THE HUMAN AND THE INVISIBLE
THE HUMAN AND THE INVISIBLE 1
Web art exhibition at Connect-Arte
Artists:
Bressemer & Alia, Lunar hands
Nilo Casares / Bernardo Tejeda, Recurrent
JODI (Joan Heemskerk y Dirk Paesmans), Invisible
Sylvia Molina / Juan Millares, The Rastro
Víctor Nubla, Method of objective composition
Marc Palau, s/t
Carles Pujol, E. F. I.
Yolanda Segura, Connections
Myriam Solar, Ex-muerte
Zush (ahora Evru), Ikela
Organizer: Connect-Arte / ACC L’Angelot
Technical direction & design: Yoonah Kim and Ralph Zenger, Connect-Arte
Curator: Claudia Giannetti
Call for works: April 1996
Date: From November 1996 to January 1997
I. CONTEXT
In 1964 the French ethnologist and sociologist Jean Servier published a book entitled L’Homme et l’Invisible, 3 whose main thesis questioned some of the dogmas Western civilization is based on. Jean Servier develops an interesting theory on the recurrent human concern about the Invisible, life and communication beyond the limits of the body and matter. “Each man is really or virtually an altar of the Invisible”, Servier argues. 4 “Western science raises the question of an ‘I’ and a ‘non-I’: a thinking subject and an object thought about. Science, in traditional civilizations, enunciates, however, a world-in-me and a world-in-the-world. Only for us in the West does the outer skin separate two heterogeneous regions: the world and me. 5
According to Servier’s account, all the dominating systems and theories created in the West share a common goal: to maintain belief in development and well-being. It is a position that indefinitely projects the problems and worries of the inhabitants of the so-called First World into the future, whereby in the end there is an attempt to justify its agenda of geographic, economic, social and ethnic domination and differentiation.
Our Western civilization “purports to be the only axis of reference for the whole of mankind.” "We have decided to ignore our enormous debt so as to propose ourselves as a model for the rest of the world.” 6
Nevertheless, as Servier asks: “What will be the use of man’s being able to go around the world in eighty seconds if wherever he goes he encounters the same uniformity and the same tedium?” 7
II. DATA CONTROL. EXHIBITION THEMES
Starting, on the one hand, from Jean Servier’s theory of the invisible, and from neocolonialism, on the other, the idea of this online exhibition is to update his proposals and place them in contrast with telematic culture at the end of the 20th century. From this starting point, two basic lines of reflection follow:
1. The Invisible
Servier, like other theorists before him, points to the fact that human beings “have the ability to upgrade their physical possibilities by using tools.” 8 Throughout the development of human prostheses, we observe an ongoing concern for the process of temporalization of space and of dematerialization of interpersonal communication, which entails a progressive advancement towards the Invisible.
In this sense, once the material and corporeal barriers of distances in time and space are left behind, thanks to the speed of different modes of transportation, human beings focus on the development of technologies that make it possible to find a way to instantly connect spaces through immaterial, ‘bodyless’ communication. The ubiquity of the medium allows for unheard-of experiences such as telepresence, interaction with simulated worlds, and so on.
To what extent do we maintain, with new technodigital media, our expectations vis-à-vis an immaterial world (such as the virtual world of cyberspace), or vis-à-vis that which is invisible? To what extent is the current euphoria about cyberspace the result of what Servier referred to as “a longing for freedom”?
2. Strategies of digital conquest: between apology, euphoria, and despotism
We are confronted more and more frequently with apologetic statements regarding the pressing need to be connected to the network, or the indispensable requirement to move along information highways or navigate in cyberspace. The gap becomes wider between those who are ‘connected’ (on-line users) and those who, for different reasons, do not have access to or cannot have access to new digital technologies. In short, a new form of colonization (cyber-colonization?) is imposed, with the difference that the objective is no longer the space or a territory as a source of wealth, but cyberspace as a guarantor of the power to control time and information. 9 It is a very different kind of power, one that no longer demands the “physical” presence of a representative or spokesperson, but which acts virtually. To what extent does the digital conquest conceal a new form of despotism behind its ‘democratic’ discourse?
