Selected Courses on Digital Art-UOWM

13 Νοεμβρίου 2014

Digital Culture – Cyberart. Interactive Art as the Doorway to the Future

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CIBERARTE
Digital Culture – Cyberart. Interactive Art as the Doorway to the Future
Roy Ascott
In the course of this paper I hope to show how art has moved from its preoccupation with being a window on to the world towards becoming a doorway into another reality, an opening through which the viewer can pass to engage in a new kind of relationship with the artist in the creative process. This new kind of relationship involves interactivity and transformation: interactivity between people and computational systems, and the consequent transformation of images, structures and ideas within those systems and within the viewer’s consciousness.
I describe the approach to interactivity in art as constituting a five-fold path of Connectivity, Immersion, Interaction, Transformation, and Emergence. It involves the creation of new worlds, in whose construction the viewer can become actively involved. It is the world of cyberspace, telematic networks, of telepresence, virtual reality and the technology of artificial life. It is life at the edge of the Net, in a space of connectivity that has no centre. At the edge of the Net we are in a particularly unresolved, ambiguous zone, partly virtual, partly material. It is the interspace between these two conditions that engages the imagination of many artists today, and particularly exercises architects and engineers faced with accommodating the Internet society within a post-biological environment. And it is with the coming together of the silicon dry world of interactive media with the wet biology of living systems, that the emergence of a new substrate and vehicle for art can be detected, which I identify as ‘moistmedia’, and which may lead to the evolution of a moist art. Moistmedia involves bits, atoms, neurons and genes (B.A.N.G.) co-existing in new configurations of form and meaning. If the universe as we know it started with the first Big Bang, we can be sure a new cultural universe is forming from this second Big B.A.N.G..
I would be trespassing far from my area of expertise if I tried to argue philosophically for these ideas, but I think it appropriate at the start of my presentation to recognize the relevance to cyberculture of radical constructivism in formulating the aesthetic of interactive art. The thrust of the movement’s ideas was expressed by the cyberneticist and bio-mathematician Heinz von Foerster in his classic 1973 lecture ‘On Constructing a Reality’ [http://platon.ee.duth.gr/~soeist7t/Lessons/lesson2_2.htm] which showed how the environment, as we perceive it, is our invention, describing the neuro-physiological mechanisms of these perceptions and the ethical and aesthetic implications of these constructs. Artists working now in cyberspace and eventually with moistmedia contribute to this perspective by creating worlds in whose construction and definition the viewer can be actively involved, and in which perception can be
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restructured and amplified. The point I wish to make also, in this context, is that many artists in the field I am discussing value the philosophical aspect of their work, and its appeal to the mind, rather more than its visual or aesthetic qualities alone.
The roots of interactive art date back to at least 1957, when Marcel Duchamp, in a University of Texas lecture, described the artist as medium, and talked about the viewer interacting with the artwork to bring about meaning. The 1960s saw innumerable events, happenings and actions involving some degree of interaction, described, for example, in Frank Popper’s Art: Action and Participation 1or Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 2.
The interest in art and technology, cybernetics and systems theory of the time led to experiments with computers and communications, and eventually to digital and telematic art. The term ‘interactive art’ was coined, or at least given public currency, in 1989, the year in which the journal Kunstforum and the Festival Ars Electronica [http://www.aec.at/en/index.asp] introduced it definitively into the canon of Western art.
For my part, I proposed a cybernetic art matrix in 1964 in ‘Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision’3, which saw in worldwide communication a necessary conduit for art as it became increasingly process-based, fluid and transformational. At the end of the 1970s the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington funded me to stage the firs t 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 [http://www.ecafe.com/getty/HIS/] a real-time communication satellite hook-up between people on the street in New York and in LA. La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale [http://www.t0.or.at/~radrian/ARTEX/PLISSURE/plissure.html]was the title of a project involving dispersed authorship that I created for Frank Popper’s Electra at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 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, which I organized as an international commissioner for the 1986 Venice Biennale, 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 [http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Ascott.html] for the 1989 festival of Ars Electronica.
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In one sense we recognize that all art is interactive now, whether the work consists in the static field of a painting or a dynamic system in cyberspace. In every case artistic experience and meaning are the product of a negotiation between the viewer and the viewed, rather than the one-way transmission of content. In the case of computer-mediated interactive art some would argue that silicon-based, computer-mediated interactivity has reached its peak, if not actual maturity. Others talk of its decline, arguing that the impact on art practice of technology, especially digital and communications technology, has been to reduce art in many cases to a form of craft in which polished technique or skilful programming, leading to dazzling special effects, have come to replace the creation of meaning and values. A resonance with the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris is invoked. There was then the same process of dumbing down from art to craft, in which the authoring of technique took primacy over the authoring of ideas, with a pandering to a luxury market, partially obscured by a veneer of social conscience. That view is refuted in my experience by a great deal of the conceptually based, open-ended and evolutional work I see in juries of the annual Ars Electronica Festival, the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles and the Intercommunication Centre Biennale in Tokyo. Here interactivity stretches far beyond the screen to complex intelligent environments and robotic structures. It is refuted by collaborations of artists in the Net, which will also, I suspect, lead to further artistic development as wireless applications bring the telematic interface into the very clothes that we wear, into our bodies, and eventually to the chip in the brain … which only a few decades ago was considered to be pure science fiction.
But we should not forget the initial shock of interactivity. The liberation and elation felt by the viewer’s ability to influence, if not totally to control, the evolution of a work of art, a narrative fiction, a line of thought, through the magic of interactive media, on-line and off, in cyberspace and bionic space, with all the accoutrements of hyperlinks and cybernetic loops, simply at the touch of a button or a wave of the hand. But the shock is wearing off. There is interactivity on every desktop now, and soon it will come, if not to your own kitchen and living-room, then to a home near you. Interactivity has turned the corner and is becoming a part of your life, your house, your entertainment centre, your car and, not least, your job. Computing is ubiquitous, and intelligence is seeping out of the human brain into every man-made object, tool and environment. But for the fact that the Net is all edge (as I have said, there is no centre), we could anticipate art effectively being driven out of cyberspace by the colonizing thrust of an aggressive e-commerce. Instead many artists are being absorbed within
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web-based corporations and much artistic creativity is being expended on the capitalist machine. This should not surprise us since internet start-up companies, particularly in Silicon Valley, seem to be becoming the primary vehicle for creative imagination, if not for artistic thought. Though of course, as in art historically, relatively few start-ups survive.
Attention is now turning towards nano-technology and the convergence of digital media and molecular technology, which I call moistmedia (dry silicon with wet molecules, or pixels and particles).
http://www.itaucultural.org.br/invencao/invencao.htm
Plugado, molhado e úmido: arte na beira da net
Roy Ascott
Para Roy Ascott a arte dos próximos 30 anos será a arte da consciência. Mas uma consciência dupla, uma mente aberta à ciberpercepção. Ascott usa o termo technoetic, que significa consciência + tecnologia. Ele engloba o antigo e o moderno, o espiritual e o artificial, o cósmico e o cultural. O corpo humano e os seres artificiais passam a ter um habitat em comum. É o desenvolvimento pós biológico. Uma troca entre o humano e o eletrônico, a moistmedia (mídia úmida). E com o surgimento desta nova realidade torna-se necessário um novo meio, uma nova arquitetura.Uma arquitetura onde o que importa não é o que sentimos sobre os lugares, mas o que os lugares sentem por nós, não o que as construções parecem para nós, mas o que nós parecemos para elas. Uma arquitetura capaz de se auto organizar, de se auto restaurar e até de perceber quais reformas são necessárias.
Pode-se questionar se este processo não fará com que o ser humano perca sua identidade e seu significado. Há uma preocupação em estar envolvido no nosso processo de desenvolvimento e tanto a identidade como o significado podem ser nossa criação.
A ciberpercepção nos permitirá entrar nos mundos interior e exterior de maneira profunda e rica, muito mais que através dos nossos sensos naturais. É possível estabelecer paralelos entre estes dois mundos. Roy Ascott considera
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que os avatares e agentes eletrônicos, por exemplo, correspondem no mundo natural às entidades de Candomblé e Umbanda.
While the desire to enter these realms is quite strong in many artists, access to the necessary laboratories is difficult and funding virtually non-existent. It was the same 30 years ago, when artists could see the potential of digital media but could not get their hands on the machines; slowly they infiltrated into computer laboratories and into corporate systems. Much of our work at that time was due to the subvention of the commercial network I.P.Sharp in Toronto and the support of Jacques Vallee’s Infomedia Corporation in San Bruno, CA. Similarly now, those artists who see the potential for their art in moistmedia must cross the difficult barrier of gaining access to laboratories and biotechnology research centres. One exponent of moistmedia is Eduardo Kac, whose genetically engineered fluorescent rabbit Alba has captured many headlines worldwide. Tissue culture art researches the use of tissue culture and tissue engineering as a medium of artistic construction. Tissue engineering can be seen as the way to produce bio-artificial organs for the body, and, if applied to the production of semi-living objects (a combination of living tissue and artificial support) can be used to create living sculpture. In 1999 Kac produced Genesis, a transgenic artwork whose key element is an ‘artist’s gene’, i.e., a synthetic gene that does not exist in nature, invented by the artist. http://www.lelieuunique.com/SAISON/0203/2/EduardoKac.html
