Over a period of two weeks, MVL’s AP Art students each created one piece of donut-shaped art every day. The only catch was they could never use the same medium twice. This quickly challenged the artists to leave their comfort zones while also serving as a profound commentary on the intake of sensory information and the nature of reality.
Let’s say you want to draw a donut. If you’re like me, you’ll just grab a pencil and scratch a vaguely round thing onto a sheet of notebook paper. That isn’t the only option. You could use paint, pastels, or even just tape if you were feeling really adventurous. No matter the medium, one thing would remain constant. The finished product would have to somehow resemble an actual donut. This could be accomplished in a number of ways. Perhaps your art would look or smell like a real donut. Perhaps it would be an abstract amalgamation of various sensory inputs that evoke donutry in that they make you feel the same way a donut does. Both options have merit, and I may well discuss the advantages of each at a later date.
For now, I want to focus on one little question I find the exhibit raises. It’s the bothersome sort of thought that slips like a hyperactive cat into the bedroom of your mind and wakes you up at 3 AM begging for attention. The question is simple. Which is more real: the donut, or the image thereof? I would conclude that the physical donut is more fundamental to our reality because any image made to represent something must be based on an object that existed beforehand. The image is founded upon the physical thing. That in itself isn’t so extreme a concept, but let’s drive it into the quiet little corner of your mind you would rather not visit too often. Consider: you’ve never actually seen a physical object before.
When you look at a donut, what you see is an image your brain created using information transmitted from the eyes. What you might call the real donut is a collection of disturbances in a quantum field that are too small to be seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted individually. We call these disturbances fundamental particles. You’ve heard of quarks and electrons, right? The funny thing is that we’ve still determined with a fair degree of certainty that fundamental particles in the donut exist, even without being able to observe them directly.
But now imagine there was something else that fundamental particles relied on to exist. Visualize something so intrinsically real that a physical donut as we understand it is imaginary by comparison. You could never say for certain if such a thing was truly there or not. The presence or absence of such a reality would have no observable impact on our lower universe, at least not one we could detect from the inside.
Even if we became aware of a higher being, it could no sooner fit in our brains than a real, physical donut could exist entirely within a sheet of paper. The only way we could even begin to understand anything so fundamentally present is if it chose to project itself into our universe the same way we project physical objects into the realm of images. Anything more real than you and I that wanted us to know about a higher form of existence would have to flatten itself out into a physical shape. It would have to present itself in a way we could interact with while also retaining the image of the higher world so we understood what it was.
That it was.
And He is.
