In July, 1997, I attended Consciousness Reframed at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), part of the University of Wales. The conference was held at Newport College of the University, situated in Caerleon a quiet, ancient village once a Roman garrison. I arrived a day ahead of the conference, and spent the morning wandering around the township and the Roman remains in the fields at the edge of the town: the Amphitheatre (later called Arthur's Round Table) and the excavated section of the garrison; and in the small museum housing much of the archeological finds. Late that afternoon most people had arrived and registration started for the weekend's proceedings.

About 150 people attended, most of them involved in the leading edge of the media-arts: multi-media and virtual reality, web-site production and theory generation, painting, video and installation, art history and architecture, philosophy and the social sciences, teaching and ethics, all in their own ways practicing artists.

What does Consciousness Reframed mean? I don't think anyone really had a definition but it provided a great stimulus to set up and discuss an incredible range of ideas from the physiology of the brain to artificial intelligence, from extra-sensory perception to shamanistic trance practices, from the Internet to virtual reality installations, from constructed ways of seeing to the role of geometry in painting and how we see. Roy Ascott, the Chair of CAiiA, in his preface to the Abstracts for the conference, put it this way:

"Interactions between art, science and technology are leading to the emergence of new cultural forms, behaviours and values. It is within the field of Consciousness that this is most marked and at the same time least understood. This conference has been convened in order to open up informed discussion of the issues this raises and to examine what might be described as the technoetic principle in art." [Ascott, 1997]

Most of the papers presented throughout demonstrated the huge diversity of practice in the areas of New-Media arts. There were far too many for any one person to get to all so, I can only give you an idiosyncratic selection from the array of possibilities. You might forgive such interpolation as I make as conduit (hopefully I do as little mutation to their ideas as possible). 

Though the conference wasn't organised to canvass any particular sets of issues, I want, here, to bring out some of the issues that were at least implicit in the papers presented.

1. What is VR and Cyberspace for? Why do we make this work? 
2. What is the VR space? Is it dream space or is some sort of Shamanistic experience? 
3. What is immersion and how does it differ from other kinds of experience like the cinema? 
4. Is language necessary for consciousness? 
5. And what of the post-biological?

This question of impact is asked often in relation to technological activity of any sort, and usually in the following way. Look, all this technology is doing terrible things to our environment or our cultural life and so isn't it time we stopped and let the 'natural' world have ascendency again? 

I'm never sure what I think about this, being so heavily involved in technology myself, but it seems that the activity of producing things into our cultural environment is an ancient and perhaps deeply human function, something I call the modelling function, in which we engage with the world in our process of understanding it. Even pre-human creatura make and use tools and certainly language and counting are technologies. Questions of why did this happen, how did that happen, who made that... all those things that we ask as children, all lead to our tendency to invent new objects, new spaces, new social/cultural structures (and the spiritual acts of transcendental space).

Yes, I accept that we need to pay far more attention to the impacts of our activities on other systems, and it is this which points to how we could work in multi-media towards a more acceptable end. That is to use a lot of the theory behind multi-media, the extended analysis of interactivity and the notions of feedback and complex systems, self-organisation and so on to rework our frameworks and cultural structures so that we can look carefully at and predict the consequences of what we do. It isn't so much a problem of the inexorable march of progress for the sake of some mythical engineering efficiency as the slow development of frameworks within which to think about things. Social Darwinism and the subsequent genetic determinism are as much a function of christian/patriarchist frameworks of thinking as they are of any 'truth' in science. I would suggest that the thoughts inherent in some of the new theories of self-organisation and the like will, as they work through into new artforms and other cultural manifestation, allow us to think more in ways which do account for the consequences of what we do.

One seeks a kind of subversive generativity, or a generative subversiveness in new-media work, promoting a proliferation of ideas and methods for handling (technical and) technological pressure, presence. To open up, spread, make new connections, layers upon layers of connectivity so that any one thing we do with the techne we can sidestep, redo, recast when it gets captured by the business world. Or do we just end up feeding the business world with new things that it can capture? This is the trap. But to stop, to cease being generative is to degenerate, to cease to exist and to allow the hijackers to win.

But what kind of argument can one put in this struggle with the hijackers? Perhaps the only thing we can give is a kind of moral guidance: that it isn't necessary to appropriate, to take whatever is there simply because it is there. The real key to one's survival is in the continuance of the overall system. That ultimately, the most selfish thing one can do is to be utterly altruistic because it is only in the suvival of everything else that one has any fulfilled, useful continuance of the self.

