The Museum of the Third Kind

Roy ASCOTT

Any discussion of the museum of the future must necessarily respond to the computer-
mediated practices which define the canon of late 20th century art. While that seems to
make sense in the context of a culture saturated with computer and communications
systems, services and products it would be shortsighted for this perspective to disregard
the impact that biotechnology, molecular engineering, and artificial life may exert on
the arts over the next 25 years. The electronics revolution has moved from where it
started in communications, to the digital computer, and now into the human brain. It is
the new biological and cognitive sciences rather than computer science which lead the
way. Indeed it could be argued that while the body and its presence, as an instrument
of interactivity and a subject or virtuality, dominates muchcurrent discourse, it will be
questions of the mind/brain, that is to say consciousness, which will come to dominate
art practice in the future. And the future is all that museums can provide for. We know
now that there is no absolute history, that the past is written in the present. We are
irredeemably futures-oriented, and our museums as well as our institutions of learning
must come to reflect that. One thing is certain. Nothing is given, neither the past,
present nor future: all is constructed, and the site of that construction is our own
consciousness. It is well recognised that consciousness is a field, and that telematic
systems are a part of its evolution.

The Internet, as it develops, may indeed come to provide the infrastructure of a global
mind. Thus in one respect the museum must be a part of that infrastructure, but it would
be both foolish and shortsighted to think that the museum should be no more than that,
that it should exist only in cyberspace, online or in a state of total virtuality. Electronic
art is soon to become bio-electronic art, just as the primary element of its practice, the
microchip is about to become the bio chip, and the digital computer gives way to the
neural network. We are moving towards the spiritual in art in ways that Kandinsky could
hardly have imagined, such that telepresence will be accompanied by teleprescience,
and cybernetic systems will integrate with psychic systems, mutating into what could be
called psybernetics.

This attitude is reflected in the remarks of Isao Karube, a leading-edge technologist of

Tokyo University. "Now that people's attention is turning towards the inner world, in
the developed countries where materialism has reached saturation point, the future of
electronics depends on the problem of what sort of approach to take towards the brain,
the neurons, and the mind." 1
Art is no longer a onesided encounter with official taste, nor a secondary encounter of
personal interpretation, but a close encounter of the third kind, involving

1
Hiroaki YANAGIDA (ed.) Technology's New Horizons, Conversations with Japanese Scientists, Hiroaki
Yanagida, ed., Oxford University Press, 1995
transformation and interactivity, where the observer becomes an integral part of the
creative system. Our art may be called digital, paranatural, technological, online, virtual,
post-biological or whatever, but it will always henceforth be interactive.
To talk about the Museum of the Third Kind is to talk about the two primary coordinates
of its design, or rather of its artificial genetic code, since it is more a question of its
process of emergence than of creating a definitive blueprint for its construction.The
primary coordinates are those of behaviour and architecture. To understand behaviour
in this context we must understand what I have defined as "cyberception" 2: Post-
biological technologies enable us to become directly involved in our own
transformation, and are bringing about a qualitative change in our being. The emergent
faculty of cyberception, our artificially enhanced interactions of perception and
cognition, involves the transpersonal technology of global networks and cybermedia.
We are learning to see afresh the processes of emergence in nature, the planetary
media-flow, while at the same time re-thinking possibilities for the architecture of new
worlds. Cyberception not only implies a new body and a new consciousness but a
redefinition of how we might live together in the interspace between the virtual and the
real.

Western architecture shows too much concern with surface and structures - an arrogant
"edificiality" - and is too little aware of the human need for transformative systems.
There is no biology of building. Architecture has no response to the realities of cyborg
living, or the distributed self, or to the ecology of digital interfaces and network nodes.
Cities must become the matrix of new forms of consciousness and of the rhythms and
realisations of post-biological life.
The convergence of computers and communications is producing an environment, a
telematic culture, in which many cherished institutions and artistic practices are feeling
challenged, threatened, or just plain redundant, as exemplified not least of all by that
triumph of ideological instrumentality, the museum. The cyberstress that the new
technologies and new media exert upon the Culture of Representation is felt as much at
the larger political level as it is in individual, personal experience. The impact of
telepresence, bionic diversity, distributed knowledge, collaborative creativity, and
artificial life on our sense of self, our sense of what is natural, what it is to be human,
indeed of the status and legitimacy of every day reality, is more than most traditional
discourses can bear. The breaking point however is not the death of culture or the
incoherence of consciousness but the revitalisation of our whole state of being and a
renewal of the conditions and construction of what we choose to call reality.
Telematic culture concerns the global connectivity of persons, of places, but above all,
of mind. The internet is the crude infrastructure of an emergent consciousness, a kind
of global brain. The Net is prodigious in its empowerment of associative thought - the
thought of the artist - that aspect of cognition which leads most often to creativity. It is

