The Herstory or Story Behind My Site
By the time the Internet came on the scene, I already had a huge backlog of metaphysical, scientific, mythological, and therapeutic articles and fine arts graphics to share with the world. Out of the closet and into the digital archive they went at The Ionasphere and Synergetic Qabala. Since then I've continued building my webpresence, collaborating and publishing in a variety of venues, popular, artistic and scientific.

With the advent of the digital revolution art has jumped off the walls and into life. No longer is print art the preferred medium, as even in Soho permanent projector installations allow artists to display their art without the typical problems of shipping and receiving. Art without frames come in a variety of multimedia formats.

But art has jumped the canvas even further into real life modalities even beyond our former concepts of performance art. Life itself becomes the artful act on an ongoing basis. The body and oeuvre are only spheres of influence that extend further and further from the realm of actual exhibition.

Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,’ including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.

The beginning of the history of modern man traces back to primordial art, such as that found in the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. From the beginning, art spoke of magic, of the supernatural, of imagination: the fantastic and disturbing. Always strong in content and aesthetic sophistication, it grew, hand in glove, with the emergence of technological skills.

The emergence of art was and continues to be an unparalleled innovation, confronting our psyches with a giant leap in human evolution whose transformative influence continues opening and exploring brave new worlds to this day. Art has been a driving force and living thread woven into the fabric of society since modern man emerged.

‘Homo Negentrop’

Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop. Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species’ of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.

Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown’ (Jung) has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, and even more arcane forms.

Chaos theory has its ‘strange attractors’ that never settle down into any normal rhythm. The strange attractor dances to the innovative beat of a different drummer. Artists, particularly edge artists, function much like these chaotic attractors whose boundaries are deterministic yet unpredictable. They draw from beyond the personality, from transpersonal resources, and the wellspring of the collective human unconscious.

One doesn’t have a Muse; one serves one’s Muse. She comes and goes. In a sense, the artist is ‘ridden’ by the creative daemon that possesses him or her. That daemon, according to Socrates is one’s genius, a compelling force urging us to create.

Passion (drive) and pathos are reflected in the fact that if this daemon isn’t served, the artist can even become physically ill. Images, ideas and inspirations cry out to become manifested. Order or form yearns to be born from chaos; and those very acts of creation breed destruction of old systems.

The artistic life is a chaotic arc of inspiration upon inspiration, following the Muse. Artists walk what for others is ‘the road not taken’ (chaos theory’s bifurcation or forking), sometimes going ‘where angels fear to tread.’ Their charismatic influence pulls others into their orbits, and the small effect of one personality potentially spreads its influence over the world (butterfly effect), sometimes over history. The history of art is one of the richest threads of our cultural heritage.

Artists wriggle among many possibilities before settling into a project. We might take poetic license calling artists ‘beautiful attractors’ (Wildman, 2004). The notion of a beautiful attractor draws on the dynamics of synergy. The power distribution of the artistic community is aimed at mutual aid and learning, much like the healing community. Sometimes artists even engage in deliberate public psychotherapy, impacting their immediate communities.

Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species’ of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance, an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.

Mana is personal power, also known as chi, prana, animal magnetism, or kundalini. Mana initiates the transformative process in individuals and society. Many artists have magnetic personalities. Exhibiting sensitivity to a certain kind of universal guidance, their influence emanates from their sphere of potentiality through synchronicity and serendipity, stimulating catharsis or breakthrough in others.

The effect is moreso when a movement or school of artistic expression is involved (complex feedback loops) as the reality morphing effect increases exponentially. Artists reflect and influence one another. Arguably, artists demonstrate where society may be heading. They haunt the psychic and perceptual frontiers, drawing the future into the now. How many cultural revolutions have begun in artists’ communities?

Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.

The Artistic Field of Influence

‘We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).

Artists, along with the other innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs, constitute only 1% of the population. We can imagine them at the top of a pyramid of influence, which trickles down to the most solidified or familial and industrial levels of society (see Appendix; Wildman, Table 1). This is clearly less true for the representational artist whose work is without symbolic value, and rather than progressive or transgressive is merely decorative or aesthetic.