The Genesis gene was incorporated into bacteria, which were shown in the gallery. Participants on the Web could turn on an ultraviolet light in the gallery, causing real biological mutations in the bacteria. This work, although less dramatic than the creation of his living fluorescent rabbit, heralds the new interest in molecular process that in my mind will increasingly preoccupy artists over the coming years.
Not only does interactive art use new technologies, but it must also use a new language. It is a matter of the hybridization of everyday language in order to try to reach an understanding of the hybridization of art. For not only does the art vocabulary of Clement Greenberg have little relevance to the art of today, but that of contemporary pundits such as Hal Foster or Rosalind Kraus is also increasingly marginalized. This is because science has entered the discourse of art, almost to the point of colonization. By ‘science’ I mean the models and metaphors of science made available to the lay reader by such exponents as Francesco Varela, Christopher Langton, David Chalmers or Roger Penrose today, as
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well as Werner Heisenberg, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson or Norbert Wiener in an earlier era. Contemporary artists are much more likely to invoke contemporary thinking about consciousness, quantum physics, biotechnology and genetic engineering than they are to refer to formal aesthetics or art theory as such. And this is not confined to the digital arts community. Painters and sculptors are just as likely to find useful models in the discoveries and speculations of new science. Indeed it is the nature of reality rather than the reality of nature that causes the shift in the focus of art, whether analogue or digital, from a concern with representation or expression of (given) reality towards the construction of new worlds and parallel realities.
To exemplify the range of practices involved in interactive art, I can do no more than point in the direction of those who in my estimation are creating generic strands in this emergent field and whose work is most intimately known to me by virtue of their presence in my research group CAiiA-STAR: Victoria Vesna, Jill Scott, Eduardo Kac, Char Davies, Bill Seaman, Miroslaw Rogala, Thekla Schiphorst, Joseph Nechvatal, Donna Cox, Gretchen Schiller [http://www.caiia-star.net/vista/embook.html]
It is through the new language that interactive art produces that we can begin to evaluate it. This language will include a range of semiotic structures, signs, texts, forms of behaviour. For the artist simply to reiterate and maintain established language uncritically is to renounce the idea that we can rethink ourselves and our world, and to accede to the notion that in matters of reality our minds are made up for us. As Richard Rorty says in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity: ‘To create one’s mind is to create one’s own language, rather than to let the length of one’s mind be set by language other human beings have left behind.’4 Rorty is a pragmatist who sees that artistic vision and fecundity of metaphor are central to the creation of reality, by denying the passive acceptance of canonical descriptions of the world. It is the artist’s role to exhume those dead metaphors which we have internalized, and whose ghosts may have ascended to the illusory realm of truth, and finally lay them to rest. The sanctity of representation in Western art was assured by its fidelity to a consensus reality, a consensus institutionally retained and reinforced over centuries. Rorty points out that 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.
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In the postmodern context the interactive artist is ready to call on any system, organic or technological, that empowers the construction of reality. He/she is 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 creativity. There is no metalanguage or metasystem that places one discipline above all others. This liberated trans-disciplinarity informs artistic research at all levels. It calls for a general disposition of openness and optimism towards knowledge and towards the world at large, the condition in telematic culture which I describe as telenoia 5– the celebration of connectivity and open-ended collaboration – to replace the paranoia, the anxiety, the alienation, the compartmentalization of knowledge, and the social segregation and loneliness of the old industrial age.
One of the grand metaphors so long in use that it has effectively acquired the status of truth is that of ‘Nature’. Time prohibits a proper examination of the term, which is more fully explored in my text ‘Back to Nature II’6, first published as. ‘Zurück zur (künstlichen) Natur’ in 1993. My thesis is that Nature, which can be shown to be our dialectical invention in any case, is no longer relevant to our evolution. Honoured since the late Middle Ages by artists who invested enormous imaginative skill in its depiction, the metaphor has reached the end of its shelf-life and is no longer useful in the post-biological culture that we are creating. The velocity of technological change makes Nature far too slow, and epigenetic human development much more attractive, a perspective that informs a number of contemporary artists, most visibly perhaps Stelarc, whose work with the prosthesis of body parts and telepresence in the Net is exemplary. This may be why artists using new media are more interested in the constructive process than in purely expressive activity. They wish to build realities rather than reflect ‘given’ or authorized reality. In this respect they are perhaps not far from the shaman who uses an entirely different but equally efficacious technology, that of the plant. As Western artists themselves become more interested in entheogens, we may see an interesting juxtaposition arise of what I refer to as the three VRs:
Validated Reality, which uses reactive mechanical technology, and is prosaic and Newtonian
Virtual Reality, which uses interactive digital technology, and is telematic and immersive
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Vegetal Reality, which uses psychoactive plant technology and is entheogenic and spiritual.
Ideas of telerobotics, telepresence, of being both here and there at the same time, the self multiplied and dispersed – a kind of creative schizophrenia – are fundamental to life in the Net. The further extension of this phenomenological development lies in the realm of quantum teleportation. On 11 December 1997 it was reported in Nature that quantum teleportation has been demonstrated in laboratories at Innsbruck, Rome and Cal Tech. According to Furusawa, reported in the journal Science in October 1998, ‘The quantum state of one entity could be teletransported to another entity’.
Many of these ideas, variously developed by artists and technologists alike, prioritize the mind and consciousness as the focus of study, while seeing a new kind of materialism and embodiment in the world. I referred earlier to moistmedia, the convergence of the wired and the wet, the telematic and biological. There are two aspects of this convergence that I would like to examine here. One involves issues governing the relationship of consciousness to technology which I shall refer to as ‘technoetics’ (‘noetic’ from the Greek nous); the other concerns the implications of molecular, cellular, structural and computational biology and nano-engineering for art. As art becomes more and more invested in moistmedia, the issue of sentience and consciousness will increasingly come to the fore.7
To many it may seem rather perverse to suggest that technology, particularly computer technology, has brought consciousness into particular focus in art today. It may be difficult to see how technology, apparently cold and alienating, could do anything to advance the subtlety of feeling and vision that art has always demanded. Historians, however, will know that technology, whether in the form of engineering, chemistry, optics or pharmacology, has always mediated the vision and aspirations of artists in all parts of the world and at all times. And observers of contemporary culture will confirm that, despite the seeming paradox, artists today are finding in digital technology and telematic media new ways to make consciousness both the subject and object of their work. Their use of interactive media enables the viewer to participate in a shared space of consciousness and actively to participate in the construction and transformation of artistic meaning. The work of Char Davis uses immersive VR to enable the user to traverse new fields of experience leading to a sense of disembodied
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consciousness. The interface is of particular interest here, involving, as it does, the viewer breathing in and out to gain a sense of ascent/descent in the virtual environment. [http://www.immersence.com/immersence_home.htm]
Ulrike Gabriel of Frankfurt employs consciousness in quite another way. In Terrain robots randomly moving about an arena are energized by light generated when the mind of the observer is calm (or when two users cooperate to create a calm field of consciousness between them). As the robots become more energized and more animated, the mind of the observer also becomes agitated, thereby restricting the flow of energy to the robot, whereupon further control of consciousness has to be exercised to bring the robots back to life. [http://www.emaf.de/1993/terrai_e.html]
The provenance of technoetics in art is not hard to find. Throughout the course of this century there has been a tradition in art of valuing concepts in their own right, even to the exclusion of direct visual reference to the external world at its surface level of appearance. Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even www.philamuseum.org/collections/modern_contemporary/1952-98-1.shtmlis the icon of the whole movement, bringing together in a set of wholly unfamiliar and densely layered metaphors the marriage of metaphysics and the mechanical world. To make the invisible visible is a familiar ambition of artists, an ambition by no means restricted to conceptual art alone. Artists as different as the coolly cerebral Mondrian, the buoyantly dynamic Boccioni and the esoteric Kandinsky sought to express the spiritual in art, or ‘the invisible which moves and lives beneath the gross forms’, as Boccioni put it. In quite different ways artists such as these created works attempting to transcend their materiality and the materialist view of human nature, to express or evoke other planes of experience and awareness. At the same time there is a strand of art practice, emanating from Russia, that eschews representation and self-expression entirely in favour of construction, a strand that winds its way right through the twentieth century. These conceptual and constructive tendencies exert a huge influence on the strategies of artists in the field of interactive art. A third element in the lineage of attitudes and approaches that have led to the technoetic aesthetic is art dealing with identity. The existential and ontological dimensions of twentieth-century art are perhaps too well known for me to detail them here.
