An Invitation to Play
In this self-directed graphic design poster series, I’ve pieced together fragments of archived images I’ve created, and research I’ve curated, over the past few years to encode a meaning which could simply be expressed as an Invitation to Play.
The micro text invites the audience to slow down, zoom in, and engage with the series repeatedly to create layers of meaning.
The word receives many forms and potential ways of understanding. I am trying to encourage the audience to read the words and seriously play with what might be revealed underneath.
Some words might require the audience to do some research, come back, and take a second, third or fourth look. To zoom in and zoom out. Frame the context differently and reflect.
The word may offer playful connections of concepts, questions, and ideas from your own journey of understanding and experiences. The act of playing with a text, reading, and rereading creates a co-authoring relationship between the word and its meaning. In this way, through repetition and reflection, it's as if we get a glimpse into the mind of the author of the word.
Prima materia is an alchemical concept. These days, alchemy gets a bad rap. But Alchemy holds its place in the history of science as the precursor to chemistry.
Oftentimes, the alchemists would encrypt their messages so that only those with the metaphorical key could understand what it is they were talking about. Carl Jung saw what the alchemists were doing as a psychological process.
The alchemists were trying to combine matters together to create a new substance.
There are two meanings to the word ‘matter’. There is the physical matter that the world is made from and there is what matters to us personally as humans.
“In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg—symbolized by the round cooking vessel—will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis.”
— Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy
In my attempts to decode this quote I see the artifex as the artist.
Prima materia is the first matter or starting material.
Anthropos is Greek for human.
Physis is Greek for nature.
So, the artist goes into chaos, (often symbolized by water) and either grasps something of value (a fish for example) or gets swallowed by it.
After wrestling with the chaos and grasping the meaning the artist will then rise above the chaos (water) into the air (symbolized by the flight of the bird/freedom) to create their magnum opus or philosopher’s stone which was always there but was concealed by space and time. (physis)
The alchemist may not actually be able to turn base metals such as mercury into gold, but the artist can turn a blank canvas (chaos/prima materia) into a work of art. (value/gold)
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To achieve this texture, I printed this poster out, put it in my sink and poured water all over it and scrubbed away the ink with a toothbrush, took a picture of it and brought it back into photoshop. (Digital and physical elemental/alchemical process)
Deus ex machina is a plot device that has been around since the ancient Greeks. It is Latin for “god out of the machine.”
The playwright Euripides popularized the technique. Characters were placed in confounding situations and struggled to solve their dilemmas, only to be saved at the last moment by an inconceivable solution. This plot device has been used ever since by writers struggling to find an ending to their stories.
This device is often frowned upon by writers as lazy, improbable, and cheap. The readers also tend to be a little let down as deus ex machina steals the satisfaction from the character finding a solution to their problems.
Oftentimes when we’re deeply engaged in a story, we avoid critical thinking or logic, this is called the suspension of disbelief.
This allows the audience to make connections and solutions of their own.
Not connecting all the dots and giving the audience a role in filling in what is happening allows for unique sparks of intrigue.
Give the audience all the dots they need to make a connection but don’t connect all the dots for them.
There are moments when you forget you’re dreaming. That’s when the magic happens.
The social dilemma.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”
— E.O. Wilson
The problem is that these three systems operate at three different clock rates. Our paleolithic emotions are akin to the road we are driving on and our technology is the vehicle that is accelerating faster than our steering wheel (medieval institutions) can handle.
Technology hacks our cognitive limits which we feel like information overload.
It hacks our dopamine system, so we become addicted.
It hacks our social validation which we see as mass narcissism.
It hacks our confirmation bias which leads to fake news.
It hacks our outrage system which leads to polarization.
And it hacks our trust in what is real.
These interconnected issues lead to shortened attention spans, social isolation, teen depression & suicide, breakdown of sensemaking, conspiracies, and extremism.
As technology accelerates, complexity increases exponentially.
How do we create shared sense-making that matches the complexity of the problems we face in a post-truth era?
What if we were to steal the culture from the bottom up and design a world that helps us learn & grow, reward nuanced thinking, debate respectfully, model forms of wisdom, develop solutions, and be sensitive to flow and balance.
