MEDIA:::::
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May 18.2005
notes on BIOCENTENARARY-AFTERIMAGE::::::
Commissioned by the ABC Regional Production Fund 2005
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'A reef of intermodulated textuality.....'
'DNA is the book of life. In the future we'll all be read cover to cover.....' Wired Magazine 2002
An evolutionary (and aesthetic) theme park of the digital world, Biocentenarary-Afterimage explores differing
cultural and perceptual modes of experience via abstract musical representations and textual interpolations.
Blurring the bouundaries between art, science, technology and the media, and utilising (for its inspiration and content) texts
as diverse as the Upanishads, Marshall McLuhan's 'The Gutenberg Galaxy', Terence Mckenna's 'New Maps of Hyperspace' and 'The Geometric Model of Consciousness' ; newly-posited futures across all areas of next-stage human evolution - scientific, aesthetic, biological, technological, perceptual and conceptual - are embraced in a genre-defying voyage of discovery
in non-linear and modular, technological-aesthetic forms.
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BCAI - INTRODUCTION
If art exists on a metaphorical, symbolic, aesthetic, sublimated, metaphysical, and allegorical level in relation to its subject matter - then the aesthetic is the frame, or enclosure, into which these qualities are transmitted or projected. An art object, or whatever is construed as art, becomes that via its ability to transcend its own subject matter. Media and cultural commentators such as Marshall McLuhan ('...the medium is the message...' etc), and postmodernism in general, have contributed to the blurring of boundaries between art, science, technology and the media - bringing into question the various cultural modalities - societal, historical, perceptual, conceptual, physiological, biological, organic and inorganic - which shape our experience of the world
The search for universal concepts, or 'first principles', in science, is mirrored in structural analogues that appear in artistic and cultural forms (amongst others). A key intellectual component in artforms is that of the 'aesthetic' - a notion under which many cultural, scientific or works of phenomenology would traditionally be excluded the status of art. The Aesthetic, as a universal structural analogue, is a unique metaphysical framing device - without this frame or enclosure art has no physical or metaphysical body and so cannot exist. While researching texts for BCAI (in particular those of Marshall McLuahn), another central idea emerged - that of 'Context' - which seems to become an additional defining factor in assigning cultural, aesthetic or artistic status ; the existential and phenomenological status of art is almost a mirrored form, an inversion of the status of what it means to be human : which is that art needs an aesthetic vehicle or body to exist ('a mirror in which to dwell'.....) - a metaphysical vehicle is still a physical medium in an extended sense of multidimensionality.
Logically, if tangentially, this somehow links in with the idea that lifeforms and the physical world as we understand it, can be defined as projections of a higher consciousness, of a god, of an overmind, of a universal intelligence binding and imbuing the fabric of the universe with an interdependent consciousness. However you express it, It is not necessary to possess religious belief, or even scientific 'faith', to see this as a curious and recurring fundamental across all belief systems and evolved intellectual structures (whether in religion or quantum physics). This curious and logical anomaly would seem to be present in all evolved systems of consciousness ; outside what we understand to be linear time; across all historical periods and cultures ; whether by accident or design - it is a primary component of our sentient legacy.
Anyway, these little musings are an attempt to grasp the unifying concept of the project. Following are quotes and textual excerpts - from McLuhan and company (.....who say it better than me anyway) - that have helped to inspire, and have been utilised in, Biocentenarary-Afterimage.
JGA May 2005
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excerpts from :
THE GUTENBERG GALAXY (1962), and UNDERSTANDING MEDIA (1964)
by Marshall McLuhan
'the medium is the message.'
'the user is the content.'
'the electric light is pure information.....we are the television screen.....we wear all mankind as our skin.'
'The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village"
'the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.'
'Once we surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.'
'The problem in the new politics is to find the right image. Image hunting is the new thing, and policies no longer matter because whether your electric light is provided by Republicans or Democrats is rather unimportant compared to the service of light and power and all the other kinds of services that go with our cities. Serviceenvironment's the thing in place of political parties.'
'The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the
neutral visual world. Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change
mental processes?'
'Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.'
'The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration - the technique of the suspended judgement.'
'When Technology Extends One of Our Senses, a New Translation of Culture Occurs as Swiftly as the New Technology is Interiorized.'
'Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity. Typography is not only a technology but it is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependance.'
'A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.'
'The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest a people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.'
'A theory of cultural change is impossible without the knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various
externalizations of our senses. Every technology contrived and "outered" by man has the power to numb human
awareness during the period of its first interiorization.'
'Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge.'
'Aquinas explains why Socrates, Christ and Pythagoras avoided the publication of their teachings.'
'Heidegger surfboards along the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.'
'Schizophrenia May Be a Necessary Consequence¾of Literacy.'
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excerpts from :
NEW MAPS OF HYPERSPACE
by Terence McKenna
Copyright Estate of Terence McKenna, used with permission
From a talk given at the invitation of Ruth and Arthur Young of the Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness, 1984.
'In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus tells us, "History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." I would turn this around and say that history is what we are trying to escape from into dream. The dream is eschatological. The dream is zero time and outside of history. We wish to escape into the dream.....'
'If one leaves aside the last three hundred years of historical experience as it unfolded in Europe and America, and examines the phenomenon of death and the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications - Neoplatonic, Christian, dynastic-Egyptian, and so on, one finds repeatedly the idea that there is a light body, an entelechy that is somehow mixed up with the body during life and at death is involved in a crisis in which these two portions separate. One part loses its raison d'etre and falls into dissolution; metabolism stops. The other part goes we know not where. Perhaps nowhere if one believes it does not exist; but then one has the problem of trying to explain life. And, though science makes great claims and has done well at explaining simple atomic systems, the idea that science can make any statement about what life is or where it comes from is currently preposterous.'
