[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]
Abstract
The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.
Introduction
The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.
The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS.
This definition of ‘The Road’ lies as a core armature for the overall research project. ‘The Road’ provides multi-dimensional access to reflect on a range of phenomena, practices, and social manifestations of presence in the world now and in the experiential and historic past. These reflections are fundamentally rooted in a worldview imbued with what, in a highly reductive sense, is called energy: a continuous and connected whole, a complete and unified field. Within such a cosmos so-called things dissolve into energetic flows and fields in a constant flux of change. It is precisely when the (social) world of things intersects with these flows that the indeterminate state of creative practice arises.
“Travel, like existence, is a non-figurative art. Travel is in the head, it is the allegiance to a complicated spatial ritual and is a radical simplification of existence.” (Baudrillard, 1990)
During much of my creative praxis, and reflecting on my particular trans-disciplinary background, I have initiated a wide-ranging exploration from a mobile locus between indeterminacy and protocol and where entropy governs the fate of all movements, directed or undirected. It is from that source which this project proceeds.
Discussion
The DCA project is a meditation on that-which-is, materialized as a multi-modal online media data-space that will trace both idiosyncratic and wide-scaled social trajectories. These trajectories endow the data-space with a coherent structure, and consequently, with meaning, and will establish the efficacy of the developing worldview – a process, “the task of our time” that fundamentally “expresses the most unselfish striving of humanity, ‘the desire to know’.” (Aerts, et al, 2007)
Within the development of this worldview, the work engages in the on-going debate, encountered in many human knowledge-systems, which explores the (energized) nature of the cosmos. At the same time it considers individual presence and the dynamic of the encounter between the Self and the Other. Within the accumulation of those social encounters, it also examines the range of protocols that the TSS deploys in order to control and direct the myriad flows of energy that are available to it. And, most critically, it establishes connections between these apparently disparate spaces through the conscious act of transformation through a personal worldview.
Mapping such a trans-disciplinary space is fraught with numerous problems, the most essential being the choice of a trajectory-of-inquiry to transit the space. This in itself was an originary motivation to develop an energy-based weltanschauung which asserts that existing disciplinary lines are themselves artifacts of a particular ‘take’ on the world. Shifting worldviews has the effect of (sometimes) rendering existing social protocols and taxonomies redundant and it certainly affects subsequent practices and actions.
The question of how to proceed affects both the inquiry side of the process as well as the deployment or project execution side. For this paper, I have settled on a trajectory that is both illustrative and which gives some feel for the importance of the work itself as a unique generator of meaning and consequently, knowledge. The trajectory is influenced by several major factors or sources. The first is my creative and teaching practice which has as a main component the activated concept of the encounter. A second is the range of secondary sources that I am in dialogue with and which contextualizes and circumscribes ongoing observations and processes. A third is my own historical trajectory which has passed deeply through a number of socio-cultural milieus pertinent to this research.
Referencing some of those sources the four reductive constituent entry points into the project’s revelatory/discursive space of energy are briefly introduced following:
The first constituent is what may be called the Cosmos – that which is “without beginning, without end, without past, without future” (Wilhelm, 1931). Simone Weil, bridging between the esoteric and the scientific suggests a simple, yet powerful view of the complete cosmos where “Two forces rule the universe, light and gravity.” Quantum physicist, David Bohm frames it as “the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders” (Bohm, 2002). It is at this level where indeterminacy comes into play.
The second is the Self, where learning a self-awareness establishes the conditions to be able to say in all ways “I sing the body electric,” (Whitman, 1895) or, to any who might listen, “I am a being of energy.” Or, in the isolation of the wilderness, where facing the self, one comes face to face with “the Great Knowing, this is the Awakening, this is Voidness – So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry …” (Kerouac, 1953) It is the space of meditative struggle, of ‘Zen sickness’ where “to activate the creative energy latent in the region of self-nature, the meditator must first face the ‘shadow’ and go beyond it” (Yasuo, 1996). Within the framework of hypostasis, spirit-coming-into-being, in the wilderness, where “I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate” (Abbey, 1968). “Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads” (Hesse, 1930). The Self which participates fully in the myriad encounters within the cosmos is the Self which will, ultimately, come to understand what is.
