No Doctor’s Day – A Consciousness Generative Process (part 1)

John Vines


Joana Griffin


Taslima Begum


Rita Cachao

No Doctor’s Day – A Consciousness Generative Process (part 1)
Today John Vines hosted an informal meeting of the Transtech researches and some invited ones from i-Dat and the Planetary Collegium as me and Jacques Chueke. As is usual in the official Transtech updates we presented our research's last developments. I used the opportunity to share the ideas of the second version of Instants of Metamorphosis explaining how this work is related to my PhD research aims as a whole. The understanding of the installation not just as a never-ending ongoing process (Rita Cachao mentioned the approach of Umberto Eco in his book The Open Work) but as a Complex Adaptive System – CAD is central to the approach. The point is that, using the complexity sciences framework may help in understanding how the informational flow through the interaction of several actors/elements creates and transforms the entire system in a generative process. There is no intention of considering the question from a mathematical perspective, measuring the amount of information, predicting transformations and emergences in a formal way. The complexity sciences perspective is being used from a qualitative point of view, combining references from philosophy and sociology to help in thing about the installation as a CAS. At this point, Rita Cachao questioned how can I defend that the idea of using this complexity sciences perspective (using systemic measures of complexity and organization for instance), could be valid to analyses a work of art? Why and how a work of art can be described as a complex adaptive system? And at this point, following the questioning moment of Rita, John Vines mentioned some similarities concerning my approach and Guto Nobrega's and Brigitta Zics's ones, in their PhD research works.
After an initial moment of open discussion, I proposed a group activity that is, at a certain level, integrated with the creative process of Instants of Metamorphosis v.02. The activity consisted in to read the Borges tale 'Two Metaphysical Animals' and the considerations about a possible use of some ideas presented and manipulated by Borges (from Condillac and Lotze, to be specific) to stimulate a conversation on how it could works as some sort of inspiration to the creative process and to think about a way or artifice to ‘capture’ emergent meaning from the system. The reading started after the presentation of a 3 minutes video about Instants of Metamorphosis 01.
We spent half an hour talking. Rita Cachao (That was very well performing the role of a doctor in the meeting!) asked me why I'm using Borges specifically. I explained that, one year ago, I was reading Clarice Lispector emergent writing book The Stream of Life because it, as a creative consciousness process it is, could has interesting connections with the main intention of my research of analyzing the interactive digital art installation from a complex sciences perspective.
Reading Clarice Lispector I was at the same time searching for possible connections between her and other fictional authors to help in constructing a fertile dialogue that could works as a base to a creative process (generative consciousness; creative evolution? ) I found some interesting articles on the dialogue between Clarice and J. L. Borges. I started re-reading Borges and was really interested in his Book of Imaginary Beings. Concerning the tale ‘Two Metaphysical Animals’, the intention is not to use it as an academic reference but to use this small part of Borges’ encyclopedic and imaginary universe as fuel to the artistic processes and the study interrelated.
After the ‘reading time’, I invited Rita Cachao, Joana Griffin, John Vines and Taslima Begum to produce individual draws from the central ideas of the 'Two Metaphysical Animals' – draws that could capture the way they apprehended the text, transformed it and turn it into memory. Amazing drawings; completely distinct universes emerged. In the end I asked the researches if they can write me a report, in two or three days, about the drawings they made. The intention is to see how this kind of exercise could help in to map emergences en a process of information interchange. In a few days I'll ask the group to produce new draws, at home, and send pictures of it to me via e-mail.