Machines are felt to be the real trustees of incorruptibility, of imperturbability, and perhaps, tomorrow, of immortality, and we eagerly want to become machines or machinelike. The body becomes the object of artistic experiments, becomes a spectacle and theater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Its anatomy, functions, and organs are disaggregated and observed analytically with a view to curing, correcting, and modifying them, enhancing or suppressing them, to free the body utterly from the legacy of bio-evolution. The effects produced on the body by information technology are particularly interesting. Telematics and virtual reality produce a communicative, perceptive, and functional diffusion of the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Virtual reality, for instance, extends the body spatially in unprecedented ways and allows it to occupy the whole planet. Distance is annihilated and sensitivity is dis-located, but, paradoxically, by denying the body\u2019s primary attribute\u2014its proximity or presence\u2014through artifice and simulation. Virtual reality enhances the body by denying it: You can travel a long way without leaving your room, without enacting the space\u2013time dislocation that is (was) necessary for the body to perceive, and consequently to exist. Tele-actions imply a tele-existence and the space\u2013temporal world of reality is lost and replaced by a tele-space\u2013temporal world that can be manipulated at will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Virtual reality gives us substitution techniques that may lead to ubiquity but at the same time weaken and reduce (according to some, kill) immediate perception. Omnipresence and complete inertia go together. Moreover, virtual reality permits us to take on extravagant or chimerical identities, so as to offer an arbitrary personality to our partners and interlocutors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Consequently, the \u201cgiven\u201d reality also takes on virtual characteristics: We are immersed in a world with which we interact, and such interactions modify both the structure of the world and ourselves. In this interactive dialectics, the subject and the world are basically one thing and constitute themselves simultaneously, so that we cannot talk of one reality or one world given once and for all; but instead we should talk of many realities or worlds that appear different to different eyes and that (as in quantum mechanics) constitute themselves in the very moment in which the interaction that evokes them takes place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Again, this separation of the body from its primitive functions and this weakening or negation of presence induced by technology imply pain. This is why children, even more than adults, should be given the joyful possibility of full immersion, body and mind, in the intense and healthy experience of being alive and in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A hypertrophic development of the mind, as is induced by computers, rather than direct experience and physical interaction with other living beings, leads to a flattening of human capabilities, even of the most abstract ones, such as verbal skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We live and develop through interaction with other people, and such interaction is the more efficient and nourishing the more it is linked to the rich and complex characteristics of bodily expression. Giving up or repressing the body would lead to a serious impoverishment of our communication skills, which are very finely tuned and give us so much satisfaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As fragments of a vast communication system, humans have an inborn bent for communication, sign interpretation, linguistic interplay, lies, theater, acting, recitation, and so on. Communication is not primarily a cognitive or conceptual experience; it is a global activity of the unity of mind and body that we call a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We talk, tell stories, argue, and perform, and this continuous and diffuse communication activity is based on our original body\u2013mind nature, which communicates even before we communicate explicitly. Information technology introduces drastic simplifications and mediations that tend to abolish distinctions and nuances in this diverse and complex landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This facilitates human\u2013machine communication, and therefore it is useful for exploiting instruments. At the same time, however, it impoverishes human communication: People tend to use a more restricted vocabulary and to resort to a limited number of grammatical and syntactic structures. And the body disappears. As the vehicle simplifies, so expression and communication risk becoming a bunch of rigid clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To which of the two components of the human\u2013machine symbiont should we attribute the various active and cognitive functions of homo technologicus? We could beg the question by saying that the two components are inseparable. Furthermore, the question could be considered a false problem, because it is the symbiont as a whole that possesses creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This problem is similar to the issue of whether or not machines can think: In a sense the question is irrelevant, because it is always the human\u2013computer unity that thinks. True, intelligence always stems from the message exchange and an intense communication process takes place in the computer as well, but computer messages have no meaning until they are interpreted by the human component (as happens with the Internet, whose messages have meaning only because there are humans at the terminals).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Actually, the actions of human beings have a meaning and are reflected by consciousness, the meaning being rooted in the world and history and coming before the actions, whereas consciousness yields the subjective dimensions of the self in an elusive yet indisputable way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Going back to creativity, humans have always been inseparable from their technological instruments, and this is true also in the case of homo technologicus. Informational instruments \u201cfilter\u201d creativity as they filter perceptions, cognitions, and actions. Like all filters, the computer filtering interface is selective, because it enhances certain capabilities and weakens or suppresses others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other words, our being in the world, and hence meaning and consciousness, are filtered by instruments. As a consequence, technology modifies creativity, changes its characteristics, and introduces expectations and perspectives that would not otherwise be present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You have different expectations depending on whether you are going to paint with a brush or use a computer to create fine-art works. Moreover, the computer can run programs to perform some parts of the art work automatically\u2014the artist need not finish up all the details of the work, but can assign them to the computer, just as some great Renaissance artists used to entrust their disciples with the finishing of their masterpieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such a distribution of tasks could also take place in literature or poetry (think of the function of such conventional tools as thesauruses or rhyming dictionaries). In other words, one can conceive of an artistic externalization as much as of cognitive externalizations (computers, databases, dictionaries, and the like).