This speculation imagined a future company, Soul Systems, that creates safety products for space travel. It extrapolates from revolutionary insights of neuroscience about the contextual and hallucinatory nature of consciousness.
Headphones on!
Soul Systems (2022)
Keter: journeying through inner and outer space together
“As we wish you farewell to explore solar systems, your welfare is our priority at Soul Systems”
Keter is a speculative listening experience that brings together aspects of Soul Systems space safety products.
The audience was instructed to place an eye mask on their forehead to initiate brain implants to start the hibernation process for space travel. They were then instructed to put on the headphones and press a button on a MIDI controller for Neural Wipe (to reset the experience) and Neural Sync (to start the recording in the headphones). I created a MAX patch to facilitate this interactivity.
They were instructed to place the eye mask over their eyes as the narrator explained how Soul Systems would safely take them through different levels of consciousness as they enter and return from hibernation. Altering states of consciousness can induce hallucinations so Mission Control would be monitoring their subjective experience at all times to adjust any perceptual dissonance.
Experiments in hallucinatory sound design
I explored how to use audio illusions creatively, such as the verbal transformation effect when the initial narration ends; Risset Glides to convey feelings of falling into, and awakening from, deep sleep; and a Phantom Word illusion at the very end to signal the ego’s return.
Informed by the phenomenology of auditory hallucinations, I processed samples of sounds that people report when they experience hallucinations when falling asleep and waking up.
To represent Mission Control, I used a AI model pre-trained on recordings from the Apollo 11 mission. I read reports of people hallucinating animal sounds in different states of sleep so I played samples of humpback whale sounds through this model.
Speculative safety products for space travel
I created a brochure (with design assistance from Katrina Peel) 30 years in the future that looks back at the scientific research emerging today that would be fundamental to Soul Systems.
Entropometer measures the conscious level of hibernating space travellers to move them safely through different levels of consciousness.
Hallucinator allows Mission Control to communicate with hibernating space travellers and simulate their conscious contents- when syncing brains, gradual cross fading is key.
Embodimonitor allows Mission Control to monitor the conscious self of synthetic living skin worn by space travellers that protects them from radiation hazards of space.
The biological space race
Underpinning this speculation were considerations about whether space travellers should be genetically engineered to survive the hazards of space and even splice genes from other organisms and species into their DNA if that would protect them. This is not science fiction since this kind of research is part of NASA’s Artemis plans to establish a permanent base on the moon in the 2030s to facilitate human missions to Mars later this century.
Neural networks represent the world
Neural networks are at the core of Soul Systems’ safety products since they learn in similar ways to human brains. The information stored in these networks’ nodes and the relationships across multiple layers of nodes provide a model of the world that is used to make predictions at the output layer when new data is processed at the input data. Their hidden layers of nodes, and their representations of the world, are often beyond human comprehension, making them almost mystical.
Mysticism materialised
With thanks to visual designer, Alex Topaz
Kabbalah and the Tree of Life
Schemas of neural networks have an uncanny resemblance to the Tree of Life in Judaism’s mystical tradition, Kabbalah. The Tree of Life consists of 10 or 11 nodes (‘sephirot’) that each represent an attribute of god’s being, and are connected by 22 lines or paths that represent the process by which the universe was created. Atop of the hierarchy is Keter (‘crown’ in Hebrew)- what the Kabbalah refers to as ‘the most hidden of all hidden things’- out of which all things are created until Yesod (‘foundation’) interfaces between the metaphysical layers above and the lowermost physical layer of Malchot (‘kingship’) below- the world of matter, planets and earth. According to Kabbalah, consciousness provides the way by which creation can reverse its course back up the Tree until reunited with Keter. The strength of the connections between nodes in neural networks is represented by numerical weighting factors. Curiously, Kabbalah uses numerology of the Hebrew alphabet to encode the nature of the paths connecting the sephirot.