Lately in my personal artwork I have begun interjecting aboriginal dream circle images into my sketches. Aborginal dream circle art is another form of art I have been somewhat interested in. I bookmarked a number of books on the subject at Amazon to eventually read and gain abetter understanding of this artform. From what I have learned, the circles are connected to the Dreamtime, which is another concept we find in mystico-spiritual beliefs that are highly correlated to shamanistic psychedelic experiences. It is a connection to the understanding of the creation of the world as told by the Ancestor Beings. This is obviously a very interesting concept and one that is worthy of being included in the Metron dataset.
The spiral or circular pattern is always evident in this art as is the use of repetitive forms and imagery in what I feel is an aesthetically pleasing manner when considering the color schemes often associated with these paintings. They remind one of the natural tones of the desert earthscape. The use of repetitive rhythm of forms creates a sensation of connecting mind and body to the self and its environment. This art is a form of record keeping and knowledge transference as well as a connection to the sublime as is understood by the aboriginals. As such, like most art, but especially cultural art, it is polyvariant in its uses and intended communication to the viewer.
Regarding the example above: To the untrained eye, what appears to Western cultural and educational cognitive biases perhaps as a representation of protozoa or cellular structure is actually a map of the Murrinh-Patha countryside in Australia. How would the aboriginal artist know of such scientific concepts and how they may look under a microscope and thus be able to create an artistic representation of them? So here we have the artist, untrained in formal scientific knowledge who creates this as a map and the Western educated observer who can deduce what they are seeing, or what they think they are seeing looks like based on their experience in the world of Western civilization. You could imagine the artist saying, “I created a map, but this person from America thinks it’s protozoan art!” What is the gulf of understanding between the two perceptions? Afterall, when you get down to it, the drill-down of the map, which is a representation of place, physical matter, geology and biology, looks something like this at the cellular level.
MetronDeep 