For a long period of time, the great objective of the First World was to “divide the time and space of other civilizations into Western chunks” (Servier). Will the end of the century confirm the final separation, on the basis of ‘data control’, between a ‘First World in a digital age’ and ‘Third Worlds in a analogical age’?
The proposition of this exhibition on the Internet is to analyze and open up a debate on these and other related topics, as well as to consciously use the medium in order to critically reflect on the telematic system itself.
Claudia Giannetti, 1996.
(English translation by: Alan Lounds, 1997)
REFERENCES
1. Previously published at http://www.connect-art.com/webart, and in ACC L'Angelot: Work in progress 1993-1997 (Barcelona: L'Angelot, 1997), pp. 61-63. Recovered version at 2. This exhibition on the Internet was the first of its kind in Spain, bringing together a number of Spanish artists or others, like Jodi, who were then working in Spain. The majority of them have done work specifically to be shown online, dealing for the first time with the new medium. 3. Jean Servier, L’Homme et L’Invisible (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1964; Spanish translation: El hombre y lo Invisible. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1970.) 4. “The term Invisible seems to me to define most faithfully what certain philosophers call the ‘Numinous’ and others the ‘Sacred’. The Sacred can be created by man as long as the Invisible holds sway. In the spirit of the man of traditional civilizations, the Invisible does not have the vagueness of a metaphysical concept, it is a reality, a dimension within which moves each man making up part of all of humankind.” Jean Servier, op. cit., p. 10. 5. Jean Servier, op. cit., p. 191. According to the scientist Humberto Maturana, “in fact we can follow the paths of the nervous system exactly... Though this only provides an infinity of data on internal dynamics, although the spirit is not involved in the processes of the thalamus, hyperfields or the cortex, but rather is created on the basis of the dynamic of relationships of the organism. […] To the degree that the organisms live in language like human beings do, this operative dynamic takes on a semantic meaning. For this reason we can never observe how our thoughts and reflections arise, because they are born out of the invisible dynamic structure of the nervous system, although they only take on meaning in the realm of social relationships.” Humberto Maturana, Was ist Erkennen? (Munich: Piper, 1994), p. 107. 6. Jean Servier, op. cit., p. 231. 7. Jean Servier, op. cit., p. 399. 8. In 1930, Sigmund Freud published a text with a rather apocalyptic charge called “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur” (Civilization and its Discontents). Above all in the third chapter, Freud reflects upon culture from the point of view of the “progress of the natural sciences and their technical application”, ensuring man’s dominion over nature, meaning the domination of space and time. “Long ago”, Freud affirms, “he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore, that these gods were cultural ideals. To-day he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself. […] Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents." 1930. The Freud Reader. Peter Gay (Ed.) (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1989), pp. 738.) 9. The control of information becomes control of communication. In reducing the circulation of data to the communication of data, knowledge and dialogue are lost. Gene Youngblood sets out an interesting differentiation between communication and conversation: “If the principle (of communication) were to be transformed into a network of two-directional conversation, so as to support the autonomous social sphere, we would then have a true communication revolution. Communication would be substituted by conversation. The majority of theoreticians who have dealt with the question of communication—from Bertolt Brecht to Hans-Magnus Enzensberger and Jean Baudrillard–-even though they speak of communication, are thinking in fact of conversation.... However, what we really need is the possibility to speak one to another in conversation. A conversation is a productive and creative process; communication is not. In communication public knowledge is privatized. In conversation, private knowledge is made public: knowledge is perfected instead of being consumed.” Gene Youngblood, “Orbitale Zeit - Virtueller Raum”, in Peter Weibel (Ed.), Jenseits der Erde (Linz: Hora Verlag, 1987), p. 74.
 |  |  |