Camila Sposati, Lovesick 2001

Veronica Diesen — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:58:51 +0000

“Electronic Eros”, -Bodies and desire in the postindustrial age.

Veronica Diesen — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:41:14 +0000

In her book “Electronic Eros”, Springer explains how artistic renderings of technology since the early twentieth century often have expressed techno-erotic impulses. One movement that did this to an extreme degree was the Italian futurism that fetishised and embraced any type of technological achievement.
According to Springer, an object of erotic attraction, electronic technology is of a different order from the industrial technology exemplified by the car.” (ibid. page 5)
“John Tierney writes, “Sometimes the erotic has been a forcer driving technological innovation; virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium.” His analysis illustrates that the histories of technology and the erotic are closely linked.” (ibid.page 9)
Posthuman life and the idea of human obsolescence.

The desire to simulate human life is deeply rooted in Western culture. Take for instance the story about Golem, a jewish tale from sixteenth century Prague, or some of the ancient Greek myths or Mary Shelleys “Frankenstein.”
And furthermore as Springer writes; “the male desire to construct an ideal woman by artificial means dates back at least to the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea,” (ibid.page 29)
There is also the male desire and belief in a total immersion of mind and machine as Moravec desires. He”envisions a way to make Descartes’s metaphor of the mind divorced from the body literal by taking the human mind out of the brain, He describes how someday it will be possible for human mental functions to be surgically extracted from the human brain and transferred to computer software in a process he calls “transmigration”. (ibid.page 29)
(…) “The Cartesian opposition between reason and emotion is furthermore apparent in many of pop culture’s cyborg texts, typically equating machines with reason and humans with emotions in conventional fashion (See for instance the terminator movies and robocop).
The cyberpunk-literature which began in the early 1980′s does also to a certain extent revolve around a Cartesian separation of mind and body.” (see William Gibson particularly)

Donna Haraway is a writer that has been particularly sceptical to the belief in the objective male scientist or what she defines as the Silent Witness. In “Manifesto for Cyborgs” she describes how a ” a human-centred universe rests on a system of dualities: real/artificial, natural/cultural, male/female, young/old, analytical/emotional, past/present, and alive/dead as well as human/technological. However, when the boundary between human and artificial collapses, all of the other dualities also dissolve, and their two parts become indistinguishable, displacing humans from the unique and the privileged position they maintained in Enlightenment philosophy.” (ibid.page 34)
According to Springer, “Cyberpunk renders uncertain any basis for an authentic human identity. Technology allows cyberpunk characters to alter themselves in any way they choose, abandoning any semblance of their original identities. (..) Their identities, moreover, are often technological constructs without origin in human consciousness.” (ibid. page 34)

The war of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age.

Veronica Diesen — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:24:38 +0000

In the book, “The war of Desire and technology at the Close of the Mechanical age”, Rosanna Stone criticizes the simplistic understanding of the word ‘interaction’. A very common way to perceive of the human-computer interaction, is the idea that all human activity can be usefully interpreted as a kind of work. Rosanna Stone criticizes this notion in that she would rather put a stronger emphasis on the notion of play in relation to work. Or as she writes; “Play revolves around the idea of purposive activities that do not appear to be directly goal oriented. ” (ibid.page 9).
According to Rosanna Stone, interaction is not as simple as the on-off situation, that is to say, triggered by the click of the mouse. Rather, interaction implies conversation, a complex back-and-fourth exchange. Cyberspace should as such not be perceived as just a mere, dual interaction between man and machine, but should rather be conceived as a social environment which fosters a complex interaction between human and machines.

Who do you love

Camila Sposati, Lovesick 2001

“Electronic Eros”, -Bodies and desire in the postindustrial age.

The war of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age.