Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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research and quotidian thought alike, in conditions of massive complexity with rich redundancy in the information. It is also the mode in which fields of knowledge are invented, and sometimes transformed (creative discovery, sudden insight). If Kant were alive today, his example for the “sublime” might be “information” rather than “ocean storm.” The institutional pragmatic goal of concept avatar is to adapt the logic or mechanisms of intuitive inquiry to interface design for semantic web databasing.
The analogy with the sublime is apt, since, as Kant explained, in those conditions the site of world measure shifts from the objective order of things (the order of beauty), to personal embodied experience. Kant’s Copernican revolution in metaphysics (shifting the locus of categories from the world to the [transcendental] mind) was the point of departure for what has evolved into a new ontology of experience, made viable by digital imaging technologies. The notion of experience ontology is proposed by analogy with the invention of semantic ontology by the Classical Greeks at the beginnings of literacy. Being (ontology) is not in the world, but is a classification system made possible by alphabetic writing. Semantic ontology, based on the categories invented by Aristotle (substance and accidents), uses rules of definition to extract certain features from observed entities. The salient features that count as “essence” are those manifesting function (purpose, end): “form follows function” was in Greek metaphysics before it became the mantra of modern design. Certainly things had functions before literacy, but literacy put this quality of experience into a tool and institutionalized it. In recent decades these ancient categories have been made more flexible, but are no match for the information sublime.
Similarly, experience ontology is relative to the apparatus (social machine) that makes it possible or functional (digital imaging). The quality of experience made accessible to ontology in electracy is that of affective memory in the individual body. Affective memory is the deepest order of memory, existing only as somatic markers informing kinesthetic intelligence. It is “enactive,” resulting from the accumulation of routines, habitus, acquired through daily life, and carrying emotional charges associated in idiosyncratic (singular) ways with individual enculturation. Anyone who has reacted “automatically” in an emergency situation of instant reflex has drawn on this kind of experience (blink). More immediately relevant in our context is the fact that this dimension of emotionally cathected sensori-motor enactions is also the source of coherence for intuition and creative insight. This affective network does not depend on specific image representations, but is encoded across the senses, multimodally. The event of insight, in which irrelevant semantic domains are superimposed, yielding a eureka moment, is due to an affective match that is not in the semantics of the domains but in the idiosyncratic experience of the seeker.
The most extensive analysis of these sorts of matches is by Gerald Holton, historian of science, who introduced the phrase “image of wide scope” (wide image) to account for his observations (Ulmer, Internet Invention). Although Holton and others using his methods have studied hundreds of cases of the most productive people across the full range of sciences, arts, and society, the prototype is Albert Einstein. Einstein himself mentioned in his autobiography the importance of the memory of a gift from his father of a compass when Albert was four-years old. Albert was fascinated by the fixity of the arrow regardless of the movements of the compass. The attunement of Albert’s disposition or temperament was manifested in this fixity, which Holton abstracts as the “invariant principle.” This disposition found a match with “speed of light” in the physics problem set Albert addressed as an adult. Holton’s argument is that this affective trace is the reason Einstein and not Poincaré or some other equally well-prepared scientist solved the problem of electromagnetism.
The image of wide scope is present in cases not covered by Holton, such as that of Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Gehry reported that one of his most vivid memories was of the carp that his grandmother would bring home live from the market. Frank loved to watch the carp swimming in the bathtub, before it was served for Sabbath supper. The movements of this fish are now observed in the sweeping curved geometries of Gehry’s designs. The wide image accounts for Gehry’s recognition of this feeling in the geometries, which he began to use even before he had access to the computers that made them practical.
The immediate point of relevance is to note the interface feature, equivalent in experience ontology of essence in semantic metaphysics. This feature is the kinetic gesture, the motion charged with affect, in the scene (e-motion). For Einstein it was the one fixed feature within a turning frame; for Gehry it was the undulations of a swimming fish. Commentators from a diversity of fields have made similar observations of this feature as the appropriate interface between the affective body and the archive of documents. Gelernter, arguing for adding intuition and poetry to the AI model, used a reading of Genesis to show the feature: a series of stories, whose coherence was provided by scenes of Moses making a certain gesture of “a powerful arm outstretched.” Deleuze and Guattari, in their study of Kafka, similarly opened a new network of intertext within the oeuvre, a system consisting of an oppositional pair: bent head + portrait photo / straightened head + musical sound. The implication is that the phrases expressing such patterns are present in the surface text, and may be extracted as features, designed as hooks or attractors addressing potential matches in the idiosyncratic backstories of researchers, supporting browsing or low-focus inquiry.
The further implication is that experience ontology is inherently supported in audiovisual media. The fact that film (AV media) simulates the presentation of the world to perception enables it to record the event situations that trigger the somatic markers of enactive memory. Digital simulations of lens photography further enhance the ability of audiovisualization to enhance, augment, and bring into awareness and articulation this dimension of intelligence that until now has remained “unconscious.” Commentators in the Humanities are especially excited by the possibility that database simulation allows reflection upon the dispositions that are a primary source of judgments and decisions in ethics and politics (not to mention aesthetics). The positive aspect of this discovery is that filmic presentation, in its capacity to trigger deep memory, in principle allows individuals to examine under the hood of their bachelor machine. The caveat directed to promotors of neuroaesthetics comes from the philosophical aptitude of German language. Presentation (Darstellung) is an improvement on representation (Vorstellung). However, as Sam Weber pointed out in several books, both of these modalities are framed and repurposed by a third kind discovered by Freud, distortion (Entstellung). Star Trek already taught us that in VR, the most convincingly authentic experience is in fact a kind of dream. Its Stelle results from all the turns of tropology—condensation, displacement, rationalization, representability. Concept avatar does not propose any one place, stand, location (Stelle), but the functionality of place (chora).
After the Greeks had spent some time with their epics in written form they began to notice some clustering and patterns emerging within the words, the phenomenon of paronomasia, with a variety of words formed out of a shared or similar roots. “Dike” or “justice” was the first word that was studied systematically for these patterns, and became the first concept constructed in philosophy (in Plato’s Republic). Similarly, commentators today are noticing the presence of affective intensities emerging within image work. The next step is to do for these image patterns what the Greeks did for their word patterns: put them into an ontology, that is, a system for storage and retrieval of information on a massive scale, opening a further dimension to reality. The purpose of concept avatar is to support this passage from one style of concept to another. Avatar does not eliminate essence, but redirects attention to a different aspect of a scene, to different traits, that gather into an alternative pattern expressing and constructing an affective metaphysics. “Experience ontology” is a reminder of this background of flash reason, joining data extraction, visualization, and collaboration tools, to integrate data and interface design. Virtual worlds, or mixed (augmented) realities, may be designed to support experience ontology, both for pedagogy and research, by addressing the somatic markers of affective memory, enhanced by information retrieval. The proposal is that experience ontology is to creative discovery what semantic ontologies have been to scientific method. On the side of technics, we need an experience web to supplement the semantic web. The Allegory of Prudence probes this dimension of experience, accessing this feeling that motivates your image of wide scope. Electracy augments the sensory capacity of your body