2
The Architecture of Cyberception, Ascott, R., Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 2, N 8, MIT Press
Journals, August 1994
the intelligence of neural networks. It is leading us to the collective intelligence of a
planetary "hypercortex". Art is always first a matter of consciousness, without a spiritual
dimension it atrophies. The artist working with digital technologies must always be
asking the question "is there love in the telematic embrace?" 3
In claiming to track changes and movements in culture by selecting, preserving, and
presenting artifacts objectively, the Museum is actually engaged, sometimes
ideologically engaged, in constructing consciousness and behaviour. The museum does
not clarify our perceptions so much as codify them. Museums are never passive. So the
Museum of the Third Kind, in its online and distributed form, is potentially an extremely
powerful tool. We must be sure it is in the right hands. This means that it must change
its role as guardian of an official reality to being that of guide to an Emergent Reality, to
Nature II, and to entirely new forms of collaborative experience. Thus, in the emergent
culture the principal focus of the Art Museum shifts from the plastic arts to the
xenoplastic arts, the arts of connectivity and interaction. It not only brings people
together across great distances, it brings ideas together across great differences. The
House of the Muses must become a Garden of Hypotheses where ideas can grow . There
will be plenty of groves for reflection but the emphasis will be more on action,
interaction and construction, than storage, classification and interpretation. The
Museum becomes a site of transformation.
Classical museum culture will mutate into a kind of bio-electronic horticulture,
"digiculture", with emphasis on planting ideas, growing forms and images, harvesting
meaning. The Museum of the Third Kind should thus be a hot house of artificial life
rather than a conservatory of 'nature morte'. The divide between the creation of art
outside the museum, and the curating of art inside the museum will change so that at
the interior it becomes a seedbed for art, and in the external world an interface to the
planetary network. This can be characterised as a process of "curation" which brings the
curatorial role and the act of creation into a new productive synthesis.

The museum must also adjust to the paradigmatic shift in the public's relationship to
art, knowledge and information, in which their role is more dynamic, more demanding
of interaction. For the post-biological artist context is prioritised over content. The artist
is the author of systems which empower the public to create meaning through
interaction. The museum will be a part of a universal macro-museum, a global resource.
At the same time it will also shrink into being the micro-museum, a neural interface as
minuscule as a biochip linked to the hypercortex, as in the research of Greg Kovacs at
Stanford and Michael Deering at Sun Micro Systems who are working on a radio-linked
chip in the back of the human neck.

What can be said of the present day Museum in the Net? Every museum director,
curator and art dealer knows that the Internet is where you can display your wares to

3
Is there Love in the Telematic Embrace?, Ascott, R., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art,
Stiles, K. & Selz, P., Eds., University of California Press, January, 1996
perhaps a 100 million users. There are currently thousands of public museums,
university art centers, private galleries, artist groups, cultural entrepreneurs, private
dealers setting up Web sites, mounting online exhibitions, publishing catalogues and
critiques, and establishing archives and collections, in the dataspace of the Net. Art
viewing online looks like replacing art viewing on the hoof. And maybe more
significantly, the collection of paintings of one of the very earliest galleries in Europe,
that of prehistoric cave paintings at Combe d'Arc in the Ardeche, was accessible in all its
majestic authority on the French Ministry of Culture's home page
(http://www.culture.fr/) within just one month of being discovered.
There is little to be said about putting material works of art out on the Net. Of course
there will be distortion in any transposition from the concrete art object to the
ephemeral digital image, and picture resolution is still generally rather weak. At the
same time, as the designers of Chartres knew, the back lit image is intrinsically more
arresting than the light reflecting surface. And it is no small thing that the great wealth
of artworks and historical artifacts built up in public and private collections around the
world, sometimes as the result of colonial theft and pillage, can be returned to the world
with an accessibility that is truly global. As network navigation in virtual space becomes
more available, no one's geographical location will be too remote to prevent them
visiting the British Museum, the Prado in Madrid, the Temple of Konarak, or the Museum
of Modern Art in Caracas. This is the Digital Museum of the First Kind.
Then there is an art destined for what we might call the Museum of the Second Kind,
which is not originated in pigment, canvas, or steel, but which is composed of pixels
from its inception, digitally destined from the start for the computer screen, which slips
easily into the Net for instant world wide consumption. Aesthetically it is hardly different
from painting or drawing in the traditional sense. A picture is rendered, forms are
composed, a work of aesthetic finality is created. You may navigate it but it is basically
a closed world. In both cases the Net remains a delivery system, an archival source, a
catalogue of holdings. It neither challenges the traditional plastic arts nor renders them
redundant. It simply extends the repetoire of artistic images and ideas, reaching those
parts of the globe that other gallery mechanisms cannot reach. It is current practice to
call such projects the "digital museum" but such a term can only be provisional and is,
in fact an oxymoron since "digital" speaks of fluidity, transience, immateriality and
transformation, while "museum" on the other hand has always stood for solidity,
stability, and permanence.

