Paul Laffoley Hyperdimensional Visionary Art

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PAUL LAFFOLEY - Painter, Visionary & Hyperspace Cartographer "Paul Laffoley, a painter and architect, is one of the most encyclopedic of visionary geniuses."
~Alex Grey, Visionary Artist"The main thesis of mind-physics holds that consciousness and matter are both manifestations of a more primary entity, and that the processes of manifestation exhibit equivalent invariances for both consciousness and matter. When the program for mind-physics is complete the subject-object dichotomy of modal logic, the polarity of concept-percept, and the antagonism between morality and technology will all come to an end. Then the non-repeatable experiment will be understood to be more primary than the traditional repeatable experiment."
- Paul Laffoley BIO INFO By Laffoley's account, he spoke his first word ("Constantinople") at the age of six months, and then lapsed into 4 years of silence, having been diagnosed with slight Autism, later determined to be Asperger's Syndrome. He attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his draftsman's talent was ridiculed by his Abstract Expressionist teachers. Laffoley attended Brown University, graduating in 1962 with honors in Classics, Philosophy, and Art History.
In 1963, he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and apprenticed with the sculptor Mirko Basaldella before being dismissed from the institution. Thereafter, he moved to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Friedrich Kiesler. He was also hired for the design team of the World Trade Center, but was soon after fired by the chief architect, Minoru Yamasaki, for his unconventional ideas. In 1964, Laffoley began work (and live) in an eighteen-by-thirty foot utility room to found the Boston Visionary Cell, where he has produced the large majority of his art. Working in a solitary lifestyle, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas can take one to three years to paint and code.
By the late 1980’s, Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, and evolved to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging Psychotronic device, similar to architectural monuments such as Stonehenge or the Cathedral of Notre Dame, with their spiritual aura and transpersonal functionality.During a CAT scan of his head in 1992, a piece of metal 3/8 of an inch long was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland. The CAT scan was advised by his dentist, after noticing something unusual in a routine x-ray before a root-canal. The CT technician asked Laffoley "Uh ... Sir, have you ever been shot in the head?". Laffoley's medical history and memory indicate he has not been shot in the head! Quite interestingly the metallic object is symmetrical in 3 ways - in it's shape(smooth tube, rounded at both ends), in it's orientation (pointing at pineal gland) and also it's position (in relation to the body's plane of symmetry). This would be an amazing coincidence if it was a bullet, shrapnel or other foriegn object.
Local Mutual UFO Network investigators proposed it might be "an alien nanotechnological laboratory." Laffoley has now come to accept the possibility that the "implant" is extraterrestrial in origin and is related to the broad-spectrum and trans-temporal motivation behind his ideas and theories.He has produced an estimated 600 of his immensely detailed 6ft square canvases. Paul has been quoted as saying that at any given time there are dozens of these works already fully-articulated in his mind, waiting to be painted and circling like airplanes in a holding pattern waiting to land. He has also mentioned that each painting is can be thought of as a single page in an immense but compressed book 'written' in color, text, form, number, symbol, chart, archetype and schematics of Paul's genuis vision of past, present and future convergent knowledge, wisdom & multidimensional science.In the summer of 2001, Laffoley fell from a 20-foot ladder and broke both legs. His right leg subsequently became infected and was amputated below the knee. He documented some of his theories about why his fall occurred in the oil painting The Fetal Dream of Life into Death (2001-02). After his amputation, in honor of his lost foot, Paul took some of the proceeds from his art and consulted Hollywood special effects guru Stan Winston (special effects creator for top films including - Aliens, Predator, Terminator series, Jurassiac Park, etc.) to create an anatomically correct, fully functional prosthetic LION'S FOOT, which Mr. Laffoley wears to lectures and special occasions.