#cosmism

Я хотела рисовать Циолковского, а это недела идеально потому что тема вызова искусства НАСА "пуск". Кто лучше рисовать, чем первый модерний учёний ракет?

I wanted to draw Tsiolkovsky, and this week was perfect because the theme of NASA's art challenge is "launch". Who better to draw, than the first modern rocket scientist?

Earthly spell  -  Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich , 1901-07.

Russian, 1874 - 1947

Anton Vidolke and the Institute of the Cosmos. Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh. 1st July - 28th October.

Anton Vidolke is a founder of e-flux journal.

Some time around 1882, God was pronounced dead. For certain Russian thinkers of the era, this loss provided an opportunity: where the place of one god closes, space for another one opens. Unlike most established schools of thought, Russian cosmism does not present a consistent epistemology, or a unified theory. On the contrary: the ideas of its nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century protagonists are often so divergent and contradictory that they appear paradoxical, or delirious.

Russian cosmism’s known scientists, philosophers, and writers include figures ranging from Nikolai Fedorov (known as a founding thinker) the nineteenth-century librarian who aimed to resurrect all living and dead ancestors into an eternal church-museum focused on the revolutionary tenet of brotherhood; Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Fedorov’s library pupil who went on to formulate mathematical equations used for spaceflight; Alexander Bogdanov, who cofounded the Bolshevik party with Lenin and experimented with blood transfusions to rejuvenate one and all; and Alexander Chizhevsky, the “heliobiologist” who discovered and mapped connections between sunspots and human political behavior, and then created lamps to harness solar energy to restore fellow prisoners in labor camps. (He concluded that a liberal change in the english government correlated directly to the sun having more than 93 sunspots at the time. Very goofy and fun, but it's the kind of 'science' that makes me laugh and then makes me serious. The entire foundation of cosmism is corollary and sometimes seems far fetched, but any corollary is based in a previous truth, so it's fun to entertain as possible.)

Similarly to Marxism, which sees labor as the engine of the emancipation of the proletariat, cosmism sees laboring towards resurrection by means of science, art, technology, and social organization as a way of collaborating with God, a collaboration that will result in the active evolution of humanity and the universe towards becoming a single interconnected, sapient organism, immortal and infinite like God. So it's like space-communism.

Biela's Comet and its incorrectly calculated trajectory into earth led to a lot of publications centred on the concept of cosmism, and these really exemplify the hopes of the cosmists.

Originally published in fragments between 1835 and 1840, The Year 4338 describes a futuristic society in the year before a comet emerges from the depths of cosmic space to destroy earth. The protagonist of the novel, a young man from Beijing, travels to St. Petersburg to meet with scientists who he thinks can prevent this impending cataclysm before doomsday in 4339. He travels on a high-speed electrical train under the Caspian Sea, through a futuristic Russia where all households are connected by telegraphs, and where people read newspapers made of liquid-crystal screens, have personal flying devices in the form of hot air balloons, eat synthetic foods, inhale special gas for recreation, and wear electric clothes that change colors and patterns. A moneyless economy has also been achieved. The few published fragments as well as the ideas behind this unfinished novel were almost certainly familiar to Nikolai Fedorov, who most experts credit with being the founder of cosmism. Fedorov worked at the very same library in Moscow as Prince Odoevsky.

While a prolific writer, Fedorov did not publish during his lifetime, partly due to his modest character but also possibly because he suspected his radical ideas could lead to excommunication from the Orthodox Church, of which he was a devout follower. After his death, a volume of Fedorov’s writings was published in Almaty, Kazakhstan, under the title The Philosophy of the Common Task. This first publication did not circulate commercially. In brief, the common task is no less than a project of human immortality achieved by technological means. It involves materially resurrecting all human ancestors (starting with Adam and Eve), controlling all the destructive forces of nature (including death), and exploring and colonizing all the stars and planets in the cosmos. An intergalactic educational project whose aim is to turn the universe into a unified feeling and thinking organism, immortal, infinite, and selfsame with God, its creator. In other words, the horizon of the common task is the construction of God by scientific, technological, and artistic means.

Despite rarely seeing publication, these revolutionary ideas influenced numerous key figures in the Russian intelligentsia, including such writers as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, religious philosophers such as Solovyev and Florensky, among many others. These ideas also influenced many in the Russian visual arts, and are partially responsible for the fascination with zero gravity, flight, and the cosmos that we can clearly observe in numerous artworks, from Malevich’s Black Square to Tatlin’s Letatlin. In a more subtle way, the influence of cosmism can be felt in the sensibility behind constructivism and productivism, which treat a work of art not as a mere fetish of sublimated sexuality in a consumer economy, but as a microcosm of world-building and God-building. Faced today with ambivalent liberal platitudes of resistance or the disposable instrumentality of “disruptive tech,” we might wonder more generally how artistic and creative thought could have been so heretical to Marxist-materialist and religious orthodoxies alike, while simultaneously believing so completely in their unified capacity for advancing human civilization.

While it never became a part of official Soviet doctrine, much of cosmism dovetails with the ethos of early postrevolutionary utopian socialism in its drive towards a classless, egalitarian society completely dedicated to the emancipation and self-transformation of humanity, and to the construction of a man-made paradise on earth. The first postrevolutionary decade saw an explosion of cosmist ideas and their application in very diverse areas of life, from art and science to the practical organization of labor, time management, and the health system.

- e-flux journal no. 88

Speaking to my friend during the three films (we were the only ones there so it was non-disruptive), we got talking about immortality through technicalities. Our energy might not travel into space as particles, but it does, say, enter the soil when we die, and nourish a plant, potentially one that bears fruit. I'm not a holistic or deeply spiritual person, but from a logical standpoint, that makes sense. I know my soul doesn't go into the fruit.. but I say that without knowing if or what the soul even is. So I don't really know.

What I do know is that the energy, the chemicals, the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen that makes me up can enrich soil, and that very same atoms that lived in me can become building blocks in a hypothetical fruit that grows out of my grave. Maybe the DNA of the fruit contains me, in some shape or form.

My friend also mentioned Ted Lasso and the desire of a character to have a fruit tree planted on their grave when they died, to be nourished by their body and fed to their loved ones. It was funny, sure, but it got me thinking. It's another element of the consumption and interrelationships I am currently focused on researching. If I am a fruit borne from my own grave and you eat me, I then become part of you forever. My chemicals build your cells. I can become engrained into the very fibres of your being. And it cycles.