On Simulation Spaces by Erik Parr

On Simulation Spaces - temporary islands of the real “Reality is nothing but a well tempered harmony of simulation.” - Brian Massumi As I entered the warehouse that houses the Ice Tank simulator at Aalto University in a wooded suburb of Helsinki, I was presented with an olympic-sized pool of tepid algae-green water. I instinctively removed my knit cap as the space took on an unexpected atmosphere. The lights were dimmed and to my left was a series of miniature concrete pillars running the length of the wall. Above, an array of metal grid panels complicated the brutalist pillars, followed by a network of large pipes snaking to the ceiling. To the right a massive orange scaffold stretched across the pool. The surface of the water had a sheen from the algae that turned it into a reflecting pool, giving the space an added layer of horizontal symmetry.

The architecture of simulation spaces is always temporary. The Ice Tank is in the process of being renovated when I visit, a million Euro restoration that would keep the 30 year old facility from becoming obsolete. When functional, the Ice Tank uses its constellation of apparatuses to create a perfectly homogenous layer of thin surface ice. The artificial ice sheet is used to test scale models of icebreaking ships—such vessels are of increasing importance in the northern seas where unprecedented arctic ice melt has created

a new superhighway in ship transport. There are many acting forces that bring this space into being. Embedded in a cycle of research and development, simulation spaces are never complete but exist in a continual state of renewal based on the systems design that controls it. The governing principle behind the organisation of simulation spaces is based on the cybernetic idea that complex systems can be reduced to a system of inputs, outputs, and controls. Therefore, with each technological improvement, the fidelity of the simulation space is improved and each input thus becomes a better simulation of the real.

In gradually building up complex systems like those found in nature, isolation plays a crucial role. As a simulation space operates by filtering out the noise of the world, each technological innovation offers the successive promises of improved signal-to-noise ratio. The Ice Tank’s isolation from the outside world gives it a certain transcendental quality like those found in cathedrals. Simulations create a space where the noise of the world is finally silenced and replaced by pure rationality—triumph over entropy—at least for a while. Eventually in these refuges of simulated order, corrosion and chaos seeps in through the crevices.

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Practically, the insulated character of simulation spaces allows for reproducibility in experiments, a key characteristic of scientific methodology. Unsurprisingly, simulation spaces often remain invisible to everyone apart from the scientists working within them.

For all practical purposes, they are intermediary spaces and only an approximate facsimile of reality. The forces of chaos, complexity, and entropy—which cannot be reproduced—are removed in these spaces. Nature is replaced with its technological double. It is perhaps this absence that most strongly defines the character of simulation spaces. Of course, beyond the walls of the simulation, the unknown elements of nature will always remain volatile. The only strategy is satisfying an infrastructural criteria that statistically reduces the probability of disaster to a minimum.

Although a simulation space creates an encapsulated reality, its strict functionalism implies subordination to a more legitimate reality beyond its walls. The model of a simulation space is an artificial approximation that re-stages an object or phenomenon, reducing it to become comprehensible, controllable and reproducible. Yet due to the veracity of simulation spaces, a peculiar situation arises. It is a suspended reality that is clearly artificial yet totally convincing. It is the superposition of opposing qualities that gives simulation spaces their uncanny character. This condition is what Jean Baudrillard called the hyperreal, an artificial reality that destroys a true model of reality and along with it, all meaning. Are these spaces just inert simulacra without the vitality possessed by the original, as Baudrillard claims? Or do simulation spaces have generative potential as producers of reality? Upon closer examination, we can see that simulation spaces always take on a life of their own.

One of the most influential works in twentieth century western art began in a simulation space. John Cage famously visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard in the 1960s to experience pure silence.

Instead, the silence brought him face to face with his own faculties of perception. “In that silent room, I heard two sounds, one high and one low. Afterward I asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, I had heard two sounds. He said, ‘Describe them.’ I did. He said, ‘The high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation.’ ” [1] The event in the anechoic chamber was a revelation to Cage, as he realised it was impossible to experience silence due to the creative dimension of the act of listening itself.

To what extent is the anechoic chamber present in Cage’s most famous work 4’33? To what extent has the reality that was presented in that simulation space proliferated, at first through Cage’s art and then to the composers, visual artists and pop musicians influenced by Cage where it eventually permeates the external reality from which it was originally isolated? The simulated ‘silence’ Cage experienced reproduced a particular model of reality that was useful to the composer. He in turn transduced that model in his music.

