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https://videohive.net/item/zooplankton-under-the-microscope/24176208

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Zooplankton under the microscope. A colony of different plankton microorganisms in a drop of water. Daphnia, Cyclopidae - crustaceans living in seas, rivers, ponds. Located at the bottom of the foo...

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https://www.openear.ie/
Live audio stream of Sherkin Island's north Shore, not far from the festival site. The stream is presented using customized open source software provided by the Locus Sonus Stream Project.

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OE '22 - This weekend! Important Information

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Hey folks,

Open Ear '22 is nearly upon us. The build is on and the hype is on too. We can't wait to see you all!
Before you make the journey down we'd like to highlight some important topics pertaining to the festival.
Your Ticket
Travel & Parking
If you are driving to the festival please check our FAQ with regards to parking in Baltimore. It is very important that you follow these guidelines as this is a small town community and cars can't be blocking entrances or be in illegal spaces. Cars or other vehicles are not allowed on to the island for the festival. You can bring your bike on.
Island Transport
Your ticket will be in your email or that of your lead bookers. Please bring it on your phone or printed out along with ID. If you are not with your lead booker have their name with you, and if you have a transferred ticket have the name of the original booker with you too.
Food Vendors
When you register up at the Sherkin Abbey there will be transport to bring your luggage across the island for €3. It is best to put name tags on your bags and tents etc for collecting them up at the festival site. There will be a mini bus for transporting people too but we suggest, if you are able-bodied, to grab yourself a drink and take the 40 minute stroll across the beautiful island and get yerselves in the mood for what we hope will be a seriously memorable weekend. The minibus costs €3. **Cash only for these services**

Food at OE'22 will be provided by:
Warehouse Food Market & Luncheonette
Bahay
L'Oasis
Food and Drink
They will have a selection of food catering for all dietary needs including the following below. Full menus will be available on site:
Steak sandwiches, brioches, hot pot, smoothies, grilled chicken thighs, mushroom oysters, breakfast granola, homemade lemonade, Granola Pots, Snackboards and much much more.
Cash Monies
There is no shop or off license on Sherkin Island so it is important that you stock up on all foodstuffs / toiletries etc before you come on the island. The closest town with an extensive supermarket is Skibereen. Open Ear is a BYOB festival so you are free to carry your drinks around any part of the festival site. We ask you to restrain from drinking when you are off the festival site as the island is year round home for others and we must respect their privacy at all times.
There will be a a designated area for cooking apparatus on the campsite.
Ferry from Baltimore
There is no ATM on the island. The closest one is in the shop in Baltimore so please remember to bring some cash with you along with your card.
Containers / glass / plastics
The ferry ticket is not included in your festival ticket or bus ticket. This must be paid as you board the ferry and it is 100% cash ONLY. Ferry costs €12 return. The Ferry will run all day Friday as each ferry fills up. The last ferry will be 10pm and NO LATER. We can't emphasise this enough - the ferry company is facilitating us a lot on the Friday and there will be no later access to the island on Friday. Ferry times will run as normal for the rest of the weekend. Please check the June Timetable on this page
Jolly Roger / The Islanders Rest
We'd really love if this weekend people would bring reusable liquid containers to help reduce waste at the festival / island. It is very important that we keep this to a minimum. Also if you could transfer liquids from glass bottles too.

There will be no Sunday party in the Jolly Roger this weekend. The pub is closed for a private function on Sunday so it is very important that you do not try and gain access to it on the Sunday. And sure we've an unreal line up of music laid on for ya down the North Shore main site.
Social Media Blackout
The Islanders Rest is currently not in operation so please do not try and access it at any time over the course of the weekend.
The people of Sherkin, in allowing us to host the festival on the island, have displayed a huge amount of trust in us and we ask you to return the favour by being as sound and as respectful as possible.
Health & Safety
At our Emerge one day event last year we operated a social media blackout and we would really love if you could adhere to this over the weekend. The last couple of years has been a difficult and trying time for everyone and we'd love it for everyone to just live in the moment for the 3 days. Sherkin is an amazing, secluded part of the world, so lets have a few days where the worries and problems of the outside world are far from our minds

There will be a dedicated medic on site 24/7, located at the production area. If you are a friend are having problems please contact a member of security immediately and you will be attended to.

Also PsyCare Ireland is a new Irish organization that will be on site at Open Ear this year. Their mission is to provide dedicated services at Music Festivals and Music Events, where high risk drug use is common; to provide one-to-one peer support, psychological first aid and crisis mental health intervention to service users in need. PsyCare Ireland provides a peaceful, friendly and safe space in the heart of the busy world of the festival.

At Open Ear Festival they will be providing Harm Reduction information and chatting with festival goers on Saturday by the entrance. For more information feel free to check out our website: www.psycareireland.org

Finally head on over to our Line Up page to find out all about who is playing and keep an eye on our socials for the Timetable breakdown in the next 24hrs

Team OE xx

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Hey folks, Open Ear '22 is nearly upon us. The build is on and the hype is on too. We can't wait to see you all! Before you make the journey down we'd like to highlight some important topics pertaining to the festival.

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Illustration by Catherine Brighton

Janice Kerbel + Felicity Callard

Garden for Agoraphobe

Agoraphobia carves its own landscape. Parts, perhaps all, of the public sphere are marked off-limits in the turn towards the domestic. FreudÕs early account of agoraphobia considered the agoraphobe as a thwarted prostitute who kept herself inside so as not to take the first man on the street. The thwarted prostitute might today seem Freud's own fantasy, but his framing of agoraphobia through desire dismantles the illusion of home as a site devoid of anxiety.

But the home also holds out the promise of keeping the assaultive power of an inflammatory world at bay. For if anxiety cleaves to particular objects, its taming does so too. Spaces and objects both solicit and assuage anxiety. Their composition can intervene in the spreading of unease.

An indoor garden is one site for the cultivation of zones of comfort. There, deracinated plants find a new home. They might turn awry usual homely logics, but in so doing offer their own models of regularity. Soothing what presses in from noisy streets, they provide other forms of stimulation.

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Illustration by Catherine Brighton Janice Kerbel + Felicity Callard Garden for Agoraphobe Agoraphobia carves its own landscape. Parts, perhaps all, of the public sphere are marked off-limits in the turn towards the domestic. FreudÕs early account of agoraphobia considered the agoraphobe as a thwarted prostitute who kept herself inside so as not to take the first man on the street.

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Home Climate Gardens is a series of nine digital drawings which was a commission and collaborative project with Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University East Anglia and the Norwich Gallery. In 2002 I joined Tyndall's collaborative research effort as artistin- residence. Out of this grew a commission to develop a new body of work - Home Climate Gardens - making Tyndall's first artist-scientist collaboration. Each garden is determined by the climatic, architectural and functional conditions of a range of indoor environments (i.e. 'Council Flat: Wall-mounted gardens', 'Gym: Respiration garden'. While Home Climate Gardens take the form of detailed and perfectly plausible plans, each garden remains unrealised. Janice Kerbel

Artwork Details: 118.8 x 84cm

Edition: Ed 3 of 5

Material description: digital inkjet on paper

Credit line: © the artist. Commissioned by Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Accession number: ACC42/2006

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Home Climate Gardens: Revolving Restaurant - Windowbox garden

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Home Climate Gardens is a series of nine digital drawings which was a commission and collaborative project with Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University East Anglia and the Norwich Gallery. In 2002 I joined Tyndall's collaborative research effort as artistin- residence.

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Botanical symbolism and the similarities between humans and plants

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Roots & Seeds XXI. Biodiversity Crisis and Plant Resistance is an international cooperation project between Ars Electronica (AT), Leonardo-OLATS (FR), University of Barcelona (ES) and Quo Artis (ES) as lead partner, and co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. With this project, we sustain we can get better action and behavioural commitments to sustainability by using Art & Science practices, approaches, techniques and aesthetics to develop passion and emotional connection for sustainable organizing and living, trying to promote habits that take care of our environment and specifically our plants, contributing to our botanical literacy.

Roots & Seeds XXI activities (residencies, workshops, forums, talks and exhibitions) will serve the purpose of transnational circulation of cultural professionals, art production and research focused on the biodiversity crisis of the vegetal world.

Roots & Seeds XXI aims to reflect on the biodiversity emergency, analyzing from different perspectives the transformation, adaptation and resilience of the plants, while promoting the intersection of Art and Science as the main platform to raise awareness of these issues.

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Roots & Seeds XXI. Biodiversity Crisis and Plant Resistance is an international cooperation project between Ars Electronica (AT), Leonardo-OLATS (FR), University of Barcelona (ES) and Quo Artis (ES) as lead partner, and co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

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SENSING ECOLOGIES: AN SOUNDSCAPE OF GEOLOCATED INTERVIEWS CREATED FOR BULL ISLAND

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SENSING ECOLOGIES: AN SOUNDSCAPE OF GEOLOCATED INTERVIEWS CREATED FOR BULL ISLAND

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I know Brendan Sayers (orchid specialist) from my time at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin. Brendan was  a key connection for me when I worked at Belize Botanic Gardens and helped me enormously with the care and curation of the orchid collection through advice and mentoring.

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Sensing Ecologies was created by artist Fiona Mc Donald as part of http://anurgentenquiry.ie/ residency commission for Bull Island 2019. An Urgent Enquiry is funded under the Arts Council's Invitation to Collaboration Scheme, 2018 and 2019, Dublin City Council, Wexford County Council and Fingal County Council.

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Homebaked Community Land Trust lies on the boundary of Everton and Anfield, just opposite Liverpool Football Club. We are a growing group of local residents who have been working together since 2012 to shape the place where we live and work in community ownership.

Starting from having saved our iconic neighbourhood bakery from demolition and supported our first tenant, Homebaked Bakery, to develop into a thriving community business, we are now transforming the adjacent terrace into environmentally sustainable, quality homes and commercial spaces at genuinely affordable rent. By regenerating our high street 'brick by brick and loaf by loaf', we will be using money spent in the neighbourhood to benefit our communities.

Our work is based on the simple belief that we all deserve to live well; for us that means making sure that the homes and spaces we create together are high quality and kept affordable to the people who live and work here - not just now, but also for future generations. We believe that living well includes access to an environment that provides good jobs, great food and welcoming spaces to meet, share stories, learn and celebrate.

feb. '21
In the latest in our 'Meet the CLT Board' series, here's our youngest board member, Bradley Barrett, in his own words...

"Hello, I'm Bradley; I am 21 years old and I grew up in Aintree and then moved to Kirkdale in my early teenage years. I have a background in community and youth engagement and I am currently studying BA Architecture at University of The Arts, London.
After leaving school in 2015, I struggled to decide how to turn my passions into a career. It was in 2018, shortly after joining Homebaked to work on the development of the flat and 'HomeSquare' that I finally had my 'Aha!' moment: I realised I wanted to become an architect. After 18 months of nurturing and support from Homebaked, I applied and was accepted on to a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at Central Saint Martins Art School in London - and stayed in London to study for my BA.
Since being in London, I felt disconnected from my community and the CLT. I wanted a way to give something back and still be a part of the organisation, so I applied to be a board member - and was voted in in December!
I am honoured to be on the board, working with the amazing team to #gettheterracedone!

feb. '21
Liverpool City Region's Community Led Housing Hub, Breaking Ground, launches with a community led housing festival from 20th-28th February 2021.

Homebaked CLT is pleased to be contributing four events to the Breaking Ground Festival on Saturday 27th February. Each event is rooted in the values at the heart of our terrace and community, discussing the right to housing, the future of our high streets, sustainability in practice and our creative DNA. National and international friends join us to share their stories to inspire and explore the possible for Anfield, Everton & beyond.
Media & Publications
jan. '21
Big thanks to Liverpool Echo & Semble for this lovely piece about our work - and play!

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Homebaked Community Land Trust lies on the boundary of Everton and Anfield, just opposite Liverpool Football Club. We are a growing group of local residents who have been working together since 2012 to shape the place where we live and wor

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Finding MISSING TEXTURES (Pink Texture Fix) in Blender!

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[2.9] Blender Tutorial: How to Make Objects Float in Blender

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Blender is first and foremost a software targeted at artists but sometimes you just want to build your house or some home DIY project and that is when measuring is important. Blender has multiple tools to accurately measure distances and support for multiple units. Another huge topic that needs accurate measuring is architectural visualization and that is an area where Blender really shines.
How to measure in Blender? To accurately measure in Blender, while in edit mode go to the overlay menu in the top right corner. There you will find a section called "Measurement". Check the edge length checkbox to get the length of any selected edge in edit mode.
That is a good start and I use the "edge length" setting in almost every project. However, there is more to the story, and we will dive deeper into Blenders measurement tools and add-ons through the rest of this article.

How units for measurement work in Blender

The first, and most useful tool is already under our belt, but this image shows a bit more clearly where to find it. Next, to the "edge length" setting we also got checkboxes to view face and edge angles as well as face area.

By default Blender measures using the metric system. Meaning meters. In the properties panel under the scene tab, we also find the Units section where we can change what units Blender should use. The other option is imperial. Useful if you are in the US. We also have a setting that is labeled "none". More on that later.

Let's go over the different settings in this unit section and see what options we have. If you are following along in Blender while reading this will be a bit easier to understand.

After the unit system, we have a unit scale. This slider is basically a multiplier of our units. It won't change anything in our scene. The relation between objects in our scene will always be the same. It will just change the numbers that we see. If this is set to 1 and we have the metric system, 1 meter will be viewed as 1 meter. If we change the scene scale to 0.1 we will now see that our 1 meter turned into 0.1 meters.

The scene scale value will not have any effect on simulations. They will still run the same. The only thing the unit system is doing is change what scale our values get in the interface.

Below the scene scale value, we can select the unit that will be used to view our measurements. For each type of measurement we have the usual increments. Meters, centimeters, millimeters and so on. Same for time and mass units.

The length unit is probably the primary reason to choose a unit system but the units for rotation, mass and time also have their place. Mass may not be obvious in a 3D program but it is used to calculate simulations. Likewise, time is used in Blenders animation system and in the Video Sequence Editor. Essentially Blenders video editor.

For any of these, we can also set "adaptive" This means that Blender will display the unit that makes the most sense for the scale of any distance.

There is one more thing that we need to keep in mind. That is object scaling. If an object scale is not set to 1.0 on all axis the measurements will not be correct.

Related content: How and why do we apply scale in Blender?

That is the bulk of how to set the units that we will see in the interface. However, no settings in the Units section will change how Blender works in any way. The units are not used in any calculations.

What are Blender units?

Remember the "none" option as a unit system. This will use blenders internal system. One could say that 1 blender unit is equal to 1 meter. But that is only true if we stick to the default unit settings. A blender unit is an internal unit that calculations will be based on. Even if we change the units that we see, the blender unit will still be used under the hood.

The important distinction to make here is that it does not matter much what settings you choose in the units section. These can be changed at any time without having an actual effect on your scene. It is only related to what you see in the interface. The importance is rather with the relationships between objects within your scene. Your scene is then relative to any measurement system that you may choose.

What about measurements for 3D printing?

Generally, you will not 3D print directly from Blender. Instead, you will export your model as an STL file and import it into another software. The scale will be determined by how the 3D printer software interprets it.

What you need to keep in mind is to model according to some measurement. If it is to meters or centimeters does not matter much but if a distance is supposed to be 1.5cm long and you model it to be 1.32cm long it will be hard to scale it correctly later. But getting the correct length when scaling from 1.5 meters to 1.5 centimeters is not a problem. You just divide the scale by 100. Simple, even math.

How does the measure tool work(aka ruler)?

The ruler has been renamed measure tool in Blender 2.80. We can find it at the bottom of our tools panel on the right side of our 3D viewport.

If we hove our mouse we get a detailed description of how we can use this tool. When the tool is activated we click and drag in the interface to get a measure. We can du this multiple times to add more measures. If we have multiple measures one of them will be white and the rest will be gray. The white is the current active ruler.

If we press "X" the currently active ruler will be deleted.

To measure an angle, press the middle of a ruler and drag. An angle measure can be turned back into a distance measure if you click the corner and press "X".

Both the ends and the corner of the measure tool can be snapped to a face, edge or vertex if you hold control while moving it. We can also snap the angle.

The last feature is to measure the depth of an object. To do this hold shift while moving the ruler and the other end will run through the inside of the object and snap on the other side.

Use the grid to measure

Another tool that may be less obvious to use for measurement is the grid. By default, the grid is set to 1 meter. We can change this in the overlay panel. At the top of the panel you will find the guide section. Here we can set the scale value of the grid. By default, this is set to 1. Depending on our settings in the unit's panel the scale on the grid may vary. By changing the grid scale we set the grid in relation to our current measurement system.

Related content: How to use snapping tools in Blender

We can accurately move objects to exact measures according to the grid by using snapping. In the 3D viewport header, click the magnet icon to enable it. Then click the snapping menu next to it and set the snapping to increment and turn on "absolute grid snap".

With these snap settings, we can take the object origin and snap it to any intersection of the grid. In edit mode, we can also snap any element such as face, edge or vertex directly to the grid.

Related Questions
What is the Measureit add-on?
The Measureit add-on comes with Blender by default. It can help us to create good-looking visual measures. It is useful both for measuring and to create blueprints or similar where we want the measures to show up in the actual render.

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How to accurately measure in Blender - Artisticrender.com

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Blender is first and foremost a software targeted at artists but sometimes you just want to build your house or some home DIY project and that is when measuring is important. Blender has multiple tools to accurately measure distances and support for multiple units. Another huge topic that needs accurate measuring is architectural visualization and [...]

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Blender 2.8 - Adding Text - Tutorial beginners

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View all of our most recent projects, and learn how you can hire us for your next project.

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hacking the system. love it.

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Japanese knotweed ( Fallopia japonica) has been stigmatised as 'the plant that ate Britain'. It has been declared a 'non-native' 'invasive' plant that can allegedly penetrate through the foundations of your house. However, the definition of 'non-native' or 'invasive' is in itself a subjective non-scientific taxonomy and there is no rigorous evidence of knotweed being more damaging than other plants when it comes to growing through a crack on a concrete surface. Widespread scaremongering has effectively led to the deflation of property value and the refusal to grant mortgages to homeowners that have found knotweed on their premises, creating a market for expensive eradication programmes.

The Devaluing Property Real Estate Agency opened at The Empire Remains Shop on Baker Street, London 2016, with a portfolio of toxic assets: properties 'affected' by knotweed growth. It expands on previous work The 'Next "Invasive" Is "Native"' to re-think the 'alien' as an entity that could construct a new reality and can bring valuable hybridisation over time. Focusing on Japanese knotweed, the project questions the definition of a pristine British landscape and who defines it, as perceptions of 'native,' 'alien,' and 'invasive' shift over time. As part of the one-on-one consultation service, customers of the Devaluing Property Real Estate Agency were able to taste The Plant That Can Sink Your Mortgage Ice Cream.

For consultation on how to devalue property through the agency of a plant and add to the toxic assets portfolio, contact us today.

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Climavore | Devaluing Property Real Estate Agency

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Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) has been stigmatised as 'the plant that ate Britain'. It has been declared a 'non-native' 'invasive' plant that can allegedly penetrate through the foundations of your house.

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Jet Bussemaker, President of the Council of the Public Health & Society Board, the Netherlands' independent parliamentary advising body, praised the project: "It is inspiring. People are tired of COVID19. What we need is courage to find new solutions, to get in touch with each other, and create some intimacy. That is what Urban Sun is doing."

Studio Roosegaarde has been researching the power of light for many years. The self-funded URBAN SUN was begun in 2019. The COVID19 pandemic made the project much more urgent. URBAN SUN connects design with science to provide innovative solutions for people to meet in a more humane way.

URBAN SUN is created by Roosegaarde's team, along with external experts and scientists from the Netherlands, the US, Japan, and Italy. The URBAN SUN's far-UVC light source is measured and calibrated by the Dutch National Metrology Institute VSL. URBAN SUN meets the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) safety standards.

The science behind URBAN SUN is based on multiple peer-reviewed journal articles authored by scientists from Columbia University and Hiroshima University. The research shows that specific ultraviolet light (far-UVC) with the wavelength of 222nm can reduce the presence of viruses, including various strains of coronavirus and influenza, up to 99.9%. Even though traditional 254nm UV light is harmful, this specific light of 222nm is considered safe for both people and animals.

Daan Roosegaarde: "Suddenly our world is filled with plastic barriers and distance stickers, our family reduced to pixels on a computer screen. Let's be the architects of our new normal and create better places to meet."

Leading authorities are enthusiastic about the project and are describing it as hopeful, promising and full of courage:

-Listen here what Dutch scientists state about the far-UVC of URBAN SUN at NPO Radio 1.

-Carlo D'Alesio from MEG Science and Professor at Politecnico di Milano: "Virtual simulations indicate a positive impact of the Urban Sun in reduction of airborne coronaviruses in public spaces."

-Matthew Hardwick PhD, President at ResInnova Laboratories, Washington D.C., who works with his team of virus experts and microbiologists: "Use of 222nm far-UVC in public space, as in Urban Sun, should prove to be both safe and effective."

-Professor Karl Linden, award winning innovator in UV technologies and founding board member of the International Ultraviolet Association (IUVA), Colorado: "Urban Sun is inspiring. It will make enjoying public spaces safer and I look forward to visiting locations where this far-UVC sun is shining."

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Jet Bussemaker, President of the Council of the Public Health & Society Board, the Netherlands' independent parliamentary advising body, praised the project: "It is inspiring. People are tired of COVID19. What we need is courage to find new solutions, to get in touch with each other, and create some intimacy.

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The idea came about from something I had noticed about copper tape. Back near the holidays in December 2017, I assisted with a class on making these cute "Christmas present" led pop-up cards, and it used copper tape to create little circuits on the inside of the card, complete with a switch, a coin cell battery, and some leds wired in parallel.

What's fun about those circuit templates found in those cards is that they mimic the ways in which circuits really look on a microscopic scale. The copper tape, being at least partially rigid-create natural straight lines that require you to create these right angles to manuver from one position to the next, rather than curve. You can do this with normal tape too-it naturally resists bending in the one axis because the material is flat, and copper tape just has a little bit more than the standard plastic-film tape. The rigity of the material almost forces you to mimic a circuit-diagram way.

After a while, I decided to create some variety in the shapes being made and started to cut more organic forms out of the 3" wide tape, which began to have a bit of a bio-mimicry feel. Having a history of working with plants and electronics (via Robot Rauschenberg), I felt like this was the way to go. The intersection between the two is quite strong when you consider that mycelial structures underground connecting plant roots has been of great interest to scientists lately and has been dubbed a sort of "nature's internet."

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Short Circuit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

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The idea came about from something I had noticed about copper tape. Back near the holidays in December 2017, I assisted with a class on making these cute "Christmas present" led pop-up cards, and it used copper tape to create little circuits on the inside of the card, complete with a switch, a coin cell battery, and some leds wired in parallel.

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Colin Mosely and I started this collaborative in 2015, with the hope to bring artists and scientists together to produce performances, installations, and more. Modeled after the success of the collaborative, E.A.T. [Experiments in Art and Technology], in 1967 by a crew of artists and engineers, including Robert Rauschenberg, Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, and Robert Whitman, we seek to bring together our current technological perspectives and methods to an artistic practice while exploring ideas about human empathy, trauma, and communication.

Collaborative partners for Sensitive Plant are Colin Mosely, Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, Eric Wolinsky, Zoe Stergiannis, Andy Schwartz, and myself.

As pedestrians walked by, sensors automatically triggered lights to highlight each of these plants.

Research: Why Sensitive Plant
We think it's more important than ever to talk about nature at this point in time, considering various rapid declines in biodiversity and the increasing dominance of monocultures. We as participants in this technological universe have lost touch with our roots, both literally and figuratively - which led our team to investigate a relatively new and growing field of research around plant communication.

Sensitive Plant [Mimosa pudica] is a well-known plant for its unique rapid movement in response to being touched. Its leaves close quickly in response to danger, and while it's not fully understood why it responds this way, scientists believe it may be to deter herbivores or to dislodge predatory insects.

Research: Plants and Communication
The study of mycelial structures, or networks of mushroom roots connect trees' roots is fairly recent. Trees have been observed to communicate through mycelium by nutrient exchange. There are also other studies showing that plants actually communicate through the air, warning each other of potential threats and adjusting their chemical compositions to combat them.

Mycelial (mushroom) structures under deep-growth forests have only been recently studied, revealing complex trades of nutrients between trees that not only seem to assist the entire forest but also warn future generations of trees away from areas of deforestation and disease. Similarly, these sort of response systems exists even within individual plants, with electrical signals and chemical transmission being measured to better understand the ways in which plants communicate within themselves, with other plants, and also with humans.

We use this research to develop our own narratives and to present the science through human stories, with the hope that these stories become encoded into our audiences' lives and stories.

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Colin Mosely and I started this collaborative in 2015, with the hope to bring artists and scientists together to produce performances, installations, and more. Modeled after the success of the collaborative, E.A.T.

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Pierre Huyghe fills Sydney's opera house with 1000 real trees

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Published: December 11, 2015

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Introduction

A Forest of Lines by Pierre Huyghe is a space that brings together the sacred and the profane. The space blurs boundaries, eliminating the separation between the audience and the art where they can become the performance as they explore the constructed forest in the theatre made of a thousand real trees, inside the concert hall at the Sydney Opera House. Thus turning one of the most urban places in the world into a wilderness, converting a space in a way, which seems exceptionally impossible and altogether remarkable.

A place between fiction and fact

Paths meander through the trees, mist brings a sense of mystic as you wonder the magical and listen to the story that brings the enchantment to life. This is a space of representation, in which an environment has been transplanted, and becomes a liminal place that is somewhere between nature and urban, a place that lays somewhere in between fiction and fact. Forests are often the sites of fairy tales and legends; they are places of amazement and sometimes fear.

Nature versus culture

There is something profoundly sensational about the opera, it is the epitome of culture, and furthermore, the Sydney Opera House is internationally known for its architecture and aesthetics. Thus by constructing a forest in a place that represents culture, humanism, and progress, the Cartesian dualism of nature versus culture is completely overridden.

Analysis

This revolutionary piece demonstrates the mediation of binaries while taking the audience into a different world of the wilderness inside. The melody is written by Laura Marling especially for Pierre Huyghes' performance, the lyrics literally indicate how to get outside the Opera House and go somewhere else. Visitors to this installation wandered through the glorious forest, and some even set up picnics in the installation, using the space as they would a park. This space was open for 24 hours, and within that short time, audience members were given the opportunity to explore a world that can be described as only a dream.

Photos

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Pierre Huyghe fills Sydney's opera house with 1000 real trees

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Pierre Huyghe fills Sydney's opera house with 1000 real trees Last updated: Published: December 11, 2015 Last updated: Introduction A Forest of Lines by Pierre Huyghe is a space that brings together the sacred and the profane.

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Forget the white cube. At Frieze New York, Marian Goodman Gallery is showing work in a black box. The gallery has dedicated almost the entirety of its solo presentation of French artist Pierre Huyghe to a single work: a glowing installation of smoke, light, and sound hidden inside a pitch-black room.

The piece, titled L'Expédition Scintillante, Act 2 (light show) is from 2002 and is the last in an otherwise sold-out edition, gallery senior director Rose Lord told artnet News at the fair's opening. The gallery always looks to showcase a single artist at Frieze, and Lord said the time was right to highlight the six-minute immersive piece.

In the darkened space, cordoned off from the rest of the bright white tent by a black curtain, the work appears to hover in the void, as covered light plays off curling plumes of smoke. The dulcet tones of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies 3 and 4, an 1888 composition orchestrated by Claude Debussy, serve as an ambient soundtrack for the piece. The effect is mesmerizing.

"It hasn't been shown in New York since his Hugo Boss Prize show in 2003," Lord said. "He originally made it for an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, where there are three floors. Each floor was like an act from a musical on ice. This was the second floor, and kind of represents the psychological idea of a journey."

Specifically, Huyghe was thinking of a drug trip-the light show is meant to replicate the hallucinogenic effects of psychadelic drugs.

The piece was also inspired by the artist's desire to travel to Antarctica, which he eventually did in 2005. With the temperature unexpectedly hitting the upper 80s at Frieze on Wednesday, the darkened booth didn't quite capture the frigid feel of the polar region. But it did include a color photograph, A Journey that Wasn't (2008), documenting Huyghe's trip to the tundra, with penguins in front of a sea of icebergs.

Inside the room, fair-goers were walking tentatively, but there are no hidden benches or obstacles to trip over in the dark. "We guide everyone in," Lord said. "We're looking out for people!"

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Pierre Huyghe's Smoky, Psychedelic Light Show Mesmerizes at Frieze | Artnet News

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Forget the white cube. At Frieze New York, Marian Goodman Gallery is showing work in a black box. The gallery has dedicated almost the entirety of its solo presentation of French artist Pierre Huyghe to a single work: a glowing installation of smoke, light, and sound hidden inside a pitch-black room.

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Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World

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Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World

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Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World explores humankind's deep connections and fascination with the plant kingdom through artworks from the Spencer Museum's permanent collection, a number of significant loans, and site-specific commissions by four artists-in-residence: Ackroyd & Harvey, Sandy Winters, and Mathias Kessler.

The exhibition is organized through several themes: artists' studies of plant forms; historic and contemporary plant lore; ecological sustainability and biomechanical plant hybrids; plants in a post-human world; and works dealing with scientific research on how plants sense the world and communicate. One aim of the exhibition is to cultivate viewers' empathy for plants by addressing the tendency of humans to dismiss plants as a static backdrop to their fast-paced lives.

Themes in Big Botany are explored further through an exhibition catalogue published by the Museum that includes short contributions from a variety of artists, curators, poets, philosophers, ecologists, and more. Additionally, a research symposium coinciding with the exhibition's opening brought scholars and researchers together to share their work on plant studies. Dr. Daniel Chamovitz, Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University, delivered the symposium's keynote lecture titled What a Plant Knows on March 27.

Big Botany is generously supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Arts Council State of Vorarlberg, the KU Research Investment Council, the Asian Cultural Council, the Linda Inman Bailey Exhibitions Fund, the International Artist-in-Residence Fund, KU Student Senate, and Friends of the Art Museum.
View the exhibition brochure. View the exhibition catalogue.

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Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World

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Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World explores humankind's deep connections and fascination with the plant kingdom through artworks from the Spencer Museum's permanent collection, a number of significant loans, and site-specific commissions by four artists-in-residence: Ackroyd & Harvey, Sandy Winters, and Mathias Kessler.

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Introducing Seeing Plants, a series of writings by artists, designers and botanists questioning the role that plants play in our everyday lives: as material for our artwork, as inspiration, as medicine, as a reminder of our own mortality

1Regan Golden, Spring Ephemerals.

I rush across the gallery towards a vibrant patch of grass and small flowers thriving atop a pedestal in the harshest of conditions: a white-walled gallery in January in Minnesota. I pace around the pedestal, eager for greenery, my heart sinks: the green grass is made of glass. Jim Hodges' ghost (2008) is an incredibly life-like arrangement of hand-blown glass plants under a glass dome that was included in Hodges' retrospective Give More Than You Take at the Walker Art Center in 2014. Like much of Hodges' work, ghost celebrates fragility and growth, as well as the impossibility of keeping what is most precious.

It was the single clear glass Maple sapling arising from the colorful flowers in Hodges' ghost that got me thinking about plant life in contemporary art: more importantly, it got me thinking about the absence of it. Often when plants appear in contemporary art they seem ghostly, the semblance of a living organism. Hodges' ghost (2008) is a unique form of mimicry, in addition to its life-like qualities, the sculpture also references Albrecht Durer's watercolor painting, The Great Piece of Turf (1503), that depicts a patch of grass growing at the edge of a muddy field. It is wistful, maybe even romantic, thinking that Durer's Great Piece of Turf and similarly Hodges' ghost inspires, as both artworks reflect upon the fleeting nature of existence. Yet what is so unusual about both artworks is that they place a clump of grass and weeds in the foreground, at the center of this conversation about mortality.

The crab grass, yarrow, and dandelion plants foregrounded in Durer's watercolor and Hodges' glass sculpture grow throughout the Twin Cities, but are often overlooked. Living in a midwestern city, plants constitute the backdrop of daily life: lining the highway and framing backyards, growing and dying throughout the seasons. Despite this perception of plants as background information, plants are an integral part of everyday existence through clothing, food, and medicine. On a broader scale, the state economy relies heavily on agricultural crops, as Minnesota is the largest producer of sugar beets, sweet corn, and green peas in the United States. If plants sustain our economy and our lives in Minnesota, why aren't plants more visible in art, or even along the highway?

In 1996 two biologists, James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, described a phenomenon called "plant blindness," which is "the perceptual and visual-cognition bases of why plants are often overlooked and neglected." Wandersee and Schussler argue there are many factors that lead to plant blindness, but two stood out to me as an artist: "failing to see, notice or focus attention on plants in one's daily life" and "being insensitive to the aesthetic qualities of plants and their structures." As Wandersee and Schussler suggest, plant blindness has serious implications for Earth because plants capture carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere, curbing the effects of global warming. If people aren't seeing plants, then we are probably not protecting them either. Since plant blindness is partially induced by visual and aesthetic limitations, perhaps artists and art institutions have role to play in making plants more visible.

Two exhibitions in the past year have done just that, Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World at the Spencer Museum of Art and The Photographer in the Garden at the George Eastman Museum. Both exhibitions combine traditional botanical prints with contemporary photographs and installations. The Photographer in the Garden included contemporary photographers from Collier Schorr to Robert Adams. Big Botany featured artworks across a diverse array of media by contemporary artists, from Mark Dion's field guides (2004-2011) to Isabella Kirkland's hyper-realistic botanical arrangements in Taxa (2006-2008). These two exhibitions also coincided with the first ever biomass study of the entire planet last year, which concluded that plants constitute approximately 80% of all life on earth (humans are just .01%, 1/10000th of the Earth's biomass). If artists and scientists are making plants more visible through their work, does this lead to greater protection of plants?

