VILM FLUSSER AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN MATRIX AND WAVE: Toward a Quantum Media Model (Transcript) Philip Pocock (A video Skype session between Berlin and Video Pool, Winnipeg, Canada, May 2012, and subsequent insertions.) Ive threaded some voices of the people involved: Vilm Flusser, Marshall McLuhan, Erwin Schrdinger, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr and assembled inklings of a proposal, an informal one, for a Quantum Media Model, a poetic, art-world equivalent to the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics. Trouble is that no one, not even theoretical physicists claim to have a complete understanding of quantum theory. Quantum mechanics great communicator, Niels Bohr, himself lamented: If thinking about the quantum theory doesnt make you dizzy [schwindlig], then you havent understood it. That makes it all the more fun to think about as an access point to gain understanding into the entanglement of consciousness and computation in contemporary social media and the future of video. Erwin Schrdinger demonstrated in 1926 that quantum mechanics is valid if a light quantum (photon) is considered to be a wave instead of a particle. His contribution in this regard was a three-dimensional wave equation. As opposed to the other proponent of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, whose abstruse matrix mathematics rendered the physics abstract and unvisualizable, Schrdinger was doggedly convinced that physics must remain imaginable in the minds eye, visualizable in the Newtonian tradition. Einstein agreed.

60 MCLUHAN & FLUSSERS COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED Werner Heisenberg, who had already put his quantum mechanics stock in probability rather than visuality as a means to model our subatomic world, chastised Schrdinger immediately for his classical Newtonian view of physics. Instead of picturing that world, Heisenberg preferred to calculate its possibilities with matrix mechanics, a matrix being an arrangement of numerical values or other mathematical objects represented in two-dimensional tabular form, a database. Its easier to make this comparison if I construct a dialogue between Schrdinger and Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein, assembled in large part from Louisa Gilders remarkable book The Age of Entanglement (2009). At times, these protagonists seem to contradict themselves, and a dazzling obscurity envelops our understanding of things quantum: Heisenberg: The electron and the atom do not possess any degree of

physical reality, as objects of daily experience. Bohr: Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. A physicist is just an atoms way of looking at itself. Schrdinger: Of course, the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to suggest that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather, only the function of registering decisions, i.e., processes in space and time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being. Einstein: But you [Heisenberg] dont seriously believe that only observable quantities should be considered in a physical theory. Schrdinger: An atom in reality is merely the diffraction halo of an electron wave.

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Bohr: When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as in poetry. Schrdinger: The funny thing was a German called Heisenberg with the help of my friend Max Born had come up with a theory half a year before me. I knew of his theory, of course, but felt discouraged, not to say repelled, by the methods of transcendental algebra, which appeared difficult to me, and by the lack of visualizability.

Bohr: Schrdinger, I think you are far too wedded to pictorial ways of thinking. Heisenberg: The more I think about the physical portion of Schrdingers theory, the more repulsive I find it. What Schrdinger writes about the visualizability of his theory is probably not quite right, in other words, its crap. Bohr: (paraphrased by Heisenberg) Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables. In this case, the images and parables are by and large the classical concepts, wave and corpuscle. They do not fully describe the real. Schrdinger: He [Bohr] is completely convinced that any understanding in the usual sense of the word is impossible. Therefore the conversation is almost immediately driven into philosophical questions. Bohr: The very existence of quantum entails the necessity of a renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality. Heisenberg: Words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation, and it has been possible to invent mathematical terms. For visualization, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete analogies the wave picture and the corpuscular picture. Einstein: (to his best friend Michele Besso) Heisenberg has laid a huge quantum egg. A real sorcerers multiplication table, in which infinite numbers replace the Cartesian coordinates. Heisenberg: I believe that one can formulate the emergence of the classical path of a particle as follows: the path comes in to being only because we

observe it. Schrdinger: His [Heisenbergs] theory had no space and time within the atom. I dont know what that means! And because of the, to me, very difficult-appearing methods of transcendental algebra much

