EVOLUTION OF A NEW TRINARY

an essay by Tamas Veszi, 2006

Human beings have, in the effort to integrate nature into culture, defined the world according to binary and trinary structures. As we enter the 21 st century, I propose that humans have surpassed the binary structures we created as a result of the industrial revolution. We have moved into a new complex form of trinary structure of a biotech era. The nature of this new trinary world has evolved beyond the previous trinaries, such as the widely accepted

notion of mind, body and soul, or the trinity of Christianity. My definition of the "new trinary" is a symbiosis of humans/nature, and technology in a completely integrated relationship that cannot be disentangled. I believe that the evolution of new trinary structures creates a more efficient balance of conceptual and material resources than previous arrangements.

At the end of the 20 th and beginning of the 21 st centuries the main concerns have been and continue to be medical breakthroughs and efficiency of storing/transferring data more quickly. Our medical goals are to overcome the limitations of the organic verses synthetic boundaries and the steps to the reproduction of the human body and its organs. At the same time socio-political developments affect not only the way we advance but also how we utilize technology. For example, concern for security and safety is rapidly growing, digital imaging and profiling is becoming part of our daily routine. The introduction of full-scale body scanning as a public safety measure will affect our aesthetic expectations not only for the objects surrounding us but also for the exterior and interior of our technohuman hybrid body.

To advance from this binary and utopist state, research has to evolve from science as well as from art. It is crucial once again to engage artists into the dialogue not just theoretically but in practice as well. Artists do not have to maneuver between the strict ethical guidelines of science, so this freedom of imagination opens up endless new possibilities which can then create a dialogue with science. The work of artist Eduardo Katz, creating a genetically engineered rabbit that glows in the dark, or Stellarc's interactive Cyborgs, or the infamous art cooperative group the Critical Art Ensemble were part of this early investigation. To demonstrate current opposites of the artist's point of view I will later briefly examine the works of artist David Altmejd and Damian Hirst.

In the pre-human time of the natural world, nature was its own self-contained, unmediated, balanced whole. As humans entered nature, their initial condition of unconscious conceptual perception needed to understand structure and balance. This was our genetic map to our primal notion of "existing within" nature.

I believe that it was implicitly understood that balance was maintained by an undefined trinary basic structure. This was not a religious but a natural human instinct. In order to dominate Nature's regenerative capacity, a perceived evolutionary hindrance to human progress, humans imposed binary and trinary structures beyond the given binaries of nature. This advancement was most interesting when humans separated from other animals. It elevated us from "being within" nature to "ruling upon" it. Soon thereafter spirituality and thinking came to have equal importance with our body.

This structure could satisfy early humans, but human ambition toward progress is an endemic phenomenon. Monotheistic culture was an important step, but it was only an intermediary between two strong trinary structures. It did not comply with the complex human need of trinary harmony. Founders of Early Christianity felt this and came to understand that without a trinary concept monotheism would not be able to achieve grand scale success. Christianity was therefore strengthened by reintroduction of a trinary concept that consisted of God the Father, Christ representing the people as the son or a centralized dead author, and the notion of the soul as "holy spirit," or the "ideal soul." This blended and released authorship of the Author-God to the reader best articulated in Barthes', "From Work to Text";

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
(Barthes in Harrison and Wood 2000 965-970)

This trinary structure may well be the strongest entity so far. At the same time it alienated a great portion of the population because it does not encompass the entire global community. It was inevitable that after almost two thousand years of Christianity man would overcome the burdens of religious control.

The second part of the 19 th century began a new era that lead to a whole new belief system in the wake of the industrial revolution. Fear of the Church lifted to a large degree, and the institution lost its initial power, though not its manpower, to secularization. Human needs shifted from dogmas to the conveniences of modern life. Aspects of this new life style, including easy and quick transportation, electricity, and security for each individual, became the primary interests of urban human beings. The binary section of the father and son (mind and body) fell into the hands of the government, private entities, and institutions of public education, instead of being enclosed within the Church.

• application of the binary system
• the computer should operate fully electronically,
• use of a central processing unit and an arithmetical unit,
• program controlling and data storage

www.neumann-haz.hu

The transition period of the late 20 th century seems to suggest the most promising vision for the continuum of long-term advancement. Because of the magnitude of technological innovations, this period has been credited with perhaps more relevance than it deserves in terms of future existence, but it   is only part of a larger journey. Fast paced advancement of human innovations and the introduction of synthetic materials depleted human resources sooner than expected. Hence, the need to reintegrate nature's capacities with technology has become inevitable.

As an example of the above mentioned necessity, the layering structure created by a Photoshop file's "binary constructed image" is evidently becoming inadequate. We have to bypass the historical idea of foreground and background or other greatly favored opposites of the binary. Need for a more stable structure has surpassed current human technological capacities. Nanochips with circuits using molecules is an example of a much more sufficient non-binary method.

Writers like Homi K. Bhabha and Marshal McLuhan insist that technology and nature feed into each other, and that the binary can no longer contain itself.

These in-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood-singular or communal- that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (Bhabha in Harrison and Wood 2003 1110-1116)

It has become clear that the center of attention is not the human body anymore but the fusion and investigation of possible basic alterations in the organic and the non-organic.

Artificial heart and lungs from the movie 'Bicentennial man'.

