonna, Iraq
Aleksander Rymarowicz, Poland
Germaine St-Onge, Canada
Alejandro Santafe, Spain
Leopoldo Garcia, Spain
:iconsandorbadacsonyi: :iconpeterzigga: :iconpellucidmind: :iconwadefurlong: :iconanubis: :iconkolaboy: :iconmathismondhut: :iconjanellemckain: :iconartofthemystic: :iconbentolman: :iconss25: :iconmasiani: :iconnaikoivanenko: :icondivee: :iconnomeedonna: :iconolorym: :iconger696: :iconhermocrates: :iconpolotron:
(enlisted)
Others(to be followed up)
The IIAA TEAM
In Association With The Surreal Arts Club and the Visionary Artists
:iconthe-surreal-arts: and :iconvisionaryartists:


IIAAProject on deviantART

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Facebook | Visionary Art

The avatar for the gallery is a work by
Abdul Mati Klarwein

Christian De Boeck, administering the Visionary Art Gallery on Facebook had done an exemplary job of rallying together like-minded artists from around the globe, many of which had been friends for decades.

I am honoured to have been named co-administrator of the gallery, together with Laurence Caruana, Laurie Lipton, Robert Venosa and Oleg Korolev .

WHAT IS VISIONARY ART?

Christian De Boeck posted under the discussion topic What is Visonary Art, Science, Engineering, Technology? (Post #5) an interesting exchange of letters (almost a decade ago) between himself and Alex Grey.

SOME OF THE OUTSTANDING WORK ON DISPLAY:

ERNST FUCHS

MARC SPENCER

LAURIE LIPTON


JOE HACKBARTH


KURT REGSCHEK

VLADISLAV ERKO


KD MATHESON

Visit this site and immerse yourself in the visions!

Facebook Visionary Art