molecular informatics //premiere version 1.0 // version 2.0 //version 3.0 //version 4.0 //trace of eye-tracking// text

 
This Thing that Sees  A reflection on "Molecular Informatics"A Visit to the Clinic In a large, dark, and empty-looking room, an apparatus sits waiting for visitors-or more
accurately patients or experimental subjects-to approach it, one at a time, and don virtual
reality glasses so that it can begin to perform its operation. Meanwhile, other visitors await
their turns with expectation and some anxiety, since the results of each test are illuminated
largely and immediately on two of the surrounding walls. As if one were being clinically
examined, 'seeing this work' accompanies the fear of exposing one's private data in front
of the public eye. The work assumes the ambiance of a clinic, where the visitor is being
checked rather than checking, observed rather than observing, examined rather than
examining. Like another of Mikami's works, 'Borderless under the Skin," which
constructed an interface using the viewer's pulse beat, this work, too, appropriates the
audience's living body and presents it as part of the information network. It is a materialist
inclination of the artist to decompose human data, yet this time what comprises the data is
more problematic than an easily measured function of the body. Here we have the eye as a
window to the human subject.
 The exhibition pamphlet explains:
The viewer experiences a virtual world created and manipulated by their own eye
movements. This movement, the human, physical part, is transformed into data that
represents the viewer's location within three dimensional space, therefore real-time change
and generation occurs within the virtual world.Once the viewer dons the VR eye-tracking glasses, s/he is thrown into a world constructed
solely of molecules. The viewer then navigates through this world via his eye movements,
and new molecules are created or mutually influenced in real-time due to these eye
movements. The participant is represented as abstract data in virtual space, and newly
generated molecules reflect how they view and react to the virtual world. (Abe & Shikata)
   In the dark void, and fitted with the glasses, as soon as one begins to gaze or move
one's eyes spheres begin to appear; as one gazes at different spots or moves the eyeballs,
more spheres (molecules) appear in a continuum, forming a world in and of themselves.
The size of the sphere alters according to the length of time the gaze pauses at one spot, like
an eye which swells larger as it gazes longer. This is an expanding space in which there is a
vivid sense that the participant becomes a part of a self-made universe.
 Yet there are also strange senses of contingency and discontinuity embedded in this
continuous, growing virtual space. In fact, there is a radical oddity in speaking of the
experience of the 'show'. It is easy to speak of the form in the virtual space the participants
produce, or even of the setting that makes it happen, both of which would offer interesting
the matics themselves, but it is extremely difficult to describe what the individual subject
goes through in this simultaneous event of seeing/producing. I can tell that something of
this show affected me deeply, but I cannot name the object I saw in the sense of the usual
art exhibition. Obviously this is related to the self-referential complexity of the mechanism
one produces as one sees, or one sees as one produces. That is, seeing itself is the
production of space in which the position of the seeing subject is constantly relativized.
And not only that, but the result of one's performance is destined to be seen by others.
 This visit to the exhibition involves an absolute passivity on the part of the
audience. As soon as one's turn comes, one is told to sit and put on the large eyeglasses,
instructed to gaze at a certain fixed spot for calibration, and so on. Here, the audience is not
a free agent; from the very beginning there is a sense of undergoing some ordeal. In other
words, the voice of the other is present from the beginning. This voice motivates the whole
event, the beginning of subjective time in the whole experience of creating a virtual world.
This voice derives from a tacit contract between a visitor and the artist that the visitor,
inasmuch as s/he has come to the exhibition, should take an active part in the making of the
exhibition. One must unconditionally follow the predetermined process.
 The stage for this encounter enables access to a point at which an enigma is born in
every subject's interiority; it marks a beginning of the process through which the
expectation and the gaze of the other is interiorized and deposited in the unconscious of the
subject. In this ritual, the advent of the subjective time is made possible by the precedence
of the other. Sartre would express such a situation as "the irruption of the self which has
been most often described: I see myself because somebody sees me." (Sartre, 257)
Although there is no authoritative examiner to judge the creative product, this whole setting
is structured around the absent gaze watching what every participant makes. That the absent
gaze inspects the individual participant's seeing/making causes and drives 'an interminable
dialogue' within the subject's self. In a sense, the artist forces the duty of painting an
interested space onto the viewer. The artist's superego is transferred to the individual
participant. In this, the artist subject is half retired in terms of dominating the artwork of her
own fantasy objects, but then it revives as a guide to the apparatus.
