CHAOS & ELECTRONIC CULTURE

Frank Zingrone at
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss3/1_3art3.htm
Scientific research shows that the brain needs the stimulation of chaotic disequilibrium in order to communicate complex meaning. But Electric media suppress the brain's ability to do this, producing a response of unfocused feelings and inattention to detail. Under electric conditions print becomes a self-organizing structure that continually governs the roles of all other media through adjustments to cultural feedback.

Chaos can show up in a linear system and destroy it: vibrating metal pushed an nth too far can shatter like glass. Or, a system seeming to lack order can unexpectedly, unpredictably achieve a state of self-organization which produces a complex nonlinear order: a turbulent flow like a river rapids can with the smallest change in acceleration can become a smooth and silky pool of eddies. We are talking about physical reality, everything from star clusters and molecular convection experiments, to the slime mold cycle (cf. Briggs and Peat 138-39).

Chaos theory, which is larger than an ordinary paradigm, is a new ground for communication that alters the ratios of meaning between print and electric media. Like weather, sun spotting activity, the rhythm of stock prices, or the extremely complex economics of the impending information super highway, such seemingly chaotic systems, can be seen as exquisite, inexhaustible order when observed as giant wholes. Chaos, the new science of wholeness, is integrating all media into one matrix, or strange attractor a chaotic structure, like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which tends toward meaning without ever becoming exhausted by full explanation. Such a thing is an implicate structure - one that continually unfolds new insights.

Even the unique structures of snowflakes can be explained by chaotic formulations and "butterfly effect," the powerful effects of very small events on very large ones: snowflake is to avalanche as butterfly wing to tornado.

The chaos of weather behaviour, is bounded by a strange attractor called climate, which shows a dynamic repeated pattern only on a global scale, through time, that daily seems completely random locally. Or, the behaviour of any person is bounded by the strange attractor called personality; and so forth. Everywhere chaos exists, self-organizing lines of nonlinear dynamic structure can be found. Nor is chaos rare. As one investigator puts it "Chaos is ubiquitous; it is stable; it is structured."

Biology and physiology are finding chaos in the human body in which erratic, random behaviours, once thought to be pathological, are now understood as "normal" chaotic irregularities. A system in extreme disequilibrium can fluctuate in ways that force the system up into a state of higher organization, more complex, more lively. Understanding such turbulent patterns, once thought to be dangerous, even life-threatening, is beginning to allow for more effective therapies and a better understanding of the effects of electric process on the body. Medicine is discovering that some degree of chaos is necessary for the healthy functioning of the heart, as it is for the brain. A healthy heart is continually varying its beat over a range of frequencies. For the brain, especially in literate, analytical pursuits, a high level of chaotic activity is generally expected in a healthy individual (cf. Gleick 281).

Perhaps the most fundamental discovery linking chaos to bodily processes is that "the level of brain function seems to be intimately linked to the degree of chaos in brain waves" (Gleick, "Inner Rhytms" chapter, 280-92). The formulation of this action seems simple enough: higher stimulation, greater chaos; lower stimulation, less chaos.

Since television viewing reduces the quantity of the highest frequency brain waves, those in the Beta range, and produces much more Theta (associated with drowsiness) what should we think of a medium that reduces the healthy disequilibrium of the brain, thus dampening down the brain's ability to send or receive information? Print comprehension requires a high energy disequilibrating input. TV dilutes this need.

Studies conducted at the Australian National University in Canberra by the Emerys, a husband and wife team, determined that television viewing creates inhibitive responses in the user and reduces cognition to low levels thus thwarting learning.

The evidence is that television not only destroys the capacity of the viewer to attend, it also, by taking over a complex of direct and indirect neural pathways, decreases vigilance - the general state of arousal which prepares the organism for action should its attention be drawn to specific stimulus. (723.9)

The Emerys' report confirms Krugman's preliminary findings of a reduction of brain wave activity in television viewing linked to a pattern associated with passive inattention. "The continuous trance-like fixation of the viewer is then not attention but distraction - a form akin to daydreaming or time out" (Ibid.). The chaos of high stimulation and extreme disequilibrium seems totally lacking here. Consciousness is not in evidence.

