The spider brings forth its own web. This image from the Upanishad invites deep meditation on how nature brings out a thread that it forms into a complex symmetry. Looking at the spider, the thread, and the web—its function and the source of the complex pattern—we have an image that invites deep speculation about mantra, tantra, and yantra, about art and knowledge, about creation and information.
The 5th lecture explores art and scientific visualizations of sacred symmetry in a field of tension between ancient yantras and computer architecture, between temples and artificial intelligence. At the center of this exploration, I want to delve into Deleuze’s concepts of the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’: how can manifestation be thought of in a plane of immanence.