 The clinical/critical situation is thus not limited to the external design of the setting,
but further extends to a production of the inner space of each subject. The exhibition
catalog continues: "Humans do not consciously control most of their eye movements and in
this project these unconscious movements are transformed into form and structure in the
virtual world, and the molecules generated by the previous viewer are left behind for the
next participant. These multiple traces of eye movement coexist and create a  multi-layered
space." (Abe & Shikata)
 In this seeing/production of the virtual space, what is truly exposed is the
uncontrollability of one's own gaze-perhaps the most severe part of the ordeal. Indeed as
a crucial lesson, the work reveals gaze, will and spirit, namely, the symbols of human
intentionality, as something passive, something that is always affected by internal (body) as
well as external (circumstantial) conditions rather than actively affecting itself. By
experiencing this work, one recognizes that one's seeing is, most of the time, being made
to see. It is easy and obvious to see something which is already there and sending signals
to the eye by its autonomous movement (like television) but to see something for the sake
of seeing is another thing altogether. Here lies the reason why the eye-tracking-input
machine did not completely work for its original intended purpose-as a target-seeker for
military uses. The flow of the mind is ultimately uncontrollable, and this eye movement is
the most obvious indicator.
 In this work the eye is treated as an interface that gathers inseparable yet
unsublatable contradictory poles of activity and passivity in the human psyche and
physiology. While one's eye-movement produces a growing dimensional space of
molecules as its subconscious act, a consciousness of wanting to move the eye this way or
that in order to produce an interesting space tries to take over, and this intention is the most
awkward entity in an otherwise ontologically consistent universe. What is this conscious
seeing that all of a sudden appears out of the field produced by the subconscious-and
much more natural-seeing?
 This seeing of seeing might be called the double of seeing, in which what is at stake
is a split within one's own seeing in the form of paradox: because one should gaze at a new
spot in order to produce a dynamic form, one cannot indulge oneself by allowing the
tendency to see and enjoy the given image already produced by one's own previous seeing.
And it is this split or gap that is the true subject which drives the virtual space: this is the
object to be seen and discussed in the 'exhibition'.
 In the art context, the paintings of Larry Poons have some aspects of a double of
seeing, in which an afterimage of dots commingles with those actually painted on the
surface, but certainly the space does not go so far as to actively neutralize the viewer's
position. This seeing of seeing might also be reminiscent of an aspect of the training of Zen
Buddhism in which the goal is to see a specific spot in the void, by not seeing anything.
But this is a seeing of nothingness as opposed to a seeing of seeing. The egg=eye=gaze in
Bataille's Story of the Eye presents another extreme in the range of sensory functions of the
eye, yet this is the frozen gaze of the dead. For that matter, Bunuel and Dali's short film,
Un Chien Andalou (1929), is also relevant, with its well-known scene of a man slashing
the eyeball of a woman/dog with a razor. While the razor is cutting the eyeball horizontally,
the image of the moon that the eye is seeing (reflected in the eye) is also being cut
horizontally, which we learn as a sharp horizontal line traverses the image of the moon.
The double of seeing in Mikami's work can be figured by a similar situation: eye and
moon=molecule metonymically look at each other, and a sharp cut-or the split in the
seeing self-penetrates through the in-between space. In this manner, "Molecular
Informatics" presents coexisting senses of desire, cruelty and ethics. Advent of the I out of the Eye  All in all, this 'artwork' is an apparatus which mobilized the subjects of artist and
audience in an experimental situation, at the same time as decomposing and recomposing
them. While the artist is deprived of her staging of sensuality and becomes a part of the
apparatus, the audience is deprived of its sheer pleasure of seeing the work, of judging and
saying whatever it wants to say. The ego of the audience is split, and the segments are
rearranged and used in the whole drive of the machine.
