by Vibeke Sorensen

I am deeply honored to receive this award, and want to thank all those who made it possible. This includes many people here at the University of Manitoba, including Char O’Kell, Cliff Eyland, Robert Epp, Alex Poruchnyk, Celia Rabinovich, and James Dean. I am honored because I know that it is normally given to someone in the humanities and sciences, or in the business community. I am an artist. But I have done my best over the 30+ years to build bridges between diverse communities using media technologies as catalysts, while at the same time trying to humanize them. It has been lonely at times, but today my heart is full, and I want to thank you for this. In Manitoba, I feel “at home” in the world.

Being here in Winnipeg, the place where Marshall McLuhan grew up, also makes this very special, as he was a great influence on my thinking. I often quote him, that electronic media are an extension of the central nervous system, of our minds and bodies. He was a visionary. When McLuhan took his Bachelor’s Degree here from this university in 1933, he received the University Gold Medal in Art and Science. That is my topic this evening. He took his Master’s Degree here in 1934, and wrote his very first publications for the student newspaper, The Manitoban, and one was titled, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow?,” on which I shall also make a few observations. Also, the fine work of the art, media, and animation community here in Canada has long been an inspiration. I modeled the Division of Animation and Digital Arts at the University of Southern California, where I was for 10 years, after John Grierson’s National Film Board of Canada, moving its principles towards a Global Digital Internet, and so in many ways I feel that I have come to my ‘spiritual home.’ I wanted to make a United Nations of Animation, an International Film Board, and succeeded in making a highly international program that integrated fine art, animation, and industry. One of the goals was to change industry so that it would be more multicultural in its global reach, and make it more of a dialog between nations and cultures.

After 10 years, I decided to go to Arizona State University where I am now working with the Center for Film and Media Research in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The idea of an international film board is still my main goal, and one step towards it is to make a transnational and transdisciplinary PhD program in Media, Art and Science. I also hope to create a laboratory for the study of consciousness, creativity and world culture through media, focused on mind-body and nature-culture relationships, and emphasizing native peoples and cosmologies. I believe that we have a great deal to learn from native people here and around the world about living in harmony with nature and the universe. And here, I learned a great deal from the experiments in “Challenge for Change,” which George Stoney did for the National Film Board, although they were more directly political than my own work.

We are all native to the earth.

Piet Hein, the Danish poet and mathematician said, “Coexistence or no-existence.”

As a Dane born in Denmark, I am an indigenous person. Like native people all around the world, I see myself and others in a dynamic and interdependent relationship with nature and the environment. I have great reverence for it and consider culture the expression of this relationship. I don’t think that this connection ends at political borders between countries. When we move to new lands, we need to learn from the native peoples of those regions. And there is so much to learn. We are all indigenous to the earth and we need to see ourselves as connected to each other and nature.

I know that the largest First Nations population in North America is located here in Winnipeg. I am inspired and touched by the opportunity that our colleagues here at the University of Manitoba have provided me to meet and get to know people of these communities. I hope to have more contact with the First Nations people of Canada in the future, and possibly work together with them. In the USA, the largest native American population is in Arizona, and that is a major reason why I went there. I have also been fortunate to have the opportunity to work in Brazil with colleagues at universities in Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. An indigenous population still exists in the Amazon region, where I have been several times. But, as all around the world, they are greatly reduced in numbers and their lives, cultures and environments are endangered. The complex ecological networks to which they and we are connected are being destroyed quickly, affecting all life on earth. We need to stop the destruction before it’s too late, and protect what took millions of years to evolve.

I have included some native teachings in the work being premiered here this month, Sanctuary. So, it is a multicultural and collaborative work. I am grateful to have been able to work with so many good people, including many of you who are here today, and also to have the opportunity to premiere it here. So I have many people to thank and many reasons for it! This honor is for you, too!

I hope that we can continue to collaborate and find new ways of working together across nations - across space, time, and culture barriers - and help solve these and other problems of survival, and celebrate our common humanity in our common world, our home.

Friends and teachers.

If I am being recognized for my work over the years, it is largely due to the support I have received from many other people, especially my teachers.

I consider myself lucky because I was born in a culture that regarded women as equals to men, in Denmark, and I was encouraged to get an education. There is a long history in Scandinavia of women being independent, and it was assumed that I would be too. Both of my parents were educated, my father a research scientist in a field now called ‘biomaterials’, and my mother a linguist. They have been very wise and good - and direct. When I was 8, my mother said to me “you have to get an education so that when you grow up, you won’t be dependent on anyone.” I also remember being told many times from a very early age, “never think of yourself as better than anyone else. No one is better than anyone else. You are not special.” This was told to all children, boys and girls, including my older brother. Well, with this in our heads all through life, you can imagine how difficult it was for me to tell my parents about this award! Of course they are very proud. I am very sorry though that they are not able to be here tonight to share this very special moment with us.

