Sleepless Dreaming in the Cybernetic Cabinet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recent experiments in parapsychology are proving that non-explicable phenomena, such as telepathy are replicable within an electronic void and my current projects propose a synthesis of these recent developments with the study of dreams and extra sensory states evidenced in pre-cognitive and psycho-kinetic accounts. In studying the parasciences the aim is to identify ways in which telepresent technologies might allow us to distribute a persistent manifestation of identifiable personal energy.

My research into telepresence and cyberception has led me to form an association with the Department of Parapsychology in Edinburgh and to participate in a Ganzfeld Technique ESP experiment with the current Koestler professor Robert Morris. The experiment was led by Research Fellow, Kathy Dalton, previously of Duke University, North Carolina, USA. The Ganzfeld Test is a scientific laboratory experiment that seeks to optimise conditions to telepathically transfer images remotely from mind to mind. The experiment utilises partial sensory deprivation as a means to enhance receptivity to intuitive or clairvoyant information. The idea that it might be possible to transmit and receive pictures or other kinds of sensa directly from mind to mind has radical implications for the technologies of communication.

The Ganzfeld technique in ESP research was developed by the late Charles Honorton as a means of incorporating findings from the Maimonides Medical Centre ESP dream experiments, as well as suggestions from traditional meditational regimens and observations of gifted ESP subjects. In the Ganzfeld experiment , the subject relaxes into a reclining chair and has his or her eyes covered with translucent hemispheres whilst listening to white noise.
This creates homogenous visual and auditory fields. About 15 minutes of progressive relaxation exercises precede the ESP session. The aim of the technique is to reduce outside sensory distractions and permit the subject to notice inner thoughts and impressions that may contain ESP information. The ESP takes place during a 30 minute period in which an isolated agent attempts to communicate a visual target to the subject. The targets can be art prints, photos, or excerpts from video films and cartoons. The subject is, of course, isolated from the target and makes his or her responses by freely verbalising any thoughts, images, memories that come to mind. The procedure which grew out of-dream studies made in the 1960sÕ, has gradually developed over the decades during which time appropriate procedural and statistical methods have been further developed to analyse the conduct and evaluation of the results. The largest effect known of ESP in the laboratory was discovered in the two decades of Ganzfeld tests using this meta-analysis.

Description of Ganzfeld Experiment Extract from PSI TODAY - Number 1 - Richard Broughton.

This creates homogenous visual and auditory fields. About 15 minutes of progressive relaxation exercises precede the ESP session. The aim of the technique is to reduce outside sensory distractions and permit the subject to notice inner thoughts and impressions that may contain ESP information. The ESP takes place during a 30 minute period in which an isolated agent attempts to communicate a visual target to the subject. The targets can be art prints, photos, or excerpts from video films and cartoons. The subject is, of course, isolated from the target and makes his or her responses by freely verbalising any thoughts, images, memories that come to mind. The procedure which grew out of-dream studies made in the 1960sÕ, has gradually developed over the decades during which time appropriate procedural and statistical methods have been further developed to analyse the conduct and evaluation of the results. The largest effect known of ESP in the laboratory was discovered in the two decades of Ganzfeld tests using this meta-analysis.

The insights of theoretical physicists are beginning to unravel the linkages perceived between time, mind and matter and in the light of these discoveries the investigations made by parapsychologists are vital to a greater understanding of the nature of the mind and consciousness of our surrounding universe. There is no such thing as the" real" real world. The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions and world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions of the sense organs. The world that meets our senses is a world of pure sensation and out of this buzzing chaos of confusion our sense organs must select categories of understanding. All mental life begins with the melt-water of our physiological constitution. Our fine receptors constantly process, internalise and transform subtly distinct sensation into consciousness. This mysterious and little understood process of siphoning and metamorphosing the alien world out there into our consciousness is the only means we have of gaining insight and knowledge.

Extract from Susan Langer - Feeling and Form - 1952

Parapsychological research is still a relatively new field of scientific investigation dealing with the potential of the mind. It began as an experimental attempt to find out if information about the objective world ever gets into the mind without the use of the physical senses. The early mechanistic models of the mind and body were inadequate when superimposed on the range psychic accounts and personal testimonies that pointed to extra sensory activity.