(Absolutely not kiding here. BTW, Paul is a LEO)In 2006 through 2008 Paul's presence on the web through Myspace, Kent Gallery, Laffoley's Odyssey and Miqel.com has caused a massive growth in awareness of his art and ideas, resulting in a flood of appreciative messages. He is also increasingly connecting with internet generation audiences (who are the next generation of consciousness explorers, scientist and memetic-engineers) through recent appearances & lectures at technopagan events like Synergenesis and futuristic 'designer reality' conferences like EsoZone 2007.Paul currently lives in Boston, Massachusets. He is working on preparing his 4 volume set of complete life-works to be released by KENT Gallery & still producing his amazing transdisciplinary art.*bio text compiled from various internet sources, including Kent Gallery and Paranoia magazine GENERAL INTRO Text from a Traveling Exhibition Organized by the Austin Museum of Art. Fall 1999 - December 2000
Architectonic Thought Forms: A Survey of the Art of Paul Laffoley, 1968 - 1997 A theorist as much as an artist, Laffoley's work explores possible, but not yet provable phenomena. To create his complex works, the artist draws upon a staggering range of literature from the popular to the arcane - works in such disciplines as art history, history, physics, science fiction, classical literature, architecture, and such occult sciences as parapsychology and theosophy. The exhibition will contain approximately 30 works including major paintings drawn from private collections, several works on paper, and three-dimensional works grouped around three fundamental themes:* The Time Machine. Of those inventions prophesied by H.G. Wells, the Time Machine is the only one which has not yet become a reality. Laffoley, however believes there is a linkage between time machine awareness and the presence of U.F.O.s, which may in fact be time machines from another dimension.* Operating systems. Laffoley approaches truth not as an absolute, but as a series of interdependent choices. Works like Temporality and Dimensionality suggest that our sense of reality is only true to the degree we are able to perceive all that is possible.* Lucid Dreams. These works, such as It Came From Beneath the Sea, are the artist's depictions of extraordinary dreams he has had while he was aware of dreaming. To picture his utopian world view, Paul Laffoley combines representational imagery with diagrams,symbols, and texts. Painstakingly wrought, he produces only a handful of canvases each year. With their dense fields of information, these paintings are to be read and pondered as much as beheld. " PAINTINGS, PHILOSOPHY & WRITINGS The BAUHAROQUE - Definition
In his seminal text “Phenomenology of Revelation” Laffoley describes the emergence of the Bauharoque, a word that means "the blending of the Bauhaus Utopian impulse with Baroque theatricality. The Bauharoque is the last period in the Modern Cycle, beginning at the turn of the second millenium A.D. and lasting to the year 2099".
Laffoley notes: “The Bauharoque began, not surprisingly, with a complete and literal rejection of the impotent cynicism of Post-Modernism. It directed its initial volley straight at the heart of what Post-Modernists considered their forte, fashion and fads, a concern for the nature of time, and taste for historicism.”
The Baharoque would also end the popularity of the genre “science fiction” because speculation about the future will merge with the actual futures as they manifest through development of time-travel devices, as well as being a period where nanotechnology allows machines to become actual living structures and humans begin to control their genetic evolution. DIMENSIONALITY in Classical Metaphysics
"I actually challenged The Theosophical Society on their concept of planes of reality. I said, "What you're doing is, you're stacking two-dimensional surfaces in three-space. And you are not going into any other dimensions at all." And they were furious, because they thought I was attacking Madame Blavatsky. They're ideologues in terms of the way they present the material."
- Paul Laffoley
On DEFINING THE ENERGETIC DYNAMICS OF UTOPIA (excerpts from "Utopic Space")
When the German Existential Lutheran Theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) wrote, in 1951, an essay entitled Critique and Justification of Utopia, his conclusion was: "utopia: the suspension between the possible and the impossible." The 1950s was not a very sympathetic era toward utopian thought. It was a time coming down off the negativity toward utopia expressed by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell in the 1930s and 40s.By the 1960s (a pro-utopia period) Tillich's apocalyptic non sequitur began to make sense. Because, utopia means one thing when you strip it of all scholarship and classical references to such notables as: Plato, Saint Thomas More (who coined the term "utopia" in 1516), Francis Bacon, Tommaso Campanella, Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, H.G. Wells and all the rest.
