Technoetic Arts - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2006

Ancient schematic systems originating in the Jewish and Chinese traditions that demonstrate dynamic integration of human consciousness with the material world offer fresh insights into the process through which technoetic art forms are created at the intersections of art, science, technology, and culture. Kabbalah is Judaism's esoteric tradition that reveals the deep structure of biblical consciousness through a symbolic language, conceptual schema, and graphic model for exploring the creative process. The Tree of Life schema is a network of 22 pathways linking 10 nodes (sephirot) that represent stages in the creative process. The first three sephirot represent the artist's undifferentiated intention to create and the cognitive dyad in which a flash of insight begins to crystallize into a viable idea. Two affective dyads, largess/restraint and success/gracefulness, are balanced by the sephirah (singular for sephirot) of Beauty, the aesthetic heart of the entire process. The ninth sephirah funnels the integrated flow of intention, thought, and emotion into the world of physical action that is the tenth sephirah. The Kabbalistic schema is used to trace the process of creating Inside/Outside: P'nim/Panim, a technoetic moist- media artwork in which a biofeedback imaging system forms a feedback loop between changing mind/body processes and corresponding changes in digital self-portraits.

The following paper will present some outcomes of research into the topic of clairvoyance in a European context and the depiction of the spiritual in film in order to suggest that a cultural analysis of the perception of the angelic imaginary can offer insights into the interrelation between the subject areas of cinema and consciousness. This research on clairvoyance began in 1997 as part of an interdisciplinary study arising out of the disciplines of Cultural Anthropology and Film Theory at the University of Amsterdam: it focused on the phenomenon of the clairvoyant perception of angels and compared this with the treatment of the spiritual in film. One major outcome of this study reveals a significant correspondence between the general cinema experience and the clairvoyants' perception of apparitions: both could be adequately described as multi-sensorial experiences reaching beyond the audio-visual perception into a stimulation of an internal affection (in the Bergsonian use of the term) imbricated with thought, memory and association, embracing the importance of the often underrated sensations of touch, smell and emotions. What follows will summarize these insights and situate them within a broader theoretical context, in which the work of Henri Bergson will be revisited through the subsequent insights of Gilles Deleuze in order to re-evaluate Deleuze's contribution and place my own research within an interdisciplinary framework of Philosophy, Film Studies and Cultural Anthropology.

This paper aims to demonstrate the relation between eroticism, perceptually expanded experience (dilated, brought forth by the intelligence of the body), and the notion of interconnectivity and global consciousness. I discern two tendencies: the self's positional relation via technology proposed by philosophers like Descartes; and the self's non-positional relation via technology that seems to be proposed by some philosophers such as Fritjof Capra. I draw my sources from the second category: my work is enriched by an anthropological approach where I expand my experience by integrating several typical dances from different countries, as well as traditional spiritual dances from a Western point of view. My process refers to oriental philosophy - it presents the exterior world and the interior world as two aspects of the same fabric, and questions the very notion of surface and bodily borders in which every thread of every energy and phenomenon, of every form of consciousness and its objects are woven into one continuous tapestry of infinite and mutually conditioned relations. This brings forth a redefinition of the notion of limit, time and reality. The bodily experience, enriched by training from several different cultures transports us to an experience of interiority which leads to states of expanded consciousness.

Concerned to make certain a difference between the human and its machinic simulation, two films released at the start of the new millennium put the trope of the Oedipal at the heart of their action. In doing so, both succeed in establishing the real of the human within its terms. However, by taking the Oedipal as the figure of this difference, both films also unleash a set of possibilities for being human in the new millennium that may not have been entirely expected. In a close reading of both Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001) and I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004), this article examines the possibilities for human being as they come to circulate within the narrative structures of both films. In doing so it also examines the further difference drawn between what each film offers as the literal and metaphorical rendition of the Oedipal itself. With the metaphorical opened to the space and time of being excluded as a possibility in its literal rendition, the consequences of the subsequent process of becoming of the human are finally laid bare.

Given that computers are not merely information-processors but rather representation-processors, who are the people most suited to dealing with representations of consciousness or the lack of it, once these consist in a computer? Who are the experts on irredundant holism when it comes to making sense of and manipulating these representations? Neither scientists nor philosophers, but rather artists, poets and so on. If this is the case it is not surprising that there already exists, in and out of the computational domain, a body of knowledge about and evidence for the synthesis in an almost alchemical way of the scientific and philosophical (spiritual, one might almost say) approaches to consciousness. This presentation will examine aspects of zombie in both computer-based and traditional art, with several previously unknown examples of the use of zombie-like imagery in classical art leading to contemporary attempts to portray the nothing that being a zombie is like. Audience participation will be more or less obligatory. This document is really background notes to the above, pretending to be a paper.