STHENO, or the last frontier
STENO

Bigger image 720/1086 130k

Sthéno, or the last frontier
Version 4.
22/03/2001
First Award of the 2002 Digital Art Awards Laurence Gartel
"Life does not exist, it is informed matter."
life is a complex informational entity that uses materials to spread, survive, become more complex, life is the negative entropy fighting against the laws of thermodynamics.

The Legend.
 Stheno was one of the three gorgones sisters of Greek mythology. Medusa, the famest one who was decapitated by Perseus, was the gorgon of intellectual perversion.
Euryale was the gorgon of sexual perversion and Stheno the gorgon of social perversion.

«The Last Frontier» is the Space. It is the last border met by the «Life» in her mysterious quest to the macrocosm, started out several million years ago.
After a myriad of experiments and aborted attempts to escape from the unavoidable coming destruction of the solar system, Life has elaborated a complex ship to continue her travel :
Mankind.

The dinosaurs, too big and too heavy died out, unable to draw up their long neck above the clouds. The lazy hilarious dolphins and the gigantic whales, frightened by the task, returned to ocean.

So the last invention of «Life», Mankind, is invested of this Graal to conquer : ...Universe...
But, to be able to cross the space frontier and to survive in the borders of galaxy, Men will have to change themselves, like the first aquatic animals changed to be able to evolve/move on the continents.
This Man's body and spirit transformation is also the last «border» to overstep.

And if the man fail in this task, he will be replaced because «Life» time is getting short before the death of the sun.
Yann Minh.

"Sthéno, Or The Last Border" was carried out for the poster of the Paris Science-Fiction Festival "Visions du futur 2001"


Done with the 3D Software Cinema 4D of Maxon
distributed in France by mediaworks.fr
This computer graphic is available in . digital printing

Eh eh ... I knew ... yes yes yes ... don't ask me how, but I was convinced of that since a long time ...
This is not the collision of the asteroid that killed the giant prehistoric dinosaurs ... their decline had already begun a long time before, for even mysterious reasons ...
http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR673675.aspx

by poetic intuition I propose my own explanation, ... this is the expression of a process at work in the entire ecosystem, at the scale of the collective intelligence of whole Life.
Most of the huge species have disappeared, unables because of there size, to escape from the earth gravity and open the stars gates to life .. .
Almost every huge animals and plants have disappeared in favor of collective intelligences, as humanity, that consume less energy in individuals, and more efficient in terms of data processing and collective survival strategies... Humanity which is the only living creature that develop for the entire ecosystem an efficient informational processing wich allow life to overcome the global attraction ... and so, saving life ... while paradoxically destroying it.


Arche-Atrahasis-Noe

Coming out of our genes, with his apocalyptic flood, the myth of Noah's Ark, since the Mesopotamian myth of Atrahasis, is a metaphorical and memetic formalization in our cultures of this tropism of life to reach the stars.

Arche-Atrahasis-Tablette
Thus, Vishnu (The Life) in the Hindu version of the myth, fight against a submarine demon in a battle that will ravage our planet, and charge his disciple (humanity) of the task to build an ark to protect life in its diversity ... task that we perform in real size at a collective scale, driven by a memetic collective tropism beyond our individualities, by building the first interstellars vessels, and by archiving seeds and genomes of species.

Arche-Atrahasis-Vishnu
As the myth of Noah's ark does not describe something that happened, but something that will happen, the allegory of Plato's cave speaks to us deep in our subconsciences at the scale of our cells. Because Plato's cave expressed in poetic form experimental gropings of living in the darkness of the "reality", to ensure its sustainability and its proliferation... the meaning of life is the survival ...
May be the great extinction of species diversity that we are currently witnessing is not just the result of human activities, but a kind of adaptation of the ecosystem as it happened yet in the era of the big lizards ... I don't know how, but life, at the scale of its collective intelligence, and to which we contribute, discover that the star gates are open, and life refocus its évolution in that direction...
yes, I know ... but I apologize ... I am an artist, and I have the right to poetic license .. so I take this opportunity

I made this allegory STHENO in year 2000 http://www.yannminh.org/french/CtSteno.html


More information onManabu Sakamoto's researchs here
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/13/1521478113
https://www.academia.edu/282308/Dinosaurs_and_the_Cretaceous_Terrestrial_Revolution
https://reading.academia.edu/ManabuSakamoto

Write me HOME PAGE
Back