Utopia amounts to one simple concept: Heaven on Earth. Well, how can you have that? Isn't heaven supposed to be an "afterlife" experience-- if it exists at all? Was Northrop Frye right when he claimed the idea of utopia was not worth the ink and paper the word was written on? Well I for one believe it does exist, meaning it has existed and can exist again because its ontological status is a special modality of mysticism-- a social mode.Consider the symbol of structure of utopia:
The breathing in of the universe: When the one falls instantly and without effort into the many. This is the female aspect of the manifestation-- the breathing out, the great release. But when the many attempt the long and arduous struggle to come back to the one, this becomes the male aspect of the manifestation of the universe-- the breathing in-- the path to utopia or the alchemical task to resolve aspects of consciousness as a manifestation of the collective will with aspects of consciousness as a manifestation of one's immiscible self.The path to utopia is expressed as a non-oppressive environment free from all systems whether they are hierarchies, holiarchies or heteroarchies. The form is the major fractal of the manifest universe-- the logarithmic spiral of equilangular spiral that makes an infinite number of revolutions around the one, becoming closer to it-- the source of all without ever violating the one from the power of the ego. The goal of this mystical topology is the utopic-- the space of the utopia. It is the space of nature, which when fully revealed to human consciousness demonstrates the unity of concepts which are apparently separated by the becomingness of history, such as: the abstract/ the real, the objective/ the subjective, death/ life, mass/ consciousness, the profane/ the sacred, matter/ spirit, body/ soul. Utopic space is the action of bringing together the dream of reason-- the freedom of the will as pure being (transcendence) with the temporal ecstasy of the imagination-- the control of the will as pure becoming (morality).Since the path to true utopia is a fractal vector, it is the control of four other vectors that would, if released, veer toward spaces other than utopic space. Utopian or utopic space exists as a dimensional portal between the 4th and 5th dimensional realms. It is literally a symbolic space and is therefore an a-dimensional and not non-dimensional space. To be a-dimensional means that it is a space that transcends the natures of the dimensioned spaces that bound it, and it subsumes the natures of the boundary spaces. If utopic space loses the tension of its quadruple nature, it will simply collapse into a space of boundaries, depending of course, upon which of the spaces suddenly becomes dominant.
The boundary-- non-utopic-- spaces are:
1. Eutopia: A life lived in relation to the mystical experience and which abdicates the common good and all social connections and responsibilities. In this space the ego believes that it has become God. The vector is directly into the source of all.2. Kakatopia (or Dystopia): Lives are lived in the knowledge of their mutual alienation ("we are all alone together"), in mutually repellent spaces-- this is the literal bad place. The vector continues the initial explosion of the one into the many which in now unnecessary.3. Kenotopia: Lives lived in a space of comfort and ignorance without stress, striving or goals. It is the kitsch place. The vector is a circle, which is established at fixed distances from the source of all, depending when the life left the true path to utopia, and can therefore account for differences and levels of taste even in the realm of kitsch.4. Oligotopia: A group of lives develops a system by which they can leave the path to utopia and enter kenotopia, which because of the system becomes the bureaucratic place. The vector is a line away from the source of all which is stopped by a pre-existing kenotopic space.The fractal spiral of nature is evolution if the human consciousness was not present. To become one with nature means to be on the path to utopia. To be in or live in utopic space has a metaphor which I have always liked-- that is the Wheatstone Bridge invented in 1872 by Sir Charles Wheatstone. It is a device for measuring electrical resistances and consists of a powered conductor joining two branches of a circuit and a galvanometer. The electromotive force introduced into the circuit is totally balanced by electrical resistors. Both the power and the resistance can increase in a balanced potential. An ideal Wheatstone Bridge, which possesses an infinite resistance to an infinite electrical power supply, would produce an undetectable rising tension unless entry into the system was gained.This system of utopic space has always seemed to me to be the most vivid, because it represents the attempt to engineer the meeting of the immovable object with the irresistible force, and this process is observable only from within the system. Like utopia itself, it seems not to exist unless you are actually in it.
