Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/I got a plan/Roy Ascott

Text File | 1994-09-13 | 21KB | 384 lines

From Appearance to Apparition:
communications and consciousness in the cybersphere

Roy Ascott, [e-mail]


"The mod does two things...it stops me collapsing the wave
function; it disables the parts of the brain that normally do so.
But the mod also allows me  to manipulate the  eigenstates - now
that I no longer clumsily, randomly, destroy all but one of
them."

"So what should we call it?"

"...neural linear decomposition of the state vector, followed by
phase shifting and preferential reinforcement of eigenstates".
She laughs. "You're right: we'd better think of something
catchier, or the whole thing will end up being grossly
misreported."

Greg Egan, Quarantine,  1992


Schroedinger's Cat has to be the most celebrated creature in the
bestiary of science, and the paradox it proposes is perhaps the
most complex in our understanding of consciousness and reality.
It describes the  problem of measurement at the quantum level of
reality, the level of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules.
This gruesome thought experiment involves a black box containing
a cat and radioactive material positioned so as to trigger the
cat's death if the particle decays. The process is quantum
mechanical and so the decay can only be predicted in a
probabilistic sense. The whole boxed system is described by a
wavefunction  which involves a combination of the two possible
states that the cat can be in; according to quantum theory the
cat is both dead and alive, until we observe or measured it, at
which point the wavefunction collapses and the cat will be seen
to be in either one state or the other.  And just as the electron
is neither a wave nor a particle until a measurement is made on
it, so the cat is neither dead nor alive until we get to take a
look at it. We are dealing here with observer-created reality. To
look is to have the system jump from a both/and situation to an
either/or outcome, the quantum jump producing what is known as
the eigenstate. But there is no agreement amongst physicists
about precisely where, in the chain of events in this
wavefunction collapse, the measurement result is ultimately
registered.

Greg Egan places the point of collapse, the point at which
reality is created, right in the brain. By proposing a technology
which could be inserted in the brain to modify this eigenstate
effect, to block it and thereby prevent the collapse of the wave
function, his scenario gives a post-biological context to the
idea that reality is constructed. Egan speaks the language of the
coming decade.  His  1990's science fiction addresses issues of
the neuro-cognitive sciences with the prescience that William
Gibson showed towards computer communication developments in the
1980s. And just as Gibson's Neuromancer correctly identified
cyberspace as an important cultural construct of the late 20th
century, so Egan's Quarantine identifies the issues likely to
preoccupy us at the turn of the millennium. The question of
consciousness, the technology of consciousness, the transcendence
of consciousness will be the themes of 21st century life.
Fundamental to this evolution is the development of a telematic
art in the cybersphere, and fundamental to that art are the
experiments, concepts, dreams and audacity of artists working
today with telecommunications systems and services.

Questions of consciousness and the construction of reality are at
the centre of any discussion of the status, role and potential of
art in the emerging cyberculture. The fundamental question is
this: Can an art which is concerned, as western art has always
been, with appearance, with the look of things, with surface
reality, have any relevance in our systems-based culture in which
apparition, emergence, transformation are seminal? Can
Representation co-exist with Constructivism?  It is the
overarching concern with appearance and with representation which
has hitherto characterised western art and which has made it the
servant of ideologies, of both church and state. It is its
concern with appearance which has kept it in line with classical
science, looking no further into things than their outward forms
allow, making of the world a clockwork machine of parts whose
movements are regulated by rigid determinism, and seeing Man as
little more than a material object. It is the art of appearance
which is purveyed in boutiques, galleries, museums and on the
pages of chic art magazines. It is International Art. And it is
dying. It is dying because it is no longer relevant to a culture
which is progressively concerned with the complexity of
relationships and subtlety of systems, with the invisible and
immaterial, the evolutive and the evanescent, in short, with
apparition. Questions of representation no longer interest us. We
find no value in representation, just as we find no value in
political ideologies. We do not wish to keep up appearances.

The telecommunications of cyberspace, on the other hand, offer
the contemporary artist the means of interaction (both his own
and that of the viewing subject) with dynamic systems, with
creativity-in-process, with the emergent properties of an art of
transformation, growth and change. It is for this reason also
that the narratives and technology of Artificial Life are so
important to us at this time. Cyberspace is the space of
apparition, in which the virtual and real not only co-exist, but
co-evolve in a cultural complexity. Apparition implies action
just as Appearance implies inertia Apparition is about the
coming-into-being of new identity, which is often at first,
unexpected, surprising, disturbing. If appearance is claimed as
the face of reality, of things-as-they-are, apparition is the
emergence of things-as-they-could-be. However, our insight into
the ways in which reality is constructed in our consciousness,
leaves us in no doubt that the processes of apparition are
authentic and that appearance is a fraud. Representation in art
was always essentially mendacious, illusory, and counterfeit. The
mirror always lies.

More and more artists now take global networks, virtual reality,
high speed computing for granted. These technologies are no
longer seen as simply tools for art, they now constitute the very
environment within which art is developing. Given this increasing
familiarity, artistic questions now are not so much concerned
with these dataworlds per se but with the interface between them,
between us, between our own minds and that larger field of
consciousness we call the world.

Whether or not Egan's fictive brain modifier gets to be
developed, the fact is that our technologies of perception,
cognition, and communication - the interface to the complex
computer systems that both mediate our consciousness and
construct our reality - are moving closer and closer to the body
and into the brain. Just as the keyboard and mouse are being
consigned to history, so too will the Head Mounted Display, the
DataGlove, even the datasuit soon be consigned to the museum.
Conceptually, they already are. We want the systems interface set
within our brain.  We want the boundaries between "natural" and
"artificial"  to be as redundant technologically as they are
becoming conceptually and spiritually. This is to talk about the
post-biological body as interface.

Progressively, we artists want to be creative in cyberspace by
controlling computer-mediated systems through biological input
sensors and biocontrollers in our own nervous system responding
directly to signals from the brain, eye and muscles. However,
while the advent of neural interfacing will certainly have
enormous consequences for the development of art in the Net, and
as much as it fascinates our speculative nature, it is not the
most fundamental question at present for artists in the
cyberculture. More important to us now is the conceptual
implications of the shift taking place in art from appearance to
apparition, from object to process. Art, which was previously so
concerned with a finite product, a composed and ordered outcome,
an aesthetic finality, a resolution or conclusion, reflecting a
ready-made reality, is now moving towards a fundamental concern
with processes of emergence and of coming-into-being. This raises
critical, theoretical, and aesthetic questions which we can no
longer avoid. In an important sense the issue is political, it
concerns as much the democratisation of meaning as the
democratisation of communications, that is to say a shared
participation in the creation and ownership of reality.

The revolution in art which prompts these questions lies in the
radically new role of the artist. Instead of creating,
expressing, or  transmitting content, he is now involved in
designing context: contexts within which the observer or viewer
can construct experience and meaning. The skill in this, the
insight, sensibility, feeling and intelligence required to design
such contexts is no less than that demanded of the artist in
classical, orthodox art. But the outcome is radically different.
Connectivity, interaction and emergence are now the watchwords of
artistic culture. The observer of art is now in the centre of the
creative process not at the periphery looking in. Art is no
longer a window onto the world but a doorway through which the
observer is invited to enter into a world of interaction and
transformation. The importance of telematic networks, of the
inherent connectivity of cyberspace, in all of this, cannot be
overestimated. These ubiquitous networks are themselves
undergoing significant augmentation with the capacity and speed
now available in the so-called 'dark' fibre, as George Gilder
explains:

"Fibre comes in threads, as thin as a human hair, as long as the
British Isles, fed by lasers as small as a grain of salt and as
bright as the sun. A single fibre thread can potentially hold all
the telephone calls in the United States at a peak moment of
Mother's Day. Fibre is not really a replacement for copper
(wires) ...it's a replacement for air. Dark fibre, lit with
different colours for different protocols, will deliver one
thousand times our present total broadcasting capacity. The
recently developed Erbium Doped Amplifier which will send an
infinity of messages through glass on wings of light, is the
communications engineer's Holy Grail - the dream communications
system, capable of communicating over vast distances with huge
information capacity."