 Speaking of the experience of participating in this event with the tracking apparatus
is no easy task, especially because this is a self-referential moment in which one encounters
oneself in the oddest of ways. It is not an encounter with mind, heart, or interiority, in
other words, a self-identical stable space, but with some active drive that accompanies
seeing and thinking itself. When this gap between the subconscious, comfortable, usual
activity of looking at things and the conscious ordeal of gazing is noticed, what it is that is
encountered? What is the strange 'thing' one is facing? Roughly speaking, this is
something like the drive of the I.
 Despite the reliance on advanced technology, or perhaps rather thanks to the artist's
passion for it, this work presents a seemingly obsolete but stubbornly persistent
problematic-the status of the self-in a totally new context, the cybernetwork. For
instance, however loudly mechanistic materialists declare the death of the individual or
human subject while advocating the coming oneness of the world through electronic media
and translingual AI, this self that sees and thinks vis-?-vis the computer screen persists,
even if it appears only as an obsolete, odd obstacle as precisely presented in "Molecular
Informatics."
 Mechanistic materialists prefer material to mind and tend to ignore the existence of
subject, which, counter to their intention, revives itself as a mysterious entity. Under the
guise of being objective and scientific, they tacitly fall prey to metaphysics because of this
repression. For that matter, Descartes, who is known to have mainly dealt with the inner
self and God, discovered a thinking machine within himself and already spoke of the
automaton almost three and a half centuries ago.This will not seem at all strange to those who know how many kinds of automatons, or
moving machines, the skill of man can construct with the use of very few parts, in
comparison with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and all the
other parts that are the body of any animal. For they will regard this body as a machine
which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any
machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than
those in any such machine. (Discourse, 140)
   He compares the poorly made automaton with a great natural machine made by
God. But if one shifts the focal point away from 'who makes,' the question of the creator
itself, the idea of 'making a better machine' comes to the fore. Then Descartes' position is
not so different from today's ideal of engineering nature itself. Here arises an inevitable
faith in modernity's ability to make. Whoever made it, a machine is a machine. The
maker's name, whether it is 'I', Canon or God, is not really the issue. As Kojin Karatani
shows us in Architecture as Metaphor, the real problematic lies in the notion of "making"-
the will to construct all the natural processes, including protein, dinosaurs, the human
body, ideal society, humanity itself, even the eco-system. What is at stake here is the view
to see the self and the world as intentionally made: this is the constructionism that grounds
modern science, not the dichotomy of whether something is man-made or god-made.
 When Descartes speculated on his singular self, he called it "a thing that thinks" or
"a thinking thing." (Second, 18) In "Molecular Informatics," the audience is decomposed
into different levels of a "seeing thing"-the functions of eye and gaze-and the gap gives
way to the advent of the "thinking thing." Yet however hard one may try to see and think,
one cannot reach the "thing" or the "thing-in-itself" in Kantian terms, that is,  the world of
'hardware' reality that motivates the 'software' world of cognition, though it is never
reached.  Then it is this inaccessibility that is programmed as the split or gap-Sartre called
it "nausea," and I would call it a subtle vertigo- in "Molecular Informatics." And this split
or gap itself functions as the motor of the thinking I-and maybe even of AI.
 In Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Zizek identifies Descartes with Deckard, the
hero of Blade Runner, because neither of them are quite human in the common sense: they
are both in the midst of doubting what they really are. "Deckard, after learning that Rachel
is a replicant who (mis)perceives herself as human, asks in astonishment: 'How can it not
know what it is?'" But, this also indicates an enduring undertone of the Cartesian doubt of
Deckard himself: Am I a thinking machine with a virtual memory-am I also a replicant?
