‘Paul Laffoley was born into an Irish Catholic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940. He spoke his first word, “Constantinople,” at six months, then remained silent until the age of four (having been diagnosed as slightly autistic), when he began to draw and paint. In his senior year at Brown University, he was given eight electric-shock treatments. He was dismissed from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but managed to apprentice with the sculptor Mirko Baseldella, before going to New York to apprentice with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler. In 1968 he moved into an eighteen- by thirty-foot utility room to found a one-man “think tank” and creative unit called the Boston Visionary Cell.
‘Laffoley supports himself with a job at the Boston Museum of Science, returning to the BVC not only to eat and sleep but to work on multimedia renderings of his visions of alternative futures and complex realities.
‘During a routine CAT-scan of his head in 1992, a miniature metallic implant, 3/8 of an inch long, was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland. Local M.U.F.O.N. investigators declared it to be an alien nanotechnological laboratory. He has come to believe that the “implant” is extraterrestrial in origin and is the main motivation behind his ideas and theories.
‘As an architect, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center Tower II. As a painter, his work is usually classified as visionary art or outsider art. Most of Laffoley’s pieces are painted on large canvases and combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind.’ — Paul Laffoley Official Website
Further
Paul Laffoley Official Website
Laffoley’s Odyssey: Short Films
Paul Laffoley @ myspace
Paul Laffoley posters & explanations
Paul Laffoley: Chasing Napoleon
Paul Laffoley on HP Lovecraft and the nature of evil
Paul Laffoley @ DATAISNATURE
Video: Infinity Factor: Paul Laffoley
Media
Lafolley’s Odyssey (6:09)
Paul Laffoley discusses ‘The Black White Hole’ (3:59)
Paul Laffoley slide show (9:57)
In the spotlight
The Parturient Blessed Morality of Physiological Dimensionality: Aleph-Null Number (2004)
The artist explains:
Bernard Riemann [ 1826-1866 ] student of Carl Friedrich Gauss [ 1777-1855 ] developed what we currently call dimensionality. Since dimensionality in the generic sense means the range over which, or to the degree to which any entification manifests itself, it often became further defined as a series contextual propositions. In other words it is a language which Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951] considered a weltanschuung or worldview, an idea that was eventually fleshed out by Benjamin Lee Whorf. But these ideas have kept dimensionality well within the scope of practical science in which one paradigm becomes either parasitic to or subsumptive of all other paradigms.
The person who moved dimensionality away from the iron grip of traditional mathematics and back to the Ancient Greek concept of Fate, was Georg Cantor [1845-1918], who posing as a mathematician [ a scientist who abhors the concept of infinity in its abstract and concrete manifestations], sought the realm of actual Absolute Infinity – the Aleph-Null Number. This was his search for the living presence of the number of elements in the set of all integers which is the smallest transfinite cardinal number, which goes beyond or surpasses any finite number, group or magnitude.
What Cantor was doing was following the learning process of The Kabbalah, which is a search for God from a base of total materialistic skepticism. One of Cantor’s followers, Kurt Gödel [1909-1963] actually attempted to devise a mathematical proof of the existence of God.
This all leads to the idea that consciousness is embedded within the nature of dimensionality, and that consciousness can not be defined totally as we experience it in our fourth dimensional realm of Time-Solvoid by projecting our definition of consciousness, learned from experience, onto other more comprehensive and less comprehensive realms.
Consciousness presents itself, therefore, as a family of forms – an octave of in
telligence many aspects of which can not be accessed by our human intelligence. But the fact that analogy-cum-metaphor is the operation of the imagination means, even if the transfer of the mind is never complete, that aliveness and deadness are terms relative to a dimensional realm.
Beyond the human realm of Time-Solvoid, the existence and nature of consciousness is often designated as God , gods, demigods, Demons divas, Angels ,souls, heroes , etc. While accepted as part of nature, these entities are rarely understood.
Below or less comprehensive than the human realm, consciousness in the form of ghosts, apparitions , shadows or hallucinations are just as distant from human consciousness as members of the so-called divine realm. But the real difference is that most humans feel obviously and naturally superior to these entities. This feeling is often translated into propositions which state that these beings are without any kind of consciousness, and that the attribution of consciousness to them , is what gave rise to the existence of superstition prior to the rise of experimental science. A science that tried, on the one hand, to discover their true nature, and on the other hand, to dismiss their existence as flim-flam.
The pre-scientific Ancient Egyptian Civilization accepted shadows as having consciousness. Of the nine parts of the Egyptian personality, two were about the shadow. The Khaibit (the shadow of the physical body) which never leaves the carcass, and The Ka (the doppelganger) the shadow of the soul that moves freely about the Earth and the stars are interpreted as phenomena such as lucid dreaming or the out-of-the-body-experience in terms of human perception.
