Category: Art

Art

Waking Life (2001)

Dreams. What are they? An escape from reality or reality itself? Waking Life follows the dream(s) of one man and his attempt to find and discern the absolute difference between waking life and the dreamworld. While trying to figure out a way to wake up, he runs into many people on his way; some of which offer one sentence asides on life, others delving deeply into existential questions and life’s mysteries. We become the main character. It becomes our dream and our questions being asked and answered. Can we control our dreams? What are they telling us about life? About death? About ourselves and where we come from and where we are going? The film does not answer all these for us. Instead, it inspires us to ask the questions and find the answers ourselves.

The making of Epiphytes | Tully Arnot and Monica Gagliano

Artist Tully Arnot’s latest work, EPIPHYTES, is a multi-sensory virtual reality experience exploring plant communication, posthumanism and alternate forms of perception. To create EPIPHYTES, Arnot partnered with evolutionary biologist Monica Gagliano, who pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own ‘voices’ and detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. Her work has extended the concept of cognition (including perception, learning processes, memory) in plants. The pair spoke about Arnot’s practice and why he chose VR as a medium to express his ideas, and discussed the importance of slowing down, ‘listening’ to, and looking more closely at the communication lines and biological relationships that exist in the plant kingdom as a means of altering the way we perceive our world.

Cosmic creativity — how art evolves consciousness: Alex Grey at TEDxMaui 2013

Visionary artist Alex Grey began his career as a medical illustrator at Harvard Medical School, but is best known for paintings that present the physical and subtle anatomy of an individual in the context of cosmic, biological and technological evolution. His work has been featured in Time and Newsweek, on the Discovery Channel, and as album art for TOOL, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana.