http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publicLecturesAndEvents/20100202_1830_youAreNotAGadget.mp3

Click on the "you are not a gadget" text below to a great lecture from Jaron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality about not becoming a gadget....

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET - CLICK HERE

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Dear Big Dog,

I am wondering why you have no head? Only long skinny stick legs that whirl around in an excitable frenzy, ending abruptly to create the impression of a walking table.  How convenient for a summers day picnic or an impromptu tabletop discussion concerning the meaning of such a monstrosity. 

You are entirely mechanical, unlike he who was made from remains of the dead and animated by a lightening bolt during a vicious storm.  So I feel no danger and I am not threatened, but I do feel sorry for you.  You’re inventors will kick you like a stray dog, putting you off balance and observe you scrambling about in order to regain you balance and carry out your duty like an obedient slave.  

Looking at you now, I believe that you were made to rescue people from Earthquakes and bomb sites but what of how you came to be?  Being created by the military aside, you came to be through a series of explosions and hard labour in the mines where the raw stuff of your being was extracted.  You came to be through a series hand shakes and signatures, paychecks and lorry driving and now here you are scrambling around like a decapitated donkey.

Best wishes,
Necrospective

QWOP

In preparation for the Olympics, Necrospective is pleased to share with you QWOP - The video is a good indicator of the loss of ambiguity and potential in the transformation of the real into representation  - OMG ! 

You can play this game yourself here:

http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html

 

The show explores the relationship between violence and acting out. Freud’s death drive has been described by Jean Baudrillard as a "nostalgia for a state before the appearance of individuality and sexual differentiation, a state in which we lived before we became mortal and distinct from one another". Baudrillard discusses this subconscious desire in relation to the project of science and technology, which he suggests, is driven by a quest for immortality, exemplified through cloning and cryogenics.  Science and technology also have the effect of manifesting homogenous and uniform objects and experiences, which embody the formal qualities of the death drive.  In this sense he suggests that the project of science is "to reconstruct a homogenous and uniformly consistent Universe." This clone of the real world, in a technological form, embodies the formal qualities that satisfy the death drive; repetition and homogeneity.

The show will explore the relationship between Baudrillard’s notion that science and technology produce objects and experiences that embody the death drive and Freud’s notion that the death drive leads people to re-enact (act out) and repeat traumatic experiences. This relationship can be realized by viewing technology as a form of performance or acting. The resultant technological object / experience is a kind of travesty, a fake or re-enactment of nature. The works in the show will explore the new sanitised invention of the world, our technologically mediated environment, the environment in which abject and mucky nature has been eradicated.  This environment is presented as a world in which the death drive is satisfied, where violence and the abject have been displaced through a technological, man made infrastructure, suggesting that, through our engagement in a technologically mediated world, we have suppressed our fear of mortality and absolved ourselves of responsibility, distorting our relationship with the origins of all our actions; “real,” unmediated nature.