There is an art which exists only in the Net, for the Net and by the Net alone. This is
destined to be a part of the Museum of the Third Kind. It uses the computer not as a
video terminal, through which you view objects of art, a kind of digital carousel
projector, but as a screen of operations, an interface, which enables you to enter into a
process of manipulation and transformation of images, texts and sound. It deals not so
much with the behaviour of forms, the aesthetic of appearance, as with forms of
behaviour,the aesthetic of apparition, of coming-into-being. Your interaction is with its
multi-mediated form and its many layered meanings. It is about the viewer being active
in the creation of art, actually with the creation of meaning. In the Net, to see is to own!
Whatever arrives at your particular interface from no matter where on the Net, whether
it's image, text, or soundbite, it is yours to keep. More significantly, it is yours to
transform.Transformation , particularly in the hands of the viewer, is the primary
functional determinant of the museum.
Virtual Reality has long been heralded as the prescription for the museum of the 21st.
century. The present state of the art is arid and dry, and compares unfavourably to the
wetness of nature, but there are signs of the emergence of an artificial reality, or what I
prefer to call Paranatural Reality, or Nature II 4 , which is essentially moist. It is in this
moist reality, grounded in the technology of Artificial Life, and the nanotechnology of
atoms and genetically engineered molecules, a post-biological reality, that life-like
behaviour may emerge. We may be approaching the point of working with forces never
worked with before, and sensing things which have never been sensed before. To quote
again Isao Karube: "Kiko-jutsu is now in fashion (an Asian discipline which develops the
inner energy called Ki) Even I could move a static piece of paper with my force, like this!
This energy might possibly be measured by a sensor, perhaps a quantum wave sensor
that works on a completely different theoretical basis"5.

This is the phase in our culture where art and science will most truly converge. Where
as artists we might become partners in evolutionary change rather than simply
expressive or analytical bystanders. This is a world pervaded by intelligence, as if it were
leaking out of our brains and seeping into every part of the planet. Here is an art of
artificial agents and algorithmic assemblies, cellular automata and digital communities
which grow, expand, diversify, disperse, and reproduce within the networks, arising
from that organisation which spontaneously arises from the net's chaotic connectivity,
with "no global controller responsible for the behavior of everypart", and its "bottom-
up, distributed, local determination of behavior" to use the phrases that Chris Langton
employs in his definition of Artificial Life 6.

So the Museum of the Third Kind, the museum of emergence, is a platform of

operations, a seedbed, a planetary resource, a site of cultural negotiation, interaction
and collaborative creativity, before it is in any sense a showcase, a stage set or
repository. It will make history rather than record it. It will be future-active rather than
past-passive.The art it will house, or give rise to, is a hybrid art requiring more than the
artist's skills alone. It involves disciplines which are themselves hybrid: cognitive
scienceand its neural nets, biological engineering and its genetic manipulations, the
physics of consciousness. Hybrid also is the viewer, user or consumer of this art. Bionic
to a degree, gender-free, wholly integrated into cyberspace, transculturally oriented to
the Net, living globally in the Interreality between the actual and the virtual, this is the
post-biological human being. This is us as we approach the turn of the millennium. And

4
Nature II, Telematic Culture and Artificial Life, Ascott, R., Convergence, Vol.1, No. 1, Libby, London,
1995
5
op cit
6
Artificial Life, Langdon, C.G., ed, Addison-Wesley, NY, 1989
perhaps most pertinent, in our search for definition of the Museum in this telematic,
post-biological culture, it is our new faculty of cyberception which will determine the
kind of space we shall inhabit, the kind of architecture we shall demand.
The Museum of the Third Kind will be anticipatory, not imposing perspectives on the
history of art, but opening up a pool of possibilities from which art might emerge,
working at the forward edge of contemporary culture, as an agent of cultural change, as
a cause of art practice rather than as a cultural effect. It will be conceived of not as a
machine but as a post-biological organism: a structure with its own memory, with a
sensorium which reacts to us, as much as we interact with it, essentially an electronic
central nervous system. Its interior activity will constantly be exteriorised with a
constant flow of data from inside out and outside in. Similarly, satellite, cable and
internet communications must allow for the 24 hour a day, two-way flow of data to and
from local, regional and international centres and public places. It will have zones for
the practice of telemeditation and cyberconsciousness, and for experiments with
identity, persona, gender, and bionic amplification.
To understand what the Museum of the Third Kind needs to be, is to understand how
the aesthetic of appearance is being replaced by the aesthetic of apparition. Where
semantic closure is replaced by open-ended pathways of meaning . Where the viewing
public is put in the centre of the creative process not at the periphery looking in. Where
medium of art, be it electronic, digital, optical or genetic, is intrinsically and generically
interactive. Where art as system constitutes a kind of structural coupling between
everyone and everything within its networks, a coupling which brings the into a
symbiosis the intelligence systems which constitute our world and the cognitive
cyberception of our selves.
Finally, the issue of the Museum of the Third Kind is political, as the house of the Muses
has always been, just as democracy itself requires a politics of the third kind, since
neither Right nor Left has found any kind of satisfactory answer. The Museum of the
Third Kind will be as much concerned with the democratisation of meaning as with the
democratisation of communications. And unavoidably it is philosophical, since the
technology of telematics is the technology of consciousness, and wisely cultivated, can
lead us to a shared participation in the creation of reality.