Nervous Control Centre
Ted Hiebert
The technological creature has become mythological, reanimated by its self-grown fictions of mediation. Is it any wonder the control centre is nervous?
A recent exhibition by Christian Kuras has created monuments to contemporary mythology, golems to a revivified technological mysticism. Nervous Control Centre. Silent tongues of confrontation, gazes turned inward, wired circuitry and flesh, immobilized by technological union. What is the fate of the body in an age of machines? Not the site of resistance it is so often held up to be -- that much is certain. No longer can we justify the body and the machine as two different things -- one with agency and personality, the other a site of pure mobilization and creative/productive potential. Now rather, our own thinking -- our own nervous extensions of mind -- is the source of the problem -- the fear of entering into symbiosis with technology is also the fear of symbiosis with ourselves.
[Christian Kuras. Console, 2003]
Marshall McLuhan always said that technology was an extension of the body.1 An extension of the human nervous system -- and a nervous extension at that -- boxed, for brand-name immortality. Without the body, technology becomes lonely, static, bored, unable to communicate with the world around it. Nervous Control Centre, abandoned by the bodies that inhabit it -- and by the bodies that it inhabits too. Not merely technology as an extension of the body, but the body as an extension of technology -- updated psychological and intellectual operating systems, updated potentialities grown of medical and biotechnological research, tweak a gene and live forever. Or more simply with the photographic image, the mirror reflection, or the electronic geography of email and webcams. Even language itself -- remembering, forgetting, thinking, imagining -- the technological fantasy is the fantasy of a technology that remains separate, pouting in the corner, passively dominated by the human machine.
Nervous Control Centre presents us with useless machines, relegated to a decorative symbolic state. Lonely machines that cannot quite bring themselves to co-opt the body in a contemporary way. A microscope that enlarges itself -- the technological temper tantrum of system feedback that knows only one way of looking. "Forget the molecular... pay attention to me!" Or the totemic control console, arthritic, atrophied, abandoned, to the extent that even its buttons refuse to perform. Stoic, martyred, mythological, a useless symbiosis of alienation. Unified or alienated, it is the same -- useless bodies, and we begin to realize that now, we are all in fact metaboys -- joined at the reflection by our technologies of self-conception.
[Christian Kuras. Metaboy, 2003]
Something happens at that limit of the imagination where science and mythology begin to speak the same language. To call it science fiction is to retreat to the delusion of a life without technological mediation, but it is the mediation of life that was already our technological fantasy. And it is our own bodies, our own caricatures, our own reflections, that are in fact the mobilized bodies of Nervous Control Centre.
Notes
1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 19.