Technology and Intuition: A Love Story? Roy Ascott’s Telematic Embrace

@ TheExtended Abstracts section of Leonardo provides summaries offull articles that appear in the Leonardo World Wide WebSite (http://wwwmitpress .mit.edu/Leonardo/home.html). Articles are jiublished at the Leonardo WWWSite upon the recommendation of members ofthe Leonardo I. TECHNOLOGYAND INTUITION: A LOVE STORY? ROY ASCOTT’S TELEMATIC EMBRACE Edward A. Shanken, Department of Art and Art History, Box 90764, Duke University , Durham, NC, U.S.A. E-mail: . The loved object is simply one that has shared an exjierience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is ... simply to let the two exjmiences compare themselves, like reflections in d q f e n t mirrors. -Lawrence Durell [I]. Whether by passionate attraction, narcissistic self-reflection, possessive desire or the harmonization of multiplicity in unification-hearts, minds and bodies crave connection with others. These are just some of the qualities that characterize the enigmatic romance of technology and intuition as well as the sentiments of the artists, scientists, and philosophers who have attempted to conjoin reason and metaphysics. This paper addresses the dynamic relationship between technology and intuition, and the points of intersection with reason and metaphysics in formulations of the future. The point of departure in the paper is the telematic theory, practice and pedagogy of English artist Roy Ascott, director of the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, University of Wales, Newport. Ascott’s sources include Henri Bergson, Norbert Wiener, Heinz von Foerster, Teilhard de Chardin, Marcel Duchamp and the I Ching. These influences are considered in the context of Ascott’s use of Charles Fourier’s notion of love as passionate attraction-attraction as a principle of technological and intuitive harmonious exchange across media. In the essay, “IsThere Love in the Telematic Embrace?” (1990), Ascott describes his interactive telematic project Aspects of Gaia (1989) as an artistic model of a cybernetic system in which participants at remote locations around the globe collaborate in the simultaneous creation and experience of the work. In his work, Ascott optimistically theorizes that the marriage of technology and intuition in telematic art might enable an integrated and systematic extension of human perception and an expansion of consciousness. This text critically presents Ascott’s theoretical work and utopian stance. He claims that the interactive elements throughout his oeuvre encompass a range of dynamic attractions and offer a more ambiguous prognosis for the future than the artist suggests. In contrast to Ascott’s description of telematic love based on the principle of “passionate attraction,”the author of this text develops an alternative description characterized by “narcissisticreflection.” While Ascott summons Duchamp’s Large Glass as a system embodying a total , loving embrace, the author reconsiders the reflective qualities of the Large Glass and the glaring monitors of telematic art in the context of the elusiveness of transparency and the dissociation of love from bodily sensation. The author’sanalysis of the technological and psychological mediation of love suggests a rethinking of the conventional dichotomies of technology and intuition, form and content. He reinterprets Ascott’swork by locating passionate attraction at the ambiguous points where these oppositions converge. He concludes that technology (including Ascott’s telematic embrace) cannot embody love by virtue of its formal structure any more or any less than by virtue of the sensitive and caring content that it potentially communicates. Utopic and dystopic formulations of the future yield to questions about how human values might emerge: what role visual information and its corollaries in textual and other systems of envisioningindeed , art and the ability to comprehend it-might play. In this context, the author considersAscott’s work for its contribution as art to the dynamic interplay of ideas and forces involved in the envisioning and creation of the future. Reference 1. Lawrence Durcii.Justinr (Sew York Dutton, 1957). 0 1997EAST ...