OUR COSMOLOGY
Art as the Creation of Symbolic Worlds
Human beings are more than biological processes. We live within worlds of stories, symbols, rituals, images, architectures, technologies, memories, and shared acts of imagination that shape how we understand ourselves, one another, and reality itself. Every civilization creates these symbolic worlds. They determine what a society remembers, what it forgets, what it celebrates, what it fears, and what futures it believes are possible. While these worlds can be rigid, they are never fixed. They are continually renewed, transformed, and sometimes overturned through artistic imagination.
Rainbow Serpent calls this ongoing process mythogenesis: the creation of new symbolic worlds through art, ritual, philosophy, technology, and collective cultural practice.
Cosmological Imagination
At the heart of Rainbow Serpent’s work is the practice of cosmological imagination, the capacity to imagine new ways of understanding existence by bringing ancestral knowledge into creative dialogue with contemporary artistic practice, scientific inquiry, emerging technologies, and lived experience.
Cosmological imagination seeks to neither reconstruct the past exactly as it was nor reject it in pursuit of endless novelty. Instead, it asks how inherited systems of meaning can become living sources of artistic invention capable of responding to the questions of the present while opening pathways toward futures not yet imagined.
Rainbow Serpent is rooted in Black queer experience and African diasporic cosmologies, which both offer generative ways of knowing the world. Black queer life has long required the invention of new symbolic languages, chosen forms of kinship, spiritual practices, artistic traditions, and modes of collective survival. We understand this creative inheritance as a profound source of cosmological imagination whose insights extend beyond any single community while remaining accountable to the histories from which they emerge. African diasporic cosmologies refuse reduction to static historical artifacts. They are living intellectual traditions that continue to generate new artistic languages, ethical questions, ritual practices, and ways of organizing collective life.
Artists as Worldbuilders
Rainbow Serpent understands artists as more than makers of individual works.
Artists generate new languages of thought, feeling, perception, and relation. They create images through which societies recognize themselves, rituals through which communities renew themselves, architectures that shape collective memory, and institutions that sustain cultural life across generations.
Every sculpture, performance, photograph, book, film, immersive environment, architectural light installation, and ritual gathering participates in the ongoing creation of symbolic reality. Art, therefore, is worldbuilding.
Ritual and Transformation
Ritual is one of humanity’s oldest artistic technologies. Long before museums, galleries, or concert halls existed, communities used ritual to organize memory, mark transformation, transmit knowledge, and cultivate relationships between the visible and invisible dimensions of life.
Rainbow Serpent approaches ritual as an evolving artistic practice through which individuals and communities encounter transformation. Ritual creates spaces where imagination becomes embodied, where memory becomes communal, and where artistic experience becomes lived experience. Our work explores how sculpture, movement, sound, architecture, performance, light, words, and emerging technologies can participate in contemporary ritual forms that honor ancestral knowledge while remaining open to continual renewal.
Artistic Languages
Every artistic medium is a language. Photography reveals relationships between light, memory, and presence. Architecture shapes how communities inhabit space. Performance gives bodily form to history and possibility. Publishing preserves and transmits ideas across generations. Film unfolds symbolic narratives through time. Emerging technologies expand perception beyond the ordinary capacities of the human senses.
Rainbow Serpent moves fluidly across these languages because no single medium can fully express the complexity of the worlds we seek to imagine. Rather than treating disciplines as separate practices, we understand them as interconnected vocabularies within a larger artistic conversation.
Technology and the Sacred
Technology is often understood as something separate from spirituality or ritual. Rainbow Serpent rejects this division. Throughout human history, new technologies have continually reshaped religious imagination, artistic expression, cultural memory, and collective life. We view scientific imaging, artificial intelligence, extended reality, architectural lighting, digital fabrication, thermal photography, and immersive environments as contemporary instruments through which perception itself can be expanded.
Technology becomes most meaningful when guided by wisdom, artistic inquiry, and ethical responsibility. Within Rainbow Serpent, technological experimentation serves the larger work of mythogenesis by opening new ways of experiencing memory, embodiment, ancestry, landscape, and imagination.
Building Enduring Worlds
Symbolic worlds endure only when they are supported by living communities and lasting institutions. For this reason, Rainbow Serpent understands artistic practice and institutional worldbuilding as inseparable. We therefore invest in artworks and in artists, publications, archives, performances, technologies, residencies, research, and cultural spaces capable of sustaining artistic traditions across generations. Our largest goal is to cultivate the conditions under which new intellectual traditions, artistic movements, ritual practices, and forms of collective life can continue to grow long after any single artwork has been completed.
We Believe…
We believe that human beings continually create the symbolic worlds they inhabit.
We believe that mythogenesis is an ongoing cultural practice through which societies imagine new possibilities for collective life.
We believe that cosmological imagination connects ancestral wisdom with future invention.
We believe that art creates new languages through which reality can be reimagined.
We believe that ritual transforms imagination into lived experience.
We believe that technology is most transformative when guided by wisdom, artistic inquiry, and human creativity.
We believe that artists are builders of worlds, institutions, and futures.
We believe that cultural memory is the foundation from which cultural invention grows.
We believe that enduring artistic movements require enduring communities, institutions, and infrastructures of imagination.
We believe that every generation inherits the responsibility and the possibility of imagining new worlds.