1. Third culture
The arts, science and technology are experiencing a period of profound change. Explosive challenges to the institutions and practices of engineering, art making, and scientific research raise urgent questions of ethics, craft, and care for the planet and its inhabitants. Unforeseen forms of beauty and understanding are possible, but so are too unexpected risks and threats. A newly global connectivity creates new arenas for interaction between science, art and technology but also creates the preconditions for global crises. Normally we use the terms digital everywhere, because it is embodied in our culture. We could talk about third culture1) as John Brockmann writes. The third culture , according to him, consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.
In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as “the intellectuals,” as though there were no others. This new definition by the “men of letters” excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg. In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a “third culture,” would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists. In Snow’s third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists.
Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game: journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, third culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public. The emergence of this third-culture activity – explains Brockmann – is evidence that many people have a great intellectual hunger for new and important ideas and are willing to make the effort to educate themselves. The wide appeal of the third-culture thinkers is not due solely to their writing ability; what traditionally has been called “science” has today become “public culture.” Of course we live now in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change. Indeed according with Stephen Jay Gould, the third culture is a very powerful idea2) .
There’s something of a conspiracy among literary intellectuals to think they own an intellectual landscape and the reviewing sources, when in fact there are a group of nonfiction writers, largely from the sciences, who have a whole host of fascinating ideas that people want to read about. And some of us are decent writers and express ourselves well enough. Nowadays the artist use the new capabilities to create work that explores the narratives and conceptual frameworks that underlie the research. At various points in history, charcoal, paints, sculpting tools and techniques, ceramics, and printmaking apparatus were state of the art technologies-. Recently, photography, cinema, electric machines, lights, radio, recording technologies and video were considered high technology. Now the technology art is a moving target. The artistic gesture to move into an area if emerging technology that is radical in one era and can being unnote worthy a few years later3) . This is a challenge to work with a medium before anyone define it as a medium. Yet several years later, when the technology has matured and the body artistic works has appeared, the choice does not have the same meaning. The relationship between science and technology is quite complex; it became a focus for philosophers of science – the application of scientific principles to solving problems. Currently, science and technology work together and inform each other. Finally, the connection to popular culture of some of the new technologies, such as digital imaging, interactive media, and Web art raises high art-low-art issues.
Science and technology and their associated cultural contexts are prime candidates for theory-based analysis because they create the mediated sign system and contexts that shape the contemporary world. The worlds resolving around digital technologies are seen as ripe for critical analysis because of their assurance of rationality of their directions and their totalizing pretensions.
2. Technoetics
Many electronic artists are interested in the new possibilities created by telecommunications technology and seem interested in inventing and extending the technology. We must be basically optimistic about the potential meanings of these developments. Roy Ascott, a longtime pioneer in this works, writes that the art of our time is one system, process, behavior, interaction, indeed this is precisely the potential of telematic system. With electronic media, its flows of images and texts, and the ubiquitous connectivity of telematic system, this isolation and separateness must eventually disappear, and new architectural structures and forms of cultural association will emerge. In this emergence we can expect to see, as we are beginning to see new orders of art practice, with new strategies and theories, new form of public accessibility, new method of presentation and display, new learning networks, in short, Roy Ascott writes, whole new cultural configurations4) .
Knowledge is accumulating at high speed, unanticipated branches of knowledge, industries, social contexts and technologies appeared. Furthermore this artistic stance calls for artist participation in other fields beyond the digital technologies. Roy Ascott uses the terms technoetics5) to describe a convergent field of practice that seeks to explore consciousness and connectivity through digital, telematic, chemical or spiritual means, embracing both interactive and psychoactive technologies, and the creative use of moistmedia6) . This syncretic7) approach redefines the relation between the body-mind and new technologies. Ascott uses the term moistmedia to represent a world between the dry world of virtuality and the wet world of biology that lies a moist domain, a new interspace of potentiality and promise. He wants to suggest that Moistmedia (comprising bits, atoms, neurons, and genes, BIG B.A.N.G.8) will constitute the substrate of the art of our new century, a transformative art concerned with the construction of a fluid reality.
