Akporode Part 3 : Converging Cosmos: Art, Spirituality, Philosophy and Science in Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Akporode Installation
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Akporode Installation by Bruce Onobrakpeya.
Onobrak Art Centre, Agbarha-Otor.
Picture by Ophori Israel
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge''
This essay explores an inspirational process behind interpreting Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Akporode installation as a cosmographic form, a depiction of the cosmos represented by the Urhobo term "akporode", "the vast and mysterious universe", as well as a monumental artistic prayer to Oghene, the Urhobo conception of the creator and sustainer of the cosmos.
Situated at the intersection of art, spirituality, philosophy and science, Akporode is examined alongside the Sri Yantra, a Hindu geometric cosmogram, modern cosmological physics, artificial intelligence and other knowledge systems.
Through this comparative lens, the installation emerges as a multidimensional meditation on the cosmos, human consciousness, and the interplay between form and emptiness.
Contemplating Sri Yantra Cosmography in Relation to Bruce Onobrakpeya's Akporode Installation
I was reflecting on a Sri Yantra on my bedroom wall as I do everyday, when something striking happened, culminating in this essay.
The Sri Yantra is an elegant Hindu geometric diagram representing the interwoven realities constituting the cosmos.
It is understood as being the geometric structure of the universe, embodying its essence, structure and dynamism.
It also stands for the human being as a microcosm, a miniature cosmos.
This cosmos/human being unity is further summed up in the Goddess Tripurasundari, who embodies and transcends the cosmos, from a thread of whose skirt the universe is described as having been created.
Through such a ritual as the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, the contemplative navigates the Sri Yantra, thereby also imaginatively traversing the cosmic, human and deity associations of the yantra (1).
On that fateful day, as I admired the exquisite symmetry of the Sri Yantra, interlocking triangles centred in a dot, subsumed by concentric circles on which sit lotus petals surrounded by a square, the whole ablaze in a symphony of colour, I reflected on Akporode, an installation by the Nigerian artist Bruce Onobrakpeya.
The Akporode Installation as a Cosmological Vision
Onobrakpeya's Akporode installation is a visual dramatization of the Urhobo word "akporode", which may be interpreted as " the expansive and mysterious world", according to Onobrakpeya's note explaining the work and Philomena Ofuafo's discussion of the concept of "akpo", "world", the Earth and the celestial bodies, in Urhobo, and its varied engagement in Onobrakpeya's art, a foremost visual imaginative explorer of Urhobo thought and distiller of the inspirational essence of African spiritual arts, uniquely reworking them in various media (2).
Onobrakpeya describes Akporode as an evocation of the multifarious possibilities offered by the universe in the context of a prayer for divine guidance towards reaching divine greatness, a prayer to Oghene, the Urhobo name for the creator and sustainer of the cosmos.
Hermeneutics of Space in Akporode
The aesthetic force of the installation is founded on the hermeneutics of space, the structural, imaginative and intellectual exploration of the significance of space in relation to the broadest human concerns, even to the meaning of existence.
The spatial relationships between the various elements constituting the installation define the structure in harmony with the individual elements comprising it.
These spatial connections are between the pillars that shape the installation and the empty space within which they are positioned.
These conjunctions are also between the pillars and the other structures within that space.
This totality of particulars and correlations between them constituting the installation may be understood as a projection of "akporode", an evocation of the world and the material cosmos in its plenitude and mysterious glory.
This magnificent multiplicity is suggested by the richly variegated constellation of forms and formlessness, concrete structures in dialogue with empty space, configuring the installation.
Akporode and the Buddhist Alaya- Vijnana
The installation is housed in the equivalent of a room, with three sides on which the forms constituting the installation rest, with the fourth side open to space so the assemblage may be viewed from outside.
In being located in a built environment, particularly the equivalent of a room, it suggests values akin to the Buddhist concept alaya-vijnana, which uses the image of a room where all the precious things owned by a person are kept, symbolizing the person's ultimate potential, a potential embodied by the person's consciousness at the intersection of the limitations of self and the immensity of cosmos (3).
"While not directly related to physical space, Alaya-vijnana is often understood as a vast and boundless 'inner space'.
Its concept of boundless potential can be interpreted as a reflection of the vastness and interconnectedness of space-time, where every action has consequences that reverberate through the cosmos.
In essence, Alaya-vijnana offers a unique perspective on consciousness and its relationship to space, suggesting a deep connection between our inner state of mind and the outer reality we experience" (4).
Hence alaya-vijnana is known as the "store-consciousness", an assemblage of possibilities akin to Akporode's constellation of forms and empty space organized to creatively provoke the consciousness of the viewer.
Enfolding/Unfolding
Information may be enfolded in an image, which itself unfolds into the infinite, Laura Mark 's description of relationships between information, images and infinity, inspired by similarities between Islamic art and technologically generated art. (5)
Akporode enfolds into itself the insights of orally encoded Urhobo philosophies, an enfolding actualized in terms of visual forms, forms, which, through a metaphorical dialogue with a viewer, unfold their possibilities through the intersection between the installation and the constellation of general and individualistic awareness represented by that viewer.
This interpretive potential is capable of infinitely unfolding depending on the capacities of the viewer, a potential for endlessness evocative of infinity in terms of which Oghene might be understood as the source of existence, an infinity grounding and enabling all possibilities.
Pillars of Akporode
Picture by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Between the Sri Yantra and Akporode
The Sri Yantra image on my bedroom wall is a two dimensional form, a painting. Akporode is a three dimensional structure. The Sri Yantra, however, may also be constructed as a sculpture, in three dimensions.
There is a large amount of literature on the Sri Yantra, from past centuries of Asian thought to the present beyond Asia, as it is studied across disciplines, from art to spirituality to mathematics.
I know of only one article, apart from my work, discussing Akporode, magnificent and strategic to Onobrakpeya's art as it is.
Akporode, though, is the work of a contemporary artist while the Sri Yantra was created at a time so far in the past it's period of composition and its creator are likely unknown even to scholars of the art.
Ofuafo's article on akpo, where she discusses Akporode, is very rich, providing a powerful conceptual background for understanding the installation, although she focuses on the work only in a brief but richly informative and ideationally tantalizing concluding section of the essay.
"Could the Sri Yantra facilitate better understanding of Akporode, the ancient structure helping to illuminate the modern creation, illumination generated across diverse cultural forms and artistic constructs, nevertheless unified in being both cosmographic forms, images of the cosmos?" I reasoned.
Emerging Inspiration
Contemplating the yantra, an insight into Akporode began to take shape in my mind, glowing with a soft sense of inspirational power though still inchoate, like a cloud slowly forming, lit by an inward fire.
The structure of the installation began to unfold in my mental space into a pattern of meaning that would not fully reveal itself until days later.
Akporode and Scientific Cosmology
Akporode and Field Theories in Physics
While still contemplating the yantra at that moment, a phrase emerged and settled in my mind " Twentieth Century Field Theories", a key to the insights into Akporode unfolding under the inspiration of the yantra.
Conceptual Developments of Twentieth Century Field Theories is the title of a book by the Chinese-American philosopher of science Tian Yu Cao (6).
The Inspirational Radiance
The spontaneous ascent of that title to the forefront of my conscious mind in that inspirational moment radiated two possibilities glowing within the matrix of that thought.
I am using the image of a glowing flame in describing the inspirational idea, thereby suggesting the sense of vitality, of richly pregnant possibility of the idea as it rose, such alluring force being a mark of my experience with inspiring ideas, embodying a sense of inward dynamism, almost as if they are alive, beckoning one into an intimate embrace promising rich unfoldings.
"All men by nature desire to know as shown by the delight they take in being able to see since it enables them see the differences between things" states the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Metaphysics as he proceeds to explore what may unify the diversity of existence (7).
Akporode's diversely beautiful forms constellating striking beauty inspire the delight of sight. Through the installation's structuration individual elements are conjoined to generate unity.
These visually realized effects inspire delight and curiosity to understand the logic of this multifarious assemblage, a conjunction of diversities evoking the multifarious beauty of the world.
Geometric Structuration in Akporode
The idea of field theories I understand as relating to efforts in physics to comprehend the universe in terms of a structure of relationships, the coordinates defined by those relationships being described as a field, such as a field of relationships between matter and energy, space and time.
Over time, the idea ripened, correlating my understanding of field theories with Akporode without my needing to look into Cao's book even though it's in my library.
