Cognitive Architecture. From Bio-Politics To Noo-Politics
Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication & Information

English
600 pp / 235 x 170 mm / paperback
price € 39.50
ISBN 978 90 6450 725 0
to be published June 2010, forthcoming

Published by 010 Publishers, Netherlands

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The “distribution of the sensible” (Partage du Sensible) refers to the implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and formsof Participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made or done. Strictly speaking, distribution therefore refers both to forms of inclusion and to forms of exclusion. The sensible of course, does not refer to what shows good sense or judgment but to what is aistheton or capable of being apprehended by the senses.

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics

But sovereignty today organizes this distribution with sophisticated apparati that are reminiscent of the Society of Control expressed in Michael Hardt’s and Tony Negri’s Empire. The logics of perception and experience are no longer materialistically defined only by contours of geometric and linear time and space arranged hierarchically in a rigid lattice but rather follow curved, non-linear Rheimannian paradigms that are expressed in complicated, non-hierarchical, rhizomatic shifting patterns. Consider for a moment the way commodities are now linked together as branded networks that intensify their desire quotient or how people communicate on chat rooms or move in and out of blog sites. Sovereignty, utilizing these methods and those of the global market place with the help of the continuing scientific research on perception and cognition, has conspired in creating powerful complex networks of attention which allow for the manufacture of explicit “connectiveness” that today defines the distribution of the sensible. Phatic Stimuli, as Paul Virilio refers to them, have evolved into highly attention grabbing conglomerates of stimuli that act as multiplicities and operate beyond the sensorium reaching into the folded gyri and sulci of the brain itself. These networks form a hegemonic cultural syntax which is inscribed en mass on the society as a whole producing new forms of subjectivity and in the case of world tuned in to global media, a bounded multitude. When these networks are internalized and become part of the automatic operation of the body’s or mind’s habitual relationships they form a Society of Control rather then the Disciplinary Society. Self-Censorship is a perfect example of the Society of Control and how insidiously this process becomes self-evident. These images together produce the “Institutional Understanding.” “Institutional understanding” is the framework through which most of us operate in the real world of material things. But artists also create their own distribution of the sensible. They use their own historical referents, materials, processes, apparati, spaces and performances, to create complex assemblages that together compete with institutional arrangements for the attention of the brain and mind. Their artistic imaginations produce practices that allow for the exploration of remote territories, like the paranormal, non-linear, psychic, and insensible, which pulsate beyond the reach of the formulaic methodologies of the philosophers logic and the scientist experimental design. This is not to imply that art is disengaged and distanced from life as some form of hermetic endeavor but quite the opposite. It is embedded in the interwoven fabric of social, political, economic, psychological, historical and spiritual relations. It in fact commingles with it and forms complex systems of recurrent and recursive loopings that in the end help produce novel forms of networks that empower the imagination of each receptive/productive subject with new possibilities for creativity which in the end reconstitute the cultural landscape with new objects, object relations, contexts and arrangements. They inhabit the same spaces and temporalities as the institutional arrangements that characterize the institutional understanding. Their presence however acts to bend and contort it, in the end, altering its static and rigid arrangements in significant ways. Works like installation art, performative sculpture and urban geographies act to redistribute the facts of this distribution of the sensible while conceptually-based works, relational aesthetics and the institutional critique operate on more metaphysical levels superimposing meaning, contexts and critiques upon it in order to change the way those distributions are read and understood and processed for instance as memories. For instance, Situationism has taught us to kinesthetically understand the urban space differently through the derive and detournement, attend to what before was uninteresting and insignificant, and process all of this in ways that allow us to understand the significance, of the urban sprawl in the context of a  grand conceptual schema of the meaning of contemporary life. (Of course the institutional understanding is always attempting to co-opt its methods, terminology and processes.) The Re-distribution of the Sensible took place at Magnus Müller Gallery in Berlin in the spring of 2007 attempting to investigate some contemporary art practices that are addressing these issues.

Speakers and Participants:

Yann M. Boutang, Charles Wolfe, John Proveti, Keller Easterling, Markus Miessen, Bruce Wexler, Scott Kelso, Jordan Crandall, Andreas Angelidakis, Abdul - Karim Mustapha

The aim of the TRANS_THINKING THE CITY series is to bring together experts and scholars in both the sciences and the humanities to discuss issues  of relevance to current architecture and urban practices; issues effecting our cities, polis, ethos, communities.  Trans_Thinking  is a term  employed to indicate a new mode of intellectual activity, thinking as part of mental mechanism brought to bear on emergent fields in both theoretical discourse and practice based activities operating at the margins of what has often been referred to as trans-disciplinarity. As such,  Trans_Thinking attempts to think  in the intervals between art, technology,  politics, science and philosophy – between the so called empirical and speculative.

Outline

ARCHITECTURE IN MIND: from bio-politics to noo-politics  colloquium invites thinkers in the areas of  political and aesthetic philosophy, neuroscience, socio-cultural theory and  visual & spatial theorists and practitioners such as architects, urbanist and artist.  Two general concepts will
guide the discussion:  First,  plasticity,  generally indicating the idea of mutability, transformation and the inherent potential for change whether productive or prohibitive, positive or negative. For some this can be understood as a theoretical notion;  for others a property of brain; for others still a metaphoric or diagrammatic concept  applied to the culture surrounding built environment, as well as spatial analysis and design. Second, noo-power, understood generally as a power exerted over the life of the mind, including memory and attention which together form the ever evolving concept of the general intellect (nous). For some this will be directly related to current theoretical discussions on ‘noo-politics’ and ‘societies of control’; for others the term will indicate  the ways and means by which the neurobiological architecture may be reconfigured; for others this will be a new and yet unconsidered concept with respects to built environments and spatial analysis and design, and this, is precisely one of the principle aims of this colloquia – to bring an understanding of the importance of this issues to the fore with respects to thinking on the City.

“Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis” and the The Neuro-aesthetic Reading room are two projects that were originally separate but now have been joined together. “Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis” was an exhibition I curated at the Thread Waxing Space, New York City, in 1999 which attempted to make explicit certain trends and ideas that I considered important parts of the history of Conceptual Art but which had not, up to that moment, been adequately explored. The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room is still an imaginary project proposal which in many ways builds on the concepts of Conceptual Art as a Neurobiological Praxis. In fact the latter is now incorporated as part of the project. Because both operate somewhere in between art works and curatorial projects they are presented here as one project in the gallery section of the website. The accompanying details of artworks included in the Thread Waxing Exhibition act I hope to highlight the type of strategies and models some artists today are using either consciously or unconsciously to approach ideas of mind and brain. Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis

The history of Conceptual Art like all art historical movements is continually under a state of siege as the changing cultural milieu in which it lives mutates the facts of its origins, development and relevance. Conceptual Art like Situationism which preceded it and Minimalism, Pop Art and Op Art which was contemporaneous with it had its own founding artists who in their desire to create an identifiable character or brand unconsciously tried to define and limit the parameters of its meaning, economy and distribution.. This of course is always hopeless, at best creating a discourse at worst creating a dogmatic regime that becomes deterministic and exclusive, and in the end results in its own demise. Such is the history of Conceptual Art which in its “pure” form, according to Lucy Lippard,, lasts only seven years running from 1965-1972. However Conceptual Art is not and was not, in spite of itself, a linear practice and emerges in the context of many streams of art practice, including Letterism and Situationsim, philosophy including Structuralism and Phenomenology, Infomatics like Cybernetics, psychosocial discourses like Psychoanalysis and Marxism and the political activism of the late 1960’s. The degree to which each of these contributes to the active image of conceptualism is the result of different networks of relationships that form between them at different moments and create nodal intensities in an open, not closed, autopoetic system of multiple feed forward, feedback, reentrant systems, and temporal synchronicities which are formed as systems of porous information modules linked together by dynamic intermittent temporal synchronicities. I am not here trying to analyze this system of relations into some finite set of determinations but instead to give the reader some idea of the massive complexity of this system and the degree to which organizations of art breathe and live in a system of multiple meanings, realities and definitions which in the end give them very complicated and folded structures which almost defies interpretation and analysis. For it is within this complexity which other forms and other meanings hibernate laying latent, remaining in a state of hypothermia and very slow metabolism, awaiting the proper set of conditions in which to emerge and once again become. We see examples of this all the time as certain artists’ work all of a sudden becomes once again important or in the way certain bodies of works, which had gained notoriety in there day, begin to be appreciated and recuperated. This is certainly true of the many careers of Marcel Duchamp but recently we have also witnessed this phenomena in a renewed interest in the work of Robert Smithson, Anthony McCall and Gordon Matta Clark.

Some would argue that an explanation of this phenomena can be found in the way that the social, political, historical, psychological, economic conditions of the late nineties and early 21st century share important qualities with those that defined the late sixties and early seventies such that this recovered work expresses key incites common to both eras. For instance the work of Sol Lewitt very much influenced by infomatics of the sixties develops renewed intensity in the context new media art today. His now famous quote from Artforum Magazine (5:10 Summer 1967) attests to this. “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” sounds very much like a quote from Cybernetics by Norbert Weiner.

