LIFESCIENCE: Death Science: Time, art and biotechnology

[sean@nagle.demon.co.uk (Sean Cubitt)]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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Death Science: Time, art and biotechnology


A central fact, indeed according to more than one commentator a central
construction of life sciences is the biological irreversibility of death.
The secular understanding of mortality is 1. That it is terminal; 2. That
it forms a motivation for behaviour (avoidance of or, for Freud, the
attraction of, the End). Eco-science adds that it is one fact for the
orgaism but another for the species and yet another for the ecosystem:
death is a necessary part of the evolutionary process of natural selection,
and of population control through starvation.

In this way death helps provide life sciences with their conception of
time, a double conception. As end, death gives a life the linear structure
of a narrative, with an Aristotelian beginning, middle and end. Without
death, an individual life has no structure. But biology also appears, at
least in the popular sense that non-scientists get from TV and pop science
magazines and books, to be structured as a science around the binary (and
occasionally dialectical) opposition of death and reproduction. So death
can also appear as the mid-point of a second narrative, the parents' death
between giving birth and seeing the next generation reproduce. Given the
differing rates of reproduction, this means that there are many time scales
involved: drosophila has one scale, a mouse another, a whale a third. We
begin to get a sense of the multiplicity of overlaid time scales, like
sine-waves mapped over one another, or like the overtones of a note
displayed on an oscilloscope.

The longest waves are much larger: the waves of a temporality associated
with ecosystems. Though we understand our own time as one of biological
crisis, we see that crisis as a rare moment in a more regular and regulated
temporality of thousands of years or more during which ecosystems change
only slowly.

For me the interest of this lies in the complexities it introduces into the
thinking of time. Since Teilhard de Chardin, many have tried to construct a
sense of a planetary mind, a noosphere parallel to the biosphere, which
would run on a far longer time-scale than that of the brief lifetime of the
individual: the poets who promise their lovers immortality had one sense of
this; Pierre Levy, Joel de Rosnay, even in some moments McLuhan all have a
newly technologised sense of this long term. The poignancy of Moravec's
uploaded consciousness (apart from its philosophical impossibility, since
it rests on a Cartesian division of mind and body) derives from his desire
to mix two temporalities: the individual and the species.

Hollywood has discovered a unique way of handling this. In place of the
poets' immortality, or the monument as permanent feature of ther landscape,
it has invented a powerful new mode of temporality: the ephemeral. The
sublime special effect, for example, especially but not excusively those
images of destruction that accompany recent movies like ID4, Armageddon and
Volcano, thrusts the spectator out of the linear time of narration and its
finality, into an atemporal if instantaneous space of the sublime.

For me this discussion offers the opportunity to debate the question: can
art do better than this evacuation of consciousness from linear, narrative
time which Hollywood achieves? Is there a way in which, especially, we can
remove from death the stigma of finality, and give back to cultural life an
ecological  understanding of death's necessity, its place as a mid-point
rather than an end? And can this be done without the sentimentality of
Hollywood's sporadic cycle of afterlife movies? And can it be done in such
a way that the participant (presuming it would be an interactive art) can
occupy a position other than the God-like objectivity of Thomas Ray's
otherwise magnificent Tierra project? Both the Webstalker and Landfill seem
to me to be moving in this kind of direction, but without addressing (why
should they? - they have other fish to fry) the desire Hollywood has so
successfully enticed into the sublime time of the special effect: the
desire to transcend one's own death by escaping from time altogether.


Sean Cubitt

Sean Cubitt
Screen Studies Online
http://www.livjm.ac.uk/~mccscubi/screen.html
Digital Aesthetics (Sage, London and New York, 1998)
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita


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