The noted psychologist, A.R. Luria has determined that "No organized thought is possible in these phasic states and selective associations are replaced by non-selective associations, deprived of their purposeful character" (Ibid.). So the smoothed out anti-chaotic brain wave state is antithetical to thought production and healthy brain rhythms. In other words, one can learn very little, if anything, from television. Not so you think? Recall just three of the fourteen to nineteen items from last night's 11 o'clock television news.

Strangely, when the brain waves of epileptics are monitored they are found to be dramatically less chaotic during a seizure. This confirms the notion that in some cases a lack of chaotic activity in the brain is a signal of incipient malfunction. It is becoming quite clear, from the work of Krugman and the Emerys, A.R.Luria, Peper and Mulholland, and others, that while watching television, the process of dynamic, alert interaction with reality is greatly reduced, sometimes completely blocked.

Habitually shutting down the verbal and analytical functions of the mind is bound to result in mental patterns that are reduced in terms of their potentials for linear order. It remains to be seen how we can train an active mind to high levels of professional competence using nonlinear techniques.

PET (positron emission tomography) imaging lights up the brain in areas according to specific activities. (Eg: reading lights up its specific area of the verbal centre.) Irradiated blood supplied by the nuclear medicine lab is loaded with positrons (electrons with reverse spin). This 'charged' blood is introduced into the patient and when the blood flow is increased to a particular area of the brain by a specific task, neurons and positrons mutually destruct in a great dispersion of gamma radiation. This action lights up the PET monitor. Such techniques produce dependable evidence as to the state of the brain induced by the use of various media. Print, we know, resides in the left cortical hemisphere and television viewing goes right.

Certain conclusions are unavoidable from the science in this area. Radiant light, the light of cathode ray technology, produces a dramatic downscaling of all brain activity associated with high energy, alert, healthy, disequilibrium. Television and VDT viewing take from the brain the best features of its highest non-passive functioning.

Acoustic work, like composition from memory, silent reading, and mental arithmetic all require and induce the faster brain wave production. Activities such as reading a televised text, watching TV, watching a televised interview, are all noticably downscale in the range of the slowest and least chaotic of brain wave activity (cf. Emery 627). Literate activity, reading,writing and talking carefully, are activities that provide a sufficiently chaotic base to experience that there is always the tendency for these activities to complexify further and speed up the brain.

The Emerys conclude, with impressive neuro-physiological evidence to back their claims concerning the function of Theta waves, that television is "a maladaptive technology," a technology that injures the health of the user. They set up a set of conditions showing the relationship between high Theta presence and low brain wave response in the situation of TV use:

1. Normal response - no theta.
2. Some theta showing periodicity.
3. Abundant constant theta, approaching drowsy or hypnogogic pattern.
4. Epileptic spike and wave response, may be subdivided at least into a) petit mal b) grand mal. (727)

Merrelyn Emery locates the effects on the brain of television viewing in the area of number three, in the domain of drowsiness and the hypnogogic state. "We can confidently predict that as theta increases during viewing, there will be at the ontogenetic level, a corresponding increase only in knowing 'of' and not knowing" (729). ["Knowing 'of' " is defined as "the primitive (ie:pre-language and consciousness) function of recognition."] And further, theta is discovered to be a sign of other perceptual trouble: "An increase in theta represents a breakdown ... between person and environment in the sense that environmental vigilance is neglected"
(728-29). So the emotionally flattened effect of TV viewing appears as ill health in respect to brain function, yet the national average of TV viewing time continues to go up. Perhaps, like neurotics, we fall in love with our disorder.

Their conclusions based on a careful analysis of the strong theta inducing properties of cathode ray technology, television and VDT's, are clear: "television must be judged as a maladaptive technology" (727) because, among several measured reasons, it "inhibits consciousness and purposeful behaviour." In other areas of study they conclude that TV is maladaptive because it stimlates only recognition and squelches conscious recall; that TV involves "more forgetting than remembering" of TV content; that "understanding" of contents is minimalized (cf. 756).

The diseqilibrium of right and left hemispheric modes of experience is another indicator of the natural chaotic imbalance in neurophysiological aspects of communication. Since television viewing is clearly biased toward the right hemisphere, the dynamic flow from side to side, associated with feeling and thinking, is disrupted. The chaotic potentials for a higher order thought are minimized, if not eliminated all together. This is low level disequilibrium not extreme enough to produce higher order.

