Overview
our planet is telematic · our media is moist ·
our mind is technoetic ·
our body is transformable ·
our reality is syncretic
What is Syncretism?
bringing together disparate entities—material and non-material—and their philosophic, religious, and cultural customs and codes.
emergent bodies of knowledge plus the wisdom of older cultures, often embracing what is unfamiliar, alien, or proscribed
syncretic thinking is associative and non-linear
the etymology of ‘syncretic’ is from sun-kretismos derived from the coming together of the ancient Cretans to face a common enemy
in different historical and religious contexts the common enemy has been military, religious, political
In present day cultural terms the enemy is habit – the uncritical repetition of behaviours, opinions, perceptions and values—the enshrining of metaphors and verities that have passed their sell-by date.
Habit
In present day cultural terms the enemy is habit—the passive, uncritical repetition or acceptance of behaviours, opinions, perceptions and values, and the enshrining as verities, metaphors that have passed their sell-by date. Habit is the enemy of art, impeding the search for new ways of being. In art today, our computer-mediated systems are mobile, interactive and transformative; they defy docile social stability while bringing evolutionary innovation to the dynamic equilibrium of living and cultural systems.
Syncretic Warning Reductionist Alert!
The artist is prepared to look anywhere, into any discipline, scientific or spiritual, any view of the world—however esoteric or arcane—any culture, immediate or distant in space or time, in order to find ideas or processes which might engender creativity. There is no meta-language or meta-system that places one discipline or world-view automatically above all others. Syncretic transdisciplinarity informs artistic research at all levels. This is why we look in all directions for inspiration and understanding: to the East as well as the West; the left hand path as well as the right; working with both reason and intuition, sense and nonsense, subtlety and sensibility.
THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX—a syncretic example
Biophysics, ethnobotany and new media art, although apparently quite strange if not alien bedfellows, can be shown to have commonalities and potentialities that it might be wise not to ignore if some of our contemporary artistic digerati are not to get lost in the smokescreen of their own technophilia. To look at these three issues – field theory, the ritual use of entheogens, and cultural cybernation – is to bring together clearly disparate models of reality and of our own sense of being. All three are of value in ameliorating the human condition—including political, economic, cultural and religious conditions, each of which have become intricately intertwined, and recently often violently interactive, in defence of competing world views.In the late 20th century, the formative issues in digital art were about connectivity and interaction.Now at the start of the 3rd millennium, our post-digital objectives will increasingly be technoetic and syncretic.During the 20th century there was much ado about e pluribus unum, out of many, one: a unified culture, unified self, unified thought, unity of time and space. Now at the start of the 3rd millennium, it could be the reverse e unum pluribus, out of one, many: many selves, many presences, many locations, many levels of consciousness.
Technoetics (noetic: Gk. noetikos mind)
Its meaning combines consciousness and technology, ancient and modern,
spiritual and artificial, cosmic and cultural.l
The Hypercortex
The Hypercortex may inform and be informed by the structural coupling of each individual within the network, and thereby affect the status of human identity, leading in evolutionary terms to the emergence of the ‘subtle being’. The Self becomes more negotiable, transactional, impermanent, transformative in its definition. The Self is an ongoing creation, open to differentiation, distribution and dissemination through telepresence, with a kind of non-linear identity in which fixed patterns of behaviour, conditioning, and enforced protocol become the exception rather than the rule. This subtlety of being will call for a subtle art, which will embody interstitial practice, art located at the intersections of e.g. cognitive science, bio engineering, and metaphysics.
Field
A definition by the Hungarian astrophysicist Attila Grandpierre—
The organisation of an organism involves fields, which are the only means to make a simultaneous tuning of the different subsystems of the organism-as-a-whole. Nature uses the olfactory fields, the acoustic fields, the electromagnetic fields and quantum vacuum fields. Fields with their ability to comprehend the whole organism are the natural basis of a global interaction between organisms and of collective consciousness, such that electromagnetic potential fields mediate the collective field of consciousness.
Grandpierre offers a quantum-physical model of a multi-layered consciousness, where the layering is expressed by the subsequent subtlety of the masses of the material carriers of information. —
Direct, immediate action at a distance actually exists in the electromagnetic field, which is the coupling, mediator field between waves and particles.The environmental, natural and cosmic fields are determinative sources of our consciousness. The Collective Field of Consciousness is a significant physical factor of the biosphere. The morphogenetic field has an electromagnetic (EM) nature. EM fields are vacuum fields. Different basic forms of vacuum fields exist, and all kinds of fields, including the particle-mediated fields as well, when overlapping each other, seem to be in a direct resonant coupling, and form a complex, merged biofield. The vacuum model of consciousness points to the inductive generation of consciousness, and to its self-initiating nature. Individual and collective methods, as well as the experimental possibilities of a global healing and improving the consciousness field of mankind are suggested.
Observation
In general, many field theories come relatively low in the estimation of state approved science, unlikely to receive serious research funding, and pushed in many cases to the margins of scientific respectability – and scientists in general, apart from the very few pioneers, perhaps even more than university bureaucrats, seek academic respectability above all things. The findings of scientists such as May Wan Ho, Fritz-Albert Popp, Karl Pribram, David Bohm are kept largely at arm’s length by the scientific establishment. And Donna Haraway, even amongst the cognoscenti of media art, is recognized more for her Cyborg Manifesto than for her much earlier Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology.1
Non-linear biophysics
Non-linear biophysics and bio-information research are aspects of science, field science that lies beyond the pale of western scientific respectability, and yet are rich in ideas, attitudes and metaphors likely to be useful to the artist, as well as to the future of science itself. Here, on the edge of knowledge, where science could join art in a syncretic alliance, is where exploration, speculation and creative affirmation could converge. As James Gimzewski has said, regarding nanotechnology, “we would do best to look at connections not the parts; waves and vibrations seem a much better starting point for the journey we could take together”.
Quantum Matters
Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world ‘sitting out there’, with the observer safely separated from it by a 20 centimetre slab of plate glass. Even to observe so minuscule an object as electron, he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. He must install his chosen measuring equipment. It is up to him whether he shall measure position or momentum ... the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never afterwards be the same. To describe what has happened one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place ‘participator’.2
Second Life
Second Life is a privately-owned, partly subscription-based 3-D virtual world, made available in 2003 by Linden Lab, founded by Philip Rosedale. The Second Life ‘world’ resides in a large array of servers that are owned and maintained by Linden Lab, known collectively as ‘the grid’. The Second Life client program provides its users (referred to as Residents) tools to view and modify the SL world and participate in its economy.This is great, but at the same time there is a call to—Bring back aesthetics!
Creativity behind socially engaged art is said to ‘rehumanize’ a ‘numb and fragmented’ society. But . . . socially engaged art has fallen prey to circumscribed critical examinations. The discourse has focused mainly on the artist's process and intentions, or the project's socially ameliorative effects, to the neglect of the work's aesthetic impact. Artists are increasingly judged by their working process—the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration. Accusations of mastery and egocentrism are leveled at artists who work with participants to realize a project instead of allowing it to emerge through consensual collaboration.There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond.3
Playing Not Gaming
Dérive: a situationist technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. involving playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period will drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones4
Ludic Society
Margarete Jahrmann, Max Moswitzer:
The goal is to show an empathy with experimental anticipative research on conceptual art plays, live action roleplaying games, computer games, in at least a bidirectional way, both as source and target. Its topics are playful social practices out of games in real space and extended gaming zones.It stresses the conceptual disjunction of game and play and its transgression into newly developed game structures for real life. Real Players incorporate a crucial role in the reconstruction of the rules of play as a vibrant element of today’s ludic umwelt.
