As the possibilities and potentials of "high" technology are being celebrated, I've found myself mourning the loss of linguistic, cultural & environmental diversity and the shrinking of public space that accompany our futureseeking. My experience of learning from the land (4) has increasingly problematized my relationship to the computer as an expressive medium. Art has never been innocent, and computer art is no exception. In Jerry Mander's insightful, though at times overly polemical, treatise on the impact of computer technology on global culture, IN THE ABSENCE OF THE SACRED, he notes,

A skillful video-game player stimulates the computer program to go faster, and as the cycle (computer program to nervous system to hands to machine to computer program) speeds up, the player and the machine become connected in one fluid cycle; aspects of each other. Over time, and with practice, the abilities of the human being develop to approximate the computer program. Evolution is furthered by this sort of interaction, but this is a notably new form of evolutionary process. Where evolution once described an interaction between humans and nature, evolution now takes place between humans and human artifacts. We coevolve with the environment we have created; we coevolve with our machines, with ourselves. It's a kind of in-breeding that confirms that nature is irrelevant to us. (5)

In his important text AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY: Technics Out of Control in Political Thought (6) high-tech ethicist Langdon Winner draws upon the writings of philosophers of technology Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul among others to sketch out another set of concerns related to this feedback loop between man and his machines7. He points to technologies as "reagents"; "not a passive presence in a human situation, but instead evoking a necessary reaction from the person using them." In this way technologies are not just extending our human power, but reshaping it.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Sources

Back to the Literature