I recently visited a sculptural installation in downtown Chicago known as Cloud Gate. From this location, I telephoned a friend in Toronto and, accompanied by ambient and reflected sounds, reported to him what I was experiencing there. I also made digital photographs that he was quickly able to view. By means of this transmitted information and all apposite aspects of our particular rapport, my friend was able to experience for himself the physical presence of Cloud Gate in such a way as to remedy what could otherwise have been described as a gap in his experience of reality. My friend was of course ‘awake’ when he received this information, but he was obviously not in direct physical contact with the content of my communciation.

While the facility of dream images and dream-generated ideas to nourish and complete our perception of reality is well-known to many of us, we tend (understandably) to distinguish between images experienced in deep sleep and technologically mediated waking realizations of unfamiliar but substantial locations. Understood as media, however, dreams can be seen as analogous to the capacity for revelation facilitated by the technological exteriorization of the collective human nervous system.

It was of some significance that the experience I was transmitting to my friend was itself facilitated by an artwork, the Cloud Gate installation; my own waking experience, in other words, was also a mediated dream/realization manifesting the intention of a ‘non-present’ artist, Anish Kapoor. A question arises as to how a stationary sculpture like Cloud Gate performs such an operation—how in this case it truly does function as the ‘gate’ indicated by its name. Kapoor’s sculpture does this by presenting the visitor with an optimally reflective and inclusive convex surface, effectively enveloping him or her in the overwhelming sum total of ambient and reflected illumination, which is to say that it creates a comprehensive environment of light.

An environment of light is of course a predominantly visual environment, and as such includes images cognizable by a human sensibility as meaningful and important. This is the reason why people without exception (even the blind) are attracted to Cloud Gate and its attendant perceptual revelations. One of the most crucial purposes of Cloud Gate is simply to attract, attraction being an indispensable element of any visual or alternative sensory phenomenon. It is after all a reality of human sensory life, of which Cloud Gate is one of innumerable possible examples, that no ultimate illumination of whatever variety can occur without a prior attraction to that which illuminates; and it is by virtue of Cloud Gate’s universal attractiveness that the content of its luminous ‘message’ is precisely the universality of its own appeal. Cloud Gate’s function, in other words, is to focus collective human awareness and to unify it around a single point; this, in essence, is what Cloud Gate does. My friend’s experience was thus simply a mediated extension of my own, itself mediated by the gateway or window that Cloud Gate was designed to be.

However flagrantly the social effects of a monument like Cloud Gate might contradict such a notion, there nevertheless lingers in the collective consciousness of our culture the idea that the realm of function does not extend to encompass works of art. Being the manifestation of an artist’s isolated and idiosyncratic sensibility (this way of thinking goes), it is no more than a fortunate (if socially useful) coincidence that an appropriately conceived artwork becomes a vortex of civic interest, inadvertently unifying a large and otherwise polarized metropolis and transforming its relationship to the global environment that in turn surrounds it. Using the case of Cloud Gate as an example, we asked ourselves what would be required to render its function as fully manifest—as illuminated—as its effects. By working backward from the intention of accomplishing this revelation, CWvortex has conceived a project that extends into the acoustic dimension the window or gateway function of Cloud Gate for the purpose of facilitating a sensorially unified experience of unity.

It is a fact that Cloud Gate reflects not only light but sound, and that it inhabits a unique and ever-changing acoustic environment as fluid as the ambient light and imagery it so powerfully reflects and recontextualizes. What would it mean for the people of Chicago to have a radiant acoustic experience as dramatically transformative as the visual experience that Cloud Gate already provides? What would it mean for this typically diverse human collective to experience a harmonious merging, across the sensory divide between eye and ear, of two distinct but perfectly allied strands of functional creative intent?

Of course the answers to these questions cannot be known until the project is realized; however, it is in the very act of asking them that the impetus to realize arises. We see in this instance how it is precisely through the asking of questions that the dream seeks out its integration in reality, and we begin to understand that humanity’s control of its destiny lies in its power to ask universally fruitful questions. By creating a sonic environment contemporaneous with Cloud Gate’s visual aura, CWvortex proposes to physically manifest, in the service of global harmony, the human organism’s sculptural capacity for purposeful collective sensory integration.

