"Identity will be a matter of freedom and choice;
Freedom will be a matter of choice of identity. "
The cyberpunk hacker

Tutors
Dr Steve Goodman
Mr Keith Piper
Dr David Chapman

Introduction Cyberpunk science fiction culture, pervades with notions of computer hackers having direct mental access to cyberspace (Neuromancer 1984), with artificial intelligence living and functioning within it, in a posthuman, post biological world were amalgamation between human and machine are commonplace, were gender and disembodiment are central themes derived from the very real fears of our own ongoing technological and cultural expansion. These issues and topics are the central concepts that my practical piece will run along using these as issues to create the soundscapes to explore the fictional acoustic cyberspace of the cyberpunk genre.   “Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry- techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of self.”          Storming the reality studio p346 CYBERSPACE, V.R, A.R The view  most held about cyberspace have changed progressively over the last 30 years, plugged into a suit with wires and VR helmet; this is the technological method in which people would enter cyberspace described in cyberpunk science fiction distopia. A superhighway of colourful information bombarding the person situated in cyberspace. This is the classic idea portrayed by mainstream culture such as in the film’s Lawnmower man, Tron, Matrix and Johnny mnemonic. These movies pioneered the visual representation of virtual space. The term cyberspace refers to an information space in which data is configured in such a way as to give the illusion, in which he/she can be linked together with a large number of users via a puppet-like simulation which operates in a feedback loop to the operator.                               (Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk p2) Cyberspace is a mediated  realm of actual digitalized information, Gestalt gathered as an amerceable environment. The experiential depth of this virtually existing collection of data is defined by the level in which the user can immerse themselves within this information metaspace. The word Cyberspace was first coined by William Gibson in his book “Neuromancer” were people travelled through interwoven computer networks of data, these electronic world is often referred to and envisioned by science fiction as an opposition to the real world, were 3d Euclidian spaces of information and data are navigable in an immersive electric environment. This environment (often referred to as Gibsonien cyberspace) is a collection of millions of computers and networks in which geographical space is liquefied in an intercultural collection of data infinite in dimension spanning across the globe. The internet is often referred to as this cyberspace. And cyberspace often lends itself to the notion virtual reality, were a 3d space is generated by the computer and in a more metaphorical way, the geometry and topology is synchronized across vast distances of networks in the World Wide Web. The internet itself is the railway lines in which carries the traffic weather it be web traffic, file transfer or voice over IP (Clements 2005). However the way in which this information is displayed to us and how well we experience the Internet carried applications is depends on the Internet connection speed and the money u spend on the hardware technology. Much progress into making internet navigation in the style of Gibsonien cyberspace has developed progressively in the last 30 yrs with work by NDG software, information visualisation research by Xerox PARC, MIT MEDIALAB, various Augmented reality research projects, Head mounted displays (HMDs), gaming companies and Universities with industrial/economic and military applications. The growing application of Post industrial virtual reality/cyberspace immersion technology within the information age is still within the embryonic stage of development as interaction immersion feedback, haptic’s and holographic are problematic in design and user application The technological growth and advances in electronic communication of the internet has changed the way in which we communicate bringing about a emergence of virtuality in our modes of experience through a cultural symbiosis of deterritorialiazation through the cultural extrapolation of these telepresence technologies. The interrelationship of the actual internet to Gibsonien cyberspace is problematic as when I send a email I have sent a message through and in cyberspace, even though the depth of immersion is very shallow. The interface, software and hardware are all dependent on the people that built these devices and the adoption of use is dependent on the technological environment in which people grow up with.   