Re: [-empyre-] last few thoughts: promises

["Patrick Lichty" <voyd@voyd.com>]

> TECHONOLOGY IS NOT A PROMISE. IT IS NOT A PROGRESS.

I would agree.

It will not replace the real, organic, material world. It is simply a new
understanding.

Perhaps not a new one, except in a very narrow sense of the word. I would
pose that it is a 'different' or 'distinctive' understanding.

> In his book The Age of Access, Jeremy Rifkin explains how society is
> changing from an object-oriented one to a lifestyle-oriented one. In a
> society where objects are over abundant, accumulation is not only
literally
> impossible but does not serve any class distinction purpose anymore...
Because such a shift in our behavior is bound to influence
> the way we do art and understand art... one cannot own it, exclusively.
One can only
> know about it and share it with others. The actual pleasure of netart work
> is not to own it while others do not, but to let others know about it, let
> others experience it. Some of you have criticized the absence of any
> spirituality in netart works. But our way of understanding the sacred is
> mainly through objects. We do not yet know how to understand the sacred in
> ephemeral objects, in ghostlike objects, in electronic « phenomenon » that
> cannot be held or even geographically pointed to. We do not yet know where
> the sacred lie in "things" created through technology. But think about it:
> Why should technology be deprived of the "mysterious"?

As technolgy advances, it will become even more mysterious to the
uninitiated, to the point that Clarke wrote of in that to some it may appear
very magical.


> When we react to the absence of the spiritual in netart (when we react to
> the fail promises), we react the same way old professors do when they
> condemn young people for being uneducated. We lament the failed promises
of
> technology and of netart because we are trying to find in them what we
> found, what made sense, what seemed mystical or spiritual in our organic,
> age-old, material world. We are not yet capable of understanding the new
> sacred and spiritual nature of netart because we are looking for it in the
> wrong places.

And in many ways this is what I'm looking at as different ways of thought.
That's why I wrote in 1997 of the application of qualitiative psychological,
or 'spiritual' systems to network technology, such as Feng Shui and
Kabbalistic practice.  This is old news, but my belief that within ancient
pracices we can find basic psychospiritual structuures that may unlock some
of the coginitive postential of networked communication.