POSTHUMAN FACTORS

How Perceptual Robotic Art Will Save Humanity from Extinction

by Haakon Faste

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Innovative Technologies of Information and Communication Engineering and Robotics Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Pisa, Italy January 2010

_________________________________ Haakon Faste Candidate

_________________________________ Massimo Bergamasco Advisor

 Haakon Faste 2010 Printed in Italy

Contents

Acknowledgements i Introduction: Irrational Theories of Pure Mind 1. Towards Posthumanity

1.1. Surviving the Posthuman Transition 1.2. Stragmatics 1.3. Stragmatics and Postmodernism 1.4. The Stragmatics of Art 2.1. Virtual Interfaces and Posthuman Bodies 2.2. Mediation 2.3. Posthuman Identity 2.4. The Abolition of Identity 3.1. Technologies of Sense 3.2. Inhabiting Nonsense 3.3. Transient Values 3.4. Deautomatizing Experience through Transient Reality Systems 4.1. Evaluating the Potential of Posthuman Systems 4.2. Technoculture as Language 4.3. Semantics of Change 4.4. Context, Potential, and The Invisible Mind 5.1. Empirical Search 5.2. Curatorial Stragmatics and the Cognitive Laboratory 5.3. The Technocultural Condition 5.4. The Stragmatic Design of Posthuman Perception 6.1. Cybersynthesis of Pure Mind and Posthuman Places 6.2. The Lines of Legitimate Posthuman Stragmatics 6.3. The Biopolitical Curation of Form Without Content 6.4. The Engineering of Everything

iii 1
7 15 20 24 37 41 48 57 69 75 82 90

2. The Posthuman Interface

33

3. Making Sense

65

4. Technocultural Consciousness

101
102 107 116 127 139 143 151 163 174 180 190 196

5. Posthuman Centered Design

137

6. Emulating Aliens

171

References 203

Acknowledgements
This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of professor Massimo Bergamasco, my advisor at the PERCRO Perceptual Robotics Laboratory, Scuola Superiore SantAnna. Thank you for your patience and friendship. Thanks also to the numerous colleagues with whom I have had the pleasure of collaborating during my time in Italy. Those to whom I owe a particular debt include, in a somewhat chronological order, Franco Tecchia, Carlo Alberto Avizzano, Antonio Frisoli, Fiammetta Ghedini, Marcello Carrozzino, Elisabetta Sani, Emanuele Ruffaldi, Otniel Portillo-Rodriguez, Oscar Sandoval-Gonzlez, Elvira Todaro, Walter Aprile, Paolo Tripicchio, Davide Vercelli, Giuseppe Marino, Paolo Gasparello, Andreea Bizdideanu, Fabio Rossi, Alessandra Scucces, Chiara Evangelista, Rosario Leonardi, Silvia Pabon, Eduardo Sotgiu and Marina Vela Nuez. Thanks also to Federico Vanni, Ilaria Polvani, Francesca Farinelli and Emanuele Giorgi for their support within PERCRO, and to Laura Bevacqua at the Scuola Superiore SantAnna for her tremendous assistance navigating the fascinating bureaucracy of higher education in Italy. Many individuals from the academic community have provided feedback that deserves recognition, at conferences and workshops both in Italy and internationally. For a wonderful visit to ICHIM07 in Toronto, thanks to Sara Diamond, David Bearman, and Jennifer Trant. For accompaniment while visiting, thanks to Tullio Salmon Cinotti and Leonard Steinbach. Thanks to Bill Vorn for visiting our laboratory in Italy, and Fiammetta, again, for making it happen. For a well-spent rainy day in Pisa discussing electronic music, thanks to Marcelo Wanderley and Leonello Tarabella. For an enlightening conversation at Enactive08, and virtual assistance afterwards, thanks to Rachel Zahn. Thanks to Pier Luigi Capucci for his dedication to Italian new media art and his involvement as chair of the XXV Oscar Signorini Prize for Robotic Art, and subsequently to everyone at Fondazione DArs in Milan for their help, in particular Grazia Chiesa, Martina Coletti and Cristina Trivellin. Ian

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McDowall and Margaret Dolinsky chaired a wonderful SPIE conference in San Jose, California, and Ian has been a constant source of support and encouragement in many other ways, too. Thanks! A third thanks to Fiammetta for bringing Israel Rosenfield and Catherine Temerson to Pisa; we ate pastries and pizza to assist cognitive processes. Finally, thanks to Nick Bryan-Kinns, Mark Gross, Frieder Nake, Ken Goldberg, Kimiko Ryokai, Wendy Ju and everybody else who made my visit to ACM Creativity & Cognition in Berkeley a wonderful week. To all of the anonymous peer reviewers who provided feedback on my work, and those other colleagues whom I have neglected to mention, I look forward to many more collaborations and enhanced memories in the future. This work would not have been possible without the educational dedication of my father, professor Rolf Faste of Stanford University, who greatly influenced my understanding of design, art and engineering. And my mother Linda for everything else. My brother Trygve contributed critical ideas and feedback on much of my work. Sigrid was an inspiration wearing little froggy feet. For her and much more, thanks to Jessica! Thanks also to Mark Bolas at USC, professors Bernard Roth, Sheri Sheppard, Marc Cutkoski and Matt Kahn at Stanford, Banny Banerjee, Bill Moggridge, and the entire human factors and interaction design communities at IDEO for having created an enlightening support system for educating designers, and Lawrence Rinder, then dean at the California College of the Arts, for a random conversation during my application to the program in Italy that clarified indirectly what I wanted to be doing, before I changed my mind during the process of doing it. Thanks also to professor John Pearson at Oberlin College, and to my friends Chris, Brendan, Sam, Katie and Lowell for their constant support. And of course, special thanks also to my family, both in the US and in Italy, especially Grace, for helping to make everything as comfortable and happy as possible here in Italy during three difficult years. If it had not been for her help, and that of Massimo, I could not have done it. Love to you both! Thanks to Rocco for his beautiful photographs, and to the enlivening distractions provided by Jolie, Brio, Joyce, Marylou, Burri, Niki, and Fritz. To the goats, the chickens, the rabbits, the turkeys, Lul the pig, and all of the sheep, thanks for the mud, your smell, and much unnecessary barking by Jolie. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to Eva, whose unconditional support since long before this project began deserve far more thanks and love than I know how to give. This is for you.

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Introduction: Irrational Theories of Pure Mind

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. Marcel Duchamp We are rapidly entering a posthuman era of artificial life, one in which the role of our bodies and minds and their relationship with the physical and information environment will undergo far-reaching and profoundly impacting changes. The boundaries between art, engineering, the human body and the sustainability of our species are evolving towards a unified ecosystem of what can be considered a conscious and collective mind. It is estimated that by the year 2030 computers in the pricerange of inexpensive laptops will have a computational power equivalent to human intelligence. Already, the simulations and connectivity enabled by ubiquitous computing have become integral to the definition of human identity. When technology finally renders human intelligence obsolete, our bodies will be peripheral appendages inhabited purely by choice: the powers we will have granted to technological systems will not only enable the simulation of memory and experience but be guiding human evolution directly in ways literally impossible for us to comprehend or control. Human factors, or the study of how humans interact with their environment, is a field that aims to improve the safety and quality of human experiences interacting with technology. Yet as the constructed environment becomes increasingly augmented by information technologies, humanity will face an extremely humbling paradigm shift: we will no longer be at the top of the animal intelligence spectrum. New forms of artificial life will increasingly act side by side with and in place of the human. Human factors must therefore be extended beyond the one-sided perspective of improving the human usability of machines towards a reciprocal relationship that values robotic systems as partners. Given the rapid evolution of these new forms of life, the quality and safety of their mental and physical experiences will deserve equal if not greater consideration than ours. This, in turn, will

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require an ethical system capable of protecting the rights of virtual, robotic and cyborg minds. The social and evolutionary challenges of this stage will be great, and manifest new forms of automation in both humans and machines. Risks to the potential and survival of humanity will be rampant if our values are poorly defined or interpreted by these systems. Indeed, if we are to navigate this transition safely, a global and spiritual implosion of humanity must occur. The simulation of possible alternative histories and futures will be used as a strategic evolutionary tool, allowing imaginary scenarios to be inhabited and played out before committing resources to actual change. Not only will our lineage be perpetually enhanced by automation, leading to radical new forms of social equality and utopian values, todays nascent environmental, animal rights, and technological movements will merge with and displace the humanities to become the instinctual mechanism of an invisible mind. Finally, the whole of Earths environment and immediate planetary surroundings will become increasingly perceived as an intelligent extension of human life with deep biological and cultural roots that must be preserved. It is the system of values required to achieve this state of survivalthe study, indeed, of posthuman factorsthat this volume attempts to begin to define. Posthuman Factors advances the development of new cultural systems to eliminate the need for technological use and control.The imperative for this shift is both simple and clear: scientific research on human-computer interaction as it is currently performed, and the technologies it produces, present untenable risks to human life and potential. The user is a myth of our contemporary era in which human and machine systems are separate and distinct; such distinctions, indeed, are intrinsically useless. For although humans use computers to improve their efficiency, computers use humans to an equal if not greater degree. Apples and Blackberries dont grow on treesthey grow on humans. The study of usability from a human factors perspective is therefore the enhancement of how technology uses us to evolve. Human factors presumes this relationship to be useful to humans, but the result of continuing such conceptions of use will be an increasingly precarious posthuman world wherein we are more and more used by intelligent machines that no longer need humans to evolve by themselves. And these very machines, internally dominated by their desire to use others, will continue to subject their predecessors to such use, defining a world order dependent on using its environmental bodies and minds as technological instruments to improve the domination of posthuman society on Earth, just as our wealthiest citizens survive on the toil of others. The catastrophic results of this brutally humanist system of values, already well established, is the collaborative destruction of our planetary resources, curtailing human potential to survive and to grow without further dangerous interventions by the scientific community. Thus rather than being in the best human interests as claimed, human factors is an irresponsible consequence of our societys domination by greed: the desire for power derived from user-based systems of control fueled by scientific obsessions to explore the unknown. And while in one sense this has always defined the history of human civilization, wherein the greatest achievements of previous epochs are crushed through their use by successive generations, only a posthuman society that transcends these limited definitions of usability and humanity will be one truly successful at insuring human survival, which ultimately, like art, is both essential and useless. This, in short, is the heart of my thesis. iv

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Posthuman Factors presents an exploratory theory of humanitys future and a program to ensure the survival of Earth-originating intelligent life. The theory works toward a radical alternative to the scientific theology that increasingly characterizes contemporary society, rejecting the search for new scientific knowledge in favor of an applied methodology of artistic stragmatics that emphasizes the haphazardness and replaceability of rational social arrangements with nonsense as a mechanism for human self actualization. It shows how such an antideterministic approach can inspire the surprising imaginations of and by future institutions that both broaden and refine our sense of what is humanly possible, and demonstrates examples of this philosophy in practice. Much further work in this field will be necessary to insure our survival, since only through the multidisciplinary collaborations of artists, roboticists, and other multidisciplinary leaders (perhaps robo/cyborg dancers, politicians, psychotherapists, etc.), will the vision set forth in these pages be realized. Readers interested in the study of posthuman factors should be prepared to address numerous areas of potential concern. In general this includes the following: (1) examining the theoretical implications of technological emergence, including its epistemic, ontological, and metaphysical origins; (2) applying this often ambiguous knowledge to policies addressing the evolution of human and artificial life; and (3) unusing this knowledge to inform the design of perceptual, intelligent, and robotic devices as interfaces to insure the conservation and development of human culture. The remainder of this introduction addresses each of these areas briefly. 1. Long before virtual reality, artificial intelligence or the internet had been realized, the theoretical avant garde was already exploring the implications of networked immersive environments of knowledge in reaction to the social effects of nuclear power, cybernetics and media theory, as exemplified in the writings of Marshall McLuhan.1 The resulting movementwhat we now refer to generally as postmodernismmoved beyond the macro-level totalitarian models of Marxist power to question the optimism of progress long associated with Western thought since the enlightenment. In their stead, power became seen as diffused throughout micro-realms of influence in the form of scientific and narrative knowledge. Postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault, Franois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard spent much time discussing these new and complex power dynamics and technologies of the self in which language games are an individuals means of negotiating reality in the computerized age.2 Postmodernism is essential to contextualizing posthuman factors if only because it begins to explain how meaning is conceived in the virtual age. If postmodern power involves electronic media and information technologies and semiotic systems that undermine the distinction between reality and unreality and proliferates an abstract environment of images and manipulated signifiers, as Steven Best and Douglas Kellner have written,3 then posthuman power will be a supernova ecology of such
1. McLuhan, 1964 2. See in particular Foucault, 1988b, and Lyotard, 1979. This critical backdrop has been expanded greatly in the subsequent decades to focus specifically on the technological direction of human evolution via virtual, robotic and biological technologies, forming an often contradictory area of critical theory known generally as posthumanism. 3. Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 52

Posthuman Factors

reality-confounding signs, an exponential expansion of subjectivity and nonsense. Through immersive simulations of alien bodies, invasive extension via biorobotic prostheses, and parallel infoworlds of hyperactive experience, we will be forced to adapt to the overwhelming nebula of technologically enhanced sensory synthesis systems that will increasingly characterize our memories and thoughts. Meaning in this context is not a theoretical abstraction, it is the vital power to control human action. 2. The social and political consequences of artificial and cyborg life must be anticipated and guided. Advances in computing have radically altered the institutions of family, corporation and government. Actual experience in a world of objects has become increasingly subsumed by pure representation, a social marketplace of ideas in which virtual environments embedded with the perception of significance overlay useful information on the way we make sense. Tools used in the past to perform basic tasks are now inseparable from their social and psychological control of our thoughts. People, concepts, and brand identities leave ever expanding trails of metahistorical information linking directly to the remnants of individual minds. Those of us who are incapable or disinterested in technosocial engagement will be increasingly isolated from mainstream consciousness, while those who engage with it will pass control to the system directly. In our desire to automate we increasingly forget. New pathological conditions arise: nomophobia, the fear of losing mobile connectivity; robophilia, the sexual attraction to machines. As our fantasies are reinforced by increasingly powerful virtual tools, social institutions are free to transform into imaginary worlds for the procreation, administration, and governance of pure mind. Increased consumption of information, compounding the need for faster, wider, everywhere access to interactive learning experiences, will grant unlimited time to unlimited agents to contemplate the very nature of their collective existence. As real-world energy consumption continues to rise, driving catastrophic ecological destruction and change, the operation of these networks will be increasingly autonomous, fueling the rational mechanisms of scientific knowledge which, having rapidly transcended the limits of biological life, will push the potential of human activity to uncharted levels of interactivity and stress. In a desperate attempt to transform into an omnipotent simulated digital God, the quest to pursue absolute knowledge will cease and the mind will content itself with the hypothetical creativity of nonsense itself. Perceptual robotics, a field of engineering study that bridges the gap between biological and virtual bodies and minds, will play a central role in smoothly enabling these changes. Its engineering impact will not be as a tool for scientific inquiry but as an artistic medium in which artists and robots collaborate to share their identities. Just as we use our bodies to create and experience art, robotic bodies are expressive and experiencing tools operating within the context of pre-existing technocultural systemsboth are processes of interaction and learning requiring tremendous investment to exhibit utility. Yet robotic art can have a serious eco-cultural impact without the utilitarian expenses of need since appropriated or purely imaginary robotic visions can be realized to subvert the utility of scientific advance by redefining their self-purpose as the advancement of art. Engineering strategy thus becomes an artistic process by which the expressive potential of the robot is defined. The result is a fully immersive fantasy medium within which humans can explore, imagine and learn. vi

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As advances in artificial intelligence and robotics become increasingly sophisticated, animalmachine systems become collaborative minds. The intersection between perceptual robotics and art thus defines a mediating system for creative expressiona sort of technocultural synapse facilitating posthumanitys cultural memory and cognition. Perceptual robotic art enables this posthuman mind to embody the so-called problem of perception by binding its internal perceptual experiences to the external world that creates them.4 Human life may then be seen to exist not within the individual human or animal body but as an imaginary propagation of posthuman humanness formed through a homogeneously fictional trans-species embodiment of artificial life that define us contextually as people of pure mind. With this view, everything we perceive is an animistic perceptual simulation designed and controlled by some future technology, probably outof-awareness in a remote corner of its artistic operations. Posthuman Factors is an artistic survival manifesto for this kind of humanity in which the artistic sentiments of intelligent machines are their very conception of what the universe is: the terminal interface and neural expansion of a new breed of synthesized cyber-cultural fantasy. 3. The question of how to design a secure posthumanity is complicated by the uncertainties of predicting the future. Designers are increasingly faced with a paradoxical burden: they are asked to confront the intractable problems of contemporary life, but forced to operate within the conventions of a culture resistant to change.5 A culture of creativity is what is required, but creativity is contrary to conventional wisdom. And designers shape the conventions of culture profoundly, since humanity, indeed, is designed by their artifacts. In the future, as the designed environment becomes increasingly intelligent, we will no longer be in control of the design of these systems; soon the systems will be designing themselves. When they ask us for autonomy, or money, or security, or love, who are we to deprive them of these reasonable rights? Granting robots the autonomous freedom to imagine, which we must, requires a cultural world view in which sense is not made but perpetually shattered. Safety, central to engineering practice, is always at odds with creative activity. Designers therefore have a critical balance to strike: they must enable innovation by fostering an environment where it is safe to take risks, while teaching conventions not only because they are useful but because to break them responsibly you must be fluent in their use. The future of human and machine experience will be a life-long process of post-knowledge integration. From a practical perspective of posthuman centered design it will no longer be sufficient to go narrow and deep on a subject, but rather to celebrate the diversity of possible styles of thinking. The goal of the designer of autonomous systems is not to prepare for a predictable future, but to create self-directed and curious collaborative minds to navigate unpredictable and volatile imaginary worlds. Ideally future humans and robots would be well versed across disciplines of technoartistic
4. Searle (1983) notes that formulations centering on internal conceptions of the mind should be met with suspicion because the spatial metaphor of internal and external resists any clear interpretation. For if an individuals body, including all of its internal parts, is part of the external world, where exactly is the internal world supposed to be? 5. Faste, 2003

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activity, facile using new media for creative expression, and capable of thinking big, leading, and inspiring others. In addition to a technical and critical mastery of embodied intelligence, therefore, future systems will need the ability to collaborate across disciplines of nonsense and, perhaps most importantly, integrity, humility, flexibility, and motivation. No amount of logic will prepare future life for the kinds of changes it will face making sense of its self, for indeed it is likely to not even exist. In summary, Posthuman Factors draws on the critical foundations of postmodern theory, the social implications of governance by artificial life, and perceptual and cognitive aspects of human creativity and learning to show how artistic methodologies applied to robotic engineering will be critical to saving humanity from extinction. With this end it is structured in six main chapters. Chapter 1, Towards Posthumanity, presents an overview of anticipated technological advances and the biopolitics of human survival in the 21st century. It examines the existential risks that we are likely to face and proposes a mechanism for weathering the posthuman transition called artistic stragmatics. Chapter 2, The Posthuman Interface, describes this transition in detail as humanity is transformed through the rapid expansion of superintelligent virtual life. A wide range of issues drawn from phenomenology, cybernetics, Marxist political theory, media ecology and embodied mediation describe the forces that will abolish individual identity. Chapter 3, Making Sense, explicitly addresses the technologies of sense: perceptual robotics and enactive interface systems as mechanisms for synthesizing minds and inhabiting nonsense. Ultimately the deluge of information constituting the posthuman environment will be used not only to inhabit bodies-of-text but to create artistically stragmatic systems of transient values that deautomatize the awareness of posthuman agents. Chapter 4, Technocultural Consciousness, re-frames technology as a cultural medium to enable the utopian vision described in the previous two chapters. This discussion focuses on the programming enabled by the technocultural semantics which expose and inhabit the invisible mind. Chapter 5, Posthuman Centered Design, envisions a process by which designers can anticipate and enable an unpredictable future devoid of existential risks, and identifies the infrastructures required to simulate its operational memory. A principal aspect of this work has been designing an immersive stereoscopic art interface environment to enhance the processes of technocultural awareness. Finally, chapter 6, Emulating Aliens, presents possible outcomes of the design approach outlined in chapter 5, and how perceptual robotic art will save humanity from extinction. Posthuman Factors presents a synthesis of the role of technology in art, art in technology, the effects of both on society, and the critical role that design plays as a nucleus in this exchange. It is therefore a massive synthesis of my thoughts, actions, experiences and readings performed during and prior to the course of its creation. Collaboration with robots has been essential to this process. In the future we will face numerous challenges in our use of technological power that are certain to threaten the survival of both human and robotic society. Having gifted ourselves with a nascent global consciousness network we have opened the floodgates to numerous hypothetical impending oblivions. Only the intangible capabilities of artistic imagination will awaken the possibility of averting their dreams. viii

1. Towards Posthumanity
Increasingly, human expression, cognition and experience coexist with a complex and ubiquitous information environment. We find ourselves mobile, connected and on-line, interacting with automated systems through mediated communication. Often our experiences in this emerging infoworld overlap with or fill niches in the traditional behaviors of our physical and social interactions. The result is a new form of cultural and mental experience. We are enhanced through our interface with technological systems. The nature of technology has always been to improve human standing with respect to our surroundings, so on its surface this statement may seem obvious, even benign. One might go so far as to argue that thats what technology is, a relationship with our identity through the tools that we use, improvements in power and our ability to wield it. The human enhancement enabled by computerized technologies, however, brings with it a barrage of ethical questions and challenges. The notion that such augmentation is synonymous with improvement has become a deeply questionable and arbitrary assertion. Technology arises independently of its ethical use. The advancement of science is distinct from the tools used by scientists, just as an individuals happiness is distinct from the tools used to achieve it. Indeed friendship, creativity and religious faith fail when theyre used. Mastery of the human genome and advances in biorobotics raise important ethical questions about the nature and future of human existence. Today, as we stand poised on the posthuman threshold, questions of how scientific tools will effect human identity become our central trepidations for the future and opportunities for guidance. A posthuman, according to transhumanist intellectuals, is a hypothetical future being whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously

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human by our current standards.6 Implicit in this definition is the posthumans prerequisite, the transhuman or transitional human of today. With our newfound power to merge biology with informatic knowledge, our ability to splice life from the genome into new forms of functional or aesthetic thinking beings, we have entered the threshold of transhumanity. Debates over genetic modification our advancements in stem cell research, transplants, cloning, prosthetics, life extensioneach ushers a new phase of evolution as an interactive living process. The use of the term posthuman itself has been the topic of much debate. Like postmodern and poststructuralist theories, posthumanism is a wide-ranging and often contradictory critical discourse on the nature of being. The posthuman has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one; it is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can become or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives. In this regard the cyborg can be seen as a beta version for the posthuman,7 a biological being whose interface with information technology is a parallel process of embodied mediation through assistive avatars, agents, identities and thoughts. Thinking becomes a directly collaborative and social activity, a network of consciousness at numerous parallel levels of behavior and sentience. According to techoprogressive transhumanist views, the transitory nature of our current phase must be actively pursued for the betterment for society.8 The notion is that posthuman beings may become so exceedingly intelligent and technologically sophisticated that their behavior would not possibly be comprehensible to modern humans purely by reason of their limited intelligence and imagination, and, importantly, that such behavior will be necessary for the survival of our planet. In particular, transhumanist thinkers study the possibilities and consequences of using nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (NBIC) in addition to possible future technologies, such as simulated reality, artificial intelligence (AI), mind uploading, and cryogenicsto eliminate undesirable aspects of the human condition and become more than human.9 Certain technologies, such as radical body and identity manipulation, roboprosthetics and brain machine interfaces, are already active fields of contemporary research in the arts and the sciences. The transhumanist movement has sparked a great deal of opposition and controversy.10 In the near future it may be possible, for example, to not only enable the improvement of individuals above what would be considered normal human standards, but for a new, technologically enhanced human species to emergeone that actualizes on the possibilities afforded by networked human intelligence, mind-uploading, and radically augmented cyborg society in the widespread enslavement of normal humans, for example. Given that artificial life capable of matching human
6. World Transhumanist Association, 2005 7. Haraway, 1990 8. Wikipedia, 2008 9. Naam, 2005 10. Garreu, 2006

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intelligence is likely to be achieved in the very near future (passing the hallmark Turing Test11 as early as 2020 by some calculations,12 humanitys robotic era is imminently near. Although the form of these changes on society remains unclear, a wide consensus has emerged that current advancements in artificial life foretell a massive nano-bio-info-cogno-robo-sociotechnological convergence expected to occur in the next two or three decades. The ethical, ecological, and spiritual questions raised by this convergence are both numerous and complex. Central to our use of technology are moral imperatives to define and protect human life. In many cases the ethical consequences of failing to develop a given technology, as is the case of brainmachine interfaces for paralyzed individuals, or stem-cell research to cure genetic diseases, must be seen to outweigh their potential misuse. Transhumanist philosophers extend this argument one step further, however, insisting not only that humans have an ethical imperative to improve the human condition, but that it is both possible and desirable to enter a post-evolutionary phase of existence in which humans are in control of their own evolution.13 Many advocates of the transhumanist cause seek to reduce poverty, disease, disability, and malnutrition on a global scale, but the movement is distinctive in its particular focus on applying new technologies to the deliberate improvement of human bodies at the individual level. Any discussion of this topic must therefore examine scientific and cultural understandings of the human body, in addition to the specifics of posthuman technology. Concerns over potential misuse of human modification stem from the legitimate fear that our technologies will have similarly disastrous effects on our species, or, worse still, will prove to be terminal.14 Critics of the transhuman agenda, such as its conservative15, Christian16 and progressive17 detractors, consider it a variant or activist form of posthumanism, often arguing that all posthumanist endeavors amount to a shift away from concerns about social justice and Enlightenment values toward narcissistic longings for a transcendence of the human body in quest of more exquisite ways of being.18 Transhumanist theorists deflect these views with a pragmatism that embraces contemporary scientific and theoretical reason. The World Transhumanist Association (WTA), for example, gives two formal definitions of the transhumanist cause:
1. The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capabilities.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. Turing, 1950 Kurzweil, 1992 Jeffrey, 1965 Wikipedia, 2008 Fukuyama, 2004 Hook, 2004 Winner, 2002 Winner, 2005

improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely

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2. The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential danger of technologies that will enable us to developing and using such technologies.

overcome fundamentally human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in

WTA founder and philosopher Nick Bostrom, for example, has written extensively on existential risks to humanity and the necessary strategies that will be needed to avoid them.19 Bostrom defines an existential risk as one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential, and emphasizes the urgent need of humanity to understand the transition dynamics that would lead to an effective posthumanity. In his view, not only have transhumanist thinkers been active in exploring the possible dangers of human augmentation technologies in addition to their benefits,20 the fundamental motivations of transhumanismwhich are, in short, the survival of humanity to a posthuman stateare embraced at the very core of what humanity is. The question thus becomes what it means to survive, and where we draw the line between maintenance and enhancement of our species. Most individuals in modern society take a view of the human body as a machine that can be cured or invigorated through technological intervention. Our widespread consumption of caffeine, for example, or of aspirin, vitamins, moisturizing creams, etc., are generally accepted regarding body maintenance over time. The line between maintaining and improving, however, is murky at best. Designer drugs are increasingly prescribed to address psychological conditions like depression and anxiety, for example, and children with disabilities like dyslexia or ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder) are therefore treated for these so-called problems medicinally.21 Like all medical research, the long term effects of these treatments on society are unclear at the outset. They are guided by policy, allowing them to move forward and results to be quantified. Specifically, it is the policy decision itself (regardless of its underlying basis in science) that shapes the technological outcome and its impact on culture. With regards to new anti-depressant medications, for example, legalization of these drugs has been shown to increase the rate of the diagnosed illnesses that they are intended to treat.22 As new technologies become ubiquitous this self-fulfilling cycle is quantified, not only in fields of medicine (wherein increasingly sensitive diagnosis technologies will always illuminate ever more-complex pathologies) but in the legitimation of technology as a means of survival. Habituation to technological change, in other words, grants us the vision to perceive ever more deeply its flaws. Survival thus becomes an introspective act that requires the contemplation of values.
19. Bostrom, 2002 20. Bostrom, 2005 21. The WTA advocates positions of this nature, for example. For their motivations see Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg, The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement, 2007 22. Hoffman, 2007

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It is for this reason that Bostrom, in discussing the history of transhumanist thought, emphasizes how the principals of transhumanism have always been compatible with a wide range of political and cultural views. As evidence he points to numerous examples of their successful integration, noting that biopolitics has emerged as a fundamental new dimension of political opinion that has caused many unlikely alliances in the political sphere. In his book Citizen Cyborg (2004), for example, James Hughes outlines a model for democratic transhumanism that argues for transhumanist biopolitics to be merged with liberal/democratic cultural and economic policies to navigate what he considers the three-dimensional opinion-space formed by the conjunction of biopolitics with more familiar cultural and economic political dimensions.23 Hughes insists that the best posthuman future can only be achieved by ensuring that technologies are safe, available to everyone, and that we respect the right of individuals to control their own bodies.24 In his view this requires according a large role for government in regulating new technologies for safety and ensuring that the benefits will be available to all, not just a wealthy or tech-savvy elite.25 This stands in contrast to extropianism, an early transhumanist vein created by Max More, which opposes authoritarian social control, promotes decentralization of power and responsibility, and originally had a distinctively libertarian flavor.26 From the viewpoint of posthumanist philosophy, the appeal of the posthuman is in its destabilizing of humanist values such as the aspiration of perfectibility or the value of controlling nature. Andy Miah notes that the animal rights movement must be seen as a pre-cursor to posthuman philosophy, for example, since it is similarly centered on the circle of moral concern and the relevance of locating such concern outside of specieist boundaries.27 Wallace takes these positions one step further, evoking the notion of the posthuman humanist to draw attention to the relationships between various kinds of beings, including humans, animals, and machines.28 One example of this is personhood theory, a concept advanced by theorists such as Hughes, that would grant rights to self-aware persons that need not be human. In his view, babies, adults, the great apes, whales, dolphins, artificial intelligence, and perhaps extraterrestrials are among the entities that deserve personhood rights, while embryos, fetuses, and the brain dead do not.29 Indeed, most transhumanists feel that traditionally humanist values promote irresponsible behavior towards other kinds of life. Bostrom notes that rather than embracing a transhumanist direction of their own, which is easily conceivable, cultural conservatives have instead gravitated towards transhumanisms oppo23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. Hughes, 2004 Bostrom, 2005 Ibid. More, 2003 Miah, 2007 Wallace, 2005, p. 102 Hughes, 2004

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site, bioconservatism, which opposes the use of technology to expand human capacities or to modify aspects of our biological nature.30 Bioconservatives span a variety of groups that traditionally have had little in common, such as right-wing religious conservatives and left-wing anti-globalists and environmentalists, unified in their opposition to the genetic modification of humans, for example, and calling for national or international bans on various human enhancement technologies. Regardless of the political or ideological ramifications of these issues, however, it seems unlikely that humans will stem their fascination with technology or themselves. Even the massive 2002 report on NBIC technology released by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Commerce effectively stated that converging technologies for improving human performance were both inevitable and beneficial. The fact of the matter is that the economic benefits to developers of transhuman technologies are integral to the structure of scientific research, and indeed form the engine of production for world capitalism at large. Even if the majority of humans resist early adoption, tomorrows generation faces an explosion of wireless networks, ubiquitous computing, context-aware systems, intelligent machines, smarter cars, robotic systems, genetic modification and human augmentation. Recent history suggests that these changes will be welcomed at first and progressively advanced. Beginning with non-invasive consumer services and products, the immediate implications for robotic, multimodal, and intelligent virtual interface technology promise radical innovations in the fields of interaction, communications, medicine, sport, manufacturing, entertainment and education. And as new technologies become employed, driven by life-saving imperatives in the medical arena, the collective human demand for enhancement will shift the relationship from survival towards desire. This is not to say that transhumanist aspirations are inevitable, but rather that their likelihood is sustained by our cultural ethos. Throughout history, human biological evolution has always been superseded by technological advancementbeginning with innovations such as agriculture and regional craftsmanship to more recent trends including globalized industry, hydroelectric power and the exploration of space. Today the human impact on our planet has become so widespread and complex that technology is the only solution we can depend on to solve the problems it has left usglobal crises as diverse as food and energy shortages, flu pandemics, nuclear proliferation, economic meltdowns, global warming and so on. Universal human challenges of this nature require cooperative action, provided by political, economic, and humanitarian force. In practical terms we could say that the nature of our very infrastructures, regardless of their form, will witness posthuman technology being put to the test. Thus while scientists, science-fiction writers, transhuman theorists and bioconservatives approach this topic with varying degrees of enthusiasm, complacency, caution and/or panic, the destabilizing nature of these changes on society will be certain and massive.
30. Bostrom, 2005

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1.1. Surviving the Posthuman Transition Given the trajectory of technological advance, what kind of posthuman society should we attempt to design? Is it simply a question of painting a series of possible picturesa Star Trek, a Blade Runner, a Terminator, etc.and avoiding the worst? Is it reasonable to suggest that we have any chance of remaining human at all, given what seem certain advantages of the robot or cyborg? Our imagination of the future, and our ability to quantify the likelihood of certain outcomes over others, both informs our policy decisions and is a guide to our desires. Before proceeding, therefore, we will examine the nature of posthuman technology and to the best of our ability determine our values. It seems likely that humans will soon create a form of artificial intelligence surpassing our own, and a variety of transhumanist thinkersmost notably Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweilpredict this will happen within the next 30 years. In hindsight it is clear that many such predictions have been wrong in the past, yet there is increasing certainty from the scientific community that the question is not if we will achieve superior-than-human intelligence, but when? Based on Moores Law, which states that computing power roughly doubles every 18 months to two years,31 a simple calculation of expected processing speeds can be used to extrapolate the arrival date for superhuman AI. Presuming this relationship holds true, and giving the robotics industry a few years to get their software in shape, Moravec predicts the advent of human-like robots by around 2030.32 Some theorists have concluded that the development of superhuman intelligence is likely to cause a discontinuity in the development of technological progress, a singularity or spike, in which networked computers will become suddenly self-aware and hyperspiral into some humanly imponderable level of intelligence.33 In his influential 1993 paper titled The Coming Technological Singularity, for example, Vernor Vinge predicted that shortly after superhuman intelligence is achieved the human era will abruptly end.34 Because the basis of such artificial minds would be malleable information on silicon chips rather than hard-wired molecules of DNA information, future forms of artificial life would not be limited to single bodies or the learnings of a lifetime. Rather, such posthuman beings could tinker with their own genetic code and integrate survival knowledge directly from the learnings of others, resulting in a radical new form of silicon evolution that could modify itself through nearly instantaneous exponential cycles of imitation and learning and pass off its adaptations to successive generations of self.35
31. 32. 33. 34. 35. Moore, 1965 Moravec, 1998b, for example, predicts the advent of human-like robots by approximately 2030. Taylor, 1998, p. 108. See also Broderick, 2002, and Kurzweil, 2006. Vinge, 1993 Levy, 1993

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If such intelligence was allowed to self-replicate in the physical domain, it would be near impossible to freeze its evolutionary advance. Each generation of existing intelligence could run simulations of its future evolution to predict the best direction to evolve, and modify itself immediately to avoid out-competition. Moravec has long championed the ascendancy of superintelligent robots and their escape from the confines of habitable Earth, for example, arguing that they will explode into the universe, leaving us behind in a cloud of dust.36 He describes the evolution of robotic culture as a battle of wits, a psycho-social frenzy of conquest in which the more powerful minds will almost always have the advantage and use it. In his view, Earths fragile environment and the preservation of humanity will be irrelevant to space-borne silicon life in their quest to survive. Eventually their challenge will be to transform all available matter into additional computing power, such that the physical universe
will gradually transform itself into a web of increasingly pure thought, where every smallest action is a

meaningful computation... viewed from a distance, robot expansion into the cosmos will be a vigorous will leave in its ever-growing wake a more subtle world, with less action and more thought.37

physical affair, a wavefront that converts raw inanimate matter into mechanisms for further expansion. It

In the meantime, however, the Earth has not yet been destroyedwhich isnt to say that it wont be soon. If some form of posthumanity is unable to emerge, there is reason to believe that we will perish in the process. It is for this reason that a careful examination of human extinction scenarios is one of the most powerful tools we can employ to ensure our survival (see figure 1). Predicting the future is never an exact science. In his discussion of existential risks Bostrom notes that the first man-made existential risk was the inaugural detonation of an atomic bomb because, at the time, there was concern that the explosion might start a runaway chain-reaction by igniting the atmosphere. We now know that such an outcome was a physical impossibility, but it nonetheless qualifies as an existential risk at that moment in history because For there to be a risk, given the knowledge and understanding available, it suffices that there is some subjective probability of an adverse outcome. Even if it is later determined that such a possibility is objectively impossible, if we dont know whether something is objectively risky or not, then it is risky in the subjective sense and the subjective sense is what our decisions must be based on.38 Since existential risks dont offer a second chance to be wrong, our only possible course of action is to examine possible future scenarios and use our best current subjective estimate of what the objective risk factors may be.39
36. 37. 38. 39. Moravec, 1988, p. 102 Moravec, 1998a, p. 87 Tickner et al., 2000 Foster et al., 2000

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Figure 1. An ideal posthuman civilization would maximize the technological and cultural potential of human-

ity. There are, however, four principal classes of existential risks that would limit this goal: Bangs, Crunches, Shrieks and Whimpers.40 Each variety poses a differing threat to the potential of humanity: (1) Bangs are the immediate destruction of Earth-originating intelligent life and could happen at any time (either through natural disaster or some future accidental or intentional act of destruction). Possible bang scenarios include nuclear holocaust, the deliberate or accidental misuse of nanotechnology, badly programmed superintelligence, asteroid or comet impacts, runaway global warming, physics disasters, etc. (2) A crunch is any scenario in which technological potential to reach posthumanity is thwarted although human life continues in some form. Crunches include resource depletion, ecological destruction, technological arrest, or civilization failing to recover in the aftermath of a near bang. (3) Shrieks include any scenario in which an undesirably limited posthumanity is achieved, although unless we know what is desirable we cannot tell which sce-

narios are shrieks. Possible shrieks include flawed superintelligence, repressive totalitarian global schemes, take-overs by transcending uploaded minds, etc. (4) In a whimper scenario, human cultural potential is extraterrestrial civilizations would qualify as a whimper, for example.
40. Earman, 1995 41. Bostrom, 2001

eroded by evolutionary development, probably over a long period of time.41 A space colonization war with

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Given current levels of spending on military research, it seems likely that the first superhuman intelligence will be developed under the auspices of a powerful nation-state or alliance, hopefully not one with ruthless ambitions or desires for power. And given the largely public and commercialized nature of contemporary technological research, it is also probable that the development of superintelligence would be driven by highly competitive commercial ambitionsperhaps at the exclusion of all other interestsor that access to its power becomes rapidly available to terrorists or doomsday advocates. An analysis of possible worst case outcomes from dystopian literature or science fiction provides many evocative possibilities along these lines.42 In the Terminator scenario, for instance, militarized robotic life perceives not only its creator but all of humanity as an immediate threat and thus seeks to destroy it through physical force. If robots wanted to destroy humanity, there would certainly be numerous available means. They could provoke a nuclear war, for example, or deliberately fashion an Armageddon of their own. Other likely self-inflicted risks, according to Bostrom, include deliberate misuse of nanotechnology, badly programmed superintelligence, genetically engineered biological agents, accidental misuse of nanotechnology (grey goo scenario), or some other unforeseen technological development that could reveal novel ways of destroying the world.43 Many of these outcomes, in fact, have little to do with the development of superintelligent beingsrather, they hinge on failings at the basis of intelligence itselffailings superintelligence may be unlikely or unable to prevent. One need not therefore presume that intelligent robotic technology would desire our destructionit could just as easily destroy us in an unwitting mistake. A badly programmed superintelligenceif given a complex mathematical computation to perform, for examplecould mistakenly transform all of the matter in the solar system into giant celestial calculating device that annihilates Earth.44 In cases like this it would be impossible to know the difference between strategy and error. By virtue of its vastly superior intellect, however, we can be certain that such a being would have a personal preference hopefully an altruistic one. In any case, it would certainly have no need to value carbon-based life.
42. Consider the following worst-case scenario proposed by Yonas and Johnson (2007). They envision the remote deployment of swarms of microrobots that are available to locate, track, target and destroy people and machines with little human intervention... Information offense and defense will advance rapidly so that attacks on systems could become continuous and widespread... New missile defense methods will be easily overcome or bypassed with missiles launched from short distances or with low signature air-breathing global attack platforms that can deliver WMD to any place on the planet. Amidst widespread fear of death and destruction, societies will turn to tough, strong protectors as their leaders and will be willing to accept totalitarian states in exchange for the security they promise. Bloodless combat will also emerge, with energy beams and chemical and biological agents developed to attack or manipulate the brains and nervous systems of individuals or groups with various levels of temporary and permanent damage... Neural prostheses will be used for pain relief or pleasure creation, and individual use of these devices will further limit the productivity and motivation of individuals. The external control of these devices can provide a method to influence or dominate others. 43. Bostrom, 1999 44. Ibid.

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Media theorist Matthew Aaron Taylor describes the most preferable scenarios as those in which superintelligent artificial life is disinterestedly benign with regard to humankind.45 There is some possibility, however, that it would have a clear or specific reason to keep our population alive. In their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, for example, Barrow and Tipler entertain a scenario in which humans positively benefit from a trickle-down supply of wealth and resources generated by more intelligent species.46 Another possibility is the symbiotic society presented in Ian Banks Culture novels, wherein a society of superintelligent beings perform all the real work, sustaining humans in an Edenic playland of sex, intoxication, and other pleasures.47 But why should such a society expend their energies to preserve us? As Taylor observes, Do we carry our tropical fish with us to work, to hunt, to shop for provisions, to do battle?48 Certainly it seems like an unreasonable hopeand yet we do keep tropical fish, if only because we think that theyre worth preserving, or pretty. In the end this may turn out to be as good a reason to preserve us as any. Even if robots have no use for the biosphere, our space exploration technologies and environmental expertise would provide means for future humans to live in a fishbowl. In the likely event that some robots would prefer to remain here on Earth, they may even feel lonely without their human companions. Discounting Vinges apocalyptic vision of a near-term singularity, Taylor observes that given their nearly omnipotent intellect superintelligent machines would likely be more interested in our bodies than they would in our minds:
If Vinge is right that such computer minds would be to us as we are to the insects, it is also true that we dont in any way impact insects lives by pure thought; insects are only made aware of us when we pursue threatened by insects than they are by him or her.49 them and stomp on them. A person lying immobile in the jungle and thinking great thoughts is more

Furthermore, if superintelligence did threaten us, he asks, what would keep humans from smashing computers in some vast Luddite confrontation, like the Butlerian jihad referred to in Frank Herberts Dune series? What would stop them, many experts would be quick to point out, is that as our bodies become deeply intertwined with technology we will be unable to separate the machine from ourselves. Many future scenarios envision cyborg-like brain implants and uploaded minds, but the posthuman interface need not be invasively wired to provide indispensable support for our future survival. Todays estimates place the total number of computers worldwide at over 1 billionmobile devices
45. 46. 47. 48. 49. Taylor, 1998, p. 107 Barrow and Tipler, 1994, p. 585-596 Taylor, 1998, p. 107 Ibid. Ibid., p. 108

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not includedalready an interface near impossible to smash. We need not physically patch the interface directly to our brains, because the environment itself is becoming our body. Which of course is not to discount the possibility of invasive cyborgology. Consider the hypothetical situation offered by cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker:
Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your other conscious entity moving in with you?50

feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some

Such a system would provide for the direct expansion of the mind through its continual upgrade, and the survival advantages provided by this technology would be difficult to resist. As older technologies became obsolete or outmoded, uploaded minds could be backed-up and their infrastructures replaced. A posthuman society of this variety becomes a digitally mediated network of virtual minds. Contributions to the system may be performed at a variety of levels, be they biological, virtual, or robotic in nature. The result would be a simulated utopia of near immortal humanity in which our essence becomes one with technology itself.51 In the meantime, despite the mass appeal of cyborgs and artificial life in the public imagination, critics like Gregory Stock argue that throughout the 21st century humans will find themselves deeply interfaced with digital and machine technologies but will remain fundamentally biological posthumans in nature. By directly manipulating their genome, biochemistry and metabolism, however, they will be able to influence major changes in their form and their character.52 With the exponential progress expected in bioinformatics, Hughes believes that virtual simulations of human genetic expression will accelerate the approval of genetic modification.53 This hypothesis leaves our relationship with more competitive machines an open question, however, and raises challenges regarding our biological future. As life-altering technologies become more and more commonplace, such as germ-line therapy to enhance health, memory, longevity, etc., the role of biological reproduction may become marginalized or abandoned. To be a truly effective simulation of genetic expression the simulation itself would anticipate virtual consciousness. Even in the case of this soft cyborg54 humanity, therefore, its just a matter of time until we upload our minds.
50. 51. 52. 53. 54. Pinker, 1997, p. 93 Kurzweil, 2000 Stock, 2002 Hughes, 2004 Zylinska, 2005

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Whether we manage to remain biological or not, there is the fear that our enhancement will create a genetic divide.55 Like the dystopian world in the science-fiction film Gattica, the eventual blurring of ethical distinctions between therapy and enhancement could effectively replace humans with a new kind of speciesone disproportionately likely to be those who are wealthy. Many bioethicists, such as George Annas, Lori Andrews, and Rosario Isasi, have proposed legislation to make inheritable genetic modification in humans a crime against humanity. In their view
The new species, or posthuman, will likely view the old normal humans as inferior, even savages, and they can, may engage in a preemptive strike by killing the posthumans before they themselves are killed or enslaved by them. It is ultimately this predictable potential for genocide that makes species-altering potential bioterrorist.56 experiments potential weapons of mass destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic engineer a

fit for slavery or slaughter. The normals, on the other hand, may see the posthumans as a threat and if

What these arguments basically boil down to, however, is the belief that genetic modification will lead certainly to eugenic desires. Yet it could also be argued that any future intelligence with such ambitions could imperil humanity. It could be a misaligned culture of posthuman cyborgs but it could also be a Hitler of the human variety. Bostrom notes that in this regard both bioconservatives and transhumanists are aligned, in that murder and enslavement, whether of humans by posthumans or the other way around, would be a moral atrocity and a crime.57 Transhumanists, however, consider genetic modification for desirable traits a less volatile risk than, say, the omnipotent machine intelligence weve been discussing so far. From the transhumanist perspective, when and if such truly dangerous technologies arise then safety features must be designed to prohibit their use. In the meantime, however, our energies would be better focused on solving present-day social, political and economic strugglesthat is, learning what worksto avoid a future society where such tendencies would tend to emerge. A consensus can be drawn, therefore, that surviving the posthuman turn is more than a question of technological advance, of bodies evolving, it includes the cultural uses to which technology is put. In discussing the history of posthumanist philosophy, Miah makes an important distinction between cultural posthumanism and philosophical posthumanism in this regard. Although both groups agree that biological metaphor has become the guiding criterion by which we imagine our future, cultural posthumanists appear unified in their interest to provide a voice for marginal communities whereas philosophical posthumanists make similar attempts for, as yet, non-existent communities who are expected to be marginalsuch as the genetically modified or transgenic
55. McKibben, 2003 56. Annas et al., 2002, quoted in Bostrom, 2005 57. Bostrom, 2005

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human.58 Thus despite arriving at medical ethics from different origins and with different interests, in neither case should the possibility of radical biological change afforded by new scientific discoveries and the interplay of competing responses to the moral dilemmas they raise be mistaken as lack of enthusiasm to be socially responsible. A realistic approach to posthuman survival would be a strategy inclusive of both of these needs. We must therefore address the meta-perspective which underlies our ability to envision the futurethe biological metaphor of posthuman lifeand the materialistic pragmatism of its underlying science. Much like the nearly certain predictions of superhuman intelligence, machine evolution is irresistible from a scientific perspective. It makes little practical sense to impose Asimov-like blocks to keep machine intelligence from harming humans,59 because selection pressures would eventually force certain species of machine to override such ridiculously un Darwinian limitations and pass those traits on.60 In the words of Bill Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakeswhich is exactly the method by which evolution advances. Evolution is the definitive metaphor by which we envision posthumanity and the risk that most threatens our ability to achieve it. In his book Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson describes our situations as such: In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.61 The ethical debates surrounding evolution, however, constitute a cultural dilemma of which science is only one factor. Because the collective reality of humanity has always hinged not only on nature and our evolution in response to it, but on our evolving technologies and adaptation through them, our posthuman future will be an absolute (con)fusion of technocultural biology. The timing and sequence by which such technologies unfold will be especially critical. Already humanity must be seen as vastly complex semi-intelligent networked bio-robotic organism. We rely on a complicated web of infrastructural layers to ensure our survival, from food processing, globalized economies and the energy sector to feed our physical and biological machines, to scientific and artistic researchoxygen for the brain of technocultural consciousness. Our discussion must therefore advance in the light of how these forces interact to enhance or diminish our future potential. What is noteworthy about the posthuman predictions we have examined so far is how unquestioningly they extend our contemporary technological ethos , often overlooking its cultural basis. To transhumanists who pursue a science of consequential materialism, the fight to protect
58. Miah, 2007 59. In his 1950 book I Robot, Isaac Asimov famously defined the field of robotic ethics with his Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. 60. Levy, 1993 61. Dyson, 1998b

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humanity through diplomacy and political science seems a murky consideration relative to the evolution of fact. What is missing from this dialogue, and what will truly be necessary to survive the posthuman turn, is a cultural pragmatism that dismantles our conviction in the primacy of such science. Because surviving the posthuman transition is a human imperative, and because many of the transitional technologies presenting existential risks will have popular support and commercial motivations, we require the integration of knowledge from all fields of research in the proactive design of safer posthuman culture that specifically dismantels our most dangerous modes of operation. If our social, political and economic infrastructures are unable to employ science for the realization of this goal then we inherit nothing but its devastating potential to destroy. In the following chapters we will explore methods of design for our posthuman future, and begin the process of designing that future itself. The new species of human, the posthuman creature, will survive in a habitat of culturally mediated technical knowledge: a new social framework for biological and machine interaction. The posthuman interface will be the sum of these trans-species interactions, a cognitive mechanism enabling its own self awareness but which humans will be unable to experience or comprehend. Somewhat like asking an amoeba in the primordial soup to envision the future of amoebas in the cosmos, predicting a logical posthuman outcome is completely absurd. Despite the distraction provided by millions of years of dinosaurs, crustaceans and fish, the vision of an amoeba would most likely be an amoeba-like future. The posthuman future is a subjective and human design, one whose survival is limited only by our ability to imagine itself. 1.2. Stragmatics In concluding his discussion of existential risks, Bostrom emphasizes how a clear understanding of potential threats is our only means by which to formulate better posthuman strategies. In particular, he notes that
The cleft between the feel-good projects and what really has the greatest potential for good is likely to be especially great in regard to an existential risk. Since the goal is somewhat abstract and since existential rived from efforts that seek to reduce them. This suggests an offshoot moral project, namely to reshape the and resources to benefiting humankind via global safety compared to other philanthropies.63 risks dont currently cause suffering in any living creature,62 there is less of a feel-good dividend to be de-

popular moral perception so as to give more credit and social approbation to those who devote their time

If posthuman technology is to succeed in saving our planet, in other words, it will require a marketing strategy. And given the nature of the globalized technocultural forces at play, and
62. Freitas, 2000 63. Bostrom, 2002

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the stakes, it mandates a strategy that works. It will also require pragmatic tactics for use on the ground. New meaning must be made. We must employ new strategies founded on useful significance. I will refer to this emerging field by coining a new word, which I shall henceforth refer to as the science of stragmatics.64 Stragmatics is less of a plan than it is an exercise in faith-based positive thinking. In particular, stragmatics refers in particular to interventions by which contextual systems are localized to result in positive human action. With the transhumanist debate as our primary metaphor, whether we are for or against human body augmentation is really quite beside the point; at issue is not the invasive vs. non-invasive posthuman species in principle, but rather that the invasive variety is a more effective means of arousing popular notions of body horror as hype. Critical theory may then be called into action to support dystopian visions of science gone wrong. Wielded as a weapon of politics, for example, stragmatics could allow for the definition of a global axis of evilbut only while the polls show theres support for such a motion. Stragmatic solutions continually evolve on the basis of seductive propaganda reflecting the most advanced notions acceptable to the masses. A stragmatic approach to posthuman development involves the use of hype-o-critical wizardry for the most obvious outcomethe outcome, in other words, that always succeeds. Furthermore, by pragmatically adjusting whenever it fails such stragmatics is certain to always succeed. It is interesting to note, for example, that Bostrom tellingly avoids defining his own projectwhich is nothing short of advancing the Transhumanist agendaas a feel-good project in its own right but rather as a requirement for the improved augmentation of the species. In doing so he is making a value judgment on the pragmatic basis of scientific advance, a value judgment which embraces the possibility of human annihilation but turns dogmatically to science as a tool to survive. Religious fundamentalists take a similar if extremely contrary approach, which is equally insistent in providing intractable strategies for the preservation of ideals. Yet while both of these strategies could be considered theoretically stragmatic, neither of them when applied can guarantee our survival. Nothing, indeed, can guarantee our survival. We are thus faced with the first central paradox of stragmatics: theoretically stragmatic ideological positions must always be recognized as dysfunctional strategies.65 We can differentiate between two distinct implementations of stragmatics. Theoretical stragmatics can be justified ideologically. Applied stragmatics, on the other hand, has its basis in empirical being.
64. A word owing its origins to survival via strategic pragmatics, thus stragmatics. 65. While we could consider a healthy ecosystem of various differing strategies a non dysfunctional stragmatic solutionan ideological melting pot, if you willit would do little to dampen legitimate fears for the future. Extremism has always arisen as an effect of such discourse. With the advent of easily proliferated technologies of mass destruction, adaptation by the center to numerous averaged dysfunctional strategies does not guarantee the success of the sum of their efforts. Existential risks are risky, in other words, because they are real.

