Abstract
The dry world of computational
virtuality and the wet world of biological systems are converging
to produce a new substrate for creative work, moistmedia, consisting
of bits, atoms, neurons, and genes. There is also a convergence
of three VRs
- Virtual Reality (interactive
digital technology): elematic, immersive.
- Validated Reality (reactive mechanical technology): prosaic,
Newtonian.
- Vegetal Reality (psychoactive plant technology): entheogenic,
spiritual.
At this interspace lies the
great challenge to both science and art: the nature of consciousness.
A technoetic aesthetic is needed which, in consort with moistmedia,
may enable us as artists to address the key questions of our time:
- what is it to be human in
the post-biological culture?
- what is the ontology of mind and body distributed in cyberspace?
- how to deal with the responsibility of redefining nature and
even life itself ?
- what aspects of the immaterial can contribute the re-materialisation
of art?
Whilst the world at large is only
just coming to terms with the Net and the computerisation of society,
another media shift is occurring, whose consequences are likely
to be even greater. The silicon dry digital domain of computers
is converging with the wet biological world of living systems.
The moist media emerging from this convergence will be
the substrate of the art of this century, as telematics, biotechnology
and nano-engineering together enter the working process of artists,
designers, performers and architects. Just as globalisation means
that not only are we are all connected, but that our ideas, institutions,
even our own identities are constantly in flux, so too will moistmedia
bridge the artificial and natural domains, transforming the relationship
between consciousness and the material world. We move fast not
only across the face of the earth but across the reach of our
minds. Our cyberception zooms in on the smallest atomic detail
of matter and pans out to scan the whole universe. Our double
consciousness allows us to perceive simultaneously the inward
dynamic of things and their outward show. This Zen of cyberception
is the consequence of a technoetic aesthetic in which consciousness
in all its forms, at all levels, and in all things, is both the
subject and object of art. Just as in the past, evolution of mind
has always involved the evolution of the body; distributed mind
will seek a distributed body. To assist in the embodiment of this
connectivity of mind is part of the artist’s task, to navigate
the fields of consciousness that new material systems will generate,
is part of art’s prospectus.
What precisely is moistmedia and
what is its potential for art? Does this mean placing the horizon
of art beyond our sight lines? We may understand these questions
best if we see the cultural shift, which they imply, as providing
a kind of wormhole into another universe. I think the metaphor
is appropriate to the immense cultural changes that I foresee.
Let me extend the metaphor by likening the creation of this new
universe to the Big Bang at the origin of the universe in which
we have been created. The Big B.A.N.G. of this emergent, new media
universe is so-named to reflect the combination of Bits
Atoms Neurons and Genes
which together, in all sorts of relationships, will provide the
substrate - the moistmedia - upon which our art and architecture,
and indeed or tools and products, will be based.
This Big Bang implies a transition
to a much more complex level of human identity, forcing us to
look deeply at what is it to live at the edge of the net, half
in cyberspace and half in a world which increasingly will be nano-engineered
from the bottom up. In this universe the old concept of nature
is seen as a set of metaphors which have outlived their usefulness;
a representation of reality, whether poetic or prosaic, which
has lost its appeal to our sensibility. Similarly, Dolly the lamb
and Alba the rabbit will inform the nursery tales of the new generation,
rather than Toad, Mole or Peter Rabbit. Nature is no longer something
‘over there’ which is to be viewed in the middle distance
with a kind of passive objectivity, or abused as an aggressive
alien, or treated with dreamy sentimentality. In as much as we
are a part of nature, we wish now to be consciously involved in
its co —evolution, which is to say in our own self definition
and reconstruction. In this sense, technology, often depicted
as the enemy of nature, will bring us closer to it, but it will
be a nature entirely re-described, and re-aligned to our post-biological
sensibilities. This is the territory of the artist; the domain
in which reality is to be constructed rather than simply reflected
or represented.
The legacy of behavioural, performative,
conceptual, and process -based art of the last fifty years has
led us to the present condition of artistic action and potential.
Amongst the many technological, ethical and aesthetic challenges
which we must address, there is the overarching requirement to
balance the possibilities for life in the Net with the new forms
and relationships afforded by our genetic, molecular and nano-technological
engineering.
