— Symbiogenic Experience

Dissertation Outline

1. Introduction
Chapter 1 introduces the main concepts address in this dissertation (symbiosis, emergence and human-machine co-evolution) and outlines the central research question addressed. It also discusses the role of interactive arts practice and introduces the reader to phenomenology and its use as a method for interactive arts research. Scope and limitation of the research and a structural overview of the dissertation are also provided.

Progress made: a provisional introduction has been completed. It will probably be modified somewhat as I finish the dissertation.

2. Conceptual Framework
The Literature Review. This chapter provides an overview of the key areas of inquiry that have emerged as a framework for the development and evaluation of my theory of symbiogenic experiences. The diagram in Figure 1 outlines the principal theoretical and critical perspectives and relevant technologies informing this inquiry and their relationships to one another. Beginning by defining co-evolution and symbiogenesis, which I use as a metaphor or point of departure, I sketch out an account of symbiogneic experiences via the interlocking frames of Interactive Arts, the existentialist phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cybernetics and Autopoietic Theory, Posthumanism, and various techniques and technologies that I loosely categorize as “intelligent systems”. This framework emphasizes the complex interdependent ways in which humans interrelate with technology and with their world, the importance of human embodied subjectivity and the embodied and situated nature of intelligence. Much like cybernetic concepts of feedback and circular causality, as well as my own hermeneutic method described in chapter one, each element in this framework may be read through or may otherwise influence the development of ideas from other elements. For example, the making of an interactive artwork may be influenced by cybernetic or autopoietic concepts, while the understanding of these concepts may be influenced by the making and experience of the artwork. In addition, reading the cybernetic concepts and the material practices of cybernetics through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, may guide our understanding of both the making and experiencing of the artwork. Collectively, the elements contained in this conceptual framework encompass the foundation of what I describe as a co-evolutionary ontology and serve in explicating an account of the embodied self and its intrinsic quality of embeddedness and intertwinement with in an increasingly complexified and technologically intelligent world and how aesthetic experience may serve a means to expand awareness so as to make this embeddedness and intertwinement perceptible to us on some level.

The concept of symbiogenesis developed by biologist Lynn Margulis serves as a metaphor and point of departure from which to form my own artistic-phenomenological inquiry into the notion of human-machine coupling and co-evolution (and also as a way to steer clear of Darwinism). In addition, the idea of cooperation and association between organisms are for her an essential element of life and evolution. I am investigating how these concepts may be applied to aesthetic experiences related to technology. Thus the term symbiogenesis — redeployed as symbiogenic — is used as a shorthand term so as to better to discuss certain types of experiences and the issues they inaugurate.

Concepts such as Jack Burnham’s "symbiotic intelligence" and Roy Ascott’s cybernetic model of interactive arts, when combined with analyses of artworks using AI, A-life or cybernetic techniques, provide a framework for examining themes of human-machine coupling, co-emergence and co-evolution in the interactive arts. This conceptual framework involves a threading together of these perspectives, and I will argue that they occupy a domain of art experience and analysis that examines, bears witness to, and engages with the observation that humans are increasingly cooperating and merging with the intelligent technological systems of their environment. This will also be elaborated further in Chapter 3 when I discuss what I call the “emergent arts”.

Posthumanist theories provide an ontological context for examining human-technology relations, analyzing interactive artworks and for the symbiogenic framework more broadly. Posthumanist thinkers such as Katherine Hayles, Mark Hansen, Andy Clark and Cary Wolfe explore the nature of our relationship to technology and its role in reconfiguring the human as a heterogenous de-centered subject, thus lessening its controlling position. They question the ontological divide that supposedly exists between humans and their technological creations.

