| Technology is still regarded by many as an instrument,
or a means to an end. Martin Heidegger asserts that techn è,
the Greek origin of the word signifies an uncovering, or a way to truth,
rather than a tool; the essence of technology is speculative thinking
rather than instrumental thinking. This view puts technology back under
the umbrella of culture, that is, the spiritual and creative activity
of man. As I recognize it today, technology has become a thinking entity with an inorganic life of its own. It is post-human in the sense that humans will cease to be its necessary condition or model. No longer grounded in the human, technology operates by self-generation. The world of technology is more than just devices or extensions of the body. It is the world of simulacra which, according Gilles Deleuze, are copies that challenge the authority of the model, and hence, the notion of copies. They are constructed on the basis of an internal principle of difference in themselves, instead of the identity of the model. Simulacra operate by replacing, and self-generating without referring back to their origin.(1) Technology is developed less out of necessity than possibility. It is a thinking entity that points us to where we can go. However, it is not goal-driven but produces only affects and excess. The locomotive, for example, was clearly invented out of the need for greater mobility. It is not clear, on the other hand, that the invention of Tamaguchi, a pocket-sized electronic pet that counts on its master to feed it by pressing a button, is based on necessity at all. As an artist who uses plastic technology, an everyday phenomenon, I see the convergence of art and technology as speculative thinking. While new technologies are cyber and digital, plastic is practically the material condition for most technological innovations. The digital world does not exist in a vacuum but amid plastic computer parts. Virtual reality carries the reality of synthetic rubber equipped with sensors. From space exploration to microscopic biochemical sensors injected into single cells,(2) plastic continues to help us to realize the impossible. Our children learn with Lego, the plastic, interchangeable, modular units that can be fitted into each other for structure building. They play with a Barbie doll made up of plastic parts that snap apart, and extremely malleable Silly Putty that stretches, snaps into pieces and bounces. They exercise an inflatable dinosaur that is a collapsible house - both skin and structure. How do these things frame the way our children look at the world? And what about these images? When Princess Diana died, Buckingham Palace, as seen on television was not covered with flowers, but a sea of shiny cellophane wrappers. In Indonesia, students threw water-filled plastic bags into the giant, raging forest fires to lampoon their government’s incompetent efforts in fighting the fire. In extra-terrestrial narratives, a shiny, flexible substance is depicted as the future plastic and an indicator of a more advanced civilization. Plastic is everywhere. If nothing else, our plastic world provides numerous vantage pints from which we can look at technology. For example: how does technology come to be autonomous and self-generating; how does technology point to the limitation of language and, therefore, provide us with multiple models of thinking; what becomes of out perception when we are surrounded by technological phenomena? Let me emphasize that plastic is beyond a substance. It is a phenomenon with cultural and philosophical implications. The characteristics of extreme malleability and its numerous potentialities force upon plastic a life of its own. Many plastic objects do not have natural counterparts, for example, bubblewrap. It exists only due to the invention of plastic. Moreover, many new plastics were invented merely by accident, such as the aforementioned Silly Putty, a by-product of a unsuccessful experiment to come up with imitation rubber. With no particular form, and no specific function, it was marketed as a material made solely for the pleasure of handling it. Plastic enables the emergence of a variety of new surfaces that are beyond the opposites of structure and depth. What happens when surface becomes so seductive that it defers indefinitely the contemplation of an enigmatic inside? Craig Kauffman an artist who was prominent in the sixties for his vacuum-formed bubbles, applied iridescent paint from the back of the vacuum form to produce an even surface. These bubble-like sculptures are smooth, shiny and radiant. They invite me to recall the surfaces of automobiles, commercial signs and bath tubs, rather than to imagine their interiors. In everyday life, we are surrounded by surfaces that are flawless with synthetic sheen and long-lasting, intensified colours - not unique surfaces, but endless numbers of multiples. What implication does this have for our perception? Look at the case of the computer, or at any moulded plastic object: those incredible curves, those mouldings, and, most interestingly, the visible parting line that tells where the mould opens. This is a line that tells the secret of its making. It is perhaps a defect. However, it is so unapologetic, so consistently and perfectly defective that there is no mystery, nothing to hide, nothing to reveal but a standard procedure that applies to an infinite number of its multiples - a procedure that maintains a certain consistent look even when it makes mistakes. The world of mass-produced forms are determined by a human designer with utilitarian considerations, however, the very execution of the forms by machines, in an assembly line with strict standards, subjects them to a kind of appearance that is beyond human, Now, with new technology, highly complex forms are created in no time that would previously have been unthinkable. Where is this machine aesthetics taking us? My recent work engages these ideas through an investigation of packaging material. This is the brand-new trash, the forgotten space-in-between, the residue of our contemporary social process that is all about moving people and moving goods. Bubblewrap, polystyrene blocks and vacuum forms are the industrial surplus of functional but otherwise strangely aestheticised forms. My sculptures employ the hand to join in the production or modification of such customised and mechanical form. If technology is essentially the handmade before the time of factory and plastic, the handmade is now rethinking technology. Hence, technology is rethinking itself. In its rethinking, the handmade does not find itself through the contradistinction of the machine-made. In other words, the hand and the machine are not opposites but co-extensive with each other. My assertion that plastic as simulacra demonstrates that technology is not a tool but a thinking entity, raises some questions concerning nature, origin and language. In thinking how technology thinks, we change how we think about thinking. What is so powerful about the image of plastic, for me, is that it actualises, materialises the idea of boundlessness, or the manifold that long exists in speculative thinking. When technology is seen in this light, the statement that, "technology becomes an operative principle in every aspect of our lives," casts new meaning. The negativity palpable in this statement is based on the assumption that technology reinforces the truth of the quantifiable, determinable, and predictable. Don’t we need to revise this negativity when new technology can be fuzzy, indeterminable and unpredictable? This does not mean, however, that we are moving towards a better or worse plac in an eschatological sense, because what humanity is simply needs to be reconsidered. Technology is plastic. Plastic, produced by technology, redefines the nature of technology as plastic. Art is plastic because it is attracted to the shape of plasticity. Humanity is itself plasticised, because of movement in its thinking and its activity. It will always be there - but who knows what shape it will assume. References 1. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 125-28 2. This refers to a new technology known as Pebbles (Probes Encapsulated By BioListic Embedding). A pebble is a small plastic sphere that is sensitive to a single chemical target. A vast number of them can be injected into a cell to detect precise response to stimuli such as hormones and drug. See "Cellular Pebble-Dash," The Economist, 11 April 1998, 64. |
