C O M M O D I F Y I N G
C O N S C I O U S N E S S

Dear Viola,

Let’s divorce the future from the technology and talk about human values. I see the nature of things today in the world and there seems to be a strong force of discontent and evil. And I wonder how there cannot be some counterbalance force, something that can apply to itself – to the spirit of man? And I begin to think about what is the meaning of film work? I believe it is possible that an inadvertent spin-off from technology will transfer man into a transcendental being. There isn’t much we can conceive now that can give us a clue to how it will come about. But I suspect vision will play an important role. The eye will have a lot to do with it. It could conceivably be some external thing, which metaphysically will affect the mind and cause some transcendental experience. So, with that in mind I’ve been thinking of ways to integrate the realist image into the non-objective image so that a synthesis will evolve, a cinematic experience which might contribute to an evolutionary transformation of man’s thought processes (2)

John Whitney, Jr
[1973]

| Sphinx | Oedipus |

I will take a moment and begin my essay with a riddle, one that dates back to the time of Classical Greeks in the city of Thebes. The Sphinx, the half woman | half lion being was the gatekeeper of the city and admission was only granted upon answering her riddles correctly or the visitor would be strangled and devoured. The fable goes as such that the Sphinx posed a riddle to a traveller, Oedipus in order to grant him access into the city.

“What is that which in the morning goeth upon four feet; upon two feet in the afternoon; and in the evening upon three?” (4)

Oedipus in a flash of inspiration [unconsciously] replied, Man. The claim that the answer was based on chance entails a ‘subjective experience’ which involves the idea primarily described as ‘phenomenal consciousness’ – a sensibility in which an experience coincides with your experiencing it. A merry and fearless traveller, Oepidus accepted his fate in the spirit of what the French refer to as joie de vivre, that which makes us all human. The tale concludes with the Sphinx throwing herself off her high rock to her death and Oepidus becomes the new King of Thebes. What is revealing here is that this event was not totally fortuitous nor inexplicable. Consciousness here was an involuntary act for it permitted Oedipus to choose his fate even if he could have chosen another answer. It enabled the process to establish a relationship with the ‘controlling forces’ of our existence. In the ancient times, it was more readily explainable that humans often had a relationship with a non-human force or controlling figures that could have been personal or religion bound, and hence persuaded by remorse, regret, prayer, etc. These forms of symbolic construct hold up a fatalistic view of life that makes the most important feature of human life – the human condition. 

| Do Forests Think? |

What does it mean to Think? What does it mean to be Alive? 

If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted. What Eduardo Kohn means, is that the world beyond the human; is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. (5) He claims that ‘our thoughts’ are alive hence it changes our understanding of relationships to other kinds of beings to the ‘human.’ He exemplifies the spirit of the forests and how it collectively and harmoniously houses other emergent non-human loci, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from humans. If thoughts can exist beyond the human, then we are not alone - the only selves; meaning, we are not the only kinds of we. The inquisition that this belief system brings true to my research is that another form of anthropology does exist beyond the human. Eduardo introduces runa (6) animism into his observations as a form of thinking about the world that grows out of an intimate engagement with thoughts-in-the-world in ways that make some of their distinctive attributes visible. If we were to pay attention to some of these engagements that symphoniously coexist, we could begin to think anthropology differently. (7)

Kohn asks as to why are these powers of confusion in the ‘living thought’, playing out at each other through the dualities of otherness and identity in our social being, so unsettling? Perhaps chaos must and will prevail in order for nature’s continual change to occur and reoccur.  

| Noosphere | Technosphere | Public Sphere | 

As architects, it is simpler to create new forms for human habitat than to create the social. But, what is the ‘social’? Is it a human condition, a spatial-relational condition; about how we are together in a space. This is often referred to as Noosphere, the ‘sphere of human consciousness.’ What are the properties and order of such a sphere? Perhaps it is not a series of projects or interventions but merely an ‘attitude’ that stems down to the way we feel about ourselves and others around us. What is that which governs such an attitude? 

Technosphere and sometimes also referred to as Anthropocene, which is that part of the environment that is made or modified by humans for human activities. To date, scientists in University of Leicester have quantified how much humans have changed the surface of the planet meaning how much mass we would leave behind if humans disappeared tomorrow. That mass currently weighs thirty million tons! But that is not what I wish to touch on but rather the physiological aspects of the technosphere on humankind. This would rightfully become the ‘sphere of the post-human consciousness’ even though on contrary it is believed that the interface between the body and the technology would be ‘unconscious’, automatic and taken for granted, simply because the cybernetic organism’s existential status possesses its own dynamics and energy flow. The 60’s concept of the cyborg, divided man into consciousness [cognitive and defined by attention] and the body [systems-mechanical, providing sensory input and active output]. On this account, initially only consciousness was necessary to existentialize ‘man.’ (8)