I saved re-engaging Cao's work for a later stage in the research and writing process on Akporode while I allowed my mind to incubate the inspiration it had received, leaving it to mature in the subconscious mind and release the germinated idea to the conscious mind when it was ready.
I came to understand the projection of that book title in my mind as indicating the possibility of interpreting the structure of the Akporode installation in terms of coordinates of modern cosmological physics, the field theories the book discusses.
Could the spatial relations between the constituent elements of Akporode- between the various pillars distributed throughout the space, between the pillars and the empty space it structures and between the pillars, the empty space and the other concrete elements shaping that space-be described in terms of scientific cosmology?
Could those structural conjunctions of Akporode be perceived in terms of scientific cosmology as that world view maps relationships between space and its implications of time, between laws of nature demonstrating the coinherence of matter and energy, space and time?
Akporode
Picture by Ophori Israel
Could the spatial relations constituted by Akporode be interpreted in terms of geometric coordinates, as is done in cosmological physics, building on scientific traditions from the 17th century scientific efflorescence that birthed modern science?
Could the Akporode configuration be related to insights from the Scientific Revolution in which, within the convergence of spirituality, philosophy and science gestating the modern scientific world view, the idea gained prominence that the geometric order of cosmos is a divine creation, "In the beginning, God geometrized"?
The great intellectual beauty of Albert Einstein' general theory of relativity derives significantly from its geometrization of physics, in which the laws of physics are the laws of geometry in four dimensions,and these laws in turn are determined by the distribution of matter and energy in the universe demonstrating the possibility of a spatially finite though unbounded universe ( 8 ).
The Akporode universe, as it may be called, is spatially finite though evocatively unbounded, in the range of associations it may provoke in the viewer.
Could such expansive associations constitute a matrix for an intellectual, aesthetic and intuitive quest for the kind of cosmos unifying configurations that drives theoretical physicists?
A quest which is the artistic, philosophical and spiritual counterpart to physicists' intellectual investigations which may also be fed by the aesthetic, in an understanding of physics as convergent with, though different from the ultimate focus of the other approaches?
The Akporode constellation creates a harmony of structural beauty and colour luminosities, mapping the structural, artistic equivalent of a scientific equation, an effort to unify vast aspects of the world in terms of numerical structures indicating their relationships, the most famous and particularly elegant demonstration of this strategy being Einstein's energy/matter equivalence equation -E=mc², which "states that energy and mass are different forms of the same thing and can be converted into each other (meaning) a small amount of mass can be converted into a massive amount of energy, and vice versa" ( 9 ).
The Pillars of Akporode
Human Consciousness, Divine Consciousness and Cosmic Creativity
Those pillars defining Akporode, as I had concluded before the encounter with the yantra, could their symbolic significance not be explored in a cosmological sense?
Akporode is a cosmographic construct representing the Urhobo cosmological concept "akporode", the cosmos as a vast and mysterious expanse in which the pillars structuring the installation articulate the idea of reaching out to the creator of the universe in praying for divine guidance towards divine greatness, as Onobrakpeya describes it.
The installation's supplicatory role is referenced principally through its pillars, adapted from the use of pillars in Urhobo shrines as a means of reaching towards the ultimacy that is Oghene, the installation being therefore a prayer for participation in the bounty represented by the universe, a call for divine guidance towards achieving divine greatness.
May those pillars not be understood as concretizing the role of humanity in shaping the cosmos, through aspiration, through effort, through trying to reach towards and draw from the creator and sustainer of the universe?
May the pillars not therefore represent the concretization of human thought and aspiration as well as the strategic role of human consciousness in the character and development of the cosmos?
Beyond this focus on human consciousness, this constellation of ideas could provoke questions about the relationship between human consciousness and the divine consciousness the pillars symbolize the human being reaching towards.
Does the divine actually exist? If it does, could it share any relationship with human consciousness? Could they be intertwined as some views claim? Could aspiration to the divine be the outcome of the divine reaching towards the human being or the expression of the divine nestled within the human person, an essence reaching out to its origins?
"To the One who, although nothing but a mass of consciousness, is yet solidified in the form of the world...To You, the transcendent, situated beyond the abyss, beginningless, unique, yet who dwell in manifold ways in the caverns of the heart, the foundation of all this universe, and who abide in all that moves and all that moves not, to You alone, O Sambhu, I come for refuge" is a collage of two prayers from the Hindu text The Paramarthasara of Abhinavagupta with the Commentary of Yogaraja, trans. and ed. by Lyne Bansat-Boudon and Kamaleshadatta Tripathi (10).
