Hyperrhiz 2
Trans/mission
Leo Kacenjar
Citation: Kacenjar, Leo. “Trans/mission.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 2, 2006. doi:10.20415/hyp/002.g06
Abstract: Trans/mission explores the radio wave as a technological advancement and a destructive force.
How do we know when technology has reached its evolutionary boundary? Is there a point when form (structure) cannot reach a higher or more descript stratification? Encouraging this thought would maintain that there is a limit to the creative ability of mankind. Is it possible that in the creation of the ultimate machine we reach a barrier? It is far less likely that this barrier is lack of human ingenuity. We must dismiss the concept of a final creation that is beyond improvement. Instead, this barrier consists of far more dreadful superiority, the point where humanity is obsolete. Then we are faced with a reality reliant upon source and signal. What is real is no longer a world of sentient experience, but instead, a dark quagmire of anti-spatial radar bleeps and nomadic, digital specters. At this point, the ghost has abandoned the machine and in almost the Taoist sense joined the abyss of non-being. It is possible that we have found gateways already, to such a time. With the construction of the internet, television, and even radio it is possible to fathom some fluidic elsewhere just beneath our perception. Perhaps in the not so distant future, we will find ourselves wandering there.
Trans/mission explores the radio wave as a technological advancement and a destructive force. It is apparent that technology eats flesh, but our winged creations are capable of so much good, it is hard see or analyze destructive potential. We are blinded by the luster of our own creative vision. Haraway says it well in The Cyborg Manifesto:
Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile -- a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque.
Sensually, the voice dies after remediation. Whether it is a result of the next form being more real, or just digital decay, is unclear. It is this concept Trans/mission hopes to confront, and it is this question that it asks audiences to ponder.