Others would argue that in fact that these works and the other works that carry for instance, a minimalist codon, were never understood completely and their reappraisal concerns a kind of historicity in which the works that followed have given their primary sources new meanings not originally appreciated, at that time but which emerge within the newly configured cultural context. For instance ideas of time and space have been radically altered since the invention of the Internet and with this new understanding primary works of art that forewarned of this new condition for instance Robert Smithsons “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space”, Arts Magazine (New York) 41, no.1 and John Baldessari, “Painting for Kubler”, 1969 have added significance. Time and space is now generally understood as intensive and folded and complex and these mutated conditions lend new levels of understanding to what these artists intuitively were trying to say. Another permutation of this explanation concerns the way a work of art or a movement is never really understood at all and that other meanings emerge that lay sleeping in the interstices of its being. That is to say the emerging contexts reconfigure the artworks themselves so that their determining factors are not what they were understood to be. In fact the founding artists were responding to conditions that would become and had not yet formed and that these artists, as they are simply observers, spectators, are a product of newly formed culturally derived subjectivities, stumbled through their creations without understanding what they were doing but doing so with extreme elegance. Finally another possibility for emerging interest in art of the past is the condition of the observer who interfaces with it. Such is the condition of the mutated observer whose reconfigured neural networks, reset as they have been by mutating temporal and spatial conditions resulting from the cultural incorporation of new media practice at the end of the twentieth century, view and experience the work in quite new and radical ways. Space does not allow me to go to deeply into this explanation and for those interested in a more in depth analysis please see my chapter entitled, “Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain” in the book of the same title.

The above discussion is especially relevant for the history of Conceptual Art. Recently a number of exhibitions have attempted to throw new light on the history of Conceptual Art. Most notably are L’Art Conceptual, une perspective,( Musee de Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,1990) Reconsidering the object of art, (MOCA LA,1998) and finally Global Conceptualism: Points of Origins, (Queens Museum, New York, 1999). Conceptual Art as a Neuro-biologic Praxis, 1999 is another recent example of this historical reappraisal by also attempting a rereading or expansion of the roots, causes and concerns of conceptualism while at the same time linking it to the history of artistic and technologic apparatuses and processes as they float between the investigation of perception and cognition on the one hand and artistic production on the other.

Jonathan Crary would link the parallel history of technologies of observation in the nineteenth century to the emergence of a new kind of observer. The same could be said of course about the late 20th century. New media according to the likes of Manuel Delanda moves us away from an extensive culture to an intensive one. Sequential, linear, heirarchial forms of information are substituted for by folded, non-linear, multiplicities of meaning. This new intensive culture is expressed in an intensive subjectivity. One only has to glance at a Frank Gehry’s Bilboa or the graphics used in Wired Magazine to know how this subjectivity is expressed.. This is another important subtext of Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis.

Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room

(Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis is reinvigorated in its newer instantiation as part of “Moments of Unease: Conjunctions of Neuro-science and Art in the Twentieth Century.”) Before progressing to describe the Neuro-aesthetic reading room a concise definition is in order. Neuro-aesthetics is the study of the development of three streams of knowledge, which are progressing in parallel, but which at times interact together to create new forms of information and images which can be used by the imagination and understanding to create new kinds of thought. These three discourses are the history of techniques as they relate to photography, film and new media, Neuro-science and art. Neuro-aesthetics describes the dance between these three very different methods of investigation that at times exchange partners. It is my contention that research and understanding of the nervous system as it is disseminated through kinds of media forms the basis of new optical and acoustic technologies which extend its abilities, and as a result of the new conditions of visual and auditory culture they produce, artists are affected in ways that stimulate them to make new kinds of images and artworks. In essence, the art works reflect in themselves directly and indirectly the current condition of Neuro-science at a specific moment as it affects ideas of perception and cognition.

1. The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room is a “trans-disciplinary space” that has three main objectives:

a. To create a transportable library and social space for the creation, production and dissemination of a new kind of trans-disciplinary information based on Neuro-science and art interactions of form and processes. Artist and Neuro-scientist are interested in similar questions like memory, object perception, colour theory, the imagination, creativity and consciousness and the reading room will highlight these interests and how they become connected.

b. To create an exhibition entitled “Moments of Unease: Conjunctions of Neuro-science and Art in the Twentieth Century” that will give the reading room a context. This exhibition traces artists’ work beginning with Cezanne, Serault and Duchamp continuing through Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley and Robert Morris and recently manifesting in the work of artists like Carsten Holler, Douglas Gordon and Olifur Eliason.

c. To create a space where random social interactions between artistic and Neuro-scientific professionals can accidentally meet and as a result develop ideas for interdisciplinary interactions in the form of hybridized projects.

The Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room borrows on a long history of artists using transportable artworks sometimes called Parasitic Architecture. Following the example of mobile architectures built by architects like Richard Buckminster Fuller and Archigram contemporary artists have used these kinds of structures to radicalize the work of art by moving out of the picture frame into real space. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rosemarie Trockel and Jorge Pardo are just some of the artists working in this manner.

In my particular case the art crate becomes an armature through which a telescopic space is reconfigured. The term telescopic space delineates two main considerations of the reading room. First: many walls built into the body of the crate spring out. Secondly, telescopic refers to the relationship between the development of optical apparatti as extensions of the body that define the history of visual technologies and their special relationship to the visual system and the brain. Physically and mechanically this configuration allows for the crate to transform itself into a travelling reading room and social interactive space. Library walls spring out horizontally, a projection screen made of cloth springs out vertically, a sitting room/lounge is built into the inside front wall which is opened on the crates arrival. The library contains book titles concerned with Neuro-aesthetics. The Reading Room will travel globally after its tour of England, and will also be featured on-line at a new web site where web cam transmission will detail day-by-day occurrences of such things as symposia and social interactions as well as accessing a compilation of on-line websites that are related to Neuro-aeshetics that will be listed and made available.

2. Accompanying the reading room and surrounding it will be an exhibition entitled, “Moments of Unease: Conjunctions of Neuro-science and Art in the Twentieth Century.” This exhibition traces the affect of knowledge coming out of physiologic psychology, neuro-biology and cognitive neuroscience that implicitly or explicitly affected artist in their art production. This exhibition would not feature real work but instead simply photocopies tacked to the wall. First there was the work of Marcel Duchamp characterized as it was by an interest in the apparatti of photography and cinema on one hand and that of the neurophysiology of the eye and brain on the other. Duchamp’s work such as the “Rotoreliefs”, “The Stereoptican Cards”, “Tu m” and “Temoins oculists” plus his statements concerning anti-retinal art attest to this. The second phase took place around the nineteen sixties. The advent of information technology in relation to feedback and feed forward mechanisms of neural loops as described in Norbert Weiner’s book Cybernetics, an interest in the “phenomena-logically” based work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an reawakened interest in the work of Marcel Duchamp and the use of psychotropic drugs led artists like Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Donald Judd, and Joyce Koslov to make work that explored the intersection of art and mind.

“Conceptual Art as a Neurobiologic Praxis” is a restaging of the original exhibition at the Thread Waxing Space, New York City, 1999, will make up the final historical period of this exhibition. The exhibition included twenty-five artists that would form the basis of works by contemporary artists who have been affected by the advent of the internet, artificial intelligence, network theory, binding, neural networks, and intelligent media. Participating artists include: Ricci Albenda, Uta Barth, Sam Durant, Eric Duyckaerts, Spencer Finch, Carl Fudge, Rainer Ganahl, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Grennan and Sperandio, Jonathan Horowitz, Beom Kim, Anne Kugler, Ann Lislegaard, T. Kelly Mason, Jack Pierson, Jason Rhoades, Mathew Ritchie, Andrea Robbins, Thomas Ruff and Charlene Von Heyl

The exhibition was divided into three parts of which artists’ work illustrated. The Retinal-Cortical Axis, as the name implies, looked at the kind of visual processing occurring in the initial phases of perception where the image of the world is transformed into electric signals. The retinal-cortical axis concerns the transfer of these electrical signals from the initial events occurring in the retina at the level of the photoreceptors to those taking place at the optic chiasm, lateral geniculate nucleus, optic radiation and finally the visual cortex. Artists in this part of the show explored through their artistic practices the various aesthetic possibilities created by the anatomical and physiological conditions present in these structures like stereopsis (Grennan and Sperandio ,Ruff), gaze (Barth), visual field (Finch, Kim), and anatomy( Albenda,Von Heyl). The second part titled The Word-Image Dialectic explored the relation between text and image. Neurobiologically this work looked at the relation between the visual cortex and those areas of the brain involved in the reception and production of language like the Arcuate Nucleus, Temporal Lobe, Wernicke’s and Brocas area were explored. Works dealing with images and text were an important component of conceptualist practice in the 1960’s and artists are still involved in issues surrounding language today except that its referents have expanded beyond an analysis of sign and signifier into issues of mapping and cultural discourse. Artists work in this domain looked at such things as language acquisition (Robbins ,Ganahl, Horowitz), neologisms (Pierson), dyslexia( Albenda, Durant) and symbolic meaning ( Durant ,Robbins). Finally Global Chaosmosis explored how the whole brain operated. This term was derived from two sources. First Gilles Deluze’s notion of chaosmosis and the rhizome and secondly from global mapping as it is referred to by Gerald Edelman and Pierre Changeux in their descriptions of the developing brain sculpted by experience. Global Mapping defines the way the disparate parts of the brain, which are working in parallel on certain cognitive tasks, are synchronized together in order that all their outputs can be shared as a unity. The underlying thematic construct here concerned the way that our cultural conditions had recently undergone a radical shift in which hierarchial, sequential, analogue, arborealike had become instead intensive, folded, complex, digital and rhizomatic and as a consequence reconfigured the neural networks of our brains into what I was referring to as an Intensive Brain. Artist here explored the nature of brain waves (Finch), cerebral lateralization (Duyckaerts) mapping (T. Kelly Mason and Ritchie), hypnosis (Lislegaard), dreaming and myth, (Rhoades and Kugler) thinking, (Gillick), artificial intelligence (Fudge) and consciousness ( Gillick, Rhoades, Ritchie and Duyckaerts, Gordon) in relation to the above mentioned changing cultural conditions.

One question that comes up quite frequently is whether or not the artists chosen for this show were intentionally making work about the brain or were intentionally utilizing neuro cognitive strategies to make their work. The answer to this question is complex. In certain situations like Ricci Albenda, Charlene Von Heyl, Mathew Ritchie, Douglas Gordon, Eric Duyckaerts and Spencer Finch the answer is definitely yes. In other cases the similarities of what is being explored by neuroscience and that of art were so close that an investigation of one automatically involves the other. In other words the synchronicity between the two fields contextualized the work of art with out the artists awareness or intent. That is true for Uta Barth, Grennan and Sperandio, Rainer Ganahl, Carl Fudge and Thomas Ruff. In the case of the others it came down to a curatorial perogative based on a my special knowledge of the field of neuroscience and cultural studies. As a result I was able to make connections and draw links between what I saw as essential components of the works and the kinds of issues that in my mind they referred to. The intentionality of the artist is not always a determining factor because in some cases the works are so ripe with meaning and causality that any one reading would be simple minded. The work of art also mutates in the sea of relations that enfold it and as those conditions change so does it. Liam Gillickís work is a case in point. Yes it has to do with thinking but in this show I was more interested in its concerns with social relations and the way that these relations became recontextualized in the context of discussions of the brain and consciousness.

3. The third component of the reading room is its “inter-activation quality”. This is a term to describe a kind of plug-in that helps the user/participant navigate the space in a creative and amusing way. When the user enters the space he or she signs in on a computer interface set up in the middle of the room and is assigned a number that relates to a tiny homing device that the individual is asked to attach to himself or herself. This homing device will help the computer record that individuals route through the reading room and will also collate that route in relation to other routes by other individuals doing the same thing. In the reading room their exists a compartment outlined in red, called the “red zone”, that contains one book from each of the ten subjects of neuro-aesthetics for instance philosophy of mind, visual culture, neuroscience. Each of these books was chosen by the artist as key references of neuro-aesthetics and is electronically connected to other volumes of like subject matter distributed locally by topic and diffusely throughout the reading room. So for instance Neurophiloshy by Patricia Churchland would obviously connect to books in the section on philosophy but might also be connected to books in the neuroscience or psychology section. Each book therefore has a multiplicity of connections that were formulated by the artist and in a way represents the workings of his mind. When the viewer or user takes one of the books from the red zone, this by the way is optional as the reading room can be freely accessed, it sends out a radio signal to a set of prescribed books with which it has an allegiance and causes a red light to flash above its placement in the shelf. One book may cause many such signals simultaneously and the user then chooses which related book to choose from. It creates another meta-category of how books are related to each other beyond subject matter. This book is hooked to the same referential network so that when it is chosen it to sends out a radio signal to related books one of which is always contained in the red zone. Consequently the user is led around the reading room according to his or her choices and selections. When finished the user receives a printout of their individual journey and the books they chose. It is like a poster and on the bottom sheet is written, Neuro-aesthetic Reading Room, the date and time. The purpose of this is to increase the desire of each user to participate with the piece. Over the course of the exhibition the computer will record many such journeys and an algorhythm will combine these separate trips to see if any patterns emerge. As the reading room travels worldwide it might be interesting to view cross cultural differences as they emerge.

“Remapping” investigates new ideas concerning mapping as manifest in art but which are generated by algorithms that link different websites or are inspired by neural network theory.

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist working with scientific iconography in the realms of genetics and neuroscience. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in such venues as the J.Paul Getty museum, the Smithsonian Institute, the Philips Collection, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art in Japan among others. Her work is represented by Universal Concepts Unlimited in New York City.

The Butterfly in the Brain continues Anker’s investigation into the visualizing techniques available through high technology simulation such as the microscope and the telescope. This work focuses on a dialogue of signs within the symmetrical (or virtually symmetrical) structures of the butterfly and the brain, both of which possess an axis copy. Using neurological maps as well as charts of urban sprawl, Anker plots the shape of a butterfly in each pattern. Constellations emerge from these distinct models calling into question the ways in which biological form is replicated in the cultural domain.

Alan Bruton - The Space of the Psyche - 1997-2002
If presented with ten slices of a brain, knowing that each of them is a sequential section of that brain, you can imagine how you might you go about reconstructing the brain’s entire form from these sections.

What, then, if you were presented with sectional representations of a psyche, could you similarly construct a form for that psyche?
This is the question posed by architect Alan Moonan Bruton in his Space of the Psyche project, inspired by research into the history and structure of the Rorschach Ink Blot Psycho-Diagnostic Test Series. The Space of the Psyche project proposes a structured formal template for a psyche, associating it with the form of the brain. The operative hypothesis in the project is that the 10 standard ink blots in Dr. Rorschach’s test series can be seen as sequential sectional representations of a psyche, a conjecture inspired by Dr. Rorschach’s writings on his development of the series.

The project develops a materialistic view of the psyche, taking it out of the realm of the psychological and placing it within the realm of the authored, perceptible, and affective artifacts of culture. As the primary generative medium of the project is video, the project can be seen as a "concrete video" played in space. Constructed using digital topographic, modeling, image analysis, and film editing tools, the Space of the Psyche Project consists of video, models, and drawings describing a contiguous set of nine spatial modules. Each module defines the space between two of the 10 blots, utilizing these blots literally as construction documents.

The project’s intention is the structuring of a space into which one could project oneself to think reflectively about the interactions between self, space, memory, and the mechanisms of perception and projection.

Cheryl A. Cotman - Auditory and Visual Methods for Examining Patterns in Rhythmic Network Activity
The image on the left, Auditory and Visual Methods for Examining Patterns in Rhythmic Activity in Rhythmic Network Activity, is a drawing of the course of a laser pointer throughout a lecture explaining the visual and sound products of network activity of the brain. The course of a laser pointer during a lecture is not only indicative of the subject but also of the specific network activity of the lecturer.

As was discussed during the lecture, the moving image on the right shows the electrophysiological activity of a brain hippocampus. The positive and negative voltage values are represented here by blue and yellow respectively.

More specifically, signals from 64 sites in rat hippocampal network were recorded simultaneously during network rhythms. The top left image is a rat hippocampus atop its recording electrodes. Numerous network connections are present within this hippocampal system. Inspection of complex spatiotemporal patterns in three dimensions (two spatial dimensions plus time) was facilitated by open-source OpenDX visualization software, resulting in images that captured the temporal order inherent in the data. The image on the top right shows a three-dimensional view of the data as viewed from the beginning, or where time equals zero. The moving image (previous page), created in MatLab, represents the spatial dimensions with time as itself. The images on this page indicate another methodology of viewing the brain’s complex activity. In addition, specialized software was written to transform the raw time-varying signals into musical sounds, enabling both chaotic and rhythmic elements of the signals to emerge.

Cheryl A. Cotman has explored the venues of both Art and Biology. After receiving a B.A. in Biology from Reed College in 1998, she worked as a researcher in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California, Irvine, where she collaborated with other scientists on projects involving neurodegeneration, genetics, and inflammatory processes. In 2000, she entered the Art and Integrated Media Graduate Program at California Institute of the Arts.

Cotman has continued her interest in the interrelationship of art and science. Last summer, as a Resident at Arteleku, San Sebastian, Spain, she focused on “Cell Culture: The Function of Art, Technology and Scientific Research in Cultural Practice.”

Cotman has presented at an Annual Meeting of the Society of Neuroscience, an Image and Meaning Conference at MIT, the Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia at UCI and a joint seminar of the Departments of Neurology and Cell Biology & Anatomy at The University of Arizona. Her work has been exhibited at various galleries, including Track 16 at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica and the Lime Gallery at CalArts. Her illustrations are found in several peer-reviewed journals, including Current Opinion in Immunology, Neurobiology of Aging and Molecular Immunology; books and book chapters on inflammatory and other aspects of Alzheimer’s disease; a tutorial on Spinal Cord Research and Injury and an Encyclopedia of the Human Brain now in press. Underlying and enriching her work are extensive, in-depth and continuing associations with fellow artists and scientists.

Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito
Agree To Disagree Online_ is an interactive map of an argument that begins when one of the three makes the statement, “In the future, books will be replaced by maps.” As each of the artists replies in turn, each statement is plotted according to how much agreement it garners from the other two participants: inflammatory statements remain on the periphery, while the center represents consensus. Visitors to the project can control the pace and level of detail of the argument as well as choose to follow digressions made to different topics, from Watergate to buffaloes to the Evelyn Wood speed reading course. _Agree To Disagree Online_ gives visual form to the flame wars and communications breakdowns that characterize Internet culture.

