Signs and Wonders E-Book

Teixeira Coelho

• Herausgeber: Iluminuras
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 341

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Technology changes culture in all possible ways. In the external world and in our internal world, our feelings, our emotions, our judgment. And now there is a radical technology that is generating radical changes. When the powder was invented, opening the doors to fire arms, it must have been astounding, people may have felt at the brink of a catastrophe. The same with the steam machines being used in ships and trains. Speed was both frightening and exhilarating. And with the internal combustion engine there came almost limitless mobility — and it was huge and liberating. Current technology is even more impressive — because it has no physical bounds: it happens also inside our minds and bodies. This is immense — and all that is immense, Sophocles noted, may bring about a curse… Museums and art itself will change and are changing, the meaning of ethics is different from what it was a few decades ago, psychological issues are being addressed with the manipulation of images. It is a new world, it remains to be seen whether it is brave...

Leseprobe

SIGNS AND WONDERS

Art & Culture in the Digital Age

Teixeira Coelho

Signs and wonders

Art & Culture in the Digital Age

L' existence de l'humanité ne se justifie que par quelques résultats anti-naturels qu'elle a atteints.1

Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres

1 The existence of humanity can only be justified by a handful of anti-natural results it achieved.

Signs and wonders

Art & Culture in the Digital Age

1. The expansion of the digital domain

History as a game

September 29th and 30th, 1941: two days to be remembered in the world’s immense book of infamy. Barely ten days after the Nazi army invaded Ukraine, and for the first time in human history, the capital of a country had most of its Jewish inhabitants murdered by the occupiers in one of the biggest and most horrendous mass crimes of all times: 33,771 Jews —men, women, old and not so old, youngsters and children out of some 65,000 in all (they were more than a 100.000 before the war). The details of the slaughter are shocking and their description and analysis do not fit here — but it is not inappropriate to add that an additional chill runs along one’s spine and hurts all human sensitivity when one gets to know that, for logistical reasons, the Jews of Kiev were summoned by posters spread all around town to go to a certain place from where they would continue on foot to the ravine of Babyn Yar where they would be slaughtered immediately upon arrival.

In 2016 the city of Kiev decided to create the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial as an homage to the victims of those abominable crimes and as an experience of the horror in order to avoid any repetition of history. The Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky was invited to be the artistic director of the Memorial. He is the author of two films, 4 (2004) and DAU (2019), that have sparked controversy and scandal wherever they were shown — all the while collecting an equal amount of positive reviews and honors as well.2 About Ilya Khrzhanovsky himself it should be enough to say that he is no beginner trying his luck with a couple of scandalous films; the son of a father who is also a filmmaker and of a philologist and publisher mother, he comes to the Memorial with an impressive visiting card.

In the presentation of his plans for the Memorial, Ilya Khrzhanovsky properly analyzes the relationship between museum visitors and the works on exhibition (artworks or other), a kind of relationship that may be observed in most or all of the museological institutions around the world. He criticizes the fact that the experience offered to all visitors to an exhibition, however different they may be, is basically the same for all and every one of them: all visitors go through the museum galleries, look at the very same works (or almost) from the same point of view (or almost) and reads the same information applied to the walls of the galleries and on labels alongside each work. To assume that all visitors of a museum will have one and the same experience is a daring statement — and an all too radical one, not to say inappropriate: different factors intervene in the process and may influence what each visitor will apprehend from the visit. But let us admit, for the sake of the argument, that Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s observation is pertinent from the perspective of a certain statistics of reception based on what one supposes those standing on front of a work are actually seeing: the work stands there, immobile in front of me (if it is a static work), and I am always on this side over here and at a certain distance from it (and I’d add: at a safe distance from it, a distance safe for the work, according to museum rules, and safe for me: anthropological studies keep reminding us that it is always prudent to keep a distance from power — and art is power). Actually this relationship between the work and the beholder develops itself in such a way that a third party, looking at them, cannot tell what goes on in the trajectory between the visitor and the work, much less what happens inside the visitor ( in their mind but also their body, nerves, muscles and guts). Using the new technologies of virtual reality and their correlates, Ilya Khrzhanovsky wants to radically transform the relationship between the beholders and the objects they contemplate in this kind of institution.

