The chaotic modern age of technology has inspired us to re-examine our most basic instincts and memories, both individually and culturally. Evidence of these primal urges is surfacing everywhere: tattooing, piercing, drumming communities and the rise of modern tribalism as predicted by Marshall McLuhan are just a few examples. In ancient tribal cultures, the medicine man and shaman fulfilled a role as mythmaker and interpreter, helping their people to explain the changes occurring in the world around them. Various materials and practices from the natural world including plants and rituals intended to induce heightened states of awareness served as tools in this process.Today it is the artist who fulfills this role, often incorporating intricate forms of electronic imagery and new shared virtual worlds. The process of extending the organic world through the virtual,of building new places and objects, has complicated our understanding of the primal. To many, it has engendered a feeling of disembodiment, perhaps a reflection of the counter-intuitive nature of the tools themselves.
Paul Mlyniec has begun to address this problem in virtual worlds by creating a more natural context from which to work- the body itself. By extending our hands in virtual space one is able to manipulate the world in much the same way a child does. Using basic and natural body motion, expression takes on new forms in virtual space, in this case combining painting and sculpture in a single stroke.
As we extend the boundaries of our body in these new spaces, our senses become heightened and we become keenly aware of our own projections and their illusory feeling. No wonder we feel compelled to explore our own primal nature together, especially in communities where the physical and virtual merge, like Burning Man.
"Burning Man is a laboratory, an experiment, not utopia." says Larry Harvey. "We are applied science. We use order to create spontaneity." By constructing a towering physical icon and a community purposely designed to empower freedom of action in a physically demanding space, participants directly experience the relationship between order and chaos.
How does architecture and design affect social behavior in these newly created, boundless spaces? What is the public sphere and what role do culture and the arts play in its construction?
According to engineer and conceptual artist Natalie Jeremijenko "technologies create the material conditions within which we work, and imagine ourselves and our identities...Engineering is where social reality is made."
If this is indeed true, then the future of humanity depends on engineers for they control by design how technology is bent to serve social and cultural agendas. Nowhere is the politics of technology more visible than in our public spaces - spaces which seem to have become inordinately private in nature.
In a Leonardo Journal article exploring these themes, Molly Hankwitz characterizes this privatization as "consumerist space- space in which values are shared as vast extension of buying power and corporate culture..." It is here says Bean, a music interactivist, "as developers of music and art we have a social responsibility to break out of organized modes (i.e. the dominant economic paradigm of the times), or our rooted sense of who we are. Ritual in a public space is one way to break out of those molds."
Tonight, with the help of four groundbreaking artists and visionaries and host Linda Jacobson, the New Minds "Bits & Pieces" will explore primal urges and public spaces.