But with the introduction of prosthetics, the realm of the cyborg has taken a new turn with the ‘man-plus’ becoming the ‘other-than-man’, a Martian subject, consciousness and body; between sensation, cognition, attention and affect. Change one ‘part’ and all parts change. (9)

In this visual age, if one is to enquire the accurate connotation of what a public sphere might represent; the answer is most likely, ‘social networking.’ But William Mitchell has an interesting take with this over-rated description, instead he calls it in his essay; Networked Eyes.’  The public sphere is not any specialized location, it is everywhere and anywhere. The Common. What is that we do or feel in common? Today, tiny digital cameras in mobile phones provide us access to this common conduct and terrain, to be social; our instant public sphere. This highly-paced reoccurrence of visual recordings redistributes human alertness and awareness in a tsunami of image data. In the era of image capture, camera phones have brought about new subtle and ambiguous body language. Unlike a chunky traditional camera, picture taking with smart-phones is almost undetectable. (10) This persuasive and pervasive social collective reconfigures all sensibilities of vanity, privacy and ethnical barriers. ‘The Internet now has ever-multiplying digital cameras, Webcams, surveillance cameras, and camera phones as its electronic gaze over the world. 

A continuously operating, geographically distributed, multi-way observation and memory machine has supplanted both the singular artist’s viewpoint of Renaissance perspective and the singular moment of the photographic exposure.’ (11)

| Choreographing | Editing | Framing | Selfies |

There is a revolution taking the world by storm right now in display technology. The ‘selfie’. These fleeting spontaneous recordings of one’s self-expression as a self-evaluating therapy and/or gaining a form of mass consensus to a personal aesthetic is a very contemporary act of commodifying consciousness. These selfies are like unpredictable ‘image seizures,’ symptoms of some incurable fetishism of this smartphone camera generation. These images of oneself, but truly simply self-expressions can be tweeted, modified and manipulated before it then is twittered [passed on] into another realm of ‘electrified consciousness’; the social media, i.e. tweetstorm. If self-expressions are truly our internal consciousness externalized, then what we are doing is commodifying our own reality, having a personalized ‘say’ to our own experiences, our consciousness. 

I might say, reality needs to be renamed just as history to be consumed with a pinch of salt. The iPhone is exactly a decade old [2007-2017] and it has changed history to a point that its relevance is no more than a postcard in life’s gift shop! If reality is to take on a new format, what would that apparatus be, which will enable us to engineer our consciousness to our own specifications; making us our own screenwriters of our own film [life]. 
If humans never have to work again, then a screenwriter will become a vocation and ‘a recreationist’ would become a profession. 
A total reversal to our existence; all play and no work! The strange thing is that this already sound like an old record, because smartphones already have Apps that regulate our realities, frame by frame and replays them in slow motion.  We can watch our consciousness on a playback mode over and over again.

| Marx’s Fetishism of the Commodity |

Karl Marx in his own fetish way does not seem to think that a commodity is just a trivial thing as in so far that it is a use-value item providing satisfaction to only suffice a human need. It has a mystical side to it that goes beyond this use-value. He brings forward a physiological side with a transcendental subtlety that quantifies the functions of the human organism that contribute to the various modes of labour or productive activities, essentially the expenditure of the human brain, nerves, muscles and the sensing organs. (13) His observation is of particular interest to my research in that, he brings to the table a direct correlation between labour and time which in turn converts into a product [commodity] as they engage with each other in a social form [consciousness]. Mankind gets included into the equation with the social characteristics of their labours manifested, taking on the form of a social relation between the products of labour. In other words, what we have here is not just use-value analogy but also ‘commodity-consciousness’. He concludes with the argument the product of the human brain [consciousness] may appear autonomous but it is endowed with the world of products made out of men’s hands. It is this fetish, called human consciousness that ‘attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.’ (14)

| Disembodied Consciousness of the Camera |

Since the new millennium, a majority of Bill Viola’s work was predominately the importance of recognizing who we are in this world and allowing the process to expose or communicate the philosophical differences that redefines who we are to one another and particularly through the phenomenological counters of the eye to consciousness. The language Viola uses embraces states of mind linked to concepts such as ‘visual trances’, when the camera takes on a ‘consciousness.’ The use of this metaphor is a strategy to describe what we see on the screen and to convey the ecology of life for humans and animals alike. This ‘disembodied consciousness of the camera’ characterizes Viola’s view of video as an extension of the body. Here the camera is not a mirror of consciousness but a mind functioning in a way that conveys a different representation of the world, one that is a process of discovery, making the visible the invisible. In the context of my research, Viola’s work embodies notions of collectiveness. Viola describes [images 4A/4B] The Tempest as ‘a group of nineteen men and women from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds are suddenly struck by a massive onslaught of water with tsunami-like force. Some immediately knocked over and others brace themselves against the unprovoked deluge. Water flies everywhere as the group clings to each other for survival. As suddenly as it arrived, the water stops, leaving behind a band of suffering, bewildered, and battered individuals. The group slowly recovers, while the few with any strength remaining assist those who have fallen. The work is recorded in high-speed film and folds in extreme slow motion to reveal subtle nuances of individual expressions and gestures of the figures.’ (18)

