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Before
examining more deeply developments in interactive art, let me return
briefly to the events of 9-11. In order to address the issue, I
would like first, out of respect for the many thousands of Americans
who have suffered unbearable sorrow and grief, to make a sober reference
to what might be called counter-interactivity. For that surely is
at the centre , and in large part the cause, of the massacre of
Tuesday 11th September. Terror as the medium of a design-build strategy
of planetary dimensions; a top-down design, a blueprint sanctioned
, in the minds of pathologically deranged zealots, by the great
architect in the sky, or what they see as his authorized agent on
earth. In fact what we see is the conflict of two world designs,
fundamentally opposed to interaction between each other, two separate
realities, unable to fuse, resistant to dialogue. There has been
in different measure, violence and cruelty perpetrated over many
decades on both sides. Unless wisdom prevails, it will lead to even
more horrific events. How conceivably could the work of artists
as artists - i.e. not pamphleteers, aestheticised social workers
or political pundits, remotely be expected to contribute to the
kind of process of reconciliation, mutual respect and understanding,
that these mixed realities must attain?
What is being designed by terror? Or more to the point how is the
world being re-designed by terror? Simply put, it is in the way
that design always operates – by the creation and manipulation
(or erasure) of symbols, of powerful metaphors. In the case of the
twin towers the symbol was created by us. Its erasure was the object
of the terror. Our response, I believe, must be a matter of fighting
metaphor with metaphor. What was attacked on Tuesday 11th.were what
the terrorists and their supporters saw as overpoweringly massive
metaphors of strength and domination. This is not to ignore the
chilling reality of their grotesque slaughter of the innocent, but
the symbolic significance to the terrorists of the destruction of
these prominent metaphors is all too evident. We as artists are
metaphor makers before we are anything else. I’m talking here
of course about metaphor in its most potent sense: structural metaphor,
behavioural metaphor, spiritual metaphor. We create metaphor, we
critique metaphor, we are always on our guard, as Richard Rorty
has wisely reminded us, against those metaphors which have outlived
their shelf life and are in danger of ossifying as truths. His pragmatic
treatise on Contingency Irony and Solidarity remains a valuable
instruction for the media artist just as it continues to show how
relativistic postmodernism can be constructively rerouted from the
negativity and pessimism which dimmed the creativity of so many
of its adherents. It was Nietzsche who first explicitly suggested
we drop the whole idea of ‘knowing the truth’. His definition
of truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” amounted to saying
that the whole idea of ‘representing reality” by means
of language, and thus the idea of finding a single context for all
human lives, should be abandoned. Such thoughts help describe the
context in which the more significant (i.e. non-ornamental) digital
art can be produced. There are many takes on reality, many ways
of finding their expression. But where hitherto art has been the
servant of such expression, it is now more engaged in the process
of creating reality, of constructing worlds, and in a sense legitimising
all our own alternative realities. In this way art is an agency
of Becoming... a constructive, more than expressive or decorative,
process. The artist is ready to call upon any system, organic or
technological, which enables that process to develop. For the same
reason he must be prepared to look anywhere, into any discipline,
scientific or spiritual, any view of the world, however banal or
arcane, any culture, immediate or distant, in order to find those
processes which engender this becoming. In my own work for example,
cybernetics and shamanism, can happily co-exist in this multidimensional
domain of knowledge and its associative structures. This calls for
a general disposition of optimism, what describe as "telenoia"
(the celebration of connectivity and open-ended collaboration) to
replace the "paranoia", the anxiety, the alienation and
loneliness of the old industrial and materialist age.
Such ambition redefines the work of the artist and gives it also
relevance in the political context. It replaces the historical sense
of the artist’s role as an “honourable calling” with
the idea of such work as a “transformative vocation” -
a concept which is central to the theory of society of Roberto Unger,
the Brazilian thinker and Harvard Professor of Law. His programme
for social reconstruction constitutes a radical alternative to Marxism
on the one hand and “social democracy” on the other. He
shows how, against the idea of work as purely instrumental or as
an honourable calling, a third idea of work has appeared in the
world. “It connects self-fulfilment and transformation: the
change of any aspect of the practical or imaginative settings of
the individual’s life. To be fully a person, in this conception,
you must engage in a struggle against the defects of the limits
of existing society or available knowledge”. (Politics: the
Central Texts, Theory against Fate. London: Verso. 1997).
