Monday, March 18, 2002

Whenever people like Roy Ascott get under my skin (see below), I should remember the existence of Thomas Kinkade, the "painter-communicator" and mall phenomenon who apparently has just published a (ghostwritten) novel called "The Painter of Light. Here's an excerpt from the Salon review, The Writer of Dreck™: What "Cape Light" shares with Kinkade's paintings is the sense that it has been created for very, very worn-out and perhaps even traumatized people. Both have the blandness of foods prepared for invalids whose stomachs can't tolerate too much excitement or variety. They're cultural Prozac. We are forever being assured that even when a character is behaving badly he or she is "not a bad person," just a little hurt or misguided, nothing that a nice chat with the good Reverend Eliot can't fix. While there's something to be said for the generosity of this sentiment, it lacks the vigor required even for good trash. 10:42:21 PM

Soon, soon I will be able to formulate a sentence. In the absence of any sort of self-organizing properties of my own, I refer everyone to Tom Ray's Tierra home page, where autopoesis is going on 24/7. Wait. I do have something to talk about. Roy Ascott. An important early "network artist" and figure in Ars Electronic, Ascott somehow became obsessed with the relationship between shamanism and cyberspace. This led him to go spend time among the Kuikuru Indians of the Brazilian Mato Grosso in 1997, which in turn led to massive ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He emerged from the experience with a vision of three planes of reality: verifiable reality, virtual reality, and "vegetal reality." This is not a fortuitous tryptich. Trying to throw the "vegetal" into debates about the virtual and the material is about as intellectually productive as making a huge bong out of an old Macintosh Herewith, an excerpt from Ascott's writings on the 3 VRs: "Virtual Reality, dependant on interactive digital technology, is telematic and immersive. Validated Reality, dependant on reactive mechanical technology, is prosaic and Newtonian. Vegetal Reality, dependant on psychoactive plant technology, is entheogenic and spiritual Vegetal Reality is quite unfamiliar to Western praxis... and is often viewed with fear and loathing by those entombed in Validated Reality. Vegetal Reality can be understood in the context of technoetics, as the transformation of consciousness by plant technology and the ingestion of psychoactive material... Frequently during the past century we have seen how the shaman's knowledge of plants has been appropriated, synthesised and marketed by the pharmaceutical industry. this ancient knowledge provides us with some of the more spectacular products of modern medicine. I am referring actually to the understanding and employment of DNA , the utilisation of is communicative function within and even between species that seems to be at the root of shamanic practice: the means by entheogens of tapping into the databases of nature and of oneself." O.K. That should drive away anyone who's stumbled over to the weblog. When I've got the energy, I'll ghettoize that citation into a story about ArtSci, Ascott, and the anti-anthrax nanobots. Stay tuned, or stay forewarned. 10:27:44 PM

© Copyright 2002 Lisa Lynch.