Summarizing Ilya’s proposals for a new experience in the Memorial that could also be applied to other kinds of museums: at the entrance to the Memorial the visitor will answer some questions on a form and their answers, from which it will be possible to extract their hypothetical profile, will be immediately analyzed by an algorithm that will classify the visitor as a member of one of the groups defined by the conceptual framework of the Memorial: the victims’ group, the executioners’, the collaborators’. And the visitor will enter the exhibition equipped with virtual reality glasses that will allow them to observe (I hesitate before using the verb to live , which Ilya Khrzhanovsky would almost certainly prefer) the content of the exhibition according to the profile previously assigned to them by the algorithm, which means these visitors will experience the exhibition from the point of view of the profile assigned to them: victims, executioner, collaborator, whatever. This means that the experience of a visitor A with a profile X will be different from that of a visitor B with a profile Z: each one will follow a specific path through the exhibition and will see things that others won’t. Technology such as deep fake, which allows the insertion of a person’s face onto another person’s body — or onto a generic body — is already available for this kind of purpose.

The questions that this kind of innovative approach may arise, all of them immersed in an eminently ethical magma, are predictable: what if I do not identify myself with the profile of the torturer that the algorithm says is mine — because “that would be the last thing I could ever have thought of, isn’t it? “.3 What if I don’t accept being a victim, and if I don’t admit seeing myself as a collaborator? What if I, instead of being a victim, as I have been classified, prefer to be a torturer? (Nobody would admit that but…) This should be enough to illustrate the ethical problems around Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s project. I do not know, at this point, what alternatives he designed in order to deal with what may happen at the entrance of the exhibition depending on the visitor’s reactions. But one should not exclude the possibility that a considerable number of people willaccept the roles assigned by the algorithm, even if “just to see what it would be like if”.4 The fact is that the scenario prepared by Ilya Kryzhanovsky brings to light an obvious ethical issue — fundamental in the context of the concerned historical facts, which have informed the lives of each and every one of us in this 21st century, either we have been directly affected by what happened in Babyn Yar or not. The news about the procedures to be adopted by the Memorial immediately brought about protests against the construction of the Memorial itself; it was underlined that to the martyrdom of tens of thousands of people murdered in the ravine it would now be added the fact that their history would be transformed into an all too video game, with virtual reality glasses and all. Many of these critical voices may also have realized that it would not be that difficult for the project to find visitors willing to accept the roles chosen by the algorithm… which says volumes about society today, at the gate of a new and radical computing age, much more than about Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s plans and, perhaps, the Memorial itself.

The fact is that on July 29th of the current year of 2020 the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, declared, in a virtual meeting with the board of the Memorial, that the project had been approved and would be implemented with all the “advanced technologies appropriate to preserve our history.” Although it seems certain that Ilya Kryzhanovsky will be confirmed as the artistic curator of the Memorial, it is not yet known to what extent his initial proposal will be preserved. One way or the other, the question has been raised and the focus of this text lies on it — because if not in Babyn Yar, now, it will happen sooner or later, with the same kind of content or a different one.

Expanded experience and dimensionless experience

Without mentioning nowhere (as far as I know) the two topics that I will address next, the fact is that Ilya Kryzhanovsky, in his design for the Memorial, literally and physically addresses two essential issues for the Humanities (and for the moment I will not make a distinction between the different fields of this area of knowledge): an older one, central to all sciences — the hard sciences as well as the soft or compliant ones, the way some hard scientist (such as Richard Feynman) considers them to be; and a more recent but not less relevant one.