For millennia human beings have lived with foreknowledge of their personal deaths. It is only relatively recently, however, that we have begun to live with foreknowledge of the demise, in our own lifetimes, of every stable frame of reference by means of which to make sense of our personal experience of being alive. We now experience within a single generation sufficient change, and sufficient acceleration of change, to register the possibility of living lives in which we will confront—if we survive—collective environments utterly different from the one we now inhabit. In this respect our experience of earthly existence is a significant departure from that of most of the generations of the past. Yet while we are conscious of raging technological development as a general trend, we remain but dimly aware of the actual effects of our technologies on our minds, hearts and senses. These effects—as unconscious as they are manifest, as invisible as the air that we breathe—are so blindingly pervasive that without the tools necessary to transcend them we risk permanent captivity (or possible extinction) in a self-referential technological labyrinth.

But how, with the organic sensory equipment available to us, are we to perceive and manage such forces? In the Information Age now upon us both the speed and intangibility of the formal structures of our man-made “reality” appear to have taken us beyond the capacities of a predominantly visual approach to perception and understanding. Even in the domain of architecture, innovative designers are now seen striving for formal expression of the ideals of fluidity, plasticity, porosity, transparency, insubstantiality and resonance. This a reflection of the reality that those factors now exerting the greatest influence on our lives are not just metaphorically but physically invisible.

The implications of this realization extend beyond the aesthetic dimension and into the realm of planetary survival for the simple reason that a “conscious” organism incapable of making effective use of its perceptual apparatus is vulnerable to biases, blind spots and unconsciously self-destructive behaviors. In the ‘natural world,’ such maladaptive traits and behaviors are implicitly correlated with relative vulnerability to predation or to inhospitable environmental conditions, and profoundly affect an organism’s individual and collective capacity for survival in a given biological form. In the case of our own species, man’s only apparent natural enemy is himself, and he now requires such sensory adaptations as would enable him to detect the proximity and precise malevolent “intent” of this most formidable adversary, i.e., the potentially lethal threat he poses to his own survival.

Of course, this ’survival model’ is insufficient to encompass the scope of the domain—or ‘landscape’—revealed by such enhanced capabilities, which is in any case more accurately characterized by its many hidden marvels than by the dangers resulting from ignorance of its existence. The questions thus arise: What is it exactly that we are missing; and how and why are we missing it?

Despite the predominance of vision in the human sensorium, it will not be disputed by any sighted (i.e., non-blind) person that in the individual human, vision is a limited sensory modality. We cannot normally distinguish detail beyond a certain distance, for example, or see through or beyond various obstructions; we cannot see micro-organisms without ocular “extensions” fundamentally similar to those required for compressing large distances; and we cannot see all things, from all angles, simultaneously. Of the many limitations on our visual capacity, these are but a few that come to mind when the human capacity for vision is considered. At the same time, it is of course obvious that for human beings the ability to see represents a profound and powerful relationship to the the world of time and space, and it is also true that through technology most of the physical limitations circumscribing our collective sense of sight have been effectively eliminated over the past few hundred years. In addition, as has been pointed out by Marshall McLuhan, the development of applied science and mathematics, and of the myriad resulting technologies of all kinds, is directly attributable to human cognitive capacities based on a visual model of perception—including selective focus, linear sequentiality and fixed point of view—and to a working relationship with the phenomenal world that privileges these qualifiers of perception above all others.

Especially in light of our great accomplishments as a species, it is undoubtedly nervewracking to contemplate the possibility that we inhabit vital but undetected dimensions of reality coexistent with those we now consider so familiar as to merit scarcely a second glance. There is already so much sensory overload in contemporary life that the prospect of opening ourselves to more may seem like nothing so much as an invitation to unanaesthetized surgery. But there is also ample evidence in our collective daily life of our ignorance of dimensions of our own experience with which it would benefit us immeasurably to establish some manner of conscious contact. Such an undertaking is not unlike that of a music teacher attempting to awaken in an otherwise motivated pupil the essential understanding that the experience of a piece of music does not reside in the score, an assertion that is met surprisingly often with a visceral resistance that clearly exposes the conditioned visual bias of our culture. (Neither does it reside in recordings, nor even, for that matter, most conventional live presentation formats, which fail structurally to honor and convey the acoustic depth of true musical experience. If we are unwilling to experience music on its own terms, then it is reasonable to wonder what other aspects of our sensory experience we might also be resistant to, and conversely, what limitations of our favored modalities we might be unconsciously reluctant to consider.)

