Subject: Quasi-identity
From: Karin Schneider (kms207@is5.nyu.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 05 2000 - 22:35:30 CST
Quasi-identity
Reading The War of Desire and Technology at the close of mechanical age I
started to reconstruct my last three years of living as an artist in a
different nation. I left my home country in 1996, Brazil, and moved to New
York. This switch made me rethink all my concepts and ideas about art,
culture, technology ,language and territory. Although I came from a
relatively privileged background, my homeland is underdeveloped and
technology was and is just for few people. I faced then a strong challenge
to be able to accommodate myself in a new hyperdeveloped society, where
technology was part of everybody's life. It was a huge change in my life and
in my body. All these changes produced on me a very complicated gap between
my mind, my thoughts and my language. My body could not understand the other
anymore as before. I found myself in a trap. The only safe and comfortable
space was sitting in front a computer and "talking" to my friends and
reading Brazilians newspaper.
The real world, for a short period of time, became more a virtual reality
than ever. I alternated both universes and the microcosms became my macro
and viceversa. The deterritorialization produced in myself a deep
displacement of time and space. My comprehension of reality imploded inside
myself and all my notions and boundaries about the body mutated. I started
to deal on daily basis with a machine. The machine was the other to me. I
started a new relationship with an instrument of technology that started to
produce on me pleasure and relief. This comfortable space opened in my mind
another world, an universe that I did not know that could be so strong and
effective. I started to incorporate a computer in my life. A precious
machine that permitted me to get in touch with fragments of my culture. The
cyberspace for a while saved myself from my pain and my lost. My body
incorporated it very fast. The computer became part of my life and part of
my body. The concrete world in that time was confusing and complicated.
Going to galleries and museums was more an educational process that ever.
New names, new work, new systems of thought, new everything. Each time I
left my house I entered in a virtual world , literally unknown to myself.
The notion of reality and virtuality shifted in my mind and body my
perception of the world of desire and technology. They got really integrated
and one can not leave anymore without the other. They are part of one body
that is part of myself. The real disintegration of my territory made me
reconstruct my body in a different speed. I realize that the speed of desire
in a modern and hiperdevelopped society follows the speed of the economy.
Money rules. Our body is not pure anymore. We are slaves to this " other",
described in the book as a prosthesis, that creates and develops a new
category of being in this cyberworld, a quasi- identity, a fluent identity
that permits oneself to be an appendices of the world of technology.
A perfect description of my experience could be transcript in a text
published at TRANS magazine, issues number 3 and 4, by Jordan Crandall,
Convertible Vehicles. "The body is ensconced behind the control board of a
vehicle, its range of movements restricted by molded parts that contour it,
trace its parameters, and subject it to highly disciplinary regiments. It
might be traveling in a convertibility, lodged behind a keyboard and
monitor. In each case small semi-automatic motions generate enormous changes
in an outside world that configures itself on the glass. The patterns and
trajectories that appear on this window are registered as motion, while the
body is suspended in a bubble - a here and now of immediate presence.
Leaving the vehicle to venture out into the exterior world beyond, it is
equipped with an array of access modes and a drive to be continually plugged
in through them. In this sense it does not really leave the vehicle but
moves from one vehicle to another in the places where they overlap. The
vehicle helps to mold the body and its behaviors, as it is molded through
its adjacency to the body and its value and utility for it."
Karin Schneider
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