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InterCommunication No.15 1996
Feature
The Museum of the Third Kind
Roy ASCOTT
Japanese is here
Any discussion of the museum of the future must
necessarily respond to the computer-mediated practices
which define the canon of late 20th century art. While that
seems to make sense in the context of a culture saturated
with computer and communications systems, services and
products it would be shortsighted for this perspective to
disregard the impact that biotechnology, molecular
engineering, and artificial life may exert on the arts over
the next 25 years. The electronics revolution has moved
from where it started in communications, to the digital
computer, and now into the human brain. It is the new
biological and cognitive sciences rather than computer
science which lead the way. Indeed it could be argued that
while the body and its presence, as an instrument of
interactivity and a subject or virtuality, dominates
muchcurrent discourse, it will be questions of the mind/
brain, that is to say consciousness, which will come to
dominate art practice in the future. And the future is all
that museums can provide for. We know now that there is
no absolute history, that the past is written in the present.
We are irredeemably futures-oriented, and our museums
as well as our institutions of learning must come to reflect
that. One thing is certain. Nothing is given, neither the
past, present nor future: all is constructed, and the site of
that construction is our own consciousness. It is well
recognised that consciousness is a field, and that telematic
systems are a part of its evolution.
The Internet, as it develops, may indeed come to provide
the infrastructure of a global mind. Thus in one respect
the museum must be a part of that infrastructure, but it
would be both foolish and shortsighted to think that the
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museum should be no more than that, that it should exist
only in cyberspace, online or in a state of total virtuality.
Electronic art is soon to become bio-electronic art, just as
the primary element of its practice, the microchip is about
to become the bio chip, and the digital computer gives
way to the neural network. We are moving towards the
spiritual in art in ways that Kandinsky could hardly have
imagined, such that telepresence will be accompanied by
teleprescience, and cybernetic systems will integrate with
psychic systems, mutating into what could be called
psybernetics.
This attitude is reflected in the remarks of Isao Karube, a
leading-edge technologist of Tokyo University. "Now that
people's attention is turning towards the inner world, in
the developed countries where materialism has reached
saturation point, the future of electronics depends on the
problem of what sort of approach to take towards the
brain, the neurons, and the mind." [*1]
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InterCommunication No.15 1996
Feature
The Museum of the Third Kind 2/6
Art is no longer a onesided encounter with official taste,
nor a secondary encounter of personal interpretation, but a
close encounter of the third kind, involving
transformation and interactivity, where the observer
becomes an integral part of the creative system. Our art
may be called digital, paranatural, technological, online,
virtual, post-biological or whatever, but it will always
henceforth be interactive.
To talk about the Museum of the Third Kind is to talk
about the two primary coordinates of its design, or rather
of its artificial genetic code, since it is more a question of
its process of emergence than of creating a definitive
blueprint for its construction.The primary coordinates are
those of behaviour and architecture. To understand
behaviour in this context we must understand what I have
defined as "cyberception" [*2]: Post-biological
technologies enable us to become directly involved in our
own transformation, and are bringing about a qualitative
change in our being. The emergent faculty of
cyberception, our artificially enhanced interactions of
perception and cognition, involves the transpersonal
technology of global networks and cybermedia. We are
learning to see afresh the processes of emergence in
nature, the planetary media-flow, while at the same time
re-thinking possibilities for the architecture of new
worlds. Cyberception not only implies a new body and a
new consciousness but a redefinition of how we might
live together in the interspace between the virtual and the
real.
Western architecture shows too much concern with
surface and structures - an arrogant "edificiality" - and is
too little aware of the human need for transformative
systems. There is no biology of building. Architecture has
no response to the realities of cyborg living, or the
distributed self, or to the ecology of digital interfaces and
network nodes. Cities must become the matrix of new
forms of consciousness and of the rhythms and
realisations of post-biological life.
The convergence of computers and communications is
producing an environment, a telematic culture, in which
many cherished institutions and artistic practices are
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feeling challenged, threatened, or just plain redundant, as
exemplified not least of all by that triumph of ideological
instrumentality, the museum. The cyberstress that the new
technologies and new media exert upon the Culture of
Representation is felt as much at the larger political level
as it is in individual, personal experience. The impact of
telepresence, bionic diversity, distributed knowledge,
collaborative creativity, and artificial life on our sense of
self, our sense of what is natural, what it is to be human,
indeed of the status and legitimacy of every day reality, is
more than most traditional discourses can bear. The
breaking point however is not the death of culture or the
incoherence of consciousness but the revitalisation of our
whole state of being and a renewal of the conditions and
construction of what we choose to call reality.
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InterCommunication No.15 1996
Feature
The Museum of the Third Kind 3/6
Telematic culture concerns the global connectivity of
persons, of places, but above all, of mind. The internet is
the crude infrastructure of an emergent consciousness, a
kind of global brain. The Net is prodigious in its
empowerment of associative thought - the thought of the
artist - that aspect of cognition which leads most often to
creativity. It is the intelligence of neural networks. It is
leading us to the collective intelligence of a planetary
"hypercortex". Art is always first a matter of
consciousness, without a spiritual dimension it atrophies.
The artist working with digital technologies must always
be asking the question "is there love in the telematic
embrace?" [*3]
In claiming to track changes and movements in culture by
selecting, preserving, and presenting artifacts objectively,
the Museum is actually engaged, sometimes ideologically
engaged, in constructing consciousness and behaviour.
The museum does not clarify our perceptions so much as
codify them. Museums are never passive. So the Museum
of the Third Kind, in its online and distributed form, is
potentially an extremely powerful tool. We must be sure it
is in the right hands. This means that it must change its
role as guardian of an official reality to being that of
guide to an Emergent Reality, to Nature II, and to entirely
new forms of collaborative experience. Thus, in the
emergent culture the principal focus of the Art Museum
shifts from the plastic arts to the xenoplastic arts, the arts
of connectivity and interaction. It not only brings people
together across great distances, it brings ideas together
across great differences. The House of the Muses must
become a Garden of Hypotheses where ideas can grow .
There will be plenty of groves for reflection but the
emphasis will be more on action, interaction and
construction, than storage, classification and
interpretation. The Museum becomes a site of
transformation.
Classical museum culture will mutate into a kind of bio-
electronic horticulture, "digiculture", with emphasis on
planting ideas, growing forms and images, harvesting
meaning. The Museum of the Third Kind should thus be a
hot house of artificial life rather than a conservatory of
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'nature morte'. The divide between the creation of art
outside the museum, and the curating of art inside the
museum will change so that at the interior it becomes a
seedbed for art, and in the external world an interface to
the planetary network. This can be characterised as a
process of "curation" which brings the curatorial role and
the act of creation into a new productive synthesis.
The museum must also adjust to the paradigmatic shift in
the public's relationship to art, knowledge and
information, in which their role is more dynamic, more
demanding of interaction. For the post-biological artist
context is prioritised over content. The artist is the author
of systems which empower the public to create meaning
through interaction. The museum will be a part of a
universal macro-museum, a global resource. At the same
time it will also shrink into being the micro-museum, a
neural interface as minuscule as a biochip linked to the
hypercortex, as in the research of Greg Kovacs at
Stanford and Michael Deering at Sun Micro Systems who
are working on a radio-linked chip in the back of the
human neck.
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InterCommunication No.15 1996
Feature
The Museum of the Third Kind 4/6
What can be said of the present day Museum in the Net?
Every museum director, curator and art dealer knows that
the Internet is where you can display your wares to
perhaps a 100 million users. There are currently
thousands of public museums, university art centers,
private galleries, artist groups, cultural entrepreneurs,
private dealers setting up Web sites, mounting online
exhibitions, publishing catalogues and critiques, and
establishing archives and collections, in the dataspace of
the Net. Art viewing online looks like replacing art
viewing on the hoof. And maybe more significantly, the
collection of paintings of one of the very earliest galleries
in Europe, that of prehistoric cave paintings at Combe
d'Arc in the Ardeche, was accessible in all its majestic
authority on the French Ministry of Culture's home page
(http://www.culture.fr/) within just one month of being
discovered.
There is little to be said about putting material works of
art out on the Net. Of course there will be distortion in
any transposition from the concrete art object to the
ephemeral digital image, and picture resolution is still
generally rather weak. At the same time, as the designers
of Chartres knew, the back lit image is intrinsically more
arresting than the light reflecting surface. And it is no
small thing that the great wealth of artworks and historical
artifacts built up in public and private collections around
the world, sometimes as the result of colonial theft and
pillage, can be returned to the world with an accessibility
that is truly global. As network navigation in virtual space
becomes more available, no one's geographical location
will be too remote to prevent them visiting the British
Museum, the Prado in Madrid, the Temple of Konarak, or
the Museum of Modern Art in Caracas. This is the Digital
Museum of the First Kind.
Then there is an art destined for what we might call the
Museum of the Second Kind, which is not originated in
pigment, canvas, or steel, but which is composed of pixels
from its inception, digitally destined from the start for the
computer screen, which slips easily into the Net for
instant world wide consumption. Aesthetically it is hardly
different from painting or drawing in the traditional sense.
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A picture is rendered, forms are composed, a work of
aesthetic finality is created. You may navigate it but it is
basically a closed world. In both cases the Net remains a
delivery system, an archival source, a catalogue of
holdings. It neither challenges the traditional plastic arts
nor renders them redundant. It simply extends the
repetoire of artistic images and ideas, reaching those parts
of the globe that other gallery mechanisms cannot reach.
It is current practice to call such projects the "digital
museum" but such a term can only be provisional and is,
in fact an oxymoron since "digital" speaks of fluidity,
transience, immateriality and transformation, while
"museum" on the other hand has always stood for solidity,
stability, and permanence.
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InterCommunication No.15 1996
Feature
The Museum of the Third Kind 5/6
There is an art which exists only in the Net, for the Net
and by the Net alone. This is destined to be a part of the
Museum of the Third Kind. It uses the computer not as a
video terminal, through which you view objects of art, a
kind of digital carousel projector, but as a screen of
operations, an interface, which enables you to enter into a
process of manipulation and transformation of images,
texts and sound. It deals not so much with the behaviour
of forms, the aesthetic of appearance, as with forms of
behaviour,the aesthetic of apparition, of coming-into-
being. Your interaction is with its multi-mediated form
and its many layered meanings. It is about the viewer
being active in the creation of art, actually with the
creation of meaning. In the Net, to see is to own!
Whatever arrives at your particular interface from no
matter where on the Net, whether it's image, text, or
soundbite, it is yours to keep. More significantly, it is
yours to transform.Transformation , particularly in the
hands of the viewer, is the primary functional determinant
of the museum.
Virtual Reality has long been heralded as the prescription
for the museum of the 21st. century. The present state of
the art is arid and dry, and compares unfavourably to the
wetness of nature, but there are signs of the emergence of
an artificial reality, or what I prefer to call Paranatural
Reality, or Nature II [*4] , which is essentially moist. It is
in this moist reality, grounded in the technology of
Artificial Life, and the nanotechnology of atoms and
genetically engineered molecules, a post-biological
reality, that life-like behaviour may emerge. We may be
approaching the point of working with forces never
worked with before, and sensing things which have never
been sensed before. To quote again Isao Karube: "Kiko-
jutsu is now in fashion (an Asian discipline which
develops the inner energy called Ki) Even I could move a
static piece of paper with my force, like this! This energy
might possibly be measured by a sensor, perhaps a
quantum wave sensor that works on a completely
different theoretical basis" [*5].
This is the phase in our culture where art and science will
most truly converge. Where as artists we might become
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partners in evolutionary change rather than simply
expressive or analytical bystanders. This is a world
pervaded by intelligence, as if it were leaking out of our
brains and seeping into every part of the planet. Here is an
art of artificial agents and algorithmic assemblies, cellular
automata and digital communities which grow, expand,
diversify, disperse, and reproduce within the networks,
arising from that organisation which spontaneously arises
from the net's chaotic connectivity, with "no global
controller responsible for the behavior of everypart", and
its "bottom-up, distributed, local determination of
behavior" to use the phrases that Chris Langton employs
in his definition of Artificial Life [*6].
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InterCommunication No.15 1996
Feature
The Museum of the Third Kind 6/6
So the Museum of the Third Kind, the museum of
emergence, is a platform of operations, a seedbed, a
planetary resource, a site of cultural negotiation,
interaction and collaborative creativity, before it is in any
sense a showcase, a stage set or repository. It will make
history rather than record it. It will be future-active rather
than past-passive.The art it will house, or give rise to, is a
hybrid art requiring more than the artist's skills alone. It
involves disciplines which are themselves hybrid:
cognitive scienceand its neural nets, biological
engineering and its genetic manipulations, the physics of
consciousness. Hybrid also is the viewer, user or
consumer of this art. Bionic to a degree, gender-free,
wholly integrated into cyberspace, transculturally oriented
to the Net, living globally in the Interreality between the
actual and the virtual, this is the post-biological human
being. This is us as we approach the turn of the
millennium. And perhaps most pertinent, in our search for
definition of the Museum in this telematic, post-biological
culture, it is our new faculty of cyberception which will
determine the kind of space we shall inhabit, the kind of
architecture we shall demand.
The Museum of the Third Kind will be anticipatory, not
imposing perspectives on the history of art, but opening
up a pool of possibilities from which art might emerge,
working at the forward edge of contemporary culture, as
an agent of cultural change, as a cause of art practice
rather than as a cultural effect. It will be conceived of not
as a machine but as a post-biological organism: a
structure with its own memory, with a sensorium which
reacts to us, as much as we interact with it, essentially an
electronic central nervous system. Its interior activity will
constantly be exteriorised with a constant flow of data
from inside out and outside in. Similarly, satellite, cable
and internet communications must allow for the 24 hour a
day, two-way flow of data to and from local, regional and
international centres and public places. It will have zones
for the practice of telemeditation and cyberconsciousness,
and for experiments with identity, persona, gender, and
bionic amplification.
To understand what the Museum of the Third Kind needs
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to be, is to understand how the aesthetic of appearance is
being replaced by the aesthetic of apparition. Where
semantic closure is replaced by open-ended pathways of
meaning . Where the viewing public is put in the centre of
the creative process not at the periphery looking in.
Where medium of art, be it electronic, digital, optical or
genetic, is intrinsically and generically interactive. Where
art as system constitutes a kind of structural coupling
between everyone and everything within its networks, a
coupling which brings the into a symbiosis the
intelligence systems which constitute our world and the
cognitive cyberception of our selves.
Finally, the issue of the Museum of the Third Kind is
political, as the house of the Muses has always been, just
as democracy itself requires a politics of the third kind,
since neither Right nor Left has found any kind of
satisfactory answer. The Museum of the Third Kind will
be as much concerned with the democratisation of
meaning as with the democratisation of communications.
And unavoidably it is philosophical, since the technology
of telematics is the technology of consciousness, and
wisely cultivated, can lead us to a shared participation in
the creation of reality.
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