Video between Architecture and Telepathy
Nicolas Holt
Arts June 29, 2023 DOI: 10.3390/arts12040133 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Juan Downey's 1973 installation-performance Plato Now restaged Plato's Cave allegory to blur the divide between mind and sensory reality, weaving together brain waves, video signals, and telepathic communications, and contends that the work prefigures new materialist concerns with relationality, hybrid assemblages, and vibrant matter. |
Abstract
On 6 January 1973, Chilean media artist Juan Downey exhibited Plato Now at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. A hybrid multichannel video installation and performance, this was Downey’s restaging of Plato’s Parable of the Cave—the “Now” registering what the myth might look like from the vantage of his own historical moment. And whereas Plato’s original operated through an inflexible division between the space of the mind and a derivative sensual reality, Plato Now explicitly sought to blur those philosophical lines by assembling a relay of invisible energies, brain waves, video signals, and telepathic communications, such that the space of mind and sensual reality became speculatively entangled. This article clarifies just how Plato Now did this, and situates its philosophical vision as a significant, if relatively unremarked, aesthetic prefiguration of the new materialist tendencies towards relationality, hybrid assemblages, and vibrant conceptions of energy and matter.