The artists working at www.three.org have been exploring the conflict inherent in the collaborative process since Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito began working together in 1992. While early adversarial collaborations by these three artists took the form of an installation, book, or drawing, in 1995 they began to take advantage of the Internet’s capacity for encouraging flame wars and other clashes of perspective. The artists’ work has been seen at ZKM/Center for New Media Karlsruhe, the Walker Art Center, and Sandra Gering Gallery. When they’re not arguing or throwing stuff at each other, Janet Cohen makes drawings, Keith Frank designs Web sites for Oxygen Media, and Jon Ippolito curates media projects at the Guggenheim.

Casey Reas - Tissue - 2002
The Tissue software exposes the movements of thousands of synthetic neural systems. Each line in the image reveals the history of one system’s movement. Each system is two synthetic sensors and actuators and different relations between these elements determine how the systems react to the stimuli in their environment. There are four different types of systems and each reacts to the stimuli in a different way. People interact with the systems by positioning a group of yellow dots on the screen. By positioning and re-positioning the dots, an understanding of the total system emerges from the subtle relations between the positional input and the rich visual output. The Tissue images were created through the interaction between the artist and the software.

Visit Reas ‘Tissue’ Project online (Requires java) | http://www.artbrain.org/gallery2/reas/web_tissue.html
Casey Reas Website: http://www.groupc.net/

Stanza - Emergent City.2002. Also called phyletcity
My interest is in the nature of emergent systems and the metaphors that exist between the city and as a system and possible links with cellular structures.

[Inner City ]……. 2002
Sections inside include
virosity. artitexture. blackstar. complicity. cuboxis. intoxcity. megalopolis. misterium. modernista. ecumenopolis. motorate. organicity. phyletcity. revolver. utopias.more info. The idea is to go deeper into analogies for the organic identity of the city. Inner City is an audio visual, interactive, internet art, experience. The micro city becomes an organic networks of grids and diagrams.The form and content of this work is a visual world of the city and its structure. Motifs of urban design de-constructed and repeated in a grid. A series of continually edited and reprocessed urban images and forms containing isolated fragments of our city experience.

Please visit the Emergent City blog of Stanza here: http://www.stanza.co.uk/emergentcity/?page_id=6

Warren Sack
Please visit the project page of Warren Sack at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Steven Holl | Chiasmic Crossing

“There is double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and the tangible in the visible: the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one. The two parts are total parts and yet are not superposable.”
-Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining-The Chiasm”

In Kiasmus ” an interior mystery and the exterior horizon , which, like two hands clasping each other, form the architectonic equivalent of a public invitation. ”
-Steven Holl, “Kiasma monograph”

Steven Holl asks the same question of architecture that Merleau- Ponty asks of philosophy . Can the ambulating sentient being embedded as he or she is in the matrix of concretized values as they are inscribed in that being experience and understand seeing in a context articulated for that purpose? How can a building such as Kiasma, function simultaneously as the “frame” of the experience of and for visual art and as an embodiment of the very process of seeing. For Holl like Ponty uses the analogy of the optic chiasm with its “inflected” decussating fiber structure which appropriates the visual field like a highway cloverleaf, allowing each hemifield to be conjoined, left side to right sided brain and right side to left side of the brain, to serve a as model to appropriate the entire visual apparatus including the eye and the folded surface of the brain, for his purpose.

Holl uses each element of the building as another opportunity to deal with the structure of light and its processing: the building operates as a kind of surrogate for the eye. On the first level of analysis there is the light catching section, functioning somewhat like a pupil, which captures the warm light of the a horizontal sun and diffuses it through carefully oriented apertures and there is the “sun path reversal” in which the building, like gaze movements of the eye, follows a reverse path of the sun’s path between 11 am and 6 p.m…

Coextensive with these aforementioned qualities of seeing is the process by which seeing becomes other. Seeing is evaluated in terms of itself and is analyzed as process. Thus Kiasma reveals a succession of curved enframed structures as rooms in which the different qualities of light are created because the light enters each room in many different ways: in the journey from one room to the next we experience the transformation of light as data. This evolving ambiance is linked to the type of art or installations exhibited in each room. ” We considered the range of contemporary art work, and tried to anticipate the needs of a variety of artists including those whose works depend on a quiet atmosphere to bring out their full intensity.” (1)

The context creates spaces in which how one reads the work of art will be affected. Ones’ journey through this museum is like that of the continuum of changes that take place as the light transformations which inaugurate the sensation of seeing at the retina, the light sensitive film like membrane at the back of eye, and then move through the component parts of the visual system, through the lateral geniculate body, optic radiation, visual cortex and on and on through the myriad of association cortices. Each of these areas of the brain have specific architectonic microbiologic structures which reconfigure the information extracted in specific ways before sending it on along to the next stage. Each areas transformations is necessary for the successive liberation of information. For instance even though the image of the world is reversed and upside-down at the retinal surface we experience as right side up by the time it is experienced by the brain. But the building like two hands which enclose themselves in each other or like the two optic nerves of the optic chiasm which embrace each other in an ecstatic moment of folding and plication, the macular fibers are diverted from their straight egress and fold upon themselves , intertwines, at its inflection, with itself and with nature. Kiasma uses this anatomy as a model for an architectural statement as Merleau-Ponty did. “The “line of culture” forms a link to Finlandia Hall, intertwining with a “line of nature” from the landscape and Toolo Bay, and lines extending from the existing city, grid.” (2)

It is this bending and merging into each other yet not like each other that Holl’s building takes hold of the real meaning of seeing. For just as the optic chiasm is affected by the structures that surround it, for instance an enlarged pituitary gland upon which it rests can distort it’s transmitting abilities, so to is Kiasma embedded in certain sociologic, political, cultural, economic and aesthetic relations which affect the way it is seen and perceived and cognated. As Bernard Cache says ” Our brain is not the seat of a neuronal cinema that reproduces the world: rather our perceptions are inscribed on the surface of things, as images amongst images.” (3) In other words in this rebuff to Descartes, Cache envisions a projective creative changing vision which is the result of an ever contextualized vision. The point of inflection in which in one grand gesture the buildings crossing imbricates itself , like the links of a chain, to a series of relations which begin with the nature, architecture’s’ source, and flow outward towards the city through a kind of vernacular history of the city that surrounds it. The building becomes a kind of knot/not that ties a cultural, historical city together and at the same time freeing it to move towards the future.

1. Steven Holl, Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 1998, page 16.
2. Steven Holl, “Kiasma, working process”, Architectural League of New York, 1995.
3. Micheal Speaks, “Folding Toward a New Architecture” in Earth Moves, Bernard Cache, MIT Press, 1995.

Linda Roy | Tonustal

“Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns”
Charles Scott Sherrington

The early 20th century theoretical biologist Jacob Johan von Uexküll, noticed the decidedly ambiguous relationship between a stimulus and the excitation patterns that ensued. He realized a reaction was not simply triggered or fired by one fixed center of coordination. Instead, internally generated rhythmic activity like tiny pulses, seemed to indicate that each small part of a nervous system was itself a mini reflex center. Coordination appeared to be located everywhere and nowhere at once. For von Uexküll, coordinated behavior was a consequence of certain regular, distributed criteria. It was variable, plastic, and flowing  something realizing itself over time, under certain conditions.

But precisely how these fluid processes were regulated remained a mystery. Von Uexküll proposed the topographic concept of the Tonustal, or the “tonus valley,” a model of displaceable fluids using gradients as a form of regulation. If nervous excitation is prevented from spreading in one part of an organism, it moves to another location as if in a valleyed landscape along which it naturally flows. In the case of the Tonustal the plastic distribution system comprises a variable nerve net across which impulses move, are caught and take form rather than being transmitted in a linear chain-reaction manner along a prescribed path as Sherrington earlier had thought.

‘Beharringstendenz’ and ‘Magneteffekt’

Von Uexküll’s Tonustal remains a conductive model. Though able to explain, if vaguely, why a single stimulus can result in a range of response forms, it fails to address those strangely spontaneous, rhythmic activities that unfailingly suggest generative processes at play. In the 1930s, after an extensive comparative study of animal locomotion producing two miles of tracings, the systems physiologist Erich von Holst identified a neural oscillator and defined it as a system effecting periodic behavior. Von Holst may be said to have done for the neural oscillator what Sherrington did for the reflex. Examining the multiple ways in which Labus, a fish distinguished by the fact that it swims using rhythmic fin motions while keeping its body immobile, synchronized its fin movements, he arrived at two basic principles that characterize the coordinative properties of oscillators: the Baharrungstendenz and the Magneteffect. Beharrungstendenz or the tendency of an oscillator to maintain its rhythm, leads to totally synchronized movements like chewing, breathing, and running, which von Holst referred to as states of absolute coordination. These steady, rhythmic oscillations work in clear contrast to the Magneteffect, which is the effect one oscillator exercises over another of different frequency so that it seems magnetically to draw and couple it to its own frequency. Phase slippages and temporal drifts, the outcome of a latent and perpetual struggle between Beharrungstendenz and Mageneteffect render infinitely variable couplings, easily forming larger compositions with smoothly altering tempos. Accelerated and decelerated running are states of relative coordination. Plastic forms such as dance are also manifestations of this phenomenon where oscillatory motions combine, forming molar ensembles moving fluidly from one mode to another. Sherrington’s reflex arc intervenes here as an adaptive agent in these fields of oscillators. By introducing information from the outside into this highly tuned but otherwise hermetic ensemble, the reflex arc sensitizes ensuing activities to changing conditions in the environment.
Here coordination is clearly plastic, variable, and adaptive, a versatile tiling of many scales of activity in space and time. Neural oscillators are an elementary unit of a nervous system. Coupled oscillators are prototypes of a time-dependent nervous geometry.

