Print This Posti’ve been inspired by pia’s practice and the conversations that i’ve been having with pia about tekhne ghosts huanted media and the strange things that she does with electrictiy and i’m particularly taken by this phrase she has of letting the non-human life live so letting something which might not meet human definitions of living or which might not fit into a rigid binary of non-living and living but nevertheless to let those things live to let the ghosts of electricity live i do have an interest in what you might call the art of ghosts which is another way to say what the activity of the dorks at dorkbot is is that it’s the art of letting the ghosts speak for themselves
- Nick Keys
Ghosts of Technology
- an excerpt
dance is a skill speaking is a skill a skill
i’m not doing very well at the moment language is a
skill rhetoric is a skill and poetry is a skill
so it’s very hard to figure out where the limits of
tekhne stop and start
so we need another story for the origins of humanity
and a different one to the blob one that went
nowhere okay so i’m a bit more relaxed
now so with the blob one we went up to heaven
right we went up to heaven right we were
going up to heaven and zeus was like na i don’t
like that so i’m going to strike these blobs down
with thunderbolts and then he was like
no that will kill them what i’ll do instead
is that i’ll chop them in half right so we he did
was he chopped us all in half so these arrogant
spherical blob creatures that we were who kind of
just rolled around on the ground and masturbated
and ate and were just totally in love with ourselves
right so he chopped them in half and then he left
it up to apollo to sort of stretch our skin over the
top of us re-aligning our limbs and over to the
belly and stitch us up there and so the belly
button is the scar left to remind us of our prior
arrogance which of course then we forgot
and that was the point and so that story is
in fact the origin of the myth of love and
what i like about it is that when humans are made
it means love is there at the beginning of humanity
in this myth which is a very appealing idea
when humans start they start because of love
perhaps what’s no so appealing about this story is
the brutal cutting in half and the implication
that love is loss as well that love is lack
where as i was kind of hoping that the idea of love
was binding was fusion was not bifurcating
putting things into two equal halves
okay so there is the blob story
but there is no tekhne in that and
that’s a problem so there’s another story
another greek story about the origin of
tekhne that is also the origin of humanity: zeus
decides that non-immortal creatures so
mortal creatures need to be brought from night
and into the light and so he goes to prometheus
and prometheus is the titan blessed with foresight
blessed with knowledge blessed with immaculate
memory and prometheus sort of comes with his
twin brother who is also his double who’s
epimetheus who’s not really blessed with
anything or he’s blessed with forgetting he
forgets epimetheus is the dude who always forgets
now zeus says to prometheus okay now that
we are bringing these mortals from out of the
night and into the light it’s your job to give
them qualities it’s your task i bestow the
task upon you to give them qualities and so
prometheus is like okay yeah fair enough
and epimetheus is with him and he begs him
please please let me do it i want to do it
it will be awesome if i do it and prometheus is
like well it seems like an arduous task
so i’ll let him do it and so he lets his little brother
or his twin who is in fact just a double of himself
the opposite of himself but he lets him do it
so epimetheus goes around with a basket of qualities
and hands them out to all the creatures right
so to the zebra he gives stripes and speed
to the lion he gives power and roar these kind
of things and so he does a great job
especially for epimetheus of distributing all the
qualities very evenly and this distribution of
qualities is responsible for the ecological balance
the even chance that things have to survive right
except that when he gets to humans he looks in the
basket and there is no more qualities left so
humans are those things that are forgotten
left naked and forgotten with no qualities
prometheus is like shit i’m going to get in
trouble for this so he decides that he will go
to zeus a pretty mad decision i would have
thought and steal fire from zeus and give it to
humans so he steals fire and gives it to
humans and as a punishment for this zeus
straps him to a rock that’s right
straps him to a rock and an eagle comes and eats
his liver and then the liver grows back
and then the eagle comes back and eats his liver
and that happens for a long time so
prometheus really suffered for giving us fire
so fire is the symbol of technology okay so
in this myth of the origins of humans
technology happens at the same moment as humans
happen so instead of having humans who
invent technology what we get is humans that
are constituted by their technicity
that’s one way of putting it in a sense we are
technological beings okay now this has
some consequences for a lot of binaries in
in in our society that that we rest
that we hold dear to ourselves anthropology
and technology so the human and the technological
that’s a split there’s also nature and
culture
and there’s also subject and object but if
humans are technological creatures from the
beginning that is to say that they are
defined by the fact they are technological then
these kind of oppositions they don’t work so well
okay so the the father of anthropology rousseau
who was a really interesting writer and he
searched for an essence of man an original
and eternal man and he wasn’t a fool he knew
that he couldn’t search for the origins of something
without making a fiction about it so he knew
that he was dealing in a sense with fiction
but nevertheless he was searching for this eternal
figure now he was then accused later on
by nietzsche i think rightly of falling into
the trap that so many philosophers have fallen into
nietzsche called it a family failing a family
failing of philosophers is that they will not learn
that man has become so there is this
search for an eternal being this kind of pure
nature and essence but the reality is
of course that we have always become
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Nick Keys is a Sydney-based writer, blogger, researcher, website producer and collage artist.
Dorkbot Sydney is a regular social gathering for “people doing strange things with electricity”.