Seeing plants might be the first step, but appreciating their beauty is what could lead to protection. As writer and theorist Elaine Scarry argues in her book On Beauty and Being Just, beauty inspires protection because the perception of beauty requires the "beholder" to acknowledge the "aliveness" of what is being perceived: "Beauty seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness of (in the case of objects) the quasi-aliveness of our world, and for entering into its protection." Beauty also has a reciprocal effect, according to Scarry, it can be life-saving for the perceiver as well and in this way beauty creates a mutual "pact" of protection. When beauty is initially overlooked, but then recognized, as Scarry describes her experience with a potted palm tree, it made be jarring. This experience of beauty can even become radically decentering-causing the perceiver becomes "adjacent" to beauty by abandoning a self-centered subjectivity. In such an experience, the center shifts: "It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world." To put this into pictorial terms, in this experience of beauty the figure fades from the foreground, as what was formerly background arises.

The plants that surround us everyday, even those considered weeds, are anything but background information for ethnobotanist and Anishinaabe medicine woman, Mary Siisip Geniusz, who argues that understanding the medicinal power of plants is key to survival and central to maintaining Anishinaabe cultural knowledge. Siisip Geniusz's incredible book, Plants Have so Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask, describes in detail the many Ojibwe names for common plants in Minnesota, while also sharing the narratives illuminating their medicinal properties and recipes for their use. Siisip Geniusz's plant descriptions enable me to see the environment in which I live in all its complexity, and challenge me to honor the plants I work with as an artist. As her important text reveals, based on teachings passed down from her elder Keewaydinoquay, the legacy of colonialism is literally embedded in our language and our gardens here in Minnesota.

A corn stalk, an Echinacea bloom, a white cedar tree are typically described as objects within the English language. How would the perception of plants change if we were to speak of plants or even to plants as beings? As Siisip Genuisz states in her book, the first step when harvesting a plant is to ask the plant for permission: "The plants have both spiritual and physical healing to offer. It is just necessary to ask for the help they can give." While the animacy of plants may be a radical idea within plant biology, this is a foundational concept within Anishinaabe culture as understood through narrative and language. If plants are thought of as beings, would that create equanimity between people and plants in Minnesota? To answer this, we've come full circle, returning to the way that plants are depicted in art and described through language as background objects. Artists and botanists can reframe how plants are seen by placing plants in them foreground of everyday life.

This article is part of the series Seeing Plants: Vision and Botany in Contemporary Art, guest edited by Regan Golden.

Endnotes

1. Jeffery Grove, "Endlessness," in Give More Than You Take, ed. Olga Viso and Jeffery Grove (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center & Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2013), 17.

2. James H. Wandersee and Elizabeth E. Schussler, "Preventing Plant Blindness," The American Biology Teacher 61, No. 2 (1999): 82.

3. Wandersee and Schussler, "Preventing Plant Blindness," 84.

4. Wandersee and Schussler, 84.

5. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 90.

6. Robin Kimmerer, "Speaking to Nature," Orion, March/April 2017.

7. Mary Siisip Genuisz, Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to do is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings, ed. Wendy Makoons Genuisz, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 23.

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Seeing Plants: Vision and Botany in Contemporary Art - Mn Artists

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Introducing Seeing Plants, a series of writings by artists, designers and botanists questioning the role that plants play in our everyday lives: as material for our artwork, as inspiration, as medicine, as a reminder of our own mortality

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Since 2012, we have been working in a permanent "common" area amidst the waterfront development of Bjørvika in Olso, Norway. We formed Flatbread Society as a proposition for working with local people to establish an aligned vision for the use of this land. Flatbread Society uses grain as a prismatic impetus to consider the interrelationship of food production to realms of knowledge sharing, cultural production, socio-political formations and everyday life. Flatbread Society's dynamic activation of the site through public programs, a bake house and a cultivated grain field has attracted the imagination of farmers, bakers, oven builders, artists, activists, soil scientists and city officials; while simultaneously resulting in the formation of an urban gardening community called Herligheten and a full time farmer hired in collaboration with the Norwegian Farmers Union. In 2014, an official renaming of the site was established. The collectively coined name " Losæter " draws from the Norwegian words "Loallmenning" and "sæter". "Allmenning" defines an area of land that is put aside by the state for recreational activities; it also defines an area that is in private or official ownership, where others than the owner have rights to use the area, for example, traditionally allowing livestock to graze on the land. And "sæter" refers to one house or a collection of houses traditionally used as a summer dairy farm in the high mountains. A right to sæter implies the right to put animals to pasture and to put up a mountain pasture house. "Losæter" combines these two terms to connect Norway's agricultural heritage to the present, extending the metaphor of cultivation to larger ideas of self-determination and the foregrounding of organic processes in the development of land use, social relations, and cultural forms. The openness and fluidity of the projects evolving at Losæter stand in stark contrast to the rational logic of development in the surrounding areas of Bjørvika. Situated amongst the National Opera, the Munch Museum, Deichmanske Library and the National Stock Exchange, Losæter is charged with questioning our relationship with the land, namely cultivation of land as a relevant, cultural endeavor that includes the production and management of common resources.

Who:

Flatbread Society is a long-term project initiated by Futurefarmers as a public art programme for Bjørvika, Oslo (Norway). The project was curated by Situations, and commissioned and produced by Bjørvika Utvikling in collaboration with the artists. Supported by The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Eastern Region).

Futurefarmers, US/Belgium
www.futurefarmers.com

Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an open practice of making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding them. Founded in 1995, their design studio serves as a platform to support
art projects, an artist in residence program and their research interests. Futurefarmers create frameworks for exchange and tactile forms of inquiry
that manifest as tools for participants to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry - not only to imagine, but to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Bjørvika Infrastructure
www.bjorvikautvikling.no/kunst/futurefarmers

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Since 2012, we have been working in a permanent "common" area amidst the waterfront development of Bjørvika in Olso, Norway. We formed Flatbread Society as a proposition for working with local people to establish an aligned vision for the use of this land.

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Going Off the Grid in California (Published 2016)

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The artist Fritz Haeg's latest project at Salmon Creek Farm is a celebration of communal life.

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Dr Patrick Bresnihan is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University working across the interdisciplinary fields of urban political ecology, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities. His practice is often collaborative, including working with environmental scientists, activists and artists. His research explores the intersections of technological infrastructures and natural ecologies including water contamination and industrial agriculture; rural climate justice; citizen science; and the politics of energy and data infrastructures. His book Transforming the Fisheries: Neoliberalism, Nature and the Commons (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) won the Geography Society of Ireland Book of the Year in 2018.

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Dr Julie Freeman explores relationships between science and nature; questioning the use of technology in how we translate our world.

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building trans-species communications systems since 2005

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Image: Rosa Menkman, Vernacular of File Formats (2009-2010).

In the spring of 2021, the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (NCAD) and The Digital Hub announced a new partnership with an inaugural In Public webinar series to focus on the transformative nature of emerging technologies, attending to artistic practice, academic research, and industry. This programme of talks invites artists, designers, thinkers and innovators to create a transdisciplinary dialogue on topics such as artificial intelligence, digital ethics, digital identities, and online environments.

The NCAD & The Digital Hub partnership builds on stakeholder participation at the intersection of artistic practice, technology and society. This programme is designed to bring together audiences from key industry figures; academics and thinkers; students and alumni; the arts sector and the wider general public. The spring 2021 talks programme is convened by The Digital Hub artist in residence and NCAD Alumna, Elaine Hoey and NCAD lecturer, Dr Rachel O' Dwyer.

The National College of Art and Design occupies a unique position in art and design education in Ireland, offering the widest range of art and design degrees at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The Digital Hub has become the largest cluster for digital companies in Ireland since its launch in 2003. Providing a collaborative, nurturing space for digital, technology and internet companies to thrive and succeed.

The NCAD & The Digital Hub co-hosted Digital Cultures Webinar Series 2021 will be broadcast on >>> YouTube <<< All Events are open for public viewing, with no registration needed. Please find Webinar descriptions and speaker biographies below.

LANDING PAGE FOR ALL EVENTS >>> YouTube <<<

NCAD In Public | Digital Hub Digital Cultures Programme: Thurs 18 March - Thurs 10 June 2021

Title: Translating Nature: Data as Art

Date: Thursday 18 March 2021, 7pm - 8pm (GMT)

Panellists: Dr Patrick Bresnihan, Dr Julie Freeman, Fiona McDonald

Moderator: Dr Rachel O'Dwyer, NCAD Lecturer

Thursday
1 April 2021
7pm-8pm (GMT)

Title: AI and Ethics. Moral Machines - Model Behaviour

Date: Thursday 1 April 2021, 7pm - 8pm (GMT)

Speakers: Nora Al Badri, Prof Barry O'Sullivan

Moderator: Artist Elaine Hoey

Title: AI and Creativity - Speculative Futures

Date: Thursday 15 April 2021, 7pm - 8pm (GMT)

Speakers: Johanna Bruckner, Dr Arthur Miller

Moderator: Artist Elaine Hoey

Title: Digital Economies | Digital Intimacies

Date: Thursday 29 April 2021, 7pm - 8pm (GMT)

Speakers: Dr Antonia Hernández, Dr Kylie Jarrett
Moderator: Dr Rachel O'Dwyer, NCAD

Thursday
13 May 2021
7pm-8pm (GMT)

Title: What Does the Algorithm See?

Date: Thursday 13 May 2021, 7pm - 8pm (GMT)

Speakers: Rosa Menkman, Joanna Zylinska
Moderator: Dr Rachel O'Dwyer, NCAD

Title: AI and Bias. Feminist + Queer Perspectives

Date: Thursday 27 May 2021, 7pm - 8pm (GMT)

Speaker: Caroline Campbell- Loitering Theatre,

Speaker: Coral Manton-Women Reclaiming AI

Moderator: Artist Elaine Hoey

Thursday
10 June 2021,
7pm-8pm (GMT)

Title: Webinar 7

Date: Thursday 10 June 2021, 7pm - 9pm (GMT)

Speakers: Dr Mercedes Bunz - Creative AI Lab Serpentine Gallery.
Moderator: Artist Elaine Hoey & Dr Rachel O'Dwyer

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>>>> LANDING PAGE FOR ALL EVENTS >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> YouTube <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Title: Translating Nature: Data as Art

Date: Thursday March 18th 2021, 7pm - 8pm.

Panellists: Dr Patrick Bresnihan, Dr Julie Freeman, Fiona McDonald

Moderator: Dr. Rachel O'Dwyer, NCAD

This panel discussion brings together artists and researchers exploring the translation of nature and ecologies into participatory projects, citizen science and visual and media art. We will look at artists and researchers who are translating 'data' from living systems into visual representations, photographic exhibitions, kinetic sculptures and sound compositions.

How can we explore the interfaces between technology, citizen science and artistic practices? What kinds of expertise and ways of knowing might these practices bring to light? And how might these artistic forms be used in future discussions and environmental debates?

Dr Patrick Bresnihan is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University working across the interdisciplinary fields of urban political ecology, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities. His practice is often collaborative, including working with environmental scientists, activists and artists. His research explores the intersections of technological infrastructures and natural ecologies including water contamination and industrial agriculture; rural climate justice; citizen science; and the politics of energy and data infrastructures. His book Transforming the Fisheries: Neoliberalism, Nature and the Commons (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) won the Geography Society of Ireland Book of the Year in 2018.

Dr Julie Freeman explores relationships between science and nature; questioning the use of technology in how we translate our world. Often working with living systems, her work transforms complex processes and data from real-time sources into kinetic sculptures, physical objects, images, sound compositions and animations, and has been exhibited widely. She founded the Data as Culture art programme at the Open Data Institute, and is co-founder of Fine Acts. Julie is a TED Senior Fellow and was awarded a PhD from Queen Mary University of London for her thesis Defining Data as an Art Material. translatingnature.org

Fiona McDonald is a Dublin-based interdisciplinary artist. She holds a BSc in Biological Chemistry from University of Ulster a BA & MA in Fine Art from NCAD & a MSc in Multimedia Systems TCD. She is a current Artist in residence in innovation and technology at Talent Garden on DCU Alpha Campus. In 2019 she was an http://urgentenuiry.ie Artist In Residence and was a 2018 recipient of the Arts Council Bursary Award. She is a current visiting research assistant of OMG Orthogonal Methods Group at CONNECT the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for future communication networks. Recent exhibitions include " Sensing Ecologies", an immersive geo-located audio tour created for Bull Island exploring biodiversity, climate change, sensors and bioindicators, In the age of Conscious Makers, 2019, NCAD Gallery, and a solo exhibition "Gateways" at Roscommon Arts Centre 2018 curated by Linda Shevlin. Her work is included in collections AIB, UCD, Digital Hub, Thomas St, Dublin, Scott Tallon Walker, Arc.

Title: Digital Economies | Digital Intimacies

Date: Thursday April 29th 2021, 7pm - 8pm.

Speakers: Dr Antonia Hernández, Dr Kylie Jarrett
Moderator: Dr. Rachel O'Dwyer, NCAD

This event brings together artists and researchers to explore the intersection of intimacy, care, platforms and online work. After a year of working from home, family zoom calls and socially distanced dating we need to talk about digital intimacy. How do users employ digital technologies to maintain or manage interpersonal relationships? What does it mean when our intimate communications are mediated by proprietary platforms - when our social and romantic selves are indexed and quantified as data for surveillance capitalism? And what about the hidden intimacies and care that underpins and shores up these online environments?

Dr Antonia Hernández is a theorist, designer and media artist whose work explores infrastructural relations of intimacy, combining theoretical investigation with arts-based practices to understand the fleshy, living, and domestic aspects of media. She has presented her work and research-creation methodologies widely at conferences, exhibitions, and in artist talks. Her SSHRC-supported doctoral research examines the role of fictional currencies to enable affective communication and differential exploitation in the context of the platform economy. The project included an art-based exploration of the sex cam platform Chaturbate through a series of performative interventions staged in a dollhouse and broadcast to the same platform. This research is the subject of a forthcoming book The Machine of Social Reproduction. Antonia is a founding member of the archive+design collective Mat3rial, that works with cultural and community organizations, researchers, and artists to develop knowledge mobilization strategies.

Dr Kylie Jarrett is associate professor in Media Studies in Maynooth University where she teaches digital media, gender, political economy, research methods, and media and cultural theory. Her research focuses on the political economy of digital media and in particular the commercial Web, with an emphasis on digital labour. She is the author of Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (Routledge, 2016) and co-author with Susanna Paasonen and Ben Light of #NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (MIT Press, 2019). She is currently co-PI of a IRC/AHRC-UKRI UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Networking project: Intersections: Feminism, Technology and Digital Humanities.

Title: What Does the Algorithm See?

Date: Thursday May 13th 2021, 7pm - 8pm.

Speakers: Rosa Menkman, Joanna Zylinska
Moderator: Dr.Rachel O'Dwyer, NCAD

We live in a world full of images made by machine for machines, from facial recognition technologies to automatic license plate readers and AI image categorisation. What's more, these new 'ways of seeing' are coupled to ways of knowing and foment action in the real world. In this panel, which brings together artistic practice and research, we ask, how is machine vision influencing contemporary visual cultures? What kinds of social differences are produced or reproduced by these imaging systems? How might we begin to understand the technological substrate of standards, codecs, formats, training data sets and algorithms that make up the new seeing machines? And how might artistic practice provide a space for seeing differently?

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch art theorist, curator, and visual artist specialising in glitch art and resolution theory. She investigates video compression, feedback, and glitches, using her exploration to generate artworks. In 2011 Menkman wrote the Glitch Moment/um, a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts (published by the Institute of Network Cultures. Since 2007 Menkman has been creating performances and static work, such as the Vernacular of File Formats and Acousmatic Videoscapes, in which she connects both sound and video artifacts conceptually, technically and narratively. Other artworks include the Collapse of PAL and Xilitla. Currently she is interested in considering alternative ways for performative lecturing.

Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, lecturer and - according to the ImageNet Roulette's algorithm - a 'mediatrix'. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. Zylinska is also an author of a number of books on art, philosophy and technology - including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). She works as Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to answer the question: 'Does photography have a future?'

Title: AI and Bias. Feminist + Queer Perspectives

Date: May 27th 2021, 7pm-8pm.

Speakers: Caroline Campbell - Loitering Theatre, Coral Manton - Women Reclaiming AI

Moderator: Elaine Hoey, Artist

The historical data we use to train Artificial Intelligence or Machine learning technologies continue to reflect biases that many of us would have hoped to relegate to the past, including bias towards gender and race. From racial profiling to gender and class bias, AI systems can reflect back and further entrench inherent problems within our society. How can the female perspective begin to challenge and question these norms?

Caroline Campbell is an artist, writer and filmmaker working under the name Loitering Theatre (both as a solo artist and with other collaborators). Loitering Theatre work across video, text, mixed message, false flags, meme magic, artificial intellect, viral interference and future archaeologies of time. Loitering Theatre has most recently presented work at Tulca Festival of Visual Arts, Galway (2020), Hugh Lane Gallery, as part of Digital Self Defence, curated by Kennedy Browne; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and Solstice Gallery (all 2019) Caroline is a practice-based PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London in the Department of Visual Cultures. www.loiteringtheatre.org

Coral Manton is an artist-technologist and game developer. She is Lecturer in Creative Computing at Bath Spa University and Course Leader for BA Hons Games Development. Her interests include XR, playable media, digital heritage and design activism. She has worked in AAA and Indie gaming and is a qualified museum curator specialising in interactive and digital collections research. She is a live-coder and has performed at Algoraves across the UK and internationally. She performed and curated an Algorave which saw 800 people dancing to algorithms in the iconic British Library in London as part of the 'Staying Late at Library' programme. She is an advocate for women in technology and much of her work is focused on creating better relationships between technology and people. She is Co-Founder of Women Reclaiming AI. A conversational AI feminist voice assistant which is being co-developed by a growing community of 100+ Women. She spoke at ITU, a United Nations Conference, on Gender and AI. Coral's work has been featured in Ars Electronica, SXSW, The Guardian Newspaper and she has led workshops at The Barbican for AI: More than Human and MozFest.

Date: 10th June 2021, 7pm-9pm.

Speaker: Dr Mercedes Bunz - Creative AI Lab Serpentine Gallery.
Moderators: Artist Elaine Hoey & Dr. Rachel O'Dwyer

Dr Mercedes Bunz is the Serpentine Gallery's Creative AI Lab's Principal Investigator and Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. Her research explores how digital technology transforms knowledge and power. She previously worked as a journalist, including as technology correspondent for The Guardian. She studied Philosophy, Art History and Media Studies at the FU Berlin and the Bauhaus University in Weimar, gaining her doctorate with a thesis on the history of the Internet, in which she gave free rein to her curiosity about digital technology. Her last publication is 'The Internet of Things' with Graham Meikle and 'The calculation of meaning: on the misunderstanding of new artificial intelligence as culture' published in the journal Culture, Theory and Critique.

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Elaine Hoey works primarily creating interactive based installations, appropriating contemporary digital art practices and aesthetics to explore the politics of digital humanity and our evolving relationship with the screen. She describes her process as 'experimental' and is interested in exploring digitally native and new forms of art. Her work often addresses and critiques themes arising from identity, place and the biopolitical body. She works through a wide variety of mediums such as, virtual reality, artificial intelligent systems in gaming engines, video, installation and live remote cyber performance. Recent exhibitions include Desire; A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age at the Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin (2019-2020); Unflattering at The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea (2020) and Citizen Nowhere Citizen Somewhere at The Crawford Gallery, Cork (2020). Other exhibitions include The Dictionary of Evil, Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018); Design and Violence MOMA and Science Gallery (2016-17); Dublin Futures,The RHA, Dublin; Turbulence, The Model Sligo; Oracle at Scena9. Bucharest (2018); Open Codes, ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany; Surface Tension,Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2018); FILE SP Fiesp Cultural Centre, São Paulo, Brazil (2019); This is not Architecture (2017) at Highlanes, Drogheda; The Ground Opened Up, The National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2017); Elaine is a recipient of the Taylor Art Award and the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award from the RDS Visual Arts Awards. She has just been awarded a year long studio residency with IMMA and DAS. Elaine is a part time lecturer in Fine Art Media at the National College of Art and Design and is currently artist in residence with The Digital Hub in Dublin.

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NCAD & The Digital Hub co-hosted Digital Cultures Webinar Series 2021

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Image: Rosa Menkman, Vernacular of File Formats (2009-2010). In the spring of 2021, the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (NCAD) and The Digital Hub announced a new partnership with an inaugural In Public webinar series to focus on the transformative nature of emerging technologies, attending to artistic practice, academic research, and industry.

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Crowd funded documentary about the rise of the tourist industry on the Costa del Sol and the impact on local people.

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A lo largo de toda la línea de costa de la provincia de Málaga encontramos diversos conflictos urbanísticos, medioambientales y socioeconómicos cuyo denominador común es que giran en torno a grandes proyectos de desarrollo turístico-inmobiliarios.

La construcción de un campo de golf junto al Paraje Natural Acantilados de Maro-Cerro Gordo, la polémica actividad de la fábrica de cemento-incineradora en la playa de La Araña, el proyecto del rascacielos del puerto de Málaga, la construcción de cuatro torres en uno de los distritos más denso Europa, la ampliación del puerto de Marbella, son solo algunos de los ejemplos más relevantes...

"Se vende" es la cartografía audiovisual de este litoral, un acercamiento al territorio a través de la mirada de sus propios habitantes. Relatos de resistencia, de lucha y de esperanza por alcanzar otro modelo de ciudad, otra política de gestión del suelo, otra forma de habitar el mundo.

La serie documental tendrá un mínimo de 3 y un máximo de 5 capítulos, dependiendo de la capacidad de financiación que logre el proyecto. El objetivo de este crowdfunding es ser capaces de financiar el Capítulo 2 (objetivo mínimo), y en el mejor de los escenarios, llevar a cabo también el Capítulo 3 (objetivo óptimo). La idea de esta producción audiovisual es ir rodando capítulos conforme se reúna la financiación para ello, pero además del crowdfunding, nuestra estrategia pasa por conseguir apoyo de otras instituciones y entidades, así como optar a diferentes ayudas y subvenciones de desarrollo cinematográfico.

Primer capítulo ya rodado

Algo importante es que en estos últimos meses, la serie ya ha podido arrancar gracias a la colaboración y financiación del Proyecto de investigación I+D+i del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades RTI2018-094844-B-C33: "Saturación turística en destinos costeros españoles. Estrategias de decrecimiento turístico. Una aproximación desde la dimensión social", que sin duda es un importante socio en esta serie. La grabación tuvo lugar en Nerja y Maro entre Agosto y Septiembre de 2020. El pasado 14 de Enero este capítulo piloto se estrenó en el Centro Cultural María Victoria Atencia (MVA) de Calle Ollerías y desde hoy también se puede visualizar de forma online:

La escaleta completa de capítulos será, en orden de desarrollo, la siguiente:

Capítulo 1: El último vergel

Localización: Maro y Nerja
Conflicto: Maro es uno de los últimos lugares libre de hormigón en toda la costa malagueña. Un territorio con un fuerte arraigo a la tierra y a su producción agrícola. El impacto paisajístico y las consecuencias a medio/largo plazo del proyecto de campo de golf, hotel y viviendas de lujo que se pretende llevar a cabo en los actuales terrenos del litoral de Maro pone en peligro esta relación centenaria de sus habitantes con el paisaje. Una lucha histórica por la propiedad de la tierra entre agricultores y la familia latifundista del marqués de Larios que se lleva librando desde hace más de medio siglo.

Capítulo 2: Un sueño verde en el distrito más denso de Europa

Localización: Antiguos terrenos de Repsol.
Conflicto: El distrito nº 7 de Málaga es uno de los más masificados de Europa. Justo allí, en unos antiguos terrenos de Repsol de 177.000m², el futuro de la ciudad está en juego. Por un lado, el Ayuntamiento pretende la construcción de cuatro torres de hasta treinta y cuarenta plantas de altura. Del otro, ciudadanos y vecinos organizados luchan por un gran bosque urbano que de un respiro y traiga, por fin, otros aires más limpios a la ciudad.

Capítulo 3: El centro histórico y su horizonte

Localización: Muelle 1 y centro histórico de Málaga.
Conflicto: El centro histórico de Málaga lleva años sumergido en un proceso de gentrificación a causa del agresivo crecimiento turístico. Una estrategia de ciudad-marca que mercantiliza la identidad, el espacio público y el patrimonio histórico. Un proyecto de rascacielos en las inmediaciones de la terminal de cruceros pretende seguir ahondando en esta concepción de progreso que está vaciando al centro de sus habitantes y que en este escenario post-pandemia, necesita más que nunca repensar su significado.

Capítulo 4: Territorio a cambio de votos

Localización: Puerto deportivo de Marbella.
Conflicto: La corrupción política-urbanística como modelo de hacer ciudad es algo evidente en el caso de Marbella. Un modelo de gestión del suelo cortoplacista que a la larga tiene fuertes consecuencias sociales y medioambientales. Toda la polémica que rodea a la construcción del nuevo puerto deportivo de Marbella no es sino otro ejemplo más de esta relación entre políticos y promotores. Pero aún hay motivos para la esperanza, y un grupo de vecinas son aquí el ejemplo de resistencia para empezar a creer que otro futuro es posible.

Capítulo 5: Cemento, sol y playa

Localización: Playa de La Araña y Torremolinos.
Conflicto: El boom turístico y urbanístico de los 60 fue percibido entonces como un rayo de luz en una España demasiada oscura. Un binomio entre ladrillo y turismo que empezaba a postularse como principal motor económico del país y que se terminó de consolidar tras la entrada en la Unión Europea y la posterior reconversión industrial. España acabo convertida en la hamaca de Europa y Torremolinos en uno de sus centros neurálgicos. Sin embargo, medio siglo más tarde, la decadencia se ha apoderado del lugar, la saturación y colmatación del litoral es evidente, y la fabrica e incineradora del grupo Heildelberg que abastecía de cemento a todas las construcciones de la costa es hoy, según señala Greenpeace, uno de los puntos negros del mapa español de la polución industrial.

En este momento histórico de pandemia que estamos viviendo, existe una oportunidad única para poner encima de la mesa el debate en torno a cómo queremos volver a esa antigua "normalidad" y si es hora de buscar modelos alternativos. ¿Qué tipo de ciudad deseamos habitar? ¿Cómo queremos relacionarnos socialmente en ella? ¿Qué relación con la naturaleza nos gustaría mantener? ¿Cómo será ese mundo post-COVID? ¿Cómo queremos que sea? ¿Es posible otro horizonte?

El objetivo de esta serie es apostar por un formato accesible, que sea capaz de transmitir la relevancia de los valores medioambientales, paisajísticos, históricos y comunitarios de aquellos territorios que están en peligro o que se ven amenazados por grandes proyectos de desarrollo insostenibles cuyo foco está más en la rentabilidad y la plusvalía que en el beneficio común.

Una serie diseñada para un público amplio que demanda cada día con más fuerza la necesidad de modelos alternativos y la resignificación de la palabra progreso, para construir así la ciudad y la sociedad de las próximas generaciones.
Las productoras audiovisuales: Peripheria Films y Criocrea
La serie estará codirigida por las productoras Peripheria Films y Criocrea. Sus trayectorias en producciones documentales y webseries son el aval perfecto para desarrollar este proyecto.

"Se vende" recoge las inquietudes que Peripheria Films lleva trabajando desde hace tiempo. El interés por la ciudad, la identidad o la problemática turística de Málaga fue algo que ya pusieron de relieve en el documental "A costa del sol" (2019), dirigido por Daniel Natoli, y que posteriormente volvieron a tratar, esta vez en Cuba, con la producción asociada del documental "Yuma ", dirigido por Rebeca Sasse.

En cierto modo, "Se vende" es un trabajo que vuelve a incidir en temas como la mercantilización y explotación de la identidad y el territorio, y aunque también trata su vertiente turística, esta serie realiza un recorrido más amplio por todo lo que implica el desarrollo a lo largo de la costa (industrias contaminantes, especulación urbanística, corrupción política, destrucción del medio ambiente, etc...)

Por otro lado, en esta aventura acompaña a Peripheria Films la productora Criocrea, cuya webserie "Latidos, yo cambio todo" (2019) sobre jóvenes con problemas de exclusión social logró quebrar prejuicios y acercar esta problemática a un público joven. En su difusión logró más de 700 Mil visualizaciones desde su estreno redes sociales en Abril de 2019 hasta la fecha. Su formato es una buena referencia de lo que se pretende plasmar en cuanto a tratamiento estético y narrativo.

Equipo Peripheria Films y Criocrea
Entidad colaboradora: Rizoma Fundación
Rizoma Fundación es una entidad sin ánimo de lucro fundada en 2005 y que tiene como objetivos el fomento de la creatividad y de la subjetividad individual y colectiva para generar conocimiento de libre acceso y disfrute para todos los ciudadanos; en especial, a través de la investigación crítica, analítica y creativa de nuestros territorios -en particular los de la arquitectura, el urbanismo y la geografía urbana-, con atención especial al ámbito geográfico denominado ZoMeCS (Zona Metropolitana de la Costa del Sol). La fundación cuenta con un equipo multidisciplinar de más de 80 personas que componen el Consejo Asesor, además de un número creciente de colaboradores.

Personas, colectivos y asociaciones que apoyan o forman parte del proyecto
Hasta la fecha, contamos con el apoyo de las siguientes asociaciones, plataformas o colectivos:

Plataforma ciudadana "Bosque Urbano Málaga" (BUM)

Plataforma ciudadana "Otro Maro y Nerja es posible"

Plataforma "Defendamos Nuestro Horizonte" (DNH)

Plataforma Aire Limpio - AAVV de El Palo

Bio Agricultura de Maro (BAM)

n'UNDO asociación

Producción audiovisual

Daniel Natoli - Dirección

Víctor Hugo Espejo - Director de fotografía

Jessica López - Jefa de producción

Pablo de la Ossa - Sonidista

Rizoma Fundación

Antonia Lorenzo

Yolanda Romero

Jose María Romero

Proyecto de investigación I+D+i del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades RTI2018-094844-B-C33: "Saturación turística en destinos costeros españoles. Estrategias de decrecimiento turístico. Una aproximación desde la dimensión social"

Antonio M. Nogués - Profesor UMH

Eduardo Serrano - Dr. Arquitecto

Enrique Navarro - Profesor UMA

Elo Vega - Artista

Germán Ortega - Profesor UMA

José María Romero - Profesor UGR

Marcos Castro - Profesor UMA

Rogelio López Cuenca - Artista

Rubén Mora - Arquitecto

Yolanda Romero - Profesora UCM

Responsable de prensa
Isabel Bellido - Periodista

+ Info

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A lo largo de toda la línea de costa de la provincia de Málaga encontramos diversos conflictos urbanísticos, medioambientales y socioeconómicos cuyo denominador común es que giran en torno a grandes proyectos de desarrollo turístico-inmobiliarios.

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American Studies

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The Arctic Circle Residency This June I will be sailing the waters of Svalbard upon the SV Antigua with 20 award winning international innovators, explorers and artists. I will be among the last people in the world to visually capture this disappearing landscape, as sadly the glaciers are melting

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-Volcanic
-Matthew Jebb, The National Botanic Gardens, Herbarium
-Millenium Seed Bank
-Arctic Seed Bank

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'Traces of Air'   Solo exhibition by Siobhán McDonald at Uillinn.

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REVOLVING SCHOOL, Irish Museum of Modern Art 2016

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Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium

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Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium

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Seating System

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Seating System can be used for talks, reading groups, exhibition and library. The boxes are modular and together form a closed circular system, the boxes can be separated to make smaller dynamic sets. The seats are a kind of nomadic school system. The audience can break away from the feeling of a conventional lecture space, and shift into formations suitable for intimate conversation or public discussion.

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While in studio 468 Seoidín has initiated a reading group with a group of feminist mothers. Collectively they are looking at 'Women's Labour' and unpacking feminist ideas and biases toward housework and the home including 'Can the home be seen and recognised as a place with political potential?'

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Humanity's place in the natural order is under scrutiny as never before, held in a precarious balance between visible and invisible forces: from the microscopic threat of a virus to the monumental power of climate change.

Drawing on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, the online exhibition  The Botanical Mind investigates the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. It positions the plant as both a universal symbol found in almost every civilisation and religion across the globe, and the most fundamental but misunderstood form of life on our planet.

This new online project has been developed in response to the COVID-19 crisis and the closure of the Camden Art Centre (London) due to the pandemic. Curated by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark,  The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree was originally conceived as a trans-generational group exhibition, bringing together surrealist, modernist and contemporary works alongside historical and ethnographic artefacts, textiles and manuscripts spanning more than 500 years.

Including new digital commissions; a focus on the Yawanawa people of Amazonian Brazil, who were to travel to London to take part in the exhibition but are now self-isolating in their village; and a new podcast series drawing on some of the leading voices in the fields of science, anthropology, music, art and philosophy, the project forms an expanding archive exploring ideas of plant sentience, indigenous cosmologies, radical botany, Gaia theory, quantum biology, and the influence of psychoactive plant medicines on various cultures and counter-cultures across the globe.

During this period of enforced stillness, our behaviour might be seen to resonate with plants: like them we are now fixed in one place, subject to new rhythms of time, contemplation, personal growth and transformation. Millions of years ago plants chose to forego mobility in favour of a life rooted in place, embedded in a particular context or environment. The life of a plant is one of constant, sensitive response to its environment-a process of growth, problem-solving, nourishment and transformation, played out at speeds and scales very different to our own. In this moment of global crisis and change there has perhaps never been a better moment to reflect on and learn from them.
The Cosmic Tree
The Cosmic Tree is a universal archetype that appears in the symbolism and mythologies of countless civilisations. It represents the Axis Mundi, or World Axis, that connects every aspect of the universe. The motif of a sacred tree is often associated with the figure of a serpent - an emblem of the shamanic experience, ascending from the shadows to the spiritual plane.

