How Spaces Build Mind

7/27/2019 How Spaces Build Mind

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Michael Kelly 10002075 BAFA 4 Dissertation 11,0050 words

How Spaces Build Mind: Space, Embodied Experience, & Language

Introduction

The embodied cognition analysis of how we think, and what it means to have a mind inthe first place, sees it in terms of a system of causal relationships between our biologicalbrain and the physical space its body evolved in. Reading around this analysis, as wellas neuroscience, especially mirror neurons and grid cells, cultural theory including theanthropology and psychology of art making, and my own phenomenological reflectionsfrom Vipassana insight meditation, I have tried to build my own model of this system.With this I hope to become able to expand my drawing practice into new, moreimmediate mediums.

On my analysis, this system has three main elements that interact in specific ways. Thefirst element is Space, or the four dimensional material universe we inhabit (length,

breadth, depth, and time). The second element is Embodied Experience, how ourspecies has evolved to model this Space, experienced on an emotional level. The thirdelement of this system is Language, or how different versions of these models come toorganise Space and so inform the model building of others. These elements,consecutively, correspond to unconscious, subconscious, and conscious parts of ourmind; interacting layers of increasingly complex causal relationships between Mind andSpace; bootstrapping themselves into existence, one upon the basis of the other.

On these terms, the artist studio and art gallery can be described as a mixture ofCommunal and Laboratory Space; if you will, a mixture between a temple and ascientific research laboratory: the space of the medium is eventually rendered by the

artist into one complex enough to overcome their capacity to rationally organise theiremotional experience, becoming Sublime. The process of art making achieves a productwith enough inter-referential complexity to become an apparently intentional, observingpresence in its own right. Within the frame of a paired down gallery space, it thenremains observable as a non-natural, closed system; an artificial construct. Thisprovides an opportunity for its viewers to apprehend the repertoire of aesthetic codesrecorded by the journey of the artist maker. This potentially enables both artist andviewer, as inhabitants of Communal spaces too complex to be organised underconscious attention, to recover some autonomy.

I conclude with a diagram of this system as I see it, and an illustration of a first attempt to

practically apply it in a gallery space; my attempt, in a manner of speaking, to use thistriune system as a surface for drawing.

Spaces, the four dimensional universe we inhabit; our unconscious mind

The first element of the system is Space, or the four dimensional universe we inhabit. Bybeing too complex for the mind to fully model and organise, it can be said to constituteour unconscious. How we come to model Space, at least in the everyday, is sensitive to


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the smallest differences in our local and initial conditions, giving our models a degree ofindividual variation. The cognitive systems that do this modelling seek to decrease thisentropy by organising the local Space around it. Emerging from this process are Memes:cultural replicators that communicate an idea or emotion byovercoding a signsconnotations into denotations. Memes exploit the way our mind draws associationsbetween things by being original, intuitive, and memorable. Brands and advertising are

Memes deliberately designed to transform our desires into useful consumptionbehaviour; by dominating the aesthetic of our Communal spaces, destabilising oureveryday working models of the world, making our sense of reality feel hallucinogenicand euphoric.

Both the cells that make up our bodies and the spaces we inhabit are nonlinear,sensitive to tiny differences in their initial conditions yet maintaining unity. This isbecause they are both metastable, depending on this continual transience for hitting onways to maintain coherent unity against entropy. In becoming autonomous or selfgoverning, both bootstrap a distinct structure through reproduction of themselves,creating a distinguishing boundary between their inside and outside. By these means,

both maintain unity by transforming their locality into a more conducive Place forinhabiting; becoming individualised when things in the wider environment become moresignificant than others (Campbell 2011).

The spaces we inhabit: Communal, art gallery & artist studio, and science Laboratoryspaces, have a deep structure analogous to the dynamics of living cells. We have madeour living spaces into reflections of our biological bodies: bounded but dynamicallyinterconnected systems, maintaining stability and replicating through transformation ofits energy sources into more efficient and useful forms (Ibid). In the case of spaces, thisis achieved through its aesthetics, transforming our desires into behaviours conducive totheir ongoing maintenance and growth.

The auto-associative semiotic process through which we construct meanings can beunderstood in terms ofmetonyms, the triggering of already unified complexes ofencoded signs by other signs. These are built from metaphors, like for like links betweensigns. Emerging from these are more stableparadigms, complexes of metonyms, whichthemselves form categories, ultra-stable complexes that dont change when new sign tosignified links are encoded to them. From this emerge syntagms, or cultural rules forassociative meaning making, which we use to shape the arbitrary materials in ourenvironments for making signs that signify(Ibid).

This process is exploited by Memes (Blackmore 1998), cultural replicatorscommunicating an idea or emotion by overcodinga signs connotations into denotations.

Using Barthes terminology, the multiplicity of possible connotations of a sign havebecome overcodedby the Meme into a single denotation, by constructing myths that setbounds around ourperceptual setfor processing new information (Ibid) According toMeme theory, this happens because syntagms act as replicators; hitting upon ways tobecome better at being communicated, more faithfully and widespread, by being signsthat signify something not previously signified or in a way not previously encountered (anemerging paradigm; by being original), something universal to human structure (upon analready established paradigm; by being intuitive), and something easily encoded andrecalled, or tending to be rehearsed due to being destabilizing (the dynamic between


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emerging and established paradigms; by being memorable) (Ibid).

Memes can be understood as that which transforms our desires into useful behaviours inthe manner outlined above; by communicating an idea or emotion to a spacesinhabitants. Persisting with the cell analogy, Memes are a spaces organelles,responsible for maintaining a cells structure by co-operatively transforming energy from

one state to another. As cultural replicators, Memes evolve to become stable syntagms,persisting despite the entropy increasing, randomising stock of encoded information thatas individuals each one of us represents. Memes form human culture by faithfullyreplicating themselves despite this Derridean slippage, inherent within connectionsbetween signs and what they signify because of the dynamic everything connected toeverything structure of our brains neural networks, and the constraints of a physicaluniverse where no more than one thing can exist in the same space at the same time(Ibid). Meanings, the sign-signified connections encoded in our brains, change over timeand place, but they do so at different rates, sometimes persisting for millennia.

Memes can be deliberately designed as original, intuitive, and memorable; wielded tomanufacture desire through the aesthetics of our cultural spaces. As interpreting and

self-aware animals, a Meme does not stay as a purely blind evolutionary process, butmay be reverse engineered then deliberately appropriated. The process can beharnessed in the same way as a botanist fertilises one replicating organism with anotherto create its progeny, mixing together the replicating machinery of each; at once both aproduct of the skill and theoretical models of the botanist, and the product of a somewhatad hoc creative process.

In this way our desires can be encouraged to take on more useful forms, asconsumption behaviour directed toward a branded product. This can be seen incontemporary advertising practice (Hill 2010). Having briefly spent time working in acreative ad agency as a planner, helping to set out the targeting strategy for the LeverFaberge Lynx deodorant brand, I have had an opportunity to participate in this practice

first hand:

Adverts have set out to foster a sense oforiginalityby subverting expectations andreflecting emerging social change. They have also sought to frame this originality withinintuitive boundaries, ones that do not then alienate their consumer from the ongoingprocess. A way they have done this is through focus on emotional display in the humanface, making sure the facial reactions of the actors feel authentic.