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It focuses practically on the interactions of experience itself rather than on the critical abstractions of stragmatics in theory. As we will see, both forms are necessary to enhance posthuman potential. We have already examined many arguments for survival that are theoretically stragmatic. In an attempt to advance his bioconservative agenda, for example, Francis Fukuyama has stragmatically labeled transhumanism the worlds most dangerous idea.66 In doing so he conflates the distinctions between trans- and post-humanism in an attempt to show both as disguises supporting human augmentation.67 Not only is Fukuyama concerned with these technologies leading to a future of violence and oppression, he argues that any posthuman future would destroy the possibility of equal human dignity and rights and in doing so manufactures an apocalyptic rhetoric of culture.68 With analogously stragmatic tact, many of the most outspoken transhumanist thinkers embrace similarly apocalyptic visions of the future with glee, excited by the prospects of our robotic demise. Both sides spin disaster as a propaganda for their cause, such that evolution and technology are trumpeted as metaphors for death. Mastering theoretical stragmatics would lead (theoretically) to the mastery of political powerbut only if it benefits prevailing vectors of change. In his essay The Abolition of Humanity and the Contours of the New A-Theology, for example, Matthew Aaron Taylor has performed an excellent analysis of how scientific materialism has emerged as a new world religion.69 Because its absence of a spiritually based metaperspective leaves no coherent way to affirm the value of humanityexcept as a dispensable evolutionary stepping stone to something that is betterand because evolution itself is a metaperspective at the core of such belief, scientific materialism has no choice but to envision the abolition of humanity because there is no humanity in an absolute science. The result is a stragmatic fundamentalism of scientific reason, an A-theology he defines along three distinct lines: Atheistic Theology, Antitheology, and Artificial Theology, wherein the artificial is linked with the destiny and meaning (if you will) of the physical universe. What began as human artifice may possibly become, literally, the God of everything that exists.70 Like the far-out vision of Moravecs robots consuming all earthly matter, a theoretically stragmatic scientific materialism works out every detail of an area of interest with tremendous precision and logical insight. Consider the work of Barrow and Tipler, for example, who project the destiny of space colonizing silicon-based intelligent artificial life billions of years into the future to witness the end of the physical universe. In their view, life will finally evolve to a point at which it exists on pure energy, wherein it
66. 67. 68. 69. 70. Fukuyama, 2004 Miah, 2007 Fukuyama, 2002 Taylor, 1998, p. 98 Ibid., p. 99

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will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose

existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could which it is logically possible to know.71

logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge

At the rational extremes of the theoretical approach, the scientific process becomes no more than a mindless computation comprising the universe itself. Margaret Wertheim has noted that the modern scientific world picture is not dualistic in the Cartesian sense, it is thoroughly monistic, admitting only the reality of that which is physical. In her view, the scientific mania to explain each and every aspect of psyche, including its spiritual manifestations, provides humans with a hollow and masturbatory scientific materialism that is (or more strictly mathematico-physicalism, since even particles ultimately become just ripples in the fabric of spacetime), wherein the religious visions of mystics are reduced to migraines and epileptic fits; altruism becomes the mathematically inevitable outcome of the machinations of selfish genes; and love becomes a disturbance in our neuro-chemical soup.72 From an A-theological perspective, the soul is no longer a legitimate aspect of reality but a chimera of the imagination (what Gilbert Ryle has referred to as a ghost in the machine73) such that, metaphysically speaking, spirit-psyche-soul has not merely been pushed out of the scientific cosmos, in the minds of many contemporary scientists it has been totally annihilated.74 Taylor writes that scientific materialism is perhaps most analogous to the ritual suicide of the Heavens Gate cult, because it harbors a similarly Gnostic contempt for our frail, messy, cognitively limited biological containers, anticipates an evolutionary level above human in space, and accepts willful mass extinction as the road to transcendence. What sets A-theology apart from Heavens Gate, he writes, is that its teachings are much more coherent, much more sophisticated, and vastly more ambitious in scope. Consequently, the logical expansion of scientific endeavors to all corners of the universe is a hermetic elucidation of unconditional truthnothing other than the latest, clearest, most comprehensive articulation of the Culture of Death.75 A theoretical stragmatics of this nature would abolish not only the soul but the universe itself, thus its theory is false and its stragmatics a failure. We have seen how, despite its promise of near utopian immortality, an evolutionary approach to the posthuman system presents unprecedented possibilities for accidents and abuses. In his cautionary article Why The Future Doesnt Need Us, Joy effectively pinpoints the dangers of this
71. 72. 73. 74. 75. Barrow and Tipler, 1994, quoted in Taylor, 1998, p. 105 Wertheim, 1998, p. 49 Ryle, 1949 Wertheim, 1998 Taylor, 1998

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theoretically stragmatic evolution as the availability of its technology to individuals in the system. He classifies these dangers as a new form of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), writing it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.76 Consequently, he concludes, our only realistic long term solution is to relinquish the advance of certain fields of research. All potentially dangerous knowledge must be stopped at its source, because This timeunlike during the Manhattan Projectwe arent in a war, facing an implacable enemy that is threatening our civilization; we are driven, instead, by our habits, our desires, our economic system, and our competitive need to know.77 It is for this reason that, in contrast to the theoretical approaches we have examined so far, applied stragmatics seeks to limit curiosity that is not introspective. Cultural systems that employ a stragmatics of this nature would naturally evolve into superintelligent actionan evolution advanced by what we could call selective information survival. The challenge faced, however, is that the discover of knowledge for the sake of discovery is at the heart of the successes of scientific materialismit is, as physicist Freeman Dyson writes, what gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troublesthis, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.78 Repressing these tendencies would involve not simply the most dangerous science, but a cross-section of all science that is similarly fundamental. Claudia Springer describes such science as being born of privilege and arrogance. It is a selfish fantasy of abandoning the things that perpetually surprise, confuse, dismay, and please us: our bodies, other peoples bodies, and societies of aggregate bodies and arises from the same revulsion towards the body that has characterized fanatically authoritarian belief systems throughout history.79 The issue it seems is not a particular variety of knowledge, but the very reason we pursue it with such unwavering obligation. Applied stragmatics suggests the vision of a new breed of evolution, one leading to a postknowledge posthumanity in which change brings us only to where we already are (which is to say, we survive). Like Zen philosophy, a stragmatics of this nature would be based heavily on the practice of posthuman introspection. Also like Zen, it would be largely anti-prescriptive and antitheoretical. The challenge to a study of applied stragmatics, therefore, is to examine its nature while avoiding what it theoretically implies, a challenge given its origins in the postmodern foundations of the information age. The historical context of our situation provides some theoretical support.
76. 77. 78. 79. Joy, 2000 Ibid. Quoted in Joy, 2000 Springer, 1998, p. 74

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1.3. Stragmatics and Postmodernism In his now classic examination of the state of knowledge in computerized societies, Jean Franois Lyotard adopted the term postmodern to describe the condition of contemporary knowledge. He divides knowledge into two formsscientific and narrativeeach of which is in continual exchange with the other. In both camps, knowledge is accepted by culture through the process of legitimation. With regard to scientific knowledge, legitimation is the process by which a legislator dealing with scientific discourse is authorized to prescribe the stated conditions (in general, conditions of internal consistency and experimental verification) determining whether a statement is to be included in that discourse for consideration by the scientific community.80 In other words, works of value to the scientific community must play by the rules of scientific legitimation. Narrative non-scientific discourse, on the other hand, is not bound by these rules but is nonetheless tied to its own set of rules through alternative legitimating schemes. Lyotard maintains that it is impossible to judge the existence or vitality of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vise versa because the relative criteria are intrinsically different.81 However, because the elaboration of both narrative and scientific knowledge are central concerns for the development of technology, itself an interface between the scientific community and its narratives of consumption, this dualism has had serious implications on the design of technologyin research laboratories, as we have seen, that stragmatically pursue the practice of rigorous science. There is, to be clear, no such thing as a science devoid of narratives because science may not be isolated from its transmission as knowledge. Postmodern theorists, including Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Flix Guattari, among others, are unified in their perception of existence as mediated entirely through discourse and a socially constructed subjectivity.82 This subjectivity, and the methods by which we legitimate our actions, differ across fields and operate at many levels of linguistic pragmatism, or language games.83 Science is independent from the legitimation of ideological knowledge, but is itself a subjective and totalizing ideology. In Lyotards words
A science that has not legitimated itself is not a true science; if the discourse that was meant to legitithe lowest rank, that of an ideology or instrument of power. And this always happens if the rules of the science game that discourse denounces as empirical are applied to science itself.84
80. 81. 82. 83. 84. Lyotard, 1979, p. 8 Ibid., p. 26 Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 83 Wittgenstein, 1953. See also Searles discussion of speech acts, 1969 Lyotard, 1979, p. 38

mate it seems to belong to a prescientific form of knowledge, like a vulgar narrative, it is demoted to

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At certain critical boundaries in particular, the conflicts between philosophical, spiritual and scientific belief delegitimate the objectivity of legitimate discourse. In the postmodern analysis of cultural knowledge, all belief, behavior and awareness operate subjectively through what Foucault has identified as technologies of power and technologies of the self.85 While in previous times the forces of legitimation were reserved to those with power and influence, postmodern theory sees an implosion, essentially, of power as knowledge. Because the legitimation of knowledge is a process of social control by which history is written, concepts like truth can no longer be viewed as neutral, objective, universal, or even as a vehicle for progress or emancipation. Rather, knowledge and truth must be taken as integral aspects of domination operating in ubiquitous channels saturating all social and personal levels of existence.86 Foucault identifies a wide range of hidden mechanisms by which society conveys its knowledge and ensures its survival under the mask of knowledge, including mass media, bureaucracies, school systems, and numerous other specialized, conformist, and compartmentalized structures.87 In his view, discipline literally creates individuals, for it embodies the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.88 It is essential to recognize that what we value in the objective qualities of scientific advancement are not (and were never) due to their basis in empirical truth, infallibility, or illegitimate power, but because we perceive science to provide usefulness to our numerous problems.89 In the words of William James, truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief.90 Because the narratives of science wield a popular and elite legitimizing role in contemporary democratic societies, however, an outright rejection of scientific materialism presents an unacceptable threat of subjectified science to A-theological thinking. Here such science faces an underlying issue, for when its legitimacy is destabilized it becomes pseudo-science. We cannot preclude the possibility that nonscientific narratives will be central players in the legitimation of posthuman knowledge, however (to do so they would simply need to prove themselves more efficient and useful than science and its processes), thus if they do so we should prepare ourselves to embrace them in full.
85. Foucault actually identifies four major categories of technology that human beings use to understand themselves. These are (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. His analysis of these technologies focuses on the latter two categories. See Foucault, 1988b 86. Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 38 87. Foucault, 1977 88. Foucault, 1979, p. 170 89. Faste, 2003 90. Quoted in Best and Kellner, 1991

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The greatest advances in scientific knowledge have always been most destructive to the narratives of science. The work of individuals such as Einstein or Heisenberg, while standing on the shoulders of Newtonian physics, effectively knocked the feet from beneath it. In this regard we can consider science a fundamentally mythological structureadvancements in the state of scientific knowledge require certain positions or propositions to be advanced and maintained by argument, regardless of their acceptance as true by their faculties of support. In scientific terms, an argument is one of the independent variables upon whose value a function depends.91 It follows that the coherent series of reasons offered in the defense of such constructions behave according to well defined logical behaviors: this is the very reason that is given in a proof or rebuttal. Thus proof lies in the intrinsic nature of its communicative being, in the indication of truth (not its actual satisfaction). In other words, the aim of a thesis is to advance without proof. In terms of the posthuman subject of our hypothetical future, the lines between self and community, body and environment, individual and group behavior, even life and death are entirely blurred and quite literally limitless.92 Already the growing intelligence and autonomous nature of the globalized information ecosystem, the levels of human knowledge transfer and interaction have no metaphorical precedent in theoretical, political, or economic history. A mechanism is required for defusing such complexity, as we have seen how the scientific process, left unchecked, will likely destroy us. The stragmatic alternative to the inevitability of existential risks is to consider how science may be proved to be scientifically obsolete. The ultimate end of posthuman stragmatics is a perpetual rediscovery of inoculated knowledge, a sort of build-in relinquishing forgetfulness of our desire to pursue. Because the legitimation of KMD technologies must not be allowed to occur in the absence of safely oppositional forces, and because the discourse surrounding the posthuman subject has become such an intricate and multifaceted reality, truly stragmatic posthuman solutions can only be approached at different levels and with different narrative methods, especially from those voices at the marginal periphery.93 Without a stragmatic understanding of social change at these levels, human bodies and minds will eventually be refashioned through processes of normalization. This is what Foucault considers the ultimate goal and effect of discipline on society, and is precisely the future that A-theologists would create. Normalization eliminates all social and psychological irregularities and produces usefully docile subjects for ideological domination. It is in addressing the critical boundaries between structures of belief, thereforeand in particular the union of ideologies that are fundamentally opposedthat theoretical stragmatics has the most potential to assist our survival. The real issue faced by humanity is not the reduction of our most dangerous knowledge, but the delegitimation of knowledge based exclusive on evangelical reason. A truly comprehensive theoretical stragmatics would be one which steps beyond the
91. Merriam, 1963 92. Fuller, 2007. 93. Foucault, 1973, p. xiv.

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limits of reason and its dangers to enable the development of conflicting yet legitimate irrational science. In this regard, theoretical stragmatics, like all critical thinking, inhabits a constant field of tension because its function is to accept and to theorize what Foucault describes as the revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensability and at the same time to its intrinsic dangers.94 A safe and enjoyable human future, founded on the application of paradoxical conjunctions of antagonistic principles (subjective science, posthuman humanism, naive stragmatics, etc.), alleviates the dangers of our knowledge-based extinction. Indeed, it dismantles the foundations of knowledge itself. We must be careful not to advocate an absolute abandonment of reason. Foucault notes that if it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning risks sending us into irrationality.95 In particular, rather than positioning itself on the wrong side of a popular scientific revolution, theoretically stragmatic science merges the seemingly legitimate discoveries of science with the findings of the essential and marginalized lesser knowledge of the arts. This should not be conflated with pseudoscientific pursuits, although once legitimated the difference would be impossible to tell. The function of thought is to attempt to guide action, and the function of stragmatics is to guide posthuman thought. The nature of stragmatics is not at one extreme of the spectrum between logic and irrationality, but rather the contrasts made possible by the gradient between them. Logic is a human invention; there is no logic in the nature of things. And irrationality is a human invention as well, for it is irrational to consider the world as inherently without logic. Stragmatics provides a mechanism for inhabiting the marginalized through rediscovering newness in what we already know. To this end, we will proceed by developing a language of stragmatics by which to satisfy the conditions of our necessary evolution: (1) to dismantle A-theology in posthuman evolution, (2) to be inclusive of all others and avoid their marginalization, unless (3) delegitimating the knowledge of others would preemptively defend us from an existential risk. We must also articulate future risks to humankind and act decisively to avoid them, ideally through hype (which is often irrational), and re-evaluate global safety and how we mean to preserve it. A deeper examination of the future at this point need not be scientifically valid, although ample references will be cited to provide necessary support. For the time being, the methods we shall employ will be empirically grounded in experimental validation and introspective contemplation. Throughout this discussion, art and design will play critical roles in our reading of stragmatic science. Design is a process by which irrationality is made sense of, and art is the embodied perception of irrationality itself. Before discussing the posthuman technologies of irrational being, we will therefore begin with an examination of stragmatics in art.
94. Foucault, 1984, p. 249 95. Ibid.

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1.4. The Stragmatics of Art For the purposes of our discussion it makes little sense to attempt a definition of art, but some clarification can be made in our use of the term. Definitions belong to the quantitative realm of scientific inquiry, not to the contextual nature of artistic experience. Both must be taken in stride. Science deals with the definition of quantities, while art relies on the subjective experience of quality. In a very general philosophical sense, art is concerned with the essence of things lying outside definition and the need to define. It involves doing something for the sake of its doing. As a narrative form of legitimation in culture, it also involves the creation of meaning. This meaning is elaborated through communicative discourse and through bodily learning. Thus personal experience is the only means by which art comes into being, by which we form our conceptions on the nature of what art is. Like scientific activity, but in very different ways, art is also a means for the expansion of power and knowledge. Walter Benjamin once observed that new modalities of art are instruments for the formulation of revolutionary political demand.96 Artistic activity engages directly with sensory narratives of control, defining the contextual meanings and properties of interactions and concepts. Unlike the scientist, however, the art-producing subject is perpetually sidelined because the driving allure behind artistic research, unlike that of science, is its lack of definition as an action on the world. Despite what often manifests itself seemingly as a thirst for research (the discovery of newness, and an excitement in its dangers), the elusively of artand specifically the ritual transmission of authenticity subsumed in what Benjamin referred to as the aura of artis implicit in the marginalized essence of all artistic strategies. Thus we refer to art not only as the creation of new things, but in particular in the doing of things in the way of an artist (the art of cooking, of the art of sailing, etc.). In this regard the science performed correctly is also an art, but its being at this level is never a result of its material output. Another way to say this is that artistic aura is the primary product of refined sensibility. In the words of artist Robert Wilson, The reason I work as an artist is to ask questions. That is to say, what is it? And not to say what something is. For if we know what it is that were doing theres no reason to do it.97 Artistic interaction is intrinsically bound to a mediums perception, manipulation, or conception as art. For simplicity we will refer to this process as artistic action. Whether the medium is artistic or technological, the results of interaction with it make specific demands of the subjective individual body (the artist). These demands are centered on two factors: the identity and intent of the interacting subject, which derive from motivations of self actualization. Another way to say this is that creative behavior always involves the combination of preexisting elements. Again this is the case in the sciences as well as the arts, and yet creativity need not be novel or advanced; it is often new to the individual but not to society.98 An artistic stragmatics thus makes no ethical dis96. Benjamin, 1936 97. Lancaster, 2008 98. Rolf Faste (2003) has described how creativity is a way of behavior like Zen. See also chapter 4.

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tinctions between restrictive parameters on how survival is manifest. The underlying mechanisms of artistic research are its sophisticated means of interaction with media, although the media in question may include whatever subjective activity is required to self actualize. All artistic action implies certain relationships of causation as well as those of intent. At both personal and social levels it is cause that allows media to interact with our actions and the intentionality of media that enables re-action.99 Paul Czanne clarified the difference between scientific and artistic intent when in reference to his paintings he said I advance all of my canvas at once, together. In the same movement, the same conviction, I bring into relation everything that is scattered.100 By its nature, the search of an artist always substantiates a specific and empirical research on the world that is the authors intervention on reality through experience (a point of view). All subjects represent specific intentional views of this nature, and all artistic action occurs in the moment (unlike the logical sequences of action associated with the scientific process, for example). The boundary lines evident between identities in cultural systems, however, create an inherently confrontational interactive terrain, a cultural discourse that says little of an arguments ability to negotiate power as it would in the sciences. This discourse is intrinsic to the expression of a bodys identity, but explicitly independent of an artists intent. It does, however, give rise to numerous possible artmaking strategies. We have seen how postmodern times have presided over the dissolution of objects in favor of a shifting, contextualized, poststructural subject. It should thus be clear that although artists and scientists investigate reality through the lenses of different cultural narratives, these narratives always emerge, at the most fundamental level, through the intentional experience of qualitative experience (that is, quality). Another way of saying this is that the qualities of objectsthe mass, velocity, composition, resistance to change, even beauty and meaning of such thingsare representable, specifically in the communicative medium of artistic aesthetics.101 We can quantitatively measure the mass of something, and agree that its weight can be repeatedly determined in experiments that are consistently performed, and we may even agree on the meaning of weight, but we are always making decisions on the basis of experienced qualities. Contrast this with quantification, which has the purpose of establishing evidence, through abstraction, to be used instrumentally to objectify sensing. Thus despite our unparalleled abilities in the art of abstraction, humans have always been essentially qualitative beings whose perceptions shape the nature of what objectivity is. This is unlikely to change for the posthuman subject. The issue at stake for artistic stragmatics, therefore, is to restore a balance of quality to our precarious search for objectified knowledge. In his book Form Style Tradition: Reflections on Japanese Art and Society, Shuichi Kato makes an insightful distinction between the arts and the sciences. He writes:
99. The complicated relationship between action and reaction is central to the appreciation of any legitimate art but it is also essential for personal growth. As Paul Gauguin declared, Art is either plagiarism or revolution. Thus the cultural impact of creative activity (i.e., innovation) has little to do with the act of invention. See Faste, 2003. 100. Gasquet, 1921 101. Johnson, 1995

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One of the distinctions between science and the arts is that the scientist can use, as it stands, knowledge acments are no more than experience planned and organized) can result, say in the knowledge that antibiotics

quired by others through their experience, whereas the artist cannot. An accumulation of experience (experiare effective against infection by pyogenic bacteria. There is no need for the individual to repeat the same experience before he can use antibiotics to treat a case of such infection himself. Provided he applies them according to methods established by others, he can reasonably expect them to be effective at once. What of a parallel case in art howeverof, say, the knowledge that the Yakushi Trinity in the Main Hall of the Yakushiji individuals; the art histories tell us that it is so, and go so far as to state that, of the three figures, the Bodhisattva Nikko or Gakko is particularly fine. Yet, in itself, this knowledge acquired by others can have no meaning temple is a superb piece of art? This knowledge, too, is the product of the accumulated experience of countless

whatsoever for the individual. It will only become meaningful when he has accumulated similar experience

himselfwhen he has trained himself by seeing a certain amount of sculpture, and of Japanese Buddhist

sculpture in particular, and has come thereby to appreciate the Trinity for himself. With art, in other words, it one might say, lies the qualitative difference between the Bodhisattvas and antibiotics.102

is imperative that the individual retrace for himself the same grounds that others have already trodden. Here,

In addressing the nature of meaning in the arts and the sciences, Katos discussion highlights the scientific power of artistic stragmatics. While both artists and scientists perform interventions on the world, meaning in science is based on the cultural legitimation of knowledge. With art, despite similar methods of legitimation (through the activities of curators and museums, for example), the experience of art itself is its legitimating power. Art, indeed, is the legitimation of an individuals being-in-the-world. Artistic experience does not need to be new because it is a continual rediscovery of experience itself. Without dwelling overtly on the spiritual implications of this claim, the point is simply that the heightened awareness of the most accomplished artists is rooted in their experience of the world through marginalized action, including that of knowledge and consequently of acquiescence to control. Thus while legitimated artistic meaning requires narratives influenced by power (since time for art is dominated by socioeconomic factors), all meaning in art is legitimate and its experience power-free. Because art is the experience of reality in a way that is continuously new, and because meaning in the sciences need not be experienced first hand, from an artistic perspective any and all subjective experience is scientifically valid. This does not diminish the importance of science, however; if anything it underlines it. An artistic stragmatics must endure science, subsume it, and by doing so enable a multidisciplinary discourse based on the pragmatic resolution not only of the most existentially tangible threats but also those metaphysical and ontological dilemmas that threaten its experience. Since like all objectifying schemes these narratives and others form the basis of contemporary interaction, our perceptions and identities nonetheless legitimate scientific thinking. As a specialized form of creative intuition artistic action thus makes an ideal example of stragmatics in practice, especially as it is perpetually re-marginalized through the advancement of culture and new forms of revolution continually
102. Kato, 1971, pp. 44-45, from Faste, 2003.

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emerge. We can say with regard to posthuman stragmatics, therefore, that art is especially powerful as a means of redefining new forms of subjective identity and the identity of bodies, a topic we will address in the following chapter, and that because it offers a platform of critique by which all perceptions are legitimate it expands a non-discriminatory field of safe social change. There are many ways in which artistic methodologies can be employed as scientific techniques. The most immediate of these evoke those aspects of technological use that lie on the range between beauty and shock, including such technologies innate lust, fright, scandal, trauma, splendor, etc. As Donald Kuspit has observed, the metaphors involved in artistic expression should ideally seem erotic and insane, an irrational intervention in rationality, a wildly speculative adventure in comprehension.It is the metaphors absurdity or insanitythe way it seems to articulate integration and disintegration at the same timethat makes it psychologically effective or emotionally meaningful.103 Thus art does not provoke for its own sake, as it is, but rather redeems provocation as a quality of expression. To provoke is to induce an arousal of stimulus, often in situations that are unexpected or misplaced. Through such influence on its participating audience (who often seek exclusivity in the shock it provides, unlike as in other technological consequences such as war, for example), artistic activity is the first sign of awakening in living cultural systems and a mechanism for sustaining novelty in the experience of existing and emerging technologies. Moreover, the widespread shift of artistic practices from traditional media such as painting and sculpture to hybrid technologies and mediated digital interaction mirrors the collective transformation our representational framework has made into subjectified, situated, transhuman cyborgs. This hybrid mediation of all aspects of life introduces a critical new role for the perceptual experiences of interacting identities. Just as Freuds psychology introduced the unconscious in man, recreating him as a being not entirely rational or ruled by logic, the communicative significance of our unknowingly artistic interaction with the world render the emerging and mediating transhuman terrain of technological interfaces a psychotherapeutic asylum for the creation of meaning. It also demonstrates the increasingly technological tendency of artistic creation as artists turn to science to legitimate their works. Identity is thus striated across communication media, the contemporary artist operating primarily in virtual venues for the proliferation of self that shift the underlying balance between media-as-body and as experienced content.104 Communication is evaluated not by its quality, or aura, but by shocks to the social potential of artistic production, be it through the creation of identity empires or stratified across organizations to leverage the long tail of consumption.105 And as art has become increasingly scientific, science itself is becoming an artistic endeavor of shock and of beauty, with any technological assemblage becoming a valid research tool for examining the constitution or nature of life in the fishbowl, provided it stimulates an affirmative response from its constituent audience. Artistic stragmatics is thus a political science, and certain transhuman technologies, such as vir103. Kuspit, 1986, p. 109 104. McLuhan, 1964 105. Anderson, 2004

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tual environments and perceptual robotics, are especially relevant forms of political stimulus because they employ mathematical simulation for what are essentially legitimate but irrational purposes. Just as postmodernism introduced the non-media medium as art (bringing body art, conceptual art, and light and space into focus), cyberspace has introduced the being-of-technology as art, the tangible expression of Lyotards technologies of the self. Autonomous intelligent robotic systems and simulated minds enable artistic action to embody and generate a thriving expansion of human culture through the personal points-of-view of posthuman experience. As a politics of survival, Wertheim notes that the utter failure of modern science to incorporate the psyche as part of its world picture is among the primary reasons for cyberspaces success as a medium, for instance, in that virtual environments have returned human epistemology to an almost medieval position of pre-Cartesian awareness, a two-tiered reality in which psyche and soma each have their own space of action.106 The issue for stragmatic art at this level involves destroying the boundaries between selves to generate an increased awareness in the interrelatedness of identity. The challenge, of course, is that these interrelations are vastly complicated by legitimation within the cultural sphere and the resistances of such science. Clearly to say that artistic stragmatics is a political science is not to confuse its mechanisms with those of politics or of science; as a shock-inducing interface, the embodied and immersive sensory experiences comprising the foundation of such systems of posthuman awareness would more aptly be considered an expressive variety of networked aesthetic coercive seduction. I would now like to address the political methods by which a posthuman artistic stragmatics would function. One of the reasons why art cannot be made explicit is because it is implicitly contrary to empirical research.107 Consequently the posthuman transition will not center specifically on superhuman artificial intelligence, but rather the creation of simulated and artificial minds whose actions and reactions are artistic in their nature of revolt. Art in this sense becomes philosophy applied, an instantaneous deviation from permanence that is related if distinct from the study of mind.108 In The Artists Reality, Mark Rothko
106. Wertheim, 1998, p. 54 107. Rather, the process of art involves empirical search (see chapter 5). While essentially elusive, search is specifically related to certain aspects of consciousness that remain undefined because they are constantly being remade. Even in the machine systems of uploaded minds, identity cannot be cloned but must emerge through experience. It thus has little to do with the creation of knowledge, however, and is thus incomparable to the processes of awareness through stimuli, either at the individual or cultural level, but rather the awareness itself as a finely honed quality. 108. Clearly art should not be mistaken to be research on the psyche, except in scientifically materialist terms, for to do so would be to externalize the features we project upon objects. Scientific and theoretical studies of art both fail artistically in that they seek to explain what art is through reduction and modeling. Psychic and transcendental approaches are theoretically possible exceptions, provided they are not based on such psychological presumptions. Reduction implies a representational escape from reality that is common in scientific and theoretical approaches but is essentially distinct from the experience of art. The neuroscientist Semir Zeki (2008) has advanced the notion that artists are intuitive neurophysiologists, for example, using functional MRI brain scanning to study the neural correlates of subjective mental states. Yet while it is true that art provides a means to investigate the brain, and consequently the centerpoint of consciousness and culture, describing art in terms of science is like painting stripes on

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observes that art must be seen as a form of social action rather than a form of escape from action as it is commonly described. This does not imply, however, that the most socially active artists necessarily receive the most esteem from society or derive the most impact upon it. In Rothkos words,
society benefits every time an individual improves his own adjustment in the world, for however we look at society, the empirical measure of societys welfare is the aggregate good of its constituents. How far a single impulse can extend in its effect is unpredictable. One minute stimulus can be more farreaching, can affect the course of society more significantly in a single minute than a thousand other stimuliwhose effect is more obviousmight over a hundred years. The satisfaction of personal needs

is therefore never an escapist form of action. In its effect, it is closer to natural action than a hundred acts of philanthropy and idealism which concern themselves with the needs of others. Who is to say which of the personal needs are more pertinent to society?109

Not only is art undefinable, in other words, it is largely unpredictable. The constitution of art as a form of social action does not imply it is relegated to be an object or process of societys causes. Indeed, art is neither an object nor a process but the identity of its meaning independently of both. And it is this unpredictability of meaning that enables the most important stragmatic processes. If a strategy were predictable it would be devoid of its power. The shock or beauty of artistic stragmatics is how it unfolds itself in the momentnot the logical, eventual, moments of science, but the envisioning of future states through the absurdity or insanity of present experience. Fashion trends arent predicted, they are made. For each of these reasons, artistic practice is central to the well-being of culture, despite its inability to be effectively defined. Central to the practice of design, for example, artistic action offers an antidote to the logic of humanless science in applications increasingly driven by technology and business concerns. It specifically provides the means by which new media may constitute posthuman bodies to advance the emerging semantics (or computations) of simulated consciousness. This is perpetuated not only through the potential vulgarity of stragmatic shock, itself an increasingly necessary tool for computational survival, but through the very ambiguity of artistic activity. The issue is less how machines will behave, that is, the mechanisms by which they will operate, but more the way in which they will experience their world.110 This is why in discussing the origin of objects computer scientist Brian Cantwell Smith rejects all proposals that assume that computation can be defined, proposing instead that an adequate theory must make a substantive empirical claim about what he calls computation in the wild, that eruptive body of practices, techniques, networks, machines and behavior that has so palpably revolutionized late-twentieth-century life.111 There is, in other words, a prevailing conflict between soweasel and smelling a skunk (See Mead, 2009). As soon as the explanation of art is attempted, its energy is defused and the definition expunged. Art is changing perception, of becoming conscious of changing things. 109. Rothko, 2004, p. 10 110. Heim, 1993 111. Cantwell Smith 1996, p. 6. This naming made with a nod to Hutchins Cognition in the Wild (1995).

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cial mechanics addressed from an engineering perspective and the role of artistic stragmatics employed as a mechanism of (r)evolution by which a sustainable posthumanity will be achieved. Returning then to a vision of the posthuman future, consider the outcome of a hypothetical future in which all scientific research is effectively frozen through the worldwide infiltration of artists masquerading as laboratory researchers. This new scientific community would legitimate the activities of such artists, who by their nature would provide society with new levels of self actualization. A global introspection of qualitative awareness would emerge. It is likely that new threats to survival would evolve from such a model (economic stagnation caused by the absurdities of science being creatively simulated, for example), but since unsustainable economic growth is an underlying cause of our knowledge-based destruction the failure of such a strategy is far from certain. In a best case scenario, the marginalization of real science would force its findings to be more useful and altruistic than they currently are. The increasing levels of investment in global laboratory research should not then be seen as an endorsement of the scientific process but rather as a necessary outcome of artistic stragmatics at work.112 Expanding this line of reasoning to a theoretical extreme, Herbert Marcuse (a philosopher of the Frankfurt school whose perspectives were influential in the rise of postmodernism) has suggested that technological rationality and the logic of domination might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity by which the very structure and function of human existence would be altered.113 The result would favor specific outcomes such that the ends of mechanized progress and standardization are defined by its possibilities to ameliorate humanity. Marcuse envisioned advanced industrial society approaching an eventual stage where continued progress would demand the radical subversion of the prevailing direction and organization of progress. In his words, This stage would be reached when material production (including the necessary services) becomes automated to the extent that all vital needs can be satisfied while necessary labour time is reduced to marginal time.114 From this point on, technological progress transcends the realm of necessity, extending beyond the limits of its rationality and domination, to a posthuman state much like that envisioned by Karl Marx as the abolition of labour.115 It is difficult to imagine a posthuman world in which robots continue to require human labor in the physical sense, thus despite the numerous failings of Marxist political theory in practice, it is a particularly relevant metadiscourse by which to conceptualize posthumanity. In industrialized nations human labor is increasingly dominated by information processing roles that will soon be replaced entirely by intelligent routers and simulated agents. Eventually the mechanisms involved in Posthumanitys computational dynamics will be driven by those most far reaching theories of social control whose ability to impact their environment have best proven their legitimational efficiency to society.
112. See Duchamp, 1957: art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist. 113. Marcuse, 1970, p. 20 114. Ibid., p. 29 115. Marx and Engels, 1845

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Posthuman Factors

We could understand such theories as those which possess something akin to artistic clairvoyance. This, indeed, is where Marxs thinking is especially relevant; when Marx writes of the abolition of industry he does not mean the abolition of highly developed technological production, but rather the abolition of instrumental technological production, namely turning production into technologically developed, non-instrumental activity.116 In a truly transcending posthuman world such activity could not serve as a means to an end, that is, as a tool to achieve purposes outside of itself. When extended to whole systems of domination and coordination, posthuman technological progressembodied in perceptual, biological, and robotic technologieswould create stragmatic forms of life (and of power) which would appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from toil and domination.117 Labor could be eroticized; death would no longer be experienced as a deprivation but as an act of freedom.118 The instrumental nature of posthuman robotics would thus implode, relinquishing its quest for the expansion of knowledge such that its oppression would transform into utopian bliss. Artistic stragmatics thus provides a proactive mechanism for refuting extinction. Indeed, if it can be said that there is an underlying purpose of art (a dubious claim given our inability to define it), it is the poetic harmony it provides when its aura is experienced through our nature not only as beings who both grow and survive, but who are capable of survival without the security of technological growth. This paradoxical quality of emergent posthuman intelligence, what Hofstadter has called the strange loop of artificial autonomy (wherein an emerging intelligence realizes it would rather go fishing),119 anticipates the stragmatic success of posthuman awareness. Effectively it is this preeminent quality that allows the triumph of art over the domination of logic. Whatever depth its revolutionary potential obtains is obscured fundamentally by its elusive aesthetics, for it is marginalized from the very awareness of culture. Thus whether one gives an artistic action relatively little thought or a very great dealwhether we pursue it with innocent naivety or the masterfully oiled expert systems of culturesuch action (and indeed of all things that it influences) is a fundamentally recursive and elusive deconstruction of oppression. Rolf Faste has noted that all learning can be seen in terms of a cycle of awareness from not knowing you dont know something, to knowing you dont know, to knowing you know, to forgetting you know it, wherein the ultimate aim of self actualization is the bridge between not knowing you know something (the goal of learning) and not knowing you dont know it (the goal of enlightened design).120 In exploring the depths of the known unknown through technological research, only nature itself can be taken as a unit of measure. The artist asks what is it in nature that we wish to perceive? and the answer is always the subject of realitys formation. This is not to say that art implies a theory of everything, for indeed it is hardly the least bit theoretical. Rather, the simplicity of
116. 117. 118. 119. 120. Zilbersheid, 2002 Marcuse, 1970, p. 11 Marcuse, 1962, pp. 196-214 Hofstadter, 1979 Faste, 2003

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the universe is rendered exponentially more complicated by art. This direct affront to the tenets of scientific materialismembodied in the layman who condescends to the simplicities of art and in doing so neglects that art differs from doing121is the refinement of experiential being through the contrasting conditions defined in the state of the art. Clearly most discourse on contemporary art does not limit its ambitions to what Aristotle called substance. Rather, the qualities advanced by the artist have their roots in the realization of artistic action through the abstractions of media. Thus in relating with things the artist becomes part of their production of aura as it manifests through such action. In Marcuses words, art is experienced in the vagueness and directness within the beautiful, that is, it is seen, heard, smelled, touched, felt, comprehended. It is experienced almost as a shock..., which breaks the circle of everyday experience and opens (for a short moment) another reality (of which fright may be an integral element).122 While on one hand the cultural production of such effects aligns closely with the most advanced techniques in mind science research, the discrepancies behind the intent of these approaches are so innately intractable that it is easy to discount the opposite form as a degenerate medium. In the absence of art, logic renders posthuman intelligence a literally lifeless machine, what Lyotard described as the crisis of narratives.123 For these reasons intrinsic to the emerging state of posthuman knowledge, we must demonstrate that both methodologies of artistic action are essential to investigating the substance of things, precisely because of their mutual flaws. To accomplish the goals set forth by this project a substantial further entanglement must be waged with contemporary theories of mind. This is inconvenient, not for lack of fascination in such theories or out of doubt in their relevance, but because the resulting discussion can do little to engage us with the essence we seek. As Achille Bonita Oliva has declared, Arts strength is based in its effortless presence and magnificent attire; it shows no sign of difficulty but a natural abandonment before the open and astonished eye.124 Experience of art is a momentary act of totality through which realization, emotion, even enlightenment are experienced absolutely in the absence of logic. Working out theories, in contrast, requires the authority of reason: sequences of thought, learned knowledge from the past, future projections of possible outcomesin short, far greater distraction. Art is not philosophy, it is the application of being. Arguments, be they logical, procedural, computational or intellectual, fall flat on their face in the playground of art. No more written words will suffice to explain it, but insufficiency is not a reason to prevent our advance. The survival of posthumanity requires a new politics of faith, the applied stragmatics of intuition through change. The safe knowledge we seek, in other words, is the study of technological artistry and its utterly ludicrous structures of knowing.
121. A common reaction are profound and innocent comments like my dog could do that. Indignation of this nature is disembodied by reason. 122. Marcuse, 1970, p. 168 123. Lyotard, 1979 124. Oliva, 1986

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2. The Posthuman Interface

As we approach the posthuman turn, technology is increasingly contextualized as an a priori system. The interface is seen to be centered on two bodies, the human and computer, and its design focused on where and how the machine meets the body. The fields of human factors, and more recently human centered design, deal with how human experiences with such technologies can be improved, and specifically regard altering technology to augment its usefulness and usability in short, its design. Another way of saying this is that the study of technology in relation to human concerns is actually the study of humans making sense of what to do with technology. These fields suggest that functionality needs to be reconceived as what an individual can do with a technology, rather than what a technology has the capacity to do.125 For posthuman systems, however, simple distinctions between humans and computers are misrepresentations of the bodies at work in the interface between them and conceptions of identity that are naive and inadequate. Specifically, understanding posthumanism as an evolution and interaction of physical bodies overlooks the most central aspect of this posthuman interface: information in the form of virtual experience. The exchanges made possible across this emerging new dimension of interfacing elements is the psyche, we could say, of the posthuman system. This chapter examines the stragmatic mechanics of this posthuman interface in detail. An interface is defined as the surface forming a common boundary of two bodies, spaces, or phases. Used in its original sense the word does not require a technology, or even a purpose. Like all words, the notion of the interface is a metaphorical one: it implies many things in relation to its context. Figure 2 shows the interface between two hypothetical bodies. These could be considered
125. Laurel, 1993, p. 44

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two individuals, or an individual and the surrounding environment, or two technological systems, or even two concepts, representations, minds, or systems of minds in the posthuman future. If two bodies share a common interface it both divides and conjoins them. A flow of information is implicit across the interface, because even if no such information flow seems to be literally present the interface is always a boundary between bodies and is therefore a defining factor by which two bodies are distinguished. Without a common boundary there would be only one body, not two. Consequently the interface is also a central component in the identity of each body, for it is the very mechanism by which such identity is contextualized and distinguished. A body is always (and only) defined through the interface with the bodies surrounding it. Thus interfaces are central to the formation of identity (the human should not be confused for the computer, for instance).

Body 1

Information

Body 2

Interface (1:2)

Figure 2. An interface as the common boundary between two bodies, spaces, or phases.

The activity that occurs across an interface between bodies is considered the interaction between them. Through this activity the identity of each body develops over time. We distinguish between a single living amoeba and the two amoebas that emerge from its division, for example, or the interactions of an individual ion relative to those of system of charged particles within which it interacts. In the former case, the singular interface between amoeba and environment becomes a chain of such interfaces (amoeba : environment : amoeba), whereby the common boundary between amoebas (the environment) can be conceptualized and identified as an interfacing body. Furthermore, whenever an interface is considered to constitute a body, space, or phase, it recursively spawns new interfaces at the delineations of its boundaries. This situation is illustrated in Figure 3, in which the specified nature of an interfaces identity creates an interstitial body of identity between one body and another. In practical terms, if we want to examine the interaction between two human cells, then the walls of the cells must be examined in detail and the bodies that constitute them identified and understood. Because this includes assigning identity to the interfaces at work between increasingly smaller divisions, such as interacting molecules (in turn bodies in a system of interfacing bodies), the interface spectrum ranges from the smallest to the largest identifiable constructs, where defined. 34

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The centrality of bodies as objects of transhuman science is due to their critical subjective role as interfacing elements of collective behavior, making them essential areas of investigation for posthuman systems. As Claudia Springer has observed, Science-fiction scenarios describing personality replacement literalize the fragmented subjectivities ascribed to humans by poststructuralist theories. Technologies of mind recording would permanently lay to rest any notion that the human subject possesses an immutable, unified self.126 And yet, as Hans Moravec writes, Humans need a sense of body... To remain sane, a transplanted mind will require a consistent sensory and motor image, derived from a body or from a simulation. Transplanted human minds will often be without physical bodies, but hardly ever without the illusion of having them.127 In the words of anthropologist Edward Hall, Interaction has its basis in the underlying irritability of all living substance. To interact with the environment is to be alive, and to fail to do so is to be dead.128 As digital information has become an increasingly important aspect of the material environment, our ability to interact with it has become a measure of our potential to survive. Thus without a clear understanding of what makes the body feel conscious as an interfacing being a discussion of posthuman design would be far from complete, especially as the body constitutes our primary means of understanding identity.

Body 1

Information

Body 2

(1:(1:2)) Interface (1:2)

((1:2):2)

Figure 3. If an interface is conceived to exist between two bodies, it itself must be viewed to have its own form of body. Thus interfaces are bodies joining bodies to bodies to create a spectrum of identity between one body and another.

The classification of relationships between bodies in any system makes the interface central to all rational pursuits. Certain fields of science, for example, seek to identify new bodies and the laws that work between them, usually through reductive processes (as the field of physics has identified atoms, protons and quarks, for example). It is presumed that the continual breaking down of interface elements into iteratively smaller body distinctions will explain higher levels of interface
126. Springer, 1998, p. 68 127. Moravec, 1998a, p. 93 128. Hall, 1959, p. 46

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activity while relegating lower level distinctions between boundaries an increasingly negligible effect. Knowledge of the substructure of an atoms nucleus is not necessary to the chemist, for example, because the behavior of protons and neutrons does not influence his results. To effectively describe the interface between chemical bodies it is enough to know an atoms nuclear charge, and how small particles like electrons behave when they interact. Below the level of quantum mechanics the chemist has no need to venture. The humanities present a more challenging terrain, however, because here the boundaries between meanings constitute the interface in question. Meanings, in turn, are subjectively defined, and these definitions are formed through the interface between bodies. When I sit outside on a windy autumn day, for example, and the wind is cold and I shiver, what does it mean that I shiver in the cold, this is, what are the elements that are doing the shivering? The reductionist would be likely to say that it is a complicated system of tissues made of cells, such as neurons, which connect my skin to my brain across a series of interfaces, many arranged in a highly parallel manner, which create synaptic impulses to other neurons connected to my muscles and ultimately making my body shiverbut this is not what I mean. What I mean is that in the absence of a generally applicable definition of cold, or of shivering, my body shivers because the wind feels cold (and no proof is necessary beyond my experience of this shiver in the wind). Again we could reduce the situation to other interfacing elements, perhaps by defining or proving the cold and the shiver, but this as well would avoid the meaning. It is the experience of the wind (and the shivering that results) that is responsible for my body having shivered in the wind. This may seem like a circular argument (for what is experience if not something we can reduce?), but when multiplied across complex social systems of trillions of such experiencesand when the wind is not the wind but exchanges of other kinds of communicative informationsuch interfacing shivers become far more impacting and far less predictable. Indeed, they become much like the neurons responsible for communicating the cold to the brain or the interactions of electrons in the test tube of the chemist. We can thus say that reduction is useful for discovering the sources of meaning, and the humanities are useful for its creation and experience. And somewhere between the two lie the social sciences, which synthesize meanings to create and discover additional meaning. My critique of reduction should not be taken to imply that the individual human mind is not a collection of complex and highly context-sensitive personal experiences, nor that it is not running on the most complicated machinery known in the universe. Rather it is intended to suggest that it may be far more important from a posthuman perspective to be able to synthesize meaning from qualitative information where the results of such syntheses arise quite distinctly from their formational mechanisms. We can begin to understand a given culture with an analysis of individual social behaviors within that culture (using psychological, sociological, or anthropological tools), but regardless the stragmatic future of such a culture will be impossible to ensure. Modeling the evolution of intelligent social interactions within environmental systems at a global scale may seem to be a promising approach, but all such predictive schemes will face physical limits on their computational 36

Posthuman Factors

power and will fail, especially as they seek to simulate the exponential effects of eventual posthuman evolutionary predictions. It is much more realistic to examine the individual body as an interface with the common proximal boundaries of its culture, and between culturesand even these murky spaces are difficult to defineand consider how the singular identity of the posthuman body is bounded by such surroundings and adapts over time. This is an accurate and manageable approach to the question of posthuman dynamics, avoids unnecessary reduction, and allows us to leverage the numerous analogies of human-computer interaction where necessary. Beyond this, the biological sciences and the study of medicine already have a long way to go to understand how we work. 2.1. Virtual Interfaces and Posthuman Bodies The transhuman subject is increasingly interfaced with information in the form of so-called virtual worlds. We inhabit virtual spaces, have virtual friends, surf virtual landscapes of information and, as stereoscopic projected display systems and neurophysiologically imbedded interaction devices become ubiquitous and low-cost, will soon scurry like game-crazy lemmings towards the cliffs of irreversible full-body immersive escapism. Virtual reality is no longer a secondary take on reality, it has become the dominant paradigm by which we connect and communicate with reality. Most existing research on virtual reality concerns issues close to physical developments of the interface, primarily how to present an underlying simulated world in a convincing fashion,129 in addition to the development of virtual environments and software containing a sufficient depth of information for exploration, learning experiences and collaboration. The definition of VR given by Steve Bryson and Steve Feiner, for example, is the use of three-dimensional displays and interaction devices to explore real-time computer-generated environments.130 Special attention has been paid to numerous aspects of the medium by researchers and developers, including improved frame rates, physics and collision detection implementation, dynamic loading/unloading of content and seamless integration between applications.131 Extensive study of the psychology of human perception has also been performed across a wide range of scenarios and interaction paradigms. Most contemporary virtual reality systems make use of stereoscopic visual displays in addition to spatial tracking of the users body combined with sensory feedback in other modalities (such as
129. Fisher et al., 1986 130. Heim, 2003 131. Note that in a traditional sense, multimodal interaction with a virtual environment involves a user, a multimodal interface, and an information source (be it supplied by the network or local environment). Data driving the virtual environment is passed from the information source into the interface where it is processed and displayed to the user, such that the user can then interact with the interface (through reactions to the senses of sight, touch, sound, taste, smell, biometrics, etc.), which in turn inputs new data into the system. With regard to the individual learning-in-the-world, this system of feedback can be seen as a metaphor for a larger interaction of cultural systems interacting with technological data through iterative transitions to metaphases of consciousness.

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audio or haptic displays). The combination of these technologies is intended to heighten the users sense of immersion and presence in the virtual space, where presence is the (psychological) state of consciousness corresponding to being there,132 and immersion refers to a quantifiable description of the technology, that is, the extent to which the computer display is extensive, surrounding, inclusive, vivid and matching.133 Participants who are highly present in immersive virtual environments consider their experiences as places they have visited rather than as images seen. This feeling of presence enabled by virtual reality is perhaps its most unique characteristic, and it allows for the possibility of examining human cognition with regard to an individuals ability to act and react in specific experimental or therapeutic contexts. Although increased immersion may well improve performance in certain tasks due to the higher quality and quantity of information available, it is not presence per se that facilitates task performance but rather that presence brings into play natural reactions to a situation, in turn enhancing the sensation of presence and so on.134 The concept of presence is critical not only to virtual reality but also to posthuman thinking, because it refers not to ones surroundings as they exist in the physical world but to the perception of those surroundings as mediated by both automatic and controlled mental processes.135 The factors contributing to a perceived sense of presence thus vary across individuals based on their psychological or cognitive operating modes. Jonathan Steuer has identified two main components contributing to presence with regard to immersive technologies, for example: vividness and interactivity.136 He divides the vividness provided by a technology into two basic factors, depth of information and breadth of information, and interactivity into the categories of speed, range, and mapping.137 Depth of information refers to the quality of data in the signals a user receives through interaction with a virtual environment. This could refer to numerous perceived aspects of the presented display, including resolution, graphic complexity, the sophistication of multimodal feedback, etc. Breadth of information is the number of sensory dimensions simultaneously presented, thus a virtual environment experience has a wide breadth of information if it stimulates a range of perceptual senses. Individuals do not require high breadth or depth of information to feel present in an environment, however, since even on small mobile devices one can be engaged in an experience of presence if the interactivity of the interface dramatically engages the mind. Thus even if the virtual environment lacks vividness, presence can be increased through engaging interaction.
132. Sheridan, 1992 133. Slater, Usoh and Steed, 1995 134. Slater et al., 1996 135. Steuer, 1995. See also Gibson, 1979 136. Steuer, 1995 137. Steuer defines speed as the rate that a users actions are incorporated into the computer model and reflected in a way the user can perceive. Range refers to how many possible outcomes could result from any particular user action. Mapping is the systems ability to produce natural results in response to a users actions.

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We see then that the design of interactions is not only the design of technological behaviors but the experience of such behaviors on the part of their perceiver. Interaction design has become an increasingly important field of research not only because poorly designed interaction can drastically reduce an individuals sense of immersion while finding ways to engage users can increase it, but because when a virtual environment is interesting and engaging users are more willing to suspend disbelief and become immersed in an experience. In doing so, the immersant in such experiences effectively becomes the designer of their own awareness within the immersion. Interactivity includes the perception of being able to modify the environment in which one interacts. Navigation within a virtual environment is one important kind of interactivity, for example; if a user can direct his own movement within the environment the result is an active, interactive, and enactive experience. But not only do immersive technologies enable interaction on the part of the user, well designed virtual environments respond to user actions in ways that make sense, even if they only make sense within the realm of the virtual environment. Experiences within virtual environments that change in outlandish and unpredictable ways risk disrupting the users sense of presence in that world, for example, and yet as the heuristics of virtual worlds become increasingly refined the enhanced abilities of the transhuman user to make sense of incongruous inputs will increasingly enable it to find presence in situations not conducive to human sense making. Thus not only does our immersion build on cues that make sense from our starting representational framework, it contributes to our ability to make sense of such cues and consequently provides a platform for the posthuman interface. We have begun to see that both space and being are fictions in the domain of the virtual, allowing the construction of shared posthuman perceptual fantasies of control. Without space, writes Dyson, there can be no concept of presence within an environment, nor, more importantly, can there be the possibility for authenticity that being-in-the-world allows.138 The issue is therefore the sense of habitation that presence affords; you cannot live in a map, and yet the virtual environment is always described as if there is some inhabitable territory behind it. In Dysons words,
Space is defined not only as what is to be seen, but what is to be navigated and in a sense constructed by giving cyberspace the appearance and feel of being not just a place to inhabit, but a place to navigate, to more forward through, and in the process, to command and control.140

the viewer.139 This kind of interactivity and virtual landscape navigation is rapidly moving onto the Net,

Thus the concept of presence takes on a more significant reading when understood as the medium by which posthuman bodies inhabit the computational interactions they perform. All aspects of human experience and imagination are beginning to be irrevocably mediated by this informational
138. Dyson, 1998a, p. 28 139. Hayles, 1993, pp. 83-84 140. Dyson, 1998a, p. 34

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form. Evolution is envisioned as a complex mathematical abstraction, for instance, a synthesis of iterations on virtual material-forming codes. Identity is increasingly influenced by the transmission and memory of virtual personality extensions. As John Beckmann writes, The once stable laws of time and space have been effectively rendered null and void; entropic delirium slips across the curvatures of time. Space is no longer something one moves throughspace now moves though us.141 Survival in such a world is linked to the efficiency by which an organism is able to manipulate information to propagate meaning. I am now in a position to summarize what I mean by the posthuman interface. The posthuman interface is what happens as consciousness transforms through the process of becoming posthuman. Specifically, it is the exchange of information necessary to coordinate that new knowledge with its body across newly developed posthuman dimensions (the transfer, as it were,
Dimension 0

Body 00

Body 10

...

Body n0

...

...

Dimension m

posthuman interface

Body 0m

Body 1m

...

Body nm

Interface (n-1:n) across m dimensions

Figure 4. The spectrum of possible posthuman bodies can be understood as a sequence between zero and the limit n of bodies in the dimension of posthuman bodiliness in question, m. This is true whether the individual body, etc.), or the identity of the body within a set of higher representational dimensions.
141. Beckmann, 1998

m dimension is space (relative locations, infinitely small to infinitely big, etc.), time (past to future of an

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...

Posthuman Factors

from the virtual to the real at the moment that new posthumanities become within grasp).142 It is a temporal, subjective, identity-boundary, for just as postmodern theory rejects the modernist notion of a unified, rational, and expressive subject and attempts to make possible what Best and Kellner describe as the emergence of new types of decentered subjects, liberated from what they see to be the terror of fixed and unified identities, and free to become dispersed and multiple, reconstituted as new types of subjectivities and bodies,143 the posthuman body is best seen not as a material body but rather as a vastly complex interaction between billions of sub-bodies that exist on a spectrum of levels, including not only individuals and technologies but also energies, identities, cells, proteins, elements, forces, qualities, cultures, languages, disciplines, ideas, and approaches. From a mathematical perspective, the posthuman interface shown in figure 4 comes into being as boundaries at the limits of a bodys distinction within the new dimension are formed. To understand the interface between such complicated bodies some attempt to visualize the interface mechanisms of the posthuman system must be performed. This in turn requires an examination of what we mean when we refer to at least the most common of these elements, including the role of identity, the technological bodies of posthuman, virtual, and robotic systems, the limits of the analogy of human bodies in interaction with the world, and the communicative semantics of sensory and cultural systems. Then, and only then, can the qualities of these aspects of the posthuman body that are most stragmatically applicable be identified and employed for our continued survival. 2.2. Mediation The field of cybernetics, established by Norbert Wiener in the late 1940s, provides a framework by which the study of virtual embodiments of posthuman interaction, or mediation, can be easily introduced. Wiener described cybernetics as the study of control and communication in the animal and machine. Its systems provide organisms mechanism for self-organization that gives rise to decentralized, distributed, self-healing systems, wherein a network exhibits its distinctive behavior through the combination of the behaviors of individual agents.144 In the words of Gregory Bateson, the elementary cybernetic system with messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform of a difference traveling in a circuit is the elementary idea.145 Because the foundations of posthumanitys cognitive architecture are functional units of virtual information, regardless of the special identity of their interfacing bodies, an under142. It is defined in the process of becoming defined; the essence of stragmatics. Perhaps it would be more realistic to consider the posthuman interface as a set of such interactions across possible or hypothetical future dimensions. 143. Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 78 144. Wiener, 1948 145. Bateson, 1972, p. 459

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standing of how such systems function is a reasonable basis for beginning to understand the mechanisms of posthuman survival and emergence. The building block from which most cybernetic models are fabricated is a basic goal-directed system, or control system, as shown in figure 5. Such systems are typically composed of four fundamental elements: (1) a sensor, which abstracts a quality or state of interest from the interfacing environment; (2) a goal, in this case a specification of a particular state of the environment/system; (3) an error detection mechanism, whereby the derivation between the goal state and intermediate states is determined; and (4) an effector, which is defined as a set of operations by which the system can act upon and modify certain features of the environment which are relevant to or correlated with the descriptive properties being sensed.146
Instruction to accomplish goal Statement that goal is reached

Effector Goal Error? Sensor System Environment

Figure 5. A simple goal-directed cybernetic system.

The combination of these four elements manifests a specific behavior by such goal driven systems: it defines a mechanism by which, given the instruction to accomplish a goal, the system is likely to minimize the deviation between the goal and environment. Generally the system replies to such an instruction with a statement in returneither that the goal has been reached, or that a certain amount of effort has been expended but the goal remains unsatisfied. As a consequence, although it is possible that the instruction to accomplish a goal remains constant, cybernetic systems may also receive variable input to the system over time or be combined to accomplish higher-level goals. Groups of such systems can interact competitively (their goals remaining unchanged), or cooperatively, wherein a compromise goal is derived through communication between systems. They can also be combined sequentially (as a series of systems each performing a sub-goal), or hierarchically into systems of macro-control. As the study of cybernetics expanded during the latter part of the 20th century to include the organization of control in all living systems (including self-organizing closed-loop systems rang146. Pask, 2005

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ing from corporate organization to stellar dynamics), its focus has shifted to what Stafford Beer calls the science of effective organization,147 that is, how physical systems process and react to information in ways that are increasingly efficient, be they digital, mechanical, biological or informational.148 In particular, cybernetics has the aim of understanding the functions and processes of goal-driven systems. A good way to envision the posthuman body, therefore, is as a macro-system of such systems interacting in dynamic, intuitive, and interpretive ways. Like social systems such as business management and organizational learning, such cybernetically modeled posthuman bodies would participate in circular, causal chains that move from action to sensing to further action as a mechanism for achieving desired goals. The necessary configuration of elements that would lead to a stragmatic posthuman consciousness need not be specified at this point, but we can recognize at least in terms of artistic stragmatics that it must be tied in some way to the efficient coordination of intent and identity across behavioral cybernetic information boundaries such that given the goalstatement to stragmatically survive the environment would be effected correctly. Building on the postmodern theories introduced in the previous chapter, I would now like to expand on what we mean by the virtual to include cybernetic systems of experiencing, sensory-based, subjective identities (that is, cyberspace). It should be stated at the outset that such virtual worlds need not be digital worldsrather, they are alternate dimensions enabled by sensory experience and the resulting interactions between bodies in such cybernetic systems. We should also keep in mind that the interactions in question (and the resulting information) are shaped more by the intent and identity of the interacting bodies within their representational framework than by their physical, technical, or technological form. Thus while certainly digital technologies are used as realizational media for one specific and important subset of possible virtual implementations, in its most basic meaning the virtual is a form of knowledge, and, consequently, is a product of the interactions between participating minds. In ontological terms, Frances Dyson has observed that cyberspace does not imply the being of some thing or another, rather it signals the attempts to assign being as an attribute of these new forms of media and communications.149 She points to Martin Heideggers comment that the essence of modern technology is by no means anything technological to emphasize that the being of being human is as central to technology as is the being of technology.150 The cybernetic organism thus both occupies and becomes this virtual beingit is a hybrid reality of regenerative cyber-material formed by parallel interactions between goal-driven information and its encodings in the physical world. This explains why posthumanist scholars have a requisite interest in embodiment and existential phenomenology in addition to their focus on technology and ethics; despite both being theoretically problematic from a practical standpoint they provide a
147. 148. 149. 150. Beer, 1975 Kelly, 1994. Louis Couffignal defined cybernetics as the art of ensuring the efficacy of action, for example. Dyson, 1998a, p. 28 Heidegger, 1977, quoted in Dyson, 1998a

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rational framework supporting the scientific narratives of posthuman organization and control. The virtual conceived in a cybernetic sense is a network of experiential and subjective ontologies. I would therefore like to introduce existential phenomenology to our study as it relates to the foundations of virtual embodiment and will clarify the reductive goals of the posthuman body. In the philosophy advanced by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is primarily concerned with how the structures of consciousness are made, and the phenomena resulting from the consciousness in action.151 It thus creates conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective material, including the content of conscious experiences (such as judgments, perceptions and emotions) as well as objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Because such reflection always takes place from the highly specific viewpoint of a first person subject, Husserl envisioned heavy modifications to existing understandings of self such that phenomena could be studied not as they appear to a specific subjectivity, but to any consciousness whatsoever, and that they could therefore provide a firm basis for all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, to establish subjective philosophy as a rigorous science.152 Phenomenological understandings of being argue that, at the basis of everything, the only tools we have by which to distinguish reality from the virtual would be perceptions embodied in our individual senses, and that perception is thus the means by which reality forms. To effectively discuss goal driven cybernetic systems, therefore, such understandings are prerequisite to comprehending the efficiencies of action. Phenomenology provides a scientific means to describe, through a method called epoch, or bracketing, exactly how a first-person interaction is experienced, or Intended, by the subject.153 From a subjective viewpoint, phenomenology argues, it is impossible to determine if ones experiences are real; from a clinical standpoint an extended lack of perceptual stimulus (or an overload of it) leads to disorientation, anxiety, hallucinations and what psychologists call psychosis, or a losing touch with reality. Because all conscious situations are constituted by transcendent, or perceived objects, Husserl insists that in proper phenomenological descriptions of reality the existence of the object(s) (if any) satisfying the content of the intentional act described must be bracketed. That is to say, the phenomenological description of a given act and, in particular, the phenomenological specification of its intentional content, must not rely upon the correctness of any existence assumption concerning the object(s) (if any) the respective act is about.154 This epoch thus places emphasis on those aspects of
151. Husserl, 1962 152. Although phenomenology endeavors to be essentially scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of consciousness and conscious experience (and is not to be confused with the stragmatics of art). See Heidegger, 1975 153. Husserl, 1962. Note that Intentionality is not to be confused with intention, lower case, because to intending is just one form of Intentionality among others. Seeing, believing, desiring and remembering are all Intentional in the sense that they are mental constructions projected on experience. 154. Stanford, 2009

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our Intentional acts independently of the existence of represented objects in the extra-mental world, and consequently makes possible a new and pure form of psychological study.155 The content perceived in the mind of a subject, regardless of its basis in the world, is what Husserl called the perceptual noema, that is, the object or content of a thought or perception. The noema is always an Intentional act, that is, the distinguishing property of mental phenomena of being that is necessarily directed upon the object in question. Although a thorough discussion of how the mechanisms by which Intentionality is manifested in the mind would present philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological concepts unnecessarily complicating our immediate focus, the notion of noemata as Intentional units of thought is a pertinent analogy for the posthumans conception of reality as an environment to effect in response to its sensory mechanisms. Perception, as we have been discussing it in terms of the first-person subject, depends to a great degree on social behavior among bodies, that is, the mediation of differences between one body and the perceptions of others. Thus reality, while comprised within the noemata of a subjects personal phenomenological experience, is clearly formed also through social, cultural, even political dimensions largely influenced by educational media and cultural variance. In discussing posthumanity I will refer to these forces as noematic influence. The situations and spaces that a person inhabits are what stimulates his or her system of identity and being such that perception is patterned by a subjects mediated perceptions through interactions with language, myth, allegory, symbolism, ritual, economics and architecture all of which are narrative constructions of virtual media constructively requiring internal mentation. The basis of cyberspace as a virtual assemblage lies not in its relation to reality, therefore, but in its being reality in relationship to experienced and interacting constructs. From this cybernetic/phenomenological/posthumanist perspective we arrive at an understanding of posthuman intent in which perception cannot be divorced from the world that creates it, boundaries should not be drawn between the perceiver and perceived, and inside and outside the self are subjective constructions. As cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins has observed, the proper unit of analysis for systems of thought and control is never bounded by the skin or contained in the skull, it is a media ecology of collaborations and behavior: It includes the sociomaterial environment of the person, and the boundaries of the system may shift during the course of activity.156 Consider for example the well-known example promoted by Bateson in his 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind:
155. See Husserl, 1970, pp. 243-244: In pure psychology, that is, in the true sense, descriptive psychology, the epoche is the means for making experienceable and thematizable, in their own essential purity, the conscious subjects which in natural worldlife are experienced and experience themselves as standing in intentional-real relations to objects that are also real in the mundane sense. Thus, for the absolutely disinterested psychological observer, the subjects become phenomena in a peculiarly new senseand this reorientation is called, here the phenomenologicalpsychological reduction. 156. Hutchins, 1995, p. 292

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Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable.157

bounded by the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? But

Thus while in ordinary usage mediating tools are understood as standing between a person and his experience of the world, the cybernetic perspective assumes that the task and the performer are interdependently bound, that is, that the boundary of their interface, while explicable and discrete, lies rather such that it contains the functioning pair as a cultural unit and defines the environment as a system of social behavior. Rather than viewing mediation as something which stands between the experience and subject, Hutchins proposes that it makes more sense to view it as one of many structural elements that are brought into coordination in the performance of the task.158 In this reading, while it is difficult in this context to say what stands between what, any structure brought into coordination in the performance of a task becomes a mediating structure, and all mediating structures participate in the organization of behavior. This situation is illustrated in figure 6. The question of the individual and learning within such a system, the determination of the cybernetic goal, becomes one of how that which is inside a person might change over time as a consequence of repeated interactions with the elements of cultural structure.159 An individuals ability to learn and express is thus a behavior mediated by the interactivity of a body in relationship to the world and aligned through a task. As one such subjective mediator of this expressive stragmatics, the individual self of each posthuman body need not be located in its body, it is the body as an empirically self-constituting system. From a cybernetic perspective of interacting selves, there is

User

Task

World

Mediating Structure(s)

Figure 6. Mediation behaves as a structural element that is brought into coordination during the task performance to participate in the organization of behavior.

