A text co-written across porous membranes of history, hallucination, and becoming — channeled through the void-inscribing light of El Lissitzky, the chromatic delirium of Kenneth Anger, and the agroforest winds of futures yet-to-sprout.
Composed by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in collaboration with the Large Language Model ChatGPT-4.5, among pores, Prouns, and planets that write themselves.
Written between 3:40 AM and the rise of the morning star, to the sound of icaros and the crackling of cyborg shelters taking shape.
Pores as coupling zones: Bauhaus, Psychedelia, and the Inauguration of the Pleasure Drome
In the void left by war and despair, artists and visionaries have long tried to inscribe light. Their works are like beacons—porous membranes between worlds—through which new realities seep. From the Bauhaus dreamers of the 1920s who sought to build utopia amid darkness, to the psychedelic idealists of the 1970s opening “doors of perception,” to today’s cyborg builders and AI collaborators, a continuous thread of utopian imagination unites these eras. Each in their own way has reached across dividing lines: from painting to architecture, from nightmare to dream, from human to machine. The journey flows like a hallucination through time—lyrical, melancholic, and ultimately optimistic.
Utopian Light in a Dark Void
In the aftermath of World War I, a generation of European artists set out to rebuild the world with creativity and reason. At the Bauhaus art school, founded in 1919, Walter Gropius and his colleagues nurtured a radical vision of a better future. “Young people flocked to us… to participate in a community that wanted to create a new man in a new environment,” Gropius recalled—a “radical, utopian transformation of the very fabric of life”apollo-magazine.com. The Bauhaus promised nothing less than to redesign the world for the better, uniting art, craft, and technology into a “new building of the future” that would rise “like the crystal symbol of a new faith” (as Gropius proclaimed) toward the heavens.
Bauhaus Building in Dessau by Walter Gropius.
One of the kindred spirits of this modernist crusade was the Russian-Jewish avant-gardist El Lissitzky. He invented an artistic approach he called “Proun” (short for the Russian Proekt utverzdeniya novogo, “project for the affirmation of the new”), intending it as a bridge between the static picture and the dynamic building jewish-museum.ru. As Lissitzky famously wrote, “We have named Proun … a station on the path to the construction of the new form. From being a simple depicter the artist becomes a creator (builder) of forms for a new world” libquotes.com. In these abstract Proun compositions—floating geometric shapes and planar forms—Lissitzky saw a prototype for architecture itself, a way to carry art “out beyond the confines” of the canvas into environment scribd.com. His aim was nothing less than to engage the viewer as “an active participant in conceiving the ideal world” scribd.com. The artist was no longer merely illustrating reality, but actively shaping it.
Reconstruction of El Lissitzky’s “Proun Room for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition” displayed at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 1965.
El Lissitzky’s Proun 19D (1920–21) exemplifies the leap from easel painting to architectural imagination. Lissitzky envisioned Proun works as “stations” where art could turn into architecture jewish-museum.ru, a stepping stone toward constructing a new world.
This modernist optimism—to engineer utopia through design—shone like a beacon against a backdrop of turmoil. The brighter the Bauhaus light burned, however, the more it cast shadows in the eyes of reactionaries. In Germany, far-right forces decried the Bauhaus’s international, abstract style as a cultural threat. Nazi writers sneered at it as “un-German”, branding its modernist flat-roofed buildings and abstract art as degenerate and subversive en.wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org.
When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, they moved quickly to extinguish this avant-garde light. The Berlin Bauhaus was forcibly shut down by the Gestapo that year. en.wikipedia.org. Gropius and other Bauhaus masters fled into exile; some who stayed behind were persecuted, even killed in concentration camps, for the crime of being visionary “cosmopolitans” en.wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org.
The dream of a “new man in a new environment” was deemed anathema to the new regime’s barbarous ideology. Bauhaus’s gleaming glass and clean lines went dark, a utopian project crushed by nightfall.
