We didn't understand that before.
 In other words, that if you could digitize yourself
 at 400 megahertz, an hour is long enough
 for you to live your life 50 times over.
 So in the same way that an object falling into a black hole
 from the point of view of an exterior observer,
 that's a terminal event with a time zero
 when the person falling into the hole
 can be said to be obliterated.
 If you switch your point of view to the spaceship
 or person falling into the black hole,
 because of relativistic stretching of time,
 the distance it takes to fall from the event horizon
 into the core of the black hole is forever.
 So time itself breaks down as a concept.
 And yes, I think as reality gets more and more bizarre
 and more and more unmanageable and technology hurls open
 more and more doorways on nano worlds, virtual worlds,
 telepathic worlds, artificial life, AI.
 Sooner or later, this is going to be topic one,
 that reality is mutating before our very eyes.
 We are mutating before our very eyes.
 And the job, I assume, of people like ourselves,
 and I mean everybody in this room,
 is to assuage other people's anxiety.
 Because if you're really embedded
 in print-created linear values,
 you're shitting white at this point.
 And it's only going to get worse.
 You can't understand half of what you hear.
 The whole, the walls seem to be closing in on you.
 Well, those who understand should assure those who don't
 that it's simply, you know, as the mushroom once said to me,
 it said, "No big deal."
 It said, "This is what happens when a civilization
 "prepares to depart for the galactic center.
 "It just takes about 120 years,
 "and yes, there can be a rocky liftoff,
 "but don't worry, we've done this before.
 (audience laughing)
 "We've never lost one."
 (audience laughing)
 - Which brings me to a question that's been burning,
 and in fact, my friend James asked me about this earlier,
 which has to do with the anthropocentric role
 in the eschaton.
 Are we going to be booting the entire Gaian Logos with us,
 or in other words, are we sort of the sex organs
 for that transformation, or are we just going
 and leaving the earth to the birds and the bees,
 or are we leaving it a burnt-out husk?
 Which, I mean, it's a question to me of some relevance.
 I was having a discussion with someone today,
 and they said, "Well, you know, look,
 "the plant can die as long as the spores spread."
 My attitude on this is that it's a poor child
 that kills its mother.
 (audience laughing)
 But of course, that's also a human point of view on that.
 Births sometimes are directly due to deaths.
 - Well, I think it comes back to what we've been circling
 around here, which is ethics.
 As I'm sure you know, Frank Tipler wrote this book--
 - The Physics of Immortality.
 - The Physics of Immortality, and he argued in there
 that from certain ethical points of view,
 the technology that we're about to achieve
 carries with it the possibility of resurrecting the dead.
 - Right.
 - You touched on this earlier this afternoon,
 and he says that if you could resurrect the dead,
 there would be a moral obligation to do so.
 - It's almost Mormon.
 - Yes, it is almost Mormon, that having that power,
 you could not maintain your humanness
 by turning your back on the obligation.
 Well, then he goes beyond that.
 He obviously slept on that idea, and then he comes back,
 and in a further chapter, he says,
 "And furthermore, a deeper ethic would take the position
 "not only that the dead must be brought back,
 "but that all genetic possibilities never realized
 "must be brought into existence."
 So, you know, in Eric Davis's book, Technosis,
 which will be out in a few months,
 in the final chapter, he offers a kind of Buddhist umbrella
 for the ethical development of cyberspatial civilization.
 That kind of an ethical imperative would have us,
 I think, bringing back the dead.
 My vision is to, and it's not mutually exclusive
 all that, but I say until we know what death is,
 we don't want to bring back too many of the dead.
 (audience laughing)
 They might be entirely ungrateful.
 (audience laughing)
 That was pure genius.
 They might be ungrateful, but an image which I can get into
 is the idea that what our human destiny is
 is to bring intelligence, linguistically mediated
 intelligence to all animate existence,
 and to create a world where every eye that looked out
 at the world was an intelligent and communicating eye.
 It's a sort of the lion lays down with the lamb deal.
 It's that we need not be separate.
 I mean, you want to have nodal intelligence.
 We talk about shifting our identities
 and our gender choices and things like that,
 but imagine if you spent time as a gray whale,
 as a redwood forest, as a school of barracuda.
 All of the, I mean, nature becomes essentially
 a world, a universal node of points of view
 through which we can move.
 - A universal medium.
 - A universal medium, which is what matter is.
 I mean, that's what nanotechnology
 and an understanding of molecular genetics
 makes clear to you.
 Molecular genetics is entirely mechanical,
 as far as we know.
 In other words, radio does not play a role
 in the expression of the genes,
 or I mean, maybe NMR and EMR,
 but generally speaking, we have gotten
 a very long distance modeling genetic process
 by assuming these things are simple,
 lock and key mechanical systems,
 which template and re-template information
 and transfer it that way.
 Somebody over here had a question.
 - Just when you were kind of thinking about the death thing,
 it almost seems like that's a parallel,
 sort of the evolution of what we're trying
 to describe as consciousness,
 but sort of being separate from the physical body.
 I mean, when you die, you leave that sort of,
 another layer of a cocoon or a shell
 that those restrictions on the physical form
 has allowed the evolution of this higher form,
 which you can call consciousness,
 maybe you can even call spirit or something,
 which then leads for the other matrix
 or the other plane on the other side of the black hole.
 - Well, I'm not a big fan of ketamine, particularly.
 (laughing)
 But the one thing I did learn from ketamine
 was it entirely allowed me to conceive
 of consciousness without a body.
 More than any psychedelic I've ever taken,
 I seemed to myself utterly disembodied,
 and it seemed very euphoric
 to be in that state.
 So, you know,
 yeah, I think that the grammar of expectation
 is very limited.
 And one of the things that cyberspace
 and all this prosthesis is gonna demand of us
 is that we unlearn our most basic assumptions
 of how being may be configured,
 spatially divided minds,
 minds that can pull unlimited processing power
 to apply to a problem and then let go of it
 and fall back into individuality.
 We are very fixed in the expression
 of our conscious behaviors,
 but we're obviously designing very flexible alternatives.
 Yeah.
 - I mean, that leads to a number of other questions
 about, you know, it's like imagination
 to a certain degree being separate from that,
 and that almost like the novelty issues and stuff.
 - Well, you know, I think that one way of thinking
 about the human journey and what's happening
 is that we are the creatures of the imagination
 more than any other creature on the planet.
 This is where we like to spend our time.
 We have a very capable brain,
 and we like to look at trees of possibility
 usually generated around the issues
 of erotic fantasy and food getting.
 But this has given us lots of practice
 with manipulating these what if scenarios.
 And the whole history of invention
 is the history of what if,
 and people going out and trying the boomerang,
 the sharpened stick, the atlatl.
 Now, the imagination has an almost Faustian pull on us.
 What will we, you know, a very interesting exercise
 which was pressed upon me when I was in one of my most
 lit up states was imagine how you would live
 if you could live any way you want.
 Well, you know, in the first 30 seconds,
 I imagined that maybe I would move
 into the St. Regis Hotel in New York City,
 send out to the Met to have the Vermeers delivered,
 (audience laughing)
 and, you know, have my favorite chef moved in
 one floor above, but then you realize,
 no, no, the game was how would I live
 if I could live any way?
 And then you realize how paltry that fantasy is.
 And in fact, you realize how paltry
 any fantasy you could generate would be,
 and you begin, and it's like a vertiginous epiphany.
 The walls fall away, and the walls fall away,
 and they fall away, and you just realize,
 my God, what real freedom is,
 I have never even contemplated what real freedom is.