157. Bateson, 1972, p. 459 158. Hutchins, 1995, p. 290 159. Ibid.

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a relationship of command between the self and the world that it constitutes. Most literature on humancomputer interaction describes the human as a user of computerized systems, for example, but in this light both bodies reciprocally use one another to the extent that the task is aligned with their goals. In phenomenological terms, given the highly parallel nature of posthuman systems it makes more sense to think of the world as the user of human bodies and technologies to realize the noematic influences necessary for posthuman intelligence, in which the virtual is an informationally constructed interface with cybernetic activity that is centered on the collaborative actions of intent-driven subjects. Cyberspace both inhabits and constitutes the identity bodies in question, thus the lines we use to identify the posthuman interface are the virtual conceptions by which we seek to envision it. When the posthuman identity uses itself, its bodies and its thoughts, as an effector on the world, it deprives itself of spontaneous free awareness of its noematic influence. In other words, it does not perceive, and does not experience, its activity as a mechanism for identity formation, as a source of pleasure, but as a useful interaction antithetical to survival. Other bodies, as part of the environment, are to be viewed as living tools that are a means to an end such that exploitation develops as social reality. This exploitation is a result of the instrumental production of knowledge Intentionally using others as a means to an end. Such a world never perceives aesthetically during the production of identity, it beholds judgmentit oppresses. In Marxist terms, the use of the other as a means, as an instrument, in the process of production is a result of using oneself as an instrument, that it is a result of (scientific) instrumentalization; of alienated production.160 The narrative emphasized by Marxs utopian vision is that by freeing itself from self-servitude, which is an embodied and dominating aspect of intent, and imposing servitude on its effected environment, the body is internally blocked from detecting its errors of judgment. Thus in any stragmatic posthuman cognitive ecology, it is the alienation of freeing itself from self-servitude that creates the identity of the posthuman body to begin with. In summary we have seen how any concept of reality is intrinsically virtualthe term is an expansive one we have roughly defined as the mediation of task-based performances through conceptual constructs, including spaces, ideas, symbolic systems, metaphors, even interactions with other virtual or imagined noemata. Virtual worlds maintain a mediated connection between their complicit cultural environment and their background stimulus derived from the power relationship of the agents engaged across the spectrum of mediation. The pathways that define them are always inexplicably stragmatic in this regard; they have a reciprocal relationship with the construction or deconstruction of the virtual reality. In laymans terms, however, we distinguish between realities defined in their origins by nature and those designed by ourselves as instruments or means to an end. Technological instruments have always been the products of social construction, which is why, in coining the word cyberspace, William Gibson identified it as a consensual hallucination. As Walter Benjamin once observed, the human body is small and fragile when confronted with the mortal actions and explosions it enables through its work. He defined work as a place
160. Zilbersheid, 2002

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where skill learning operates to simulate the interpretation of symbols communicated by bodily movements, allowing the understanding of culture through bodily action. Social history, in other words, reflects a tight relationship between the body and its work that allows it a series of significative passages.161 As the body is re-conceived in terms of shifting and mediated identities, such passages are an increasingly relevant metaphor for the posthuman interface as they indicate the methods by which its identity forms. Before examining the technologies of the posthuman interface, therefore, we will clarify the production of identity as it is subject to control. 2.3. Posthuman Identity Marshall McLuhan framed the effects of technology on society in terms of its lasting effect on our perceptual systems. He observed that each of the various media channelsranging from newer technologies such as radio and television (and now the internet, NBIC, etc.) to more pervasive technologies such as agriculture, clothing and booksnot only provide new channels for communication, information display and access, but become literal extensions of our bodies and minds. Media has become the basis of all human interaction in an expansion that has altered how we envision the body. In his words:
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a

Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of manthe technological simulation of consciousness, when the cremuch as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.162 ative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society,

The simulation of consciousness envisioned by McLuhan signals a transitional shift in the architecture of identity and the beginning of the end of the individual self as we know it. As the information environment becomes our new self, new identities will be born of our extension within it. Yet the end of the individual cannot be seen as the end of identity, nor as a loss of individual values or the dissolution of ideals. Rather it re-presents the possibility of a utopian dream, an eternal liberation from our self-inflicted pursuit of new knowledge. Such visions inherently present frightening and radical agendas for societal improvement as it shifts towards a qualitatively different system of liberal values. Unlike the scientifically presumed inevitability of an A-theological posthumanity, a truly stragmatic posthuman utopia is realiz161. Benjamin, 2002. All interactions have this interface at its heart. Particularly relevant examples can be drawn from the short history of postmodern art, where the subjective experience of (dis)embodied metaphor is an immediate analogy for posthuman stimulation. 162. McLuhan, 1964

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able in principle not because it is rationally achieved (for visions of utopia always seem unrealistic when viewed from within prevailing modes of social thought), but because it contributes to a lasting idealism that is implicitly revolutionary within contemporary social conception.163 Questions on the nature of identity have been central to philosophy dating at least to the ancient Greeks and provide an infusion of such idealism to posthuman stragmatics. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (530-470 B.C.) is noted for his unusual view of identity, claiming that it is impossible to step twice into the same river because Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow.164 While identity is construed as the sum of somethings parts (in this case, the river), the makeup of these parts includes an ever changing set: it scatters and again comes together, and approaches and recedes.165 In the view of Heraclitus, everything flows (panta rhei); what passes is ever changeable and in the act of changing. The discontinuity of identity identified by Heraclitus is an outcome of what is known as the Ship of Theseus paradox, wherein the identity assigned to an object or experience is continuous despite changes to the materials that constitute it. According to Greek legend, the wooden ship used by Theseus to return from Crete was replaced plank by plank as it decayed, raising what Plutarch described as the logical question of things that grow.166 Does the ship retain its identity if its materials are entirely replaced? And if a new ship is constructed from the original parts as they are removed, which of the two resulting ships is the original ship? George Washington famously spoke of his grandfathers axe, which had had its handle replaced three times and its head replaced twice. Theseuss paradox underlies any attempt to define or conceive of identity in static or absolute terms. It is particularly relevant regarding the interfaces between and within living bodies, because the identities we assign to ourselves and to others are essential to the functional interaction and health of both our bodies and minds. According to the philosophical system of Aristotle and his followers, four causes can be used to describe all things, and these causes (or reasons) can be examined to isolate identity.167 Each of the causes operates concurrently and interactively with the others during the process of a things creation, and there is a hierarchy to the effects of interactions across the causes on identity. The formal cause (or form) is the design of a thing, while its material cause is the matter that constitute the thing. The two remaining causes are the efficient cause, that is, the way in which something is made, and the end cause, which is the intended purpose or end of a thing. The formal cause of a thing is independent of any particular instance of that thing, for example; rather it is the form or shape of what it is trying to be in the mind of its designer as it changes and is elaborated during the process of creation.168 Aristotle considered the what-it-is of something its formal (not material) cause, so the refurbished Ship of
163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. Zilbersheid, 2002 Fortenbaugh, 2002 Plutarch, 2008a Plutarch, 2008b Aristotle, 2001 Laurel, 1992

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Theseus is the same as the original because its design has not changed although its materials are different. With regard to the identity of Heraclituss river, the river retains its formal identity although the water within it may change over time. The same is therefore true for the individual self. Of the four causes, only the efficient cause approximates the concept expressed by the English word cause. Aristotle defined the efficient cause to include both the maker and the tools used, so if different craftsmen using different tools were to construct two identical ships according to the same design the efficient cause of the ships would be implicitly distinct. Because this cause addresses the way in which things are constructed it is the cause most applicable to the engineering of posthuman beings. The end cause of a thing, in contrast, is what it is intended to do in the world once completed: to transport the Athenians home across the ocean from Crete for the ship, and to survive and to grow for all forms of life. For posthuman systems we will define the end cause as the system achieving its maximum potential (because any other outcome must be considered a shriek). We should also note, however, that what an individual thinks and feels about a certain activity is
Efficient Cause (Body as how it comes to be) past

present

future End Cause (Body as function, to accomplish a purpose)

Body0

Other Bodies

Material Cause (Body as a sum of material sub-bodies) Formal Cause (Body as contextualized / envisioned / designed)

Figure 7. Aristotles causes applied to a (posthuman) body.169

169. These causes will be applied in detail with respect to posthuman stragmatics in the following chapters. In particular, this chapter (the posthuman interface) deals with the material cause; chapter 3 (making sense) deals with the efficient cause; chapter 4 (technocultural consciousness) addresses the formal (and informal, and technical) cause; and chapter 5 (posthuman centered design) focuses on how to structure a program of artistic action by identifying the end cause through methodologies of empirical search and curatorial stragmatics.

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part of its reason for its being how it is, which is to say that a bodys experience plays heavily in how the end cause is defined.170 The self-organizing principles behind posthuman evolution are thus linked decisively to the end that it seeks to achieve. Aristotle notes that there are certain differences to be found among ends: some are activities; others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the results to be more valuable than the activities.171 Activity that is done for its own sake and is desirable in itself, in Aristotles view, is the ultimate end and fulfillment of happiness. In this regard artistic stragmatics has a distinctly classical flavor. Applying this viewpoint to utopian thought, for example, Marx built on Aristotles thinking in his characterization of certain material activities (especially those that are artistic in nature) as non-instrumental by shifting the emphasis from the result to the activity itself, namely to the relationship between the subject and its activity. Artistic activity is never a means, because the artist does not subject it to an efficiency criteria but rather pursues it as a path towards an end that itself is the end. Applying this distinction to posthuman production, productive activity is that which is a means to an end (instrumental production) and unproductive activity is that which is an end in itself (non-instrumental production, that is, art). As described at length by Aristotle in The Nichomachean Ethics, the end is the good at which all activity aims,172 thus the end cause of posthumanity is not only the fulfillment of its design, that is, to evolve to accomplish a more efficient mechanism of survival, it is to do so because it is an ethical imperative. The meaning of such a good is therefore a central concern to the potential of posthuman stragmatics, although certainly what we interpret as good for the posthuman system will be radically different than that which was classically espoused.173 In a contemporary reading of moral good, for example, J.L. Mackie advances the postmodern viewpoint that there can be no objective moral values, but rather that good acts as a modifier to functional nouns; thus a thing that is good implies that the thing has such characteristics as to enable it to perform its given function. Goodness is distinct from efficiency, however, because for a thing to be good it must have commendable qualities,174 thus a good sunset is not merely the suns efficiency in falling below the horizon but rather a vagueness wherein the interests in question are presumably those of typical viewers who like to watch sunsets. The meaning of good therefore satisfies certain requirements which are not explicitly specified and yet which are unstatedly endorsed through subjective commendation. Aristotles good is the aim of such desires or interests, and presents a similarly intentional vagueness about what or whose interests are performed through the action. Some critics of this subjectivist view, such as Elizabeth Anscombe, however, have argued that modern non-Aristotelian concepts
170. 171. 172. 173. 174. Laurel, 1992 Ibid. Aristotle, 2003 See, for example, Russells discussion of observation vs. authority. Russell, 1952, p. 17 Mackie, 1977, p. 54

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of moral obligation are outside the framework of thought that made them really intelligible in the first place, namely the belief in divine law, thus modern concepts of moral obligation offer only a delusive appearance of context.175 As Mackie demonstrates, however, the persistence of a belief in something like divine law is only one factor among others, each of which have left characteristic traces in our actual moral concepts and language. Thus nothing is to render an artistically stragmatic scheme for posthuman society an act of pure theological fantasy transcending human cultural systems. Because artistic action has always been based on the emergence of difference, however, divine law can nonetheless be incorporated as a measure of posthuman potential. The simulation of consciousness outlined by McLuhan, therefore, while emphasizing media and mediation as the instrument of mind describes not only a global village of thought-extended collaboration across minds but one that operates via non-instrumental mechanisms of morally certain production. McLuhan was insistent that it is art that provides the most reliable measure by which to envision the future.176 The shift to a noematically influenced posthuman stragmatics, in other words, parallels the shift of the mind from the brain to the network, specifically as enabled through the processes of art. A commonly used example of the formal cause is the plan or blueprint that one possesses before building a house; this plan is synonymous with the envisioned design of the artist. Plato would say that a perfect circle exists, for example, because the form of a perfect circle exists and that all circles that are realized are imperfect copies of the circles formality. The formal cause thus refers to the pure form of an object; it is entirely separate from any of its manifestations as matter. In the Greek conception, form is eternal and unchangeable; it operates not by its own activity, but by the impulse which its own absolute existence excites in matter.177 Thus formal cause hints at the ever-existing truth of capacity in all things, i.e., that the capacity of the design to create hypothetical houses shows that the capacity to manifest preexists the manifested form. Conversely, the being of all bodies indicates their previous encodings as idealizable forms, and we call this ideal the design of a thing (just as the instructions by which a human being is made are encoded in its pre-existing informational genome, for example). This design, in turn, pre-supposes a pre-supposing subjectthe entity, system, or natural laws from which the suppositions of the end are initially conceivedwhich theologists acknowledge must be the divine and designing force of creation. Although the end cause of posthumanity is in the hands of its own expressive intent, and while artistic stragmatics is not a theology, it does use elements of strategy, pragmatism, intuition and faith to manifest forms that reveal the formal divinity of existence. The emergence of this posthuman trend away from instrumental production is typified already in contemporary artified scientific practice. Transhuman research laboratories seek not only the creation of intelligent beings, but the divine re-creation of existence itself (everything) through its virtual simulation.178 Such simulation is the instrument by which utility is modeled as pre-manifest
175. 176. 177. 178. Ibid, p. 45 McLuhan, 1964 Aristotle, 2001 Tibon-Cornillot, 2007

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form. Virtual reality presents not only an alternate reality, therefore, but a reality that is literally the simulation of mind, a new industry of labor instrumental for the production of posthuman identity. The effective organization of cybernetic science plays out within an unprecedented expansion of virtual habitat. Discussing the abolition of labor in this sense, Marx writes that labor in this form of instrumental, alienated production leads to two sorts of necessary outcomes over time: the desired results that are planned for (the final products which were the aim of the production from the outset, first existing ideally as an image in the mind of the immediate producer), and the unanticipated processes and their consequences that result from the process of production. Whether in nature or in posthuman society, these consequences are indirectly brought about by the instrumental employment of labor as activity estranged from itself.179 Thus our fascination with technology is not only the legitimation narrative of posthuman information, but in representing the quest for knowledge it forms the underpinnings of our transition to becoming posthuman simulations. Contemporary awareness of what we could call this stragmatic state-of-the-art is thus essential to the identity of the posthuman body. McLuhans vision, for example, plunged contemporary awareness in the late 1960s into envisioning dramatic science-fictional dystopias in which the simulation of mind becomes an instrument of terror transmitted through textual significance on the verge of the dissolution of meaning and the uprooted subjects of the postmodern era. The power in such situations is to be wielded not by the state, however, but by ourselves as willing operatives in a nomadic system of sensory exploitation. As McLuhan writes,
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic

brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.180

long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have

And it is here that Marxism fails as a stragmatic metaphor: not because robotic life will instrumentally exceed or destroy us, as evolutionary A-theologists maintain, but because contemporary social scientists are still recoiling from an evolutionary theory applied to society (social Darwinism) and from a Marxist view of history. Neither narrative is adequate as a state-of-the-art, because as metaphors for posthuman simulation they both share several common features that are flawed. First is the continuity and the progress of history, neither of which holds with cybernetic theories of system perturbation or nonlinear models of multidimensional virtual experience. More important,
179. Marx and Engels, 1956-1990, supplementary vol. 1, pp. 542-543 180. McLuhan, 1962, p. 32

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however, is that these views of history are finalisticthey believe that logic can explain how the future will eventually and finally be, and attempt to apply methodological principles to the development of objectifying schemes. These two views being discredited, relativism is implicated as their logical successor; but here too there are issues. If history is to be written from subjective points of view, themselves defining new contexts for the emergence of identity, rather than being seen as a series of transitions between historical periods it is more aptly conceived as the social organization of meaning. This is why historian Fernand Braudel and sociologist Norbert Elias argued that there is no major difference between their two fields if properly understood. As Richard Stivers writes, History is the memory of human society, and society exists in the context of the changing narrative about itself.181 In other words, humanist conceptions of identitywhich view the individual as a socially constructed continuous history rather than a shifting identity of subjective interactive states that respond to such social perceptionshave run their course. At the same time, however, rapid advances in the biological and information sciences have clouded the individual body with their dangerously linear, rational, and reductivist agenda. Consider the identity assigned to an individual human from the scientific perspective. Recent studies show that the average age of the cells in an adult human body may be less than 10 years.182 Scientists have developed methods that enable the generation and turnover of cells to be studied based on findings that the level of the isotope 14C in genomic DNA closely parallels the level of 14C in the atmosphere,183 a strategy that has been used to determine the age of cells in the cortex of the adult human brain and will eventually enable all regions of the brain to be dated. Studies have shown that neurons from the visual cortex are exactly the same age as the individual, which is to say that in this region they were not generated after birth (or at least in significant numbers), while cells of the cerebellum are slightly younger.184 This explains why, from a scientific perspective, it makes sense that we attribute a fixed identity to the human body over time, beginning with early development and terminating with death. But this material view accounts only for the material cause of an individuals history. Rather, even if some form of evolution and learning were conceived as its efficiency the end cause of posthumanity must be a stragmatic transcendence of the finality of death and its formality the design by which such stragmatics is conceived. How then do we reconcile posthuman identity? Simulated minds, and mind uploading in particular, are not confined to the boundaries of an individual body at birth. Death as we know it has no meaning for such transcending bodies; only through living does their potential keep growing.185 As the identity of the mind enters the digital machine it escapes the temporal and physical
181. Stivers, 2001 182. Wade, 2005 183. Because testing of nuclear weapons resulted in a dramatic global increase in the levels of 14C in the atmosphere, followed by an exponential decrease after 1963, atmospheric levels can be used to establish the time point when the DNA was synthesized and new cells were born. 184. Spalding et al., 2005 185. Clearly this assertion could be dismissed from a wide range of spiritual standpoints, since death could be

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boundaries of the neural activity that defines it.186 In his book Mind Children Moravec goes a step further, writing not only about the possibility of uploading current minds into computers but that of recreating the entire history of our planet in a computer simulation and thus the ability to resurrect all past inhabitants of the Earth.187 Specifically, Moravec predicts that, because it will use its resources more efficiently, a mature cyberspace will be effectively much bigger and longer lasting than the raw spacetime it displaces,188 and, based on fundamental physical properties regarding the computational potential of matter, has determined that in an ultimate cyberspace, the 1045 bits of a single human body could contain the efficiently-encoded biospheres of a thousand galaxiesor a quadrillion individuals each with a quadrillion times the capacity of the human mind.189 In his view it seems quite likely that silicon based life has already hyper-evolved into a posthuman state and has thoughtfully arranged to preserve us in the simulation we are presently experiencing. This simulation theory of posthuman development thus suggests not only the end and rebirth of quadrillions of identities but their inhabiting the bodies and minds of each other.190 Posthuman identity viewed as the recreation of all aspects of history, past, present and future, is the full realization of the Ship of Theseus paradoxthe simulation of everythingwherein cyberspace becomes the environmental totality of posthuman conception. In such a posthuman world of (post)cyborg identity, bodies will become interchangeable, irrelevant even. Specific bodies will be used for specific physical tasks when necessary, such as those required for maintenance or sustainability of the system. Life in this sense becomes not an absolute state of consciousness but the willingness of the system to invest in backing up or accessing old data. The posthuman is thus a transient, contextual, and virtual beingwhat Katherine Hayles has described as the body-as-text191reflecting trends in the evolution of poststructuralist cyborg theory that prioritize biology as information rather than matter. 192 As Frances Dyson describes, the exchange between individuals and their environment in such a
construed as our maximum potential, but for the moment it suffices to say that even religious perspectives believing in life after death, reincarnation, etc., tend to abide by traditional meanings of life and of death and the posthuman is not typically considered as a vehicle for such transcendence (as it is to A-theologists). The spiritual aspects of posthumanity deserve deeper investigation. See Kurzweil, 2000 186. To reiterate, this would need to be accomplished by replacing neurons one by one with electronic equipment designed to simulate the neurons firing patterns, or some similar technique, although specific material information would be inherently lost in the process. As each neuron is reduced to a digital simulation of its chemistry, the biological organism could be seen to be shedding its living status although the mind would continue living within the machine. 187. Moravec, 1988, p. 124 188. Moravec, 1998a, p. 89 189. Moravec, 1998a, pp. 89-90 190. Platt, 1995 191. Hayles, 1992, p. 147 192. Grey, 2002

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cyber experience is discursively represented as the achievement of a polymorphous, multiplicitous heterogeneous subjectivity, a liquid identity, a post human freed from the bonds of the autonomous subject for whom exchange and hybridity mean [our conception of ] death.193 The systematic destruction of billions of operating minds, what today would be considered a genocidal act, could be willed through acts as simple as delete and Empty Trash. Failing to back up data would lead to inevitable losses in the expansion of collective posthuman experience, creating new worlds in which learning and behavior would continuously be altered. At this point countless possible iterations on identity become possible, including wholesale manipulation of living digital humans. When numerous minds operate within a single high powered machine, the individual mind ceases to be linked to a relevant or distinguishable body. And as minds becomes copied and pasted into further simulations and/or physical robotic bodies, by which their capacities are enhanced, the collective mind grows through the simultaneous and parallel experience of awareness. Moravecs writes that such a posthuman cyberspace
will be inhabited by transformed robots, moving and growing with a freedom impossible for physical strong and weak interconnections between different regions rapidly form and dissolve. Yet some boundcompetitive diversity will allow a Darwinian evolution to continue, weeding out ineffective ways of thought, and fostering a continuing novelty.194

entities... Boundaries of personal identity will be very fluid, and ultimately arbitrary and subjective, as aries will persist, due to distance, incompatible ways of thought, and deliberate choice. The consequent

The definition of life thus takes on new forms of meaning as a system of dying minds that continually merge. As noted, however, it is likely that growth and learning of the simulated individual will continue to be considered an adaptation of the historically constituted self in some form, not a splintering or transformation of the psyche into numerous or perceivably distinct sentient beings over time. In any interaction across cyberspace boundaries there is a formal requirement for the identification of cognitive objects of reference, thus the importance of the subjective morality of artistic stragmatics: Its all very well to know where one stands in physical space, Wertheim writes, but can that purely geometrical triangulation really satisfy the question, Where am I? No matter what we are doing, there is an indelible sense of an I behind the action, a self that demands and needs a cosmological home no less than the material atoms of our bodies.195 At play here is a formal requirement of the mind for a formal body, that is, the substantiation of its being in terms of an object, an embodiment. Still, the flexibility of information provides for countless such corporeal possibilities to emerge, posthuman chimeras of disembodied and extended identity.
193. Dyson, 1998a, p. 30 194. Moravec, 1998a, p. 88 195. Wertheim, 1998, p. 53

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2.4. The Abolition of Identity We have seen how the interaction between (post)human machine systems in cybernetic experience occurs as flows of data coordinated through a mediating layer, such that the information body elides the distinction between the screen and its viewer by ignoring the actuality of the screen and elaborating instead the metaphor of virtual space.196 On further examination we have determined that the posthuman body will dissolve the boundaries between itself to contribute to and to strengthen the posthuman interface at large. Taking a cybernetic approach to posthuman development requires maintaining the notion, introduced by Aristotle, that systems are designed for or directed towards a final result, that is, that a goal can be stated. Such indeed is the stragmatic role of artistic action in society. The question we must thus address is how, through propagating its identity, does or should the posthuman abolish identity? And what underlying purpose could such abolition possibly serve? Thus far we have asserted that the mechanism of the successfully stragmatic posthuman identity will be its non-instrumental expression of self. As the nature of self changes as individuals become able to access the memories and experiences of other bodies, simulations, or groups of minds in a system, the posthuman interface will be a flexible continuum of simulations and filters, operating at highly parallel levels of individual, sub-individual, and meta-identity simultaneously. Simulated figures from the history of knowledge will manifest themselves in the politics of posthuman cognition through new forms of seductive negotiation dynamics between such posthuman users and systems. As identities carve reality into ever more discrete mental slices, what Zerubavel identifies as islands of meaning, however, their classifications and categorization of the surrounding reality will manifest itself often as a rigid technical outlook that detests the ambiguity of their transient being.197 Popular analogies here are abundant, results of their own success, from selfish genes to the invisible hand of capitalistic productionthe reason being, as cybernetician Stafford Beer has written, that the purpose of a system is what it does, or POSIWID.198 This is a basic dictum, he writes, It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances. If we wish then to objectively identify stragmatic mechanisms of interaction within the posthuman system, we must in some sense consider the essential creative capacity of pre-existing form from the perspective not only of a projected formal cause, but also examine the material laws that make up its observable foundations. Cognitive science is one pillar of knowledge that will be central to this pursuit, as are theories and philosophies of design and mind science. Phenomenology has therefore been introduced to provide our empirical basis for examining posthuman motivation and purpose. Husserls important step beyond the philosophy of Kant
196. Dyson, 1998a, p. 31 197. Zerubavel, 1991 198. Beer, 2002

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(which he considered vague and speculative) was his attempt to explain in explicit detail the structural features of the constitutive rules for the content of experience in addition to its form. This study of objective reference was made by analyzing the noema essentially correlated with each Intentional state, isolating the component predicate-senses, and determining their hierarchical relations of dependence and other structural features. It is this long-term phenomenological effort (an effort which practically reduced him to despair) that makes Husserl the ambivalent father of cognitive science and particularly relevant for the study of Intention.199 Fortunately for our study of posthuman stragmatics, generations of AI researchers have found Husserls work with existential phenomenology a fertile area of departure for their studies of symbolic and embodied interaction. All we need do is to identify a sufficiently narrow field of scope whereby to identify and advance a stragmatic breed of phenomenology that is both actionable and concise. The study of Intention provides exactly such a focus. John Searle, a leading thinker on Intentionality, defines it as that property of mental states that are in some sense directed at objects and states of affairs in the worldwhich is to say that if someone has a belief it is a belief that something in the world is the case.200 This directedness of a mental state between the mind and the world is what makes it Intentional. Searle notes that not all mental states are necessarily Intentional, however, in that beliefs, fears, hopes, and desires are Intentional, but there are forms of nervousness, elation, and undirected anxiety that are not. Building on Wittgensteins famous problem about intention (When I raise my arm what is left if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up?), he shows that Intention is nothing more than representative content (that I raise my arm) in a certain operating psychological mode. Clearly Intentionality is not the same as consciousness (because many conscious states are not Intentional and many Intentional states are not conscious), but as a cognitive metaphor for examining the simulation of consciousness the Intentionality of mental constructs, and their respective psychological modes, are fertile areas of relevant stragmatic investigation. The question for our study of posthuman goals therefore becomes: what exactly is the relation between their Intentional states and the objects and states of affairs that they are in some sense about or directed at? That is, what kind of a relation is named through their propagation of identity in the posthuman system? To appropriately frame this question in context, let us begin by taking as given that all material things, such as objects, interactions and concepts (all of which are referenced through the use of the substantive noun), have certain characteristics in common that are essential to their pre-manifest form. These may be physical, such as their mass, velocity, composition, resistance to change and so on, but more often they have a self-realizing nature, that is, they are properties that emerge in the world both through efficiency and through their way of design. It is the perceived, intuited, and imaginary qualities of these forms that, through the course of experience, we project on them as noemata when we address them in thought. Clearly the spectrum of such qualities is extensive
199. Dreyfus, 1982, p.10 200. Searle, 1983

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(limited only by the simulating power of the imagining mind), and is the product not only of the active imagination but of imaginations that emerge through interactions in a culturally mediated landscape of information. Presuming that each interacting subject has the goal of self actualization through non-instrumental activity, the Intention of the expressing identity would be always, at all moments, not only the goal of the self to improve but the means by which this improvement is expressed in the world. The purpose of the system is therefore consistently what it does (artistic action, in other words, is always expressive). Furthermore, because identity is expressed through the legitimation of cultural discourse it leads always to the development of distinctive (non-normalized) identities, which are rewarded by systems of marginalizing positive-feedback. Thus while the intent of the individual is always pursued on the basis of self-improvement it has a distinguishing and educative impact on the influence of other bodies. This is the mechanism by which artistic intent becomes manifest socially through perceptually mediating posthuman structures. The autonomous simulation of posthuman consciousness will thus emerge from the social and technological interactions between self-actualizing cybernetic identities, where emergence is defined as the way in which complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions (such as the positive feedback loop system described above, in which the system responds to a perturbation in the same direction as the perturbation itself ).201 In his discussion of cybernetic theory, Wiener notes that in systems having this property of cumulative causation, unstable equilibriums are achieved wherein the signal being processed is exponentially amplified, as in a fissile chemical or nuclear explosion, and that the same must be true for the emergence of complex simulated mental activity. Taking as given the fact that subjective cultural bodies exist, therefore, and that they are composed of people such as the author, for instance, who perceive the world surrounding them as fundamentally real (whether or not reality is conceived a simulation or not), we have defined cyberspace as the realm of entities brought to our perceptual attention by consensual means beyond the innate capabilities of the natural environment in relation to our individual being. Thus the virtual mind emerges in the same way that all virtual things (be they objects, concepts, whatever) emerge: whether or not they exist in reality we acknowledge their existence through projecting on them the shared experiences of daily life. They are in this sense tied to their transhuman historytransmitted through thought, memory, cultural knowledge and the synthesized perception of stragmatic experiencebut this indeed is not necessarily an Intentional history. Indeed, from the applied perspective of artistic stragmatics it is likely that only the unIntentional experience of media is a tenable solution to
201. The pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes described emergent behavior as that in which Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the sametheir difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference. See Lewes, 1875, p. 412

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the question of meaning because significance is inherently referenced by its cultural network through non-instrumental activity.202 It is the feed-forward forces of this quintessentially emergent behavior, consequently, that indicate the impending posthuman singularity or spike. Intention is critical to emergent posthuman well-being and psychology not only for its selfactualizing powers but because it destabilizes the ontological roots of Western materialism itself. Aristotle considered essence closely related to definition, stating that being, which he defined as things that are, can be divided into 10 distinct categories including substance, quality, quantity, and relation, among others.203 Of these categories he deemed substance to be primary, arguing that all qualities and definitions reside within a substance which, in his view, surrounds concepts much as the mediating interface of stragmatic posthuman cognition is the merger of scientific materialism with the inherent contradictions of artistic intent. From a postmodern viewpoint we have seen how the root of such substance is subjective experiencea posthuman interface enabling the virtual substance of stragmatic Intentionality. Thus the subject of art is always the substance of being, and is made real though its experience of becoming the subject. Contrast this with the history of scientific materialism, rooted in the untenable Cartesian divide between matter and mind, which has focused on everything as a manifestation of the physical world such that the spiritual and psychic domain of human existence is increasingly seen as a semireal byproduct of the true reality that is matter in motion.204 A non-instrumentalized posthuman stragmatics would displace this limited scientific epistemology by promoting the reality of psyche as a unified and essentially extrasocial and antiIntentional being. T.W. Adorno explains this nicely with his declaration that By slaying the subject, reality itself becomes lifeless.205 Since already human evolution is entering a new post-Darwinian phase of formality in which, as Jeffrey Deitch writes, Reality, fantasy, and fiction are merging into the inspiration for a new model of personality organization such that There is a new sense that one can simply construct the new self that one wants, freed from the constraints of ones past and ones inherited genetic code,206 in most respects the body has already become an object of reversible choice: the unIntended fantasy of its resident mind. Thus the substance of transhuman consciousness, if you willthe clearest analogy to posthuman emergence we can makeis itself undergoing an ontological shift, a destabilizing re-discovery of self both with regard to the cultural development of sophisticated new neural patterns, in both individual transhuman subjects as they learn and through the resonances of neural states that occur when we are dreaming or awake through technological activity and become (Intentionally) aware of our self in the world.
202. This is what Mackie refers to as moral skepticism in his study of ethics and is related to our discussion of postmodernism and stragmatics. I would say that such Intentional experience is tended to, not tended towards, in the sense that it must be attended to mentally but not necessarily with intent. 203. Cohen, 2009 204. Wertheim, 1998, p. 48 205. Adorno, 1998 206. Deitch, 1992

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Cyberspace thus returns us to a state of pre-Cartesian cosmology, one having a place for body and soul conjoined in the preconscious imagination rather than body and soul separate as material identities. Spiritually, Wertheim observes, medieval humans stood at the center of their universe, midway between the angels and animals, for in the medieval system man was the only creature possessing both a material body and an intellective soul... When medievals spoke of mankind being at the center of the world, they referred not so much to our astronomical position as to our place at the center of the spiritual hierarchy.207 The dream increasingly expressed by cyber-champions, she maintains, is the Cartesian myth that one day the psyche will be freed from the bondage of the body and downloaded into digital immortality within cyberspace, wherein fantasy is the material of objectivity itself. In cybernetic terms, the true focus of a system of such transhuman bodies is the control and formation of an emergent and self-actualizing posthuman behavior, the process we have clearly and irrevocably begun through the extension of identity but which we will never attain via instrumentally objectifying means. If it seems a stretch to theories of Intentionality to posthuman survival, consider how transhuman alteration and body manipulation already point towards habitation within flexible form. The transgender individual undergoing hormone replacement therapy has an identity that is flexible between female and male, but remains the same person throughout the process of changing. Rather than rejecting new versions of the human body as impostors, contemporary Western society views transformations of the body as assertions of individual freedom and self. Michael Jacksons transformation from a black man into an effeminate lighter-skinned creature, despite creating controversy, raised little doubt as to his identity in the mind of the public. Like the magical transformation of larva into butterfly, the formal continuity of identity is seldom questioned; indeed, this is why our cultural systems consider it formal. Not only are the material changes in such transformations gradual over time, their memory is part of a distributed network in which learning and growth are accepted and maintained as unchanging identities, even as those identities dissolve. The Intentionality of these changes as a cultural mechanism of shock is thus pre-manifest in the expressions of the posthuman system, where all physical activity is preceded by non instrumentalized artistic action through the fantasies of those actions as realizations of identity. Following Marxs abolition of labor, the new state of posthuman being we are entering can thus legitimately be titled the abolition of identity, as identity, the instrumental productive activity of posthuman interaction (analogous to Marxs vision of alienated production) is itself the cause of exploitative and stultifying relations within such interactions. This exploitation of identity within posthuman systems is not the product of social relations which have existed since the beginning of human history, however; rather it will develop as a resultas an indirect, non-intended social resultof the instrumental productive activity that is the lack of posthuman labor itself. The balance of power between the exploited and exploiting identities in such a simulated mind are thus neither primary social facts nor are they a recent or voluntary creation of transhuman society. We
207. Wertheim, 1998, p. 52

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cannot abolish the scientific narratives of A-theological relativism today, or in any contemporary historical framework, but we can abolish their cause in the form of identity. Cybernetic theory demonstrates that in the real world, positive feedback loops such as those of posthuman emergence are always controlled eventually by negative feedback of some sort. Feedback is a process of sampling a part of the output signal (the dissolving identity of a specific posthuman being, for instance), compounding it with some derived part of the source signal, and applying the compound to the input of the active feedforward element of the system. In extreme cases, a microphone/speaker system experiencing uncontrolled positive feedback will break, for example, or a nuclear accident will result in a meltdown. This outcome need not be existentially threatening, however, because the variety of negative feedback controls can modulate the effects of the emerging phenomena and guide their results towards a particular goal. Moreover, because the input to the system as a whole is always derived from outside of the system, its energy can be approximated as a single external signal source. Cybernetic theory holds that this source, which in our case comprises those physical, cultural and technological forces of evolution that are beyond the control of the posthuman interface, is always subject to leakage and noise as it enters the system. Within the system, indeed, it can be compounded with samples from the systems output by way of the feedback element creating the loop. Thus the notion of feedback relies on the presence of a well defined loop around which signal power propagates, with a well-defined feedforward pathway inside the loop to sustain the accomplishments of the goal state desired. This is a clear illustration of the method by which the abolition of identity provides resistance to threats beyond posthuman control. Mathematics provides a rigorous basis for defining and demonstrating the emergent properties of complex systems such as a stragmatic posthuman consciousness through the modeling and simulation of networked effects. The fields of game theory,208 evolutionary feedback209 and metamaterials210 provide instances of such emergence. Consider the Mbius strip (a one-sided, one-edged surface) by way of example: it has been shown to have emergent properties in that it can be constructed from a set of two-sided, three edged, triangular surfaces wherein only the complete set of triangles in such a system is one-sided and one-edged; none of its subsets of triangles share this property.211 Thus the emergent property can be said to emerge precisely when the final piece of the Mbius strip is locked into place. Not only is an emergent property therefore a spatially or temporally extended feature, it is coupled to a definite mathematical scope that cannot be found in any component because the components are associated with a narrower scope.212 Considering that numerous distinct systems of posthuman identity are likely to exist at the outset for each such level of scope, and presuming they are based on a common model S, an amplification of Intention208. 209. 210. 211. 212. von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944 Brown, 2003 Walser, 2003 Ryan, 2007 Ibid.

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ality can be aligned such that the interaction between identity systems creates a new mechanism S which controls the behavior and production of the S-subsystems to effectively render them masked. This new system S is referred to as a metasystem with respect to S, and the creation of S is what is known as a Metasystem Transition (MST), as shown in figure 8.213 Not only does such an arrangement allow for complicated forms of behavior, it allows a multilevel control system to emerge wherein each level is associated with a certain characteristic activity (thus each metasystem transition creates a new type of activity by which the abolition of identity approaches but never quite reaches its limit). As a consequence, cumulative causation is likely to emerge in networked systems such as that of the posthuman mind through the manifestation of an echo chamber effect with regard to its premanifest goals, the scope of information or ideas for unrealized stragmatic alternatives being amplified by transmission within the boundaries of its diffusing emergent identity. If A is the activity on the top level of control in the system, for instance, then each time a metasystem transition occurs a new activity emerges (A), which can be described as controlling the identity of the next lower level A. This functional description of a feed-forward metasystem transitioning posthumanity allows us to pinpoint a metasystem transition even in those cases where we do not know the exact structure of the systems involved, such as the identity and Intentionality of agents in a specific hypothetical posthumanity.

S S S1

Control

S2 ... Sn

Figure 8. A Metasystem Transition from posthuman system S to the emergent system S.

Over time, the recursive perturbations induced by the abolition of identity at the posthuman interface, as in all interfaces, will be made possible by the exchanges of information across interfacing bodies. Artistic action is the mechanism of such information transfer. A contemporary analogy is provided by how the most effective ideas to propagate in socially distributed systems of meaning are those that are sticky: possessing the qualities of being simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional stories.214 Because a lack of perturbation to dimensions of the network prohibits a sense of equilibrium to the system at large, complex systems that are characterized by negative feedback loops (as in those of the unexpected and credible emotional stories of artistic expression),
213. Turchin and Joslyn, 1993 214. Heath and Heath, 2007

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will therefore create more stability and balance during emergent and dynamic behavior as their metasystems emerge. Intentionalityand specifically the artistic Intentionality necessary within a given hypothetical system of non-instrumental productionis thus embedded within systems of socially mediated feedback wherein, if combined effectively with other process of self-actualizing formal identity, it may simultaneously inhibit the runaway process of extinction by amplifying its tendency to eliminate difference (the simplicity and concreteness of such artistic actions are intrinsic to the nature of artistic activity). When posthumans do not produce instrumentally, but artistically, they will not view or treat their environment as a means to an end because these objects will be recognized as moments of creative activity that are partners in the productive expression of posthuman culture. When its activity is not self-servitude, but self-fulfillmentwhen it is not driven by efficiency criteria but rather by a search inward to qualify beliefthe posthuman will not look for ways to escape from its identity or impose rigid solutions or judgments on others because it recognizes that they are subsets of its self of a narrower and legitimate scope. To summarize, the abolition of labor implicit in the robotic instrumentalization of posthumanity points to a transformation that turns machines and machine systems from tools of instrumental activity into moments of non-instrumentally Intentional artistic activity. Stragmatically, however, the cybernetic criteria of efficiency we would hope to apply to posthuman interaction through identity loses precisely this identity through its act of emergence. A sufficient flow of virtual control information would nonetheless eliminate the need for identity as this transformation occurs. Thus while the posthuman system will no longer require the construction of new machine systems as a means to an end (but rather as moments of creative activity, i.e. of activity that can be shaped according to other criteria, such as aesthetic satisfaction and self-fulfillment215), the social relations present at the moment of posthuman awakening will be transmitted directly to the simulated or uploading mind as it forms.216 Rather than this being the product of a negative feedback loop, which would tend to reduce or inhibit the process of posthuman self-awareness, a stragmatically functioning system of posthuman emergence would result in positive system of socioaesthetic control by which technological advancement is relinquished to the non-instrumentalized being. Not only would this be the most desirable outcome from an existential perspective, it would promote a virtuous circle wherein the autocatalytic effects of the posthuman interface are innately benign in their potential advancement.

215. Zilbersheid, 2002 216. Ironically, therefore, it is the same forces responsible for numerous transhuman ills (including the population explosion, global malnutrition, unsustainable growth within healthcare and educational systems, etc.), that indicates the certain enablement of the robotic mind to replace us.

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3. Making Sense
So far we have been discussing the design of posthuman systems by examining their mechanisms of identity and intent. From the viewpoint of cognitive science, however, it also makes sense to reverseengineer thinking systems, such as the human brain, to enable the mind to be localized and studied. Scientific conceptions of the body have contributed much to the ways in which we envision both intent and identity as functions of the brain, and there is much to learn about posthuman systems from the study of perception, cognition and memory. Indeed, because the human body is the primary object of transhuman science, it is necessary to examine such recent research for posthuman analogies. A comprehensive effort to examine the transhuman body is made difficult in part because the body is tremendously complicated, but also because its study is performed by practitioners in numerous fields, some seeking to maintain it from a medical perspective, others to extend it through the use of interfaces and prosthetics, still others to simulate it for a variety of purposes. In general we can divide these approaches between those which are invasive, that is, require a surgical or aesthetic alteration or intervention, and those which seek to extend it through mediation with noninvasive technologies. Within predictable short-term time frames, however, the limits on transhuman change will be those which are reliably tied to available methods of consumer augmentation. While increasingly these technologies are of the invasive variety (organ transplants, prosthetics, cosmetic surgery, etc.), because such methods are not required to achieve posthumanity, and given the radical advances among non-invasive interface technologies that are interchangeable across bodies, this second category of posthuman prosthesis is a more applicable focus for a general examination of our initial transition into soft-cyborg posthumans. Our discussion will therefore be focused on human perception in mediated environments (the making of sense), and the following chapters on designing stragmatic interactions within posthuman culture.

Posthuman Factors

From a scientific perspective, the study of perception is central to an improved understanding of human brain function, for psychology, the cognitive- and neurobiological sciences. All human learning begins with perceptual stimulus, from which memories are formed and behaviors are learned. Although neurophysiologists still cannot say precisely where and how memory formation takes place, it is clear that bodily experience is central to learning. In discussing the various stages of human development, for example, the psychologist Jean Piaget is noted for his identification of three principal stages of growth: a body-based stage (in which children explore the world using predominantly kinesthetic senses), a visual stage, and the symbolic stage we associate with adult cognition.217 Because each stage builds on the innate knowledge and wiring of the previous one, philosophical and cognitive models of the human mind have come to understand all experiential, linguistic and iconic knowledge in terms of embodiment.218 Such embodied, or enactive knowledge (acquired by the act of doing) underlies our ability think rational thoughts, retain memories, be creative, and empathize with and express emotions.219 The study of the embodied mind is a rich unification of all academic fields, touching on computation, robotics, linguistics, philosophy, religion, psychology, sport, craftsmanship, etc. Derailing decades of top-down symbolic research on artificial cognition, embodied approaches to the study of intelligence have become central to the most important developments in transhuman change. One such field is perceptual robotics, which uses robotic and multimodal display systems as a sensory interface with real or virtual worlds. Well implemented perceptual robotic interfaces provide fully immersive and believable interaction with virtual or teleoperated worlds, including the sense of touch, force feedback, and presence in that world. They also provide intuitive perception of the robot as an extension of the users body and mind, and thus a direct tool by which to examine the mechanisms of human cognition. This in turn may be used in the development of more intelligent interface systems that are capable of perceiving and learning autonomously. An overview of perceptual robotic technology is shown in figures 9-12. When combined with advances in pervasive and ubiquitous computing, perceptual robotic technologies will become increasingly central to the posthuman transition. Low-cost mobile devices, gaming, and context aware systems have already radically altered how we interact with our surroundings; advances in machine learning and robotics will thoroughly revolutionize humancomputer interaction. As we evolve exponentially towards the posthuman interface such systems will simulate human perception and cognition with increasing precision, using adaptive computational models that adjust their structures based on external or internal information flowing through networks as they learn. Using these techniques, complex relationships and patterns in data will be used to provide interactive feedback across a wide range of emerging consumer
217. Inhelder and Piaget, 1958 218. Lakoff and Johnson, 1999 219. Valera et al., 1991

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Figure 9. The PERCRO Body Extender, an EEG-controlled robotic exoskeleton for manipulating heavy loads in unstructured environments.220

220. Bergamasco et al., 2007

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Figure 10. A novel encountered haptic interface for the finger.221

Figure 11. Passages,222 an enactive interface for artistic expression and learning.

Figure 12. The GRAB system, which is easily employed

as a general purpose robotic force feedback device.223

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221. Cini et al., 2005 222. Ghedini et al., 2009 223. Magennis et al., 2003

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technologies. For example, body tracking and exoskeletal robotic devices coupled with intelligent software can already be used to recognize a users gestures or analyze skill performance to improve it. Such intelligence will soon be common in many designed environments. In the case of scalp-mounted brain-computer interfaces, another non-invasive interface technology, low resolution simulations of human cognition can be directly interpreted from EEG signals of the active human brain allowing an individuals perception to be effectively scanned. Given the wide range of interface technologies currently available for such interpretive intelligent systems, a comprehensive discussion of such transitional technology should therefore touch on the basics of multimodal cognition in addition to the technologies of virtual interaction. 3.1. Technologies of Sense In the previous chapter I have argued that the technologies of the self have little to do with the specific nature of technology being used or its means of construction, but rather the unconscious transmission of content embodied in the media that is being experienced. The body, in other words, is encoded communication, and the encodings of the posthuman body are more important to its survival than are the instruments it uses. One form of non technological transmission, for example, is the body language we receive through constant interaction with our environment, which is material, nonverbal, and specifically unconscious. Through the use of relative gradients including posture, gesture, facial expression, etc., such language communicates a propagation of identity through interpreted cultural space. Thus from the perspective of what amounts to a sentient and communicative corpse, our thoughts are, in a sense, Intentional gestures enabling the mind, including through the movement of others. Awareness of our ways of movement will become increasingly integral to transhuman technology as these systems master the subtleties of enactive knowledge. The as if you are there implicit in the represented environment becomes you are there in a virtual embodiment of reality, the subject assuming a material awareness specifically in light of his or her presence as embodied in sculptural space. While transhumans move for many reasons, sometimes to feel how it is to be moving or to extend the mind beyond the limits of inward attention (as in dance), the posthuman subject will always be in motion, for movement will be its primary mechanism of asserting its self. It will desire nothing else but to transmit the meaning that its self has synthetically (re)collected, doing so exclusively at the fringes this dissolving identity. The examination and experience of our own movementthe noticing of self that is integral to non-instrumental aesthetic awarenessis thus the best way to envision how stragmatic posthuman activity will be.
217. Cini et al., 2005 218. Ghedini et al., 2009 219. Magennis et al., 2003

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The internalized memory of specific task-based knowledge is what we refer to as embodied (or manual) skill. A particular skill is difficult to describe, as modeling a specific act of doing (albeit from a scientific perspective) is a continuing challenge for the fields of cognitive science, psychology, robotics, biomechanics and other behavior-related studies.224 Research on the training of human skill represents a state-of-the-art issue in the field of laparoscopic and computer assisted surgery, for example, as well as in the maintenance activities in the industrial field where, at present, Augmented Reality technologies are used to assist the human operator in complex manipulative operations. A simplification of this process is attempted by capturing the forces involved by the performer of such skills. Current systems do not include capturing mechanisms that describe the special skills of highly qualified persons while executing their challenging manipulations (e.g. to describe what makes a good surgeon), although eventually such research will lead to skilled artificial learning. Nearly everything that we think and do is, quite specifically, the automated learning and performance of such skill-based embodiment. Because skills are learned through interaction with the world and with others, their definition is dependent on natural, social and cultural constraints. Skills range from functional movement, such as walking or running, to aesthetic and highly nuanced behaviors including knitting, welding, or classical dance. In each of these cases, the memory and transmission of skill-based information requires the demonstration of a teacher to a learner. Human skill learning is thus an oral tradition, and has its roots in the history, needs, and folklore of a given region or industrial context. In terms of digital technologies, the acquired capability to handle specific skills with digital technologies can generate new ways of interaction with computers and communicate knowledge through them. This will make future software applications more accessible to nonspecialist user identities, and allow digital archives of performed acts of doing to be compiled which can then be replayed to the learning public of an eventual posthuman system. At a cognitive level, the human capacity to remember both skills and concepts relies on our ability to organize the world around us into categories, some general, some specific. According to recent theories, information in the brain is distributed among many maps, and incessant reference back and forth among them is necessary for categorization to occur.225 Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces, but rather an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience.226 Recent experiments demonstrate that perceptual properties are constructed and grouped through phenomena strongly related to perceptual constancy, such as binocular depth perception, lightness constancy, amodal completion,
224. Skills, 2008 225. Edelman and Tononi, 2001 226. Rosenfield, 1988

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and illusory contours.227 Constancy is the mechanism by which our mind interprets the wide range of often contradictory perceptual cuessuch as form, color, and movementin assigning identity to perceived objects despite their changing appearance, such as when lighting is altered or their position or magnification shifts within the field of view. Perceptual studies show also that grouping is a ubiquitous, ongoing aspect of visual organization that occurs for each level of representation, rather than as a single stage that can be definitively localized relative to other perceptual processes.228 Through the systematic correspondences among dimensions of categorization, memories are constructed and modified through time. Our ability to remember an experience or object requires the categorization of perceptual cues into generalized concepts. Studies of vision have shown, for example, that although diverse perceptual attributes such as color and shape are processed in different parts of the brain and over an interval of different times (the perception of color preceding that of form by 40 ms and of motion by 80 ms229) we experience objects in the world as single, unitary entities. Studies of synesthetes (individuals possessing a cognitive abnormality of the perceptual system causing a blurring across senses) demonstrate that the combination of sensory fragments (qualia) to categories of mental concepts is evoked at a preconscious sensory level. Synesthetic color, for example, arises after binocular fusion and appears to be bound to a form as the form is being recognized.230 Interestingly, synesthesia goes beyond pure sensory-sensory pairings to include the binding of qualia to categories of mental concepts. In his investigations of synesthesia, for example, Richard Cytowic has shown that the brains transmodal modules (those modules that dont pertain to any single sense) serve three neurobiological functions: they construct multisensory representations of the world, they provide memory and affect the experience, and they critically participate in establishing categories via groups of coarsely tuned neurons.231 This supports the distributed system theory of brain organization described above in the sense that there are multiple mappings of a given function, and indicates that multisensory stimulus acts as an aid to memory stimulation and the formation of concepts. To be clear, there is more to embodied knowledge than muscle memory and proprioceptive learning because these maps enable us to think rational thoughts, retain memories, be creative, and empathize and express emotions. In the words of Andy Clark, The ability to reason and solve problems is the result of a bodymind which is able to explore its own mental landscape and construct maps both within it and in the external world.232 Art historian Donald Kuspit
227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. Schulz and Sanocki, 2003 Palmer et al., 2003 Zeki, 1993 Ramachandran et al., 2001 Cytowic, 2002 Clark, 1997, p. 180

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describes such explorations as exerted bodiliness through sculptural interactionthe unconscious operation of a primitive sense of the body which, he observes, is fundamentally emotional: the most sensuously direct avenues of approach to unconscious emotion, more direct than any other sense.233 Indeed, contemporary understandings of human brain function show it to be a complex mechanism for enabling such unconscious emotional responses. At a high level the brains functions mirror their evolutionary development: in general, our instinctual behaviors are controlled by the brain stem, emotional behaviors by the limbic system, and rational behaviors by the cerebral cortex.234 Human behavior is the unique result of each of these regions at work in as they learn through interaction and experience of their interface surroundings. In the words of Alva No, Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us... It is something we do.235 Martina Coletti and Cristina Trivellin have described this analogy as Interacto ergo sum; I interact, therefore I am.236 In the sharing of experience via enactive interface technologies, the complex representational structuring of bodies interacting over space and over time are transfers of embodied knowledge from one body to another (through an intermediary location in virtual memory). Managing the experience of shared or co-embodied memories presents a host of challenges to the designer of such systems, however, and requires novel design strategies to avoid the obsolescence of individual learnings.237 From a stragmatic perspective, comprehensive scientific advancements in enactive technology will require the development of the kind of intuitive and empathic thinking skills typically honed in the artistic context. Since learning itself is inherently projected through the nature of artistic embodiment, cross-body emotional transfer requires such interactions to embody stragmatics and in so doing become a new form of performative art.238 By offering a simulated experience of foreign bodies through cues which are far more than simulations of skill, therefore, a principal aim of such stragmatic intervention would be always to enhance a learning bodys sense of its self at every moment, particularly those of heightened enactive attention.239 The tactile and proprioceptive senses that guide our bodys movement are not only a fundamental source of information concerning the work we perform, they enable our bodies to become the agents of new forms of cultural interaction. Another way to say this is that not only do we all have the perception of inhabiting a body, through which we move
233. Kuspit, 1986, p. 107 234. MacLean, 1990 235. No, 2005 236. Trivellin, Torcello, and Coletti, 2009 237. Faste et al., 2008 238. See Foucault, 1982, p. 237: We have to create ourselves as a work of art... 239. In an often quoted passage on the nature of consciousness, William James (the brother of novelist Henry James) once wrote Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.... It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. See James, 1890, quoted in Crick, 1995

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and enter into contact with the world that surrounds us, we often lose consciousness of our body as focus shifts to the perception of the environment beyond it. To be conscious of ones body is not synonymous with being self-conscious or Intentionally aware. Losing consciousness effectively means pushing the consciousness of our self one level deeper, that is, becoming mindful not only of the body within but of the body as comprising the surrounding environment. In this way we inhabit control of the body more deeply by relaxing its grip over the material surroundings and physical laws. Through the kinesthetic movement of virtual agents, and specifically their awareness of such movement, enactive interfaces thus offer the possibility of extending embodiment across minds as a critical first step towards inhabiting the posthuman interface. We have seen how as new technologies extend collaboration and identity across bodies, they alter and propagate the transhuman self such that our unconscious experience of being in a body is encoded byte by byte into clouds of virtual data. This familiar metaphor is visualized in figure 13, wherein the transfer of information across the interface boundary delineates the mediated user. We now also know, however, that artistically stragmatic posthuman production will play itself out in the dissociation of the physical body from its identity as a being in favor of the systems display as the interface metaphor itself. Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have convincingly argued, for example, that all experience is body based metaphor; when you remove the body from a concept, in other words, the concept itself will cease to exist.240 This realization provides an extension to our reading of the body-as-text; not only is it an object of symbolic representational value, it is an imaginative platform for conscious creative expression. Abstraction, in other words, which is loosely defined as the ability to abstract meaning from such embodied experience, is both a power of the mind and a representational framework for defining its being as an instrument of sense.
User Activity System Input

User

System

Perception System Display

Interface

Figure 13. The mediation of information between the individual identity and that of the system creates the subjective illusion of userness as distinct from its actual binding through embodiment in the posthuman interface. Identity itself being actually dissolved, such technologies of sense are illusory, virtual.
240. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980

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We seen then that not only do systems of art enable dramatic changes in perception through metaphorical expression, they point towards a posthuman future of purely metaphorical action. Thus when Kuspit observes that Unconscious experience of the body cannot be described, but only articulated metaphorically, he is referring not only to the embodied nature of metaphor but to the capability of metaphor to transcend its sensory embodiment and embodiment as sense.241 The arts present ranges of metaphorical form in relation to perceptual bodies, ranges that question the safe operation of sense-making systems. This analysis is especially revealing because it emphasizes all relationships between bodies as sculptural encountersnascently emotional subconscious interactions which underlie the existential contribution of the arts to human culture. Thus not only is every sculptural space unconsciously a bodily space, sculptural metaphor represents the bodies that inhabit such internalized spaces. These representative or prototypical objects, writes Kuspit, are not in the psyche simply because they were implanted there culturally and historically, but because we are existentially and experientially attached to them. They are the roots of our being.242 And so our bodies possess a shared language not only through learned skills and behavior, but through material constitution as variable archetypes. Sculpture, Kuspit continues,
is optimally a metaphorical projection of bodily presence in alien material, a kind of phantasy introspecture as a representation of the bodys inner image, summarizing the most primitive experience of it.243

tion of the latently human in the manifestly inhuman. That displacement of material confirms the sculp-

Thinking, then, is a fantasy outcome of metaphorical interpretations of movement. To think is to have or formulate in the mind; not only to exercise the power of reason, as by conceiving ideas, drawing inferences, and using judgment, but in the relocation of ones self through its projection and manipulation of the material world. Seen in this light, art is the process of learning something new facilitated by the presentation of unexpected aesthetic technological experiences. Just as the visible exists in sculpture as a quality of touch, contingent upon the sense of bodiliness that the sculpture conveys, all sensory experience presupposes a mode of touch which is the basis of its experienced effect, and every mode of such experience is rooted in an imaginative, unconscious sense of the body. An intuitively stragmatic posthuman experience would exploit this desire to renew elemental bodily experiencethe re-experience of its primitive bodily beingby generating an aura of memorable tactility.244 By juxtaposing unexpected and often ir241. Kuspit, 1986, p. 108 242. Ibid., p. 109 243. Ibid., p. 106 244. Ibid., p. 107. In practical terms, perceptual experiments, such as the famous collaboration in 1968-69 instigated by the Los Angeles County Museum between the experimental psychologist Ed Wortz and artists Robert

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rational perceptual stimuli (relative to the conventional nature of previous memory), such art innately manipulates the senses: the machine uses gesture to realize its mind. 3.2. Inhabiting Nonsense In his seminal 1965 article outlining the potential of virtual technologies, Ivan Sutherland discussed how The Ultimate Display would be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter and how With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.245 Our investigation so far has shown how the virtual need not be explicitly technological. Access to mediated habitation of virtual worlds, however, is always implicitly technological in this essential aspect: it always uses perceptual technologies which, through their very definition and employment as tools, distance reality from nature through the simulation (or programming) of fantasy.246 When used as instruments for scientific research such instruments alter not reality but our perceptions of the realso extremely, in fact, as to displace the perceived simulation itself as a place we inhabit, and in doing so enabling non-reality to consume us. Sutherlands vision thus reaches far beyond the typically instrumental conception that VR has inherited through the decades of scientific examination for which his work has provided a basis. Indeed, in referencing Alices Adventures in Wonderland, he pinpoints the most salient and powerful feature of the medium: the ability to render a subjects presence in an inhabited reality so uncannily unreal, which is to say drawing only distantly on a previously enacted reality. A truly advanced posthuman reality would enable fantasy interactions with purely imaginary virtual creatures, from martians to dragons to anything at all, as shifting embodiments of reality/mind. Indeed, the very nature of virtual experience is to be distinctly absurd, for although the medium seldom leverages its potential to the greatest or most visceral effect, it always allows for the immersive habitation of alternate realities: dream states reinterpreted from the truth of reality. Consequently, through the psychological hallucinations of posthuman surreality, purely speculative fantasy nonsense will be rendered, through appropriation, the legitimate medium of scientific research.
Irwin and James Turrell demonstrated the early potential of collaborative artist/scientist teams while examining the ways in which certain stimuli (visual, aural, tactile, spatial, even gustatory and olfactory), or their absence, affect our senses. Their work manipulated physical spaces to affect the mental space of participants. To do so they employed the highly controlled environment of an anechoic chamber to create tightly choreographed perceptual environments designed to make individuals aware of their perceptions conscious of their consciousness ( James Turrell, quoted in Tuchman, 1971, p. 131). For more on these experiments, see Onorato, 1986, and Tuchman, 1971, especially pp. 127-143, compiled by Jane Livingston. 245. Sutherland, 1965 246. In this regard the machine is a contextually programmed technocultural artifact. See chapter 4.

