Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Space, place, and the AGO transformation

I finally had a chance to visit the new Art Gallery of Ontario this weekend to have a look at the new Frank Gehry addition.  After an unfortunately not entirely positive reaction to the other big-name archi-revamp in Toronto, the ROM Crystal by Daniel Libeskind, I confess I was braced for the worst.  I visited under the best possible conditions.  I had arrived in Toronto on Friday, sans gaggle of offspring, avec lovely partner in crime where we lolled around in the cavernous bar at the Intercontinental (gotta love Hotwire) deconstructing the perfect martini.  There was nothing on the slate for Saturday other than feeding ourselves delicious things, visiting the gallery, and hunting down some good music.  I can't remember the last time my agenda looked like that.  Anyway...my mind is now wandering space and time...so back to the AGO.

I'm not going to rabbit on here about Gehry's beautiful sinuous curves, the astonishing masses of Douglas Fir, or the clever staircases.   Others have poured heart and soul into that effort.  I'm actually more interested in how people move through spaces and how they feel as they do so.  The attentive reader might have already noticed this about me.

First, art galleries in general:  for people interested in space and movement, they're the perfect kinds of spaces.  Unlike spaces such as shopping malls, libraries, casinos, offices, hospitals, or government buildings, there's really only one reason we visit a gallery:  to look.  My old friend Thomas Seebohm used to describe galleries as the "teapots of architecture".  What he meant by this might only be obvious to those readers who know something about computer graphics.  A classic reference object  for computer graphic modeling and rendering of three-dimensional objects has been the teapot.  If you can render its surfaces, curves and reflections in a convincing manner, then you've got a good 3-d model.  In the same way, if you can make a gallery work, then you've got a good space.

That's how I approached the new AGO.  Where did I want to go, and how did I feel when I got there?  As we passed through the entryway, craning our heads to take in as much of the complex, curvy organic warmth of the wood as we could (but I won't go there), I immediately began to feel a bit of rising tension.  The source of it, I think, was a greedy concern that I not miss anything. Where's the contemporary stuff?  Where's the Impressionism?  What new Canadian art is here?  Are there some traveling exhibits that I won't be able to see next time I visit? This slight art-angst (where's the Munch?) was probably exacerbated by the fact that this AGO was an entirely new version of an old gallery that I have been visiting on a regular basis for about 40 years (more about this in a moment).  Suddenly, a space that I have known pretty well for a long time has been reorganized, but it retains many of the old objects that I've grown to know over much of my life.  It didn't take me very long at all to discover that what the transformation is all about is breaking down those kinds of traditional approaches to a gallery space by refusing to categorize art in the conventional manner.  Instead, pieces have been put together to stimulate thought about art, rather than to encourage visitors to go look for their favourite iconic artworks so they can tick them off a mental list like birders going after the rare Black-Faced Spoonbill.  So for example, one of the most brilliant spaces for me was one in which one wall was literally plastered with a large number of well-known and much loved paintings hung Academy style, while the wall facing it was carefully arranged with a sparse collection of beautiful Impressionist paintings.  At the same time we're admiring the pictures, we're confronted with an interesting epoch in art history.  What does the contrast mean?  What do the changes in the ways that we present art have to say about how we feel about art?

Another example:  In the contemporary galleries, pieces are arranged chronologically.  As we walk through the collections, we move through time, make connections with the context in which the art was being made.  Instead of looking for common uses of materials, techniques and methods, we're looking for repeating ideas and themes.

As a repeat visitor to the gallery, and one who can connect much personal history to the space (everything from grade school excursions, bus rides from hell, illicit cigarettes sneaked outside the back door to visits with wan and willowy young companions when I was a pretentious university student wearing a safety pin in my ear), I was fascinated by the fact that re-arrangement according to new devices, new categories of thought shook loose all of these memories, separated the personal context of my viewing from the work itself in a wonderfully jarring way, and stimulated thought.

But beyond the personal, I loved the fact that what the AGO has done is to make the arrangement of spaces and the objects that it contains into a series of pieces of conceptual art.  Even though I've spent a decent amount of time talking to curators, and have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the process works, it was a deep epiphany for me to see curation as such a fundamental and transformative creative act.  The curation has actually changed the art.    That's what Gehry has unleashed here.

