🍄 Utopic Space

No holiarchies, no hierarchies, and no heteroarchies.

May 03, 2024

Exploring every rabbit hole there is. For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it's free.

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Listen to Interstellar Travel
🎧 Alice podcasts

Paul Laffoley thought of his “architectonic thought forms” as portals allowing the viewer to enter, transcend time and space, and achieve an expanded state of consciousness.

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. In 2001, the founders of Alice curated a cultural event titled manTransforms. For the first time ever at Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, influential artists, scientists, physicists, philosophers, authors, designers and inventors joined together to discuss ideas shaping the future. It was a miracle Paul Laffoley made it! A few months before the event he fell off a ladder and broke both his legs, an infection set in, and he had been in a hospital bed fighting to save his leg from amputation. His arrival in a stretch limo with his own private nurse in a wheel chair was dramatic, yet fitting for a man that lived in Utopic Space and titled his painting: The Kali-Yuga: The end of the Universe at 424826 A.D.

Laffoley, whose annotated diagrammatic paintings, with representations of philosophic systems, made him one of the most distinctive and cerebral of the outsider artists. He died in 2015. Many of his works incorporate mandalas, his texts often pay homage to the thinkers behind the work. The Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin recurs frequently, along with Goethe, Blake and Jung.

Below is an excerpt from Paul Laffoley’s 2001 speech:

"In 1969, R. Buckminster Fuller [1895 – 1983], the pre-eminent engineer of the 20^th century United States–or perhaps the world–threw out a very personal challenge. It was in the form of a book entitled, Utopia or Oblivion, daring the Earth to make the choice. Reading now as both a futuristic and nostalgic tract, it appeared in 1969 like a literary barn-burner manifesto of the 1920’s classical modernist variety.”

“Agreeing with the spirit of his message, I believe, however, that not enough time has elapsed for the world to both absorb and accept the impact of this dare and to transform the soul of it into a completed cultural artifact. But, of course, we must do it now utilizing whatever means we can. There have been, however, a few groups of futurists who over the past 32 years have heeded Fuller’s message, and have attempted a convergence of as many aspects of human knowledge as possible within their limits. The goal of the present endeavor is to produce a transdisciplinary world-view which will sustain human existence into a continuous future. This, of course, was the basic message of Fuller’s book.”

“Because time moves swiftly on, Fuller’s Kairos [or crisis point] is now upon us. Decisions that will influence everyone are now inevitable and unavoidable. They must and will be made.”

“During these same 32 years my own work has been an attempt to anticipate this new cultural artifact in the form of both a new world-view, conceived intellectually and a felt sensibility which has been the source of my art work. This combination has always been my way of entering into the process of living within Utopic Space. This is a space which I believe no longer deserves to be characterized as something vague or literary at base having no reality beyond the imaginative and chimerical. Instead we will begin to discover, as Fuller claimed, it is necessary in order for humanity to survive.”

“As a felt and lived sensibility, Utopic Space has a generic religious base because the concept of utopia, as Saint Thomas More [1478 – 1535] said in his book of 1516, who coined the term–Utopia means Heaven on Earth. For humanity whether at the collective or the individual realm, Utopic Space expresses itself on the day to day basis as a total compassionate love for all living things including oneself.”

“Utopic Space presents from an objective point of view absolutely no aspects of internal structure–no holiarchies, no hierarchies, and no heteroarchies.”

“Since Utopic Space has no natural directions such as those associated with Cartesian coordinates, it can receive information of any kind and any amount without organization. This situation allows a complete merger of content without any loss of noetic integrity. This is the true transdisciplinary process of knowledge is similar to the child’s mind that faces the cosmos with an eagerness for the authentically new, and makes no distinctions of time, values or survival logic. In fact, logic is something not directly desired within Utopic Space, but something that emerges as a by-product of the structure of this space. Those who have entered Utopic Space have reported a state that they describe as tantamount to a sense of absolute freedom. Such spontaneous entries into Utopic Space leave in doubt the larger question of how social groups or conventicles enter or depart from this space which is the clue as to how to express to the world the advantages or Utopic Space in relation to all other spaces.”

“My personal mission as an artist has always been to explore Utopic Space in terms of both sensibility–that is how I can react to it emotionally–and its ontic status–the analysis of its natural invariances. I have developed this task by means of symbols, perhaps the only way an individual can approach such a project. Real symbols move the mind up to and through the metaphor and finally beyond to a semiotic state that has never been successfully named–in other words, through a true epistemic portal. Symbols are different than signs, much different.”

“On the one hand, a sign refers the human mind back to the space in which it now exists and becomes the basis of a closed and finished structure which shuffles meanings in a completely lateral manner. This is the basis of a code. On the other hand, the symbol creates a suggestion which moves one through imaginative projections to something beyond itself–a new reality, a new ontic status.”