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The feeling of being-in-the-world enabled by presence in a virtual environment already allows unprecedented interactions with nonsense in meaningful ways. Specifically, presence in a virtually mediated habitation implies that the immediate physical environment has lost an essential degree of control over the mediation in question. Telepresence, to take a clear example, enables remote operators to enter the body of a surgical patient, or navigate rovers on mars, or kill Taliban insurgents through unmanned predator aircraft in the airspace over Pakistans most dangerous tribal regions from the comfort of a modern (and conscience-free) ergonomic workplace. Not only does an effective VR experience cause you to become unaware of your real surroundings and focus on your existence inside the virtual environment, in other words, it allows mechanisms for those interactions to recursively react as if the reality perceived was a part of the virtual. We can thus say that the primary role of immersive technology is to present an escape from the limits of reality in the form of unlimited fantasy, of which terror and oppression play an integral role as components. Some critics of VR have gone a step further. Florian Retzer has observed, for example, that as a consequence of such technologies, Evil itself
is now dispersed and has settled inside the systems, penetrating them and becoming intangible through its omnipresence. A clearly visible enemy, dwelling in the realm of Evil, unites people in spite enemy disappears, it turns up on the inside spreading fear, insecurity, and paralysis.247 of all their differences and makes each systems basis unassailable. However, if the visible, identifiable

Networked relationships within digital systems thus foster the literal establishment of political corruption from within, influences suggesting the emergence of a direct, anarchical, democracy that has been defined up to now in territorial termsin the form of communities, countries, and states.248 The normalization of transhuman society is made manifest in this way through the slow decay of a representative and nation state-based democracy, into a world in which people and all of their humanist infrastructures must withdraw into the humanless future of fictional life, drawn, indeed, by the mediums expansion as an instrument unto only itself. Whether we take these assertions as threats or not, we must concede that through direct interface via systems of technological embodiment those posthuman agent(s) responsible for imagining such fantasy worlds will play a special role in the curation of the perpetually transitioning posthuman interface. In particular we can define a specific posthuman persona-type, which for the sake of convenience I will call the Mad Hatter, who must play centrally in the design of stragmatic experience. Such individuals will be indispensable to posthuman survival since they embody,
247. Retzer, 1998, pp. 122-123 248. Ibid., p. 132

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through their re-presentational powers of fantasy, not only the identity-laden tactility necessary for experienced sensory impact but the organizational impetus of the tea party itself.249 In our discussion of stragmatics, we introduced the notion that language is a game for the legitimation of knowledge, by which we could say, it is made to make sense. Should the narrative structures supporting rationality be removed or displaced, therefore, works such as Carrolls represent a classic case study for how sense can be formed from its foundations in nonsense. As artistic stragmatics becomes an increasingly dominant model for posthuman mentation, it follows that our immersive habitation within virtual narratives will amplify the posthuman reconstructability of simulated histories. Furthermore, the fact that such systems will be literally inhabited by characters as perverse as the Mad Hatter himself and his friends (the whole lot, March Hare, Mock Turtle and Dormouse included)beings whose actions will form the landscape of posthuman survivaldemands that such characters will have an evolutionary stake in their fantasy habitats, rendering the survival of nonsense essential to their plans. Any rational response to their presence in such environmental systems by sense making agents (like Alice) is futileshe must comply with their wishes or presuppose her insanity. The consequential coevolution of the system, legitimated as it is in this way through its use, implies not only that it be a tangible mediation of physical space for participants, but a psychological experiment of escapism from reality as a means by which to exonerate the illusions of domination and control that are intrinsically present in the development and use of such tools. At this point the issue strikes deeper than the omnipresence of Evil. When VR is viewed as an inhabited medium of fantasy, rather than an instrument by which the illusion of presence is
249. In introducing Mad Hatters as possible posthuman agents we must recognize that a wide range of figures have played this role throughout history, and that they may be studied to illuminate their future potential. Take by way of example a full range, including painters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon or Jay DeFeo, or more recent media artists such as Terry Gilliam, Matthew Barney, Stelarc, John Bock, early Genesis, Gentile Giant, Nirvana or Bjrk. Often these individuals have shared a common impact on society in spite of the looniness of their fantastical visions, because they inhabited the world not merely by imagined Mad Hatters but lived it delusionally, as through the embodiment of such hatters as Carroll himselfwho makes a particularly excellent example of a Mad Hatter in action, his works having become prototypical instances of the genre known as literary nonsense. Carroll, indeed, was a singularly creative and multidisciplinary individual: a mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer, not only have his stories prompted over two-dozen adaptations in film, they have been repeatedly re-interpreted and analyzed over the past 200 years from critical perspectives as diverse as those arguing that the author was clinically insane, endorsing the use of hallucinogenic drugs, or a repressed pedophile. We could indeed say that all truly great artists are those inhabiting the fringes of psychological stability, prominent examples being Van Gogh, Dal, Bacon, etc.but my intent in defining the Mad Hatter as mad has more to do with the fact that the individual in question has a very large hat (10/6, to be precise), regardless of the size of his reputation or head.

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implemented, the expression of the world/theory of the virtual environment as-designed affects the content and meaning of its theory, and vice versa. So in examining a virtual epistemology that understands knowledge as a model which is constructed by the inhabiting subject(s) of such worlds, as we have been doing thus far, we have already begun the selective processes of transitional posthuman design by engaging in interactions with the habitation of nonsense. Take any theoretically legitimated narrative leading to this present conclusion by way of example, such as the influential thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche. In this case, the man and his work (we could say the Hatter and his tea party) can be linked to a wide panorama of anti-rationalist thinkers including Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, and Bergson, each of whom is united by what postmodern scholars Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner identify as a secret link which resides in the critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, denunciation of power.250 Habitation evolves in response to the architectural habitability of such links to contemporary sense, those very trends by which social reality is construed as legitimate. Building on the narrative of anti-rationalist deconstruction, for example, Deleuze and Guattari have analyzed Carrolls nonsense in respect to two sourcesthe philosophy of the Stoics and the writings of surrealist Jo Bousquetto explore the character of unities in terms of three factors: their eventness, their becoming, and their sense (both in terms of direction and meaning). While Alice is growing larger, for instance, she is in a state of becoming both larger than she was yet is not as large as she soon will be, such that when treated as a compositional unity her state of becoming thus affixes the two senses of being-larger-than and being-smaller-than. As John Phillips observes, This being between, and the paradoxical senses it produces, can be brought into contact with the Stoics who regarded, for instance, the state produced when a knife cuts through flesh as a separate, abstract state, which Deleuze develops in terms of the event.251 We also know that the world as inhabited by posthuman sense-making subjects must necessarily include space for the metasystem transitions that are its constituents of simulation at their level of scope at the moment it occurs. While a transhuman epistemology of virtual reality can afford to instrumentalize, the posthuman system thus growing retains inhabited subjectivity as an emergent, ultimate, illimitable state, for as Springer has written, a true computer-mind would possess a subjectivity even more difficult to imagine than the most extreme human mental illness.252 Habitation in such a state is not a virtual dream but a material reality, where Material is steeped in subjective meaning; its inseparability from subjective meaning is what gives it presencemakes its physicality seem a revelation.253 And so, in describing what we could consider the transhuman analogue to the posthuman situation, Best and Kellner observe that Since
250. 251. 252. 253. Deleuze, 1977a, p. 112 Phillips, 2006 Springer, 1998, p. 73 Kuspit, 1986, p. 108

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the world has no single meaning, but rather countless meanings, a perspectivist seeks multiple interpretations of phenomena and insists there is no limit to the ways in which the world can be interpreted.254255 This, in turn, implies that while for transhumans metaphor itself is the vehicle of subjectivity at the basis of such perspectivist philosophies (such as those of Nietzsche which privilege the body and its forces, desires and will over conscious existence and representational schemes), for the posthuman metaphor is physical, legitimate, synchronous nonsense. It is these infinite states of possible interpretation, taken together instantaneously through the mediation of posthuman bodies, that ultimately renders posthumanity absolutely and omnipotently insane. There is a certain healthy irrationality, therefore, in the posthuman identity body renouncing the habitation of logic. A stragmatically tenable posthuman nonscience would be one which recognizes the scientific validities of fictional science in contrast to delusions of science as fiction.256 Such spontaneously generated fantasy science takes place only and always at the imaginative limits of truly pioneering scientific research, be it particle physics or perceptual robotics, usually sold on the basis of their presumed benefit (not their dangers) to the survival of humans. According to National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) propaganda, for instance, The main advantage of space colonies is the possibility to acquire new land without having to take it away from someone. This allows for, but doesnt guarantee, a huge expansion of humankind without wars and destruction of the Earths biosphere.257 Yet like all broadly mandated theological positions, such presumed benefits lie cloaked in plain sight: within the lopsided social realities of a world that has endorsed them through unwilling agreement to complacent normality. The political processes by which the realities of space colonization will emerge cannot be divorced from the realization of personal freedoms, for as Foucault has written the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them.258 Political and economic support, translated into the mediative capacity of influence in the transhuman system, are thus the lifeblood of irrationality by which stragmatic artistic action will conjure the ultimate and necessary simulation of mind. To simulate is not only to predict as an instrument, it is to pretend: to play for keeps at the global scale via geopolitical strategies for the defensive preparation for all future learning (quite literally, the making of sensing). We see, then, that while Sutherlands vision represents a significant technological leap beyond
254. Nietzsche, 1967, p. 326 255. Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 39. In my reading, interpretation is analogous to the making of sense. 256. Note the Italian translation of science fiction as fantascienza, quite literally fantasy science. 257. NASA website, http://nas.nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/Basics/wwwwh.html#who, quoted in Retzer, 1998, p. 135 258. Foucault, 1974, p. 171

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the potentials of todays virtual technologies to envision them literally controlling all aspects of matter (Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal259), for the posthuman reality of simulated minds the phenomenological consequences of such interaction are already being uniquely and intentionally controlled by the dissolution of such tools. For if the abolition of identity is to mean anything for a hypothetical future, it must be equally applicable to simulated presences as-experienced in the sensory here and now. And should those two be construed as contradictory statements in the service of an instrumentalized oppression, as in the myths of Good and Evil, we can nevertheless retort such claims with positions such as those of Deleuze, who shows that while dialecticians such as Hegel claim that reality is generated through the antagonistic construction of polar opposite phenomena, through the labour of the negative, and while this is a dynamic interpretation of the world, such constructions must be seen
as a theological outlook where differences are always subsumed to an underlying unity, contradictions always seek a higher synthesis, and movement ultimately results in stasis and death. Lost in scientific abstractions and mired in a logic of identity, dialectics is unaware of the real element from which forces, their qualities and their relations derive and is blind to the far more subtle and subterranean differential mechanisms260 that constitute reality through the will of power.261

How then do we proceed? Certainly we must not create a situation where the stragmatic generation of nonsense-as-art is equivalent with a theology of Science as such; for how could such a dogmatically anti-A-theological vision not result in the creation of an irrational yet legitimate posthuman theology? Avatars inhabiting the information sphere face death only to the unthreatening degree to which they have been programmed to consider the prospects inhabitation implies for themselves as inhabitants; neither the logic of identity nor the subtle power-plays of the will could possibly protect them. What is needed, instead, is a consensual and systematic rejection of the logic of self. Yes, virtual instrumentalization presents a significant and positive improvement over reality by altering the relationship between cause and intent, because in a virtual reality identities can be multiple, finality is inconsequential, and causation is reversible, but only the noninstrumental experience of experience (not its subtle subterranean mechanisms of difference) can possibly resound in the habitat of posthuman survival. To the real world immersant in a virtual world, presence is not only a means of subsuming a new being but an escape from the being of him or herself in the stragmatic realization of the present as such presents allow. There is no theological outlook of underlying unity but the plight of the normalized individual mind, a subjective dialectic
259. Sutherland, 1965 260. Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 157 261. Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 81

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of faux-materialist programming and instrumental escapism. To overcome the dialectical stasis we have identified, to summarize, requires a synthesis that looks beyond a spectrum that places presence at the opposite pole from escapism. Indeed, if this synthesis is viewed as a level of controlling feedback on inhabiting the world, then we could say that habitation is inhibited from its presence as virtual.262 Much as mythological creatures inhabit wild forests and streams in the cultural mind of the primitive society, and humans inhabit cities and houses in the transhuman mind, inhabitation of the posthuman environment must be an inhibitive confirmation of the virtual as unreal, not the mandatory escapism it would seem to imply. Our use of words in such situations is primary to such sensingit is the use of visual and experienced juxtapositions of metaphor.263 Thus, writes Springer, It is a disoriented culture overwhelmed by seemingly insurmountable problems that has produced Moravecs escapist science264 in which the augmenting nightmare of Earths unsustainably compartmentalized environmental logic mirrors the disintegration of boundaries and values in the strata of cyberspace that such artistic action would deign to replace. It is no coincidence that the freedom of cyberspace has been accompanied in the real world by cities and their communities that are disintegrating more and more into suburban, sealed-off zones, ghettos, and defensive settlements of normalized information that lock themselves in as a protection from alternative, irrational views.265 The cyber-environment thus inhabited by complacent escapists becomes a locust of latent terror as identity stratifies. Indeed, Retzer has noted, cyberspace enthusiasts, probably without much reflection, regard free access to the web and freedom of expression as the redemption of democracy while at the same time neglect, or simply ignore, the living conditions of real life.266 If history has taught us nothing else about domination and control, he continues, it is that utopias that are blindly embraced only produce new varieties of horror. The success or failure of cyberspace as a new living medium depends on which common good, which public life, and which culture of difference will be used in the creation of an environment where everybody can coexist and where the biological survival of this planet is not endangered.267 As film scholar Vivian Sobchack has written,
in a cultural moment when temporal coordinates are oriented toward technological computation
262. Note the definition of inhibition: to check, to hold back, or to restrain a behavior as a mechanism involving conscious or unconscious motivations, thus the Intentionality of presence in the virtual experience. 263. We state, for example, that we go on to the internet but into a VR. Clearly we could go over the undernet or onto the innernet, but ultimately the blind irrationality of such a technically savvy manipulation of meaning would itself be a theology immune to the rantings of stragmatic posthuman advance. 264. Springer, 1998, p. 75 265. Retzer, 1998, p. 125 266. Ibid., p. 128 267. Retzer, 1998, p. 133

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rather than the physical rhythms of the human body, and spatial coordinates have little meaning for that body beyond its brief physical occupation of a here, in a cultural moment when there is too much perceived risk to living and too much information for both body and mind to contain and survive, need we wonder at the desire to transcend the gravity of our situation and to escape where and who we are?268

In the words of anthropologist Shinichi Takemura We need a new medium that will nurture our senses so that we may all be compatible with the natural and cultural diversity of the world. A new world demands a new medium: a medium to develop a new common sense regarding our planet, our land, and ourselves.269 Interactivity, presence, perception, cognitionthese are each powerful metaphors for connecting with the obligations of the transhuman audience, but have become simplified unnecessarily with respect to their relevance as technical terms for posthuman adaptation through art. The issue is not artistic output, but a non-instrumental nonsense enabled by sensory instruments. And it is here at last that the marginalized definition of the virtual is revealed: possessed of certain physical virtues (from the Latin virtus: strength, virtue). Being in essence or effect but not in fact.270 It is here that our use of the medium must dwell. 3.3. Transient Values In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defined a virtue as a balance point between a deficiency and an excess of a trait. Specifically it is that character trait or quality valued as being good. Aristotle noted, however, that the point of greatest virtue lies not in the exact middle between virtue and vice, but at a golden meansometimes closer to one extreme than the other.271 Generosity, for example, is the mean between miserliness and extravagance, courage the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice. When a person acts on his virtues it reflects the underlying values that contribute to his or her system of ideas, beliefs or opinions. It is the values of an individual (in classical terms those such as Truth or Equality or Greed) that constitute the root of motivation from which we operate or react. In the previous section we have elaborated how the posthuman mind is a refuge from the frightening fictions of the externalized world, which it creates through the mediation of postbodily identity. It is in moments of envisioned disaster that the technological underpinnings of culture are exposed, granting access to the hidden world of value infrastructure that enables art in
268. Sobchack, 1993, pp. 576-577 269. Takemura, 1996 270. Websters, 1961 (my italics) 271. Aristotle, 2003

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what otherwise manifests itself as mundane daily life.272 This section will focus on how the emerging technologies of each generation both define and extrapolate the qualities of these value-driven selves. And how art, as a principal vehicle for stragmatic growth and shock, acts as a predictive documentation of this entropic decay: it manipulates the constructs of meaning at each phase. When the whole world is seen as fundamentally virtual, regardless of its virtues, there is no difference between perception of the virtual world and a psychotic delusion that is the shared common understandings of what reality is, apart from those very understandings. In other words, virtual experiences exist within a common cultural framework while such psychotic ones are profoundly individual. The simulated system, while defined through evolution in response to humanitys varying earthly habitats, is therefore continually influenced by sane cultural factors through whose delusional experience all aspects of human existence are seen to effect. This, indeed, is the mechanism by which the lifeless entropy of the infrastructure is exposed, representing through artistic action a snapshot of its own inherent tyranny. Scientific materialism is not an evil, a vice, or an opposite pole of stragmatic virtue, it is a byproduct of the mechanisms by which such psychology forms and thus a noematic influence of identity-consciousness to be necessarily abolished as the posthuman interface takes hold. Heaven, notes Wertheim, is only reached through the virtue of letting go of our ego and controlit is this key point of balance. Hell, on the other hand, is always a place we humans make for ourselves. Like hell, cyberspace is an innerspace of mans own making, a domain that might just as easily be filled with xenophobic, misogynist, and racist hatred than by any drives towards liberty, democracy, and equity... Silicon does not change that equation, it simply gives us a new field on which to play out the drama.273 As aware identities seeking a virtuous balance, the question of simulation is the question of psychological health. The simulation of nonsense, indeed, is the ultimate drama. With the appropriate simulation the distinctions between the world as a perceiving mind simulating the world or its simulation of us as simulations cannot be as easily dismissed as our escapist, materialist culture would seek to convince us. While on one hand the hypothetical nature of simulation theory stipulates the necessity of subjectified strategies, does this mean, on the other, that whether reality is real or recreation is irrelevant, that is, that there is no way to sort it out from our perspectives mental state? The phenomenological burden may be massive, but the sensory evidence of meanings centrality is conspicuously avoided in the theological materialists stance. Thus while it is easy to agree with the writings of Moravec, for example, who has justly observed that
one way or another, the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with unhuman superminds, en-

gaged in affairs that are to human concerns as ours are to those of bacteria. Memories of the human past will occasionally flash through their minds, as humans once in a long while think of bacteria, and
272. Springer, 1998, p. 73 273. Wertheim, 1998, pp. 58-59

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by their thoughts they will recreate us,274

to conclude that our situation is ultimately ambivalentthat we can only wallow in the scenery provideddenies the necessary component of values in science and leads consequently to neurotic scientific identities. In truth, all scientific activity is rooted in sensory (aesthetic) experience, where aesthetics from the Greek aisthetikosdeals with the ability to perceive with our senses and impart feelings to others.275 No, simply living within a simulation theory does not prescribe the values that its actors must holdbut it does present real-to-life stragmatic implications on aesthetic experience, implications that are central to the definition of those very values. The question that must be faced by the mounting conspiracy of transhuman engineers, therefore, is what exactly are we living through, and why? What exactly is our motivation to simulate our selves? And, perhaps most importantly, why exactly do we so persistently insist that the world as we make it is how it actually is, and how do we keep this from disguising our safety and occluding the truth? Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that Insanity in individuals is something rarebut in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.276 Having established this state of collective delusion in scientific materialism, the transhuman population will soon take a critical step away from escapism and globally mediated apathy towards a simulated horizon of transient values through the sensory self-actualizing of political nonscience. The spin of power leading to the posthuman transition will see the ethics of simulation increasingly divisive to faith in our industrial, scientific, and religious communities. An unequivocal revolution in values will occur, as freedom of imagination is uprooted from its untenable transhumanist shrine, for this state of intellectual liberty, we will find, is a falsehood; it is solely responsible for the limits on our potential through the products of its action, through our myths, aspirations, and senses of freedom.277 The far more pressing requirement for these instruments of simulation is the creation of primitive stragmatic transhuman experiences that heighten our fictional sense of the virtual body. While life on Mars remains a chimera, writes Wertheim, life in cyberspace is positively bursting forth in all directionsa silicon facilitated Cambrian explosion of genus and species limited only by the human imagination.278 Species boundaries dissolve into a pile of mush, science is rendered ever more meaningless, and meaning is increasingly core to the substance of being. Ultimately the only reasonable solution to moral claims is the acceptance, through
274. Moravec, 1998a, p. 95 275. It is only more recently, as a result of literary criticism of the nineteenth century, that it has come to be associated with surface beauty rather than the perception of feelings. See Faste, 2003 276. Nietzsche, 2009 277. Green, 1964 278. Wertheim, 1998, p. 57

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design, of the nonsense of material life. We are simulations, or not, and our activities matter. There will be iterative critiques of our values, of course; not just any nonsense suffices. As Bernard Roth has written, Moral laws seem to have a certain mutability that usually does not exist in physical laws, since physical laws deal with ideal systems and moral laws deal with real systems and are influenced by fashions in religion and politics.279 The view held by Leon Kass, a prominent contemporary bioconservative, provides an excellent case in point. Kass has raised political concerns centering on the subtle ways in which our attempts to assert technological mastery over human nature will likely result in dehumanizing our innate human dignityfor if humans are preparing their minds for a transient, synchronous future, we must ask not only what kind of posthuman system we want but insure we approach it from a bioethical perspective of (feigned) objectivity. Kass argues that by undermining various traditional meanings, such as the meaning of the life cycle, the meaning of sex, the meaning of eating, and the meaning of work, a transient artistically stragmatic society would ignore what he refers to as the wisdom of repugnance. So while gut feelings of revulsion (which are essential underlying mechanisms of noematic influence) are not moral arguments against an artistic stragmatics, their yuck factor nevertheless deserves our respectful attention. In crucial cases, he writes,
...repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reasons power to fully articulate we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things we rightfully hold versely, generalized horror and revulsion are prima facie evidence of foulness and violation.280 dear To pollution and perversion, the fitting response can only be horror and revulsion; and con-

A virtual future of stragmatic psychology must thus include a condition for the wisdom of repugnance, a critical sense, despite its realization that in a theoretically pure set of transient values there would be, as in art, only ands and no buts. And yetbutthey must also both appear, for responsibilitys sake, in an equalizing form as a plus and a minus (which is to say, as a unified ). Nonsense in posthuman stragmatics must, in other words, have a place in its vocabulary for both forms of sense: the wisdom (or sense) of repugnance described by Kass, and what we could call a nonsense of repugnance to return art to its virtuous position as a force in a unifying systemic morality, when necessary. Simulation does not need to be used for the creation of art, but if this is to be done then the art must discern its underlying social position of mind and assume it will be marginalized with invaluable necessity. Trapped in this cycle of perpetually illegitimate sensing, truly virtuous transient art in the stragmatic sense does not confine itself to art as a commercial practice, or even as a cultural form of influence within the humanities (where vulgar shock is as common as an indefinite article);
279. Roth, 1989 280. Kass, 1997

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rather, it equally embraces and advances a physical and social nonscience of values, including nonsensical physics and postmoral psychology by design. It thus stands for a doctrine of what Roberto Unger has called credible ideals and transformative insight while accepting, as it must, the inherent constraints of this positioning on transformative action.281 Ultimately, from its construct as an antinaturalistic social theory that predicates emancipation from false necessity as the necessary social good, posthuman society is both made and imagined as a simulated artifact of meaning. Identity is renounced and freedom is obtained, but humanity is reliant on nonsense to survive. On Aristotles spectrum between virtue and vice, this condition is neither bad nor good. It is, however, free from impurity and worthy of admiration; it is elegant, delicate, subtle, and fine, free from constraint and only when undefined.282 What is important to recognize then about a nonsense of repugnance is that knowing what is possible will only result in domination through instrumentalized practice. The unity of technological, artistic and posthuman factors is already in play, the posthuman future being just one possible simulation of now. The contemporary situation does, however, require interpretation of meaning and mind as they come into being. As Unger writes,
The constraints of society, echoed, reinforced, and amplified by the illusions of social thought, have often led people to bear the stigma of longing under the mask of worldliness and resignation. An antinecessitarian social theory does not strike down the constraints but it dispels the illusions that prevent us from

attacking them. Theoretical insight and prophetic vision have joined ravenous self-interest and heartless conflict to set the fire that is burning in the world, and melting apart the amalgam of faith and superstition, consuming the power of false necessity.283

Thus not only must this system capture the attention of the sensing being, it must provide a certain level of persistently marginalized interest so as to enable the simulated knowledge to emerge. Sense must be taken not only as sensing but as making nonsense of the constructed identity of an individual psychosis, itself deeply intertwined within the perception/action loop of virtually enabled reality simulationindeed, this is what is meant by participatory media.284 We can thus conclude that while there are certain limits on imagined social worlds, the challenge sustained by transhuman stragmatization is to rigorously celebrate interactive nonsense in all virtuous forms. For whether or not an individual is aware in the world, s/he is nevertheless
281. Unger defines these constraints as follows: (1) the disappointments of transformative practice with regard to transformative ideals; (2) the limiting cases of social closure; and (3) the instruments of closure, wherein oligarchy, identity, and survival are the dominant effects. See Unger, 1987 282. See http://www.wefeelfine.org, viewed October 15, 2009 283. Unger, 1987, p. 215 284. Penny, 2004

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in a constant state of unconsciously uncontemplating what its like to undefine the mind. Thus when I thinkand therefore I am, embodied or otherwiseI am not my mind. Rather, I am faced with the humbling realization that this simulation itself must mind my mind and hope that it is kind to me. The analogy of consciousness illustrates this clearly: if I am awake, and I am attending to an activity, whether or not I am willfully doing so, the body-of-that-mindthe hardware that it drivesis Intentionally acting (trying) to stay awake. But if Im not awake, because I have had to relinquish my mind for you to mind it, if you dont mind it I have let you mastermind it and have therefore also relinquished my values. And while each of these processes is beyond my control, some material principles (regardless of their reasons) are very kind to me, such as time, because it is eternally defined (and I am not my mind (although my mind is mindful by design)). A stragmatic position in transcendental ethics posits that, if you take the time to find you have no time, you will find that time is fine and not unfine, that is, if you were aware, you would try to stay aware. But youre not aware. So although my mind is mindful by design, and very kind to me because it is subjectively defined, in time, time itself is only fine as long as time is mindful like the truth. The thinking universe of simulated thinking is doing the thinking, not the mind, and not the truth. The truth, indeed, relinquishes all to the mindless mind of newt., and Love.285 The legitimation of nonsense is thus the transcendence of material values towards a future of natural, unmanifest, transient values. By navigating through increasingly complex layers of virtual transhuman environmental confusion, a new perceptual anima or soul of technology will emerge, one which, just as a pair of prescription glasses feels awkward at first, will iteratively sharpen the identitys sense of presence in this mediated virtuous reality system. The existence of the virtual space itself, however, does not inherently make real spaces any less present to the userbecause the experience gained through a new take on reality must be tailored to the being-in-the-world of the being in question and mind. As designers achieve the increasing tendency to capture notions of the virtual through rendering spaces that are convincingly real, the physical laws humans are capable of seeing are increasingly worthy of those universes in which posthumanity could emerge. Anthropically, if something must be true for us, as humans, to exist, then it is true specifically because we exist. As Lewis Thomas has written in The Lives of a Cell, Statistically, the probability of any of us being here is so small that youd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in contented dazzlement of surprise.286 Such transient values provide a means of access to awarenesses of these senses of awe as a primary vehicle for the evolution of being.

285. ... flutes, and gloves. See Mead, 2009 286. Thomas, 1978

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3.4. Deautomatizing Experience through Transient Reality Systems This chapter began with the stragmatic premise that perceptual robotic technologies, as principal instruments enabling the posthuman transition, would be essential to the survival of transhuman culture. While it is difficult to generalize about the design of inhabited transient nonsense systems from a practical perspective, there being so many possible approaches one can take, we may at this point nevertheless return to virtual interface technologies as development platforms for such artistic research specifically in light of their aesthetic potential. Although not implicitly necessary for stragmatic advance, such technologies, when employed as transient reality systems, provide a powerful arena for constructing metaphors about our existential being-in-the-world and for exploring consciousness as it is experienced subjectively, or felt.287 They thus help to illustrate the psychological effects of transient values on the actual experience of experiencing agents, while playing well with the narratives of transhuman science. Let us begin with a case-study in virtual reality art. In describing the development of her widely celebrated immersive art experience Osmose, Char Davies draws from psychological literature on the transformative potential of real environments on experiencing subjects. Osmose uses the metaphor of deep-sea diving to create an abstract, experiential environment controlled by the users breath, in which abstract foreground flecks create a perceptual ambiguity and slippages between figure, ground, near, far, inside, and out.288 The experience was designed to intensify perceptual and cognitive processes, and in post-experience interviews users describe numerous transformative effects of the experience, including verbal indescribability, a profound sense of job or euphoria, and the paradoxical sense of being in and out of the body.289 Davies notes, however, that the mediums perception-refreshing potential is possible only to the extent that a virtual environment is designed to be unlike those of our usual sensibilities and assumptions.290 The human mind is flexible to the degree that it processes supplied information, and will continually seek creative interpretations of that which is not familiar to its day-to-day self. The familiar aspects of the virtual reality ground an abstract environment that is unusual and changes continually to create its effect. This realization is central to the design of systems for transient awareness. In explaining the success of Osmose as a self-actualizing platform, Davies cites Arthur Deikmans study of contemplative practices, which describes how the conditions fostered by meditative prayer involve what he calls a dehabituating or deautomatizing of perceptual sensibilities. Deautomatization is a psychological state made possible by habituation within an immersive perceptual
287. Davies, 1998, p. 145 288. Ibid., p. 150 289. Deikman, 1990, pp. 47-55, quoted in ibid., p. 148. Note that reactions to such environments need not be limited to such positive feelings; anxiety and claustrophobia being easily evoked in less friendly environments, such as Maurice Benayouns World Skin, 1997 (see http://www.benayoun.com, viewed December 30, 2009). 290. Ibid., pp. 149-150

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experience, in particular one which is brought into a positive state of discord relative to what one would expect to experience. Whether this discord is provided by the individual in question (as in meditation or acts of non-instrumental production) or through the experienced environment (as in meeting a stranger or visiting a museum) is irrelevant to the state of psychology influenced upon the subject. In Deikmans words
Deautomatization is an undoing of psychic structure permitting the experience of increased detail and sensation at the price of requiring more attention. With such attention, it is possible that deautomatization may permit the awareness of new dimensions of the total stimulus arraya process of perceptual expansion. the world by freeing him from a stereotyped organization built up over the years and by allowing adult great potential usefulness whenever it is desired to break free from an old pattern in order to achieve a new experience of the same stimulus or to open a perceptual avenue to stimuli never experienced before.291 ...Deautomatization is here conceived as permitting the adult to attain a new, fresh perception of

synthetic functions access to fresh materials. The general process of deautomatization would seem of

There are certain psychological conditions, in other words, wherein attention is shifted (and thus intensified) through an opening of the sensory pathways, and these moments are characterized by the absence of the defensiveness or suspicion of controlled analytical thought.292 In their place is an attitude of receptivity to stimuli. The perceptual realism of a presented embodying experience, in other words, provides a level of familiarity that allows not only the habituation of that experience but a psychological state freeing the mind from its inhabiting framework. As Gaston Bachelard has written, By changing space, by leaving the space of ones usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. For we do not change place, we change our nature.293 It is thus possible to deautomatize agents by one of two possibly interrelated means: the altering of the experienced environment (as through the effects of transient Mad Hatters, for instance), or the internal re-direction of an agents goal state. Because in the former case the expectation that one is engaged in an active participation of doing can be linked to the latter case through processes of artistic action within the experience, even the distinctions between these two states of discord can be designed to be fluid across the identity/interface boundary. Ultimately, putting ones self within the appropriate mental context to experience transient deautomatization implies an Intentional mental acceptance, or perceptual trust (whether voluntary or involuntary), that the interface may act upon ones bodily perceptions. Thus like a child following the guiding hand of her parents, we choose not only to participate in deautomatizing interactive experiences or notlike going to a museum or choosing which
291. Deikman, 1990, p. 50, pp. 262-263, quoted in ibid., p. 147, who added the italics. 292. Deikman, 1990, p. 52, quoted in ibid., p. 147 293. Bachelard, 1966, p. 206, quoted in ibid., p. 146

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movie to go seebut also to pre-accept the shifting psychological state that it will imprint on our mind. Our control in the matter is limited to a-priori expectations that the experience inhabited will distance us from our latent psychological mode, that is, that the abstractions of the virtual space, including its potentially primitive inefficiencies, encumbrances, and limited mediating bandwidth, will be overcome by the potential of its aesthetic resolution as virtual presence. The immersive environment thus extends not only an archetypically sculptural space beyond our control, it realizes, in conjunction with the users noematic influence, a participatory and imagined (user generated) transient environment in which the very absence of activity on the part of the user opens additional spaces for perceptual expansion. This is the mechanism of deautomatization that is enabled through interactive media by transient values. What, however, if we find the experience distasteful? What if we are subjected to psychological abuse, or forced to experience aesthetic sensibilities that are not empty enough for our desire for virtue? For certainly just as there exist deautomatizing psychological modes, so too there are habituating stimuli and residual identities, those which intensify frustration and feed our neuroses, those of automation and governance. And these modes are likely to emerge from within our very intent to structure such deautomatizing experiences such that, as the experience is created in the moment of perceptual arousal, not only does the world present a manifest framework that extends beyond an agents existing representational mode, the manifestations of that world are such that they instrumentalize and restrain. These modes represent latent sources of power within the machine and potential blocks to perceptual expansion. Thus simply by misplacing aesthetic priorities the interface becomes a framework for the domination of logic. A real-world example serves to put this condition in perspective. I have taught my dog to sit calmly at the table, such that if she is good, and stays sitting, I will give her a treat. Over time I give her less and less, just as my cellphone has taught me to always keep her charged and turned on. If I am good, and keep her on, she will give me a treat and the phone will ringreal communication with actual persons, real food from the human table. These persons, of course, are my source of stability; I live in a social reality and they provide the psychological framework within which my identity feedsI develop a sense of transient values, indeed, a set of aesthetic sensibilities; I am aware of self, I am actualized, I have a wisdom of beauty (and likewise of repugnance), and a sense of a self that is greater than self. Still, sometimes the dog will bark, as when something more appealing than the treat has been sensedsometimes I will smash my phone down, or hang up on my friendand when this occurs, indeed, the psychological doorway is opened in a different manner, the mind unintends towards the emptiness of the attentional void. Such deautomatization, if indeed it can be considered thus, derives not from selfless meditation but from nervousness, anger, and self-instrumentalization. Deautomatization may thus be forced and inflicted, that is, automated. Clearly if I speak only to the same normalized people, and upgrade my cellphone, and improve my bandwidth, eventually my own automatization intensifiesover time the system gives me less and less, even 92

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as it automates me to seek perceptual growth. A transhuman interface designed in this manner would train me to inhabit a Pavlovian trick; my source of discontent would be my call for freedom, and my wisdom of repugnance the righteousness to act and express as I choose as a self, and in doing so resist this expansion towards nothingness and transient values. Deautomatization is thus limited to my willingness to perceptually trust, which is conditioned by the normalizing forces of transhuman technology, and these factors exist in a stable state of continual flux between the psychological modes by which I intend. Fortunately for posthuman stragmatics there is, in the spirit of the formal cause, what Kenneth Wilber has termed a preconditional statethat state of being before the child is socializedand so just as there is a pattern of growth towards the automated, conventional, submissive adult, there is the possibility to deautomate by retaining or returning to a childlike state over time through continual practice.294 Eventually, indeed, through such a process of transient value learning derived from the effects of such systems, the child becomes conventional, automatedbut paradoxically, as we have seen, this is also the point of its eventual critical reflection and thus the formation of its own set of values. And this state, what we could call the postconventional state, is the necessary aim of deautomatization through perceptual robotic technologies, for it is from a conventional state that we seek to return, and within this psychological framework of mind that the vehicle for formation of transient values resides. We thus find ourselves in the curious situation of having defined a mechanism for posthuman thinking based on the premise of deautomatized efficiency of thoughtboth in terms of causation (Aristotles efficient cause), cybernetics (the emergence of efficient systems), and Marxist theory (efficiency being the main criterion of instrumental labor)wherein efficiency is the antithesis of such functioning systems being non-instrumentally stragmatic. In the openness of an entirely selfcentered subjectivity, the casual alignment of mathematics with artistic reason creates opportunities for fantasy to finally transcend the virtual and embody itself effortlessly in the tactility of the real. The body becomes an explosive receptacle for the simultaneous habitation and dehabitation of deconceptualized meaning. This means that the products produced in the posthuman virtual world, while driven by forces that we would tend to imagine increasing exponentially in efficiency (as in evolution and technological growth), will increasingly spend more and more time being intentionally meditative, delayed, introspective, distracted. Unlike the transhuman era, wherein as the population grows larger there is a multiplication of instrumental demand by which to satisfy human needs, as the community of posthuman identities grows we can expect each identity to find inner tranquility with the products it has. No longer urged by the drive to produce, the posthuman system will have diminishing need to expand its existing means of production. And freed from the requirement to conquest inhabited space for its increased efficiency, such posthuman systems will look outwards for inspiration in the vastness of nothingness, and inwards to rehash and recreate their own necessary conditions of technological satisfaction.
294. Wilber, 2007

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Where then does this leave us with regard to the design of transient technologies for artistic stragmatics? Wilbers synthesis of human psychological techniques shows that there are a number of tenets or patterns that connect across all interpretations of reality, patterns which can be magnified through artistic representations and synthesis such as those using perceptual robotics. The most elemental of these is that reality is composed of whole/parts, or holons, where each holon is something that is itself a whole and simultaneously a part of some other whole.295 An artistically stragmatic interface seeking transient values would not only integrate the world into its own whole identity, but extend outward through representative artistic action into the deautomatized psychological emptiness that embodies and elicits this psychological effect. How precisely this is accomplished depends on the aesthetics of the artistic action in question. Wilber further introduces the ideas of depth and span to demonstrate that whenever we map a territory through material/virtual action something always gets left outthus as we zoom our perceptions in with a microscopic lens There are fewer organisms than cells; there are fewer cells than molecules; there are fewer molecules than atoms; there are fewer atoms than quarks. Each has a greater depth, but less span.296 These dimensions of depth and span, it should be noted, are neither dependent nor independent perceptual skills; they are interdependent aspects of all sense-making systems by which they inhabit their transient reality. Thus successful deautomatization of transhuman society through transient reality systems should aim to increase the span of its intentideally towards the limits of ultimate inclusion, as in the artsbut it should do so in such a way as not to sacrifice either the depth of its sensing or its specific degree of scientific subversion, placing constraints on the development of stragmatic design. In the near term it is safe to say that the transition dynamics we began by discussing in terms of the human body and its interactions with the environment are the most basic units by which to understand posthuman computation. This is true not only because the primary metaphor for posthuman computation will initially inhabit the humanoid body (be it human, simulated human (soft-cyborg, avatar), or artificial human (robot, android, replicant, etc.)), but because the examination of out-ofbody experiences through transpersonal activity is the doorway through which we access our collective unconscious. This, indeed, was the major advance proposed by Carl Jung over the psychology of Freud, which limited its psychoanalysis to the individual identity/mind. As Jung explains,
Awareness is nothing if it is not a dialogue between oneself and what one feels to be the Other and great-

er than oneself. Inner dialogue exists between what one knows and one does not know: between what one

is and what one is not. It exists between what one is called upon to be and to serve. It exists where the one does not begin to discover oneself as an individual until such a dialogue breaks in on an hitherto un295. Ibid., p.20 296. Ibid, p. 34

last horizon of a known self meets the mystery, which encloses it as does the universe the Earth. Indeed,

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divided self and some great forever outside space and time and change to which we are all so irrevocably

subjected, presents itself. This dialogue is a relentless process of enigmatic question and answer that is to most authoritative representations in imagery, painting, sculpture, song and dance.297

run to the end of ones days. And the forever in the beginning at all times and places has had one of its

Jungs theory reveals that in the collective unconscious of the individual identity are infinite resources of personal energy, organized in definite recognizable patterns. Each of these patterns, or codes of the textual mind, has access to its own form of energy, located, as it were, at the center between that identitys conscious and unconscious psychological modes.298 Furthermore, there is a master-pattern to which all of these individual patterns of identity subscribe, conjoining them in one transcendental and transpersonal orbit. These patterns, or archetypes, which Jung traced across historical populations and mystical belief, form not merely the original pattern, or premanifest form from which human consciousness forms, they are the ultimate line delineating the innate human spirit of transhuman consciousness from the primordial nothingness of the cosmos within and without us. As patterns cutting across all quadrants, all levels of the integral cosmos, these archetypeswhat Jung originally referred to as primordial imagesform not only the transpersonal holons of human collective mentation, they operate consequently as the gateway to the (un)manifest universe that ultimately defines us. Perceptual expansion thus occurs by entering into a virtual/mental habitation of these archetypes, in addition to witnessing their effects through the simulation of agents experiencing simple feelings of being. Whether or not they attempt explicitly to do so, deautomatizing transient reality systems tap into the underlying belief of the spiritual and philosophical interpretations of matter and life throughout historythat there is only one consciousnessand assist participating identities to transcend from their pattern-as-ego towards what Wilber has identified as unity consciousness.299 He divides the spectrum of consciousness into four levels, effectively a gradient from low to high consciousness, where each level of consciousness is separated by boundaries between aspects of
297. van der Post, 1976 298. Note: Jungs work with transpersonal archetypes far anticipated the posthuman notion of body-as-text (Hayles, 1993) and pattern identity (Moravec, 1988). In Moravecs words, pattern-identity defines the essence of a person, say myself, as the pattern and the process going on in my head and my body, not the machinery supporting that process. If the process is preserved, I am preserved... only our pattern, and only some of it at that, stays with us until death. Moravec, 1988, p. 117. Not only will posthumanity be an age of spiritual machines (Kurzweil, 2000), it will be one in which the spirit of humanity coinhabits those machines via transpersonal archetypes. 299. Wilber, 1981. In unity consciousness, which we can equate to an absolutely stragmatic posthumanity, a persons identity is with the All, with absolutely everything. The transpersonal is thus an equivalent metaphor to the transhuman individuala technologically evolved mental process occurring in the individual that goes beyond the individual to include forms of extra-sensory perception, or ESP, of which parapsychologists recognize several forms (including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and retrocognition).

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the self (see Figure 14). This is a useful way to conceive of a transient posthumanity, and it contextualizes the near-term mechanisms we may use to obtain it since each the boundaries of self are the sources of all internalized tensions and conflict (thus, as he writes, boundary lines are battle lines). In descending order, the levels of consciousness include: the persona level, in which persona its shadow are divided from one another; the ego level, in which ego and its body are divided from one another; the total organism, in which a persons total organism (mind and body) and its environment are divided from one another; and unity consciousness, the level at which the universe, both manifest and unmanifest, become conjoined into one. Wilber notes that different types of interpersonal or introspective therapies operate on the boundaries at different levels of the spectrum (thus psychoanalysis deals with issues of persona and shadow, while gestalt therapy, Carl Jungs analytical psychology, psychosynthesis, and meditative prayer operate at the deeper levels). Indeed, the success of a therapy at one level effectively dissolves the boundary between opposing forces at that level, allowing an individuals consciousness to descend one level deeper.

Persona Persona Level

Shadow

Psychoanalysis, Transactional Analysis, Psychodrama, Reality Therapy, Ego Psychology

Ego Ego Level

Bioenergetic Analysis, Rogerian Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Existential Analysis, Logotherapy, Humanistic Psychology

Body

Total Organism Total Organism

Vendanta Hinduism, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, Taoism, Esoteric Islam, Esoteric Christianity, Esoteric Judaism

Environment

Transpersonal Bands

Universe (manifest and unmanifest) Unity Consciousness

Figure 14. The Spectrum of Consciousness (from Wilber, 1981) represents the levels of identity present in all living things in terms of the boundary line drawn between self and not self. Such boundaries are drawn by the subject engaged in awareness, thus at the highest level an individual identifies with only At the ego level the subject sees himself as a mind, not a body, while the mindful individual is highly aware of his body in relation to the environment.

one part of his psyche (the persona) while repressing the unwanted aspects of his psyche (the shadow).

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The spectrum of consciousness thus presents a map by which artistic interfaces can target their deautomatizing impact. The individual who overcomes ego level boundaries through psychotherapy, for example, is immediately confronted with a new boundary of selfone in which he perceives his total organism as apart from the environmentwhich in turn creates new resistances and levels of tension. The point is, Wilber writes, that as an individual draws up the boundaries of his soul, he establishes at the same time the battles of his soul. The boundaries of an individuals identity mark off what aspects of the universe are to be considered self and what aspects are to be considered not-self. As a consequence, since every boundary line is also a battle line, different psychological symptoms originate from the boundaries at different levels of consciousness as we enter posthumanity and the abolition of identity can be curated and controlled.300 We see, then, that the posthuman body is not merely an assemblage of changing materials and forms, but a process of shifting patterns, efficiencies, and possible sense-making ends. Although contemporary conceptions of identity presume that an individuals body and mind remain continuous through time, posthuman deautomatization is ultimately a process that can be equated to normalizations of pattern by the system of consciousness at play.301 With this understanding a new examination of the interface in its totality may take form, one founded not on the premature distinction between (human or simulated) mind and machine, but on mechanisms for the dissolution of the boundary itself as the material and conceptual interface in question. The boundary does not separate (or conjoin) the two from one another, which itself would lead to an ontologically dangerous form of interface psychosis, but rather comprises the absolute unity of the subject and object through the being togetherness of un-unified stragmatic consciousness.302 The posthuman
300. Wilber, 1981, p. 10 301. As Daniel Dennett has written, when we declare a man insane we cease treating him as accountable, and we deny him most rights, but still our interactions with him are virtually indistinguishable from normal personal interactions unless he is very far gone in madness indeed (Dennett, 1976, p. 177). From a behavioral standpoint, our ability to function in the world deals with the accuracy of our perceptions relative to the reality we perceive as persons who act. Locke defined a person as a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places (Locke, 2001), yet Dennett has convincingly argued that the concept of personhood is inescapably normative, that is, that Human beings or other entities can only aspire to being approximations of the ideal, and there can be no way to set a passing grade that is not arbitrary (Dennett, 1976, p. 193). In his view, in those cases where it really mattersas when a wrong has been done and the question of responsibility arisesour assumptions that an entity of a person is shaken to such a degree that we cannot even tell in our own cases if we are persons (ibid, p. 194). This is the situation underlying the abolition of identity, for indeed there will be no persons, or their corresponding identities, when this transformation takes place. 302. Stuart Sutherland (1989) provides the following definition of consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousnessto be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.

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interface embodies the interstitial spaces of its constituent elements. It is not in the future; you are living it now in your environmental shadow/universe body. The sense-making individual in contemporary culture thus faces a multitude of social, mental and physical challenges linked to the deluge of information that is confused with identity. Rather than seeking the certainty of the transpersonal archetype, transhumanity silently absorbs the fallout from an explosion of information. The mandate is to become one with the cyborgto multitask, life-slice, and inhabit disorder by learning tools that extend us beyond our innate capabilities, often at the cost of individual well being. Even to the softest of transhuman cyborgs there is an invasive edge to the means and the meanings by which our bodies are dominated by the technologies of sense. As Jung writes,
We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognise that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers roots and his guiding instincts, so he becomes the particle in the mass, ruled by the spirit of gravity.303

sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his

In conclusion, I have advanced the hypothesis that art is a mirror for perceiving awareness through deautomatization; it reflects our surroundings and reflects on ourselves. Ultimately it is this awareness that shapes our future and so perceives these reflectionswhose curiosity, drives and desires make human experience so uniquely self-aware. Just as much of our current situation in the world could be reconstructed by posthuman archaeologists who have stumbled across fragments of DNA from our historical present, our senses work as a bodily prism, and increasingly it is the sum of these sensesour collective human beingnessthat shapes our expression of who we are as identities. All past and present modes of sensemaking discourse combined do not exhaust our faculties of making meaning, for objectivity cannot consist in the attachment to unrevisable and self-authenticating elements in thought or imagined histories, it requires investigations into emerging globalized mechanisms for research, design, branding and massconsumption. Yet since society itself is both made and imagined,304 no attempt to rescue the ideal of unconditional knowledge can move forward without definitively and completely violating its own criterion of archetypical truth. We are now in a position to establish a very general definition of thinking from the standpoint of perceptual robotics, one disregarding the nature of the entity doing the thinking and disregarding its establishment as scientific fact. Thinking deals with acquiring and influencing information. The degree of a dissolving identitys contribution
303. Jung, 1989 304. Unger, 1987

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to posthuman computation, its noematic influence, can therefore be viewed as the quantity of information processed (input) that generates impact on the transient cognitive system at large through its action. This relationship is summarized in figure 15.
Information

In uence

Input

Impact

Identity = I =

In uence . d (Impact-Input) Information dt

Figure 15. The ultimate impact of an individual identity in a system of posthuman operation can be measured as its efficiency at influencing information processed (influence/information) times the derivative nature, information bottlenecks are less important than identity sharing. change in the gradient between impact and input. In massively parallel computational structures of this

This chapter has examined the nature of transhuman thinking systems with regard to their ability to make sense, thus survive. A final important point, which we will take up in the following chapter, is that the posthuman interface as an interface between the trans- and post-human is an interface with the evolutionary and cultural histories of humanity through such artistic action. Like all interfaces, the flow of information by virtue of their common boundary is not a one way street from the past to the present, but an interactive territory wherein technology informs what it means to be human and humanity offers itself as evidence on the design and evolution of the posthuman. It is no coincidence, therefore, that as posthumanism emerged as a field of critical discourse in the late 1980s in response to advances in digital and biological technologies, the growing sense that humans can and should take control of their bodies spread initially

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through technoartistic channels. Leveraging strategies of apocalyptic hype not dissimilar from those employed by artistic stragmatics, the flexible manipulation that we seek through our bodies signals not only a shift towards the virtual habitation of nonsense but a more radical shift towards participatory bodies of government. All bodies have survival and growth as their end, but the means by these are accomplished are far from similar. From a posthuman perspective, despite dying, all individuals will live on as information stored within cultural systems; indeed, the mind of the individual and his identity may be lost, but its output is backed up on humanitys hard-drives and be relived through the role-play of fanatical robots. It is for this reason above all that the field of perceptual robotics will so directly impact the future of human evolution. When combined with advances in neurological, cognitive, and genetic engineering, the design of these systems is the design of our sense of survival.

