Is there anything beyond

reality? Well, yes: death!!

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By Antnio Cerveira Pinto
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Single coin!
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Head: a gold coin with my mothers image and an algorithm.
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Deck: art and money were born the same year speculation on a single coin.
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Lead: art and money have found themselves in the same deadlock. So if we want to save
money we have to save art as well, and the other way around: if we want to save art we
have to imagine a new protocol for love and for value exchange too. Accumulation has
always been a menace for societies, and the thin air of debt is even worse. We happen to
be already inside a new cave kind of a run-out of fuel spaceship. Big time for smart
guys and for the artists too!

What does valuable money mean? Trust! How can we rebuild trust once we have
jeopardised it on bad bets? Can we do it without a deep symbolic reconstruction of the
Self? Can we accomplish that necessary reconstruction without coming up with a new
image, and a new narrative about fair exchange and love?

Lets begin with a new memory tale about genes, motherhood and Gaia, and for this
purpose let us discuss technology, what we know about knowledge, conscience and
reality.

Cognitive art is something new. It means that post-contemporary artists either need a
substantial body of logic knowledge, and proficiency in more than one formal language,
be it a classical discipline of Academia (Physics, Mathematics, Biology, History, and so
on) or some sort of computational cocktail, or he or she will stay somehow off tune and
loosing the main conversation that is going on among the new post-contemporary art
practitioners. My point of view on this particular issue though is that in the end if we
expect artists to create artworks this still means techne (). Cognitive
representation without craftsmanship and holism, is not art. The difficulty though is to
know where does conventional knowledge, technology and science stops to aesthetic
representation begins.

I am since the last two years in the mental process of conceiving a new form of local
currency, of symbolic bartering. In the end I will have to design, model and mint a new
coin that may respond to the huge collapse of trust that is presently destroying so many
things we cherish for so long. It is not a practical solution I am working on though. It is

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a cognitive-symbolic one! In the beginning money and art were the same trade. Im
wandering the way back to Paradise.

The following is a collage of previous texts of mine revised and edited for this seminar
and a theoretical background for the ongoing art project Single coin.

Obs: this is a keynote to the 12th Consciousness Reframed International Research

Conference, presented at Centro Cultural de Belm, Lisboa, on December 1st, 2011.

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Augmented reality in art!
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A witty article Lexposition des impressionistes written by the painter, engraver

and playwright Louis Leroy, for the satiric newspaper Le Charivari, named and
consecrated at one go the most important aesthetic European movement of the last span
of the nineteenth-century. The succession of incidents that led to the exhibition
organised in 1874 by the Socit Anonyme des Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs, at the
photographer Flix Nadars study, had begun eleven years before, when Edouard Manet
saw the Salon de Paris of 1863 refuse his scandalous Le djeuner sur lherbe. This
censorship by the French academy would lead the Emperor Napoleon III to decree the
carrying out of a Salon des Refuss, to let the public judge the merit of the artistic
creations of the so-called refused (works). By 1864 Manet would exhibit the first of a
series of scandalous pictures for that epoch.
There are three elements in this story that I would like to explain short, as I am writing
regarding a reunion of artists and professionals immersed in technologies of virtual
realism of computational origin.

Curiously Manet refused to participate in the show that would be considered the first
exposition of impressionist painters. On the other hand the tremendous criticism that
Louis Leroy addresses against the paintings of the exposition mentions openly their lack
of definition:

Impression, I was sure of it. I also told myself, since I am impressed there must be
there any impression and what a liberty (freedom), what an easiness in this craft! A
preliminary drawing for a wall paper has more definition than this sight of the sea.

Finally, the exhibition organised by Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Czanne,
Guillaumin and Berthe Morisot (the only woman painter belonging to this group), took
place at Nadars studio, one of the most famous and inventive pioneers of photography
that by then came off from his first experimental phase (Nipce, 1822, 1825, 1826;
Nipce & Daguerre 1825-1829; Fox Talbot, 1834; Daguerre, 1839).

By then time exposure portraits, landscapes and city sights were already frequent, as
well as object and machine images made in a mechanic way, i.e. through the direct
action of day light over photosensitive materials. These surfaces chemically emulsified

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had and have the quality of retaining and fixing in image a certain exposition to the
photons reflected by the illuminated objects. That that doesnt reflect the light, because
it lets it pass, or because it has an absorbent colour, is black, and that, that reflects the
light in all its visible spectrum, is white. Between these two extremes there is a long
range of grey. The outlines (contours) are abrupt transitions of state, shape, colour and
luminosity. The line doesnt exist. The grains do, like the pioneers of photography saw,
when they understood the physics of the chemically emulsified and then sensitised
particles.

