THE NEW PROTOZOANS? 

by Tom Sherman


I have spent the past couple of weeks trying to flesh out the Memesis
story.  I would like very much to do so in an effort to explain to myself
and others my sustained enthusiastic participation in the construction of
a second nature, a symbolic universe experienced only by the light of
machines.  The first few lines of the story are very hard to grasp:  in
fact we are asked to look back into the future on a moment literally at
the beginning of time, when the first primitive order emerged within the
infosphere.  I am struck by the immense distance I have to travel to find
this kinky retrospective point of view and I am confused by the fuzzy
metaphor that keeps clouding my vision upon arrival. 

Here in the United States the religious right continues to do everything
it can to force public school teachers to discredit a theory of biological
evolution based on natural selection, while they posit Biblical
fundamentalism, Man's creation authored by God, as the absolute truth. 
When we play around with the big picture called Memesis, a "culturally
based history of creation", are we not stretching ourselves to render
another creation myth?  Adventuresome analogies are fun to hatch at
parties, but if we find ourselves on the floor holding hands, pretending
together we form the chemistry behind the new protozoans (extremely
self-conscious protozoans at that), would it be wise to record a fossil
record, say in video?  While we might help some supra-human intelligence
to gain perspective someday in an unimaginable future, my main concern is
that this video fossil may be interpreted shortly after 1996 as just
another version of the Bible. 

On a more positive note, it is a pleasure to add Darwin to the
art/culture/technology discussion.  I'm an artist and most of the people I
know are stuck in a groove between Marx and Freud.  I must also admit I'm
currently institutionalized in a university, a social organization that
encourages the seemingly endless reverberations of less than contemporary
ideas.  Long before the arrival of this Memesis project, I had noticed an
increase in and changes in the way the word survival was being used.  With
the emergence of the idea of a Darwinian economy (early-1980's), giant
corporations were locked in a struggle for survival and in their effort to
survive they had to discard redundant and unnecessary employees.  These
discarded employees are now trading their resumes with each other,
authoring their own collective survival strategies.  After an initial
tumble into depression and self pity (the big fish eats the little fish
and the little fish feeds on me...), the survivors may aspire to
contribute to the chemistry at the base of the new protozoans.  To survive
one must retool.  Computer skills are mandatory: creativity is a definite
plus. 

So now we are surviving in an information economy or ecology and suddenly
it has become clear that cultures are central to the information age. 
Information really moves through cultures, not through machines.  As the
new digital order is emerging, we must acknowledge that thousands of
languages and cultures are endangered and disappearing.  At a time when
thousands of languages and cultures are threatened with extinction, we are
invited to celebrate the emergence of new technologies. 

To bring this down to a local, somewhat pedestrian level, in talking with
other artists, I've noticed there are emerging, immediate strategies for
survival in our communities.  Many artists are becoming conversant,
somewhat expert, with the new technologies.  Many artists are retooling,
learning new skills:  digital skills.  Artists have always understood that
diversity is necessary for survival--that survival is a manifestation of
diversity.  Stated very simply, artists have always held three jobs to
maintain their existence and they've always done crazy things to attract
attention.  Artists will do anything and everything necessary to support
their art and to gain and maintain a connection with an audience.  As
public funding has been withdrawn from the arts, artists worry
increasingly about survival as their connections with audiences are
severed.  The promise of the I-way is the promise of connections with
other survivors (and/or audiences). 

The most troubling aspect of this apparently inevitable development of a
post-biological nature is the crisis we continue to ignore in the first
nature, our biological world.  I can accept all this ecological posturing,
the analogies and emerging metaphors for viewing cultures and economies
globally, as one interdependent, dynamic system, if it is leading us
towards a greater awareness of our global environmental crisis.  When I
remove my VR headset, I find I'm living in a burned-out, totally out of
date industrial city in the rust-belt of the American northeast.  Syracuse
sits on the south end of a large 'freshwater' lake, Onondaga Lake, which
is so polluted it can barely support bacteria, let alone fish.  It is a
completely dead body of water.  The local myth is that our lake actually
glows in the dark.  In the summer I escape Syracuse to spend as much time
as I can on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, in Canada, on the edge of the
North Atlantic.  Over the past decade I have witnessed the complete
collapse of the fishing industry in Nova Scotia.  There are simply no more
fish in the sea. 

When I speak about such environmental issues in my work I am more and more
frequently being criticized for being nostalgic.  I am told I'm guilty of
longing for a nature that is history (its dead and gone).  Surely I must
understand that everything man does is natural!  I just hope that all this
ecological redefinition of the global cultural and economic environment
will lead to some consciousness raising in the world our bodies exist in. 
I think the same thoughts when I watch television advertising wrapping
every conceivable product in images of a perfect, untouched nature (many
American automobiles are named after and even represented by computer
animations of endangered species).  All this constant modelling,
remodelling and over-coding of nature:  maybe this obsessive modelling of
nature is our species' strategy for survival? 



Tom Sherman

The School of Art & Design, Syracuse University, New York, USA
twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu