Game Studies 1st Assignment - Erik Davis and Technological Soul Space
How useful is Erik Davis’ discussion of technological soul-space for the analysis of our interface with computers?
The place is San Francisco. The year, the early 1990s. You are in the midst of four “Watchtowers” embodied by the shapes of four noisy 486 PCs. These are joined to each other via an Ethernet and in turn, linked to a SPARC server station that has access to the Internet. These four PCs, stand tall like pagan sentinels in the cardinal directions of the cast circle. Each of these PCs represents the four elements of ancient lore whose power they have been trying to invoke: earth, air, water and fire. You gaze into the monitor screens and notice a three dimensional ritual space, a Virtual Reality Marked-up Language space. Its pentagrams and colored polyhedrons, spookily mirror, the magic circle that enclose the room you are standing in. This is the ceremonial launch of VRML, conducted by Mark Pesce, technopagan, goddess-worshiper and ‘occasional partaker of psychedelic sacraments’. (Davis, 1998: 193-194) This ceremony to launch VRML is just one of the various examples that Erik Davis brings forth to discuss the spiritual or hermetic relationships in our interface with computers through the themes of Cyberspace, cyber- souls and spirituality.
With the advent of the Internet, and the global influence that it has over people’s lives, our relationship and interface with the computer and the internet perhaps have become an integral part of our lives that we now take it for granted. Many theorists have attempted to analyze this phenomenon. Each of them, has different analytical focus and angles. This paper aims to discuss cyber guru Erik Davis’ Techngnosis, particularly his chapter on ‘The Virtual Craft’ and examines whether his radical discussion on soul-space can be applied to an analysis of our interface with computers. For the purposes of this discussion, our interaction with computer games like The Sims, and certain aspects of the usage of the internet will be briefly explored. This paper will also attempt to briefly highlight the limitations of the physical body that Davis has not explicitly discussed.
Erik Davis’ Techgnosis
The term ‘Techgnosis’ was invented by Erik Davis to illustrate spirituality and its interaction with technology. Davis had added the word ‘Tech’ to the existing ‘gnosis’, to discuss the radical idea of a spiritual component to our interface with computers. Onelook dictionary on the Internet states that ‘gnosis’ is the ‘intuitive knowledge of spiritual truths; said to have been possessed by ancient Gnostics’. Gnostics in short is the belief in the a higher, supreme being, usually god. Science writer Margaret Wertheim defines Gnosis as ‘that union with divinity that is characterized by a state of intuitive all-knowingness.’ (Wertheim, 1999: 274) Davis’ point of view is that for most computer and online internet users, there is a spiritual component to their interface with the computer. (Davis, 1998) Davis undertakes the analysis by comparison with early technological developments that served as metaphors for the proponents’ views of the world. One example Davis cites is that of Extropians, a Californian sect which believes that it is possible to one day download the essence of the human mind into a computer and thus achieve immortality, and he suggests that this has common elements with the Christian concept of the afterlife. (Davis, 1998) An example from The Sims will illustrate this phenomenon later in this paper. Davis’ stand is that this use of technology to fulfill a certain sense of spirituality is a modern example of gnosis, thus Davis’ attachment of the word ‘tech’ to ‘gnosis’.
Origin Of Cyberspace
The origin of cyberspace can be traced to William Gibson’ novel, ‘Neuromancer’. The setting and ideas in Neuromancer have influenced films like The Matrix. Davis draws an image from a part of Gibson’s writing to illustrate cyberspace, ‘Cyberspace. A Consensual hallucination … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. … Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind.’ (Davis, 1998: 191) Davis cites Margaret Wertheim in that through ‘Creating a space that follows the virtual laws of thought rather than the concrete laws of matter, cyberspace provides a cosmos where the psyche can once again live and breathe.’ (Davis, 1998: 192)
This element of the psyche which is able to exist in cyberspace, is remediated from the ancient Greeks and from Judeo-Christian culture. (Wertheim, 1999, 31) Similar to Davis’ work, Wertheim draws similar analysis that ‘for the Greeks, man was a creature of soma and pneuma, a body and a spirit. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle all saw both human beings and the cosmos in bipolar terms.’ (Wertheim, 1999: 31) Thus this fascination with the ability of the psyche to be able to exist in an alternate space called cyberspace is nothing new and had already been coined by ancient philosophers.
