The Symbiogenic Art Experience: A Phenomenological · PDF fileThe Symbiogenic Art Experience:...

The Symbiogenic Art Experience: A Phenomenological and Aesthetic Approach to the Question of Human-Machine Co-evolution

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Carlos Castellanos, Dr. Diane GromalaSchool of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT)Simon Fraser UniversityVancouver, BC Canada

11/2009

Friday, November 6, 2009

The Symbiogenic Art Experience: A Phenomenological and Aesthetic Approach to the Question of Human-Machine CoevolutionCarlos Castellanos, Dr. Diane Gromala • Simon Fraser University

Human-machine co-evolution and the artsLooking at human evolution and transformation in relation to intelligent machines and digital technologies within the fields of interactive arts or “new media.”

Our research goal is to develop (or evolve) new strategies for facilitating subjective experiences that elicit or effect an embodied, felt sense of our co-evolution with intelligent technological systems.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N



Outline of presentation• What is co-evolution?

• Background/Context• Cybernetics• Philosophical/Historical• Interactive Arts

• Phenomenological Underpinnings• Merleau-Ponty’s Contemporary Legacy

• The Symbiogenic Experience

• Protocol, Interactive Art Piece

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What is co-evolution?Co-evolution“...an evolutionary change in a trait of the individuals in one population in response to a trait of the individuals of a second population” (Janzen 1980).

“...interaction between two major groups of organisms with a close and evident ecological relationship” Ehrlich and Raven (1964).

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What is co-evolution?

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/etienne_valois/4048152822/sizes/l/





What is co-evolution?SymbiosisA close, prolonged association between two or more different organisms of different species that may, but does not necessarily, benefit each member (American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Ed.)

Important factor in evolution

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What is co-evolution?• Definition of coevolution is a bit unclear

• We are discussing a somewhat broad definition, with an emphasis on some kind of interdependence or “interlacing”

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Representations of human-machine co-evolutionpopular culture, science fiction, military, etc.

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Representations of human-machine co-evolutionInteractive Arts - Stelarc, Extended Arm

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Symbiogenesis• Merging of two distinct organisms to form a single organism

• Introduced in the early 20th century by Konstantin Mereschkowsky (Khakhina 1992), Ivan E. Wallin (1927) and others

• Popularized and expanded by biologist Lynn Margulis (Margulis 1998; Margulis 1993; Margulis & Sagan 1986; Margulis 1981)

• Cooperative, holistic view of evolution and inter-species relations

• Contrast to relentlessly competitive Darwinian model

• Eyelashes are “festooned” with symbiotic life (Margulis 1998, 5)

• “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.” (Margulis & Sagan 1986, 15)

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Symbiogenic ExperienceInteractive Arts often interrogate, advance or examine notions of connectivity and control.

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We believe it can go farther:

Elicit an embodied felt sense of our co-evolution with intelligent systems.

These experiences can reach the level of awareness, however fleetingly.

We assert that while these experiences can be identified, they lack a cohesive theoretical framework from which to study and analyze them. To help address this question, the term “symbiogenic” has been created as a shorthand term to better discuss these types of experiences and the issues they bring forth.



Symbiogenic ExperienceCan human-machine coevolution be “felt?”

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CyberneticsJoseph Licklider

Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)

• Humans and machines work together to solve problems dynamically and interactively (“ real-time”).

• “Symbiotic partnership” performs much more effectively than human could alone

• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

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B A C K G R O U N D



CyberneticsRobert M. Page

Man-Machine Coupling - 2012 A.D. (1962)

• Use of technology to “enhance human capabilities”

• Human machine communication via bodily gestures, breathing rate, pulse, etc.