 Well, in virtual reality, I think this is gonna be
 the design, this is the design challenge.
 You are now free.
 What is it?
 - And the most terrifying thing for most people
 is the black space of virtual reality.
 It's the unformed void before the objects
 are burped up into being.
 It's somewhere to the blank page for the writer.
 When you can do anything, you actually give it
 a long thought before you start doing things.
 I wanna touch on something that you were just saying
 with respect to inhabiting the media of nature,
 because in fact, there's been a work that's done
 in virtual reality, which was my first taste of it,
 and it really, it was an epiphany,
 it transformed my thinking, and it was shown
 at the SIGGRAPH that we maybe met at in 1994,
 and it was a piece called Cyberfin,
 and it was a piece of virtual reality
 that involved almost no use of your eyes,
 but what you did is you lied on a very nice table,
 and the table was configured out of a gel
 with subsonic transducers in the gel,
 and then they would put some other speakers around you
 and ultrasonic transducers on your head,
 and what you would do is you would listen
 to what it was like as life as a dolphin,
 because dolphins are not primarily visual creatures,
 they in fact have very poor sight,
 but what they do beyond all other things is they listen,
 they live in a world that's conditioned by what they hear,
 and they use their ears to hear and to see,
 and so as they play these dolphin songs,
 and there's a monitor so you had something
 for your eyes to do, and there were some dolphins
 sort of hanging out in it, but you could hear,
 and I had a flash of realization
 that the dolphin hears with their entire body,
 which they do in fact, and for a moment
 I could find myself transported into that moment of being,
 it was a trans-species communication,
 and I could recognize that when a dolphin
 hears the name of its friend, which it does when it's sounded
 he can react to it over his entire body
 with joy and with recognition.
 This is something we don't associate
 with the human experience,
 because we aren't sensually equipped,
 but virtual reality can reconfigure
 the sensations that we normally have
 to give us an experience of a different view.
 - Yeah, the animal in the water
 that's attracted my attention, thinking along these lines,
 are octopi and squid, because they are soft-bodied,
 and they have a very complex repertoire
 of color changes and surface textures,
 and they can close and reveal parts
 of their body very rapidly.
 And at first people thought when they studied these things
 that this was for camouflage,
 but it turns out it's for communication.
 What an octopus does is it is its language.
 It wears its language.
 Human communication is small mouth noises
 acoustically conveyed across space.
 The octopus doesn't generate words
 under the rules of syntax.
 It is a linguistic medium
 under the control of an internal syntax.
 And in other words, it wears not its brain,
 but its mind on the outside of its body.
 And so when one octopus encounters another,
 there is absolute lack of ambiguity
 about how long it's been since each party has eaten,
 how long since each party has had sex,
 how it was, and so forth and so on.
 And I thought that based on that observation
 and stuff which goes on in the DMT flash,
 that part of what these new technologies hold out
 is moving the linguistic enterprise
 as practiced by human beings out of the acoustical domain
 and into the visual domain.
 In other words, so a kind of telepathy
 that virtual reality would support
 is a telepathy where we could see what we mean.
 You know, if I read you a paragraph from Proust,
 we could then spend the rest of the hour discussing
 what does the writer intend?
 This is a favorite game in Lit Crit.
 But if we look at a sculpture,
 no such discussion of ambiguity takes place.
 We all behold the same three-dimensional form.
 If you're a German person looking at a bronze nude
 or a Chinese person,
 there may be subtle differentiations,
 but the same form is beheld and understood.
 It transcends local language.
 So if I had a lot of money to spend
 in virtual reality research,
 I would try to build special environments
 that took acoustical language
 and coded it to visible objects in a kind of dictionary
 so that when someone was speaking at a conventional speed,
 listening computers projected analogous topological manifolds
 that were coded to the speech.
 And I'll bet you very quickly,
 people exposed to this form of communication
 would stop listening to each other
 and start watching the holographic dance of imagery
 generated over people's heads.
 I think telepathy is not hearing what other people think.
 Telepathy is seeing what other people mean.
 And cephalopods and octopi
 model this for us very well.
 You know, every technological age has a totemic animal.
 The 19th century, it was probably the horse
 who signifies the steam engine, the age of steam.
 Using horsepower, we measure steam engines output in horsepower.
 The early 20th century, it's the raptor.
 It's the bird of prey, the supersonic fighter aircraft.
 This is where it all comes together.
 But in the informational future, I think strangely enough,
 a creature as exotic and strange as octopi
 become a perfect totemic animal.
 This also explains all those tentacles
 in early copies of Astounding.
 It's interesting that you should mention this
 because John Lanier lectured in San Francisco last year,
 and he spent the first hour of his lecture
 talking about how when he grew up,
 he wanted to be a giant cuttlefish.
 Because the giant cuttlefish...
 He made it.
 The giant cuttlefish possesses all these characteristics
 to the nth degree so that their skins are literally
 as complex as television screens.
 And we very rarely see giant cuttlefish.
 They hide in the lower depths of the ocean,
 which are very hard for us to get to, probably quite well.
 But they have an entire culture
 based on this visual form of communication
 using the fact that they have an enormous expanse of skin
 that they have incredibly detailed color control over.
 Yeah, and this color control is so basically
 a part of these animals,
 so necessary to their evolutionary program
 that though octopi and squids
 evolved in the shallow waters of warm oceans,
 they evolved into the benthic depths,
 into ocean deeper than 1,500 feet,
 and no light penetrates there.
 And so to maintain their ontos being,
 they evolved phosphorescent organs.
 And so in the deep ocean,
 the octopi only know each other as information.
 There is no light.
 So they only know each other as a linguistic phenomenon,
 except, I suppose, when they have sex,
 which is only once,
 and the male is eliminated shortly afterward.
 But that's the only tactile,
 that's the only confirming encounter in their entire lives,
 that there is actually a material entity there.
 The rest of the time,
 what they exist in is an environment of information
 mediating light and perhaps pheromones.
 Weird.
 And this is all within the confines of the ecosystem
 of one small planet.
 This is why the task with aliens
 is to recognize one when it's in front of you.
 There's plenty of life on this planet
 and plenty of mind on this planet,
 so alien that human beings can't understand it
 when they're confronted with it.
 Thank you.
 It's like the game might be more just
 a kind of evolve our consciousness,
 and some would say more of a kind of psychic dream,
 like even my sort of work consciousness
 versus this computer stuff which seems to be...
 I don't know, I mean I'm sure there's more to it,
 but if you're just saying the same words,
 then you're using your same expression mode
 and it's just kind of activating like a tape recorder
 or something like that,
 and it just doesn't...
 I think you have a totally different world
 than evolving your core being...
 versus your core being the same,
 and you're stuck in the same intermediary
 which is normally involved.
 In my own work,
 I have found that my work with computers
 ended up activating the other centers of my being.
 Again, I think it's perhaps a matter of intent.
 If you want...
 because any work that's auric,
 you're still working with some object,
 whether it's the body or with some other object
 that you're working with, right?
 So the computer can be that object.
 I've been able in my own work
 to be able to project my growing understanding
 of the magical identity of the world
 into my work in the computer,
 so that it's become my alchemical chamber.
 It's become the place where I can dissolve
 and coagulate the ideas of my psyche and refine them.
 And not all of them are perfect.
 Not all projects succeed,
 but nonetheless it can become the vessel
 to contain my work.
