Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

The Aetheiapolis
1987
Oil, acrylic, ink and lettering on canvas
73 1⁄2 x 73 1⁄2 in.

Subject: The Organization of Individual Minds into a System for a Specific Purpose

Symbol Evocation: The Form of Utopia

Comments: The Aetheiapolis, or Singularity City, is a proposed conceptual city with one function: to realize the true nature of the form of utopia. The sixty-four inhabitants are made up of thirty-two people from the present, sixteen from the past, and sixteen from the future. It is of paramount importance to the concept of utopia to consult people from the past and future in order to avoid being temporally parasitic to the social intentions of those already dead and possibly temporally destructive toward the social intentions of those yet unborn.

Most utopias are presented as constructs already in medias res with no indication of how they came to exist, or in what way they might dissolve of disrupt future societies. My city attempts to answer this problem. It is not, therefore, a utopia, but a device for confronting the entity of utopia.

The Aetheiapolis is built on a fifty-foot deep brine pond 1,000 feet in diameter which contains a hydromedusa, or jellyfish, genetically programmed to reach a diameter of 650 feet. At this size the jellyfish cannot possibly move and its electrical and psychic circuitry can be used. Thirty-two astral projection chambers are mounted at the end of the tendrils. Between the tendrils are thirty-two time machines controlled from the astral projection chambers. Sixteen of the time machines are tuned specific space-time coordinates in the past, and sixteen tuned to coordinates in the future.

Through various electronic and psychotronic devices such as the Project Hermes Device, the particular resonant frequencies of the sixty-four souls of the inhabitants are converged into a standing wave and directed to the tetraheptahedron. This piezoelectric crystal form is modeled on the firestone crystal that Edgar Cayce claimed was the main motive power source on Atlantis. Because the tetraheptahedron is spun simultaneously on three perpendicular axes by means of nested rings, it subsumes lower dimensions. The tetraheptahedron creates the passage from dianoia (reason) to episteme (pure thought), or from the fourth to the fifth dimensional realm and back again.