Forward from Christophe Bruno : Re [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity: introducing Eric Kluitenberg

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

hi everyone, yes, it's really true, mailman only accepts plain text.   
This is a forward from Christophe Bruno. -cm


Christophe writes:

Hello
First, thank you very much for this invitation.  To introduce myself  
further, and before we might talk about Modernity and Antiquity, let  
me start with a few links about my work. On http://iterature.com you  
can find pieces based on language as a medium, where I try to grasp  
what I think has been renewed by the rise of the Web, like semantic  
capitalism in http://www.iterature.com/adwords. My last piece, Human  
Browser http://www.iterature.com/human-browser , a wireless Google  
Hack, is an adaptation of the very first net.art piece I made in  
2001: http://www.iterature.com/epiphanies, inspired by Joyce’s  
definition of the Epiphany... Another work using wireless  
technologies is http://www.unbehagen.com/wifism . By the way, it’s  
not a parody anymore since I recentely built the device (it was  
exhibited for the first time in Toulouse and you can see some  
pictures here: http://www.unbehagen.com/wifism-for-real ; and if you  
visit Paris, I will be very happy to make you try it in my atelier ;-)

Anyway, I’m now working on a new project called “Cosmolalia” on  
http://www.cosmolalia.com
For now there is an introductory article at  http:// 
www.cosmolalia.com/readme100
Some of my starting points were:
1)  the idea that, as we might have reached some new phase of  
capitalism, Science has also reached a new phase and has turned into  
a marketing tool for this capitalism at the “age of access” (hard  
science invading more and more the territory of what we call human).  
Cf what I called “taylorisation of speech”.
2)  some similarities between our whatever-modern world and  
Antiquity, and for instance between the Turing test (separation  
between man and machine) and the mythologies related to Prometheus  
(separation between man and gods). But there are other ones.

In fact these similarities struck me very recentely. This resurgence  
of Antiquity in my life was a surprise to me and because it was so  
unexpected I believe there is something here to be explored  
further... But all this does not seem to fit exactely with the idea  
that Modernity would be our Antiquity. It looks more like a huge  
loopback in time....