Report on The Virtual Worlds 2000 Conference :
An island of negative entropy
Joseph Nechvatal

Something exciting happens when one looks at various subjects not for
closed conceptual systems, but to find an ever-opening conceptual edge.
This conceptual edge is more and more important today after we have
learned that modernist reductionist assumptions are not easily changed
by mere postmodern negations. For example, postmodernists typically
reject scientific reductionism, but often assume a kind of fractionated
cultural reductionism. Thus people stay trapped in the scientistic
objectivist model because it is largely the only working one out there.
What seems to be needed are self-mutating conceptual models to think
differently with; self-re-organizing conceptual models that are never
just the completed or inverted objectivity of the usual conceptions.

Hence, details concerning a plethora of new conceptual and procedural
models shown and discussed at the Virtual Worlds 2000 Conference - which
was held for three days in July at Pule Universitaire Leonard de Vinci
in Paris–might give us some sense of the many promising conceptual
points found there–even though the private discussions I had with
participants were often even more abstract and complex and not fixed to
the topic I am reporting on here. We all seemed to agree that we no
longer needed a further contextual completion before we can reject any
reduction of human processes to the completed/objectified kind, even
while we still respect science and its logic as a recognizably special
tool within a new art/science matrix.

Prof. Jean-Claude Heudin, director of the International Institute of
Multimedia Lab and chairman of Virtual Worlds 2000, aimed to avoid any
fall-back by starting off and catalyzing the conference with a succinct
but stimulating talk on the conference's goals, which, like the first
Virtual Worlds conference in 1998, were to develop a discourse around
the merging of Virtual Reality–VR–and Artificial Life–A-Life–the
study of synthetic systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of
natural living systems.

Unlike the first conference in 1998, this one was better organized as a
single thread and even though there were three key-note speakers–Bruce
Damer, Ken Perlin, and Claude Lattaud–they did not dominate the
discourse. As a result there was a very good rapport at the conference
between the diverse international participants and a general feeling
that virtually nothing is impossible with co-operational imagination.
Cyborg imagery in pop culture, I suppose, has fruitfully fertilized this
optimistic ontological feeling by imaginatively inviting people to
experience their ontology through losing track of their bodies and
becoming–what seems to be–pure consciousness–even though people all
over the world have now grasped the fact that even dis-embodied
self-conceptual models bring old conceptions of the sexual body with it.
As the self becomes progressively more detachable from the location of
the body, it becomes increasingly constituted through and in
communication processes. The postmodern critique of the sexual/racial
body and the problems it poses are now widely understood too, but many
are bored by the constant stoppage, as every conceptual model of the
body can be made to seem a fall-back into an older politics or
metaphysics–and hence a backhanded re-affirmation of them. Thus the
benefits of studying ontological complexity via apparently autonomous
computational self-modeling systems.

This rhizomatic discourse embraces such diverse fields as advanced
computer graphics for virtual worlds, evolutionary computational
systems, simulation of ecological systems, simulation of physical
environments, multi-agent on-line communities, evolutionary applications
for cyber-art, and a host of philosophical traditions. Indeed, except
for an overall idea of a coming immersive evolution, there was great
diversity at this extremely informative gathering; a gathering of such
intellectual breadth that one often felt like a mesquito in a nudist
camp, buzzing from one promising approach to another, vampiricaly
loading up on them all. But I found this diverse, interdisciplinary
approach warranted, for with Virtual Worlds 2000's emphasis on merging
Virtual Reality with Artificial Life we come to a fundamental human
exploration concerning the spatialization of consciousness relating to
the recognition of life–a working definition of life is quite important
to establishing whether an artificial system exhibits life or not, but
such a definition is still under debate with some biologists insisting
that life can only be found in certain hydro-carbon chains while
Schrdinger and Von Neumann early on speculated that life is best
characterized as islands of negative entropy, a.k.a. information–. That
doesn't sound too high-minded, does it? Not because the applications are
rather banal; ranging from apparently intelligent computer game avatar
simulations to system-bot on-line education and business uses. Well,
even so, the high-mindedness is justified in that, in Virtual Worlds
2000 a new kind of apparent art/scientific animism was being devised; a
buzzing animism that incorporates the recognition of life in artistic,
computer scientific, virtual worlds. Hence, Virtual Worlds 2000
continues the opening of a new discourse after postmodernism. Whereas
Virtual Reality has largely concerned itself with the design of 3D
immersive spaces, and Artificial Life with the simulation of living
organisms, Virtual Worlds is concerned with the synthesis of digital
living wholes–systemic synthetic worlds–. Thus it continues to move us
past the time when it was revolutionary to undermine the idea of
apparent logical unities.

