Barnabus, the protagonist in a VR180 screenplay I’ve been intermittently crafting over the past three years, has undergone numerous transformations throughout the writing process. He has variously appeared as an Abductive Reasoning Assistant (ARA), negating the need for personal decision-making, and as a wild Gonzo psychologist attempting to cogently traverse the state-space of his own mind through a technique he’s dubbed “Deliberate Self-Splitting”. This inaugural blog post introduces some of the cognitive frameworks I’ve personally traversed and developed for the film. Mind uploading initiated…

*SPOILER ALERT*

The film is based around the concept of a symmetetrad, an impossible geometrical shape that is also some form of living organism likewise computational hivemind inspired by the symmetriad in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.

At the epicenter of the film lies the notion of a symmetetrad, a formally consistent but perceptually impossible geometric shape that also functions as a living computational hivemind possessing unimaginable intellectual faculties. This proxy of an entity is heavily influenced by the symmetriad in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.

 (pp. 127-128):

The symmetriad now begins to display its most exotic characteristic–the property of ‘illustrating,’ sometimes contradicting, various laws of physics. … The interior of the symmetriad becomes a factory for the production of ‘monumental machines,’ as these constructs are sometimes called, although they resemble no machine which it is within the power of mankind to build: the designation is applied because all this activity has finite ends, and is therefore in some sense ‘mechanical.’ …

It would be only natural, clearly, to suppose that the symmetriad is a ‘computer’ of the living ocean, performing calculations for a purpose that we are not able to grasp. … The hypothesis was a tempting one, but it proved impossible to sustain the concept that the living ocean examined problems of matter, the cosmos and existence through the medium of titanic eruptions, in which every particle had an indispensable function as a controlled element in an analytical system of infinite purity.

Along with serving as an exercise in theoretical geometry, employing the symmetetrad as a key motif is an effort to deconstruct consciousness while simultaneously generating it. In essence, it encapsulates the subtitle of this blog: metaprogramming cognition.

The very first scene throws the audience into the point of view of a participant in a scientific experiment just about to undergo a brain scan. As the cinematic immersion increasingly embodies the participant, attention is phonologically directed to some confusion and uncertainty between the researchers and the participant. This culminates in a psychedelic epiphany, fully recorded psycho- and physio-metrically. The majority of frames currently envisioned for the unproduced film are projected equirectangularly onto a head-mounted display (HMD).

In the mind of Barnabus, life is a scientific experiment conducted by someone he is devoting his art to identify, meet and question. Although he knows by rational means that focusing on the identification process would increase his chances of self actualization, he dismisses the top layer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as any noble pursuit. Instead, in his own scientific experiments he aims to penetrate the apex from an orthogonal angle by grasping for questions to his Self and sooner than the speed of negentropy to his tetra-split Selves in a gonzo journalistic fashion.

The last question by Isaac Asimov is the first but not last question Barnabus asks. In fact the most efficient questions he comes to think of is one so dangerous that it can be expected to have the most radical proponent of free speech consorting to propose death penalty for any one asking the exact question Barnabus has in mind. Yet, an answer to this question is in theory so satisfying for the human condition that it simply cannot be avoided consideration despite all it’s inherent existential risks. However, the hedonic imperative is seldom endorsed by any legal counsel, let alone the peer pressure exerted by significant others preferring to sit tight in a boat floating downstreams on a burlesque river of love with a bottle of whine and French cheese.

BUT. My curiosity is my life force. Abandoning it, and the cornerstone to my faith in modern cosmism would crumble. In such case, I risk becoming an anhedonic imbecile biologically and mentally indifferent to the apocalypse of civilization as we know it.

Now, before setting sail towards the Rosetta stone of cognition and disclosing the question, I will practice due diligence and go to bed.

To be continued…