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E-mail Iona Miller
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My Address
Southern Oregon, USA
http://ionamiller.weebly.com
Iona's Homepage
IONASPHERE Website
IONASPHERE Homepage
Iona Miller
Webpresence 2006: IONATOPIA http://ionamiller.weebly.com
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WHAT’S NEW
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:
* BOOK The release of Iona’s interview in Zora Von Burden’s THE LUX ARTILLERY: Exceptional Underground Women
http://theluxartillery.chaosmagic.com
ART - NEW 9/7/2005 KABBALAH LUMINATA ~
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/iona_m/album?.dir=/d422&.src=ph&.tok=phFnzkDBf53bngCB
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ARCHIVES & IONATOPIA PORTALS 2005:
THE IONASPHERE: COLLECTED WORKS 2000
http://ionamiller.org
2005 ART UPDATES
http://ionamiller.50megs.com
2005 GENERAL IO UPDATES PORTAL
http://ionamiller.chaosmagic.com
FANSITES 2005
TRIBE Public URL: http://ionaisthebomb.tribe.net
BLOG: http://people.tribe.net/ionamiller
BLOG: http://www.myspace.com/ionamiller
SUBCUTANEOUS UPDATE PAGE 2005
http://www.subcutaneous.org/Iona.html
LUX ARTILLERY ART BOOK 2005
http://theluxartillery.chaosmagic.com
SYNERGETIC QABALA PORTAL 2005
http://synergeticqabala.chaosmagic.com
FUTURE SCIENCE PORTAL
http://futurescience.chaosmagic.com
CREATIVITY PORTAL
http://creativity.chaosmagic.com
THE MODERN ALCHEMIST BOOK
http://themodernalchemist.chaosmagic.com
EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM PORTAL
http://emergenthealing.50megs.com
SCIENCE ART USA PORTAL
http://science-art-usa.50megs.com
CHAOSOPHY JOURNAL PORTAL
http://chaosophy.50megs.com
EDGEWORKS HYPNOSIS PORTAL
http://edgeworkshypnosis.50megs.com
MYTHIC LIVING PORTAL Pantheon Book
http://mythicliving.chaosmagic.com
NEW 6/2005: BIOPHYSICS Portal
http://biophysics.50megs.com
SACRED GEOMETRY
http://sacredgeometry.50megs.com
IO UPDATES 2005 & SAMPLE ARTICLES
http://www.angelfire.com/art2/digidiva_ionamiller
THE MAGICAL & RITUAL USE OF PERFUMES book
http://magicalperfume.chaosmagic.com
Iona is published by Phanes Press, Destiny Books (Inner Traditions International), Autonomedia, Nexus Magazine, Dream Network Journal, Journal of Nonlocality and Remote Mental Interactions (JNLRMI), Chaosophy Journal, DNA Monthly, and more.
buy the book
“THE MODERN ALCHEMIST:
A Guide to Personal Transformation”
IS BACK IN PRINT FROM IONA
.95 + .50 S&H for single book; Paypal at
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/books/modernalchemist/modernalchemist.htm
About the author: Trandisciplinarian Iona Miller is a consultant, writer, hypnotherapist and multimedia artist doing groundbreaking work on the relationship of chaos theory and emergent paradigm shift in experiential psychotherapy, new physics, biophysics, philosophy, cosmology, medicine, creativity, art, qabalah, magick, metaphysics, and society. See her annual CHAOSOPHY JOURNAL at homepage http://ionamiller.org Also visit 2005 UPDATES at http://ionamiller.chaosmagic.com and ARTLINKS at http://ionamiller.50megs.com
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
Artistic Vitality in Sexually Potent Art
Iona Miller, 4-2004
“New art is always shocking,
because you don’t know what you’re looking at. . .
It’s about boundaries being permeated and transgressed.
It makes people nervous when there aren’t any boundaries.”
~Lisa Phillips, Director, New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC
“...the number of perverts involved in the field of art is probably much
greater than the average for the population in general.... It can be supposed
... that the pervert inclines in some particular manner to the world of art.”
~Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, 1985
“With male nudes in full display, pornography a common source material,
and explicit imagery the norm in galleries and museums,
sex in art has become fun, disturbing, raunchyâ€â€even cerebral.”
~Linda Yablonsky, Art News, January 2004
Nakedness and Vulnerability
Many art forms over the centuries have centered around celebrating the body – both male and female, animalistic and spiritualized, and imaginative forms in-between. Like undertows along the shore, deep currents of eroticism have always pervaded the creative edge of the cultural ocean of art. To remain vital, art must stay in contact with the erotic element, the ground of our very psychophysical being. To deny it, is to deny life and the vulnerability of our naked awareness.
