frames from "Regeneration" (Igor Night, 2008) It is only the beginning. Common sense perceives a long time, transforming the collective insight into very specific projections. They are the latter, the matrix of fantasy literature.
So, that's just the beginning of exponential growth. It is difficult to imagine where this will lead. The boldest routes, drawn from the imagination of artists and poets, there might be less than a century timid groping in the dark.
Prepare launchers for intergalactic spaceships, vehicles dive ever undertaken in the depths of the psyche, intelligent tools that colonize the infinitely small and artificial announce Alter Ego, which multiply the very idea of \u200b\u200bthe difference. Then he broke the legendary Pillars of Hercules of the starry sky above us and the moral truths within us. Maybe this will be beyond the current average lifespan. But the harbingers of time they participate.
is in effect a radical change of all kinds, authentic metabasis eis the genos, absolute systematic transgression, and of gigantic proportions. No doubt this is also a macro-phenomena that scares intimidating. What's more, in some cases this register undefined boundaries of reality but always critical, results in the rejection, the rejection of an established immune system of the psyche. Why deny it? Of the reactions of resistance or regressive attachment to tradition derives from the opening of horizons which can be observed and recorded live, for many decades. Because only a few decades, the eye of the observer perceives the state transition when it occurs, almost without psychological decompression chambers.
Still, the rejection could be part of the project. If this is the systolic pressure that pushes the making, it is necessary that it is expressed together with an equally powerful diastole, identified in the rest of the consonants and different expressions. "Conservation," "defense", "sustainability", "protection", "protection" are part of this lexicon of the immune response to the expansion of all boundaries. In relatively recent times has combined the magic word "decline". Similarly, the upper floors of thought and action, decompression and relaxation are used to recall intervention of universal entity. Ancient mystical and metaphysical merge with modern sensibilities, and they mingle, mingle. But none of this can change a single grain of the Squaderno of the event, which we are all active spectators.
Moreover, processes of decentralization and concentration follow any form of technological innovation, the dawn of time. Both movements are both present, consistent and coherent. Decentralization can also define a fragmentation that precedes the 'expansion. The centralization is also a condensation process that precedes the fall.
However, the emphasis should be placed in that logical product, which means the truth value of the function. In the logical product, as is known, both terms must be true or logical atoms. Therefore, there is no contradiction in the simultaneous presence on logical principles that govern the expansion and contraction. Just as it never existed. The history of technology, perhaps even more than the chronicle of memorable events, exhibits the antithesis continuously converging, in turn intuitively based on a generalized sort of asymmetry, which continually redefines the state of equilibrium of the system.
For example, consider the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, with their mighty architecture (itself a techno-political). Even in forms of these entities represented its centralized administration, in turn based on the invention and perfection of writing. Which, in those remote reality, sprang from the changing needs of accounting. Archaeology accredit this hypothesis, in the eyes of contemporary counter-intuitive, because we are viscerally tied to a narrative conception of the first external system modeling. Indeed difficult to accept the idea that abstraction precedes and even assuming representation. Yet, over time, it was that the writing, which originated from a military and administrative efficiency basically centralized, has generated in spite of an indomitable centrifugal force, a massive systolic blood pressure, and almost complete absence of vessels that contained it.
Dissemination and reproductive (memory, knowledge, imagination) represent the characteristic features dominant. Affrancatasi by calculating optimal and enunciation of the law, the writing is surprisingly open to all conceivable flight of the soul, and after several millennia, even those inconceivable, forcing its own statutes. It is a process that exceeds all testing and that is never finished. Other times
other complexities, and new modes of contraction and expansion. A similar phenomenon occurs with the invention of printing (the first true industrial revolution and technological) culture emerged from the scriptorium and the growing political and commercial reorganization of the Middle Ages. However, from the innovative thinking in words and forms derived in the space of less than a century it is also known as the first star map.
The universe for the first time it opened, expanded, multiplied by the cumulative effects never before experienced. The role of humans in the cosmos also faltered. Here is a very special three-dimensional centrifugal motion, which disintegrated in its age-old myths and capillary passage established beliefs, but only to lay the groundwork for other myths, for new beliefs.