Plasticity

In everyday usage, when we say something shows plasticity, we imply that it can be molded or readily made to assume (and to retain) a new shape. Probably the term should not be used in relation to living systems, since plasticity is something found in inert, inanimate material. The nervous system is living and changing all the time; and while it can be induced to change shape by surgical or other traumatic means, it cannot be induced to maintain a new shape without being killed. Yet the concept of plasticity is used in relation to other growing systems; one talks about molding the character of a young person, or molding the shape of a tree by selective pruning. What is meant by such cases is that constraints are applied so that the form of the organism changes and future growth is differently channeled.
Plasticity in the nervous system means an alteration in structure or function brought about by development¹ or experience. But not just any alteration, to qualify for term plasticity, an alteration has to show pattern or order. Plasticity here means patterned alteration of organization.
Richard L. Gregory | The Oxford Companion to The Mind p623

In the past ten years there has been an avalanche of information in the popular press concerning neuroscience. It seems one does not open the news paper without being confronted by some story about something to do with the brain and the nervous system, diseases, accidents, discoveries, new drugs and recently, new art. It is my opinion that it is this accessibility, attention to the brain and it’s epiphenomena that have fueled the inspiration of Neuroaesthetics. As co-founder of artbrain.org, which shows the Net-Space Gallery and the Journal of Neuroaesthetics since 1997, I’m amazed by the amount of art, music, writing, films, and architecture that I come into contact with which interface with neuroscience both implicitly and explicitly. This conference is a very focused vision, as I felt it was important to propose a clear notion for all of you of what I felt the state of this field is today. This conference has a very cultural focus, for instance one of the titles of the session is ‘The Biopolitical Systems in the Cultured Brain’, and with the exception of Marcos Novak, does not include the new exciting new artworks concerned with new media, or many intriguing works by neuroscientists themselves who are tiptoeing into this domain. Daniel Glazer and Beau Lotto may give us a glimpse of their research. I feel that these fields of research, especially those that deal with artificial intelligence, are producing new potential for understanding the dynamic and virtual issues concerning the brain and will become more important in the future as these new and all-pervasive systems become us…or we become them.

Any quick look at our brain will test my sympathy with these other forms of production. But no conference can be all things to all people. I felt that given the context of Goldsmiths College, this emphasis on the interface of culture and art practice was more relevant. Before letting the conference speak for itself, I would like to thank Goldsmiths College for hosting this conference and the Arts Council for funding it, and thank you all for coming. I would like to introduce Charlie Gere, who will introduce the first session entitled ‘First Dialectic: Edges of the Envelope’ and who along with Bronac Ferran  and Scott Lash provided valuable assistance without all of which this would not have happened. Charlie Gere is the reader in new media research at the Institute of Cultural Research at Lancaster University, chair of Computers and the History of Art and the Director of Computer Arts Contacts Histories. He is co-author with sibling and Historian of Science, Cathy Gere, of a special issue of ‘Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C’, ‘Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomendical Sciences on Brain in the Vats’ and author of ‘Digital Culture,’ Reaction Books, and is currently undertaking research into the relation between art and speed for the early nineteenth century up to the present day to be published as ‘Art, Time and Technology’ by Burg in 2005. Thank you.

Audience: Did you virus check them?

They are virus-free. The fun part about making mixes entails a sense of, as Jacques Derrida liked to call, Archive-fever. So what I’m going to be doing today is thinking about how the notion of sampling has inherited certain issues of collage-culture.  The key word here is thinking about film grammar. So what Im going to do is take us back, rewind so to speak, to the beginning of a certain kind of pictoral memory that developed with cinema and then unfolded into different forms of what our contemporary multimedia art forms, Im thinking about digital media in general, have inherited.

So, what I want to start with is a film clip that I think highlights some of the examples Im going to talk about.  This is one of my favorite pieces of Meliés, and you’ll see in a second. He came up with this term actualités, which is a French term that essentially was about taking a film scene and exploring the different motifs in just one scene and trying to understand it as a concept that would convey a story.  And in my book what I do is draw a link between the idea of actualités and sampling content and thinking of a theater of sound. What I’m going to do is play this; here we go.

[clip begins: Nearly a century a go, Meliés played himself in Un Homme Orchestre, a one-man band.]

So, we have to remember, in that era, being able to edit and splice and dice a scene apart became a form of thinking about how we look at motion; how we record things and then recombine them to create a story. What Meliés was exploring was a sense of absence and presence.  And thinking about contemporary art in the 21st century, what we’re thinking here or what Im trying to present, is the idea of a kind of conceptual expressionism. What I want to do is update the formula on these issues.   I’ll play you another example of an inheritance effect. The same sense of editing and punning, the idea of sampling, and splicing and dicing can be applied to many different contexts.  As an artist what a lot of my work focuses on is how we make meaning out of meaning.  So, when we’re looking at collective memory ,in the form of recordings, everyone has the same access to memory.  But what Im going for today is kind of invoking a kind of, what I said earlier, gift economy.  If you guys all look at the cds you got, you’ll notice that everybody got a different one; so we’ll all leave here with different versions of sound, or memory.  If you open it up you’ll see a little stamp on it, and each one is a different version and different kinds of sounds. So if you got the one with the parachute, that’s about 30 years of Jamaican music; if you got the one with the Cheshire cat, that’s a lot of my hip hop remixes; if you got the one with the dancing Indian woman, that’s a lot of my remixes of a lot of south Asian artists. If you got the one with the Cheshire cat that’s playing the violin (from Alice in Wonderland), that’s a lot of my remixes of people like Sean Paul, Missy Elliot, and other stuff like that.  So, the idea here is the change is same. We’ve all had access to the same logo and the same cd, but the information on the cd is radically different; so we leave with a different memory.  Each of us will go home and you’ll realize when you put the mix in your stereo and you talk to a friend, they’ll be like, ‘oh yeah DJ Spooky was talking about heavy metal’, and the other person will be like, ‘no he was talking about reggae’, and the other person will say, ‘oh they were talking about gangsta hip hop’.  So, I’m not exactly Fifty Cent, but the whole idea here is to think about hip-hop as an inheritance of a lot of the collage issues you were just seeing with Meliés. The idea of Rhythm Science, and what I’m talking about in my book, is essentially what people are doing with 21st century info culture.  Which is implying global folk-culture. What I’m going to play here is another example of the nation-state under the siege of remix-culture.

[clip plays: (Voice of George W. Bush) during these last few months, I have been trained by Al Qaeda, I am weak and materialistic, I told our country and I told the world, if it feels good do it. I hope you'll enjoy me expressing fear……]

Oops, sorry I went back to the main menu. This is wild, I’m remixing the lecture as we go. Can we play something?  The ox video on the main menu. I just wanted to get the volume up. Alright, so, there we go. So, volume, that’s it. Everything else off, great. Its a badly designed menu. There we go, got it. And there we go. Interface.

So, what I was saying earlier is how we organize meaning out of meaning.  And that means interface-culture. We’re looking at how people manipulate and control certain messages. And, of course, this being a conference on neural physics and neural aesthetics, the mind is how we, as human beings, organize information around it. We, as human being, carry a certain perspectival architecture.  To me, at least in the 20th century, the development of film and the parallel developments with recorded media, in general, implies that we are now projecting, or kind of erasing, the kind of nature vs. nurture.  We of course are thinking as artificial projections of the natural human mind, but we are reshaping the world to fit our own projection.  What I want to do is rewind back, for a second, to this remix of the State of the Union, and think about the suggested metaphor here.  Its like the metaphor of, for example, we say, ‘you have horsepower, instead of a car’. But how many horses are in your car? None.  The fun part about what’s going on with metaphor and culture, in general, is your mapping, again cognitive mapping, thinking about layers and vectors of meaning. So here’s a link. Lets just do this and Ill jump to the next part.

[clip plays: (Voice of George W. Bush) during these last few months, I have been trained by Al Qaeda, I am weak and materialistic, I told our country and I told the world, if it feels good do it. I hope you'll enjoy me expressing fear and selfishness. We will embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We can be summed up in one word: Evil. I have committed to defending not only the good work of charities, but the values that will bring lasting peace. And we have a great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world toward suicide and murder. Lets roll.]