A compelling dramatization from Trika , another school of Hindu Tantra, the constellation to which the Sri Yantra belongs.
A vision of human and divine unity, human individuality and cosmic plenitude, is dramatized in those lines, incidentally resonating with Akporode's dialectic of solidity and voidness, concrete forms and empty space, within an aspiration to the bounty enabled by the Ultimate understood as creating and sustaining all.
"Homage to (Siva), the source of the generation of all marvelous things, the one who creates the portrait of the universe on his own body, which is made of the ether of consciousness", an expression from another Trika text, by Somananda (11).
Concrete forms, a body, abstract reality, consciousness, are fused in this remarkable image dramatizing the human need to conjoin concreteness and abstraction in visualizing the divine.
Akporode pursues a similar goal, integrating concreteness and abstraction, pillars of robust beauty on which are inscribed the fruits of contemplation, of the balance between thought and reflective action that creates great art, with empty space, within a cosmographic form in which plenitude may be understood as both visible and invisible, actualized and potential.
The Music of the Spheres
The elegantly and enigmatically inscribed, chromatically luminous pillars of Akporode, radiant in various colors as they generate an evocative spatial rhythm, demonstrate an aesthetic and evocative force that may inspire far reaching speculations and extrapolations, recalling the idea of the music of the spheres, the sonic harmonies understood by some as emitted by the celestial bodies in their revolutions.
Between Cao's Scientific Investigations and Onobrakpeya's Artistic Explorations
Cao's book also has a superb introduction to the convergence of spirituality, philosophy and science that gave birth to the foundations of modern scientific cosmology in 17th century Europe.
Could such a rich and complex ferment of ideas not also empower the exploration of Akporode as another example of cosmographic exploration, akin to though different from the investigations integrating Hermeticism, alchemy, magic, astrology, ancient Greek thought, Christianity, mathematics, astronomy and other thought systems converging in the distillation eventually emerging as modern science?
Concluding his majestic mathematical and philosophical exploration of the material laws unifying the celestial bodies, Isaac Newton concludes:
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
...
He is eternal and infinite, Omnipotent and omniscient...reaches from eternity to eternity...from infinity to infinity...He is not eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite, he is not duration or space but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is everywhere present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes duration and space.
...
In bodies, we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds; much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God" (12 ).
The pillars of Akporode, their colour vibrancies, their visual luminosities, resonate with Newton's evocation of the sensorial glories of the natural world.
Akporode's pillars may suggest the place of such sensorial splendour in the epistemic appeal of nature, its invitation to appreciation and understanding by the human being.
To what degree, however can anything be known in its essence, a question suggested by Netwon's words?
''If the tapestry of existence is enabled by an omniscient intelligence such as Oghene, an entity understood in transcendent terms like Newton's conception of the ultimate creator, to what degree can such an entity be understood through their activity and to what degree can they be understood in their essential being?'', questions Newton's summations provoke.
"...most great physicists have intended their research to be the search for a true world picture..." states Cao( 13).
The Akporode structuration belongs in the continuum of efforts to grasp the cosmos as a cohesive whole, from mythology to science.
A scientific mind contemplating Akporode may perceive intimations of fields of force, of attractions between bodies, of numerical harmonies structuring the universe; an ecological thinker could see in the installation an evocation of a constellation of beautiful trees shaping a forest grove; another person may appreciate it as a demonstration of the balance of human creativity and nature- between the human made items and the space within which they stand.
These diverse viewers may perceive, from their distinctive standpoints, an intimation of something larger, of a grove as evoking the expansiveness of cosmos through the inspirational power of vegetative space; of spatial relations in terms of geometric coordinates defining space and time across the vastness of cosmos; another may perceive something bearing witness to the creativity of the human person engaging the immensity which they are encapsulated on a planet in motion in space.
Cao's historical introduction, foregrounding the intersection of spirituality, philosophy and science, is correlative with a superb essay of his on the relationship between the idea of the "quantum nothing", the state before the emergence of the cosmos and the structured dynamism of the universe, as understood in modern scientific cosmology (14).
