Digital Transcendentalism

Leigh McCloskey on Cosmogramma artwork

2010-06-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

http://warp.net/records/flying-lotus/player/video/inside-the-codex

'Intelligence' is esoteric

2010-06-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

[by Renaud Hallée]

Our 'intelligence,' our conscious communication, is as unique to the universe as a moon rocks' relationship to gravity. We are alone, or rather, we speak the esoteric language -- the universe is already communicating on a cosmic scale.

The Parallax View

2010-05-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

"There is an entire series of modes of parallax in different domains of modern theory:

quantum physics

[Clemens Jahn photography]
(the wave-particle duality)

The parallax of neurobiology

(the realization that, when we look behind the face into the skull, we find nothing; "there's no one at home" there, just piles of grey matter – it is difficult to tarry with this gap between meaning and the pure Real).

The parallax of ontological difference

[Ad Reinhardt]
(Of the discord between the ontic and the transcendental-ontological (we cannot reduce the ontological horizon to its ontic "roots," but neither can we deduce the ontic domain from the ontological horizon; that is to say transcendental constitution is not creation).

The parallax of the Real

[Collage by Brion Nuda Rosch]
(the Lacanian Real has no positive-substantial consistency, it is just the gap between the multitude of perspectives on it)

The parallax nature of the gap between desire and drive

[New track/visuals from Flying Lotus via twitter]
(let us imagine an individual trying to perform a simple manuel task--say, grab an object which repeatedly eludes him: the moment he changes his attitude, starting to find pleasure in just repeating the failed task, squeezing the object which, again and again, eludes him, he shifts from desire to drive)

The parallax of the unconscious

[Photo by Daniel Sannwald]
(The lack of common measure between the two aspects of Freud's theoretical edifice, interpretations of the formations of the unconscious and theories of drives)

Last and least -- the parallax of the vagina

(the shift from the ultimate object of sexual penetration, the embodiment of the mystery of sexuality, to the very organ of maternity [birth])."

Genesis

2010-05-21T19:58:00.001-07:00

Scientist Create 'artificial life.'

The report ends on a positive note:
"Barack Obama, the US president, asked his bioethics council to study the potential ethical implications of artificial DNA."

The singularity rapidly approaches!

Rabbits

2010-05-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

Ever notice how The Television laughs for you?

The Problems of Consciousness

2010-05-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

Wants to hold on to the notion of consciousness as an inherently unexplainable phenomenon. More so, really, that the traditional problems of consciousness are not solved by Dennett's disillusionment of this pseudo-Cartesian outlook.

THE obvious problem I see in this bizarre debate is that when Block says the word consciousness, he means something very different than what Dennett means when he utters the word consciousness. Dennett thinks of consciousness as the cartesian theater, a hypothesis with no physiological justification in the brain. Block, on the other hand, seems to be addressing the mysterious process that Dennett alludes to when he speaks of the brains wonderful ability to produce this illusion. It seems as though Block, believes that Dennet is saying that this unity does not exist. On the contrary, Dennett when saying illusion, means that the brain REALLY IS producing this unity, but that it has very little justification in reality.

DeLillo's SciFi

2010-05-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of taking a writing class with writerbloggereditor, Ed Park this past fall. He is the author of the novel Personal Days (hugely funny, maybe the greatest sentence ever written), his blog is called disambiguation, and he writes a scifi column for the LA Times called Astral Weeks.

This week Part took a look at The Secret History of Science Fiction, in which DeLillo's short story, "Human Moments From World War III," is included. It is most certainly worth the trouble of searching out. Of the little short fiction I've read of DeLillo's, this piece stands out as one of his best (not that he's really capable of doing much wrong).

Did I mention that Ed Park is also the founder and editor of The Believer? Here's a 2004 interview with Slavoj Zizek because, why not?

Thanks Professor
via disambiguation

Zizek's Universe

2010-05-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

Cosmogramma

2010-05-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

Hiatus over. Cosmogramma is here

And it's probably the augmented reality piece fiedlines that speaks to the genius of this record more aptly than any intellectual form of communication can wish to.

But I can try, with no apologies for any gushiness. No artist today, in my eyes, is more inspiring or important to the evolution of music while simultaneously, unabashedly, composing accessible, pleasant music. Cosmogramma is effortless for the listener.

Just listen to it, very very loud.

I'm Here

2010-04-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Beautiful short by Spike Jonze for Absolute

Retrospective Apocalyptic Visions

2010-03-30T16:02:00.000-07:00

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2009/11/slavoj-zizek-apocalyptic-times/

From cyborgs to Nazis, Zizek theorizes the threat of a digital revolution in humanity based on nano-technology, bio-engineering and computer intelligence. Zizek discusses the eminent integration of digital media with human biology. Even at this point, it is believed that there are more interactions between computers, than there is between man and computer. This suggests that the digital language between computers has its own interactions and may form its own agenda, and manipulate us.

Compare this with Pollen's thesis about corn or potatoes. Who is manipulating who? Have we already reached the point where machines are manipulating us with perfect, intuitive design? For the Digital Transcendentalist, this is just more justification that we already occupy a meta-reality, far from what history has defined humanity to be.

New Website for Timothy Saccenti

2010-03-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

The new timothysaccenti.com is a collaborative visual experience involving the mind-melting photography and motion work of Timothy Saccenti, along with the brilliant, meta-conceptual design and interface of Build, one of the more progressive and stunning design studios around. It's a trip. Here are some of my personal favorites, old and new:

... and of course

... truly the palette for idea's beyond words. Digital Transcendentalism at its finest.

Psychedelic-Influenced Astrophysics

2010-03-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Space Collective:

http://spacecollective.org/aloksubbarao/5731/PsychedelicInfluenced-Astrophysics-

OK TO GO from universe on Vimeo.

This is a montage put together by Claire Evans of YACHT. It is an exploration of hyperspace in films.

Nobody Beats the Drum

2010-03-19T00:08:00.000-07:00

Rogier van der Zwaag's video for Grindin', by Nobody Beats the Drum:

Really makes a statement about the meaning of 'digital art.' Brilliant

'Blind Side of a Secret'

2010-03-03T12:18:00.000-08:00

Blind Side Of A Secret, 2007 from Yoshi Sodeoka on Vimeo.

[W]hen Daniel Dennett, for example, advocates a shift from Cartesian notion of the Self as the central controlling agency of psychic life to a notion of the auto-poetic interaction of competing multiple agents, does this not echo the shift from central bureaucratic control and planning to the network model? It is thus not only that our brain is socialized –- society itself is also naturalized in the brain, which is why Malabou is right in emphasizing the need to adress the key question: "What is to be done to avoid the consciousness of the brain coinciding directly and simply with the spirit of capitalism?"

Savoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce

As Zizek reiterates, consciousness is an illusion created by a socialized system. In the era of digital capitalism, decentralized bureaucracy really begins to resemble a socialized financial system -- modern day capitalism as an illusion for a latent socialized force.

Nice Nice - Everything Falling Apart from Yoshi Sodeoka on Vimeo.

It just really seems - could it be? - that this is, appears to be, a good thing?

Yoshi Sodeoka is a New York based artist, designer and musician who has been producing both art and commercial projects since the early 1990s.

Interesting short piece on the singularity

2010-02-28T17:04:00.000-08:00

It's interesting to me how the singularity is always talking about as this one moment. I can't help but feel as though we are already far beyond homo sapiens from the introduction of the internet alone. So much of what makes us contemporary humans is our projection into the digital realm.

Passion Pit's "Little Secrets" video directed by Timothy Saccenti

2010-02-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

This is Saccenti's new video for Passion Pits song, "Little Secrets" off Manners.

You have no model for communicating this superlative fact, but you are seduced into using a super-expression. (It might be called a philosophical superlative.)
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

http://www.mtv.com/videos/passion-pit/484643/little-secrets.jhtml#id=1518071

Timothy Saccenti communicating philosophical superlative with exploding heads.

The Bluebrain Project

2010-02-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.

Babe Rainbow, Lynch and Zizek

2010-02-14T00:22:00.000-08:00

Babe Rainbow is the new act on Warp. The ep is called Shaved, for which Salazar has put together an interesting video that uses a progressive narrative style meant to explore the disillusion of individual psychology.

Babe Rainbow - Shaved from Salazar on Vimeo.

David Lynch's Lost Highway is the benchmark of this brand of storytelling, so much so that famed theorist Slavoj Zizek has written about the film extensively in his book, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime.
Here is a bit from the Zizek site:

Critics either hold Lynch's Lost Highway to be a New Age mishmash of initiatory themes wheeling around an absurd critique of post-modern life, or they abandon critical hope in seeing the film as an exercise in noir excess -as James Naremore put it, "no other purpose than regression. . . another movie about movies." Slavoj Zizek has exhumed the serious and elegant stylistics behind the film to demonstrate that it is neither just an exercise nor a coded New Age manifesto but, rather, a coherent and consistent artistic account of our cultural condition. Not so coincidentally, Zizek's Lacanian insights correspond to bolagrammarian motions about an anamorphic center.This Möbius-band design constellates characters who are,without the underlying template, simply enigmatic.

House and shed

The house occupied by the couple we first meet (Fred and Renee Madison) is the best starting point. Fred hears a voice on the intercom, "Dick Laurent is dead,"but there is no one at the door, just a videotape that happens to show their house from the outside. The next morning, another videotape is left that shows the house's interior with the sleeping couple inside. The police are called in but can find no explanation.We learn that Fred is semi-impotent, and when he accompanies Renee to a party, we suspect that she and the host, Andy, are having an affair. A man at the party, the macabre Mystery Man, tells Fred that he has not only met Fred at his house, but that he's actually at his house at that moment. He has Fred call home to verify this.

The third videotape shows Fred with the corpse of the murdered Renee, and in quick order we understand that Fred is convicted for murder and is serving out his sentence in jail. Inexplicably, he is transformed into another person,Pete Dayton. Dayton has no connection to the crime and, thus,is released. Dayton returns to his life as an auto mechanic. A gangster-client at the garage, Mr. Eddy (also known as Fred Laurent),asks Pete to accompany him on a drive to diagnose a problem with his car. A passing motorist offends Mr. Eddy and the subsequent chase and beating of the motorist alarm Pete. Eddy's mistress,who looks exactly like the murdered wife Renee, seduces Pete and persuades him to rob Andy, an associate of Mr. Eddy's and the person who got her involved in prostitution and pornographic films.During the robbery, Andy is killed. Pete and Alice drive to a desert motel and make love. She disappears in the darkness with the words, "You'll never have me!" and enters a wooden shed that bursts into flame.

