“You have never felt how small you were when looking at the ocean.” He laughed. “Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of air planes.” “Yes. And that particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature—I’ve never received it from nature, only from…” she stopped.
– Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
The Unknown Ideal is a series of companion pieces to Blas’s Silicon Traces, a trilogy of moving image installations that contends with the beliefs, fantasies, and histories influential to Silicon Valley’s visions of the future. Presenting photographic views of the sublime vistas seen from wellness resorts popular among tech entrepreneurs, The Unknown Ideal asks: what do Silicon Valley aristocrats at boutique techno-utopian retreats see when looking out to the horizon?
Meditation getaways and silent retreats in grand, beautiful landscapes are notoriously fashionable with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and now a global industry of wellness tourism caters to an intensifying consumer demand to find balance between spirituality, health, and work. The goal of a successful meditation retreat, in which both mind and landscape are plumbed, is to bring one’s ultimate potential into sharp focus. From the peaks of mountains to ocean shores, participants look within themselves and outward to nature, seeking to envision future glories of information capitalism through horizons of the mind and horizons of the land alike.
Each iteration of The Unknown Ideal consists of a landscape image installed on the gallery windows as a translucent print on perforated cling vinyl, illuminated by natural light but replacing the view from a museum building with one seen from an elite resort, such as the Canyon Ranch Woodside in California, the Insight Meditation Society of Massachusetts, the Northwest Vipassan Association in Oregon, the Kainchi Dham ashram in Uttarakhand, India, the Dhamma Mahim Vipassana Center in Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar, and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s Sensei Lānaʻi in Hawaiʻi, to name a few. By representing these situated perspectives of landscape, the installations offer museum visitors immersive confrontations with how tech moguls enframe and capture horizons through meditation.
The Unknown Ideal (Esalen Institute) presents the coastal hot springs and rapturous horizon view as accessed from a notable wellness retreat, located on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur, California. A popular countercultural enclave in the 1960s, the Esalen Institute has since rebranded as a spiritual, healing sanctuary for Silicon Valley, and its exclusive campus is a cherished destination for tech visionaries hoping to optimize their predictions of a capitalist future. The fundamental openness of horizons are thought of as wondrous occasions that provoke thoughts of the unknown and reflections on that which is greater than oneself. But the one-dimensional horizons seen from Esalen and other such locations are styled to summon visions of a delimited, capitalist telos. Their elite visitors look out on exclusive landscape views in order to see themselves and their known ideal reflected back.
