Infinite Virtual Stoa
​
Luis Torrao, Yiannis Papadopoulos, Darren McKie
​
GA2018, the XXI Generative Art Conference
Verona, 17-20 December 2018
Stoicism is a philosophy that considers the object of life to be ataraxia (αταραξία), a state of psychological stability which is undisturbed by exposure to phenomena and circumstances that lie outside one’s control. Such circumstances may include ill health, poverty, natural disasters, corrupt social orders, unpopularity, and unrequited love, and may cause loss of composure and mental balance through feelings of pain, humiliation, insufficiency, envy or greed. Stoicism is a coherent system of powerful ideas about how to pursue a life of equanimity in the face of adversity which has inspired philosophy and psychology to this day. The founders of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy have cited Stoicism as their main inspiration. Stoicism flourished in ancient Athens and Rome at a time when ancient democracy was dying and people experienced loss of control over their lives under authoritarian and imperial regimes. In an age of serious global economic, environmental and psychological uncertainty and crisis, stoicism has still pressing and valuable lessons to teach us about calm, composure, stability and emotional resilience.
Stoicism owes its name to Stoa Poikile (‘painted porch’ in Greek), a colonnaded building in the Athenian agora where Zeno of Citium founded his school in the 4th century BCE. Inspired by this, we develop an ‘Infinite Virtual Stoa’ to host an expandable online repository of resources about Stoicism. Our repository exists in the space defined by the Stoa, which is a colonnaded building in the form of the ancient, and sacred to many cultures, geometrical pattern known as ‘the flower of life’. The building is composed of multiple evenly-spaced, overlapping circles arranged in a flower-like pattern with six-fold symmetry that is potentially expandable to infinity. Our Stoa is immersed in water, with pools regularly forming in the space between the colonnaded walks that delineate the space, and becomes an art gallery-library for the creative exhibition of online stoic resources: quotes, stories, books, paintings and videos. Here, one can create areas of study devoted to great stoic philosophers, like Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, or thematic areas where stoic ideas are explained with quotes, text, animations and videos. Specific ideas or themes can be presented in a creative fashion to the viewer as multimedia illuminated sculptures using Timaeus, a digital art studio for the creation of such 3D media sculptures which was developed at the University of Hull inspired by the homonymous Platonic dialogue.
The two images show a sculpture of an illlustration of the Stoic cosmopolitan view, as seen externally from the stoa (above) and internally (below). The word cosmopolitan derives from the Greek κοσμοπολίτης meaning being ‘citizen of the world’. Hierocles, an eminent Stoic, developed a brilliant illustration of the concept by placing the individual in the centre of a series of expanding circles of concern: the smallest circle is the individual itself, next comes the close family, the extended family, the city, the neighbouring cities, the country, and finally the larger circle is humanity. Our task - stated Hierocles - is to compress those circles so as to bring humanity closer to the core of our concerns [34]. Cosmopolitanism thus becomes the idea that all humans belong to one community based on our shared nature and capacity for logic and morality.
Infinite Virtual Stoa
​
Luis Torrao, Yiannis Papadopoulos, Darren McKie
​
GA2018, the XXI Generative Art Conference
Verona, 17-20 December 20178
Stoicism is a philosophy that considers the object of life to be ataraxia (αταραξία), a state of psychological stability which is undisturbed by exposure to phenomena and circumstances that lie outside one’s control. Such circumstances may include ill health, poverty, natural disasters, corrupt social orders, unpopularity, and unrequited love, and may cause loss of composure and mental balance through feelings of pain, humiliation, insufficiency, envy or greed. Stoicism is a coherent system of powerful ideas about how to pursue a life of equanimity in the face of adversity which has inspired philosophy and psychology to this day. The founders of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy have cited Stoicism as their main inspiration. Stoicism flourished in ancient Athens and Rome at a time when ancient democracy was dying and people experienced loss of control over their lives under authoritarian and imperial regimes. In an age of serious global economic, environmental and psychological uncertainty and crisis, stoicism has still pressing and valuable lessons to teach us about calm, composure, stability and emotional resilience.
Stoicism owes its name to Stoa Poikile (‘painted porch’ in Greek), a colonnaded building in the Athenian agora where Zeno of Citium founded his school in the 4th century BCE. Inspired by this, we develop an ‘Infinite Virtual Stoa’ to host an expandable online repository of resources about Stoicism. Our repository exists in the space defined by the Stoa, which is a colonnaded building in the form of the ancient, and sacred to many cultures, geometrical pattern known as ‘the flower of life’. The building is composed of multiple evenly-spaced, overlapping circles arranged in a flower-like pattern with six-fold symmetry that is potentially expandable to infinity. Our Stoa is immersed in water, with pools regularly forming in the space between the colonnaded walks that delineate the space, and becomes an art gallery-library for the creative exhibition of online stoic resources: quotes, stories, books, paintings and videos. Here, one can create areas of study devoted to great stoic philosophers, like Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, or thematic areas where stoic ideas are explained with quotes, text, animations and videos. Specific ideas or themes can be presented in a creative fashion to the viewer as multimedia illuminated sculptures using Timaeus, a digital art studio for the creation of such 3D media sculptures which was developed at the University of Hull inspired by the homonymous Platonic dialogue.
The two images show a sculpture of an illlustration of the Stoic cosmopolitan view, as seen externally from the stoa (above) and internally (below). The word cosmopolitan derives from the Greek κοσμοπολίτης meaning being ‘citizen of the world’. Hierocles, an eminent Stoic, developed a brilliant illustration of the concept by placing the individual in the centre of a series of expanding circles of concern: the smallest circle is the individual itself, next comes the close family, the extended family, the city, the neighbouring cities, the country, and finally the larger circle is humanity. Our task - stated Hierocles - is to compress those circles so as to bring humanity closer to the core of our concerns [34]. Cosmopolitanism thus becomes the idea that all humans belong to one community based on our shared nature and capacity for logic and morality.