This synthetic/emergent approach has opened possibilities that were
missed by both foundational models and by their postmodernist negation.
VR/A-life studies then systematically escape postmodernism's either/or;
we are neither just logical nor arbitrary. Hence, VR/A-life studies gets
us past the postmodern alternatives as it systematically exceeds
formulation and yet it is far from arbitrary. This approach can
re-establish apparent empirical findings within a more critical
omnijective context, rather than the strict postmodern disbelief in
empiricism. And this is as it should be, for VR is not strictly a
virtual enterprise. It is a fuzzy virtual-actual–viractual–
thus a radicalization of classic Cartesian dualism–as with VR the
electronic apparatus supplements both the body's limitations and its
classic imaginary spaces and mental possibilities as the equipment
systematically supplements the mind/body's powers of perception.

Moreover, as we are learning through the Human Genome Project, like
everything, life itself has been succumbing to digital
dematerialization. But with VR/A-life inspired life, life is even better
characterized as a viractual process, rather than the digital substrate
in which that process is embedded. This seems right to me, as our life
has an apparent order that is more intricate than a single conceptual
system. VR/A-life is clearly not static or fixed. It is dynamic.

Without dynamic viractuality, digital ontology encounters a major
quandary as life re-mutates into binary modulation, re-structuring human
reality again into a new breed of dualing Cartesianalities. But with the
dynamic viractual socioepistemic ontology offered in the study of
VR/A-life which comes about through the particular viractual
conjunctions of body and digital technology we are enabled to construct
new forms of intersubjective ontology and apparent ways to embody those
ontologies to slip into them, take them on, and live them out
immersively to their outer edges.

While we might have once assumed spatial separation between the body and
digital technology, the viractuality found in VR/A-life effects a
recuperation of spatial absence through temporal presence. This
viractual notion places us at once at the most general and limiting
condition of our existence. Our bodily existence, or embodiment, is from
this standpoint understood to have a viractual range of potential
experiential modalities in relation to features of cultural and
historical context.

As the interpenetrating of bodies with digital technologies continues
unabated, becoming more and more seamless and pervasive, new domains of
art experience and being-in-the-world become colonized by this
ontological demand. Sure, VR/A-life research is currently devoted to
synthesizing new and more seamlessly aesthetic ways to interface
embodied ontology with disembodied computer intelligence. However, the
majority of people today clearly do not show any special interest in
Artificial Life or/and Virtual Reality, as art they perceive them
exactly in the same way as they perceive the creation of any other
specialized conceptual esoterica. Equally, people don't comprehend their
own ontological internal processes because how we define the extended
viractual space of our life is always more than cognitive, like good art
is. Therefore, the quintessential VR/A-life concept of emergent
complexity via immersive genetic algorithms is a valuable conceptual
model for art today in that much of its emergent computational work is
organized in a "bottom up" fashion; focusing on local rather than global
behaviors, while centering its ontology around poly-sexual cellular
automata, neural networks, enzyme catalysts, nanotechnology, RNA
strands, and immersive computer models of ecological systems.

But it is not just art. As Prof. Heudin indicated, VR/A-life is a major
new ontological medium based on the collaboration of science, technology
and art. With VR/A-life yielding up some useful insights into procedure,
we might self-study our own organisms apparent behaviors and
environmental interactions by studying our life as it might be. This is
clearly not a counter-revolution against postmodernism but an emergent
surpassing of it. Instead of mere postmodern pluralism we might create
for ourselves an apparent complex unified ontology made up of emergent
multiple-selves by involving a sophisticated steering of artistic
applications into a fully ontological immersive context. Such an
interplay between evolutionary self-representational dis-embodiment and
emergent being-in-the-world embodiment is precisely the viractual issue
found in all post-biotechnological applications of the computer, as
demonstrated at the conference by both Jeffrey Ventrella's and Tina
LaPorta's work.

By being taken up into an emergent viractual environment, the complexity
of ontological life consciousness is re-represented in VR/A-life and, I
would suggest, altered as the computer VR/A-life manipulator encounters
emergent representations of her own bodies processes. Thus the VR/A-life
inquiry will continue to unfold under its own weight from the point of
view of the extended reproducing body, with the next set of emergent
ontological questions necessarily having to do with how VR/A-life worlds
–for they are always multiple–are constituted, what it means to have
them, how they feel, and precisely how we may inhabit them
aesthetically.

Note: The full list of conference participants–with the abstracts to
their papers - can be found at http://www.devinci.fr/iim/vw2000. The
full proceedings have been published by Springer LNCS/AI
http://link.springer-ny.com