Program Notes
Guest speaker: Erik Davis
In this talk, Erik Davis gives an overview of the role that visionary art, as lineage and practice, plays in today’s planetary culture. Then he contrasts this with what he is calling “Visionary Design”: the translation of the visionary impulse into the design of artifacts, systems, and real-world solutions.
Previous Episode
017 - Stop Worrying and Love the Dimensional Shift
Next Episode
019 - The World Wide Web and the Millennium
Similar Episodes
- 049 - Pharmacology and the Posthuman Phuture - score: 0.80024
- 123 - Opening the Doors of Creativity - score: 0.78373
- 129 - The Imagination and the Environment - score: 0.78215
- 052 - The Future of Visionary Art Part 2 - score: 0.77248
- 354 - Pre-End of the World Special - score: 0.76598
- 003 - Beyond Belief_ The Cults of Burning Man - score: 0.75453
- 197 - McNature - score: 0.74527
- Podcast 708 – Beyond Realism - score: 0.74067
- 373 - Thoughts About Gnosticism, Art, and Music - score: 0.73976
- 116 - Techno Pagans at the End of History - score: 0.73742
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
3D Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
00:00:10 ►
Delta Shades here in the Psychedelic Salon. In today’s salon, we’re going to hear a talk that Eric Davis gave
00:00:27 ►
at the MAPS Palenque Norte lectures during the 2005 Burning Man Festival.
00:00:33 ►
And if you listened to the previous podcast of Daniel Pinchbeck’s talk
00:00:38 ►
that came just before Eric’s,
00:00:40 ►
then you have a little idea of what it was like on the playa that day.
00:00:44 ►
If you go to our website, matrixmasters.com slash podcasts,
00:00:49 ►
you’ll find a link to the Burning Man 2005 page
00:00:52 ►
where you’ll see some pictures that were taken during this talk.
00:00:57 ►
Those pictures, as well as these recordings, by the way,
00:01:00 ►
are all thanks to Bruce Dahmer.
00:01:03 ►
And also on that 2005 Burning Man page, I’ve put a link to Bruce’s site where he’s posted
00:01:11 ►
a whole lot of Burning Man pictures, including quite a few from MAPS Blanque Norte lectures.
00:01:17 ►
And there are even a clip or two, a couple really short, just a few second video clips of one of Daniel and one of Eric as they were speaking in the domed structure there.
00:01:30 ►
And the clips are short, but they really give a good feeling for what it was like in the dome the day the talks were given.
00:01:38 ►
Eric titled his talk that day, Visionary Art, Visionary Design.
00:01:47 ►
visionary art visionary design among the many topics he’ll be discussing even weaves in the spirit of our dear departed friend Terence McKenna I’m
00:01:53 ►
gonna tap into the audio stream here just as Bruce Dahmer begins his
00:01:57 ►
introduction of Eric and to be honest I guess I could have just picked up when
00:02:02 ►
Eric starts speaking but truth is that Bruce
00:02:05 ►
says so many nice things about me that I just couldn’t cut it out, you know?
00:02:10 ►
So I guess you can all tell that I’m certainly not under the influence of any ego-dissolving
00:02:16 ►
substance right at the moment.
00:02:19 ►
Anyway, let’s get on with the program.
00:02:21 ►
Here’s Bruce and Eric.
00:02:21 ►
Let’s get on with the program.
00:02:22 ►
Here’s Bruce and Eric.
00:02:35 ►
I acknowledge Lorenzo Haggerty for starting this series called Palenque Norte with maps two years ago and making this all happen.
00:02:38 ►
Palenque Norte is Palenque, Mexico, El Norte here in Burning Man,
00:02:43 ►
and it kind of is carrying on that tradition
00:02:45 ►
that was established over many years in Palenque and we’ve been lucky enough to
00:02:50 ►
have gracious hosts every year to to to bring you all together and continue this
00:02:55 ►
and there’s so many new fresh faces and bigger crowds it’s wonderful and so I
00:03:02 ►
want to acknowledge Lorenzo for he’s not here this year.
00:03:05 ►
He’s probably going to come back next year.
00:03:08 ►
But just want to acknowledge him for doing that and for all the people who helped set up this stage and for Snowflake Village.
00:03:15 ►
And do you have any announcements?
00:03:19 ►
No.
00:03:20 ►
No announcements to make.
00:03:21 ►
So without further ado, because we have to keep moving, I want to introduce Eric Davis.
00:03:25 ►
And I was saying before, you’ve read his books and his articles and his thinking.
00:03:31 ►
It really is a mirror on you, I think.
00:03:34 ►
So it’s a really good mirror, and it’s sort of a mind-opening mirror on everybody here
00:03:39 ►
and what you’re doing and what you’re seeking to do.
00:03:41 ►
So without further ado, Eric here’s the comms
00:03:46 ►
and he’s going to start up this so we’re going to make sure it gets well recorded
00:03:50 ►
because all of this will be on the site palenque narte dot org and if you just
00:03:56 ►
google Palenque Norte and that’s the QUE dot org or Palenque Norte you’ll find all
00:04:01 ►
these talks probably within a couple weeks.
00:04:10 ►
And there’s a mailing list and there’s a tribe and everything just to keep you in touch with this community that we’re continuing to grow.
00:04:13 ►
Without any more ado, here’s Aaron.
00:04:21 ►
All right, thanks, Bruce and the MAPS folks for setting this up
00:04:25 ►
and a distant Lorenzo for masterminding the Palenque Norte lectures.
00:04:32 ►
I mean, in some ways, certainly in terms of Daniel, I can say, and Bruce, too, I know,
00:04:39 ►
and many of the other people who have spoken in some ways were kind of fragments or vectors of Terrence,
00:04:45 ►
people who were inspired by Terrence McKenna in different ways
00:04:49 ►
and have taken those inspirations and gone in different directions
00:04:53 ►
that still share something of his unique, inspiring, charming, amusing, tricksterish spirit
00:05:01 ►
and that these whole series of talks, a way comes out of that legacy.
00:05:07 ►
And the aspect of his work or his inspiration that I’m going to be talking about today has
00:05:14 ►
to do with the imagination and with the cultural expression of the imagination.
00:05:20 ►
And I kind of picked this idea because I wanted to tie together a number of different themes going on right now.
00:05:28 ►
One is the theme of this burning man, the psyche.
00:05:33 ►
And I’ll talk about the relationship of the psyche to the imagination in a bit.
00:05:38 ►
Another is the role and importance of visionary art in this culture,
00:05:43 ►
something that’s just been increasingly important to me
00:05:46 ►
and something I’ve gotten more obsessed with
00:05:48 ►
over the last few years as I’ve met
00:05:50 ►
contemporary visionary artists
00:05:52 ►
and learned more about the tradition
00:05:56 ►
and want to kind of create a,
00:05:59 ►
try to understand more about why art is so important
00:06:03 ►
in this particular culture or this particular set
00:06:06 ►
of overlapping cultural zones with its emphasis on visionary experience, on play, on bohemianism,
00:06:14 ►
on hedonism, on ecstatic wonder, on profound cosmic amusement.
00:06:20 ►
There’s something in there about art that’s extremely important that I want to get to.
00:06:24 ►
There’s something in there about art that’s extremely important that I want to get to.
00:06:32 ►
And then finally, I kind of want to address in a way a perspective on the problem that Daniel raised at the very end.
00:06:40 ►
When he really kind of took off, we all sort of felt it about how to do something.
00:06:42 ►
Now, what does it mean to do something? How do we stay true to our crazy, wild, inspired,
00:06:48 ►
poetic, artistic selves and deal with the reality on the ground? It’s a very frightening,
00:06:55 ►
confusing situation. And I want to kind of shift or talk about a shift from an emphasis on visionary
00:07:02 ►
art to what I’m calling visionary design.
00:07:06 ►
But before we get there, I want to talk a little bit about the imagination,
00:07:10 ►
because the imagination is an excellent portal into many of the major themes
00:07:15 ►
that certainly dominate this particular Burning Man,
00:07:20 ►
but also dominate a lot of the questions about how we proceed
00:07:23 ►
and how do we deal with, let’s say, visionary information.
00:07:27 ►
Let’s say we’re mostly more or less kind of skeptical, secular types.
00:07:34 ►
We don’t believe that it accounts for everything.
00:07:36 ►
We’ve had peculiar experiences.
00:07:38 ►
We’re starting to get intuitions, synchronicities, things happen.
00:07:42 ►
But what are we supposed to do with them?
00:07:44 ►
Do we become true believers?
00:07:45 ►
Do we create some system that we hold on to?