Some impressionist painters, from Monet and Pissarro to Seurat, exactly understood this
extraordinary important fact of perception. The points of primary colours congregate in
spots, the colour and intensity transitions of which are understood as contours, volumes
and lines i.e. as images built along a complex, an interactive and ultra-rapid process of
sensorial impression and of emotive and cerebral work.

Manet (1832-1883) refused the invitation from the younger rebel painters like Monet
(1840-1926), Renoir (1841-1919), or Czanne (1839-1906). Why? Only because they
belonged to another generation? Nadar (1820-1910), who received the future
impressionists at his photography study, was a decade older than Manet and a score
older than Monet! So there must be another explanation.

This is my interpretation: owing to an extraordinary conjuncture, I think the behaviours

of Manet, Nadar and of the artists of the Socit Anonyme express the three founder
movements of the modern culture of the second half of the nineteenth-century and of all
the twentieth-century.

Manet represents the provocation and the urbanity of the new realistic programme
announced by Goya (1746-1828), Gricault (1791-1824) and Courbet (1819-1877).
Nadar is the leading figure of the surprising emergency of the technological realism,
which, in spite of the innumerable falsifications, manipulations, and now special effects,
goes on expanding like a sort of an absolutely facsimile speculation of reality a a
t (Barthes, 1980). The Impressionists at last opened the door to an interminable
formal analysis of the artistic practice, working and helping their successors work
towards abstraction and later on accepting to welcome the iconoclastic traditions,
originated in the Protestantism and even in the Zen Buddhism.

Curiously we are in the presence of three distinct typologies of realism: the critical
realism, the technological realism and the analytic realism. While the first permits the
integration of the technological and aesthetic acquisitions of the processes of figuration,
representation and speculation in an essentially political narrative, and the second
innovates without any compromise in a sort of noematic crescendo of the representation
apparatus (the determinable X that identity through time called upon by Husserl), the
third, finally, sets up a destructive discipline in the art.

However, if we elect Avatar, the film produced by the writer and inventor artist James
Cameron, to illustrate one of the latest examples of the technological realism, we fall
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into a paradox: the extreme measure of realism obtained through stereoscopic digital
film techniques (Reality Camera System 1) and augmented reality systems, which
instantly allow us to see the result of the graphic computation of processes that capture
the real movements of cinematographic action (using the producers virtual camera),
is after all good for creating a narrative universe of pure fantasy and propaganda.

To adjust our theoretic presumption, we need to turn to two new causes of the modern
and contemporary paradigm of the manipulation of the communication and symbolic
representation processes. The former is called illustration, caricature, comic, anime,
Ukiyo-e, and the latter, propaganda, public relations, seduction and language games.

One of the important arts of the critical realism of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries is illustration, above all the one practised through engraving techniques by
Hogarth (1697-1764), Goya (1746-1828), Daumier (1808-1879), John Tenniel
(1820-1914) and Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), among others.

The explosion of the means of mechanical reproduction of writing and of image, of

which lithography (Alois Senefelder, 1796) and photogravure (Nipce, Daguerre, Fox
Talbot) were powerful instruments, associated to the true revolution of the transport
systems, in operation by then, made possible the appearing of a new phenomenon: the
proliferation and popularisation of the means of communication and art. The emerging
of an urban mass-society aimed at a new paradigm of communication, new artistic
production ways and a radical change of the nature of aesthetic reception. This was
what happened, although under the form of a true growing synthesis between
merchandise and pleasure.

The libertarian narrative of the French Revolution, associated with the optimistic and
commercial pragmatism of the Industrial Revolution displaced the centre of the
symbolic communication and figuration, of the cathedrals, of the churchyards, of the
imperial saloons, to the city of speed, multitude and light. A new Pop realism would no
doubt appear from such a cultural agitation.

