Green Gartside, Smash Hits, June 1982.
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Sterling Morrison, quoted in Rob Sheffield's Beatles book I'm guessing the VU hated the Mothers ever since that period when the latt... -
"When I first saw Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' , I turned to my wife during the screening & said, “Everything I have d...
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The pinnacle of that view of freedom, of course, is avant-garde jazz, which I find by and large a dead loss. It operates on the assumption...
Techno does not "become nature", unless you're a transhumanist. And you can lean towards transhumanism even unbeknownst to yourself, by simply going along with the trends of our technoILLogical age. Miss Guðmundsdóttir put reality down to just two cathegories, those of nature and techno, but what about the methaphysical (beyond natural)? It is true that we need to live with both nature and techno, but we needn't BE either, since WE ARE NOT either. To subscribe to the distinction, however, you need to refer to a particular metaphysics. It is transhumanist metaphysics that seeps through her statement, which was possibly intended as a laconic overarall scetch of her own art (an attempt I beleive artist better refrain from), but is certainly also indicative of her worldview, which veers toward the "always already technical" anthropology of Bernard Stiegler. Christian metaphysics, on the other hand, sets us up as creatures (created as part of nature, but endowed with singular traits+faculties and a special teleological task with regard to nature and to ourselves) who can create (i.e. produce stuff or techno by using only one part of our faculties), but who can also achieve much more. To say that we should be both nature and techno is not breadth of apprehension, but a whittling down of who we really are (i.e. beings tasked with a unique responsibility that we cannot manage on our own) to a romanticized, easily digestible and seductively bearable half-nature-half-techno hodgepodge.
ReplyDeleteTo lower the tone a little... The quote could have been used as the epigraph for the new Planet of the Apes movie. It's not great, but it has its moments, including the skyscrapers of (I think) 22nd century LA, reclaimed by the forest and covered in vegetation. CGI, of course, but rather beautifully done.
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