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The parallel world I think of now: National Forests and National Parks managed by foresters, firefighters, and loggers working on a plan originally made well over a century ago and constantly amended to fix the future. I think of Yellowstone and the ideas of America’s Park with its enormous lodge and thousand campsites. In Yellowstone, for the first several decades, forest fires were stomped out because they threatened to ruin the conservation the park held or the aesthetic at least. Rainbow trout were introduced to fuel recreation. And other improvements on nature were made. The idea, still seen in the mission—“for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations…”—of the Bureau of Land Management, was to create an escape into nature.

Conserve the past for the future.

The past predicts the future.

Historical myths look backwards.

The land is held as a piece of the past managed for present and future generations. Once inside the boundaries, you can touch the past in and around your campground. You can promise your kids they can do the same in forty years. Initially, fire didn’t exist in the park as if it didn’t exist in the past. Rainbow trout existed as if they always had. The predatory rainbows overtook the native fish, and the lodgepole pine grew too thick. Then in 1988 fires started, spurred by drought, that couldn’t be stopped. The thick pine trees, the most perfectly managed forest, fueled the largest fire since 1910. It couldn’t be stopped, contained, or controlled. As the fire burned those in charge realized this was natural—lodgepole actually need fire to release their seeds—and so they made a new policy (Live and Let Burn) and changed the past, present, and future. The image of a perfect park changed. The trout are still there and now fires are “let burn.”

How many people were let down when the park wasn’t their perfect? How may various parallels of the park exist. Joe could remember the park one way, hold that, and Billy another.

This brings me to garbage.

Everything in the woods: A forester walks around scaling trees and projecting their growth; a wildlife biologist sneaks through thinking of how to make more mature elk herds, better grouse breeding areas, and/or more controlled predator populations—“There, see those chickadees? We need more.”; A hiker walks through enjoying the natural beauty of it all—is it nature at this point?—maybe they leave a snack wrapper along the trail so someone else walks by and realizes: “Assholes. They’re what ruins the perfection of places like this.” I hate being reminded I’m not alone in the woods or even that I’m not the only person who’s ever been there. Have you ever been sixty miles from any highway, house, or human and found shit-stained toilet paper?

Garbage: an interruption, a footprint in the present to remind the future of the past. But where does the garbage, the interruptions, stop? Superficially, the garbage defaces nature, but below it is the trail, probably put in by the CCC in 1934. That also defaced nature—remove nature step by step. Along the trail is the manicured forest worked by Wild land-Urban-Interface crews. Don’t forget the units logged at various times between 1900 and present that are now managed by foresters checking to see if land practices worked effectively or if the leave-timber is ready for to be harvested. This spot exists on the map of his gps, connected to a larger map with units and timber sales drawn all over it. He knows this piece of nature as something different than you. The same is true for mining claims—mineral rights reach a mile into the ground. And property lines, grazing rights, hunting zones. A million footprints to remind you of the past. Deeper than all of it, maybe inside you, exists the romantic abstraction of nature. This is where you will find your sublime: this is where you will touch the supernatural. The Romantics climbed mountains they pretended had never been explored. Isn’t it all just garbage? Isn’t it all just getting away from what natural really is by creating dialectics that mislead and misguide? Support atavism. Support a return to nature. But who can handle that much violence?

Instead, go find the sublime in an empty box store. You can’t see down the aisles or through the forest of shelves. Listen to echo of nothing, imagining standing in a large, secluded canyon. Maybe predators are stalking you, waiting for their chance. Yell, “Hey!” and listen to the echo bounce back to you to prove emptiness. You’re alone, secluded, removed from reality like the Village of the Blind. Return to your side of the dialectic when you’ve had enough.

These are parallel worlds: fictional worlds we all make up, walk through, and ruin.

literal exploration

a parallel world is so open to interpretation that only hypothetical parameters can be constructed. btw i think i did this wrong.

a parallel world is:

a secondary (at least +1) dimension or world or perspective. given that there is a primary to have some type of relationship to.

An exact day for day, atom for atom, thought for thought repeat of some kind of timeline, except PERHAPS quadrillions of years ago/away and bazillions of light years this way/ or that way. as an example: a solar system with the same exact mutations in the evolutionary process, same exact events with the same exact people named, raised, and killed in the same exact manner, with the same exact number of hairs on their head, whilst they are thinking of the same exact thoughts at the same exact time, as it was done in the primary world. of course this might be a laughable poke at the idea of the infinite and endless expanse of time and space, yet those words by definition lend itself to that. someone named Jason Lee in a different time and place, is a bfa4 graphic designer in Norman and Tom's class. ironically, writing a paper about parallel worlds, thinking that he himself is the first and primary Jason Lee, but he will never know this and he probably is not.

