2. Project 1. After tutorial 1

Reflections

What I was interested in initially, was the construction of non-existent reality by putting together things that were not meant to be.

Yes, I conducted some loose experiments trying the method of combining not relevant things together, and yes, the mind comes up with some narrative behind it. Not a clear story, but a feeling how could it work, how to make sense of it.

Looking for different examples of speculative worlds, I noticed different ways they related to reality. Some existed in parallel to it, some branched off from it, some talked about past that didn’t happen, some took place within it as microcosmos, or expanded beyond it like reality in which our world was created or programmed. Some served as explanation of the reality, some discussed possible future.

Because we mentioned Archigram in the discussion, my thoughts went into the direction of speculative architectural visions. There are many examples of architectural visions that deeply influenced the direction of how our world and cities shaped. Some of them were loose ideas of different scales like Etienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton, Paul Rudolph’s Strange Vision of a Cross-Manhattan Expressway, Imaginary Prisons by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, or Buckminster Fuller’s Manhattan Dome. Some provided more or less thought through visions of whole cities like La Città Nuova by Antonio Sant’Elia, Plan Voisin by Le Corbusier, Broadacre City by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Something about them felt different, more tangible, even though presented on drawings far from realistic. At their core, they were grounded in the reality, responding to some issues of their times and providing innovative scenarios for the future. The strength of their impact laid exactly in the fact that they did not aim at tricking the eye and the mind, they did not pretend to be real, but clearly brought a provisional representation of something that could be real at some point. That itself opens up a different door in one’s mind than sci-fi movies, concept art or speculative fiction.

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There is something fascinating about how the mind generates knowledge. How each of those scenarios becomes in a way valid the moment you understand the concept, even if none of that happened. We’re surprisingly good at swiftly making sense of what’s put in front of us. In fact, we’re so apt to build narratives that we even grasp the reality through storytelling.

We’ve always been very curious about the world around us, but since we never had the full picture and all the knowledge needed to understand it, we would implement the scraps of information available to us at the moment into stories, myths, theories.

In the past those stories were tied to symbols, to certain frames of expression through mythology, religion, and as Joseph Campbell points out, ‘taught as facts’, and ‘it has always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally’. He calls them though ‘life-supporting illusions’ and states that ‘lies are what the world lives on’. 

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For some reason understanding the workings of the world is crucial for us, and every era, époque, civilisation, responded to that need through different beliefs, explanations, stories, closely tied to knowledge available at the time, as well as to philosophy, religion and politics – all blended together and served as facts. With time, as we grew in knowledge, the theories about the world needed to adapt and adjust to findings of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, of Copernicus and Galileo, and many others.

Now we believe in the Big Bang theory just the same as people in the past believed in concepts of a god of the sun travelling each day through the sky, of nine worlds connected by an enormous ash tree, or of a flat disc supported by four huge elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle. It’s worth mentioning that the notion of Earth being round was standardised in ancient Greece as Ptolemaic model. Earth was imagined as a solid stationary sphere with seven transparent spheres revolving around it. This idea lasted through the middle ages until the Copernican Revolution when it changed from geocentric to heliocentric.

In the end, how we see the world now is way more marvellous and way less tangible than any of old civilisations and religions could imagine – a universe in which Earth plays a role of a very not significant planet, revolving around one star, in one galaxy of so many that we can’t even describe this number by rows of digits.

Science plays larger and larger role in the theories about the world, and there’s something deceiving about it. The nature of science is that each concept is only but temporary, provisional, and serves as the most accurate model of reality for the time being, not pretending to be completely true or final. The word ‘myths’ and ‘beliefs’ are nowadays replaced by ‘hypothesis’ and ‘interpretations’, but they’re still merely believable, speculative, and we seem to have forgotten about it.

As I was digging through Wikipedia articles about different multiverse theories like the many-worlds interpretation, the mathematical universe hypothesis, or the theory of everything, just seeing such amount of different scientifically possible hypothesis made me distance myself from them, and basically put them on the same level as Greek or Norse mythology, or Ptolemaic system – as far-reaching ideas based on what we ‘know’ in the given moment, aka what model of reality has worked so far and was not proven wrong yet.

Let’s not forget about people who nowadays still don’t seem convinced about the idea of Earth being a sphere, and advocate a model of flat Earth surrounded by a huge ice wall of Antarctica. Regardless of what is the actual shape of Earth, they have a point saying that all we know or rather believe in, as society, was given to us by media and educational system, through mere text and images, which doesn’t differ from any concepts and beliefs from the past.

I realised that we might still not know as much as we think we do, and our concepts of reality might seem just as ridiculous to people in the future, as some old theories seem to us nowadays.

The vision of the Discworld created by Terry Pratchett, brought to life with a blend of scientific and magical vocabulary made me realise how serious we are about something that in the end might not make sense at all, we just don’t know it yet.

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So going back to speculative worlds, I think the most intriguing are those which are supposed to serve as a model, a medium for understanding our own actual world. Ironically, even though speculative, they all aim at being as close to truth as possible, and exactly that intention makes them all equally absurd, along with the newest scientific theories, because they can’t all be true at the same time. All the concepts were just as much believed in at some point, and the current ones are no exception, they are but another step towards understanding our reality.

In the Instagram account, I would like to treat all those theories equally. I would like to show old drawings next to quotes reminding us about the speculative nature of science. I hope that would draw more attention to the same intention behind each theory, of trying to make sense of our world and having something certain to believe in.

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Quotes

Not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been – and still are, in fact – the supports of their civilisations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers.

With the loss of them there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life (…) requires life-supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm.

Lies are what the world lives on, and those who can face the challenge of a truth and build their lives to accord are finally not many, but the very few.

Myths to Live By, J. Campbell

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But now, finally, what would the meaning be of the word ‘truth’ to a modern scientist? Surely not the meaning it would have for a mystic! 

For the really great and essential fact about the scientific revelation – the most wonderful and most challenging fact – is that science does not and cannot pretend to be ‘true’ in any absolute sense. It does not and cannot pretend to be final. It is a tentative organisation of mere ‘working hypotheses’ (…) that for the present appear to take into account all the relevant facts now known. (…) There is to be only a continuing search for more – as of a mind eager to grow.

Myths to Live By, J. Campbell

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The cosmological principle is usually stated formally as ‘Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers.’ 

This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.

The Road to Galaxy Formation, W. C. Keel

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As skeptical as I am, I think the contemplation of the multiverse is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the nature of science and on the ultimate nature of existence: why we are here…. In looking at this concept, we need an open mind, though not too open. It is a delicate path to tread. 

Parallel universes may or may not exist; the case is unproved. We are going to have to live with that uncertainty. Nothing is wrong with scientifically based philosophical speculation, which is what multiverse proposals are. But we should name it for what it is.

Does the Multiverse Really Exist?, Scientific American, G. Ellis