10 Research

Project Aims

Throughout my research I have been condensing abstract concepts into something more solid. I’ve delved deeply into the technologies, as well as identifying themes with which to steer creative decision making and build a narrative upon. What is not so clear are the aims of the project. Through looking back at my research, as well as focussing on my personal interest in everything I looked at, I returned to the emotion of awe and improved well-being.

Can I instil awe in the audience? How would I go about achieving this, and for what reasons?

Subjectively I know that art and immersive experiences can result in awe, but I now want to look at what others are saying about this. I discovered that there is a large body of scientific studies examining awe that explore its definition, causes, and effects (such as how it relates to well-being).

In this video, Dacher Keltner (the faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, and a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley) describes why awe is important, quotes other thinkers on this subject and points to some of the science.

Dacher talks about how awe leads to transformation, offering a transcendent experience. He cites the beginnings of evidence pointing to evolution leading to particular genes that help us experience awe.

“The first property of awe is that it’s vast”

“Awe: Being in the presence of something vast, beyond current understanding.” (Keltner, 2009)

The video shows how awe leads to many varied benefits for the individual and their relationship to the wider world and its inhabitants in the following diagram;

What affects does awe have on us?

“my lab mates and I started to realise that this realm of awe and bliss and ecstasy and aesthetic emotion, the chills you get listening to music or the tears you experience when you see an activist who really moves you, no one had really mapped those. So, we’re far along on mapping awe, and it is an incredible emotion.
One of the striking findings in the new science of psychedelics, which Michael Pollan has wonderfully written about in How to Change Your Mind … They started to go in search of the soul and the brain when you’re on psychedelics. And it turns out what happens is this part of your brain called the default mode network, which is parts of your cortex that really look at the world through an egocentric lens, shuts down. So, in some sense, awe is enabled when our self shuts down, which is true to the experience.
And that’s what happens, so far what we know, in awe, which is if I’m feeling awe looking at nature, the default mode network goes quiet, regions that are associated with moral reward are activated. So, importantly, what happens in the brain is your self becomes silent.” – Dacher Keltner

Source https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/02/22/after-thoughts-dacher-keltner-on-awe-and-psychedelics/

“This sense of merging into some larger totality is of course one of the hallmarks of the mystical experience; our sense of individuality and separateness hinges on a bounded self and a clear demarcation between subject and object. But all that may be a mental construction, a kind of illusion—just as the Buddhists have been trying to tell us. The psychedelic experience of “non-duality” suggests that consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it— like to think. Carhart-Harris suspects that the loss of a clear distinction between subject and object might help explain another feature of the mystical experience: the fact that the insights it sponsors are felt to be objectively true—revealed truths rather than plain old insights. It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on psychedelics has lost.

The mystical experience may just be what it feels like when you deactivate the brain’s default mode network. This can be achieved any number of ways: through psychedelics and meditation, as Robin Carhart- Harris and Judson Brewer have demonstrated, but perhaps also by means of certain breathing exercises (like holotropic breathwork), sensory deprivation, fasting, prayer, overwhelming experiences of awe, extreme sports, near-death experiences, and so on. What would scans of brains in the midst of those activities reveal? We can only speculate, but quite possibly we would see the same quieting of the default mode network Brewer and Carhart-Harris have found. This quieting might be accomplished by restricting blood flow to the network, or by stimulating the serotonin 2A receptors in the cortex, or by otherwise disturbing the oscillatory rhythms that normally organize the brain. But however it happens, taking this particular network off-line may give us access to extraordinary states of consciousness—moments of oneness or ecstasy that are no less wondrous for having a physical cause.” –

This brings my attention to psychedelic experiences and I remembered trying a demo for the platform Tripp which in 2021 secured $11M to expand it’s ‘digital psychedelic’ wellness VR platform for mental health. (Pennic, F. 2021). Tripp features a growing number of experiences such as audiovisual meditations, and relies on the affordances of VR to immerse the user and give presence in its virtual worlds. The commercial interest in this is notable here by the sizeable investment.

“Awe is the emotion that arises when the individual encounters something vast or complex that cannot be readily made sense of with current knowledge. Awe creates the mental state of wonder, which leads to the search for knowledge, are cognition of one’s position within the broader social con-text, and prosocial inclination (Piff et al.,2015; Stellar et al.,2017).” – (Keltner et al. 2018).