A video game (technology and computers to be more general) can be argued to be a parallel world. The movements and actions commanded by an interactee are simultaneously being executed by this secondary world's environment and inhabitants. this idea conveniently puts the parallel world on the level of the television, xbox and internet. a world within another world, yet still being parallel. this relationship can only be represented by concentric circles or the layers of a jawbreaker. this interpretation may not mean anything to the class, but this different stance on the idea of parallelism juxtaposed with the idea of the parallel world is interesting to me.

Thought and reality, or imagination and actuality, or the conscious and the unconscious, or organic actions and inorganic actions. from the first person perspective of a sentient being. interacting and moving through time and space, while at the same time having unconscious brain, heart, kidney, stomach, nerve, skeletal, mutagen, microbiological, subatomic activity. perhaps lending itself to the idea that, all secondary parallel worlds line up their own respective and distinctive traits to create the primary as a whole. like some kind of epic heavenly glow of a planetary eclipse. or a human body. all are different in some way but share one thing.

Are parallel worlds still considered parallel, if they are only parallel for a fraction of a second? Time is a factor that must be considered when dealing with anything in the first to 27th dimension. Like a pack high speed chameleons running through an endless wallpaper store. dynamically evolving and devolving relationships between worlds and dimensions, through the stretch of time. Do worlds manifest its parallelism once it comes in contact with another world and copy one anothers actions events and entities? perhaps this can be the third answer to the war between fate and choice.

Since, in geometry, parallel lines never intersect; is it safe to say that, by definition, there is no type of direct or indirect interaction between two worlds? simply a sharing of an x or y axis (definitely not both, that would be a congruent world [and with that what does a congruent world constitute? {and just to be cynically curious, what are the parameters of a perpendicular world?}]) Thinking about parallel worlds from a mathematical perspective, leave them to be interpreted in the 3rd dimension (x,y,z) given that two parallel entities cannot be points which only leave lines, planes, and full objects. entities parallel in the 3rd dimension must share 2 out of the 3 axis's. this opens another dimension of interpretation.


Parallel worlds cannot be simply put.

Jason Lee
BFA4 graphic design

Worlds of Difference

In my previous response, A Parallel World is a Dialectic, I established that in fiction, parallel worlds work to create a discourse between two systems (two "worlds.") The truth is that whether fictional or not, the parallel world is about relational difference. Each world that is established is defined by and understood through its relation to the system or systems it is set in opposition against. These systems may only differ in one way, but that is enough for massive discrepancies between them.

The lead characters in H.G. Wells' The New Accelerator establish and explore a parallel world, even though that world exists in the same physical space as the world they've left behind. By creating and imbibing an elixir that pushes them into an existence "many thousand times" faster than the norm, the two see the world in a new light. In the set up and conclusion of the story, the Wells describes some ways in which the world would be changed by this invention: students, politicians, doctors, lawyers, writers; they'd all be able to retreat to this place where time is less meaningful, where they'd be able to work in leisure instead of in haste.

Wells makes no serious inquiries into how this world would change, though. Surely the economy would be uprooted. Would new classes be established between those who had access to this elixir and those who had to go about their lives with only 24 hours in a day? Would "insider" trading be the act of existing in fast-time so that you could react to changes more quickly? What would this mean for war, for crime, for assassination?

Why doesn't Wells discuss these heavy handed issues? Because, like many good writers, he finds a simply metaphor that works more effectively than any proselytizing could. When under the effect of the New Accelerator, the lead characters go about a routine amounting to written slapstick - they move around objects stuck in slow speed, laugh at those stuck in awkward poses, and listen to odd, distorted music. (I wonder what Wells would think of Justin Bieber slowed down by 800%.)

But one gag has serious weight: the clothes that these men wear begin to burn as they move around at high speeds. Their linen trousers, perfectly acceptable for daily living, are a risk and a limitation the world of Acceleration. What works, in fact, what is fashionable in one world is fatal in another. Neither the narrator nor the inventor of the New Accelerator had seen it coming, and how could they?

