The digital age has changed the notions of reality and consciousness, with profound implications for the artist and the art viewer. In contrast to the traditional dialectical separation of self vs. the universe, we now have a conscious body that blurs the distinction between these two. Reality, embedded in the temporal-spatial physical universe, has been supplanted by a digital reality that exists on high-speed networks, and where the notions of time and space are almost irrelevant (and perhaps even no longer meaningful.) The lineal, logical narrative form, which dates back to the Classical period and found its true flowering during the late Renaissance and the Industrial Age, has evolved into an always-on always-evolving universally-aware form. Our perception of the outside world has been replaced by digital interactions over the network and thus the world now often means the digital reality, a networked reality that no longer can be clearly explained as being external or internal to the individual. We call the combination of the individual plus the network the conscious body, an organism not imagined by traditional art or science, which exists partly in the traditional consciousness of the individual and partly in the enhanced network consciousness. This thesis explores the conscious body and the digital reality in which it operates, and considers the implications for the artist.

Within this new framework, we can now ask fundamentally new questions. Since, the speed of networks allows us to almost escape the limits of the physical universe, we ask: in the digital era, can we evolve beyond a conscious body? Does this new conscious body bridge gaps that have appeared between 洖igital reality and 涐magination ? I explore this and other implications of these three co-existant entities (the conscious body, the digital body, and the imagination), and discuss the new, more comprehensive externality dehors created by the conscious body living in the omnipresent and instantaneous digital universe.