While both forms of the shadow are ultimately the same, the dynamic and static forms demonstrate the form of Life-Death of the Shadow.
In today’s world-view, very few people believe that shadows possess a form of consciousness, let alone believe that a human can communicate with one. To most people the shadow is simply the result of solid objects in space blocking the rays of a light source and that is it.
The association of light with consciousness has a history lost in time. But closer to our time James Clerk Maxwell [1831-1879] discovered in 1856 the relation between light and electricity which led eventually to the theory of the electromagnetic spectrum which developed in the early 1930’s. From about 1875 on, the Occult vision of dimensionality, akin to the Pythagorean musical scale of infinite extent, was introduced and supported by Maxwell’s discovery.
Degrees of consciousness, from almost blinding light to almost total darkness, provide the metaphor for Good to Evil, The Divine to The Demonic, Life to Death, all as degrees of embodiment. These are the aspects of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which include what we call visible light –a very small portion of the spectrum. Most of the spectrum is undetectable by our unaided senses, but nevertheless, it contains octaves of energy which separate themselves into individual dimensions.
Today so-called “physical light” is a metaphor the position of human consciousness within the total dimensional system for two reasons:
(1) “Physical light” always has its origin in the Past, whether or not that origin is a star or a candle;
(2) The “brilliance” that we associate with light exists in Nature only in the minds of intelligent conscious life-forms, and is not inherent in the non-conscious aspects of Nature. The photons which deliver energy to waiting retinae do not “carry” light. If it was the case that they do, the entire Universe would be “lit up” all of the time in an isotropic and homogeneous manner, and there would be no “darkness” in the Sky.
The symbol for the velocity light has been in our contemporary world the letter “C” meaning 299,796 + or – 4 km./ sec. in a vacuum near the Earth , or in the open air. But now astrophysicists are discovering there is a type of space which can not be monitored by any aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the space where an old star goes when it explodes and dies. This space is distinct from the space of a Black Hole, only in the sense that the Black Hole space is an infinitesimal point of that , space infinite in extent, which acts as the background energy plenum of the Universe.
On Earth these same astrophysicists have discovered a way of slowing down the speed of light to 17 mph by changes of media. They expect very soon to have light to travel at 4 mph. Then everyone will be able to interact directly with light, even the blind , because the energy of the electromagnetic spectrum travels in the human brain at 700 mph.
According to Philip Gibbs in an article entitled: “The Symbol For The Speed Of Light ? “, he states : “…, it is possible that its use persisted because “C” could stand for “celeritas” and had therefore become a conventional symbol for speed. We can not tell for sure how Drude, Lorentz, Planck or Einstein thought about their notation, so there can be no definitive answer for what it stood for then. The only logical answer is that when you use the symbol “C”, it stands for whatever possibility you prefer “.
While there are many physicists who propose an identification between light and consciousness by means of formulae that rival the simplicity and power of Einstein’s famous E = Mc². I prefer, therefore, to use “C’ to stand for consciousness.
The Day I Met Paul Laffoley
by Jason Louv
Shortly after returning to the States, I was visiting my college girlfriend and her family in Boston. Our relationship hadn’t exactly stood the test of a year long distance—whereas I had left Santa Cruz, California as a stoner literature student into The Smiths, veganism and the occult, I had returned as some kind of Psychedelic Warlord Avatar. My eyes were hollowed out by a year of nonstop chaos ritual and months spent drifting among the Untouchables and dead bodies in the East, and I was holding a book contract, a mandate from Genesis P-Orridge to enlighten the young, and a slowly escalating case of paranoid psychosis.
In such a situation, I did the only reasonable thing: Go shopping, or, rather, follow my college girlfriend around while she did her shopping, all the while wondering what the f*** had happened to me.
It was on this fateful consumer outing that I thankfully became SOOOOOO bored waiting for the girlfriend to finish at H&M in downtown Boston that I suddenly had the impulse to leave the store and buy a $3 hotdog from a cart vendor on the other side of the street.
No sooner had I bought said hotdog and turned back towards H&M did Paul Laffoley cross the road.
My brain reeled for a moment before I leapt into action and approached.
“Excuse me, I don’t want to bother you, but are you Paul Laffoley?”
“Why, yes! Yes I am!” he said, staring up at me through round coke-bottle glasses, apparently shocked that somebody had recognized him.
