First Contact
Just minted an NFT collection titled ‘First Contact’ on objkt. Had a LOT to say about it. So wrote this blog post to explain...everything.
IMHO there are some quotes one finds in books that are scarily powerful .
Like this one below :
‘It is not the (human) eye that sees but the
Seeing-ness itself that sees.
There is nothing called the
seer(what we call the ‘self’)here, it is merely the sight that sees’
The lines are from an English translation of the Yoga Sutras(an ancient Indian scripture) written by Patanjali.
Oddly(or maybe not?), this ties in with the content-mix of all the books and blogs I’ve read so far across different knowledge-domains (‘science-y’ topics, literature(especially poetry), neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, evolutionary anthropology, linguistics, political theories, cognitive science, theories of emotion, and yes, AI too)
More on that later. For now, I’ll talk about the artwork inspired by this quote.
The exact phrase, making ‘first contact’ has been intentionally used by me. It is usually used in a science-fiction context though, where it is about a human making contact with aliens from worlds other than ours.
First contact in a sci-fi context : It is the known(us, humans) and the unknown(alien races) initiating contact to try understand the other
The more I study the esoteric, the more I see that the essence of esoterism is not really out of sync with science. Esoterism complements a scientific mindset to create a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.
But, I digress. Coming back to the artwork.
In a nutshell, ‘First Contact’ is about the moment when the Known and Unknown make ‘contact’ by acknowledging the other in an attempt to understand the other
There are 3 pieces of digital artwork
- The Watching-ness : Watching-ness (unknown) making first contact and wrapping itself around that which is Watched (known)
- The Source : A Human hand(known) making first contact with the Source of aliveness itself(unknown). The Source is an abstract concept which makes us pulse with life and animates our blood cells with alive-ness.
- The Timeless : The watching-ness outside of time (unknown) that makes first contact by watching the linear flow of time on this physical plane (the known)
(Okay that is all. This blog post shall end abruptly now until I edit it further)
