Synthesis & technological synthesis 
 
 
On-Line TEXTS
 
 
 
'Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we would find it not.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
 
  In the electronic domain and at a later stage the digital revolution, the term 'synthesis' was familiar in reference to the use of electronic (digital) technology to create sounds; images; video animation and even artificial intelligence to generate poetry and /or texts. But this technological synthesis utilized in expressive media is becoming the catalyst for a synthesis of a more profound nature. From multimedia and interactivity to the world-wide web, the convergence of western culture's spiritual malaise with the constructive potentials of new expressive technologies attracts attention. 
 
The integration of art and technology always has been marginalized as 'beep and grunt' or otherwise 'cold and non emotive' exercitions from artistic electronics freaks, but that just couldn't stop the spreading of ideas and the appeal on - mainly - a younger generation to follow these pioneers steps. This is because art is driven by synthesis - not digital synthesis, but the synthesis of life experience - a fundamental force in both cultural and individual development.
 
  According to Hegel's 'triadic dialectic', an extreme force or idea in a culture ('thesis') can stimulate a contradictory force or idea ('antithesis'). This conflict becomes the basis for growth and change, and the outcome is a 'synthesis', a new state of the culture. One critique of dialectic is that synthesis of 'harmful v/s progress' or 'retrograde v/s onward' is not very helpful when the results could be a status quo as two trends would get an equal share. Indeed, it would not be helpful to even suggest that there is some kind of synthesis to be found in the question 'to be or not to be'. However, in the realm of human values and culture, people live every day actively engaged in a balancing act between dualism's such as self v/s group, norms v/s relativism, externalizing v/s internalizing, tradition v/s innovation etc. In this light, synthesis is the ongoing process of adjusting the balance between irreconcilable forces in an individual and a culture. In this definition, dialectic is not necessarily an evolutionary paradigm; change must occur simply to maintain balance. 
 
In specific circumstances an entire culture may be prepared for a shift - primed with an unbalance requiring a new resolution - around devastating events as a war or a natural disaster, but often it is a few individuals who, in engaging this unbalance directly, become primary agents in leading a transition to a new synthesis. Artists are a particular example. It is in this light that one can say that suffering is the required pre-condition of an artistry that has significance: the artist of integrity must be willing to face the pain of an internal conflict - between a thesis and an antithesis - and try to find a resolution to that conflict through expressive synthesis. At best, this activity in turn encourages the process of synthesis required of the whole culture. 
 
One of the dualism's that any society based on the western culture must balance is that of rationality versus irrationality. Human history has been immersed in a thesis of irrationality into a large extend. These extreme excrescences were followed by a dominant antithesis of rationality (i.e. industrialization of the culture). Faced now with the inheritance of both extremes, a new resolution has to be worked out to deal with this conflicting situation. Rational analysis could identify this problem. However, rationalism and analysis prove incapable in themselves to solve the problem so identified.
 
  For a good visual - classical - example addressing this subject, Godfrey Reggio's film ' KOYAANISQATSI ' (1980), is highly recommended. The title is adapted from (to civilized westerners) 'irrational' notions and prophecies from the Hopi indian tribe:
 
 
  
ko-yaa-nis-katsi (from the Hopi language): 
 
1) crazy life 
2) life in turmoil 
3) life disintegrating 
4) life out of balance 
5) a state of life that calls for another way of living
 
 
  In this film, with it's beautiful soundtrack composed by Philip Glass, there's a Hopi prophecies sung: 
 
If we dig precious things from the land, 
we will invite disaster. 
 
Near the day of purification, there will be cobwebs,  
spun back and forth in the sky. 
 
A container of ashes might one day be thrown 
from the sky, which could burn the land 
and boil the oceans.
 
Of course the concept for this work arose in an era near the end of the cold war; the apocalyptic side issue doesn't make it any weaker though.
 