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CULTURAL |
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classical |
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post-modern |
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syncretic |
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Content |
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Context |
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Field |
Object |
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Process |
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Flow |
Perspective |
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Immersion |
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Absorption |
Paranoia |
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Telenoia |
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Holonoia |
Reception |
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Negotiation |
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Semantic Transience |
Representation |
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Construction |
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Seeding |
Autonomous brain |
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Distributed mind |
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Telenoesis |
Nature |
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Artificial life |
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Hybridology |
Certainty |
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Behavior of mind |
Organicists and Holistic Theories of Living
The success of molecular biology in the 1930s dealt a devastating but temporary blow to organicist and other holistic theories of living things that were emerging. It was at a time that theories of field phenomena had opened up entirely new ideas about organisms, environments and energy. Such models at that stage however lacked the possibility of intervention in the formation, structure, and function of macromolecules that a wholly materialist biology could provide. Field models of greater sophistication have resurfaced in recent years, reinvigorated and chiming with our current understanding of art as flow, art as field phenomena, art as aspects of mind.
Fritz-Albert Popp
Biophoton emission is a general phenomenon of living systems. It concerns low luminescence—from a few, up to some hundred photons per second, per square centimetre surface area—at least within the spectral region from 200 to 800nm. The experimental results indicate that biophotons originate from a coherent (or/and squeezed) photon field within the living organism, its function being intra and intercellular regulation and communication.
Biophotons
- Bioelectrical or bioelectromagnetical phenomena have been known for a long time, but the coherent bio-electromagnetic fields, including biophoton fields are a new concept.
- They exist in living biological systems although we cannot see them.
- They are some kind of structure with specific patterns, but they are not real matter, only fields which regulate and bring the living system into a coherent state.
- In such a state within the coherent volume, there is no difference between particles and waves, therefore distance has no meaning.
- This state provides ideal conditions for the communication that is the basis for biological regulation. 5
Universal ISI of light
An organism’s information network of photons emitted by DNA molecules is paralleled technologically by the constant flows of electrons and photons across the body of the planet through telematic networks.
Credo
- Every fibre, every node, every server on the Net is a part of me.
- It’s a phase space I’m in, a sort of tele-potentiality.
- As I interact with the Net, I reconfigure myself.
- My net-extent defines me, just as my body defined me in the old biological culture.
- I am weightless and dimensionless in any exact sense.
- I am the reach of my connectivity
Field of Consciousness
It is through our eventual understanding of that subatomic
domain that we may discover the source of consciousness.
We should be prepared to discover that ‘individual consciousness’ is no more than an oxymoron. While individual self-awareness is a prerequisite of living beings, consciousness is more likely to be the attribute of a field than of the individual organism. A strong advocate for this point of view is Hans-Peter Durr.
Immaterial Connectedness—the physical basis of life
The above heading is Durr’s. I quote:
- quantum physics reveals that matter is not composed of matter, but reality is merely potentiality.
- the world has a holistic structure, based on fundamental relations and not material objects, admitting more open, indeterministic developments.
- in this more flexible causal framework, inanimate and animate nature is not to be considered as fundamentally different, but as different order structures of the same immaterial entity.
- in a stable configuration effectively all the uncertainties are statistically averaged out, thus exhibiting the unique and deterministic behaviour of ordinary inanimate matter
- in the case of statistically unstable but dynamically stable configurations, the ‘lively’ features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the macroscopic level and be connected with what we observe as the phenomenon of life.6
Quantum Coherence
Mixed Reality and bio-telematics may become entangled with the quantum states of coherence, leading to the emergence of universal connectivity and non-linear relationships that exist beyond the classical constraints of space and time. Biophotons orchestrate the quantum coherence of the living being, and may lead us to ideas in some pixel/particle exchange of establishing the quantum coherence of virtual states. The concept of coherence describes the wholeness of the organism, which, if we follow for example Andy Clarke’s concept of the human organism as inclusive of its technological extensions, should embrace the whole as a unified sentient field.