Today, science and art aren’t as polarized in their aims as we might think. They are perennial venues for the emergence of discovery, invention, and creation. The argument is that although science and art are social phenomena, an innovation in either field occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity. Like art, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from the inside.

“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).

The objective and subjective mode are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that lies beyond the dialectic in the tension of opposites.

Thus, the metaphors of science have gained increasing relevance in the artworld. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines.

Gregory Bateson calls metaphor Nature’s language. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person.

We can draw from the organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts. Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature’s own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.

Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic.

Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.’ It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole. Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow.

Negentropy is implicated in the successful development of science, economics, technology, infoscience, and art. Negentropy is the degree of order, or function of a state. It relates to the organization of societies, including subcultures such as the artworld, determining the quantity and quality of creative work

That which was formerly unmanifest comes into being. Negentropy governs the spontaneous transmission and direction of flow of information among systems. The qualities of that information are timeless. It is synergistic in that what was formerly unconnected becomes so, creating something wholly optimal and new or futuristic. In the 1920s, Hungarian scientist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi coined the term syntropy for ‘negative entropy.’

In cybernetics, a meaningful interpretation of negentropy is a measurement of the complexity of a physical structure in which quantities of energy are invested, e.g., buildings, works, technical devices, and organisms which become more complex by feeding not on energy but on negentropy. Art facilitates negentropy by expanding our general field of experience. Negentropy facilitates artistic realization by creating something from nothing.

The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic, way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence.

The two worlds of science and art have married in the digital revolution. Art has from the beginning required a certain amount of technical expertise, the ability to create and use technology in its execution. Only the means and their complexity have changed, evolving over the years, culminating now in a revolution based on ‘ars electronica’:the electronic arts.

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WHAT INSPIRES ME
A Field Theory of Art and the Imagination


By Iona Miller 10-2005


Inspiration, noun
1: arousal of the mind to special unusual activity or
creativity
2: a product of your creative thinking and work; brainchild
3: a sudden intuition as part of solving a problem
4: arousing to a particular emotion or action
5: the act of inhaling [inhalation, breathing in]

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens. ~ Carl Jung

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. ~ Buddha


Sensual Culture

Inspiration should be a verb, not a noun; it is a complex dynamic, a force of Nature and our nature. When someone asks me what “inspires” me and my artwork, I can’t imagine naming any one thing, or list of “things”. It’s like asking my favorite color. I can’t help but answer, ALL, “all of the Above and Below”.

What doesn’t inspire the artistic eye that doesn’t merely “look at”, but “sees through” to the imaginal depth of any given perception or experience? Rather than the impressionistic senses informing the soul, the soul informs the multisensory experience of being. Inspiration means life, the opposite of death. It implies purpose, direction, meaning, ecstasy, creativity.

Any moment can be as inspirational as the next. Inspiration can come from an internal movement or sensation, a love affair with color and form, the awe of an incandescent moment, even the pain of a soul on fire struggling to express itself or the zeitgeist of the times. All ways of looking at reality are imaginative. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle.


The soul in depth psychology is an empirical manifestation of imagination, fantasy, and creativity which is always in the process of becoming--images forming, and dissolving, and forming anew. Imagination is the essence of the life forces, both physical and psychic. It is the hidden ground behind symbol, archetype, metaphor, image. These fantasies always permeate our beliefs, ideas, emotions, and physical nature.

Our imagination is not something possessed by our minds, but the fundamental conscious/unconscious field of our psyche, our soul. The imaginal field is not derivative, but the very ground of our existence, conditioning all of our experience. It is where the personal encounters the transpersonal and finds “I AM That”. Imagination is the primary irreducible activity of the soul.

The image-making psyche or soul is the primary creative capacity, not only in art. Yet, perhaps, this is what is meant when it is said an artist has ‘soul,’ the capacity to draw on the inspirational mythopoetic taproot to Source, the creative field. Imagination is the basis of soul. In fact, to live the artistic life is to live immersed consciously in that aesthetically-nuanced Reality, to find it virtually inescapable.

