THE BIONIC CODES

"Ebon Fisher's "Bionic Codes" are like whirling digital dervishes let loose in a psychic field unleashing jolts of energy while gently caressing my soul to a relative calm."

-Michael Lane, Publisher, Monk Magazine, 1995

Longing for the voices to cease, for the poof of all that prods and taunts us, we can neither block nor escape. Antagonised information only multiplies. In the foam of accelerated interconnection we fix no positions. Waves of electronic culture shall lap against our skin and bleed into our minds. Bolts of local and international thought shall ricochet through our web of tongues. And the waves shall gather into a furious noise.

In the midst of such a vast turbulence our only recourse may be to ride our feral culture into small rivulets of illusory coherence.

And may we ride in a variety of ways, with no dominant method. May we merge with these fleeting illusions and form a sea of media organisms, mongrel codes, flexible semi-structures, and little gleams of symbiotic cheer.

We are witnessing the birth of a vast bionic culture, a nervous spirit squeezed between nature and technology. It is neither the real world nor cyberspace, but the interaction between the two. Bionic culture is a howling, sentient lubricant, growing, node by screaming node, somewhere between our bodies and the machine. It is becoming us.

VIRTUAL MORALITY

In a swirling confluence of fingers, neurons, and electricity, we witness a fundamental trust played out. We upload our tender memories into cyberspace, and download new memories from it. But the process may not always be conscious. Behaviour exercised in a symbolic fashion may unwittingly become a rehearsal for action in the everyday world. (Regimented schools are rehearsals for factory work. Boot camp is a rehearsal for warfare. The computer game, "Doom," can be a rehearsal for unbridled paranoia. It has already given this author terrible dreams). The crisis is this: the plethora of business-oriented software, and fight-oriented computer games, has begun to encode a rather narrow emotional bandwidth into legions of addicted users. Granted, the internet provides a new realm of open dialogue, and not all games follow the kill-or-be-killed formula. But for most of the top-selling games and applications, options for power-sharing, environmental sustenance, non-violent conflict resolution, and quiet reflection, are not on the menu.

In an effort to help expand the moral vocabulary within the wilderness of cyber-culture, I have codified a series of moral operations in the manner of circuitry. I am not inventing a language so much as attempting to liberate one which resides deep in the center of our scientific culture.

Although in the process of molding these codes I draw upon numerous spiritual and romantic traditions, it must be said that they are not meant to be prudish or to invoke sin, that abusive mind-bender of the middle ages. Rather they are fertilized by wild invention, and a need, in this cynical age, to unleash some positive disturbances. It must also be stressed that my Bionic Codes are not rules. They are as optional as any computer codes. They are a flexible system of social algorithms, problem-solving devices, to be utilised alone or in combinations. As the code above suggests, consider probing "beyond closed matrix." Leap free of this very pedagogy before you, and cultivate your own bionic conscience.

BIONIC POP

On another level the codes are an experiment taking place in the petri dish of popular culture. Is it possible, I wonder, to "grow" these gentle mnemonic structures in the electronic media and the collective mind? Can morals be considered memes? Are they media organisms? Are the codes more alive by virtue of their electronic reproducibility -or their biological reproducibility via memory? Doesn't it require the coupling of a human and a computer to trigger a copy? And can any of these codes, in this bionically sexy manner, help subvert the new "Church," the vast tangle of corporations, museums, and advertising agencies, which manufacture our popular visions?

((Is that tangle too tangled to even worry about? What about the huge imbalance of power that is emerging in this union-weak era? The world's 358 billionaires have a net worth equal to the bottom 45 percent of the world's population -and a vast number of those 45 percent are quite thoroughly hungry. Hasn't the pyramid become too top-heavy? Shall we wait for the crash, or consciously induce a redistribution?))

And would these codes be considered "Third World" media since they're not generated by Bill Gates, Ted Turner, or Rupert Murdoch? And now that anarchy has become a blue jeans ad and Madison Avenue has stolen every sacred, anti-establishment hex out of the churning minds of surfers and hip-hoppers, how can traditional models of liberation subvert anything, not to mention the candy-coated libertarian selfishness of corporate culture? (You with the luxury car, I'm talking to you).

Instead of an emphasis on freedom as privatization, or its opposite, decadent disengagement, can we consider a third kind of freedom? How about one modeled after life-forms: FLUID SYMBIOSIS. Isn't that more ecologically sophisticated? Couldn't we nurture a complex variety of fluid, transformative agents within the system -within the bionic system of overlapping social, ecological, and electronic webs? Can we imagine the greatest expression of human freedom to be the cultivation of sustainable bionic ecologies? Human rights networks? Nonlinear hyper-unions? Symbiotic media viruses? Small, flexible businesses? Communal media rituals? Media-literate children? Hybrid families? Bionic love?

VIRTUAL SPIRIT

Although my Bionic Codes allude to values I sincerely believe in, some of these codes are impossible to actualize. Like many ideals, they operate as theological teasers. They are an attempt to open a dialogue, and infuse bionic morality, and bionic spirit, with a necessary mad passion.

In communal media we breed our gods.

-Ebon Fisher-

A FEW CODES

VENTINGS