Collective Imagination: the Supper of Suppers Josephine Grieve (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference) Table of Contents: Summary Introduction Giordano The Supper of Ashes A Transformative Space * * * Summary Like Kristi van Riet, Josephine Grieve (manager of the 4D programme at the Netherlands Design Institute) talks about identity in the MOO environment, but from a very different point of view. In the MOO, she is Giordano, a nomadic male philosopher and artist born in Naples in 1548. Giordano is a narrative figure, an emanation from the memory of recent European culture and at the same time, a part of herself. As such, he relates in a completely different way to others than Grieve does in real life. She uses his work The Supper of Ashes, the first book published in defence of Copernicus, as a basis to give her vision of what she calls a transformative space. She takes issue with today's `binary' discussion of corporeal vs. incorporeal, and poses the question of how to create the magic of Giordano's supper in a MOO. * * * Introduction Kristi van Riet and I will speak about our own, very different experiences in MOOs or multi-user domains on the Internet, especially with regard to the issue of identity. I have a very specific relationship with my MOO character, Giordano Bruno, whereas Kristi is doubtful -- very doubtful -- about the use of another identity in the first place. * * * Giordano MOOs are text-based, networked environments accessed through the Internet. A MOO has an object-oriented programming language incorporated into the environment, which is set up as a basic structure, usually modelled on an existing building like the Media Lab at MIT. MOOs are developed and extended by MOO participants, using the programming language, which feels simple because it is used in the context of play. Although they are described and actualised with text, MOOs are experienced visually in the imagination. The first thing a participant does in a MOO is to define their character. I type in: @describe me as `nomadic philosopher and artist. Born Naples, Italy 1548. Burned alive as an impenitent heretic, Campo dei Fiori, Rome, February 17, 1600.' I now have my MOO character, a new identity named `Giordano'. He is a narrative figure, an emanation from the memory of recent European culture and is also a part of me -- I relate to Giordano as a simulacrum in my imagination, the link through which I can access, at will, a mesh of knowledge across time and space. The substance of the link is passion -- Giordano has historical content and specific meanings. He is well placed in the traditions of hermetic philosophy, the esoteric use of symbols and of renaissance culture, which inform my work. Through this identity in the MOO, I relate to other people I meet, other characters, in a different way than IRL -- in real life. Not only do I come from a different time and place, but I also have another gender. When someone in the MOO who knows my physical identity calls Giordano `she' , Giordano feels confused, sometimes angry and answers emphatically: he. The first thing I said as Giordano is: Is there nothing new under the sun? At Doors of Perception, we have all been hacking the future -- future scenarios, 2050, the future of the future. I like to spend as much time looking to the past, as a way not only to understand the present, but to illuminate the future. Giordano Bruno was born in Naples in 1548, entered the church and was trained in the classic art of memory, one of the most underrated knowledge weapons of the medieval church. At 30, he left the church and became a nomad, exploiting the memory art for his own purposes in an original and innovative way (revealed so eloquently by Frances Yates in her seminal text The Art of Memory). Bruno created a new, universal memory system, infused with magic. He sowed seeds of inspiration and spiritual revolution in the royal courts of France, England, and Germany. He wrote and printed about 30 texts, all polemical and thus `dangerous'. He was arrested by the Inquisition police in 1592. After 8 years in jail in Venice and Rome, he was burnt at the stake in1600. When researching Bruno, I imagine late renaissance Europe, a time of intense political and religious upheaval, great class and gender inequality, the will to colonise, a certain amount of paranoia on behalf of the church and the state because they weren't yet in control the new medium, printing, which disseminated ideas and images in alarming quantities -- and I do draw parallels with what is happening today with the Internet. * * * The Supper of Ashes In the 1590s, I imagine an overwhelming sense of apocalypse, balanced with an equally overwhelming sense that a new age was dawning - I read it in the words of the poets Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and the philosophers Pico della Mirandola and Ficino. I see it in the images of painters like Botticelli and Rafael. It seems from Bruno's texts and reports from his contemporaries that in this context, he believed that he qualified as prophet and leader of the new movement that would bring in the new age. Bruno was a little bit out of control. In a book called La Cena dei Ceneri (The Supper of Ashes) (the Ash Wednesday supper -- ed.) written in 1584 while in England, he articulated his new philosophy. The Supper of Ashes was the first book published in defense of Copernicus, whose revolutionary theory had been published a few decades earlier. In the Supper, using the regeneration imagery of Lent, Bruno explains and defends the radical heliocentric cosmology. This was a controversial topic, to say the least. One commentator said that it was like the unexpected eruption of a volcano. Bruno wrote the book in 1584 and was burned at the stake the day after Ash Wednesday in 1600. By some strange twist of fate, his last meal was the Ash Wednesday Supper. The line between IRL and fiction in Bruno's work is as blurred as it is in a MOO. The Supper of Ashes is peopled with easily recognisable characters from Oxford and the court of Queen Elizabeth I, which also included Bruno himself. Bruno sets himself up against the Oxford doctors, who he calls grammarian pedants. Yates says that these academics were his greatest enemy, his nightmare obsession...