What if we phase-shifted towards a world where we are focused on developing the skills and wisdom to create a shared philosophical system that can detect signals from noise.
What is happening behind the doors?
Memorize this, it will be on the quiz.
“There is a world within, a world of thought and feeling and power; of light and life and beauty; although invisible; its forces are mighty.”
— Charles F. Haanel
The answer is found within.
The egg.
“Every Door Leads to Another Door.”
Time is always a wonder; it always brings questions.
“What did I do Yesterday?”
Responses to time are temporary.
“Oh, I grew into the person I am today.”
Time is an indicator of Becoming.
Becoming means growth, decay, and the unfolding of time.
As time unfolds, we gain a new perspective of who we are, we have always been who we are, but we gain a new sense of who we are. Like the unfolding of a rose, or Russian doll.
If you examine your growth from the time you were a kid to the point you are at now you will see that you have gone through countless stages, or doors of perception in your process of becoming who you are meant to be.
The phenomenon or occurrences of your experience is always in flux or flow, but the essence or structure of who you are is unchanging.
Like an egg.
…It’s been a while since I’ve seen the sun, I wonder if it has changed colour yet…
A frozen moment plucked from an unfolding drama.
The sun (light, consciousness) is a common symbol of God. The sun always gives and never asks for anything in return. It moves celestial bodies with just as much ease as it ripens grapes.
Following the Age of Enlightenment, in the early 20th century, there were a lot of discussions about the death of God. Science in many ways had secularized and rationalized the common conception of God.
Yet, the eternal problem remains.
Through Nietzsche’s vision of Eternal Recurrence, we can sense the cyclical nature of death and rebirth.
Seeing God as speaking symbolically through the Logos, the Word, reason, and logic, provide a personal relationship with the Word. In my view, this personal relationship with God is what the Bible points towards.
We live inside a narrative. (Symbolically speaking) When we wake up in the morning, we tell ourselves a story about who we are and what our past is. All forthcoming action is embedded within this narrative we tell ourselves.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
—John 1:1
This personal relationship with narratives is very much alive and well in society. We love to tell and listen to stories, whether it be locally, on social media, on Netflix, or on whatever newest show is being released. We pay our hard-earned money and time to share and embed ourselves into these narratives. To have a positive relationship with the narratives we share, Being awake, conscious co-creators with these narratives we share, is in my view, what the Bible has been speaking about for over 2000 years and we throw that history away at our peril.
The death of God is merely one moment plucked from this unfolding drama. Day and night, Sun and Moon, Yin and Yang, Conscious and Unconscious, Infinite and Finite, Death and Rebirth, are all archetypal patterns in the symbolic world.
Through the looking glass.
A wall always has two sides. The Yin and the Yang.
Walls are definite things. They may provide us with safety, but just as often they are symbols of entrapment.
The walls’ purpose is to form a curtain, a veil, behind which a different perspective can be found.
Although, I have had a ridiculous dream where walls hold hidden secret portals which allow the light to shine through at night. When you pay very close attention to the night sky you might receive one of these lights from a very distant star which will invite you into a truly ridiculous dream.
“Can we pull back the veil of static and reach into the source of all Being?”
— Ice King
Walls are a symbol of the absurdity of life. We decorate our walls with art (portals) to make the mundane disappear.
The night sky gives us a perspective beyond the mundane into the infinite.
The wall is a mirror.
The mirror is a powerful reflection tool.
The moon is a mirror, it reflects the light of the sun. The moon illuminates the darkness of the night sky.
Mirrors reflect light which allows them to reflect the world around them. The light is a powerful symbol of wisdom and awareness. As a consequence, mirrors are symbols and carriers of truth and reflect what our truth is. Mirrors represent the wall between conscious and unconscious and therefore, by looking deep into a mirror, we look deep inside ourselves in a conscious way, unveiling a perspective beyond the mundane.
“When the bird and the book disagree always believe the bird.”
— John James Audubon
A seed, sown long ago, begins to sprout.
This is not a music record.
This is a Kabbalist symbol called the Ein Sof meaning “infinite.”
The word Kabbalah means received, or tradition. Kabbalah is an ancient strain of mystic Judaism.
According to Jewish tradition, the first Kabbalist was Adam from the book of Genesis.
