Originally Nowhere

GX Jupitter-Larsen

I don't find it at all ironic that I look up my local TV listings on my flashlight.

Maybe it's still too early. Maybe it's too late, but I'm still waiting for a real Nam June Paik of New Media to take the stage. Has anyone used magnets to alter or distort smartphones? Has anyone made a statue of a sitting Buddha gazing down upon his mobile device? And yes, I know about that mass-producted toy that depicts Buddha taking on his cell phone, but that doesn't count. That's not what I'm taking about here. Why hasn't any one built an actual working airplane out of parts from old antiquated flight simulators?

Personally, for me, New Media has always been about re-inventing the toaster. If I were to re-invent the toaster, I would want mine to make toast by broadcasting the bread. Not just teleporting to a single location, but true broadcasting, to many different locations simultaneously. The browning of the bread would be a result of transmitting the slices directly into other peoples' homes. Call it cooking by telepresence. I like toast, and I know other people enjoy it in the morning as well. Of course, I would only want to broadcast bread if it could be done by piggybacking on some other carrier signal, bypassing the need for any hardware dedicated for receiving bread. I like the idea of people finding pieces of random toast appearing in their homes for no reason. A reality hack served up with warm butter. The obvious difficulties with such a conversion process has kept me from further developing the project further.

Sound artist Kimihide Kusafuka, better known as K2, originally came onto the scene in 1984, just to disappear a few years later. He returned in '93 after having just graduated as a Pathologist. K2 has a Ph. D. from the Tokyo Medical & Dental University. He works at a city hospital, researching the morphogenesis of salivary gland tumors and cartilage formations. He's also conducted his studies at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. K2 sees no difference between the act of making noise and the act of science. K2 says he practices a kind of alchemy through his noise. He aims to metamorphosize himself with both the insight he gets from his scientific experiments, and the emotional strength he gains from performing and listening to noise. "Noise..", as K2 puts it; "can not be refused by either ears and heads!"

When I ask what will replace the internet, all I get are examples of new-&- improved, re-modeled and upgraded versions of what we already have. But what I'm going for is something that is truly both post digital and post analog. We went from the book, to radio, to television and video, to the web. What comes next? Most of those who cry the post digital label are still involved with the digital format, addressing the humanization of digital technologies. That's fine, and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I'm curious as to what the next platform might be. First there was analog, then there was digital; but what's next? What?! Something furry? Jazzy? Something flossy, frizzy, or woolly? Something, noisy?

In my novels, I've written about Floating Telepresence Blimps that replace both television and the internet as the dominate mediums. These so-called blimps work as an aerosol, allowing broadcasts by simply breathing; both in teams of transmitting and receiving.

Normally, and I'm picking my words here very carefully, I care more about the message than about the medium. I think the issue of what will make digital obsolescent could have some very interesting broad cultural ramifications. To say the least. Man Ray said in a quote we're all familiar with, when asked if photography was art, he replied he didn't care. Art was a thing of the past he said, and what we needed was something else altogether. I know I'm still looking for something else.

Will future futurists relay on yesteryear's futurism, and continue the tradition of techno-fetishism, or will the superfuturists of tomorrowland surpass the superceded futurists of the past with a clean and decisive break from history? If so, what motif will this new superfuturism take on? If our new future will no longer be measured by technological development, what will it be measured by?

I'm not talking about a non-technological causality here, just one in which people have a relationship with technology that is different from the one they have currently; a kind of relationship that does not appropriate the assembly line as a calendar.

Photographer and media artist Ursula Brookbank emailed me the following comment, "I feel a huge attraction and need to hold onto technologies such as letterpress printing and pinhole cameras in an effort to have an emotional, tangible, tactile result from my endeavors." She went on to say that she's always working to undermine the sureness of digital methods in order to find a mystery.

"The future will be measured in orgasms." said the sound poet who goes by the moniker blackhumour. He went on to contend that it was the past that needs to be predicted, and not the future.

Is the future such an old-fashion idea? The future, I think, should be our means of getting passed ourselves. It should be about seeing beyond our own constraints.

Ultimately, as media artist Achum Wolischeid once told me, "there is no escape from information, because there is news even in complete redundancy. While repetition goes on, the context will change and thus so does the meaning."

What I think should happen, is some kind of non-temporal based futurism. Any superfuturist actually living in the future would be forced to look inward for what lies ahead, and not outward at some calendar for some poetic date that's been imagined. Afterall, anti-time is when time isn't.