WRITINGS:
1993~
Keisuke Oki

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WIREHEAD - an electronic way to Synchronicity

WIREHEAD represents a new kind of man-machine interface. Although it smacks of Cyberpunk, our idea has
its root in Eastern iconography, in which great revelation shows us an alternative way to re-interpret thischanging world even in the context of computer technology. The networking world is becoming increasingly
similar to the realm of spiritual communication. After all computers are networked in the future, what we should
really expect next is the direct connecting of our brains to communicate with each other. As the image below
shows, it is a highly spiritual stage of mind.
WIREHEAD as an artistic expression is part of a series of DTI's art works using brainwaves to manipulate data
including images, sounds and other digital signals in / from / to computers. In recent years, DTI
has createdand exhibited art works such as BRAINWAVE RIDER (1993, Tokyo, Minneapolis), VIRTUAL HAZE
(1994, Helsinki) and SYNCHRONICITY (1995, Luxembourg). While all of those works and WIREHEAD utilize
brainwaves, each one has different focus. What distinguishes WIREHEAD from the others is its network connection.
WIREHEAD delivers brainwave-driven commands to two wire-connected locations, London and New Castle, at
Ex Machina. It can connect simultaneously any number of places where the necessary devices and networks
are available, such as telephone lines and communication satellites, or other electronic communication systems including ham radio.
WIREHEAD and its system analyse the user's brainwaves, which reflect the state of his/her brain. If the brain
metaphysically means the mind, then WIREHEAD can analyse your mind and send its signals to remoteplaces.
When your mind rings a bell over here, it should ring some bells on the other side of the world as well.

Ex-Machina, London, 1996

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"Synchronicity" in the computational age"There everybody believes in ghosts, here everybody believes in vitamins."
C.G. Jung, 'The Difference Between Eastern and Western Thinking', "Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation" 1
It was several nights before my mother died from cancer that I had an unbearable pain in my back. The
pain seemed to come from within my spine. At that time, neither I nor my mother knew that she was sufferingfrom cancer and that her backbone was afflicted with the disease. I myself was in pretty good health, and there
was no obvious reason for my suffering from this sort of pain. One day, my father told me that my mother hadcancer, and I interpreted without a doubt that the pain I had experienced that night was "transmitted" from mymother.
I have been interested in synchronicity for a long time. However, my interest in synchronicity is notparticularly rooted in psychoanalytic or occult thinking. On the contrary, I have been interested in it as a functionof the brain and from the viewpoint of programming synchronicity.
In the field of Artificial Life, experiments seem to be still at the early stage that creates life forms like
insects or amoebas. If the prime rule in Nature is survival of the fittest, is synchronicity the result of evolutionary
progress? Or, is it true that human beings have already lost the instinct, inspiration or foresight that wild animals
innately possess?
On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI) studies are figuring out the brain's cognitive functions andcomprehensive faculties, namely, the human pattern of response to the environment. There is still plenty ofroom for us to understand a cognition based upon the five senses.
C. G. Jung found synchronicity to be a characteristic of the Eastern world. In the age in which he lived,
the East was a mysterious world spiritually different from the West. However, there is no big difference between
the East and the West these days. I suppose California might be the most spiritual place in the world, where
people commonly take in both vitamins and oriental spirituality in the same dose. In fact, many people's belief
in the power of vitamin C might be related to the result of evolution, as the human being is a rare animal whichcannot metabolically synthesize vitamin C in its body. (This lends an ironic note to the quotation from Jung
which I mentioned at the beginning.)
However, I am somewhat concerned about what Jung pointed out about science and religion in the samethesis mentioned above: "There is no conflict between religion and science in the East, because no science isthere based upon the passion for facts, and no religion upon mere faith; there is religious cognition and cognitive religion."
Right now, the East is the only area in the world displaying vivid economic growth. There, materialism isflowing in and the relationship between the material and the spiritual is becoming twisted.
In the first half of 1995, it seemed that Japan was thrown into a chaotic hell. After the earthquake in Kobe
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in January, a nightmarish incident was allegedly perpetrated by a religious cult, Aum Supreme Truth, in March.
(As of May 12, their connection to the poison gas released in the Tokyo subway on March 20 has not beenconclusively proven, due to incomplete evidence.) Japan, where the rigid Confucian morale tradition that prevails in society is collapsing gradually, seems to be descending into a dark world.
The case went beyond common sense and shocked the nation with its bizarre circumstances. Besides
the massacre and its accompanying details, what really astonished people was the cult's brain washing. Generally, brain washing refers to a tool of ideological education for controlling belief. The Aum group uses various
methods, not only mental and spiritual but also medical, i.e. the use of drugs with mind-controlling effects.
However, what surprised people was the use of electrode-equipped headgear. These transmitted electric
waves to users' heads, who were told that the waves carried the brain wavelengths of their Guru. In appearance, the headgear resembles brainwave detectors used for medical purposes such as
electroencephalograms, and also the headgear interface for controlling computers through brainwaves usedby my artistic group, DTI. Our headgear is capable of both detecting brainwaves and carrying brainwave data.
Generally speaking, old people cannot understand why Aum uses devices so unusual to religious discipline. But it is natural for many young people, who know of the existence of brainwaves and understand how
they reflects the mind's condition. Most members of the cult are in their twenties; for them, brainwaves become
an indicator for their degree of accomplishment in the sect's disciplines, although achievement of the Guru's
spiritual level through the headgear is a myth that has been created by the sect leaders. Actually the gear isused as a tool to collect money: 10 million yen to buy the gear and one million to rent it for a year, say somesources.
The intentionality of machine and computational psychology
Spirituality and materiality mix well in the electronics culture. Anyone using computers is apt to notice thisfact. Even with no computer experience, most people realize that monetary information, such as stocks andfortunes, is indicated by only numeric data. The majority of people, however, still believe in the banking system,
which just may be the most virtual entity in the world.
In Buddhism, deliverance from the materialistic world is considered the supreme virtue. Here is a picture
which C.G. Jung took from a Chinese text on Taoism titled Hui Ming Ching:This picture represents the supreme stage of meditation. Jung's concern as a psychologist lay withconsciousness. But the picture reminds me of the current state of the electronics culture. Also, the image's
portrayal of direct connections with the brain appealed to me as one of the themes underlying my artistic
expression.
Virtual reality technology has made it possible for us to move freely in a space that can be described asexisting but not existing. This sort of space used be possible only within the thoughts of Eastern philosophy or
religion. It allows the realization of almost any psychic experience: out-of-body experiences, teleportation, etc.
This sort of thing has been discussed extensively within the electronics culture. But, it may be more thanjust fashion.
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At every step, the choices we make depend on what we have become. Our sciences, arts, and moral
skills do not originate from detached ideals of truth, beauty, or virtue but stem partly from our endeavors toplacate or please the images established in earlier years. Our adult dispositions thus evolve from impulses so
infantile that we would surely censure them, if they were not by now transformed, disguised, or - as Freud said- "sublimated." 2Thus said Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of Artificial intelligence, in his famous The Society of Mind, chapter
17.11 "Intellectual Ideals", which begins with the words of Buddha.

Thoughts concerned with spirituality used to belong to the counter-culture, but have become natural
within the electronics culture as well. The computer goes beyond the concepts ordinary people hold regarding
machines. John von Neumann, the genius mathematician who promoted the creation of the first digital computers in the late 1940s and designed the von Neumann architecture which we use even today, thought themachine would multiply by itself in the future. The distinction between machine and life was banished in theory
and the basis for Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence was birthed.
However, the von Neumann architecture in the computers of today, which makes no inherent distinction
between program and data, is getting old. It is expected to make way for a new architecture capable of parallel
processing or super parallel processing, which can behave more human-like or "brain-like".
When we regard machines within the context of intelligence, the dividing line can be drawn between
thinking machines and non-thinking machines.
If you are familiar with arguments that have been submitted in the AI field, such as the Chinese Roomargument, you know that the point of contention is whether machines can think or not, or in other words,
whether they can have intentionality or not.
The Chinese Room argument was submitted by University of California at Berkeley philosopher John
Searle in 1980. His argument is considered one of the most famous philosophical arguments proposed within
the past twenty-five years. The scenario of the Chinese Room goes as follows:
Imagine a non-Chinese-speaking person sitting in a room with a long list of rules for translating strings ofChinese characters into different strings of Chinese characters. When a string of Chinese characters is slipped
through a slot in the door, the person consults rules, produces a new string, and slips the results back out
through the slot in the door.
If the incoming strings actually comprised questions, then a particularly clever and efficient set of rules
could allow the person in the room to produce outgoing strings that comprised answers to the questions.
Outside the room, there is a Chinese-speaking person who slips in questions. From the point of view ofthis person, the room would seem to contain an intelligent person who is reading the questions and coming up
with answers.
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Searle argued that no matter how sophisticated a machine's programming, the machine could never besaid to think or to have intentionality. Simply put, Searle says the Chinese Room represents a computer whichjust receives inputs and responds according to programs to produce outputs.
AI researchers made objections to his argument. The computer architecture that Searle targeted is thelinear one of von Neumann. However, a highly sophisticated AI program on a parallel architecture computer
would not simply process a list of rules in a simplistic fashion, but rather would consider many different types ofrules in parallel, deal with conflicts among rules, make guesses concerning rules, recognize relationships
among rules, and construct new rules, much as the human brain does.
In the same line, the AI side recently submitted an interesting argument: the Korean Room argument by
William J. Rapaport, a scholar at the Department of Computer Science and Institute for Cognitive Science at
the State University of New York in Buffalo. The story Professor Rapaport submitted in his article Syntactic
Semantics: Foundations of Computational Natural-Language Understanding is as follows:
Imagine a Korean professor of English literature at the University of Seoul who does not understandspoken or written English but who is, nevertheless, a world authority on Shakespeare. He has established andmaintains his reputation as follows: He has only read Shakespeare in excellent Korean translations. Based in
his readings and, of course his intellectual acumen, he has written, in Korean, several articles on
Shakespeare's play. These articles have been translated for him into English and published in numerous, wellregarded, English-language, scholarly journals, where they have met with great success. 3
The argument question is this: Does the Korean scholar understand Shakespeare? Professor Rapaportthus described his point:. . . unlike the Chinese-Room Argument, the issue is not whether he understands English; he does not. Nordoes he mechanically ("unthinkingly") follow a translation algorithm; others do his translating for him. Clearly,
though, he does understand Shakespeare - the literary scholarly community attests to that - and, so, he understands something. Similarly, Searle in the Chinese room can be said to understand something, even if it isn't
Chinese. More precisely, an AI natural-language-understanding system can be said to understand something(or even to understand simplicitly), in so far as what it is doing is semantic interpretation. (Of course, it does this
syntactically by manipulating the symbols of its semantic interpretation.) We can actually say a bit more: it
understands natural language, since it is a natural language that it is semantically interpreting. It is a separate
question whether that which it understands is Chinese. 4"Brain-like" AI computing is closing the gap lying between the human brain and the computer.
ART, a computer-based model of how the brain works, developed by Stephen Grossberg and his groupat Boston University's Center for Adaptive Systems, is said to be eerily brain-like in function.
David H. Freedman, the author of Brainmakers, describes ART as follows:
ART learns as the brain does, by studying examples, picking out patterns, and drawing its own conclusions. It
6has components analogous to those of the human brain; when one of these components is disabled, ART's
resulting impairment resembles that of people who have had brain lesions in the corresponding brain section.
As Grossberg puts it, ART is "a microcosm of cognition." More formally, ART is an artificial neural network. 5