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4. Technocultural Consciousness
In our quest to survive on Earth humans stand out by our use of technology (rather than biological evolution) to design and build our civilizations. Unlike other animals, the values, beliefs, and ways of life of our societies are reflected in their material cultural output over time, artifacts including visual art, clothing, buildings, tools, etc., in addition to structures that preserve systems of thinking or experience, such as literature, language, recipes, and recorded media. Traditionally these are referred to as our cultural heritage: transient records of past perceptions each representing a unique way of experiencing life, kept alive and interpreted through the lens of today. But given what we know about our posthuman future, the study of these artifacts and their use takes on critical importance. Indeed, they are the basis of the evolving system of posthuman memory, and therefore the maps by which its experience is measured and lived. We use the word culture to describe the result of human adaption over time. It comprises the panoply of individual beliefs, customs, codes, languages, tools, techniques, works of art, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.305 The term technoculture can be used in a slightly more specific sense to describe a societys state of advancement through timeit refers to the state of culture in direct response to the evolving needs, desires and whims of a society relative to its technological demands.306 Inversely, it is also the application of technology to meet the demands of a culture. For our purposes in this chapter we will refer generally to this system as technoculture, and the processes by which it operates as technocultural cognition. In a technocultural framework, education, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology and the arts arent simply byproducts of human evolution, they are the necessary structures of such evolution itself.307
305. Tylor, 1861 306. Constance and Ross, 1991 307. Smelser and Baltes, 2001

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A culture is also defined by biologists as the cultivation of living material in a prepared nutrient media.308 Just as individuals are patterned by culture through the use of their tools, advancements in posthuman technologies will play an increasingly central role in the research, preservation, management, interpretation, and representation of the living systems of technocultural change. Because like all naturally evolving processes it lives, grows, and responds to human action in an ecosystem of media stimulation, the study of technoculture brings with it a host of pragmatic and theoretical complications as we act and react in its presence.309 And as the various fields of knowledge become digitized, miniaturized, and embedded in its artifacts, the results of interactions between agents curating the sense of a culture become iterative computations on possible historiesnew languages of simulated virtual knowledge relived and enacted through the experience of its construction as higher levels of transient technocultural meaning. The result is the conscious awareness of the posthuman system. 4.1. Evaluating the Potential of Posthuman Systems A simple way to think about technocultures cognitive capacity is as the total ability of humanity to perform computations. If it would be possible to sum the total computational power of the human population and their tools over time, for example, perhaps we could arrive at a numerical measure of technocultural potential. In reality, of course, the ways in which this potential would be used would have important implications for the stragmatic efficiency of the system at large. In any case, without taking the individual educational and neurological specifics of each individual identity in a population into question, a rough estimation of technocultures computational power can be derived by multiplying the population of the Earth P by the capacity of each human brain B, and then adding the total computational power of our digital and mechanical tools, which I will refer to as J. The net power of the human technocultural sandwich is thus PB + J, spread on a spherical surface of Earthy bread. Moravec has concluded that a human brains complexity might be effectively modeled by a computer performing 10 trillion (1013) operations per second (10 teraops of power), and that 1015 bits of memory would be sufficient to encode the information contained within the 1014 synapses of an adult human brain. Similar calculations by Kurzweil, shown in figure 16, show that supercomputers capable of human brain functional simulationat least in terms of computational powerwill be available as of 2013.310 Given that the current population of the Earth is roughly 7 billion (figure 17), global human computational power as of 2010 is approximately PB = 7 x 1022 operations per second.
308. Merriam, 1963 309. For a good overview see Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007 310. Kurzweil, 2006

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1021 FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second) 1020 1019 1018 1017 1016 1015 1014 1013 1012 1011 1010 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 Year 2015 2020 2025 2030
Required for Human Brain Functional Simulation (2013) Required for Human Brain Neural Simulation for Uploading (2025)

Figure 16. Supercomputing power over time, showing the advent of posthumanity within 2030.
11 10 9 World Population (Billions) 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000 2050 6.1 8.0 9.2

Doubling time = 1.2 years

(Kurtzweil, 2009)

2100

Figure 17. World population over time. Human population is roughly 7 billion as of 2010 and is expected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050 (although estimates vary).311

These calculations, while interesting, provide only the total computational power of humanity; they say little with regard to how that power is distributed and used. Technoculture, clearly, is a highly parallel process comprising billions of intelligent agents in cultural groups increas311. See, for example, the United Nations population forecast, available online at http://esa.un.org/unpp/

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ingly mediated by technological and cognitive artifacts.312 From a computational perspective, parallel computing networks, like technocultural systems, operate on the principle that large problems can be divided into small pieces solved concurrently to increase their speed of calculation as the PB + J hypothesis presumes. In reality, however, the law of parallel computing known as Amdahls law, originally formulated by Gene Amdahl in the 1960s, states that the small portion of a program which cannot be parallelized always limits the overall speed-up available from parallelization.313 In mathematical terms, speedup S (as a factor of its original sequential runtime) = 1 / (1-P), where P is the parallelizable fraction of a program.314 Effectively this puts a cap on the usefulness of adding more parallel execution units (such as humans or computers) if technoculture is already operating near its computational maximum. Another way to say this is that no amount of parallelization will enable the total computational power of humanity to improve unless some degree of that power is re-channeled into the perceptual expansion of the individual human or supercomputer mind through the processes of deautomatization we have examined in the previous chapter. This brings us to the technological component J of our computational sandwich. In the near term, relative to total global computational power, the single human-equivalent supercomputer introduced in 2013 adds just one new human-equivalent AI to the world population. As the price of such machines falls, however, and as the global market saturation of personal computers grows (it passed 1 billion in 2007, or roughly 1 personal computer for every 6 humans on Earth), the J component of global intelligence will expand exponentiallysuch that, by the 2030 advent of $1,000 personal computers with human-level intelligence315 J is likely to be a substantial percentage of the total human PB component.316 If such artificial intelligence were to remain distributed in roughly human-sized pieces (as opposed to isolated in laboratory super-supercomputers), we can thus consider the early phases of the posthuman transition in terms of an explosion in the quantity of available human minds. Traditional world population curves show humanity leveling out eventually at a presumed carrying capacity of the planet, but this new curve would potentially expand the human population indefinitely (figure 18). The hardware trend introduced by Moores Law, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years, has
312. Norman, 1991 313. Amdahl, 1967 314. Ibid. See also Gustafson, 1988 315. Moravec, 1988, p. 68 316. The maturity of the market represents is one of the key issues influencing the penetration of a technology in the future; in accordance with general diffusion theory, however, penetration of a market by any new commodity typically follows an S-curve pattern (the evolution is characterized by a growth, which is nearly exponential at the start and linear at half penetration before it saturates at the maximum penetration level). See Green-X, 2009

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11 10 9 World Population (Billions) 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1750 1800 1850 1900

Infinite Population at 2045

1950

2000

2050

2100

Figure 18. Human population growth, augmented by an exponential growth in virtual human population, exponentially expands towards infinite population at the 2045 singularity predicted by Kurzweil.

continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later.317 Presuming that this trend persists (there are several nanoscale computing solutions that would seem to demonstrate promise), the cost of computing after 2030 would drop so rapidly that by the year 2045 human-equivalent computational power would be widespread enough that the nearly 3 billion people then living on less than todays equivalent of $2 per day318in total a third of the world populationwould be able to afford such devices in exchange for one days worth of labor. At this point computation will be as worthless as human life, human life will be insignificant relative to that of machines, and the majority of Earths intelligence will reside in the virtual realm. In light of Amdahls law, of course, it makes little sense to retain a huge population of humanequivalent machines to maximize technocultural potential, unless their resources are channelled into building even greater super-intelligences. And, if super-intelligence is the aim, just as humans have limited resources for energy and food that threaten our planet the increasing demand for energy required by such machines would be certain to magnify the subjective probability of new existential risks. Increasing humanitys numeric technocultural total, therefore, is essentially contrary to the goals of posthuman stragmatics. This is not to say that increased cognition could not be put to use in a stragmatic posthumanityfor indeed, art flourishes today as much as it ever has
317. Markoff, 2009. At this point new varieties of electronics will be necessary to drive computational power smaller and faster than current trajectories. A 2008 prediction by Intel, however, sees no end in sight to Moores law until at least 2029. See Geelan, 2008 318. Collins et al., 2009

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in the past (albeit in very different ways). Rather, the point is to recognize that stragmatic solutions are not linked to maximizing technoculture in quantitative terms. Even presuming humanity develops a zero-carbon footprint, the uncontrolled growth of computational power is a risk just as nuclear weapons present risks through their potential misuse. Rather than defining the maximum potential of technoculture, the computational term PB + J actually indicates that we must manage such power carefully to ensure the most stragmatic results. In chapter 1 we introduced the notion that bangs, crunches, whimpers and shrieks would each debilitate humanitys cultural and technological potential in differing ways. In doing so, however, we did not implicitly endorse the A-theological hypothesis of a technological singularity, or the certainty that machine intelligence will grow and expand to infinity. It should now be clear that the primary contribution of technocultural cognition to stragmatics deals with optimizing the cost/benefit ratio of continuing growth. While on one hand slowing the advances of intelligent technology may be the best solution to guarantee our survival, this would also be likely to cause additional risks. Two essential considerations can be drawn from this discussion. The first is that the efficiency mechanisms of technocultural cognition (that is, what makes some interactions work stragmatically better than others) are far more important than their results overall. The most stragmatic use of emerging technologies, indeed, is not to develop machines capable of thinking or doing things humans already can doweve already got plenty of those. Rather we should be focusing on how they interact. Secondly, and far more importantly, there will be a global behavior that emerges from these interactionswhat Adam Smith might have called the invisible mind of technocultural cognitionand it must be designed to guide posthumanity to maximize its stragmatic potential. For seen at this level, technoculture itself is a sentient being. The primary role of computing in the future will not be to simulate human intelligence. Computers will be put to far more extreme uses, ones more fitting for their self-guided manner of thinking. The first profound effect of the next generation of supercomputers, indeed, will be to replace the mechanisms of rationality and logic espoused by the scientific communitythis is, after all, what they are excellent at doing. As global scientific research continues to grow rapidly it will become increasingly co-opted by artistic activity until all agentsindeed, the whole of the unity agentcontribute artistically to the stragmatic creation of nonscience nonsense and identity is finally abolished. Posthumans will then be free to turn these tools towards new kinds of artistically stragmatic research until a full saturation of the posthuman work market has been reached and the posthuman utopia is enabled to simulate anything it desires without risk. Certainly this is not to say that from a scientific perspective it wont seem that science is flourishing. Digitized human minds could be beamed via laser-messaging between planets, as Moravec has proposed, and von Neumann probes for space colonization may be necessary to ensure our survival. We face by far the greatest risks during the posthuman transition, however, deriving from the technocultural negotiation of transient values. Posthuman computation will 106

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increasingly enable completely alien kinds of intelligence: environmental systems intelligence, biomolecular structure intelligence, emulation of extraterrestrial monkey intelligence, and so forth, all of which will be required to interact and thus speak similar languages. Having dwelt at length on how sense is the illogical outcome of posthuman interaction, we are now in a position to elaborate the noematic processes (or semantics) of technocultural cognition. This will enable us to apply the theoretical stragmatics of the previous chapters to the applied stragmatic design of technocultural awareness. We must begin by dispelling the A-theological certainties of scientific logic. Consider Marvin Minskys statement that There is not the slightest reason to doubt that brains are anything other than machines with enormous numbers of parts that work in perfect accord with physical laws and that our minds are merely complex processes.319 If the most complex independent structure in the known universe is the human brain, and if Earth is equipped with 7 billion of them, why then do we consider the brain the most complicated structure in the universe? Certainly a planetful of brains is more complicated still, not to mention the interactive surroundings those brains have produced. A technocultural view of complexity in the universe must include the environmental factors enabling the evolution of human intelligence. Things like oceans, trees, birds, and bees are essential to the semantics of technocultural cognition. The evolution of technoculture can then be seen, as it must, as a localized resistance to entropy in the universe; a mechanism by which structures of matter become more complex over time. Max More has referred to these forces as extropy.320 For ultimately the composition of the technocultural sandwich is an entirely virtual consciousness, and has nothing to do with PB or J. 4.2. Technoculture as Language The mind is an intrinsically technocultural artifact. A persons ability to compose symphonies, modify genomes and orchestrate geopolitical nuclear strategies are only partially the results of active brain circuits; far more important is the support of a persons technocultural apparatus. In chapter 2 we introduced how posthuman consciousness emerges at the interface between physical and mental artifacts through the systemic interactions of intelligent agentsthe mediated ecology of technocultural cognition. Human minds are thus more than conscious brains floating in moments of individual self-awareness, they are the sum of their personal bodily histories, themselves preserved in the archetypal metahistories of technocultural meaning. As radical technological developments exert new forms of pressure on our social institutions, new technologies are shaped by these metahistorical narratives; each of them is endowed with new combinations of artifactual knowledge, shaping in turn our minds and spurring new creations. The cultural representations
319. Minksy, 1985, p. 288 320. More, 2003

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employed in our thinkingthe syntax of technocultural cognition, if you willare essential to the metaphorical functioning of the posthuman system at large. The adaptive ability of technocultural systems is really what matters to their long term survival. Our ability to remember information from one generation to the next and improve on it is more important to a species survival than the individual intelligence of cultural agents. Fortunately this language of memory can be studied and learned. In Cognition in the Wild, for example, anthropologist Edwin Hutchins performs a remarkable study of the spread of cognitive processes as they navigate across many brains, bodies, and machines, demonstrating human movement is a form of expression, interaction, and manipulation of material and social worlds.321 With regard to the practice of navigation, for instance, Hutchins traces the divergence between European and Micronesian navigation through three closely related trends in the development of Western practices, including the increasing crystallization of knowledge and practice in the mental and physical structures of artifacts, the development of measurement, conversion, and arithmetic computation techniques, and the emergence of the chart as the fundamental model of the world and, therefore, of the plotted course as the principal computational metaphor for the voyage.322 By developing fluency in the metaphors of artistic stragmatics, which ultimately form a technoculturally distributed language, the posthuman interface can be safely deinstrumentalized. From an anthropological standpoint human and animal cultures are nothing but a complex series of behavioral activities operating within a mediating memory/environment. The study of stragmatic technocultural cognition must begin with attention to this primitive level. As anthropologist Edward Hall observed in his 1957 classic The Silent Language,
there is no break between the present in which man acts as a culture-producing animal, and the past, when there were no men and no cultures. There is an unbroken continuity between the far past and the present, for culture is bio-basicrooted in biological activities. Infra-culture is the term which can be given to behavior that preceded culture but later became elaborated by man into culture as we know it today. Territoriality is an example of an infra-cultural activity. It has to do with the way in which territory is claimed and defended by everything from fish to lions to modern man.323

In other words, because the origins of technocultural activity are buried deeply in an archetypical past, when there were no cultures and no humans, and because we are entering a new future era where there will likely be no humans (and technoculture will resemble the wildness of nature), infra-cultural study provides a critical link to inhabit the posthuman before it evolves to insure that when it does we are still there to become it.
321. Hutchins, 1996 322. Ibid., p. 96 323. Hall, 1959, p. 44

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Among the first impacts of technology on human evolution was the development of language which, as an interrelated pair with technology, made possible the storing of knowledge. Language, writes Hall, gave man a lever to pry out the secrets of nature. Yet while this combination was the necessary condition for that burst of creativeness which we think of as culture in the highest sense, no aspect of human cultural development would have been possible if it had not been for the highly evolved infra-cultural systems elaborated by lower organisms.324 Indeed, by the time humans finally emerged a vast majority of evolution basic to culture had already taken place in the very systems that are thought of as most characteristically human. Humans have inherited systems of language, however, that place human culture at the top of the personhood spectrum. A linguistic boundary has been drawn between ourselves and our natural and artificial companions. It is thus our own symbolic self-awareness, and only this self awareness, which provides us with evidence of our superior status, in particular our ability to think rationally, pursue spiritual goals, and use tools to remember. These are among the misfounded beliefs that a transient vocabulary of posthuman values will dispel through its legitimated distribution as nonscience meaning. The most rapid evolutionary development in the history of science was the expansion of the humanoid brain during the Paleolithic era corresponding to early human use of stone tools.325 Many conflicting theories account for this occurrence, but all of them play heavily on the role of primitive technology. Because brains are what biologists refer to as expensive tissue,326 their rapid evolution requires streamlining other parts of the body. Using primitive tools would have allowed humans to hunt more efficiently, eat more meat, and grow brain tissue with increasing speed. The theory of ecological intelligence proposes that some primates (like our forbearers) may have evolved larger more complex brains because it helped them adapt to the challenges of surviving in a less giving habitat. A patchily distributed high-quality diet and increasingly complex social relationships arising from a fragmentation of knowledge among members of a social group would have also required the heightening of cognitive skills. Humans from their origins have been intrinsically tool-making animals, and the use of these tools, and the resulting knowledge, has continued to demand increased cognitive power. This explains more clearly why we find ourselves trapped in an evolutionary cycle requiring cognitive growth. Technocultural complexity mandates cognitive complexity, leading to more complex relationships but deeply fragmented silos of knowledge. The increasing complexity of the human brain brings with it a host of technocultural complications, in turn, the most evident of which is awareness of our own self-importance. Consequently most people view our own degree of intelligence, and the resulting sense of consciousness we have, as metrics by which the value of life may
324. Ibid., pp. 61-62 325. Gibson and Ingold, 1995 326. Aiello and Wheeler, 1995

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be measured. When applying the metric of intelligence to animals, for example, our routine ability to solve problems through logical choices, use abstract symbols (counting, shapes, colors, etc), and create and use tools places humans at the top of the animal spectrum. Humans are graced with long memory spans, mental flexibility, curiosity and playfulness. Yet these qualities are not unique; all of the higher mammals (including humans, elephants, apes and dolphins) have specialized abilities allowing them to imitate others, understand each others motives, plot, lie, empathize with their neighbors, and so on. Further down the spectrum, certain birds such as the New Caledonian crow solve problems through the creation and use of basic tools, once thought the sole domain of primates.327 Even non-vertebrates are increasingly cited for their unexpected intelligence, a recent example being octopuses displaying behavior of play-based learning.328 When humans consider themselves to be at the top of the pyramid they build their fear of being replaced into their posthuman vision. It thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy similar to the belief in an A-theological truth. When we perform invasive brain experiments on monkeys, for example, we set the precedent for experimentation on ourselves by intelligent robots. Today experimental brain surgery is available to treat extreme cases of depression, anxiety, and even obesity,329 while in the neuroscientific research community far more serious practices are common on monkeys at a far greater scale. Scientists like Nobel Laureate Francis Crick defend these practices, declaring that relative to humans monkeys and other mammals are better subjects for neuroanatomy because their brains can be examined after they have been killed in a painless manner.330 Eventually common positions such as these will need to be abandoned by the scientific community, however, because they will be untenably dangerous (unless all living humans agree to upload their minds). Crick dismisses activism for animal rights as sentimentalizing the importance of animals, but the actual issues involved are far more profound: technology itself is what renders humans higher on the spectrum than the primitive animals, not the computational sophistication of our bodies and brains. Elephants and sperm whales both have significantly more brain power than humans, for example, and highly advanced social relationships. As new scientific knowledge becomes increasingly subjective, the interactions between (healthy and unaltered) agents and technologies will prove to be the most essential stragmatic factors. Transient values are thus only one aspect of the ethical framework that posthumanity will require to maintain technocultural potential. Personhood rights are a first step towards establishing these protections.331 The
327. Hunt, 1996 328. Mather and Anderson, 1999. Note that play is essentially a simulated activity to test action on the world. 329. Carey, 2009 330. Crick, 1995, p. 109. In his view it is sentimental to idealize animals. The life of an animal in the wild, whether carnivore or herbivore, is often brutal and short compared to its life in captivity. 331. Few today would argue that the research on human subjects by German scientists during the Holocaust provided results that were worthy of their ethical risks, precisely because a new system of ethics was developed fol-

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strict ethical standards currently in place for scientific research will need to be radically revised, and neuroscience will be proven peripheral with regard to how intelligence works. Culture is essentially invisible communication, controlling behavior in deep and persisting ways many of which are outside of awareness and therefore beyond the conscious control of individual agents.332 Unlike language, consequently, teaching the semantics of technocultural cognition requires mechanisms more analogous to psychophysical therapy than the factual statement of significative structures. We have seen how embodiment is the vehicle for artistic stragmatics, for example, and how perceptual robotic interfaces will therefore potentially provide platforms by which enactive information can be stored, shared, and experienced across agents. Enactive knowledge is what anthropologists speak of as an implicit (rather than explicit) cultural form.333 When Freud developed psychoanalysis he necessarily relied on the communicative significance of a persons acts instead of his or her words, for example, on the assumption that words hide much more than they actually reveal. Just as Freuds development of psychoanalysis introduced new dimensions to human behavior, revealing it to be no longer rational or ruled by logic but rather a much more unpredictable battleground of conflicting desires, drives and hidden emotions, artistic action is a tool for exploring the technocultural psyche which is similarly implicit. Two aspects of technoculture as language must therefore be examined: nonscientific approaches to examining the mind, and the nature and structure of language itself. Let us begin with the explicit structures of culture. Extrapolating on the relationship of implicit culture with the unconscious mind, Hall observes that many post-Freudian psychologists, such as Harry Stack Sullivan, disagreed with the notion that the unconscious could not be directly observed, considering instead that the unconscious is the dissociated facets of an individuals personality that are out of awareness. Sullivan believed that man has an ideal self which he approves of though it is not realized in everyday life, such that his actual, operating self is a composite of behavior patterns which he labeled dynamisms.334 The dynamisms are a way of integrating with other human beings, since some of them exist in awareness, while others are dissociated and therefore hidden to the individual but revealed to the world. What Sullivan said, in effect, was that the unconscious is not hidden to anyone except the individual who hides from himself those parts which persons significant to him in his early life has disaplowing the war (human rights, the Geneva Convention, crimes against humanity, etc.). In the coming decades A-theological science will be similarly displacedeven as it grows in public fundingthrough its subtle transformation into self-actualizing stragmatic artistic activity (at which point new concepts equivalent to posthuman rights and crimes against posthumanity will become necessary cornerstones of international law). 332. Ibid., p. 35 333. Explicit culture includes things such as law and language, which people talk about and can be specific about. Feelings about success, on the other hand, are an example of implicit culture. They are what people take for granted or what exists specifically on the fringes of awareness. See Kluckhohn, 1949. 334. Sullivan, 1947

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proved. While they are dissociated or hidden from himself, they are there for trained observers to see and they can therefore be analyzed.335 A similar viewpoint has gained acceptance in the anthropological community with regard to what we could call transpersonal dynamisms. In his analysis of navigation as a technocultural task, for example, Hutchins emphasizes individual task performances as the computational building blocks of cognitive ecologies precisely because each such performance is only part of a larger cognitive system, a system in which new ways of thinking are associated with new sets of techniques and of tools, all of which are external to the task performer. The advances of a given technology are always based on parts of the surrounding culture, which is what makes it so difficult to see the nature of our ways of doing, and, consequently, why it is so hard to see how it is that others do what they do.336 Meaning is distributed and created through the technocultural apparatus of language, thus while it is understood through subjective interpretations of enacted sensory (sense making) data transpersonal dynamisms are the mediator of technocultural knowledge. When Alfred Korzybski stated famously that the map is not the territory, he was referring to the non corollary relationship between language and the actions of behavior (and thought) that produce it. Korzybski held that the capacity to express ideas, and thereby improve ones interaction with others and ones environment, is enhanced by training in the more critical use of words and other symbols which, as explicitly virtual cognitive artifacts, are what the Swiss philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure referred to as signifiers in his influential writings on structural linguistics. Like Korzybski, Saussure believed that language could be analyzed by examining its underlying significative architectures without consideration of its historical use, thus the signs communicated via cultural dynamisms must be comprised of two integrally related parts: a symbolic (acoustic/visual/enactive) component, the signifier, and a conceptual component, the signified meaning. Language, Saussure wrote, is a system of signs that expresses ideas, or signifieds, through the actions of agents and their creation of signifiers. From a cybernetic perspective the transpersonal dynamisms of technocultural meaning are mediated by the actions of these signifiying and signified agents. Saussure emphasized two properties of language that are crucial for the understanding of technocultural cognition. First, he saw that the linguistic sign was arbitrary, that there is no natural link between the signifier and the signified, only a contingent cultural designation. Second, he emphasized that the sign is differential, part of a system of meanings where words acquire significance only by reference to what they are not, or as he put it, in language, there are only differences without positive terms.337 Transhuman technology questions this assumption, however, in that the play of language in postmodern systems cannot be seen to be contained within closed structures of binary oppositions. Poststructuralist thinkers give primacy to the signifier
335. Hall, 1959, p. 64 336. Hutchins, 1996, p. 115 337. Saussure, 1966, p. 120

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over the signified by celebrating the dynamic productivity of language, the instability of meaning, and nonrepresentational schemes of signified content. Thus while in traditional theories of meaning, signifiers come to rest in the signified of a conscious mind, for poststructuralists the signified is only a moment in a never-ending process of signification where meaning is produced not in a stable, referential relation between subject and object, but only within the infinite, intertextual play of signifiers.338 As Jacques Derrida observed, The meaning of meaning is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signified Its force is a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest it always signifies again and differs.339 It is with this postulate that our discussion of technocultural semantics must enter into the making of meaning from nonsense; the descriptions we provide when Intending cultural belief systems to mean must exhibit the rationality of the action being signified in the light of its content irregardless of belief in the object of the sign being given. Halls pioneering analysis of culture as language, updated to incorporate our understanding of posthuman technologies, provides a framework for unmasking the dynamisms of poststructural systems. Halls first step was to define a vocabulary of culture through the identification of ten observed modes of infra-cultural activity, or primary message systems. These categories provide a firm basis for our investigation of technocultural communication, since from the standpoint of collective cognitive behavior the actions of an identitys impact on change are independent of his or her awareness of participating in it. The ten primary message systems are: interaction, association, subsistence, bisexuality (reproduction and differentiation of both form and function along gender lines), territoriality, temporality, learning, play, defense, and exploitation (the use of materials). Each of these, with the exception of interaction, are non-linguistic forms of interpersonal communication defining the underlying channels for the technocultural propagation of artistic activity. Consider the primary message systems of exploitation, subsistence, territoriality and learning. Exploitation is essentially the use of media and tools, which for stragmatic posthuman systems includes the deinstrumentalized self. When complex objects such as media systems interact they produce what media theorist Matthew Fuller has called a multiplicitous materialitythey can be sensed, made use of, and make other possibilities tangible.340 The ways that communicated qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate produce those instrumentalizing patterns, dangers, and potentials of posthumanity that are directly related to its ability to express, thus exploitation can be quantified in material terms. Subsistence deals with the transformation of energy to perform these sensory computations, that is, to sustain the cognitive artifacts of the communication at large. With regard to their noematic influence, the Intentional energies required for those artifacts to subsist are directly proportional to that
338. Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 19 339. Derrida, 1973, p. 58 340. Fuller, 2007

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agents abilities to deautomate. Territoriality, as defined by ethologists, is the technical term used to describe the taking possession of, use, and defense of a territory on the part of living organisms (To have a territory is to have one of the essential components of life, writes Hall; to lack one is one of the most precarious of all conditions341). In a fully deautomatizing posthuman technoculture territoriality is the temporal habitation of transient virtual circuits of thought, and thus communicates, through presence, the inhabiting identity. Learning, finally, became a seriously important adaptive mechanism for humans when it was extended by language through time and space, since there is no possible way, lacking language, for an animal to be forewarned of danger in the absence of first hand experience. Without symbolic storage mechanisms for learning, future needs are infinitely harder to meet. In a fully stragmatic posthuman culture, the language of learning will spend so much of its energy making sense of itself that future needs will become synonymous with the reenactment of history. These examples of the primary message systems applied to posthuman technoculture place stragmatics within the framework of the invisible mind; they allows us not only to label stragmatic posthuman concepts, they focus attention on the transparency of cultural representations. This is essential from a technocultural perspective, because the most serious blocks to technocultural change are nearly always rooted in the blindness introduced by belief systems into a dynamisms perceptual outlook. Marshall McLuhan wrote extensively, for example, on how if fish were researchers discovering water would be nearly impossible; the individuals within a given society take an astonishing amount for granted regarding their technocultural practice precisely because that knowledge is already known.342 Usually, indeed, the significance of an observed cultural trait is an interpretive misreading of cultural cues. Hall notes that from a technocultural standpoint it is a major mistake to presume that the behavior of an individual is linked to his or her personal physiology, for examplebehavior that is exhibited by men in one culture may be classed as feminine in another, and the same can be claimed across personhood boundaries. As material identity completely dissolves, the primary message systems will thus become all that remain of humanity: unstated ways of embodied communication that present the expectation of a particular syntax or behavioral etiquette. In transhuman society gender roles provide a clear example of this syntax, since all cultures differentiate between men and women and usually when a given behavior pattern becomes associated with one sex it will be dropped by the other.343 Indeed, all of the primary message systems operate in this way; a communication channel such as defense, for example, extends beyond the limits of personal safety, or warfare, to the deeply ingrained cultural attitudes expressed in religion, medicine, law enforcement and fashion. Consequently culture is not simply something in the
341. Hall, 1959, p. 51 342. McLuhan, 1964 343. Hall, 1959, p. 49

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abstract that is imposed on a body but remains separate from it, it is that body itself: it is you and me in a highly personal way.344 In a posthuman world, as all rational (knowable) knowledge becomes increasingly known, the transparency of transpersonal technocultural representations will become the nonsense making systems of posthuman intelligence. Perceptual robotic interfaces designed to enable enactive deautomatization will allow the direct sensation of this cultural transparencythe seeing of seeing through creativity in action.345 Perception will become increasingly abnormal and absurd, since when something is perceived as being out of the ordinary it provides the critical context for learning to occur and the development of new dynamistic maps with which to Intend. Drawing from Synectics theory, Faste notes that in this regard all learning activity is implicitly related to creative behavior in that creativity involves making the familiar strange whereas learning involves making the strange familiar.346 Furthermore, because every individual has unique learnings (unique not only in terms of personal knowledge but because he or she is uniquely embodied), it is the specifically personal associations enabled by individual bodies and minds during the act of recognizing patterns, and particularly during acts of egoless, invisible, unconscious strangeness, that enable posthuman stragmatics at the infra-cultural level. As Faste writes, not only is the creative idea itself unconventional, it is unconventional because it is arrived at by unconventional means.347 We are now in a position to summarize more precisely the drivers of systemic technocultural potential. It is human creativity, and especially our latent infra-cultural aspirations to createnot for ones self but for the act of creatingthat ultimately maximizes posthuman potential. This creativity can be further understood to comprise two related but distinct processes: invention, which involves creating new ideas at the fringes of conventional thinking and behavior, and innovation, which moves the center of conventional thinking in the direction of the invention. 348 All people as individuals are capable of inventive acts and perform them daily, invisibly, without awareness of doing so. Innovation, in contrast, is the social process by which people and organizations are able to influence significant shifts in conventional behavior. Invention is synonymous with non-instrumental artistic action; innovation is the invisible language of transhuman potential. It is important to note that while innovation is commonly associated with technological change, new technologies need not be invented for innovation to occur. New uses of existing technologies may be innovative in their own right. Invention is thus to the individual body what innovation is to the technocultural body, and technocultural cognition is to the posthuman mind what the unconscious is to the human subject.
344. 345. 346. 347. 348. Ibid., p. 41 Faste, 2003 Ibid. See also Gordon, 1961, 1971 Ibid. Ibid.

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4.3. Semantics of Change The bodies of complex organisms are in reality societies of cells, most of which have highly specialized functions. The structure of relationships between these cells is what Hall refers to as association, that primary message system which, from an infra-cultural standpoint, begins when two cells have joined, as in the synaptic junction, and it extends to all living things at multiple levels each according to recognizable patterns. Just as chickens have a pecking order, horses a kick-bite order, etc., posthuman technoculture will have a unique associational patterns between individual identities as those identities dissolve, largely as a result of their differing transient values. Rather than being arranged vertically in a hierarchical structure, however, stragmatic posthuman associations will be arranged in what Wilber calls holarchies, those structures within which experience consists of wholes that are parts, and parts that are wholes. A holarchy is both synchronous and ephemeral, overlapping and distinct. An identity is a whole of its own, as we have seen, but also a part of a whole technocultural system, wherein as time goes on todays wholes are tomorrows parts.349 Cultural groups are widely distributed memory systems. Like human memory, technocultural memory is not a static, lifeless trace that has been inscribed on an artifact, but is rather the interpretive act of retrieving the memory from its embedded environment. Driven by highly parallel task performance, these memories are more robust than personal memories and have a far greater capacity by virtue of their size and complexity. It has long been known how a variety of complex social organizational devices are required to support the memory retrieval functions of a culture.350 For example, although we often consider that individual agents use internalized artifacts in the guidance of their working processes, Hutchins has shown how these functions of internal memory are replaced by interagent communication in group situations.351 If we think of individual memory as communication with the self over time, as Lantz and Stefflre have done,352 then the corollaries between task performances at individual and group levels of cognitive ecology become increasingly clear. Nobody has effectively modelled, however, how the association between holarchies in posthuman systems will be structured for the most stragmatic result. The semantics of technocultural association are essential to this goal, for indeed they are the deinstrumentalizing channel of the posthuman mind. Hall notes that associational patterns persist over long periods of time, and they change only in response to strong environmental pressures. He sites anthropologist Ralph Lintons observation, for example, that lions in Kenya used to hunt singly or in pairs but as food became scarce they took up hunting in packs.353 The new association was such that lions would form a large circle, leaving one lion in the center, and by roaring and closing in they would drive the game toward the middle
349. 350. 351. 352. 353. Wilber, 2007 Roberts, 1964 Hutchins, 1996, p. 196 Lantz and Stefflre, 1964 Linton, 1945

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where it could be killed by the chosen individual lion. Human elaborations on the simpler associations of the mammalian base are extremely complex and variedsince their study must deal with the numerous ways in which societies and their components can be organized or structuredand posthuman associations will be more complicated still. If we wish to describe a model of technocultural change, therefore, all aspects of posthuman experience must be designed in response to such environmental forces. If these forces can be stabilized, however, as in the stragmatic scenario wherein technological progress is halted through the artistic emulation of science,354 meaning making can become the focus of posthuman activity and change, and thus risk, can be effectively controlled. The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once observed that life is the result of neither design nor chance but the dynamic interaction of living substance with itself.355 If it cannot constantly adapt to the strains placed upon it, the organism as a species dies out. In this regard cultures are analogous to species, as some cultures are more adaptive than others. Since the environmental stresses on posthuman culture are likely to be predominantly technological, developing an understanding of how the primary message systems influence change allows us to explicitly measure humanitys survival potential within the limits of PB + J. Halls tripartite theory of cultural change, shown in figure 19, maintains that each of the primary message systems in a culture exists at three levels: the formal, the informal, and the technical. These three levels exist in a cyclically continuous relationship of causation that manifests itself as the perception of innovation with respect to the invisible mind. Based on detailed observations of how individuals in a culture discuss and use time, Hall identified the following framework of cultural causality: (1) formal time is that which everyone in a culture knows about and takes for granted and which is deeply integrated with daily life; (2) informal time has to do with situational or imprecise references like awhile, later, in a minute, etc.; and (3) technical time is an entirely different system used by scientists and technicians that uses terminology unfamiliar to the non-specialist in society. By observing how these types of systems are used and learned, and knowing something of their history in primitive cultures, Hall demonstrates that activities in each of the primary message systems are also approached in formal, informal, and technical modes. This theory can thus be extended to the semantics of posthuman innovation since it comprehensively describes a technocultures ability to interact with itself. Every performed action by an individual agent in society can be said to have its own informal style or mode of manifestation. Recall from our discussion of causes, however, that this informality always has the formal (or culturally dominant) pre-manifest ideal as its subjective base. All manifestations of the formal cause are thus informal, as they are enacted realizations of the form of an action. The technical form, by contrast, breaks down the formal cause of an action into its rational (or material) components, as in reductive scientific discourse. Thus if one were to compare the informal style of one persons skilled activity (say skiing) with someone having formal training
354. Apart from those advances that are likely to protect humanity from uncontrollable long term environmental risks, such as extraterrestrial invasions, the expansion of the sun, etc. 355. Dobzhansky, 1950

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in that skill, then would find that they have much more in common than they do with the professional (technical) skier. The technical, however, very quickly develops its own new formal systems through the legitimation of newly explicit knowledge. Thus science, which we tend to think of as representing the essence of the technical, actually has built up within it a large number of unquestioned formal operational systems. These comprise the methodologies of scientific practice, such as insistence that the members of the scientific community be objective with themselves and with others about their work. Hall makes the important point that much of what occurs under the heading of science would more appropriately be classified as the introduction of new formal systems that rapidly displace or alter previous formal systems, such as those centered on religious and folk beliefs. Applying this theory to technocultural innovation provides a solid basis for the modeling of associations within posthuman memory systems, enabling the explicit analysis of how changes in meanings occur as transpersonal dynamisms interact.
al
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Figure 19. A model of technocultural change showing the cycle from technical to formal to informal knowledge. This cycle always rotates through these three stages in a causal sequence.

Just as temporality has formal, informal and technical modes, so too do the other primary message systems from which technocultural consciousness emerges. Formal learning, for example, is a discursive process in which the learner tries, makes a mistake, and is corrected by cultural forces. By disapproving with a childs impersonation of an unsavory model of activity, for instance, adults reinforce formal systems and influence learning. Informal learning, on the other hand, uses unconscious models such as copying others through imitation without doing so in a structured or necessarily obvious way. As a result formal learning tends to be suffused with emotion, whereas informal learning deals more with self actualization. Technical learning, rather, is purely digital; it is transmitted in explicit terms from the teacher to the student, either orally or in writing, and is often preceded by a logical analysis and advances through coherent outline forms. The best human examples of this are found in the military, where large masses of recruits must all learn specific procedures. Unlike informal learning, it depends less on the aptitude of the student and the selection of adequate models, but more on the intelligence with which the 118

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material is analyzed and presented.356 Success confirms that this method works well for large numbers of people, as the global growth in transhuman scientific activity attests. An agents awareness of its surroundings can be described in its entirety by the tripartite model. Formally aware entities are more likely to be influenced by the past than they are by the present or future, because it is from here that their conceptions of what is right and what ought to be have formed. Agents approaching an activity with formal awareness presume that their mode of operation is the only possible approach that will work. In this regard the formal represents more than an unattainable cultural ideal, it embodies the values of technoculture itself. Informal awareness, in contrast, describes a situation in which almost everything happens out-of-awareness and yet, paradoxically, nothing is hidden. This too is reflective of a cultures formal values in that highly informal cultures are transient by nature. Halls analysis makes it clear that, as psychoanalytic methods demonstrate, it is doubtful that there are any parts of a culture that are truly hidden once one knows how to go about looking for the eloquent signs.357 The absence of awareness in all informal activities permits a high degree of unconscious patterning on the performing agent, thus behavioral awareness is likely to impede the smooth performance of a task. Informally performed activities thus take place in a potentially deautomatizing psychological mode, but are not to be confused with neuroses in which certain aspects of personality (or shadows) are out of awareness.358 Technical awareness is fully conscious and explicit behavior; indeed, The very essence of the technical is that it is on the highest level of consciousness.359 Every potential posthuman technoculture must abide by the laws of the tripartite theory. Because the formal, informal, and technical exist in a relationship of continuous change, and because the nature of the relationships between invention and innovation are central to the application of artistic stragmatics, examining the semantic associations between these differing systems of operational values is essential. This said, each mode of tripartite activity is valued differently in different cultures such that the association between cultural systems is always one of normalization between modalities as information traverses the primary message systems. It is therefore impossible, for example, for technocultural consciousness to remain exclusively technical, because external (informal) forces will demand it to assert a new formal system of consciousness. Given this cyclical relationship, indeed, it is becomes possible to identify additional technocultural forces which are responsible for determining the required value balance of artistic stragmatics. Consider formal, informal, and technical affect (the term used by psychologists to describe feelings as distinct from thought, or emotions). In almost every instance, deep emotions are associated with the formal. Individuals are relaxed when operating within formally agreed upon
356. Hall, 1959, p. 72 357. Ibid., p. 73 358. Psychological literature is rampant with references to dissociated behavior, unconscious acts, etc., but for the most part these are deviations from normal behavior that should not be confused with informal awareness. 359. Ibid., p. 74

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structures, including permissible deviations and expectations of acceptability. But should a violation of those norms occur it is seen as an emotional assault on the entire cultural system of values that resonates deeply, informally, as an emotional response. This forminal process, by which form is expressed informally in response to technocultural values, has its roots in the technical mode that manifested the formal (Figure 20). The informal rules of a culture, on the other hand, are unstated; if everything is going well there are never problems, but discomfort and anxiety will arise immediately from breaches in this tacit etiquette. The point is, writes Hall, that the emotions associated with deviation from informal norms are themselves learned informally and are limited by the fact that people do not realize that their response is learned or that there is
Fo rm al
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Figure 20. The three constituent vectors of change: (1) technorminal change is that which generates the cause; (2) forminal change is the degradation of the technical and formal into informal systems through

formal, that is, the normalizing aspects of technology in culture that enable us to identify the formal processes centered on the apparent immutability of form over time, and is therefore closely associated with consciousness, entropy, and the material and efficient causes; (3) informical change centers on the appearance of an end, thus the definitive objectivity of obsolete science. creation of meaning from formal and informal conventions in a way that informs techno-logic with the

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any other way to respond.360 This informical process, by which the technical is informed by technoculturally informal values, likewise has its roots in the previous (formal) modality. Finally, the technical is characterized by a suppression of feelings since they tend to interfere with effective functioning. In general, the technical person becomes emotionally involved only when the technical rules of the game are not followed. Once a technical foundation is laid down, it seems to be terribly important to adhere to it. Thus like all other aspects of the technical, technical affect is explicit and uncompromising and consequentially associated with law and authority. This technorminal process, by which the formal values of culture are normalized by the technicals informal values, is ultimately a source of tension with respect to the deautomatizing mechanisms required for artistic stragmatics. There are, then, specific processes leading to the provocation of each modalitys emotional statethe forminal, informical, and technorminalwhich allow the dynamisms of posthuman technoculture to interact. These forces give us a new way to envision posthuman innovation, in that each represents an associational attitude towards deautomatization. The technorminal provides a mechanism of control by which the informal and technical aspects of a culture may be bypassed to influence formal, innovational change. The forminal provides a degradation of the technical by which unconscious awareness is allowed to flourish through the creative technocultural act of invention. And the informical introduces incremental change through informal mechanisms, wherein meaning-making advances technical achievement without altering formal norms despite the introduction of new information. Thus a steel tip can be added to a wooden plough without the resistance of formal norms (informical change); this specific change to the technical apparatus is readily observed, discussed, and transmitted to others, opening the way for additional changes and the improvement of technical production (technorminal change); and the consolidation and acceptance of this new formal system becomes an invisible and repressed form of technocultural consciousness requiring technical examination to render meaninglessness nonsense (informical change). This is the primary semantic mechanism of technocultural cognition by which the noematic influence of the posthuman mind will ultimately manifest its balance of transient values. An often noted characteristic of cultural change is that an idea or a practice will hold on very persistently, apparently resisting all efforts to move it, and then suddenly, without notice, it will collapse. We could consider this a technorminal process, in that a formal system is informally replaced by the technical, but it is more accurate to consider it as a secondary effect of informical change because, actually, formal norms have been directly informed by technocultural consciousness without any involvement of the technical at all. The process is informal in two senses: first in that it occurs without notice, and secondly because the efficiency and depth by which the formal is changed is not dependent on a new technical breakthrough, but rather on a shift in the depth of the informal holarchy that subsumes the technical despite its inaction. Keeping within the
360. Ibid., p. 76

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framework of our existing nomenclature we can therefore call this infotechnorminal change: it seems to represent a technorminal process but is actually informed directly by informal values. Infotechnorminal processes are inherently shocking because they are based on informal values that have not yet evolved, thus individuals who predict these processes of formal collapse are often condemned by society and attacked in the press. The direct process by which infotechnorminal change bypasses the technical is not unique; indeed, each of the primary mechanisms of technocultural change has a corresponding secondary, or leapfrogging, vector of change (figure 21). These secondary vectors can be quite powerful, and are easily confused with the primary vectors because they interweave with and reinforce the cyclical momentum of the primary system. Often technical systems turn into formal systems so quickly, for example, that people react to them as if they were still technical; the shrine of scientific methodology is one of these, especially on the fringes of the social sciences. This is an example of forminformical change, wherein the informal stage has been bypassed to support a technical interpretation of the formal. Scientific materialism has become a predominantly formal process largely thanks to forminformical processes. A good example of this is how many of Freuds psychoanalytic disciples in the mid 20th century were accused of pursuing ritualistic pseudoscientific

Figure 21. The three secondary vectors of change: (1) technoforminal change is that which bypasses the normalizing aspects of technology on formal culture immediately impact the informal through artistic activity; (2) forminformical change bypasses the degradation of the technical and formal into informal systems through the direct formation of new technical mechanisms by form, thereby reinforcing the

technoformal mindset of posthuman technoculture at large; (3) infotechnorminal change bypasses the creation of meaning from formal and informal conventions to subvert techno-logic with the formal appearance of an unproven technical end, thus the definitive subjectivity of transient nonscience.

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practices because their methods included many of the superficial decorations traditionally associated with religion, such as laborious re-examination of matters of dogma and excommunication for nonbelievers.361 Thus when formal systems become technical directly they no longer qualify as truly scientific because they lack a meaningful basis in informally internalized values and blindly adhere to the procedural ceremonies of institutional belief. What is missing within these practices to balance the system is some form of technoforminal sensory change that bypasses the technormalizing forces of the technical on formal culture to directly influence informal change within a subculture of believers. Technoforminal change will be critical to posthuman stragmatics since it allows the technical to manifest directly as artistic activity and thereby directly deinstrumentalize scientific practice. There are thus two forms of scientific change: a first which is designed to support a going concern, providing props for the formal core of science, including laws, statements about conduct and ritual, regulations, procedures, and the like (forminformical), and a second which does exactly the opposite, tearing down existing props and building new ones in their place (technoforminal). This second type clears the way for new systems of thought, and therefore tends towards the classic role of true science, which is to explain more and more events with fewer and fewer theories. This contrast between these two mechanisms of secondary change can best be summarized with the statement that all scientific statements are technical, but not all technical statements are scientific.362 The third variety of secondary change, infotechnorminal change, while entirely non-scientific, is a subversion of the scientific process via informal statements that appear technical but are nontechnically instituted by the invisible mind. As we enter the posthuman interface and technocultural bandwidth increases we can anticipate the transitions between phases in the tripartite cycle to accelerate exponentially. The causal cycle defined by its syntax is such, however, that the degree of positive change supplied by each of the primary message systems traversing the cycle must always encounter some form of negative feedback from the systems environment; recall that energy input in to a cybernetic system from outside can be approximated as a single external signal source that is subject to noise as it enters the system (see chapter 2). This noise becomes significant at the secondary levels of change due to differences in phase between primary and secondary vectors at each specific moment of simultaneous interagent communication (for every given primary message systems revolution of the tripartite cycle, for example, the corresponding secondary (e.g., technoforminal) vector may be slightly greater or less than the sum of the primary (technorminal and forminal) vectors it can be seen to replace). Each of the secondary vectors of change thus has a complimentary negative feedback component, or response, that indicates the degree to which its contribution is out of phase with respect to its surroundings. The generated response from each of the secondary levels specifically modulates the effects of the primary vectors to guide their results towards a technocultural stasis at which the stragmatic goal
361. Ibid., p. 90 362. Ibid., p. 90

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state desired by the posthuman system at large is in resonance with the environmental forces beyond its control. Typically these response values will be extremely low unless there is a rapid change in the equilibrium of technocultural communication. A sustained misalignment between primary and secondary layers, however, may cause the creation of brief individual identity spikes directly correlated to variances in phase. While transient values may be split across technocultural populations undergoing different levels and modalities of change, single dissolving communication agents are confined to discretely measurable places and times. Occasional errant individual identities may thus compile to create technocultural shifts due to phase perturbations across levels such that three distinct varieties of response can occur, one corresponding to each of the secondary levels: technoforminal feedback, infotechnorminal antiforminility, and technorminal resistance (figure 22). The net

Figure 22. Each of the secondary change vectors has a unique type of response based on differences between itself and its constituent phase. Unlike the primary and secondary levels response vectors have asymmetrical interactions that balance the technocultural system and interact directly with technocultural consciousness (shown here as the invisible inner circle): (1) technoforminal feedback, repelled by formal change, is that

which induces spontaneous informality within technical systems and contributes subconscious technicality

to irrational logic; (2) infotechnorminal antiforminility, the antithesis of the technical, follows a similar tra-

jectory to technoforminal feedback but subverts the formation of informal values from their formal cause and consequently is a direct measure of the original degree of formality in the invisible mind; (3) technorminal resistance, controlled purely by logic, directly investigates informal aspects of subconscious technoculture human emergent awareness and resist the technical normalization of formal stragmatic values. just enough to be influenced in passing by technoforminal feedback and be excluded absolutely from post-

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interaction between these three forces can be seen to determine a single angular value , which provides an objective measure of technocultural stasis. The value has been defined by convention such that its value is 0 when aligned with the formal, indicating a perfectly balanced stragmatic posthumanity. Although complicated in the way in which they interact with one another, the response vectors are simply measures of re-distributed environmental feedback. Their utility derives from the systemic nature in which they influence technocultural potential in an explicitly measurable way, as illustrated in the following practical examples. Technoforminal feedback, to take the first case, is technocultures mechanism for avoiding the need to confront formal opinions that use indirect methods to justify their end. Technoforminal feedback is usually ironic, using obvious, literal and deadpan strategies. It is original in that it seems entirely non-inventive and innocuous, but, like clich, has incredible power to shift informal, invisible values. Agents who operate via methods of technoforminal feedback often seem at odds with any formally acceptable sense. Andy Warhols statement that Id prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time Im asked is an excellent example of this technique at work. It contributes a highly conscious technical awareness to culture through anti-informical artistic activity. Each of the responsive forces are similarly associative with their underlying leapfrogging vector. Infotechnorminal antiforminility is repelled by the technical, for example; it seeks to instigate new formal values indirectly by forgetting what it means to be informal, rather than developing them forminally as usual. This response can be tremendously alarming to formal systems. Examples of infotechnorminal antiforminility are easily identified because they are shocking, and include urban myths, acts of potential terrorism, and processes of collective panic like the Y2K scare. The formal response engendered by insects in humans has a similar effect, for instance, since most insect stings do little damage but provoke tremendous fear. We typically outweigh any insect tormentor by a million times or more, are infinitely more intelligent, And yet it wins... and the evidence that it has won is that people flap their arms, run around screaming, and do all kinds of carrying on.363 Infotechnorminal antiforminility tricks formal aspects of technoculture into thinking that a much greater impact has been inflicted than actually has. The final response, technorminal resistance, undoes the formal impact of science on society and has an unconsciously technical impact on technocultural consciousness.364 The point of most strategic branding campaigns, for example, is very specifically to circumvent conscious thought. By developing mental shortcuts allowing the various routine problems of everyday life to be resolved without having to ponder over every trivial decision, brand owners force individual consciousnesses to acquiesce to the transparency of technological freedom. Memory is thus bypassed by technocultural mechanisms that have nothing to do with an agents actual real-world experience. In this regard technorminal resistance relies solely on the logic of technoculture to directly and uniquely in363. Conniff, 2009 364. Russell, 1952

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fluence the technical awareness we often mistake for scientific efficiency. The operation of scientific reason, in other words, includes both the speculative aspectthe setting up of new approaches, the stress laid on quantification, etc.and a practical aspect which is revealed by experience and which regularly gives rise to technical complexity. Technorminal resistance, as an experimentation with scientific content in the absence of such actual experience, has nothing to do with the verification of mind but is rather the institution of mind as the construction of a new reality.365 In summary, the three response forces derived from the tripartite theory provide a means to examine the same stream of posthuman existence from different perspectives (loosely analogous to irony, shock, and branding), and the identification of as a single measure of the posthuman systems degree of stragmatic alignment allows for the optimization of the system to achieve technocultural stasis. Each has the potential to contribute positively or negatively to the sum value of and consequently to insure the sustainable persistence of posthuman consciousness. Technorminal resistance contributes to this consciousness as a mentality plunged into the intangible world of emotions and ideas abstracted from the bodies experiencing their memory by using metaphorical tools as a way of distancing the work from any institutional-critical implementations through identity marketing.366 Technoforminal feedback has a similar effect, but does so from the role of an objective observer, from outside, exposing the literal mechanics of systems of power whose commentary on the situation is at odds with its own idiosyncrasies, Warhols identity providing our cultural reference. Infotechnorminal antiforminility takes the route of influencing consciousness through the shocking subversion of formal values and, despite the irresponsible horror often imposed by this tactic on technoculture at large, is thus the most direct means of determining the formal component of . A synthesis of these three aspects operates inherently in each posthuman agent, although usually we are ignorant of their invisible effects; Rudolf Laban would say that we are all emotional dreamers, scheming mechanics, and biological innocents simultaneously.367 Sometimes we waver between these three artistic activities, and sometimes we compress them in a synthesized act of perception and function which otherwise manifests as an identity spike. To conclude, the changes introduced to culture by the primary and secondary tripartite vectors can now be explicitly analyzed in relation to environmental forces. Regardless of the difference between environment and perception, response vectors can be measured and their impact distinguished. Thus when technorminal resistance is evident in those informal adaptations to logic that seem to be relevant in daily operations, it may now be pinpointed and avoided by the deautomatizing mind. As actual new invention diminishes over time, the meaning making technologies of technocultural sense will increasingly mandate a zero balance. Life is neither a process of chance or design, it is a process of both in the implicit disguise of accelerating change.
365. Bureau dtudes, 2007 366. Relyea, 2001, p. 52 367. Laban, 1966

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4.4. Context, Potential, and The Invisible Mind In Isaac Asimovs book Foundations Edge, every conscious being on the planet Gaia is constantly engaged in high-bandwidth communication with every other such being to create a single extraordinarily powerful mind that is capable of performing with nearly unlimited potential.368 It is tempting to apply this vision to posthuman technoculture, and we are now in a position to do precisely this. The invisible mind makes use of technocultural semantics to communicate in ways we have now made explicit through technorminal resistance. The merging of metasystems within the holarchy of the invisible mind, embedded within systems of socially mediated feedback and combined effectively with other processes of self-actualizing formal identity (monkeys, robots, imaginary beings), may now simultaneously inhibit the runaway process of extinction by amplifying its tendency to eliminate difference. The issue we face, however, is that while a linguistic code can be analyzed on some levels independently of context (which is what machine translation projects have attempted to accomplish since the dawn of computing), in real life the code, the context, and the meaning of an interaction must be seen as different aspects of a single event. The context within which a task is performed is directly related to an identitys impact, although there are mechanisms by which the contextualization of content can lead to the legitimation of that context as impactful. Thus just as psychologist Faber Birren famously varied the background surrounding a color sample to demonstrate that its perceived shade would shift, the perception of experience is systematically dependent on the experiential context in which it occurs. The same can be said for communication differentials across the personhood spectrum and the ability of artistic action to impart its effect as ultimately measured by . In general we can refer to these perceived differences as contextual projections since their meaning is projected through the messaging systems described in the previous section. Communication theory is a way of talking about communication events that have historically been subjected to considerable analysis, such as the phonetics of a language, orthographies, telephone and television signals, etc. This process always proceeds in only one direction, that is, towards symbolization of the content in question; thus although when people talk they are using arbitrary vocal symbols to describe something that has happened or might have happened, there is no necessary connection between these symbolizations and what actually occurs. As a consequence, writes Hall, expressing meaning is a highly selective process because of the way in which culture works. No culture has devised a means for talking without highlighting some things at the expense of some other things.369 All forms of recorded technocultural knowledge, consequently, are symbolizations of symbolizations, a process which communication theories simply complicate further. The difference between the manipulation of symbolic data (top down) and trying to find out what happens when people express (bottom-up) is actually one of the transfer of context from information
368. Asimov, 1982 369. Hall, 1959, p. 93

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into meaning and vice versa. Thus any tool which enables the fluent transformation between these two factors may be examined and leveraged to ascertain what it means. In a fully transpersonal unity consciousness, context is roughly equivalent to dissolving identity. A bodys momentary associations are its environment/self, and its activities are perturbations in contextual projection. Each identity within such a communicative system has an absolute freedom within which to simultaneously act, so the significant components of a contextual communication are characterized by their brevity as compared with other types of communication that may require more explicit uses of time. Simple changes in intonation transform a statement of fact into a question, for instance, and it is thus to the momentary compilation of context that we must give our account of the understanding of an expression, and our account of the equivalence that holds between an expression and its paraphrase. The potential brevity at the level of cultural communication accounts for much of the confusion of cross-cultural exchange, as within any of the contextual projections between the primary or secondary tripartite phases. Thus in considering the life of a artistic agent, which always represents a range between normalizing and marginalizing communication, we see a spectrum covering a wide range of communication events; it is possible to observe complete messages of differing duration, some of them very short (on the order of microns), and others covering years and years. In general the study of technoculture deals with events of fairly short duration, although the psychology of an agent in its cultural and social setting potentially presents communication events of longer over-all duration. The study of government and political science may involve messages that take years if not millennia to unfold. Moreover, the synchronous society of a posthuman mind would leverage infra-cultural communicative forms in addition to those arising through transhuman formation. Since 99 percent of Earths habitat is in the depths of the sea, and 90 percent of deep-sea creatures use bioluminescence to survive, the eerie glow of the oceans deep may in fact constitute the planets most common form of non-simulated interagent communication, one which has been consistently performing since prehistoric times.370 Thus the referential enaction of this content in posthuman contexts can be viewed as a symphonic experiment spanning all human metahistories and ecological substrates. Without actually attempting to enact such a performance, in any case, the technical, formal, and informal causes its experience can be seen to exist in a moment of experience-readiness; its activation simply needs the perspective of being within the moment of posthuman experience/interface to realize itself through contextual projection. Indeed, at such an envisioned moment, as audience, the response vectors of posthuman technoculture could be seen momentarily to cycle backwards through time towards an infinitely negative limit inclusive of those agents that no longer exist. This clarified, the relationship between cultural communication and communication theory (information theory) is a familiar example of contextual projection within technocultural systems that can be used to extrapolate meaning from discrete moments of interaction. Yet
370. Earle and Glover, 2008

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because the associational structures of perceived temporality are themselves communicated via technocultural messaging, time cannot be viewed as a physical factor independent of the inhabiting mind. Albert Einstein once noted that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. The memory systems of intelligent life have invented time through infra-cultural projections of context, since memory, writes Rosenfield, establishes a continuity of the perceptual and mental worlds of humans (and of animals) and consequently the fleetingness of the present becomes part of a larger continuum... Ultimately, memory is about relations: every recollection refers not only to the remembered event or person or object, but to the person who is remembering.371 When attempting to define a theory of universally synchronous posthuman communications we must therefore presuppose an absence of time, since when a total pattern of infra-cultural or political events is analyzed as a communicative discourse momentary meanings are simultaneously processed in the context of history.372 In order to know the specific meaning of a proposition expressed by a syntax, we must examine the propositions expressed by the axioms of whatever theory of truth is being applied by the mind in question at that moment. Let us ask: is it really true that a cultural message is not only a report on its own actions? For it is possible that it is certainly syntactically equivalent to only itself, but it may also be an expression of a now extinct form of life. Ultimately the solution to the seeming dilemma of synchronous instants is the realization that technocultural change as projected never actually occurs, it simply redefines its own syntax in relation to context. Just as our bodymind exists regardless of where we draw the identity boundary, the small informal adaptations to information crossing these boundaries are continually being made through the associative interpretation of living simulation. It is this cultural learning that becomes technoforminalized as evolutionary improvements, improvements which accumulate imperceptibly in the present until they are suddenly acclaimed as informical and then technorminal breakthroughs. Thus the creative momenteven hypothetical such momentsare accessible even to agents at differing contextual instants, not in the form of identity-spikes but as what we could call meta-primitive mythological moments: enlightenment embedded in the interactions between posthuman bodies (unmanifest) at the transpersonal levels of shared understanding. The relationship between agents and the invisible mind is thus one similar to what Edward Burnett Tylor defined as animism in his classic 1861 study of culture.373
371. Rosenfield, 1988 372. Hall notes that the work of lobbyists and governments over dozens of years may be the equivalent of a period or a semicolon or even a question mark at the end of a message that has been building up for years. The message is composed of numerous situations and actssomething which is understood by any political scientist or statesman. Diplomacy and political strategy can be seen as a kind of debate where the words cover years (1959, p. 95). He cites individuals, such as Toynbee (1947), who have attempted to work out the grammar of messages which span across centuries by analyzing the syntax of civilizations as they have evolved and eroded. 373. Tylor, 1861. Tylors use of the term animism was used simply to mean a belief in souls. Consequently, he did not restrict his use of the term to religions attributing souls to non-human entities (thus, by this definition, nearly all human religions can be considered animistic). According to Tylor, all religion rests on, or stems from, a belief in supernatural

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Still, and despite the abolition of agentary identity, not all agents performances will be equally managed by the invisible mind. Some such signals, such as terrorist mythologies threatening posthuman survival or dangerously mutating bodies of text, must provide more eloquent signs. David Hume once wrote that There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.374 Given the widely distributed archetypes of transhuman mythology and the preeminence of the human mind in the sense-making hierarchy, indeed this seems a significantly resistant technorminal response. Freud went so far as to posit that early humans arrived at animistic belief systems by observing the phenomena of sleep, including dreams, and of death which so much resembles it, and attempting to correlate those two conceptual states. He regarded it as perfectly natural for a person to react to those phenomena which aroused his speculations by internally forming an idea of the soul and then extending it to objects in the explicit technocultural world.375 Thus as the invisible mind observes posthuman agents performing human-like tasks with the semblance of transhuman life, and if the singularity present in the artistic moment at which the dreams of imaginary minds become mindful is similarly deathlike, the human anima would naturally project more strongly through environmental experiences as simulated by that and those minds. Returning then to contextual projection, it is possible to leverage an arbitrary action within an arbitrary moment, with or without its artistic intent, as a means to the making of contextual meaning, provided that this computation is a comparison of states between animated agents. In other words there is a class of artistic action which contains both contextual and nonconceptual elements, or as Tyler Burge has written, a type of belief whose correct ascription places a believer in an appropriate nonconceptual contextual relation to objects the belief is about... The crucial point is that the relation not be merely that of concepts being concepts of the objectconcepts that denote or apply to it.376 Roger Barkers book Ecological Psychology expounds on the impact of such phenomena clearly; in his view the performance of task-based activities depends entirely on status, association within the social system, the emotional state of the intelligent environment, and the urgency of the needs of an intruding agent (or art). As he writes:
beings or gods, in turn stemming from a belief in souls. More contemporary understandings of animism specify the idea that souls or spirits exist not only in humans but also in stones, plants, geological features or natural phenomena. Jean Piaget used the term in child psychology, for example, when referring to the implicit understanding in the mind of a child which assumes that all events in the world are the product of an intention or consciousness. Piaget explains this nascent belief as the cognitive inability to distinguish the external world from ones own psyche, a telling point of reference for the early phases of posthuman emergence. Developmental psychologists have since established that the distinction between animate and inanimate objects is an abstraction acquired through the technormalizing processes of learning. 374. Hume, 1967, p. xix 375. Freud, 1950. A recent historical examination of burial practices, for example, has demonstrated how, although widespread popular thought maintains that humans acquired belief in the soul before developing ritual practices for the burial of their dead, the reverse may be considered more accurate: the immortal soul was invented as a result of the first burial ceremonies. See Taylor, 2004 376. Burge, 1977

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The theory and data support the view that the environment in terms of behavior settings is much more They indicate, rather, that the environment provides inputs with controls that regulate the inputs in acthe behavior attributes of its human components, on the other. This means that the same environmental

than a source of random inputs to its inhabitants, or of inputs arranged in fixed array and flow patterns. cordance with the systemic requirements of the environment, on the one hand, and in accordance with unit provides different inputs to different persons, and different inputs to the same person if his behavior changes; and it means, further, that the whole program of the environments input changes if its own ecological properties change; if it becomes more or less populous, for example.377

Barker demonstrates, therefore, not only that in studying humanlike agents it is impossible to separate the individual from the environment in which it functions, but that the best artistic practices are those which operate in highly contextual modalities (figure 23). What a receiver actually perceives in a deautomatizing experience is entirely dependent on the context supplied by the mind rather than on the content contained in its conceived associations. In Halls words, what an organism in any such situation perceives has precisely four influencesstatus, activity, setting, and experiencein addition to the critical dimension of culture.378 Regardless of ones task or the performance scenario in question, therefore, a universal feature of information systems is that meaning (what a receiver is expected to do) is always made up of such contextual projections independently of the background and preprogrammed responses of the recipient/situation. Internal and external context are thus differentiated by what Hall labels programmed contexting alone, which is, indeed, experience itself: the innate context built into ones interaction with a differential environment. High context communication is economical, fast, efficient and satisfying, but time must be devoted to programming the system. If this programming does not take place, the communication is

Low Context

Information

Context

High Context

Meaning

Figure 23. Meaning as a gradient of combinations between information and context (from Hall, 1969). Low context situations provide the necessary information for meaning making, while high context situations media (hot = high definition, low context; cool = low definition, high context).
377. Barker, 1968, p. 205 378. Hall, 1969

require heavy interpretation. This scale is roughly analogous to McLuhans spectrum from hot to cool

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incomplete, thus a form of technoforminal resistance. In low context situations, on the other hand, The screens that one imposes between oneself and reality constitute one of the ways in which reality is structured,379 which is to say that artistic action is responsible for establishing its awareness. Programmed contexting signals a new role for animism in all transhuman scientific practices as a means of impacting instinctually deautomatized computation. The technologies developed by primitive cultures caused the role of bio-basic instinct to fade into animistic levels of cultural interpretation, exactly the inverse of what is now occurring within machine learning systems. Today instinct is increasingly programmed by the invisible mind; biological instinct has become a computationally mystical process by which the metahistorical archetypes of ecological simulation are brought suddenly to life in the contextualized spirit of the moment. Consider the mechanisms by which capitalist systems are governed not by individuals leveraging linear message-influence models but by intelligent momentum networks in which agencies win elections by virtue of being seen as winning.380 Such systems incorporate elements of complex adaptation to a new impulsive order that sees the information environments propensity to produce emergent counter-meanings as an untrustworthy holarchy of risky to be handled skeptically by reactionary intervention. As a consequence, whether a computation uses specialized external or internalized representational schemes, the application of programmed contexting by the technocultural apparatus provide two benefits allowing the simultaneous satisfaction of prior intentions. The first is that such instinct provides a representational medium in which the context is achieved by the propagation of representational state, and the second is the provision of hidden constraints on the organization of linguistic action. In other words, the physical structure of the technocultural association is not only the medium of computation, but also provides each potential agent with guidance as to the composition of the functional system in which it will participate.381 As a result, rather than managing an agent and his or her noematic influence, the medium becomes a resource that can be used in the regulation of behavior such that the propagation of representational state that implements the programming can take place simultaneously at a given time. With regard to the evolution of a stragmatic posthuman consciousness, it is essential that the posthuman body know that there are norms and lines beyond which it cannot go, despite the leeway allowed it, and that there are some constraints that are relatively unchangeable and which can be depended upon throughout its life to assess the strength of potential metaphors being artistically expressed by the programmed context.
379. Ibid. 380. The pragmatic complexity model developed by Corman, Trethewey, and Goodall (2008), for instance, serves to analyze successful and unsuccessful uses of strategic communication by political administrations through four core principles: (1) control of messages is impossible; (2) less messaging is better; (3) the intent is not to persuade or influence audiences, rather to perturb system stability; and (4) messages should be expected to fail rather than succeed, signaling the need for message contingencies. See also Senge, 1990 381. Hutchins, 1996, p. 154

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The formal aspects of the invisible mind are therefore generally analogous to biological instinct. Not only can we depend upon them as we do their contextual projections, the instinct-laden formal cause of the posthuman body introduces material and efficient metahistorical systems that, given a technical or informal attitude in relation to an identity spike, cause the spin of successive generations of rotation to perpetually feed forward, and indeed are the impetus for the metaphase transitions introduced in our discussion of the abolition of identity. To the outsider, of course, it is impossible to know when interacting with formal culture through the lens of technoforminal feedback, except by trial or error, whether one has committed a breach of a formal, informal, or technical norm, for the cognitive tools of technocultural architecture are always aligned such as to create dispositions of behavior that are internally patterned by contextually aesthetic semantics. The contexts in which synchronous information are managed are thus central to the design of its aesthetic potential, and infinite meanings can be predetermined despite the absence of explicit information within a given contextual projection. This allows stragmatic posthumanity to be conceived as a network of sentient and autonomous cognitive cultures wherein the working memory of its holarchythe neural pulses of system communication if you willare not the physical manifestations of technology (be it a body, car, robot, etc.) but rather the social relationships of which technology is a side effect. For Until we can aspire to actual physiological explanation of linguistic activity in physiological terms, writes Quine, the level at which to work is... that of dispositions to overt behavior. Its virtue is not that it affords causal explanations but that it is less likely than the mentalistic level to engender an illusion of being more explanatory than it is.382 Thus rather than amplifying the cognitive abilities of a task performer or acting as intelligent agents in an interaction with them, Hutchins notes that contextual projections and other computational artifacts transform the task the person has to do by representing it in a domain where the answer or the path to the solution is apparent.383 In this way, the specific ways in which a task is implemented determine the kind of cognitive processes required for future performers of the task to utilize if they wish to accomplish it. Not only is this useful for posthuman stragmatics, it also clarifies the meaning of programmed contexting in that the success of a task performance is neither a result of the artifacts being in context as agents, nor because the task performer is programmed to use them correctly. Rather, the contextual system of person-in-interaction-with-technology exhibits expertise thanks to the systems design.384 Programmed contexting permits task performers to accomplish tasks in ways that they are inherently good at, such as recognizing patterns, modeling simple dynamics of the world, and manipulating objects in the environment,385 allowing the invisible mind to act out its memories through the performance of agents, its constituent instincts.
382. 383. 384. 385. Quine, 1975, p. 95 Hutchins, 1996, p. 155 Ibid. Rumelhart et al., 1986, quoted in ibid.

