Michael Kelly 10002075

BAFA 4 Dissertation

11,0050 words

How Spaces Build Mind: Space, Embodied Experience, & Language Introduction The embodied cognition analysis of how we think, and what it means to have a mind in the first place, sees it in terms of a system of causal relationships between our biological brain and the physical space its body evolved in. Reading around this analysis, as well as neuroscience, especially mirror neurons and grid cells, cultural theory including the anthropology and psychology of art making, and my own phenomenological reflections from Vipassana insight meditation, I have tried to build my own model of this system. With this I hope to become able to expand my drawing practice into new, more immediate mediums. On my analysis, this system has three main elements that interact in specific ways. The first element is Space, or the four dimensional material universe we inhabit (length, breadth, depth, and time). The second element is Embodied Experience, how our species has evolved to model this Space, experienced on an emotional level. The third element of this system is Language, or how different versions of these models come to organise Space and so inform the model building of others. These elements, consecutively, correspond to unconscious, subconscious, and conscious parts of our mind; interacting layers of increasingly complex causal relationships between Mind and Space; bootstrapping themselves into existence, one upon the basis of the other. On these terms, the artist studio and art gallery can be described as a mixture of Communal and Laboratory Space; if you will, a mixture between a temple and a scientific research laboratory: the space of the medium is eventually rendered by the artist into one complex enough to overcome their capacity to rationally organise their emotional experience, becoming Sublime. The process of art making achieves a product with enough inter-referential complexity to become an apparently intentional, observing presence in its own right. Within the frame of a paired down gallery space, it then remains observable as a non-natural, closed system; an artificial construct. This provides an opportunity for its viewers to apprehend the repertoire of aesthetic codes recorded by the journey of the artist maker. This potentially enables both artist and viewer, as inhabitants of Communal spaces too complex to be organised under conscious attention, to recover some autonomy. I conclude with a diagram of this system as I see it, and an illustration of a first attempt to practically apply it in a gallery space; my attempt, in a manner of speaking, to use this triune system as a surface for drawing. Spaces, the four dimensional universe we inhabit; our unconscious mind The first element of the system is Space, or the four dimensional universe we inhabit. By being too complex for the mind to fully model and organise, it can be said to constitute our unconscious. How we come to model Space, at least in the everyday, is sensitive to

the smallest differences in our local and initial conditions, giving our models a degree of individual variation. The cognitive systems that do this modelling seek to decrease this entropy by organising the local Space around it. Emerging from this process are Memes: cultural replicators that communicate an idea or emotion by overcoding a signs connotations into denotations. Memes exploit the way our mind draws associations between things by being original, intuitive, and memorable. Brands and advertising are Memes deliberately designed to transform our desires into useful consumption behaviour; by dominating the aesthetic of our Communal spaces, destabilising our everyday working models of the world, making our sense of reality feel hallucinogenic and euphoric. Both the cells that make up our bodies and the spaces we inhabit are nonlinear, sensitive to tiny differences in their initial conditions yet maintaining unity. This is because they are both metastable, depending on this continual transience for hitting on ways to maintain coherent unity against entropy. In becoming autonomous or self governing, both bootstrap a distinct structure through reproduction of themselves, creating a distinguishing boundary between their inside and outside. By these means, both maintain unity by transforming their locality into a more conducive Place for inhabiting; becoming individualised when things in the wider environment become more significant than others (Campbell 2011). The spaces we inhabit: Communal, art gallery & artist studio, and science Laboratory spaces, have a deep structure analogous to the dynamics of living cells. We have made our living spaces into reflections of our biological bodies: bounded but dynamically interconnected systems, maintaining stability and replicating through transformation of its energy sources into more efficient and useful forms (Ibid). In the case of spaces, this is achieved through its aesthetics, transforming our desires into behaviours conducive to their ongoing maintenance and growth. The auto-associative semiotic process through which we construct meanings can be understood in terms of metonyms, the triggering of already unified complexes of encoded signs by other signs. These are built from metaphors, like for like links between signs. Emerging from these are more stable paradigms, complexes of metonyms, which themselves form categories, ultra-stable complexes that dont change when new sign to signified links are encoded to them. From this emerge syntagms, or cultural rules for associative meaning making, which we use to shape the arbitrary materials in our environments for making signs that signify (Ibid). This process is exploited by Memes (Blackmore 1998), cultural replicators communicating an idea or emotion by overcoding a signs connotations into denotations. Using Barthes terminology, the multiplicity of possible connotations of a sign have become overcoded by the Meme into a single denotation, by constructing myths that set bounds around our perceptual set for processing new information (Ibid) According to Meme theory, this happens because syntagms act as replicators; hitting upon ways to become better at being communicated, more faithfully and widespread, by being signs that signify something not previously signified or in a way not previously encountered (an emerging paradigm; by being original), something universal to human structure (upon an already established paradigm; by being intuitive), and something easily encoded and recalled, or tending to be rehearsed due to being destabilizing (the dynamic between

emerging and established paradigms; by being memorable) (Ibid). Memes can be understood as that which transforms our desires into useful behaviours in the manner outlined above; by communicating an idea or emotion to a spaces inhabitants. Persisting with the cell analogy, Memes are a spaces organelles, responsible for maintaining a cells structure by co-operatively transforming energy from one state to another. As cultural replicators, Memes evolve to become stable syntagms, persisting despite the entropy increasing, randomising stock of encoded information that as individuals each one of us represents. Memes form human culture by faithfully replicating themselves despite this Derridean slippage, inherent within connections between signs and what they signify because of the dynamic everything connected to everything structure of our brains neural networks, and the constraints of a physical universe where no more than one thing can exist in the same space at the same time (Ibid). Meanings, the sign-signified connections encoded in our brains, change over time and place, but they do so at different rates, sometimes persisting for millennia. Memes can be deliberately designed as original, intuitive, and memorable; wielded to manufacture desire through the aesthetics of our cultural spaces. As interpreting and self-aware animals, a Meme does not stay as a purely blind evolutionary process, but may be reverse engineered then deliberately appropriated. The process can be harnessed in the same way as a botanist fertilises one replicating organism with another to create its progeny, mixing together the replicating machinery of each; at once both a product of the skill and theoretical models of the botanist, and the product of a somewhat ad hoc creative process. In this way our desires can be encouraged to take on more useful forms, as consumption behaviour directed toward a branded product. This can be seen in contemporary advertising practice (Hill 2010). Having briefly spent time working in a creative ad agency as a planner, helping to set out the targeting strategy for the Lever Faberge Lynx deodorant brand, I have had an opportunity to participate in this practice first hand: Adverts have set out to foster a sense of originality by subverting expectations and reflecting emerging social change. They have also sought to frame this originality within intuitive boundaries, ones that do not then alienate their consumer from the ongoing process. A way they have done this is through focus on emotional display in the human face, making sure the facial reactions of the actors feel authentic. That is to say, adverts have sought to feel intuitive. Full of motion and change, on understanding gained from eye tracking studies (Ibid), ads exploit our attentional resource allocation process, which favours elements in a state of change. Our stress response, hardwired to spike on indications of oncoming change (Dennett 2007), motivates us to resolve emerging potential problems using the product as a solution; on our emotion of hope. Thus, we become engaged while not being duly challenged, increasing the likelihood of our accepting what they say as true, perhaps even coming to fight to protect it from contradiction. In this way brands sell themselves on our deeply held values, prejudices about groups of people over others, and our emotion of pride. Emotion is the primary playing field upon which an advert communicates with its targets, because its fundamental structural role means it is able to efficiently address many individuals at once, and because we tend to post-rationalise from emotion, essentially telling ourselves a story about ourselves, making it very persuasive. Ads, then, will often

seek to back up their emotion lead selling with an intellectual argument. This is performed with as much elegant simplicity as possible, concentrating on utilizing one dominant detail in an engaging way. By these means it is made sure that the amount of unanticipated associations we make in re-constructing the meaning of our experience is limited. By addressing more than one sense and rendering fine details ads hope to create an immersive emotional experience. Biasing our attention toward our feelings, promoting repeated rehearsal in a prolonged effort to bring meaning to it, they seek to become memorable. By these means they seek to influence our buying behaviour by inductively transforming their propositions into triggers for an appropriately toned experience when we encounter the product again in the shop. This conditioning is amplified through its domination of our communal spaces aesthetic, through its continual repetition via a range of media, including the behavioural advocacy of our peers. Through this process, a densely inter-referential and emotionally intense paradigm emerges. According to Baudrillard, this is a main reason why our everyday working models of the world have become qualitatively fuzzy and fluid, making our sense of reality border on the hallucinogenic and euphoric (Baudrillard 1994). One narrative of the so-called Postmodern Break is of this process being contingent with that of Modernism (Jameson 1991); a cultural phenomenon said to have began proper around the early 1960s when post-Industrial technological advance and Structuralist intellectual paradigms enabled us to deconstruct and playfully reconstruct our given cultural spaces in a newly potent way. In a self-amplifying positive feedback loop, this process sped up to the point where our view of reality effectively disappeared as a unified and discrete phenomenon, instead becoming multiple and negotiable. A consequence was a softening of boundaries between a fine/high and kitsch/low aesthetic, as their newly identified codes were co-opted by both, deepening associations between the sign to signified networks they had used to derive discrete meanings. With this came a new and all encompassing social order based on consumption, shortcircuiting Industrialist Marxist narratives of class struggle around ownership of the means of production. In 2012, we are faced with this process having spread across the globe and perhaps reaching stable equilibrium under a surviving few, very large multinational corporations. The contemporary situation has become one in which all transgressive wielding of Memes are immediately co-opted by this power. The romantic idea of a transgressive avant-garde is apparently dead; being apprehended, re-interpreted, and re-transmitted the moment any novelty emerges, by an all-encompassing and ever-adaptive cultural associative network. In an evolutionary arms race, any innovations are used to inform its increasingly sophisticated methods. Aesthetic products are commodities within this process. The previously high cultural realm of Modernist Fine Art has become of one process with the former low mass culture of brands and advertising, to the point that both share repertoires and learn from one another in ways that have made them all but indistinguishable. In terms of Baudrillards notion of simulacra (Baudrillard 1994) our everyday working models of reality are now no longer based upon concretely stable associations between objects taken to exist in a universally accessible real world, but are instead systems of fuzzy intensities between fluid associations. On encoding these experiences, and

thereby having them form the basis of subsequent interpretation, we become complicit in consolidating this state of affairs by building them into our habitats. In this way the process has become self-amplifying; bootstrapping the replacement of use value with moneys exchange value, the ubiquity of processed material over its raw state, and urbanization away from direct contact with the land (Ibid). A commonly argued (Deleuze 2004, & Pollay 1986) consequence of this is of our general sense of reality coming to gain a schizophrenic quality. Inhabiting the densely interconnected media saturated environments emerging from late Capitalism, our sense of reality has become fluid and malleable, hyper-real; bordering on the hallucinogenic and euphoric. This simulacrum being such that its encoded associative structure is in relatively greater states of flux, the subjective velocity of our self-reflection is increased, decentering and fragmenting our outer aspect into a relatively stable multiplicity of intertextual surfaces. Embodied experience, how we model Space; our subconscious mind The second element is Embodied Experience, how our species has evolved to model Space. We experience our own behaviour as a mixture of internal immediacy and external abstraction. That is to say, as well as our immediate emotional experience, our posited point of view of others is part of our sub-conscious mind. This can be understood in terms of a Theory of Mind process with a self-referential structure (I think, they think, I think). This process is built around an often problematic emotional framework, derived from our earliest attachment relationships with our primary caregivers in infancy. By destabilising this process, Memes create a cascade of change in our connected auto-associative memory systems, presenting to us as an insecure feeling of subjective flux (which can itself be said to constitute our internal model of Time passing). The more evolutionarily adapted Memes use this process to spur us to reexpress them to others. This is not a merely conceptual process, but in the way we understand the world in terms of metaphors drawn from the somatic values of our body, for instance in the way we anchor our experience to external reference points of landmarks we recognise. Our sense of being looked at by another may also be part of this process. Under this gaze we become destabilised; we are motivated to re-stabilise by simplifying the world, including the other people in it. This process has been hit upon by Memes as a way of getting themselves concretely built into the very fabric of the spaces we inhabit; through our tendency to delegate our more problematic cognitive work to our environments. As such, we are complicit in building and maintaining the Communal Space of our late Capitalist Lebenswelt, or Life World. The hallucinogenic and euphoric quality of late Capitalist Communal Space is not only conceptual, but also in how we intuitively experience and understand the world in terms of our own bodies. This amplification of our minds automatic drawing of associations, a feeling of being in flux as opposed to stability, primes us to interpret it as an impetus to do something specific. This is used by brands to place their products as a solution, whose conspicuous consumption serves to cement this destabilising state of affairs further. Our behaviour and conscious self-identification is changed on a fundamental level, away from autonomy and toward a sense of dependence, of possessing a lack of self-control, and so toward us building a fragmented sense of self in general.