So, the remix implies collective memory and transformation, in the same way that we can think of looking at, and hearing, a speech that we all thought we heard and realize we all walked away with a different version.  What I’m thinking about is dub-aesthetics, here; thinking about erasure of the voice, erasure of identity, and making these a kind of a malleable, uncertain palette.  Speaking of palette, I wanted to just show you guys some of my current works. This is a Photoshop illustrated poster that I’ve been working on from my movie.  Its a remix of the DW Griffiths film Birth of the Nation ,and the text is Iraqi, Persian, and also Arabic.  The puns, of course, here are that it says in the Arabic text, in this particular poster, ‘not in our name’.  Which means, basically, ‘not in our name should you wage infinite war’; which was a series of posters that were kind of part of my last show at Paula Cooper Gallery.  But the idea of logos, of thinking about density of information and condensation of meaning implies, of course, a kind of metaphoric, and again metonymic, approach to visual grammar. What I’m thinking about here is the way digital media has inherited a lot of the issues of conceptual art and especially language art.   The idea here is that the language is code and that code applied to visual meaning.

So, when you think about the way human beings represent information in an age of density, its that its about playing with fragments, playing with the smaller pieces of information to create new meanings. What you’re seeing here is an image of one of my favorite theoreticians, Vannevar Bush.  He came up with the term Memex, which was one of the first computing systems that was meant to handle a large amount of information. What he was thinking about during WWII was the sheer fact that to coordinate the war effort, the allies had to create and manage huge information systems. I’m talking about millions of troops moving, shipments of airplanes, routed boats, tanks, missiles, all that kind of stuff; and they needed a way to be able to coordinate it.  So he came up with this term a Memex; it was meant to be a hypertextual computer. This is around 1944-45.  He also felt that it needed to be a computer that you would be able to speak to. I’ll just show you a schematic here. He came up with this term, ‘the voder’, v-o-d-e-r, which was meant to be kind of a synthetic human voice.  Again, identity here is the key word. But the synthetic voice was meant to be able to interact with the person, who could say, ‘Look, computer, I need this file’.  And the computer would then search through its memory, millions of data that it had accumulated, and spit back an image, whatever you needed.  But it was meant to be a verbal interaction.  So he thought that being able to linguistically encode certain styles of speech and command modules, and being able to make them into code, would be a good way to interact with information. Again this is in 1945.  Let me show you the schematic of the voder, v-o-d-e-r.  What you’ll realize here is that this has kind of been going on for a while. So, were looking at records, playing with records, traces of identity.  I’ll just say to make a record we push a  typewriter, but to think about a record as an audio trace of human gesture or an audio trace of performance is what I’m talking about. So were looking at contemporary art of the invisible. Essentially sound is a trigger.  Its something that moves air molecules; its about patterns in the air. The conventional art world is usually about, ‘ok I bought a sculpture’ and ‘I have a Jeff Koons on my wall’ and ‘I have an Andy Warhol’ or whatever.  But the idea here is that the studio now becomes a metaphor for technological transformation of the art object.  Again verbal interaction here is the core issue about how to control information. This is again, 1945, remix, rewind, fast-forward into 2005. So, the voder, v-o-d-e-r, is the first synthesizer to be able to pull together various electrical currents to simulate the human voice.  And if we think about the voice as a usual signifier for identity, what happens in our era is that the voice is now detached from the body.  Sampling implies performance as a kind of virtual theater.  So, we are looking at Deleuze’s notion of the abstract machine when applied to sound. What’s going on here is that we’re seeing, more and more in the digital era, human beings are abstracting and outsourcing, so to speak, aspects of themselves into software.  Memory is not just, of course, my mind; its gigabytes in my iPod.  Its memory as thinking about how we transform metaphors of human speech, human memory, of human desire, into technical relations.  To me what’s fascinating is ‘why the voice?’, ‘why sound?’, ‘why sound art?’.  It reflects a transformation of the art object. Let me just play you this, and this is, again from1939.

[clip plays digital voice]

So that’s 1939.  And what you’re seeing there is the actual interaction between the various synthesizers and resonator filters, and the idea of an oscillation that is allowed.  Basically, this is a flow-chart or a schematic of a machine to simulate the human voice.  So, if we fast-forward here, the machine simulation of the human voice, it now becomes, say for example, James Earl Jones.  Jones, maybe some of you guys know, was the voice of Darth Vader. “Luke I’m you’re father.” But, the funny thing is, whenever I hear his voice, I view that as a signifier of a certain kind of blackness; he’s like sort of a 70’s ’soul brother’. He’s like, ‘Yo what’s up baby.’  So the funny thing is, Darth Vader’s voice is probably one of the most branded voices of the last 30 years.  But James Earl Jones, of course, is a signifier; he’s a human being; it doesn’t matter.  But the funny thing is, whenever you hear that voice, it triggers a Mimex of a certain era, perhaps a certain movie scene; you’re not sure, but there’s an echo of it in the mind.  I’m using that just as a metaphor, but the voder here is a kind of jump-off or tipping point.  If we look at the voder vs. Meliés, editing, visual material, actualites, of sound, of image, we update the formula here for 21st century conceptual expressionism.

The reason I started out with Meliés was, of course, he was one of the first film editors to understand the choreography of gesture that makes for meaning. When you look at silent film, the reason the body language is so exaggerated, a lot of times, is that they are trying to tell you a story with their body. What you’re seeing here is a cover of Scientific American in 1914; and its a piece that kind of reflects the idea of breaking apart motion, which was a really fascinating topic in that era. And this is Eddie Angouls.  What he was trying to figure out was, when you have stop-motion photography, you’re able to break apart human motion, gestures, and of course sound. Being able to edit and splice these pieces together, like Meliés did, is the same thing I do when I’m sampling a track. When I make a rhythm, I am going through my archive of records, I’m going through my archive of files and I make a track. We’re looking at sequence of gesture; we’re looking at sound as a series of sequential fragments; and when we’re updating the formula here from 1914-2005, its about memory.  When I look at terabytes, when I look at megabytes, when I think about a ‘bit’ of information, you’re looking at [the word] ‘bit’ as a contraction of language; bit means binary digital. Analog memory vs. digital memory.  Being able to play with these kinds of metaphors is a luxury. If you look back about even 10 years ago, the samplers I used to use, the Akai S3000, or something like that, they only had about 32 MB of memory.  These days your average cell phone has more computational power than the Apollo space mission. The pun of course is that we’re using it to make remixes of Bush speeches; we’re using it to remake and remix, we’re using it for fun. Which, I think, is a healthy thing, actually. Let me play you an example of this.

[clip plays]

So, that’s a little postcolonial critique there. The whole sense of humor I have with my remixes and bootlegs and versions of things is that there’s always a hook. I mean if you look at the stickers on the cds that you got, that’s a remix of the Napster logo, because a lot of kids are always putting my music on Napster.  So if they take my music, I’ll take their logo. But I remixed it with the black power flag, now instead of Napster we call it Blackster. And break dancing soldiers remixed with Dr. Drey, it all makes sense.  This is a picture of one of my favorite composers, John Cage, and I’m kind of riffing on this sound that you’re hearing.  Basically, what you were just hearing was a sound of a piece that John Cage did in 1939 called Imaginary Landscape.  When you went into an orchestra hall in 1939 to hear this piece, you didn’t see an orchestra; what you saw was a bunch of records and record players playing at different speeds.  Essentially, Cage was one of the first people to conceptualize sound and indeterminacy, and being able to try and figure out how to make compositions out of that.  I view him as one of the key composers thinking about technology and mythology.  And for Imaginary Landscape to be made of frequencies of records playing at different speeds, implies for us, our cell phone culture and the wireless imagination of the 21st century.  So one artist’s mythology of 1939 now becomes a technological reality of 2005.  The imaginary landscape of frequencies of 1939 becomes the industrial frequencies of wireless networks, of high bandwidth exchange.

I’m leaving here tomorrow because my film Birth of Nation is playing at the Acropolis.  I got the Greek government to let me play the film at the Herodeon Theatre, at the base of the Acropolis.  So I kind of riff on this as, this is my little hip hop thing; maybe I should have had something kind of like that.  But the whole sense of humor about things, in general, and the idea of collage and different eras, and, of course, different ethnic groups, is thinking about sampling as what happens when you free certain signifiers.  There’s a very famous phrase from one of my favorite poets, Shilling, when he says, “architecture is nothing but frozen meaning.” What I’m doing is remixing and repurposing that phrase, and we come up with the phrase ‘music is nothing but liquid architecture.’  So the pun here is the idea of the Greek monument with the hip hop remix added, or for that matter, remixing a sampling of a crazy, racist, Ku Klux Klan film and projecting it on a Greek temple.  So it was kind of an amazing sense of negotiation when I was talking to the folks from the Greek government.  They were saying, ‘why does he want to play a Ku Klux Klan film at the Acropolis?’.  So of course a sense of irony is part of my style; but I think in general when you’re looking at film grammar and how its influences affected so many aspects of what we call contemporary media, we have to look back at the origins of theater.  Which is why, with the Greek, we think about temples and think about the whole notion of theater in general: tragedy & comedy.  That’s what the whole juxtaposition is; that’s when the Greek government was like, ‘oh we get it’.