This will mean the spread of intelligence to every part of the built environment coupled with recognition of the intelligence that lies within every part of the living planet. In according with Ascott, the artist’s role at the larger planetary level of self-organising and self-aware systems, will be to plant, grow and cultivate new forms, new structures and new meanings. The notion of cyberbotany, Ascott writes, extends from the wise application of plant technology, in the technoetic context, to the creative employment of horticultural metaphor in envisioning outcomes at the material level of construction. In this visionary pragmatism can guide the artist’s participation in building worlds that we would want to live in and indeed can take the love inherent in the telematic embrace9) and create new relationships, new societies, and new cultures. To Ascott the best media employed to effect these changes will be Moistmedia, the networks that sustain them will be technoetic, and the cyberception of the planetary society as a whole will reflect a growing sense of optimism and telenoia. Roy Ascott writes that 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. But just, the english artist explains, how 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 effect a transcendence of the material state and like computer-mediated perception and cognition, plant entheogens alter our consciousness, our understanding and viewing of the world and ourselves. Both technologies, technological and pharmacological, provide fields of awareness which are usually at odds with our everyday, so-called common sense of reality. According to Ascott, who considers the space of our consciousness, or its state at any given point, is the triangulation of the mind between three poles, what he refers to as the Three VRs: Virtual Reality, Validated Reality and Vegetal Reality10) .
Fig. 1 The ambiguity of Self: living in a variable reality, © Roy Ascott 2008.
3. Third lives
For the first time, not only are humans fully aware of evolution at work but they witness it as it un folds in novel ways and at accelerated speed. More important, they play a direct and conscious role in its development on a large physical scale. In the age of molecular biology, robotic age we can start to talk about a new form of life in relationship between human and artificial nature in a sort of hybridization, infection and cooperation. Artists working with the tools of the bio-technology age grapple with the complexity of life, that is, the interaction among genetics, organism and several environments. They resist biological determinism and reductionism and they demonstrate the fragility of the objective edifice of science. Pier Luigi Capucci describes this new form of life as the third life ((( Pier Luigi Capucci, From life to life. The multiplicity of the living, in New Realities: Being Syncretic. IXth Consciousness Reframed Conference, 2008. ))).
The term of Artificial Life is used to describe an extension of life’s idea outside the organic realm, making it more general, universal. To Capucci, the living is no more defined by the matter it is made of, but by the instructions which rule it: the living is no more hardware based, but software based. Indeed after the first life, (biological life), the symbolic life is the second level of life through the acquisition acquired by our species seems at the basis of the ongoing and future evolution of life form. In fact in according with Capucci, through the symbols (symbolic life) we developed our conscience, imagination, interiority, introspection, self-awareness and we created the conditions to transcend the physical constraints of the “here and now” and crafted parallel worlds, from which mythologies, rites, and religions were born. Thanks to symbols we developed, – explains Capucci – in an almost hypertrophic fashion, the ability of projecting, imaging and designing the future, and ways to be living in the future. In fact we live in the future, a relevant part of our thoughts, acts, activities, ideas and projects are declined to the future.
Lastly after symbolic life, nowadays we participate to developed a new form of life: the third life, that represents a bio-technological model, where biology and artificial meet. Capucci writes that the symbolic dimension is an increasingly autonomous universe, constantly expanding and restructuring itself. It is a universe which is mainly based on simulation, and the simulation process is probably at the core of the evolution. This universe of simulation can mix up and often totally substitute what we call “the real world”. The artifacts and machines we have invented stem from the use of symbolic intelligence, and often, such as in the case of artificial intelligence, they come from an attempt to simulate or emulate it. Finally we can explain and understand our living and the worlds that we generate is possibly due to the nature of our living as structure-determined system. In fact ethics and morals are our intrinsic responsibility in the worlds that we generate with our living because it is only we can distinguish and live or not live in them. In other words, we mustn’t forget that art can have a dark, transgressive dimension that does not imitate the world but rather produce a new world where values may be not only contrary to those accepted in the world, but simply incomparable. The art could be the bridge to connect the science and technology and to reflect on new dimension of humanity and a new aesthetics sense of world.
