Technoetic Arts - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2003

In both the philosophical and visual sense, ‘seeing is believing’ does not apply to nanotechnology, for there is nothing even remotely visible to create proof of existence. On the atomic and molecular scale, data is recorded by sensing and probing in a very abstract manner, which requires complex and approximate interpretations. More than in any other science, visualization and creation of a narrative becomes necessary to describe what is sensed, not seen. Nevertheless, many of the images generated in science and popular culture are not related to data at all, but come from visualizations and animations frequently inspired or created directly from science fiction. Likewise, much of this imagery is based on industrial models and is very mechanistic in nature, even though nanotechnology research is at a scale where cogs, gears, cables, levers and assembly lines as functional components appear to be highly unlikely. However, images of mechanistic nanobots proliferate in venture capital circles, popular culture, and even in the scientific arena, and tend to dominate discourse around the possibilities of nanotechnology. The authors put forward that this new science is ultimately about a shift in our perception of reality from a purely visual culture to one based on sensing and connectivity.

With the expansion of consciousness comes new ways of seeing reality. The hypercontextual pretexts, contexts and subtexts created by the new technologies of virtual, immersive and cyber realities create boundaryless experiences that are analogous to the archaic techniques evolved through shamanic journeys designed to transcend all human boundaries.

The magico-spiritual imagination, far from disappearing in our supposedly secular age, continues to feed the utopian dreams, apocalyptic visions, digital phantasms, and alien obsessions that populate today’s ‘technological unconscious’. The language and ideas of the information society have slipped into and even transformed the myriad worlds of contemporary spirituality. What is emerging is a networked framework for grappling with some of the impulses that are currently tearing us apart: spirit and the machine, modernity and nihilism, technology and the human. ‘We find ourselves trapped on a cyborg sandbank, caught between the old, smouldering campfire stories and the new networks of programming and control’ (Davis 1998: 131). We are ‘beached’ between the archaic sea of our magico-spiritual ancestors, freshly emerged from our proto-modern past, and spawned into the postmodern reality of fragmented selves, networked options, downloadable digitized consumerware and ‘technologies of ecstacy’.

This article explores some of the language used to describe life and evolutionary processes; from bacteria to collections of cells. Then the paper will discuss the Semi-Living entities created by the Tissue Culture & Art project (TC&A) and the possible different engagements with them, in the light of increased suspicion and intolerance in Western urban society. Different notions of life will be looked at in the context of current rhetoric used in our pre-war2 global society.

Architectural experience and creation is studied through a selection of projects, each driven by an obsessive creator towards particular levels of architectural experience, both physical and virtual. The article investigates the processes of turning dreams into physical space, exemplified by four extraordinary creators and collectors of space, each one a pursuer of obsessive architectural activities, all haunted by transitive dreams: Baron Des Esseintes, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ fictional character in the novel À Rebours (Against Nature) from 1884; Kurt Schwitters, the dadaist painter and constructor of the Merzbau created in Hannover between 1919 and 1937; Sir John Soane, the architect and collector, who arranged his home as a museum from 1790 until 1837; and the German artist Gregor Schneider, whose home in Rheydt since 1985 is slowly folding in on itself under the name Haus Ur. Whereas Des Esseintes is a fictional builder of dreams in physical form; Schwitters, Soane and Schneider are real builders of dreams in physical form - the author Huysmans is a real builder of dreams in fictional form. Three of the four selected projects introduce layers of hybrid existence into ordinary building shells, and one represents the virtual architecture of narrative space. Their creators are driving architectural space into different ontological states, providing a field of perceptional and representational problems. The architects of parallel realities are subsequently challenging our basic understanding of architectural organization, aesthetics and methods. This erratic field of subjective and obsessive architecture serves my purposes of investigating architectural imagination as the main asset of virtual space.

‘The new city presupposes that the cables of the interhuman relations are switched reversibly, not in bundles as with television, but in real networks, respons(e)ibly, as in the telephone network. These are technical questions; and they are to be solved by urbanists and architects.’ (Vilém Flusser 1990). To reinforce the significance of public space we have to deal with at least two ‘publics’ - the global and the local public - by creating spheres where local and global public space can fuse and interchange.

Although the field of wearable computing is experiencing a great boost at the level of design and production, research on its social dimensions is still at an early phase and the literature on the subject is scant. This paper attempts to partially fill this gap by reviewing the current status of the field of wearable computing and the main issues that are starting to emerge from their usage. The first part defines wearable computers and assesses its technical and conceptual origins and developments. Examples of current wearable computing products are provided. The second part reviews some of its possible social implications, especially as they relate to the issue of control. It concludes by suggesting future research directions for the study of the social dimensions of wearable computing.