My idea is to explore the origin and progressive evolution and function of the graph, the grid, the net, the intricate matrix that governs all civilization from the ancient East to the West and into the global mindset that is the future as a tool to navigate, document and create useful works of art that balance form and content, structure and spontaneity for the generations that will follow.
All phenomena are contained with a three dimensional system of coordinates that contain reality. Think of it as a graph that forms a scaffolding, an ordered system of boxes, a rectilinear framework, a three dimensional array that forms a kind of skyscraper, an infinite network of interlocking Rubik’s cubes that contain and enable us to metaphorically map everything from the molecule to the Milky Way galaxy and beyond. We are born into boxes called cradles, live in boxes called buildings, drive around in boxes called cars, fly around in boxes called planes and space shuttles and are buried in boxes called coffins. The trick is to think not just ‘outside the box’ but also about all the infinite possibilities within it.
Arête is the French word for sharpness; the goal is to sharpen one’s technological skills with a concept of excellence of being prepared, alert and ready for the challenges of the future. This set of qualities or strengths will enable one to do his or her best, to realize the potentiality in each individual’s ability to become an intellectual contributor in the 21st century. That is the goal. A balance of structuralism and spontaneity will help in one’s creative endeavors to balance form and content into new forms of creative expression.
Digital art is the language of the future. As a digital artist, I would like to explore and develop my skills in the realm of computer generated imagery working with the elements of color, space, time, light, and sound and develop my voice in images that speak to the culture of my time. This is the 21st century and artists must be equipped to deal with the demands of this new fledgling electronic culture as a means of survival and to respond to it. The computer provides an arena of the imagination where the elements of art can be explored within a graphic structure and still holds a vast range of possibilities for creative solutions.
A sense of structure clarifies thought and allows the imagination to communicate. I am a structuralist. As a structuralist, I intend to balance a firm sense of control with an improvised spontaneity, in order to capture energy. This is an important metaphor for my work and my life as an artist. Experimentation with electronic media led me to discover an important principle: the intriguing effect of stillness versus motion when opposing forces complement one another. This idea of complementary components applies to all languages of art. It is this fascination for static combined with kinetic elements that integrates art and amplifies all of its contrasts, variations, subtleties, geometric and organic qualities.
I have arrived at the conclusion that structure in art and in life is crucial; it is an orientation device for creativity. It allows one to articulate his or her deepest convictions and to translate dreams into reality. It is a map, or geography of the mind that allows one to contemplate many facets of meaning at the same time.
While appreciating the established structures of art and all types of media, I am not opposed to the ‘one of a kind’, ‘made by hand’ art at all. It is my intent to be ready for the future of visual culture and communication and in my view it is digital and vast in scope and scale. My goal is to realize the images in my imagination and to do so digitally and to confront the vast arena of possibilities that is progress itself.
An expertise and agility of mental alertness and versatility and a new vision will enable one to see the parallels in science, art and technology. The development of sound reasoning and imaginative communication helps one to navigate any environment, geographically even in outer space. The skills of navigation in the future are critical to the survival of humanity.
There is a new underlying philosophy of convergence of art, music, science and the humanities in a square. Creativity should be disciplined, aligned and allied with science and technology. The random happening or opportunity can be captured, documented and archived in a new form of art that is the record of our time. A globalism and creative synthesis will evolve to result in a new special kind of intelligence to be prepared for new things that are still unknown.
It is old fashioned to think in terms of my family or my nation. We must work together with mutual respect and toward the common goal of peace. Humanity needs more genuine cooperation. Each individual possesses his or her own unique and separate version of reality or point of view based on his or her experience and memory. Each of these separate realities are valid based on the individual and should be respected and acknowledged during communication. There are times when individuals share an experience.
When each individual’s separate reality encounters the same phenomenon such as a song, painting or a film, and so on, it is a landmark in the memory that offers an opportunity to connect to another individual and yet each individual’s experience is unique and therefore of value.
“Oh, so you like Picasso too?”
When individuals share an experience they feel connected in some way. Recently there seems to be evolving a new network of collective consciousness where each individual shares so much that each individual’s memories and products become part of the contemporary culture and then archived in the vast databases the ‘libraries and museums’ of the digital future online.
Compartmentalization is everywhere. It is so much a part of the design of our contemporary urban culture that the individual gets pigeon holed into a box with a number, a date, a file a tiny little square on a demographic census chart. George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a blueprint. Everyone commits a thought crime on occasion but not everyone gives weight to irrational thought and takes action on it. There is a filter in the civilized mind that restrains, contains and balances intuition, with action.