ART seems to be a well-developed model of an artificial neural network. ART stands for "adaptive resonance theory." It is said that an ART neural network system consists of four main components: a short-term
memory to evaluate input patterns, a long-term memory to store categories, an attentional subsystem to focus
attention on important features of input patterns, and a reorienting subsystem to keep the long-term memory
from learning irrelevant patterns.
There are many interesting ongoing AI projects and efficient neural network systems in the world. Amongthese, lately I am interested in the "brainwaves" of artificial neural network systems.
100 billion neurons exist in the human brain and they are constantly exchanging signals among themselves. And brainwaves are electric waves emitted by the brain.
As I mentioned briefly earlier, my group DTI (Digital Therapy Institute) has created works of art that utilize
brainwaves.
Brain Wave Rider, which was shown at the ARTLAB exhibition in Tokyo and FISEA in Minneapolis in
1993, is a vehicle with neither engine nor wheels. You travel through a computer-produced landscape on themonitor by changing the frequency of your brainwaves.
Virtual Haze, which also uses brainwaves and has been shown at ISEA'94 in Helsinki, is a shoot'em-up
pitting you against the computer. You try to blast enemy UFOs by changing your brainwaves; failure to do solets the computer counter your attack.
What I found interesting in the story about ART is the existence of "brainwaves" in the system. Freedman
explains:"Even more intriguing, recordings of electrical activity in the brain suggest there are specific "waves" of activity
during recognition and memory formation that seem to correspond to the sequence of signals employed byART. Neurobiologists have noted that a brainwave known as "N200" accompanies a perception in their part ofthe brain that provides short-term memory, answered by a "PN" wave from long-term memory, apparently
corresponding to ART's bottom-up and top-down signals; when the brain is struggling with recognition it issues"P120" waves to short-term memory followed by "P300" waves to long-term memory, apparently corresponding
to ART's mismatch and reorienting signals. In fact, this might in a sense be considered a case of life imitating
ART, since ART was established before the pattern of interaction of these brainwaves was identified." 6

If our brainwaves and computers' waves could be identified clearly, and if both could possess some sortof compatibility with each other, the relationship between human and machine would enter a new stage.
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We could exchange data with machines in novel ways which should be completely different from thecurrent ways (typing on keyboards, clicking "mice" etc.) Moreover, via networks like a future version of theInternet, we would be able to send our own memories to some place or directly transfer human memory tosome memory storage device. In other words, we could upload and download our own memory data freely.
Technological developments always makes the mysterious real. With the appearance of TVs, peopleacquired the power of telepresentation.
Sooner or later, we are going to acquire the power of telepathy, and Synchronicity will become as commonplace as a weather forecast for the local area.
Kunstforum, 1995

1. C.G.Jung:
The reality of the psyche in Buddhist thought: from:'Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of theGreat Liberation', edited by J.J.Clarke,'Jung on the East', (London:ROUTLEDGE,1995) pp.205
2. Marvin Minsky:
The Society of Mind: 17.11 Intellectual Ideals,(New York:Simon & Schuster,1985,1986) pp.184
3.4. William J. Rapaport:
Syntactic Semantics:Foundations of Computational Natural-Language Understanding:from: Thinking Computers & Virtual Persons: Essays on the Intentionality of Machines: edited by Eric Dietrich(San Diego: Academic
Press, 1994) pp.254-255
5.6. David H. Freedman:
Brainmakers, (New York:TOUCHSTONE,1994) pp.62-63, pp.90-91

Kunstform, November - February, 1995, Germany

8The Dromology of the human brain and man-machine interface
Digital Therapy Institute

Brain Wave Rider is a game machine controlled by your brain.
You, the player, command the "vehicle" you are riding by changing the state of your brain activity. You
can make it go faster and slower, shoot missiles and fly up to the sky.
BWR reads the player's brain waves, changing the speed of the vehicle as it moves forward in thecomputer-generated "landscape." The brain wave data we are describing here are called EEG(=Electroencephalogram) in the medical field and have been used for generally measurements of brain
activity. In the BWR, we use the IBVA (Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer) to detect and analyze brain
waves via Macintosh computer. IBVA is a multimedia biofeedback system produced by Psychic Lab, Inc.
Standard brain wave classification recognizes four kinds of waves: Alpha, Beta, Theta and Delta. The
BWR displays "symbols" corresponding to each brain wave type, and transmits the vibration of the "engine"to the player's body through the body-sonic board and the body-sonic chair. Sound comes from the speakers
attached to the helmet and the chair. In addition, the flashing LEDs placed in the goggle synchronize withbrain wave frequency.
The brain wave types correspond with the following displayed symbols:
Alpha wave: missile launch.
Beta wave: meteorite attack.
Theta wave: explosion of substances in the brain.
Delta wave: psychedelic patterns
Eye movement: flying image. (Eye movement signifies
ocular muscle signals
with lower frequency
than the brain waves.)

Through these symbols, the player can visually recognize the waves his brain is emitting.

The most outstanding feature of the BWR's man-machine interface is that it uses the brain wave as a
trigger, causing physical change without physical action.
Without button-pushing or other physical action, the player can control the computer graphic image,sound and vibration via meditation or mental calculation, i.e., by changing the state of his brain waves.
9At the "Psycho-scape" exhibition organized by ARTLAB, an artistic organization backed by Canon Inc.,
DTI set up two BWR systems.
The players first sit down in the cockpit, put on the headband with brain wave detection sensors, andfinally on the helmet and goggles.
Their brain wave data is analyzed by two computers (Macintosh). One more computer (NEC PC-9801)
reads the analyzed data and controls the devices for the sound and CG images.

The goggles LEDs flash in synch with the players brain wave frequencies, fed to the eye apparatus by
the computers.
If player A should emit a higher-frequency wave such as Beta while player B emits a lower-frequency
wave such as Delta, B could be influenced to accelerate by A's brain waves and A could be influenced toslow down by B's brain waves, as the brain tends to be influenced by the frequency of light or sound.

As we have mentioned before, the speed of the video image changes according to brain-wave
frequency: higher-frequencies make the speed faster, and lower frequencies make it slower.
If both players emit higher-frequency waves they can travel as if flying, while they will seem to crawl if
both emit low-frequency waves. When only one player drives one BWR, he can attempt to control thevehicles speed freely.
If two experienced players skilled in controlling their brain waves drive two BWRs simultaneously, they
can fly forward together at very high speed; they also may constrain or interrupt each other's speed.

2. Vehicles and images of space
If you were to participate in a voodoo ceremony, you would be able to feel the energy emanating fromworshipers in the transcendental state as a shock wave penetrating the real world from the spiritual world.
Even if you had no previous knowledge of the ceremony or were just taking photographs of the goings-on,
you would feel it.
In many religions, the energy coming from "the spiritual experience" may be thought to be something
far removed from ordinary brain activity. However, as yet we do not have any means of precisely measuring
the values of this energy.
The energy released in such a ceremony would make the surrounding people feel it like an explosion,
without producing a physical change that would destroy the ceremonial situation (even though small animals
were sacrificed). Or rather it would make individuals feel implosion in their bodies in the form of spasms andfainting, just as images implode in their brains. Stage props, such as ornaments, patterns and incense,
merely play the role of the fuse for implosion.
DTI's activity began with the measuring of brain waves of a Chinese Qigong master in the state of
Qigong mental healing, studying the various subliminal effects on the five senses of audiovisual stimulation,and looking at other aspects of brain activity. In the end we have tried to grasp things generally thought of as
properties of spiritual activity - religion, mental healing, art appreciation etc. - at the materialistic level, as
signals and data. The BWR was born through a reversal of these activities.
10Paul Virilio contributes his short essay "The Last Vehicle" to Dietmer Kamper and Christoph Wulfs
Looking Back on the End of the World. In the essay he describes vehicles thus:"Also the advent of a final generation of vehicles, of means of communication for distances that havenothing in common with those associated with the revolution of transport anymore - as if the conquest of
space confirmed the conquest of the mere images of space. If in fact the end of the nineteenth century andthe beginning of the twentieth experienced the advent of automotive vehicle, the dynamic vehicle of therailroad, the street, and then the air, then the end of this century seems to herald the next vehicle, theaudiovisual one, a final mutation: static vehicle, substitute for the change of physical location, and extensionof domestic inertia, a vehicle that ought at last to bring about the victory of sedentariness, this time an
ultimate sedentariness."
The description of "the last vehicle" that Virilio portends surely applies to the BWR. "The victory ofsedentariness" is at the heart of the BWR, which the player commands without moving even a finger.
It is natural that the BWR correlates with Virilio's vehicle theory, as BWR is an interactive system using
audiovisual equipment, computers and computer graphic images for landscape simulation. Thus the player
can move through a multitude of images of space," all from the same physical location.

In religion, vehicles signify an important means of linking this world with the spiritual one. Vehicles andtheir images frequently play a part in religious ceremonies.
In the case of ceremonies performed on land, vehicles are hauled by animals such as horses, cows,
elephants, or people during the ceremony; generally they are retired to some sort of garage afterward. The
Chinese peoples of South East Asia, who maintain traditional customs more than the mainland Chinese,burn paper effigies of money, houses, cars and so on as gifts to the dead during funerals. The vehicles
cannot depart from this world if they are not burned.
Usually, vehicle denotes a means of transportation over land. Space transport is labeled space ship or
space vehicle. Once a vehicle leaves the land, its categorization is not clear. There are innumerable vehicles
and ships flying through the sky in the world of religion and myth.
On the other hand, in the case of certain rites performed on the water, ceremonial ships sail for a very
short distance in this world and then pass into the other. They transcend the boundary of the real world andthe images of space.
At the "Shaara boat" ceremony held on the last day of the Bon festival in Nishinoshima Mita in the Oki
islands, people build a straw boat, decorated with small colored flags attached to ropes stretched from themast and bearing the Buddhist sutra "Namuabidabutsu, and send the boat out with heaps of offerings to thesea. Some children actually climb aboard the Shaara boat as a second boat tugs it out to sea, until theceremonial boat starts sinking. Then the boat heads for the other world with spirits of ancestor on board.
Voodoo also uses a boat for the ceremony of Agwe, God of the Sea. Each voodoo divinity isexpressed as a symbol called a "vever." Agwe is represented by a sail boat with the word Immamou. The
boat used for the ceremony of Agwe depicted in the documentary film and book, Divine Horsemen: The
Living Gods of Haiti, produced by documentary film maker Maya Deren, resembles the boat of the Oki
islands. This boat is also decorated, and disappears with its burdens of offerings to the sea. In this case,
Agwe first makes his appearance by transmigrating to the priests performing the ceremony on the boat, then11the boat heads for the world of Gods.
Both the Shaara boat and Agwe's boat leave the shore to sail for a short distance on the ocean,moving in the images of religious space after they sink and stop their physical travel. These boats share apoint in common with the BWR as vehicles moving in the images of space.