That is to say, adverts have sought to feel intuitive. Full of motion and change, onunderstanding gained from eye tracking studies (Ibid), ads exploit our attentionalresource allocation process, which favours elements in a state of change. Our stressresponse, hardwired to spike on indications of oncoming change (Dennett 2007),

motivates us to resolve emerging potential problems using the product as a solution; onour emotion of hope. Thus, we become engaged while not being duly challenged,increasing the likelihood of our accepting what they say as true, perhaps even coming tofight to protect it from contradiction. In this way brands sell themselves on our deeplyheld values, prejudices about groups of people over others, and our emotion of pride.Emotion is the primary playing field upon which an advert communicates with its targets,because its fundamental structural role means it is able to efficiently address manyindividuals at once, and because we tend to post-rationalise from emotion, essentiallytelling ourselves a story about ourselves, making it very persuasive. Ads, then, will often


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seek to back up their emotion lead selling with an intellectual argument. This isperformed with as much elegant simplicity as possible, concentrating on utilizing onedominant detail in an engaging way. By these means it is made sure that the amount ofunanticipated associations we make in re-constructing the meaning of our experience islimited.

By addressing more than one sense and rendering fine details ads hope to create animmersive emotional experience. Biasing our attention toward our feelings, promotingrepeated rehearsal in a prolonged effort to bring meaning to it, they seek to becomememorable. By these means they seek to influence our buying behaviour by inductivelytransforming their propositions into triggers for an appropriately toned experience whenwe encounter the product again in the shop. This conditioning is amplified through itsdomination of our communal spaces aesthetic, through its continual repetition via arange of media, including the behavioural advocacy of our peers. Through this process,a densely inter-referential and emotionally intense paradigm emerges. According toBaudrillard, this is a main reason why our everyday working models of the world havebecome qualitatively fuzzy and fluid, making our sense of reality border on thehallucinogenic and euphoric (Baudrillard 1994).

One narrative of the so-called Postmodern Break is of this process being contingentwith that of Modernism (Jameson 1991); a cultural phenomenon said to have beganproper around the early 1960s when post-Industrial technological advance andStructuralist intellectual paradigms enabled us to deconstruct and playfully reconstructour given cultural spaces in a newly potent way. In a self-amplifying positive feedbackloop, this process sped up to the point where our view of reality effectively disappearedas a unified and discrete phenomenon, instead becoming multiple and negotiable. Aconsequence was a softening of boundaries between a fine/high and kitsch/lowaesthetic, as their newly identified codes were co-opted by both, deepening associationsbetween the sign to signified networks they had used to derive discrete meanings. With

this came a new and all encompassing social order based on consumption, short-circuiting Industrialist Marxist narratives of class struggle around ownership of the meansof production.

In 2012, we are faced with this process having spread across the globe and perhapsreaching stable equilibrium under a surviving few, very large multinational corporations.The contemporary situation has become one in which all transgressive wielding ofMemes are immediately co-opted by this power. The romantic idea of a transgressiveavant-garde is apparently dead; being apprehended, re-interpreted, and re-transmittedthe moment any novelty emerges, by an all-encompassing and ever-adaptive culturalassociative network. In an evolutionary arms race, any innovations are used to inform itsincreasingly sophisticated methods. Aesthetic products are commodities within this

process. The previously high cultural realm of Modernist Fine Art has become of oneprocess with the former low mass culture of brands and advertising, to the point thatboth share repertoires and learn from one another in ways that have made them all butindistinguishable.

In terms of Baudrillards notion ofsimulacra (Baudrillard 1994) our everyday workingmodels of reality are now no longer based upon concretely stable associations betweenobjects taken to exist in a universally accessible real world, but are instead systems offuzzy intensities between fluid associations. On encoding these experiences, and


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thereby having them form the basis of subsequent interpretation, we become complicit inconsolidating this state of affairs by building them into our habitats. In this way theprocess has become self-amplifying; bootstrapping the replacement of use value withmoneys exchange value, the ubiquity of processed material over its raw state, andurbanization away from direct contact with the land (Ibid).

A commonly argued (Deleuze 2004, & Pollay 1986) consequence of this is of ourgeneral sense of reality coming to gain a schizophrenic quality. Inhabiting the denselyinterconnected media saturated environments emerging from late Capitalism, our senseof reality has become fluid and malleable, hyper-real; bordering on the hallucinogenicand euphoric. This simulacrum being such that its encoded associative structure is inrelatively greater states of flux, the subjective velocity of our self-reflection is increased,decentering and fragmenting our outer aspect into a relatively stable multiplicity of inter-textual surfaces.

Embodied experience, how we model Space; our subconscious mind

The second element is Embodied Experience, how our species has evolved to modelSpace. We experience our own behaviour as a mixture of internal immediacy andexternal abstraction. That is to say, as well as our immediate emotional experience, our

posited point of view of others is part of our sub-conscious mind. This can beunderstood in terms of a Theory of Mind process with a self-referential structure (I think,they think, I think). This process is built around an often problematic emotionalframework, derived from our earliest attachment relationships with our primarycaregivers in infancy. By destabilising this process, Memes create a cascade of changein our connected auto-associative memory systems, presenting to us as an insecurefeeling of subjective flux (which can itself be said to constitute our internal model of Time

passing). The more evolutionarily adapted Memes use this process to spur us to re-express them to others. This is not a merely conceptual process, but in the way we

understand the world in terms of metaphors drawn from the somatic values of our body,for instance in the way we anchor our experience to external reference points oflandmarks we recognise. Our sense of being looked at by another may also be part ofthis process. Under this gaze we become destabilised; we are motivated to re-stabiliseby simplifying the world, including the other people in it. This process has been hit uponby Memes as a way of getting themselves concretely built into the very fabric of thespaces we inhabit; through our tendency to delegate our more problematic cognitivework to our environments. As such, we are complicit in building and maintaining theCommunal Space of our late Capitalist Lebenswelt, or Life World.

The hallucinogenic and euphoric quality of late Capitalist Communal Space is not only

conceptual, but also in how we intuitively experience and understand the world in termsof our own bodies. This amplification of our minds automatic drawing of associations, afeeling of being in flux as opposed to stability, primes us to interpret it as an impetus todo something specific. This is used by brands to place their products as a solution,whose conspicuous consumption serves to cement this destabilising state of affairsfurther. Our behaviour and conscious self-identification is changed on a fundamentallevel, away from autonomy and toward a sense of dependence, of possessing a lack ofself-control, and so toward us building a fragmented sense of self in general.


