Technoetic Arts - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2006

These days paradoxes seem to be all around us, constantly produced under the impetus of new technologies but tending to dissolve no less quickly at the instigation of these same technologies. Everything that was considered durable (concepts, organizations, ideas) tends to shift towards immediacy, as if long-term memory can and must become instantaneous memory. New technologies, especially the various networks and mobile telephones, fit less and less into established frames of reference. They go so far as to break with the very notion of a frame, and thus place us in a movement of continuous and chaotic knowledge that the author has dubbed rheomorphism. The Web is increasingly oriented towards interaction among users, and the creation of rudimentary social networks that can provide content that makes good use of the network effects, with or without real visual and interactive rendering of web pages. In this sense, current websites act more as points of presence, or Web portals centred on the user rather than on traditional websites that were more or less static pages of data.

Low Power Society is a new approach to social complexes. It is not about slow scale but fast, it is not about absence of power but intense power. It is a possible answer to the negative aspects of our present globalization. The archetype (C.G. Jung) of this concept-paradigm is Eros or, from another point of view, HermAfrEros - a synthesis of Hermes, Aphrodite and Eros.

Anamnesis (Swiatlo Dnia) was written as an aftermath of a six-day performative installation at the twelfth-century castle in Trancoso, Portugal with the participation of local women and men, mainly farmers. It was written concurrently while working on the editing of the video and the sound, which I filmed and recorded on site (or, as I think of it, layering of images, sounds and different time paths). The text addresses the act of drawing as related to speech, mark, trace, scripture, presence and absence as it elaborates on the notion of gesture across the media and time. The vital connections between the performative act of drawing and the desire to mark since time immemorial and the contemporary virtual and cinematic mediums are crucial to the notion of anamnesis in both the physical installation in real time with performative inhabitation of space and in the virtual and altered memory of that occurrence in the resulting video piece.

Twenty-five years ago some young artists initiated V2, a contemporary interdisciplinary arts centre focusing on art and technology and its social, cultural relations. V2 focuses on the interference between media itself, and the social and cultural impact of (media) technology. In its projects V2 explores the relationship between the arts, science and technology by bringing together artists from different art disciplines, scientists and people from different practices thus initiating interdisciplinary working relations among them, this within concrete art projects. Research is an important aspect of all activities within V2; it concerns presentation, hardware and software development, publications and artist in residencies and the education activities. V2 looks for the encounter between practice and theory within these projects. V2 operates within diverse (inter)national and local collaborations - some structural, some on a project basis.

Morphogenetic fields of thought, flux and transformation, energy and light are the manifestations that inform a new sensibility for creating realities and exploring the world. We are seeing the emergence of a new moistmedia culture and the possibilities of a syncretic art that combines aspects of a vast transdisciplinary field. Historically, syncretism has destabilized political and religious orthodoxies, reconciling and harmonizing formerly discrete antagonists; its etymology derives from the coming together of opposed tribes to resist a common enemy. In contemporary culture, the enemy is habit - the uncritical repetition of behaviours, perceptions, categories and values. Just as cybernetics analogizes differences between systems, so syncretism finds likeness between unlike things. If cybernetics underlies the technology of new media art, syncretism informs the psyche. In the context of telematics, it is a matter of heuristics and heteronymia. The digital moment in art is passing as it approaches the status of orthodoxy; the period of discovery through extreme speculation, invention and untrammelled creativity is in danger of giving way to academicism and commercialization, whether in cyberspace, on the Web or through the mobile. Art's twentieth-century preoccupation with the body is giving way to the technoetic exploration of new territories of mind. This may involve revisiting the pathways to personal transformation and transcendence of older cultures, where the syncretism of knowledge and beliefs, as for example in Brazil, is explicit. Art needs to adopt syncretic strategies to embrace emerging models of mind and matter, cyberception, living process and computational systems, moist-media, quantum reality, the nanofield, and ecological, social and spiritual issues. This may lead to significant changes in the way we regard our own identity, our relationship to others, the nature of memory, the exploration of consciousness, and the phenomenology of time and space.

A new type of neuronal cell was discovered a few years ago: the mirror neurons. Their existence is a disturbing fact for our conceptions of intelligence and memory, giving to the whole universe of mind understanding a new logical framework. The impact of such a discovery on our concept of aesthetics and philosophy of thought makes us to recall Peirce, Lupasco, Buckminster Fuller launching ourselves to field folds, the super-string model or black holes among other non-linear time and space complexes.

In the last few years a strand of virtual worlds known as Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) has catapulted the development and demand for online worlds to an unprecedented scale. This paper interrogates the commonly held assumption that places these online worlds in the same category as other digital games by seeing them as places which reconfigure the interaction between the real and imaginary through virtual technologies and proposes that the demand for these worlds is the contemporary techno-mediated manifestation for a desire for otherworlds in various forms that has persisted through time.

In syncretic thought one of the forms of reality is virtuality, in other words description as detailed by man of the forms and technologies belonging to his era. Information, bytes and history. An analysis of the film Matrix reveals an interesting Gnostic design for the narrative virtual reality in which we find ourselves immersed. The white rabbit in Wonderland, virtual reality as man's adaptation strategy for technology, and the close connection between narrative elements and allusions in the film with works that are the patrimony of post-modern culture and critical theory's way of listening and seeing.

This article focuses on the intriguing relationship between mathematics and physical phenomena, by putting forward the argument that all conscious thought may be contextually generated within a hierarchical series of iterated and interlocking frames of reference. It overcomes the epistemological complexities of the Frame(s) Problem by proposing that the primal frame of reference from which all conscious thought ultimately emerges is essentially an abstract representation of the four-dimensional properties of existence, plus the genetically derived emotional behaviours that even the lowliest cognitive organisms are born with, and automatically express as they struggle to exist within an ever-changing and often hostile environment.