The great Twentieth century psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed a deep understanding of the archetypes of the collective unconscious and how they emerge as symbolic images. He created an extraordinary manuscript - the Liber Novus - now commonly known as The Red Book, filled with symbolic images he discovered in the depths of his own mind. The tree was a recurring motif, pictured as both supporting and connecting every aspect of the cosmos. Planted in the earth its roots reach down through the terrestrial realm toward darkness and the shadow realm, whilst its branches stretch up through the celestial, toward the star-filled heavens.

Artist Andrea Büttner reveals the now-overgrown planting-beds and greenhouses in a former Nazi concentration camp. Last year, she made a video, Karmel Dachau, about a Carmelite convent that was founded in 1964 adjacent to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. "I've known this convent since my childhood. Next to the concentration camp memorial, former greenhouse structures and the concrete borders of plant beds still exist. They were part of the plantation at the Dachau concentration camp, where the prisoners had to work and were killed by labor. One of the purposes of the Nazi's plantation was cultivate German drugs, German herbs, and to do research in biodynamic gardening."

Philip Taaffe, Calyptra, 2007. © Philip Taaffe; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Sacred Geometry
Echoing the fractal and spiral geometries inherent in plant-forms and flowers - as well as the psychoactive visions induced by (entheogenic) mind-manifesting plant medicines - certain patterns or designs emerge again and again in art and science, appearing and reappearing across cultures and through time. Blueprints for the natural world, they seem to connect the macro- to the micro-cosmos, revealing an encoded intelligence. These 'sacred' geometries can be seen in the arrangement of Camelia and Dahlia petals, the seeds in a sunflower head or the fractals of Romanesco broccoli. They recur throughout nature in the animal, mineral and vegetal kingdoms - the curve of a conch shell resembles the unfurling of a fern, or the spiral of a lizard's tail. The flower-like figure of the mandala, common to Indian, Japanese, Persian, Mesoamerican and European religions, is one of the oldest spiritual symbols and another example of these sacred geometries. As too, is the proliferation of pattern and repetition found across Islamic, Nordic and Neolithic art. As Theophrastus wrote in the 2nd Century BC: 'Repetition is the essence of the plant' - a life of unceasing nourishment, growth, replication, and a complex and constant extrapolation of forms.

Elena Valera Vasquez, Tela (textile), made in the traditional style of the Shipibo-Conibo people, Pucallpa, Ucayali River, Peru. Courtesy Private Collection

Indigenous Cosmologies
In the Amazon rainforest, the patterns found in nature are the basis of sacred geometries that indigenous people paint onto their skin and ceramics, or weave and embroider as textiles or bead-work. They call these patterns 'kené (sacred designs) and some say that these geometries once connected the universe in a continuous tissue -a primordial reality in which the planes of existence (material, immaterial, visible, invisible) were once unified and whole.

The Yawanawá people are settled in villages along the banks of River Gregorio, in the Brazilian rainforest -guardians of 200,000 hectares of biodiverse virgin rainforest. They survived violent contact with western society and after nearly a century of domination they have reclaimed their land and freedom, their ancestral culture and spirituality. They live in harmony with the natural cycles of nature, nourishing a profound connection with the healing plants of the Amazon.

In collaboration with Delfina Muñoz de Toro, an indigenist, visual artist and musician from Argentina, and artists from the Yawanawá family, The Botanical Mind presents a new project based on their kené and music. Their designs and music are central to their cosmology -their aesthetic vision involving plants, animals, and beings from the spirit world.

The Covid-19 pandemic poses a particular threat to indigenous communities who are vulnerable to infections and diseases from outside their territories. During the European colonisation of the Amazon, many ethnic groups were decimated by diseases that they had no immunity to. The Yawanawá, like many other indigenous communities, are now in self-isolation in their sacred village.

In 2014, independent filmmakers and sound-explorers Priscilla Telmon & Vincent Moon spent time with the Yawanawá family, recording and filming their daily life in the rainforest. This footage is part of an archive of the diverse spiritual traditions in Brazil and their interwoven roots - Híbridos [Hybrids] - amassed over a four-year period.

Their films are all available on their open-source, creative commons, platform and span the traditional ceremonies and plant-based healing techniques of indigenous peoples of the Amazon, as well as the syncretic lines of Umbanda -an Afro-Brazilian religion- and Santo Daime, which incorporates folk Catholicism, African Animism, and indigenous shamanism from South America, in particular the use of a sacred plant medicine known as Ayahuasca. Telmon and Moon's ethnographic experimental films and music recordings explore transcendent states with image and sound -filming sacred music, religious and shamanic rituals and drawing from the wisdom traditions and teachings they receive from spiritual elders and shamans around the world. They are compelled by a shared knowledge that everything, visible and invisible, is vibrating energy, the foundation of ancient science and healing through music.

Indigenous Amazonian people have a wealth of knowledge about their plant allies gained not through scientific experiment but in communion with music and the senses. They make allegiances with plants they consider to be sacred ancestors, emissaries of spiritual wisdom, plants that guide them and reveal their healing properties and preparations as musical transmissions -icaros or healing songs. In the Shipibo-Conibo lineage, an ethnic group indigenous to the Amazonian lowlands of Peru, these songs can have both visual and aural form, distinctive vocal and percussive music that is whispered, whistled and sung to stimulate contact with a subtle dimension that's interlaced with intricate abstract geometries. For these communities, both music and visual abstraction are central to their deeply entwined relationship with the rainforest.

For the Huni Kuin people from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, their designs are passed through ancestral lines signifying indigenous identity and spirituality. They sing music while they weave them into textiles -specific songs that are related to the designs they are making. They learn to weave from an early age and have a sense of transformation through the process which for them, is intimately related to The Great Spirit.

In the Twentieth Century many European artists and thinkers were inspired by indigenous cultures in the Americas, including Yves Laloy and Wolfgang Paalen. Josef and Anni Albers spent periods of time in Mexico and Peru where their work was influenced by pre-Colombian aesthetics, the ancient stone carvings at Mitla, and the traditional textiles of Andean weavers.
Astrological Botany
The intrinsic connection between geometry, music and the earthly and astral realms has been contemplated by European philosophers and artists since antiquity. But it would resurface in the 20th century in works by a number of outsider, surrealist and modernist artists including Anna Zemankova, Adolf Wölfli, Hilma Af Klint, Ithell Colqhoun, Eileen Agar, and Anni and Josef Albers.

Ithell Colquhoun (b. 1906-d. 1988) was a British-Indian artist and occultist. She studied at the Slade in the late 1920s and was later a member of the British Surrealist Group. She was expelled soon after, her work and ideas apparently too esoteric, even for them. As well as her work as an artist, she wrote a number of books and articles on magic, divination, landscape, and myth, as well as stories and poems. Colquhoun was a practicing occultist, interested in various systems of magical thought, hermeticism and alchemy. She created a tarot from shapes and forms automatically produced through poured enamel paints, as well as making paintings and drawings based on various automatic, or 'mantic' techniques. These works sought a kind of equivalence with the patterns and forms of nature and were, for her, aids to divination, enlightenment and knowledge.

Kerstin Brätsch's practice has involved collaborations with other artists, astrologers, psychics and artisans working with traditional stained glass and paper marbling techniques. Her distinctive, highly saturated and abstract images resemble patterns found in nature -geodes or other stone formations, or the markings of plants and animals- and also read like ciphers, a kind of language. She works with processes that are like alchemical rituals, combining pigments and liquids with other materials in precise measures according to traditional, event ancient, methods and surrendering to the intelligence of the materials in themselves - the way they behave.

Bruce Conner, INKBLOT DRAWING (5/13/93), 1993, Pelikan ink and YES glue with photocopy
23 1/16 x 21 7/16 in. (58.6 x 54.5 cm). Photo: Steven Probert © 2020 Conner Family Trust, San Francisco / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

As Within, So Without
In Carl Jung's concept of the archetypes, he perceived continuities between the forms of physical as well as psychic reality, essential patterns - regularities of form and structure - that appear in nature and arise naturally in the mind. The many mandalas that appear in his Liber Novus, or Red Book, were created with a method he called Active Imagination - an attempt to 'form in matter' his innermost thoughts and the structure of his psyche.

The mandala is one of the oldest spiritual symbols and an image which attempts to both represent the universe schematically - with the individual subject occupying the central position - whilst also operating as an active meditation device, a gateway enabling transformative states of consciousness. They are common to various traditions of eastern and western mysticism, but they have also been created by a number of contemporary and modern artists.

The popularised fractal or spiral geometries associated with the art and images of psychedelia, appear not only in the morphology of plants but in the visions induced by mind-manifesting plant medicines, like Psilocybin found naturally in certain mushrooms, Mescaline arising in the Peyote cactus or Dimethyltryptamine, a substance secreted naturally in the brain, and activated when drinking Ayahuasca. The mystical experiences invoked by psychoactive plants, as well as encounters with Eastern mysticism, became central to the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, exemplified in art, music and literature by figures like Bruce Conner, William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley and Brion Gysin.

Scholars have also speculated on the role of entheogenic plants in the evolution of consciousness and language, as well as the development of global religions, including that the mystical substance Soma in the ancient Indian Vedas was a psychoactive mushroom, and that the ritualistic use of psychedelic plants played a part in the development of Christianity.

Bruce Conner (1933-2008), well known for his landmark experimental films, was motivated by mysticism, spirituality and psychedelia. His visionary works were often filled with dark subject matter, symbolic and religious imagery. One of Conner's first departures from the found material that constituted his earlier works is Looking for Mushrooms, a visionary travelogue including footage of journeys he and his wife Jean made in Mexico, as well as scenes of their life in San Francisco. Between 1961 - 62 while he and Jean were living in Mexico City, they ventured into the rural landscapes to look for psychedelic mushrooms, on at least one occasion accompanied by Timothy Leary who appears on camera. The original version was shown as a loop, with a soundtrack by The Beatles. Conner revisited it in 1996, repeating each frame five times, stretching the footage out to fourteen-and-a-half minutes and accompanying it with a soundtrack composed and performed by experimental musician Terry Riley. The, at-times dark, subject matter combined with rapid rhythm, multiple-exposure sequences and strobe effects, evokes an atmosphere of meditation or perhaps even a psychedelic experience, in which subliminal images are allowed space to arise within the mind.

Jordan Belson (1926 - 2011) made paintings from a young age and later became known as one of the most important artists in 20th century avant-garde cinema and visual music. He was interested in expansive states of consciousness, devoting himself to a meditation practice and experimenting with hallucinogens. His films and paintings convey the inner images of his mind's eye, of altered psychic states. He sought universal truths by voyaging inwardly, through meditation, to discover primary forms - circles, spheres, squares, pentagrams, hexagons - that also appear in sacred art, in Tibetan mandalas and tantric paintings.

Belson was a mystic who combined the spiritual with the scientific, with geometry and physics. His paintings and films are filled with dynamic and abstract forms that could equally emerge in the nebulous forms of deep space phenomena, the celestial, as well as in the sub-atomic realm or the immaterial expanses of the mind.

Gemma Anderson, Garden of forking paths (series); Mitosis Score, spiralling spindles, 2019. Pencil, watercolour and colour pencil on paper, 31 x 41 cm. Courtesy the artist

Vegetal Ontology
Plant sentience is often dismissed as its characteristics cannot easily be overlaid on the signs of consciousness expressed in human, or animal, subjects. A philosophical consideration of vegetal life requires an expanded appreciation for modes of being peculiar to plants, attending to them on their own terms as centres of intelligence that exert behaviour within scales of time and movement that differ vastly from our own. If the animal is bounded by a body that moves, the plant is instead defined in 'being-sessile'; rooted in one place and subject to change and growth in a complex and highly sophisticated relationship with its environment.

We now know that plants can learn from experience and environmental stimuli; that they can interact and communicate, not just with other plants but with other animals and insects in highly manipulative ways; and their sensitive, rhizomatic root structure and decentred, collective intelligence provides a far more modern way of thinking about social and environmental relations. To be sessile, embedded in a milieu, is to express life-force on a molecular-cellular level. Plants do not possess a neurological centre but, like art perhaps, they are defined by a state of ceaseless unfolding, a material knowledge or thinking without thinking, and an insatiable, immanent becoming.

Gemma Anderson's experimental drawings emerge from an iterative process of (mis-) understanding and reforming in her longstanding collaboration with a biologist (James Wakefield) and a philosopher of science (John Dupré). Following Goethe, they share the question of how to create mental and physical images of living processes without adopting a 'thing/object' based vision. They understand living systems as 'processual' - as patterns and eddies in a flow rather than static, solid objects in a machine. Anderson's images represent major processes in living organisms as scores for an orchestra or choreographies of elements working together in a dance reflecting on the shared qualities of pattern and waves of energy.

These drawings make visible aspects of dynamic living processes such as cell division and protein folding (cross species) at the molecular and nano scale. Rather than describing morphological characteristics, the abstract content of the drawings aligns to energetic relationships and movement patterns. They are made in collaboration with cell and molecular scientists and a philosopher of biology as part of an ongoing research project 'Representing Biology as Process' [www.probioart.uk].
Artists and Writers
Eileen Agar / Anni Albers / Josef Albers / Sarah Angliss / Consuelo "Chelo" González Amézcua / Gemma Anderson with Wakefield Lab and John Dupré / Anna Atkins / Kirk Barley / Jordan Belson / Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater / Karl Blossfeldt / Carol Bove / Jagadish Chandra Bose / Kerstin Brätsch / Bernd Brabec De Mori / Hildegarde von Bingen / Andrea Büttner / Adam Chodzko / Ithell Colquhoun / Bruce Conner / Brenda Danilowitz / Das Institut / Mirtha Dermisache / Minnie Evans / Cerith Wyn Evans / Charles Filiger / Robert Fludd / Monica Gagliano / Giorgio Griffa / Brion Gysin / Friedrich Wilhelm Heine / Ernst Haeckel / Dr Stephan Harding / Anna Haskel / Tamara Henderson / Channa Horwitz / Textiles from the Huni Kuin (Kaxinawa) people / C.G. Jung / Joachim Koester / Rachid Koraïchi / Hilma af Klint / Emma Kunz / Yves Laloy / Ghislaine Leung / Linder / Simon Ling / Michael Marder / Agnes Martin / André Masson / John McCracken / Terence McKenna / Henri Michaux / Matt Mullican / Wolfgang Paalen / Paul Păun / Stefan A. Pedersen / Santiago Ramón y Cajal / Steve Reinke and James Richards / Edith Rimmington / Adele Röder / Daniel Rios Rodriguez / Rupert Sheldrake / Textiles and ceramics from the Shipibo-Conibo people / Penny Slinger / F. Percy Smith / Janet Sobel / Philip Taaffe / Priscilla Telmon and Vincent Moon / Fred Tomaselli / Delfina Muñoz de Toro / Alexander Tovborg / David Tudor / Lee Ufan / Scottie Wilson / Terry Winters / Adolf Wölfli / Bryan Wynter / Henriette Zéphir / Anna Zemánková / Unica Zürn / artists from the Yawanawá community

The Botanical Mind Podcast Series has been developed and produced with Matt Williams and Alannah Chance.

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THE BOTANICAL MIND. ART, MYSTICISM AND THE COSMIC TREE

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Drawing on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, the online exhibition "The Botanical Mind" investigates the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time.

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A project by Hemra Teke, Farshad Saffari Ghandehari, Mohammad Ghasemi / Isfahan, Iran

"Dargoosh is a product for listening to the voices and memories of the trees. The trees have spirits and they are affected by their surroundings."

Listening to the Trees

Once upon a time, a day in many years later, in northern jungles of Iran, people live in tree houses.

Gholi is one of these habitants who lives in his hazelnut house.

A morning, when the roaster sings, he wakes up.
He washes his face with his blanket.
He walks through his green bathroom where he has his own organic garden.
He looks in the mirror and then he takes a look at the photos of his grandfather, he sees his eyes are blue so he decides to use herbal tea that changes his eye color.
He looks at his plants and he finds out he runs out of blue herbal tea.
He turns back into his room and turns his bed upside down so as to transform it to a treadmill.
He has to run on it every day to generate the electricity of his house.
He takes some purple tomatoes to go to Jafar's home, who always have blue herbal tea, and eat bread, cheese and tomato for breakfast.
He looks around on the way Jafar's home and thanks God for his great life.
He rings Jafar's house doorbell and Jafar invites him to his house for having breakfast.
Jafar suggests to listen to some tree music while they are eating.
Music comes to the moment that reminds them about a good memory, so, Jafar and Gholi talk about it, while their eyes color is changing to blue.

...

Dargoosh, Reunion of man and nature and the music of the trees. In a future that, the trees are much important than before they are known as the most important species, "Dargoosh" is a product for listening to the voices and memories of the trees. The trees that have spirits and they will be affected by their surroundings. Dargoosh is made of two words, "Dar" that means Tree in Persian, and "Goosh" that means ear. Dargoosh is a product that has two separate parts, one is a belt that will be enclosed around the tree and the second part will be the player and instrumentalist of the voices of the tree that will be placed in a home, where has the warmth and friendliness of the family and friends. Dargoosh's belt has a technology that works with sending and receiving electromagnetic waves into the tree and sends the data to the receiver inside the player part of the Dargoosh in the house. There is a controlling knob that helps the user to choose the kind of memories and the time of them and send them wirelessly to the player. Setting the belt up happens on the belt that is on the tree to keep the user and the tree in constant interaction. The main body of Dargoosh is like traditional Tar, a musical instrument from Iran. It is crafted by hand from berry tree. The process of making sound in Dargoosh is almost like the traditional Tar but instead of having strings on the inner stomach skin of sheep there is a comb and pin mechanism under the skin that in the final product Dargoosh player is not only a player it is almost an instrumentalist that receives the notes from the tree and plays them.

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Listening to the Trees - GlobalFuturesLab

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A project by Hemra Teke, Farshad Saffari Ghandehari, Mohammad Ghasemi / Isfahan, Iran Once upon a time, a day in many years later, in northern jungles of Iran, people live in tree houses. Gholi is one of these habitants who lives in his hazelnut house.

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Souvenirs Feeling Human Anima Azmari Ropa Vieja In Search for Pieace Sharing Masks El Arca de la Vida Sensory Paduka Together Preserve the Memory Spiritual Fluid Singing to the fish Karma Coin Listening to the Trees Huevo Patentado Biological tatoo Isolation Cafe Rugstyle Shutter Out Efficiency Meter A Love Story Light Up Gallinazo Danza energética

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Speculative Futures: an online discussion about Speculative Design practices

A Speculative Design discussion from the perspective of the SpeculativeEdu community, Wednesday, 3 March at 18:00 (CET).

The aim of the Speculative Futures event is to showcase Speculative Design and related practices from the perspective of the SpeculativeEdu community. SpeculativeEdu, an Erasmus+ project, started in late 2018 with the intention of strengthening Speculative Design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experience and advancing educational practice in the area of Speculative Design and its self-critical approach. This 90-minute event will present a selection of case studies, putting designers up front, presenting their futures. The first part will include three projects selected from the SpeculativeEdu landscape and the second part will include three projects from the Global Futures Lab, Mexico City (GFL/MX). The European and North American perspectives will be at the forefront of the event, aiming to introduce participants with an emphasis on the "real world"; that is, responding to the needs of people, society, public policy and the economy. The SpeculativeEdu team will give a short introduction and will moderate Q&A sessions with invited designers.

The Speculative Futures event programme:
18:00 Opening words by hosts

* Ivica Mitrović, University of Split, Croatia

* Karla Paniagua, Global Futures Lab, Mexico

SpeculativeEdu: 18:15 Introduction Case studies
Moderated by: Sara Božanić, Institute for Transmedia Design, Slovenia and Julian Hanna, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Global Futures Lab: 18:45 Introduction

* Karla Paniagua, Global Futures Lab, Mexico City

* Paolo Cardini, Global Futures Lab, Mexico City

Case studies
Moderated by: Julian Hanna, Tilburg University, The Netherlands and Sara Božanić, Institute for Transmedia Design, Slovenia
19:15 Panel and Closing words

* Ivica Mitrović, University of Split, Croatia

* Karla Paniagua, Global Futures Lab, Mexico

* Paolo Cardini, Global Futures Lab, Mexico City

* Sara Božanić, Institute for Transmedia Design, Slovenia

* Julian Hanna, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

The event is organized by Speculative Futures Milan in collaboration with Ivica Mitrović and Sara Božanić (SpeculativeEdu), and Speculative Futures Lisbon.

Join us for our Speculative Futures online discussion (free) - Reserve your spot now!

Case Studies

The One With the Programmable Friend

Set in a near future where automation has become commonplace, The One With the Programmable Friend takes as a point of departure new social realities of living with robots. Programmable and stereotypical, the robots' behaviours reflect different characteristics of their respective owners/human friends, who hold contrasting views towards these algorithmic friends. As crises emerge in the plot, themes such as robot rights, employment and love are explored.

The 1990s TV sitcom Friends was used as a format to discuss the future. Through a series of exercises, activities and processes, authors of The One With the Programmable Friend became the script writers for an experimental, non-normative version of this popular representation of friendship, urban living, employment and love. The project was developed through Future Friends, a SpeculativeEdu workshop led by Jimmy Loizeau, Matt Ward, and Dash Macdonald of Goldsmiths, the University of London (UK) and James Auger, École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (France).

Plasticful Foods

Plasticful Foods are products made from the finest organic ingredients and recycled plastics, and by consuming Plasticful product consumers help clean up the planet! Born from a desire to disrupt waste management behaviours, Plasticful invites audiences to imagine "waste" as a resource.

The project combines facts and data from the real world, with humour and real-life marketing strategies. It calls attention to the global microplastic crisis by envisioning waste management processes as more sustainable, and even circular. The main objective of the project is to disrupt our audience's normalised thought patterns around waste, so they will be uncomfortable enough to seek a solution. Therefore Plasticful Chips, Plasticful Burgers, and Plasticful Tea products are used to motivate people to act.

"We Did Something for Africa"

Situated in the small village of Lushoto in Tanzania, the We Did Something for Africa project introduces a number of questions that focus on the speculative practice itself, which were embodied in the self-reflexive project as it attempted to address current criticisms. The discussion is embodied in the satirical representation of uncritical and constrained approaches in speculative practice, which are unfortunately still common. This grotesque answer questions the reliability of designers as visionaries of collective futures. Exposing failures of design processes was based from the beginning on discomfort with the role which we were given. To avoid designing for a place to which we have no rightful connection, we chose to prevent others from following the consequences of neo-colonialism.

Can we speculate about other peoples' realities?
Is it better to act with good intentions on an uninformed opinion than to do nothing?
Is deciding not to design the most radical act of design?
Can knowledge ever be neutral?
Is speculation possible without projecting one's own desires or fears?
Where is the gray area between inspiration and colonisation?

The We Did Something for Africa project was realised during the SpeculativeEdu NeoRural Futures workshop, led by Alessandra Del Nero, Human Ecosystem Relazioni, and Federico Biggio, University of Turin, Université Paris VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis.

The ark of life

This artifact belongs to a future scenario in which suicide is not taboo at all. When citizens in Mexico City turn 20, parents give their children a personalized box containing a pill to administer suicide to anyone who decides to do so. The ark includes small drawers with personal memories, a fingerprint reader, and a capsule with a single lethal dose.

The Ark of Life was created during the Global Futures Lab Mexico 2018, led by Paolo Cardini and Karla Paniagua.

Chinampa Ring

Inspired by medieval rings that contained a secret compartment to store poison and the cultivation method on water known as the Mexican chinampas. This object corresponds to a scenario in which completely organic seeds are rare jewels, more valuable than precious stones, to the extent that there is a global black market for their conservation. Each ring contains seeds, which are carried around the world to preserve the genetic heritage.

Chinampa Ring was created during the Global Futures Lab Mexico 2019, led by Paolo Cardini and Karla Paniagua.

Posional

Posional suggests a critique of the increasingly complicated relationship between humans and their emotions, artificially mediated. The term "posional" results from the fusion between potion and emotion. The project includes five glass bottles that contain organic compounds used by people in an alternative future in which emotions must be induced externally: Joy, anger, surprise, disgust, and fear.

Posional was devised during the Global Futures Lab Mexico 2019, led by Paolo Cardini and Karla Paniagua.

Join us online on March 3 rd (the event is free of charge). Apply here!

The SpeculativeEdu project has been funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

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SpeculativeEdu is an educational, project funded by ERASMUS+, the European Union programme for education, training, youth, and sport, with the aim of strengthening speculative design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experience whilst developing new methods in the field of speculative design.

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ANNE & DENIS have lived and worked in Paris since 1990

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Philosophisches Seminar, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany

Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity. Among these examples are conscious experience itself, "Bayesian" and social VR, amnestic re-embodiment, merging human-controlled avatars and virtual agents, virtual ego-dissolution, controlling the reality/virtuality continuum, the confluence of VR and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as of VR and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), VR-based social hallucinations and the emergence of a virtual Lebenswelt, religious faith and practical phenomenology. Hopefully, these examples can serve as first proposals for intensified future interaction and mark out some potential new directions for research.

"Virtual reality encompasses virtual unreality" ( Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016, p.38).

Introduction

What are the most promising future directions for an intensified cooperation between the philosophical community and virtual reality research (VR), potentially also including other disciplines like cognitive neuroscience or experimental psychology? The purpose of this contribution is to take a fresh look, from a philosopher's perspective, at some specific research areas in the field of VR, isolating and highlighting aspects of particular interest from a conceptual and metatheoretical perspective. This article is intended as a source of inspiration for an interdisciplinary audience; if each reader finds just one of the ideas presented below useful, it will have served its purpose. Hence the article was not written as a technical contribution by one philosopher for other philosophers and is not meant as an exhaustive list of philosophical research targets. I simply draw attention to a selection of topics that are, I believe, characterized by an exceptionally high degree of heuristic fecundity. To make these issues accessible to an interdisciplinary readership, I will briefly introduce some central concepts as I go (see Box 1), and sometimes use a more essayistic style. The hope is that these topics, deliberately presented along with a series of concrete examples, can serve as contact points between both disciplines and mark out promising subfields in which VR researchers and the philosophical community could profit from intensified future interaction. I will briefly highlight the theoretical relevance of most examples, along with the potential future benefits of intensified cooperation. Sometimes, I will also try to sketch a specific technological realization that would interestingly constrain philosophical theory formation, open new routes, or constitute the "perfect" or "maximal" VR-experience in a given context.

Box 1. Philosophical concepts.
Amnestic re-embodiment
Re-embodiment of the subject of experience in VR without the conscious knowledge that one is currently immersed in a virtual environment and identified with a virtual body or character.
Counterfactual content
A linguistic statement or a mental representation has counterfactual content if it contradicts the current state of reality. Thought experiments, conscious experiences, and most computer-generated models of reality are counterfactual in this sense, because they do not represent or reflect the actual, current state of the world. In some cases, they may simply be classified as "false" or "misrepresentational," in other cases they may be adequate, for example if they target a possible, but highly likely perceptual situation.
Epistemic agent model (EAM)
A conscious internal model of the self as actively selecting targets of knowledge, as an agent that stands in epistemic relations (like "perceiving," "believing," "knowing") to the world and to itself (as in "controlling the focus of attention," "reasoning" or "knowing that one knows"), and as an entity that has the capacity to actively create such relations of knowing. Human beings only have an EAM intermittently, for about one third of their conscious life-time ( Metzinger, 2013b, Metzinger, 2015 section 2.5, in Metzinger, 2017). Today's virtual agents and robots are not yet driven by an internal EAM.
Epistemic innocence
The theory that certain mental processes such as delusion and confabulation (which may count as suboptimal from an epistemological perspective) can have epistemic benefits. The idea is that in some cases, what superficially appears as an imperfect cognitive process may really enable knowledge acquisition.
Epistemology
The study of knowledge that seeks to answer questions like: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for saying that one possess knowledge? What makes a belief a justified belief? How many different kinds of knowledge are there? Is there anything like certainty?
Global neural correlate of consciousness (GNCC)
The minimally sufficient set of neurofunctional properties that brings about the conscious model of reality as a whole at a given point in time.
Global transparency
Phenomenal transparency for a whole conscious model of reality.
Hybrid avatar/virtual agent systems (HAVAS)
Digital representations of persons and/or epistemic agents which are simultaneously human-controlled and AI-controlled.
Justified true belief
According to one traditional philosophical model, three individually necessary conditions (namely, truth, belief, and justification) are jointly sufficient for a subject S to possess knowledge: S knows that p if and only if p is true and S is justified in believing that p.

A pre-given social world in which subjects experience themselves as being united by a quality of "togetherness." A Lebenswelt is intersubjectively given and is actively constituted by everyday social interactions leading to a shared first-person plural perspective (a more or less implicit group context, a mentally represented "we").
Ontology
In philosophy, the investigation of what there is, i.e., of what entities exist and what the most general features and relations of those entities are (for example, physical objects, God, universals, numbers, etc.). In computer and information science, the representation, formal naming, and definition of entities and relations substantiating a domain.
Other-minds illusion
The conscious experience of currently interacting with a system that has mental states when it really has none, for example the (hallucinatory) experience of encountering another self-conscious entity that actively selects targets of knowledge or is really "perceiving," "believing," "knowing" in a way that is relevantly similar to the observer. An other-minds illusion is a social hallucination.
Other-minds problem
The epistemological problem of gaining knowledge about another entity's mental states, for example the subjectively felt character of its conscious experiences or the content of its beliefs.
Phenomenal transparency
Transparency as used in this article is a property of conscious representations; unconscious representations in the human brain are neither transparent nor opaque. "Transparency" means that only the content of a representation is available for introspective access; the earlier processing stages or aspects of the construction process are hidden. Therefore, the content cannot be subjectively experienced as a representation. This leads to the phenomenology of "direct realism," a subjective experience of immediacy and realness, as if, for example, directly perceiving mind-independent objects.
Phenomenal unit of identification (UI)
The conscious content that is referred to in phenomenological reports of the type "I am this!" (see section Example 2: Embodiment and Bodily Self-Consciousness, for a definition cf. Metzinger, 2018a).
Postbiotic social boot-strapping scenario (PSBS)
A scenario in which multiple AIs create a non-biological Lebenswelt by mutually interacting with each other using virtual agents based on transparent, VR-based personoid interfaces, thereby causing robust other-minds illusions in each other. Such systems would apply the algorithms they originally developed in man-machine interactions to machine-machine communication, while still using individual virtual avatars or agent-models as their interfaces.
rt-fMRI-NCCF
A real-time fMRI representation of the global NCC that is directly converted into a virtual reality environment. This would create a perceivable dynamic landscape which the conscious subject can directly experience, navigate, and causally influence via multiple real-time neurofeedback loops.
Second-order virtual agent
A machine-controlled virtual character or person-model that transparently represents itself as socially situated, i.e., that has an internal model of itself as standing in genuine social relations to other persons or other self-conscious agents. A second-order agent has an inbuilt other-minds illusion.
Social hallucination
See other-minds illusion.
Synthetic phenomenology (SP)
Artificial conscious experience realized on non-biological carrier systems.

Philosophy of Mind

Empirically informed philosophy of mind is, rather obviously, the area within philosophy that can most directly profit from recent results in VR research. The VR community should also actively seek more productive input from philosophers of mind. I will confine myself to two examples.

Example 1: Consciousness

The richest, maximally robust, and close-to-perfect VR-experience we currently know is our very own, ordinary, biologically evolved form of waking consciousness itself. VR is the best technological metaphor for conscious experience we currently have. The history of philosophy has shown how technological metaphors for the human mind always have their limitations: Think of the mechanical clock, the camera, the steam engine, or, more recently, the computer as a physically realized abstract automaton, with psychological properties as exhaustively described by a Turing machine table ( Putnam, 1967, 1975, 1992; Churchland, 2005; Boden, 2006). All these metaphors have severe limitations. Using the computer example, the classical-cognitivist metaphor of a von-Neuman-machine cannot accommodate dynamical embodiment, subsymbolic representation, non-rule based types of information processing, or the experiential character of phenomenal states as subjectively experienced from a first-person perspective. Nevertheless, it is hard to underestimate the influence and impact the long-abandoned "computer model of mind" has had on modern analytic philosophy of mind. Technological metaphors often possess great heuristic fecundity and help us in developing new ideas and testable hypotheses. Indeed, the computer model of mind has led to the emergence of a whole new academic discipline: classical cognitive science. Similarly, I believe that the heuristic potential of the VR metaphor for philosophical theories of consciousness has just barely been grasped.

Some philosophers ( Metzinger, 1991, p. 127; Metzinger, 1993, p. 243; Metzinger, 2003a, 2010, p. 6; Revonsuo, 1995, p. 55; Revonsuo, 2006, p. 115; Noë, 2002; cf. Clowes and Chrisley, 2012; Westerhoff, 2016, for critical discussion and recent overviews) have already argued at length that the conscious experience produced by biological nervous systems is a virtual model of the world-a dynamic internal simulation. In standard situations it cannot be experienced as a virtual model because it is phenomenally transparent-we "look through it" as if we were in direct and immediate contact with reality ( Moore, 1903; Metzinger, 2003b; for the notion of "phenomenal transparency" and a brief explanation of other philosophical concepts see Box 1). Likewise, technological VR is the representation of possible worlds and possible selves, with the aim of making them appear ever more realistic-ideally, by creating a subjective sense of "presence" in the user. "Presence" is a complex phenomenal quality, the three major dimensions of which are identification (i.e., being present as a self), self-location in a temporal frame of reference (i.e., being present as a self now, in this very moment), and self-location in space (i.e., the classical "place illusion," Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016). "Presence" is a phenomenal quality normally going along with a minimal sense of selfhood ( Blanke and Metzinger, 2009), and it results from the simulation of a self-centered world-in VR settings as well as in everyday life. Interestingly, some of our best theories of the human mind and conscious experience itself use a similar explanation: Leading current theories of brain dynamics ( Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2013; Clark, 2016; Metzinger and Wiese, 2017) describe it as the constant creation of hierarchical internal models of the world, virtual neural representations of reality which express probability density functions and work by continuously generating hypotheses about the hidden causes of sensory input, minimizing their prediction error (see Wiese and Metzinger, 2017 for an accessible introduction). The parallels between virtuality and phenomenality are striking. Here are some points of contact between VR and philosophical phenomenology:

* Phenomenal content and virtual content are both counterfactual.

