I spent a few hours today bringing my daughter’s class to visit the studio of a professional photographer friend whose hobby is the camera obscura. He can turn his whole studio into an experience of flowing images of the outside world washing across his walls, as though you were standing inside the camera bellows itself. This effect is accomplished via a special custom made lens that focuses the outside imagery against his studio wall. As I sat back and watched the streets and buildings of Providence turned upside down, it struck me what an extraordinary invention this must have seemed in 300 BC when first discovered by the Chinese. Literally, it was the first cinema.
Under good resolution, the specter of life carrying on in the streets below us, with miniature cars driving overhead and stick-like figures walking in and out of buildings upside down, the camera obscura managed to convey a startling sense of organic life, albeit of a shadow world. Unlike a film, events were unfolding in real time without editing. Nothing could ever be repeated in exactly the same fashion. This unique time signature made me grasp at the images and somehow seek to retain them. They created an unfamiliar kind of nostalgia, which simultaneously seemed to be very meditative.
FIGURE 27: ILLUSION:
FIND THE WORD “LIAR” IN THE IMAGE.
We also spent some time examining the inside of an old bellows studio camera, which is basically just a small camera obscura. Then my friend mentioned how the eye itself is essentially a camera obscura, and I immediately found myself floating in the Norseen Semiotic. Looking at the shadow world on the wall, I began pondering the Representamen and how far it has come in dominating our lives. Before the camera obscura, the only Representamen were shadows or artworks bound in time, static images on walls or molded into three dimensions. Suddenly, with the camera obscura, the imagery began moving across the walls and ceilings like living things. Like the NS, they are composed of both the living and the non-living. Life is what makes them move, but in spite of that they are still only a facsimile of it. That being said, we should ask how much life do the images hitting the back of our eyes contain? Whatever the answer, as they penetrate deeper into the brain they are copied again, who knows how many times. In so doing, what have they become, the reality the images represent, or a distorted illusion?
If all of our senses operate in this semiotic fashion within our nervous system, then it is hard to find out where exactly the “life” fits in. We sense life in the moving objects around us, in the surfaces we touch and the patterns we see and hear. Yet, what we take into our brain from outside is purely the representations of that life force, unless we consider the implications of the Norseen Semiotic. Correct me if I am wrong, but if we don’t draw some “life force” in with the semiotics from the outside world, then are not our perceptions no better than an elaborate line of code?
I began thinking again about my twenty year involvement with the Tourbillion, that vision of the whirlwind of fire I experienced beginning back in 1978 or so, that kept replicating itself in my life in so many ways for the next twenty years. First it was through art; then through direct manifestation in my life and finally through death via Pan Am 103.
In retrospect, the Tourbillion appeared to be a type of living semiotic that entered my consciousness from a super-conscious realm. It carried with it both information and future prognostications. Initially, I thought of it as an archetype of the Self, in the Jungian sense, and that model worked just fine for integration purposes. Now that I have become familiar with the NS, I am tempted to re-examine that interpretation.
I know that the Tourbillion visions interpenetrated my conscious and subconscious mind for the first ten years in many odd ways until it culminated in a physical, real world manifestation of itself as a burning landscape along both sides of the ancient, sacred road from Coba to Tulum in Mexico. All along the road peasants were burning the trees and brush, and as the road turned, the fire with its whirling flames of smoke appeared perpetually straight ahead. That event was just the beginning of the metaphorical overlay that occurred on that trip. Most important symbolically, the Tourbillion had come full circle from numinous image to accomplished fact, and with it, I suppose, followed my understanding of its meaning.
FIGURE 28: ROAD FROM COBA TO TULUM, MEXICO
FIGURE 29: DUNCAN LAURIE “THE ROAD FROM COBA TO TULUM”
PAINT AND LEAF ON CARVED GLASS.