This is my studio, you’ll notice that there’s no paint, no stuff like that.  Its basically a lot of bass, and its a physical kind of interaction with the computers around me that makes my music, it makes my artwork.  And, of course, bass frequencies; you gotta have a pounding beat; this is part of my style.  But, again, you’ve got to remember that I started out as an artist and a writer.  DJ ing was meant to be a conceptual art project about what happens when you repurpose certain situations.  With sampling, like I said earlier, we look at the idea of architecture: structure, rhythms, patterns; and so because of that we again repurpose that phrase ‘architecture is nothing but frozen music’ and update the formula and make it into code.  So the neural linguistic part of this is not necessarily about the mind or the body, but thinking about the codes that regulate the interactions between the human and the machine.  One of my favorite theoreticians of this is Norbert Warner; he came up with this phrase Cybernetics. When we think about the idea of the cyborg, its basically the remix of a word that Norbert Warner came up with, which was called the cybernetic organism, cyborg. The funny thing, with our era, is we are slowly absorbing technology in all sorts of ways.  Whether its pacemakers in your heart that regulate the bodily flow of fluids like blood, or whether its the fact that a lot of people in the US, especially in California and Florida, have a lot of plastic surgery. Or for that matter the fact that the car is viewed as an extension of your ego.  So, when you drive a Porsche, that reflects your consumer aesthetic tastes; or if you have another kind of car, that reflects your identity and so on, and so on. So, the pun here is the studio is a myth-lab and what’s going on with that is thinking about how music, art, and literature are blurring in the digital medium. It doesn’t matter if its a sculpture or if its a painting, or for that matter a Greek temple. Its funny, one of my next-door neighbors is the gentleman Richard Serra, a very bizarre and angry guy. I live down in the area called Tribeca in New York.  In the morning at the Dwayne Street Café, I go in and get my coffee. And he’s sort of there; a sort of frumpy guy, and we kind of just stare at one another every once in a while. The funny thing is his studio is next door and he’s had his loft since the 60s and I’ve had mine since after 2001. To make a long story short, his sculptures are huge. Most of the people here are art oriented, so Richard Serra, you know, big sculpture, angry guy.  Basically he’ll do his design on his computers and send a little computer aided design, what they call CAD file to a place in Germany that makes battleship armor. He does a couple lines, then he has one of his assistants, (he barely knows how to use a computer), send it as an attachment file to this battleship yard in Germany, and two weeks later somebody gets a 70-ton steel piece of sculpture on their doorstep. For me, Id rather send somebody a mix cd.

This is a show I was doing outside of Tokyo a little while ago. The reason I’m riffing on this is the fact that, not only do I love Japan, its one of my favorite places, but the fact that the Japanese, if you look at the crowd, they’re all wearing clothes from radically different cultures. We have sort of a Rasta Japanese guy there, we have the punk rock crew in the back, [and] various sort of Gap clones. The funny thing about DJ culture is that its a theater of sounds.  So when you go out at night, when you hear music, you’re looking at, again, a kind of social relational architecture.  I use this kind of photo, as an example of thinking about how sound is a global-folk image here. So, it doesn’t matter if you’re in Japan, or Finland, or Brazil, or London.  At this point, so many of us have access to the same musical files and sounds from online that its transformed the idea of the global imagination. And the pun here is that sampling paved the way for that.  So you can look at, say for example, early djs like Grand Master Flash or Grand Wizard Theodore, and their scratching and breaking up records and update that. The same thing goes with my film Birth of a Nation; for me it all goes back to Birth of a Nation.  A lot of the early Djs were calling themselves Grand Master Flash or Grand Wizard Theodore.  But they didn’t know that those were also Ku Klux Klan titles.  So you have Grand Wizard, and it’s a different thing to be Grand Wizard in the South Bronx vs. being a Grand Wizard in Kentucky.  The whole sense of humor about that is, ‘what happens when you map one metaphor onto another?’.  Considering I’m in England, I’ve kind of been swaying my lecture towards the guards of the Westminster Abbey, or whatever.  This is one of my favorite British inventions. Break dancing soldiers; the H4 clock.  What you’re seeing is probably Britain’s, the Empires, biggest gift and/or curse to rest of the world.  It is the idea of standardized time.  The way human beings interact with one another in our era, in our micro-managed and micro-controlled 21st century environment, is regulation of time.  The British invented this as a way to organize theif empire.  If you think about Harrison, the guy who invented it, in 1764, essentially he came up with the idea of longitude; to be able to standardize travel routes and navigation routes so that the British E mpire would be able to then have shipments of goods move more quickly.  The H4 clock here is the first idea of standardizing the entire world into time zones.  So we now have longitude and Greenwich Meridian Time; and of course, Britain being an ego-tripping empire, put themselves in the middle. So, we have standard time based on the Greenwich Meridian.  What you’re seeing here is a remix of the clock, and I’ve erased a lot of the numbers and added my own graffiti tags. We have the idea here of subjective versus objective time.  And the fun part about remixing the British clock was we had to call the British Admiralty.  We got them to put a stethoscope in the H4 clock and I recorded it.  They were like ‘you want to record the clock?’.  I was like, yeah, I’m going to make a hip-hop remix of it.  And they were like ‘why would you want to make a hip hop remix of it?’.  So again, whether you’re playing at the Acropolis, or calling the British Admiralty, it’s always what the hackers like to call social ingenuity.

What you’re seeing here is a grid structure; its basically the worlds time zones. For this project, I did a collaboration with Julian LeVerdiere, who’s an artist based in New York.  He designed those two light beams they put at the World Trade Center.  We got the British Admiralty to give us the sound of the clock, and I’ll play it.

[sound plays]

So, that’s one standard minute. The idea here is to think about what happens when sound, time and memory all interact with one another.  In DJ culture we have what is called beats-per-minute.  When you hear certain hip hop tracks, or house music tracks, or techno tracks, they are assigned what are called tempo maps.  But the idea of longitude here is a tempo map for the entire world. And that beat right there, is that the idea of longitude is based on time regulating geography.  So if a ship is moving in the Atlantic, the captain would be able to look at the stars, make a series of measurements, and regulate this sense of time and make sure that where they were was the correct place. Of course, when we update the formula for that, its what we call GPS or Global Positioning Satellite system. Your cell phones are GPS devices. When you’re in a different city they automatically update the time, and wherever you are, you’re on the same standard time. These kinds of issues are now, again for one era’s industrial psychology in machinery, updated for digital media.  I’m punning on that, mainly as this notion of standardization of imagination, because we’re looking at software as a global vocabulary in the same way that film is a global vocabulary or sampling is a global vocabulary. So, we’re thinking about standardization of the imagination, standardization of time, thinking about how the artist is now an artist of the invisible world, the floating world of multimedia.  I’m going to wrap up with playing one or two examples of my current projects.  I just want to say that, tonight, I’m throwing a big party for one of the projects, which is called Drums of Death.  It is a project I did with the drummer from Slayer and Public Enemy.  So, it’s a long story, but yeah I’m sure everybody will say DJ Spooky was talking about heavy metal. I’m sure most of you are art world types and the art world loves Matthew Barney.  He’s a guy who will put the drummer from Slayer in one of his videos. I don’t know if you guys saw the Cremaster movies, but there’s a drummer who has all these bees on him and he’s playing the drums; that’s the drummer from Slayer. And the art world can’t deal with hip hop.  You go to any gallery and if it has anything with rhythm, its like ‘no we cant have rhythm’.  Yet, they’ll have like Christian Marclay with squeaky records or Matthew Barney with this little kind of electronic, weepy stuff.  So, I was like, ‘ya know what?’, lets get the drummer from Slayer to play hip-hop, and well put it in a gallery.  So the sense of humor around that was ‘Why not?’.  Why is there a fear of rhythm in the art world?  What I want to do is play you one or two examples of what the idea of rhythm is, but from the viewpoint of remixing artists.  In the cd that goes with my book, what I did was find a lot of rare records of people like James Joyce, or Gertrude Stein, or Antonin Artaud and these sort of modernist heroes of the art world, and remix them with hip hop.  So its like Gertrude Stein rhyming over a Wu Tang beat.  Lets see.  I’ll just play one or two clips, and what I wanted to start with was something that everyone knows.  This is the idea of the Audio Logo. Hold it one second.

[clip plays : Looney Tunes theme is heard]

So that was the theme from Looney Tunes.  I’m sure as most of you know that the idea of cartoon music and the idea of sound and multimedia and attaching an image to sound, was a compositional strategy that was taken up by a gentleman by the name of Raymond Scott.  Now I’ll show you just a quick clip of that; hold on one second. I’m remixing my lecture you guys. Here we go.

