GYORGY KEPES ART AND ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS The forces of nature that man has brought under a measure of his control have again become alien; they now approach us menacingly by avenues opened by science and technology. This does not mean that we have freed ourselves from nature's old scourges, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and other "acts of God." The recent tidal wave in the Bay of Bengal left over half a million dead. What we face now are destructive forces of a completely new kind—man-generated, cumulative, and of almost cosmic proportion. A wildly proliferating man-made environment has shrunk living space, dimmed light, 1)1 cached color, and relentlessly expanded noise, speed, and complexity. We have contaminated our rivers and lakes through the unrestricted dumping of human and industrial waste, and poisoned our sky, sea, and land with radioactive waste. We have shaved barren our mountains, hills, and fields and exterminated their birds, fishes, and beasts. And it is not only the destruction of the physical environment that is involved. Aldous Huxley's comment that by mistreating nature we are eliminating the basis of half of English poetry expresses a deep truth. The world around us—the mobile, luminous richness of the sky, the infinite wealth of colors and shapes of animals and flowers—provides the essential basis for all our languages, verbal and visual, and constitutes the means of attaining a higher, richer sensing of life. We have had many warnings. Again and again, men in the past have lamented the destruction of their environment and the consequent loss of poetry and beauty. They saw and felt the ruthless impoverishment of life. A hundred years ago John Ruskin said: In that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others. The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is now defiled with languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires: their very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if Hell had breathed on them; the waters that once sank at their feet into crystalline rest are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to shore. These are no careless words_they are accurately, horribly, true. . . . Ah, masters of modern science you have divided the elements, and united them; enslaved them upon the earth, and discerned them in the stars. Teach us, now, but this of them, which is all that man need know—that the Air is given to him for his life; and the Rain i i" his thirst, and for his baptism; and the Fire tor warmth; and the Sun for sight; and the Earth for his mean—and his Rest.1 A few years later William Morris observed: ■ And as yet it is only a very few men who have begun to think about a remedy »r .t m us widest range: even in its narrower aspect, in the defacements of our big www l>> a I that commerce brings with it, who heeds it? who tries to control their squalor and ludeousness? . . . cut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull ' .ent and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of s"IZ ; !;'aCken nVerS' hlde the sun and Prison the air with smoke ol ere!' , bu™ to see to ,t or mend it; that is all that modern ^Z\tZZn^/0rgCtfUl °f the WOTksh°P- will do for us herein. . . . 1 should have thoi,ght eas>for —i* superfluous black dv ,k * sm°ke' or leeds h™ to §et rid of its -onh he auentin Y k ilU° the "hich would be as much biggest of useLrgunsV * ** ***** °f heav? black si,ks' OT * to the •teg^tSw^ri^^Sr' ^ t0 destruction of livi"g ^rms and eventually People realize the urgent need T mmAt And although an increasing number of dynamics of our situation and "C 311 Car"ed alon§ b> the uncontrolled code of values to guide us in AdT l° m°re P°werful tools without a Some of our wise nred with nature-to the remold^T retof^ed that there are limits to our interference »u„ win not 0.;; r ;?u:se,ves and the ™* around us. Heraclitus knew will find him out" ?h * ^T"'' if he does- the Eryn«, the maids of weening ambition to change th I'm ° Icams de™™rates the fate ol man's over-;ib*tyed that if we trie/to he «r d; Some three hundred and fifty years ago, Galileo would cease to hold together TreI mamm°th ShiPS and Pala«s, Yearns and bolts 3 certain size and still retain k"""01 gr°W bey°nd certai» height, nor animals unl (,1h iency. rCUm the Potion and materials that give them stability Such limits also exist in the rate of growth or of development. There is an old Chinese fable about a farmer who, impatient with the natural rate of his crop's growth, went to the field every day and gave each sprout a good hard pull to speed its maturation. When the loosened plants all died, he came to understand nature's scale limits—tao, nature's way. Every physical form, every living form, every pattern of feeling or thought has its own unique identity, its boundaries, its extension and its wider context; it contains or is contained by another pattern; it follows or is followed by another pattern. The unique identity, discrete shape, and nature of a space-occupying substance are shaped by the boundary that separates it from and connects it to the space outside. An organic form lives and grows only through its intricate transactions with its environment. An optical event becomes a visually perceived figure only when seen against its ground. The quality, feeling, and meaning of a sound is cast in the matrix of the physical processes that generated it; it is not independent of its surrounding silence or the other sounds that dame it. In the same way the physical, biological, or moral individuality of man is the function of his active relationship with the physical and social environment. But the world is not made of discrete fixed entities. The boundaries that separate and connect them are fluid. The world's infinitely complex fabric is in a process ol never-ending transformation; biological forms, social groups, human feelings and understandings undergo continuous changes. They may merge into larger, more encompassing, more complex configurations or fall apart into smaller, simpler constituents. Perception psychologists, investigating the dynamics of visual figure-ground relationships, discerned a dynamic hierarchy of gestalts—perceptual patterns moving toward larger, more inclusive patterns. Our present