Fig. 2 © Pier Luigi Capucci, From life to life. The multiplicity of the living, in New Realities: Being Syncretic. IXth Consciousness Reframed Conference, 2008
4. Metrobody: new metric of body in the third millennium
In the end we could came back to the opening of the discourse, the artists during the third millennium have begun to tackle the concepts, the tools, and the contexts of scientific and technological research: the results of their works are provocative and intriguing. These artists, who have been working combining both scientific and technological approach, outlined new perspectives in the art fields, in order to explain the complexity of the world following a trans-disciplinary method. A proposal could be to re-categorize aesthetics in relation to trans-media and digital flows, analyzing artworks from a different perspective in a “post-digital” context and re-examining the relationship between science and art. Nowadays the images offered redefines body condition and the feelings it produces in relation to the world through the use of new technologies.
We can identify this new condition, undertaken by body, introducing a neologism: the ‘metro-body’. This expression allows me to reconfigure and hypothesize a different level and a different meaning of corporeality. When we enter in connection with digital space, the shape and the image of our body perception are “embedded”, reacting to the presence of our body with a corporeal-feedback. The corporeal-feedback consists of a complex, distinct, decomposed and hybrid image. It is at this stage of re-configuration that the condition of the metro-body comes into existence. It works as a filter between our Leib11) (lived body), that interacts in connection with digital space and our bodies, which are virtually embodied in multiple functional identities marked with distinctive passwords and nicknames (avatar). Art has long questioned its status in relation to modern technologies, to understand the importance of this new and varied corporeal dimensions: from Ballard’s sci-fi literature, to Cronenberg’s films; from Artaud’s Body without Organs (CSO), to all the various forms of Body Art; from Orlan’s aesthetic and bio-politic practices, to Sterlac’s contamination between flesh and technology, up to Jaron Lanier’s virtual reality. Artists have investigated the meaning of this new existential dimension, adopting plural and innovative means and elaborating meta-narratives of bodies and changing identities. Aesthetics, considered as the science of sensory knowledge, must take into account and analyze this new social and artistic reality. In order to do that successfully, aesthetics must also be contaminated with anthropology, psychology, semiotics and natural sciences, placing itself in a trans-disciplinarity context. Within this new conception, aesthetics is no longer considered as a delimited area, but moves through bodies floating in a the displaced territory made of humankind connections. A thorough evaluation of this composed term has led philosophers to “touch” their discipline and their tools in relation to body, intended as a container of symbolic meanings that interacts and mingles with and through mechanisms of connection and hybridization with digital devices and their applications. And in the other hand, this new contaminated and floating aesthetics is capable to illuminate a new multi-identity.
Contemporary society is facing the challenge of complexity and in this panorama the metro-body concept functions as a filter of a new bodily condition, placed between the reality and the virtual space. At the same time, aesthetics is going to participate actively, in a trans-disciplinary way, to a new form of narrative (cross-media-narrative). Therefore, we could say that a new form of trans-aesthetics (aesthetics-of-transition) is possible; it floats through hybrid bodies in a digital world. Interacting with different and plural specializations in various technological-scientific fields, even art itself has transformed its corpus in relation to social change. The introduction of new technological devices has extended the limits of our bodies, opening philosophical and scientific debates upon a new anthropocentric prospective. New media have modified the perception of the world and have also modified the relation between humans and nature. Multimedia, interactivity, ipermediation and virtuality represent the ingredients of a new dimension of communication and information. Considering the body as immersed in the process of opening itself to virtual boundaries and so acquiring new meanings.
This over-semiotics of body needs a new approach. For example there are several artists developing distinct approaches in which body is multiplied (virtual bodies and avatars, Maurice Benayoun12), Jeffrey Shaw13) etc..), digitally dissected (Visible Human Project14) ), crossbreeded with a machine (as Stelarc15) , Marcel.Lì Antunez16) , etc…), and relocated in the robotic (Hiroshi Ishiguro17) ) and biological (The Tissue Culture and Art Project18) , Critical Art Ensemble19) , etc…) realm. These different experiences bring to conclude that body is better conceivable as the result of the mixture of classical and contemporary points of view.
