Dawning awareness.

Dawning awareness was the culmination of a series of works by simulative artist Paul Mbeki. Roundly rejected as immoral by critics at the time, it was instrumental in starting the debate that led to the transhuman rights movement of the late 70s.

The simulative art movement was founded in the early 20s by Ashley Jones, and began as a rebellion against neostuckism. Drawing inspiration from the conceptual artists of the 20th century, Jones declared in her manifesto that 'the truth of art is found in the contemplative, rather than the physical, encounter with the work'. This philosophy was exemplified by her first major work, A genuine Thomson (£30,000), consisting of the text

Thomson's painting shows Serota, the director of the Tate gallery. He is smiling behind a large pair of red knickers on a washing line, saying "is it a genuine Emin (£10,000)" and thinking, "or a worthless fake?"

stored on the clipboard of an iLet.

Paul Mbeki's early work was marked by use of HelpMate software, and by a gentle exploration of the boundaries of art. He became notorious for Applaudee, for which he assigned a HelpMate clone the task of observing and aesthetically critiqueing the data from his SenseCam. After a year, he signed the wall of a toilet, then disconnected the clone.

In the 50s, Mbeki's work became increasingly self-referential, and he began to work with the software of the Computational Neuroscience Group at the University of Capetown. The CNG was only able to produce rudimentary blue brains at this stage. In fact, these full-brain simulations were still being run on the descendents of the Blue Gene supercomputer for which they are named. At this point, the blues were running at a speed of just 2% natural, and the CNG were just beginning their crucial research on cognitive phase transitions.

In 2058, Mbeki produced the first of a series of pieces, each consisting of the data capturing a blue during a single timeslice of a cognitive phase transition. At this time the CNG was making rapid progress, and though the holographic techniques used to instil detailed memory-scapes in blues were first conceived in 2059, Mbeki was unable to use them successfully in any but the final work in the series: Dawning awareness, created in 2061.

Mbeki chose a memory-scape representative of an early 21st century democratic capitalist freeloader, and instilled it into a blue. He chose a realistic, if simple, artificial environment, including a personal computer displaying some text via a visual interface. The text was a review of Dawning awareness itself, sketching some of the historical background and context and including a brief description of the piece. The self-referential nature of the text slowly became sufficiently transparent for the blue to realise that it was the simulation being described. The timeslice Mbeki chose as the work itself was representative of the cognitive phase transition involved in this realisation. Though Mbeki controversially originally claimed that, acting out of mercy, he had not allowed the simulation to develop beyond this chosen timeslice, it later emerged that he had allowed it to run for several more seconds of simulated time before disconnecting it.