The art of being lost

We're in for a very interesting year.  To put it mildly.  The world's economy is being shaken to its foundations.  I don't think we've come to terms with all of the reasons for this yet.  Fingers of blame are pointed at politicians and investment bankers, and there's some justification for that, but there's a greater mystery: what have we become that we were so willing to mortgage our own future, our children's future, and our grandchildren's future for the sake of an avalanche of underpriced plastic toys, cheap electronics, and gigantic amusement parks for homes that, deep down, we know just don't make us happy?  

There will never be a better time for us to think about what we've become, think hard, and think outside the box.  Indeed, there may never be another time to do this.  Artists of all stripes can make a real contribution to this difficult and painful exercise.  I hope theatre like this is the thin edge of a wedge.  We're all lost in the woods, like the Hansel and Gretel of old.  But now the woods look very different.  Because of the cocoon of modern technology we've built for ourselves everything is happening at once and all in the same place.  So how can we ever feel lost?  Because being everywhere feels exactly the same as being nowhere, and being everywhen feels the same as having just run out of time.

Summer fiction

Ok.  I once promised my agent that I would never mention to anyone in the business that I wrote fiction sometimes.  But this story, written a couple of years ago, resonates with the themes that obsess me, so it seemed worth a gamble to show it the light of day. Besides...it's summer.  And I'm on vacation.  I called it What Spiders Know.

 

High season ends. The weather cools. I remain, stubbornly walking up and down the only road in town, clambering over the rocks on the beaches, kicking at the sand. A man with a rusted dump truck and a worn out hat drops a small mountain of firewood on my driveway. I spend days stacking it in neat piles, having driven slowly past the neighbour’s houses to take mental snapshots of the proper technique. Now, I tell myself, they’ll believe that I’m here to stay. When every piece of this wood has turned to ash in my little stove, I’ll still be here, digging in, fending off the long Maritime winter, walking up and down the road. By then they’ll know I’m serious. By then I’ll be a fixture.

My simple plan to stay and grow roots did not sit well with the ghost of Risser’s Beach. I met her one quiet afternoon in a thick stand of birch trees lying just off the water. All of her possessions sat in plain sight, piled on an old stump in the woods: A plastic deer, a baby bottle, some scraps of ribbon and a few coins, arranged in a crude pentagram. My hands, old and wrinkled like my father’s, hovered over the stump. These were hands worn down by time and love, but as foreign to the winds and tides on this lonely piece of beach as if they had just blown onshore in a hurricane. They hovered over the flotsam shrine but could not touch it.

She made a sound. Not the guttural moans or wails you might expect from an old Atlantic seawitch, but more a gentle coo, a melody. I turned my head, but seeing only empty space, turned away with a shrug. If she became bolder, reached out with icy fingers to touch my shoulder, blew her chilly breath through my hair, I could soar off this beach without a backward glance and never return. So what’s to fear? I walked on, thinking less about what kind of eerie presence might be behind me than of how best to tell the story to my family at dinner.

Darkness falling, I made my way back to our rental house, stumbling along the shoulder of the highway. More than half of the houses along the way were empty. Curtains down, fridge doors propped open, chains across the driveway, the inhabitants fled to the city for the winter or possibly forever. Those who had stayed behind could be seen through their windows, sitting around tables, bathed in yellow light, lost in conversation. They seemed as though they were posing for me, showing off the tight consistency of their lives, proving that, unlike me, they belonged here. I stood before such a house, trying to imagine myself on the other side of the window. It hurt to be outside, looking in. I wanted to share what they had, be inside the neat corners of that room, defined by light and warmth. I convinced myself I could pay the price, rise at four in the morning in January, blue fingers fumbling with a match to light the stove, fending off the gnawing hunger and screaming children.

Who was I kidding? The worst part about inventing the wheel was that it gave us mobility. Ever since then, we’ve been rolling about the globe, scrambling so hard to be somewhere else that we forget where we started out. I’ve tried to find virtue in that kind of drifting, a nobility of detachment. When I broke away from the ground that bore me, flew to

Canada

from a motherland an ocean away, I cut all ties. Now I hover above the earth, looking down on geometric plains of land like a high flying eagle, as I plot great circle routes over the planet. I can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. But no matter how hard I plunge my fingers into the soil here beneath my feet, it is as an interloper, a stranger lurking in the bushes beside the highway, an isolated incident soon to be blown away and forgotten.