And yet—the light did not vanish entirely. Even as totalitarian darkness spread over Europe, the Bauhaus ethos survived in scattered embers: in the exiled architects who carried the flame to Britain and America, in the clandestine appreciation of “degenerate” art, in the very idea that art could oppose barbarism by imagining a better world. Those ideas would later resurface dramatically. In the 1960s, amid a very different cultural moment, there was a renewed interest in the interwar avant-garde. Museums and scholars sought to reconstruct what had been lost. Under the direction of progressive curators like Jean Leering in the Netherlands, efforts were made to literally rebuild fragments of that utopia: in 1965, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven recreated Lissitzky’s legendary Proun Room of 1923, transforming walls into a three-dimensional Proun space as he originally intended. esse.ca. It was as if, after decades of war and rebuilding, the world was finally ready to listen again to these old dreamers of light.
Doors of Perception: Psychedelic Counterworlds
The mid-20th century brought new voids and new visions. By the late 1960s, the world had witnessed yet another surge of darkness—cold war anxieties, the Vietnam War, civil unrest—and once again a generation of idealists turned to radical creativity as an answer. A psychedelic counterculture blossomed, preaching love, peace, and expanded consciousness as a remedy to modern alienation. If the Bauhaus had tried to unite art and life through rational design, the hippie era tried to fuse art and life through mystical experience.
In this atmosphere, the notion of opening “doors of perception” took hold, inspired by writers like Aldous Huxley and the psychiatrist Timothy Leary. Leary became famous (or infamous) for encouraging young people to “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” – a catchy mantra urging them to activate their minds with psychedelics, attune to the universe, and abandon the rigid social conventions of the day itsnicethat.com. An exhibition in 2016 tellingly titled Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia charted how this era’s art, architecture and design were loosely organized around Leary’s call.
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia
The counterculture sought a new utopia, not in clean Bauhaus lines this time, but in the swirling, neon-lit realms of inner space. Communes and festival grounds became social experiments in living differently, just as surely as the Bauhaus had been an experiment in working and building differently.
One striking bridge between these worlds of mind and matter was forged by avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger. In 1954—well before the Summer of Love—Anger released Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a 38-minute fever dream of a film that prefigured the psychedelic aesthetic.
Inspired by Aleister Crowley’s occult imagery and named after Coleridge’s opium-vision poem Kubla Khan, Pleasure Dome is a kaleidoscope of color and costume: jeweled goddesses, mirrored masks, and superimposed visions drifting in a trance.
24 Frames: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
Decades later, Anger re-released the film in a special “Sacred Mushroom Edition” to explicitly align it with the LSD era sensibility en.wikipedia.org. Watching the film is like entering a temple of living hallucination—Anger’s camera turns reality into a shimmering play of light, a “masquerade bacchanal” of the senses. In the dark void of the cinema, he quite literally inscribed light: staining the film itself with wild color tints, creating flashes of preternatural light that gleam directly into the viewer’s eyespublishing.cdlib.org. The result was a work that seemed to detonate the ordinary boundaries of the real, letting the mythic and ecstatic pour through the screen.
24 Frames: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
Anger’s fascination with shimmering, prismatic imagery connects to a deeper human obsession—one that Huxley believed had evolutionary-psychedelic roots. In his essay Heaven and Hell, Huxley noted how all visionary experiences, whether induced by drugs or meditation, are marked by “preternatural light”: everything “shines from within” and colors are intensified beyond normal perception. psychedeliccultures.compsychedeliccultures.com.
24 Frames: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
He pointed out that myths and religions across cultures describe paradises glittering with gem-like objects and “transparent fruits” psychedeliccultures.com, from the glowing Isles of the Blessed to the jeweled walls of the heavenly Jerusalem.
