Art, technology and Time

For over a hundred thousand years, the stories we told about ourselves and of creation were anchored to the cycles of nature and the turning of the stars. These stories may have been fantastical, populated by ancestral beings and rainbow serpents, but the art, rituals, and song that accompanied them had a very practical purpose. Honed by eons of natural selection, these culture packages enabled us to stay warm, find food, navigate and survive disasters of unimaginable scale.

In our present age we no longer look to the stars to anchor stories, for they have long sunk into the illuminated void of urban night. Lost, we seek new constellations in the inner world of the media surround; new forms in the flux, new auguries, new myths. Mirages of coherence, around which we group like scared animals amidst the enclosing night of information. Untethered from connection to earthly realities, how easily these new stories slip into the malignance of conspiracy theory and ideology. Yet as our understanding drifts, the cosmic irony is that our material impact of the world has never been greater. Each click and swipe is of geological consequence.

The late Christopher Hitchens advocated for a New Enlightenment. Rather, I think we need a New Renaissance. A reunification of the arts and humanities; of the scientific and the sacred; of qual and quant; of the systematic mind and the mythopoetic imagination. A new understanding of the world that transcends brute computation, and lets us identify the stars through which we’ll navigate the turbulence of the long now.