Star Tetrahedron Otherworld 2025

This page is all about an art installation for Otherworld 2025. Otherworld has provided a subsidy of $950 and I'm putting in $1000. We have supported each other's events, ideas and camps over time in a sharing economy as volunteers and through cash contributions. This is your opportunity to participate. A few designated tickets are also available for volunteers onsite. Here's the background:

Ascendence Revised

Ascendence Revised is an interactive light sculpture to think about our search for transcendence—spiritual, technological, or interdimensional—and our relationship to myths of Ascendence. This discovery started by considering traditions of sacred geometry, UFOlogy, Burning Man principles, and Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). The art is a metaphor for today’s ideas of alien contact and spiritual awakening compared to ancient stories.

The Star Tetrahedron is a geometric shape of two interlocking tetrahedrons and central to the design. Based on ancient symbolism, it implies balance and harmony between opposing concepts: material/spiritual, masculine/feminine, earthly/cosmic. In a festival context, Ascendence Revised invites you to think about myths of Ascendence, including religious dogma and alien contact stories. A key objective of this work is to play, share stories and experience joy with others in the present moment as a key first step.

Roots of the stories

The Star Tetrahedron’s geometry ties together many myths, a reflection of our passions about symmetry, duality, and timelessness:

Greek Philosophy

The most clear reference to the Star Tetrahedron comes from Plato’s Timaeus (4th century BCE) linking one of the five Platonic Solids to the element of fire, symbolizing transformative energy. The Star Tetrahedron, is a compound of two tetrahedrons.

Archangel Metatron

The Star Tetrahedron is also known as Metratron’s Cube. Modern stories suggest the geometry is a portal or stargate for interdimensional travel for the Archangel Metatron. Based in Jewish mysticism, Metratron first showed up in post-biblical texts including: Talmudic, as a celestial scribe and mediator; Sefer Hekhalot as the ascended Enoch and Kabbalistic, known as a keeper of cosmic secrets. The term Metatron’s Cube is a recent designation. Some current UFOlogy stories suggest that Metatron’s role has expanded to oversee Earth’s Ascendence following extraterrestrial contact.

Hindu Cosmology

Vedic texts describe vimanas, or celestial chariots, as vehicles for gods and enlightened beings. These myths share parallels to the Merkaba’s role as a “light body” for Ascendence. The Sri Yantra, a Hindu geometric diagram of interlocking triangles, shares similar principles of cosmic balance and unity.

Abrahamic Traditions

In Jewish mysticism, the Merkabah as a divine chariot is described in the Book of Ezekiel, ca. 6BCE. It is often interpreted as a tetrahedral vehicle. Ezekiel’s vision of “wheels within wheels” and intersecting celestial beings supports the Star Tetrahedron’s structure, extending beyond our three dimensions. Later Kabbalistic texts conflated this into meditative practices for Ascendence.

Mayan Calendar Ties

The Mayan calendar’s 13th b’ak’tun cycle ended on December 21, 2012, marking the close of an era. While the Star Tetrahedron is absent from authentic Mayan cosmology, it became a symbolic tool in New Age reinterpretations of 2012. New Age teachers like Drunvalo Melchizedek linked the Star Tetrahedron to the “Ascendence process,” claiming it could activate a protective energy field known as the Merkaba to survive the 2012 shift.

Global Sacred Geometry

From the Flower of Life patterns in ancient Egyptian temples to Metatron’s Cube in Renaissance esotericism, the Star Tetrahedron appears as a recurring archetype. These universal symbols suggest a shared human intuition about geometric harmony as a pathway to Ascendence.

Evolving understanding

In Ascendence Revised, the Star Tetrahedron becomes a tool to reconsider Ascendence myths in our time. In the same way that our ancestors used sacred geometry to frame existential questions, today, some believe that UFOlogy provides a framework for survival and transformation. The sculpture’s responsive lighting and soundscapes invite participants to think about their own stories to blend ancient symbolism with a utopian singularity.

Cargo Cult Parallels

A key theme in Ascendence Revised is its comparison to “cargo cult” behavior—the ritualization of unfamiliar phenomena hoping to gain material or spiritual salvation. Cargo cults emerged during WWII when isolated Pacific Island communities witnessed Western forces. They invented religious practices based on mockups of planes and radios to summon supplies from their interpretation of “alien” encounters.

Today, similar behaviors can be drawn from UFOlogy, New Age spirituality, and techno-utopianism. This includes and expectation that extraterrestrial beings may be saviors to deliver humanity from political, environmental and economic crises.

Drawing on reports of UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena aka UFO) sightings, Ascendence Revised invites participants to think about our pursuit of Ascendence, related symbols and evolving, often conflicting, stories.

Burning Man Principles

The festival setting for Ascendence Revised aligns with Burning Man principles such as radical self-expression, communal effort, immediacy, and participation. It also embodies Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)—a space where default culture dissolves temporarily to allow for new experiences and understandings of ourselves. The installation is a work of self-expression, involving others in communal activity. The experience of seeing or sharing stories about it offers a sense of immediacy—unmediated conversation not interpreted through commercial media. Design, fabrication, installation and onsite facilitation align with the principle of radical participation.

Scientism

While some might dismiss the parallels or current stories about our relationship with non-human intelligence past or present, we must guard against following into scientism. Scientism refers to the belief that empirical science is the only valid way to understand reality, often dismissing metaphysical, spiritual, or unexplained phenomena as invalid.

We must keep in mind clear evidence, not reported by commercial media, that human civilization has been misled by the military and intelligence agencies about human and non-human entities, and recovered craft.

By prioritizing current “hard evidence” over intuitive hypotheses, we risk dismissing ideas that challenge existing paradigms. After all, quantum physics once faced similar skepticism. Scientism becomes problematic when it conflates current evidence with ultimate truth, closing off avenues for discovery.

The work

The sculpture integrates motion sensors, sound sensors, LED arrays, and soundscapes to engage festival participants.

Movement near the work will change light intensity and color patterns within the Star Tetrahedron structure. Sounds close and distant also affect the display. You are invited to play. Discover which interaction produces what effect, as you listen and tell your own stories around it.

Ambient audio is overlaid with occasional stories about the history and mythology of this platonic solid.

Wrap

Ascendence Revised is symbol of our history of expectations through symbols. It raises a question about current Ascendence stories. The geometry provides a conversation between ancient and speculative futurism. The installation asks you to look at your own survival patterning stories while still trapped in this cultural matrix.

Through interactive engagement in a festival setting inspired by Burning Man principles, Ascendence Revised is more than just eye candy. It provides a temporary autonomous zone for sharing and questioning inherited stories while imagining new ones in the present.