VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL

MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE:

Toward a Quantum Media Model (Transcript)
Philip Pocock

(A video Skype session between Berlin and Video Pool, Winnipeg,

Canada, May 2012, and subsequent insertions.)
Ive threaded some voices of the people involved: Vilm Flusser,
Marshall McLuhan, Erwin Schrdinger, Werner Heisenberg, Albert
Einstein, and Niels Bohr and assembled inklings of a proposal, an informal one, for a Quantum Media Model, a poetic, art-world equivalent to the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics.
Trouble is that no one, not even theoretical physicists claim to
have a complete understanding of quantum theory. Quantum mechanics great communicator, Niels Bohr, himself lamented: If thinking
about the quantum theory doesnt make you dizzy [schwindlig], then
you havent understood it. That makes it all the more fun to think
about as an access point to gain understanding into the entanglement
of consciousness and computation in contemporary social media and
the future of video.
Erwin Schrdinger demonstrated in 1926 that quantum mechanics
is valid if a light quantum (photon) is considered to be a wave instead of
a particle. His contribution in this regard was a three-dimensional wave
equation. As opposed to the other proponent of quantum mechanics,
Werner Heisenberg, whose abstruse matrix mathematics rendered the
physics abstract and unvisualizable, Schrdinger was doggedly convinced that physics must remain imaginable in the minds eye, visualizable in the Newtonian tradition. Einstein agreed.

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MCLUHAN & FLUSSERS COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED

Werner Heisenberg, who had already put his quantum mechanics stock in probability rather than visuality as a means to model our
subatomic world, chastised Schrdinger immediately for his classical
Newtonian view of physics. Instead of picturing that world, Heisenberg
preferred to calculate its possibilities with matrix mechanics, a matrix
being an arrangement of numerical values or other mathematical objects represented in two-dimensional tabular form.
Its easier to make this comparison if I construct a dialogue between
Schrdinger and Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein, assembled in large
part from Louisa Gilders remarkable book The Age of Entanglement
(2009). At times, these protagonists seem to contradict themselves, and
a dazzling obscurity envelops our understanding of things quantum:
Heisenberg: The electron and the atom do not possess any degree
of physical reality, as objects of daily experience.
Bohr: Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. A physicist is just an atoms way of looking at itself.
Schrdinger: Of course, the introduction of the observer must not
be misunderstood to suggest that some kind of subjective features are
to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather,
only the function of registering decisions, i.e., processes in space and
time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or
a human being.
Einstein: But you [Heisenberg] dont seriously believe that only observable quantities should be considered in a physical theory.
Schrdinger: An atom in reality is merely the diffraction halo of
an electron wave.
Bohr: When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as in poetry.
Schrdinger: The funny thing was a German called Heisenberg
with the help of my friend Max Born had come up with a theory half
a year before me. I knew of his theory, of course, but felt discouraged,
not to say repelled, by the methods of transcendental algebra, which
appeared difficult to me, and by the lack of visualizability.

VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE

Bohr: Schrdinger, I think you are far too wedded to pictorial ways
of thinking.
Heisenberg: The more I think about the physical portion of
Schrdingers theory, the more repulsive I find it. What Schrdinger
writes about the visualizability of his theory is probably not quite right,
in other words, its crap.
Bohr: (paraphrased by Heisenberg) Quantum theory provides us with
a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables. In this
case, the images and parables are by and large the classical concepts,
wave and corpuscle. They do not fully describe the real.
Schrdinger: He [Bohr] is completely convinced that any understanding in the usual sense of the word is impossible. Therefore the
conversation is almost immediately driven into philosophical questions.
Bohr: The very existence of quantum entails the necessity of a renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of
our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.
Heisenberg: Words can only describe things of which we can form
mental pictures. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation, and it has been possible to invent mathematical terms. For
visualization, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete
analogies the wave picture and the corpuscular picture.
Einstein: (to his best friend Michele Besso) Heisenberg has laid a
huge quantum egg. A real sorcerers multiplication table, in which
infinite numbers replace the Cartesian coordinates.
Heisenberg: I believe that one can formulate the emergence of the
classical path of a particle as follows: the path comes in to being only
because we observe it.
Schrdinger: His [Heisenbergs] theory had no space and time
within the atom. I dont know what that means! And because of the,
to me, very difficult-appearing methods of transcendental algebra much

