Is it possible that Database and Narrative exist without intention or willed interface? This may sound like the creation science debate all over again but with the explosion of art in the modern era expanding into the post modern we can, if we suspend our faculties of sympathy and antipathy, at least momentarily, perhaps, understand or glimpse the ever widening realm of divine and human creation. Time and eternity are entwined, and even the concepts of relativity and randomness and even chaos can be understood in possible relation to the idea of will and even intention.
If we consider the existential narrative as it includes both humans and animals, we are alike to animals in our awareness of mortality or we are not. If we are alike then it is in the will to survive death that this is principally manifest and we are alike in this as it is manifested in the sex drive. This also can be understood as an act of creation proceeding from the will. We may also see this will manifested in the protection of the young and in the instinct for self-preservation and sacrifice. If we understand the opposing thumb and perhaps a consequential or maybe even unrelated development of self-awareness interfacing with an ever-expanding ability to create external to or beyond the basic and even complex social structures among both animal and human groups, we can at least admit to some fundamental difference between humans and Animals. Though there are definitely differences other than this among the animals, it is this that universally differentiates the animals from that which is human, or at least what we experience as human. The most telling questions may not be whether we evolve or how we evolve or if there is ultimately design in this but whether this evolving and design is intentional or random or if the intention and randomness both reach a confluence where both are subsumed in and equal to the database and the narrative alike.
The Database is not greater than nor perhaps equal to the narrative; nor are these greater than or equal to the interface. The interface may be both transcendent and integral, and may be transmuted or transformed altogether by something akin to our experience of universal love, among ever evolving forms, of infinitely varying conscious states, within the stasis of being.
If we are talking about art, of course, then the database initially shrinks. The process of modernization in art can be explained in one sense as the redefining and deconstructing of the database as well as an investment in new narrative. In order to create truthfully it was necessary for the database to be revealed and the essential qualities within the database to be mined and set within the new narrative. Problems and limitations arose and erupted in crisis at every turn. The narrative was finally subsumed within the database when zero and one remained and with zero there was nothing left to reveal but the revealing. Metaphorically speaking, Minimalism, devolves and deconstructs to zero and one, tries to take out the one, and zero’s relation to one, but can do neither; which is what conceptual art finally explains, if not by choice then by process. Thus both Database and uber-narrative are restored in the magical process of death and rebirth. Art is sacrificed on the alter of art to be lost for a time and reborn among us.
Art and Anthroposophy 