Wintermute-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon, socket-head subversion... skin, interfaces, & mimetic flesh; Fanged Noumena, Digital Delirium, & Stelarc

/ Stelarc \

Fanged Noumena; Nick Land, hither>>>

Memetic flesh as a floating outlaw zone where memes fold into genes, where the delirious spectacle of cyber-culture reconfigures the future of the molecular body. In Ars California, mimetic flesh is neither future nor history, but the molecular present. Pure California Gening. . . . Neither techno-utopian nor techno-phobic, mimetic art in the streets of SF is always dirty, always rubbing memes against genes, always clicking into (our) memetic flesh.

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker eds. Digital Delirium, in Information Arts; Stephen Wilson, hither>>

My latest filmic foray into the world of WWE (formerly WWF, the wildlife guys were 

getting wild) where cold war agitprop gilded the flesh fight ; Paris 2014

The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.

How can the body function within this landscape of machines? Technology has speeded up the body. The body now attains planetary-escape velocity, has to function in zero-G and in greater time-space continuums. For me this demonstrates the biological inadequacy of the body. Given that these things have occurred, perhaps an ergonomic approach is no longer meaningful. In other words, we can't continue designing technology for the body because that technology begins to usurp and outperform the body. 

Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match it's machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it's done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There's no way of directly jacking in. Mind you, I'm not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the body.

 Technology is what defines being human. It's not an antagonistic alien sort of object, it's part of our human nature. It constructs our human nature. We shouldn't have a Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn't consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian way - that we're somehow selling our soul because we're using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is, and always has been, an appendage of the body.

CTheory interview with Stelarc, hither>>>

a simulated experience or a dream; simultaneous reality and fantasy; And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee; Ghost in the Shell l'Eve Future FN AK

The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the Ideal made eternal prisoner / l'Andréïde, avons-nous dit, n'est que les premières heures de l'Amour immobilisées, l'heure de l'Idéal à jamais faite prisonnière

This spectral vision could cloud my eyes, my senses, my soul; but could I ever forget that she is nothing personal? My self-consciousness cries out to me coldly: how does one love zero? / Vous pourrez troubler mes yeux, mes sens et mon esprit par cette magique vision: mais pourrai-je oublier, moi, qu'elle n'est qu'impersonnelle? Comment aimer zéro? me crie, froidement, ma conscience.

Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam; L'Eve Future, 1886

That's all it is: information. Even a simulated experience or a dream; simultaneous reality and fantasy. Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket.

If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems, and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory.

Who can gaze into the mirror without becoming evil? The mirror does not reflect evil, but creates it.

>> Batou x 2, Major Motoko Kusanagi / Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2 / 1995, 2004

When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.

>> Arthur Koestler / The Ghost in the Machine / 1967

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

>> Friedrich Nietzsche / Beyond Good and Evil; Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 1886

fluid neon origami trick; And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face... WG Neuromancer

`The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said
the voice-over, `in early graphics programs and military 
experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional 
space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, 
demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic 
spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab
animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control 
circuits of tanks and war planes. `Cyberspace. A consensual 
hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical 
concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system. Un-
thinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of
the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights,
receding...'
`What's that?' Molly asked, as he flipped the channel se-
lector.
`Kid's show.' A discontinuous flood of images as the se-
lector cycled. `Off,' he said to the Hosaka.
`You want to try now, Case?'
Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with
Molly beside him. `You want me to go out, Case? Maybe
easier for you, alone...' He shook his head.
`No. Stay, doesn't matter.' He settled the black terry sweat-
band across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai
dermatrodes. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing
it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed
shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the
wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there
with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.
He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking
past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures,
faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, _now --_
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
_Now --_
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler
gray. Expanding --
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the
unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent
3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the
stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission 
Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of
America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms
of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his
face.