Cage was part of a larger movement in art that saw the expansion of art into its environment, turning away from representation of the real toward the production of new models of reality.

This scenario—in which the activities of artists like John Cage form new circuits of knowledge production that influence how reality is shaped—goes against a postmodern conception of reality. In Jean Baudrillard’s seminal work Simulations and Simulacra, he laments the loss of an objective reality as the result of a world which has reproduced through simulation. To Baudrillard, simulation overwrites the model of the thing it simulates, replacing it with an invented, synthetic model. We are left with a crisis that leaves us unable to access the original model of reality.[2] The postmodernist views simulation as a deft counterfeit that has in turn negated a true and objective world. Such a loss of an original has thus stripped us of any semblance of agency, leaving us in a perpetually disoriented and paralysed state.

Fortunately, Deleuze offers a better alternative to Baudrillard’s dilemma by proposing that the world as we know it has in fact always been contingent on certain conceptions of reality. To acknowledge that we cannot comprehend nature without some kind of mental framework is to reclaim the agency that the postmodernists claim were lost in reproduction. The simulation simply replaces a model with another model. Brian Massumi lays out this Deleuzian theory of simulation, criticising Baudrillard’s thesis. “He cannot clearly see that all the things he says have crumbled were simulacra all along: simulacra produced by analysable procedures of simulation that were as real as real, or actually realer than real, because they carried the real back to its principle of production and in so doing prepared their own rebirth in a new regime of simulation. He cannot see becoming, of either variety.” [3] Science has made its own attempts at defining subjective reality objectively. Emerging from the slippery field of perceptual psychology in the 1970s, the Ganzfeld experiment was an early attempt to simulate a state of so-called pure perception in a human subject. By placing them in a carefully constructed spherical space, they were exposed to a limitless visual field with no defining features. Inside the simulation, participants were subjected to an endless visual space of uniform white light. However the experiment utterly failed in creating such a perceptual tabula rasa. When participants were subjected to the limitless white space they encountered intense hallucinations. No two experiences were alike, as each participant’s brain compensated for the sensory deprivation by creating their own stimuli. Incredibly, the psychologists had not anticipated human perception to be so subjective.

Although the Ganzfeld experiment proved limited in the study of human perception, many artists at the time found meaningful artistic potential in such simulations. Inspired by the methods of direct engagement of the senses through an altered environment, the highly controlled environment created a simulation space in which the subject is the object, which proved ideal for artistic inquiry. The American artist James Turrell (who holds a degree in perceptual psychology) has spent his entire career exploring light as a spatial medium, and has employed Ganzfeld simulations extensively in his work.

The history of science in the twentieth century saw a shift from 19th century notions of an objective and deterministic universe to one based in relativity and subjectivity. Criticism towards scientific claims at objective truth was part of a larger dialogue that came from philosophy, science and culture.Surrealism marked a moment in which art was returning to a conception of aesthetics that was concerned not primarily with beauty but with perception in general. Using the new science of psychoanalysis to critically challenge the very concept of reality, the project of Surrealism was as much political as it was artistic. With his background in psychiatry, Surrealist founder Andre Breton used subconscious activity—especially dreaming—to provide the basis of an anti-rational model of reality. Dreams were used as a primary method to decompose facts and subvert the logic of the established model of reality that served oppressive power structures.

In response to an invitation by Breton to contribute an essay to a surrealist magazine, the phenomenologist philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote an essay called Surrationalism. This proposed a creative use of rationality by employing rational methods and pushing them to their limits until the line between the rational and absurd became blurred. Unlike the surrealists, Bachelard did not consider rationality a challenge to the possibility of a liberated future. For Bachelard, psychoanalysis was the key to reforming the objective delusions of science. He strongly advocated a pluralistic conception of scientific rationality and he employed psychoanalysis as a way to explicate how science is always particular to the values, history, and properties of a subject. “Where then, lies the duty

