check Flying Carpet online!
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It’s flying, flying, flying…
Try to imagine the most desirable and most whimsical item of furnishing for your living room, without putting too many restrictions on your fancy. Very likely there would be room here for the flying carpet or rug known from the legends and fairy tales of Persia, China and Russia. This magic requisite was used in the Aladdin story and countless other later fairy tales, in the erotic comic strip of Milo Manara, often in the form of spent metaphor, and sometimes is fitted out as ship, tourist agency agenda or airline. The artistic project of Lala Raščić, in this case, puts into the shape of “interactive wooden sculpture”, 170 x 75 cm in area and 12 mm thick. It is composed of masterfully worked wooden panels, subjected to triple torsion to guarantee the maximum comfort and strength for its users, as well as visual identifiability. On the surface of this somewhat rococo-frivolous and at the same time, in its form, shrewdly moderate piece is imprinted a decorative pattern that the artist constructed herself on the basis of traditional oriental carpets. Of course, the interactive approach in this particular item of transport also requires that it takes off. Lifting it up from the ground, at least a metre up, is a component part of the display – the carpet is suspended in the gallery venue. But how can it be used in its prime function, how is it to be employed for the big getaway? Travelling ensues at the virtual level: the sculpture has speakers associated with it from which come sounds from a number of places, if possible from all quarters of the earth. The various sounds emitted, the source of which is potentially modifiable, are component parts of the artist’s composition, an aural landscape that is given objective reality in the space bounded by the speakers. To be more precise, on the flying carpet. With the use of technology that in the last dozen years has become exceptionally popular in the world of cyber-art, and further afield, web streaming, the sound literally comes into the gallery premises from distant cities. It is not recordings of segments of an urban environment that we are experiencing, but live, direct transmissions, and every moment of the 24-hour composition is unrepeatable. As is the phantasmagorical destination of the magical carrier.
In the flying carpet the space meant for the passenger is made concrete, it is an exclusive space in constant motion, both physical, corporeal and perceptual, which Marc Augé calls the archetype of non-places. Augé sees non-places, in the book of the same name, an introduction to the possible anthropology of super-modernity, in spaces devoid of any identity, which are never ultimately produced, such as stations, airports, hotel chains, amusement parks. Among them are the moving chambers, means of transportation that are “a complex nexus of cable and wireless networks that use the space outside the earth for the purpose of communication that is so alien as to correlate the individual with a mere second image of himself”. But our magical vehicle is specifically and positively the reverse of non-place: it stands on the spot and moves only with the power of thinking (or humour?) and is complemented with a virtual version that is realised precisely within the cable and wireless networks. This game-cum-work of art uses the benefits of globalisation somewhat self-indulgently, transforming streaming, quite often used in connection with artistic exploits that have social or political action or the commitment of conference at their base, for an innocent ivory tower approach. The medium is no message, no weapon, it is not art, just a means for shaping the fantasy. Alienation, at least for a moment, gives ground to hedonistic isolation.
Lightness or levity is the concept with which Italo Calvino starts off his American Lectures, the first of six proposals for the new millennium. Liberation from the law of gravity, “the search for lightness as reaction to the gravity of life” is a feature that Calvino depicts in pictures from the victory of the fleet-footed, winged-sandal-helped Perseus over the petrifying threat of the Medusa to Kafka’s frozen rider on the empty bucket. In a number of literary examples there is also the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, with its “descriptions of flying carpets, flying horses and genii that come out of the lamp”. And the spellbound carpet in the Thousand and One Nights is one of the most effective means of flight, in the double sense: in this case it is the means for a fairly short escapist excursion. Just long enough for us not to sicken from a surfeit of truth.
by Jasna Jakšić
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The world of extension perceptible to the senses includes seven climates of traditional geography. But there is still another, the eighth climate, possessing extension and dimensions, forms and colours, without their being perceptible to the senses, as they are when they are properties of physical bodies. This intermediate world is the mundus imaginalis, alam al-mithal; a place outside of place, a "place" that is not contained in a topos. However, unlike Thomas More’s utopia, Na-koja-Abad, the “land of No-where”, is as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect. Thus, while the constituent linguistic elements of Sohravardi’s 12th century neologism and More’s own may appear as identical as twins, there is yet a difference; a differential of the soul, of which Na-koja-Abad is a region; the topography of which is, it has been suggested to us, just as has been seen by those who actually have been there. Once the boundary into Na-koja-Abad is crossed, the question "where?" (ubi, koja) loses meaning.
