Edge-Life:

technoetic structures and moist media

Roy Ascott

Life @ the edge of the Net

Just as the development of interactive media in the last century transformed the world of print and
broadcasting, and replaced the cult of the objet d’art with a process-based culture, so at the start of this
century we see a further artistic shift, as silicon and pixels merge with molecules and matter. And just as
broadcast radio, TV and the interactivity of the Net changed entirely the way we lived at the end of the 20th
century, so now in daily life, our habits, attitudes and ambitions are undergoing a further transformation.
We can call this Edge-Life since we are re-defining completely our identity, our social structures, and our
picture of the world, here at the edge of the Net where the virtual flows seamlessly into the actual, the
transient into the fixed, and the metaphysical into the material.

Between the dry world of virtuality and the wet world of biology lies a moist domain, a new interspace of
potentiality and promise. I want to suggest that Moistmedia (comprising bits, atoms, neurons, and genes)
will constitute the substrate of the art of our new century, a transformative art concerned with the
construction of a fluid reality. This will mean the spread of intelligence to every part of the built
environment coupled with recognition of the intelligence that lies within every part of the living planet.
This burgeoning awareness is technoetic: techne and gnosis combined into a new knowledge of the world, a
connective mind that is spawning new realities and new definitions of life and human identity. This mind
will in turn seek new forms of embodiment and of articulation.

At the same time, as we seek to enable intelligence to flow into every part of our manmade environment,
we recognise that Nature is no longer to be thought of as ‘over there’, to be viewed in the middle distance,
benign or threatening as contingency dictates. It is no longer to be seen as victim ecology, fragile or
fractious, according to our mode of mistreatment. Technology is providing us with the tools and insights to
see more deeply into its richness and fecundity, and above all to recognise its sentience, and to understand
how intelligence, indeed, consciousness, pervades its every living part. The mind of Gaia, set in de
Chardin’s noosphere, is becoming amplified and perhaps transformed by the technoetic effects of human
connectivity, ubiquitous computing and other far reaching consequences of the Net.

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 MOIST MIND
Is technoetic multiconsciousness
is where dry pixels and wet molecules converge
is digitally dry, biologically wet, and spiritually numinous
combines Virtual Reality with Vegetal Reality
comprises bits, atoms, neurons, and genes
Is interactive and psychoactive
embraces digital identity and biological being
erodes the boundary between hardware and wetware
is tele-biotic, neuro-constructive, nano-robotic
is where engineering embraces ontology
Is bio-telematic and psi-bernetic
is at the edge of the Net

But, as multimedia gives way to moistmedia, and interactive art takes on a more psychoactive complexion,
consciousness remains the great mysterium, just as intelligent artificial life remains the great challenge. For
some years now artists working at the edge of the Net have been exploring the nature of consciousness and
the potential of artificial life, assisting effectively in the emergence of Edge-life. Compared to the art of
previous eras, their work is inevitably more constructive than expressive and more connective than discrete;
and considerably more complex both semantically and technologically. Within this complexity, I foresee
the insertion of a new but very ancient technology that of the psychoactive plant such that a sort of
cyberbotany may arise around the instrumentality of such plants as ayahuasca (banisteriopsis caapi), the
shamanic liana. It is my contention that Vegetal Reality and Virtual Reality will combine to create a new
ontology, just as our notions of outer space and inner space will coalesce into another order of
cosmography.

My project ayahuascatec.net is designed to explore this field. It seeks to link telematically and
telepathically a number of ayahuasceros, employing their double consciousness to navigate both psychic
space and cyberspace, with spiritual guides who traditionally can be expected to arrive as helpers bringing
wisdom and knowledge to those in advanced use of the psychoactive brew. This builds on my initial project
to share ideas of navigation in cyberspace and psychic space with the Kuikuru indians during my visit to
the Mato Grosso in 1997, and on my experience with the ayahuasca in the ritual of Santo Daime1. The aim
is to bring these disembodied entities into communication with human users and their artificial agents in the
Net, thereby creating a kind of a psi-bernetic system, in which experience of our everyday world and the
wisdom of the other can interact in a kind of feedback loop.

