To look at consciousness research in the context of technologies and the arts is initially to take a broad sweep of the planet as a whole and to interpret ideas of mind, machine and culture in ways which reach far beyond the Western paradigm.

The term “technology“ will mean quite different things to cultures in the Kalahari desert or the Amazonian rail forest from those current in Silicon Valley.

 

I think I shall start somewhat provocatively by approaching my topic from the far edge of consciousness studies, that which deals with spirituality

The issue of spirituality here in our deeply materialist culture is a contentious one. Many see it as an alien concept, or worse, a concept to be held only by aliens. In searching for a more planetary overview of its meanings, it is interesting to note that the search engine Google provides 2, 290, 000 entries for “spirituality”.

 

Harvard University Health Service pops up quickly with this definition:

Spirituality: concerned with the soul or the spirit, not external reality. Nonmaterial. Incorporeal. Psychological. Inner. Sacred. Religious. Inspired. Divine.

But then retreats in a state of denial to conclude:

However you define spirituality, research has shown that feelings of joy and happiness produce elevated endorphin levels which contributes to the synthesis of the hormone DHEA by the adrenal glands.

 

As a result, the thymus gland is stimulated to better carry out elevated immune function. In other words, your immune system can be bolstered by feelings of faith, hope, and happiness.

Ah! the comfort in the illusions of materialism!

 

In this scenario, even the immaterialism of the free flying spirit is returned to the grounded body, in line with that desperate kind of born again mentality in which the body is ever insistent, where embodiment is a virtue, and out-of-body is a vice.

 

I have no wish at this time to debate spiritual ontology except to affirm for my part that spirituality is a condition rather than a project, consciousness is a field rather than an epiphenomenon of the brain. I prefer to place it within that continuum where our field of being, or better said, our field of becoming, in all its complexity, invites endless exploration and contemplation.

Spirituality calls for total immersion in this field, just as the technological art that we practice, calls for our absorption in a flow of connectivity and interaction. And like the broadband technology of connectivity at its best, spirituality is always on. It seems to me that to navigate consciousness is an important part of the function of art.

 

The journey is always open-ended. We can compare our immersion in this emergent psychic process with the cannon of interactive art, a journey which, in both cases, follows the five fold path of connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation and emergence.

 

In the case of art this has resulted in a culture shift of paradigmatic significance, just as a shift in Western thinking about the spirit is beginning to take place. The emphasis by the artist moves from content to context, from object to process, from representation of the world as a given, to the construction of worlds in emergence, from certainty to contingency, from composition and resolution to complexity and emergence. In short our focus has shifted from the behavior of forms to forms of behavior.

I would like to ask you to look a little bit into the future.

 

Imagine a technology of the mind that allows you to tap into a vast database of universal knowledge, one that reaches deep into the neuronal zones, cuts through the layers of inhibition laid do by centuries of cultural conditioning, religious prejudice, and political repression Imagine the enormous advantage this technology would confer on the individual, otherwise functioning as no more than a cog in a vast and indifferent social machine, as well as its potential to humanize, unify and transform that mechanized society into an integrated but highly diversified network of minds acting from a base of wisdom and insight.

Imagine the instrumentation of this technology working as simply and smoothly as say a memory stick being inserted in the side of the neck in the way of Gibson’s Neuromancer, or to be less romantic and more up to date.

 

Imagine our current researches in molecular biology producing an ingestible pill, a condensation, at the nano or pico level, of intelligent robots programmed, or self assembling, to go to work on the body and its brain, opening up pathways of perception and cognition that hitherto were only known to us as simply myth or magic.

 

I think you can well see that that is where technology might be taking us, with implants in the brain or body, or realignments of our neural networks, that effectively transform consciousness, our sense of self, and our place in the universe. Imagine too how politicians, or those vested interests they front for, would hate it. How every force of surveillance and prohibition, secular and religious, would be brought to bear on outlawing it.

Well, in fact you don’t need to imagine the advent of this advanced technology at all - it is already here - we’ve known about it for quite a while, although hitherto it has been treated rather secretively if not hermetically. Most universities get rather uncomfortable if it is openly discussed in front of students. It’s an academic prejudice that extends across the world, in fact the technology itself has been developed across the world, apparently independently, in many regions, north and south east and west.

 

The technology is not digital, as you might expect, but molecular, involving according to some authorities, the instrumentation of DNA. It’s what can be called “plant technology” since it involves the ingestion or absorption of plants under carefully structured conditions with strict protocols of application.

 

It is known on this continent as yagé or ayahuasca, and its technology, or something like it has formed the basis of knowledge acquisition in countries as disparate as central Australia, Africa, Siberia and northern Europe.

 

Its one of our earliest technologies, and it is currently outlawed in practically every part of the world, subject to all those forces of surveillance and prohibition, secular and religious, to which that I have just referred.

 

This prohibition, of course, stems from a confusion of these sacred plants with substances intended for distraction and recreation which as we know are more often than not mind-destroying, or a tragic extension of the materialist search for a specious happiness. So let me be clear from the outset, I wish to discuss a sacred technology, a technology of mind concerned with transcendence and search for knowledge and wisdom.

 

Plant technology is archaic, it comes from the past.

 

The future I asked you to imagine is that where this technology, with its access to what I would call a “vegetal reality”, converges with the other two realities that currently give shape to our experience, the validated reality of everyday, common sense perception of the world, and virtual reality, of which all readers of this magazine are to some extent aware.

 

The three VRs:

This convergence of technologies is accompanied, as I see it by the convergence of two media, the dry silicon media of the computer, and the wet molecular media of biological engineering.

This I call moistmedia. I intend to explore the implications of three VRs and moist media in the context of our symposium: art technology and spirituality; to speculate (I hope not merely fancifully or irresponsibly) on how this “grand convergence” might lead to new forms of behavior, possibilities of self-creation, and the emergence of a planetary consciousness.

A discussion of planetary consciousness cannot ignore differences existing between West and East that are often reduced simplistically to a kind of dialectic of consciousness:

on the one hand the isolated mind locked in its Cartesian box, on the other hand minds-at-large floating in clouds of knowing.

Quantum physics and ubiquitous telematics (amongst other models and methods of our non-linear era) have together ruptured this expedient dichotomy.

 

In recent years, artists have eagerly employed the metaphors of science and the tools of advanced technology to break new ground, allowing a new culture of consciousness to grow. I call this culture “technoetic” and the concomitant changes in the way we think and perceive the world “cyberception”.

 

Technoetic is derived from the Greek techne and noetikos (mind) which have always been related in wise societies, regardless of their place in historical time or geographical space. Moreover, art has always had a spiritual dimension no matter what gloss prevailing political attitudes or cultural ideologies have forced upon it.

 

Cyberception describes more than just the prosthetic amplification of thought or our ability to see deeper into matter and further into space:

it constitutes a whole new human faculty, one which confers upon us an entirely new set of dispositions and a radically transformed behavioral repertoire.

Here is the gap which is to be bridged, many gaps, many bridges not just between east and west, but north and south, great and small, black and white.

 

Clearly this is not simply a matter of passing from one side to the other. It’s actually about collapsing the two sides into a whole new environment, a fluctuating field of potentiality, in which new forms of human identity, living systems, spiritual states, architectures, cultures and connectivities can be planted, grown and nurtured.

 

The grand convergence of moistmedia and the three VRs may offer a means to build this new environment.

 

Questions of consciousness have an important place in the agenda of art and technology and in the formation of the post-biological culture to which we are contributing. Consciousness is the great mysterium that entices artists and scientists alike to enter its domain. It is the ultimate frontier of research in many fields, and probably only a truly trans-disciplinary approach will allow us to close the explanatory gap.

 

It is within consciousness that our imagination is at work, and it is in imagination that we first mix the realities of the actual and the virtual.

