(Beauty is) In the Eye of the BeeHolder
(1976)-2006
mixed technique 70x70x27 cm
Dedicated to René Magritte, Karl Ludwig and the Hubble Helix team
«Known as the “Eye of God”, the “Helix” planetary nebula, NGC7293, is in the constellation of “Aquarius”
Distance from planet Earth: 690 light years (213 parsecs). Dimension: 5.6 light years (1.7 parsecs) across».
Since man is supposed to have been created in the ‘image of God’ (Genesis 1:26 – 1:27) God is here given a human outline, the eye of which is the Helix planetary nebula: ‘The Eye of God’. An all-seeing vision!
Not only is the bee one of the oldest creatures that has remained unchanged by evolution through millions of years (a 100 million year old bee was found embedded in amber in 2006), it also symbolically represents knowledge. The Bee-Holder is he ‘who retains the source of all knowledge’: all is in the eye of the beholder.
The debate around realism versus idealism - whether our minds are entirely a construct of external reality, or whether that external reality is a construct of our minds - is often considered closed in the presence of independent mathematical 'fact'. For example, 'P(π)' could potentially be generated long after humanity's passing by a simple yet stable computer. This might imply that humans are superfluous to reality. And yet, without an attendant human to understand what is being calculated and displayed, the computer becomes just another piece of anonymous space debris. Mathematical facts may or may not exist aside from the human mind, but it is a human need to understand the Universe (Multiverse?) which uncovers these 'facts', just as the honey bees unknowingly incorporate mathematics and geometry in the perfect hexagonal of their honeycombs. That the mathematical form - as a mathematical ideal - could exist aside from the bee does not erase the bees’ unwitting complicity in its coming into being (or bee-ing? OUCH !).
Charles Siefe, the Information Theorist, believes it’s best to think of the Universe as an enormous computer, shaped by the information that’s moving back and forth within it. The artist would like to think that the prowess of humans in mathematics and computer technology, and the fact that we will soon perfect a quantum computer (if it lives up to its expectations) will mean that human consciousness will one day dovetail into the universal computer.
So, present day human consciousness (aided, if not overtaken, by ‘Neuromorphic Computing’ and eventual ‘evolutionary leaps’) would create a psychological computer which would become absorbed into the vaster computer which is the ‘Multiverse’. In this way, Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘Noosphere’ – the sphere of human consciousness – will be elevated to cosmic proportions, which in turn would entail a sort of "Divinity"’ at the end of time, at the “beginning” (?) of eternity.
Mathematical reasoning stands to humans as ‘bee dances’ and hexagonal cell creating capacities stand to bees!?!
Dog is God spelled backwards
April, 11th 2019
Alternative version using the black hole in the center of Galaxy, Messier 87,
55m light-years from Planet Earth