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Mirror neurones have been implicated as a neural correlate of Theory of Mind process,central to our sense of individual subjecthood and empathy with others, and so ourshaping of spaces for our own and collective ends (Frith 2004). They connect togetherour sensory and motor systems, forming neural body-maps common to all human beingsthat fire both when an action is performed and when that action is viewed or anticipatedin another (Ibid). As such, they have been implicated in our forming of attachments with

others throughout life (Ibid). From infancy, experienced as increasing or decreasinglevels of stress, this system helps us learn subconscious associations between oursensory experiences and our actions (Bowlby 1997). This emotional framework thenshapes a good part of the background tenor of our intuitive gauging of other people andsituations throughout life; shaping the way we build a sense of self through ourmemorys associative recall, and our exploration of this in self observation; through abackground emotional tenor that colours our subjective experience per se (Ibid).

Beginning in infancy, our brains develop and we begin to explore, making our situationsmore complex. We come to build on these initial associations to realise our particularsense of individual inner subjectivity; to varying degrees, depending on the level ofassociated anxiety, we come to experience a sense of self distinct from our models of

spaces and other subjects within them. This sense of inner subjective unity is dependenton having been built on a stable network of initial associations, derived from an earlysecure attachment with those caregivers we approached for stress relief; a caringreationship that was consistently provided and came without anxious consequences(Ibid). As we go on to seek throughout life a sense of autonomous consciousnessthrough self-reflection, this is mediated by the emotional tenor of this framework; makingself realisation a potentially extremely problematic task (Ibid).

This ongoing process may be disrupted and changed later in our life cycle, given theright contexts, but it is typically a very hard thing to do (Ibid). This is the theoretical basisand purpose of psychotherapy (Ibid): that a new emotional framework, in this case amore secure one began through an attachment with the therapist, may be engendered

and used to build a more autonomous sense of self upon. Such a relationship may alsobe understood as the basis on which a brand uses advertising to build a demographic foritself, creating a market for its product.

This earliest relationship with our caregivers and, eventually, others in general can beunderstood as part of a general motivation to offload our minds work onto Space; havingus organize it to encode and process information for us, thereby extending and refiningour ability to handle change by limiting what change is able to happen in the first place.

This understanding complements an Embodied Cognition analysis of how the mindworks, which developed as a consequence of apparent inadequacies in the Cognitivists

(computational) and Connectionists (neural network) critique of Behaviourism (thedenial of the mind as a valid subject of empirical, scientific modelling, instead focusingon behaviour). Circumstantial evidence for the Embodied Cognition analysis can befound in the field of artificial intelligence, which in following cognitivist models gained littlesuccess in building generally intelligent robots, but after utilising interactively emergentmodels such as are found in the Embodied Cognition analysis achieved breakthroughsuccess (Embodied Cognition Sept 2012).

As opposed to Representationalist views that see the mind as a passive processor of


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input sense data to output behaviour via abstract encoded representations of the world,Embodied Cognition views go further and see the mind as enactive. That is to say, as anactive processor of information that, through its sensorimotor system, interacts with theworld to shape it into an environment that is meaningful and useful to its particular bodysetup. Completing a feedback loop, the environment then shapes the mind in return, bybecoming the information it processes (Lakoff 1999).

As such, our spaces become our means for individual self-reflection and self-realisation;our means to schematise subconscious emotional experiences, upon the basis of theemotional framework outlined above (Bowlby 1997). The complexity our cognition iscapable of reaching, therefore, is dependent on the complexity of information our contextis capable of processing. This means that how our cognitive processes fulfil theirfunction will differ from place to place and across time.

Over a few millions of years, ontologies of Space, arguably the very oldest Memes, mayhave so contributed to biological organisms survival that they became our brains labour

saving hardwired algorithms for modelling Space.

We are hardwired with schemas inherited from our successful ancestors interaction withSpace; The mind is in the body and the body is in the mind (Lakoff 1999). At afundamental and barely conscious level, we think in terms of being a body in a spacewith other bodies. Phenomenologically speaking, as Merleau-Ponty put it, "When I saythat an object is on a table, I always mentally put myself either in the table or in theobject, and I apply to them a category which theoretically fits the relationship of my bodyto external objects (in Atkins 2004). We understand the world in terms of metaphorsdrawn between our inner subjective experience and our sensorimotor experience (Lakoff1980). Our experience is of Space taking on the somatic values of our body (Tuan1977), intuitively organizing Space in terms of its posture and structure, closeness or

distance from others, approximately organised around the compass points and centredon the individual. This is evidenced in the way we use personal pronouns, somethingfound across cultures (Fig 1; Ibid):

Figure 3: personal pronouns are paired with spatial demonstratives.


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Space in front is primarily visual, where our eyes are, feelong larger and more suffusedwith light than our back. There is evidence this is paired with how we tend to valueSpace and Time as concepts (Fig 2; Ibid):

Tuan accounts an experience of being lost: where space is still organized in these ways,but they lose their utility because they are no longer anchored to anything external.However let a flickering light appear behind a distant clump of trees. I remain lost in thesense that I still do not know where I am in the forest, but space has dramaticallyregained its structure (Ibid). This would suggest we maintain a sense of subjectivestability by anchoring our somatosensory experiences to external reference points oflandmarks we recognise. Also, that our barely conscious body awareness, projectedonto the space around us, is organised by our visual apprehension of the space. This

apprehension connects to other spaces, forming a cognitive map, incorporating bothembodied and visually schematic elements. This analysis may find support in a neuralcorrelate of grid and place cells in our brains entorhinal cortex and hypothalamus,observed as being arranged in a self-recursive, fractal triangular grid pattern (Moser2008).

This process is initially below our level of awareness, but can become available toconscious awareness after being disrupted; at which point we can exhibit re-stabilising,re-orienting behaviour, as seen in Tuans example above. As above, it can also be linkedto the subconscious cognitive process of Theory of Mind, the self-reflexive nesting ofmodels of ourselves inside models of others inside models of ourselves (and so on).This is used to deeply model our situations in real time, enabling us to anticipate others

intentions (Griffiths 2000). Sartre identified the phenomenology of this process withinthe Look, a destabilizing experience of sharing space with an observing other (inCritchley 2005).

In this way, bodies and Space together form a complex system of positive (amplifying)and negative (reducing) feedback loops, from which emerges a dynamically stableLebenswelt(ukasiewicz 2010): a Life World built into Space and shared betweenpeople for offsetting the cognitive work of fulfilling their evolved motivations (Husserl, in


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Atkins 2004), and perhaps between smaller groups of people for offsetting the navigationof similar emotional frameworks developed in infancy.

Organisation of unconscious space and subconscious embodied experience through

Language, visual imagination; our conscious mind

The third element of my system is Language, or how different versions of models cometo organise Space and so inform the model building of others. This can be understoodas doing the organising of unconscious space and subconscious embodied experience,through a Lebenswelt. Subjectively, it predominantly operates through our visualimagination as expressed through the Theory of Mind process. By linking sign tosignified in a way that eventually links back again to the sign, we encode relativelystable paradigms within our brains auto-associative neural networks, modelling currentstates of the world including ourselves and others. This is what enables us to anticipatechange and take steps to take control of situations. Authorities use spaces as mediumsfor social control by setting their own limits on how they come to be modelled in this

way. A way they do this is by using language to propagate Memes that play to amalignant yet neutral, impossible spectator; encouraging us to fetishize their Memesas our way to solve the problem of building our Lebenswelt.

