ART IN THE TIME OF THE FOURTH VR
Syncretic strategies
Connectivity syncretises, absolute connectivity syncretises absolutely. It’s no longer simply a matter of the emergence of moistmedia from the convergence of silicon-dry digital technology and biologically wet systems, as much as it’s about the three VRs – virtual, validated and vegetal – coming out of their separate 20-th Century boxes and merging into the continuous flow of variable reality: the fourth VR. It’s a syncretism that will make incontrovertible demands on both artistic and scientific inquiry, in that only a wholly transdisciplinary research of mind and matter will yield significant outcomes in the domains of new knowledge and spiritual awareness. Initially, the 3 VRs ran in parallel, with movement between these states requiring discrete action, due to the limitations of early access technology. This constituted an ontological compartmentalisation, which meant the separation of validated reality, involving reactive, mechanical technology in a prosaic, Newtonian world, from virtual reality, involving interactive, digital technology in a telematic, immersive world, and from vegetal reality, involving the chemistry of the mind, and psychoactive plant technology, in a world of altered states of consciousness.
Variable Reality, the fourth VR, inhabits a fluid space that is as unstable ontologically as it is creative, and where, it can be argued, instability and uncertainty fuel the evolution of post-human identity and behaviour. Just as Hugh Everitt III’s research has persuaded many of us of the utility of the many-worlds hypothesis [1], so we are gaining the desire to live in a state of variable selfhood. This «many-selves» condition is most readily perceived in the enormous growth of activity in Second Life, with its proliferation of avatars, its radical redesign of bodies and personae, and leverage of an open-endedness of being. It is equalled in significance by the engineering research in the construction of cognitively complex robots, and the intensive biological effort to emulate life processes with the seeding of sentient organisms. There is as much folly as farsightedness in these domains. Folly in the assumption that intelligence can be grown successfully without requiring the blossom of emotion; farsightedness in making the Singularity dependent on an ethical, if not aesthetic, recursive augmentation.
If we look at the achievements in the field of art and technology over the past thirty years, it will be clear that artists with a particular interest in the technology of mind, and what I call ‘cyberception’, as well as in the reformulation and distribution of the body, are prepared to look into any discipline, scientific or spiritual, any view of the world, however eccentric or esoteric, any culture, immediate or distant in space or time, any technology, ancient or modern, in order to find ideas and processes which allow for technoetic navigation and exploration. While the body can be mapped (a certain levels of resolution), the mind is an unknown territory. What David Chalmers has called the hard problem [2] remains intractable to science, which knows nothing of the location of consciousness, how it arises, or of what it is constituted. It understands as little about the «dark matter» of mind as it does about the dark matter of the universe. In short, while matter matters, the mind is yet to be mined.
Variable Reality inhabits a space where instability and uncertainty
fuel the evolution of post-human identity and behaviour.
The two domains may in some mysterious way be linked. The astrophysicist Attila Gran dpierre claims that the cosmic, natural, and environmental fields are determinative sources of our consciousness. «The organisation of an organism involves fields, which are the only means to make a simultaneous tuning of the different subsystems of the organism-as-a-whole. Fields with their ability to comprehend the whole organism are the natural basis of a global interaction between organisms and of collective consciousness». [3] He offers a quantum-physical model of a multi-layered consciousness. Direct, immediate action at a distance actually exists in the electromagnetic field, which is the coupling, mediator field between waves and particles. In his view, the collective field of consciousness is a significant physical factor of the biosphere. Similarly, the concept of immaterial connectedness is advocated by Hans Peter Dürr [4] of the Max Plank Institute for Physics in
Art’s preoccupation with the body is increasingly giving way to a more determined and subtle technoetic investigation of the mind. It may be instructive to revisit the technologies of consciousness that are employed in older cultures, where the syncretism of knowledge and worldviews is explicit, for example in
Biophysics, ethnobotany and new media art, although apparently quite strange if not alien bedfellows, can be shown to have commonalities and potentialities that it might be wise not to ignore if some of our contemporary artistic digerati are not to get lost in the smokescreen of their own technophilia. To look at these three issues – field theory, the ritual use of entheogens, and cultural cybernation – is to bring together clearly disparate models of reality and of our own sense of being. All three are of value in ameliorating the human condition — including political, economic, cultural and religious conditions, each of which have become intricately intertwined, and recently often violently interactive, in defence of competing world views. In the late 20th Century, the formative issues in digital art were about connectivity and interaction. Now at the start of the 3rd millennium, our post-digital objectives will increasingly be technoetic and syncretic. During the 20th Century there was much ado about e pluribus unum, out of many, one: a unified culture, unified self, unified thought, unity of time and space. Now at the start of the 3rd Millennium, it could be the reverse e unum pluribus, out of one, many: many selves, many presences, many locations, and many levels of consciousness.
If there is a technological revolution in art it lies not simply in the global connectivity of person-to-person, mind to mind (significant as that is), but in its power to provide for the release of the self, release from the self, the fictive «unified self» of Western philosophy. It lies in our ability to be many selves, telematically in many places at the same time, our self-creation leading to many personas and serial identities. This is the appeal of Second Life, as it is to the many narratives and games of generative identity, shape-shifting, and transformative personality that artists today are creating. The challenge is to untie the Newtonian knot that binds our perception, whilst extracting from vanguard scientific thought, strategies that will inform a technoetic and syncretic practice. An example can be found in Biophysics that brings new dimensions of meaning and value to the evolving terminology of art discourse: long-range interaction, non-linearity, self-organization and self-regulation, communication networks, interconnectedness, non-locality, coherence, macroscopic quantum states, field models, and the inclusion of consciousness.
As artists in search of new insights, new images, systems and structures, new intellectual, social and spiritual associations and relations, we hold within our creative and critical world view five (con)temporary truths: our planet is telematic, our media is moist, our mind is technoetic, our body is transformable, our reality is syncretic.
References and Notes:
[1]. DeWitt, B. R. and Graham, R. N. (eds). 1973. The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton:
[2]. Chalmers, D.J. 1995. Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. In: Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 200-19.
[3]. Gran dpierre, A. 1997. The Physics of Collective Consciousness. In: World Futures. The Journal of General Evolution 48: 23-56.
[4]. http://www.shiftinaction.com/discover/luminaries/hans_peter_durr (accessed 20.08.08)
[5]. Ho, Mae-Wan. 1997. Quantum Coherence and Conscious Experience. In: Kybernetes 26: 265-276
[6]. Popp, F-A, and Beloussov, L. 2003. Integrative Biophysics – Biophotonics.
[7]. Pribram, K. 1991. Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing.
[8]. Bohm, D. 1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order,
[9]. Ray, T. 2005. «The Chemical Architecture of the Human Mind». http://brainwaves.corante.com/ archives/2005/02/05/ (accessed 17.08.08)
Roy Ascott (