So, dark fibre, boxed cats and biocontrollers are directly
relevant to the development of art in the cyberculture, this
domain of apparition in which natural intelligence and artificial
life can interact creatively. Whatever the dominant media,
whether electronic, optical, or genetic, the art of the
cyberculture is generically interactive. This interactive art is
characterised by a systems approach to creation, in which
interactivity and connectivity are the essential features, such
that the behaviour of the system (the artwork, network, product
or building) is responsive in important ways to the behaviour of
its user (the viewer or consumer). More than simply responsive,
it constitutes a structural coupling between everyone and
everything within the Net. This kind of work is inherently
cybernetic and typically constitutes an open-ended system whose
transformative potential enables the user to be actively
involved in the evolution of its content, form or structure.

Science fiction such as Egan's is not alone in positing scenarios
in which human consciousness is seen as the instrument for
creating reality. Outstanding amongst philosophers from the point
of view of cyberculture is Paul Watzlawick whose contributions to
Radical Constructivism can be seen as directly relevant to the
interactive art aesthetic. Radical Constructivism is as
incompatible with traditional thinking as interactive art is with
traditional art. As early as 1973 the cybernetician and bio-
mathematician Heinz von Foerster gave his classic lecture On
Constructing a Reality showing how the environment, as we
perceive it, is our invention, describing the neurophysiological
mechanisms of these perceptions and the ethical and aesthetic
implications of these constructs.

What both the art and technologies of cyberculture are able to
show is that there is a radical shift in our perceived
relationship with reality, where the emphasis has moved from
appearance to apparition, that is from the outward and visible
look of things to the inward and emergent processes of becoming.
In this culture, neither the precise state of art nor its
cultural status can be fixed or defined; it is in a constant
state of transformation. This is not a state of transition
between two known and fixed definitions or destinations, rather
is it transformation itself as a defining characteristic, as
intrinsic to the identity of interactive art as the composed and
finite object was to its classical predecessor. Interactive art
is art in a state of endless becoming. It is art-in-flux. This is
so at present both in stand-alone systems, whether hypermedia or
multi-media in format, as much as in the Internet with its global
multiplicity of inputs and outputs.

A culture concerned with appearances bases itself on certainties,
a definitive description of reality. Uniformity of dogma,
uniformity of outlook and goals, cultural continuity and
consensus, semiotic stability, these are its distinguishing
features. Within this larger frame, aesthetic changes, when they
occur are merely cosmetic, the basic conformity to an approved
model of reality remains. There have been paradigm shifts in art
just as in science, but it could be argued that the canon of
Western art has maintained a much longer consistency and
continuity than science, since numerous scientific revolutions
have come and gone while art's preoccupation with appearance,
with the surface image, with ready-made reality, has held for
millennia.

In contrast, a culture concerned with apparition bases itself on
the construction of reality, through shared perceptions, dreams
and desires, through communication, and on the hybridisation of
media and the celebration of semiotic instability. The shift in
art towards apparition and construction as its primary concerns
is a paradigmatic shift. We now realise that an art dedicated to
appearance, simply gives the lie to whatever is the case, since
the retinal gaze can penetrate very little of the material state
and almost nothing of the spiritual state of things. The surface
of the world hides more than it discloses. Science in the 20th
century has been based largely on what is invisible to human
retinal vision since it has always attempted to comprehend the
forces and fields, and relationships underlying "our" visual
world. In the earlier art of the 20th century this also to some
extent was true; Kandinsky, Duchamp and Pollock, distinguish
themselves, in their radically different ways, by their attempts
to reveal the invisible, and construct their separate realities.
Of these, it was Pollock whose intimations of connectivity
brought to modern painting the great commanding images of a
networked world, in the swirling, circulating, linking,
confluences of line and colour. It was Pollock who first brought
the tight-framed picture window of painting off the gallery wall
and onto the surface of the earth,  marking out an arena for
action and interactivity, and thereby laying the groundwork for
those holistic ways of viewing, imaging and constructing, an
entirely new attitude towards art and aesthetics, of which we in
our digital space are the principal heirs and benefactors.

