artforms:
Screenbased Interactives
Installation
Artificial Intelligence
Video

science engagements:
Mind and Consciousness, artificial life as it works towards artificial intelligence and the production of conscious artefacts.

science partners:
Effectively I am doing the science myself, by which I mean that the consciousness work is not experimental science perhaps more like a literature review, though the intention is more in the bringing of scientific ideas to the public and providing the background upon which much of contemporary interactive and new media thinking is based. This primarily applies to The Brain Project web site and CD-Rom. The Reading Scroll is a more personal work building up my own views of the ideas explored in the Brain Project and presenting something more of a personal philosophy particularly relating to the embodiment of consciousness and the construction of one's experience of the world.
The main science, currently, is in developing a theory of emergence and the organising relations that make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. This applies particularly in the area of Artificial Life in which the dynamics of organising relations can be explored experimentally. It also applies in the area of consciousness in that an explanation for how a material system of neurons and physiology can produce the apparently non-material effects of experience and mentality. The proposal is rather similar to the biological work that meant that invoking an elan vital or vital spirit was no longer necessary to explain the production of living organisms from non-living chemistry. Much of the experimental level of this work does have scientific partners and there are already several publications in the formalisation of theory and in experimental studies.

project description:

I am presently building an electronic reading scroll. It is derived from the Chinese and Japanese reading scroll which is a long sheet of paper that is unwound from its roll and read by travelling along the unwind/wind process.

The content for this machine will be my current work in the philosophy of consciousness and artificial intelligence and the practical issues involved in developing conscious machines. These topics include how consciousness comes about in living beings and how robots and other artifacts might be endowed with consciousness.

links:
http://www.culture.com.au/brain_proj/
http://www.culture.com.au/brain_proj/caiia.htm