A place just has to be more than its water, trees and rock formations. Stories are what glue it all together. Each bend in the road is knit to the next one by a name from the past, and each name joins with others in a song. In some places I imagined rousing anthems, in others, quiet hymns. Bathed in lonely silence, I strained to listen, like an old man nearing the end of his senses. I convinced myself I could hear a note or two, but it might have been nothing more than a stray breeze.

Walking the rest of the way home, I remembered a conversation with my daughter. On a long drive, she asked the timeless question:

“Dad, where are we?” I gave what I thought was a reasonable answer.

“We’re about halfway between

Milton

and

Guelph

.” I could see her rolling eyes in the rear view mirror.

“Yes, but where are we?” she persisted. I smiled. How to explain municipal boundaries, county lines, the miasma of urban politics and how arbitrary borders get defined to a tired little girl looking out the window at a blur of passing trees and grassy hills?

“Well, right now, we’re not really anywhere.”

I deserved the rolling eyes. I was the one who didn’t get it.

Milton

and

Guelph

were places. We’d been to them, roamed the streets drinking coffee, stretching our legs in the middle of a long journey to some other place. This place right here, outside our windows, was nowhere. Empty space. A few clumps of vegetation and a stone farmhouse or two. Not far from the giant neon Schneider’s Meats sign beside the highway which meant that, no matter how tired we were and how bad the weather, we’d be able to make it all the way home to Kitchener. That’s all it meant.

Now, remembering this conversation, I wish I had answered her question by pulling onto the shoulder, stopping the car, taking her by the hand and leading her into the middle of one of those grassy fields where we could lie down, side by side, smelling the soil, listening to the insects crawling and watching the clouds ring the sky like giant pearls on a tangled necklace.

“This is where we are.” I would say.

The trailer home I passed looked rough. One end was held together with old tarps and nylon rope. A scattering of articles around the property formed a crude fence, lit up in harsh monochromes by a single bare bulb dangling in the yard. A car wheel sat collecting rainwater, weeds poking from the bolt holes. The iron door of an old stove stood resting against a post. There had been times when I had puzzled over such sights. Why cling to cold, sodden ground like this when the world waits just around the next corner? How sad to be trapped, to lack the imagination to climb to one’s feet and take flight. What piece of brain were these people missing that chained them to the ground, dooming them to an existence scratched out of the old parts that had fallen off of other people’s possessions? Why didn’t they just move, for God’s sake? Were they alcoholics? Mentally retarded? Now, as the wind flapped at the few tattered bits of laundry hanging from the line, the truth washed over me like the first decent wave sliding up the beach as the tide changes. These people could no more imagine cutting themselves out of this place than they could reach in and rip out their own organs. This lonely stretch of land along the side of the ocean wasn’t just the container that held their souls. It was their skin, blood and bones.

In darkness only pierced by stars, I reached out with tentative fingers to find the front door. My hands swept through a cobweb. The plump spider, unstartled, slipped down a filament of silk to peer at me. Such optimism. They were immense this year, the local residents had told me. It was a sign. I didn’t ask ‘of what’ so as not to give myself away. In movies, spider webs symbolize decline. How did this insect, in two hours, claim this place with such alacrity while I bumbled about in darkness by the side of the road, wishing only for a brief taste of belonging? I know too much. I’ve seen this place from above, even if only in my dreams. I can find it on a map. My web, in sorry tatters, blew into the sky long ago.

The cold doorknob turned with resistance, as though there was a hand on the other side, holding on lightly. The door scraped open, and the thud as it hit the wall echoed through the empty house. All lights were off. I’d forgotten that nobody would be home. Or home but not here. Real home was somewhere else at the moment. Perhaps it always would be. Leaving the lights off, I kicked off muddy shoes and mounted the stairs to the bedroom and let myself fall, face down, on the unmade bed. Fitful sleep took me almost immediately. Still in darkness, I woke to a voice in bed beside me. The words were muffled but insistent, as if she were shouting at me from a great distance.

“I’m here with you,” she might have said. I wasn’t sure.

The sound of the old fashioned twist-bell on the front door was unmistakable and startling. I sidled down the stairs like a cat against a wall. I threw on the light and opened the door. A man stood on the threshold, blinking in the light.

“I didn’t know anyone was living here,” he said. “Saw someone creeping around earlier. Must’ve been you. Thought I should check.” We stood in confused silence for a few seconds. The man shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. He looked past me into a living room littered with toys, newspapers, coffee cups. “Here with family?”

