Lowry Burgess – « Prelude, Fugue, Choraal and Descant » on « Releasement » Theme of Martin Heidegger: Linkages between Earth and Space through « Zero Gravity » – 2004

Abstract

The phenomenology of zero-gravity consciousness is central to the author’s artwork and thinking. In this paper he will discuss the direct corollary of Heidegger’s philosophy of « releasement » or disengagement (Gelassenheit) to the many reports of artists and others in the experiencing of zero-gravity or micro-gravity. This nexus of disengagement and releasement is a precondition to the a exploration of nascent aesthetic formulations that are inherent to zero gravity or released experience.

The author calls for new networks of large university, institutional, and space agency support in Europe, Asia, India, as well as involving the cultural potentials of the International Space Station. These « ground-to-zero-gravity linkages » need to be explored in a variety of settings and conditions involving new communications technologies to build broader educational and cultural participation.

Carnegie Mellon University, through its STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, as well as with the recent appointment of Frank Pietronigro, Director of the Zero Gravity Consortium, to the Fellowship, is fostering a much wider participation among the space art community, NASA, as well as with the inauguration in June of a new Institute by Interdisciplinary Programs of Carnegie Mellon University. The Institute, called the Sparta Institute, in Sparta, Greece, is a creative experiment in interdisciplinary integration based on the ideas of Martin Heidegger expressed in his Conversations on a Country Path. The project will link the ground-based philosophy of disengagement to micro-gravity disengagement in the parabolic flight in an effort to open wider horizons for the direct and indirect experiences of zero-gravity consciousness to an interdisciplinary group of young students, artists and experts.

The author will conclude with a brief description of his own artwork for micro gravity flight, Moments in the Infinite Absolute. The Seed of the Infinite Absolute will float in micro-gravity above Greece generating brilliant flashes of light as it transits from O G to 2Gs. It is formed by an elaborate series of processes and distillations over the past 25 years.

* * * * *

I used to have dreams when I was a kid
that I’d go running down the street and
jump up in the air and go flying and
just fly through the air all by myself.
That’s what weightlessness is like.

Robert Gibson

This « prelude, fugue, choral and descant » is based on the harmonic integration of four modes of « disengagement »: meditative consciousness, zero gravity, cyber/interactive telepresence and creative practice. It also includes a harmonization comprising an aesthetic of zero gravity and zero space disengagement and releasement.

For the past 50 years the many disconnects between ecstatic experiences with zero gravity and the earth-bound habits that bind us have isolated much of the advanced perception sensing of our species from general culture. The question has become: How to lift the earth into unfettered freedom and bring ecstatic experience to earth — how to communicate and evolve the experiences, knowledge and precedents that have emerged from outer space into the transformation of earthbound culture at its evolutionary edges: in space law, science, technology, communications, extra-terrestrial resources and importantly, here at this conference, the arts?

Illuminating both earth « releasement » and zero gravity « disengagement » is a philosophical text by Martin Heidegger written in 1944-45 at the dawn of the Space Age. In Conversations on a Country Path on Thinking [1] first published in German in 1958, Heidegger articulates a type of meditative thought, a process and philosophy of what he calls « releasement » (Gelassenheit), a disengaged floating openness of human consciousness that is crucial in the creative process evolving from the thought of Meister Eckhart. There is a direct corollary between Heidegger’s philosophy of « releasement » or disengagement (Gelassenheit) and the many reports of artists and scientist/astronauts in the experience of zero-gravity or micro-gravity. The phenomenology of zero gravity confronts consciousness and the entirety of mind and body with a fundamental disengagement and subsequent release into a state of levitation. Reciprocally, whenever high states of consciousness are achieved on earth, we experience ecstasis: the sensation of floating, or in extreme cases, even physical levitation has been reported. This disengaged consciousness is characteristic of high states of creativity or inspiration and can be read in the many biographies of important creators. This correspondence is the anti-gravitational core around which this « fugue » is composed.

In Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking Heidegger begins the journey toward « releasement » (Gelassenheit) by the negation of and disengagement from will and willing, a releasement that is « not effected » not willed, but let in, let into a disengaged « region » where we await in a non-doing, patient abiding. It is a region where we wait and abide and that gradually opens toward a broad horizon becoming an enchanted region in which everything belonging there rests, reconciled to itself. This region gathers to itself as if nothing were happening, freely turning towards itself letting everything merge and float, guided by their own gravitational nature, pulled overall by the coming forth of truth’s transcendent nature. This truth also simultaneously abides in the origin of ones own essential nature and in a transcendental otherness. Here a floating released region of newly integrated truth reveals integrative being, unfolding within time.