We are looking at a culture in which
intelligence is spilling out of our brains to fill every nook
and cranny of the world, every environment, every tool, every
product. Pervasive and ubiquitous, the flood of intelligence both
human and artificial is unstoppable. At the same time we are coming
to recognise that the whole of the natural world is in some sense
conscious. The sentience of Gaia is not in doubt. In seeking to
create artificial life and artificial intelligence, we have come
in turn to understand how consciousness pervades every part of
the planet. Moreover, the richness of its bio-diversity need not
be threatened by technology, when that technology serves artistic
creativity. Instead, it should be seen as a challenge to the cyber-diversity
that we might generate as artists in the interspace between virtual
and material worlds. This natrificial space, product of the merging
of the natural and artificial process, is the domain of moistmedia.
But just as we are using new technology
to investigate matter and its relationship to mind, so I believe
we shall increasingly use an old technology to navigate consciousness
and transcendence of the material state. This ancient technology,
has been used by shamans for millennia, is the technology of plants,
specifically psychoactive plants. I believe that as it becomes
more widely understood and experienced, this plant technology
will join with computer technology to effect radically our way
of being. Together, these two technologies may produce ontology
of remarkable dimensions. It will be the point at which engineering
becomes ontology. In order to advance an understanding of this
hybrid technology, I need to bring a third element to the binary
opposition, or parallel positioning, of the virtual and actual
in our culture. I am going to call this the triangulation of Three
VRs: Virtual Reality, Vegetal Reality and Validated Reality. Now,
what do I mean by these three terms?
By Virtual Reality I am referring
to much more than a singular technology. Apart from Augmented
Reality technology which allows the viewer to see simultaneously
both the internal dynamics and the external features of an object
of study, VR encompasses a whole ontology of telepresence, of
sensory immersion, and immaterial connectivity, which affords
the construction of new worlds completely liberated from the constrains
of mundane physics. While at first unfamiliar and exotic, 3Dcyberspace
is now a common feature of Western culture, and leads to expectations
in daily life of completely new forms of entertainment, education,
commerce, social gathering, and eventually no doubt, political
organisation and democratic representation. Whatever is or will
become the case, VR changes the way we view ourselves, the manner
of our comportation, and environments we wish to inhabit.
Validated Reality, our daily experience,
is familiar to us all. It is what William Blake described as Single
Vision, The Dream of Reason and Newton’s sleep. It is the
orthodox universe of causal "common sense", a reality
whose consensus is achieved early in our lives by the constant
repetition of its axioms. Validated Reality finds it hard to accept
the world views of quantum physics, eastern mysticism, or the
many conflicting models of consciousness generated by contemporary
scientists, across a wide range of disciplines, in their attempts
to bridge the explanatory gap that prevents our understanding
of this ultimate mysterium. Those whose minds have been conditioned
to accept Validated Reality as the only reality balk at the implications
of nano-technology, and have great difficulty in coming to terms
with genetic modelling and the scope of biotechnics in redefining
Nature. In short, Validated Reality is authorised reality, whose
narrow confines delimit the sense of what we are or what we could
be. Nevertheless it controls the co-ordinates of our daily life,
dictates the protocols of our behaviour, and provides an illusion
of coherence in a contingent universe. It has been Validated Reality,
which has created Nature as an array of objects set in Euclidean
space, rather than a dynamic network of processes and relationships.
You need it to catch a bus, but you leave it behind to create
teleportation.
Vegetal Reality, the third axis
of reality following the Big Bang, is quite unfamiliar to Western
praxis, despite the extensive researches of Richard Evans Schultes
of Harvard, for example, or the proselytising of the late Terence
McKenna. Vegetal Reality can be understood in the context of technoetics,
as the transformation of consciousness by technology. In this
case, the plant technology involved supports a canon of practice
and insight which is archaic in its human application, known to
us principally through the work of shamans, largely visionary
and often operating in a context of healing which is distant in
the extreme from the Validated Reality of western medicine.
It will be through Vegetal Reality,
conferred particularly by such plants as the ayahuasca, in consort
with telematic systems, that we shall navigate, and perhaps transform,
the field of consciousness of which we are a part. Ayahuasca is
a Quechuan word referring to the vine Banisteriopsis caapi,
which consists of the beta-carboline alkaloids harmine, harmoline,
and tetrahydroharmine. Combined with plants such as psychotria
viridis, which contains tryptamine, it is brewed as a tea,
which properly consumed brings about visionary states of awareness.
