Mental Ecologies: Consciousness as an Emergent Phenomena
Symposium:
Presentation Title:
- Mental Ecologies: Consciousness as an Emergent Phenomena
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Taking emergence as the basis of a theory of cross-scale communication interactions – from subatomic particles, molecules and cells to verbal and gestural communication strategies integrating animals, artificial systems and nature to generate a planetary consciousness, we propose navigating conceptual problems related to emergence-based theories of consciousness considering the “[…] primacy of consciousness as both the context and content of art, and the object and subject of study, but that the very provenance of art in the twentieth century leads, through its psychic, spiritual, and conceptual aspirations, towards this technoetic condition.” (Ascott, 2003, p.357).
Considering the specificity and subtitles of each contributor approach, the panel waves poetics and reflections such as the emergence of transdisciplinary creative practices and theories of a group of African American visual and performing artists, writers, and public intellectuals actively collaborating in Chicago during the closing years of the US Great Depression (Richard Courage); following Duchamp’s conceptualization of the creative act and Ascott’s notion of cyberperception, the syncretic entanglement between humans and machines has afforded the emergence of new understandings in a semiotic dance promoting a technoetic construction of meaning (Claudia Jacques); strategies for gestures engagement with relational objects suggesting a field of technoetic experience that allows for structuring and restructuring of consciousness (Liz Lessner); consciousness as an emergence from elementary entities level communication processes between human body native cells and hosted microbiome (Clarissa Ribeiro).
