Er(r)go,
...reality...hyperreality...cyberreality... It may be difficult to close this passage. "The construction and emergence of new virtual worlds unrelated to the optics of visibility draws our attention again towards [...] metaphysical problems, towards questions about being and about the limits of cognition" (Barbara Kita). There is no danger of boredom: any new morpheme extending the continuum of reality raises the same old questions again, but now in contexts dangerous to them.
Time and space, the ancient pillars of wisdom, begin to crumble in the age of electronics. Even though the idea of virtuality, in a clandestine form, had always been present in our culture, it really began to emerge—still veiled in the concept of intentionality—in the Middle Ages. The development of electronics not only "materialized'' and technologized virtuality, not only did it bring it closer to actuality—extended its spectrum—but also made it cross over the critical moment where intensity becomes a new quality. Now cyberspace devalues space, pushes it to the margins; speed annihilates time; visibility usurps for itself the status of metacognition. The cult of interface and hologram supplants the tedious labour of mastering and mapping out space; telepresence displaces presence; teleportation is ready to replace movement; non-place is becoming more attractive than place. The role of identity—as norm—is taken over by hybridity, which is embodied (dis-embodied?) by virtual subjectivity: the subject, sucked in by cyberspace, disperses itself not only into the human community of its co-subjects, but also into technology and machinery: terminal identity (Bukatman, Mazurek) is no longer merely a phantasm created by science fiction. It is only the evident real (Er(r)go 3, Chojecki) that refuses alliance with reality.
Wojciech Kalaga
No. 49 (2024)
Published: 2024-12-30
10.31261/errgo
English
Język Polski