Background and Future; Eddies of Thought
River is the latest evolutionary instance of a complex tapestry of intellectual thought developed over a period of years by Will Bauer. Such a fabric attempts to explore, interrelate, and engender new conceptual lenses through which to view the ineffable reality of our universe.
River is the second in a series of experimental media-art “data portraiture” pieces created by Will. The first, “Life Tastes Good – a Portrait of Coke as an A.I.” (“LTG” for short) was an attempt to represent the complexity of a corporation. Using the rich-media forms of the Internet and non-linear database search technology, it tried to depict the many changing “faces” of the entity known as “Coke”.
LTG took a novel conceptual tangent in its assessment of Coke as far more than simply the legal fiction of an artificial “corpus” or body. Instead, it regarded Coke as an actual instance of primitive Artificial Intelligence (“A.I.”). From this viewpoint, the entity known as "Coke" can be viewed as being built from the bodies of its human constituents in a manner similar to that by which we are built from individual microscopic cells.
Such entities exhibit emergent behaviour and agency of their own, agency not always aligned with the long term needs or desires of their individual human constituents. For an example of this, one need look no further than the U.S. government and their present-day foreign policy of violent “pre-emptive” action around the world. Nominally protective, such actions often actually foment aggressively anti-American sentiment the world over - not an end desired or supported by most of the U.S.’s individual human constituents.
While this began as merely a novel sort of “what if” conceit on which to base an art piece, as LTG came together it began to seem that this might actually be a useful way of regarding corporations (particularly large, multi-national, ones) or governments. Such “cyborgs built from human flesh” (to use a term from one of Will’s lectures on this subject) may be an aspect of technological modernity of which we have not been fully aware until now.
River thus derives its intellectual lineage from two “streams” of thought presently being developed and explored by Will: the concept of corporate entities as actual “artificial” life forms and the notion of “data portraiture” as an experimental form for representing complex entities or bodies of information.
As such, the latter is founded more generally in the notion that, while of unquestionable utility and value, fundamentally Cartesian representational forms such as geometric perspective (artistically) and coordinate geometry (scientifically) have some very definite limits, limits of which both scientific and artistic communities are beginning to be aware.
Such limits invite experimental departures in representational methodologies, of which River is one and Life Tastes Good another. Will’s hope is that his experiments -along with those of others - will someday lead to new intellectual tools that reunify art and science, achieving something he terms “The Poet’s Bandwidth”. Such an achievement would take us beyond our present-day intellectual boundaries, generating a whole new spectrum of understanding and ways of knowing. In the same manner (at least metaphorically) that Maxwell’s equations united electricity and magnetism, such an integration of knowledge domains and ways of thought will ultimately engender a significantly greater understanding of the universe and our place within it.