As above, so below. As within, so without #flaming #sky #Roma #urban #landscape
The discovered secret of nature in the construction and in the fertilization of the flowers
index to plate descriptions here
By Sprengel, Christian Konrad, 1750-1816
Arndt, William, 1750-1813 , engraver.
Capieux, Johann Stephan, 1748-1813 , engraver.
Jaeck, C. (Carl) , engraver.
Wohlgemuth, A. , engraver.Publication info Berlin: When Friedrich Vieweg the parents, 1793rd
Contributor:Smithsonian Libraries
Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library
Transforming Street Art into animated GIFs
In line with the animated GIFs of ABVH, here is a selection of the amusing creations of A.L. Crego, a motion designer who is having fun transforming the artworks of many famous street artists into animated GIFs, from David De La Mano to Pixel Pancho through Phlegm or Levalet.
On life and the cosmos and everything
Breathe.
You’re
just experimenting how the cosmos works. It doesn’t have any special
meaning behind, besides the fact that you’re marveling at its beauty
and harmony, between the tides of highs and lows, from energy to mind
patterns and people’s behaviour, everything is a continous, infinite,
interdependent hence intricate flow. Everything shifts from a state
to another, everything is change, in an infinite present moment. That’s what you’re beginning to contemplate, the perfect chaos that
everything is, a chaos that forms an infinite number of different
combinations with its tools, this way exposing its behavioural
patterns (orders within it). Chaos and order are the same thing. Everything seems dual, everything seems contradictory since there are
two extremes of everything, hot and cold, love and hate, or light and
the absence of it. In the middle of the two extremes there are ‘10000
things’, every state that is possible.
It’s interesting to think about the possibility of multiple universes created whenever something changes
from one state to another, because of the external stimuli received
by the situation it was in. Let’s think about this from people
perspective: I can have an impact on another person, basing it on how
i feel in one particular moment, like in deciding not to tell someone
that they had a piece of salad between their teeth. It can change
events so much as to prevent that person to impress one who could be the love of their life that first night they saw
each other, or it could change almost nothing at all, but with the
mere fact that I was existing there in that moment (with my inner
thoughts and the influence that I received from other events) I
had an impact on that other person, by making a specific decision. Same thing goes for ourselves. We are in the middle of this dance of
events, we impact and get impacted on, thus shaping what we are and
what our lives look like.
We can try to be aware of these
impacts, decide what we want to get shaped by, and try to impact
responsibly, knowing what impact means. Trying, for example, to
really recognize the existence of other people, trying to
understand where they come from, not judging them because you know
where YOU come from, then trying to dance with them, instead of
simply impacting on them. You could remember that you and them are
part of this amazing system where harmony and disrupt are the same
beautiful thing. Remembering that everything is one. It’s this cosmic
dance of life and death, in an infinite cicle where death gives new
life which sprouts, develops and then dies, its remains to be
sprouting something else. Like stars that end their lives in raging
explosions and blurt out their long nurtured elements, spanning them
across the cosmos, to create new environments, combine in infinite
forms, enriching everything, every time they combine, with something
more than there was before. Everything has a beginning and an end,
and something that can be produced in the middle. And that is the
purpose. To experience and interact, creating everytime something new
and fundamentally different from preexisting bases. These patterns go
on on myriads of different levels, like fractals. Everything is
fractal. Everything is a mirror image of the same thing on different
scales, which change it accordingly, like octaves, but more.
We’re
one and the same with the universe, intending for universe the
interchanging system we’re in. We are to the universe what atoms are
to us, we’re part of this system and this system is part of us. An infinite division of space, of any kind of space, even the space
of the mind, which is not different from the universe simply because
it is a part of it, it exists within us and we exist within it.
We can change reality with our
minds. We can have an idea and act on it, or we can ignore it,
waiting for the next one, but we will always act on our thoughts. There is nothing magical behind the so called Law of Attraction, it’s
simply the direction we decide to focus to. If you decide to view the
world in a negative way, whenever someone or something impacts on
you, you will be more prone to view it in a negative way, simply
because you were focusing in that direction. So the more this goes
on, the more you tend to see every little event in a negative way;
you actually reinforce this behaviour over time piling all these
little things up and you forget that there is the flip of the coin to
everything. That every negative thing that happens to you has a good
side to it, often 'only’ being the fact that you can learn something
from it. The key to overcome this is acceptance. Analyze the
situation you’re in, and if there is something you don’t like, you
are allowed to change it, knowing which consequences you’re facing
towards. If something bad happens, you have no other choice besides
accepting it and working on it, as hard as it may be, as weak as it
may seem to some, knowing that it will make you stronger if you
overcome it. Life is constant creation. We just need to do what we’re supposed to do, create. This is the power of the mind.