In spite of our sciences and technologies and the comforts that flow from them, the electric revolution has created for us conditions of extreme disorder and anxiety. We are increasingly overloaded with extraneous information. There is a strong desire to inhibit information, to desensitize ourselves to the endless onslaught of data stimulation. Is there an order in all of this chaos? The millenial shift is upon us. What changes does it bring?

A deep order is emerging from the multi-media complexity of our overloaded world. Electric media have created chaotic relations between thought and feeling in our lives by severing one from the other. Now, possessed of interactive media complexes in technologies like CD-ROM, and the rest, we fear that print is obsolescent. This is probably not true and for several reasons.

1.Radiant light and reading are mutually exclusive: As the Emerys and other investigators have shown, the neurophysiological evidence is overwhelmingly clear that VDT use for extensive reading carries the virtual certainty of deleterious health effects. Simply put: radiant light (as contrasted with reflected light, that is, cathode ray technology CRT) draws energy away from the verbal centre and sets up strong stress patterns for anyone trying to use a VDT for literate purposes. Print is going to have to stay on the printed page where it can best enhance our re-entry into the acoutic space of electromagnetic wave resonance. It is easy to see that as movies become enslaved to moronic visual production values,sound track technology has grown impressively.

2. A whole view of any event cannot be gained through any one medium. The classics of any culture are implicate structures, or enfolded contents always unfolding: an ancient story from prehistory unfolds as a great epic poem; the poem gives rise to a dramatic version staged by great actors; the play becomes a novel; the novel becomes a film; the film is remade into a five-part TV series; the panoplied story thus lives on regenerated by its own internal resistence to finality, its self-re-organizing potential.

Parallel to these translations of the story from one modality to another is a series of technological changes that make each version of the story possible. As Baum and Peat put it, "The explicate form of all this is the structure of society, and the implicate form is the content of the culture which extends into the consciousness of each person" (185). Society is structured by the technical means of communication that it employs, as Innis has made clear. So the explicate form of order in this example unfolds but is not seen to unfold while the implicate order arrests our attention as an entertaining unfoldment of interesting contents. Each medium is biased in respect to the view of reality implicit in the structure of its technology, a film view, a book view, a TV view, a photographic view, or the multiplex views that are now emerging, like an I-Max consumation of a Rolling Stones concert.

3. The deep story is an irreducible form. Mircea Eliade has impressed many people with his profound insights into comparative religions and the Hermetic grounds to human culture. It is his opinion that story is an irreducible form, as important to survival as food, sex, or living space; that is, the deep story, the enfolded, implicate myth, is irreducible, permanent. When one encounters someone, an actor ideally, unfolding a story, a strong sense of reconciliation between inner and outer is achieved, and is one of humankind's finest sensibilities. Every child, like an amazed primitive, listening to a bedtime story at a parent's elbow knows this. No electric medium can begin to consumate this need without careful instruction and control by print. Christmas television specials are paragons of this relationship in which the told story supervenes even the compelling values of animation.

4. Only print can lift the level of public debate above the simple headline service of television: Most good studies of electric media show clearly that their technology reduces language to levels of embarrassing simplicity. A cultural environment stultified by such intellectual ill health would quickly decay into an ungovernable swamp of inarticulate lawlessness. Print's persistent reinvention of itself, vis-a-vis the feedback from electric media, may save us from this immanent fate. There are signs that the general level of public discourse has risen measurably in the last quarter century as a direct result of forcing criticism out of television's arena of sponsored debate. Our jaded disinterest in political rhetoric is the surest sign, as well as our social desire for smaller group identities, provided that doesn't slip into sectarian mindlessness or violent tribalism.

5. Print tends to deal with complex inner realities because it is the medium that best does this. To obsolesce print or eliminate it altogether is to contemplate a headless body and a thoughtless world. Electric media can only intimate depth and at best create strong feelings about events. The influence on thought and perception of the form of any medium cannot be exaggerated. This complex produces a neo-Whorfian hypothesis: language and print in their imbalanced tension with electric media shape our understanding of reality. Multi-sensory media, film and television, live by print, as screen plays and scripts. The semblance they give us of a wholer reality is still controlled by print even though they convert print into a ground. Print is the thought ground to
the feeling media. This is a nonlinear relationship.