00:07:49 ►
Or do we try to keep an open process of letting these inspirations come in
00:07:53 ►
and yet also honoring, in some sense, our own real tradition,
00:07:57 ►
which is the skeptical secular West?
00:08:00 ►
And one of the things I want to suggest is that going deeper into the imagination
00:08:04 ►
and understanding more about what the imagination means in a fuller sense is one of the ways to kind of approach this problem.
00:08:26 ►
book of tales, portions of a poem by William Blake,
00:08:30 ►
who is, of course, one of the West’s great visionary artists.
00:08:34 ►
And you’ll no doubt be familiar with the opening.
00:08:39 ►
To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower,
00:08:45 ►
hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
00:08:47 ►
That’s usually where people stop, but I’ll go on a bit.
00:08:51 ►
A robin red breast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage.
00:08:56 ►
A dove house filled with doves and pigeons shudders hell through all its regions.
00:09:02 ►
A dog starved at his master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state.
00:09:07 ►
A horse misused upon the road calls to heaven for human blood.
00:09:11 ►
And he goes on this way, talking about incidents in ordinary life,
00:09:16 ►
incidents of joy and incidents of suffering, of cruelty.
00:09:20 ►
And he draws these very mundane examples, a dove in a cage.
00:09:21 ►
What’s the big deal?
00:09:24 ►
You know, a horse getting slapped by its master.
00:09:25 ►
It connects them with this larger visionary reality, the world of heaven, of gods, of the large soul. And it goes
00:09:34 ►
on and on in this way. And then it ends in just a very marvelous, poetic, memorable fashion.
00:09:42 ►
Every night and every morn, some to misery are born.
00:09:46 ►
Every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight.
00:09:50 ►
Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless nights.
00:09:55 ►
We are led to believe a lie when we see not through the eye,
00:10:01 ►
which was born in a night to perish in a the night when the soul slept in beams of light.
00:10:07 ►
God appears and God is light to those poor souls who dwell in night.
00:10:13 ►
But does a human form display to those who dwell in realms of day.
00:10:19 ►
And I’ll just talk about that last little bit.
00:10:27 ►
about that last little bit because the connection between these ordinary events, the dove in a cage, the horse getting beaten, the dog crying, and these larger issues of our society,
00:10:33 ►
the ruin of the state, heaven and hell, the connecting tissue there is the imagination.
00:10:40 ►
The imagination is the faculty, meaning like eyesight or sense, the sense that we have,
00:10:46 ►
and it is also the place that links the ordinary, material, physical, imagistic reality that we are submerged in every day
00:10:56 ►
with a larger, fuller, possibly more real realm of meanings, impressions, stories, archetypes, God forms. It’s the sort of connection
00:11:08 ►
between our world and the dream world and the world even farther beyond that, a world of abstract
00:11:14 ►
ideas and forms that are very difficult for us to wrap our heads around because they’re so
00:11:19 ►
transcendental, they’re so otherworldly, they’re so mystical. And so the imagination is a kind of vessel that connects these two very different realms.
00:11:29 ►
And at the end he’s talking about for those poor souls who dwell in night, God appears
00:11:34 ►
as endless light.
00:11:35 ►
It’s a kind of compensation.
00:11:36 ►
It’s the mystical vision.
00:11:38 ►
But for people who dwell in day, God appears in a human form.
00:11:42 ►
Now why would he say this?
00:11:43 ►
In a way it’s like, oh, it’s more of that humanistic obsession stuff you know that Christianity kind of overdid with the the
00:11:50 ►
emphasis on the human being rather than the natural world but Blake’s up to something else
00:11:55 ►
here which is to acknowledge the incredible soulful power that comes through actual physical bodies, other people, other personalities.
00:12:06 ►
All of you today, incredibly individual.
00:12:09 ►
I look out here, it’s remarkable.
00:12:11 ►
I could focus in on each one of you and a kind of story emerges or a sense, a temperament,
00:12:16 ►
a flavor that’s unlike anything else.
00:12:18 ►
But that very sense in this embodied state, in room today is connected on these various levels in this kind
00:12:26 ►
of mystical cosmology with much deeper archetypal forces we all carry different archetypes everything
00:12:33 ►
has its soul everything has its kind of essence every individual thing in this kind uh in this
00:12:39 ►
kind of vision is what i’m sort of you know, what I really want to explore as a way to go into
00:12:47 ►
this question of the imagination, what it means, and how it tells us something about
00:12:53 ►
visionary art, and finally at the end, visionary design.
00:12:59 ►
The term imagination means many different things to many different people.
00:13:04 ►
If I ask you, oh, let’s talk right now, what does it mean?
00:13:07 ►
And so I want to talk a little bit about different ways that it’s been described.
00:13:13 ►
On one level, the kind of simple ones, we just think of fantasy.
00:13:17 ►
It’s sort of making something up.
00:13:18 ►
It’s kind of a reverie.
00:13:20 ►
It might be a productive reverie where you’re composing a poem.
00:13:26 ►
You want to describe something in a story, and so you imagine what the room looks like and then you describe it.
00:13:31 ►
Or it might be just sort of the machinery of the mind going off where you, you know,
00:13:35 ►
oh, I imagined that this thing was happening and I knew it wasn’t true, but it kind of
00:13:38 ►
takes you over with a sort of vision, a kind of a fabulation, perhaps a fiction. But there’s deeper senses to the imagination as well,
00:13:48 ►
even within the Western world that’s turning away
00:13:51 ►
from that kind of mystical vision that Blake described.
00:13:55 ►
Because in many ways, that’s what the modern world does,
00:13:59 ►
is it reduces the authority of those mystical inspirations
00:14:09 ►
or that deep intuition, that deep poetic intuition that we’ll talk more about in a little wise.
00:14:12 ►
But still the imagination has this very important role.
00:14:15 ►
The philosopher Immanuel Kant saw it as kind of a synthetic function that allowed us to
00:14:21 ►
take different aspects of our perceptions, the way we
00:14:25 ►
see reality, the way we organize time, the way we perceive space. And it’s what kind of draws it
00:14:32 ►
all together into the ongoing flow of one reality that we perceive, you know, more or less most of
00:14:39 ►
the time. So it’s kind of behind the scenes, sticking things together. And in a way, it’s an interesting vision because it gives us a deeper sense already
00:14:47 ►
that when we talk about the imagination, we shouldn’t just be talking about mere fantasy
00:14:53 ►
or just making things up, that there’s something more profound going on in this realm of the psyche,
00:15:00 ►
in this realm of the images and stories that come up.
00:15:03 ►
Just as an aside, I mean, one way of looking at Burning Man or describing Burning Man
00:15:08 ►
is that it’s not just sort of an art festival, but it’s a celebration of the imagination
00:15:13 ►
in all of its realms, from its kind of hokey, carnival-esque, cheesy midway show side
00:15:21 ►
to its sort of most ecstatic visions of, you know,
00:15:25 ►
archetypes and angels to, you know, future scenarios.
00:15:28 ►
And all these different worlds are here, you know,
00:15:32 ►
all these different portals into different pockets of space-time,
00:15:36 ►
different historical moments incarnated in art cars and clothes.
00:15:40 ►
It’s this, like, festival of the human imagination, of the whole storehouse.
00:15:44 ►
And then drawing these things together and making new connections
00:15:49 ►
Mixing them up in new ways synthesizing them in new ways
00:15:52 ►
So it’s a it’s a very apt theme this year the psyche because the psyche has these
00:15:58 ►
deep connections to the imagination to the imaginal around
00:16:03 ►
When we first hear the word psyche when you, when you just pick up on it,
00:16:07 ►
we’re like, what exactly does that mean?
00:16:09 ►
And we think of psychology, which is kind of like the science of mind
00:16:12 ►
and trying to heal our fucked up neurotic personalities.
00:16:16 ►
And it doesn’t have that deeper resonance.
00:16:20 ►
But psyche is the Greek word for soul.
00:16:23 ►
But psyche is the Greek word for soul.
00:16:30 ►
And that soul has a much richer role to play than simply like our neuroses and our kind of complexes that modern psychology, or at least some modern psychology, treats.
00:16:38 ►
And one way to get into this issue of the psyche and the soul is to tell a very abbreviated version of the
00:16:46 ►
Greek myth of Psyche and Eros, or Psyche and Cupid. Because it’s a very strange, very interesting
00:16:55 ►
story, and again, I’ll do a pretty quick form of it. But basically, Psyche is the youngest daughter of a king and queen. And her oldest
00:17:07 ►
sisters are kind of shrews. And they’re married off to other kings to keep all the political
00:17:12 ►
situation okay. But Psyche is extraordinarily beautiful. Extraordinarily beautiful. And so
00:17:19 ►
beautiful that suitors try to come and win her and they just can’t deal with it. It’s too much.
