Auctor intellectualis, multimedia artist, script writer, film director, author of works in the field of history, theory and workshop issues of digital media culture and art.
STRANGE PHENOMENA SEEN IN THE SKY – pareidolia, collective hallucinations and simulacric phantasms as sources of immaterial sound-images.
ABSTRACT
Amazing reports about strange phenomena seen in the sub-lunar sky, taking place with participation of crowds of extraterrestial figures, seen by numerous public appear many times in all kinds of literature, in all historical epochs of the pre-modern world. These will also constitute the subject of our divagations.
To be exact, the field of interest of this project will not include mirage projections and Brocken spectra, which are in total an objective creation of nature. We will be interested in immaterial phantasms, which were formed in perceiving man as an artificial product of his mind and a cultural phenomenon, though they were treated by their viewers and authors at the same time, as images of objective reality.
Popular-scientific (academic) abstract We encounter their naturalistic descriptions especially in texts that were created not for artistic reasons, but the will to give testimony of significant events and to present the historical truth. Hence, in these relationships usually more attention is paid to the course of the phenomenon than to the nature of the stimulus that caused it.
However, since antiquity humans were fascinated also by the mysterious origin and ephemeral projections in culture, which gave them expressive values and by the nature of these symulacric phantasms. For them they were sources of different extraordinary experiences and inspirations. In the light of the traditions the ghastly riders from the beyond perceived by viewers with the strength not of an illusion – demonstration – but of the intensity of simulation – actuation – paced through the world. Instead of the image of the world in perceptions, the viewers saw an image as the world – simulation of sensing the reality, or perhaps of some other reality.
These visions contained the deposed human fears, investigations, aims and reflections inscribed in the historical basis of the social and cultural discourse. Thus, the large-format projections of strange phenomena seen in the sky, find their projections in culture, which gave them expressive values, connected with beliefs, civilization practices, paradigms of knowledge and various forms of social interactions, to which, in turn, they contribute.Magical and mystic thinking here interweaves with the world of myths, superstitions, fantasies and scientific investigations, entering the areas of esthetic experiences and media technologies. Here, in the historical approach, mythology encounters science and art. Thus, the consequence of strange phenomena was frequently quite real effects in the form of historical facts resulting from their explanation.
As they were also subjects of art- especially since the times of Renaissance – they are an element of iconosphere in a double way - understood as all visual experiences accompanying man. Thus, they belong to anthropology and broadly understood culture of image – hence our interest in this subject.