Roy Ascott

Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace

The past decade has seen the two powerful technologies of computing and telecommunications converge into one field of operations that has drawn into its embrace other electronic media, including video, sound synthesis, remote sensing, and a variety of cybernetic systems. These phenomena are exerting enormous influence upon society and on individual behavior; they seem increasingly to be calling into question the very nature of what it is to be human, to be creative, to think and to perceive, and indeed our relationship to each other and to the planet as a whole. The “telematic culture” that accompanies the new developments consists of a set of behaviors, ideas, media, values, and objectives that are significantly unlike those that have shaped society since the Enlightenment. New cultural and scientific metaphors and paradigms are being generated, new models and representations of reality are being invented, new expressive means are being manufactured.

Technoetic Pathways toward the Spiritual in Art: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Connectedness, Coherence and Consciousness

The coherence of living systems may be due in part to an information network of biophotons emitted by DNA molecules. This network can be seen as parallel to the telematic networks that connect the planet. Nanotechnology can play a significant role in the emergence of a moistmedia substrate for technoetic art. Immaterial connectedness confers a spiritual dimension on both telematic art and quantum mechanics. Field theory supports the contention that the material body may be a consequence rather than a cause of consciousness. A technoetic art may locate its ground in the triangulation of connectivity, syncretism and field theory.

Art and Education in the Telematic Culture

A t was Simon Nora who coined the term tekmatics to describe the new electronic technology derived from the convergence of computers and telecommunications systems. His report to the President of France, LYnfmmatisation de la Sociitt?, published in 1978, is perhaps one of the most influential documents in this field to have been published in Europe-influential in that it led to the swift establishment by the French government of the Programme Tihatique, which has resulted in the transformation of many aspects of French culture. This process of telematisation is most dramatically seen in the ubiquitous and rapid spread of Minitel, the public videotex system that enables widespread interaction between users and databases across an enormous range of services. Nowadays on the Paris Metro, for example, it is enough to see a poster of an island in the sun, a new household appliance, or racehorses pounding the turf, inscribed with a seven-figure sequence of numbers, to know that another Minitel service is being advertised. At home, at one’s Minitel terminal (distributed by the FIT in place of volumes of telephone directories previously provided) one can interact in electronic space with friends, colleagues, institutions and organisations of all kinds. Artists, too, have not been slow to assimilate the medium. Interactivity is the essence of the videotex system, as it is of all telematic systems, giving us the ability to interact in electronic space, via computer memory and beyond the normal constraints of time and space that apply to face-to-face communication. The concept of interactivity also has an important place in recent theories of communication, in contrast to the one-way linearity of older models. The new approach is found, for example, in the network analysis of Rogers and Kinkaid and in research into biology and cognition by Maturana and Varela. Neither of these studies is centrally concerned with electronic systems or telematic technologies. Both, however, deal with human interaction, language, meaning and memory, which is of value in our understanding of the potential of telematic systems to enrich visual culture. Let me quote from both of these studies:

Orai, or How the Text Got Pleated: A Genealogy of La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale

This paper is an attempt to make sense of the Japanese word orai and to consider in what way the authors own comings and goings across artistic, literary and esoteric pathways led to the formulation of his practice, later to be theorized as telematic art and to be understood as a form of associative connectivism. The paper focuses on La Plissure du Texte, his first project involving distributed authorship.

Chronology and Working Survey of Select Telecommunications Activity

7 he following is a partial, working survey of telecommunications activity in the arts, highlighting North American and European projects. The chronology is not complete, and it is hoped that it will be expanded upon to more fully reflect the wide range of activity in the field. The editors invite artists to bring to our attention other projects that should be added to this chronology for publication at a later date. Telecommunications is hereby defined as electronic transmission of information through computer networks, radio, slow-scan video, telephone, television and satellites. The projects listed here are important because they were interactive, establishing two-way communications.

Towards a Field Theory for Post-Modernist Art

I would like to look at the attributes of a paradigm for art, a field theory which would replace the formalist modernist aesthetic. It takes as its focus not form but behavior; not an information model of the sending/receiving of messages in a one-way linearity but the interrogation of probabilities by the viewer; it looks at a system in which the artwork is a matrix between two sets of behaviors (the artist and the observer) providing for a field of psychic interplay which can be generative of multiple meanings, where the final responsibility for meaning lies with the viewer.