The expression of self, the identity of self, the presence of self are issues that differentiate twentieth-century art perhaps more than anything else from the
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art of previous eras. This triad of concerns, concept, construction and consciousness, underwritten by technological innovations in our perception of invisible forces and fields, prepared the ground for the technoetic aesthetic. This perception, developed further by advanced technology, becomes in our era what I call cyberception 8 – a bionic faculty in the human repertoire, involving an amplification of conceptual and perceptual processes, in which also the connectivity of telematic networks plays a formative role.
Artists whose practice is invested in networked hypermedia and virtual reality, in their interactions with artificial agents and avatars, know that personal identity can be endlessly transformed. We see the immutability and unity of the self, so dearly prized in the European tradition, giving way to an understanding of how we each can be involved in our own self-creation. In cyberspace the self is open to tele-differentiation, distribution and planetary dissemination. In consequence a kind of non-linear identity is emerging. The telematic adventure in art, currently played out in the Net but swiftly migrating to the ‘smart’ environments and mechatronic structures of ubiquitous computing, has brought questions of distributed mind and shared consciousness to the definition of a new aesthetic. Within this, the question of double consciousness may have some importance. Double consciousness refers to the state of being that gives access to two distinctly different fields of experience, or to two quite separate locations, with two distinctly different identities, at one and the same time. This also describes the shaman in trance, who is both in the everyday world and at the same time navigating the outermost limits of other worlds. Shape-shifting, changes of identity, out-of-body experiences, are all part of the tradition. In post-biological terms, this double consciousness is found in our computer-aided ability, employing ‘mixed-reality technology’ to move effortlessly through the dimensions of cyberspace while at the same time accommodating ourselves within the structures of the material world. Confronted by an array of technological devices that offer us a pathway into virtual worlds, we are invited on the plane of prosthetics to enact the shaman’s journey. Immersion in such noetic simulation may induce real changes of consciousness and eventually real transformations of self. 9.
Historically, we have had little option but to keep the worlds of our double consciousness in separate and distinct categories, such as the real, the imagined, and the spiritual. The advent of the artificial life sciences, in which I include both dry (pixel) and moist(molecular) artificial organisms, and the whole prospectus of nano-technology (still largely theoretical), points to the possibility of erod//
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ing the boundaries between states of mind, between conception and construction, between the internalization and the realization of our desires, dreams and needs of our everyday existence. Let me give an example, which can be found in our cyberception of matter at the atomic level. Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) enables us not only to view matter at this level but also to image individual, single atoms. www.iap.tuwien.ac.at/www/surface/STM_Gallery/stm_schematic.html However, the real significance of this process does not end there. Not only can we select and focus on individual atoms, but we can also, at the same time, manipulate them one by one, atom by atom, to construct from the bottom up atomic structures of our own choosing. Nano-technology could eventually allow the creation of self-replicating mechanical devices that build products on the nanometric scale (billionth of a metre), or atom by atom, molecule by molecule. Lined up end to end, hundreds of thousands of nano-machines would fit across the width of a 50p coin.
Artificial life technology [http://www.biota.org/papers/cglalife.html] is concerned with investigating ways in which living systems can be generated and evolve, such that not only biological systems but also any series of complex non-linear self-organizing interactions may ultimately arise. It is an ambition mirrored in the artist’s fascination with complexity, with algorithmic process, and bottom-up design. The best definition of Alife may be that provided by Chris Langton, who was responsible for naming the field, and for convening the first Alife workshop at Santa Fe in 1987: ‘Natural life emerges out of the organized interaction of a great number of non-living molecules, with no global controller responsible for the behaviour of every part. Rather, every part is a behaver itself, and life is the behaviour that emerges from all of the local interactions among individual behavers. It is this bottom-up, distributed, local determination of behaviour that Artificial Life employs in its primary methodological approach to the generation of lifelike behaviours.’
The application to art of the principles Alife and molecular biology, and of nano-technology as it develops, will lead to a re-materialization of art. The ascendancy of the immaterial in art in the last quarter of the twentieth century, theorized by Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, is perhaps coming to an end, a case hopefully of ‘Bye, bye Baudrillard!’ The importance of telematic networks, however, will certainly not decline; rather, we shall see the progressive embodiment of moistmedia within the Net. The technoetic principle will remain paramount.
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This paper’s brief navigation of the emergent world of interactive art is nearly at an end. However, I cannot finish without at least touching briefly on the ways in which architecture is responding to the post-biological condition. I shall pass over its achievements with smart buildings, which, along with smart products, present ideas that are popularly quite familiar. The Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris is a particularly charming example of the genre, with iris windows that respond to the density of sunlight falling on its façade. At the edge of the Net and the boundaries of the material world much research is underway in defining, as well as designing, the interspace between the virtual and built environment. Among those architects engaged in this area, are Peter Anders [http://www.telefonica.es/fat/anders.html] and Marcos Novak http://www.centrifuge.org/marcos/.
The change in the focus of architecture is not registered at the level of form so much as at the level of behaviour. To give just one simple example, our exaggerated interest in what a building looks like, its mere appearance, will give way by contrast to the concern with how a building sees us and its world, the quality of its gaze. Instead of the emotions that places and objects exert on us, we might consider how we could affect them; how products and structures might respond emotionally to their social environment. Questions of the form and structure of buildings will be overshadowed by ambitions for their dynamism and intelligence, their ability to interact with each other and with us, to communicate, learn and evolve, essentially to anticipate our needs. Engineering will embrace ontology!
The convergence of an architecture based on molecular technology and nano-engineering, allied to artificial consciousness and the networking of the human hypercortex 10can bring us to an architecture that has a life of its own, that thinks for itself, that feeds itself, takes care of itself, repairs itself, plans its future, copes with adversity. It will be an architecture that is as much emotional as instrumental, as intuitive as it is ordered. We shall want to get inside the mind of such architecture and an architecture that can get into our own mind. The building of sentience is the challenge to architecture in the twenty-first century.
By way of conclusion I would like rather briefly to summarize the cultural shift that is under way in interactive art by contrasting current cultural attitudes and practice with those of the previous era.
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CULTURAL
SHIFT
from
to
content
context
object
process
reception
negotiation
representation
construction
hermeneutics
heuristics
tunnel vision
bird’s-eye view
perspective
immersion
figure-ground
pattern
iconicity
bionicity
nature
artificial life
certainty
contingency
resolution
emergence
top-down
bottom-up
observed reality
constructed reality
paranoia
telenoia
autonomous brain
distributed mind
behaviour of forms
forms of behaviour
Conclusion
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 and linear narrative with a process-based culture, so throughout this century we shall see a further artistic shift, as silicon and pixels merge with molecules and matter. Between the wired world of virtuality and the wet world of biology lies a moist domain, a new interspace of potentiality and promise for the creative mind, and one that will demand a total revision of the practice and processes of the arts. Moistmedia (comprising bits, atoms, neurons, and genes in every kind of combination) will constitute the substrate of the art of our century, a trans//
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formative art concerned with the construction of a fluid reality. This will mean the spread of intelligence through ubiquitous computing to every part of the built environment coupled with recognition of the intelligence that lies within every part of the living planet.
Roy Ascott
© Roy Ascott
www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8867.html
Endnotes
1. Popper, F. 1975: Art :Action and Participation (London: Studio Vista)
2. Lippard, L. 197): Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York: Praeger)
3. Ascott, R. 1966: ‘Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision’, Cybernetica,
Journal of the International Association for Cybernetics [Namur], vol. 9
4. Rorty,R. 1989. Contingency, irony, solidarity. Cambridge:CUP.
5. Ascott, R. 1993: ‘Telenoia’, in Adrian, R. (ed.) On Line – Kunst im Netz
(Graz: Steirischen Kulturinitiative)
6. Ascott, R. 1993: ‘Zurück zur (künstlichen) Natur’, in Kaiser, G., Matejovski, D., and Fedrowitz,
J. (eds.), Kultur und Technik im 21.Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag), pp. 341–55
7. Ascott, R. 2000. Edge-life: technoetic structures and Moistmedia. In: R. Ascott (ed)
Art, Technology, Consciousness: mind @ large. Bristol: Intellect. pp2-6.
8. Ascott, R. 1998. A Arquitectura da Cibercepção (trans. Sónia Marques). In: C. GIANNETTI
(ed) Ars Telemática. Telecommunicão, Internet e Ciberespaço. Lisbon: Relógio D’Agua. pp 163-178
9. Ascott, R. 1998. The Shamantic Web: art et technologie de la conscience. (trans. Myriam Bloedé).
In: M. KLONARIS & K. THOMADAKI (eds) Pour une Ecologie des Media: Art, Cinéma, Vidéo,
Ordinateur. Paris: Astarti. pp 88-104
10. Ascott,R. 1997. Cultivando o Hipercórtex.(trans. Flavia Saretta) In: D.DOMINGUES (ed).
A Arte no Século XXI: a humanização das technologias. Sao Paulo: University of Sao Paulo.
Pp 336-344

