Reframing Consciousness Art, Mind and Technology
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Reframing Consciousness Art, mind and technology Edited by Roy Ascott intellect Reframing Consciousness Edited by Roy Ascott First Published in Hardback in 1999 by Intellect Books, FAE, Earl Richards Road North, Exeter EX2 6AS, UK First Published in USA 1999 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 5804 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA Copyright ©1999 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy- ing, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdani Cover Images: Peter Anders Copy Editor: Wendi Momen A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Electronic ISBN 1-84150-815-2 / Hardback ISBN 1-84150-013-5 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Wiltshire Acknowledgements There are many individuals to thank for their help in bringing this book into being. In addition to the authors themselves, my colleagues and students in CAiiA-STAR, the editorial support team at ACES, and the staff of Intellect, particular thanks are due to Professor Ken Overshott, Principal of the University of Wales College Newport, who has made privileged provision for CAiiA from its inception. His continuing support for the Consciousness Reframed conferences is much appreciated. Preface iv Introduction 1 Part I – Mind 1 Models 6 Can there be Non-Embodied Information? – Stephen Jones Acts Between and Between Acts – Ranulph Glanville Between Reality and Virtuality: Toward a New Consciousness? –Julio Bermudez The Actualisation of the Virtual – Mark Palmer We are the Consciousness Musicians – Electronic Art, Consciousness and the Western Intellectual Tradition – Mike King Immersive Computer Art and the Making of Consciousness – Laurie McRobert 2 Memory 38 Casablanca and Men in Black: Consciousness, Remembering, and Forgetting – Michael Punt Virtual Space and the Construction of Memory – Andrea Polli Memory Maps and the Nazca – Bruce Brown 3 Transcendence 52 Parallel Worlds: Representing Consciousness at the Intersection of Art, Dissociation, and Multidimensional Awareness – Kristine Stiles Sacred Art in a Digital Era: Or the Internet and the Immanent Place in the Heart – Niranjan Rajah and Raman Srinivasan Negotiating New Systems of Perception: Darshan, Diegesis and Beyond – Margot Lovejoy and Preminda Jacob Seeing Double: Art and the Technology of Transcendence – Roy Ascott Jumping Over the Edge: Consciousness and Culture, the Self and Cyberspace – Lily Díaz Space-time Boundaries in the Xmantic Web – Maria Luiza Fragoso Part II – Body 4 Post-biological Body 81 Recreating Ourselves: Romeo and Juliet in Hades by Future Movie – Naoko Tosa and Ryohei Nakatsu The Body as Interface – Jill Scott Art at the Biological Frontier – Eduardo Kac Images and Imaging – Amy Ione The Power of Seduction in Biomedicine – Nina Czegledy Stasis: The Creation & Exploration of Subjective Experiential Realities through Hypnosis, Psychosynthesis & Digital Technology – Richard Brown Emotion, Interactivity, and Human Measurement – Christopher Csikszentmihalyi Writing the Post-Biological Body – Steve Tomasula 5 Space and Time 119 For a Spatiotemporal Sensitivity – Ginette Daigneault Virtual Geographies, Borders and Territories: GPS Drawings and Visual Spaces – Andrea Wollensak An Exploration of Spatial/Temporal Slippage – Chris Speed Thinking Through Asynchronous Space – Mike Phillips The Space Between the Assumed Real and the Digital Virtual – Dan Livingstone Part III – Art 6 Strategies 145 The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Historiography – Brett Terry Mind Memory Mapping Metaphor:Is Hypermedia Cognitive Art? – Dew Harrison The House that Jack Built: Jack Burnham’s Concept of “Software” as a Metaphor for Art – Edward Shanken Streams of Consciousness: Info-Narratives in Networked Art – Christiane Paul Consciousness and Music – Mladen Milicevic The Irreducibility of Literary Consciousness – Philipp Wolf Nonsense Logic and Re-embodied Intelligence – Bill Seaman Conscious Isomorphisms and Young Farmers: Consciousness as a Subject of Artistic Research – Stefaan Van Ryssen Modeling Interpretation – Sharon Daniel Performing Presence – Barry Edwards 7 Projects 196 Éphémère: Landscape, Earth, Body and Time in Immersive Virtual Space – Char Davies Virtual Environment as Rebus – Margaret Dolinsky Dynamic Behavioural Spaces with Single and Multi-User Group Interaction – Miroslaw Rogala Reality, Virtuality and Visuality in the Xmantic Web – Tania Fraga Xmantic Webdesign – Fatima Bueno Assigning Handlers to a Shadow – Kieran Lyons 8 Architecture 223 Human Spatial Orientation in Virtual Worlds – Dimitrios Charitos An Interactive Architecture – Gillian