Mircea Eliade and the Art of NOW by Bob Cotton 2023
“One has only to take the trouble to study the problem, to find out that, whether obtained by diffusion or spontaneously discovered, myths and rites always disclose a boundary situation of man. A boundary situation is one which man discovers in becoming conscious of his place in the universe. It is primarily by throwing light on these boundary situations that the historian of religions fulfils his task and assists in the researches of depth psychology and even philosophy.” (Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols - Studies in Religious Symbolism 1956
And of course this work of delineating boundary situations, has been approached methodically across the broad and intermingled categories of myth, religion, faerie and folk-tale by esteemed authors of the calibre of Joseph Campbell, Andrew Lang, James Frazer, Marina Warner and many others, including Eliade himself.
This wonderful mix of approaches - anthropological, ethnographical, mythological, religious, spiritual, fairie and mythographic folklore, delve to the very roots of our boundary situations - they are, Jungian or not, the maps of our collective unconscious, their universal commonality attest to how similar our human minds work as we explore the limits and the gateways of our consciousness. And this range of studies of course encompasses our shared digital memory - the stuff that we interrogate through Large Language Models, chat GPT, Bard and other AI tools.
And recently, in the last decade or so, artists, film-makers and other on-the-case creatives have embodied glimpses of this vast collective memory in works like AES+F The Last Riot (2007):
"Last Riot is a reflection on the exponential growth of virtuality at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, on the disassociation between real violence and its representation in media, and on humanity’s perpetual drive toward total destruction, always thwarted by its near-comical inability to achieve it. Last Riot depicts a world of endless strife and conflict, its young, androgynous inhabitants having shed their identities in a fight against both the self and the Other. As in a video game, the protagonists of Last Riot are unable to die while everything else is destroyed around them—there is no longer any history, ideology, or ethics, only the all-consuming Riot." (https://aesf.art/projects/last_riot/)
I first saw AES+F: The Last Riot - the first in their Liminal SpaceTrilogy of multi-screen, multi-media audio-visual extravaganzas at the Venice Biennale in 2007. And it was spectacular, seeringly impactful and both sensually and intellectually immersive and thoroughly exciting. Do check out the AES+F website to see the terrific range of work they have created since.
The Daniels: Everything, Everywhere All at Once 2023
To me this epitomised and in several ways presented the 21st century, mega-channel, mega-streaming
the Daniels’ Everything, Everywhere, All at Once’ (2022) and Adam Curtis’ What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom (2007), and Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021), and AES+F: The Last Riot (2007):
AES+F: Last Riot 2007
and other editions of their Liminal Space trilogy. These are the media-art-forms that begin to express the spirit of our time, right now in the 2024+ quantum-computing, LLM-AI, multi-strand, multimedia, 24/7/365 all-at-once universe we are creating/living in.
Other examples of ZG-expression include Neil Gaiman's American Gods (book 2001 TV 2017); George Miller's Three thousand Years of Longing (2022); Terence Mallick’s Tree of Life (2011); Lanthemos: Poor Things 2023 - and Cixin's The Three-Body Problem (on NetFlix, created by Benloff, Weiss and Woo 2024)- from Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past 2008; - you can think of other examples, no doubt. And this is not just a plea to listen to artists and other creatives who are listening to, and interpreting the ‘spirit of the age’ - though these are incredibly important - look at the impact that David Attenborough’s programmes have had. Richard Buckminster Fuller was very fond of pointing out that if (blessed thought) we removed all the politicians on the planet, no-one would be inconvenienced in the slightest. Yet if we removed all the engineers on the planet, the entire fabric of our heavily mechanised society would collapse within a few days. We are blessed with brains that can build machines and solve incredibly difficult problems - that can predict the weather, build cyclotrons, build CERN, send spaceships to the Asteroid Belt and bring samples of extraterrestrial materials back to Earth, we are beginning to understand the World’s sublime ecosystems. We have built educational systems to help explore more of our planet and how it works, we have built a worldwide network of all our acquired knowledge stored in books, in libraries, in museums, in public and even in private archives, in galleries, even in the magnificent wikipedia and other public collections. Perhaps we need a united nations of knowledge, a global think-tank of all the best physicists, best chemists, best engineers, best designers, best architects, best mechanics, best computer-scientists - it would be a new version of Buckminster Fuller's World Game - an iteration of his Design-Science philosophy of innovation - a new global think-tank outside of politics - an iteration of Disney's imagineers - artists, engineers, designers, - all creatives thinking outside the box, looking for the best consensus on tackling and solving world problems...Such a worldwide brain-storm must produce at least well-argued strategies:
