Space is the place

"Space is the place," Jazz musician Sun Ra famously proclaimed while adorning himself like the Sun God Ra as he conducted his musical rituals in the communal living space he shared with his band and following in the heart of Philadelphia.

Space is the imaginary place in which some of the world’s most successful entertainment franchises, like Star Wars and Star Trek take place, establishing vast communities of intensely loyal fans in the process.

Space is the void where the faithful of different cultures and religions hope to one day find salvation behind the pearly gates of a heavenly kingdom, in paradise, or in the Otherworld where according to Welsh mythology the departed souls reside.

The world’s great churches with their skywards-reaching ceilings are designed as containers of holy space where godliness holds the flock in its inspirational embrace from above.

Space is where the world’s first astronomers discovered the constellations that
may define our astrological character traits while greatly influencing the fate of our earthly existence.

Space also figures prominently in the mythology underlying the controversial religion of Scientology which holds that our past lives on other planets continue to be a source of negative influences on the mind and spirit in the present.

Many scientists agree that space is where we come from. Indeed, as charismatic astronomer Carl Sagan would famously phrase it, there’s a good chance that we are actually “made of starstuff,” and, given our avid space exploration, we appear to be destined to return there one day.

Space is the distance humans traversed to experience their first awe-struck glimpse of the pale blue dot on which we live. This prompted visionary architect Buckminster Fuller to coin the endearing term “Spaceship Earth” as he looked at our orbiting planet with great concern because then, as now, we were threatening to blow it to smithereens.

Space is an ever shrinking commodity on Earth, where only the rich can afford a sizable piece of it while the poor are forever pushed towards the outskirts, locked out of paradise once again.

To be a one planet species has often been considered a great liability for the human race, and NASA’s back-up plan to expand our human presence in space
comes down to the simple directive, “We’re out of here!”

The era’s push for space migration was informed by Gerard O’Neill’s book The High Frontier in which the author proposes to build space colonies, orbiting between he earth and the moon, where the inhabitants might avoid some of the mistakes made on the besieged mother planet as they would start over with a clean slate.

In space some people suspect evil to lurk in alien worlds, while others are speculating on a Higher Intelligence that may one day illuminate us, unless these extraterrestrials would treat us with the same lack of respect we afford other species who we consider to be lower ranking life forms. Indeed, some humans take their arrogance so far as to believe that we are the only intelligent species in an otherwise infinitely vast realm of empty space.

Space is a mindset, ranging from the “spacey” mental states of a drug-addled brain to the sheer exaltation of transcendental minds like William Blake who observed infinity in a grain of sand; not to mention the turned on mind explorers of the ‘60s who expanded their minds to the furthest reaches of consciousness
from where they reported back that “we are all one” and “everything is connected.”

Between inner and outer space now lies a third realm which, for lack of a better word, we are calling cyberspace. This vast tangle of technology spans the globe like an invisible web that will eventually encompass all of us. Although there is no vantage point from where we can look at it, the fact that it is indeed a space can be measured by its potential to replace massive amounts of the “real” world with a virtual realm where we will be conducting an ever larger part of our lives in pursuit of new mythologies.

Wed, Feb 21, 2007  Permanent link

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Virtual Bodies, Virtual Souls
Project: , Polytopia

In 1996 former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and internet pioneer, John Perry Barlow, addressed the governments of the material world with the following message about the online community:

“Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter and there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion”

From there he went on to describe the enlightened governance that was emerging on the Internet.

The discrepancy between the physical nature of the “real” world and the non-physicality of virtual reality has been a constantly recurring motif in movies, from actual people getting caught in games, starting with the movie Tron (1982) or in TV shows as in, for example, Pleasantville (1998). In 1999 The Matrix took this theme one step further by giving its characters the illusion of a full-fledged sensory existence in the virtual world, loosely inspired by traditional philosophical concepts which suggest that the world exists merely as a function of our perception.

In the future world of Star Trek human bodies can be beamed into space after being broken down into molecular components which can be reconstituted elsewhere.
Scientists like Robotics expert Hans Moravec, have been announcing for quite some time now that we will soon be able to discard the body altogether by downloading our brains into the computer, providing us with a form of digital immortality that should come in handy, since at present our lives are still firmly rooted in and limited by the mortality of our human flesh.

For more than half a century scientists have promised us physical immortality or at the very minimum serious life extension, through the reprogramming of our DNA or through the physical intervention of molecular-sized nanobots injected into our bloodstream. But with all the promises of rapid advances in medical science our physical existence remains our greatest liability. Even more so since in Western society our bodies tend to be held in rather low esteem and are constantly targeted by a large scale dietary and environmental assault.

Judging by the popularity of porno on the Internet it would seem that even our copious sexual urges are often better catered to in the non-physical realm than in the flesh.

However to call the virtual world non-physical is essentially a misnomer.

In virtual communities like Second Life, countless romantic opportunities are being pursued which are only on occasion carried over into the physical world. Still, surrogate erotic interactions between the virtual visitors may be triggered across the network through tele-dildonics. Immersive game playing also causes all sorts of bodily sensations and the simple verbal alert of being poked by someone on the social networking site Facebook stirs near-physical excitement in its members. As a recent demonstration showed, neural activity can now move things around on our computer screens without intervention of a mouse or other devices, giving us a glimpse of our increasingly intimate relationship with technology which will become fluent to the point where mind, body and machine will be the holy trinity of the future.

So if you look at your body as a Pavlovian physical mass, equipped with a capacity for feeling pain, a disposition for gluttony and the experience of pleasure by virtue of a few scattered erogenous zones, you are clearly selling yourself short. The human body is a highly complex transmitter and receiver of a wide variety of impulses and the amplitude of certain signals may be more easily experienced through direct neural input, reducing the interference of the material world with the help of the machine. But these virtual stimuli will continue to be complemented by the raw visceral desires that have been serving us so well since we emerged from the primordial ooze.

Which is to say that the typical sci-fi interpretation that technology is out to annihilate the flesh is just another paranoid expression of Western culture’s obsessive preoccupation with the mind-body split. What we really seem to be after is the opening up of additional channels for a heightened sensory perception that will allow us to explore the full bandwidth of our evolutionary potential.

Wed, Jan 24, 2007  Permanent link

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