larger project

co-evolution of models of media; models of cognition; models of life

differential relations and mutations of these models

media practices at the heart of mutations

How dramatic are these mutations?

Modernity ending (if it ever came together)

Kantian ideas and institutions challenged

“Consciousness”? “Cognition”? “Life”?

Are network ecologies making contemporary forms of interaction somewhat traumatic?

The living being is above all a thoroughfare, and ... the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted.

(Bergson, 1911)

Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow’s Derive ...

I lay my hands upon an ‘anatomically correct model of a human body lying supine on a table. Set into this body are some 100 proximity, pressure, light and sounds sensors and a theremin’

(http://www.ucalgary.ca/~einbrain/derive.htm)

Interaction as the enjoyment of assemblage

Bergson and Whitehead

perception a key process within life, not only a supplement

this includes technically mediated perception

Simon Penny’s Petit Mal (1995)

(http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/petitmal/petitcode

.html )

Life and Technics

Often thought in terms of the future ...

But what about now - the life led in concert with technics?

3 bases:

1. life interactive from start (and the real as “occasions of experience

2. perceptions, sensations, actions and mediations crucial components within life

3. technics as the very essence of human life (Stiegler)

the globalisation of media technics

global mnemotechnics - the global technics of memory

embodied and (technically) extended mind as applied to life

the lived/thought as thoroughfare for perceptions, sensations and actions as well as biochemical transduction

life/thought as interactive assemblage, meta-medium or network ecology

to live is to assemblage and mediate interactions

..... in active self-enjoyment

Perception, Sensation, Interaction

not representation to pre-existing subject

not communication between self and distinct world

perception arises from our interactive immersion in world

we are interactive images amongst other interactive images

an image is any sensation (not just visual)

Simon Penny’s Traces (1998-2000)

(http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/traces/

http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/traces/Tracescode.html)

… from action, that is to say from our faculty of effecting changes in things, a faculty attested to by consciousness and toward which all the powers of the organized body are seen to converge. So we place ourselves at once in the midst of extended images, and in this material universe we perceive centers of indetermination, characteristics of life. In order that actions may radiate from these centers, the movements or influences of the other images must be, on the one hand, received and, on the other hand, utilized.

Living matter, in its simplest form and in a homogeneous state, accomplishes this function simultaneously with those of nourishment and repair … perception arises from the same cause which has brought into being the chain of nervous elements, with the organs which sustain them and with life in general. … Perception, in its pure state, is, then, in very truth, a part of things.

(Wardip-Fruin, McClain, Greenlee, and Carroll’s Screen [2002]).

(http://hyperfiction.org/screen/)

life actualised via centres of indetermination

sensation arises from the relational movement of images

habits and novelty

a temporal, interactive emergent self (as network ecology)

Dance Dance Revolution

(http://www.konami.co.jp/am/ddr/)

Routine and Novelty

Whitehead - ‘life and offensive, directed against’ repetition

aim beyond repetition while remaining immanent to it

life is a bid for freedom + a bid for a ‘certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment’

but these are specific and contingent -> ‘occasions of experience’

The More Interactive it Gets ... the more networked ...

the more intense are the differences that emerge within repetitions

differential intensity if literally felt (i.e. lived) within interactions

this is not cosy - shifting network ecologies require adaptation and create a desire for control

only partial control possible - it’s really participation (at best)

Sony’s Eye Toy

… the actualised data presented by the antecedent world, the non-actualized potentialities which lie ready to promote their fusion into a new unity of experience, and the immediacy of self-enjoyment which belongs to the creative fusion of those data with those potentialities.

Levitation Grounds (Joyce Hinterding & David Haines, [2000-2002]) (http://www.caos.org.au/members/galleries/THE_LEVITATION_GROUNDS/)

Networks, Life and Society

network society as an ongoing ‘evocation of intensities’ (Whitehead)

not just the operation of cognitive artefacts and fixed symbols

life in the gaps - in the interstices of cells, the brain, world

Social Context is not Enough

1. ‘no nature apart from transition’ (fixed symbolic relations not enough to account for this transition)

2. assemblages of occasions include but go beyond the social

3. relations are interactive events (and events relations) and not just social relations and events

4. so social has to be put within highly contingent networked ecologies

Ulrike Gabriel’s Breath (1992)

(http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/breath/)

Final borders dissolving between

embodiment/world

abstraction/symbolisation/cognition

We can feel it, not only in connections but in interstices

Problems

Ecologies not always “nice”

production of novelty is the basis for new modes of labour and Capital (Virno’s ‘virtuosity’)

“Worked Life”

1. reduction of life to work

2. biotechnology

3. working of life via new networks of perception and mediation

The ‘General Intellect’ (Virno)

functionalist ‘linguistic-cognitive faculties common to the species’

global technics of mediated memory

cognitivism?

marketing, performative statements, “excellence”

“life” can be understood as the argumentative mix of technical virtuosities via which life plays itself out in an ongoing manner.

The end of modernity?

not to mention cognition, consciousness, democracy, education

tertiary (technical) retentions

fourth (technical) synthesis

‘What’s at stake is an ecology of the mind’ (Stiegler)

--> trauma, but a quiet trauma

functionalist “linguistic-cognitive faculties common to the species” (Paulo Virno)

and/versus

“deep design” (Richard Slaughter)