Carl Jung (1875-1961), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and later his nephew Edward
Bernays (1891-1995) are three among a brilliant group of pioneers, who raised the
knowledge of the persons behaviour, and above all the mass behaviour to unimaginable
heights by the hand of wizards, who until that time guided the consciences of the
faithful and of the subjects. Adam Curtis, in his prized documentary film of 2002 for
BBC, The Century of the Self emphasises the importance of Bernays (the author of
Propaganda, a book that is not much known nowadays), in the creation of the present
and omnipresent system of Public Relations.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to
control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?
The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain
point and within certain limits. (Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda, 1928)

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The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom
to persuade and suggest. (Edward L. Bernays, The Engineering of Consent, 1947)

It seems so, that there is a very present realism, which didnt exist when Impressionism
appeared. For want of a better expression, lets call it media realism. Why realism? Why
not propaganda and manipulation?

If we think a little over the present publicity, at least the most creative (which
PostPanic Postman Returns, by Mischa Rozema, is a goo example), what do we have
in common?
I would say, first we have a good story or a good anecdote, then seductive images,
musical rhythm and at last a quasi-order in the shape of a tempting invitation or kind
blackmail. The most important thing though is that the communication and the
seductive shape have a precise objective here: to lead us to reality, or at least to an
effective and immediate part of the surrounding reality. In the thicker and thicker and
more complex labyrinth of the city, publicity is a vector of communication, information,
social and cultural status. Because the urban and post-industrial obsolescence is
enormous and the post-modern memory too volatile, realism, clearness, rhythm and
humour which is simultaneously an expression of critical realism and mnemonics
are crucial for an efficient way of commercial communication. The consumer needs
help in the stream of material and virtual objects which flow into his choice
possibilities. It is in this dialectics that the communicational intelligence becomes
critical and needs a type of special creativity, lexical and dyslexical at the same time,
where the qualia (and no more the aura) appears as indispensable. The commercial and
informative propaganda is for the effect of this analysis the same reality, the media
reality.

If we finally consider the worldly realism, that goes from William Hogarth (1697-1764)
to Robert Crumb (1943-), and also through Hokusais Japanese pictures and the great
influence these images from the floating world (Ukiyo-e) had in the nineteenthcentury Europe and went on having during all the twentieth-century, not only in Europe,
but also in the United States of America, influencing decisively the emerging of the
comic strips, of illustration bands published in the press, and the authors editions and
comics magazines, and are still continuing to influence such strong and global urban
aesthetic movements like anime and manga, we cant help registering here an important
and powerful underground movement, without the educated preoccupations of the
critical realism, properly so called, but nonetheless less perspicacious and contusing. In
other words: that that distinguishes the worldly realism from the educated critical
realism is the exaggerated sense of humour, the worship of mockery and provoking
eroticism in opposition to the palatial game of shadows of the critical realism. Another
important distinction derives from the audiences that each of these two realisms
convenes. Manets public has never been the same that has been devouring Crumbs
heavy fantasies, although it certainly shares the taste for Hokusais pictures.
The discreet production for an aristocracy of art appreciators is not to be mixed up with
the mass production addressed to the urban crowds.

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This short text, meant to isolate the core of the present electronic digital imagination,
would need some more time and detail to avoid literal reading of the ideas expressed
here. For example, how to explain Walt Disney or Shrek, Hulk, T-1000, or Avatar
according to the different incarnations of realism that have been described?
Where do the Teletubbies stay in this divagation?

The present electronic digital imagination lives somewhere at the intermittent contact
point between technological realism, media realism and worldly realism. The skeletons,
the hard cuirasses and the increasingly complex and hybrid grey matter of the digital
world, form a kind of mutant techn, the applications of which demand increasing
dedication and learning by the human race. From the initial realism, whose
improvement already allows the digital world to make perfect illusions, we set out for a
kind of augmented reality, or immanent artificiality, in which genesis and
development, the interference of the collective of cognitive gods, producers,
programmers and designers, who perform the creative process, will have a tendency to
be dispersed and densified simultaneously into a finer and finer network full of knots,
levels of complexity and diversified degrees of interference, from where the new
artificial life will start some day its development.

Meanwhile another paradox remains: the quicker the processors are, the more time and
dedication are demanded from those who cause the creative processes.