Raymond Scott was a composer that was essentially commissioned to work for the Warner Brothers group throughout most of the 40s and 50s, but he was the first composer to really think about attaching moving sound and image.  The funny thing was that he was so far ahead of his time that he had to build his own computers.  So you can see that this is an extremely early phase of what was going on in the scene.  If you think about Raymond Scott and Carl Starling (Carl Starling was one of the other composers for Bugs Bunny and all those cartoons), and the idea of Looney Tunes, being able to move image and have sound was such an idea that to synchronize them was a huge revolution in steps. So I look at Raymond Scott and Looney Tunes motif, there, as audio logo composers. The Italian Futurists came up with the idea of what they call the Art of Noise, back in the era of WWI, to define the idea of composing in the urban environment and overload, density, and sounds of war.  You can see any cool composer has his own poster. If we think about the way the futurists were playing with the idea of dematerializing sound and trying to play with the idea of dematerializing the orchestra, what we see here is an update. I have to wrap so I’m just going to show one or two clips and then play one or two other pieces.  This is a collaboration I did around my film Birth of a Nation.  I had a seventy six piece orchestra play, and I was sampling the orchestra at the same time, so you were not able to tell if it was a human being playing or the orchestra, or for that matter a computer simulating the orchestra.  The idea here is what Sigmund Freud would call the uncanny the unheimlich, and trying to figure out how art is now an art form of the uncanny.  What’s going on when you have sound but no body?  Again, this is what I was talking about earlier; its when you divorce sound from the body and you play with that, you’re looking at perception issues; you’re looking at how people make meaning out of identity and how sound signifies identity.  So, I know were tight on time so Ill just skip ahead.  When we talk about identity, one of my favorite hip hop MCs, and this is the guy I just did my album with, Chuck D from Public enemy, has one of the most branded voices like the James Earl Jones kind of scenario. So, I’ll play you his voice that he sent me as a high-resolution file when we worked on the album.  And you’ll see what I mean. But think standardized time and rhythm. What’s happening here is we’re looking at architecture and sound and how rhythm is a kind of structure.

[clip plays Chuck D’s voice]

What you guys were all hearing was a cadence; again a specific vocal rhythm.  What I ended up doing was taking what Chuck D sent me and making a rhythm out of it.

[clip plays]

So we go from one rhythm vocally, so to speak, and its interaction with the drums from the guy from slayer, and we combine them.  Again, what Joseph Beuys would have called a social sculpture; but no one was in the same room, and in fact all of those were just files interacting with one another.  I’m gonna play another remix and then Im going to wrap up. This is a piece I did for German national radio, an opera by Ernst Krinech, one of Germany’s sort of modernist composers.  Basically, he was one of the first opera composer to compose for jazz and the sound of machines, and also it was the first opera to have Germans in black face.  What was wild about that, was Hitler was so angry that they had the actors taken from the opera stage and beaten, the composer was banned, and Hitler came up with Entartet Musik.  So I went through the German national radio’s archives, and I found a lot of works of banned composers, because Krinech combined jazz and classical music and art in a way that infuriated the conventional art world of the day.  So, this is the end result.

[clip plays]

All right, so there’s that. And then the last piece.  This is a gentleman who was arrested for singing the lyrics to how to decode a DVD. But he sang these as a mathematical code.  What you were hearing there was classical music mixed with algorithmic hip-hop, but at the same time you don’t really deal with the mathematics of the algorithms, you just press play. What this gentleman did was find out how to decode a DVD and then make a song about it. And I’m going to wrap up with that.

[clip plays]

So, mathematics and biology, thinking about how human beings interact with computers ,doesn’t necessarily imply that its just software, but improvising with code.  And so what I’m going to wrap up with is this idea of repurposing phrases, repurposing with the idea of metaphor, and thinking about art in the 21st century as playing with the invisible, which is of course nowadays, the wireless imagination; the idea of thinking about how art is an open system.  Because of that, what I’m going to say is, we remix the phrase ‘architecture is nothing but frozen music’ into ‘music is nothing but liquid architecture’.  I’m going to wrap with that and say thanks; the book is Rhythm Science.

I am Kodwo Eshun, I teach here at Goldsmiths; I teach the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures; I am part of the artist group called the Otholith Group, and I write on questions of futurology, questions of the city-sonic, questions of technoculture, generally, and what I took from Paul’s lecture was the notion of the gift-economy and that’s what I’m going to be talking about. This notion of the gift-economy is really of interest to a lot of cultural practice at the moment, and what I want to do is cast the question of the gift economy in a slightly wider context. Probably the next couple of days, people will be talking very much in terms of the lens of cognitive science, and I want to slightly tilt that away and look at the question of the emotional and affective dimensions. I want to see what happens more when the question of the emotional dimension of the human nervous systems aren’t so much subordinated to the workings of the brain, to the cognitive patterns of the brain, but what happens if they’re fore-grounded, what happens if we move the notion of the dimension of the affective and the dimension of the emotional into the front, because we know from the work of Sadie Plant who characterizes the human nervous system more as a living laboratory, Sadie says that the nervous system can be seen as a living laboratory, a vast system of chemical processes that is continually engaged in the manufacture, the synthesizing, the distribution of a vast range of chemical communications and regulations, and these chemical communications are closely related to our experiences of pleasure, of depression, of euphoria. So, effectively, we are experiential, excited, vital bodies. We are our own alcohol. We are our own alcohol, and within this alcohol, millions of processes happen simultaneously– processes of pain, stress, arousal, excitement, the body’s normal and extreme processes, activities, and states. We are a soft clock telling several times, simultaneously.

So that is the sort of broad context in which I want to think about the gift economy and I want to, kind of, bring it into a particular case which I’m sure we all know about, the case of Napster. Paul mentioned Napster briefly. If we look at Napster in its heyday, between 1999 and 2001, Napster was responsible for 58 million users downloading files. That’s 58 million users. This is a way in which we can think about what Professor Massumi was talking about in which media operates as a nervous system in which the relationships between humans and machines are plugged in and vitalized. So, we can think of Napster as this distributed system of appetites, this distributed, transmissible archive that amplifies all kinds of energies and all kinds of emotions and all kinds of affects. So, I’m very much interested, not so much in the technical aspects of that, not so much in the implications for intellectual property, because there are people who specialize in that. I’m much more interested in the cultural imaginary, and in the effective dimension of what those 58 million users thought they were doing in those 2 years before Napster got modified and closed-down, and the whole legal apparatus captured Napster—the moment before that, what was going on in that moment in which virtual, which, effectively 50 years worth of popular music was effectively allowable and collapsible into the virtual space of software. It was free for the taking. What I’m interested in is the affective dimension of those people. How do we characterize that very nervous extended system, that kind of mass system of desire and appetite?

Maybe there are two things we can talk about. The first thing is that the flouting of copyright becomes something that’s virtuous, becomes something that’s righteous. People want to do it; they feel empowered to do it. They feel that it’s theirs, not just their right, it’s their imperative. And not just their imperative, it’s their entitlement. It’s what they should do. This stealing, this mass stealing, this mass illegalization of process, this notion in which our pleasures make us criminals, this was eagerly desired. And I guess it was eagerly desired because there’s ease of access, because of course there’s a volume of acquisition that’s easily accessible, and of course there’s this absolute blanking of the actual material origins and conditions of music production. So it arises as files, files that sit on your desktop. Paul talked about the human outsourcing of various aspects of the psyche into technological objects, into your zip drive, into your various technical accoutrements. This is about the enlargement of data space, the enlargement of memory.

I’m very much interested in science fiction, not because science fiction predicts the future in any way, because it doesn’t, but because of what the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delaney said, he said that science fiction offers a significant distortion of the present. So science fiction allows us to exaggerate, to hyperbolize the present. In this way, we can think of Napster as very much a moment in which science fiction and social reality have merged, a moment that Hakim Bey would have called a “pirate utopia,” an online pirate utopia. You can see that in some ways Napster actualized dreams that existed in radical literary culture, the dreams of Roland Barthes, who said that ‘the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the author.’ He said that the text is a fabric of quotations resulting from a thousand sources of culture. In the same way Napster was a popularization of post-Structuralist ideas that had been in the academy for some 20-25-30 years; Napster in some way massified that. But, as I said, what’s striking to me is the sense of entitlement that went with that. I’ll wrap up quickly by talking about a particular science fiction writer called K.W. Jeter. K.W. Jeter just published a book called Noir, and I’m drawing very much on the work of Stephen Shaviro’s book Connected, who links these questions together in a really fascinating way. What K.W. Jeter’s book is really about is the psychology of copyright piracy. So for my purposes, he is really talking about this emotional dimension of file-sharing, of being part of this giant global sound archive, this appetite for sound, this giant sono-sphere, this mediascape, and he says that what we see in file-sharing, what we see in global sound archive, what we see in Napster, what we see in peer-to-peer sharing, what we see in the whole idea of an online pirate utopia, is the idea that books, music, paintings, and information really belong to the thieves and not to the creators. What Barthes sees as a positive utopian force, Jeter sees as a kind of outrageous sense of aggression against creators, against artists. It’s kind of an exaggerated way of playing out some of the more unconscious drives that take part in file sharing, and I’m interested in it because file sharing tends to be written about as a kind of transparent, utopian project. I’m interested in Jeter because he’s possibly the first person to draw on the pathological aspects of file sharing, downloading more music than you’ll ever need ever in your whole life or can ever listen to, the whole pathological notion of the iPod and playlist culture. I’m kind of interested in that. So, what he says is, you want a gift economy? This is a gift economy; I’ll give you a gift economy. In my world, in the world of my book, Noir, I’m going to have a trophy system. And in this world, the downloader is immobilized, but is compelled to remain conscious. The downloader’s limbs are lopped off, his or her torso is sliced open, his brain and spinal cord are extracted, there is just enough neural tissue left to make sure that the offender retains “basic personality structure and ongoing situational awareness.” The offender’s neurons and synapses are encased within a household item, a vacuum cleaner or a toaster, and then they are handed over to the artist whose copyright the offender has violated. That’s his vision of a gift economy.