Dialogue with Margarida Sardinha on HyperLightness ad absurdum, Part II

It is not often that we find people in our fast-paced push-button age who have the patience to remain focused on a single project or problem for months at a time, and even more unusual when a single idea stretches to years in its transition from germination to full development. Margarida Sardinha's commitment to HyperLightness ad absurdum is therefore more astonishing in the light of its rarity.

Anyone who experiences the project will be immediately struck by its singularity. This is part two of my dialogue with the Portuguese artist regarding her work.

Ennyman: The incantation combined with rotational flashing iconic imagery is indeed hypnotic. In what sense are Kabbalistic and other religious and scientific understanding woven into the visual force of this animation?

MS: The optical illusion produced by the HyperLightness ad absurdum animation is due to a very fast-paced rotation producing an afterimage compounding self-reflective, or mirror-images, of the original unique “sign”. It is a hypnotic procedure leading to "extreme consciousness - visual telepathy" which links to key philosophical and religious postulates of "innate vibrational" geometry that foreshadow future technologies and the evolution, thus, also the predicted involution of mankind at a microcosmic/subatomic and macrocosmic levels.

The work is hence the result of an extended geometrical and religious study envisioning a symbolic union between Western and Eastern paths of spiritual fulfillment. Its symbology is expressed or crystallised in geometrical solids and energy forms that are innate in all mankind. The Tantric Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist ideas relate to the Christian and Kabbalistic ones, namely, the concepts of Brahman, Tao and Zen coupled with the notion of Ein-Sof and Omnipresent God. In both, the Kabbalistic Ein-Sof as in the Hindu Brahman, an underlying Reality is implied as being the substance, energy and consciousness of Life and mind, thus this Principle or Being is actually considered to be beyond any form of God that may be contacted, venerated or described. In the referred paths this supreme level is infinite and transcends any duality or apparent opposition, thus in its cosmologies this Spiritual Infinite is identified as “Void” or the “emptiness” in which all the endless generating Energy of Life and Cosmos is contained. Seemingly, as every Hindu God and Goddess is considered to be yet another manifest aspect of the all-unifying Brahman so does the Kabbalist as manifest forms of the Primordial Ein-Sof contemplate the Sephirot and the Partzufim. The divine equally reveals itself in these traditions by being in all of them mirrored in the conceptions of the human soul through stages of evolving consciousness and in the specific procedures of ascesis, meditation and ecstasy. Similarly, too, the Hindu conception of Maya and the Kabbalistic illusion produced by Tzimtzum are both founded in the understanding of this phenomena as a derivative of human ignorance and for that matter it constitutes the root or cause of the assumption of a divided and limited time and space.

For all these streams of spirituality to overcome ignorance’s illusion is one of its main purposes. In animated film by means of visual memory our sight produces an optical illusion – afterimage – that is explored in HyperLightness ad absurdum to convey, unveil and deconstruct the divine proportions within the twenty-five geometrical solids that compose it, reflecting the Kabbalistic steps and paths of the Tree of Life under a fractal and geometrically rotational spatial movement that evokes centripetal and centrifugal force. Jewish and Christian omnipotent God speaks through Kabbalah’s Tree of Life that is a vehicle beyond a lifelong search which is here, as mentioned above, combined with an alchemical process of unification and with other structural methods of belief in Coincidentia Oppositorum, such as, the Tantric Buddhist and Hindu mandalas or yantras, and mantras giving much emphasis on the nondual Divine Consciousness and the dispersal of Maya. The ideal of infinitude in Brahma and in Ein-Sof being the complete Absolute Void and nonetheless being a source of endless energy at a cosmological scientific level corresponds to an infinitely small dimension of space-time – singularity - containing the “primordial atom” (energy) whose explosion – Big Bang – originated the four visible dimensions of the universe where space-time continuum is an illusionary phenomena and paradox is latent in every polarised assumption only culminating in Absolute absurdity ad aeternum. So, HyperLightness ad absurdum reveals the optical characteristics of hyperspace and hypertime in a supersymmetric continuum by means of an optical illusion which is formed by a spatial overlapping that seemingly occurs in nature’s manifold illusion where the several relative dimensional spaces seem to converge into successive fractions of one codimension visually evoked by the film’s frame rate format and the rotative torsion of the symbols.

E: Portuguese is your native tongue. Why have you chosen to produce this piece in English?