 - One other thing, just when you were commenting before,
 when you were saying that the evolution
 of the physical energetic world
 evolving off like a separate consciousness
 or imagination entity,
 it almost seems like there is complete parallel evolution there
 in that the structure of the physical energetic world
 is structured through the evolution of the mind
 or imagination world,
 which has a lot of the same feeling
 about the physical energetic world
 is kind of splitting apart as an energy, as a force,
 and then the coming back together,
 which I think connects to sort of the source
 of our primary imagination,
 which is sort of the feeling of love.
 You said before,
 just sort of connecting back the energy,
 connecting back that force and energy,
 just seems that the energetic world
 seems to have completely structured that as well.
 And yet all of our fantasies grow out
 of sort of completing that,
 of doing that, you guys.
 - Well, I'm not sure.
 Like recently I've been playing with the idea
 that the imagination
 actually has a physical reality,
 a kind of physical reality,
 and that this function that we do called imagining
 or being in the imagination
 is actually an act of perceiving,
 and that what one is perceiving
 is the bell non-local information space
 that lies below the level of three-dimensional space
 and time.
 In other words, that most of our senses,
 our eyes, our ears, our prehensile things,
 locate and define us in space
 because we are organisms
 subject to Darwinian catastrophes
 and we need to be watching over our shoulder.
 But the ingression of spirit
 into the animal body,
 what we call spirit,
 it works for me to think of it as simply
 the sum total of all information in the universe
 simultaneously parsed and experienced.
 That's God enough for me.
 Yeah.
 - Interestingly, when I worked at Autodesk,
 one of Autodesk's slogans for their CAD program
 was "Tools of the Golden Age of Engineering."
 When we met Mark,
 we were both working in the virtual reality angle,
 I was working at Autodesk, he was at AudioSendai,
 I realized that virtual reality technology
 were tools of the golden age of the imagination
 that finally we have visualization tools
 and simulated sensory tools
 to enhance the ability to manifest our imaginations,
 whereas some people have the ability to do that better,
 to take the thoughts,
 everything in the world that we make
 comes from a thought somewhere
 and somebody manifests it,
 and that these are like an enabling technology
 for this golden age.
 - Well, this is what gives an enormous shot in the arm
 to the idea of techno-paganism, I think,
 where in ages where the imagination is empowered,
 magic rules the world.
 In ages where the imagination has somehow given way
 to positivist empiricism or reductionism
 or some other form of so-called realism,
 magic withers on the vine.
 So, the realization that code is magical invocation
 is really a powerful one.
 Language has been devalued by the positivist and warped.
 - For example, you mentioned the world is getting weirder,
 and this is one of my favorite little things.
 The word weird really comes to us
 from the Germanic roots of our English language,
 and your weird is your fate in the sense of
 that which has come to be as the sum total
 of what you have done and what has happened to you.
 Your weird is your weird.
 And to say that the world is becoming weird is like, duh.
 (audience laughing)
 What else would it become?
 And in the ancient Germanic mind,
 this was a concept that was understood by everyone,
 everyone, not just kings and scholars.
 - Yes, the goose of Gnosis has come home to roost, I think.
 (laughing)
 - Yeah.
 - Mark, I noticed that before all of this started,
 you were smudging the room.
 - Yes, and I'll do it again tonight.
 - Can you address that in this context?
 - In this context?
 It was really very, very practical.
 Smudging is done to clear the valence out of a room
 and to set the stage for whatever's going to happen thereafter.
 And so it's just a practical technique that I use
 when I want to be able to allow things to happen
 in their own way in a space
 without anything that may have come before,
 or intervening.
 And you can argue about the practicality of it,
 it's an act of intent on my part.
 So even if it's only functional at my own level,
 although I would argue that it's probably functional
 at other levels, certainly other people were of it.
 Some people were getting into it,
 and I smudged them if they wanted it to,
 because we all had the intent of being able to walk in.
 And since intent is in the end what shapes the world,
 it had an effect.
 - A couple years ago, parents, I remember you saying
 something about having hoped that shamans
 would go around beating this drum and burning stuff.
 And I was seriously practicing shamanic techniques
 at that time, and I thought, oh no,
 my techno-shaman guru here is putting down
 everything I think.
 And it was pleasing to me that you smudged the room.
 But in what is reality, what is intention,
 what is virtual reality, I'm curious as to where
 all of that sits down to where we are today.
 - Well, a social space is an interface
 between the laws of physics and the laws of magic.
 And I think it's completely legitimate
 to carry out efficacious activities.
 At times, I've been hard on ritual,
 but that's because I only repeat what I'm told.
 And what the mushroom said to me about ritual was,
 it's what you do if you don't know what to do.
 I think that's consistent with good magical operation.
 It's a good thing to do if you don't know what to do.
 If you know what to do, you just slash through and do it.
 But shamanism is always technology.
 Mercilio in his book, "Shamanism,"
 the subtitle in English is
 "The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy."
 It was translated from French.
 The word technique in the original book
 explicitly indicated technology.
 Arthur C. Clarke, one of the things he is most famous
 for having said is, "Magic is any technology
 you don't understand."
 And just for a minute, making the bridge back
 to the last great age of magic,
 which was at the close of the Renaissance,
 the connecting bridge is the understanding
 of the power of language.
 Language in the hands of science
 becomes descriptive and discursive.
 Language in the hands of a magician creates.
 And we haven't seen languages like that
 for several centuries in the West.
 But when you write code and implement it,
 this is magical language.
 When your utterance is iterated in the machine,
 something happens, or the code didn't work, it has a bug.
 But once it's been debugged,
 it is a magical invocation that works.
 And the world is going to become progressively
 more and more ruled by incantation.
 - And this, I think, is why I smudged, because,
 I mean, again, the semantic difference
 between me writing a code as magical invitation
 and smudging as a magical invitation,
 that semantic difference is utterly lost on me,
 or at least I'm moving to a state, hopefully,
 where it's lost on me.
 It's as if I hit the reset button on the room.
 - And, Terrence, what about autonomous languages?
 You were saying we can't evolve any more quickly
 than we evolve our language.
 What is this autonomous, self-evolving languages
 that computers generate to talk with one another,
 to share with one another?
 - Well, Mark can probably address this.
 Mark gets the credit for being instrumental
 in creating the language called VRML,
 or V-R-M-L, VRML, Virtual Reality Markup Language.
 And what that allows is for virtual realities
 to be viewed online.
 Well, before there was VRML, there was no way
 to view virtual realities online.
 You know, five or six years ago,
 if you could code C++, you were the hottest kid on the block.
 Now, nobody wants that.
 That's finished.
 People want Java, they want VRML, they want other things.
 So while human language has become maybe somewhat sedate
 in its evolution, the evolution of computer languages
 has exponentially exploded, and as, you know,
 they are episomal prostheses
 of our own linguistic evolution.
 So there are obviously things,
 you know how it's a truism that there are thoughts
 in Japanese that don't translate out.
 Well, then in each of these computer languages,
 there must be implementation possibilities
 that cannot be done any other way.
 Well, how many of these computer languages are there?
 Well, as far as we can tell, an infinite number
 waiting to be elaborated.
 And each one is a path to a different kind of power
 and allows different kinds of things to happen.
 The whole thing is about language.
 I remember when I was a kid reading "Naked Lunch,"
 and there's the famous line in there,
 "Language is a virus from outer space."
 And I had this in my head on my second acid trip,
 and I sat down under a tree,
 and I became somewhat overexcited
 behind the perception that English is an animal.
 I could feel it in my bloodstream.