Important and pioneering research in Telepathy began in 1930 at Duke university in North Carolina when J.B Rhine a psychology instructor gave each of his students a well sealed , opaque envelope and explained he wanted to try a new and simple kind of test. Each envelope had in it a card with a number stamped on it from nine to zero. Each student had to guess the digit inside the envelope and write the guess on the outside. Rhine knew about the statistical laws of chance, which are measures of the inherent probability of an occurrence.

One student Adam Linzmayer had an uncanny ability to guess correctly and from 1931 to 1933 thousands of tests were carried out. What was the process that produces ESP? The results that were collected pointed to a direct contact between mind and reality. The numbers were replaced by symbols. The symbols - cross, star, circle square and wavy line were selected to be as simple and distinct as possible. Five cards with each a symbol made a deck of twenty five, and this deck soon became a standard research tool.

ESP experience indicated that embedded within the regular processes that run according to the laws of chemistry and physics, another order existed. Rhines early experiments demonstrated that psychic experiences operate outside the co-ordinates of time and space. His findings, later led Carl Jung to hypothesise that space and time had "elastic" properties. He used the terms "synchronicity" and "The Accausal Principle" to describe this falling together in time.

Phenomena such Out of body Experience, Hauntings, Lucid Dreaming and ESP push us towards a pluralistic understanding of the powerful and imagistic capacity of human consciousness and one implication of the technologies of the VR model is that through sensory transduction it may become possible to have a direct perception of phenomena previously associated with paranormal and dream experience and what I am proposing is a synthesis between scientific, cognitive phenomena, stimulated by the multi-sensory and telepresent models of VR and the psychic experience of the human being.

The anatomical maps of the human body, secular and religious architecture can all be seen as guidance systems, they help steer us and keep us on course. We have come to embrace all these designs in the organisation of our experience and in the reservoirs of our minds all spatial and temporal stimuli and every emotion connected with every sensory stimuli is intimately connected, recorded and available for playback within the human cortex.

Miraculous sensory incursions and probes into outerspace and into the nervous systems of our bodies have made us into cyborgs. In the virtual reality model the architecture of the body is de-stabilised by technological add-ons. These prosthetic garments offer somatic insights into the body/mind construct. A technological means has been developed whereby we can explore the morphic characteristics of concurrent and inconsistent realities.

Real world space is amorphous, it has no shape, it is a substrate of all our experience, known by sight and touch, afar and near sounds and is a factor of our moving and doing. Our nervous systems are embodied and the world arrives as mosaic and process.

The human mind is doing physical work all the time. Thought itself is a form of telekinesis. Space does not seem to limit information in the mind. There seems to be some "psychic shuffling" going on.

When the nervous system is embodied in the prosthetic garments of VR technology we enter a mild sensory privation and isolation situation inside technology and outside ourselves. The mind leaks into the points and grids of cyberspace and not only the frame that disintegrates. A bionic marriage takes place. The interaction between natural process and robotic structures constitutes a blurring of the boundary between imagination and perception. In this way the technologies of human presence are tearing the sacred bindings of the body apart and discharging the mystical and anarchic mind into a telematic void, where the higher dimensions of spatial and temporal associative pathways begin to suggest a psi-space: a space for clairvoyant activity. The gravitational hold is destabilised and the maps of the body, supplied by the bio-medical, cognitive computing and engineering sciences which write directly to the nervous systems of our bodies give a somatic presence in a beyond place.

In dreams we frequently replicate phantasmagoric versions of the self and it is through powerful dream experience we come to know the self as a multiple of selves. These apparitional actors are compelled by the mind like remote and acrobatic ghosts. Many of our dreams take place within the phantom architecture of houses that symbolise the inner space of psyche. These alternative "dream houses" are manifested so that we can maintain and re-create ourselves or plot our own or others destruction. Particular dream types are highly similar across cultures and one notion that is still with us is that dreams are based on actual night travels of the soul. In telematic space the psychical marionettes we encounter, might be automatic projections from consciousness or they might have their centreÕs elsewhere. They might be the dead dreaming of the dead or the dead dreaming of the living.

The artifice of science has reduced our spatial and temporal existence to co-ordinates of mathematical function. Imprisoned in the matrix - in the theatres of Cartesian abortions, are the ghosts which are us. The physical nature of what we regard as most intimately ourselves is absent.