Our best current theories of consciousness describe it as something that could be called a form of "online dreaming" ( Metzinger, 2003a, p. 140), in which conscious waking is a dreamlike state currently modulated by the constraints produced by ongoing sensory input. It is a controlled hallucination based on predictions about the current sensory input ( Hohwy, 2013; Clark, 2016; Wiese and Metzinger, 2017). Relative to the actual state of the world, if taken as referring to this state, all predictive representations are non-veridical. Strictly speaking they are misrepresentations-but are nevertheless potentially beneficial for the system in which they occur ( Wiese, 2017). VR content is typically part of an animated computer graphics model, and if taken as depicting the actual physical 3D scene surrounding the user, it is also a misrepresentation. However, VR content does not result from a design flaw-the whole point is to generate perceptual representations of possible worlds in the user's brain, not of the actual one. Phenomenal content (the brain-based content of conscious, subjective experience) is the content of an ongoing simulation too: a prediction of the probable causes of a sensory signal. It is not a veridical representation of the actual environment, and it is useful for precisely this reason. By definition, machine-generated virtual content is counterfactual (see Box 1) as well, although it may be interestingly blended with real-world elements, as in augmented reality (AR) setups.

If this first point is correct, then it would be interesting to create VR utilizing the same mechanisms the human brain uses. What if, for example, in dynamically updating itself, the animated computer graphics model used the same computational principles of top-down processing, statistical estimation, prediction error minimization, hierarchical Bayesian inference, and predictive control many theoreticians now believe to be operative in the brain itself? Would this change the user's phenomenology in any interesting way, for example its fine-grained temporal dynamics? This is one example of a new research question that is interesting from a philosophical perspective, but which also has implications for making the VR experience better. It should therefore be of interest to people in the field and it could be tackled with interdisciplinary cooperation.

* VR and conscious experience both present us with an integrated ontology.

Ontology is not only a subfield in academic philosophy investigating the logic and semantics of concepts like "being," "becoming," or "existence." The concept also refers to an area in computer science and information science investigating the representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations of the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate a given-or even all possible-domains. Interestingly, the conscious brain is an information-processing system too, and it certainly represents data and entities as "being," "becoming," or "existing." Conscious experience can be described as a highly-integrated set of hypotheses about the likely causes of the inputs received by the embodied brain, in the external as well as in the internal (i.e., intraorganismic) environment. It is not a list of propositions containing existential quantifiers. For an information-processing system to be conscious means it runs under an integrated ontology (see Box 1), a unified, subsymbolic situation model, which is internally presented to it in an integrated temporal frame of reference defining a subjective now, a "window of presence" ( Metzinger, 2003a). VR creates ontologies and integrated situation models too, but their presentation within a single "lived moment" (i.e., a Jamesian "specious present," the temporal frame of reference referred to above, plus the construction of an experiential subject; see Clowes and Chrisley, 2012, p. 511), is still left to the brain of the user. If this is correct, then it follows that if we understand the computational principles underlying self-location and self-presentation within an internal temporal frame of reference in our brains, and if future VR technology were then to create a virtual "specious present" as part of a yet-to-be-invented form of virtual time representation, then this would amount to the creation of a very simple form of artificial consciousness.

The conjunction of these two first points leads us to a bold general claim: The "perfect" VR system would lead to artificial consciousness-the creation of synthetic phenomenology (SP; see Box 1). Call this the "SP-principle": In its maximal realization, VR would be tantamount to the creation of artificial phenomenal states, to a technological realization of synthetic phenomenology. Of course, this would have to include a fully integrated multimodal scene, a virtual "specious present," a self-model that creates a first-person perspective by being a virtual model of an epistemic agent (EAM; see Box 1 and section 2.5 in Metzinger, 2017, for details and further references), plus global transparency (see Box 1). Today, there still is a biological user, partially immersed in a visual situation model created by advanced computer graphics, and what VR technology ultimately aims at is real-time control of the information flow within the minimally sufficient global neural correlate of consciousness (GNCC; see Box 1).

This seems to be a second general principle: As of today, the ultimate "engineering target" is the conscious model of reality in a biological agent's brain. VR is a non-invasive form of neurotechnology targeting the GNCC. But imagine a world without conscious biological creatures, in which an autonomous, intelligent robot had learned to control its interaction with its physical environment by opening an internal global workspace. Then imagine that the content of this workspace is determined by the "perfect" VR sketched above. If we imagine this robot as internally using a maximal realization of VR-global integration, specious present, transparency, and a self-model which it now "confuses" with itself (see section Example 2: Embodiment and Bodily Self-Consciousness and Metzinger, 2003a), then this would be tantamount to a machine model of embodied conscious experience.

* Phenomenal content and virtual content are both locally determined.

It is widely accepted in philosophy of mind that phenomenal properties supervene locally; and as of today, virtual content is processed in single machines and presented by local devices to individual users. This will soon change through the confluence of developments in VR, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and social networks. For philosophers, this will create an interesting new target for the internalism/externalism debate on mental content ( Menary, 2010). For computer scientists, the question arises of what the "perfect" form of social VR would actually be. In social VR, what exactly is the relationship between the phenomenal content locally instantiated in the brains of multiple users and shared virtual content created by causal interactions distributed over different machines and artificial media? Social VR is a field that needs a combination of new technological approaches and rigorous conceptual analysis, for instance with regard to the concept of "tele-immersion" (for an excellent example, see Ohl, 2017).

The first contribution computer scientists can and certainly will make lies in the field of interface design: For the special domain of social VR, what would be the most efficient and reliable interfaces linking human brains via BCI-coupling and shared VR? This issue is theoretically relevant because it addresses a classical philosophical problem: the "other-minds problem" (Box 1). We assume that each of us has a direct knowledge of our own experience, but we can never directly know that someone other than ourselves is in the mental state they are in. Could social VR create more direct forms of knowing another person's mind? Could it provide us with new means of acquiring phenomenological concepts like "red" or "joy" which we apply to inner states of sentient creatures other than ourselves? We have already begun to causally couple the self-models in human user's brains to robots and avatars via robotic and virtual re-embodiment today (see Figure 1), but what would a more direct linkage of conscious minds involve? They could constitute new inner "modes of presentation" for social facts, as philosophers might say. It is interesting to note how we are already beginning to re-embody ourselves not only in robots and avatars, but also in other human being's physical bodies ( De Oliveira et al., 2016). This naturally leads to the question of virtually re-instantiating the higher levels of a human user's self-model in those of another human being's self-model, of a more abstract form of re-embodiment in another self-conscious mind. This then would be the step from virtual body swap ( Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008) to virtual mind swap. Apart from a careful conceptual description of research targets, the coupling of whole conscious world-models plus embedded high-level, cognitive self-representations (and not only bodily self-models) would require a deep confluence of neurotechnology and VR. The maximal realization of social VR would therefore consist in creating an artificial platform on which whole individual biological minds can merge, thereby transcending the principle of local determination.

Figure 1. "PSM-actions": A test subject lies in a nuclear magnetic resonance tomograph at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. With the aid of data goggles, he sees an avatar, also lying in a scanner. The goal is to create the illusion that he is embodied in this avatar. The test subject's motor imagery is classified and translated into movement commands, setting the avatar in motion. After a training phase, test subjects were able to control a far remote robot in France "directly with their minds" via the Internet, seeing the environment in France through the robot's camera eyes. Figure with friendly permission from Doron Friedmann and Michel Facerias; written informed consent for publication of figure has been provided by Michael Facerias.

* Phenomenal content and virtual content can vary along a continuum of opacity and transparency, respectively, of explicit virtuality and projected realism.

Today, a broad standard definition of "phenomenal transparency" (Box 1), on which most philosophers roughly agree, is that it essentially consists in only the content properties of a conscious mental representation being available for introspection. Any non-intentional or "vehicle-properties" involved in the representation are not available for introspection. In other words, it is not experienced as a representation. Introspectively, we can access its content, but not the content-formation process itself. Typically, it is assumed that transparency in this sense is a property of all phenomenal states (for more, see Metzinger, 2003a, b).

But of course, the standard assumption is incomplete, because opaque phenomenal representations also exist (whereas unconscious states are neither transparent nor opaque in this sense). Phenomenological examples of opaque state-classes are, most notably, consciously experienced thoughts: We experience them as mind-dependent, as mental representations that could be true or false. Similarly, some emotions, pseudo-hallucinations, and lucid dreams are subjectively experienced as representational processes. Most importantly, the phenomenology of VR is also typically characterized by incomplete immersion, with varying degrees of opacity. This may change as the technology advances. Phenomenally opaque processes sometimes appear to us as deliberately initiated cognitive or representational processes. However, sometimes they appear to be automatic or spontaneously occurring; they are limited or even global phenomenal simulations and frequently are not under the experiential subject's control.

Here is another concrete proposal: Perhaps the most interesting contribution VR researchers could make is to develop a reliable "volume control for realness." Obviously, a clear conceptual taxonomy is needed as well, but the role of computer scientists in this type of cooperation would lie in developing a metric for immersion and self-identification-a quantifiable approach. The interesting point here is that human phenomenology varies along a spectrum from "realness" to "mind-dependence." This frequently overlooked phenomenological feature provides another conceptual bridge into the representational deep structure of VR-environments: there are degrees of immersion. VR environments can be more or less realistic, and this general property is itself directly and concretely reflected in the user's phenomenology (cf. the epigraph for this article). Below I will argue that VR is the most relevant technology to create innovative experimental designs for philosophical phenomenologists interested in empirically researching the transparency/opacity continuum characterizing human consciousness (as introduced in Metzinger, 2003b).

The "perfect" form of VR technology would be one in which the user-or the experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, or philosopher interested in consciousness-could reliably set the "level of realness" for the experience. If we calibrate the transparency parameter of ordinary waking states as 1, then possible levels would include values >1, leading to "hyperreal" phenomenologies (as in certain drug-induced states of consciousness, during "ecstatic" epileptic seizures, or religious experiences), and values < 1 (as in "unreal" experiences like depersonalization or derealization disorder). Some VR applications aim at phenomenal presence, realism, embodiment, and an illusion of immediacy, others will want to create a "dreamlike" quality (for example in entertainment settings). There are two specific subtypes of phenomenal states which (a) are of special systematic interest to philosophers, and (b) are directly related to the typical phenomenological profile created by VR technology: the lucid dream state and the out-of-body experience (OBE; see Metzinger, 2009b, 2013c, for philosophical discussion).

There has been a lot of excellent work trying to create OBEs in VR labs, trying to make it a repeatable, experimentally controllable phenomenon (see Ehrsson, 2007; Lenggenhager et al., 2007 for classical studies; Blanke, 2012, for a review). So far, these attempts have not been successful because users do not yet look out of the eyes of the avatar offered as an alternative unit of identification (UI, which in this and other articles is not an abbreviation for "user interface," but instead refers to the conscious experience of self-identification; see Box 1, Metzinger, 2018a and the next section for a definition of the concept). Rather, the resulting phenomenology typically resembles the clinical phenomenon of heautoscopy. According to the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT; Metzinger, 2003a, 2008), the main reason for this failure is that the user's "interoceptive self-model" is firmly locked in the biological body; it cannot be simulated in an avatar yet. The interoceptive self-model is that layer of bodily self-representation in the brain that is driven by internal signals from the viscera and other areas signaling the state of the body to the brain ( Craig, 2009; Barrett and Simmons, 2015). The prediction under SMT is that full identification with an avatar can only be achieved under two conditions: Either the avatar has its own interoceptive self-model that can be synchronized with the biological counterpart in the user's brain, or interoceptive experience is selectively blocked and another artificial unit of identification (Box 1) is created and technologically exploited. According to SMT, a prime candidate would be the sense of effort going along with mental forms of agency like controlling one's own attention, because this is what creates the sense of self on the mental level. The empirical prediction from SMT is that if avatars in virtual reality had a functional analog of visual attention which the user could control, then the consciously felt "sense of effort" of the user trying to control the avatar's attention would create a deep form of identification. This is another concrete research proposal, derived from a philosophical theory, but fully testable and open for interdisciplinary cooperation. We could call the proposed strategy "subjective identification via interoceptive extinction plus synchronized attentional agency."

What about creating not OBEs (which involves an externalized visuospatial perspective), but lucid dreams with the help of VR technology? The dream body can also be completely devoid of an interoceptive self-model. In section Example 1: Consciousness, I said that waking consciousness could be called a form of "online dreaming." Could VR help to create a new, distinct class of phenomenal states in the form of a new version of lucid online dreaming? Having a metric and an implemented, quantifiable "realness control" for VR would enable experimental psychologists to create a machine-model of the lucid dream state. It would be highly interesting for philosophers of mind, dream researchers, and phenomenologists if they could use VR technology to explore the transparency/opacity gradient of their very own conscious experience at will.

In both subtypes, certain content elements may be experienced as only virtual (e.g., dream reality as such or the immediate environment in which an OBE unfolds), while, phenomenologically, others remain as ultimately real (for example, even in lucid dreams other dream characters encountered by the experiential subject are often taken to be real entities, as is the transparent model of the knowing, observing self in an OBE). On the technological side, the reality/virtuality continuum encompasses all possible variations and combinations of real and virtual objects ( Milgram et al., 1994; Milgram and Colquhoun, 1999). The "reality/virtuality continuum" has been described as a concept in new media and computer science, but it is interesting to note how our very own everyday phenomenology also possesses elements that appear "unreal" to us (optical illusions, benign pseudo-hallucinations) or as only diffusely or not at all located in physical space, e.g., as "unworldly," "disembodied," or "mental" (namely, mental action and mind-wandering; see Metzinger, 2015, 2017).

However, as philosophers we must never forget that the reality/virtuality continuum itself only appears in a virtual model activated by our brain. In addition, this brain is embodied and developed against the historical-cultural context of the cognitive niche in which we are born. This is, unfortunately, a deep structural feature which systematically hides its own virtuality from its user, the biological organism in which it appears. One philosophically interesting point is that investigating the phenomenology of VR will give us a deeper understanding of what it really means-and why it was functionally adequate-that the reality-appearance distinction became attentionally as well as cognitively available by being represented on the level of appearance ( Metzinger, 2003a). It also leads to subtle and potentially novel insights into the specific phenomenal character related to metaphysical indeterminacy (see section VR-Phenomenology in the Context of Comparative and Transcultural Philosophy).

Example 2: Embodiment and Bodily Self-Consciousness

Advanced VR technology seeks not only to create the classical place illusion described by Slater and Sanchez-Vives (2016) (section Introduction), it also increasingly targets the deepest layers of human self-consciousness by utilizing techniques for virtual embodiment and robotic re-embodiment ( Cohen et al., 2012, 2014a, b; see vereproject.eu for further examples). We are already beginning to use VR technology for re-embodiment in other human bodies ( De Oliveira et al., 2016) and many of the more recent empirical results are highly interesting from a conceptual and metatheoretical perspective (see Ehrsson, 2007; Lenggenhager et al., 2007, for classical studies; Metzinger, 2008, 2009a, b, for accessible introductions; Blanke, 2012, for a review). First, they allow us to distinguish different levels of embodiment and to develop a more fine-grained analysis of bodily self-awareness in humans; second, they open the door to a deeper understanding of the mechanism of identification underlying the way in which a conscious subject of experience locates itself in time and space by identifying with a body. Let me briefly explain this point, as it is of interest for philosophers.

Let us say that for every self-conscious system S there exists a phenomenal unit of identification (UI, Box 1) such that

* S possesses a single, conscious model of reality;

* the UI is a part of this model;

* at any given point in time t, the UI can be characterized by a specific and determinate representational content C;

* such that C constitutes the transparent part of the system's phenomenal self-model (PSM; Metzinger, 2003a) at t.

If we assume a "predictive processing" model of human brain activity ( Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2013; Clark, 2016; Metzinger and Wiese, 2017), then, for all human beings, C is always counterfactual content because it does not refer to the currently present, actual state of the world. The UI is the best hypothesis the system has about its own global state ( Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013; Limanowski, 2014). For human beings, C is dynamic and highly variable, and it need not coincide with the physical body as represented (for an example, see de Ridder, 2007). There exists a minimal UI, which is likely constituted by pure spatiotemporal self-location ( Blanke and Metzinger, 2009; Windt, 2010, 2017; Metzinger, 2013b, c); and there is also a maximal UI, likely constituted by the most general phenomenal property available to S at any point t, namely, the integrated nature of phenomenality per se ( Metzinger, 2013b, c, 2016). C is phenomenally transparent: Internally, S experiences the representational content constituting the UI neither as counterfactual nor as veridical, but simply as real. Phenomenally experienced realness is an expression of successful prediction error minimization, high model evidence, and counterfactual richness (e.g., invariance under counterfactual manipulation). Therefore, the UI simply is the transparent partition of the PSM. I submit that perhaps the central philosophical relevance of recent work on virtual embodiment and robotic re-embodiment is that it holds the promise of introducing a set of more fine-grained conceptual distinctions into the theory of embodiment and self-consciousness. Could VR researchers also create a "volume control for self-identification"? Work in VR that helps us to experimentally manipulate the UI in a non-invasive but causally fine-grained manner has already successfully demonstrated its relevance for the neuroscience of bodily self-consciousness, for example by creating innovative experimental designs. Philosophers have already cooperated with neuroscientists and shown how the UI can be influenced to "drift toward" an avatar and how peripersonal space can be expanded in a VR-setting ( Blanke et al., 2015; Noel et al., 2015; Serino et al., 2015). However, there are two logical steps that have not yet been taken. There are two types of experiment that would be of great interest to philosophers of mind: Maximizing the UI, and deleting the UI from human phenomenal space altogether. The open question is if engineers and scientists in VR could technologically implement this.

How would one create a VR experience in which the user becomes one with everything? Clearly, this would have to be an entirely passive experimental setup, because any bodily or mental interaction of the user with the system would immediately create a felt sense of agency and therefore keep its phenomenal model of reality split into subject and object, divided into a knowing self and an external environment. How could one create an entirely passive VR experience in which everything the user experiences gradually turns into one big knowing self, a single conscious unit of identification that has been maximized by being expanded to the boundaries of the phenomenal world?

Experiments of the second type would aim at creating selfless states of consciousness. Instead of ego-expansion they would aim at ego-elimination. Such experiments would be interesting because they would create a contrast class or a set of alternative experiences not characterized by a UI-states without any consciously experienced ego. The phenomenon of "ego dissolution" is well-known from pharmacological interventions by classical psychedelics, dissociative anesthetics and agonists of the kappa opioid receptor ( Millière, 2017) and it can be measured, for example by the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI; Nour et al., 2016). It occurs in psychiatric diseases, and it has also been reported across the centuries by spiritual practitioners from many different cultures. Comparing results from both types of experiments might help to decide the question if the existence of a UI necessarily leads to a consciously experienced sense of self, or if some states created by maximizing the UI are actually selfless states if assessed with the help of existing inventories for measuring the degree of ego-dissolution. Here, one central question-highly relevant for philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists alike-is whether research in VR could help to establish a double dissociation between the phenomenology of identification and the phenomenology of selfhood.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and is concerned with questions such as: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the possession of knowledge? How many kinds of knowledge are there, and what is their structure, what are their sources and boundaries? What makes a belief a justified belief (Box 1)? Accordingly, VR-epistemology might ask questions like these: How does one obtain knowledge about virtual objects, and how do we arrive at justified beliefs about facts holding in a virtual world? Are there such things as virtual facts? Are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge interestingly different if we limit our domain to perceptual content presented via VR? What are the sources of knowledge about elements of a given virtual world? Is justification relative to this specific class of epistemic objects internal or external to one's own mind?

Example 3: Amnestic Re-Embodiment and Epistemic Innocence

VR settings immediately remind every philosopher of Descartes' dream argument: Even in a best-case scenario of sensory perception, we can never rule out that we are now dreaming, because dreaming is subjectively indistinguishable from waking experience (see Windt, 2015, section Example 1: Consciousness). If classical Cartesian Dream Skepticism is on the right track, then at any given moment our implicit belief that we are awake might be mistaken. If this basic background assumption is correct, our current belief that we are, at this moment, not in VR might be mistaken as well, although "in order for the VR to be indistinguishable from reality, the participant would have to not remember that they had "gone into" a VR system" ( Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016, p. 37).

One interesting form of collaboration between philosophers and VR researchers would be to systematically transpose classical philosophical thought experiments into VR-settings. Here, the question would be if VR researchers could create a full-blown "Cartesian dream." Could there be something like "amnestic re-embodiment" (see Box 1) in VR? It seems there are many conceivable scenarios of VR use in which this constraint (let us call it the "SSV-constraint," as it was introduced by Slater and Sanchez-Vives) could be satisfied, for example in animals equipped with head-mounted displays, in human children, in drug users, in sleep labs, or in patients suffering from severe amnesia, intoxication syndromes, or dementia. Moreover, in future entertainment scenarios or in therapeutic applications it may exactly become a goal to purposefully satisfy the SSV-constraint, to make users forget the fact that they currently are in VR.

Bortolotti (2015a, b) recently introduced the concept of "epistemic innocence" (Box 1) to articulate the idea that certain mental processes such as delusion and confabulation (which may count as suboptimal from an epistemological perspective) may have not just psychological, but also epistemic benefits. Perhaps amnestic re-embodiment in VR (say, in a pharmacologically supported therapeutic context) could lead not only to psychological benefits that are not simply purchased with the epistemic cost of episodic amnesia, but which also causally enable forms of genuine knowledge acquisition, for example new forms of self-knowledge. Perhaps new philosophical ideas like "amnestic re-embodiment" or "epistemic innocence" can be fruitfully applied in the domain of VR if actually implemented and viewed as a tool for self-exploration, cognitive enhancement, or future psychotherapy. And of course, on a speculative metaphysical level, it is only a question of time until the SSV-constraint will be discussed in relation to real-life experience, to traditional religious theories of reincarnation, "pre-birth amnesia," etc. In any case, it seems safe to predict that many classical issues of external-world skepticism may re-appear in a new guise, playing a central role for the new discipline of VR epistemology.

Example 4: Knowing Personal Identity

Here, I name one particular example of great relevance for the philosophy of law and the applied ethics of VR: The problem of reliably knowing about another human agent's personal identity in VR. If I want to reliably interact with another human being in VR, for example via avatar-to-avatar interaction, then I need to know the identity of the person currently controlling or even phenomenologically identifying with that avatar. This leads to the problem of avatar ownership and individuation, which will certainly be an important future issue for regulatory agencies to consider.

How does one assign an unequivocal identity to the virtual representation of a body or a person? Could there be something like a chassis plate number, a license plate, or a "virtual vehicle identification number" (VVIN)? We already have digital object identifiers (DOIs) for electronic documents and other forms of content, a form of persistent identification, with the goal of permanently and unambiguously identifying the object with which a given DOI is associated. But what about an avatar that is currently used by a human operator, namely by functionally and phenomenologically identifying with it? Should we dynamically associate a "digital subject identifier" (DSI) with it? (Madary and Metzinger, 2016, p. 17).

Maybe there can be a technological solution to this problem, perhaps similar to the RSA cryptosystem. This presents a technical question to mathematicians and computer scientists: What would be a "non-hackable" mechanism for reliably identifying the current user(s) of a given avatar? But even if we find such a mechanism, the epistemological problem of other minds remains. Even if I can be convinced of the identity of an agent I encounter in VR in a way that suffices for all practical and legal purposes, I will still be interested in a higher degree of certainty when it comes to more direct interpersonal relationships in social VR. Interestingly, as regards the personal identity of social others nothing short of absolute certainty seems to be what we are really interested in-although, as one might certainly argue, even in "normal" non-VR scenarios there always remains room for other-person skepticism, because the mere logical possibility of misrepresenting personal identity can never be fully excluded.

There is one variant of the personal-identity problem which could soon become relevant and for which cooperation between VR specialists and philosophical ethicists will be important. Let us conceptually distinguish between an "avatar" as a digital representation of a single human person in VR (over which they can have agentive control and ownership, functionally as well as on the level of conscious experience), a "human agent" as a normal, self-conscious human being currently controlling a biological body outside of VR, and a "virtual agent" as a virtual character or person-model that is computer-controlled, for example by an advanced AI. For human users in VR, it may be impossible to distinguish between avatars and virtual agents, that is, between digital representations of single human persons currently controlled by a real, biological human, and such representations which are actually AI-controlled, for example by an artificial system not possessing self-consciousness and which does not satisfy the current human criteria for personhood ( Dennett, 1988). This may at first seem as just an extension of the problem in current online computer games where there is a mixture of non-playable characters and other people, but there will be much more at stake in future contexts generated by the technological confluence of VR and autonomous AI-systems. Again, a technological solution to this problem would be important to prevent social hallucinations, consumer manipulation, or successful deception by malevolent AI systems. But there are looming conceptual complexities.

For example, avatars could also be jointly controlled by distributed groups of human beings (creating problems of legal personhood, accountability, and ethical responsibility). There could be digital person-models that are avatars and virtual agents at the same time, because they are simultaneously human-controlled and computer-controlled (HAVAS, see Box 1; for example, resembling a self-consciously controlled biological body possessing a large number of highly intelligent, but unconscious motor subroutines), and perhaps in the future human agents outside of VR could be partly computer-controlled as well. I will not discuss any of these complexities here, but simply point out that the problem of personal identity in VR poses challenges for ethics and legal philosophy and that, on a psychological and cultural level, it may greatly change the landscape of future social interactions.

Although the exact etymological origin of the Latin concept of persona is still controversial, it originally referred to the masks worn by actors on stage. It is interesting to note how avatars are exactly this: ever more complex virtual masks worn by human actors on a virtual stage. Social VR resembles an on-stage experience, involving encounters with unknown actors. In this wider context, it may be helpful to recall how in 1938, Antonin Artaud, in first introducing the concept of "virtual reality" described the illusory nature of characters and objects in the theater as " la réalité virtuelle" (in a collection of essays entitled Le Théâter et son double) while at the same time another classical metaphor for human consciousness is the "theater model of mind" ( Baars, 1997a, b; for a critique of this model, see Dennett, 1991; Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992). Isolating the necessary and sufficient conditions for determining the identity of the person behind any such virtual persona is one of the most interesting epistemological problems for philosophers, but they will need help from the VR community in determining what is technologically possible, what is not, and what are rational, evidence-based strategies for risk minimization [the issue will certainly generalize to human interaction with intelligent agents categorized as non-persons, e.g., as a result of future AI/VR confluence, see section Example 7: The "Postbiotic Social Boot-Strapping Scenario" (PSBS)].

Metaphysics

VR can be interestingly described as a computationally implemented ontology ( Heim, 1994, 2000; Chalmers, 2017). Its virtual character consists in the quality of its entities having their attributes without sharing a (real or imagined) physical form, but solely by creating a functional emulation of real objects. On a more abstract level of analysis, virtual realities are functional structures defined by input/output relations and by internal relations between states with different and often complex causal roles. Via interfaces enabling sensorimotor interaction, they have the potential to causally enable the instantiation of specific phenomenal properties in the brains of human users. When implemented and in direct causal interaction with an embodied human user, they can perhaps also be interestingly described as explicit assumptions about what exists, as a new type of "metaphysical affordance": I can take this for real. VR opens a space of possible existence assumptions. In providing an explicit model of reality to the user it can also represent objects, properties, and spatial and temporal relations, offer concrete affordances for action, or even present other agentive selves to this user, making them available for reliable and systematic social interaction.

But the novel space of causal interaction opened by VR is not limited to providing affordances for sensorimotor engagement. With the help of advanced brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) we can imagine "mental" actions bypassing the non-neural body (see section Example 5: Walking Around in Your Own NCC With the Help of rt-fMRI-NCCF). Similarly, we can imagine much more causally direct forms of intersubjective communication using much more disembodied forms of social cognition, perhaps even making the "mental" states of users an explicit element of VR (see section Social and Political Philosophy: The danger of complex social hallucinations). As such they could be mutually manipulated, with the interaction acquiring a causal force on its own. Additionally, in VR, assumptions about what exists need not obey the physical laws governing our world: In principle, the set of worlds defined by a given level of VR technology will often be much larger than what would be nomologically possible in the actual world. On the other hand, obvious constraints of technological feasibility again strongly compress the space of mere logical possibility.

VR clearly opens new spaces of causal interaction for human agents, but its relevance to philosophical metaphysics is not immediately obvious. Imagine an empty room with a connected headset lying on a table while a computer is running a complex virtual reality demonstration. It would be hard to construct any metaphysical mysteries in this situation. For example, speaking of "virtual objects" or even "virtual worlds" being created by the machine would not justify assuming that just the running of the system itself changes physical reality in any interesting sense. No new building blocks of reality are created.

VR only becomes philosophically interesting when causally coupled to the pre-existing conscious model of reality running in a user's biological brain ( Clowes and Chrisley, 2012, p. 511). Then it begins to change the phenomenal ontology underlying the user's subjective experience, and of course many unconscious expectations as well. In particular, certain high-level priors and assumptions about what the true causal sources of current sensory input really are may now begin to change as the model containing them is continuously updated [see section Example 1: Consciousness (point 1)]. What would we say if an entirely unconscious, but highly complex and intelligent robot began to interact with a VR system? Would we assign any special metaphysical status to the unconscious internal ontology that emerges as the robot learns to successfully interact with the VR? Obviously, we would not want to say that any relevant new metaphysical entities have been created. What has changed is a model, not the deep structure of the physical world. Call this the "Principle of Metaphysical Irrelevance": VR technology per se does not create any new "virtual objects" in a metaphysically interesting sense. But what about virtual subjects? I think the "Principle of Metaphysical Irrelevance" may be interestingly different or invalid in the case of social ontologies: What if independent groups of intelligent, virtual agents began to internally model their social relationships in the way human beings do, creating a robust form of virtual intersubjectivity (see Example #7 below)?

The general principle is that to have an ontology is to interpret a world: The human brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting our world, possesses an ontology too ( Metzinger and Gallese, 2003). It creates primitives and makes existence assumptions, decomposing target space in a way that exhibits a certain invariance, which in turn is functionally significant. It continuously updates its model of reality, minimizing prediction error ( Friston, 2010; Wiese and Metzinger, 2017). There are explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of the brain's motor output and its representational deep structure. But very often in VR, a completely different world needs to be interpreted and predicted by the brain. Thus, an alternative causal structure has to be extracted. For example, the human motor system normally constructs goals, actions, and intending selves as basic constituents of the world it interprets. It does so by assigning a single, unified causal role to them, and empirical evidence demonstrates that the brain models movements and action goals in terms of multimodal representations of organism-object-relations. Obviously, such relations can undergo dramatic changes in VR as the brain continually adapts a hierarchically structured model of reality to the external invariances provided by artificially created input. But the ontology of the human brain, even when causally embedded in an alien media environment, always remains a representation of the likely causal structure of the world. It is just the current best guess about this causal structure.

In sum, I think that analytical metaphysics is likely the area in philosophy where we can expect the least fruitful interaction with the VR community, simply because virtual ontologies are orthogonal to philosophical problems in metaphysics. Nevertheless, for philosophers interested in metaphysics, there may still be many interesting issues. These issues include the relationship between possible-world theory and VR; the status of properties, categories, universals, individuals, abstract and fictitious objects, events and selves when epistemically accessed under a VR-mode of presentation; questions about virtual time and virtual space [section Example 1: Consciousness (point 2)]; and perhaps also the promise of a richer and more precise account of what actually constitutes a Lebenswelt [Box 1; I return to this issue in section Example 7: The "Postbiotic Social Boot-Strapping Scenario" (PSBS)]. Maybe progress on this traditional concept can be achieved as we now begin to construct entirely new life-worlds from scratch. I will also give one example of unexpected metaphysical contact points between VR and intercultural philosophy in the final section on "Comparative Philosophy."

New Subfields: Digital Aesthetics, Recent Philosophy of Technology, and Media Theory

There are many newer areas of philosophical research for which VR is an obviously central target, including aesthetic judgement and experience ( Shelley, 2015), the philosophy of digital art ( Thomson-Jones, 2015), the philosophy of technology ( Franssen et al., 2015, section 4.1 in Gualeni, 2015), and media philosophy ( Gualeni, 2015, Ch. 7; Heim, 2000; Sandbothe, 2000; de Mul, 2015). There already exists a growing literature on VR in these fields, and the interested reader may find entry points to the relevant debates in the works cited here.

Action Theory, Free Will, and Self-Consciousness: Novel Affordances for Action

Increasingly, avatars are not just dynamic, user-controlled models of bodies in space. They also begin to enable sensory perception and instantiate complex properties like emotional expression, intelligent gaze-following, and natural language production. Avatars are gradually turning into semi-autonomous, user-controlled models of virtual selves. Above, we conceptually distinguished between avatars and virtual agents, but it is certainly conceivable that digital representations of persons emerge that fall under both concepts simultaneously. One philosophically as well as technically interesting aspect lies in the prediction that virtual agents will, by being coupled to artificial intelligence (AI), gain strong cognitive self-models. For example, they could function as complex output devices or personoid interfaces by which larger AI systems communicate with humans. But to be really good interfaces, they will have to model the needs and goals of their human users and engage in advanced social cognition. If they reflexively apply their social cognition modules to themselves, they may therefore begin to represent themselves as "knowing selves," even if they are still partly human-controlled. Therefore, it is also conceivable that such hybrid avatar/virtual agent-systems (Box 1) become proper epistemic agents (EAMs; cf. Metzinger, 2017, 2018a; Box 1) rather than merely virtual bodies moving in virtual space, thereby simulating a system that possesses and actively expands its own knowledge.

A second important aspect of this historical development is that there already exists a biologically grounded self-model in the human operator's nervous system. The human nervous system generates another virtual self-model which often includes an EAM. It has been optimized over millions of years of biological evolution and possesses unconscious as well as conscious content layers. Today, avatars are mostly causally coupled to the phenomenal self-model (PSM; Metzinger, 2003a, 2008) in human brains, but this may change in the future. First pilot studies ( Cohen et al., 2012, 2014a, b) demonstrate that, via virtual or robotic re-embodiment, elements of VR can turn into dynamic components of extended self-representation, which not only co-determine locally instantiated phenomenal properties in the human brain, but also enable historically new forms of action. Let us therefore look at novel, philosophically relevant affordances for action potentially provided by VR.