“Yes, but they’re away tonight. It’s just me here. I’m sure it’s me you saw. I’d been walking. I came home.” Still groggy, I struggled to put together a sensible set of words. The man reached out a hand.

“Name’s Finn. I live just across the way. This house is usually empty this time of year.” He gave me a questioning look.

“Colin. I’m renting. For the year.” Finn straightened up and turned his head slightly to fix me with one eye.

“You’re not leaving? Here for the winter?”

“Thanks for looking in,” I said, nodding.

“Got some wood? You’ll need some.” He looked up and surveyed the house, pushing his cap back to get a better view of the roof. “Nine cords, I’d say.”

“I’ve got three.”

“Three?” he fixed me with the sideways glance again, assessing. “Thing is, nobody lives here anymore. Maclean moved away years ago. I’m not used to neighbours. I’m all by myself.” Whatever he was trying to tell me was just beyond my comprehension. It seemed safest to nod. He looked up at the spider, still dangling in the doorway, a new web almost completed. “Sure three’s enough? Oil’s high this year. Sure you’re gonna stay?”

“I’m staying,” I said, feeling more awake now and able to push a hard edge of certainty into the words, “no matter what.” Finn smiled.

“Winter’s miserable here. You’ll hate it. I do. Everybody does.” He turned to leave. “See you again,” he said over his shoulder. I watched him walk down the driveway. When he reached the large rock that marked the house from the highway, he sat down. I waved. He waved back. He took off his hat and crouched forward, elbows resting on knees, fingers running over the edges of his hat. He was rocking slightly as if he was thinking, weighing matters up. I took a step toward him. He looked up at me, waiting. I raised my head, as if I’d stepped outside to look at the stars. I subjected the sky to a thorough, sweeping scan and then let my gaze land on Finn, as if by accident. He straightened his back and shifted, preparing to stand, but it looked effortful. I took a breath, plunged in, and walked the few steps to where he sat.

“Thing is, I wonder if you could drive me into town. I’m not feeling altogether too good.” My reflex was to hesitate, weigh, filter, analyze, ask a probing question or two.
“Sure. Let me get my keys.” By the time I had fumbled through discarded pants pockets, found the keys and met Finn in the driveway, things looked worse for him. Even in the dim light of the yard, I could see the sweat and smell his sickness. He sat in the passenger seat of my car, breathing heavily, eyes closed.

“Finn? Do you think we should call an ambulance?”

“No need. I’ve seen you fellas drive.” Finn had his left shoulder raised and his right hand was pushing hard on his chest. He slumped forward in his seat, head bobbing with every movement of the car. I sprayed gravel as I pulled on to the highway. By the time we reached the emergency entrance at the hospital, Finn was white, drenched with sweat, gasping for air. Before I could get out of my seat, a paramedic had yanked open the passenger door and had poked his head into the car. I could see the top of his head, close shaved and shiny as he looked into Finn’s face. He smelled clean, medicinal, safe.

“Finn, my old son. You’ve cut it close this time I think.” The attendant looked up at me. “Ticker.” he said. “Third time. You must’ve driven here quick. Thank the Lord for those

Ontario

plates,” he chortled, “They sure burn up the highway.” Another attendant had appeared with a stretcher and, with characteristic economy of movement and effort, the two of them had unfolded Finn from the car and had him laid flat on the stretcher. I stood under the awning of the entrance and watched him pass. The second attendant eased me aside. “Staying out at The Point?” he asked.

“Yes, staying….just moved in. New neighbours.” I struggled to explain myself.

“Lucky for him you were nearby,” the paramedic mumbled without looking up, busying himself with the straps on the gurney.

“Yes, lucky,” I replied. Finn raised his head slightly as he passed by and grasped at my arm. His face was ashen. Eyes locked with mine, his lips moved to speak. I leaned in closer to hear him. His voice was a croak.

“Three cords’ll never do her,” he said. I nodded, patted his arm and watched until he disappeared through the sliding doors.

Following the breath, virtually

I'm still waiting for my neural activator thingie from OCZ (I could really use it today --the coffee isn't working) and still thinking about novel ways of interacting with space via technology.  Here's one that I'd really like to try.  A breathing interface.  One floats through a beautiful virtual environment on movements guided by the breath.   It reminds me of a hard year I spent training in some Vipassana techniques I was trying to learn with a local Buddhist group.  There, the idea was more to use the breath as an instrument of calming though rather than as a navigational device.  However, the primal instruction was always to "follow the breath."  I wonder what kinds of interesting mental spaces we'll find as these new technologies make brain and machine connect in new ways.

