Imagery and Evolution
Panel, "Computer Graphics - Are We Forcing People to Evolve?"
SIGGRAPH '94, Orlando, Florida
Program Summary of the Panel: The topic of this panel is
a key emerging proposition in computer graphics and interactive
techniques: the computer graphics industry is changing our
world in a massive and basic way, from "written-word"
communication to "imagery" communication, and this is changing
how and what people think.
Roger Wilson, Chair
Leonard Shlain
Brenda Laurel
Terence McKenna
I want to say at the outset that I had great difficulty
preparing this talk - I mean more than the usual amount. On
topics of a smaller scale I have generally succeeded over the
years in finding something optimistic to say. I pride myself in
my positive attitude. I am very hopeful about the advent of
graphical and other sensible forms of representation that have
advanced so dramatically in my lifetime, and I am not at all
concerned that they may end the primacy of the written word in
human culture. What I can't work up much optimism for is the
survival of our species. But more of that anon.
The question seems to posit that "forcing people to evolve"
is a "new" thing - that is, that a cultural or technological
change which cannot possibly be accommodated by "biological"
evolution is something that hasn't happened to us before. Yet
there is persuasive evidence that the brain lags as much as
fifty thousand years behind the times in its hard-wired
evolution [Donald, 1991]. This would mean that, while we may be
optimized for language, we are certainly not ready for
perspective painting, photography, television, or computer
keyboards. Sorry folks, the shit has already hit the fan. There
are two points here. One is that we do manage to adapt, even at
the neurological level. The wiring of the human visual cortex
is profoundly influenced by events, both biological and
environmental, all the way through puberty, affecting things
like ocular dominance, stereopsis, and the perception of shapes
and patterns [De Valois, 1988; Sekular and Blake, 1994].
The other point is a meta-comment, which I will quote from
our old friend Marshall McLuhan:
Anything that raises the environment to high intensity,
whether it be a storm in nature or violent change resulting
from new technology, turns the environment into an object of
attention. When it becomes an object of attention, it assumes
the character of an antienvironment or an art object. [McLuhan
and Parker, 1968]
Such antienvironments, McLuhan believed, "open the door of
perception to people otherwise numbed in a nonperceivable
situation." In other words, every now and then technological
change makes us wake up and notice our media environment with
great surprise and alarm, and then we go to sleep again; for
example, when people worry about the commodification of sex,
the intensification of escapism, and the potential for mind
control in virtual reality, they are describing the cultural
environment of television. There may be just a touch of this
phenomenon going on here.
Changes in contemporary media are certainly causing people
to adapt - this is nothing new. But the Lamarckian
hypothesis that adaptations which occur during the lifetime of
an individual are inheritable has been shown, in most cases, to
be false. In cultural evolution, the metaphorical equivalent of
inheritance is education - the teaching of what has been
learned and invented by previous generations. Cultural, not
biological, evolution is the issue in the case of this
question. The sticky wicket is that we have seen in this
century that our cultural evolution may profoundly affect the
survivability, not only of individuals, but of our entire
species.
Here are the points in the argument that I want to address
-
1. that our new media enhance our ability to create compelling representations of imaginary, unreal, or altered objects;
2. that this boosts the divergence of human experience from natural intelligence and/or the natural world; and
3. that this is a dangerous state of affairs.
I want to say a few words about each of these points.
1. that we can now create compelling representations of imaginary, unreal, or altered objects. There are two corollaries:
- that we can therefore no longer distinguish imaginary or altered objects from actual objects in representations, and
- that we can not distinguish representations themselves
from actualities.
While the first point is certainly true in some cases,
changes in our epistemology generally arise to counteract the
effect. If this were not so, we could not laugh at the
hundred-foot shark gobbling a yacht on the cover of the
National Enquirer or sit still in the theatre during a
screening of "Jurassic Park." Of course, we are worried here
about more insidious effects - we know when images we see are
imaginary but they affect us anyway, subliminally and
emotionally. If this is a lethal flaw, then it has been with us
for a long time - we have been making representations of the
contents of our imaginations for as long as we have been
Homo sapiens. We would be hard pressed to find any domain
of human activity in which the imagination is not manifest and
blended in some way with the actual world - from paleolithic
horse-head carvings to subatomic physics.
The second point is really just a recursion on the first,
that we may not even know that we are experience a
representation as opposed to an actuality - the perfect VR
system, for example. Whenever one of my friends finds an object
that he has misplaced lying in plain view, he exclaims that he
has found another bug in the simulation we're both part of. But
this, too, is an old motif. Plato banished the art of theatre
from his Republic because he felt that people would not
be able to distinguish the representation from reality, and
that this would presumably lead to poor judgment (Plato does
not tell us how he handled the fact that the Republic
itself was a representation).
We all know the stories about people running screaming from
early films because close-ups looked like severed heads. We
also know that people are remarkably good at perceiving the
conventions of a representational medium almost as soon as they
are invented - a kind of "instant literacy." Children who tried
out the VR piece that we built last summer had no difficulty
coping with "flying" - a certain level of knowledge about the
medium preceded their first encounter with it. Note that this
phenomenon works even when the conventions are not directly
perceivable. Stand outside a showing of the latest action film
and listen to people's speculations about how the special
effects were achieved as they leave the theatre.
Blue-screening, model effects, photo-shopping, and morphing are
old news even to six-year-olds.
The second two points,
2. that the rapid growth in our ability to synthesize and alter representations boosts the divergence of human experience from natural intelligence and/or the natural world, and
3. that this is a dangerous state of affairs,
are more troubling to me. It is certainly trouble if we
stray so far from the natural world that we damage it to the
point that it no longer supports many kinds of life, including
our own. We seem to be well on the path to doing that, but I
can see no evidence that our growing ability to create new
forms of representation is either good or bad except in how we
use it.
A few amateur observations about evolution. It seems to me
that we are the embodiment of a way of surviving, a way of
being in the world, that began long before the patriarchal era
and the invention of the written word. The precursors to the
way we are were the invention and use of tools and weapons, but
they were not sufficient to lead to us; other tool-using
humanoid species died out without direct competition from our
forbears. It seems to me that our history began with those
traits that Stephen Jay Gould identifies as belonging uniquely
to Homo sapiens - abstract reasoning and
representational art. As Gould points out in his book
Wonderful Life:
[Humanity is] . . . an improbable and fragile entity,
fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small
population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a
global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an
embodiment of general principles. [Gould, 1989]
We are unlikely, not a done deal; nor would evolution
predict that we are to be the forebears of an even more
"intelligent" species than ourselves. Indeed, if evolution did
surprise us and produce the cybernetic meta-organism that Vinge
and others predict, say by a means similar to the appearance of
multicellular life, I would not want to meet an organism in
which Serbian soldiers were asked to serve as mitochondria. As
Vinge observes, given what it's got to work with, a posthuman
meta-organism might well be an almost unimaginably nasty beast
[Vinge, 1993]. The story of evolution is neither the unfolding
of a divine plan nor the inevitable march of sentience toward
more and more spectacular manifestations; rather, extinction is
the rule. We are much more likely to die out than to transform
into a self-aware, infinitely smart, infinitely wise collective
shrouded in white light. As far as evolutionary history would
predict, the same set of traits that got us into this mess are
going to have to be the ones that get us out of it - namely,
abstract reasoning and representational art, and the way that
they develop in their ongoing dialectic.
I will not drub you with the pre-catastrophic litany of
industrialism, pollution, and destruction of the environment
and all its dire consequences for the survival of our species.
Suffice it to say that regarding the last fifty years of human
history has been not unlike watching the Challenger accident
over and over in slow motion.
Humanity is indeed an endangered species. We can sit here
and be effete about it or we can get up on our hind legs and
catch a couple of frisbees. Kids today can parse about five
times as much information from a rapid-flow stream of video
images as I can. This is part of the tragedy of the seemingly
superhuman cultural literacy of teens in the "developed" world
- beyond this visual alacrity, they can create, transmit, and
receive personally authored information around the infosphere
with relative ease; they can successfully distinguish point of
view as a component of information, unlike most of their
Madison-Avenue-trained parents - in short, they are in an
excellent position to pull the pants off of the politics of
information that has dominated the last several centuries in
the service of a truly toxic turn in cultural evolution. .
.
Humans are able to adapt to their media environment very
well thank you, but I think we can all name - if we dare - the
thing that's missing from the formula. Where is the place to
stand? Where is the fulcrum from which this brave new species
can conquer the bullshit of the world? What torch will guide
them in their reconstruction of reality? It isn't snotty smart
predictions of doom, that's for damned sure. Yes, we need
eloquent foretellings of what the future may hold, with all the
scary bits writ large. But for we who are alive right now,
there's no way around but through. Declaiming the end of life
as we know it is only half the job of the contemporary
demagogue. The other is to try to see the way
through.
How can young people have hope? Although it is growing
blessedly un-hip in intellectual circles, the virus of
deconstructionism is alive and well in American youth culture.
With the bright curiosity that human children are still
miraculously born with, they begin to explore. Soon they begin
to hear messages about what is wrong here on Planet Earth.