Artist Round Tables

Taking the Planetary Collegium as their starting point, members of the round table address research issues as they relate to the development of practice and theory in the context of collaborative criticism and inquiry across a wide field of knowledge and experience. The Collegium network is worldwide, in terms of its meeting and conference locations, the cultural identity of its members, and its ambition to develop nodes based on and complementary to its unique procedures and method-ologies. The Collegium emerges from 10 years of experience with CAiiA-STAR in gathering doctoral and post-doctoral researchers of high calibre whose work transcends orthodox subject boundaries, and whose practices are at the leading edge of their fields. We are living in a time of crisis for universities, museums and corporations, a time in which old cultural and academic structures need to be replaced by research organisms fitted to our telematic, post-biological society. The Collegium combines the physical, face-to-face transdisciplinary association of individuals with the nomadic, trans-cultural requirements of a networking community. The panelists, all members of the Collegium at various stages in its development, present their personal visions of the direction future research might take and the structures needed to support it.

Planetary Technoetics: Art, Technology and Consciousness

As the planet becomes telematically unified, the self becomes dispersed. The convergence of dry silicon pixels and biologically wet particles is creating a moistmedia substrate for art where digital systems, telematics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology meet. A technoetic aesthetic not only will embrace new media, technology, consciousness research and non-classical science but also will gain new insights from older cultural traditions previously banished from materialist discourse. In the present post- 9/11 crisis, collaborative transdisciplinary research is needed if a truly planetary culture is to emerge that is techno-ethical as well as technoetic.

The Technoetic Predicate

A R T ter Art Gallery in Maribor, Slovenia (24 October–7 November 1998), which linked the gallery to the Web [2]. In both cases, Teleporting an Unknown State combined biological growth with Internet agency. In a very dark room, a pedestal holding earth served as a nursery for a single seed. Through a video projector suspended above and facing the pedestal, remotely located individuals sent light via the Internet to enable this seed to photosynthesize and grow in total darkness. The Web version of Teleporting an Unknown State connected the Kibla Multimedia Center Art Gallery to the Internet. As local viewers walked into the gallery, they saw the installation: a video projector hung from the ceiling and facing down, where a single seed lay on a bed of earth. Viewers did not see the projector itself, only its cone of light projected through a circular hole in the ceiling. The circularity of the hole and the projector’s lens were evocative of the sun breaking through darkness. On the Web, anonymous individuals clicked on a nine-image grid (which consisted of live Webcam feeds) to capture light from the sky of eight countries and physically project this light onto the seed. The central image of the grid showed streaming updated stills of the plant in the gallery. When participants clicked on an image, light from the sky over eight distant geographic locations (Vancouver; Chicago; Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; Paris; Mawson Station, Antarctica; Moscow; Tokyo; Sydney, Australia) was captured by Webcams at the remote sites and re-emitted through the video projector in the gallery. All Web participants were able to see the process of plant growth via the Internet. During the show, photosynthesis depended on the remote collective action of anonymous participants. Birth, growth and death on the Internet formed a horizon of possibilities that unfolded as participants dynamically contributed to the work.

Art at the End of Tunnel Vision: A Syncretic Surmise

Syncretism can provide dynamic coherence to competing world-views, scientific paradoxes and emergent cultural practices: The most urgent eco-necessity today is the re-design of ourselves. We are at the final frontier of knowledge: consciousness, a calling for the imaginative deployment of new technologies of communication, computing, as well as chemistry and older somatic practices. Our sense of Being and of Time is changing. The creative navigation of our seamless Variable Reality calls for technological and noetic development of the orthodox sensorium and of the previously excluded second-order senses. The ‘iMeme’ refers to the multiple self, our generative and distributed personas, emerging in telematic society and in the evolution of consciousness. Concomitant with the views of Bohm, Grobstein, and Blofeld that all matter, animate or otherwise, is mind, this paper concludes that art has a new responsibility towards the creative unfolding of reality.