The oldest issue concerns the relationship between the subject and the object, unfolding into a series of aspects that structure it: the distinction, real or imagined, between the subject and the object, the opposition between them, the influence the former has over the latter and vice-versa. This is a central issue for the Humanities, in all their philosophical, sociological, aesthetic and artistic variations. And a central issue for the “hard” sciences as well: as fundamental to Einstein’s theory of relativity as it is to contemporary music, the classical theater, the modern visual arts, psychoanalysis in its diverse trends… The second issue, a more recent one, at least in this formulation, concerns the opposition between two concepts of experience as they were discussed by Walter Benjamin: Erfahrung and Erlebnis.

Let’s start by the second of these two modes of experience, which implies the first. Erfahrung, usually translated as experience, comes from fahren (to move by means of a vehicle: a train,a car) and is etymologically connected to Gefahr (which involves the idea of danger). The resulting meaning of these two ideas combined: the experience as something that stems from a displacement, from a physical move, from the insertion of a body in a space defined by a duration of time and implying the possibility of repeating the event — and on which hovers the possibility of some risk, some danger. Air travel still is associated with the idea of risk— so much so that most air travellers will remind their wives or husbands or children that, in case of an accident, a certain document will be found in a certain drawer, the life insurance policy in another one or in the safe.5 In all these long months of 2020, a second risk has been added to the experience of traveling by plane or by any other means of transportation: the risk of contagion by the virus of the year, eventually causing the affected person’s death6. But most people today seem to worry more about dying in an airplane accident than with the possibility of dying as a consequence of being infected by a virus — or the virus. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the risk for a European traveler — as for Montesquieu going from France to Italy, late in his life, to see for the first time the wonders of Italian art — were the robbers along the road, the fragility of the boats available (you can’t even call them ships) and so many others. Perhaps theirs were greater risks than ours today, which did not prevent them from traveling: “to sail is necessary / to live is not necessary” (Fernando Pessoa). I will stop short from writing that a risk free trip is not worth it. Erfahrung: an experience involving a physical time and space that can be felt as such; the experience that stems from a body immersed in its own spacetime and open to all kinds of eventual risks. In Montesquieu’s case, a body and a mind are also exposed to another kind of risk, and not a smaller or less relevant one: the risk of exposing oneself to art. Art is dangerous, for those who make it and for those who open themselves up to it, this has always been true. Montesquieu changed his way of thinking after opening himself up to art.7 This is what happens at least to all who take art seriously, as a commitment of the mind, the body and the soul — as an engagement, a concept perhaps not trendy today but still meaningful when it comes to art.

Erlebnis: Dilthey8 departed from Kant’s concept of Erlebnis as an inner experience to understand it as a real lived experience in time, an issue later addressed by Husserl and which acquires a specific meaning with Walter Benjamin: that of a punctual experience, disconnected from a broader context for which the notion of a before and an after is irrelevant or vague. In other words, Erlebnis it is nothing but a fleeting experience, a floating world experience, an impoverished experience,9 a negative experience, the experience proper to late-capitalist humanity, the only kind of Erfahrung that was possible at Benjamin’s time in a Germany between wars whose new winds of destruction he saw blowing the wings of the approaching angel of history. Actually, whenever one reads an expression such as late capitalism it is always appropriate to ask whether the same scenario could not be found in the ideology and economy that pretends to be its opposite, that of the Soviet nomenklatura at the time Benjamin was writing what he wrote or that of the China today that also presents to be a communist country. But that too is an issue that does not fit here. Erlebnis: a product of the “technological orgy” with its warlike destruction and its empty speeches about “peace” and its violent denial of the “eternal humanistic values”. And Benjamin asked himself whether it would be possible to invent a new Erfahrung for this late-capitalist humanity, a humanity he described as “preparing itself to survive civilization, the Walt Disney civilization”,10 this humanity that is no longer made up of travelers of the Montesquieu kind11 but a humanity of tourists of the Méditerranée Club kind, a humanity that sails in packed commercial cruises plagued by viruses and bacteria of all kinds, a humanity of tourists of the two-nights-in-Paris-and-two-in-Rome kind and whose main interest is to take selfies of their own emptiness in front of artworks they will never understand nor remember.