This experience of relationships among people, things and disciplines is in a free-space or what Heidegger calls a « released region » or more specifically his « regioning of thought ». This sense of « free-space » is critical counterbalance to our world’s more and more rigid adherence to outmoded methodologies and ideologies. Opening up such free-space dialogues both in outer space, on earth and within social and institutional relationships is an essential agenda for this time. Opening up a profound depth of monologue and bringing that depth of self-communication into a broader social and political dialogue is essential to the perception of a larger, more universal humanity, established beyond international institutions where an essential humanity resides as an « inexhaustible demand », a transcendent category that Jacques Derrida so brilliantly articulates in Giovanna Borrodori’s book Philosophy in a Time of Terror [2]. Derrida maintains that transcendent humanity confronts us with an impossible demand, an « impossible experience », in the gap between existing societies and the ultimate human futurity. The experience of Heidegger’s « regioning »- the transcendent lifting pull of truth conforms to Derrida’s « impossible experience ». It is our « released » monologue with this transcendent truth, always futuring that is the levitational pull that disengages and frees. The internal monologue responding to its internal call must engender an intense dialogue with the other (another time, another society, another person) in the impossible and continuous promise of utopia, making us responsible for the future in the other and in oneself– while at the same time finding oneself in the other’s future. This commanding essence resides within our philosophical meditation on levitation, disengagement, releasement (Gelassenheit) and its return to the double gravitational demand of broad based individual and social responsibility, the micro-gravitational flickering in and out of the absolute from 1G to 0Gs, to 1G, to 2Gs and back to 1G, a gravitational axis between release toward transcendent truth and the gravitational weight of incarnate responsibility. Simply put, the philosophical process of « releasement » or « Gelassenheit » brings about a reciprocal weight or responsibility within a generalized reality. Releasement engenders a node of increased pull upon the mesh of our individual and social realities.

Since the early nineteen sixties, Heidegger’s text has existed behind our thought, actions and art. We (including a large group of Sky Artists at and around the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT initiated by Otto Piene) have pursued levitational freeing releasement into the sky, the release from both internal and external « gravities » in our art, pedagogical research and experiments, conferences and gatherings as well as Sky Art Manifestos. We have further seen this disembodiment in our many experiments with disengaged cyber and virtual realities within the global communications sphere over the past 25 years both at MIT and at Carnegie Mellon University (The DAX group, Digital Art eXchange organized by Bruce Breland with artist friends at Carnegie Mellon and around the world). Through many global telecommunications events we all experienced a constant sense of cyber and virtual disengagment and release, we have seen elements of a vocabulary of the art of disengaged body/consciousness. More recently, we have experimented with such « astral » dislocations in our work with interactive telepresence and remote sensing. The conditions exist to integrate these technologies and contexts in a more extensive and continuous framework at every level and to connect and communicate this shared extraordinary experience among ourselves and with our broader communities more intensively.

Now, we are expanding the call for sites and resources that more profoundly integrate these disengaged and released experiences with zero gravity experience within our academic, research and cultural institutions and to set a philosophy with this complex assembly of technologies and institutions that link us in a profound purpose.

You experience a strange dreamlike
sensation of freedom. You can spread
out your arms and legs as if soaring in
the clouds.

Valeri Kubasov

What follows is an aesthetic improvisation on the « releasement » theme — thoughts concerning the creation of a telepresent, zero-gravity, earth-linked, studio/muse-eum aboard the International Space Station and the kinds of emergent meanings and feelings that might present themselves in conjunction with the interactive telepresence experimentation. I have previously called this new culture-space topology the 3rd Space, or « body and garden in zero state » in which the embodied becomes disembodied and the disembodied becomes embodied.

(Imagining such a place or « space station » of disengagement and art’s relationship to it is not new to humans. To mention one such example, I point to the temple complex at Delphi, the temenos of Apollo, the solar divinity around whom the artful muses flocked and competed. The Temple of Apollo at Delphi is a highly technical and exact integration of « energies »- geomantic, celestial, chemical, aesthetic, psychological and political with the precise intention of providing the complex integration through which the Pythia or prophetess of Delphi could enter into dialogue with Apollo and prophetically speak to the entire Greco-Mediterranean world from the depths of primordially divine reality for nearly twelve hundred years.)