Language has been understood as necessary for the achievement ofLebenswelt(Turner 2006). Rather than merely a mirror of our internal states, language is a toolthrough which our cognition is extended and enhanced through structuring of its spatialcontext (Lakoff 1999). As such, it is the Memes basic means of transmission. Languageis inherently metaphorical, transferring meaning between sensory modes and domainsof discourse. This process may be understood as an artefact of different ways the neuralcorrelates of emotion and language model Space; the former on the basis of a modular

grid structure that can potentially associate all points to every other with equal weight,the latter as associating its points on a nested basis (Kelly 2011).

In evolution, there is evidence that our emotional modelling of Space is much older thanthe linguistic. In line with Chomsky (in Pinker 1999), language is an evolutionarilyyounger, more conscious structure of the brain, whereas emotion is more grounded inthe way we automatically understand the world, without need for the monitoring ofconscious attention. A consequence is that the language module in our brain is able todeconstruct and simulate the emotional one. Conversely, over time, the signs making uplanguages rapidly erode from pointing to purely physical phenomena into abstractsyntax; capable of constructing Space into an interconnected yet unified Place, byharnessing, through their simulation, the linguistic and emotional modules of other

peoples brains. In this way, ideological power interests build unified aestheticsthroughout our spaces, ones that constitute a Lebenswelt that we then take on as anemotional basis for behaving.

By linking sign to signified in a way that eventually links back to the sign, aesthetics arethe encoding of shifting paradigms for meaning making within our brains auto-associative neural networks. By these means, spaces are transmitters of social control.This is exemplified in architectural spaces. Architectural spaces can be understood asthe behaviour of particularly successful delegatory power interests; the rendering of our


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nebulous, subconscious embodied cognition into conscious grammatical systems;Lebenswelt that can open up our awareness to otherwise unconscious experience, andso refine and expand our repertoire for self identification (Tuan 1977). The flip side tothis, however, is that such spaces can favour some grammars over others, and soencourage us to selectively refine and expand the self in accordance with the vestedinterest of others. That is to say, our delegation of cognitive work onto our contexts is

also an act of power over others; not only a delegation through organisation of inertmatter, but also an appropriation of the Theory of Mind of other beings, using methodssuch as those outlined above in my discussion of advertising.

An optimally efficient way of achieving this is to have us experience its context as anunquestioned given; a Lebenswelt with no apparent alternatives. As such, we havepowerful impetus to feel and, upon this basis, take on given these feelings giveninterpretations as natural ones; stand ins for our internal models of the cosmos at large(Ibid). The overwhelming size of monumental architecture, where the delineationbetween inside and outside its space becomes blurred, has been used with successin this regard (Ibid). Yet another side to this, however, is that some people then re-appropriate such as havens where less risk is felt in exploring the emotional tenor of

their relationships, promoting wider and deeper engagement in these things; promotingthe growth of complexity, differentiation, and so the potential flowering of autonomy.Ideological space must, therefore, seek to constantly maintain itself as such, stabilizingthis mutation rate on its own terms.

By these means, the late Capitalist Lebenswelt has replaced Nature and the Divine asthe Sublime experience. For Immanuel Kant, a basic aesthetic experience is theSublime. The Sublime is the feeling of being overwhelmed by something we cannotentirely apprehend. For Kant, this is mathematical, when we are overwhelmed by thesize of something. It is also dynamical, when our resistance is overwhelmed by force.This can be both a fearful and pleasurable experience. For Kant, we experience

something as mathematically Sublime because it allows our reason access to theabsolute totality of Nature. Something is dynamically sublime because it allows reasonaccess to absolute freedom. According to Kant, the Sublime feeling that is both fearfuland pleasurable is a product of our oscillation between these two experiences; beingboth overwhelmed by and overwhelming what is encountered, through our only partialorganising of it in reason (Kant's Aesthetics July 2012).

By giving us its commodity-language to make problematic and then manage our sub-conscious communications between one another, the omnipresent gaze of anomniscient Divine, or the towering mountain in Nature too large to be taken in at all atonce, has been latterly replaced by the edifice of a global late Capitalist Lebenswelt.This destabilising Sublime motivates us to invest further in its networks; through our

conspicuous fetishising of its brands, as a means to limit the problematic emotional tenorof other people who share this space, who are themselves attempting to do the samething; tapping in to aspects of its Sublime energy. In this way, we are communally lockedinto its process - consolidating and growing it, seemingly without limit.

This idea of brands acting as power wielding languages is complemented by LudwigWittgensteins semiotic argument; placing words and phrases as things that can beinstantiated visually, as opposed to purely lexically (Wittgenstein 1978). Words can in


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fact be anything that seems to have meaning, that can be combined with other suchthings to form sets of combinatory grammatical rules (Gee 1999). Out of this seminalphilosophy, Discourse theory (Ibid) offers its complementary analysis of humanlanguage as a builder of Figured Worlds: simplified models of the world that includemodels of ourselves and others in it; encoded by our minds as images, metaphors andnarratives. These are also encoded outside our heads, in our media and architecture; a

way in which the mind delegates its work to its situations, including the minds of others,through this act of pointing toward.

On this basis, Discourse theory critically analyses meaning making on two levels,utterance and situated (Levinson, in Ibid). Environments, pointing toward some overother things, things about our subconscious experiences, feed information to our Theoryof Mind process, helping us recognise what is going on. This includes what identities orroles have been taken on by ourselves and others, what relationships we have or desirewith others, and so what constitutes an appropriate distribution of information (Ibid). Thiscan result in our encoding of a highly unified set of associations around our embodiedexperience of other people.

When a number of people use even only one or two similar signs, we have been foundto readily extend this to an impression of being of the same mind (Dennett 2007).Perhaps exploiting our minds older, evolved, unconscious hardwiring (Ibid), this processcan construct a sense of Spectating presence in the manner of Sartres observing Other;by encouraging our Theory of Mind to misapply itself, beyond available evidence for theirbeing an intentional agent actually present (Ibid). Our postmodern environments, bygiving us its limited sets of visual languages to interpret ourselves and others, builds andconsolidates itself by exploiting this process in us.

