Paintings and Conversations

and more writing….  by Quentin Hardy.

Modern man has remade the physical world beyond recognition to any previous age. In consequence mankind is also remaking – in ways more urgent than ever – its age-old relationship with the invisible. These are the worlds of emotion, the subconscious, historical forces, Heaven and Hell, the self and the soul, plus the nameless dimly perceived and the still unseen worlds that guide, mark, vex and delight us.

Altrealism is a response to this paradox of the triumph of the physical and the reassertion of the invisible. As a means of tapping unconscious realms of experience to bring forth glimpses of that experience, Alrealism aims to unite personal inner worlds and larger social patterns, seeking commonality of expression – the terms of experience. Altrealism describes worlds we have both within ourselves and beyond our limited physical senses, bringing them to our shared physical space to renew it.

Altrealism has precursors in the so-called (still!) “modern” age of a century ago. As its name suggests, surrealism was one forebear, and the most influential. Surrealism was grounded in the same hopes for human transformation, however, that stoked philosophies of destruction from Russia to Germany to Cambodia. “Making man new” meant killing as a cost, and it exhausted our civilization for decades. Surrealism’s goal to “ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them” now seems like more deluded totalitarianism.

Man is never made new, Altrealism knows. But man must recognize anew of what he is really made. Altrealism is the artistic, playful journalism of our explosive invisible worlds – the stuff of which we are really made.

First, we must appreciate our achievement over the physical world. We have inherited and exploited a triumph of the scientific method, made real through engineering, with results that surpass previous dreams. Our forebears moved rivers or [and] leveled mountains [erase end of phrase up to the semicolon] as the final victory of their civilization; we fuse atoms, adjust molecules, and tinker with proteins inside DNA [as commerce] as commercial activity. We ease our loneliness among the billions of stars as we consider terraforming new planets. We wrap this world in fiber optic cables, construct cities for a billion or more people, and melt the glaciers of millennia. We are masters of the largest and smallest, for better or worse.

Greater still though are our different invisible worlds. Many of these are in service to the physical, but may rebel from control. Few of us care what an atom looks like, though we hear that it is largely empty space, dominated by the incessant motion of particles. We know, however, that it is we. This discovery and exploitation is, like all others, the product of a culture of desire, spurred by insubstantial dreams of consumption. We define ourselves by credit scores, potential to act or achieve, and loyalty points. They do not exist, in any meaningful sense, except their domination of our thoughts.

Our sense of human history was long dominated by theories of impersonal economic forces at work; these have lately fallen to an equally discredited impersonal “magic” of the marketplace. The recent eruption of global terrorism is in itself more a shout of negation, a “no!” to an accepted flow of history by dominant forces, than the terrible bombings that are its manifestation. People flock to its invisible rage, blind to the absence of any way forward.

Our durable cultural legacy includes for many ideas of Heaven and angels, somewhat less so Hell, and for others the equally immaterial subconscious and its urges. Even as we dominated the physical, we cling to vague awareness of ever more invisible forces and worlds. At times, death alone seems the one unchanged invisible world, though we shun its complex and terrifyingly simple presence.

The great lodestar of today, the Internet, is the greatest exemplar of this physical/invisible paradox. We know it consists of fiber and computers existing somewhere, made meaningful by billions of lines of computer code. Software, however, is a most insubstantial thing – it may rest on disks or inside silicon, but its essence is a series of statements of how the world might be arranged. Turn it on, and it is so. The essence of the Internet is our collective experience of it, however, a largely imaginary activity of connection, observation, recognition and change. With the personalization allowed as the system matures, each of us will possess a configuration of the messages, images, and connections perfect for us: In effect, not one Internet, but billions of individual Internets, in continual change. Or, as they used to say of God, our center will be everywhere and our circumference nowhere. The delight may in fact be palpable.

We have discovered new and invisible attributes of ourselves, such as the “hive mind” of our intersubjective intelligence. It is constituted in common with others, based on interactions with others, a shared perspective that is interdependent and fluid, depending on changes happening in others and in ourselves, and socially constructed. We are, it seems, in some invisible way capable of discerning lost objects and unknown prices through aggregation of our small, ungoverned contributions to addressing a problem.

The intersubjective, still being explored, throws our sense of the individual into doubt, even as we seek newer software to measure our ever-shifting collective behavior as a basis for action. Follow the behavior of the group, it goes, and we build the best possible product for the individual.

On top of these non-physical outcomes of the physical world of computers and the market, there is the undeniable world of emotional response. It has become increasingly hard to place, as the invisible is harnessed to better serve the physical. Friendship was once a coequal recognition, a lifelong bond. Now it is a choice on Facebook. Love is managed in prenuptual contracts, to be consumed without unforeseen consequence. Rage and anger are unhelpful, and must be managed. Joy, real joy, is frightening and disruptive. To feel something is merely that. Feelings no matter how deep are discouraged as a guide to action, and are thereby denied. Or else, they are terrifying forces of truth, justifying invasions. Either way, we do not know where to put them in this world.

Small wonder, then, that easy and foolish sarcasm dominates so much of our discourse and entertainment. It is the ideal secular religion for a consumer culture that has abandoned any physical-seeming teleological end, one in love with the method and a process. Sarcasm allows us to be in on the joke, to admire the process and its insubstantiality even as we consume. We are left somewhat hollow for knowing it was a joke, however, and must therefore consume again.

We have known that our dilemma must end in crisis. We feel it every day – even the casual nihilism of process is abandoned. In time, we have gained the courage to stop.

The solution we seek is Altrealism. Alrealism acknowledges the longstanding frustration with the domination of the method, adding to it an observation of our dilemmas in the invisible worlds created by the visible. The artist has always known this, but became caught up in the domination of the physical, often with sarcastic commentary posing as comprehension.

By acting as an observer and reporter of the great invisible, Alrealists return to the primacy the invisible as a source of action and creation in the physical world. We are reporters of the felt and the intuited, with scouting reports from the motive regions, the place of creation and suffering. We are the reporters of the felt and the intuited.

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