Frequently at frontiers we are asked, "Anything to declare?"
The wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border
official is to say that you have "nothing to declare", and quickly move
on. Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or
at least to get by with saying very little. A degree of reticence is
the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.
The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realise the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of telepresence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the reinvigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favour of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hypermobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits - most prominently in the intense debate on global warming - citizens and organisations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced telepresence technologies.
ReadHow much has changed in just a few days. Here is another text I've composed in an attempt to continue to think about the pandemic, and our lives within it. I hope it's of use, however minorly, as we all try to come to some kind of terms with the novel transformations, precarities, and struggles emerging in every direction.
~i
Artist | Critical Engineer
ReadNadia Plesner (born 1981) is a Danish artist working and living in the Netherlands.
ReadMicha Cárdenas is a Lecturer in the Visual Arts Department and Critical Gender Studies Program at University of California San Diego (USCD), a transgender performance and new media artist and theorist. She is a researcher at the Experimental Game Lab at CRCA and at CalIT2. Her work deals with the interplay of technology, gender, sex and biopolitics. She currently lives and works in San Diego and Los Angeles.
ReadCandida TV was born from the melting of different realities: underground cinema, video production, rave parties, street theaters, independent radios, underground bulletin board systems on the net and counterculture pop-magazines in the last seven years in Rome.
ReadThe Negative Dialectics of the Net
In his essay, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime", Jean-François Lyotard observes that capitalism, technoscience and the pictorial avant-garde of the twentieth century share an 'affinity to infinity'. All three point towards a sensibility that is constitutive for the experience of the modern world.