Reaching for nothing

I had a great chance to experience some uniquely local high culture last night at the world premiere of Reaching For Nothing: Water's Thirst, a brilliant multimedia piece by composer Peter Hatch and architect Dereck Revington (who, incidentally, designed the much-discussed brilliant aural suicide-barrier at the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto).  I'm not a reviewer, per se, so I'll leave that angle to the professionals (at least in pre-review format).  This was an event that both because of the local talent and because of the venue -- Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics -- worked as a marvelous piece of site-specific art.

My fantastic experience at this event perhaps attests to the truth that a performance works best when the observer becomes personally immersed in the presentation.  On a physical level, the set was explicitly designed to encourage such immersion.  Sound sources, both live and electronic, were dispersed throughout the small hall -- which seemed a perfect venue for this piece.  Through clever use of lighting, drapes, and a wee bit of dry ice, visual sources were similarly dispersed through the room at times, enhancing one's feeling of being inside the performance and sharing in it at a more intimate level than that of the viewer. I think I first noticed this when I discovered that the sounds of my own breathing were at first a distraction to me -- yes, it was just this quiet in the hall full of rapt attendees -- but then somehow joined on to the performance to serve as yet one more reminder that I was not on the outside peeking in at something, but rather was an integral part of it.

The performance itself was an extensive meditation on space and time so again a perfect fit for a physics institute and also close to my own intellectual leanings.  Lately, I've spent much time thinking about some of the connections between the two domains.  We use space and time interchangeably sometimes, in trying to understand our own place and impact on the planet.  My own favourite and slightly daffy example of this is the time that I once asked a street person for directions and his response was to wave his arm in the correct compass direction and to grunt "It's about two cigarettes from here."  More fundamentally than this, though, I've wondered how our generally weak grasp of the geometry of the connections between places might relate to our perceptions of time.  I have a colleague who has shown that brain-injured people who suffer from a syndrome referred to as "neglect" in which they act as though the space on one side of their body is missing also have inabilities to estimate time accurately.  Like many people, I have a disturbingly good grasp on time of day, but become fuzzy very quickly about more remote events (did something happen last week or the week before?  Deciding on an answer to a question like this can involve some tricky mental acrobatics).  I've also wondered about the connections between the patterns of space that we find soothing and restorative -- natural settings, forests, water and the patterns of time contained in natural sounds and in certain types of music.  And also the connections between the two.  A part of the epiphany of nature that I wrote about a few days ago was my sense that in nature the sights and sounds fit together with the kind of coherence that one just doesn't find on a city sidewalk. 

Sharing a beautiful multimodal space with a group of talented performers and designers last night gave me a perfectly comfortable little cerebral nest into which I could snuggle and contemplate this interesting set of ideas and to  explore their connections as if watching a dance of waves on an ocean beach.

Playing with space

I'm spending a luxurious Sunday afternoon lolling around in my office, having walked over here from my house filled with ambitious intentions of preparing classes, writing papers, working on some magazine pitches, and even moving around some lab equipment.  My head, still slightly hazy from having seen out this year's Oktoberfest with a big bunch of good friends last night, is not quite up to that level of engagement today, so I've had to content myself with something a bit different -- I'm just letting go of things a bit and letting my mind wander where it may, hoping it picks up some inspiring fuel for the days ahead when my full wits return to me.

I've been thinking a lot more about how our engagement with place seems to have this melancholy double edge to it, where we both revel in our freedom from geometry by embracing space-crushing technology, while at the same time nurturing these wistful cravings for an attachment to real places that such technology seems to steal from us.

A great example of this is Yellow Arrow, described as a massively authored artistic publication.  The concept is simple enough -- members purchase yellow arrow stickers, attach them to places that mean something to them, and then phone in a caption to an electronic depot using SMS messaging.  Someone discovering the arrow can dial up a code and retrieve the caption.  It's an interesting example of an attempt to recapture the authentic granularity of space.  The one who attaches the sticker lays claim to a piece of space using a short string of narrative -- he connnects his life to a place.  The one who finds the sticker, dials up the code, and reads the message links herself with the original author through a vector that attaches both parties to a very precise view of a small slice of the world.  Except that this is being done by beaming signals off of satellites orbiting the planet, it's a bit like an Inuit tracker reading the social history of a clump of snow by examining sled tracks and bootprints.