Concerning museums and similar institutions, it has now become a commonplace to say, with no ground other than the politically correct argument of participation, that the experience of a typical visitor is always and necessarily of the Erlebnis type, even if this concept is not explicitly mentioned — meaning the visitor is supposed to have a passive experience, which is considered to be bad. Ilya Khrzhanovsky does not say, as far as I know, that the regular visit to a traditional museum — the kind of visit from which everybody would depart taking with them one and the same experience — is of the Erlebnis kind; but that is the idea underlying the argument that visiting a museum, the way it happens today, is a poor experience.12 Some visitors, however, may experience an authentic Erfahrung — which is another way of saying that the museum experience is not necessarily a passive, inert experience, as the radical cultural activists insists it is — cultural activists who condemn cultural democratization (multiplying as much as possible the access to culture and art) in favor of a never explained cultural democracy. Those critics argue that In a cultural democracy everybody should be entitled to “make art”; but they never actually explain or justify what exactly that means and do not seem to have a clear awareness of what the proposition implies — a program they nevertheless try to justify by brandishing the slogan of the participatory democracy with which they pretend that everyone should “make art” while ignoring that the right to participate in the cultural life brought to light by UNO’s 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights13, revised in 1976, implies the right not to participate in the cultural life, be it in an “active” or a “passive” way… And they also ignore that it is absolutely possible to take part in the adventure suggested by a painting without having to pick up any brushes with one’s own hands and without getting near to a canvas… It is true that it is really not an easy task to participate in a painting standing in front us or to participate in a theatrical play or in a music concert while sitting on a not always comfortable chair in the audience: that’s an operation that requires concentration, an ability to think just as one enjoys what one is seeing or listening to, the ability of being there at that precise moment while being out there and before that moment and after it without actually leaving the place and while one is travelling at the speed of light to all places and times suggested by the play or the film or music that one is watching, listening to thanks to the hundreds of billions of neurons stocked in one’s head. It is easier to demand, in the name of the collective, a “real and actual participation in art” by means of workshops that generate “works of art” that do not stand up to minimal evaluation of what art really is.

The difficulty or impossibility of having a rich or somehow significant experience when visiting a museum, the difficulty or impossibility of having a richer or less poor experience throughout life itself is what Georg Simmel assumed to be the tragedy of culture,14 steaming from the dualism at the origin of the endless process of interaction between subject and object. The first instance of this dualism consists, for Simmel, in the clash between the human being and the natural state of the world, to which man does not belong or not any more (unlike the animal) and to which man presents his demands, with which he struggles, to which he imposes his violence and by which he is raped. The second instance of this dualism takes place (or “finds its room”, as he puts it) within the human spirit itself, or, in his words, in that which he describes with the help of a metaphor or a “nebulous parable”: the journey of the spirit towards itself. The first instance may imply a physical journey, to be undertaken in the concrete, material space of the world; this first instance involves a hard kind of trajectory, which presents itself as a real and concrete obstacle to the spirit. In the second kind of journey, the path is immaterial, virtual as it has become usual to say nowadays. It is tempting to say that the first corresponds to the universe of Erfahrung and the second to that of Erlebnis. But to do so would be another tragedy in itself because not every concrete and “presential” journey across the world, like a physical travel with all its risks, necessarily opens itself up to an Erfahrung just as not every virtual experience, a virtually immobile one implying no risks other than those that consists in exposing oneself to the world or a work of art, necessarily ends in an impoverished experience. It is a fact, on the other hand, that objects follow their own logic independently of the subjects’ lives; that these objects, products of the technological orgy, multiply themselves incessantly at a rate that suffocates the subject; and that, in order to expand the stock of cultural contents, most subjects usually make their own “contribution” without any consideration to the fellow subjects around them, in particular to those who, like themselves, are also contributing to that stock. Simmel chooses his words carefully but he says quite clearly what he means: the objects structure their own system from which the subject, who gave them birth, is afterwards excluded and ever more so considering the increasing number of objects generated by their own logic to which adhere some subjects who do not take into account their and everybody elses’ own real and ultimate needs: those of going back to themselves in an expanded way after their journey among the objects.

