Another Telematic People Publication might be on the way. Recently, I excavated old work from the start of my image adventures in 2014 and blended them with some 2024 generations. In doing so, I have noticed a running theme in everything I look at the moment; magical connections we weave together, like a spiderweb. Somewhere I read the spiderweb is a visual manifestation of the spider’s thoughts (EDIT 2/10/24 – see Smith-Ruiu, 2022; 65*); so too, perhaps, are the serendipitous connections we recognise. By revisiting this work from when I was younger, perhaps I am weaving a spiderweb of my own, in which to catch and devour myself: a way of killing and extending my life at once. And of course, there is much to say about the relationship between contemporary technology and its eugenicist/transhumanist phantasies.
The original work below (the colour maps) were part of a project I submitted in 2014, as described in the IG post, with a Barthes’ quotation about death (see image below).
Today, reading Deluze’s (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, I am struck by the following: “Before Nietzsche, he denounces all the falsifications of life, all the values in the name of which we disparage life. We do not live, we only lead a semblance of life; we can only think of how to keep from dying, and our whole life is a death worship.”
And then elsewhere, this is not quite my favourite line from a collection of essays by Flusser on writing, but it’s up there: “Human communication is an artistic technique whose intention it is to make us forget the brutal meaninglessness of a life condemned to death. By “nature,” man is a solitary animal, because he knows that he will die and that his community will not matter in the hour of his death: everyone must die alone. Moreover, every hour is potentially the hour of death”
The colour maps (2014) above were made in 2014 when Photoshop was still a kind of monstrous mystery. The images in the IG post were made by blending these with some machine-generated images I’ve been exploring. I preferred these flat graphics to the photographs they were based on
And then we move to the death of the human. This death is not the end of the biological/myth-needing critters we know as humans. There are over eight billion of us on this planet. We critters will be around for a while yet. Rather, the death of the European human subject; the humanist. What comes next is up for debate. (I am swayed by digital humanist intentions, but appreciate this may be wishful thinking). From Colebrook: “Just as the very desire for fats and sugars that propelled the body to hunt and develop technologies for metabolic stability and survival will drive the modern body into obesity, hypertension and an early grave, so the darting eye that stimulated the brain into becoming a reading and interpreting animal, may also be at the forefront of the human species’ cognitive atrophy.” With that in mind, Flusser’s comments on colour below are another thread in the web.
And let’s not forget the Death of Photography which this bundle of connections points towards (regardless of the many voices who insist it’s not dead!)
I wrote something about bumping into Orpheus in Homebase in 2019 which I need to find as I think that scribbling may work in this next publication.
Refs:
Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Colebrook, C. (2014). The Death of the Posthuman. Open Humanities Press.
Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Flusser, V., Ströhl, A. (ed.) and Eisel, E. (trans.) (2002) Writings. Electronic Mediations, Volume 6. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Added 4/10/2024
*The spider’s web may be properly—meaning not only metaphorically—considered as the locus of its extended cognition.8 An arachnid’s nerves do not extend into the filaments it spreads out from its body, but the animal is evolved to apprehend vibrations in these filaments as a fundamental dimension of its sensory experience. The spider’s sensation is not “enhanced” by the vibrations it receives from the web, any more than my hearing is enhanced by the presence of a cochlea in my inner ear. Perceiving through a web is simply what it is to perceive the world as a spider (or at least as a member of one of the many spider species that spend a good part of their lives in webs of their own spinning).
Smith-Ruiu, Justin. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning (p. 66). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.