Let us consider then the value of the idea of Planetary consciousness.
Questions of consciousness have an important place in the agenda
of art and technology and in the formation of the post-biological
culture to which we are contributing. There is no time to trace
the history of its course through the art of the last century: enough
perhaps to point to the work of Kandinsky, Boccioni, Duchamp for
whom issues of consciousness, mind and spirit were predominant .
Consciousness is the great mysterium that entices artists and scientists
alike to enter its domain. It is the ultimate frontier of research
in many fields, and probably only a truly trans-disciplinary approach
will allow us to close the explanatory gap, or, in our terms as
artists, to navigate its many levels , to reframe our perceptions
and experience. It is within consciousness that our imagination
is at work, and it is in imagination that we first mix the realities
of the actual and the virtual.
Where consciousness evolves at the planetary level, a new sensibility
arises, a new way of valuing ourselves, our attitudes, and actions.
It has begun to arise from our understanding of the dynamics of
living processes, the flux and flow of nature, the transformative
continuum of energies at both quantum and cosmic levels, which condition
both our material states and our sense of being. Computer assisted
technologies have allowed us to look deeper into matter and out
into space, to recognise meaningful patterns, rhythms, cycles, correspondences,
interrelationships and dependencies at all levels. Computational
systems have led us to a better understanding of how design might
be an emergent process, replacing the old top-down approach with
a bottom-up methodology. Telematic systems have enabled us to distribute
ourselves over multiple locations, to multiply our identity, to
extend our reach over formidable distances with formidable speed.
We have learned that everything is connected, and we are busy in
the technological process of connecting everything. But we forget,
all too frequently, that connectivity must be truly ubiquitous and
comprehensive if it is to be consistent and humane, and to maintain
its ubiquity it must be cared for and protected, a rule that applies
of course not simply to telematic networks and communication systems
but must be extended generously to our fellow human beings. Our
decision collectively to forget or ignore so many people and cultures
in the world , in many cases actively to impede their communication,
to silence their voices, often through sheer indifference as much
as greed or malice, plays a large part in the situation we find
ourselves in today.
Where in recent history did the notion of planetary consciousness
and species consciousness come from? Certainly Marx used it in Private
Property and Communism back in1844, and more recently its currency
has been renewed by New Age writers of varying complexion, from
the so-called info-mystics to more orthodox scientists such as the
Pittsburgh physicist Oliver Reiser with his Psi-field of 1966. Peter
Russell in The Awakening Earth 1982 made the case for its emergence
out of our telecommunications complexity. We have seen other terms
appear in this context. Pierre Levy in 1994 published L'Intelligence
Collective, and Derrick de Kerckhove, a tireless advocate of McLuhan’s
global village, published Connected Intelligence in 1997. Aldous
Huxley talked of Mind-at-large In the Doors of Perception, 1954,
as did Gregory Bateson, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) .
De Chardin’s Noosphere provided a more fully spiritual dimension.
And of course no one can forget Buckminster Fuller’s planetary
vision.
For my part, I proposed a Cybernetic Art Matrix in Behaviourist
art and the cybernetic vision in 1964 which saw in worldwide communication
a necessary conduit for art as it became increasingly process-based,
fluid and transformational. At the end of the seventies the National
Endowment for the Arts in Washington, gave me money, astonishingly,
to stage the first international telematic art project, Terminal
Art, linking artists in two continents. At the same time Kit Galloway
and Sherrie Rabinowitz created their historic Hole in Space, a real
time communication satellite hook up between people on the street
in New York, and those in LA. The planetary implications were clear.