The process is described as entheogenic, which means searching
for the God within. The god is that repository of knowledge and
energy, often described as pure light, which links us on the psychic
or spiritual plane to the other worlds and other planes of existence
from which are separated by our ordinary state of awareness. It
parallels our technological probing for knowledge deep into matter,
and our voyages into outer space. I am convinced that the technology
of psychoactive plants, aligned with the technology of interactive
media, will come to constitute a cyberbotany which will largely
be articulated and defined by moistmedia. Entheogenics will guide
much of the future development of moistmedia art. Encounters with
that which is unknown within us, linking to our design of the
new and unknown beyond us, will give interactive art its primary
role. Cyberbotany will cover a wide spectrum of activity and investigation
into artificial life forms within the cyber and nano ecologies,
on one hand, and into the technoetic dimensions of consciousness
and cognition on the other.
To stand at the confluence of these
three VRs (the Three Graces of our culture) is to take a more
participative and formative place in the stream of evolution.
We are all familiar with the dialectic between the actual and
the virtual, or the real and the artificial as we persist in calling
it, even though any real differentiation between these states
is fast disappearing. We address nature in terms of artifice and
treat the artificial quite naturally. The interplay of natural
and artificial systems is becoming quite seamless, just as our
mental and physical prosthesis are integral to our being. We are
familiar with the notion of interspace, the place at the edge
of the net where these two realities come together. We know that
it constitutes a domain, which presents enormous problems and
wonderful opportunities, for example to architects and urban planners.
We know too the questions of identity which are raised when we
find that we can be distributed across the Net. Now, with cyberbotany,
we have to bring to these issues the technology of mind, which
will induce new, technoetic states of consciousness. This leads
us to consider a scenario of being which is non-ordinary, non-local,
and non-linear, thereby fusing the three principle features of
21st century culture: consciousness, quantum physics, and interactive/psychoactive
media.
Telematic space makes actors of
us all. There can be no outside observer. You are either in the
space and actively engaged or you are no where at all. The consequence
of the Net, even at the popular level, in fact especially at the
popular level, is to encourage us to redefine ourselves, to re-invent
ourselves, to create multiple identities operating at many locations,
distributed throughout cyberspace. There we can play with gender,
physical characteristics, and a multiplicity of roles. Similarly,
3D worlds enable us constantly to design the environment in which
we can engage through our avatars and agents with others in the
game of self-invention. The game is in the full seriousness of
understanding how to manage reality, the many realities that cyberspace
allows us to create. But our behaviour in cyberspace is both real
and a phase transition, a preparation for life in the world of
moistmedia. What we once called ‘virtual’ has now
become actual for us, and what was thought to be a immutably ‘actual’
is treated by us as transient and virtual. The artificial is now
part of our nature, and nature is in large part artificial.
Just as the scanning tunnelling
microscope (STM) lets us view individual atoms and also move them
around at the same time, so too our brains will focus both on
material events and trigger their transformation at the same time.
In this context, to envisage is to create. The interface is moving
into the brain; we see how electronic sensors can utilise biological
elements, and semiconductor devices use living micro-organisms.
We are approaching that point in our evolution where artificial
neural networks will join with our own biological neural networks
into a seamless cognitive whole: this will mean a marriage of
the immaterial and the material leading to transcendence over
the simple materiality of ‘natural’, unmediated life.
Self aware systems invested in self-replicating, self-defining
structures will raise questions about the nature and purpose of
art, just as artificial life technology, complexity and algorithmic
process have already raised questions about authorship. It will
be the role of research centres and media art centres to bring
these issues, through the vision of artists invested in moistmedia,
to the public arena.
Artists working with technology
are already bringing matters of mind and consciousness to the
top of their agenda. And in the sciences the pursuit of knowledge
in the attempt to understand consciousness is intense. For example,
in Tucson Arizona, every two years, nearly a thousand leading
scientists, technologists and philosophers from all over the world
assemble to present their research and discuss the issues raised
in the attempt to build a science of consciousness. At my research
centre CAiiA-STAR we convene the conference Consciousness Reframed
every year, which has over one hundred presentations by artists
and scientists from over 25 countries. The issues in every case
are: how does technology affect consciousness, how does our understanding
of the mind influence the technological and artistic goals we
set ourselves. But the "explanatory gap" between mind
and matter remains. While scientists seek to analyse, dissect
and explain consciousness, artists attempt to navigate consciousness
and create new structures, images and experiences within it. Consciousness
is a field where art and science can co-mingle, where together
we face what is perhaps the final frontier of knowledge - consciousness,
the ultimate mysterium. It is also of course precisely what shamanic
culture has been immersed in for millennia.
