Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002

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Phantoms in the Corridor: Portal Systems in the Digital Mind

by

Grant Taylor and Nick Lowe

 

For millennia the transition from one zone to another, be it physical or psychic, has often been realised via a transitory passage—the portal. Utilising a portal schema found in different mythologies and media this paper identifies a portal system hierarchy from the physical to the non-physical. We have fashioned a digital portal model extending the different logical and spatial parameters from previous exemplars with the perceptual engagement offered by an interactive graphical process. A portal system built upon this model would give participants the ability to experience a journey through a web of portals in a transformative and generative continuum.

Throughout the ages the transition from one zone to another, be it physical or psychic, has often been realised via a transitory passage—the portal. This hole, perforation, or gateway demarcating two adjacent or concomitant worlds, commonly the terrestrial or celestial, has possessed various transformative and transcendental powers. Commonly linked to different spatial and conscious states through various mythologies these portals possess similar logical configurations consistent with an overlying schema. This universal portal schema is the pure concept of all portal systems. It is a paradigm for consideration of a space as a collection of independent subspaces connected by transformative portals. Every portal model is a derivation of this schema, and can only represent a subset of portal configurations. The subset that a portal model can realise is restricted by its own conventions and medium for representation. Physically contained portal systems are subject to more constraints than non-physical systems and this forms a hierarchy that corresponds to progressive shifts towards complete realisation of all portal possibilities resulting in heightened psychic and transcendental states. When applying the portal schema to architecture, shamanism, and literature, corresponding portal models materialise, each with their own paradoxes and possibilities attributable to the internal characteristics of each domain. The nature of the digital domain could allow for more portal potential than any other medium. Exploring a continuum of formal possibilities, we have designed an experimental digital model that would permit non-linear egression through portals connecting multidimensional spaces.

 

Gothic Portals

The architectural portals characterised by the gothic cathedrals are spatially demarcating structures that act both as gateways and barriers. These portals must adhere to the general nature of the material world and represent partitions within a contained physical space. Each portal is necessarily bi-directional; that is, it is inconceivable that upon entering a portal in one direction it would be impossible to return in the same manner. However, gothic portals aspire to possess greater spiritual value than ordinary spatial partitions. Perhaps what distinguishes the gothic portal from other doorways is its particular symbolic property. Acting as a spiritual metaphor the material gothic portal encourages access to the immaterial. As the gateway to spiritual enlightenment the portal functions as a division between the terrestrial and celestial. This passage through to the house of God was termed by Abbot Suger as anagogicus mos, (Panofsky 1979) which expressed the transition from the ‘inferior’ to the ‘higher’ world. The experience of enlightenment via the material doorway is revealed in Suger’s poem regarding the central west portal of St Denis:

 

Should brighten the minds so they may travel, through the true light,      

To the True Lights where Christ is the true door.

In what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door define:

The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material

 

(Abbot Suger, as quoted in Panofsky 1979)

 

Rather than a disembodied experience, it is enlightenment through a phenomenological encounter with the luminosity and materiality of the work of art. No metamorphosis or transmutation takes place; instead a transitory conveyance of the exalted celestial realm occurs. The mainly visual characteristic of the portal is exemplified by their didactic function—as a visual extension of religious teaching. Imbued with symbolic and allegorical significance through a coherent scheme of iconography the sculptures adoring the archivolts and tympanum create a terrestrial splendour that permits ‘anagogical’ transfer of one’s state to the higher celestial sphere. This metaphoric function elevates the gothic portal in the portal hierarchy to a level higher than the purely physical portal.