6. Print allows thought to become dynamic. Gray and LaViolette model a non-linear brain:

They've proposed that thought starts as a highly complex, even chaotic bundle of sensations, nuances, and "feeling tones" which cycle from the limbic system through the cortex. During this feedback cycling, the cortex selects out, or "abstracts" some of these feeling tones. These abstractions are then reinserted back into the loop. The continued abstracting process has the effect of nonlinearly amplifying some nuances into cognitions or emotions, which become organizers for the complex bundles of nuance-filled sensations and feelings (Briggs and Peat 170).

LaViolette even regards thoughts as "stereotypes" of these feeling tones. "They're like cartoons of reality," he says of thoughts. The animated cartoon, a special manipulation of the persistence of vision, is a medium of its own, not absolutely restricted to film or television. It is instructive that a post-modern epistemology should rely on "feelings" and "cartoons" as the basis of a nonlinear theory of the development of thought. But in recording and presenting these ideas the authors resort to print, the only medium complex enough to contain the metalanguage of their hypothesis. Shouldn't we know by now that the brain is both linear and nonlinear simultaneously; it may even be, as Pribram suggests, holographic.

7. An important aspect of the apparent disorderliness of the postmodern world is our inability to perceive complex cultural contents in our artefacts. As McLuhan first suggested, the form of a new medium produces psychic and social change in all the other media forms and gives us, in total, a new pattern of perception for looking at the world. Television, for example changes the way in which film and novels mean, as well as the world they reflect. Another 'dialect of perception' is added to our awareness of a diversifying reality. The content of the psyche may be rapidly expanding considering that: The true content of any medium is the perceptual disequilibrium its technique adds to the structure of the story. The story of Don DeLillo's White Noise concerns the evacuation of a city in flight from a cloud of toxic gas with a "mind" of its own. The true content of White Noise is its chaotic interplay between all the media as the structural ground for the novel's story. William Marshall's Roadshow, a bizarre novel about a traffic jam, is chaotic fiction as well. And Beckett has written more chaotic novels than anyone, yet. Just think of How It Is, a book that defies narrative approaches and is a nonlinear, iterative swamp. William Burroughs is the father of pharmaceutical chaos in the implicately ordered novel he spent his life writing called variously Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine, et cetera .

8. Television and films can easily be misunderstood and feared if only measured for their maladaptive tendencies and in isolation from print. By themselves, and not considered part of the media mix they do suppress brain function and thwart aggressive cultural reach. But to a significant extent the people who watch the passive electric media also use print, listen to radio, keep notes and write letters or faxes or ads or reports. Their chaotic habits in playing with the media mix change print's roles but cannot destroy the medium itself, a perfectly ridiculous contention in a society dominated by highly trained, high priced professionals.

9. Disequilibrium and chaos in communication: No sense speaking of balance, because that is not the answer if disequilibrium is essential for high art with strong meanings. All media, taken together, are a process pattern in which every medium bears a more or less strong relationship of imbalance with print. Radio less, television more. But each relationship is a ratio. The media mix feeds on disequilibrium. The fundamental disequilibrium between all media is the measure of each form against the Ur-form of print. The further apart electric forms get from print the more energy of disequilibrium is available for conversion into higher ordered ironic possiblities for print. Print gorges on her own children for strength.

Considering the nonlinear structures of Joyce's, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, the original hypertext, with its 'Windows'-like structure, and especially Finnegans Wake, the confusion and disorder these dynamic works introduce into the reader's consciousness is so intense that the works suffer serious cultural neglect. This is a powerful irony. The best must now be ignored. "Here Comes Everybody," indeed! Joyces works are dissipative structures in the full sense of Prigogine's criteria: requiring enormous imputs of energy, attaining very high tensions of disequilibrium and having within them not apparent but discoverable deep orders of self-organization. Astounding! Once again we find that art leads science in matters of paradigm shift. Also per usual, most people want to be spared such understanding.