Chapter 1-                 Role of the body in cyberspace   The term “virtual reality” (VR) was first coined by Jaron Lanier, the former head of vpl research Inc. in California, and has recently been defined as a real or simulated environment in which the perceiver experiences Tele-presence Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk P5 A Cyborg is a cybernetic organism hybridised as both man and machine, this discussion focuses on the body in cyberspace. In cyberpunk culture the post human cyborg, were man and machine are joined and married derives a fictional perspective of whole body immersion. The topic of Cyberbodies has been slowly elevated from science fiction to science interest with research in wearable electronic, prosthetics and human computer interfaces pushing past the vision of big cumbersome VR helmets and Hollywood style images conjured in popular mainstream culture. The new technological environments of virtual reality and cyberspace confuse the boundaries between internal and external worlds, creating the illusion that internal and external realities are one and the same. (Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk p144) However Cyberbodie and cyberculture discourse academically has been extrapolated by feminism gender and cultural studies from such minds as Sadie plant, Donna Haraway, Sandy Stone, Katherine Hayles. With interest into internet communities, hypertext communication in cyberspace from the likes of Ellen Strenski, Janet Murray,  Marie-Laure Ryan, George landow, However the focus of the bodies’ role is more specifically noted from the stance of gender although embodiment and disembodiment in cyberspace does raise questions about the new modes of identity and social intercourse in cyberspace, were gender blurs and temporal location become distinctly diluted by unfixed time space coordinates (S Plant 2000); my consideration of the Cyberbodie involves the progressive tracking of the entropic development of two philosophical interpretations of virtuality that tele-presence discourse describes. The Virtual as Gibsonien The idea of the virtual again is much characterised by notions portrayed from a Gibsonien perspective in popular mainstream culture, disappearing into the “net”, uploading consciousness and existing as a virtual bodies. Although in the far future full virtualised immersion again will entail this imaginative perspective. The virtual has many meanings, and really the idea is not a new one, since the dawn of time a virtual world has been imagined, a collection of ideas, an underworld, a netherworld, pure thought, an information metaspace region not bound by time and space. This idea is not essentially a new one. However the technological progress of the digital medium has allowed us to touch, see and feel the ethereal cyberspace underworld and brought this notion back into contemporary interest. “Gibsonian cyberspace represents an imagined merger between the internet and VR cyberspace” Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk p7 In Neuromancer, cyberspace among other science fiction is described, as a fully transgressable information metaspace in which the body freely moves, bound not by space and time. This surfing, design and navigation of different reality’s, (Leary) by the virtualized entity are often theorized as a hyperembodiement. The difference however is that embodiment and disembodiment seem to be both a polemic of existence to the virtual bodie situated in cyberspace. The body in cyberspace changes configurations, moving temporally, becoming virtual brings about a need for new methodological approaches and understandings required to grasp the potential of this virtualization. “The virtualization of the body is therefore not a form of disembodiment but a re-creation, a reincarnation, a multiplication, vectorization, and hetrogenesis and alienation, actualization and commodity reification” becoming virtual reality in the digital age p67 This notion of the virtualized bodies hyper-situated free form in immersive space still echoes a Gibsonian perspective to the virtual and essentially  reminds us that cyberspace science fiction distopia Uploading information, visually represented, transgressing cities of data and moving around electronic realities are centralised themes running across the notion of the virtual described by these science fiction dramas. Research into immersive VR is focusing on such possibilities but problems in design, realism and the general understanding of what the internet is and is not are recursive polemics in application and design. Rather the question is weather the bodies role in cyberspace involves more than just these hypothetical dynamics of embodiment, disembodiment etc that construct the dialogue of conceptual terrain understood as VR, cyberspace interface and design. Sure there is more to the assemblage of factors that theoretically pivot the virtual body, but what do we mean by virtual. As the term virtual seems to bounce between fantasy and fact especially with the notion of mainstream virtualization conjured in popular culture.   The Virtual as potential   Contry to the popular culture view that virtual is not real; the virtual philosophically represents a field of potential. Pierre Levey was born in 1956. Professor, researcher, theorist and cyberneticist, whose ideas on communication and electronic media, technology the virtual and cybernetic culture have built upon the theoretical discourse of virtualization and a deterritorlization of virtualized bodies though immersion cyberspace. Many notions pervade the ideologies surrounding the virtual, that for instance a seed has a pre programmed set of instructions that the environment effects and its own growing development runs along as a potential of avenues in outcome. This potential is virtual, however there is a discreet difference between virtual as potential and virtual as possibility. Possibility suggests that a design and trajectory of outcome is all ready decided, however virtual as potential is not real, it is not decided and essentially fluidic in outcome and on the edge of becoming. Another good example of potential would be virtual 5D particles, minutely invisible in 3D space and immeasurable by physical means, however there affective transference of energy from 5D space to 3D in there movement and interaction creates measurable changes and reconfigurations of electromagnetic forces and particles in physical 3d space. This represents a potential of outcomes as these virtually existing particles interact and exert influence with measurably real physical particles. Pierre describes rigorously that Potential is inherent in the virtual and that it is not opposite from the real but a “productive mode of being, powerful and productive that gives free rein to creative processes.”