Art and Media Symbiosis

Whatever the future of AI, the symbiosis between media is guaranteed to broker unprecedented breakthroughs in art and consciousness. A too familiar sight in restaurants or at dinner tables—smart phones next to the silverware if not in hand. Screens have become our new umbilical. Art and sociality continue to confront the compulsivity of the digital Rubicon. Broadcast mania and online obsessions accelerate as institutions undergo high-stakes crises challenging political stability and interpersonal relations. Though technology may be all consuming, art initiates breakthroughs in perception and cognition. Internet and social media have increased symbiotic co-dependence, enabling artists to bypass gatekeepers, agents, and critics to access and produce enormous ranges of genres and styles, as well as for disseminating programs and artwork.In biology, a symbiotic relationship occurs when one species piggybacks on or with another: domesticated pets and animals are ready examples. A symbiont can also be a parasite, microbe, or pathogen, not unrelated to how rampant misinformation and viral disinformation invade psyches and infect the mass media. Just as the human body can be a host for invisible bacteria, the metastases of power politics, divisive ideologies, and rabid conspiracies also operate like infectious symbionts. Being inter-species, symbiosis exists not only throughout the natural and animal kingdoms but also across digital domains. Technology and media have turned us into symbiotized creatures; art, too, can function as a parasite—or “para-sight”—moving eye, ear, and brain beyond everyday perception.Art and technology were wedded from the get-go. The decade before Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, the first camera, in 1839, his elaborate theatrical dioramas of mobile painted scenery set in motion a fascination with moving pictures. Samuel Morse was a portrait painter and anatomy artist before inventing the telegraph a few years earlier, which compressed messages into binary coded signals and converted them into streaming electrons transmitted by an electrical current—the digital pulse. Morse met Daguerre in Paris that seminal year, became fascinated with his new invention and wrote a letter to the New York Observer describing it. Published widely, Morse quickly helped publicize photography. Two centuries later technology continues to produce a vast spectrum of mimetic currencies—the flora and fauna of the WWW—catalyzing instantaneous transferences between nations, psyches, and media. Our dependence upon online connectivity makes it easy to forget how recent the internet is: Google (1998), Facebook (2004), YouTube and Fios (2005), Twitter (2006), and iPhone (2007). Although digital transmission began with the telegraph, it now encompasses omnipresent windows, high-frequency multimedia, and instantaneously interactive touchscreen software. Cyber fission continues to produce unstoppable weaves and waves of immense immersive communitivity that challenge social stability and upend politics while also contesting the boundaries between art and commerce, as well as between the avant-garde and mainstream. Following the nineteenth-century inventions of the telephone, movie camera, and radio, TV and computer exploded the implosion of the Infor­mation Revolution, accelerated by transistors, semiconductors, microprocessors, and internet.This seismic symbiotic shift started during the 1960s when avant-garde artists began experimenting with mixing genres and art forms that produced multimedia, forerunner of software and windows. People compulsively hold smart phones to their ears as they once did pocket transistor radios (before ghetto blasters and boom boxes). Sixties artists never tired of extolling their credo that there wasn’t, and shouldn’t be, any separation between art and life, thereby anticipating the coming cultural bombardment that intensifies the participation mystique of media synergy. In 1960, R. Buckminster Fuller proposed building a giant geodesic dome over Manhattan to regulate weather and air pollution. Happenings, along with chance, improvisation, and experimental movies, forerunner of Reality TV, blew out the theatre’s fourth wall.Filmmakers like Stan VanDerbeek created an expanded cinema that simulated immersive virtual environments, forerunner of AI. Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas co-founded the Film-Makers Cooperative in 1962 to disseminate freewheeling independent experimental films, emerging eclectic genres prophetic of what now proliferate on YouTube. In 1964, dancer/choreographers Elaine Summers and Beverly Schmidt incorporated projected films in their dances as kinetic décor: Summers’ Fantastic Gardens at the Judson Dance Theater and Schmidt’s Poem For The Theater #6 (with film) to music by Heitor Villa-Lobos at the New York Poets Theater—the symbiosis of dance and film intensified theatrical virtualization. While LSD was blowing minds, Tony Conrad’s experimental stroboscopic movie The Flicker (1966), a celluloid loop composed of five black and white repeating frames, activated an intense hypnotic visual pulse—psychotropic cinema. The hyper mimetic crepuscular bombardment overexcited viewers’ retinas and brains, causing them to auto-project subliminal images, even hallucinate, confirming that film is neurophysiological—beyond content. Like filmstrip’s initial pixilated flutter, The Flicker magnified the micro-intervallic interstices stimulating the frequencies of afterimage apperception—a ticket to multidimensional hyperspace.Long before Studio 54, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966) anticipated psychedelic disco with hyperactive films, performers, and light shows. For his projected but never completed multi-movie extravaganza ironically titled **** (’Four Stars’: newspaper critics’ highest rating), he shot reels that were to be simultaneously projected on multiple screens in a large gallery or amphitheatre. (Chelsea Girls concurrently projected on two screens might have been an alternative—eyes challenged to watch both simultaneously.) The atom bomb, sci-fi, drugs, and alienation promulgated the mythos of superstars, space aliens, body snatchers, zombies, and clones. Celebrity became a narcotic, fame a vampire. In France, the death of the author augured