Art gives form to the apparitions of our imaginations, and one of the most imaginative is the erotic form, expression of the erotic impulse, or raw libido. Both art and eroticism are forms of the epitome of human life, expressions of insight and deep feeling. Sexuality is one way of inducing ecstatic states that alter perception dramatically. It is simultaneously and paradoxically ordinary yet extraordinary. It embodies the very essence of dramatic tension, a finite act with infinite repercussions.
Art is the spearhead of human development, both collective and individual. It was the seminal force and vanguard of cultural advance in Egypt, Greece, Europe, Africa, and Asia; all these cultures produced some extraordinarily erotic art. While the vulgarization of art is considered a sure sign of ethnic decline (Langer), erotic or vulgar art itself appears in all eras heralding new perceptions of our erotic drive, our sexual self-images. Even if perceived as an affront, art values rather than devalues the sexual image.
More than the difference between the naked and the nude, erotic art transgresses the boundaries of outdated eras and mores, including fashionable nudity. All that is erotic is not necessarily pornographic, and what some might call pornographic is often not perceived as lacking artistic merit, even prescience, in following eras. Artists test our social and psychic boundaries, making them more explicit. Sexual art can emulate the psychic and emotional forces at play in arousal, active engagement, and afterglow. Sexual tension has been a perennial theme in art through the ages.
What begins as shocking becomes familiar once emotional merger is consummated through suggestive penetration. Art expresses an essentially inward experience. Though for some the distinction between art and porn is not easy, explicit or compelling artistic depiction of the fringes of human sexuality is not the same as perversion or obscenity. It brings images back from the extreme edge of society to the mainstream for consideration at all levels, shamelessly chronicling the unvarnished human condition.
Shock, Shame and Disgust
Art, unlike pornography, contains an essential emotional content. It aims at stimulating the largest sex organ – the mind -- rather than just the genitals. Erotic art is always more than merely aesthetic. The function of the artist has always been to look unflinchingly into the dark heart of humanity and describe the living, breathing processes of human life as frankly as possible. The artist’s mandate is to look at everything.
Erotic art serves the same purpose as all art: objectifying self-knowledge as it springs forth from artistic imagination. Every generation has its own style of feeling, determined by forces including artists who shape that vision. Erotic art’s purpose is more than to shock, to confront, even to transgress. It explores the threshold of sanity and insanity, narrowing the definition of obscenity and expanding the definition of art as a legitimate context for sexual expression.
Each flowering of the arts, each new formulation leads to a cultural advance that signals a new way of feeling. It reeducates our vision beyond hostility to the explicit into mirroring the foresight of the artist’s eye. It transforms the worldly and mundane into a piece of imagination -- an imaginative inward vision.
Total nudity is more than nakedness; it is an imaginative state where barriers between lovers, between artwork and viewer, dissolve in a lingering encounter. Truth stands revealed, unadorned, transparent.
Fertility, Fear and Awe
Cross-cultural and transtemporal visions of sexuality have maintained persistent themes of power, beauty, and spirituality in the grossest and most carnal of human acts. The cultural trinity centers around sex, death and religion. In the Paleolithic era art was visceral shamanic fetishism, talisman creating and ritual drama.
In the Neolithic era, fetish continued as taboo. The first fully modern humans were characterized by art and symbolic thought. Then cult worship of the chubby pudenda of the Great Mother goddesses developed. Her mystery embodied the magical invisible workings of divinity through the sexual organs.
Sexuality had an important place in Egyptian myths, creation tales, and the afterlife that was not ignored in their art, symbolic and explicit. The so-called Turin Erotic Papyrus (O’Connor) demonstrates both reverence and irony in a variety of positions emphasizing the delightful fertility generating energy of the blue lotus.
In the Near Eastern and Greco-Roman pagan worlds, the wildness and soulfulness of the psyche were equally celebrated in the ithyphallic form and availability of the hetaera or sacred prostitutes, along with heroic versions of the human form. Nudity was perhaps the most important contribution of classical Greek art. The repressive early Christian era brought sublimation and transmutation of the instinctual spirit’s yearning for union.
After the near total religious suppression of Eros in the Dark Ages, the Renaissance brought a resurgence of pagan imagery and renewed interest in the vitality of the physical and psychic image. Meanwhile, Asian sexual art explored the spiritual dimension of Lingam and Yoni, jade-warrior and fleshy blossom, while African art maintained its blunt primal vitality.
Modern art began a systematic exploration of the distortions and perversions of sexuality, including impressionistic, surrealist, and abstract fetishization. Avant garde breakthroughs and revelations were conceptually daring and novel in both graphic design and ritualistic physical performance art. Now we are jaded by these socially assimilated clichés and neo-tribalism. It is a fact of post Postmodern life that all these currents still flow strongly, endlessly recycling through the depths of our collective psyches depending on where we find ourselves on the sexual evolutionary spectrum.