Other notable Kabbalists in the Bible are Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses.
Moses Received (Kabbalah) the Torah from God on Mount Sinai.
The Ein Sof is related to the sefirot, meaning, emanations.
The sefirot are energy emanations found on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
Often, the people who bring inanimate objects to life (artists) use Kabbalistic teachings.
The sefirot is a very common symbol in popular culture. Seen in shows such as The Midnight Gospel, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Yu-Gi-Oh, Final Fantasy, The Witcher, and many many more.
The circles in the Ein Sof are vessels or containers, like cups that hold water, the white line that goes to the center is the light that illuminates all levels of abstraction, from the macrocosm to the microcosm.
Analog mediation is a conceptual term.
To understand “analog” here, we can look to etymology. Ana-, the prefix, is Greek for, among other things, “again”. Logos means “a ground”, or also “a reason,” or, “a word” in the sense that a word has a certain authority. So, an analog is a copy of an authentic, real original.
It is in this sense that a record is an analog mediation of sound.
“Mediation” can also be understood through etymology. It means, basically, “middle,” but quite early on picked up the connotation of an intervening agency, as in the sense of “The principle mediated the dispute between the two children.”
Technical media is an intervening technology (a logic that comes from know-how) that exists between an original and a copy, or, a sign and its referent. Therefore: Analogue mediation is a form of intervening agency that translates an original into a copy.
The numbers surrounding the circle refer to the (circular nature of time) analog clock which measures time as well as the 12 months making up a year or 1 revolution around the sun.
This is a record used for analog mediation.
Patterns tell us where we’re going.
Music is constructed out of patterns that communicate a reality beyond reason.
Our bodies pick up patterns from the outside world and tell us where to go. Most of this happens unconsciously. (Dancing)
The patterns of music map a reality that is beyond the finite mundane reality we mostly find ourselves in.
We sometimes get lost in the complex patterns that inhabit our reality.
We use the map or frame we receive from the patterns to inform us where we should move into the potential future territory.
A metronome is a tool to measure the patterns of music through space and time. Most of the time when we see a metronome, we don’t think twice about it. The complexity of the object is concealed from us. Technology reveals this concealment of complexity.
For example, surrealist painter Rene Magritte often took very mundane objects and depicted them in very unusual contexts. By doing this he was inviting the observer to look beyond the mundane perceptions of reality into the nearly infinite number of possibilities before us.
Reality is made from patterns and those patterns can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. Your mind is also made from patterns. The interaction between mind and matter creates an even more complex pattern. Reality is the interaction between layers of patterns. Reality is made from what matters to us personally and the physical matter that conceals it. Music helps us understand this interaction through layers of patterns that produce a meaningful signal that not even the most nihilistic person can deny.
The world is a complex place of patterns.
Existence is created out of an infinitely vast hierarchy of patterned landscapes.
“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense.”
— C.G. Jung
This is an unfinished drawing of a bust of Moses, the tree of life, the living word, and the fall, these symbols represent the changing of seasons in the eternal recurrence we call the human condition.
Everything is mediated by the language, the logos, the code, the algorithm, and the map of meaning.
Take the word “tree” for example, there is a whole system of identifiers beneath the word that gives it deeper meaning. Images, paintings, photos, poems, essays, and conversations about a tree are simulacra to the tree. The tree is nested inside a forest of trees. The deeper meanings form a rhizomatic root structure beneath the tree connecting and communicating messages with the ground beneath it.
The meaning doesn’t come from the tree in itself but from the human relationship with the tree.
The eternally recurring season of Fall represents the circular growth, decay, and unfolding of things throughout time.
As time unfolds, we become richer and richer in “sense”.
I drew these pictures separately before I went to university, I didn’t know what these drawings meant to me at the time I drew them.
Things unfold in the process of Becoming.
The meaning of the picture grows in resolution throughout time.
The circular view of time was taken up by Friedrich Nietzsche in his conception of the eternal recurrence.
The hermeneutic circle is always intriguing because there is never a decisive answer.
The interpretation of Being is an indicator of Becoming.
“Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below; just as trees never grow from the sky downward but upward from the earth, however, it is true that their seeds have fallen from above.”
— C.G. Jung
Spectacular!
