Page 18 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014body, in the same way they see their nature suffocated by the artificial, which they produce.The passage of time is the way by which something artificial acquires the category of something natural, just as immigrants or their descendants can, with time, be regarded as natives of a country. We forget the artificial origin of something that forms part of our lives so that it seems natural. We speak of natural food, without chemical fertilisers, preservatives and nontransgenic produce when agriculture itself is the artificial intervention of humans in nature, but one that took place thousands of years ago. It seems natural to us to read from a book, but we have struggled to accept that reading from an electronic screen is too. In a technological culture, with inflationary innovation, the artificial avalanche heightens the sensation of unease and disorientation.In spite of everything, the dissolving of the border between the natural and the artificial is speeding up on account of the ebb and flow produced in the human being. There is a continuous extraversion of our nature in artificial creations. It is a tide that has been taking anatomical functions away from us such as punching with the fist, scraping with the nails, piercing with the teeth, ever since we made a biface hand axe, a scraper or a punch. We have passed over to machines the expenditure of energy required to accomplish tasks which previously consumed our calories. And we have passed on our skills to robots, from the mechanical loom to the industrial robot. Memory we have passed from the written word to the Net and we are trying to give computers intelligence and feelings. In the opposite direction the artificial enters the realm of the natural, the body, in the form, and this throughout the ages and in all cultures, of tattoo ink and also piercings, prostheses, implants, transplants, chemicals in medicines, stem cells. So we have a homo extraversus and a homo proteticus.Homo proteticusThe evolution in computing has been, and continues to be, astonishing. Just seventy years separate theAC/Esmartphone from Colossus and the ENIAC. A whole room to house a calculating machine and the palm of a hand to hold a digital Aleph. And that is where we come from, via a breathtaking cultural and technological evolution. Implosive miniaturisation (a quotient between features and volume), ergonomics, consistency (the absence of special maintenance), the cost of acquisition, all these confer the invisibility and adherence of a prosthesis. The digital world, the virtual, specular world, is already a prosthesis. The cultural consequences are obvious, and this is just the beginning.We have been asking here how the representation of a digital world as an all encompassing mirror of our reality would make itself manifest. With the concept of prosthesis that question is resolved. The tablet, the smartphone or the phablet, or folding screens, spectacles, bracelets and other forms of prosthetic device mean that the two worlds, the virtual and the real, have the contiguity of the two sides of the mirror and that the view from one to the other vibrates constantly. We look at the world on this side of the mirror, and do so without interruption on the other side, and then back again to this side, and so on continuously resonating. A duality is thereby established in these prosthetic beings that must be borne in mind when arranging and showing the material world, and also with regard to prohibitions. Following former criteria of preservation, how can limiting access to cultural venues or places for these prosthetic beings be accepted? How can an environment be provided for these beings who are equipped with this ability for perception, this ability to interact, this duality so that they do not feel as if it is a fossilised stage, something alien and strange, and take refuge on the other side of the mirror?Explosion: the digital world that is emerging is an impressive display of the extraversion of the natural capacities of human beings in an artificial world and of its ensuing amplifications. Implosion: and at the same time a contraction of this world to the point of becoming a prosthesis.WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 1: TENSIONS AND TRENDS IN DIGITAL CULTURE CURRENT PAGE...18