The Hallucinarium of Glo-Art: A History That Never Stops Beginning
What would most astonish an alien observing us? Not that we started so slowly, but that we started at all. Two hundred thousand years of near-stagnation—then suddenly, in the blink of an eye: fire, language, cities, music, spaceships. As if we were waiting for something without knowing what. As if some hidden urgency had finally awakened.
The painting begins with the Big Bang, but this is actually a misleading opening line—as if an explosion explains everything, when the real mystery isn't the beginning, but the fact that *something kept happening* afterward. Humans are the animals who not only change their environment but keep rediscovering what they actually want. We built pyramids before knowing why, wrote sonnets before understanding love, and flew to the moon before knowing what we sought there. Our history isn't a series of necessary steps, but a collection of improbable leaps—as if we secretly knew where we were going without ever being able to explain it.
Yes, there are patterns: agriculture leads to cities, ships to encounters, knowledge to new questions. But the wonder isn't that this happens everywhere the same—the wonder is that it happened *somewhere* at all. As if the human mind resonates with the world, able to find something new in any circumstance that wasn't there before. We call it progress, but it's really a form of desire that keeps reinventing itself.
Hegel saw history as liberation, but perhaps it's more a discovery: we were always free, we just didn't know it. The nomad who founded a city, the inventor who accidentally created beauty, the artist who painted without knowing why—they weren't driven by necessity but by a kind of playful seriousness. As if the universe secretly enjoys playing with itself, and we're how it does so.
And yes, there's only one history. But that's precisely the paradox: it's unique yet recognizable, as if all humans are unwitting participants in the same story. The Incas and Romans invented similar things not because they had to, but because human minds everywhere ask the same questions—and are then surprised by the answers.
The Hallucinarium shows not only what happened, but what *could have* happened. The emptiness between scenes isn't absence, but an invitation. As if the painting says: "Look, all this was unnecessary, yet it happened. What does that say about what might still come?"
We aren't prisoners of our past—we're prisoners of our own imagination, which keeps convincing us there must be more. And perhaps that's the secret: history isn't fate, but a conversation that never ends. We answer questions not yet asked, and that's precisely why we continue.
What is a village that becomes a city? A place that was first nothing, then something, yet ultimately still nothing—except for those who happen to live there. It's a story that could be told anywhere, and therefore about nowhere. Yet you paint it anyway, as if cataloging facts—the Romans, the Spaniards, the steam engines—might change something. As if listing events could tell us what it meant to live there. As if history weren't primarily made of everything that didn't happen.
And what did happen, really? Almost nothing. Most centuries were just stretched-out presents, prisons of stagnation. You were born, you stayed, you died—and the world barely moved. That's the real story: not rebellion, but acceptance; not discovery, but inability to leave. And yet this is precisely what we never paint, never celebrate. Wars and inventions are spectacular, but identity—that vague sense of belonging somewhere without knowing why—remains elusive. As if we're afraid that if we examine it too long, we'll discover it doesn't exist.
We imagine tradition preserves something, but perhaps it just conceals how little we actually retain. Change is what we admire, but what we truly are is what refuses to change. And yet—when we try to describe that feeling of "home," it evaporates. As if identity were a necessary hallucination to avoid noticing we've been imprisoned all along.
The painting shows everything that occurred, but the real drama lies in everything that could never occur. History is a sum total of missed chances, yet against our better judgment, we feel something must be preserved. As if secretly hoping someone might someday look at this painting and think: "Yes, this was it. This is how it felt." While secretly knowing: it can't be. And yet you keep painting.