Yet, the technology of printing performed simultaneously and with equal force an indomitable centripetal energy. It is embodied in the bureaucratic administration of the nascent nation-states, east and standardized ideas, stabilized procedures of all kinds, sacred and profane, as shown in his magisterial study Elizabeth Eisenstein.
systole and diastole, then. Concentration and expansion. Pressure inwards and outward pressure.
And what about the radical transformation started in the Belle Epoque? There was not only the space to be invested, but also time. The Kern - you know - it dealt with unsurpassed depth and lightness. Telephone, telegraph and then several applications of the discovery of the microwave Squaderno never before imaginable potential of the almost instantaneous transfer of thoughts, words and actions. Will then be the era of mass transfer in the works: that is the reality we live in real time. Still to come the transfer of bodies. But give it some time. This press
the contrary in this brief note is to draw attention to new forms of concentration / dispersion, internal pressure and pressure forever.
For a few moments through the eyes of the mind suppose to go to enjoy a romantic cityscape fin de siècle, crowded with horses and carriages, including coat, tube and pince-nez. Everything runs rather slowly, after all. Yet you feel - accredited news is - almost by magic it is now possible to manipulate space and time together. They say that we can talk at a distance, it seems that even those old electrical signals traveling on the wire can now abandon that annoying cord, lying in piles on the lazy, for miles and miles. While in space, with a snap of his fingers, something so clean, so ethereal.
the illusion is born, soon belied by the facts, you can even control the effects of new processes of thought and action. Whatever the practical use of new inventions, what matters most is the psychodynamic effect that they introduce various levels. If you can generate a feeling of almost ubiquitous and almost instantly, then it is also possible to conceive of time in a flexible way, and redefining the age-old principles of causation.
Even the physical point of view was the beginning of a process of expansion unparalleled for speed and depth. The first radio signals were also the first space travel, in all respects in the vanguard of mankind in the cosmos. We are still here, waiting to build the technologies necessary and sufficient to put us at a profit after them. Even in this case is only a matter of time. In the meantime we can only note that those ancient inventions, as primitive, had reversed the route. Until then the man had merely "receive" that which came from heaven, from meteorites to the light rays from that moment on we met the star, first with the signals, then the products of an increasingly sophisticated engineering. Systole unprecedented, dramatic increase in centrifugal energy. And his
diastole? It is the planet itself, which for the first time is perceived in desperate finiteness of its ironclad geometric constraints. The common house, yes, but also the common prison. From here, the bright reflections of Peter Sloterdijk, who plays the construction of a hyper sphere in the name of compensation necessary but not sufficient, for the loss of the heavenly dimension Archaic. Cities, highways and expanding electronic networks, but as mere extensions of our progressive wander through the maze of non-Euclidean geometry. All this just to avoid the gaze position on that universe now naked, foolish and unattainable for now, replacing the correlation with the housing elsewhere falsely reassuring and protective of a land multiply.
So we landed in today's mixed reality, half real and half virtual. We live immersed in the illusion that the signs are especially significant narrative elements of a common experience. The intersection between media, aided by digital technology and satellite, it seems nowadays structuring an intricate web of relations between the immediate object, which falls under our senses, and the mediated, in almost infinite variety of the symbolic manipulation techniques. Groped to emerge to the surface of this reality "imbollata," or even to touch the bottom of this ocean of vibrating emotions, it is a difficult task, if not impossible.
While it is true the opposite, namely that the greater the technological complexity, more narrative elements - call them value-reference systems - serve as epiphenomena of a computational substrate that supports them, just as the cork Horace memory, which if he goes somewhere, rocked with no apparent direction from which it is immersed in the ocean currents.
However, the sum of these two forces in play can not be zero. Apply the principle of the exploration of the "adjacent possible", introduced by Stuart Kauffman mathematically to justify the indefinite growth of complexity in a universe not ergodic. In
maximum integrated systems of our present, which include physical spaces, virtual spaces, and then (especially) totally abstract spaces, numeric, you play the challenges of new complexities, we reveal the unexpected creativity of all the "adjacent possible" contained in the inherent limitations of these structures moving. Again systole and diastole are in mutual convergence. Where these new advances will lead us in the space of possibilities is impossible to say. But nobody, nobody, can stand on the balcony, quietly observing the movement flowing down there in the street.
Milan, May 2009