While their brothers and sisters in some less privileged places
subscribe to the relatively simplistic prescriptions of
nationalism and holy wars, the postmodern tribe begins to take
things apart. They peel and peel away at the veneer of
objectivity, at the hidden agendas of consumerism, at the
mealy-mouthed values that short-circuit ethics into obedience -
obedience to institutions that have as their goal, not the
well-being of either the individual or the species, but profit
and power. They peel and peel away until there is nothing left
of their bright curiosity but a thin flame of cynicism, which
eventually gutters out in a gust of apathy. Apathy is the "way
around" that will take us extinct. This is not a portrait of
all kids, or of any economic or ethnic group of kids, but of a
nontrivial percentage of kids, and you can find it from Beverly
Hills to Bedford-Stuyvesant.
It is not the lack of information that has done this, nor is
it the disappearance of the word - the "news" plays a pivotal
role in the whole sad progression. The economy sucks, politics
sucks, presidents lie, sports heroes commit murder, how should
I care? As Neil Postman observed, apathy proceeds, not from
ignorance, but from a surfeit of information from which no
action can proceed, information about things over which we have
no control [Postman, 1985] - life in a world of one-way
information.
One piece of potentially good news is that the
decentralization that is occurring in the geopolitical sphere
seems also to be happening in the world of media. The number of
magazines in circulation has increased exponentially in the
last five years. Students sent email and faxes from Moscow and
Tienanmen Square. Teenage girls in LA are toasting video for
their friends. People are producing and sharing personal
journalism and authentic narratives in all media. These people
work through enormous interface obscurities to get at the
heartbeat of what they want to do. They are not stopped; they
do what works. They make new tools. They ignore intellectual
property. With any luck, and the invention or emergence of a
good alternative economic model, it may be that literacy in
this brave new world will not be shaped and controlled by
either the owners of the infrastructure or the content
providers of yesteryear. It may be shaped by the revitalization
of the oldest goodest impulses of humanity: to make our
experiences into stories and performances and share them with
each other - the active impulses of self-revelation and
creative imagination. I think that this is still the most
reliable transmitter of values - long after church, TV, and
politics are debunked, people will still take delight and
wisdom from each other's stories.
In my lifetime, I have seen the privileged status of the
written word pass on to the television, then from the
television to the computer. My work with American children
confirms for me that as the computer becomes more transparent
the idea of any one medium having an authoritative voice is
fading away. With decentralization comes repersonalization and
a healthy attitude toward appropriation. One thing we can do is
work toward assuring that the economics and technology of the
net don't beat this impulse into submission.
Finally, I want to talk for a minute about what our new
media have to do with our relationship with nature, because
this seems to me to be the issue lurking at the bottom of the
pond.
In Western culture, we often speak of science as
being "a dialogue with nature." In The Character of Physical
Law, Richard Feynman notes that both artists and scientists
"appreciate sunsets, and the ocean waves, and the march of the
stars across the heavens." "As we look into these things," he
says, "we get an aesthetic pleasure from them directly on
observation. There is also a rhythm and a pattern between the
phenomena of nature which is not apparent to the eye, but only
to the eye of analysis; and it is these rhythms and patterns
which we call Physical Laws." [Feynman, 1967]
The scientist's analytical tools extend the domain of
aesthetic pleasure from the visible to the invisible.
Representational tools - from elegant equations to scientific
visualizations - make the unseen patterns of nature sensible to
us again. Too often, I think, we set art and science in
opposition to one another. Both are intimately involved with
the natural world, and both intend to make sensible
representations of phenomena that are in some way unseeable or
at least unseen.
In a particular sense, art is a dialogue with human
nature as well. A painter's brush is in intimate relationship
with a painter's hand, with the physical qualities of paint and
paper, and with the eye and brain of whoever will see the
painting. The technologies of an art intersect the
nature of its materials, its objects, its makers, and its
beholders.
Making art with computers is a difficult enterprise because
computers make nature so hard to get to. They typically have no
sense organs, for instance, nor do they address any of ours
particularly well. They have evolved as a race of severed
heads, without bodies, without a sense of pleasure, doomed by
the arcana of their communication mechanisms to make extremely
small talk with people who are almost as strange as they are. I
see them staring vacant-eyed, impaled on pikes that surround,
not the fortress of Count Vlad, but the edifice of mind-body
dualism.
The idea of virtual reality is the antithesis of this state
of affairs. It intends, regardless of how well it succeeds, to
accommodate the body as well as the mind - in theory, it
refuses to distinguish between the two at all. It makes use of
the equipment that evolution has so magnificently prepared for
us - namely, our ability to perceive the world from a situated
and embodied point of view. VR is concerned with the
nature of the body - how our senses work, how we move
around, how we get the sense of being somewhere, and how the
sense of physical presence affects us. Regardless of the nasty
little applications to which it the military-entertainment
complex is busily applying it, VR is at its root a technology
which attempts to conform to nature, in opposition to one which
attempts to dominate it. We do a great good as artists and
makers of culture when we explore and develop this alternative
potential.
