Art in the Age of Dreams, Pt 3

Also see:
Art in the Age of Dreams, Pt 1
Art in the Age of Dreams, Pt 2

I began sculpture by carving marble. After all the undergraduate academics it was hard to fathom I could earn an MFA simply by hitting a stone with a chisel. No thoughts were necessary. A purely intuitive process guided the development of the carving from beginning to end. It was an incredible liberation from thinking and intellect, like being freed from a deterministic prison. Spontaneous action opened up the heart and bypassed the mind.

Fast forward a decade. I became exposed to radionics and other alternative technologies and began experimenting with them artistically in Long Island City, NY. Fast forward another 15 years. A “lab” is set up in Rhode Island with Gordon Salisbury, a retired electrical engineer, and Todd Thille, a VJ, graphics designer and webmaster. We began doing sonic art experiments, conducting research and sharing our discoveries with artists, electronic music composers, anyone interested. One fascinating discovery was rock electricity, the capacity of certain stones to create very small voltages. We amplified and changed these voltages into pitch, and assigned them instruments. Rock Music. What emerged wasn’t just random notes; what exactly were the rocks expressing?

How can I describe the direction of this work? Science has difficulty investigating consciousness because it requires consciousness to do so, muddying the results. But what is Art, if not consciousness investigating itself? Are we not mining the substratum of the objective world, the forces at the core of consciousness? Artists also seek answers via experimentation often guided by vision, dream or trance. What if the source of all that inspiration was, in fact, emerging right out of the earth below our feet?

∞

Our investigations led us to the work of T. Townsend Brown (1905-1985). From Brown we learned certain stones exhibit an electrical self-potential. Certain rocks will produce an electric current, even when properly shielded, in the millivolt range. Brown began his rock studies in 1931, then interrupted by the war, but he returned to these studies at the end of his life. Today Brown is remembered primarily for his controversial anti-gravity work for the US Navy. In a paper published in Psychic Observer, Brown stated:

In the case of rock, electricity, rectification from RF to DC presumably, takes place within the rock (as a solid-state function—like a transistor). The natural capacitance of the rock serves to store the rectified DC, so that more or less continuous output is observed. In a sense, the rock becomes a quasi–permanent electric dipole, or electret but, actually, is a continuous converter of energy received from its environment.

Many different rocks have been studied. Granite and dense lava rocks so far have shown the greatest voltage output. Rocks, containing lead, or other heavy metals seem to indicate that the electrical output is a function of mass (which is to be expected if the effect is gravitational).

Gordon and I tested many types of rock under various conditions. The important point Brown stresses is the relationship of electricity to gravity. Low frequency gravitational waves (LFGW) were postulated by Einstein in 1915 but not officially “discovered” until very recently. The source of these low-frequency gravitational waves is believed to originate in supermassive black hole binaries in the very early universe.

Writing about gravitational waves, author Robert Lee adds: “These waves are often likened to an orchestra, where spacetime ‘rings like a gently struck bell”.

Of interest is this “bell sound,” which has great precedent in meditation disciplines. The Surat Shabd Yoga traditions purport to connect the human soul, Surat, to the Shabd, the primordial sound of the universe. In this yoga, hearing the ‘bell sound’ marks a significant juncture between inner worlds, if properly accessed through meditation. We found it fascinating that Brown believed he was detecting remnants of these frequencies in stone.

To continue Brown’s thesis:

Rocks also have a wide variety of cyclic patterns, the phasing of which differs from one rock to another. The interpretation of this phenomenon might be that the gravitational (wave) spectral band (RF) to which each individual rock is attuned is slightly different. Hence, each rock senses only that portion of the very broad spectrum of the ambient flux (from space) to which it is resonant. The effect is similar to radio receivers tuned to different frequencies.

Our artist takeaway from Brown was to sonify these rock frequencies. Using stones with the electrical self-potential as described by Brown, we translated each rock’s electrical fluctuations into pitch, and then via computer, assigned the pitch to instruments.

Brown informs us that:

Studies of telluric electricity, as related to individual rocks, have revealed the existence of electrical self-potential. The true source of this energy is not now known, but the fact that the electrical output of rocks undergoes diurnal cycles, sidereal cycles and secular variations indicate that the energy has a cosmic origin. One might express it—that the rocks of the Earth may actually be “tapping cosmic energy.” 

In our lab, our electronics expert Gordon Salisbury made his own chart of the diurnal cycles and secular variations of the rocks we were studying, confirming Brown’s observations. Of continuing interest was the apparent link these small millivolt readings had to enormous cosmic events.