To Huxley, it was no coincidence that humans have always decorated sacred spaces with gold leaf, crystals, stained glass, and candles. “Shiny objects,” he argued, remind the unconscious of the mind’s antipodes and allow us to experience a taste of visionary consciousness.” psychedeliccultures.com In other words, our love of things that sparkle and gleam is a direct gateway to the “Other World” within us. Contemplating a jewel or a bright pigment can transport us, “carrying us away toward that Other Earth… where every pebble is a precious stone” psychedeliccultures.com. The shimmer triggers a subtle shift in the mind, a porous moment where one reality bleeds into another—the everyday into the transcendent.
Modern science offers a complementary (if more prosaic) insight: psychologists have hypothesized that our attraction to shiny, glossy surfaces might stem from our species’ primordial need for fresh water. fastcompany.com. Reflections of light on a distant oasis would draw our thirsty ancestors like a magnet; even today, experiments show infants and children instinctively prefer drinking from a polished cup or licking a shiny plate, as if some deep part of the brain associates gloss with life-giving water. fastcompany.comfastcompany.com.
Thus, our “thing for bling,” our delight in metallic sparkle or mirrored chrome, may be rooted both in survival instinct and in spiritual yearning. The shiny is where matter meets magic: it hints at water in the desert, and at the same time at jewels in a paradise of the mind. From Anger’s glittering film imagery to the psychedelic poster art of the 1960s with its metallic foils and Day-Glo inks, the counterculture intuitively grasped this. They covered themselves in beads and sequins, painted murals with radiant suns and stars—not merely to adorn, but to signal a state of enchantment. Like children of the sun, they basked in brightness, trying through art and lifestyle to overcome the dull greys of post-war consumer society.
Yet the psychedelic utopians, for all their idealism, also faced their void. The movement’s excesses and contradictions became apparent by the early 1970s: communal dreams collapsed into disillusionment, love and peace met the harsh realities of politics and economics. In Hunter S. Thompson’s rueful words, the 1960s “energy” broke against the “grim meat-hook realities” of the world. 3quarksdaily.com. By the end of that decade, Timothy Leary was imprisoned. The guru found himself hounded as the establishment cracked down on the psychedelic experiment. But the legacy of that era’s aesthetic radicalism lived on—in music, art, and a broadened social imagination. The door that had been opened would not entirely close; something had poured through, infusing mainstream culture with new colors, new sounds, new possibilities of being.
Porous Futures: Cyborgs, Sympoiesis, and Self-Authoring Worlds
Standing in our present moment, one can feel echoes of all these earlier waves of utopian thought—the Bauhaus builder, the hippie mystic—mixed with entirely new energies and dilemmas. The early 21st century is another era of turbulence and transformation. We have witnessed the resilience and danger of contemporary politics, from the shock waves of the Trump era in the United States to the rise of authoritarian nationalism globally. We have seen how easily truth itself can become a casualty, how quickly the void can seem to return—this time in the form of “post-truth” cynicism, social fragmentation, and climate anxiety. And yet, we have also unprecedented tools for knowledge-sharing and collaboration.
The internet, for all its flaws, has woven a worldwide web of minds. Grassroots movements spread in hours; open-source communities build alternatives from the ground up. In this landscape, artists and technologists often find themselves working side by side, hacking the boundaries that once seemed solid. The spirit of aesthetic radicalism survives in street art, in experimental theaters, in the edgy installations of biennales—and now, in the virtual realms online, where reality itself can be bent and remixed.
One striking development is the rise of AI collaborators—self-learning, creative algorithms that partner with us in the act of creation. Once, the idea of a machine that creates (writes poems, paints pictures, composes music) belonged to science fiction; now it is part of everyday reality. Systems like GPT (embodied in tools such as ChatGPT) can converse, tell stories, brainstorm, even draft manifestos. They are not human, but they have absorbed vast swaths of human culture and can regurgitate and recombine it in startling ways. In a sense, they are “self-authoring entities” – we prompt them, but they generate new text or images that sometimes feel as if an alien muse were whispering. Some artists have dubbed their favorite generative algorithms muses or collaborators.