- text (c) Paul Laffoley from commentary on his 1973 painting,
"Utopia: The Suspension between the Possible and the Impossible" In Progress:
VIDEOS
Paul Laffoley: Clip from DISINFO
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PHYSICALLY ALIVE ARCHITECTURE - THE LIVING STRUCTURED ENVIRONMENT (extracts)
"Subject: The Vegetable-House as the Answer to Low Cost Housing
The modern movement in architecture is based primarily upon the utopian solution to the most basic of building types: mass-housing. As we enter the Bauharoque Period with its bulging populations, unwinable terrorist wars that seem to keep on escalating, a general and continuous degrading of the world’s natural environment, politics as entertainment and a substitute for religion, or the popular media making money by pitting various interest groups and classes against each other - what could be more plausible than having the world housing shortage ended by simply sowing genetically altered seeds so that houses could be grown almost anywhere on the surface of the earth, with a growing time of approximately two months."
Model of chimeric first generation self-repairing and oxygen, light and electricity producing Plant-House "I believe that if a strategy for mass housing could found, that would involve non-repressive personal environments [ that would avoid mechanical standardization], a base could be established from which other social problems will be solved. Then finally the quest for meaning in existence could gradually replace the goals of our almost complete secular world. To do this requires the total convergence of Science with Mysticism. While this task has already been started a few individuals and groups [beginning in the 19th Century], it will not be until the entire world is involved, will a real change be noticed.
My proposal ,therefore, for ending the world housing shortage is by growing houses from plant materials and developing genetically altered seeds which will induce habitable forms in single multiple species. These forms will then begin to approximate the rich vocabulary of spaces the history of the Human Species has created from the individual home to the city"
"The Conservatory has one basic drawback. It is a building type that requires Human intervention to protect the plant species inside. The purpose of Das Urpflanze Haus or physically alive architecture is to do what all architecture is supposed to do – protect us from an alien environment. We exist on the Earth because of the existence of Vegetation, not the other way around. Over the aeons we have been weakening the life force of plant materials by protecting them by artificial cultivation techniques and Hot Houses. What we must do is help plant species regain their rightful place in the world as the Prime Species and avail ourselves of their protection and love by willing to fall in love with plant forms and feed ourselves by eating their delicious fruits and nutritious vegetables [ which are seed pods which are produced in an abundance beyond what is necessary for sustainable reproduction].
Bringing this proposal to fruition will first require prototypes created by grafting plant materials in forms generated by advancements in Combinatorial Topology – the branch of mathematics that has the best chance of understanding the true nature of Biology. "
"What could be a more plausible or delightful solution than to live in a world-wide garden? The New Eden – populated with physically alive architecture that could exist almost anywhere on the Earth’s surface or under the ocean or up in the air, that was produced in growing time of approximately two to three months. Also as Humanity begins to explore other planets and moons, I do not believe people will like living in high-tech tin cans on barren wastelands." - Paul Laffoley
Proposal: The EARTH-MOON LINK & Space Elevator
"Subject: Redesigning Part of the Solar System
"I propose an earth-moon link-up through open space to form a simple, but gigantic motor. It would consist of double-layered geodesic spheres that rotate one within the other about ten miles off the surface of the earth and the moon. These friction machines could be constructed of a transparent living plastic and would be linked through space by a tube of the same material. The choice of a living material would mean that repairs would be self-generated and instantaneous.
detail view from "I, Robur" (1969)The orbit of the moon would drive the motor and provide all the energy ever needed. The sphere itself could support an atomic train, able to stop at any point above the earth's surface and lower shipments; thus the time needed to distribute goods and services would be minimized. All buildings and instrumentality would be physically alive."
- Paul Laffoley Text extracted from Laffoley's comments on the paintings "The Bauharoque: Physically Alive Structured Environment"(1997),
"The Primordial Plant-house"(1990's), "I, Robur"(1969) and "The Earth Flower"(1994)
Laffoley's Odyssey- Preview #1
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Rustbelt Films Preview: LAFFOLEY'S ODYSSEY
NOTE: Myspace Blocks Videos from this site(?),
so this opens to a page with the video embedded at LaffoleyArchive.com
presumably they block 'Re VV er' because it is from a competitive video sharing site. I can't even post the link without Myspace subtracting the domain name!! That's insane ..