3. LandscapeIf you have driven a car in the U.S.A., you have probably noticed the warning on the rear-view mirror
saying, "Caution: Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear." It is necessary to be prepared forevery contingency in the land of product liability.
Jean Baudrillard quotes this same warning at the outset of the first chapter, "Vanishing Point," in his
book America. He used the warning to express the emptiness of America, as he started his motor trip fromthe vast desert and discovered the rear-view mirrors warning.
The landscape on the monitor of BWR was created through popular AMIGA landscape simulation
software such as "Scenery Animator" and "Vista Pro." These pieces of software may be of limited business
use, but they are elaborate programs which let you easily enjoy traveling through computer-generated
landscape simulations. The detail of the images is evident when you look up through the leaves in a digitaltree to see blue computer sky beyond.
Interestingly, the software makers produce pre-generated data letting you reproduce and travel
through, in three dimensions, the grand views of America: the Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park, andso on. Now a new series of data, jumping off the American continent, take you as far as the extraterrestrial
landscape of Mars.
Baudrillard's America tastes of a road movie, passing through the desert and talking about people andtowns. But, this road movie belongs to the video age of the 1980s.
"We'd need the whole film of the trip in real time, including the unbearable heat and the music. We'dhave to replay it all from end to end at home in a darkened room, rediscover the magic of the freeways andthe distance and the ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed and live it all again on the video at home inreal time, not simply for the pleasure of remembering but because the fascination of senseless repetition isalready present in the abstraction of the journey".
Where the trip in the computer landscape differs from that of the road trip is that Baudrillard actually
ran through the real America. His trip was not simulacrum. Objects in his mirror just looked smaller, thats all.
His trip becomes simulacra only when recreated on video. Medium, in this case the computer and the video,
make the difference.
Baudrillard thus says in his book Simulation, "Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, thedouble, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or asubstance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory nolonger precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the map that engenders the territory".
The computer-generated landscape is a simulacrum, unlike the real landscape Baudrillard describes in
America, as it can take infinite forms never seen before. It is "a real without origin or reality: hyperreal." The
only person who can experience this hyperreality is the one operating the computer to generate the12landscape. With the BWR, a rider can travel through hyperreal landscape at hyperreal speed, all controlled
by his brain waves.

4. The brain and speed
Taking a ride on the BWR, you ostentatiously put on the helmet, like an old time race car driver.
However, what is the significance of speed to the brain controlling the speed of BWR?
The chapter Education and Development" in Marvin Minsky's book The Society of Mind starts with thequestion by Parent: "If those younger children take so long to acquire concepts like conservation of quantity,
can't we help speed up their growth by teaching such things earlier?"
The question interests us in that parents seem to only hope to speed up the processing speed of theirchildrens brains. A Japanese expression for cleverness translates literally as "the rotation of the head isquick, and English has its share of speed-centered phrases such as "quick-witted" or "a nimble mind."
Both examples reveal that importance is placed upon speed of the brain. According to a U.C. Berkeley
study in 1985, Einstein's brain had four times more "oligodendroglia" - helper cells that speed neuralcommunication - than the brains of eleven merely gifted people.
Fast processing speed is all-important to computers. No matter how someone may insist that "great
talents mature late" with regards to man, he will still choose a computer based on how fast it is. The Chinese
word for computer translates as "electric brain." It goes beyond the original English meaning - "that which
computes" - to suggest "Artificial Intelligence" as the most developed form. The fact we should not forget isthat the computer is an extension of the human brain, so that man will keep seeking a fast brain in the future
as well. The human brain will never slow down.
The value of experiencing the BWR is knowing the fact that you can effect a physical (speed) change
by varying the state of your brain waves. Usually one has no chance to observe his own brain waves (barring
EEG exams after suffering a head injury.) Even more so, nobody thinks of changing his own brain wave toeffect physical change in an environment. However, as you drive the BWR you gradually master changing
your brain waves. Which may not be as immediately useful as mastering, say, tax evasion, but it is still a real
expansion of ability.

Supplement
One of Marvel Comics super-heroes, Weapon X, is a mutant with fearsome combat skills honed
through training with a battle-simulator helmet which creates virtual combat scenes. His fictional helmet
resembles BWR's in both form and function: by donning it one can acquire new talents. When you discover
new ways of using your brain, the possibility of mutation will be open to you.
William S. Burroughs, expounding upon his thoughts in his dialogue "The Job," quoted from The Living
Brain by Gray Walter: "The rhythmic series of flashes appear to be breaking down some of the physiologic
barriers between different regions of the brain. Then Burroughs pointed out that the consciousnessexpanding experience can be induced by flicker - that is, rhythmic light flashing in the retina at the rate offrom ten to twenty-five flashes per second, creating characteristics of consciousness-expanding drugs.
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BWR's helmet can be both audiovisual apparatus like that which Burroughs used for his consciousnessexpanding experience, and a talent-acquisition trainer like Weapon X's helmet.

reference:
1. LOOKING BACK ON THE END OF THE WORLD, Dietmar Kamper, Christoph Wulf,
Semiotext(e)2. DIVINE HORSEMAN: THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI, Maya Deren, McPherson & Company
3. America, Jean Baudrilard, Verso
4. SIMULATIONS, Jean Baudrilard, Semiotext(e)5. THE SOCIETY OF MIND, Marvin Minsky, Simon & Schuster
6. Newsweek, June 28, 1993 "The puzzle of Genius"
7. The Job, William S. Burroughs, Penguin Books

1993"Psychoscape" ARTLAB, Canon, 1994
Revised version:"Brain Wave Rider: A Human - Machine Interface"

LEPNARDO, Volume 28, NUmber 4, 1995

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Decisions at the speed of electronic circuitry

The robots of writer Isaac Asimov seem to derive from some analogy with pet animals. In particular,
the response to humans of Robbie, a robot appearing in I, ROBOT, reminds me of a big dog who sometimes
bites his keeper. But if Robbie follows some rules, the Three Laws of Robotics in this case, he will be
admitted as a family member.
In the real world, machines' recognition ability seems to not even reach the animal level. Without
human assistance, machines are not yet given rights to judge things by themselves, even in the mostadvanced technological area such as computer-aided military technology. However, it is not a dream that
someday machines will feel, become jealous, joke, read minds, and do whatever else people do.
When we at DTI made the work VIRTUAL HAZE, the second work in our series of art works using
brainwaves, our biggest concern was how to make a computer react to various brain states through thesensing of brainwaves — in other words, the process of reading minds. However, I didn't want to think of it
as 'mind reading,' as I thought it was something different from 'brain reading'. Mind is not a physical entity but
the brain is. The brain accumulates knowledge, experience, etc. as data. Comparing the brain to a computer,the mind could be seen as an image on the monitor. It is a phenomenon resulting from processing by brain
hardware.
It is, however, not clear how we distinguish mind from brain terminologically. The field of psychology
takes up mind as its subject, describing the brain without clear definition. This is typical not only of
psychology. Even in Marvin Minsky's THE SOCIETY OF MIND, an element called 'agents' is used to explain
how mind is formed. Although the book describes how the mind functions, Minsky doesn't define theboundary between mind and brain either. Presumably, the distinction is not important to him in the context of
his theory, which contends that minds are like societies which grow from the child stage to the adult. In
chapter 1.2, 'THE MIND AND THE BRAIN', Minsky names some predecessors: psychologists producing
theories about child development, like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget; mathematicians on the mechanicalside who 'began to reveal the hitherto unknown range of what machines could be made to do' like Kurt Gödel
and Alan Turing; and Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who began to merge these two streams and'showed how machines might be made to see, reason, and remember' in the 1940s. Minsky also mentions
research into the science of Artificial Intelligence (on which he is an authority) starting in the 1950s, which
was 'stimulated by the invention of modern computers.' These descriptions may reveal how Minsky
constructed the context of his theory. Or some one already can sense how he develops the theory in earlypages of the book, as simply as a formula, like 'Freud+Turing+Artificial Intelligence=THE SOCIETY OF THE
MIND'. I am left to wonder why he entitled the chapter THE MIND AND THE BRAIN without delving into thedifference between them.
In DTI's art works, the brain, not the mind, plays roles including that of joy stick, interface, processing
unit, etc. Naturally the brain is a multi-purpose control unit; what we mainly focus on is the extension of its
control function. We have tried to extend this function beyond the body with two art works in the past. You
can make physical phenomena happen by changing your brainwave frequency, if you get accustomed tocontrolling it.
With BRAIN WAVE RIDER, the first work to use brainwaves, you control the speed, accompanied bysounds and vibration, of a vehicle racing through a computer-graphic landscape. The speed changes
according to the frequency; higher frequency gets you faster speed.
The second work, VIRTUAL HAZE, is a war game; you can shoot down enemy UFOs by producing
15

