A place to jot down a few passages from an early iteration of Roy Ascott’s “The Architecture of Cyberception.” The author thinks the omission may have been due to word length considerations or to accommodate a more architectural tone, but assures me it was not omitted ideologically.
About 5 graphs in:
The effect of cyberception on art practice is to throw off the hermeneutic harness, the overarching concern with representation and self expression, and to celebrate a creativity of distributed consciousness (mind-at-large), global connectivity and radical constructivism. Art now is less concerned with appearance and surfaces, and more concerned with appartition, with the coming-into-being of identity and meaning. Art embraces systems of transformation, and seeks to maximise interaction with its environment, both the visible and the invisible, by maximising the environment’s capacity for intelligent, anticipatory behaviour. The artist inhabits cyberspace while others simply see it as a tool.
About 8 graphs in:
…[T]he Romanticism of the private, solitary individual – essentially anxious, alienated, paranoid. Indeed paranoia, secrecy and dissimulation seems to have been embedded in all aspects of the industrial age. In our telematic culture, instead of paranoia we celebrate Telenoia: open-ended, inclusive, collaborative, transpersonal networking of minds and imaginations.
9th and 10th graphs:
And just as the cybernet is our community, we shall see increasingly, the replacement of the nuclear family with the non-linear family. The telematic culture may bring back to human relationships what industrial society effectively eradicated. Take life on the street now. I mean those streets just off hte super highway. Nothing is more human, warm and convivial than a bunch of kids hanging out on the Internet. As networked virtual reality transports our telepresence, and gives us the tools to reconfigure our own identities, social life is becoming not only more complex but more imaginative. As I have long-time insisted, there is love in the telematic embrace.
Our new body and new consciousness will bring forth a wholly new environment, an intelligent environment which returns our gaze, which looks, listens and reacts to us, as much as we do to it: smart buildings and tools which listen for our every move, attend our every utterance. We are not talking about simple voice commands at some crude computer interface, we are talking about anticipation on the part of our constructed environment, based on our behviour, resulting in subtle transformations of the mis en scene. Just as we cyborgs see, hear, feel in ways unknown directly to biological man, (although his myths and rituals always expressed his desires for self transformation), we live in an environment which increasingly hears, sees and feels us. There is a community implication in all of this for us.
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