He proceeded to excitedly drag my girlfriend and I to his studio, a tiny one-room flat he had dubbed the Boston Visionary Cell, which was only a block away. The area was absolutely packed with books, from floor to ceiling, covering every available bit of wall space, with his paintings leaned against them, and architectural diagrams rolled into scrolls everywhere.
Paul proceeded to download cosmic information at us for the next four hours. I wish to god that I had a tape of everything that he said, because it went by so fast that I could only process maybe one percent of what he was saying. He ranged across his architecture career, his hero Antoni Gaudi, the occult and ten thousand other topics. Laffoley showed us his plan for the new version of the World Trade Center (which he had submitted to the city, but which had been turned down!) that would be built to look like one of Gaudi’s original sketches for the first WTC. I mean literally like a sketch, too, complete with steel girders in place to represent the graph paper that Gaudi had drawn his original version on. At the top of this new WTC would be a ball with cedar trees growing out of it at all angles, like a chaostar; Cedars, Paul explained, were traditionally associated with death, and would absorb and transmute the “thanatopic” energy left over from 9/11.
He proceeded from this remarkable display to telling us how he had recently had a leg removed. While in the hospital after the amputation, he had experienced “astral mountain lions” coming to take the astral double of the severed leg, presumably to eat. In their honor, and as a wry turn-about, he had commissioned an artificial leg made from a mountain lion’s leg and foot, which he said he would use on occasion. While I was working hard to process this, he offered to read our palms (Really? I thought)—my life line, he said, was remarkably long, though my girlfriend’s was short.
“That’s OK,” he said with a goofy grin. “We can just punch that up with a razor…”
We both laughed nervously.
Paul also answered my questions about magick, in ways that I’m still trying to understand. I asked him if I could correspond with him on the subject, and he agreed—which I never followed through on, to my own great loss. He was also kind enough to provide the cover for my first book, Generation Hex, which is a detail from his 1978 painting The Metatron.
That day, I felt we had met a being from a completely different dimension, a friendly alien who had come into our reality to evolve our understanding of the universe we live in, and to simply break our false categorical distinctions between science, spirituality, architecture and literally everything else.
Works
‘Mind Physics: The Burning of Samsara’ (1967)
‘Homage to the Black Star of Perfection’ (1965)
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR HEAVENWARD TO OUTER SPACE: THE FUTURE (2001)
The Living Klein Bottle House of Time (1976)
Magical Man (1969)
Life And Death Of Elvis Presley (1988)
‘Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth’ (1990)
‘THE QUEST FOR THE VISION OF THE JUST WORLD’ (1976)
‘The Solitron’ (1998)
‘Pickman’s Mephitic Models’ (2004)
‘The Living Klein Bottle House of Time’ (1978)
‘Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe’ (1973)
‘The Number Dream’ (1968)
‘Dimensionality’ (1992)
‘The Future: Architecture Will Become Plant-Forms’ (1974)
‘Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from The Earth’ (2006)
‘The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D.’ (1965)
‘Homage to Kiesler’ (1968)
‘The Fetal Dream of Life Into Death’ (2001-2)
‘The Visionary Point’ (1970)
‘The Skull of Plotinus’ (2001)
‘Mel’s Hole’ (2006 – 2008)
‘Dante’s Inferno’ (2000)
‘The Renovatio Mundi’ (1977)
‘True Liberation’ (1967)
‘The Alchemy of Breathing’ (1992)
‘The Fourth Living Creature’ (1975)
‘The Sexuality of Robots’ (2009)
‘The Flower of Evil’ (1971)
ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL (1968)
RIP Paul Laffoley (1940 – 2015)
*
p.s. RIP Tom Robbins, Walter Robinson. ** jay, Hi! I saw some of the first season of ‘White Lotus’ when I was visiting LA and quite liked it, and I saw a few episodes from the second season and thought the show had run out of gas. But I don’t know, and I don’t know recent TV much at all. You’re in Paris! Wow. Let me know if you want to meet up for a coffee or anything. Recommendations: I always recommend The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in the Marais, which is possibly my favorite thing in Paris. The 10th arr., especially After8 Books, nearby Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, my favorite street in Paris, and the area around the canal. Butte Chaumont if you like parks. I could go on. Anyway, would be happy to see you while you’re here but only if that rings a bell. Have big fun. Apologies for the moist, chilly skies. ** Chris Kelso, We storyboard our films. It helps a lot, even if you end up diverging from them on set. I’ll check those YouTubers and the Seabrook book. Very intriguing. And I’ll go check my email, thanks! ** James, Hi. I’ve had a few friends who were teenaged actors. One of them grew up to be really famous and respected, and the rest kind of faded out and who knows. Visconti does the best sudden zooms. Mulhouse seems to be out of