By these means we become complicit in constructing within our Communal Spaces ashared sense of an overseeing presence; the gaze of a transcendent Spectator. On a

mainly unconscious level, religious communities have been particularly successful inthis, an example being its use of totems; placing this process as a fundamentally humanone, grounded somewhere in the deeper structure of our species. Totems bare a strongresemblance to the form and function of brand logos, which have arguably appropriatedthe processes of religion toward their own, more conscious ends:

Prehistoric and modern hunter-gatherer societies have been recorded (Durkheim, inTanner ed. 2004) using designs and objects to distinguish certain groups. These aretypically reproduced across buildings, clothing, tools, and public spaces. These totemstend to reference a threatening and unpredictable characteristic of the environment,often a predatory animal or weather event, one that our Theory of Mind tends to overascribe intentionality to (Dennett 2007). A totem may then act as a way of metonymically

signifying a sharing of this intentionality, thereby magically enabling the subject toexercise some influence over the threatening agents behaviour. Also, it may enablethe taking on of some aspects of the threatening force, thereby influencing other people.This complements Zizeks suggestion that fundamental to how ideological interestsconstruct their power is their referencing of a malignant yet neutral, impossiblespectator (Zizek 2009). This is usually situated above us, and played to by thebehaviour of this or that authority.

Brand logos, then, can also be understood as a means of addressing, embodying and


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influencing an impossible Spectator. According to Zizek, this illusion that ideologyconstructs need not be an unconscious one for us, where we fail to see that we arelabouring under a misapprehension of reality. Instead, we can be fully aware of thisbeing the case, but we have fetishised its totems and thereby remain motivated to act asif the ideology is reality (Ibid). There is a mistake driving this process, but it is not simplya mistake of what is really real. We may be cynically aware that an ideology is not

reality, but we nevertheless feel like acting as if it is, because its objects have come todo our social thinking for us; because we have come to an understanding of ourselvesthrough their use, as a means through which our power is exercised. These linguistictools become apparently necessary; we feel bound to them as if they are themselves theonly possible world. The sense of ironical distance experienced in cynicism aboutideology only serves to save face and permit us to keep going along with it, while at thesame time continue to see ourselves as sophisticated and rational beings (Ibid).

This compliance consolidates and reproduces the space in others. Lacan uses theexample of the Chorus in classical tragedy to illustrate this process (Ibid). If the audiencewith its everyday preoccupations finds it difficult to identify with the emotional subtext ofa play, much like a laugh track on a TV comedy show, the Chorus will then visibly feel

the appropriate emotions for them. We, due in part to our mirror neuron networksdescribed above, come to empathically feel those emotions. Furthermore, due toembodied cognition, we come to identify with them and think in their terms. Encouragedby our sublime feeling of destabilised subjective flux, a consequence of the dense butrelatively isolated inter-referentiality of our hyper-real context, we tend to experiencethese associations as a selfhood defining impetus. An ideal Chorus will continue toperform until we organise this experience in an appropriate way, namely throughidentification with the world of the play.

This analysis is complemented by the Marxist idea of commodity fetishism, in which theproducts of our labour become the primary means through which we relate to oneanother, and eventually come to replace these relationships altogether. Our products

take on our hopes and beliefs, essentially doing our believing for us; creating spaces inwhich we feel free to act as if the ideology is real (Ibid).

Infants begin by relating the sight of others with the feeling of their own body, enablingthe imitating of others. It is thought that this is how we begin to build a sense of having adistinct self (Meltzoff in Hurley 2005); by then finding others who are and are not likeme, thereby distinguishing our inner emergent experiences from those coming fromwithout. An individual is never fully captured by a mirroring process; there is alwayssomething in embodied experience left without a rational alibi. This process ofmirroring, according to Lacan (in Zizek 2009), is the means through which ourengagement with an ideological Space is maintained. It holds our attention by

emotionally destabilizing us in a way we cant quite come to grasp, just enough to beenjoyable. In this way, we become engaged in the ideology; embed ourselves in itsspaces and consolidate its dominance. Ideologies, designed or at least stubbornlypersisting Memes, seek to hijack our process of self-realisation. In this way, the ideologyof late Capitalist Lebensweltgained persistence when its signifying networks becameself-referential in a way too complex for us to fully organise and so take on for entirelyour own purposes; that is to say, when it became Sublime, essentially a SpectatingPresence with an apparent gaze of it own. This deepended our engagement with it, aswe sought to totemically tap into this gaze, as a means of self realisation despite the


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problematic presence of others.

Prior to global communications, our Communal Spaces, primarily defined by religion,maintained stability as largely isolated simulacra. By reaching a threshold of becomingless able to comment with apparent legitimacy on a world outside, it threatened tobecome impotent in contexts wider than itself, those being opened up by the

Enlightenment; short circuiting the sense of apparent necessity and allowing its subjectsto leave.

Latterly, through global communication this process has deepened and sped up. In Alter-Modernism our models of Space have become digital and pan-cultural; even more,perhaps even fully decodable into meta-contexts - bits of aesthetic code that can beplayfully stitched together to simulate and appropriate formerly discrete contexts. Thishas allowed our Communal Spaces to globally share energy, becoming not only multi-cellular on a global scale, but now also modular.

Communal Laboratories

In the field of Psychological research, Laboratory spaces have attempted to reverse-engineer the Communal spaces of human culture; under paired down, simplified,controlled conditions. The artist studio and gallery can be described as a mixture ofCommunal and Laboratory Space, complex enough to overcome an individual capacityto organise their experience, with work taking on the aspect of an observing other, yetsimplified and therefore controllable enough to render this process visible, in an ongoing

process of development. This provides repertoires of aesthetic codes enablinginhabitants to potentially escape Sublime Communal spaces too complex to beorganised under conscious attention, ones that have robbed them of autonomy. This isachieved when an artist, through their embodied cognitive engagement with therecording surface of a medium, investigates both the rational workings and emotional

possibilities of Memes, framing them as transparently artificial constructs; building up thecomplexity of a work until an intentional presence is felt to be looking back.

As a leading edge innovator of meaning making, Fine Art has been brought into theservice of this late Capitalist situation, being today a main skill set in the advertisingindustry. Although, arguably, especially leading up to and after the 2008 financial crisis,and due to an ongoing human interest in fostering autonomy, this relationship is by nomeans without its problems. Because of this, art practice may also be understood as anarms race between individual autonomy and the ideological power interests of religion,and latterly multinational Corporatism.

Like everyone else, artists have also worked to harness the Sublime Spectating

Presence for their own ends. However, enabled by a clarifying and abstractinggallery/studio space, they have tended to frame it as a transparently artificial construct.In this way, a contemporary artwork can raise the consciousness of its viewer; havingthem share in at least some aspects of their transcendent Spectators situation by notonly being a commodity that they visibly consume (although this can be the case throughengagement in the art market), but as a way of sharing the artists ideal creativeengagement with their mediums recording surface. Akin to Buddhist Vipassanameditation, engaging with the recording surface of a medium while removed from thecomplex cognitive demands of a Spectating Communal Space, both artist and viewer


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are able to be hold themselves in their state of flux while also having a sense ofdistance; by having already encoded paradigms disrupted, yet also an optimum varietyof interpretative repertoires for this experience. From this, they can foster a morecomplex, autonomous way of consciously organising their flux; by evolving their ownindividualised yet potent, meta-languages.

I practice daily Vipassana insight meditation, and have a personal interest in theemerging tradition of Secular Buddhism. This incorporates readings of the Pali Canon(Sutta Pitaka Sept 2012), the earliest known transcripts of the Buddhas teachings. Italso tries to take account of its problematic relationship with the earlier Hindu Brahmictradition, and pays special attention to developments within neuroscience.