When I think of the Tourbillion in semiotic terms today, I think of it as a specific form of powerful information that produced a profound energetic transformation in my life. If a bullet had gone through my body I could measure its effects in damaged tissue, in loss of blood and vitality. The Tourbillion was like the reverse of that metaphor. Every time it passed through my consciousness aspects of my life became energized that were formally dormant. Here, an image in my mind that was only information, i.e., mass-free, without motive force like a bullet, was responsible for releasing enormous amounts of energy that I was able to effectively benefit from in multiple, complex ways for many subsequent years. I would say now the Tourbillion was a semiotic of the life force. Since the life force is for all intensive purposes invisible to man even though it animates him from within, to understand it or communicate with it symbolically requires a representation.
For all intents and purposes, this mass-free moving image in my personal Krylov Space, with no apparent physical motive force, nevertheless released a powerful and sustained stream of energy into my mind and body for many years hence. As the energy worked its way through the dark areas of my psyche, it liberated images and feelings that became the substance of my evolution as an artist. Beyond that, it effected a therapeutic inclination. The energy released into my psyche was like a boar digging up old roots. All types of negative attachments were pried loose: addictions, emotional dependencies, unresolved beefs and burdens, and eventually an existential longing for contact with something beyond “me;” ironically, given the circumstances.
Anyway, the connection between my material and Norseen’s today is that as I experienced the semiotic of the Tourbillion and it began to open me up, my consciousness became far more fluid and adaptable to understanding visions, ecstatic contact, cosmic consciousness, etc. --- more bandwidth as Norseen would say. If the NS can also be characterized as a state of consciousness, then this would be it! In the same way, such experiences can’t be languaged very easily, so the need to reconcile and expunge them becomes nonverbal, i.e., “art”. What remains constant is a longing to understand what is really going on.
The side effect of such a process is not always artistic. Mental illness is one other option, as is religious fanaticism. The invention of visionary technology can also result — termed radionic or psychotronic here — and with it, an uncanny ability to make machines and instruments do work that otherwise would defy mechanistic/deterministic protocol. All such theory assumes that some motivated “life force” exists on, in or around the planet, inclined to guide consciousness and make possible similar benefits to all. I have heard it argued that an experience like mine is delusional and the product of exaggerated self-inflation, but when you actually experience the profundity of it all, that notion becomes ludicrous.
Here exists the profound difference between semiotic immersion in the expansive, visionary sense and semiotics in the scientific and engineering sense. Science, in keeping with mechanistic thought in general, views semiotics essentially as a means to and end, often as a means of reducing consciousness into discrete manageable compartments or quanta with mechanical or probabilistic relationships to other events. Of course, this is in part quite necessary for engineering purposes, in the same sense that our body must be understood as a biological mechanism as well as a conduit to cosmic contact. But in spite of what appears so obvious to some, others genuinely believe today that brain chemistry alone can produce consciousness and cognition.
ART is more concentrated, thus more powerful SEMIOTICS...nature is replete with semiotics...semiotics is communications of every sort, but semiotics means that communications have structure...the more structure the more complicated and more expansive the communications. You need to build structure to communicate...semiotics is the structural components involved in making communication.
There is a big bang and there are universal forces at play and there becomes a resultant structure to the universe…certain things that physics allows and doesn't allow at certain times and grid locations. Semiotics however would allow for certain properties to form into place. Or, as you mention, can be pulled into place by future operations…a back vectoring semiotic channel. The rushing into place of the future controls a vivid understanding of past events. The future descends from its own compilation of the past. This is all described by the HUNT.
Imagine you are on the hunt to find where a person has been hiding, such as a Bin Laden. If you are wise to the environment, you can begin to tell if a location was frequented by someone or not. The Gary Larson cartoon...Yep, the deer sure was bedded down here last night! And on the ground are a wrinkled blanket and a picture of the deer's mom.
What is it that allows someone to know that an environment has been disturbed? Well, it is part physics, and then part semiotics… and then, if the place is really orchestrated, part ART. Then, if the location actually alters the future in a predictive way, it is science/technology...wherein Semiotics becomes ART and Science.
Now, what if you came across a place that, by its very nature, explained to you who had lived there, what they did, where they went and ways to access and communicate with them. What is left at the site is some object or mental impression. What really is the difference if the site leaves an interactive DVD/cell phone which allows you to technologically contact the prior inhabitants in some current distant location...or a mental semiotic that tells you what and where they are?