Mirror neurones have been implicated as a neural correlate of Theory of Mind process, central to our sense of individual subjecthood and empathy with others, and so our shaping of spaces for our own and collective ends (Frith 2004). They connect together our sensory and motor systems, forming neural body-maps common to all human beings that fire both when an action is performed and when that action is viewed or anticipated in another (Ibid). As such, they have been implicated in our forming of attachments with others throughout life (Ibid). From infancy, experienced as increasing or decreasing levels of stress, this system helps us learn subconscious associations between our sensory experiences and our actions (Bowlby 1997). This emotional framework then shapes a good part of the background tenor of our intuitive gauging of other people and situations throughout life; shaping the way we build a sense of self through our memorys associative recall, and our exploration of this in self observation; through a background emotional tenor that colours our subjective experience per se (Ibid). Beginning in infancy, our brains develop and we begin to explore, making our situations more complex. We come to build on these initial associations to realise our particular sense of individual inner subjectivity; to varying degrees, depending on the level of associated anxiety, we come to experience a sense of self distinct from our models of spaces and other subjects within them. This sense of inner subjective unity is dependent on having been built on a stable network of initial associations, derived from an early secure attachment with those caregivers we approached for stress relief; a caring reationship that was consistently provided and came without anxious consequences (Ibid). As we go on to seek throughout life a sense of autonomous consciousness through self-reflection, this is mediated by the emotional tenor of this framework; making self realisation a potentially extremely problematic task (Ibid). This ongoing process may be disrupted and changed later in our life cycle, given the right contexts, but it is typically a very hard thing to do (Ibid). This is the theoretical basis and purpose of psychotherapy (Ibid): that a new emotional framework, in this case a more secure one began through an attachment with the therapist, may be engendered and used to build a more autonomous sense of self upon. Such a relationship may also be understood as the basis on which a brand uses advertising to build a demographic for itself, creating a market for its product. This earliest relationship with our caregivers and, eventually, others in general can be understood as part of a general motivation to offload our minds work onto Space; having us organize it to encode and process information for us, thereby extending and refining our ability to handle change by limiting what change is able to happen in the first place. This understanding complements an Embodied Cognition analysis of how the mind works, which developed as a consequence of apparent inadequacies in the Cognitivists (computational) and Connectionists (neural network) critique of Behaviourism (the denial of the mind as a valid subject of empirical, scientific modelling, instead focusing on behaviour). Circumstantial evidence for the Embodied Cognition analysis can be found in the field of artificial intelligence, which in following cognitivist models gained little success in building generally intelligent robots, but after utilising interactively emergent models such as are found in the Embodied Cognition analysis achieved breakthrough success (Embodied Cognition Sept 2012). As opposed to Representationalist views that see the mind as a passive processor of

input sense data to output behaviour via abstract encoded representations of the world, Embodied Cognition views go further and see the mind as enactive. That is to say, as an active processor of information that, through its sensorimotor system, interacts with the world to shape it into an environment that is meaningful and useful to its particular body setup. Completing a feedback loop, the environment then shapes the mind in return, by becoming the information it processes (Lakoff 1999). As such, our spaces become our means for individual self-reflection and self-realisation; our means to schematise subconscious emotional experiences, upon the basis of the emotional framework outlined above (Bowlby 1997). The complexity our cognition is capable of reaching, therefore, is dependent on the complexity of information our context is capable of processing. This means that how our cognitive processes fulfil their function will differ from place to place and across time. Over a few millions of years, ontologies of Space, arguably the very oldest Memes, may have so contributed to biological organisms survival that they became our brains labour saving hardwired algorithms for modelling Space. We are hardwired with schemas inherited from our successful ancestors interaction with Space; The mind is in the body and the body is in the mind (Lakoff 1999). At a fundamental and barely conscious level, we think in terms of being a body in a space with other bodies. Phenomenologically speaking, as Merleau-Ponty put it, "When I say that an object is on a table, I always mentally put myself either in the table or in the object, and I apply to them a category which theoretically fits the relationship of my body to external objects (in Atkins 2004). We understand the world in terms of metaphors drawn between our inner subjective experience and our sensorimotor experience (Lakoff 1980). Our experience is of Space taking on the somatic values of our body (Tuan 1977), intuitively organizing Space in terms of its posture and structure, closeness or distance from others, approximately organised around the compass points and centred on the individual. This is evidenced in the way we use personal pronouns, something found across cultures (Fig 1; Ibid):

Figure 3: personal pronouns are paired with spatial demonstratives.

Space in front is primarily visual, where our eyes are, feelong larger and more suffused with light than our back. There is evidence this is paired with how we tend to value Space and Time as concepts (Fig 2; Ibid):

Tuan accounts an experience of being lost: where space is still organized in these ways, but they lose their utility because they are no longer anchored to anything external. However let a flickering light appear behind a distant clump of trees. I remain lost in the sense that I still do not know where I am in the forest, but space has dramatically regained its structure (Ibid). This would suggest we maintain a sense of subjective stability by anchoring our somatosensory experiences to external reference points of landmarks we recognise. Also, that our barely conscious body awareness, projected onto the space around us, is organised by our visual apprehension of the space. This apprehension connects to other spaces, forming a cognitive map, incorporating both embodied and visually schematic elements. This analysis may find support in a neural correlate of grid and place cells in our brains entorhinal cortex and hypothalamus, observed as being arranged in a self-recursive, fractal triangular grid pattern (Moser 2008). This process is initially below our level of awareness, but can become available to conscious awareness after being disrupted; at which point we can exhibit re-stabilising, re-orienting behaviour, as seen in Tuans example above. As above, it can also be linked to the subconscious cognitive process of Theory of Mind, the self-reflexive nesting of models of ourselves inside models of others inside models of ourselves (and so on). This is used to deeply model our situations in real time, enabling us to anticipate others intentions (Griffiths 2000). Sartre identified the phenomenology of this process within the Look, a destabilizing experience of sharing space with an observing other (in Critchley 2005). In this way, bodies and Space together form a complex system of positive (amplifying) and negative (reducing) feedback loops, from which emerges a dynamically stable Lebenswelt (ukasiewicz 2010): a Life World built into Space and shared between people for offsetting the cognitive work of fulfilling their evolved motivations (Husserl, in

Atkins 2004), and perhaps between smaller groups of people for offsetting the navigation of similar emotional frameworks developed in infancy.

