Refounding Legitimacy Through Aethogenesis

Article: Refounding Legitimacy. Toward Aethogenesis. By Olivier Auber. Technoetic Arts Journal, 2016

URL = https://www.academia.edu/16621395/Refounding_Legitimacy_Toward_Aethogenesis

Source: Consciousness Reframed – The Matter of the Immaterial Art & consciousness in the post-biological era. To be published in english and Chinese in a special issue of Technoetic Arts Journal, 2016

Abstract

“The fusion of human and technology takes us into an unheard world, described by someauthors as populated by quasi-living species that would relegate us —  ordinary humans — , to the rank of alienated agents, emptied of their identity and consciousness. I argue instead that our world is woven by simple, though invisible, perspectives, which — if we become aware of them — may renew our ability of judgment and our autonomy. I became myself aware of these invisible perspectives by observing and practicing a real time collective net art experiment called the Poietic Generator. As the perspectives unveiled by this experiment are invisible, I have called them Anoptical Perspectives (i.e. non-optical), by analogy to the Optical Perspective of the Renaissance. Later I have realized that these perspectives are holding their cognitive structure from the political origin of our language. Accordingly, it is possible to define certain cognitive criteria for assessing the Legitimacy of the Anoptical Perspectives just like some artists and architects of the Renaissance have defined the geometrical criteria that establish the legitimacy of the optical one. Finally I argue that — if we apply those criteria to the technological artifacts which pretend to autonomy or tend to invade our bodies and minds — , we could move from the status of Selected to the role of … xxx (uncopyable)

Therefore we could emulate a kind of Global Immune System that would prevent the takeover bysome illegitimate bodies. Towards which direction? Nothing less than an new Singularity which would augur an era where the systemic predation of our species against itself and its environment would have vanished. I propose to call this era: Aethogenesis.“