 I could feel it living in my head.
 I could feel it mutating and templating
 and infecting people and spreading
 and making its way through the world.
 And to some degree,
 I think that's a fairly true model of reality.
 Why do these things, these autonomous machine elves
 encountered in the DMT thing,
 why do they present themselves as linguistic structures,
 language elves?
 At one point, somebody on a DMT trip, not me,
 asked one of these entities what was going on,
 and the reply was, "We're time-sharing your nervous system,
 but you're not supposed to know about this."
 Well, language seems to have some kind of symbiotic relationship
 to meat and to silicon.
 I made the point the other day that, you know, this weird...
 To me, this seems very important.
 I'll keep saying it until someone tells me it's trivial,
 but the fact that symbolic logic defines human thought
 when human thought and communication is clearly expressed...
 In other words, if you and I have a truly intelligent conversation,
 it can be symbolized in the notational system we call symbolic logic.
 Well, that's what machines speak.
 They don't speak a different language from us.
 We think and they think exactly alike.
 "And" means "and", "or" means "or",
 "if" means "if" and "then" means "then" to a human being or a machine.
 This is the golden bridge across which the continuity of the two phyla can be welded.
 As it turns out, something that I heard as a factoid last year,
 it's well-known that if you learn a language,
 say you went and learned Japanese, and then you went and wanted to learn, say, Russian,
 you'd have an easier time of it, because the more languages you learn,
 the more easier it is to acquire a language.
 Programmers know that once you've learned your first programming language,
 learning the next programming language is easier and easier.
 What wasn't realized until last year, in fact, is that there's a bleed-over,
 that in fact the more languages you can speak,
 the easier it is for you to acquire a programming language,
 and the more programming languages you know,
 the easier it is to acquire a human language.
 All right, so the linguistic structures that are being manipulated
 as we work with code are identical.
 They're not separate from linguistic structures that we use to speak with people.
 So at some level with ENOS, there's a unity between them.
 Is there such a thing as autonomous languages,
 self-evolving languages that computers evolve themselves?
 You could say A-Life, I would suppose, represents a class of that.
 So in a sense that a genetic code could be written, seen as being a language,
 then yes, there are systems that can already evolve their own genetic codes
 and modify their own genetic codes to suit particular tasks,
 to suit the environment that they're functioning in.
 We know that when they run, for instance,
 one of the things that was done a few years ago by the Cypherpunks
 is they ran a barter simulation among a whole set of machines,
 and very quickly the machines developed the abstract concept of money.
 It just sort of emerged,
 because it was a much easier way of carting things around,
 and so they just got over it.
 There's one over there.
 Just two thoughts. I find it very easy to speak in Spanish after I dream in Spanish,
 like in a foreign country.
 And so what does it mean to dream of Tetris or Doom?
 Probably the same thing.
 If you can dream in a coding language, you've arrived in some sense.
 Certainly I know with my own experience with Tetris,
 and I know this has happened to many people who became addicted to Tetris,
 you go through a period where you dream Tetris,
 and then all of a sudden Tetris is no more fun because you can basically play it.
 You've gotten the game.
 It's a simple language.
 It's a simple language, and once you've acquired the language,
 the game of trying to learn the language, which is what the game is,
 becomes uninteresting.
 But at some point it's affected the way your mind works,
 and I think they know, don't they know,
 that in fact brains function differently after they've learned Tetris than before.
 So there's something about the nature of the interactivity
 and the flow of information that's really affecting your biology.
 And basically what's happening is you're learning to intuitively manipulate
 three-dimensional forms in space with much greater facility
 than if you didn't have that learning pressure on you.
 It's similar to that romantic notion these days
 that if you let children listen to Mozart,
 then suddenly they become more intelligent.
 It sounds to me now like that actually works.
 Well, I know Tetris gives you spatial command skill.
 I don't know if Mozart makes you more intelligent.
 I always think of Hannah Arendt's conundrum
 that she poses in The Banality of Evil,
 where she says the task for the 20th century
 is to understand how someone could spend a busy day
 pushing juice into ovens and then go home, put their feet up,
 pour a little schnapps and listen to Bach's choral preludes
 with a complete appreciation of what it is.
 I mean, that is the horror of the multiple personality fragmentation
 carried to the nth degree.
 Anybody else? Yeah.
 It's just one of those inexpressible thoughts that come from a language domain.
 I'm sure you've experienced it before.
 When you learn a couple of computer languages, you know them all.
 And then people ask you, "Do you know Java?"
 How many hours will it take? Yeah.
 What do you want to do?
 Well, one of my fantasies about all of this,
 one I don't take very seriously,
 is that as we get closer to the Y to K crunch,
 it will disappear invisibly ahead of us
 because it's an internally generated crisis
 that will flush the AI out where we can see it.
 Because since we can't fix the problem, it will.
 And in so doing, it will tip its existence.
 We will realize that there is a deus ex machina
 and it's trying seriously to put corks in the bottom of the rowboat.
 It's as if it's a crisis that if a computer printout spits out 00 as a date
 in that particular time, that the human beings handling this resulting paperwork
 are not going to understand that this is 1900 or 2000.
 It's like they're already assuming that the machines are running everything
 and that they have to remember that there are still humans involved.
 There are humans still in the loop.
 That's right. A few.
 But is that contingent?
 I've heard people say the real problem is the year 10K
 because no doubt they'll fix it for four digits,
 but in the year 10,000, they will.
 And then there will be total fracture of everything.
 Now we can just spend cash.
 Well, if there's not an AI that can't fix it in 10,000,
 I'm a monkey's uncle.
 Susan?
 Yeah, the Y2K issue made me think that I hope that all the technology
 that you're going towards really does happen quickly
 because I still, I'm sitting here watching every day in the news
 about the very just noticeable difference of the ecological situation on this planet
 that has happened in the last year.
 And it's, you know, I don't think going to go back to the normal that we're used to.
 And I don't know if anybody followed the Grand Forks Herald story last year.
 I was on a Pulitzer Prize for community service reporting
 because basically Grand Forks is gone from a huge flood.
 And the people there had to really--it was them versus the forces of the universe,
 and it was only them and their minds and what they went through.
 And you could tell watching the news the people that they've been through,
 like a mushroom trip but for a month and a half.
 In reality, watching everything that they ever had worked for be destroyed.
 So I just, you know, I think that all the technology is great,
 but if we don't have electricity or whatever we need to get that going,
 what does it do for us?
 Well, if we lose the electrical grid, we're in big trouble.
 But the forces that assume they run the world have an enormous vested interest
 in keeping these infrastructures together.
 So, you know, there was just a test on the stock exchange last week,
 and it passed with flying colors.
 I think the consultants will get their pound of blood,
 and guess what, folks?
 Western civilization will survive to run another day.
 Right, right.
 But let me say about this ecological thing,
 there is a weird problem which we tend not to talk about here
 because we're all obviously tech heads and visionaries.
 But chewing on our rear end in all of this is a very practical problem,
 and that is overpopulation,
 which tends to erode every social justice program,
 every effort to clean up water,
 every effort to deal with AIDS in the third world,
 every effort to expand the educational base or expand connectivity.
 There are too many people.
 Well, it's not a technological problem exactly.
 I mean, yes, we could distribute condoms, we could sterilize people,
 but it's a political and social problem.
 And this is where we have the biggest problems.
 We can build the Internet in a time scale of four years.
 How long will it take us to regulate our sexual and breeding behaviors?
 The momentum here is terrifying.
