Keynote speakers

My interest is in the building of organisms of learning and research that can elicit and develop a technoetic creativity that is at once syncretic and ubiquitous. I shall briefly examine a number of dynamic models in whose design I have been centrally involved over the past several decades in England, Canada, Austria, and currently China. In every case, both analogue and digital processes and systems are addressed, prioritizing issues of behaviour, multiple identity, and connectivity. Whether media employed is immaterial or moist, questions of consciousness are central to the advancement of art. I take the position that consciousness, like space, is primordial. The suggestion that it is generated by the brain is as unlikely to me as the idea that space is generated by the body. Just as visual and auditory organs have evolved to register and negotiate space, so the brain has evolved to access consciousness. Science tells us that we see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum, and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. We have no measure of the degree of consciousness that can be reached, but many technologies over the millennia have been developed to widen or intensify the access, both somatic and chemical. Science cannot provide an explanation of how and why we have qualia or phenomenal experiences; technoetic art, by contrast, argues for the navigation of consciousness through a diversity of technologies, both archaic and contemporary. As for personal identity – what it is to be a Self – the isolated, solitary self of western culture since the Enlightenment is giving way to the emergence of the generative self. We see that the single-self organism is evolving into the multiple-self, which participates in the evolution of a variable field of multiple realities.