A Postdigital Universe.

Michael Punt
Mpunt@easynet.co.uk
Michael Punt is also Editor in Chief of Leonardo Reviews a member of the Leonardo/ISATS Advisory Board, and
the MIT/Leonardo Book Series Committee. He is a Reader Art and Technology at the University of Plymouth A full
list of publications and exhibitions can be found at: http://people.i-dat.org.

Abstract
The underlying claim of this essay is that we live in a multiverse, that is a universe of many universes that
occupy the same space and time, not as an exotic excursion into the realms of science fiction, but as an
everyday necessity that affects our social and economic interchange. Faced with such instability, the convenient
way that this was managed was through an arbitrary division of labour that assigned the rational to the ‘real’
and the irrational to the ‘imagined’. Recent speculation in cosmology and the science of consciousness studies
has obliged us to reconsider the concept of reality as an "absolute given" from which all laws can be verified. The
inevitable realisation in scientific circles that the reality of the imagined has as an equivalent epistemological
significance to the reality of the material, raises fascinating questions as it invites a sceptical reconsideration of
the essential basis of knowledge and a revision of procedures. While the radical shift in scientific thought
provides the moment of profound satisfaction for those artists, designers and scientists who have long argued
for a transdisciplinary world view.
Keywords: Consciousness, Early Cinema, Postdigital, Postdigital Analogue, Science, Transdisciplinary,

Technology and Metaphysics.

I existed independently of time and matter, I felt myself departing from my body as I imagined a spirit would
depart -emanating into the cockpit, extending through the fuselage as though no frame of fabric walls were
there, angling upward, outward, until I reformed in an awareness far distant from the human form I left in a
fast-flying transatlantic plane. But I remained connected to my body through a long extended strand, a strand
so tenuous that it could have been severed by a breath.
.. and later
My visions are easily explained away through reason, but the longer I live, the more limited I believe reason to
be.
Charles A. Lindbergh (Philips, E.1987.)