Probing deeper into how small discoveries could nonetheless contain world changing possibilities, T.T. Brown asserts:

In recent years, scientists have speculated on the possibility, predicted by Einstein, that gravitational waves are generated by stellar explosions, rotation of binary stars, and the gravitational collapse of stellar masses into so-called ‘black holes’. Gravitational radiation, constituting a whole new spectrum equivalent to the electromagnetic spectrum, is bathing the earth from every direction. There is evidence that this extremely penetrating radiation may be coming with greatest intensity from the centers of gravity, including our own galaxy. It passes, in large measure, completely through the earth. The total energy may be enormous, even equaling the total radiation of light and heat. Why is it that massive or dense materials act to intercept this radiation from space and transform it into electricity is not now known. One may say it is a process and analogous to the conversion of light into electricity, as in the photo cell, but this is a new technology and very little is known about it.” [Brown later filed for preliminary patent specifications and claims in 1953 for an Electro-gravitational Communication System technology.]

T. Townsend Brown’s theories about rock electricity are startling. Could rocks exhibit properties and capacities we haven’t understood or appreciated? Could their electricity power micro-electronic circuits? What can the sonic expression of these voltages tell us about Nature? Is Brown correct in suggesting certain rocks are tapping energy from a whole new electro-magnetic spectrum derived from gravitational force? Is low frequency gravitational radiation stemming from colliding black holes in the heart of spacetime actually being expressed in rock electricity? Is it conceivable when these rock voltages were assigned instruments, we were hearing musical notation from a conscious primordial resonance?

∞

Anyone can experiment with rock electricity. Attach the probe of a common voltmeter to a rock to see if it is generating electricity in the millivolt range. For more precise experimentation, it helps if the rock is shielded from external RF contamination by a Faraday cage. Ironically, the millivolt output of rock happens to be in the same spectrum as brainwaves.

Using a brainwave hardware/software technology called IBVA, designed by Masahiro Kahata, we were able to translate the minute current fluctuations in the rock into both graphic output and pitch, and then assign the rock a selective instrument. This allowed the rocks to ‘play’ a violin or cello, an electric organ, or any other instrument within the software’s set of parameters.

“Rock Star” video

Sounds of Unseen Worlds CD, Bandcamp

Electronic musician and composer Steve Nalepa introduced our work to many of his friends: Benton Bainbridge, Brian Kane, John Lario, David Last, Justin Boreta, Richard Devine, Josh Kay, Michele Darling, Terry Golob, Sariah Storm, Brendan Angelides, David Lublin, Josh Randall, Jamie Watts and others. Visits of these artists to our sound lab in Rhode Island was educational and entertaining. Most had expertise in Ableton Live and other platforms, and in John Lario’s case, lasers. Combined with our equipment, these artists took rock and plant electricity into orchestrated compositions and powered laser light displays. 

Of interest is the role rock and plant electricity provides the composer. Sonic sources completely beyond the composers equipment and individual skills become available inexpensively. A rock can function as instrument in the composer’s hands, but it can also can be considered an autonomous co-creator. Once assigned an instrument or algorithm, the rock will ‘perform’ entirely on its own. Rocks can also play different instruments in combination with plants. (Plants produce millivolt output in the same range as rock).

In the course of our research, I wanted to believe Brown, that these small rock voltages were generated deep within the cosmos, possibly through gravitational waves being captured by rock mass. We had assigned those voltages musical instruments, and enabled more complex sonic composition via technology. Two questions remained, was information also passing through the sonic output from “deep within the cosmos”? If so, how to decode it? Accessing the science to get a firm answer was beyond our capacity, but wouldn’t we like to know? 

If the message was joy, we got it!

∞

Petroglyphs or cup carvings, placebo trials, powerful encounters with contemporary art or radionic instruments, all employ a significator: an object, symbol, tool or device through which the transaction takes place. Consciousness, guided by intent, gets translated into results in the external world. The line between placebo, technology and art gets blurred when it comes to describing the actual role of the significator.

I wrote Brian and asked him what triggered him to create his symbols that I recalled from so long ago? He said he was basically driven to produce and refine these glyphs; adding,

Against all modern theory, I believe that our presence goes very far back in time, towards a point of origin that can also be conceived as a point in an alternate dimension. From what I have been shown, we human beings have existed before the human body, in its current form, had even been imagined. We are the witnesses to the half-formed dream life of the Absolute. It is our job to lift relics from the bottom of the ocean.

I took Brian’s statement to mean the glyphs’ had a design function within his consciousness. Their origin was buried deep within both his memory and the cosmos. By excavating them from the depths of his being, Brian’s glyphs functioned as a significator for personal transformation.

There it was; the point of origin, the cupule carved on the rock. Our “presence” or consciousness, beyond human, suddenly self-observed, making its first mark, the first significator, the device/artwork emerging from a dimension beyond the known, birthing the creative impulse.