Simmel could not have operated with the concept of a “late capitalism”, which is always on Benjamin’s horizon, because it simply belongs to a later age; nor did either Simmel or Benjamin, for that matter, experience the extreme “late capitalism” whose full consequences we are all facing know, in this fast-paced 21st century. But it is clear that Simmel can answer Benjamin’s question about the possibility of finding or inventing a new form of Erfahrung in this economic system that eats its own entrails in order to survive — a paradox with no chance of a solution, so far. The last lines of Simmel’s, Tragedy, he who, just like Benjamin, was criticized by orthodox Marxists for being too “idealist” (because neither of them elected as their main theoretical tools the primacy of economics over culture nor claimed to be seeing the rosy day that is about to rise by the hands of history), are clear and strong:

“The great undertaking of the human spirit, consisting of overcoming the object as such — the object that creates itself as an object— in order to return countless times to itself as a subject enriched by that objective creation, is often successful; but the human spirit must pay for this accomplishment with the tragic possibility of finding, in the self-regulation of the world that it has created, a logic and a dynamism that dissipate the contents of culture at an ever faster pace and take them far away from culture’s own purposes.”

In this scenario the new experience that Ilya Khrzhanovsky pretends to offer to the 21st Century Babyn Yar Memorial’s visitors will not be a more solid Erfahrung than the one he intends to replace — simply because Erfahrung is seldom possible, if at all, as a practice in which the great number can indulge. In a world with 7,5 billion people walking happily like lemmings down the precipice — a precipice that is already visible, for instance (among many others) in what was once considered to be the eternal snows of the Mont Blanc that are now sliding down and threatening to sweep away everything below it — it seems that there is no longer the possibility of an Erfahrung for the masses, a kind of experience that seems accessible to the occasional subsisting subjects (who will not require the kind of experiences designed by Ilya Khrzanovsky’s project, if ever they come to light). And those are the kind of subjects that can hardly classify as the typical visitor of any museum.

Personal history as a game

Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s idea is not, however, to be dismissed entirely for in principle it stands in line with a solid and essential thinker like Georg Simmel: to place the subject as an object for itself (a subject that has been driven out of itself to begin with) so that she is able to accomplish her journey towards herself. In the case of the Memorial, this means taking the subject — who usually does not see herself — to consider herself as a subject through the object placed in front of her by the narrative Ilya khrzhanovsky will create. This is, in a slightly different way, the focus of an experiment at the Philippe-Pinel Institute, in Montréal, where the psychiatrist Alexandre Dumais is looking for a new approach to the treatment of schizophrenia by turning to the new computational technologies such as virtual reality. A rather relevant humanitarian project: the World Health Organization lists schizophrenia among the ten most disabling diseases in the world. Dr. Dumais wishes to find a way to at least reduce the auditory hallucinations that affect many schizophrenics and that resist the available treatments. Telling one’s own problems to a specialist, in the traditional psychoanalytic way, does not seem to be of much help. It occurred to dr. Dumais to create the conditions to establish a dialogue between the patient and his own inner demon which obstructs the subject’s journey towards himself. In other words, dr. Dumais is looking for ways to build a dialogue between the patient and himselfas anobjectified subject. This would be carried on as a series of conversations between the patient and an avatar of his inner demon: the patient begins by describing, to an expert in digital drawing (the way victims of crimes used to describe their assailant to a skilled draftsman using the old technology of pencil on paper ), the features of his inner demon as it appears inside his head. The resulting representation is digitally animated and transformed into a file that can be uploaded to the regular screen of a computer or watched with the help of virtual reality glasses. The avatars I saw in a documentary video produced by Radio Canada Télé are so rudimentary — like children’s drawings without the charm children usually display — that, strictly speaking, it would not be necessary to resort to computational technology to materialize them; but this is not a deficiency of the digital technology, it almost certainly results from the imagination capabilities of the patients all the time under bombardment from the most stereotyped clichés of mass culture…