IF both hook you up and provide the answer, then it really is a matter of convenience which one you use to communicate with the here and there occupants of the location. The very place, the mental backdrop that it creates, and reliving the ritual of the place may all serve as semiotic steps necessary to create an open linkage to the inhabitants.
I am amazed how Blood is a very particular Black when in MOONLIGHT. Imagine a frenzied priest and a fully engaged sacrifice and the heightened intensity of the enchanted crowd of believers, swaying and reciting the chants...and then the act……. and then the flow of blood…the particular Black Flow in the moonlight and the sweaty perspiration of the tropic night...if there were a specific arrangement of icons, or Artworks, all would be a form of semiotics designed to capture and sustain the moments.
Today, just picking up a shard of a broken masonry coated with a bit of the tale could easily reawaken the entire complex culture, and it would surge through one’s mind psychically as an active memory of distant times.
Similar events could find you picking up a child's handmade toy outside of the death camps -- forcing in one's mind the playing of lilting violin music, the last chords of Sobibor.
Or, look at the splayed bodies arching towards a gasp of fresh air, holding hands and cradling a loved one in the dust casts at Vesuvius. Here, a single long day 2000 years ago is played over and over again. Every new glimpse or repeated look re-lives the killing grounds of the volcano.
ART is like the Blood in the Blackness, or the shard of a fallen child’s toy, or the cast of the last moment of life — it captures and propels the past with riveting clarity into the future, turned on by the Semiotic structure and Semiotic channels of some future Communications.
So Duncan, what is the "thing" that makes a Tuscany different than a landslide. What makes it 'obvious' that the break in the forest is the path of a wounded deer, and not some crashing boulder? It is the event and the interpretation of the event. Now some events have more semiotic energy than others. Pompeii and Vesuvius carry more semiotic weight than Krakatoa. The Nazi Death Camps carry more semiotic weight than the killing fields of Cambodia. And so too it seems that the Psychic Energy of the SA Pyramids is greater because of the entire ritual blood letting.
But it takes both sides of the Semiotic to have structure. The more structure, or the more unique the energy associated with the structure, the more it stands out in the future or the past. This makes sense...where sentient logic spends time and energy creating more structure, something highly unique takes place...there is a greater NOTICEABILITY…that someone, something, BEDDED down in this place.
Now let's say that I want someone to find me but I have to keep moving…I want to attract attention, but also to point the way to some future communications point. So I leave more elaborate or even simple signs and semiotics. Or I can leave a really powerful semiotic, a battery powered or solar powered or sonic powered device that when you pick it up it reveals where you need to look for me. Now what would this device be. Is it a semiotic…Yes. Is it radionic…Yes. Is it art…Yes. Is it scientific/technological...Yes.
Well, what if I was really powerful, and, rather than leave a device, I left Semiotic Energy impressed into the Space-Time manifold. Any being capable of semiotic thought, when passing into this zone, would immediately begin to KNOW ME, WHERE I WAS, WHAT I AM and WHERE I AM, and, would also begin to immediately draw my thoughts to this person and vice versa.
NOW this form of psychic Semiotics would utilize Synesthesia...the winds at the location could become comprehended as my Words speaking into the ear. Or the Coolness of the breeze could be transformed into a clear map of where I am located...and the feel of the sandy dirt falling through the fingers could be felt as thousands of candles burning with the promise of treasure, or power or love, as each one is endlessly extinguished.
It is probably true that the most highly advanced species in the universe will not rely on a device for communications, but will use the Semiotic Structures, the brains, of the local occupants for Connection and Directions. Therefore there must be Semiotics that take over the existing semiotic structure and cause it to transmit in a different way.
This is where the Radionics and the ART and the Science all become fused to allow the Semiotic structure of one to alter the semiotic structure of another, so the two can communicate fully.
So how can you capture and create this today? Just as you imagine, you must have some form of Interaction between the Art and the observer or the interpreter. The Art Form must be aware that it is being observed and then it must execute a semiotic that interacts with the interpreter.
Birds do this all the time. A bird flies into a tree branch in my backyard and sings out four or five notes and a harmony. IF I only approximate the same chirp, the bird will do it again trying to locate me. If I do a good job mimicking the bird chirp, I can actually feel the bird start to get excited in its semiotic quest. It sings a little bit louder or faster or twitches a bit more on the tree limb. But, at some point in this charade, the Bird figures out that I am not part of his species and his songs dissipate or he flies away and tries elsewhere.