Existentialist phenomenology, particularly the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and those who have extended his work such as Shaun Gallagher and Don Ihde are employed as a framework for understanding and analyzing co-evolutionary experiences in interactive art. The ideas of these thinkers have come to influence many of the important philosophical components of this conceptual framework, which include examination of the technical dimensions of embodiment and how embodied phenomenology relates to the fields of artificial intelligence and cybernetics. These thinkers emphasize the crucial role of embodiment in the construction of experience, particularly with regard to technology. Existentialist phenomenology serves as the core method of philosophical analysis with interactive art projects serving a crucial role as reservoirs of experience that inform and function alongside scholarly writing and argumentation. The phenomenological method employed here combines accounts of direct experience, philosophical analysis and reflection, with relevant aspects from cybernetics and autopoietic theory in an artistic-theoretical inquiry into the nature of our relationship with intelligent systems and technologies.

Cybernetics and autopoietic theory emphasize the notion of reciprocal interplay and open-ended emergent interactions between system and environment as well as the notion that the environment and the organism are intertwined and cannot be understood except in relation to one another. In essence, it blurs the division between people and things that has been so common in Western thinking. The concept of co-evolution offered in this dissertation draws significantly from autopoietic theory and neocybernetic theories of emergence. Autopoiesis outlines the ways in which living systems and their environments co-determine and mutually specify one another. Cybernetic ideas related to system boundaries, autonomy and adaptability are employed in this research as a framework for analyzing and understanding: (1) the design and behavior of “intelligent” interactive artworks, (2) how intelligent technological systems (and an intelligent technological environment more broadly) can couple with and effect change in the human and (3) through the lens of existential phenomenology, analyze the recursive art production process itself and how it may lead to new ideas and new understandings.

This research includes the production of interactive artworks as an important aspect of the research process. Certain computational and biomedical methods from research areas such as machine learning and sensory substitution have been employed in the development of these artworks. These provide the relevant scientific and technological background, and artistic inspiration, from which to build these works. At the broadest level, they represent an interest in exploring the coupling of human and machine, sometimes with the goal of providing some sort of “enhancement” to the human. Entire research fields are not covered here but rather, a specific set of references concerning the most important and relevant technological aspects of the research and art-making contained in this dissertation.

Progress made: a rough draft has been completed and submitted to Diane. I am currently working on an updated draft.

3. The Emergent Arts
This chapter contains a taxonomy outlining a number of characteristics of new media and interactive arts practice that engage in processes that establish a foundation for the shifts in perceptual and bodily experience that I characterize as symbiogenic. These artworks thematize reciprocal interplay (and even co-evolution) of humans and machines and give an intuitive sense of connection or enmeshment with an increasingly intelligent technological environment. Many of the artworks I draw from may be characterized by this drive for “symbiotic intelligence” between humans and their increasingly technologized environments that Jack Burnham described. These works engage in similar processes and approaches to the artworks documented in Chapter 5 and form the basis for understanding symbiogenic experiences. I refer to this range of works collectively as the “emergent arts”. These works will be analyzed through the lens of cybernetics and neocybernetic theory in conjunction with Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology. I will of course go deeper into these concepts in Chapter 4. The taxonomy I am developing is currently made up of five general characteristics which the works explored here can be analyzed across:

1. Intertwining/direct coupling: Some artworks that feature a directly physical or embodied form of interaction. These works necessitate direct physical human interaction with some kind of intelligent technological system.
2. Disturbance/Perturbation: Other works feature looser or altogether non-existent physical couplings with the interactive system, with artworks perhaps demonstrating greater agency of their own. These works feature systems that operate and respond to environmental perturbations or disturbances and are often in some kind of cybernetic feedback loop with that environment (and often with itself).
3. Inter-corporeal/Performative: Some works stage performances of human-technology symbiosis and co-evolution. “Performance” in this case is not limited to stage performance but is simply meant to describe works where we experience at things to some extent from the “outside” or from a distance. Nevertheless we feel it ourselves on some level. These works function by engendering a sense of what Merleau-Ponty refereed to as intercorporeality (i.e empathically “feeling” the same thing as someone else; what modern neuroscience explains though the function of what are called “mirror neurons”).
4. Material/Organic Complexity: Sometimes the material itself becomes an important aspect of the work and even a context for the experience of it. Like all the works here these works still take a “systems approach to creation” but instead of a direct focus on systems as such these works feature relations grounded on the unique complexity of the material employed in the artwork/system. The material substrate(s) that a work is built upon functions as the driver and locus point of experience rather than the system itself, although the two are directly related. Here the very material form of the works adds a certain novel dimension of tactility and sensuous presence, sometimes even exhibiting a certain kind of agency.
5. Distributed/Apparitional: Some works feature processes that are outside any direct human perceived effect (at least immediate effect) but give a sense of longitudinal intertwining (play out over time). There is a sense of intertwining between human and intelligent system as being “in the air” or functioning as a background context, monitoring us, performing tasks for us or otherwise linked to us in some way. Here the work engages us beyond the physical presence and experience of the gallery space. While the effects may often be longitudinal, they lack any distinct physical location.

It should be noted that any given artwork can have aspects of each of these characteristics (they are not mutually exclusive) and each characteristic can be read across a continuum.

Progress made: a rough draft is currently being worked on and will be completed by the end of September as I am presenting a paper based upon it at the SLSA conference.

4. Exploration and Analysis of Symbiogenic Experiences
This chapter will serve as the core chapter where I sketch out the key characteristics and operative principles that comprise a symbiogenic art experience. I will do this in a two-fold fashion. First, I will identify some key concepts that form the theoretical foundation of the symbiogenic framework. This constitutes the theoretical lens through which I am viewing co-evolutionary experience and will be devoted to a close analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s existentialist phenomenology and its relevance to intelligent systems, cybernetics and the emergent arts. This will be followed by identifying the four key aspects of the symbiogenic experience itself. Provisionally they are as follows:

1. Distributed: the manner and extent to which a symbiogenic experience motivates a sense of our cognitive process and overall sense of being (particularly our intentionality) as being expanded beyond our biological “skinbags” (as philosopher Andy Clark would say); not locatable within one body or entity at any one time.
2. Enactive: the manner and extent to which our reality is enacted (in the Varelian sense) through embodied interactions with an intelligent technological life-world. This aspect concerns how symbiogenic experience relates to how we “bring forth a world” for ourselves.
3. Visceral-Biological: this relates to deeply embodied inward feelings and sensations rather than abstract reasoning as well as experiences that confront us with our biological natures.
4. Social-Cultural: the social and cultural milieu and intersubjective dialogues of our life-world and how a symbiogenic experience influences and is influenced by ones participation in it.

Much like the characteristics listed in Chapter 3, these aspects of symbiogenic experience are not mutually exclusive and can be read across one another (with each individual characteristic also being read across a continuum). An experience can have more than one aspect of each.

Progress made: a rough draft is currently being worked on but is in its early stages

5. The Projects
This chapter details the development of the three interactive artworks that comprise the tangible/practical component of this dissertation. I describe the development of the conceptual, aesthetic and technical structures that have informed each work, as well as the context within which each work was developed. It includes phenomenological descriptions and analyses of my own experiences with the works and analysis of the deeper conceptual connections to the symbiogenic framework. Three projects are discussed: Protocol (2009-2012), Biopoiesis (2011-2012) and Proof-of-Process (2012). Each of the projects are presented according to the following general structure:

• General overview of the work, including it’s conceptual underpinnings and developmental context
• Design and Implementation: details of the project’s design and technical implementation, including hardware, software and materials used, data mapping strategies, etc
• Exhibition and Evaluation: details of the work’s exhibition and evaluation of the work overall
• Analysis of the work’s conceptual connections and relationship to the symbiogenic framework

Progress made: All projects have been completed. One exhibition has been completed (at Gallery Gachet in Vancouver) for all the projects. Two more exhibitions for Biopoiesis remain (SIGGRAPH in August and ISEA in September). A third exhibition is also possible at the Re-New Festival in Copenhagen, but I currently lack the funds to attend.