Cyberbotany, once established and integrated into 21st century culture, as I believe eventually will be the case,
would cover a wide spectrum of activity and investigation into, on the one hand, the properties and potential of
artificial life forms within the cyber and nano ecologies, and, on the other, the technoetic dimensions and
psychoactive effects of banisteriopsis caapi and other such vegetal products of nature. Cyberbotany, in my
estimation, could indeed become the determinative factor in the shaping of Edge-life with the technoetic shaping
of mind involving vegetal technology every bit as much as digital technology. The moist ecology will bear truly
exotic technoetic fruit. Terence McKenna’s observation is wisely pertinent:

‘Our future lies in the mind; our weary planet’s only hope of survival is that we find ourselves
in the mind and make of it a friend that can reunite us with the earth while simultaneously
carrying us to the stars. Change, more radical by magnitudes than anything which has gone
before, looms immediately ahead. Shamans have kept the gnosis of the accessibility of the
Other for millennia; now it is global knowledge. The consequences of this situation have only
begun to unfold' 2

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Constructive Language and Visionary Pragmatism.
The key to understanding this new state of being is language: the understanding that language is not merely a
device for communicating ideas about the world but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence. Art is of
course language, and as such can be is a form of world building, of mind construction, of self-creation, whether
through digital programming, genetic code, articulation of the body, imaging, simulation or visual construction.
Art is the search for new language, new metaphors, new ways of constructing reality, and for the means of re-
defining ourselves. It is language embodied in forms and behaviours, texts and structures. When it is embodied in
Moistmedia, it is language involving all the senses, going perhaps beyond the senses, calling both on our newly
evolved cyberception and our re-discovered psi-perception. Just as we may transfigure natural forms so they will
become more transparent at the level of process and production. Moistmedia is transformative media; Moist
systems are the agencies of change. The Moist environment, located at the convergence of the digital, biological
and spiritual, is essentially a dynamic environment, involving artificial and human intelligence in non-linear
processes of emergence, construction and transformation. Language not only enables us to understand nature, to
communicate with nature, but to become partners in a process of co-evolution which will give us the responsibility
to redefine nature. Nature II will actually provide the context for our developing Edge-life, but it will also enable
us to return to the archaic relationship with the invisible processes and patterns of living systems, reading the
secret language of both flora and fauna.

Through the languages it creates, art serves to reframe consciousness. Simply to re-iterate received language,
uncreatively and uncritically, is to renounce the idea that we can rethink ourselves and our world, and to accede to
the notion that in matters of reality our minds are made up for us. In Richard Rorty’s words: “To create one’s mind
is to create one’s own language, rather than to let the length of one’s mind be set by language other human beings
have left behind”.3 Rorty is a philosopher who challenges the very category in which the world would place him.
His pragmatism eschews the sanctity of philosophy in favour of the artist’s visionary impulse and search for
metaphor that leads to the continual construction of reality and of the self, thereby denying the passive acceptance
of any canonical description. Similarly, many artists escape the constraints of artistic identity by straying freely in
the speculative zones of science and technology, mysticism and philosophy. Breaking free of categories,
intellectually and emotionally, and creating new realities, new language, new practices is what art is about.

When the visionary impulse is combined with pragmatism of the kind that Rorty espouses, we have a description
of what it is that artists do, or seek to achieve, and have done throughout cultural time. This visionary pragmatism,
as I shall call it, is about flying with your feet on the ground. It’s about working with the future in the present. It is
living life acausally but not casually. Visionary Pragmatism defines the technoetic endeavour of our era: mind
operating on the substrate of moistmedia. At its most efficacious, it combines, within the artistic domain, the
perennial wisdom of shamans and gnostics with contemporary insights of scientists, engineers and philosophers.
Visionary pragmatism finds in Moistmedia its creative ally, with its triad of computational exactitude, biological
fluidity, and technoetic complexity. Visionary pragmatism is an attribute to be fostered in all aspiring artists. It is a
quality least understood but most in need of support. Visionary pragmatism is guided by the need to bring dreams
to earth. In the case of the digital culture, it has led to what is known as ubiquitous computing, where intelligence
spreads throughout the network, and into every facet of the environment, into every product, every tool, every
system. At the same time, it is visionary pragmatism that is pushing the consequences of a screen-based,
immaterial world into the re-materialisation of culture involving molecules and atoms, nano technology and
neurons. It can corner the nihilism and despair of late post-modernism and springs forth into the post-biological
culture with a radical constructivism. It’s a case of “bye-bye Baudrillard”, and signals a reversal of the sense of
terminal decline that characterised art at the end of the millennium.