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FIGURE 1 UNMOVIE video server Python script

VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE

harder than what were doing here and because of the lack of vividness
(Anschaulichkeit) I felt deterred by it, if not to say repelled.
Heisenberg: It could be like you are watching a film, and often the
transition from one picture to another does not occur suddenly the
first picture becomes slowly weaker while the second becomes stronger,
so that in an intermediate state we do not know which picture is intended. In the atom too, a situation could arise in which for a time
we just do not know what quantum state the electron is in.
Schrdinger: There is nothing new in the postulate that in the end
exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what
can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we
shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about
the real nature of the world.
Einstein: (to Schrdinger) You are the only person with whom I am
actually willing to come to terms. Almost all the other fellows do
not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts;
they cannot get out of the network of already accepted concepts; instead, they only wriggle about inside.
Heisenberg: What the word wave and particle means, one no longer
knows there are too many classical words for the quantum world.
Einstein: Dont you see, Heisenberg? It is theory which first determines what can be observed.
Heisenberg: We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Bohr: Heisenberg, the nicest mathematical scheme in the world wont
solve the paradoxes we are up against. Classical words like wave and
particle are all we have. This paradox is central.
Heisenbergs denigration of the role of the visual in quantum theory is
based upon his Uncertainty Principle that states that the position and
speed of a particle cannot both be known to an observer (human or machine) at the same time. The measurement (observation) of a particles

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FIGURE 2 UNMOVIE (BubbleCam)

VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE

position necessarily disturbs its momentum (speed) and vice versa. Its
analogous to observing a fast moving object. Either the measuring device (the eye or camera) pans in sync with the motion and pinpoints
the objects position, or it doesnt and all the observation does is register a blur, a measure of the objects speed. Neither a camera nor an
observer can measure both realities at once.
One might argue that at the macro level of everyday existence, the
level at which life is lived, unvisualizable quantum theory seems like
a clever solution, but whats the problem? The same might be said of
media philosophy: the virtual and the actual, consumption and production, interactive and interreactive, databanks and databases, presences
and absence, avatars and identity, bits and atoms, and so on. Quantum
invisibility presents a paradox illustrated by the Schrdingers Cat
thought experiment, intended as a critique of Heisenbergs obscure matrix approach to quantum theory, the result of which reads like a Wild
West bill: Cat Wanted: Dead AND Alive. Parallel paradoxes abound
in social media. Is a Facebook profile a virtual death mask posted to
screens AND a real world diary accessible to the powers-that-be? Is a 3D
metaverse, a virtual world, a pixilated necropolis inhabited by tribes of
zombies AND a laboratory space for modeling real word (RL) identity?
Common sense aside, quantum theory, its codes and provisions
ask, as Jacques Derrida does, what comes before the question? Im going to play a couple of very short quantum theory clips that Ive culled
from YouTube. Theyre wonderfully spacey, and each runs about 2030 seconds. If one enters transcoding mode and thinks social media,
then quantum parallels abound. Then the speakers in these clips begin
to take on both a Flusserian and McLuhanesque hybrid character. Let
me know if Skype lets you see these videos over there.
[Skype video of Schrdingers Cat novelist Robert Anton Wilson plays.]
All physical matter, everything we have around us is the result of a frequency. And what that also means is that if you amplify the frequency,
the structure of matter will change.
Ok, so thats a little bit about the more contemporary cosmology of
quantum physics, namely, superstring theory, which the rock star of
contemporary physics Brian Greene describes as a search for what

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FIGURE 3 UNMOVIE (Fountain Image)

VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE

stuff is made of. As a superstring theorist, he believes that subatomic

particles are not the basic building blocks of matter, and that inside
all of these particles and subparticles, you end up with a frequency
or a superposition of frequencies that may be shared, entangled with
other particles and subparticles anywhere in the universe, or in one
of countless parallel universes. Does that mean that matter is made
of sound, so to speak? Is mass a force produced by immaterial vibrations? Sounds like art and rings like McLuhans notion that we are
naturally immersed in acoustic space, and that we were for a time banished from this continuum with the arrival of the phonetic alphabet
that transformed our ears into eyes, and which is now dissolving in
the electric age, re-immersing us again in an artificially ubiquitous and
deeply resonating environment. I cant help but thinking of ubiquitous
social media such as Twitter and Montreals ident.ca.
McLuhan: Electric information is always lacking in visual connectedness and always structured by resonant intervals.
Flusser: Everything aesthetic begins as a terrifying enormous noise
(big bang), and as it grows more habitual (redundant) it ends in a
quiet whisper (whimper).
[Skype video of Robert Anton Wilson continues.]
The modified Copenhagen view is that light is neither waves nor particles until we look, and the things adjust themselves depending on
what were looking at and what with. An electron is not anywhere until we look, and when we look the electron decides to be somewhere
as long as were looking; as soon as we stop looking the electron is
everywhere again.
Ok, one last short clip, this one from Michio Kaku:
[Skype video plays.]
In other words, the electron is a point particle, but you dont know
quite where it is, and the probability of finding it at any given point is
given by a wave, the Schrdinger wave. So we have this beautiful synthesis of waves and particles.

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The cult novelist Wilson accents the Zen far-outness artists prefer to
read into quantum theory (as Schrdinger did later in life), while the
physics professor Kaku compliments that spirit with a succinct, downto-earth take on the wave/particle duality in quantum physics. Both
pay homage to the reconciliatory stance Bohr took in his Copenhagen
Interpretation of quantum mechanics in which light is considered to
have a dual wave/particle nature. I remember my high school physics teacher joking with us that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays
light is a particle, and the rest of the week its a wave.
The wave/particle complementarity Bohr brought to quantum mechanics some physicists deem positivistic, others diplomatic, and everyone incomplete. Nonetheless it can be seen to cohere with what might
be advanced as the basis for a quantum theory for electric media pooling the dual mediologies of McLuhan, who tends towards Schrdingers
more Pop position (wave) and Flusser, tending toward Heisenbergs
more phenomenological position (matrix). Perhaps one day media
artists and theoreticians will speak of a Winnipeg Interpretation of
Quantum Media !
Let me improvise an imaginary script with our Prairie pundit
McLuhan and the Czech exile Flusser to juxtapose their quantum-related
ideas, as well as their kinship to Schrdinger and Heisenberg respectively:
McLuhan: The revolution that de Broglie [Schrdingers muse] describes is a derivative not of the alphabet but of the telegraph and of
radio.
Flusser: Behind the keyboard, on which they hit, is a swarm of particles. And this swarm is a field of possibilities, which can be realized.
McLuhan: Electric speed is approximately the speed of light, and this
constitutes an information environment that has basically an acoustic structure. You are drawn into that [TV] tube, as an inner trip.
Youre totally involved. You have no objectivity, no distance. And it is
acoustic. It resonates.
Flusser: Mere observation of an object by a subject may change the
object. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the praxis of ethnology are merely two among many examples.

VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE

McLuhan: Modern physics abandons the specialized visual space of

Descartes and Newton, and re-enters the subtle auditory space of the
non-literate world.
Flusser: The TV program is the result of scientific theories (texts)
it needs texts (for instance, telegrams) for it to function. The new types
of images are best called techno-images. Imagine culture as a gigantic transcoder from text into image. It will be a sort of black box
(news about events, theoretical comments about them, scientific papers, poetry, philosophical speculations), and they will come out again
as images (films, TV programs, photographic pictures): which is to say
that history will flow into the box, and that it will come out of it under the form of myth and magic. The box is the fullness of time.
From the point of view of the images that come out of the box, this
will be a situation in which history becomes a pretext for programs.
McLuhan: Heidegger surf-boards along the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.
Flusser: A lecture may be considered a natural communication in this
way . The lecturer is a sender (he emits sound waves), the public is
a receiver (it receives the waves), and the air in the room is a medium
(it transmits the waves). Now, this is a thermodynamic process, and
part of the energy invested in it is degraded into heat. The sum total
of information in the room diminishes as the lecture goes on. But the
lecture may be considered a cultural communication in this way: The
lecturer is a sender (he emits words), and the language is a medium (it
transmits words). Seen thus, the lecture is not a thermodynamic process,
but is of a different order. The sum total of information in the room
increases as the lecture goes on, if seen thus. And this is in fact the reason why it increases information, why it is negentropic.
McLuhan: In electric simultaneous time, we are encompassed by the
new electric space which is simultaneous and acoustic, i.e., we hear
from all directions at once creating a space which is a sphere with centre everywhere and margin nowhere. Quantum mechanics stresses
the discontinuity and the resonant interval in all material structures.
But modern physicists are visual thinkers to a man, in spite of this.

