LET THE SPIRIT MAKE YOU MOVE Technological Restructuring and the Subculture The following is a text of a lecture delivered at the Hochschule der Kunst (Berlin) during the Ars Digitalis conference celebrating the art academy's 300th anniversary, 23 October 1996 . ®1996 by Peter Rubin First of all, I'd like to welcome you all here this evening and also thank Tim and the rest of the organizing committee for inviting me to speak to you . In point of fact, today's electronic art student will become, tomorrow, one of the most important figures on planet Earth. For in the hands of the young media people of today rests that which will determine how the world will communicate during the next century. And the nature and content of that communication will serve to determine the course of human civilization for hundreds of years to come. In tomorrow's world, however, those who remain attached to the trendy formulas of mindless software manufacturers, TV producers or advertising executives will soon find themselves isolated, frustrated and increasingly alienated. Tomorrow's enormous demands require a revolutionary new approach to media, far from the childish game mentality which abounds today. As always, for the artist, it's not what just looks or sounds nice . It's what it says, how it affects us, how it is communicated. And the more one understands the reality of ones environment, the better chance one has to successfully communicate . As I've written a number of times before, I believe everything in today's reality must be defined in technological terms. At the moment, global civilization is facing its greatest environmental challenge since the comet which destroyed the dinosaurs. This change has nothing to do with pollution, over population, destruction of the rainforest or the likes. Although all these areas as well as everything else on the planet are being affected by this same basic phenomenon . In the transition from the industrial age to the electronic age, we find the most profound changes occuring in our own human relation to the forces of power which have traditionally directed our lives. Less and less are we able to predict the direction of our personal lives as well as our national or global identities or intentions . Our faith in our traditional leaders is constantly diminishing as their visions for the future become less relevant or realistic to us all . page: 1 Slowly we are all being left alone with a gigantic question mark hanging over each of our heads. Most of us just ignore all this, waiting for someone else to solve the problem. And yet, we all feel a growing sense of pressure, fear and insecurity. The future is clouding up with the darkness of terrible predictions and consequences with no solutions in sight, nor individuals capable of explaining anything to us at all . Ironically, this feeling has as much to do with our own intellectual growth, awareness and capacity as it does with the diminishing abilities of our traditional leadership. And therein lies the problem for today and the solutions for tomorrow. For the problem I speak of is that of emerging new and revolutionary forms of technological structure. Actually, it is even more significant than that. For these are in fact evolutionary structures that will change not only human civilization but human beings themselves. .ourselves. Now, when I say the greatest problem facing the planet at the moment is technological restructuring, what do I mean by this? In simple terms, it means that due to this latest stage of technological development, all the traditional rules regarding how our civilizations have historically created and governed our societies are being totally transformed, and in ways over which none of us have any control . First and foremost it has to do with the rebalancing of the entire global society via the redistribution of power. What is occuring all across the planet today is a universal process wherein power is being transferred from the individual and the individual institution to the collective whole . Technolgogical restructuring is a process wherein ever-increasing percentages of the population are being conditioned to live with no central power structure . Simultaneously, it creates the conditions for the development of individual responsibility. A collective global network of responsible individuals will then have the enormous capacity needed to solve tomorrow's problems. No one person or group of persons or country is responsible for this. This is a non-human universal law, a technological phenomenon which is forever changing human society and its relationship to the universe. This is not Big Brother. This is much bigger than Big Brother. page : 2 Until the first part of this century, for the past 10,000, 100,000 or million years, depending on how one wants to look at it, nothing much changed regarding how civilization dealt with power. Power remained in the hands of the few who manipulated this power to dominate the mass. However, this domination always remained regional . Which is to say, within the vision and control of individual rulers. Though there were those who wished to dominate the entire world, no one ever had the ability or means to do so. Which is also to say that the world as a whole was always pre-eminent to any and all of the parts within it. Although power was enforced by military strength in one form or another, the real power was in the control of information ; knowledge of ones own capability and the capability of those who would threaten that power. Everything changed with the splitting of the atom. Most prominent of all these changes was the just mentioned relationship between the planet and those elements within its makeup. For the first time in history, human civilization had discovered the vision and the capacity to deal with the whole; now not only the whole planet but the micro and macro universe as well. Until that point, traditional power had expanded within the scope and ability of its own individual desires, all this culminating in the industrial revolution . Those in power decided on the size of the territory or market which they wished to exploit. And they decided when and how much to expand. If you were in the car business and you had a chance to sell 60,000 automobiles to make such and such a profit, you did it. You produced your 60,000 autos and made the profit. 1 +1=2 . It was an arithmetic formula . Production=Demand. Everything was under control, pre- determined and predictable. Electronics changed all that. Arithmetics suddenly, like a cancer, turned to multiplicity, immediately creating an ever-expanding network of intercommunications and interdependencies, constantly more complicated and demanding and totally out of control; a never-ending process that would continue this multiplying madness forever. page: 3 This process actually develops in identical fashion to the laws surrounding the splitting of the atom. All this has quickly made it impossible for any one single source to predict, manipulate and, thus, control anything that had before been controllable . This was the beginning of technological restructuring. After all the centuries, human civilization was thrown into a brand new equation involving the laws of atomic structure on the one hand, Mother Earth and the universe on the other. And , never again would we be the emperors of our planet. Suddenly, as if from out of nowhere, there has appeared this huge technological express train roaring everywhere and throughout everything. And the scope and ability of individual planning has rapidly and increasingly become more and more difficuilt to bear under the weight of this multiplying megalith of a phenomenon. It was not the discovery of atomic laws, but the misreading and misuse of them which started things down their present path. The planet is indeed sick as all the environmental studies show. And civilization has proven itself to be totally misdirected in its priorities. So, if civilization cannot come up with the correct solutions, the system tries to rebalance itself. And it will only succeed if the collective human mindset is working together - rebalancing itself, as it were, for the sake of the entire planet. If individual power manipulation has only caused mass devestation and division, then collective awareness and interactivity become the last hope. And if we as a civilization cannot create those conditions ourselves, then universal laws will come into play in the attempt to achieve this. What I am speaking about at the moment are the universal laws of systems. Once civilization joined with the atom and the planets, it became part of a greater system involving laws which had never been considered before. Now if you have something wrong with your stomach, this means that your digestive system has gone out of balance . Any living, creative page: 4 system (as opposed to a dying, destructive system. In terms of astrophysics: an expanding system as opposed to a contracting system) will naturally use its inbred capabilities to rebalance itself in the event of problems. Thus, your stomach starts to produce any number of gastric juices or anti-toxins or whatever to re-fix this balance and will continue in this attempt until it finally finds itself back in balance. In the present case, due to our own inabilities to control our planetary environment, technological restructuring laws have been set into motion in an attempt to regulate the problem. Like it or not, this new truth for our times is perhaps the most difficult for egocentric human civilization to accept. For it means that we are no longer in total control of our future destinies.