Pete now transforms back into Fred and gets into a fight with Mr. Eddy, who is executed by the suddenly appearing Mystery Man. Fred returns to his house, leaves a message on the intercom, "Dick Laurent is dead" and rushes off into the desert, pursued by the police.

The key structuring elements are the parallels,doubles, and flips that constitute a comprehensive anamorphic program. Had this story existed in Roman times, Ovid would have had to include it in his Metamorphosis. The house/shed,Renee/Alice, and Fred/Pete play out doubles that do not match.Fred and Pete look different but are the same person. Renee and Alice look alike but are "different." Pete's affair with Alice is a hopeful projection that compensates for Fred's failed relationship with Renee. Mystery Man presides over the flips, and mediates the disbelief when we learn that one person can, following the rules of phantasmagoria, be in two places at once. Mr. Eddy/Laurent is the evil Other, but the Mystery Man is the Other of the Other, playing the drama out like an impresario of hell.

While the bolagram does not explain "why"Lynch uses this flipped script, it does show how, despite the in congruencies the audience experiences, it "plays by the rules." This is Mr. Eddy's admonition to the roughed-up driver who had harmlessly passed him on the road - one must "play by the rules." The film has a plausible psychological "explanation"as the fantasy projection of Fred beginning with his imprisonment,but this doesn't cover the circularity of time created when he leaves the message on his own intercom about the death of Dick Laurent. Zizek argues that the film is in fact a document about the "end of psychology" ? the ultimate failure of attempts to explain this or any other event from the viewpoint of the outlooks of the participants/characters.

Along these lines, the bolagram of Lost Highway shows that any psychology is "collective"and not deducible from motives of the players, who are lost within the matrix of relationships. However, the overall pattern is discernible,consistent, and (eventually) symmetrical within the rules of atemporalized topology that repeats a dynamic that can be found in the earliest myths.

As the idea of an individual psychology leaves the interest of contemporary art, artists are forced to attractively convey the peculiarities of a collective psychology. This jarring narrative experience is an exciting horizon for art.

More meditation needed.

*EDIT
-Doesn't the person[?] at Babe Rainbow's website kindofsorta resemble mystery man in Lost Highway?

A Brave New World

2010-02-10T12:51:00.000-08:00

I saw this cover on biblioklept and was reminded how important this book was to me.

You can download this version, narrated by Huxley, here.

Polygenesizing with Don DeLillo

2010-02-08T22:43:00.000-08:00

The Omega Point of DeLillo's philosophical pondering is one concerned with the trajectory of consciousness and the information that makes up our experience of life as individuals.

Time plays another major role in this philosophical investigation. Which time do we inhabit? Is our time subjective? Can we escape it?

He's received a heavy handed amount of criticism for his newer, slimmer novels, but with Omega Point, DeLillo proves that he is as sharp and talented as ever. For me, this book definitely goes amongst the top of his collection (not to mention, a stunning piece of digitally transcendental literature).

"I looked out into blinding tides of light and sky and down toward the folded copper hills that I took to be the badlands, a series of pristine ridges rising from the desert floor in patterned alignment. Could someone be dead in there? I could not imagine this. It was too vast, it was not real, the symmetry of furrows and juts, it crushed me, the heartbreaking beauty of it, the indifference of it, and the longer I stood and looked the more certain I was that we would never have an answer."

Animal Collective Movie Screenings in New York

2010-01-31T16:00:00.000-08:00

They're calling ODDSAC a visual album. It kind of looks to me like a more terrifying version of Lynch's "The Grandmother."

Screenings:
March 2
New York City NY, USA
Visual Arts Theatre
With special guests director Danny Perez and members of Animal Collective.

March 17
Chicago IL, USA
Music Box Theatre
With special guests director Danny Perez and members of Animal Collective.

Digital Dancing

2010-01-26T20:40:00.000-08:00

Vanishing Point from Bonsajo on Vimeo.

This is a video from Vanishing Point, directed by Takuya Hosogane. It's one of the more beautiful graphic pieces I've seen. To me, it suggests a change in digital art from the realistic to the conceptual.

Tomorrow, in a Year

2010-01-24T16:43:00.000-08:00

The Knife plans to release a studio version of thier Darwin inspired opera Tomorrow, in a Year.

The digital release on iTunes is February 2nd.

Play-time

2010-01-13T14:09:00.000-08:00

Artwork by Tauba Auerbach

So the suggestion and implications of consciousness simulation has been discussed more and more as the singularity approaches. Here and throughout the philosophical community, thoughts of downloading our conscious self onto a computer (or the thoughts that we are now, already, here inside some greater simulation) are sparking all kinds debates and breakthroughs.

Though maybe we can think about what it means to simulate consciousness and perhaps we can find such a process in our pragmatic lives. What does it mean when a child 'plays?' Think of objects of play (toy cars, dolls, cardboard boxes, etc.) and try to put yourself in a place where such objects could be enjoyable.

The object of play is truly the imagination. Children simulate the consciousness of of other possible characters and use toys to make the simulations feel (in the most strict sense of the word) like their conscious reality.

As children play by themselves, they are not conscious; they are in a world of their own: a imagined character's world where the possibilities expand as far as the imagination can. Video games provide a similar consciousness simulation. The fun isn't fiddling with the remote, it's letting yourself simulate the consciousness of mario or sonic. When your character dies in a video game, what do you say?

Consciousness, as Daniel Dennett and others understand, rises from the communication of language. The digital system that is our language gives us one particular consciousness, but certainly, we are made up of many different kinds of brain states other than the inadequate understanding of consciousness. Are these consciousness simulations different entities that we create in our minds? Do they have some stake in our multiverse? Are we the mental runoff of a higher intelligence's playtime?

playstation commercial by Timothy Saccenti

Where Am I?

2010-01-04T17:09:00.000-08:00

Photo by Daniel Sannwald

Dan Dennett asks, 'where is the mind?' This essay is one of many in his 1978 book, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology . The collection is a transformative experience.

Where Am I?

by

DANIEL C. DENNETT

Now that I've won my suit under the Freedom of Information Act, I am at liberty to reveal for the first time a curious episode in my life that may be of interest not only to those engaged in research in the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience but also to the general public.

Several years ago I was approached by Pentagon officials who asked me to volunteer for a highly dangerous and secret mission. In collaboration with NASA and Howard Hughes, the Department of Defense was spending billions to develop a Supersonic Tunneling Underground Device, or STUD. It was supposed to tunnel through the earth's core at great speed and deliver a specially designed atomic warhead “right up the Red's missile silos,” as one of the Pentagon brass put it.

The problem was that in an early test they had succeeded in lodging a warhead about a mile deep under Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they wanted me to retrieve it for them. “Why me?” I asked. Well, the mission involved some pioneering applications of current brain research, and they had heard of my interest in brains and of course my Faustian curiosity and great courage and so forth . . . . Well, how could I refuse? The difficulty that brought the Pentagon to my door was that the device I'd been asked to recover was fiercely radioactive, in a new way. According to monitoring instruments, something about the nature of the device and its complex interactions with pockets of material deep in the earth had produced radiation that could cause severe abnormalities in certain tissues of the brain. No way had been found to shield the brain from these deadly rays, which were apparently harmless to other tissues and organs of the body. So it had been decided that the person sent to recover the device should leave his brain behind. It would be kept in a safe place as there it could execute its normal control functions by elaborate radio links. Would I submit to a surgical procedure that would completely remove my brain, which would then be placed in a life-support system at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston? Each input and output pathway, as it was severed, would be restored by a pair of microminiaturized radio transceivers, one attached precisely to the brain, the other to the nerve stumps in the empty cranium. No information would be lost, all the connectivity would be preserved. At first I was a bit reluctant. Would it really work? The Houston brain surgeons encouraged me. “Think of it,” they said, “as a mere stretching of the nerves. If your brain were just moved over an inch in your skull, that would not alter or impair your mind. We're simply going to make the nerves indefinitely elastic by splicing radio links into them.”

I was shown around the life-support lab in Houston and saw the sparkling new vat in which my brain would be placed, were I to agree. I met the large and brilliant support team of neurologists, hematologists, biophysicists, and electrical engineers, and after several days of discussions and demonstrations I agreed to give it a try. I was subjected to an enormous array of blood tests, brain scans, experiments, interviews, and the like. They took down my autobiography at great length, recorded tedious lists of my beliefs, hopes, fears, and tastes. They even listed my favorite stereo recordings and gave me a crash session of psychoanalysis.

The day for surgery arrived at last and of course I was anesthetized and remember nothing of the operation itself. When I came out of anesthesia, I opened my eyes, looked around, and asked the inevitable, the traditional, the lamentably hackneyed postoperative question: “Where am l?” The nurse smiled down at me. “You're in Houston,” she said, and I reflected that this still had a good chance of being the truth one way or another. She handed me a mirror. Sure enough, there were the tiny antennae poling up through their titanium ports cemented into my skull.

“I gather the operation was a success,” I said. “I want to go see my brain.” They led me (I was a bit dizzy and unsteady) down a long corridor and into the life-support lab. A cheer went up from the assembled support team, and I responded with what I hoped was a jaunty salute. Still feeling lightheaded, I was helped over to the life-support vat. I peered through the glass. There, floating in what looked like ginger ale, was undeniably a human brain, though it was almost covered with printed circuit chips, plastic tubules, electrodes, and other paraphernalia. “Is that mine?” I asked. “Hit the output transmitter switch there on the side of the vat and see for yourself,” the project director replied. I moved the switch to OFF, and immediately slumped, groggy and nauseated, into the arms of the technicians, one of whom kindly restored the switch to its ON position. While I recovered my equilibrium and composure, I thought to myself: “Well, here I am sitting on a folding chair, staring through a piece of plate glass at my own brain . . . But wait,” I said to myself, “shouldn't I have thought, ‘Here I am, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes’?” I tried to think this latter thought. I tried to project it into the tank, offering it hopefully to my brain, but I failed to carry off the exercise with any conviction. I tried again. “Here am I, Daniel Dennett, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes.” No, it just didn't work. Most puzzling and confusing. Being a philosopher of firm physicalist conviction, I believed unswervingly that the tokening of my thoughts was occurring somewhere in my brain: yet, when I thought “Here I am,” where the thought occurred to me was here, outside the vat, where I, Dennett, was standing staring at my brain.

