I'm going to make my first reference to design immediately: Ars Technica, a group of French artists around La Villette, holds an annual design competition to which projects are submitted. Most of them don't get realised, but are nonetheless interesting. Let me tell you about one of them that I hope will be realised, but will take some footwork. The idea, intended for the Association of Cow Breeders of France, is to use genetic engineering to change the cow hide and design it before the animal is born, eventually allowing cows that look like a Mondriaan or Vlaminck or any other painting in history. Unfortunately, I can't show you that, even though we're planning to make a little show with a cow, describing different changes of design in it. I thought that would be something delightful, especially for designers in Holland.

However, it's non-interactive, so I'll drop that and get back to the topic at hand.

Interactivity in a larger social context has become a buzzword that's turning industry and governments around. It's an about-face. Very interestingly, in the last decade or less, people, instead of fighting technologies -- especially new technologies -- are now greeting them. We don't even have a VR industry and everybody is already talking about it; multimedia was around as a word long before anyone knew what it meant. A lot of people who had never even touched multimedia were already talking about it and hailing it as the future.

What's going on? It's a very interesting thing that interactivity is in, even in the most distant bureaucratic circles. And we see the most extraordinary marriages, the latest one being TCI and Southern Bell. It was done in a way that reminds one of the big Mediaeval takeovers; a whole area, a whole network is taken over by another network, reminiscent of the way empires or conquests were made in the Middle Ages, when the daughter of the King or Prince married and that the two lands were combined. It's a takeover -- a friendly takeover without bloodshed.

And we're seeing the same thing. It's a very interesting mood that is developing. We can understand why this networking deal is a kind of bureaucrat's dream. Hardware plus network is a physical investment, one that probably will pay -- it is possible to see what has been done. And governments are thinking that they must do something (I'm thinking of the Canadian Government) because of the present economy. Such deals may be the solution.

The problem is they have, by and large, no idea what real people will do with it. In interactivity, multimedia and VR, the ratio of excitement to understanding is inversely proportional. The less they understand, the more excited people get about it. The idea of putting a big network in place for us now -- a big issue in the US and Canada -- is to establish the electronic superhighway. I suddenly find myself thinking: the idea of making a network first is a bit like proposing six-lane highways at the time of the Model T Ford for bicycles and horse-and-buggies.

In reality, one should ask oneself: does the highway bring the traffic or is it the traffic that brings the highway? Certainly in terms of technical and infrastructure development, we find it is the traffic that has brought on highway growth, not the other way round. You might say: 'Well, let's be ready for this one.'

The Brain
I still don't think that this works quite the way that the bureaucracies think it does -- not to discourage growth of electronic highways, but let's just think about how this thing is going.

One image we can all understand is the image of brain development. I feel there are more and more relationships now between brains and images of the brain and culture than ever before in the history of this planet. I'm very happy that yesterday Thomas West reminded us that before birth, the child's brain has a surfeit of neurons, a 'grand plenty' of neurons that die before the child has had a chance to be born. Is that pure loss, or the generous aspect of nature that always has more than it takes for life to survive, like spermatozoa, of which only one out several billion makes it?

Well, not quite. What is very interesting about brain development and neuron development is that before birth, the brain cells are not connected. Learning (and the development of the organism) occur in response to increasing exposure to the various stimulations that happen within and then outside the womb. This actually generates the connections. What happens is that both under the guidance of genetic programming and the experience of the individual body, this mass of cells gets `carved in' and the personality or basic features -- first of biology and then of personality -- actually are organised in the process of development.

The basic network is implicit in genetic programming. The map is drawn but the active connection only comes as a result of exposure to experience. This is really what I want to insist on in comparing the development of the brain and what happens in electronic highways.

There are two very important features in this development: first, fierce competition among the neurons for food. Those who find a site and are fed remain and survive; those who don't starve and die. There is more `business imagery' happening inside your brain before you are born than there is in real life!

There's a Darwinian kind of thing happening. It works like this: the brain or neuron has an axon -- the part that actually travels -- that goes from the point where the neuron is fixated to the point where the connection has to be made. This may be from neuron to neuron, or it can be a single neuron going and finding the site where it will command neuromuscular response.

That is the first feature: that there is competition and only the neuron that makes the connection survives. As you know, within the neuron, there are many other connections called synaptic connections. More about those presently. The important feature is that some cells are especially adventurous. These are called scout cells. They are the first to reach the site and once they get there they become Teacher cells -- a kind of signposts -- allowing the larger group of cells to make the connection and create the fundamental interaction in brain and body.

I like this model very much, because it could be a way of predicting, or at least optimising the wiring of society that is occurring right now. The key idea I am proposing is that interactive technologies and even the business environment supporting their development and distribution are socio-technological projections of how the brain and central nervous system develop.