O Big Brother,
Like Michnoku cloth
Printed with tangle ferns
Our minds are disordered
Because of you
But our love is not.
Everything comes in a box. Like shoes, eggs, even people live in boxes and when they die, they are buried in boxes. When looking at the calendar, or the periodic table, we see squares everywhere. In the bathroom tiles and miles and miles of endless streets, highways, runways and train tracks crisscrossing at right angles all over the globe.
As we grow and our culture and our brains evolve, we are reaching a point where everything we do, every choice we make about the things we buy is as an artist choosing a color for the painting on his or her canvas of life. In this way, we are all, each and every one of us artists and our lives are our art and what we leave behind are our notes, and clues, a trail of pearls of what we learned along the way. Our stories become a part of history or her-story. Each of us should attempt to find our own version of happiness and to approximate our ideals and to do our best with the opportunities that we are given and in times of need, rise to the occasion and fight bravely for what is right.
At the dawn of human history, many years ago, we find that writing-
(Or was it drawing? What is the difference between drawing and writing? When did these two activities become separate practices? When did we stop inventing letters or sounds and characters to represent them? In English for example, who decided that twenty six letters were enough?)
-was probably invented with a stick scratching onto the earth, images were painted on the walls of caves and then carved into stones then onto skin then later plant fibers were pressed into paper and fibers were woven into a fabric, a network, a matrix, a graph, a flowing curtain, a tapestry, quilt, a screen, a back drop, a cloth, grid of thread, a flag waving in the wind, and planted on the moon.
This piece I originally wrote over twenty years ago begins and ends with an explosion. It opens with the ‘Big Bang’, that singular spark that ignites and creates the universe or perhaps even a multi-verse and catapults all spinning matter into outer space to form the Milky Way galaxy where our solar system with its planets align, spin and are held in place by the delicate forces of gravity and levity, attracting and repelling in perfect balance like a magnet that holds all of humanity and the entire planet in place as we burrow into it, build on it and fly around it and orbit it until all of its potential resources are used up, burned out and exhausted until it, (hopefully only hypothetically), ends with another explosion.
This illustration is just for symmetry and the beauty of the antithesis of the original ‘Big Bang’ is hopefully just a future fiction, a ‘warning’ that we must begin to think in terms that are systemic, holistic and aware of the consequences of a planet’s fate whose average inhabitants think not as guardians of the ecosystem but as only consumers and to begin to see the earth as sculpture and to balance the natural with the man made, the organic with the geometric, the seemingly random with the governing universal order of rectilinear structure.
Consider at all the books and the written words, it doesn’t matter what language it is, it is essentially just arbitrary combinations of fixed symbols into patterns arranged in one direction or another within a rectangular space, graphically, on pages and bound either on the right or left with a title on the spine in a rectilinear configuration.
The grid is an image, a symbol, an underlying structural imaginary force that underwrites art, music, dance, poetry, sculpture, architecture, science, and all languages of all of human thought. It is from this foundation of graphic order that we can begin to see similarities and patterns in thoughts both in the flat two dimensions of vertical and horizontal flat composition and into the third dimension depth of sculptural and architectural space and the fourth dimension of time.
The fact that all ideas exist within a framework, scaffolding, or a system of coordinates can no longer be ignored. No matter what one’s geographic origin and individual race, or creed if we begin to focus on the grid we might be able to truly arrive literally on the same page and begin to find agreement simply by first observing this thread of commonality and similarity of human intelligence we could then arrive at a common ground and respecting the unique discoveries within it, this structure, this foundation that maybe peace, prosperity and progress might converge and merge into a new synthesis and we can then find ways to improve our lives and make way for the future generations to benefit from our creative contributions to the culture of the human race without losing face as we explore ever deeper into the oceans and into the crust of the earth and reach up into the sky, the stars and planets of outer space.
This matrix mindset, this structure of the map, the geography, the periodic table, the calendar, the microchip, the chess board, the blue print, the three dimensional array that where unique shapes are only able to be imagined within the confines of structure, on the screen, within the picture frame, the system of coordinates, the scaffolding, the musical staff of the longitude and latitude lines that circumscribe the earth with that ancient grid that governs and holds the key to united imaginations.
As artists, the goal should be to help our planet and its inhabitants work together with united imaginations for the good and prosperity of the future. Now is the time for all men, women and children and all those in between to come to the aid of our planet.
Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, California on November 17th, 1904, to an American mother and a Japanese father. Imagine an individual human-being with the genes of the freedom of America with all its possibilities and the ancient graphic structural order of Japan encapsulated in his DNA. His first name means courage. His first sculpture was a ceramic wave with a bright blue glaze. It was not long into his early childhood that his mother had him help design their new house that was being built in Japan in Chigasaki. It is the dichotomy of these two creative forces, the freedom and motion of the blue wave with the graphic structural architecture and planning and straight lines of carpentry that inform some of the most thought provoking work of his career.
It is his tenacious grasp of his original creativity that inspires us most. He really never strayed from the idea of waves and grids throughout his career. The natural and the man-made are at the heart of all his work. In his assembled stone sculptures toward the end of his career the vertical stones feature slick industrial carved surfaces coupled with the raw uncarved blocks of natural stone. At another point in his creative development he invented the assemblage of flat slab stones with slots cut precisely that carefully balance organic biomorphic forms within essentially a cubic format and structure.
The idea of a system of order and all the variables within it could be applied to music, poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture- virtually all things known exist within another structure. The idea of random action versus geometric form still illustrates the irony and brevity of life. It is a vision where even the most mundane happening seems to resonate in accord with a universal song.
There is also the idea of language. The language of form is one that Noguchi articulates visually in the most direct and economical yet very generous means of expression. This juxtaposition of these simple principles leads one on an associative level to understand language as an arbitrarily constructed system of order.
The Structure of United Imaginations
There should be an international forum discussing the origins of art and the direction of progress. I would build a structure for the conference. It would be made of shiny, stainless steel tubes arranged in a grid to form scaffolding, simple cubic scaffolding that would function not only as a sculpture but as architecture, a musical instrument, a slide, film and video screen, a theatrical set and backdrop.
Essentially the scaffolding would be the central focus of a performance piece, an opera of sorts about civilization, creative thought, music art, literature, science and technology. The opera would also be a kind of ritual ceremony, an unveiling of an extremely Spartan literally bare bones piece of art. The opera ritual would help the viewer see the grid as I see it, as a kind of universal form that connects all thought.
The unveiling would begin with a film about the dawn of time, the initial spark, that ignites the big bang where the universe as we know it came to be and then a little cartoon that would feature the image of the earth from outer space. Its surface, oceans and continents would be circumscribed with lines longitude and latitude. These lines would then be peeled off like an orange and then stretched into cubic scaffolding.
Then cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, numbers, calendars, graphs, maps and then a myriad of images and transformations would appear frame by frame to illustrate the concept of the grid and its function as a universal thought connecting form until the audience is so bombarded with images that the screen eventually blurs and explodes, not actually but the film would end with the image of an explosion.
The screen then moves forward after the film and is slowly revealed as actual scaffolding and within it is one very dark person in the shadows and with a stick they tap on the stainless steel structure and achieve a sound that would be bell-like yet percussive and would serve as the metronome for the entire piece.
Later, other artists would join at different levels, intervals and areas, which would light up while orators, philosophers, scientists and poets would speak and their speech would be an integral part of the action. Then dancers would appear to be woven in among everyone else and break out of their cells and climb over and crawl through and dance all around the structure.
At one point two singers would sing in two different languages and couples would join them in pairs of other languages until everyone was singing in his own language. This song would sound like a harmonic cacophony of chaotic consonants and vowels that would turn into a make-believe language and then dissolve into "ah's" and "mmm's" and everyone on stage would hold hands and encircle the structure as if it were an idyllic shrine representing united imaginations.
Finally lights, lasers and fog would merge in a kind of electronic, red pulsing digital rhapsody and the thing of stainless steel would rise up and be re-veiled in an opaque white scrim and move to the back once again to become a part of the theater, the screen, the backdrop, simply vanishing into an invisible ordinary wall. And before the audience realizes it, before the song is done without any applause or pause, an immediate change of scenery with instant transition, the conference begins.
The speaker is an artist, a poet, a physicist or astronomer talking about creativity using video, slides and an electronic pointer and the audience will watch intently. They will watch the screen because they will know; they will have seen the beauty that is behind it.
Isamu Noguchi's first name means courage and that is what he has given us. His art reaches back to the originally constructed thoughtful creativity of his childhood and forward into the future of space and the steely finesse of the technological era. I find it no coincidence that both he and Andy Warhol's studios both had the interiors painted silver to allow no shadows. Surely Isamu left a path that we as individuals should all follow, a journey without borders back to our true selves and into the future with courage.