My reading of the Buddhas words are atheistic and sceptical at their core, concernedwith the nature and extent of self-maintaining processes, in relation to the self and itsgiven narratives. Meditation can be said to employ seminal methods ofphenomenological investigation. Vipassana seeks to direct attention to the minutiae ofhaving an embodied mind, observing inner phenomena as they arise, without grasping

and trying to interpret them, and so being taken over as we use them to narrateourselves. I can experience consciousness as a flux of sensations built upon themodelled self-reflections of others - or I can foster a trait of experiencing a here and now,breath by breath, and so potentially make this process visible.

It is my view that product advertising has been a particularly dominant power in buildingour immediate social contexts in ways that minimise such a consciousness fosteringsense of distance. It attempts to manufacture our consent by limiting our availableschemas for conscious organisation of our emotional experience, having us take on themaintenance of its Lebensweltinstead. An older and more dominant form of this, itseems to me, can be found in state religion, being Memes that are so extraordinarily

successful they have managed to colonise and exploit our social institutions acrossseveral thousand years. The typical Tibetan Buddhist temple is a case study in this.

It can be argued that Tibetan Buddhism appears to have evolved a particularly effectiveway of ideologically constructing a subjects consent to take on its Lebensweltin the waydescribed above (Fig 3 - 8):


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Figure 3: Tibetan Buddhist Statue of the Buddha

This is a good example of an ideology, much in the same manner as an advertisement,minimising scrutiny through reliance on emotion with a rational alibi, concentratedthrough one dominant detail(Hill 2010). The central idea to Buddhist meditative practiceis of attachment being the primary cause of suffering, with the means of achieving itscessation being the fostering of mindfulness, through the repeated re-focusing ofattention toward one aspect of experience, usually the breath (Batchelor 2011). Thefigure of post-enlightened Gautama is an object lesson demonstrating a first Jhana, ormeditative state of cessation, to be achieved through this process.

By devaluing the viewers own embodied experience of themselves, it thereby makes itproblematic. This promotes, through our empathic sense, the increase of our attentionalfocus on our own embodied experience, which is then rationalised as a lack relative tothe Buddhas ideal. The Buddha figures long ears can be interpreted as showing hisincreased embodied awareness and concentration, his open hand a non-graspingacceptance ofdependent co-arising, or self associative flux of thoughts and sensationsthat make up experience. The projection from the top of his head is a way of referring tohis consciousness expansion through progressive Jhanas into the no-Self (at least in itsessentialist sense) void ofNirvana.


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Figure 4: Inside a Tibetan Buddhist Temple

Statues of the Buddha are predominantly to be found as the focal point inside TibetanBuddhist temples. This, I argue, is an example ofincreasing reliance by maximisingemotional volume, within an immersive, multi-sensual, richly rendered experience (Hill2010). Like those of other religions, the Tibetan Buddhist Communal Space is packedwith stimulus across sensory modalities. This reaches a peak during collectiveceremonies, where our empathic experience is maximised through the presence ofmany others and so, through the self-reflective feedback process inherent in Theory ofMind, our own somatosensory experience gains volume.

Figure 5: sweeping up a Sand Mandala.

Part of Tibetan Buddhist ritual is the painstaking building of Sand Mandalas, intricate andoften beautiful circularly symmetric designs from coloured sand, representing thematerial world in its process of continual arising and passing away. Having constructed a


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maximal embodied awareness experienced as a lack, this can be understood as anexample of then flagging oncoming change and confirming already held prejudice, tocreate stress and justification, for selling hope (Ibid).

As a representation of the material world, which includes the temple setting, building anddestroying a Mandala can be understood as a form of Vipassana meditative practice.

Tibetan Buddhism has a self-critical aspect that seeks to deconstruct its own acts ofcapture. However, by apparently criticising itself it also justifies its own critical method asespecially valid. That is to say, its critical practice in itself does not permit other critiquesthat could perhaps more deeply deconstruct its context; it is not sceptical in the fullestsense. However, it is fair to say that the Buddhist notion of dependent co-arisingreferenced by the circular Mandala, in complementing modern systems dynamics (Macy1991), at least leaves a way open for its subjects to associate some outside criticalmethodologies.

Figure 6: Mara, Lord of Death

Meaning "destruction", Mara is understood to represent our passions, driving the cravingand suffering causing attachment within the process of dependent co-arising (Bachelor2011). Much like Christs encounter with Lucifer in the desert, in the Pali Canon he ismentioned as trying to tempt the Buddha away from his process of enlightenment. Assuch, he is an example ofrepresenting/symbolising a predatory or unpredictable part ofthe environment, encouraging over ascribing of intentionality(Dennett 2007).

Mara is the counterpoint to the Buddha. Through the same process of empathydescribed above, our rationalisation of our own embodied experience as a lack relativeto the Buddhas ideal is consolidated again with negative emotion; through provocativeimagery referencing predatory animals such as enraged eyes, claws and teeth. Thisheightens our stress level and may provoke us into a state where we increasinglyanticipate threats from our environment. A consequence of this can be our more hastyuse of Theory of Mind to model the intentions of others, including anticipatory modellingof possible others (McEwen 2000). As part of an increased tendency to mistakecorrelation for causation, linking signs together without good reason, we gain a bias forassociating phenomena with a sense of threat. This bootstraps a simulacra feeling ofintentional presence from phenomena that are in fact without intent (Dennett 2007).


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Figure 7: Yipeng Full Moon Festival, Thailand

Traditionally celebrated at the end of the rainy season in Thailand, the Yipeng Festival ismarked by the making and lighting of lanterns to represent the ongoing move fromdarkness to light. This, and religious festivals in general, can be understood as a way ofconsolidating and sharing in some part of this malignant yet neutral, impossiblespectator,by playing to it(Zizek 2009). Much like how consumers use brand logos, aconsolidated, dogmatic syntagm of linked together signs, metonyms to paradigms,collectively emerge into an embodied sense of spectating presence overlooking all.

Figure 8: Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist Centre, in Esk, Scotland


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All of the above typically happens in or around a communal space, one which repeatedlygathers together all of the stimulus in one place, commonly the site of a temple. As such,it becomes an identified part of Space where people come to meet, conditioning oneanother into experiencing it as both an object used for rational self-definition fromembodied emotional experience, and a context Chorus directing that experience.

The Tibetan and emerging Secular Buddhist examples are, to my thinking, an interestinghalf way point in transcendent religious symbols becoming signs; paradigms in theprocess of shifting and dissolving, and so connecting to other signs now required to drawout their meaning (Tuan 1977). Multiple, apparent, and relatively self-sufficientsyntagms, interpretive grammars, have attached to these has-been symbols, as theybegin to disappear as structuring principles for shared experience of a CommunalSpace. While presently we still tend to reproduce these signs as grammars of anhistorical social hierarchy, because they are part of the architectural spaces we inhabit,we no longer predominantly manage our relationships under its subconsciously readomni-present gaze, one of a Divine Spectator. Instead, a technologically induced,

Commodified Spectator has latterly replaced this.