• Emotional states

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B A C K G R O U N D



CyberneticsManfred Clynes & Nathan Kline

Cyborgs and Space (1960/1995)

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B A C K G R O U N D



Philosophical and HistoricalBruce Mazlish

The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (1995)

• Humanity has has been struggling to come to terms with its relationship to machines for quite some time

• Offers a rich historical context (starting as far back as Renaissance)

• Humans and machines are “continuous”

• Our evolution is inextricably interwoven with machines

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B A C K G R O U N D



Philosophical and HistoricalN. Katherine Hayles

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999)

• Critique of disembodied information

• Coherent independent being is giving way to the posthuman, a subject amenable to the effects of its relation to information-processing technologies, to the point of being dependent or reliant on them

• Notes the capacity of technology for extending human agency and cognition

• Embodiment still matters

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B A C K G R O U N D



Philosophical and HistoricalBernard Stiegler

Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998)

• Technology “invented the human”

• At the core of what makes us human

• Argues that the long philosophical tradition of separating ēpistēmē from tekhnē can no longer be maintained

• We exist not only in constant relation to technology, but realize ourselves through it

• Our relation to time (e.g. memory) is technologically rooted

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B A C K G R O U N D



Philosophical and HistoricalAndy Clark (cognitive offloading)

Donna Haraway (social/cultural divisions break down)

Mark Hansen (how new media art reveals the technical nature of embodiment)

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B A C K G R O U N D



Interactive ArtsSimilar to cyborg but rather than “brute force” hybridization, it is an embodied integration or incorporation of shared, distributed processes that act as triggers for, or influences on, each entity’s operationality within a domain of “structural coupling.”

Structural coupling: interaction between two entities or systems where neither determines the other but each triggers andor selects structural changes in the other (Maturana & Varela 1992; Maturana & Varela 1980). A way of accounting for a system’s embeddedness in an environment.

Autopoiesis: “self creation.” Phenomenon whereby a system generates and defines its own organization. Living systems are self-producing machines and life is defined as an emergent property of autopoietic systems.

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B A C K G R O U N D



Interactive ArtsIn our inquiry, we’re looking at how interactive artworks that offer a structural coupling between human and technological structures can produce transformations in the other, resulting in a blurring of autopoietic boundaries.

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B A C K G R O U N D

Figure adapted from Maturana & Varela (1980)



Interactive ArtsRoy Ascott

• interactive arts, more than previous art forms, engage one’s embodied and sensory faculties

• has transformative potential because of its structural coupling and its cybernetic nature (Ascott 2003)

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B A C K G R O U N D



Interactive ArtsJack Burnham

• among first to recognize the broadening of the art experience made possible by “cybernetic arts.” (Burnham 1970)

• envisioned possibilities for a reconfiguration of aesthetic experience.

• “symbiotic intelligence”

• “[sensitizes] us to information that would normally be ignored.”• connections with 2nd wave cybernetics and autopoietic theory (e.g. structural coupling).

• also emphasized the importance of “bodily activities” over object contemplation.

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B A C K G R O U N D



Interactive ArtsJames Seawright

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B A C K G R O U N D

Searcher, 1966



Interactive ArtsJames Seawright

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B A C K G R O U N D

Electronic Peristyle , 1968



Interactive ArtsStelarc

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B A C K G R O U N D



Interactive ArtsMyron Krueger

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B A C K G R O U N D

Videoplace, 1969



Interactive Arts• symbiogenic experience: heightened awareness

• autopoietic blurring accomplished through recurrent, performative interactions of a technological nature.

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B A C K G R O U N D



Interactive ArtsMark B. N. Hansen

New media art reveals and catalyzes the technical dimensions of embodiment at play in the current stage of “human technogenesis” (co-evolution of humans and technology) (Hansen 2005; 2006).

Interactions are potentially technical and “can increasingly be actualized only with the explicit aid of technics” (Hansen 2006, 39).

Leverages the enactive potential of bodily action (Varela).

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B A C K G R O U N D



PhenomenologyHow can the technical dimensions of embodiment be “laid bare” (Merleau-Ponty) and brought into some kind of (pre)conscious awareness (however fleetingly)?