Now returning to some of the tremendous transformations demanding a new aesthetics:

1. The new infinite cosmology, « the open universe, infinite »

2. Life as a universal presence–Mars, and beyond

3. DNA–control of life forms, cloning, inside out reversals–DNA controlled life–life is now controlling DNA, agro-genetics

4. The computer combined with global communications systems, the simultaneous cyber-communications sphere

5. Brain re-forming chemistry alters mind/body relationships

6. Internal and external robotics–the micro/macro machine

7. Shared dream-culture, a lucid dreaming, within the communications sphere

8. Simultaneous interactive telepresence and remote multi-sensing

Zero gravity’s effect is not what one would assume from conceptual thought or seeming reason. When I observe interactions in zero gravity, it has surprised me that zero gravity appears as an energy that flows through things causing them to live and grow out, to fan out with new potentialities! Zero gravity energy flows through and out and so doing pulls things inside-out! It manifests as a vital energy, a grace that lives and moves. It is powerful in all its transformations — its disengagement and releasement requires new topological relationships. It is demandingly vital!

This zero gravity vitality disengages and releases a new topological image: that of the new, zero state, mind/ body/context, dominated by inversions, reversals and inside-outedness. These body/context changes are archetypal, and assembled as a whole; represent a new paradigm, a new surface and form. For example, the natural and the human have been displaced, inverted, as if the body were turned inside-out. Both body and nature are combined in a 4th dimensional « Kline Bottle ». (A Kline Bottle is a mathematical topology where the inside and outside are one continuous infinite surface.) In this metaphor, mind/body/nature creates an infinite skin/landscape, an infinite surface for the newly blooming body, an infinite, 4th dimensional, « Kline bottle » body. This « body » and its surrounding surface constitutes a new « garden » or zone of potential, an intimate region of mutual exaltation–where nature and the human exalt each other. Now, the unknowable wilderness is at our core, surrounded by nature, which is now within the body–all surrounded by the mind and its struggles to form meaning. Further still, this inversion becomes infinitely extensive becoming the layers of an infinite and continuous surface– the skin/landscape–an intimate and infinite « Garden » wherein gravity locked time becomes unfettered and unfolds itself as a flower of petals of simultaneous times.

In this disengaged zero-gravity garden, communications networks both inward biological and outward technological, become complex holographic mirrors that image the largest axiologies of culture, producing an interference pattern that gives rise to new gestalts, feeding back upon our fundamental psychic processes. What is most radical is the multifaceted flowing and multidirectional dynamism that inhabits this holistically interactive mesh with its communicative and expressive power — a new intimate poetics — new forms addressing existential necessities, i.e., redemption, propitiation, liberation, transcendence and ecstasy. What we need is to extract the particulars from the structures that are being shown– to see the larger forms, the archetypal « organisms » of this new aesthetic reality. In the zero state one floats among these blinding, seemingly random, highly significant stroboscopic flashes. This newly evolving drama is flickering back and forth between the intimate sensorial field of mental life and externalized physical substance, energy and society. In this interface, we can enter a more flowing relationship between the mind and sensorial physicality, a communicative, interactive multi-draft, multi-drift « garden » constituting its own new forms, structures and contents. Images and words, music and sounds, gestures and touch, do not live comfortably in this disengaged, zero gravity reality. They want to be more dynamic, more rapid, more explorative, and inquisitive; they want to be more democratic, more synaesthetic, more polyvalent, more free-associative. This new framework demands a de-gestalting and fragmentation– then a re-assembly on another plane of consciousness. It requires entirely new image formulations — dynamic, hieroglyphic and synaesthetic in nature– all in a mutual « inter-relational » mesh filled with new aesthetic meanings to be formed by artistic effort.

This provocative condition requires artistically original plots, narratives and choreographs — a new kinesthetic and dramaturgy. New artistic/poetic invention fashions and explores, together with the new technologies and techniques, an expressive, intimate, synaesthetic/multi-sensory consciousness evolving within a vibrant mesh of actions and events pulled by a tremendously vital anti-gravitational force toward the integration of the senses in synesthesia driven by the desire (even addiction) for higher coherence in 4D, « zero gravity », released consciousness.