If Bill Gates does succeed in being the only supplier of computer software in the world then the monocultural structure of his control can only lead to the degradation of the software, a collapse of any idea development and generativity, leading eventually to the collapse of his whole house of cards (and everybody else's by that stage). A world deprived of any of its aspects becomes less of a world that one would want to be in. If the biosphere collapses we all collapse. If the technosphere collapses so we all collapse. If technoesis collapses then our knowing and what is knowable shrinks around us, hemming us in, restricting us, our growth, our generativity....

Theories of cybernetics and ecology show us that it is the relations between things, not the fixed named objects, which are important. What does this biological conception imply for techne? The relations between, the support things give each other, becomes a key to survival and continuance. The multiplicities of feedbacks between layers and sections provide multifarious pathways for energy flow and for escape, regrouping, re-orientation (pro-active response) as well as for self-regulation within the system, re-assessment, strategic withdrawal, the results of feedback.

The rhizome (the grasses in a sand dune) always finds a new pathway whenever a barrier or an edge is discovered. We work our ways around things. Stop hitting your head against the brick wall. Biology is mutable, shifting, always changing and regenerating, taking up every niche and ally, filling the niche with itself and its projections, always diversifying, and so should we. The culture in which we live is our forest, our jungle. It has an ecology and the success of an ecology depends on the success with which it diversifies, taking every opportunity to develop, to communicate, to know and to name. All the while without removing and destroying its neighbours, it is not a struggle for territory so much as an exchange of territories, nutrients, habit(at)s, practices.

Back to the works.

One of the more important current virtual reality works is Char Davies' Osmose, installed at the Barbican Gallery, London, during August to October (as part of the Serious Games exhibition). When you enter the installation you are presented with two screens, one a sillhouette of the person 'flying' the work at present and the other of the space that she is 'flying' through. It is a gentle and elegant work where one floats through translucent underwater-like jungles and crystalline spaces as well as worlds of text and the underlying computer code. All available time-slots for immersion were booked up so I didn't get to experience being in the work, but for the casual viewer it is an evocative piece, with the music and image presenting a floating, wistful kind of feel. [Graham, 1996]

Davies (a CAiiA doctoral student) in her paper "Techne as Poiesis: Seeking Virtual Ground" spoke of Osmose as being a kind of poiesis or bringing forth, unconcealing our being in the world. The prime navigating principle is in breathing, as one breathes in one rises through the virtual worlds and as one breathes out one sinks slowly into deeper realms, until one gets down to the core machine-code world at the substrate. She likens the experience to one of diving rather than dreaming. One gains a sense of being removed from the everyday world and 'immersed' in some environment which does not necessarily behave according to the rules of the known. Immersion in Osmose brings with it the realm of the emotional, especially through its use of the breath. Breath and balance in the immersant, along with the transparency of the virtual world, undo our habitualised everyday perception leading to altered states of consciousness. 

Beyond its use of the breath as a basic navigational stance, immersion in Osmose brings with it the realm of the emotional. One is brought to a different experience of the technological. Davies asks whether it is "possible for artists to subvert the technological imperative associated with virtual reality or are such attempts destined to be co-opted?" She comments that Heidegger suggests "that the very danger associated with modern technology could be transformed into revealing." and that the "'process' philosophers...have suggested an alternative [to the "rational eternal and transcendent order behind the changing world of nature"] by re-conceiving humans as beings 'within' the world, as participants among the world's temporal becoming/s." Thus reponse to the experience of Osmose is often one of its ineffability, its undescribable nature, "an unfathomably poetic flux of comings-into-being, lingerings, and passings-away within which our own mortality is encompassed." [Davies, 1997]

Others who presented work offering this sort of reading included Margaret Dolinsky (of the University of Illinois, Chicago), Diana Domingues (a Brazillian artist), Kathleen Rogers (a Brtish artist) and Mark Pesce (the inventor of VRML)

Margaret Dolinsky in her paper "Dream Grrrls: a World of Virtual Reality" spoke of VR as being in some way an active or "lucid" dreaming. Her work Dream Grrrls was developed for the CAVE, a display system developed at the Chicago Art Institute. The CAVE is an immersive virtual display theatre, a 3meter square, high resolution, stereo-video and audio projection environment. Wearing stereographic glasses you are able to walk around and interact with objects in the virtual environment in the way that you experience dreams. Dream Grrrls "is a journey through five different environments that present an opportunity for exploration and self-reflection...in new and dynamic ways, much like an active or lucid dreaming." Navigation is more about encounter than control, experiencing the elusive nature of the dream world. Paths meander and are non-linear, and allow "the participant to create a personal performance by learning to interact with the environment and recognise its plasticity." [Dolinsky, 1997]

Dolinsky provides active dreaming spaces where one can explore desires and dream versions of oneself, where the options provided by the artist allow the audience into realms of ideas to which they may, ordinarily, have secondary access as in reading but to which they do not normally have primary experiential access. Thus the cyberrealm is one of substantially different value as progenitor of experience having substantial otherness from our regular in-the-world being.