What I feel you are looking for is for ART to find a Mate. And this quest can be accomplished by semiotic batteries. Such batteries correspond to a radionics feedback loop that can distinguish, via Interpretation values (aesthetic values), the level of interest in a Semiotic communications linkage. So how can this be done? Sensors and aesthetic gauges are needed to start with, plus some form of radionic measurement.
You have your ART placed in a specific location. Sensors near the ART can locate if an object is near the ART, and the ART maybe moves a bit to the left...what does the object do...or the ART lets out a pitch or two...what is the response of the object....The ART can turn on a semiotic battery and get brighter, move right and left and let out a song if the object begins to dance with it. The more the object responds the more the ART engages in semiotics. The logical conclusion of the ART is: sending out a message that if the object would like to occupy the ART, or for the ART to occupy the object, a STATEMENT or ACTION must be made: Trade address for credit card number....when satisfied, the ART is sold to the object. Or, some lesser form of language AGREEMENT is negotiated.
So I guess what I am getting to in Semiotics is that the final act is AGREEMENT or NEGOTIATION...some future event is entered upon.
And this is what separates Semiotics from other energies in the forest. SEMIOTICS can lead to a Future AGREEMENT. This future potential is what makes a semiotic stand out in the wilderness. THE SEMIOTIC in the most pure form is ART. Secondly it is Science/Technology. Thirdly, as Radionics, it is able to store and release the energy of Intent. All together, the total semiotic is a purposeful arrangement of structure that allows the Future to be Negotiated.
You and I know we are into semiotics, because my semiotics to you, as interpreted by you, forces you, by your nature, to re-interact with me, thus causing both of us to have some FUTURE PURPOSE. Semiotics is not only signs and symbols. When it becomes ART and Science/Technology, it is the Mechanism by which we can Interpret the Future and the Future that draws the past toward itself.”
I want to come back and spend more time expanding on your comments and questions here, and in several other of your recent email responses. The major Theme sticking in my brain today is the SELF IMAGE...what is it that is carried in each cell that projects some universal self...perhaps it is the DNA itself...that DNA projects a REPRESENTAMEN that each fractal piece can refer to for its local definition of boundary and self...and of a global carve out in space time of what will be occupied by SELF.
When I am on a chair on a roof and I am about to jump over the roof seven stories up onto another roof separated two feet away, I have a very good feeling or a very sick feeling that I can make the jump. It must be like this regarding intention...each part of the biological body must have a picture of whether it can reach the target…the grape on the end of the stick. There is some degree of measurement that is either encompassed by the semiotic whole or is not...if it is encompassed, then intentionality is very low. But if the gap is great then the Intentionality needed to close the gap must then become very large. Perhaps it is this SELF-KNOWLEDGE that is the cause of anxiety. I look at my dogs trying to get to the snack that I am holding just over the edge of a small gate...the dog would otherwise move right to the snack, but now there is an obstacle, the gate...the dog starts to get anxious and tries to go over, around, under the gate...you can see the pressure, the semiotic pressure building in the dog's mind to figure out how to get to the snack...and what is it...another semiotic is blocking what otherwise would be closure on the snack.
I see illness as an obstacle like the gate. The body knows what it is to feel healthy and gets anxious...gets internal pressure building up because energy is not matching the OVERALL PICTURE OF HEALTHY SELF. So the body does all kinds of incredible things to cover over the negative Semiotic, the gates, and to REBUILD a new perfect SELF IMAGE that will eventually reach over the gate and connect to the other set of correct self images.
So really, it is semiotics that is the root of INTENTIONALITY and all the anxiety and angst felt by an artist that they are not getting the Correct Image transmitted, or by the student getting all bent in knots about not understanding the correct image, such as in golf. You can see the perfect semiotic shot to the green and are happy when it occurs…or frustrated when it is blocked out; you make a mistake and try to correct for it. So then it is also Semiotics which is the root of Memory...all memory is either perfect semiotics recalled, or the intense anxiety of incorrect semiotics that needs to be torn down and rebuilt...But to what? A perfect SELF IMAGE.