Imaginal Ground as Aesthetic Paradigm

The intrapersonal process of art and the products of art have different cultural meanings. However, the primary purpose of art as a culture is to externalize and concretize for some time that ephemeral ever-morphing field of the image-scape. It merges subjective and objective through an affective, aesthetic experience. Our cultivation of the soul restores the human dimension to experience, destigmatizing imagination as merely fantasy, illusion, dream, or delusory perception.

It is the mind that is perhaps a distorting lens, structured by beliefs, myths, and philosophies, even those of so-called rational science. This is so because the mind is in the Imagination, the Anima Mundi, rather than the reverse. We can’t think without images. Multisensory images constantly condition our meaningful perception of the world, inner and outer. They organize our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. our responses.

Our images condition our perception and perspective: the way we see. As artists, it isn’t what we see and depict, but how we see it. Traditional art promotes conformity. Interesting art, as distinct from what we could call “sofa art”, has something to say, a unique perspective or point of view that speaks to the observer or participant.

Art as a culture is a traditional means of confronting the imagination. Art as a process is not confined by rules of academic art. The digital revolution challenged the traditional world of painting, but computer-assisted art is no less human because the tool has changed from a brush to a program. In fact, it is the human dimension of this art that keeps it interesting, over-riding the sterility of mere technical perfection.

People turn to film and art to help them contextualize experience, personal and collective. The “art world” as a biased cultural force cannot predetermine how any generation will meet the imagination. Dogmatic expression of fantasy is an oxymoron. It discourages the genuinely novel, demoting it to novelty.

Thus, there is no “artform” today, because even “The Present” barely qualifies as such. Thus, “fame” has become a pseudo-artform superceding the importance of one’s ouvre in the public domain. The “artist”, a role-playing put on, becomes a mere novelty or element of the media spectacle, there to provide entertainment.

The more we attune to the imaginal field, the closer we come to the semantic idea of “inspiration”, as a lived and breathed reality, renewed in each instant. That ‘present’ can remake our past and forge our future. Why should inspiration or creativity be “unusual” when, in fact, it goes on all the time? It quickens, exercises, elevates and stimulates the intellect and emotions with passion, purpose, meaning.

Make friends of The Muses. Inspiration is simply the loving expression of a heightened and churning impulse toward creativity. What we believe conditions what we perceive, feel, and express. The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels.

If you want to be inspired, live a life undergird and informed by that inherent capacity. Quit fantasizing that you do not! Inspiration comes from the imaginal field: the zero-point of soul -- even if we are as unaware of it as the quantum field.

The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. Embrace the image. Soul mediates between mind and body, personality and world. Believe in the truth of images. Don’t institutionalize your imagination or experiences.

We “make soul” by living life, by irrepressibly imagining possibilities. Soul is rooted firmly in the mundane world. We cannot be in the physical world without demonstrating the archetypal or the imaginal. We might conclude that imaginative behaviour and physical behaviour exist in a symbiotic relationship

Quit falsely imagining that you are uninspired, that you are separate at all from the heartfelt Source of inspiration: the communication of Truth. Cultivate your soul, giving it a voice. Challenge your accepted, institutionalized way of perceiving, habitual forms, with an imaginative aesthetic response.

Beauty is the manifestation of the soul, reflecting the ways we are touched, psychically and sensually. We connect with objects through imagination and feeling, our heartfelt response to our senses. Imaging is an aesthetic activity that evokes human feeling. The value of images is their ability to evoke feeling, elaboration, speculation, and transformation. Engage process and inspiration flows. You become artist, not as a role but a vocation, when you return that heart and soul to the world.


Also see, The Relativity of Body and Soul,
http://mythicliving.chaosmagic.com/custom3.html
On the nature of spirit, soul and body.

_____________________
Iona Miller
Webpresence 2006: IONATOPIA
Google ‘Ionatopia + Iona Miller’ for the whole list
iona@ionamiller.org or iona_m@yahoo.com
Io Art Updates: http://ionamiller.50megs.com
General Updates: http://ionamiller.chaosmagic.com
___________________________________________________
WHAT’S NEW

1/1/06
NEW WEBSITE: IONATOPIA
Comprehensive intro and updates for all writing and art.
http://ionatopia.50megs.com

Coming: MAY 2006; Memorial Day Weekend
ASSACON, May ’06 http://www.assacon.com
San Francisco, California; Memorial Day Weekend
Workshop Title: Altered States of Sex, Love, Intelligence
Co-facilitators:
Sobey Wing, Vancouver B.C. and Iona Miller, So. Oregon
The mixing of the psychedelic experience and the world of relationships can be a road to enlightenment or suffering. Love itself being considered a drug gives rise to possibilities of harm reduction approaches to the way we share energies. Neo-tribalist, Sobey Wing and Cybersybil, Iona Miller provide an inter-generational bridge in a culture lab investigating the potentialities of dyad voyages from preparation to post-integration of the entheogenic experience. Use of aphrodisiacs will also be touched upon. Looking at questions that hinder our intimacies and create armoring of the heart, we will seek ways to empower the resource states in ourselves. Applications draw on tools that including free writing, discussions and breakout groups, movement and self hypnosis as we explore ways to re-pattern mind states to anchor more sacredness in our love and sexuality. Also see more at http://digitaluniverse.50megs.com/custom2.html

2/7/06
NEW WEBSITE: DIGITAL UNIVERSE
http://digitaluniverse.50megs.com
VIRTUAL QABALAH art/music DVD with Merlyn Morgan;
Albert Hoffman 100th birthday party, Basel; Io digital media art
Media Ecology; Video Guru Nam June Paik’s Wake, NYC, more.

2/9/06
I've been asked to join the Board of Directors of MediGrace nonprofit, which continues my interests of including meditation in complementary medicine, and development of human survival technologies. I've been working on this for some time with Dr. Marshall F. Gilula in Miami (heartstringsbook.50megs.com), but this local organization does both professional and public outreach, emphasizing self-care, which I find appealing. The Calm Birth book was released last season; Calm Healing has been written and includes some of my nonobjective artwork. It is wrapping up the publishing process now. medigrace.org/ calmbirth.org/

12/2005
NEW WEBSITE: THE PHOTONIC HUMAN
From the Heart of Darkness springs the Light, and we are That. Virtual Photon Fluctuation is the Source of the photons that form and sustain our Being. We are truly Light Beings: Homo Lumen. We literally inhabit and embody a Temple of Living Light, which is interconnected with the deepest level of Cosmos. We are shiny Diamonds of Rainbow Light. We are made in the Images of that Brilliance. Shine On!
In the Effulgence of its Brilliance.
http://photonichuman.50megs.com

10/2005

NEW WEBSITE: KABBALAH LUMINATA
As a digital artist I paint with LIGHT; as a Qabalist I practice in the Temple of Living Light. Recently discontent with static and Flash imagery alone, I have begun venturing into the world of filmmaking. Comes see some of the art frames I have prepared for animation at my new Kabbalah Luminata Portal at
http://kabbalahluminata.50megs.com

9/2005

PUBLISHING Iona’s painting “The Diamond Body”,
plus commentary in Science-Art art book;
see http://www.science-art.com.au/ and http://science-art-usa.50megs.com
THE TRUE MEANING OF THE DAVINCI CODE
By Robert Pope; ISBN 0-9577784-7-3 (155 pgs)
Science-Art Research Centre of Australia, Inc., 2005
By adhering to a mechanistic worldview, Western civilization is on a path to extinction, says Science-Art philosopher Robert Pope. The ancient knowledge passed on by the Greeks upheld a survival science, a “Savior science” that was misinterpreted by Leonardo Ad Vinci but was privately understood by Isaac Newton. In response to Dan Brown’s The da Vinci Code, Pope hopes to set the record straight by returning to the atomistic philosophy of the ancient Greek scholars such as Plato and Philo. Plato’s worldview is much more akin to a holographic reality, Pope argues. The “true meaning of the code”, he suggests, relates to atomic movement creating evolutionary wisdom, and he points out some classic examples of Renaissance art that communicate this truth.

