It's well known that we have lost touch with Nature. It is not so much that Nature has retreated, or that we have dismissed it, destroyed it, or denied it.

The journal welcomes theorists and practitioners, working at the leading edge of their field, to guest-edit issues of the journal. In this present case, we are delighted to have secured the collaboration of Professor Neil Spiller and Doctor Rachel Armstrong of the Bartlett. I wish to thank them both, and their selected authors, for the originality and scope of the articles here assembled.

Drawn from the contributions to the 9th international “Consciousness Reframed” research conference held at University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2008, this publication aims for a timely re-definition of contemporary syncretic inquiries into the fields of art, science, technology and society through theory and practice alike, reframing the concept of innovation in its relationship to progress and change within the context of perception and its transformation. It comprises a wide range of outstanding expertise and insights of artists, architects, performers, musicians, (...) writers, scientists, and scholars. Among the authors from at least 20 countries are most prominently Roy Ascott, Gerald Bast, Jim Gimzewski, Pierre Lévy, Ryohei Nakatsu, Michael Punt, Ruth Schnell, Barbara Maria Stafford, Alfred Vendl, Victoria Vesna and Peter Weibel. The publication includes full papers and a DVD, edited by Ruth Schnell, with short video extracts of the event and accompanying visual reference. (shrink)

Morphogenetic fields of thought, flux and transformation, energy and light are the manifestations that inform a new sensibility for creating realities and exploring the world. We are seeing the emergence of a new moistmedia culture and the possibilities of a syncretic art that combines aspects of a vast transdisciplinary field. Historically, syncretism has destabilized political and religious orthodoxies, reconciling and harmonizing formerly discrete antagonists; its etymology derives from the coming together of opposed tribes to resist a common enemy. In contemporary (...) culture, the enemy is habit - the uncritical repetition of behaviours, perceptions, categories and values. Just as cybernetics analogizes differences between systems, so syncretism finds likeness between unlike things. If cybernetics underlies the technology of new media art, syncretism informs the psyche. In the context of telematics, it is a matter of heuristics and heteronymia. The digital moment in art is passing as it approaches the status of orthodoxy; the period of discovery through extreme speculation, invention and untrammelled creativity is in danger of giving way to academicism and commercialization, whether in cyberspace, on the Web or through the mobile. Art's twentieth-century preoccupation with the body is giving way to the technoetic exploration of new territories of mind. This may involve revisiting the pathways to personal transformation and transcendence of older cultures, where the syncretism of knowledge and beliefs, as for example in Brazil, is explicit. Art needs to adopt syncretic strategies to embrace emerging models of mind and matter, cyberception, living process and computational systems, moist-media, quantum reality, the nanofield, and ecological, social and spiritual issues. This may lead to significant changes in the way we regard our own identity, our relationship to others, the nature of memory, the exploration of consciousness, and the phenomenology of time and space. (shrink)