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Among different threats related to the globally rising prevalence of digital technologies, Hand lists ‘liquefaction’ of traditional institutions and practices. The humanistic stability of the self could also be subject to this process. Bauman (2000) pointed at  uncertainty as pervasive characteristics of liquid modernity. He illustrates this further by referring to notions of chaos, fluidity and ambivalence and describes a liquid modern man as a nomad or a tourist, responsible for weaving his life himself. Being in  perpetual motion and executing the freedom of one’s own making have become a mode of being.

The collapse of stability and the never-ending changes a human undergoes through the course of their life seem to be at the forefront of posthumanism (based only on preliminary reading), which also conceives the posthuman as an ‘emergent ontology’, thus emphasising the importance of becoming, hosting multiple identities and perceiving the world from a number of perspectives.

Again rapid digitisation and the transformation of culture into digital culture is possibly instrumental in this process of posthumanisation of a human(Hand 2008) or even their cyborgisation.

Is this liquefaction liberating or threatening in regard to our agency and the choices we make, our free will? If none of the universal truths can be trusted any more in the times of supercomplexity and if reality is to be observed through a number of perspectives, perhaps the notions of agency and ‘free will’ lose their validity, especially when multiple identities are at stake? It appears a whole new mindset is needed …

Liquid Man

Pic by Chris Wardle-Cousins.

These bio-ports are quite interesting in a sense that they are linked to the spine via a sort of a umbilical cord, which is a metaphor in itself referring to the relationship between a mother and the foetus (physical interdependence, nourishment) and then a child throughout his/her life (more emotional). The relationships between the mother and the child, especially a grown-up one are complex, from unconditional love to control , jealousy, hatred. In this intimate relationship between the gamer and the tech, who assumes the position of the mother (nurturer but maybe a controller) and who that of the child (the nurtured, the controlled, possibly the rebel)? Allegra being the game designer could be perceived as a mother at first but quickly the roles seem to revert as the natural and machinic spheres start to blur to an extent that the characters cannot distinguish between the actual and virtual reality, and their agency gets affected (this is a big question for me this week, the influence of the tech on humans’ free will). So, the blurring is also visible in how the game characters surface more strongly in the main characters and persist in taking over their actual selfs (interesting links to Gee’s theory of self in gaming – it seems to me that the projected self being the bridge between the virtual and actual selves undergoes rapid shrinking in eXistenZ and is thrown into non-existence?) So for example, Pikul starts abusing and killing people. Interestingly enough, he resists the temptation of killing Allegra but it is made clear that the relationship has been built around trust. Is it the old human trust that prevents Pikul from pulling the trigger of the organic gun when for fun he pointed it at the Demoness of Armageddon?

The sequence in the restaurant is interesting from the point of view of nature vs tech. The organic bones (mind you the ‘two-headed friend’ cannot be 100% natural, it’s another example of cross-contamination between nature and tech) are assembled very naturally into an organic gun. Is that dystopic, in a sense that tech corrupts nature? Or rather utopian – after all the tech, physically at least, assumes the organic, natural form. Does it become sacred? Does it become god as the previous film (and the title of the film, Isten meaning ‘god’ in Hungarian) would indicate?

Deus ex Machina

Pic by ekud on www.deviantart.com

Synopsis: A man goes up a big mountain where, in answer to his invocation and in a flood of eerie light, a machine descends from heavens. He brings it down to his compatriots who immediately knock down a bull from the pedestal and start worshipping the Machine. The TV Set, as the machine turns out to be one, is slightly wicked but in a playful way, showing gleeful pictures and playing seemingly innocent pranks on its followers. When one of them accidentally gets killed, another wants to take revenge on the TV set and resorts to violence against it. To stifle possible rebellion, the TV Set undergoes transformation and shows its truly evil side, grows horns and grins like a demon. The pictures it shows also become more vivid, if not terrifying, thus manipulating people’s emotions and so the (oppressive) cult of the Machine is born. The evil festival goes on and on until a thunderstorm in which the TV set gets struck, and in a fit of wild passion/agony, it wreaks havoc among flames and whining sirens. The worshippers keep kowtowing, but to save their fragile lives put on gas masks as if they knew how the seeming apocalipse is going to end. What follows is tragic – a mightier machine appears and shoots down the TV Set – its remains are shoved off into a precipice to share the fate of the bull and other fallen idols.

However, the show must go on and so the story repeats itself and soon the subsequent machine is also replaced by a stronger and better one …

Questions:

Bendito in Spanish means ‘blessed’. Is the machine already blessed with a holy status when it descends to live amongst humans? Or, like in Roman Catholic religion, is beatified upon its death? Or maybe it’s blessed cos it is capable of reincarnating, reinventing itself continuously, each machine being created a better image of the Ubermachine? The question here arises whether this process is never-ending or whether there is some nirvana point to achieve?

Who’s dwelling in the heaven – Is that some Ubermachine or Urmachine, machine-god/god-machine sending its messengers to teach the humans a lesson? If so, is it a loving utopian lesson or a dystopic evil lesson?

There is a striking resemblance between the man praying for the Machine and Moses receiving stone tablets with 10 Commandments on Mount Sinai – the first set of tablets got smashed as the humans didn’t understand fully how great a gift the commandments were. Do we understand the goodness of technology being brought to us or just throw ourselves into senseless consumption, using it unreasonably or even misusing or abusing and thus forcing the technology to turn into an wicked being that attacks us?

The idols replace each others in a quickening succession – isn’t it the time of time accelleration, and does it point to a possibility of exhaustion or will it contrinue into eternity?

Finally, is the machine inherently evil and its sole plan is to deprive us of agency or rather it is us who project our own evilness onto it?

Zero Commandment(s)