Beyond dreaming one comes to the trance states of the shaman. Kathleen Rogers in her paper "Viperscience" explores Mayan shamanism in the mythology of the snake, She "draws on the work of the unorthodox anthropologist Jose Diaz Bolio from Yucatan, Mexico...author of The Feathered Serpent - Axis of Cultures" to explore the role of the rattlesnake in Mayan art and religion. Bolio has proposed "that the plumed serpent in the image of the rattlesnake embodied the essential physical resonance, energisation states and vortex mechanics to become a living psychic software." That is that the priests of the Mayan culture use the "harmonic geometry of the snake skin as mask for scrying" and similar shamanic activities. Rogers' intention "is to re-activate this complex model of Mayan consciousness" as a kind of cognitive archeology of the snake in its, perhaps universal, representation of spiritual energy as well as the cyclical notion of time held by the Maya. [Rogers, 1997]

For Rogers the snake represents many things from sprirtual energy, e.g. the raw sexual energy of the Kundalini in Hindu Tantra, to the creation spirits of indigenous Australians, to the double helix symbol of DNA in the modern West. Using VR immersion and multi-media to try to emulate and perhaps actually bring on these trance states, she is attempting to get to some sort of essence of this 'interactive mythology'. 

Diana Domingues in "The Desert of Passions and the Technological Soul" also spoke of the potential for VR to bring out shamanistic states and likens the screen of VR to the idea of the desert as a place for losing the self, a screen onto which our dreams and desires may be projected, thus giving it a role in the shamanistic practice of ancient cultures as much as it has role in contemporary culture as evidenced by the many films in which the desert features almost as a character. She suggests that creative production is a way of losing ourselves, losing the ego, and offers "interactive installations for people to experience conscious propagation in an organic/inorganic life. Electronic interfaces and neural networks provide intelligent behaviours, managing signals of the human body in sensorized environments", providing electronic ritual and trance interfaced with electronic memory as "virtual hallucination" producing a Shamanic experience in an interactive work. The audience become the shaman allowing them to "communicate with the beyond and intervene in the real world because they dialogue with spirits. The participants' behaviors determine the life of the environment..." [Domingues, 1997] 

She suggests that creative production is a way of losing ourselves, losing the ego, and offers "interactive installations for people to experience conscious propagation in an organic/inorganic life. Electronic interfaces and neural networks provide intelligent behaviours, managing signals of the human body in sensorized environments", providing electronic ritual and trance interfaced with electronic memory as "virtual hallucination" producing a Shamanic experience in an interactive work. The audience become the shaman allowing them to "communicate with the beyond and intervene in the real world because they dialogue with spirits. The participants' behaviors determine the life of the environment..." 

Mark Pesce (the inventor of VRML) in his paper "Ritual and the Virtual" suggested that the networks of cyberspace are essentially incomprehensible, ineffable. For Pesce cyberspace is mythological space, "dream-time" or "faerie", a space of magical reality. "The forms of magical reality, ancient to humanity's beginnings, shape our vision in the unbounded void of elelctronic potential." He suggests that we are at about the same stage with cyberspace as our primary antecedants were with language and the world into which they grew when cultures were still at isolated stages. It is as though cyberspace provides a dream-like, almost hallucinatory, configuration of our perception: becoming a screen for the projection of our spiritual desires and interests. "In a world of unbounded complexity, [we] compress and complexify symbols into the barest essentials of meaning: in this way the ancient narratives become myths." [Pesce, 1997]

The suggestion that a number of artists are making is that we can use vr and cyberspace as a tool for inducing spiritual states in the VR adventurer. I would suggest that at least at the level of dreams there is an element of possibility in this, but it will require a considerable sophistication in the available means of generating and navigating cross-currents and cross-connections in the content of the work .

But before we have a look at possible ways of achieving this lets have a look at what dreams are.

Dreaming is our most commonly experienced "altered state of consciousness" in which "a loosening of associations [is] the most essential characteristic" [Hobson, 1994, p32]. Dreaming is an everyday "madness" we experience every night. When we go to sleep we shut down the usual inputs to the brain and consciousness. EEG (electro-encephalograph) recordings show that we are still conscious in the dreaming state, that there is a great deal of brain activity, rich and vivid, clearly associated with what is known as REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. [Hobson, 1994, p55]. It is apparent that much of the normal activity of the brain/body continues during dreaming, although not during deeper sleep episodes.