Bear in mind that, except in the context of meditative practices designed to cultivate such experiences, seeing, for example, is rarely just seeing, nor hearing just hearing; rather, there are cognitive and behavioral correlatives of every sensory modality that come to light (so to speak) through the use of images, expressions and gestures in thought, language and behavior—or, speaking more generally, in our inner and outer life and experience, and in our perception of our relationship to space. Are we aware, for example, that due to the specialized focus of the visual modality on manifestations of the physical world it is actually not possible to “look within”? How does it affect our experience of our own inner life that we engage in the mental gymnastics necessary to arrive at and reify this metaphor? While it is possible to view recollected or fantasized images in the mind’s eye, or to cognize dream images while asleep with the “windows” closed, we hear involuntarily whether awake or asleep, and are capable of listening with full consciousness both outwardly and inwardly—in the latter case to a constant inner stream of thought, voices and music that we allow ourselves to ‘regard’ as insubstantial simply as a result of having trained ourselves to accord the status of genuine substantiality only to the physically visible.

It is in general only to a lesser degree that most outer—i.e., genuinely physical—auditory experience is similarly devalued in relation to the visual in conventional contemporary perception; seeing, in other words, is still believing. But be that as it may, the alliance of the auditory facility—both inner and outer—with the condition of full-fledged conscious awareness now gives the ear a significance that, while largely overlooked in our still predominantly visual 21st Century culture, is only likely to increase.

As McLuhan points out, the twin characteristics of our technological environment over the past century that have conspired to bring about this incipient reordering of our sensory hierarchy are the blinding speed and invisibility of the electrical impulse. With respect to the first, we would do better to speak of instantaneity or simultaneity, as the completion of an electrical circuit takes for all practical purposes no time whatsoever. And as a consequence of this extreme or ultimate compression of the temporal dimension, we are confronted with an analogous spatial compression perhaps best understood as non-locality, since all possible locations on our planet have become in effect one location, subject to divisibility only according to anachronistic criteria that now appear increasingly arbitrary.

The implications of these developments for perception—including self-perception, or identity—are far-reaching and dramatic, and they are also, not coincidentally, invisible to the eye, which persists inexorably in its preordained modality of fragmentation, of separation of figure from ground. It is by contrast the ear that informs us of the non-local and non-historical context that we have come to inhabit and perhaps have always inhabited; and it is the ear, similarly, that informs us of the underlying unity of collective human consciousness and the intrinsic continuity of inner and outer, personal and intersubjective, experience. The answer to the question of who and what we are is not available to the eye to a degree remotely approaching its accessibility to our capacity to listen, which is uniquely attuned to the indivisible simultaneity and inclusive multi-directionality of the phenomenal world. Possibly this is why even the most forward-thinking rational analysis is insufficient to produce the concerted action necessary to ensure our collective as opposed to our short-term individual survival. Possibly this is also why the exteriorization of the collective human nervous system, which now envelopes the planet in the form of satellite networks and instantaneous electronic communication of all kinds, is still not perceived as such by the self-referential mouse-wielding flagellates suspended in its undulating currents. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that only a perceptually integrated organism capable of perceiving the fundamental unity of its constituents would care enough to muster the will to survive as such.

As mentioned earlier, there are nevertheless totems of this fluid and non-fragmented entity visible throughout the landscape of contemporary architecture, sculpture and visual art, works that emulate in physically tangible media the increasingly significant characteristics of sound. Among those that may suffice as examples are the works of artists as diverse as Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd, Cai Guo-Ciang, Andy Goldsworthy, Anish Kapoor and Frank Gehry. The central preoccupations of Judd’s engagement with space are of particular relevance to this discussion, leading him as they did into a direct experience of its malleability and—more to the point—of its non-separateness from consciousness itself. It would not be overstating the case to say that Judd’s life and work communicate an integration of physical space and human consciousness so complete as to reveal the possibility of a purposefully creative—or sculptural—relationship to one’s own sensory experience and by extension to the whole of mental and physical life.