One person’s evolution is no different than the one of
the species. Fractals. We encounter hardships. We adapt, or we die.
We often think that since nothing has changed until now, it never will. Butterfly effect, just another of the universe patterns. Yin and yang, a process that is born from a point, develops ever faster, until it reaches its maximum expansion, the breaking point in which the element comes back being itself. Step by step, we go on.
We learn how to deal with hardships, we find a
loophole in order to overcome them, or we fail, we give up, and die,
sometimes even being still alive.
There is a point of no return, as in every other
thing, there is an events horizon. Once reached, there is no way
back.
When we face a period of depression
we are actually moved by our subconscious to recognize what’s wrong
deep inside, what’s really wrong, and this takes a long time,
sometimes very long; to actually recognize the true problem(s) is a
very hard thing to do. We are in constant research on the inside. Our
subconscious has taken over on the conscious mind (which naturally
holds the reins of our life, being reactive in the everlasting
present moment, but receiving a constant feedback from our
subconscious), it’s sending our conscious on a little trip in its bad
spots, so that, it hopes, it finally realizes the problem
and they can resume working in balance, enriched by the new knowledge
of mind they reached. This requires a lot of insight. It means trying
to shed the ego from our backs and look at things in the most
objective light as possible. It’s not easy. But it isn’t supposed to
be.
It’s the famous
trip to hell of classic literature. 'Hell’ is nothing else than a
profound lack of balance and
harmony between the subconscious and the conscious mind, a place
where you find demons, your worst fears, like the common fear of not being
what you feel you should be. You have to recognize who you are, not
tempered with delusions of grandeur in the midst of feelings of
inferiority, not ceding to paranoia, self-deprecation and guilt,
losing, more and more as you go on, touch with the people you have
beside you, which even if you are the most misanthropic person alive, you need, as a social animal. You need to want to
get better, finally believing that it all reduces to choices that you
make in the present moment. Past is useful as it provides a sense of
continuity and experience to gain from to go on, but you
can only decide what defines you in the present moment. Future is important as well. It provides something to
look forward to, it holds the promise of finally reaping what you’re
trying to sew in the here and now. But when your here and now
really sucks you view the future as bearer of bad news, even if often
it’s no news at all, as every day is the same as the day before. You
lose what can be called hope. That is because in the present moment
you are changing nothing, maybe because you don’t know what the real
reason is behind you feeling depressed, or maybe because you stopped
believing you could change anything. You have to find the loophole,
that next logical step that breaks you free, and the only way is
looking for it.
So you go on this trip to hell and you can either
lose yourself, never getting out of it, sometimes even not wanting to
get out of it, since what’s familiar is always comforting to our mind, or you can explore it high and low until you find your Euridice. Then, once you have found the problem, you have to look at
it, you have to understand it, because that’s how you’ll gain the
most from it, you have to accept it, accept the fact that you, yes, you, have this problem, and that is perfectly human. Then you can leave behind what’s hindered you for so
long. You can come out of hell, being born again, freer and stronger
than you were thanks to an increased knowledge of yourself, and,
likely, of others too. You have a different sense of awareness. You
now know that you can do what you deem best in every circumstance,
that the only limit is the limit you decide for your well being,
respecting other people’s (if not for goodness of heart then simply
because it’s the most logical thing to do in order to maintain the
balance of your energies).
Embrace the change. It is the only sure thing that is constantly happening everywhere. You can try to fight it, losing your energy to the cause, or you can accept it and make do with what comes (and has come) your way, actively trying to direct yourself where you really want to be, shaping things like you want them instead of being shaped by them. This is the power of the mind. Being in the moment, free of prejudices and unsatisfaction for what already is, being open to change and infinite possibility. Being actively conscious and aware of what situation you put yourself into means actively controlling how (in what state of mind) you enter it.