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Flusser: We are forced to split up the things and processes of the

world into three orders of magnitude. In the medium order of magnitude, which is measurable in our measures, that is in centimetres and
seconds, Newton is still valued. In the big order of things, that is, the
one measureable in light years, the Einsteinean rules are valued. In
the smaller one, which is measureable in micro-microns and nanoseconds, the rules of quantum mechanics are valid. In each of these
three worlds, we have to think differently, try to imagine differently,
and act differently.
Im going to put on a video document of an algorithmic film piece
I made with a terrific team of former students: Axel Heide, Thorsten
Kloepfer, and Oliver Kauselmann, and a Zen monk and space sculptor Grego Stehle for the Future Cinema exhibition that began its tour
at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Germany, co-curated by Peter
Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw.
[Skype video of UNMOVIE plays.]
This document was videoed by the curator of the show, Margit
Rosen, back in 2002. The work UNMOVIE is rather long. It opened on
November 11th, 2001, and ran 24/7 for several years online and intermittently in museums, including incarnations at Banffs Walter Phillips
Gallery, co-curated, I might add, by Winnipegs Anthony Kiendl, Galerie
Oboro on Montreal curated by Florian Wst, as well as the ICC Tokyo,
the Kiasma in Helsinki, and the location depicted on our screen now,
the Lothringer 13 Kunstehalle in Munich (figs. 1-2).
Our UNMOVIE actors (or actor-media, as Gilles Deleuze would
characterize them) never got tired. They are synthespians, that is, conversation simulators commonly known as chat bots. They are very artificially intelligent and draw upon a set of linguistic algorithms, open
source ones, that generate what Flusser terms pretexts History becomes pretexts for programs. In sum, the future of writing is to write
pretexts for programs while believing that one is writing for utopia.
These pretexts or bot dialogue scenes occur on a screen-stage that
may be populated as well by anyone logging in over the internet or
locally via TCP-IP in any one of our exhibition spaces. The bots write
the script that semantically culls appropriate online-user videos that

VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE

Flusser would consider posthistorical techno-images The new type

of images [techno-images] are unlike their prehistoric predecessors in
that they are themselves products of texts, and in that they feed on
texts. They are products of history. Imagine culture as a gigantic
transcoder from text into image. All texts flow into that box (news
about events, theoretical comments about them, scientific papers, poetry, philosophical speculations), and they will come out again as images (films, TV programs, photographic pictures): which is to say that
history will flow into the box, and that it will come out of it under the
form of myth and magic.
Our synthespians act according to the classic tetrad of cinematic
states of behaviour (listen, talk, chase, flee). When they feel like conversing on stage at times they feign reticence and wander they simulate dialogue which is fed into the UNMOVIE black box of our software
and technology which Flusser would consider an apparatus-operator
complex (his black box described above and its functionaries or programmers necessary for the complex to operate) in which our programs
(scripts and cues) act upon text input from the UNMOVIE stage in real
time to output a never-ending UNMOVIE stream of Internet user-generated videos, that is, until one looks away or logs off. Observers are
invited to become observer-participants (Yous) and improvise scenes
with the bots on stage, initiating what Flusser would consider narratologically Buberian (I and Thou) dialogic situations.
An UNMOVIE participant logging in online or at the show became
a You as we called their cloud-like avatar representations on stage on
screen. (This is four years before YouTube entered the picture). You
dialogue was remembered by the interlocutor bot and entered its
digital memory, available to it to utter in phrases generated by another You it connected with and addressed at a future time on stage.
I realize now how Flusserian it all was. From the script generated by
the bots and You-sers on stage, under certain circumstances that we
had scripted with our code, words that recur in dialogues (chat bots
generally match words to simulate conversation) drummed up playlists of user-generated online video and streamed them in montage or
montrage (Deleuze) through our early apps virtually and variably embodied within datatectural (data interwoven with dwelling) installations, including our UNMOVIE (Wall-Image, Fountain-Image, Stand-in,

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FIGURE 4 UNMOVIE (EXIT Gallery)

VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE

Two Tourists, Kiasma Extension Proposal, Exit Gallery, and Mandala)

productions (figs 3-5).
[Pause. Video plays while speaker reads texts.]
I consider UNMOVIE to be a prototype model for quantum media. And
to recap and reinforce the irreality of the quantum Imaginary described
in the YouTube videos I played earlier, let me interpret the scenario in
a quantum media imaginary light, that is, how a quantum media event
happens along: a photon expands through space as a wave/particle of
light. It is massless. Triggered by an observer observing it, its compelled
to collide with an electron, and its wave collapses. This releases energy
and causes the two-dimensional surface of the struck atom to unfold
and create for the moment an illusion of three-dimensional mass in
space for a time. For that observer, an image of reality occurs. It is our
consciousness, in effect, that catalyzes this entire process that provisionally creates a world, or to rephrase an iconic line from The Matrix, we
substitute the desert of wave particles for the real. As the observation
is happening, a measure of energy released from the photons wave collapse excites other local and nonlocally entangled wave/particle photons
to create new probabilities for future productions of observed reality.
Its this kind of mental yoga that stimulates me as an artist, and its not
just restricted to deconstructing wave mechanics. Its just as inspirational with the matrix mechanics which the Wachowski brothers (via
Sophia Stewarts The Third Eye novel) were portraying in The Matrix.
Slavoj iek: The Matrix also functions as a screen that separates us
from the Real that makes the desert of the real bearable. It is not the
ultimate referent to be covered/gentrified/domesticated by the screen of
fantasy the Real is also and primarily the screen itself as the obstacle
that always already distorts our perception of the referent, of the reality
out there. When a screen intervenes between ourselves and the Real,
it always generates a notion of what is In-itself, beyond the screen (of
the appearance), so that the gap between appearance and the In-itself
is always-already for us. Consequently, if we subtract from the Thing
the distortion of the Screen, we lose the Thing itself. The Thing in
itself is ultimately the gaze, not the perceived object. The Matrix itself is the Real that distorts our perception of reality.

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iek questions in another section of the passage from which the above
quote is taken if the Wachowskis Matrix is not an exacting supermodern replica of Platos dispositif of the cave? (Matrix means womb.) And
here is an indication of Flussers Matrix take on quantum desertification occurring in our information society.
Flusser: It has been demonstrated that atoms are divisible into
particles and particles of particles, and that individuals are divisible.
However, something far stranger has turned up. When I subdivide the
object I can no longer precisely say if it is objective or subjective. And
conversely, when I rationalize the subject, the individual, I can no longer
say that the part I have at hand is subject or object. If we feed the
decideme [decision] into the computer, then the computer decides. It is
then senseless to ask if the computer is a subject or an object. The
calculation shreds it as both subject and object into sand that scatters
probabilities one facet is object, another as subject appear. And with
this picture to live in, I am in a desert, a sand desert, the grains of which
are neither subject nor object. Instead only potentialities of a subject
and an object, a scattering cut through with overlapping fields of possibilities. Thanks to computation I can then compost on this field my
alternative subject and alternative object.
As I have said, UNMOVIE is an instance of what might be termed quantum media. Three reasons why: first, it acts as an open rather than a
closed digital packet-based platform (quantum means packet). Second,
it deals with probabilistic rather than determined content. Third, it
allows two-way access to its mutable source, an interactive database
(Linux, MySQL, PHP, Python), rather than one-way access to an interreactive databank (Read Only Memory, CD- and DVD-ROM). Please
dont forget that the Uncertainty Principle also holds for rhetoric and
that exceptions are also a rule. Not all database media are experienced
interactively, and not all DVD media are experienced interreactively.
[Pause. Speaker describes video playing.]
On your screen is an instance of UNMOVIE we titled Fountain-Image.
The cable from which we suspend our collages snakes around other
objects in the work, ultimately climbing like an electric cobra up to the

VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE

transmitting and receiving tip of an antenna at the top of the room. This
is one example of a myriad of ways we have installed the project under
various site-specific circumstances and discussions with our curators.
All the data, every virtual bit, the user videos, the dialogue and
keystrokes from participants at the show and remotely online gushed
from the top of the antenna like an information fountain. It was a wireless fountain, raining invisible yet content-carrying waves of ones and
zeros, lighting up screens and sounding on speakers with and for our
audience. To make the point clear (in 2002 wireless was not common
in Germany), we interwove with the antennas data cable a second
circuit of water pumps and tubes through which water flowed and at
points gushed and murmured in the installation as well. The water we
used melted from snow collected around a lovely Baroque fountain that
was just down the street from the exhibition space at Weienburger
Platz, Munich. That fountain was off for the winter, and UNMOVIE
(Fountain-Image) was happy to act as its understudy.
[Pause. Presentation resumes.]
Fountain-Image was a specific instance of a purpose attributed to visual art by Marshall McLuhan, that is, to distill our shared environment out into our collective midst, to render its necessary invisibility
as background suddenly visible and palpable, in our case, to make data
strangely with us, tangible as its waves of information energy slosh
about in our space and metaphorically collapse our antennas transmitted frequencies into pixels on our screens. Perhaps as information
environment, it reflected upon and cast Marshall McLuhans acousmatic environmentalism into the age of ubiquitous computing and
social media, that years after our fountain disappeared, has dawned.
Inspired by T.S. Eliots auditory imagination filtered through his
Toronto cohorts Harold Innis and Ted Carpenter, McLuhans original
premise, that electrified humans inhabit acoustic space, again poses
the possibility that a quantum media model just may be thinkable: if
not now, then certainly when quantum computing comes around and
the bit, either 0 or 1, becomes the qubit, either 0 or 1, 0 and 1, or any
combination in between (which is equivalent to imagining that our
planet is spinning in opposite directions at the same time). Quantum

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FIGURE 5 UNMOVIE (Internet Stage)

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computing swells medias two-tone digital harmonic scale to unimaginable proportions, allowing the entire current universe of information to be simulated in a single qubit. This makes a Quantum Media
Model at some point inevitable.
Curiously, McLuhans adherence to the acousmatic makes his musings future-proof in many ways, and it makes me think that somehow he uses the words acoustic and medium almost interchangeably,
whereas Flussers applications of the word medium is far more particulate in nature and more likely to need structural maintenance from
time to time to persevere the coming Quantum Media age.
McLuhan: Auditory space has no point of favoured focus. Its a sphere,
without fixed elements, space made by the thing itself, not space containing that the thing. Its not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic,
always in flux, repeating its dimensions moment by moment. It is indifferent to background.
That he wrote with Ted Carpenter, who was in the Toronto
Communications Group back in 1960, for Explanations.
Flusser: The structure of a message reflects the physical character of
its symbols more than the structure of the universe it communicates.
This explains the famous sentence The medium is the message.
[Session brought to a close.]
Transcription by Tom Kohut, March 2013
.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Australia, 2009). His theoretical work examines the links between

art, culture, technology, identity, and consciousness. He is the editor
of Energy, Biopolitics, Resistance Strategies, and Cultural Subversion
(2012), The Apparatus of Life and Death (2012), Art in the Biotech
Era (2008). Recent publications include: How biotechnology and
society co-constitute each other (Technoetic Arts Journal, 2012);
Consciousness and Electronic Culture(Consciousness Reframed:
Catalogue of 4th International CAiiA-STAR Research Conference, 2002);
The Position of Culture in Southeast Europe (Understanding the
Balkans, 2002); and On Modes of Consciousness(es) and Electronic
Culture (Glimpse: Phenomenology and Media, 2000). He has contributed to the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (Chicago 1997,
Liverpool/Manchester 1998, Nagoya 2002, Singapore 2008, Istanbul
2011) and has delivered papers at international conferences in San
Diego, Perth and Beijing on biotechnology and art.
PHILIP POCOCK

Philip Pocock is a Canadian artist based in Europe. During the 1980s,

he exhibited documentary photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario
in Canada and the Cooper Union in New York, where he was a faculty
member at the International Centre of Photography. He co-founded
the Journal of Contemporary Art in 1988 and relocated to Europe in
1991. Currently, he is researcher-in-residence at ZKM Karlsruge and the
Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Canada.
BARBARA RAUCH

Dr. Barbara Rauch is an artist practitioner and research academic.

She is a Digital Futures Initiative hire in a tenure-track position at
OCAD University, Toronto, in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies
and Graduate Studies. Rauch is the Graduate Program Director for the
Interdisciplinary Masters Program in Art, Media, & Design (IAMD).
She is the Director of the eMotion Research Project in the Digital
Media Research and Innovation Institute, researching the development of emotion with the facilitation of data analysis using advance
technology in 3D printing, sculpting, and analysis. In the lab, we
aim to designate an alternative format of acknowledging discourse
around the topic of emotion in artistic practice. Situating ourselves

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