Integrating Science, Technology, Art and Culture
                Integrating Intuition and Logic

    in order to Explore the World as it could Be!

      Using the Computer as a "Simulation Machine"     to test     ideas

      It is time for the prisoners to come out of their cave!

      Our (West) European culture is a strange historically developed mixture
      of (bastardized) Hellenic, Christian and Humanist values.

      We are not the inheritors of a great Mediterranian/Middle East culture,
      but the inheritors of the barbarians who tried to reconstruct the
      culture their forefathers had destroyed.

      We have evolved from a "Land based culture" via a "Money based
      culture" to a "Technology based culture" -although we still have
      problems in relating "Technology" to "Science" -and "Art" and "Culture"
      are still suspicious of both.

      Most of the autocratic War Lords now appear to have (re)learned the
      principle of "Tribal Democracy" -but we still have problems defining
      the limits of the tribe and the relationship with other tribes.

      However, the concept of tribalism loses meaning as members get
      dispersed through war and poverty -especially when modern communication
      systems together with global coporate capitalism reduce the world to
      a single global village.

      So where are we heading? Are we losing control? Will the drug of
      consumerism protect us from the gods of war? Is global democracy
      desirable? If so: -what form should it take? -how can we achieve it?
      -and how can we sustain it? If not: -what alternatives do we have?

      We need to look backward in order to reappraise our Hellenic,
      Mediterranian and Eastern cultural roots and to reconsider the paradoxes
      of Christian Humanism.

      We need to look forward in order to (re)integrate our intellectual and
      our emotional modes of experiencing, expressing and processing information.

      Hopefully, if we can understand our historical evolution(s) then we
      shall be able to find ways of escaping from the mistakes that have
      been made and to find ways of developing and exploring alternatives.

      Perhaps our first priority should be to make the academy once more
      into a garden -and not the factory it has become!

(ecology, simulation, space, aesthetics, ontology)

                 Art and Reality

                 Art as Local Broadcasting System
                 Artist as self-reflecting mirror

                 Art    as expression
                 Computer as tool


                    emotiion, formalism and reflection

                    Is freedom possible with   rules ?
                                         without chaos ?
                    Is freedom possible with   chaos  ?
                                         without rules ?

                    Art    as shamanistic process
                    computer as medium

                            The computer as linguistic apparatus
                                   language as simulation
                              simulation as ontological research

         Practice:


         Simulation:
                                                           


         Languages, Translations and Codes:

SIMPLE  PROJECTS (pedagogical or art colabourations)  

  What's in a name?
 

  "Universal" Project:
 

 "Number" Project
 

   A possible Answer to "Babbage's Dream", a Dutch exhibition in Groningen?  

   By chance, or not, Oxford was I believe the domicile of Ruskin
   -the famous english art critic who (as many others) was repulsed
   by the flowering Industrial Revolution and sought refuge in a
   return to a romantic rural (imaginary) past. Ruskin thus laid
   the mental foundation for a legacy which is now irretrievably
   part of the english tradition.

   The famous Bauhaus, which is also not completely irrelevant to
   the ideological tradition of the AKI, was partly a reaction
   against the romantic notions of the time and an attempt to
   rationalize the design process in accordance with the industrial
   production process which had proved inevitable.

   As Media Artists we are inescapably infected by the spirit of the
   machine. We may embrace the mechanistic, deny it or search for a
   balance between man and machine but in all cases the machine remains
   as basis for our reaction.

   Presumably our exchanges with Oxford will be located somewhere in
   the area between Ruskin and the Bauhaus.

  i.e.   -Virtuality
         -Simulation
         -Dialectic
         -etc....
 

       Some Initial Suggestions for Parallel and Sequential Development.

   I.   Potential Research Areas:

         -Post Graduate Studies in Non-linear Cognition
         -Artists in Residence

       Notes for a Cage project:

Trevor Batten
Amsterdam
(date unknown)