the liberation of écriture. Media began promoting instantaneous hypnotic escapes that challenged culture and comprehension by reifying the subliminal valences of stealth, eyeshot, and surveillance. The digital atomism of the letter, the synergistics of words, images, and media further distill, compress, and concatenate reciprocal exchanges between gestalts, mosaics, messages, and senses—the thresholds that negotiate self and world. Mimetic currents zap, infiltrate, and trespass media platforms whose instantaneous viral dissemination leverages the cultural communications glue connecting logos, polis, and ethos.In 1963, Robert Rauschenberg foraged found materials for Merce Cunningham’s Field Dances, décor that changed from performance to performance depending on the dance company’s venue. In 1965, Cunningham premiered How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run, accompanied by John Cage reading his humorous and often hilarious anecdotes. The text provided a lively rhythmic counterpoint to the dancers exuberantly bouncing and bounding through the athletically intricate choreography. Curiously, this dance occurred at the same time that cognitive neuroscientist Roger Sperry was engaged in his split-brain research that revealed language and spatial perception are coordinated by separate neural hemispheres: dancing is a mind-body bridge. Between 1967 and 1969 John Cage and Lejaren Hiller collaborated on the first computer-generated musical composition HPSCHD. New portable video camcorders in 1972 prompted Cunningham’s TV Rerun, with cameramen threaded through the dancers during performance.That year Yvonne Rainer’s solo Inner Appearances featured the choreographer concealed behind a dark eyeshade nonchalantly operating a vacuum cleaner while behind her slide projections narrated an intense inner psychological drama concerning her lover, a standoff between hot and cold. Branching into photography, Rauschenberg created a dynamic interactive photomontage for Trisha Brown’s dance Glacial Decoy (1979), a projected décor of disparate sequences of constantly changing slides while the dancers entered and retreated in pairs from the stage wings. The perimetrics accentuated the double overlay of kinetic configurations which challenged the audience’s eyes to “read” two different sets of visual stimuli, and which curiously confirmed technology guru Marshall McLuhan’s uncanny precept—that the eyes scan and process information via their peripheral vision, similar to reading a newspaper or navigating a crowded street.Nam June Paik, heralded as the father of video art, utilized banks of TVs to orchestrate multi-screen blitzkriegs of media architecture. Mass advertising began appropriating the fragmentation and mosaic techniques of avant-garde art. Representation went the way of spittoons. The Wooster Group’s virtuosic pioneering video experimentation that recalibrated theatrical dramaturgy became Broadway’s big exploding inevitable. Large-scale video screens now populate exhibitions, sports stadiums, and mega rock events to zoom in and magnify the action. Spinoffs of Philip Glass’s soaring electronic harmonies popped up in commercials. Form yielded to a synergy and syzygy of interpenetrating networks—incessant interprecessionary transcriptions between corporeal, visual, linguistic, kinetic, sonic, and digital systems galvanized double virtualizations, both continuous and discontinuous.The retinal saccades that process media symbiosis accentuate the intervallic relays of information, not unlike the seductive lures of clickbait and cyber surfing. Microsoft windows and touchscreen technology quicken multi-sensory involvement. Infomatic transferences challenge perceptual systems to process a barrage of simultaneous streams of stimuli whose converging data provoke a fission of neural networks and a frisson of sensual stimulation, which is different than synesthesia where one sense is transposed into another—e.g., seeing colors while listening to music. Mimesis, in turn, fortifies the interactive reciprocities underlying alterity—the dynamic plays and counter-plays, tensions and exchanges between dualities and opposites—between nations, cultures, political parties, ideologies, systems, and media; between objectivity and subjectivity, interiority and exteriority, even between visibility and invisibility.Science and technology continue to transform the exploding virtual horizon. Thanks to Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance 3-D inaugurated scalar dimensionality, the intricate network of sightlines and vanishing perspective that centuries later launched GPS geometricity. Sightlines are ideomotor vectors that interconnect spatial coordinates whose digital currents materialize the visceral filaments of global media perception. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Gutenberg Revolution’s printing presses initiated the word and image symbiosis that began synergizing neural dissemination. Mimesis simultaneously leverages the vectors between words, signs, sounds, and images that virtualize the world’s connectivity across boundaries, borders, networks, and dimensions. The digital highway thereby reinforces transferences between nations and cultures, and also between the modes of realism and abstraction as well as between codes and information. Space-time might be likened to the dimensional paradox of a Möbius strip that flexes and flips the torque of coordinates orchestrating the succession and inversion of linear sequencing. The mimetic currents pulsing through the circuits interconnecting the WWW have mirror analogs with Wilhelm Reich’s bioenergetics, the meridians that magnetically surround and energize the human body.Even before early twentieth-century talkies, the celluloid filmstrip had created a hypnotic visual fixation, an obsessive fascination with rapid pixilated motivity that enforces an intense participation mystique. The cathode ray tube further accelerated the capacities of our photoreceptors by intensifying retinal acuity and eidetic perspicuity. Quantum physics revealed the world is comprised of interpenetrating particles, fields, and psyches. Heightened media frequencies activate cognitive and neurotropic capacities. Hollywood invaded homes and psyches via TV exploding the cultural sensorium; then computers ignited the instantaneity