beta waves, or warp to another stage without fighting if you achieve alpha waves. Otherwise you will be shotby enemies if you don't concentrate on the battle, as one of the computers used for this game is capable ofreading the state of your brain and judging whether you are really willing to fight. If you don't concentrate onfighting, the computer will counter your attack, this time with an infrared ray gun. Machine versus human.
Similar technology is applied to some safety devices for operating machines or vehicles. These
devices analyze brainwaves, and shut down operation for the drowsy operator if they detect brainwaves of alower frequency at certain times.
This sort of relationship between man and machine will be be expanding in fields where 'decisions at
the speed of electronic circuitry' are essential. The biggest need lies in the military field, where quick
decisions give strategical superiority — 'move faster, kill better, and live longer than the enemy.' An article in
the September 1994 WIRED, 'Cyber-Deterrence,' reports on the 194th brigade of the US Army, which isliterally a high-tech army: 'at the high end of the lethality spectrum, the Americans had top-of-the-line M1A2
Abrams main battle tanks, each carrying an information system that collected real-time battlefield data from
airplanes, satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles. At the low end were the "21st Century Land Warriors"(also called "warfighters" but never "soldiers" or "infantry") who came equipped with day-and night-visionscopes mounted on their M-16s, video camera, and 1-inch LED screens attached to their kevlar helmets.
The 486 computers in their rucksacks were wired to radios that could send voice or digital-burst
communications to a battle command vehicle coordinating the attack through a customized Windows
program.'Paul Virilio talks about the central electronic-warfare administration in chapter 1, 'Military Force IS
Based upon Deception,' of his book WAR AND CINEMA: The Logistics of Perception. The administration isbased on "the so-called '3Ci' (control, command, communication, intelligence)" which attends "in real time tothe images and data of a planetary conflict." The book was written in the days of Ronald Reagan, whoseStar Wars project, a space-based anti-ballistic-missile system relying on lasers and mirrors, was slated forestablishment by the year 2000. The project never came about due to the end of Cold war and the budget
shortage. However, '3Ci' has survived the Gulf war and following conflicts over the world, and has been
inherited by military units like the 194th brigade.
In the same book, Virilio says 'weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception - that is
to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological process in the sense organs andthe nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of
objects'. Military technology becomes more and more perceptual and seeks decisions- making at the speedof electronic circuitry, which should be far faster than the human brain.
'By tracing the history of the modern war machine at each one of these levels (weapons, tactics,
strategy and logistics) we will be able to understand the role that computer technology has come to play inthe automation of the commander's task,' Manuel De Landa points out in his War in the Age of Intelligent
Machines.
However, technologically we are still at the beginning. With the exception of some examples likepilotless aircraft and unmanned tanks, which are intelligent enough to select and destroy their own targets, it
is said that the role of machines is still at the "advisory" level and not the "executive" level. But the evolution
will certainly take place.
What will happen when machines replace human commanders? De Landa comments interestingly:'the efforts of military institutions to get humans out of the loop have been a major influence in thedevelopment of computer technology. The birth of autonomous weapons systems, of war games played byautomata, of production systems that pace and discipline the worker, all are manifestations of this militarydrive. But. . . even though humans are being replaced by machines, the only schemes of control that can
16

give robots the means to replace them are producing another kind of independent "will" which may also
"resist" military domination'.
With our VIRTUAL HAZE, as I mentioned before, the computer reads brainwave and counters attacks
if it detects its enemy's failure to concentrate on the battle. This sort of thing may be applied to real militarytechnology.
Prior to the start of replacing human commanders with machines, the latter already are available tocollect any data regarding soldiers. This may include physical data, even brainwaves, of soldiers. The
WIRED article envisions: 'In a real war in the near future a video camera would record the body damage. In
this case the medic popped the disk into a portable PowerBook to discover that his victim had a sucking
chest wound. The image was digitized and transferred via a radiolink to a triage unit in the rear, where adoctor talked the medic through the treatment of the wounded soldier.' If said soldier were to get receive ahead injury, it would be natural to transfer his brainwave data to the rear. Soldiers' physical data become amilitary secret on the battlefield.
As De Landa says in the above-mentioned article, will independent will be able to resist military
domination? I have been wondering about this since I saw the computer precisely counter my attack in our
art work. I think that in order to evade the counter attack from the computer, I may have to implant somedevice into my brain to change the brainwave frequency so as not to be detected. But, are cyberpunkish
ideas like BRAIN IMPLANTS or WIREHEADS the best solution?

Notes:
1. ISAAC ASIMOV "I, ROBOT" BANTAM SPECTRA
2. MARVIN MINSKY "THE SOCIETY OF MIND" Simon & Schuster
3. PAUL VIRILIO "WAR AND CINEMA, THE LOGISTICS OF PERCEPTION"
translated by Patrick Camiller
VERSO
4. JAMES DER DERIAN "Cyber-Deterrence" WIRED September, 1994
5. MANUEL DE LANDA " War in the Age of Intelligent Machines"
ZONE BOOKS

Burda Academy, 1995, Germany

1995
17

Living on the network - Synchronicity of human brain and materials

From the early stage of computer research, computer scientists have predicted that in the future computers
would function as the human brain does.
Accomplishments of Artificial Intelligence research lead us to recognize that the difference between a computer
and the human brain is indistinguishable at the functional level. We now realize that the activity of the humanbrain could be recorded in a computer and its network in digital form. In a way, all 'spiritual' activity in your brain,including 'memory', 'thought' and 'will' could be processed and saved as data.
What we at DTI present at TELEPOLIS is intended to represent a new relationship between the human brain
and materials. Its concept may go beyond thoughts – for example, the simple things we believe such as "tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life", or our hopes for physical longevity. Because your spiritual activity
could be kept as data even if your physical part were to disappear. "Living on the network" could take on awhole new meaning.
Brain waves are under scrutiny by researchers everywhere. Some of the latest reports say that brain waves canbe used for controlling equipment if certain types of brain waves can be achieved, or for communication without
speech. (These particular technologies are still at too early a stage to have any practical application.)
At the UCLA Medical Center, for example, brain wave data are uploaded to a LAN for reviews of patients' brain
waves by the Department of Neurosurgery. In addition, the LAN is connected to the Internet, allowing a review
of patients' vital signs and brain wave patterns from anywhere with Net access.
In a future art project, an object glows in a water-filled tank in the center of a room. It moves from time to time,
like a living creature. Cables run from the creature to a computer. The computer contains brain wave data whichmake the creature move. The creature responds to the recorded brain waves as if controlled by a brain. Also, it
opens a communication line when another computer detects certain brain waves. The system allows observers
to transmit their own brain waves to the creature when they place sensors against their foreheads while touching a monitor. The observers can make the creature move, and initiate a phone line connection without any
physical action, if his or her brain waves are controlled properly. If these brain wave data were recorded to thehard disk of the computer, the same action could be repeated over and over.
The above is just a system analyzing and responding to brain waves as electromagnetic waves; it unfortunately
doesn't really understand the contents of the brain wave data. We can not see the contents of memory, thought,
will and other spiritual activities of the brain at this stage. However, even this might be possible someday.
20th century visual art was not able to totaly free our recognition and aesthetic values from seeing. Many artists– Dadaists, Surrealists, Marcel Duchamp and countless more – have tried to surpass those limitations, but
none have succeeded. Most artists haven't recognized that the eye is an unstable optical sensing organ connected to the brain, which is a mechanism making use of electrical and chemical reactions. But, for us, it is notnecessary to stick to aesthetic values in the art context because what we are approaching is a totally new shift
in cognition. It's totally different.
TELEPOLIS, Luxembourg, 1996
18

The Brain in the Techno-Landscape

In Stanley Kramer's famous movie "On the Beach", an American submarine captain played by Gregory Peckpicks up unidentified telegraph signals that might indicate survivors of a nuclear war that has alreadydestroyed most of the world, and goes up to San Diego from Melbourne with his crew to check it out. The
signals contain no message, but occasionally create words like "King Lear" and other random, nonsyntactical "words". Has someone survived to try to contact others? You can probably guess the truth. It was
just a Coca-Cola bottle caught against a window shade, accidentally placed on a telegraph machine. The
bottle was tapping against the machine in the wind.
When I think of artificial intelligence, this movie always comes to mind. It makes me imagine myself riding on
a submarine, looking for something indicating intelligence. Or maybe it's not just imagination. We experiencesimilar events in our daily life related to unidentified intelligence. But what is intelligence anyway? As seen in"On the Beach", we tend to fall into a psychological trap in which we believe non-intelligent "things" to be
intelligent.
'We might make mistakes. We might endow mindless things with minds, or we might ignore a mindful thing in
our midst. These mistakes would not be equal. To overattribute minds - to "make friends with" yourhouseplants or lie awake at night worrying about the welfare of the computer asleep on your desk - is, atworst, a silly error of credulity. To underattribute minds - to disregard or discount or deny the experience, thesuffering and joy, the thwarted ambitious and frustrated desires of a mind-having person or animal - would bea terrible sin.' -- Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds (1)Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, defines a "mind-haver" as different from a mindlessthing. From his book "Kinds of Minds": "When I address you, I include us both in the class of mind-havers.
This avoidable starting point creates, or acknowledges, an in-group, a class of privileged characters, set off
against everything else in the universe." So distinguishing mind-having from mindless is an "avoidable
starting point" for us.
Computers may become electronic brains
Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and MIT professor, reports on young children's recognition of computers,
especially whether or not they think computers are alive or intelligent. Psychology such as Jean Piaget's
traditionally says children between three and eight start understanding about what is alive and sentient
through their interactions with objects around them. This situation has drastically changed since the adventof the computer in the home. Now children play with computers which can speak, sing and cheat at tic-tactoe. Through interaction, computers make children think of them as having a sort of intelligence. Turkle
comments, "Children today contemplate machines they believe to be intelligent and conscious yet not alive."(2)
Once just machines for computing, computers are becoming something different from what we now call acomputing machine. As Turkle's study shows, more people have started thinking computers are intelligent. In
19Chinese, the word "computer" is expressed as "electronic brain", pronounced "dian-nao". The Chinese
expression for computer may be the most appropriate from here on out. (Actually, "diannao" was originally aslang term. A formal expression of the computer in Chinese is "jisuanji", which also literally means "computer= computing machine". This is a good example of imagination on the street overcoming formal academic
thinking. As Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Laboratory says in his book "Being Digital", now is the timefor "street smarts on the superhighway".)
In fact, computers nowadays don't have much intelligence, and most adults don't think of their PCs as more
intelligent than their colleagues. (But some of them may consider computers to be more useful than theircolleagues:-) In the future, computers with intelligence may be available in the home. Reuter reported on aBill Gates speech in Detroit as follows:
Tuesday April 29 2:59 PM EDT Microsoft's Gates Sees More Computer Interaction (By Todd Nissen)
DETROIT - Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, in town to make a $2 million cash and software donation, said thebiggest changes on the horizon for computers will be how they interact with users. Gates said personal
computers that can understand the context of spoken words and interpret facial expressions hold thepotential for more significant advances than the lower prices and faster speeds that will also occur.
Microsoft has sold operating systems for PCs not only to offices and schools but also to homes all over theworld. Everybody acknowledges that Bill Gates has been the best sales person in the history of computerbusiness. His speech above indicates the way our computers are heading. "Personal computers that canunderstand the context of spoken words and interpret facial expressions" in our home should be very useful.
We might be able to replace many non-intelligent home appliances, or even pet dogs and cats, with thosecomputers. For the moment, the majority of people's concerns regarding computers, like yours, centeraround clock speeds, multimedia performance etc. Drawing on Bill Gates' comments, in the future yourconcerns will shift to how your own computer cleverly responds to what you say, how it says something
funny to make you laugh when you're looking gloomy.
Bill Gates' words sound a bit out of place, though. What his company has done for the computer market isjust the sale of MS-DOS and Windows, and those OSes have pushed manufacturers to produce computerswith "lower prices and faster speeds". But now he seeks "the potential for more significant advances than thelower prices and faster speeds." In the context of computer development, the advent of smart computers isvery natural, and computers are already headed in this direction. Also, computers will change theirappearance. As Negroponte says, we might even live in a computer in the future. If so, might we live in an
intelligent "home"?
Meaningful Mechanical LifeIn the future, if you wish, most of your organs could be replaced with artificial organs: artificial heart, artificial
stomach, artificial womb... We might gradually become cyborgs. But will we be able to replace our brains
with something else? The answer might be "no" because of the definition of a cyborg. Cyborgs differ fromrobots. Robots are basically mechanical entities in any form. Androids look like humans and are
indistinguishable from them; they are sometimes genetically engineered organic entities but they do not
combine organic with non-organic parts and basically are robots.
20

