NARCISSUS GUIDE

Fortunes and disgraces of technology.

XIV Fortunes and disgraces of technology. Television became a kind of infinite mirror for Narcissus in which all his wisdom and virtues, maladies and stupidity could be represented. If we see reality through images of itself, it is because this is the only way to see, relying on our condition as visual animals. So reality is itself seen through images and not otherwise. (In fact reality is too big and unlimited already for our senses*, so visual art, painting in this case, can only pretend to exult the marvels of non-linear reality when criticizing the hazards of linear visual reality in itself...and complementarily to celebrate its conscious complex interaction through the realizing artificial!). From that limitation which is human we create models of technology, technology to see and to understand reality. Name it, painting, photography, cinema, television, video, computer games, virtual reality: all these inventions are the image of the self of reality as we humans see it, understand it, love it or hate it!. Consequently if we like to expand our limitations when seeing limitations of images seen, we are going to have to use different metatechnologies for it. In an Era of philosophical contradictions, take McLuhan's "the media is the message" from the 70s, and compare it with the 90s Negroponte's "the media is not anymore the message", or Krueger's "the response is the medium", and we are going to learn of our own contradictory possibilities,capabilities and limitations when it comes to understand reality through the images we create and the technologies we use.(31) Technologies die only when they are not useful anymore, but in the case of Art, Metatechnologies like drawing, painting or sculpting, we can only reinvent these if, with the technologies of tomorrow, the image of the reality we see is broadening our sense of self, as well our recognition of 'the other'!. Clearly the condition here is not to create object-oriented technologies but human-oriented metatechnologies instead.(32) Or at least, "the effective re-enframing of technology, which as Taylor says, requires common political action to reverse the drift that the market and the bureaucratic state engender towards greater atomism and instrumentalism."** The so called "muerte de la pintura"***implies the agonizing decadence of a media in its labyrinth (call it the metatechnology of painting), because the way of taking the image of reality has changed, those images(33) sources are right now television, video, virtual-reality and more. So the right proposition will be not to kill a beautiful old media used to talk images, but to enhance it, to create a mixed new tribal-global ritual toy, with both transitional Euclidean and Cartesian, Eisteinian and Quantum space elements. As a consequence, reversing the "electric media obsolescence effect" in all which is "segmented visual, connected and logical" (such painting on any euclidian-cartesian flat, traditionally well organized surface, or sculpting, either a connected, representational or a homogenous non representational form). As a result, arriving at primary levels of complex art (like combining continuous... discontinuous surfaces plus continuos-discontinuous spaces, non-spaces, analogies and relationships etc.). Hence, useful to convey the new images of the complex self of reality, as well the images of our own elemental-complex self on it. The thought of using New Knowledge of the Realm of Reality upon deriving from the New Consciousness of Complexity comes on the agreement that the findings of this natural knowledge enlighten new insights to see and to understand the whole of reality itself as an elemental-complex one!. In its call for consciousness, aesthetics of complexity must be founded on taking a chance, so "the limits of human adaptability" for the "Future Shock", (as mentioned by Alvin Toffler) will be more easily predicted, documented and portrayed. As a result, the problems of reality become more problems of the FUNCTION (the primordial function of broadening our sense of Self as well our sense of Reality), through a new hypersense of space, time, color and form. With these premises in mind, we should overcome any philosophical contradiction in our post-historical self if we have the vision and the courage, to create useful complementary metatechnology in our increasing awareness of what reality is before our eyes, and beyond us!(34)... * "We are living in an infinitely complex reality..We are incapable of absorbing all the information available to us at any moment". Myron W. Krueger, "Artificial Reality II". 1991. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. U.S.A. Page 154. ** "Charles Taylor, "The malaise of modernity". 1992. House of Anansi Press Limited. Ontario, Canada. Page 120. *** "From today painting is dead." It is now (1981) nearly a century and a half since Paul Delaroche is said to have pronounced that sentence in the face of the overwhelming evidence of Daguerre's invention." And " we might think about art after the end of art, as if we were emerging from the era of art into something else the exact shape and structure of which remains to be understood." Arthur C. Danto, "After the end of art".1997. Princeton University Press. New Jersey, U.S.A. Pages 137 & 4.