Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we are questioning” (Heidegger).
The project, ‘The Obscure Objects of Desire and the Rise of the Technological Chimera’ looks at how media technologies are remediated. How such technologies manifesting as objects emit a presence which is not singularly transparent but is in a sense haunted. Such technologies have their own evolutionary transcended processes which when, integrated with human presence configures a new reality imbued with ‘technological chimeras’.
Part of this rise of the Technological Chimera has to do with how machine and human have begun to fold onto each other. In turn, this has created what I refer to as a ‘second skin’. It is through this new skin that we have begun to access memory and identity. A possible end game to all this may be less dramatic than we had originally thought. For it is not the machine, which will rise up to embrace and simulate the complex nuances which defines humanity, but the exact reverse. We will in turn succumb to the machine’s own limitations, adapting to its own vision and language of what it means to be human.