FIGURE 1 UNMOVIE (2001-) video server Python script

harder than what were doing here and because of the lack of vividness (Anschaulichkeit) I felt deterred by it, if not to say repelled. Heisenberg: It could be like you are watching a film, and often the transition from one picture to another does not occur suddenly the first picture becomes slowly weaker while the second becomes stronger, so that in an intermediate state we do not know which picture is intended. In the atom too, a situation could arise in which for a time we just do not know what quantum state the electron is in. Schrdinger: There is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. Einstein: (to Schrdinger) You are the only person with whom I am actually willing to come to terms. Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot get out of the network of already accepted concepts; instead, they only wriggle about inside. Heisenberg: What the word wave and particle means, one no longer knows there are too many classical words for the quantum world. Einstein: Dont you see, Heisenberg? It is theory which first determines what can be observed. Heisenberg: We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Bohr: Heisenberg, the nicest mathematical scheme in the world wont solve the paradoxes we are up against. Classical words like wave and particle are all we have. This paradox is central.

Heisenbergs denigration of the role of the visual in quantum theory is based upon his Uncertainty Principle that states that the position and speed of a particle cannot both be known to an observer (human or machine) at the same time. The measurement (observation) of a particles

FIGURE 2 UNMOVIE Fountain-Image (BubbleCam Kinetic Koan)

position necessarily disturbs its momentum (speed) and vice versa. Its analogous to observing a fast moving object. Either the measuring de vice (the eye or camera) pans in sync with the motion and pinpoints the objects position, or it doesnt and all the observation does is reg ister a blur, a measure of the objects speed. Neither a camera nor an observer can measure both realities at once. One might argue that at the macro level of everyday existence, the level at which life is lived, unvisualizable quantum theory seems like a clever solution, but whats the problem? Proposals in media science sense a problematic, ubiquitous uncertainty in emegent visual culture. Digital time-images are manipulated in data networks by code-images -- an Apple user will notice the filename extension .dmg when installing a new program, the .dmg an acronym for disk image -- and human-scripted algorithms in turn command code-images generate time-image but not necessarily. The same might be said of media philosophy: the virtual and the actual, consumption and produc tion, interactive and interreactive, databanks and databases, presences and absence, avatars and identity, bits and atoms, and so on. Quantum invisibility presents a paradox illustrated by the Schrdingers Cat thought experiment, intended as a critique of Heisenbergs obscure ma trix approach to quantum theory, the result of which reads like a Wild West bill: Cat Wanted: Dead AND Alive. Parallel paradoxes abound in social media. Is a Facebook profile a virtual death mask posted to screens AND a real world diary accessible to the powers-that-be? Is a 3D metaverse, a virtual world, a pixilated necropolis inhabited by tribes of zombies AND a laboratory space for modeling real word (RL) identity? Common sense aside, quantum theory, its codes and provisions ask, as Jacques Derrida does, what comes before the question? Im go ing to play a couple of very short quantum theory clips that Ive culled from YouTube. Theyre wonderfully spacey, and each runs about 20 30 seconds. If one enters transcoding mode and thinks social media, then quantum parallels abound. Then the speakers in these clips begin

to take on both a Flusserian and McLuhanesque hybrid character. Let me know if Skype lets you see these videos over there. [Skype video of Schrdingers Cat novelist Robert Anton Wilson plays.] All physical matter, everything we have around us is the result of a fre

quency. And what that also means is that if you amplify the frequency, the structure of matter will change. Ok, so thats a little bit about the more contemporary cosmology of quantum physics, namely, superstring theory, which the rock star of contemporary physics communicator Brian Greene describes as a search for what

FIGURE 3 UNMOVIE Fountain Image (Wireless art data cascade detail)

stuff is made of. As a superstring theorist,he believes that subatomic particles are not the basic building blocks of matter, and that inside all of these particles and subparticles, you end up with a frequency or a superposition of frequencies that may be shared, entangled with other vibrating subparticle strings anywhere in the universe, or in one of countless parallel universes. Does that mean that matter is made of sound, so to speak? Is mass a force produced by immaterial vibrations? Sounds like art and rings like McLuhans notion that we are naturally immersed in acoustic space, and that we were for a time banished from this continuum with the arrival of the phonetic alphabet that transformed our ears into eyes, and which is now dissolving in the electric age, re-immersing us again in an artificially ubiquitous and deeply resonating environment. Folksonomic social media such as Reddit, Twitter and Montreals ident.ca, to name a few, become hypernarrative parables for considering a new pataphysics, a quantum-world approach to modeling metaversal new media for critique and insight. McLuhan: Electric information is always lacking in visual connectedness and always structured by resonant intervals. Flusser: Everything aesthetic begins as a terrifying enormous noise (big bang), and as it grows more habitual (redundant) it ends in a quiet whisper (whimper). [Skype video of Robert Anton Wilson continues.] The modified Copenhagen view is that light is neither waves nor particles until we look, and the things adjust themselves depending on what were looking at and what with. An electron is not anywhere until we look, and when we look the electron decides to be somewhere as long as were looking; as soon as we stop looking the electron is everywhere again. Ok, one last short clip, this one Bohrs Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by Prof. Michio Kaku:

[Skype video plays.] In other words, the electron is a point particle, but you dont know quite where it is, and the probability of finding it at any given point is given by a wave, the Schrdinger wave. So we have this beautiful synthesis of waves and particles.

68 MCLUHAN & FLUSSERS COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED The cult novelist Wilson accents the Zen far-outness artists prefer to read into quantum theory (as Schrdinger did later in life), while the physics professor Kaku compliments that spirit with a succinct, downto-earth take on the wave/particle duality in quantum physics. Both pay homage to the reconciliatory stance Bohr took in his Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics in which light is considered to have a dual wave/particle nature. I remember my high school physics teacher joking with us that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays light is a particle, and the rest of the week its a wave. The wave/particle complementarity Bohr brought to quantum me-chanics some physicists deem positivistic, others diplomatic, and everyone incomplete. Nonetheless it can be seen to cohere with what might be advanced as the basis for a quantum theory for electric media pooling the dual mediologies of McLuhan, who tends towards Schrdingers more Pop position (wave) and Flusser, tending toward Heisenbergs more phenomenological position (matrix). Perhaps one day media artists and theoreticians will speak of a Winnipeg Interpretation of Quantum Media Let me improvise an imaginary script with our Prairie pundit McLuhan and the Czech exile Flusser to juxtapose their quantum-related ideas, as well as their kinship to Schrdinger and Heisenberg respectively: McLuhan: The revolution that de Broglie [Schrdingers muse] describes is a derivative not of the alphabet but of the telegraph and of radio. Flusser: Behind the keyboard, on which they hit, is a swarm of particles. And this swarm is a field of possibilities, which can be realized. McLuhan: Electric speed is approximately the speed of light, and this constitutes an information environment that has basically an acoustic

structure. You are drawn into that [TV] tube, as an inner trip. Youre totally involved. You have no objectivity, no distance. And it is acoustic. It resonates. Flusser: Mere observation of an object by a subject may change the object. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the praxis of ethnology are merely two among many examples.

McLuhan: Modern physics abandons the specialized visual space of Descartes and Newton, and re-enters the subtle auditory space of the non-literate world. Flusser: The TV program is the result of scientific theories (texts) it needs texts (for instance, telegrams) for it to function. The new types of images are best called techno-images. Imagine culture as a gigantic transcoder from text into image. It will be a sort of black box (news about events, theoretical comments about them, scientific papers, poetry, philosophical speculations), and they will come out again as images (films, TV programs, photographic pictures): which is to say that history will flow into the box, and that it will come out of it under the form of myth and magic. The box is the fullness of time. From the point of view of the images that come out of the box, this will be a situation in which history becomes a pretext for programs. McLuhan: Heidegger surf-boards along the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. Flusser: A lecture may be considered a natural communication in this way . The lecturer is a sender (he emits sound waves), the public is a receiver (it receives the waves), and the air in the room is a medium (it transmits the waves). Now, this is a thermodynamic process, and part of the energy invested in it is degraded into heat. The sum total of information in the room diminishes as the lecture goes on. But the lecture may be considered a cultural communication in this way: The lecturer is a sender (he emits words), and the language is a medium (it transmits words). Seen thus, the lecture is not a thermodynamic process, but is of a different order. The sum total of information in the room increases as the lecture goes on, if seen thus. And this is in fact the reason why it increases information, why it is negentropic. McLuhan: In electric simultaneous time, we are encompassed by the new electric space which is simultaneous and acoustic, i.e., we hear from all directions at once creating a space which is a sphere with centre everywhere and margin nowhere. Quantum mechanics stresses the discontinuity and the

resonant interval in all material structures. But modern physicists are visual thinkers to a man, in spite of this.

