4.12.23 First Realization: One Human Culture

Finally, the project begins the process of becoming fully realized. I was very happy to create this sequence, and have all of my ideas come together and build upon one another, finally.

Below is the (very) rough cut of Megalomania;

Be warned, it is still very very loud.

https://youtu.be/z5aiDUv5DTk

Here is what still needs to be done:

- Fill pre-Fall space with meaningful sound/ambience...

- Trim borders of puppets into circles

- Create the "silent film" kind of effect on my inter titles (possibly other clips too)

- Fix loud!

***

The main idea on my mind as I have been working on this project is that of progression, or rather, the lack thereof. The Genesis narrative is an archaic text, from a time that is beyond ancient, foreign, and unknowable. This archaic quality can be observed most in the character of God, who, throughout Genesis displays many qualities that the Abrahamic God of today is not known for. Throughout not only Genesis, but much of the Old Testament, God destroys cities, shatters cultures, exterminates entire families. He is drenched in blood, conquest and fire.

Only later, and definitely by the time of the New Testament, has the transition to a benevolent and forgiving God been established, the reason for such a drastic change having to do with how deities evolve and change with cultures, accumulating new traits and combining with other deities.

Here is a fascinating video specifically about the cultural origins and evolution of the Abrahamic God:

https://youtu.be/mdKst8zeh-U

To study the Old Testament is to see into a world distant and forgotten, swallowed by passing millennia all but for a handful of preserved texts. In that time, myths were alive and breathing, not materially extant but fabricated out of cultural struggle and conflict, and kept alive by the resolve of the peoples believing in them. The region of the levant is one with an old history, powers rising and falling like a seething tide such as Canaan, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and later Rome. It is in this turbulence that we see the emergence of one unified panetheon, a psychological toolset to aide and incentivize ones understanding of the world around them, but also the understanding of the self and others. The distant sound of thunder, and the endless expanse of stars, or the permenance of the sea and the sun and the rains, soon after, understanding life, death, good, evil, community, judgement, all features of the world that have been with us since gaining sapeince. It is in our nature to apply names and reasons behind these concepts that are inherent to the universe we exist in. At the time of Genesis, this phenomenon was called Yehovah, and Yahweh, later Elohim and El-Shaddai, and eventually became known as God. Today we know it as science, philosophy, law, technology, knowledge, and progress.

I believe that the vast world of today has grown beyond the need for God, but we have yet to grow beyond the nature of our own existence. It is under this thought that, for me, Genesis, and all accounts of all human histories, becomes recontextualized not as ancient and unknowable, but as extant and living. The tellers of these stories were human like us, dealing with, at their core, the same dilemmas and experiences; in reading their tombs, the ghosts of forgotten generations return to the world through us. Our world is unfathomably different from theirs, but has anything truly changed?

We carry an instrumental shared human culture, a set of common experiences that transcends the divides that we impose, beyond sex, beyond race, beyond culture, existing for all humans, all worlds, and all times.

***