Organisation of unconscious space and subconscious embodied experience through Language, visual imagination; our conscious mind The third element of my system is Language, or how different versions of models come to organise Space and so inform the model building of others. This can be understood as doing the organising of unconscious space and subconscious embodied experience, through a Lebenswelt. Subjectively, it predominantly operates through our visual imagination as expressed through the Theory of Mind process. By linking sign to signified in a way that eventually links back again to the sign, we encode relatively stable paradigms within our brains auto-associative neural networks, modelling current states of the world including ourselves and others. This is what enables us to anticipate change and take steps to take control of situations. Authorities use spaces as mediums for social control by setting their own limits on how they come to be modelled in this way. A way they do this is by using language to propagate Memes that play to a malignant yet neutral, impossible spectator; encouraging us to fetishize their Memes as our way to solve the problem of building our Lebenswelt. Language has been understood as necessary for the achievement of Lebenswelt (Turner 2006). Rather than merely a mirror of our internal states, language is a tool through which our cognition is extended and enhanced through structuring of its spatial context (Lakoff 1999). As such, it is the Memes basic means of transmission. Language is inherently metaphorical, transferring meaning between sensory modes and domains of discourse. This process may be understood as an artefact of different ways the neural correlates of emotion and language model Space; the former on the basis of a modular grid structure that can potentially associate all points to every other with equal weight, the latter as associating its points on a nested basis (Kelly 2011). In evolution, there is evidence that our emotional modelling of Space is much older than the linguistic. In line with Chomsky (in Pinker 1999), language is an evolutionarily younger, more conscious structure of the brain, whereas emotion is more grounded in the way we automatically understand the world, without need for the monitoring of conscious attention. A consequence is that the language module in our brain is able to deconstruct and simulate the emotional one. Conversely, over time, the signs making up languages rapidly erode from pointing to purely physical phenomena into abstract syntax; capable of constructing Space into an interconnected yet unified Place, by harnessing, through their simulation, the linguistic and emotional modules of other peoples brains. In this way, ideological power interests build unified aesthetics throughout our spaces, ones that constitute a Lebenswelt that we then take on as an emotional basis for behaving. By linking sign to signified in a way that eventually links back to the sign, aesthetics are the encoding of shifting paradigms for meaning making within our brains autoassociative neural networks. By these means, spaces are transmitters of social control. This is exemplified in architectural spaces. Architectural spaces can be understood as the behaviour of particularly successful delegatory power interests; the rendering of our

nebulous, subconscious embodied cognition into conscious grammatical systems; Lebenswelt that can open up our awareness to otherwise unconscious experience, and so refine and expand our repertoire for self identification (Tuan 1977). The flip side to this, however, is that such spaces can favour some grammars over others, and so encourage us to selectively refine and expand the self in accordance with the vested interest of others. That is to say, our delegation of cognitive work onto our contexts is also an act of power over others; not only a delegation through organisation of inert matter, but also an appropriation of the Theory of Mind of other beings, using methods such as those outlined above in my discussion of advertising. An optimally efficient way of achieving this is to have us experience its context as an unquestioned given; a Lebenswelt with no apparent alternatives. As such, we have powerful impetus to feel and, upon this basis, take on given these feelings given interpretations as natural ones; stand ins for our internal models of the cosmos at large (Ibid). The overwhelming size of monumental architecture, where the delineation between inside and outside its space becomes blurred, has been used with success in this regard (Ibid). Yet another side to this, however, is that some people then reappropriate such as havens where less risk is felt in exploring the emotional tenor of their relationships, promoting wider and deeper engagement in these things; promoting the growth of complexity, differentiation, and so the potential flowering of autonomy. Ideological space must, therefore, seek to constantly maintain itself as such, stabilizing this mutation rate on its own terms. By these means, the late Capitalist Lebenswelt has replaced Nature and the Divine as the Sublime experience. For Immanuel Kant, a basic aesthetic experience is the Sublime. The Sublime is the feeling of being overwhelmed by something we cannot entirely apprehend. For Kant, this is mathematical, when we are overwhelmed by the size of something. It is also dynamical, when our resistance is overwhelmed by force. This can be both a fearful and pleasurable experience. For Kant, we experience something as mathematically Sublime because it allows our reason access to the absolute totality of Nature. Something is dynamically sublime because it allows reason access to absolute freedom. According to Kant, the Sublime feeling that is both fearful and pleasurable is a product of our oscillation between these two experiences; being both overwhelmed by and overwhelming what is encountered, through our only partial organising of it in reason (Kant's Aesthetics July 2012). By giving us its commodity-language to make problematic and then manage our subconscious communications between one another, the omnipresent gaze of an omniscient Divine, or the towering mountain in Nature too large to be taken in at all at once, has been latterly replaced by the edifice of a global late Capitalist Lebenswelt. This destabilising Sublime motivates us to invest further in its networks; through our conspicuous fetishising of its brands, as a means to limit the problematic emotional tenor of other people who share this space, who are themselves attempting to do the same thing; tapping in to aspects of its Sublime energy. In this way, we are communally locked into its process - consolidating and growing it, seemingly without limit. This idea of brands acting as power wielding languages is complemented by Ludwig Wittgensteins semiotic argument; placing words and phrases as things that can be instantiated visually, as opposed to purely lexically (Wittgenstein 1978). Words can in

fact be anything that seems to have meaning, that can be combined with other such things to form sets of combinatory grammatical rules (Gee 1999). Out of this seminal philosophy, Discourse theory (Ibid) offers its complementary analysis of human language as a builder of Figured Worlds: simplified models of the world that include models of ourselves and others in it; encoded by our minds as images, metaphors and narratives. These are also encoded outside our heads, in our media and architecture; a way in which the mind delegates its work to its situations, including the minds of others, through this act of pointing toward. On this basis, Discourse theory critically analyses meaning making on two levels, utterance and situated (Levinson, in Ibid). Environments, pointing toward some over other things, things about our subconscious experiences, feed information to our Theory of Mind process, helping us recognise what is going on. This includes what identities or roles have been taken on by ourselves and others, what relationships we have or desire with others, and so what constitutes an appropriate distribution of information (Ibid). This can result in our encoding of a highly unified set of associations around our embodied experience of other people. When a number of people use even only one or two similar signs, we have been found to readily extend this to an impression of being of the same mind (Dennett 2007). Perhaps exploiting our minds older, evolved, unconscious hardwiring (Ibid), this process can construct a sense of Spectating presence in the manner of Sartres observing Other; by encouraging our Theory of Mind to misapply itself, beyond available evidence for their being an intentional agent actually present (Ibid). Our postmodern environments, by giving us its limited sets of visual languages to interpret ourselves and others, builds and consolidates itself by exploiting this process in us. By these means we become complicit in constructing within our Communal Spaces a shared sense of an overseeing presence; the gaze of a transcendent Spectator. On a mainly unconscious level, religious communities have been particularly successful in this, an example being its use of totems; placing this process as a fundamentally human one, grounded somewhere in the deeper structure of our species. Totems bare a strong resemblance to the form and function of brand logos, which have arguably appropriated the processes of religion toward their own, more conscious ends: Prehistoric and modern hunter-gatherer societies have been recorded (Durkheim, in Tanner ed. 2004) using designs and objects to distinguish certain groups. These are typically reproduced across buildings, clothing, tools, and public spaces. These totems tend to reference a threatening and unpredictable characteristic of the environment, often a predatory animal or weather event, one that our Theory of Mind tends to over ascribe intentionality to (Dennett 2007). A totem may then act as a way of metonymically signifying a sharing of this intentionality, thereby magically enabling the subject to exercise some influence over the threatening agents behaviour. Also, it may enable the taking on of some aspects of the threatening force, thereby influencing other people. This complements Zizeks suggestion that fundamental to how ideological interests construct their power is their referencing of a malignant yet neutral, impossible spectator (Zizek 2009). This is usually situated above us, and played to by the behaviour of this or that authority. Brand logos, then, can also be understood as a means of addressing, embodying and