Which brings me finally, to the question of artistic style
in new media. Style instantiates philosophy. Style articulates
a relationship with the world. It implies both a natural
philosophy and a metaphysics. In artistic representations,
style is the way in which these philosophical materials are
used as working hypotheses in the construction of what-ifs.
In contrast to the slickly literal heavy-metal worlds of
virtual entertainment, I would describe most of the artistic
virtual worlds that I have seen so far as
constructivist. Sometimes technological artifact and
sometimes conscious choice, the imagery in such worlds is
blatantly constructed. Dizzying topologies, illegible
structures, surfaces with their polygons showing - sometimes
even the algorithms are showing, of which a certain flavor of
techno-artist is very proud. The invisible human being,
sometimes iconized as a tiny floating cluster of polygons that
one is told represents a hand, is reconstructed as an absence -
a disembodied point of view that moves without friction, noise,
rhythm, breath. In a medium that tries so hard to surround us
and saturate our senses, this denial of the embodied self seems
an absurd contradiction.
There are recent historical parallels here. Constructivism
as a style in theatrical design is most closely associated with
the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold in the first third of
the 20th century, who was reacting at least in part to the
style of Stanislavski. For Method acting he substituted a
theory of biomechanics, rejecting psychological realism in
favor of a notion of actors a machines who would carry out the
explicit directions of their operator. For the conventions of
scenic realism, he substituted constructivism - the
scene as a set of geometrical and mechanistic constructions
that could be used by his actors in a gymnastic way. The point
of these changes was to make the audience aware at every moment
that they were in the theatre. His goal was to induce social
action outside the theatre, not through the conventional
means of empathy and suspension of disbelief, but through
theatre as rhetoric, performance as the presentation of
argument.
Constructivism was part of a reaction against realism and
bourgeois aesthetics that rippled through all of the arts
throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the
anti-realistic movements during this time arose in response to
the political horrors of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, culminating in World War I [see, for
example, Gibian 1971]. If reality could be so abominable, then
the world was not at all as it had been portrayed. Realism
became identified existentially as well as aesthetically as a
lie - that is, it employed illusions to perpetrate comfortable
myths about how the world works. The deceptive nature of
representations themselves had to be unmasked, and disjunctive
new approaches to theatrical art - from Tristan Tzara to
Bertolt Brecht - were a cultural necessary. Anger, shock, and
political activism fueled the reaction against realism.
Constructivism and other anti-realistic styles intended to
prevent empathy and force intellection - in a sense, severing
the head of anger and judgment from the body of nature -
negating the biochemistry of empathy, the need to connect, the
tendency toward growth. Meanwhile, playwrights like Giraudoux
and Anouilh created a more holistic alternative to realism in
the form of theatrical impressionism. Impressionism in painting
and photography was also influenced by 19th-century romanticism
in its reverence for nature as a source of both truth and
ecstasy. In contemporary fiction, film, and increasingly,
computer graphics and animation, magical realism is the
descendant of impressionism. The plausible portrayal of the
fantastical brings people to question our constructions of the
possible in terms both of nature and human agency. In another
sense, magical realism is what comes after the compulsion to
dismember. By representing the unseen agencies of dream,
spirit, and nature as sensible actors in everyday reality,
magical realism speaks of hope, healing, and
reconstruction.
Magical realism is but one example of a style - a point of
view - that has the power to help us envision how things might
be. Like Leonardo's flying machine, our representations are
indices to a possible future - a way of making technology, and
a way of thinking about the world. The representations made by
a culture organize its construction of the possible and
galvanize its will.
For myself, as an artist and as a person, working from this
point of view reveals the glimmering of a way through. For you,
too, this is an actionable suggestion. After all, you are here
because you are the makers of the images that the world sees
and the creators of the tools that produce them. It seems to me
that we must be constantly in dialogue with nature, in both the
objects and the process of our work, in the way
we think about the eye, the hand, the gesture, about walking,
flying, seeing, seeing faces in the clouds, to know not only by
unmaking but also by creating, making new, reconstructing the
possible, manifesting harmony, instantiating dreams, reifying
hope.
References
De Valois, Russell L. and Karen K. De Valois. Spatial
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Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages
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Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967.
Gibian, George, ed. and trans. Russia's Lost Literature
of the Absurd: A Literary Discovery. Selected works of
Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvendensky. New York: Norton, 1974,
1971c.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and
the Nature of History. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1989.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Harley Parker. Through the
Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York:
Harper & Row, 1968.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
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Books, 1985.
Sekular, Robert and Randolph Blake. Perception. Third
Edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 1994.
Vinge, Vernor. "Technological Singularity." Whole Earth Review, No. 81, Winter 1993, p. 88ff.
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