Installation at ArtSpace
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Reading the Machine,
Brain, Mind and Body
- a Unity of Multiplicities
by Jeffrey Cook
”The mere fact that such a familiar feature of our lives has resisted
for so long all attempts to characterise it suggests that our conception
of it is at fault.” (Gregory, on Consciousness, 1987).
The practices of art and science have two main strategies that overlap
with a fair amount of redundancy, to use that informational term: analysis
and synthesis. One is a pulling apart and one is a pulling together. But
to work properly - to explicate and perhaps predict - these two countervailing
tendencies must somehow, or in some way, work together, just as art and
science sometimes work together. This was ever the task of the antique
natural philosopher: working not just on one or the other, but somewhere
in the middle, somewhere immersed and enmeshed in the flow of ideas, inventions,
explanations, observations and intuitions about the art of perception,
memory and knowing.
Knowing the self, the thinking I, has been a preoccupation of both art
and science from the earliest times, but just as it is compulsive, it is
also a most difficult and dangerous self-obsession. The language we use
becomes difficult, thin and near useless when turned reflexively in on
our selves, completion of the investigation would necessarily entail a
kind of complete "self-knowledge", a knowledge of all possible selves,
a connectionist worldmind or minds under the surveillance, in Foucault's
sense, of other minds that are as much potentially malevolent as benevolent.
To date we have happily had little success in such self-control. And little
word to date reflects on the terrifying ethical implications of potential
and possibly imminent success. But the project proceeds nonetheless.
But how can we know the minds of others if we can only ever know our
selves? How also can we deal with the religious legacies of metaphysical
ideas, particularly in these oh-so material times, of a mind separate from
our brain and bodies when the word "mind", doesn’t actually "refer" to
any thing at all? Like the linguistic problems encountered in quantum mechanics
due to inadequate descriptions of a single thing, light, as both wave and
particle, the mind too seems to float freely in a hard-to-define virtual
space about and within us, seemingly two things at once, both a human Computer
(mind) and, a machine-like computer (brain). A necessary reformulation
of the problem suggested in the Gregory quote above might be a way out
but together with this task, but ongoing formulations of the issues such
as The Reading Machine remain an essentia1 part of the process.
The Reading Machine, as the physical embodiment of a collection of ideas
about our selves and what it means to be our selves, open to readings by
passers-by, is one part of the larger Brain Project that Stephen Jones
has undertaken to analyse and synthesise "discussions and explorations
... on the question as to how consciousness arises". A desire to understand
mind and brain is as much part of human history and culture as language.
It began in the prehistoric past, aptly, as the self-conscious self-reflections
of "fireside" philosophers on what it is to be a thinking, knowing human
being, has continued through the Middle Ages, and is continuing apace today
in laboratories around the world, and at yearly conferences such as "Towards
a Science of Consciousness", "Consciousness Reframed" and "Brain and Self
Workshop", and many others. Jones’s project follows on in the traditions
of the quest for self-knowledge.
Always parallel to these formal and philosophical tropes are those of
artistic investigations into the nature of being: an other garden (perhaps
world) criss-crossed by trellises of vine and branch, by lattices and matrices
of root and rhizome; and perhaps part of the same garden anyway, as the
thicket of living thought makes it difficult to distinguish boundaries.
And so we have another ancient history of the artistic quest for self-representation,
of sentient statues and portraiture, of gods in human and animal form,
of ancient automata and golems, as artists, up to the present day, struggle
with what has been described as the most difficult human project: to re-present
the self in ways that make the self understandable. The twin artistic and
scientific projects other uncanny similarities, and many contradictions,
some evident in the "juxtaposition" of The Reading Machine in the organic
art space as an object-art installation (intentionally) ahout the subject,
the self.
It is in this interspace between artistic and scientific practice that
The Reading Machine transforms the art space into The Reading Room (a sort
of steam punk Renaissance library), The Machine into a rhizomatic prosthetic
of the expanded mind, and the spectator into a self-reflexive philosopher
of the self. Here art, science and self become contingent one on another,
abstracted from the Outside and accessible to other minds. Now maybe synthesis
can begin.
Whatever the direction, it seems all roads lead to the self-imaginary
(of which Jones’s Brain Project is part), from taking the mind and body
apart - deterritorialising - and then, like the good king’s men - reterritorialising
the body and putting it all back together again. That this re-assembly
re-incorporates the arts and sciences, judiciously - and, often enthusiastically
- sewing together whatever bits and pieces are necessary until a body of
knowledge can stand on its own, seems fitting for our millennial position
on the cusp of a new era. But the quest generates as many questions as
it answers.
If the project, like that of the Human Genome Project focusing on the
body, leads to a real understanding, and hence prediction about, and control
over, the conscious mind, then what will we, as humans, do with such knowledge,
such an extreme range of power? Will the project of evolution be truly
finished as some say? Or has it only then just begun? Will the self-representational
figure on this new landscape be a Frankensteinian cyborg, as Harroway predicted,
a Living Robot, as is Moravec’s wish, or, in the country of Hansonian racial
fear and hatred, will it/s/he be something more or less than human?
* The author, Jeffrey Cook, is an epistemologist and writer on technology
and its cultural impacts, and is an unreconstructed identity theorist with
radical instrumentalist leanings.
Bibliography
Deleuze, G, Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Gregory, R. L., (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford University
Press, 1987.
Harroway, D, Cyborgs, Simians, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature,
Free Association, London, 1985.
Moravec, H, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1988.
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