”Awe has traditionally been considered a religious or spiritual emotion, yet scientists often report that awe motivates them to answer questions about the natural world, and to do so in naturalistic terms. Indeed, awe may be closely related to scientific discovery and theoretical advance. Awe is typically triggered by something vast (either literally or metaphorically) and initiates processes of accommodation, in which existing mental schemas are revised to make sense of the awe-inspiring stimuli. This process of accommodation is essential for the kind of belief revision that characterizes scientific reasoning and theory change. Across six studies, we find that the tendency to experience awe is positively associated with scientific thinking, and that this association is not shared by other positive emotions. Specifically, we show that the disposition to experience awe predicts a more accurate understanding of how science works, rejection of creationism, and rejection of unwarranted teleological explanations more broadly.” – (Gottlieb et al. 2018).

There is now a large body of scientific research into awe and its benefits, providing an excellent foundation to support the aim of this project, as well as useful ways to measure this in an audience.

I am drawn to the word ‘vastness’ and it makes me feel full dome would be most useful in generating awe. I am further drawn to geometry as the basis of nature to theme this piece of work.

Of particular relevance here is Summer Allen’s 2018 white paper which includes sections on; What is Awe?, Why Did Awe Evolve? General Elicitors of Awe, Factors That Influence Who Experiences Awe, Effects of Awe and Limitations and Future Directions.

More on Story

While thinking about the concept of a communal temple experience, my thoughts return to protopias (bielskyte 2021) and afrofuturism and the significance of creating a narrative that imagines the future in creative and positive ways.

It can be useful to artists to have a narrative with which to direct their practice, even if this is not exposed within a piece to the audience, an example of this being the Detroit techno music duo Drexciya.

“Drexciya, a Detroit-reared duo consisting of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, developed a mythology to orient their subterranean techno sounds. Borrowing Sun Ra and George Clinton’s concept of creating a musical cosmology, the duo created a new myth of a Drexciyan race. The Drexciyans are an underwater nation, the descendants of the African women thrown overboard in the transatlantic slave trade.” (Womack 2013).

“Afrofuturists value universal love, reinterpret sound and technology, and echo beauties of a lost past as the essence of a harmonious future. While the music is full of mind-benders, with the new era of technology, sounds can literally go beyond the stratosphere. Always ahead of the curve, Afrofuturist music embodies the times while literally sounding out of this world. Listen to Sun Ra’s “Astro Black,” Lee Scratch Perry’s “Disco Devil,” Brides of Funkenstein’s “Mother May I?,” an X-ecutioners live DJ show, “Drexciya’s 2 Hour Mix—Return to Bubble Metropolis” by VLR, and “Dance of the Pseudo Nymph” by Flying Lotus and you too might feel like you’ve been sailing on a black ark from a distant star.” (Womack 2013).

As a vehicle for imagining and inspiring a better future the power of art is great.

To draw from this as inspiration, I ask myself, what kind of a future do I want to imagine through this piece?

By building on sacred geometry a vast human past is not only being referenced but revived, but where do I want this to point? I think that what I would like is for this to be a communal temple-like experience which re-connects the audience with the world outside of themselves, encouraging them to connect more with nature, awe and other people into the future, and inspiring more art like this. A more connected future for humans, the planet and the universe, maybe this is my protopian vision?

I will consider creating a mythical narrative concept in a similar vein to Drexciya.

Bibliography

Pollan, M. (2019). How to change your mind: What the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence, Penguin.

Podcast: The Science of Happiness. Episode 16: How to Change Your Mind https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/podcasts/item/change_your_mind

PENNIC, F., 2021. TRIPP Secures $11M to Expand Digital Psychedelic Wellness Platform for Mental Health. Atlanta: Newstex.

Keltner, Dacher, and Paul K. Piff. “Self-Transcendent Awe as a Moral Grounding of Wisdom.” Psychological inquiry 31.2 (2020): 160–163. Web.

Gottlieb, Sara, Dacher Keltner, and Tania Lombrozo. “Awe as a Scientific Emotion.” Cognitive science 42.6 (2018): 2081–2094. Web.

ANDERSON, C.L., MONROY, M. and KELTNER, D., 2018. Awe in nature heals: Evidence from military veterans, at-risk youth, and college students. Emotion, 18(8), pp. 1195-1202.

Summer Allen 2018 “The Science of Awe”. A white paper prepared for the John Templeton Foundation by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley

Yaden, D. B., et al. (2019). “The development of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S): A multifactorial measure for a complex emotion.” The Journal of Positive Psychology 14(4): 474-488.

Womack, Y. (2013). Afrofuturism : the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. Chicago, Chicago Review Press.

Monika Bielskyte PROTOPIA FUTURES FRAMEWORK2021. https://medium.com/protopia-futures/protopia-futures-framework-f3c2a5d09a1e