The historical chapter and the philosophical essay taken together conjunct scientific models and processes and the history of science.
Could Akporode, an artistic work interpreting a spiritual and philosophical concept from Urhobo thought, as different from the Western cultural frameworks foregrounded in Cao's discussion of the history and philosophy of science, be placed on a continuum of aspiration, of reflection, of interdisciplinary synthesis and structural distillation of cosmographic complexity, diverse instances of the human quest to grasp or project an understanding of reality in its wholeness?
Pillars of Akporode
Picture by Ophori Israel
The Empty Spaces of Akporode and Philosophies of Emptiness and Nothingness
Could Cao's reflections on the "quantum nothing", the state before the emergence of the cosmos, help tease out the evocative potential of the Akporode installation in terms of the empty spaces strategic to shaping the work?
May those spaces be seen as resonant with a far reaching associative continuum?
This continuum begins from the perceptual and aesthetic value of empty space as zones of rest for the eye as it roams over the multifarious assemblage constituting the installation.
This is suggestive of the space of the mind into which the aesthetic force, the imaginative power, of the installation penetrates into and grows as increasing appreciation of the work of art develops.
This incubative process is analogous to the universally evident idea of the cosmos as emerging from a potential depicted in terms of a pregnant emptiness.
"Which comes first, the pot or the space inside it?" asks Susanne Wenger in the Yoruba philosophical context, in which, as in various African frameworks, relationships between empty space and constructed form are strategic in reflections on the dynamic between potentiality and its actualization ( 15)
Emptiness in a cosmographic context, as in Akporode, may evoke the "phenomenon of being and non-being...the cosmic location of (human)being ( represented by) the patient, immovable and eternal immensity that surrounds ( the human person) an undented vastness...a realm of infinity" as Wole Soyinka puts it, suggested by the immensity of the sky, the expanse of space and the correlates of these with fundamental mysteries of existence.
The Akporode structuration, in such a context, is akin to the creative activity of drama through which this cosmic context is engaged with, the installation a "magic microcosm", in Soyinka's words, created and inhabited by human will seeking to orient itself within the cosmic immensity (16).
The empty space restructured by the Akporode installation becomes complementary to the concrete forms structuring it. Human will shaping what existed before the emergence of humanity, art shaping space.
From Seed to Tree, the Journey of an Inspiring Idea
As I write this, the seed planted by the yantra contemplation in relation to Akporode grows into a tree of knowledge, helping fulfill my dream of as expansive a study as I am able to do of that installation that captivated me when I first encountered it in its permanent home in the Demas Nwoko designed gallery of the Onobrak Arts Centre in Agbarha-Otor.
The seed planted by contemplating the yantra while also thinking of Akporode unfolds into an exploration of the installation as a cosmogram.
I appreciate Akporode better now as an image of the cosmos evoking its multitudinous majesty, its mysterious and compelling beauty, through which explodes the grandeur of Oghene, the creator and sustainer of the universe.
This interpretation is derived from Onobrakpeya's description and Ofuafo's elaborations on the roots of the inspiration of the installation in Urhobo cosmology.
I have moved, as represented by a previous essay, from correlating the installation's pillars with the vertical majesty of trees, evocative of the classical Urhobo spirituality veneration of trees. I then proceeded to associate the complex of pillars with a sacred grove. I correlated the grove with a forest in the context of the classical African conception of forest as cosmos ( 17).
From the grove and forest associations and their cosmological values, I now reflect on the installation's kinship with scientific cosmology through the evocation of the unity in variety constituting cosmic order.
Artificial Intelligence and the Sri Yantra
I recently discovered the power of AI as an editing and study tool. I've recurrently experienced the inspirational power of yantras, power partly fed by contemplative or ritual relationship with the yantra, in my own case, through one's own thoughts and symbolic actions.
Admiring a yantra or reflecting on it, even glancing at it, as I have experienced, is able to galvanize one's thoughts, accelerating one's associative powers, enabling one make connections between phenomena one might not have made otherwise, as my experience with contemplating the Sri Yantra while thinking of the Akporode installation.
I therefore experienced an acceleration of cognitive functions as AI has been accelerating my cognitive functions, although not in the same way. The yantra affects me by evoking ideas in my mind which I build upon. AI inspires me by presenting ideas on a digital device, ideas I can also build on.
