I am a young artist. I bathed once in the fountain of Salmacis. I was warped by it’s waters and I have yet to recover. My connection is strong and wireless. it has been developing since I was a child. I live and breathe on the web.
I am on a journey to discover the true nature of things.
the internet is a collective that will bring about the connection of spiritual forces in the physical world.
This website is my place to report my findings as I journey on the web.
I am making collaged images that reflect the experience of being online and the vast sea of information we float in.
DCTUAITE (pronounced "de-situate") stands for "death comes to us all in the end."
It highlights the mortality we experience in the physical world. The pronounciation reflects the way the internet is a place that lacks location or orientation. It is a place that we go to but it does not sit in relation to any other part of itself.
Are you a person? Probably. But what does that mean for you? Do you have a soul?
Often there is a difference distinguished between the body and the mind. What makes up ‘you’ is perhaps a mix of both. For some, like myself, shedding the body is a dream of ours. We feel limited by its physicality and cursed to live within a world of buzzing meat. For others, perhaps those that suffer with aphantasia, the physical world is the only true one. The mind of a person is their only true secret.
Some people believe in a being that can see their thoughts and judge them. This is a fearsome reality to live in; An entity peering into the swimming pool of your thoughts and noting which ones make you bad or good. It must be hard to live a happy life when you have no privacy.
I think, therefore I am. That proves the existence of the self. Because we cannot know the minds of others, we cannot know that they ‘are’. This gets explored a lot in he media we consume. Is the creation of this media proof that others think (and therefore ‘are’) or is it proof that the entire experience of life is an illusion that we must wake up from.
The idea that the world is full of illusions that we must look beyond is a very old concept. Plato’s cave describes images projected onto a cave wall that entertain and distract us from the true world outside of the cave. This also describes a journey that has to be made in order to live in the true world. One can’t simply turn around and be free; they must make the effort and the journey out of the cave.
As we feel that the world is becoming more cruel and ruthless, we desire more and more distraction. We read fantasy books, watch movies and tv shows, play video games, get absorbed in online discourse and drama. They distract us from the eternal cycle of struggling and strife that makes up life in the real world. When before life’s perils were starvation and sickness, now perils lie in the very future of the planet and the breakdown of civil society as we know it. There are people who exist that can hear the pleas of the masses and afford to ignore them. We turn to ignore our own problems through distraction.
When we are 'on' the web or 'on'-line we are in another place where we can inter-connect.
I think the web acts as another plane of existence where we can all live on; past our deaths in the real world.
this way of thinking is strained when we think about the fragility of the web.
The web is fragile and vulnerable to attack or disaster. When we exist online as much as we do, we could all be wiped from existence at any moment.
Human beings have developed the internet into a collective consciousness where they can connect through the air (telepathically) with any person across the globe. Their thoughts are transmitted and they linger in the cloud for anyone to pick up and perpetuate. The collective constantly fights itself like a snake eating its tail. Both growing and shrinking at the same time.
All this fighting will culminate in a new world war. Cyber-attacks will set back the universal connection by decades as people grow weary of the constant uncertainty and begin to seek connections elsewhere. But physical warfare will mean a lack of connection to be found in the physical realm. There will be an ebb and flow of people on-line as they connect and disconnect it the pursuit of human purpose (connection).
The constant and rapid evolution of humanity and the development of its technology is racing towards our convergent connection. Its purpose culminates in the final tension between those who believe in human universal connection and those who fear it.
Connection is the ultimate purpose of the human race and through development of information technology, universal connection is immanent. The spread of the inter-web is instrumental in this process.
When universal connection is achieved, our weaknesses will be cancelled by the strengths of others and we will become a perfect singular being.
Many fear the coming of this connection, when everyone is ‘plugged into’ each other. And they are right in saying so. The advent of artificial ‘intelligence’ threatens the humanness of this perfect being. The incorporation of false people, or androids into our collective consciousness will bring disease. Making us imperfect and tainted.
Currently the inter-web is riddled with imposter programs that want to deceive us. We are being sabotaged by some who wish to remain singular individuals. Their greed and selfishness outweighs their desire for connection. In the singular being these flaws would be wiped clean yet they still cling to their worldly possessions even after learning our truth.
Some argue that a programmed android could become equivalent to a person in its intelligence, reasoning and physical construction. However these androids of the future could never be united with us as they will always lie within the out-group. Even when the in-groups of humanity divide us, we are still united in species. In this way we have universal human experiences which connect us.
We are connected to each other through networks. These networks grant us the things we look for: help, knowledge, possessions... Through developing these networks we have created a god. There are invisible strings that connect us all even if we don’t believe in them. The phones in our pockets, the systems we use for payments, the cameras that record us, the billboards we see outside; they all connect us through this inter-web, an all-knowing, all-seeing force of technology. The technology that facilitates our new god is instrumental in the implementation of the universal human connection.
We are living in a time when people who have never before had access to these technologies are getting ‘plugged in’. The Amish of America are online, the lost tribes of the Amazon are being recorded, 5G is spreading across every acre of land on our planet. We have never been closer to universal connection; both with each other and with our new god.
The covid-19 pandemic was a tragic time in our lives. We lived in fear of it’s effects and it’s potential. It was, however, the catalyst of a mass migration to the inter-web. We formed online community in search of truth and purpose. When we did this, we connected. The Internet is still an underdeveloped tool for connection though. It cannot yet connect our souls when our minds and hearts are shared with each other. Due to this lacking, many became lonely and depressed. Soulful connection on the internet should be our next goal as we progress towards our ultimate human potential. The internet is a great way to memorialise those we have lost and to celebrate the lives we have now. It seems that many things on the internet are permanent yet ephemeral. Nothing is really ever deleted but so many new things appear to cover up the past that it becomes lost to even those who dive the deepest.
Bits have been at the core of machinery for centuries. The Jaquard Loom, invented in 1804, used a series of punched holes as code to control the way fabric was woven into a pattern. Using inputs to automate an output is the spirit of a computer. This would be demostrated by Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine: a complex mechanical engine that could theoretically perform calculations (a computer in its most literal sense.) It used some of the same punch card technology as the Jaquard Loom but was never actually completed due to a lack of funding.
When we think about the sequences which make up the DNA of living creatures, they exist in strings of ATGC, which themselves exist in pairs AT and GC. We can draw a line to the binary DNA of computers: 1’s and 0’s.
How close can a computer get to being a living organism? I think the better question to pose is: are living organisms computers. Constant sparks of electricity run through the systems of organisms as they sense the world around them. More complex ones run calculations of probability in order to plan and make decisions. In this way they compute in a different language than machines, but compute none-the-less. With exploration into brain organoid computers a living machine could bring about the unification of life and technology.