6. Conclusions and Future Directions
This chapter will detail some conclusions and future directions for this research

Progress made: This chapter is in its earliest stages

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 The Role of Artistic Practice

1.2 Method: Phenomenology as a Method for Interactive Arts Research

1.3 What is Meant by “Intelligent Systems”

1.4 Scope and Limitations

1.5 Structural Overview

Chapter 2: Conceptual Framework

2.1 Symbiogenesis and Co-evolution

2.1.1 Symbiogenesis as Metaphor

2.1.2 Defining Co-evolution

2.1.3 A Note on Technological Determinism

2.2 “Symbiotic Intelligence” and “Technogenesis” in the Interactive Arts

2.2.1 Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems

2.2.2 Technogenesis

2.2.3 Summary and Implications

2.3 Posthumanist Theories on Embodiment and Human-Technology Relations

2.3.1 Historical Context

2.3.2 Overview of Posthumanist Thought

2.3.3 Summary and Implications

2.4 Phenomenology and Human-Technology Relations

2.4.1 Overview of Phenomenology

2.4.2 Merleau-Ponty

2.4.3 Human-Technology Relations after Merleau-Ponty

2.4.4 Phenomenological Methods of Analysis of Interactive Art

2.4.5 Summary and Implications

2.5 Cybernetics and Autopoietic Theory

2.5.1 Autopoiesis and Enaction

2.5.2 Autonomy and Neocybernetic Emergence

2.5.3 System-Environment Hybrids

2.5.4 The Cybernetic Ontology

2.5.5 Summary and Implications

2.6 Embodiment, Computation and Intelligent Systems

2.6.1 Cyborgs and Human-Computer Coupling: Historical Context

2.6.2 Intelligent Systems

2.6.3 Organic Alternatives to Digitally-based Intelligent Systems (“Organic Analogues”)

2.6.4 Electric Body Stimulation and Sensory Substitution

2.6.5 Biofeedback and Physiological Monitoring

2.6.6 Summary and Implications

Chapter 3: The Emergent Arts

3.1 Intertwining/Direct Coupling

3.2 Disturbance/Perturbation

3.3 Inter-corporeality/Performative

3.4 Material/Organic Complexity

3.5 Distributed/Apparitional

3.6 Summary

Chapter 4: Exploration and Analysis of Symbiogenic Experiences

4.1 Deeper into Co-evolution

4.2 Emergence and Autonomy

4.3 Boundary Questions

4.4 Ambiguity and Unknowability

4.5 The Problem of Intelligence

4.6 Symbiogenic Framework

4.6.1 Distributed (Distributed Intentionality)

4.6.2 Enactive

4.6.3 Visceral-Biological

4.6.4 Social-Cultural

4.7 Summary

Chapter 5: The Projects

5.1 Precursors

5.1.1 BodyDaemon

5.1.2 Naos

5.2 Protocol

5.2.1 Overview

5.2.2 Conceptual Foundations

5.2.3 Developmental Context

5.2.4 System Design and Implementation

5.2.5 Exhibition and Evaluation

5.2.6 Analysis

5.3 Biopoiesis

5.3.1 Overview

5.3.2 Conceptual Foundations

5.3.3 Developmental Context

5.3.4 System Design

5.3.5 Implementation Strategies

5.3.5.1 Emergent Relations

5.3.5.2 Optimal/Sub-optimal

5.3.5.3 Organic Learning

5.3.5.4 Evolving Dimensionalities

5.3.6 Exhibition and Evaluation

5.3.7 Analysis

5.4 Proof-of-Process

5.4.1 Overview

5.4.2 Conceptual Foundations

5.4.3 Developmental Context

5.4.4 The Process

5.4.5 Exhibition and Evaluation

5.4.6 Analysis

5.5 Summary

Chapter 6: Conclusions and Future Directions