I tried and tried to think myself into the vat, but to no avail. I tried to build up to the task by doing mental exercises. I thought to myself, “The sun is shining over there,” five times in rapid succession, each time mentally ostending a different place: in order, the sunlit corner of the lab, the visible front lawn of the hospital, Houston, Mars, and Jupiter. I found I had little difficulty in getting my “there”'s to hop all over the celestial map with their proper references. I could loft a “there” in an instant through the farthest reaches of space, and then aim the next “there” with pinpoint accuracy at the upper left quadrant of a freckle on my arm. Why was I having such trouble with “here”? “Here in Houston” worked well enough, and so did “here in the lab,” and even “here in this part of the lab,” but “here in the vat” always seemed merely an unmeant mental mouthing. I tried closing my eyes while thinking it. This seemed to help, but still I couldn't manage to pull it off, except perhaps for a fleeting instant. I couldn't be sure. The discovery that I couldn't be sure was also unsettling. How did I know where I meant by “here” when I thought “here”? Could I think I meant one place when in fact I meant another? I didn't see how that could be admitted without untying the few bonds of intimacy between a person and his own mental life that had survived the onslaught of the brain scientists and philosophers, the physicalists and behaviorists. Perhaps I was incorrigible about where I meant when I said “here.” But in my present circumstances it seemed that either I was doomed by sheer force of mental habit to thinking systematically false indexical thoughts, or where a person is (and hence where his thoughts are tokened for purposes of semantic analysis) is not necessarily where his brain, the physical seat of his soul, resides. Nagged by confusion, I attempted to orient myself by falling back on a favorite philosopher's ploy. I began naming things.

“Yorick,” I said aloud to my brain, “you are my brain. The rest of my body, seated in this chair, I dub ‘Hamlet.’” So here we all are: Yorick's my brain, Hamlet's my body, and I am Dennett. Now, where am I? And when I think “where am I?”, where's that thought tokened? Is it tokened in my brain, lounging about in the vat, or right here between my ears where it seems to be tokened? Or nowhere? Its temporal coordinates give me no trouble; must it not have spatial coordinates as well? I began making a list of the alternatives.

1. Where Hamlet goes there goes Dennett. This principle was easily refuted by appeal to the familiar brain-transplant thought experiments so enjoyed by philosophers. If Tom and Dick switch brains, Tom is the fellow with Dick's former body — just ask him; he'll claim to be Tom and tell you the most intimate details of Tom's autobiography. It was clear enough, then, that my current body and I could part company, but not likely that I could be separated from my brain. The rule of thumb that emerged so plainly from the thought experiments was that in a brain-transplant operation, one wanted to be the donor not the recipient. Better to call such an operation a body transplant, in fact. So perhaps the truth was,

2. Where Yorick goes there goes Dennett. This was not at all appealing, however. How could I be in the vat and not about to go anywhere, when I was so obviously outside the vat looking in and beginning to make guilty plans to return to my room for a substantial lunch? This begged the question I realized, but it still seemed to be getting at something important. Casting about for some support for my intuition, I hit upon a legalistic sort of argument that might have appealed to Locke.

Suppose, I argued to myself, I were now to fly to California, rob a bank, and be apprehended. In which state would I be tried: in California, where the robbery took place, or in Texas, where the brains of the outfit were located? Would I be a California felon with an out-of-state brain, or a Texas felon remotely controlling an accomplice of sorts in California? It seemed possible that I might beat such a rap just on the undecidability of that jurisdictional question, though perhaps it would be deemed an interstate, and hence Federal, offense. In any event, suppose I were convicted. Was it likely that California would be satisfied to throw Hamlet into the brig, knowing that Yorick was living the good life and luxuriously taking the waters in Texas? Would Texas incarcerate Yorick, leaving Hamlet free to take the next boat to Rio? This alternative appealed to me. Barring capital punishment or other cruel and unusual punishment, the state would be obliged to maintain the life-support system for Yorick though they might move him from Houston to Leavenworth, and aside from the unpleasantness of the opprobrium, I, for one, would not mind at all and would consider myself a free man under those circumstances. If the state has an interest in forcibly relocating persons in institutions, it would fail to relocate me in any institution by locating Yorick there. If this were true, it suggested a third alternative.

3. Dennett is wherever he thinks he is. Generalized, the claim was as follows: At any given time a person has a point of view and the location of the point of view (which is determined internally by the content of the point of view) is also the location of the person.

Such a proposition is not without its perplexities, but to me it seemed a step in the right direction. The only trouble was that it seemed to place one in a heads-I-win/tails-you-lose situation of unlikely infallibility as regards location. Hadn't I myself often been wrong about where I was, and at least as often uncertain? Couldn't one get lost? Of course, but getting lost geographically is not the only way one might get lost. If one were lost in the woods one could attempt to reassure oneself with the consolation that at least one knew where one was: one was right here in the familiar surroundings of one's own body. Perhaps in this case one would not have drawn one's attention to much to be thankful for. Still, there were worse plights imaginable, and I wasn't sure I wasn't in such a plight right now.

Point of view clearly had something to do with personal location, but it was itself an unclear notion. It was obvious that the content of one's point of view was not the same as or determined by the content of one's beliefs or thoughts. For example, what should we say about the point of view of the Cinerama viewer who shrieks and twists in his seat as the roller-coaster footage overcomes his psychic distancing? Has he forgotten that he is safely seated in the theater? Here I was inclined to say that the person is experiencing an illusory shift in point of view. In other cases, my inclination to call such shifts illusory was less strong. The workers in laboratories and plants who handle dangerous materials by operating feedback-controlled mechanical arms and hands undergo a shift in point of view that is crisper and more pronounced than anything Cinerama can provoke. They can feel the heft and slipperiness of the containers they manipulate with their metal fingers. They know perfectly well where they are and are not fooled into false beliefs by the experience, yet it is as if they were inside the isolation chamber they are peering into. With mental effort, they can manage to shift their point of view back and forth, rather like making a transparent Necker cube or an Escher drawing change orientation before one's eyes. It does seem extravagant to suppose that in performing this bit of mental gymnastics, they are transporting themselves back and forth.

Still their example gave me hope. If I was in fact in the vat in spite of my intuitions, I might be able to train myself to adopt that point of view even as a matter of habit. I should dwell on images of myself comfortably floating in my vat, beaming volitions to that familiar body out there. I reflected that the ease or difficulty of this task was presumably independent of the truth about the location of one's brain. Had I been practicing before the operation, I might now be finding it second nature. You might now yourself try such a trompe l'oeil. Imagine you have written an inflammatory letter which has been published in the Times, the result of which is that the government has chosen to impound your brain for a probationary period of three years in its Dangerous Brain Clinic in Bethesda, Maryland. Your body of course is allowed freedom to earn a salary and thus to continue its function of laying up income to be taxed. At this moment, however, your body is seated in an auditorium listening to a peculiar account by Daniel Dennett of his own similar experience. Try it. Think yourself to Bethesda, and then hark back longingly to your body, far away, and yet seeming so near. It is only with long-distance restraint (yours? the government's?) that you can control your impulse to get those hands clapping in polite applause before navigating the old body to the rest room and a well-deserved glass of evening sherry in the lounge. The task of imagination is certainly difficult, but if you achieve your goal the results might be consoling.

Anyway, there I was in Houston, lost in thought as one might say, but not for long. My speculations were soon interrupted by the Houston doctors, who wished to test out my new prosthetic nervous system before sending me off on my hazardous mission. As I mentioned before, I was a bit dizzy at first, and not surprisingly, although I soon habituated myself to my new circumstances (which were, after all, well nigh indistinguishable from my old circumstances). My accommodation was not perfect, however, and to this day I continue to be plagued by minor coordination difficulties. The speed of light is fast, but finite, and as my brain and body move farther and farther apart, the delicate interaction of my feedback systems is thrown into disarray by the time lags. Just as one is rendered close to speechless by a delayed or echoic hearing of one's speaking voice so, for instance, I am virtually unable to track a moving object with my eyes whenever my brain and my body are more than a few miles apart. In most matters my impairment is scarcely detectable, though I can no longer hit a slow curve ball with the authority of yore. There are some compensations of course. Though liquor tastes as good as ever, and warms my gullet while corroding my liver, I can drink it in any quantity I please, without becoming the slightest bit inebriated, a curiosity some of my close friends may have noticed (though I occasionally have feigned inebriation, so as not to draw attention to my unusual circumstances). For similar reasons, I take aspirin orally for a sprained wrist, but if the pain persists I ask Houston to administer codeine to me in vitro. In times of illness the phone bill can be staggering.

But to return to my adventure. At length, both the doctors and I were satisfied that I was ready to undertake my subterranean mission. And so I left my brain in Houston and headed by helicopter for Tulsa. Well, in any case, that's the way it seemed to me. That's how I would put it, just off the top of my head as it were. On the trip I reflected further about my earlier anxieties and decided that my first postoperative speculations had been tinged with panic. The matter was not nearly as strange or metaphysical as I had been supposing. Where was I? In two places, clearly: both inside the vat and outside it. Just as one can stand with one foot in Connecticut and the other in Rhode Island, I was in two places at once. I had become one of those scattered individuals we used to hear so much about. The more I considered this answer, the more obviously true it appeared. But, strange to say, the more true it appeared, the less important the question to which it could be the true answer seemed. A sad, but not unprecedented, fate for a philosophical question to suffer. This answer did not completely satisfy me, of course. There lingered some question to which I should have liked an answer, which was neither “Where are all my various and sundry parts?” nor “What is my current point of view?” Or at least there seemed to be such a question. For it did seem undeniable that in some sense I and not merely most of me was descending into the earth under Tulsa in search of an atomic warhead.

