An imaginary experiment to re-enchant the world

 AN IMAGINARY EXPERIMENT TO RE-ENCHANT THE WORLD

This proposed conceptual art exhibition as an imagination experiment is an attempt by ‘The Living Work of Art’, the  Wizard of New Zealand, to “re-enchant the world” through combining and synthesizing science, religion, magic and art in a coordinated virtual reality event on the Internet.

Disenchantment; between the 15th and 17th Centuries Christendom began the process of becoming “Western Civilization” or just “The West”. How could such a fundamental change in identity from a metaphysical belief system to identification as a mere physical location have taken place? Many technological, religious, political, economic, technological and scientific transformations had their beginnings in this period, together with a remarkable growth of religious, economic and political individualism. Various explanations have been offered, but whatever their differing explanations, historians, sociologists and psychologists agree that it represented a progressive ‘disenchantment of the world’.

Revitalisation Movements: As the first mercantile industrial civilization, the Ancient Greeks went a long way towards disenchanting the world by splitting the Natural from the Supernatural and trivialising the supernatural. The Romans institutionalised and expanded the process. After the collapse of civilisation in Europe and the Middle East, which followed the disintegration of Rome, the new Christian metaphysics filled the void of meaning. The restoration of meaning to cultures which have had their most precious beliefs confounded is not only provided by new religious or secular interpretations of the historical meaning of existence, anthropologists have described a wide variety of magical revitalisation movements which also fulfil this function.

There is no reason to assume that creative artistic expression combined with magical explanations could not fulfil the same functions today. The late sixteenth century in Europe and much of the history of China, where magical explanations of the operation of the universe were popular, show that technology can flourish without the rapid mechanization and industrialisation that followed the seventeenth century scientific revolution in Europe. The connection between the intellectual and the aesthetic is much stronger in magic than in science which is basically utilitarian. Thinkers, like Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine and Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society, have examined and criticised the unique mechanistic philosophy underlying  our civilisation.

Since the late 19th Century new ideas in psychology, anthropology, physics, philosophy and advances in technology (particularly electronic communication) are subverting the reductionist mechanistic metaphysics which replaced the traditional religious metaphysics. A good summary is Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point. The process of re-enchantment of the world can now begin. Art has a spell-binding effect and beautiful rituals can be more effective than complex and often highly irrational bureaucratic rituals in binding communities together. The post-industrial world is completely dependent on mass advertising (a largely artistic phenomenon) which moulds emotions to create and maintain the demand for commodities and services. In addition, in the twentieth century skilful political propaganda has motivated millions to adopt irrational and puritanical ideologies involving massive social and technological engineering.

The Exhibition

The exhibition culminates in two sensational events. After a video display of a series of working models of historical human attempts to describe the structure and functions of the universe,  the entire physical universe is turned inside-out as a dramatic ‘spell’ by a conformal inversion of the traditional mathematical co-ordinates. In spite of the sensational impact it would produce this is a rational scientific thought experiment. Moreover this new model of the universe has important religious, magical and aesthetic implications.

Since 1970 the Living Work of Art has been creating his own self-organising cosmology outlining the dynamic forces and relationships from the evolving physical and biological systems to the involving psychological, social, cultural and personal. This could be shown by electronically animating the icon of his Kabbalistic Tree of Life, as well as a series of musical, concentric and converging spheres of time, space and identity and accompanying kinematic animations of evolving self-organising systems. Time, now regarded as a probabilistic event hierarchy, converges on NOW. Space or location converges on HERE. Identity or intentionality converges on ME. These are all coordinated. Notes on the working of the cosmology have already been prepared and can be found in the Cosmology section of this publication.

The second sensational event would be the culmination of the exhibition, the “Imagination Experiment” itself. New virtual reality technology could be employed to show the flight of a levitating shaman to the centre of the universe as pure thought. Through the Internet this event could be linked up to occur simultaneously with other viewers all over the world, either in art galleries or though big screens in public squares. A suitable location would also be essential. For the necessary financial sponsors the consequent publicity such a sensational international event would generate would be highly rewarding. Pre-publicity would also be easy since The Wizard is already known internationally as a unique character, regardless of his low status as a conceptual artist amongst other less imaginative conceptual artists who have compromised their original radical visions to obtain grants from commercial corporations or welfare government bureaucracies.

Wizard of NZ 2018