Kingdom of Illumination (2019-20)
Kingdom of Illumination is an 8-channel video, 16-channel audio installation created with Gary James Joynes.
Aldous Huxley writes about this world in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, where he describes the Otherworld you can access through psychedelics and art. He quotes William Blake: If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. In my dissertation, I had written about the altered state of consciousness induced by creativity, visions, meditation, and psychedelics. Neuroscience was tying them all together to a neural network in the brain, the Default-Mode Network. They all did the same thing to it—slowed it, dissolved it, dissolving you. They all accessed the same space. Carl Jung writes about this space, the collective unconscious. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman also writes about the reality behind the world-we-world, our constructed, constrained reality, against the unknowable world-out-there. All of these thoughts remain lose and in flux as I work on this world-behind-our-world, the Kingdom of Illumination.
I want to focus on water, the flow of water, that we are water physically and metaphorically, and that the water came here from the cosmos. Waterfalls, whirlpools, snowfalls, and tides. The essence of flow. How all life and cosmos is a flow at another scale. They build, they change, they develop. Water never stops moving, even when it gets trapped on top of a mountain or deep within the ground. It's just at a different timescale. I wanted to cleanse the doors of perception and see water as it is, deep within the Kingdom of Illumination, infinite.