So instead, I will bring them here in words and tell you a little about them. Now in their mid and late 80s, and still vibrant, perhaps the most important thing about them is their respect for life, other people and cultures, and their emphasis on social responsibility and justice at all levels. They frequently said to me as a child “always share what you have with others. Never think of yourself first, and never promote yourself. Consider the feelings of others and always try to understand their points of view. Let everyone else speak first, listen, and speak last.” My brother liked this very much, of course! Today, he is an engineer and anthropologist working with Hospice in most of his free time. Our parents taught us to be empathic and independent, to speak up in support of human rights. “The most important thing is how people treat each other. People behave the way they are treated.” And we were expected to help others. “Make sure that what you do with your life will make the world better for other people. You can change the world. But you have to help others. Be kind.” As my mother’s mother said, “the most important thing in life is to help others to be happy.”

Our mother and father are of the generation in Denmark that survived WWII, resisting the Nazis and bringing light back to a spiritually dark and physically destroyed world. They constantly risked their lives to save lives. Somehow they and their generation kept the memory and dream of a different life alive, and the strength of their collective vision of social justice transformed the living nightmare into world again worth living in. They made miracles each day, step by step creating a more humanistic and responsible world. Of course it was not without problems. And at times when wars began again, it seemed bleak, “it’s not such a great world to bring children into.” Life is fragile, and it takes a kind of vigilance, a conscious effort to resist oppression rather than openly fighting. It takes imagination to develop cooperative rather than hierarchical and competitive strategies. It takes courage to be optimistic rather than pessimistic. They and their generation transformed what had not long before been a third world country into a first world country by prioritizing social programs. Recent research shows that investment in social programs is directly related to positive economic growth. Being good to people is good for the economy, too! Still today my parents discuss and warn about the signs and consequences of fascist practices and policies around the world. My mother still teaches language and culture at the university and about the Holocaust to high school students in Buffalo, New York. I sometimes worry what will become of the world when our elders leave it. I know I was very lucky to have been born the way I was, and to have the opportunities I had. I only hope that I and others of my generation will have learned well the lessons of our parents’ lives. We have had the great privilege to be their children, and to be a part of their dreams for a better world.

Dr. Gerald O'Grady

I also want to acknowledge my greatest mentor after my parents, Dr. Gerald O’Grady, founder and director of the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He exposed me to many of the most important artists in the field and in my life. He gave me courage by supporting thinking beyond boundaries. A visionary who saw the role of media in the larger world as a conscience and consciousness, his passion for knowledge, ideas and media culture has inspired many artists and academics. He has helped to preserve and disseminate many rare films from a wide range of countries and cultures, including African-American and Latin. He is an expert on Marshall McLuhan, and worked with the rare films on Malcolm X, among many, many others. His intellectual range is as vast as the goodness of his heart. I am honored to have been ‘under his wing’ for so many years. He has been a great teacher and friend, inspiring some of my best ideas and guiding me through many of my most difficult decisions. He always made my life better.

Dr. Heitor Capuzzo, Dr. Leopoldo de Meis, Dr. Vivian Rumjanek and Mr. John Hench

I was very fortunate to have been invited to the Institute for Advanced Transdisciplinary Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and I have met and worked with a number of special people there and also in Rio de Janeiro. Primary among them is my good friend and colleague, Professor Heitor Capuzzo, the director of the midi@rte laboratory that provided so much help with Sanctuary. Also inspirational are biochemists and Professors Leopoldo de Meis and Vivian Rumjanek, who encouraged me to pursue my research further, and to emphasize the values I discussed above. I always keep in mind Heitor Capuzzo’s words: “life is viable,” recalling those of the late John Hench, one of the first animators at Disney. As I began the animation program at the University of Southern California in 1994, John told me: “people like things that affirm life.” He wanted to catalyze the development of cinema by bringing fine artists to Disney to make experimental films. He said “there is no conflict between fine art and industry” and “entertainment is the way to bring fine art to the masses,” bringing Salvador Dali there in the 1940s. He also thought that art and science are not in conflict, and that both can benefit and be benefited by the entertainment industry. He helped found Imagineering with that in mind. On a personal level, he encouraged my experimental and multicultural oriented work. He was very interested in Sanctuary and in particular my use of plants and documentary photography.