In other words, how will be the body’s future? Maybe we are already living in that way. This hybridization takes the form of these silent bodily mutations, where body “passes” from a solid state to a liquid state heading towards a gaseous state, from a carnally written formation to a digital informative inscription. If we think on transhumanist theories (i.e. Moravec20) , Minsky21) and Kurzweil22) ), we try to overturn the science-fiction approach adopted by transhumanist theorists into a more concrete vision. In other words, according to my position, transhumanist thought should be read in a positive way.
In this sense, the terms involved in a transitive relation could be inserted in a sensorial polycentrism23) where the “transit” is perpetually ongoing. From my point of view, this more concrete interpretation of the transhumanist theories should be seen as an ontological revision of the body, which can now be considered both as a subject and an object. This digital, technological, biological, nanotechnological, transculturalist approach creates a bodily consciousness. In this new context, aesthetics as a philosophical discipline has also the chance to go beyond its limits (beyond an aesthetic), reconfiguring itself in a digital way and blending with other disciplines. I provide my personal considerations on how the body needs a new metric in order to understand itself within our anthropologically and technologically changing panorama. This panorama is describable as a trans-formation, where the suffix trans bears the meaning of crossover − toward and among − while formation part stands for an artificial and biological development. It is in the course of this metamorphosis that, quoting Heidegger, the process of “in becoming” “happens”; and it is in this situation, again, that the “event” (Ereignis by Heidegger24) ) of bodily transition is possible.
Body is included in a digital dynamicity, and it develops itself in a codification of mechanical, biological and virtual components, providing us with meta-bodily data. The concept of metro-body represents the idea of a new metric of body, conceived both as a mutant parameter and a transitive variable. From this point of view, body becomes similar to a landscape and it thrills itself into metro-bodily passages. Aesthetics extends its control over the realm of feelings in a “undisciplined” way, and starts to redefine its disciplinary structure in order to go towards “the beyond of aesthetics”. Following the line of this trans-disciplinary approach, in my opinion the “aesthetics of beyond” as a “methodology of feelings”. In an epoch − ours − where body undergoes several kinds of mutation, art dialogs with sciences and technology. In this context the body is understood as a device because it gets “deviced” with and through this trans-mutating process. Inside this short-circuit, body finds itself between the digital and the physical. “Body disposition” in the digital world opens up a new model of existence, a new way of living. Artist’s hand catches the artworld from the risk of falling into dehumanization and allows this technological device to become aesthetic. Body narrates itself “dipping” into the technological narration surrounded by a multi-sensorial context. Disciplines are moving along a “transdisciplinary doing”, heading towards a simplification of the complexity of the world, erasing the gloss that veils it. I outlined in my research that this is the challenge that the new metric of the body must face to make sense of it all in order to appreciate, with prepared ears, the noise of the world which thrills looking for a sound.
Lastly we could think the body as technological device in an aesthetics of transition as huge challenge, to grasp an understanding of the body in the context of our trans-media and trans-diciplinary discourse. This sophisticated approach to the role of embodiment in our digital age reveals the “metro-body” as a very promising concept in addressing the constant creation of meaning we face today both on the virtual and analog side of mediatechnology.
I tried to show that the paradigmatic shift in understanding the differentiation between human and nature calls for an interplay of art, media, science and technology that thrives towards a “new anthropocentric perspective”. I identified that the transformation is the anthropological and technological paradigma of the trans-media age. The image of the body itself is becoming dynamic through the experience of the digital and unfolds today in terms of the analog and the virtual at the same time. This process follows the thought of Walter Benjamin25) , Vilém Flusser26) , Marshall McLuhan27) , Derrik De Kerckhove28) and outlines how the body is placed in a time in which signs and information are continuously being produced.