The patient then “interacts” with his demon’s avatar, i.e., interacts with himself, with that objectified rendering of himself that he sees on the screen: he hears, from the mouth of the avatar whose image is right in front of him, what he himself hears the demon telling him in the privacy of his head. What he hears in virtual reality are lines taken from the narrative his psychiatrist heard from him during some previous “traditional” sessions and that this patient now hears as words coming from the inner demon in the voice of his psychiatrist — and I don’t know the reason why the psychiatrist has to lend his voice to the avatar: is it perhaps a remnant of the traditional psychoanalytic belief in the necessity of identification between the patient and his analyst? Anyway, however one looks at this kind of technology it doesn’t seem to be that advanced…

The thesis behind the operation: to learn how to confront one’s demons instead of submitting oneself to them, instead of running away from them. “We are light years away from traditional psychiatry,” says the specialist at the Phillipe-Pinel Institute. It is true — if it were not for the psychiatrist’s voice coming out the mouth of the avatar. The idea is that the subject will hear the demon’s insults (“You are not a good father, nobody likes you, you are a failure, you are nothing “) and since these beratings are coming from someone or something in front of him, he will be able to discuss with the avatar, to insult back and to resist it since it is something exterior to the patient: “No!, I am a decent person, I am not a failure, say one more and I’ll break your leg…”

Patients seem to approve of the therapy: “The voices inside my head have decreased by 80%, 90%”; and the therapy would have already allowed some of them to go back to work and have a “normal life”. Good for them. Nineteen patients participated in the pilot project, fifteen of whom said they had experienced a considerable improvement in their condition. Any “hard” science, which psychiatry and psychoanalysis are far from being, would dismiss not only these results but the method and its authors. Aware of this kind of criticism, the psychiatrist in charge says that the process has already worked in England and has worked in Canada and, therefore, “it would not be necessary to test it with 200 people. The results are significant”. If he thinks so, good for him. And for his patients — except for those who were not satisfied with the experience due to a “deficit of realism of the avatar” — which in fact seems to have run away from a bad Walt Disney animated cartoon. In accordance with the true spirit of this age, an avatar 2.0 is being designed in the laboratory of a virtual reality startup involved in the project: “avatars more faithful to the hallucinations” are coming, announce the young CEOs of the start up. Nevertheless, this method and the whole program will have to undergo a long series of tests before getting the “imprimatur” of the hard sciences.

Game is old days, the thing now is direct access to the brain

The application of virtual reality to the rendering of the collective and objective history of groups of people or to the personal history of individuals does not limit itself to the kind of cases discussed above, of course: there is a lot more going on. One in particular, belonging to the field of “hard” sciences proper, or to technology in any case, refers to the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in the rehabilitation of patients affected by strokes, different kinds of accidents or neurodegenerative diseases. This initiative, led by a researcher at Unicamp — Universidade Estadual de Campinas-Brasil,15 implies the stimulation of new neural connections in the brain that can have a role in the recovery from those kind of damages and that consists in the immersion of the patient in virtual environments that stimulate various sensory systems, in particular the visual and the auditory ones, making it possible to send new information to the central nervous system. The use of images is not mentioned in the paper that presents the experiment, but nothing excludes that they can also be used in the same process, either immediately or in the near future. Besides, image (Bild) is a term elastic enough to cover the auditory field as well: a sound is an image (Bildnis), a portrait, a rendering of something. A new device specifically designed, the Biomechanics Sensor Node (BSN), controls the patient data and his virtual environment, a new software being required in order to complete the connection between the BSN and the Unity Editor used in the construction of digital environments. This procedure allows the patient to interact with the VR environment and to be observed by the therapist in real time. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans show brain activities linked to the virtual movements, which the common language insists on describing as “fictitious” (if those movements happen, they are real in some way because they cause observable changes).

Contrary to the example of the Canadian institute dealing with internal demons, BSN applications can be verified in real time by the fMRI and reproduced by other researchers in other circumstances, which meets the basic requirements of the “hard” sciences for an experiment or theory to be accepted as a scientific fact.

