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Last Issue: #31 The Journey
Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (1825-1905). This book is the answer to my thoughts on travel. It certainly anticipated the saga...Read more
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Loading ...Rather than being a metaphysical entity, a brain is first and foremost a local aggregate of matter, a knot of interwoven and interlinked neurons acting as pathways for chemicals and electrical charges to travel down and along.
Scientists are no longer that sure that it works on a rigidly sectional basis, even though they admit that it’s made up of highly specialised cells that make it different from any other organ of the body and even more so from one-cell organisms, such as the amoeba. That’s why it may safely be said that it’s not in human nature to be natural, as poetic and hazy as that may sound. We may instead view ourselves as functionalised machines. Cybermechanisms used by scientists to study natural languages are precisely just cyber-mechanisms. Yet it is from these that we hope to learn more about how language works, not only about how we get to use it but about language as a general system.
Some art practitioners are very skilful at revealing to what extent the artificial and the natural merge, like those who create settings that make for a sense of estrangement. “What’s happening to my sense of balance, to my ability to stand up straight?”, one wonders when isolated in Gianni Colombo’s blank, sensory deprived room with its sloping floor [ www.studiodabbeni.ch/p_espo/colombo.htm ].
There’s a feeling not unlike that of a young, heavymetal fan and crack addict. But if narcotics are so “habit forming”, it’s probably because they give the user a kick that’s not all that unlike what comes naturally thanks to substances that our own body produces.
As extreme as these examples may be, they show how misleading it is to consider nature and technology as diametrically opposed. In a way, we are ourselves high-tech devices.
What’s really important to know is, for instance, whether dying a river green as Olafur Eliasson did [ www.olafureliasson.net ] before making the big-time is hazardous to the river and what’s in it. Or whether being glued to a display for too long or being a net devotee can end up intoxicating the mind, as some competitive video-games appear to do.
An apple, after all, isn’t always as natural as it’s made out to be. Anyway, not if it comes from a grafted apple-tree whose trunk and branches have been subject to conventional orchard farming practices. In an operation of several years ago (Munster, 1997), the two Swiss art practitioners, Fischli and Weiss, set out to make a vegetable patch, showing onlookers the seed bags and chemical “tricks-of-the-trade” without which the job would have been impossible. True enough, drinking hemlock or being bitten by some poisonous animal can be fatal. But then again, so can abusing of the drugs that Damien Hirst [ www.damienhirst.com ] displays in chock-a-block full show-cases, packed almost to overflowing in obsessively neat order.
“Biology’s biology and technology’s technology and never the twain shall meet” is a rash and indeed obtuse attitude. What’s needed is a new covenant between technology and humankind. After all, the latter’s the source of the former. Once again they’ve got to be made to go it together, just like when humans coaxed the cherry-tree to turn out plump black cherries. Let’s face it, whose really ever eaten a cherry from an ungrafted cherry tree?
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