70 MCLUHAN & FLUSSERS COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED Flusser: We are forced to split up the things and processes of the world into three orders of magnitude. In the medium order of magnitude, which is measurable in our measures, that is in centimetres and seconds, Newton is still valued. In the big order of things, that is, the one measureable in light years, the Einsteinean rules are valued. In the smaller one, which is measureable in micro-microns and nanoseconds, the rules of quantum mechanics are valid. In each of these three worlds, we have to think differently, try to imagine differently, and act differently. Im going to put on a video document of an algorithmic film piece I made with a terrific team of former students: Axel Heide, Thorsten Kloepfer, and Oliver Kauselmann, and a Zen monk and space sculptor Gregor Stehle for the Future Cinema exhibition that began its tour at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Germany, co-curated by Peter Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw. [Skype video of UNMOVIE plays.] This document was videoed by the curator of the show, Margit Rosen, back in 2002. The work UNMOVIE is rather long. It opened on November 11th, 2001, and ran 24/7 for several years online and intermittently in museums, including incarnations at Banffs Walter Phillips Gallery, co-curated, I might add, by Winnipegs Anthony Kiendl, Galerie Oboro on Montreal curated by Florian Wst, as well as the ICC Tokyo, the Kiasma in Helsinki, and the location depicted on our screen now, the Lothringer 13 Kunstehalle in Munich (figs. 1-2). Our UNMOVIE actors (or actor-media, as Gilles Deleuze would characterize them) never got tired. They are synthespians, that is, con-versation simulators commonly known as chat bots. They are very ar-tificially intelligent and draw upon a set of linguistic algorithms, open source ones, that generate what Flusser terms pretexts History becomes pretexts for programs. In sum, the future of writing is to write pretexts for

programs while believing that one is writing for utopia. These pretexts or bot dialogue scenes occur on a screen-stage that may be populated as well by anyone logging in over the internet or locally via TCP-IP in any one of our exhibition spaces. The bots write the script that semantically culls patternalistic online-user videos that

Flusser would consider posthistorical techno-images The new type of images [techno-images] are unlike their prehistoric predecessors in that they are themselves products of texts, and in that they feed on texts. They are products of history. Imagine culture as a gigantic transcoder from text into image. All texts flow into that box (news about events, theoretical comments about them, scientific papers, poetry, philosophical speculations), and they will come out again as images (films, TV programs, photographic pictures): which is to say that history will flow into the box, and that it will come out of it under the form of myth and magic. Our synthespians act according to the classic tetrad of cinematic states of behaviour (listen, talk, chase, flee). When they feel like conversing on stage at times they feign reticence and wander they simulate dialogue which is fed into the UNMOVIE black box of our software and technology which Flusser would consider an apparatus-operator complex (his black box described above and its functionaries or programmers are necessary for the complex to operate) in which our programs code (scripts and cues) act upon text input from the UNMOVIE stage in real time to output a never-ending UNMOVIE stream of Internet user-generated videos, that is, until one looks away or logs off. Observers are invited to become observer-participants (Yous) and improvise scenes with the bots on stage, initiating what Flusser would consider narratologically Buberian (I and Thou) dialogic situations. An UNMOVIE participant logging in online or at the show became a You as we called their cloud-like avatar representations on stage on screen. (This is four years before YouTube entered the picture). You dialogue was remembered by the interlocutor bot and entered its digital memory, available to it to utter in phrases generated by another You it connected with and addressed at a future time on stage. I realize now how Flusserian it all was. From the script generated by the bots and You-sers on stage, under certain circumstances that we had scripted with our code, words that recur in dialogues (chat bots generally match words to simulate conversation) drummed up play-lists of user-generated online video and streamed them in

montage or montrage (Deleuze) through our early apps virtually and variably embodied within datatectural (data interwoven with dwelling) installations, including our UNMOVIE (Wall-Image, Fountain-Image, Stand-in,