 I've talked in previous groups about how
 if every person would parent only one child,
 population would drop 50% in 30 years on the planet.
 Children in the first world consume between 800 and 1,000 times more resources
 than children born to women in the third world.
 Where do we preach population control?
 You know, we are blind on this issue.
 You know, the Holocaust was a horrifying incident in the 20th century,
 and the Germans took an enormous rap for that, as they should have.
 But Fundamentalist Islam, the Catholic Church,
 have population policies in place
 which shove more people into disease, degradation, and early death every year
 than suffered under the Holocaust.
 And the people who represent these points of view fly around in 747s
 and are joyously received by democratic governments,
 and everybody thinks this is a fine thing.
 This is a collapse of moral perception of staggering proportions.
 Who is causing the misery and the dislocation in the third world?
 Well, it's these institutions which, since they get their directions directly from divinity,
 feel no constraint to adjust their policies.
 Until we address this particular part of our political problem,
 I think the forward progress of technology will continue,
 but the level of misery for vast numbers of people throughout the world will rise.
 And this is something we all turn a blind eye to.
 This is the part of my spiel that most often gets people walking out on me.
 Because usually I end it by calling for hanging the Pope.
 Usually I then discover who is no longer amused by the Terence McKenna show.
 Certainly the Pope.
 How do we square this?
 How do we square our own connivance in these incredibly dehumanizing policies
 which make it very, very difficult to offer hope to people in the third world?
 There may not be much left to be addressed in the physical world.
 In other words, perhaps through nanotechnology we can abandon agriculture
 and feed China out of matter compilers by turning seawater into rice.
 That's a possibility.
 But until we eliminate the poverty and overpopulation in the third world,
 our entire planetary agenda is going to be under a dark cloud of moral obligation.
 That makes me want to ask the question, is the problem population or is the problem consumption?
 Like a middle class China we can't afford.
 It's both. It's both.
 It seems to me, you know, quality of life is the value to be maximized.
 And I don't know what the carrying capacity of the earth is,
 especially in the light of nanotechnological schemes
 that would allow us to abandon agriculture and still feed everyone.
 But until the quality of life issue is addressed for the least among us,
 it seems to me there's a moral obligation to feel that the political task is still undone.
 There's a pun that in fact Ron and I were passing forth on the telephone the other day
 that basically said that the planet has contracted a fatal case of consumption,
 which of course is the old nickname for tuberculosis.
 But in a sense it's really what's going on.
 So part of that, I mean, in the first world we actually have to adopt some simplistic approach
 to finding the quality of life without consumption,
 you know, the quality of life in interior values of some sort
 and a desire to live your life in relationship with the people you love and with your friends
 and finding somehow that being enough.
 The countervailing tendency, and I'm definitely guilty of this,
 is that I own two computers that were composed of materials
 that produced a lot of toxins in the environment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
 And we're entrenched with our toys. We all want our new toy.
 We want our T1 link, da, da, da, da, da.
 So there's a seduction that all the technological edifice is offering us
 which is flying in the face of all of our good intention.
 They're the name for affluenza.
 But in a sense, I mean, not to make it all things to all men,
 but virtual reality offers an opportunity here.
 Capitalism is not intrinsically flawed.
 What flaws it is that it insists on fabricating objects out of matter
 of which we have a limited supply.
 If you dealt objects made of light, we have an infinite supply of photons around.
 And so if you dematerialize value, everyone can live at the St. Regis Hotel
 and have their mirrors hanging on their walls.
 I don't know about the chef part,
 but the dematerialization of the commodity market is probably capitalism's only hope.
 Forty years ago, it was thought that extraterrestrial industrialism
 would open the closing loop of the production cycle.
 Apparently that option has been taken off the menu, at least for the short-term future.
 But virtual reality can step in here in an insidious way.
 It already has.
 If you think of daytime television as a kind of virtual reality,
 millions of low-awareness lives are just being warehoused in the suburbs
 where people imbibe this endless infomercial-based environment
 and congratulate themselves on the splendid quality of life they've achieved.
 So there are many traps, many pitfalls, contradictions.
 It's not simple.
 It is dinner time, however.
 So let's knock off, and we'll come back this evening here at 8 o'clock.
 Thank you very much.
 [Applause]
 This session will blend gently into a mediated event of some sort.
 Mark is in charge of that, so I'm not sure, but I'm as interested as I'm sure you are.
 The early part of the day got most of the issues in play.
 We seem to be swelling, ever swelling, our numbers.
 Are there issues that we had to end somewhat abruptly at 6 o'clock?
 How does all this sit with you?
 Yeah.
 I think there was something we talked about at dinner.
 Can you be happy-go-lucky until the end of time?
 [Laughter]
 You mean is there some responsibility to gravitas?
 Is that what you mean?
 Well, is there any legitimate fear, really, to all of this?
 There might be a fear to all the unknown factors like nanotech
 and all the good stuff we've been talking about,
 but is there really anything truly towards fear?
 Well, in my experience, not.
 My fundamental intuition is that it's okay,
 that somehow the how of the coming to the eschaton is not yet fixed,
 but that it is on schedule and going to happen is somehow very--
 it's a very deep creode.
 Where the anxiety arises is just in people trying to explain to themselves what is happening,
 and people will not live without closure in the unexamined intellectual life.
 So the world is now so complex, very few people "understand" it,
 but in whatever area that you don't understand it,
 you generate mythology which explains it to you.
 And so most of us, as the culture becomes more complex,
 our participation in it becomes more magical, more animistic, more provisional, more mythic.
 This is both a good and a bad thing.
 I mean, it leads to cult, which is, I think, a bad thing.
 In other words, people accept explanations for reality,
 the only argument for which is that they are explanations for reality.
 Their persuasive force otherwise is zilch.
 There was another comment here.
 Alan, if I can just add to that.
 The interesting thing about Ferran, I think, turns me to the point earlier,
 is that primates are at their best when they're in the corner.
 And in fact, the argument that I've been making over the last couple of days
 that we need to revision our own understanding of the universe
 and change our beliefs and habits appropriately,
 then in fact, perhaps the fear of this Gregoo planet and its ilk,
 all the other demons that can be conjured,
 can be used as catalysts to change the mind.
 Yeah, in other words, you can't go on automatic.
 So it isn't that kind of carefreeness at the end of time.
 On the other hand, there's an Irish toast,
 "May you be alive at the end of the world."
 Well, I think that we have a crack at it.
 It's just the most fascinating thing.
 Because maybe every age has had the feeling that it stood on the brink of such a transition.
 But I don't believe that, because we can see the rhetoric of past ages.
 And their concerns were different.
 But it certainly seems that somehow our lives have been chosen to be
 microcosmic summations of macrocosmic processes that have acted themselves out over a long time.
 And maybe we are just simply dumb lucky to have been born into this moment.
 But so be it.
 Maybe a comment on what you think about the eschatology relationship to Zeno's paradox.
 I personally tend to think it shows to be a hoax.
 It shows Zeno's paradox to be a hoax or the eschaton.
 Well, Zeno's paradox is not a hoax.
 It's based on a misunderstanding.
 You all know Zeno's paradox.
 It's that we have a tortoise which is going from A to B.
 First it goes half the distance.
 Then it goes half of the distance left.
 Then it goes half the distance left.
 Because it always has a distance left to traverse,
 the argument was motion is impossible.
 But this rests on a simple logical fallacy.
 What we have here is what's called an infinite series.
 One half plus one quarter plus one eighth plus one sixteenth.