(Pierre) This reinterpretation of the virtual is what is considered to be far removed from the conventional understandings of the virtual, but considered by Pierre to be that which is developing. Again this is a move away from the conventions of the virtual as an embodiment/ disembodiment process. Heni Bergson a French philosopher was the first to suggests that the virtual as potential. Were as Pierre has suggested that the actual and the virtual are uniquely different because the virtual is on the edge of becoming real, not even designed or bound by intent, Actual suggests that something is and has become real, although I must say that virtual does not mean something is not real but that it has the capacity to become real with in a potential of chances, but subsequently still has the capacity to transmute and become virtual again. It could be said that the word virtual and the connotations associated with it have dramatically changed away from our initial conception. Giving a broader approach perspective of the semiotic meaning behind the linguistic labelling installed by mainstream culture in regards to how we envision the virtual. Though in surmise Brian Massumi based upon Deleuze and Guattari considers the body as a flux of processes in continuation in regards to affect, virtual and molecular level paradigm understanding, I want to focus on the virtual and cyberspace link together. I feel that the Gibsonian perspective of the virtual and Pierre ideas on the virtual give us a different perspective on a topic much clouded by mainstream ideas, my essential feeling on this topic is that though technologically (excluding secret militry research) we are presently unable to create immersive virtualization of the body in cyberspace. To often we draw away from the main point of our excersise being the question, How can we make internet navigation and immersion more wholesome and a full-bodied experience through what we know is capable with what technology we’ve got?     Chapter 2-          Virtual reality Cyberspace VR does not Re-present, VR Tele-presents     Virtual reality, traditionally defined as an interactive ethereal immersion experience generated by a computer, (Marie-Laure Ryan) is often portrayed as an externally collective intelligence visualised and conceptualized by the cyberpunk mythology in science fiction. It also holds closely to the conceptualized cultural envisioning behind Marshall Mcullans notion of a global village as a global digitalized communication network. Thus the mainstream illusion is that virtual reality is analogous to 3d Euclidian space that’s fantasized and romanticised by cyberpunk ideology. One of the ironies of the digital revolution is that as more and more media go digital, the means by which people interface with these media are becoming increasingly analogic in form. The desktop metaphor, the room metaphor, digital gloves and body suits. The increasingly sensory mix of how we interact with digital systems; all are movements towards a powerful user illusion based on an analogy with a familiar world of objects located in space. Cyberspace is digital, but the way we interface with digital computer systems that mediate our use of cyberspace still depends on analogy. The cyberspace lexicon (Bob Cotton and Richard Oliver) Could it be considered Marshal McMullan and William Gibson are both visionaries that share the same ideological vision of a global information cyberspace? Marshall Mcullans ideas behind global communication and culture share the ideology behind Gibbsons conception of cyberspace of a futuristic global communications network. Even though Gibbsons virtue as a pioneer in terms of social implications and imaginative storytelling combine and relate to actual cultural and technological advances, the technology is still years away from true immersion virtual reality cyberspace. An interesting cyberpunk claim comes from Tim Leary who stated William Gibson…. “Has produced nothing less than the underlining myth, the core legend, of the next stage of human evolution. He is performing the philosophic function that Dante did for feudalism and that writers like Mann, Tolstoy (and) Melville…did for the industrial age.” (Leary, cited in kellner, 1995; 298)   It could be said that William Gibson ideas behind the cyberspace immersive environment related closely to Marshall Mcullans ideas of the global village and the Internet. However technological discrepancies between the actual and fictional vary, science fiction has always allowed important ideas, fears and narratives to be investigated and extrapolated, and they always provide foundations of cultural and scientific inquiry to future events. Rather that it’s the need and investigation of the virtualizatanal implications in cybergeography of a digitalized economy, bodie, space and location that have all been virtualized by the electronic medium within cyberpunk science fiction distopia. These ideals have only recently within the last 100 years been taken seriously by science and the humanities although they have been recurrent