The Archaic Revival Pt. 3: Autopsy for a Synchronistic Hallucination

“The Mandlebrot Set is Real.  An absolute thing, no question whatsoever.  Any mathematician, or computer scientist, or synchro-mystic can study it and describe the same thing.  It’s a common experience. 

Such things that can be magnified forever and have infinite precision do exist, 

but they’re not touchable.”

Dr. Michael Barnsley

The Mandelbrot Set, Finnegans Wake, VALIS, McKenna's Time Wave, LeClair’s Tensor: what does it all mean?

Hologram vs. Fractal:  All Holograms are fractals, not all fractals are holograms

Tensor vs. Matrix:  Every tensor is a matrix, not every matrix is a tensor.

(.)

Every artwork is a fractal, not all artworks are holograms.

Every artist creates a matrix, not every artist creates a tensor.

PKD had his 10 volume meta-novel.  Written as a matrix of mutually exclusive artworks, their interconnected dynamics were not consciously recognized until years later.

*To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed 
in the light of a laser beam.   See PKD, David Bowman.

The films of Stanley Kubrick form a Matrix.  There exists a dynamic resonance between each genre that kidnaps the viewers own personal experiences and magnifies the collective  resonance in such a way that the Matrix is elevated into that of a Tensor (the shared experience). This Tensor establishes each film as a room in an interconnected and interactive environment; what is identified as environment instantly opens meta-verse Catholicism, in this specific case, a steampunk version of cyberspace. Read that again 

**A tensor is a mathematical entity that lives in a structure and interacts with other 
mathematical entities. If one transforms the other entities in the structure in a regular way, 
then the tensor must obey a related transformation rule.
This “dynamical” property of a tensor is the key that distinguishes it 
from a mere matrix. It’s a team player whose numerical values shift around 
along with those of its teammates when a transformation
 is introduced that affects all of them. 
Steven Steinke

The Archaic Revival Part 4:   Autopsy for a Synchro-Mystic Hallucination

The Sword and the Stoned

The best selling author confessed that one of his most popular books contained large sections of thinly veiled plagiarism.  

He experienced more confusion than guilt, as the plagiarized sections should have been obvious, yet, after 20 years no one had stepped forward to complain.

He kept his finances transparent so that every dollar from the sales of the book were available for the moment that the deception would be revealed 

Part 1:  The Objective Truth

An exegesis of objective journalism

This is a thing

These are the screenshots

This is how you make it

This is how it was discovered

Emails, no narrative analysis

Part 2:  The Subjective Proof

The odds:  How many curve balls?

Is it a benign face alien?

Or an elaborately disguised ghostbuster box designed for both imprisonment and salvation

Part 3:  The Truth of Proof is that there is no Proof of some Truths

What did I learn after many years

What's the closest I can arrange my sense-ratios to a “being there” experience?

-Edibles
-Long walk
-No setlist

Imagine a static radio station:  you can sense the song, but can’t tune it in.  
Solve the signal, get the tunes.

Imagine scrambled porn: you can sense the sex, but can't get off.  
Solve the scramble, get the jack pot.

Imagine a rubix cube:  you can sense the algorithm, but can't resurrect. 
Solve the scramble, impress the fam.

Imagine a rubix cube made out of films and albums and history.  You sense the magnitude of the vision, but you can't see the truth.  

Solve the scramble, enter a hyper-dimensional Eden of cosmic awareness.

The Role of Math In Synchronicity

    "a big piece of math with a little bit of media in the middle

or a big piece of media with a little bit of math in the middle"

One of these is more correct than the other

Raised on media, it was hard to see the math

But it was always there.

Someone else saw the math clearer than the rest,

A Wizard himself.

The Physical Tensor

I was an awe-struck partner in the project, like a Van Dyke Parks with Robert Wilson

I was out of my league, but I was a true companion, and the closest to the madness.

The Tensor wasn’t coming together, partly because I was seriously coming apart.

Partly because I knew I was out of my league, and  feeling in the way.

I was finding it mpossible to resurrect the Holygram from the fractal.