Growth Burst
The point is we fail to recognise how many of our technologies, being extensions of our minds, bodies and faculties, are actually spreading in the environment as if they were foreign to us. In fact, they are not foreign, but are a real extension of us. This means that we can regard this whole socio-economic, socio-technological development as a projection of what we are, as we develop, along with this inner being that we don't know very much about.

We are now at a junction in the history of this planet comparable to what James Restack calls a growth burst. We need to know how this happens in the brain, because there we find examples of how it might work in society. It is a period in neurological development marked by explosive connectivity and a structural shake-up or shakedown.

In social terms, there has been a succession of such growth bursts throughout the last hundred years. Ever since the advent of the telegraph, there have been collective global bursts of inter-connectivity. And it is important to realise that all this and other related inventions were in fact the beginning of globalisation.

McLuhan talked about the global village back in 1962; nobody paid any attention. Today, everyone says we're in the midst of globalisation, but we have been globalised since the very first time you could send a message from one side of the planet to the other instantly. The only thing is that nobody, but nobody recognised this at the time. The first wiring of the planet through the telegraph was the basic connection, the very one we would find at the earliest development of the brain evident in fetology.

The second one becomes a resonance environment; radio and direct address become the second stage of globalisation. This could also serve as an image of the endorphine function in the early brain. There is a resonance pattern established from one side of the brain to the other for checking and communication without direct contact.

The third stage of globalisation is television. I'm sure there are plenty of intermediate stages, but I'm just talking 'broad screen'. Television seems to have been an unconscious or un-self-conscious globalisation. We began to look at the world -- I'm reminded of Sartre, who talked about the difference between being aware of whatever it is one is involved with and being aware of being aware of whatever one is involved with.

This kind of relationship was not clear in the 60s: that TV amounted to 'being aware of'. A large body of the world population became aware of the world, without having had the chance to become self-aware. In fact, TV literally sucked out the identity and privacy of the individuals who were watching it, so it was not a self-conscious globalisation.

The next globalisation was of instantly self-conscious, because of feedback -- computers and networks cause a rapid shift from one type of psychology to another. Suddenly, people become very conscious of their presence in the world. This is the beginning of this fierce burst of interconnection. And, by the way, the shakedown that accompanies those enormous bursts of energy and wiring and connecting often translates into war. There is a relationship between the telegraph and World War One, which suddenly pitted all kinds of cultures against each other that had never had to deal with each other with such speed. World War Two was clearly related to radio; the end of the war with Berlin was clearly related to TV technologies. It always takes a while before the burst matures into a major conflict.

Now what we see is that perhaps the new bursts are establishing peace; they are much more peaceful than the first one. But the acceleration of culture can tend towards war.

I want to describe a model of the planet working like the brain. I would like to see us move in a certain direction, such that we will not precipitate a new war.

The abundance of various images of birth is also interesting. Over and over again, I've seen tunnels -- in 3D modelling, in VR, in all this multimedia environment, there seems to be an obsession with the seduction of going through a tunnel. It's either our memories of the vaginal conduct or an image of birth. It seems all these little creatures running through dark tunnels are being born. The one that is being born is the weird creature who is half-human and half-mechanical -- it's a Transformer, and we find it coming out of the other end in a state of wonder: weightless, horizonless and appearing in a kind of marvellous discovery of the world.

Inversion
Something of an inversion between man and machine is happening now. This inversion is very interesting and serious and I will address it presently.

Where is the interactivity in this model? My sense is that interactivity in the brain comes at a stage where in order for the organism to integrate into more and more complex relationships involving more and more specific and useful information, it is not enough to connect. You need to test, to probe and assess. These neurons are in the process of probing, testing and assessing, and the interactivity in the brain becomes thinking. When you think, you are making your cells interact very quickly and very strongly; hence, the model stays at that level.

At different levels, interactivity is and needs many different things. At the industrial level, it is industrialised creativity. From the very humblest PC all the way to the most sophisticated flight simulators, you find an industrialised form of creativity at the edge of things -- the edge of technology -- not somewhere in the middle.

At the technology level itself, a fascinating aspect of interactivity is the whole world of interfaces. Interfaces are a variation on the sense of touch. They mean a rediscovery of the tactile sense and also the rediscovery of the body. We're using every possible gesture of the body -- and we saw some very moving ones from Dave Warner about the use of them by the handicapped. They're very subtle, as they have to be, but there are all kinds of interface we can develop and all of them seem to be a variation on that one sense that in the West we have been repressing all that time -- the sense of touch.

At the psychological level, interactivity is a kind of recovery of the type of autonomy that broadcast was threatening to remove from us. We derive an awful lot freedom as human, individual, private subjects from learning to read and write. The moment TV came along, we began to put on a corporate identity -- and I don't mean here a corporation in the sense of a business, but a global, collective identity that emerges as we watch TV. When we turn the TV off, we become a private person again. You're a public person when you watch TV, not to mention when you're on it.