“Utopic Space, which is the new reality, has been waiting for humanity since the beginning of time. It is the source of all mystical traditions from the East to the West. Since Utopic Space is completely at one with itself, therefore, it can when entered merge all theological positions that appear contradictory in traditional spaces, such as: Theism, Atheism, and Agnosticism [both dogmatic and methodological]. In Utopic Space it is possible to have a real religious syncretism combined with a personal faith commitment.”

“Because of this situation, religious visual symbols that involve the mandalic structure, which have been observed in all cultures, not just the East, and at all times, have often been wrongly interpreted as inherently as past-oriented and not concerned with the future. Utopic Space is waiting to be entered as it is always the focus of humankind’s hopes and dreams.”

“Over the past 150 years this “Earth-Limbo” has grown as much in its internal conviction as it has moved away from the spirit of Utopic Space. If this secular space continues to proliferate, as the forces of nature are eschewed or overly manicured, and while the population rises, it could become the case that the entirety of our municipal infrastructures will resemble hospitals, as our private homes become intensive care units, accompanied by the almost silent hum of medical instrumentality. Political leaders and functionaries will assume the white coats of doctors as our physical lives are cared for from the womb to the tomb as we become gradually passive, infantilized and controlled as we pass through the soft but vivacious nightmare scenarios first put forth by such 20^th century writers as Henry Miller [1891 – 1980], Aldous Huxley [1894 – 1963] or George Orwell [1903 – 1950].”

“There has been one 21^st century writer who, to my mind, made a noble attempt at describing the true vision of Utopic Space. This was father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [1881 – 1955], philosopher, priest and paleontologist. Le phénomène Humain [1955], his magnum opus which was published immediately after his death, combined the history of biological evolution with a revival of teleology which moved directly to the teleonomy [the quality of apparent purposefulness in living organisms that derives from their evolutionary adaptation]. Because of the fact that Teilhard was able to so successfully converge theology with science, his supporters declared that he offered the best vision of the future of humankind. Teilhard for the past forty years has been placed into the pantheon of modern thinkers.”

“Teilhard’s two best constructs are: 1. The Noosphere – the sphere of human consciousness or mental activity that grows out of the biosphere of the various species of creatures that exist on the surface of the Earth, especially in relation to the force of evolution; and 2. The Omega Point – the convergence of evolution with the revelation of the godhead yielding the true definition of vitalism which is the realization that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry and that life is in some part self-determining.”

“For many years in my reading of Teilhard’s works I could find no flaws in his version of Utopic Space. Until one day I noticed an obscure footnote which described a conversation with one of Teilhard’s friends, the gist of which declared that the Noosphere and the Omega Point was for the Earth only. Any reference to intelligent life in the rest of the universe was considered by Teilhard irrelevant, if not non-existent. I believe it is obvious to almost everyone today that the universe beyond our immediate locale will be as important to our personal futures as it will be to the collective future of the human species.”

“Unless we utilize our growing presence in our outer space in a humanizing fashion, we cannot hope to discover those positive ways to revitalize and retrofit the Earth. Existing in interstellar space has both physical and metaphysical aspects which blend together without destroying the integrity of each aspect. Entering a more comprehensive dimensional realm does not mean simply rising up.”

“Our survival as a species is directly relational to the quality of these visions and which are convergent with others and which are divergent. Achieving Utopic Space is like trying for the summit of the highest mountain in the Universe. The convergence of visions is like arriving at various base camps and a sense of security. The divergence of visions represents that bold striking out on your own onward and upward, climbing toward Utopic Space and the final realization that when the terminus is reached we will all experience the end of the future.”

Thank you Paul Laffoley.

What else we’re wandering…

The Essential Paul Laffoley: Works from the Boston Visionary Cell. Living and working in a tiny space in Boston he called the “Boston Visionary Cell,” Laffoley became best known for his large mandala-like paintings filled with symbols and texts. Their titles range from the paranormal and arcane, such as The Ectoplasmic Man and The Sexuality of Robots, to the organic, as with Das Urpflanze Haus, to the erudite, including De Rerum Natura, a reference to the Roman poet Lucretius. Whether focused on working with plants to create living architecture or centered on the process of alchemy, these detailed, brilliantly colored works reflect Laffoley’s utopian hopes and transdisciplinary interests: throughout, he aimed to unite the boundless freedom of human imagination with the mathematical precision of the physical world.

Utopia or Oblivion: This collection of essays by American designer Buckminster Fuller (b. 1895) illuminate “his basic conviction that Utopia can be attained, and ecological disaster forestalled, by imaginative and fearless use of our most modern technical discoveries.”

The Phenomenon of Man: Pierre Teilhard De Chardin was one of the most distinguished thinkers and scientists of our time. He fits into no familiar category for he was at once a biologist and a paleontologist of world renown, and also a Jesuit priest. He applied his whole life, his tremendous intellect and his great spiritual faith to building a philosophy that would reconcile Christian theology with the scientific theory of evolution, to relate the facts of religious experience to those of natural science.

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts