Technoetic Arts - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2016

This paper explores our increasingly intimate engagement with the electromagnetic spectrum. It does so by focusing on technology’s wireless wave, from radio and telegraphy to the mobile phone (a device that has been adopted throughout the planet faster than has any technology in history), as well as the rise of smart objects, wearables and the Internet of Things. It shows how these technologies communicate in frequencies whose range is beyond our perceptual reach, arguing that the technological revelation of the imperceptible waves within which we are immersed is critical to the futurism at the heart of modernity.

This article presents my creative research to date at the Scottish Centre for Simulation & Clinical Human Factors (SCSCHF), Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Larbert, Scotland. The SCSCHF is a state-of the-art professional training facility, undertaking simulation-based medical education for medical students, nurses and professionals. It boasts a range of mid- and high-fidelity training manikins, embodied with physical responses, such as pulse, breath, tears and voice, accommodated within two multipurpose simulation suites representing clinical hospital locations. These suites create an extraordinary psychological fidelity for the trainees, resulting in a profound level of conviction and commitment by participants, to the simulated scenarios they experience. I have been investigating the emotive and psychological potential of SCSCHF’s manikins as a core construct for a live participatory performance in progress entitled Eidolon. Developed through collaboration between interdisciplinary partners, for the unique setting of the SCSCHF simulation suites, the Eidolon live performance intertwines manikins, medical professionals, simulation technicians, professional performers and audience. This article considers the technological body of the manikin within the Eidolon performance through an eclectic and broad lens including zombie culture, phenomenology, the uncanny and Activity Theory.

This article provides an overview of research into how certain forms of interactive art, what I call the ‘emergent arts’, facilitate or amplify a construction of a reality that is active, dynamic, collaborative and co-evolutionary with our increasingly technologized environment. By examining these artworks and experiences via the interlocking frames of cybernetics, phenomenology and posthumanist thought, this research articulates the movement towards a framework that fuses theoretical and experiential modes of enquiry to provide insights relevant to both interactive artists and humanities scholars. I will discuss two primary components of this framework. The first is a taxonomical model that outlines a number of characteristics of new media and interactive arts practice that engage in processes that establish a foundation for the shifts in perceptual and embodied experience that I characterize as ‘symbiogenic’. The second major component is a sketching out of the conceptual basis of the symbiogenic framework, allowing us to go deeper into examining the dynamics of what I call co-evolution by outlining four theoretical concepts that I consider to be the cornerstone of what I call symbiogenic experiences in the emergent arts: ambiguity and unknowability, boundary, distributed intentionality and collectively emergent autonomy.

The senses convey impressions, perceptions and ultimately feelings, from which meaning emerges, revealing a platform where perception and thinking are actually very closely involved. From this perspective, the distance between descriptive, mental (cognitive) meaning and emotive, affective (non-cognitive) meaning shrinks, creating a platform to investigate how meaning is generated by posing the question ‘how does meaning actually make sense?’. This project investigates meaning as derived from the physical nature of our brains, our bodies and our physical experiences. We construct a collaborative dialogue between art and the field of logic, specifically studies of embodied mathematics and computational theory as related to the construction of meaning. Here ideas from modern symbolic logic, such as abstract model theory (i.e. theory of institutions), can provide a suitable framework to explore a theory of meaning.

This article suggests that the relations of politics and aesthetics in the flexible, mobile, variable collaborations of computational/informational technologies open a new way of being-and-knowing. By linking art, technology and humanity as the understandings of ‘We’ human-and-technology in collaborative actions rooted in interdependent perspective, informational technology recomposes both human identity and technological practices as collaborative fusion between the human and technology. The new identity provoked by such technologies might be called ‘We’ human-and-technology. In this conceptualization of ‘We’ human-and-technology, the coded complexities of informatics technology remix the axes and dimensions of action between politics and the aesthetic. Prior investigations of the relation of politics and the aesthetic in contemporary art are stuck in the binary frame of domination in which ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ enforces a mutual degradation of the human and technified in thought and action. This approach is criticized here from two perspectives. First, the real disruption of ‘We’ human-and-technology is a reified inversion by a frame of fantasy, using the tolerance tactic. Second, the traditional instrumental understanding of technology sees it only as an instrument for colonization, which is a limited appraisal of all that happens in technological praxes.