In our imagined floating telepresence, zero-gravity « studio » is the image of a new infinite skin/landscape, a skin-scape both body and nature in one –all eye, all ear, all touch…. all synaesthetic, dynamic–moving; having all sensory powers simultaneously. This skin/scape flows as a dynamic surface of inverted relationships where the wilderness of the unknown or unknowable is the core layer, sandwiched by the inverted layers of body/nature, laminated between outer layers of the mind— an entasis and ecstasis in one surface. It embodies the disembodied and disembodies the embodied. This « zero-point-in-zero-gravity » is folding us, turning us inside out, and inverting all things in a relational ecology.

At the conference in Paris, I had suggested that we do not know what the genome wishes to become in zero gravity. Certainly, most of the physical and mental structures that have evolved to enable the genome in gravity will become superfluous in zero gravity. What is it that life is to become in the zero gravity garden, this zero 3rd Space? What does this evolution imply for the evolving dialogue with such a gravity formed creature as ourselves? In this reality the human body, with all its meaning and history, becomes enfolded and engulfed, swallowing all external society and nature in its gravitation – totally inverted and pulled inside-out, flowing through the zero space-zero gravity garden of releasement. Surely, within this evolving experience reside new emotions and feelings, a plenum for a newly emerging aesthetic framework for many artists and collaborators to articulate and develop in conjunction with the invention of new technologies and science of the magneto-gravitational spectrum.

Weightlessness comes on abruptly. I
Soared as if I were inside a soap bubble —
Like an infant in the womb of my
Spacecraft, still a child of my mother Earth.

Miroslav Hermaszewski

Recently, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, through the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry in the College of Fine Arts, we are initiating a « zero gravity » focus by the invitation of Frank Pietronigro to be a Fellow of the STUDIO, the Zero Gravity Consortium. It is our hope that within the university we can develop a broader institutional context for artists and other academics in various disciplines and centers to involve young artists/scholars with the domain of « disengaged/released » research and projects, consciousness and culture.

This June, parallel with the activity in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, we are initiating the Sparta Institute in Sparta, Greece, to provide a site for our interdisciplinary pedagogical experiments. Integrated among the projects of the Sparta Institute is the linkage of the ground-based philosophy of « disengagement » to micro-gravity disengagement in the parabolic flight in an effort to open wider horizons for the direct and indirect experiences of zero-gravity consciousness to an interdisciplinary group of young students, artists and experts. The Institute is devoted to forming new integrations as well as the new creative tasks that will be discovered.

We anticipate the linkage of a micro-gravity flight to ground-based « disengagement », to explore new kinds of linkages between earthly « disengagement » and micro-gravity « disengagement » through the Studio for Creative Inquiry and other related disciplines and centers where we can evolve the art, the projects, curricula, networks and archives for the enhancement of zero gravity, « released » creativity where new groups of artists and students can experience a more coherent process of development than has been the experience of the past. It is our hope that other such affiliations and centers for our art can be developed and evolve in the near future.

Further, we propose the development of new networks of university, and other institutional support in Europe, Asia, India, and the US connected with ESA, JAXA, NASA and other space agencies and facilities for the integration and fusion of zero gravity with cyber telepresence to explore the domain of « disengaged » creativity.

Beyond these specific institutional initiatives, we can imagine, and in fact propose, the creation of a Zero Gravity Studio/Muse-eum within the complex of the International Space Station that exists in a continuous relationship with existing and emerging ground-based, zero gravity facilities, (micro-gravity flights, floatation tanks, various types of telescopes, or VR/telepresence and cyber-levitation facilities, remote touching, hearing and seeing technologies, immersion reality environments and technologies, etc.). What is required is the continuous creative experience in a state of disengagement ascertaining what it is that we are to become, both on earth and in the heavens — in a state of mutual integration.

It tells you something about your relationship to this things we call life. So that’s a change. That’s something new and when you come back there’s a difference in that world now. There’s a difference in that relationship between you and the planet and you and all those other forms of life on that planet, because you have had that kind of experience. It’s a difference and it’s so precious.