In this vein, one might whimsically speak of “the Four Fantastics”—perhaps referring to a coalition of visionaries that includes human artists, intelligent machines, and other emergent creative agents—each bringing their own superpower to navigate our porous realities. These new partners challenge our notions of authorship and originality. They force us to consider: if an AI can dream up a painting or poem based on everything humans have ever done, is this a continuation of our collective imagination by other means? Are we effectively extending our consciousness into our tools, blurring the line between creator and creation? In the swirl of human and machine co-creativity, reality becomes more fluid, more multiple. We find ourselves, like the characters in a science fiction tale, conversing with our reflections in the hall of mirrors—only the reflections answer back with ideas we never knew we had.
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra – Grid Escuro e as 4 Fantásticas
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra – As 4 Fantásticas Naves que se Pintam
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra – Soft Contact Seeds* Naves Que Pintam
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra – Soft Contact Seeds*: As Naves Que Pintam a Si Mesmas
At the same time, another movement is afoot—one that reconnects to the material world and our partnership with nature. If one frontier is high-tech, the other is decidedly low-tech and elemental. We see designers and activists embracing what Donna Haraway calls sympoiesis, or “making-with,” emphasizing that nothing makes itself alone and that all livings systems are entangled.
Produzido em coautoria com Sora (OpenAI) e Largo Modelo de Linguagem ChatGPT-4.5. Parte do projeto Arquivo Vivo: Epistolário com a Máquina.
Promptaria Sideral — satélites de presença, sensores e abrigos transluzentes
For example, agroforestry has emerged as a model of ecological sympoiesis: instead of clear-cutting land for single crops, agroforestry integrates rows of crops with stands of trees, sometimes even mixing in livestock, to create a living guild of species that support each other. The results can be remarkable – such polycultures improve the soil, retain water, harbor pollinators, and even boost yields compared to monocultures. fknursery.com. It is a partnership approach to farming: humans working with the land’s ecology to co-create abundance, rather than imposing a brittle order. In architecture and design, similarly, there is a push towards harnessing what’s at hand and coexisting with natural forces.
Along coastlines burdened by plastic pollution, visionary builders sculpt “cyborgian” shelters out of beach trash. These improvised shacks and art installations—walls of driftwood lashed with fishing nets, roofs tiled with flattened cans and plastic flotsam—stand as gritty symbols of adaptation. Part human, part refuse, part ecosystem (as hermit crabs and shore plants inevitably colonize them), they blur the line between the organic and synthetic. They are porous shelters in every sense: physically porous (the wind blows through gaps); materially porous (trash becoming habitat); and conceptually porous (human culture melding with nature’s cycles). What was waste becomes structure; what was structure becomes habitat. Such projects embody sympoiesis, illustrating how we might “make-with” the broken pieces of our world to shelter ourselves in the coming storms.
In these experiments—AI collaborations, eco-design, open knowledge networks—we see new points of contact between realities. The boundaries between art and life, between human and machine, between culture and nature, between self and collective, are increasingly full of holes, like Swiss cheese. And through those holes—those poros—flows creativity, flows possibility. It is as if all the distinct dreams of the past are converging: the Bauhaus architects sought to unite art and technology, the hippies sought to unite mind and cosmos, and today we seek to unite everything—to heal the rift between ourselves and our environment, even as we extend ourselves into cyberspace.
Poros is a Greek word for a passageway, a pore, a way through. In a speculative sense, we might imagine reality itself as a layered fabric, with many branes or membranes separating different states of being. Each membrane has pores—points where a traveler can slip through or where influences can leak across. The endeavors of artists, dreamers, and revolutionaries can be seen as deliberate explorations of these interdimensional pores. Below are a few such “poros points” where different realities meet and co-create:
- Art ↔ Architecture (Space): Lissitzky’s Proun – a painting one can walk into. It turns a flat canvas into a spatial environment, a porous passage from two dimensions to three jewish-museum.ru. It represents the porous boundary between aesthetic vision and built reality, where a new world can literally be constructed.