ART WRITING Jungian Psychology Cut-Up ESSAY on artist
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE: PandroGENy: A Love Story of Gender Reunion
~The Yab-Yummy Way of Imagination.
http://ionamiller.chaosmagic.com/catalog.html

“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense - he is 'collective man,' a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.” (Carl Jung, Psychology and Literature, 1930)

PORTRAIT Animated portrait of Iona by international electronic artist in Paris, Philip Wood:
http://www.sign69.com/medialounge/space543.html


Coming Attractions:
* Travelling road show with Iona on Quantum Biofeedback, Lorin Kiely on Top Down Yoga, Mark Comings on plenum physics, and cosmic comic Swami Beyondananda, opening at Alex Grey’s CoSM in NYC.

* VIDEO HYPNOSIS DVD from Temple of Living Light Productions, with brain drivers for Alpha and Theta. Next: “MOODIES” based on consciousness journeys. Soon: “VIRTUAL KABBALAH”, digital pathworking.

* BOOK HEARTSTRINGS: NONLOCAL HEALING is both a co-authored book and series of articles in the works with a Miami Neuropsychiatrist and distance healer, Marshall F. Gilula, M.D. Groundbreaking Experiments with quantum biofeedback software and hardware.
http://heartstringsbook.50megs.com
http://cyberdoctv.com

* BOOK Also coming, BEYOND MK ULTRA, co-authored with Charles Stone, Chief Deputy to Dr. Carl Schleicher in Mankind Research Foundation. After his military career in psiops, Schleicher opened Mankind Research Unlimited, a parapsychology and alt.healing SRI or IONS type thinktank. In the 1980s, he was exposed as the creator of the deployable human cyborg, a Manchurian Candidate, and is the likely model of the X-Files “Cigarette Man”. My ex-husband physicist Richard Miller worked as his NW Regional Director of MRU after he published “Holographic Concept of Reality” (with Stanley Krippner) in 1973, long before anyone else. This is the inside track. See “Getting Blood from a Stone”
http://tigernews2005.50megs.com/photo2.html
http://tigernews2005.50megs.com/photo3.html

Also soon:
The release of Iona’s interview in Zora Von Burden’s THE LUX ARTILLERY
http://theluxartillery.chaosmagic.com

NEW 6/2005: BIOPHYSICS Portal
http://biophysics.50megs.com

__________________________________
NEW 9/10/2005
Kabbalah Luminata Art Slides
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/
album?.dir=/d422&.src=ph&.tok=phFnzkDBf53bngCB

NEW 8/26/05 ART SLIDES ~
NUCLEAR MYSTICISM A Homage to Dali
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/98fe&.src=ph&.tok=phbKNhDB06IYM8oE
TEXT: http://ionamiller.50megs.com/photo5.html


NEW ART SLIDES 8-15-05 ~
HEARTSTRINGS: NONLOCAL HEALING SLIDESHOW

MORPHIC RESONANCE
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/df6d&.src=ph&.tok=phyKndDBKVZORC6A

BARDO VISIONS
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/d3ea&.src=ph&.tok=phUQndDBpCe8z_N6

QUANTUM BIOHOLOGRAPHY/HOT LIPS
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/7a82&.src=ph&.tok=phMTndDBDq_ftt7f

NEW 8-2005 VISUAL META-SYN SLIDESHOW
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/435b&.src=ph&.tok=ph4dCXDBN5fLEiI7

ILLUMINATIONS
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/7a51&.src=ph&.tok=phk0TYDBteRCTRgW

PLASMA UNIVERSE
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/9932&.src=ph&.tok=phjWuYDBmiRwUqcG
___________________________________
NEW 7/05
MANDALAPALOOZA SLIDE SHOW Links & Wall Text
Be sure to watch these slide shows as the thumbnails do not do them justice!