00:17:24 ►
They just quail at it.
00:17:26 ►
So she remains in this very strange position and people begin to kind of fear her
00:17:30 ►
and think there’s something sort of wrong about her.
00:17:32 ►
And not coincidentally, some oracle, one of the oracles they listened to at the time,
00:17:37 ►
says that it’s time for her to be sacrificed to the beast.
00:17:40 ►
So they drag her to the top of a hill and tie her there and leave her for the night.
00:17:47 ►
And everyone imagines that’s it. She’s sacrificed to the great serpent monster. And we’re done with
00:17:53 ►
her. Well, what happens to Psyche, she wakes up and she’s been miraculously untied from this post.
00:18:00 ►
So she wanders down into the other side of the valley. She finds this beautiful valley,
00:18:05 ►
incredibly gorgeous. Oh, the butterflies and the lights coming through the dappled trees and the
00:18:11 ►
streams there. And it’s this enchanted valley. And there’s this remarkable house, this palace
00:18:17 ►
of gold and jewels, the most extraordinary building she’s ever seen. And she goes in and
00:18:21 ►
it’s full of all the pleasure she could ever have marvelous
00:18:25 ►
wines and and fruits and there’s these sort of mysterious kind of spirit robots who come out to
00:18:32 ►
sort of help her in all of her wishes and she’s like kind of a little blown away by what’s going
00:18:37 ►
on here and she’s told that the the master of the house will be coming that night and meeting up with her as sort of basically his new bride.
00:18:48 ►
And this is all sort of her, you know, this is her new life.
00:18:52 ►
So she waits the night and then the fellow comes, but in darkness, in darkness.
00:18:58 ►
She does not see him.
00:19:00 ►
And she loses her maidenhead, as they once said in the day, but rather enjoys it and looks forward to the repetition of this every night when her lover, husband, benefactor comes in the guy. And she begins to hear the call of her sisters.
00:19:27 ►
They’re weeping.
00:19:28 ►
They’re upset.
00:19:28 ►
Her parents are upset.
00:19:29 ►
They know that she wasn’t killed.
00:19:31 ►
They don’t know what happened to her.
00:19:32 ►
And she’s feeling the human tug of family, even though these people are kind of a drag.
00:19:36 ►
So she doesn’t really know what to do.
00:19:38 ►
So she starts talking about it with the guy.
00:19:41 ►
And he’s like, look, if we go down this road, it’s going to be a disaster.
00:19:45 ►
We got to stay away from your sisters, we have to stay away from the
00:19:48 ►
whole scene, and just not, don’t listen to them, don’t talk to them.
00:19:51 ►
But she keeps pleading with him, keeps pleading with him, and he says, okay, okay, go ahead,
00:19:55 ►
tell them you’re alive, but just don’t believe them, don’t do anything they say.
00:20:00 ►
Well, of course, once she starts talking to her sisters, they’re very happy to see her, sort of.
00:20:11 ►
And eventually they wheedle her enough so that they go to visit her new spread.
00:20:14 ►
And they walk in and they’re, like, completely overcome with envy.
00:20:16 ►
Like, oh, my God, how did she get all this stuff?
00:20:21 ►
We’re married to these miserable, petty-ass kings and we’re not getting this kind of stuff.
00:20:23 ►
So they start to, like, nag her more and more.
00:20:24 ►
Well, who is this guy?
00:20:30 ►
Who? How do you know? You don’t see him. He maybe he’s the beast. He’s an evil serpent. So he she they freak her out. So she starts to think, oh, my God, it’s this guy who’s coming. I’m sleeping
00:20:34 ►
with every night is this horrible serpent. And so they they they hatch this plan that she’s going to
00:20:41 ►
like pull up a light and see him and pull out a knife and kill
00:20:45 ►
him. So she gets ready. She’s freaking out. She’s got to see this guy. So she says it’s
00:20:50 ►
middle of the night. They make love. They’re sleeping. She wakes up, pulls out an oil lamp
00:20:56 ►
and it’s the most beautiful being she’s ever seen by far. And it’s the god Cupid, which is kind of a dumb name. Eros is a much
00:21:08 ►
richer and more appropriate name for this being. And she falls just even more in love with this
00:21:16 ►
god, this god suddenly before her in all of his beauty. And she’s sitting there just like
00:21:23 ►
staring at him, holding this lamp, and she goes in to kiss him.
00:21:26 ►
And then a drop of oil falls from the lamp
00:21:28 ►
and lands on his shoulder and awakens him.
00:21:30 ►
And he wakes up and is in love, totally in love,
00:21:33 ►
and is like, ah, that’s it though.
00:21:36 ►
Now you’ve seen me. It’s over.
00:21:38 ►
It’s over. Sorry. It’s over.
00:21:40 ►
And so he flees.
00:21:42 ►
And then this story goes on.
00:21:44 ►
She seeks him. Aphrodite hates her because she’s so beautiful.
00:21:49 ►
Produces a lot of trials that she has to pass and the various beasts of the kingdom help her overcome this.
00:21:55 ►
And it actually ends, unlike many Greek myths, on a happy note with sort of reuniting of Eros and Psyche.
00:22:03 ►
But the real key part here, and it’s not, there’s no answer,
00:22:07 ►
there’s no like, oh here’s what it means. It’s that it sets up a couple of really
00:22:12 ►
profound things about the relationship of Eros, of desire, of the imagination of
00:22:19 ►
desire, because of course desire infuses the imagination. It’s one of the most,
00:22:23 ►
it’s the fuel of the imagination.
00:22:26 ►
The relationship of desire and the soul.
00:22:28 ►
The soul that understands itself, that finds itself through the imagination,
00:22:33 ►
through Eros, through this sort of rich world of the imagination.
00:22:37 ►
And one is, is that you are immersed in mystery.
00:22:41 ►
That there’s always a darkness to the side of it.
00:22:43 ►
There’s always an unknown.
00:22:44 ►
in mystery, that there’s always a darkness to the side of it, there’s always an unknown.
00:22:51 ►
And the very human desire to reconnect and see and weave into a human community, whether it’s to connect with the sisters and parents at home, or whether to find out what this
00:22:56 ►
guy looks like, that that is always in opposition to the further deepening of this relationship, which is incredibly exquisite on one level,
00:23:06 ►
but also elusive, also runs out.
00:23:10 ►
There’s an ambiguity and ambivalence that you can’t get away from.
00:23:13 ►
And the more you try to get away from it by fixing it, by grabbing a hold of it,
00:23:18 ►
it’s kind of a metaphor for relationships as well,
00:23:21 ►
the more likely you are to actually lose it and actually lose the juice and be
00:23:25 ►
left with an idea or an image, but not the living force.
00:23:31 ►
And another aspect of this relationship is the beast, is the beast, that to enter into
00:23:38 ►
the world of the imagination, into the world of the imaginative, the visionary realm, you
00:23:44 ►
have to sort of be willing to go where the beasts are,
00:23:47 ►
where the serpents might be,
00:23:49 ►
and to kind of dance with that
00:23:50 ►
and recognize that’s part of the world.
00:23:54 ►
I mean, even though the beast has sort of a negative connotation in the story,
00:23:57 ►
if you imagine it more from her side of things,
00:24:00 ►
she’s having to confront this fear,
00:24:01 ►
confront this imagination,
00:24:03 ►
confront the possibility that this rich life and all the hedonism that feeds the psyche,
00:24:09 ►
all the joys and pleasures that feed the imagination,
00:24:14 ►
are somehow bound up with a beast, with a serpent kind of figure.
00:24:21 ►
So all of these sort of themes are brought together in this marvelous myth.
00:24:27 ►
And what the myth, for me, it sort of
00:24:29 ►
calls to deepen the engagement with the psyche
00:24:34 ►
and to really see it, in my mind,
00:24:36 ►
in terms of the imagination and in terms of the desire that
00:24:40 ►
infuses the imagination. The other way of thinking about the imagination
00:24:50 ►
that goes beyond poetic fancy, intuition, inspiration, even art, is to think about
00:24:57 ►
it as an actual place. That just as there is a sort of physical world that we’re
00:25:02 ►
engaging with these senses, our senses five, that there is an additional realm, a realm of the imaginal, a realm of the imagination.
00:25:10 ►
And this is really the sort of, you know, pre-modern way of understanding it.