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The goal and the wish always meet a step ahead!
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Mental thing. Seeds rather than forests!
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In the second half of 1997, I conceived an interactive, geo referenced map of my

country that would connect a virtual navigation of a map of the territory to websites
then exponentially popping on the Internet. The project would finally be presented at
EXPO98 under the name Portugal Digital. For this purpose, I consulted and brought
together several Portuguese institutions: the Instituto Superior Tcnico, the
Universidade Nova, the Centro Nacional de Informaco Geogrfica and the Instituto
Geogrfico do Exrcito. To compile and program the project, I received the help of
Joaquim Muchaxo, one of a cluster of IT engineers who made the project viable in time
for the big exhibition. To calculate and visualise in real time all the processes that called
up and compiled the data, it was necessary to buy a Silicon Graphics supercomputer, the
SGI Onyx2 Reality Engine, with 4 GB of RAM and a 195 MHz processor. In 1998, the
cost of this machine was around 600,000 euros! Today, 13 years later, the same
computing power costs no more than 3000 euros, i.e., 200 times less!

Measuring this technological revolution from another angle, for example, that of the
virtual population of the Internet, we can confirm that there were 147 million users in
1998 while today the number has risen to 1,966,514,816, that is, it has increased 13fold. In little more than a decade, the technological revolution that was underway has
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led to a cognitive and sensorial fabric that is hybrid, digitally interactive, half-human,
half-machine and whose degrees of freedom grant it an enormous linguistic and visual
elasticity and a growing, even invasive, ubiquity. From a triangulation of
communication satellites, this new superhuman skin is covering the planet with a film
of wholly unexpected and transformative meta-reality.

Curiously, in 1999, one year after the presentation at EXPO 98 of the unknown
prototype of what, in 2005, would emerge as Google Maps (the fruit of another
venture), Andr Sier, then a student at AR.CO, was presenting his first computational art
project, 0 0 255, which, although inspired by the first-person shooting game Unreal,
clearly deviated from the games ideology. While computer and video games follow
iconic and narrative models that stem from the imagination and from popular urban
culture, not infrequently arising from the vast world of cartoon adventures, animated
cinema, and sci-fi literature, the typical stripped-down nature of Andr Siers interactive
worlds, while taking maximum advantage of computational engines, algorithms,
libraries and available programming languages, clearly point to another cultural
tradition: that of the essentialist and analytical aesthetics of one of the most important
areas in nineteenth and twentieth-century modern art: the tendency towards abstraction.

Unlike the Jodis fantastic deconstructions of games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Jet
Set Willy and Max Payne 2, Andr Sier follows a more constructivist approach. His
distancing from what could be called entertainment, popular culture, commercial art, or
the creative industries does not take place under a regime of divergence from this sort of
alienated reality, which the Jodis hacker ideology so thoroughly distorts and
scandalously exposes. Rather, it occurs as a construction of new possible worlds using
the same genetic tools that industry uses for purposes as varied as warfare and popular
agonistic culture.

Observing Siers work, as I have done for many years, I know that it is in itself a
progressive record of sedimentation and generative expansion, accumulating strategies,
algorithms, possibilities, designs, grammars, libraries, actors, environments and
narratives, whether constituted or potential. The pieces evolve in series, precisely
because they are worlds of autonomous possibilities which can iterate and gain in
complexity, depth, definition and colour by way of automatic, aleatory, genetic and
interactive processes, both endogenous and/or exogenous. What makes the immersive
worlds ordered by Andr Sier so fascinating is the intimate correlation, as it were, that
exists between the intuitive drift of his oneiric constructions and the purely mental and
logical techne that is rigorously pursued by someone who, in the circumstances of his
own conscious creative process, cannot fail to be considered an artisan, or a technician,
committed to master a language discipline to better tackle this matter, which invariably
resists not only modelling but also the word and the final gesture that heralds the birth
of a great work of art. In this case, the mass of the creation consists of zeroes and ones,
or more precisely, binary combinatorial processes based on series of 8 bits, 16 bits, 32
bits, 64 bits, 128 bits, etc., the activation of which depends on a bang the discreet
echo of a primordial big bang [wav file].