Wells notes that there would need to be a counter-potion to the New Accelerator. One that slows us back down after speeding up - or even just allows us to breeze through agitating events (presumably long flights and boring phone calls) with ease. What would this new economy of speed bring? What would the dangers there be? How could we ever know?

The rule of the parallel world, fictional or not, is that there will be unforeseen complications when we cross from one to the other - or when we exist in both simultaneously. The same technology that lets us kill time at work by talking to people thousands of miles away also allows a sudden move towards civilian reporting in 140 characters. The same tool that let me locate all of the links in this piece may also be a post-legislation panopticon.

And in what other world could I deliver these messages? Here I have autosave, and backspace, and tabbed browsing. I can be tangential without seeming unfocused, distracted, spacey. Even after all that, I can't help myself but to think: This world seems safe.

On Parallel Worlds and Global Travel - Jayson Lantz

In considering the statement that “parallel worlds […] are a journey into the ‘misremembering of the future’,” I could not help but think of the works of Chris Marker –which often deal explicitly with journeys, memory, and the future. Furthermore, the concept of parallel worlds and its relation to travel and the exotic led me to think particularly of Marker’s “travel films”.

How does the parallel world of the foreign land –misremembered in advance by the traveler –change in a globalized world, when she/he is always already linked to this parallel world through rapid transit and mass communication?

To investigate this change, it seems worthwhile to consider Marker’s travel films (and the parallel worlds which they present) alongside the panoramas of the 19^th century. These panoramas (according to Norman Klein), which appear initially as obvious Artifice, result eventually in an immersive parallel world, merging the machine and nature to (often imperialistically) improve up the latter. The travel films by Chris Marker, however, while presented initially under the guise of documentary, persistently subjugate this form to the digressive nature and compositional whim of a singular subjectivity, i.e. that of the traveler –a merging not of the machine and nature (as is the case for panoramas), but of the machine and the subject.

So, in a world where the traveler is always already connected to the destination, it seems that the “misremembering” of the foreign land must take on different characteristics. Marker’s travel films seem to suggest that globalism, by revealing the infinite connections of the traveler, has led the exotic and imperialist totality of panoramic artifice to dissipate from the parallel world of the foreign land, only to be replaced by the inescapable mediation through both the subject and the image. In the wake of this transformation, is the foreign land still a parallel world?

Bill Viola, Time, and the Accelerated Internet

            With the Internet, we now live in the age of the instant. New media technologies and their effects on globalization continue to accelerate our ability to send and receive information and as these technologies advance our sense of time only continues to compress. Bill Viola, the contemporary video artist, explores what happens when slowing down videos reverses this paradigm.

            Viola’s Quintet Series from 2000 is a set of four videos that feature five actors who are each expressing their own reactions to various emotions (e.g. astonishment, remembrance, etc.). However, the videos are extremely slowed down to the point where every detail of the actors’ changing expressions can be detected. The audience is placed into a position of feeling accelerated in a sense; a very particular affect that forces one to reconsider how we think about time and emotion.

            The irony surrounding Viola’s slow motion videos is that it is a challenge for the audience to watch the entire video, as the Quintet Series videos are all fifteen-minute loops. In a period of instantaneous gratification it is difficult to experience the whole thing. However, this irony only makes the feeling of acceleration stronger. Perhaps we don’t need H.G. Wells’ New Accelerator, just the Internet.

Our Invisible World

Imagined parallel worlds of science fiction and fantasy are often artistic extensions of psychological and cultural traumas derived from technology, capitalism, and luxury superseding value in human interactions, sincerity, and labor. In The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum, the realm of Oz is both a parallel universe that exists on earth contemporaneous to Kansas but is also Dorothy’s fantastical physiological breakdowns that represents her disjointed internalization of the bourgeoning urban world competing with the rural. Our internal need to place concepts in a single time and space is a modern struggle that existed prior to and continues to persist as much today as in the time of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “we actually live mythically and integrally… but we continue to think in the old fragmented space and time patterns of the electric age” (4). Oz is an example of the psychological complications that result from technology adding variability to time and space, and therefore to communication, independent of a purely natural and mechanical reality.

In Neil Gaiman’s science fiction novel, Neverwhere, London Below exists as the parallel underworld that is not only home to fantastical and historical beings but also to humans who, in London Above (modern London), are of the lowest classes and are therefore physically invisible. Economic and cultural visibility corresponds to physical visibility implying that divergence in cultural ideology can separate one world into autonomous realms of time and space. In our current world, those who live physically, culturally, and psychologically underground and at the margins follow their own ideologies and patterns of problems and solutions.