So I feel it is really these people, our parents who are our true friends and teachers, and our teachers and friends who expand on our parents’ efforts, who are special. So I would like to accept this award for them, and in recognition of the many others who continue to believe that by being good human beings, by prioritizing ethics and never being cynical, the world actually is better.

Art and Science

I shall now give my own best thoughts on “art and science” and on “tomorrow and tomorrow?,” Professor McLuhan’s concerns of 72 years ago.

Art and science are two ways of knowing, discovering and understanding of our world and universe, and reflect upon processes that are fundamental to a continually changing universe, a complex system of emergent phenomena. In regard to science, let me say that I have been deeply influenced by the new emphases on biology and ecology, and the new discoveries in neurophysiology.

To begin at home, I should mention the Danish science writer, Tor Norretranders, who conceived and directed what I consider one of the most visionary art-science research centers in the world, Mindship. Located in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1996-97, it brought together thinkers and creators across disciplines to share ideas. This included mathematicians and philosophers, physicists, evolutionary biologists, composers, writers, theater directors, visual and multimedia artists, and animators. I was fortunate to have been included. His book Maerk Verden, published in 1991, was translated into English as “The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size” in 1998. I would like to add as a personal note, that I am aware that Tor, who is my age, shares many of the same feelings as I have about our parents’ generation.

This emergent system, or network, is reflected throughout nature, including our human environment. From our cells to our bodies, brains, thoughts and interaction with other people, our cognitive processes, including language, are very much a part of this complex and dynamic system. Art and science are a product of intellectual activity. They arise from complex bio-chemical processes and systems, too. Thus, art and science, and their products are also natural phenomena that can be studied as part of scientific research.

Through our endless search for knowledge, we are trying to understand our place in the universe. All of our experience, including our memories, dreams, and creative imagination are part of a dynamic physical-mental process that reveals our world and what we think about it. There are patterns repeated across the electromagnetic spectrum (cycles, beating patterns, and polyrhythms), as well as generative processes that exist in all living things and their behaviors. They are reflected in the physical entities as well as relationships between them. Our thoughts, language, and cultural experiences are a part of this vast interconnected system that has common qualities.

I want to clarify, for those who are wondering, that I do not believe that there is a single, universal cultural pattern of expression. On the contrary, I feel that cultural diversity and biodiversity are interrelated and necessary for survival. But it is precisely because all people live in relationship to nature and the environment, that one can see these multiple complex structures of cycles and patterns in culture as reflections of it.

As ways of knowing, art and science share many commonalities, as well as differences. Some of the most fundamental connections between them include the use of iterative processes of discovery and investigation such as the scientific method. Artists use the experimental approach that is virtually identical to it. Even more fundamental, however, is the creative impulse. It is reflected not only in the fields of art and science, as practitioners make leaps of imagination and other forms of innovative thought in identifying new research problems and discovering or inventing new solutions to them, but all human activity and all forms of life. Phenomena observed at the most basic biochemical level reveal that the spontaneous appearance of new forms and structures is common to all living things, and operates at all levels from simple cells to complex social structures. The network of connections between the elements of a cell, and the cell and its environment, and other cells and organisms, can be seen as a complex non-linear system, where the relationships between the elements affect the behavior of the cell and as well as its development and evolution. Because it is alive, and has self-generating and regulating ability, it has intelligence and consciousness. This quality exists in all living things, not only in people. Therefore, we are all part of a continuum of life, together with plants and animals, and deeply connected to them as part of nature. All have consciousness that are interrelated.

The relationship between the cell, its elements, and environment can be seen as a network of epicycles in constant change, a dynamic process wherein the cells take input, interact, adapt, and cycle again. Because they are dependent on their environment, their function and dysfunction shed light on that environment. This is possibly the most important indicator of health and thus, the sustainability of a living system, or ecosystem. By extension to the global environment, we are faced with considerably larger scale problems both phenomenologically and conceptually. These problems are often beyond our ability to sense directly and therefore there can be a role for new technologies in helping us to sense the world better. Hopefully, this means that we will be able to detect and protect life better, too.

New technologies provide us with unprecedented modes of interaction with the physical world, extending our senses through digital prostheses. If we want to understand living systems better, we need to couple to them in non-invasive ways that can contribute a deepening wealth of information about them. We are working increasingly with computers as the common digital foundation between all aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum, which allows us to shift and transform data from the imperceptible domain to the range of our senses. And because data can be shared, communication between fields is accelerating, providing new ways of working together.