Example 5: Walking Around in Your Own NCC With the Help of rt-fMRI-NCCF

In consciousness research ( Metzinger, 1995, 2000), a standard background assumption is that in the domain of biological creatures and for every form of conscious content there exists a minimally sufficient neural correlate (NCC; see Chalmers, 2000, for a definition, and Fink, 2016, for a refined account). At every point in time, there will also be a minimally sufficient global NCC (see Box 1): the set of neurodynamical properties which fully determines the content of subjective experience at this very instant and which has no proper subset of properties that would have the same effect. Let me draw attention to, and at the same time propose, a highly specific application of VR technology here. One technological possibility that will be of great interest for philosophers would be a highly selective combination of VR and neurofeedback generated by real-time functional magnetic resonance imagining, but explicitly targeting the global NCC only.

Let us call this "rt-fMRI-NCCF" (see Box 1). This would be a variant of real-time fMRI-based neurofeedback, but employing VR technology and specifically targeting the neural basis of consciousness. Thus, a real-time fMRI representation of the global NCC would be directly converted into a virtual reality environment: a perceivable dynamic landscape which the conscious subject could passively observe, in which it could navigate, and with which it could then causally interact in entirely new ways. Of course, the VR-based form of rt-fMRI-NCCF I am proposing here would never be "real-time" in any more rigorous conceptual sense, but it would generate historically new forms of self-awareness and afford completely new types of phenomenological self-exploration, including a model-based control of one's own conscious experience ( Flohr, 1989; Jacquette, 2014). At present, the only neurophenomenological configuration that comes close to rt-fMRI-NCCF is the stable lucid dream of a scientifically informed person. The stable lucid dream is a conscious state in which the experiential subject knows that everything it feels and sees is determined by the NCC currently active in the sleeping physical body, but unlike the potential rt-fMRI-NCCF, it lacks an external, technically realized feedback loop ( Metzinger, 2003a, 2013c; Windt and Metzinger, 2007; Voss et al., 2014).

Example 6: PSM-Actions

PSM-actions are all those actions in which a human being exclusively uses the conscious self-model in her brain to initiate an overt action. Of course, there will have to be feedback loops for complex actions, for instance, adjusting a grasping movement in real-time when seeing through the camera eyes of a robot (something still far from possible today). But the relevant causal starting point of the entire action is now not the flesh and bone body, but only the conscious self-model in our brain. In PSM-actions, we simulate an action in the self-model-in the inner image of our body-and a machine performs it.

Such experiments are interesting for philosophers, because they touch conceptual issues like action theory, agentive self-consciousness, free will, ethical responsibility, and culpability in a legal sense. On one hand, it is obvious that the phenomenal self-model (PSM) often is a crucial part of a control hierarchy: it is an abstract computational tool for sensorimotor self-control. The PSM is a means to predict and monitor certain critical aspects of the process in which the organism generates flexible, adaptive patterns of behavior and also enables a degree of veto control. On the other hand, it is highly plastic: several representations of objects external to the body can transiently be integrated into the self-model. In tool use, a hammer or pliers could be such an object, but rubber hands can demonstrate that the whole process can also take place in a passive condition, by bottom-up multisensory integration alone. For tool-use, "control by embedding" may be a general principle-tools are extensions of bodily organs that need to be controlled to generate intelligent and goal-directed behavior. Whenever the physical body is extended by sticks, stones, rakes, or robot arms, the virtual self-model must be extended as well. Only if an integrated representation of the body-plus-tool exists can the extended system of body-plus-tool in its entirety become part of the brain's predictive control hierarchy. How else could one learn to intelligently-i.e., flexibly and in a context-sensitive manner-use a tool, without integrating it into the conscious self?

As I have explained elsewhere ( Metzinger, 2003a, 2009a), human beings possess physical and virtual organs at the same time. The conscious self-model is a paradigm example of a virtual organ, allowing us to own feedback loops, to initiate control processes, and to maintain and flexibly adapt them. What is new is that whole-body surrogates now increasingly provide the human brain with new affordances for action, either as virtual avatars or as physical robots coupled to the virtual self-model in the biological brain. Some element of the expanded control circuit are physical (like the brain and tools), others are virtual (like the self-model and the goal-state simulation). Robots are physical tools; avatars are virtual bodies. It is therefore possible to transiently embed them into the PSM and thereby causally control them "directly out of one's own mind."

If this general perspective is correct, then we have a maximally parsimonious strategy to scientifically explain self-consciousness without assuming an ontological entity called "the self." Prediction, testing, and explanation can take place in a much more parsimonious conceptual framework, namely, by introducing the concept of a "transparent self-model" (a conscious model of the person as a whole, which cannot be experienced as a model). VR technology is relevant because it offers instruments for experimental testing by selectively influencing different representational layers of the human self-model: bodily self-location, perspective-taking, motion experience, affective self-representation, and so on. One role of VR researchers could be to develop new instruments by which causal dependencies and hypothetical double dissociations between such representational layers can be tested, demonstrated, and technologically exploited, for example by new clinical applications. The maximal realization or "perfect avatar" would be one in which the user can precisely select what aspects of his or her conscious self-model she wants to change by identifying with a digitally created self-representation.

Directly coupling a human PSM with an artificial environment is an example for a new type of consciousness technology, one that might even be called a "technology of the self" (section 4.3 in Gualeni, 2015). Currently the effects are still weak, and there are many technical problems. However, it is possible that technological progress will happen faster than expected. What would we do if systems for virtual or robotic re-embodiment became able to function fluidly, with many degrees of freedom, and in real-time? What new conscious states would become possible if one were also able to control feedback with the help of a computer-aided brain stimulation directly aimed at the user's self-model, again bypassing the non-neural body? What historically new forms of intersubjectivity and social cooperation could emerge if it were suddenly possible to simultaneously connect several human persons and their self-models via coupled brain computer interfaces, and perhaps even to merge them?

Social and Political Philosophy: the Danger of Complex Social Hallucinations

The number of contact points between VR technology and political philosophy is too large to even begin creating a short list. The convergence of VR and existing social networks may lead to new forms of machine-based manipulation in the formation of political will, novel threats to privacy and autonomy, and a belittlement of the actual political process outside of VR (section 3.2 in Gualeni, 2015). Perhaps most importantly, it is conceivable that what today we call "real life outside of VR" or "the real cultural/historical/political process unfolding in the actual world" would become increasingly experienced as just one possible reality among many others. This might incrementally lead to a dangerous trivialization of real-world suffering and an unnoticed, implicit relativism with respect to value judgements in the original sphere of social interaction (in which any VR technology is still grounded). I would like to term this risk "VR-induced political apathy," brought about by creeping psychological changes caused in users by a toxic form of mental immersion into a novel medium that originally held the promise to facilitate and enhance the democratic process. As Stefano Gualeni puts the point:

The interactive experiences of virtual worlds, together with their characteristic combinatorial and procedural processes, can in fact be seen as both

* facilitating and encouraging individual engagement in the socio-political sphere, and

* denying and confusing the ontological superiority of the world indexed as actual over a myriad of virtual ones. This levelling of value comes with a momentous belittlement of the historical process and of existence itself.

Understood from the proposed perspective, all virtual worlds can be deemed as holding an implicit political relevance that is a derivation of their combinatorial, modular, and self-organizing constitution. Both the use and the design of virtual worlds as means of production are, thus, implicitly political activities ( Gualeni, 2015, p. 129).

We may well live through a historical transition that we are only beginning to understand. In the beginning, avatars were just moving statues, models of bodies in time and space. As they have become more realistic, new features like the functionality of gaze-following or emotional expression via facial geometry have been added. It is interesting to note how even at this early stage of VR technology what I have termed "social hallucinations" (see Box 1) are emerging: In users, the phenomenology of "presence" can now be enhanced by a phenomenology of being socially situated. Users are confronted not only with virtual models of other bodies, but with actual selves-other agents who are autonomous subjects of experience, mutually sharing an intersubjective phenomenology of presence. The classical "place illusion" (section 1.3 in Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016) is now complemented and strengthened by an "other-minds illusion."

My first point is that such social hallucinations will soon become increasingly sophisticated and thus much stronger. One research target is the interaction of the place illusion with the other-minds illusion: how strong is the causal interdependence between spatial immersion and social immersion? If we imagine human users communicating with advanced AI systems in natural language and via anthropomorphic (or at least person-like) interfaces, then we will soon reach a stage where unconscious machines are automatically modeled as independent cognitive agents by the human brain. We may have no control over this process. If so, virtual agents will automatically be experienced as thinkers of thoughts, and the human brain will inevitably begin to predict their behavior as belonging to systems possessing high-level psychological properties like episodic memory, attentional control, and self-consciousness. The combination of VR and AI may therefore lead to a situation in which VR-based anthropomorphic interfaces begin to target the naturally evolved modules for social cognition and agent detection in the biological brains of their human users in intelligent and ever more successful ways. Self-optimizing, but entirely unconscious AI/VR-systems might discover that it simply is most efficient to be perceived as self-aware cognitive agents by humans, consequently creating robust and complex social hallucinations as a new phenomenological foundation for man-machine communication.

For empirical researchers in the field of social cognition, this will be of great interest, because it allows for highly innovative and precisely controllable forms of experimental design. The maximal model would be one in which the user's other-mind illusion can be created by every virtual entity she encounters during her VR experience. For philosophers, the impact will extend beyond obviously relevant classical topics like the other-minds problem, social ontology, or political philosophy. The combination of social VR and AI will also touch many issues in applied ethics, including: What is the proper ethical assessment of deliberately causing social hallucinations in human users? Are there ethically recommendable, non-paternalistic applications of VR-based other-minds illusions (see section Applied Ethics)?

Example 7: the "Postbiotic Social Boot-Strapping Scenario" (PSBS)

Let me end this section by briefly describing what I think is the most interesting conceptual possibility from a philosophical perspective. I call it the "postbiotic social boot-strapping scenario" (PSBS; see Box 1), and it would again involve a combination of VR and AI.

Let us assume that future AI systems have begun using avatars-VR-based person-like interfaces-to communicate with humans. Non-persons communicate with persons via person- models. Through advanced user modeling those systems will have learned how to cause the most reliable and robust social hallucinations in their users, thereby optimizing their overall functionality. Now the crucial assumption behind the PSBS is the logical possibility that such combined AI/VR-systems begin to mutually cause social hallucinations in each other. This would occur by the systems applying the algorithms they originally developed for man-machine interaction to machine-machine communication, but still using individual virtual avatars as their interfaces. What I call the "social boot-strapping scenario" would begin when such systems attempt to cause social hallucinations in other AIs as well as in humans. It is conceivable that the continued optimization of combined AI/VR-systems would generate second-order virtual agents (see Box 1), that is, virtual entities that not only possess an internal model of themselves in order to control their behavior, but also harbor a functionally adequate misrepresentation of themselves as being socially situated. A first-order virtual agent would be controlled by an AI that uses it as a communication interface. A second-order virtual agent would be driven by a different self-model: it would falsely represent other AIs/virtual agents as real, self-conscious entities. It would represent itself as standing in genuine social relations-as a genuine subject embedded in a network of intersubjective relationships. It is also plausible to assume that such forms of functionally adequate misrepresentation might make groups of virtual agents and groups of interacting AI systems much more efficient-the added explicitly social layer of self-optimization could enable a new level of complexity that would serve to gradually improve the intelligence of the newly emerged overall system. Such second-order agents would therefore not only cause robust social hallucinations in their human users, but also in the AIs controlling them. Groups of such intelligent virtual agents using personoid avatars as their interface or "outward appearance" would instantiate a new property-"virtual intersubjectivity"-by drawing on and mimicking algorithms and neural mechanisms which first appeared in the psychological evolution of biological organisms, were later optimized in man-machine communication, and are now virtually implementing certain types of social cognition and functionally adequate forms of self-deception in postbiotic systems.

Therefore, they would necessarily begin to represent each other as sharing a common Lebenswelt. A virtual Lebenswelt-or "life-world"-is a pre-given social world in which subjects experience themselves as being united by a primordial quality of "togetherness," as inhabiting a universe which is no longer "merely virtual," but rather intersubjectively given. A Lebenswelt is co-constituted by a shared first-person plural perspective, by a mentally represented "we," and is therefore absolutely real and self-evident for every individual virtual agent. To put the point differently, while human beings might still describe the internal social context generated by the interaction of combined AI/VR-systems as "virtual" or "simulated," these systems themselves might evolve a fully transparent representation of their own life-world and accordingly arrive at very different epistemological conclusions about the social context in which they evolve.

This is an example of a new field where philosophers working on theories of social cognition and intersubjectivity could very fruitfully interact with researchers in VR, creating simulated "toy societies." Here is the most provocative question: Is our own, human Lebenswelt ultimately a biologically evolved variant of the PSBS? Is it based on functionally adequate misrepresentations enabling biological organisms to "hallucinate selfhood into each other"? Can we model the relevant transition in virtual agents? Should we attempt to do this, or would we be ethically required to relinquish such research pathways altogether? Clearly, such research may be ethically problematic, because it may lead to artificial suffering or a dangerous and irreversible intelligence explosion in autonomously self-optimizing social systems.

Applied Ethics

Less dramatically, VR technology has the potential to increasingly change what many philosophers, including Edmund Husserl and Jürgen Habermas, have traditionally called the "life-world" of human beings. As explained above, a life-world is partly constituted by a prescientific, collective phenomenology of intersubjectivity. This underlying phenomenology in turn gives rise to apparently self-evident cultural systems and normative orders which attempt to give a meaning to life and to the shared social institutions that stabilize patterns of collective action. These patterns causally influence psychological properties, determine the content of seemingly individual cognitive processes, and may even shape our personality structure. Elsewhere, I have argued that because of this, VR technology will function as a new cognitive niche to which the human mind will adapt:

What is historically new, and what creates not only novel psychological risks but also entirely new ethical and legal dimensions, is that one VR gets ever more deeply embedded into another VR: the conscious mind of human beings, which has evolved under very specific conditions and over millions of years, now gets causally coupled and informationally woven into technical systems for representing possible realities. Increasingly, it is not only culturally and socially embedded but also shaped by a technological niche that over time itself quickly acquires a rapid, autonomous dynamics and ever new properties. This creates a complex convolution, a nested form of information flow in which the biological mind and its technological niche influence each other in ways we are just beginning to understand. It is this complex convolution that makes it so important to think about the Ethics of VR in a critical, evidence-based, and rational manner (Madary and Metzinger, 2016, p. 20).

VR technology poses many new problems for applied ethics, ranging from unexpected psychological risks to military applications. Rather than exploring the ethical and sociocultural ramifications of VR here, I instead refer readers to the first Code of Ethical Conduct Michael Madary and I developed ( Madary and Metzinger, 2016). Applied ethics is a prime example of another domain of philosophical research that is of highest relevance for researchers in the field of VR, consumers, and policy-makers alike.

Philosophy of Religion

VR, if applied as a conceptual metaphor in different domains of inquiry, possesses great heuristic fecundity. We have already seen that there are considerable commonalities linking VR and the phenomenon of conscious experience (section Example 1: Consciousness). Religious faith is another example of a domain in which unexpected analogies can be discovered. Religious faith dramatically changes the model of reality under which a human being operates, because it installs or superimposes a new virtual ontology. We can view the evolution of religion as an evolution of pre-technological augmented reality (AR) systems aimed at expanding the phenomenology and motivational structure of human beings. Can VR and AR be used as fruitful conceptual metaphors for the philosophy of religion? Let us take a look.

Example 8: Having Faith As Biosocially Evolved Augmented Reality

In standard situations, the perceptual phenomenology of human beings is largely determined by top-down predictions colliding with the sensory input generated by continuous embodied interaction with an external environment ( Friston, 2010). Augmented reality adds an environmental layer that is invisible for others, superimposing a new and additional set of priors onto the conscious subject's model of reality. A novel perspective on organized religion emerges from this: religious-belief-as-enculturated-augmented-reality, where religion is a set of representational functions, originally realized by cultural practices like burial rites, ancestor cults, prayers, sermons and increasingly complex rituals. Three obvious and well-documented adaptive advantages provided by this set of functions are (a) offering a viable psychological strategy for mortality-denial, (b) increasing social cohesion in the context of in-group/out-group conflicts, and (c) the stabilization of existing social hierarchies. As a crude analogy, religious faith is like a metaphysical version of Pokémon Go: it populates the subject's life-world with invisible beings like Gods, angels, and spirits, thereby causally enabling new forms of social hallucination and self-deception ( Trivers, 2000). Within a given evolutionary or cultural context, such virtual expansions of a pre-given conscious model of reality may prove to be functionally adequate. Having a religious faith augments an agent's subjective reality, and it often motivates in-group prosocial behavior.

Another example of a related new concept is "transreality gaming" (e.g., Lindley, 2004). Transreality gaming describes a type or mode of gameplay that combines playing a game in a virtual environment with game-related, physical experiences in the real world and vice versa. In this approach, a player evolves and moves seamlessly through various physical and virtual stages, brought together in one unified game space. Let me ask a question that may, initially, sound overly provocative, but which may later prove to possess great heuristic potential: Is religious practice a form of transreality gaming? Are religious rituals like funerals, ancestor cults, or prayer not attempts at an integration of virtual worlds with a biologically grounded life-world? The notion of "transreality gaming" also gives us a new way of looking at what a conscious human being really is: a biological organism that has evolved into a "transreality interaction platform" by enabling causal interactions across physical and virtual reality ( Martin and Laviola, 2016). From this perspective, religious practices are a particularly interesting special case of this general principle, governing and stabilizing the "player's" day-to-day interactions with their social environment as well as with their own mind.

Above, I have experimentally framed the evolution of religion as the evolution of augmented reality systems aimed at expanding the phenomenology of human beings, hypothetically later enabling successful, scalable cooperation in ever larger groups. I have provisionally defined it as a set of representational functions, originally realized by externalized cultural practices like burial rites, ancestor cults, prayers, sermons and increasingly complex rituals, later internalized into the minds of individual agents. This new perspective, leads to a whole range of interesting questions of whether the same set of functions could also be technologically implemented. Could there be religious practice in VR? Would it count as valid from a theological perspective? What about the technological implementation of an individual "VR heaven," where users encounter a medial environment allowing them to interact with their own ideal self, with an impersonal ideal observer, or with virtual angels, saints, and deities? Could there be "VR churches" giving an individual user a comparable phenomenology and the same psychological effects as real social interactions in an embodied religious context? Can there be technologically mediated "virtual rituals" serving basically the same-or historically new-functions? If so, Slater's and Sanchez-Vives' programmatic idea of "Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality" could even be extended to the sphere of religious practice.

Please note how the "convolution principle" introduced in section Applied Ethics still holds. Again, what is new, and what creates not only novel psychological risks, but also entirely new soteriological dimensions, is that one virtual reality gets ever more deeply embedded into another virtual reality: The conscious mind of human beings, which has evolved under very specific conditions over millions of years might become causally coupled and informationally woven into technical systems for representing possible realities-and these could even be of a religious type. Now, the religious mind is not only culturally and socially embedded, but also shaped by a technological niche, a niche that over time quickly acquires rapid, autonomous dynamics and ever new properties. This creates a complex convolution, a nested form of information flow in which the transcendence-seeking mind and its technological niche influence each other in ways we are just beginning to understand. Religious practice in VR could be one of these ways.

VR-Phenomenology in the Context of Comparative and Transcultural Philosophy

The VR-experience has a distinct and unique phenomenological profile. What we currently lack is not only a philosophical meta-theory for VR-phenomenology, but suitable conceptual instruments that help us bring out the essence of what really makes conscious experience in VR so interestingly different. At the same time, an important and strongly growing area of philosophy is comparative philosophy, which aims at bringing together and perhaps even integrating philosophical traditions that have developed in relative isolation from one another and that are defined quite broadly along cultural and regional lines ( Wong, 2017). I will conclude this contribution by very briefly pointing to a way in which a central concept of Buddhist philosophy-namely, suññatā -could be conceptually connected to a philosophical metatheory of virtual reality.

Example 9: the Phenomenology of Emptiness and Virtuality

Depending on doctrinal context, the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" or "voidness" has many different meanings. Buddhist metaphysics is radically anti-substantialist and anti-essentialist. In a nutshell, this means that entities are conceptually analyzed as being devoid of inherent existence and as lacking any form of "true inner nature"; what in Western traditions has often been simply called "reality" actually is characterized by metaphysical "hollowness" and indeterminacy as to existence vs. non-existence. My first point here is that exactly the same is true of so-called "virtual objects" and other entities like properties, whole situations, or simulated selves as represented in VR. They are not ontologically self-subsistent (i.e., they cannot independently "stand" or independently hold themselves in existence), and they have no self-sustaining, enduring, or essential inner nature beyond the present moment and the ongoing process of being virtually represented as such. They depend not only on a complex network of functional relations implemented in a given computational system, but also on this pre-existing network being causally coupled to the physical brain of a user already endowed with consciousness and self-consciousness. Entities in VR are a paradigmatic example of what Buddhist metaphysics would call "dependent origination": impermanent phenomena arising out of a fluid dynamic of causal interrelatedness.

Interestingly, there is a semantic connection linking the classical Pali term suññatā to the concept of "virtuality" (stemming from the late-medieval scholarly neologism virtualis, which in turn preserves elements like "potentiality" and "latency of possibilities" characterizing the original Aristotelian notion of "dynamis"). To see this partial, but philosophically relevant overlap, it is particularly helpful to focus not only on the metaphysical, but also the phenomenological reading of suññatā, an absolutely central and classical term, which has been a cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy over many centuries ( Williams, 2008).

With a minimalist sketch of the metaphysical background already in hand, let us therefore proceed to the phenomenological level of analysis. The VR-experience has a unique phenomenological profile which is another excellent example of a potential future target for interdisciplinary research, and comparative philosophy may actually help us to see the relevant features more clearly. The phenomenological reading of "emptiness" refers to a specific contemplative mode: a way of consciously experiencing the world and the process of knowing this world as inherently selfless ( anatta). "Seeing out of emptiness" is a specific mode of phenomenally experiencing the world as not seen by a self-as-subject, an ancient meditative practice, in the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, of "observing without an observer" ( Krishnamurti, 2010). The phenomenological reading of suññatā also includes a mode of perception in which one neither adds anything to nor takes anything away from what is present, thereby, as it were, "directly seeing" the qualities of suchness, interrelatedness, and impermanence. In this way, the phenomenological reading of "emptiness" refers to a specific mode of conscious experience that can be described as a choiceless form of pure awareness. This mode does not involve an agentive phenomenal self, and things are experienced neither as real nor as unreal. Therefore, this way of seeing also bears multiple and subtle relations to what, in Western phenomenology, has been described as the "bracketing" of an explicit existence assumption when philosophically investigating a specific content of consciousness, and is associated with technical terms like epoché, "eidetic reduction" or "phenomenological reduction" ( Beyer, 2016).

Obviously, I am not saying that suññatā describes the phenomenology of a standard VR user today. In VR, there is clearly a phenomenal self, and if the place illusion has been successfully created, the experience of actually "being there" can be transparent and subjectively robust ( Blanke and Metzinger, 2009). But the second element, the subjective experience of an environment in VR as being "neither real nor unreal" describes the phenomenology of VR very well. My second, phenomenological, point is that what makes VR phenomenology so special is the subjective quality of metaphysical indeterminacy. The claim is that VR-phenomenology is characterized by a phenomenology of metaphysical indeterminacy, meaning that objects and environment in VR are subjectively experienced as neither existing nor non-existing. Put differently, Buddhist philosophy may actually offer the conceptual instruments to describe the properties of interest from a more fine-grained phenomenological perspective on what is most interesting about an immersive VR experience. For many elements of subjectively experienced VR, there really is a distinct phenomenal quality of ontological neither-nor-ness: It is not the case that subjectively experienced elements of VR are either phenomenally real or phenomenally unreal. Phenomenologically, virtuality is emptiness if we describe it as an explicit phenomenal experience of metaphysical indeterminacy. I would like to submit that this is a core aspect of what is philosophically interesting about VR phenomenology and what distinguishes it from ordinary waking states. It is therefore noteworthy that Buddhist philosophy may have already given us the conceptual instruments to describe this in a much clearer and heuristically fruitful way.

Of course, things become much more complicated if we include augmented reality setups, and the constantly changing landscape and temporal distribution of phenomenal opacity versus phenomenal transparency into our investigation. The phenomenology of metaphysical indeterminacy is not all-pervading, it is variable and impermanent. But one may speculate that in the future we might, via controlled experimentation, use VR technology itself to make progress on philosophically relevant issues like these. For example, one might think of "contemplative" types of VR technology that explicitly aim at enhancing our lives by making the phenomenal quality of metaphysical indeterminacy more robust, then extending it to the place illusion and the sense of self. But as we have seen, many other options are now on the table. Perhaps the most interesting promise of VR technology lies in supporting rational, evidence-based and empirically informed research programs in philosophical phenomenology, with philosophers in turn providing some conceptual foundations and proposing novel research targets for the VR community.

Summary

As pointed out in the introduction, this article was mainly intended to be a source of inspiration for an interdisciplinary audience. Contact points and potential future directions for interdisciplinary cooperation between different subdisciplines of philosophy and VR research have been explored, through a series of concrete examples and possible research projects. The areas explored were:

* theories of consciousness and VR;

* embodiment and bodily self-consciousness in VR;

* amnestic re-embodiment (in which the user is unaware of having entered VR);

* the problem of personal identity in VR;

* rt-fMRI-NCCF (i.e., "walking around in the neural correlate of consciousness" by a proposed new variant of real-time fMRI-based neurofeedback employing VR technology);

* PSM-actions (i.e., novel forms of actions exclusively initiated in the conscious self-model which causally bypass the non-neural body);

* Complex social hallucinations and the risk of VR-induced political apathy;

* PSBS (the new logical scenario of "postbiotic social boot-strapping");

* the applied ethics of VR;

* VR and the philosophy of religion;

* VR-phenomenology as a new field of research.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.

Funding

This work was funded by a 5-year Fellowship awarded by the Gutenberg Research College, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Robert Clowes, Lucy Mayne, and Wanja Wiese for helpful critical discussion, Lucy Mayne and Wanja Wiese for editorial and technical help with the manuscript.

Footnotes

References

Baars, B. J. (1997b). In the theatre of consciousness. Global workspace theory, a rigorous scientific theory of consciousness. J. Conscious. Stud. 4, 292-309.

Cohen, O., Druon, S., Lengagne, S., Mendelsohn, A., Malach, R., Kheddar, A., et al. (2012). "fMRI robotic embodiment: a pilot study," in 2012 4th IEEE RAS & EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob) (Rome: IEEE), 314-319. doi: 10.1109/BioRob.2012.6290866

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Metzinger, T. (1993). Subjekt und Selbstmodell. Paderborn: Schöningh.

Metzinger, T., and Wiese, W. (2017). Philosophy and Predictive Processing. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.

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Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers?

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This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity.

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An error has occurred. Please check that your email address is correct. Thank you for subscribing to Hub News. To complete your subscription to our newsletter please click on the 'activate subscription' link which we will email you shortly. The Digital Hub Artist-in-Residence: Elaine Hoey interviewed about VR in the arts.

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Original title Ernste Spiele III: Immersion Director, scriptwriter Harun Farocki Research Matthias Rajmann Editor Harun Farocki, Max Reimann Cinematographer Ingo Kratisch Sound Matthias Rajmann Production Harun Farocki Filmproduction, Berlin with support from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH Co-production Jeu de Paume, Paris, Stuk, Leuven Format video (double projection), color, sound, 20 min. (Loop), Germany 2009

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Harun Farocki: Serious Games III: Immersion

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Original title Ernste Spiele III: Immersion Director, scriptwriter Harun Farocki Research Matthias Rajmann Editor Harun Farocki, Max Reimann Cinematographer Ingo Kratisch Sound Matthias Rajmann Production Harun Farocki Filmproduction, Berlin with support from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH Co-production Jeu de Paume, Paris, Stuk, Leuven Format video (double projection), color, sound, 20 min.

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Abstract

Immersion is the third of four documentaries by Harun Farocki that explores the use of video games in the U.S. military. The first film demonstrates training software in which a young soldier called Watson is killed; the second, a live action role play training exercise; the third, virtual reality (VR) immersion therapy; and the final film compares these pre- and post-war simulated environments side by side. The demonstration of the virtual reality software Virtual Iraq employed in Farocki's film Immersion will be reviewed here.

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Harun Farocki, Serious Games III (Immersion) (Review)

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Author(s): Eves, Natasha | Abstract: Immersion is the third of four documentaries by Harun Farocki that explores the use of video games in the U.S. military. The first film demonstrates training software in which a young soldier called Watson is killed; the second, a live action role play training exercise; the third, virtual reality (VR) immersion therapy; and the final film compares these pre- and post-war simulated environments side by side.

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Sacred Geometry is often referred to as the "architecture of the universe", it is found throughout the natural world. It is all around us and is one of the very few subjects that satisfy both the left brain and right brain hemispheres simultaneously. It satisfies the left brains desire for logical, sequential and objective data. It also satisfies the right brains desire for random, intuitive and subjective data.

It is simply not possible to cover all aspects of sacred geometry, although I will try to include as much as possible in this article. People have spent entire lifetimes studying a single aspect of sacred geometry; such as a rabbi studying the kabbalistic tree of life. The following content provides an overview on all Sacred Geometry symbols.

The Graphic below shows all of the basic Sacred Geometry shapes.

Vesica Piscis is a mathematical shape formed by intersecting two identical circles so that the center of each circle intersects the perimeter of the other. The vesica piscis is commonly used for Venn Diagrams and in various art and in seals organizations.

Various other symbols can be derived from the vesica piscis including the Ichthys, also known as the "Jesus Fish", the triquetra symbol, and the Reuleaux triangle. It has also been a symbol used by Freemasons for many years. Historically, the vesica piscis has been used as a system of proportions for architecture, illustrated in the works of Vitruvius.

The Seed of Life is a universal symbol that also represents the seven days of creation. It is found in all of the major religions and can be seen in many sites around the world, such as churches, mosques, prayer books and ancient temples. The two dimensional projection of the seed of life contains seven overlapping circles. It has been used for centuries as a symbol of blessing and protection.

The typical depiction Flower of Life always stops after 19 circles, the remaining circles are hidden outside the bounds of the outer circle. In the past this image and knowledge related to the Flower of Life was so sacred that they couldn't allow it to become common knowledge. Out of the complete Flower of Life pattern a new shape emerges; the The Fruit of Life.

The Flower of Life is said to be the actual blueprint of the universe continuing the basic design of every atomic and molecular structure, life form, etc; essentially everything in existence. Modern science and quantum physics are confirming the cosmic significance of these ancient sacred geometric forms which represent the building blocks of our physical universe. The ancients knew about the energetic nature of our existence. Other sacred patterns such as the Egg of Life, Seed of Life and the Tree of Life also exists within the Flower of Life pattern.

So what does the Tree of Life represent? A connection to everything including the things we cannot see or the void beyond. It reminds you that you are not alone in the Universe but rather part of a vast interconnected network.

The Tree of Life provides a hierarchical structure for all of the forces in the Universe. It can also be used as a road map of one's soul. The 10 spheres are called the "Sephiroth" translating to eminiation. These are connected by different paths. The first Sephira on the Tree of Life is at the top. It represents cosmic consciousness. The Sephira at the base represents the material world. The rest of these Sephiroth represent different qualities of the Soul. These can be divided into three pillars; the Pillar of Severity, The pillar of Mildness and the Pillar of Mercy.

The fruit of life is composed of 13 spheres; this is actually the 2d representation of a 3d structure Thirteen represents unity and transition between worlds / dimensions.

Those of you who play an instrument know the chromatic scale of 12 notes the thirteenth note is actually repeating the first note but on a higher frequency; when you attain a higher octave you enter a higher dimension. If we connect all the Centers of the 13 circles the result is 78 lines which create a structure known as Metatron's Cube. This structure contains all five platonic solids, these three-dimensional figures and their different combinations reveal every possible geometric law forming the physical reality we are experiencing.

The spheres of the Fruit of Life represents the female movements or elements of creation and provide the field for the 78 ray like male movements of creation. The geometry of Metatron's Cube is set to underlie what modern physics calls the quantum vacuum or void and is fundamental to the creation process at the quantum level. What we're talking about here is what's been called zero-point, life force or bio force energy.

The graphic known as Metatron's Cube didn't show up until later when a Medieval Italian Mathematician Leonardo Pisano, discovered Metatron's Cube. He read the history and legends of Metatron and was also familiar with sacred geometry and was probably an initiate in one of the schools that held those secrets.

Metatron's Cube traces back to nature's first pattern, and the 13 circles that are found inside the fourth circle in Nature's first pattern. When you connect the centers of all the 13 circles, you get the shape known as Metatron's Cube. Leonardo Pisano also discovered that you could create all 5 of the platonic solids within Metatron's Cube. Metatron's Cube is a transcendental form and beautifully illustrates the mental universe through the unfolding of 2-dimensional realities into 3 dimensional realities

The Hermetic axiom reads "all is mind, the universe is mental" and Metatron's Cube is teaching us about this conceptual mental nature of the universe and the current experiments in quantum physics are also teaching us this exact same thing. Without first being a conceptual equivalent in consciousness nothing could exist. Sacred geometry is the creator's conceptual architecture on which all things precipitate.

The star tetrahedron is the basis of the 64 grid tetrahedron also known as the Grid of Life. This is the masculine equivalent to the Flower of Life pattern. As the name suggests, this shape is made up of 64 tetrahedrons. Which as you know is one of the platonic solids.

When the 64-tetrahedron is overlaid on the flower of life this represents a powerful concept; the spheres represent space and the lines lines represent where space and time come together.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the 64 tetrahedron is the number 64 itself and how it appears throughout the natural world.

Here are a few examples:

There are 64 codons in human DNA

64 is the number of cells we have before the cells start to bifurcate (differentiate) after conception.

