[-empyre-] cyber-animism

[Gregory Ulmer]

  On 4/19/11 12:02 AM, Tamiko Thiel wrote:
> Hi Y'all,
>
> I'm not sure at this point if I'm supposed to be 'on' this week or 
> next week, but since I have some spare moments during a plane ride to 
> compose an email I thought I'd fire off a couple of curve balls.
>
> I want to pick up John Craig Freeman's ball on monuments and memorials 
> in public squares, and Davin Heckman's ball on AR as 'folk practice' 
> by which he meant graffiti, and throw then even further:
>
> The urge to augment is a deep seated part of human culture, with the 
> first forms of augmented reality being cave paintings and 3D cult 
> artifacts. The perception of an entire sphere of existence surrounding 
> us but invisible to those without the proper "sight" has been with us 
> from the beginning and is only lacking today in atheists who don't 
> believe in science. Especially in cultures with animist folk practices 
> like Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism etc etc the profane world 
> is still strongly augmented with saints and spirits, and the images 
> and effigies that represent their presence. Plus the large number of 
> nominally Protestant peoples who talk to God and believe in angels and 
> aliens lead me to believe that the number of people who believe that 
> the only world around us is what we see is small indeed.

Thanks for this observation, which I am happy to second.  I have been 
collaborating with Craig Freeman since the 1990s (and Will Pappenheimer 
also) on a project to invent electracy (the digital equivalent of 
literacy).  A key point in apparatus theory (as you know) is that 
technology is only one dimension of a complex matrix that includes 
institution formation and identity experience (individual and 
collective).  Each part of the apparatus has its own invention stream or 
genealogy, as you point out.  Human faculties persist across apparatus 
mutation, and these drives are fulfilled in radically different ways in 
different historical conditions.

The immediate relevance to AR is an interest in its capacity to support 
the imagination in general.  A shorthand version of our experiment is 
the possibility of designing an app supporting a collective epiphany 
(dubbed "appiphany").  The context is Virilio's warning about the threat 
of an Internet accident, a general accident that occurs everywhere 
simultaneously, due to the light-speed connectivity of our technology.  
The society of the spectacle has evolved into a dromosphere (says 
Virilio), producing a dimension collapse rendering a critical public 
sphere impossible.  Our project is to develop a practice for such 
conditions, for collective decision making at light-speed.  The 
challenge is to devise a usage practice that enables individual 
first-person experience of total information.

Appiphany.

This context is what makes your point so important to our experimental 
inquiry.  My pursuit of relays and prototypes for the simultaneism 
(Apollinaire's "new spirit") of epiphany has led me from a point of 
departure in modernist poetries (from Baudelaire on) back through 
traditions of Western hermetics and mysticism (revelation of various 
kinds) to, at present, Henry Corbin's accounts of Creative Imagination 
in Sufism, especially that of Ibn 'Arabi.  I only recently learned about 
the Celestial Earth, the place known as Hurqalya, the place of 
theophany, between the faculties of the sensory and the intelligible (a 
description that could apply as well to Kant's faculty of judgment).

The goal is not to become mystics, but to learn from the sophisticated 
practices of these experts on epiphany something about how the 
imagination operates.  Sufism (for example) is an autonomous source of 
invention, to be correlated with digital instantiations of virtual 
environments to support the political, ethical, and aesthetic ends of 
well-being for a contemporary world.

This particular genealogy does not constrain other possibilities, 
different sources and goals (far from it).  Thanks to this list for such 
a timely topic.

Greg Ulmer
University of Florida


>
> My favorite book on this topic is Margaret Wertheim's "Pearly Gates of 
> Cyberspace," which was written at the height of the VR and (the first) 
> virtual worlds craze in the 1990s, but can be applied equally well to 
> AR. We had a vast space that we could populate at will and we called 
> it the heavens, until the advancing sciences drove the boundaries 
> further and further back. I agree with Wertheim that this is why 
> virtual worlds and AR are both so captivating, because cyberspace 
> gives us back the huge canvas that we used to have - but it is blank, 
> not populated by eons of cult practices or under priestly control.
>
> Enough for one post.
>
> Also, probably because I neglected to send in a recent bio, the one 
> that was posted to the list was from over ten years ago with a broken 
> website link, so here's an update with functioning link:
>
> Tamiko Thiel (www.mission-base.com/tamiko/) is an American media 
> artist based in Munich. She is developing the dramatic and poetic 
> capabilities of various forms of virtual and augmented reality as a 
> medium for exploring social and cultural issues, often focusing on 
> site-specific works. She shows internationally at venues such as the 
> Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, the Metropolitan Museum of 
> Photography in Tokyo, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the International Center 
> for Photography in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in 
> Boston and in London, and at media art festivals such as Siggraph and 
> ISEA. Her work has been supported by grants from institutions like the 
> Japan Foundation, the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the City 
> of Munich, the Berlin Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the IBM Innovation 
> Award. She is a co-founder of the Manifest.AR cyberartists group, and 
> is spearheading the Manifest.AR intervention at the 2011 Venice Biennial.
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre


-- 
*Gregory L. Ulmer*
http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue
http://heuretics.wordpress.com
  University of Florida