General Case/Special Case (Soul Journey)
This is the first in what I hope will be many attempts to translate metaphysical ideas into simple visual forms.
Within esoteric philosophy, cosmogenesis is often framed in terms of number and geometry, only later becoming more complicated and eventually personified, before landing almost unrecognizable in our world of so-called matter. Cycles, loops, repetitions and hypnotic processes all serve to evoke the infinite and so this is where I begin.
Created with After Effects.
Money Supply (Solar Cycle)
Every year, the United States Congress funds the government and spends units of account into being. An enormous debate within blockchain communities is the role that moving away from the Gold Standard in 1971 plays in the larger ecosystem. And ultimately this moves towards considering the role that government plays in the economy, and in human life more generally.
In the minds of many, shifting away from a gold-backed currency was a centralization of power. That is, until another view arrived. Modern Monetary Theory understands this but instead of seeing the emergance of fiat as a corrupt ploy, MMT observes that Congress spends money into existance and unlike critics of the fiat system, MMT also observes that consequently taxes don't fund the government.
It's a huge psychological shift which remarkably few who operate the levers of power in government have made themselves but it's essential. Fiat is not inherently bad but a different way of relating to money. MMT is the only system that appreciates this in terms of the productive potential that follows.
If it's all made up by government, an understanding of real limitations (labor and nature) opens up an understanding of how money, and thus Congressional spending can work for all of us.
This animation shows the flow of currency emerging from and returning to the source of currency, or the void, every year. When the sequence loops, the viewer is invited to imagine another cycle of our Earth around the Sun and another chance to get it right.
Conceiving of the money supply as an annualized creation connects our economic lives to geologic time and cosmic processes in a way that provides both flexibility and stability.
Polarity (Unmasked)
In our minds and in many philosophies, features of the world we experience are divided into polarities like light and dark, good and evil, positive and negative, hot and cold, masculine and feminine, or active and passive.
In the course of pursuing these abstractions, correlations will often arise. Dark and evil are commonly coded together as are masculine and active. Using this shorthand can have useful purposes, but as stacks of polarities clump together and associations get shored up from habit and conditioning, a huge amount of possibility collapses.
In this depiction of polarity, the opposing sides are identical, and it's only in their merger that a different visual signal emerges. Here, they are the same in their relation to each other. Their existance as opposite makes them identical in their role or position.
But when they meet, a difference of identification becomes a difference in quality, which is opposite in nature rather than function. Polarity is here instead represented in terms of change of condition and this invites the viewer to imagine polarity in novel and unique ways that reject simple opposition in favor of relationships that defy traditional notions.
The dimensions of difference are not fixed unless our conception of them is.