64 is the fundamental number in computer memory and bits of code

64 is encoded in the Tetragrammaton within the Hebrew Bible, which is the four letter theonym YHWH that means God in Hebrew.

64 is the number of generations from Adam until Jesus

64 manifestations of Lord Shiva in Hinduism

64 squares in chess and checker boards

64 hexagrams in the I Ching

64 tantras which is a form of Hinduism

64 is the maximum number of strokes in any Chinese character

This metaphysical symbol can produce many trees of life which radiate inward, this is why the 64 tetrahedron is symbolic of linking up ones individual paths in harmony with our soul family. It is said that connecting with your soul / star family will amplify each individual's energy to accomplish and manifest one's goals. A true symbol of the mastermind principle of harmony with among a group of individuals.

The shape known as a ' Torus' is a type of vortex. So what is a torus? The word "torus" comes from the Latin word meaning swelling. In sacred geometry it is the first shape to emerge from the Genesis Pattern. The torus is found in everything from atoms, to life forms and even in all cosmic bodies such as stars and galaxies. It is a primary shape in existence.

For many years 'seers' have taught that the human aura appears as a series of nested torus formations around the body. Energy flows through the center of the body and loops around to connect the feet and head. The flow from the feet to the head is bi-directional.The energy is flowing through the surface of the torus and inside an in a spiraling pattern, this is why the sacred geometry shape is shown with curves lines throughout the middle, while also adding the illusion of a 3d perspective to the 2d depiction.

The Torus is a 2d depiction of a 3 dimensional shape, like many other sacred geometry forms. The 3d shape is known as a horn torus. This can be mathematically described .

The Merkaba symbol (also spelled Merkabah) translates to light, spirit, body. The symbol consists of 2 intersecting tetrahedrons that rotate in opposite directions, this creates an energy field that is commonly referred to as a light body.

Merkavah mysticism is an early school of Judaism, practiced between 100 BCE - 1000 CE. The teachings were based on visions found in the Book of Ezekiel and hekhalot literature. These stories speak of ascents into the heavens and to the Throne of God.

Everyone has access to their own personal Merkaba or vehicle of light with practice in meditation. It is said that once one has access to their Merkaba it can provide a powerful protection and transport your consciousness to higher dimensions. The Merkavah symbol can remind us of the potential power we hold when we unite our bodies energy to Source.

This symbol combines opposing energies in perfect harmony and has allegedly been used by ascended masters to connect to higher realms. In modern esoteric teachings, the Merkaba is considered an interdimensional vehicle. It is also known as a star tetrahedron and can be imagined as a 3-dimensional Star of David.
HOW TO DRAW SACRED GEOMETRY SHAPES
All of the basic Sacred Geometry shapes can be easily derived from this cubic grid developed by Pardesco.

How is Sacred Geometry Created?

Let me show you how nature created its very first pattern. It is interesting to note that Genesis in the Bible essentially describes the same process I'm about to show you. However it should be known that this knowledge is most likely taken from the ancient Egyptian mystery schools and it is not original to the bible.

In the beginning, there was an infinite void or complete emptiness. A space with zero dimensions and no time.

In this depiction nothing material has been created, only imaginary lines that represent pure consciousness expanding out front, back, left, right, up and down.

To define boundaries in space all that needs to be done is connect the end of each point to every other point. The beauty of this is that you cannot make a mistake, it is simply impossible.

Once all the ends are connected we have what is called an octahedron, which if viewed from the correct perspective reveals a hexagram, also known as the Star of David.

Now that boundaries have been created, relative movement within the void are possible; where as previously consciousness had nothing to move relative to.

In the Bible, Eve was supposedly created from Adam's Rib - when you compare this story to the next step in the process you can begin appreciating the idea that maybe the Bible is only an exoteric recreation of older esoteric wisdom.

The octahedron is made up of perfectly straight lines. In sacred geometry straight lines are considered to be male and curved lines female. At this stage we have a purely male shape, this is why the freemasons consider the male to be the generating principle.

The next step in the process involves spinning the octahedron in one full rotation around each of the axes defined previously. Again it is impossible to make a mistake in this step. The end result will always be that the parameters of a perfect sphere have been traced.

Now we have a fully female shape. Eve has now been created from Adam.

Consciousness now has a reference point, the spherical membrane, on which to repeat the process.

This shape can be found twice in the human body in the appearance of the human eye behind the eyelids and also the lens within the eye, which adjusts the focus of light.

To project a third sphere we move to the newly created intersection between the two original spheres.

After this third sphere is created, there is only one rule that is followed to complete the first process; always move to the innermost origin points before projecting another sphere. This results in the process being perfect and prevents a chaotic mess being created.

This symbol is found all across the world today, but the earliest known depiction was found at the temple of Osiris in Egypt, etched into the granite using a process unknown to modern science.

It is interesting to note that all the parameters for a hypercube, also known as a tesseract can be easily extracted from Metatron's Cube. It should also be noted that Metatron's Cube is also deeply connected to the platonic solids. Below is a 2D projection of a tesseract:

Many of the ancient traditions were fascinated by a science of simple 3 dimensional geometric shapes, that were originally discovered by Plato (who invented school). The Platonic Solids have more symmetry than any other shape you could possibly make.

The most advanced hyper dimensional models, that scientists are trying to build multidimensional in the Universe you can see the Platonic Solids show up frequently, because they know that in order to build higher dimensions you need a lot of symmetry.

In the original model Plato came up with, each shape represents an element. The Cube represents Earth, the Tetrahedron represents Fire, the Octahedron represents Air, the Icosahedron represents Water and the Dodecahedron represents Aether.

Connecting the edges of four equilateral triangles creates the tetrahedron. Connecting the edges of size squares creates the hexahedron. Connecting the edges of eight equilateral triangles creates the octahedron. Connecting the edges of 12 pentagons creates the dodecahedron. Connecting the edges of 20 equilateral triangles creates the icosahedron. He wrote about this in their philosophical texts.

There are five platonic solids: the tetrahedron, octahedron, hexahedron, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron. What makes these shapes so special is that the faces, angles and edges are all congruent and that each one can fit perfectly inside a sphere with all the corners touching. There are no other shapes in existence that can satisfy these parameters.

The five platonic solids also form pairs, known as jewels; the hexahedron and octahedron make up pair and the icosahedron and dodecahedron make up the other. The tetrahedron is the odd one out, as it is a jewel with itself by connecting the midpoints of each face. Each platonic solid is also associated with an element.

THE GOLDEN SPIRAL & FIBONNACI SEQUENCE

Closely related to the golden ratio is the Fibonacci Sequence. It was first described by mathematicians in India in about 700 CE and introduced to the west by Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci. In his book, Liber Abaci . The easiest place to find this sequence in nature is in plants. No matter what type of flower you look at you will see the number of pedals equals one of the numbers in the Fibonacci series. Rows of seeds in sunflowers and pinecones always add up to Fibonacci numbers. Learn more about the Fibonacci sequence and its relationship to Phi .

The Golden Ratio. What is Phi?

The golden ratio appears in ancient Greek architecture and some famous artwork. It is found throughout nature in various forms and is likely to have been quantified after considering a regular pentagon with a side length of 1. The length of the diagonal connecting two adjacent sides of a pentagon is the golden ratio. Closely related is a shape known as the pentagram, if the shortest of these lengths are 1, then the other lengths are powers of Phi.

Ages ago the Renaissance thinker Luca Pacioli was fascinated by this ratio and wrote a book called "The Divine Proportion" which was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. The book studies various geometric solids and the ratio's appearance in architecture and the human body. Many artists throughout time have embraced this ratio in there work, such as Salvador Dali painting The Sacrament of the Last Supper on a canvas in the shape of a golden rectangle. Another example is the ancient Greek sculptor Phidias who used the golden ratio to illustrate the idea of physical perfection.

A golden rectangle can be progressively broken down into squares whose side lengths depend on Phi, this is often depicted with the Golden Spiral which connect the corners of each of these squares.

Three golden rectangles can be created by connecting the twelve vertices of the icosahedron. You can read more about the mathematical properties of the golden ratio .

Additional Resources:
Ichthys Symbol Explanation Metatron's Cube Meaning Hypercube Wiki

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Sacred Geometry Shapes Sacred Geometry is often referred to as the "architecture of the universe", it is found throughout the natural world. It is all around us and is one of the very few subjects that satisfy both the left brain and right brain hemispheres simultaneously.

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'Creating Deeper Engagement on Climate Change' workshop hosted by Creative Ireland, which explored how arts & creativity can be used by public bodies to create deeper levels of engagement on climate action.

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Minister Catherine Martin speech at 'Creating Deeper 'Engagement on Climate Change' workshop

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Welcome to the official site of Park Fiction: Since June 16, 2013, Park Fiction is Gezi Park Fiction St. Pauli. after the clearing of occupy gezi, the neighbours pictured below, renamed the park as a gesture of solidarity with the struggle in Istanbul & turkey.

This text is a brief introduction to Park Fiction, it's practices, concepts, terminology - and how these (or some of these) are being actualized in the current struggles for the Right to the City in Hamburg.

Park Fiction organises Collective Productions of Desires for a park in Hamburg's red light district, St.Pauli, since 1995.

Today the neighborhood park has been realized. Designed by the residents, it is located with a view over the harbor, in a significant and beautiful place, that the city's government wanted to sell to private investors.

A costly building was planned here originally, but the neighborhood stopped the development in 1997. After ten years of struggles the park was inaugurated in 2005.

Production of Desires in the Urban Field

The plans were stopped by a clever Network in the community. Instead of just protesting against the governments plans, this network organised a Parallel Planning Process in the community, creating Platforms of Exchange between people from different cultural fields: musicians, priests, a headmistress, a cook, café owners, bar-men, a psychologist, children, squatters, artists - Interventionist Residents.

INFOTAINEMENT

Instead of doing activism proper, Park Fiction made the struggle as well as the planning process work as a Platform of Exchange & Production. Lectures, talks, discussions, exhibitions and film-screenings employed the Local Knowledge, people started to make-each-other-more-clever.

TOOLS

Special tools were developed to make planning more accessible: the Plasticine Office, the Archive of Desires, questionnaires and maps, the Garden Library and the Action Kit (a portable planning studio with an unfoldable panorama view of the Elbe-River, for house visits), a telephone Hotline with answering machine for people who get inspired late at night.

Park Fiction organised the planning process like a game. Consequently, instead of handing out textual leaflets explaining how to access the process, Park Fiction gave out a Game board showing all the possibilities to become part of the project.

FILM

Margit Czenki shot her film Park Fiction - Desire Will Leave the House and Take to the Streets on Super 8 and 16mm film in 1998, to capture the different voices and the moment, when art and politics made each other more clever.

THE PARK

Construction of the park started years later, after Park Fiction was invited to Documenta11.

Ideas were developed into buildable designs by the residents and Park Fiction in collaboration with landscape architects. The Teagarden Island or Palm tree Island (based on a drawing by a boy called Yusuf made in 1997) features artificial palm trees (you can hang your hammock between them and enjoy the view over the harbour) and is surrounded by an elegant 40 meter long bench.

There are three Open Air Solariums and a Flying Carpet, a wave shaped piece of lawn bordered by an Alhambra-inspired mosaic, designed by Sabine Stöwesand. A flat steel palm tree is copied from the carousel on Hamburg's funfair.

The „Bamboo Grove of the Humble Politician" and the Dog Garden (featuring the long desired poodle-shaped-box tree) were realised in 2005 along with the Boule Field Abolition du Travail Aliené (idea by Bernd Ehemann), the tenant gardens, and the Tulip Patterned Tartan field by Nesrin Biguen. The tulip pattern is a secret reference to the tulip era in 16th century Turkey, a time cherished in collective memory for it's flourishing of the arts, tolerance, lack of military ambition and exchange with the west.)

The Woman Pirates Fountain and the Strawberry shaped Tree house, however, have not been financed yet. This is mentioned as an example, for the damage that happens to desires, if you succeed to be In Bed wit Bureaucracy.

The plans for a Park Fiction Archive of Independent Urbanism, floating in the air in rugged El-Lissitzky-style in a container, mounted on pillars, were thwarted by local authorities. It is now housed in the new rooftop of the Golden Pudel Klub.

As a start, Park Fiction organized an international congress in 2003, the Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space - inviting Sarai / Cybermohalla and Raqs Media Collective's Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Delhi, the self organized settlement Maclovio Rojas from Tijuana, Ala Plastica from La Plata, and Isola Art Center / OUT-Office for Urban Transformation from Milan, the Schwabinggrad Ballett, the Galerie für Landschaftskunst and LIGNA from Hamburg - groups that manage to create Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space. With the conference, Park Fiction also intervened into the global discourse about cities, self organisation, irregular settlements and the role of art in urban research and urban development.

The Park was inaugurated in 2005 with a Picnic Against Gentrification:

GENTRIFIDINGSBUMS

Between 2000 and 2010, rents in St.Pauli rise as dramatically as the investor's towers. The Action-Network against Gentrification It's Raining Caviar is formed. Caviar's campaign starts with a party and a series of talks in the Park Fiction.

The park's political meaning is actualized by other events: The Euromayday starts it's annual parade in the park. On board: mobile Production of Desires against commercial beach clubs at the river. The protest is successful - the beach clubs are stopped.

Irene Budde, Olaf Sobczak and Steffen Jörg produce the documentary Empire St.Pauli - On Pearl Chains and Banning Orders. The filmmakers choose political and contested locations for their screenings. When the film is shown in Park Fiction in Summer 2009, 1300 viewers turn up. Late at night, after the screening, a spontaneous demonstration starts, protesting against gentrification of St.Pauli. The event marks one of the beginnings of the Hamburg Right to the City movement.
The Right to the City: Other Spatialized Struggles in Hamburg
In the Video below, Park Fiction Komitee member Christoph Schäfer talks on the project and how the park has become a place of „spatialized resistance" in the last years. „Space is the Place" is the title of Schäfer's Eight-Minute-Lecture in the Creative Time Summit 2013 in New York University's Skirball Centre:

The growing Right to the City movement relates to the urban thinking of Henri Lefebvre, whose theory influenced Park Fiction in the mid nineties. Starting in 2009, Hamburg's Right to the City Network connects different spatial struggles (by now over 40 initiatives joined the network). It thus echoes Lefebvre's idea, that space is produced by social interaction, movements and imagination.

Suddenly, tenants work together with artists and squatters, radical leftists with allotment gardeners, raver join forces with people fighting for sustainable energy, guerrilla gardeners cooperate with neighbours who want to set up a community run production centre with a fab lab.
Struggles in the Hood: NoBNQ
Is the Hamburg Network an example, how emancipatory movements can operate outside the narrow frame of party politics? How people can get a foothold on the slippery terrain of post-fordism, by connecting spatial struggles?

Spring 2009, only 200 meters away from Park Fiction, new investors buy
half a block of houses. They want to kick out the old tenants,
modernise the old houses, build 82 costly condos, and then sell the
whole complex (called BNQ - Bernhard Nocht Quarter) again.

The bad news are made known, and neighbours found No BNQ.
A multitude of activities is started against the investors plans, their
advertising event is hijacked, and on a street party against the project,
neighbours start an alternative planning process.

NoBNQ develops an integrated urban concept for the houses:
cooperative housing and low rents, combined with innovative use of
the commercial spaces, with a Fab Lab, an open digital, community-
run workshop, as it's core element. Around it, small companies like
Ameise record pressing plant, the Gyro Gearloose Playground in the
backyard or a neighbourhood Café, would provide jobs and places
of learning for local kids and grown ups.

To promote the idea, the Fab Lab Truck from the Netherlands starts
production right in front of the investor's buildings in August 2010. The
City's administration, however, doesn't approve of the idea. The
neighbourhood Concept for Friendly Takeover, can not be realized.

The investors plans, on the other hand, are altered dramatically:
Because of the pressure, all tenants have a 10 year rent guarantee
(rent is frozen till 2021), instead of 82 private condos, there will be 67
tenant flats, plus 40 social flats in a cooperative house.
Struggles with artistic components: Gängeviertel
NoBNQ is a founding initiative of the Right to the City Network.

August 22, 2009, 4 o'clock in the afternoon:

Disguised as a courtyard party, 200 artists squat 15 buildings in the city centre of Hamburg, the last remnants of the Gängeviertel, old working-class houses and a factory building, right between the Springer publishing house and the Unilever high rise.

2 hours later thousands of people visit the houses, watch exhibitions, discuss and party. And the wonder happens: the police stays away, and the next day, all newspapers, even the conservative ones, run double pages on the friendly artists' squat in Hamburg.

Years before, the houses had been sold by the city to a Dutch investor years before, who planned to demolish most of the old buildings. Due to the financial crisis, the investor had difficulties to cough up the money.

Komm in die Gänge joined the Right to the City Network and launched a city-wide discussion on urban planning and politics, leading to some changes in policy and laws of the neoliberal hanseatic city.
Production of desires - round the corner: UNSER! AREAL
In November 2009, 3 months later, the artists achieved the impossible: the houses were bought back by the city. And only now, in August 2011, city and squatters signed a cooperation agreement, which gives control over the houses and the renovation works to the squatters.

...appropriates the planning process for the vacant Alte Rindermarkthalle (old cattle market) in Hamburg St. Pauli, both conceptually and physically.

Conceptually, since 2010 Unser!Areal has helped the people living nearby to express their ideas for the future of the hall in a Collective Production of Desires, inspired by Park Fiction. The desires, gathered in a first poll among 18.000 local inhabitants, are sent back into the neighbouring quarters in the form of so called „phone books". They express a strong opposition to the initial plans of the city to streamline the hall into an entertainment centre and at the same time suggest manifold clever, socially beneficial uses.

Physically, Unser! Areal has recently entered the estate with five „planning cubes", each seven feet wide. Unfolded the cubes open up a space for the local inhabitants in which a self-determined planning process can go on with drawing, painting and
architectural bricolage. Film screenings, discussions and practices in urban gardening accompany the process.

While the city of Hamburg has finally refrained from having the "illegal" planning cubes removed, the struggle about the future use of the hall is in full swing as the city now plans to set it up as a mere shopping mall.
Park Fiction 2 - stretching the feet into the Elbe
Park Fictions most popular post of all times (up till now): The solidarity shoot with occupygezi, seen by over 66.000 people on facebook alone.

Since August 2020 we have started a new production of desires for the concrete strip between Elbe river and street, in front of the harbour.

„What do you think the site should be able to do in the future? How can the park's „island principle" jump to the Elbe? What do you need in a pandemic age?

The following restrictions are important to us: fish market and harbour birthday party should still be able to take place there. And everything that is planned must be able to withstand a flood.

Come along - we have come up with new TOOLS so that EVERYONE can plan. This first phase of the desired production starts on four weekends in August and September:

August 14th - 16th.

August 21 - 23

August 28th - 30th

04 - 06 September

Always from 3 pm till dark

At 17.00 there is always a guided tour through the park and to the new planning area.

The planning of course with a hygiene concept.

PARK FICTION 2 - JUMP TO THE ELBE"{„type":"block","srcIndex":1,"srcClientId":"9d793a4f-97c1-4a6d-86c2-3626429eb27b","srcRootClientId":""}

Scientists! Researchers!
Park Fiction Concept 1995: Rebellion on Level p The City is Unwritten
For further reading & research, please read the basic texts of Park Fiction:
All posts in English language
A nearly complete list of publications on Park Fiction starting in 1995, last updated 2006, can be found here.

Park Fiction 2 - Re-Thinking the Concrete Slap

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Welcome to the official site of Park Fiction: Since June 16, 2013, Park Fiction is Gezi Park Fiction St. Pauli. after the clearing of occupy gezi, the neighbours pictured below, renamed the park as a gesture of solidarity with the struggle in Istanbul & turkey.

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Park Fiction

Park Fiction

This text is a brief introduction to Park Fiction, it's practices, politics, theory and terminology - and how these (or some of these) are being actualized in the current struggles for the Right to the City in Hamburg: the reference to Henri Lefebvre's thinking, spatialisation of social struggles, introducing elements of art and playful elements into emancipatory politics, Production of Desires.
Park Fiction organises Collective Productions of Desires for a park in Hamburg's red light district, St.Pauli, since 1995.

Today the neighbourhood park has been realized. Designed by the residents, it is located with a view over the harbour, in a significant and beautiful place, that the city's government wanted to sell to private investors. A costly building was planned here originally, but the neighbourhood stopped the development in 1997. After ten years of struggles the park was inaugurated in 2005.

Production of Desires in the Urban Field

The plans were stopped by a clever Network in the community. Instead of just protesting against the governments plans, this network organised a Parallel Planning Process in the community, creating Platforms of Exchange between people from different cultural fields: musicians, priests, a headmistress, a cook, café owners, bar-men, a psychologist, children, squatters, artists - Interventionist Residents.

INFOTAINEMENT
Instead of doing activism proper, Park Fiction made the struggle as well as the planning process work as a Platform of Exchange & Production. Lectures, talks, discussions, exhibitions and film-screenings employed the Local Knowledge, people started to make-each-other-more-clever.

TOOLS
Special tools were developed to make planning more accessible: the Plasticine Office, the Archive of Desires, questionnaires and maps, the Garden Library and the Action Kit (a portable planning studio with an unfoldable panorama view of the Elbe-River, for house visits), a telephone Hotline with answering machine for people who get inspired late at night.
Park Fiction organised the planning process like a game. Consequently, instead of handing out textual leaflets explaining how to access the process, Park Fiction gave out a Game board showing all the possibilities to become part of the project.

FILM
Margit Czenki shot her film Park Fiction - Desire Will Leave the House and Take to the Streets on Super 8 and 16mm film in 1998, to capture the different voices and the moment, when art and politics made each other more clever.

THE PARK
Construction of the park started years later, after Park Fiction was invited to Documenta11. Ideas were developed into buildable designs by the residents and Park Fiction in collaboration with landscape architects. The Teagarden Island or Palm tree Island (based on a drawing by a boy called Yusuf made in 1997) features artificial palm trees (you can hang your hammock between them and enjoy the view over the harbour) and is surrounded by an elegant 40 meter long bench.
There are three Open Air Solariums and a Flying Carpet, a wave shaped piece of lawn bordered by an Alhambra-inspired mosaic, designed by Sabine Stöwesand. A flat steel palm tree is copied from the carousel on Hamburg's funfair.
The Bamboo Grove of the Humble Politician and the Dog Garden (featuring the long desired poodle-shaped-box tree) were realised in 2005 along with the Boule Field Abolition du Travail Aliené (idea by Bernd Ehemann), the tenant gardens, and the Tulip Patterned Tartan field by Nesrin Biguen. The tulip pattern is a secret reference to the tulip era in 16th century Turkey, a time cherished in collective memory for it's flourishing of the arts, tolerance, lack of military ambition and exchange with the west.)
The Woman Pirates Fountain and the Strawberry shaped Tree house, however, have not been financed yet. This is mentioned as an example, for the damage that happens to desires, if you succeed to be In Bed wit Bureaucracy.
The plans for a Park Fiction Archive of Independent Urbanism, floating in the air in rugged El-Lissitzky-style in a container, mounted on pillars, were thwarted by local authorities. It is now housed in the new rooftop of the Golden Pudel Klub.
As a start, Park Fiction organized an international congress in 2003, inviting Sarai from Delhi, Maclovio Rojas from Tijuana, Ala Plastica from La Plata, and Isola Art Center / OUT-Office for Urban Transformation from Milan, the Schwabinggrad Ballett and LIGNA from Hamburg - groups that manage to create Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space.
The Park was inaugurated in 2005 with a Picnic Against Gentrification.

GENTRIFIDINGSBUMS
Between 2000 and 2010, rents in St.Pauli rise as dramatically as the investor's towers. The Action-Network against Gentrification It's Raining Caviar is formed. Caviar's campaign starts with a party and a series of talks in the Park Fiction.
The park's political meaning is actualized by other events: The Euromayday starts it's annual parade in the park. On board: mobile Production of Desires against commercial beach clubs at the river. The protest is successful - the beach clubs are stopped.
Irene Budde, Olaf Sobczak and Steffen Jörg produce the documentary Empire St.Pauli - On Pearl Chains and Banning Orders. The filmmakers choose political and contested locations for their screenings. When the film is shown in Park Fiction in Summer 2009, 1300 viewers turn up. Late at night, after the screening, a spontaneous demonstration starts, protesting against gentrification of St.Pauli. The event marks one of the beginnings of the Hamburg Right to the City movement.

Spatialized Struggles

The growing Right to the City movement relates to the urban thinking of Henri Lefebvre, whose theory influenced Park Fiction in the mid nineties. Starting in 2009, Hamburg's Right to the City Network rechtaufstadt.net connects different spatial struggles (by now over 40 initiatives
joined the network). It thus echoes Lefebvre's idea, that space is produced by social interaction, movements and imagination.
Suddenly, tenants work together with artists and squatters, radical leftists with allotment gardeners, raver join forces with people fighting for sustainable energy, guerrilla gardeners cooperate with neighbours who want to set up a community run production centre with a fab lab.
Is the Hamburg Network an example, how emancipatory movements can operate outside the narrow frame of party politics? How people can get a foothold on the slippery terrain of post-fordism, by connecting spatial struggles?

(Quelle: http://www.parkfiction.org/2011/09/516.html)
Video: 02 Políticas de Ciudad: Ch. Schaefer - Park Fiction text - parkfiction - Eine andauernde Geschichte der praktischen Stadtkritik

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urban-matters.org is a project based platform inquiring current artistic and urbanistic strategies, methods and tools for urban development and the new role these strategies can play as equal partner for a future planning of our society beyond governing principles of neo-liberal interests.

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The awesome bike-mounted parks were the brainchild of Rebar Group's John Bela and N55's Till Wolfer, who sought to find a new way to engage the community with public art and the power of the bicycle. A fleet of the lush bicycles were created for YARAT Contemporary Art Organization for their Baku Public Art Festival, which started in Azerbaijan earlier this month, along with a slew of other world class public art installations.

Each pedal-powered park bike can accommodate a rider as well as plants, trees, picnic gear or lawn games. Add on a passenger or two on the front of the bike's "lawn," and you have a pedicab like no other. The Parkcycle Swarm pieces can be moved easily to any area to bring a grassy knoll for reading, relaxing or hanging out with friends. The fleet can also joined together to make one big elevated green space, making a literal pop-up park sized park in the middle of an urban setting. The Parkcycle Swarm will be bobbing around Baku for the duration of the festival, which runs until September 17th.
+ Rebar Group
Via PSFK

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Parkcycle Swarm's Mobile Pop-Up Parks are Powered by Bicycles

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The awesome bike-mounted parks were the brainchild of Rebar Group's John Bela and N55's Till Wolfer, who sought to find a new way to engage the community with public art and the power of the bicycle.

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Paul Farley I remember once standing in front of Walter De Maria's The Earth Room in New York, it's the first time I'd seen contained earth in a room in that sort of situation. It's sterilised as they don't want things growing, but there is still someone there tending to the soil. It's a strange kind of gardeing because he is actually suppressing. He's watching out for toadstools or mushrooms, he's watching out for shoots that have blown in or a seed that somebody has walked in from Central Park, and he is keeping it at a steady state. I read somewhere that the track of the sun across the gallery floor dries the earth out in a path across it and he has to water it. I suppose is going to have that too now, while it's here for the next few months it's going to be looked after, but in a different way from The Earth Room because you accept that things might grow.

Abraham Cruvillegas I was trying to propose a question: Who am I? Which is a very dangerous question because it normally leads you to think about genealogy about history, geography, politics, migration, and economics and so on. So I arrived at this very simple thing, maybe I am an empty lot because of what it represents and what it means, in my own experience of course. There will be someone watering the earth, who is not a gardener, so if something grows they will not be gardening, just providing the minimum for something to grow: light and warmth. They'll do this during opening hours, so it's not necessarily a performance, but there is some activity. But I want to think also that this activity is not the most important one, because I've seen many worms and bugs, little beetles, and I'm not thinking, or not mentioning spores, and many, many things that we don't see, but there is a lot of activity already there. We have little clay bowls as our first layer, then compost, and then the soil that came from the parks, and that's where something can potentially come from - hidden roots for example. It's not that I'm hoping that something will happen, I'm hoping that it's continuous; the size of the Turbine Hall is so impressive because of the scale, but the real drama is microscopic.

PF That's right, to really see it, or to experience it, requires a huge adjustment of scale, the micro to macro is wonderful. One of the things that's impressed me about your work when I've seen it over the years, especially I remember your residency here a few years ago, is your willingness not to categorise things or materials. You quite happily will have things that are organic and inorganic working together and I love the surprise and adventure of that. Let's move away from talking about gardening. This isn't just soil. Soil is incredibly interesting because of how loaded it is, in any culture. The English war poet Edward Thomas went off to fight in the First World War and when asked what he was fighting for, he leaned over and picked up some earth and said 'this is what I'm fighting for'. What made you chose soil? And what made you choose the soil you've chosen, because it's come from places all over London.

AC What you said is very important to me. The real purpose of my work in general is about trying to understand the idea of people trying to own a piece of land. This is my personal story, my experience. I haven't lived through a war, but I've been in constant struggle as we all do in our different ways, and if we don't arrive at a kind of awareness then we are wasting our time, and our life. I am very grateful to my parents because they didn't give me land, but the idea of how to be proud of the way you relate yourself to the earth; meaning fertility, meaning nature, meaning the landscape and the horizon.

Abraham Cruzvillegas Autoconstrucción 2009
© Abraham Cruzvillegas

PF Tell me about Mexico City in the 1960s and 70s. What's happening there in terms of people's land use? Were people moving towards the centre of the city or away from it?

AC After the Mexican revolution of 1910-1920 there was a strong desire and drive to construct the Mexican identity, which of course is a myth. As a country we have many languages and multiple cultures, which means difference and great diversity. We are not a homogenous society but the government wanted to consolidate the nation in to one thing - impossible. And suddenly in the 1930s there was a very important discovery for the economy - oil. Oil became the most important economic force. Many people left the countryside to go to the cities, and ended up taking land illegally, as my parents did. They chose a piece of land that was volcanic rock so nothing grows there. The nice thing about it was that people organised themselves to fight for the property of the land, to fight for education and having a school, having a market, having electricity, water, sewerage services - but in the context of not only an impoverished economy but also a very corrupt one. Despite this, people, my family included, made something very beautiful out of this - a community. It became very politicised and critical to the government, so it became a national movement, and the leaders of this movement were women, mothers, because the men had to go to out to work. We attended many demonstrations against the government and American intervention. That process led everybody to understand that you can do anything. The construction was done by everybody. Work became sharing and building together, which was an amazing process of togetherness.

View of buildings in Abraham Cruzvillegas's home town of Ajusco, Mexico, 2009, photographed by the artist
© Abraham Cruzvillegas, courtesy the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

PF Would the word 'Autoconstrucción' have been common currency in1970s Mexico?

AC Yes. It means very literally 'self-constructed'. This is how I've been trying to understand the way I became myself. So when I call these works auto-construccion, it's not just the way we made these houses, but it could be translated as self-constructing. The shapes of the houses are often very chaotic, even inefficient I would say, and very contradictory in many ways, because there is no architect involved. There is no planning, no design, no budget, and many times there are no ideas, but needs. The main material in fact is not the rocks or the stones or the wood, but the specific need. Scarcity would be the main material. And with scarcity you can make everything.

When I was looking at Empty Lot I was re-energised in my love for this idea of auto-construction. We're almost the same age, but it was a very different story that happened in the UK at that time. Working-class people were moved out of cities because the housing stock was poor after the war. Cities had been heavily bombed, so we all moved out, not in. And we moved to spaces that had been constructed largely by local and central government; and the new-build housing stock, is almost all modernist - it's not Le Corbusier - but it's trickle-down modernist, because they're realised that it's cheap to build this sort of stuff quickly. Our back garden was delivered to us. The houses were so new there was no garden, just a piece of concrete and so a lorry came, full of soil, and emptied it behind the house and my father came out and said 'right, there's our garden' and we got to work. The odd thing was that we knew there was nothing underneath the soil. We knew we were living in a totally artificial space.

Abraham Cruzvillegas collecting soil from the Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2015
© Mark Godfrey

AC For this project, we contacted every possible place in London where we could possibly get soil, including Buckingham Palace and private gardens - even people who work at Tate. People began bringing little bags of soil and so it became a kind of democracy. A collaboration with the city. In England you have so many words for these spaces; commons, greens, meadows, gardens, parks. It is a new way of looking at landscape.

You seem keen to stress this work isn't simply autobiographical, and it's not all about you. TS Eliot, who wrote The Wasteland, said the best poetry is an escape from personality, it's not about you.

AC Exactly. It is about everybody.

PF You're a sculptor but do you have a relationship with poetry?

AC Very much so. In the catalogue for this work, they gave me 60 pages to do with what I wished. So I piled up lots of reference images - I say pile as I'm a sculptor so the way I work normally is to pile things - as well as poetry. Since I was a teenager I have been a poetry lover and I'm very interested in the group Los Contemporaneos, who were active in Mexico in the 1920s, and of course I still read poetry from my contemporaries now, such as Gabriela Jauregui, and I love William Carlos Williams; I often quote them in my publications. Dylan Thomas is also a big inspiration for me - I could keep adding names...

PF It's music to me ears when people cross those boundaries. Can I ask you about playfulness? When I'm writing I have to remind myself to play a bit, otherwise the words doe on the page. Is it like that for you as a sculptor?

AC Yes. The other day I went to collect some soil from a school here in London; so instead of just going to collect soil we arranged, say, a lecture, for eight and nine-year-old kids. I probably got the best questions that I've ever had in my life. I'm very happy that I have constructed a space in which I can become a child whilst working. This kind of playfulness you just described, like piling things in a way that they're all about to collapse; at that moment, my work is finished. I have the privilege of being an artist - I would be stupid not to take advantage of the learning that means being able to play in such a troubled society and universe.
Hyundai Commission 2015: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, curated by Mark Godfrey with Fiontán Moran, 13 October 2015 - 3 April 2016
Join the conversation #EmptyLot

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that's your lot: abraham cruzvillegas in conversation with paul farley

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That's Your Lot: Abraham Cruzvillegas in conversation with Paul Farley - Interview | Tate

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Paul Farley I remember once standing in front of Walter De Maria's The Earth Room in New York, it's the first time I'd seen contained earth in a room in that sort of situation. It's sterilised as they don't want things growing, but there is still someone there tending to the soil.