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CYBERCEPTION

Filed under: NOTES ON ARCHITECTURE — admin @ 09:31 
THE ARCHITECTURE OF CYBERCEPTION
            by Roy Ascott




            
Cyberception
Not only are we changing  radically, body and mind, but we are 

becoming actively involved in our own transformation. 

And it's not just a matter of the prosthetics of implant organs, 

add-on limbs or surgical face fixing, however necessary and 

beneficial such  technology of the body may be.  It's a matter
of consciousness. We are acquiring  new faculties and new understanding of
human presence. To inhabit both the real and virtual worlds at one and the
same time, and to  be both here and potentially everywhere else at the same
time  is giving us a new sense of self, new ways  of thinking and perceiving
which extend what we have believed to be our natural, genetic capabilities. In
fact the old debate about artificial and natural is no longer relevant. We are
only interested in what can be made of ourselves, not what made us. As for the
sanctity of the individual, well we are now each of us made up of many
individuals, a set of selves . Actually the sense of the individual is giving
way to the sense of the interface. Our consciousness allows us the fuzzy edge
on identity, hovering between inside and outside every kind of definition of
what it is to be a human being that we might come up with. We are all
interface. We are computer-mediated and computer-enhanced. These new ways of
conceptualising and perceiving reality involve  more than simply  some sort of
quantitative change in how we see, think and act in the world. They constitute
a qualitative change in our being, a whole new faculty, the  
post-biologicalfaculty of  "cyberception" .
            
Cyberception involves a convergence of  conceptual and perceptual processes in
which the connectivity  of  telematic networks  plays a formative role.
Perception is the awareness of the elements of environment through physical
sensation.  The cybernet, the sum of all the interactive computer-mediated
systems and telematic networks in the world, is part of our sensory apparatus.
It redefines our individual body just as it connects all our bodies into a
planetary whole. Perception is physical sensation interpreted in the light of
experience. Experience is now telematically shared: computerised
telecommunications technology enables us to shift in and out of each others
consciousness and telepresence within the global media flow. By conception we
mean the process of originating, forming or understanding ideas. Ideas  come
from the interactions and negotiations of minds. Once locked socially and
philosophically into the solitary body, minds  now float free in telematic
space.  We are looking at the augmentation of our capacity to think and
conceptualise,  and the extension and refinement of our senses: to
conceptualise more richly and to perceive more fully both inside and beyond
our former limitations of  seeing, thinking and constructing. The cybernet is
the sum of all those artificial systems of probing, communicating,
remembering and constructing which data processing, satellite links, remote
sensing and telerobotics variously serve in the enhancement of our being.
            
Cyberception heightens transpersonal experience and is the defining behavior
of a transpersonal art. Cyberception involves  transpersonal technology, the
technology of communicating, sharing, collaborating, the technology which
enables us to  transform our selves, transfer our thoughts and transcend the
limitations of our bodies. Transpersonal experience gives us insight into the
interconnectedness of all things, the permeability and instability of
boundaries, the lack of distinction between part and whole, foreground and
background, context and content. Transpersonal technology is the technology of
networks, hypermedia, cyberspace.
            
Cyberception gives us access to the holomatic media of the cybernet. The
holomatic principle is  that  each individual  interface to the net is an
aspect of a telematic unity:  to be in or at any one interface is to be in the
virtual presence of all the other interfaces throughout the network.  This is
so because all the data flowing through any access node of a network are
equally and at the same time held in the memory of that network:  they can be
accessed at any other interface through cable or satellite links, from any
part of the planet at any time of day or night.
            
It is cyberception which enables us to perceive the apparitions of cyberspace,
the  coming-into-being of their virtual presence.  It is through cyberception
that we can apprehend the processes of emergence in nature,  the  media-flow,
the invisible forces and fields of our many realities. We cyberceive
transformative relationships and connectivity as immaterial process, just as
palpably and immediately as we commonly perceive material objects in material
locations. If, as many would hold,  the project of art in the 20th century has
been to make the invisible visible, it is our growing faculty of cyberception
which is providing us with  x-ray vision and the optics of outer space. And
when, for example, the space probe "Cassini"  reaches the dense nitrogen
atmosphere of Saturn's satellite  Titan, it will be our eyes and minds which
are there, our cyberception which will  be testing and measuring its unknown
surface.
            
The effect of cyberception on art practice is to throw off  the hermeneutic
harness,  the overarching concern with representation and self expression, and
to celebrate a creativity of distributed consciousness (mind-at-large), global
connectivity and  radical constructivism. Art now is less concerned with
appearance and surface, and more concerned with apparition, with the
coming-into-being  of identity and meaning. Art  embraces systems of
transformation, and seeks to maximise interaction with its environment. So too
with the human body. We are making the body  a site of transformation - to
transgress the genetic limitations. And we seek to maximise interaction with
our environment, both the  visible and the invisible, by  maximising the
environment's capacity for intelligent, anticipatory behaviour. The artist
inhabits  cyberspace while others simply see it as a tool.
            
The cybernet is  the agent of construction,  embracing a multiplicity of
electronic pathways to robotic systems, intelligent environments, artificial
organisms. And in so far as we create and inhabit parallel worlds, and open up
divergent event trajectories, cyberception may enable us to become
simultaneously conscious of them all, or at least to zap at will across
multiple universes. The transpersonal technologies of telepresence, global
networking, and cyberspace may be stimulating and re-activating  parts of the
apparatus of a consciousness long forgotten and made obsolete by a mechanistic
world view of cogs and wheels. Cyberception may mean an awakening of our
latent psychic powers, our capacity to be out of body, or in mind to mind
symbiosis with others.
            
