Monday, October 11, 2010
Parallel After the Corner
“Even your death is unnecessary in a traditional sense.”
Tilda Swinton tells Tom Cruise’s David Ames in Vanilla Sky. The ability to purchase your future subconscious while in the process of freezing the present moment.
As the future quickly approaches our current moment, or perhaps, as our current moment approaches the future. We seem to attract, invent and integrate the ability to separate our moment to moment lives from the wider scope of the present and what will inevitably become the future. Waking each day into a world with seamless mechanization “improving” the human condition. Cars that stop for you, detect dangers ahead, mobile phones that memorize store and calibrate your every text, email search and key tap, computers that tabulate permutations of information at speeds rivaling that of anything known in the history of technological innovation.
Then, perhaps in the middle ground of what the majority would bill as “progress,” we find ourselves. Often awaking in the middle of the night when the mind has gone to sleep and the technological engines have turned up to catch a hold of time not yet recognized, wondering where is the “more” the visceral and experiential component of being.
Peter Handke writes in his Kaspar:
“I want to be someone like somebody else was once.”
Considering the pace of contemporary global human culture we can modify this to illustrate the message of progress:
“I want to be somebody like the other was once.”
That other for us as an ever accelerating global culture being “progress.”
The artist Paul Klee has his famous watercolour, Angelus Novus, who while accelerating blindly into the future has no perception of the “storm of Progress” gathering at his feet. We as a global human culture might consider this present moment our moment of turning the corner of Paradise, and the inevitable storm has be gun, propelling us blindly towards an ultra-integrated future. We follow along as the mechanism of invention that the human hands are, attempting to guide our creations to do no more than assist in conducting human life along a supposed “better path,” more health, more ease, more capacity for completion and communication. Untold bundles of information flying through the waves around our ears at an unfathomable pace. All while we move about the Earth, human as ever, in a world more pseudo human than we might imagine.
Richard III asks:
“Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace.”
May we look to that as a sort of transgression of common trends in human history, the weak time of peace we face now in a world where we can buy the super manipulation of our subconscious, lulling ourselves into a haze of technological integration while the war progresses around us. As a global culture the parallel is a machine of our own design, what is to better our lives and to assist in the optimum levels of human existence is actually that which rides alongside of us, unseen, educating itself the further we press on into the future. The parallel is blind, because we have designed it with seamless features in mind. As a global culture we are turning the corner, arms outstretched to embrace the integration and our eyes falling blind to the realization that what is riding along with us, is learning to be us, like walking a Los Angeles side street as a BladeRunner extra, if it all came to life in a instant of hyper-progress, the technology loses its distinction from the actual, and culture fades into the seam. Maybe Swinton should have spoken...
“Life is now unnecessary in a traditional sense.”
Bibliography:
The Tragedy of King Richard III
Edited by Anthony Hammond
1981 Methuen & Co. Ltd.
Vanilla Sky
Directed by: Cameron Crowe
Screenwriter: Mateo Gil
2004 Paramount Pictures
Kaspar
Playwright: Peter Handke
1967 Germany
Angelus Novus
Artist: Paul Klee
1920
Tilda Swinton tells Tom Cruise’s David Ames in Vanilla Sky. The ability to purchase your future subconscious while in the process of freezing the present moment.
As the future quickly approaches our current moment, or perhaps, as our current moment approaches the future. We seem to attract, invent and integrate the ability to separate our moment to moment lives from the wider scope of the present and what will inevitably become the future. Waking each day into a world with seamless mechanization “improving” the human condition. Cars that stop for you, detect dangers ahead, mobile phones that memorize store and calibrate your every text, email search and key tap, computers that tabulate permutations of information at speeds rivaling that of anything known in the history of technological innovation.
Then, perhaps in the middle ground of what the majority would bill as “progress,” we find ourselves. Often awaking in the middle of the night when the mind has gone to sleep and the technological engines have turned up to catch a hold of time not yet recognized, wondering where is the “more” the visceral and experiential component of being.
Peter Handke writes in his Kaspar:
“I want to be someone like somebody else was once.”
Considering the pace of contemporary global human culture we can modify this to illustrate the message of progress:
“I want to be somebody like the other was once.”
That other for us as an ever accelerating global culture being “progress.”
The artist Paul Klee has his famous watercolour, Angelus Novus, who while accelerating blindly into the future has no perception of the “storm of Progress” gathering at his feet. We as a global human culture might consider this present moment our moment of turning the corner of Paradise, and the inevitable storm has be gun, propelling us blindly towards an ultra-integrated future. We follow along as the mechanism of invention that the human hands are, attempting to guide our creations to do no more than assist in conducting human life along a supposed “better path,” more health, more ease, more capacity for completion and communication. Untold bundles of information flying through the waves around our ears at an unfathomable pace. All while we move about the Earth, human as ever, in a world more pseudo human than we might imagine.
Richard III asks:
“Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace.”
May we look to that as a sort of transgression of common trends in human history, the weak time of peace we face now in a world where we can buy the super manipulation of our subconscious, lulling ourselves into a haze of technological integration while the war progresses around us. As a global culture the parallel is a machine of our own design, what is to better our lives and to assist in the optimum levels of human existence is actually that which rides alongside of us, unseen, educating itself the further we press on into the future. The parallel is blind, because we have designed it with seamless features in mind. As a global culture we are turning the corner, arms outstretched to embrace the integration and our eyes falling blind to the realization that what is riding along with us, is learning to be us, like walking a Los Angeles side street as a BladeRunner extra, if it all came to life in a instant of hyper-progress, the technology loses its distinction from the actual, and culture fades into the seam. Maybe Swinton should have spoken...
“Life is now unnecessary in a traditional sense.”
Bibliography:
The Tragedy of King Richard III
Edited by Anthony Hammond
1981 Methuen & Co. Ltd.
Vanilla Sky
Directed by: Cameron Crowe
Screenwriter: Mateo Gil
2004 Paramount Pictures
Kaspar
Playwright: Peter Handke
1967 Germany
Angelus Novus
Artist: Paul Klee
1920
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