00:25:14 ►
That when Moses is before the burning bush, the burning bush is burning.
00:25:19 ►
It doesn’t mean there’s actually a physical bush that has this miraculous thing happening
00:25:24 ►
to it, the voice coming
00:25:25 ►
out of it like some kind of cheesy movie. It means that on some level, on some level of experience or
00:25:31 ►
perception, there’s this kind of fire, this kind of visionary fire, and it’s overlapped, it’s
00:25:37 ►
superimposed on the physical world. So it’s a really important distinction because it allows you to recognize
00:25:46 ►
the reality, the reality of experiences on the level of the imagination without making what I
00:25:54 ►
think of, and for many reasons is a mistake, which is to literalize it and to believe or to claim
00:26:00 ►
that it’s something that actually happened in the material realm we share. So instead of
00:26:06 ►
saying, wow, I had this visionary perception, that must be the way things really are. It’s like, no,
00:26:11 ►
I was granted a glimpse of the imagination, of the imaginal world, which relates to this world,
00:26:17 ►
which uses its images. Again, all of us here, the robin, the bird, the dog from the poem, are sort of mirrored in this realm of
00:26:28 ►
realized or true imagination. And this in many ways is like the way people saw and experienced
00:26:35 ►
visionary realities outside of the modern world. And what happens in the modern world is that we
00:26:42 ►
demythologize that, disenchant it, drag it
00:26:46 ►
down into the way that we generally think of imagination now, which is like making stuff
00:26:50 ►
up.
00:26:51 ►
Maybe at the best it helps you write a poem or something.
00:26:54 ►
You can see now, even though the imagination is very inspiring on that level, it’s a very
00:26:58 ►
degraded concept compared to the richness and fullness of that potential.
00:27:10 ►
And that potential, that potential of the imagination as a visionary experience is what we see or seek through visionary art.
00:27:15 ►
That’s how I’m linking into this sort of topic of visionary art.
00:27:20 ►
Now, there’s a lot of different ways to define and talk about visionary art.
00:27:25 ►
If you go to a mainstream art form kind of person and you say the term visionary art,
00:27:33 ►
they think it means something like outsider art, which means pretty wacky stuff done by
00:27:37 ►
people who have no training and are often ignorant or naive.
00:27:42 ►
So they’ll say Watts Towers in Los Angeles is an example of visionary art.
00:27:48 ►
And that’s it.
00:27:49 ►
Of course, it is visionary.
00:27:52 ►
But in a lot of ways,
00:27:55 ►
it’s a very denigrating way of looking at it
00:27:57 ►
because it denies the fact that the visionary artist,
00:28:00 ►
the tradition of visionary art,
00:28:02 ►
is deeply embedded inside of Western art history,
00:28:06 ►
and then deeper than that in terms of world art history.
00:28:10 ►
Now, if this was like a lecture hall, I’d start showing you lots of pictures and talking
00:28:12 ►
about details, but I’m not going to do that.
00:28:14 ►
I’m not going to bring up a bunch of artists that you may or may not have heard of when
00:28:17 ►
I can’t show you what they’re on about.
00:28:20 ►
So what I want to do is paint in really broad strokes a story, a myth, if you will, about Western art and the role that visionary art plays in it now.
00:28:30 ►
And again, it helps understand why I think visionary art is so important.
00:28:34 ►
Because it keeps alive this deeper sense of the imagination or the imaginal.
00:28:40 ►
So what happens with Western art? Well, probably the most pivotal thing that happens, or there’s probably two really pivotal things that happen, is the entrance into three-dimensional representation, where you start to paint paintings that look like they’re windows out onto a real world that looks the way that our eyes construct the real world through our biology. So you start developing perspective.
00:29:06 ►
And here’s Renaissance perspective.
00:29:08 ►
Now, paintings no longer look like medieval icons where they’re flat and kind of out of, you know, they’re in different proportions.
00:29:15 ►
Instead, they look like you’re looking through a window.
00:29:17 ►
It’s like you can see the perspective is what we recognize in our normal life.
00:29:21 ►
What’s really happening there is the whole realm of art, the whole realm of imagination is beginning to move in and colonize physical world, the material
00:29:30 ►
world and it very much is the most appropriate reflection of what’s happening in Western
00:29:35 ►
culture in general. As we move into science, we move away from mysticism, we move away
00:29:41 ►
from the dominant teachings of the church. We move into a world
00:29:45 ►
that affirms material reality as the sole reality. So it’s reflected, of course, in the images,
00:29:52 ►
in the vision, in the imagination of its artists who are suddenly painting more and more realistic
00:29:58 ►
pictures of the world. But this tradition does not last, and it begins to dissolve.
00:30:06 ►
There’s visionary artists scattered through it, but I’ll leave that aside. But at the end of the 19th century,
00:30:10 ►
this begins to dissolve, literally. Impressionism, which I’m sure all of you have seen, Monet
00:30:15 ►
and all that, and Descartes and lots of impressions people are very familiar with. One way of
00:30:21 ►
describing what’s happening is that that material window that
00:30:25 ►
looked like it was looking out onto an actual space begins to dissolve into dots.
00:30:31 ►
It begins to become fuzzy.
00:30:32 ►
It begins to sort of play with the actual process of perception.
00:30:38 ►
What happens if I suggest colors this way?
00:30:41 ►
What if I dissolve the sort of sense of perspective into these different kinds
00:30:45 ►
of spaces? So suddenly the whole history of representation with its emphasis on the material
00:30:50 ►
world begins to dissolve. And the ultimate expression of this dissolution is, and believe
00:30:58 ►
me, the art history lecture will not last for the whole time. The ultimate expression of it
00:31:03 ►
is the turn towards abstract art. What’s
00:31:06 ►
abstract art? Well, you turn away from the representational world. You’re not painting
00:31:09 ►
an apple. You’re not painting a nude. You’re painting some set of images of colors, of shapes.
00:31:16 ►
And I think, and I probably share this, is that I think a lot of us think of
00:31:20 ►
abstract art is probably a little cold, a little too 20th century, a little
00:31:27 ►
too flat.
00:31:28 ►
You know, interesting can be inspiring, but a little, you know, why look at that when
00:31:32 ►
you can look at whatever, Alex Gray or William Blake or, you know, something with a little
00:31:37 ►
more juice to it.
00:31:38 ►
But what’s fascinating is that the artists, the individual artists who first made the
00:31:43 ►
turn, first started doing abstract art,
00:31:45 ►
were all totally immersed in visionary and mystical worldviews,
00:31:49 ►
in theosophy, in Steiner, in this kind of worldview that Daniel Pinchbeck was talking about.
00:31:56 ►
So the turn away from representation, turn away from the Western idea that material reality is the primary reality,
00:32:06 ►
turn away from the Western idea that material reality is the primary reality is inspired by
00:32:09 ►
this whole culture of mysticism of
00:32:12 ►
bohemianism of
00:32:15 ►
Hedonism and here at wait things are starting to sound a little familiar
00:32:20 ►
I mean you we all have an image in our heads of what the late 19th century avant-garde artist was like They lived in a little garret and they’re poor and they’re suffering for their art and they’re drinking absent and they’re having wild affairs and they’re running off to Tahiti
00:32:29 ►
and hanging out with the native girls and shdupping the native girls. And, you know,
00:32:33 ►
it’s this whole bohemian kind of mythos. But in many ways, it was very true because it was the
00:32:39 ►
way to replug into these streams that feed the deep imagination.
00:32:46 ►
And these streams are altered states,
00:32:48 ►
whether through drugs or alcohol or other extreme means,
00:32:53 ►
dropping out, not being part of the state, the mainstream society,
00:32:58 ►
hedonism, exploring the realms of desire
00:33:01 ►
and being willing to plunge into it in all its agony and excess and ecstasy.
00:33:06 ►
It’s a whole way of being that feeds this deeper visionary impulse that starts to express itself
00:33:15 ►
more and more throughout 20th century art. So part of the reason I think that visionary art
00:33:23 ►
is important and part of the reason people respond to it so much and respond
00:33:28 ►
particularly let’s say to a figure like Alex Gray who I’m sure all of you are familiar with and I’ll talk a little bit more
00:33:33 ►
about his second because this is one artist that I know that most of you at least
00:33:37 ►
have seen some of his images and I wish I could show them because even the people who don’t think they’ve seen them probably have
00:33:43 ►
seen I wish I could show you because even the people who don’t think they’ve seen them probably have seen them.
