This is an image I created last year, to enter an art contest organized by an online UFO conference. To be honest, the ‘tone’ of the conference was VERY off-putting to me, and the prices they were charging to attendants were outrageous (especially for an online event!) but the prizes offered were rather attractive, and two of my friends had already joined in and convinced me to do the same. “What the hell?”, I thought. “I’ll put in the least amount of effort I can on to a piece, and the worst thing that can happen is I wasted a Saturday for nothing.”
Like I said, the tone of the conference was not to my taste because it was too ETH-centric. Which is why I chose to create a piece that would challenge those stupid unproven assumptions about the phenomenon. It was because I read Morning of the Magicians when I was young that I began an interest in the subject of Alchemy and its possible connection to the UFO phenomenon –the fact that researchers like Jacques Vallee is also interested in Alchemy shows me that I am not the only one who takes those connections seriously. So that’s why I chose to expand upon a sketch I had created a while back on my sketchbook/journal in which I drew a gray alien as if it were a homunculus created by a medieval alchemist in his lab.
The Homunculus is basically a diminutive human being created artificially through magical-alchemical means to do their maker’s bidding. It is an ancient myth that somehow aligns perfectly with more modern myths regarding the ideas that perhaps the ‘Greys’ are neotenized human beings genetically altered by an alien intelligence to help them interact with us humans at a closer level of existence.
There’s also all those legends of ‘human-alien hybridization programs’ which rely on the rather controversial testimony of experiencers who recall –via hypnotic regression, hence the controversy!– to have seen enormous vats and aquarium-like glass tanks in which dozens of hundreds of distorted fetuses with giant heads are swimming in some strange clear liquid.
And if that wasn’t enough, there is also the modern obsession with the creation of artificial intelligence (A.I.) which is considered by many influential people in our society to be almost an inevitability, and a necessary step for the evolution of our own species; almost as if humankind needs to prove itself as worthy of wielding the power of the gods, by way of creating life out of non-life matter.
All these ideas I wanted to convey in the piece, which took (as usual) longer than I’d anticipated (some 8-10 hours I think) before I submitted it to the contest via the rather complicated webpage the organizers prepared for it.
And just like I’d expected, I did not win. Hell, I didn’t even make it into the finalist list! Part of me still suspects I might have messed it up when submitting the stuff into the webpage because the instructions were so confusing (for starters, I never received in my inbox the supposed free link into the conference that all entry contestants were promised by the organizers); but mostly I imagine this was not the type of artwork desired by a bunch of people who are convinced Disclosure is around the corner and the Space Brothers are going to welcome us with open arms and tentacles to the Galactic Federation once that happens. Oh well…
In any case, and even though I know it’s not my best work, I still kinda like it. Which is why I thought it was time to share it with you guys 😉
Absurd by Design 