(There are so many great lines from this song it’s ridiculous)‘I’m sure everyone out there agreethat everything you see ain’t really how it be.’
To understand the facts of quantum physics, as much as is possible anyway, is to fully understand these lines. Put simply we do not fully know what ‘reality’ is. At a quantum level all matter can be said to be either a wave or a particle, or rather both. Obviously nothing can quite be two things at once, which is what the experiments show us, so what these results do prove is that our models are somehow flawed. There are many things, indeed most things at a quantum level, which don’t make sense. It’s funny that it is actually this complete disillusionment with reality is actually the main source of hope for me. I am an atheist and a misanthrope, I lean towards nihilism but my hope keeps me in the light of existentialism (nihilism is a dark place which should avoided as much as possible).
It is because ‘a man that knows something knows that he knows nothing at all’ that I have hope for the future. We have learned a lot about the world over the past 100 years and the rate of our advancement is ever increasing. Reality at the moment seems pretty grim. The world is full of suffering, but it is hidden from us, we are all deluded as to the nature of reality due to our imperfect brains (this I have learned through readings in psychology, and experienced through my taking of some serious drugs). But I have hope that in the future these problems will be solved.
For now my goal in life is to make the world a better place in order to increase the chances of my hopes eventuating. Part of this, I now know, is to make people see that the world we live in is actually a corrupted paradigm. Rampart materialism has warped how we see the world. Just as we don’t see a jumble of shapes that make the image of a pipe ‘this is not a pipe’, we do not see the world for what it is, with all its beauty and wonders and all its horrors and ugliness. What I want people to understand is how we view the world is always through subjective eyes; ‘this is not reality’. I feel that this concept is often expressed well in music, hip-hop in particular, but it is hard to show in art and design. Surrealism is a style which lends itself well to showing how warped our world views are and I quite like it because of this. I’m not sure how much other people ‘get’ it though. They see crazy images and just think ‘that’s cool, that’s interesting’ and like most art the masses fail to ever grasp the ideas behind the expression. As such most people often fail to take anything meaningful away from it.
(much can be taken away from the ambiguity of surrealism. image source)
Another way of trying to express this idea of the ‘corrupt paradigm’ is to show some of the ugliness in the world within the beauty of it. Like all great design goals this is not simple to do this and is best done subtly. What I dislike about contemporary architecture today is that it rarely meaningfully engages with the ‘ugly’ side of life. Ugliness is something we try to design out of our architecture; we cover it up or hide it away. By doing this we express our culture of ignoring our problems. I’m not sure if showing our failures or oddities in architecture will do anything to improve our ability to face them. But I am sure that by always hiding away our problems with gleaming facades of materialism both our architecture and our society will remain unsustainable.
A bit of surrealism in architecture, I love it. Trust the Spanish, who from Gaudi to Miguel de Cervantes (writer of Don Quixote) have always seemed to understand the irrationalities of our minds better than most.
In this world there are many very rational, functional and beautiful buildings, but as these buildings proudly show off our ideals our society continues to fail to live up to them. These buildings hide the truth that there is much wrong with the world. I don’t like highly rational design because it suggests that we are something we are not; rational. I don’t like highly monumental, formal and streamlined architecture (think Zaha Hadid) because it suggests our world is something it is not; all sorted out and magnificent.
I just wish more people would see something in the way of things.
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