The third constituent is that of the encounter with the Other – “… we do not think, see, or feel in isolation” (Ascott, 1990) – where the model builds an awareness of flows between the Self and the Other. It is a space of coming-to-be where only “in virtue of the power to enter into relation is one able to live in the spirit” (Buber, 1956).
“The individual is a fact of existence in so far as he steps into a living relation with other individuals. The aggregate is a fact of existence in so far as it is built up of living units of relation.” (Buber, 1965)
This is a space of intersubjectivity, and a space of dialogue. Dialogue not merely as the site of the applied protocol of language, but the full range of all possible energized exchanges between the Self and the Other. The accumulation of all such encounters irrespective of temporal and spatial limits is what essentially generates the fourth constituent, the techno-social system.
The techno-social system (TSS) is the cumulative social space driven by protocols and standards (ways to direct, limit, and control existing flows); and which, of course, feeds back into the other entry points of the model (the space of encounter and of self-presence, and to the (scientific) concept of modeling the cosmos itself). The project is intent on widening a holistic awareness of this space of complex flows that is governed by the constant struggle between entropy and order. Prior work examining the connection between social systems, engineering, and energy established a base line for considerations of energy in the existence and structuring of social systems (Cottrell, 1955; Georgescu-Roegen, 1977; Pimentel, 1996; Odum, 1998). However, all these sources stop short of recognizing energy as the substrate of the cosmological system, but rather consider it as only a driving factor in a thermodynamically materialist system of relation, where, “… the evolution of Homo Sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet’s energy balance” (Price, 1995).
Two sub-sets of the TSS in particular are important to the project and will take a front-line in the bridging between the creative and the engineered, the un-controlled and the controlled; the chaotic and the formed; the analytic and intuited.
The first cumulative protocolary space is the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) – a social development first noted in Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address to the nation that contained an explicit warning to the American public to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
The MIC, as a particular sub-system of the TSS, is an integral feature of my family history. My father spent his entire career at high levels in many of the core institutions of the MIC as an engineer and senior policy analyst; I was educated and worked as an engineer in the global extractives industry; and then there is the obvious, though seldom publicly-noted reality that the MIC is an immersive system that is energetically formative of every aspect of the existence of the United States.
An important facet of this research looks into the analytic realm of engineering in order to explore the influence of the protocols/standards applied by the TSS on the various flows that it encounters:
“Maintaining consistency … is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools: They embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character … and make possible widely shared knowledge.” (Edwards, 2004)
The Road – as a specific deployment of the MIC and the TSS – is a directed, protocol-driven pathway for the flow of available energies: it becomes, in the context of this project, the locus for creative engagement. It functions as a structuring agent for the discursive trajectory which brings together these four spaces: themselves constellated and brought into relation through the common thread of energy flow. It contains the essence of a powerful and resonant cultural politic; it contains a significant space of personal biography, and is a primary expression of the engineering mind as a means of re-organizing flows. It contains a potential for linking these disparate spaces in new ways: it connects, it divides, it bridges, it informs, it deforms, it forms.
The cumulative trajectory of research subsumes these conceptually-defined spaces and combines historical reference and personal experience with immersed and experiential observation. Collectively these entry points and the discursive spaces which they suggest are influenced by the three fundamental ideas mentioned earlier: indeterminacy, entropy, and protocol. In fundamental interaction, these ideas engage a number of existing social narratives and deeply inform the exercise of any methodological processes.