FIGURE 4 UNMOVIE The Mind Cannot Rest on Anything, Walter Phillips Gallery Banff

Two Tourists, Kiasma Extension Proposal, The Mind Cannot Resot on Anything, and Mandala) productions (figs 3-5). [Pause. Video plays while speaker reads texts.] I propose UNMOVIE to act as one prototype variation for quantum media. And to recap and reinforce the irreality of the quantum Imaginary described in the YouTube videos I played earlier, let me interpret an absurd scenario in an imaginary light, that is, how a quantum media event happens along: a photon expands through space as a wave/particle of light. It is massless. Triggered by an observation, its compelled to collide with an electron, and its wave collapses. This releases energy and causes the two-dimensional surface of the energized atom to unfold and create provisionally an illusion of three-dimensional mass in space for a time. For that observer, an image of reality occurs. It is our consciousness, in effect, that catalyzes this entire process that filters a discreet world from a timeless universe, or to rephrase an iconic line from The Matrix, we substitute the desert of wave particles for the real. Quantum media acts as metaphor for denigrating visual re-presentation with performative probabilities of the visual. As the observation is happening, a measure of energy released from the photons wave collapse excites other local and nonlocally entangled wave/particle photons to create new probabilities for future productions of observed reality. Its this kind of mental yoga that stimulates UNMOVIE, and its not just restricted to deconstructing wave mechanics. Its more popularly mind-bending with the proposed quantum media mechanics the Wachowski brothers (via Sophia Stewarts The Third Eye novel) were decoding in The Matrix. Slavoj iek: The Matrix also functions as a screen that separates us from the Real that makes the desert of the real bearable. It is not the ultimate referent to be covered/gentrified/domesticated by the screen of fantasy the Real is also and primarily the screen itself as the obstacle that always already distorts our perception of the referent, of the reality out there. When a screen

intervenes between ourselves and the Real, it always generates a notion of what is In-itself, beyond the screen (of the appearance), so that the gap between appearance and the In-itself is always-already for us. Consequently, if we subtract from the Thing the distortion of the Screen, we lose the Thing itself. The Thing in itself is ultimately the gaze, not the perceived object. The Matrix itself is the Real that distorts our perception of reality.

74 MCLUHAN & FLUSSERS COMMUNICATION & AESTHETIC THEORIES REVISITED iek questions in another section of the passage from which the above quote is taken, asking if the Wachowskis Matrix is not an exacting supermodern replica of Platos dispositif of the cave? (Matrix means womb.) And here is an indication of Flussers matrix take on quantum desertifica-tion occurring in our information society. Flusser: It has been demonstrated that atoms are divisible into particles and particles of particles, and that individuals are divisible. However, something far stranger has turned up. When I subdivide the object I can no longer precisely say if it is objective or subjective. And conversely, when I rationalize the subject, the individual, I can no longer say that the part I have at hand is subject or object. If we feed the decideme [decision] into the computer, then the computer decides. It is then senseless to ask if the computer is a subject or an object. The calculation shreds it as both subject and object into sand that scatters probabilities one facet is object, another as subject appear. And with this picture to live in, I am in a desert, a sand desert, the grains of which are neither subject nor object. Instead only potentialities of a subject and an object, a scattering cut through with overlapping fields of possibilities. Thanks to computation I can then compost on this field my alternative subject and alternative object. As I have said, UNMOVIE is an instance of what might be termed a quantum medium. Three reasons why: first, it acts as an open rather than a closed digital packet-based platform (quantum means packet). Second, it deals with probabilistic rather than determined content: it performs rather than re-presents. Third, it allows allopatric access to a set of mutable source codes and contents, an interactive database (Linux, MySQL, PHP, Python, TCP-IP), rather than one-way access to an interreactive databank (Read Only Memory, CD- and DVD-ROM). Please dont forget that the Uncertainty Principle also holds for rhetoric and that exceptions are also a rule. Not all

database media are experienced interactively, and not all DVD media are experienced interreactively. [Pause. Speaker describes video playing.] On your screen is an instance of UNMOVIE we titled Fountain-Image. The cable from which we suspend our collages snakes around other objects in the work, ultimately climbing like an electric cobra up to the transmitting and receiving tip of an antenna at the top of the room. This is one example of a myriad of ways we have installed the project under various site-specific circumstances and discussions with our curators.