  In the sequel ' POWAQQATSI ' (1986), Godfrey Reggio doesn't aim at technology (as he did in koyaanisqatsi) but at 'human' behaviour or rather: the possible behaviour of living creatures. Powaqqatsi is not as powerful as koyaanisqatsi, but equally beautiful and engaged. For the sake of completeness:
 
 
  
Po-waq-qa-tsi (from the Hopi language, powaq sorcerer + qatsi life): 

an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces 
of other beings in order to further its own life
 
 
  Considering a quote of Jung from The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, 1934: 'things that come to light brutally in insanity remain hidden in the background in case of a neurosis, but they continue to influence the consciousness nevertheless, therefore it is necessary to integrate the unconscious into consciousness'; it's maybe feasible that 'irrationalism' is a necessity, just as well as rationalism (and analysis). 
 
Jung introduced creativity as an integral part of the therapeutic process. The resulting drawings or paintings etc. often revealed the patient's inner conflicts. In the process of making these conflicts surfacing through creativity, the patients were better able to resolve the unconscious. The resolution of the patient's inner conflict was an intuitive dialectical rather than a rational process.
 
  In emptiness there is no consciousness: 

Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose wrote an interesting article 'Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections' about the relation of quantum physics and consciousness. 
 
Quote: 'Some philosophers have contended that 'qualia,' or an experiential medium from which consciousness is derived exists as a fundamental component of reality. Whitehead, for example, described the universe as being comprised of 'occasions of experience.' To examine this possibility scientifically, the very nature of physical reality must be re-examined. We must come to terms with the physics of space-time - as is described by Einstein's general theory of relativity - and its relation to the fundamental theory of matter - as described by quantum theory.' 

Hamerhof and Penrose developed a model to describe the 'hard problem' of consciousness on a quantum physical level, on the basis of a so called 'objective reduction' scheme: 
 
'Within the objective reduction scheme, we consider that consciousness occurs if an appropriately organized system is able to develop and maintain quantum coherent superposition until a specific 'objective' criterion (a threshold related to quantum gravity) is reached; the coherent system then self-reduces (objective reduction: OR). We contend that this type of objective self-collapse introduced non-computability, an essential feature of consciousness.' 

Essentially they describe consciousness as a pulsating phenomenon (sequences of conscious moments ) - based on their findings on a quantum physical level - and this is amazingly analogous to 'subjective viewpoints that have been expressed with regard to the nature of the progression of conscious experience':
 
 
  
'For example, support for consciousness consisting of sequences of individual, discrete events is found in Buddhism; trained meditators describe distinct 'flickerings' in their experience of reality (Tart, 1995). Buddhist texts portray consciousness as 'momentary collections of mental phenomena', and as 'distinct, unconnected and impermanent moments which perish as soon as they arise'. 
 
Each conscious moment successively becomes, exists, and disappears - its existence is instantaneous, with no duration in time, as a point has no length. 
 
Our normal perceptions, of course, are seemingly continuous, presumably as we perceive 'movies' as continuous despite their actual makeup being a series of frames. Some Buddhist writings even quantify the frequency of conscious moments. For example the Sarvaastivaadins (von Rospatt, 1995) described 6,480,000 "moments" in 24 hours (an average of one "moment" per 13.3 msec), and some Chinese Buddhism as one "thought" per 20 msec.'
 
 
  Interestingly enough these (semi-)objective findings of Hamerhof and Penrose and the subjective viewpoints of 'meditators' expand on earlier and recent philosophical theories: 
 
'Why do we have an inner life, and what exactly is it?'
 
 
  
'The 'hard problem' of incorporating the phenomenon of consciousness into a scientific world-view involves finding scientific explanations of qualia, or the subjective experience of mental states (Chalmers, 1995; 1996). On this, reductionist science is still at sea.'
 
 
  'One set of philosophical positions, addressing the hard problem, views consciousness as a fundamental component of physical reality. For example an extreme view - 'panpsychism' - is that consciousness is a quality of all matter: atoms and their subatomic components having elements of consciousness (e.g. Spinoza, 1677; Rensch, 1960). 'Mentalists' such as Leibniz and Whitehead (e.g. 1929) contended that systems ordinarily considered to be physical are constructed in some sense from mental entities. Bertrand Russell (1954) described 'neutral monism' in which a common underlying entity, neither physical nor mental, gave rise to both. Recently Stubenberg (1996) has claimed that qualia are that common entity. In monistic idealism, matter and mind arise from consciousness - the fundamental constituent of reality (e.g. Goswami, 1993). Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. From this, Chalmers (1995;1996) proposes a double-aspect theory in which information has both physical and experiential aspects.' 
 
