Report on The Virtual Worlds 2000 Conference : an island of negative entropy
by
Joseph Nechvatal
Something exciting happens when one looks at various subjects not for closed
conceptual systems, but to find an ever-opening conceptual edge. This
conceptual edge is more and more important today after we have learned that
modernist reductionist assumptions are not easily changed by mere postmodern
negations. For example, postmodernists typically reject scientific
reductionism, but often assume a kind of fractionated cultural reductionism.
Thus people stay trapped in the scientistic objectivist model because it is
largely the only working one out there. What seems to be needed are
self-mutating conceptual models to think differently with;
self-re-organizing conceptual models that are never just the completed or
inverted objectivity of the usual conceptions.
Hence, details concerning a plethora of new conceptual and procedural models
shown and discussed at the Virtual Worlds 2000 Conference - which was held
for three days in July at Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci in Paris -
might give us some sense of the many promising conceptual points found there
- even though the private discussions I had with participants were often
even more abstract and complex and not fixed to the topic I am reporting on
here. But we all seemed to agree that we no longer needed a further
contextual completion before we can reject any reduction of human processes
to the completed/objectified kind, even while we still respect science and
its logic as a recognizably special tool within a new art/science matrix.
Prof. Jean-Claude Heudin, director of the International Institute of
Multimedia Lab and chairman of Virtual Worlds 2000, aimed to avoid any
fall-back by starting off and catalyzing the conference with a succinct but
stimulating talk on the conference’s goals, which, like the first Virtual
Worlds conference in 1998, were to develop a discourse around the merging of
Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Life (A-Life) - the study of synthetic
systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural living systems.
Unlike the first conference in 1998, this one was better organized as a
single thread and even though there were three key-note speakers (Bruce
Damer, Ken Perlin, and Claude Lattaud) they did not dominate the discourse.
As a result there was very good rapport at the conference between the
diverse international participants and a general feeling that virtually
nothing is impossible with co-operational imagination. Cyborg imagery in pop
culture, I suppose, has fruitfully fertilized this optimistic ontological
feeling by imaginatively inviting people to experience their ontology
through losing track of their bodies and becoming (what seems to be) pure
consciousness - even though people all over the world have now grasped the
fact that even dis-embodied self-conceptual models bring old conceptions of
the sexual body with it because as the self becomes progressively more
detachable from the location of the body, it becomes increasingly
constituted through and in communication processes. The postmodern critique
of the sexual/racial body and the problems it poses are now widely
understood too, but many are bored by the constant stoppage, as every
conceptual model of the body can be made to seem a fall-back into an older
politics or metaphysics - and hence a backhanded re-affirmation of them.
Thus the benefits of studying ontological complexity via apparently
autonomous computational self-modeling systems.
This rhizomatic discourse embraces such diverse fields as advanced computer
graphics for virtual worlds, evolutionary computational systems, simulation
of ecological systems, simulation of physical environments, multi-agent
on-line communities, evolutionary applications for cyber-art, and a host of
philosophical traditions. Indeed, except for an overall idea of a coming
immersive evolution, there was great diversity at this extremely informative
gathering; a gathering of such intellectual breadth that one often felt like
a mosquito in a nudist camp, buzzing from one promising approach to another,
vampiricaly loading up on them all. But I found this diverse,
interdisciplinary approach warranted, for with Virtual Worlds 2000’s
emphasis on merging Virtual Reality with Artificial Life we come to a
fundamental human exploration concerning the spatialization of consciousness
relating to the recognition of life (a working definition of life is quite
important to establishing whether an artificial system exhibits life or not
– but such a definition is still under debate with some biologists insisting
that life can only be found in certain hydro-carbon chains while Schrödinger
and Von Neumann early on speculated that life is best characterized as
islands of negative entropy, a.k.a. information). That doesn’t sound too
high-minded, does it? – because the applications are rather banal; ranging
from apparently intelligent computer game avatar simulations to system-bot
on-line education and business uses. Well, even so, the high-mindedness is
justified in that in Virtual Worlds 2000 a new kind of apparent
art/scientific animism was being devised; a buzzing animism that
incorporates the recognition of life in artistic, computer scientific,
virtual worlds. Hence, Virtual Worlds 2000 continues the opening of a new
discourse after postmodernism. Whereas Virtual Reality has largely concerned
itself with the design of 3D immersive spaces, and Artificial Life with the
simulation of living organisms, Virtual Worlds is concerned with the
synthesis of digital living wholes (systemic synthetic worlds). Thus it
continues to move us past the time when it was revolutionary to undermine
the idea of apparent logical unities.