Bio-Syncretics
At the material level, Mixed Reality technology provides us with another skin, another layer of energy to the body, adding to the complexity of its field.
Instead of populating Mixed Reality space with (virtual) objects we would be more syncretic if we considered it as a medium for the creation of (virtual) fields, or as an extension of the biofield itself. We can see Mixed Reality be the field in which new possibilities for living systems are being rehearsed.
Spiritual Syncretism
Hans Bonnet characterized syncretism as the realization of the idea of one god ‘inhabiting’ another rather than two gods being fused, equated or identified.—
Using the example of Amun-Re, Bonnet argues that:
The formula Amun-Re does not signify that Amun is subsumed in Re or Re in Amun. Nor does it establish that they are identical; Amun does not equal Re. It observes that Re is in Amun in such a way that he is not lost in Amun, but remains himself just as much as Amun does, so that both gods can again be manifest separately or in other combination.7
In religious or spiritual contexts syncretism means combining from diverse sources:
rituals, psychic instruments, and psychotropic plants and herbs, into new forms of sacred communion.
In contemporary society syncretism may involve combining disparate technologies (interactive and digital, reactive and mechanical, psychoactive and chemical), with new media rituals of emergent communities (mobile, locative, online), and awareness of those holistic practices of older cultures that have been seen as
exotic, alien, proscribed.
Art – a dangerous business
Syncretic thinking is associative and non-linear: associative thought and non linear inquiry inevitably breach boundaries and subvert protocols. Art could again become a dangerous business. Thinking out of the box, searching for the limits of perception, testing the limits of language, expression and construction, puts the artist out on the edge of social and cultural norms, which in our present heavily circumscribed society is a dangerous place to be.
Unleashing the Self
Understanding contemporary reality as syncretic may lead to significant changes in the way we regard our own identity, our relationship to others, and the phenomenology of time and space. Syncretism not only destabilises orthodoxies and changes language, it may also result in the release of the self from the constraints of overweening rationality and totalising dogma.
Heteronymia or Being Syncretic (presaging the postmodern condition)
Four Poets of Syncretism:
Ricardo Reis (1887—1935) is the master of metaphysical and neoclassical poetry. Reis was a monarchist who sought exile in Brazil, and is believed to have died there in 1935. But Jose Saramago has speculated that he died in Lisbon a year later under mysterious circumstances, unwittingly entangled in the revolts which spilled over from the Spanish Civil war.
Alvaro dos Campos (1890—1935) was born in Taviras, and became a naval engineer in Glasgow, traveling all over the world before settling in Lisbon, and founding the avant-garde magazine Orfeu. He was an opium-eater, absinthe-drinker, dandy and futurist. His writings “proclaimed the advent of a perfect and mathematical humanity”.
Alberto Caeiro (1889—1915 ) was a simple shepherd, living, apparently “barefoot in contact with nature”. Both Alvaro dos Campos and Ricardo Reis considered him the master writer. They both fully recognised the influence of his ideas on their own work.
Bernardo Soares (1888—1935) was a book-keeper who lived a humble life in Lisbon. His only book, The Book of Disquiet, written in the 1920’s, was only discovered in 1982.
These four poets, were written by one man: Fernando Pessoa (1888—1935)
They were not pseudonyms of the author; he was not writing under different names. They were heteronyms. The various heteronyms he created had their own individual histories, appearances, emotional qualities, philosophies, and style of writing. They were authentic, distinct personalities in their own right.
There were more than seventy heteronyms in all. These “jostling aliases express his belief that the individual subject—the core of European thought—is an illusion" (John Gray). Pessoa well understood the notion of the divided self, that we are each many selves. We have no evidence that he had read Ouspensky’s ideas about the multiple self, althoughTertium Organum was published in 1922. He certainly knew the writings of the Theosophists—having published an attack on Mme Blavatsky and her circle.
