Subject: here it is!
From: Samantha Longoni (samlong@club-internet.fr)
Date: Mon Jan 24 2000 - 04:21:53 CST
Energy Events
Technology and Body
Action and re-action, passage and shift, desires and subtleties.
Following a previous research done on the value of the body in Cyberspace, the objective was to define what and how we are when interacting with digital technologies and precisely with the world of cyberspace.
I considered (digital) technologies to be "events of technology", as phenomenon, modes of existence, "being-in-the-world" and ultimately this translated in "events of men". Technology not as a tool, not computers nor screens but functions created with us and through us: this is precisely why we can speak of symbiosis man-machine as one world.
Within this frame I tried to understand how we come alive in an environment like cyberspace introducing discussions on memory, monads, topology and alter ego.
Expanding to more scientific realms, I realise now how much we should try to push our personal, physical and intellectual boundaries in more practical terms. I realise now the misjudgement made with my previous thesis work; I misjudged the real potentials of so called digital technologies.
My misjudgement reflected itself in a closure of the frame/Gestell of cyberspace, considering it an environment where we still should have had the necessity of "emplacement" in its classical terms.
Cyberspace is not and should not be lived as a "container" but as a "happening" (as in pre-gestell) where everything is everything but in its temporary form, as digits, quanta, quanta of action, where spatial relativity follows its own laws of nature being space and time connected.
Following Quantum Field Theory all possible movements can take place at the same time and together represent the totality of the movement, therefore the totality of its energy. By its own naturality in Cyberspace everything can happen at the same time, being a network where everything is involved with everything else, incessantly moving and evolving. (Monads, Compounds, Rhizomes.)
The "container effect" is therefore eliminated and the space and time in a conventional way leaves its relevance to the space and time between two events: "time span". The "time span" between "man - machine", "machine - machine", "person 1 - person 2" is the applicable mode where every event, every presence, every being has its own "time span", constituting thus the substratum of cyberspace.
Cyberspace is now what Foucault defined an Heteroutopia, as an "excess of realisation". Cyberspace not as an arrest, not a closure, but an action, not controlled but happening.
Technology, including the one of our body (example sight), has always been used as a Gestell, to pin point, to see, place, understand, capture, to arrest in us, in our minds "for ever". Why not try to apply technology by seeing it as a creator of a model of de-framing, as a creation of a fiction in Nietzsche's terms (creation-destruction-recreation, as in logging-in and logging-out), not as a fake but as production. This could be the moment when the "language" of digital technologies, as in programming languages, could break the metaphysical dualism of "our" language, producing actions and possibilities.
What I am trying to define here is a technology as an event, as an Energy Event, an interaction, and an exchange of particles that would "make-up" the material world. Matter and Energy coming together, a relationship that comes to life uniquely with our perception.
The leap?
We as bodies are technology, we represent a "state of being" in Physics terms, and therefore we are quanta. Everything in our body thinks, interprets, relates: cells, organs... We are interface, a metabolism as in meta-bolism such as converters of the finest and sensible kinds. We com-vert matter into energy and energy into matter through our perception. Perception is what allows precisely the rupture of the dualism between body and mind.
This allows naturally for new events to come alive, events as "souls", events as states and as vector spaces where bodies are vectors themselves, bodies are space and ultimately tendencies, potentialities, eternally active in the renovation and expression of itself.
The more we allow ourselves and the function of technology to be "un-gestell", not-closed, the more we allow the beauty of infinity and the infinite pleasure of interpretability, activity, potency, virtuality, potentiality, excess.
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