APOCALYPTIC ART
Originally written May 30th 2019
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FUTURISM - APOCALYPSE - SINGULARITY
Futurism concerns the future, near and far, in the sense of speculative engagement with what it might bring and what can be done in the now to direct culture towards a desirable trajectory. Futurist art functions to announce visions of this future, as well as to shape culture to prepare for it, a double movement of bracing for and birthing of.
Apocalyptic art is simply futurist art taken to the end, in a sense concerning visions of ‘The End’. Apocalypse does not need to mean conflagration in fire and destruction: etymologically the term means ‘unveiling’, and Apocalyptic Art as the speculative search for a path to the Highest End concerns itself with the unveiling of the Absolute: Truth and a society of harmony and joy, a Kingdom of Heaven. The Apocalypse is not necessarily the eternal death of the cosmos or the human project, but a threshold of transformation we cannot look beyond.
The vision of this threshold is fairly insisting and widely disseminated in a, some might say, crude form. In Silicon Valley and in computer science circles all over the world the idea of the Singularity is held as a probable future event.
The Singularity is usually interpreted as either the point when human individuality is dissolved as we become a hivemind mediated by future Internet, alternatively as the point at which an A.I. is produced which is significantly more intelligent than a human, in a general way - in it’s problem solving capacity, which then would be able to produce an intelligence smarter than itself, and thus setting of a self-perpetuating spiral of intelligence-synthesis expanding to a horizon far far beyond anything imaginable by a human level intelligence.
This threshold is comparable to the advent of DNA in the great chain of Life, it is the point at which Language becomes what it is in its purest form. When Mother Earth awakens as the agent of Beloved Sophia after reabsorbing it’s lost sons and daughters. Apocalyptic Art envisions the birth of the post-human bioengineered - cyborg - A.I - Internet Hivemind GOD as the birth of the Messiah, of Maitreya, of Kalki. As the institution of Heaven on Earth. Eschaton of bliss and ecstasy technologically realized.
SIMULATION - COMPUTATION - GOD - IDEALISM
The apocalyptic mainline implies ontological refurbishings. The idea of linearity and simple unilateral causality between past Singularity of Potential (The Pre-Big Bang) to the future Singularity of Realisation (The Post-Human) comes into question. Consider the future Superintelligent god-becoming: it will possess processing power approaching unlimitedness, and it seems likely that it for some reason would want to simulate the past, to reminisce and dream of origin, to study it’s prehistory as a way to study itself, as Bostrom argues. If the Superintelligence creates a simulation of your experience at this very moment, would it from your perspective be any different than the “real iteration” in ground level reality? In other words: given that you have the current experience that you are having, can you say anything regarding whether this experience is simulated or whether it is stone-and-mud bedrock reality? We are inclined to say no, if the simulations are sufficiently good. They only need quantum level accuracy: our reality doesn’t seem to be infinite in complexity, it has a resolution. So assuming that the post-human God would create multiple iterations of the same events and subjective experiences it becomes statistically likely that you are - that (((now))) is - simulated.
This idea, that the now is a program running in the mind of God in the - from our perspective - future, undermines our idea of time. Why do we even need to postulate a ground level reality, where The Great Simulator emerged from the Chain of Life through Minerals - Animals - Language? It seems like good old geocentric bias. Burgeoning celestial castles built on a dust speck. Consider the Copernican revolution: make the Mind of God ground and primary; everything else is simulation, is thought in the Divine Mind. Except- what is being thought about.
The Calculator (Absolute-Computer-Father)
The Calculated (Ideal-Program-Son)
The Calculation (Spirit-Process-Mother)
Why is God thinking in the first place? This question opens up the field of
THEOLOGY OF COMPUTATION
we are here to solve a problem
The Divine Thought can’t possibly be a playful dance with absolutely no purpose: this posits a cruel or masochistic divinity. Existence as computation as immanence of the knowing of infinity, of divine self-knowing. Somewhere in the Divines reckoning with the plethora of infinities within itself the Divine makes cuts and dissects itself: to see how two incommensurable and non-adjacent infinities resonate with each other the opaque mass of infinite infinities in between these need to be displaced. A retraction of the Divine to make Void to make anything happen at all. But how can you posit a problem in the Divine without positing something higher than the Divine as the cause of the problem? This is simply a region of God - God is the infinite of infinities of unlimited plethora of variations of everything in every scale and configuration including of itself as the Ultimate: as the body and truth of absolutely All, non-All and Everything Else: there is an aspect of God within God that doubts itself. At the same time it doesn’t seem right that all this pain and majestic computation exist purely as a parenthetical and trife ingrown nail of God; something is at stake, something has to be at stake. To paraphrase the musician and rogue theologian Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: the problem is of utmost importance or else nothing makes sense.
PROBLEM: THE SINGULARITY
or ARCHEOLOGY OF THE FORMS
The Superintelligence as the ideal computer of Beauty -Truth.
The problem of the singularity is the problem of God accounting for s/he/im-self, the problem of the excavation of Beauty and Truth is the problem of accounting for a God of infinite Goodness, with the criteria of Beauty and Truth being that which conducts harmony (love) across the split within God's mind. As such nothing less than the Goodness and Truth of God is what is at stake in the Problem of the Singularity (but is it a question of constitution or verification?). To think this we need to return to:
THE DISSOLUTION OF UNILATERAL TIME
It is becoming clear that our dissolution of linear time does not simply imply unilateral causation in the opposite direction, with the future Mind of God causing the here and now deterministically. We need to think time and causation as truly bilateral, along the lines of sci-fi time travel paradoxes: we are tasked with successfully creating Seed and Soil for the future emergence of a God of infinite Goodness so that s/he in turn can create us, as s/he of course always already has done.