Whether or not we have the wit to exploit these possibilities, one thing seems sure - print will continually benefit from the novelizing feedback from electric forms.The future of print is probably rich in its enhanced abilitiy to give birth to new futures through its eternal role in gestating all new forms of communication.

Works Cited
Bohm, David, and F. David Peat. Science, Order, and Creativity. New York: Bantam 1987.

Briggs, John, and F. David Peat. Turbulent Mirror. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

Emery, Merrelyn. The Social and Neurophysiological Effects of Television and their Implications for Marketing Practice. Doctoral dissertation. Australian National University. Canberra, 1985.

Gleick, James. Chaos. New York: Viking, 1987.

Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1951, 1977 (first ed. 1951).

Krugman, Herbert E. "Brain wave Measures of Media Involvement." Journal of Advertising Reasearch 11.1 (1971): 3-9.

-----. "Memory Without Recall, Exposure Without Perception." Journal of Advertising Research 17.4 (1977): 7-12.

-----. "Electroencephalographic Aspects of Low Involvement: Implications for the McLuhan Hypothesis." American Association for Public Opinion Research. New York, 1970.

Luria, A.R. [Alexander Romanovich] Language and Cognition. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1981.

Mulholland, Thomas, and Erik Peper, "Occipital Alpha and Accomodative Vergence, Pursuit Tracking, and Fast Eye Movements." Psychophysiology 8.5 (1971): 556-575.

Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam, 1984.

EDGE-ARTISTS AS STRANGE ATTRACTORS
EDGE ARTISTS AS ‘STRANGE ATTRACTORS'
A Source of Negentropy in Society

By Iona Miller, 3-2004
http://www.geocities.com/iona_m and http://www.subcutaneous.org/Iona.html


Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos . ~ I Ching

Although science and art are social phenomena, an innovation in either field occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity . ~ J. Bronowski

The level of entropy is the degree of disorder in a given system.This is the reverse of the degree of informationthat is present. Hence negentropy is the build-up of information, increase of meaning ~E.E.Rehmus
Introduction

Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,' including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.

The beginning of the history of modern man traces back to primordial art, such as that found in the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. From the beginning, art spoke of magic, of the supernatural, of imagination – the fantastic and disturbing. Always strong in content and aesthetic sophistication, it grew, hand in glove, with the emergence of technological skills.

The emergence of art was and continues to be an unparalleled innovation, confronting our psyches with a giant leap in human evolution whose transformative influence continues opening and exploring brave new worlds to this day. Art has been a driving force and living thread woven into the fabric of society since modern man emerged.

‘Homo Negentrop'

Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop . Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species' of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.


Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown' (Jung) has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, and even more arcane forms.

Chaos theory has its ‘strange attractors' that never settle down into any normal rhythm. The strange attractor dances to the innovative beat of a different drummer. Artists, particularly edge artists, function much like these chaotic attractors whose boundaries are deterministic yet unpredictable. They draw from beyond the personality, from transpersonal resources, and the wellspring of the collective human unconscious.

One doesn't have a Muse; one serves one's Muse. She comes and goes. In a sense, the artist is ‘ridden' by the creative daemon that possesses him or her. That daemon , according to Socrates is one's genius, a compelling force urging us to create.

Passion (drive) and pathos are reflected in the fact that if this daemon isn't served, the artist can even become physically ill. Images, ideas and inspirations cry out to become manifested. Order or form yearns to be born from chaos; and those very acts of creation breed destruction of old systems.

The artistic life is a chaotic arc of inspiration upon inspiration, following the Muse. Artists walk what for others is ‘the road not taken' (chaos theory's bifurcation or forking), sometimes going ‘where angels fear to tread.' Their charismatic influence pulls others into their orbits, and the small effect of one personality potentially spreads its influence over the world (butterfly effect), sometimes over history. The history of art is one of the richest threads of our cultural heritage.

Artists wriggle among many possibilities before settling into a project. We might take poetic license calling artists ‘beautiful attractors' (Wildman, 2004). The notion of a beautiful attractor draws on the dynamics of synergy. The power distribution of the artistic community is aimed at mutual aid and learning, much like the healing community. Sometimes artists even engage in deliberate public psychotherapy, impacting their immediate communities.

Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species' of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance – an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.