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The genetic revolution of products arising from instructions followed and algorithmic
possibilities depends, from the start, on a strategic design, or, from the Deist
perspective, a demiurge, or rather, that which is between God and the Realised Thing.
During the last century, the long analytical trend in modern art arrived at two apparently
antithetical critical movements from which, it was then supposed, Western art would
move inexorably towards a phase of revivalist and academic decadence (which was the
case). These two movements were known as minimalism and conceptualism. They were
two sides of the same coin: the phenomenological reduction of art as an object, or a
thing in space-time, and as language. Finally, a cosmopolitan cultural experiment,
oscillating between logical mysticism and the voice of rhetoric, was born out of this
dilettante phenomenology. However, things went well until Carl Andr, Donald Judd,
Dan Flavin appeared in the minimalist camp, and Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth and Dan
Graham appeared in the conceptual camp. Tragically well! In some way, we can now
say that the general trend towards abstraction that accelerated after analytical
postimpressionism (particularly that of Monet and Seurat), cubism, suprematism,
neoplasticism and abstract art at large, reached its end during the 1960s and 70s with the
emergence and decline of minimalism and conceptual art, both of which were prisoners
of a reductionism that was more metaphorical than genuinely intellectual. However,
they left a legacy which, today, artists like Andr Sier can legitimately revisit by
invoking the philosophical and aesthetic acuity of European arts inestimable heritage
that the renaissance undoubtedly started, and which rationalism, positivism, and
German idealism subsequently raised to levels of complexity and metaphysical
robustness from which there could be no possible return to the religious narratives that
dominated the sentiment and procedures of art for hundreds of thousands of years.

During the twentieth century, literature, fine arts and philosophy itself reached the
degree zero of their respective constitutive and cultural paradigms. With forms being
stripped to the most radical abstraction the sort of return to geometry and logic that
dominated the spirit of European and American intellectuals and artists from Monet to
Roland Barthes there remained the time in which to anatomise the processes by which
several languages, authorial psychoanalysis, and the sociology of reception were
generated.

In 1936, the mathematician, logician and cryptologist Alan Turing had already
published his description of a mental experiment called the a(utomatic)-machine,
which would subsequently become known as the Turing machine. A universal Turing
machine (UTM) is a machine that manages to simulate any other Turing machine
(1948), and the Turing test is a way of assessing a machines ability to display
intelligent behaviour. During the Second World War, Turing was recruited by Winston
Churchill to help the British Intelligence to decipher the coded messages from the
German Navy, the encryption of which was carried out by two rotor-based
electromechanical machines, the Enigma and the Lorenz (the latter being used strictly to
encrypt the messages of the German high command). At the time, German submarines
were responsible for sinking thousands of ships, particularly civil vessels which
transported people, provisions, equipment and various materials (particularly for the
war) between the American continent and wartime Europe. The German encryption
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machines, the origins of which dated back to the First World War (1914-18), seemed
impossible for the Allied human cryptologists to break. It was then that Alan Turing, a
member of the team of cryptologists working at Bletchley Park, also known as Station
X, and his theories about computational numbers and automatic machines left an
indelible mark on the procedures that led Tommy Flowers, the Post Office Electronics
Engineer, to design and finally build a machine that was capable of emulating the
coding operated by the rotors of the Lorenz and thus to decipher the messages of the
German high command on the eve of the Allied landing in Normandy, known as D-Day.

Colossus Mark I and Colossus Mark II were therefore the first two electronic machines
designed to digitally process information that were ever built for practical purposes, as
well as being the absolute pioneers of modern day computers. This brief historical
incursion is important if we are to understand the founding epistemological leap taken
by what can properly be called the start of the postmodern era. In other words, the
moment from which the understanding and human manufacturing of possible worlds
moved, at least partially, from work that was merely human, physical and intellectual to
the work of intelligent machines. Rather than painting forests or building worlds as
Brian Eno said in a particularly elegant and poetic formulation, the postmodern creator,
a sort of agnostic and post-industrial monist, devotes himself to sowing generative
principles from which he expects new harmonic constellations to emerge seeds rather
than forests.

John Conways cellular automata (developed by Bill Koster and Stephen Wolfram,
among others), Karl Simss genetic algorithms, and Craig Reynoldss swarms are some
of the paradigms of the new emerging culture in which Andr Sier is clearly located,
along with many other contemporary, or rather post-contemporary, creators (to the
extent that their creations are not actual but potential, incorporating past, present and
potentially future states). Being among the youngest of the cognitive and computational
Portuguese artists, Andr Sier is one of their most serious, original and remarkable
representatives.

