An Exploration of Remnants from Essence: A Timely Reflection

Abstract

This research, attempts to ask questions and ignite debate with regard to the digital evolution in relationship to humankind’s own evolutionary development. The essay is a critical exploration of the question: Where does humankind evolve to after the digital? Not only in the physical bodily sense, but with regard to the breaking down of neurological theories, philosophical realizations and debates of post and premillennial, that are now merging to present: the formula to combat the digital socio enveloping every corner of our consciousness and being. The premise being here that the digital self of humankind cannot survive and continue without the analogue self. Will art and science merge in an alliance? Sense-data.1 This digital of everything: evolving and primarily inspired from the creative, artistic emotions of the very nature that is humankind. Key questions prompting this research include: how can humankind evolve in the digital while continuing to have a consciousness of reality: what reality? These emotions and senses controlled by a button, a haptic wave of the hand or a prosthetic ignition behind a human spectral receptor. Why now? Is it the impatience of humankind to discover their true self: that spurs the individual into the digital. The individual now become a dividual of one substance merging into the one existence. Castoff, for the last time: the instant disposable digital world. Recalling the ignition with an instant, an action, an icon and maybe a word: on/ off. Is there an alternative: an alternative that relates to our ephemeral self? Humankind following nature rather than constantly disturbing the morphogenesis: finally aware of the reality of nature. From my multidisciplinary art practice through to my cryptic research prose I will critically argue that humankind’s evolution with the analogue self and digital self presents a new departure that will evoke an as yet undocumented topology of incomparability into other dimensions. The theoretical dimensions ignited into reality once more: poetry and mathematics merging. This merger ignited over the now evolving digital domain of humankind while intertwining the soon to be customized cartography of the analogical neurology into the thermodynamically accelerated flash of the intrinsic sphere: nothingness, with no haptic or manual off button. Or are there to be only transcendent chapels for the last of the analogue and virtual databases for the digital? This question linking temporality and the question: Is the Dasein2 analogue death: dead? Are the two performing this macabre dance: twins? One being: the analogue and the other, a digital mode of one Spinozian substance within a finite dimension. The balance created in an extended presence of spacetime.3 This research provides an articulation and critical reflection of existing articles, prose and contemporary art merging with my own attitudes and experiences of myself being one of the last of the analogue: generation ‘X’4, a chameleon that adapts constantly to its environment, in nature, in the digital and beyond through to the furthest reach, yet closer still than currently imagined. An artist, a navigator, a pilgrim and explorer of dimensions ignited by metaphysical cognition soon to be presented in iconography and ideograms within a cartography. These ideographic codes, presenting the only record of a futurist’s past journey of exploration into the other dimension. The final undocumented pause in the cartography revealing a final departure of a human form never to return: the evolution realized and documented for whom? A remnant remains: a castoff human form lies at the last place of departure. A panpsychist,5 would inevitably offer here the reasoning that overtime the mentality of these castoffs would evolve and form new modes6. A Sartrean reincarnation of form: realizing the typology and learning to read the ideographic code set before them in the once more ancient cartography set in time. A Möbius strip (August Ferdinand Möbius & Johann Benedict Listing 1858) revisited: “jump higher next time,” the ideograms might read. A distant voice calls out a Nietzschean, ‘Will to Power’7. Can they already see the Necropolis reflecting in their spectral receptors? The Möbius strip created with thorns of a viscous form flowing. Intelligibility, emphasizing that whomever steps into the viscous form: the metaphorical river, shall never step into the same river twice. The flow: the volatile current, a distant voice is heard; there are two of you. This cotemporality ignited by Siddhartha Gautama8 in the fourth century B.C. The founder of the spiritual tradition: known as Buddhism. This spiritual tradition four centuries later inverted in another doctrine and theology: Christianity. Vilém Flusser personifies this in his book: The History of the Devil9. Vilém states, the Buddhist seeks (to formulate in his terms) to lose faith: to negate God. The Buddhist dreading dying is not enough: he seeks nothingness. The inversion: Christianity, running desperately from death. Diving deep into a philosophical climate here: I am willing to identify with the belief of not only another existence, but a parallel existence in conjunction with the life already taking place. Are we not from the lotus-eaters? The artist: the existential being. Preprogrammed with an inner existence: an artist metaphysically creating the phenomenology of being through cognitions not only of the body but the subconscious of the synthetic. The question here: is the metaphysical cognition imprinted, or copied? The ‘Y’ chromosome passed on from male to male, from male artist to male artist: a discourse for a poet no doubt. Is this practice creating the sublime from the theory: at an instant passed on through generations? The sublime doctrine reconfigured at will. The best art stolen and reproduced once more. Was the enlightened one? An artist.