SMALL INTRODUCTION FILM “EM” :
INITIAL ALUMNI :
FLDST I
James Lee Byars (°10 april 1932 – 23 may 1997)
When Byars was 37 years old—then half an average lifespan—he wrote his “1/2 autobiography.” Sitting in a gallery, he jotted down thoughts and questions every time a visitor approached him, and published them afterwards in a book he also titled The Big Sample of Byars. Obsessed by the idea of perfection, Byars produced a remarkable body of work that strove to give form to his search for beauty and truth. Pursuing what he called “the first totally interrogative philosophy,” he made and proposed art at scales ranging from the vastness of outer space to the microscopic level of subatomic particles, in an attempt to delineate the limits of our knowledge while enacting a desire for something more / Founded and organized “the World Question Center”.
Pythagoras of Samos (°c. 570 – c. 495 BC)
Pythagoras and his followers were important for their contributions to both religion and science. His religious teachings were based on the doctrine of metempsychosis, which teaches that the soul never dies and is destined to a cycle of rebirths until it is able to free itself from the cycle through the purity of its life. Pythagoreanism differed from the other philosophical systems of its time in being not merely an intellectual search for truth but a whole way of life which would lead to salvation, or to be delivered from sin.
An important part of Pythagoreanism was the relationship of all life. A universal life spirit was thought to be present in animal and vegetable life, although there is no evidence to show that Pythagoras believed that the soul could be born in the form of a plant.
The Pythagoreans presented as fact the dualism (that life is controlled by opposite forces) between Limited and Unlimited. It was probably Pythagoras who declared that numbers could uncover the secrets of the universe, limiting and giving shape to matter (anything that takes up space). His study of musical intervals, leading to the discovery that the chief intervals can be expressed in numerical ratios (relationships between numbers) between the first four integers (positive whole numbers), also led to the theory that the number ten, the sum of the first four integers, embraced the whole nature of number.
FLDST II: SACRED GEOMETRY
Hildegard von Bingen (°1098 – 17 September 1179)
Composer, mystic, polymath / Made visionary symbolic paintings in mandala-forms and considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
Fibonacci (°c. 1170 – c. 1250)
Fibonacci sequence, spirals and their relation to the golden ratio
FLDST III : TERRA (Gaiagraphy)
Copernicus (°19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543)
A new way of perceiving our world by the recognition of Gaia as being our living planet and its reverence in every realm of scientific, metaphorical and philosophical endeavor, could trigger a Gaian revolution
Viktor Schauberger (°30 june1885 – 25 September 1958)
Water is a living substance and has to be handled with great sensitivity.
Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (°28 February 1863 – 6 January 1945)
Noosphere (is the sphere of human thought the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life) / Russian cosmism
FLDST IV : EFDIM
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet (°17 December 1706 – 10 September 1749)
She emphasizes the necessity of the verification of knowledge through experience / profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics (the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy)
Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (°30 November 1756 – 3 April 1827)
Inventing a technique to show the various modes of vibration of a rigid surface (chladni-figures)
Paul Klee (°18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940)
Created through his art a poetic universe and a methodology for resonanzverhältnis
FLDST V : TIME
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (°24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986)
Borgesian time / Borgesian conundrum (ontological question of “whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him”)
Kairos
(was the spirit (daimon) of opportunity, the youngest divine son of Zeus / Ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment.
FLDST VI : I-CARUS
Erasmus (°28 october 1466 – 12 july 1536)
Writings on “Free Will” / laid the foundations for religious toleration / interest in natural medicine / apostle of independent scholarship & freedom of intellect and literary expression.
Carl Gustav Jung (°26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961)
Psychoanalysis / Archetypes / I-ching / Soul / synchronicity
Hazrat inayat khan (°5 July, 1882 – 5 February, 1927)
Founder of universal Sufism.
Lygia Clark (°23 October, 1920 – 25 April, 1988)
Sought to redefine the relationship between art and society. Abstract and holistic works/performances with a focus on psychotherapy and healing.
FLDST VII : POLARITY
Zarathustra (around 1500 BC)
Dualism (truth-lie, light-dark, …) / Avesta
+ ( 14th Century, Nicolas Oresme’s manuscripts shows early use of “+”)
Positive
– (appears in Luca Pacioli’s Compendium “Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità” from 1494)
Negative
FLDST VIII : COSMOLOGY
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (°24 February 1463–17 nov.1494)
Human as magnum miraculum (a great miracle) & copula mundi (unifying element) / At the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic, for which he wrote the “Oration on the Dignity of Man”, which has been called the “Manifesto of the Renaissance”.
George Steiner (°1923)
Author, essayist, literary critic, professor and stand-in for Rudolf Steiner (°27 February 1861 – 30 March 1925)
FLDST IX : ALEGRIA
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