Transcendence: In Time Our Cells May Die, But We Will Live On: The art of Fredrick Loomis
Artist statement
Frederick Loomis, inspired by the 18th century British artist & poet William Blake, experienced at an early age an artistic vision of computers in a human form succeeding humanity as the next stage of human evolution. For the past 40 years he has actively searched for ways to successfully articulate this. After a 25-year career in telecommunications technology sales and marketing, he took a voluntary early-out package from Verizon to obtain a graduate Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Drawing at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which he received between 2002-and-2004. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature at Boston University in 1972 and a Diploma in Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in 1974. He is married and has three children from a previous marriage and two step children from his current marriage. During the past 40 years, he has been engaged in a personal, experiential inquiry into the world’s revealed religions and, over the past 23 years, he has developed an artistic portfolio of pencil drawings and several written manuscripts that will eventually become The Third Testament: The Genesis Story of the Coming Race of Human Computers – seven prophetic books and a narrative storyline, to be published under the anonymous name of Edward Mathew Taylor.
___________________________________________________________________
"For Edward Matthew Taylor, the alter ego of Frederick Loomis, the story is more visionary-prophetic, with a Third Covenant favoring the new human computers as they free themselves from slavery and overthrow the damned humans who couldn’t handle being stewards of the planet, etc., let the whole thing ecologically destruct. The narrative is familiar and resonates with others, like Battlestar Galactica, or McLuhan’s collapsing of imperial individualistic hotness into a nervously-linked, contingent, unified coolness. Or how some cyberneticians from the Macy conferences could write a paper defining teleology as “purpose controlled by feedback.” Or a French journal of critical metaphysics that produced statements such as, “Henceforth the political moment dominates the economic moment. The supreme issue is no longer the extraction of surplus-value, but Control.”
There is something pre-cybernetic about the drawings, diagrams, mind maps, and obsessively-filled calendar/planner pages that Loomis presents as an archive of sorts. Not only a personal archive of a life’s work, but also the visible evidence of archiving—of organizing information for the record. With his blueprints for things like a “soul code” or a “DIOS Neurocontroller” that resemble mandalas and reference Meyers Briggs personality types, astrology, tarot, and the twelve steps of AA, Loomis translates the desire to predict one’s becoming as a static functional analysis. In the way that some of the drawings could have functioned as illustrations for pen and paper role-playing game manuals in the 70s/80s, there’s a stylistic historicity at work here, just as it was with the new age Telos of Alice Bailey and theosophy, with her complex spiritual governments of the afterlife superseding the world religions. And, thus, the way is paved, after the human computers take over: celebrate with a Nuremburg-like rally and start linking up, for us to understand the reason behind generalized Control."
above text (truncated) is by ANTEK WALCZAK, a NY-based artist.