Cybernetics & Entheogenics 

Abstract of the lecture by Peter Lamborn Wilson
For the 'Next Five Minutes" Conference, Amsterdam, january 1996

The Information war 

Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".

Toward Polymorphous Radio 

We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of constitution, perhaps even as decline and impotence, the end suggests the completion and the place in which the whole of history is gathered in its most extreme possibility.[1]

• radio

"The Desire to be Wired" 

1. Desire.

I come from a social and cultural context which has its languagetaboos, and among them a strong one refers to the libido. Desire is,therefore, something rather personal, and connecting it to the publicsphere might personalize the approach in a naive sense I learned toavoid. But since the same topic has been voiced last year in thecalling papers of the Enschede Photo Biennial, we might be dealing herewith a common place, therefore with a language defensive reflex, andthis is something useful to talk about.

http://new . territories / appropriation . of . medical . discourse / art . com 

Nina Czegledy and Inke Arns presented the material described in the following text during the afternoon programme at V2_Organisation Rotterdam on Sunday, January 21st, 14.00 - 18.00 hrs.

On an imaginary journey in the territories of current medical practice and visual art, we observe the disintegration of former boundaries and discover the emergence of a new discourse involving new metaphors and new mythologies. In the course of this voyage we witness the crystallization of a process which began in the Enlightenment and today is linked together by electronic technologies. Mediated by television, and lately the Internet, the concepts involved here, have contributed to the construction of a simulated reality in both medical science and art which imprisons attention and redirects it from the subject of the activity reproduced.

Pit Stop Manifesto 

1. Internet culture will bring the US, Western Europe, and the UK closer in to mental alignment,

• tactical media,
• net criticism,
• media criticism

Sex in the Age of Media 

The most important issue concerning the representation of sexuality in the media is, whether human dignity is being honored or not. Respect has many forms and those forms have many layers, and really there is no one else but ourselves to be the judge of the way we are being treated. Yet when and where basic human rights are not granted, the feeling of being deeply rooted in one's dignity (if not entirely unimaginable) is but a dream. This world is certainly not the best of all worlds and there is always a battle to be fought and battles will have to be fought again and again. Some so mean and savage that they can only be fought by those prepared to go till the end.

Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class 

Arthur Kroker, Canadian media theorist and is the author of 'ThePossessed Individual', 'Spasm' and 'Hacking the Future'. Over the pastyears he, together with Marilouise Kroker, were often in Europe andmade appearances at Virtual Futures, V-2, Eldorado/Antwerpen, etc.Recently, they have also been discovered in German-speaking countries.Both are noted for their somewhat compact jargon, which made theirmessage appear to drown somewhat in overcomplex code. But "DataTrash"`(1994) changed all that. The long treck through the squashydiscourses had not been in vain. Firmly rooted in European philosophy,yet not submerged, Arthur Kroker has found his topic: the virtual class.

• theory,
• media theory

Grundrisse einer Netzkritik 

1. Toward a European Standard Code for Critical Interchange (ESCCI)

Bezeichnen wir das Internet einfach einmal als 'Kind der Moderne', soist das klassische Genre der Kritik sicherlich ein Teil davon. Im nochandauernden Zeitalter des multikulturellen Massenkonformismus, vollerMikropraxis und Ich-Management, ist die Kunst der Kritik jedoch inVergessenheit geraten. Die hiesigen Kommentare zielen nur noch aufKorrektur von Verhaltensweisen ab. Die Meinungsmacher/innen haben allesAngebotene laengst hinter sich, sie sehen das Ganze wirklichdifferenziert, aus sicherem Abstand. Die glueckliche Tatsache, man seieben nicht engagiert, wird als persoenliche Errungenschaft gefeiert.Solche talking heads ohne Eigenschaften sind aber nutzlos in Zeitenrascher Entwicklungen, sowie das beim Wachstum der Computernetze imMoment der Fall ist.

• network cultures,
• net criticism

INFOBAHN BLUES 

Since American Vice-President Al Gore made his famous speech in California a couple of years ago, it has become impossible to scan any news medium without finding at least one reference to the "Information Superhighway". The Information Superhighway metaphor - specially tailored for Mr. Gore's California audience - is so brilliantly simplistic it seems to have blown the mind of every media editor in the Western Hemisphere. With an Information Superhighway you just plug in your modem and roll your data out onto the ramp and into the dataflow where it zips along the freeway until it hits the appropriate off-ramp. Finding data is the same - it's all nice straight data-lanes with on and off ramps and well-banked curves.

The Disappearance of Public Space on the Net 

The Internet was started in the 1970's by the U.S. Defense Departmentas a communications tool and is now being bought out by I.B.M., M.C.I.and other megaCorporations. April, 1995 marked the closing of theNational Science Foundation's part of the internet, and signaled thebeginning of the end of the publicly funded computer networkinfrastructure.

• network cultures,
• net.activism

Some points of departure 

Introductory essay for the second editon of the Next 5 Minutes festival of tactical media, 1996.

• culture

Postscript on the Societies of Control 

1. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."