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We are currently riders of the information storm. AI fascinates us,
images mesmerize us, data defines us, algorithms remember us, news
bombards us, devices connect us, isolation saddens us. Deeply
embedded in digital technology, we are the very first inhabitants
of life in the quantum zone. The Quantum Revolution is about life
today – its entanglements, creativity, politics, and artistic
vision. Arthur Kroker and David Cook explore a new way of thinking
drawn directly from the quantum imaginary itself. They explain the
quantum revolution as everyday life, where technology moves fast,
and where, under cover of the digital devices that connect us, the
most sophisticated concepts of technology and science originating
in mathematics, astrophysics, and bio-genetics have swiftly flooded
human consciousness, shaped social behavior, and crafted individual
identity. The book discusses the concept of the quantum zone as a
new way of understanding digital culture, and presents stories
about art, technology, and society, as well as a series of
reflections on art as a gateway to understanding the quantum
imaginary. Richly illustrated with sixty images of critically
engaged photos and artwork, The Quantum Revolution privileges a new
way of understanding and seeing politics, society, and culture
through the lens of the duality that is the essence of the quantum
imaginary.
We are currently riders of the information storm. AI fascinates us,
images mesmerize us, data defines us, algorithms remember us, news
bombards us, devices connect us, isolation saddens us. Deeply
embedded in digital technology, we are the very first inhabitants
of life in the quantum zone. The Quantum Revolution is about life
today – its entanglements, creativity, politics, and artistic
vision. Arthur Kroker and David Cook explore a new way of thinking
drawn directly from the quantum imaginary itself. They explain the
quantum revolution as everyday life, where technology moves fast,
and where, under cover of the digital devices that connect us, the
most sophisticated concepts of technology and science originating
in mathematics, astrophysics, and bio-genetics have swiftly flooded
human consciousness, shaped social behavior, and crafted individual
identity. The book discusses the concept of the quantum zone as a
new way of understanding digital culture, and presents stories
about art, technology, and society, as well as a series of
reflections on art as a gateway to understanding the quantum
imaginary. Richly illustrated with sixty images of critically
engaged photos and artwork, The Quantum Revolution privileges a new
way of understanding and seeing politics, society, and culture
through the lens of the duality that is the essence of the quantum
imaginary.
With astonishing speed, we have been projected into a new reality
where interactions with drones, robotic bodies, and high-level
surveillance are increasingly mainstream. In this age of
groundbreaking developments in robotic technologies, synthetic
biology is merging with artificial intelligence, forming a newly
blended reality of machines, bodies, and affect. Technologies of
the New Real draws from critical intersections of technology and
society - including drones, surveillance, DIY bodies, and
innovations in robotic technology - to explore what these advances
can tell us about our present reality, or what authors Arthur and
Marilouise Kroker deem the "new real" of digital culture in the
twenty-first century. Technologies of the New Real explores the
many technologies of our present reality as they infiltrate the
social, political, and economic static of our everyday lives,
seemingly eroding traditionally conceived boundaries between humans
and machines, and rendering fully ambivalent borders between the
human mind and simulated data.
In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Arthur
Kroker explores the future of the 21st century in the language of
technological destiny. Presenting Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and
Friedrich Nietzsche as prophets of technological nihilism, Kroker
argues that every aspect of contemporary culture, society, and
politics is coded by the dynamic unfolding of the 'will to
technology.' Moving between cultural history, our digital present,
and the biotic future, Kroker theorizes on the relationship between
human bodies and posthuman technology, and more specifically,
wonders if the body of work offered by thinkers like Heidegger,
Marx, and Nietzsche is a part of our past or a harbinger of our
technological future. Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche intensify our
understanding of the contemporary cultural climate. Heidegger's
vision posits an increasingly technical society before which we
have become 'objectless objects'-driftworks in a 'culture of
boredom.' In Marx, the disciplining of capital itself by the will
to technology is a code of globalization, first announced as
streamed capitalism. Nietzsche mediates between them, envisioning
in the gathering shadows of technological society the emergent
signs of a culture of nihilism. Like Marx, he insists on thinking
of the question of technology in terms of its material signs. In
The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Kroker
consistently enacts an invigorating and innovative vision, bringing
together critical theory, art, and politics to reveal the
philosophic apparatus of technoculture.
Smelling the virtual flowers and counting the road-kill on the
digital superhighway are just a couple of things that
Kroker/Weinstein explains. Others include: the theory of the
virtual class; virtual ideology; the will to virtuality; the
political economy of virtual reality; prime time reports; virtual
(photographic) culture; and the virtual history file.
As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, the
writings of Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway
offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society,
politics, and culture. Butler leads readers to rethink the
boundaries of the human in a time of perpetual war. Hayles turns
herself into a “writing machine” in order to find a dwelling
place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of
the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to
have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language
of potential reconciliation among previously warring species.
According to Arthur Kroker, the postmodernism of Judith Butler, the
posthumanism of Katherine Hayles, and the companionism of Donna
Haraway are possible pathways to the posthuman future that is
captured by the specter of body drift. Body drift refers to the
fact that individuals no longer inhabit a body, in any meaningful
sense of the term, but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies:
gendered, sexualized, laboring, disciplined, imagined, and
technologically augmented. Body drift is constituted by the blast
of information culture envisioned by artists, communicated by
social networking, and signified by its signs. It is lived daily by
remixing, resplicing, and redesigning the codes: codes of gender,
sexuality, class, ideology, and identity. The writings of Butler,
Hayles, and Haraway, Kroker reveals, provide the critical
vocabulary and political context for understanding the deep
complexities of body drift and challenging the current emphasis on
the material body.
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