Interactive media, from the zapper -- which is the first real interactive medium we have known -- all the way to VR, is the recovery of autonomy in front of electricity, autonomy in front of the medium.

Going from the cultural all the way down to the physiological level, interactivity is the rediscovery of proprioception -- the inside of our body. Interactivity is actually receiving images from the outside but immediately feeding them back into a reassessment of what is happening -- all the very complex, truly interesting events that are going on within you are now becoming okay again. We can look into it again. The Puritanical era is over; we can begin to recognise what is going on within ourselves.

So it's not a surprise that all of this interests artists very much. What is an artist in the brain? It's one cell that discovers the site; it's a scout cell. It's the first one there -- the others follow, and the hungrier cells (don't forget they actually have to survive) are also the ones that get faster. They are the designers of the brain. They plan around structured behaviour.

The second question which was raised by the conference is: is all of this 'good'? Well, it's a very good question, one not sufficiently asked and one that I don't often address because I don't like to make a judgement too soon. But I would ask: in which way? Good for what? Good for whom? If we like it so much, I presume it's basically sound.

However one regards the man/machine inversion, that sudden inversion of position between mind, bodies and the machine outside, it warrants further questioning. It is quite obvious that we are becoming the organic core or organic extension of our own brilliant, sophisticated machines.

The more we cede them, the more extensions we have and become. I mean that VR is a perfectly simple example of what is really happening with the motor car on the highway; when we're on the phone or watching TV, we become 'the other end'. It used to be so comfortable to say: technology is an extension of the body; it is less comfortable to say the body has become an extension of technology, which is what is happening, because there's more and more of it out there, and the proportion between what's out there and what's in here has changed completely. We have to ask ourselves whether we want to go along with this.

The machines are becoming intelligent and in no time they will also acquire a self. We don't know that much about self, but we do know that it's not that difficult to programme one. The more neural networks machines have, the more they can learn. At Linz, we have an incredible, ugly but interesting Neuro Baby programmed by Japanese artist Naoko Tosa to learn to speak in the same time scale as a human baby. Within the next three years, she is hoping to have a conversation with him. This is an electronic creature appearing on a screen. You talk to it and it talks back to you.

That intelligence -- again the idea of birth, of a baby -- is symbolic of the whole culture. That intelligence and that self put together will make the world of graphics and sound a kind of mind outside my mind. The world of graphics and sound is out of my mind, yet I am in it. It is now capable of directing my movements as long as I go along with it. If you think that TV was tyrannical, just wait until you get caught in a VR warp. You'll have to do exactly what you are told. The freedom may be illusory.

This VR -- or all interactivity -- are steps towards inversion. As humans, we are coming out of an old skin and regrouping. Regrouping outside, on the Net and on all our technologies. The regrouping is interesting in itself. Are we regrouping by ourselves? Of course not. We are meeting other people in different guises and our minds are changing as we do. Is that good? I really don't know. It feels right. But then we have done things wrong for so long, I wonder if we still have the capacity to judge.

Signposts
My response is twofold. One: I am ready to support all this development as long as I am sure that there is still ample, and perhaps more room for the heart out there. A lot of it is very mental, very technical and a lot of it is not entirely oriented towards other people, and yet it is starting now to show up particularly among artists. That is why I'm often more interested in the artists work than any other technical work, because that is where I see the presence of that emotional reality which tends to be eliminated from technology.

What I trust in interactivity are the artists and designers who show a sincere interest in it. They are the ones who open the doors of perception. And the designers are the first ones to look through them. It's the people you trust. The machines? You can develop any relationship at all -- you can be excited by it and you can be quickly bored by it. It's the people that you meet who are working on these things that you feel are the Brave New World -- in a very nice sense, not at all negative. I've seen very little of the grubbiness, competition, bad mood and discouragement that you see in the traditional art scene, where everyone is complaining about the market not supporting them. But these new artists, engineers and designers who are involved with these things are people who have a kind of 'let's go for it' attitude -- they're not that concerned with the ideological substrates of what they're doing. I find that most exciting.

For me, interactivity only becomes interesting when it becomes fluid and continuous, not when it's step-wise. The real meaning of interactivity is: you have a relationship with that environment. The most important thing in interactivity is creating a tonal rather than a modal or purely instrumental relationship between people and machines and between people and people through machines. Mechanical interaction, even the most sophisticated, very quickly becomes boring. Today, we don't want our machines to obey us, we want them to respond, which is part of this inversion of man/machine. This response is a new mirror, one which we need more than others. It's the mirror of our feelings; the mirror of our inside. We're beginning to have an inside again, thanks to those kinder and softer images of ourselves. This is why I call the culture of interactivity Depth Culture, the culture of deepness. We're only beginning to find out that we are human, after the transition from a time when we felt the notion of human was attached to the literate personality. We lost that humanity during the last two world wars and we are rediscovering a sense of humanity that we have to rebuild, in some ways.