According to the French social theorist Paul Virilio, we are living inside an ever expanding series of psychic, optical and auditory ‘accidents’. The spectral world of cyberspace is overlaying itself upon the world we once thought we recognized concretely. Suddenly, everything has become subjective, even reality.
Pontius Pilate once asked, “What is truth?” He meant it to illustrate his belief that “truth” was not a tangible commodity, merely an action of subjective perception. It seems his viewpoint has become the defining one for our postmodern world of sensory simulation.
As we sit inside our vast web of inter-connected “vision machines” we are manipulating and reconfiguring the world around us. What we are really manipulating fundamentally is ourselves. What is being altered, is our perception, our consciousness.
Our vision machines are becoming more powerful than we are. As both constructing AND defining tools; shaping the way we build our world and also the way we see it. They are now the governing devices of our representational reality, producing the metaphors which we live by. It follows that whoever governs these “metaphor machines” has enormous power to mould and shape the minds of men.
Our physical senses are being displaced as the primary vehicles through which we gather knowledge of the world around us. We are reaching deeper into the portals of our perception machines. Reaching out to touch them in fact. As we do so, we are dissolving into them, surrendering the sensory primacy of our eyes and ears to literally live, act, be, hear and see at a distance. Displacing the distinctions between real and the imaginary, at a very fundamental level.
What are we looking at and what are we really seeing? What is it we reaching out to touch? The real world, reconfigured as information and interface? Ourselves, reborn as data? This isn’t a solid or defined place anymore, its a sensorial recreation, remodeled and rebuilt. Its a huge dizzying collision of the spectral and the actual, where the ‘accidents’ of our reality are increasingly viewed solely through the symbolic pixelating power of our machines.
You need to be a member of Infocalypse: Saijo City to add comments!
Join this Ning Network