Russell Schweickart

In a lifetime of artwork for and in, as well as referring to outer space or the cosmos, Moments in the Infinite Absolute, is now prepared for a micro-gravity flight. Within these inspired states of both Heidegger’s « Gelassenheit« , or in moments of intuition, inspiration or seizure, resides the connection to a transcendent truth radiant around the Absolute. Often the experience of zero gravity engenders a profound sense of connection between the inmost intimacy and outermost objectivity, a coincidencia oppositorum, a fusion of opposites — a deep inward and outward truth or inspiration linked. In this in-folding, through truth itself, is glimpsed an apprehension of the Absolute in its shining balance and perfection.

Moments in the Infinite Absolute is a preparatory micro- gravity « event » before the placement of two twin seed-like forms, the Seeds of the Infinite Absolute at the edges of terrestrial infinities: in the high chill of the Antarctic Pole and in the dark pressured Vitaj Depths in the Marianas Trench, the abyss of the Pacific Ocean. These « seeds » are to be placed in relation to the vast construction of artworks called the Quiet Axis that has been formed during the past 36 years. In their micro-gravity flight the Seeds of the Infinite Absolute will float up from the hands that are holding them into micro-gravity generating brilliant flashes of light as they transit from O G, 1G to 2Gs. (Their doubled weight is as important to their relation to the absolute as is its weightlessness, e.g. the analogue to the Absolute’s hyper density, its enormous incarnational responsibility.) The zero gravity moment is the equant or balanced absolute moment, the « Seed » in its absolute state.

The twined forms are formed by an elaborate series of processes and distillations that have been performed over the past 25 years. The shell that contains the essential emulsion, a geometrically complex, hand size « seed » is a fusion of the 12 « royal » metals. It contains the emulsion of the essences of 44 trees, 52 flowers, 36 waters, 32 bloods and 120 telepathic hopes. Each sample represents the entire earth– each implicates infinities of time and space. All are unified into an essential hand-held form to be « released » to the flashing stroboscopic edge of its absolute state in micro-gravity and double gravity. The hands are equal formed partners with the « Seeds » and integral to these Moments in the Absolute.

The Seed’s release from the hands and their falling back into double gravity signals to the « touching » primordial base of consciousness. All consciousness is based on touching contact. Touch is primary and underlies all other sensory development. The senses evolve or branch from the base sensation of touch or contact, and, in particular, the hand is a focal organ in the broadly distributed sense of touch spread out in the vast organism of the skin. It is the world touching us and we touching the world that is basic to consciousness. It is the ever changing contact with the environment or other, caused by the event of living, which finally synergized human consciousness. Reciprocally, it is this ever-changing-ness that redefines the inner consciousness of our organism laying the basis for the reflexivity of consciousness.

In this blinking back and forth, rising from the hands and falling back into the hands, between micro-gravity and macro-gravity, the « Seeds » flash in their equant absolute reality and gather its nature to be implicated at the edges of our earthly world and to the inward edges of our consciousness.

I am led by the double implications of infinity to the domain of the Absolute. The dream of double infinities, that all infinities are 2n leads me to this edge, gateway or domain so completely establishing itself in my sensibility, as if a background surface from which echoes of ephemera resonate, and yet which stands so flamingly and flashingly on my retinal heart. It is at once warm and creamy as it surrounds and flows while at the same time an unbearable light, blinding and painful, and yet so, so very distant objective and serenely geometric, as if an inverted white cone. It both impels and attracts, both ontos and telos. It is toward this that I now face and step, measure by sublime measure awaiting the paralysis of insight inhabited by the terrors of William Blake’s symmetry and perfection yet confident in my own sense of the Absolute’s calm equant balance and pervasive securing warmth.

From the Introduction to On the Nature of the Absolute manuscript by Lowry Burgess

This short « prelude, fugue, choral, descant and finale » has briefly outlined a philosophical, aesthetic, institutional and artistic basis for a membrane that links, interconnects, integrates an extraordinary plenum and potential for human creativity and freedom within and among networked groups, institutions, facilities, etc. scattered around the world. It calls upon these, the world’s Space Community, its space agencies, research, academic and artistic institutions to extend a deep cultural hospitality to the arts and humanities within the scientific, technological and technical frameworks that exist — to engage in an imagining with and for the whole of humankind. It is my hope that the vast potentials we see will be enabled among us all by the generous and loving spirit that our life so deeply requires.