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through which is achieved coordinated activity among a group of individuals. From the earliest religious activities, art has been intimately linked with the expression of mystical states and the marriage of spirit and social behavior. We suggest that art shows us the path that relates the theology that forms the framework of policy with the trust that derives of ecstasy in the ultimate revelation of our inner selves. If computers allow us to mesh in the digital world of policy effectuation, can computers be so foreign to our real identity that our theology would stop at the edge of society, and not, in any way, reflect through them some image of higher religious states?

Art and religion at many times and in many aspects are virtually indistinguishable. This holds true for art in its various guises and is just as applicable to religion in its many forms. It is in the artistic impressions from antiquity to the present that we find much of the foundation for the future evolution of personal electronic devices. Religious significance is fairly easy to come by in museums filled with artistic endeavors. It is also found in the parietal art of cave paintings and perhaps even in the modern renditions of Campbell Soup cans. Consider some examples.

The Louvre Museum’s Mesopotamia section presents the bullae of the fourth millennium B.C. They were first simple clay receptacles, the size of an egg with tokens inside, illustrating the number of, say, sheep to be brought to market. The herdsman would receive the bulla from his master and would bring the herd to destination, giving the clay pot to the buyer who could check that the sheep have all arrived. As time passed by and counterfeiting became a recurring threat, bullae became beautiful objects patterned with intricately decorated seals that were the holograms of the time. Such patterns were difficult to replicate and thus were a deterrent to fraud, but the counterfeiters eventually overcame this obstacle. When gods were finally represented on the bullae to insure that nobody would dare to duplicate the seals lest they would endure divine punition, the bulla had ascended to become the conveyor of commerce, a summit of ancient art and the religion endowed carrier of the policies of the time. Naturally, such mechanisms would offer little impediment to non-believers.

In part through various artistic media, human beings have evolved ever more powerful means of communication that have yet to find a match in the computer world. They are an affectation of policy through subtle means rooted in the ecstasy of the mind that we do not yet know how to describe, let alone implement within computer systems; but we can start. We ascribe substance to these mechanisms through the art and art forms that parallel mankind’s ascendancy among species that function as individuals within a collective. The problem is one of context-sensitive conveyance of policy; of policy specification as applied to a given set of participants, at a given time, in a given place and with an agreed upon purpose.

In the XVIII^th Century, an ukiyoe print from the shogunate era of Japan (the XVII^th – XIX^th Centuries) entitled The Cat’s Claw expressed for us the power of such communication in one picture. The print is by Utagawa Kuniyoshi and is representative of an age of repression on the forms of art. To defy authorities, Kuniyoshi painted in a form of graffiti that diminished the appearance of his message of theatrical exchange while keeping its content intact. (We are indebted to Maki Hirotani, a student of Japanese cultural periods whom we had the pleasure to encounter when researching this print, for helping us seek references. Any error of interpretation, naturally, is ours.)

This meaning within a meaning relevance of art permeates many, if not all of our endeavors. Consider the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Here was a XVI^th Century painter at the court of Rudolf II (of the Hapsburg dynasty) who painted in vegetables. A number of his paintings hang in the Louvre. From a distance, they appear to be portraits of the patrons of the time. On closer

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