(because of) their narrow-minded philosophy and minute attention to style and dictionaries of words and phrases. The doctors in turn accused Bruno of being mad. Bruno always uses metaphors at several levels. In this book, he uses two metaphors -- the Copernican cosmology and the Supper. The defense of Copernicus is only one layer in The Supper of Ashes, a complex, non-linear text. Copernican theory is used as a hieroglyph to promote his new `philosophy', which includes insights into the nature of the universe, the relationship between humankind and universe, between microcosm and macrocosm. What at first seems to be a scientific discourse becomes a treatise on philosophy, religion and magic. From Copernicus, Bruno takes a giant leap of the imagination to the idea that there is an infinite universe with no centre, peopled with innumerable worlds, all moving and animated with divine life. These ideas are central to Bruno's philosophy: an infinite universe where the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere; multiple worlds and the balanced oscillation between multiplicity and unity; universal harmony and the reconciliation of opposites, as in his description of the Supper: A supper so grand and small, so pompous and childish, so sacrireligious and religious, so cheerful and angry, so bitter and happy, so Florentine-lean and Bolognese-fat, so cynical and luxurious, so trifling and serious, so tragic and comical. The Supper is a set of dialogues that begins with an introduction of the characters, followed by a journey through the streets of London, a boat trip and finally the supper. Bruno paints the images lucidly with words as he implements the occult art of memory. The Supper is not linear but recursive. The arguments that Bruno makes in one place are often related in a complex way to arguments and comments made elsewhere. This plan is in harmony with Bruno's universe, in which everything interacts with everything else as a vital precondition of its existence. The metaphor of the supper evokes Lenten imagery -- an annual ritual of regeneration which is lived and experienced at that time by most of the population in western Europe, whether Catholic or Protestant. Lent was a time of semi-fasting. Ash Wednesday, the day after Mardi Gras, was the first day of Lent. So Ash Wednesday begins a period of renewal. The Supper itself is a transformative space for a collective -- as distinct from a transformative space for an individual. A supper is for the multitude. At supper, ideas, images and food are shared and digested. The experience is sensual and intellectual; it engages the body and the mind. The table becomes the temporary centre for a network of collective intelligence, collective imagination and collective creativity. It has all the resonance of ritual and is a grounding metaphor, a matrix which delivers nutrients and brings forth ideas. * * * A Transformative Space It is the nature of this transformative space, with all its mutations, that interests me. Is it possible to create such a transformative space on the Internet -- a Supper MOO? Or a Supper in a MOO? MOOs are like Memory Palaces: a cybernetic manifestation of the Greek memory palace system. You travel from room to room and in each room, you find objects and images. MOOs are perfect environments for multi-levelled signification systems. MOO suppers have been tried and I have been to MOO parties and Cyber Dinners, but I have not yet found all the ingredients: the depth of character, the loose structure of a supper, the expectation, the ingestion and digestion of ideas, the resonance of ritual, in a word, the multi-sensual stimulation. The Supper Club in Amsterdam is such a transformative space. It is a bizarre environment that engages all the senses -- sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. It is an original, low-tech, multimedia space, with video, slides, sound, painting, installations, continually mutating and unpredictable. One week, you walk in and the ceiling is a mesh of laundry lines with white laundry hanging everywhere. A few weeks later, it is a sophisticated Parisian salon, except that the windows are covered in lace -- lace from the inside of a sheep's stomach. The food is sublime. The chef's favourite ingredient is a vivid sense of humour. There are thousand-year-old eggs, the fleshy skeleton of a fish and its sushi, berries falling out of their cardboard container onto a splattered plate with unctuous cream. Here is a place that provides the structure for collective creativity (Bruno wrote about collective intelligence 400 years ago.) The Supper metaphor reveals the necessity of the corporeal experience. Collective intelligence is multi-dimensional and multi-sensual, linked to the body and to the earth. It is concerned with re-materialisation, not dematerialisation. It is simultaneously corporeal and incorporeal. I've had enough of the binary opposition that continually invades our discussions. How can the body be obsolete when so much of our intelligence is embedded in it? Experience is etched on our bones; rhythms control our muscles; human memory lines the uterus to be absorbed by the foetus. Can't we accept that we can simultaneously experience multiple realities and live in multiple worlds? That we can have multiple personalities? This is a concept as old as the sun. How can we create the magic of the supper in a MOO? How can we create a supper MOO where ideas and images can be exchanged and digested, one that engages as many senses as possible and allows for transformation of the participants. It will not replace the corporeal experience -- an exquisite, surprising night at the Supper Club -- but it could complement it and Giordano could have another supper.

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