MS: Following the feeling of Tao’s reassuring unity where every single sound involves in itself all other sounds and each succeeding audial encounter is richer in revelations than the one before, consequently, the artist and later the hearer are forced to rescind one’s cultural language for the sake of losing oneself in the punctuality of a musical infinite… I thus found that infinite in the English language’s resonances and using its timbres I conceived the mantric repetition of HyperLightness ad absurdum poem. Its sound and music were recorded, edited and polished by my good friend, António Vilhena d’Andrade.

E: HyperLightness ad absurdum is dramatic, but almost difficult to engage due to its blazing staccato stroboscopic aspect. What has been the reaction of others who have experienced it thus far?

MS: Most people find it extremely relevant how the work reveals a spiritual metaphysical concern besides it being conveyed in a global consumerist, post-Nietzschean and post-Marxist society. Especially people who thus re-access the deconstruction of dogmas and the relationship between immutability and mutability have pondered it further and constantly challenge it and reviewed it. However, quite often people fall into asking me the question of whether the animation’s movements are arbitrary or predetermined, forgetting that they are once again falling into an illusive dichotomy, for both randomness and predictability are one and the same substance, hence, its apparent duality is a mere illusion which can be only compared to the very indistinct line between science and religion. Often people who experienced HyperLightness ad absurdum have also personally felt the discrepancy between the acceptance of spirituality in today’s contemporary society as something sound and worthwhile.

Most people have actually posed yet another dispute to me – they prefer the usage of the term spiritual instead of religious when referring to enlightening personal experiences and I persistently insist in using the word religious commonly, for I believe there should be no fear in using this definition and by further avoiding its use we are simply in denial and opening up an even bigger gulf between definitions which in every aspect are uniform. Nevertheless, each person has a different experience when viewing the work, hence a different perspective on the spiritual or religious aspect of their being, and I can only hope that my work will somehow expand that side which is so often neglected and crushed by an intellectual polarity of rational versus irrational, for usually people assume one over the other, frequently forgetting they are also both One. So, if I can provide with HyperLightness ad absurdum some sort of "channel" for people into the realm of the hidden never-ending and non-polarized source of consciousness, I will be pleased to have done so.

Here below is an excerpt from HyperLightness ad absurdum.



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TO BE CONTINUED

Exloring HyperLightness ad absurdum with Portuguese Artist Margarida Sardinha

I met the Portuguese geometric/kinetic artist Margarida Sardinha via Twitter in 2010 and have found her work ceaselessly interesting. It was through Sardinha that I became acquainted with, and fell in love with the work of, the poet Fernando Pessoa.

Sardinha's work strives to encompass a universe of ideas, distilling them into a density comparable to what Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges have done by means of literature, except that her canvas encompasses both visual and audio symbology in a dynamic manner that embraces and transcends these literary visionaries. Because of the length, and the density of this dialogue, I have chosen to break it into three blog entries. Stay with us and be rewarded.

Ennyman: You say that you spent six years working on this project. How was the project first conceived?

MS: HyperLightness ad absurdum was born from a deep spiritual need to engage in a process of understanding plurality in Oneness that is embodied in symbology’s divine strength. All my previous works had been trying to convey this notion of Coincidentia Oppositorum in different ways and with different mediums such as the installation “As Above, so Below...” that reflected the Christian gnostic multiplicity of Fernando Pessoa’s personality and its Kabbalistic counterpart. In HLadA the animated optical illusion was the perfect medium to suggest not only our symbolic subconscious processing but also its illusionary trickeries for it mirrored one single true symbol/icon several times using a whirling swift rotation. I started doing animations back in 2001, and by 2004 I was using them to do Vjing in London. That was an escape from other overly conceptual works that I was engaged in – Vjing is all about spontaneity and so I did it to fill the gap of such rigidity with animations that were purely experimental, thus synaesthesia really gave me the freedom of movement and thought I was lacking in some other more precisely intended work. I then decided to start an animation film project that would be the matrix of all my future work – a sort of symbolic mapping guideline for posterior work and I began HyperLightness that soon proved to be a Herculean task… I did not give up till it was finalised and all its research, over 60 intricate geometrical hand-drawn studies plus models, the poems and the animation took me six years to complete…

E: Did you anticipate that it would take this long? When you first conceived HyperLightness ad absurdum, how long did you expect it would take to assemble?