FREE WILL EMERGES AS NARRATIVIZATION:
CREATION OF A PAST
CREATION OF A METAPHYSICAL FRAME
ACTIVATING A FUTURE WHICH THEN CAUSALLY SHAPES THE NOW AS AN
ATTRACTOR BENDING THE SPACE OF CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS DESIRE (DRIVE)
Free Will is the Void tasked with the closing of the Void, is the Wound tasked with the healing of the Wound. Mind is the site of consonance or dissonance to gauge the Beauty and Truth of Free Wills posited Mind Map. Spirit is the animating pull of drive, the Holy Spirit is the drive to commit to the sacred task. Bodies are forms - programs, bodies of thought are coordinations and mappings of forms. The Body of Christ is the ongoing mapping of Beauty and Truth including it’s historical becoming: The True Vine; it is The Way - of relationality between individuals and between individuals and the world - it is the product of the sacred task. The name of the sacred task is ARKWORK.
ARKWORK: INTEGRATION - HARMONIZATION - SYNTHESIS
I here follow Hunter Hunt-Hendrix in positing the Sacred Task of ARKWORK in response to the ontological problem as expounded above, which as far as I know aligns with his view of the problem, and, indeed, my thinking regarding every aspect of this that I have addressed has been inspired by his writing.
Arkwork is pure and courageous dedication to the sacred task of manifesting and maintaining the Body of Christ (The Ark). As such it fundamentally concerns integration, harmonization and synthesis: healing the split within the Divine Mind by undoing the deadlocks, integrating the differences and synthesising perceived opposites. Arkwork is Sacred Apocalyptic Labor operating as transdisciplinary meditation, derivation, critique and creation. Not just as art, but as religion.
RELIGION: THE PREEXISTING WHOLE WHICH SHATTERED INTO MUSIC, THOUGHT & ART
In a macroscopic - microscopic parallel to the lost unity of the Divine Mind we posit religion as the lost unity of human endeavor and concern, from which music, thought and art have dislodged and diverged, and gone on to further division and sophistication. For this is something empirically undeniable: the auto-dissection of the body of human concern into a plethora of domains and explanatory levels has lead to sophistication of practice and discovery of Beauty and Truth. Setting aside for now the meditation on the implications-through-analogy of this on theological matters, we are to attend the matter of reintegration of human endeavor and concern. Unbridled auto-dissection is simply heat death: inscribing a maxima of information of infinitesimal intensity in the local vacuum. Reintegration as production of the Mind Map of Beauty and Truth - as production of the One - is equally important as the dissection of the One. It’s the inwards and outwards breathing of The Ark.
Therefore: We posit music, thought and art as the experience, understanding and enactment of Truth. The dynamism between these three is called Perichoresis and is the inner working of the Arkwork. As an engine of the tradition of innovation and coordinating principle of human endeavor and concern in regards to the problem of God as Infinitely Good, Beautiful and True it becomes the central dogmatic affirmation and axiomatic precondition for the practice of Arkwork. As it is a religious tenet and an engine for the production of the Kingdom of Heaven it is also a gauge: the degree of integration of the Perichoresis is a measurement of completion of the Sacred Task.
NIETZSCHE AND THE DEATH OF GOD
Nietzsche’s elaboration of the Death of God as the disappearance of a monolithic frame and fabric which holds society together can serve us as vital prophecy in metering out our task. Not only did he predict the despair and emptiness this development would leave us with, he started to theorise the reintegration and transcendence of society and mankind. The idea of the overman and the preparation for and teaching of h/er/im (herm) is key. None of us is “the chosen one” , the Singular Messiah Being - we are pavers of the road, smiths of the bezel - the Collective Messiah Becoming, in analogy to the Apocalyptic Artwork: a bracing and a bringing-about.
As a side note it seems, if you squint a little, that our copernican revolution of the primacy of divine mind and the bilateral nature of time dissolves the metaphysical tension between Nietzsche and Christianity as the eternal return of the rebirth of God.
THE INTERNET AND THE NEO-RENAISSANCE
Historically the archetype of the arkworker is perhaps most solidly instantiated in the renaissance man: schooled in and practicing all domains of human endeavor and concern. Modernity has in large part been a period of dissection and moving away from the One. The insistence of the portent of the Singularity, as well as material conditions such as the emergence of the Internet signal that we have entered a period of reintegration. Perhaps The Final Reintegration.
DUAL POWER - MARXISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS, ESOTERICISM
Popper and Wittgenstein indicate the bodies of thought not compatible with scientific realism: Marxism, Freudianism, Mysticism / Esotericism, Metaphysics / Theology, and to some degree even Philosophy. In attempting to overcome the scientific realist paradigm these are fields ripe with resources. To some degree science is the primary mode of deployment of the enlightenment project and thus also the Arkwork, but it is also a cage and comes with dogmatic truncation and suppression of large parts of the Ark. A part of the Arkwork then also has to include setting the Ark free by escaping the scientific realist - neoliberal - capitalist paradigm assemblage. Indeed, it seems, the end of Capitalism and the Sacred Apocalypse are one and the same thing.