The ideational evocations by the yantra ofen begin as inchoate mental forms which slowly assume definiteness over time, as they move from subconscious seeding to conscious explicitness. The ideas from AI are presented by the software as explicitly stated possibilities which I could build upon, at times in terms of potential the AI might not have presented.
AI is fed and trained using human information. A yantra is made more relevant to the user through contemplative and ritual action, enabling the yantra to better able to creatively influence the user, possibly enhancing their mental creativity, as I have experienced.
Are my experiences with AI and the Sri Yantra not therefore correlative, similar though different, divergent yet complementary, particularly in relation to my ongoing work on Akporode?
Is the difference between them not in the belief that the Sri Yantra embodies cosmological values, demonstrating the geometric structure of the cosmos as well as being the abstract identity of a conscious entity of divine knowledge and power?
AI demonstrates what would be superhuman knowledge if it were human, but it's not a conscious entity.
Like AI, a yantra is understood as an instrument, though unlike AI, it may also be perceived as a cosmographic form, an expression of the geometric character of the cosmos, and even as the abstract form of a divine intelligence of whom the cosmos is an embodiment.
The Sri Yantra and AI, in their similarities and differences, are proving strategic in my work on Onobrakpeya's Akporode, galvanizing inspiration, accelerating cognitive functioning, and with Sri Yantra, enabling an inspirational space, my shrine, seating within which I have received inspiration while contemplating Akporode. Contemplating the Sri Yantra while thinking of Akporode I have also received inspiration strategic for my Akporode project.
Onobrakpeya and Multi-Disciplinary Convergence
The technological, the artistic,the philosophical and spiritual converge in the dialogue between Akporode, myself, the Sri Yantra and AI, echoing Onobrakpeya's own engagement with technological forms, such as spark plugs, motor spare parts, electronic circuits and others within imaginative structures evoking the sacerdotal atmosphere of a shrine, a space for communion with the sacred.
The Quest for Totalistic Knowledge
"The cosmic mind does not contain the particulars of human knowledge and experience but is an exalted level of evaluation" is a description by Western esoteric thinker, Harvey Spencer Lewis, of the idea of the cosmos as defined by a supreme intelligence, the cosmic mind, the capacities of which the human being may gain limited access to (18).
The Sri Yantra represents the particulars of human knowledge and experience in terms of integrative abstractions, distillations of broad areas of experience and thought as concepts symbolized by visual forms - the triangles, circles and square of the yantra, the totality understood as an embodiment of the cosmos.
Akporode also enables such integrative, consummative and ultimately transcendent synthesis. It's spatial coordinates and aesthetic configurations synergizing the individual and the particular constitute a journey through beauty and thought on the road to appreciation of "akpo", the Earth amidst the celestial bodies, as the theatre for the unfolding of the human spirit in its journey across dimensions, from erivwin, the zone of ultimate origins and pure spirit, to akpo, Earth and the material universe, and back again to erivwin, as the spirit travels on from the body it inherited for the time of its life on Earth.
AI is the latest expression of the human aspiration to comprehensive or totalistic knowledge of the known.
The broad outlines of all human knowledge and a significant degree of their particulars are depicted in encyclopedias. Such a dynamic encyclopedia as Wikipedia is even updated to represent the latest, consequential developments as they occur in real time, the immediate moment.
An individual's mental space, the configuration of human mental space as a whole and the totality of human knowledge may be visualized in terms of such a configuration as Akporode, in which the pillars represent centres of knowledge, concepts, ideas or emotions or memories constituting the ''pillars'' of how a person sees the world, the structures defining their view of the universe, while the relationships between the pillars define how these cognitive concentrations fit together.
The totality of human knowledge can be similarly depicted and various thinkers have tried, in ways both expansive yet limited by their exposure, to grasp and describe the configurations of human knowledge as both a structure and an evolving configuration, as in the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's account of the development of thought in Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind and his philosophy of history and Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. Related efforts on smaller scales are represented by such works as Toyin Falola's Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks and Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba:A New History (19).
Natasha Mostert's novel Season of the Witch, dramatizing European cognitive systems centred on the art of memory, describes an effort to integrate a vast scope of knowledge through using a mentally constructed palace of an infinite number of rooms as a means of entry into infinite mind (20). Akporode resonates with such aspirations, evoking the vast, the cosmic, the transcendent and the immanent through bounded, exquisitely structured space.