We propose a framework for identifying and analyzing these felt experiences that at its foundation includes a phenomenological model of intentionality expanded to include dynamics of human-machine coupling and co-evolution.

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B A C K G R O U N D



What is Intentionality?Consciousness is always directed towards things in the world

Core structure of experience

We are always directed toward the objects and phenomena that make up our world, and thus we cannot be understood in isolation from them

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I N T E N T I O N A L I T Y



Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied IntentionalityMaurice Merleau-Ponty (extending Husserl) includes embodied and preconscious aspects in his model of intentionality, which he refers to as “motor intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 127)

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Technology and the Intentional DomainDon IhdeDescribes 4 types of human technology relationships

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embodiment (human – technology) ➞ world incorporation; e.g. eyeglasses

hermeneutic human ➞ (technology – world) textual representations; e.g. thermometer

alterity human ➞ technology ( – world) “other”; e.g. robot

background human ( – technology – world) not directly experienced; e.g. hvac system

Human–technology relationships (Ihde 1990)



Technology and the Intentional DomainPeter-Paul VerbeekExtends Ihde’s analysis - “Cyborg Intentionaity”

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hybrid (human / technology) ➞ world merging; e.g. pacemakers

composite (human ➞ technology) ➞ world“doubling” of intentional domain; “technological intentionality;” e.g. photography

Cyborg Intentionality (Verbeek 2008)



Technology and the Intentional DomainDistributed Intentionality

A single intentionality, not locatable within a single entity at any single point in time.

A shifting intentional zone that may consist of any number of systems (human and machine), each either ceding or co-constructing portions of their intentionalities as a result of their interactions.

• ambiguous, mercurial, metastable

• need not occur in full conscious awareness

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Technology and the Intentional DomainShaun Gallagher

• Certain preconscious or “prenoetic” factors of the body act as constraints on perception and experience (Gallagher 1995).

• “Body schema” can shape the body’s attunment and “limit and define the possibilities of intentional consciousness.”

• involves an “extraintentional operation” that exists outside of or prior to conscious experience but still effects it

• body is “unowned” and “subpersonal”

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Control over movement, even though it is for the most part a conscious and willful activity, is still subject to postural or other adjustments that are not under conscious control — for example, those adjustments necessary to maintain balance.

Our argument is that this control is subject to “outside” influence and that technics is the vehicle for that influence.

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Following Merleau-Ponty, Gallagher also stresses the body schema’s role in relating the organism’s sense experience to the environment, noting that the workings of the body schema are not possible “without reference to the environment” (Gallagher 1986, 156-157).

Thus, just as embodied organism-environment coupling is central to Burnham’s vision of a re-imagined aesthetic experience, so too is it central to Gallagher’s and Merleau-Ponty’s view of a human being’s overall sense experience and world construction.

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Technology and the Intentional DomainBody influenced by processes that are not consciously felt but still have an impact on felt experience

Certain factors remain in the background so the body can to attend to the task(s) at hand (Leder 1990).

Merleau-Ponty states that things are not simply given to us in perception but instead are “internally taken up... reconstituted and experienced... in so far as [they are] bound up with a world” (MP 2002, 380-381).

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Technology and the Intentional DomainA symbiogenic experience and its location within a zone of distributed intentionality would necessarily leverage the inherent ambiguity and fluidity of this dynamic, perturbing one’s extraintentional operations.

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PhenomenologyIntentionalityMerleau-Ponty, Gallagher, Ihde

Posthumanity& Symbiogenesis

The Embodied MindAutopoiesisStructural Coupling

Networks,Intelligent Systems & HCI

Embodiment& Computational Systems

Social/Cultural/Historical Factors

Interactive ArtsDeweyHansen

Stelarc

Penny

Gromala

Schiphorst

Rokeby

Krueger


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Protocol• purely discursive approach is insufficient

• artistic explorations are necessary components of inquiry

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E M B O D I E D T H E O R Y



Protocol“Intelligent” digital entities that “sense” and “communicate” with humans via sound, rhythmic patterns and electrical stimulation of the human participant’s skin.