It's a lovely idea -- we subvert technologies that were designed to free us from space by using them to bind us back to it again.  A mental Möbius strip.

The space was singing

David Rokeby, Toronto new media artist, talked about his work here in Kitchener last night, in conjunction with the CAFKA-Haptic contemporary art festival.  The installation that he brought with him, a project that obsessed him for over a decade, is called the "Very Nervous System."   In the words of Marcel Duchamp, he now classifies this project as 'definitively unfinished.'  It has much yet to offer, but not in Rokeby's hands.

This incarnation of the installation sits just outside of the front doors of Kitchener City Hall and is almost entirely invisible.  In fact, an unobservant visitor could walk right through it without noticing that it was there at all.  The Very Nervous System consists of a small hidden camera, a few speakers, and some clever computing.  The camera and computer divide a zone of space into a number of small segments, and Rokeby programs a palette of sounds that are produced by movements through the zones.  In keeping with the haptic theme of this year's festival, the sounds are locally produced recordings of hands moving over tools, materials, and hardware.  Though this is not a very difficult thing to do with current technology, Rokeby's first version of the work, in the early 1980's, required him to build his own cameras and to program the entire effort in something that only the bravest go near these days -- 'assembly language programming' - Rokeby's apt analogy was that writing in assembly was a bit like sculpting using atoms. 

There was much to interest me in Rokeby's talk, but one idea captured my mind completely.  Rokeby explained that at some point in the development of the project, he came to feel that the computer was beginning to anticipate his movements.  He tried various kinds of 'gunslinger' games to try to initiate a movement before the speakers announced his movement with a sound, but he found that he could never do so.  The sound of his movement always seemed to precede his decision to make a movement by a fraction of a second.  Rokeby delved into the neuroscience literature and discovered the work of Benjamin Libet, who has shown, astonishingly, that we somehow become conscious of a decision to act some time after the decision has actually been made.  The experiments are clever.  They involve asking a participant to watch a sweeping clock hand while making random and unpredictable decisions to carry out a simple movement.  When they report the location of the clock hand at the time they felt they made the decision, brain and muscle traces always report that the bodily activity accompanying the movement has already begun when the conscious 'decision' is being made.  This finding, fascinating all by itself, has rippling implications.  A friend of mine (in fact the person who introduced me to Rokeby's work about a year ago) advised me to spend a lot of quality time in the Very Nervous System.  "The longer you spend in the space, the better the experience becomes because the computer learns about you," he said.   As it turns out, this is not true at all, but it resonates with Rokeby's experiences with this and other installations that the more closely peoples' actions are monitored, the more detailed and fine-grained the surveillance, the more they feel they are having a truly interactive experience.  Our mental confusion about when things happen, the smearing of event time, can invert our commonplace constructions of causality.

In short:  our conscious selves don't exactly have the kind of access to our decision-making processes that we might think.  Decisions seem not to originate in conscious acts of will, but somewhere else.  Consciousness somehow skiffs along the surface of our actions, noting them, constructing interesting and entertaining accounts of what we do, but not really providing the motive force.  As Rokeby points out, there are some ominous overtones.  Lacking a firm grasp on when we do things, we won't necessarily know why we act. 

Rokeby and Stelarc make a fine pair at this festival.  Stelarc robbed me of my 'where' and now Rokeby questions my 'when'.  This has been a dazzling and slightly disorienting week of ideas for me.

