Space travel challenges
mankind not only technologically but also
spiritually, in that it invites man to take an
active part in his own biological evolution.
Scientific advances of the future may thus be
utilized to permit man's existence in
environments which differ radically from those
provided by nature as we know it.
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We might divide the technological world
in to that of cutting edge technology, and mundane
everyday technology. There are crossovers of
course--network adapters and GSM radios are installed in
automobiles, and micro-computers and WiFi for
refrigerators and FM radios. But we know where to look
for the latest in technology. The indicators are radios,
chips, sensors, and pixels all crammed into a small
space. Digitalness and its indicators and interfaces,
are the signs of the new in contemporary times. We look
to capacitive touch-screens, always-on data connections,
predictive algorithms responding to our every move with
suggestions for commercial purchases we might suddenly
wish to make.
But what if our brains are undergoing a
parallel transformation to our tools? What if our
apprehensions of sensations were themselves evolved, to
the point where our mental expectations for our
phenomenologically 'high-tech' environments were
themselves, a form of technology? Rather than expecting
to see a chip implanted in our head, what if we felt
this digitalness in the new ways we interpret and
interact with our environments, using the same senses
we've always had?
Thinking about the designed and evolved
interaction between the human body and systems of the
outside world calls the cyborg
to mind. The cyborg, today, is largely an idea
of sensation. It is an aesthetic that we imagine, a
vision of what we imagine future technology to look and
feel like. Wires protruding from the back of the neck,
machinery and LEDs flashing underneath the skin, the
sounds of synthetic music surrounding the dark worlds
where such monstrous creatures live--this is the
sensation of the cyborg. But we have contemporary
sensations that are not of cyborgs but themselves due to
a more literal cybernetics. Our senses have become
attuned to an environment bursting forth with sensation,
and in response, have begun attenuating themselves to
this effluvia-rich space, filtering the world in order
to prise out the information we need to survive.
The transition from literal cyborg to media
cyborg is not just a product of post-modernism,
but was baked into the technological transformations
occurring back in the early days of cybernetics.
For nearly a century, cutting edge
science has been ensconced within the
military-industrial complex. The cyborg was originally
intended to be a nuclear-powered astronaut, a Cold
Warrior, fighting against the Russians in space with a
body evolved to be more like the vacuum. The budgets
came from the Defense Department, and even those
scientists employed at public universities eventually
interact with colleagues, conferences, and private
institutions that are aligned by the magnetic pull of
national defense.
Norbert Wiener, author of the book on cybernetics, Cybernetics:
Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine, worked on ballistics during World War
One, and automatic aiming of anti-aircraft guns in World
War Two. Although they might not seem it, anti- aircraft
guns were largely an information problem. The explosive
shells fired by large anti- aircraft guns were more than
large enough to destroy an aircraft. However, aircraft
at high altitude are separated from those shells by a
long distance over which to hit a moving target. Analog
computer devices, occasionally coupled with the new
invention of radar, served to aid the aiming of the
guns.
After the war, Wiener became a
pacifist, and refused to work on any military-related
research projects. However, as his work contributed to
opening up the new field of cybernetics--using
information to affect and correct the functioning of
systems--it would naturally be absorbed into more
militaristic fields, like the game theory of nuclear
weapons deployment worked on by John Von Neumann, one of
Wiener's collaborators, and the work of Manfred E. Cynes
and Nathan S. Kline, who proposed the cyborg.
But this was not the only arena in
which cybernetics would be influential. A science that
we don't ordinarily think of as primed for cyborg
modification, is the study of sound. Information theory
can as easily apply to audio technology as much as
nuclear weapons. One of Wiener's students was Amar Bose,
who would found the Bose Corporation, and revolutionize
theory of high-fidelity stereo systems.
In Earth
Sound
Earth Signal, Douglas Kahn describes the
fundamental paradigm shift that brought about Bose's new
stereo systems. Previously, stereo equipment was
designed to perform in anechoic chambers, in which all
reverberations of sound are absorbed, and the source of
the sound can be heard perfectly.
Their waffled walls absorbed
all sounds without reflecting (echoing) any
back, emulating a "free field" where sounds
dissipate unimpeded by anything in an
environment but a constant medium. A free
field is in effect an infinite outside, in
other words, not a room at all. It is also a
theoretical environment without life; before
the designers of the first anechoic chamber
named it for echoes and their absence, the
customary expression for a soundproof space
was a "dead room."
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By constructing his speaker systems
with the echoes of the surrounding environment taken
into consideration, Bose was able to achieve a much more
natural sound from the system, consistent with way live
sound is apprehended by the ears. The experiment that
Bose did to demonstrate the importance of echoes in the
room, consisted of reading a poem into a microphone and
recording it on tape, then playing it back into the same
room, and recording it again. And then, repeating. Over
successive recordings, the echoes built up into
harmonics, that sounded like bell tones. The echoes are
something we mentally tune out, but form a significant
part of the sound we hear. Therefore, it was something
to take into account and feed back into the system.
Douglas Kahn, in the same book, tracks
how Edmond Dewan, a friend of Wiener, mentioned this
experiment to Alvin Lucier, a composer working with
experimental sound. Lucier produced his piece "I Am
Sitting In A Room" using the same technique. Lucier also
produced other experimental work involving brain wave
recordings, atmospheric electromagnetic recordings, and
earth sounds. It was a time of many sound
experimentations, as new equipment became available that
allowed us to access and alter the sound environment,
newly considering how our perception of that environment
was formed. John Cage was also producing similar
exploratory works, and Emory Cook, the inventor of
stereo phonograph records, was recording his own records
of atmospheric and earth sounds. To hear, record,
playback, and edit the music of the planet, was to
design an interface between humans and the planet that
yet to be explored.
Feedback, the relationship between a
system and its informational control, stimulated new
awareness of how our bodies' sensors work, and why they
are so important. No longer were the human senses simply
a means for passive empirical observation, but a
constituting system of what we recognize as the world.
The cutting edge technology for audio recording and
playback that allowed this transition was developed in
the same social milieu as cybernetic theory. And as we
began to understand our bodies as functioning systems,
the shape of the world as we perceived it, became
systematically adjusted. Not just reducing or
intensifying the odd audio tones created by repetitive
echoes captured sequentially on tape, but the
intensifying the understood phenomenological importance
of that process, became crucial for how we understood
our sense of sound. The world was now not just something
to be listened to, but a living organism of audio
energy. As our activities across the face of the world
raised its own din of clashing sound, it was becoming
apparent to those with the right technological
equipment, that the works of Ozymandias were not just to
be looked upon, but to be heard as well.
The onset of affordable high fidelity
stereos led to personal music collections. Personal
music collections led to portable music collections.
Fifty years after Bose founded his company in 1964, we
walk the streets plugged in to headphones. We are used
to having music with us all the time, shaping our
perceived environment with a consistent, personalized
level of sound. We respond to the noise of the subway,
the traffic, the sounds of the multitudes yelling,
chattering, laughing, and cat-calling each other by
putting a small magnet into our ear, surrounded with
insulating plastic. To retreat into one's own personal
soundtrack is not solipsistic, but a mediated reaction
to feedback, a cybernetic adjustment to the
informational environment. As astronauts produce viral
music videos aboard the space station, here on earth we
evolve to join the wires, cocooning out a small space in
the copper tendrils, a small resistor of limited ohm
value, sapping the current so that it will not short
circuit us.
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