Zizek stresses that "metaphysics endeavors to heal the wound of the 'primordial repression'
(the inaccessibility of the 'Thing which thinks') by allocating to the subject a place in the
'great chain of being';" but "the very notion of self-consciousness implies the subject's
self-decenterment, which is far more radical than the opposition between subject and
object." (Zizek, 15)
 This split, or the subject's self-decenterment as an active drive, is what one senses
the existence of, even in the flash of a second, in Mikami's piece. In the epistemology of
Lacan, this is the "split between the eye and the gaze." He says, "The eye and gaze-this is
for us the split in which the drive is manifest at the level of the scopic field." For him, this
split that we experience with such a strange contingency is the symbol "of what we find on
the horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration
anxiety." (Lacan, 73) And then, the famous but somewhat esoteric object a.  It is here that I propose that the interest the subject takes in his own split is bound
up with that which determines it-namely, a privileged object, which has emerged from
some primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the
real, whose name, in our algebra, is the object a. In some scopic relation, the object on which depends the fantasy from which the
subject is suspended in an essential vacillation is the gaze. Its privilege-and also that by
which the subject for so long has been misunderstood as being in its dependence-derives
from its very structure. (Lacan, 83)  The object a is something necessary for the subject to constitute itself; it is only by
separating itself off from it-that is, by producing the object to see and enjoy as a
supplement of the lack in the scopic field-that the seeing=thinking subject can appear on
earth at all. My point is not necessarily to interpret the self-referential, self-generating space
in Mikami's work by Lacan/Zizek's theory of lack/enjoyment/subject. However, it is useful
in order to exorcise the ideology of the self as a self-identical depth from which everything
begins, and to point to a more active and structural formation of the thing called self-and it
does not matter whether this belongs to a human or a replicant inasmuch as it is a self-
doubting entity. And what one is supposed to see in Mikami's work is the mechanism itself
as to how the self is formed in the process of seeing=making its own Object a. For in this
work, the combination of circumstance and machinery is the very apparatus to induce the I
out of the eye, in its own movement of expansion, rotation, and inversion. Systemic Vertigo  If "Molecular Informatics" is seen just as a work that uses advanced technology to
produce interesting form in an audience-participatory setting, its problematic nature is not
fully illuminated. It should rather be read as a work which tells us how technology and the
self have always/already been interacting with each other to form our cultural apparatus.
This work points to a realm where the self and technology are not yet completely separated,
forming a drive to construct something unknown; we do not know when it started, but we
do know that the drive of this apparatus cannot be stopped. However, it goes without
saying that this coexistence does not necessarily mean a harmonious one. "Molecular
Informatics" in fact contains an ambiguous and contradictory tendency: a strong faith in
technology and the elements that does not allow a simple homage to the futurism of the
techno-ages. This conflict might reveal the ultimate antimony which the ideologies of
technology and cyberspace inevitably contain.
 Heideggar had a conflicting view on technology. On the one hand, he feared and
hated it, but on the other, by once surrendering to its power and even offering it a throne,
he attempted to domesticate it as a replacement of metaphysics. Thus he considered
technology to be a completion of metaphysics: The epoch of completed metaphysics stands before its beginning. The basic form of appearance in which the will to will arranges and calculates itself in the
unhistorical element of the world of completed metaphysics can be stringently called
'technology.' This name includes all the area of beings which equip the whole of beings:
objectified nature, the business of culture, manufactured politics, and the gloss of ideals
overlying everything. Thus 'technology' does not signify here the separate area of the
production and equipment of machines. . . The name 'technology' is understood here in such an essential way that is meaning
coincides with the term 'completed metaphysics.' (Heideggar, 93)  As he claims, technology for Heideggar is certainly not limited to new media or
new scientific inventions; rather, by this term he conceives of the network of all techn?,
growing in the process of combining all human practices. It is thus a completion of the
"great chain of being." The world becoming one as an ideal has been repeated in many
forms. The world is in fact always already one, as an eco-system as well as a space of
economic intercourse, that is, as an event, but the consciousness of being one can
inexorably be no more than a construct of some subjectivity, and not of all subjects. Any
attempt to construct a unity or immanence is to be dogged by some monstrosity, as has
been the case throughout human history. And so many pedestrian talks about the potential
of the techno-age tend to collapse the differences of the world in order to celebrate the
ultimate oneness. This is especially true in the domain of the phantasmic virtual reality that
cyberspace produces. In virtual reality, the world seems to be becoming one large subject,
like the Hegelian notion of the self, which gulps everything and becomes the world itself,
like an 'I' which "is the vacuum for anything and everything. . ." (Encyclopedia, S24)
 This might be the precise point where the new faith in cyberspace and the old faith
in the Geist or Being cross over in a strange way. This might also be the point at which
postmodern ideology, mechanistic materialism, and perhaps some monistic tendencies in
various theoretical stances overlap. The oneness of the world or the immanence is an
inevitable ideal; yet the 'immanence' always exists with 'difference' to form an antinomy
which can never be sublated. As the intensity of the immanence gets stronger, the
difference contained gets harsher-such is the becoming of the world.
