Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 139
Machines For Ultimate Questions:
Popular Culture Between Techno Elegies
and Raving Ecstasy
Today we are entering a world that is becoming more and more artificial and
techno-coded. It is a world of techno and a new generation of the artificial, namely
a second order artificial which has extended to the form of life-like processes.
Techno then in this sense is not just a form of modish music developed from Acid
House and Detroit Techno at the end of the 80’s. Instead, it is a term used in this
essay to indicate a new paradigm in the world under the realm of the artificial.
Specifically, the techno describes a massive shift from the natural to the artificial
— a shift which is gaining advantage over what we have, up until now, accepted as
our natural, given reality. Heidegger touched upon a similar transition in his essay
titled The Question C oncerning Technology: “The hydroelectric plant is not built
into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that Joined bank with bank for
hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the
river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power
station.” (Heidegger 1991: 15) With regard to the power plant, the river suddenly
became of secondary importance; the river is “dammed up into the power plant”,
which means the river is derived from it or has become its derivative. Comparable
is the techno, which when considered from the horizon of the end of 20th century,
can be seen mutating into a new generation of the artificial, namely to the level of
second-order artificial, indicating a transition from mechanical (the logic of a clock’s
mechanism), to life-like processes in the non-biological hardware. What we are
seeing is a transition from “mechanical” to “biological” or, if we reach into sciencefiction, a transition from Frankenstein’s monster to virtual agents, bots and clones.
The techno principle involves the following fundamental concepts: augmented
reality, in the sense of a given, “real” reality, and artificial realities coexisting in an
interdependent complex relationship; the world as a “pluriversum” of the given
world and artificial worlds; an interaction between Apollonian and Dionysian (the
coexistence of the principles of order and ecstasy); mix as an ontological principle
in the forming of synth realities (DJ, metaphorically speaking, as protoartist and
protodesigner); second-order artificial (an artificial state between living and non
living); life-as-it-could-be on non-organic hardware; technology as culture;
technology as politics; technology as religion; augmented concepts of the individual
(multiple-egos, avatars); technoscience as a creative, artistic science; scientists as
the creators, the techno-artist — his/her work as a totally scientific work of art and
a total work of science; augmented and accelerated, techno-modelled sensitivity