BACK TO NATURE II

Art and Technology in the 21st. century

Roy Ascott

Published in Kultur und Technik im 21.Jahrhundert, Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen, DŸsseldorf, 1993

 

It's well known that we have lost touch with Nature. It is not so much that Nature has retreated, or that we have dismissed it, destroyed it or denied it. It is simply that the metaphors it has long supported no longer hold . Nature is, of course, all metaphor: the good, the pure, the unadulterated, the whole. It speaks of innocence, a kind of blessed naiveté, as well as the wild, the unspoilt and the instinctive. We should perhaps first agree that it has never as such existed, or that it has existed in different ways for different societies. It is the first virtual reality - in which the pure data of an undifferentiated wholeness is programmed, shaped and categorised according to our language, fears and desires. We have always placed it in opposition - to culture, the city, technology. Its strength has lain in this opposition, as much a refuge as a force. But now, the binary opposition of town and country, for example, is disappearing. With the ubiquity of telematic networks, the city is no longer the necessary site of commerce, learning or entertainment, while the advance of artificial systems of synthesis and replication in biological sciences means that the country can no longer claim a hegemony of pure and authentic natural process . The country was the environment within which or against which the city was set, but with high technology as the environment , neither country nor city can be distinguished as objects to be foregrounded or privileged. As we move into the 21st. century we shall need to create new metaphors to house the complex interacting systems of biological, technological and social life which we are developing.

 

The whole text is in the CD Rom Earth Art