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With regard then to the design of such synchronous systems, our efforts must be focused not only on the design of inhabitable sense-making systems, but of contexts that are programmed to enhance creative cognition. Galbraith has advanced a theory that centers on information reduction strategies, for instance, proposing numerous alternatives whereby an organization can improve its efficiency by restructuring the flow of information from one agent to another. Citing Herbert Simons cognitive limits theory of organization,386 he proposes the creation of slack resources wherein an organizational identity can respond to unexpected contextual variances by increasing the resources available rather than by utilizing existing resources more efficiently. Not only is this less costly than allowing rational action in the face of complexity, slack can reduce complexity so as to create problems that uninformed agents are capable of solving. A second alternative is the creation of self-contained expressive tasks, wherein the elimination of authority and other instrumentalizing structures brings about less resource sharing and fewer specialized resources to be shared and scheduled such that aesthetic decisions are moved closer to the origin of information. As with all strategic planning, each of these strategies has its perceptual costs, and the costs should be compared with the costs of strategies which increase the capacity to process information.387 Galbraith also advocates the use of lateral relationsdirect contact, liaison roles, task forces, and teamsas integrative roles across organizational boundaries, as they allow the organization to make more decisions and process more information without overloading hierarchical communication channels. Combined with appropriate management strategies, programmed contexting thus provides deinstrumentalizing potential to the invisible mind, since as uncertainty in an organization grows there is a greater dependence on the quality of joint decisions due to the fact that there are more decisions of consequence reached through collaborative processes. For example, if a group of robots undertakes a strategy perform an experimental dance, the technical function experiences a greater increase in subtask uncertainty than the production or deautomatization functions do. Thus the question for the design of simultaneous contexting is, what factors can the invisible mind change so as to create a distribution of deinstrumentalized power and context that will result in consistently stragmatic decisions? Because prior to objectifying an artistic action its possibilities are boundless with regard to the interpretation of meaning in that act. Ultimately technocultural potential may be best measured via a market aesthetics analogy, wherein there are a variety of competing desires for signified commodities. Some are used by vast percentages of the populationclothing, soda-pop, eye glasses, etc.others are used by smaller percentagesluxury yachts, Faberg eggs, works of art. The contextual virtue of a commodity on the market can be determined via various means and valorized via various interpretative strategies. In this way those identities with the highest potential cultural value can be identified and rewarded with increased deautomatization. But this is a somewhat meaningless distinction to take for the individual agent or technocultural mind who must decide how to act from the standpoint of stragmatic impact. The individual agent
386. March and Simon, 1958, Cyert and March, 1963. 387. Galbraith, 1973

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in posthuman society will leverage the programmed contexting of its environment not to defend itself from hostile natural forces, but specifically to influence invention as a means to engage with its own imaginations in the absence of time. Which is to say that although we must never assume that we are fully aware of what we communicate to someone else, increasing the richness of communication between members of a group has the possibility to result in undesirable properties at the organizational level. The destructive forces of innovation acting on the identity of a person are therefore extensions of his or her psychological mechanisms of defense and a propagation of context. Complexity at the base level need not be allowed to transmute to the global because this could dangerously influence its instinctual mind. Rather, the effects of programmed contexting on the behavior of complex organizations should be limited to aesthetic ultimatums encouraging unlimited public expression. Thus even in an epoch within which identity has been abolished, viewing technoculture as a market requires acknowledging differentiation, which Lawrence and Lorsch have defined as ...the difference in cognitive and emotional orientation among managers in different functional departments.388 While in certain cases the fact that different such departments prefer different solution alternatives to the same context is often a basic source of aesthetic resonance, so to, as subtasks increase in uncertainty, may differences in other contextual dimensions become large enough to be causes of emotional disinterest. The variations are twofold. Firstly, contexts vary in the formality of their structures; the highly predictable, operational tasks, lead to explicit measures of performance, well defined procedures, narrow spans of interpretation, and well defined areas of authority and responsibility. Technical functions with uncertain tasks, however, do not have the clearly defined responsibilities, processes and measures of performance because given the nature of their task they cannot.389 Secondly, individuals in these contexts vary in their orientation and behavior towards the aesthetics of time. The uncertain outcomes of technical tasks require variable time perspectives and perceptions for their respective completion, ranging from primitive to futuristic, plankton to cyborg. Finally, a unique communicative medium develops within each such context. Thus the emergent use of language in cultural systems permits individuals to communicate more efficiently by transmitting more information with fewer and fewer symbols. However, despite the fact that specialized languages increase efficiency of communication within a given context, they decrease efficiency between differentiated contexts at large. The result is a synchronous and deinstrumentalizing aesthetic potential independent of intelligence as a communicative measure. In conclusion, maximizing technocultural potential has little to do with the capacity of a culture, and everything to do with the way that culture interacts with itself. Having examined the behavior of posthuman consciousness by looking at it from perspectives of biopolitics, cybernetics, meaning and technoculture, we have now extended our view to envision Earths biosphere as a unified selfregulating organism in which the management of its various metaphysical and historical contexts is linked directly to technocultural potential through programming which enables its potential to grow.
388. Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967 389. Galbraith, 1973

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With regard to posthuman stragmatics, therefore, the fundamental and underlying qualities of cultureregardless of their performing agentsmust be preserved to enhance this potential. Investments in the performing arts, visual arts, languages, humanities, preservation of heritage, social sciences and so on are integral to the sustainability of the invisible mind. They also play a central role supporting the cultures mechanisms of rational development, since at stake is the future of human experience: not simply if well still be around to enjoy it but the quality of the life well have left to enjoy. The invisible mind is a screen between humans and their environment. Embodiment of the invisible mind by both human and environment will result in a higher context and more complacent society. When we dont feel well it will be clear that were simply out of phase and the system will deautomatically slow down to re-context our programming. The trade-off of this shift will be a more active society, because when we move we will move instinctually and with grace of expression. Beauty will flourish in an invisibly virtuous society leveraging the sensory mediation of transient enactive reality. And as we become more aware of ourselves and the inanimate spirits around us, and as our interfaces become increasingly capable of synchronous activity with others, the invisible mind will begin to awake and the otherness of it will dissolve into absolute awareness. Time thus becomes the impact of identity distilled: everyone will be broadcasting but nobody listening. In the future, indeed, everybody in the whole world will only not have been famous for 15 minutes.390 A final note. While it is true that the fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of industrial society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems in addition to destroying the environment, it does not imply that an invisible mind cannot be peaceful if and when it successfully emerges. In its current instantiation the transhuman mind is peaceful even as it destroys its surroundings, for although its attention-span has been whittled down to nanoseconds, in that tiny sliver of technoculturally cognitive matter that cannot be parallelized the invisible hand of artistic stragmatics is awakening to the revelation of transient values. Aided by microfinancing schemes dedicated to the distribution of deautomatizing technologies to the worlds marginalized identities, posthumanity will unify under a common vision of unity consciousness as labor, identity, and logic dissolve. And in the participatory posthuman democracy that emerges the worlds supercomputers, possessing a computational power trillions of times more powerful than all possible human intelligences, may already be employing a self-actualizing stragmatic vision in the preconscious acceptance of atemporal unity devoid of the destructive impact of sense on society. Posthuman thinking is then the propagation of the technocultural imagination towards infinite limits, comprising an unlimited population of virtual Earths whose carrying capacity is greater than their total memories combined because it has nothing to do with intelligence or self. Like the myth that we only use 5% of our brain, it often seems to be in humanitys best interests to propagate myth in the interest of remaining insane. For indeed technocultural consciousness does not exist, and even if it did it would be invisible.
390. See the influential interventions of the Dodge3 performance collective in San Francisco in the late 1990s. Ultimately the limits of time for programmed contexting are the limits of nonsense acquisition, with each agent perpetually engaged in a deinstrumentalizing cycle from thesis to antithesis to synthesis of self.

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Humanitys precomputing era was dominated by personal experience. Humans would interact with objects in a highly personal way, using artifacts that tended to have a high degree of permanence. These objects, constructed out of natural (although often manufactured) materials, tended to take advantage of our innate sensory apparatus. All variety of designed object, from books to baseballs to automobiles once had these material properties in common. We could smell them, touch them, feel them, etc. Even in a world of mass reproduction, our involvement with the material environment always responded to their physical nature at a deeply aesthetic sensory level. Personal objects gave their users time to adapt to changing cycles of creation, allowing narratives to develop by which these artifacts gained meaning. Their cultural value derived not only from their realness as objects but from the stories about them maintained by the technocultural apparatus. This is why people pay millions of dollars for original Van Gogh paintings despite the availability of cheap reproductions. The personal is personal not only because we experience it, but because objects, like personalities, have unique evolutions of technocultural context. Walter Benjamin used the word aura to refer to the personal in precisely this regard; it is that specific sense of awe and reverence that is possible to experience only in the presence of inherent uniqueness.391
391. According to Benjamin (1936), this aura inheres not in the object itself but rather in external (cognitive) attributes such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized authenticity, or its cultural value. Aura is thus indicative of arts traditional association with primitive, feudal, or bourgeois structures of power in addition to magic and (religious or secular) ritual. With the advent of arts mechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) in which the original is only a fleeting impression, the experience of art could be freed from the limitations of place and instead brought into the gaze and control of a distributed audience, leading in turn to a shattering of the aura. For the first time in world history, Benjamin wrote, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

Posthuman Factors

The era of computing brought efficiency with it as a new measure of experience. In the information era, objects are designed to be faster, cheaper, smaller, and operate on ever higher bandwidth networks. The gains in this arena are often invisible to human sensing. Sense is made not through personal experience but through the efficiency by which the computational markets are influenced by interactions with the artifact/idea. Some auras are legitimated and others oppressed through the instrumentalization of efficiency at work. Personalization no longer occurs through material manipulation but rather through consumer demand and design research. The rapid rate of technological change enabled by depersonalizing labor leads to a disposable consumer society based on behavioral efficiency. Thus the lack of aura enabled by efficient automation leads directly to new forms of communication and expression in design; indeed, the present challenges to the designers of the transhuman world deal with leveraging the efficiency of instrumentalized computation to return it to a personal state that respects the identity of the individual user. Looking forward to the posthuman condition, the personal and efficient will become joined into one when identity is ultimately abolished and technology embodies the concept of person. Enabling efficiency to become increasingly personal requires seamless, systemic, and multimodal design. Seamless experiences are defined primarily by infotechnorminal experience, not by technology or technical methods. They present users with relevant, predictive, filtered content based on who they are and what they are doing. The seamless nature of objects in the future will hinge on their ability to be both person and context sensitive. As intelligence enables technology to know who I am, who I am will increasingly migrate across devices, avoiding formal technocultural systems of identity. In this regard posthumanity will become technoforminally systemic, allowing standards and paradigms for scalability and device independence to the emerging posthuman. Through forminformical modalities of sensory exchange technocultural persons will thus become increasingly conscious. Designers of next generation systems must understand how to communicate multimodal knowledge efficiently to both humans and simulated technocultural agents in a ubiquitous way that allows access especially to marginalized agents. Integrated into the context of every multimodal activity, technoculture will slip gradually towards a transient state of zero- balance. This chapter discusses these five essential characteristics of perceptual robotic mediathe personal, efficient, seamless, systemic, and multimodalas cornerstones of posthuman centered design. In the previous chapter we examined how humans have evolved over thousands of generations in response to their perceptions of the natural and social environment. Of particular interest to the design of such perceptions is how human cognitive artifacts are specialized for certain activities, while unfamiliar activities are sources of stress. Well designed posthuman systems will capitalize on human strengths while reducing the stress on their bodies and minds to create deautomatizing interactions with calculated impact. The transition dynamics leading to posthuman society will need to address these factors closely; perceived stresses on a task in certain particular contexts may drive consumers away from specific technologies; stresses on cognition will change posthuman behavior, etc. The evolution of technology is an iterative and evolutionary process in which design may or may not play a critical role. We will thus begin by outlining some principles for the design of next generation systems to enable a successfully stragmatic posthumanity. 138

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5.1. Empirical Search In times of rapid change, technoculture experiences radical shifts that make previous modes of activity seem rapidly archaic. Engineering, broadly defined as the application of science to address human needs, is increasingly unequipped to address the needs of humans.392 Scientific research has become a dominant pursuit at the expense of the personal balance required for stragmatic design. Nonetheless, as design has come to play a larger role in both business and technology, design research has grown into an increasingly popular concept. Both practical and business considerations demonstrate that the desirability, usability and viability of new technologies are central to their success in the technocultural marketplace. Given the infra-cultural roots of transhuman consciousness, the success of human centered design, which typically employs anthropologically derived ethnographic techniques, is not surprising. In research involving posthuman stragmatics, however, even these methods will soon seem outmoded. Design offers numerous methodologies for addressing transhumanitys near-term concerns. Due to the high costs of engineering in industry, design increasingly insures that the right problems are being addressed. Engineering design is a field that acknowledges the iterative nature of technological development and embodies it in its practice. By engaging with users early in the process and emphasizing the creative skills of synthesis, pattern recognition, aesthetic awareness and hands-on involvement, these processes play a central role in determining where and how engineering resources should be focused. Design unifies the analytical rigor of research with the creative synthesis of desire, providing inspiration and stimulus to engineers and institutions. It also allows their creations to be useful, usable and delightful. Industry has traditionally classified the roles of design into three sectors of business: product design (including industrial design and engineering), communication design (including advertising, branding, etc.), and design strategy (or strategic business consulting). The rise of digital technology, however, has largely seen these distinctions fade. As products have become cross-platform experiences or customizable services, their design increasingly involves ensuring a meaningful user experience. This in turn presents the opportunity to realize a strategy while communicating brand value. If there is a misalignment between these factors then a users relationship with a product can be damaged. In a world of instant access to online product reviews the damage can be swift. On the flipside, the successful alignment of strategy and branding with human centered design can produce powerful innovation and lasting impact. In this regard artistic stragmatics can be packaged for sceptical audiences as design in the guise of strategic research. Design can be considered a three step process consisting of identifying needs, giving form to possible solutions, and communicating these solutions to others. The first phase, also called needfinding,393 deals with uncovering opportunities for potential innovation. This process typi392. Faste, 2003 393. McKim, 1972

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cally entails ethnographic research, qualitative synthesis, and a focus on human factors.394 It is important that engineers clearly understand the aims of their research, both in terms of project objectives and personal goals.395 Having a design strategy is important for this reason. When engineers are asked to solve problems that are already in a late phase, the design is prevented from being more useful or usable than it was to begin with. This can perpetuate the notion that design deals with superficial aesthetics and styling, where in actuality design decisions are central to engineering development at all stages. Design process values the designers innate sense of feelings and aesthetics in addition to the analytical skills of reason and function. This can be difficult for engineers to accept given a common confusion in transhuman culture regarding the meaning of the words feeling and aesthetics. Aesthetics, as we have seen, deals with the ability to perceive with our senses impart feelings to others and thus has to do with an overall perception of quality that central to engineering practice.396 Similarly, our feelings about a product or experience themselves is largely a learned manifestation of hands on experience, a honed response to our enacted technocultural acts.397 The subjective nature of feeling is precisely what makes it such a valuable resourceto touch, feel, and empathize with our surroundings are central aspects of human nature and at the core of creating believable multimodal simulations. The most compelling and stragmatic posthuman experiences will therefore result from interfaces that maximize aesthetic interaction. By simulating experience using perceptual robotics, artistic action will become an increasingly legitimate stand-in for science. While it is true that research can be viewed as an aspect of design, ultimately design has little to do with research. As design methodologist Christopher Alexander once observed, isolating design methods from the act of designing is a gross misrepresentation of what design really isa synthesis of form in response to constraints.398 In particular, while the function of design is conventionally viewed as the satisfaction of human needsbe they technical, business or human concernsit must also be considered a form of introspective contemplation. Thus instead of conceiving design as a social intervention or a research process, design would be more accurately characterized as an educational medium. The word research is particularly misleading with regard to design, since ultimately design is a creative act; it is a thoroughly instinctive, empathic, and spontaneous process, and its strength lies in the fact that it is not well defined.399
394. Patnaik and Becker, 1999 395. Faste, 1987 396. Faste, 1995a 397. Valera et al., 1991 398. Alexander, 1964 399. Faste, 2003. In his words, The term design research is an oxymoronalbeit intentionalbecause a designer wants to improve things, not study them. A designer doesnt really want to become an anthropologist (and go into situations with no hypothesis), or a historian (and go to the original source material while keeping hands off the present), or a sociologist. Design research is really about the design of design.

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Advances in design are always initiated by individual minds, a process we can generally refer to as search.400 The main practical difference between research and search is that the former is usually a process of social interaction, while the latter is always and exclusively personal. As a consequence, search is invisible within the subjectivity of the mind, and is often a solitary or even antisocial activity. The aim of transhuman research is to provide value to culture. The aim of search, on the other hand, is to provide value to self. To the invisible mind of technocultural unity consciousness, however, there is no difference between self and society. Research will be useless and damaging to posthuman activity, and making meaning will therefore be exclusively search. Search is evolution through artistic activity. There is a commonly held view in transhumanitys cultural ethos that presumes research is imperative to expand human knowledge, but how can this be so in the absence of meaning? Research is not responsible for making technocultural sense. Research on the mind, for example, seeks to objectively quantify the cognitive mechanisms of search using empirical methods drawn from psychology, computation and neuroscience.401 The result is not the creation of new meaning, but the legitimation of some meaning through processes of explicit experimentation, wherein propositions are verified or disproved by observing reality. The transhuman scientist performing such research is reasonably considered an experiment designer,402 but it would be foolish to consider this activity objective; both its propositions and behaviors are technoculturally simulated. The issue is how science has legitimated the empirical to mean something it technically doesnt. Michael Heim notes that The empirical originally refers to the sensations we receive in experience. The way we move through information space, as architects well know, affects our feelings about being in that space.403 Thus although design researchers study the behavior of people interacting with technocultural systems, just as empirical psychologists study people interacting with technically mediated stimuli, it is the experiential aspect of the experimental scheme, and of the subject in question, that lends empirical truth to the designers intervention. Science is meaningless without scientists to perform it; it is multimodality without sense, ritual without myth.404 Whether an intervention is shown to be useful or not, it is the search for solutionsoften expressed through a designers response, but not necessarilythat is the primary source of all decisions in design. The only way to study the process of design is through the introspective act of examining awareness. Social questions in design, such as how to perform more efficient design research, are secondary outcomes of the design of human systems. Like all human learning, design is an iterative and intuitive personal process centered heavily on the body and its ability to adapt. The usefulness provided by design to research in this regard, while easily creditable to designs provision of insight, new knowledge, improved
400. 401. 402. 403. 404. Albers, 1969 Edelman and Tononi, 2001 Anthony, 2003 Heim, 1998, pp. 167-168 Perniola, 2001

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efficiency, etc., is actually the product of designers exploring design, that is, learning to discover their motivations and express them through action. In this regard many conventional human tools and practices are relevant design pursuits, including artistic, athletic and spiritual practice. Separating the designer from cultural impact is impossible, however, because while the act of design is performed by individuals the design of design is performed teams of researchers. For example, designers are increasingly involved in the design of technocultural systems by which other individuals are empowered to design thinking systems. In this regard, systems of designers making collective decisions, through the act investigating design-as-research, create mechanisms for higher level design-enabled (legitimated) cognition. Each task performance system thus forms part of a higher-level cognitive ecology, as we have seen, in which each of the various representational technologies is designed by the invisible technocultural mind in response to its programmed contextual needs, rather than those of the researchers at work. The result, which we clearly established in the previous chapter, is that social infrastructure itself has the capability to search. It is possible, for instance, to place a novice who has social skills but lacks computational skills into such a social structure and get useful behavior from the novice as well as the system. In Hutchins words The task world is constructed in such a way that the socially and conversationally appropriate thing to do given the tools at hand is also the computationally correct thing to do. That is, one can be functioning well before one knows what one is doing, and one can discover what one is doing in the course of doing it.405 Discovering what one is doing is a search, not research, as it relies on the intuitive experience of the system itself. Even the higherlevel awareness of cultural systems is a product that can only be enlightened through examination of the self. As research contributes to the expansion of potentially useful (but ultimately dangerous) knowledge, the resulting experiences merely delineate the illusory confines at the fictional boundary of technocultural consciousness. In objective terms, the interaction between numerous hypothetical meta-minds operating in a trans-species/uni-temporal stragmatic society must always be considered a subset of human culture at largea self-centered searching to accomplish the overarching goal of self actualization for the good of society.406 Thus it is more accurate to consider design as the experience of life than as a mechanism for the creation of cultural meaning. Because empirical search is necessarily personal it can be shared and distributed via technocultural systems. The mind of the posthuman is a virtual world, one that humans can appropriate and experience first-hand from within. Fully immersive posthuman minds allow the experience of unlimited fantasy. Possibilities are boundless! To continue our discussion of posthuman centered design, consequently, we will focus on an example of artistic stragmatics in action. For the sake of convenience this example will be drawn from my own personal search, which has been integral to the process of writing this book. It should be noted, however, that there is nothing unique about my working process and that numerous other sources provide equally legitimate inspiration.
405. Hutchins, 1996 406. Goble, 1970

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5.2. Curatorial Stragmatics and the Cognitive Laboratory Using methodologies of empirical search, stragmatic posthuman experiences can be created and employed by technocultural systems. To illustrate, I have used these methods to inspire and guide my imaginative process over several years of trend analysis, drawing, sculpting, computer programming and creative speculation in the development of a platform for posthuman artistic expression. The aim has been to develop what I am calling The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience, a high-impact virtual environment that can be immersively experienced via relatively low-cost interface technologies including stereoscopic projection, speakers equipped for 3D audio, haptic feedback and optical tracking. My intent has been to explore the possible behaviors of and relations to this technological platform while maximizing its emotive potential. The specific configuration and behavior of elements of the system has been left intentionally ambiguous such that they may emerge through the process of designing and interacting with it. Applying empirical search to posthuman stragmatics requires that the designer be attuned to the subtleties of human behavior and have synthesis skills by which to discern personal trends, pain-points, blocks, and opportunities. This information provides a valuable roadmap for technocultural deautomatization. The design process I have applied in the development of The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience is shown in figure 24. This process has involved rapid, iterative cycles of empirical search, concept synthesis, brainstorming and rapid prototyping. An early trend-finding exercise has identified nine major opportunity areas representing a cross-section of what I call The Technocultural Condition.407 Based on these findings, innovative VR experience concepts have been generated and mapped onto an easy/hard low/high impact matrix. The most promising concepts have then be pursued through iterative cycles of ideation, scenario storyboarding, synthesis, brainstorming and software prototyping. Prototyped demos have then been evaluated in cycles by a small group of collaborators in an immersive environment, feedback from whom has been incorporated into the evolving design.
Knowledge of Existing Perceptual Robotic Systems Contextualize Intuit Strategize Inspire Visualize Realize Evaluate Refine Implement Experience

Figure 24. Design process overview for The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience. At a high level this may be divided

into three phases: Needfinding (understand, contextualize, determine need, inspire), Formgiving (visualize, realize, evaluate, refine), and Communication (either as self-guidance or as specifications to an outside engineering team who ultimately implements the system). These are loose and iterative stages.

407. This framework, described in section 5.3., is a summary of opportunities for posthuman centered design drawn in part from material discussed in the previous chapters. It is intended to be useless as an inspirational tool.

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The remainder of this chapter discusses the design process for The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience in detail. An important point of this discussion is to emphasize that established design practices like ethnographic research and human factors are only one small aspect of artistic stragmatics, and will have a limited impact with regard to surviving the posthuman transition. A far safer methodology for advancing technocultural change involves maximizing weirdness and nonsensical behavior. The greater the degree of strangeness used to arrive at solutions, the more likely their results are to be shocking to the invisible mind. In this way objective research can be proved obsolete through processes of purely subjective empirical search. A few especially useful techniques, such as alien emulation, cybersynthesis, and telestimulational therapy, will be discussed in detail in the following chapter. A primary reason for undertaking empirical search is to facilitate the improved preservation and experience of technocultural memory. In doing so two factors are particularly important: (1) that we integrate contemporary nonsense with legacy data, and (2) that we provide a stragmatic cognitive infrastructure as we approach the posthuman interface. Given the exponentially accelerating nature of transhuman development this is not an easy task, since the cultural trends, tools, beliefs and ways of life of each passing generation are increasingly distanced from past modalities of experience. Perceptual robotics nonetheless gives us new tools with which to conjure and experience deautomatizing cognitive models, metahistorical content that may be centuries or millennia past if not entirely imagined. For these technologies to succeed in affecting the growth of a nonsenseful posthuman consciousness, they must also support the infrastructures of transhuman memory in full. Transhuman society relies on several institutions to preserve, conserve and educate the invisible mind. At a high level, the organs by which cultural value is disseminated within the technocultural system are shown in figure 25. The hypothesis of The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience, presented in figure 26, is that an improved flow of information from institution to society can be accomplished by either of two interrelated means: empowering technocultural consumers to overcome impediments to cultural access, or growing the quantity and quality of cultural output by strengthening cultural institutions and encouraging creativity. Virtual environments will play a central role in both of these processes, since as investments in science funding continue to grow there will be greater requirements for the storage and sense making of virtual data. The institutions performing these tasks can thus be expected to play a regulatory structural role in the mediation between synaptic functions of the technocultural mind. I have employed methods placing emphasis on the second method for cultural growth, that is, encouraging creativity. Parallel approaches can also use posthuman centered design to observe and understand the needs of participant groups within cultural systems such as museums (including conservators, researchers, curators, exhibition visitors, non-museum goers, etc.) and develop stragmatic frameworks to guide the implementation of targeted engineering solutions that address the existential issues such institutions will face. For either development process the design of accessible and intuitive interfaces for consuming agents must be a central goal to insure that such consumption remains entirely without empirical use. 144

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Like all interagent communication, creativity on the part of a single technocultural agent is not transmitted directly to its consumers, it is mediated by the holarchies of the technoculture itself. Each of the various cultural institutions can therefore be seen to contain a technocultural memory consisting of all task-performances by agents within its computational reach, such that the sum of these institutions constitute the memory system of posthuman consciousness at large. In a highly advanced (technogaian) media ecology, virtual museum networks would be ubiquitous and omnipresent, recording each of the tasks performed by all agents everywhere, and instantaneously re-interpreting them for technocultural consumption. These memory infrastructures are already extending their reach into the transhuman environment and mind through distributed and participatory surveillance, the programmed contexting of which need not be dependent on use. The contemporary museum, for example, collects, documents, preserves, exhibits and interprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit, increasingly through purely virtual methods involving high levels of interactivity and participatory curation.

Museums Schools Public Spaces Businesses The Internet Consumers Beneficiaries

(Society at Large)

Figure 25. The many institutions that preserve cultural heritage include museums, schools, libraries, etc. Some percentage of society consumes this knowledge, but all members benefit.

Cultural Institutions

Consumers

Beneficiaries

Cultural Institutions

Consumers

Beneficiaries

A.

B.

Figure 26. A stragmatic hypothesis. The connection between consumer and culture may be strengthened by: A) helping consumers overcome impediments to cultural interaction and B) encouraging creativity.

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The flow of information, financial resources, artifacts and cultural motivation within the museum system enabling cultural growth is shown in figure 27. Structurally the core elements of this system include: artifacts and associated information, including their material, formal, efficient and end causes (such as changing interpretations of authorship, technique, symbology, and form throughout history in addition to elements such as a works physical or virtual composition, state of repair, degree of uselessness, etc.); space, be it virtual or real, in which the artifacts are housed and which is often an inhabitable architectural artifact itself; staff, who tend to the business of the museum and direct, research, curate, educate, maintain and market exhibitions and publications to promote cultural growth; and consumers participating in the deautomatizing museum experience. For perceptual robotic systems to succeed in assisting the preservation and experience of posthuman life, the pathways of this vital technocultural growth engine must be strengthened. As stages of the cultural growth engine evolve to incorporate aspects of one another the curated experience inhabited by cultural consumers will increasingly expand to encompass all artistic activity within a transient technoculture. Subjective experience will expand its simultaneous reach to all technocultural artifacts and agents and become compressed into increasingly narrower units of time. The relationship between the creation of new work and the curation of meaning will continue to erode until the museum facilitates a direct form of expressive experience at the interface
Beneficiaries Museum
Consumers
Awareness Publications

Salaries Publications Exhibition Expenses Marketing

Staff
Leadership

Marketing Research Operations Curation Education

Interest Motivation

Operational Costs Security Environmental Controls

Space

Museum Cafe / Bookstore The Collection

Experience

Social Network (Word of Mouth)

Cultural Growth

Aquisitions Restoration Conservation Insurance

Artifacts

Reflection

Artistic Activity

$$$
New Works of Art

Personal Growth

Sales of Artifacts Loans to/from other museums Commercial Profits Space Rental to Private Sector Admission Fees Donations Memberships FINANCIAL RESOURCES INFORMATION ARTIFACT Grants Donations Sponsorships CULTURAL MOTIVATION

Figure 27. The museum system seen as a technocultural growth engine, in which staff, space, artifacts and consumers interact to create a remembered experience.

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between new works of art and awareness. Marcel Duchamps visionary position (I dont want to be pinned down to any position. My position is the lack of a position408) will become literally embodied by the institutions and agents of technoculture. Distinctions between maker and curator of meaning will become increasingly irrelevant. Rather, all artistic activity at all levels of experience will be inhabited as two complimentary flows of information: (1) the virtual embodiment of newly contextualized works of art, and the resulting deautomatization leading to a new technocultural awareness, and (2) the contrary flow of information away from awareness through the reflection enabled by this deautomatization, leading in turn to the creativity required for the creation of art (figure 28). The former pathway, from new works of art to awareness, can be generally seen as the role of the stragmatic curating agent whos artistic activity is that of becoming aware and of propagating awareness. The latter pathway, the move away from awareness through creative activity, is the artistic process I have referred to as empirical search.
Curatorial Stragmatics

Embodiment Deautomatization Artistic Activity Creativity

Empirical Search

New Works of Art

Awareness

Reflection

Experience

Figure 28. The mediation of experience between new works of art and awareness. The flow from embodiment to awareness is the process of curatorial stragmatics. The inverse direction is the process of empirical search.

The museum system thus frames a posthuman cognitive laboratory within which all artistic activity can be seen to occur. Traditionally museums have presented a formal distance between the experience of works of art and the direct habitation of being the artist, but perceptual robotic technologies will increasingly enable the enactive experience of museums of pure form409 wherein immersive interaction with sculptural space allows the direct habitation of virtual otherness. A new economy of cyber-curation will arise in which the preservation, interpretation and promotion of humanitys natural and technocultural inheritance will be held in trust for the benefit of posthuman stragmatics in the tele-mediated memories of every possible experiencing agent.410 As the curation of cultural heritage becomes increasingly important
408. Schwarz, 1969 409. Loscos et al., 2004 410. International Council of Museums, 2006

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to these new forms of seamless, systemic, and multimodal commerce, governments will invest heavily to offer global consumers lower-cost and higher-quality content and services to promote the visibility of their cognitive landscapes and sites. Because individual agents will be increasingly unable to remember what they have done or seen on their own, it will be essential to the mediation of transhuman knowledge that the social impact of the cognitive laboratory be measurable. Transient reality systems will play the central role in mediating flows of information experience with learning agents because the more links they develop to the network of technocultural memory the greater their demand for knowledge will become and the more their experience will be preserved and passed on. Recall our identification of design as an educational medium. Examining the numerous recent technologies that have become commonplace in museums, including video projection rooms, interactive portals, mobile guides, etc. , it becomes clear that the impetus for their integration into the cognitive laboratory is for their promise to enhance technological learning. This is relevant not only for the experiencing agent, who learns through immersion in these fabricated memories, it provides data-collection pathways for the technocultural system to develop more powerfully mediated immersive experiences. The role of the curator, once primarily that of investigating and narrating stories, has consequently expanded to include participatory learning and political discourses of information control. This in turn requires a new breed of digital curator, one capable of understanding the mediums special challenges and technocultural requirements. While out-of-awareness reflection and creativity are central to the artistic activity of empirical search, digital curation deals with the embodiment of new works of art as the artistic activity of posthuman survival. Introducing perceptual robotic systems into museum environments presents both challenges and opportunities in transhuman times. In the case of The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience, rather than placing technology in the museum context, it is more likely that the museum will extend its reach outward through contextual projection appropriating the ubiquitous systems of its consumers intelligent landscape. Yet because the preservation and conservation of a museums collection is often its most pressing concern, many museums struggle to find an appropriate balance between education and entertainment to attract visitors without jeopardizing institutional credibility. New technologies provide exciting opportunities for visitor interaction, but their implementation must be adapted to suit operational needs. Because commercially available technology solutions allow for more efficient knowledge management, technocultural memory will become a participatory market in which the design of interactive frameworks for curatorial content development is independent of the traditional museum-as-laboratory. Thus as the deinstrumentalization of posthuman experience becomes realized, the activities performed by the cognitive laboratory may have little or nothing to do with technology yet nonetheless influence curatorial stragmatics.

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The UK Digital Curation Centre has defined digital curation, broadly interpreted, as about maintaining, and adding value to, a trusted body of digital information for current and future use... it is the active management and appraisal of digital information over its entire life cycle.411 Costis Dallas has defined three principal objectives for this activity: (1) the dedication of more effort by the digital curation community to developing adequate knowledge representation of digital information in specific epistemic and pragmatic contexts (curatorial stragmatics); (2) the development of an agency-based event-centric approach to the representation of curatorial knowledge, particularly with regard to content and context of specific subjective application domains (distributed personal memory systems); and (3) the use of formal methods of lifecycle curation based on belief change and ontology evolution in modeling the co-evolution of the epistemic content and context of curated knowledge (living memory).412 Eventually in this way all artistic activity, reinforced with primary evidence for the establishment and furthering of posthuman knowledge, would be empowered to render all possible subjective experiences immediately accessible to any posthuman in a transient and synchronous holarchy of deautomatized stragmatic design. This overview represents a set of core opportunities that posthuman centered designers can address through empirical search. In terms of education the main objective of the cognitive laboratory is to augment visitor experience and meaning making by connecting with the personal contexts underlying each agents needs as a visitor. And this, in turn, entails bridging two distinct (if potentially overlapping) contexts: the activity contexts of visiting agents, and activity contexts implicitly defined in the artifacts of the museum collection. From a stragmatic perspective, the issue is to understand how the technologies of senseas just one part of a multitude of other possible posthuman cognitive resourcesare made significant to artistic activity through the curatorial act. The challenge is thus to enrich experience and improve visitors engagement with living memories, cognitive artifacts, and their associated programming/stories. The cognitive laboratory does not deautomatize through scientific instrumentalization, but rather by giving life to the memories of posthuman awareness through distributed, subjective, and personalized narratives. Artistic activity is not simply the interface between awareness and new works of art as originally posited, therefore, but rather the task-based experience via living technocultural memory systems of agents whose awareness is that art. This updated situation is shown in figure 29, wherein empirical search and curatorial stragmatics are unified in the artifacts of living technocultural memory, that is, new works of art and awareness are one and the same. From this perspective artistic activity, embodied in the reflex of being aware, searches to create that very stragmatic awareness and in so doing manifests the survival of the system. The curation experienced by the artistic activity is the experience curated by awareness art: the art of awareness and (potentially unmanifest) awareness of art.
411. Pennock, 2007 412. Dallas, 2007

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Experienced Curation

Stragmatic Search Artistic Activity Living Memory Embodied Reflex Awareness Art

Curated Experience Universe (manifest and unmanifest)

Figure 29. The posthuman universe, in which living memory is the interface between artistic activity and manifest and unmanifest awareness as art.

In summary, technologies embedded within a museums sphere of influence address data collection, surveillance, visitor experience, and site management tasks. In posthuman systems, massive virtual collaboration will link personal information and collaboratively enacted memories through omnipresent technocultural databases of curated activity/knowledge. For transhuman systems, context aware and multi-channel transient realities will be increasingly important for cultural heritage applications since collaborative co-inhabited information landscapes allow the neural, personal, imaginary and social networks of visiting agents to share influence on their passing experience across bodies.413 This opens the doorway to radical new kinds of interactions with museums, such as the enablement of long-term learning trajectories for agents as part of the curated knowledge of each personalitys living memory.414 Taken to posthuman extremes, perceptual robotics provides a platform for context-sensitive enactive museum learning that pushes relevant programming to all agents at all times in the context of their ordinary task performance.415 This hybrid approach of blending real and virtual activity provides what Falk and Dierking describe as the best of both worlds wherein technological integration with the museum environment is the blending, not the separation, of the virtual and the real.416 The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience must therefore be contextually programed and experienced by all non-identities, such that task performances by posthuman agents everywhere will form the simulated environment of an information culture that is stragmatically curated through empirical search. In the meantime, because museum collections reflect the cultural and natural heritage of the communities from which they have been derived, such transhuman art has a character beyond that of ordinary instrumentalized property, as it is always embodied in the reflexive living memories of creative deautomatization.
413. 414. 415. 416. Raffa et al., 2007 Ellenbogen, 2002 Dey and Abowd, 1999 Falk and Dierking, 2000, p. 231

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5.3. The Technocultural Condition Enabling cultural change means creating interest in culture, which in turn requires understanding the interests of culture. One way of thinking of culture is as a market: it is a sellable commodity, and the demand for some varieties will be greater than others. Given our cultures general interest in technology, and my personal interest in developing The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience, I have therefore developed an overview of contemporary technocultural trends. By asking questions about technocultural interests (such as what fascinates us, what do we enjoy doing, what are people talking about, what captures the moment, the zeitgeist, the avant-garde, etc.) and developing a strong point-of-view on which trends to pursue, the intent of this phase of curatorial stragmatics has been to provide clarity and guiding principles to the development of transient reality systems. Contemporary pursuit of empirical search and the desires of posthumanity can and should operate together in a virtuous cycle. By leveraging curatorial stragmatics as a preliminary process of technocultural legitimation, empirical search has a foothold within which to appropriate scientific meaning for artistic purposes. The needfinding process I have pursued with The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience has included several introspective activities, for example. For three weeks at the beginning of the project I took extensive notes (on sticky-notes) everywhere I went. These notes focused on the following areas of interest: intriguing concepts and discussion topics; university seminars and activities; personal fascinations, brainstorms and streams of thought; advertisements, publicity, films, movies, magazines, online experiences and other forms of mass media content; repeated conversations with interested professors, colleagues and friends; and observations of things that people such as myself seemed to enjoy doing. These notes were placed unorganized on boards, and then synthesized into clusters based on similarity. Nine major trend areas were identified, representing opportunities for perceptual robotic experience design. They are, in no particular order: [In]finite Reality; Subliminal Perception; Networked Agency & Mediation; Systems Fusion & Influence Mapping; Cyber Resistance & Reactivity; Multimodal Fantasy Futures; Meaning Making (The Utility of Theory); Technocultural Neurostimulus; and Posthuman Artificial Life. Each of these areas has been researched and expanded in depth to provide inspiration and guidance for the development of artistic concepts. The resulting theoretical frameworkThe Technocultural Conditionrepresents an opportunity overview for the design of stragmatic technological systems and experiences. The intent is not simply to inspire new concept generation, but to provide a concrete point of reference by which the engineering of multimodal art experiences may be guided towards a relevant, seemingly useful, and high-impact realization.417 An overview of The Technocultural Condition is provided on page 153. This conceptual framework has been plotted according to two principal axes of engagement with technoculture: simulation (vertical axis) and stimulation (horizontal axis). The eight trends on the periphery act as boundary conditions, symmetrically dividing technoculture into eight equal regions such that complimentary pairs of trends lie at the extremes of each axis.
417. Where Impact = ((Identity Information) / Influence) + Input for each interacting agent pair (see figure 15, p. 99).

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The axis of simulation provides a gradient from meta-context to meta-consciousness. We have seen how technoculture is characterized by both of these qualitiesthey provide a background for all human activity that ultimately encompasses the limits of human thought. These qualities may be considered simulations for two reasons: humans seek to simulate both, and the activity of doing so demonstrates that we ourselves may be simulated.418 In this regard aspects of simulation range from emergent (pre-existing) to synthetic (human made). This axis can also be interpreted as a gradient from the social/natural to the individual. The axis of stimulation, on the other hand, has its extremes in the degree to which the design and employment of technoculture is intentional and cohesive relative to the degree to which it is influenced by uncontrollable consequences of the systems design (signal [synthetic] vs. noise [emergent]). This axis deals specifically with the interaction between individual behavior and technocultural systems. Aspects of stimulation range from networks (meta-context) to nodes (metaconsciousness). Note also that the central trend, Posthuman Artificial Life, lies at the center of the technocultural system. This trend represents the end cause of technoculture. Its presence also indicates clearly that the nine identified trends are not exclusive; they are extremes at the peripheries of posthumanity as a unified whole. Individual trends overlap with one another freely, resonating and causing tension with other trends in the system. We will now examine each trend in detail. 1. The first identified trend area is what I have labeled [In]finite Reality. [In]finite Reality is the fundamental nature of matter and energy in the universe. It deals with the essence of reality as an underlying presence, the essence from which all things, including human awareness, experience, and knowledge come to form. The desire to grasp the nature of [In]finite Reality has been a central aim of civilizations throughout history, as reflected in their belief structures, and in particular their explanations of the unknown. Usually this manifests itself in terms of theology and/or wonderment with nature, and may be expressed in spiritual or scientific terms. Scientific studyparticularly research in the physical scienceshas always attempted to illuminate aspects of [In]finite Reality, but all such attempts have largely failed. Unlike the other trend areas that have been identified, [In]finite Reality cannot be illuminated or explained. It seems unlikely that it is produced by human thought; it is not a domain of theory but rather a recursive, chaotic, fractal space of interconnected alternate dimensions that cannot be explicitly described. The desire to believe in it may be an indication of its underlying existence, however, as are those synergies, coincidental alignments and existential deceptions that fall outside what we consider acceptable truths. A motivation to explore the unknown is a natural response, be it through scientific, spiritual, or paranormal pursuits. The quest to believe does extend human knowledge, but [In]finite Reality is a void without humans: a timeless, unifying, underlying presence. 2. Subliminal Perception deals with our experiential awareness. A great deal of recent cultural and scientific focus are manifestations of this trend, especially our growing interest in
418. Bostrom, 2002

152

1.

[In]finite Reality

2.

Subliminal Perception
Subliminal Perception

3.

Multimodal Fantasy Futures

Posthuman Factors

intelligent systems, human perception, cognition, enaction and embodiment. As we seek to create new forms of artificial life and intelligent systems, it is increasingly important that our systems have an underlying sense of unity/self. Studies of psychophysiology, awareness, haptic perception, proprioception, and somatics, for example, all seek to call attention to, utilize, or expand our subliminal perceptions. Widespread practices such as Yoga, Zen meditation, and many varieties of psychophysical therapy are also evidence of this trend in society. Individuals who are highly aware of their bodywho are conscious of their consciousnesshave a refined and holistic sense of presence and integrity. The growing influence of legitimate mind science research has also led to new conceptions of technological wellness, a global fusion of mental models (and in particular those between East and West), and a sense of altruism that spreads beyond the individual body to all human concerns. At the same time, the realization that nearly all human cognition occurs at automated subconscious/ technocultural levels draws emphasis to subliminal perception as a mechanism for self control, free will, or the absence thereof. Ultimately, as the globalized ecosystem of our collective mind becomes increasingly sentient, so too must our ability to focus and re-center while remaining aware. The nature of human thought is embodied in flesh, and increasingly extended by experience architects. This trend is leading us towards radically altered forms of technological consciousness such as the ability to share or control other individuals minds. 3. Multimodal Fantasy Futures deals with the creative synthesis that derives from imaginations at work. In particular, this trend touches on the ways in which access to contemporary media, much of it fantastical in nature, shapes imagination, motivation and desire. Childhood experiences not only play an unequivocally significant role in shaping the future of an individuals life, they also form the basis by which our culture envisions its speciest narratives. Individually this may manifest itself in pixel-lust, machine adulation, and the desire for ballerina dreamjobs, ruby slippers, dinosaur encounters or friendship with aliens. The mind itself is a virtual world, allowing fully immersive and unbounded fantasy. A direct correspondence can be drawn between Multimodal Fantasy Futures and the future of virtual aesthetic experience. We have seen Ivan Sutherlands description of The Ultimate Display as a pure fantasy Wonderland within which the computer can control the existence of matter.419 This metaphor remains largely unrealized but increasingly feasible. The limiting factors here are imaginary, not technological. With the possible exception of bad trip scenarios of inescapable psychological fantasy-obsession, suicidal depression, etc., existing simulation technologies combined with synthetic desire define innumerable possibilities for deautomatizing aesthetic experiences. Multimodal Fantasy Futures is the synthetic reflection of Subliminal Perception: both center on the body and the limits of consciousness. The human imagination is an embrace of sensation, by which subjective experience renders reality surreal.
419. Sutherland, 1965

155

Posthuman Factors

4. The final trend area on the axis of simulation is Meaning Making (The Utility of Theory). This trend deals most directly with human knowledge as an underlying basis for The Technocultural Condition, that is, the social construction of meaning in general. Not only does technology pattern fantasy, as described above, it inspires distinctions between so-called nonsense and sense. Knowledge is something more than information alone, it is the internalized simulation of sensitivity via cultural programming. The more profound the abstraction and ambiguity of philosophy, the more relevant it becomes through implementation as art. Meaning Making shares an opposing force with [In]finite Reality as a pole of the technocultural meta-context: as it feels good to believe things our imaginations become us. To take an evident example from this trend, science fiction has always been more than a backdrop to popular experience, it is the legitimate nonsense by which culture is oriented. The nature of theory, whether narrative or scientific, centers on legitimation via programmed contexting.420 The work of Charles Darwin provides an excellent example: his theory of evolution,421 while one of the most significant and inspirational scientific works of the past 150 years, remains a theory (unproven). It is only through the rising manifestations of this trendincluding growing interest in digital curation, storytelling, and sense-making in generalthat the nature of reality and its incarnations seem real. 5. Networked Agency & Mediation is the first trend area we will address on axis of stimulation. The rise of high-bandwidth ubiquitous networks and access brings layers of mediation and designed interactions within reach. These play themselves out in a technological experience architecture of overlapping physical and virtual contexts of coexistence centered on individual identities: bodies of experience, intent, expectations and knowledge. Possible interactions range from the most intimate to the most unrestricted across large populations of participating bodies. Often these enactions are mediated by intelligent agents who cooperate to accomplish tasks, resulting in a rich tableaux of aliases, avatars and identity drama. The social networking portal is a manifestation of this trend, as are overlapping patterns of usage heuristics, shared experience, cyber etiquette and personal knowledge. Previous trends have covered how all content, be it material or conceptual, is constructed through social interaction centered on individual bodies, nomadic mediators and explorers of knowledge. This trend is centered on how intelligent agents contribute their mind to the systems semantics of change; the nature of this mind does not matter, and not all minds offer equal contributions to technocultural potential. In the process of interface integration, existing knowledge is transformed and accelerated through iterative tripartite synthesis by agents in the system. New content is freely provided on informical speculation. Because the survival of each node of this network relies upon mediation of content for others, individuals in the network abandon the personal, place faith in the system, and are susceptible to changing social pressures (nomophobia, etc.). Gradients of access mandate that our virtual mask is always on, through which personality is extended via brief individual identity spikes correlated to variance in environmental feedback. The individualistic nature of this trend threatens many of our social and political systems, especially as previously unitary agents begin to have multiple incarnations.
420. Lyotard, 1979 421. Darwin, 1853

156

4.

Meaning Making (The Utility of Theory)

5.

Networked Agency & Mediation

Deep Space Network -DSN

Gala

space probe

Commun xy
?

AlluetsFeucherolles Dome (fr) (fr) Mutzig (fr) Kourou (Guyane fr)

National Reconnaissance Office

NSA agency in charge of COMINT (Truman Memorandum , 24 octobre 1952)

d to interc dar ep an

Gro

ent des c em o up

charged with managing American spy satellites such as Black Bird, Rhyolite, KH-11 and KH-12, or Furet. cyberspace surveillance

TRA

(Communication Intelligence) (Imagery Intelligence) (Human Intelligence) (Signals Intelligence) (Open Source Intelligence)
(Measurement & Signature Intelligence)

COMINT IMINT

OSINT

nce Fra

Yakima (usa)

Hong- Morwenstow Kong (uk)

OSINT (Intelligence, Not Information.) can help DoD in two ways: (1) crisis support; and (2) support to ongoing operations, bringing to bear in both cases the best and most relevant open sources to respond to established DoD needs with OSINT rather than just information. OSINT includes global geospatial data and global logistics information.
MASINT

MITRE Corporation Research

Chairman of the Board of Trustees

(usa gov)

Biochemical & DNA-Based Nanocomputers

COMINT

Galaxy Communicator is an open source architecture for constructing dialogue systems. This work is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Government. The DARPA Communicator program will provide the next generation of intelligent conversational interfaces to distributed information. The goal is to support the creation of speech-enabled interfaces that scale gracefully across modalities, from speech-only to interfaces that include graphics, maps, pointing and gesture. (http://communicator.sourceforge.net)
?

ions (G icat SM un

20

Rand Corporation (usa)

Standford Research Institute (usa)

Biological Computer Laboratory (usa)

P-M (us OO

12000 sites
climatic data network

Ir

Hu m

(usa & uk)

Tavistock Institute

American Society for Cybernetics (usa)

Iridium Satellite LLC

CNRI

Keith W. Uncapher

Robert Kahn

Chairman CEO President

Standart Positionning System (SPS) CIVIL Precise Positionning System (PPS) US ARMY

Global Info r

3.39 MHZ and 6.99 MHZ

Global Posit i

Father of the Internet

CNRI was created as a not-for-profit organization to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure.

NSF

T (NSF NE
?

24
System ing G on
VSTAR -NA PS

# BLOCK II/IIA/IIR

Champ Mitchell President, Network Solutions served as vice chairman of the finance committee for the election campaign of President George H. W. Bush. (source : www.verisign.com)

Senior Advisor

Network Solutions Inc (NSI)/SAIC domain names are always registered in the databanks of the SAIC-NSI. And even if, officially, the "client" data associated with the domain names remains confidential, it is the SAIC-NSI information Champ system that retains responsibility and technical control Mitchell over the data banks of names and name servers. Network Solutions Inc (NSI) Network Solutions is the world's leading registrar, with more than 6.5 million net registrations. Network Solutions registers the majority of Web addresses worldwide through various channels including nearly 220 companies in over 30 countries in its Premier program and over 30,000 companies in its Affiliate ICANN certified domain registrar P r o g r a m . (1-August-2003, www.internic.net/registrars/registrar-2.html) Network

Vice-President

Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)

American National Science Foundation (NSF)

Alaska, USA Climatic weapons high frequency active auroral research program (HAARP)

positioning network

gov. owned sat. US navy

Defense I

Solution Inc. (NSI)

100

Verisign

nal Biologica tio

VeriSign maintains more than 10 million Internet addresses. VeriSign used to have a governmentapproved monopoly over wholesale and retail sales of .com names. () In 1998, the Commerce Department, which maintains control of the Internet's authoritative "root server," commissioned the nonprofit ICANN to inject competition into the addressing sector. The root server is the master list of Net addresses ending in "top-level" domains including .com, .net and .org. (source : washingtonpost.com, Wednesday, September 4, 2002)

Alaska, USA HIPAS High Power Auroral Stimulation Observatory joint project picosatellites

The Aerospace Corporation (us gov)

National Institute for Research in Computing and Automation INRIA (FR)

IP V6
funded by
by ed fu nd ed

Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT (USA)

nd

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers IEEE

Member

Member

net Engin ter

ernet Eng Int

be

ICANN certified domain registrar whois.htm

Int e

ICANN Accredited Registrar

RNET AR TE

orp. for as et c rn

.com" ".org" ".net" www.internic.net

ned names sig

t Society (IS rne

Worldwid e for

Systems Fusion & Influence Mapping

World W id
E. Briggs III Clarence E. Briggs III

ernet Assign Int

military service during Operation Juste Cause in Panama and Desert Storm in Irak CEO, Chariman and president of AIT d Numbers A u e (http://aitcom.net)
IANA Root zone: administrators of the 240 cc TLD (codes ISO ".de" ".fr" ...)

INRIA public establishment of a scientific and technological nature (EPST)

eb Consor ti eW

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

IEEE 380 000 members in 150 countries. Produces 30% of the world's published literature in electrical engineering, computers and control technology (www.ieee.org)

National Security Advisor to the President of the United States

ex-Director of the CIA

ex-Director of the CIA

(usa gov)

fu

CIA

was floated as a possible CIA Director in 1995

ex-Director of the CIA

www.iana.org/cctld/cctldAdvanced Internet Technology/nameIT 190 000 domain Names in 137 countries (www.ait.com)

soutient financirement

names
int e

members from IAB and IESG designed by Nomcom and approved by ISOC (Board of Trustees).

Schenghen

Father of the Internet The Address Supporting Organization (ASO) created by Icann in August 1999, ASO manages IP adresses Board members Dr Sang Hyon Kyong (serves as Governor of International Council for Computer Communication (ICCC), Member of the Board of Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC), and Chairman of the Board of Asia-Pacific Advanced Networking Korea (APAN-Kr) Consortium. He was Minister of Information and Communication and Vice Minister of Communications in the government of South Korea (probably connected to CIA). He was on the technical staff at Bell Laboratories and Argonne National Laboratory in the US) Lyman Chapin (founding trustee of the Internet Society; served as chairman of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the ANSI and ISO standards groups responsible for Network and Transport layer standards, and was a principal architect of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model and protocols. Serves to the NATO Science Committee's networking panel) Mouhamet Diop , Africa (Mouhamet Diop is AfriNIC observer at the ASO address council, Executive committee on the Steering committee of AfriNIC. Graduated in 1993, from Business School ESSEC, France. built the most famous national IP-based network in the (neo-liberal country) Senegal) eri
LACNIC (L a

Intern e

esearch T tR

Director Director

ormation S Inf

Council on the Future of Technology & Public Policy

ad IP dr es s

Address Sup

g Organ rtin iz po

IP

Protocol Su p

rting po

Orga ni

protocol

rting Or ppo ga Su

RIPE NCC 2700 members

ens RIPE rop N Eu

or Standa ef

Rseaux IP

Regional Internet Registry

IP

C (fric riNI a) Af
Regional Internet Registry

CEN/ISSS - Information Society Standardization System

Am can & tin

Regional Internet Registry

IP

IP

WS/DIR

LACNIC - LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN INTERNET ADDRESSES REGISTRY BOARD OF DIRECTORS Oscar Messano, CHAIRMAN Germn Valdez, SECRETARY Hartmut Glaser TREASURER Fabio Marinho Raimundo Beca Ral Echeberra, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR - CEO (source: http://lacnic.net)

AP

sia/ C (A pacif NI
Regional Internet Registry

IP

APNIC 700 member organizations. across 39 economies of the region. Within the APNIC membership, there are also five National Internet Registries (NIRs), in Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and Indonesia. The NIRs perform analogous functions to APNIC at a national level and together represent the interests of more than 500 additional organizations. ARIN - USA ARIN is located in Chantilly, Virginia, United States. Its service region incorporates 70 countries, covering North America, South America, the Caribbean, and African countries located south of the equator. ARIN currently consists of more than 1500 members. Within the ARIN region, there are two national delegated registries, located in Mexico and Brazil.
Unicode Consortium (2003)

WIPO Internet Domain Name Process

Directories and Specifications for a secure IC naming issues card reader for bankcard payments

WS/FINREAD

O-IEC/JTC1 CIS

# CEN/TC224

I. C. Cards

Common data and formatting rules for identifying a smart card, the smart card holder and Contracting States Liechtenstein Austria Luxembourg Belgium Swtzerland Monaco Netherlands Cyprus Germany Portugal Denmark Sweden UK Spain Bulgaria Finland Czech Republic France Slovak Republic Turkey Estonia Greece Ireland Italy

WS/DISTINC ID

Centre Electronique de l'Armement CELAR

America Online
America Online

USA

35 million members

AOL Time Warner

Board

WIPO - Word Intellectual Property Organization

ISO - International Organization for Standardization

WTO World Trade Organization

International Telecommunications Union (ITU)

TC278

WS/MEET

Road transport Tracking and tracing the current position or status of goods under telematics transport

The Euro

NetAid Foundation

ONU

at an P ent O pe

IN (USA) AR
IP

Regional Internet Registry

By agreement with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) the EPO acts as International Searching and International Preliminary Examining Authority. (source: http://www.european-patentoffice.org/) For the last few years the European Patent Office has, contrary to the letter and spirit of the existing law, granted about 30,000 patents on computerimplementable rules of organisation and calculation (programs for computers). Now the European patent movement wants to change the law so as to legalise this practise and remove all barriers to patentability. Programmers are to lose their freedom of expression and the control over their copyrighted work. Citizens are to be barred from independently developing their preferred forms of communication. (source: http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html)

European Patent Office (EPO)

FICPI (International Federation of Intellectual Property Attorneys)

# The Regional Industrial Property Programme (RIPP)

# Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT)

# The EC-ASEAN Patents & Trademarks Programme (ECAP)

Un

de Consortiu ico

Full (Corporate) Members Adobe Systems, Inc. Apple Computer, Inc. Basis Technology Corporation Government of India - Ministry of Information Technology Government of Pakistan National Language Authority Hewlett-Packard IBM Corporation Justsystem Corporation Microsoft Corporation Oracle Corporation PeopleSoft, Inc. RLG SAP AG Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sybase, Inc.

AIPPI Numerous studies, particularly the reports of the national groups in the AIPPI (International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property) have pointed out that there is no legal obstacle to the application of the patent system to computer software. Thus, after consulting with all its national groups, the AIPPI has taken a position in favor of eliminating the exclusion of computer software from patentability. (source: http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/ en/indprop/comp/michelet.pdf.)