Though the shift from a predominantly
immaterial, screen-based culture to the re-materialisation of
art in moistmedia and nanotechnological construction will be radical,
the cannon of interactive art is not changed intrinsically. Even
though art practice will move from pixels to molecules, from fly-through
itineraries to bottom-up design, the five-fold path of Connectivity,
Immersion, Interaction, Transformation, Emergence will not
change. Our media may now become moist, our environment will reflect
the fall-out of the Big B.A.N.G., but the artistic process will
continue to follow the pathway that leads from connectivity (between
minds and systems) to immersion in the data/nano-fields. We shall
still plan interactive scenarios that lead to the transformation
of matter and mind, and the reframing of consciousness. We shall
continue to plant artistic seeds that can lead to the emergence
of images, structures, and relationships that provide us with
new insights, experiences and meaning.
In the moistmedia environment, the
artist will continue to be concerned to create the context within
which meaning and experience can be generated by the interactivity
of the viewer. Work with pixels and telematic networks will interact
with work with molecules and biological structures. Process will
still be valued over product. Reception (from the artist to the
viewer) will continue to give way to Negotiation (between artist
and viewer) in the theory of communication. We shall continue
to celebrate the contingency of the world over and above the killing
cosiness of unfounded certainties. Working with moistmedia will
reinforce our understanding that reality is to be actively constructed
rather than passively observed. The classical model of the Autonomous
Brain gives way to that of the Distributed Mind. Telenoia will
remain as the defining emotion of our time, just as paranoia so
succinctly describes the dominant attitude of industrial life
in the twentieth century. Finally, in reviewing the continuity
of the aesthetic in art from the digital to moistmedia, we shall
continue to be concerned with forms of behaviour rather than with
the behaviour of forms. The historic shift from the culture of
the objet d’art and the composition of meaning to that invested
in process, performance and the emergence of meaning will be maintained
and enriched in the moist ecology of art. So this radical shift
does not mean rupture or loss of those aesthetic assets and insights
built up in art over the past fifty years; instead it means a
development which can be enriched by recognising its links back
into the practices and purposes of quite ancient cultures, indeed
to aesthetic and spiritual values found in early societies throughout
the world.
Research into these values and the
societies which still uphold them, means immersing oneself in
their practices. For my part, I have spent time over the past
six years, in various parts of Brazil in search of that kind of
experience and for an understanding that will allow me to make
a connection between the non-ordinary states of consciousness
of early cultures and states of consciousness that new technologies
might engender. I have pursued this research on the basis that
it might provide useful insights into the ways we might proceed
with computer applications designed to extend, transform or emulate
the human mind. Three years ago, I flew into the remote Xingu
River region of the Matto Grosso, where I stayed with a group
of Indians known as the Kuikuru. While their shamans (or pajés)
played different roles - medical, social, or spiritual - they
all had in common the need to navigate psychic space, to communicate
with other worlds, both within themselves and out in the external
world of plants and animals.
I wanted to share my experience
of navigating cyberspace with them, to see if there were any commonalties,
anything either of us could learn from the other. I knew nothing
then of their most formative technology just as they knew nothing
of mine. While mine was invested in the interactivity and connectivity
of telematic, computer technology, theirs was invested in the
psychoactive and telepathic technology of plants. It was the first
intimation of the correspondences and perhaps co-ordinations I
was later to theorise between the two VRs, virtual reality technology
and vegetal reality technology. I should hasten to add that the
prescient pajés of the Kuikuru quickly saw the implications
and promises of cyberspace, and on a purely pragmatic level quickly
came to the conclusion that the Web could help save their culture,
avoiding the contagion of tourists and speculators, by restricting
visitors to a website, to visiting their village in cyberspace,
thereby protecting them physically from the transmission of disease
and their culture from invasive ideologies. They saw quickly saw
how it could also function as the market place for trading their
artefacts and craftwork, making them more independent of FUNAI,
and government interference more generally, and removing the need
of the bi-monthly airlift to trade in the city.
