Interview with Juan Manuel Castro./amberfest 09
Which art project do you attend the Amber Festival with?
Intervoltaic (Geometrical events of neural electrical activity).
What is your aim with your art work?
I am very interested in the transformation of intangible collections of biological information into something perceptible, in most cases where no visual metaphors exist in the physical world for them. These visualizations of organic data are an attempt to reach beyond the goals of finding patterns, making better-informed characteristics or communicating knowledge about organisms. The aim is that they will be ideally suited to present insights about organic systems in engaging ways, which are able to personally involve people and therefore make strong emotional connections with them.
The project that I presented at Amber’09, “Intervoltaic”, is in that sense the result of this process. Knowing that the neural activity is characterized by highly intricate, nonlinear, and super complex mechanisms -which confront us with an intelligent sub-system that generates his own behavior and sporadic order- I was asking myself: what does the communications between the neurons look like? How can the continuously changing structure of such a complex network be represented?
Applying aesthetics in order to approach these questions includes the various attempts to define and visualize the biological complexity, the physics of living networks and the study organic information systems. So, what is most exciting about these attempts is that they illuminate the chain of connections between, on the one hand, the simple underlying laws that govern the behavior of living organism and, on the other hand, the complex fabric that we see around us, exhibiting diversity, individuality, and evolution. In this way, “Intervoltaic” embodies both scientific curiosity and the poetical formulation of a new type of experience, as a geometrical metaphor that reveals the unforeseen architecture and dynamics of human information processing.
How does your project works?
In Intervoltaic, visitors are invited for a digital mapping of their brain’s spontaneous electrical wave patterns as recorded from sensors placed on the scalp. These sensors acquire and analyze brainwave activity using standard non-invasive electrodes. Then, this electrical activity is encoded with a device that transforms analog voltage signals into messages for processing. The device also sends out the information to the computer using bluetooth wireless transmission.
Thus, by means of an original program, the neural information generates a digital structure that responds to the user’s bioelectrical wave patterns. The program uses OpenGL geometry to create the structure from the volumetric density field obtain by data. Using the Alpha and Beta wave activity, this structure changes and divides itself into multiple cells at the locations where the density values intersect the limits of each division. Hence, the structure creates different types of geometric artifacts that may result in a composition that is comparatively simply or complex depending on the brain activity. If the user is actively engaged in mental activity or alert there is a faster range of beta waves which creates different spatial distributions in the structure. So, the more engaged the mind the more complex and faster the articulation of the structure. In this manner, this system shows oscillations of alpha and beta activity at a variety of frequencies that have characteristic ranges and spatial distributions associated with different states of brain functioning.
Could you describe your process of creation?
Organic intelligence is what interest me –in particular the richness of being able to experience its innate aesthetic quality. My attempt is to show organisms viewed as interacting networks that give rise to information processing. The process of creation in this way ranges from identifying and developing means to work with biological systems, researching strategies for presenting biological information in real-time, and developing technologies as aesthetic tools.
How long have you been producing digital art?
Almost 8 years.
How do you describe your art as an artist using technology?
The research I have been developing until now is focused on the future interaction of media and biological technologies. The aim is to present projects situated in the intersection between information aesthetics and biotechnology. Thus, the idea is to create interactive installations to support real-time transformation of organic information within an aesthetic processing design. This can be thought of as a research that uses technology and aesthetics into new appreciation and knowledge about organic systems.
What made you choose digital media as medium?
What it is possible to see now, at the age of the biological revolution, is that while new digital technologies open the possibility of making more biological measurements, the ability to turn this data into meaningful conclusions presents a great challenge. With this in mind, it is reasonable to ask how this new information will feed into one another to transform millions of measurements into biological insights. The aesthetic potentiality that is offered by the combination of media and biological technologies is that which is of special interest here. The importance of the digital media as a medium is its capacity to help us recognize and appreciate phenomena and relationships unstated in abstract data. One of the certain objectives of its effective use is, thus, to provide the audience with an enhanced understanding of biological information. This is the reason why I work with digital media, as I feel that as aesthetic tools they offer new possibilities for understanding life and also the cybernetics behind it.