Engaging body gestures supports making sense of astronomical phenomena. We can hold a coin at arm’s length and look at its portrait to understand how small the Ultra Deep Field image is. We can zoom out from our solar system and galaxy at exponential speed, creating the illusion of shrinking space. Simulated left and right eye views are offset to enhance spatial depth; yet, in human scale, stereoscopy only works up to a few feet away. By adjusting scales we are sizing the Universe so that we can dance with galaxies. Tailoring space brings the Universe into our personal spaces.

Video games provide a highly efficient mode of learning. As such considerable research has been performed in terms of their educational potential. However, most of the research to date has been focused on intentional learning. In other words the focus has been on the educational games that have been designed to be learning tools, whereas little to no attention has been paid to the games that are based on true events and are not intended as learning tools. Such games are indirect teachers. They provide historical content that is all too often taken for face value, while at the same time is not historically accurate. For many players, these games become the only source of knowledge on a particular topic. The events and characters experienced in the game are subconsciously yet directly accepted as truths. In this article, I intend to recreate parallel lines of reality between the historically correct interpretations and the media-told stories while at the same time posing the question of how do we know what really is historically correct?

Art that incorporates science is questioning our existence and by this means it is showing us a way forward. Art may as well have some meanings or messages, but what makes it art is not only its content but also its affects, the sensible force or style through which it produces the actual content, however much of it is mixed with other functions. The fact that we do produce styles and sensible affects in art discloses something about what our thinking can do – that our minds are not just machines intended for information or communication, but that we also possess the tools we produce desires and work with affectedness with.

This article introduces Pulse Project (2011–2016), a practice-led performance research study that explores an ecology of complex relations between art, humanities, medicine and technology. In this study, I embody transdisciplinary research practice itself through adopting the role of ‘acupuncturist-investigator’ and acting as an instrument or medium between myself and others and between cultural traditions for understanding and mediating the body and the embodiment of consciousness. Pulse ‘reading’, case histories, notations of pulses, i.e., readings of the ‘energetic’ body and algorithmic compositions are all used together as methods for exploring the cultural encounter between a creative producer, participants and diverse cultural/informational practices.

‘So well established was the cliché which connected TB and creativity that at the end of the century one critic suggested that it was the progressive disappearance of TB which accounted for the current decline of literature and the arts’. Some biochemical evidence does indeed invite a hypothesis that M. tuberculosis originally joined the human holobiont as a brain evolution-enhancing endosymbiont, thus possibly contributing towards the development of human consciousness and creative potential. Exploring the complexity of mycobacteria’s entanglements within human corporeality leads us to questions that challenge anthropocentric conceptions of creativity in a twofold manner. As noted above, the tubercle bacillus forms machinic assemblages and operates as an endosymbiont with human bio-systems. It is possible that these endosymbiotic assemblages contribute towards human creativity and destabilize simple notions of its origin. In a double reflection, the concept of creativity itself could be revisited along alternative lines: it can no longer be considered only as the production of human cultural artefacts and experiences, but rather it can be understood as ubiquitous activity performed by heterogeneous highly dynamic machinic assemblages (comprising of human, animal, computational, social, molecular, bacterial, viral and other processes), which lead to the production of novel modes of existence.

The fusion of humans and technology takes us into an unknown world, described by some authors as populated by quasi-living species that would relegate us – ordinary humans – to the rank of alienated agents, emptied of our identity and consciousness. I argue instead that our world is woven of simple, though invisible, perspectives, which – if we become aware of them – may renew our ability for making judgements and enhance our autonomy. I became aware of these invisible perspectives by observing and practicing a real-time collective net art experiment called the Poietic Generator. As the perspectives unveiled by this experiment are invisible, I have called them anoptical perspectives (i.e., non-optical), by analogy with the optical perspective of the Renaissance. Later, I have come to realize that these perspectives obtain their cognitive structure from the political origins of our language. Accordingly, it is possible to define certain cognitive criteria for assessing the legitimacy of the anoptical perspectives, just like some artists and architects of the Renaissance defined the geometrical criteria that established the legitimacy of the optical one.

