It makes no doubt at all that the sheer size of the present demultiplication of visual images about things that are so largely unknown by the citizens of the world will have an incalculable impact upon the perception of reality and its understanding by future generations:
- scientific imaging is bound to modify our perception of what reality is all about. Those images will be giving to all a visual understanding of aspects of reality that earlier were only accessible to highly educated and specialized people. Something as an innate basic understanding of the complexity of reality will be made possible from the systemic nature of our cosmos to the systemic nature of the microscopic. This basic innate understanding will extend to the patterns present in the real world from the infinitely small to the infinitely large..
- scientific imaging will enlarge the scope of the visual forms and colors that are accepted by humans. Forms that were unknown earlier will gradually be “normalized” in the psyche of all on earth. This abundance and richness of forms and colors is bound to to have an immense effect on future visual representations in the arts and in design.
- scientific imaging will enhance the sense that some “hard-wiring” must be at work deep inside the “mechanics” of change that, in the end, is resulting in the coating of reality under a surface layer made of patterns that are somehow giving us the rhythm and harmony of the lines forms colors and sounds found in our reality.
We experience physically any disharmony in sound in the form of an unease in our ears that can reach the level of a shrillness that we feel could tear our tympanum but we have no such physical experience at the contact of lines forms and colors. It seems that for physical reasons our ears can only accept a narrow harmonic of sounds while our eyes can accommodate any visual shapes and shades.
Here lies perhaps the reason why music in the modern age could continue to fulfill its societal function without falling into excesses leading to death while, not being constrained by limits, the visual arts fell in such excesses that led them to die.
If visuals can't be troubling physically for our eyes the same can't be said for our brains. Visuals can indeed be very troubling for our tastes for our ideas of what beauty is all about. In other words the acceptability of visuals is not a physical question it is a cultural question.
The reason why the visual arts could be pulled so far into excesses becomes now understandable they were on a path of fashion making by marketeers who succeeded in imposing their excesses as the cultural norm of the day. Only greed no pain no cultural gain but in the end the death of the visual arts plunging everybody in a deep confusion.
Jettisoning visual arts out of sense has thus been the fact of a parasitic group of usurpators of the role traditionally devolved to the men of knowledge: the managers marketeers the bureaucrats curators and the groupthink critics. This state of affairs is societally intolerable.
If culture is really the shaper of what is visually acceptable, as I posit, then we have to conclude that those who detain the scientific knowings and those who detain the knowledge derived from the confrontation of scientific knowings with philosophy have a historic obligation towards all of humanity.
The new men of knowledge have to stand up and reclaim their rightful position in society. They have to re-establish themselves as the rightful guides of the producers of visual arts. I know damn well that money has an overwhelming power over ideas in the short term but one should remain conscientious of what is at play here. Knowledge and visual arts are bound in their societal role of shapers of the worldviews of their societies. Nor the power of money nor the ideological power of traditions can resist this natural rule of societal evolution.
Over time the proliferation of images out of the treasure trove of scientific imaging will have a lasting impact on our perception of reality and thus also on the shaping of the future visual arts. The acceptance of scientific imagings will transform the knowledge behind it into a hegemonic culture and its values will be taken over as the common sense values of all.
Thus a consensus culture will develop in which everybody will come to identify the knowledge of the men of knowledge with his own system of belief. The present-time culture sucker power-art triumvirat will not make his mea-culpa but we can bet on it that it will run to make his the new worldview of the time.
The cultural reassessment of the visual arts, that is starting to be engendered today under the pressure of the exponential rise in scientific imaging, is pulling humanity to awaken at the dawn of what will be seen a few centuries from now as the greatest of renaissances, as the unification of humanity under the banner of "the citizenry of the earth".
In the past tribes have been unified under the banner of Nations and then States now we see the day pointing when Nations and States shall be unified at the level of the earth.
How should we coin this new reality of a conscient citizenry of the world, the cells of Gaia?
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