themes thought out mankind’s history. Since now as the internet technologically has viably allowed us to partake in Gibsonian virtual and cyberspace as immersion as an electro plastic medium in which interactivity and immersion have become a reality of everyday life even though on a shallow level of depth. Marshall Mcullans techno-cultural cyber cartography inquiry goes beyond the thinkers of his time by pushing the envelope and foreseeing the effects of technological progress globally with his famous line “the global village.” He also foresaw the limitations of the conceptual paradigms used in relation to understanding electronic media as a new mode of communication both culturally and scientifically. “The dense information environment created by the computer is at present still concealed from it by a complex screen or mosaic quilt of antiquated activities that are now advertised as the new field for the computer.” (Mcluhan and fiore. 1968:89) Marshall sees and acknowledges the realism of the actual global information network that makes the internet, being that collectively as an information archive of data, the internet is a kind of hyper mind in which, all thoughts, all information of all man and woman is shared regardless of copyright or legislation and that any reality conveyed is sharable in an endless stream of information. However this information sea is not validated as true or even raw data in the trustiest sense of the word. Its collectively collectable virtuality of electronic information, (Pierre) containing hundreds of years of information, un censurable and effectively freeform and intangible, just as the electrons zooming down this cable are intangible to your hands, yet the cable is. “Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of time and space and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men, it has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale” (pg 16 Marshall Mcluhan the medium is the massage) Although notions around the virtual from Pierre levy to theories of Deleuze and Guattari, borrow and build upon each others notions of affect, sensation and philosophical interpretations concerning ideals of being, My attempts is to track and explore the polemic’s of two very different concepts of how the conception of the body as a virtual object and its relationship to a virtualized cyberspace have been viewed. My main task is establishing a theoretical context in which to explore the discourse surrounding cyberspace in relation to the Telematic-sense of user immersion experience, and its relationship to Synesthesia.     Chapter 3-                   Synesthesia and Cyberspace   Digital media have given us a new way in which to communicate (Leary 1995), in which multimedia communication has evolved in electronic media with sound and light such as the development from radio to TV and then Internet. All these things created huge cultural changes that rocked peoples worlds both on a personal level and globally, after all most houses contain a tv, but now that’s being replaced by the computer if not already. Reciprocal telecommunications of the global network have enabled an evolution of communication; these new cybernetic systems of interaction, interface, immersion and feedback have slowly encompassed more senses from text, sound, touch, and light. Feeding the senses and developing more and more a whole sensory hyper-embodiment interface. For now when I call my partner I can see her as well as hearing her on my mobile phone, were as 8 years ago the technology enabled me just to her. It’s about developing a more multisensory full body approach when devising better interfaces. The Historical development of Synesthesia has been from the perspective of physiology, neuroscience, Art and science with researchers Dr Hugo at the royal academy of arts in Munich, Roy Ascott, John Harrison, Sadie plant and Richard Cytowic. Synesthesia research has been investigated in a tradition of understanding concerning sensory perception phenomenology and scientific validation and definition, which has always been defined by what we believe to be true within the accepted conceptual paradigm map of the status quo.   “The characteristics of certainty vary according to the philosophers chosen system” Art and Theory 1900-2000 p454   However now more than ever Synesthesia has been realised both trans-disciplinary between the science and arts as and important key in our understanding of the technology of perception, sensation and affect. It’s now clear that Synesthesia can be used as a conceptual modal for also understanding computer interfaces, immersion design with military and industrial economic applications.   The psychological relationship between the senses provides an understanding between the inter relationship of possible modality assemblages as different amalgamations. Surmised as an interaction dynamic between the senses, the audio-visual of experience and the proprioception-haptic kinaesthesia of electroplastic media mediate between consciousness and pure subjective experience. When immersed within cyberspace as an entity prosthetically detached, New and exotic modes of being, communication and cultural processes often occur pushing theoretical discourse to the limit and demanding new innovative approaches conceptually. To often these new ideological approach’s are deep rooted concepts that are hardwired into the science’s, art and humanities and just as new learning involves making room aside to accommodate such new conceptual map rewrites, a sense of uncertainty and denial