The Bridge to Alternative Experience
The feeling of global connectedness initially fostered by “broadcast communications technologies” has been displaced by a feeling of isolation. As television programs and commercials came to dominate the collective sensory experience of the Advanced Nations, it became easier to pretend that nothing which came to us via Television was real. Art, in response, was overrun by Synthetics and Surrogates of all types, which, even from the greatest of artists producing at that time, did little more than stir a vague, introspective melancholy. Had this trend continued, we might today be living in a world pervaded by Selfish Apathy, instead of Xenophobic Paranoia.
But something happened in the early 1990’s that simply changed Everything…more
December 15th, 2006 at 12:45 am
[…] And such it was for a very long time that different cultures of earth, separated by great distances, might know nothing of the other, but for the appearance of the occasional mask or other odd artifact among some arriving ship’s bric-a-brac. Our modern day romantic notions of foreign travel, the connotation of the word “exotic”, for example, are based on thousands of years of having to stretch the imagination to think about other parts of the world. About 100 years ago, things began to change — quickly. At the end of the 19th Century, Freud and the advent of wire-based communications technologies brought a sense of instantaneity, fleetingness and greater personal subjectivity to the human experience than at any other moment in human history. Before then, I believe, people imagined others living in far-away places of the world as either very similar to themselves, or, otherwise, as so dissimilar as to be able to completely disavow their existence in Abstraction. Art was, therefore, quite free to serve us in all the ways we needed it to, because there was little to contradict it in the form of actual information from Other Places. But, when a degree of “remote verification” became possible by way of transformative new communications technologies and faster modes of transportation, it became more difficult to indulge our fantasies of Alternative Experience. […]