Santa Yarbera: Sortie, A Transhuman Tarot

Wherein the Author Divines Futures Through Robert Yarber's June 2007 Exhibition

mobius@psu.edu

Together, biologist Julian Huxley and Theologian Teilhard De Chardin coined the term "transhuman" as they looked toward the imminent transformation in store for the human species. Both declared evolution and our increasing awareness of it to be the highest principle toward which to tune our thoughts and action. Today we hear much from scientists such as Raymond Kurzweil and Hans Moravec about an imminent technological transformation similar in magnitude but distinct in content - the "Singularity." Investigating this 'condition transhumain", recent authors seldom mention the planetary ecological distress likely to play a major role in the coming cosmic drama, a period in which humans will not only be enhanced but transformed. Yet what we shall become has hardly begun to be glimpsed, and in era limited only by our imaginations, it is precisely the imagination that is found wanting, capable only of remixed sequels to Post WW II comic books and celebrity weddings as the ice sheet cracks and the species begins a long diapsora. Such productions make clear that the global infosphere comprehends the imagination as mere adjunct to the technological. In Sortie: A Demonlogical Survey currently manifesting in Kyungpook National University Art Museum in Daegu, Korea, painter Robert Yarber returns to the liquid capacity of paint to refract and divine the very limits of the human, and the result is an emerging Tarot for our collective futures. The author draws three cards.

This card is often the first to be uncovered by those eager for revelation. What does Eye Propagator propagate? Yarber's vision is haptic and hence synesthestic. Celestial and yet unmistakably corporeal, liquid, ethereal, painterly and digital, Eye Propagator scrambles our habitual sensory memeplex and re-tunes the beholder towards an embodied experience of cyclonic time. Here the temporal and not simply visual horizon of the observer becomes folded into itself: Attentive observers feel what it is to see. This is an Emersonian Involution: Eyeball has become I, helically unfolding unto infinity. The eye, everywhere, becomes not paranoid (Orwell), but enfleshed, an embryonic perceptron whose folds augur an unthinkable but most definitely feel-able future. Beholding Eye Propagator envelops us in a temporal vortex suckled unto transhuman infinity. The swollen nippled figure is the vertically enfleshed manifestation of a divine mudra pointing obliquely to the eternal aspect of time. Whirling, an ecstatic panspermia of distributed vision evolves as we glimpse Who and What we are becoming: beyond the figure, there is a flouresence of chlorophyl, dirt and sky - a vital, planetary light. Is this Gaia I see before me?

The Triumph of Polyphemus is animated; There is something royally Hanna Barbera about it, yes, as if paint could blend a 1960's cartoon, Ovid, and an unknown Secure Extraterrestrial Location.. A herald of trumpets sound. There's Wally Gator ridin' an outboard backwards through a swamp, here's three roosters pulling a velventeen throned chariot across Mars, mocking the Nasa Rover with (inflatable?) drive-by ecstasy. And it won't help to just cover your ears, because yes this paint is alive, mutating: I say boy now put down your long haired books, cause Rhode Island Red transgenically recombines with Chanticleer, and everyone is crowing. Only mythic biotech chickens can pull this rig: in these transhuman futures it's a living to tote extraordinary ass decked out in the flimsiest of royal garb, echoing Yarber's earlier works on glamour and the Eternal Return of ecstasy. "Oh, Bellboy!" This is the hedonistic imperative: live in the best of all possible worlds. "Love, and do what thou wilt."

Listen: Encosmic Hearer fathoms the perceptron as glyph shadow. Yarber declares the alphabet obsolete and projects a richly topological darkening in its mute two dimensional stead. With architect Haresh Lalvani, whose works creatively explore and actualize a \"morphogenomic\" field of all possible forms, Yarber casts uncanny shadows dancing on dimensions you didn't yet know existed. Properly tuned, the resulting "algorhythm" seems to manifest your future self in frenzied communication with the present. Yet this signal is older than the Golden Dawn: Upon inspection the ecstatically resonating figure transmutes an increasingly fertile golden glyphic substrate. Hear Ye, hear Ye, this is Wayang Kulit, shadow puppetry for projecting transhuman yantra into the future. Screen them upon Your Present Moment and rediscover your unique Quest in this unfolding transhuman epic.

Thus Spake Chanticleer

mobius ( aka DJ TallyEssence)