Primordial Force
Audiovisual Piece for Immersive Installations
2021
Can Buyukberber's new audiovisual piece Primordial Force (2021) takes the concept of water into its alchemical roots and uses it as metaphor for the collective unconscious, as Carl Jung described. A primordial force can be modeled as an energy that originated everything: reality, time, space, life; an infinite potential of constant movement, influencing the interaction between pieces, forming an ever-evolving whole.
Primordial Force at Akbank Sanat, Istanbul. As a part of Now in Digital Art: Alternative Realities + NFT exhibition, from March 1st to May 7th, 2022. Curated by Zeynep Arınç and curation consultancy of NFT by Assoc. Prof. Selçuk Artut. Photo Credit: Akbank Sanat
Video documentation from "Now in Digital Art" a 3-month long exhibition at Akbank Sanat, Istanbul. The piece was shown in Moscow, Atlantic Beach Florida, Istanbul, Hamburg, Venice and counting.
Primordial Force (2021) takes the concept of water into its alchemical roots and uses it as metaphor for the collective unconscious, as Carl Jung described. A primordial force can be modeled as an energy that originated everything: reality, time, space, life; an infinite potential of constant movement, influencing the interaction between pieces, forming an ever-evolving whole.
"Excerpt from my new work; "Primordial Force" will be premiered simultaneously on April 22nd, as a part of ULTRAMARIN, Virtual and Augmented Reality Festival in Moscow and enLiGHTen Art Festival in Atlantic Beach, Florida with 2 different site-specific immersive installations at Stanislavsky Electrotheatre and One Ocean Resort. Collaborations with Art Republic and VRHAM Virtual Reality & Arts Festival.
As someone who prioritizes creativity and independent thinking above anything else, I couldn't be more excited to know that the universal language of art and technology brings different continents together into a slightly more positive space in these strange times."
Based on his interpretation of synchronicity and extra-sensory perception, Carl Jung - Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology - argued that psychic activity transcended the brain. In alchemy, Jung found that plain water, or seawater, corresponded to his concept of the collective unconscious.
In "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (November 1929), Jung wrote:
"And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.
The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths."
In "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (November 1929), Jung wrote:
"And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.
The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths."
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