But until the effects of cyberculture were felt, until the
radical implications for art of the new technologies had begun to
be recognised and adopted, those artists whose practice,
complicitly or unthinkingly, upheld the old orders of perception
and knowledge, aided and abetted by the de facto controllers of
representation and consciousness, the curators, critics,
historians and dealers, resisted the radicalism of these
pioneers. The great shame of American scholarship is that Pollock
has never been properly appreciated or understood, nor, as Tim
Hilton has noted in reviewing the current, disastrous  Royal
Academy Exhibition American Art in the 20th Century, has he ever
been given a serious full scale retrospective, nor a fully
sympathetic book. "America wishes him to be a dead movie-star
rather than an artist." And yet Pollock first created the
aesthetic possibility, in a sense the historical permission, for
our own radical constructivism in the cybersphere to come into
being. Because, at base, working with networks, is a matter of
attitude before it is anything to do with machines. Telematic art
is conceptually driven not technologically led.  The fundamental
concepts of art as action, interaction with the art-in-process,
the artwork as arena, art as transformation, change, flux and
flow, these are in origin Pollock's - with the acknowledged
provenance of course of Navaho and the visual culture of Native
America. If there is any link whatsoever between the art of
cyberculture and the art of the pre-telematic era, it lies in the
painting of Pollock. The link is one of sensibility not style, of
attitude not form.

The collapse of the New York School, the market rise of resurgent
German expressionism, the despairing flounderings of post-
modernist solipsism, the dismal return to nineteenth century
academicism, figuration and narrative, the whole miserable
confusion, demoralisation and splintering of art at the fag end
of this century is evidence of the major paradigm shift which we
are undergoing. Nothing is spared in the process: galleries
become redundant, museums have to be rethought and redesigned,
academies have to be abandoned and reconstituted, the patronage,
placement and perpetuity of art are all to be reconsidered.

In our present understanding of the world, nothing is
sufficiently stable for us to wish to give a permanent form to
its representation. Nor do we wish it to be. We are on that
evolutionary spiral which has returned us to a more Taoist desire
for flux and flow, for change and transformation. No eternal
verities present themselves as worthy of consecration in
manuscripts or monuments. We want now an art which constructs
new realities, not one which represents a world preordained,
finite and ready-made. We want now an art which is instrumental
rather than illustrative, explicatory or expressive. Rather than
to simply embellish the world and add to its ornamentation, the
artist of the cyberculture wishes to engage in its renewal and
reconstruction.

Above all we do not need any longer, hovering like vultures at
the periphery of the old order of art, the cultural theorists,
critics and academics who winge and wince at technology, who wag
endlessly their disapproving and despairing fingers at the daring
perceptions and dazzling innovations of science.  Cultural theory
was little more than ideological determinism dressed up in
pretentious rhetoric, all show and no action, ideally suited in
these latter years to preside over the demise of the old order of
art, the art of appearance.

Art in the cybersphere is emerging out of the fusion of
communications and computers, virtual space and real space,
nature and artificial life, which constitutes a new universe of
space and time. This new network environment is extending our
sensorium and providing new metaphysical dimensions to human
consciousness and culture. Along the way, new modalities of
knowledge and the means of their distribution are being tested
and extended. Cyberspace cannot remain  innocent, it is a matrix
of human values, it carries a psychic charge. In the
cyberculture, to construct  art is to construct reality, the
networks of cyberspace underpinning our desire to amplify human
cooperation and interaction in the constructive process.


(C) Roy Ascott 1993


Published in:

"De la Apariencia a la Aparicion", Intermedia. Nuevas
Tecnologias, Creacion, Cultura, Vol.I, No.1. November,  Madrid,
1993

"From Appearance to Apparition: Communications and Culture in the
Cybersphere", Leonardo Electronic Almanac, No.2, 1993

"From Appearance to Apparition: Communications and Culture in the
Cybersphere", Papers, 4th International Symposium on Electronic
Art, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, Minneapolis, 1993


This document is available for non-commercial, personal use. The rights
to this document belong to the author(s) and it may not be published,
excerpted or redistributed in any form without the express written
consent of the author(s). However, you may freely download it for
personal use.