David Brody, Still from Proliferation, 2003/4

LOVE SONG TO A HYPER-RUNT
– Ebon Fisher

"The definition of life itself has become blurred, the virtual and real have converged together into a continuum, the infotech / biotech / nanotech trichotomy."
– Charles Ostman

Awash in new communications technologies, new information industries to support the new technologies and an accelerating amount of information produced by all of the above, what is a humble collection of cells to do? Go into a coma and wait for all this pass?

It won't pass. The information behemoth will just continue to grow in complexity and it will demonstrate a jungle-like capacity to become tangled, and great swaths of the thing will become obsolete before you've had a chance to discover it existed. The time we spend digesting past information and imagining the future will shrink before our expanding effort to keep up with the present.

Those of us in the US majority who are walking that thin line of survival (while new technology muscles our livelihoods out the window) have at least this small consolation: we have the company of Edvard Munch, that way cool Norwegian cat who decades ago gave us a phrase to enoble the current condition:

"I felt a great, unending scream piercing through Nature."

Oh, that Edvard. It's interesting to note that one of his paintings associated with this quote, The Scream, has just been stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo, inducing a reaction in the press which effectively multiplied the famous image in millions of digital and hardcopy facsimiles. More screams. Nature, construed as an infinite continuum stretching between this keyboard and a womb in Alpha Centauri, has a way of growing everywhere, in every possible medium. And we're missing most of it.

Which brings us to the Hyper-Runts.

I cobbled together the term, Hyper-Runt, to explore an unusual kind of cultural phenomenon, a media organism if you will, which seems to grow out of, and in response to, the growing chaos of new technologies and cultural systems. Co-curator, Emily Zimmerman, and I contacted a number of remarkable artists whose experiences with science, technology, and "information space" suggested they might have a Hyper-Runt or two kicking around in their studios or iPods –some tender, revealing creature which may not have been appropriate for the usual public scrutiny, but within the experimental safe-house of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, could shine its impertinent light, drool a bit and scream.

We were quite delighted to find that most of the artists we approached had a native feeling for the territory and were happy to share some of their lovely bastard children with us.

At this point you might ask, what the varmint are you talking about?

This is not the usual kind of art exhibit. Nor is it the usual kind of multimedia blitzkrieg which all too often leaves an audience more dazed than moved. We're taking a zoologist's approach to culture here and suggesting that above and beyond the conscious production of artifacts, something else is always emerging somewhere amidst the wires and the humans which we ought to be on the lookout for –something akin to the canary in the mine-shaft. Hyper-Runts are an indicator species: awkward, maladjusted and oracular.

PRINCE'S LITTLE HYPER-RUNT

O(+>


PRINCE'S LITTLE HYPER-RUNT Let me offer an example of a Hyper-Runt from the music world. The recording artist known to his parents as Prince Roger Nelson, is well known for his coy media charms. He continuously sheds music, symbols and postures like a diaphanous, molting snake. Prince's most emblematic media creation, The Symbol, was born in the 1990s when his label, Warner Brothers, began to limit his creative boundaries. Prince, in effect, metamorphosed into an androgynous glyph ( O(+> ) which empowered him to release new material under a different label. While The Symbol was intended as a precise alias, it took off with a life of its own, spawning numerous variations and a labyrinthine discourse on the nature of the artist behind the ruse. Prince's freakishly multiplying doppelganger is a lovely example of a Hyper-Runt. The runt in question is not the symbol per se, but the entire living spectacle of its emergence.

THE HYPER-RUNT OF THE MEDUSA



Not all Hyper-Runts need to be situated in today's voracious electronic culture. Consider Gericault's painting of 1819, "The Raft of the Medusa." Startling millions of art-lovers and tourists alike, it has kept alive a nightmare of aristocratic exploitation for nearly 200 years. Not every tourist gazing upon the 24 feet of tortured bodies will read up on the political scandal behind the painting, but its very existence has induced a constant flow of scholarship on the tale of death, cannibalism and a sailing voyage undermined by self-serving elites. The Medusa's backstory has been sucked up along with the painting and driven forever forward into the future.
The work is more than a striking object of aesthetic consumption, but a living system of moral outrage. The current president of the United States, for example, may not admit to the parallels between the "Medusa" and his horrible bumbling into Iraq. But the links are there for those who look, centered on the delusion of godlike infallibility which befalls many who inherit their power. The "Raft of the Medusa" gives us a framework for understanding the depth and odor of the Bush administration's ineptitude and arrogance.