print, which is so ridiculous. Typewriters had their charms, but they were mostly a laborious hassle. I do not miss Liquid Paper, let’s just put it that way. A good American biscuit is fantastic. Like a holy unsugared marriage between a scone and a croissant. Biscuits and grits, yum. Thanks for inputting my stuff into your eyeballs and hopefully deeper. ** Steeqhen, Hey is universal, hey is nice. Wow, you sound internally intense, that’s cool, I’m envious. I think celebrity pop is kind of interesting because of the flyaway branding component, but I prefer the perfectly constructed pop song where it feels like the songwriter must have done an intensive study of what a great pop song requires formally and then replicated but personalised their findings. I hope you got the needed draft done and that it sufficiently dazzled its power receiver today. And I remain highly honored. Ace on the upping of your ‘Nosferatu’ take. Everyone, Steeqhen has put his thoughts about Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ into words, and they’re titled ‘The Frustration of Egger’s Nosferatu’, and why don’t we all symbolically convene over there and read it together, eh? ** Steve, At the moment my broken tooth is behaving itself, and I’m hoping to avoid a dentist visit, but we’ll see. I hope you got an appointment or you’re feeling surprisingly better or both ideally. I like your song. The Lynch aspect is just the right combo of subtle and inescapable. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Nobuhiko Obayashi’s LONELY HEART for Screen Slate here. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yep, and she fit right into the the 60s teen rebel drug exploitation genre too. ** Uday, Me too. Zac and I are just waiting for the signal and scrambling to add the final touches. The Mimsy moniker has been totally lost, I think, right? Nina Simone is such a genius. A few years back, I came across a video of her singing that banal, terrible song ‘Feelings’, and while I was watching it I thought it was greatest thing I had ever seen in my life. And it probably was. That’s a million (billion?) dollar question you’re asking, and I can’t think of any essays, but there must be solid attempts out there. Great, I’ll go look at my email and check and write back to you. Thank you so much! ** Misanthrope, Night people seem to live fully productive lives. I don’t know how, though. You and Alex will obviously sort out how to be together enough, but that workplace requirement is so thoughtless and moronic, as I don’t need to tell you. It seems like no one at the top is even using their brains these days. Did you get cheesy crust? The only selling point for me with Pizza Hut is cheesy crust, but it’s a goodie. ** Lucas, My broken tooth seems to be just sort of settling down into a relatively quiet life in my mouth so far, but I’m poking it with my tongue occasionally to make sure it’s happy. Awesome about the Xiu Xiu show. Wow, Jamie did ‘Blacks’?! He told me once he would never play that song live again. That’s wild. Obviously cool if your pal can come to Paris with you, Fingers, you know, crossed. ** HaRpEr, Oh, right, archive footage. I think you mentioned that before, and I spaced. That’s such a nice and true Bresson quote. You didn’t sound remotely arrogant, you sounded very pleasingly locked into the work. I would say … let me think … ‘Un Femme Douce’ is my sixth favorite Bresson film. I haven’t watched it since it was restored, and I really want to. I love Celine, or I mean his work. His personal prickishness is no doubt a real problem if he himself has to be the point, but that prickishness fuelled the literary greatness, and I’m not that interested in the whole branding thing. ** Darby☏, Hi, D. Thanks for hitting pause long enough to feed here and me. I’m so sorry about the thing with your friend and the friending difficulties. I won’t be glib and say you’re just too exciting for them, but I did think that. Art fairs, yes, that sounds like a plan. Whimsy is very underrated and too superficially studied, I think. I think you can just say ‘academic’ in that circumstance. Writing quandaries, yes, high five. I’m working on a new film script and those dilemmas are frontal lobe for me at the moment too. Jefferson Airplane rule. Well, until ‘Bark’. Gosh, I have no memory of what kind of stereo system I had. Strange. No memory at all. Maybe someone gave it to me or something. What do you play your stuff on? ** Tyler Ookami, Urgh, okay, ixnay on ‘Companion’. People I know who are into A24 seem to think the director is hot shit, but everyone else I know kind of matches with you. I remember ‘Dig’ being plenty long as it was. I reviewed it when it came out, and I wasn’t all that sold for reasons I don’t remember. I think I remember thinking the film was trying to set BJM as the geniuses and DW as the more trad wannabes or something, and I didn’t think they were all that differentiable quality-wise. Or something. I heard that about Kendrick’s self (?) censorship. I find American football extremely boring, and I don’t really care about the advertisements competition, so … Happy Monday. ** Right. Today my gallery space fills up with the systematic stylings of the artist Paul Laffoley, and that’s your show for today. See you tomorrow.