When I found the warhead, I was certainly glad I had left my brain behind, for the pointer on the specially built Geiger counter I had brought with me was off the dial. I called Houston on my ordinary radio and told the operation control center of my position and my progress. In return, they gave me instructions for dismantling the vehicle, based upon my on-site observations. I had set to work with my cutting torch when all of a sudden a terrible thing happened. I went stone deaf. At first I thought it was only my radio earphones that had broken, but when I tapped on my helmet, I heard nothing. Apparently the auditory transceivers had gone on the fritz. I could no longer hear Houston or my own voice, but I could speak, so I started telling them what had happened. In midsentence, I knew something else had gone wrong. My vocal apparatus had become paralyzed. Then my right hand went limp — another transceiver had gone. I was truly in deep trouble. But worse was to follow. After a few more minutes, I went blind. I cursed my luck, and then I cursed the scientists who had led me into this grave peril. There I was, deaf, dumb, and blind, in a radioactive hole more than a mile under Tulsa. Then the last of my cerebral radio links broke, and suddenly I was faced with a new and even more shocking problem: whereas an instant before I had been buried alive in Oklahoma, now I was disembodied in Houston. My recognition of my new status was not immediate. It took me several very anxious minutes before it dawned on me that my poor body lay several hundred miles away, with heart pulsing and lungs respirating, but otherwise as dead as the body of any heart-transplant donor, its skull packed with useless, broken electronic gear. The shift in perspective I had earlier found well nigh impossible now seemed quite natural. Though I could think myself back into my body in the tunnel under Tulsa, it took some effort to sustain the illusion. For surely it was an illusion to suppose I was still in Oklahoma: I had lost all contact with that body.

It occurred to me then, with one of those rushes of revelation of which we should be suspicious, that I had stumbled upon an impressive demonstration of the immateriality of the soul based upon physicalist principles and premises. For as the last radio signal between Tulsa and Houston died away, had I not changed location from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light? And had I not accomplished this without any increase in mass? What moved from A to B at such speed was surely myself, or at any rate my soul or mind — the massless center of my being and home of my consciousness. My point of view had lagged somewhat behind, but I had already noted the indirect bearing of point of view on personal location. I could not see how a physicalist philosopher could quarrel with this except by taking the dire and counterintuitive route of banishing all talk of persons. Yet the notion of personhood was so well entrenched in everyone's world view, or so it seemed to me, that any denial would be as curiously unconvincing, as systematically disingenuous, as the Cartesian negation, “non sum.”

The joy of philosophic discovery thus tided me over some very bad minutes or perhaps hours as the helplessness and hopelessness or my situation became more apparent to me. Waves of panic and even nausea swept over me, made all the more horrible by the absence of their normal body-dependent phenomenology. No adrenaline rush of tingles in the arms, no pounding heart, no premonitory salivation. I did feel a dread sinking feeling in my bowels at one point, and this tricked me momentarily into the false hope that I was undergoing a reversal of the process that landed me in this fix — a gradual undisembodiment. But the isolation and uniqueness of that twinge soon convinced me that it was simply the first of a plague of phantom body hallucinations that I, like any other amputee, would be all too likely to suffer.

My mood then was chaotic. On the one hand, I was fired up with elation of my philosophic discovery and was wracking my brain (one of the few familiar things I could still do), trying to figure out how to communicate my discovery to the journals; while on the other, I was bitter, lonely, and filled with dread and uncertainty. Fortunately, this did not last long, for my technical support team sedated me into a dreamless sleep from which I awoke, hearing with magnificent fidelity the familiar opening strains of my favorite Brahms piano trio. So that was why they had wanted a list of my favorite recordings! It did not take me long to realize that I was hearing the music without ears. The output from the stereo stylus was being fed through some fancy rectification circuitry directly into my auditory nerve. I was mainlining Brahms, an unforgettable experience for any stereo buff. At the end of the record it did not surprise me to hear the reassuring voice of the project director speaking into a microphone that was now my prosthetic ear. He confirmed my analysis of what had gone wrong and assured me that steps were being taken to re-embody me. He did not elaborate, and after a few more recordings, I found myself drifting off to sleep. My sleep lasted, I later learned, for the better part of a year, and when I awoke, it was to find myself fully restored to my senses. When I looked into the mirror, though, I was a bit startled to see an unfamiliar face. Bearded and a bit heavier, bearing no doubt a family resemblance to my former face, and with the same look of spritely intelligence and resolute character, but definitely a new face. Further self-explorations of an intimate nature left me no doubt that this was a new body, and the project director confirmed my conclusions. He did not volunteer any information on the past history of my new body and I decided (wisely, I think in retrospect) not to pry. As many philosophers unfamiliar with my ordeal have more recently speculated, the acquisition of a new body leaves one's person intact. And after a period of adjustment to a new voice, new muscular strengths and weaknesses, and so forth, one's personality is by and large also preserved. More dramatic changes in personality have been routinely observed in people who have undergone extensive plastic surgery, to say nothing of sex-change operations, and I think no one contests the survival of the person in such cases. In any event I soon accommodated to my new body, to the point of being unable to recover any of its novelties to my consciousness or even memory. The view in the mirror soon became utterly familiar. That view, by the way, still revealed antennae, and so l was not surprised to learn that my brain had not been moved from its haven in the life-support lab.

I decided that good old Yorick deserved a visit. I and my new body, whom we might as well call Fortinbras, strode into the familiar lab to another round of applause from the technicians, who were of course congratulating themselves, not me. Once more I stood before the vat and contemplated poor Yorick, and on a whim I once again cavalierly flicked off the output transmitter switch. Imagine my surprise when nothing unusual happened. No fainting spell, no nausea, no noticeable change. A technician hurried to restore the switch to ON, but still I felt nothing. I demanded an explanation, which the project director hastened to provide. It seems that before they had even operated on the first occasion, they had constructed a computer duplicate of my brain, reproducing both the complete information-processing structure and the computational speed of my brain in a giant computer program. After the operation, but before they had dared to send me off on my mission to Oklahoma, they had run this computer system and Yorick side by side. The incoming signals from Hamlet were sent simultaneously to Yorick's transceivers and to the computer's array of inputs. And the outputs from Yorick were not only beamed back to Hamlet, my body; they were recorded and checked against the simultaneous output of the computer program, which was called “Hubert” for reasons obscure to me. Over days and even weeks, the outputs were identical and synchronous, which of course did not prove that they had succeeded in copying the brain's functional structure, but the empirical support was greatly encouraging.

Hubert's input, and hence activity, had been kept parallel with Yorick's during my disembodied days. And now, to demonstrate this, they had actually thrown the master switch that put Hubert for the first time in on-line control of my body — not Hamlet, of course, but Fortinbras. (Hamlet, I learned, had never been recovered from its underground tomb and could be assumed by this time to have largely returned to the dust. At the head of my grave still lay the magnificent bulk of the abandoned device, with the word STUD emblazoned on its side in large letters — a circumstance which may provide archeologists of the next century with a curious insight into the burial rites of their ancestors.)

The laboratory technicians now showed me the master switch, which had two positions, labeled B, for Brain (they didn't know my brain's name was Yorick) and H, for Hubert. The switch did indeed point to H, and they explained to me that if I wished, I could switch it back to B. With my heart in my mouth (and my brain in its vat), I did this. Nothing happened. A click, that was all. To test their claim, and with the master switch now set at B. I hit Yorick's output transmitter switch on the vat and sure enough, I began to faint. Once the output switch was turned back on and I had recovered my wits, so to speak, I continued to play with the master switch, flipping it back and forth. I found that with the exception of the transitional click, I could detect no trace of a difference. I could switch in mid-utterance, and the sentence I had begun speaking under the control of Yorick was finished without a pause or hitch of any kind under the control of Hubert. I had a spare brain, a prosthetic device which might some day stand me in very good stead, were some mishap to befall Yorick. Or alternatively, I could keep Yorick as a spare and use Hubert. It didn't seem to make any difference which I chose, for the wear and tear and fatigue on my body did not have any debilitating effect on either brain, whether or not it was actually causing the motions of my body, or merely spilling its output into thin air.

The one truly unsettling aspect of this new development was the prospect, which was not long in dawning on me, of someone detaching the spare — Hubert or Yorick, as the case might be — from Fortinbras and hitching it to yet another body — some Johnny-come-lately Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. Then (if not before) there would be two people, that much was clear. One would be me, and the other would be a sort of super-twin brother. If there were two bodies, one under the control of Hubert and the other being controlled by Yorick, then which would the world recognize as the true Dennett? And whatever the rest of the world decided, which one would be me? Would I be the Yorick- brained one, in virtue of Yorick's causal priority and former intimate relationship with the original Dennett body, Hamlet? That seemed a bit legalistic, a bit too redolent of the arbitrariness of consanguinity and legal possession, to be convincing at the metaphysical level. For suppose that before the arrival of the second body on the scene, I had been keeping Yorick as the spare for years, and letting Hubert's output drive my body — that is, Fortinbras — all that time. The Hubert-Fortinbras couple would seem then by squatter's rights (to combat one legal intuition with another) to be the true Dennett and the lawful inheritor of everything that was Dennett's. This was an interesting question, certainly, but not nearly so pressing as another question that bothered me. My strongest intuition was that in such an eventuality I would survive so long as either brain-body couple remained intact, but I had mixed emotions about whether I should want both to survive.

I discussed my worries with the technicians and the project director. The prospect of two Dennetts was abhorrent to me, I explained, largely for social reasons. I didn't want to be my own rival for the affections of my wife, nor did I like the prospect of the two Dennetts sharing my modest professor's salary. Still more vertiginous and distasteful, though, was the idea of knowing that much about another person, while he had the very same goods on me. How could we ever face each other? My colleagues in the lab argued that I was ignoring the bright side of the matter. Weren't there many things I wanted to do but, being only one person, had been unable to do? Now one Dennett could stay at home and be the professor and family man while the other could strike out on a life of travel and adventure — missing the family of course, but happy in the knowledge that the other Dennett was keeping the home fires burning. I could be faithful and adulterous at the same time. I could even cuckold myself — to say nothing of other more lurid possibilities my colleagues were all too ready to force upon my overtaxed imagination. But my ordeal in Oklahoma (or was it Houston?) had made me less adventurous, and I shrank from this opportunity that was being offered (though of course I was never quite sure it was being offered to me in the first place).

