Excitable Tissues and Virtual Worlds: Art, Science, and Technology

How is it that science and technology, often considered indifferent to art, can now be found deeply entwined in its domain?

Historically, in the west, the business of artificial worlds—of visualizing our relations, fears, desires, and how we understand ourselves to be—has been the almost exclusive domain of artists. But that has changed. Now, our new information technologies are deeply involved in the ways we re-imagine ourselves.

As humans become increasingly disconnected from nature and technologically linked to a virtual world, our multiple senses are increasingly mediated. Where do our psyche and physiology begin and end? What do we imagine ourselves to be? The answers lie in the new territory where the worlds of art, science, and technology converge.

Charged Hearts (1997) occupies this new territory. The piece shamelessly mixes the look of an early science lab with an early 19th-century art museum display of collectibles under glass. Upon entering, the first impression is visually alluring and seems familiar. The art-gallery experience appears to tell the visitor, “look, contemplate, but don't touch.” Observe three simple brass cabinets. The two shorter ones are identical, each displaying a bell jar with a single, life-sized blown-glass heart. Inside each jar, an electrode emerges from a copper spool and descends into the main artery of the heart. Between these cabinets is a slightly taller one displaying a large, glass sphere with a small, dark sphere inside. Glass-blown onto two sides of the large sphere are electronic wires.

In the “don't touch” art-gallery experience, the boundaries between the visitor and the objects are well defined. It is understood where each begins and ends. But in Charged Hearts, the boundaries are blurred or non-existent. The point of this work begins when the visitor picks up the bell jar in the cabinet and turns the piece inside out. As the heart is grasped, it excites and begins to beat luminescently. Simultaneously the sphere, the terrella excites, forming a luminescent plasma cloud of electromagnetic weather, a miniature version of the unimaginable wireless dynamo that surrounds the earth and hides in our household television sets. Holding hearts, plugging in, spectators are literally and figuratively part of the electromagnetic fields, a phenomenon they can barely see but can sense.

Plugging ourselves into the electronic world
Charged Hearts asks a question and responds aesthetically. What is it like for us—human, flesh, blood, driven by heartbeats of living electromagnetic charges—to plug into the electromagnetic world that surrounds us? Our new technological environment is electromagnetic. And so are we. Excitation is both the means and the end. Excite, say physicists observing electron energy. Excite, we say when our hearts are moved. Excite, say doctors watching heart tissue beat. We can change heartbeats by a warm embrace, a cold dream, a fearful image, or an electric charge. We are plugging one electromagnetic system into another: ourselves into the electronic world. We can change heartbeats and we can change minds.

This brings us to the brain. The heart is an excitable tissue. So too is the brain. The follow-up piece to Charged Hearts is called I was scared to death / I could have died from joy (2000). In the piece, two stainless “clean” tables stand in a large, dim room, one at either end. On each table is an oversized test tube containing a blown-glass half brain, life-sized, with spinal nerves. As the viewer approaches, the brain suddenly appears to pulsate as the tube glows with luminescent gas in vertebrae-like patterns. As the viewer touches the tube, an excited plasma follows the fingers.

These particular art works set out to aesthetically investigate the conditions of our culture's massive project: to engage our senses in artificial worlds that are technologically simulated and aim to surpass the natural world.

Virtual reality as an art experience
Some events can be called “found art.” Watching a human form tethered by wires, blinded by a helmet and computer images, gesturing with a gloved hand at the unseen, and followed by handlers, is one of these “events.” A kind of found performance art. These were the images of the first virtual-reality system when it became a civilian event as NASA, the U.S. space agency, moved technology from weapons development to a virtual environment lab. Since the user literally wore the technology, it was an enticing snapshot of immersion in new media environments. The technology was all over the body, tracking, so close to the senses that it seemed to be dealing directly with our ability to create mental images, plugging us directly into a system.

As virtual reality has became more accessible, the popular understanding of it has grown more confused. Many claim it as an immersion in a realm of pure mind, seemingly abstract and bloodless, and at last leaving behind the troublesome flesh. This commonly held opinion appeared to reconstruct the mind/body split, which is puzzling since it was an outdated paradigm in science and unfashionable even in conventional medical circles.

In the late 1980s, the question of finding a way to investigate these issues was not easily answered. The Banff Center for the Arts in Banff, Alberta, was one of the few places in the world that could welcome a multidisciplinary residency in virtual reality, the body, and art practice. In 1991, this project became the BIOAPPARATUS residency that played its part in setting the stage for the convergence of these issues (at the same time, crucial support from the Canada Council for the Arts meant travelling to Edmonton to work in the first Canadian lab with immersive virtual-reality gear).