Methodology
“We must summon up the will for intentional travel.” (Bey, 1987)
Phenomenology, as practiced through processes of situational awareness and sensual reflection is partially applicable to my undertakings in this project with the recognition that there are aspects of embodied presence which it does not address. These areas are circumscribed by a distinctly non-Cartesian body-mind approach that does not “formulate an empirical law by generalizing as its standard the cases of an unspecified, large number of people.” Rather, Eastern body-mind issues stipulate the importance of the idiosyncratic, where “the exception clarifies the essence” (Yasuo, 1993), and where “the body enfolds not only the mind, but also in some sense the entire material universe” (Bohm, 2002).
When phenomenology encounters a holistic energy-based worldview where “each human being is an independent actuality who interacts with other human beings and with nature,” it conflicts with the idea that “all these are projections of a single totality” (Bohm, 2002). My practice seeks a phenomenology unleashed from the limits of idealized ‘averaged’ objectivity, pyrolyzed by incipient indeterminacy, and actively transformed into a space of conscious reflexive and reflective introspection. This alteration comes about through the shift of perceptions implicit in the energy-based worldview. As Chris King writes, “Subjective consciousness may be necessary for the actualization of physical reality. … ‘observers’ are significant and possibly necessary boundary conditions for the existence of the universe” (King, 2006). It is the presence of the observer which initially brings the world to be and allows for the subsequent naming, categorization, and integration of phenomena populating that world. It fundamentally changes the nature of the introspective act which is taking place in that it becomes a less of an abstracted conceptual exercise and more of an embodied and powerfully transformative meditation or self-cultivation that “receives the activity of the Dao and is a tool for its activity” (Wilhelm, 1967). The meditative observer (meditation as a cognition of unconscious states) has the ability to access “not only the external world (the world of matter) but even more so cognition of the depths of the world of mind” (Yasuo, 1993).
Buber’s approach which places the coming-to-be of the world at the prototypical encounter between the Self and the Other (the ‘I-Thou’ and the ‘I-It’), maps out the dynamic of that encounter and how it, in turn, inspires a connectivity which is essential to this project. As with any creative endeavor, it is the dynamic relationship between intuited observation, action, and non-conventional reductive ‘documentations’, ‘translations,’ and, especially, resonant connections between all actors that set up any enduring efficacy. Indeed, any significance will be closely tied to the clarity of idiosyncratic be-ing, how that is juxtaposed with the wider social system, how it is reductively presented, and ultimately, how the energy of presentation subsequently ‘encounters’ Others.
Current status
The current status of the actual project is well in-progress. The general technical infrastructure is in place (though not in any final ‘form’) at (https://neoscenes.net/blog/). The archive is organized and functioning though it is not complete, nor, in two senses, will it ever be. The first that the amount of material directly available including my father’s film, image, and text archive, is of such a size that it will never be completely available in digital form. The second is that I am constantly, in real-time, adding to that archive as part of my ongoing creative practice. All of this material is sifted (re-membered), meta-tagged, and subsequently, incrementally, woven into the fabric of the the project itself. There are presently more than 600 multi-media entries in the database, with a goal of 2-3000 by the culmination of the project period. All of material is intertwined around the thematics, concepts, and ideas outlined in this paper. It includes several thousand images, hundreds of audio files, numerous videos, and texts ranging from bibliographic reviews to focused meditations.
In order to enable encounters, I opted for a structurally conservative early Web 2.0 platform for several reasons, the primary is that I can have the entire creative production process under my technical control (aside from the basic Apache web-hosting service). The chosen platform will allow user response and freedom of navigation, but not user modification of the content. This will focus the user on the movement through the space of inquiry in the process of engagement. I made a specific choice not to engage in a full Web 2.0 environment because of technical and material control issues.
As the core ‘form’ of this work is an SQL database, the outward interface will remain in flux until the (arbitrary) moment I decide that it is ‘ready.’ In fact, however, a provisional interface to garner a public readership in progress is completely operational (and has been since early 2009). This is important in the wider picture of attracting a readership/audience. It is, as I point out elsewhere, an accretionary and accumulative project, and audience gathering is not optimized by simply ‘unveiling’ the project for the examiners to interact with it. This is the nature of the medium – dynamic and flexible, but also slow(er) to garner attention given the truly saturated media state we are immersed within. It will remain a work-in-progress after the ‘final’ deployment as a reflexive and recursive resource.