This synthetic/emergent approach has opened possibilities that were missed
by both foundational models and by their postmodernist negation. VR/A-life
studies then systematically escape postmodernism’s either/or; we are neither
just logical nor arbitrary. Hence, VR/A-life studies gets us past the
postmodern alternatives as it systematically exceeds formulation and yet it
is far from arbitrary. This approach can re-establish apparent empirical
findings within a more critical omnijective context, rather than the strict
postmodern disbelief in empiricism. And this is as it should be, for VR is
not strictly a virtual enterprise. It is a fuzzy virtual-actual (viractual)
one – thus a radicalization of classic Cartesian dualism - as with VR the
electronic apparatus supplements both the body’s limitations and its classic
imaginary spaces and mental possibilities as the equipment systematically
supplements the mind/body’s powers of perception.
Moreover, as we are learning through the Human Genome Project, like
everything, life itself has been succumbing to digital dematerialization.
But with VR/A-life inspired life, life is even better characterized as a
viractual process, rather than the digital substrate in which that process
is embedded. This seems right to me, as our life has an apparent order that
is more intricate than a single conceptual system. VR/A-life is clearly not
static or fixed. It is dynamic.
Without dynamic viractuality, digital ontology encounters a major quandary
as life re-mutates into binary modulation, re-structuring human reality
again into a new breed of dualing Cartesianalities. But with the dynamic
viractual socioepistemic ontology offered in the study of VR/A-life – which
comes about through the particular viractual conjunctions of body and
digital technology – we are enabled to construct new forms of
intersubjective ontology and apparent ways to embody those ontologies … to
slip into them, take them on, and live them out immersively to their outer
edges.
While we might have once assumed spatial separation between the body and
digital technology, the viractuality found in VR/A-life effects a
recuperation of spatial absence through temporal presence. This viractual
notion places us at once at the most general and limiting condition of our
existence. Our bodily existence, or embodiment, is from this standpoint
understood to have a viractual range of potential experiential modalities in
relation to features of cultural and historical context.
As the interpenetrating of bodies with digital technologies continues
unabated, becoming more and more seamless and pervasive, new domains of art
experience and being-in-the-world become colonized by this ontological
demand. Sure, VR/A-life research is currently devoted to synthesizing new
and more seamlessly aesthetic ways to interface embodied ontology with
disembodied computer intelligence. However, the majority of people today
clearly do not show any special interest in Artificial Life or/and Virtual
Reality as art – they perceive them exactly in the same way as they perceive
the creation of any other specialized conceptual esoterica. Equally, people
don’t comprehend their own ontological internal processes because how we
define the extended viractual space of our life is always more than
cognitive – like good art is. Therefore, the quintessential VR/A-life
concept of emergent complexity via immersive genetic algorithms is a
valuable conceptual model for art today in that much of its emergent
computational work is organized in a "bottom up" fashion; focusing on local
rather than global behaviors, while centering its ontology around
poly-sexual cellular automata, neural networks, enzyme catalysts,
nanotechnology, RNA strands, and immersive computer models of ecological
systems.
But it is not just art. As Prof. Heudin indicated, VR/A-life is a major new
ontological medium based on the collaboration of science, technology and
art. With VR/A-life yielding up some useful insights into procedure, we
might self-study our own organisms’ apparent behaviors and environmental
interactions by studying our life as it might be. This is clearly not a
counter-revolution against postmodernism but an emergent surpassing of it.
Instead of mere postmodern pluralism we might create for ourselves an
apparent complex unified ontology made up of emergent multiple-selves by
involving a sophisticated steering of artistic applications into a fully
ontological immersive context. Such an interplay between evolutionary
self-representational dis-embodiment and emergent being-in-the-world
embodiment is precisely the viractual issue found in all
post-biotechnological applications of the computer, as demonstrated at the
conference by both Jeffrey Ventrella’s and Tina LaPorta’s work.
By being taken up into an emergent viractual environment, the complexity of
ontological life consciousness is re-represented in VR/A-life and, I would
suggest, altered as the computer VR/A-life manipulator encounters emergent
representations of her own bodies processes. Thus the VR/A-life inquiry will
continue to unfold under its own weight from the point of view of the
extended reproducing body, with the next set of emergent ontological
questions necessarily having to do with how VR/A-life worlds (for they are
always multiple) are constituted, what it means to have them, how they feel,
and precisely how we may inhabit them aesthetically.
Note:
The full list of participants - with the abstracts to their papers - can be
found at http://www.devinci.fr/iim/vw2000.
The full proceedings have been
published by Springer LNCS/AI subscriptions@springer.de /
helpdesk@link.springer.de and are available on-line on the Springer Web
site: http://link.springer-ny.com
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