Not only do computer, video, and laser technologies promise to transform our notion of reality on a conceptual level, they also reveal paradoxes in the physical world that transcend and remake our perception of that phenomenon as well. A glimpse of the future of expanded cinema might be found in such recent phenomena as the spherical mirror developed by the Los Angeles chapter of E.A.T. for the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka. Although it developed from the synergetic technologies of computer science and poly-vinyl-chloride (PVC) plastics, it is triumphantly nontechnical as an experience. It's just a mirror— a mirror that is nearly two-thirds of a sphere made of 13,000 square feet of air-inflated mirrorized mylar one-thousandth of an inch thick. It is ninety feet in diameter and fi fty-five feet high, and weighs approximately 250 pounds.
There have been other mirrorized mylar (or PVC) spherical tensile structures, notably the Pageos and Echo satellites. But they weren't constructed as mirrors per se and, of course, one could not enter them. Thus once again, as in the case of City-Scape, we see that humanity's most ambitious venture into the frontiers of reality— the space program— contributes to the expansion of the world of art: both are efforts to comprehend larger spectra of experience.
Essentially a full-scale model of the pavilion mirror that later was constructed in Japan, E.A.T.'s sensuous, transcendentally surrealistic mirror-womb was revealed to the world in September, 1969, in a cavernous blimp hangar in Santa Ana, California. There, sustained in 210-degrees of space and anchored by 60,000 pounds of water in two circular tubes at its base, was a gateway to an open empire of experiential design information available to the artist. An astonishing phenomenon occurs inside this boundless space that is but one of many revelations to come in the Cybernetic Age: one is able to view actual holographic images of oneself floating in three-dimensional space in real time as one moves about the environment.
Hemispherical mirror developed by the Los Angeles Chapter of Experiments in Art and Technology for the Peps-iCola Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. Shown in a blimp hangar at the Marine Corps Air Station, Santa Ana, California.
Specifications: 13,000 square feet of mirrorized mylar 1/1000th of an inch thick, air-inflated to a 210-degree hemisphere, ninety feet in diameter and fifty-five feet high. Photo: David MacDermott.
Because the mirror is spherical no lenses or pinhole light sources are necessary: the omni-directionally-reflecting light waves intersect at an equidistant focal point, creating real images without laser light or hardware of any kind. Interfaced with perpetual fog banks and krypton laser rainbow light showers at the World Exposition, the mirror indeed "exposed" a world of expanded cinema in its widest and most profound significance.
The accelerating transformations of radical evolution often generate illusions of impending disaster: hence the overriding sense of paranoia that seems to cloud the new consciousness as we thrust toward the future. Yet surely some revelation is at hand. In 1920 W. B. Yeats (in his poem "The Second Coming") saw that things were falling apart: "The falcon cannot hear the falconer; /... the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,... / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
Yeats didn't know what was coming, and thus like all of us he feared it. But in assigning Bethlehem as its birthplace he suggested that we were to be visited by a savior, however fearsome. That savior is technoanarchy and he is born out of the industry of man's ignorance, in spite of our petty copulations, in contradistinction to our minor misbehaviors. The term anarchy is defined as "a political theory... advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups... a utopian society having no government and made up of individuals who enjoy complete freedom." The biologist John Bleibtreu is an anarchist, then, when he speaks of “… a new sustaining myth which corre-sponds to reality... this new mythology which is being derived from the most painstaking research into other animals, their sensations and behavior, is an attempt to reestablish our losses— to place ourselves anew within an order of things, because faith in an order is a requirement of life."4 Yesterday, man needed officialdom in order to survive. But technology has reversed the process: survival today depends on the emergence of a natural order. Thus we see that anarchy and order are one, because history is demonstrating that officialdom is no order at all.
Technology is the only thing that keeps man human. We are free in direct relation to the effective deployment of our technology. We are slaves in direct relation to the effectiveness of our political leadership. (Herbert Read: "Effective leadership is fascism.") The world is populated by three-and-a-half-billion human slaves, forced by the masters of politics continually to prove our right to live. The old consciousness perpetuates myths in order to preserve the union; it reforms man to suit the system. The new consciousness reforms the system to suit man. Water takes the shape of its container. We have no basis for postulating a "human nature" until there's no difference between the individual and the system. We cannot ask man to respect his environment until this difference is erased. This is anarchy: seeking a natural order. It is technoanarchy because it will be realized only through the instrumented and documented intellect that we call technology.
"As they are extended into mythologies, metaphysical systems allow mankind the means to abide with mystery. Without a mythology we must deny mystery, and with this denial we can live only at great cost to ourselves. It seems that we are in the process of creating a mythology out of the raw materials of science in much the same way that the Greeks and Jews created their mythologies out of the raw materials of history."5
The limits of our language mean the limits of our world. A new meaning is equivalent to a new word. A new word is the beginning of a new language. A new language is the seed of a new world. We are making a new world by making new language. We make new language to express our inarticulate conscious. Our intuitions have flown beyond the limits of our language. The poet purifies the language in order to merge sense and symbol. We are a generation of poets. We've abandoned the official world for the real world. Technology has liberated us from the need of officialdom. Unlike our fathers we trust our senses as a standard for knowing how to act. There is only one real world: that of the individual. There are as many different worlds as there are men. Only through technology is the individual free enough to know himself and thus to know his own reality. The process of art is the process of learning how to think. When man is free from the needs of marginal survival, he will remember what he was thinking before he had to prove his right to live. Ramakrishna said that given a choice between going to heaven or hearing a lecture on heaven, people would choose the lecture. That is no longer true. Through the art and technology of expanded cinema we shall create heaven right here on earth.
3Cage, op. cit., p. 35.
4 Bleibtreu, op. cit., p. 8.
5Ibid., p. xi.