Re: <eyebeam><blast> Item 1

[Jordan Crandall <crandall@blast.org>]

>CAE believes that while we will continue to see ICT upgrades (such as
>in bandwidth) and further technological development in domestic space,
>radically significant change in the communication and information
>technology of everyday life will not take place until the gap between
>the technology and its organic platform is closed.

Interestingly, this gap is also being closed by making ICT wearable,
attached directly to the body or inserted into the skin.  So at the same
time that biotech seeks to close the gap by building from the cellular
level upward, ICT advances from exterior computational systems to bodily
attachments and insertions, which augment sensorial and perceptual
processes (among others).  Each attempt to bring the body 'up to code,'
and it seems that as they intertwine (join forces?), it becomes
increasingly difficult to isolate them.  On the one hand we have the
biological metaphors of the net (as in - shudder - K. Kelly) and curious
alignments with sociobiology, and on the other hand, the computational
metaphors of biotech (body as decipherable code, etc.) most of which
rely on ICT.  And with odd traversal-fields like nanotechnology, where
the computational is inserted into the cellular level, but relying on
the cellular already figured as an information processor.      

But in any case:  "the need to redesign the body to meet dromological
imperatives (whether in warfare, business, or communications)" is clear. 

>Their intention is to map and rationalize the body in a manner that 
>will allow the extention of authoritarian policies of fiscal and social 
>control into organic space. We know this network as the Flesh Machine. 
>Its primary mandate is eventually to design and engineer organic 
>constellations with predispositions toward certain task-oriented 
>activities, and to create bodies better suited to extreme technological 
>interaction.

What is the role in this landscape for critical artistic practice? 



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