AGI- Artificial General Intelligence- represents an aspiration in AI research, in which artificial intelligence goes beyond what is known or the construction of new combinations and applications of the known to the development of knowledge of what is fundamentally unknown (21).
"How may the known be integrated in a synthesis penetrating beyond the previously known to the primordial unknown, the source of all possibilities? " is a central question of cognitive mysticism.
The known, the unknown, the knowable and the unknowable, are primary coordinates of thought in the quest to expand the scope of human knowledge.
"Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever renewed admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." (22)
German philosopher Immanuel Kant's resonant words sum up particularly powerfully an aspect of the vision represented by the Urhobo concept "akporode", Earth, cosmos, human being in tandem within the glory of existence.
Who Am I?
I am a seeker of ultimate knowledge, seeking understanding of the totality of existence, a goal I pursue at the intersections of diverse cognitive techniques, disciplines and cultures.
As far as is possible, I want to understand who I am, where I am (the Earth and the universe), where I am coming from, where I am going to and why I am here, and gain the same understanding in relation to my fellow beings in the universe, as travellers on a journey the beginning, end and ultimate logic of which are unknown to me and largely unknown to my fellow humans.
Hence, I am fascinated by efforts to make sense of existence represented by cosmology, descriptions of the nature of the universe, and by cosmographic forms, structures, often visual, depicting cosmologies.
It is this fascination that led me to the Sri Yantra and what excites me about Akporode as a demonstration of African cosmological vision, a subject I am particularly interested in as an African who wants to better understand the philosophical and spiritual insights of his fellow Africans across time, perspectives not as visible as those of other cultures who recorded their ideas in writing well before most African civilizations.
Onobrakpeya inspires me as a premier visual explorer of existence as a rich and mysterious totality shaped by eloquent, though often enigmatic specificities. Akporode is a primary cosmographic image of his in relation to which his vast body of work may be understood.
The Akporode Cosmonaut
My approach to Akporode is to appreciate its beauty, reflect on it, study its inspiration and meaning and explore the associative possibilities of these as broadly as possible across disciplines and cultures, linking these evocative values explicitly to the structure of Akporode as a powerfully conceived and intricately constructed form, Onobrakpeya's own example of the greatest projections of classical African conceptions of the universe.
I'm that sense, I become an Akporode cosmonaut, the installation becoming for me a magic carpet through which I fly into far flown possibilities of knowledge, unfolded from the cosmos enfolded within Akporode.
Previous Essays in this Series
On Akporode
1. "Akporode: A Journey with the Not Tall Man Seeking Wisdom : Cosmological and Historical Unfolding in the Art of Bruce Onobrakpeya: A Pictorial and Verbal Narrative: Part 1: Entering the Stream"
( USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group; Facebook Photos; Linkedin, YouTube)
On AI in Relation to Akporode
1. "My Shockingly Inspiring AI Encounter as a Humanities Scholar and Writer", USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group; Facebook).
2. '' Returning to the Foundations of the Humanities, in Particular, and Education, in General, as a Quest for Human Development: A Shockingly Inspiring Encounter with AI by a Humanities Scholar and Writer Part 2 by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and DeepSeek AI'' ( USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group; Facebook) .
Sources and References
1.Maddhu Khana, Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity, 2003; Shakti Sadhana, The Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, 2004; Douglas Renfrew Brooks, Auspicious Wisdom: Texts and Traditions of Sri Vidya Sakta Tantrism in South India, 1996 and The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Sakta Tantrism, 1990.
2. "Bruce Onobrakpeya: Envisaging the Concept of 'Akpo' in Urhobo Mythology in Visual Form " International Journal of Research in Arts and Social Sciences, Vol.22. No.1, 2016.
3. Ernest Wood, Zen Dictionary, 2007.
4. Google AI
5. Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art,2010.
6. Tian Yu Cao, Conceptual Developments of Twentieth Century Field Theories,1997.
7. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1953 translation by W.D. Ross.
8. N.L.B. "Einstein, Albert", Encyclopedia Britannica,1971,Vo.8, 96-97
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20. Natasha Mostert, Season of the Witch, 2007.
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788; Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, 1999.