There is still a learning curve to be climbed regarding the dynamic reception of

generative and interactive works that have been created outside of the strict disciplines
of music, environments, and installations aimed purely at the ear. Responsibility for this
cultural delay primarily falls upon the conservative inertia of the museum and gallerybased world of so-called contemporary art. While popular electronic culture has
progressed at an exponential rate, as incontrovertibly attested by the sociological,
economic and strategic importance of the games industry, the generative and cognitive
arts in general remain encapsulated in a sort of pre-artistic limbo, as if they were
strange beings which were not yet fully entitled to enter the adult world of art. This
institutional delay will be overcome, probably after a big bang, which I believe lies
around the corner. When we least expect it, the cognitive and generative arts will enter
our neurones with the same apparent naturalness, speed and irresistible impregnation as
an algorithm as revolutionary as that which led to the birth of Google. The preparatory
work has been underway for a long time and the philosophically possible worlds of

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Andr Sier are surely part of the swarm that will produce the next big change in the
(techne).

Finally, in this brief introduction to the exhibition that Andr Sier had at the Museu de
So Roque (Lisbon) I will leave you with some notions to remember when we see, hear,
feel, perceive and interact with some of the pieces that make up uunniivveerrssee.net:

1) The perceptive environment is multi-modal: space, object, sound, image, interaction,

retroaction, ghost, connection, network, sharing, suspension, interval, continuation,
potential.

2) uunniivveerrssee.net is not a finite world but a cosmogony of possibilities,

computationally generated on digital foundations with various (32-bit and 64-bit)
extensions. In this case, sentences like I went to see Andrs exhibition, or I liked
Sierss installations, are incomplete and describe only the memory of a highly
incomplete and ephemeral perception of the potential reality inscribed in the works of
art on offer, the apprehension of which actually requires the apparently infinite time of
games.

3) Creatures imprinted and taken from the digital world of possibilities, inscribed or
unleashed by human-machine interaction a game, individual or collective, whether
aleatory or built, shared, or simply an accumulation of possibilities are the
perceptive, sensorial and physical proof of a real emergence that is therefore much
nearer to us than the merely fictional or simply virtual worlds of the prehistory of
cognitive art.

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Towards a social responsive art practice!
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Art must evolve to a new collaborative and responsive techne.

Museums should be more socially oriented to local and global communities.

The present financial and economic meltdown arrived a bit earlier than I could foretell
back to November 2005 (1), when I first mentioned the idea of transforming so-called
contemporary art museums in some kind of techno monasteries as well as new
community cultural centres.

The techno monastery (2) can be seen as a spiritual logo, or as an environment

dedicated to preserve the modern and contemporary machines of art and
knowledge.

The basic definition of techno monastery responds to a twofold coming reality: the
financial collapse of public and private contemporary art museums, and the extreme
public need to find a surrogate temple for the non-believers. All those millions of
urbanites immersed in the rational culture of freedom of choice, creativity and reason
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are under a massive threat of extinction. Like medieval monasteries the techno
monastery could play an important role as an intellectual refugee for survival activists
focused on the preservation of the last 200 years most relevant examples of industrial
and post-industrial culture. Like old monasteries the new techno monastery would also
have public facilities devoted to local and global communities.

Art, science, technology and democracy are the primary gods of modern paganism.
Abundance though has been its sin, its illusion and the cause of its fall.

If coming dramatic readjustments are unavoidable, the moderns and the

contemporaries will finally realise that weve all been dreaming if not sleepwalking
for almost 200 years!

Art and Knowledge will have to give up insensitive speculation and learn the way back
to the people.

The main motive for this lays in its intrinsic civilisational values, which are a step
forward as far as conventional wisdom concerns. That rational fire that is the realm of
modernity cannot be jeopardised by the catastrophic events foreseeable in the horizon.
We must find a way, that is a common language and a common terrain, across the many
languages of human-centered activities, so that the best of humanity can cure its wounds
and reinvigorate a new master-plan for the entire planet as well as for all living
creatures. The selfish gene is dead! We have to give power to new forms of cultural
symbiosis and to a global-collaborative effort for the survival of Gaia.

We need to implement massive collaborative interdisciplinary projects for the exclusive

benefit of humankind, and restore Gaia as the only and ultimate Paradise we always had
and will always have.

Old churches and traditional religions are welcome to this restoration task. They have
their own cross to bear though. What matters here, as far as the metamorphosis of the
modern and the contemporary world concern is the urgent need of adapting creativity
and belief to a new world social fairness. A just social order, empowered with freedom
and democratic accountability, is missing. And we need it!