Ask yourself: “Am I now/here?”
When we say, "To depart from the where," what does this mean? The organ by means of which this migration, this return ab extra ad intra occurs, is neither the senses nor the faculties of the physical organism, nor is it the pure intellect. It is the active Imagination, magical intermediary between thought and being, which permits the transmutation of internal states into “extensive” vision-events. This transmutation is itself what spatializes internal or spiritual space; what causes space, proximity, distance, and remoteness to be there.
Ask yourself: “Have I been into the City?”
The mode of presence conferred by the imaginative power (hudur khayali) is by no means an inferior mode or an illusion; it signifies to see directly what cannot be seen by the senses, to be a truthful witness. “Oh God, show us things as they are”. For Ibn Arabi, God creates the universe by imagining it. Creation is essentially theophany, (tajalli) that is, the manifestation or appearance of God, and as the active human Imagination is itself the organ of the absolute theophanic Imagination (takhayyul mutlaq), it follows that all human creation is an act of the divine imaginative power (Abd al-karim Jili). When you configure a form in thought, this configuration and this imagination are created. This imagination and this figure exist in you. You are the creator (al-Haqq) in respect of their existence in you. The organ of the active Imagination is the heart; its creative power is himma, (whose content is perhaps best suggested by the Greek word enthymesis, which signifies the act of meditating, conceiving, imagining, projecting, ardently desiring. It is the function of himma to achieve a true knowledge of things inaccessible to the intellect, which alone (as in Valentinian gnosis) is insufficient. In the (Persian) ghazal tradition, “the city” is the realm of rationality while “the wilderness” is the abode of the transrational, those who have transcended the boundaries of ratiocination and entered into intuitive knowledge, via the heart. While “sober” intellect perceives multiplicity and distance, the active Imagination, revealing a unitary knowledge or nearness; induces a “drunkenness” which blinds reason. For Ibn Arabi, only those who see with both eyes maintain the desired equilibrium between reason (sobriety, distance, diversity, civilisation) and revelation (drunkenness, oneness, nearness, wilderness). Then there is a higher sort of sobriety, which sees everything in its proper place, and which may be achieved only after intoxication.
‘Stain your prayer carpet with wine’ (Hafez).
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This text is a composite of Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1970); his Mundus Imaginalis; (http://www.hermetic.com/bey/mundus_imaginalis.htm), William Chittick’s Sufism (One World, Oxford 2000) and is studded with citations from Sufi texts and the Qu’ran.
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by: Rebecca Bligh
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Lala Raščić, 1977, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Graduated form the High Scool of Applied Art and Design in Zagreb in 1995. She aquired her BA diploma at the Academy of fine Art in Zagreb in 2001. She has been actively exibiting since 1998. Her work has been shown both in Croatia and abroad at numerous group shows, film festivals and several solo exhibitions.
In 2004 she finished a two year work period at the Rijkskakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. In 2005 she was an aritst-in-residence at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul.
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Partners in the project:
The Israeli Centre for Digital Art, Holon.
www.digitalartlab.org.il
Waag Society, Amsterdam, Nizozemska
www.waag.org
Nikša Rušić, UMAS, Split, Hrvatska/Croatia
Pro.ba, Sarajevo, Bosna & Hercegovina
www.pro.ba
Hrvatski filmski savez/ Croatian Film Club’s Association, Zagreb, Croatia
www.hfs.hr
Zerynthia/RAM/ Soundartmuseum, Rome, Italy
www.zerynthia.it, www.radioartemobile.it
mi2 lab, Zagreb
www.mi2.hr
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Curated by: Jasna Jakšić & Antonia Majača
Set up: Lala Raščić & Jasna Jakšić & Antonia Majača
Techical setup and support: Marcell Mars & Mi2 lab
Web design: Blaženko Karešin Karo
Radiodial application: Jeremy Birbach