00:33:45 ►
But one of the reasons that these figures are so important to us is it’s almost, it’s one of the only places
00:33:52 ►
in modern Western culture where we retain something of that old shamanic, mystical, truth-seeking possibility. There’s a possibility of that.
00:34:08 ►
Because however much whatever we believe,
00:34:12 ►
maybe we believe in scientific materialism or a little skeptical, we don’t know.
00:34:17 ►
But somewhere out there, there’s an artist who’s like going as far as they can into their own peculiar individual experience.
00:34:20 ►
And as a visionary artist, into visionary experience.
00:34:27 ►
Having inspiring visions. And then bringing them back in a way that says, this is what I saw or something like what I saw
00:34:32 ►
or something that I want to communicate inspired by what I saw. And you can engage it not as a
00:34:39 ►
religion, not as a new myth that you either believe or don’t believe, or a new story that forces you to, like, revise your entire worldview.
00:34:47 ►
It’s more of an inspiration of a kind of visionary glimpse.
00:34:50 ►
In a way, it’s allowing you to partake of some of that visionary experience.
00:34:56 ►
So there’s a heroic quality to the visionary artist.
00:35:02 ►
We sort of, and to the artist in general, we see them as sort of figures
00:35:07 ►
who kind of go through these deeper experiences that maybe we have sometimes, maybe we don’t have
00:35:11 ►
other times. And Alex Gray, again, is a really, really good example of this,
00:35:19 ►
because his artwork really expresses in many ways the multiple layers of visionary art
00:35:27 ►
and what it means to be making visionary art in our world today.
00:35:32 ►
It shows these different layers of the imagination
00:35:36 ►
because it’s rooted, for one thing, in his own visionary experience.
00:35:41 ►
And then out of that experience, he begins to layer these multiple layers of
00:35:47 ►
symbols from different cosmic systems, astrological glyphs, things from the Kabbalah.
00:35:52 ►
He’s drawing in that synthetic work of the imagination. He’s drawing these different
00:35:57 ►
symbol systems together and providing an opportunity, a kind of glimpse that you have into this sort of more real than real
00:36:07 ►
world.
00:36:08 ►
And one of the great things I like about Alex’s paintings is when there’s a new one that I
00:36:13 ►
haven’t seen, it’s like I know that first glimpse is going to be amazing because they’re
00:36:19 ►
so overly real, you know, photorealistic, hyper-realistic, that they just jump down your optic canal
00:36:27 ►
and shake you often, or at least in my experience.
00:36:31 ►
So it’s this incredibly intense communication of a deeper experience of the imagination,
00:36:39 ►
of visionary experience, of where visionary experience happens, than we normally have
00:36:44 ►
in our day-to-day,
00:36:46 ►
even in our normal dreams.
00:36:48 ►
So it becomes a place to engage this imaginative matrix.
00:36:53 ►
Because I really think that it’s in that kind of process, in vision questing, in engaging
00:36:59 ►
with those deeper realms, that we draw forth the inspirations that lead us on.
00:37:08 ►
It’s like one of the things that the imagination does is it imagines the future.
00:37:12 ►
It says, oh, well, this could happen this way, this could happen that way.
00:37:15 ►
We’re overly dominated by dark imaginings.
00:37:17 ►
It’s harder to manifest.
00:37:19 ►
We’re over dominated by uninteresting images.
00:37:24 ►
It often drives us into a cul-de-sac.
00:37:27 ►
So the imagination is part of the way we manifest.
00:37:29 ►
But where do we get our imaginations from?
00:37:31 ►
Where do we get our images?
00:37:32 ►
Well, unfortunately, most people get them from just the mainstream meme mess, the world
00:37:41 ►
of programming that comes from your parents who weren’t really given much of a chance
00:37:44 ►
to find themselves in a lot of
00:37:45 ►
Ways and you’re trying to make that up as you go through media and advertising and different political views. It’s a mess out there
00:37:51 ►
So how am I supposed to find vision for my own life for the for the life of the planet for poetic?
00:37:57 ►
inspirations in the midst of all this and and what the visionary art kind of points to is a
00:38:02 ►
Process wherein you go through a kind of experience.
00:38:05 ►
You engage on a deeper level through dream work, through psychedelics, through trance, through meditation,
00:38:12 ►
through just engagement with these stories, with these myths that can take you over
00:38:16 ►
and begin to weave themselves into your life through dream and through synchronicity.
00:38:20 ►
We feel this kind of stuff on the fly.
00:38:22 ►
It’s kind of what draws us here in some ways is to enter into a life in which the imagination
00:38:28 ►
is more real and more alive and more tantalizing and suggestive all the time.
00:38:35 ►
So that realm of visionary art really mirrors and gives us in a way a model of a way to
00:38:43 ►
bring that into our lives, you know whether we consider our own
00:38:46 ►
Decisions we make art or not. It’s kind of beside the point. It’s the same sort
00:38:50 ►
sort of model
00:38:52 ►
but I think there’s also a
00:38:56 ►
problem with the the hero model of the visionary artist because it still is that
00:39:04 ►
struggling the visionary artist because it still is that struggling individual, that Western individual
00:39:09 ►
who’s breaking through and finding their own particular truth and then heroically or magically
00:39:15 ►
or bringing it back to the people.
00:39:20 ►
And a very important model.
00:39:23 ►
It’s never going to leave us.
00:39:24 ►
But I think something else is happening now.
00:39:27 ►
And this is really where we get to the kind of last part of the talk
00:39:31 ►
and touching on a little bit of the things that Daniel was talking about
00:39:35 ►
in terms of, you know, where do we go?
00:39:37 ►
How do we approach what’s around the bend?
00:39:42 ►
And while I think, you know, anything that’s inspirational on the level of the visionary,
00:39:46 ►
even cheesy television at its best,
00:39:49 ►
is useful in the game to stay awake and to stay enthused
00:39:53 ►
and to stay desiring of a richer, better future,
00:40:00 ►
I think that that hero model has some problems
00:40:03 ►
because I think that in a lot of ways where we’re going is towards a world of collaboration, of collectivities, of networks, of people linking together.
00:40:23 ►
is to take that basic model we have with visionary art,
00:40:26 ►
where the visionary artist is able to go back and touch into a deeper realm of the imagination
00:40:30 ►
that has more reality to it than we allow,
00:40:33 ►
that is full of information as well as full of force and inspiration.
00:40:39 ►
And to bring that back into the world,
00:40:42 ►
what I want to see is some of that same inspiration, some of
00:40:45 ►
that same imagination coming into the realm of design.
00:40:50 ►
Now what do I mean by design as opposed to art?
00:40:52 ►
I’m going to contrast the two.
00:40:54 ►
Design has a fuzzier kind of connotation, but I like the fuzziness.
00:40:58 ►
So let’s talk about a couple of ways that design is really crucial, ways to characterize
00:41:04 ►
it. You know, one of the ways of saying is that design tends to be functional on some level,
00:41:10 ►
but not strictly functional.
00:41:11 ►
So you’re designing a system because you want something to work,
00:41:15 ►
or you’re designing, you know, an egg beater, and you want the egg beater to work in a certain way. So on some level, unlike art, the concept of design has a functional, practical dimension to it.
00:41:31 ►
But it’s not just functional and practical,
00:41:34 ►
because the design is also very much about how you bring art and aesthetics and creativity and style
00:41:42 ►
and trendiness to the functionality.
00:41:45 ►
So if I’m making my egg beater, I don’t just want it to achieve certain effects.
00:41:49 ►
I want it to look kind of cool.
00:41:51 ►
So by being cool, you know, it’s going to maybe sell better,
00:41:56 ►
but it’ll also, you know, fit in with people’s lives because you want to bring a little.
00:42:00 ►
That’s one of the ways we bring art into people’s lives is through design.
00:42:04 ►
All of us here as consumers, which all of us are, consume partly based on design, which isn’t just
00:42:09 ►
the design of products, but the design of a whole ethos, a whole meme space. It’s really the way you
00:42:16 ►
develop style. So a graphic designer, what are they doing? They’re taking images, they’re taking
00:42:21 ►
the material of art, images, shapes, forms, recognizable
00:42:26 ►
symbols, archetypes, etc., etc., but they’re putting them to a slightly different use.
00:42:30 ►
They want to communicate a message.
00:42:32 ►
They want to create a set of associations between products and ideas.
00:42:37 ►
And none of this is a bad process because it’s part of our practical world.
00:42:42 ►
It is the world we live in. And if these ideas that we have here, that were inspired here, are going to get out,
00:42:49 ►
even though in a way there’s always the devil’s bargain problem,
00:42:52 ►
they’re going to be coming through design in many ways.