There are many accounts of an ethereal counterpart of the physical body which has been spoken about in the past as the mental body, the spiritual body, the radiant body or the luminous and fluidic body. This phantom like counterpart of our physical bodies has been described as having ideo-plastic properties and strongly suggests that consciousness is disembodied. Many people report to having had an impression of the near presence of someone in which no sensation - either of hearing or touch appears to be involved. This sixth sense seems to indicate that someone or something is there but not apparently in the "real" world, physical space. These materialisation phenomena and ghostly experiences appear to occur in the human domain in response to the human presence. The visible details of ghosts are often described as vividly real and life like and perceived tactually and audibly as well as visibly. They are described as appearing in normal perspective, reflected in mirrors and seen to obscure other objects. The visibility of phantoms is somewhat erratic however, they appear and disappear suddenly, they fade in and out and appear to be self-luminous. They have been seen to pass through solid and locked doors, rise in the air without physical support and glide instead of walk. They can communicate ideas without words, gestures or other symbols - that is, telepathically.

Primitive fears are being stimulated by the emerging presence of a technological "other". A non-human form of consciousness is lurking in the cybernetic cabinet. The void of cyberspace is a focusing centre and scrying mirror where the thoughts of the discarnate and the vision of the psychic might meet. Using cyberception the mind is enfolded in a non-unified field of human/machine consciousness and points to a potential, spiritual and emotional coupling between humans and computer void.

You are about to enter the void .... Your head is severed from your body and you are staring outward into the space. In the black void a detached hand draws an arc of shadow. You are standing on the threshold about to enter a room. The mirrors have been covered over. Your consciousness comes apart from your body. You are waiting for a small distant voice to reply. In the limitless darkness your breathing takes shape and your sensitivity increases. There is no light for you to see with and the foetal calm folds you inside. You descend into the absolute nothingness. You swallow the blackness like mothers milk, and like a child clinging to its past you press against the stillness, reading the petrified surface like an oracle. In the electronic void you carry your own corpse. Your unearthly and hollow body is fastened to you like a dumb actor. Both of you are fastened to the cold weight of gravity. The sound of your voice has reached a distant wall. A boundary has been detected and your voice is echoed. Electrical waves are reflected in the same way. A breath on your face sends electrical waves towards the remote corners of the earth and the earth replies. The warmongers make hungry demands for regular human sacrifices and because of them cybernetic void has already become a burial ground and a mortuary structure, where even powerful human tears are just pointless fury. Where the real dead and the virtual dead prey on our emotions and superimpose themselves on our conscious minds. You are about to enter the void.... Your head is severed from your body and you are staring outward into the space. In the black void a detached hand draws an arc of shadow. You are standing on the threshold about to enter a room. The mirrors have been covered over. Your consciousness comes apart from your body. You are waiting for a small distant voice to reply. We have loved those flowers that fade within those celestial city walls sweetest spectra of desire. The stench of blood and soot reaches out towards you like a mother. The remains of your childÕs body are held up to the mirror. The bloody torn limbs and hard killing hands enter your body. The clock has stopped ticking In the black void all mirrors are blind You are stitching dead skin to live animals The weight of each is 100lbs You skewer the hole in the kitchen sink and communicate without wires to any point on the globe. You wander around in your blood stained night clothes Drenching the house with your tears Your enemy is dead and your merciful haven is this dreadful place. You are in the lair of ghosts They have led you to their mortuary structures. They say that here you can disgrace yourself without shame That here you can perform even more revolting displays. Your hard killing hands steer by compass and chains. You are fastened to the substrate of all your experience. The outpourings of your selves are ruinous shapes in the mysterious realm of ghosts. Your heart beats out the proportions of a flower and it turns to dust.

 

Published in Exposure - Society for Photographic Education Volume 30 Number 1/2 1995 - Power and Control: Imagin(in)g Technology USA

Coil - Journal of the Moving Image - Volume 1 - 1995 - London

Excerpts of this text were presented at the symposia ISEA - International Symposium of Electronic Art - Helsinki 1994 ASTARTI - International Festival - Mutations of the Image - Paris 1995 The End of Reality - Bratislava 1995 - Photography and new imaging technology The Institute of Contemporary Arts - Seduced and Abandoned in the Virtual World - London 1994 Fotofeis International - Scotland 1994 London Film Makers Co-op - Images of Women - London 1995