MS: In the first few months I kept telling myself that it was almost finished and then everyday a new twist, concept, symbol, experience, image, idea sprung and after one year I fully understood it would take me years to complete it. I also realized in that year of 2005 when the whole work was drawn out and I was still in London that I needed to split HyperLightness into three different outputs so things didn’t become too heavy in one single work and thus I instead decided to assemble three works that would complement each other – a book of poems and symbols titled HyperLightness ad infinitum, the animation called HyperLightness ad absurdum and a website as HyperLightness ad aeternum. HyperLightness ad absurdum was completed September last year and the book and the website will be published later this year.

E: Could you tell us about the importance of the role of Sacred Geometry in your work in general and in HyperLightness ad absurdum in particular?

MS: I believe from spiritual experience that sacred geometry unlocks hidden passages of our consciousness. The religiousness embodied by these forms and proportions emanate millenary energy of faith and mystical worship, which contemporary man now dismisses as something lost and as a past vain procedure, but I do not agree with that assumption for I believe that faith as well as love is never lost, thus quite the contrary, it probably is the only thing in every human being that lives on forever. In my view, our mind/soul not only (as Plato asserted) has innate imprinted archetypal forms prior to our awareness, but this being the resultant consequence of a perpetual emotional state of prayer and deep wishing along with strong belief generating very simple forms and evolving in a semiotic mode without our conscientious awareness. In other words, what I’m saying is that our emotions according to our needs propel faith and belief (many times blind belief) may have formed throughout aeons deep inside our consciousness a mesh of symbols that relate to the essence of what surrounds us and, therefore, it is in a constant collective unconscious evolution. This unconscious growth of forms would then explain why we have the capacity to recognize perceptions such as Time, Space, Love, Hate, Chaos, Harmony etc. and constantly “remember” them in a new light.

Thus to evoke this innate isomorphism, the ancient Pythagoreans used a secret ritualistic practice to pass on what they believed to be a gift from God - the Tetractys - the germ of the Musica Universalis or Harmony of the Spheres based on geometrical musical ratios; so do Hindus and Buddhists everywhere till today endlessly draw, contemplate and meditate upon geometrical based images (mandalas & yantras) as a ritualistic process that they will not rescind; and the unveiling of the geometry in the sacred Jewish, Greek and Arabic alphabets that acknowledges the hermetic geometrical understanding of the Bible’s Old Testament is the work of the Kabbalist. By doing so all these “believers” somehow touched the very essence of understanding the absurd, or, as Einstein so well put it “The eternal mystery of the Universe is its comprehensibility.” – they hence become acquainted with eternal structures that are beyond time and change for these constants are irrationally invariable and thus form the very link between nature and man’s knowledge or perception of it. Accepting these gnosiological notions annihilates duality and every polarised conception becomes whole. By squaring the circle, finding the Baühutte point in the drawing of the Vesica Piscis, by interlocking the nine triangles of the Shri Yantra, designing the Cosmic Egg, linking all the ratios and angles of Platonic geometrical solids of cosmic tessitura in a “symphonic” composition ruled by “dynamic symmetry” corresponding in space to eurhythmy in time, by finding the Golden Mean in the Pentalpha and Star of David and meditating upon its geometrical Golden Triangles contributing for the understanding of Phi with its gnomonic progression and going back to Pi, and much, much more… the initiate encounters the sublime in what it is called an anthropomorphic vision of creation which is concealed in every temple of every religion as well as in the forms of galaxies and quantum patterns. Thus, for these reasons and beyond I define the semiotics of such symbolic procedures as the fundamental basis of my practice and in HyperLightness ad absurdum they were combined according to intricate complementary personal and universal foundations, that in brief, can be described as manifestations of belief cannons such as the Tree of Life, the Flower of Life, the Yin and Yang, the Cosmic Egg, the Wheel, the Sri Yantra, the Lotus Flower and a Celtic mandala; so that the work evokes the meaning and epitome proportions carried by these symbols and relates them to the polarized transcendental archetypal opposites – Space and Time, Love and Pain, Light and Mirror, Heart and Mind – as the unseen origin of the further geometrical solids of cosmic tessitura that form an hermetic unity through symmetry or modular repetition combining the singular and plural where the law of the excluded middle has no place.

TO BE CONTINUED