In his book In the Theater of Consciousness Bernie Baars describes dreaming as "appear[ing] in response to random stimulation from the brain stem, which the cortex interprets with remarkably creative, fluid and vivid imagery; ad hoc stories that flow free of any sensory constraint." He suggests this is because "conscious flow is constructed so as to make sense of almost any consistent input" [Baars, 1997, p.95. author's italics]

So what is going on here? Taking a model of the operation of the brain and consciousness consisting in cascades of very wide-band neural networks, the daily processes of perceiving and knowing what it is you perceived continually retrains the network. Neural networks are really wide bundles of neurons which carry the data flow of the brain from plexus to plexus. The primary point about a neural net is that at each plexus a vast array of synapses provide the links from bundle to bundle that are the brains processing of, say, sensory information. Any one nerve requires inputs from the large number of preceeding nerves that synapse onto it to exceed a certain threshold value. It is probable that the values (known as weightings) of each synaptic connection are altered with continued use of that particular neural pathway, ie are altered by experience. This is an idea originally proposed by Donald Hebb in 1949. [Hebb, 1949] and is suggested as being at least partly how learning works.

The synaptic connection weightings are always being altered as the input flows and changes and the importance of what we intake changes according to our needs and current output conditions (a walk, a conversation, looking at pictures...). 

When we shut down the inputs as we go to sleep, the neural network will keep operating. So dreaming is a kind of consciousness without input. Any stuff still going on in the body/brain will look like an input to the consciousness net, any internal noise or invasive stimulus will still be interpreted through the current weighting structure of the still active brain and will be given imagery and form such as the brain normally applies to standard waking input. But the standard rules of the world, its continuity of sequencing, the things that we agree belong together, the stuff that comes already synchronised, are no longer operating and 'noise' issues forth from all sorts of nooks and crannies in the physiology. Everything is still interpreted but the rules of consistency are not being reinforced, so the connection structure is disjoint, irruptive, disconnected and the ideas that get form in the brain system are thus similarly irruptive and non-sequiter.

Also because the pressure of the awake flow of input is taken off, low level stuff, stuff we haven't been attending to fills the niches, takes the available networks and connections, inputs, and arises for consideration. These may become insights, new symbols for expression, new recognitions about ourselves and others, irruptions and things we didn't want to know about. The stuff of dreams.

But all the imagery and other stuff of dreams is internally generated from the content of our experience and our reflections upon it. Where does this become available in vr or cyberspace? The content of cyberspace is provided by the artist and simply accessed, or not, by the immersant. Perhaps if the content provided can be evocative enough, as Davies' Osmose might be, then we might be leaning towards the dream. But how much can we say that there is a truly altered state of consciousness operating as we would expect in a shamanistic state?

Shamanism seems to be a rather different affair from dreaming. Mircea Eliade, in his major work on Shamanism, describes the shaman as being one of a spectrum of magico-religious operators within tribal societies who, in particular, uses techniques of ecstacy and has special relations with spirits involving ascents to the sky and magical flight, and descents to the underworld and conversations with the spirits of the dead. The shaman is the controlling agent in these activities and is not "possessed". [Eliade, 1964, p.6ff] The shamanistic trance is considered very similar to the hypnotic state and seems to involve long hours of "ritual practice/preparation including dancing and sleep deprivation" [Hobson, 1994, p247]. The actual state is usually induced in the participants by the priest or shaman and is often characterised by various automatisms, involuntary acts such as flailing arm movements, jerky, spasmodic body movements, uncontrolled speech (speaking in tongues), and loss of contact with the surroundings. 

The shaman often returns from the trance with special information about how to proceed on some matter and this leads to one of the more difficult questions in consciousness studies: Just where does the information come from? Who or what are these 'spirits' that were communicated with? But I have to leave this matter for another investigation.

These activities may be carried out for medical or religious purposes as well as for determining future social paths and intra-tribal decision-making. but it is the particular activity of ecstacy that I suppose is being canvassed in new-media artists' attempts to bring the shamanic experience to their audience. 

If we do want to produce dream works and shamanic works in vr and cyberspace, then one of the primary problems that we come upon is that most vr presents all the options essentially pre-programmed. Because these options are pre-generated they cannot be a drawing-out from our minds but must be our acceptance of another's view. As in all texts it is as we interpret it but the pointers and triggers for interpretation are provided by others so that it can never be a truly shamanistic or even dream event. We are not drawn on the content of our own minds except as to the content of the screen onto which we might project.

If we are to develop a theory which allocates dream or shamanistic conditions to vr we must provide a structure which is capable of considerable mutability in the available visual/experiential options. Dreams are fluid, discontinuous, disruptive experiences in which unpredictability is almost a necessary condition. In shamanistic experience the message comes from outside and is interpreted by the shaman within context of his/her culture. The shaman is in control in the ecstatic state, the dreamer is out of the control loop being asleep. Nevertheless experience gained in either condition is usually considered "left-of-field" or out of context, an irruption into the normal stream of consciosuness.