'Science has nothing to say about how one can decide to close one's hand into a fist, and yet it happens. This is utterly outside the realm of scientific explanation because what we see in that phenomenon is mind as a first cause. It is a example of telekinesis: matter is caused by mind to move. So we need not fear the sneers of science in the matter of the fate or origin of the soul. My probe into this area has always been the psychedelic experience, but recently I have been investigating dreams, because dreams are a much more generalized form of experience of the hyperdimension in which life and mind seem to be embedded.'
'Looking at what people with shamanic traditions say about dreams, one comes to the realization that for these people dream reality is experientially a parallel continuum. The shaman accesses this continuum with hallucinogens as well as with other techniques, but most effectively with hallucinogens. Everyone else accesses it through dreams. Freud's idea about dreams was that they were what he called "day-residues," and that one could trace the content of a dream down to a distortion of something that happened during waking time.'
'I suggest that it is much more useful to try to make a geometric model of consciousness, to take seriously the idea of a parallel continuum, and to say that the mind and the body are embedded in the dream and the dream is a higher-order spatial dimension. In sleep, one is released into the real world, of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometric sense. There is a plenum - recent experiments in quantum physics tend to back this up - a holographic plenum of information. All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of time in a kind of eternity - an eternity that does not have a temporal existence about which one may say, "It always existed." It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.'
'At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected.....'
'The metaphor of a vehicle - an after-death vehicle, an astral body - is used by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will know what to do and one will make a clean break. Yet there does seem to be the possibility of a problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life. One can muff it through ignorance.'
'Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth - the metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of incorrect activity. The English poet-mystic William Blake said that as one starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from the golden track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment - a crisis of passage - and the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly lived is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so that this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position.
'I want to include an abyss in this model - one less familiar to rationalists, but familiar to us all one level deeper in the psyche as inheritors of the Judeo-Christian culture. That is the idea that the world will end, that there will be a final time, that there is not only the crisis of the death of the individual but also the crisis of death in the history of the species.'
'What this seems to be about is that from the time of the awareness until the resolution of the apocalyptic potential, there are roughly one hundred thousand years. In biological time, this is only a moment, yet it is ten times the entire span of history. In that period, everything hangs in the balance, because it is a mad rush from hominid to starflight. In the leap across those one hundred thousand years, energies are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all of these concerns that control power with greater and lesser degrees of ethical constancy appear. Ever present is the possibility of aborting the species' transformation into a hyperspatial entelechy.'
'We are now, there can be no doubt, in the final historical seconds of that crisis - a crisis that involves the end of history, our departure from the planet, the triumph over death, and the release of the individual from the body. We are, in fact, closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter - the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter. The old metaphor of psyche as the caterpillar transformed by metamorphosis is a specieswide analogy. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum of the historical forces already set in motion.'
'Evolutionary biologists consider humans to be an unevolving species. Some time in the last fifty thousand years, with the invention of culture, the biological evolution of humans ceased and evolution became an epigenetic, cultural phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve, but the human somatotype remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very much like people of a long time ago. But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. The body can become an internalized holographic object embedded in a solid-state, hyperdimensional matrix that is eternal, so that we each wander through a true Elysium.'
'This is a kind of Islamic paradise in which one is free to experience all the pleasures of the flesh provided one realizes that one is a projection of a holographic solid-state matrix that is microminiaturized, superconducting, and nowhere to be found: it is part of the plenum. All technological history is about producing prototypes of this situation with greater and greater closure toward the ideal, so that airplanes, automobiles, space shuttles, space colonies, starships of the nuts-and-bolts, speed-of-light type are, as Mircea Eliade said, "self-transforming images of flight that speak volumes about man's aspiration to self-transcendence."
'Our wish, our salvation, and our only hope is to end the historical crisis by becoming the alien, by ending alienation, by recognizing the alien as the Self, in fact - recognizing the alien as an Overmind that holds all the physical laws of the planet intact in the same way that one holds an idea intact in one's thoughts. The givens that are thought to be writ in adamantine are actually merely the moods of the Goddess, whose reflection we happen to be. The whole meaning of human history lies in recovering this piece of lost information so that man may be dirigible or, to paraphrase James Joyce's Finnegans Wake on Moicane, the red light district of Dublin: "Here in Moicane we flop on the seamy side, but up n'ent, prospector, you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings, so if you want to be Phoenixed, come and be parked." It is that simple, you see, but it takes courage to be parked when the Grim Reaper draws near. "A blessing in disguise," Joyce calls him. '
' .....the modalities of appearance and understanding can be shifted so that we can know mind within the context of the One Mind. The One Mind contains all experiences of the Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian universe, deployed through light-years of three-dimensional universe, and the interior mental universe. They are adumbrations of the same thing.'
'We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms because of the low quality of the code we customarily use. The language we use to discuss this problem has built-in dualisms. This is a problem of language. All codes have relative code qualities, except the Logos. The Logos is perfect and, therefore, partakes of no quality other than tiself. I am here using the word Logos in the sense in which Philo Judaeus uses it - that of the Divine Reason that embraces the arhcetypal complex of Platonic ideas that serve as the models of creation. As long as one maps with something other than the Logos, there will be problems of code quality. The dualism built into our language makes the death of the species and the death of the individual appear to be opposed things.'
'.....The role that we play in relationship determines how we will present ourselves in that final, intimated transformation. In other words, in this notion there is a kind of teleological bias; there is a belief that there is a hyperobject called the Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience of this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.....'
'.....One way of thinking of this is to suppose that the waking world and the world of the dream have begun to merge........one
gets these curious experiences, sometimes called psychotic breaks, that always have a tremendous impact on the experient because there seems to be an exterior component that could not possibly be subjective. At such times coincidences begin to build and build until one must finally admit that one does not know what is going on. Nevertheless, it is preposterous to claim that this is a psychological phenomenon, because there are accompanying changes in the external world. Jung called this synchronicity and made a psychological model of it, but it is really an alternative physics beginning to impinge on local reality. '
'The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever. There is an experience of time zero. So if one imagines for a moment oneself to be made of light, or in possession of a vehicle that can move at the speed of light, one can traverse from any point in the universe to any other with a subjective experience of time zero. This means that one crosses to Alpha Centauri in time zero, but the amount of time that has passed in the relativistic universe is four and a half years. But if one moves very great distances, if one crosses two hundred and fifty thousand light-years to Andromeda, one would still have a subjective experience of time zero.'
'The only experience of time that one can have is of a subjective time that is created by one's own mental processes, but in relationship to the Newtonian universe there is no time whatsoever. One exists in eternity, one has become eternal, the universe is aging at a staggering rae all around one in this situation, but that is perceived as a fact of this universe - the way we perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe. One has transited into the eternal mode. One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity.'
'I believe that this is what technology pushes toward. There is no contradiction between ecological balance and space migration, between hypertechnology and radical ecology. These issues are red herrings; the real historical entity that is becoming imminent is the human soul. The monkey body has served to carry us to this moment of release, and it will always serve as a focus of self-image, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination. This is what is meant by the return to the Father, the transcendence of physis, the rising out of the Gnostic universal prison of iron that traps the light: nothing less than the transformation of our species.....'
'.....Very shortly an acceleration of this phenomenon will take place in the form of space exploration and space colonies. The coral-reef-like animal called Man that has extruded technology over the surface of the earth will be freed from the constraints of anything but the imagination and the limitations of materials. It has been suggested that the earlioest space colonies include efforts to duplicate the idyllic ecosystem of Hawaii as an ideal. These exercises in ecological understanding will prove we know what we are doing. However, as soon as this understanding is under control we will be released into the realm of art. This is what we have always striven for. We will make our world - all of our worlds - and the world we came from will be maintained as a garden. What Eliade discussed as metaphors of self-transforming flight will be realized shortly in the technology of space colonization.....'
'The transition from earth to space will be a staggeringly tight genetic filter, a much tighter filter than any previous frontier has ever been, including the genetic and demographic filter represented by the colonization of the New World. It has been said that the vitality of the Americas is due to the fact that only the dreamers and the pioneers and the fanatics made the trip across. This will be even more true of the transition to space. The technological conquest of space will set the stage; then, for the internalization of that metaphor, it will bring the conquest of inner space and the collapse of the state vectors associated with this technology deployed in Newtonian space. Then the human species will have become more than dirigible.'
¾'.....Our institutions, our epistemologies are bankrupt and exhausted; we must start anew and hope that with the help of shamanically inspired personalities, we can cultivate this ancient mystery once again. The Logos can be unleashed, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and Heraclitus can speak again in the minds of modern people. When it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien. This is the promise that is held out; it may seem to some a nightmare vision, but all historical changes of immense magnitude have a charged emotional quality. They propel people into a completely new world.....'
'.....Life is central to the career of organization in matter. I reject the idea that we have been shunted onto a siding called organic existence and that our actual place is in eternity. This mode of existence is an important part of the cycle. It is filter. There is the possibility of extinction, the possibility of falling into physis forever, and so in that sense the metaphor of the fall is valid. There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient.
'.....We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such"; to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.....'
'.....Time is the notion that gives ideas such as these their power, for they imply a new conception of time..... the Logos demonstrated that time is not simply a homogeneous medium where things occur, but a fluctuating density of probability. Though science can sometimes tell us what can happen and what cannot happen, we have no theory that explains why, out of everything that could happen, certain things undergo what Whitehead called "the formality of actually occurring." This was what the Logos sought to explain, why out of all the myriad things that could happen, certain things undergo the formality of occurring. It is because there is a modular hierarchy of waves of temporal conditioning, or temporal density. A certain event, rated highly improbable, is more probable at some moments than at others......'
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excerpts from :
THE POST-DARWINIAN TRANSITION
by David Pearce
Copyright 1995-2005 David Pearce
Used with permission
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'Natural selection has previously been "blind". Complications aside, genetic mutations and meiotic shufflings are quasi-random i.e. random with respect to what is favoured by natural selection. Nature has no capacity for foresight or contingency-planning. During the primordial Darwinian Era of life on earth, selfishness in the technical genetic sense has closely overlapped with selfishness in the popular sense: they are easily confused, and indeed technical selfishness is unavoidable. But in the new reproductive era - where (suites of) alleles will be societally chosen and actively designed in anticipation of their likely behavioural effects - the character of fitness-enhancing traits will be radically different.
For a start, the elimination of such evolutionary relics as the ageing process will make any form of (post-)human reproduction on earth - whether sexual or clonal - a relatively rare and momentous event. It's likely that designer post-human babies will be meticulously pre-planned. The notion that all reproductive decisions will be socially regulated in a post-ageing world is abhorrent to one's libertarian instincts; but if they weren't regulated, then the earth would soon simply exceed its carrying capacity - whether it is 15 billion or 150 billion. If reproduction on earth does cease to be a personal affair and becomes a (democratically accountable?) state-sanctioned choice, then a major shift in the character of typically adaptive behavioural traits will inevitably occur. Taking a crude genes' eye-view, a variant allele coding for, say, enhanced oxytocin expression, or a sub-type of serotonin receptor predisposing to unselfishness in the popular sense, will actually carry a higher payoff in the technical selfish sense - hugely increasing the likelihood that such alleles and their customised successors will be differentially pre-selected in preference to alleles promoting, say, anti-social behaviour.
Told like this, of course, the neurochemical story is a simplistic parody. It barely even hints at the complex biological, socio-economic and political issues at stake. Just who will take the decisions, and how? What will be the role in shaping post-human value systems, not just of exotic new technologies, but of alien forms of emotion whose metabolic pathways and substrates haven't yet been disclosed to us? What kinds, if any, of inorganic organisms or non-DNA-driven states of consciousness will we want to design and implement? What will be the nature of the transitional era - when our genetic mastery of emotional mind-making is still incomplete? How can we be sure that unknown unknowns won't make things go wrong? True, Darwinian life may often be dreadful, but couldn't botched paradise-engineering make it even worse? And even if it couldn't, might not there be some metaphysical sense in which life in a blissful biosphere could still be morally "wrong" - even if it strikes its inhabitants as self-evidently right?
Unfortunately, we will only begin to glimpse the implications of Post-Darwinism when paradise-engineering becomes a mature scientific discipline and mainstream research tradition. Yet as the vertebrate genome is rewritten, the two senses of "selfish" will foreseeably diverge. Today they are easily conflated. A tendency to quasi-psychopathic callousness to other sentient beings did indeed enhance the inclusive fitness of our DNA in the evolutionary past. In the new reproductive era, such traits are potentially maladaptive. They may even disappear.
The possibility that we will become not just exceedingly happier, but nicer, may sound too good to be true. Perhaps we'll just become happier egotists - in every sense. But if a genetic predisposition to niceness becomes systematically fitness-enhancing, then genetic selfishness - in the technical sense of "selfish" - ensures that benevolence will not just triumph; it will also be evolutionarily stable, in the games-theory sense, against "defectors".
Needless to say, subtleties and technical complexities abound here. The very meaning of being "nice" to anyone or anything, for instance, is changed if well-being becomes a generic property of mental life. Either way, once suffering becomes biologically optional, then only sustained and systematic malice towards others could allow us to perpetuate it for ever. And although today we may sometimes be spiteful, there is no evidence that institutionalised malevolence will prevail.
'From an ethical perspective, the task of hastening the Post-Darwinian Transition has a desperate moral urgency - brought home by studying just how nasty "natural" pain can be. Those who would resist the demise of unpleasantness may be asked: is it really permissible to compel others to suffer when any form of distress becomes purely optional? Should the metabolic pathways of our evolutionary past be forced on anyone who prefers an odyssey of life-long happiness instead? If so, what means of coercion should be employed, and by whom?'
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'This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.'
'The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted.'
'Today, the prospect of paradise-engineering still sounds weird, Brave New Worldish - and perhaps "unnatural". Yet the metabolic pathways underlying heavenly states of consciousness are neither more nor less "natural" than any other patterns of matter and energy elsewhere in space-time. Knowledge of these (hitherto) genetically maladaptive forms of mental life has mostly been impossible to emotional primitives like us. This is because of the pressure of natural selection. Cruelly, any genetic blueprint for naturally "angelic" minds [if evolved blindly via the mechanism of natural selection acting on random genetic variations] entails crossing dips in the evolutionary fitness-landscape. Such jumps are forbidden for reasons of neo-Darwinian theory. So truly beautiful minds never evolved; brutish Darwinian lifeforms were selected instead.'
'Fortunately, thanks to genetic-engineering, a spectrum of mental superhealth will soon become safely accessible. Better still, primordial-DNA-driven minds are destined to redesign themselves out of existence. An enriched neural architecture will then disclose modes of ecstatic bliss far more intense, diverse and exhilarating than a drug-na„ve hunter-gatherer psyche can comprehend. Such magical kinds of happiness are only travestied, alas, by the dry textual placeholders found here. Such happiness is only travestied, too, by today's short-acting euphoriants or wirehead rodents.'
'For within a few generations, lifelong bliss that exceeds any fantasised Christian afterlife can become the genetically-coded basis of our existence. If we want our kids to enjoy mental superhealth - emotional, intellectual, and ethical - then we can design them a genetic makeup to ensure every moment of every day is a sublime revelation. Gradients of well-being way beyond our own lame "peak experiences" can be their everyday norm of mental health.'
'On this scenario, Post-Darwinian superminds will go on to rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign our whole global ecosystem, and abolish suffering and cruelty throughout the living world.'
'The abolitionist project has an overriding moral urgency. Yet it's just the beginning. The molecular biology of paradise may be closer than we think.'
"...our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we emotional primitives cruelly lack: sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend..."
"...two hundred years ago, before the development of potent analgesics and surgical anaesthetics, the notion that so-called "physical" pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed crankish. Most of us in the affluent western nations now take its daily absence for granted - though opiophobia prolongs its presence in the lives of a minority. The prospect that what we describe as "mental" pain, too, could ever be eradicated is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition via biotechnology turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice..."
"...at some momentous and exactly datable time, probably well before the end of the third millennium, the last unpleasant experience ever to occur on this planet will take place. It will be, perhaps, a (purely comparatively) minor pain in some (to us) obscure marine invertebrate. For just as the smallpox virus was systematically hunted down to extinction, so the precise molecular signature(s) of aversive experience and its predisposing genes can predictably be hunted down and wiped out as well. The application of nanotechnology, self-reproducing micro-miniaturised robots armed with quantum supercomputer processing power, and ultra-sophisticated genetic engineering, perhaps using retro-viral vectors, can assure the eradication of the root of all evil in its naturalistic guise throughout the living world. Eventually, the global ecosystem will be redesigned. The vertebrate genome will be rewritten. The advent of the post-Darwinian era will mark a major transition in the evolution of life on earth and beyond..."
"...the neurochemistry of pain and malaise served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the Darwinian era. But in the new reproductive era of "designer babies" ahead, it will be superseded by a radically different sort of neural architecture Gradients of sublime well-being of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable are destined to become the lifetime norms of mental health..."
"...it won't just be the quality and quantity of consciousness in the world that will be transformed in the post-Darwinian Transition. As (post-)humanity emerges from the neurochemical Dark Ages, enriched dopaminergic function in particular may sharpen the sheer intensity and meaningfulness of every moment of conscious existence. For a generation whose lifetimes span both modes of awareness, it will be as if they had just woken up. They will feel they had hitherto been sleep-walking through life in a twilit stupor. Thereafter their former mundane and minimal existence may be recalled only as some kind of zombified trance-state whose nature they were physiologically incapable of recognising..."
"...day-to-day life may blend, say, the exalted, life-loving euphoria of a potent dopamine releaser and agonist with the serene and mystical love induced by an empathogen such as Ecstasy. Yet using recreational drugs may be counterproductive - even if empathetic euphoriants safer and more sustainable than neurotoxic MDMA ('Ecstasy') can be synthesised. In the reproductive era of designer babies ahead, we will instead have the option of genetically hardwiring [the predisposition to] a spectrum of lifelong empathetic bliss for our future offspring. Somatic gene therapies should be on offer to old-time Darwinians too, coupled with an enriched conception of mental health to mandate their use. Cloud-nine happiness can become the new biological default-condition and homeostatic 'set-point' around which our daily moods fluctuate. For it is feasible to combine states of incisive, goal-directed thought with a profound love and regard for others. The homeostatic mechanisms of the post-Darwinian psyche can ensure 'peak experiences' are as natural as breathing. By contrast, today's norms of so-called psychological health may come to be viwed in a different light. After all, they are just a pathological expression of the workings of Darwinian minds..."
"...our emotionally enriched descendants may be genetically pre-programmed to enjoy beautiful states of consciousness as a background feature, and possibly even an absolute presupposition, of everyday existence. The texture of post-human modes of everyday awareness may possess a diversity, intensity and sublimity that emotional primitives from the Darwinian era cannot grasp..."
"...the sensualist will discover that what had hitherto passed for passionate sex was merely an agreeable piece of foreplay. In the future, erotic pleasure of an intensity that mortal flesh has never known will be enjoyable with a whole gamut of friends and lovers. Universal love is possible because jealousy, already transiently eliminable today under the influence of serotonin releasers like MDMA ("Ecstasy"), is not the sort of gene-inspired perversion of consciousness likely to be judged worthy of conservation in the post-Darwinian era. It can be genetically eliminated as the reproductive revolution unfolds. In addition, designer love-philtres and smarter sex-drugs promise to transform our conception of personal intimacy. Today's ill-educated fumblings will seem inept by comparison. Sensualists may opt for whole-body orgasms of a frequency, duration and variety that transcends the limp foreplay of their Darwinian ancestors. Whether the sexual adventures of our descendants will be mainly auto-erotic, interpersonal, or assume rapturous guises we can't currently imagine is a topic for another night. But profound love of many forms - both of oneself and all other sentient life-forms - is at least as feasible as the impersonal emotional wasteland occupied by Huxley's utopians...."
"...our genetically-enhanced descendants may regard any sort of aversive
experience as something akin to hard-core pornography..."
"...notions of what today passes for tolerably good mental health will be superseded. They may be written off as mood-congruent cognitive pathologies characteristic of the old DNA regime. For dismally low standards of well-being - or rather ill-being - are typical of emotional primitives from the Darwinian Age. By contrast, life in the new reproductive era is destined to get incomparably richer as we rewrite our own genetic code. Ultimately, the re-creation of any of today's state-spectrum of malaise-ridden waking and dreaming consciousness may be outlawed as cruel and immoral. Or perhaps once the exquisite alternatives to Darwinian life have been explored, a regression to earlier forms of consciousness will be discounted as simply inconceivable..."
"...enriched post-humans will be able to subvert our traditional status as throwaway genetic vehicles. When Paradise - or something better - has been biologically implemented, then perhaps the very notion of tampering with our new-won "natural" condition and feeling "drugged" may come to seem perversely immoral. For who would want to contaminate the purity of their ecstatic biological soul-stuff with alien chemical pollutants? Until that era arrives, we still need chemical mood-enrichers to flourish...."
"...an all-pervasive network of virtual realities will enable everybody to have their objects of desire fulfilled, and at minimal cost. Interactive or solipsistic, artistic masterpiece or pornographic wish-fulfilment, an ever-growing software library of virtual worlds will let everyone have their dreams come true. Yet on its own, any such utopian VR scenario wouldn't, mirabile dictu, make us significantly happier for long. The hedonic treadmill of feedback inhibition in the CNS would still grind. For a revolution of rising expectations will eventually lead people to expect to enjoy and enact in VR any set of perceptions and narrative structures they choose. We'll expect to do so in virtual worlds that manifest physical laws, narrative plot-lines and body-images of our own choosing. In the absence of at least a minimal mesolimbic repair-job to enrich our mental health, then Darwinian sentiments of boredom, angst and other dormant negativities would periodically surface to spoil our ostensibly perfect idylls and utopias. On its own, even utopian VR can't transcend the limits of our genetically constrained "set-point" of well-being or ill-being. Ironically, a mass migration into virtual worlds may come to represent Peripheralism's final fling. Only total control of one's notional surroundings via immersive VR may be enough to convince the sceptic of the futility of purely environmental manipulation to secure lasting happiness. By contrast, the symbiosis of gradients of genetically preprogrammed euphoria and the application of mature virtual reality software engineering is an awesomely exciting prospect..."
"...our genetically-enriched descendants may view us as little better than sociopaths. For with enlightened gene-therapy the role of, say, key receptor sub-types of the 'civilising neurotransmitter' serotonin, the 'hormone of love' oxytocin, and the 'chocolate amphetamine' phenylethylamine, can be radically enhanced. When naturally loved-up and blissful on a richer cocktail of biochemicals than anything accessible today, our post-human successors will be able, not just to love everyone, but to be perpetually in love with everyone as well. Whether we'll choose to exercise this option just because it's technically feasible is another question. Cynics may argue that the scenario of lifelong egoistic bliss is more plausible. It's been well said that when we're in love, we find it astonishing it's possible to love someone else so much - because normally we love each other so little. This indifference, or at best diffuse benevolence, to the rest of the world's population is easily taken for granted in a competitive consumerist society - or on the plains of the African savannah. Quasi-psychopathic callousness to our fellows is an ingredient of 'normal' archaic mental health. Yet our deficiencies in love are only another grim expression of selfish DNA. If humans had collectively shared the greater degree of genetic relatedness common to many of the social insects (haplodiploidy), then we might already "naturally" be able to love each other with greater enthusiasm. Sociobiologists would then explain why we all loved each other so deeply, not so little. Happily, in the future it will be possible to mimic, and then magnify out of all recognition, the kind of altruistic devotion to each other that might have arisen if were we all 100% genetically-related clones. Hints of a capacity for universal love can be glimpsed fleetingly today, most commonly on the empathogen 'hug-drug' MDMA (Ecstasy). But a predisposition towards loving each other to bits can also be genetically pre-programmed. This capacity can become innate. Empathetic bliss needn't be a drug-induced aberration. For if the right sort of psychochemical cocktail is automatically triggered whenever anyone one knows is present or recollected, then we can combine absolute, unconditional and uninhibited love for each other with a celebration of the diversity of genes, physiques and cultures. At present this prospect may seem some way off...."
"...for there is a well-attested correlation between depressed mood and low social status. The manifestations of melancholic depression and, conversely, euphoric mania are also uncannily typical of social animals occupying omega and alpha status-roles. Evolutionary psychology suggests that depression is part of a genetically adaptive coping process. Depressive behaviour involves the passive submission to a prolonged or uncontrollable stress. The persistence into the post-hunter-gatherer era of depressive states continues to foster (relatively) stable hierarchies of social dominance of our hominid ancestors. Yet pecking orders aren't an immutable law of nature. In this sense at least, Aldous Huxley got it wrong. The project of radically enhancing everyone's mood and motivation is likely to be subversive of authority. Enhanced well-being will leave people less, not more, vulnerable to exploitation by a power elite. In Brave New World, members of the populace are (effectively) the opiated dupes of the ruling elites. Soma is used as a pacifying agent of social control. The social consequences of genetically pre-programmed happiness, however, will be very different. This is because everyday mental super-health promises to undermine the biological underpinnings of the dominance- and submission-relationships characteristic of humanity's ancestral environment of adaptation. Happiness, and an enhanced responsiveness to a wider range of rewards, is empowering. Happiness, and a pharmacologically or genetically enhanced capacity to anticipate happiness, potentially enables people to take greater control of their own lives. This sense of empowerment is in striking contrast to the spectrum of "learned helplesness" and "behavioural despair" so typical of depressive disorders. Boosting the efficiency of tyrosine hydroxylase, for instance, doesn't act merely to elevate mood. The consequent enhanced noradrenaline function in the locus coeruleus tends to diminish subordinate behaviour. Super-well people don't let themselves be bossed around. Contrary to a thousand-and-one sci-fi dramas, our post-human descendants aren't doomed perpetually to re-enact the power-plays of the African savannah..."
"...theologians talk of the 'dignity of suffering'. Yet being biologically compelled to suffer, as under the present Darwinian DNA regime, is arguably the greatest indignity of all...."
"...sadly, if God exists, then He has chosen cunningly to hide His existence from most of His creatures. Indeed a physicist once noted that things make much more sense if you assume the world was created, not by an all-good and all-powerful being, but by a God who is 100 percent malevolent yet only 90 percent effective. Less heretically expressed, if He does lurk benevolently in the background, then one must presumably be confident that He is greater than all of us, not just in the depth, but also the range of His compassion. If so, then He will scarcely favour a more restrictive or mean-spirited project than paradise-engineering - with its commitment to the molecular biology of univeral well-being... Statistically, the bulk of the world's suffering is undergone by members of other species. Sometimes their anguish is ghastly and prolonged. Such suffering doesn't, even notionally, have any redeeming features. It isn't character-building. It never issues in great art and literature. Non-human suffering can't support even the kinds of sophistry we use to rationalise our own ills... Mercifully, as the abolitionist project gathers pace, the pain and malaise of non-humans as well as humans from the Nightmare Era of primordial life is likely to be phased out too. Legacy genomes will be rewritten. The entire global ecosystem will be redesigned. For there is no need to pay homage to the product of selfish genes - as though self-replicating DNA from the old Darwinian era were some sort of secular equivalent to Providence. The genetically pre-programmed well-being of the post-Transition epoch shouldn't, and probably won't, remain arbitrarily species-specific...."
"...neurochemically, there's no reason why each moment of one's existence couldn't have the impact of a breathtaking revelation...the substrates of boredom and ennui can be eliminated....the exhilarating sense of joy and wonderment one might have experienced witnessing, say, the Creation can become part of the normal fabric of everyday life..."
"...today one can't responsibly advocate the use of major psychedelics. The risks to mental health are too high. "Bad trips" are an ever-present possibility for emotionally unenriched Darwinians. "Freak-outs" on LSD may befall even the psychologically robust. Informed consent prior to taking psychedelics is biologically impossible. This is because psychedelia is not just weirder than the drug-na„ve mind conceives; it's weirder than the drug-na„ve mind can conceive. One can't grasp, in advance, the nature of the sorts of experience to which one is nominally consenting. Yet in consequence of this taboo on chemically altered awareness, a host of unimaginably alien state spaces of consciousness remains off-limits. Trapped in the squalid psychochemical ghetto of Darwinian life, we lack the necessary wetware to conceptualise radically altered states of mind. We can't explicitly represent such states. We haven't even names for the strange new textures of selfhood and introspection that their metabolic pathways disclose. Alas pure reasoning is impotent to access their nature because it lacks the semantic primitives with which to do so. Yet when the vertebrate genome is rewritten, and gradients of genetically-preprogrammed bliss become the norm of mental health, our veil of ignorance can be safely ripped aside. Armed with exquisite cocktails of designer-drugs, even the most outlandish realms of psychedelia can then be investigated in depth. The study of consciousness can become a truly experimental scientific discipline. And crucially, the advent of post-Darwinian genotypes coding for invincible happiness offers a delightful prospect. At last we'll be able safely to explore other-worldly forms of existence in the confidence that they will all, without exception, radiate the sparkle of earthly paradise..."
"... mature enhancements of currently drug-induced states of euphoria can be transformed into an absolute presupposition of sentient existence. Gradients of sublime bliss can become the norm of everyday mental health. The newly emerging disciplines of nanotechnology, quantum computing and genetic engineering allow us to rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world..."
"...within the next few decades, biotechnology can stop the animal holocaust. Genetic engineering will enable the human species cost-effectively to mass-produce edible cellular protein, and indeed all forms of food, of a flavour and texture indistinguishable from, or tastier than, the animal products we now eat. Vat-food will also be cheaper than 'livestock'. As our palates become satisfied by other means, the moral arguments for a cruelty-free diet will start to seem compelling. When it becomes economical to do so, the Western(ised) planetary elite will finally award the sentient fellow creatures we currently abuse and kill a moral status akin to human infants and toddlers. Veganism, though not in quite the contemporary sense of the term, will become the norm. And by a happy coincidence, in the future even the humblest snack will taste more delicious than the ambrosial food of the gods..."
"...one day, we may have thought-episodes like sunsets. Their brilliance will replace the sad little series of cognitive tickles that we shuffle around, and via which this manifesto is written and read..."
"...for ultimately the real intellectual challenge ahead won't lie in happiness-maximisation. After all, if non-stop hedonistic bliss were the (sole) objective of paradise-engineering, then a rat or monkey with electrodes implanted in its pleasure-centres already points the way forward. Electrical stimulation of the brain is both extraordinarily crude and extraordinarily effective. No physiological tolerance exists to the substrates of pure pleasure. In fact, our descendants may find that sustaining life-long happiness per se trivially easy. A genetic predisposition to express the substrates of emotional well-being can be hardwired from conception. The truly challenging task in the era of post-genomic medicine will be exploring how to re-encephalise emotions in ways that serve our own interest - and not simply the inclusive fitness of primordial DNA. In generations to come, a primary focus of neuroscientific mind-making may lie in remapping the axonal and dendritic arborisation of the neo-cortex. This task is much more ambitious than merely amplifying the brain's pleasure-centres - though states of bliss thousands or even millions of times more intense than anything accessible today may be routine for our descendants. As this neural remapping unfolds, our emotional and intellectual enrichment may take many guises. The enrichment of (post-)human mental health is hard to quantify or even define. But the aim of this rational redesign of our own nature will be to bootstrap our way into fulfilling our second-order desires for who and what we want to become - whether gods or just better (post-)humans..."
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bibliography
¾
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Marshall McLuhan's works include :
Counterblast (New York: Harcourt Brace 1969) with Harley Parker
Culture is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill 1970)
Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon 1960) co-edited with Edmund Carpenter
From ClichZ’ to Archetype (New York: Viking 1970) with Wilfred Watson
The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1989) with
Bruce Powers
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1962)
The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962 (Toronto: McGraw-Hill 1969) edited by
Eugene McNamara
Laws of Media - The New Science (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1988) with Eric McLuhan
The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam 1967) with Quentin Fiore & Jerome Agel
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972) with Barrington Nevitt
Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper & Row 1968) with Harley Parker
Understanding Media (Cambridge: MIT Press 1994)
War & Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam 1968) with Quentin Fiore & Jerome Agel
____________________________________
Terence McKenna's work includes :
The Invisible Landscape (with Dennis McKenna, 1975, 1993)
The Archaic Revival (1991)
Food of the Gods (1992)
Synesthesia (with Tim Ely, 1992)
Trialogues At The Edge of The West (with Sheldrake and Abraham, 1992)
True Hallucinations (1993)
____________________________________
David Pearce / BLTC
Paradise Engineering & the Post-Darwinian Transition
www.post-darwinism.com/
http://www.paradise-engineering.com/
see also
http://bltc.com/
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10.03.04
notes on BLUE SECTOR
commissioned by the ABC REGIONAL PRODUCTON FUND 2003-4
the pieces in blue sector were constructed via digital processing and manipulation of field recordings gathered in north east victoria, january and february 2004.
all share similar material and formal elements; re-framed/re-shot/re-focused via discrete addition and subtraction of layers of acoustic 'film'/or transparencies - vignettes open into vistas and vice versa....
my grandmother's old bluthner piano ringing out against the evening cicadas, the hum of a local quarry, a dawn cacophony of birds, splashing in the creek on a sunday morning... found sound objects and organic materials exist in symbiotic relationship with each other; as an observational, aural and formal experience, the barriers between natural and machine environments become increasingly arbitrary in a sonic sense - formally distinct integrities become interchangeable with those of the other.
blue sector attempts to synthesize various aspects of these diverse environments via 'organic' forms and structures suggested and partially determined by the flow of natural events in time - simply by listening and observing the goings-on of reality in a temporal scheme.
echoes of stockhausen, musique concrète, gavin bryars, b-grade horror films, harold budd, ryuichi sakamoto, wagner's 'parsifal' - they're in there somewhere, a segments of an old piece 'reveria im neuen stil' appears in the blue sector 2 remix piece. everything else happened in real time, and I tried not to get in the way too much.
thanks to anthony burgess and his book 'earthly powers' which i read while doing the piece.
finally, thanks to everyone at the ABC and the Regional Production Fund for making this work possible.
broadcast from march 2004: Late Nights with Julian Day, ABC Classic FM;
the Sound Lab with Fenella Kernebone April 04;
other selected broadcasters later
REVIEWS
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"......An artist who sits very highly on the 'music prodigy' side of the scale......James Gordon Anderson has outdone himself again! From the chilled out, melancholic drum'n'bass slant of Septemberfield, Conquistadores and Skan, to the heavenly hymns of Ariel Dub Matrix, his colours of innovation and style will bewitch you........an exquisite production......."
INTHEMIX.COM.AU, 13.05.2004 (Conquistadores)
"An album layered with never ending tales. His music cannot help but pick up and shuttle you to worlds that are galaxies away... altogehter an exquisite auditory painting... if you never lost yourself in music, this will be your turning point... recipient of my high rotation star..."
IN THE MIX.COM.AU, 13 June 2002 (Till Eventide Now Voyager)
"Stunning, lifts your mind away to the heavens..."
TRM MAGAZINE, Feb 2000 (Zen Gun)
"Since his 1998 debut Concord - a 50 minute ambient piece popular among the installation set - self-described space guru James Gordon Anderson (aka Polestar) has cranked the volume, pace and instrumentation; opening his fan base to club and café goers with his apocalyptic breakbeat, shimmering space funk and stellar ambient soul. His latest, Till Eventide Now Voyager, is a cracker, proof that while Anderson might be looking to outer space for inspiration, his feet are firmly on the ground. TENV runs the gamut from boody-shaking doof to shimmering jazz trillings, to meditative calm - often within the one song (Orpheus, for example). It's worth it for the awesome closer, Jupiter Curve, alone. That he doesn't put a foot wrong on the other nine makes it a must buy."
MELBOURNE CITY WEEKLY, 23 June 2002 (Till Eventide Now Voyager)
"Installs the listener in a world of hallucinatory power and beauty...."
ABC Classic FM, 1998 (Concord)
"Anderson is a deeply creative spirit and this rather wonderful CD really shows that off. His aural exploration draws on the spiritual expressionism of Sufidom, tantric beats and robotic nu-jazz through this magic journey...."
QSTAGE REVIEWS, June 2002 (Till Eventide Now Voyager)
"The music of the second act reaches sweet resolution in a mesmerising, Eno-esque progression of sliding singular notes...."
The AGE, 1 August 2000 (Chunky Move Dance company HYDRA world première)
"The trick to minimalism, to crossing the invisible barrier that delineates captivating from repetitive: is to make subtle incremental changes to an ever-encircling theme. Polestar's James Gordon Anderson has done so magnificently on his second release. In over an hour of swirling electronica, the listener circumnavigates myriad notes, sketched like a ballet of snowflakes glancing off a Melbourne windscreen. Does the journey return to its source, or find a new beginning in its culmination: the minutiae of detail giving way to sprawling spectrum of opportunity. Anderson recalls some of Philip Glass's earliest works, but with a delicacy of touch to replace Glass's occasional bombastic outbursts. Stunningly world class."
THE SCENE.COM.AU Brisbane 2000 (Zen Gun)
"Till Eventide Now Voyager is a refreshing take on modern musical themes. Anderson's classically trained ear lending itself to dark psychedelia and fibrous minimalism. In the space between alternating beats and left field composition Anderson creates this own planet of sound, one that endeavours to travel vast expanses of untapped human conciousness. A highly imaginative album that has audible appeal through numerous musical genres."
Zebrahype Magazine, June 2002 (TENV)
"Take a talented ivory tinkerer, give him an old Atari sequencer, a keyboard and two years of insomnia and you get Zen Gun, the inspired new offering from local composer James Gordon Anderson (aka Polestar). Less installation-like than his celebrated debut Concord, Zen Gun is in the same family as Reich and Glass are, but unique enough that it's a second cousin twice removed. Opening track The Prayer Wheel is pure mind candy - one of those trance inducing tracks best kept form the car stereo...."
MELBOURNE CITY WEEKLY, June 2000 (Zen Gun)