The hologram was the experience, and experiences are hard to transmute into words.
You can’t give someone an experience, especially when doubt coupled with existential crisis are the main ingredients.

You have to spend a year of weekends tuning this thing in yourself, you can’t give it to someone.  They not only must cross that bridge themselves, they must also build that bridge themselves.  All you can do is draw up the blueprints when they arrive.

Dark Side Of The Rainbow is a blueprint 

The Kubrick Transformer is a blueprint 

The Tensor is a blueprint for the false-work necessary to raise the dome of the plasmatic cathedral

The first time you open Finnegans Wake, you realize that this book is not a book.  It is a fractal.  
25 years later, you realize Finnegans Wake is no longer a fractal, it's a hologram.  A place, an actual reality.

LeClair and I knew that this was exhausting and maddening work, and as the battle for Kubrick’s brain withered on, a miracle took place.

I had revisited an idea that I posted in one of the second or third messages to mark

the Kubrick totem pole, that of stacking all films on top of each other 

I started to do this with good results until one day

a skip occurred, thwarting the perfection of the timing.  Alarmed, and ready to realign, something shouted at me to continue.

I was forced to make the decision to jump out of the agreed upon strict parameters of the Tensor coding and entertain a new timing.  

I can’t tell you, in words, what it was like to find.   It was a Joycean Thunder.  And Lightning.  Time in reverse, time travel.  Abduction.  Celebration.  

The best.

I immediately ordered extra copies of the DVD  

Then I set up the experiment again and it... was gone.  The film that I had just watched disappeared.  

Everything broke. 
Panic.  Madness.  

How was I to know that all 2001: A Space Odyssey's are not the same, and that the timing of the Intermission would be different on different DVD's?

Then realization:  if I had never kept my 2001: ASO DVD from Blockbuster, I would have never made this second discovery.  If the DVD had never skipped as well!  It was as if this thing wanted to be discovered.

Perfecting the timing of The Wall came first.

Then the obvious:  DSOTM, and Meddle.

The Kubrick Transformer has timings for The Wall, DSOTM, as well as Meddle, and all three can feel like mutually exclusive works of art.  

Sync Book

Blog

#noschizo

Comment sections

Reddit

Phish.net

Any community that I could share

Find the others, find them now

At some point the mind tires, and hibernation is required.

Math Teacher

Return of the Tensor

Gauss, William

The Kubrick Transformer sounds lame as a title, despite invoking the correct mechanics of the plastic toy.

The Kubrick Transformer as homage to Dr. Cotterell, too obscure?  Apparently.

Finding "the transformer" in Tensor mathematics?   
Mind melting.

I had arrived at the title independently of the role of transformation in the identity of a tensors.

The Phantom Threads

What happens when you lose the sense of smell or limb?
Phantoms.

What about losing the sense of sync?  Or when sync has done its job?

It wants to happen again.  Searching, chasing a phantom.

Media As Métier

When deciding on a title for this, I rejected “Autopsy for a Fractal Hallucination” as well as “Autopsy for a Mandelbrot Hallucination” because both, by definition, invoke pure mathematics.  The body in question, The Kubrick Transformer, was not driven by explicit mathematics.  Math was in the passenger seat, sure, but media was at the wheel.  And this autopsy is that of a media based multi-beast.  

Alfred North Whitehead defined understanding as “The apperception of pattern as such”.  This is truly a gloriously simple statement.  It exemplifies how the gloss of poetry can effectively communicate an elegant statement of pure mathematics.  And it is this gloss of poetry that makes the field of Synchro-Mysticism (SM) so intoxicating.   Much like how Robert Anton Wilson or Terence McKenna could dive deep into fields beyond the average stoners ken and elevate their attention into academic understanding without the burden of tuition or grit, SM eliminates the middle man by shining little pink lasers onto little crazy diamonds.  

Patterns?   How big are your patterns?  Math is the only catholic language capable of giving credence to this universal gestalt, gestalt being the mode of apperception with which to gain understanding.