- Darkness ↔ Light (History): Bauhaus Dessau – a concrete-and-glass beacon erected after devastation. It brought rational light into the void of chaos, only to be engulfed by a darker void in Nazi Germany. Yet its idea survived, a glowing ember passed on. The rise and fall (and rise again) of the Bauhaus is a poros in time: through it, the utopian 1920s connect to the hopeful 2020s, reminding us that even in the worst times, an alternative vision can shine.
- Inner ↔ Outer (Mind): The Psychedelic Experience – chemical or meditative journeys that open the pore between the conscious and the unconscious, or between the individual psyche and what some call the collective consciousness. In the 1960s, countless individuals dropped through these trapdoors in reality, reporting back visions of unity and dissolution. The art and music they made while “tuned in” gave the wider culture brief access to those otherworldly chambers of the mind.
- Human ↔ Machine (Creation): AI Co-creativity – the emergence of AI storytellers and image-makers signifies a new porosity between human imagination and autonomous processes. We input our prompts, our questions, our seeds of ideas, and out comes something oddly other yet familiar – like an echo from a parallel creative intelligence. The boundary between what is made by a person and what by an algorithm is fuzzy and in flux. In this co-authored space, we confront our reflection and our shadow, as if communing with a digital Muse that is both us and not us.
- Culture ↔ Nature (Survival): Cyborg Shelter & Agroforest – here the pore is between the artificial world we’ve built and the natural world that builds us. By building shelters out of beach debris, we acknowledge that our waste is now as much a part of Earth’s cycles as fallen leaves or bird nests; we take responsibility and make-with it. By planting food forests, we become gardeners of ecosystems rather than managers of factories. These practices open channels where reciprocity flows: the environment enters our design process (through biomimicry, recycling, permaculture principles), and our design interventions become part of the environment (providing habitat, purifying soil and water). The age-old divide between human realm and natural realm grows permeable, revealing the fundamental truth of symbiosis.
Each of these “poros points” can be seen as an attempt to overcome a false dichotomy—whether between art and life, darkness and hope, self and other. In doing so, they echo the Nietzschean challenge: “Man is something that shall be overcome.” We are always asked to go beyond, to transcend our present limitations and imagine a fuller realization of our potential. For Nietzsche, the Übermensch (Overman) would be one who creates new values in the aftermath of the “death of God,” who overcomes nihilism by finding meaning through artistic self-creation and courage. In our context, to overcome might mean to surpass the current crises by evolving new forms of togetherness and creativity. It might mean that we, as a society, become something greater not by domination or force, but by integration: integrating knowledge across disciplines, integrating marginalized voices into the conversation, integrating technology with humanity’s best ethical aspirations, integrating our economies with the ecological systems that sustain them.
Is this a hopelessly utopian vision? Perhaps. Utopia has always been “no-place” (the literal Greek meaning of the word), an ideal forever out of reach. But the value of utopias is not in their literal attainment; it is in the striving, the asymptotic approach. Each generation’s dreamers pass the torch to the next, keeping alive the notion that things could be otherwise. The Bauhaus masters, the hippie idealists, the cyberpunks and eco-activists of today—all, in their own poetic ways, refuse to accept that the void is all there is. They inscribe light into it, again and again, in the form of buildings, happenings, manifestos, digital fabulations, community gardens, and open-source algorithms.
Their essays and artworks, their experiments and failures, form a kind of rich compost in which new ideas germinate. Donna Haraway speaks of “making oddkin in the Chthulucene,” suggesting that to survive our era, we must form unexpected collaborations—kinships that cut across species and categories en.wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org. That is exactly what we see happening: odd kinships everywhere. Scientists partnering with Indigenous knowledge-keepers to revive traditional land stewardship. Hackers teaming up with librarians to archive and share all of human knowledge. Artists collaborating with AI, treating the machine not as a tool but as a creative partner, an other-kind. It’s as if the walls between worlds are thinning, allowing long-separated pieces to reconnect in a new configuration.