Hunt Heterotic Architecture – Ted Krueger The Cybrid Condition: Implementing Hybrids of Electronic and Physical Space – Peter Anders Virtual Architecture as Hybrid: Conditions of Virtuality vs. Expectations from Reality – Dace Campbell 9 Creative Process 248 Acquiring an Artistic Skill: A Multidimensional Network – Christine Hardy Enlarging the Place for Creative Insight in the Theatre Model of Consciousness – Thomas Draper An Approach to Creativity as Process – Ernest Edmonds and Michael Quantrill We are having an idea: Creativity within Distributed Systems – Fred McVittie To be or not to be.... Conscious – Eva Lindh and John Waterworth Part IV – Values 10 Values 273 CyberArt & CyberEthics – Colin Beardon The Metaphoric Environment of Art and Technology – Carol Gigliotti The Four Seas: Conquest Colonisation, Consciousness in Cyberspace – Joseph Lewis Future Present: Reaestheticizing Life through a New Technology of Consciousness – Anna Bonshek and Gurdon Leete Conspiracies, Computers and Consensus Reality – Paul O’Brien The Failure and Success of Multimedia – Sean Cubitt Abstract Virtual Realism – Nik Williams Beyond Film & Television-whose Consciousness is it Anyway? – Clive Myer Chimera for the 21st Century: Mis-Construction as Feminist Strategy – Terry Gips Preface The articles in this book are representative of over a hundred papers presented at the Second International CAiiA Research Conference, Consciousness Reframed: art and consciousness in the post-biological era, which was convened at the University of Wales College, Newport (UWCN) in August 1998. CAiiA, the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, was established at UWCN in 1994 to research and advance new fields of practice emerging from the convergence of art, science and technology; fields in which questions of the mind and consciousness play an important part. In tandem with CAiiA, STAR – the Centre for Science, Technology and Art Research – was created in the School of Computing at the University of Plymouth in 1997. CAiiA-STAR operates as an integrated centre of research, pooling the considerable resources of both universities, and has attracted to its doctoral and postdoctoral research programmes artists who are amongst the principal proponents of their field . The work of CAiiA-STAR embodies artistic and theoretical research in interactive media and telematics, including aspects of artificial life, telepresence, immersive VR, robotics, non-linear narrative, computer music, intelligent architecture involving a wide range of technological systems, interfaces and material structures. As such it can be seen as a microcosm of a widely based and complex field which is developing internationally. While this means that a great diversity of issues are addressed, it is possible to discern a common thread in the emergent discourse of this field. This commonality of ideas embraces a radical rethinking of the nature of consciousness, awareness, cognition and perception, with mind as both the subject and the object of art. The CAiiA-STAR conferences have attracted speakers from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, France, Germany, Holland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA as well as the United Kingdom. This widespread response supports the contention that issues of mind and consciousness are significant in contemporary thinking about art and technology. In turn, the intensity and fecundity of work produced in this context, and the debates it engenders, insist that the conference be convened on an annual basis. The approaches represented here are multidisciplinary and multicultural, offering many dynamic, compelling and provocative strategies, projects and lines of inquiry. Their purpose has been to identify key questions rather than to provide definitive answers, to pursue creative implications rather than prescriptive explanations. Introduction To most readers it will seem to be no more than a truism to say that issues of consciousness are at the top of the agenda in art today. Surely, it will be argued, art has always been concerned with conscious experience, and with matters of sensation, perception, and cognition; it has always dealt with what is seen, felt and understood, and has always made objects to be seen, felt and understood. Who, if not the artist, explores the mystery of being, and what, if not a work of art, articulates the rich quality of human sensibility? Equally, it would seem to be nothing but perverse to suggest that it is technology, particularly computer technology, that has brought consciousness into particular focus in the art of today. Many will find it difficult to see how technology, apparently cold and alienating, could do anything