The classification presented here will condense into five categories the adjectives, concepts, artworks and topics of discussion that are related to ‘post-materiality’, understood here to mean those art practices that are related to artistic physicality in some shifted way by being objectless artworks or works beyond physicality. I present several elements that are related to the history and theoretical background of this question. The immateriality, dematerialization and non-materiality of art will be considered in the context of digital art and culture. We can follow artistic concepts related to immateriality in the late 1950s, discussions on dematerialization of art in the late 1960s and the appearance of ‘immateriality’ in the 1980s. ‘Immateriality’ emerges again in the early 1990s, this time in association with the digital environment, and has remained a much-discussed term and more of a metaphor up to the present since so-called immaterial digital art is in fact a labour-intensive and material-intensive sphere. In observing the experimental and theoretical activity around artistic technologies over the past 50 years, it is possible to discern two directions: first, dematerialization in the context of non-technological art, and second, immaterialization of the art object in the context of technological art.

The evolution of fractal theory can be traced through Leibniz’s attempts to understand the Recursion model in seventeenth century, the work of Karl Weierstrass and descriptions by Von Koch Helge (1904) and later visualization experiments by Benoît Mandelbro within the digital realm through computer technology. Selfsimilarity and Scale-free are manifested features of fractal theory. These features are also evident as emergent syncretic properties of contemporary social information communication behaviour. The attraction of fractal theory does not only provide a mapping of creature, universe, nature but also provides a path to deeply understand and probe the evolution and structure of human consciousness. Digital Social Media Networks can be seen to manifest properties that are reminiscent of what Ascott describes as a ‘moistmedia’. This article explores the tangible relationships between fractal theory and philosophy, its manifestation through digital visualizations and the moistmedia emergent properties of Social Media Networks. Put forward social media (Weibo) the moistmedia (mixed bio, nano, geo, psycho, etc.) in the dissemination of information evolution, with the fractal features of visualization, has formed a new Techneotic language of artistic expression, but also for our better understanding of political philosophy, social system operation rules to provide ways of thinking.

Consciousness and perception of reality are related to internal and external factors as the sum of collective and social interactions. Attila Grandpierre in his ‘The physics of collective consciousness’ underlined the prime role of performing arts quoting the words of Vekerdy, who said that theatrical artists especially in the ancient Japanese Noh Theatre have a great effect on audience in three ways: using words, hearing by movements, through seeing and the use of intense emotion. Generally in the design field the relation between user and the product is stressed; on the other hand, in the theatre field the ability to explore and underlining the social impact of a specific object or action is important. We might assume that each of us perceives the world differently according to the culture that we are a part of. The ancient Aristotle’s peripatetic School and the context of Zen Buddhism highlighted the senses and experimental knowledge as the first important tools to cultivate intellect. This article will describe an experimental blend created in Thailand between physical theatre and design education.

Quantum theory applied to data analytics using a quantum computer has become the leading research endeavour to find a way to store and retrieve data using the nano-sized world of molecular structures. Much of the theorization that is applied to quantum computer development relies on a conceptual framework largely based on metaphors to understand the behaviour of sub-atomic elements within a quantum field. One aspect of the quantum field is the entanglement of elements, whereby behaviours of two distinct elements respond to change independent of their location. The Toridion quantum algorithm was used to scatter pre-recorded sound into frequency amplitudes within a simulated quantum computer environment. The sounds were composed by using quantum cognitive meta models for the creation of electronic music compositions. The Toridion Encoder creates highly compressed ‘glyphs’ of the sounds whilst simultaneously creating a probabilistic quantum neural network within the cyclic mental workspace of the computer. This article will explain how using a quantum compositional framework in composing electronic music orchestrations can aid in retrieving lost memories of either images or verbal expressions. The implications for exploring a quantum language (exo-language) formed by self-organizing principles in the quantum field and interpreted using the Toridion quantum algorithm’s search function will also be discussed.

Space and spatiality had been a thorn in philosophy’s side from time immemorial. Spatiality, immediately associated with corporeality, finitude, even death, properly speaking constituted problems for philosophy; enigmas posed to philosophy to disrupt its cool complacency.

The root of the difficulty, it seems, rests on nothing more than a prejudice: the rightful domain of philosophy is time, understood as pure continuous duration, the image of eternity; the compartmentalised units of space are (always in the plural) the province of cartographers and geographers, but certainly not the philosopher, lost in his transcendent contemplation … What follows then is a preliminary study, or better an étude deploying variations on a single theme: how can we liberate space from the Cartesian grid under which it has been imprisoned for so long, so as to open up its free expanse? What might it be to think of space as a form of duration, without breaks, without borders, without boundaries? And in the last instance, is this pure void not another name for the very being of consciousness itself?