Bill Seaman's techniques of recombinant poetics offer us access to the discontinuous random supply of ideas and language. Puns and double entendre emerge from the supply (the vocabulary) provided by the artist, but the combinatorics are at least stochastic or chaotic and supplied by the user. This then generates all sorts of unexpected thoughts and interpretations in the viewer.

Bill Seaman (CAiiA doctoral student) explored possible emergent experiences in his paper "Emergent Constructions: Re-embodied Intelligence within Recombinant Poetic Networks". Seaman is developing a theory of navigation within cyberspaces which involves a process of 'recombinant poetics'. "Computer-mediated networks present an artistic medium which heightens the potential for an intermingling of the knowledge of the viewer with the 'Re-embodied intelligence' of an author" in a new form of poetic construction. The user of a work is in interaction with the meanings encoded in the work by the author and their own personal meanings, developing "an emergent experience, which is not known in advance by the author, and is unique for each subsequent viewer." Seaman suggests that "such an environment [can] enhance or trigger particular 'states' of consciousness in the viewer" reframing "aspects of the consciousness of the artist". He then discussed how this idea is developed in his work Passage Sets and in particular his new work the World Generator, carrying "compressed potential meaning constructed of language, image and sound elements within an engendered technological environment.". [Seaman, 1997]

In Seaman's Passage Sets: One Pulls Pivots from the Tip of the Tongue (which was also in the Serious Games: Art.Interaction.Technology exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London [Graham, 1996]) the viewer is presented with three video projection screens of image and text. The centre screen contains a sort of 'menu' controlled by a mouse at a plinth in the viewspace. On mouse rollover of words in this 'menu' new combinations of visual, sound and textual elements are displayed enabling one to explore the poetic dimensions of any of the phrases Seaman has provided in the 'menu'. The menu shifts and alters form, and the screens to either side present video and textual resonance and oblique references making puns across the screens and within one's reading/memory space. Deep and evocative - with imagery from architecture to gesture, bodies in spaces public and private - the work allows navigation through an everchanging poetry constructed afresh from the elements originally supplied. 

Although in this work the recombination appears to be at least semi-random the potential of the recombinant poetics technique for producing new ideas in the viewer is evident. Disjunctive phrases joined together by a pun or some concept internal to the viewer produce streams of ideas new to the viewer and unpredicted by the artist.

The real activity of dream work or shamanic work for us as contemporary audience is in the emergence of new ideas and new triggers for interpretation through the experience of the work. Though this has always been an aspect of the contemplation of the artwork, commonly more passive, in vr and cyberspace we may be able to pro-actively generate emergent ideas in the audience as they experience the immersive condition. 

Joseph Nechvatal (CAiiA doctoral student) spoke on "Immersive Implications" and suggested that telematic connectivity provides a tool for society to understand itself. It reworks and redirects the idea of the perspectival point of view: "...the classic Cartesian duality between subject and object becomes omnijective, iridescent, shimmering and porous in its inversions." Immersion is enveloping, a 360degree surround, physical rather than cognitive. Different from the absorption we have in a book or the cinema. For Nechvatal immersion in a VR work implies a unified total space, an homogeneous world without external distraction, striving to be a consumate harmonious whole. He identifies "two grades of immersion...(1) cocooning and (2) expanding within which, when these two directions of psychic space cooperate ... we feel...our bodies becoming subliminal, immersed in an extensive topophilia...an inner immensity where we realise our limitations along with our desires for expansion". He goes on to ask "Does VR's immersive attributes permit us to support non-discursive intuitive generalisations from which to weave a philosophy of virtual reality by adapting principles of complex generosity?" and offers that a "specifically spherical way of conceiving encounters" a new 'perspective' is afoot within VR. Nevertheless, as continuous total immersion would be monstrous, we should regard VR as a modelling system in which artists have as a necessary function the generation of the "countless, but short-lived, experiences and observations that can be exact only because they are brief entries into the encompassing phenomenon of a shimmering deframed consciousness." [Nechvatal, 1997]

Char Davies' Osmose in many ways provides the paradigm example of the truly immersive space: one dons the helmet and breath measuring harness and enters a world of swimming, where everything is transclucent, floating, jungle-like - enveloping worlds of the imagination, not one's own but the artist's. 