Anticipating the Web
On his death, Pessoa left a trunk containing 25, 426 items: poems, letters, journals – writings on philosophy, sociology, history, literary criticism, plays, treatises on astrology, observations on the occult, esoterica of many kinds – written by dozens of heteronyms. Pessoa’s psychological and literary prescience, and the breadth and complexity of his interests, anticipated life in the 21st century hypertextual world of the Web, where the fluidity of associative links and genres, and the instability, variability and transformation of identities and personas is one of its greatest appeals and challenges. We can only imagine what his (dis)embodied syncretism might have brought to the telematic embrace.
Esoterica and Occultism
Pessoa’s automatic writings produced a variety of esoteric signs and symbols, Masonic and kabbalistic insignia. He developed other occult skills and paranormal powers, including spiritualist mediumship, telepathy, and especially his development of 'etheric vision.'
There are moments when I have sudden flashes of 'etheric vision' and can see certain people's 'magnetic auras' and especially my own, reflected in the mirror, and radiating from my hands in the dark. In one of my best moments of etheric vision... I saw someone's ribs through his coat and skin... My 'astral vision' is still very basic, but sometimes, at night, I close my eyes and see a swift succession of small and sharply defined pictures... I see strange shapes, designs, symbolic signs, numbers... 8
Pessoa exchanged correspondence with the British occultist Aleister Crowley. Crowley goes to Lisbon to meet Pessoa and then vanishes mysteriously. Pessoa collaborates with the police to solve what is being described as a crime. In the triangulation of multiple identity, occultism and cutting edge science, Crowley is interestingly situated between Pessoa and Jack Parsons.
Syncretism in art and in the spiritual domain
The search for ways into ‘higher worlds’ (Pessoa) had been a feature of the life and poetry of the Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud. The Surrealists also sought a kind of delirium, as well as employing automatic writing—the most notable example being the novel Les Champs Magnétiques by André Breton and Philippe Soupault.
Breton read Eliphas Levi and other occult writers, although his interest was probably less directly occult and more a kind of psychoanalytic approach to letting the repressed unconscious go free.
Finding new, unfamiliar, disconcerting behaviours and mindsets is also a feature of Islam in its least orthodox form, namely in the language of the Sufi. Sufism is a highly syncretic spiritual practice that is in-between the tangible and abstract, the known and unknown, the visible and invisible, keeping each distinct yet related in their difference. The Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said) points to a link between the syncretism in art and in the spiritual domain in his comparison of Surrealist and Sufi thinking:
[Surrealist writing] like Sufi writing, appears for the most part to be filled with strange things, contradictions, obscure references and disjointed images … the anarchic, the astonishing, the baffling and the obscure form the basis for Sufi (and Surrealist) writing .… When the poet enters a world of transformations, he can leave it only by transformative writing: waves of illuminating images, which do not bear scrutiny by reasonable or logical means, and through which reality itself is transformed into a dream.9
The syncretic impulse in Surrealism, its inherent resistance to the status quo, and its transformative many-sidedness in cultural, social and psychological aspects, is rather well indicated in Breton's well known declaration: "I wish I could change my sex as easily as I change my shirt".
