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"A major art revolution is going on," says Dr. Anna Bonshek, adjunct faculty member at Maharishi University of Management. Bonshek recently returned from England and Wales where she presented papers at two international conferences on consciousness, technology, and electronic art. "It's a new technology where everything's open for grabs--all possibilities," she says. "That's the thing that's exciting about it--huge potential for artists."
A graduate in painting from London's Slade School of Fine Art, Bonshek draws on various media to express her ideas, which range from traditional subjects to "notions of space and infinity, time and eternity." Bonshek drew on these ideas for the papers, co-authoring one of them with Gurdon Leete, Media Art Director at Maharishi University of Management. "Working out the ideas with Anna was fascinating," says Leete, "and I think we have brought out some absolutely fundamental points about culture, consciousness, and digital media that need to be pondered by everyone who cares about art." One of the papers will be published by the journal Intellect.
"We were very fortunate to have been selected," Bonshek says. "I think I only saw one other person from Iowa at a conference where 690 delegate packets were given out and 300 presenters and artists attended. We were fortunate also to receive one of a limited number of bursaries from ISEA [the International Symposium on the Electronic Arts], which provided funding to attend." Other support was forthcoming as well, and she would like to thank Dr. Richard Bonshek and Dr. Jane Bonshek at the University of Manchester and Dr. Lee Fergusson, without whose combined help she would not have been able to attend the conferences.
Exploring Consciousness and Art
The Centre for the Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) sponsored a conference entitled "Consciousness Reframed II: Art and Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era," which focused on consciousness, digital media, and the convergence of culture, art, science, and technology. Hosted by the University of Wales, Newport College, it was held in the historical village of Caerleon in the beautiful Wye Valley. Comprised of a small gathering of 100 speakers, the event aimed to explore "the secret of consciousness."
A major discussion centered on how computer technology is transforming our lives. In his preface, program chair Roy Ascott declared that an era is emerging in which art, science, and technology have converged. Whereas they once avoided the machine, "Artists now work with the metaphor of science, and technology increasingly informs our aesthetic and epistemological structures, engendering new processes of perception, communication, and cognition," said Ascott.
Digital media is creating new kinds of art. Most obvious has been the influence of virtual reality, the most interactive media and perhaps the most revolutionary way of seeing yet developed. During the conference, Canadian virtual reality artist Char Davies presented her work, which, according to Bonshek, "creates a very powerful effect that alters our concepts of time and materiality." Davies uses points of light, submerging into waterscapes, bodily interiors, landscapes, the whole cycle of creation and destruction. Her concept is that the body is the means for perceiving the world as a total experience.
In another session, Bonshek spoke alongside Malaysian-based artist Niranjah Rajah, who discussed ways in which the Internet is shifting the emphasis away from materiality and how the sacred traditions of India could be expressed in this new media. To illustrate this, Rajah presented a virtual temple that he and Raman Srinivasan had created on the Internet. His grandmother had scoffed at the idea of constructing a virtual temple, saying "the temple resides in the heart--you don't go out and look for it." But in a sense, there are three temples: the one in stone, the one on the Net, and the one in the heart. The Internet temple is less material than the one in stone, but not as immaterial as the one in the heart, which is the domain of consciousness.
Other speakers, like Julio Bermudez, saw consciousness as emerging from the neuronal activity of the brain--and culture, as a parallel structure, emerging from the interconnected workings of many human beings. Logically, then, huge numbers of people involved in the Internet would influence the form that consciousness takes.
Bonshek, however, sees consciousness operating in a completely different way. Her paper "Future Present: Reastheticizing Life through a New Technology of Consciousness" emphasized the role of the Maharishi Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs. These technologies of consciousness operate on a more abstract level than electronic technology.
Her presentation focused on the power of consciousness through Maharishi Vedic technologies to transform art in the digital media age. By developing consciousness, these technologies refine perception and enliven culture, enabling digital media artists to transform aesthetics and redefine art as a medium for all possibilities. These are some of the ideas she has been exploring in her forthcoming book, Art: A Mirror of Consciousness.