>So what differentiates cyberception from perception and conception? It's not
>just the extension of intelligence promised by CalTech's silicon neurons, the
>implications of  the molecular computer,  or the consequences of Bell AT & T's
> electro-optic integrated circuit that will  compute in one billionth of a
>second.   The answer lies in our new understanding of pattern, of seeing the
>whole, of flowing with the rhythms of process and system. Hitherto, we thought
>and saw things in a linear manner, one thing after another, one thing hidden
>behind another,  leading to this or that finality, and along the way dividing
>the world up into categories and classes of things: objects with impermeable
>boundaries, surfaces with impenetrable interiors, superficial simplicities of
>vision which ignored the infinite complexities.  But cyberception means
>getting a sense of a whole, acquiring a bird's eye view of events, the
>astronaut's view of the earth, the cybernaut's view of systems. It's a matter
>of highspeed feedback, access to massive databases, interaction with a
>multiplicity of minds, seeing with a thousand eyes, hearing the earth's most
>silent whispers, reaching into the enormity of space, even to the edge of
>time. Cyberception is the antithesis of tunnel vision or linear thought. It is
>an all-at-once perception of a multiplicity of view points,  an extension in
>all dimensions of associative thought,  a recognition of the transience of all
>hypotheses, the relativity of all knowledge, the impermanence of all
>perception. It is cyberception that allows us to interact fully with the flux
>and fuzz of life, to read the Book of Changes, to follow the Tao. In this,
>cyberception is not so much a new faculty as a revived faculty. It is us
>finding ourselves again, after the human waste and loss  of  the age of
>reason, the age of certainty, determinism and absolute values. The age of
>appearance, the Romanticism of the private, solitary individual - essentially
>anxious, alienated, paranoid.  Indeed paranoia, secrecy and dissimulation
>seems to have been embedded in all aspects of the industrial age. In our
>telematic culture, instead of paranoia  we celebrate  Telenoia: open-ended,
>inclusive, collaborative, transpersonal networking of minds  and imaginations.
> 
>Cyberception defines an important aspect of the new human being whose
>emergence is further accelerated by our advances in genetic engineering and
>post-biological modelling.  The originating of a life,  biological conception,
>should now also be called post-biological cyberception since the decision to
>initiate and process the birth of children is shifting from the so-called
>imperatives and constraints of "nature" to the will and desire of individuals,
>in consort with new technologies and  regardless of their age or sexual
>performance. And just as the cybernet is our community,  we shall see
>increasingly, the replacement  of the nuclear family with the non-linear
>family. The telematic culture may bring back to human relationships what
>industrial society effectively eradicated. Take life on the street now. I mean
>those streets just off the super highway.  Nothing is more human, warm and
>convivial than a bunch of kids hanging out on the Internet. As networked
>virtual reality transports our telepresence, and gives us the tools to
>reconfigure our own identities, social life is becoming  not only more complex
>but more imaginative. As I have long-time insisted, there is love in the
>telematic embrace.
> 
>Our new body and  new consciousness will bring forth a wholly new environment,
>an intelligent environment which returns our gaze, which looks,  listens and
>reacts to us, as much as we do to it.:  smart  buildings and tools which
>listen for our every move, attend our every utterance. We are not talking
>about simple voice commands at some crude computer interface, we are talking
>about anticipation on the part of our constructed environment, based on our
>behaviour, resulting in subtle transformations of the mis en scene. Just as we
>cyborgs  see, hear, feel in ways unknown directly to biological man, (although
>his myths and rituals always expressed his desires for self transformation),
>we  live in an environment which increasingly hears, sees and feels us. There
>is a community implication in all of this for us. Cyberception impels us to a
>redefinition how we live together and where we live together.  In this process
>we must start to re-evaluate that  material matrix  and cultural instrument of
>society  which we have for so long taken for granted: the city.
> 
>Architecture
The problem with Western architecture is that it is too much concerned with surfaces and structures and too little concerned with living systems. There is no biology of building, simply the physics of space. What we might call the
"edificial" look is all. The city is seen as a battle zone in which this or  that architectural genre or idiomatic impulse fights to survive. It's a matter of relative inertia. The classicists wishing to protect the total inertia, political and cultural, of a stylistic past, the modernists protecting the privileged inertia of a stylised present. No one is interested in radical change, or intimations of the future.  Edificial images, superficial surfaces
define the contemporary city.    But to its everyday users, a city is not just a pretty facade. It 's a zone of negotiation  made up of a multitude of networks and systems. What is needed is   designers of such spaces who can provide  forms of access  which are not only  direct and transparent but which enrich  the city's everyday business  and  everyday transactions. The language of access to these processes of communication, production and transformation is more concerned with systems interfaces  and network nodes  than with traditional architectural discourse. And, without the fundamental understanding, on the part of planners and designers, of the human faculty of cyberception and its implications for transactional behavior, the  cities will remain  the  arid and unwelcoming tracts of modernist glass and concrete or tacky post modernist folly that we are generally forced to endure. We need to reconceptualise the urban strategy, rethink architecture, we need bring into
being the idea of zones of transformation,  to accommodate the  transpersonal technologies  that are shaping our global culture.
Cities support and embody the interactions of people, the arts  add value to such exchange. Today it is predominantly electronic systems which facilitate our interaction and connectivity,  and the art of today is based on such
systems. Cities can  be dynamic, evolving zones of transformation, just as interactive art itself  is about transformation and change. And just as cities
can offer rewarding  complexities of  buildings and streets to navigate, leading to surprises, delights, mysteries, beauty,  and are, at their best, about human dreams and human fulfilment, so interactive  art urges you to navigate its many layered  multi-media realities. It invites you to  immerse
yourself in its cyberspace, to get online to its global networks. If it is through recent innovations in art and science that we have become aware of cyberception, it will be cyberception at the level of city planning and architecture that will lead us to the city of the 21st century. As has already been argued in this journal, art is no longer about appearance, and certainly
not about representation,  but is concerned with apparition, the coming -into- being of what has never before been seen or heard or experienced.
Cities which are no more than a set of representations function badly. Their buildings may speak "hospital", "school", "library", but unless they articulate these meanings within integrated, cybernetic systems, they lie in their teeth. And too many buildings lie in their teeth. Their monuments,unless they invite the recreation of the past by means of interactive media, are no more than inert witnesses to the duplicity of official history.
Cities work best  when they  are constructed to empower their citizens   to find fulfilment . Such urban aspirations  call for the support of an art which is less concerned with  representation  and expression and more concerned with
radical construction and imaginative realisation.  This is the art which is presently emerging out of the fusion of new communications and computer media. It builds on the complexity and diversity of dreams and desires that our
multi-cultural, multimedia world brings forth. Just as we call this  art interactive ,  the enriching environment  which our cities must become should be based on the same principles of interaction and connectivity.
The city in the 21st century must be anticipatory, futures oriented, working at the forward edge of contemporary culture, as an agent  of   cultural prosperity,  as a cause of profitable innovation  rather than simply as an
effect.  of the art and products  of a former  time. It should be a testbed for all that is new, not just in the arts but in entertainment, leisure, education, business, research and production.
A city should  offer its public the opportunity to share, to collaborate, and participate  in  the processes of cultural evolution . Its many  communities must have a stake in its future. For this reason, it must be transparent in
its structures, its goals, and its systems of operation at all levels. Its infrastructure, like its architecture,   must  be both "intelligent" and  publicly intelligible, comprising systems which react to us, as much as we interact with them. The principle of rapid and effective feedback at all
levels should be at the very heart of the city's development. This means highspeed data channels crisscrossing every nook and cranny of its urban complexities. Feedback should not only work but be seen to work. This is to talk about cyberception as  fundamental to the quality of living in an
advanced technological, post-biological society.
Just as architects must forget their concrete boxes and Disneyland decorations, and attend to the design of  everything which is invisible and immaterial in a city, so they must understand that planning must be developed
in an evolutive  space-time matrix  which is not simply three dimensional or confined to a continuous  mapping of buildings, roads, and  monuments.
Instead planning and designing must apply connectivity and interaction to four quite different zones: underground, street level, sky/sea, and cyberspace.
Instead of the planner's talk of streets, alleyways, avenues and boulevards, we need to think of wormholes, to borrow a term from quantum physics, tunnelling between separate realities, real and virtual, at many levels, through many layers. Similarly the paradigms and discoveries of Artificial
Life science must be brought into play. The architect's new task is to fuse together material structures and cyberspace organisms into a new continuum.
Architecture is the true test of our capacity to integrate into humanly enriching zones and structures, the potentials of the material world, the new consciousness, and  virtual realities. In this enterprise many traditional ideas must be jettisoned, ideas whose inherent instability was always implicit
in the dichotomies by which they were expressed: urban/rural, city/country, artificial/natural, day/night, work/play, local/global. The boundaries on these ideas have shifted or eroded altogether.
The city as an amalgam of systems interfaces and communications nodes is likely to be much more supportive of creative lives and personal fulfilments than the grossly conceived and rigidly realised conurbations of the industrial age. In place of their dense and intractable materiality, we can expect the environmental  fluidity of faster- than- light pathways, intelligent surfaces and structures,  and transformable habitations. The end of representation is nigh!  Semiology is ceasing to underpin our structures.
Buildings will behave in ways consistent with their announced function, rather than speaking their role by semiological implication. Appearance is giving way to apparition in art, and notions of unfolding, transformation and coming-into-being are suffusing our culture. It will only be with the understanding that buildings must be planted and  ‘grown’ that  architecture will flourish. It's a grow bag culture that is needed, in which seeding replaces designing. Architectural practice should find its guiding metaphors in horticulture rather than in warfare. Ultimately we can perhaps talk about
pollination and grafting.
Building, like cities, should grow. But without cyberception, the traditional architect and urbanist have no idea whatsoever of what we are proposing. To see  that technology changes, that building methods, economies, and planning systems change, but to fail to recognise that human beings also are radically changing, is a grave error. Perhaps classes in consciousness and gardening should replace the study of classical orders and historical cannons of styleand genre which stultify architectural education!
Where is there a building, much less a city, which supports a cyber culture, that sees cybercasting as central to human sense and sensibility? Where is there an urban space in which we can fully celebrate "Telenoia" ? Where is there an architectural school which is, as a whole, united body, determined to create the conditions for the proper evolution of a truly  21st century city?
Where in architecture and planning are connectivity and interaction taken as primary principles of the design process? The debate in architecture should not be a matter of  either/or. Either  classical or modern, either new or old,
either idealistic or pragmatic, either functional or frivolous. Between idealism and pragmatism, between conception of the desired and  perception of the possible, lie  the evolutive initiatives of cyberception .
As a frustrated  HyperCard programme  might say,  "Where is Home?"  Where will we cybernauts of the turning millennium live? What is the nature of community  and cohabitation in a telematic culture.  How is cyberspacial transience to be accommodated? Where are those zones  that we can cyberceive as  beautiful and fulfilling?  We inhabit  material forms with psychic dimensions set in the
limitless boundaries of cyberspace. We are networked to the universe, our nervous systems are suffusing the cosmos. We navigate inner and outerspace. We don't need buildings so much as we need ourselves to be built, or rebuilt from the genetic foundations which we are rapidly re-evaluating and may soon restructure.
Perhaps the most radical challenge to the old ideas of architecture comes from the consequences of telepresence, the disseminated self. When human identity itself is undergoing transformation, the collaborative mind and the connected consciousness replacing the unitary mind and solitary consciousness of the old order of Western thought, architecture must look to new strategies if it is to bring useful ideas about living and interacting in the world.
Telepresence is the province of the distributed self, of remote meetings in cyberspace, of online living. Telepresence means instant global interaction with a thousand communities, being in any one of them, or all of them, virtually at the same time. Telepresence defines the new human identity perhaps more than any other aspect of the repertoire of cyberculture.
Contemporary architecture and shopping have become more or less the same thing. Architecture, having turned its back on the need for radical responses to the realities of the teleself and distributed  presence, constitutes little more than a shopping cart world of boxed packages, wheeled around  the sterile zones of a mall culture. Each building is a prettified and packaged product, each component mail-ordered from a  catalogue. The "have a good day" code  of building practice has put  the appeasement of  tradition before collaboration
with the future. But the need for an architecture of interfaces and nodes will not go away. We shall increasingly live in two worlds, the real and the virtual, and in many realities, both cultural and spiritual, regardless of the indifference of urban designers. These many worlds interconnect at many
points. We are constantly on the move between them. In the creative zone, transience and transformation identify our way. Hi-tech chic and Bauhaus bluff will not fool our keen cyberception. Change must be radical. The new city,
both in its visible immateriality and its invisible construction, will grow into a fruitful reality only if it is seeded with imagination and vision. It is artists who can become the sowers of these seeds, who can take the chances
needed to allow new forms and features of the new city to grow. It is their cyberception that equips them with the global awareness and conceptual dexterity to resee, rethink, and rebuild our world.
(C) Roy Ascott 1994