On the scientific research agenda was the question of simulating presence in virtual worlds. But if we were attempting to simulate presence in virtual bodies, we first had to ask a question: How did we know if we were present in our material bodies? This question led to scientitic expertise in the sense of proprioception, that is, the sense of inhabiting our bodies (how we know we are). Remarkably, the research demonstrated that this habitation of our material bodies turns out to be quite unstable. Household technology used on a blindfolded subject could illicit illusions of displaced bodies: an arm can be felt to be somewhere other than where it is, even inside the body. Artists at Banff became the willing victims of my inquiry. Fundamentally, the question became this: What might happen if we displaced this bodily presence and found a way to map it into virtual bodies?

The art pieces I have attempted to bring to life here result from years of research and collaboration with scientists who were tuned to complementary intuitions: neuroscientists, perceptual psychologists, physicists, electrical engineers, medical researchers, computer scientists, and mathematicians. Since the technology is an integral part of each piece's intention, much of it is specifically developed including: programming, evacuating glass tubes and filling them with gases, and constructing high-voltage supplies (not to mention the installation of a prototype at 4 a.m. the day of the exhibition opening that is intended to run continuously for months of tactile accessibility to the public).

Simulating our senses through technology
Canada has a history of artistic expression that perceives information technology as a cultural artefact and artist terrain. The 1960s and 1970s were an explosive period of art happenings, multimedia art events, performance art, video art, the first portopaks, satellite live art, art installations, and Telidon (the first consumer graphic work station and used by artists). Artists took Marshall McLuhan’s lament perversely to heart. On one hand, McLuhan described media technologies as wreaking drastic shifts in society. On the other hand, he singled out the artist’s role: "In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious adjustment…to new extensions (technologies) except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists."

McLuhan was preceded by such Canadian thinkers as Harold Innis and George Grant who were part of a general climate that included institutions like the National Research Council, the National Film Board, the Department of Communications, the Canada Council for the Arts; research labs like the Structured Sound Synthesis Project at the University of Toronto; and companies such as Alias Research and Softimage. It was a climate that recognized the convergence of media technologies, science, art, and culture. The artworks described here extend this historical thread of awareness. It is an awareness that understood that, by technically simulating our senses, we appropriate that power over our imaginations.

In contemporary terms, these early threads have spun further and further into the social matrix. New information technology has became more than computer image making, user interface developments, and displays. There are now new visualization methods such as evolutionary algorithms and visualization of complex data and data mining. The technology has deeply implicated the viewer by imaging the formerly inaccessible, such as the interior of the human body and its processes. It is also profoundly implicated in the myriad of surveillance and tracking techniques that can read minute physiological body changes, as well as feed into complex models of dynamic systems. And it is becoming deeply enmeshed in day-to-day life be it smart houses, smart agents, smart fabrics, or smart toys.

While creating Charged Hearts in 1995 and reflecting on the slippery language of physics and emotion, we were considering which areas would be the next subject for simulation and mediation. Consequently, our first project on emotion and intimacy was a Web site linked to the glass hearts in Charged Hearts. The Web site was an ironical look at an intimacy simulation: a real time, interactive, emergent game of hearts where one’s heartbeat could become dangerously over excited, have a heart attack, or become comatose. Its life depended on the relationship with other users’ hearts, which could be called in, dragging in their malcontent friends’ heartbeats with them. With our slim resources, we cheerfully called it the slowest game. However, it anticipated a move in information technologies to model emotion, now among a trend of related ways to “make alive’’ new technological representations.

The moment when representations are “alive” may be seen in the well-known first cinematic public event, when the audience fled a film projection of an oncoming train. Looking back further to the mid-1700s, it was also revealed when French philosopher Denis Diderot recounted his experience of entering a painting and being flooded with “sensations délicieuses.” Currently, the same kind of moment may be seen when virtual reality users declare they leave their bodies behind, or evolutionary algorithms are said to be alive and evolving.

By 2000, the project of emotions, intimate interactions, and mediation evolved into Method and Apparatus for Finding Love (1 MB Acrobat PDF file), a work of art that takes the form of a patent. The form was chosen as a way to implicate both the world of art and the world of invention in the construction of desire. As such, it critiques how technology is developed and rationalized in North American culture. The patent is a description of an art piece and a device: a wireless, embedded, handheld, information technology device that will simultaneously act as a new kind of personal information technology, and an instrument that will collect data on its and the user's behaviour. In its first exhibition, a young woman sat at a desk placed next to a locked room. To enter the room, viewers were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising not to reveal the contents of the artwork.

As the research progresses, it will present an opportunity to investigate a speculative issue on the relationship of humans and intelligent systems. There is continuing discussion that we are becoming “post human” and mixed with intelligent machines that take on human attributes. These works of art raise further questions. Is the initial pleasure, the enticement of the mind and senses in both art and media related to the obsession to “make alive” a world of representation? Is this an extension of aesthetics? If so, then the aesthetic project has been taken up by media and now information technologies. If this seems to be the case, then the aesthetic project appears to go to exceeding lengths to re-invent that moment of disbelief, with the consequences played out in the human landscape.