Third ears, teleportation, and the end of bodies

I had an utterly mind-stretching hour last night listening to Stelarc's tour through the history of his performances, beginning with his astonishing and eye-catching "suspensions" series that had him hovering naked over city and sea, impaled by huge meat hooks attached to wires, and ending with his presentation of a "prosthetic head" -- a five metre high projected image of Stelarc-head, complete with animated facial expressions and eye movements, and ready with witty, ironic, deep, or sometimes just plain silly replies to questions from the audience.  It's not hard to get the impression after a quick scan through his website that the main objective of much of Stelarc's performance art has been to draw attention to himself through a series of actions that almost seem to revile living flesh, provoking visceral, head-averting reactions from the audience.  At times, it was hard enough to look at the pictures, let alone experience the real thing.  But listening to Stelarc's words, ruminating on the thematic threads that run through all of his work, it is hard not to stand in awe of his approach to the delivery of his message.  Stelarc's artistic argument is that "the body is obsolete."  Technology that delivers instant messages from one place to another has had an enormous impact on how we see and use physical space.  In a sense, space as Newton understood it has disappeared.  But what Stelarc has done is to find ways to use this effect of modern technology to make clear what he sees as a deep truth about the illusory nature of self-hood.  The everyday notion that we human beings are embodied causative agents, he says, is nothing more than a mirage.  Things happen.  Our bodies, or perhaps just parts of them, participate in these events, but don't cause them.  And whatever the nature of this participation might be, it is a mistake, he says, to locate it in our bodies. 

To demonstrate the argument, Stelarc finds ways to blur, distort, or reverse the connections between human bodies and the dynamic events taking place in vast, disconnected spaces.  By means of muscle stimulators embedded in his arm, he surrenders control of his own body to a foreign operator, either human or computer.  By growing a third ear in his forearm using cutting edge cell culture biotechnology, Stelarc turns a part of his body into an auditory portal tuned using Bluetooth to the Internet.  Eventually, we will be able to dial up Stelarc's brachial ear on the Internet and listen to what his arm is hearing.  Perhaps he will even think of re-inserting the muscle stimulators so that we can tune and direct the ear.  If so, then whose body, whose causes, and whose acts?

I wasn't the only audience member to notice Stelarc's peculiar references to himself as "the body", and it reminded me of a year spent sitting in a group with a remarkable Buddhist teacher, who encouraged us to work towards a state of detachment or 'equanimity' from our own minds, the point being, I think, that each of us participated in a vastly complicated nexus of cause and effect that transcended the individual.  Just as Stelarc argued last night, personal agency was an illusion.

The sense of self fascinates me.  Converging evidence from neuroscience suggests that there are specialized circuits in our brains whose function is to put a sense of self, or personal agency together.  Certain pathologies, produced by strokes or other diseases, can fracture self-hood.  Even some pathologies of sleep, most likely connected to the same brain areas, can produce peculiar shifts of self-hood, such as the out-of-body experience.  Imaging studies are suggesting that experienced meditators may have found ways to 'quiet' or alter this part of their brains.

In our laboratory, and following the leads of some others, we have begun to experiment with virtual reality methods to encourage the breakdown of the sense of self.  This can be done by having someone wear virtual reality goggles which are connected to cameras showing a remote view of themselves.  People see themselves move and act from a remote perspective, and we stand by, ready to mix and remix the connections between the actions they see and the effects they expect.  We're doing this to try to understand more about where selves come from and how they locate themselves, but Stelarc's talk last night reminded me of the bigger picture, that such questions lie at the root of much human philosophy, religion, and art. 

The years immediately ahead of us, where the interests of scientists, artists, and other thinkers converge to produce striking new views of the connections between minds and spaces, may well produce some of the defining moments of our evolution as a self-reflecting species.

Art and science

One of the most enjoyable parts of being involved in the new virtual reality centre at the University of Waterloo is that I've had a chance to meet people who are interested in many of the same things as me (it's amazing how often the words 'space' and 'place' come up in ordinary discourse -- everywhere from conversations among teenagers who 'need their space' to discussions of architecture, politics, engineering, psychology and the arts).  Among the most intriguing of these interactions are those I've been able to have with new media artists.  As a scientist, I'm still getting used to the idea that one might want to build a complicated virtual reality installation not to understand, explain and take control of something (hopefully for some productive purpose) but rather in much more playful way -- to make a non-verbal commentary on some aspect of the natural or built world or the connections between the two.

This weekend, I've been spending time at an ambitious exhibition of such work, headlined by Stelarc, an Australian performance artist who often insinuates himself into his performances by means of real physical (and, by the look of it, painful) connections between man and machine.  I've seen a wild variety of performances, installations and exhibits -- a responsive blanket that senses your movements to more effectively wrap itself around you, a customized rainshower that caresses you with gentle raindrops while serenading you with an interesting palette of sounds, a space that invites you to use your ears to reinterpret your own movements so that your connection with the external world is recalibrated. 

Over the next few days I'll be going to some talks, going back to some of the installations to revisit and think about them a bit more and, whenever possible, I'll write about these projects in this space.