Is this the real world?

LITTLE grey pamphlet not unlike a mass sheet accompanied packs handed out to delegates at Sensing the Future, a conference held at Arthouse in Dublin over last weekend. The pamphlet, headed Technoetic Aesthetics, contained "a glossary of definitions and terms coined by Roy Ascott," Director of The Centre of Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, at the University of Wales College, Newport, where all the weekend's speakers are currently pursuing doctoral research.

The events aimed to explore some of the directions in which electronic media are leading artists, and the booklet explains to save valuable time presumably - some key terms in these new developments.

"Paramentation" is "the cerebral activity of collective intelligence"; "Shamantics" is "foregrounding the semantic aspect of shamanism in the technoetic context". "Noetic networks", if you are wondering, turn out to be what happens when "our personal neural networks merge with global networks to create a new space of consciousness." Geddit?

Even familiar words see rather transformed by contact with Ascott. An Author, the pamphlet explains, is: "The designer of contexts for Noetic navigation, and of open ended, evolutive systems in the Net".

While all of these explanations offer some help towards understanding the interests of the speakers, one idea from the glossary occurs in presentation after presentation: The Five fold Path, that is to say "Connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, emergence." This, in plain language, seems to be how the future should work out, according the researchers at CAiiA. Presumably, this is meant on some sort of metaphorical level, but it was hard to tell this from many of the speakers at the conference.

Many of the works discussed in architect Gill Hunt's session maintain the status of concepts. Clicking her way through a folder of Photoshop images, Hunt called up a succession of unbuilt, and within current constraints, unbuildable, buildings. Manifested in shell like structures, full of swirling turrets and bulbous, organic spaces, Hunt's idea seems to be that buildings should ideally be planted, rather than built and then permitted to evolve in response to the needs of their users and the environment.

Meanwhile, back in the space often referred to as "the real world", is Char Davis, an artist and director of Visual Research at Softimage, manufacturer of the high end graphics software used to model dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, who is perhaps best known for developing a virtual reality installation (or an "immersive experience", as she prefers it to be known) called Osmose (which will go on show at the Barbican in London this summer). Wired, perhaps the best known digital culture magazine, suggested Osmose might be the first work of virtual art. Others have suggested that it will remind humans that they are angels, and even that it can combat the fear of death.

The piece is accessed through the now familiar VR headset, which positions two screens over the eyes in order to render a convincing world in 3D images, while a sensory vest translates the "immersants" movements into movements within the Virtual world. What is unusual about Osmose is that instead of the aerial dog fight for blood splattered blow 'em away dungeons, it offers users a chance to pass through imaginary worlds of crystal forests and subterranean caverns, ooze among walls of text containing quotations from Heidegger and Rilke, and even the system's own code. Her ambition for the device, Davis told the conference, was to "tweak something in people's consciousness that made them want to leave the machines and go out into nature".

Davis's talk, like most of the sessions, involved artists talking about works or projects which were represented at the conference by images projected from video or from a computer. This meant, rather paradoxically, that the interactive artworks were available only in the form of a limited guided tour. While this did not necessarily distract from some interesting sounding projects, it certainly made the evangelistic messages about interactivity and collaborative creativity that peppered presentation seem a little hollow.

It was frustrating, for example, to see only glimpses of Jill Scott's The Digital Body Autoniata, the hypermedia project the Australian artist has created for her Ph.D. Scott's "viewer activated multimedia installation" allows the user to approach the idea of technological transformations of the body, while browsing the connection between images and ideas from fact, fiction, science and art. But while the connections drawn between feminism, Frankenstein Alien and genetic engineering seemed sharply made by the work only a session that permitted interactivity could offer a more precise assessment.

With so much in the hands of demonstrators, the sessions sometimes resembled a digital version of the Late Late Show Christmas Toy Show, watching people playing with impressive new toys but never being able to touch them.

BILL Seaman has created another interactive project, The World Generator, which should permit users to build their own virtual world through selecting sounds, textures and objects from a shelf and placing them into a virtual space. (This work will also be on show at the Barbican this summer). Once more, for the conference the product was offered, like the future itself, only in tantalising glimpses.

It is possible to access the latest project from Victoria Vesna, Bodies INCorporated over the World Wide Web. Visitors to the BodiesINC site can join Vesna Virtual Corporation, and design and select their own bodies, which may then be displayed on large projections in various galleries. Owners of bodies at BodiesINC can also kill their virtual selves, or take part in the life of the corporation and earn shares in the virtual company. Perhaps, Vesna suggested, at some future point when the distinction between the on line and the off line were less rigid those shares would be translated into money.

When all the speakers from CAiiA, almost uniformly dressed in scruffy jackets and jeans, sat together in a semi circle for a final question and answer session, the level of evangelical zeal flowing around the room seemed to rapidly increase. It might have started off mildly enough, with some warm up questions about the possibility of censoring the Internet, but pretty soon the discussion had moved on to whether Time Warner and a few other multinationals were going to be able to colonise cyberspace.

When the questions turned to the Net and ESP, the room was a sea of hands, hands attached to people keen to hear more about Ascott's trip up Brazil to meet and explore consciousness with some Amazonian shaman. One speaker from the floor began to explain the connection between the psychic power of Newgrange and her own web site. "Can you create a psychic field in cyberspace?" someone wondered. Had communism secretly won the cold war?

Finally, the gently spoken Ascott began to boil down some of his ideas into some very straightforward language. The group has basically been talking about "sympathetic interaction and the technologies that promote it".

"It seems strange to say it out - just like that," says Roy, but I suppose we're talking about love."