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Ahh yes…reality. I’ve heard of that

A friend sent me a link…and there I found all sorts of very fun stuff. Depending of course, on your definition of ‘fun.’ Here is one bit that I grabbed from around that site.. Anyone with children or teenagers, or who works with young people, has to be interested in this stuff. We have no choice. And anyway it IS interesting.

‘The solid objective world of our everyday experience is a representation of an oscillating immateriality that we recognise, at another level of resolution, as constituting quantum phenomena. It’s not that matter doesn’t matter anymore, so much perhaps as the idea that matter isn’t matter anymore. Can we not reasonably ask whether there is a reality beyond what quantum mechanics describes, even closer to the really real? If our material, everyday world depends on our consciousness, what existed in the world before human consciousness had evolved, and how will the world look if our consciousness evolves still further? For many who live largely online, cyberspace accommodates a vivid and consequential normality that renders the material world less relevant to their lives. Until recently, we adapted our sensibilities to fit into separate boxes, variously identified as real, virtual, spiritual, and so on, which we saw as being served by separate ontologies. That separation has now merged into a flowing continuity, in which telecommunications, computing, nano technology, bioengineering and pharmacology play significant roles. The binary opposition between real and virtual realities no longer holds, and the Western conception of the individual human brain creating its own isolated mind may be giving way to the recognition  of a connected intelligence seeking fuller access to a primordial field of universal consciousness. What might be the role of the artist in all of this?  Can a trans-disciplinary art practice contribute to strategies for making the real really real?

The status of our reality is uncertain.

Roy Ascott, 2010

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