Often catalytic artists are the heralds for diversity, for future society, ‘poly-‘ or ‘pantopia.' They can be consciously aware of this function, such as when extreme artist, Genesis P-Orridge (influential innovator in body art, performance art, rave and Goth culture, and magick) calls himself a “cultural engineer.” He is considered the ‘godfather' of megastar Marilyn Manson.

The infectious influence of radical artists such as these, though seemingly small gets pumped up to societal proportions through an effect analogous to, if not literally, what is known as ‘the butterfly effect' in chaos theory. The flapping of a butterfly's wings can influence global weather through minute perturbations that get pumped up in proportion.

The same pervasive influence which can be claimed for music is true of the avant garde and transgressive film genres, as well. These cult films, including the perennial favorite ‘ Rocky Horror Picture Show ,' have transformed the dreamscape of the entertainment industry over the years. What was once outrageous becomes almost banal.

A small-scale pattern takes on global proportions. Viable attractors function as building blocks for higher level structures, including social structures. They organize weaker interactions ‘enslaving' subordinate structures. In this way the catalytic artist functions as what Jung called a ‘mana' personality, having similar charismatic qualities to shamans.

Mana is personal power, also known as chi, prana, animal magnetism, or kundalini. Mana initiates the transformative process in individuals and society. Many artists have magnetic personalities. Exhibiting sensitivity to a certain kind of universal guidance, their influence emanates from their sphere of potentiality through synchronicity and serendipity, stimulating catharsis or breakthrough in others.

The effect is moreso when a movement or school of artistic expression is involved (complex feedback loops) as the reality morphing effect increases exponentially. Artists reflect and influence one another. Arguably, artists demonstrate where society may be heading. They haunt the psychic and perceptual frontiers, drawing the future into the now. How many cultural revolutions have begun in artists' communities?

Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.

The Artistic Field of Influence

‘We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).

Artists, along with the other innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs, constitute only 1% of the population. We can imagine them at the top of a pyramid of influence, which trickles down to the most solidified or familial and industrial levels of society (see Appendix; Wildman, Table 1). This is clearly less true for the representational artist whose work is without symbolic value, and rather than progressive or transgressive is merely decorative or aesthetic.

Today, science and art aren't as polarized in their aims as we might think. They are perennial venues for the emergence of discovery, invention, and creation. The argument is that although science and art are social phenomena, an innovation in either field occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity . Like art, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from the inside.

“ Scientists search for a ‘real' and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth' model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs .” (Sargeant, 1999).

The objective and subjective mode are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Science adapted the artist's sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that lies beyond the dialectic in the tension of opposites.

Thus, the metaphors of science have gained increasing relevance in the artworld. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines.

Gregory Bateson calls metaphor Nature's language. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person.

We can draw from the organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts. Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature's own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.

Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic.

Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.' It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole. Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow.



Negentropy is implicated in the successful development of science, economics, technology, infoscience, and art. Negentropy is the degree of order, or function of a state. It relates to the organization of societies, including subcultures such as the artworld, determining the quantity and quality of creative work

That which was formerly unmanifest comes into being. Negentropy governs the spontaneous transmission and direction of flow of information among systems. The qualities of that information are timeless. It is synergistic in that what was formerly unconnected becomes so, creating something wholly optimal and new – futuristic. In the 1920s, Hungarian scientist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi coined the term syntropy for ‘negative entropy.'

In cybernetics, a meaningful interpretation of negentropy is a measurement of the complexity of a physical structure in which quantities of energy are invested, e.g., buildings, works, technical devices, and organisms which become more complex by feeding not on energy but on negentropy. Art facilitates negentropy by expanding our general field of experience. Negentropy facilitates artistic realization by creating something from nothing.

The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic, way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence.

The two worlds of science and art have married in the digital revolution. Art has from the beginning required a certain amount of technical expertise, the ability to create and use technology in its execution. Only the means and their complexity have changed, evolving over the years, culminating now in a revolution based on ‘ars electronica' – the electronic arts.

Psychotronics: the Electronic Revolution

Rather than merely the atavistic/entropic art of the unconscious, the cutting edge artist also reveals a glimpse of the future, in both mediums and content, such as the hypermedia of the electronic revolution: hypertext, digital ‘faux-tos', digital films, multimedia, interactive media and other electronic forms, including those still to be defined since they haven't emerged.

