[-empyre-] Jon Solomon: Resolution for Digital Futures

[Timothy Murray]

Mine is a bio-technological resolution, not 
exactly digital, but not totally unrelated, 
either.

2009 begins as another chapter in the definitive 
institutionalization of government-by-crisis and 
change-through-catastrophe, presaging new forms 
of biopolitical overexposure. Everyone I know is 
in the fight of their lives, by the skin of their 
teeth. Even the roaches...

Ever since the age of nuclear warfare, the human 
species has been toying with a biological future 
defined by the epithet: "only the roaches will 
survive". Seen in this light, the recent 
scientific experiments featuring cockroach 
chip-implants are nothing if not attempts to 
evade the disasters of our own making through 
transhumanist bioengineering. Roaches aren't 
human, you say? What about the six species that 
share our homes? Nothing emblematizes more 
succinctly the inverted paranoia of the companion 
species exception than that scene in Men in Black 
(1997) when a giant alien cockroach eats a farmer 
and then uses the farmer's skin to disguise 
itself as a human being. Apparently, we are that 
giant cockroach who needs to destroy in order to 
become human.

Manga character Keroro Gunso exemplifies a 
different option: an alien stranded on earth, he 
disguises himself to look like a frog-easy 
enough, since his alien mug looks like a frog to 
begin with. This year I'll be organizing a 
concept festival of local music at Taipei's 
premiere indy performance space, The Wall, on 
July 31-Aug. 1, 2009. This event will take the 
roach, in its various forms, as a symbol of 
surviving "their" crisis.

My resolution for 2009: Whether in a soft-skinned 
space or a hard-boiled empire, molt!

Bio: Jon Solomon (Taiwan) is an assistant 
professor in the Graduate Institute of Futures 
Studies and the French Program, Tamkang 
University, Taiwan, and has published a number of 
papers in the areas of translation, biopolitics, 
and the reorganization of the university. 
"Translation, Violence and the Heterolingual 
Intimacy", was recently published in "Translating 
Violence", Transversal, No. 11 (Fall, 2007), 
http://eipcp.net/transversal/1107 . He writes in 
Chinese as well as in English, and has published 
a Chinese translation of Jean-Luc Nancy's 
landmark essay on sovereignty, "La communauté 
dés¦uvrée". 

-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University