La Plissure du Texte: a planetary Fairy Tale was the title of the
project I created for Frank Popper’s Electra at the Musée
d’art moderne in Paris 1983. Here artists at 14 nodes around
the world took on the identity of fairy tale personae, and across
the networks created a non linear narrative. The planetary perspective
was celebrated in Planetary Network: Laboratory UBIQUA (Venice Biennale)
1984 which I organised as an International Commissioner along with
Don Foresta, and Tom Sherman. I put a more mixed reality technology
at work in Aspects of Gaia: digital pathways across the whole earth
(Linz)1989. I first introduced the concept of the hypercortex and
the global mind in 1991 at Art Futura in Madrid, and at FAUST in
Toulouse the same year.
Enough of history; although I consider it important to show that
planetary consciousness as an ideal, as a dream, has been with us
for a long time. But now I believe we must work towards its real
emergence as a matter of necessity. Networking supports and promotes
intimacy, and as the technology of empathy, can provide the conditions
for love and compassion. In this context, I find it interesting
that my text of 1991, Is there love in the telematic embrace? is
consulted quite widely on American campuses and further afield.
In my view, to bring together telematic media with Mixed Reality
technology is an important next step, as much for the powerful metaphor
it will provide as for the content that users might generate through
the contexts that artists will provide .
Planetary consciousness needs more than the expansive drive of telematic
networks however. A sensibility to cultures which lie outside the
Western paradigm is essential, and here, despite the obvious reference
to Islamic cultures (and I use the plural with grave emphasis),
which clearly we need to approach and understand more intimately,
I refer to the “exotic” and largely ignored indigenous
cultures of South America, and Australia. . Here is knowledge of
a kind we too often ignore or despise with a kind of techno-aristocratic
sneer ( containing perhaps as much fear as hubris) . And here too
a mixed reality obtains, where “ordinary” perceptions,
ordinary reality, ordinary state of being are crossed by, converge
with, are entwined within, non-ordinary states of awareness and
non local states of consciousness. As in the West, a technology
is instrumental here in producing the condition of Mixed Reality:
but it is Plant Technology rather than digital technology at work.
And make no mistake, the technological skills, methodologies and
instrumentality of the shaman - healer, mystic and man of knowledge
(or woman of knowledge as it is in Korea today and always was largely
throughout the Northern Hemisphere) - constituting what we what
we would classify as pharmacology, botany, biology, and psychology
- amount to a knowledge base certainly as extensive and complex
as what is prized in western science.. As is the case with the advanced
tools of the West, the shaman’s two realities mix on the plane
of imagination, their convergence offering the potential of new
ways of being, perceiving and behaving . My feeling is that we can
learn from these cultures in ways that will bring Mixed Reality
technology into our lives as environment, rather than merely a tool,
however efficacious or profitable that tool , in surgery, engineering
, architecture or entertainment might be.. Indeed we have much to
learn from these cultures in the widest and deepest sense, not least
in how we shall manage the condition of double consciousness, multiple
identity, and mixed reality. The tools are different of course -
in one case taken from nature, in the other brought to our post-biological
world, a condition in which technology has assimilated and, in some
cases, replaced natural process.
Tuesday 11 September 2001: a day of the utmost horror and barbarism.
While it is clear that life will never be the same again for any
of us, and may be far shorter than we might have expected, we need
as artists and as citizens to reflect carefully one the dynamics
of the situation we are facing, and to seek for wisdom in the guidance
of our response and future actions. In the light of the omnipresent
terror, meaning can quickly escape from peoples lives. Our job as
artists is not to provide meaning but to offer creative contexts
in which new meaning can be built and from which new meaning might
emerge.
My feeling is that the cannon of digital art, our aesthetic values
and aspirations, may offer a useful model to civil society confronted
with terrorism from within and without its boundaries. Ours is an
art which is dialogical . I have alluded to the cannon of Connectivity,
Immersion, Interaction, Transformation and Emergence. Meaning is
created out of interaction, and dialogue can transform attitudes
and behaviors. It is as if art, media art, must more clearly highlight
its aesthetic uniqueness, and must fully communicate its values
more widely to the world. For these principles wisely applied could
enable a more integrated and coherent world politic to emerge. Make
no mistake. I am not arguing that art can effect these changes directly.
