BEAUTY: Sculpture--Wang Zi Won

What is human? What is machine? Will there be a day when the boundaries between the two are sufficiently blurred to allow the difference to disappear? If we make a machine that completely replicates human thought and consciousness, a machine that replicates what it is to be sentient, how will anyone be able to say that the machine is not feeling or thinking for itself? How can anyone judge if the machine is sentient? How do you prove you are sentient, aside from simply stating that you are?

Wang Zi Won's kinetic sculptures of cyborg bodhisattvas and buddhas blur this line. I am reminded of the profound Spielberg film "A.I." and of course Björk's transcendent video "All Is Full Of Love" (a rather Buddhist statement) featuring smooth white cyborgs in a state of agape.

http://ultraz1.com/

"Let's get unconscious, honey..."

This just popped up on my iPod and although I posted it last June, this mind-blowing Madonna song bears a re-post. This is the Madonna I long for. Almost everything she created after "Ray of Light" pales.

http://www.madonna.com/

Currently listening to...

...possibly the best Madonna song (and video!) ever, the satisfyingly eerie "Bedtime Story."

Written by Icelandic singer Björk, the song is an ode to a highly spiritual sense of surreality, dreams, unconsciousness, and the pre-verbal place in all of our brains where such things dwell.

"Today is the last day that I'm using words
They've gone out, lost their meaning
Don't function anymore

Let's, let's, let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious honey

Today is the last day that I'm using words
They've gone out, lost their meaning
Don't function anymore

Traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, to the arms of unconsciousness
Traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, to the arms of unconsciousness

Chorus:

Let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious
Let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious

Words are useless, especically sentences
They don't stand for anything
How could they explain how I feel

Traveling, traveling, I'm traveling
Traveling, traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, traveling, I'm gonna relax
Traveling, traveling, in the arms of unconsciousness

(chorus)

And inside we're all still wet
Longing and yearning
How can I explain how I feel?

(chorus)

Traveling, traveling (repeat twice)
Traveling, traveling, in the arms of unconsciousness

And all that you've ever learned
Try to forget
I'll never explain again"

The lyrics--and particularly the last three lines--call to my mind a quote by the brilliant C.G. Jung: “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.”

The nearly all-electronic sound is ominous, heavy, unearthly, and references nothing acoustic, in keeping with the subliminal sense of the song and visuals. And speaking of visuals, between the sets, art direction, special effects, and costuming, the video is an absolutely incredible hallucination. It seems to somehow capture the paradox of a kind of "organic science fiction" and contains some arresting, painterly tableaux. Madonna has admitted that much of the phantasmagorical look for the video was influenced by female Surrealist painters such as Leonora Carrington and especially Remedios Varo (the shot of two Madonnas, faces in mirrors, on a bench in water is a literal staging of the Varo painting "The Lovers"). Filmed over 5 days in 1994 and directed by Mark Romanek, the video is part of the permanent collection at MOMA New York. At the time of shooting, it was the most expensive music video ever made, coming in at $5 million.

http://www.madonna.com/