Alan Sondheim on Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:10:34 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> The Wrong Direction & The Right Direction |
The Wrong Direction & The Right Direction We've taken the wrong direction. This is the big illumination today. We're doing it all wrong. Dance, jazz, improvisation, sports - just about any- thing requiring the body - is already outdated, useless. Why choreograph when prosthetic bodies twist with infinite possibility? Why improvise when programming can set instrumentation to any degree of facility? Tuning a physical instrument is exhausting, useless; it's never sufficiently accu- rate. Spending hours in the dance-studio - ultimately for the purpose of spectacle - is meaningless, when sufficiently detailed avatars can enact anything whatsoever. Theatrically, cinematically, the same is true: an avatar can move untowardly, can memorize thousands of pages of script, hits the mark every time, requires no nourishment or pandering. I'm seri- ous - my life has taken a wrong turn, too much physical labor. All that does is kill you, wears the muscle out. On the other hand, programming clearly increases the longevity of brain power. Wait, I'm not done. Today you can program mistakes as well, make things more human than human. If I sit here as I do and work on intonation with one or another instrument, I'm clearly wasting my time. If Foofwa repeatedly stretches his body to the limit, hour after hour, he's participating in a vanishing art - no wonder dance is in a crisis, splitting into ballet on one hand, obscenity on the other! And Azure's singing? Why bother, when there's an app for that? The realization is as follows: we should be living a world of fantasy, not indulging in blood, sweat and tears. Without wanting to appear callous, I'll just say it - that's for the other fellow. If our virtual prosthetics twist as we desire, the other fellow has extracted the materials holding the software in a physical bubble projecting our good lookings for anyone to see, hear, taste, touch, smell. We've buried the physical in the physi- cal, and that's how it should be. The future moves from wires to optics to the air itself; we keep track of the few and fetishized physical elements with embedded technologies of all sorts. We didn't have to build these of course - they just arrived. Now I know what you're thinking - this is the same old story of labor below, beauty above (isn't that the case with the human body?), but it's augmented, prosthetically, by market and creative forces driving human aspirations for anyone who can afford a computer. And certainly for those of us still physically laboring, ourselves, at impos- sible and incomprehensible perfection - we should move into the 21st century, embrace nothingness, enter realms of pure imagination - in other words, survive in the real, play in the imaginary. The digital-eternal always keeps dirt, decay, and even technological obsolescence away from inherent beauty. (Obsolescence, in fact, is only a matter of reconfigura- tion.) We'll still eat (for a while) and excrete (for a while); we'll still breath (for a while). But these are no longer determinative as they once were, and for all we know, we might already be cycling through vaults of pure virtuality, locked into the appearance of infinity, of our own free will, and once upon a time. Let it go! Foofwa, Azure, myself and many others, are giving up the practice and praxis of body; we're about to embark on a journey that would have been inconceivable, were it not for the analogic and digital labor of countless others. We'll send messages and images back, works of art far in advance of anything you might imag- ine, and we'll charge nothing. For we're always present elsewhere by virtue of the virtual, and require very little for the apparent embodi- ments of a thought so pure that it dare not be named. Look upon our works and be astonished; join us and forget the trivia of species already lost to the planet; search out destinies that have always been intended; and meet our makers in ourselves. The physical was never there in the first place; now we've voluntarily given up even the thought of it. We live in an infinite universe, creating and joining the universal Mind. Our gods are with us, you shall hear from us again. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org