If the Canadian experiment to deal with a schizophrenic’s inner demons is technologically rudimentary, the ubiquitous Elon Musk and his company Neuralink (the name unveils the nature of its business) prove to be far more ambitious on the path of putting computer technology at the service of the personal history of individuals. As in the case of the Unicamp researcher, Neuralink aims at the use of artificial intelligence to treat pathologies and also, perhaps mostly, to increase the capacity of the human brain. Neurolink’s proposal is to develop the technique of brain implants (implantable brain-machine interfaces or BMIs) and improve the connections between the brain and the computer. That the brain can emit electrical signals that may be picked up by a machine is already a relatively common practice. What Neuroplink is trying to do16 now is the second step in the conversation between man and machine: to create the conditions for the human brain to receive and appropriately decode signals coming from a machine. The ultimate result and meaning of this research is the connection of all human brains and the automatic sharing of all available information — something similar to a number of computers operating on a network. The resulting augmented human memory would be able to stand up in equal terms to some supercomputers network that, left unchallenged, would be able to control all humans. The no less indefectible M. Zuckerberg is equally involved in this kind of race but with expressly commercial objectives, which is coherent with the infamous story that Facebook is building for itself: from Facebook’s perspective, the name of the game is the identification of everyone’s wishes and the proposal of the corresponding objects even before their need comes to the surface of the person’s conscience — somewhat like Steve Jobs when, presenting his products that changed communication among people, said that

“People don’t know what they need until they see the thing in front of them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our job is to anticipate what does not yet exist.”

Compared to Jobs, M. Zuckerberg is much more conservative: he puts his bets on what people already want even if they are not aware of it… In a letter to his brother Johann, who had written to him describing himself as”a landowner”, Beethoven signed his response saying he was a brain owner. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg and the like want to own everybody’s brain..

Neuralink’s report about its research also does not mention the use of images, which will obviously have its seat on board. Even without images, the consequences are predictable — and immense. At the limit, the transparency of all thoughts in its highest degree, which carries with it the radical abolition of privacy, something that will come to be considered a luxury of the past. Everything has a price, as it usually goes, and if that is the price for the elimination of fake news, the spread of hate, corruption and all its consequences, humanity will probably be willing to pay it — and that will be a different kind of humanity.

The development of the neuronal link will have consequences for the idea of art also. No artist in any of the languages of art — literature, cinema, visual arts, dance, music —, with the exception of the arrogant ones, fails to recognize that only occasionally, and in a rather approximate way, she can express, represent or render what was going on inside her head when she was trying to translate her thoughts on paper, film, her own body if she’s a dancer or a comedian (and that is even more so since what goes through everyone’s head has the property of passing through at the speed of light and leaving behind very few traces). Immediate and open transmission (as in a TV live broadcasting) of all inner sensations to a third party or parties17 will eliminate the usual clichés used by almost everybody like “I cannot express what I am feeling, what is going on in my mind right now, I cannot translate it into images”… By means of an extended neuronal link, art will finally present itself as entirely conceptual: it will exist in the head only — the creator’s and the receiver’s. And it is not clear, at this moment, if and to what extent the receiver of these transmissions can interfere with what he receives and transform it at the very moment when he is receiving it. No language of what is still called art can — for the moment— dismiss some kind of materiality — although it is obvious that it won’t be easy tothink inside one’s head an entire feature film or sonata, from the beginning all through the end. At least, not according to the usual patterns of art.

