OPEN CALL - Rolling Admissions - No Deadline 2025

WHAT IS AN EVENT HORIZON?
by Julienne

Click to enlarge

Using the cosmological phenomenon of the Event Horizon as an analogy for transcendence, there is time and space for creativity. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Albert Einstein



Inspiration

Oliver Sacks: The Creative Self

Essential Elements of Creativity

Oliver Sacks said that creativity is the “buzzing, blooming chaos” of the mind. Contrary to the archetypal myth of the lone genius struck with a sudden Eureka! moment, this chaos doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Rather, “it coalesces from a particulate cloud of influences and inspirations, without which creativity, that is, birthing of something meaningful that hadn’t existed before, cannot come about”.

“It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction.”

The analogy is complete, picture an event horizon which is defined as "the shell of points of no return", with a gravitational pull so great as to make escape impossible, even for light. All life on earth evolved from star dust, the thrust of particles buried in the DNA of our ancestral beings. We are life-forms coming from generations of cultural rituals that shape our cosmological relationship with time and space. Our minds are buzzing with the chaos of our conciseness, born of the universe from a never-ending swirl of matter and tension.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Event Horizon, Kubrick and Homer

KUBRICK:I believe that drugs are basically of more use to the audience than to the artist. I think that the illusion of oneness with the universe, and absorption with the significance of every object in your environment, and the pervasive aura of peace and contentment is not the ideal state for an artist. It tranquilizes the creative personality, which thrives on conflict and on the clash and ferment of ideas. The artist's transcendence must be within his own work; he should not impose any artificial barriers between himself and the mainspring of his subconscious. One of the things that's turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear so in the state of universal bliss the drug induces on a good trip. They seem to completely lose their critical faculties and disengage themselves from some of the most stimulating areas of life. Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful.
Agel, The Making of Kubrick's 2001, 1970

Is there a A Space Odyssey connection to Homer's Odyssey?

"About the best we've been able to come up with is a space Odyssey comparable in some ways to the Homeric Odyssey," said Mr Kubrick. "It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of sea had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation, and the far flung islands Homer's wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them than the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us. Journey also shares with the Odyssey a concern for wandering, exploration and adventure." Mr. Clarke agreed...space is an endless source of knowledge, which may transform our civilization in the same sense that the voyages of the Renaissance transformed the Dark Ages.


Back