Text by PolyXene Kasda for Visionary Art Life Achievement Award and Best Artist Award
I was born in Alexandria Lost ; a shifting Hellenistic
homeland grafted with the element of deconstruction, reconstructed in the
dissipative global structure of my
Project Myth/Network . I was born
in the ‘point zero of the present as defined by radiocarbon calibration, in the
beginning of nuclear tests and the changes in the measurement of time with the
first computers.
I choose to start this intervention with one
insightful moment that shifted my point of view and has defined all my
subsequent work
“I was walking
knee-high in the sea of Avithos in the burning aroma of the sun reflected by
the sparkling membrane of the water. I was warm light. Someone called me. At
the sound of my name my familiar world emerged with me from the light. It was a
slow-burn experience of me seeing myself seeing the reflection of an otherwise
inaccessible reality. This innocent summer walk 1985 turned out to be the most
revolutionary act in my life”
This peripatetic time-shift insight into my very
process of perception, had inspired me to write The Conscious Eye, Athens 1988,
a short essay dealing with an eye seeing itself seeing, thinking itself
thinking, while undergoing the cubist-state-of-mind that sealed the arts and
sciences of the 20thc., revealed the linguistic-cognitive scaffold
of vision (references to structuralist and conceptual art) and triggered modern
crisis, mining with autognostic explosives our certainties.
In that
reflexive essay I had made many references to the then rising science of A.I.
as an endoscopic tool (research conducted at Prof. Papert’s lab. MIT , A.I. department 1985).
The Conscious Eye 1988 was revived by A.I. Professor
who injected the old text, with contemporary research in Artificial
Intelligence and Machine Consciousness in the joint essay Artificial
Intelligence Professor John Kontos ‘Needles’ Poly Kasda's Conscious Eye,
Intelligence
is what hasn’t been programmed yet and so is the unsolvable mystery of our consciousness.
In this light, Artificial Intelligence-Machine Consciousness Technology is an
introspective tool explicitly disengaging us from our absorption in our
‘being-in-the-world’, unleashing, by the power of contrast, the possibility of
an endoscopic participation in the phenomenon of Being- in- the- world.
“ But, what was the nature of this compulsive tide
that pushed artists in a self-cancellation frenzy, leaving behind a dilapidated
mental space and the labyrinthine traces of an unsatiated question mark?”
With this question my book The Conscious Eye 1988 was
completed and I was left with this viral Something Essential Missing.
Now I know that this ellipsis, this devouring
self-grinding wormhole hollowing itself out in the comfort of convention is the
most precious element in our human consciousness. I knew I had tο drift into
it to be able to comprehend incomprehensibly this matter which was other than
anything known.
In 1990, I
surrendered to my SEM attraction and I found myself in the bottom of the Lake
of Mornos, in Greece, which, was hit by drought, uncovering, for a short while,
a Hellenistic city and a submerged sanctuary
Metaphorically, I was sucked into my counter-clockwise
reflection, my whole being swallowed inward in myself, in the self-engulfing
archetypal fields of Puer Aeternus, carving with my searching fingers the mud
overflowing the sacred altar as though I was trying to exhume that SEM from its
own sacrificial plinth.
The mud sculptures, relics of that ritual performance,
the Chrysalii, were soon seeded by hundreds of international
participant-interactors, in 300 sites, in 27 countries, co-creating a
biodegradable, interactive global installation which melted in the rain leaving
behind a conceptual web of relational arrows, without the use of web
technologies which were still unknown.
Attuned to my “transcendent-I” still held in ‘the
other side of the mirror’, I was now unleashing on the crest of the nineties
the repressed imagery of my swelling consciousness which I was rediscovering embodied
in the mythical topology of Greece. My art-works now consisted mainly of affective immersive
maps, charged with graphisms and time-shattering instructions merging spectral/
actual space, tracing mythologically-augmented- anti-historical parcours, activating
dormant receptor, restituting with chunks of
information mythically augmented spectral hyper-spaces without the
use of Virtual Reality technologies, through the consensual synesthetic
engagement of the participating poets.
This early
crust of breakthrough experimentations was recycled in 2009 into the fertile
layer of Urania’s Gardens community projects, realized with the collaboration
of PrimopianoLivinGallery, social art generating artwork merging actual /
inner/spectral space:
There I was pattern-Setting
and monitoring a set of
techno-agro-psycho-social applications, in culturally gagged, mythically
augmented loci of Greece, based on a core idea and evolving script
layers outpacing the emerging psychosocial play states-
Special attention was given to the phasmatic affect
of ancient relics on our cognitive processes
Urania’s Gardens projects ranged from
art-constellations in remote villages, exploration of madness in social
semantics, linguistic games and treasure-hunt games on legend-freighted
subjective maps with the risky guidance of Heraclitus’antinomic fragments,
exploring the ecstatic power of paradox, meant to elicit the impossible
experience of PAI, the archetype of the Child playing
Our current project under preparation is Kadmus looks for Europe, an Alphabet-centered
project in which the whole city of
Thebes is to be converted into a linguistic playspace crammed with Lexomorphic
patterns generated by the numerical modeling of words based on the Ancient
Greek numerical codification of the Greek alphabet: a fascinating linguistic
game where everyday words are morphing into elegant rhythmic number-sets meant
to renormalize our disrupted rhythm with their ancient examined proportions.
The
Lexomorphe generated by the numerical modeling of the Greek word CHRYSALIS is
the legendary Graal, that became a ‘speaking sculpture’ a public space monument installed in public space.
It is made with my innovative material PXK that represents my skin left
behind. The Chrysalis monument hosted the
Olympic flame in 2004.
Is our impossible
object of desire incarnated in language itself?
Etymologically the Greek word Onoma means ‘giving
self-birth to Being’ (Kratylus). Could language be the Virus-of-Man that drives
him to commit heroic self-sacrificial acts to leap out of his mortality as Anthropos?
Currently, I am involved in completing Chiton Apeiros, a floorwork inspired by Polyxene’s sacrificial cloak in
Sophocles tragedy. A depotentiation shroud made with patches of my Olympic Chrysalis monument. It is the
final part of my PXK Route global
installation 2004-2017. Here are 30 pieces of this material PXK shreds of this global installation.
Could the Gene of God, this partially hereditary predisposition
for mystic experiences, favored by natural selection, as postulated by Dean
Hamer, be a genetic reformulation of Yοung’s archetype of the Child (PAI), that
‘psychic organ’ that allows us to mystically participate in the emanation of
Being in the world?
Myth/Network is a noetic artwork, evolving on the
interface of liturgical inertia/empirical time, anchoring current geopolitical
con-fusion to the dispersive configuration of our mythical infra-structure.
Project Myth/Network is an intercalage of presents
springing from the same principle performed on the game- changing threshold of
the 21st century. Could its 4D noetic structure be echoing the
dispersive configuration of the “Aeon that is PAI (Child) at play” ? (Heraclites)
It could be so and it could be otherwise” (Socrates).
PolyXene Kasda Italy Lecce 14/5/2017