DIGITAL CYMATICS Wall Text:
http://ionamiller.50megs.com/catalog.html

Mandala ANIMAtions ~
Custom animations suitable for large screens for Music, Fashion, Meditation, and Lecture Events
http://onenationundergods.com/mandala.html

ABRAHADABRA
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/3a00&.src=ph&.tok=phmNsRDBGvAPIE0o

ABRAHADABRA 2
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/eece&.src=ph&.tok=phmhySDBXY3VKVh6

MANDAL-BRAT or MANDALOGIC
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/a649&.src=ph&.tok=phulXQDBqVo05gnl

MANDALAPALOOZA
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/b1f8&.src=ph&.tok=phOXcQDBvjBv4eyi

MANDALAS 3 - QUATERNIONAS
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/9cce&.src=ph&.tok=phmNYSDBV1AtJped

ALCHEMICAL HOLOGRAPHY; New 6/25:
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/3976&.src=ph&.tok=phwLSMDB3CQ8j2hp

ATLANTIS
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/f9da&.src=ph&.tok=phrYBSDBS4VLO5.n

ART ATTACK
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/6fbb&.src=ph&.tok=ph.eBSDBhdHsh2c0

New 5/2005: Nexus Conference May ’05 Amsterdam pix
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/44e1&.src=ph&.tok=phEA1BDBBZRE2Gsk

Others
My quest began long ago in Ojai at Krotona and the Krishnamurti Foundation. I've been fortunate to have such great mentors and collaborators as Dr. Stanley Krippner www.stanleykrippner.com and John Curtis Gowan http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan in transpersonal theory and practice and Laurence Gartel in digital art www.gartelmuseum.com with Bob Judd in animation www.subcutaneous.org. There are many more, including Dr. Marshall Gilula, and some unwitting models who have fostered me too numerous to mention, some old and some relatively new. I continue friendly collaborations with ex-husband Richard Alan Miller, see http://nwbotanicals.org.

FREE STYLE
Art Without Frames;
Science Without Boundaries;
Healing Without Patients

By Iona Miller, 10/2004

“...to behave is to choose one pattern among many.” ~ Professor Jose Delgado, Yale

"meaning is not something that is attached to or floats between or behind things that can parade before one's mind but something that connects with something deeply embodied in our being." ~Wittgenstein (1973/1958)

"There was a passionate craving among all ... [intelligentsia] ... for a means to express their new concepts. They longed for philosophy, for synthesis. The erstwhile happiness of pure withdrawal each into his own discipline was now felt to be inadequate. Here and there a scholar broke through the barriers of his specialty and tried to advance into the terrain of universality. Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences."
~ Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

R. Buckminster Fuller pointed out that rulers in the past made it virtually mandatory through the rules of academic advancement that the smartest minds became specialists, thus missing the Big Picture. In this way they sought to suppress their own overthrow by those more intelligent than themselves by containing their thought-processes. This system creates stricture in scientific and artistic freedom. Hermann Hesse not only wrote the classic introspective novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, but won the Nobel prize in Literature (1946) for his final masterwork published under two titles in English: The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi. This work (set in the 23rd Century) describes a cadre of individuals and their headmaster -- the Magister Ludi -- engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Hesse never forthrightly explained just how the game is played, but gave many hints to its structure for future aspirants seeking solutions to the critical predicament of mankind through Global Architectronics. The Glass Bead Game requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy. The name Castaglia, the place of knowledge, is the Italian form of the Latin Castalia, which was the Roman name for the spring on Mount Parnassus where dwelt the mythical Muses. Castalia was also the name for the abstract realm of the intelligentsia. Let the game begin.


Introduction

Free Style is an improvisational aesthetic that uses one’s realtime local surroundings and (synthetic) synchronicities and virtualities from which to create new expressions in any medium or discipline. We can deal with and use “what comes up” in a creative and therapeutic manner; we can intuit, invent, and concoct from the nonlocal information that is at hand if we simply open to that, living artfully from that spontaneous place.

Free style is an intuitive act that is at once intentionally connective with source and presence, thus freeing and directing that which is inside desiring to emerge: meta-creativity. Freestyle breaks free from the vault of derivative, corporate, or audience-driven formula production. After all, it takes risk to either succeed or fail.

This is the source of artistic and scientific freedom. We must trust the process; trust our own vision; the womb of our subconscious that gives birth to full-blown ideas and inspirations. Freedom of expression means each artist is free to create their own style, weaving into the existing genres of expression, combining, contrasting and injecting their own unique rhythms, modulations, and vision by working at their dynamic edge.