The point of view in the immersive world is omni-directional, the point of hearing rather than view. The head is a point of origin in the centre of a sphere, the aural centre of perception in the jungle. The primary sense in the jungle can only be the hearing. What surrounds us and brings us contact with the jungle is only accessible to the hearing, the sight is continually obscured by the forest. We can only see the shortest most local distance yet we can hear from within the centre of a vast world of sounds. In the immersive world of vr we are placed at the centre of a polar dimensional view/realm. Wherever we turn our perspective follows, the sounds of the cyberjungle lead us and exist out there within plain hearing, the view is only revealed as we penetrate deeper into re-calculated space. 

In a biological system there is no centre, any point can become a centre as required by the moment, everything spreads from there, spreads out its tentacles and seeks for what it needs. The centre is always shifting, a source of growth goverened by the source of nutrient. 

In the jungle, hearing becomes primary, vision is downgraded. In the vr world hearing and vision are continually re-calculated to place us at the centre of polar cordinates. Nothing stays fixed at the origin of a cartesian perspective. As art historian Suzanne Ackers suggests, renaissance perspective is displaced and we are learning new ways of seeing, navigating in new kinds of conceptual space [Ackers, 1997]. Point of view no longer operates in its traditional manner, it now alters over time and our perception of time and space becomes as a virtual knowledge, no longer fixed to the cartesian frame, and I might add, mutable, always recalculated, determined by our progress through the environment. Consciousness can only follow along hoping to make the necessary adjustments before we fall out of the world. We are momentarily out of balance, vr sickness appears as our vestibular apparatus are thrown out of kilter by the new unstable enveloping polar hearing space.

In the jungle one is oneself the geometrical origin of the space. All sound and sight follows you, wherever you go you are the centre. Likewise in vr space the real-time calculations of the system always start from wherever you navigated the 'frame' before. 3D convolvers of the sound always place you in the centre. Head tracking tells the system where you are and it re-calculates its presentation to place you in the centre again, when it lags to any sufficient degree you become off-centred and disoriented. The geometric centre of the maths no longer gels with the psychological centre - dislocation, disruption ensue - consciousness loses consistency. An internal centre dislocated from the external centre, suddenly we don't know where we are.

In the world of sentience, we supply the centre, the perceiving entity carries its own centre. It carries it with it as it moves through the world, we each supply a centre, the culture is made of myriads of centres and origins in connection and relation to each other. There may be some sort of peak of concentration of similar characteristics achieving a kind of consensus. This perhaps is what a city is, or a temple, or a museum.

To return to Nechvatal, the immersant is cut off from the world, in a fusion of sight and sound where a "radical unity and aesthetic transcendance through totality... provide a complete alternative reality to the viewpant for exploration and contemplation...immersive art striving towards a consummate harmonious whole". The experience of vr is one of non-knowing, omni-perception transcending formerly known territories, launching us into dreamspace and the worlds of the shaman. As Davies amply demonstrates in Osmose the world visually perceived becomes one of multiple layers as well as one of fluid viewpoint, worlds layered as sheets of knowing through which we can navigate, each sheet providing its own enveloping omni-projective space as though we tore away at the veils of perceptiion rumored at in so much early western mystical literature. 

In her paper "Perception of Individual Time", Suzanne Ackers (art historian at Skoevde University in Sweden) pointed to the role of geometry and mathematics in our perception. She asked how has this altered over the history of art and how does it appear in the new VR work? "...geometry played a crucial role in the development of Gothic architecture [as did perspective in Renaisance painting]. Today, we easily perceive the numerical harmonies in a cathedral's facade or interior space. What about our perception of the numerical harmony in digital images?" For example, in Osmose the visuals "can be seen in the context of pictorial tradition, the dimension of time is an addition which has only been made possible by the complex use of numbers, and of computer programming." The interval of our immersion in Osmose provides a perspective which is time-based as well as spatial and constantly perturbs our usual sense of locus in space and 'now'. This is a new kind of aesthetic experience where individual time plays an important role in our view of the work. [Ackers, 1997]

In the average audience's contemplation of an artwork the durational element becomes little more than a slightly extended present, whereas involvement with a vr work or even the less immersive new-media and video work forces one to spend some time with the work simply to gain any idea of it all. This being captured by the work is another factor in the immersive nature of vr. Duration as a dimension of an artwork allows the producer of the work to introduce a series of ideas, or a flow and mutation of the idea, which is not available to most painting or sculpture. (Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase is the only painting I can think of where there is an explicit attempt to show duration). Time allows an audience the luxury of contemplating the work, of exploring possible interpretations and it allows the producer the luxury of being able to extend and develop associations and permutations of their ideas. It is this which promotes interaction as much as any "hands on" operability of the computer driven work. Conversation takes time to develop and one's conversation with an artwork similarly takes time to develop, being especially enhanced if the feedback from the artwork is active. Our perception can change, or be changed, over time as the feedback loop between us and the artwork is allowed to develop.