As far as anyone knows, conventional politics is fully contaminated with lies and unfair
privileges. We cannot count on them anymore. We only hope the coming collapse will
forge a new political attitude, new ethical standards and above all more, much more
imagination and goodwill.

Our freedom and abundance have been of little use in the end of these industrial and
post-industrial times. We have changed work for productivity, but we are not ready for
leisure time! Billions of human beings are unemployed and will not recuperate from that
stage consistently. What shall we do then? Shall we eliminate all the high-tech
machinery and organisational wonders that we have managed to evolve and co-evolve
with computable numbers and neural networks since the beginning of the oil era?
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Artists and scientists, as well as writers and technologists, are the ones better prepared
to grasp the complexities, drama, but also the wonders of a post labour society. That is
why I believe museums and concert halls should mutate towards a new interactive web
of socially responsive platforms.

On the one hand the contemporary art museum has to change to a kind of technomonastery, where preservation tasks should take place in a steady fashion. On the other
hand the new cultural platform should become a glocal, public, collaborative and
interdisciplinary topoi focused on the deeply dramatic and complex change of the
conventional worker to a reinvigorated holistic Homo Faber, kind of a new religious
persona, where knowledge-intensive based art, as well as intensified awareness, will
apart exploration and alienation as the most poisonous derivatives ever produced by
man.

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This is an obviously huge task! Now is the time for it.
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All governments will have to spend massive amounts of money in what appears to be
the most important metamorphosis ahead. We should force them to do it sooner than
later. Not less than 10% of each countrys GDP will match the ambitious goals and
responsibilities at stake.

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FOOT NOTES
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1. Guidelines for a lecture
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In Tiempos de vdeo. 1965-2005 a seminar curated by Antonio Mercader.

Mediateca Caixa Forum, Barcelona, 2005-11-24.

How did video evolved in its short life, and what made audiovisuals so irresistible?
A) Moving image and Cinematics: the most perfect cultural metaphor for the moderncontemporary era
Industrialism
Urban design
Techno Science
Social-democracy
Mobility

B) Peak Oil will end our civilisation as we know it

Productivity
The mythology of exponential growth
Welfare State
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Mobility
Technophilia
Modern-contemporary culture

C) Culture and post-contemporary art (the new monasteries)

Cognitive
Digital
Dialogic
Communitarian

D) Survival and conservation of modern-contemporary heritage

Cognitive and Aesthetic heritage (science, technology and art): the fire we have to
preserve no matter what (that is, notwithstanding the global meltdown of world
Capitalism and the end of that hype culture we still stand for)

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2. The Technological Monastery

In The post-contemporary condition (Lisbon, December 2005.)
We can now examine the modern movement and its sequels considering the energies
which gave birth to them.

If there had been no coal or steam engines, what would it have been like? What if there
had been no petrol or natural gas? If these carbon-based resources, which guaranteed
the expansion of the industrial era, allowing the planets population to grow from a
hundred million to 6.5 billion souls in the space of only 200 years, had already begun
down the slippery slope of unavoidable decline? What would happen to our intellectual
optimism if within 20 or 30 years the majority had to live without petrol, without
natural gas, and without the richest varieties of coal (or with drastically limited and
extremely expensive access to this energetic paradigm)? Worse still, what would happen
if a third of the worlds population, around the year 2050 (which by then would be
about three billion struggling souls), made the decision to sacrifice the other two-thirds
of humanity and abandon them to hunger, thirst, continuous weather disasters, viral
epidemics and permanent war, in the name of the survival of the species?

There is nothing delirious about these wanderings. The modern condition based itself
upon an unconscious hypothesis, which we only discovered to be mistaken far too late:
that of the unlimited and abundant availability of natural resources, which was
translated to an ideology of continuous growth, consumerism and welfare state.

The post-modern condition, upon foreseeing the overtaking of the utopia of growth by a
utopia of knowledge, nevertheless still retains a strong belief in the possibilities of
world economic expansion. The post-contemporary condition, on the other hand,
already takes into account evidence that there will be a dramatic rupture of the current
global energetic paradigm before 2030-50, which will bring in its wake inevitable social
decomposition on a planetary scale.
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The doubt which still persists in the post-contemporary spirit can be summed up a need
to know if a dramatic cutback in current levels of waste of energy and prime materials,
combined with a genuine techno-cultural revolution committed to the digital duplication
of the world, i.e. a substitution of a large part of the current macroscopic disturbance
with electronic and digital interactivity, can possibly avoid the disaster and allow
Humanity to continue its progress on Earth.