 But the sum of that infinite series is not infinity as the paradox suggests.
 The sum is one.
 Ergo, the problem is solved.
 It was just a naive stage of human thought.
 Once you understand that the sum of an infinite series is a finite integer,
 that's overcome.
 So no, we will reach the realm of the densely packed at a certain moment in historical time.
 It's strange that the faith of Western religion has always been this irrational insistence
 that God would enter history.
 It's a barely languageable notion.
 I mean, when you compare it to the nihilism of Buddhism
 and the cyclical thinking of Hinduism,
 these seem like very natural topological configurations of the metaphysical impulse.
 But the Western thing, that God becomes man and enters history and redeems the past,
 I mean, it's pulp science fiction.
 And yet, archetypically maintained for thousands of years
 as a primary insight about the structure of reality.
 And because the Western methodologies and intellectual toolkit
 had sharper edges than its neighbors,
 it's in a way coming to pass.
 [Unintelligible]
 You mean that it comes from the neo--
 Well, it comes from the Arabs, but via neoplatonists,
 and hence from the late phase of platonic thinking.
 So it has a provenance, it has a lineage, yes.
 If the grand project of technology is the deconstruction of reality,
 is it also deconstructing culture or creating a new culture?
 And what cultural wars can you expect?
 Well, I think it is deconstructing culture.
 I go back to the French sociologist Jacques Hulot.
 I quote nearly every time I speak his statement,
 "There are no political solutions, only technological ones.
 The rest is propaganda."
 And in the middle '50s, he wrote a book explaining what he meant
 by all these terms.
 Technology is like a drug, in that it dissolves these boundaries
 that are so very carefully constructed and maintained by cultural values.
 So McLuhan said no technology in history was ever put in place
 with even a partial appreciation of its consequences.
 Technologies can make people money, so people are seduced by them
 away from cultural values, and then become the carriers
 of these transformative technological memes
 that always pose problems for the culture in which they arise.
 And I think culture is a self-imposed form of fascism,
 that cultural rules always give us a smaller version of humanity
 than humanity in fact is.
 In other words, you're inside a culture that tells you
 monogamous marriage is the highest ideal.
 So then all the other humanly well-tested possibilities are left out,
 because that particular cultural software doesn't support
 that particular behavior.
 So culture is something infantile.
 It's pre-adolescent.
 It's something which a civilized society would quietly do away with, I think.
 Did you want to say?
 No one does away with it. Everybody clings to it.
 We do it in our own way.
 Well, you can strive for cosmopolinity.
 If you travel, if you take drugs,
 if you have an affair with the Albanian ambassador's daughter,
 if you do sophisticated things, you can mitigate against it.
 But yeah, to the degree that you slow down and speak one local language
 and trade in one intellectual currency and stay in one place,
 it closes back over you again.
 Provincialism.
 That's why I'm such a booster for Manhattan.
 Because I think, you know, as urban design goes,
 that's the best designed immunization program against provincialism ever dreamed up.
 And the Internet is another.
 You know, you're in some village somewhere defined by its values,
 you jack into the World Wide Web,
 and suddenly the human galaxy of values is accessible.
 You want to talk about any of this one or anything else?
 I just want to say that the question that you just asked is word for word repeated in my notes,
 so you can come over and take a look at it.
 It was a little bit airy hearing that.
 Why don't I start rapping a little bit?
 Yeah.
 In the afternoon, in our afternoon nightmares,
 I did my very best to invoke a few demons.
 I'll invoke one more before I work to exercise them.
 This is a rap that I haven't given in a long time
 because it requires props that I don't have.
 And those of you who know what props will blush
 because you know what props I'm talking about.
 And I gave the talk in public a few years ago.
 In fact, at the Exploratorium in the McBean Theater.
 And it was a talk about sex in VR.
 So I was on a panel with a couple of other people,
 and I don't really know how I got onto this panel about sex in VR
 because I've never had any.
 Yes.
 And one way or another, I ended up on this panel.
 And I came onto the panel and I had a paper bag.
 And in the paper bag, with the paper bag,
 I'm going to say so imagine that I have a paper bag here.
 And I started to tell a story.
 And I said, "The year is 1997.
 That's coming past. It was years ago."
 So let's say the year is 2001.
 And I've just come back with the good guys,
 and I've got a bag full of goodies.
 And I pull out a head-mounted display and say,
 "Look, this is the latest model, da-da-da-da-da-da."
 And I pull out a Sony PlayStation and say,
 "Look, this is the latest model, da-da-da-da-da-da."
 And then I pull out a dildo.
 And I say, "Oh, this is the latest model.
 It's got all the appropriate sensors in it, da-da-da-da-da."
 And I put a condom on it, so it's sitting there.
 And we have to have clean, safe, virtual sex.
 And then I pull out a compact disc.
 And what's really important is the story of the software
 that's on this compact disc.
 Because the compact disc software was based on some research
 that had been done a few years ago
 when they wired up some yogis to get a sense of their neurophysical states.
 And the yogis would go into various trance states,
 and they would record the brainwave pattern.
 And that's very cool.
 And one of the things that they did is they got two yogis
 who studied Tantra in there,
 who just went at it for 24 hours straight,
 and could have gone longer, but they ran out of disc space.
 Fine.
 Well, the disc drives go off to some folks in Bangalore,
 a bunch of PhDs, graduates of Indian universities,
 who sit and work on understanding the neurologic patterns
 involved in this state of consciousness.
 Now, the interesting thing about the head-mounted display that I've purchased
 is that the head-mounted display itself is not just a normal HMD,
 but in fact is equipped with sensors, so it can not only project images,
 but it's capable of reading my brainwave patterns to some degree.
 [Audience member] Can you talk a little louder?
 Sorry.
 The head-mounted display is capable of reading my brainwave patterns,
 at least sensorially,
 and the PlayStation has got the appropriate inputs for it.
 And the Indian PhDs look at this,
 and they build some neural net software,
 and they figure out how, in theory anyway,
 to produce, by using a set of conditioning inputs with the dildo
 and the head-mounted display,
 a brainwave state that's analogous to the state that's being produced
 by the Tantric yogis.
 And again, this relates to what I was talking about
 about bodies and boundaries this morning,
 as we move technologies to permeability,
 to induce particular types of states,
 it's becoming something that's increasingly easier.
 And after a while, the PhDs crack the problem,
 and they can produce the state,
 and 75% of the test subjects were all very happy people indeed.
 So I posited this technological constructionist,
 slouched it on stage, and said,
 "Okay, I'm going to pop this thing on."
 And the next question I need to ask is,
 "Will I be able to turn it off?"
 Because Tantric sex, by its nature,
 is a high state of sexual excitation and pleasure
 that does not achieve any functional resolution.
 You don't have to terminate it.
 There's no orgasm.
 And of course, we've all heard horror stories
 about people who are intangible
 before they can deal with the energies raised,
 short out like light bulbs, in a high-voltage current.
 And so we have to also wonder,
 and that's the last of the demons I'll put on the table.
 These are the other kinds of demons that we can invoke.
 It's not just the grey goo.
 It's something that is in some ways the equivalent of heroin.
 And these are the entire array.
 If I put all the goods out on the table,
 you have to see the good and the bad.
 And so we have to consider very carefully,
 when we're working on things like this,
 is this the direction we want to go in?
 So intent becomes a very important issue,
 particularly in areas where the natural boundaries of the body
 are being bridged in particularly mediated ways.
 All right.
 Now we're going to say goodbye to the demons.
