----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
I'm not sure how the list works but I offer what follows as a provocation for
discussion:
I sat through ISEA, as with many other conferences and for a long time an idea
has been growing in me that challenges what I've been hearing: I feel that
theoretical constructs alone are without worth. Put another way: The end of
theory is nigh.
Take a construct like that of 'Big Data' where we now have accepted an idea
that there are trawling algorithms that can find sufficient meaning to
agglomerate a conclusion from our collective behaviour both online and via
social media. But this is a narrative construct about one behaviour that has
appeared to have been successful. Whether it is really successful is another
thing.
Big Data, if it exists, is a consequence of two things: Industrialisation of
repetitive tasks and the tendency of the Western Mind to require a particular
kind of answer. The 'repetitive tasks' in this case are the so called
democratic free thoughts of earths individuals - thinking as if freely and yet
constrained by an obsessive compulsive rehearsing of received thinking. I'm not
sure whether the Eastern Mind is susceptible to the same level by left brain
dominant thinking - I suspect though, that this is also the case.
...But Big Data does not exist. It is a fairy tale for consumption.
A cognitive approximation of hope and fear distributed within a fairy-tale mime.
Theory, or the obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified
bureaucratic cataloguing of meaning, by the societal grouping known as academia
(and associated groupings), is now dead.
Here are my reasons for thinking this:
For several million years the human project has advanced its requirement to
export memory and knowledge outside of itself, beyond the material, into its
exogramatic form, data.
Prior cognitive distributive networks are reconfiguring to enable this
development to engage in valuable exchange, but the 'language' that has served
us well previously, is no longer fit for task and is currently responsible for
remediating the vista before us – the consequence is that the landscape we view
seems to appear as one thing, but is in fact something else altogether.
Effectively our thinking minds are getting in the way.
New 'language' is developing but due to an increased velocitisation of human
experience language is lagging behind neural developments - the reason being,
theoretic language per se developed from the needs of the prior paradigm and is
of a ratiocinatory bureaucratic construction. Using it to describe something
that is beyond its nature renders it inherently reductionist.
We now need to conceptualise new forms of communication to suit and be relevant
to the paradigmatic changes within cognitive distributive networks –
Fortunately for us, Art is the primary vessel for this communication.
Unfortunately for us, current artistic behaviour is rehearsing past and
increasingly irrelevant concerns.
In developing an appropriate response to the nature of the incoming paradigm,
we need to cognate beyond the kinds of thought we have known until now - we
need to create new behaviours that utilise our next developmental stage of
mind, which uses entrainment rather than ratiocinatory, rehearsed frontal lobe
behaviour, as its primary form.
…So I've stayed away from the analogue based theoretical language of the last
70 years because that use of language compromises the possible changes. Given
my proposition, ratiocination is the 'worry-beads' of the mind, but entrainment
is a possible way of leading towards a way in which the human psyche can now
begin to respond. There’s nothing wrong with the thinking mind – in its place -
which is to follow, rather than lead human cognition.
The thinking mind takes its lead from the deep cognitive mind.
Between the two is the intermediary state, which used to be described as
intuition. It processed deep cognition and rendered it understandable to the
thinking mind - intuition in gnostic circles was known as inward teaching,
where the thinking mind was 'instructed' in its duties. Now intuition is simply
the intermediary process - because our late Enlightenment thinking requires
demystification. But demystification empowers thinking and disempowers
intuitive cognition.
This description is another fairy tale - but:
Becoming sensitive to the production of this mechanism is the primary behaviour
required for understanding the incoming paradigm - and resistance, in this
particular case, is futile.
Terry Flaxton
Professor of Cinematography and Lens Based Media
University of West of England
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/flaxtonpage1.htm
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