Where consciousness evolves at the planetary level, a new sensibility arises, a new way of valuing ourselves, our environment. Computer assisted technologies have allowed us to look deeper into matter and out into space, to recognize meaningful patterns, rhythms, cycles, correspondences, interrelationships and dependencies at all levels.

 

Computational systems have led us to a better understanding of how, like living organisms, our design and construction of our world could be an emergent process, replacing the old top-down approach with a bottom-up methodology.

 

Telematic systems have enabled us to distribute ourselves over multiple locations, to multiply our identity, to extend our reach over formidable distances with formidable speed. We have learned that everything is connected, and we are busy in the technological process of connecting everything.

 

But we forget, all too frequently, that connectivity must be truly ubiquitous and comprehensive if it is to be consistent and humane, and to maintain its ubiquity it must be cared for and protected, a rule that applies of course not simply to telematic networks and communication systems but must be extended generously to all fellow human beings.

 

Our decision collectively to forget, marginalize or ignore so many people and cultures in the world, in many cases actively to impede their communication, to silence their voices, often through sheer indifference as much as greed or malice, plays a large part in the situation we find ourselves in today.

Planetary consciousness needs more than the West’s expansive drive of telematic networks. A sensibility to cultures which lie outside the Western paradigm is essential, and here, despite the obvious reference to Islamic cultures (and I use the plural with grave emphasis), which clearly we need to approach and understand more intimately, I refer to the “exotic” and largely ignored indigenous cultures of South America, Africa and Australia.

 

Here is knowledge of a kind we too often ignore or despise with a kind of techno-aristocratic sneer (containing perhaps as much fear as hubris). And here too a mixed reality obtains, where “ordinary” perceptions, ordinary reality, ordinary state of being are crossed by, converge with, are entwined within, non-ordinary states of awareness and non local states of consciousness.

 

As in the West, the technology is instrumental here in producing the condition of Mixed Reality: but it is Plant Technology rather than digital technology at work.

 

And make no mistake, the technological skills, methodologies and instrumentality of the shaman - constituting what we what we would classify as pharmacology, botany, biology, and psychology - amount to a knowledge base certainly as extensive and complex as that prized in western science.

 

As is the case with the advanced tools of the West, the shaman’s two realities mix on the plane of imagination, their convergence offering the potential of new ways of being, perceiving and behaving.

 

My feeling is that we can learn from these cultures in ways that will bring Mixed Reality technology into our lives as environment, rather than merely a tool, however efficacious or profitable that tool, in surgery, engineering, architecture or entertainment might be. Indeed we have much to learn from these cultures in the widest and deepest sense, not least in how we shall manage the condition of double consciousness, multiple identity, and mixed reality.

The tools are different - in one case taken from the forest, in the other brought to our post-biological world, a condition in which technology has assimilated and, in some cases, replaced natural process.

 

In the grand convergence of technologies and media to which I referred in my introduction, Moistmedia is set to create a whole new post-biological universe, quite unlike the world as legislated on high in its authorized version with its apparently immutable laws.

 

Let me extend the metaphor by likening the Big Bang creation of this new universe to that of the first cosmic Big Bang, now named to reflect the combination of Bits Atoms Neurons and Genes which together, in all sorts of relationships, will provide the substrate - the moistmedia - upon which our art and architecture, systems and services, will be based. It too heralds an expanding universe, full of complexity and contradictions, equally rich in evolutionary potential, but hopefully assisted by the speed and subtlety that advanced technology can bring.

 

This Big Bang implies a transition to a much more complex level of human identity, forcing us to look deeply at what is it to live at the edge of the Net, half in cyberspace and half in a world increasingly nano-engineered from the bottom up.

 

In this universe the old classical concept of nature is seen as a set of metaphors which have outlived their usefulness; a representation of reality, whether poetic or prosaic, which has lost its appeal to our sensibility. Whether through artificial neural networks, genetic engineering or other applications of molecular biology, the bridges to a post-biological society being opened up and artists are contributing to its definition.

Nanotechnology has immense potential for the ways in which we approach the re-construction of ourselves, our senses, our brains, and ultimately our consciousness.

We are looking at a culture in which intelligence is spilling out of our brains to fill every nook and cranny of the world, every environment, every tool, every product

 

But just as we are using new technology to investigate matter and its relationship to mind, so we shall increasingly bring about a convergence of computer-mediated cyberception, with plant entheogens to alter our consciousness, our understanding and viewing of the world and ourselves, a reach a more spiritual perspective.

 

This is the grand convergence of the three VRs:

In this respect I’d like to investigates the metaphoric contiguity of Silicon Valley and the Amazonian rain forest, in the context of our post-biological culture, to show how, so to speak, the jaguar might lie down with the lamb.

 

The Jaguar shaman and Dolly the lamb clone mark out shifting boundaries that define our new epistemology of mind and matter, where particles, neurons, atoms and genes converge as the substrate upon which our mixed realities can be built. Our experience of life on the Net and in cyberspace has already prepared us to reconsider the Western conventions of time and space, the apparent immutability of human identity and the isolation of the discrete mind, and to replace those illusions with a more constructive vision of a collaborative and coherent future.

 

The place of art in all of this, with its ability to move creatively through cultures however distant or exotic, to find new meaning and method in ancient practices and esoteric knowledge, is to compliment the urgent progression of science, and creatively embrace the innovations of technology.

 

To advance this study I spent some time in May 1999 with the Kuikuru Indians in the Xingu river region of the Mato Grosso, and later with the Unioa do vegetal and Santa Daime groups in Brazil.

 

Brazil in my view is precisely where the grand convergence will most likely take root.

 

Just as the US, modeling its institutions on European models for a century woke up one day to find out of all its chaotic strivings, it had created a new civilization that has come to dominate the world, so I believe out of the current confusions, complexity and chaos of life in South America, will come a new fusion, a new form of social organization, much more spiritual in its prospect, and planetary in its implication.

 

This is due to the syncretism of the culture in which diverse spiritual disciplines coexist, converge, intertwine and remake themselves:

These experiments in a spiritually informed life are constituted in small groups, sometimes rural communities (for example in Acre, deep in Amazonia) and even a whole township, as in the case of the Valley of the Dawn outside Brasilia.

 

I suppose our western response lies in the concept of research. Certainly very earnest inquiry into what mind is, how, where it might be located (in the brain, a quantum effect, or in contact with the zero point field ) is at the top of the agenda in science. At my research centre, The Planetary Collegium, we convene an annual meeting to look at new thinking and new practice in this context <http://www.planetary-collegium.org/>.

 

The centre itself, while not exclusively focused on consciousness research, nevertheless is bound up with work in which qualities of mind, and varieties of artificial intelligence are investigated., tracing a trajectory from telematics to moist media.

But the question will be asked:

What meaningful relationship can there possibly be between the spiritual practices of the rain forest and the materialism of silicon valley?

Is not the lore of plants rather more gnomic and occult than genomic and transparent?

Aren’t matters genetic best left to western scientists in their labs rather than shamans in their huts?

In any case, who can master the formulaic intricacies of genome-speak?

How could such remote and archaic people have any knowledge of DNA?

Well, it can be shown that shamanic practices have everything to do with these matters - with DNA, genetic communication, and molecular manipulation.

Although we know little neurologically about how entheogens (the psychoactive ingredients of the shaman’s plants) work on the human organism, there is nothing mysterious or magical about their efficacy.

Certainly I think we need to approach the field with the same technological curiosity as we did in the early days of digital technology. Meaning we need to grasp new principles, new terms, a whole new language.

In this respect it is perhaps worth referring at this point to the research of Jeremy Narby, embodied in the book Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge which relates shamanic knowledge to a kind of shared genetic matrix.

 

Narby suggests is that the shaman is, in some way, communicating with his own DNA, and this is where his informative visions originate. He suggests that once the shaman taps into their own DNA, it can then communicate across organisms, across species - even across the boundary between animal and plant - and that the totality of all the DNA in the world forms a kind of matrix.

 

This transmission of signals between DNA in separate cells is effected by the emission of bio-photons, the signals are in the form of light, and at a wavelength visible to humans.

The term “biophotons” was first used by Fritz Albert Popp, in 1974i to describe the quantum phenomenon of photonic emission from biological systems. All living systems emit biophotons, both those absorbed initially from the sun and those emitted spontaneously from molecules.

 

Building on the ideas of Alexander Gurwitsch (1874-1954), the Russian biologist who introduced ideas of the morphogenetic field and mitogenetic radiationii, Popp argues that every change in the biological or physiological state of the living system is reflected by a corresponding change of biophoton emission. This may be indicative, he argues, of an information channel within living systems that may relate to chemical reactivity in cells, intercellular communication, and biological rhythms.

 

Biophysics is a field-based science.

Recently, field theory has been popularly but usefully reviewed by Lynne McTaggart, in The Field just as twenty years ago, a morphogenetic model of biological process informed Rupert Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life.

 

Finally, there is the question of how the grand convergence might be facilitated, how we might research and support its emergence. At this level I think it becomes a question of architecture and planning. Technoetic architecture lies somewhat in the future.

 

I have defined it as,

“an architecture that has a life of its own, that thinks for itself, feeds itself, takes care of itself, repairs itself, plans its future, copes with adversity and anticipates our changing needs.

 

An architecture that returns our gaze. In this sense It’s not a matter of what buildings look like to us but what we look like to them, not what we feel about places but how those places feel about us”.

But new information systems and architectural structures, and the dynamic spaces of nonlocal interaction, call for more than simply optimism and hope that a planetary art will emerge.

For this reason there is much activity in developing the Planetary Collegium based in University of Plymouth, with its first node at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst in Zurich, and in negotiating for nodes at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arte, Milan and the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia.

Never was the future more open ended, never was culture more hybrid and emergent, it seems, than now. This is moment for the synthesis of spiritual and material technologies, and artists have a part to play in its realization.

 

The grand convergence I have outlined, with its three VRs and moistmedia, may of course prove to be little more than a dream, although I feel confident that we shall see evidence of its reality - but as Montaigne pointed out, it is pricing life exactly at its worth to sell it for a dream

 

 

 

 

Roy Ascott

Founding Director of the Planetary Collegium (CAiiA-STAR), is Professor of Technoetics in the University of Plymouth, England and Adjunct Professor in Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Amongst many senior academic and advisory appointments he has been Founding Director of CAiiA-STAR (University of Wales College Newport and Plymouth University) from which base the Planetary Collegium has evolved; Vice-President and Dean of the San Francisco Art Institute; Professor of Communications Theory, University of Applied Arts, Vienna; Professor and Chair of Fine Art, Minneaplois College of Art & Design; and President of the Ontario College of Art. He is on the Art and Media Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.

Roy Ascott is an artist and theorist who has shown, inter alia, at the Venice Biennale, Electra Paris, Ars Electronica Linz, V2 Holland, Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil, European Media Festival, and gr2000az at Graz, Austria. His research is in art and the technology of consciousness. He is the founding editor of Technoetic Arts: a journal of speculative research, and he serves on the editorial boards of Leonardo. LEA, Convergence, Digital Creativity, and the Chinese journal Tom.Com. He has advised new media centres and festivals in the UK, North and South America, Europe, and the Far East, as well as the CEC and UNESCO, and convenes the annual international Consciousness Reframed conferences.

His publications are translated into many languages and include the books:

Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art Technology and Consciousness.2003 . Technoetic Arts. (Korean trans. & ed. Won-Kon Yi). Yonsei: Yonsei University Press, 2002 Art.

Telematic Embrace by Roy Ascott, Edward A. Shanken - Paperback - University of California Press (ucpress.edu)

---

Convergent Realities - Art, Technology, Consciousness, From the Planetary Perspective (basecamp.com)

---

Convergent Realities – Art, Technology, Consciousness, From the Planetary Perspective – Library of Rickandria