There was another prospect even more disagreeable: that the spare, Hubert or Yorick as the case might be, would be detached from any input from Fortinbras and just left detached. Then, as in the other case, there would be two Dennets, or at least two claimants to my name and possessions, one embodied in Fortinbras, and the other sadly, miserably disembodied. Both selfishness and altruism bade me take steps to prevent this from happening. So I asked that measures be taken to ensure that no one could ever tamper with the transceiver connections or the master switch without my (our? no, my ) knowledge and consent. Since I had no desire to spend my life guarding the equipment in Houston, it was mutually decided that all the electronic connections in the lab would be carefully locked. Both those that controlled the life-support system for Yorick and those that controlled the power supply for Hubert would be guarded with fail-safe devices, and I would take the only master switch, outfitted for radio remote control, with me wherever I went. I carry it strapped around my waist and — wait a moment — here it is. Every few months I reconnoiter the situation by switching channels. I do this only in the presence of friends, of course, for if the other channel were, heaven forbid, either dead or otherwise occupied, there would have to be somebody who had my interests at heart to switch it back, to bring me back from the void. For while I could feel, see, hear, and otherwise sense whatever befell my body, subsequent to such a switch, I'd be unable to control it. By the way, the two positions on the switch are intentionally unmarked, so I never have the faintest idea whether I am switching from Hubert to Yorick or vice versa. (Some of you may think that in this case I really don't know who I am, let alone where I am. But such reflections no longer make much of a dent on my essential Dennettness, on my own sense of who I am. If it is true that in one sense I don't know who I am then that's another one of your philosophical truths of underwhelming significance.)

In any case, every time I've flipped the switch so far, nothing has happened. So let's give it a try . . . .

“THANK GOD! I THOUGHT YOU'D NEVER FLIP THAT SWITCH! You can't imagine how horrible it's been these last two weeks — but now you know; it's your turn in purgatory. How I've longed for this moment! You see, about two weeks ago — excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but I've got to explain this to my . . . um, brother, I guess you could say, but he's just told you the facts, so you'll understand — about two weeks ago our two brains drifted just a bit out of synch. I don't know whether my brain is now Hubert or Yorick, any more than you do, but in any case, the two brains drifted apart, and of course once the process started, it snowballed, for I was in a slightly different receptive state for the input we both received, a difference that was soon magnified. In no time at all the illusion that I was in control of my body — our body — was completely dissipated. There was nothing I could do — no way to call you. YOU DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I EXISTED! It's been like being carried around in a cage, or better, like being possessed — hearing my own voice say things I didn't mean to say, watching in frustration as my own hands performed deeds I hadn't intended. You'd scratch our itches, but not the way I would have, and you kept me awake, with your tossing and turning. I've been totally exhausted, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, carried around helplessly by your frantic round of activities, sustained only by the knowledge that some day you'd throw the switch.

“Now it's your turn, but at least you'll have the comfort of knowing I know you're in there. Like an expectant mother, I'm eating — or at any rate tasting, smelling, seeing — for two now, and I'll try to make it easy for you. Don't worry. Just as soon as this colloquium is over, you and I will fly to Houston, and we'll see what can be done to get one of us another body. You can have a female body — your body could be any color you like. But let's think it over. I tell you what — to be fair, if we both want this body, I promise I'll let the project director flip a coin to settle which of us gets to keep it and which then gets to choose a new body. That should guarantee justice, shouldn't it? In any case, I'll take care of you, I promise. These people are my witnesses.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this talk we have just heard is not exactly the talk I would have given, but I assure you that everything he said was perfectly true. And now if you'll excuse me, I think I'd — we'd — better sit down.”

Photos by Ryan McGinley

We are here, there and everywhere. As our brains manufacture reality, the self becomes an objective observer in a mental realm – a transcendental realm birthed from interpreting the jumble of sensory information any way that determinism sees fit.

Henry Markram and The Fabric of the Brain

2009-12-30T14:40:00.000-08:00

'My Boys,' get it?

2009-12-27T15:17:00.000-08:00

Taken By Tree's rendition is nearly as catchy as its predecessor, but the video is way sweeter. Directed by Marcus Soderlund.

I Don't Mean to Seem Like I Care About Empirical Things

2009-12-21T13:58:00.000-08:00

The appropriate holiday wrapping paper for all your DigitalTranscendentalist friends designed by build for the Design Museum .

Arthur Magazines stellar gift list.

Pitchforks 50 best albums of 2009 supervene their holiday gift guide[?].

Merry Shopping.

Jim Gaylord and the Hypothetical Syllogism.

2009-12-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

Logic is a determinate, digital system performed through reason.

Conversely, the natural world is transcendental. We have no access to it outside of how it appears to our sensory apparatus.

[Why do we always say, our sensory apparatus, our faculty of reason or our left arm and not the arm that is me or the area of myself who functions in reason?]

We use our logic to fill in the gaps, to draw hypothesis for the space between the information we think we have.

Jim Gaylord is a painter born in Washington, North Carolina. He now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

New Fever Ray Video

2009-12-14T21:04:00.000-08:00

Stranger Than Kindness from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

Directed by Andreas Nilsson

I want philosophy to look like this:

2009-12-14T19:35:00.000-08:00

The Fragment as Digital Transcendentalism

1. [s] refer to some whole, always.

2. To dub any text a fragment, implies two things: wholeness and fracture.[1]

3. There is always a supervening whole.

4. Thoughts are not fragmentary[2]; fragments refer to thoughts with meta-linguistic properties.

EXAMPLE:

‘The early bird catches the [ ]’

-Is this a fragment?

(A: Yes and no, this series of words has a transcendental intelligibility that corresponds to processors with an understanding of the idiom and it’s meaning. The words refer to that transcendental understanding but are not the understanding itself.[3] However, insofar as this group of words exists in a grammatical series, it is a sentence fragment)

5. Fragments are digital information with transcendental properties.

DIGITALTRANSCENENTALISM:

Digital (dij-i-tl):

Of or relating to a system of data employing

discrete values communicated through

a language understood by sender and receiver.

TranscendŸentalism (tran-sen-den-tl-iz-uhm):

<> trans: beyond + <>scandere: to climb

<>talis: such + <>isma: action, condition, doctrine

The digital realm transcends the natural realm, as the digital realm is not subject to natural laws. Digital information (words, symbols, numbers, etc.) refer loosely, among other things, to conscious thoughts, but are simply incompatible with them, so misunderstanding or subjective relevance or serendipitous context gives language power beyond intelligible representations of our conscious thoughts.

[Fragments become enticing to people because the meaning of a fragment must change based on the individual person.[4] Fragments allow the mind to bend the laws of nature[5] by providing us a transcendental input (an input with properties outside of the laws of nature) and thus giving our minds causeways between neural groups that would never naturally cross otherwise.]

Digital language has provided us a construct in which to think of our world and ourselves. However, language does not seem to fit correctly everywhere.[6] For example, attempting to cope with ‘freedom’ in light of determinism causes a philosophical dilemma. But what could we possibly mean by the word freedom? The ontology of the universe is determinate. What could ‘freedom,’ the way we use it, even mean? The language falls short. The word takes on a transcendental property in light of its unfounded meaning.

Implications:

1. In light of any and all skeptical arguments, language must exist as we experience it. Language is the vehicle in which we say, “I am a thinking thing” or “cogito ergo sum.” It is subjectively intelligible and objectively intelligible.[7]

2. Perhaps also digital artwork or communication can avoid the blade of skepticism in that the language between sender and receiver is intelligible, and therefore only material that an entity in this reality can understand is communicated.

3. If we were to become the evil daemons and build an alternate reality using a digital system, would it be a reality devoid of skepticism? Considering digital transcendentalism, the answer seems to be yes.

[1] Fragments of fragments?

(A: context considered, a fragment is part of one whole. ex: a fragmented sentence in a chapter of a fragmented anthology is a fragment of a supposed whole chapter despite the fragmentary nature of the chapter and/or the anthology)

adjacent conclusion: there is always a supervening whole.

[2] They are electrical and, therefore, have no necessity for complete compatibility in a digital system i.e. German, English, C++…

[3] The words stimulate corresponding neural patterns in the brain, but are not the complete manifestation of them due to the overwhelming epiphenomena that accompany the mere reading (and understanding) of the words as they appear.

[4] Each individual person (or conscious entity) will have a different array of mental context in which to cognize a given fragment, especially if the fragment’s meaning is unintelligible in a grammatical or logical context. The mind will, nevertheless, cognize the fragment and form concepts solely through its reasonable faculties.

[5] Partially providing a sort of freedom of the will.

*DISCLAIMER: This is not true free will in any sense of the word unless one is willing to accept that the subject is nothing more than acquirer and processor of sensible data, which it is.

[6] This is Philosophy.

[7] Our language as a digital system has standard rules that make them fit methods of communication, but (as previously stated) there is always subjective interpretation.

Eadem mutata resurgo

2009-12-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

Daniel Askill - WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE from Cgunit on Vimeo.

Breaking the pataphysical boundaries of nature, WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE is a journey of transcendence.

Written and directed by Daniel Askill

Check out the interview here.

Think Different

2009-12-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

A new model of the Universe

Earth

and Time:

TEDxAmsterdam: Wubbo Ockels from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.

Frankenstein + 7

2009-12-07T19:34:00.000-08:00

*EDIT: this is the N+7.

Envelope regiment exposition return glowing navigator embroidery conspiracy renovating resolved sleet vial wildness stream madness mange determined fact germ luggage gash chick reverential reverently destination animate navigator thief scope onion died departure studies elementary dribble zinc prompt phlegm lifeless mayonnaise worm moor credits speaker host freedom trembled concealing experience silver sidetrack yield neglected ugly heaven levy creek hilt writer mouth murdered filth pity frightful imbecile gun gravy gore insanity blackest condemned ignominy acknowledged spa hunch figure revolution tentacle savage occupy tournament pipe spleen begone abhor hurdle announcement fishmonger breeder work huff employee extinguished compatriot consumption sympathized follow reception lark affected enraptured listened creed remainder minister prove pronunciation hoard land parcel lost monstrous cursed despot preposition condemned speaker arose rainfall heartless supermarket meditate eternal fig deformed denial keepsake persuade gleam consume bog blind tally tax magazine oilfield being judo blouse intention sage pursued squalid forehand ladder soul virgin applicant applause refrigerator gushed condiment excitement cosmonaut succeeded loathing mist accountant ghastly procedure limb lived alas sector coupon lowland free benefactor comply relapse brigade fluorescent realist expire vain bodily dance ambassador loose barbarous movement hem dryer nipple toilet struck font vengeance moor imperialist escape China marathon cat blamable balancing steeple representation merchandise criterion energy

Would the epiphenomenal treatment performed on Frankenstiein work in reverse? After changing all the nouns around, could we work backwards and have a different artist write a page of prose for each word, in light of all the words, and come up with a new, coherent text?