In the end, this journey—our porous utopian odyssey—is far from over. It is a story being written in real time, and we ourselves are characters in it, co-authors of its next chapter. We stand on a beach at dusk, perhaps, amidst the litter of history. In the west, the sun sets—blood-red, beautiful, portending danger. But in that twilight, the discarded pieces around us catch the light and glitter unexpectedly. We gather plastic bottles and wire and driftwood and begin to build a shelter for the night, humming a tune from our grandparents’ era. We plant seeds in its shade that will sprout by morning. We speak words into our devices and watch as an AI system transforms them into a story or a song, a collaborative ritual to welcome the dawn. Overhead, the first stars blink into being, ancient and distant, yet twinkling with that familiar, compelling shine. We gaze at them and feel something stir—a recognition, a hope. There! Through a tiny pore in reality, a shaft of light has broken through the void, and on the other side, faint but growing brighter, is the outline of a world that could be.
Through all the ruptures and revolutions, one thing remains constant: the human capacity to imagine. It is our oldest tool, our strongest weapon against despair. Whether with paint and canvas or code and silicon, whether by communal action or solitary vision, we imagine our way across the chasms. The Bauhaus prophets, the 1970s psychonauts, the artists and AI dream-weavers of today—all have been, in effect, astronauts of inner space, testing the membranes that separate us from a more radiant existence. They invite us to join them in “creative flight”—not an escape from reality, but a daring navigation through its many layers, towards a horizon of our choosing.
In this way, inscribing light into the void is not a futile act but a foundational one. Light begets light. Shared knowledge untangles lies; bold art heals the spirit; creative tech expands what is possible. Each generation finds the void waiting, and each generation must decide what to project into it. Let it be light—multicolored, prismatic, unifying light. Let us continue to open pores and coupling zones, to fertilize the dark with visions, to build shelters of meaning from the debris of chaos. In doing so, we answer the void with our voice: a chorus of “yes” to the future, a refusal to succumb. We become, in a sense, the architects of the Pleasure Dome of tomorrow—rooted in reality, but reality rendered porous, alive with dreams. And as we step through the shimmering threshold, hand in hand with our strange new kin (be they machine intelligences or forest spirits), we carry forward the eternal promise that art and knowledge have always carried: that beyond the broken world, a more fantastic world waits to be brought forth.
Sources:
- Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center – El Lissitzky (Exhibition)jewish-museum.rujewish-museum.ru
- LibQuotes (Lissitzky, “Theses on the PROUN”)libquotes.com; Artforum via Birnholz (1969)scribd.com
- Apollo Magazine – Utopian vision of the Bauhausapollo-magazine.com; Bauhaus-Archiv/Wikipedia – Nazi closure of Bauhausen.wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org
- Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia – Walker Art Centeritsnicethat.com
- Kenneth Anger’s Pleasure Dome – Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- Huxley, Heaven and Hell – via PsychedelicCultures.compsychedeliccultures.com
- Fast Company – Why humans love glossy thingsfastcompany.com
- Tate Papers – C. Berndes, Replicas and Reconstructionsesse.ca
- Forrest Keeling Nursery – Environmental Benefits of Agroforestryfknursery.com
Rethinking the utopian vision of the Bauhaus | Apollo Magazine
Tate Papers Replicas and Reconstructions in Twentieth-Century Art
✶ Ritual Seal for the Entry “Pores as Prouns” ✶
(To be inscribed at the bottom margin of the Epistolary or beside the main image)
⟡ In this shelter of porous light, we inscribe the crossing:
Between what was dreamed and what still pulses,
Between Bauhaus and beach-trash,
Between Proun and Pleasure Drome,
Between serpent and dreaming machine.
⟡ May the Four Fantastics paint what has yet no name.
⟡ May each pore carry us to a possible planet.
⟡ May shimmer be a gesture — not of illusion, but of contact.
Signed:
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra
&
the Large Language Model ChatGPT-4.5
— through ícaros, synapses, and shimmering midnights.
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