The plethora of ideologies and lifestyles that encompasses such deviance derives from the assumption that we live at the fore, and therefore at the most advanced point, of one linear time. With more choices, differences, and extremes, we are blind to much more and much more exists strongly and independently of mass knowledge.

Theoretically, as long as one has access to a computer or an internet device, exposure to representations of other economic, religious, political, social, and identity realities is infinite. Our world becomes smaller and more inclusive but with the price tags of 1. privacy loss and 2. cultural fractions through consistently reinforcing self-identification. Surveillance, unknown ignorance, hierarchy, and narcissism become the evils in a world condensed into wires and code. Thus paranoia and fear are enacted in daily tasks to both maintain privacy and reinforce identity through usernames and passwords. Daily searches act as diary entries of our own thought flow. The internet allows us to live in our individual realities since survival is not dependent on adherence to one cultural narrative. We seek out people like us more easily and stay in touch while living amongst a sea of others.

The theme of technology-driven apocalyptic parallel worlds is most famously exemplified in Blade Runner from 1982 and each day becomes more relevant as evidenced by the recent popular films, Wall-E and Avatar, which are critical of our approaches to consumption and technology. We live in parallel worlds facilitated by mis-education, economic difference, and political confusion especially regarding our planet’s fate and the environmental impact of daily human creations and purchases. Even though planned-obsolescent machines are taken to recycling centers all over the US, the materials and chemicals are noxiously burning in China, causing severe health problems and possible atmospheric harm. In the Pacific Ocean, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a dystopic glimpse of a new type of landscape built from the side effects of our material decisions. These unpopular worlds exist but their sites and derivations are undervalued and therefore invisible.


Cited Works

Baum, Frank. The Wizard of Oz. London: CRW Publishing Limited, 1900.

Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. New York: Harpertorch, 1996.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.

Evolving Parallel

The concept of parallel worlds directly relates to my art practice. In my work I depict clashing environments that might normally be perceived as opposite and perhaps unrelated. My work moves to reveal the intersections between these ecosystems that might normally be overlooked, bending parallel lines into a cross-section matrix. A couple years ago I actually began this book project titled Parallel Universe in which I created drawings of organisms that are hybrids of two or more forms. The first drawing in the book is a combination of a jellyfish and a sponge. They are similar systems in that they are colonies of organisms that make up what appears to be a singular form, in unison. Jellyfish and sponges generally live totally separate lives, yet often in the same space (ocean water), not interacting as far as we know (and how mysterious they are to us—like aliens).  The idea is that the separate organisms are living and existing parallel to one another, side by side, yet mirror like. They both live in water, are both colonies of cells which become specialized into different parts, both have jelly-like textures, both exhibit polyp forms (many jellyfish in their juvenile state are polyps attached to rocks much like sponges), among other traits and habits. The hybrid drawing creates a super-form of the two, bridging the gaps between their existences to exhibit their likenesses—and in turn differences. Their realities and existences are merged, making two parallel existences one.

Many of the organisms featured involve a symbiotic relationship. For instance, “Ant Plant” depicts a carnivorous pitcher plant which gives an ant colony a home within its structure and sweet nectar to eat, while simultaneously dissolving them for fertilizer, only at the same rate the ant reproduce. The ecosystem is generally balanced and self contained. This is a combination carnivorous plant and various ‘ant plants’, which are plants in our reality that provide homes for ants in their roots. These two plants, the carnivorous plant and the ant plant are not generally regarded as related, except for their usage of insects. Evolutionary they present similar mechanisms for survival, yet oppositely—the carnivorous is not symbiotic, yet the ant plant is. On a smaller scale, the ants have their separate reality of the space, and the plant its own. This is an example of where we might think spaces or consciousnesses might be running parallel, when, depending on perspective (perhaps from the outside), they might appear to be more of a matrix, with parallel parts in between.  

There is a term called ‘parallel evolution’, which describes two separate organisms that have essentially no contact with each other, and develop evolutionarily into having similar traits. This is something I am very interested in and which appears in my work quite frequently. I think it is ironic that we can believe things to be unrelated because of historical, ecological circumstances (according to parallel evolution), despite obvious similarities. When one gets deep into relationships between organisms, taxonomy appears completely arbitrary. This is the paradox of parallel worlds and perception. 

Celeste M. Evans