Initially, the notion of virtual reality was first mooted by a French playwright in 1938, who was also a film actor, and state-declared lunatic. Antonin Artaud first adopted the phrase in his magnus opus, “The Theatre and Its Double”. (Davis, 1998: 190) Artaud argues that what theatre does is to create a virtual reality or ‘la realite virtulle’ – ‘in which characters, objects, and images take on the phantasmagoric force of alchemy’s visionary internal dramas’. (Davis, 1998: 190)
With VRML, it aims to allow us to navigate through a digital visual domain in cyberspace, although Pasche initially envisioned it as a medium to store massive amounts of information in the digital realm; and with VRML, we can navigate that realm to retrieve information. VRML however has not really taken off and at present, has only been successful in virtual online chat rooms. And even with virtual chat rooms, we hide behind the façade of the identity we created to represent us. In the real world, our bodies still remain the same, and even though our avatar does not fatigue or tire, our real bodies do.
In comparison with novels, through cinema or comic books, ‘cyberspace gives us a space to suspend the usual scientific rules that constrain the physical reality where our bodies live. But unlike these media, cyberspace is a shared interactive environment, an electronic “soul-space” that beckons the postmodern psyche to both find and remake itself.’ (Davis, 1998: 192) Thus, while novels, cinemas and comic books gives us an arena of escape, computers, access to the internet and online computing allows the added feature of interaction to facilitate that escape. We will briefly look into The Sims in the later part of this paper to illustrate this interaction.
Palaces Of Data
Drawing references to medieval times, devoid of computers and digital databases to facilitate effective information retrieval, Davis’ research uncovers the Ars Memoria, ‘which is the ancient mnemonic technique of building architectural databases inside your skull’. (Davis, 1998: 198) Its anecdotal origin, according to Greer, is briefly this: The poet Simonides of Ceos, as the tale goes, was hired to recite an ode at a nobleman’s banquet. At that time, praising the divinities (in this case, Castor and Pollux) was imperative. The host objected and deducted his fee. Simonides was sarcastically told he could receive his reward from the gods later. Shortly after, a message for Simonides was announced at the door. When Simonides reached it, no one was there, but at that moment the banquet hall collapsed behind him. The gods did repay him. Simonides when questioned, was able to call to memory the image of the banquet hall and the order of guests. Thus he proceeded according to legend, to invent the classical art of memory. (Greer, 2004)
This method, simply put, just requires one to visualize item or information that one wants to remember, and then infuse the next item to be remembered with the first item, via virtually impossible or extraordinary means. For example, if we would want to remember the items: pen, apple and molecules, we visualize a pen, then see it pierce the apple, causing it to disintegrate into millions of fragments. We then zoom in on one of the fragments to visualize a molecule. At any instance, we are able to go back to any link, just by reversing the rhetoric or flow.
Medieval theologians used this system to remember ‘heaven and hell’, lodging the vices and virtues ‘within Byzantine psychic architectures.’ (Davis, 1998: 199) And this was just one of many examples.
With the triumph of Cartesian mechanism, the Hermetic tradition was cast underground and the Art of Memory into oblivion in the late seventeenth century. (Greer, 2004)
The world wide web is now a modern version or remediation of the Ars Memoria. It was created by Tim Bernes- Lee, to master a physics lab’s labyrinthine information system. Bernes-Lee created a hypertext system which allowed him to drop words into documents which acted as specific links to other documents. (Davis, 1998: 200) With our interface with the internet, we are able to go from one web page to another, linked by hypertexts which facilitate our transition from page to page.