influencing an impossible Spectator. According to Zizek, this illusion that ideology constructs need not be an unconscious one for us, where we fail to see that we are labouring under a misapprehension of reality. Instead, we can be fully aware of this being the case, but we have fetishised its totems and thereby remain motivated to act as if the ideology is reality (Ibid). There is a mistake driving this process, but it is not simply a mistake of what is really real. We may be cynically aware that an ideology is not reality, but we nevertheless feel like acting as if it is, because its objects have come to do our social thinking for us; because we have come to an understanding of ourselves through their use, as a means through which our power is exercised. These linguistic tools become apparently necessary; we feel bound to them as if they are themselves the only possible world. The sense of ironical distance experienced in cynicism about ideology only serves to save face and permit us to keep going along with it, while at the same time continue to see ourselves as sophisticated and rational beings (Ibid). This compliance consolidates and reproduces the space in others. Lacan uses the example of the Chorus in classical tragedy to illustrate this process (Ibid). If the audience with its everyday preoccupations finds it difficult to identify with the emotional subtext of a play, much like a laugh track on a TV comedy show, the Chorus will then visibly feel the appropriate emotions for them. We, due in part to our mirror neuron networks described above, come to empathically feel those emotions. Furthermore, due to embodied cognition, we come to identify with them and think in their terms. Encouraged by our sublime feeling of destabilised subjective flux, a consequence of the dense but relatively isolated inter-referentiality of our hyper-real context, we tend to experience these associations as a selfhood defining impetus. An ideal Chorus will continue to perform until we organise this experience in an appropriate way, namely through identification with the world of the play. This analysis is complemented by the Marxist idea of commodity fetishism, in which the products of our labour become the primary means through which we relate to one another, and eventually come to replace these relationships altogether. Our products take on our hopes and beliefs, essentially doing our believing for us; creating spaces in which we feel free to act as if the ideology is real (Ibid). Infants begin by relating the sight of others with the feeling of their own body, enabling the imitating of others. It is thought that this is how we begin to build a sense of having a distinct self (Meltzoff in Hurley 2005); by then finding others who are and are not like me, thereby distinguishing our inner emergent experiences from those coming from without. An individual is never fully captured by a mirroring process; there is always something in embodied experience left without a rational alibi. This process of mirroring, according to Lacan (in Zizek 2009), is the means through which our engagement with an ideological Space is maintained. It holds our attention by emotionally destabilizing us in a way we cant quite come to grasp, just enough to be enjoyable. In this way, we become engaged in the ideology; embed ourselves in its spaces and consolidate its dominance. Ideologies, designed or at least stubbornly persisting Memes, seek to hijack our process of self-realisation. In this way, the ideology of late Capitalist Lebenswelt gained persistence when its signifying networks became self-referential in a way too complex for us to fully organise and so take on for entirely our own purposes; that is to say, when it became Sublime, essentially a Spectating Presence with an apparent gaze of it own. This deepended our engagement with it, as we sought to totemically tap into this gaze, as a means of self realisation despite the

problematic presence of others. Prior to global communications, our Communal Spaces, primarily defined by religion, maintained stability as largely isolated simulacra. By reaching a threshold of becoming less able to comment with apparent legitimacy on a world outside, it threatened to become impotent in contexts wider than itself, those being opened up by the Enlightenment; short circuiting the sense of apparent necessity and allowing its subjects to leave. Latterly, through global communication this process has deepened and sped up. In AlterModernism our models of Space have become digital and pan-cultural; even more, perhaps even fully decodable into meta-contexts - bits of aesthetic code that can be playfully stitched together to simulate and appropriate formerly discrete contexts. This has allowed our Communal Spaces to globally share energy, becoming not only multicellular on a global scale, but now also modular. Communal Laboratories In the field of Psychological research, Laboratory spaces have attempted to reverseengineer the Communal spaces of human culture; under paired down, simplified, controlled conditions. The artist studio and gallery can be described as a mixture of Communal and Laboratory Space, complex enough to overcome an individual capacity to organise their experience, with work taking on the aspect of an observing other, yet simplified and therefore controllable enough to render this process visible, in an ongoing process of development. This provides repertoires of aesthetic codes enabling inhabitants to potentially escape Sublime Communal spaces too complex to be organised under conscious attention, ones that have robbed them of autonomy. This is achieved when an artist, through their embodied cognitive engagement with the recording surface of a medium, investigates both the rational workings and emotional possibilities of Memes, framing them as transparently artificial constructs; building up the complexity of a work until an intentional presence is felt to be looking back. As a leading edge innovator of meaning making, Fine Art has been brought into the service of this late Capitalist situation, being today a main skill set in the advertising industry. Although, arguably, especially leading up to and after the 2008 financial crisis, and due to an ongoing human interest in fostering autonomy, this relationship is by no means without its problems. Because of this, art practice may also be understood as an arms race between individual autonomy and the ideological power interests of religion, and latterly multinational Corporatism. Like everyone else, artists have also worked to harness the Sublime Spectating Presence for their own ends. However, enabled by a clarifying and abstracting gallery/studio space, they have tended to frame it as a transparently artificial construct. In this way, a contemporary artwork can raise the consciousness of its viewer; having them share in at least some aspects of their transcendent Spectators situation by not only being a commodity that they visibly consume (although this can be the case through engagement in the art market), but as a way of sharing the artists ideal creative engagement with their mediums recording surface. Akin to Buddhist Vipassana meditation, engaging with the recording surface of a medium while removed from the complex cognitive demands of a Spectating Communal Space, both artist and viewer

