Roy Ascott Published in ISEA '94- The 5th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Cyberception
Not only are we changing radically, body and mind, but we are becoming actively
involved in our own transformation. And it's not just a matter of the
prosthetics of implant organs, add-on limbs or surgical face fixing, however
necessary and beneficial such technology of the body may be. It's a matter of
consciousness. We are acquiring new faculties and new understanding of human
presence. To inhabit both the real and virtual worlds at one and the same
time, and to be both here and potentially everywhere else at the same time is
giving us a new sense of self, new ways of thinking and perceiving which
extend what we have believed to be our natural, genetic capabilities. In fact
the old debate about artificial and natural is no longer relevant. We are only
interested in what can be made of ourselves, not what made us. As for the
sanctity of the individual, well we are now each of us made up of many
individuals, a set of selves. Actually the sense of the individual is giving
way to the sense of the interface. Our consciousness allows us the fuzzy edge
on identity, hovering between inside and outside every kind of definition of
what it is to be a human being that we might come up with. We are all
interface. We are computer-mediated and computer-enhanced. These new ways of
conceptualising and perceiving reality involve more than simply some sort of
quantitative change in how we see, think and act in the world. They constitute
a qualitative change in our being, a whole new faculty, the post-biological
faculty of "cyberception" .
Cyberception involves a convergence of conceptual and perceptual processes in
which the connectivity of telematic networks plays a formative role.
Perception is the awareness of the elements of environment through physical
sensation. The cybernet, the sum of all the interactive computer-mediated
systems and telematic networks in the world, is part of our sensory apparatus.
It redefines our individual body just as it connects all our bodies into a
planetary whole. Perception is physical sensation interpreted in the light of
experience. Experience is now telematically shared: computerised
telecommunications technology enables us to shift in and out of each others
consciousness and telepresence within the global media flow. By conception we
mean the process of originating, forming or understanding ideas. Ideas come
from the interactions and negotiations of minds. Once locked socially and
philosophically into the solitary body, minds now float free in telematic
space. We are looking at the augmentation of our capacity to think and
conceptualise, and the extension and refinement of our senses: to
conceptualise more richly and to perceive more fully both inside and beyond
our former limitations of seeing, thinking and constructing. The cybernet is
the sum of all those artificial systems of probing, communicating, remembering
and constructing which data processing, satellite links, remote sensing and
telerobotics variously serve in the enhancement of our being.
Cyberception heightens transpersonal experience and is the defining behavior
of a transpersonal art. Cyberception involves transpersonal technology, the
technology of communicating, sharing, collaborating, the technology which
enables us to transform our selves, transfer our thoughts and transcend the
limitations of our bodies. Transpersonal experience gives us insight into the
interconnectedness of all things, the permeability and instability of
boundaries, the lack of distinction between part and whole, foreground and
background, context and content. Transpersonal technology is the technology of
networks, hypermedia, cyberspace.
Cyberception gives us access to the holomatic media of the cybernet. The
holomatic principle is that each individual's interface to the net is an
aspect of a telematic unity: to be in or at any one interface is to be in the
virtual presence of all the other interfaces throughout the network. This is
so because all the data flowing through any access node of a network are
equally and at the same time held in the memory of that network: they can be
accessed at any other interface through cable or satellite links, from any
part of the planet at any time of day or night.
It is cyberception which enables us to perceive the apparitions of cyberspace,
the coming-into-being of their virtual presence. It is through cyberception
that we can apprehend the processes of emergence in nature, the media-flow,
the invisible forces and fields of our many realities. We cyberceive
transformative relationships and connectivity as immaterial process, just as
palpably and immediately as we commonly perceive material objects in material
locations. If, as many would hold, the project of art in the 20th century has
been to make the invisible visible, it is our growing faculty of cyberception
which is providing us with x-ray vision and the optics of outer space. And
when, for example, the space probe "Cassini" reaches the dense nitrogen
atmosphere of Saturn's satellite Titan, it will be our eyes and minds which
are there, our cyberception which will be testing and measuring its unknown
surface.
The cybernet is also the agent of realisation and construction, embracing a
multiplicity of electronic pathways to robotic systems, intelligent
environments, artificial organisms. And in so far as we create and inhabit
parallel worlds, and open up divergent event trajectories, cyberception may
enable us to become simultaneously conscious of them all, or at least to zap
at will across multiple universes. The transpersonal technologies of
telepresence, global networking, and cyberspace may be stimulating and
re-activating parts of the apparatus of a consciousness long forgotten and
made obsolete by a mechanistic world view of cogs and wheels. Cyberception may
mean an awakening of our latent psychic powers, our capacity to be out of
body, or in mind to mind symbiosis with others.
So what differentiates cyberception from perception and conception? It's not
just the extension of intelligence promised by CalTech's silicon neurons, the
implications of the molecular computer, or the consequences of Bell AT&T's
electro-optic integrated circuit that will compute in one billionth of a
second. The answer lies in our new understanding of pattern, of seeing the
whole, of flowing with the rhythms of process and system. Hitherto, we thought
and saw things in a linear manner, one thing after another, one thing hidden
behind another, leading to this or that finality, and along the way dividing
the world up into categories and classes of things: objects with impermeable
boundaries, surfaces with impenetrable interiors, superficial simplicities of
vision which ignored the infinite complexities. But cyberception means getting
a sense of a whole, acquiring a bird's eye view of events, the astronaut's
view of the earth, the cybernaut's view of systems. It's a matter of highspeed
feedback, access to massive databases, interaction with a multiplicity of
minds, seeing with a thousand eyes, hearing the earth's most silent whispers,
reaching into the enormity of space, even to the edge of time. Cyberception is
the antithesis of tunnel vision or linear thought. It is an all-at-once
perception of a multiplicity of view points, an extension in all dimensions of
associative thought, a recognition of the transience of all hypotheses, the
relativity of all knowledge, the impermanence of all perception. It is
cyberception that allows us to interact fully with the flux and fuzz of life,
to read the Book of Changes, to follow the Tao. In this, cyberception is not
so much a new faculty as a revived faculty. It is us finding ourselves again,
after the human waste and loss of the age of reason, the age of certainty,
determinism and absolute values. The age of appearance.
Cyberception defines an important aspect of the new human being whose
emergence is further accelerated by our advances in genetic engineering and
post-biological modelling. The originating of a life, biological conception,
should now also be called post-biological cyberception since the decision to
initiate and process the birth of children is shifting from the so-called
imperatives and constraints of "nature" to the will and desire of individuals,
in consort with new technologies and regardless of their age or sexual
performance.
We are at the dawn, not just of a new body but a new consciousness, which in
turn will demand a wholly new environment, massive urban transformation, a
reconsideration of every aspect of the zones of living. Cyberception impels us
to a redefinition how we live together and where we live together. In this
process we must start to re-evaluate that material matrix and cultural
instrument of society which we have for so long taken for granted: the city.
CITY
The problem with Western architecture is that it is too much concerned with
surfaces and structures and too little concerned with living systems. There is
no biology of building, simply the physics of space. What we might call the
"edificial" look is all. The city is seen as a battlezone in which this or
that architectural genre or idiomatic impulse fights to survive. It's a matter
of relative inertia. The classicists wishing to protect the total inertia,
political and cultural, of a stylistic past, the modernists protecting the
privileged inertia of a stylised present. No one is interested in radical
change, or intimations of the future. Edificial images, superficial surfaces
define the contemporary city. But to its everyday users, a city is not just a
pretty facade. It 's a zone of negotiation made up of a multitude of networks
and systems. What is needed is designers of such spaces who can provide forms
of access which are not only direct and transparent but which enrich the
city's everyday business and everyday transactions. The language of access to
these processes of communication, production and transformation is more
concerned with systems interfaces and network nodes than with traditional
architectural discourse. And, without the fundamental understanding, on the
part of planners and designers, of the human faculty of cyberception and its
implications for transactional behavior, the cities will remain the arid and
unwelcoming tracts of modernist glass and concrete or tacky post modernist
folly that we are generally forced to endure. We need to reconceptualise the
urban strategy, rethink architecture, we need bring into being the idea of
zones of transformation, to accommodate the transpersonal technologies that
are shaping our global culture.
Cities support and embody the interactions of people, the arts add value to
such exchange. Today it is predominantly electronic systems which facilitate
our interaction and connectivity, and the art of today is based on such
systems. Cities can be dynamic, evolving zones of transformation, just as
interactive art itself is about transformation and change. And just as cities
can offer rewarding complexities of buildings and streets to navigate, leading
to surprises, delights, mysteries, beauty, and are, at their best, about human
dreams and human fulfilment, so interactive art urges you to navigate its many
layered multi-media realities. It invites you to immerse yourself in its
cyberspace, to get online to its global networks. If it is through recent
innovations in art and science that we have become aware of cyberception, it
will be cyberception at the level of city planning and architecture that will
lead us to the city of the 21st century. As has already been argued , art is
no longer about appearance, and certainly not about representation, but is
concerned with apparition, the coming-into-being of what has never before been
seen or heard or experienced.
Cities which are no more than a set of representations function badly. Their
buildings may speak "hospital", "school", "library", but unless they
articulate these meanings within integrated, cybernetic systems, they lie in
their teeth. And too many buildings lie in their teeth. Their monuments,
unless they invite the recreation of the past by means of interactive media,
are no more than inert witnesses to the duplicity of official history.
Cities work best when they are constructed to empower their citizens to find
fulfilment. Such urban aspirations call for the support of an art which is
less concerned with representation and expression and more concerned with
radical construction and imaginative realisation. This is the art which is
presently emerging out of the fusion of new communications and computer media.
It builds on the complexity and diversity of dreams and desires that our
multi-cultural, multimedia world brings forth. Just as we call this art
interactive, the enriching environment which our cities must become should be
based on the same principles of interaction and connectivity.
The city in the 21st century must be anticipatory, futures oriented, working
at the forward edge of contemporary culture, as an agent of cultural
prosperity, as a cause of profitable innovation rather than simply as an
effect of the art and products of a former time. It should be a testbed for
all that is new, not just in the arts but in entertainment, leisure,
education, business, research and production.
A city should offer its public the opportunity to share, to collaborate, and
participate in the processes of cultural evolution. Its many communities must
have a stake in its future. For this reason, it must be transparent in its
structures, its goals, and its systems of operation at all levels. Its
infrastructure, like its architecture, must be both "intelligent" and publicly
intelligible, comprising systems which react to us, as much as we interact
with them. The principle of rapid and effective feedback at all levels should
be at the very heart of the city's development. This means highspeed data
channels crisscrossing every nook and cranny of its urban complexities.
Feedback should not only work but be seen to work. This is to talk about
cyberception as fundamental to the quality of living in an advanced
technological, post-biological society.
Just as architects must forget their concrete boxes and Disneyland
decorations, and attend to the design of everything which is invisible and
immaterial in a city, so they must understand that planning must be developed
in an evolutive space-time matrix which is not simply three-dimensional or
confined to a continuous mapping of buildings, roads, and monuments. Instead
planning and designing must apply connectivity and interaction to four quite
different zones: underground, street level, sky/sea, and cyberspace. Instead
of the planner's talk of streets, alleyways, avenues and boulevards, we need
to think of wormholes, to borrow a term from quantum physics, tunnelling
between separate realities, real and virtual, at many levels, through many
layers. Similarly the paradigms and discoveries of Artificial Life science
must be brought into play. The architect's new task is to fuse together
material structures and cyberspace organisms into a new continuum.
Architecture is the true test of our capacity to integrate into humanly
enriching zones and structures, the potentials of the material world, the new
consciousness, and virtual realities. In this enterprise many traditional
ideas must be jettisoned, ideas whose inherent instability was always implicit
in the dichotomies by which they were expressed: urban/rural, city/country,
artificial/natural, day/night, work/play, local/global. The boundaries on
these ideas have shifted or eroded altogether.
The city as an amalgam of systems interfaces and communications nodes is
likely to be much more supportive of creative lives and personal fulfilments
than the grossly conceived and rigidly realised conurbations of the industrial
age. In place of their dense and intractable materiality, we can expect the
environmental fluidity of faster-than-light pathways, intelligent surfaces and
structures, and transformable habitations. The end of representation is nigh!