http://www.eff.org//Net_culture/Cyborg_anthropology

/cyberception.paperPresented at:
> 
>ISEA'94, , The 5th International Symposium on Electronic Art , Helsinki,
>Finland
> 
>F.A.U.S.T. '94,Forum des Arts de l'Univers Scientifique et Technique
>,Toulouse, France.
> 
>Cybersphere '94, International Symposium on Cyberspace, Stockholm, Sweden.
            
            
            
Seeker1    [@Nervm.Nerdc.Ufl.Edu] (real info available on request)
CyberAnthropologist, TechnoCulturalist, AnthroFuturist, Topothesian
Home Page URL: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/anthro/Seeker1_s_CyberAnthro_Page.html
"One measures a circle, beginning anywhere." -- Charles Fort

The Art of Roy Ascott

Filed under: ΚΕΙΜΕΝΑ — admin @ 09:30
Gary Michael Dault

The Art of Roy Ascott

artscanada #166/167/168, Spring 1972.
[ 1,395 words ]

In February, the University of Guelph mounted the first show in Canada of the work of Roy Ascott, comprising pieces from 1960 to the present. I should like to point out some of the qualities and concerns of Ascott’s art by concentrating on three areas of work: the Video Roget of 1962, the templates and chance-maps of 1967-70, and the current ‘transactional’ pieces.

The Video Roget, featured in his one-man show at London’s Molton Gallery (1963) is perhaps the outstanding result to that date of the artist’s dissatisfaction with the static one-to-one spectator / artifact relationship and his attempt during these years to provide himself and his audience with a machine for wide ambiguous experience and more particularly for the infinitely suggestive cross-referencing that occurs between shape and mind. Acting as a visual thesaurus, the Video Roget presented alternatives and near-equivalences of relationship, this time in terms of shape instead of word-meaning. The piece consisted of four horizontal rows of archetypal or at least highly generalized shapes (flap, wedge, bottle-container, claw, umbrella-shelter, etc.) separated (two rows, above and below) by a horizontal black (unknowable) area referred to as a ‘calibration unit’, a linking device between rows of shapes, a ‘black box’ which suggested that it housed the spectator’s reaction space and the process of the mind’s construction of meaningful relationship between the shapes. The piece presented not only an opportunity for personalized, participatory image-making by the viewer but also offered itself as a simplified demonstration of the working of any analogue structure: the essence of metaphor that this is possibly equivalent to that, run through the switchboard of Mind, equivalences between them close enough and suggestive enough to alter and enhance simultaneously both original ideas.

The long series of templates and chance-maps had to do with the artist’s concentration upon the ideas of boundaries and parameters. For Parameter III (1967), Ascott set out to investigate some of the ways in which boundaries are decided upon, to see how spatial limits are chosen and fixed, and to find out what it is a parameter really does, what it means. With Parameter III, he worked on wood, on a sheet of wood larger than the diamond-shape he had previously decided upon and measured out as the controlling outside shape and size of the piece. Then, acting on the wood surface both inside and outside of this chosen area, he drew, scribbled, and otherwise despoiled the surface in random ways, cutting away certain areas of wood where his resulting lines suggested that cuts be made (often finding in the process that certain cuts caused such a weakening in particular parts of the sheet that whole areas of it would crumble away) and then building up on the surface that remained (survived, actually) coat upon coat of polymer wash, thus effectively toning down and eventually blocking out almost entirely any information about how the final shape came to be, how its edge was chosen. The end result is a large irregular shape of wood now sufficiently containing itself, its perimeter the wandering high-pressure outline holding it all together, the piece now at rest in a kind of final blandness (though with the apparent peacefulness of its surface belied by the distant recollection of the struggle of its making demonstrated by the writhing of its outer edge). More recent variations upon this work, Chance-map (Red) (1970), for example, allow the spectator to see the gyrations and criss-crossings of crayon lines on the surface of the wood, this drawing being the chaotic undifferentiated activity upon which the artist’s decisions about, for example, cutting the wood, have been made; in this particular work, some areas formed by the crossing of lines have been darkened by staining, some other such areas cut out those areas, according to the artist, that were ‘almost looking like something but not quite’ those areas where generalized, almost significant images came swimming up through the chaos; the piece in this respect acts as a primitive Video Roget. In this case, however, only a couple of steps backwards from it, the piece becomes a large coloured wooden panel, something only in the process of becoming a display-case of generalized universal images.

One of the terms Ascott has coined to help explain the meaning of his work is the word ‘metaform’. Obviously deriveable from ‘metaphor’, a metaform is a form (flat shape or three-dimensional object) ‘greater than the particular’, abstracted from it (the ‘idea’ of a wave-form, for example, or perhaps a spiral or perhaps a tube); so are the generalized shapes of the Video Rogetmetaforms. But in addition to its appearance as a generalized physical form, a metaform has, the artist feels, audience-reactive, behavioural, performance qualities as well. That is to say, it may be introduced with measurable effect, for example, into an otherwise inert ‘situation’. Ascott talks of his interest in setting up certain physical and possibly banal situations like ‘wardrobe’ or ‘supermarket’ or ‘bathtub’ and introducing into this kind of benign everyday theatre a particular metaform or assortment of metaforms, which upon contact will then animate themselves and their contexts together, charging both with new meanings. In just such a way, for example, does Marshall McLuhan’s DEW-line card pack work as a programmer of hitherto unexpected approaches to a problem. In one method for use of the pack, the problem-solver is dealt three cards, each of which is printed with an aphorism or a pun or an otherwise suggestive statement. The object of the thing is to force a new look at a previously unsolvable problem by bringing to bear upon it a new meaning for it, the result of the energetic juxtaposition of the three previously unrelated ideas forced into confrontation and focused on the neutral problem. If, in Ascott’s work, we see the neutral physical situation of say ‘bathtub’ as the ‘problem’ we are attempting to animate, then we bring to that situation not aphorisms or puns but Ascott’s metaforms’, concrete visual objects (visual ideas) capable, like McLuhan’s aphorisms, of wide energetic interpretation. Just as the introduction of potent idea into neutral problem further animates both idea andproblem in the ensuing dialogue, so the introduction of the metaforms into the neutral physical situation energizes and renders significant both metaform and original situation in a new total way.