Visual, sonic, haptic, and other sense based problems are the same across disciplines, including art and science, and so solutions in one area are ultimately beneficial to other fields. There is a long history of this activity dating back to the ancient Greeks and before. More recently, the experimental animation work in the late 1950s by John Whitney Sr., now considered the father of computer graphics, and the experiments of composers, filmmakers, and visual artists at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s, pushed ahead the field of communications and thus the digital revolution. As Dr. Max Matthews, formerly of Bell Laboratories and now at Stanford University stated, “artists working with science and technology accelerate the development of science and technology.” Art is research in communication, and artists working with technology are engaging in research in communications technology. Animators in particular are at the center of this, and more important than ever before, given their deep understanding of movement and transformation of spatial phenomena. Thus, they are stimulating the advancement of the information revolution and helping us to better understand the mind, body and the potential of digital media. Conversely, scientists working with visualization and other modes of human-machine interaction provide new ideas and processes for artists to engage.

The interaction between the two is a fertile paradigm for catalyzing discovery and invention. Seen historically, it reverses a 300 year separation between them, an anachronism that is a mental construction, an artificial and counterproductive apartheid of the intellect. The innovative work done in digital media by artists, filmmakers, and composers has been extremely beneficial not only to science, but all fields concerned with dynamic phenomena that communicate with moving images and media. It has contributed a great deal, not only in identifying research problems and finding innovative solutions, but also for providing new ways of seeing and understanding the world and universe, and our place in it.

The computer is modeling the body and mind, and the best way to understand and connect this technology productively, is through actual connections, both conceptual and physical, to life and living things. Moreover, active involvement in technology development from the perspective of ethics, has the potential to enhance rather than destroy life, helping us re-direct technology development away from destructive uses, which unfortunately are far more common, and toward more constructive and humanistic approaches. Of course there is a great risk, and there has been misuse of technology, especially through news media where it has been used cynically to misinform and separate people from each other and nature. It has also been used to misrepresent and separate people from reality and actual events taking place around the world, including war, famine, and natural and man made disasters. Computer graphics and entertainment models often conflate fantasy with reality, especially in war games, and thus affect the world in profoundly negative ways, often with tragic consequences. The very same media created by artists and scientists to enhance our ability to perceive and communicate, has been profoundly misused in this regard. There is an urgent need to shed light on this, and actively create alternatives focused on social conscience, ethics and compassion.

For science, technology and art to be ethical, it is essential to have a humanistic and life affirming approach with a direct and clear connection between nature, culture, mind and body. We need technologies that help us protect human, women, and children’s rights, and celebrate the human spirit -not destroy it. It would behoove us to express this point of view actively in our thinking and work, including the development of our most abstract and advanced technologies, connecting it directly with the real world it engages. The main problems that we need to address are the disappearance of ecosystems, and bio and human diversity, due to poverty, disease, pollution, and war.

We need to remember that although it can provide us with wonderful new ‘glasses,’ and a seductive mirror, digital media has limitations. For example, often when people know they are connected electronically, they disconnect in their minds, using media as a barrier to feel safely far away from the suffering of others. So while it has the potential to help us empathize, it just hasn’t been realized. It is people who feel, not machines, and we need to be sure that this ability is not lost. It is urgent to emphasize humanistic development, because life is not a game. War is not a game either.

The emphasis on the connection between the body and mind, the development of technologies that reinforce our understanding of life and create alternative approaches, has been the focus of my work for almost 30 years. I have tried to make bridges between art and science in a range of ways, including by building interdisciplinary new media programs at universities, by working with computer scientists in development fundamental algorithms for computer graphics, including scientific visualization, and in the development of new systems.

In my personal artwork, I have worked mainly with moving images and music, as well as documentary photography and video, computer graphics, and live human gesture/performance and text. I have tried to combine these seemingly unrelated media in ways that make use of structures common to them all, while infusing them with my social values. My view has been that when real-time, improvised human gesture is integrated into media and technology, it helps us to develop new connections between our minds and bodies, and understand better the way the senses interact and bind, and thus how we think and communicate. This binding between vastly different data coming from our senses is transformed into a mental model of the world that to some degree conforms to it. It is a problem that artists working in multi-sensory multimedia shed light on. It enhances the development of multimodal languages of communication that are made possible through it. Additionally, I work with cooperative rather than competitive strategies, so that it can remain open to other people and cultures. I work together with mathematicians and scientists, especially Dr. Miller Puckette, to combine animation, gesture, and music into an open source, integrated system that uses the common foundation of wave phenomena and polyrhythmic structures to connect them.