On the other hand, cyborgs are basically humans with mechanical interchangeability. "The idea of humaninterchangeability with machines has been pushed even further by those who imagine that humans andmachines are merging to form a new hybrid entity: a cybernetic organism, or cyborg", says Claudia Springer,
an author of "Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age". In the book, she quotes thedefinition of two types of cyborg by David Tomas, an artist and anthropologist at the University of Ottawa:"the post-organic...classical (hardware-interfaced) cyborg and the postclassical (software-interfaced)transorganic data-based cyborg or personality construct." She continues saying, "the first type combines theorganic human body, which either preexisted as a person or was genetically engineered, with nonorganic
mechanical or electronic implants or prostheses. The second type has no organic form but consists of thehuman mind preserved on computer software. When fictional characters load software directly into theirelectronically wired brains, they also qualify as cyborgs." (3)A number of my artworks, such as "Brain Wave Rider" (1993, Tokyo and Minneapolis), "Virtual Haze" (1994,
Helsinki), "Synchronicity" (1995, Luxembourg), and "Wirehead" (1996, London), can be interpreted in thecontext of the "postclassical (software-interfaced) transorganic data-based cyborg." Through the artworks,
the audience can manipulate computer-generated images and sounds through electrodes on their heads. In
particular, the title "Wirehead" directly derives from the idea of "electronically wired brains." Programs for the
artworks can reflect the audience's mind by identifying brain waves; however, my "computer software" does
not yet approach the human mind. It could take another 100 years easily to accomplish this idea. Alreadysome computer scientists are trying to make programs which simulate our minds, though most research isstill at a very early stage and no one can predict when programs will function as "minds". Before we cancreate such a program, computers or machines might come to have a "mind" or become a "mind-haver" bythemselves!
(When Marvin Minsky, a MIT professor considered one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence,
was asked how long before we can create a HAL (the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey", written by
Arthur C. Clarke and filmed by Stanley Kubrick), Minsky replied as follows: "If we really work hard - andsmart - we can have something like a HAL in between four and four hundred years. I suppose if we're lucky,
then, we can make it by 2001!" ) (4)Stories about cyborgs are not only the stuff of science fiction novels but will relate to our future life style.
'Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our tools toourselves. This is a different dream of a common language. It means both building and destroying machines,
identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories. I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.' -- Donna
Haraway
Cyborgs have already influenced many areas in the cultural field. In 1983 Donna Haraway wrote "the Ironic
Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s, or A Socialist Feminist Manifesto for Cyborgs". The manifesto's influence has been
felt in some areas of the feminist movement since. She said:"I want to examine 'women in the integrated circuit' in relation to two universes of science and technology:
communications technologies and bio-technologies. These are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These
tools embody social relations in a particularly powerful way for women world-wide."21

Technologies, media, and science have been dominated by men. But now women might be able to use themas tools to liberate themselves. This is, however, not only a matter of feminism. "Cyborg imagery" might leadall of us to a meaningful mechanical life.
Who draws the landscape in the brain?
Landscape painting in the East differs from that in the West. One of the greatest inventions in Westernlandscape painting was the 3-D perspective that the Eastern painting lacks. In Eastern landscape paintings,
on the other hand, landscapes are expressed on the basis of empiricism. If you look at Eastern paintings,
especially old Chinese and Japanese paintings, you can see, for example, mountains and villages which are
not visible from the one viewpoint in the same composition. The painter draws according to his experience orsomeone's experience, so that the paintings represent the accumulation of experience.
It seems to me that landscapes in computer-generated Virtual Reality are landscapes lying between the
Eastern and Western modes. They are based on empiricism and perspective at the same time. The VR
image is naturally one of "perspective", one of the important visual elements of reality, but you can alsochoose someone else's perspective view. For instance, if you choose the view of 8 year-old child, you can
see the landscape from his perspective. Also the child can see from your view in the VR world. You canshare the experience with him. However, the VR image can let you go beyond this point, and experience theperspectives of creatures with views completely different from a human's. Some of them, like a jellyfish, only
recognize light and shadow. Or you may be able to realize the so-called "bird's-eye view" is not how asparrow sees the world at all.
Technology is changing both our view and the landscape at the same time. The parallax also will shift all thevalue systems of our visual culture. When Impressionists began their painting style influenced by thespectrum analysis of light, one of the latest scientific findings at that time, it was a revolution in art history.
Now we might be in the midst of another revolution in art history. The 20th century was the movie century.
No other form of artistic expression can steal this claim from the movie, the age's most representative art
form. What will appear in the 21st century? It is a difficult question. But what I can say here is that some point
always can be found in "the man-machine interface." The words 'man-machine interface' may remind someof just a keyboard or a mouse or another cyberpunk device from William Gibson's novels. However, in mymodest opinion, the man-machine interface in some form will play a role as tools for new artistic expression.
My brainwave-detecting helmet might be a very early model of the new art tools for drawing landscapes inthe brain.
NOTES:(1) Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds,(BasicBooks,1996): 4(2) Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen,(SIMON & SCHUSTER,1995): 84(3) Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age, (University of Texas
Press,1996): 19-20(4) David G.Stork, Scientist on the Set:An Interview with Marvin Minsky,(The MIT Press,1997): 30

The text was written for a book for LIQUID VISIONS (Lucerene, Switzerland). 199722

Smart, Friendly and Personal - an Agent for All of Us

Computer science -- it's the alchemy of the modern age. This is what makes the field so attractive to inquisitive
young minds. "The Fetishism of Commodities", a key concept behind "alienation" in Marxism philosophy, may
never change in future society. Marx said that "price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression ofvalue. The values of all commodities of this country, for example, are expressed in gold prices, while on the Continent they are mainly expressed in silver prices." (Karl Marx, Capital). In the 1970s, the international monetarysystem lost its convertibility with gold. Since then, our paper money has been scrip guaranteed by nothing morethan mutual agreement.In the 1990s, money is losing even more of its materialistic roots. "Electronic money" istaking the place of conventional money. Values are expressed in digital data; manipulating digital data via computers has become integral to the basis of value formation. The old saw "Time is Money" needs an upgrade to "Processing Speed is Money"; the processing speed of computers becomes the most essential part of value formation.
Agent technology has become one of the hottest areas of computer science, in response to a number of factors (butpredominately business needs). Computer scientists, today's alchemists, don't produce gold but rather programs
that "live" in the digital habitat. Agent technology will develop at an accelerated pace for next decade or so. We
have a need for agents to process tasks in our daily life. We'll use agents to check schedules, answer the phone,receive and send e-mail, gather information on our interests, monitor stock markets, secure our homes, and so on.
In other words, we're going to depend upon agents to be our secretaries, our messengers, and our guards. So weneed these agents to be smart. They'll need to grow in intellect in response to our needs.
Agents are developed "bottom-up", in contrast to the conventional "top-down" approach of designing Artificial Intelligences. Learning is a very important process to agents. Artificial Intelligence applied to business uses so far
leaves us with an impression of inflexibility. They show intellect in given tasks but are not so smart in newlyexperienced situations. Most Artificial Intelligence programs are built upon the expert system, which seeks to store
the knowledge of medical doctors, lawyers, engineers and so on. AIs have been used in power plants, hospitals,
transportation systems, etc. Pursuant accidents have made us aware that expert systems aren't always trustworthy. (This is a sci-fi standby, and we see it again in "Jurassic Park", where so much trouble begins with a computer
system under-counting the park's dinosaurs. The story plays on our worries about computer systems.) Too many
experts know their expertise is flawless. They're wrong.
Already agent programs are at work on the desktop and on networks. Each agent has unique tasks and behaviors.
On desktops we see operating systemagents and application agents; on the Internet, Web search agents, Web server agents, information filtering
agents, information retrieval agents, notification agents, service agents, and mobile agents; and on intranets, collaborative customization agents, process automation agents, database agents, and resource brokering agents.

"MExA = Mind Extension Agent" - Cheerful communication between mind-havers and mindless machines"When I address you, I include us both in the class of mind-havers." - Daniel C. Dennett, "Kinds of Minds"
An agent I am currently developing is called MExA (=Mind Extension Agent). MExA is created for use by man the"mind-haver". It is a speech-recognizing, brainwave-reading, speech-enabled, information-searching and learning23

