Artists or Aliens?
“The thing’s hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it’s full of stars!”
What connects the Utah and California deserts, Neamt country Romania, Sulzbach Germany, Ayllon Spain, Dendermonde Belgium, the Isle of Wight UK, and aYia’s ‘Easy’? Why, they’re the perfect spots for a 2020 alien device of course — large, shiny, unnerving monoliths.
Or at least that’s what designer Tom Dunford told BBC news when he claimed responsibility for the Isle of Wight edition this week. ‘If the aliens were to come down I think they’d go for the safest place which is the Isle of Wight — in Tier 1’
When the monoliths first began to appear earlier this month, starting with the one in a remote part of the Utah desert, they inspired wild theories about alien contact and ancient entities, with people naturally calling back to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which features a series of monoliths — machines built by an unseen extraterrestrial species.
Joy Cuff, a VFX artist who worked on 2001 told Insider “Stanley would’ve been really quite excited about this I’m sure […] It would’ve been amazing. Imagine this had arisen when we were doing this in ’66 or ’67. I think it would’ve blown his mind actually. It’s quite something.” To see something that, at the time, took a great deal of innovation to produce, recreated overnight all over the world is as mind-bending as the monolith itself purports to be.
Kubrick, and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke, did mountains of research on supposed UFO sightings leading up to the film’s production, all of which Cuff finds ‘a little shivery’. As Kubrick and Clarke were inspired by these accounts, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, postulates with his tongue firmly in his cheek that in turn ‘the monoliths could be artefacts planted by aliens, perhaps beings who are somehow familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s work’. In the never-ending circle of artistic inspiration, planet of origin appears to be of little concern — especially considering earlier this year the eerie monolith observing humankind reappeared in pop culture, via Salomon Ligthelm’s film ‘Easy’, for AYIA. Talking to Film Supply, Ligthelm explores the inspiration behind the film, in which he details the relationship between a young man, and a sinister monolithic being.
‘I remember the first visual that came to mind was this floating orb or monolith — I felt it would be interesting to explore the relationship of this inanimate object and a human being by going literarily exploring the film from two contrasting POVs — between the POV of a human, and that of this monolithic being’
What makes monoliths so unnerving — the complete detachment from any kind of personality or functionality, anything that might make it knowable — also seems to be what allows this kind of reflection, in the same way as other abstract art does. To see yourself from the point of view of something entirely non-human is to understand yourself. Indeed, in 2001 the monoliths went a little further — directly influencing the path of humanity.
Art collective The Most Famous Artist has taken responsibility for the Utah monolith via a series of Instagram posts with captions such as “monolith-as-a-service.com”, and has chimed in on the wider monolith craze too. When asked about the Isle of Wight monolith, the collective responded “The monolith is out of my control at this point. Godspeed to all the aliens working hard around the globe to propagate the myth.”
As much as I’d like to keep the state of the world out of fantastical speculations about alien beings, The Most Famous Artist’s allusion to manipulation of reality is hard to ignore. We live in a world in which reality and truth can be difficult to discern — and even preferable to ignore. It’s no wonder then that the monoliths have captured the world’s attention — especially at a time when vast swaths of the population have nothing to do right now other than sit inside and wonder.
Unfortunately, Utah’s Department of Public Safety points out that such wondering should not be done on public land without the proper permit, “no matter what planet you are from.”