Electrical stimulation patterns — inspired by Paul Bach-Y-Rita (1972) — along with the rhythmic patterns generated by the participant, constitute a sort of informal protocol

While not always immediately discernible can nonetheless be incorporated into the subpersonal aspects of the body schema and thus influence the participant’s pre-conscious movement, gesture and affective states, resulting in an alteration of the rhythmic communication patterns

Altering of the participant’s and the machine’s specific corporeal articulations could result in a shaping of the sonic, rhythmic and overall communicative dynamics.

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Protocol

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Protocol

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Protocol

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Protocol

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Protocol

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Protocol

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Further Inquiry• Machine-intelligence side of equation

• What qualifies as a “felt experience?”

• Are there a clearly identifiable set of conditions that need be satisfied in order for an experience to qualify as symbiogenic?

• Can/should it be codified?

• Temporal, longitudinal aspects of experience

(Castellanos & Gromala DAC 2009)

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C O N C L U S I O N


References

Ascott, Roy. 2003. From Appearance to Apparition: Communication and Culture in the Cybersphere. In Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology,and Consciousness, ed. Edward A Shanken, 276-283. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bach-y-Rita, Paul. 1972. Brain Mechanisms in Sensory Substitution. New York: Academic Press Inc.

Burnham, Jack. 1970. The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems. In On the Future of Art, 95-122. New York: Viking Press.

Clark, Andy. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Clynes, M. E., and N. S. Kline. 1960. Cyborgs and Space. In The Cyborg Handbook, ed. C. H. Gray, H. J. Figueroa-Sarriera, and S. Mentor, 29-33. New York/London: Routledge.

Ehrlich, Paul R., and Peter H. Raven. 1964. Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution. Evolution 18, no. 4 (December): 586-608.

Gallagher, Shaun. 1986. Lived Body and Environment. Research in Phenomenology 16: 139-170.———. 1995. Body Schema and Intentionality. In The Body and the Self, ed. José Luis Bermúdez, Anthony J. Marcel, and Naomi Eilan. Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press.

Hansen, Mark B. N. 2005. Embodiment: The Machinic and the Human. In aRt & D: research and development in art, ed. J. Brouwer, S. Fanuconnier, A. Mulder, and A. Nigten, 150-165. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: V2_NAi Publishers.

———. 2006. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. New York: Routledge.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149-181. New York: Routledge.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Indiana series in the philosophy of technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Janzen, Daniel H. 1980. When is it Coevolution? Evolution 34, no. 3 (May): 611-612.


References (continued)

Khakhina, Liya Nikolaevna. 1992. Concepts of Symbiogenesis: A Historical and Critical Study of the Research of Russian Botanists. Ed. Lynn Margulis and Mark McMenamin. Bio-origins series. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Licklider, J. C. R. 1960. Man-Computer Symbiosis. Human Factors in Electronics, IRE Transactions on HFE-1, no. 1: 4-11.

Margulis, Lynn. 1981. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Life and Its Environment On the Early Earth. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.———. 1993. Origins of species: acquired genomes and individuality. Bio Systems 31, no. 2-3: 121-125.———. 1998. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books.

Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. 1986. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors. New York: Summit Books.

Maturana, Humberto R, and Francisco J Varela. 1992. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Rev. ed. Boston: Shambhala.

Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, Holland ; Boston: D. Reidel.

Mazlish, Bruce. 1995. The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C Smith. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, May 3.

Page, R.M. 1962. Man-Machine Coupling - 2012 A.D. Proceedings of the IRE 50, no. 5: 613-614.

Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Wallin, I. E. 1927. Symbionticism and the Origin of Species. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2008. Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology of human–technology relations. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7.


Carlos Castellanos, Dr. Diane GromalaSchool of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT)Simon Fraser University

[email protected]


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