But Synchromysticism must, at some point, return to its center.

Synchromysticism returning to its sexual roots?  Leads to co-dependence, or cold dependence.

Synchromysticsm returning to its drug roots?  Dangerous, leads to madness.

But when Synchromysticism returns to its mathematical roots, SM becomes a secret weapon. The best minds in SM have extraordinary mathematical minds and mathematical educations.

The first three people who were prominent in the SM ocean that immediately come to mind are Chris Knowles, Jake Kotze, and David Charles Plate.  I have to believe each has excelled at college level mathematics at some point, each clearly gifted with mathematical minds

Knowles and Plate approach the ability of Terence McKenna to carry a metaphysical conversation with the ease and depth for hours and hours.  

If you talk to a regular human being, they may be conversant in dozens of subject matters, but it is the rare person who is conversant in dozens of subject matters, and can discuss all 64 at the same time, carefully scaffolding the points of their conversation 

But out of all the many people in and around the community that I was lucky to talk with, either by phone, email, or instant message, one person stood head and shoulders above any one I have ever met.  

That person is Mark LeClair, the author of the out-of-print blog wrongwaywizard.com.

I honestly don’t remember why I reached out to share my personal experiences of film/album synchronization, but that was the beginning of a dialogue that lasted for close to a year.

The culmination of this dialogue was personal discovery born out of a project LeClair had invited me to help build.

The Tensor, or The Physical Tensor by Stanley Kubrick and Pink Floyd

Three films, three albums, 9 combinations.

Math.  The core of the project was math, a math that arose out of the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss and defined by a man named William Rowan Hamilton.

I saw Mark’s vision, hell, he asked me to help him build it.  But explain it?  
That was the mission we accepted ahead.  

From Bris to Hubris

I quickly proved to be deficient as a collaborator, and simply could not keep up, or convince myself that I had the necessary talents to contribute anything of value.  

The Tensor was a one to one synchronization:  one album, one film.  But understood within a matrix of 8 other timings.  The dynamic tension of resonance and release between the participants elevate it beyond matrix, and into the realm of the tensor.  At some point, I do not remember how or when, I arranged my television and laptop in a way that two films and one album could be synchronized.  This was actually an idea I proposed in one of the very first correspondences I had with Mark.

I started to fold the Tensor in on itself.  I doubled, maybe tripled the intensity of the vision: laser lightning and thunderwords for all.  

While working with 2001 and The Shining in one of these twin viewings, an accident led to the birth of miracle.  I imagine its the feeling one has when one hears that they have the sixth correct number in the lottery.  Or when one sees a UFO.  Not orgasm, well, certainly not my orgasms.  It was something else. 

I probably worked on lining that thing up for weeks, watching, rewatching, noting timings. 

A problem eventually arose:   it did not correspond to the definitive timings that were canon to the Tensor.  

Was this an outsider?  An insider?  Frosting?  
It was the child of the Tensor for sure, but how did it fit into the project?  

It involved only two of the proposed films.  It crafted it with The Wall, but true to the whole ethos of The Tensor, it worked for DSOTM as well as Meddle, each with mutually exclusive starting points.

  I have had certain people say they think that DSOTM is the superior soundtrack.  I have heard some say that Meddle is the one that works best.  Honestly, over time, one must witness all three versions.

I chose The Wall as it provides the deepest field of apperception; it provides the largest infinity of understanding.  

The intensity of awe in this discovery was not shared by LeClair, which was a terrible blow to my elation.  If anyone were to share in the victory dance, certainly it would be my compadre in sync?  But if I remember it correctly, the break from the established timings was a monkey wrench that led to the shelving of the LeClair/Klaus Tensor partnership.  Thankfully the end of this partnership did not lead to an end to our friendship.  We were able to re-establish our dialogue which led to many other projects for the both of us.

I had considered developing an annotated guide to the Kubrick Transformer, in the vein that the Tensor project had designed, an annotated guide to the body of Christ, but it soon became obvious that it was : impossible, detrimental, embarrassing, impossible.  