of neural nets—the global filaments and mimetic circuits that materialize Jung’s collective consciousness. Some quantum scientists insist the universe itself is conscious and intelligent. Art, like consciousness, the biggest mystery of all, often amplifies comprehension by bypassing or surpassing thinking. Media likewise electrify our biospheres catalyzing a vast vibrating spectrum, a symbiosis of networks, platforms, stations, nations, and channels. Consciousness and culture now move faster than print.Just as reading romances sealed poor Madame Bovary’s fate, the inevitable fusion of art and media continues to incite seismic global transformations. Consciousness is being continually bombarded and transmuted by the neurological challenges of media synergy, intensified by mobile portability. Who would have thought that after the 1960s artists’ mixed-means experiments the portable phone, initially as heavy as a brick and thanks to wireless pioneer Martin Cooper, would lead to the cellular revolution? Lightweight portable blackberries, smart phones, iPhones, and mobiles, the prime movers of worldwide connectivity, now negotiate an immense symbiosis—activated in the palms of our hands.Two decades before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, and well before social media, installation and pop billboard artist Jenny Holzer had already begun what is now text messaging and tweeting—letteristic and infomatic epigrams that anti­cipated media transference. The ubiquity of iPhone camera technology in 2013 baked apps into microprocessor-equipped mobiles; selfies followed catalyzing the Me-Me-Me and Me Too generations; instantaneous digital camera miniaturization fashioned citizen journalists and YouTube junkies. Even the exploding diaspora of desperate refugees depend on cell phone connectivity for their hazardous long-distance treks before confronting another devastating dramaturgy, bureaucratic border snafus insisting they use an app to apply for asylum while remaining trapped indefinitely in limbo.■Computers do much more than think. Machine thinking and AI, which scrub the internet like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, are synonymous with amassing, collating, and instantly processing vast amounts of data that analyze and illuminate but can also subvert human intention. The term “artificial” intelligence may be misleading, because like intentionality, it’s always operating, whatever form it takes or however it’s manifested or exemplified. The acrimonious controversy surrounding AI unfairly confuses computation and consciousness while conflating intelligence with information processing. Linguist Noam Chomsky discovered children learn to speak before understanding the rules of language and, like artists, break the bonds of form and logic to new as did and The the into the and the for vision, and by up and and perspective that the quantum of and quantum seeing is mosaic a out of different and disparate of information. The of constantly that interactive data the between quantum and and of a of interpenetrating Thanks to instantaneous online connectivity media continually the human via the vast spectrum of interactive streaming platforms, and movies, further by the of along with the of advertising and social media. Just as and surround by intensifying cinema expanded by windows, and media have online the of have their that being their the the uncanny to with an even more of their Media continually and kinetic and perceptual Like performance art the created theatrical genres by virtuosic like John and along with and and The to the of and a and eye, an to and and a for and Mimesis is also a power of that across and both and of consciousness, and being as it linguistic, and digital thereby transferences between art, and psyches while the boundaries between media, and world. The of and continually media the sonic, and through while continually and the of perception. The simultaneous and of mosaics, and valences a between dimensionality, and illuminate the quantum of and that accelerate psychological and systems with art as movies, rock and music and dance are or art become in and upon media and and are by online performance The of exhibitions, as well as over a YouTube are all via the Media symbiosis makes consciousness with and to in rapid like The of and global are simultaneously by instantaneous and have initially activated art, and that over into Mimetic in how signs, and techniques that mirror the subliminal underlying perception. the of and with their underlying and Just as and are art and technology have become as their circuits while borders, boundaries, and domains. Mimetic currents continually multiple and the digital was at the of the when at the same time that experiments of animal and human what the human eye, cinema. Wilhelm invention of technology the to the of the human Mimetic the of and the and underlying Mimesis the visceral currents the circuits culture and which and The and been by our interpenetrating to and access were by the of and transmission behind symbiotic In continue to be by a further challenged by increased and media and for the of to the AI quantum over the and even Like art, AI makes host and symbiont Just as animals depend upon their is upon media but also like and advertising the of their by and messaging and and infect and and power politics, pop and art and while media the of The global the is or in France, and synonymous with of the for AI art are in electronic performance that experiments with a of and During the next AI, which continues to a if not and and and connectivity by internet neural and symbiosis that might be have that the of the and human the of the neural and continue to be the to future quantum breakthroughs in consciousness. to vast reinforces the that all and information the The big surrounding AI is to and human software like and are of and of art time fusion of the of and and is and AI like and that are of but and Just as Renaissance art created 3-D perspective and the AI the power to itself Art continue to and by symbiosis with AI via and the and that in the synergy between media and the and have become even the into a and continue to undergo AI continue to and the of and to and AI might also be to politics and to negotiate and may there is beyond would be to but they are to and