are able to be hold themselves in their state of flux while also having a sense of distance; by having already encoded paradigms disrupted, yet also an optimum variety of interpretative repertoires for this experience. From this, they can foster a more complex, autonomous way of consciously organising their flux; by evolving their own individualised yet potent, meta-languages. I practice daily Vipassana insight meditation, and have a personal interest in the emerging tradition of Secular Buddhism. This incorporates readings of the Pali Canon (Sutta Pitaka Sept 2012), the earliest known transcripts of the Buddhas teachings. It also tries to take account of its problematic relationship with the earlier Hindu Brahmic tradition, and pays special attention to developments within neuroscience. My reading of the Buddhas words are atheistic and sceptical at their core, concerned with the nature and extent of self-maintaining processes, in relation to the self and its given narratives. Meditation can be said to employ seminal methods of phenomenological investigation. Vipassana seeks to direct attention to the minutiae of having an embodied mind, observing inner phenomena as they arise, without grasping and trying to interpret them, and so being taken over as we use them to narrate ourselves. I can experience consciousness as a flux of sensations built upon the modelled self-reflections of others - or I can foster a trait of experiencing a here and now, breath by breath, and so potentially make this process visible. It is my view that product advertising has been a particularly dominant power in building our immediate social contexts in ways that minimise such a consciousness fostering sense of distance. It attempts to manufacture our consent by limiting our available schemas for conscious organisation of our emotional experience, having us take on the maintenance of its Lebenswelt instead. An older and more dominant form of this, it seems to me, can be found in state religion, being Memes that are so extraordinarily successful they have managed to colonise and exploit our social institutions across several thousand years. The typical Tibetan Buddhist temple is a case study in this. It can be argued that Tibetan Buddhism appears to have evolved a particularly effective way of ideologically constructing a subjects consent to take on its Lebenswelt in the way described above (Fig 3 - 8):

Figure 3: Tibetan Buddhist Statue of the Buddha This is a good example of an ideology, much in the same manner as an advertisement, minimising scrutiny through reliance on emotion with a rational alibi, concentrated through one dominant detail (Hill 2010). The central idea to Buddhist meditative practice is of attachment being the primary cause of suffering, with the means of achieving its cessation being the fostering of mindfulness, through the repeated re-focusing of attention toward one aspect of experience, usually the breath (Batchelor 2011). The figure of post-enlightened Gautama is an object lesson demonstrating a first Jhana, or meditative state of cessation, to be achieved through this process. By devaluing the viewers own embodied experience of themselves, it thereby makes it problematic. This promotes, through our empathic sense, the increase of our attentional focus on our own embodied experience, which is then rationalised as a lack relative to the Buddhas ideal. The Buddha figures long ears can be interpreted as showing his increased embodied awareness and concentration, his open hand a non-grasping acceptance of dependent co-arising, or self associative flux of thoughts and sensations that make up experience. The projection from the top of his head is a way of referring to his consciousness expansion through progressive Jhanas into the no-Self (at least in its essentialist sense) void of Nirvana.

Figure 4: Inside a Tibetan Buddhist Temple Statues of the Buddha are predominantly to be found as the focal point inside Tibetan Buddhist temples. This, I argue, is an example of increasing reliance by maximising emotional volume, within an immersive, multi-sensual, richly rendered experience (Hill 2010). Like those of other religions, the Tibetan Buddhist Communal Space is packed with stimulus across sensory modalities. This reaches a peak during collective ceremonies, where our empathic experience is maximised through the presence of many others and so, through the self-reflective feedback process inherent in Theory of Mind, our own somatosensory experience gains volume.

Figure 5: sweeping up a Sand Mandala. Part of Tibetan Buddhist ritual is the painstaking building of Sand Mandalas, intricate and often beautiful circularly symmetric designs from coloured sand, representing the material world in its process of continual arising and passing away. Having constructed a

maximal embodied awareness experienced as a lack, this can be understood as an example of then flagging oncoming change and confirming already held prejudice, to create stress and justification, for selling hope (Ibid). As a representation of the material world, which includes the temple setting, building and destroying a Mandala can be understood as a form of Vipassana meditative practice. Tibetan Buddhism has a self-critical aspect that seeks to deconstruct its own acts of capture. However, by apparently criticising itself it also justifies its own critical method as especially valid. That is to say, its critical practice in itself does not permit other critiques that could perhaps more deeply deconstruct its context; it is not sceptical in the fullest sense. However, it is fair to say that the Buddhist notion of dependent co-arising referenced by the circular Mandala, in complementing modern systems dynamics (Macy 1991), at least leaves a way open for its subjects to associate some outside critical methodologies.

Figure 6: Mara, Lord of Death Meaning "destruction", Mara is understood to represent our passions, driving the craving and suffering causing attachment within the process of dependent co-arising (Bachelor 2011). Much like Christs encounter with Lucifer in the desert, in the Pali Canon he is mentioned as trying to tempt the Buddha away from his process of enlightenment. As such, he is an example of representing/symbolising a predatory or unpredictable part of the environment, encouraging over ascribing of intentionality (Dennett 2007). Mara is the counterpoint to the Buddha. Through the same process of empathy described above, our rationalisation of our own embodied experience as a lack relative to the Buddhas ideal is consolidated again with negative emotion; through provocative imagery referencing predatory animals such as enraged eyes, claws and teeth. This heightens our stress level and may provoke us into a state where we increasingly anticipate threats from our environment. A consequence of this can be our more hasty use of Theory of Mind to model the intentions of others, including anticipatory modelling of possible others (McEwen 2000). As part of an increased tendency to mistake correlation for causation, linking signs together without good reason, we gain a bias for associating phenomena with a sense of threat. This bootstraps a simulacra feeling of intentional presence from phenomena that are in fact without intent (Dennett 2007).

Figure 7: Yipeng Full Moon Festival, Thailand Traditionally celebrated at the end of the rainy season in Thailand, the Yipeng Festival is marked by the making and lighting of lanterns to represent the ongoing move from darkness to light. This, and religious festivals in general, can be understood as a way of consolidating and sharing in some part of this malignant yet neutral, impossible spectator, by playing to it (Zizek 2009). Much like how consumers use brand logos, a consolidated, dogmatic syntagm of linked together signs, metonyms to paradigms, collectively emerge into an embodied sense of spectating presence overlooking all.

