To Be Alive, To No Longer Be Alive, and Yet to Be Alive

Digital Salon Artists’ Statements 443 PARTNERS: JON BERGE, MICHELLE LACH, CHRISTOPHER YOCULAN To Be Alive, To No Longer Be Alive, And Yet to Be Alive The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture , men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. —Donna Haraway In a disembodied state, the supply of sensory stimuli is perforce cut off because the supposed experient has no sense organs and no nervous system. There can therefore be no sense perception . One has no means of being aware of material objects. Apart from this awareness, it is hard to see how one could have memories or desires. For all the emotions we have in this present life are concerned directly or indirectly with material objects, including our own organisms. Yet there is nothing self-contradictory or logically absurd in the hypothesis that memories, desires, and images can exist in the absence of a physical brain. It is not difficult to conceive that the experience of feeling alive could occur in the absence of a physical organism. It is conceivable that a disembodied personality could be alive in the psychological sense, even though by definition it would not be alive in the physiological or biochemical sense. Devoid of sense perception, the object is constituted by the imaginary, dependent on the function of the mind. In what way would our creations be mind-dependent, however? Presumably in the same way as dreams are. They are dependent on the imagination, the memories and the desires of the one who experiences them. Memories and desires determine the genus of the image. Memory provides the pigments. Desire paints the picture. It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. —Walter Benjamin As a product of human imagination, technology is neither angel nor demon. It is servant and companion, audience and critic. It confirms us in our sense of being. It comes to life in the uncertainty and temptation born of our forbidden attachment to it. It is part human, part machine. And it is this foreboding beckoning that recalls for us technology’s ancient counterpart, the part-human female whose secrets we are hailed to peruse. At the base of the Sphinx we look up to an ancient symbol, a cross between human and nonhuman imagery. She poses a riddle that we ceaselessly fail to unlock. Blurring the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between the material world and the semiotic world of signs and meanings, goddesses and cyborgs act as material-semiotic subjects . Yet the cyborg and the goddess differ in their function and form. The cyborg absorbs the material into the semiotic. It is material, constructed as potentially changeable by semiotic, signproducing acts, by programming and reprogramming. By contrast , the goddess represents a mythical reality. She absorbs the semiotic into the material. For her adherents, the goddess is not just a name, a semiotic device. The goddess’s materiality signifies. While the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal , continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. —Walter Benjamin The Nagini is myth and technology at once. She is an ancient being, produced using modern means. The ancient underwrites the new. We experience her today using imaging technology by projecting through our desires and memories a new life form that is both mythic and modern in function. She reminds us that forms of the part-human have existed before and will continue to exist forever. She signifies that the body is unimportant and that it is imagination (desire and memory) that chains the past to the present. In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always, simultaneously, “what has been from time immemorial.” As such however, it is manifest, on each occasion , only to a quite specific epoch—namely, the one in which...