Page 12 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

12
About Tippet Rise
its history, out into view. As much as leaves are an emblem of the hidden spirit of the tree, so nature
is the edge of a hidden world which supports us, although we can’t see without instruments its
small atoms or its enormous nebulae. But it is the lattice of the world, the energy grid which underlies everything, which transmutes thought, which parallels time, which permits the transmigration of matter, which the music of the spheres references.
Music itself is energy made flesh, variants of equations, orbits, atomic spins, which manifest themselves as frequencies, along with other unhearable frequencies such as ultraviolet rays, gamma rays, solar flares, the Northern Lights. When you drive under power lines you can feel the fizz of the frequencies. Sometimes you feel the tingle of a cosmic ray passing through your body.
These mysterious single events are accidental windows into the larger world of atomic structure, which is what creates the scaffolding on which our lives are hung.
Music is a harbinger, an avatar, an eidolon of this invisible world of whizzing atom tails and magnetic relationships. Music exists in the small window
of hearable harmonies. On either side of these harmonies are the overtones and undertones of a larger cosmos, just as there are millions more colors than our eyes can see, millions more galaxies than even a telescope can make out.
There are computer pieces which are composed out of tones beyond our hearing, vibrations both too low and too high for our ears’ very limited range. These notes, however, produce sympathetic vibrations within the gamut of our hearing, and these accidental neighbor notes become what we hear, and the piece the composer intends us to hear,
although he wrote something else entirely: a piece calculated to produce ghost tones that become in fact the human translation of his ethereal scientific computer program.
Goethe painted a work which, when you stared at
its colors, produced a totally different image of complementary colors on your eyelid when you closed your eyes. It was this image which Goethe intended you to see. Goethe, a great scientist, wanted to illustrate how the vast invisible world creates “neighbor” relationships which intrude upon our more limited vision, and how we see only a small part of what’s there, as if we saw a corner of a vast painting of waterlilies. In fact, Monet’s paintings of water lilies were intended to be hung together in an enormous grouping of panels which, put together, illustrated his entire pond. When we see only one
of the panels, we are seeing just a bit of what Monet wanted us to see. These panels have almost never been assembled in their entirety, so we effectively can never see what Monet saw (although we can see reduced versions of it in books and on the web). This is where virtual reality will eventually be able to bring us into such integrated environments.
Monet chose to paint without his glasses, so he could see the blurred (and thus impressionist) world that he was used to, rather than a world corrected by science. Cameras existed at this time, and
Monet took pictures to help plan his gardens, but the final product was a more romantic version of reality, which Monet preferred to the more clinical view of the camera.
When I was in Venice, I took a vaporetti, a water taxi, and photographed Venice reflected in a metal fender on the boat for several hours. The floating palaces su- perimposed themselves on one another as the boat moved, and the complex reflections were much more