How does one experience an orange? The color of the fruit, feeling of the skin, fresh smell and citrus taste are similar -- but different -- for each new encounter.
Imagine creating a computer system that can experience things in multiple ways -- just like human beings do. This type of "neosentience," or new way of thinking about a being's capacity for sensing or feeling, is the work of Bill Seaman, a new professor in the department of art, art history and visual studies at Duke University.
"It's interesting to me to try to re-look at the body, re-look at embodiment and multi-modal sensing -- how the senses are working together to give us a deep impression of the world," Seaman said.
His work on neosentience (a term he coined) is the latest in a career that has spanned more than 20 years. A self-titled "artist/researcher," Seaman has held positions at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and, most recently, Rhode Island School of Design where he was graduate program director, professor and chair of the Digital+Media graduate department.
With German biochemist and theoretical physicist Otto Rössler, Seaman is currently working on a book about neosentience, electrochemical computing and the future of artificial intelligence. A primary focus of the book is how beings experience and interpret the world.
"Asking the hardest questions about what it is to be human -- coming to know how we become embodied in the world, how our body truly operates on information, how our memory really works and how we make associations is something I find really exciting to chip away at," Seaman said. "I don't know if in my lifetime we'll solve a many [of these questions], but the process is a rich one."
Seaman said much of his work stems from a lifelong curiosity about the nature of what makes us human. He grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, in a family that bridged the worlds of academia and art; Seaman's grandmother was both a concert pianist and later dean of women at Colby College in Maine. His mother was an artist and his father was a college administrator.
After receiving a master's of science in visual studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seaman earned his Ph.D. focusing on recombinant poetics at the University of Wales. He likens the concept of recombinant poetics to that of recombinant DNA -- the idea of cutting and re-splicing media or meaning that is alive and changing.
One such example is his work "The Architecture of Association," done in collaboration with digital artist and computer scientist Daniel C. Howe.
The work, which will be part of an exhibit opening in December at Paris' Grand Palais, features a set of poetic sentences and related images that converge on plasma screens through a computer system that is programmed to connect associated words and images. Seaman likens the experience to watching somebody's thinking process.
He is also currently working on a project with Howe called the Bisociation Engine. In this initiative, a series of microprocessors interact to explore machine intelligence and literary creativity.
"All my work is interested in meta-meaning processes -- in other words as you interact with the system you watch meaning as it's arising and changing," he said.
Seaman works with computer programmers, neuroscientists, graphic artists and literary scholars to create works of art that examine the way beings create and experience meaning. He said Duke's culture of interdisciplinarity is part of what drew him to the university.
He has proposed a class called "the body as electrochemical computer" and hopes to plan lectures each week with speakers from across the disciplines to show how our bodies, like computers, use a series of digital and analog signals to create moods and emotions as well as to enable us to learn and function in the world.
"The Visual Studies Initiative at Duke brings artists, theorists, scientists and people from the humanities together in high-level discussion about where we are in terms of new media, new poetics and technology," he said.
"So to my mind, [Duke] is probably one of the most interesting places I could be right now, to be able to talk to and collaborate with some of the class one research scientists on the highest level of research."