Differences between West and East are often reduced simplistically to a kind of dialectic of consciousness: on the one hand the isolated mind locked in its Cartesian box, on the other hand floating clouds of knowing. Quantum physics and ubiquitous telematics (amongst other models and methods of our non-linear era) have together ruptured this expedient dichotomy. In recent years, artists have eagerly employed the metaphors of science and the tools of advanced technology to break new ground, allowing a new culture of consciousness to grow. I call this culture "technoetic" and the concomitant changes in the way we think and perceive the world "cyberception". Technoetic is derived from the Greek: techne and noetikos (mind) which have always been related in wise societies, regardless of their place in historical time or geographical space. Moreover, art has always had a spiritual dimension no matter what gloss prevailing political attitudes or cultural ideologies have forced upon it. Cyberception describes more than just the prosthetic amplification of thought or our ability to see deeper into matter and further into space: it constitutes a whole new human faculty, one which confers upon us an entirely new set of dispositions and a radically transformed behavioural repertoire.

We are living on the edge, in complex mixed realties, between cyberspace and material space, between particles and pixels. I would argue that a whole new substrate of our lived experience is being formed from the technologically driven convergence of Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes & the Big B.A.N.G. From the artists point of view this is ceating a new media universe. The first stage of this convergence can easily be seen as the digitally dry data of the computer mixes with the wet biology of living systems, producing a kind of "moist media". The advent of nanotechnology, now moving much closer to the forefront of our material practices, brings another dimension to our constructive urge to build new worlds.

This brings me to the gap which is to be bridged. Clearly this is not simply a matter of passing from one side to the other. It's actually about collapsing the two sides into a whole new environment, a fluctuating field of potentiality, in which new forms of human identity, living systems, architectures, cultures and connectivities can be planted, grown and nurtured. I think one useful way of trying to describe this territory is to think of the triangulation of three different kinds of VR: Virtual Reality, Validated Reality, and Vegetal reality.

The nature of the first two is pretty clear. Virtual Reality has everything to do with digital worlds, online or stand alone, which are separated from or blend into our everyday world of Validated Reality. When they blend we talk of Augmented Reality (the kind that enables the surgeon to see both the external surface of a body and a visualisation, specifically located, of the internal dynamics of the organism), or of Mixed Reality (which brings artificial and real scenarios into a navigable, phenomenologically persuasive synthesis).

Validated Reality, that which is supported by the pillars of classical, Newtonian science, taught from birth and ceaselessly drummed into us as "common sense", is the reality that is authorised and reinforced in order to maintain some degree of coherence in what is actually a wholly contingent universe. It is the reality that doesn't bear looking at too closely. And one reason for the cultural gap between west and east has been precisely that eastern thought goes beneath the surface, recognising the fundamental flux and flow of being that has been anathema to Western ontology. Where we saw Nature as a series of objects in space, the oriental gaze has been towards processes and becomings. But cybernetics, at first crudely and then more subtly after the intervention of Heinz von Foerster (whose 1973 lecture On Constructing a Reality must rank as one of the turning points in our intellectual history), led us to a more holistic view of the world, paralleling the ideas of wholeness and inter-connectedness espoused by the Copenhagen School of quantum physics earlier in the century. It took then the proving of Bell’s theorem of non-locality to change the direction of our thinking "eastwards", just as the East was looking to the advent of telematics and global connectivity as the means of engaging more directly in the technological revolution.

The admixing of materiality and metaphysics has distinguished the achievements of the twentieth century, and in my view could lead us into an enormously enriched culture of consciousness, in the 21st. This is the domain of fecund commonality that will make the need for bridges redundant! I see the spiritual in art blossoming because of technology not despite it. I see it reaching qualities of experience that Kandinsky , for example, could not have dreamed of. But I have dealt only with the beginning of this journey into new realities: the merging of the virtual and the validated.

I turn now to the third axis of this triangulation, Vegetal Reality. This is perhaps first best understood in comparison to the other two VRs.

Virtual Reality, dependant on interactive digital technology, is telematic and immersive.
Validated Reality, dependant on reactive mechanical technology, is prosaic and Newtonian.
Vegetal Reality, dependant on psychoactive plant technology, is entheogenic and spiritual

Vegetal Reality is quite unfamiliar to Western praxis, despite the illuminating research of Richard Evans Schultes, Professor of Ethnobotany at Harvard, for example, or the proselytising of the late Terence McKenna, and is often viewed with fear and loathing by those entombed in Validated Reality. Vegetal Reality can be understood in the context of technoetics, as the transformation of consciousness by plant technology and the ingestion of psychoactive material. This refers to a canon of practice and insight which is archaic in its human application, known to us principally through the work of shamans (in both East and West!) largely visionary and often operating in a context of healing which is distant in the extreme from the Validated Reality of western medicine. However, frequently during the past century we have seen how the shaman’s knowledge of plants has been appropriated, synthesised and marketed by the pharmaceutical industry. this ancient knowledge provides us with some of the more spectacular products of modern medicine. I am referring actually to the understanding and employment of DNA , the utilisation of is communicative function within and even between species that seems to be at the root of shamanic practice: the means by entheogens of tapping into the databases of nature and of oneself.

I think we shall see entheogenic, telematic and technoetic aspects converge, just as bits, atoms, neurons and genes will combine, in the moistmedia art of the future. This will not simply be a bridging of cultures separated in space or time but the marking out of a whole new territory, both of material production and connective consciousness. It is in the gap between us , between paradigms of mind, and between cultural contexts, that our new world will be built just as it will be in the gap between ourselves that new forms of human identity and values will arise.
© Roy Ascott June 2001