In the current ‘transactional’ pieces, the artist has provided a variety of physical situations, a counter top, a metal ladder, some tables, and a selection of metaforms, in this case ‘found’ ones, things easily available in hardware stores, certain already abstracted things (a plastic funnel, for example, a pure idea made visible); furthermore, he has not only brought these units together for their mutually animating effect, but has added the possibility of spectator participation (thus their ‘transactional’ potential) as the ‘players’ rearrange the objects in ways that they themselves determine. Unlike classical ‘found objects’ (Duchamp’s, for example, had to do with criticism) these readymades of Ascott’s are quite literally visual ideas; they act as tools in the transactions which occur when they are manipulated. As Ascott points out, one of his table-tops loaded with arrangeable objects is not so much itself a proposition (except for the mutually animating one we have discussed) as it is the raw material with which a proposition can be made. The transactional process of two people pulling up chairs, sitting down and arranging generalized, familiar, but strangely evocative objects in new and surprising ways, this game-playing is of course an analogue for the way things get themselves discovered in science, in art, and in administration of all kinds; indeed, the process of playing with these things is a useful analogue for the contemporary administrative process. Appropriately enough, Ascott is administrator as well as artist, in this case President of the Ontario College of Art; I should be tempted to refer to his current work as an artist as ‘theoretical administration’; certainly the aesthetics of the things he makes and the meaning of the things he says and does are all of a piece. Ascott’s metaform for open-ended art education has, as is common knowledge, pretty well polarized the College. It has done so in very much the same way as a concrete visual metaform energizes the hitherto benign theatre into which it is introduced.

Turning on Technology

Filed under: ΚΕΙΜΕΝΑ — admin @ 09:29
Turning on Technology
by Roy Ascott

Art’s affair with technology has led to more than a marriage of materiality, and more than the augmentation of intelligence that high-speed computing power and ubiquitous networks bring to the human condition. The significant outcomes are as much spiritual as biological or social. In this reconfiguration of ourselves and our culture, the process of transformation lies between what I call cyberception,1 technologically extended cognition and perception, and the technoetic aesthetic,2 art allied to the technology of consciousness. As for the social impact of new media, it is well over thirty years since McLuhan pointed out that “we are…suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmented specialism as never before–but also involved in the total social process as never before.”3
Nowadays, we are more likely to describe this as the telemadic navigation of hypermedia and the net, but the point remains: we are engaged in a new social process. This in turn flows from the new thinking that circulates in, around, and as a consequence of the convergence of computers, communications, and biotechnologies, which is leading to the reinvention of the self, the transformation of the body, and the noetic extension of mind. In the process, art has shifted its concern from the behavior of forms to forms of behavior. While artists engage optimistically with this shift, some are not uncritical. Speaking of our bionic ambitions for the body, for example, Michael Joo feels that “our demand…for hyperextensions of our physical selves…is tragically ironic.”4 Critical and poetic responses can co-exist, and multimedia can be “structured around extremes–extreme behavior, irrational actions, or illogical technology” (Susan Otto). There is no doubting the sensitivity, vitality, and invention that informs the highly diversified field of technology-based art.
Of course there are exceptions. When art is no more than craft, when the artist engages in little more than exploring what a machine can do, the output can be banal. In fact, most early computer-based art took this route, a kind of digital extension of modernism. Not so in the case of Techno-Seduction. Here the conceptual base is substantial, and human values predominate. Questions of gender, race, power, identity, the body, and the environment are raised at interactive interfaces and within responsive installations that enrich the viewer’s transactions with significance and sensibility. Narrative structures are reexamined. All is under the sign of transformation and within the cannon of uncertainty: “identities are not fixed, but contingent and mutable” (Christine Tamblyn).
The rubric under which the exhibition is presented may imply that technology is inherently seductive, or that it is an instrument of seduction, drawing us into a less than human world without art or values. But I would argue that the reverse is true. We artists are trying to seduce the machine: we wish to embrace it with our ways of thinking and feeling. We want computers that emote, networks that are sentient, robots that care. We stroke their screens, play with their mice, run our fingers over their keyboards, to entice them into our field of consciousness. At the same time, powerful claims are presented for the emotional capacity of technology: “With a pulsed laser and the metaphysical medium of holography, I wanted to dig out of those bodies a taste of human passion and angst” (Harriet Casdin-Silver).
Ever since Rosenblatt’s Perceptron,5 with many false starts we have been trying to seduce the intelligent machine into a more human way of thinking. What are neural networks if not the measure of our determination to bring artificial learning and associative thought into line with our own cognitive processes? This principle of seduction is best exemplified in the technology of artificial life,6 whereby we invite technology into the living world. Can artificial consciousness be far behind?
Henri Bergson wrote: “Consciousness seems proportionate to the living being’s power of choice. It lights up the zone of potentialities that surround the act. It fills the interval between what is done and what might be done.”7 In short, it is the space of art. Bergson, properly admired for his affirmation of the Heraclitean flux and flow, lacked only the dynamics of our networked hypermedia to complete his model of mind. The cognitive rhythms, the jumps and leaps, the hyperlinks, tunneling from mind to mind, image to sound, sound to text, from real locations to virtual places, from people in the street to identities in cyberspace, these characterize the desires and ambitions of artists caught up in this techno-seductive dance of the mind.
Seven years ago, when I wrote “Is there Love in the Telematic Embrace?” for Art Journal,8 it was to identify attraction, affinity, love, or, as we say, “connectivity” as central to art’s concern and its augmentation by telematic media. I argued that the artist’s responsibility was now toward context rather than content, with meaning emerging from the interactions of the viewer and their necessarily unstable relationship. The principle of open-endedness and indeterminacy, extending to every part and player in the technoetic arts, is even more insistent today.
“Meaning, like the body and its culture, is fleeting, transitory, and has no center or hierarchy” (Jenny Marketou).
Just as intelligence is spreading everywhere, leaking out of our brains and spilling into our homes, our tools, our vehicles, so too is connectivity. We are about to see the environment as a whole come online–a global networking of places, products, ideas, with the Internet as a kind of hypercortex. Increasingly, artists like Jessica Irish seek to link their installations and electronic sculptures inextricably with the World Wide Web. While for Adrianne Wortzel cyberspace is where the present can be “archaeologically” excavated from a virtual place in the future.
With everything connected, everything can be shared, including, of course, responsibility. Poignantly, Duane Slick reminds us:
“Everything I see, everything I hear, I have become responsible for.”
As this exhibition demonstrates, art can be propositional and computational as much as visual or metaphorical. Janet Zweig speaks for a whole generation of artists when she claims to be “more interested in the possibilities of using the computer as a thinking device than as an imaging device.” It may at first appear strange to be told that the “game of images”9 is over. There never was a time when the image was so fecund, so insistent. But while it remains substantially visual, art is increasingly based in concepts, constituting in many ways a kind of philosophical process. It is more street smarts than grand narrative, attuned to what lies beneath the surface of things, questioning the why more than the what: “It is the unseen, interior structures of nature and thought that interest me” (Kathleen Ruiz). Melinda Montgomery enlists science-fiction to explore questions of mind-body identity.
In this technoetic culture, the art we produce is not simply a mirror of the world, nor is it an alibi for past events or present intensities. Engaging constructively with the technological environment, it sets creativity in motion, within the frame of indeterminacy, building new ideas, new forms, and new experience from the bottom up, with the artist relinquishing total control while fully immersed in the evolutive process. The viewer is complicit in this, interactively adding to the propositional force that the artwork carries. It is seduction in semantic space: Barthe’s juissance all over again.10 And it is a noetic enticement, an invitation to share in the consciousness of a new millennium, the triumphant seduction of technology by art, not the seduction of the artist by technology.

1 See Roy Ascott, “The Architecture of Cyberception,” in M. Toy, ed., Architects in Cyberspace (London: Architectural Design, 1995), 38-41.
2 “Noetic” is from the Greek nous, mind.
3 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 358.
4 Unless otherwise cited, quotations from artists in the Techno-Seduction exhibition are from their artist’s statements.
5 See Frank Rosenblatt, Principles of Neurodynamics (New York: Spartan Books, 1962).
6 Artificial life is concerned with generating lifelike behavior, artificial intelligence with intelligent behavior. See Christopher G. Langton, ed., Artificial Life(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1989), 1-47.
7 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Michell (New York: Holt, 1922), 179.
8 Roy Ascott, “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?” Art Journal 49, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 241-47. See also Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 489-98.
9 The phrase belongs to Deleuze: “But a game of images never replaced the deeper game of concepts and philosophical thought for Nietzsche.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), 31.
10 See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Roland Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).

The connectivist turn.