| Governing Consciousness | Shaping one-Self |

In Benkler’s essay, Shaping A Self; he challenges the concept of ‘governance’ not specifically in reliance on governments, but on a variety of voluntary models of cooperation, coordination, problem solving and conflict-resolution. He reduces this aspect of governing to a more local scale of social practices. He counter-argues to individual autonomy because it essentially reserves what makes us human, which is having a dialogue with others. It is not a choice between individualism and collectivism but rather the level of transparency to a self-authorship within a reality that is always to some extent collective and always individual. (19) No matter how many restrictions are placed on either side of this social practice, individualism will always coexist alongside with the collective. The media giant, TED champions this form of social framework under the slogan, ‘ideas worth spreading.’

As networked communications become ever more central to social practice, we need those who build participatory bodies not to be naive in thinking that technology necessarily makes participation easier, but rather to be sub-conscious at the individual ethical level in terms of: which things I am participating in, what information I am giving, what platforms I am using. (20)  Benkler continues to insist that a ‘plug-server architecture’ would eventually create individualized networks within a decentralized network, so that the cloud that is owned by media corporations who sole purpose is to sell data, can now be governed by users, hence replacing social networks and gaining control of authorship and data flow. 

| Madness | Passion | 

The possibility of madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion. Long before the eighteenth century, passion and madness we kept at close proximity to each other because passion was defined as a temporary and attenuated madness. (21) When Cameron Crowe released his movie; Vanilla Sky, he cracked open all inhabitations concerning illusion and reality and exposed some very terrifying aspects of the true vulnerability of human consciousness between passion and madness. The desire to love and the desire to return to life after dying for it. That is human consciousness in a nutshell; it is a stream that flows in one direction and then in the other, the next minute. 

| World’s Most Dangerous Idea | Mind Uploading |

‘Mind Uploading; a hypothetical process of transferring or copying a conscious mind from a brain to a non-biological substrate by scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer or another computational device. The computer would have to run a simulation model so faithful to the original that it would behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishably.’ (22)

Technological evolution is headed rapidly to what scientist are referring to as; Hypothetical Technologies, which to date has been the subject of science fiction. One should not be dismissing this line of scientific research prematurely only because we have called the bluff when the movie industry releases one of its sci-fi blockbuster entirely produced digitally and or green screen technology. In 1997, the sci-fi thriller; The Fifth Element to predicted an unforeseeable proposition for intelligent mobility in the city of New York. In 2017, several car manufacturers are at the verge of launching the first ‘autonomous car’ [driverless car] into the global market, in less than a year! 

| A Pre-Conclusion |

The latest sci-fi movie, a post-cyberpunk iteration of a possible future; The Ghost in the Shell, boldly presents technological developments in ‘singularitariaism’ – the ultimate creation of artificial superintelligence [ASI], when humans transcend biology. The notion that ASI’s integrated circuitry will eventually be gelatinized is not that far-fetched an idea to ponder. Consciousness can only be commodified in a human form; no other simulation would suffice. 

| Bibliography |

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, 2003
Haraway, Donna, Manifestly Haraway, 2016
Blok, Anders + Jensen, Torben, Bruno Latour - Hybrid thoughts in a hybrid world, 2011
Kohn, Eduardo, How Forests Think, 2013
Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization, 2001
Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, 2014
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Visual Culture Reader, 2002
Jones, Caroline, Sensorium, 2006
Uchill, Jones Mather, EXPERIENCE, 2016
Pias, Ana Paula + Strauss, Carolyn F., Slow Reader, 2016
Hanhardt, John, Bill Viola, 2015
Townsend, Chris, The Art of Bill Viola, 2004

|Credits|

| Image Sources |

[1]   http://www.cellophaneland.com/bill-viola-thames-hudson/

[2]   https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QoLoSdrctsQ/maxresdefault.jpg

[3]   https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/tweeting-up-a-tweetstorm

[4a] http://en.cafa.com.cn/bill-viola-unspoken-at-james-cohan-gallery-shanghai.html

[4b] http://en.cafa.com.cn/bill-viola-unspoken-at-james-cohan-gallery-shanghai.html

[5]   http://micheleburke.com/vanilla-sky/

[6]   https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ghost-in-the-shell-2017-trailer-ed.jpg