Semiology is ceasing to underpin our structures. Buildings will behave in ways
consistent with their announced function, rather than speaking their role by
semiological implication. Appearance is giving way to apparition in art, and
notions of unfolding, transformation and coming-into-being are suffusing our
culture. It will only be with the understanding that buildings must be planted
and 'grown' that architecture will flourish. It's a growbag culture that is
needed, in which seeding replaces designing. Architectural practice should
find its guiding metaphors in horticulture rather than in warfare. Ultimately
we can perhaps talk about pollination and grafting.
Building, like cities, should grow. But without cyberception, the traditional
architect and urbanist have no idea whatsoever of what we are proposing. To
see that technology changes, that building methods, economies, and planning
systems change, but to fail to recognise that human beings also are radically
changing, is a grave error. Perhaps classes in consciousness and gardening
should replace the study of classical orders and historical cannons of style
and genre which stultify architectural education!
Where is there a building, much less a city, which supports a cyberculture,
that sees cyberception as central to human sense and sensibility? Where is
there an urban space in which we can fully celebrate "telenoia" that is the
product of networked consciousness, interactive awareness, thought at a
distance, "mind-at-large" (to use Gregory Bateson's term). Where is there an
architectural school which is, as a whole, united body, determined to create
the conditions for the proper evolution of a truly 21st century city? Where in
architecture and planning are connectivity and interaction taken as primary
principles of the design process? The debate in architecture should not be a
matter of either/or. Either classical or modern, either new or old, either
idealistic or pragmatic, either functional or frivolous. Between idealism and
pragmatism, between conception of the desired and perception of the possible,
lie the evolutive initiatives of cyberception.
As a frustrated HyperCard programme might say, "Where is Home?" Where will we
cybernauts of the turning millennium live? What is the nature of community and
cohabitation in a telematic culture. How is cyberspacial transience to be
accommodated? Where are those zones that we can cyberceive as beautiful and
fulfilling. We inhabit material forms with psychic dimensions set in the
limitless boundaries of cyberspace. We are networked to the universe, our
nervous systems are suffusing the cosmos. We navigate inner and outerspace. We
don't need buildings so much as we need ourselves to be built, or rebuilt from
the genetic foundations which we are rapidly re-evaluating and may soon
restructure.
Perhaps the most radical challenge to the old ideas of architecture comes from
the consequences of telepresence, the disseminated self. When human identity
itself is undergoing transformation, the collaborative mind and the connected
consciousness replacing the unitary mind and solitary consciousness of the old
order of Western thought, architecture must look to new strategies if it is to
bring useful ideas about living and interacting in the world. Telepresence is
the province of the distributed self, of remote meetings in cyberspace, of
online living. Telepresence means instant global interaction with a thousand
communities, being in any one of them, or all of them, virtually at the same
time. Telepresence defines the new human identity perhaps more than any other
aspect of the repertoire of cyberculture.
Contemporary architecture and shopping have become more or less the same
thing. Architecture, having turned its back on the need for radical responses
to the realities of the teleself and distributed presence, constitutes little
more than a shopping cart world of boxed packages, wheeled around the sterile
zones of a mall culture. Each building is a prettified and packaged product,
each component mail-ordered from a catalogue. The "have a good day" code of
building practice has put the appeasement of tradition before collaboration
with the future. But the need for an architecture of interfaces and nodes will
not go away. We shall increasingly live in two worlds, the real and the
virtual, and in many realities, both cultural and spiritual, regardless of the
indifference of urban designers. These many worlds interconnect at many
points. We are constantly on the move between them. In the creative zone,
transience and transformation identify our way. Hi-tech chic and Bauhaus bluff
will not fool our keen cyberception. Change must be radical. The new city,
both in its visible immateriality and its invisible construction, will grow
into a fruitful reality only if it is seeded with imagination and vision. It
is artists who can become the sowers of these seeds, who can take the chances
needed to allow new forms and features of the new city to grow. It is their
cyberception that equips them with the global awareness and conceptual
dexterity to resee, rethink, and rebuild our world.