All phenomena are contained with a three dimensional system of coordinates that contain reality. Think of it as a graph that forms a scaffolding, an ordered system of boxes, a rectilinear framework, a three dimensional array that forms a kind of skyscraper, an infinite network of interlocking Rubik’s cubes that contain and enable us to metaphorically map everything from the molecule to the Milky Way galaxy and beyond. We are born into boxes called cradles, live in boxes called buildings, drive around in boxes called cars, fly around in boxes called planes and space shuttles and are buried in boxes called coffins. The trick is to think not just ‘outside the box’ but also about all the infinite possibilities within it.
Arête is the French word for sharpness; the goal is to sharpen one’s technological skills with a concept of excellence of being prepared, alert and ready for the challenges of the future. This set of qualities or strengths will enable one to do his or her best, to realize the potentiality in each individual’s ability to become an intellectual contributor in the 21st century. That is the goal. A balance of structuralism and spontaneity will help in one’s creative endeavors to balance form and content into new forms of creative expression.
Digital art is the language of the future. As a digital artist, I would like to explore and develop my skills in the realm of computer generated imagery working with the elements of color, space, time, light, and sound and develop my voice in images that speak to the culture of my time. This is the 21st century and artists must be equipped to deal with the demands of this new fledgling electronic culture as a means of survival and to respond to it. The computer provides an arena of the imagination where the elements of art can be explored within a graphic structure and still holds a vast range of possibilities for creative solutions.
A sense of structure clarifies thought and allows the imagination to communicate. I am a structuralist. As a structuralist, I intend to balance a firm sense of control with an improvised spontaneity, in order to capture energy. This is an important metaphor for my work and my life as an artist. Experimentation with electronic media led me to discover an important principle: the intriguing effect of stillness versus motion when opposing forces complement one another. This idea of complementary components applies to all languages of art. It is this fascination for static combined with kinetic elements that integrates art and amplifies all of its contrasts, variations, subtleties, geometric and organic qualities.
I have arrived at the conclusion that structure in art and in life is crucial; it is an orientation device for creativity. It allows one to articulate his or her deepest convictions and to translate dreams into reality. It is a map, or geography of the mind that allows one to contemplate many facets of meaning at the same time.
While appreciating the established structures of art and all types of media, I am not opposed to the ‘one of a kind’, ‘made by hand’ art at all. It is my intent to be ready for the future of visual culture and communication and in my view it is digital and vast in scope and scale. My goal is to realize the images in my imagination and to do so digitally and to confront the vast arena of possibilities that is progress itself.
An expertise and agility of mental alertness and versatility and a new vision will enable one to see the parallels in science, art and technology. The development of sound reasoning and imaginative communication helps one to navigate any environment, geographically even in outer space. The skills of navigation in the future are critical to the survival of humanity.
There is a new underlying philosophy of convergence of art, music, science and the humanities in a square. Creativity should be disciplined, aligned and allied with science and technology. The random happening or opportunity can be captured, documented and archived in a new form of art that is the record of our time. A globalism and creative synthesis will evolve to result in a new special kind of intelligence to be prepared for new things that are still unknown.
It is old fashioned to think in terms of my family or my nation. We must work together with mutual respect and toward the common goal of peace. Humanity needs more genuine cooperation. Each individual possesses his or her own unique and separate version of reality or point of view based on his or her experience and memory. Each of these separate realities are valid based on the individual and should be respected and acknowledged during communication. There are times when individuals share an experience.
When each individual’s separate reality encounters the same phenomenon such as a song, painting or a film, and so on, it is a landmark in the memory that offers an opportunity to connect to another individual and yet each individual’s experience is unique and therefore of value.
“Oh, so you like Picasso too?”
When individuals share an experience they feel connected in some way. Recently there seems to be evolving a new network of collective consciousness where each individual shares so much that each individual’s memories and products become part of the contemporary culture and then archived in the vast databases the ‘libraries and museums’ of the digital future online.
Compartmentalization is everywhere. It is so much a part of the design of our contemporary urban culture that the individual gets pigeon holed into a box with a number, a date, a file a tiny little square on a demographic census chart. George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a blueprint. Everyone commits a thought crime on occasion but not everyone gives weight to irrational thought and takes action on it. There is a filter in the civilized mind that restrains, contains and balances intuition, with action.
