Colorado Plateau Project: Dialogue Between Two Worlds

           

Goethe created the first barometric pressure gage demonstrating the interaction between high and low pressure systems and containers of water like underground wells or springs.
Text Box: Exhibit Panel #1 The Colorado Plateau: Mirror of the Universe Exhibit Panel #2 Wind and Mountains: World in Motion Exhibit Panel #3 Wupatki: House of Wind and Water Exhibit Panel #4 The Little Colorado River Watershed Ethnographic records of climate balance Contemporary graphics of dynamic climate pulses Exhibit Panel #5 Sky Loom: Lightning and Thunder Talking

INTRODUCTION:  Two definitions for  the word “image”

    In the pre-Renaissance world, rendering living images took the form of petroglyphs and cave paintings, pottery designs, weavings, murals in sacred places and in architecture itself — all mirroring an environment filled with natural phenomenon of luminescence, lightning and thunder, mists of unusual forms and sounds that spoke to human interpreters, trained and untrained. Perhaps the best word for cultural arts would be “communion” with nature connected to vast spaces and times beyond direct experience.

      ‘Simulacra’ means this early form of vision. As with untrained children seeing figures and unique places in clouds, water, twisted trees, gardens, sunrise and so on, humans have “seen” with an inner as well as an outer eye.

   With the advent of Renaissance methods of perspective in fine art schools of the 1500’s, there was a historic break in the prevailing visual imagery in the West.

   Originating with Renaissance perspective grids, the invention of mechanical devises to measure and record natural phenomenon began to evolve. The photographic image and computer mathematics for graphing data and statistics completed a cultural shift to replicas of nature measured by an intermediary machine. Thus, a representation of nature thought to be a faithful but standardized image arose.

   This shift worried influential German naturalist and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832. Goethe believed that the human body with all its senses and the interpretive arts of poetry and drama expressed nature in the most accurate manner.

   Goethe warned the early scientists:

 

 

 

 

   The flow forms of water, wind and the natural world were re-introduced  to the Western mind in 1965 by Theodor Schwenk in “Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air.” His text and illustrations unite the two ways of knowing and should be read by any serious student of this exhibit.

   Each page of the exhibit branches from this introductory page. The viewer will need return to this introductory page to enter another panel. The resource page is under construction. Many supporting documents and educational  worksheets will be available for free plus shipping or by email. As soon as possible

   The exhibit photographs and text are copyrighted and protected under United States unless otherwise noted . Please credit this exhibit in research projects as: www.coloradoplateauproject.net.
Text Box: Man in himself, in so far as he uses his healthy senses, is the most powerful and exact physical apparatus there can be. The greatest mischief of modern physics is that the experiments have as it were, been separated off from the human being. Man wishes to cognize Nature only by what artificial instruments show, and would thereby limit and prove what she can accomplish.

An on-line interpretive educational exhibit addressing the crisis of cultural values and global climate change