agent. (Speech recognition is currently limited to English.) MExA's current job is to entertain users culturally. It
selects programs and information from the Internet (or an intranet) for its users, guided by man-machine interaction
utilizing brainwaves and voice. It talks, tells jokes and selects Web pages containing information that it deems
appropriate for the user.
But I really expect MExA to help bridge the gap between man and machine. The computers we use every day are
not so human-friendly; they certainly don't seem to be making friends with us. We don't include them in our "classof mind-havers" yet. (Of course, the definition of "mind-haver" varies by individual.)" "We left Houston at dawn, headin' down the road - just me and my truck." Strange. If this fellow thinks his truck issuch a worthy companion that it deserves shelter under the umbrella of "we," he must be very lonely. Either that, or
his truck must have been customized in ways that would be the envy of roboticists everywhere. In contrast, "we just me and my dog" doesn't startle us all, but "we - just me and my oyster" is hard to take seriously. In other words,
we're pretty sure that dogs have minds, and we're dubious that oysters do."- Daniel Dennett, "Kinds of Minds"
As Dennett says, it's odd how the truck driver treats his mindless vehicle as a worthy companion on the road. We
give minds to dogs but not oysters. "Some think it's obvious that a ten-week-old fetus has a mind, and others think
it's obvious that it doesn't." (Dennett) So what about computers? Some surely think of their computer as a collaborative colleague, yet most consider it just a machine. We're nowhere near creating a computer like HAL in "A Space
Odyssey". Marvin Minsky says of "HAL's Legacy": "I am still a realist: If we work really hard-and smart we can havesomething like a HAL in between four and four hundred years. I suppose if we're lucky, then, we can make it by
2001!"
MExA is no HAL. It has no intelligence, and only responds to a user's voice and brainwaves. (It's worth noting thateven HAL described himself as an intellect-less mimic of man's behavior.) However, MExA can record the user's
voice and brainwave patterns so that future versions could draw upon these data when communicating with man.
Why have MExA use brainwaves? EEGs are used as input data to investigate man's "mind". Other possible inputs
include event-related brain potentials (ERP), electromyograms (EMG, a measure of muscle activity), pupilometry(a measure of changes of pupil size), electroculography (EOG, a measure of eye movement), electrodermal activity(EDA, changes in electrical activity at the skin surface), heart response, blood volume, and blood pressure. Then
there are measures like respiration, oxygen consumption, salivation, skin temperature, and gastric motility. In
addition to speech recognition, the use of face recognition should be considered in the future.
These body signal analyses and readings are inputs to be processed by the computer technology. These data areused in some fields such as Psychophysiology. But there are cultural reasons to use these too. The technologicaldevelopments born of computer engineers aren't always keen on cultural awareness!
For example, the Unicode developed mainly by computer engineers in Western countries may not fit non-Westerncultures if it restricts their use of language. People in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan use Chinese characters(along with home-grown characters in Japan and Korea). The Taiwan government has formally recognized about
50,000 characters. Most Western countries use alphabets containing far fewer characters. Ignoring these differences, Unicode unwittingly tries to simplify real-world cultural traits in its zeal to simplify digital text processing.
24Even the ways of using "yes" and "no" may differ among cultures. A native
speaker of English asked "Don't you like apples?" might answer "No, I don't like apples". But in other langauges
including Japanese, the answer would be "Yes, I don't like apples".
Existing computer technology is far from enabling linguistic communication between machine and man. For us tounderstand each other, computers are going to have to climb higher up the intelligence ladder. And when they gain
those smarts, the use of physical input data might help machines understand their mysterious organic partners.
A technological archetype of MExA was originally developed for "News_agent(x)" (1997) exhibited at ISEA97 in
Chicago. News_agent(x) was my first work in a series of agent-based interactive art works. The following text was
written for ISEA97 to describe the basic concept of News_agent(x):News_agent(x)Stock markets, wars, power struggles, environmental problems, murders, and more -- we always try to find out
what's behind the headlines on television news or what's to be read between the lines of newspaper articles. It's
easy to see that there are many causal relationships lying under the surface of the daily news. All the small particles
of cause interact with each other, to become social phenomena at the final stage.
Evening news programs on TV can work toward family ties, providing a time for sharing common subjects withother family members. Yet 24-hour news programs like CNN or BBC Satellite can turn us into world news addicts.
We can hardly stop watching news programs. They bring dramatic spectacles to our homes in real time, as domusic and sports channels.
News seems to influence our feelings, thoughts, behavior and attitudes in everyday life. All of human activity
reflects the mechanical, materialistic elements which form the world. This is the traditional sociological viewpoint,
but it is being turned upside-down. We should now start interpreting society through the methods of biology. Social
structure needs to be seen as a biological system rather than a material system. Applying this interpretation tonews, the reflection of our social structure in all of our activities is based on biological reasons, since individuals'
activities can be understood in the context of biological rules.
The latest theories in financial analysis -- as well as other fields -- derive largely from biological findings. (Theories
based on "complex systems" are a good example.) Darwinian competition, too, is being applied to those theories.
For ISEA97, I would like to set up a closed circuit information flow, a virtually-created "news program", which
consists of TV images, newspaper articles and financial market reports. A "favorability" score indicated by theaudience's brainwaves will categorize news contents. Brainwave data, in this case, depicts the audience's subconscious. In between the human response and news factors, there would be an agent which indicates the audience's
state of mind. There would be 4 degree of "favorability" in responding to news: very favorable, favorable, neutral,and unfavorable. Depending upon the "favorability" indicated by measured brainwaves, the agent would modify thenews and financial market reports that it calls up. The more the audience indicates favor, the more the agent"grows", like a biological entity. If the agent grows to a certain degree, it starts breeding. The agent has a life span,so that it will have to mature within a given period of time. Otherwise it cannot bear descendants.
25

The result of the whole process above can be output as a graph in a financial report. The audience can see various
types of news and find out
how their minds relate the news factors at the same time a computer detects how an audience's brain is behaving.

News_agent(x) worked only locally as part of an installation artwork at the ISEA97 exhibition site. As an installation
artwork -- although an unfinished one -- it represented my concerns about man and machines, information, andculture.
MExA (=Mind Extension Agent) carries on all the functions of News_agent(x), is able to retrieve information fromnetworks, and has the other functions mentioned above. At the current stage of development, it doesn't differ fromthe ordinary software agents you see on your desktop or on some Internet sites. However, it's still developing. It willbe learning as an intelligent agent program and will communicate with other agents too.News_agent(x) is an interface agent custom-selecting news by corresponding with users' brainwaves. By contrast, MExA is an entertainment agent -- with an additional focus on promoting communication between man the mind-haver and mindlessmachines. In the future, studies using MExA may cross-develop with other scientific and cultural fields such as
Psychophysiology, Biology, Psychology, Ecology, Anthropology, Philosophy and Medical studies.

26

bodyfuture - Say "good bye" to the terrestrial body

Launching spacecraft is an everyday event seen on the TV in morning news shows. Ina story on Mars exploration,a CBS newswoman asked, "Now, are we going toMars?" as if she was talking about going to Manhattan or Florida.
Few are bewildered by this kind of things. Given the biological and nonbiological evolution to come, almost every
form of fashion is trivial. Fashion appeals to us only when we are attached to our bodies that have evolved within
the confines of terrestrial ecology. We have already set out for the direction toward abandoning the terrestrial wayof being. The old astronaut John Glenn returned to the space not because of the countdown to "space travel foreveryone"in the near future, but because of the striking similarity between aging --physiological decline of thehuman body-- on the earth and the degeneration of muscles and bones in the space. There's a great concern about
the fact that our bodies -- our long companions -- are not spaceworthy. We are pressed to decide when and how weshould have done with ourbodies, which are going to be useless.
Human beings are still on the way ofevolution. The enormous length of time required for biological evolution isbeyond the perception of ordinary people. On the other hand, human "history" is nothing but millenniums. The
makeup of our minds have hardly changed in the last 30,000 years. The people who lived in caves and hunted fortheir day's games are not much different from modern "civilized" people with respect to the mental elements. The
only difference maybe the ability to understand vaguely the status of our unchanged self.
The last fashion is for us the people feeling shame for the second time since expulsion from the paradise. It
provides us a guise to conceal our bodies, and also an attire for the ceremony of departure from the gods and spirits
associated with terrestrial ecosystems.
Some entities in our neighborhood continue to evolve at a great speed incomparable to that of livingorganisms.They are machines. Mathematician von Neumann, the father of computers, stipulated that machines
can self-reproduce and satisfy basically all requirements for living organisms. The processing capacity of the central processing unit, sitting at the center of the machine's brains, is growing exponentially. The capacity of machines
will soon match the human brains and then excel. As Hans Moravec, who created the Robotics Institute atCarnegie Mellon University, said, machines are our future "mind children."Marshall McLuhan saw the extension of the human body in the way media developed in the latter half of the 20th
century. However, his discourse of extension applies only to the body undergoing the short transient phase fromthat time to the near future. Nowadays, 30 years after McLuhan, our focus is gradually shifting from extending the
body to breaking out of the body. To separate the consciousness from the body means putting an end to thehistorical controversy about "body and mind." Somewhere in the future, human beings will have to decide whether
they should upload their consciousness into machines, or they should surrender the role as the master of the world
to machines that are superior to them.
This is not a cyberpunk story. Felix Guattari, already in 1987, foresaw thatt he subjectivity of machines would not
be placed under the reorganized subjectivity on the part of human beings, but there would be the subjectivity ofmachines created anew. Unfortunately, his heart stopped beating before he told this in detail.
Let's talk again about more physical (nearer to the body) things. The life span of human beings will soon be twice
as long as it is. We have much to do, and we must do it making use of our bodies that are going to be useless. Givensuch missions, the parts of the body losing functions may need to be supplemented mechanically or biologically,27

and this notion, if you think over it, is taken for granted by many. If you acknowledge this notion, youshould be able
to understand the themes that must be developed in arts and fashion in the coming age of apprehension for "theStorm and Stress," waiting forthe demise of the terrestrial body.
Mapping of the human genome allows us to understand what programs are the basis for the constitution of ourbodies. The completion of the whole process of this decoding is now a question of time. After all, we'll have anothertrifling thing to worry about, dragging the burden of the"obsolete body" (Stelarc).
When their DNAs are compared, chimpanzees and human beings are virtually similar. Despite this fact, many
unenlightened people, imprisoned in the darkness of the body, want to emphasize the absolutelyi nsignificant
differences in the color of the skin or hair or in gender. At the same time, some people tries to createhuman spermsof murine origin.Conventional values are being challengedby extremely radical technologies.Feminism, as well as
antiracism, seems tosuffer difficulty in forming a commonfront because of ideological conflictsamong the groups
that once pursued acommon cause. Our conceptual understanding of self still impedes the insight that our body is
not much different from a computer bought at a shop, in the sense that it is an assembly of separate parts. The
situation resembles the belief in the concept of a state or nation as communal illusion, and this also will undergo aprocess of deconstruction in the same way as the globalization in economy and politics is gradually annihilatinginternational borders and even nationalities.
The use of fashion to dress our obsolete terrestrial bodies for whatever the best of beauty may be based on thesame mental logic as the Neanderthal men mourned the death of their peers with the offering of flowers. It is difficult
to tell at present whether this mental logic should survive the future process of the replacement of subjectivity. Only
one thing is certain: We someday have to say "good bye" to our terrestrial bodies.

bodyfuture, text for "bodyfuture" installation, 1999
National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Metorpolitan Musuem of Contemporary art, Tokyo

28

Hell Hawaii"Hawaii, a paradise on Earth" -- the words carry a nice ring, especially to commercial and political interests.
What most people don't know is that today's image of Hawaiian paradise was built atop the ruins of the land's
independence. The Hawaii Monarchy was illegally overthrown by American businessmen on January 17, 1893.
A century after the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, on November 23, 1993, President Clinton signed Public
Law 103-150, the "Apology Resolution" aimed at native Hawaiians.
But no "resolution" could reverse what befell Hawaii and its native history.
To swarms of Japanese tourists Hawaii is a paradise -- if paradise is nothing more than a beautiful resort, that is.
They swim, surf, fish and play golf in the emerald islands, while for the most part remaining ignorant of thehistory of Hawaii and even the history of its Japanese immigrants.
Originally Japan and Hawaii maintained a good relationship. Around the end of the19th century, King Kalakaua
even proposed a royal marriage between his princess niece and a Japanese prince, but unfortunately theJapanese declined. (But in modern times, tracking the year-end Hawaiian holidays of Japanese movie stars andpop singers is a topic of intense interest for Japanese New Year's television programs.)
Talk of the US - Japan relationship as it relates to Hawaii naturally centers on the state's unfortunate role as thestarting point of the two nations' Pacific ocean clash in World War II. The American "Remember Pearl Harbor"
stands as a rallying cry to counter the Japanese "No more Hiroshimas".
One apocryphal story holds that the US military knew of the coming Japanese attack without sending notice toPearl Harbor, as the Japanese military's coded communication was easily deciphered by the US intelligence
service.
It was an information war from the beginning. Can we see here the roots of the US government's keen sensitivity
to the export of American PGP technology?
"American businessmen" took over Hawaii
Mention of Hawaii and businessmen brings to mind Elvis Presley's dad in "Blue Hawaii", with his stereotypical"wealthy mainland executive" lifestyle.
Elvis played the rich kid in the movie, always looking fancier than his native Hawaiian and Japanese Hawaiian
friends. The attitudes of dad and his son in this movie struck me as colonialistic.
Knowing how American businessmen took over Hawaii is important in understanding the history of the land. In
January 1893 Queen Liliuokalani, the last successor to the throne, was preparing to proclaim a new constitution
to restore the crown's power.
A group of armed American businessmen occupied the Supreme Court, declared the monarchy overthrown, andannounced a provisional government, led by Sanford Dole, son of a pioneer missionary. A contingent of US
sailors came ashore, ostensibly to protect the property of US citizens, but instead of guarding the property theyclaimed to protect, the troops marched on the palace and aimed their guns at the queen's residence. Realizing
the futility of opposing US forces, Liluokalani opted to avoid bloodshed and stepped down.
29