Matters of Mind
The question is “Whose epiphenomenon are we anyway?” We might expect art to develop across two principle axes: Technoetic connectivity (TA) and cultural syncretism (CS). Technoetic research may syncretise new developments in the chemical mapping of the brain (CM), and older models of mind embedded in plant technology (PT) lying outside the western paradigm
Tom Ray: The shift of focus from A-life to Mind science
Initially, Tom Ray was internationally famous for the creation of Tierra:
Synthetic organisms have been created based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the ‘energy’ resource and memory is the ‘material’ resource. Memory is organized into informational patterns that exploit CPU time for self-replication. Mutation generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different genotypes compete for cpu time and memory space…
Cutting edge research on the chemistry of mind
Tom Ray’s focus has now shifted decisively:
Nineteen psychedelics have each been screened against over one hundred receptors, transporters and ion channels, providing the first comprehensive view of how these compounds interact with the human receptome. Each individual psychedelic causes a unique spectrum of subjective effects. DIPT causes auditory distortion. 5MeO-DIPT enhances orgasm in males but not females. MDMA provokes empathy. TMA provokes anger. Mescaline provokes an appreciation of beauty. 2C-B causes tactile, gustatory and sexual enhancement. 2C-E provokes rich fantasy and introspection. The project aims to understand the mechanisms underlying the qualitative diversity of actions of psychedelics, by locating each drug in an abstract ‘receptor space’, a coordinate system with one axis for each receptor. The state of the brain is constantly on the move, regardless of medication. We can think of it as a complex dynamical system, in which the trajectory follows high-dimensional orbits, and switches among many ‘attractors’, where the attractors represent the major emotional states and moods, and whatever mental phenomena the chemical systems are mediating. In this dynamic reference frame, drugs will create a perturbation along the binding vector, thereby pushing the system into a new attractor. We want to get to know the pharmacology of the attractors. . . .to begin to map the chemical organization of the human mind.
The digital moment has passed
A pharmacological moment is upon us within cognitive science and beyond its borders Only our extreme materialism and the cowardice of political expediency and mind control, prevents us from exploring new worlds and participating in new realities.
Vegetal technology involves:
Three molecules:
- Harmine inactivates MAO, an enzyme that destroys DMT in the intestinal tract.
- DMT travels through the blood-brain barrier and acts in the CNS (central nervous system) competing with serotonine in post- synaptic receptors.
- Tetrahydroharmine blocks the re-uptake of serotonine in the pre-synapsis.
Pharmacology of Ayahuasca:
- Banisteriopsis caapi: harmine & tetrahydroharmine.
- Psychotria viridis / Diplopterys cabrerana: dymethyltryptamine (DMT)
Syncretic Reality
We live in an intensive syncretic reality, simultaneously in many worlds, in a complex that involves at least three VRs:
- validated reality : involves reactive, mechanical technology in a prosaic, Newtonian world
- virtual reality : involves interactive, digital technology in a telematic, immersive world
- vegetal reality: involves psychoactive plant technology in an entheogenic, spiritual world.
The ratio of these three realities varies across cultures, continents and hemispheres.
Vegetal Reality is least known amongst western societies, while in parts of Africa and South America the technology of psychoactive plants (iboga and ayahuasca for example) is central to the understanding of uncharted states of consciousness
Singing and Screaming in the Nanofield
(yeast cells let rip)
- James Gimzewski and Andrew Pelling at the UCLA Department of Chemistry made the discovery (in 2002) that yeast cells oscillate at audible frequencies.
· The tool with which the cell sounds are extracted – the atomic force microscope (AFM) – can be regarded as a new type of musical instrument.
· The AFM touches a cell with its small tip, comparable to a record needle feeling the bumps in a groove on a record. With this interface, the AFM feels oscillations taking place at the membrane of a cell which can then be amplified.
· Manipulating the cell with chemicals will result in a change of oscillation. Isopropanol (rubbing alcohol) for example, will change a singing cell into a screaming cell.
· Artists Anne Niemetz and Andrew Pelling have put together the first composition to utilise cell sonics: ‘The Dark Side of the Cell’.
Ask not what science can do for art—ask what art can do for science.
Science’s Five unknowns
- Dark matter and dark energy
- The location of mind
- The nature of qualia
- Evolutionary purpose
- The influence of energy fields
The Cloud of Unknowing
- Scientists do not know what makes up 96% of the Universe. We live in the midst of unknown dark matter and dark energy
- As above so below. We also know next to nothing about consciousness – where it is located, how it arises, when it is shared, why it persists.
- The ‘dark matter’ of the mind has been treated as occult, and banned from polite academic and religious discussion for over three hundred years.
- Artists have the freedom to absorb both orthodox and forbidden knowledge and a duty to attempt to bring the unknown to light.