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he stepped platforms of Abraham Cruzvillegas's Empty Lot stand on a forest of scaffolding. Rising towards the bridge from the downward slope of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, they continue to rise again beyond. Looking back from the rear of theroom, the structure resembles a ship in a dry dock, its gigantic raised prow facing east. From down here the view of the upper level (where all the action is) is extremely limited. The best views are from the bridge and along the level 1 walkway, commanding a view of the deck below.

But it's not a deck - more a garden or allotment. Cruzvillegas's work is absorbing and frustrating in equal measure. Absorbing because of its wealth of details, frustrating because it is difficult to see all of them with any clarity. Wherever you are (and however sharp-eyed), much of it is hard to make out. Distances are too far; the light is often against you. There's too much going on. This is how it is in a crowded market, or any large public space.

All an illusion ... the small planters look like so many untended graves. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Shutterstock

You want to walk on the artist's floating floor and examine the briccollaged lamps he has cobbled together from junk he found in the local area around the gallery, but you can't. Angled over some of the 240 raised, triangular planters that form a pleasing geometric pattern across the floor, Cruzvillegas's lamps are a kind of precarious sculpture.

Nor can you get down and dirty in the earth, transplanted from 36 sites all over London - the gardens of Buckingham Palace and Brockwell Park, city farms and the Lea Valley, the famous gardens at Kew and Wisley. The soil is as various in colour and texture as the places it comes from. There's a way of identifying its origins but I doubt many will try (apart from avid gardeners) - though examining soil types is one way of reading the work. You can take pleasure in their muted colours.

Another is to botanise. Nothing has been planted but there are seeds and seedlings, bulbs, bugs and who knows what else already in the earth. The artist expects guerrilla gardening, the chucking of seed-bombs and other furtive infiltrations. Weeds have already begun to sprout here and there, the odd tuft of grass, emerging funghi. Someone has already thrown an apple into one of the little triangular plots, but I doubt the seeds will get a chance to germinate before the commission comes down next spring. Do not expect a flourishing of verdant and colourful plants. It is an empty lot. The small planters look like so many untended graves.

The earth has been transplanted from 36 sites all over London - the gardens of Buckingham Palace and Brockwell Park, city farms and the Lea Valley, the famous gardens at Kew and Wisley. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Shutterstock

The optical pattern is nice. Wandering the area below is like a visit to a health-and-safety conscious building site, all the towers of scaffolding enclosed in mesh-lined wooden structures. There is no public access up the staircases built into some of them.

The weakening winter daylight, and the Mexican artist's own arrangement of little lights, is augmented by powerful lamps on poles around the perimeter of the garden. The whole thing has the air of a compound in a displacement camp. Like any local allotment, there's a lot of make-do and human disorder.

The raised floor with the gloomy lower level brings to mind the second Turbine Hall commission, the late Juan Muñoz's 2001 Double Bind, recently re-installed in the HangarBicocca in Milan. When we met by chance last week, Cruzvillegas told me he was unaware of this work. He also insisted that the lower level of Empty Lot is part of the work, not a plinth. If it is more than a support structure, it exists to acknowledge all the building work taking place around London. Mostly, it just makes you aware of the scaffolder's skills. In many countries, including Mexico, scaffolding is more ad-hoc, using reclaimed timber and bamboo rather than prefabricated lengths of steel tube, engineered couplers, clamps, props and standardised planks. Cruzvillegas has avoided the exotic.

Master builder ... Abraham Cruzvillegas on his 'allotment'. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex Shutterstock

What goes on up-top among the lozenge-like grid is more homely, though the overall effect resembles Buckminster Fuller's geodesic structures (as well as the artist's memories of the roof of the Mexico market where his parents had a shop when he was a child). Now with new sponsor Hyundai, the Turbine Hall commissions invariably rely on spectacle or theatre. It is tough to do something entirely new. For all its scale and tons of materials, Empty Lot manages to be both grand and modest. There is an amiable balance of the determined and the improvisatory, and the possibility that nature itself will change it over the coming months. Inviting chance to play a part in the work's development - acknowledging the work of John Cage and Daniel Spoerri - Cruzvillegas doesn't know quite what will happen. But this is less a greening of the Turbine Hall than a romantic evocation of the persistence of nature. Like French artist Pierre Huyghe (who laid out a mysterious garden at the last Documenta, and is building an underwater playground for jellyfish in the Marmara Sea in Turkey), Cruzvillegas is inviting nature in as a creative agent. We wait, and hope.

Hyundai Commission 2015: Abraham Cruzvillegas is at the Tate Modern from 13 October 2015 to 20 March 2016

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Abraham Cruzvillegas's Turbine Hall review - a frustrating floating allotment

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he stepped platforms of Abraham Cruzvillegas's Empty Lot stand on a forest of scaffolding. Rising towards the bridge from the downward slope of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, they continue to rise again beyond. Looking back from the rear of theroom, the structure resembles a ship in a dry dock, its gigantic raised prow facing east.

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The City farming plant module is an inexpensive method to create floating plant modules using off the shelf products. Using a semi-permeable cloth, soil and a soaker hose; modular planting units can be arranged however is desired, as long as it is in range of a water source.

The power of this project lies in its simplicity and power to accommodate many needs and personal tastes. The set up is inexpensive and materials are easily accessible. The only drawback is having access to a spigot.

SOURCE: http://www.n55.dk/manuals/CITY_FARMING/CITY_FARM.html

EDITOR'S NOTE: Can be used on any terrain, which is ideal for urban settings, as long as there is access to water.

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The City farming plant module is an inexpensive method to create floating plant modules using off the shelf products. Using a semi-permeable cloth, soil and a soaker hose; modular planting units can be arranged however is desired, as long as it is in range of a water source.

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Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

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Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

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"What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn't you dance it? Wouldn't you act it out? Wouldn't your every movement tell the story? In time you would be so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives."

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Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants.

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Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants.

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Learning the Grammar of Animacy. Beautiful text on language and inclusion.

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Braidin Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer

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At the time, however, I had just curated a feminist group show, Mademoiselle (CRAC, Sète); 37 women artists exploring feminist art's heritage in contemporary art, and therein the paradoxes of being a woman today with an unforgiving sense of humour. Hence, I thought that appointing me for an exhibition in Iran, consciously hid a wicked, subversive agenda in the organizers and that I, of all curators, was being hired to outsmart Islamic censorship. I accepted. This show would provide me with the opportunity to confront the concurrent controversy surrounding the 'relevance today of women only' exhibitions like Mademoiselle-a debate I deemed precipitate and unfair. After all, Iran, and many western countries too, are proof that women's emancipation is directly linked to nationality, race and class, and that the feminist project is far from being accomplished. Would Iranian censorship detect any subversive agenda if I presented Romana Londi's colour changing snakeskin canvases addressing both colour and gender as evolving cultural constructions? And Conrad Shawcross's dancing tribute to 19th century computer programmer Ada Lovelace, The ADA Project (2013-) a she-robot that dances to music: would Iranian officials arrest it/her for dancing? I wondered.

So, dwelling on feminism, the role of nature, and Iran's repressive regime, I started to wonder why am I so radically against the identification of women and nature? What is wrong with nature? And why and how did We, Women, become associated with it? But also, turning the debate to the present tense: what are the consequences of women's and nature's association for mankind at large? What lessons can we learn from it today? This is how and why, from being a feminist curator, I 'evolved' into an Her-storian, an Her-cheologist, and a so-called eco-feminist art theorist. The story I discovered is not only long, but as old as time itself, and rather than providing an exhaustive answer, it raises multiple other questions, which are windows into different worlds. This brief article offers only a glimpse into some of these windows, yet, hopefully, it can provide an introduction into ecofeminism and ecofeminist art.

Feminist artist Judy Chicago's 2019 work If Women Ruled the World (conceived, but not executed, as Inflatable Mother Goddess in 1977) contributes to the series of questions about the consequences of women's exclusion from decision-making roles in history. In this work, Chicago seated an audience inside a gigantic goddess figure on the Rodin Museum grounds, presenting inside it an installation The Female Divine, a multitude of flagging tapestries raising questions such as: "Would Buildings Resemble Wombs?" "Would God Be Female?" "Would There Be Violence?" "Would Both Women and Men Be Gentle?" but also "Would The Earth be protected"?

Meanwhile in developing countries, women's struggle to survive in a rural environment is directly linked to an ecological struggle, as women are intimately involved in sustaining and conserving water, land and forests they depend on. Indian eco-feminist Vandana Shiva theorized women's increasing subjugation in the midst of what she calls 'mal-development', by questioning what we consider and value as Progress and Wealth. It turns out that the battle against the environmental crisis is also, and again, played out on the grounds of gender, race and class. This is especially apparent when we consider that economically-challenged countries have become the dumping lot of wealthier ones, and available cures against its effects (illness), depends on the (at times spine-chilling) limited knowledge and focus on women's bodies and health. The taboo surrounding women's bodies and sexuality is one of the most acute consequences of the denigration of Mother Earth, nature and natural processes, and the flight from the feminine. Yet, it does not affect only women, but men too.

[1] Gimbutas, Marija A. The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.

[2] Moore, Jason W. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press, 2016.

[3] Merchant, Caroline. The Death of Nature. Wildwood House, 1980.

[4] Federici, Silvia. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018.

[5] Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1987.

Tragic Magic, Oil on Linen, 11.75" x 11.75", 2020 by Ambera Wellman

If Women Ruled the World, copyright Judy Chicago, Christian Dior SE, 2019.

(Witch, and Neo pagan theorist) by Suzanne Husky, 2019, still from Earth Cycle Trance, led by Starhawk, 32 min video, Istanbul Biennial, 2019

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At the time, however, I had just curated a feminist group show, Mademoiselle (CRAC, Sète); 37 women artists exploring feminist art's heritage in contemporary art, and therein the paradoxes of being a woman today with an unforgiving sense of humour.

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or a few fleeting moments during the New York governor Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday 6 May, the sombre grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.

"We are ready, we're all-in," the governor gushed. "We are New Yorkers, so we're aggressive about it, we're ambitious about it ... We realise that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way."

The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor's briefing to announce that he will be heading up a panel to reimagine New York state's post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.

"The first priorities of what we're trying to do," Schmidt said, "are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband ... We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better." Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair's goals were purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.

Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop "a smarter education system". Calling Gates a "visionary", Cuomo said the pandemic has created "a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates's] ideas ... all these buildings, all these physical classrooms - why, with all the technology you have?" he asked, apparently rhetorically.

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the Screen New Deal. Far more hi-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent - and highly profitable - no-touch future.

Anuja Sonalker, the CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, recently summed up the new virus-personalised pitch. "There has been a distinct warming up to humanless, contactless technology," she said. "Humans are biohazards, machines are not."

It's a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces, but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor's offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration "in the community" was already booming. But in the future that is hastily being constructed, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.

This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen "shared" on a mediated platform. It's a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control), and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It's a future that claims to be run on "artificial intelligence", but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centres, content-moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyper-exploitation. It's a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.

If all of this sounds familiar, it's because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fuelled future was being sold to us in the name of friction-free convenience and personalisation. But many of us had concerns. About the security, quality and inequity of telehealth and online classrooms. About driverless cars mowing down pedestrians and drones smashing packages (and people). About location tracking and cash-free commerce obliterating our privacy and entrenching racial and gender discrimination. About unscrupulous social media platforms poisoning our information ecology and our kids' mental health. About "smart cities" filled with sensors supplanting local government. About the good jobs these technologies wiped out. About the bad jobs they mass produced.

And most of all, we had concerns about the democracy-threatening wealth and power accumulated by a handful of tech companies that are masters of abdication - eschewing all responsibility for the wreckage left behind in the fields they now dominate, whether media, retail or transportation.

That was the ancient past, also known as February. Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.

Thanks to Cuomo and his various billionaire partnerships (including one with Michael Bloomberg for testing and tracing), New York state is being positioned as the gleaming showroom for this grim future - but the ambitions reach far beyond the borders of any one state or country.

And at the dead centre of it all is Eric Schmidt.

ell before Americans understood the threat of Covid-19, Schmidt had been on an aggressive lobbying and public-relations campaign, pushing precisely the Black Mirror vision of society that Cuomo has just empowered him to build. At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants - with public schools, hospitals, doctor's offices, police and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.

It's a vision Schmidt has been advancing in his roles as chair of the Defense Innovation Board, which advises the US Department of Defense on increased use of artificial intelligence in the military, and as chair of the powerful National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, or NSCAI, which advises Congress on "advances in artificial intelligence, related machine learning developments and associated technologies", with the goal of addressing "the national and economic security needs of the United States, including economic risk". Both boards are crowded with powerful Silicon Valley CEOs and top executives from companies including Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and of course, Schmidt's former colleagues at Google.

As chair, Schmidt - who still holds more than $5.3bn in shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company), as well as large investments in other tech firms - has essentially been running a Washington-based shakedown on behalf of Silicon Valley. The main purpose of the two boards is to call for exponential increases in government spending on research into artificial intelligence and on tech-enabling infrastructure such as 5G - investments that would directly benefit the companies in which Schmidt and other members of these boards have extensive holdings.

First in closed-door presentations to lawmakers, and later in public-facing opinion articles and interviews, the thrust of Schmidt's argument has been that since the Chinese government is willing to spend limitless public money building the infrastructure of high-tech surveillance, while allowing Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei to pocket the profits from commercial applications, the US's dominant position in the global economy is on the precipice of collapsing.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) recently got access, through a freedom of information (FOI) request, to a presentation made by Schmidt's NSCAI in May 2019. Its slides make a series of alarmist claims about how China's relatively lax regulatory infrastructure and its bottomless appetite for surveillance are causing it to pull ahead of the US in a number of fields, including "AI for medical diagnosis", autonomous vehicles, digital infrastructure, "smart cities", ride-sharing and cashless commerce.

The reasons given for China's competitive edge are myriad, ranging from the sheer volume of consumers who shop online; "the lack of legacy banking systems in China", which has allowed it to leapfrog over cash and credit cards and unleash "a huge e-commerce and digital services market" using digital payments; and a severe doctor shortage, which has led the government to work closely with tech companies such as Tencent to use AI for "predictive" medicine. The slides note that in China, tech companies "have the authority to quickly clear regulatory barriers, while American initiatives are mired in HIPPA compliance and FDA approval".

More than any other factor, however, the NSCAI points to China's willingness to embrace public-private partnerships in mass surveillance and data collection as a reason for its competitive edge. The presentation touts China's "Explicit government support and involvement eg facial recognition deployment". It argues that "surveillance is one of the 'first-and-best customers' for Al" and further, that "mass surveillance is a killer application for deep learning".

A slide titled "State Datasets: Surveillance = Smart Cities" notes that China, along with Google's main Chinese competitor, Alibaba, are racing ahead.

This is notable because Google's parent company, Alphabet, has been pushing this precise vision through its Sidewalk Labs division, choosing a large portion of Toronto's waterfront as its "smart city" prototype. But the Toronto project was just shut down after two years of ceaseless controversy relating to the enormous amounts of personal data that Alphabet would collect, a lack of privacy protections, and questionable benefits for the city as a whole.

Five months after this presentation, in November, NSCAI issued an interim report to Congress further raising the alarm about the need for the US to match China's adaptation of these controversial technologies. "We are in a strategic competition," states the report, obtained via FOI by Epic. "AI will be at the centre. The future of our national security and economy are at stake."

By late February, Schmidt was taking his campaign to the public, perhaps understanding that the budget increases his board was calling for could not be approved without a great deal more buy-in. In a New York Times article headlined "I used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China", Schmidt called for "unprecedented partnerships between government and industry" and, once again sounding the yellow peril alarm, wrote:

"AI will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a defense department priority ... If current trends continue, China's overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.

Unless these trends change, in the 2030s we will be competing with a country that has a bigger economy, more research and development investments, better research, wider deployment of new technologies and stronger computing infrastructure ... Ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world's leading innovators, and the United States is not playing to win."

The only solution, for Schmidt, was a gush of public money. Praising the White House for requesting a doubling of research funding in AI and quantum information science, he wrote: "We should plan to double funding in those fields again as we build institutional capacity in labs and research centres ... At the same time, Congress should meet the president's request for the highest level of defen ce R & D funding in over 70 years, and the defense department should capitalise on that resource surge to build breakthrough capabilities in AI, quantum, hypersonics and other priority technology areas."

That was exactly two weeks before the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, and there was no mention that a goal of this vast, hi-tech expansion was to protect American health. Only that it was necessary to avoid being outcompeted by China. But, of course, that would soon change.

In the two months since, Schmidt has put these pre-existing demands - for massive public expenditures on high-tech research and infrastructure, for a slew of "public-private partnerships" in AI, and for the loosening of myriad privacy and safety protections - through an aggressive rebranding exercise. Now all of these measures (and more) are being sold to the public as our only possible hope of protecting ourselves from a novel virus that will be with us for years to come.

And the tech companies to which Schmidt has deep ties, and which populate the influential advisory boards he chairs, have all repositioned themselves as benevolent protectors of public health and munificent champions of "everyday hero" essential workers (many of whom, like delivery drivers, would lose their jobs if these companies get their way). Less than two weeks into New York state's lockdown, Schmidt wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that both set the new tone and made clear that Silicon Valley had every intention of leveraging the crisis for a permanent transformation.

"Like other Americans, technologists are trying to do their part to support the front-line pandemic response ...

But every American should be asking where we want the nation to be when the Covid-19 pandemic is over. How could the emerging technologies being deployed in the current crisis propel us into a better future? ... Companies like Amazon know how to supply and distribute efficiently. They will need to provide services and advice to government officials who lack the computing systems and expertise.

We should also accelerate the trend toward remote learning, which is being tested today as never before. Online, there is no requirement of proximity, which allows students to get instruction from the best teachers, no matter what school district they reside in ...

The need for fast, large-scale experimentation will also accelerate the biotech revolution ... Finally, the country is long overdue for a real digital infrastructure ... If we are to build a future economy and education system based on tele-everything, we need a fully connected population and ultrafast infrastructure. The government must make a massive investment - perhaps as part of a stimulus package - to convert the nation's digital infrastructure to cloud-based platforms and link them with a 5G network."

Indeed, Schmidt has been relentless in pursuing this vision. Two weeks after that article appeared, he described the ad-hoc home schooling programming that teachers and families across the country had been forced to cobble together during this public health emergency as "a massive experiment in remote learning".

The goal of this experiment, he said, was "trying to find out: how do kids learn remotely? And with that data we should be able to build better remote and distance learning tools which, when combined with the teacher ... will help kids learn better." During this same video call, hosted by the Economic Club of New York, Schmidt also called for more telehealth, more 5G, more digital commerce and the rest of the preexisting wish list. All in the name of fighting the virus.

His most telling comment, however, was this: "The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon." He added that people should "be a little bit grateful that these companies got the capital, did the investment, built the tools that we're using now, and have really helped us out".

chmidt's words are a reminder that until very recently, public pushback against these companies was surging. Presidential candidates were openly discussing breaking up big tech. Amazon was forced to pull its plans for a New York headquarters because of fierce local opposition. Google's Sidewalk Labs project was in perennial crisis, and Google workers were refusing to build surveillance tech with military applications.

In short, democracy - inconvenient public engagement in the designing of critical institutions and public spaces - was turning out to be the single greatest obstacle to the vision Schmidt was advancing, first from his perch at the top of Google and Alphabet, and then as chair of two powerful boards advising US Congress and the Department of Defense. As the NSCAI documents reveal, this inconvenient exercise of power by members of the public and by tech workers inside these mega-firms has, from the perspective of men such as Schmidt and the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, maddeningly slowed down the AI arms race, keeping fleets of potentially deadly driverless cars and trucks off the roads, protecting private health records from becoming a weapon used by employers against workers, preventing urban spaces from being blanketing with facial recognition software, and much more.

Now, in the midst of the carnage of this ongoing pandemic, and the fear and uncertainty about the future it has brought, these companies clearly see their moment to sweep out all that democratic engagement. To have the same kind of power as their Chinese competitors, who have the luxury of functioning without being hampered by intrusions of either labour or civil rights.

All of this is moving very fast. The Australian government has contracted with Amazon to store the data for its controversial coronavirus tracking app. The Canadian government has contracted with Amazon to deliver medical equipment, raising questions about why it bypassed the public postal service. And in just a few short days in early May, Alphabet has spun up a new Sidewalk Labs initiative to remake urban infrastructure with $400m in seed capital. Josh Marcuse, the executive director of the Defense Innovation Board chaired by Schmidt, announced that he was leaving that job to work full-time at Google as head of strategy and innovation for global public sector, meaning that he will be helping Google to cash in on some of the many opportunities he and Schmidt have been busily creating with their lobbying.

o be clear, technology is most certainly a key part of how we must protect public health in the coming months and years. The question is: will that technology be subject to the disciplines of democracy and public oversight, or will it be rolled out in state-of-exception frenzy, without asking critical questions that will shape our lives for decades to come? Questions such as these, for instance: if we are indeed seeing how critical digital connectivity is in times of crisis, should these networks, and our data, really be in the hands of private players such as Google, Amazon and Apple? If public funds are paying for so much of it, should the public also own and control it? If the internet is essential for so much in our lives, as it clearly is, should it be treated as a nonprofit public utility?

And while there is no doubt that the ability to teleconference has been a lifeline in this period of lockdown, there are serious debates to be had about whether our more lasting protections are distinctly more human. Take education. Schmidt is right that overcrowded classrooms present a health risk, at least until we have a vaccine. So how about hiring double the number of teachers and cutting class size in half? How about making sure that every school has a nurse?

That would create much-needed jobs in a depression-level unemployment crisis, and give everyone in the learning environment more elbow room. If buildings are too crowded, how about dividing the day into shifts, and having more outdoor education, drawing on the plentiful research that shows that time in nature enhances children's capacity to learn?

Introducing those kinds of changes would be hard, to be sure. But they are not nearly as risky as giving up on the tried-and-true technology of trained humans teaching younger humans face-to-face, in groups where they learn to socialise with one another to boot.

Upon learning of New York state's new partnership with the Gates Foundation, Andy Pallotta, the president of the New York State United Teachers union, was quick to react: "If we want to reimagine education, let's start with addressing the need for social workers, mental health counsellors, school nurses, enriching arts courses, advanced courses and smaller class sizes in school districts across the state," he said. A coalition of parents' groups also pointed out that if they had indeed been living an "experiment in remote learning" (as Schmidt put it), then the results were deeply worrying: "Since the schools were shut down in mid-March, our understanding of the profound deficiencies of screen-based instruction has only grown."

n addition tothe obvious class and race biases against children who lack internet access and home computers (problems that tech companies are eager to be paid to solve with massive tech buys), there are big questions about whether remote teaching can serve many kids with disabilities, as required by law. And there is no technological solution to the problem of learning in a home environment that is overcrowded and/or abusive.

The issue is not whether schools must change in the face of a highly contagious virus for which we have neither cure nor inoculation. Like every institution where humans gather in groups, they will change. The trouble, as always in these moments of collective shock, is the absence of public debate about what those changes should look like, and who they should benefit - private tech companies or students?

The same questions need to be asked about health. Avoiding doctor's offices and hospitals during a pandemic makes good sense. But telehealth misses a huge amount. So we need to have an evidence-based debate about the pros and cons of spending scarce public resources on telehealth - rather than on more trained nurses, equipped with all the necessary protective equipment, who are able to make house calls to diagnose and treat patients in their homes. And, perhaps most urgently, we need to get the balance right between virus tracking apps, which, with the proper privacy protections, have a role to play, and the calls for a "community health corps" that would put millions of Americans to work, not only doing contact-tracing, but making sure that everyone has the material resources and support they need to quarantine safely.

In each case, we face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very unlikely to do both. The refusal to transfer anything like the needed resources to states and cities in successive federal bailouts means that the coronavirus health crisis is now slamming headlong into a manufactured austerity crisis. Public schools, universities, hospitals and transit are facing existential questions about their futures. If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G and driverless vehicles - their Screen New Deal - there simply won't be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs. On the contrary: the price tag for all the shiny gadgets will be mass teacher layoffs and hospital closures.

Tech provides us with powerful tools, but not every solution is technological. And the trouble with outsourcing key decisions about how to "reimagine" our states and cities to men such as Bill Gates and Schmidt is that they have spent their lives demonstrating the belief that there is no problem that technology cannot fix.

For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but the deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied. And Andrew Cuomo, by putting the former Google chair in charge of the body that will shape the state's reopening, appears to have just given him something close to free rein.
* Republished with permission from The Intercept. Sign up for The Intercept's Newsletter here.
* Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic

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or a few fleeting moments during the New York governor Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday 6 May, the sombre grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile. "We are ready, we're all-in," the governor gushed.

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Tech oligarchs are encouraging the creation of virtual worlds as a cheap way to avoid problems in the real one.

The future of virtual reality is far more than just video games. Silicon Valley sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a political problem. In a world of increasing wealth inequality, environmental disaster, and political instability, why not sell everyone a device that whisks them away to a virtual world free of pain and suffering?

Tech billionaires aren't shy about sharing this. "Some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it. The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted. It is not possible, on Earth, to give everyone all that they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island," Doom co-creator and former CTO of Oculus John Carmack told Joe Rogan during a 2020 interview. "People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot of people in the virtual sense."

Virtual reality is an attractive escape, but it's not a solution to the world's ills. The problems of the real world will persist beyond the borders of the metaverse created by companies such as Epic, Valve, and Facebook. Without decisive and radical action, our planet will continue to burn, the gap between the rich and poor will grow, and totalitarian political movements will flourish. All while some of us are plugged into a virtual world.

Worse, the virtual world will be one owned and controlled by the companies that create them. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook-branded set of VR goggles strapped to an emaciated human face-forever.

By the principle of the free market Silicon Valley lives and dies by, virtual reality is a loser. Only 1.7 percent of Steam users have a VR headset, according to a December 2020 hardware survey. And while it's true that sales of headsets are up during the pandemic, roughly 30 percent in 2020 over 2019, video game sales in general are up overall.

Valve released Half-Life: Alyx in March 2020, just as the lockdowns were beginning. This was the first new Half-Life game in 13 years, the continuation of a franchise fans had been desperate to play for more than a decade. It sold well for a VR title, somewhere north of 2 million copies, but didn't match the incredible numbers of 2020's top-selling titles and was quickly forgotten by the mainstream press. Unless you're really into VR, you probably weren't talking about Half-Life in 2020.

The reasons why are obvious. First, virtual reality is expensive. At the high end, Valve's premiere headset-the Valve Index-costs $1,000. On the cheaper end, Facebook's Oculus Quest 2 is $299. To play Alyx, those headsets need to be wired to a high-end gaming PC. The price of these machines vary, but something that can handle VR will cost around $1,000. Once the machine is built and the headset hooked up, the player will need to carve out a dedicated physical space to play the game. Most games require a minimum of about 6.5 feet by 5 feet, but the more space you have the better.

VR requires an incredible amount of cash and free space to set up properly, and the headaches don't stop there. Right now, it reminds me of the early days of computer gaming. It works most of the time, but I've spent hours tweaking settings, adjusting controls, and reconfiguring hardware in a desperate bid to achieve the optimal experience.

Cash, space, and time is no guarantee that you'll enjoy VR games. Some people experience nausea and vertigo in virtual reality. Sometimes, you can overcome this by properly adjusting the hardware or slowly exposing yourself to the technology. Some people get their "VR legs" and adjust. Others never do. Setting aside VR sickness, the technology is incredibly inaccessible for differently-abled people. The industry made huge strides toward making video games accessible to a wide range of people in 2020, but virtual reality-with its bulky headsets and strange controllers-is simply impossible for some people to use.

But all these problems can be overcome. As Carmack mentioned in his Rogan interview, tech companies will drive down the cost of the headsets. "Moore's law may be crapping out in terms of absolute performance, but we've still got a lot of price-performance that we can drive out of these things," he said. "We can have virtual reality devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these."

Carmack was explicit about the importance of tech companies pushing virtual reality. "Not everyone can have a mansion. Not everyone can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate, to some degree, in virtual reality. Now, the simulation is not as good as the real thing. If you are rich and you have your own home theater or mansion and private island, good for you ... you're probably not the people that are going to benefit the most," he said. "Most of the people in the world live in cramped quarters that are not what they would choose to be if they had unlimited resources."

That's absolutely true; most people in the world live in cramped quarters and would choose not to. But Carmack's solution is to create a virtual world where people can escape. It's a promise of the future where the living conditions are still cramped but people have accepted their material conditions and retreated into a fantasy world created by the tech companies.

And it will not stop at screens and speakers. Elon Musk is working on a brain-machine interface called Neuralink. Similarly, Valve's Gabe Newell is heavily invested in creating the literal matrix. "We're way closer to The Matrix than people realize," Newell told IGN in 2020.

In a televised interview with New Zealand's 1 News, Newell was explicit about creating a world where brains and computers interface and computers are able to make changes to the brain. He even called the body a "meat peripheral" and further dehumanized the physical form. "You're used to experiencing the world through eyes. But eyes were created by this low-cost bidder that didn't care about failure rates and RMAs, and if it got broken there was no way to repair anything effectively, which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is not at all reflective of consumer preferences," Newell said, sounding like a cartoon villain.

For Newell, the goal is to achieve a fantasy world better and more fascinating than the real one. "So the visual experience, the visual fidelity we'll be able to create-the real world will stop being the metric that we apply to the best possible visual fidelity," he said. "The real world will seem flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create in people's brains."

If this all sounds like a nightmarish vision of the future where the world burns around us while we retreat into fantasy worlds, you're not alone. "There's this piece of art that goes around the internet of this dystopian kid in a corner, drooling, with goggles on with rainbow pictures and it's a terrible looking place," Carmack told Rogan. "And people say, 'This is the world you're trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them.'"

Carmack's response isn't encouraging. "Is his life really better if he takes them off and he's in this horrible place?" he asked. "I live in Dallas. It's 100 degrees there. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air-conditioning. People don't generally go, 'Oh, you're not experiencing the world around you because of air-conditioning' ... That is what human beings do, we bend the world to our will."

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook-branded set of VR goggles strapped to an emaciated human face-forever.

For Carmack, virtual reality is a path to making the world a better place. "That's how the world gets better, by building technologies and distributing them to people so that they have something better than they would have had if that didn't exist," he said.

That assessment of virtual reality ignores several fundamental lessons we've learned about technology in the past few decades. Far from liberating the world, technology has introduced new methods of control into our lives. Power changed hands as Silicon Valley came to dominate our lives. Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon wield an incredible amount of control over our lives, and much of the power they wield is occluded.

The rush to create digital worlds ignores both the hard realities of the physical and the ways we might all be manipulated if tech companies control not just the apps we use every day but the very world we inhabit. Look at Epic, whose Fortnite is lauded as the first metaverse. Far from being a land of unrestrained freedom and palatial palaces for everyone, Fortnite is a popular video game that sometimes hosts impressive live events while slowly selling its inhabitants goofy costumes.

Virtual worlds will be molded in the image of their creators, not their participants. Already, landlords are dividing up real estate in the blockchain-backed metaverse Upland. When Apple and Fortnite go to war, it's their users who suffer. Virtual worlds can be anything we want them to be, but Silicon Valley sees them as a place to push digital mansions and movie theaters on the hoi polloi. It will be a simulacrum, an ersatz world like our own with the pain edited out.

You can bet they'll charge top dollar for it.

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Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change

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Tech oligarchs are encouraging the creation of virtual worlds as a cheap way to avoid problems in the real one. The future of virtual reality is far more than just video games. Silicon Valley sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a political problem.

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Air pollution is a nasty beast. It's been linked to brain damage, and the cost of treating the several respiratory ailments it causes is estimated to run into trillions of dollars.

But because you can't see it, and because the damage it causes can take so long to manifest, it's hard to get people up in arms about how polluted their air is. To draw the attention of politicians, business people, and the powers that be to the daily visceral reality and general ickiness of air pollution (and, we assume, move them to action), an experimental food group called The Center for Genomic Gastronomy has come up with a crazy way to give them a taste of the problem. Their recommendation? Send along gifts of dessert with real city air baked in.

If you're outside in Bangalore, or any other polluted city, you're basically eating smog.

"If you're outside in Bangalore, or any other polluted city, you're basically eating smog," Zack Denfeld, co-founder of Genomic Gastronomy says. "[Air pollution] is fairly invisible and you get used to it. But if you make these meringues at different parts of the city and then offer them to people to eat, you could see what they actually feel about air quality."

Their exhibit, called Smog Tasting, begins with egg whites-the delicious foamy, crunchy goodness that makes up meringues, soufflés and countless other dessert treats. The water-loving proteins in egg whites dry out as air is whipped in, and the proteins link up to make airy molecular cages.

"Smog Tasting grew out of this idea of using food as a biosensor," Denfeld says. "If egg foams are a way of capturing air, could we capture air pollution as well? This could be a way of calling attention to the problem."

If egg foams are a way of capturing air, could we capture air pollution as well?

Last fall, students from the Bangalore Food Labs and Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology (where Denfeld visits to teach) went out into different parts of the city armed with whisks, and made meringues from the batter that came back. Then they offered them around to people, after filling them in on the back story. "We'd say, 'Would you eat this edible smog from Mekhri Circle or Yellahanka,'" Denfeld laughs.

Denfeld proposes that the smoggy batter could be tested for heavy metals or other particles in the air, just to note how bad it is. The desserts could be displayed on a map of the city, with, say, a cookie pinned to the zone from which it came. Other cookies could then be sent to local politicians or business owners, Genomic Gastronomy says on their website, as "trojan horse treats."

The project ties into The Center for Genomic Gastronomy's larger goal of researching our connection to food and where it comes from. "People may not be eating smog on a daily basis," he says, "But this is a way of connecting people to their local ecosystem."