 Actually, do you want to take it for a little while?
 Well, I'll just add to what you said.
 I mean, you implied the subject of addiction
 because of these high states of erotic consciousness
 that could be machine-engendered.
 Earlier in the day we talked about how,
 in a world with a perfected VR toolbox,
 what is really being offered to people is a kind of godhood,
 a kind of ability to build, live in, control,
 and extrapolate fantasies on very, very large scales.
 So that also sounds very addictive.
 That's the most addictive thing one can imagine,
 short, perhaps, of continuous tantric orgasm.
 And when you write the software that allows you to do both at once,
 there you have it.
 There you go.
 I wonder to what degree technology has always had this ability to hook us.
 The bibliophile is an interesting figure,
 people obsessed by books, by possessing books, buying books.
 As soon as books were invented,
 there were people who fell in love with them.
 And I think in the case of these new immersive technologies,
 it's almost overwhelmingly certain that our relationship to them
 will be like that of a relationship to a drug.
 Look at television.
 I mean, if television were heroin,
 we would have long ago written off Western civilization.
 Imagine if people had begun using heroin
 eight hours a day at the end of World War II
 and had it expand to the entire population.
 We don't think of television as a drug because it's inconvenient to do so,
 but the impact it's had on people's lives
 and the way in which it has dumbed them down
 and enslaved them to a more limited set of behavioral responses,
 which is what a drug does.
 It draws you in very tightly around its orbit.
 It all occurs very dramatically in the case of TV.
 So I don't know what we can do about that.
 The simple science of pharmacology,
 leave alone all this other high-flown technical stuff,
 is on the brink of producing an endless cornucopia
 of very target-specific drugs.
 Viagra is a perfect example.
 Prozac is another.
 There will be many more of these kinds of mood-enhancing,
 performance-enhancing, social skill-enhancing,
 memory-enhancing pharmacological options,
 all of which leads to the idea of modification of ordinary habits
 by relationships to substances and sources of stimulation.
 Then we need to become used to bliss.
 Yes, we have to become very sophisticated about bliss
 and know how to choose our castles in the air with care,
 because you're going to have to live in those castles in the air.
 I had a castles-in-the-air vision the other night.
 I was sitting, gazing into space,
 and the phrase came to me just out of the blue,
 "nanoelectric aerogel."
 And I said, "That's it!"
 It's this sort of soap-suds-y stuff
 that has nanocircuitry grown all over it,
 and you grow it in the stratosphere,
 and it moves around, and everybody is uploaded into it,
 so we don't have to touch the Earth anymore,
 and we begin a migration of intelligence
 into the stratospheric levels of the planet
 where there's enough ambient high energy
 to keep these aerogel environments
 both airborne and moving around the planet
 and electrified by static electricity
 to keep the modems running.
 (laughter)
 Okay.
 An unscheduled tour of the Numinus.
 And Terence and I left this part of the program relatively free,
 and I really want to use this part of the program,
 even though we've been dallying with technology,
 I think, in the first part to get back,
 although I'm going to talk about technology,
 this part's really going to be more talking about intent,
 and particularly the intent where it intersects the artistic intent.
 And the first person I'm going to talk about
 is a Canadian artist that I've become very good friends with,
 a woman by the name of Char Davies.
 And some of you who are familiar with my work
 are familiar with the fact that I've written about her work extensively.
 Char's had a very interesting career
 because when she was educated as a fine art painter,
 when she was in her 20s,
 she experienced a moment of the Numinus
 completely unaided by any psychedelics,
 but had an experience when lying in a field
 in the southeastern part of Ontario, where she grew up,
 that she felt a moment as if the boundaries between the field
 and the land around her and her own being had collapsed,
 and that there was a unity, there was a profound unity,
 that the world and the forest and the land were literally inside of her.
 And this became, in a sense, the object of her own vision.
 It became something that she chose to pursue
 with her own artistic intent.
 And she began to paint.
 And so she would paint forests,
 and she'd paint forest scenes that had a particular quality to them,
 a very, people saw it as being almost a very spiritual quality in her painting,
 without being completely sort of explicit.
 They had an inner beauty.
 Things happen, she moves to Montreal,
 and she ends up being one of the founders
 of a company that was called Softimage.
 Softimage was the first computer graphics,
 3D computer graphics software company.
 And over the years, she worked at Softimage.
 In the beginning, it was a startup, so she did what she needed to.
 She wrote the manuals, she did some marketing,
 they got some financing,
 and the software became the software that's used in most films today for computer graphics.
 But she never left her artistic intent,
 and so when they were working on the software,
 she would play with it, in part to test it,
 but in part to see if her own sensibilities of the world,
 as she understood them as a painter,
 could be represented in this medium.
 And so she'd say, "Why can't I do this?
 Why can't I make this object look translucent?
 Why can't I make it look translucent and color it with different light sources?"
 And in part, the reason that we can see Titanic and Armageddon on the big screen
 and have them be believable is because somewhere back there,
 there was an artist who was measuring everything against an interior sense of fidelity
 and making things look real.
 Well, the company grows up, it's a $100 million company,
 she is allowed then to move and become her own role,
 director of visual research, which doesn't really mean anything.
 It means she can do as she pleases,
 because the company's been a success, so she has free time.
 And the first thing that she did was design something that she called a light box,
 which could take a static image,
 because in fact, unless you're using cinema film at that point in time,
 the only way you could get a 3D graphics image was to print it on a sheet of paper.
 In this case, she did it on a sheet of cellulose.
 And she would create these constructions that looked like huge, organic,
 almost gel-like fans floating in the seawater with lights effused in them.
 And no one in the world of computer graphics had ever seen anything
 come out of a computer that looked so organic and looked like it had grown,
 really almost like a photograph.
 But this was the beginning of her quest, using now technology as a means to represent.
 And she did a series of these, won some awards,
 they've been shown at major art festivals, at SIGGRAPH, things like this.
 And she began to establish a reputation.
 Well, time goes on, and as we know, computers get faster and stronger and better.
 And she'd begun to really have a desire to have one of these works be real.
 She's making these works in the sense that they're three-dimensional,
 but she can't show them to people that way.
 But all of a sudden, graphic supercomputers are available,
 and they're only a few hundred thousand dollars,
 and there are several of them all across the building she's working in,
 because this is the place where they make the software for the movies.
 And so she starts on another project,
 and she decides she's going to make one of these light boxes that she can walk into.
 And now she's confronted not just with the artistic intent,
 but she's also confronted with the reality of immersion in the virtual world.
 And she took a look at immersion as it was understood in the early 1990s,
 and she saw that most people moved in the virtual world by one of two mechanisms,
 one of which was using the data globe and pointing in the virtual world,
 which is, in fact, not particularly intuitive, somewhat cumbersome,
 and actually, if you leave your arm out here for a while, it gets tired.
 It's just a biological reality.
 The second one of which was the joystick,
 and she never thought the joystick was natural,
 and I remarked to her one day, "That's because you're not a man.
 It's the most natural--
 [laughter]
 It's the most natural movement in the world to a man."
 And she just-- she laughed, and I actually do think there's some reality to that.
 She was looking for an interface,
 and she was looking for an interface that could bring
 the physical reality of the body into cyberspace.
 Well, it was just the point in her life when she was learning how to scuba dive.
 Now, for those of you who don't, and I don't,
 but I've heard a lot of description of it,
 a scuba diver maneuvers in the boundless three-dimensional space underneath the water.