Since the Second World War's "rejection" of the past and traditional has become a favored conceptual notion, not only in art, as in Duchamp's rejection of the original, but in other aspects of society as well. An example would be activism against the imbedded binaries of social behaviors toward race and gender. Binary structures maintained a false utopian idea that humans are in control of nature, which was reinforced by the feeling of power over technology. Postmodernism is a natural byproduct of the modern age,which I believe has been a philosophically and socially strong period, bringing self-reflexive dialogue into the mainstream. However, architecture and design from this period have remained limited in binary frameworks. Even with these discrepancies, the main intention of postmodernism was to locate and dismantle embedded binary notions. Renee Green uses architecture as an example to demonstrate the binaries created and used by postmodern architecture. " I used architecture literally as a reference, using the attic, the boiler room, and the stairwell to make associations between certain binary divisions such as higher and lower and heaven and hell. The stairwell become a liminal space, a pathway between the upper and the lower areas, each of which was annotated with plaques referring to blackness and whiteness."(Green in Bhaba in Harrison and Wood 2003 1112)

Bloch talks about this belief in The Meaning of Utopias :

The limitation of the utopian theme must eventually cease, . . . It is not only there is (or ....be) no tallying with mere humbug in daydreaming, or with: fairy tales" in the pejorative sense, but that even the social utopias themselves though admittedly they form the main stream of all utopian books) function only in the midst of other, specific utopian areas, with the reference to human culture as a whole- indeed to Nature independent of men. (Bloch in Marxism and Art 1973 578)

Bhabha also address this in terms of a cultural hybridism:

This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy: I always went back and fourth between racial designations and designations of physics or other symbolic designations. All thee things blur in some way......To develop a genealogy of the way colours and noncolours is interesting to me. (Bhabha, 1949, 1112)

Recently there has been a revival of interest in the non-binary, the so-called multiple valued logic in computing. The interest is due to the fact that the increase of logic density can provide additional processed information through each connection.

With the reintroduction of organic particles to the binary system, a new trinary mechanism is created. In mathematics this system is called ternary arithmetic that gives multiple options (-1, 0, 1). In the new trinary this construct would represent a similar but more conceptual formula. (0) and (1) are separate entities but both represent a binary element of technology and (-1) would translate as the natural or organic component.

It follows automatically based on historical evidence that artists not only adopt contemporary scientific concepts but also reenact future developments.   For example, Leonardo DaVinci stated after his anatomical researches and experiments that ' god created man but man is a machine so it can be copied.'

a) Diagram of the Spine           b) Rear view of a skeleton

       Leonardo                           Leonardo

We may be able to copy ourselves, but these copies will be androids made of organic and non-organic materials.  

Artificial hand of an android from the movie 'Bicentennial Man'.

Let's say we create a material called Irobone-P. This material consists of an organometallic compound associated with the carbon nanotubes, human bone tissue and some form of polystyrene. The result would be exceptional not only for the hybrids or androids but also for all types of medical purposes as suggested in the film "The Bicentennial Man."

The art works of David Altmejd show a valid passage into the trinary investigation. We get the feeling of the synthetic and organic fusion of a hybrid in-between stage. Although they both can co-exist separately as well, their fused state becomes more complex and fascinating. This ambiguous system is intuitive and not defined. It becomes an abstract organism created by the combination of organic creatures and synthetic objects and particles. Meaning and symbols turn into the energy that creates the tension of an undefined in-between hybrid state.

David Altmejd, The Builders 2005

In contrast, artist Damian Hirst is still involved in the postmodern notion of presentation of an object as a spectacle. The binary between death and morality is one of Hirst's main interests. He is stating factual characteristics from society and nature, but it does not initiate a new terrain beyond a well-defined aesthetically pleasing space. There is no transformation emerging from signifier to signified. It imposes the historical hierarchy of separation between materials and binary non-progressive space.

                            The Physical Impossibility of Deathin the Mind of Someone Living (1991)     The Elusive Truth (2005)

In a recent interview, Stephen Hawking, the noted physicist, stated that if humans do not concentrate on improving themselves through genetic manipulation machines could take over. Hawking notes that since computers effectively double their capacity every 18 months, there is a very goodpossibility that computers will develop their own intelligence. To combat this possibility, Hawking promotes the idea of increasing the complexity of human DNA.     

      Superbly complex DNA                    Normal human DNA

As well, he suggests the development of interfaces that would allow the direct connection of a human brain to a computer/artificial brain. This would enable the computer brain to work for us as an extension of ourselves, rather than as a separate entity. A problem arises, though, if the computer starts to control us instead the brain controlling the computer. It will be inevitable that we will end up with a computer based on organic materials built into our brain, thus creating a hybrid of each individual.

This transparency will lead us to the next stage of this trinary evolution. Our future is not only full of realizable utopias but undetectable artificial particles merging and

blending in with nature. The question is, will technohumans be again "within nature" as a different kind of species by this integration of the biological? Will art be separate from science? It has become clear we are not able to "rule upon" nature after all. The cycle of evolution has no origin but there is a motion toward our infinite ideas that creates parallel points of shifted origins.

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Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An anthology of Changing Ideas . Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, 1957, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972

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http://www.akrylic.com/contemporary_art_article40.htm

http://dgleahy.com/dgl/p05.html accessed in 12/04/2005