Figure 8: Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist Centre, in Esk, Scotland

All of the above typically happens in or around a communal space, one which repeatedly gathers together all of the stimulus in one place, commonly the site of a temple. As such, it becomes an identified part of Space where people come to meet, conditioning one another into experiencing it as both an object used for rational self-definition from embodied emotional experience, and a context Chorus directing that experience. The Tibetan and emerging Secular Buddhist examples are, to my thinking, an interesting half way point in transcendent religious symbols becoming signs; paradigms in the process of shifting and dissolving, and so connecting to other signs now required to draw out their meaning (Tuan 1977). Multiple, apparent, and relatively self-sufficient syntagms, interpretive grammars, have attached to these has-been symbols, as they begin to disappear as structuring principles for shared experience of a Communal Space. While presently we still tend to reproduce these signs as grammars of an historical social hierarchy, because they are part of the architectural spaces we inhabit, we no longer predominantly manage our relationships under its subconsciously read omni-present gaze, one of a Divine Spectator. Instead, a technologically induced, Commodified Spectator has latterly replaced this. We still tend to make sense of things on these terms, suggesting that this transcendent spectator may be a biologically evolved, hardwired category that groups together our culturally evolved paradigms, but they no longer encode in us a worldview held stable under a generally apprehended cosmic totality. Instead, they encode fragmented, negotiated, even self-contradictory place-holders, under a gaze of ubiquitous totems internalized within our Theory of Mind process. Much like the function of ritualistically building a Sand Mandala, the course of Fine Arts Modernism has also been a conspiracy in its own disappearance, although more deliberate; achieved through an overriding interest in consciousness raising, and escape from traditional (religious) paradigms. Like Religion, Art has sought to promote in its viewers a pre-conscious flux, an emotional experience of infinite Derridean rupture (Derrida 1970). However, instead of then providing its own rationale through a sacred Communal Space like the above, to argue the presence of a transcendent Spectator, it has instead emerged as trying to use its temple-like galleries to transparently frame this experience as an artificial construct. An artist can work to achieve this by fostering an embodied awareness of her engagement with a medium, bracketing as much as possible her conceptual imagery of a final result, and so opening the way for shaping a sense of presence within the same embodied awareness of a viewer. That is to say, fine art creativity is less inspiration than an embodied craftsmanship (Turner 2006); realising, through long and repeated engagement with a medium, a modelled space of liberating experiences that uncover and record how human cognition is shaped on a structural level. Under an Embodied Cognition analysis, the practice of an artist and the viewers experience of that practice may present themselves to both parties as a similar aesthetic experience if the context of the encounter is similar; because their context emerges from hardwired elements common to human beings. If uncomplicated by extraneous sensory experiences, a shared experience between artist and viewer may emerge. By these

means an artist creates a space to inhabit, one that can also relate to the context that frames it in such a way that its givens remain free to be apprehended and criticised using external critical methodologies. This may be a way of understanding the emergence of the explanatory contemporary art gallery experience. In a manner of speaking, much like Buddhist mindfulness meditation, through an artwork the body can gain a new Space for mindfulness of itself. This can, in turn, increase a subjects more grounded, complex and concrete reality associated interpretive repertoire; preparing a subject for future encounters with ideological spaces, by increasing their complexity beyond its own complexity, used to capture them through empathic embodied experience in this Space. A gallery may be temple-like, but it is firmly a gallery and not a place of worship. That is to say, a gallery space has come to be paired down in a way that seeks to isolate the experience of individual works within their own frames. However, works can still be potentially understood as referencing processes making up a more general cultural situation, one the viewer may not be wholly if at all conscious of but this is in a way that, although potent, tends not to overwhelm in a way that motivates its restabilising use for self identification. By addressing, for instance, the working relationship between religions and states (ODoherty 2000) an artwork can potentially drive social change. As I see it, the more effective contemporary artwork will not achieve this by simply representing the reproduction of ideology. Straight representation is a legitimate way of doing this but, it seems to me, not an optimally immersive yet distance fostering way. Like meditation, it will attempt instead to harness the process itself in a way the creates distance; reproducing aspects of the late Capitalist Sublime Lebenswelt in the experience of those who encounter it, essentially using our human cognition as a surface on which to draw. This is what it means to wield an aesthetic code as such. Historically, artists can be understood as beginning the journey of refining this method by deconstructing the thousands of years long evolutionary process of Religious Memes. What these highly adapted Memes incrementally built through our selves and our spaces, Modernist art practice can be understood as having reverse engineered it. This concern was perhaps inherited from its days of Ecclesiastical patronage. An attempt, if you will, at escape (Figs 9 15):

Figure 9: Gustave Courbets The Grotto of the Loue. Art practice emerged from an imposed concern to become both an object used for rational self-definition from embodied emotional experience, and a context Chorus directing that experience. Artists, brought into the service of dominant power interests, sought to construct spaces in which ground was denied for a subject to form a stable point of view, stopping thought to let the schema of an apparent presence be empathically experienced all the more. This is exemplified (although perhaps only subconsciously on the artists part) in Courbets Realist painting. The painting apparently seeks to draw in the curiosity of the viewer with a dark cave, one whose recesses cannot be clearly apprehended. This experience pushes the viewers attention out again into a disturbing surface of fierce water, which consequently shifts attention back to the empathic figure, who once again looks back into the cave. The viewers apprehension is caught inside a self-feeding process, one solved through a deliberate act of escape in looking beyond its frame. Courbets painting may be read as his unconscious attempt to make sense of a religious paradigm at the beginning of its 19th century post-Enlightenment solvency. As it dissolves, aspects of a paradigm may become more visible, at least through the subconscious recording surface of an artists medium.

Figure 10: from Matthew Barneys Cremaster Cycle. Artists like Matthew Barney have apparently exhibited concern to reference a shared sense for an impossible Spectator. Often using imagery of spectator sport within spaces curiously absent of spectating crowds, Barneys work is filled with meaningless and repetitive actions within empty monumental architectural contexts. As such, he can be argued as concerned with consolidating and sharing in some part of this malignant yet neutral, impossible spectator, by playing to it (Zizek 2009).

Figure 11: Bruce Naumans Clown Torture. Naumans piece consists of videos of a clown showing emotion ranging from joy to terror. The clowns makeup inverts our normal empathic responses to the emotions it partially conceals, making the experience highly destabilising as the empathic ground shifts between them. As such, it can be understood as concerned with representing / symbolising a predatory or unpredictable part of the environment, encouraging over

ascribing of intentionality (Hill 2010).

Figure 12: Guillermo Vargas Exposicin N 1. Vargas created a highly controversial Situationist piece consisting of a tied up dog in the corner of a gallery that he publicised as remaining until it starved to death. In the artists later statement, he said the purpose of this was to underline a hypocrisy of contemporary society, who react with uproar to one starving dog and repeatedly take action to release it, yet ignore the situation of the many starving dogs in the streets outside (Habakkuk Guillermo Vargas Nov 2012). As such, this can be understood as concerned with flagging oncoming change and confirming already held prejudice, to create stress and justification (Ibid). Unlike religion and advertising, however, it does not do this to then sell its solutions. Instead, it apparently seeks to leave a Space in which, although emotionally insecure and anxious, is opened to new possibilities.

Figure 13: Cai Guo-Qiangs Head On. Guo-Qiangs piece can be understood as concerned with maximising emotional volume within an immersive, multi-sensual, richly rendered experience (Ibid). Art commonly has a flair for combining dramatic, monumental, intense experiences, with subtler, complex ones. These are at the core of Kants Sublime, and the hallucinogenic intensity of Baudrillards hyperreality; achieved through a sharpened apprehension of what pushes our buttons, through prolonged embodied experience of mediums and their possibilities.