Real Realities
Neither science nor philosophy can help us in knowing what is real and what is our construction of reality, if indeed such differentiation is possible. Quantum scientists, seemingly close to new understanding of the world, are mostly in denial, resolutely refusing to acknowledge, still less promulgate, the metaphysical implications of their trade. The issue is complicated by the fact that we move now more or less effortlessly through multiple realities, mediated by innumerable technologies—virtual, locative, telematic, non-linear, chemical, as well as those conforming to a consensual orthodoxy of what was once thought of as ‘everyday, normal reality’.
Syncretic Strategies To identify new knowledge fields and develop transdisciplinary discourse and practice.
Prioritise:
- subject before object
- process before system
- behaviour before form
- intuition before reason
- mind before matter
Syncretic transdisciplinarity
- amplifying thought: concept development
- sharing consciousness: collaborative processes
- seeding structures: self-organising systems
- making metaphors: Knowledge navigation
- constructing identities: self-creation
Some key questions to guide research
- How might new technologies and the metaphors of science be employed in the education of the artist?
- How might the insights of the artist contribute to the advancement of knowledge in science and to technological development?
- How can the accrued wisdom of exotic or ancient cultures be allied to the search for meaning and values in a post-biological society?
- How might new technologies serve to support and sustain cultures that lie beyond the Western paradigm?
- How might the Net serve the needs of interactive, non-linear, transdisciplinary learning, and engender creative thought and constructive action?
- How might new discourses be initiated which will bring critical, aesthetic and moral perspectives to bear on emergent fields of practice?
- While stretching to the full the constructive and expressive potential of electronic, telematic, and interactive digital media, how best might the artist pursue developments in post-biological research, molecular engineering, neuro science, and nanotechnology, while identifying artistic and spiritual strategies that optimise human capabilities, and seed new visions of a planetary society.
Conclusion
- A syncretic process could hold together the current ferment of ideas, images and models of reality that communities and cultures across the planet are generating.
- To recite the story of media art in its syncretic mode is not to advance its development, nor is it sufficient simply to outline the syncretic reality that is emerging.
- Strategies to strengthen this emergence are needed
- Cultural habit to be viewed as the enemy.
- Need to identify new knowledge fields and develop transdisciplinary discourse.
- Need to create syncretic, many stranded organisms of exploration, inquiry, learning and creativity.
- Demands a syncretic schedule of artistic, computational, psychic, biophysical and nanotechnological projects in order to bring about new conditions for life and art.
- Field theories offer useful models in charting the relationship of consciousness to the material body.
- The (human) organism’s internal information system seems to be closely connected to the biophotonic activity of its DNA molecules.
- Scrutiny of the nano-field may lead to an understanding of ideas about the immaterial connectedness espoused by both quantum physics and Eastern metaphysics.
- More ancient cultures that retain a place on the margins of technological society have also something to tell us, both directly and metaphorically, about the perception of the numinous and our construction of reality.
- As it outgrows dialectical sociology, narration and representation, new media art may play its part in the navigation of mind that will take us to new spaces and states of consciousness, while enhancing the technology of our connectedness.
Roy Ascott is a pioneer of cybernetic and telematic art, Ascott is an internationally renowned artist, theorist, and educator. Roy Ascott is the founder and President of the Planetary Collegium, the Director of its CAiiA-Hub, and Professor of Technoetic Art in the University of Plymouth, England. He is Visiting Professor in Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Ascott's work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris, Ars Electronica Linz, V2 Holland, Milan Triennale, and European Media Festival, Osnabrü
Notes
1 Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth—Century Developmental Biology. Yale University Press, 1976.
2 J. A. Wheeler& W. J. H Hurek, Quantum Theory and Measurement. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1983.
3 Claire Bishop. The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents. Artforum February (2006)
6 Hans-Peter Durr Max—Plank—Institut fuer Physic, Munich
7 Jefferson Monet, The Syncretism of Egyptian Gods.
8 Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2001)
9 Adonis, Sufism and Surrealism. London: Saqi Books. 2005.