from academia and mainstream science attempts to deny such improvements to its own discord. However it’s still unclear as to whether Synesthesia presents a hyper-function of the cerebrum or a dysfunction. (Cytowic)  However it does prove the parallel processing capabilities of the brain for it could be said that no sensation is alone in its affect. The fact that “natural” visual perception is never pure. Vision always cofunctions with other senses, from which it receives a continuous feed and itself feeds into: hearing, touch, proprioception, to name only the most prominent. Parables for the virtual, Brian Massumi p145  Tele-Matic Hypermedia   The building picture of the role of the body in cyberspace and a definition of this of how Synesthesia is connected to cyberspace lies between the Gibsonian conception of the virtual and a Marshal Mcullan based notion of the techno-cultural effects of cyberspace technology. Just as cyberculture science fiction provides an informative purpose of inquiry from a cultural social studies standpoint, this project has defined the notion of two very different but related approaches’s to precisely pinpoint theoretically the meaning of the virtual and cyberspace. Synesthesia, (Greek, SYN=together + AISTHESIS= perception) which is where one sense becomes mixed with another. Tele-Synesthesia: evoked by a Telematic use of new media; the travelling senses (Hugo Heyrman 2005) The question of the domination of sight in perception, (Plato-circa 430bc) Has been the bane of cognitive processing research for interfaces that has forced a working between trans-disciplinary science’s, bridging practice with theory, in which the outcome of these innovative new technologies has realistic potential to redefine the relations between the senses. However critique and exploration of trans-media understanding relates most specifically to reforming and mutating current understanding of digital space, the body, and interaction dynamics between the senses. These factors leans towards the questions can Tele-Synesthesia be conceptually extrapolated to formulate a hyper-dimensional Telematic Cyberbodie model? In an attempt to move away from the conventions of speculation research of Synesthesia. Can a Shifting away from the micro mimetic model of the virtual bodie be possible? my speculation surrounds that Tele-Synesthesia relates specifically to cyberspace and a new conception of the virtual based around the travelling senses, 3+ sensory mixing in interface design and perception paradigms in Synesthesia discourse revolve around phenomenology but to much into philosophy? This is not a case of interactivity vs immersion but the realization that both are mutually important as components to virtual reality interfaces. But the problem with current V.R , Interface technology are in fact in embryonic stages of development in terms of user definement and parameter definition in the engagement of these digital mediums. Although we are able to choose, the choosing is within definable limits set by the technological and parameter limits. These issues represent the crux of the problematic issues facing current computer interface technologies around notions of user interface definement and experiential depth based on an ocular centralism. By these technologies being embryonic I’m implying that current cyberspace immersive realities and technology are “lean back technologies” in which partial or little true user definement and immersion interaction is sustainable let alone existing. These factors are only exemplified by the extremity of the fictional disposition of the cybernaut. There is no reality but the reality that the author places on to it, you can only talk about the reality by drawing on your reality that you inherent as experience and mnemonic programming that you live in. Any reality is an opinion. No matter how much academia or vocal intellectual gymnastics used, there is still a defence and offence into the reality that is inhabited by the speaker or researcher that inhabits his cave. Most of the time we inhabit other peoples realities, which raise the question, How much of the reality that you inhabit is really yours? People’s spaces of mind and experience are essentially software of borrowed, bastardized, romanticized mind programming, this idea extends into cyberspace as peoples and corporate realities will be super-imposed in cyberspace, as official validated safe as secure hibernation prisons of intellect, capitalized on and shared among the mass’s. My personal experience on this matter for example is a genius that I know of, who once quoted to me that when I asked him about mathematics “the beauty of the mathematical theorem!” He is one of the top best programmer in the world I have no doubt, fluent in electronics, programming languages, circuitry and hardware, lectured at universities and a genius of the digital but essentially confused emotionally but sure of his stance and disposition of geniusness. He rarely knows of any other opinion or experience but that of his own. This psychological and somewhat presumptuous statement probably echoes something from my own mind, however I want to draw on the fact that as more and more technologies of cyberspace create the Gibsonian virtue the more we will inhabit other people’s realities as an immersed wholesome experience. Which draws me to the question will the collective mind of the internet visually portrayed by virtual reality cyberspace as the ultimate interface really magnifying and intensifying the mind of other’s and reality’s that we inhabit?