What is the work of an artist?

Cleansing the doors of perception

“In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, And all you behold, though it appears without, It is within, in your imagination, Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.” -William Blake

What is real and what is imaginary? Where does one begin and the other end?

In our day to day lives we tend to think of reality as being plain and obvious, I look around at my environment and find I’m surrounded by a world that is coming and going without my participation and the experience of it is real and visceral. So to suggest a question like this sounds silly at first until with further investigation we find out the distinction between reality and imagination is not as clear as we might like to think.

The things that surround me and occupy the space around me are “real” and the experience of them tells me this, but how are we defining what is reality? If we define “reality” as something that is unchanging and constant never coming and going, then we have to admit then the things around me that I consider real are not real in the sense I think of them as.

We are so preoccupied with the demands of society, the expectations of others and materialism of the modern world that we don’t stop and take a second look at what we are actually calling “real”. Take the the device you are reading this article on for example, the experience of using the device is no doubt real, but if we had the ability to fast forward time and watch the device change we would see what the mundaneness of everyday life hides from us: that the iPad or the phone you are using is not what you think it is.

Instead it is a form of atoms that has been fashioned to take this form for our brief usage before returning into a state of what one may call “decay", a totally different form altogether due to the virtue of entropy. Everything that we interact with on a day to day basis is in a constant state of flux, changing from one form into another never arriving at any definite state. The world is obscured, seemingly on purpose, by time itself to give the illusion on consistency.

But where did this device come from to begin with? The device in question has been fashioned by the human mind, or to be more precise it came from the imagination. The imagination is something we take for granted and regard as a silly thing that children are preoccupied with until the education system does us a great favor and beats it out of us, and we become adults ready to serve society. But what’s even weirder is that the people who deal with the imagination can’t tell you where these things come from either.

Look at enough of the biographies of great inventors, artists, or writers and eventually you will find the same answer that these things: they don’t know. Or more precisely that the great book, painting or invention seemed to exist independently of them and manifested through them.

The title of the piece at the beginning of this article is called The Variant Space, this is the best visual metaphor I can come up with for how I see the imagination. I see the imagination as a space of infinite doors receding forever into space in every direction. In this liminal space there is no time or space, no up, down, left or right.

Instead just infinite doors leading to infinite universes. It seems to be the only constant and never changing backdrop of reality that everything transient seems to emerges from before falling back into this space of potentiality. So the question is then what are we manifesting and why?

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