Another possible development: that which the “artist” would pass on to other people through the neurolinks could not be sold or auctioned in anyway for lack of materiality — even if, again, some big tech like Amazon will certainly find a way to offer the download of that immateriality and to monetize the operation — perhaps as a subscription to a streaming process of some kind? In the same vein, nothing will prevent some mental contentproducers from being more appreciated and known and celebrated than others for the quality, audacity, depth, originality of their immaterial products — which may mean that art will continue to be out of reach for a considerable amount of people just as it is now, in spite of all good humanistic and ideological intentions. And again, in this uncertain journey full of comings and goings, if all brains receive the same input, and should everyone reaches the same level of creativity, why would people bother to get or generate content from and to other people? The situation thus created will be the one described in 1909 Forster’s The machine stops: a world where everyone gives lectures to everyone else all the time (without adding anything interesting or new in any of those lectures since the idea behind all of them is already known by everybody else… Or it may be that, at last, Nietzsche’s utopia, “an art for artists only”, will be achieved because everybody will be an artist. However, if everyone is an artist, the concept of artist itself is annihilated… Besides, it is just as likely that the pleasure of writing a novel, a film (with the collective action that it involves and presupposes), of staging a play — something that today consists of confronting matter and actualresistances of all kinds, of bending matter and wills according to the creator own will and mind— goes up in smoke. “Freethinking”, Millôr Fernandes, a Brazilian cartoonist, used to say, “ is nothing but thinking”. Will all that thinking take on the form of the free internal flow of thought such as the one inside Molly Bloom’s head in the last chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a formless torrent of thoughts (some say “of conscience”) rendered without punctuation, without pause, without a beginning, a center or an end other than the end of the book just like thinking ends with the end of life? Or will neuronally connected thinkers, with or without the help of Neuralink’s BMIs, be trained or train themselves to generate something more structured? On second thought: more structured for what? Why? Neurolinked or transhuman thinkers will look back to this year of the virus of 2020 and will not be able to understand the reasons why humanity (or a small part of it, actually) attributed so much symbolic and economic value to these impure, uncertain and always failed manifestations to which the name of art has been given for some centuries… Years ago, before this computational scenario began to deploy almost daily its new possibilities, I used to describe the artwork as the rest. In Portugueses, there is a more expressive play of words to say it: a obra é a sobra, the (art) work is what’s leftover — like in “the leftovers of last night’s dinner remained on the table”. The material artwork is the leftover, that which is left exposed as a result of a creative process. The materiali artwork in front of a beholder is nothing but what is left of an inner process much wider and richer and complex than that which the beholder sees or listens to. This rest may be as good as that which the creator conceived in her head or it may be better or worse; the creator may be satisfied with what she sees or listens to, it doesn’t matter: what she sees or listens to is the rest of the creative operation. If the neural connection or linkage becomes a reality, as everything indicates it probably will, there will be no more leftovers: everything that is generated inside a certain head will be communicated to another head in its entirety. The meaning of this kind of art production for humanity will be immense. The Funes the Memorious Hypothesis according to Borges,18 as I call it, will finally prove to be true.

Commenting further on this immemorial dream of humanity which is the total universal communication — now including the communication between humanity and its objects and among the objects themselves as well (the internet of things); and beware of what you dream of, it may become reality—, the computational sphere specialist and philosopher Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, chairman of the Ethics Committee for the powerful French Conseil National de Recherche Scientifique-CNRS , recalls (Le Monde, October 17th, 2020) the investigations of the physicist Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), a scientific adviser to F.D. Roosevelt, who in 1945 wrote As We May Think where he foresees a certain application (in today’s terminology, of course) called Memex (Memory Extender) capable of managing technological knowledge in constant progression. Vannevar Bush imagines, and designs, a piece of polished glass —the equivalent to a cell phone or iPad screen—, on which information could be projected and read. Ganascia is fascinated by Vanevar Bush’s ability to anticipate the future. It is a pity both for Ganascia and Vannevar that they did not know about nor read Forster’s The Machine Stops in which the novelist describes a world whose inhabitants receive all the information they need on the scream of a small machine whose current denomination is…iPad. Since our theme here is humanity and the Humanities, and since the issue is memory and how to expand it, it is vital to remember that the arts usually coare the first to predict the future or to suggest new paths for it, in an impressive way.

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What remains for certain after a perfunctory investigation on the impacts of computing is the ever increasing and ever accelerating dynamics of inserting successive and superimposed wedges between the human being and the world at large — and, as in the last two examples, between him and his own inner world.

Wedge is another word to designate the mediation