The present graphical-user interface (GUI) is the open-source WordPress platform which I am very familiar with. It has a robust developer community and enough user-customizable options to suit the project well. I continue to develop meta-tagging/key-wording strategies along with traditional hyper-linking to facilitate exploration of the data-space. This is a critical step in the overall project as a data-space is only as revelatory as its architecture and GUI allows. The strategy here is to literally ‘connect the dots’ using concepts arising from the energy worldview that will elucidate connections between disparate points in the data-space.
The physical server is under US jurisdiction, so the entire project conforms with US (academic) fair-use conventions, as well as any federal laws on content. All archive content is under my sole ownership. The project will have a Creative Commons status eventually. I own all the requisite tools necessary for the production and maintenance; although having access to web, audio, and video editing tools is helpful when I am in Sydney.
Potential Problems and Timeline
The most difficult problem lies in the realm of the creative. To maintain a focus on such a volume of material and simultaneously establish productive meta-data structures that will provide a rich and provocative experience for the audience: this is the creative challenge, to break with standard structures, imposed protocols, and easy answers and, ultimately, to occupy a space of indeterminate outcomes.
I anticipate bringing the project to a conclusion absolutely no later than June 2012, though I am aiming for December 2011 at this point. Both of these dates would be earlier than provided for in the original candidacy offer.
There is significant work remaining in processing of historical (analog) sources, along with concurrent generation of new content. I am doing a workshop at the Aotearoa Digital Arts “Energy and Informatics” Symposium in Whanganui, NZ in early December 2010, and was invited for another residency with the the Center for Land Use Interpretation (https://clui.org) in western Utah in March-April 2011 where I had a very productive residency earlier this year. Otherwise, I will continue into 2011 the digitization, assembly, and synthesis process, knitting together the foundational data-space.
Bibliography
The following references are primary sources cited in this short text and are excerpted from a larger bibliography at https://neoscenes.net/blog/thesis-bibliography and which itself a subset of a sizable Zotero database covering a much wider range of sources.
Aerts, D., et al (1994). World Views: From Fragmentation to Integration. Brussels: VUB Press.
Ascott, Roy (1990). Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? in Art Journal, Volume 49:3. pp. 241-7. New York: College Arts Association of America.
Baudrillard, Jean (1990). Cool Memories II. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso.
Bey, Hakim (1987). Overcoming Tourism. https://hermetic.com/bey/tourism.html (last visited: 10/10/2010)
Bohm, David (2002). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge.
Buber, Martin (1987). I and Thou. New York: Scribner.
Buber, Martin (1965). Between Man and Man. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Cottrell, William F. (1955). Energy and society: the relationship between energy, social change, and economic development. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Edwards, Paul (2004). “A Vast Machine”: Standards as Social Technology. in Science, Volume 304. Washington, D.C.: AAAS.
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, (1977). Energy and Economic Myths. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Science & Technology
King, Chris (2006). Quantum Cosmology and the Hard Problem of the Conscious Brain in The Emerging Physics of Consciousness. (Ed.) Jack Tuszynski. New York: Springer.
Mirowski, P. (1991). More Heat Than Light : economics as social physics, physics as nature’s economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Price, David (1995). Energy and Human Evolution. in Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Volume 16:4. New York: Human Sciences Press, Inc.
Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M. (1996). Food, Energy, and Society (revised edition). Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Weil, Simone (1952). Gravity and Grace. Trans. Arthur F. Wills. New York: Putnam.
Wilhelm, Richard (1967). The I Ching. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Wilhelm, Richard (1931). The Secret of the Golden Flower. Translated from German by Cary F. Baynes; London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner.
Yasuo, Yuasa (1993). The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy. Albany: SUNY Press.