This baroque method of memorizing and storing information is now found in the very depths of the computer hard disk and the internet. These so-called prosthetic memory banks, are now doing the work of what was once done in older societies by trained mnemonists. (Greer, 2004). Greer also notes that reliance on prosthetics will weaken natural abilities. Anyone who uses a car to travel all over, will find walking short distances a chore. The same can be applied to the mind. With cyberspace giving us the ability to be free from physical limitations, it has also made memory databases available at the touch of a button. What happens when we come back down to earth, and these databases are erased? Can we fall back on our human memories?
Inhabitants and Analogy
The notion of inhabitation in cyberspace can be drawn from references to Dante’s Commedia, where there was supposedly ‘collosal soul-space’. (Davis, 1998: 196) Wertheim also explores this notion of inhabitation, which she finds similar to Christian doctrines,
‘where early Christians conceived of Heaven as a realm in which their ‘souls’ would be freed from the frailties and failings of the flesh, so today’s champions of cyberspace hail their realm as a place where we will be freed from the limitations and embarrassments of physical embodiment…’ (Wertheim, 1999: 19)
The Sims does not offer the gory ‘bash-em up’ type of game-play, but rather the player gets to create a narrative according to one’s fancy. One radical example is illustrated in Time magazine’s feature article on The Sims. Lev Grossman wrote about a fifty six year old American retired nurse, who after the passing of her husband, started playing the Sims and created little Sims of herself and her husband to work through her grief, and she apparently communicated to her husband through the Sims. (Grossman, 2002) Through The Sims, the retired nurse is able to ‘download’ (sic) her knowledge and recollection of her dead husband’s character traits and attitudes into the digital realm. Socializing with the dead husband through The Sims, would perhaps be akin to the Christian doctrine of a life after death, and eternal life. This would perhaps be the precursor to what Minsky has been trying to achieve - the upload of a person’s brain and consciousness into a digital domain. And in this case, the nurse has done it through the use of The Sims. (Analyzing this rather interesting case, this theory of cyberspace where the soul will be devoid of all frailties and failings of the flesh, can possibly be applied here in this rather bizarre real life scenario.)
On the flipside, the nurse however was aware that she was using The Sims as a tool to overcome her grief, and that she was aware of the unreality of it all. (Grossman, 2002) This conscious recognition of her interaction with the computer software thus represents a gap in theory and application. She is aware that she is using the game as a tool to come to terms with the death of her late husband. She is not totally absorbed like the way Mark Pesce treats his pagan-like relationship to VRML, that she loses a sense of reality. And that is perhaps the attitude of our relationship in our interface with computers. We are aware of the physical reality, and even though we are able to ascend a realm where we can be somebody else, or create the perfect avatar of ourselves, after a long duration of interaction with the computer, we are brought crashing down to earth, with physical bruises and bodily aches. One only needed to play an eight-hour counter-strike marathon to only step out the next day feeling like we’ve been run over by a truck?
Thus there is a gap between theory and application to Erik Davis’ theorization of cyberspace, and cyber-souls and this glaring omission can be seen in the applications of theorists like Wertheim as well. It is perhaps true that our interface with computers and games is one that of escapism and effective information retrieval. It is rare in contemporary times not to utilize computers to access information in databases and to provide a realm to explore limitless possibilities and assume an immortal identity. However the reality of our interface with cyberspace and associating it with medieval visions of the soul in a heavenly realm would be constantly be constrained by our physical limitations. Even though, in cyberspace we are close to immortality. Save for a hard disk crash.
Bibliography
Davis, Erik “Cyberspace: the Virtual Craft”, Technognosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age Of Information, Harmony Books, NY, 1998, ch. 7. pp.190-224.
