Art, Technology, Consciousness mind@large Edited by Roy Ascott intellect Art, Technology, Consciousness mind@large Edited by Roy Ascott First Published in Hardback in 2000 in Great Britain by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK Intellect Books, ISBS, 5804 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA Copyright ©2000 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 Copy Editor: Peter Young A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Electronic ISBN 1-84150-814-4 / Hardback ISBN 1-84150-041-0 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, thanks are due to Professor Ken Overshott, Principal of the University of Wales College Newport, for his continuing support. Contents Preface Beyond Boundaries 2 Edge-Life: technoetic structures and moist media – Roy Ascott Towards a Third Culture | Being in Between – Victoria Vesna The Posthuman Conception of Consciousness: a 10-point guide – Robert Pepperell Genesis: a transgenic artwork – Eduardo Kac Techno-Darwinism: artificial selection in the Electronic age – Bill Hill Not Science, or History: post digital biological art and a distant cousin – Michael Punt The Imagination of Matter, Pre-Columbian Cultural DNA and Maize Cultivation – Kathleen Rogers Meaning and Emotion 33 Capacity to Conceive New Meanings by Awareness of Conscious Experience – Michio Okuma & Isao Todo Motioning Toward the Emergent Definition of E-phany Physics – Bill Seaman Emotion Spaces Created from Poems – Tsutomu Miyasato The Process Appears: representation and non-representation in computer-based art – Christiane Heibach Towards a Physics of Meaning – John Sanfey Inquiry into Allegorical Knowledge Systems for Telematic Art – Tania Fraga Making Emotional Spaces in the Secret Project: building emotional interactive spaces – Richard Povall The Spectator Project: a multi-user narrative in ‘Mediaspace’ – Mike Phillips et al Interactive Media and the Construction of Dramatic Narrative: becoming and identity in contemporary American drama – Rhona Justice-Malloy Two Portraits of Chief Tupa Kupa: the image as an index of shifts in human consciousness – Niranjan Rajah Transmodalities 84 The Gift of Seeing: nineteenth century views from the field – Amy Ione Rendering the Viewer Conscious: interactivity and dynamic seeing – Tiffany Holmes The Mind’s Eye – Nina Czegledy Forms of Behaviour and a New Paradigm of Perception to the Production of New Sounds – Edson S. Zampronha Music Video, Technology and the Reversal of Perspective – Kevin Williams Paradigms of Change in Music and in Digital Communication – Dante Tanzi The Space of an Audiovisual Installation within a Real and a Virtual Environment – Dimitrios Charitos and Coti K ‘Give us the Funk…’ Machine Autonomy meets Rhythmic Sensibility – Jonathan Bedworth and Ben Simmonds The Synesthetic Mediator – Malin Zimm Location 129 Places of Mind: implications of narrative space for the architecture of information environments – Peter Anders Crystal Palace to Media Museum: a conceptual framework for experience and sight – Kylie Message Disturbing Territories – Shaun Murray Being @ Installations: the space-time of technoetics – Royden Hunt Evolutionary Algorithms in Support of Architectural Ground Plan Design – Tomor Elezkurtaj Mind Theory 155 There is no Intelligence – Ted Krueger Toward a Theory of Creative Inklings – Liane Gabora The Bicameral Mind and the Split-Brain Human Computer Interface – Gregory P Garvey Attractors and Vectors: the nature of the meme in visual art – Nicholas Tresilian Geo-Aesthetics of Quasi-Objects – Milan Jaros A Quantum Mechanical Model of Consciousness – John Cowley Conceptor: a model of selected consciousness features including emergence of basic speech structures in early childhood – Konrad R. Fialkowski and Boleslaw K. Szymanski The Twin-Data-Stream Theory of Consciousness – Paul Ableman Kantian Descriptive Metaphysics and Artificial Consciousness – Susan A.J.Stuart and Chris H. Dobbyn Towards a Physics of Subjectivity – Stephen Jones Preface The articles in this book are written by artists and scientists presenting papers at the Third International CAiiA-STAR Research Conference, Consciousness Reframed, at the University of Wales College, Newport (UWCN) in August 2000. The work of CAiiA-STAR <caiia-star.net> embodies artistic and theoretical research in new media and telematics, including aspects of artificial life, telepresence, immersive VR, robotics, technoetics, non linear narrative, ubiquitous computing, performance, computer music, and 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. As in our previous book, Reframing Consciousness, the approaches represented here are multidisciplinary and multicultural, offering many dynamic, compelling and provocative strategies, imaginative projects and creative lines of inquiry. Their purpose is to identify key questions rather than to provide definitive answers, to pursue creative implications rather than prescriptive explanations. Within a technological context, the book addresses contemporary theories of consciousness, subjective experience, the creation of meaning and emotion, the modalities of the senses, and relationships between cognition and location. Its focus is both on and beyond the digital culture, seeking to embrace the world of neurons and molecules, and to assimilate new ideas emanating from the physical sciences. At the same time spiritual aspects of human experience are considered along with the artistic implications of non- ordinary states of awareness. For additional information on the authors, please consult the Intellect website <www.intellectbooks.com>, and the last page of this book for their email details. Roy Ascott Director – CAiiA-STAR 1 Beyond Boundaries Edge-Life: technoetic structures and moist media Roy Ascott Life @ the edge of the Net Just as the development of interactive media in the last century transformed the world of print and broadcasting, and replaced the cult of the objet d’art with a process-based culture, so at the start of this century we see a further artistic shift, as silicon and pixels merge with molecules and matter. And just as broadcast radio, TV and the interactivity of the Net changed entirely the way we lived at the end of the 20th century, so now in daily life, our habits, attitudes and ambitions are undergoing a further transformation. We can call this Edge-Life since we are re-defining completely our identity, our social structures, and our picture of the world, here at the edge of the Net where the virtual flows seamlessly into the actual, the transient into the fixed, and the metaphysical into the material. Between the dry world of virtuality and the wet world of biology lies a moist domain, a new interspace of potentiality and promise. I want to suggest that Moistmedia (comprising bits, atoms, neurons, and genes) 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. This burgeoning awareness is technoetic: techne and gnosis combined into a new knowledge of the world, a connective mind that is spawning new realities and new definitions of life and human identity. This mind will in turn seek new forms of embodiment and of articulation. At the same time, as we seek to enable intelligence to flow into every part of our manmade environment, we recognise that Nature is no longer to be thought of as ‘over there’, to be viewed in the middle distance, benign or threatening as contingency dictates. It is no longer to be seen as victim ecology, fragile or fractious, according to our mode of mistreatment. Technology is providing us with the tools and insights to see more deeply into its richness and fecundity, and above all to recognise its sentience, and to understand how intelligence, indeed, consciousness, pervades its every living part. The mind of Gaia, set in de Chardin’s noosphere, is becoming amplified and perhaps transformed by the technoetic effects of human connectivity, ubiquitous computing and other far-reaching consequences of the Net. But, as multimedia gives way to moistmedia, and interactive art takes on a more psychoactive complexion, consciousness remains the great mysterium, just as intelligent artificial life remains the great challenge. For some years now artists working at the edge of the Net have been exploring the nature of consciousness and the potential