Aliyah Marr: META-physics

Convergence

This year I created an interactive piece of functional art: the Transformational Tarot — you can play it online.This Tarot deck functions through a non-repeating random script in Flash that I designed.

The functioning of the Tarot as a divinatory device uses a well-known principle in Quantum physics: that the intention or expectations or thoughts of the experimenter influence the outcome of the experiment. I know that I wrote a program that produces random cards, but the readings are anything but random for the Tarot believer. I find this absolutely fascinating.

Secondary to this, is a discovery I made some years ago about the nature of advanced programming, that at a certain level, programming acts as a kind of evolutionary device. When one is working within a good scripting environment, it can have an almost organic feel to it; and you can see how it can be designed in such a way as to evolve on its own once launched. If you look at the simple computer virus, it replicates like a living organism, lives off its host, and sometimes destroys it, just like a real virus.

It is somehow fitting that in our role as creators of our environment, that we would eventually get to the level of developing something that resembles the most elementary form of organic life. I am fascinated by how our tools change us. Human beings are the only creature on earth who live their entire lives in an artificial environment of their own making.

We evolve in tandem with the tools we create; but our tools do not necessarily free us or allow us to evolve into better human beings. At one point in my childhood I read a great deal of science fiction because I loved to read about entire environments based upon a "what-if" posed by the author; a great example of this is Dune Trilogy by Frank Herbert. He asked himself, "What if you removed almost all the water from a planet, and made it a place where the remaining water was controlled by a desert society? What if that society developed a religion and a social structure based upon a desert climate which made the very scarcity of water a sacred device?" How would such a society develop? What would be its values?"

One of my favorite stories from that science-fiction-reading era in my life serves as a metaphor for me today: A group of scientists were developing a time-travel device. They were trying to test the device by putting contemporary objects into the device and sending them back one-by-one to the remote past. They were disappointed each time because they could see that nothing changed in their present. However, the story was told from the omnipresent third person, and the reader could note that the scientists themselves had changed: with each object they threw into the past, their physical bodies were subtly changing until they had become totally different creatures.

I understand that one of the roles an artist has is to note the changes that no one else notices: we are like the omnipresent third person in the story, seeing the changes, and making them visible to others. One of those changes in present day is the ubiquitous communication device. We are all in constant communication with each other; through our cell phones we can talk endlessly about the trivia and details of our lives.

Our media puts us in contact with others and their stories; but everything is interpreted for us and the people we met through the media are remote and unreal because we are limited to a one-way communication, and we are reduced to passive observers, rather than active participants. It is becoming apparent to me that most of our present limitations exist only in our minds, because, despite all our technology, we are still living in a world view inherited from the 19th and 20th century.

The old world-view sustains a concept of linearity in regards to time and to creative activity. The new concept of non-linearity (actually an old concept, revived) is one that permeates my work — see the Subtitulo movies: Subtitulo Berg and: Subtitulo Kuro How do the use of non-linear, user-driven, interactive tools influence us?

The idea of user participation and user influence is central to my work as an interactive artist. This is most apparent in the Tarot deck and also in the Subtitulo movies. When a friend saw the Subtitulo movies for the first time, she made up a story to match her expectations to the silent images on screen. She was participating in a way that was linear, applying her idea of a story to a sequence that had been stripped of a plot.

Since publishing the Tarot, I have noticed that people have a longing for another kind of connection; the kind of connection I felt over 25 years ago when I was in the caves in Altamira Spain, seeing the shamans' paintings on the rough walls. I felt that those people who painted these paintings were not gone, they were present in another layer of reality, and I knew that if I could just adapt myself to that reality, I would see these marvelous artists again with my eyes.

At the time I had not studied Quantum physics, which validates my intuition today. At a certain level of reality or awareness, time as we know it does not exist. Through Quantum physics the distinction between the shamans' knowledge of the universe and the scientists view of the world is becoming blurred. With all the science we have today, we are left with the same essential questions as artists. Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going?

First published in the Inner Realm Magazine January 2005

Aliyah Marr is a multimedia artist, interactive designer, published author, teacher, transformative coach, personal trainer, and motivational speaker. She is the author / artist of the Transformational Tarot.

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