Something must be providing the perfect self image...This is FORM, the form in information. FORM must be captured and reproduced by the biology...this must be occurring in the DNA...for what is it that a virus does when it encounters other cells. It INJECTS its DNA and creates a Copy of itself. This must reflect the basic structure of communications of life itself. Life is a REPRESENTATION of FORM....then life becomes a process of satisfying FORM. HENCE, the Pyramids. The purpose in life was to build the REFLECTING or RESONATING CHAMBERS, the RADIONICS to sustain life after life itself. The ANKH even looks like a MIRROR on shoulders. The BRAIN is the SEMIOTIC CHAMBER. For some the heart was the chamber...but we can see it is also the written or spoken language, the culture which is the resonating chamber. Hence, ART can become the media for representing the mirror to the FORM.
A couple emails back you talked about how you can feel different thought patterns, sometimes just a twinge, other times full bore…well, I wrote a rather lengthy project report for NASA back in 2000 and also for NSA related to Cryptomnesia…this is Greek for the Continuum of signals and noises that can occur in a brain.
Imagine a Vertical Bar to the left of this page. In the middle of the bar would be zero dB or decibel, and it would move to over 100 db + positive to the top...and in the same vein would register down into 150-200 db – negative.
This is exactly the same kind of measurement scale that is used to rate a submarine sound signal or Electromagnetic Signal...positive and negative. Well, it is possible using EEG and other BioFusion tools that one can track the movement of Identified Thoughts or Semiotic Structures as they emanate Functions or Communications (INTENT). In fact, right now, you Duncan, probably have hundreds or thousands of Thoughts and mini-thoughts that are dancing around, and banging around inside your head, just like a radar sweep looking out at weather patterns…one can radar sweep the semiotic conditions inside of your head and plot them on this Cryptomnesia Scale. You can even apply Doppler analysis and see which thoughts are growing in intensity, or dying out, or getting stuck in “feed-back” loops, sustaining themselves, perhaps in Unconscious or Non-Cognitive zones, at let's say – 100 db or -35-50 db, self obsessive routines, etc. etc.
FIGURE 30: BASYS, BIOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURES & SCIENTIFIC SYSTEMS
When thoughts emerge past zero and move into the high positive values then you can clearly see that that is what is occupying the Mental Awake State of the person...you can flash brief visuals or sound types or kinesthetic potentials, and you can see the Brain Thought adjust…
Well, equally, if you are aware that a person is entering an Alpha State, or better yet, a hypnogogic (falling asleep) or a hypnopompic state (pre-waking state) of an modified Theta-Alpha brain engagement region...you can actually see the subconscious mind at work and interact with it...you can actually Inject Semiotics into the mental region and see the Brain Thoughts surround the Semiotic, infuse it, and then act upon it right into the Awake States. In this way, you can DIE INJECT, action potentials...for influencing someone during the day...or you can do the same thing and get Alert Semiotics injected into the sleeping and even into the LIFE-Death interface of the Delta state...you can probe the deepest depths of the person and see just exactly how deep into the abyss, the db, you can go...You can even affect someone with Semiotic cues down at negative (-) 200 db…down at the very bottom of our semiotic ability to understand information, and right at the zone where Alfven Wave corridors of the brain Magnetite exchange ZPE in the dendritic neuropil at nanoscale, discrete bandwidth, channels. It is right here in the Marianas Trench of human thought/perception, that the person is exposed to the Universals of Quantum State potentials, and that each individual thought or Semiotic Identity is formed, only to then bubble or shoot right up to the surface of positive thought realms.
Just as you can look into an aquarium or a fish bowl and see the stuff at the bottom work its way up to the surface, you can track the origin of Semiotics from Alfven Wave Interactions with ZPE, from the plumbed depths of the Brain.
FIGURE 31: HUMAN CENTERED PERCEPTION IN MACHINES
This is really pretty cool stuff, because it allows us the opportunity to use Radionics to condition or reinforce or direct the destination of the most basic to the most sublime of human thoughts and the HUMAN CONDITION.