Look at video of this great conference with Marcos Novak and Bruce Sterling. It was organized by Share Festival on the 16th of march 2008.
Here you can read the text printed in the catalogue of the Share Festival:
“Canonical works were once heretical. Established species were once mutant. There is a deep relationship between how the new is conceived, produced, introduced, and established in nature and how the new emerges in culture. While evidences of this can be traced throughout the centuries, it is just now, in this nascent century, that we have finally developed tools powerful enough not only to represent or describe the processes of development and speciation by which the new enters the world, but to simulate them, and then, beyond that, to actually embody them. We will not stop at simulating the evolution and mechanisms of life, we aim to manufacture new species of life itself.
Our operations are strange and growing stranger: once we have grasped the principles of nature’s operation, we create simulations, and once our simulations satisfy us, we quickly fictionalize them and extrapolate from them new rungs for the ladder we are building in our effort to leave this little planet and cast ourselves across the universe. It is this last step that is the most powerful: the rendering of science at the service of a fiction of transport to a more ample habitat, that is to say, of drifting horizons, shifting cultures, and ever-expanding desires, moving us from the understanding of the biology of evolution to the building of the allobiology of innovation, by which I mean the technological leveraging of the mechanisms of biology for the evolution of thought itself.
What is this “allo~,” then? The idea of the “allo~” stands for “the other of another kind,” in contrast to the more conventional “other of the same kind.” It is the root of otherness: “alien,” “else,” “alternative” all stem from it. This distinction among othernesses characterizes our time. The “allo~” is the filter our ideas must now pass through to warrant attention and investment.
In slower times, the past informed the future: mimetic Beauty was our guide to developments that unfolded at a more leisurely pace. We could see the future coming. Now we rush into futures for which we have no eyes and no models. Mimesis, looking to the past, is of little use when we face forward unto the oncoming Alien of our own making. The “allo~” is the filter, and yet, we still need a criterion: not all that the future brings is to our liking: among an infinity of alien options we still seek the few, the rare, the beautiful.
Our science and epistemology have undermined all certainty. Between relativity, quantum mechanics, and m-brane theory, between Heisenberg and Gödel, between Duchamp and Cage, between Deleuze and Badiou, old stable modalities have collapsed but have neither been replaced by new stable ones, nor are they likely to. Rather, we find that space and time (indeed, “spime”), mass and energy, biology and information, organism and mechanism, are ever more deeply entangled. Not only are they not the polar opposites they once were held to be, they are actually intricately implicated in one another. Everything points to a transmodal universe that is inherently metamorphic and vibratory, but that is always characterized by ecologically complex balances and counterbalances and richly immanent order.
In this context where admixture rules, taxonomies fail, architectures become liquid, expand into transarchitectures, converge with spatialized music and navigable music into the spacetime “spime” amalgam archimusic, conjoin with numerous other strange combinatorial monsters, burst open into transvergence and speciation, exceed and fuse all modalities into a new transformational continuum, and strive for a perpetually self-renewing allo~.
At the basis of all this change is the shift from the ancient atomic understanding of the world to a present alloAtomic worldview, in which the atomic itself is recuperated into rigorously defined but ever-shifting and constantly re-embodied fictions. Via immersion, we went from atoms to bits. Then, those bits informed our desires, and changed forever what we expected of atoms. Now, via eversion, we are virtualizing the material world itself even as we materialize virtuality. We invent atoms, alloAtoms, cast them free, and watch the worlds they make.
The focus of our imagination has shifted to the engineering of these fictive atoms. We start reading a book that is constantly rewriting itself in response to our gaze because every letter in it is a living organism that is watching us, then suddenly realize that we, the readers, are ourselves potentially alloAtomic, made of “atoms” that can be equally fictive and availing themselves to radical reconfigurations, equally open to being used to rewrite us into new, automutant, Alloselves.”
2008 Marcos Novak