Figure 14: Ron Muecks Mask II Mueck makes hyper-realistic sculptures portraying stages in the human life cycle. As such, his work is a good example of a concern, albeit negatively realised, with minimising scrutiny through reliance on emotion with a rational alibi, concentrated through one dominant detail (Ibid). An investigation of the limits of this strategy, by exploring the possibilities for reproducing a sense of intentionality in a manifestly artificial context. The human body occupies a central position in art from its beginnings in prehistory, from the emergence of Theory of Mind in our species around 40,000 years ago (LewisWilliams 2004). Under the Embodied Cognition analysis this is not surprising, since it should be the primarily intuitive context; the source of engaging and immersive interpretive repertoires, shared by both artist and viewer; its form readily ascribed by us as possessing a point of view in its own right. Latterly, the body has been under scrutiny as a socio-cultural construction, a product of tacit encodings, especially those of patriarchal ideologies, but also as a commercial entity built for consumption; reproduced as an intentional agent for ideological purposes.

Escape An ideological Space functions to limit the range of apparent choices communicated to its inhabitants; essentially to remain too complex for them to organise a sense of self beyond those resources it provides; to become Sublime. As such, it comes to feel like an intentional, observing presence in its own right. To escape is to become complex in a way surpassing that of a Communal Space; becoming a being whose intentions their context cannot decode and reflect back. I do not think, contrary to some Postmodern narratives (Krauss 1986), that mechanical reproduction has resulted in the end of individualised aesthetic production. This, I think, is premised on a false dichotomy between free will and determinism, itself an ideological binary construction in the Saussurian mode (Chandler 2004). The cell analogy applies both to the structure of cultural spaces, their human inhabitants, and the process of their co-evolution, and is more formally speaking a fractal structural analysis, as opposed to a Euclidean one dealing in binary oppositions. It is one of a relatively simple structure containing a recursive iteration of itself, anchoring it to the structure of physical reality and the consciousness that perceives it (Hofstadter 2007). Under this analysis, there is no dichotomy, at least up to a point, between free will and determinism. As self-reflective beings we build up, individually and within cultural exchange of ideas, our own somewhat unique models of what things mean, and this provides us with our own spaces for movement, potentially beyond our locally deterministic structures. Cosmologically, it seems, there is ultimately no escape from determinism. Draw three points to form a triangle. Starting at any point inside this triangle, choose another point at random. Find the halfway between these points then, from this new point, repeat this process. The distribution of points that eventually result form a shape called a Sierpinskis Gasket fractal (Bourke 1993; Fig 15):

This, I think, is a useful analogy for thinking about how a conscious being comes to build knowledge of its deeper structure over its lifetime. In behaving, it seems, over our lifespan we are bound to uncover something of the structure of the universe, because we are, under the dominant materialist analysis, the behaviour of the universe. While potentially having this definitively vast domain to move in, at the same time our behaviour is also a step-by-step moving from one state to another. Each decision forms the basis of the next, and also the decisions made by communicating agents in its developing field of movement. Free will ex nihilo is, it seems, illusory. Instead we have

autonomy, a freedom to explore potential by expanding the locally apparent space in which we can move, achieved most efficiently through lateral as opposed to linear and oft tread movement. In this way we can subvert power interests who seed our spaces with reflective attempts to keep us engaged in them. Our process of self-reflection, however, being built on a biological basis, is itself built on this definitively complex physical reality. Uncovering its detail can therefore increase our complexity over and above any subsidiary ideological attempts to appropriate them. The probability of our escape from capture can be maximised through mindful, conscious accessing of our peculiar balance of concrete, biological structure; a becoming complex beyond that of the local models of Space that attempt to capture us. A way of achieving this efficiently, I think, is through engagement with scientific theoretical models. That is to say, a paradigm that itself is potent enough to disrupt the corporate paradigm, instead of merely serving it. The role of art, under this analysis, is to articulate and occupy the Place of such theory; its embodied, applied, and concretely complex given meaning of Space. In this way, both artist and viewer are potentially able to open up a local space for autonomous movement; one able to continually grow and shift within a definitively vast domain.

Conclusion

Fig 16: How Memes compose how and what we think. Arrows denote direction of information flow, setting up positive feedback (+ fb), negative feedback (- fb), and dynamic equalibrium (-/+ fb) relationships. This system has three main elements that interact in specific ways: Space, or the four dimensional material universe we inhabit (length, breadth, depth, and time), our

unconscious mind. Embodied Experience, how our species has evolved to model this Space, experienced on an emotional level, our sub-conscious. Language, or how different versions of these models become our conscious organisations of Space, and attempt to inform the model building of others. Ive come to think of my studio as a mixture of communal temple and scientific research laboratory. Through a medium, I record my journey into a space of complexity that overcomes my ability to consciously grasp the slippery emotional experience it promotes; to a point where the work begins to feel like it may somehow have a point of view of its own, and returns my gaze. The specific medium, while requiring distinct paths of inquiry for coming to this state, is not as important to me as the state itself; I am seeing the material systems responsible for producing the state as a surface to draw on. Within the simplified frame of a gallery space, a work becomes somewhat closed to the open system of the world. Consequentially, a viewer may become more able to share the journey with an increased autonomy, without pressure from a given real world of overwhelming complexity. This recent work attempts to occupy and articulate the place of a returning gaze by speaking through how our body makes us aware of Space. I'm concerned to progress in achieving this up to its limits of abstraction. A possible social consequence may be to aid its understanding as an induced, as opposed to immanent presence (Fig 17):

Figure 17: maket for how I intend to use the gallery space. The self portrait in oils, poster paints and pencil refers upwards with its anus; helped by a gathering complexity, tending to move the gaze upward toward this vulnerable area. The circular grid overlay is to aid achievement of a maximally complex, photorealistic result while also exploring the limits of abstraction. The bottom edge of the self-portrait is level with the top edge of the monitor screens, which are arranged in a ring at average head height, helping the viewer relate to the video piece on an instinctual level. My intention with this is to aid its reading as a continuous field to the smooth abstraction of the video rendering, moving the viewers gaze upward in an uninterrupted fashion. This is aided by the eye direction of the faces in the monitors, which are also directed upwards. The circular grid on the canvas refers back to the arrangement of the video piece, which is me vocalising vowel sounds as a five note D chord across five monitors. The videos are played on a continuous loop, intending to interrupt the rational interpretive efforts of the viewer through continuous repetition, helping them feel immersed through the harmonic quality of the sound. A circular chalk drawing on the floor is intended to encourage a sense of tension between this immersion and its sense of separation.

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