We still tend to make sense of things on these terms, suggesting that this transcendentspectator may be a biologically evolved, hardwired category that groups together ourculturally evolved paradigms, but they no longer encode in us a worldview held stableunder a generally apprehended cosmic totality. Instead, they encode fragmented,negotiated, even self-contradictory place-holders, under a gaze of ubiquitous totemsinternalized within our Theory of Mind process.

Much like the function of ritualistically building a Sand Mandala, the course of Fine ArtsModernism has also been a conspiracy in its own disappearance, although more

deliberate; achieved through an overriding interest in consciousness raising, and escapefrom traditional (religious) paradigms. Like Religion, Art has sought to promote in itsviewers a pre-conscious flux, an emotional experience of infinite Derridean rupture(Derrida 1970). However, instead of then providing its own rationale through a sacredCommunal Space like the above, to argue the presence of a transcendent Spectator, ithas instead emerged as trying to use its temple-like galleries to transparently frame thisexperience as an artificial construct.

An artist can work to achieve this by fostering an embodied awareness of herengagement with a medium, bracketing as much as possible her conceptual imagery ofa final result, and so opening the way for shaping a sense of presence within the sameembodied awareness of a viewer. That is to say, fine art creativity is less inspiration than

an embodied craftsmanship (Turner 2006); realising, through long and repeatedengagement with a medium, a modelled space of liberating experiences that uncoverand record how human cognition is shaped on a structural level.

Under an Embodied Cognition analysis, the practice of an artist and the viewersexperience of that practice may present themselves to both parties as a similar aestheticexperience if the context of the encounter is similar; because their context emerges fromhardwired elements common to human beings. If uncomplicated by extraneous sensoryexperiences, a shared experience between artist and viewer may emerge. By these


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means an artist creates a space to inhabit, one that can also relate to the context thatframes it in such a way that its givens remain free to be apprehended and criticisedusing external critical methodologies. This may be a way of understanding theemergence of the explanatory contemporary art gallery experience.

In a manner of speaking, much like Buddhist mindfulness meditation, through an artwork

the body can gain a new Space for mindfulness of itself. This can, in turn, increase asubjects more grounded, complex and concrete reality associated interpretiverepertoire; preparing a subject for future encounters with ideological spaces, byincreasing their complexity beyond its own complexity, used to capture them throughempathic embodied experience in this Space.

A gallery may be temple-like, but it is firmly a gallery and not a place of worship. That isto say, a gallery space has come to be paired down in a way that seeks to isolate theexperience of individual works within their own frames. However, works can still bepotentially understood as referencing processes making up a more general culturalsituation, one the viewer may not be wholly if at all conscious of but this is in a waythat, although potent, tends not to overwhelm in a way that motivates its restabilising use

for self identification. By addressing, for instance, the working relationship betweenreligions and states (ODoherty 2000) an artwork can potentially drive social change.

As I see it, the more effective contemporary artwork will not achieve this by simplyrepresenting the reproduction of ideology. Straight representation is a legitimate way ofdoing this but, it seems to me, not an optimally immersive yet distance fostering way.Like meditation, it will attempt instead to harness the process itself in a way the createsdistance; reproducing aspects of the late Capitalist Sublime Lebenswelt in theexperience of those who encounter it, essentially using our human cognition as asurface on which to draw. This is what it means to wield an aesthetic code as such.

Historically, artists can be understood as beginning the journey of refining this method bydeconstructing the thousands of years long evolutionary process of Religious Memes.What these highly adapted Memes incrementally built through our selves and ourspaces, Modernist art practice can be understood as having reverse engineered it. Thisconcern was perhaps inherited from its days of Ecclesiastical patronage. An attempt, ifyou will, at escape (Figs 9 15):


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Figure 9: Gustave Courbets The Grotto of the Loue.

Art practice emerged from an imposed concern to become both an object used forrational self-definition from embodied emotional experience, and a context Chorusdirecting that experience. Artists, brought into the service of dominant power interests,sought to construct spaces in which ground was denied for a subject to form a stablepoint of view, stopping thought to let the schema of an apparent presence beempathically experienced all the more. This is exemplified (although perhaps onlysubconsciously on the artists part) in Courbets Realist painting. The painting apparentlyseeks to draw in the curiosity of the viewer with a dark cave, one whose recesses cannotbe clearly apprehended. This experience pushes the viewers attention out again into adisturbing surface of fierce water, which consequently shifts attention back to the

empathic figure, who once again looks back into the cave. The viewers apprehension iscaught inside a self-feeding process, one solved through a deliberate act of escape inlooking beyond its frame.

Courbets painting may be read as his unconscious attempt to make sense of a religiousparadigm at the beginning of its 19th century post-Enlightenment solvency. As itdissolves, aspects of a paradigm may become more visible, at least through thesubconscious recording surface of an artists medium.


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Figure 10: from Matthew Barneys Cremaster Cycle.

Artists like Matthew Barney have apparently exhibited concern to reference a shared

sense for an impossible Spectator. Often using imagery of spectator sport within spacescuriously absent of spectating crowds, Barneys work is filled with meaningless andrepetitive actions within empty monumental architectural contexts. As such, he can beargued as concerned with consolidating and sharing in some part of this malignant yetneutral, impossible spectator,by playing to it(Zizek 2009).

Figure 11: Bruce Naumans Clown Torture.

Naumans piece consists of videos of a clown showing emotion ranging from joy toterror. The clowns makeup inverts our normal empathic responses to the emotions itpartially conceals, making the experience highly destabilising as the empathic groundshifts between them. As such, it can be understood as concerned with representing /symbolising a predatory or unpredictable part of the environment, encouraging over


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ascribing of intentionality(Hill 2010).

Figure 12: Guillermo Vargas Exposicin N 1.

Vargas created a highly controversial Situationist piece consisting of a tied up dog in thecorner of a gallery that he publicised as remaining until it starved to death. In the artistslater statement, he said the purpose of this was to underline a hypocrisy ofcontemporary society, who react with uproar to one starving dog and repeatedly takeaction to release it, yet ignore the situation of the many starving dogs in the streetsoutside (Habakkuk Guillermo Vargas Nov 2012). As such, this can be understood asconcerned with flagging oncoming change and confirming already held prejudice, to

create stress and justification (Ibid). Unlike religion and advertising, however, it does notdo this to then sell its solutions. Instead, it apparently seeks to leave a Spacein which,although emotionally insecure and anxious, is opened to new possibilities.


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Figure 13: Cai Guo-Qiangs Head On.

Guo-Qiangs piece can be understood as concerned with maximising emotional volumewithin an immersive, multi-sensual, richly rendered experience (Ibid). Art commonly hasa flair for combining dramatic, monumental, intense experiences, with subtler, complex

ones. These are at the core of Kants Sublime, and the hallucinogenic intensity ofBaudrillards hyperreality; achieved through a sharpened apprehension of what pushesour buttons, through prolonged embodied experience of mediums and their possibilities.