relationship to our environment is at the threshold of such a process of reorientation. New circumstances have now forced us to see that we can no longer think of ourselves as separate and independent from our environment; rather, together they form a new, higher gestalt. What are these new circumstances? First, there are the obvious, immediate, and real environmental tragedies. Until the recent past man had to concentrate his major efforts on safeguarding himself from the inimical forces of the natural world—beasts, cold, sickness, and hunger. At this historical junction, the real beasts are man-created; we face ourselves as the enemy. Nearly two centuries of industrial civilization have defaced and poisoned our environment. Shaped with the blighted spirit of cornered man, our S cities are our collective self-portraits, images of our own hollowness and chaos. And if not properly guided our immensely potent technology may carry within itself curses of even more awesome proportions. The not yet understood, uncontrolled dynamics of scientific technology could do more than poison our earth; it is capahle of wreaking havoc on man's genetic future. But man-made circumstances could also bring immense positive potentials. In the nineteenth century, inquiry into man's social nature and the study of Darwinian theory of biological evolution led to the belief that biological and social evolution were closely linked; little attention was paid at this time to the question of how social evolution was involved in the transformation of human consciousness from an early primitive level to its present more advanced one. During the past, two decades this aspect of the evolutionary-process has re-engaged the interest of some of the freer and more speculative scientific minds. Simultaneously, there have been momentous developments in genetics, computer and control technology, and economic production. In technically advanced countries, development has reached the point where the traditional purposes of human work-keeping men housed, clothed, and fed^an be transcended, permitting men to take responsibility for the shaping of human consciousness. ome scientists have read our new situation with confidence, concluding that man-< has entered an important new higher stage of evolutionary development. "We are sto I ' WTOte I"1"" HuxU* "t0 be »ving at a crucial moment in the cosmic ■ » moment when the vast evolutionary process in the small person of the inquiring ;r hhe t fscemed tw° ctS threshoids in ;his add (DNA) and n„ -- when' thanks to the evolution of deoxyribonucleic egan to operate. The second was when, thanks to the evolution Mol^icai phase^nt^ratT-5 ^ ***** -lf-Produdng' byTaSm1 menS1' ""W and the transmission of experience ^^^Z--^^ °^anizations became self-varying and self- Today, we are in the critiral r ^|»s toward what could 1,\T\ «% ' °f ** d,(,a,e a surface but 1 * repetltiVe nations, I have not attempted to Beyond the ,™f™. contrary, I have tried to break its dimensional limitations. ^d just as SncenroLrt"641 freed°m °f in'erP1Ctation awaitS US' bUt alS°' ^m^WthX^? tHatkWhat has ^ppened in art is itself a part of a very of rigorous logic t™w *ience has made the major contribution. Through its dynamics R logic twentieth-century scientific understanding has come to conclusions not unlike those of the artists. Scientists recognize that in the most precise ranges of observation the observer and the observed interact. When observed and measured with maximum precision, the environment in both its largest and its smallest realism cannot be considered an independent objective world anymore. It is quite understandable that many are sincerely convinced that the application of scientific method to all our problems will provide solutions to the complex equations of contemporary life. Mustering their new energies and their extended tools of the human mind—computer game theory, theories of servo-mechanism, systems approaches, and the like—men face the overwhelming problems of today with unwavering confidence in their capacity to overcome them. At the same time, such confidence is belied by the fact that the most sophisticated systems applications of technical know-how yet devised are those that have been used to invent means of tearing and burning the flesh from our brothers in areas of the world that, technologically speaking, have never had the chance to live in the twentieth century. But one need not go to distant lands to see that modern man has more cause to fear for his life in the big cities of rich countries than medieval man had in his deepest forests. Our outdated socioeconomic system would seem to cancel our newly-forged tools to build a sounder and richer life. There is an entry in Ralph Waldo Emerson's notebook, written in the mid-nineteenth century, that has an almost symbolic bearing on our plight. Traveling in the outer Cape in Massachusetts, Emerson met some citizens of one of the smaller communities, who complained bitterly about their inability to have a lighthouse built. Their fellow citizens objected to the project on the ground that by warning approaching ships, the townspeople would be deprived of the goods they salvaged from the vessels that were periodically wrecked on the lightless rocks. The lack of moral intelligence that has led to the adulation of objects rather than of lives is a major factor in our failure to realize our potentials. The resistance today of the status quo is not against the scientific technological tools and methods themselves, but against their use in uncompromisingly social applications. Our potent new tools, both conceptual and physical, contain within themselves an important aspect of new human perspectives. The more powerful the devices we develop through our scientific technology, the more we are interconnected with each other, with our machines, with our environment, and with our own inner capacities. The more sensitive and embracing our means of seeing, hearing, and thinking become through radio, television, and computer technology, the more we are compelled to sense the interaction of man and his environment. Our new tools of transportation, communication, and control have brought a new scale of opportunities to inter-thinking and inter-seeing: the condition of a truly embracing participatory