Free style results may be concrete or ephemeral, but the drive comes from a commited perspective on the fundamental nature of reality and our nature. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic. The art of survival equals the survival of art.

Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness, getting” the Big Picture, and perhaps doing something about it.

Creativity is a local embodiment, an essentially holistic process of a spontaneous non-local field of influence that can permeate the globe. The creative process, like a hologram encapsultes the entire gestalt at several levels of observation; each part reflects the whole if at lower resolution. In this way we find meaning in an idea, a piece of art, a performance, or a culturally revolutionary invention.

The thrust and dynamics of the creative process are such that intentionality encompasses multiple threads of creation simultaneously, rhapsodies of multi-tasking without drudgery. Therefore, there can be no “failure”, for a lost project is easily replaced by another project or process, another thread to weave, another melody to play.

“Free-styling” is a spontaneous eruption of the ever-renewing geyser of creativity; it means embodying the process of inspirational flow in each moment, artful living. This form of creativity can originate in the sciences/technology or the arts or any combination thereof (i.e., Hypermedia; Science-Art; Poetry Science; Nonlocal Healing; Global Architectronics). It describes the mutual interpenetration of life and art, a recurrent theme in contemporary art.

This negentropic energy leads to the embodiment of something intrinsically valuable and emotionally meaningful from essentially nothing. Therefore, free style is always breaking news; it cannot be anything but fresh.

Characterized mainly by deep feelings and heartfelt authenticity and intensity, freestyling creates a hyperreal random movement that nevertheless has its own tempo and internal cohesion, even when it moves in quantum leaps. A good example is an incredibly stimulating and cross-pollinating conversation or interview, where real rapport is established with context and depth allowed to emerge. It springs from an open-minded perspective based in authentic emergence rather than contrived product.

The medium may be people, behind-the-scenes influence, mentoring, cross-pollination, dreaming out loud, brainstorming, contributing to global dialogue on topical issues, technological shift, process-oriented therapies, Socratic method, or immersive experiences that transform those who experience them. There are many more.

The often unrecognized modalities are virtually infinite and range from formal to informal, academic and highly technical to “street”. All are means of influencing people and environments, through revealing meaning with little or no commercial or corporate interests. Freestyling tells it like it is. It is art that reveals Truth.

The significance or meaning of life is a central topic in philosophy, art, religion, medicine and psychology though any definitive answer remains elusive. Ethics or morals (personal accountability) should help us cooperate with one another. But there is no moral super-principle that undergirds us all besides humankind’s survival. It is clear, however, if humanity should cease to exist, it all becomes moot. We may be throwing away the entire arc of evolution through poor choices.

If we have values, we have to stand up and be counted and speak out for them. Moral agency and status are relative. Meta-ethics examines our notions about what constitutes ethics or morality relative to the position of others. Related issues are lifestyle choices, decisions, respect, impartiality, responsibility, identity, duty, principles, empathy, compassion, and conscience or consciousness.

The flattening of affect or emotional neutrality is the enemy, the aspect that conditions poor choices and ethical erosion as the acceleration or speed of cognition increases in our mindnumbing modern lives and we become dulled to the field of perception (Damasio 2004). Its been called information overload and future shock.

Ethics is Aesthetic

How can we rectify our guilt and shame for living so heavily on the planet? We are born and die consuming non-renewable resources, at least under current technological conditions. If there is any ‘original sin’, arguably the necessary evil of consumption is it. This fact of life has led our world into ecolo-nomic crisis, which has spawned multidimensional sociopolitical crisis where no one problem can be solved in isolation and change can wreak havoc in other domains.

Ethics relates to intentionality which means more than self-serving, so-called “good intentions,” individually and collectively. It means living deliberately, with global intentionality, which is an artform in itself: living with awareness and acting from that center. It is an aesthetic choice for ‘artful living’, living life in an artful manner in harmony with flow and creativity, choosing enriching experiences over consumerism. Art, which has its roots in primal shamanic culture, has traditionally been associated with the optimistic ‘Bohemian’ ethos rooted in Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love.

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