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of surrationalism?” he questions. “It is to take over those formulas, well purged and economically ordered by the logicians, and recharge them psychologically, put them back into motion and into life. . . . In teaching a revolution of reason, one would multiply the reasons for spiritual revolutions.” [4] Bachelard articulated a way that art may respond and take part in the negotiation of a reality that was becoming increasingly malleable by scientific forces. It was a relevant debate in an era that saw great leaps in scientific progress and technological development, coupled with a world war whose destruction was amplified by those same forces. Both Surrationalism and Surrealism respond to rationalist and objectivist claims to reality. Bachelard prefigured later relativistic philosophies of science that sees the development of science not as a progressive march toward an absolute reality, but as guided by certain paradigms, as described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. [5] Each scientific paradigm develops according to its own trajectory, sometimes contradicting each other, but never progressing in a linear way.

Meanwhile Donna Haraway stresses the point that for all its claims of objectivity, scientific knowledge is always dependent on an observer whose body has a particular politics and relation to the world.[6] Haraway’s situated knowledge shows that everybody who participates in the discourse of science contributes to a particular narrative based on their position in the world. The move toward a concept of reality that is relative and negotiable suggests a philosophy of science that is less about revealing the true nature of reality and more about creating potential realities. The question is no longer what is nature in itself, but what can nature possibly become?

If science has proven to be a creative endeavor, art has similarly moved away from representing the real to reinventing the real. A key moment in this history also occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century in France when playwright Alfred Jarry created the pseudo-philosophy Pataphysics. Hugely influential among the early twentieth-century avant-garde, the project of Pataphysics was to create an alternate science described as the “science of imaginary solutions.” Pataphysics employs scientific methods to create speculative and absurd fictions based on scientific paradigms. Like Bachelard, Jarry’s Pataphysics challenges the claims of objectivity within science, replacing a general science with a “science of the particular.” Rather than representing the real, Pataphysics speculates upon the real. It operates not in accordance to observable natural laws but rather by precisely those cases that empiricism rules out—the exceptions to the rule. Pataphysics appropriates scientific methods and knowledge only to corrupt its laws and confound its applicability. Yet such appropriations indicate that methods of rationality and science can be employed by the imaginary, though they may remain purely speculative. As stated in his book on Pataphysics, the experimental poet Christian Bök encapsulates the raison d’etre of pataphysics. “Reality is quasi, pseudo: it is more virtual than actual; it is real only to the degree to which it can seem to be real and only for so long as it can be made to stay real.” [7]

As I emerged from the Ice Tank warehouse back into the fresh spring air of the Finnish landscape, I couldn’t help but think about space on a larger scale. What are the limits of simulated spaces?

Three hundred years ago, an atmosphere with our current levels of carbon could have only been possible in a simulation space. Our atmosphere has been physically shaped by our models, which in turn introduced a new geological epoch known as the anthropocene. As future speculations turn to terraforming distant planets, we have awoken to find ourselves at the wheel of our own terrestrial simulation. Only for us, there is no other alternative. Our simulated earth remains, for the time being, utterly isolated in the cosmos.

References: 1. Cage, J. (1961). Silence: Lectures and writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

2. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

3. Massumi, B. (1987). Realer Than Real - The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari. Retrieved May 11, 2015, from http://www.brianmassumi. com/ 4. Rosemont, F. (1989). Arsenal: Surrealist subversion. Chicago, Ill.: Black Swan Press.

5. Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

6. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Feminist Studies (3rd ed., Vol. 14, pp. 575-599). Feminist Studies.

7. Bök, C. (2002). ‘Pataphysics: The poetics of an imaginary science. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Simulation spaces make for an especially convincing demonstration of the real and its possible realities. In these highly controlled and insulated enclaves, the difference between scientific rationality and pataphysical speculation becomes less obvious. Isn’t the anechoic chamber already a pataphysical space? Insofar as silence doesn’t exist as a phenomenon to be experienced, is it not also an imaginary solution? Rather, it is not a reproduction of reality but a speculation of a reality that is possible. Similarly the Ice Tank, with its perfectly homogenous ice sheets free of environmental chaos, is also a surrational space in which its uncanny character reveals a rationalistic absurdity. Perfection is just another human model of reality. Simulation spaces demonstrate an immanent, virtual dimension. The absurd scenarios enacted within simulation spaces indicate that even though they seem unnatural, such worlds are possible within these temporary islands of reality.

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