Do you have aesthetic concerns while producing your art?
Aesthetic application of technology is the only means of achieving new consciousness to match our new environment. So, we may conceive of artworks as offers to perception. Every work of art must give an opportunity for a conveyance of meaningful information. It is for this reason, that the particularity of aesthetic communication lies in a purposeful preparation of the information-instruments, an adaptation to the ability and readiness for the perceptible reception, and the working up toward the receiver.
It is a perceptual issue that the human senses are so empowered for understanding external and most precisely, visual stimuli, but also that our mental capacity is aided by methods for externalizing knowledge. It is for this reasons that the idea of externalizing concepts too difficult to understand using aesthetics stands as a fundamental basis when working with technology.
What do you think about the literal and figurative integrations of the human body and technology?
Many of the latter technological interventions on the body -such as genetic engineering, direct brain-machine interface, xenotransplantation, etc- have been controversial, but they do indicate a tendency to apply developmentally relevant technologies whenever they become available. Indeed, the development of technology feeds back upon the consciousness of people and people begin to experience the world anew through the mediation of those technologies. As Martin Heidegger noted, put a hammer in a man’s hand and the whole world begins to look like nails. In this case, as soon as technologies become available for educational intervention with children, there are people who are willing to apply them. The subtle and continual adjustments that occur between culture and technology insure that by the time cyborg technologies are a reality, the attitudes and values of at least some subcultures will accept the new technologies as part of their world.
It is thus reasonably safe to predict that, for example, a direct brain-machine interface technology will be a reality in the near future. Therefore it seems important to reflect upon the possibilities and implications for human consciousness and culture of establishing such technologies.
Let us consider that little attention has been paid to the implications of cyborg technologies for the development of neurocognitive processes in children. Even less attention has been paid to the possibility that the development of human consciousness may be optimized using such technologies. Yet many people are working today to produce effective nano robots, brain-machine interfaces, etc, – devices that will eventually be incorporated into the brains of the very young.
What I would like to point out is that our postmodern culture with its entrenched materialist values and economically-oriented attitudes about child development will tend to apply AI components toward problem-solving and function-directed capabilities (most commonly in the medical and military domains) rather than toward the development of consciousness in its broadest sense or the total well being of the child. At the very least these developments should give rise to serious debate over the ethical and regulatory responsibilities we face in the near future with regard to utilizing, guiding, controlling, and perhaps even forbidding experiments that involve child-machine interfacing. For reasons that will become clear very soon, the incremental application of cyborg technologies may well sneak up on us if we are not careful about their applications and alert to the very profound ethical issues involved.
What we may become as a result of our increasing engagements with technology?
The emergence of the cyborg is a process of progressive technological penetration into the body, eventually replacing or augmenting the structures that mediate the various physical and mental attributes that we normally consider natural to human beings, such as the emotion, perception, intuition, imagination and cognition. The process is as profound as it is probable. I am assuming, for example, that the cybernetic penetration into the cortex of the brain will continue, and will result in the technical alteration of human consciousness. It is clear from developments already implemented or planned for the near future that cyborg advancements will most likely occur first in the context of military and medical problem solving. Perhaps later these developments will shift into the domain of space exploration.
The cyborg brain-mind-machine entity will be capable of processes and activities foreign to the solely biological brain-mind. More than this, the internal organization of consciousness will become altered in such a profound way that, eventually, the mind-states enjoyed by the cyborg may be entirely different than those enjoyed by normal humans.
The point to keep in mind, however, is that the development of the cyborg seems as likely as the invention of the hand ax. The cyborg is in the process of becoming, and is entailed in the technical nature of our species — that is, humans and our human-like ancestors have utilized technical adaptations for at least the last two million years. So, just as a Paleolithic hand ax could be used either to feed the family or kill a spouse, the value of the cyborg will depend upon the intentions and values of the culture in which it emerges.
Interview: Çiğdem Zeytin
