digitaldeities

check out my new KICKSTARTER project page - just posted!

Sacred Acoustics and Janet Cardiff

This last week I heard about this artist below who created an installation with 40 speakers that played 40 different voices and you could experience the song from many angle as you walked through the room.

I was also reading in a Sacred Geometry book (by Robert Lawlor) about the Cistercian Order who achieves visual beauty through designs which conform to the proportional systems of musical harmony. Many of the abbey churches were acoustic resonators transforming human choir into celestial music. St Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired this architecture, said of their design, 'There must be no decoration, only proportion.'

JANET CARDIFF
Materials: 40 loud speakers mounted on stands, placed in an oval, amplifiers, playback computer

Duration: 14 min. loop with 11 min. of music and 3 min. of intermission

Comments by the artist:
"While listening to a concert you are normally seated in front of the choir, in traditional audience position. With this piece I want the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers. Every performer hears a unique mix of the piece of music. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices. It also reveals the piece of music as a changing construct. As well I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.

I placed the speakers around the room in an oval so that the listener would be able to really feel the sculptural construction of the piece by Tallis. You can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all of the singers are singing.”

janet cardiff website here

power diagram

 page 12 from Yantra

Yantras function as revelatory symbols of cosmic truths as instructional charts of the spiritual aspect of human experience. 

All primal shapes of a yantra as psychological symbols corresponding to inner states of human consciousness, through which control and expansion of psychic forces are possible.

It is for this reason that a yantra is said to embody a 'functiona-principle' (Kriya-rupa).

By constant reinforcement in ritual worship the apparently inert yantra forms shake off their dormancy and act together as emblems of psychic power.

In this case, the yantra is said to move beyond 'form' and 'function' and emerges as a 'power diagram'  endowed with a self-generating propensity to transform a mundane experience into a psychic one.

It is at this point that the yantra is said to be 'revealed'. 

Although its outward meaning may be relatively easy to undestand, the inner meaning that gives it its efficacy is difficult to grasp because its archetypal forms as basically concerned with the inner facts of psychic experience, gained through intuitive vision.

A yantra is a substitute for an anthropomorphic image of the deity.... a deity's yantra may bear no resemblance to the iconographic image, whose proportions and human attributes are fixed by the traditional canon.  The yantra is its 'trans-form' its abstract translation. A yantras retains the suprasensible vitality of an image, expressing the sense and spirt of the original.

As the body is to the soul and oil is to the lamp, a yantra is to the deity.
Kularnava Tantra

       

Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity by Madhu Khanna and Ajit Mookerjee

 

Heaven on Main Street + Bovina Center Angel

Yesterday I went to Heaven.  A super cute coffee shop that is only open Sat/Sun from 9-2 in Bovina Center, NY.  Two young, well visioned NYC folks decided this is Heaven and opened up a weekend place for locals and visitors to gather and congregate.  This is tiny tiny town has no stop light and 1 general store with 1 gas pump!  It is surrounded my rolling green farm land and picturesque red barns.  Clairvision Meditation School, where I am currently living, is located about 2 miles from Bovina Center and consequently Heaven.

I then stopped at the general store on by way back home and rifled through a stack of cards.  I saw this one and I could not resist making the $2 purchase.  It is a home-made pen and ink drawing with a button glued to the front.  I found it to be exactly what I need to not intimidate me on this prototyping and creative process I am in this week.   This little angel card sits beside me while I work here at my desk.