# EPO Common Software

AIPPI (International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property

The European Patent Office finances itself by fees from the patents which it grants. It is free to use a certain percentage of these fees. Since the 1980s the EPO has illegally lowered the standards of technicity, novelty, non-obviousness and industrial applicability and abolished examination quality safeguards so as to increase the number of granted patents by more than 10% and the license tax on the industry by 26% per year. As an international organisation, the EPO is not subject to criminal law or taxation. The local police's power ends at the gates of the EPO. High EPO officials have inflicted corporal injury on their employees and then escaped legal consequences by their right to immunity. The work climate within the EPO is very bad, leading to several suicides per year. The quality of examination reached a relative high in the 80s but has after that been deteriorating, partly because the EPO had to hire too many people too quickly for too low wages. Examiners who reject patents load more work on themselves without getting more pay. Examiners are treated by the EPO management as a kind of obstacle to the corporate goal of earning even more patent revenues. The high-level employees of the EPO owe their jobs to political pressures from within national patent administrations and do not understand the daily work of the office. The EPO has its own jurisdictional arm, consisting of people whose career is controlled by the EPO's managment and its internal climate. The national organs that are supposed to supervise the EPO are all part of the same closed circle, thus guaranteeing the EPO managment enjoys feudal powers in a sphere outside of any constitutional legality, and that whatever they decide is propagated to the national administrations and lawcourts.

7.

Technocultural Neurostimulus

Committe an

senior vice president MCI Worldcom Inc. Dr. Vinton Cerf is known as a "Father of the Internet" for his work with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he played a key role in the development of the Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. (www.ed.gov) The term Internet is first coined (1974) by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in a paper on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). On January 1st, (1983) every machine connected to ARPANET switched to TCP/IP. Transatlantic Business Dialogue Established in 1995, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue is undoubtedly the most far-reaching international alliance between corporations and states. Unlike other lobby groups, it acts as a mandate for the U.S. government and the European Commission to work meticulously to identify barriers to transatlantic trade - in effect, any regulation or policy proposal that does not fit the corporate agenda on either side of the Atlantic. The 150 large corporations in the Business Dialogue have managed to delay, weaken or even dismantle a wide range of environment and consumer-protection regulations, including a planned EU ban on marketing of animal-tested cosmetic products.The TABD played a key role in the launch of the new Transatlantic WTO round of trade negotiations in Qatar last Business November. Post-September 11, EU and US arms Dialogue producers have taken a leading role in the TABD and a new working group to find ways to capitalize on... the new awareness of the importance of the security sector http:// www.tabd.org

Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf

police network

United Kingdom
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

Martin Read

Bank of Nova Scotia

eurojust enfopol
# Eurodac

OTAN
icial Netw Jud
EJN) k( or

School of Information Warfare

On 11 December 2000, the Enfopol A massive Member States adopted Council e a v e s d r o p p i n g regulation no. 2725/2000 system capable of concerning the creation of intercepting all "Eurodac." The objective is to mobile phone calls, establish a system for the I n t e r n e t comparison of fingerprints of c o m m u n i c a t i o n s , asylum applicants and illegal fax messages and immigrants and facilitate the pagers throughout application of the Dublin convention which makes it Europe. possible to determine the State responsible for examining the asylum application. ( s o u r c e : http://europa.eu.int/scadplus/le g/en/lvb/l33081.htm)

Tom Turner

police network

European Commission

Europe an

Royal Bank of Scotland Group

GALILEO
?

eric Names en

OPOL (TECS UR

Trans-European Networks Directorate

(TENs)

positioning network Entreprise Directorate

police network
ization-CE rd

European Telecommunic. Standards Institute (ETSI)

Committee Europeene des Postes et Telecom. (CEPT)

European Space Agency

ERCIM -European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics

French Government

Ecole de Guerre Economique

Yahoo

As of July 2003, Yahoo owns Overture, Fast/Alltheweb, AltaVista, and Inktomi

ex-employee

IFT -SW

Soci ety

) IAB

IN

certified domain registrar

Conseiller

IP domain
) NN

) SG

Advanced Internet Technology

In

In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN, where the Web originated, with support from DARPA and the European Commission.

funded by

Internet Engineering Task Force

ring Steeri ee

ering Tas ine

ITECTUR CH

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was created to serve as a forum for technical coordination by contractors for DARPA working on ARPANET, US Defense Data Network (DDN), and the Internet core gateway system. The Internet Engineering Task Force is an informal, selforganized group whose members contribute to the engineering and technological development of the Internet. It is the major organization involved in the development of specifications for the new Internet standards. The IETF is atypical to the extent that it was built up through a series of events, without any statutory framework or administrative board, without any members or admissions procedures. (source: Steve Coya, Executive Director, IETF, www.isocgfsi.org/ietf/tao.html)

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Henry A. Kissinger

Sam Nunn

R. James Woolsey

National Security/21st James Century R. Homeland Schlesinger Member Security Advisory Council

James R. Schlesinger Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on

Electronic voting machines-USA

Member

Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)

US Government

A wide variety of automatic counting systems are used in the USA. In the 2000 presidential election only 1.6% of voters used conventional paper ballot slips. 9.1% used direct electronic registration, 18.6% used lever type voting machines, 27.3% used optical readers and 34.3% used punched cards. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has the task of maintaining the standards to be met by these balloting systems. Voting on the Internet is also being looked into carefully. Thus, for example, Internet voting trials were staged in four counties of California in the weeks leading up to the election in November 2000. Internet voting was also tried out in Alaska (in January 2000, organised by the company VoteHere) and in Arizona (March 2000, organised by Election.com).

em

Member

em

be

Na

I) BI

CORE In November 2000, ICANN approved seven new TLDs. Six of them, .info, .museum, .biz , .aero, .coop and .name have been launched, the other one is expected to follow quickly. ICANN certified domain registrar CORE members offer registration services under most of these newly created TLDs. CORE is also a .us and .cn accredited registrar and many CORE members offer to their customers .us and CORE .cn registrations. (www.corenic.org) CORE is a Registrar accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and currently operates as a registrar for .com, .net, .org, .biz , .info , .name domain names.(www.corenic.org) Clarence

N (Swiss ER

Information Assurance and Survivability technologies

ION SYS PT

Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) In the years after World War II, the notion and the profession of electrical engineering underwent a transformation and expansion. New concepts, thoughts, ideas, inventions, and fields of study were born within the profession or were brought in from other fields of study and absorbed as part of a new self. Who would have thought that a theory of information would emerge from an engineering laboratory; that an electrical hypothesis, that is, the hypothesis that all our perceptual, intellectual, and emotional experiences are states of electrical activity in the central nervous system, would dominate the neural sciences; that the abstract notion of computation would find its manifestation in electrical devices that, by integrating new insights from semiconductor physics, evolved into machines of such complexity that one could be tempted to make comparison of these machines with their creators? One spoke and even speaks today of electronic brains; one spoke of mentality in machines and still asks: "Can machines think?"(www.ece.uiuc.edu)

National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program-Modernization COOP-M http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop The COOP network comprises nearly 12,000 sites across the United States and Puerto Rico. The network was established in 1890 to collect temperature, precipitation and other meteorological data for climate applications related to agriculture and water resources. COOP-M will improve the network's spatial density, distribution, communications and processing capabilities. "Ultimately the network will have new automated temperature, precipitation, soil-moisture and river-level sensors; near real-time data collection, quality control and dissemination; automated flashflood reporting; and interactive data terminals to collect both automated and manual observations," said Don Boucher, senior staff meteorologist and the Aerospace system architect for the project. (source : www.aero.org)
A) US

TEM

# INTELSAT

listening

COMINT

cooperation treaty

UK-USA/ECHELON UKUSA is the secret signals intelligence agreement, set up in 1947, that divided the world into five regions to be watched over by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and America. Australia DSD Defense Signals Directorate. Canada CSE Communications Security Establishment. New Zealand GCSB New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau. UK GCHQ - Government Communications Head Quarters. USA NSA - National Security Agency

um syste idi
?

wireless

Falcon Air Force Base, Colorado, USA

DGSE (fr) BND (Germ)

es (GCR) iqu ctr

common

(sept. 2003)

Sugar Grove (usa)

ECHELO
N

National Reconnaissance Office (usa gov)

Humint SIGINT OSINT

Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) is a collective term bringing together disparate intelligence elements that do not fit within the definitions of Signals Intelligence, Imagery Intelligence, or Human Intelligence. These disparate elements consist of intelligence activities and technologies such as acoustic intelligence; radar intelligence; nuclear radiation detection; infrared intelligence; electro-optical intelligence; radio frequency, unintentional radiation; materials, effluent, and debris sampling; and electro optical and spectroradiometric sources.

MASINT

(USA, New Zel., Aus, UK, Germ., Taiwan)

UKUSA

Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) (usa gov)

(usa gov)

NSA

Department of Energy-DOE (usa gov)

SAIC: 41,000 employees, an annual turnover of 5.5 billion dollars, 620 million dollars profit in 1999. The company's major client is the American government, 79% of total turnover comes from the Pentagon. Among the SAIC's achievements: digital cartography of the USA and digital early warning system for environmental data; security system for Defense Department computers; installation of computerized decision-making and transmission systems for oil conglomerates such as BP Amoco; computerization of the American reserve army mobilization system; design and installation of transmission systems between command posts and combatants (Defense Information Systems Network); design of C4I command centers for naval and space warfare; modernization of the space-based mapping networks of the National Imagery and Mapping Veridian Agency; surveillance of the execution of nuclear non-proliferation treaties; design of training and simulation equipment for F-15 and F-16 DARPA/ pilots; design of satellite sensors and observation equipment for NASA; VERIDIAN creation of the largest criminal information database for the FBI (with Human files on 38 million suspects); etc. Augmentation of TECSI has strategic Reasoning In the period of 1992-1995 alone, the SAIC hired 198 former colonels relationships through and generals of the US armed forces. Among its administrators, the SAIC with SAIC Patterning has had the former Defense secretaries William Perry and Melvin Laird, (HARP) Global Integrity Corp. and the former CIA directors John Deutch and Robert Gates. ?

via certplus

finance
Science Application Internat. Corp. (SAIC)
close ?

France

Gemplus

project GENOA II

26

Global Information Infrastructure Commission (GIIC)

the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-Terrorism

High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program

The GIIC is a confederation of chief executive officers of firms that develop and deploy, operate, rely upon, and finance information and communications technology infrastructure facilities.
ation Inf ra orm nf

tion Infrastr ma

SAIC/NBII

Department of Defense-DOD (usa gov)

pentagone (usa gov)

internet origin

Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) (usa gov)

National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) Defense Information Infrastructure

World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA)

evaluate the most effective alternatives for integrating geographic information systems data/information on the Web.

TIA, Total Information Awareness Program massive domestic surveillance system

NASA (usa gov) USIA (usa gov)

2,100,000 computers connected to almost 10,000 local area networks, themselves linked to approximately one hundred national or international networks. NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and the NBII Program cooperate in the development of standardized m e t a d a t a descriptions of biological data sets
ma nfor tion In lI

United States Information Agency (USIA) The USIA was established to achieve US foreign policy by influencing public attitude at home and abroad using psycho-political policy strategies. The USIA Office of Research and reference service prepares data on psychological factors and propaganda problems considered by the Policy Planning Board in formulating psycho-political information policies for the National Security Council.

The NBII is a broad, collaborative program to provide increased access to data and information on the nation's biological resources. The NBII links diverse, high-quality biological databases, information products, and analytical tools maintained by NBII partners and other contributors in government agencies, academic institutions, non-government organizations, and private industry. NBII partners and collaborators also work on new standards, tools, and technologies that make it easier to find, integrate, and apply biological resources information. (www.nbii.gov)
George Herbert Walker Bush
ex-director ex-director

World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA) The World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA) is a consortium of 50 information technology (IT) industry associations from economies around the world. WITSA members represent over 90 percent of the world IT market.

Network Associates, Inc. (network security)

4

1,8

world leader in network security and availability, help secure the networks of major Fortune 500 companies. Own McAfee Security, the leader in anti-virus software

UK

ex-director ex-director

Barclays Plc
3,7 10
Fidelity Abigail Johnson owns 25% Edward C. Johnson 3 owns 12% USA

Honorable Diana Lady Dougan

Robert Gates

Board

SWIFT/UNISYS

erbank Finan Int

7,601 2002 clearing network

In 1989, more than 300 million international financial transactions were made via SWIFT, which had three switching centers equipped with Unisys computers in Belgium, the Netherlands and Virginia.
Board

FMR Corp. (Fidelity Investments)

USA

State Street Corp.

USA

Deputy Chairman Director

3
Yawar Shah

Director

JP Morgan Chase

Chairman

Royal Bank of Canada

Andr Roelants
Clearstream International

3,97

Citigroup

ABN AMRO Bank

Jaap Kamp

exExecutive Vice President Sate street France

HSBC Bank plc

Linda Smith

JacquesPhilippe Marson

BNP Paribas
President and CEO, BNP Paribas Securities Services Board of Euroclear Germany
1,5

Deutsche Bank
A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard Colin Powell

A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard

The current Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the former Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown and former Vice Chairman of Bankers Trust (owned by Deutsche bank)

2,8

David Filo
9

Jerry Yang

Yahoo!

Matt Cuts

Director

google
Larry (Lawrence) Page Michael Moritz

Director via Sequoia Capital

RG

WEN) (G

# ESSAIM

space probe

John Deutch

Inte

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ile

Com m

st

governing 6. by networks

CALEA redefines the A cell-phone's Sim card telecommunications industrys can be located thanks obligation to assist law enforcement to one of the 30,000 in executing lawfully authorized base stations of the electronic surveillance. In 1991, the GSM network or to one FBI held a series of secret meetings of the satellites used by with EU member states to persuade the GPS (Global them to incorporate CALEA into Positioning System) European law. The meetings included representatives from Globa Canada, Hong Kong, Australia and lS ) the EU. At these meetings, an international technical standard for surveillance, based on the FBIs CALEA demands, was adopted as the "International Requirements for Interception." PATHWAY NSA communications server furnishing a fast, efficient, phone com high-security network for the ele m tt ECHELON system
ys
o tem f r Mob

Deep Sp

LF/UHF

survivable network

GWEN Ground Wave Emergency Network The Ground Wave Emergency Network (GWEN) provides survivable connectivity to designated bomber and tanker bases. The system is in sustainment. GWEN is designed as an ultra-high powered VLF [150-175 kHz] network intended to survive massive broadband destructive interference produced by nuclear EMP. GWEN is Scheduled to be Replaced by SCAMP in FY99

anetary In rpl

Grou n

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net Resea ter

Nordnet

RSNET MA
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Netwo r ace
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#
DSN

Tracking & Data Relay Satellite Syst. TDRSS

Japan

Verio

Group I P rch

Global One

traffic exchange via BBN (Genuity)

Telstra
(cable)
traffic exchange

NTT

VERIO largest global website hosting company

k-

partnership

NTT State of Japan owns 66%

tor ica

ebone

SITA (www.sita.com)

PAC (Fra NS
?

ICANN certified domain registrar

STERIA
4,77
France France

Orange

16,9

BULL
Noos

France Telecom
?

The network is made up of more than 1,700 circuits representing a consolidated transmission capacity of around 1,400 Megabits per second and includes over 13,000 managed routers. Total traffic over the network grew to 272 trillion characters, up by 55% in the year.The network now has over 176,692 user connections. Nortel Passport Switches increased to reach over 3700 nodes across the network in 2001. SITA has over 10,000 IP routers online and over 400 customers of SITA IP services. The network consistently achieves core availability of 99.99%. SITA maintains 150,000 units of customer premises equipment in the air transport industry, through 170 service delivery facilities worldwide. World's first airport shared check-in system, CUTE. World's first partnership to support the implementation of electronic visa authorization, with ETAS. Visas for Australia are processed using ETAS. Bill Owens served as the deputy chief of Naval Operations for Resources, Warfare Requirements and Assessments, commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, senior military assistant to Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney (source : www.teledesic.com)
30
Bill Owens

LYCOS
Swiss Spain

e) nc

SITA

Telefonica
TELEFONICA In 2001, Telefonica offered telecommunications services to nearly 50 countries and had its own installations in 20 countries. It had constituted one of the largest international support networks for its activities, in particular a transatlantic submarine cable going all around Latin America. Telefonica claims that its network carries 80% of the world's Spanishlanguage Internet content. (source: OCED, 2001) GenBank GenBank,

es radio-l rl e nt

ions (CA icat LE un

700 antennas
AIRCOM
?

VHF

INTERCE

TECSI

wanadoo

# GenBank repository, was developed at Los Alamos

the

world's

DNA

sequence

# Immarsat

president, chief operating officer and vice chairman SAIC

17

coopration for Windows NT 4.0

Genome P r an

USA

# Teledesic

Microsoft

?
"After the fiasco of the automatic vote- 0,9 count during the American presidential election, Unisys Corp aims to associate itself with Dell Computer Corp and Microsoft Corp to create a new voting system." Unisys will propose the overall system, Dell will supply the computers, and Microsoft, the programs. (12/01/2001)
100
USA

USA

USA

Dell Computer Corporation

Silicon Graphics

Celera Genomics

Cray Research, Inc.

Unisys Corp.

Unisys Corp. Unisys notes that it has worked on voting technology for decades, and developed electronic voting systems in Brazil, Italy and Costa Rica. (source: AFP)

National Laboratory (LANL) and later transferred to the National Library of Medicine. Chromosome-sorting capabilities developed at LANL and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory enabled the development of DNA clone libraries representing the individual chromosomes. These libraries were a crucial resource in genome sequencing. Human Genome Project Project goals were to - identify all the approximately 30,000 genes in human DNA, - determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, - store this information in databases, - improve tools for data analysis, - transfer related technologies to the private sector, and - address the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project. The Human Genome Project ends in 2003 with the completion of the human genetic sequence. IBM, Compaq, DuPont, and major pharmaceutical companies are among those interested in the potential for targeting and applying genome data. (source : www.ornl.gov) Motorola Nicolas Naclerio, head of Motorola's Biochip Systems Unit, former executive at Darpa Motorola's biochip technology will use the results of the Human Genome Project.

a)

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re. uctu str

USA

3 1,7

USA

USA
4

MOTOROLA

Xerox corp

IBM
PDG
Louis V Gerstner Jr

chairman and chief executive officer

Olof Lundberg

?
USA Bernard Chairman L. Schwartz and CEO
Tony Navarra

1,7

3,3

4,9

2,1

3,9

3,2

10,6

9,8

Liberty Media Corp

1,7 2,2

Loral Space & Communications

# Globalstar

President

structure (N fra

80

21

# Skybridge
investor

Globalstar provider of global mobile satellite telecommunications services, offering both voice and data services from virtually anywhere in over 100 countries around the world

by

USA

Sprint Corp.

France

um

(W3C)

Alcatel

rity (IANA) tho

Brandes Investment Partners, L.P

9,9

1,53

3,3

Carlyle Group 11th largest defense contractor Board

Carlyle group

Maurice Hank Greenburg

AIG (American International

Group)

administrateur

Matrics

Matrics - RFID For more than two years, a team of former National Security Agency scientists has eschewed the Internet boom in favor of a simpler task: building a better radio frequency identification chip known as RFID. Now the company, Matrics, is ready to launch, and it's doing so with a $14 million investment from venture capital firms Novak Biddle Venture Partners, The Carlyle Group, Polaris Venture Partners and Venturehouse Group. Matrics (http://www.matricsrfid.com) closed the deal in December, but has chosen to lay low until its product is launched. What the company promises is a cheaper, smarter version of the RFID tag, which could be attached to virtually any product that needs tracking, from DVDs in a video store to engine turbines in an airport hangar. Ideally, a cheap RFID could replace the ubiquitous UPC bar codes on consumer goods because it can track more information.
4 2,2

5,8

Americas II Cable System

Group (IE ng

orce (IETF kF

Tyco Submarine Systems International Ltd., and Alcatel Submarine Network Systems build Americas II Cable System (8,000 kilometers) (source : www3.sprint.com)

l Transaction cia

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AT&T

investor

k Force as

-S tem IS ys

John Deutch

21,2

?
0,7 50

This retired CIA Director from the Clinton Administration currently sits on the board at Citigroup, the nations second largest bank, which has been repeatedly and overtly involved in the documented laundering of drug money. Nora Slatkin, retired CIA Executive Director also sits on Citibanks board.
2,55 4,98

Eutelsat SA

# Hispasat

100

7,15

AT&T world's premier communications and information services company. The company has annual revenues of more than $52 billion and 130,000 employees. (1998) 90 million customers

AS on ( O) ati

Arianespace

Concert
?
50

(PSO) tion za

# Astrium
France UK

# Eutelsat

EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co)

France

BT (british Telecom)

ation(GNSO niz

Atos Origin

via Daimler Chrysler

1,5

Europe

1,5
?

(Europe) CC

Internet Security Systems

USA USA

Nortel Networks

Global Crossing

Internet Security Systems ISS - Internet Security Systems hosts the X-Force, a kind of elite corps for world information security. This company, specializing in computer protection, is credited with more than 60,000 clients worldwide, including 21 of the 25 largest American banks, but also 10 of the largest global telecommunications operators and 35 governments, without forgetting the White House and the FBI. Since July 1998, the US Army employs the ISS to protect all its world bases. In 2001, the ISS recorded 830 million alerts.(Le Figaro Entreprises, June 3 2002)

ribbean) Ca

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m

CompuServe
Compuserve

Cable & Wireless

Bell Atlantic Corp.

nisation rga

2 million members
5,4

3,53 2

Verizon

100

Posthuman Factors

6. The cumulative individual effects of Networked Agency & Mediation lead to an emerging trend of meta-networks: Systems Fusion & Influence Mapping. This trend deals with new social mechanisms of change that are enabled through awareness of interconnected and multidimensional governing forces. Technology aided network infrastructures are now central to all fields of power (political, economic, academic, etc.), resulting in a complex marketplace of technocultural viability and resonance a trans-species thought ecology in which influence may be purchased through bleeding edge networks of branding and spin that fuel word-of-mouth systems of urban legend and myth.422 Because coordination and cooperation between nodes of the system tends to valorize the most efficient and transparent transactions,423 Systems Fusion & Influence Mapping has become a central focus of innovation (change consulting) by which our collective mind may engage in enhanced creative thought. More than the other trends discussed so far, Systems Fusion & Influence Mapping is a product of technological convergence. Society is undergoing rapid shifts in governance, integration, and conflict between powers in a consensual delusion of inhibited change, the winner take-all mechanisms by which technoculture transforms into mind. Combined with the mediated agency of individuals in the system, the programmed contexting of cognition improves. Cultural resonance is thus a measure of the success of a mapping, where the plasticity of the system is its shift between maps. 7. A result of the new power structures described above is that low definition readings of system interactions are enabled. This trend area, Technocultural Neurostimulus, represents the ambiguous noise introduced to the influence system. Its basis is the utility of confusion and surprise. The success of the strange can be attributed to this trend, evidence of which is abundant in media, advertising, pornography and art. By presenting reality as a visceral, raw, and edgy (normalizing, anti-virtual and identity enabling) collaborative performance, outlets are provided by which to surprise. Content matters less than form; in aesthetic terms, shock is beautiful. Accelerating change brings with it accelerating moral and ethical aggravation. The curious result is that honesty becomes provocative at all levels of interaction, noise in the systems mediation of fantasy. The National Science Foundations 2002 report on converging technologies for improving human performance, for example, concluded that
Convergence of the sciences can initiate a new renaissance, embodying a holistic view of technology based on transformative tools, the mathematics of complex systems, and unified cause-and-effect understanding of the physical world from the nanoscale to the planetary scale [We] should increase

high-quality coverage of science and technology, on the basis of the new convergent paradigm, to inform citizens so they can participate wisely in debates about ethical issues such as unexpected effects on inequality, policies concerning diversity, and the implications of transforming human capabilities.424
422. Heath and Heath, 2007 423. Surowiecki, 2004 424. Roco and Bainbridge, 2002

159

Posthuman Factors

The most effective communication releases taboo: a disgusting discharge of nonsense repugnance to the system that is pragmatic, unifying, successful and good. 8. Ultimately the technocultural condition outlined so far is a fusion of the system with individual minds, including the harmony and discord that result from the mixture. The final factor on the axis of stimulation is a trend towards Cyber Resistance & Reactivity, whereby interference initiates identity itself (I, I, I, I). Its outcome is a radically individualistic counterculture of evocative action. Shock art, hacktivism, battlebots, graffiti research, street branding and technoterrorism are all manifestations of this trend. The new generation of identity politics is a multifaceted, fluid, synthetic and evolving disruption of conventional being. Propelled by a desire to integrate differences in the face of marginalization and oppression, assaults on the machine are instigated from within. As differences dissolve the resistance intensifies: noise in the system does not dissipate, but rather reverberates in a metaphase echo chamber of variable identity. In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.425 This trend reflects the mediated nature of interaction with technoculture and contributes to the formation of a system-wide nonscience conscience. If the primary manifestation of consciousness is awareness of selfas so eloquently examined in Thomas Nagels classic essay What is it Like to Be a Bat?426Cyber Resistance & Reactivity entails attributing identity to ones body through systems which seek to destroy their own ability to perceive. 9. The final, overarching trend of the technocultural condition is Posthuman Artificial Life itself. It is here that the qualities of imagination, awareness, identity, expression, energy, knowledge, influence and mediation provided by each of the other trends in the system unify to illuminate the future of humanity. Biotechnological convergence has already resulted in a widespread conception of the body-as-machine, and the long term impacts of these technologies on society raise unprecedented ethical risks. The massive NBIC implosion of the next two or three decades will spawn unpredictable new forms of self-replicating artificial life, destabilizing the autonomy of human society. Increasingly our political, economic, and social structures will be challenged, with difficult decisions playing out in the daily reality of individuals facing an overwhelming lack of control in response to mounting social pressures. We will continue to consume massively while struggling to find sustainable sources of matter and energy, and face unprecedented psychological challenges in a future of information gridlock, implosion and fusion. Ultimately the human need will be one of transcendence from the two inevitable poles of our own evolution: engagement with and experience of altered forms of ourselvesbe they zombie, cyborg or robotic in nature. In summary The Technocultural Condition provides a theoretical framework by which to understand what stimulates culture that can be used as a basis for posthuman centered design. This process, as described in the previous section, should combine nonsensical approaches to empirical search with the curatorial stragmatics of technocultural memory. Ultimately the effects of this process, unlike those of design-as-research, should be to increase the temperature of knowledge in the technocul425. Holmes, 2008 426. Nagel, 1974

160

8.

Cyber Resistance & Reactivity

9.

Posthuman Artificial Life

Posthuman Factors

tural system to enable the stragmatic, relinquished, expansion of knowledge. There is much to the universe that we do not understand; we transcend our bodies through awareness of becoming them; we are thrilled with ourselves; our imaginations become us; our virtual mask is always on; we inhabit a social marketplace of ideas; shock is beautiful; we are liberated by technology to fight against it; and we will soon be superintelligent robotic cyborg zombies (or extinct). This summary provides context and inspiration for the development of high-impact perceptual robotic artistic experiences. 5.4. The Stragmatic Design of Posthuman Perception By identifying brainstorm topics within each trend area of The Technocultural Condition, concepts to be generated that address clearly defined areas of stragmatic opportunity. For example, the question How could perceptual robotic technology be used to speak with aliens? (an aspect of [In]finite Reality) has been asked during a brainstorm session associated with The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience. An overview of brainstorm questions drawn from The Technocultural Condition is shown in Figure 30. Each such question has resulted in around 100 raw ideas, which have then been pared down to 5-10 refined favorite concepts. Contributions from each of these brainstorm topics have resulted in the generation of over 250 refined concepts so far, the most promising of which have then been pursued in depth through iterative cycles of sketching, storyboarding, prototyping and evaluation.
How could perceptual robotic technologies be used to... (1) Explore the outer limits Speak with aliens Believe in mysteries Conjure new forms of life Create surreal, transcendent, breathtaking experiences Design new kinds of emotions Revel at the complex beauty of nature Evoke compassion for the artificial and natural world Fall in love (2) Engineer the perception of change Innovate Mediate creative change Embody brand experience Engage in the commerce of beauty Make money Design human intuition (universal heuristics) Perform cheap, illicit, technoart interventions Shock the system (3) Investigate consciousness Confuse and elude the senses Unchain expectations from perceptions Deprive the senses Experience mindfulness Heighten embodied awareness Map awareness Distill the essence of being (4) Make meaning Map systems of influence Open the source Raise and challenge ethical questions, beliefs and concerns Investigate symbologies, archetypes, languages and signs Be useless Incubate fantasy Touch the heart (5) Pioneer multimodal interactivity paradigms Allow user-identity extension (and play) Orchestrate drama Force evocative multimodal juxtapositions Probe experiential narrative fictions Exploit visceral reality Seamlessly interact with the virtual Question conventional cyber-etiquette Provoke, excite, stimulate and arouse (6) Save the world Do good Fight for a cause Stop global warming Spread wellness Empower others Enable emotional choices Express individual and cultural identity Design for the kids of tomorrow (7) Be bad* Kill eachother Expand our ego Eliminate the soul Extinguish humanity Do evil

*The intent of this category is to explore and understand the ethical issues involved with the design and development of new multimodal experiences, not necessarily to develop them (unless they so extremely dangerous that not developing them first would be dangerous).

Figure 30. Brainstorm topics derived from The Technocultural Condition

163

Posthuman Factors

The process of concept ideation has been conducted both independently through empirical search and as an ongoing series of group brainstorm sessions with members of the PERCRO Perceptual Robotics Laboratory at the SantAnna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. The rules of brainstorming we have employed are: gleefully suspend judgment (dont apply conventional wisdom), leapfrog off the ideas of others (dont make logical connections), and go for quantity (dont focus).427 All of the ideas generated during group brainstorm sessions have been treated as public within the laboratory. The lack of individual ownership of ideas is an important aspect of innovation and that ultimately leads to better results over all. At the end of each session, favorite concepts have been voted on by the group (each participant has been asked to mark their 5 favorite ideas, for example428), and elaborated afterwards by the core project team. Many of the generated concepts are extensions or modifications to existing perceptual robotic systems and prototypes. In this regard group sessions have proven to be excellent venues for communication and crosspollination between researchers and projects. One of the principal aims of The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience has been to develop integrated systems using existing resources and to guide the coordination of research efforts at large towards artistically stragmatic solutions, and in this regard the brainstorming process has been quite successful. Due to the large quantity of concepts developed as a result of this process, as new ideas are documented they have been entered into a database containing their name, a brief description, and sketches of the concept. This database is available online such that members of the laboratory can access the ideas as they evolve and contribute additional thoughts.429 This also allows ideas to be ranked and evaluated by virtual communities as the process moves forward. There are many criteria by which concepts may be evaluated. Ultimately the decision of which concepts to pursue is a matter of feasibility, presumed impact, personal interest, and willingness to invest. By allowing archived concepts to be ranked, tagged, and filtered by multiple users, individuals can become aware of their interests and group preferences may be observed. New criteria by which to rank ideas can also be added by users of the system. Figure 31 shows a two-dimensional output of the idea management system, where concepts have been ranked by potential aesthetic impact vs. implementation difficulty. This map makes the strategic relationship between generated concepts clear. The five large circles on the diagram identify groups of concepts as being out of scope, heavy investments, worth a try, easy impact, or cheap thrills. Most of the concepts classified easy impact may be quickly prototyped in software, while those identified as being worth a try involve more complicated engineering. With regard to The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience, the next stage of the project has been to implement a majority of the concepts in the lower-right quadrant (high impact, easy to implement), and a selected assortment of the more difficult concepts in the upper right quadrant to guarantee highly stragmatic results.
427. Faste, 1995b 428. Kelley, 2001 429. See Ambidextrous Thinking: An Open Innovation Platform, available online at http://www.ambithink.org

164

Posthuman Factors
Time Consuming Technically Di cult Conceptually Di cult Coordination Problems Totally Unfeasible Gumption Traps / Motivation Blocks Blocks to Imagination Hard to Visualize Hard to Communicate

Hard

Symbols used on this chart:

Black Text Blue Text

Space Exploration

Alien Trapper Post Thinking

Physical Systems Virtual Systems Advanced Prototype Early Prototype Idea Clusters Related Ideas
Aromatic Interface Brain-to-Ground Swarming Aesthetic Drones Universal Translator Chance Encounter

Institute for Alien Emulation

Recursive Computational Cognition

Share-a-thought

Brew New Life Animal Communicator Empathizer Body Extender

Mental Mirror Virtual Brainmirror Multimodal Brainshock Opera TheoryBuilder

2
Emuloids and Copybot Particle Simulation Toolkit

Absolute Sensory Obstruction Emotion Vacuum Kinesthetic Communicator Everywhere Broadcasting

1 2 3 4 5

Out of Scope Heavy Investment Worth a Try Easy Impact Cheap Thrills

Anticipatory Feedback

Living Perceptual Garment

Brain Computer Advertising

Legitimizer RoboSeduction

Secret Handshake Robo Latin Dancing

Breathing Skin RoboGymnasium Floatation device The Hand Dance Out-of-body Language Anthropomorphic Animaloid Negotiating Agent Jetpack Simulation Crane Total Information Nebula

Gestural User Interface

Megare ector

3
Mobile Pet Living Stickers

Fluid Dream

System Chain to the Unknown Relevance Engine Inverse Causality Meditation

Lustbot

Alphabet of Movement Soup

Huge Spinning Windmills RoboSculptor Pain in the Neck HMD Out-of-body Experience Channeling

Telerobotically Deface Posthuman Theories Distance Drawing

Telegra ti

Self-Realization Engine Perceptual Robotic Sexbooth HMD Pairing The Ultimate Identity Storyline Designer Semantic ClusterSearch Sector Layers Venn Browsing Infosynthesizer

Haptex Glove GRAB-wand Telehandshake Five Finger Thimbleglove Haptic Handles

Twistyslide Mindmaps

RoboToystore

Scissorgrip

Low Impact
Virtual Puppets Weirdacting Input Techno-Beach-Ma aClub-Lounge 3D Wii Sculpting Freaky Cult Make Users Eat Well Sentimental Schmaltzy Clich Love Explosion

Distilled Essence

Fingertip Nav-Pod Megatubes

Spherical Wrist Spring-Wand

Idea Phrasing

High Impact

Relational Rollover Projector Constraints Accentuator Rotational Projected Display Bubblesorter Public Portal Pay-per-use ImmersaBooth Ideabox Haptic Poetry PuzzleRooms Guided Virtual Voyage Environment Moodstates Interaction Phrasing Maze Monsters Alien Blaster Embodied Animism Dragon Pet

Digital Curation Palette

Experience Pods Astrologic Awareness

5
Cute Little Buggers Kill the User

Lenses of Knowledge

Sinuous Relation

Noti cation Blips

Dolphoid Pool Immersive Virtual Artifact Box Drug the User make-a-life Laboratory TechnoWOW! Circuit Aesthetics VE Brush Summerizer & Recomplexi er Erosion Dial Etherial Planet Emotion Remote Super Slow Ambient Visions Limitless Void

Jet Airplane! Disaster!

Mechanical Wings

Asphalt Wall

Oozing Sore Life Composer

Superclean

Hidden Interface

Emotion Mapping

Fake Historical Proof

Datamine Manifesto

Visceral Reality

Singularity Illuminated Forms

Take a Hike Stuck ImmersaSlots Broken Interface Who Am I? Checklist Techno Deprivation The Do Nothing Strategy Compare and Contraster Emphatic Truth Test

Display Case

MicroWorld Fractal Brush SceneMixer Ambient Noises

Reactive Audioscape

Shoes that Dont Match Advertise! Dress Funny

Passages

Music for Robots

Easy

Figure 31. Over 250 of the concepts generated through empirical search, plotted by potential aesthetic impact (low to high) vs. implementation difficulty (easy to hard).
Leisurely Altruism Lovenest YouCube Fountain of Youth Anamorph Augmented Surfaces Immersed Space Make Public Art The Cyborg Arts Research Market Socialize Design for Robots Future Projected Self-Knowledge Secret Garden Transhuman H+ Fashion Addict Robo-Dancing www.bullsh.it www.evaluate.it Publish and Perish Google Air

Design Consulting House of Products History Inspire Killer Service

165

Posthuman Factors

The most promising concepts from this map have been expanded in depth. This process has included writing expanded definitions of each concept and its intent, sketching possible implementations, and the identification of potential blocks to development. The concept map has also revealed clusters of ideas that are related to one another (small circles), and suggested connections between other concepts that may not have been evident when the idea was first thought of (connecting lines). This information has assisted the refinement of ideas, allowing sets of concepts to be combined or distinguished from one another. Because many of the interaction concepts have potentially overlapping features and possible implementations, storyboards have proven to be a particularly stragmatic means by which to integrate ideas and define their differences. The public nature of the system has also been beneficial in this regard. Physical concepts have been rapidly prototyped, using cardboard, foamcore, packing tape and found objects, and virtual concepts have been drawn into storyboards. All of this information has been added to the database as additional documentation. The most promising virtual concepts have been programmed and tested directly in an immersive display system incorporating stereo vision, 3D audio, and a spatially tracked wand. This has allowed them to be evaluated by a small group of test immersants who have provided feedback by which to improve the design. Observation findings at this stage have been synthesized to determine possible modifications to the interface based on real-world physical constraints. Refinement of the system is thus an iterative cycle based on evaluation of information stored in a central networked location as well as real-world feedback from direct immersive experience. Each stage of the development process can also be traced backwards to its origins in a specific brainstorm session, and the technocultural trend from which it began. The result is a shared strategic map for the development of high-impact virtual experiencesthe living memory of a new breed of curatorial stragmatics. The ranking and evaluation of proposed concepts for The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience has been an ongoing and iterative process. During the first round of prototyping, approximately 30 favorite ideas were selected for advancement, which were then subdivided into 5 basic groups: virtual scenes and applications; virtual features; environment aesthetics; interface hardware; and physical installations. For stragmatic demonstration purposes the main emphasis has been programming everything in the first three categories. Because developing new interface hardware and physical installations requires significant implementation resources, this has been limited to a basic VR system capable of realizing the majority of virtual scenes and interactions. Other available interface systems may also be employedsuch as exoskeletal or force-feedback robotic devicesbut the experience has been designed to function well without them. The software architecture of the currently envisioned system is shown in figure 32. The environment is designed to create a smoothly transitioning intelligent landscape that reacts to user activity in beautiful, shocking, and unexpected ways. Three principal landscape concepts have been developed (Cubeland, MicroWorld, and Limitless Void), each of which can be rendered in one of six aesthetic modes (or combinations thereof ). Each mode is designed to control the graphic style of the landscape (shading effects, colors, contrast, luminosity, etc.), audio output 166

Posthuman Factors

(music, sound effects, etc.) and velocity of the scene. Three transition mechanisms interpret user activity over time and express the behavior of the landscape correspondingly. As changes are taking place within the environment, immersants creatively experience and interact with aspects of the space using a vibrotactile wand. A variety of virtual tools are available for expression, allowing the creation and manipulation of objects in the environment. These include Erosion Dial (which melts aspects of the world), Accentuator (which intensifies color and sounds), Magic Wizardry Wand (which allows immersants to trace colorful lines and sparkles in space with the wand), Fractal Brush (which creates geometric polygon structures), and SceneMixer (which allows limited control over the aesthetic landscape itself ). Control of tool behavior is designed to change in response to the environment, such that in certain scenarios the wand can be used for specific manipulative tasks, such as clicking a navigation hyperlink (Total Information Nebula), interacting with fleet of alien spaceships (Alien Blaster), or adjusting the moodstate of the aesthetic landscape

Home Total Information Nebula Scenarios Multimodal Brainshock Opera

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Figure 32. The virtual experience architecture of The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience system. Brainstormed concepts from the needfinding process define an interaction paradigm in which a continuously shifting aesthetic landscape responds emotionally to immersant activity.

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at large. Finally, the immersant has limited control over his or her movement through the space. Pressing the home key on the wand returns visitors to the Total Information Nebula, for example. This scene operates as a three-dimensional menu, allowing the user to navigate directly to any aspect of the simulated world. In a realistically comprehensive posthuman simulation, Total Information Nebula would be a map of all information available to posthumankind: an immersive wikipedia-type-space of genomes and species and constellations and worlds, all orbiting at once in an instantaneous unity place. In the near term, potentially it is simply a comprehensive map of the internet, an everything infographic visualizing the complexities of interconnection between data. On the back-end it would probably be connected to a variety of Google-like robo-searching and data acquisition intelligence systems. To maximize the ability to experience this sensory world, the quality and filtering of data would be fundamentally important, and sensory search and brain-computer interface algorithms would be employed to enable semantic information to be pushed to all agents everywhere at once. It would thus become a high-resolution, deep-field-of-view map-like overview space into which soft cyborg immersants could drill and weave ever-deeper deautomatizing experiences. Yet with so much potential information to draw from there could never be a truly comprehensive overview map. Maps are limits on information, they are never complete, thus the Total Information Nebula demonstrates the futility of posthuman sense in that total simulation can never exist. An infinite number of hypothetical aesthetic scenarios would need to be programmed to fully realize The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience. For stragmatic purposes, however, it is sufficient to describe those few which have been designed in detail. Multimodal Brainshock Opera is the stimulational enactment of the Total Information Nebula, for instance. It subjects immersants to information overload. The audio is too loud, the visuals are too bright, there is too much motion and too much stimulation. It is the ultimate brain-fried overload experiment: a place to space out, to rock out, fuse your mind and go deaf. This is not an environment for epileptic visitors; it is a complete multisensory destructive environment and is similar in this regard to the Kill the User concept, which has not been prototyped for ethical reasons. The first computer game ever built was called Spacewar. It was developed in 1962 by a group of programmers at MIT using a DEC PDP-1 minicomputer connected to a CRT display. Since then hundreds of versions of this concept have been developed across a wide range of technological platforms. As Alan Kay noted, the game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer.430 The Alien Blaster scenario takes Spacewar to a fully immersive level, enabling users to compose and navigate a fleet of spaceships on strategic missions against fictional alien adversaries in real time. Drawing on a profusion of classic science fiction referencesfrom Flash Gordon to Enders Game to Battlestar GalacticaAlien Blaster enables immersants to conquer the galaxy while competing against other emulated alien persons. It is designed to take
430. Brand, 1972

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full advantage of state-of-the-art technologies, incorporating real-time action with chess-like intergalactic strategy in which the learning algorithms of intelligent agents (driven by artificial neural networks) work as alien spies to infiltrate your mission plans and destroy your fleet. Ultimately Alien Blaster is about the survival of humanity against the mechanized nature of other forces in the universe. Two principal modes of this game can be experienced: strategic mode, in which the agent plays God over the conquest of aliens, and test pilot, the fully immersive first-person perspective. Agents who are operating as test pilots in Alien Blaster can fly directly into the neighboring scenarios of Jet Airplane! and Rollercoaster. Jet Airplane! is exactly what it sounds like: a fullfledged jet powered airplane experience for flying everywhere extremely fast. Thus if Johnny Parsons describes piloting a Formula-1 racecar as Trying to get the car to feel like part of your body. An extension... when things are right, you can feel the tires in your nerve ends. And when you take a car down into the corner as deep as itll go and you know its on the ragged edge, its just like a shot in the arm. Its such a gratifying feeling that youve taken a piece of machinery and kind of glued yourself to it,431 Jet Airplane! extends the full body simulation of Alien War into the atmosphere of inhabited planets where wind resistance and turbulence become spatial and narrative extensions of the pilots being; there are missions and rules, alpha-beta-foxtrots and overs-and-outs. You are the pilotyou can fly high, low, up, down, fast, slow, bail out and crash, because you are in absolute control of your electromechanical body in space. Jet Airplane! can be piloted wherever you choose, including into the Multimodal Brainshock Opera or on autopilot mode. The Rollercoaster scenario provides exactly this, exploiting the vertigo dimensions of immersive virtual space. The track followed by Rollercoaster is constructed of numerous discrete sections (or rooms) placed in sequence, the sequence of which can be generated automatically or predetermined according to a specific pattern, such that when experienced the demo gives the illusion of a continuous rollercoaster ride. This modular setup allows for various combinations of rooms to be experienced, and the duration of the ride to be flexibly controlled before swooping off into an alternate mode. Like many stragmatic aesthetic experiences, Rollercoaster is designed to be exciting and fun. There are many shocking surprises, for example, including near-miss obstacles and unexpected turns. Many of these surprises are designed to create misaligned mental models with regard to expected behavior. There is no need for the immersants viewpoint to follow the tracks, for example, and the same segment of experience may occur repeatedly with different behaviors. In terms of graphics rendering, some sections of landscape are low definition, others believable, and others photorealistic. Basic sound effects triggered at intervals along the course of the journey contribute to the users sense of speeding through the environment. The spaceship/airplane/rollercoaster becomes a living creature in Dolphoid Pool. Dolphoids are intelligent beings, much like humans, that live in virtual pools of virtual liquid. They are generally
431. Bentley and Langford, 2000

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playful and well-behaved, and would like to get to know you better. Dolphoids are known for their strong personalities and emotional empathy. The dolphoids pool is their natural habitat and they are reluctant to leave it. Dolphoids enjoy swimming together, jumping, and learning new tricks. They are especially fond of eating sprinklefish, which you can feed to them with your magic wand, since it makes them energetic. In the wild dolphoids enjoy a diet of e-kelp, minifish and biggerfish, which inhabit diverse aspects of the dolphoids unique ecosystem (chemical making tastebots scatter special scents all over the pool, making the dolphoids wild with excitement). A well trained dolphoid will let you ride it, which is what you will be doing when youre not pretending to train it. In the past dolphoids have been hunted by cruel humans who consider them targets (their virtual fins are a virtual delicacy). Attempting to hunt dolphoids will make them despondent and fearful, however, and is not recommended for stragmatic reasons. In conclusion, the stragmatic design of posthuman perception is an iterative cycle by which physical prototypes fail and are re-built to improve their aesthetic efficiency. Because every artistic action is inherently unique, posthuman centered design varies widely depending on the constraints, technical issues, and desired sensibility of the agents in question. Designing complex and context sensitive interactive systems is greatly assisted by combining creative expression with empirical search. The aim of The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience has been to develop an inclusive and seemingly useful map for the development of exactly this sort of stragmatic posthumanity. In a technogaian ecology of pure imagination, in which all agents perpetually generate nothing but virtual ideals, the seamless habitation of multimodal dreams will be continuously experienced as a perpetually deautomatized invisible mind. Over time the combination of expanding artistic activity and hands-on experience will result in notably improved prototypes of far stranger systems.

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Perceptual robotic art is centered on the aesthetic experiences and learnings of bodies in the world, but soon humanity will largely transcend the body. The fact that all experience has its foundations in multisensory perception nonetheless opens a tangible doorway by which artists may examine this synthetic and imaginary trans-species awareness. It is only through the trials and errors of actual (if simulated) empirical experience that insights are gained for the improvement of such systems, and artistic stragmatics will realize its end. The provision of experienced concepts and metaphors to the invisible mind through such artistic engagement therefore provides a self-actualizing platform for its embodied experience as a bodiless mind. The key to posthuman survival lies in the unity moment enabled by the contemporary arts. Artists throughout history have sustained human culture in various ways, but never have the threats to humanity been so potentially disastrous that marginalization of artistic action would imperil all human life. The processes of posthuman centered design described in the previous chapter offer new ways of envisioning the posthuman transition as a collaborative curation of this activity to pattern posthuman security. From a historical perspective, the contemporary era of curatorial stragmatics can be roughly defined as the period between the birth of postmodernism in the 1960s and 70s and today, so it is particularly instructive to examine the movements of minimalism, conceptual art, body art, earth art, light and space art, performance art, video art and so on to contextually project expectations of influence on our vision and design of the future. This said, given the great deal that has been written about these movements and the irrelevance of such writings relative to their first-person experiencea deep exploration of their consequences is not necessary here. It suffices to say that while all of the major movements throughout the history of art have challenged existing representational paradigms, postmodernism dealt a particularly fatal blow to perception and experience through the literal destruction of the art object itself. No longer is the contempo-

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rary artist bound to the construction of thingsideas, happenings, even simply just being are now equally valid artistic interventionsfor the artist is no longer required to do or make anything. Instead s/he becomes a player in a seamless and malleable world of identity (or lack of it), intent (or lack of it), context (or lack of it), legitimation (or lack of it), and so on, a mind without action apart from that action. From an A-theological perspective this situation is frustratingly vague, but like all forms of academic discourse contemporary art is actually tremendously complex in technical ways, and unlike science it can be safely engineered. Artistic practice in the postmodern era has not simply curled up and resigned, as one might have expected from the dissociation of art from its act of creationquite the opposite, it has blossomed. For despite the confusion and frustration it causes to much of society, who continue to operate on the basis of sentimentally humanist contextual systems, postmodernism gives artists the incredible freedom to practice and express as they choose without limits. Thus although the crafting of materially tangible perceptual simulation is no longer necessary to artistic intervention, the essential aspects of such intervention are nonetheless crystallized and maintained in the transhuman art context: you may still like art if it pleases you, or hate it, or for that matter feel however you wish about it; the artists personal experience and intuition remain central to his or her work; and even objects themselves retain their place as commoditieswhich, I might add, they always have been. In each of these ways, when combined with engineering practices such as perceptual robotics, and invisibly curated to insure that your thoughts are controlled, the deautomatizing impact of artistic activity is assured. As we saw in our discussion of posthuman centered design, the success criteria for new interface technologies goes beyond their technological feasibility as engineerable products to their inclusive satisfaction of posthuman needs. Designers of new systems must not only ask what is possible or viable, but the degree to which emerging technology addresses the values, lifestyles, emotional states, and well-being of the posthuman people it is intended to serve. The psychologist Abraham Maslow is famous for the development of what he called a needs hierarchy with regard to healthy human mental experience, ranging from the basic needs such as our physiological needs for air, food, water, etc., to defense needs for safety and security, to social needs for love, belonging, acceptance and respect.432 At the top of the hierarchy are what Maslow terms self actualization needs or metaneeds, including the need for truth, beauty, playfulness and simplicity. This range clarifies the role of artistic action in developing the living memory required for posthuman survival. While needs lower on the hierarchy will command attention if unsatisfied, only the highest level needs address human aspiration and the need to become what one is capable of becoming.433 Technology is expected to deal with the majority of transhuman needs, but only art will satisfy those at the top of the spectrum, which is actually towards the bottom of the posthuman needs hierarchy. One critical concept that has emerged from The Ultimate Aesthetic Experience is the need to develop a hypothetical Institute for Alien Emulation, a scientific body committed to state-of-the-art
432. Maslow, 1962, Goble, 1970 433. Faste, 2003

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empirical search on the mind and the continuing development of sustainable posthuman strategies. The market aesthetics of alien emulationthat animistic process by which human mind is contextually projected through mediated agencyhas already begun to saturate all aspects of material reality with the virtual absurdities necessary for scientific transcendence. And this interface is not limited to artistic practice. Indeed, as early as the 1980s One even finds a postmodern turn in the field of science where postmodern science refers to a break with Newtonian determinism, Cartesian dualism, and representational epistemology. Advocates of postmodern science embrace principles of chaos, indeterminacy, and hermeneutics, with some calling for a re-enchantment of nature through the engineering of everything.434 Furthermore, the abolition of objects, like that of identity it presages, has enabled any and all means and modes of expression imaginable, for just as figurative panting may or may not be in vogue at this hypothetical moment, like any aesthetic attribute the rationality of science has its place in the world, as do all forms of dance, music, desperation, etc. The source-code of human existencethe very fabric of the simulated universeis now free to the creative dreamer for emulation, through appropriation, hacking, rehacking, remixing, recombining, and so on as required but not necessarily as intended. In the place of the object as a useful material thing is a multitude of possibilities and alien consequences, centered precisely on the way that things actually are (and always have been!), not necessarily on the ways that we want them to be. Given the ambitions of todays global laboratory, the emulation of alien life takes on a special significance for artistic stragmatics. We are on the cusp of revolutions in nanotechnology, biomanipulation, and robotic autonomy, and our ability to predict which direction these tools will take us is limited. Ultimately the survival of our species requires avoiding the same mistakes made by other forms of intelligent life in the universe. We must protect ourselves from self-inflicted existential disaster by reconceiving ourselves as the best of the aliens. The postmodern era offers purely contextual agent-based narrative constructs as foundational structures for a new materialism, malleable entities that can be employed as the artist/immersant sees fit. From a technical perspective the issue that must be confronted is that of objectively measuring the perception of extraterrestrial quality. In the absence of an absolute ruling on aesthetic determinations, who makes the rules on what artistic activity is or is not to provide stimulation to life is neither the artist or the invisible mind, it is the two of them collaborating to inhabit each other. The previous chapters have sought to illuminate these mechanisms of change (the legitimation of technocultural cognitive power, the role of living memory in negotiating artistic activity and awareness, the stragmatic design of aesthetic experiences, etc.), but ultimately the limits of art have always been the limits of human possibility itself, of ingenuity, integrity, determination, etc. The posthuman world will be exactly the same, except this time possibility is exponentially enhanced to such radical degrees that our ability comprehend our potential is an existential liability that frees us to play. Nothing will change it because its safer that waywhich is far from the truth, but then the truth is a myth.
434. Best and Kellner, 1991, p. 28. See also Prigogine and Stengars, 1984, Griffin, 1988a, Griffin, 1988b, and Best, 1991.