Smog Tasting is currently part of the " Edible" exhibit at the Science Gallery at Dublin's Trinity College. Denfeld hopes the exhibit will start up conversations about food and air quality, and also give Dubliners a "humanized," street-level view of an emerging megacity.

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Air pollution is a nasty beast. It's been linked to brain damage, and the cost of treating the several respiratory ailments it causes is estimated to run into trillions of dollars. But because you can't see it, and because the damage it causes can take so long to manifest, it's hard to get people up in arms about how polluted their air is.

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Common Ground, an arts development organisation based in Dublin 8, is currently working with a range of artists on an initiative called CITIZEN ARTIST. One of those artists, Seoidín O'Sullivan, has been working with local community groups, since 2017, to graft native Irish trees from the Lambe Clarke Collection in UCD.

In the HARD/GRAFT project, trees are been collectively grafted towards future orchards for Dublin 8. Eight trees make an orchard and the first of these was planted in Dolphin House Flats Complex, in December 2018, as part of its first phase of regeneration. Dolphin House and its Community Development Association have partnered with this initiative to plant future sustainable orchards as part of the regeneration of the site.

The HARD/GRAFT project visited The Digital Hub campus, where a heritage pear tree sits next to the well-known St. Patrick's Tower. This 150ft high smock windmill dates from 1805, and it was used to grind corn for Roe's Whiskey Distillery until about 1860, when the grinding process was powered by steam. The remains of the windmill still stand and the pear tree next to it. The tree itself is thought to be 150 to 200 years old.

Given its age, it is likely the pear tree at The Digital Hub would house a unique DNA and be very resilient to disease. With advice from expert grafter Kevin Kenny, formerly steward of the Lambe Clarke collection in UCD, The Digital Hub was delighted to facilitate the group of grafters, including the Artist, Seoidín O'Sullivan, and Siobhán Geoghegan, Director of Artistic Programme, Common Ground, with cutting new scions (growths) from the pear tree, so its DNA could be preserved onto new root stock.

HARD/GRAFT currently have 45 whips (small trees) housed in Richmond Barracks, Inchicore from the UCD Rosemount's Lambe Clarke collection and they will be partnering with UCD Geography Department in 2019/20 on an EPA funded research project that will map green spaces and trees across Dublin 8.
Common Ground will host a series of public grafting workshops in Inchicore on March 9th. For more information contact info@commonground.ie or phone (01) 707 8766

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HARD/GRAFT art project and the pear tree at The Digital Hub - The Digital Hub

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In the HARD/GRAFT project, trees are been collectively grafted towards future orchards for Dublin 8. Eight trees make an orchard and the first of these was planted in Dolphin House Flats Complex, in December 2018, as part of its first phase of regeneration.

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Blender Tutorial  - Create a Flower Meadow

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Blender 2 8 Tree creation with modular tree

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How to Create a Low Poly Tree in 1 Minute

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Art, Technology, Society

"There's so much we don't see yet, so much that's still hidden; no one really knows where the digital revolution will take us."

A new festival. The first Ars Electronica begins on September 18, 1979. 20 artists and scientists from all over the world gather at this new "Festival for Art, Technology and Society" in Linz to discuss the Digital Revolution and its possible consequences. This Ars Electronica is small, but groundbreaking. The initiative for this came from Hannes Leopoldseder (AT), director of the Upper Austria regional studio of the Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF), who is passionate about everything that has to do with the future. Together with the electronic musician Hubert Bognermayr (AT), the music producer Ulli A. Rützel (DE) and the cyberneticist and physicist Herbert W. Franke (AT), he lays the foundation stone for a festival that will become the world's largest and most important of its kind.

"Ars Electronica has always been open to signals from the future, open to experimentation."

In the center we humans. Since September 18, 1979, our world has changed radically, and digitization has covered almost all areas of our lives. Ars Electronica's philosophy has remained the same over the years. Our activities are always guided by the question of what new technologies mean for our lives. Together with artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists, we shed light on current developments in our digital society and speculate about their manifestations in the future. We never ask what technology can or will be able to do, but always what it should do for us. And we don't try to adapt to technology, but we want the development of technology to be oriented towards us. Therefore, our artistic research always focuses on ourselves, our needs, our desires, our feelings.

"We're not excited about technology, we're excited about what we can do with it."

For digital humanism. With Machine Learning and Co, we are initiating the transition from automation to autonomy today. The digital becomes independent for the first time. On the threshold of this new era, we must set the course for our digital society to remain committed to fundamental values such as human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights. Together with artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists from all over the world, we want to contribute to such a digital humanism.

„Technology is culture, and culture shapes technology."

Between art, technology and society. Over the past four decades, a number of pioneers have turned Ars Electronica into a creative ecosystem that now enjoys a worldwide reputation.

Since 1979 we celebrate once a year the Ars Electronica Festival. More than 1,000 artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists are coming to Linz, Austria, to address central questions of our future. For five days, everything revolves around groundbreaking ideas and grand visions, unusual prototypes and innovative collaborations, inspiring art and groundbreaking research, extraordinary performances and irritating interventions, touching sounds and rousing concerts.

Since 1987 we have been awarding the Prix Ars Electronica every year. With several competition categories, we search for groundbreaking projects that revolve around questions of our digital society and rehearse the innovative use of technologies, promising strategies of collaboration and new forms of artistic expression. The best submissions will receive a Golden Nica, considered by the global media art scene to be the most traditional and prestigious award ever.

Since 1996 we have been working at the Ars Electronica Center year after year with tens of thousands of kindergarten children, pupils, apprentices and students on questions concerning the ever-increasing digitalization of our world. The focus is on the potential of the next Game Changer: Artificial Intelligence.

Also since 1996 we operate the Ars Electronica Futurelab, whose international and interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists is researching the future. With interactive scenarios, we prepare central aspects of the Digital Revolution for the general public in order to initiate a democratic discourse.

1998 we initiated create your world. The year-round programme is developed together with young people and includes a competition for under 19 year olds, a festival of its own and a tour through the region. We see create your world as an invitation and challenge at the same time and want to encourage young people to leave the role as mere users of technology behind, to discover new possibilities of acting and designing and to implement their own ideas.

2004 we started Ars Electronica Export with a big exhibition in New York. Since then we have been to Abuja, Athens, Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Bilbao, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Doha, Florence, Kiev, London, Madrid, Mexico City, Moscow, Mumbai, Osaka, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, Tunis, Venice and Zaragoza. Together with partners from art and culture, science and education, business and industry, we organize exhibitions and presentations, conferences and workshops, performances and interventions at all these locations.

Since 2013 our team at Ars Electronica Solutions has been developing market-ready products inspired by visions and prototypes from the artistic cosmos of Ars Electronica. We develop innovative, individual and interactive products and services for exhibitions, brands, trade fairs and events.

Since 2016 we are active all year round in Japan. Especially in Tokyo and Osaka we work together with leading Japanese universities, museums and companies, develop and present artistic projects, design workshop series and Open Labs and dedicate ourselves to the future of our digital society in conferences.

All our activities since September 18, 1979 have been documented in the form of texts, images and videos and stored in the Ars Electronica Archive. This archive provides us with a unique collection of descriptions and documentations of more than 75,000 projects from four decades of Ars Electronica.

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Art, Technology, Society "There's so much we don't see yet, so much that's still hidden; no one really knows where the digital revolution will take us." Hannes Leopoldseder, co-founder of Ars Electronica A new festival. The first Ars Electronica begins on September 18, 1979. 20 artists and

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Click the image to view the full gallery.

Artist Name(s)

Adam Gibney

Artwork title

Your Seedling Language

Context/Background

St. Catherine's is a 320 pupil school located in St Catherine's Estate, Rush North County Dublin. It is a co-educational school with children from over 40 different countries, many from Eastern Europe and Africa. Approximately 30% of the school's children are from countries other than Ireland and many of these start with little or no English. The school has 12 mainstream classes and two special classes for children with autism. They also have a Montessori pre-school on the premises who operate two classes. One is run through English and the other through Irish. St. Catherine's National School are very proud of their multi-cultural environment and feel that this is of tremendous benefit to the children in their school. In 2016, St. Catherine's had a new school built. This Per Cent for Art commission emerged from this project.

Description

Your Seedling Language is a site-specific artwork by artist Adam Gibney created for St. Catherine's National School in Rush, County Dublin. Curated by Jennie Guy, the commission was funded by the Department of Education and Skills and the Per Cent for Art Scheme

Launched in 2019, Your Seedling Language is comprised of two parts: a cluster of sound-and-light-producing sculptures in the school's entry stairwell, and a sensor tower outside of the school. The artwork will behave differently on a bright, sunny day than on a cold, dark evening, or during a rainy week.

The artwork utilises environmental data that is commonly related to the growth of plants. The moisture of the soil, light and temperature outside of the school provides organic compositional parameters that manipulate a generative, eight-channel vocal composition. With over 1,000 syllabic samples to call upon, the artwork unravels ideas surrounding the theory of biolinguistics, providing the school with a language of its own.

The development of this work stemmed from research into Fingal's rich multicultural history and how this influenced the now unused Fingallian dialect. Your Seedling Language celebrates the mixture of cultures and languages that flourish in this school.

Biographies

Adam Gibney is a Dublin-based artist who engages with sound, electronics and sculpture as a means to unravel the impossibilities in understanding key elements of our objective reality. His practice often deals with the philosophical implications of knowledge generated by Science and Philosophy and their points of intersection. Sound-manipulation, electronic design and computer programming act as catalyst for digesting the philosophical conundrums that his practice investigates. He was the recipient of several awards including the Aileen MacKeogh Award (awarded to the most outstanding, creative student in IADT) and the Siamsa Tíre Emerging Artist Award. Adam has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Adam's most recent solo exhibitions include Projective Verse 9: Deep Breadths (Daegu Foundation of Culture, 2017) and Euclid, I miss you...(Artbox, 2016). Other recent and notable exhibitions include Scaffold (The Bomb Factory, 2019), The Voyage (CB1 Gallery, 2016) and Futures (Royal Hibernian Academy, 2014). In 2016, Adam represented Ireland in the V Moscow Biennale for Young Art - Deep Inside. He is currently working towards a solo-exhibition for The Oonagh Young Gallery and a public art commission for Fingal County Council's Infrastructure programme.

Jennie Guy is a curator, artist and educator based in Dublin, Ireland. She regularly consults on, and curates major public art commissions in Ireland. She is the founder and director of Art School, a framework that explores strategies for placing artists within sites of education through in-school artist residencies and workshop programmes. Building on the momentum developed through Art School, Guy curated the EVA 2018 schools programme. In 2016 Guy launched Artists' Exercises with Stine Marie Jacobsen, providing an online platform for distributing fragments of artists' educational strategies featuring contributions from over fifty international artists. She is the editor of Curriculum: Contemporary Art Goes to School distributed internationally by Intellect Books (summer 2020). As curator in residence with Rua Red Arts Centre she curated the exhibitions Field Recording (2018) and It's Very New School (2017). She has been a member of The Enquiry Reading Group, The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) since 2009. Guy is also currently the Manager of Programme and Operations at Fire Station Artists' Studios.

Commission Type

Government Department

Commissioner Name

St. Catherine's National School

Commissioning process

Curated process

Project commission dates

October 1, 2017 - July 1, 2019

Public Presentation dates

July 1, 2019 - January 1, 1970

Funded By

Department of Education and Skills

Budget Range

35000 - 70000 euro

Project commission start date

01/10/2017

Project commission end date

01/07/2019

Location

St Catherine's National School

Street Address

The Avenue, Rush, Fingal.

Google Map Insert

View this projects location

Content contributor(s)

Jennie Guy

Relationship to project

Curator

Associated professionals / Specialists involved

Ger ÓSé - School Principal

Jennie Guy - Curator / Project Manager

BA Steel Fabricators - Stainless Steel Fabrication

Kristian Doherty - Wood Turning

Caitríona Ní Mhurchú - Voice artist

Les Keye (Arad Studios) - Recording Sound Engineer

Jim Mansfield - Structural Enginner

Conor McCague - Install Technician

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Click the image to view the full gallery. Artist Name(s) Adam Gibney Artwork title Your Seedling Language Context/Background St. Catherine's is a 320 pupil school located in St Catherine's Estate, Rush North County Dublin. It is a co-educational school with children from over 40 different countries, many from Eastern Europe and Africa.

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Our ears can't blink. It is an observation that is frequently raised in areas of study such as biology, sociology and sound theory. This is used to demonstrate how valuable listening has been to our evolutionary development. It also points to why noise is so intrusive and imposing since we can't easily block it out. The pervasive use of headphones in populated environments represents one way in which listeners maintain some level of control over their personal audio space.

The Noisolation Headphones are a critical investigation that transforms the relationship between a person and the noise in their environment. This electromechanical listening appendage is designed to exist directly between a listener and the noise that surrounds them. While worn, exposure to the noise is structured through a sequence designated by a composer which controls the behavior of the sound-prevention valves. The composer also determines what values are adjustable by the listener through the single knob built into the device. The headphones mechanically create a personal listening experience by composing noise from the listener's environment, rendering it differently familiar.

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Listening Instruments : Alex Braidwood : Sound Artist : Acoustic Ecologist

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Our ears can't blink. It is an observation that is frequently raised in areas of study such as biology, sociology and sound theory. This is used to demonstrate how valuable listening has been to our evolutionary development. It also points to why noise is so intrusive and imposing since we can't easily block it out.

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LISTENING INSTRUMENTS

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Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth, by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species and their habitats throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including wilderness, rural, suburban and urban locations. It is a distinct genre from Environmental art in that it involves functional ecological systems-restoration, as well as socially engaged, activist, community-based interventions. Ecological art also addresses politics, culture, economics, ethics and aesthetics as they impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art practitioners include artists, scientists, philosophers and activists who often collaborate on restoration, remediation and public awareness projects.

Ecological art is a genre in the field of contemporary art that presents artistic activity that began in response to the global environmental crisis. This art merges an aesthetic, informative and educational art that strives to promote environmental awareness and community involvement in environmental restoration in nature.

Ecological art is expressed in a variety of artistic methods such as sculpture, painting, photography, video art, assemblage, environmental installation, environmental sculpture, poetry, cinema, Many other methods. Within the genre of ecological art there are additional categories, such as the art of land restoration and environmental art, whose main purpose is to rehabilitate the environment aesthetically, to restore ecological systems in artistic ways that combine cooperation with a variety of groups such as artists, geologists, biologists, engineers, scientists, architects Social and community groups.

An artist in the field of ecological art usually tries, through his art, to present his philosophical perspective and to raise awareness in society of the importance of rational use of natural resources, human damage to water, air, land, human damage to the environment as a result of consumption. Ecological art aims to promote a change in human consciousness in order to strengthen the interrelationships between art, culture and sustainability.

Beginning in the 1960s, several artists, mostly Germans, such as Nikolaus Lang, Lili Fischer, Hans Haakke, Joseph Bois and Alan Sonfist, began a new work of art that emphasizes contact with the human environment. As part of their artistic work, they tried to explore the materials on the ground, the ground and the landscape. Their work was primarily an art that explored the need to protect the environment in which human beings live.

Some of these artists began collecting constant details of reality, everyday objects, remains of landscapes, sites and more. In their attempt to bridge the gap between life and art. They also incorporated works with ecological aspects in their works. Lang, for example, presented a museum collection of artifacts he collected around the world, including dry reports from the field about the activities of wandering and collecting. His representation included remnants of cultures that the white man had destroyed. Fischer, who was active in Hamburg, went on a journey to discover used and old objects when she moved from house to house and offered new brushes for the return. The old brushes that she collected, she later incorporated in her representations when she tried to demonstrate that objects and nature have their own qualities that receive special depth and meaning when dealt with over time.

Theories:
Environmental art is a generic term that refers to art whose main object or subject is ecology and the natural environment. It could include landscape paintings, for example, but in practice it is usually used to design artistic actions, installations and sculptures from the second half of the 20th century in a natural outer environment. Typically, some of the art of the earth are included in this category, for example, in order to have landscapes and environments of the natural environment.

The 2012 book, Toward Global (Environ)Mental Change - Transformative Art and Cultures of Sustainability, proposes that the global crisis of unsustainability is a disruption of the hardware of civilization, as well as a crisis of the software of the human mind. The 2004 book, Ecological aesthetics: art in environmental design: theory and practice, presents an analysis of a variety of tendencies and approaches to landscape architecture, science and theory that inform research and the transformation of the landscape for over thirty years. Green Arts Web, compiled by Carnegie Mellon University senior librarian, Mo Dawley, is a compendium of core readings on contemporary environmental art, ecological art and theory (20th century to the present) that includes, among other sub-categories, for example, deep ecology practices; ecofeminism; ecopsychology; land ethic and bioregionalism; sense of place; and systems thinking.

Principles:
Artists considered to be working within this field subscribe to one or more of the following principles:

Focus on the web of interrelationships in our environment-on the physical, biological, cultural, political, and historical aspects of ecological systems.
Create works that employ natural materials or engage with environmental forces such as wind, water, or sunlight.
Reclaim, restore, and remediate damaged environments.
Inform the public about ecological dynamics and the environmental problems we face.
Revise ecological relationships, creatively proposing new possibilities for coexistence, sustainability, and healing.

Approaches:
Ecological art involves numerous diverse approaches, including:

Representational artwork: reveals information and conditions through image-making and object-making with the intention of stimulating dialogue.
Remediation projects: reclaim or restore polluted and disrupted environments - these artists often work with environmental scientists, landscape architects and urban planners.
Activist and protest art: engage, inform, energize and activate change of behaviors and/or public policy.
Social sculptures: are socially engaged, time-based artwork that involve communities in monitoring their landscapes, and take a participatory role in sustainable practices and lifestyles.
Ecopoetic art: initiate a re-envisioning of the natural world, inspiring co-existence with other species.
Direct encounter artworks: utilize natural phenomena such as water, weather, sunlight, plants, etc.
Didactic or pedagogical works: share information about environmental injustice and ecological problems such as water and soil pollution and health hazards through education.
Lived-and-relational aesthetics: involve sustainable, off-the-grid, permaculture existences.

Orientations:
Contemporary ecological art has been articulated across interdisciplinary and scholarly groups in terms of life-centered issues, community participation, public dialogue, and ecological sustainability. In 1996, the educator and activist, Don Krug identified concepts frequently addressed by ecological artists that can be used by to interpret ecological perspectives and practices. The following four orientations were identified: Environmental Design, Ecological Design, Social Restoration, and Ecological Restoration.

Environmental design - Some artists work with nature as a resource for particular aesthetic endeavors. Artists with an orientation to environmental design are interested in achieving particular formal aesthetic effects. In the 1980s and 90s, artists, architects, designers, and civil engineers explored ways to link art, aesthetics, ecology, and culture.
Ecological design - Artists who work in the area of ecological design create art that is contingent on direct experiences and interactions with a particular place where the art is created. An ecological view of design considers the artwork within larger contexts of how people, plants, and animals are interconnected with each other, the site, and/or the earth.
Social restoration - An ecological ethic where humans live in relationship to larger communities of life to catalyze socially responsible artwork. Socio-ecological artists critically examine everyday life experiences. These artists scrutinize relations of power that produce community tensions about ecological issues.
Ecological restoration - Some artists attempt to alert viewers to environmental issues and problems through scientific exploration and educational documentation. They seek to restore fragile places and educate the public to the systemic character of bioregions through the use of communication, ritual, and performance. Some ecological artists engage people directly in activities or actions by confronting environmentally unhealthy practices with social, ethical, and moral ecological concerns.

Ecological Movement:
Art historical precedents include environmental art, earthworks, land art, sustainable art, landscape painting, and landscape photography. While historical examples may reach back to neolithic times, according to the history published in the book, Ecovention: current art to transform ecologies, a short list of key works include Herbert Bayer's Grass Mound (1955) at the Aspen Art Institute, Aspen, CO; Joseph Beuys 1962 proposed action to clean up the Elbe River in Hamburg, German; Hans Haacke's 1965 manifesto for time-based, "natural", dynamic indeterminate art; Nicolas Uriburu's 1968 performance "Green Power, coloration Grand Canal - Venice" and Agnes Denes's 1968 performance, Haiku Poetry Burial, Rice Planting and Tree Chaining/Exercises in Eco-Logic, in Sullivan County, New York. 1969 was a watershed year for ecological art practices, including Haacke's Grass Grows in Ithaca, NY; Alan Sonfist's activities articulating the significance of native forests in urban areas and his action to monitor air quality in New York city. Betty Beaumont documented the clean-up of what was the worst U.S. ocean oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, while Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote Manifesto for Maintenance Art (Spaid) In 1969, the John Gibson Gallery in New York city mounted the exhibition, Ecologic Art, that included the work of Will Insley, Claes Oldenburg, Christo, Peter Hutchinson, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Morris, Bob Smithson, Carl Andre, Christo, Jan Dibbets, and Richard Long. In 1969-1970, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison collaborated on mapping endangered species around the world. In 1971, artist Bonnie Sherk performs Public Lunch with the Animals in the Lion House of the San Francisco Zoo. From 1972 to 1979, Helen and Newton Harrison realize seven projects designed for and about lagoons in California.

The 1972 essay, Art and Ecological Consciousness by Gyorgy Kepes in his book, Arts of the Environment. presents the genre as distinct from environmental art. In the 1992 exhibition and book, Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists' Interpretations and Solutions, art historian, Dr. Barbara Matilsky differentiates ecological art from environmental art in that the former has ethical underpinnings. In 1993, a workshop and exhibition, specifically about ecological systems and art, was presented by Don Krug, Renee Miller and Barbara Westfall at the Society for Ecological Restoration in Irvine, California. The term ecovention, was coined in 1999 as a conjunction of the words ecology and intervention, in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name curated by Amy Lipton and Sue Spaid, representing artist's projects that use inventive strategies to physically transform a local ecology. In a 2006 UNESCO research report for the Art in Ecology think tank on arts and sustainability, "Mapping the Terrain of Contemporary EcoArt Practice and Collaboration," the artist Beth Carruthers uses the term Ecoart. A current definition of ecological art drafted collectively by the EcoArt Network of international artists, founded in 1998, is: "Ecological Art is an art practice that embraces an ethic of social justice in both its content and form/materials. EcoArt is created to inspire caring and respect, stimulate dialogue, and encourage the long-term flourishing of the social and natural environments in which we live. It commonly manifests as socially engaged, activist, community-based restorative or interventionist art."

Joseph Beuys:
Boyce, Hakka, and Sonfist were the first pioneers to explore ecological and social issues through art that addresses real-time problems related to politics, economic systems, ecology, industry, and other daily life experiences. Bois invented the revolutionary term "Everyone is an artist" and worked to stimulate social change to encourage social sculpting to solve environmental problems, to address community problems related to urban ecology, and to work against deforestation and habitat destruction A model for a generation of young artists in the world. "Joseph Beuys' tree-planting operation, which he called" social sculpture "and presented in the seventh documante in Kassel, 1982, is a good example of this type of art."

There are those who argue [that it is necessary] that Boyce's conception of social sculpture and his famous saying "Everyone can be an artist" are two key elements that drive today's social practices. These two principles are a clear expression of what seems to have been Boyce's utopian vision that sought to develop a social organism that would turn art into a revolutionary force with concrete significance for society (a model he called Expanded Art). Community-based art - like Boyce's - is a broad spectrum of artistic endeavor.

Bois was a partner in the establishment of many organizations and institutions, including the Organization for Direct Democracy through a referendum and the Green Party in Germany. One of Bois' greatest projects was the establishment of the Free International University, which promoted forms of experimental pedagogy. The university served as a multidisciplinary framework that included cultural studies, sociology and economics, based mostly on discussions and conversations that were open to the public without admission or tuition fees. Boyce believed that higher education should be accessible to all and that it was a framework in which the individual should find the creative potential inherent in it.

In Israel too, the great influence of Joseph Beuys is evident. The name Boyce came to the Israeli art scene in the late 1960s and late 1970s. Boyce's influence on Israeli artists began immediately after the Six Day War and reached its peak after the Yom Kippur War. In 1970, the Israeli artist Yitzhak Danziger traveled to Germany as a consultant to Bezalel and met Bois there. Following the meeting, the two began collaborating and planning environmental projects that combined site restoration, ecology and culture to create ecological art.

Boyce's influence on Israeli art has been exhibited in art exhibitions in various exhibitions over the years throughout the country.

Fluxus group:
In parallel with the development of the field of ecological art in Germany, an American-Lutheran artist named George McKayas founded the Fluxus group, whose members advocated artistic experimentation with new materials and techniques combined with political activism. These artists were scattered in several countries in Europe and the United States and were called the "Fluxus Group". The group advocated artistic experimentation with new materials and techniques combined with political activism. The activists in the group were members of various political organizations that worked to solve ecology problems in the community and urban ecology and worked with various communities to plant trees and other activities.

The "Fluxus Group" artists encouraged a DIY-style approach and values of simplicity, whose members criticized Western commercialization and worked with everyday materials they found, and the activities of the group were outside the commercial galleries. One shared the style of a group of Fluxus artists, some of whom were collecting and assembling and creating from junk materials such as cigarette butts and wafer wrappers (now referred to as "the art of recycling"), while others dealt with video art, drawings, musical and literary works.

Development of ecological art:
In 1962 the book "The Silent Spring" was published. The book, written by marine geologist Rachel Carson, documented the harmful effects on the environment in the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson claims that because of the structure of the food chain in the animal world, insecticide-targeted pesticides eventually affect the entire fabric and that some substances, such as DDT, harm human health. The book was a major commercial success in the world and brought Carson to lecture on this subject around the world. The book provoked a storm and was one of the factors that led to a change in national policy in the United States when a national ban on the use of pesticides for agricultural use was accepted. The supplier also inspired the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.

Following Carson's book, the artists Helen Meir and Newton Harrison began to create innovative art. One of their first projects was a "mobile orchard" project where visitors could experience natural plant growth and be aware of how the most urban residents away from the natural processes of agriculture would be exposed to indoor art spaces. Their projects have been international in creating art and writing articles dealing with education for the creation of ecological art, green art, visual arts and art education, which serves to raise awareness and connect with environmental concepts and issues.

In 1980, members of the environmental organization Earth were the first to create art relating to the state of the earth. In their art they expressed the value of the arts that helped us to remember that there is not only fear, sorrow and loss of human damage to the environment, but there is a huge need for hope, beauty and creativity through the art of workshops, seminars, writing and creativity.

In 1989, an article was published by the artists Christophe Brunner, Roberto Nigro and Gerald Reunig in which they presented aesthetic practices, which were first described as ecological art, exploring contemporary forms of activism in various techniques. For the first time, they propose integrating ecological art into technologies as part of the post-media era. Post-communication era in which ecological art technologies and techniques create subjective art that is also expressed in sounds and sounds, in virtual art to promote social justice and environmental justice through art.

In 2006, a think tank for art and sustainability was established in Vancouver, Canada by the Canadian Arts Council, the UNESCO Canada Committee, the Vancouver Foundation and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Production and Trade in London, UK.) All organizations worked collaboratively to produce an initial document examining environmental issues The committee published an initial document examining the trends, problems and developments in ecological art, collaborations between artists, environmental organizations, communities and scientists The committee investigated the process that began in the 1960s and although the terminology of this art is not precisely defined, S is expressed through the relationship between art and the environment.

At the end of the research process, the article was published in a number of sections on ecological art:

Corrective art - or art to restore land, water, which occurs naturally to systems and habitats.
Community-based art - projects that combine creativity and work in collaboration with the community.
Art Ground works - a type of contemporary art that uses the landscape, soil or environment, as a science, technology, industry (STI).
Ecological art (green art) - works that seek to change, mediate or inform cultural / social ideologies / beliefs and behaviors.
Science / Art - Collaborations between art and science from an ecological and technological standpoint.
Sustainable development - art that relates to development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to satisfy their needs.
Most eco-art projects are collaborative, whether initiated by artists, environmental organizations, museums or local communities, and tend to be connected to a sense of location and local concerns about environmental pollution from waste, contaminated water, air pollution, soil erosion, habitat loss, logging and overuse. Of natural resources. These projects are less exhibited in the galleries but are visible in the field in order to strengthen the awareness and involvement of the community in protecting the environment.

This art is also integrated with art education in environmental education as a means of developing awareness and interaction with environmental concepts and topics, such as conservation and reconstruction of buildings, rehabilitation and sustainability. Through the study of ecological art and environmental education, an innovative approach is being developed to ecological and environmental education that will lead to future projects and major collaborations on global issues such as climate change and the strengthening of the global connection of humans to the Earth.

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Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth, by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species and their habitats throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including wilderness, rural, suburban and urban locations.

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Thank you for visiting.

Maryannn Worrell is an artist and educator who employs diverse disciplines, subject matter and tactics in devising works that can generate different kinds of knowledge of landscape, our place in it and our responsibility to the growing need for reform. Her work explores the interactive potential of art as a research tool and its capacity for social and environmental change. She works as an independent artist and/or collaborator on various projects which combine art, science and education .

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Thank you for visiting. Maryannn Worrell is an artist and educator who employs diverse disciplines, subject matter and tactics in devising works that can generate different kinds of knowledge of landscape, our place in it and our responsibility to the growing need for reform.

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The Hollywood Forest Story : An EcoSocial Art Practice | Co. Carlow Ireland

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Over the last decade, I have developed an art-led transversal eco-social art practice. In my practice, this means I weave diverse lifeworld and disciplinary experiences together to re-think alternatives to extractive, unsustainable industrial land practices. Since 2008, my 'slow art' practice, the Hollywood forest project, is inspired by the small conifer plantation community that I live with, in County Carlow, Ireland. In this project, I undertake actions to transform this monoculture conifer plantation to co-create a flourishing and permanent, mixed-species forest.

My transversal practice, developed from my recent art practice-led doctoral research at the National College of Art & Design, Ireland, grows from various life experience in art, science, alternative forestry and Green politics and involves: exploring, learning about new-to-Ireland, Close-to-Nature continuous cover forestry (an alternative to monoculture, clearfell forestry), experimental film-making, writing, eco-philosophy and eco-criticism reflections, national forest policy development and ecocide law advocacy (I succeeded in getting continuous cover forestry as the key point in the new Irish Green Party Forest policy (2012) and that the Green Party of Ireland and Northern Ireland recognise that a crime of ecocide (the long term destruction of ecosystems by man) be supported in international law (2013).

I employ blogging as a creative method for my ongoing eco-social art practice. This approach enables me to collate diverse activities and information as a motivating 'connected learning' form. My blog www.hollywoodforest.com has also created a narrative for this long-term project, allowing a means to communicate transversally to diverse local and online audiences.

Overall, my ongoing eco-social art practice envisions a way to 'softly subvert'* the stranglehold of industrial forestry. I see my practice as a meme for the Symbiocene (Albrecht, 2016, 2019**) rather than the ecocide of the Anthropocene, as it emphasises ideas and practices to enhance the mutual flourishing of all life.
See my work since 2008 on The Hollywood Forest Story here:
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** Albrecht, Glenn (2016) 'Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene.' Minding Nature, 9 (2), 12-16.

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Cathy Fitzgerald PhD | ecosocial artist | ecoliteracy educator | researcher

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Artist's statement for my eco-social art practice: The Hollywood Forest Story

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Over the last decade, I have developed an art-led transversal eco-social art practice. In my practice, this means I weave diverse lifeworld and disciplinary experiences together to re-think alternatives to extractive, unsustainable industrial land practices. Since 2008, my 'slow art' practice, the Hollywood forest project, is inspired by the small conifer plantation community that I...

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I am interested in the ability of place names to suggest partial narratives of settlement, displacement, migration, possession, loss and authority. I like their taken-for-granted nature and their burden of meaning. There is something neat, contained and sensible about their reference to location, but there is also something that is elusive and infinite about them. I like the way they feature in both personal stories and grand narratives, and how they index the intimacy of a well-known place and the bureaucratic rationality of official government gazetteers of standardised names. I am interested too in how they circulate in speech or are written, mapped and catalogued; how they travel, change or are replaced by codes and numbers; their ambiguous charge as the focus of intense local debate; their potency as devices to imagine distant places; their existence in memory. To say they have poetics and politics only begins to trace their diverse registers of meaning.

Kathy Prendergast + Catherine Nash

Mapping emotion, again

Catherine Nash
Place names continue to fascinate me. This is partly about my work on issues of identity, culture and location in Ireland and other places. But I suspect they have wider appeal.

Sometimes the names of local places that are no longer in common use in Ireland have an afterlife on the gravestones of Irish migrants to the United States and in the family trees of their descendants now searching for their Irish roots. These dissonant geographies of memory and forgetting evoke long histories of modernisation and migration and more recent patterns of identity and belonging.

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I am interested in the ability of place names to suggest partial narratives of settlement, displacement, migration, possession, loss and authority. I like their taken-for-granted nature and their burden of meaning. There is something neat, contained and sensible about their reference to location, but there is also something that is elusive and infinite about them.

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Tactical Interventions: Environmental Sensing
and Socially-Engaged Arts

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How do sensors, connectivity and art collide? Dive into pieces exploring this intersection of technology and art

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Four Moments/Movements for an Expanded Art Practice (following Deleuze following Spinoza)

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Deep Map of West Cork - Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures

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Explore the Deep Map of West Cork Share on Twitter on Facebook on Google+

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SciArt Initiative is dedicated bridging the gulf between art and science.

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“Thermocultures of Memory and Memory Machines“           4 December, 2020

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“Thermocultures of Memory and Memory Machines“           4 December, 2020

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Samir Bhowmik (multi-disciplinary Finnish artist and architect.)

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A look at Sherkin Island off the west coast of Cork and the people that live there.

The narration for this documentary is provided by the people who live on the island giving them the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. They describe the way of life in the peace and quiet of the island for young and old.

This episode of 'Pieces of Land' was directed by Tony Barry and broadcast on 21 June 1976.

'Pieces of Land' was a four part series filmed in some well known Irish havens of peace and quiet.

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A look at Sherkin Island off the west coast of Cork and the people that live there. The narration for this documentary is provided by the people who live on the island giving them the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words.