Isabelle Delmotte (Australian artist) in her paper "Epileptograph: the internal journey" spoke of her audio-visual exploration of the "sensations experienced during the awareness process leading to the regaining of consciousness after a generalised epileptic seizure." She focuses on the hidden internal language of the body, revealing the re-accumulation of the self as a visceral and frightful process leaving only glimpses of imprecise memory. Showing a video version of the computer graphical material she has generated from her deep, direct experience of this pre-linguistic "reaccumulation of myself as a functional being" she raised questions of to what extent consciousness is dependent on language. As she puts it: "Is a visceral and thoughtless process, which lacks any form of language, part of our notion of consciousness?" given that she can bring the experience to visual manifestation and so in some sense is conscious of what happened, if only through memory. [Delmotte, 1995]

On the other hand, Mark Pesce made some interesting remarks about the relationship between language and consciousness. He argues that to think requires the linguistic distinction of figure and ground, the detection of the object, and it is difference which enables this detection. Discontinuity is what we see, not the narrative. Language is the encoding of what we see, these differences. Language leads to consciousness. Ritual is the cultural storage of this encoding into mythology, and he suggests ritual is the language of cyberspace. The virtual world of cyberspace is a mirror to the virtual world of our cultures, illuminating "the magical reality of all human narratives." [Pesce, 1997] He suggests a kind of connectionism within culture wherein the whole of human culture might be seen as a single organism, and I wondered did he suggest that culture is a conscious thing?

So it does rather depend on where one draws the line between consciousness and mere awareness. Something which becomes fraught with dificulties if one draws it too high, say at the level of requiing language. It's a bit like the suggestion that visual processing is necessary for consciousness: What then of the blind?

Perhaps it is better to suggest that we open up the concept of language to include any of the realm of possible means of showing that we are using information from the world in ways useful to ourselves and that we can report this use in any number of ways in making art and otherwise demonstrating our consciousness of things about us. Mere awareness falls away with the idea of using the information for our own purposes, some sort of reflective activity having such output as might indicate that we are actively working with said information. Reportage becomes active cultural production. This would certainly accommodate the kind of consciousness that Isabelle Delmote speaks of in the Epileptograph where she describes a realm of knowing in which language is as yet unavailable, but the content of experience of her re-assembly of the self is a viscerally potent content of her mind, ready for reporting at such moment as it becomes possible.

Jill Scott (CAiiA doctoral student) in her presentation "Future Bodies" spoke about her current three part installation (at ZKM Medienmuseum, in Karlsruhe, Germany) called 'Digital Body - Automata'. These works "are designed to encourage intimate and contemplative and interactive participation on the part of the viewer and center around a similar theme; the exploration of the desire to transform the human body by technology, and, the effect technology may have on the design of the human body in the future." Part 1: 'A Figurative History' is a touch screen interactive which explores "fantasies about the [past] mechanical transformation of the body by technology". Transforms of "these bodies [are] further extended by the touch of the other viewers in the space, as well as mechanically through the sculptural interfaces." Part 2: 'Interskin' is a VR game in which "players can "go inside" separate body parts, guided by selected "avatars" or "agents"...one can explore the gender and identity of a second self or other body which may reside deep inside the viewer's personality." Part 3: 'Immortal Duality' explores the paradox of science in molecular transformation from the early discoveries of radiation to "the latest developments in DNA manipulation and Human Genome Mapping." An interactive automaton presents "a depiction of ethical issues about anti-aging, cloning and reproduction...and the viewer can interact with these to compose associations of their own." [Scott, 1997]

The production of artworks employing some of the feedback-driven complex self-organising capabilities which we embody offers some leads to the solution of the problem of a technologically determined culture. If this kind of work can become complex enough, or if enough connectionism can be developed among these kind of works - say, over the internet - then is it possible that the system thus evolved might in fact become conscious? And if so what then? To make something approaching a human, the model for all atempts at artificial intelligence, is going to require quite astounding amounts of 'wiring', arrays of processing sub-systems and interconnectivity. Such an effort, even if theoretically possible, poses almost insurmountable manufacturing problems.

It seems that we would have to use evolutionary algorithms and some kind of auto-assembly process to even begin to build such a machine. I argue that the imbuing of consciousness to this machine will follow fairly straightforward principles but that the actual technical implementation of such a machine will require a total reworking of manufacturing techniques into something more akin to a biological process. Ultimately, we would have to let such a system grow itself and decide what it wants to do both in relation to us (in responding to our input and requests) and in relation to itself. This becomes an ethical issue. 

