Poetic Realities

Today I attended the MFA Annual Exhibition, Poetic Realities. Although I truthfully had little no knowledge of the reasoning behind some of the artworks exposed, I was able to fully immerse myself in the context of the exhibition with intangible effort. Poetic Realities brings together the work of 10 emerging new media artists working across immersive 3D, video, sculpture and sound. The means of the exhibition are meant for guests to become one with the art, reminding Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “medium being the message” [1]. Poetic Realities perfectly embodies the archetype of the intersection between technology and the arts. 

Gilma Berit @ MFA Annual Exhibition, Poetic Realities

Among the artists who collaborated to enhance the exhibition, I had a brief talk with Gilma Berit, whose piece, “The Planet Mars, 1 Million Years in The Future”, struck me particularly. Gilma Berit’s work is an attempt “to collapse time and space to engage with a target of utmost remoteness: The Planet Mars, 1 million years in the future” [2]. This piece references a real event that took place in 1984 when CIA asked a remote viewer to have a conversation with an ancient Martian. Similarly, this new work uses psychic travel to explore not the past but the future on Mars.

 

"The Planet Mars, 1 Million Years in The Future"

The mean through which this work allows us access to the future is Remote Viewing, aka Extra Sensory Perception (ESP), in other words “the ability of human being to perceive information and imagery of remote geographical targets” [3]. Using the CIA protocol, a professional remote viewer, Henry Gilroy, psychically receives information of a future-artifact on Mars that is mediated into materiality. Aside from blurring the lines “between art and science, reality and fiction, psychic phenomena and technology”, I personally see more in this piece than a quest into the past and future of humanity. After having briefly chatted with the artist I started to consider her work as her attempt to find herself, looking and seeking where nobody has ever dared to. I see myself mirrored into this idea as I’m still exploring eager to grasp what I really want to do. I might be completely off with my interpretation, but I must say that if anything this work helped me, Pietro, to have a little less blurred direction. 

MFA Annual Exhibition, Poetic Realities

Citations:

 

[1] McLuhan, Marshall Herbert. Understanding the Media. The Extensions of Men. McGraw-Hill,(1964), page 7.

[2] Berit, Gilma Gwendolyn. The Planet Mars, 1 Million Years in The Future. 2022 - http://projects.dma.ucla.edu/exhibitions/mfa2022/

[3] Srinivasan, Malur Ramasamy. “Clairvoyant Remote Viewing: The US Sponsored Psychic Spying.” Strategic Analysis: A Monthly Journal of the IDSA. Jan-Mar 2002 (Vol. XXVI No. 1), 2002.