Figure 14: Ron Muecks Mask II

Mueck makes hyper-realistic sculptures portraying stages in the human life cycle. Assuch, his work is a good example of a concern, albeit negatively realised, withminimising scrutiny through reliance on emotion with a rational alibi, concentratedthrough one dominant detail(Ibid). An investigation of the limits of this strategy, byexploring the possibilities for reproducing a sense of intentionality in a manifestly artificialcontext.

The human body occupies a central position in art from its beginnings in prehistory, fromthe emergence of Theory of Mind in our species around 40,000 years ago (Lewis-Williams 2004). Under the Embodied Cognition analysis this is not surprising, since itshould be the primarily intuitive context; the source of engaging and immersiveinterpretive repertoires, shared by both artist and viewer; its form readily ascribed by usas possessing a point of view in its own right. Latterly, the body has been under scrutinyas a socio-cultural construction, a product of tacit encodings, especially those ofpatriarchal ideologies, but also as a commercial entity built for consumption; reproducedas an intentional agent for ideological purposes.


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Escape

An ideological Space functions to limit the range of apparent choices communicated toits inhabitants; essentially to remain too complex for them to organise a sense of self

beyond those resources it provides; to become Sublime. As such, it comes to feel likean intentional, observing presence in its own right. To escape is to become complex in away surpassing that of a Communal Space; becoming a being whose intentions theircontext cannot decode and reflect back.

I do not think, contrary to some Postmodern narratives (Krauss 1986), that mechanicalreproduction has resulted in the end of individualised aesthetic production. This, I think,is premised on a false dichotomy between free will and determinism, itself an ideologicalbinary construction in the Saussurian mode (Chandler 2004). The cell analogy appliesboth to the structure of cultural spaces, their human inhabitants, and the process of theirco-evolution, and is more formally speaking a fractalstructural analysis, as opposed to aEuclidean one dealing in binary oppositions. It is one of a relatively simple structure

containing a recursive iteration of itself, anchoring it to the structure of physical realityand the consciousness that perceives it (Hofstadter 2007). Under this analysis, there isno dichotomy, at least up to a point, between free will and determinism.

As self-reflective beings we build up, individually and within cultural exchange of ideas,our own somewhat unique models of what things mean, and this provides us with ourown spaces for movement, potentially beyond our locally deterministic structures.Cosmologically, it seems, there is ultimately no escape from determinism. Draw threepoints to form a triangle. Starting at any point inside this triangle, choose another point atrandom. Find the halfway between these points then, from this new point, repeat thisprocess. The distribution of points that eventually result form a shape called aSierpinskis Gasket fractal (Bourke 1993; Fig 15):

This, I think, is a useful analogy for thinking about how a conscious being comes to buildknowledge of its deeper structure over its lifetime. In behaving, it seems, over ourlifespan we are bound to uncover something of the structure of the universe, becausewe are, under the dominant materialist analysis, the behaviour of the universe. Whilepotentially having this definitively vast domain to move in, at the same time ourbehaviour is also a step-by-step moving from one state to another. Each decision formsthe basis of the next, and also the decisions made by communicating agents in itsdeveloping field of movement. Free will ex nihilo is, it seems, illusory. Instead we have


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autonomy, a freedom to explore potential by expanding the locally apparent space inwhich we can move, achieved most efficiently through lateral as opposed to linear andoft tread movement. In this way we can subvert power interests who seed our spaceswith reflective attempts to keep us engaged in them.

Our process of self-reflection, however, being built on a biological basis, is itself built on

this definitively complex physical reality. Uncovering its detail can therefore increase ourcomplexity over and above any subsidiary ideological attempts to appropriate them. Theprobability of our escape from capture can be maximised through mindful, consciousaccessing of our peculiar balance of concrete, biological structure; a becoming complexbeyond that of the local models of Space that attempt to capture us.

A way of achieving this efficiently, I think, is through engagement with scientifictheoretical models. That is to say, a paradigm that itself is potent enough to disrupt thecorporate paradigm, instead of merely serving it. The role of art, under this analysis, is toarticulate and occupy the Place of such theory; its embodied, applied, and concretelycomplex given meaning of Space. In this way, both artist and viewer are potentially ableto open up a local space for autonomous movement; one able to continually grow and

shift within a definitively vast domain.

Conclusion

Fig 16: How Memes compose how and what we think. Arrows denote direction ofinformation flow, setting up positive feedback (+ fb), negative feedback (- fb), anddynamic equalibrium (-/+ fb) relationships.

This system has three main elements that interact in specific ways: Space, or the fourdimensional material universe we inhabit (length, breadth, depth, and time), our


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unconscious mind. Embodied Experience, how our species has evolved to model thisSpace, experienced on an emotional level, our sub-conscious. Language, or howdifferent versions of these models become our conscious organisations of Space, andattempt to inform the model building of others.

Ive come to think of my studio as a mixture of communal temple and scientific researchlaboratory. Through a medium, I record my journey into a space of complexity thatovercomes my ability to consciously grasp the slippery emotional experience itpromotes; to a point where the work begins to feel like it may somehow have a point ofview of its own, and returns my gaze. The specific medium, while requiring distinct pathsof inquiry for coming to this state, is not as important to me as the state itself; I amseeing the material systems responsible for producing the state as a surface to draw on.

Within the simplified frame of a gallery space, a work becomes somewhat closed to theopen system of the world. Consequentially, a viewer may become more able to sharethe journey with an increased autonomy, without pressure from a given real world ofoverwhelming complexity.

This recent work attempts to occupy and articulate the place of a returning gaze byspeaking through how our body makes us aware of Space. I'm concerned to progress inachieving this up to its limits of abstraction. A possible social consequence may be to aidits understanding as an induced, as opposed to immanent presence (Fig 17):


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Figure 17: maket for how I intend to use the gallery space. The self portrait in oils, posterpaints and pencil refers upwards with its anus; helped by a gathering complexity, tendingto move the gaze upward toward this vulnerable area. The circular grid overlay is to aidachievement of a maximally complex, photorealistic result while also exploring the limitsof abstraction. The bottom edge of the self-portrait is level with the top edge of themonitor screens, which are arranged in a ring at average head height, helping the viewerrelate to the video piece on an instinctual level. My intention with this is to aid its readingas a continuous field to the smooth abstraction of the video rendering, moving the

viewers gaze upward in an uninterrupted fashion. This is aided by the eye direction ofthe faces in the monitors, which are also directed upwards. The circular grid on thecanvas refers back to the arrangement of the video piece, which is me vocalising vowelsounds as a five note D chord across five monitors. The videos are played on acontinuous loop, intending to interrupt the rational interpretive efforts of the viewerthrough continuous repetition, helping them feel immersed through the harmonic qualityof the sound. A circular chalk drawing on the floor is intended to encourage a sense oftension between this immersion and its sense of separation.


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