democracy. The advancement of creative life and, by the same token, of human knowledge is produced by the interaction of the whole community. Through the communication of the knowledge and insights of creative men in many fields, we have the opportunity to make all that is valuable in man a shared possession—a new "common" properly of all who seek a higher quality of life. The notion of the "common" has always been alive for those who kept their human sense unsullied. A party of colonists asked Tecumseh, the Indian, if he would sell them his land. "Sell the country?" he asked in astonishment. "Why not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea?" Emerson once reflected, "The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke thai, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has bui he whose eve can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet." A new "common"—the potential complex, total syslern now being made possible t>y our scientific technology-can be explained by comparing ii with the growth pattern Ot an individual human nervous system. It has been observed that the development of the orain increases the range and scope of perception. This increased perceptual range leads in to a need for greater control within the brain, that is, a greater ability to the widened range of information. This coordinated, interconnected capital expirie^T kn°wledRe th('n offe« a richer resonance to forthcoming perceptual readied th ^ T eX'Cnded S°dal and environmental system, we have not yet edge and Symmetr>- Either ™r ^nsorv feelers-our tools of knowl- control essential "* f °Wmg undleck^ exponentially without the coordination and ... ......-i ,"' 03 dcePen«i and widened sense of life, or our concentrated powers of control and communicati capacity. ons network are growing bigger than our individual receptive and inn t(' aes. iNature has become an artistic challenge again. Artists, instead of representing appearances, have explored ways to present nature's processes in their phenomeno- 10 logical aspects. Wind, rain, snow, nature growth, magnetic and hydraulic processes, and sound events have now re-entered the artist's vocabulary. Third, some artists, finding it hopeless to formulate their experiences of the expanding, new world in sensuous objects or images, have attempted to capture the expanding space-time parameters in conceptual presentations that catch these experiences only partially. These artistic attempts signify a fundamental reorientation. The dominant matrix of nineteenth-century attitudes was the use of Marx's term "reification"; relationships were interpreted in terms of things, objects or commodity values. Today a reversal of this attitude has begun to appear; there is a steadily increasing movement in science and in art towrard processes and systems that dematerialize the object world and discredit physical possessions. What scientists considered before as substance shaped into forms, and consequently understood as tangible objects, is now recognized as energies and their dynamic organization. In the visual arts, painters and sculptors have arrived at conclusions not unlike those of the scientists. Artists have liberated their images and forms from the inhibiting world of object. Painting has become the capture and arrangement of visual energies. Through the innovations of a number of contemporary architects and engineers, buildings are also losing their object solidity and opacity to become light and transparent, "thingless" events. Buckminster Fuller's airy Dymaxion structures are important milestones of this road. Imaginative younger architects and engineers have moved still further away from weight and have touched upon the possibilities of enclosing space with air currents. Like instant envelopes these currents could be turned on or off as needed by sophisticated sensing and computing devices regulated by weather conditions. Architecture is making fundamental departures from its traditional position as a discrete, independent, heavy, and solid form catering mainly to the visual sense and is becoming a responding, bodiless, dynamic, interdependent structure answering to man's changing needs and growing controls. The flexible, mobile, transparent lightness can contribute significantly to man's liberation from the fixed space enclosure that separated him from nature's wealth of events. The meanings of architecture and urban configurations have a still more significant revaluation. Buildings and groups of buildings are no longer considered sculptural forms and their space-organizations, but rather as systems of functions, programing life patterns with the participation of those concerned. These innovations are the physical manifestation of a new sensibility. The scientist- 1 i TOWARD A NEW ENVIRONMENT engineer Dennis Gabor, one or the contributors to this volume, once commented that: "the future cannot be predicted, but (it) can be invented. . . . The first step of the technological or social inventor is to visualize by an act of imagination a tiling or state of things winch does not exist and which appears to him in some way desirable." :i Imagination is the key to pre-experiencing alternative futures; desirability, in terms of human values, is the decisionmaker that now selects the right alternatives. At this stage of evolutionary history, a new attitude toward the environment can be discerned. To the degree that man understands the external environment and, for better or worse, shapes its features in his own image, man's inner and outer landscapes will have a new meaning. The uncharted space is within ourselves, in our still unfathomed ethical potentials, in our still untapped imaginative power. Some three hundred years ago, .Sir Thomas Browne saw this with his inner eye. He wrote: "We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that hold and adventurous piece of Nature, which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume."' The Powers of Nature and Man Fig. 1, Nebulae. Courtesy Mount Wilson and Paloniar Observatories. UMW1!™: TT' "HoPes M* Pears lor Art " «ton, John Lehman, 1947. tism, [ .011- 3- 1>. Gabor, Inventing the Future, New York. Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. 4- T. Browne, Religio Merlin. New York Ihliw'r- sity Pi ess, I9.rj 11 >3