The US president at the time was Democrat Grover Cleveland, who had just replaced a Republicanadministration and clearly favored the queen.
Cleveland ordered the US flag to be taken down and Liliuokalani restored to her throne. However, the provisional
government was firmly in power and turned a deaf ear, declaring that Cleveland was meddling in "Hawaiian
affairs". Although Cleveland initially favored reversing the situation, he also knew that the American public's
sense of justice was none too keen on the matter and that ousting a government of white Americans in favor ofnative Hawaiians wouldn't be of any aid to his own political future.
Consequently, the preseident's actions were largely limited to rhetoric.
The history of Hawaii points out some dangers in the American way of business, especially in today's Pax
Americana digital world.

Immunology and independence
Descendents of the native Hawaiian peoples who lived in the islands at the time of their European "discovery" in1778 by British explorer Capt.
James Cook are still seeking real independence. However, it is said that the number of "pure Hawaiians" is 9000
today, less than 1% of the islands' population. While the sugar industry boomed in the middle of 19th century,
Hawaii's native population was in decline, largely as the result of diseases introduced by foreigners.
Hawaii is a chain of islands floating in the middle of the ocean; the diseases were brought in from the outside
world. Hawaii's immunological isolation led to a horrible tragedy. Today we panic upon learning of Ebola
Haemorrhagic Fever, yet as an epidemic it's limited to small areas only.
What native Hawaiians experienced was an influx of epidemics throughout their homeland.
Being a Hawaiian today is largely a matter philosophical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional ties.
There are an estimated 200,000 people -- about 20 percent of the state's diverse population -- who claim
descent from the first inhabitants of the islands.

Tokyo used be a Mecca for Hawaiian music. And now it has us with our "Hell Hawaiian music".
Hawaiian music is not as popular now in Japan as it was in the old days. The post-WWII era brought a big
Hawaiian music boom, back when Hawaii was the dream destination of honeymooners.
The existence of many Japanese immigrants in Hawaii (ethnic Japanese make up 21% of the population, thesame ratio as Caucasians) also spurred sympathetic feelings in Japan. The island sound caught the ears ofmany a young Japanese music lover. The popular singer Teruko Hino was known as the "Queen of Hawaiian
music".
(I've just recently found out that she's a friend's mother!)I don't play our music happily because we know that Hawaii is not a paradise, but a hell.
Also, our music is culturally, immunologically and digitally different from native Hawaiian music.
It is a new music, "Hell Hawaiian".

30

I strongly recommend you visit the site "Hawaii - Independent & Sovereign Nation-State"
http://www.hawaii-nation.org/hawaii-nation.html/) to better understand Hawaii and its history

31

A Game for Love and Fascism
The story of Giacomo Pucchini's opera "Tosca" provides an exercise in game theory.Tosca is a beautiful singer andher lover Mario a painter, arrested by the police forhaving sheltered an escaped political prisoner. Mario is sentenced to death. Torescue him, Tosca has to negotiate with the police chief, Scarpia, who lusts afterTosca. Scarpia
offers a conditional deal: he will save Mario's life only if Toscabecomes his lover. Tosca agrees to the deal andScarpia orders blanks to besubstituted for the firing squad's bullets. However . . .
Game theory looks at how an individual makes decisions based on instrumental rationality. John von Neuman -mathematician, Hungarian immigrant and pioneer of the modern computer -- developed the discipline together withhis colleague, economist Oskar Morgenstern. (Von Neuman is also well known for his crucial mathematical contributions to the Manhattan Project to develop atomic weapons during WWII.)
While playing poker and observing the role of bluffing, von Neuman became interested in the general problem ofwhat to do when your best choice depends on what othe rpersons think you might to do. He and Morgenstern
defined game theory as any interaction between agents that is governed by a set of rules specifying the possible
moves for each participant, and a set of outcomes for each possible combination of moves. Game theory can beapplied to decisions of all kinds -- crossing the road intraffic, negotiating disarmament, raising prices, giving tocharity, joining a union,
producing a commodity, having children, and so on.
Among various "games" studied, the Prisoner's Dilemma is perhaps the most fascinatingfor many social scientists.
The name comes from a particular illustration of theinteraction of two people. The story behind the game is this:Two people are picked up by the police for robbery and placed in separate cells. They each have the option toconfess to the crime or not. The prosecutor tells each the consequences of the combined decisions made by thetwo prisoners. If both "confess", the judge, having no doubt over their guilt, will give each 3 years each in prison. If
both do not confess, then conviction is still the result, but the doubts in the case make the judge err on the side ofleniency, handing down sentences of only 1 year each.
Here's the catch: the prosecutor also notes that he can intercede with the judge on behalf of one prisoner when that
prisoner confesses and the other does not. The judge looks kindly on such action: it helps to make theprosecution's case, and thus earns the confessing prisoner a suspended sentence of no jail time. But exemplary
punishment of five years is meted out to the prisoner who does not confess, as his plea of not guilty has wasted
court time.
According to the rules of game theory, a strategy is "dominated" if it is never an optimal strategy no matter whatstrategy the opposition chooses. Conversely, astrategy is "dominant" if it is the optimal strategy (i.e. it maximizes aplayer'sutility pay-off) regardless of the opposition's choice of strategy. And when anoutcome results from strategies that agents have good reason to follow, game theorydefines that outcome as an "equilibrium".
If we assume that each prisoner only cares about avoiding prison time, then confession becomes the dominant
strategy for each player. The result of three years in prison for each prisoner is the equilibrium.
Each prisoner knows that the best thing to do is to confess -- and yet that choice yields the paradoxical result of32

making each worse off than he would have been had hechosen "don't confess" and there by spending only one
year in prison.
On Being Nice
The Prisoner's Dilemma, originally conceived in the 1950s, has spawned numerous games, each uniquely different
from the original. The popularization of the computer has allowed the study of repeated games, which extend thescope of game theory considerably.
In the 1970s, political scientist Robert Axelrod organized a tournament of computerprograms employing strategies
to "win" a Prisoners' Dilemma situation. The winning program was Tit-for-Tat (TFT), submitted by Anatol Rapoport.
The TFT programcooperates on the first round, and on every subsequent round mimics the other player's previous
move. Thus, if the other player cooperates (defects) in the nth round, TFT will follow (defect) on the (n+1)th round.
This strategy is very simple --proving that simplicity is not necessarily a disadvantage. TFT achieved thehighestaverage score among a field of far more complicated programs.
Axelrod pointed out that TFT contains two elements in its strategy. These can be described with the words "nice"and "forgiving". The biologist Richard Dawkins alsoi ntroduced the Tit-for-Tat strategy in his book "The Selfish
Gene". He agrees with Axelrod, noting that many wild animals and plants are engaged in ceaseless games of
Prisoner's Dilemma. Niceness is a technically important strategy, according to Dawkins: "If we translate the colloquial meaning of 'nice guy' into its Darwinian equivalent, a nice guy is an individual that assists other members ofspecies, at itsown expense, to pass their genes on to next generation. Nice guys, then, seem bound to decrease in
numbers: niceness dies a Darwinian death. But there is another,technical, interpretation of the colloquial word
'nice'. If we adopt this definition,which is not too far from the colloquial meaning, nice guys can finish first."
The strength of the 'niceness' strategy was only realized using by computers forrepeated games. Repeated games
gave us new views into game theory, biology, and computer science, all at the same time.
Fascio on Networks
Fascism today will not be the same as fascism in the past. Fascism derives from the Italian word "fascio", which
equates to "bundle" in English -- for fascism bundles people up like straw. We now have the grandchildren of old
fascists trying to "bundle up" people in Austria, to oust foreigners from the homeland. These Austrian fascists,
following the way of the old-time fascists, have so far been enjoying power in acoalition government. Their fortunes seem rooted in local causes, such as reaction against the former government and people's xenophobia.
However, their time could be short. "Bundling" is an old idea in today's information society. Information flow isessential to our society -- that is, to the global flow of information, materials, and people, borderless in every
dimension. At any given time, the equivalent of the entire population of the USA is moving around the world,in theform of refugees, tourists, business persons, and exiles. The fascism idea is just a backlash against this situation.
Our life itself depends on information flow in DNA. Mutation from a normal gene to anoncogene can be caused bysome extremely subtle change in this flow. For example, thehuman bladder carcinoma oncogene and its precursor,
the normal human ras gene, are outwardly very similar. Both are five thousand DNA bases long -- identical in allbases but one, where the sequence GCC GGC GGT changes to GCC GTC GGT. That single replacement of one
33

G by a T in the bladder carcinoma cell DNA is a very subtledifference in an information flow -- which leads todrastically different results.
We'd do well to realize that fascism today is also a malfunction in information flow -- not only in a political context
but also in technological, economic, and cultural contexts. Another characteristic of fascism as totalitarianism ismonitoring. The slogan "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" from George Orwell's "1984" is hardly an originalcitation, but "1984" has played an amazing role as a prophecy for certain realms of politics in the twentieth century.
Many people think of monitoring as specific to totalitarianism, whether fascism or communism, but it's specifictoorganizations in any form: the state, company, school, hospital, union, etc. The e-mail system at work is recognized as company property these days; a system operator in the employ of the company might be reading your emails. In the early days of Internet use at offices, some employees tried to sue employers for invasion ofprivacy
after they found managers reading their e-mails. Yet monitoring of e-mail ona company-owned mail system has
become almost the norm. It's common sense in the business world.
However, common sense can lead you into a trap on the national and internationa lstage. Monitoring exists not
only in totalitarian countries but also in "free"nations. Echelon is known as a spy system designed and coordinatedby the US NationalSecurity Agency (NSA) to monitor everything from e-mail to satellite communications.Shared by
five English-speaking countries -- the USA, England, Canada, Australia, andNew Zealand -- Echelon is a global
network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted transmissions for pre-programmed
keywords.
It is suspected that Echelon has been used not only for national security purposes but also for spying on large-scalebusiness projects in the private sector, forperceived impact on national welfare. Is this a new type of fascism? A
system likeEchelon literally "bundles up" cables used for communication -- a network fascio, ifyou will. At least withe-mail, you can encrypt messages using a program like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to keep your messages forintended eyes only.
Conclusion
Getting back to Tosca's story: how does this opera end? The bad outcome reads as follows. As they embrace,
Tosca stabs and kills Scarpia, deceiving him. She expects that her negotiations with Scarpia will let her reclaim herlover Mario and escape --but alas, Scarpia also defected! The bullets were real. The opera ends in tragedy as
Tosca leaps to her death.
You may wonder what the game theory aspect of "Tosca" has to teach us, or how it applies to Austrian politics.
Theoretically speaking, the fascist situation is not somuch an instance of a Prisoner's Dilemma game, but anotherclassic game: Hawk - Dove. So the instrumentally rational decision for people and artists is to maximize democratic freedom, and obviously to not compromise with fascists. Those bad guys cannot finish first.
My favorite ending for the opera also strays from serious game theory. Most audiences today want happy endings.
They want Disney. In Tosca by Hollywood, a sympathetic soul would aid Tosca in escaping with Mario. The credits
would roll as Tosca and Marioembrace. Kiss, kiss.
Watch out! This might be another type of totalitarianism, attacking our sense of aesthetics.
34

