" Did I say something?"
- Ture Sjolander
 

"The new age of education is programmed for discovery rather than instruction. Art as radar environment, radar feedback, early warning system: the antennae of the race."

- Marshall McLuhan


"It's the Age of the Apocalypse, for no-one any longer can say whether Humanity will survive. The world's leading scientists in the relevant fields seem agreed about this: We've created for ourselves a set of crises which may prove impossible to contain. Repeatedly, we attack dysfunctions in our social organisations while the symptoms continue to worsen. I submit that what causes the helpless feeling is the inadequacy of old forms of thought to cope with an historically unprecedented situation. We can't even think of solutions without correctly recognising the problem, and it's now commonplace to pose our problems incorrectly. We tend to focus on what's seen, rather than on our way of seeing. Instead of focussing on how we produce and consume, we must focus on how we perceive  and on how we communicate. "

- Gene Youngblood


"Art is to the community what the dream is to the individual."

- Thomas Mann


"What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life, and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of humankind."

- Carl Gustav Jung


"The (work of art) becomes a document on the fragmentary state of the vision of a certain moment of history. The work reveals man's conception of his situation in the world at a certain stage of evolution of his species and in function of the information received about his status in the universe. Each time a fresh piece of information questions the reigning definition, man gains a new awareness of his relationship with the world - and the artist within the pictorial space represents a new visual system which explains it. At his moment emerges the deconstruction  of the former system, and the setting up of a new scheme."

- The editors of Réalités magazine.


"If it were possible to personify the unconscious, we might think of it as a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and old age, birth and death, and - from having at its command a human experience of one or two million years - practically immortal. If such a being existed, it would be exalted above all temporal change; the present would mean neither more nor less to it than any year in the hundredth millennium before Christ; it would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to its immeasurable experience, an incomparable prognosticator. It would have lived countless times over again the life of the individual, the family, the tribe, and the nation, and it would possess a living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay."

- Carl Gustav Jung


"Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought to bear upon the conscious outlook of an age, the event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living in that age. A work of art is produced that contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations of men."

- Carl Gustav Jung


"I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation, we have to have an inner meditative sense of who we are, what we are, what our values are, and we can't look to the external world to define them because the external world is changing."

- William Irwin Thompson


"Our favourite concepts are standing in the way of a flood-tide two billion years building up. The verbal dam is collapsing... It is inevitable that a new language will develop to communicate the new aspect of experience. The language of words we now use is extremely clumsy, static and heavy. We are going to have to develop... a language that will pay respect to the fact that our experience, our behaviour, our social forms are flowing all the time."

- Timothy Leary


"For an impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realise sensations."

Paul Cézanne


"The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. He then builds models or Noah's arks for facing the challenge at hand."

- Marshall McLuhan


"We need an image, a mythos, representing a way upward and outward where creative longing can be released"

- Joseph Clinton Pearce


"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realise its own ends through him. As a human being, he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense - he is 'collective man' - one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being."

- Carl Gustav Jung


"Feeling and love for nature sooner or later find a response from people who are interested in art. It is the painter's duty to be entirely absorbed by nature and to use all his intelligence to express sentiment in his work, so that it becomes intelligible to other people. To work for the market is, in my opinion, not exactly the right way, but on the contrary involves deceiving the amateurs. And true painters have not done so. Rather, the sympathy they received sooner or later came because of their sincerity. This is all I know about it, and I do not think I need know more."

- Vincent Van Gogh
From a letter to his brother Theo


"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment."

- D.H.Lawrence


"Let us suppose for a moment that the Western world has been hugely fragmented and splintered in its consciousness and its individualism for many centuries. And that under electric conditions it is being integrated and merged together again at a very fast clip. The question for us is, all right, if this is happening, what is a valid human strategy for conduct? Should we resist it and detach ourselves? Should we involve ourselves?... As far as the artist can clarify issues in this way, he is doing very important work."

- Marshall McLuhan


"To understand the whole of us and the world, we have to participate with the whole of us. Specifically, the bringing together of verbal and non-verbal forms of knowledge - rational and intuitive - is necessary."

- Francisco Varela


"Until notation systems apart from language are developed for culture, it is doubtful that the type of revolution occasioned by the development of writing and mathematics will occur. When this happens, however, there is no way of gauging the effect on human consciousness."

- Edward T. Hall


"The emergence of relationships between the culture you're in and the parameters that allow you expression are fed back through a technology. It's the state-of-the-art technology within a given culture that gives shape to ideas."

- Frank Gillette


"The communications of humanity obviously are trending towards that future point at which virtually all information will be spontaneously available and copyable at the individual level: beyond that, a vast transformation must occur. Today when one speaks of Cinema, one implies a metamorphosis in human perception".

- Gene Youngblood
Expanded Cinema


"Unconsciously we're developing memory storage and transfer systems that deal with millions of thoughts simultaneously. Sooner than we think, we'll be communicating on very high levels of neurological referencing."

- Stan Van der Beek


"A scientific mentality capable of giving shape to a new realm of tangible, commonly shaped experience, would have to go beyond anything called by its name today. It would have to encompass mind, growth, language, history, and produce social concepts that have meaning for a humanity that inhabits the whole earth are reaches for the stars."

- Joseph Chilton Pearce


"We want to be artist-in-residence of the world, but we don't know where to apply."

- Stan Van Der Beek


"In times of change of Zeitgeist, when the accompanying need for new orientation to new conditions the psyche is stunned into activity... Sensitive souls receive the impact of these activities from the psychic depths... "

- John Weir Perry


"The transformations of culture do not take place in history. They take place in myth. It is because the individual cannot perceive in the limits of his own lifetime such transformations as the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions that we have need of myth. A model, a hypothesis or a myth is a way of rendering the invisible. Because the unconscious is outside of time, it can perceive transformations beyond the limits of the ego. These unconscious perceptions are expressed in art or mythologies. We ourselves are living in an age of cultural transformation, but if you went to the experts to ask for a description, they could tell you nothing. You have to go to those who are at home in the unconscious and the superconscious, the artists and prophets; through myth and symbol in art, science fiction or religion, they will describe the present by speaking about the future."

- William Irwin Thompson.


"Our new information environment is not quantitative but holistic and qualitative where situations interface at all times, thus creating ever new changes of pattern which call for the training of perception rather than the acquiring of classificatory concepts."

- Marshall McLuhan


"The kind of motion picture I'm interested in will be like creating the modern LP record. It will be 'mixed' into ways of thinking, rather than cut linearly."

- Francis Ford Coppola


"In matters of war too the Druids and singing bards are readily obeyed, and this by their enemies as well as by their own people. Often, in fact, when battle lines are drawn and armies close ground with swords and spears poised, they will step out into the middle and stop both sides as if enchanting wild beasts. Thus the spirit yields to the Arts, and Mars reveres the Muses."

- Diodorus Siculus, 1st Century BCE.