The electronic artist still explores the relation of awareness, sensitivity, and expression. All are linked to the telos of manifestation, either in artwork or in society. The future pulls them forward perhaps more strongly than most. In this way, creativity is linked to the evolutionary dynamics of self-organization. We have discovered a new way of being – a hyperrealism. In some instances the body itself becomes indistinguishable from art.

Today's digital artist, no matter what his or her electronic media, spends a good portion of time in the ‘chip body' (coined by media guru, Bob Dobbs) – a virtual field -- as opposed to the physical body. This chip body is a vortex of quantum bits of information swirling chaotically in the hyperspaces of digital media, including the worldwide web. It has made a virtual reality of what was once called the astral body, an alternate vehicle for conscious exploration of alternate states and realms.

Similar to the whirling polarized energies of yin and yang, all probabilities and potentials are contained within this vortex or imaginal field body. The nature of this Tao can be seen as a void or a plenum, either a ground state from which all images emerge, or a ripe fullness from which they are plucked out of the aether. Each quantum is a conscious entity aware of all others. This creative source is inexhaustible.

The void of the vortex sets up a resonance carrying the potential for manifesting the force and form of consciousness. Today's artist must willingly enter this Abyss as it smiles back at him. Images condense as memories, or knots of energy, in the physical or perceptual world.

At certain wavelengths, this imagery resonates back up the vortex or condensing field. Before condensation, perception is multifaceted because all potential is observed. After condensation, the strength of the wave or memory resonates as a single image or flow of imagery.

In quantum physics, wave packets collapses under observation to create manifest reality. They represent the sum of the polarity charges, we can call yin and yang. Collapse is a change in the substance of consciousness, or a change in the state of the vortex created by the introduction of resonance.

If Von Neumann is correct that consciousness plays a part in state vector collapse, then consciousness/reality is a closed loop control system, each feeding the other. Our mind is a reality filter within our brain's reality processor.

In the artistic process, collapse is consistent with focus; focus is consistent with selection; selection is consistent with the resonance or stimulus. The stimulus is consistent with the physical reality and reality is consistent with collapse. In quantum chaos, this collapse is a cascade leading to an entirely new organization – to emergent creativity.

The whole process is a flow or condensation of potential of consciousness. The gauge is the perspective of consciousness or imagination. We are free to choose our perspective, and with electronic media have a way of manifesting a mind-boggling variety of variations at lightning speeds.

The essence of our time-bound experience is receptivity to experience, to flow within the vortex. When we experience our timeless nature – our unbound self -- there is no flow, only resonance. We have the freedom to choose our point of focus or resonance. We can be stimulated by probability or chance, by the chaotic creative process underlying all reality itself.

We cannot predict what will come of it, what will emerge from entering that creative vortex, nor should we even try. All we can do is let go and open ourselves to the morphing power of the transcendent imagination, to bring our awareness into resonance with it. As we transcend the vortex we narrow our freedom to select our perceptual view of the physical world.

Art and the Unconscious

Art and psychotherapy are two ways of understanding the human experience, of demonstrating what we resonate with, and where we are going next, personally and culturally. Art lets our unconscious decipher the narrative contained within, while psychotherapy lets the unconscious create the non-linear narrative.

Art reflects our own emotional issues and provides a glimpse into our unconscious. The films, poems and plays that we find most gripping or poignant tell us something about our own unconscious world and help us reach a greater degree of self-understanding. In creating our own poetry or performing in theater, we are revealing part of ourselves to others that is important for us to share. Our reasons for creating art and our personal reactions to art tell us about who we are and what is most important to us. The decision to create is revealing in itself, but what we decide to create can be equally informative. Writing poetry and performing on stage are very different forms of expression that reflect the personality of the artist , (Pflanz, 2003).

Echoing the shamanic roots of healing and artistic inspiration, these new artforms help us sift through human emotions and confront life's problems. Through art, artists seek to inspire, to create beauty and to grapple with difficult issues through various mediums. In both instances, the challenges facing the human condition are central.

