DECEMBER: MEREDITH MORRAN X CATARINA RODRIGUES
@mermorran // @catariinaarodrigues
Meredith and Catarina carried out an extended collaboration on the platform in December - following on from their individual residencies in August and November, they’ve been thinking further about digital spaces; how we inhabit them, who has power, who has agency and who has a choice.
By Catarina:
In Alien’s Agency, Chris Salter states that “biotechnical, computational, and responsive techniques and methods perform and make a different world. They wholeheartedly blur and hybridize distinctions between organic and nonorganic, living and non-living, and generate complex amalgams of technical-social-cultural-material-semiotic actions and objects”, paraphrasing Donna Haraway (1985). Furthermore, Salter affirms that to be human today is “to be mutable, transforming, alive with the possibilities of technoscientific delineation and determination”.
Alive or dead, our body is a site of identity. In a simulated reality, in what way can we transcend our own body? 👁
Image: Entire observable universe squeezed into one image by Pablo Carlos Budassi
By Meredith:
In The Introduction to Umwelt (1936), Jakob Von Uexküll writes: “everyone who looks about in Nature finds themself in the center of a circular island that is covered by the blue vault of heaven. This is the perceptible world that has been given to us, it contains everything we can see.”
In his theory of the unwelt, von Uexküll, writes about perception subjectively. He de-anthropomorphizes his writing, teaching humans that the perceptions of all species and livings beings vary sensorially, spatially, and temporally. Of course, his theory is a theory of the organic world.
The overlap between digital and organic worlds is growing. As opposed to the organic world, where humans have at least *some control* over where they look, what they smell and taste and touch and even hear, the digital world is a highly mediated and controlled world. The edges are less defined than a “circular island,” and this world contains many things that we cannot see.
Furthermore, digital spaces are becoming so commercially-driven. Is something even really simulation then, if actual human commerce is involved?