00:42:58 ►
And so the question then is how to bring that design process onto, in a way, a kind of visionary, on a visionary level.
00:43:06 ►
And I forgot to mention one other important part about design is that design is almost
00:43:10 ►
always collaborative, like in any kind of industrial sense, in any kind of, you know,
00:43:14 ►
even graphic designers, whatever.
00:43:16 ►
They’re always, it’s really something that comes out of the way that groups function.
00:43:21 ►
And in a way of thinking about one way of defining design is it’s how do you
00:43:25 ►
set up a system that’s going to enable a group to function better or to achieve what they want
00:43:31 ►
or to put out an expression? Because you need to have a different way of engaging. You can’t just
00:43:36 ►
go off and be the solitary, tortured artist who has to change everything at the last minute to
00:43:41 ►
seek their absolute ideal image. People like that are a real pain in the ass to work with, and they don’t tend to last
00:43:47 ►
long in the kind of realms that I’m talking about.
00:43:50 ►
But the kind of realms I’m talking about are crucial because that’s where the infrastructure
00:43:55 ►
for what’s coming next in both a good and bad way is happening, and that the kinds of
00:44:00 ►
remarkable or quick or sort of mimetic transformations that some people see around the bend,
00:44:07 ►
that Daniel also talked about a little bit, I believe in many ways are coming through the design process.
00:44:13 ►
So the question is then how do you bring that visionary element, that deeper imaginative element into design?
00:44:18 ►
So you’re not just basing your design on the trends of the moment, or on a merely functional purpose, or on some very
00:44:27 ►
low level idea of what people want.
00:44:30 ►
So many products are insults to what the potential of human beings and human collectivities have.
00:44:37 ►
They’re already there.
00:44:38 ►
They’re embedded in the product, in the branding, in the way it’s designed, in the way it’s
00:44:42 ►
manufactured, in the way we learn about it, in the way we can’t learn about it, we can’t find out where it comes
00:44:47 ►
from.
00:44:48 ►
All of these things are functions of a design process that are bringing these things to
00:44:52 ►
market.
00:44:53 ►
So how do we bring this kind of visionary element into that?
00:44:59 ►
There’s so many different ways of talking about it, specifics in terms of energy systems
00:45:04 ►
and et cetera, et etc. I’m not going
00:45:06 ►
to go into that. What I want to do is come back to Burning Man a little bit and think
00:45:10 ►
about that whole idea again that we come out here because of, at least in one respect,
00:45:15 ►
because of the art. That’s often how it’s described. It’s an art festival. It’s a creative
00:45:19 ►
art festival. We also know it’s a party and a mystical riot and all these other kinds of things. But, you know, that’s one of its main claims to fame is it’s a place for art and
00:45:30 ►
it’s very particular, very visionary kind of art. Visionary not just in the sense that
00:45:37 ►
it’s made often by people who are not officially trained as artists, which is part of what’s
00:45:40 ►
remarkable about it, but visionary in the sense that it has very much to do with this visionary tradition
00:45:46 ►
and with this sort of deeper realm of the imagination,
00:45:50 ►
and even further, that it has to do with the actual process of vision, of perception.
00:45:57 ►
That when you go out, when you navigate the playa at night,
00:46:00 ►
you’re navigating this very peculiar realm of light technology.
00:46:04 ►
And many of the artworks out there play tricks with your perceptual system,
00:46:09 ►
particularly an enhanced perceptual system, but that’s not necessary.
00:46:13 ►
And they take advantage of the way that the human perceptual system creates,
00:46:20 ►
in some ways, imagines its reality.
00:46:23 ►
What am I perceiving out there?
00:46:24 ►
How far away is that?
00:46:26 ►
Is that a cube? Is it a portal? Is it a Snoopy? I can’t tell. And it’s playing with that sense
00:46:34 ►
of ambiguity on a very technical level. It’s one of the marvels of most of my favorite
00:46:40 ►
playa art is very simple arrangements of electricity and lights, some rebar, PVC, and
00:46:48 ►
they stick it out there and it does marvels to your mind.
00:46:51 ►
Oh, it reminds you of this, it looks like that, it calls you in, it seduces you.
00:46:56 ►
We move through the playa scape as we’re sort of seduced by these things.
00:47:00 ►
So there’s a very rich sense of visionary art here at the playa, and it’s part of what
00:47:04 ►
draws people back here.
00:47:07 ►
But this site is also a site of visionary design.
00:47:10 ►
And we don’t always pay as much attention to the design on that level.
00:47:14 ►
I mean, of course, we have to deal with it because when we come here, you can’t just show up.
00:47:18 ►
You’ve got to get a system going.
00:47:19 ►
And that system almost always involves other people.
00:47:23 ►
And most of the system is functional, practical.
00:47:26 ►
But if you just do it on a functional, practical level, it’s kind of boring,
00:47:30 ►
both for yourself and for the other people that you want to provide something to.
00:47:33 ►
So there’s a little bit of aesthetic there.
00:47:34 ►
There’s a style.
00:47:35 ►
There’s a twist.
00:47:36 ►
There’s a spin.
00:47:37 ►
There’s something going.
00:47:38 ►
You go out there.
00:47:39 ►
You grab memes.
00:47:39 ►
You grab, oh, the furry thing, or, oh, the playa thing, or, oh, the furry thing or, oh, the playa thing or, oh, the alien thing.
00:47:46 ►
And you recombine them and recrystallize them to design your environment,
00:47:50 ►
to design your camp, to design your artwork,
00:47:53 ►
to design how you’re going to deal with your gray water, to design all this stuff.
00:47:57 ►
You know, and some of this we do better at than others.
00:47:59 ►
Some of this is more fun than others.
00:48:01 ►
But we’re all deeply involved personally on a design process in
00:48:06 ►
precisely the sense that I mean, and that it does have a visionary dimension, that that’s
00:48:11 ►
that William Blake vision where, you know, beating the dog reflects the whole political
00:48:15 ►
situation, reflects the nature of heaven.
00:48:18 ►
It’s like what you do with your gray water, even if you end up going, oh, I don’t really
00:48:22 ►
deal with it, is part of that visionary experience.
00:48:26 ►
And to draw to that place where the visionary infuses all this absurdity
00:48:31 ►
and the things we actually have to deal with on a functional level,
00:48:35 ►
in a way that’s the kind of gesture, that’s a way that I see things evolving.
00:48:40 ►
So that’s how the visionary design works on a level that all of us here participate in. But also Burning Man itself is designed, it’s engineered, it’s a conscious
00:48:52 ►
environment. One of the best myths about Burning Man is it’s just about like free expression.
00:48:59 ►
You know, like it’s about everybody coming out here just having free expression. Well,
00:49:02 ►
no, I mean, it’s constrained. You can’t go over here.
00:49:05 ►
You can’t do this.
00:49:05 ►
You can’t put your thing there.
00:49:07 ►
There’s a lot of organization here.
00:49:09 ►
This organization, the decisions, zoning questions, where things happen, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed.
00:49:15 ►
All of these things were developed necessarily in most respects in order to keep the system functioning as it got larger
00:49:24 ►
and as more of the state forces paid attention to it.
00:49:29 ►
So it’s making design decisions all the time.
00:49:32 ►
And in many ways, we’re in a designed environment.
00:49:34 ►
But we’re in a particular kind of designed environment
00:49:37 ►
that wants to keep the undesigned, the mysterious, the chaotic, the turbulent, as accessible as possible.
00:49:47 ►
And that’s where it differs from most kinds of design environments,
00:49:49 ►
where things are like over-design, where they try to make everything happen.
00:49:52 ►
They want to constrain your experience from the get-go, like Disneyland.
00:49:57 ►
Disneyland is an incredibly well-designed environment,
00:49:59 ►
but it’s designed to channel your imagination in very specific ways.
00:50:03 ►
And it does it in, you know, sometimes
00:50:05 ►
creative and playful, but in a lot of ways sort of in an insidious manner. Well, the
00:50:10 ►
playa is designed to like avoid that. It’s still a theme park, but it’s this crazy, multi-dimensional,
00:50:17 ►
madcap, you know, festival of theme parks, you know, where each theme park goes in a
00:50:22 ►
different direction and it’s made by hand and it’s made by, you know, folks you know.
00:50:28 ►
So it too is a designed environment and the kinds of questions that come up about, well,
00:50:35 ►
are we going to do this or do that?
00:50:36 ►
Are we going to zone this or zone that?
00:50:37 ►
How are we going to deal with the art?
00:50:38 ►
How are we going to deal with the Borg tube?