AND: Feel Free To Complain To Myspace About their Censorship & Linking Policies! The HYPERCUBE HOUSE & TIME TRAVEL - (extracts)
Tesseract (Hypercube) House
Because: The Time Machine implies that all creatures will meet eventually throughout the universe and genetically retrofit themselves into one species of being with one goal- the fulfillment of the Cosmic Task, which is to transform all of the absolute matter of physical universe into absolute spirit, starting from one instant before the Big Bang to whatever and whenever a motionless future is reached.
Because: The Big Bang is God (He, She, It) expelling all deadness from the ultimate void, and since there is nothing but “the all,” we must work to bring aliveness to the matter of physical universe and prepare it to be delivered from our dimensional frame of Time-Solvoid into the next higher dimensional realm of Eternity-Vosolid, and live with the fact that we have no way of knowing where we are going, but we do know that we have to go.
Therefore: The only logical thing to do is establish a series of built environments around the world that provide a higher dimensional mood, thereby allowing any strange phenomena to be interpreted in relation to time mechanics, such as flying saucers, UFOs, implants, psychic phenomena, all as being, therefore, parts of the time machine.
These environments, called Tesseract Houses (or fourth- dimensional houses), were invented by the American architect Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866- 1946). I have taken on the task of presenting The Tesseract House as it should be, i.e. as envisioned by the architect.
It is a live-in architectural studio for a team of designers. The team will pursue such design problems as:
1. Physically alive architecture, both vegetative and mammalian,
2. Developing time machine variations in relation to the natural scale of inerial frames of references,
3. Mega and nano engineering such as the earth-moon link up, redesign of the solar system and eventually the entire universe, and
4. The replacement of natural evolution by an understanding of authentic human intentionally under the guidance of pure spirit."
text: extracts from
Paul Laffoley's commentary on "Tesseract House"(1978) .
details of "Aetheiapolis" The Aetheiapolis
or Singularity City, is a proposed conceptual city with one function: to realize the true nature of the form of utopia. The sixty-four inhabitants are made up of thirty-two people from the present, sixteen from the past, and sixteen from the future. It is of paramount importance to the concept of utopia to consult people from the past and future in order to avoid being temporally parasitic to the social intentions of those already dead and possibly temporally destructive toward the social intentions of those yet unborn. Most utopias are presented as constructs already in medias res with no indication of how they came to exist, or in what way they might dissolve or disrupt future societies. My city attempts to answer this problem. It is not, therefore, a utopia, but a device for confronting the entity of utopia.
The Aetheiapolis is built on a fifty-foot deep brine pond 1,000 feet in diameter which contains a hydromedusa, or jellyfish, genetically programmed to reach a diameter of 650 feet. At this size the jellyfish cannot possibly move and its electrical and psychic circuitry can be used. Thirty-two astral projection chambers are mounted at the end of the tendrils. Between the tendrils are thirty-two time machines controlled from the astral projection chambers. Sixteen of the time machines are tuned to specific space-time coordinates in the past, and sixteen tuned to coordinates in the future.
Through various electronic and psychotronic devices such as the Project Hermes Device, the particular resonant frequencies of the sixty-four souls of the inhabitants are converged into a standing wave and directed to the tetraheptahedron. This piezoelectric crystal form is spun simultaneously on three perpendicular axes by means of nested rings, it subsumes lower dimensions. The tetraheptahedron creates the passage from dianoia (reason) to episteme (pure thought), or from the fourth to the fifth dimensional realm and back again.
- Paul Laffoley
text: extracts from Paul Laffoley's commentary on "The Aetheiapolis" (1987) "I began to research the concept of dimensionality from the point of view of quality, and not just quantity, as a mathematician might do. Taking my clues from the theosophical use made of the Vedantic levels of reality, I identified the western notion of Energy (as someting which is effecatious by means of motion), with the idea of Time. The more comprehensive dimension 'eternity' I defined as a form of energy which is efficacious without motion. In this manner I began to establish the qualities of dimensions and open out the seemingly monolithic concept of energy."
- Paul Laffoley, from: Elements of the Time Machine: Homage to H.G. Wells NEWS / UPDATES
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