Filed under: ΚΕΙΜΕΝΑ — admin @ 09:29

The connectivist turn.
Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace. Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness.
Author: Jan Baetens
Published: May 2004
Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace. Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. Edited and with an essay by Edward A. Shanken
Berkeley, California University Press, 2003
If the definition of a good book is that one feels intellectually provoked during its reading, and leaves the volume with the certitude of being more intelligent than at the start, then Telematic Embrace is the book one might be looking for. And if one is not hesitant about the old seductions of style and, most of all, that impossible thing called the ‘personality’ of its author, this book provides even more than one could ask from a vast collection of essays in the problematic, because too overtly fashionable and therefore too easily outfashioned, field of theory on art and electronic culture. In the case of Ascott’s writings, those two elements–the visionary force of his thinking on the one hand and the personal qualities of his style on the other–may seem a little contradictory, since few authors have made such strong pleas in favour of “distributed authorship” and against the mirages of the traditional (romantic, ego-centered) art world, yet the very example of Telematic Embrace, which presents an extremely useful, highly representative and carefully edited anthology of Ascott’s scholarly work, proves one of the basic theses of the author, i.e. that the leap towards global connectiveness through cybernetics and telematics does not exclude the human factor or prevent man from liberating himself when abandoning the traditional domains of the humanities.
Most books and essays on the relationship between art, science, and technology, represent either a synthesis or a ‘snapshot’ of what their authors have been thinking or are thinking on the subject. In both cases, their writings are homogeneous: in the case of a book, the previous phases of reflection are integrated in a kind of global survey that camouflages internal contradictions and transforms previous hesitations and errors into stepping-stones on the long path leading to final insights; in the case of an essay, which normally gives just a cross-section of the author’s thinking on that specific point of time and place, the lack of a global framework is not always considered a flaw, and contradictions with later texts are part of the game (“This was what I was thinking in 1984, and this is what I am thinking now, and tomorrow I may appear to think something else…”). The exceptional merit of Roy Ascott’s work as a theoretician of the relationships between art, science, and technology, is that it in spite of their often shattered and overtly ‘visionary’ character, they are not just a succession of speculations in which new links replace or destroy the previous ones. Although they have not been rewritten for this publication, the texts gathered in Telematic Embrace span a period of more than three decades (1964-1993) and reveal indeed an exceptional coherence (and maybe even a kind of master narrative, yet this word may be too negatively connoted).
This coherence is not the result of the mere application of a pre-established, teleological programme or of a single, all-explaining and stubbornly adhered to theoretical paradigm. The coherence of Ascott’s thinking and writing develops almost spontaneously along some basic lines, which the author never renounces but which he always adopts following his own principles of feed-back and interactivity. If one had to summarize Ascott’s evolution, one might say that he gradually moved from cybernetics to telematics, and from telematics to an overall view of connectedness at both an electronic and at a biological level. In the late 50s and during the 60s, Ascott pioneered the interaction of art and the emerging science of cybernetics (defined as “the study of control and communication in living and artificial systems”, p. 331). He then realized, with the cyberneticians themselves, that such a study missed an essential point, namely the fact that the observer had to be considered part of the system studied. This brought him to second-order cybernetics, which recognized the blurring of boundaries between object and observer, while emphasizing even more the importance of feed-back and interactivity. With the revolution of telematics (the integration of computers and telecommunications), Ascott’s ideas evolved towards a what he calls “connectivism”, a paradigm in which the ancients spheres of mind, body, and world, or those of nature and culture, are no longer separable and in which universal interaction is celebrated as a new step in evolution (not only of man’s evolution, since there is no longer a clear-cut separation of man and non-man in the universe).
All of this sounds familiar and the name of McLuhan comes quickly to mind. The philosophical underpinnings of Ascott’s telematic embrace and McLuhan’s global village are not without analogy: the East and the West will meet, human conflicts will be overcome by ‘communication’, ancient hierarchies will be replaced by freedom and democracy, even love will be in the air. Ascott likes quoting (and connecting!), for instance, more or less like-minded people such as the 19-th French socialist thinker Fourier, the apologist of “universal attraction”, the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, the inventor of the “noosphere”, or J.E.Lovelock, the advocate of Gaia, not to speak of McLuhan himself, regularly mentioned with great sympathy. Yet there are also considerable differences, which undoubtedly play in favour of Ascott. Ascott’s visionary thinking is always deeply rooted in concrete, professional contexts: his many appointments (academic, advisory, and editorial) all over the world have insured that he has always been in very close contact with the wishes and the needs of students, artists, researchers, and the interested audience. This field experience is crucial: it is the perfect counterweight to intellectual freewheeling and gratuitous speculation (what Ascott is discussing is always both visionary and down to earth: in the same essay, for instance, he can demonstrate the necessity to establish ‘post-institutional’ ways of working and giving all possible details on the equipment of each single room of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz). It is also the warrant of a real interdisciplinary approach (Ascott’s understanding of contemporary science, for instance, is a real understanding, and not that of a dilettante (?)). Moreover, Ascott’s work has always been at the service of the intellectual needs of the field. The selection of his essays in Telematic Embrace gives full and clear evidence of this attitude of deep concern with the didactics of contemporary art (of course, since ‘everything is connected’, these didactics are never bookish). Almost all important issues which are at stake in the twentieth-century reflection on art, are represented here: the role and place of a museum, the relationship between art object and audience, the integration of art and society, etc.
Ascott’s place in the philosophy of art (I know this label is erroneous, but nevertheless it helps to stress the importance of this work) is paradoxical. Ascott is antimodern, since he rejects absolutely the ideology of the purity of art and the celebration of its objects, and in this respect his visionary thinking can be linked with post-structuralism (one is not surprised to see that in the recent texts by Ascott the name of Deleuze starts appearing). Yet at the same time, his clear belief in some Grand Narrative makes him a antipostmodernist (many essays, even in the years when postmodernism was still a positive value, are very critical of its incapacity to tackle the new and to exceed the parodying relationship with the past). The very long introductory essay by Edward A. Shanken, who did a wonderful job as an editor (the very fact that the editing goes almost unseen is the best compliment one can address to an editor!), provides the reader with a very profitable historical survey of the major tendencies in 20 th century art one has to know in order to fully understand what is at stake in Ascott’s work. It is at the same time a perfect introduction to this work itself, which it helps to interpret while giving the reader a strong impulse to deepen their own interpretations. Often, collected and introduced essays are broken up into two non-communicating parts: the new introduction and the older essays. In Telematic Embrace, the editor and the author manage to make love.

3ds Max Learning Path

Filed under: 3DMAX — admin @ 09:28
http://area.autodesk.com/3dsmaxlearningpath

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max-design/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/ENU/123112/files/3dsmaxdesign-2014-tutorials-html.html

12 Νοεμβρίου 2014

tutorials

Filed under: UNCLASSIFIED 1 — admin @ 12:08

George V. Antoniou <georgevantoniou@hotmail.com>

http://vimeo.com/80851591 3 technics animation on photoshop by cartoon network artists 

https://medium.com/@joyybox/making-phantom-limb-1eef3f6d085f good instruction of ideas development  / story board / 2d /stop motion animation 
http://vimeo.com/69829328 the animation Phantom Limb “released” by http://latenightworkclub.com/?page_id=36 look at ther work, new age animation / illustrators and all that 
http://www.laika.com/ look at the productions there making , the stop motion with 3d figures movies there making. show them Tim Burtons work as well 
http://animationtidbits.tumblr.com/ new age animation ,this covers everything, all fields from the begging to the end  
http://2dtraditionalanimation.tumblr.com/ lots of ” making of “material of 21century animation

Filed under: UNCLASSIFIED 1,ΚΑΛΛΙΤΕΧΝΕΣ-ARTISTS — admin @ 09:51

//%20www.youtube.com%20/embed/IGF5bkr8esQ

TASOS selfportrait

Filed under: SELFPORTRAIT,UNCLASSIFIED 1,ΑΣΚΗΣΕΙΣ — admin @ 07:54
   Stop motion animation αντιπροσωπευτικό της

ψυχολογικής μου διάθεσης.
Η υπομονή ένα από τα προτερήματα  μου, μεχρι ένα βαθμό
τουλάχιστον. Υπομένω έως ότου πέσει και η τελευταία σταγόνα
όπου θα ξεχειλίσει το ποτήρι.
   Τσαλακώνομαι , εξαντλώ όλα τα αποθέματά μου, μέχρι που τα δίνω
όλα μια κλωτσιά και τα καταστρέφω όλα.
   Ξανασηκώνομαι ,αρχίζω πάλι από την αρχή …
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFj5oqSu6SY]

Walking At Florina

Filed under: WALKING — admin @ 06:12

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