Futurenaut.has just expanded into the world of visual media with a new blog over at cyanidewand.tumblr.com dedicated to all things colourful. It's early days yet but things will likely expand very quickly so check back often. Rest assured the current news stream will continue here. Well, what better way to celebrate than with a song!
In the 1920's, Edgard Varèse, the "Father of Electronic Music" began working on a grandiose work that has become known as L'Astronome. Although the work was never finished, it's plot focused on communications with the brightest star in our night sky, Sirius. Varèse's libretto would ultimately be provided by the playwright Antonin Artaud. We are almost certain there is documentation of Artaud being an acquintance of Aleister Crowley (we will update with the exact reference when we rediscover it).
Crowley had received The Book of the Law in Cairo (1904), a book which contains the line, "Is a god to live in a dog? No! but the highest are of us." (Sirius is also known as the 'Dog Star') He later went on to draw a portrait of a praeter-human intelligence, Lam, around 1917 that bore an eerie resemblance to the descriptions of grey aliens that would later become a fixture of close-encounter accounts.
Jump forward to the early 1970's and Varese's biggest fan, Frank Zappa is releasing album after album. Meanwhile, author/philosopher Robert Anton Wilson starts communicating with an intelligence he attributes to a being that resides in the vicinity of Sirius (He would later attribute the phenomena to his own nervous system).
John Zorn, the inimitable composer/saxophonist, has since released a series of albums featuring his 'Moonchild Trio' (Mike Patton, Trevor Dunn & Joey Barron) which is dedicated to Varèse, Artaud & Crowley. Their second album in particular, Astronome, deals with what might have been had Varese completed this masterwork.
Our personal favourite Varèse opus is Ameriques, written from 1918 to 1921 as a response to his moving from France to New York. Monolithic skyscraper shadows tower over the composer as he navigates the bustling streets, the sun flashing between them. Life crawls over itself, trying to secrue a foothold. Everywhere are microcosms of people, intricately manipulating their destiny, the sum of which snowballing into a chaos of unstoppable forces. America: all discoveries, all adventures....the unknown!
Opening today and running till August 20* at Buratti Fine Art Gallery in North Fremantle, Western Australia is the show Windows to the Sacred. It features the art of none other than To Mega Therion himself, Aleister Crowley, alongside the works of the infamous 'Witch of Kings Cross', Rosaleen Norton and the fascinating pieces of Barry Hale. If you're lucky enough to be able to get there then don't miss out! It seems they have plans to exhibit more of Crowley's work in the future too...
* Some sources say August 22, so contact the gallery for confirmation if you intend on procrastinating!
Austin Osman Spare is one of the most legendary artists and occultists of the turn of last century. As an artist, his materialising atavisms and automatic drawings are phenomenally evocative of intelligences marshaled from deepest dimension. As an occultist, his invention of the sigil as a pictorial means to manifest desire was a massive technological breakthrough for the art and, along with his other methods, form a large portion upon which the canon of Chaos Magick teachings derive from (see the post on Peter J. Carroll). Numerous apocrypha are bandied about regarding Spare's evocation of entities and the subsequent insanity rendered upon less adept observers (see the works of Kenneth Grant). Together with Aleister Crowley (of whose A .'. A .'., Spare was a onetime member), he stands as a giant of early 20th century occultism (see the post on Crowley).
In 1905 (at age 18), Spare published a limited run of his first book 'Earth Inferno': a combination of art and aphorisms. In 2004, Producto Desecho produced the following homage, featuring a Kenneth Anger-like series of tableaux vivant. Bon appetit.
Scientists have recently managed to control a robot's movement by thought alone. A robot with video sensors was given visual cues (e.g. move forward/right/left) which were projected to person lying within an fMRI machine. The person then imagined carrying out these movements. The resultant brain areas that lit up on imaging were then mapped to movements in the robot. The team wishes to give people who have lost the use of their body the ability to experience life through one of these robot avatars. Of course, the applications of such technology are much broader. Scientists always mask this kind of transhumanist developments as being tools for the disabled when the intentions obviously span well beyond to the creation of cyborgian ubermensch.