The implication in the foregoing statement of the proximity of man to ‘God,’ or to a cosmogenic creative principle, is entirely in keeping with the scale and ambition of Judd’s achievement, and above all with the comprehensive non-imaginal depth of its simultaneous impact on space and on human sensory perception of space. His fusion of the purest non-illusional creative impulse with the functional tools and materials of advanced industrial technology was little short of Promethean; its effect on the consciousness of the viewer, unmitigated by distracting representation, remains commensurately visceral and staggering, dictating implicitly the assumption of a daunting degree of human responsibility for the beauty and orderliness of the total planetary (and perhaps cosmic) environment. Judd’s coordinated installations at Marfa and elsewhere are transmissional testimony to his recognition and bold acceptance of this responsibility. “Ultimately,” remarks the Tate Modern’s curator, Sir Nicholas Serota, “when you’ve experienced these works in the right context, the impact of them is so great, and the quality of the way they affect your body and your whole being is so unexpected, that you have a sense of art doing what it can do at its best, which is to uncover some of the natural order in the world, and to make us very, very conscious of ourselves and of our place in relation to that world.”

Judd’s work thus flies in the face of our culture’s lingering Platonic prejudice against the adequacy of the senses to reveal and facilitate intimate experiential contact with ultimate truth. Judd himself, on the other hand, was in the habit of suggesting that most people, despite their embeddedness in space, have never actually bothered to see or experience it, nor to develop, despite their innate capacity to do so, any significant awareness of its properties. This illuminates the paradoxical necessity faced by Judd and others like him: that of dispensing with an accepted visual medium in order to facilitate and reproduce a direct and unmediated experience of vision itself. Obviously, such an undertaking is not accomplished by closing the eyes; rather, it entails a rigorous awareness—and renunciation—of the cognitive and behavioral correlatives associated, in our culture, with the primacy of the visual modality. It is impossible for us to experience space as Judd reveals it—at least to any sustainable degree—unless the perceptual biases fostered and reinforced by our habitually fragmentary manner of looking at the world are brought into balance with other equally significant perceptual modalities. Once this happens, however, the experiential implications of inhabiting a malleable, undivided and inclusive universe can begin to reveal themselves, and at last things are seen to be not as they seemed.

What are these implications, the implications of space? One could begin by asking if there really is such a thing as a disembodied truth or human consciousness, or if this is not rather the compensatory fantasy of a creature unnaturally abstracted from its environment through the distortion and fragmentation of its own sensory capacities. Ultimately, for the embodied sensate human organism, extension in space means tactility—touching or feeling the invisible—and the confluence of the experiences of sight, sound, taste and smell in the experience of contact—touch actual or imagined, touch local or non-local, touch at a non-separate or paradoxically intimate distance. Habitation of space—embeddedness in space—means intrasensory synergy and trans-sensory reinforcement of physical and psychophysical experience. And it means conscious multidimensional participation in unity and macrocosm to a degree not possible so long as our collective perceptual experience reinforces a bias against contact and in favor of separation.

At this level of perception and understanding it becomes apparent that a cultural critique is in many ways not distinct or separate from an aesthetic, or sensory, critique, and that one of the fundamental elements of an artist’s responsible engagement with the prevailing sociocultural environment may well be the endeavor of recalibrating the collective sensorium. In this endeavor, choices regarding the selection of tools and the uses to which they are put are of paramount importance, and it is no coincidence that such choices often give rise to upheaval or controversy.

Among many visual artists, the visual and physical emulation of the characteristics of sound represents a late-20th-Century trend in this domain of creative/functional decision-making, and has brought about correspondingly radical changes in approach with respect to space, color, material, technique, scale, etc. Color in Judd’s work, for example, came to function in a role closer to that of pure timbre and further from that of a defining characteristic of a shape or field. Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate fuses the physically opposed qualities of form and insubstantiality, confronting the viewer with the cognitively dissonant spectacle of an imposing and clearly defined shape as simultaneously indistinct from its surrounding atmosphere as it is possible to be. In this we see an example of the functional evolution of the role of contour: from that of a separative wall dividing and excluding space to that of a porous border delineating infinite and continuous points of contact and facilitating interaction and fusion between contiguous “spaces.”