The two quotations that open this essay are not intended to herald an entry into the dispute about the causes of
Lindbergh's visions, but simply to point out that whether it is 1927, 1987 or today, when machines and human
minds meet there is always the possibility of the mechanical capsizing into the paraphysical or the metaphysical.
Lindbergh's story has a particularly unnerving effect it seems, quite possibly because in a machine that is so
dependent on the state of science, technology and engineering in order not to come to grief, the determining
presence of the irrationality of human intelligence threatens to undermine the reign of reason. Reflecting on the
history of the Spirit of St Louis, or railway trains, or the movies , it seems impossible to avoid the idea that many
of the technologies that involve people sooner or later become inhabited by ghosts. Perhaps the most
persistently ghostly technology is the cinema – so ghostly in fact that a specific discourse formed around a
discussion of cinema, realism and phenomena within a decade of it becoming a public entertainment. Most
famously when in 1916 Hugo Münsterburg, who became the chair of the Philosophical Department at Harvard,
published The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. As an advocate of applied Psychology he was so vehemently
opposed to any taint of spiritualism that he theorised the cinema as a mechanical effect of consciousness as
though the cinema was used by its audiences to replicate the banality of realism. On the contrary, in the early
years, phantom rides, (in which the camera was fixed to the front of a moving train), proved such a fascination
that a fuller cinematic simulation of virtual travel was developed by George C Hale. Hales Tours and Scenes of
the World, in which the audience sat in a full-size model of a railway carriage and viewed phantom rides
projected on the front wall, (to the rattle of cams and a rocking motion) was possibly inspired by a number of
other early experiments with film as a transdimensional medium. These included the collaboration between H.
G. Wells and Robert Paul (an early film pioneer) on a 'time machine', and the Lumière’s Cinéorama which was a
spectacle at the 1900 world’s fair comprising a 360' panoramic view from a balloon by which the audience was
ecstatically levitated without leaving the ground. From a survey of the many ways in which moving images were
(and still are) combined with other forms of technology it is clear that there were many aspects to the attraction
of moving pictures to the public. The combination of trains, virtual travel, the simultaneous address to somatic,
and cerebral stimulation produced an excitement and delirium that could bring an audience back time and time
again to experience the same show and turn a handsome profit for the exhibitors.
Those producers and exhibitors who worked with early cinema technology knew that ordinary human beings
have long needed token explanations of multiple realities in order to stabilise conflicting desires and
constraints. As we learn more about the beginning of the cinema it seems clear that almost from its outset the
projection of moving images was understood to facilitate a degree of mobility of identification that was denied
to the viewer of a painting or the reader of a novel. Thinking about the complexity of the man/film relationship
(maker, actor, character, viewer) David Thompson points out that ‘L’Arroseur arosé (1895) is very short and its
transference of identification is accomplished in one shot.’ (Thompson. 25) It depicts a prank in which a boy
drenches a gardener by first stepping on a hose to restrict the flow and then, at the crucial moment, releasing
the pressure. He gets caught and is brought in front of the camera to be spanked. A simple joke, but in less than
a minute audience identification flows seamlessly back and forth between the boy and the gardener, the image
and the technology, and the real and the imaginary. It reminds us that, apart from the many other things that it
did, the Cinématographe provided a social space in which the idea that the extent of dimensions that we draw
upon are always in a state of flux, was socially sanctioned through participation in the consumption of
technology. The rather prosaic turn that the cinema took after 1907, when in various forms it began to replicate
the theatre as a mode of reception, did not mean the end of this strand of the attraction. Indeed, it may be
argued that the attraction, and persistence, of continuity editing provided a satisfactory token, as the excised
absent was made virtually present in a way that resembled the daily experience of selecting information in order
to build a contingent reality.
The multiplicity of times and spaces that converge in a single individual have long been sifted by academics in to
two piles: those that have a rational and scientific explanation (e.g. money, work, knowledge) and those that
have an irrational basis (e.g. love, pleasure, and art). In lived experience no such convenient division takes place.
The constellation of different banks of knowledge and experience that temporarily intersect in consciousness to
become awareness produces a momentary universe that is a unique component of the collective worlds: a
universe among universes. Such fine imagery, however, is always in danger of its own hallucinatory seduction
into an existential reverie that renders all action a product of contingencies. What follows is an invitation to
proceed from the claim that we exist in a multiverse of multiple realities in order to consider science as a
generic cultural artefact prone to the shift between the technological and the metaphysical.
The Earthquake in Chile.
In 1811, five years before committing suicide in a pact with a terminal cancer sufferer, Heinrich von Kleist wrote
a short story with the title of The Earthquake in Chile. Although it is set in South America and based on the
historical fact of an earthquake in Santiago in 1647, it is almost certain that the uppermost thought in his mind
was the disaster which struck Lisbon in 1755. The Lisbon earthquake was that it not only obliterated two thirds
of a city but also a belief in a divine justice. On all Saint's Day, when the churches were full of the pious and the
good, the earthquake not only destroyed the cathedrals but reduced much of the city to rubble. The fires which
followed, mainly caused by votive candles, were almost as destructive as the ensuing tidal wave which sank the
shipping in what was considered the best of Europe's ports. The response was cool and rationalist: a dignified
closure of the ports, the disposal of bodies at sea in barges and the focus of attention placed, not upon the
souls of the departed as was the habit, but on the condition of the living. A benign statutory authority took to
tending the sick, fixing prices and raising and using taxes for rebuilding the city. This time there was no longer
any space for the fickle divine - in its place the bold grid of the Baixa, rebuilt as the seed of a rational civilisation
set in the serpentine chaos of nature as a clear statement to any sentient deity who might happen to be cruising
around the Universe that man had at last understood the earth to be a random nonsensical, and above all hostile
planet which was to be tamed not by prayer but by human force, creative energy, and rationality – man was in
charge.
Hienrich von Kleist's story, written 60 years later tells the story of Jeronimo and Josefa, two star crossed lovers
separated and condemned to death for fornicating in a convent. As Josefa is about to be beheaded, her
distraught lover, confined to prison, wants nothing more than death as a release from his heartache. He
attempts to hang himself in his cell, at the very moment an earthquake strikes the city. This disaster instantly
reverses Jeronimo's mission from self destruction to self preservation as he desperately tries to scramble from
the collapsing prison. Unknown to him, Jeronimo, is also set free by the disaster and amid random annihilation
of both good and evil people the two lovers miraculously meet under a pomegranate tree in a glade outside the
turmoil of the city. There, among the other survivors, a natural democracy based on equality of need pervades,
and those with food feed those without. When order is restored, however, the lovers return to the city and make
straight for the only church left standing to give thanks for their salvation. Alas they are denounced from the
pulpit and lynched by a fanatical mob who attribute the disaster to their passion. The pattern of Kleist's novella
mirrors the more common natural disaster of a tornado, with violence and matter at the outer edges and a
transcendental moment of complete calm at its centre - a tree with outspread branches. The object lesson of
Kleist’s story is that the sentiments which had hitherto been visited on a hostile nature now included human
beings and, as a consequence, there was now no clear reason for anything on earth only dogma. In half a
century the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment had collapsed as spectacularly as they had been rejuvenated
in Lisbon in 1755.

