Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Naturephobia/Videophilia?

Interesting tech-related stories are coming thick and fast this week.  This one, another pre-publication electronic release (only slight irony here) shows that there is a world-wide trend for us to spend less time in natural spaces, including national parks, campgrounds, fishing and hunting grounds.  The authors, knowing that their evidence for a tight connection is slightly sparse (they discuss this in another of their papers, published some time ago, but available at their nice website) suggest that it cannot be coincidence that the decline in our time spent communing with nature began at around the same time as a noted upsurge in screen time (in the 1980s and beyond).

Regardless of what one thinks of the causation argument (that we don't go to parks because we're more inclined to spend our leisure time looking at television, computer screens, bigger screens at the cinema), one of the implications of a finding like this speaks to those trying to convince the general public to shell out resources and put up with inconvenience to preserve biodiversity.  In the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould, "we will not save what we do not love."  If we want to convince people that biodiversity has value, it won't be so simple as to remind them of how much they enjoy communing with nature.  Perhaps they really don't.

I think as well of the deeper roots of this development.  Why has there been this cultural shift?  Why are we gravitating towards looking at windows on the world, rather than the world itself?  For one thing, it's safe and manageable.  If I can immerse myself in the Serengeti with a flick of a remote control or a drive to the local cineplex, then why not?  Going deeper still, though, the answer has to lie in a brain that is so comfortable with the jarring discontinuities of spaces joined only by etherlinks and invisible radio-waves that we can let these flickering images stand in place of the real thing without feeling that we've lost anything.

Like many, I worry about these kinds of developments, but at the same time I wonder whether the answer is to simply beat on electronic media as the greatest evil since Walter Raleigh chuffed on his first smoke.  Might there be ways to co-opt these media to re-connect people (kids especially) with nature?  Is there no scope for a computer game whose goal is promotion of biodiversity, or even embedded media that remind us of our connections to a greater world?  What would be the impact of a giant screen on a city street that streamed 24/7 video content from the melting Polar caps?  Isn't it just possible that a spark could light in the mind of someone sitting, waiting for a bus, looking at that screen?

The technology that is responsible for letting us teleport from  one place to another using just our eyes is not going away. Clearly, though we may not yet know exactly why, we love this stuff.  Given this, to me it makes more sense to find ways to use our strange attraction to the visual to our benefit, rather than to issue blanket condemnation of all things electronic.

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.