By examining the works we find most moving, we can better understand ourselves. Equally important, the discussion of art, film and literature can provide an invaluable glimpse into the unconscious world. Art helps us understand the organizational landscape:

The relationship between art, aesthetic experience and the unconscious has long fuelled both the creative endeavors of artists, and the analytical and critical musings of theorists and connoisseurs. From the demonic images of ancient painting, to the modernist predilection for the surreal in image and performance, art has provided a means by which humanity has been able to explore and represent that which is usually hidden from us, yet which plays such a central role in who and what we are. Fantastical and often deeply disturbing imagery, sounds and structures have all provided an alternative and often critical means of understanding the world and the relationship we hold to it, while our culture is littered with artistic artifacts that appear to play out the primary psychodynamic processes which underpin the emergence of human subjectivity, (Carr and Hancock, 2004).

Technoshamanism

Today's leading edge artist is a technoshaman, using new media to transform the face of art and society. Digital art, in particular, is for the technically gifted, or at least proficient. Of course there are many other very challenging technical processes for creating art besides digital media, as well.

Just as musicians have had to adapt to increasingly complex gear, so have artists in these mediums, whose use may be direct or indirect. Even though some protocols have become more complex, others such as digital film and nonlinear editing have become somewhat easier and more available overall.

In order for today's electronic artist to be successful in the real world, he or she must not only master the medium to the extent such is possible in a rapidly evolving modality, but also master ‘the media' -- factors of human perception, subjectivity, and culture. The average viewer of a work of art only gives it 30 seconds of attention, if that, before moving on.

To convey one's unique vision, means not only producing art, but like a political spin doctor also producing and orchestrating the perception of what that art means in the cultural landscape. Thus, the artist must have a strong entrepreneurial quality, a flair for promotion, and the ability to contextualize the work that is emerging. One must be able to work with and mold the minds of others, to get inside their heads, comprehending what moves them subjectively and how that process works.

The artist defines the social space in which the work will be seen, giving it a historical context by defining its roots and boldly declaring a new point of view. This is far different from simple mastery of the media, as a graphic designer or factory-style animator. Most anyone can learn by rote, by repetition. But the results while pleasing are “safe” or uniformly mediocre, considered “hack” work.

The true medium of the leading edge artist as ‘strange attractor' is, therefore, the culture itself. Marshall McLuhan said ‘the medium is the massage,' and ‘massaging' the mass media is part of today's artistic repertoire. In the post Postmodern world, sponsors are the new art patrons.

We know from the lessons of politics and media that most people come to embrace that which they are conditioned to accept. Mass media doesn't document or report reality; it creates it, or a version of it with specific cultural or economic ends in mind.

Tastes for certain processes, products, and media are imposed, cultivated, and acquired. Their relevance must be explicitly defined. In this context, edge or extreme art isn't high or low-brow, but ‘hyper-brow.' In this process, one must move the audience from the known to the Unknown, since it is the nature of human beings to be both nostalgic and novelty-seeking.

The context is the entire history of art -- a thrust that carries us forward into the future on an ever-renewing wave of creative spirit. Learning to surf the gravity waves emanating from the zeitgeist of one's era is as important as how to apply the traditional rules of artistic production to one's medium.

Shameless self-promotion and a transcendence of the barriers separating the artist from the art are key notions in this process. Many a gifted artist has sunk into oblivion for lack of the former.

Even in the fine arts world, ‘form follows function.' And the function of the contributing artist is ‘pathfinding,' not just creating another pretty or more shocking picture, nor contributing to the glut of recycled commercial imagery that plagues our senses. Creating tangibles from the depths, which truly move us, which speak to us collectively, is another gift altogether. It is work that ‘says something'.

Conclusion

Art is a vocation, not a trade. It's a cliché that it is a process, not a product. One is ‘called' to create – to manifest -- by one's inner being, and one ignores the call at one's own peril.

Born at the cutting edge, the creative edge of chaos, this type of emergent art and artist has the capacity to carry the artistic dialogue into the future. It's one thing to have vision that resonates, and quite another to articulate it and get it out into the world.

Art has a certain healing or negentropic capacity, the capacity to counter the entropic energies of social breakdown, decay, and meaninglessness. In this sense, great art – authentic art -- feeds us, as it has fed mankind from the earliest times.

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