Dodge, Martin & Rob Kitchin, “Geographies of Cyberspace”, Mapping Cyberspace, Routledge, Lodon & NY, 2001, ch.3, pp.52-64
Greer, John Michael, “Ars Memorativa: An Introduction to the Hermetic Art Of Memory” in Synaptic Accueli, accessed 4th May 2004, < http://www.synaptic.ch/infoliths/textes/arsmem.htm>
Grossman, Lev. “Sim Nation: The Sims Online is a new virtual frontier. Is a video game just what this divided nation needs?” Time, Nov 25, 2002 v160 i22 p.78+
Wertheim, Margaret, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, Doubleday: Sydney & London 1999
The place is San Francisco. The year, the early 1990s. You are in the midst of four “Watchtowers” embodied by the shapes of four noisy 486 PCs. These are joined to each other via an Ethernet and in turn, linked to a SPARC server station that has access to the Internet. These four PCs, stand tall like pagan sentinels in the cardinal directions of the cast circle. Each of these PCs represents the four elements of ancient lore whose power they have been trying to invoke: earth, air, water and fire. You gaze into the monitor screens and notice a three dimensional ritual space, a Virtual Reality Marked-up Language space. Its pentagrams and colored polyhedrons, spookily mirror, the magic circle that enclose the room you are standing in. This is the ceremonial launch of VRML, conducted by Mark Pesce, technopagan, goddess-worshiper and ‘occasional partaker of psychedelic sacraments’. (Davis, 1998: 193-194) This ceremony to launch VRML is just one of the various examples that Erik Davis brings forth to discuss the spiritual or hermetic relationships in our interface with computers through the themes of Cyberspace, cyber- souls and spirituality.
With the advent of the Internet, and the global influence that it has over people’s lives, our relationship and interface with the computer and the internet perhaps have become an integral part of our lives that we now take it for granted. Many theorists have attempted to analyze this phenomenon. Each of them, has different analytical focus and angles. This paper aims to discuss cyber guru Erik Davis’ Techngnosis, particularly his chapter on ‘The Virtual Craft’ and examines whether his radical discussion on soul-space can be applied to an analysis of our interface with computers. For the purposes of this discussion, our interaction with computer games like The Sims, and certain aspects of the usage of the internet will be briefly explored. This paper will also attempt to briefly highlight the limitations of the physical body that Davis has not explicitly discussed.
Erik Davis’ Techgnosis
The term ‘Techgnosis’ was invented by Erik Davis to illustrate spirituality and its interaction with technology. Davis had added the word ‘Tech’ to the existing ‘gnosis’, to discuss the radical idea of a spiritual component to our interface with computers. Onelook dictionary on the Internet states that ‘gnosis’ is the ‘intuitive knowledge of spiritual truths; said to have been possessed by ancient Gnostics’. Gnostics in short is the belief in the a higher, supreme being, usually god. Science writer Margaret Wertheim defines Gnosis as ‘that union with divinity that is characterized by a state of intuitive all-knowingness.’ (Wertheim, 1999: 274) Davis’ point of view is that for most computer and online internet users, there is a spiritual component to their interface with the computer. (Davis, 1998) Davis undertakes the analysis by comparison with early technological developments that served as metaphors for the proponents’ views of the world. One example Davis cites is that of Extropians, a Californian sect which believes that it is possible to one day download the essence of the human mind into a computer and thus achieve immortality, and he suggests that this has common elements with the Christian concept of the afterlife. (Davis, 1998) An example from The Sims will illustrate this phenomenon later in this paper. Davis’ stand is that this use of technology to fulfill a certain sense of spirituality is a modern example of gnosis, thus Davis’ attachment of the word ‘tech’ to ‘gnosis’.
Origin Of Cyberspace
The origin of cyberspace can be traced to William Gibson’ novel, ‘Neuromancer’. The setting and ideas in Neuromancer have influenced films like The Matrix. Davis draws an image from a part of Gibson’s writing to illustrate cyberspace, ‘Cyberspace. A Consensual hallucination … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. … Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind.’ (Davis, 1998: 191) Davis cites Margaret Wertheim in that through ‘Creating a space that follows the virtual laws of thought rather than the concrete laws of matter, cyberspace provides a cosmos where the psyche can once again live and breathe.’ (Davis, 1998: 192)
This element of the psyche which is able to exist in cyberspace, is remediated from the ancient Greeks and from Judeo-Christian culture. (Wertheim, 1999, 31) Similar to Davis’ work, Wertheim draws similar analysis that ‘for the Greeks, man was a creature of soma and pneuma, a body and a spirit. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle all saw both human beings and the cosmos in bipolar terms.’ (Wertheim, 1999: 31) Thus this fascination with the ability of the psyche to be able to exist in an alternate space called cyberspace is nothing new and had already been coined by ancient philosophers.