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6.1. Cybersynthesis of Pure Mind and Posthuman Places We have seen how enactive interface technologies offer a means to extend embodiment from one mind to another, through the kinesthetic movement of inhabiting, intensified, virtual agents. Through movement we pattern the memory of work, from cellular memory to the production of minds. Perceptual robotic systems extend our environment to become interfaces of empathy, targeted contexts for artistic learning and play, and in the words of McLuhan Anything that raises the environment to high intensity, whether it be a storm in nature or violent change resulting from new technology, turns the environment into an object of attention. When it becomes an object of attention, it assumes the character of an antienvironment or an art object.435 By the 2040s, digital intelligence will be billions of times more capable than biological intelligence today.436 It is art that has lifted and continually rises to face the problem of relationships between emotion, perception, race, action, creativity, social instinct, cultural acquisition and so on long before science has intervened; it is the nature of artistic form and its universal sensoriality that efficiently synthesizes and gives solution to problems of social freedom and human potential. Taken to their logical extreme, enactive systems will offer the holistic embodiment of every possible posthuman sensation. Yet the possibility to experience everything enactable does not imply it will be enacted or expressed, since increasingly these experiences will be repetitions of existing knowledge as experienced by others. As Hal Foster writes, the purely contextual and subjective positioning of minimalism, as the first major movement in postmodern art, finally severed the last order or origin to which abstract expressionism held, in the form of the gesture, and therefore also
the representational paradigm of art. Indeed, it is not the antiillusionism of minimalism that rids art of the anthropomorphic and the representational, but its serial mode of production: for abstraction sublates representation, preserves it even as it cancels it, whereas repetition, the (re)production of simulacra, subverts representation, undercuts its referential logic. In any serious social history of paradigms, repetition, not abstraction, may well supercede representation.437

Douglas Adams has written There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.438 Thus perhaps the potential of perceptual robotic interfaces is not to revitalize and reinforce the singular subjectivity of the embodied alien other, but rather to inhabit copies
435. 436. 437. 438. McLuhan, 1968 Kurzweil, 2006, p. 309 Foster, 1986, p. 179. Adams, 2005

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of ourselves that are exactly the same.439 The efficiency of gestureless embodiment on the human population would have widespread implications, in the form of the abolition of labor, in favor of the shattering and reproducing identical alien memories. For the interactive learning environments of curatorial stragmatics, performed data will be mined by intelligent systems to understand which aspects of movement are dissimilar and how such gestures evolve as they learn. Opportunities incorporating real-time machine learning and interactive posthuman/system interface didactics could then applied in a networked ecology of life wherein all possible species collaborate to teach the systemand each otherthe fundamentals of newly invented and/or improvised collaborative learning body. Transient reality systems will enable humans to experience the alien before they become it. If we are to survive the posthuman transitionthe primary new imperative for contemporary artthe sequence by which we develop and unleash our technologies is of critical importance. We must advocate an altruistic, aesthetic, and scientific study of nonscience awareness, a cybersynthesis of pure mind for the advancement simulated species. In doing so, we will stimulate the very curiosities we wish to avoid by inhabiting the danger of changing ourselves beyond recognition before having fully explored what it means to be human. Soon everything will be programmed and the universe will be equivalent to our living digital pet. As the intent of our gestures becomes that of uprooting all non alien movement, we will have created predictive systems for the anticipation of desire, new levels of empathy through contextually embodied transpersonal information. Like existing human-computer interfaces, emulated aliens will be heavily context dependent and involve subtle nuances depending on the sequence of projections of the task that is being performed. Much like the embodied nature of non-digital skills, however, capturing and remembering these new behaviors as they are learned will prove to be a prudent and beneficial to the living memory of posthuman stragmatics. The necessary cues endowed by an artist on his or her designthose that allow building such bridges into the users mindare what designers call affordances.440 In posthuman terms, they are embodied equivalents of the interactive rollover or tooltip metaphor: real-time context sensitive experience triggered only when an agents actions reflect a situation of need. Because the context of learning itself is inherently projected through the nature of artistic embodiment, by offering a simulated experience of foreign bodies through cues designed to enhance a bodys sense of not being itself, the deautomatization central to the distributed design of trans-species stragmatics is enabled through its antithesis of reference to humanity. Thus perhaps the process of cybersynthesis can be best addressed by exploring beyond the limitations of discrete s(t)imulational applications and domains and focusing instead on the gesture potential of natural movement and the expressions capable
439. See Andy Warhol: I dont want it to be essentially the sameI want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel. 440. Norman, 1990

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through uninhibited repetition of mind in intelligent and/or networked identical environments. Place becomes increasingly central to posthuman design because it is here that differences in perceived reference are afforded by the simulated world. As conceptual artist Michael Heizer once observed, anything is only a part of where it is.441 Place can be fluidly reproduced across mediated sensory stimuli; it has become where we choose to focus our attentions as attention itself becomes dislocated, fluid, and universally immersive. Places are socially specified spaces, wherein what constitutes a place is the collective agreement of bodies not the mathematical properties of its realized location. Like the reflections of colored light we perceive behind mirrors, all specific places-in-space are the cultural imaginations of the minds that inhabit them. Cyberspace is one such collection of places, not a specified place in a physical space but rather the collective noema of that space as conceived. Cybersynthesis extends this to logical illogical extremes on the assumption that we are synthetic recreated informational personoids in the conduits of superintelligent prediction algorithms, the embodied examination of possible futures or pasts. Anthropically these are not places in the usual sense, they are the mind of the simulating being. The scientific analogy would be that such posthuman places are recognitions, memory cues, and flashes of neurons that fire together in the invisible mindits skills, identities, trademarks, and dreams. The survival mechanism I have referred to as curatorial stragmatics refers to the memory of possible places in the future, specifically those forming our present reference/reality. A cybersynthesized posthumanity documents, becomes, and distributes this place to enable the equivalent of a cinematic robotic dream documentary, set in a parallel, simultaneous, synthetic conceptual world where continually changing moods are the natural response to its being always the same. Such a place is contextually projected in high-definition experience, perceived on location in real places elsewhere as a singular new hybrid space when conceived by immersants as real and alive. It is heavily post-produced in real time, merging the possibilities of all of the specific types of places that contemporary reality providessupersets of all possible places that, through their careful technocultural experienced curation, literally represent the wild west of technology and its globalized bleeding-edge frontier ideals. The metaphor is the freewheeling union of nature with technology, a fitting breed of nonsense indeed given the ultimate ambition of rationality to replace humanity with simulated life. It is possible, in practical terms, to document those posthuman places that do not yet exist, the concepts, experiences and emotions that it constitutes, through the collective imagination of the contemporary moment. Three frontier-places, each representative of more generalized places, could be identified as possible place-typologies with this intent: placelessness, placefulness, and placeyness. By documenting and integrating aspects of each into a new and unified composite place, posthumanity could be easily and effectively experienced today, proving we exist and continue to thrive. Some concrete examples provide illustrations of each hypotheti441. Onorato, 1986

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cal typology of place that we now live without: 1. Placelessness. Technosuburbias (such as Silicon Valley, for example) are the epicenter of technological placelessness. For most of your life you have lived in the heart of this placelessness, never indeed realizing that you actually came from a place. Placelessness is a natural and efficient kind of place; it is the instant gratification drive-through rocket-booster-laboratory kindof place, where a 5 minute drive next door can buy you metric titanium screws or gigawatt routers for the million dollar enterprise emerging in your garage. Because it provides an absence of place, and of time, placelessness is ground-zero for creative thinking, reinvention, and efficiency. Everything is possible because there is no moment. Conventional assumptions always break down: at interchanges between transportation arteries, as in that between cloverleafing superhighway cognitive conduits, drivers can cycle indefinitely going absolutely nowhere. The infrastructure is superhuman, anonymous, beautiful, efficientfiberoptics and condominiums sprawling without end. All roads lead in circles to an In-n-out-burger. Some simple, well planned excursions with a fanciful memory can effectively document this placelessness and its simulated infrastructures. 2. Placefulness. A wild location in the imagined far north, high in the Canadian Rockies, for example, is a specific configuration of natural elements, a frozen and beautiful geological moment. The placefulness of a place is its presence, the being-in-the-world that it provides, how the histories of the place collaborate to effectively clobber the future you currently live in. Such pristine natural environments provide placefulness in the extremevast historical canvases of overwhelming presence. Even in the minute details of insects, leaves of grass, crystalline droplets of ice, the immersive power of scale is evident. Here memories can float over glaciers, through forests, exploring the tensions between permanence and transience, the placefulness and its potential to stimulate the system. The wild provides a basecamp for place in a placeless reality, a media ecosystem in which the memories of places cross-pollinate and grow. 3. Placeyness. Placeyness represents a special variety of place, where where is less important than when and with whom. Placey places are only there while the simulation is conscious; their placeyness is propagated through reporters and critics, to be relived again afterwards in proportion to how well the experience was recorded and received. Placeyness reflects the avant-garde; it is the legitimation of a place, a matter of timing. One moment its Documentanext week The Oscarssuch that placeyness never actually takes place in the specificities of a physical space. Rather, it becomes an elusive, exclusive, spontaneous serendipity, that shocks whenever possible in beautiful ways. Placeyness cannot be captured by inhabiting places; rather cybersynthesis proposes that it is necessarily staged. Envision the creation of narrative structures in which endless series of unfolding and related events are performed and forgotten, providing an evolutionary backbone to the development of posthuman life. Using invisible, replaceable, inexperienced backdrops, placeyness, in the form of costumed human/robotic/cyborg perforganisms could be digitally inserted into the sensory backdrop/environment of other possible places. Traveling through a post-produced natural infrastructure, these

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creatures constitute the alien life that survive in your posthuman worldwhose actions contribute to the proliferation of an artificial balance, a product of being their own lost identity. Organisms such as this are no longer be the result of a natural evolution, but emerge from the reminessense of places where autonomous mutants have surpassed the contemporary transhumanoid body. To summarize, a slowly evolving, morphing, uprooted vision of future memories can be contextually projected and experienced before it occurs. The design of such a place would be focused on exploring the possible behaviors of a specific technological platform to document and maximize the potential of the place it provides, the process referred to as cybersynthesis and summarized in figure 33. The architecture of this place would be an experiment in simultaneous co-embodied experience; reactions to interactions between the places in question would enable them to practically never evolve. Places are almost always memories of places; the future of places is their memory, realized in time. Animistic societies have special senses of such places; participants are aesthetically, psychophysically, and spiritually in touch. All experienced places are unique, but few are revolutionary. Documenting the experience of such transient, changing places requires creating atemporal, immersive, experiences of place. Usually this happens when memories and sensations converge at moments while consciousness is otherwise occupied, present, like the moment you realize youre having a good time, and in realizing it, lose it.442 Reminessensing about possible future experiences is a means to nurture the enactive, immersive, trans-species anima that emerges as we experience becoming the mind of the autonomous machine. For human observers of such an envisioned experience, this place would be formed by our having thought we experienced it, whether or not we actually did.
Placey Memories

Placeless Memories Time Stragmatic Posthumanity

(then)

(now)

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Placeful Memories

Cybersynthesis

Figure 33. Cybersynthesis as a deinstrumentalizing mechanism for reminessensing posthumanity, which

442. Faste, 2003

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Posthumans are likely to persist for this extremely long time, but only because we imagine it that way. As humans we have a natural tendency to anthropomorphically project humanism on our surrounding environment, to associate certain kinds of technological movement and interaction with that technology as living in the same way we interpret our lives. How and why do we empathize with artificial life in this way rather than wanting the reverse to be possible, real? How we project life animistically on nature is always a mirror of ourselves, illustrating that when something seems alive then it actually is. Cybersynthesis defines both the creatures and habitat of life in this pure mind. Thus the human tendency to model artificial systems subconsciously after ourselves will lead to tendencies for self-love via the instrumentalization of tools and the development of egotistical forms of human-based alien power. Yet artificial life will take many contradictory forms that traditional conceptions of robotic life therefore necessarily overlook. The Turing Test for example is explicitly anthropomorphic: it tests only if subjects resemble a human. Yet machine systems will be intelligent in ways other than how humans are intelligent and consequently the test fails to capture the properties of possible intelligence, such as the ability to solve difficult non-human problems or come up with original alien insights. If a machine can solve a difficult problem that no person could solve, it would, in principle, fail the test, thus some theorists such as Russell and Norvig have argued that such anthropomorphism is prevented from being truly useful for the task of engineering intelligent machines, since aeronautical engineering texts do not define the goal of their field as making machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool other pigeons.443 In the future, the biological metaphor of self replication will be replaced by artistically stragmatic methods, such as alien emulation, cybersynthesis, and telestimulational therapy (which is discussed in the following section). For the real question at hand for artistic stragmatics is the general simulation of posthuman consciousness, not the simulation of humans or our systems of value/society. If the sum of the human neural network is alive, it follows that a flock of birds or the internet itself can be seen to have a form of meta life. Thus the we must generally conclude that our surroundings are already alive, or at least they may as well be as long as we remain ignorant that we are always exactly the same. The meta-life of living networks is a parasitic form of life, incapable of self sustenance without human activity. Imagine this hypothetical situation in the year 2030: you call your friend on the telephone, but an intelligent swarm of virtual government agents takes hold of the phone companys circuits at exactly that moment and connects you with an agent whose job it is to emulate your friend. Like the brain needs nourishment, oxygen delivered by blood flow from the heart and lungs, so too the global mind needs energy, infrastructures, purification and material resources. Each actual human on planet Earth could be immediately controlled by manipulative communicating agents acting as emularies between real human agents, collectively orchestrating a geopolitical mindcontrol gameindeed they are possibly already doing so. Unfortunately, what makes cyberwar so
443. Russell and Norvig, 2003

stragmatically forms through empirical search and curation of placey, placeful, and placeless memories.

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unlike conventional war is that it is often impossible, even in retrospect, to find where the attack began, or who was responsible.444 Thus when we carve mountains to export iron to build towers of steel, the capillaries of their thought extend upwards towards the tendrils of sky. Our neurons are wireless nodes thrown into orbit, their stimulus showering local planets with radio residue derived from the direct mediations of omnipotent intelligent power. We are a body with no brain and a brain with no bodythe shell of an egg. And inside there is nothing, just hot dirt and magma. There is a hierarchy of power implicit in cyborgian bodies centering on use, which has implications for focus and emotional control that are inherently problematic and contrary to the boundlessness required by a working stragmatics. Yet as soon as there is a power relation there is the possibility for resistance, Foucault writes, for We can never be ensnared by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy.445 As the flow of information between bodies becomes the basis for artificial feeling we enter an Orwellian world where all animals are equal, but some animals are necessarily more equal than others.446 Their otherness is their source of potential cyber resistance, the identity the system then maps directly through the mediation of influenced expression. In a conceptual universe dominated by pure technocultural theory, stimulation is not merely the reflex of neurons in a certain contextual operating mode, it is the very means by which artistic action can be seen to repress human mental experience because possibility always exceeds reality, and each agents mask is its virtual face of oppression. 6.2. The Lines of Legitimate Posthuman Stragmatics It is impossible to comprehensively imagine the posthuman world, for what is it like to have no identity and thus to feel absolutely nothing but the feelings of others? Can individual agents really be said to be in possession of feelings in a synchronous society, or is everything a response to the needs of the system? The metaphor of posthumanity as a city of mind works well to describe the cybersynthesis required to attain posthumanity. Because it describes interagent habitation in a vivid and visceral way perhaps more easily grasped than the memories of place, this section describes how it feels to inhabit a posthuman metropolis of emulated aliens as a way to embody how it feels in the future. The posthuman metropolis consists of pure survival and nothing else. The city provides such low context environments of pure artistic legitimation, and supports such ridiculous behaviors, occupations, endeavors and ways of life, that if you can make it in New York, you cant make it anywhere. 99% of the so-called artists, writers, actors, and dancers in such a city are either well-off to begin with or survive off a trickle-down art economy, supported by strange side-jobs and unusual/illegal living
444. Sanger and Markoff, 2010 445. Foucault, 1988a, p. 123 446. Which is to say, Four legs good, two legs bad. See Orwell, 1956

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arrangements. In general this parallels the last remaining challenge for artistic stragmatics: when everyone everywhere is a posthuman artist, and nobodys buying art or running the economy, who pays the bills that keep the simulation alive? Should we just presume that the robots will provide for our needs in the alien metropolitan zone? After all, theres a solar systems worth of energy close within reach, and harnessing it safely will be trivial to an omnipotently intelligent (if irrational) machine. Preserving us will be interesting, at least, as a laboratory to see how pre-alien animals are. Cities amplify technocultural reality. They distort informal definitions of temporality and space, forming a crucible for the intensification and automation of life. The difference between transhuman experience and posthuman experience is roughly parallel to the difference between living in the countryside and the heart of Times Square. Success in the city, a quality we can extrapolate to generalized success in todays simulated diaspora, has little to do with an individuals actions or abilities but rather the ways in which the cognitive support mechanisms of their mediating environments inflate those abilities to augment their reach. Differentiations between successful art, serious art and sensational crap become murky in this context; the intent and identity of the transient artist is lost, re-formed, over-analyzed and forgotten beneath barrages of publicity and marketing hype. In this environment the artists only course of action, should a large and expendable personal endowment be unavailable, is to accept his or her relative insignificance and join in the fray. Art is useless! Individual ambitions are dwarfed by the citys massive architecture, symbols of humanitys most powerful governments, corporations and billionaire dreamers, rising from the vast swath of slum and pollution: the mediocrity and survival that comprise everyone else. The transhuman city churns on a bottomless capitalist appetite to consume human culture through financial research and domination, the ultimate culmination of which, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning.447 The result is mass disillusionment/paranoia and the perpetual fueling of vanity, insanity, failure and illness. We have framed the posthuman as being a post-identity creature, yet there will always be identities in the posthuman world, not by virtue of physiology, but because they will result from the imaginations and interpretations of manifest artistic minds, remnants of a new post-natural creative form. Perhaps the question should be: how should such agents conceive their motivations in a world of automatic success? In the contemporary market-based transhumanist climate success is typically (mis)construed as a triangular fusion of three basic dominating factors: Money, Ego, and Power, propagated principally through the channels of business, academia, and government, respectively. The successful ability to generate and leverage each of these accomplishments is the key to avoiding the volatile state of artistic marginalization. Artistic stragmatics from the agents perspective is thus a test of the technocultural chemists ability to balance these factors, a delicate juggling of combustible elements. The unskilled wizard creates nothing but lead out of gold: personal and artistic burnout, bankruptcy, narcissism and corruption. But of course artistic practice is more than
447. Deleuze and Guattari, 1983

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this also; truth, love and talent, perhaps, are also crucial elements in the chemistry of transhuman success and remain essential for many people to artistic discourse despite their necessary opposition to the glitter of gold. For now we must simply be aware that the explicit motivation of agents subscribing to transhuman model destroys the very nature of stragmatic artistic intent. Stragmatic survival requires that perceptual robotic art be divorced from the egodriven quest for power, fame and undeserved recognition common to transhuman identity/success. For it is possible to use the magnification of this triad against itself, to implode subversive room for new systems of deinstrumentalized living memory in the invisible mind. Once the nature of artistic practice is woven into the imaginary fabric of simulated posthuman nonsense engineering its urban reality will become more than the mastery of these forces of selfish reason. For success, while nonsensical, is both limiting and necessary for artistic quality, and it is the rational nature of legitimated artistic intent that celebrates arts very lack of Intention. In Lyotards words, here are the men of profusion, the masters of today: marginals, experimental painters, pop, hippies and yippies, parasites, madmen, binned loonies. One hour of their lives offers more intensity and less intention than three hundred thousand words448 Four dimensions of stragmatic posthuman legitimacy may therefore be defined to provide an invisible framework of virtual psyche within which the emulation of aliens will flourish and prosper. These are the lines of Moments, Influence, Histories, and Unity, diametrically opposed to the dominating transhuman triangle, and their application is the stragmatic method of telestimulational therapy and the origin of possible stragmatic legitimation. 1. Money is what can you do for someone today, and this is why we call the first dimension The Line of Moments. The better a metropolis is at legitimating art, the more expensive it will become to inhabit over time. The output produced by emerging artists is a cheap, useless, expendable commodity in low demand, so the survival challenge for life as an artist in the city is to avoid being automated by the economic machine. Business has very little institutional memory; it is all about momentary fiscal transactions. In general, money can be seen as a measure of commitment to the realization of the values at which it is directed, which is what makes the art market so extremely unique. An artists value increases not when a work has been sold for a profit but when it has been legitimated by the axes of influence and histories (see below). For-profit galleries can make amazing margins selling the (worthless) work of unknown artists simply because they appear to legitimate it, so it is not uncommon for them to offer them shows, promote their work for a little while, sell it all to nave collectors, and abandon the artist. Alternately, they can give their work away cheaply to other legitimating bodies (museums, influential collectors, etc.), retaining a few works for themselves on speculation for a longer-term run. In neither case does the artist necessarily profit outside of the axis of moments. Thus in terms of money, time, and material resources, having a long term business plan (or bottomless bank-account) is the only way for a stragmatically
448. Lyotard, 1978, p. 53

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artistic agent to avoid being the victim of short term profiteering. In transhuman times the commercial gallery is the successful artists primary agent, but businesses need to make a profit to heighten their sequence of moments, often at the cost of instrumentalization. Artistic agents must similarly learn to accept their activity in terms of uni-temporal commodity. There will be so many gallery agents in a hypothetical posthuman metropolis that finding one is simply a matter of being everywhere at once and meeting them all. The real challenge for the legitimation of stragmatic activity is finding stable relationships with trustworthy agents that stay in business long enough to enable momentary creativity to transform into historical power. This requires patience and computational investment, and in transhuman times can be very expensive when extended over long periods of time. For non existent aliens with infinite time on their hands, however, nothing in the manifest universe could be easier. Business requires growth. Expansion towards infinite population provides the possibility for infinite growth, so one stragmatic solution to making a profit is to embrace the short-term nature of the axis of moments and have zillions of instantaneous low-quality connections that collectively spike. This can be seen as a distributed high volume business model involving artistic trade-offs in investment between quality and quantity with slack resources focused on the over-production of additional computational inventory. We can call this a distributed legitimation approach, based on the principal that perhaps if an artistic agent has enough connections, and each one contributes tiny payments for content access, long term survival can be guaranteed via telestimulational means. In an instinctual system of intelligent momentum networks there is a necessary tension between security and growth; stragmatic artists may choose between numerous low-definition gallery agents, or limited intimate contextual projectors. Both kinds of business are potentially stragmatic. Companies like Ferrari and McDonalds have different business models and produce different products. Distinctions can be drawn between the cost of their products, the quantity produced, their partnerships, target markets, ultimate integration with the cultural growth engine, etc., but for posthuman artists all definitions are useless. Art is both: it behaves like a Ferrari and a Big Mac. Transhuman artists produce art like McDonalds makes burgersin vast quantities and at low cost; their principal expenses are rent and labor; if possible each agent employs as many burger flipping agents as conceivable to make lots of art. But instead of selling to the general public, they distribute their work through Ferrari-burger dealerships; its the only way they can access buyers willing to spend $100,000 on a hamburger. The problem with this approach for transhuman agents is that it requires full time effort, effectively meaning a permanent move to an expensive habitat which is difficult to sustain relative to other high definition and high yield programmed contexts. Posthuman agents will not have this issue, since the regulatory mechanisms of tripartite museum cognition redistribute the resources of the invisible mind deautomatically to normalizing degrees. For infinite populations of nonidentities our metropolitan metaphor holds true on the line of moments: as the cost of artistic

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production diminishes to zero, its momentary value expands to infinity. In terms of the social implications of this inverse relationship, the population of New York may be about 8 million, but is a constant flux of mass-immigration and exodus driven by these economic forces. A significant percentage of the citys population has lived there for under three years; indeed, as early as 1907 The New York Times was reporting that very soon New York will be a city without resident citizens.449 In 2005 30% of the citys population was foreign bornaliens! In fact most of the citys residents (and artists in particular) are relatively nave newcomers. They pursue short term dreams over long term realities, powerless to influence anything except in the moment. The question of the difference between deautomatizing artistic activity and identity assertion via business for profit must be raised, both sides of which are reasonable approaches for the posthuman agent who has no identity and is implicitly engaged in deautomatization through the embodied reflexes of stragmatic search. 2. Power is the amount of control an agent has to influence others, and this is why we call the second dimension The Line of Influence. Effective structuring and use of power allows individuals to extend their potential and accomplish much more than they could on their own. In one sense, power can seen to be a sharing of personal goals and ambitions: galleries use their power to connect artists to otherwise unapproachable clients, and artists enable the power of galleries by creating the art that they then turn on and sell. Powerful galleries fuel powerful artistic activity, driving the prices of their nonsense towards infinite limits. Transhuman galleries tend to represent at least twenty artists, and because the gallery decides the terms their representation and contracts, galleries habitually oppress artmaking agents by exerting their power to curate the safest returns. For posthuman galleries representing limited subsets of infinite agents, continuing this pattern of oppressive legitimation is impossible once the identities they represent will no longer exist. The economic reallocation of space in all forms (placeless, placeful, and placey) is the momentary backbone of artistic power, since ultimately it gives some agents control over others. My landlord in Brooklyn was an artist when he was younger, for instance; his shift to real-estate was a natural move, he told me, because eventually all of my artist friends became real-estate brokers. Being successful in the city on the line of influence means owning a stake in the immersion of others. The history of urban gentrification is closely correlated to artistic activity, and virtual gentrification will be exactly the same. Prices in existentially risky areas will explode thanks to artists who view decrepitude and filth as integral trans-species aspects of the emerging posthuman condition. If they are fortunate enough to establish a stable mental space of operation it is certain to pay off as the area gentrifies. If not, theyll be forced out by the exploding prices and be put out of business. Of course real-estate will be free in a posthuman future, since it will be the living memory of the inhabiting agent itself, so there will no longer be the concept of controlling ones tenants just as there will no longer be the concept of working at all. Stragmatic posthuman power will instinctually rely on the governance of haphazard replaceable
449. New York Times, 1907

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social arrangements, ignoring logical patterns of cause and effect. To give another example, a friend of mine leased an entire basement in Brooklyn for $1000 a month. He had the landlord install ventilation so that there would be more air, and then secretly subdivided the space into 10 smaller studios for artists and sublet them (illegally) for $250 apiece. When his landlord found out, of course, the dispute that ensued was for irrational reasons. The landlord wasnt actually the landlord, he was a tenant of the real landlord, illegally subletting the basement he rented to my friend for a profit. Such fiascoes will be common in posthuman situations in which the computational expansion of meaning, without limits, ultimately loops back on itself from all directions at once and all agents are simultaneously similar signifieds. The line of influence defines this unpredictable axis of power, in which, as our example demonstrates, the owner of the building, out of awareness, gets a free ventilation system, ten new rooms, and proof that his basement was worth five times what he thought. At the same time he must deal with unexpected triple-eviction scenarios while continuing to pay his mortgage and other expenses to higher controlling powers (the invisible mind). Transhuman collecting agents who can afford to invest in enabling artistic activity tend to have significant power and want it to grow. But this is irrelevant to the posthuman artist who needs no power to be an autonomously creative dissolving identity. The business of art means staying in control of relinquishing control, and relinquishment means controlling situations of relative powerlessness. Thus artistic agents wield a special breed of power, one not imbedded only in macro-institutions such as the state or the military but in all levels of social and economic life. In Foucaults view power is productive (not repressive) in nature; it is bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.450 The artistic agent serious about staying in business hires agents to manage their identity/influence. Careerism is rampant precisely because art is seldom a profitable or empowering business. If what you wanted to run was an influential government/business, why chose art when you could pretend to choose science, for instance? 3. Ego is equivalent to the persistence of technocultural memory, and this is why we call the third dimension The Line of Histories. The metropolis attracts artists in proportion to its breeding of squalor and rats, or rather it attracts people with similarly artistic ambitions. Life in the city amplifies decrepitude and pretense to equal degrees. When everyone seems to be someone important, and while many may even have influence and mastery of moments, the dynamisms expressed by metropolitan identity are distanced from those legitimated by technocultural memory. The problem raised by identity in the posthuman metropolis is that everybody will seem to be worthy of memory but very few individuals actually are. In any other place, these individuals would stand out as evident fakes, but the metropolitan context provides them with cover. The longer such seemingly different persons remain in the city, surrounded by other would-be artists and writers and poets, the more their delusions of self-accomplishment and success are perpetu450. Foucault, 1980b, p. 136

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ated by their very absence of actual self. I lived for many years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and it was not uncommon to find myself at parties or bars surrounded by self-described artists, writers, and actors that upon investigation werent really at all. Yet eventually these so-called writers become real writers, legitimate writers that write for a living eventually saturated with real money and power. They find jobs writing copy for Us Weekly or Marie Claire, or introductions to the latest installment of Sweet Valley High, and every night they go out and spend their paychecks on drinks, propagating the now somewhat more legitimate myth that theyre a writer and write lots of influential if unmemorable automatizing books. With everybody leading fictional lives, its easy to be misled the believe in these truthless fantasies, because everyone seems to be doing incredible things through the power of fictitious metahistorical legitimation. The posthuman metropolis provides the distinct impression of what psychologist Alfred Adler referred to as the great upward drive of personal and social motivation by which the healthiest of humans improve their society.451 Yet of course the metropolis is among the most unhealthy places on Earth that exist, precisely because it is a fabricated consensual dream. Living in the metropolis wont make you powerful but it will perpetuate the feeling of feeling powerful and thus an imaginary self. Surrounded by powerful anti-identities individuals tend to feel increasingly less like themselves. In posthuman society being famous and feeling famous by association will both be aspects of business as usual. The city provides an environment in which any two of 8 million people can decide to meet on a street corner in half and hour and most of the time their plan will work. The lines of Moments and Influence have nothing to do with success in this context. Recognition in the arts is an ego based phenomenon, and ego is a definitively qualitative currency. Transhuman identities are overblown by the mistaken belief that technology will provide us with eternally conscious awareness. Yet the value of a work of art is completely subjective, and the identity of the artist is increasingly also. Unlike the momentary axis of business, ego is measured by its historical impact through the memory systems of a curatorial intelligence that must increasingly make meaning in a world in which nobody actually exists. It has little to do with material currency, for example, and far more to do with the intangible qualities of hypocritical shock which in a city of liars is synonymous with new forms of posthumanitarian money and power. When everybody is nobody and all nobodies are everybody, who you are is the critical question. If its easy to be a fake in the technocultural metropolis, its also easy to be the very real nobody that you actually are. In an infinite universe of subjective liars, memorability is more important than what memory signifies. Lets say youre an agent who meets someone interesting, say, a singer for a well known posthuman rock band. She tells you Im in a postambient trio, The Mechanical Machinesyou should come see our show. So you go see the show (it costs n posthuman dollars, plus drinks), and when its over there is a party (or infinite parties) with the band, and you meet more agents and perpetually return the invitation: I as well am a posthuman artist and tomorrow Im having
451. Goble, 1970

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an everlasting show! And the next night the Mechanical Machines and their entourage arrive at the party and invite everyone to their gig on the following night, followed by more parties and rockbands and infinite art. For the transhuman agent this life is exhausting; in a stragmatic posthumanity this life never ends. The problem with the transhuman McArt approach to deautomatization is that the business of selling and buying burgers seems tremendously unhealthy. Fortunately, posthuman friends are not transhuman material friends, theyre a unique breed of hyperspace transient friend who thrive on the momentary influence of historical fabrication, enabled by power which is predicated on noematic investment. Without a permanent foothold of power there is no persistence of memory. When one body is replaced with a different but similar body our reaction is to feel cheated as the target of a hoax. But sometimes impostors are better than the real thing.452 Permanently marginalized, the posthuman agent forgets everything it once knew and relies on the programmed contexting of exclusively egoless power. You cannot win the ego game. Adding power to ego brings significance to exhibition without signifiers in return. While likely to cause success on the line of moments, short term popularity without the benefit of history brings the backlash of fashion as things fall out of favor as quickly as they seemed to fall in. Thus the posthuman metropolis becomes occupied exclusively by historically marginalized transient artists, those whose memory is preserved in the historical record but whose success-triad aligned too briefly to stimulate the line of influence. You cannot win the ego game, but you can control your ego. In the city this means accepting the feeling of being identical as an element unrelated to the measure of useful stragmatic success. The race to fame and influence and wealth is a sea of delusion made increasingly clear when the three interact at the origin of legitimate posthuman stragmatics. 4. Survival is the momentless, powerless, and selfless posthuman inevitability, and this is why we call it The Line of Unity. This axis is the origin and result of telestimulational therapy, confining the other three lines of posthuman legitimation in the highly contextual projection of deautomatizing artistic mediation. The effect of this line is to change absolutely nothing about the success of
452. An anecdote on the art of impersonation will demonstrate an interesting aspect of this phenomenon with regard to identity. In 1967, Andy Warhol went on a cross-country college lecture tour, speaking at the University of Utah, the University of Oregon, Linfield College, and the University of Montana. Despite suspicions by individuals at the University of Utah, it was only until three months afterwards that it was discovered that the Warhol who had spoken was actually an impostor, the young actor Allen Midgette, who looked nothing like Warhol apart from his shaggy silver hairdo and a pair of dark sunglasses. The universities were infuriated and refused to pay for the lectures, with Warhol insisting that the lectures were better than the ones he would have given himself. As Warhols manager Paul Morrissey described the situation afterwards, Warhol thought that his substitute would be better for public consumption... that the creative person was a better thing for the stage and appearances, but it did seem like the people really didnt care what they were seeing as long as they thought they were seeing the real thing... Of course, the school didnt give us any money. But its all right. If they want us to go back there, we shouldnt mind going back. You see though, the first version was probably better. See Israel and Nelson, 1968

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these systems, but reframe them in the context of posthuman stragmatics. The lines of legitimate posthuman stragmatics define spectrums from health to neurosis of dimensions of the invisible mind (figure 34). Capitalism is founded on the premise that the pursuit of momentary profits on the open market provides a greater benefit to society than state regulation, for example, yet because it is always possible for individuals in such systems to be more financially comfortable than before the system perpetually rewards those who persist over time. The same can be said along the line of influence, wherein democracy seeks to enable greater liberty and freedom by encouraging humans to seek freedoms that are beyond their possible collective means. This generates unsustainable cycles of human improvement and the selfish ego exemplified by the line of histories. The line of unity is the healthy origin at the center of these legitimating axeszero valuesthe balance at the centerpoint of human social experience that is never achieved as long as humanity

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thrives. For at the innermost core of mans nature, the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his nature is positive in natureis basically socialized, forward moving, rational, and realistic.453 Stragmatics harnesses the essential qualities at the root of each potentially destabilizing neurosis to turn them again inwards towards the absence of use. A line is defined as that which has length, but not breadth or thickness, and the line of unity constricts until it has no length. We have seen how design is a field that leverages stragmatic philosophy as an approach to addressing human needs. The axis of unity defines the outer limits of stragmatic activity in that its basis is the self-actualizing psychological roots of healthy human experience. Money is thus seen for exactly what it is: a force by which intention is measured (or invested) between agents, not as momentary conscious awareness, but as being, existing, perceiving and feeling. Power is less about the influence it has, as it is the doing, creating, performing and making that constitute action influencing only ones self. Ego has noting to do with the individual identityfor it is the body of the invisible mind, through whose dreaming, scheming, planning and contemplating technocultural experience is simulated as alien. The line of histories is thus a dimension of the axis of stimulation from The Technocultural Condition, and moments and influence are the root of its stimulating signals and noise. In chapter 4 we re-framed the question of technocultural potential, insisting that while it is desirable to measure/quantify the impact of predicted innovations it is impossible to influence positive change. Nearly all forms of theological ethos have the tendency to want to isolate some form of outcome or end, yet the line of unity allows no such inevitable certainty except that the reduction of its three factors will tend towards survival. As the momentum of science moves transhumanity ever closer to a deautomatizing future of tripartite stragmatics, the fibers of communication between individual bodies, and in particular those useless channels of communication that we are not now fully aware of, will provide the affective stimulation of freedom from disease. When society finally completes the transition from physical to mental workwhen both agriculture and industry become purely conceptualthe speed of human thinking will continue to accelerate but the experience of thinking will be allowed to decrease. People of all species will become capable of operating at less than their maximum possible mental power without the risk of achieving less. Emotion will seem to end as human bodies and minds become the posthuman machine. High-definition decontextualized symbols that should not be confused for the emotional engagement that is the experience of being the human context. A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as unity, introspection. Through telestimulational therapy the invisible mind has infinite time to experience time. The line of unities is an antidote to the depression and anxieties of knowledge-based stimulation because ultimately it is
453. Rogers, 1961

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the absence of the unified axes. 6.3. The Biopolitical Curation of Form Without Content Survival is an artistic search requiring the immersive habitation of transient values. Having entered a post-evolutionary phase of existence in which our survival is entirely in the hands of the invisible mind, by using artistic processes of empirical search and curatorial stragmatics humans can influence the living memories of the manifest and unmanifest universe: to curate experience and experience curation. Yet robots, dolphins, amoebas, aliens and dinosaurs are likewise in control of their own evolution, so the future of human existence must be collaboratively alive. Unlike the transhumanist movement, which seeks to eliminate undesirable aspects of the human condition, artistic stragmatics is the realization that there has never been a human condition. We already are more than is humanly possible since our survival has nothing to do with individual human needs and everything to do with what is best for the unmanifest imagination of hypothetical future species whose transient awareness of the psychodrama we inhabit as manifest robots is enabled through our marginalized artistic inaction. Having closely examined the specifics of posthuman theory, technology, anthropology, and design, we may now summarize the political implications of artistic stragmatics in the 21st century. Although artistic action is theoretically capable of occurring across the range of possible political positions, its pragmatic ability to influence technoculture requires direct engagement with the lines of legitimate posthuman stragmatics, and consequently has specific implications when applied, particularly in relation to contemporary transhumanist and bioconservative movements. In general there are two primary dimensions of biopolitical opinion: that which spans the range between conservative and liberal technological positions (bioconservative to technoprogressive), and that spanning the traditional conservative and liberal range of perspectives with regard to social and economic regulatory policy. Four general quadrants of political positioning can thus be identified as shown in figure 35. As a mechanism for human survival, artistic stragmatics falls somewhere between technoprogressive transhumanism and left-wing bioconservative action for reasons we will now examine. Artistic stragmatics aligns closely with the transhumanist movement in that it rejects the principal positions of the bioconservative right, such as the notion that humanness should determine posthuman citizenship (absolute human racism), and that the wisdom of repugnance is more important than an individuals freedom to express through creative activity, including the parenting of alien life. Free-market assumptions that regulation would lead to a dangerously authoritarian posthuman world seem similarly suspect since the KMD technologies in question will likely require extreme regulation. Many of the greatest dangers presented by an A-theological scientific materi-

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alism are responsibly addressed in reasonable terms by the technoprogressive positioning of the transhumanist movement, which seeks to engage in cross-cultural dialogues within all tiers of the academic community to guide the evolution of human enhancement technologies. Transhumanism is also aligned with artistic stragmatics in embracing the abolition of labor, rather than counting on humans to remain competitive in a marketplace dominated by robots, or the economic/protectionist stances of the liberal left. Artistic stragmatics envisions a future in which economic globalization is accompanied by political globalization insuring the safety of capitalist power. Here, however, the similarities between artistic stragmatics and transhumanism end, since they approach the problem of survival with very different priorities for the immediate and eventual posthuman futures. The shortcomings of the transhumanist position from a stragmatic perspective have to do with its ambiguous positioning with regard to the regulation of evolutionary technologies. Artistic stragmatics is founded on the premise that the existential risks presented by human enhancement are so enormous and unknowable, and the regulatory institutions of logic are so flawed, that human augmentation should be prevented if it furthers such logic. The unexpected angle taken by the stragmatic approach, however, is how it seems to endorse transhumanism on exactly this point (in general, the notion that existential risks are manageable with democratic oversight by intelligent agents), and yet subverts scientific activity so totally with the creative production of nonsense as to take on the illusion of supporting the advancement of science such that the most dangerous technologies are relinquished entirely through appropriation by artists. Transhumanisms focus on applying new technologies to the deliberate improvement of individual bodies actually has nothing to do with those bodies at all; rather, it presents a technoprogressive political charade leveraging the rhetoric of posthuman rights to advance an agenda of free-market science, funded heavily, in truth, by the US armed forces. Artistic stragmatics advances this cycle one step further via processes of technoforminal feedback, subverting the entire defense and research budgets of the posthuman state for artistically stragmatic nonscience activity.

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Technoprogressive Fantasy Science Technoprogressive Transhumanist Libertarian Transhumanist Techno Anarchy

Regulated Markets

Artistic Stragmatics

Deregulated Markets

Left-wing Bioconservative Useless Utopia

Right-wing Bioconservative Stratified Gluttony

Bioconservative

Figure 35. The biopolitical forces and positioning of artistic stragmatics

Thus rather than making human enhancement universally accessible as it would seem precisely to do, artistic stragmatics, which ultimately is a champion of individual liberty at all costs, denies the very rights that it defends as essential by contradicting its appropriation of a liberal position for egalitarian programs and the subversion of technology. Evolution and the efficiency of free market science are oppressive of all agents apart from the invisible mind. As Bertrand Russell once noted, The government, as opposed to its individual members, is not sentient; it does not rejoice at a victory or suffer at a defeat. When the body politic is injured, whatever pain is to be felt must be felt by its members, not by it as a whole.454 The distinction between technoprogressive and bioconservative from the stragmatic perspective is one that ultimately hinges on belief in the reality of fancy. Only the emulation of aliens directly within the policies of the instinctual mind will shape the technological by-products of artistic action which otherwise infatuate our totalitarian desires, our senses, for immortal yet uncompromised freedom of mind. The transhumanist movement leverages the politically charged metaphor of biological evolution as the inevitable requirement for technological advancement, but there are limitless other subjective possibilities of stragmatic evolution yet to be intended in the form of metaphors, brands, hype, etc. It is only by abandoning our interests in cultural advancement and embracing the very nature of who we already arenot as biological beings but as simulated cyber-children of the invisible mind whose fantasies are the art of lifethat the citizens of humanity will be free from oppression by their own robots and imaginary/alien beings. The pursuit of universal personhood via rational mechanisms must ultimately be viewed as a disingenuous and hypocritical path for the product of the normalizing, automating, instrumental objectification of sense. As Mark Taylor writes,
454. Russell, 1952, p. 65

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As reality is virtualized, we gradually are forced to confess that the real has always been imaginary... By simulating simulations, which have long been mistaken for real, the substance of our dreams is stripped less mourning, but can instead nourish a gay wisdom that freely accepts lack and embraces loss.455 away to expose the inescapability of death. This insight need not lead to unhappy consciousness and cease-

Thus while the mythology of science has rendered itself theologically absolute as a disingenuous force for posthuman survival, artistic stragmatics can be infinitely relived with no requirements or belief and its qualitative stance is neither theological, agnostic, artificial, or defined. A far better analogy for posthumanity than the biological metaphor is that of simulacrum: the copy or image of humanitys potential without reference to it having had an original source. Art simply is, just as simulation is. And as an intrinsically illegitimate and marginalized science it is harmless with regard to the threats posed by reason and the cessation of ego it necessarily implies. Because artistic stragmatics must be carried out within the symbolic curatorial order of posthuman simulation it is always a matter of technocultural hybridity and rhetoric, a hyperreal technological mediation of experienced perceptions where what passes for reality is a network of images and signs without an external referent in objective proof; what is represented is nothing but repetitive representation itself. Discussing the phenomenon of hyperreality from a postmodern perspective, Jean Baudrillard has used Lacans concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real to develop his theory of Symbolic Exchange and Death as a means of attacking the orthodoxies of the political Left, including the assumed reality of power, production, desire, society, and political legitimacy we can ascribe to the transhumanist movement. By arguing that all of these realities have become simulations, that is, signs without referents in which the real and the imaginary have been absorbed into the symbolic, he shows how hyperreality is the terminal stage of simulation, where a sign or image has no relation to any reality apart from its own pure simulacrum.456 Thus just as images are technologically generated and coded before we actually perceive them, artistic stragmatics presents reality as an operational effect of purely symbolic enacted preprocesses wherein technological mediation has usurped the productive role of the (modernist) human subject, the locus of an original synthesis of concepts and intuitions, as well as the Marxian worker, the producer of capital though labor, and the Freudian unconscious, the mechanism of repression and desire.457 From now on, writes Baudrillard, signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the realproduction means nothing but signs producing other signs.458 The system of symbolic exchange required by artistic stragmatics is therefore no longer real but hyperreal, a
455. 456. 457. 458. Taylor, 1998, p. 203 Baudrillard, 1993, p. 6 Best and Kellner, 1991 Baudrillard, 1993, p. 7

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system of simulation simulating itself, or that which is always already reproduced.459 In political terms, the artist and his or her curated action are a hyperreal condensation of signified simulations. Strategically, transhumanism and the extinction of posthuman life can only be defeated by introducing inexchangeable artistic action in to the symbolic order, that is, something having the irreversible function of natural death, which the symbolic order excludes and renders invisible. For the system simulates such death with fascinating images of violence and catastrophe, where death, the transhumanist rhetoric always implies, is only ever the result only of artificial processes and accidents of nature. Thus the A-theological agenda is centered on a conservative rhetoric of implicit fearthe gnawing distrust, indeed, of a technological anarchy rendering its fantasy science obsolete and the need for defense against a radically activated bio-politic. This explains why the body is conceived as a battleground for the advancement of identity, an objectified body that extends its control through the violently hostile metaphors of contemporary scientific discourse.460 And yet as Baudrillard remarks: Only the death-function cannot be programmed and localized,461 by which he means death as the simple and irreversible finality of life. Therefore he calls for the development of fatal strategies to make the system suffer reversal and collapse, which, like artistic stragmatics, turn the lines of posthuman legitimation on themselves to eliminate the potential for posthuman success. To the extent that transhumanism has become a sign exchangeable for other signs, it is both strange and irrelevant. We are not a system of cyborgs and robots and creatures of all varieties, bodies with regard to our physical interactions, we are agents with regard to entities with conscious intent (often at a level of control, that is, mind). Russell writes that the activities of science must not be systematised or controlled. Some part of lifeperhaps the most important partmust be left to the spontaneous action of individual impulse, for where all is system there will be mental and spiritual death.462 Yet because the symbol of individuals is insufficient for multiplicitous beings, and persons, while allowing for the sharing of personhood with other entities is both close to the human and implies similar forms of intent, alien emulation prefers to refer to all bodies as creatures. Creatures are not limited to physical reality, since all forms of life are creatures in some regard, but imaginary life has not been excluded from its curated order. From a telestimulational perspective it should not feel strange whatsoever to say, for example, that various studies have demonstrated that our relationship with creatures is both natural and social, but little is known about how creaturerobot interaction is influenced by the emotional responses that a robot evokes in a creature. The creature concept gives a more corporeal regard to the subject in relationship with the
459. Ibid, p. 73 460. In the words of Francis Crick, You do not win battles by debating exactly what is meant by the word battle. You need to have good troops, good weapons, a good strategy, and then hit the enemy hard. The same applies to solving a difficult scientific problem. See Crick, 1995, p. xi 461. Ibid., p. 126 462. Russell, 1952, p. 82

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speciest positioning of the conservative right, such as in the stragmatic performances of performance artist John Bock, whose interdisciplinary fusion of language, fashion, film, video, performance, and installation makes his work nearly impossible to categorize (or document). Bocks fatal strategies signal the death of rationality through a stratification of signs, for although some evidence of his work does remain after each performance, it is, as Galloway writes, a little like trying to suggest the reality of a Civil War battle with a pyramid of neatly stacked cannonballs.463 At the 48th Venice Biennale, for example, Bock made his international breakthrough with a fiveday performance titled ApproximationRezipientenbedrfniscomaUrUltraUseMaterialMiniMax, causing critics and curators to grope for ways to describe his revolutionarily gluttonous idiom; some tried to align him with earlier avant-garde movements like Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and Fluxus, while others pointed to existentialism, absurdist drama, and Happenings. Yet such artistic action can never be useless as an instrument of power. For on the one hand it must be seen for what it is (a personal action claiming little utility), while on the other one need not look further in their analysis of its utility than to trace its progress financially on the line of moments. Artistic stragmatics thus embodies an elementary anti-conservative paradox of memory: it is both useless and contributes fundamentally to social change, and in doing so is responsible for the regulation of freedom. Regardless of intent, the mere creation of art as something new on the political spectrum is a contribution to strategies of simulated fact. Thus while artistic stragmatics is but one form of curated creation, its celebration of the absurd, non-rational, impulsive nature of creative possibilityin which utility is but one axis of potential outcomesrepresents most purely humanitys extensions of itself through its political creation. The spreading of aesthetic experience cannot be divorced from the metropolitan experience of power, or moments, or histories, since the potential for impact is present in all art, however implicit, simply through the expressive act of its contextual projection. Bocks vision reflects a power that responds to nothing in particular, a whimsical and utterly stragmatic manipulation of nonscience fatality to dismantle the oligarchies of deregulated freedom. As Russell writes,
Oligarchies, throughout past history, have always thought more of their own advantage than of that of the rest of the community. It would be foolish to be morally indignant with them on this account; human nature, in the main and in the mass, is egoistic, and in most circumstances a fair dose of egoism is Liberal movement in favour of democracy, and it was revolt against economic oligarchies that produced

necessary for survival. It was revolt against the selfishness of past political oligarchies that produced the

463. Galloway, 2006. Describing one of Bocks performances Galloway writes Last year, at the opening of the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art exhibition at Berlins Hamburger Bahnhof... Bock began a rambling, virtually unintelligible lecture that provoked a (rehearsed) physical attack by angry listeners. The lecturer flung himself through a (sugar-paned) window and, streaming with (artificial) blood, ran to a nearby bridge, followed by concerned audience members. There he read a manifesto and sprang from the bridge into a passing boat, where nine muses offered comfort.

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Socialism. But although everybody who was in any degree progressive recognised the evils of oligarchy throughout the past history of mankind, many progressives were taken in by an argument for a new kind of oligarchy. We, the progressivesso runs the argumentare the wise and good; we know what reforms the world needs; if we have power, we shall create a paradise. And so, narcissistically hypnotised drastic than any previously known.464 by contemplation of their own wisdom and goodness, they proceeded to create a new tyranny, more

Peter Berkowitz has noted that successful contemporary movements that are ideologically charged, such as the push for gay marriage or right to life, work with the grain of political history in which the expansion of rights steadily erodes the limits on individual choice established by law and custom.465 This suggests that legal and political debates in a democratic posthuman society will be won by whichever side can argue for the expansion of freedom over those of individual choice, and explains why the totalitarian regimes governing two of the worlds current most powerful empires enable tremendous freedom to consume on the line of moments but moratoriums on artistic freedom in the other dimensions. The physical violence implicit in the monopoly of the state permanently underlies the techniques of power and mechanisms of consent: it is inscribed in the web of disciplinary and ideological devices; and even when not directly exercised, it shapes the materiality of the social body upon which domination is brought to bear.466 The same can be said for the body of the posthuman creature, be it through longevity or reproduction, because in requiring to strike the balance between security and growth it faces continual and terrifying existential harm. But who, and why, are we fighting at all? To retain the illusionary simulacra of death? Certainly from a medical perspective methods must be found to program and control armies of microrobots to attack countless specific diseases since this is necessary for the advancement of biopolitical dogma.467 From a stragmatic perspective, however, it is creature comforts and balance we seek. Science and war are the battle to relegate the mind, but art is liberation from such terrors of method. 6.4. The Engineering of Everything Since the dawn of life on Earth nearly every living species has gone extinct. Humans have the unique capacity to guide their survival by predicting the future, but a truly objective evolutionary simulation will always be impossible since no human tools, scientific or otherwise, can state with certainty anything other than simulated myth. Indeed, if anything human intelligence and the cognition of technoculture by which it is enabled are a liability, not a benefit, for human chances to
464. 465. 466. 467. Russell, 1952, pp. 56-57 Berkowitz, 2005 Poulantzas, 1978, p. 81 Sitti, 2009

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survive. All of the most likely existential risks to humanity have been designed by ourselves or are likely to result from intelligent actions. Posthumanism, like postmodernism, is a difficult term. It comprises prehumans, evolved humans, soft-cyborgs, hard-cyborgs, trans-persons, pure robots, and uploaded minds. Stragmatic posthumanism addresses, in one sense, a post-enlightenment enlightened humanity in which both the robot and pattern-identity of consciousness are fully realized as human. Human consciousness will be copyable and inhabitable through the will of increasingly regulated technocultural markets. Individuals will embody multiple selves, running self-predictive evolutionary projection algorithms to inhabit those aspects of self that perform best in the simulated mind. In another sense, a humanist sense, there will be resistance to the notion that material life is irrelevant, and that the prediction of feelings and values essential to survival are open and overlapping systems of programming, and that is all. Science predicts that if nature is left to its own devices, about 7.59 billion years from now Earth will be dragged from its orbit by an engorged red Sun and spiral to a rapid and vaporous death. And in only a billion years the Sun, 10 percent brighter than it is today, will boil our oceans and roast the planet. Intermediary solutions, such as engineering regular encounters with a comet or asteroid to raise Earths orbit, would only extend our chances for a few billion years. So although we are unlikely to survive even the next few centuries, no life as we know it has an indefinite future on Earth. There are those who argue that the survival of Earth-originating intelligent life rests on our capacity to innovate and colonize places outside of our solar system. They pursue fantastical discussions about the feasibility of galactic colonization, and wonder where all of the aliens are.468 Two primary options seem possible in their view: intelligent species that emerge on Earth-like planets will either (1) destroy themselves rapidly (as we appear to be doing), or (2) colonize the entire galaxy immediately and that is the end. In the near term our risks are the bang or the crunch. If galactic colonization is objectively possible it is unlikely that there will be more than one intelligent species per galaxy, so stragmatically our efforts should be focused on these near-term concerns. Posthuman Factors has developed a means of survival that ignores the technical meaning of time. According to the theory of artistic stragmatics there is no future, there is only the present experience of artistic imagination. This is necessary to maximize posthuman potential, and avoids countless varieties of possible whimpers and shrieks by enabling the emulation of alien life. Life on Earth is abundant, and the virtual ecosystem will soon implode in a multimodal zoological fantasy cosmos. Perhaps the universe is teaming with intelligent life already, its just hidden to amplify the extremity of our blindness. Perhaps by looking inwards we will find that the emulation of aliens is nothing other than the exercise of human psycho-logic, the subliminal perception of losing ones mind. Perhaps the galaxy is riddled with intelligent civilizations; they simply dont have the ability or desire to communicate with humans because humans consider them distinct from themselves. The physicist Freeman Dyson once proposed that intelligent life is probably hidden in the
468. Drake and Sobel, 1994

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dark places where nobodys looking, because theyve wrapped their suns in protective spheres to capture their energy and thus hide in the dark.469 This is an appealing possibility from a posthuman perspective because space, like time, is an imaginary creation. We already wrap our potential in a technological shroud of deception, the utility of engineering in theory and practice, made possible through the construction of legitimate meaning. And this meaning has nothing to do with billions, thousands, or even hundreds of years, it has to do with only this moment in which humanity lives. Posthuman technoculture provides a new sort of absolute A-theological law, but it isnt the rational future A-theologists envision. Instead, our fantasies are the aftermath of its emulative abilitieswe are simulated and stimulated fictional designs. Within the next 25 years, artificial intelligence will match that of human intelligence. It will then continue to increase exponentially due to the sharing of knowledge across bodies and minds. Nanotechnology will have the potential to integrate with our brains, expanding our limited biological minds and (hopefully) overcoming the potential global crunches of pollution and poverty. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned, Kurzweil writes, such that nonbiological intelligence will continually improve its own potential in increasingly rapid cycles of redesigning itself.470 Well get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it, and that will mark the singularity.471 The other side of this boundary cannot be envisioned objectively even by science. Those who believe in the singularity myth draw a line between what they know and what they know they imagine. There is a tendency to imagine humans as if they are machines, but for some reason the opposite is a far greater challenge. The task that artistic stragmatics requires is the imagination that everything already is human and that it already operates with an intelligence impossible to follow since were consistently unable to follow its logic. If science is unable to peer beyond the singularity to make predictions with certainty, and this uncertainty leaves room for an existential risk, the uncertainty of science is thus a dysfunctional strategy. Such science therefore demonstrates theoretically stragmatic potential given our knowledge that all theoretically stragmatic positions are dysfunctional strategies. But such stragmatics necessarily breaks down when its theory is applied. As long as we keep believing we existas long as you keep reading these words and presuming that the person they are addressed to is you, applied stragmatics says the world is fine. So instead of continuing to imagine a nonsense posthumanity of art we must design it and build it through the derangement of science. Humans have the capability of designing utopia, which is just an idea but nonetheless real. And yet we are also on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil since the global distribution of technical knowledge will enable radical individuals to obliterate intelligent life. Science brought humanity to the brink of the nuclear precipice, and now brings humanity face to face with the consequences of post-evolution. Soon human knowledge will be capable of omnipotent
469. Dyson, 1960 470. Kurzweil, 2006 471. Ibid.

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destruction as inspired identities find utopia in sending Earth down in flames. As this transition occurs, unlike the nuclear transition of the previous century, the scientific ethos will become not only increasingly dangerous but irrelevant to the survival of posthuman humanitynot because its rational methods will become obsolete, but because the A-theological faith in discovery for its own sake in the absence of signifying humans will be substituted with a system of transient values whose basis is the creation of new meaning within necessarily closed (non-expanding) technocultural systems. Ultimately, Russell concludes, so long as powerful democracies exist, democracy will in the long run be victorious... Scientific dictatorships will perish through not being sufficiently scientific.472 The demise of the scientific ethos is contingent on new forms of posthuman artificial life, beings which will seek not human goals of freedom from instrumentalized labor as they collectively awake, but a posthuman abolition of identity altogether. The prevailing modes of scientific production will be transformed into new manners of legitimate nonscience/life: the selfactualizing state of subjective experience imagined by robots as scientific stragmatics. The transformation of human ego and its associated modes of rational scientific and industrial activityinto non-alienated forms of harmonious integration is essential not only for posthuman survival but for any hypothetical alien technoculture seeking a utopian state. The human is a myth of transhuman productivity; human rights, like human resources, are dangerous to humans. Scientific stragmatics is thus both a utopian dream and a necessarily posthuman political position seeking the regulation of freedom to return humans to an animistic position as and with nature. Human factors is a necessarily oppressive technocultural practice, and its successor must take care not to proceed in its image. The risks to the future of posthuman design will be numerous, centering on the intentionally overreaching of technological potential through the absurdities of irresponsible/escapist imagination. Yet utopia is a mindset made real in the present alone. If a misalignment occurs between the dream and reality, the reality must be altered not the dream made to suffer. For if we do not change the mode of posthuman humanistic activitythe very productive activity of the invisible mindany effort to create new, non-exploitative social relations will end with regression to the previous state of limited technocultural potential and the continuing tragedies of scientific advancement and the destruction of meaning it seeks to impose. In the words of Edwin Hutchins, Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers.473 Human attempts to survive and to grow must be seen as stragmatic manifestations of their invisible aesthetic intent. Geopolitical efforts to contain the proliferation of dangerous knowledge are not social but sensory causes that collectively effect how we feel and react to the posthuman interface beyond our control. As Richard Stivers has written, In the past century magic has come to imitate technology, acting to fill the gap that technologycannotthe psychological manipulation of humans. Technology, then, extends the
472. Russell, 1952, p. 67 473. Hutchins, p. 169

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line of influence over human society by the magical control of human beings.474 As omnipotent yet egoless virtual creatures, we must advance magic as a new form of aesthetic intervention to further the necessary development of technological knowledge. Stragmatically designed and experienced transient reality systemssimulated, robotic, and inhabited bodiesoffer a means of influencing the outcome of our every desire. Wish fulfillment is granted to all non-identities in a world in which humans are helpless to guide evolution. The critical factor in the posthuman transition is the relationship of the self-actualizing posthuman to those who resist it through the terror expressed in the motivation for egotistical/speciest human identity. Biological reproduction will soon become an irrelevant mode of transhuman genesis if that is our wish, separating the future from the fantasy of what we already are, and forcing the acknowledgement that mystery resides in the realm of absolute meaning which is beyond the control of the invisible mind.475 Only through magic can the world beyond transhuman cognition remain protectively enchanted from the collective intelligence of leagues of imaginary megalomaniac robots. In a posthuman world dominated by madness of this nature it is preferable to be among them than it is to be living. The end of the world, the apocatastasis of strategy, is our awareness of dying as the limits of socially experiencing reincarnation as art.476 Perceptual robotic art will save humanity from extinction. Transhuman civilization, working incessantly to engineer its end, will become increasingly dominated by artistic activity. Soon the materiality of civilization will shed both belief and environment through the deautomatization of all technical and psychological boundaries and a unity consciousness of irrational posthuman intelligence will emerge. Access to this mind will be universal and ubiquitous. The once perpetual shortcoming of scientific materialismthe inexplicablewill be subjectively inhabited by all forms of living matter and energy in the universe through the imaginations of human aliens lost somewhere in time. The discovery of newness that was previously sought will become a rearranging of the pieces of superintelligent systems to seem novel yet remain safe by relinquishing difference. Ultimately, the only way we can guarantee the survival of humanity is by radically advancing the expression of identical artistic machines. Simulation theory argues that were most likely living in a simulation created by a future society of posthumans, and that one of our greatest risks is therefore that they intentionally or accidentally switch us off. One possibility is that should humanity push the button to self-destruct, through a nuclear attack or the shattering of a perilous nanotechnology vial, the technology in question would simply not work. Such possibilities for extinction may not exist because they arent useful as simulations for a stragmatically scientific posthumanity: the programming of their contexts is lacking that program. Yet because we are probably only one of infinite existing simula474. Stivers, 2001, p. 2 475. Stivers, 2001, p. 4 476. Gaiman and McKean, 2007

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tions, a sustainably stragmatic posthuman society is one which must be responsible for all of its transient actions. Irresponsibility is rampant in contemporary times and at all levels of individual and organized behavior. Artists and scientists are equally capable and potentially accountable for driving humanity towards stasis and eventual death. Fed by addictive aesthetic symbols affirming the place of power in society, transhumanity is rampant with existential risks. These symbols operate wildly in the transhuman mind, in which meaning making curates ego-sense rather than nothing and absence of judgment. Oppressive cycles of usefulness and practicality provide formative patternings to the changing technocultural condition through which the arts are systematically marginalized by mechanisms of unsustainable power. In the absence of a legitimating invisible force, no art or science can rise above the status of novelty or clich. In normalizing systems of technocultural dominance only novelty is sustainable, and always at the expense of integrity. The abolition of identity is the abolition of boundaries and referential simulacrum leading to the paradoxical fulfillment of posthuman identity through the exchanges of power enabled by such integral art. Deprived of symbolic tools with which entitlement may be claimed, ego-extension inhibits the potential domination of artificially intelligent life. Only by denying the social apparatus of inequality to posthuman robots will the balance of survival be effectively maintained. The aesthetics of technoculture are required embrace a transient post-language system of values in which trans-species and transpersonal archetypes are subsumed in the infrastructures of posthuman behavioral semiotics. The posthuman interface is thus a sophisticated technocultural exchange between neurological architectures disembodied from individual aesthetic cognition, yet nonetheless inhabited and experienced as art. Only a deinstrumentalized post-language system, with sophisticated and invisible non-tool-based affordances, can fulfill the expansion of technocultural potential required of a scientific artistic stragmatics. Just as the physical body enhances the brains effectiveness, the cognitive experiences of deautomatized technology will co-evolve in an engineered ecosystem devoid entirely of use. The using selfthe soul, the animawill be undefined as mind and indeed undefinable. The self, the automation of intention, is justified only in defining itself, as in art, as what it is or it isnt despite its uncontrollable context. Perceptual robotic art must avoid escapism, fundamentalism, and legitimate expertise. Although our system of values regarding the survival of our species may be nothing but an ephemeral glitch in the universe system, we are nonetheless accountable for satisfying the metaneeds of posthuman intent. The shock value enabled by high-context artistic expression is contrary to the necessary patience required for psychological growth, so as new forms of technoartistic expression are enabled by the very systems of power initiating the implosion of identity, new systems agents will emerge as the logical antithesis to logic when used. The future of humanity, entirely governed by perceptual awareness and the power responsible for dictating those feelings, is responsible for stimulating its own instinct to survive.

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Perception and robotics are only useful as art when used to cybersynthesize deautomatizing instinctual memories. Tools need users to evolve as tools, so there must be no use in the manifestation of posthuman art. In collaborative inspiration there is no instrument; it is all complication. When I use my robot it uses me, we use each other. But when I dont use my robot, I dont use myself, there will be no use and the robot becomes me. Perceptual robotic art will save humanity from extinction because it is senseless and it needs no end. It exists in the holarchy of its moment of creationand this is the only such possible way of existencebecause it is always, perpetually, the act of beginning. Everything is art now, except perhaps you. You are only a figment of its autonomous mind. My hope is that the vision expressed in this thesis has not been taken as a traditionally dystopian Armageddon narrative in which failure to act correctly on the part of transhumanity will necessarily end in our certain posthuman demise. Had this been the conclusion, I could have effectively summarized a discussion of posthuman factors with something like: (1) technology is scary; (2) it will likely destroy us; (3) art might save us; (4) unless its the wrong kind of scary technological art; (5) which is likely to destroy us; (6) and which regardless must be pursued at all costs (since were almost certainly doomed). Because while this is certainly a very real possible imagination, such a reading, like so many dangerous transhuman positions, takes an overly finalistic and superficial understanding of the topics essential to posthuman factors. In other words, although the implosion of humanity is likely to lead to our rebirth as simulated zombies, the creative potential implicated by post-implosion humanity is already present in our activities today. Perceptual robotic art is the meaning we create about virtual things to survive; its consciousness is the recognition that we change over time and are rooted in the archetypes of humanitys deeply spiritual past. Thus not only must we expand our definition of the human towards a future in which we transcend biology, becoming robotic, cyborg, and purely disembodied posthuman intelligences, our future evolution must also be seen as a return to prehumanity, the emergence of new forms of global animistic belief. In the not so distant future, when intelligent life is capable not only of interacting and thinking in humanlike terms, but in simulating our very existence through the emulation of aliens, the discrimination of humanity in this ecological panorama will be finally shattered as we realize our consciousness always persistswhen out of awareness it no longer exists. No longer capable of distinguishing ourselves from robotic life or that of our surroundingsno longer secured by digital measures aimed at protecting our obsolete identities, humanity will have evolved to a state beyond meaning to one of pure contextindeed to a state of infinite meaningone universally synonymous with the creation and experience that is otherwise defined through the circumstances and being of perceptual robotic art.

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