This approach is in line with contemporary cultural practices dealing between science and art. We try to understand clearly that critical theories on cross-media narratives and recent technological developments tend to oversee the benefit and productiveness discourses in art, science, media and technology. This methodology allows to merge classical and contemporary perspectives on the body between the natural and artificial in a very innovative way, where the body placed between the analog and the virtual. My idea of the “aesthetic touch-screen“ applies perfectly to the challenge of complexity we are facing nowadays. On the other hand my concept of “screenpathy“ outlines that the concept of the body itself can be understood as a game. I provide a fine analysis of the oversemiotisation of the body in its multiplied, digital, robotic and biological connotation. Furthermore, my analysis of the body in the process of becoming global provides a fresh reading of trans-humanist theories under a positive perspective, which leads to an ontological revision of the body, where the distinction between the subject and the object becomes obsolete. We take the condition of present multi-identity development into consideration, as well as new forms of narratives (cross-media-narratives) and types of trans-aesthetics (aesthetics-of-transition) in order to develop an understanding of “floating“, the real process in which the human image and ontological condition of the body is rooted nowadays. In this perspective in which the inscribed meta-narratives of bodies and their changing identities allow a contemporary understanding of aesthetics to go beyond their mere benefits in art. It opens up the process of subjectivation in the post-digital age for an existential understanding of our mediated sense of presence.
Finally the concept of the “metro-body“ is thought as a metric for the body under post-digital condition. Here the body itself becomes a device, an interface, a tool, a piece of art, emphasizing its transitional state. In other words, nowadays the natural sciences need to be open to the playfulness inherent in the arts, specifically the playful nature that the arts have in toying with scientific observations. Alan Shapiro in this context writes how the transdisciplinary method can promote interesting ways of thinking, and one way is through metaphor29) . In this new digital process, the art is rethought as a process, where science and technology are integrated, which cross the various field of knowledge in a communication system, in the end, understanding and recognizing the complex natural process of evolution of art.
The chance to cross the single disciplines and to go “the beyond of aesthetics“ is a very exciting idea. The body itself becomes a device, which potentially could become a new model of existence. This reflection could be interesting and powerful model against dehumanization and calls for a reaestheticization of technology and science.
Bibliography
Roy Ascott, (2008) Cybernetic, Technoetic, Syncretic: the prospect for Art, Editorial. Leonardo Vol 41 No.3. p.204
-, Telematic Embrace. Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, University of California Press, 2003.
-, The Technoetic Dimesion of Art, in Art @ Science, Sommerer C., Mignonneau L. (eds.), Springer-Verlag/Wien 1998, pp. 279-289.
-, Roy Ascott, 2008, Technoetic Art, Intellect Book 2003.
John Brockman, The third culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Simon & Schuster, 1995
Massimo Canevacci., (2010). Aria de pixel: riprodutibilità aurática digitale. Psicologia & Sociedade, 22(1), 169-179.
-, Image Accumulation and Cultural Syncretism, in Theory Culture and Society 9, no. 3 (1992): 95–110.
Pier Luigi Capucci, From life to life. The multiplicity of the living, in New Realities: Being Syncretic. IXth Consciousness Reframed Conference, 2008.
Vilém Flusser, Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder, European Photography, Gottingen 1985, trad. it., Patriarca S., Immagini. Come la tecnologia ha cambiato la nostra percezione del mondo, Fazi Editore, Roma 2009.
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe Volume 5. This collection includes “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (1935–1936), trad. it., (1954) Saggi e discorsi. La questione delle tecnica, trad. it., Mursia Editore, Milano 1976.
Derrick De Kerckhove., Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business, Bosch & Keuning, Brainframes. Mente, tecnologia, mercato, trad. it., Baskeville, Bologna 1993.