Initially, the notion of virtual reality was first mooted by a French playwright in 1938, who was also a film actor, and state-declared lunatic. Antonin Artaud first adopted the phrase in his magnus opus, “The Theatre and Its Double”. (Davis, 1998: 190) Artaud argues that what theatre does is to create a virtual reality or ‘la realite virtulle’ – ‘in which characters, objects, and images take on the phantasmagoric force of alchemy’s visionary internal dramas’. (Davis, 1998: 190)
With VRML, it aims to allow us to navigate through a digital visual domain in cyberspace, although Pasche initially envisioned it as a medium to store massive amounts of information in the digital realm; and with VRML, we can navigate that realm to retrieve information. VRML however has not really taken off and at present, has only been successful in virtual online chat rooms. And even with virtual chat rooms, we hide behind the façade of the identity we created to represent us. In the real world, our bodies still remain the same, and even though our avatar does not fatigue or tire, our real bodies do.
In comparison with novels, through cinema or comic books, ‘cyberspace gives us a space to suspend the usual scientific rules that constrain the physical reality where our bodies live. But unlike these media, cyberspace is a shared interactive environment, an electronic “soul-space” that beckons the postmodern psyche to both find and remake itself.’ (Davis, 1998: 192) Thus, while novels, cinemas and comic books gives us an arena of escape, computers, access to the internet and online computing allows the added feature of interaction to facilitate that escape. We will briefly look into The Sims in the later part of this paper to illustrate this interaction.
Palaces Of Data
Drawing references to medieval times, devoid of computers and digital databases to facilitate effective information retrieval, Davis’ research uncovers the Ars Memoria, ‘which is the ancient mnemonic technique of building architectural databases inside your skull’. (Davis, 1998: 198) Its anecdotal origin, according to Greer, is briefly this: The poet Simonides of Ceos, as the tale goes, was hired to recite an ode at a nobleman’s banquet. At that time, praising the divinities (in this case, Castor and Pollux) was imperative. The host objected and deducted his fee. Simonides was sarcastically told he could receive his reward from the gods later. Shortly after, a message for Simonides was announced at the door. When Simonides reached it, no one was there, but at that moment the banquet hall collapsed behind him. The gods did repay him. Simonides when questioned, was able to call to memory the image of the banquet hall and the order of guests. Thus he proceeded according to legend, to invent the classical art of memory. (Greer, 2004)
This method, simply put, just requires one to visualize item or information that one wants to remember, and then infuse the next item to be remembered with the first item, via virtually impossible or extraordinary means. For example, if we would want to remember the items: pen, apple and molecules, we visualize a pen, then see it pierce the apple, causing it to disintegrate into millions of fragments. We then zoom in on one of the fragments to visualize a molecule. At any instance, we are able to go back to any link, just by reversing the rhetoric or flow.
Medieval theologians used this system to remember ‘heaven and hell’, lodging the vices and virtues ‘within Byzantine psychic architectures.’ (Davis, 1998: 199) And this was just one of many examples.
With the triumph of Cartesian mechanism, the Hermetic tradition was cast underground and the Art of Memory into oblivion in the late seventeenth century. (Greer, 2004)
The world wide web is now a modern version or remediation of the Ars Memoria. It was created by Tim Bernes- Lee, to master a physics lab’s labyrinthine information system. Bernes-Lee created a hypertext system which allowed him to drop words into documents which acted as specific links to other documents. (Davis, 1998: 200) With our interface with the internet, we are able to go from one web page to another, linked by hypertexts which facilitate our transition from page to page.
This baroque method of memorizing and storing information is now found in the very depths of the computer hard disk and the internet. These so-called prosthetic memory banks, are now doing the work of what was once done in older societies by trained mnemonists. (Greer, 2004). Greer also notes that reliance on prosthetics will weaken natural abilities. Anyone who uses a car to travel all over, will find walking short distances a chore. The same can be applied to the mind. With cyberspace giving us the ability to be free from physical limitations, it has also made memory databases available at the touch of a button. What happens when we come back down to earth, and these databases are erased? Can we fall back on our human memories?
