For the Mirror is not the Glass
Quantum physicist Hugh Everett said, “…physical objects always appear to us to have definite positions”. Optics physicist Rudolf K. Luneburg said, “…there is no absolute localization even in binocular vision”. What is the meaning of these diametrically opposed statements? Can Husserl's reductive phenomenology and Piaget's account of cognitive development shed light upon the paradoxes involved, and provide insight into what Proust meant by the statement, in REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, that “…perhaps the immobility of things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not something else”?
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Object and Subject
In traditional Asian cultures, directions -- left and right -- were referenced from the point of view of the implicitly animistic object, not that of the subject viewing the object. A Westerner receiving directions involving landmarks would generally take a series of wrong turns. Likewise, perhaps, regarding directions relative to realms of the spirit. The Germans, with their traditional experience of Einfühlung and Umwelt, once were especially well equipped to understand the factors involved. But has the modern mind transformed what was once a right-hand path into one left-handed, by undue fear of the subject being made into an object, whilst simultaneously denying subjectivity to the object?
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Tank Proposal
Derek Dillon’s understanding is that Pioneer Corporation had developed a dedicated machine for interactive CD-ROMs. They could not sell this machine without software being available. The software development task was subcontracted to the Tokyo design-studio types with hip connections: Yoko Ono, the NYC jazz scene, John Lilly, Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and so on. John C. Lilly, M.D., had an extensive personal scientific archive documenting forty years of active research. If a CD-ROM related to his career was to be made, this material needed to be put in the public domain -- which initially meant surveying the archive, so it could be appraised prior to acquisition by a university library. The tasks sub-subcontracted to the surveyor included coming up with ideas for interactive interfaces with the scientific materials surveyed. This was done to the tune of about two dozen such ideas. Only trouble was, how could the same Japanese intelligentsia who never understood why Yoko Ono’s contribution to Fluxus is so important, who unquestioningly ate the Western art-critical psychiatric “dysterpretation” of Yayoi Kusama’s profound prefiguration of 21st century Kunstwissenshaft, who failed to comprehend and hence to enthuse over the “spontaneous quantal fusion” involved in Mariyo Yagi’s “rope shock”, possibly understand interactive interfaces with John Lilly’s research? Such are the limitations of monkey-brain sashimi run through a blender made in America. The tank proposal was put together independently as a result of re-engaging John Lilly’s world. In the early 1970s, Joseph Bridger pioneered Autogenic Training in the “Lilly Tank” and became, along with Derek, another enfant terrible with “variable educational background” embraced by Wolfgang Luthe, M.D. Earliest discussions of theoretical perspectives on fractal image generation during autogenic meditation in the isolation/flotation tank -- and the relation of that imagery to Charles Muses’ hypernumbers -- transpired soon thereafter.
(excerpts, circa 1993)
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SmartDress Proposal
Origins of the SmartDress go way back; back to the Chinese invasion of what is now northern Viet Nam; back to Shinto possession cults, fox spirits, and identity transparency in Kyushu rice ritual; back to Bali’s Moon of Pejeng and a tribal mini-skirt in Vientiane; back to old sari from Old Delhi, a visa-run to Penang, a titillating conversation on Tokyo’s Inogashira Line, a drunken jerk-a-jerka flight from Nashville to Albuquerque, a piece of Kashmiri chiffon in the hands of a Kiev designer, a seditious suggestion from an indicted lady out-call-service entrepreneur and lingerie fabricator in Ithaca, a fateful dinner across Sukhumvit from Bangkok’s still most storied club: the hidden, after-hours, underground Temple of Thermae.
(excerpts plus figurations, circa 1980-97)
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