[-empyre-] Machine Dreams: on glimpses and glitches

[Mark Marino]

I was paging through the beautifully terrifying and sweet and lonely
imagining of the Machine Dreams zine and noticing some through lines, or
subroutines.

As in the 1950s, when post-War marketing dreamed of the future, today's
techno-marketing is full of optimism.  The house of the future.  Cars that
fly.  Jetpacks. The sleek extended human.

But like the poets of the past, our machine dreams do not extend us
seamlessly into some chrome-plated future.

These machine dreams, not quite nightmares, but haunting impressions.

It is not a raceless, egalitarian utopia.  Nor is it a Platonic ideal on
some frictionless, unblemished grid.

It is broken, glitchy, it is pimpled, it is lossy, it is partial.

Michael Widner's Bug

> I discovered a new bug today...

Nibbling away
> on brittle bits,
> the routines of desire.



And those bugs keep pointing back to our humanity:

As the scientist says in the beginning of Miyoko Conely's The Dream

> Think I gained a wrinkle (Beat) That's the problem. *The *problem,
> actually. With me. With us.


And none of this in some pure imaginary environment but in the market of
NanoMix of Ricardo Dominguez's Nano-Garage, where we might survive on
weapons contracts rather than utopian visions of unlimited self-serving
pleasure machinery...

(But I still want my jetpack.)

-- Mark




-- 
Teacher/Writer/Thinker/Spy
http://markcmarino.com
http://haccslab.com

“Enough.


sentence #3 from* E-Sig*
Micro-novel (limited edition) (being published one sentence at a time via
my email signature). Collect them all by writing to me frequently or by
trading with my friends.  Sentences will be updated periodically.
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