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