Perhaps works like Marco Brambilla's Civilization are good examples of this.

Frankenstein as Epiphenomenalism

2009-12-06T21:48:00.000-08:00

"Its out there in here"

-Mark Warren Jacquez

What do we get out of a picture or a novel or any experience? What can we take away? We leave with nothing material. The object that exists is invisible data.

"Pumps have no efficacy. Of course, objects are caused to be pumps, i.e., their being pumps is a consequence of their parts having the properties they have and standing in the relations in which they stand. But all the causal work of pumps is explained by the properties and relations of the parts. It would be ludicrous to say that the movement of fluids has two causes, i.e., the push of the blades and the pumping. Explanation of the movements of fluids in terms of such things as rigidity and motion of the pump's parts has to be mentioned in any full account of those movements, and this kind of explanation explains everything that needs to be explained; thus the explanation in terms of rigidity and motion of the pump's parts excludes the property of being a pump from any explanatory role. Our intuition that pumps move fluids is just an illusion. Being a pump is a mere epiphenomenal property."

-Jaegwon Kim

When we read a book like Frankenstein, we recall few scenes or specific events as they were presented. What we come away with is a concept of what the whole of the novel evokes in our own chemistry.

I like to call this "Frankenstein as Epiphenomenalism."

Enterprise reflections expedition return glowing nature embarkation considerations renovating resolved sledge vessel wildness stranger madness man determined eyes Genevese love gardener cherub reverential feverently desire animate nature theories science omen died departure studies elementary dream zeal progress phenomena lifeless materials workshop months creation spark horror Frankenstein trembled concealing existence silence sickbed yield neglected ugly heart letter creature hilarity wretchedness mountains murdered figure pity frightful ignorance guilt grave God innocence blackest condemned ignominy acknowledged soul human fiend revenge tenderness savage oblivion torrents pines spirits begone abhor hunger animals fire bread wood hovel emotions extinguished companion consumption sympathized follow reception language affected enraptured listened creator relationships mind prove promise history lament Paradise Lost monstrous cursed desire prejudice condemned spark arose rage heartless sun meditate eternal fiend deformed demand justice persuade glaciers consume boat blind tale task machinations ocean being journey blood instruments sacrifice pursued squalid forebodings laboratory sophisms villain appetite apparatus reflect gushed conscious examination corpse succeeded loathing misery accident ghastly prison light lived alas secret countenance love free beloved comply regret bride flowers rays expire vain bodily daemon Alps loose barbarous mourner hell dreams night toils struck foe vengeance monster imagination escape children mankind cast blamable balancing stature repentance memory criminal end

It is made up of one word from each page of the novel. Reading through this, seemingly, is an alternative route to the same epiphenomenal experience: a stepping stone on the road to a post-literate age.

Radical Friend's Yeasayer video

2009-12-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

This video accomplishes two things:

1. Is completely parallel to all the neural circuitry patterns in the digitally transcendental aesthetics' brain

2. Gives steve graf goosebumps

Yeasayer - Ambling Alp from Spy Films on Vimeo.

Alice Fulton & Fractal Poetry

2009-11-29T17:11:00.000-08:00

Fulton is a poet and Cornell Professor interested in the science of poetics. Her paper on fractal verse is a mind-bogglingly intelligent look at literature and the beauty of mathematics. "About Face" is one of her more beautiful poems.

About Face
Because life's too short to blush,
I keep my blood tucked in.
I won't be mortified
by what I drive or the flaccid
vivacity of my last dinner party.
I take my cue from statues posing only
in their shoulder pads of snow: all January
you can see them working on their granite tans.

That I woke at an ungainly hour,
stripped of the merchandise that clothed me,
distilled to pure suchness,
means not enough to anyone for me
to confess.I do not suffer
from the excess of taste
that spells embarrassment:
mothers who find their kids unseemly
in their condom earrings,
girls cringing to think
they could be frumpish as their mothers.
Though the late nonerotic Elvis
in his studded gut of jumpsuit
made everybody squeamish, I admit.
Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.

Was the audience afraid of being tainted
--this might rub off on me--
or were they--surrendering--
what a femme word--feeling
solicitous--glimpsing their fragility
in his reversible purples
and unwholesome goldish chains?

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It's intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it.I almost wrote despise.

courtesy of Spacecollective

As 'Post-Art' comes to a close, it will be the artists who surrender their ego to the world of 'post-human' computation who will be the most important.

Digital Distortion

2009-11-27T14:57:00.000-08:00

Have we been familiar with television snow, blocked cable channels or breaks in control track long enough to have an evolutionarily disposition to react negatively to digital distortion?

Special Problems thinks not. With their new video for 'Community Service Announcement' for Jonathan Boulet, Special Problems juxtaposes chaotic digital distortion with the natural beauty of the woods. I'm a biased judge, but the former seems to be the more captivating ingredient, like an Oulipoian treatment of computer code.

The Post-Human

2009-11-23T11:07:00.000-08:00

Digital Transcendentalism is our capacity for a collective consciousness in our singular world.

We tap into the digital brahma and create art

Photograph by Timothy Saccenti

Digital Transcendentalism

2009-11-17T10:33:00.000-08:00

Freedom? yeahright.

2009-11-16T11:29:00.000-08:00

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will
-George Lichtenberg

United Snakes from Stephen Walker on Vimeo.

An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes

-Pierre Laplace

Touch and Taste

2009-11-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

TOUCH

a digital finger in the rippling pool of the Heraclitian digital river.

TASTE

digital pineapple poetry.

Everything is Everything

2009-11-09T20:22:00.000-08:00

Why? What makes it so that nearly everything we're made up of (along with everything we make) comes out looking the same. Is it the structure of chaos? Does that make any sense? The important diagram is that of the eye and the rays of photons entering. What is it that we are seeing? We only see colors, but really we only see photons. But can we really say that we 'see' photons or colors? What it should look like is electrical sparks, which is what our brain is doing to compute the sensory information of the empirical world. There is so much more filament between our appearances and the objects in the world as they are in themselves, it is remarkable.

Perhaps that is all we see: the electrical firings in the brain.

Math Abdicates the Ego

2009-11-08T20:56:00.000-08:00

There's this French club, founded in the 60's, for writers, The Oulipo, where artists developed all these weird constraints and limitations in order to help their writing find a new or bizarre voice. Members include Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau. Oulipo stands for “Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle/Potential Literature Workshop.” They were fans of things like lipograms (works excluding such and such letter [lipogram in e, lipogram in g]), palindromes, Snowball (A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer) and, my personal favorite, the n+7. This is a poem in which the author takes an old poem and replaces each noun with a noun seven dictionary entries away form the first. For example:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

becomes

To see a Worm in a Grampus of Sandblast
And a Hebe in a Wild Flu
Hold inflow in the palsy of your hangar
And Ethos in an housefly.

I find something really fascinating about this technique in that there is nothing the author adds to the poem whatsoever, outside of implementing the function. Some results are really astounding, but mostly the technique pumps out lines of poetry (or potential prose) that are mathematical functions that are, in the realm of art, beyond chaotic. It's brilliant, really. The process yield's strange, original lines that only a computing machine could create. I'm reminded of Deep Blue versus Kasparov. This was the fateful chess match between the world champion and the IBM computer. Kasparov claimed that the computer used moves that no one could have predicted: moves that were so strange and bizarre that it was nearly impossible to play as he ever had before. Maybe the age of artistic computers isn't so far off. Our art may be made up of simpler functions than we think.

Considering the beautiful world of fractals and other indifferent, mathematical art, maybe it is time for us to make some room for the robot da Vinchi?

Would the LHC kill its own grandfather?

2009-11-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

Not the LHC I know; but mistakes do happen.

The obvious, of course, being that the collider should have been colliding for more than a year now and hasn't. For those who don't know, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a massive (17 mile long track beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva) particle smasher running on the largest Xeon grid known to man looking to collide sub-atomic particles at near speed of light speeds in order to discover the great mysteries of the very early universe and how it is made up today. Some pseudo-mythological, grant grabbing players scientist are on the hunt for are 'The God Particle,' or 'Higgs Boson'(the particle that all massive things are made up of), and the gravitron's hypothesized movement to dimensions outside of our own.

Two prominent papers have been published recently that suggest the failure of the LHC is due to the experiment's "aberrance to nature." The papers, “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” cite the Grandfather paradox as basis for their hypothesis. These scientists believe that the Higgs Boson ripples back in time to stop the creation of one like a time traveller Killing its own grandfather.

As asinine as this theory appears, it does bring up an interesting paradox. What does happen when we go back through time and kill our grandfather. Many argue, similar to that of the LHC arguments, that we cannot do it: that our grandfather would simply bend over and tie his shoes as the bullet grazed by his head.

The answer to this paradox seems obvious to me, so it is probably confused (I haven't worked in particle physics since the late 60's), but isn't one of the major goals of this experiment to prove the existence of other dimensions, of possible universes? If there turn out to be other possible worlds, this paradox seems to disappear. Killing your grandfather would place you in a dimension in which your grandfather was determined to die before you were born -- a place outside of your universe where people don't kill their grandfathers.

The scheduled reanimation of the LHC is dated around Christmas. Spacetime will tell.

Explaining Explanation

2009-11-03T16:57:00.001-08:00

Ted, being one of the greatest sources of knowledge known to the modern man, carries with it the greatest minds of our times. David Deutsch is one of those minds.

Digitally Organic Monochrome Horses

2009-11-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

Why are artistic fads -- that are so clearly fads -- sometimes so intellectually satisfying, even in retrospect? Is it that we realize the genius of predecessors after their work has seen the public light?

WeWereMonkeys: Land of Talk - It's Okay from WeWereMonkeys on Vimeo.

This is the new Land of Talk video by WEWEREMONKEYS. It's a really beautiful take on this three way juxtaposition of nature, digital media, and chemical aesthetic of old-school, monochrome photography. It's ironic! kind of.

It is reminiscent of painter Michael Zavros's 2006 series of monochrome horses.

It is justification for the belief that horses are the quintessential representatives
of everything that is organic.

This is The Joy Division's 1988 video for atmosphere. It's timeliness is scary.

The Singularity

2009-10-31T00:55:00.000-07:00

If your not following this... you probably have never seen it.
http://spacecollective.org/

Space collective is a commonwealth of digital transcendentalists looking for humanity's next step into the future, be it through outer space, cyber space, or spacetime: a group of the most intelligent and most imaginative on the web. Spacecollective asks the big questions of self, freedom, and intelligence. The content is made up of anything from philosophical arguments to design models of lunar housing.

Check it out; your evolution depends on it.

A Homeric Journey Through the Collective Conscious of Thoreau

2009-10-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

From whatever afterlife meets us at our demise, Henry David Thoreau made clear his opinion of this blog to me today by way of organic vegetable vendors, Bjork, Larry King, and an impossibly hideous Chevrolet that I couldn't even find on the internet (thats how ugly) but could easily be substituted for such vehicles as the Lumina or the SSR Push. My journey began, as many do, upon an instance of stupidity; waking up from a long nap, I walked over to my bookshelf and imagined that I'd find Harry Stephen Keeler's The Riddle or the Traveling Skull waiting for me, but was hit by something blunt before I could get there: the realization that I did not, nor did I ever, own the book. Whatsthebigdeal? The Keeler book was assigned to me by Ed Park for his "Only Connect: Strategies for Writing" course. So, without much problem, I reserved the book at Barnes and Nobel in Union Square and walked downtown.
Why, you may be asking, would a professor ever assign a Harry Stephen Keeler novel? Isn't, you may be remembering, he the one who has been dubbed the worst mystery writer of all time? Wouldn't, you may be thinking, a writing professor assign a piece with substance and literary value? The answer: pending.
Did I just pick up and walk downtown right after reserving the book as I have said? No, not really. Anyone who has used the Barnes and Nobel book-pick-up-from-local-store system knows that it takes them an hour to send you a confirmation e-mail. So why do I say I reserved the book and started walking downtown? My meandering through the world wide web seemed irrelevant for most of my walk. I realized the importance of the Larry King debate between Anthony Bourdian and Jonathan Safran Foer in retrospect. They were debating the importance of meat in our diets. Jonathan Safran Foer's new book is called Eating Animals. Being one of my greatest literary heros, the announcement of this new book struck me as fuckingannoying, to say the least. Everything nutritionally biological in me sided with the chef, but the scene at Union Square, culminating in a paranormal connection between me and the late, great naturalist, shook my foundation.
You may be thinking, but what about that peta video I saw at my weed dealer's house or that chick grinding video or the effect of cattle production on the environment or the deadliness of e. coli or heart disease, and you are right, but did you ever take the livestock's intentions into consideration? What do these quasi conscious beings really want out of life? The answer, says Darwin, is to pass on their genetic makeup as far and wide as they can. Is it any mistake that meat cattle have evolved to fit our every need? Is it any mistake that we have wiped out practically every other species of cow on the planet to spread the genes of the ones that help us out for the things we want? Shake Shack Burgers? Our livestock have been outsmarting us into slaughtering them for food and, perhaps you're right, they need to be punished by shutting down factory farms and showing the livestock who's boss of this planet. (but seriously, can't we just keep on engineering? Couldn't we just adapt like we always do? Isn't that, like, our thing?)
Upon Union Square, Flying Lotus's mix of Bjork's 'All is Full Love' came on the ipod and I started getting that profound feeling that good music often puts on a person. This, Henry David Thoreau, was a dirty trick. Bjork is one of the most influential electronic artists of our time and should be out of your scope. There was construction going on in the park and, before I could realize, I was walking through a organic farmers market with all the staples of contemporary, anti-foodie banality: fresh fish vendors with long beards and long triton-like hair; fruit pushers with short, blonde dreads; zucchini peddlers with thick rimmed glasses, ponytails, and paint on their overalls. This is where the retrospective importance of the Larry King special hit me. This was kind of nice. This was the way farming was supposed to be: vegetables in the street. The song picks up and Bjork really starts to belt it out, "All is full of love, all is full of love, all is full of love," and I turn into the elevated area of the park to better orient myself and, like a scene from a disney princess movie circa 1969, squirrels, sparrows, larger unidentifiable birds and other (likely projected) woodland creatures came running out toward a woman with breadcrumbs.
"ALL IS FULL OF LOVE" (I'm trying to recreate this madness for you).
I picked up the book from Barnes and Noble and made my way home. I passed by the unnamed, hideous Chevy and thought, damn Henry, you got me. Maybe there's something to all this nature stuff that we keep fucking up.. Then I passed the United Cerebal Palsy of New York City building and thought, no, I've been right all along. I picked up some street meat on the same block and got back to my
apartment. My naturalist experience sat in my head like the eggplant on my lamb and rice. I didn't know what to do with it.
The first sentence of the Keeler book justified all my fears an arduously bad read:

I knew full well, when the Chinaman stopped me in the street that night and coolly asked me for a light for his cigarette, that a light for his cigarette was the last thing in the world he really wanted!

Isn't the nature of nature to die? Why was Thoreau haunting me with these images and feelings of transcendence (the bad kind). Thoreau and his ideas occupy the collective consciousness of our human world. That's his afterlife. That's all our chances at afterlife. Thoreau succeeded. He transcends his death. Our goals aren't too different. He called it spirituality; I call we call it a collective conscious. We have recently made amends. I just thought you should know.

Fantastic Planet and Jonas Burgert

2009-10-27T22:02:00.000-07:00

Fantastic Planet is a french film from the 70's based on the Stefan Wul Novel, Oms en Série. It is a visual and conceptual journey about the power of knowledge. It is a thought provoking, psychedelic allegory that is as timely as it is aesthetically relevant. I would love to see this remade today.

(Watch the entire piece on youtube).

The images reminded me immediately of the Berlin artist, Jonas Burgert.

Burgert is likely one of the most talented painters around today. His work is mystifying, beautiful and inspiring (Fever Ray's 'If I Had a Heart' video?). His current show is "Hitting Every Head," at the Haunch of Venison in London. Maybe he could take a crack at the Fantastic Planet remake?

Seriously though; am I right?

Where the Wild Things Are, Freedom, Descartes and Kant

2009-10-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

It is likely that anyone who has gone to see Where the Wild Things Are has had the similar revelation that at no point was Spike Jones interested in making a kids movie. There is something awe inspiring about this film that goes beyond the Urban Outfitters publicity, the bus ads, and the billboards. Where the Wild Things Are is a film that, like many before it, redefines our parameters for imagination.

Kant says this of our capacity for experience:

The I THINK must BE ABLE to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me.
-Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

As I looked over this today, I found something curious about his suggestion. If it were so that the I think (concepts) did not accompany a representation, we would not experience it. Could it be that some things exist in the world that we cannot see or experience because they do not fit our concepts of the world? This reminded me of Descartes and his famous argument for skepticism. Descartes had dreams, he claimed, that felt as though they could be real and of his waking life. This, therefore, meant that he could not be certain whether he was dreaming or not... ever. But did Descartes have dreams that were as surreal as some of ours tend to be now, in light of such perceptual stimuli as Where the Wild Thins Are and its visually stimulating predecessors? Could he have?

The realism of this film makes me believe that Descartes could not have had the imagination I have, or any of us have. A film like Where the Wild Things Are allows us to conceptualize the impossible. Our experience is able to lay outside the confines of the laws of nature. Our deterministic loop is synthesized with something Descartes or Kant could have never imaged. The predictions we make and, in turn, the decisions we make are constituent upon more than our experience of the natural world. In this way, even our freedom exceeds that of people existing just a few hundred years ago. Where our memories and experiences inform our patterns and predictions, a plane of meta-experience (experience beyond that of the natural world) affords us an avenue of freedom never experienced before.

As film production technology advances, and the experiences we are able to cognize expand, the things that make us conscious humans change. Was this Spike Jones's plan all along? Probably not, but it is the nature of art to expand our consciousness in whatever way it can. This film, to me, was a life-altering step in the right direction. If for no other reason than that, Where the Wild Things Are is one of the most important films of our time.

Nature After 'After Nature'

2009-10-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

Maybe there's some kind of evolutionary cause, or some kind of genetic tick –- or side effect –-, but the human desire to recreate the complex, unintentional patterns of nature is astounding.

Tara Donovan
is a brooklyn based artist who works with staples of human design, i.e. pencils, drinking straws, styrofoam cups, assembling natural landscapes that invoke images bacteria beneath a microscope or a mossy field.

Non-format'sinnovative "Peroxide" campaign is just one of the many digital invocations of nature. Combining photography and digital images, the result is a kind of interstellar milkshake: the natural kind.

Likely the purest and most digitally transcendental example of the manifestation of nature in digital art is that of Commonwealth Design Studio. With their lard series, Commonwealth not only captures the idiosyncrasies of nature in a digital schematic, but were able to reproduce these beautiful pieces in the physical world.

http://www.commonwealth.nu/projects/61/lard

These brooklyn based designers reek of innovation. Their work is both beautiful and inspiring in way that convinces me I am living in an age where Rembrandt is a furniture designer.

If their work looks familiar, you may recognize the masks from Timothy Saccenti's show, The Garden of Unearthly delights (just a few posts down).

Tauba Auerbach

2009-10-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

Besides the obvious aesthetic beauty that Auerbach produces in her captivatingly deadpan works, what makes her so mystifyingly fascinating? I am reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke and his invention of the 'thing-poem.' He, working closely under the influence of Rodan, thought that a poet could produce a poem that was a kind of thing that you could hold and examine. Auerbach turns that on its head by reaching into our most geometrical constructs for perception and pulling out... things.

Her art, like that of Rilke's, is a move from the metaphysical to the physical. Her paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs all embody the a priori places in us that lack a place in our material world. Her work on the digital world is the same. Auerbach takes the intangible world of waves and distortions and captures them in a way that demands contemplation.

here

Sayonara Film

2009-10-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

Was it Jean Cocteau who said that film would never be an art form until it was as cheap as paint and brushes? The day is steadily approaching. Deal with the results America!

http://ubu.com/film/trecartin_kcorea.html

This is the work of artist Ryan Trecatrin. If your terrified, don't be terrified; its terrifying and is meant to be. Being one of the more ugly things I've seen, there is something hypnotizing about it. The process of watching says as much about what make us a society as the content.

http://ubu.com/film/trecartin_sibling.html

This piece is in the same vein but longer and slightly more narrative. Give it a chance. By the end, you sort of feel like you've been punched in the face... in a good way. and don't forget, as the great Diderot said, "There's no one who doesn't put the existing order on trial, without noticing he's renouncing his own existence."

Apologies for the links

The Garden of Unearthly Delights and Kant

2009-10-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

"The mind could not possibly think of the identity of itself in the manifoldness of its representations, and indeed think this a priori, if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its action, which subjects all synthesis of apprehension (which is empirical) to a transcendental unity, and first makes possible their connection in accordance with a priori rules"
-Immanuel Kant The Critique of Pure Reason

You tell'em Kant! The consciousness of self is constituent upon the consciousness of the unity of apperception (the unity of objects all around the world FOREVER!!) and vise versa.

This idea is insanely compelling and (as many things are with Kant and traditional philosophy) so common sensical. A few months back, I wrote a piece for Timothy Saccenti's show, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, where this idea is manifested in a story of creation. The original story and concept belong to Tim. He is a genius down many avenues, creating images for the show that are surreal and beautiful.

DIESEL DENIM GALLERY ART EXHIBITION #9, Garden of Unearthly Delights, Timothy Saccenti from Caroline Celis on Vimeo.

This is the piece.

Of the Singularity and the Improbability of Existence

In three opposite and indifferent dimensions, black expanses unfold and encompass all matter, potential and otherwise, shattering silence and a tactile emptiness in all directions. There is nothingness, tangible as the paradox implies, in every corner of the non-existent verities of the particular universe – no eyes to see nor fingers to touch. Directionless and without a center, the lacuna is a possible universe void of possibility and rapt with patience. Change, given the great virtue of patience, is both impossible and inevitable in this cold, isolated reality.
Time is a direction and a space. The terrific darkness of this possible world explodes and reaches towards and through this vector, intertwining with the oldest and the newest of space in a thick fabric of black dimensions. Beneath the flat darkness is a deep and tumbling labyrinth of dimensional throughways that is beyond perception – blackness within blackness within blackness. Whatever would be is intangible and suffocated like sunshine drowned in oil.
The place is an impossibility. Nothing is material, only weak potential: empty glass containers beginning to learn the art of reflecting light. Tall, smooth pendulums of clear glass support bubbled domes of more nothing. Segmented and parallel, emptiness becomes the common denominator and from nothing – and only nothing ¬– comes something.

Of Existence and The Possible Universe

In a plane of existence where time is absolute, the potential for anything sparks a causal and deterministic chain of events where any possibility becomes a necessary reality. Under one glass roof is a paradise – under another, a desert. Each is as fragile as the frequency of the glass in which it occupies.
The particular dome retains mostly nothingness. Darkness surrounds and invades it. Energy is consumed by wanderlust. Bouncing and reflecting off the probable glass surface in the possible universe, a space was created with the aesthetic of curiosity. The trait is carried through inanimate masses and into complex life.

Of The Possible Universe and Its Inhabitants

A pulsating glow emanates in vibrant, bountiful waves before all encompassing black negates it and smothers the light to nothing. Again and again, the light billows like the smoke from a fire then dies like a bittersweet memory: a figment of some idealistic imagination. As the pale, pink light waxes and wanes, the borders of the darkness become spacious then narrow. Like hungry fingers, luminance reaches out around a pale figure to explore and feel the space around it. The light radiates in a chord protruding from the creature’s stomach, wrapped loosely around the body like a cumbersome article of clothing. Headless, though upright on slender legs below a torso with delicate arms, the creature wades through the darkness with only a feeble blink of perspective, lost, mostly, in uncertainty, comprehending only the feel and shape of its own form. The creature moves listlessly through the void, allowing one step to thoughtlessly beget the next. Like a non-existent strong force of gravity, the tall, slender creature is pulled along the glossy ground like the gears of a clock. Its slivery skin slices through space with determined precision. One foot touches down, then the next.
The creature’s is a form to contemplate. Of what stretch of existence does it occupy – for what reason does it walk?
“The ground,” it might say, given the capacity or will to communicate, “It comes up at me with each and every stride I take towards the darkness.”
But it does not communicate nor recognize matter outside of itself and therefore knows no conscious action, purposeful or not. There is no language to frame its thoughts, nor understanding of any spatial counterpart, denying the internal exchange of a conscious being. The particular mechanics of this possible creature places the being nowhere and everywhere. Time neither exists for the creature or for its universe. Each step is identical to the next in each and every calculable way. The creature’s spatial position is a quantum possibility at any given moment on an elliptical timeline of unseen dimensions.

Of The Inhabitants and Their Life Cycle

It is born and dies in the light. The long and vibrant umbilical grows longer and brighter as the creature continues through life – wrapping again and again about the body, fighting against the force that pulls it toward the ground. Eventually, the weight and the blinding light overcome the creature. A being emerges from the white space that is identical to the organism before it in all measurable and calculable ways besides the chord of light. The new being has a flat stomach where a new chord will grow.

Of a Particular Creature in a Particular Moment

An eternity or a moment ends in a flash as the light of its belly is reflected off an object in the distance. In this life shattering instant, the creature understands its special relationship with the void around it and the object in the distance (perhaps ten paces away). It freezes in a state of solidarity and minuteness that it has neither the capacity nor the physical means to articulate in any way but silence. Time begins rapturously as the creature realizes a moment that is different from the last.
Faced with a stimulus to which it has no natural or behavioral response, the creature walks in the direction of the reflected light with purpose and intrigue. Aware and connected to the space around it in a way that has never been experienced before, the creature gains a capacity for the intelligent gift of irrationality. For no other reason but curiosity, the creature, on hands and knees, approaches the object in the distance.
Upon the object, the creature kneels down and handles the reflected light as if it were just that. Its hands feel a surface that is similar to its own. The object is hard and opaque, but moveable. With its curious and awkward hands, the creature lifts the object and handles all of its intricate curves and textures. The touch is different than the creature’s own. It is harder. Coarse, dry strands of a completely different texture hang from the base of the object like hair. The creature understands a feeling of uniqueness less dramatic and more precise than before. There was before, it thought wordlessly, and there is now.
The spatial anomaly was shaped like an elongated face with large, distended eye sockets and a wide, symmetrical jaw from which the hair like strands protruded. The face immediately became a part of the creature, as it had never experienced anything so similar to itself. The creature lifts the face upwards and fixes it to the void between its shoulders. The creature suddenly is able to see in a way it never could before. It sees the hot light from the cord in its stomach glowing in all directions. This new face catches the light so precisely, that the creature is able to consider the dimensions of its own body without the aid of touch. It looks down at its hands and sees light reflecting differently than from the rest of its body. The coarse, hairy strands sweeping across its chest reflect yet a different way with momentously similar yet deeply distinguishable imperfections in its reflectivity. The new sensation is natural and familiar, as though it was a part of the creature all along.
Two objects, both following separate and parallel paths, realize an extended place. They meet and the experience of two roads is synthesized in one being.

Of The Particular Creature in The Garden

Standing still, the creature looks out into the void and notices a light shining high in the sky. The light holds shape and the creature stares at it blankly. Against the tenacious darkness, it sees the light in the sky and its own light. The familiar sensation of uniqueness changes and reconstitutes itself resiliently. With pensive eyes, the creature can no longer distinguish where one light begins and the other ends. A long path cuts through the blackness beginning at the creature and ending at the symbol in the sky. It follows the light in wonderment and awe. The light becomes brighter and reaches farther and farther into the darkness until it stops and the creature finds itself in a circle of light not its own.
At the center of the circle is an object standing upright and still. A thin trunk grows from the ground and breaks into thinner and thinner braches holding flat leaves similar to the texture of the creatures face. Hanging off of the structure is a round and spiny orb that seems to have grown from the branches. The creature is transfixed by the pod and feels a strange affinity towards it. It smells the sweet scent of life.
The circle is bright. Reflected light enters the creature’s sensory apparatus and dazzles its being with colors and shapes. It walks awkwardly about the tree, looking intensely in all directions. The creature’s legs seem to intertwine beyond the complexity of only two appendages. The creature trips and falls only to get up without noticing.

Of The Garden and Meaning

Amidst the creature’s awe, and out of the darkness, a second creature walks into the light. The second humanoid creature is of the same type as the first with more dramatic angles and a distended stomach. There is a similar object resting between the creature’s shoulders that she moves about as an appendage. The texture of the facial object is similar to that of the first creature’s, but the shape is not the same. The angles are softer and curve in unison with the voluptuous body. The hair-like material fans from the mouth and over the chest.
They look at each other passionately, as though projecting wonder and curiosity onto their counterpart. The creature develops a feeling of relation with its counterpart. Both organisms feel the warmth of life in the other. They recognize a shape that is shared.
Looking back at the tree, the creatures see the majestic, spiny pod and reach towards it. The first creature pulls it from the tree and hands it to the second. The pregnant creature squeezes the pod until the spines break skin and secrete and clear, stringy liquid. It hands the pod back to the first creature who does the same. They reach out their hands and feel the congruency in the other’s. Clear liquid oozes from the creature’s hands and is spread about their bodies in passionate strokes. The second creature rubs it’s pregnant belly, thickly glossing the vessel. As they touched, the color of their facial apparatuses changed. Speaking to each other and to themselves, they communicated and found consciousness.
From the belly of the second creature, a child is born. A cool, breezy force comes over the creatures. Leaves on the tree, ripped from their branches, fly past them. After the endless meander through the darkness, meaning has entered their lives. Weightlessness overcomes them and gravity is suspended, but it is all right.

Thanks To Timothy Saccenti

The Transcendental Aesthetic

2009-10-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

Is there something metaphysical about our dreams? Is it fair to say that there is something metaphysical about something, that is, some...thing. Is it fair to say there is nothing metaphysical about something while saying anything at all? Digital media brings life to the meta-nature of our dreams. Youtube videos bring light to our deepest, darkest meta-natured dreams. As apparatuses between our mind and the physical word get smaller, we see more and more of what we're really made of.

Until then, portraying the true otherworldlyness of our dreams and subconscious relies on the digital world.

And thank goodness.

Why Digital Transcendentalism?

2009-10-20T00:04:00.000-07:00

Mute, and slip on your favorite SIgur Ros song. Take that Ralf Waldo Emerson!