Power and Helplessness
The artist’s actual medium is the psyches of the public, which are massaged, aroused to curiosity, piqued, fascinated, infatuated, and sometimes emotionally terrorized by this pseudo-intimacy. The artist mounts more than his image: the viewer is intellectually and emotionally ridden at his or her pleasure. Curiously, it is not a substitute for sex, but arguably its very creative evolution. Reflective observation is more than passive voyeurism. One is changed by the experience, seeded within the dark virtuality of the unseen dimension.
Our culture’s preoccupation with sex is undeniable as expressed in advertising media, so why shouldn’t it continue appearing in our galleries, museums, music venues, and screening rooms in ever-renewing forms? Surrealism bent and stretched our notions of physical embodiment with a bizarre, dreamlike qualities. Low brow art has proven that all that implies beauty and truth is not necessarily beautiful to look at in its stark reality, but worthwhile to consciously examine, nevertheless.
Today’s “Know Brow” art fearlessly stares at it all, if not in the face, where it clearly counts. Perhaps the Third Eye really lies below the waist. Why not realize that “many of the masterpieces of modern art depend on perversion to make their dramatic point”? (Kuspit) Robert Bak suggests, “Fetishism is the model for all perversions.” Still, the seductiveness of the bodies is subsumed in the seductiveness of the overall image or scene. In this context, one’s oeuvre means more than one’s fleshy meat.
Contemporary sexual identity is in flux, creating new sexual types and titillations by actively changing our psychology and sexuality. The future of reconfigured sex is pangendered – pandrogynous (P-Orridge) -- a liquification not only of the organs, but also of all the formerly presumed limitations of our biology. Visual, theatrical and biological experimentation in this area has been happening at the fringes and in the dungeons of contemporary society at least for a few decades, as people play imaginatively with their bodies and sexual personae.
Liberation
‘Normal sex’ has become all too familiar and boring outside of the bedroom. More than narcissistic indulgence, for today’s artist, the formerly pornographic image is just part of the artistic palette, something to be morphed and remolded in the contemporary context, sometimes hiding the explicit in plain sight. Visions of new ways of connecting are already emerging in the art world, as they always have.
“Put an artist at a drawing board and he may design new types of genitals that attach like replaceable parts, or at least move them around a bit (clitoral relocation) so that they are better positioned, or not so vulnerable (internal testicles). Genitalia could resemble the unfolding designs of a Georgia O’Keefe painting, or an element that rises indefinitely like M.C.Escher’s staircases. Genitals could be advanced prosthetics that barely resemble the parts that we have today. We could have several genitals, or none. Add an extra one for more stimulation, have none when you really want to focus without distractions.” (More, 1997)
For art to remain vital, not merely decorative and safe, it must follow the currents of the libidinous urge as it flows stronger than ever through our cultural landscape beyond simple physical sensation and somatic gender. We will always be motivated to maintain and feed our greedy sexual appetites. We will also continue craving strong cerebral and aesthetic responses, as well as somatic experiences.
So why not praise and celebrate both penis and vagina before technology and imagination make them potentially obsolete? Rather than supplanting the sexual aim, sexual art is vital -- it is preparatory…the seed of “coming attractions.” It is merciless and unrestrained cultural foreplay, designed to rouse us from our indolence, from ambivalence. Why not let it ravish us?
REFERENCES:
Bonfante, Larissa (2003). “The Naked and the Nude: Erotic Images in the Near Eastern and Greco-Roman Worlds.” Archaeology Odyssey. Jan-Feb 2003, p. 44-53.
Duca, Lo (1966). A History of Eroticism. Covina, California: Collectors Publications. Adapted from the French by Kenneth Anger.
Evola, Julius (1983). The Metaphysics of Sex. New York: Inner Traditions International.
Kuspit, Daniel. “Perversion In Art.” Online at
Langer, Susan (1962). “The Cultural Importance of Art”. Philosophical Sketches.
More, Natasha Vita (1997). “The Future of Sexuality” Online at . Accessed 4-4-04.
O’Connor, David (2001). “Eros In Egypt” Archaeology Odyssey, Sept-Oct 2001, p.42-9.
Paglia, Camille. Sex, Art, and American Culture.
Paglia, Camille (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson.
P-Orridge, Genesis (2003). Painful But Fabulous. Soft Skull Press.
Prose, Francine (2004). “What Has This Woman Just Been Doing?” Art News, Jan. 2004, p.122-3.
Tannahill, Reay (1980). Sex In History. New York: Stein and Day.
Yablonsky, Linda (2004). “How Far Can You Go?” Art News, January 2004,
p. 104-9. |