Link
http://www.alan-shapiro.com/international-flusser-lecture-by-alan-n-shapiro/
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge101.html
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html
http://stelarc.org/testForFlash.html
http://www.mecad.org/afasia/menu.html
http://www.geminoid.jp/en/index.html
http://tcaproject.org/projects/noark
PDF (2,3 MB)
- ( John Brockman, The third culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Simon & Schuster, 1995. [↩]
- ( http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge101.html [↩]
- ( Stephen Wilson, Information Arts. Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England 2002, pp. 3-9. [↩]
- ( Art and Education in the Telematic Culture, in Leonardo. Supplemental Issue, Vol. 1, Electronic Art (1988), pp. 7-11. The first time that Roy Ascott used this terms finds in the text When the Jaguar lies down with the Lamb: speculations on the post-biological culture, First publishing in Portuguese: Ascott, R., Quando a onça se deita com a ovelha: a arte com mídias úmidas e a cultura pós-biológica, in: Domingues D. (ed). Arte e vida no século XXI. São Paulo: Editora UNESP. 2003, pp. 273-284.
The defining aesthetic of this media-shift will be technoetic, that is to say a fusion of what we know and may yet discover about consciousness (noetikos) with what we can do and will eventually achieve with technology. It will make consciousness both the subject and object of art. In wise societies Techne and Noetikos have always been related, and at every level. Art has always been a spiritual exercise no matter what gloss prevailing political attitudes or cultural ideologies have forced upon it.
Roy Ascott, CAiiA-STAR Symposium: ‘Extreme parameters. New dimensions of interactivity’, (11-12 july 2001). [↩] - ( Technoetics is a convergent field of practice that seeks to explore consciousness and connectivity through digital, telematic, chemical or spiritual means, embracing both interactive and psychoactive technologies, and the creative use of moistmedia.
Roy Ascott, 2008, Technoetic Art, Intellect Book 2003. Roy Ascott, 2008, Technoetic Art, Intellect Book 2003.
Cfr. Monico F., Reviewing the Future: Vision, innovation, emergence, Conference Planetary-Collegium Montreal, 19-22 Aprile 2007, Canada.
Cfr. Monico, F. (2008). La Variazione Technoetica in “Le variazioni Grandi” Quaderno di Comunicazione 8. Roma: Meltemi.
Cfr. Ascott, R. (2008). “Cybernetic, Technoetic, Syncretic: the prospect for Art”. Editorial. Leonardo Vol 41 No.3. p.204
Roy Ascott, The Technoetic Dimesion of Art, in Art @ Science, Sommerer C., Mignonneau L. (eds.), Springer-Verlag/Wien 1998, pp. 279-289. [↩] - (http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=142/ [↩]
- ( Roy Ascott uses the terms “syncretic”, which has been seen historically as an attempt to reconcile and analogise disparate religious and cultural practices, may contribute today to our understanding of the multi-layered worldviews – material and metaphysical – that are emerging with our engagement in, amongst other things, ubiquitous computing and post-biological technology. For Roy Ascott the syncretic process is not in any way to be confused with synthesis, in which disparate things meld into a homogenous whole, thereby loosing their individual distinction. Nor is it mere eclecticism, which usually signals a wavering course of thought of only probable worth. In the syncretic context, extreme differences are upheld but aligned such that likeness is found amongst unlike things, the power of each element enriching the power of all others within the array of their differences. Standing in emphatic distinction to binary opposition, syncretism is a process between different elements, the in-between condition of ‘being both’.
Roy Ascott, Syncretic Reality: art, process, and potentiality, 2005. Roy Ascott, Syncretic Reality: art, process, and potentiality, 2005. http://www.drainmag.com/contentNOVEMBER/FEATURE_ESSAY/Syncretic_Reality.htm
Cultur syncretism refers to the methodology of montage and collage, to “cross-cultural plots of music, clothing, behaviour, advertising, theatre, body language, or . . . visual communication, spreading multi-ethnic and multi-centric patterns”
Massimo Canevacci, Image Accumulation and Cultural Syncretism, in Theory Culture and Society 9, no. 3 (1992): 95–110. [↩] - ( Moistmedia is set to create a whole new post-biological universe, quite unlike the world as legislated on high in its authorised version with its apparently immutable laws. Let me extend the metaphor by likening the creation of this new universe to that of the first cosmic Big Bang, 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, systems and services, will be based. It too heralds an expanding universe, full of complexity and contradictions, equally rich in evolutionary potential, but hopefully assisted by the speed and subtlety that advanced technology can bring.
