Old Stories, New Interpretations : The Garden of Eden (Part I)

Virtual Garden of Eden from “Revelation to the Disembodied”

I was never really interested in the Judeo-Christian creation narrative involving the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. The whole thing seemed - well - it didn’t really resonate. I didn’t grow up in a religious household, though I would describe one of my parents as spiritually curious (the other was an atheist). I grew up in Austin, Texas - home of the “Keep Austin Weird,” slogan. And, in the 1970s and up to the mid 1990s, Austin was truly a magnet for weird without flaunting its weirdness. As a result, I was exposed to so much spiritual weirdness growing up (from sleeping under plexiglass pyramids to hearing channelers talk about their contact with the other dimensional “pink cat people”) that the whole Adam and Eve thing seemed quite oppressive by comparison. So, I didn’t really pay much attention to the story. There was much cooler stuff out there for a kid.

It wasn’t until I started working on The Genesis Trilogy, of which my two short animations “cyberGenesis” and “Revelation to the Disembodied” are chapters, when I contemplated what might happen if a human created artificial intelligence developed it’s own creation mythology based on bits and pieces of humanity’s online legacy. It made sense that this AI might pull from existing creation myths - the way generative art AI pulls from styles and techniques of several existing painters and illustrators (side note: all the images on the Liminal Soup Blog homepage are AI generated). And since the Genesis Story was a cornerstone myth of the particular civilization in which modern computing and the internet was developed, it seemed worth checking into. When I started researching the myth, I came across a few different interpretations of the story (particularly those interpretations offered by the Gnostics) that peaked my curiosity.

To Be Continued . . .

Future Eden from “cyberGenesis”