[...]
3- genetic turning point in the post-nuclear era --> cybernetic teratology: effects of toxicity and environmental pollution ==> new monsters [--> Tsing]
experience of the world of high-technology
artifacts of visual culture, (TV advertisements) dealing with the tropes of the primitive, technology, horror:
(these artifacts connote دلالت ضمنى long histories of techno-mytho-political dramas)
•Audi spider; where Audi is likened to a preditor, ensnaring, devouring its rivals; Vorsprung durch Technik written in gothic-style jagged, suspended cobwebs {<-- Ridley Scott's alien's technology as dirty; a lair swathed in a thick cobweb-like substance --> *technology as life* <== the dirt and dampness of *dirty technology* suggest an animate, sweating, breathing life-force [~ an aesthetic]} --> horror <== damp dark leaking space containing moulding cocoons of spider --Campbell--> motivation, goals or logic of this life form cannot be recovered within the economy of the human (=/= clean cold untouched technological artefact)
◦***technology covered in its own dirt --implies--> life --implies--> disorganization --implies--> disintegration of borders between ‘us’ (bounded) and ‘them’ (unbounded) --implies--> loss of control
◦ajayeb-e spider // links the world (of primitive + high-technology), its metamorphosis into automobile ==> its multiple and contradictory genealogy; sight of spider --Freud--> induce crisis of neurotic anxiety (arguing that this fear comes from an unconscious association of the spider with the image of the phallic mother and the web --> threatens to engulf us --> mpnstrous feminine, Ridley Scott's alien = technologized embodiment of the phallic mother)
◾ancient activity of weaving [computer emerges out of the history of weaving; the first computers were based on the logic of the loom, quintessence of women's work (Plant, Babbage, Campbell)] --> *contemporary technoculture is an era of insectophilia* (love of insects and arachnids, spiders ants bees worms etc.)<== these insects embody the logic of high-technology which values decenterdness, microprocessing, and swarm intelligence. colonies, swarms, teems ==acts==> *metaphor & epistemology & ontology* to understand decenterdness, rhizomaticity, distribution and microprocessing ==> *insect aesthetic* [#use the term collapse as marketing storytelling, divided entities now mixed with eachother to induce mixed feelings in the audience --> chimera in advertisement]
◽matrix, from the latin ‘mater' = womb, the term matrix possessing the potential to nurture & to trap (---> go to Matrix film series)
◽Arachne: a younge woman, was so skilful at weaving that she was rash enough to challenge the goddess Athene to a contest. she was transformed into a spider and was doomed to weave forever
•Nike mutant foot; to convey the feeling that running with these shoes is like running in bare feet (--> chimera?); the mutant foot evokes a worn and labored transition from human to posthuman which leaves behind traces of pain; ‘foot of the future’ contains within it the supplement of its embodied visceral human existence, a potent reminder of the human within the posthuman. Nike mutant foot *suffers from origin horror* (= no secure telos of origin which can link back to a primary source of either technology or organicism) we cannot trace it back to an originary ideal category of existence ==> it horrifies
•Nissan pathfinder; shape-shifting technology, moves between the animal and technical --> *automobile metamorphoses without any trace of its metamorphosis* (it bears no marks, scatches, dents, damage); mighty industrialized rendering (transformers film series) --> (an X-Men fantasy:) a future world of *ontological mobility* : entities are not fixed, their morphing into other entities is not painful, but a natural instantaneous reaction to their environment [=/= ajayeb]
•BBC digital faces; a giant disembodied head that roams across hilly countryside ~ *an affront to a humanist sensibility of integral bounded being*; filled with tiny selves --> genealogy of monstrous and mythical forms (Matrix 3rd episode the machine face) --> *visualization of the idea that the self possesses no central consciousness* [<-- posthuman: all mental thought, all consciousness and spirit, can be attributed to the operation of micro-material processes distributed in autopoitic (~ self-creating) body] /ERG website
metamorphing
critique of becoming (of consumer)
Cartesian (human logic of a world of fixed entities) =/= posthumanism (polymorphic unfixity, articulating a logic of identity as decentered and in the state of transition)
mutating =/= morphing (universally regarded as positive, apolitical <-- in poststructural theory)--> imagined technological posthumanism which cruises effortlessly and seamlessly through ontologies [like T1000 in Terminator]
digital morphing is a common production device in contemporary visual culture (transformers, X-Men <-- to resist that in our web designs)
morphing =/= ontological fixity
•how technology does not oppose nature, but stimulate it (Nissan pathfinder)
•how the morph causes a radical splintering of consciousness (BBC digital faces)
•how morph is the a visualization not of being, but of becoming
--> *flow, universally coded as positive* (sensibility of process and flux considered liberatory)
--> a logic of quick-change (embedded in entertainment and computer industries)
high-technology embodiments:
•cyborg
•foetus
•ecosystem
•database
•genome
•cellular automata
•insects
•
morphing =/= mutating: the visceral, painful, embodied experience that results from ontological boundary clashes
mutating into otherness =/= morphing into otherness
(pain of the flow -->) ***mutation is a concept that stops the flow***
(utopian:) technological imaginary portraying a simple and painless ascent into a silicon existence
chimera: (a term biotechnological discourse uses to refer to) the evolution of elements that do not belong together
[in greek mythology, a savage beast part lion part goat part snake =/= natural order]
•(Iron Man's definition of) technology: an instrument which accords the human with a gradual ascend towards increasing civilization, linear progress and power over her or his environment
•(Black Mirror's definition of) technology: paradoxical scene, a primal instinctual force
(my ajayeb =/=) technological primitivism: (aesthetic that is produced by) the ways “primitive” icons are used in discourses of high technology
technological merges into the mythological
ancient merges with the modern
•eXistenZ film 1999, a high-tech-primitive blend of amphibian eggs and synthetic DNA
portrayal of a symbolically resonant ancient life-source + form of a technical life-source
(Campbell suggesting) atavism: how supposedly primitive evolutionary traits which had disappeared generations ago reappear in contemporary human or animal life
-traits of a former time but still exist in the present
*proto-atavism: (exhibiting of) future evolutionary traits in the present ==> collapsing the quality of linear time [~=? my sleep-walking] (=/= human approaching a state of technological perfection through an orderly ascent of increasing complexity and sophistication)
--> technological progress = nonlinear, punctuated, multiple [<-- used in marketing today]
proto-atavism --argument--> that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life ==Campbell==> (how) *human life: a cacophony of co-existing interacting states of past present future existences with no recourse to a single reassuring origin* (=/= singular progression)
(like animal rumors in old bestiaries ajayeb in a story-starated world) found telegram videos and internet pic used in my image assemblages --> (found images which make it difficult to trace their lineage) in an image-starated world ==construct==> ambivalent visual representations that do not have a signifier in an external “real” world (Baudrillard's rhetoric simulacrum: an object that is a copy of something which does not “exist”)
==Toffoletti==> potentiality: exceeding the bounds of description
(we are living in an) age of **technosubjectivity**
(Margulis theorizes) the symbolic basis of eukaryotic cells
(Dawkins posits) the existence of selfish genes and the extended phenotype
*system theory: human life subsumed radically into an all-encompassing concept of system, of[...]