Page 17 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014digital space. It is a reflection, an inevitable duplication. Pretending that it is not there is like trying not to leave a footprint in the sand when walking on a beach. In the digital world the grains of sand are ones and zeros and any action of ours leaves a trail. In the same way that looking at the prints on the sand of a beach tells you something about the person who left them. This one was an athlete who has run the length of the beach; this one stayed stretched out and hardly moved; this one went swimming a lot; this one met up with other people, and so on. The prints we are constantly leaving in the sand of ones and zeros are what trace our image in the mirror. It is a phenomenon that will continue increasingly, and the mirror image will become sharp. This is the result of the evolution of the digital world itself because it is not possible for it to continue growing as a megalopolis without its districts becoming delimited at the same time; that is to say, those environments to where each people again see things and are themselves recognised. In this way the immense space becomes tailor made for people, it becomes an environment, it presents itself according to their needs and within their reach.If we recognise ourselves on the other side of the mirror and other people consequently identify us, simulation will emerge as in any other social relationship on this side of the mirror where we are. A feeling of presence will arise—it can be felt already—in the virtual world, based on our image being there and things happening now in an expanded now. The ephemeral nature of the Net, the tendency towards orality in the digital world, make time seem like an expanded now, that is to say, something that is happening there, where our image also is, but which reverberates in digital space for as long as it is repeated, reconveyed, recombined.NATURAL VS. ARTIFICIALWe are homo faber, but we struggle to accept what we make. We are indefatigable builders of artefacts and with them (or because of them?) we evolve and they become indispensable because, without them we would find ourselves defencelessly naked.AC/ENevertheless, the artificial—that which leaves our hands connected to our brains, the result of something so human as imagination and abstraction, communication and memory (personal and collective memory, in other words, culture), without which it would not be possible to make even a biface hand axe—does not receive the appreciation it deserves. We continue with the myth of the return to Paradise, of believing that nakedness, the shedding of everything artificial, will lead us to a better state. We understand that the artificial is only a burden on the road to expulsion, but that, by nature we should be free of this artificial baggage. When another artefact arrives in our lives we look at it with suspicion, if not with contempt, as another intrusion that deprives us of another slice of our humanity.Digital prostheses bond the virtual world to the real one, it is not a question of limiting their access to cultural ve‐ nues, but of providing them with a good environmentSuch convictionsleave their markeven on ourexpressions, andsoitisthatwesay thatsomething orsomeone isnatural, and we do so to emphasise a positive value, such as simplicity, the purity of things, sincerity, empathy with people. We value natural food. And we even construct arguments of moral rejection claiming that this behaviour or other is contrary to nature.The artificial, however, is to culture as the body is to genes. Genes travel in time and space protected in constructions with proteins which are the bodies— countless machines in continuous evolution, innovation and obsolescence, of all shapes, the fruit of infinite trials—within which the genes live. Culture has a similarly close relationship with artefacts; they are its bodies made, not of proteins, but of stone, metal, plastic and so forth. All cultures produce their bodies, that is to say, their artefacts, and they are inseparable from each of them. And if human beings have always maintained this opposition, the source of religions, between spirit and body, and the hope that the spirit be liberated from the bonds of theWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 1: TENSIONS AND TRENDS IN DIGITAL CULTURE CURRENT PAGE...17