living information real life

Living InformationMedia & Information10 Real Life

three options

① war against the machines

② give in to mediated reality

③ we become media

three options

① war against the machines

② give in to mediated reality

③ we become media

“The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants”

Samuel Butler in 1863

[living information means] “a person will no longer be a worker (homo faber) but rather an information processor, a player with information (homo ludens).”

Vilém Flusser (1920-1991)

three options

① war against the machines

② give in to mediated reality

③ we become media

INTERVIEWER Why do you feel that Truman’s never come

close to discovering the true nature of his world?

CHRISTOF We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

“It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of Empire, but of ours. The desert of the real itself.”

“...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1946)

Jean Baudrillard’s critique of The Matrix:

“its classical, Platonic treatment”

“The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.”

“simulation is no longer that of a

territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a

real without origin or reality: a hyperreal”

a Matrix-based reality cannot be fundamentally altered, as even Neo ultimately turns out to be just another inevitable part of the program.

so what can you do in a reality

that cannot be changed by

references to that reality?

Baudrillard’s answer: “theoretical violence, not truth, is the only

resource left to us”

three options

① war against the machines

② give in to mediated reality

③ we become media

artefacts

activities

using/making media

identity

belonging/community

feeling/passion

arrangements

1839

1816

“Technology is not the nameless other. Technology 'R' Us: to embrace technology is to embrace, and face, ourselves. This we must do, and fearlessly”

David Cronenberg in 1997