Essays for a web-zine,"TELEPOLIS"

35

Lives in your pockets and girls in your memories

Personal computers are everywhere from New York offices to Buddhisttemples in Tibet. They normally sit on
or under our desks. Our computersare still in the early stage of development, so we give them places likethe
top of the desk or below it. In the future, computers will lookdifferent from the one before you. It may not evenbe called a computer any more. Or, as Nicholas Negroponte of the Media Lab at MIT writes in his book
BEING DIGITAL, we may live inside computers in the future.
While we're not yet ready to start living inside our computers, alreadymany female Japanese students feed
the cats and dogs that live in the girls' PDAs (=Personal Digital Assists). Girls give them food and pet themevery day. These digital animals respond like real animals and sleep in their owners' pockets.On the other
hand, some young boys prefer girls found in computer games toreal girls. They feel that real girls don't quite
meet their tastes,whereas so-called "Anime" girls are controllable. ("Anime" inJapanese is derived from"animation" originally, but has come to refer toJapanese cartoon characters even outside Japan. If you type
"Anime" into search engines on the net, you'll find sites concerning "Anime".)Even some adults are trying toraise babies in computer simulation games,without having had raised real ones.If they raise the game's girlbaby theright way she becomes a little sweet angel when she reaches 17.But raise her wrong, and the user
is stuck with a 17-year old bitch.The borders between real life and electronic life in computers is becoming
more and more vague. The meaning of "real" is changing.
Naturally, business people aren't overlooking these changes as a busineschance. Japan's largest
entertainment talent agency, Hori production Co.,and a major advertising agency, Hakuhodo, have beenworking hand in hand todevelop the world first "Virtual Idol." Developed under the code name "DK96", she is
16 years old, good at singing and dancing, and speaks a couple of languages because, the explanation
goes, she was born and grew up nearby an American military base in a Tokyo suburb. I personally don't
understand this part of the plot. How does growing up near a militarybase make her multilingual? Her family
hangs out with GIs there?
Always this sort of story comes with a lot of "media hype". However, itsounded more real when I heard thetwo companies were spending big moneyto take advantage of the latest video capture systems to simulate
hermovement smoothly on a computer. She is apparently a product of recentcomputer technology and theTV game business.
In a text for the History of Sexuality, the French philosopher MichelFoucault quoted Artemidorus'
Interpretation of Dreams.Foucault was interested in the way of Artemidorus interpreted dreams
involvingsexual intercourse. Artemidorus states as a general rule that women indreams are "symbol of things
that will happen to the dreamer, so that thecharacter and disposition of the woman determine what will
happen to him."For instance, to the conventional triad of wife, mistress, and prostitute,Artemidorus adds theunknown women one encounters. His analysis is variedby what she is. In this case the dream's value for the
futuredepends on the social "value" of the women it represents.
Virtual idols and Anime girls are new things in human history. We havenot started seriously thinking about
their social value yet. Also almost noone has defined their positions in the history of sexuality yet.
36However,young kids have sexual feelings of sorts and may dream about thoseartificial girls. Because thesegirls are saved not only in computers' memoriesbut in biological ones as well.

37

Ying-Yang Theory for Movies and Computer Games

Here in the year 1997, it is time to start objectively speaking about thiscentury in the past tense. Were there
any big changes? Socially, yes. Howabout art in the 20th century? What was the most representative
artisticexpression of the century? Naturally it was the movie! The 20th century wasthe movie century. No
other form of artistic expression could steal thisclaim from the movie, the age's most representative art form.
TV was just amedium. Its cultural influence was tremendously big, but it didn't createart of its own. (Maybesome byproducts, like video art, which was createdin a similar context. But, this was not mainstream.)
The movie is already over 100 years old. Its lifespan is a representationof this century, with all the events weexperienced recorded mostly onfilm. Also, the movie has reigned as the king of entertainment in mostplaces
around the world. Hollywood has been active as the biggest imagefactory on the earth, not only in thiscentury but in all of history. Nopast civilization has had the capability to mass-produce visual andmusicalimages on the scale of Hollywood. This factor made the United States ofAmerica the most culturally
influential country of this century.Hollywood's immense cultural influence may be thought of as the"footprintsof the gods" in the future, if past civilizations left their "fingerprintsof the gods" elsewhere
throughout history.
Japan was not much of a movie nation compared with the US, despite ahandful of great movie directors suchas Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa.Recently "Japanimation", a general term for Japan-made cartoon movies,
ispopular around the world. This is a unique culture coming out of Japan.However, it is still culturally ashadow, Ying, of Hollywood. If MickeyMouse is Yang, Akira is Ying.
We should now take note of a new ripple in this Ying-Yang situation, asmall pebble stone thrown into thewaters surrounding the movie. Thispebble is the computer game. The movie is 100 years old, while thecomputergame is fairly young. It is still primitive and simple. However, we seethat games are becoming more
and more movie-like. The new generation ofcomputer games is not simple like early games -- "Space
Invaders","Pac-man" and the such. The new games are capable of having everything amovie has: a story,visual and musical spectacles, and so on. In addition-- and this is a very important point -- a computer gamehas interactivity.The movie was a one-way communication, so to speak. The computer game makestwo-way
or multi-way communication possible. And games will be increasinglynetworked. Then they may finally go
beyond the movie in influence.
Movies will presumably become more game-like, while computer games becomesmore movie-like. Movie
theaters are becoming smaller and closer to apersonal space; they will finally disappear. The "audience" foraninteractive feature won't be able to resist taking part in the plot, soproducers will have to plan forchangeable parameters allowing manipulationof characters and actors. Also, the "audience" will be able totake part ina movie as "avatars". Soon all the features of the computer game will bebrought into the movie.
Somehow this scenario will affect the future of the entertainment business.Sony's movie business in the US
is not in good shape. On the other hand,the company is expanding its business in the computer gameindustry. Itsexpansion surpasses other rival makers such as SEGA and Nintendo. Now SEGAis going to forma new company with BANDAI to work together against Sony.
38

We should not dismiss one more very important thing. Computer games andtheir production system are
more independent than the film productionsystem. Anyone who has a computer can start game production.
The decade ofthe 1980s was the time of independent film producers, but most of them aregone. Computer
game production is different, as a big Hollywood-likeproduction system is not so suited to game production.
The world ischanging. After Yang has fully permeated the world, Ying is showing itself.Ying rises in the wakeof Yang.

39

Japan's new capital in the 21st century
Centralization vs. Decentralization
In this age of networking, social structures throughout the world have become more decentralized. People
will depend on, and live on, the network as it will free them from centralized culture, economy and politics.
(You may be one who feels this way.)
In the past, centralization was a strong engine for the formation of a nation. Without centralization, themodern nation would have never evolved. Conversely, we are now in the middle of a decentralization
process. Offices everywhere are experiencing a wave of "down-sizing" of old business systems consisting
chiefly of main frame computers. Decentralization in the office replaces these main frames with networks ofworkstations and personal computers. Local networks lead in to linking up with the Internet, and the Internet
now expands beyond the borders of nations. The structures of nations and the appearance of cities will haveto change in the next century. Without this change, nations and cities will become defunct. This process may
already be in progress.
When "Tokyo - the Megalopolis" appears in movies such as the "GODZILLA" movies or "A-ni-me" (Japanese
cartoon movies) like "Akira", it is always destroyed by monsters or nuclear wars. It can be amusing to see
the image of a devastated Tokyo. It is especially amusing when a monster destroys new landmark buildings.
Just as new buildings have been built every year in the real Tokyo, they have been destroyed in the movie
Tokyo by monsters. Watching these scenes of collapsing buildings is a way to release stress after office orschool hours. Some workers may see their offices fall and break into pieces. However, enjoying such things
was just light vandalism before the earthquake hit Kobe city in January 1995. The earthquake literally
brought the ruins of a modern city into the real world. It changed the scenario for the future plans for Japan.
The earthquake made the government seriously advance a relocation plan for the capital. However, theearthquake is not the only reason for the relocation.
On December 14, 1995, a governmental committee looking into the relocation of the national capital
proposed that the new capital should be within 60 to 300 kilometers--or one to two hours by train--fromTokyo. In addition, some other conditions are mentioned in the proposal. An International airport with directflights to the U.S. and Europe should be located within 40 minutes of the capital, but the new capital should
not be too close to other large cities. Also, the proposal mentions that the capital should be built in an areawith an adequate water supply and that is unlikely to be damaged by a large magnitude earthquake. The
proposal recommends that construction on the capital city should start before the end of the century and thatit should be ready to convene sessions in the new Diet building by 2010. Since estimates of the cost of
construction are as high as 14 trillion yen, several municipalities are vying to have the capital located in their
particular city.
The relocation plan is generally welcomed in the financial sector. The opinion from this sector believes that arelocation will resolve the stagnant economy. However, many people criticize the proposal for various
reasons. Criticism hasn't formed a strong consensus yet. But, the main stream of criticism derives from thedeep distrust of the bureaucracy. The majority of the people believe the worst things originate in thebureaucracy.
Historically speaking, Japanese learned construction technology from Ancient China. The old cities of Japan
like Kyoto and Nara were built using the most advanced construction technology which had come from40

China. Bureaucracy crossed over the China sea into Japan along with the culture and technology. The
construction of those old cities was a great symbol for the nation. Japanese ministries are still referred to in away of reminiscent of ancient times and so may account for the reason bureaucrats still dream of acentralized nation. The most progressive factions of the opposition groups insist on decentralizing thegovernmental functions. However, while centralization and bureaucracy have a 1400 year history here,
decentralization has just begun.

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