Mail Art News #22: Saying Yes or Noooo to the Nooscope



postcards for mailing, T. Brown, 4-22-2023

Things go round on the internet. Around 2004 or 2005, in an online art group called the World Artist Network on Myspace, we somehow got to talking about memetics. The exponential growth of online memes began shortly thereafter. And then somewhere around 2011, I learned of the term "noosphere" which is the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity in regard to its influence on the biosphere. And then I heard nothing more about in my own little corner of the world until April 20, 2023, when it showed up along with a new term -- nooscope, in an article titled Earth’s Ultimate War: A Battle to Control the Noosphere.
Looking further into the topic, I see articles from 2016 talking about this nooscope, a device for monitoring the noosphere. Some of the articles in the corporate media outlets are predictably dismissive, yet other sites approach it with genuine interest. The website https://nooscope.ai/ discusses the topic from a scientific perspective [also from a socio-political perspective - TB, 4-27-2023]. There's even the Global Consciousness Project (https://noosphere.princeton.edu/ ) which has been ongoing since 1999. 
Russian official, Anton Vaino's article Capitalization of the Future (2012), is said to describe the nooscope as a new technology that can be used by governments to manage and control the more challenging societies of today and of the future, as the old means no longer seem to be working. 
The nooscope: 
  • is a device that scans transactions between people, things and money,  an invention of parallel significance to the telescope and the microscope
  • can tap into global consciousness and detect and register changes in the biosphere and in human activity 
Now, what does any of this have to do with mail art? While I do not plan to be super political on a regular basis with Mail Art News, I do ask the mail art community to put this topic on their radars. That is all. And so I have created a set of basic postcards for mailing out. Imagine all of the electro-chemical equations happening on the planet in a 24 hour period. There are forces that will want to control all of that, profit from all of that, etc. Will this be used for the benefit of all? What do you think? Do you say yes or no to the nooscope? Perhaps some Dadaists will answer the call. 


Sources: 

https://nooscope.ai/

https://noosphere.princeton.edu/

https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/nooscope

https://photoatelier.org/2016/05/23/psychosphere-vs-noosphere/

https://abcnews.go.com/International/putins-chief-staff-claims-invented-nooscope-study-collective/story?id=41429546

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2016/08/15/nooscope-a54991

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37109169

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noosphere

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/psychosphere

https://journal-neo.org/2023/04/20/earths-ultimate-war-a-battle-to-control-the-noosphere/

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