Art of whatever complexion always works, and is allowed by society
to work, on the symbolic level, through its construction of powerful
models and metaphors. It can ebable us to navigate new reaches of
consciousness. In interaction with the viewer, the artist enables
new meaning and new experience to emerge, creating paradigms of
perception or construction which may then effect events or aspirations
in the social, political or industrial world. But the relationship
is indirect. It is this indirectness which protects the artist and
permits our dreams and visions to have currency and survive.
Mixed Reality will constitute the hub around which I would like
to frame this discussion of a technoetic awareness, and my description
of the steps that might be taken, in the frame of art and research,
to cultivate the hypercortex, enabling a planetary consciousness,
a species consciousness to fruitfully emerge.
The emergence of Mixed Reality technology marks a further step in
our quest to control our own evolution, to redefine what it is to
be human, and to become actively responsible for the construction
of our own realities. It is this quest which distinguishes us from
past generations imprisoned in superstition or in thrall to scientific
determinism .
Mixed Reality, in its convergence of events in actual and virtual
space, parallels the convergence in the material world of nano structures
and living systems. It provides a metaphor for the convergence of
cultures, that we do desperately need. We need to be able to live
in mixed realities, mixed ethnicities, mixed cultures with the ability
seamlessly to shift focus , while comprehensively grasping the planetary
whole. In its strictly technological form Mixed Reality is in many
ways a rehearsal for the truly enormous changes that lie ahead as
the dry digital technologies converge, with the biologically wet,
producing what I call moistmedia.
Moistmedia arises from the convergence of Bits Atoms Neurones and
Genes: the “Big B.A.N.G.” of our post-biological universe.
As examples, think of Osaka’s nano-bull, (a three-dimensional
model bull just 10 micrometres long - about the size of a red blood
cell), Roslin Institute’s lamb called Dolly , Kac’s Alba
the florescent Rabbit , Robokoneko, Starlab’s kitten, or Steve
Grand’s robot baby orangutan, Lucy. Relevant here too is the
work of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of Tissue Culture Art in Perth,
Australia, and Ulrike Gabriel of Berlin. They are the harbingers
of the re-materialisation of a culture which earlier we thought
would be totally immaterial and virtual. It’s a matter of “bye-bye
Baudrillard”. Also, we might add that, at the level of Hollywood,
and its influence on popular consciousness, the movie AI should
not be ignored, with its rubric: “his love is real but he is
not”.
The aesthetic, as well as pragmatic, value of Mixed Reality technology
should not however disguise the fact that what is commonly regarded
as “unmediated” and “directly apprehended” reality
is as much a construction as the virtual reality with which it becomes
technologically fused.
If we see the tools of Mixed Reality technology as an extension
of our own organic systems of perception and cognition (together
constituting an emergent faculty of cyberception), we can more readily
understand the whole flow of events in this domain as primarily
technoetic.
Overall, we can foresee the development of a quite radical Mixed
Reality which will be made up of three essential parts, which can
be called the Three VRs:
Validated Reality involving
reactive, mechanical technology in a prosaic, Newtonian world.
Virtual Reality involving
interactive, digital technology in a telematic, immersive world.
Vegetal Reality involving
psychoactive plant technology in an entheogenic, spiritual world.
Vegetal Reality ?!
The question will be asked: what meaningful relationship can there
possibly be between the spiritual practices in the rain forest and
the materialism of silicon valley or the labs of molecular biology.?
The link may lie in the area of DNA research. Jeremy Narby, in his
book Cosmic Serpent : DNA and the Origins of Knowledge , suggests
that the shaman’s visions come from communicating with his
own DNA, We have to remember that we do not know why most of our
DNA is there. A mere 3% accounts for the whole diversity of life.
Narby thinks the shamans information comes from the mysterious junk
DNA, the 97% we don’t account for. DNA in one cell exchanges
signals with the DNA in other cells. Narby suggests that once someone
taps into their own DNA, it can then communicate across organisms,
across species - even across the boundary between animal and plant
- and that the totality of all the DNA in the world forms a kind
of matrix. This is another way of coming upon planetary consciousness.
This transmission of signals between DNA in separate cells is effected
by the emission of photons, the signals are in the form of light,
and at a wavelength visible to humans.
Narby’s working hypothesis is that shamans can take their consciousness
down to the molecular level and gain access to information related
to DNA, which in their terms are "animate essences" or
"spirits." He writes: “Here they see double helixes,
twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes. In this way shamanic cultures
have known for millennia that the vital principle is the same for
all living beings and is shaped like two entwined serpents (or a
vine, a rope, a ladder ... ). DNA is the source of their botanical
and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized
and "nonrational" states of consciousness, though its
results are empirically verifiable. The myths of these cultures
are filled with biological imagery. And the shamans’ metaphoric
explanations correspond quite precisely to the descriptions that
biologists are starting to provide”.
Before we dismiss critically these ideas as “merely metaphorical”
ie not real genetic or biological science we should remember perhaps
that the war of interpretation in quantum physics was won with metaphor
by Neils Bohr and his Copenhagen School, as Mara Beller of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem has shown in her recent book Quantum Dialogue;
the making of a revolution . Just as she argues for dialogical discourse
rather than paradigmatic dogma within science, so I think we should
attempt to build a dialogic discourse between western science and
native bodies of knowledge.
It could well be then that DNA’s highly coherent photon emission
accounts for the luminescence of the shaman‘s hallucinatory
images, as well as their three-dimensional, or holographic, aspect.
On the basis of this connection, Narby conceived of a neurological
mechanism for his hypothesis. The molecules of nicotine or di-methyl-tryptamine,
contained in ayahuasca , the psychoactive brew of choice of most
south American healers, activate their respective receptors, which
set off a cascade of electrochemical reactions inside the neurons,
leading to the stimulation of DNA and, more particularly, to its
emission of visible waves, which shamans perceive as "hallucinations."
There, he concluded, is the source of knowledge: DNA, living in
water and emitting photons, like an aquatic dragon spitting fire.
I think it is worth reciting this account of Narby’s work because
it amplifies the intuition that there is much to be gained in both
biological sciences and the arts from research which seeks correspondences
and collaborations between the two technologies of machines and
plants, within the natrificial space of the Three VRs, virtual,
validated and vegetal. Indeed it can be argued that the whole ecological
movement could gain if a constructive dialogue with technology would
be instituted which tried to see the deep correspondences between
western science and archaic knowledge. The problem is not with science
but with the rejection of science at its leading edge in favour
of the old scientific paradigm, that very paradigm which refuses
the spiritual implications of quantum physics, for example, or the
very intelligence of plants, so to speak, that molecular biology
might reveal.
In this talk I have tried to indicate some of the many issues that
call for research and reflection, innovative practice, and theoretical
elucidation, if new media art is to mature and take its place in
the world. If potent images, environments, systems and structures
are to be constructed which can challenge the constraining orthodoxies
of thought and behaviour, now increasingly supported by violence,
whether overtly fundamentalist or covertly repressive of our liberties,
and not only from without but increasingly within civil society,
new conditions for creative practice, transdisciplinary research,
critical interaction, and collaborative effort must be established
and maintained. The orthodoxy of universities and art academies
more or less inhibits, if it does not expressly outlaw, this very
transdisciplinarity. New instruments, and organisms of learning
and production are quite urgently needed. I would like to move to
the second part of this presentation by referring you to you one
attempt to address this need, my research center CAiiA-STAR, which,
while it is currently located within the university framework, is
to be seen as a prototype node or hub of an emergent Planetary Collegium.
I shall present this material in the form of the two appendices
which follow hereafter. ©Roy Ascott 2001
Appendix 1. CAiiA-STAR
Appendix 2. Planetary Collegium
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