Is the "Raft of the Medusa" merely an exercise in politics upstaging art? Hardly. The painting speaks for itself as a masterpiece of the French Romantic movement. What we have, when taking stock in the Medusa as an entire historical system, is a Hyper-Runt. This magnificent creature transcends its category as "painting" and is re-born again and again as a warning to the smugness in all of us.

HYPER-EMERGENCE

Where Prince's symbol grew out of the crucible of corporate media and Gericault's painting out of a 19th Century sea-faring tragedy, the creatures gathered together for this exhibit emerged out of an experimental culture of labs, studios and internet exchanges. We've herded together a fairly delicate gaggle of Hyper-Runts drawn from artists whose efforts are already marked by an interest in the fecund nature of culture and media systems. These artists swim in the discourse and practice of media viruses, hypertext, interactive authorship, artificial lifeforms and emergent forms.

Many tech and systems artists today are especially fond of a strategy of creation called "emergence" – a bottom-up method of cultivating complex phenomena from simple bits which has become very popular in robotics and computer labs. Hyper-Runts are, in a sense, the emergency of the emergence -- a hyper-emergence. They jump track. They jump category from artificial lifeform or system into a larger media event, media virus or meme. Above all, however, they take on a wild presence.

MEMES AND HYPER-RUNTS

It is very tempting to chase down a Hyper-Runt and throw it into a little cage labelled "meme" and feed it synthetic carrots. A Hyper-Runt is not a meme, per se, although it may have memetic tendencies.

Around the time that Darwin's Origin of Species was published, a discourse began to heat up around the notion of cultural evolution. Quite some time later, in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins began to explore this idea in a more exacting fashion by coining the term meme. A meme, from the Greek word for memory, is a cultural gene. The theory is that culture piggy-backs onto humans like a virus -- some of it benign, some parasitic. Cultural packages such as soundbites, images and ideas compete for human attention, the fittest managing to be retained and passed along, possibly mutating along the way. The most easily reproduced memes survive. There are a number of debates as to whether memes exist in the mind or in a bionic field stretching between humans and their culture-reproducing apparatus. Theoretically culture has evolved in this fashion at a relatively rapid rate, moving from hunter-gatherer systems on up to the complex quagmire we are swimming in today.

One of the problems with a memetic view of culture is that, like any empirical view of the human condition, it discounts subjectivity. Artificial intelligence researchers and memeticists alike are loath to even discuss the sticky issue of consciousness. I've had conversations with Richard Dawkins and artificial intelligence researchers such as Marvin Minsky where the possibility of experiencing a culture as a melted melange of memes is simply written off as "unmeasurable." There is also the issue of whether we can even believe in the objectivity of anything, let alone the science of memes, assuming that our sense of objectivity may in itself be a meme. The meme made me believe in memes said Mimi.

In anycase, a Hyper-Runt is an experience of something which, like a meme, may be quite media-friendly. But it's our subjective relationship with the thing which gives it the qualities of a lifeform-as-presence. This presence is of immeasurable significance in understanding the animal. Hyper-Runts, like children, are far more than curious specimens. Memetics may provide a framework for understanding the cruder behaviours of a Hyper-Runt, but it misses the emotional and ethical plunge into its animal husbandry.

TRANSCENDING THEIR PURPOSE AS SPECIMENS

A Hyper-Runt is a fairly wild animal. These are not the average artificial lifeforms twitching on the computer screen, or a precisely planned internet event which might assuage the anxieties of funding agencies. These are the remarkable deviations from the mean which defy their stations of birth and become interesting in ways not entirely planned, bankable or understood. Their aesthetic criteria, in effect, emerges along with them, and we and civilization along with that.

The point is that a Hyper-Runt isn't merely an oddball result of digital systems. These little critters have a charm which defies their humble origins. They jump out of their cage and take over our consciousness for a moment, transcending their purpose as "specimens."