ISEA98: The Transformational Power of Technology
Though the organization is based in Canada, each year ISEA is hosted in a different country. Last year it was held in Chicago; this year it was split into two symposia--in the rival cities of Liverpool and Manchester--only 60 miles north of Bonshek's childhood home in the Midlands of England. Located in the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, ISEA98 appropriately advocated the themes of Revolution and Terror as applied to the transformational power of technology. Significantly, the first computer was built in Manchester in 1948.
In the rather unusual ISEA98 format at Manchester, presenters had only 5-15 minutes to speak, were cross-examined, and then time was opened up for questions and discussion. "We didn't just stand up there and read a prepared paper as at the other conference," says Bonshek. "As a result, the whole conference had a livelier feel about it."
Her session was all about whether transcendence was an inherent aspect of digital media art. People asked her a wide variety of questions, including the definition of Brahman or Brahman Consciousness--the experience of oneself as the totality, which could be thought of as an aggregate of multiple infinities. "These ideas may be current in the digital media arena today," says Bonshek, "but they are part of a long tradition of knowledge and have been explored by faculty and students at Maharishi University of Management for decades. The difference is that now they are being applied to different areas of electronic art."
Digital media theorists like Steven Holtzman advocate technology as "a tool for investigating the cosmic truths found in structure. The computer--the ultimate tool for manipulating structures--can reveal a new dimension of Brahman: a digital reflection of Brahman." Bonshek suggested that while this may be so, first we must live and become Brahman in order to best reflect Brahman. This can be achieved by unfolding individual awareness.
Participating in the Terror98 symposium, Bonshek discussed "The Shock of Refinement" with the idea of refining one's nervous system through practicing technologies of consciousness. "Refinement is often associated with an elitist, 19th-century, arbitrary notion of taste. But refinement can be understood literally as the inner process of refining the physiology through the Transcendental Meditation technique. The potential for terror is dissolved and the potential for an unbounded, unrestricted experience established," says Bonshek.
Refinement in this sense is a specific process involving the mind and body, which develop expanded awareness. Digital art is currently the best way to represent this refinement, she says.
Other topics at the conference involved redefining the role of art and the artist. Artists now fill a multiplicity of roles--technologist, marketer, businessperson, provocateur, collaborator, perhaps even scientist. Also, the old ways of viewing art have changed. "The pieces we saw are very powerful and do seem to have an effect on an individual in a way that just looking at a sculpture or a painting doesn't have," Bonshek says. "This somehow is directly related to the way we think. If you have an image on the screen, then it's actually closer to the nature of the original thought. And it can be there one minute and gone the next--much closer to the way the mind functions."
Multiple Infinities: Exploring the Dynamics of Consciousness
The video animation Multiple Infinities, which was shown at both conferences, uses Soft Image 3-D animation software and Adobe Premiere and is two-and-one half minutes long--quite lengthy by animation standards. Neven Kovacic says he and Dr. Bonshek worked on it furiously, right up until the moment she left to catch the plane for England. "It's the most enjoyable thing I've done so far," says Kovacic. "We were totally committed--no obstacles--and everything went really fast."
The screen opens with an intense white dot against a liquid blue background. The dot is a point of infinity, as Bonshek explains it. Then it starts to vibrate, generating multiple dots in sequence. Three dots represent the three-fold nature of consciousness. Then, continuing to vibrate, five dots emerge, and so on. All of these dots represent infinity; that's the idea behind multiple infinities. The dots spiral, unfolding into a circle. Then circles, or mandalas, unpack, first quickly, in a three-fold sequence, then slowly. At the end the dot expands to infinity in a warm glow of golden light.
"The idea is that if you have infinity in a point, the point should be able to expand because it's infinity as well. It's like you're going into that point and the point becomes infinity," she says.
Bonshek explains that the inspiration for the video was an attempt to visually represent, in artistic form, principles from Maharishi Vedic Science, which unfold the dynamics and experience of consciousness. "We wanted to deal directly with these principles and create something inspiring and, hopefully, convey an idea of something very abstract and immaterial but which is related to our own consciousness."