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Shamanic Portals

The complex transcultural phenomena of shamanism, and its mythology of the disincarnate being provides an example of transcendental logic contravening the physical portal arrangement. The shaman, once achieving the ecstatic trance through intoxicants or other ritual processes, is able to embark on an incorporeal journey via the soul or spirit into the mystical and celestial realms. By controlling the techniques of ecstasy the shaman breaks free from physical containment, safely abandoning his body to roam vast distances. The portal in the shamanic mythology is a passage from one cosmic region to another—from earth to the sky or from earth to the underworld. This transmission among the cosmic zones is made possible by the configuration of the universe. The universe is envisaged as having three levels or cosmic regions: the sky, earth, and underworld, which are connected by a central axis. (Eliade 1964) This axis passes through an ‘opening’ or ‘hole’, and is through this hole that the ‘gods descend to earth and the dead to the subterranean regions; it is through the same hole that the soul of the shaman in ecstasy can fly up or down in the course of his celestial or infernal journeys.’(Eliade 1964) Contrasting the physical constraints of the gothic portal we find that the mysticism generating the shamanic portal allows for a transcendental logic that involves ‘magical flight,’(Eliade 1964) through multiple psychic territories, and extraterrestrial regions. Often the shaman’s body is a ‘temple or tabernacle for the spirits, a vehicle or receptacle,’ that allows the passage of knowledge and mystical power. This suggests one of the fundamental operating logics is ‘ecstasis’ or the notion of ‘standing outside,’ moving from the space of the body to a space outside it. The shaman’s body remains in the physical world while his or her spirit takes flight and affiliates with the metaphysical territory, but eventually returns to the body. Thus, the shamanic portal is also bi-directional. Whereas the gothic portal works from metaphor and allegory, the shamanic portal acts as a true transformative portal; it isolates a shaman’s spirit as she or he enters and performs the inverse transformation, reuniting the spirit and body, upon her or his return. The transformative nature of the shamanic portal, and removal from purely physical constraints, places it closer towards the conceptual end within the portal system hierarchy.

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Literary Portals

One of Lewis Carroll’s greatest literary concepts, the inverted world beyond the looking glass, represents a fictional portal system examining different logical paradoxes. Not surprisingly a logician and creator of mathematical puzzles, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, employs mythologies of mirrors, and the science of optics and light to construct his portal logic. Carroll creates a visual concept that allows an array of logical inversions both pictorially and linguistically. Carroll’s literary concept derives from the ‘mirror puzzle’ or the paradoxical logic and optical depth-reversal involved in the perception of the mirror image. (Gregory 1997) Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, (1872) conveys the fictional story of Alice, who, fascinated with the inverted world in the mirror, is able to pass between the drawing room and the ‘Looking-Glass room’ via the mirror that separates them. Appealing to the ambiguous perceptual phenomena of the mirror and the deep-rooted chimerical desire to enter into the illusory space of the second dimension, Carroll creates a space consumed with logical potentiality. This literary portal is also bi-directional, like the previous examples, however it possesses a transformative capacity through its logical inversion. Originating from the mirror illusion, the portal to the ‘Looking-Glass land’ does not maintain real-world logic; much like the shamanic portal transforms the shaman into a disembodied spirit, the mirror portal inverts Alice. Also important is that the portal appears to link physically adjacent space, as witnessed in John Tenniel’s illustration of Alice traversing the two spaces. However, it actually acts as a conduit to a parallel world rather than to the physical space behind the mirror. This represents a physical impossibility and positions the mirror portal away from the purely physical end of the portal hierarchy.

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Postmodern Portals

In the late twentieth century, through the effects of popular techno-science writings, the portal is conceptualised as a conduit, a channel or pipe that carries or conveys data. In science fiction the portal manifests in terms of a ‘Star Gate,’ theorising the entrance to a wormhole. This form of space-portal provides linkage through space-time from one black hole to another, and for the theoretical hyperspace engineer traversable wormholes have the potential for time travel. In this way the portal is understood as a conduit linking different physical and temporal worlds, which are not distinctly bi-directional or rely on physically adjacent spaces. One such portal system that exhibits these different logical formations is expressed in the film Being John Malkovich (1999), written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. This film directly deals with the possibilities of a portal giving access to another person’s conscious state. Working against the notion that consciousness is intrinsically unobservable the film portrays characters accessing the visual and conscious experience of another. This particular portal allows passage from a small doorway in an office building to John Malkovich’s mind for a period of fifteen minutes, after this time the person falls from the sky metres from the New Jersey Turnpike. The portal allows Malkovich’s mind to be visible and tangible to a subjective perceiver. Like the Cartesian theatre there is a regress of observers positioned somewhere in Malkovich’s head.  As the narrative progresses the character Craig Schwartz shifts from a third-person to a first-person point of view through his puppetry skills that allow him to physically control Malkovich’s body. Although working against Cartesianism the portal derides the self-assured certitude of consciousness. Like the other models this portal acts as a conduit. In this case, social relations and agents pass through the portal, and are influenced by the passage. Unlike other models, the portals are not bi-directional. Once a person enters the portal into Malkovich’s head they cannot return to the physical world through the same portal, or in the same manner. Likewise, once expelled from Malkovich’s head the exiting portal never allows re-entry. The film utilises two uni-directional portals: one into Malkovich’s head and one out. The complete removal of bi-directional and physical constraints elevates the postmodern portal towards the top of the portal hierarchy.