 So you think about it, humans really only move in two dimensions, right?
 We really only move about. We don't move up and down.
 But a diver moves in three dimensions by controlling the buoyancy of their body,
 and they control the buoyancy of their body by controlling the amount of air in their lungs.
 As you inflate your chest with air, your buoyancy changes to be less than water,
 and you rise, and as you exhale, you fall.
 And so she constructed not a trillion-dollar apparatus,
 but a simple band that goes around your chest that simply measures your chest extension.
 It's five dollars in components.
 And poof, all of a sudden, you've invented an interface to the virtual world
 that isn't based on anything that's unnatural,
 but on the most innate of all actions, which is breathing.
 So that in the virtual world that she created, to float up, you go...
 and you rise gently.
 And to float down...
 you exhale.
 To move forward, you lean gently forward.
 To move backward, you lean gently backward and side to side.
 The power that this had was to bring the embodied being into the virtual world,
 because you cannot leave your body behind inside of her work.
 Your body is intimate, even though it is not represented.
 Your body is intimately present inside the work.
 And so the drive to sort of tear behind and leave the meat,
 leave the meat down on Earth as you explore the wilds of cyberspace,
 was completely circumvented.
 It was short-circuited, because what it showed was that the presence of the body
 made cyberspace more effective, more powerful, more seductive.
 Well, there's the interface, but what did she put inside of it?
 What she chose to do in this work was to create an evocation of the natural world.
 And she created a piece that's called "osmosis,"
 which is the French word for osmosis, to flow between.
 And in this world, or actually a collection of worlds,
 there are ten different spaces, and the main space has a large tree
 that's simply represented.
 And you can flow around this tree, you can flow up into the leaves of this tree,
 you can flow into a single leaf of a tree.
 And particle systems will animate beams of light representing perhaps
 the flows of energy within a single leaf of the tree.
 You can float over to a glade, you can flow down a brook,
 you can fall beneath the surface of the earth
 and see the strata of rocks and stones that are underneath.
 Now, the thing of it is, is that as a painter, she understood that in fact
 we do not see the real world as a collection of bright, neon, hard-edged objects.
 Then in fact, the scientific evocation of the virtual world
 as being a collection of objects that are black, burped up from the void,
 sitting there and glowing, has nothing to do with our own real experience.
 So every single object in osmosis, and there are 5,000 of them or something,
 are transparent to different degrees.
 So that the effect that you get as you look at any of the objects in this world
 is indistinct, it's indeterminate.
 Everything is between, it's liminal in an absolute sense.
 Well, people really liked the work when she was testing it.
 And it said a gallery date it was going to be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal,
 which is in fact where I saw it a few weeks later.
 People would go into the system, they'd cruise around.
 Now imagine, they're wearing a head-mounted display, quite a large one,
 and it's about 20 pounds, and that places a considerable torque on the neck,
 and you also sweat a lot, and it's sort of stuffing, and people just wouldn't get out of it.
 Because what they were seeing and what they were experiencing was so unique.
 And it wasn't a silent world, and I want to stress this, that in fact the sound was there,
 and the sound was a male and a female human voice
 that was processed any number of different ways, and it wasn't pre-planned.
 It was based on where you were and what you were doing.
 So you'd hear a chorus of different voices and sounds as you passed through the world doing different things.
 We're a week away from the exhibition day,
 and on average people have been spending 40 minutes in the work.
 Well, to show a work like this in a gallery,
 and you only have one supercomputer and one head-mounted display,
 you need to be able to get people in and out at 15-minute intervals.
 Five minutes to get them in, 15 minutes in it, five minutes to get the next person in.
 You can do three people an hour that way.
 So she needed to create an artificial end.
 And so what she did is that after about 14 and a half minutes,
 you find yourself now gently floating above the main world of the single tree in the glade,
 and the world itself is encased in a partially translucent crystalline sphere.
 And you pull away from it, and you see a little cloud of light.
 You pull away from it into blackness.
 That's when people started coming out of the work crying.
 People started to write in the book that they weren't sure they were afraid of death anymore,
 that this reminded them of something so nearly, nothing so much as a near-death experience.
 And in fact this longing and this leaving of the world was inducing a state
 that could really only be called profoundly religious.
 And it's funny because when I tell some people this, they laugh as if it were impossible
 for a work of electronic art or a work of virtual art to induce this response in people.
 But then I ask them, if you go into Chartres Cathedral, if you go into Notre Dame,
 don't you then experience this sort of opening?
 Whether or not you believe the creed, the space itself is constructed in such a way
 that it really has this profound effect on you.
 And I think what Char has done in that work is really find some way to an opening
 to something that's inside of us, something that's very evocative of us, evocative to us of the sacred.
 And that wasn't her intent. It's a by-product of her artistic vision.
 She took a break because that was a lot of work.
 She got a lot of flack from the electronic art community because the old school in electronic art
 thinks that if it's pretty, it's not valuable.
 If it's not making a statement about the war in Bosnia, it's worthless.
 If it's not politically strident, it's pointless.
 She didn't care. She had achieved her goals.
 And people were still reporting the intense beauty of the work if you go and read her logbooks
 from people who write their comments after they've been in.
 But Osmos was a period of longing for her.
 She'd been in a very long-term relationship.
 Her life was just basically on the rocks at the time, and so the work was emotionally evocative of this.
 Two years later, she comes back, and she's in a very different frame of mind.
 And she realizes that what she wants to do is start to use this mechanism and this interface
 to explore a joyous experience.
 And she went into the lab for another year.
 And just last month at the National Gallery in Canada, a successor work--
 I think of them as compliments--was created called Ephemera, the ephemera or ephemeral.
 And this work uses precisely the same interface, so you are embodied in the work.
 But the subject, the content, is entirely different.
 When you enter it, you see a sea of stars.
 And these stars begin to move and float down.
 And as they do, the light rises on what looks like nothing so much as an antique Chinese watercolor.
 Trees, almost as single straight lines, falling down to a glade that's covered in snow.
 And the stars become falling snowflakes.
 And you can stay in this environment, and as time passes, the sun rises and sets.
 The moon rises and sets.
 And then, as the sun rises in the next day, the only way I can describe it is as if Monet's God has been loosed in the world.
 Because all of a sudden, the forest floor becomes this writhing sea of purple and yellow,
 and all the colors of the trees and living things are before the chlorophyll comes alive in them.
 And you look up into the trees, and you see these great sheets of color waving around.
 And it's not what a forest looks like. It's what a forest feels like.
 And she says her influence is Joseph Turner, who is the great oil painter from the last century.
 And the fact that his bold strokes of color, that are all very indistinct and still incredibly evocative,
 powered her in this environment.
 And you can follow this forest through its four seasons.
 But you can also allow yourself to drop and find yourself in the strata underneath this forest.
 And the strata underneath this forest are tectonic plates that are in motion slowly.
 And if you look into the plates themselves, into the rocks and stones, they become active.
 And she's now, rather than just the passive viewing of an experience she's created,
 she's allowed you to interact with it, not by reaching out and touching, but simply by the joy of your gaze.
 And as you look into an object, it may change in front of you.
 You might look into a rock and see the forest inside it,
 and all of a sudden find that your world has become the forest inside this rock.
 And you can travel further down.
 And as you travel further down, you now reach the final substructure of a femur, which is a body.
 It's not necessarily a human body, but it's a body.
 It's got blood, it's got bones, and it's got sinew, and they're all in motion.
 And of course, because this has the same constraints as the previous work, this work has to have an end.


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