Inhabitants and Analogy
The notion of inhabitation in cyberspace can be drawn from references to Dante’s Commedia, where there was supposedly ‘collosal soul-space’. (Davis, 1998: 196) Wertheim also explores this notion of inhabitation, which she finds similar to Christian doctrines,
‘where early Christians conceived of Heaven as a realm in which their ‘souls’ would be freed from the frailties and failings of the flesh, so today’s champions of cyberspace hail their realm as a place where we will be freed from the limitations and embarrassments of physical embodiment…’ (Wertheim, 1999: 19)
The Sims does not offer the gory ‘bash-em up’ type of game-play, but rather the player gets to create a narrative according to one’s fancy. One radical example is illustrated in Time magazine’s feature article on The Sims. Lev Grossman wrote about a fifty six year old American retired nurse, who after the passing of her husband, started playing the Sims and created little Sims of herself and her husband to work through her grief, and she apparently communicated to her husband through the Sims. (Grossman, 2002) Through The Sims, the retired nurse is able to ‘download’ (sic) her knowledge and recollection of her dead husband’s character traits and attitudes into the digital realm. Socializing with the dead husband through The Sims, would perhaps be akin to the Christian doctrine of a life after death, and eternal life. This would perhaps be the precursor to what Minsky has been trying to achieve - the upload of a person’s brain and consciousness into a digital domain. And in this case, the nurse has done it through the use of The Sims. (Analyzing this rather interesting case, this theory of cyberspace where the soul will be devoid of all frailties and failings of the flesh, can possibly be applied here in this rather bizarre real life scenario.)
On the flipside, the nurse however was aware that she was using The Sims as a tool to overcome her grief, and that she was aware of the unreality of it all. (Grossman, 2002) This conscious recognition of her interaction with the computer software thus represents a gap in theory and application. She is aware that she is using the game as a tool to come to terms with the death of her late husband. She is not totally absorbed like the way Mark Pesce treats his pagan-like relationship to VRML, that she loses a sense of reality. And that is perhaps the attitude of our relationship in our interface with computers. We are aware of the physical reality, and even though we are able to ascend a realm where we can be somebody else, or create the perfect avatar of ourselves, after a long duration of interaction with the computer, we are brought crashing down to earth, with physical bruises and bodily aches. One only needed to play an eight-hour counter-strike marathon to only step out the next day feeling like we’ve been run over by a truck?
Thus there is a gap between theory and application to Erik Davis’ theorization of cyberspace, and cyber-souls and this glaring omission can be seen in the applications of theorists like Wertheim as well. It is perhaps true that our interface with computers and games is one that of escapism and effective information retrieval. It is rare in contemporary times not to utilize computers to access information in databases and to provide a realm to explore limitless possibilities and assume an immortal identity. However the reality of our interface with cyberspace and associating it with medieval visions of the soul in a heavenly realm would be constantly be constrained by our physical limitations. Even though, in cyberspace we are close to immortality. Save for a hard disk crash.
Bibliography
Davis, Erik “Cyberspace: the Virtual Craft”, Technognosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age Of Information, Harmony Books, NY, 1998, ch. 7. pp.190-224.
Dodge, Martin & Rob Kitchin, “Geographies of Cyberspace”, Mapping Cyberspace, Routledge, Lodon & NY, 2001, ch.3, pp.52-64
Greer, John Michael, “Ars Memorativa: An Introduction to the Hermetic Art Of Memory” in Synaptic Accueli, accessed 4th May 2004, < http://www.synaptic.ch/infoliths/textes/arsmem.htm>
Grossman, Lev. “Sim Nation: The Sims Online is a new virtual frontier. Is a video game just what this divided nation needs?” Time, Nov 25, 2002 v160 i22 p.78+
Wertheim, Margaret, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, Doubleday: Sydney & London 1999