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Digital Portals

Portal systems that model and represent physical spaces already exist within the field of computer graphics. These systems have been used for architectural rendering and model only the purely physical end of the portal system hierarchy. Jones’ (1971) implemented a portal system representative of a geometric world. His system restricted portals in such a way that they were not transformative and only connected spaces modelled as physically adjacent. More recently, Luebke (1995) relaxed Jones’ rigid portal system to efficiently render mirrors. A ‘mirror portal’ within his framework is a transformative portal that links a space back into itself with a reflective transformation. Unlike the physical world, in which a mirror reflects light, Luebke’s ‘mirror portal’ is a conduit to the reflected source space. Much like Carroll’s mirror, the portal breaks physical laws and indicates that digital portal systems can utilise a greater range of portal models. Further relaxation of constraints, such as portal bi-directionality, and perversion of conventional technology to model non-physical spaces would facilitate the realisation of an interactive, transformative portal system capable of modelling a wide spectrum of configurations under the universal portal schema.

 

The universal portal schema dictates that a portal system comprises spaces connected by transformative portals, which create a seamless interactive realm that may be representative of a physical, non-physical, or composite world. Previous non-digital portal systems have extended basic physical portals to include transformative features and non-physical directionality. However, restrictions imposed by conventions or media has meant that the pure concept of portal systems has never been realised. The digital apparatus provides a sphere in which to institute any number of logical mechanisms into the portal model, possibly enabling the pure concept of a portal-based environment and potentially extending this construction to a psychic experience through existing interactive fields. Seaman (1999) recognises that the digital mechanism, formulated in logic, can be used to explore ‘illogical and elusive resonant artistic content.’ One aspect raised by Campbell (1999) is a hybrid in which ‘the mimicking of the physical at one end and the mathematical spatial array at the other—there lies an infinite possibility of exciting combinations.’ We can architect a purely digital space offering an array of different experiences dynamically connected in unique ways via transformative portals. With the added possibility of immersion the digital medium offers an exploration to the ‘metaphysics of presence’ through gaining a certain psychic interiority. Along with removal of constraints, development of new technology necessary to resolve possible complications, would result in a digital portal system capable of modelling and rendering at any level within the entire portal hierarchy.

 

Digital Spectres

By realising the potential of portal rendering, the immaterial worlds usually depicted in a static pictorial manner can be created, maintained, and evolved within a computer system. In essence, our portal model would provide an interpreter for a metaphysical logic that can be used to model portal systems impossible to fully represent in other forms or media. In fact the portals are the space-establishing elements within the model. A portal system built upon our digital model would give participants the ability to experience a journey through a web of spaces and portals in a transformative and generative continuum. By subverting the hierarchical logic found in previous portal systems new relations can be identified through displacement. The design would create expanded forms of consciousness through anomalous states and multidimensional awareness. Ascott has already pointed to the parallel between the psychic space of mysticism and that of cyberspace, and the possibility of a ‘double consciousness’ (1999) that gives access to distinctly different fields of experience. We hope to mirror the perceptual egression through different physical and transcendental states, as witnessed in gothic, shamanistic, literary and postmodern portals, by immersion within diverse spatial matrices only possible within the digital medium. We envisage engaged participants forming an immaterial presence, becoming psychic spectres in a dynamic disparate world.

 

 

References

Ascott, R. 1999. ‘Seeing Double: Art and the Technology of Transcendence’, in Ascott, R. eds. Reframing Consciousness. Exeter: Intellect Books, p. 67

 

Campbell, D. A. ‘Virtual Architecture as Hybrid: Conditions of Virtuality vs. Expectations from Reality’, in Ascott, R. eds. Reframing Consciousness. Exeter: Intellect Books, p. 244

 

Carroll, L. 1937. The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. New York: Random House.

 

Eliade, M. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated by W. R Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 259

 

Gregory, R. 1997. Mirrors in Mind. New York: Macmillan Press, p. 233

 

Jones, C.B. 1971. A New Approach to the `Hidden Line' Problem. The Computer Journal, vol. 14 no. 3 (August), p. 232

 

Luebke, D. & Georges, C. 1995. Portals and Mirrors: Simple, Fast Evaluation of Potentially Visible Sets Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, pp. 105-106

 

Seaman, B. 1999. ‘Nonsense Logic and Re-embodied Intelligence’, in Ascott, R. eds. Reframing Consciousness. Exeter: Intellect Books, p. 174

 

Suger, Abbott. 1979. Abbot Suger: On the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures. Translated by E Panofsky. Edited by E Panofsky. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 21-23