00:50:40 ►
All of these kind of mechanical questions about the event are also visionary questions.
00:50:45 ►
They’re also ways of thinking about how to maximize visionary experience
00:50:51 ►
and to sort of incarnate that whole visionary realm.
00:50:58 ►
One just a simple example from this year is the decision to move some of the theme camps
00:51:03 ►
back from the esplanade into the middle sort move some of the theme camps back from the Esplanade
00:51:05 ►
into the middle sort of circles of the camp
00:51:09 ►
as a way to break up the kind of suburb city thing that was developing.
00:51:13 ►
So that’s a design decision.
00:51:15 ►
Well, let’s set up an experiment and do it this way and see what happens.
00:51:19 ►
And we’re the guinea pigs.
00:51:20 ►
We’re the Petri dish, this open, evolving petri dish that has all
00:51:26 ►
of the elements of engineering in it, what we do with all of our functional problems
00:51:31 ►
with our shit and water and electricity and all these things in an environment devoted
00:51:37 ►
to the visionary.
00:51:38 ►
So in that respect, I see it as a very inspirational in terms of how do we begin to introduce that visionary
00:51:46 ►
element into the practical design questions or technologies or systems that we’re involved
00:51:51 ►
with in our normal lives or even involved with in our careers.
00:51:55 ►
And where I hope Burning Man is evolving, and I see signs of it kind of both ways, is
00:52:01 ►
to an increasing embrace of some of the more tawdry, not necessarily
00:52:05 ►
that inspiring elements of what it means to be outer, particularly in terms of energy
00:52:09 ►
consumption.
00:52:10 ►
And to bringing a sort of, how do we recognize that environmental problems and environmental
00:52:17 ►
constraints are excellent opportunities to practice the deeply imagined, desired, visionary potential that we all have.
00:52:27 ►
That it’s a great problem.
00:52:29 ►
It’s totally inspiring.
00:52:31 ►
It’s not just a problem that if we don’t fix in some practical way, it’s going to kill us.
00:52:36 ►
So we can go off and do our art and parties over here.
00:52:40 ►
It’s that that energy has to go over here and bring those things together, bring
00:52:45 ►
the practical problems that we’re facing on so many levels in our society with that visionary
00:52:50 ►
inspiration, which is an inspiration both about information, about knowledge of how
00:52:55 ►
to do things, and about the mystery, the lights off. You don’t know who you’re sleeping with,
00:53:00 ►
but it’s marvelous thank you
00:53:22 ►
hello thanks for your talk you haven’t have an expanded very much on the old- fashioned sense of the word visionary as like when you
00:53:26 ►
talk about when people talk sometimes about visionary architecture, it carries this kind
00:53:32 ►
of positivist kind of will to kind of carry a model for future generations or a project for society or a description of how things
00:53:47 ►
could be in the future. I guess the answer is easy because I see Burning Man as a kind
00:53:55 ►
of experience of how we could as well develop our society in the future a bit more. Do you
00:54:00 ►
have something to say on that?
00:54:02 ►
Yeah, that’s a good question. He was just raising the point of another way the term visionary has been used,
00:54:10 ►
an important sense of it, which I think just feeds into most of what I was saying,
00:54:15 ►
which is particularly if you talk about visionary architecture.
00:54:18 ►
Visionary architects are really creating models for the future,
00:54:22 ►
for how society can evolve, can be.
00:54:26 ►
And it’s not just that they’re inspired by fairy tales or something.
00:54:32 ►
It’s that they’re really trying to design, in many ways, a whole system for how people can live and can transform,
00:54:39 ►
can move away from unhealthy patterns.
00:54:42 ►
It’s actually kind of both sad and marvelous
00:54:45 ►
when you start to get more and more into visionary architecture,
00:54:47 ►
which I’ve been doing more recently,
00:54:49 ►
because in some ways it’s the best example
00:54:53 ►
for the kind of design process I’m talking about,
00:54:55 ►
because you have to design everything,
00:54:58 ►
and you’re designing the place where everything else happens.
00:55:02 ►
And there’s so much remarkable stuff out there.
00:55:05 ►
And you just look at the way, like, say,
00:55:07 ►
the United States has been developed
00:55:08 ►
with these sprawl cities or these sprawl suburbs
00:55:12 ►
and what could have happened if it…
00:55:14 ►
Well, let’s just take one state
00:55:15 ►
and try to build wisely compressed urban environments
00:55:19 ►
that have public space and da-da-da-da.
00:55:21 ►
I mean, there’s so many marvelous answers.
00:55:23 ►
And these things are happening on the fringes
00:55:25 ►
and they’re very much an important part
00:55:27 ►
of the ideas and inspirations that come into this,
00:55:31 ►
the whole topic of visionary design.
00:55:32 ►
So I’m really glad you brought that up
00:55:34 ►
because it’s really key.
00:55:36 ►
And that’s part of what Burning Man is about again,
00:55:38 ►
is it’s the way it’s set up, the way it’s designed,
00:55:41 ►
is an architecture of space.
00:55:43 ►
And that architecture of space lets certain things happen. Even the decision to let the man start spinning around has a great
00:55:50 ►
reverberation in the architecture of space, because the way you orient yourself at night
00:55:54 ►
is no longer quite so solid. So suddenly the space is a little bit more topsy-turvy. It’s
00:55:59 ►
probably my favorite element of the design this year because it introduces that degree of turbulence. But architecture is a really rich model for understanding and approaching this question
00:56:10 ►
of visionary design.
00:56:11 ►
Hi.
00:56:12 ►
I was wondering what you think about…
00:56:15 ►
Close the mic.
00:56:16 ►
Oh.
00:56:17 ►
I was wondering how you think about how contemporary and modern art fits within visionary art.
00:56:24 ►
Yeah. contemporary and modern art fits within visionary art? Yeah, it’s a really interesting question because it seems to me that one thing that’s happening now is that,
00:56:31 ►
and I’m no, like, total expert on contemporary art, but, you know, I try to keep up,
00:56:37 ►
is that in reaction to sort of the kind of arid conceptual sort of ways that people are plunging into more and more intense material.
00:56:48 ►
So you have paintings with shit on them,
00:56:51 ►
or dead pigs, and paintings about drugs.
00:56:54 ►
There’s more and more of a willingness to draw
00:56:56 ►
from the deeper zones of popular culture.
00:57:01 ►
And that’s one element I didn’t talk about,
00:57:03 ►
is that one way of talking about contemporary visionary art is that in addition to drawing off of traditional visionary
00:57:10 ►
symbol systems and drawing off of people’s individual experience is they very much have
00:57:15 ►
to do with popular culture, partly because of this history of the 60s and how that influenced
00:57:19 ►
popular culture. And now more and more contemporary artists are turning to it, and you’re starting to see signs of this kind of overlap. So there’s like a big show at the MOCA this fall in L.A.
00:57:35 ►
called Ecstasies, and it’s like 40 established contemporary artists, mostly young, whose
00:57:42 ►
work more or less overlaps some of the issues of visionary
00:57:45 ►
artists.
00:57:45 ►
And at the same time, there’s like a show of opening of like strict psychedelic underground
00:57:51 ►
visionary artists.
00:57:52 ►
And there’s some overlap between those.
00:57:54 ►
So I do think there’s actually more and more conversation between these two realms, partly
00:58:00 ►
because the mainstream one is running out of ideas.
00:58:02 ►
And there’s so much richness in this tradition that’s been kind of disavowed.
00:58:07 ►
So I think that there’s going to be more conversation between the mainstream kind of world
00:58:13 ►
and the sort of underground that more we see reflected here.
00:58:22 ►
Hi.
00:58:23 ►
You spoke a little bit about Disney, and I just walked in, and I’d like you to speak
00:58:28 ►
a little toward comparing what the, as far as the design, how you would, what the differences
00:58:36 ►
and the similarities are between, say, Black Rock City and the Disney World.
00:58:41 ►
Right, right. That’s a great question. It’s a funny one, too. The more you think about it,
00:58:46 ►
the richer it becomes.
00:58:49 ►
One of the ways is to say
00:58:51 ►
that it is an architecture
00:58:52 ►
of the imagination
00:58:54 ►
in the sense that both places
00:58:56 ►
are drawing you into a liminal
00:58:59 ►
and otherworldly space.
00:59:01 ►
But they have very different qualities.
00:59:03 ►
In Disneyland, for the most part, the other world that you’re being drawn into is kind of cutesy
00:59:08 ►
and acceptable and ultimately supports family values and it’s kind of a friendly place.