Roy Ascott, CAiiA-STAR Symposium: ‘Extreme parameters. New dimensions of interactivity’, (11-12 july 2001). [↩] - ( Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace. Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, University of California Press, 2003 [↩]
- ( Ascott describes the Virtual Reality which allows the viewer to see simultaneously both the internal dynamics and the external features of an object of study, as for example in surgery, VR encompasses a whole ontology of telepresence, of sensory immersion, and immaterial connectivity, which affords the VR changes the way we view ourselves, the manner of our comportation, and environments we wish to inhabit. According to Ascott, 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. Vegetal Reality can be understood in the context of technoetics, as the transformation of consciousness by plant 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. However, frequently during the past century we have seen how the shaman’s knowledge of plants has been appropriated, and synthesised by the pharmacutical industry. This ancient knowledge provides us with some of the more spectacular products of modern medicine.
Roy Ascott, When the Jaguar lies down with the Lamb: speculations on the post-biological culture, CAiiA-STAR Symposium: ‘Extreme parameters. New dimensions of interactivity’, (11-12 july 2001). [↩] - ( Edmund Husserl, (1931) Méditations cartésiennes, trad. it., Meditazioni Cartesiane, trad. it., Bompiani, Milano, 1960. [↩]
- ( http://www.benayoun.com/ [↩]
- ( http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/ [↩]
- ( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html [↩]
- ( http://stelarc.org/testForFlash.html [↩]
- ( http://www.mecad.org/afasia/menu.html [↩]
- ( http://www.geminoid.jp/en/index.html [↩]
- ( http://tcaproject.org/projects/noark [↩]
- ( http://www.critical-art.net/ [↩]
- ( Cfr., Hans Moravec, Il robot universale, in Il corpo tecnologico, Capucci P.L., (a cura di) Baskerville, Bologna 1994.
Cfr., Hans Moravec, Robot. Mere Machine to Trascendent Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York 1998. [↩] - ( Cfr., Marvin Minsky, Conscious Machines, in Machinery of Consciousness, Proceedings, National Research Council of Canada, 75th Anniversary Symposium on Science in Society, June 1991. [↩]
- ( Cfr., Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Penguin Paperback, New York 1998. [↩]
- ( Massimo Canevacci., (2010). Aria de pixel: riprodutibilità aurática digitale. Psicologia & Sociedade, 22(1), 169-179. [↩]
- ( Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe Volume 5. This collection includes “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (1935–1936), trad. it., (1954) Saggi e discorsi. La questione delle tecnica, trad. it., Mursia Editore, Milano 1976. [↩]
- ( Walter Benjamin, Das Passagenwerk, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982, trad. it., I «passages» di Parigi, Einaudi, Torino 20073
Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1955, trad. it., Filippini E., L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, Einaudi, Torino 2003.
[↩] - ( Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Graw-Hill Book Company, New York 1964, trad. it., E. Capriolo, Gli strumenti del comunicare, Il Saggiatore, Milano 1967. [↩]
- ( Vilém Flusser, Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder, European Photography, Gottingen 1985, trad. it., Patriarca S., Immagini. Come la tecnologia ha cambiato la nostra percezione del mondo, Fazi Editore, Roma 2009. [↩]
- ( Derrick De Kerckhove, Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business, Bosch & Keuning, Brainframes. Mente, tecnologia, mercato, trad. it., Baskeville, Bologna 1993 [↩]
- ( I think that interdisciplinarity in itself is insufficient, because interdisciplinarity implies that what is required to move knowledge forward is merely dialogue and cooperation among the existing disciplines or academic-scientific fields of knowledge. My position is rather that the knowledge of different disciplines should first be brought together, and then a project of deep rethinking of everything should take place, leading, among other things, to a new classification system of knowledge. When this rethinking happens, then the whole will be much greater than the sum of the parts.
Alan Shapiro, Software of the Future, or The Model Precedes the Real, International Flusser Lecture, 10 Luglio 2012, Berlin.
http://www.alan-shapiro.com/international-flusser-lecture-by-alan-n-shapiro/ [↩]
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