Let it speak for itself, it exists for those to see who need to see.
  

Thanks to the unexpected revival of an old high-school friendship, who happened to play tennis with a film student who gifted an editing program to him, a DVD of the KT was produce.  I spent a few weeks burning copies with other odds and ends, in unique covers, 111 in all.

I shipped about 50(?) copies to Alan Green in New York, who was in the process of launching The Sync Book.  I handed out copies to friends.  I handed out copies to strangers.  I left copies in libraries, on college campuses.  I was a Johnny Apple-Sync, trusting the waves of the universe to turn on as many minds as possible, to allow the miracle to find them.

I wrote a chapter in Sync Book two and included the timing codes.  And that’s kind of where it ended for the KT.  

I few years later I decided that taking down all footage of the KT on my blog, or on YouTube wa necessary.  I am even tempted to remove still images, as to allow those moments to retain the full energy of their impact.  

I have had debates with DCP about whether to not to make it easy for the viewer to watch these syncs.  I still stand that the essential ingredient in these arrangements is doubt, and taking that first leap of faith towards actually taking the time and effort to correctly and precisely align the required materials is an admission of need.  It is the need for alchemical healing, and I sincerely believe that this must be respected as something not necessarily sacred, but necessary.  Not scientific, but common sense.  

Chemotherapy is for the cancer, not the healthy.
Divine pink lasers are for the dying, not for the living.

I do not own any DVD copies of the KT.  I don't even have the proper materials to watch it.  I find that it is better this way.  It is safely buried, regaining its essential power. I don’t plan to watch it again anytime soon.  I may not get to watch in its proper form ever again. 
But yet it's still here with me, and will be in truth forever.

Years later, I started taking on-line math courses in order to get a Masters Degree in Education.   I started to learn about linear algebra, discrete mathematics, all the way to the impossibly rich Abstract Algebra.  In the course of my studies I ran into Gauss once again, and started to dip my toes into the mathematics that birthed the inspiration for LeClairs tensor.

It was over my head, by I could finally see it.  But a masters degree doesn't require reaching that far, so there it remained.

I think I am taking the first step into the realm of pure math.  God help me.

Closure of this blog has been an important goal for me, a goal that I have reached on more than one occasion, but it seems to always fade.  

*To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

While it is true that if you would cut a hologram into a few pieces, you could still view the entire image by illuminating a single piece, the resulting projection would be of a lower resolution. Talbot mentions in his book that the projection will get hazier and smaller.

**  "What is the difference between a matrix and a tensor?"

There is a short answer to this question, so let’s start there. Then we can take a look at an application to get a little more insight.

A matrix is a grid of n × m (say, 3 × 3) numbers surrounded by brackets. We can add and subtract matrices of the same size, multiply one matrix with another as long as the sizes are compatible ((n × m) × (m × p) = n × p), and multiply an entire matrix by a constant. A vector is a matrix with just one row or column (but see below). So there are a bunch of mathematical operations that we can do to any matrix.

The basic idea, though, is that a matrix is just a 2-D grid of numbers.

A tensor is often thought of as a generalized matrix. That is, it could be a 1-D matrix (a vector is actually such a tensor), a 3-D matrix (something like a cube of numbers), even a 0-D matrix (a single number), or a higher dimensional structure that is harder to visualize. The dimension of the tensor is called its rank.

But this description misses the most important property of a tensor!

A tensor is a mathematical entity that lives in a structure and interacts with other mathematical entities. If one transforms the other entities in the structure in a regular way, then the tensor must obey a related transformation rule.

This “dynamical” property of a tensor is the key that distinguishes it from a mere matrix. It’s a team player whose numerical values shift around along with those of its teammates when a transformation is introduced that affects all of them.

Any rank-2 tensor can be represented as a matrix, but not every matrix is really a rank-2 tensor. The numerical values of a tensor’s matrix representation depend on what transformation rules have been applied to the entire system.

This answer might be enough for your purposes, but we can do a little example to illustrate how this works. The question came up in a Deep Learning workshop, so let’s look at a quick example from that field.