00:59:13 ►
Whereas here, it’s a little bit more up for grabs what the implication is of any of the myriad worlds
00:59:19 ►
that you might be drawn into.
00:59:21 ►
That’s one difference.
00:59:23 ►
Another is that Disneyland, even though it has all these,
00:59:26 ►
I mean, one similarity is that there’s all these different places that you go. Well,
00:59:30 ►
do I want to get on that ride or get on this ride? Do I want to go to the haunted house world? Do I
00:59:34 ►
want to go to the Tom Sawyer world? And that’s how we navigate the playa. We’re like, well,
00:59:37 ►
do I want to go to that world? Do I actually want to go through that door, that spinning wheel?
00:59:41 ►
No, I won’t do that one. I’ll go over here. So this is kind of choosing of entering into these different kind of imaginative portals. But here it emphasizes the differences
00:59:51 ►
between them, the brokenness, the fragmentation, the multiplicity of them. And it’s kind of this
00:59:56 ►
sense that everyone can create a portal and everyone can kind of go into it. Whereas there’s
01:00:02 ►
this subtle, it’s too strong a word really, but there’s this subtle fascism to Disneyland
01:00:07 ►
where it’s very much in control
01:00:09 ►
of the range of your responses.
01:00:12 ►
And even to the way the place is designed.
01:00:14 ►
So one thing that’s interesting if you go to theme parks
01:00:16 ►
is to try to get somewhere that you wouldn’t normally go
01:00:21 ►
and look around.
01:00:22 ►
Like if you go to the back of the concession, like, the concession stand, and there’s this
01:00:25 ►
one place where the garbage is, and you can kind of go over
01:00:28 ►
and then you look back at the realm, and
01:00:30 ►
suddenly the fantasy collapses, because
01:00:31 ►
you can see all the girders, and you can see
01:00:33 ►
how they’re feeding the system. So,
01:00:36 ►
in a classic theme park, you have
01:00:38 ►
this very well-defined little pocket
01:00:40 ►
of imaginative
01:00:42 ►
play,
01:00:43 ►
supported by this whole elaborate machinery that’s unexposed.
01:00:48 ►
But at Burning Man, we not only have to expose the underlying framework,
01:00:53 ►
it’s a great pleasure.
01:00:54 ►
That’s one of the delights of playa art is you see this marvel in the distance
01:00:58 ►
and you come up to it and you’re like,
01:01:00 ►
oh my God, it’s doing this thing to my brain and I’m reminded of this
01:01:02 ►
and it’s an other world and it’s just a bunch of, oh my God, what a great idea.
01:01:07 ►
What a great thing to do with PVC. I never thought of that.
01:01:09 ►
And then that idea goes and the next year they build something out of that.
01:01:13 ►
So it’s open source as opposed to like, you know, my little playground where I have the thing.
01:01:21 ►
But I don’t want to say to you all negative things about Disneyland
01:01:23 ►
because the Pirates of the Caribbean is an excellent experience.
01:01:27 ►
What’s that?
01:01:29 ►
Ann Havonin Mansion, absolutely.
01:01:31 ►
Hello, I would just like to say thank you very much and thank you for bringing into
01:01:37 ►
the sustainability issue because that’s been really something that I’ve had to reconcile
01:01:40 ►
within myself. And just a comment, you talked about light and sound experiments.
01:01:45 ►
If you haven’t been to the haunted garden,
01:01:47 ►
go to the haunted garden.
01:01:49 ►
Deep playa, deep playa, deep playa.
01:01:53 ►
There’s no address.
01:01:54 ►
Just go.
01:01:55 ►
Find it.
01:01:56 ►
Thank you.
01:01:57 ►
I like that.
01:01:57 ►
It was great.
01:02:00 ►
OK, I guess.
01:02:02 ►
Should we do that?
01:02:03 ►
I guess I want to give an opportunity for the wonderful, beautiful person below me to describe MAPS, to talk about MAPS.
01:02:11 ►
Yes.
01:02:13 ►
Hi, I’m Valerie.
01:02:14 ►
I work for MAPS.
01:02:15 ►
MAPS is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
01:02:19 ►
And you are right now in the MAPS theme camp.
01:02:22 ►
We’re going to be having psychedelic lectures here
01:02:25 ►
every day in the afternoons.
01:02:27 ►
Well, tomorrow is our last day.
01:02:29 ►
So if you really want to hear a lot more about MAPS,
01:02:32 ►
please come tomorrow afternoon.
01:02:34 ►
And the president, Rick Doblin, will be speaking at 4.
01:02:38 ►
And we’ll tell you all about all the research that we’re doing
01:02:41 ►
and the vision and all the things about MAPS.
01:02:43 ►
And also, please pick up a MAP maps brochure up here in the front.
01:02:46 ►
There’s more by the door.
01:02:48 ►
And look through it.
01:02:49 ►
And visit our website, maps.org.
01:02:58 ►
Didn’t you really love Eric’s connection of imagination with the concept of you are immersed in mystery.
01:03:07 ►
Those of you who have been lucky enough to make it to the Burning Man Festival a few times
01:03:12 ►
can probably relate to being immersed in mystery there.
01:03:17 ►
It’s the only place I know where you can have a powerful psychedelic experience
01:03:21 ►
without ingesting any drugs.
01:03:23 ►
Because as you know, of course, the word psychedelic means mind manifesting or soul manifesting.
01:03:30 ►
Until you’ve been to Burning Man in person, you really don’t have much of an idea of what
01:03:35 ►
incredibly imaginative souls us humans can manage to manifest from time to time.
01:03:42 ►
As you just heard, I wasn’t able to make it to Burning Man myself this year,
01:03:47 ►
but I’ve already started putting away a little money each week
01:03:50 ►
so I can be sure to make it there next year.
01:03:53 ►
In case you aren’t aware of it yet,
01:03:55 ►
next year at Burning Man,
01:03:57 ►
MAPS is going to be celebrating their 20th anniversary.
01:04:01 ►
I’m sure you’re going to be hearing a lot more about this in the months to come, but if you’ve ever thought about going to Burning Man,
01:04:08 ►
then I think next year is one you really won’t want to miss.
01:04:12 ►
Well, that about wraps it up for today.
01:04:15 ►
Thank you again to Eric for taking the time to put together another Burning Man talk
01:04:20 ►
for us. Eric, as some of you probably know,
01:04:24 ►
was one of the original Planque Norte speakers
01:04:26 ►
in 2003, and he’s always found time to support all of our efforts here at Planque Norte,
01:04:34 ►
and we really do appreciate it. It’s pretty amazing considering all of the things Eric’s
01:04:39 ►
involved in. I know he’s working on a new magazine with Daniel Pinchbeck. I think it originally was called Medicine,
01:04:46 ►
but now I believe they’ve rebranded it as Evolver,
01:04:50 ►
so stay tuned for that.
01:04:52 ►
I know Eric is an editor of Evolver magazine,
01:04:55 ►
and he’s also got a new book coming out called The Visionary State,
01:05:01 ►
A Journey Through Spiritual California,
01:05:03 ►
and I’ve heard a few good things about that already.
01:05:06 ►
I think it’s one you probably want to, hopefully it’s going to be out in time for Christmas
01:05:11 ►
time and put it on your Amazon wish list.
01:05:13 ►
Also Eric’s Burning Man essay that’s titled Beyond Belief has just been published in a
01:05:20 ►
collection of essays called Afterburn that were edited by Mark Van Prooyen and Lee Gilmore.
01:05:26 ►
And that essay, Beyond Belief, by the way, is the basis of Eric’s talk that he gave at Burning Man in 2003.
01:05:34 ►
And it’s actually in our podcast, Psychedelic Salon No. 3, in case you want to hear that.
01:05:42 ►
At least you can hear almost all of it.
01:05:45 ►
Unfortunately, our generator died near the end of Eric’s talk that year,
01:05:49 ►
and we didn’t have a battery-operated recorder as a backup,
01:05:53 ►
so, well, you know, there’s always something like that on the playa.
01:05:58 ►
And again, thanks to Bruce Dahmer for recording this talk for all of us,
01:06:02 ►
and also to the MAPS BOP Camp Snowflake Village crew
01:06:06 ►
that put all the structures together
01:06:08 ►
and the sound system and everything.
01:06:10 ►
Gosh, we really appreciate you guys.
01:06:13 ►
Couldn’t have done it without you.
01:06:15 ►
And also a big thank you to Chateau Hayouk
01:06:17 ►
for the use of their music as our theme song
01:06:20 ►
here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:06:22 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:06:28 ►
Be well, my friends.