flesh eating technologies

7/28/2019 Flesh Eating Technologies

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Flesh Eating Technologies

An analysis by Prof. Ruben Guzman in collaboration with The Banff Centre for t

Arts, for the Canadian publication Semiotexte

Flesh Eats Technology

From now on, man will be able to eat technology.

Stelarc

Or not. Since the time Robotics was developed after the Industrial Revolution

increase production (eating entire populations, not just their flesh), many

thinkers and artists have come to varied conclusions on the assimilation of

technology.

Going beyond with technology

Your (painted)waterfalls make too much noise. I can no longer sleep!

Emperor Suang Sung to the painter Li Chin Chi

Undoubtedly, one of our major aims, so it seems, is to reach beyond. To get

there where our limited bodies cannot reach. Hot-air balloons, planes, the V2

Voyagers, or telematic media...

Perhaps, it has to do with our itchy anxiety. Anxiety has caused us many

problems: just take a look at our recent history. Boredom and its related

partner, contemplation, seems to hold negative connotations in the western

world. Around the 4th century, A.D., Cassanius stated one simple rule to comba

boredom, still in use by entertainment experts today: we must distract

distraction by means of distraction. Can we afford the time to experience

Benjamins photographic unconscious, Barthes Punctums , a Chinese Penjing1 ,

Suan Sung waterfalls? Blaise Pascal in his Penses states that all the evil

men comes from one thing and one thing alone: their inability to remain at re

in a room. No time, no contemplate, no think.

Maybe it is just that we do feel contempt for what is within our reach in our

daily lives. Perhaps we simply do not have a clue on what THIS is all about.

getting further a way of exploring new thing and/or a way of eroding our

physical and natural boundaries? It seems irrelevant to understand the place

from where we decide to project ourselves. At any rate, we must go beyond. Now

The close equivalent to a Japanese Bonsai


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one question necessarily arises: WHO gets to go beyond and WHO does not, and

therefore lags behind? Here is our first Darwin.

Going beyond has been closely related to ways of colonialism, and still is

interesting related exercise could be that of comparing colonizing with eating

or devouring). Economical concerns and their related schemes of power havealways set the rules of the game. Under the current status of Guattaris IWC

(Integrated World Capitalism), people in the North will advance further than

those in the South, generally speaking. When the Northerners get there, howeve

they wont send us a single postcard.

Telematic media

All media are extensions of some human facultypsychic or physical.

Marshall McLuhan

Weve been a long way, though. We have annihilated time and space. Rudolph

Arnheim arrived to this conclusion when analyzing the effects of television..

back in 1935. Now, how should we live in this time and spaceless world, still

geared with the old tools and with the same power structures?

The fact is that media act as switches between the outside world and our

conscience. How much of what we decide to consume is already designed for us b

someone else in this scheme of power? From this scheme derives, for instance,

the content of the information. This information should be able to support the

status quo from which it originates, therefore reiterative, unquestioning and

uneducating. This starts sounding Darwinian again. But indeed, there is a lot

Darwinism in media analysis, from perceptual to production selection.

Flesh Adding Technologies

Electric circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system.

Marshall McLuhan

In fact, McLuhan envisioned all media as extensions of man. For over a century

stimuli to our senses have been telematically reconstructed and simulated. In

way, we have projected our senses to the distance, to the beyond.

According to Norbert Bolz, all new media do not belong to the external world.

fact, they constitute a schematic representation of our own internal

orientation. Perhaps it is more relevant to think of Flesh Adding Technologie

since it could be seen as an added limb or annexation to our bodies. An addit


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usually justified by our sensorial appetite.

However, our sensorial organs do not coincide with the so called social organ

although social organs can induce our own sensorial needs. So far, history ha

been written by the forming social organs and their own needs, far beyond

sensorial and concerns. Thus arises a valid question: whose limbs are weappending to our bodies?

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