|
|
Digital Delirium Introduction (Part 4)
www.ctheory.net
Digital Delirium is CTHEORY: a mutating web site and ascii listserv for bleeding together the critical edges of theory, technology and culture.
Everyday when the sun comes up over China Basin Landing in San Francisco, when cold digital winds blast the streets of Montréal, when guns and knives are silent for the moment in Sarajevo, and when pirate hackers band-talk from Amsterdam to Vienna and Bucharest, CTHEORY webs the globe, radiating back to its net readers a continuously updated media analysis. Theory from the academy without walls, where the very best cyber-philosophers today are standing on street corners in the middle of daily protests in Belgrade with wireless communication systems strapped to their heads rapping out an event-scene for instant transmission to a waiting CTHEORY global community.
A mutating theory-net: Jean Baudrillard vivisecting the 90s, Paul Virilio speaking about cyberwar, god and television, R.U. Sirius reflecting on how it's better to be inspired than wired, Slavoj Zizek meditating on the cultural politics of Japan and Slovenia, dispatches from hyperreal Serbia, event-scenes from the Zapatistas, reports from the virtual body wars of Los Angeles.
With CTHEORY, a new intellectual community is born in hyperreal mode. Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling, mech poet John Nòto, extraordinary fiction writer Kathy Acker, pioneering electronic artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, pulp theorist Sue Golding, and theory-fiction writers Stephen Pfohl and Lorenzo Miglioli levitate right off the page, writing cypherfunk, hyper-poems, philosophy, soliloquys, and librettos.
Siegfried Zielinski writes of ancient dreams and medieval cyber-art while computer programmers diagnose the star trekking of physics. Episcopalean priests stalk the UFO meme. Architects track the transphysical city. Hackers splice and rupture the cyber-delirium of Norbert Wiener. Others theorize the importance of "fonts and phrasing" as a new way of digital seeing, technologies of uselessness, whether Tokyo must be destroyed, or should we grow old with Negroponte? CTHEORY is a digital site where net games, panic quakes, and nanotech futures light up the darkening sky. An explosion of intellectual creativity - liquid and critical and diverse - announcing the surfacing of the Web as a new hypermedia of (dis)communication.
Refusing tech hype and rubbing theory against digital culture, CTHEORY brings together Silicon Valley engineers, electronic artists, nano-scientists, computer entrepreneurs, fiction writers, journalists, political, social and cultural theorists, Web Masters, and cyber-researchers in multimedia research institutes from Cologne and Tokyo to Paris, Milan and San Francisco. Moving between print and Web realities, Digital Delirium intensifies cyber-reality by allowing electronic writing to break the surface of print.
CTHEORY theorizes in, of, for, and sometimes against the Web, and reports back to the world in the cold type of Digital Delirium.
Cold print for a cool millennium.
Digital Renaissance
There is a new renaissance in the making: not medieval analog but hypermodern digital.
After the long sleep of modernism, the creative imagination dreams of coded castles in the air, opens its virtual eyes, and gets to work rewriting the digital world. Now, the future is flash-forwarded into the present: a convulsive recoding of digital reality where the essence of new codes is internalized, retheorised, mutated, and wetwired. Theory in the datastorm.
That's Digital Delirium: an upsurge of virtual writers who with every molecule, breath and synapse spark of cyber-imagination rethink life as it has never been known, but has been actually lived. Today, tech reality, like clonal engineering, genetic resequencing of DNA, copyrighting the human species, and tissue engineering, accelerates beyond tech ethics. Tech has taken a big hit on the central nervous system. But now, bunker time for the self-protection of the human species is over. The digital renaissance begins by retelling the story of life in the code exits of cloning, architecture, poetry, sci-fi, fiction, politics, robotic engineering, and science.
With vision, the androids flourish.
|
|
