A list of definitions and terms coined by Roy Ascott.

Art While traditionally art was focused on the appearance of things and their representation, artists now are concerned with processes of transformation, construction and emergence.

Aesthetics The classical concern with the surface image of the world gives way to the technoetic aesthetics of creative consciousness and artificial life.

Art Gallery The artist¼s window on the world now becomes a doorway into dataspace. As the gallery changes from showcase to operations centre, the museum must become a collaboratory.

Author The designer of contexts for noetic navigation, and of open-ended, evolutive systems in the Net.

Behaviour Classical Aesthetics dealt with the behaviour of forms, Technoetic Aesthetics deals with forms of behaviour.

Biohaus We need a biology of building. Seeding should replace designing, buildings must be planted and allowed to grow.

Body The site of bionic transformation at which we can recreate ourselves and re-define what it is to be human.

Connectivity Connectionism is the way of cognitive scientists, connectivism is the way of the technoetic artist. They converge where the artificial collaborates with the natural in a new synthesis of being.

Cyberception The emergent human faculty of technologically-augmented cognition and perception.

Cyberself We are each made up of many selves: de-centred, distributed, and constructively schizophrenic. We are the embodiment of technoetic relativity.

Design Design was always a top down affair with blueprints, master plans and models. Now it¼s a bottom up process, its algorithms growing in a telematic substrate.

Double Gazing We see, hear, and feel in ways unknown to biological man, just as the environment increasingly hears, sees and feels us. With retina-tracking lasers, the artist¼s gaze is returned; the walls have ears, and buildings speak volumes.

Five-fold path Connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, emergence.

Galatronics The technological amelioration of planetary life.

Holomatics The holomatic principle is that each network interface is an aspect of a telematic unity: to be at any one is to be in the virtual presence of all others throughout the network.

Hypercortex The global network of collective cognition. Superthought comes from its community of mind, wisdom from its hyperstructure of experience.

Immateriality The dematerialisation of art, telemedia and virtual reality leads inexorably to the re-materialisation of culture in the form of artificial life.

Interactivity The trivial form is a closed system with a finite data set. The non-trivial form has the open-ended capacity to accommodate new variables.

Interspace Between the virtual and the actual, where reality is re-negotiated and the new consciousness is embodied.

Interstitial practice Art located at the meeting point of bio-electronics, nano-engineering and the science of consciousness.

Ki Consciousness in artificial systems, machines and architecture. The Japanese know this spiritual energy to be intrinsic to technology.

Mystemics The systems study of mystical consciousness, in architecture, iconic and ritualistic form.

Nanotechnology Tools to re-materialise art from screen-based media to world-based artificial life, where atoms replace pixels.

Noetic networks Our personal neural networks merge with global networks to create a new space of consciousness.

Paranature Absorbs, recontextualises and goes beyond Nature, technologically assisting in its many inadequacies. Paramentation The cerebral activity of collective intelligence.

Photomutation In the multimedia culture the silence of the lens may go the way of the early movies: mute images will mutate to the sonic state.

Post-photographic practice The digital camera is a tool for constructing reality not for reflecting it.

Psibernetic phenomena The human desire for transcendence takes many forms: telepathy, telekinesis, out of body experience. Now we have telematics, telepresence and the aesthetics of apparition.

Radical Constructivism Forget representation, think only of connectivity, complexity and the construction of reality.

Sentient Net The conscious Net is the feeling Net. In artificial systems, only emotional intelligence can produce truly augmented thought.

Shamantics Foregrounding the semantic aspect of shamanism in the technoetic context.

Smart Architecture To support the realities of cyborg living, the distributed self, and our technoetic ecology, architecture will have to become more conscious, anticipatory and responsive.

Structural Analysis Psycho-therapy for intelligent buildings may be more appropriate than putting ourselves in analysis. Think of all the psychotic and schizophrenic places you know.

Technoetic Art The technology of consciousness provides the substrate from which a new art is emerging.

Telematic Imperative When there are no more geographical boundaries, territorial aggression is as irrelevant as polarised politics. The only imperative is to connect. Nowadays even the self is permeable.

Telemantics Net semantics: the creation of meaning in cyberspace.

Telepresience Just as telepresence gives us a new sense of self, so our consciousness accelerates to a higher state of prescience: telepresience. It means that we anticipate faster and foresee further.

Telenoia Telenoia celebrates the networked consciousness of global connectivity. It replaces the paranoia of the old industrial culture: anxious, alienated, secretive and neurotically private.

Variable Reality
Dry Reality is found in the arid spaces of vr. Wet Reality is the nature we nurture. Moist Reality emerges form the bio-technology of artificial life.

Wormhole Intrinsic to hypermedia in cyberspace, the wormhole also is as essential a requirement of urban systems as of galaxies, facilitating our passage between real and virtual spaces, and between natural and paranatural worlds.

Zen The new necessity in art of watchful preparedness: standing back in a Zen-like state of readiness to allow new ideas and forms to emerge from the hyperconnectivity of the Net, then to cultivate, nurture and re-seed them.

© Roy Ascott 1996
Reprinted with permission of the author.
Originally published by CAiiA 1996

The Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts
University of Wales College, Newport, NP6 1YG, UK

http://caiiamind.nsad.newportac.uk