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<font color="#178282">______________________</font>
<p><font color="#008099" size="3">Ebon Fisher's Media Organisms</font>
<br>
<font color="#178282"><font size=+1>___________________</font></font><p><font color="#178282" size="2">Peter Boerboom<br>
MUTE Magazine, London, 1997</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">The neighborhood of Williamsburg
is directly across the oily East River from New York City, on its more
battered Brooklyn bank. Their geographical proximity is deceptive though,
for as you ride the L train beneath the silent weight of the water or cruise
over the looming Williamsburg Bridge, you cross a cultural schism. On one
side Wall Street's financial engines hum endlessly, on the other empty
warehouses and factories lie abandoned. On one side the energy of commerce
drives human interaction, while on the other the ethic of neighborhood
still binds communities. On one side the established art world is slick
and lucrative business, on the other, up from between the cracks in the
concrete and through the windows of the abandoned warehouses, grows a vibrant
creative community.</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">Toiling in this fertile soil for
the past seven years, Ebon Fisher has bred media organisms, invoked teeming
ecologies of people, art, machinery and mustard seed, and incubated a world
with manifestations in physical and virtual dimensions.</font> <font size="2">
</font>
<p><font color="#008099" size="2">95 THESES & NEURAL GRAFFITI</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">In 1981, long before landing in
Brooklyn, Fisher asked nine psychologists to diagram a brain cell. By juxtaposing
and re-presenting the very distinct interpretations of these putatively
objective individuals, he began to explore the fuzzy boundary between scientific
fact and opinion.</font>
<p><font size="2"><img SRC="9Neurons.GIF" BORDER=20 height=204 width=300><br>
<font color="#178282">9 Neurons drawn by 9 Psychologists</font></font>
<font size="2"><br>
<font color="#178282">Compiled at Carnegie-Mellon University,
1981</font></font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">In a series of spray paintings in
Pittsburgh, Fisher then rendered nerve cells on abandoned cars, golf courses,
and bridges. At a time when science has replaced religion as our culture's
paradigm for self-definition and as the map which it uses to chart its
course, this act of dragging the language of science into a public and
populist light takes on something of the character of heresy. As when religion
was at the height of its political power, one of the scientific community's
central beliefs is the infallibility and superiority of its methodologies,
if not its findings. It has made sacred its version of truth in order to
maintain its dominance. We trust the statistical study, the dissection,
the categorization, the pinning down of facts like so many species of butterfly.
But what do we make of our truths when they start to move? By painting
nerve cells in public spaces in Pittsburgh, Ebon Fisher tacked up a reminder
that truth is always moving. Within the involuted vaults of self-justifying
logic it may appear fixed, but as soon as it's free in the ecology of culture
it starts to <a href="wigglism.html" target="homeframe">wiggle</a> away.
The neural graffiti stands as a challenge to science to reassert the principle
that resides at its core: exploration without prejudice.</font>
<font size="2"><br>
</font>
<p><font size="2"><img SRC="GrafittiCar.GIF" BORDER=1 height=206 width=250><br>
</font><font color="#178282" size="2">Neuron on Abandoned Car</font>
<font size="2"><br>
<font color="#178282">Boundary Street, Pittsburgh, 1981</font></font>
<font size="2"><br>
</font>
<p><font color="#008099" size="2">COMMAND LINE COMMANDMENTS</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">Since 1992, Fisher has been cultivating
the bionic codes. Each code is a stand-alone program designed to trigger
patterns of behaviour and processes of thought. In other words, the bionic
codes act as moral operators on biological operands. They are modules designed
to hack into culture's core and rewrite some of its basic routines. Unlike
many moral systems, the codes do not indulge in dogmatism. They do not
demand allegiance, nor do they make promises. Above all they make no claims
of exclusive truth. As routines available to the operating system of society,
they assert themselves as beneficial options.</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">As part of an object-oriented program,
none of the codes are dependent on any others. There is no heirarchy, and
no linear execution order. In combination, the codes feed off of each other's
outputs and back into each other's inputs, spontaneously tracing new patterns
and encouraging reinterpretation. But each can settle comfortably back
into isolation, stable and still resonant on its own.</font>
<p><font color="#008099" size="2">SYMBOLIC ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">The visual component of the codes
is constructed from simple geometric primitives arranged and connected
to convey structure, motion, energy, and meaning. Computer languages have
evolved over many years from the low-level machine language that the computer
uses to communicate internally to higher-level languages that facilitate
human control, but must be translated back into language the machine understands.
Symbolism is the machine language of human communication: the raw encoding
of concept unmediated by layers of verbal abstraction. The skillful manipulation
of this low-level instruction set results in highly compact and easily
transmittable messages.</font>
<font size="2"> </font>
<p><img src="codex/=pip_EQUALIZE_SEDUCTION.gif" width="119" height="96">
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">By coupling these striking symbols
with a corresponding verbal version, a bionic code binds the entire attention
of its target, simultaneously penetrating the preverbal mind with its symbolic
prong and projecting its verbal component onto the abstract conciousness.