Seen from the perspective of neuroscience, it is known that gesture and interaction with the physical world stimulate the formation of patterns of connection between neurons in the brain. It is widely held that the more connections that are made, the greater the measure of intelligence. It has also been shown that gesture and language exist in the same place in the brain. Additionally, gesture and technology have evolved together over millions of years and so are directly related to our ability to communicate through symbols and language. These symbols and languages exist as expressions of our conscious experience, and are transmitted through our media.

It is evident that the most applicable structures to digital multimedia systems are those that are fundamental to natural systems, given their physical foundation, and the way the mind works to combine the senses. I am specifically interested in physical-digital systems and methods to integrate them. From interaction paradigms based on the body to explorations of consciousness and the development of language, I see our technology as a reflection of the integration of our bodies and minds. In the connection to the physical world, using analog-digital converters, computers model our bodies and brains. The structure of the memory systems of computers is an example of this, with ROM, RAM, and active programs of millions of parallel activities changing their status and organization of bits like neurons in the brain. Neurological connections in the brain are one of the primary models for robotic systems being developed today. The constant interaction with sense-based media and other forms of computing (embedded systems, robotics, wireless etc) for input and output parallels what happens between our bodies, brains and the environment as we live each day. As these processes increasingly take place inside cells themselves, there is promise for curing diseases but also huge ecological risks. We are intervening in evolution but do not have millions of years to adapt. And we are quickly destroying our atmosphere and polluting our water. Birds are going extinct at a 100 times the natural rate, according to the September issue of Scientific American. How will we survive? We need to see what we are doing and reverse it as quickly as possible.

Digital technology extends our senses in ways that allow us to see ourselves and the world more clearly and at scales never before possible. Systems that integrate a sense based approach to media are the most widely applicable to the world around us, and they enhance our ability to apprehend and understand our human and global condition.

It is clear to me that these correlations are governed by the same principles of behavior as witnessed in the harmonic patterns of wave phenomena observed across the electromagnetic spectrum, including those at the cellular level of living things as well as in sound and light. I have been intrigued by this and so have worked with related correlative strategies for many years in my creative and research work. This includes networked live visual-musical performance and interactive architectural installation. Since 1997, I have been working with James Snook of the Neurosciences Institute of La Jolla to develop new sensing devices and with Miller Puckette on the creation of custom software that operates on multidimensional data in parallel ways, focusing on probabilistic and chance based processes, combinatorics, and complexity, integrated with wave behavior as a fundamental approach to the creation of non-linear multi-modal media experiences. In short, it seems that the connection between physics, biology, and cognition, according to emergent oscillatory phenomena, is very strong indeed.

As Fritjof Capra states in his book, ‘The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living,’

"..the experiential state is always "embodied," that is embedded in a particular field of sensation. In fact, most conscious states seem to have a dominant sensation that colors the entire experience. The specific neural mechanism proposed by [Francisco] Varela for the emergence of transitory experiential states is a resonance phenomenon known as "phase locking," in which different brain regions are interconnected in such a way that their neurons fire in synchrony. Through this synchronization of neural activity, temporary "cell assemblies" are formed, which may consist of widely dispersed neural circuits. According to Varela’s hypothesis, each conscious experience is based on a specific cell assembly, in which many different neural activities – associated with sensory perception, emotions, memory, bodily movements, etc.- are unified into a transient but coherent ensemble of oscillating neurons. The best way to think of this neural activity is, perhaps, in musical terms."

Conclusion

We are part of a complex system, a kind of structured musical improvisation. It is a language for thinking and creating, for communicating, and contemplating our existence. Language is the art of the science of the brain. We give meaning to our impressions, arising from interaction with people and nature. We reflect it in our memories and encode it as knowledge. And this is poetry. A kind of epic poem inspired by life and dreams, and translated through imagination and innovation into our constantly changing reality. I want to return to the question: are we making life better for others? We have the great gift of life and should use it well.

I have learned some simple lessons: that idealism can be real, that dream and reality are not mutually exclusive, that reason and emotion are not in conflict, that nature and culture, mind and body are deeply connected, and being in harmony with nature is being in harmony with ourselves. Language can be beautiful, as life. But words are mental constructs that reflect our experience and understanding, and approximate our impressions of being alive. They can be weapons or bridges, and make artificial dichotomies or rich analogies. I am interested in using them as bridges to affirm and enhance life. I want to live together in peace with other beings at home in the world.

Thank you again for this great honor.

October 6, 2005