'Among these positions, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1929; 1933) may be most directly applicable. Whitehead describes the ultimate concrete entities in the cosmos as being actual 'occasions of experience', each bearing a quality akin to 'feeling'. Whitehead construes 'experience' broadly - in a manner consistent with panpsychism - so that even temporal events in the career of an electron have a kind of 'protomentality'. Whitehead's view may be considered to differ from panpsychism, however, in that his discrete 'occasions of experience' can be taken to be related to 'quantum events' (Shimony, 1993). In the standard descriptions of quantum mechanics, randomness occurs in the events described as quantum state reductions - these being events which appear to take place when a quantum-level process gets magnified to a macroscopic scale.'
 
  Back to Jung, his creative therapeutic process relied on symbols, metaphorical in function, irrational. Considering however the possibility that 'consciousness is a fundamental component of reality', then what is reality? And to what extend individual (un)consciousness is a component of a broader 'collective (un)conscious universe'? Is consciousness what it is generally taken for really? Perhaps the whole issue of (un-)consciousness is beyond the scope of rational analysis and at least partly the domain of irrationalism. (which would in effect lead to mystical theory, in which Jung had a life long interest) 
 
Research into chaos, dynamic systems, cybernetics, self-adaptive systems, cellular automata, and neural nets is leading to a realization that the richest results from the computing environment come from structures that cannot easily be predicted and controlled - structures instead that must work through distinct processes, learn, and evolve. 
 
Religion has been the primary mediator between the conscious and the unconscious, between the rational and the irrational, for long periods of time in 'civilized' human history. Though religion never actually worked well, it nevertheless affirmed the need to resolve inner conflicts and balance societal forces and did so through an archaic vocabulary of sacral rituals and symbols. Critique, analysis and technology belong to the realm of the rational. As such they desacrilize, remove the power of, processes that evolved to mediate with the irrational (Bateson 1987). 
 
From reasoning it appears that there is a need to resolve conflicts that do not necessarily have rational resolutions. While the traditional means of attaining those resolutions have been denied by rationality, there's still a need for processes that might re-balance the active dualism in the present culture. However, adapting to known (and yet existing) spiritualities of the past won't stop the potential spiritual malaise; it simply wouldn't change anything because it didn't function before. One must evolve a synthesis, it is experiential rather than objectifiable. (of course technology does not in the least bit qualify to be a religion or anything like it) 
 
The relatively new mass-media provides the means through which to express other dimensions of modern art. The potential of new technologies to 'synthesize' away the boundaries between previously disparate media and modes of creation could bring an other stage in the reconciliation of opposites: between high and low art, between author and public, between technique and mystique, between individual and group identity. 
 
Whether this possibly could help to find new resolutions to internal contradictions, hinges upon the integrity of those who express themselves with the new media. The artist will face inward conflicts and resolve them through expressive synthesis, addressing society to find new resolutions to the conflicts it tries to deny or ignore. Some will choose to avoid confrontation, seeking instead to engineer technical props for the ego and the cultural establishment. 
For the latter, stimulation through technological novelty will be a primary concern and synthesis will only be techno-synthesis. For others working with the new mass-media the most important challenges and questions to be faced will not (only) be technological, but emotional, ethical, and spiritual, and synthesis will be the process of a meaningful appliance of technology. 
 
On-Line TEXTS 
 
 
References 

' KOYAANISQATSI ' (1980) & ' POWAQQATSI ' (1986), Godfrey Reggio motion pictures. 
Bateson, G. and Bateson, M.C. 1987. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. 
Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose 
 Jung, C.G. 1934. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious 

(with regards to Brett Battey's texts on creativity and interactivity)