Science in a Multidimensional Universe.

The Lisbon earthquake caused a crisis in reality and prompted a frank admission that there may not be a single
explanatory system that can account for the world. The rapid collapse of that insight draws us to the centre of
the problem that consciousness studies poses for biological science today as it calls for a new kind of
explanatory system in which the perception of reality, the representation of reality, and ideology do not fit so
snugly. The search for new procedures, which lies at the very heart of the study of consciousness, mirrors
research into sub-cellular structures such as mitochondria which have their own DNA to drive the engine of
another genetic structure through a process of enchantment. Science as a whole may also need to embrace
magic and astrology, an idea that also connects directly with some recent research in the study of consciousness
concerning the reconciliation of the electro-chemical processes of the brain with the rest of the world. Recent
studies on human precognition and the possibility that we have perceptions of events prior to their happening
has sanctioned some strange affiliations between science and parascience. Dick Bierman conducting scientific
research using fMRI at the Faculty of Psychology in the University of Amsterdam for example provides
compelling evidence that subjects do indeed exhibit changes in brain pattern prior to certain events. (For a
discussion of this see my review of Toward A Science of Consciousness http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/
Leonardo/ldr.html). Attempts to account for this evidence without astrology produce their own magical
inventions such as the (respected) idea that there is a backward referral in time to accommodate the variations
of speed at which data travels around the body’s system. Fast visual data must be reconciled with slower tactile
sensations and living in a disjointed present rather than a past has significant evolutionary advantage.
Explaining how information can run backwards is not so easy in a classical environment and forces us to return
to a world governed by quantum mechanics in which, according to its foundational logic of uncertainty,
quantum information does indeed run backwards in time or, at least, time is indeterminate.
In another scientific speculation entitled The End of Time, Julian Barbour uses the theory behind quantum
mechanics, which lies at the root of modern electronic technologies, to consider the idea that time does not
exist. He suggests that the idea of time as the Heraclitian flux may be nothing more than a well-founded
illusion. Barbour’s notion is of an infinity of “nows” that are organised in sequence in a continuity based on
minimal difference (like a film strip) which creates an impression of time. Describing time as an illusion does not
mean that the clocks stop, any more than describing the earth as round changes our perception of it as flat.
What the end of time does open up, however, is new possibilities for understanding how the perception of
multiple realities that we all experience becomes thought. Barbour’s work is timely since in the face of the
immanent collapse of string theory, another dimension has opened up: the infinitely long and infinitely thin
eleventh dimension of Membrane Theory that allows us to account for the apparent discrepancies between the
laws governing small things and those in charge of big things.
The convergence of science, parascience, Quantum Mechanics and Membrane Theory to account for
precognition may seem to be an inelegant collage of off-the-peg science, but although each explanatory system
has a different epistemological constituency, what joins them is a methodology that celebrates, rather than
attempts to reduce, difference. Freed from the yoke of the logocentric dogma of the last century, imaginative
leaps have been enabled that may or may not answer our questions about reality, but they are fun, and they do
extricate us from the cul-de-sac of twentieth century theory founded on a spurious reign of the cult of fact. If
nothing else the invocation of the other worldly exposes the ideological conjuring trick that makes the
connection between the apparently irreconcilable oppositions of normal and paranormal. It exposes the sleight
of hand that teaches us to regard all that is consigned to superstition with great suspicion whilst superstitiously
following the truth claims of a scientific rationalism that few of us understand. A sleight of hand that is
effectively passed through the scientific community's rejection of the determining effects of the experimenter’s
performance as a crucial element of the truth claims that it supports.
The strand of research at the interface of the multiverse is between the sub-microscopic and the study of human
consciousness. Drawing on a world-wide transdisciplinary community of scientists in a variety of fields whose
experiments suggest that without the explanatory benefits of parallel realities their findings fall into the realm of
miracles. Science, that most rational aspect of human enquiry rejects miracles as it also courts a transcendental
infinity and it extends its claims beyond the point where they might be physically verified, first through the
telescope, then, demanding an even greater leap of faith with the microscope – an optical instrument that
demands consensus and an act of faith as its technology abandons the eye for a comparative judgement
between other instrumental realities such as fluoroscopy, radioscopy and so forth. Walking to the stars to test
the claims of the telescope is in theory a possibility - no such confirmation is available for the microscope -
microscopy is based on belief no less demanding than our faith in Saints. Consequently working at the sub-
microscopic level allows metaphysical questions of human determination to surface as a scientific issue. No less
than the astrologer or the spiritual medium the realities of the séance and the sub-microscopic are united
around the shared cultural imperative of a total dissatisfaction with the chaining of consciousness to the
materiality of the body.
The Postdigital Analogue.
At this distance there is now little doubt that the digital revolution was, from its technological and conceptual
inception, always destined to be the postdigital earthquake in which similarity, congruence and continuity found
a new currency. The necessary radical shift in scientific thought to avoid a return to dogmatic realism provides a
moment of satisfaction for those artists, designers and scientists who have argued, through their practice, for
new kinds of knowledge and new sources of authentication of the self to be regarded on an equal footing with
the old. It marks a victory in the struggle with the idealisation of rational representation which disavowed daily
experience as circulation of metaphors for undifferentiated desire and resistance. At stake in this victory is more
than the recovery of the subject: it is nothing less than whose vision of paradise prevails. Things are different:
we are now postdigital and biology has paradoxically not become more mechanical but much more aggressively
organic. Where the digital proposes the perfect finite conditions for a perfect existence regardless of matter, (as
for example in the human genome project), in the postdigital analogue (as for example in the ironies of genetic
and wet biological art) human consciousness is regarded as almost infinitely malleable, able to shape its identity
in response to local (and technological) conditions, aware all the time of the range of possibilities (digital and
analogue) that are not developed.
What seems clear as we embrace the postdigital analogue – that is the postdigital reality that is the object of our
current analogous representation - is that we need new procedures, ones that are not obsessed with
equivalence and difference but can finely accommodate the equivalencies of differences. The digital eventually
gave us flowers as code – the machine in the garden to be sure. The postdigital analogue, on the other hand,
points to a version of paradise that is not a finite discontinuous place or a non-homogeneous moment of time,
not Eden in a nostalgic future, but a thick membrane in which local conditions, desire and resistance are
constantly stabilised to form a whole identity. Such speculative gambles, however seductive, may be symptoms
of a more radical condition that we need to imagine. Quite possibly the fluid reality that we occupy does not
lend itself to explanation – in which case the postdigital could herald not so much the end of time but the end of
explanation – by which I mean that we may be forced to the frank acknowledgement that description and
analogy provide as much insight into our realities as we are ever going to get. It is a medieval thought, more a
provocation than a sustainable intervention, but one which to our rational logocentric ears sounds like madness.
But it is worth reflecting for a moment on the Martian view. If you were a passing alien looking on, what would
you make of the different attention paid to the practice of belief and the practice of science, or the hierarchy
between the image and the word in a world where “anything" is always two or more "things" at once? What would
you make of a world in which human beings were evidently simultaneously multiprocessing huge amounts of
data in their consciousness both backwards and forwards in time, and turning this data into complex actions,
but whose perceptions are only socially sanctioned as "thoughts" if they are articulated in the serial modality of
the text? Perhaps the Martian might look at the history of art and suggest that it is time to recover the power of
the alchemist – Medieval to be sure – but the task before us is to rebuild our sensitivity to the networks of
similarities in differences which has been so in the thrall of the logic of a single reality that not even the Lisbon
earthquake could finally change it.

As I have suggested here the Cinématographe as an artefact that represented technological achievement, did not
emerge from a realist imperative for movement in the way that materialist histories demand, but that a cultural
obsession with other dimensions and a radical shift in the relationship between ordinary people and technology
converged on a number of machines and reinterpreted them to satisfactorily unite irreconcilable ideas. Not to
acknowledge this has contributed to a flawed history of early cinema that becomes an impediment to our
understanding of the cinema now and in the future. Similarly in this essay I have argued that to repress the
determining impact of the paranormal in the history of science and technology skews our understanding of what
science is. It also affects our understanding of what it means to do science and consequently what it means
when non-scientists do science. The insistence here on beginning with a reality that is malleable and mixed in
order to understand how scientific knowledge has developed is less for the benefit of the scientific community
and more to prepare artists, historians, and philosophers to consider what new visions of the Universe we might
recover from critically engaging with any world view that includes the immaterial, the apparently irrational and
the comfortable coexistence of the contradictory.
(Photo: Michael Punt)
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For a further discussion of these issues see: http://www.uoc.edu/caiia-star-2001/eng/articles/mich_punt/
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See also: www.extraordinaryconnections.org for the latest projects.
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punt
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