If we are going to produce conscious 'machines' we must accord them the same kinds of rights to self-determination that we demand for ourselves. Further, because of the kinds of biological 'technologies' that would be required to manufacture such a system, this system becomes a living biological entity. As with the problem of cloning human beings, can our society seriously condone the creation of new forms of living beings when we still have so much trouble with the destruction we have wrought on so many existing, and once existing, now extinct, living beings? Is this the post-biological that was suggested in the subtitle to Consciousness Reframed?

"If, as I surmise, one purpose of consciousness is to help us make our way through constant change, then we may need to better understand the limits that fear imposes in us in understanding both our own consciousness and our involvement in the development of artificial life forms with consciousness of their own. We may want to ask ourselves: could it be that our consciousness is for making only our meaning in the world, imprinting only ourselves on this vastness, bettering the planet and perhaps space, with only our intelligent creations? But then what is animal consciousness for? And for that matter, what would robotic consciousness be for? ... how can we hope to understand and develop a positive relationship with beings of our devising if we understand so little of the incredible richness of those beings that already exist and share our conscious and unconscious space here and now." [Gigliotti, 1997b]

Finally, as I go through the abstracts now I realise how much I missed and worse how much I have had to leave out of this discussion. There were so many interesting and remarkable papers that I was unable to get to, and each of us who attended would have come away with a completely different view, as though we went to different conferences. But each of us would have been thoroughly stimulated with new ideas and new connections.

I have used the Char Davies installation Osmose as my primary example because it so aptly covers so many of the implicit issues I have raised here. On my way out of the U.K. I stopped briefly in London to go to the Serious Games: Art.Interaction.Technology exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery where Osmose and Bill Seaman's Passage Sets or One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue were on show, along with works by Toshio Iwai (Resonance of 4), Jim Campbell (Hallucination) and Harwood (Rehearsal of Memory) and others. This is a valuable collection of works which ably covers the spectrum of cyberspace and vr artwork, providing important examples of the kind of work which was discussed at the conference. A wonderful coincidence as best I can tell.

Ackers, S. (1997) "Perception of Individual Time". In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p2. [back to 1st reference] [back to 2nd reference] 

Ascott, R. (1997) "Preface" to Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p1. [back]
See also Leonardo article on Ascott.

Baars, Bernard J. (1997) In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind. New York, Oxford Unversity Press. [back]
See also Baars on: Metaphors of Attention and Consciousness.

Davies, Char (1997) "Techne as Poiesis: Seeking Virtual Ground". In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p28. [back]
See also artnetweb article on Davies' Osmose.

Delmotte, Isabelle. (1995) Epileptograph: The Internal Journey. Sydney, Artspace. See also her abstract in Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p29. (1997) [back]
See also Mesh article on Delmotte's Epileptograph.

Dolinsky, Margaret (1997) "Dream Grrrls: a World of Virtual Reality". In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p32. (1997) [back]
See also Dolinsky's web site.

Domingues, Diana (1997) "The Desert of Passions and the Technological Soul" In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p33. [back]
see also Leonardo article on Domingues, and Domingues' web site.

Eliade, M. (1964) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. [back]
See also biography of Eliade and further links.

Gigliotti, Carol (1997a) "What is Consciousness For?" In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p40. and full paper in Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Conference Proceedings. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. [back to 1st reference][back to 2nd reference]
See also What Children and Animals Know That We Don't by Gigliotti.

Graham, B. (1996) Serious Games: Art . Interaction . Technology. London, Barbican Art Gallery. [back to Davies ref in Sect.1] [back to Seaman ref in Sect.2] 
See also Serious Games web site.

Hebb, D.O. (1949) The Organisation of Behaviour. New York, Wiley. [back]
See also a web site on Hebb.

Hobson, J. Allen, (1994) The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes its Mind. Boston, Litle Brown & Co. [see also Hobson, J.A. The Dreaming Brain] [back to "dreams"] [back to "shamanism"]

Jones, S. (1997) "A note on a possible physiology of subjectivity, and some comments on what a conscious machine might want to do for itself." In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Conference Proceedings. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. [back][to full paper]

Nechvatal, Joseph (1997) "Immersive Implications". In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p68. [back]
See also Nechvatal's web site.

Pesce, Mark (1997) "Ritual and the Virtual". In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p71. [back to virtual space] [back to language] 
See also Mark Pesce's web site.

Rogers, Kathleen (1997) "Viperscience". In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p80. [back]
See also Rogers' Viperscience web site.

Seaman, B. (1997) "Emergent Constructions: Re-embodied Intelligence within Recombinant Poetic Networks." preprint of paper for Consciousnes Reframed, 1997 [back]
See also Seaman's web site.

Scott, Jill (1997) "Future Bodies" In Ascott, R. (ed) Consciousness Reframed: Abstracts. CAiiA, University of Wales College, Newport. p82. [back]
See also Scott's web site.