The Building of Sentience

Architecture provides a useful focus to visionary pragmatism since the term resonates in a number of pertinent
contexts: building with hardware and with code, terrestrially and in cyberspace; intelligent environments; and
nano-construction at both biological and industrial levels. While Euclidean space appeals primarily to the physical
body, cyberspace appeals primarily to the mind. The body loves surfaces, solidity, resistance; it wants its world to
be limitless but safely ordered, open to the clouds but protected from indeterminacy. Above all, the body wants its
senses put in perspective. In 20th century architecture, the body ruled. But in our new century, architecture
progressively will embody mind; technoetics will be at the foundation of practice. The mind seeks connectivity
and complexity, uncertainty and chaos. It knows reality to be layered and ambiguous, constantly collapsing and
reforming, observer-dependent, endlessly in flux. In reflecting these attributes, 21st century architecture will be like

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nothing the world has ever known. Distributed Mind, Collective Intelligence, Cybermentation, Connected
Consciousness, whatever we choose to call the technoetic consequences of the Net, the forms of telematic
embodiment likely to emerge will be as exotic to our present conception of architecture, as they will be protean.
Stylistic and functional diversity will increase exponentially as the practical consequences of nano-engineering
kick in. In turn, our frustration with the limitations of our own bodies will demand prostheses and genetic
intervention of a high order.

We realise that the body, like our own identity, can be transformed, indeed must become transformable. The many
selves hypothesis, like the many worlds hypothesis of physics, is not only compelling but also necessary to life and
liberty in the Moist culture. Increasingly, the attitude of the mind towards the body is post-biological. Its view is
cybernetic, seeking always the perfectibility of systems. The hypercortex, mind in the Net, needs shelter. Human
bodies and artificial agents need common habitats. At the point where cyberspace and post-biological life meet, an
entirely new kind of social architecture is required. A truly anticipatory architecture must prepare itself for this
marriage of cyberspace with Moistmedia, combining self-assembling structures and self-aware systems.

As the century advances, the paradigmatic change in architecture will be registered at the level of behaviour rather
than form. To give just one simple example, the 20th century’s exaggerated interest in what a building looks like,
its mere appearance, will give way to a concern with the quality of its gaze, how it sees us, how it perceives our
needs. Questions of the physical structure of buildings will be overshadowed by ambitions for their dynamism and
intelligence, their ability to interact with each other and with us, to communicate, learn and evolve within the
larger ecology. . Engineering will embrace ontology. Time will become more dominant than space, system more
significant than structure. Seeding, as I have argued earlier,4 will become at least as important as designing, and
design will be a bottom-up process, seeking always short-term evolutionary gains. The goal will be the building of
sentience, a Moist architecture that has a life of its own, that thinks for itself, feeds itself, takes care of itself,
repairs itself, plans its future, copes with adversity. It will be a technoetic architecture that is as much emotional as
instrumental, as intuitive as ordered. We shall want to get inside the mind of such architecture and an architecture
that can get into our own mind, such that our neural networks can be synaptic with the artificial neural networks of
the planet. If the building of sentience is the challenge to architecture in the 21st century, the emergence of a
Moistmedia will be the manifestation of its radical restructuring.

The artist’s role at the larger planetary level of self-organising, self-aware systems, will be to plant, grow and
cultivate new forms, new structures and new meanings. The notion of cyberbotany extends from the wise
application of plant technology, in the technoetic context, to the creative employment of horticultural metaphor in
envisioning outcomes at the material level of construction. In developing the hyperculture the artist can learn from
horticulture; the creative challenge being to create a Moist synthesis of artificial and natural systems. Visionary
pragmatism can guide the artist’s participation in building worlds that we would want to live in. Visionary
pragmatism can take the love inherent in the telematic embrace and create new relationships, new societies, and
new culture. Just as art in the next hundred years will be not only interactive, but also psychoactive and proactive,
so human affairs will benefit from closer connectivity, distributed intelligence, and spiritual solidarity. As the
unfolding years of this new century will show, the media best employed to effect these changes will be
Moistmedia, the networks that sustain them will be technoetic, and the cyberception of the planetary society as a
whole will reflect a growing sense of optimism and telenoia.

References
1
Ascott, R. 1999. Seeing Double: Art and the Technology of Transcendence. In: R.Ascott (ed), Reframing
Consciousness. Exeter: Intellect Books. Pp 66-71.
2
McKenna. T. 1992. Food of the Gods. New York: Bantam Books. pp263 –4.
3
Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge University Press.
4
Ascott, R.1995. The Architecture of Cyberception. In: M. TOY, ed. Architects in Cyberspace. London:
Academy Editions, pp 38-41.