Folding the future
"Science fiction and its relatives have been a main artery for recasting our imagination." (Walter Mosley)
Reality in the cybernetic era is not simply understood in terms of the technosphere, bequeathing our heritage to technical machines in species war's and silicon mind uploads. This is only a part of it. Wiener, the so called Father of cybernetics, was terrified of the terrain he had tapped in to. He truly understood that the immanence information flows across and amongst the living, the nonliving, the human, the alien, will put an end to the barricades put in place by the Human Security System (HSS).
Reality in the cybernetic age is truly 'virtual' but not in the sense that Baudrillard etc. understand the simulation, there isn't a melancholic edge in sight, and, this is nothing new. Reality is always accessed in terms of both the virtual and the actual, the intensive, and the extensive, with no break between them, just a Baroque infinite folding. The virtual might be a kind of simulation zone, a zone of potential, of very blurred edges in curved space-time, but it is a real-simulation.
Fiction engages with the tendencies of this virtual-actual circuit, attempting to break open the virtual architecture of reality, and open up the Bergsonian potential of matter. Cyberpunk, ribofunk, nanopunk. Fiction and film can extract tendencies of the present and simulate them into a near future immersive world in a rewind circuitry which reengineers the present. This is proleptic thought, recasting our imaginations outside of integrated thought and mechanistic linear time frames. Repotentialisation of the present.
Reality in the cybernetic era is not simply understood in terms of the technosphere, bequeathing our heritage to technical machines in species war's and silicon mind uploads. This is only a part of it. Wiener, the so called Father of cybernetics, was terrified of the terrain he had tapped in to. He truly understood that the immanence information flows across and amongst the living, the nonliving, the human, the alien, will put an end to the barricades put in place by the Human Security System (HSS).
Reality in the cybernetic age is truly 'virtual' but not in the sense that Baudrillard etc. understand the simulation, there isn't a melancholic edge in sight, and, this is nothing new. Reality is always accessed in terms of both the virtual and the actual, the intensive, and the extensive, with no break between them, just a Baroque infinite folding. The virtual might be a kind of simulation zone, a zone of potential, of very blurred edges in curved space-time, but it is a real-simulation.
Fiction engages with the tendencies of this virtual-actual circuit, attempting to break open the virtual architecture of reality, and open up the Bergsonian potential of matter. Cyberpunk, ribofunk, nanopunk. Fiction and film can extract tendencies of the present and simulate them into a near future immersive world in a rewind circuitry which reengineers the present. This is proleptic thought, recasting our imaginations outside of integrated thought and mechanistic linear time frames. Repotentialisation of the present.
Had you considered a career in advertising?
[ Bartle Bogle Hegarty 04/09/2005 02:59:20 :: web]
Hi, thanks for the comment,
I don't know if you're serious or not, but i would be very interested to talk with you further. Drop me an email - i keep getting failure messages when i try to mail you.
thanks,
james.
I don't know if you're serious or not, but i would be very interested to talk with you further. Drop me an email - i keep getting failure messages when i try to mail you.
thanks,
james.
[ James 05/09/2005 17:34:12 :: web]
Care to comment? 