All the data, every virtual bit, the user videos, the dialogue and keystrokes from participants at the site and remotely online gushed from the top of the antenna like an information fountain. It was a wireless fountain, raining invisible yet content-carrying waves of ones and zeros, lighting up screens and sounding on speakers with and for a participant audience. To compliment the as-yet (2002) uncommon WLAN fountain, we interwove with the antennas data cable a second circuit of water pumps and tubes through which melted snow water flowed -- it was winter at the time of the installation -- and at points gushed and gurgled in the installation as well. The water we used was melted from snow collected around a lovely Baroque fountain that was just down the street from the exhibition space at Weienburger Platz, Munich. That fountain was off for the winter, and UNMOVIE (Fountain-Image) was happy to act as its understudy. [Pause. Presentation resumes.] Fountain-Image was a specific instance of a purpose attributed to visual art by Marshall McLuhan, that is, to distill our shared environment out into our collective midst, to render its necessary invisibility as background suddenly visible and palpable, in our situation, to make data strangely, with us, tangible as its waves of information energy slosh about in our space and metaphorically collapse our antennas transmitted frequencies into pixels on our screens. Perhaps as information environment, it reflected upon and cast Marshall McLuhans acousmatic environmentalism into the age of ubiquitous computing and social media, that years after our fountain disappeared, has dawned. Inspired by T.S. Eliots auditory imagination filtered through his Toronto cohorts Harold Innis and Ted Carpenter, McLuhans original premise, that electrified humans inhabit acoustic space, again poses the possibility that a quantum media model just may be thinkable: if not now, then certainly when quantum computing comes around and the bit, either 0 or 1, becomes the qubit (a quantum-bit), a 0 and 1, or any combination in

between simultaneously (which is equivalent to imagining that our planet is spinning in opposite directions at the same time). Quantum

FIGURE 5 UNMOVIE (Internet Stage)

computing swells medias two-tone digital harmonic scale to unimaginable proportions, allowing the entire current universe of information to be stored and processed by a single array of quantum computers. This makes a Quantum Media Model at some point inevitable (and policy is essential or inscrupulous governments will exploit this power). Curiously, McLuhans adherence to the acousmatic makes his musings future-proof in many ways, and it makes me think that somehow he uses the words acoustic and medium almost interchangeably, whereas Flussers applications of the word medium is far more particulate in nature and more likely to need structural maintenance from time to time to persevere the coming Quantum Media age. McLuhan: Auditory space has no point of favoured focus. Its a sphere, without fixed elements, space made by the thing itself, not space containing that the thing. Its not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, repeating its dimensions moment by moment. It is indifferent to background. That he wrote with Ted Carpenter, who was in the Toronto Communications Group back in 1960, for Explanations. Flusser: The structure of a message reflects the physical character of its symbols more than the structure of the universe it communicates. This explains the famous sentence The medium is the message. [Session brought to a close.] Transcription by Tom Kohut, March 2013 .

Australia, 2009). His theoretical work examines the links between art, culture, technology, identity, and consciousness. He is the editor of Energy, Biopolitics, Resistance Strategies, and Cultural Subversion (2012), The Apparatus of Life and Death (2012), Art in the Biotech Era (2008). Recent publications include: How biotechnology and society co-constitute each other (Technoetic Arts Journal, 2012); Consciousness and Electronic Culture(Consciousness Reframed: Catalogue of 4th International CAiiA-STAR Research Conference, 2002); The Position of Culture in Southeast Europe (Understanding the Balkans, 2002); and On Modes of Consciousness(es) and Electronic Culture (Glimpse: Phenomenology and Media, 2000). He has contributed to the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (Chicago 1997, Liverpool/Manchester 1998, Nagoya 2002, Singapore 2008, Istanbul 2011) and has delivered papers at international conferences in San Diego, Perth and Beijing on biotechnology and art. PHILIP POCOCK Philip Pocock is a Canadian artist based in Europe. During the 1980s, he exhibited documentary photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada and the Cooper Union in New York, where he was a faculty member at the International Centre of Photography. He co-founded the Journal of Contemporary Art in 1988 and since 1993 has developed projects with MOMA Paris, Nam June Paik Art Center Seoul, Documenta X and ZKM Karlsruhe and the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Canada. BARBARA RAUCH Dr. Barbara Rauch is an artist practitioner and research academic. She is a Digital Futures Initiative hire in a tenure-track position at OCAD University, Toronto, in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and Graduate Studies. Rauch is the Graduate Program Director for the Interdisciplinary Masters Program in Art, Media, & Design (IAMD). She is the Director of the eMotion Research Project in the Digital Media Research and Innovation Institute, researching the development of emotion with the facilitation of data

analysis using advance technology in 3D printing, sculpting, and analysis. In the lab, we aim to designate an alternative format of acknowledging discourse around the topic of emotion in artistic practice. Situating ourselves