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the future, such artistic externalizations could contribute to the diffusion of creativity, shifting it partly from humans to machines, once the latter become flexible enough. Much depends on how the human\u2013machine interface develops and on the quality of the interaction between the two components.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the artistic field, as in the scientific, technical, and mythological fields, humans tend to reconstruct a part of the natural world, filtering it through their perception, sensitivity, and cognition. The prime instrument of this reconstruction is the body, with all its perception, cognition, and action organs. As the body becomes enriched with instruments and prostheses, however, the reconstruction is performed through those added peripheral devices as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whenever homo technologicus acts in the artistic, scientific, or technological worlds, he also tries to reconstruct the natural world, resorting to all his perceptive, cognitive, and active instruments. Such instruments derive from an integration of the tools of the two components of homo technologicus, but primarily the biological body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the case of homo sapiens, the reconstruction of the world, be it artistic, scientific, or technological, obeys criteria of economy or even survival. But, in art and poetry for example, emotional, expressive, ethical, and aesthetic components also come into play, as well as symbolic and religious needs that cannot easily be reduced to material or instrumental considerations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moreover, artists want to express their sadness or joy, the uneasiness of being, the vague and ill-defined anxieties that stem from contemplating the night sky or distant landscapes, the mystery of being alive, the terrible events of birth and death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those components and needs have their roots in biological evolution and stem from the immersion in the world of the unit of mind and body that we call a human being. To what extent can the new symbiont share them? There are in fact great differences between the artistic activity of homo sapiens and that of homo technologicus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe it is too early to draw a picture, albeit approximate, of such differences, but some of them can be hinted at by the following questions: What is the aesthetics of the symbiont? What is its ethics? What are the links between the two? What world does the symbiont (re)create? Such questions are of paramount importance for the low-technology human, for whom ethics and aesthetics are closely linked together, because both are rooted in evolutionary history and both mirror life and evolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a sense, ethics and aesthetics coincide (or are isomorphic) because they stem from the strong coimplication of species and environment: Aesthetics is the subjective feeling of our harmonious immersion in the environment; ethics is the subjective feeling of respect for, and harmonious action in, the environment of which we are a part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conse quently, ethics allows us to preserve aesthetics, and aesthetics serves as our guide in ethical action. Ethics and aesthetics are historical; that is, they evolve, both at the species level and at the individual level: experiences in varying contexts produce ethical and aesthetic novelties that seem to have a concrete physiological counterpart in the activation of specific brain circuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a consequence of the Cartesian and Baconian separation between a human being\u2019s components and between humans and nature, and of scientific thought and technology, ethics (i.e., the complex of \u201cjust\u201d courses of action, able to grant a dynamic, harmonious survival) has been subject to enormous stress for a long time, and this stress is today at its strongest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It would appear this has had important consequences for aesthetics as well. Ethics and aesthetics are modified also by the strong simplifying effect that technology has on our image of the world and of humans. All this has brought about a serious crisis in aesthetics, to which the process of abstraction and coding that underlies scientific formalism has contributed. In contrast to natural messages, humans\u2019 signs and codes are arbitrary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In music, in architecture, in painting, and partly also in literature, aesthetics has been disrupted: the harmony between humans and their evolutionary immersion in nature has been replaced by the combinatorial arbitrariness of signs, as is demonstrated by many of the recent trends and modes in music or painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cognitive externalization represented by computers and by the Internet has changed the terms of the ethical\u2013aesthetical problem. What \u201cbrain\u201d connections in a general sense (biological or artificial) are activated by experiences? How do these new connections interact with the totality of preexisting connections?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the case of the symbiont, can we say that \u201clife\u201d is mirrored by aesthetics and ethics? Can we speak of \u201charmony\u201d or \u201ccoincidence\u201d between ethics and aesthetics or of \u201crespect\u201d for the vital or biological needs of the global system? How does the symbiont \u201cevolve\u201d? And in what \u201cenvironment\u201d or \u201cworld\u201d does this evolution take place?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These questions may sound too \u201cphilosophical,\u201d but they are important because they go to the very roots of our relationship with machines and of our bio-technological evolution and they shed some light upon the fundamental importance of that elusive, mysterious entity that we call the body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Machines are felt to be the real trustees of incorruptibility, of imperturbability, and perhaps, tomorrow, of immortality, and we eagerly want to become machines or machinelike. The body becomes the object of artistic experiments, becomes a spectacle and theater. Its anatomy, functions, and organs are disaggregated and observed analytically with a view to curing, correcting, … <\/p>\n