ELLE BURCHILL TRUNCATES INTO A HYPER-RUNT

Hyper-Runts pop up out of the boiling bionic continuum all the time. Sometimes it’s a strange effect on an answering machine, sometimes it’s a misprint on a driver's license leading to identity confusion, sometimes it's the photograph above. As writer, Elle Burchill, said of this snapshot of her mouth: "This footage was shot as legal evidence following an accident and shows the stitched gums and gaping hole left after the front teeth were extracted. I later included the footage at my recovery party."

From specimen to presence.

FROM GIZMO TO HYPER-RUNT

Not every tech artist slumps into the dreaded half-life of endless gizmo creation, poised nervously between an engineer and an artist. But, even if that were the case, they are fully capable of mid-wifing a Hyper-Runt from the fertile womb of tinkering – assuming they can recognize their parental responsibilities and bond with their offspring.

A RUMINATION ON BEING ASSIMILATED BY LITTLE CREATURES

This takeover, this bonding, can be a powerful and overwhelming experience. Last weekend I was at the New Jersey shore, building sand castles with my son, Anatoli. Little kids were continuously appearing and disappearing on the site like particles in brownian motion. Suddenly a little girl no larger than a plastic shovel appeared before me and smiled, eyes wide as moons. She must have been about two and was surely in that zone of development where bonding with adults was an instinctive form of life insurance.

So I was a goner. She seemed to smile her way right into the center of my brain. I don't know what she did or how she did it, but I felt as if her little face had jutted itself like a tentacle straight through my own face and entered my skull. It was a palpable sense of being assimilated. Surely my own parental instincts, jump-started by my four-year old, contributed to the process. After all, we've co-evolved with everything around us, especially other humans. We swim in a mesh of co-dependence so thick it plays complete, high definition games with our consciousness. If you ask me, that's a lovely thing.

A really determined Hyper-Runt does this sort of thing too. It telephotos right into you and squirms about. Our parental instincts make us highly susceptible to Hyper-Runt adoption.

Of course, it may be necessary to establish orphanages or hyper-zoos to take care of all these new organisms. There are a lot of strange and wonderful creatures emerging in the techno-cultural sea. Then again, we could just change the signage on a few pre-existing institutions. Would the Museum of Modern Media Organisms suit you? Or perhaps the Philadelphia Media Zoo? Perhaps Google should create a sub-portal called Wiggle.


HYPER-RUNT TRANSMIGRATION

1) A litter of forms emerge in the studio or on the internet.
2) One entity breaks from the pack, defies control and interpretation.
3) Scientists and connoisseurs alike are left with an anomaly which creates an unintended meaning in the world.
4) Professionals squirm. The public spills wine and dances. Hyper-Runts put the wild back into virtual reality and artificial life.

CYBER-CITY MUSIC HALL

This exhibit did not arrive fully formed like some plug-and-play exercise in gallerism. (As a media artist, I'm always apalled at the lack of music in such affairs –especially when the art is worth dancing to). As my co-curator, Emily Zimmerman, will attest, Hyper-Runt took awhile to formulate. I came up with the term after rejecting a host of other possibilities, realizing that a certain mode of creation had become routine within both the universities and the digital underground scene. The public had caught up with our paradigm.

Even back in 1993, I recall a debate with friends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, over the use of the term cyber in our publicity for a Web Jam. Many of us felt cyber was over-used at that time. Little did we realize how wave after wave of new initiates would enter the digital sea and repeat the same revelations and metaphors. To me "cyber" has all the anachronistic qualities that "radio" has had for more than half a century. Cyber City Music Hall anyone?

So now that bio technology, artificial life, emergence, and other wiggly strategies of creation are beginning to appear, it would seem a lot more interesting to explore life-oriented systems and metaphors than wired ones. Hyper-Runt, however, is a necessary compromise. Global warming, dangerous weather patterns and species extinction continue to prove that the Earth is coping with more industry and technology than ever. And the cybernetic element isn't going to disappear (although it may sprout bionic variations). Information technology seems to be growing at such a rate that some futurists bandy about the notion of a historical "singularity" where cybernetic systems begin to reproduce themselves without our comprehension or control. But why wait for 2084? Mini singularities are popping up all the time. In fact, they're Hyper-Runts. But they're not always easy to identify.

FREE SPEECH AS HYPER-RUNT

Free speech, when it's truly free, is always improper. At times it's gloriously unnerving. It's so unpredictable and undefinable that when you try to pin it down on the slab and run it through an MRI scanner what do find? You find out the crazy bugger is a Hyper-Runt. It pokes its little snout out of the litter of big ideas precisely when its inherent weakness in the face of media monopolies, censorship and spin doctors is threatened. Like a 17-year locust it emerges from its lumpen coding deep within the US Constititution and the Magna Carta and becomes a living event.
What makes the critter hyper is that it is so volatile and no one can quite define the thing. Mary says free speech is telling off her father. Her father says it's his right to walk away and shut her out. Rodney says Free Speech is peer-to-peer file sharing. Time-Warner says it’s a team of lawyers right to muzzle the culture-sharing practices of 12-year-olds and music-sampling DJs. But one thing is sure, the animal is very alive right now – tortured, shaking, indescribable and alive.

GRAFFITI ON WALLS, MEDIA AND MINDS
As a crude attempt at turning the tables on the idea of public information, I began tagging Pittsburgh in 1980 with spray-painted neurons. A professor of mine introduced me to Keith Haring who was tagging New York with images of radiated babies and dogs. But the art world was never my cup of tea. I had no interest in joining Keith into the gallery system, although it is clear he was able to change the art paradigm from within - at least for awhile. It has a way of defaulting to painting every other decade.

I was more obsessed with the idea of culture as a multi-world, multi-class, multi-media web of nerves. We synchronize our nervous systems continuously, threading together a life and a view. In the mid 80s I began to look at the extensions of our nerves into the media and the machine world, exploring inter-coding relations between these two very different realms of carbon and silicon. I've wondered how we can re-cast art and culture in a way which renders it an active player in this hybrid plasma, rather than merely a parlor game in which paintings of computers suffices for a response to the paradim shift.

Two decades after spraying those first shaky neurons I have found myself swimming in the virtual graffiti space of digital media. From this vantage point it is tempting to reframe the world as a monstrous hive of Hyper-Runts. These coy creatures tag the sea of information like a form of self-constructing graffiti. It's a presumptuous exercise, but why not? Cubism re-cast and expanded pictorial space. Surrealism inverted our inner and outer worlds. There are limits to this exercise in relabeling the divine madness of life, but it can also offer insights into areas of existence that have become routine.

We could site numerous examples of Hyper-Runts in our culture: consider Picasso's Guernica, Warhol's Marilyn Monroe (multiplied), and more recently, Damien Hirst's animals floating in formaldehyde. Each of these works have transcended their operation within the limited confines of the art profession and become living forces on the world stage. But it can also be said that within every neighborhood, within every circle of friends, expressive activity bubbles up into living local mythology - Hyper-Runts one and all. These aren't the exalted "signifiers" blooming into "signs" which the structuralists of old might argue. Nor are they simply anthropomorphic projections of ourselves into the world. With enough of a perspective shift, these are as alive as any organism. Strange, certainly, but alive. If we were able to be objective and look down upon ourselves, we might see that Hyper-Runts are focal points of activity within an extended ecosystem of humans, machines, flora and fauna. But objectivity itself is a Hyper-Runt. We experience these organisms head-on as presences.

It should be stressed that a Hyper-Runt cannot be engineered with any exactitude and in most cases the public chooses the creature and its meaning, despite the intentions of the author (and often despite the critical pirouettes of the press). Although many scholars have noted that Gericault was quite calculating in his choice of subject matter for the Raft of the Medusa, it has also been pointed out that a few years after the toil of creation was over a much weakened Gericault succumbed to illness. His creation, like Frankenstein's monster, did him in. He didn't intend such a result, no more than Jesus intended his object of torture, the cross, to eclipse his gentle life in the centuries to come. David Brody's Hyper-Runt, Proliferation, is a compelling testament to this unnerving lack of control we have over culture.

CONTROL ISSUES AT MIT'S MEDIA LAB

As many of my friends in the digital arts will attest, there is a culture of control and exactitude which permeates the geek world. Many media artists are dependent on corporate or academic support and must walk the walk of professional predictability even as they are exploring realms of chaos, unbridled imagination and cultural subversion. But there is another kind of control from which a Hyper-Runt must be liberated and it's a peculiar one. I can speak from personal experience.

Once while attempting to code a computer game at MIT in the mid 80s, my de-bugging efforts backfired and I ended up with a game in which the user would inevitably release jets of blue light, filling the screen with an ominous tangle. Although I finally managed to get the corrupting code under control, I was struck by how strange and captivating my mistake was.

I went back to the errant code a week later and focused its effects, bringing out what seemed to be its nervous, runtlike charms. Whatever I had created, it wasn't a computer game –or at least it was one where the rules broke down soon after it was activated. The author of the thing seemed to reside somewhere between me, the machine and the user. Knowing that most of my peers at MIT's Media Lab would find my "expressionist programming" of little interest, not to mention "trivial," I video-taped the anamoly and put the thing away. On reflection, in my effort to maintain complete control over my output, I may have killed a Hyper-Runt.

Thankfully, there are many more artists working with computers today, and interest in the fuzzy logic of art has enveloped a small corner of the computing world. We have now been through the "gee wiz" phase of digital art, the "you Tarzan, me cyborg" phase and the "look, dudes, I've spammed the Pentagon" phase. (This last endeavour may never lose its raison d'etre, which lies within the general milieu of militarism). We've even seen the growth of an interdisciplinary culture in which artificial lifeforms have emerged to beautiful effect. All these phases are quite pertinent and wonderful and continue to breed new hybrids. But I am struck by how much a culture of control is still quite endemic to this first few decades of digital experimentation. Even artificial life requires parameters and boundaries in which the critters evolve and move about.

As any Buddhist or child will attest, too much control is a drag. Obsessed with control we become an ennervated tangle of self-control. Ask Karl Marx. Ask the Marx Brothers. Ask the Situationists. Ask the Japanese who nailed this digital numbing over a decade ago: they call it "otaku." Roughly translated it means "radical boredom" –an extreme form of dispassionate cogitation necessary in the face of exorbitant amounts of information processing. It be the times. Pop music has become as measured as Britney Spear's sweat is fake. Lead by Clearchannel and Rupert Murdoch, our growing corporate culture is choking with control systems, downsizing idiosyncratic rap groups and film projects like maggots. Furthermore, with the aging of the baby boomers, not to mention a stagnant economy, a predictable return to religious and cultural verities has spread across the land. Even the Wicca children of the fundamentalists, bless their rebellious hearts, are hard-wired to their formulaic incantations. Heck, we're all freezing up like cold testicles in the moonlight.

So we need to be vigilant and seek the wilderness within our expanding civilization. We need to root about in the dirt of our lives and find the dear little creatures, the runts and Hyper-Runts, which challenge us to transcend the bionic prison of our own creation..

__________________
EBON FISHER

In 1985 Ebon Fisher was the youngest instructor at MIT's brand new Media Lab. There he began his research into culture as a form of "inter-coding" between humans, machines and the environment. In the 1990s Fisher's bionic "media rituals" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, helped to build a network of communication for one of the most vital arts districts in New York City. According to Domus Magazine, Fisher's 15-hour Web Jam for 2,000 participants became a "symbolic climax" to the emerging Williamsburg scene. Newsweek dubbed Fisher's Web Jam a "sequel to the rave."

Fisher's bionic rituals gave rise to his Bionic Codes, a weblike ethics for the information age which has been presented online by the Guggenheim Museum for the last 6 years. Fisher has presented Bionic Codes, Zoacodes and his evolving media world, Nervepool, at museums and festivals around the world. He taught the digital arts at MIT, the Massachusetts College of Art and the University of Iowa. He has lectured at NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, Bennington College, the University of Washington and Columbia University. In 1998 he created a new digital arts program for the University of Iowa called Digital Worlds, which he directed for three years. He has written for Art Byte, the Utne Reader, the Walker Arts Center and the New York Council for the Arts. He holds an MS in Visual Studies from MIT and a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Ebon Fisher's Nervepool can be found at http://www.NERVEPOOL.net