Simulacra and Simulation is a book written in 1981 by Jean Baudrillard. It has inspired generations of film, music, and novels.
A simulacrum is a copy or representation of something, (a pictogram, a letter, a sound, a gesture, a signifier)
The simulation in Baudrillard’s view is the technological virtual world we are all plugged into.
We live in a world where Netflix, YouTube, Tik Tok, and Instagram define our lives. We spend our time searching for simulated portals wherein the material substrate (The Real) disappears, and we are transported into a floating bubble of symbolic exchange. (Flow)
What’s interesting about these hyper-real portals is their ability to depict reality better than reality itself can.
Technology has liberated us from the pharaohs who had once enslaved us but once we have been liberated, we are forced to ask who we are.
We are condemned to the desert of the real searching for the promised land.
In the Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord describes the spectacle as a worldview that permeates all of society. Social media is a great example of spectacle.
The medium of Instagram is a machine that is constantly refreshing and constantly needs to be refreshed to mediate the spectacle of society.
The spectacle is not interested in the subtleties, complexities, or contradictions of reality. The spectacle is only interested in simplified monosyllabic simulacra.
The meta-crisis is a systemic interweaving of many crises.
The environmental crisis, political crisis, mental health crisis, and so on and so forth.
Culture is at a bifurcation moment wherein it will either break-down or break-through.
For culture to exist we must live in a similar collective imaginary. The internet affords a nearly infinite semantic collective which has never before been possible.
Culture is constantly breaking down and rebuilding itself. How do we as conscious co-creators mend the collective imaginary?
Traditionally, God played the role of the ultimate authority, but as Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed, God is dead, and we have killed him. Science then took the role of the ultimate authority. But we are now realizing that even though science is a social construct, that science does not have every answer. The market then slips in the back door and acts as an anchor for ultimate authority.
The market is an incredibly strong human invention. That being said, it has become a guiding star in all sorts of areas where it is not suitable to be.
Money and water, for example, are two fundamentally different ontological things.
If we as a collective came together and said, we no longer need water we could not do it. But, if we came together and said we no longer need money, we want a new mechanism to allocate the goods in society, we could do it.
At a certain level, the distinction between money and water is very important but on another, they are both parts of one interconnected system.
The complexification of systems affords the break-through to new potentially integral ways of Being-in-the-world.
We are at a very critical point in history where we must take a collective leap of faith to become collective conscious co-creators of a future that works for us.
Making sense together
“Water is great and all, it helped our ancestors survive, but with today’s technology we don’t really need it anymore.”
The rate at which the world is complexifying is exponentially increasing with today’s technology. We are taking in a massive amount of personalized information at every moment of the day. How do we collectively make sense of all this data when we are not all receiving the same signals?
We have a whole ecosystem of information coming in from all sorts of sources, marketing, government, advertising campaigns, peers, social media, etc. We use this information to make sense of the world and make choices for our future.
We hope that the information surrounding us is mostly true so we can make well-informed choices. But what happens when our information ecosystem has become damaged by bad actors?
The signals we receive at any given moment are mostly strategic.
Currently, the game is tilted towards a rivalrous win-lose dynamic. When our information ecology is guided by the gain of capital, the distortion and withholding of information for personal gain becomes incentivized. The withholding of relevant information is a pollution of the information ecology.
To combat this war on sensemaking we should detect as much signal as possible from the noise before agreeing with the information we are receiving. Take a step back, frame, contemplate, and share.
This is the last poster from a series of posters I’ve created surrounding the topic of self-transcendence for a self-directed project in my GD4 class at OCAD U.
Game A is the way we have always done things as humans, it is a finite, centralized, extraction, win-lose, based game.
The mindset surrounding the alternative, game B, is an infinite, decentralized, sustainable, win-win, based game.
A triangular black monolith is suspended in front of the two explorers standing along the great frontier.
It’s my hope that through art we can transform into the game B mindset.
The theoretical concept is based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conception of “Language Games” and Soren Kierkegaard’s conception of the finite and the infinite.
In Hebrew, the phrase Abracadabra means “I will create as I speak.”
The meta-narrative of this series references Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of the eternal return and the circular nature of time. This is why I am posting the last poster, first.