Immobilized, the receptor is infused with message: seeping from above and
probing from below, impregnating and pervading, dividing and intertwining,
and then finally, spawning comprehension.</font>
<font size="2">
</font>
<p><font color="#008099" size="2">ROOTS, FOLIAGE, & SEED</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">Marvin Minsky, the Artificial Intelligence
pioneer, has advocated 'sloppy' corrective programming when fixing bug-plagued
computer code. By this method, rather than repairing the offending instruction,
one compensates with additional code for the situation that caused the
error. The goal is that the program will become robust in a wider range
of circumstances. This notion of improvement by accretion is characteristic
of systems that grow, in contrast to those that are built. Over the years
of their development, the bionic codes have grown to become an increasingly
resilient network of meaning. New codes are birthed, compensating for and
enhancing others, and ultimately contributing to the web of their interaction.</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">The individual codes have evolved
even as their network has grown. One incarnation extols a ãprogram
for equalized seduction,' which later reappears as a ãprogram to
equalize seduction'; this new language reveals an understanding that there
is no stable state of equalized seduction, but rather that there is always
flux, that any system is prone to waver in the face of various and varying
forces. Instead of a 'program for,' with its sense that the program is
indifferent to its own utilisation, the phrasing 'program to' is activist.
The program is not only capable of transforming human attitudes, but now
seeks actively to do so.</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">Any manifestation of a bionic code
- on a sticker or a t-shirt, in a gallery, on a monitor, or as a tattoo
- is an instantiation. Planted in media, it exhibits the current mutation
of the living, quivering and changing pattern of information that governs
its growth: the code behind a code.</font>
<p><font size="2"><img SRC="=w.GIF" BORDER=7 height=104 width=200><br>
</font><font color="#178282" size="2">Equalize with Other Beings</font>
<font size="2"><br>
<font color="#178282">Installation at Test-Site, Brooklyn,
1992</font></font>
<p><font color="#008099" size="2">WRITHING RITUALS</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">In an installation at Test Site,
an art/performance space in Brooklyn, the bionic code "equalize with other
beings" was projected from the ceiling onto people below who had triggered
motion detectors. Illuminated within one of the circles that compose the
code, these impromptu participants were thrust into interaction not only
with other beings, but with the code itself, and with the mechanism of
its display. Such active exploration of the relationships between humans
and the systems which they create and with which they interrelate has been
a pervasive and persistent goal of Fisher's work. His multimedia rock ensemble
Nerve Circle performed biologically-themed events that intermeshed musical
and visual instrumentation. He has engaged in guerrilla street theater
and has staged performances centered around the bionic codes. These live
events are all about collaboration and convergence; they are an attempt
to compress people, technology, art, and ideas into a cultural reaction
chamber.</font>
<p><font size="2"><img SRC="SuctionBirdview.GIF" BORDER=1 height=223 width=150>
</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">Human Suction/Reflection System</font>
<font size="2"><br>
<font color="#178282">Installation at the Flytrap, Brooklyn,
1991</font></font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">One of the most memorable of these
was the Organism web jam, which for twelve hours transformed Brooklyn's
Old Dutch Mustard Factory into a thumping, pulsing incubator of interaction:</font>
</center>
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<font color="#178282" size="2">"That was a creature which
I initiated to explore new systems of creativity. The social algorithm
I employed was the 'Web Jam,' a hybrid of ancient nature worship, emergent
behavior theory (via robotics), and down and dirty urban partying. One
hundred and twenty artists and musicians collaborated by spreading their
individual creations weblike throughout the area. The objective was to
absorb the audience into the belly of numerous systems, one blending into
another, including the audience, and the very soil, mustard seeds, and
the oxygen of the site."</font>
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<font color="#178282" size="2">An experiment seeks to control
variables, a jam invites uncertainty and thrives on the challenge of adapting
to and shaping the unpredictability of its inputs. It risks catastrophe
for the opportunity to fuse a few moments of resonance from the chaos of
its components. It is a provocation of the systems and experiences that
we normally expect to remain stable÷an attempt to excite them to
a state of enlightened alignment by feeding them energy, attitude, and
love until the whole snarl leaps to a different level. The moment may be
fleeting but it resonates in its participants long after, lingering as
a glimpse of a potential state of being where we act in synch with each
other and the systems with which we are intertwined.</font>
<font size="2"><br>
</font>
<p><font color="#008099" size="2">BAYING AT THE MILLENIUM</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">Art. Science. Religion. Technology.
Western culture has contributed to its own sclerosis by trying to cleave
to clean a distinction between its various tissues. Each generation indulges
in rediscovering the endless interconnectedness that thrives at the vital
core of culture, and it would be merely indulgent to proclaim that Fisher's
enlightened work heralds an enlightened age. But as the frontiers of physics
and math flirt with timeless zen truth, as technology accelerates cycles
of evolution, and as networks of communication spread nerve-like over the
surface of a planet, it is worth speculating that the bionic codes are
part of a program of morphogenesis, integrating and synchronizing the specialized
organs and systems of some vast but embryonic organism.</font>
<p><font color="#178282" size="2">-- Peter Boerboom</font>
<font size="2"><br>
<font color="#178282"><a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a></font></font>
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