What I learned from them was particularly
significant for interactive art. I believe it is a lesson we could
learn also from many other non-westernised or aboriginal groups
in Asia, Africa, and Australia. All the activity of the pajés,
and of those who interact with them in painting, dancing, chanting,
making music, is performative but is not intended as a public
performance. It is never played to an audience, actual or implicit.
No one is watching or will be expected to watch what is being
enacted. It is not a public performance but a spiritual enactment,
which entails the structuring or re-structuring of psychic forces.
To paint the body elaborately, to stamp the ground repeatedly,
to shake the rattle, to beat the drum, to circle round, pace back
and forth in unison, is to invoke these forces, to conjure hidden
energies. This is an enactment of psychic power not a performance
or cultural entertainment. This perspective, although seen at
a distance from our current hypermediated culture, may be of value
in our consideration of the function of works of interactive art.
Art as an enactment of mind implies an intimate level of human
interaction within the system, which constitutes the work of art,
an art without audience in its inactive mode. Eschewing the passive
voyeur, the traditional gallery viewer, this technoetic aesthetic
speaks to a kind of widespread intimacy, closeness on the planetary
scale. It is the question of intimacy in the relationship between
the individual and cyberspace, which must be at the heart of any
research into technologically assisted constructions of reality.
The quality of intimacy in the relationship between artist, system
and viewer is of the greatest importance if a technologically
based practice is to engage or transform our field of consciousness.
So much early promise of art at
the interface (be it a screen or a prepared environment or intelligent
space) has been lost: that direct mind-to-mind experience of subtle
intimacy, has been wrecked by an indulgence in spectacle, mere
special effects. While the art of special effects is in some ways
the glory of our technical achievements, it can be disastrous
for the artist, just as hyperbole and inflated rhetoric can be
for the writer. Progressively we have seen intimacy and delicacy
in technological art being replaced publicly by heavy-handed spectacle.
Why? I think in part the museums have been to blame. In their
haste to appear contemporary and up to date, they have simply
rejigged the partitioning of their endless white cubes, as if
all interactive art needs for its proper installation is more
wall sockets to plug into, and lower light levels to show up the
screens. So the user of these one to one interactive installations
simply becomes part of an "interactive" performance
that other viewers passing by can observe….as a spectacle.
There has been little re-thinking of what the museum might be
in the wake of digitalisation and the rise of connectivity and
interactivity in the arts. The advent of Vegetal Reality as a
constituent technology of interactive art will compound the complexity
and increase the need to preserve intimacy in the manipulation
and experience of the work. There is a challenge here to all new
art centres and museums, for which answers are not readily available,
and for which no quick-fix solutions will be suitable. Only careful
negotiation between curators and artists, designers and technologists
in a truly transdisciplinary research and collaboration, is likely
to move in the right direction.
The key to understanding this new
state of being is language: the understanding that language is
not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world but
rather a tool for bringing the world into existence. Art is a
form of world building, of mind construction, of self-creation,
whether through interactive or psychoactive systems, molecular
modelling or nano-engineering. Art is the search for new language
embodied in forms and behaviours, texts and structures. When it
is embodied in Moistmedia, it is language involving all the senses,
going perhaps beyond the senses, calling both on our newly evolved
cyberception and our re-discovered psi-perception. As this language
develops we shall see that it can speak to individuals in all
kinds of social settings, notwithstanding their political complexion
or cultural constraints. These individuals in turn will contribute
to the construction of this planetary language through their interactivity
with the new scenarios and constructions that new media artists
will create. The art of the 21st century will constitute a language,
which builds the world as it defines the desire of those who articulate
it. If 20th century art was about self-expression and response
to experience, the art of our century will be about self-construction
and the creation of experience, with no clear distinction between
the maker and the viewer.
Moistmedia is transformative media;
moist systems are the agencies of change. Western art has been
through what its many theorists and commentators have chosen to
see as an extended period of materialism, attaching no significance
to the spiritual ambitions of its featured artists, and ignoring
the everyday intuitions and psychic sensibilities of those hundreds
of thousands of artists who have found no place in the history
books. Art in reality has always been a spiritual exercise no
matter what gloss prevailing political attitudes or cultural ideologies
have forced upon it. The role of technology, virtual, validated
and vegetal, is to provide the tools and media — moistmedia
— by which these spiritual and cultural ambitions can be
realised.
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