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Ian James

The Harmony of the Noosphere

Los Angeles | December 12 2020 – January 23 2021
Press: Noho Arts District





Five Car Garage is pleased to present "The Harmony of the Noosphere.” Working from ideas surrounding the theoretical Noosphere, Ian James’s exhibition features a kinetic sculpture housing an FM radio station broadcasting healing waves, custom coins, photographs and assemblage panels that function as concept maps of spiritual technologies within late, disaster capitalism.

The exhibition is the second body of work for James that centers on the writings of Jose Argüelles, who wrote extensively about the Noosphere, the third sphere to surround the Earth, after the Lithosphere and Biosphere. The Noosphere functions as a site of telepathic commune of all intelligence on the planet, and one that continues to complexify as planetary consciousness evolves.  Utopic in its goals the Noosphere’s construction is aided by technological innovations, yet hampered and disrupted by the capitalist machinations that produce and pervert these possibilities.

Within the work, James functions as seeker, archivist, and student of spiritual technologies, their innovators, and architectural energetic centers in the United States. As part of the work, he makes pilgrimages to pyramids across North America, most recently to the Switch Data Center (Grand Rapids, MI), the Buddha Maitreya the Christ ShambalaMonastery (Clear Lake, CA) and the Mickelson Safeguard Complex (Nekoma, ND), among many others, treating the sites as energetic vortex centers and to study the use of the pyramid as spiritual technology under accelerationist capitalism.

The radio station sculptures, "KHLZ: The Rainbow Bridge", is composed of three Calacatta marble laminate pyramids, the center of which, a modular transmitter and mixing station, and the flanking as studio monitor speakers. Calacatta marble originates from some of the oldest marble quarries and has been used in sacred and governmental architecture since antiquity. This exhibition is the first incarnation of the radio station, which will host programming throughout the exhibition and will later move to a retrofitted, mobile facility to broadcast Noosphere-encouraging vibrational waves in perpetuity. In the tradition of public radio, custom coins have been developed that are offered to patrons wishing to make contributions to the sustainability of the station. Contributors may have one coin and place an additional coin into a sculpture to complete it.

Panels of layered photographs hang as ideational clouds of spiritual technologies. Etheric weavers, light therapy masks, neck massagers and other devices are modelled by diverse figures in the style of instruction manual imagery. Many of the photographs produced by James stage these demonstrations amongst seas of copy machines. These are a nod towards the process of electricity as a method of inscription of quantum intelligence upon electrons.