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the Machine is Us : Web 2.0

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O'Reilly Report: Web 2.0
Movie about Web 2.0

Did you ever want to be someone else?

In a new performance project titled Did you ever want to be someone else?, Mathieu Briand collaborates with choreographer Prue Lang (b 1972), formerly part of the Forsythe Company.
This unique performance will involve up to 100 participants performing in real-time a series of simple instructions within the natural flow of visitors in the Turbine Hall. Briand and Lang have shaped a very ambitious project that explores identity and social behavior through its individual and collective dimensions.
This performance was inspirited by some of the most interesting and disturbing visions in literature and cinema, touching up the sci-fi imaginary and its questioning of the future of society and human nature.
Did you ever want to be someone else? Is part of a one-year project presented in 2007 at Gallery Maisonneuve in Paris entitled UBIQ: A Mental Odyssey.

Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C3eLoCFs2Y

Android Aesthetics

Who do you wanna be today?

Image created by Erik Vervroegen for Sony Playstation

From: www.nextnature.net

"The Body is Obsolete" - Stelarc

It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment.
The body is neither a very efficient nor very durable structure. It malfunctions often and fatigues quickly; its performance is determined by its age. It is susceptible to disease and is doomed to a certain and early death. Its survival parameters are very slim - it can survive only weeks without food, days without water and minutes without oxygen.
The body's LACK OF MODULAR DESIGN and its overactive immunological system make it difficult to replace malfunctioning organs. It might be the height of technological folly to consider the body obsolete in form and function, yet it might be the height of human realisations. For it is only when the body becomes aware of its present position that it can map its post-evolutionary strategies.
It is no longer a matter of perpetuating the human species by REPRODUCTION, but of enhancing male-female intercourse by human-machine interface. THE BODY IS OBSOLETE. We are at the end of philosophy and human physiology. Human thought recedes into the human past.

Read more: http://stelarc.va.com.au/

Living Doll

Cindy Jackson is an artist and public personality who has successfully taken control of her own life by redesigning her body in the popular image of the western feminine ideal. Having undergone more than 20 cosmetic procedures on her face and body to become as aesthetically pleasing as possible, she is now setting the standard of ‘perfect beauty’ for the new millennium (21st).

http://www.cindyjackson.com/

Sci-fi Aesthetics - Michael Guida

“The instruments man uses become extensions of his body. Most importantly, man must, in order to operate his instruments skilfully, internalise aspects of them in the form of kinesthetic and perceptual habits. In that sense at least, his instruments become literally part of him and modify him, and thus alter the basis of his affective relationship to himself.”

“The electric light is pure information”

McLuhan contends that all media — in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate — exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that alter this sensory balance — an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that created the technology. According to McLuhan, there have been three basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance. McLuhan has made it his business to explain and extrapolate the repercussions of this electronic revolution.

Read more at: http://www.nextnature.net/research/?p=1025

Real Nature Is Not Green, Future Fashion Is Not Grey

Koert van Mensvoort at: http://www.nextnature.net/research/?p=695

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"The notions of nature and culture seem to be trading places. Nature, in the sense of trees, plants, animals, atoms, or climate, is getting increasingly controlled and governed by man. It has turned into a cultural category. At the same time, products of culture, which we used to be in control of man, tend to outgrow us and become autonomous."See more at: http://www.nextnature.net