 Cyberspace is a network of transmitting messages for communication, but at the
same time, it is an autonomous world of virtual reality. In this collapse of function and
fantasy, it seems that the traditional place for the subject is lost, for the symbol of the
original lack is constantly and instantaneously fulfilled with phantasmic reality; that is to
say, even though the subject does not actively go out there to discover the filling, the Object
a, it comes by itself. In cyberspace one does not have to deliberately see, because the
scopic field is autonomously composed and decomposed organically by itself in front of
one's eye. It is only necessary to sit in front of it to watch. This is thanks to the
enforcement of the network of technology as Heideggar envisioned. In "Molecular
Informatics," this whole process through which the traditional subject becomes totally a
passive agent-to be absorbed into the Hegelian I of virtual reality-is mise-en-scened with
a slightly sadistic tone. And it is here that the movement-split, doubt, seeing, and
thinking-begins to function as a critique of both traditional subject and the monstrous
conflation of virtual reality. In this work, Mikami opened a can of worms from which the
problematics concerning cyberspace slither out.
 This break inexorably occurred in choosing the eye as the interface. Using Sartre's
metaphor, this is the "keyhole" to the external reality from which the self arrives. This is a
multi-sensory network, where various types of stimulation/pain are received to form the
recognition of the external world. Like pain as an eye to the body, this teaches us the
absolute precedence of the external world.
 The subject has never been totally independent from the world of technology, but
has always been thrown into it. At the same time, from the beginning cyberspace has
always been just another part of subjectivity, because its original role is to decorate the
world for subjects by way of rhetoric. Seen from the view of the "thing-in-itself," for
instance, as the world of technology becomes more and more complete and cyberspace
becomes stronger and larger, this oneness gets more blinded to the problems of the raw
world of the "thing-in-itself." As if assimilating itself to realities of computer jargon, the
more convenient the software becomes, with Windows, for instance, the more difficult
access to hardware problems becomes. Such is the role of the more and more accelerated
production of the phantasmic virtual world. It must be that the vertigo that this I
experienced in "Molecular Informatics" is precisely the detector of the fragmentation
between the hardware and the software of the technological world.
 
  Works Cited Abe & Shikata, "Molecular Informatics-morphogenic substance via eye tracking,"
 Canon ARTLAB6, press paper, 1996. Descartes, Ren?. Discourse, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, Trans. J.
 Cottingham, R Stoothoof and D Murdoch, Cambridge University Press. ---. Second Meditation, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, Trans. J.
 Cottingham, R. Stoothoof and D. Murdoch, Cambridge University Press. G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Trans. by W. Wallace, S24, Oxford University Press. Heideggar, Martin. The End of Philosophy, Trans. by Joan Stambaugh, Harper Collins,
 New York, DATE. Karatani, Kojin. Architecture as Metaphor-Language, Number, Money, Trans. Sabu
 Kohso, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Trans. by Alan
 Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1973.Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, Trans. by Hazel E. Barnes, Washington
 Square Books, 1956. Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993.
  June 1996
  Sabu Kohso
His major work of translation is Kojin Karatani's Architecture as Metaphor (MIT Press, 1995).
As a translator and essayist, he has worked with such presses as Semiotext(e), Boundary 2,and Any.
He also hosts a website karataniforum.org.