One way or another, we will have to prepare ourselves for this rapidly approaching
shock to civilisation. Some thinkers argue that the overshooting of humanity has already
begun, and that we will inevitably fall into the great pit of energetic scarcity, lack of
drinking water, deterioration of agricultural land, the depletion of various basic prime
materials, the inviability of continuing to create and manufacture synthetics derived
from petrol and natural gas (plastics, fertilisers, dyes, varnishes, medicines, etc),
environmental disasters, uncontrollable epidemics and new wars of mass destruction.

What is to be done? What place is there for art and museums in a scenario of this
nature? I asked recently, in a seminar on audio visualisation in art promoted by La
Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, what would happen to the artistic heritage of the
twentieth and 21st centuries in a future in which the scarcity of energy and basic
resources determined the entropy of the technological systems which currently support
not only the continuing production of virtual and enhanced reality in which we are
immersed (including the info-sphere and all types of techno-cultural manifestations online) but also its electronic conservation. What will happen to Bill Gates photo-digital
repository, to recorded music or to cinema and television archives, on the day that it
ceases to be economically viable to produce new equipment and means of storage and
digital reading and all analogical equipment has been permanently discontinued?

Who among us has not seen on a small domestic scale the harmful effects of
technological obsolescence: the hundreds of video cassettes lovingly collected over the
course of the last twenty years are about to pass their sell-by date and DVDs will not
even last that long! Computers go into the rubbish bins every four years or so, mobile
phones every two years or so. It is easy to imagine this phenomenon on a global scale:
the whole technological civilisation suddenly hit by an unprecedented energetic and
ecological rupture. Alarming!

The cause can hardly be the technical potential of History, but rather the model of socalled post-industrial society itself. The service economy, great cities and their suburbs
would cave in, and the return to subsistence-based socio-economic models would end
up being imposed upon humanity. Following a catastrophic and violent interim, the
survivors would have to rise up from the ashes to re-embark upon the long and difficult
journey of human development. What and where is the starting point? How would it
collapse and rebirth? What tools will be used then? What remaining knowledge will still
be available? What kind of will and convictions will be in place for connecting people?
Will we return at the end of this century to a regime of low-intensity plastic arts? Will
we revert to the times of wandering storytellers, aesthetic religious rituals based around
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crop seasons, or to anti-cataclysmic votive offerings? What will happen to the cognitive
and technological heritage of the commercial and philosophical arts from the two
centuries marked out by the invention of photography and the most certain implosion of
the technical reproducibility paradigm as described by Walter Benjamin?

These questions would take a long time to answer, but nonetheless I believe they are
urgent ones. Philosophy and art will need to be reinvented based on radical changes in
the anthropological paradigm looming on the horizon. For this reason it would perhaps
be worth considering the transformation of the worlds museums into real community
centres dedicated to simulations of the approaching scenarios of change. As far as I am
concerned, and I hope to come across fellow enthusiasts up to the end of the present
decade, the time has come to consider the idea of technological monasteries, i.e. a
strategic withdrawal which will allow us to reflect with absolute honesty on possible
ways to safeguard knowledge and art.

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Copyright Notice
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Accordingly to international law all my texts can only be copied or published under my
previous authorisation.

Augmented reality in art

Translated by: Maria Helena Graa Silva
First edition: 2010 by Antnio Cerveira Pinto
Second edition: 2011 by Antnio Cerveira Pinto

Mental thing. Seeds rather than forests

Translated by Sean Linney
First edition: May 2011 by Antnio Cerveira Pinto
Second edition and revised translation: November 2011 by Antnio Cerveira Pinto

Religare: towards a social responsive art practice

First edition: February 6, 2009, by Antnio Cerveira Pinto
Second edition and revised translation: November 2011, by Antnio Cerveira Pinto

Guidelines for a lecture

First edition: November 24, 2005, by Antnio Cerveira Pinto
Second edition and revised translation: November 2011, by Antnio Cerveira Pinto

The Technological Monastery

First edition: December, 2005, by Antnio Cerveira Pinto
Second edition and revised translation: November 2011, by Antnio Cerveira Pinto
December 1, 2011, by Antnio Cerveira Pinto

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