At Baltan Laboratories during Dutch Design Week within Age of Wonderland
Branly Gio López in collaboration with Masha Ru, Tjitse Boersma,
Louwrien Wijers, Jeanette Groenendaal.
Curated by Arne Hendriks
During the last three years, Branly Gio López studied the Mayan ancient philosophy and started working as a spiritual leader supporting people in his community. Whereas the industrialized world is collecting information accumulated into big data, López turns this approach 180 degrees around: he considers the ancient knowledge of the Maya as 'big cosmic data'. This knowledge not only entails codes of information but also guards ancient wisdom about circular time-space data that has to be experienced personally and in communities. According to the calendar, all the information we need is already in the cosmos. To innovate we need to get liberated from the feeling of uncertainty by becoming conscious of the creative cosmic energy inside us and the fact that ‘cosmic data’ is always changing. For centuries, the Mayan ethical codes were kept a secret and only transmitted orally because of colonial and neo-colonial thinking and practices.
During the Age of Wonderland programme López seeks to apply these ancient ideas about cosmic data to our current reality. He will explore different ways of how to make the Mayan big cosmic data accessible through exchanging ideas with people related to science, art, philosophy and technology. Branly forms a team together with Masha Ru (1984, Russia), artist and mathematician, and Tjitse Boersma (Oravante Coaching), tzolkin calendar expert (1958, The Netherlands) to work on the data visualisation of the knowledge of the Mayan calendar. Also joining the project are Louwrien Wijers, artist and writer, and filmmaker and astrologer Jeanette Groenendaal (1964, The Netherlands). Branly will research brain activity during meditation together with Vojkan Mihajlovic (Serbia) from Holst Centre/IMEC, Eindhoven, where he is responsible for developing signal processing solutions for wearable and wireless EEG technology and exploring novel EEG application domains.
This project took place from the 22nd and 30th of October 2016 in Baltan Laboratories. On the course of those nine days, we invited the visitors, coming from different places of The Netherlands, to provide dates from future or past that they find important. 260 records of those dates have been collected in the time range between the years 1914 and 2028. Most of them were birthdates. Nonetheless, the collection also included dates of death, marriages, falling in love, divorces, moving, buying property, starting businesses, and participating in spiritual ceremonies, as well as the elections in the United States of America. All the dates have been converted into the Cholq’ij or Mayan Lunar Calendar (the combination of a tone and a seal).
The Cholq’ij is a calendar year of 260 days. On average, one record per day was collected and obviously, there were deviations. Each day of Cholq’ij in our dataset contains between 0 and 4 records. Based on this dataset we tried to approach Toj/Karma of the Netherlands by quantifying and feeling those entries. The dataset was interpreted according to the meaning of the numbers in the Mayan philosophical system. Especially we looked at the emptiness – days of Cholq’ij, containing 0 records. It is important to mention that in the Mayan philosophy, emptiness is associated with wholeness. For example, the 16th seal Ajmaq, which is related to forgiveness, is particularly empty. It has collected only 5 records, while on average there should have been 13 records per seal.
More information:
‘Big Cosmic Data’, Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee Radio, by Michiel van Iersel and Arif Kornweitz, 22-10-2016, The Netherlands (English) https://soundcloud.com/jajajaneeneenee/age-of-wonderland-2
‘Big Cosmic Data wrap up! Look at the insights in Toj/Karmatic data’, Age of Wonderland, by Masha Ru, Tijtse Boersma and Brandly López, 14-11-2016, The Netherlands (English) ageofwonderland.nl/articles/big-cosmic-data-wrap-up
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