"I'm not trying to dominate you with this multi thousand year psy-op about original sin.  I'm trying to study the psy-op!" -AR

I'm thrilled to be able to offer you the complete video collection of PARADISE NOW, Invisible College's Fall 2023 program. From October to December, we studied Milton's Paradise Lost in a Saturnine container called RECREATION, focused on discipline, ambition, and what's at stake when a masterpiece literally recreates the creation of the world.

We balanced RECREATION with HAAG (aka HERMETIC ATHENAEUM FOR THE TRANSMUTATION OF GRIEF), a space for integration, conversation, writing, and the practice of Kundalini Yoga, which made it possible for our community of artists to weave our studies and personal lives together with the atrocities and political decay to which we all bore witness.

Between the October 7 attacks and the ensuing onslaught on Gaza, our studies were marked and inflected by extreme grief, rage, obsession, consternation. Correlating these to the collapses and failures to which Milton himself was party made our work something not only inspiring and steadying-- but something real.

Who are we? Where did we come from? What is the true purpose of our technology; our longings? What is the meaning of love? What happens when poetry is pushed to the very limits of the human imagination? Are our minds vast enough to encompass true knowledge of the cosmos? Of ourselves?

I chose to plunge myself into these studies because I want to see more art taking on the questions that really matter, in wilder and more creative ways.

Even if you have no intention of actually reading Paradise Lost (I doubt I would have gotten through it without group energy) this video collection is a deep reckoning not only with just what has become of the planet Earth since the late seventeenth century, but the role art plays in where we may be going.

Love,

Ariana