O Big Brother,
Like Michnoku cloth
Printed with tangle ferns
Our minds are disordered
Because of you
But our love is not.
Everything comes in a box. Like shoes, eggs, even people live in boxes and when they die, they are buried in boxes. When looking at the calendar, or the periodic table, we see squares everywhere. In the bathroom tiles and miles and miles of endless streets, highways, runways and train tracks crisscrossing at right angles all over the globe.
As we grow and our culture and our brains evolve, we are reaching a point where everything we do, every choice we make about the things we buy is as an artist choosing a color for the painting on his or her canvas of life. In this way, we are all, each and every one of us artists and our lives are our art and what we leave behind are our notes, and clues, a trail of pearls of what we learned along the way. Our stories become a part of history or her-story. Each of us should attempt to find our own version of happiness and to approximate our ideals and to do our best with the opportunities that we are given and in times of need, rise to the occasion and fight bravely for what is right.
At the dawn of human history, many years ago, we find that writing-
(Or was it drawing? What is the difference between drawing and writing? When did these two activities become separate practices? When did we stop inventing letters or sounds and characters to represent them? In English for example, who decided that twenty six letters were enough?)
-was probably invented with a stick scratching onto the earth, images were painted on the walls of caves and then carved into stones then onto skin then later plant fibers were pressed into paper and fibers were woven into a fabric, a network, a matrix, a graph, a flowing curtain, a tapestry, quilt, a screen, a back drop, a cloth, grid of thread, a flag waving in the wind, and planted on the moon.
This piece I originally wrote over twenty years ago begins and ends with an explosion. It opens with the ‘Big Bang’, that singular spark that ignites and creates the universe or perhaps even a multi-verse and catapults all spinning matter into outer space to form the Milky Way galaxy where our solar system with its planets align, spin and are held in place by the delicate forces of gravity and levity, attracting and repelling in perfect balance like a magnet that holds all of humanity and the entire planet in place as we burrow into it, build on it and fly around it and orbit it until all of its potential resources are used up, burned out and exhausted until it, (hopefully only hypothetically), ends with another explosion.
This illustration is just for symmetry and the beauty of the antithesis of the original ‘Big Bang’ is hopefully just a future fiction, a ‘warning’ that we must begin to think in terms that are systemic, holistic and aware of the consequences of a planet’s fate whose average inhabitants think not as guardians of the ecosystem but as only consumers and to begin to see the earth as sculpture and to balance the natural with the man made, the organic with the geometric, the seemingly random with the governing universal order of rectilinear structure.
Consider at all the books and the written words, it doesn’t matter what language it is, it is essentially just arbitrary combinations of fixed symbols into patterns arranged in one direction or another within a rectangular space, graphically, on pages and bound either on the right or left with a title on the spine in a rectilinear configuration.
The grid is an image, a symbol, an underlying structural imaginary force that underwrites art, music, dance, poetry, sculpture, architecture, science, and all languages of all of human thought. It is from this foundation of graphic order that we can begin to see similarities and patterns in thoughts both in the flat two dimensions of vertical and horizontal flat composition and into the third dimension depth of sculptural and architectural space and the fourth dimension of time.
The fact that all ideas exist within a framework, scaffolding, or a system of coordinates can no longer be ignored. No matter what one’s geographic origin and individual race, or creed if we begin to focus on the grid we might be able to truly arrive literally on the same page and begin to find agreement simply by first observing this thread of commonality and similarity of human intelligence we could then arrive at a common ground and respecting the unique discoveries within it, this structure, this foundation that maybe peace, prosperity and progress might converge and merge into a new synthesis and we can then find ways to improve our lives and make way for the future generations to benefit from our creative contributions to the culture of the human race without losing face as we explore ever deeper into the oceans and into the crust of the earth and reach up into the sky, the stars and planets of outer space.
This matrix mindset, this structure of the map, the geography, the periodic table, the calendar, the microchip, the chess board, the blue print, the three dimensional array that where unique shapes are only able to be imagined within the confines of structure, on the screen, within the picture frame, the system of coordinates, the scaffolding, the musical staff of the longitude and latitude lines that circumscribe the earth with that ancient grid that governs and holds the key to united imaginations.
As artists, the goal should be to help our planet and its inhabitants work together with united imaginations for the good and prosperity of the future. Now is the time for all men, women and children and all those in between to come to the aid of our planet.
Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, California on November 17th, 1904, to an American mother and a Japanese father. Imagine an individual human-being with the genes of the freedom of America with all its possibilities and the ancient graphic structural order of Japan encapsulated in his DNA. His first name means courage. His first sculpture was a ceramic wave with a bright blue glaze. It was not long into his early childhood that his mother had him help design their new house that was being built in Japan in Chigasaki. It is the dichotomy of these two creative forces, the freedom and motion of the blue wave with the graphic structural architecture and planning and straight lines of carpentry that inform some of the most thought provoking work of his career.
It is his tenacious grasp of his original creativity that inspires us most. He really never strayed from the idea of waves and grids throughout his career. The natural and the man-made are at the heart of all his work. In his assembled stone sculptures toward the end of his career the vertical stones feature slick industrial carved surfaces coupled with the raw uncarved blocks of natural stone. At another point in his creative development he invented the assemblage of flat slab stones with slots cut precisely that carefully balance organic biomorphic forms within essentially a cubic format and structure.
The idea of a system of order and all the variables within it could be applied to music, poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture- virtually all things known exist within another structure. The idea of random action versus geometric form still illustrates the irony and brevity of life. It is a vision where even the most mundane happening seems to resonate in accord with a universal song.
There is also the idea of language. The language of form is one that Noguchi articulates visually in the most direct and economical yet very generous means of expression. This juxtaposition of these simple principles leads one on an associative level to understand language as an arbitrarily constructed system of order.
The Structure of United Imaginations
There should be an international forum discussing the origins of art and the direction of progress. I would build a structure for the conference. It would be made of shiny, stainless steel tubes arranged in a grid to form scaffolding, simple cubic scaffolding that would function not only as a sculpture but as architecture, a musical instrument, a slide, film and video screen, a theatrical set and backdrop.
Essentially the scaffolding would be the central focus of a performance piece, an opera of sorts about civilization, creative thought, music art, literature, science and technology. The opera would also be a kind of ritual ceremony, an unveiling of an extremely Spartan literally bare bones piece of art. The opera ritual would help the viewer see the grid as I see it, as a kind of universal form that connects all thought.
The unveiling would begin with a film about the dawn of time, the initial spark, that ignites the big bang where the universe as we know it came to be and then a little cartoon that would feature the image of the earth from outer space. Its surface, oceans and continents would be circumscribed with lines longitude and latitude. These lines would then be peeled off like an orange and then stretched into cubic scaffolding.
Then cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, numbers, calendars, graphs, maps and then a myriad of images and transformations would appear frame by frame to illustrate the concept of the grid and its function as a universal thought connecting form until the audience is so bombarded with images that the screen eventually blurs and explodes, not actually but the film would end with the image of an explosion.
The screen then moves forward after the film and is slowly revealed as actual scaffolding and within it is one very dark person in the shadows and with a stick they tap on the stainless steel structure and achieve a sound that would be bell-like yet percussive and would serve as the metronome for the entire piece.
Later, other artists would join at different levels, intervals and areas, which would light up while orators, philosophers, scientists and poets would speak and their speech would be an integral part of the action. Then dancers would appear to be woven in among everyone else and break out of their cells and climb over and crawl through and dance all around the structure.
At one point two singers would sing in two different languages and couples would join them in pairs of other languages until everyone was singing in his own language. This song would sound like a harmonic cacophony of chaotic consonants and vowels that would turn into a make-believe language and then dissolve into "ah's" and "mmm's" and everyone on stage would hold hands and encircle the structure as if it were an idyllic shrine representing united imaginations.
Finally lights, lasers and fog would merge in a kind of electronic, red pulsing digital rhapsody and the thing of stainless steel would rise up and be re-veiled in an opaque white scrim and move to the back once again to become a part of the theater, the screen, the backdrop, simply vanishing into an invisible ordinary wall. And before the audience realizes it, before the song is done without any applause or pause, an immediate change of scenery with instant transition, the conference begins.
The speaker is an artist, a poet, a physicist or astronomer talking about creativity using video, slides and an electronic pointer and the audience will watch intently. They will watch the screen because they will know; they will have seen the beauty that is behind it.
Isamu Noguchi's first name means courage and that is what he has given us. His art reaches back to the originally constructed thoughtful creativity of his childhood and forward into the future of space and the steely finesse of the technological era. I find it no coincidence that both he and Andy Warhol's studios both had the interiors painted silver to allow no shadows. Surely Isamu left a path that we as individuals should all follow, a journey without borders back to our true selves and into the future with courage.
