Controller and Controlled: Interchangeability


Session Title:

  • Short Paper Presentations

Presentation Title:

  • Controller and Controlled: Interchangeability



  • In our culture the anticipated future has replaced the historical past as the most fundamental and decisive reference. Web artistic activity is a typical example of such anticipated future. It is a science fiction object. Technically it can be realised today but psychologically our society is not ready for it yet. We can predict the future characteristics of the Web by placing it within the history of telecommunication. The dream which inspired the invention of a telephone was that of being in two places at once. The telecommunication revolution fulfilled this dream of spatial co-extensivity by creating a radically new type of communication vector: now thought could be transmitted simultaneously and in many directions at once. The subsequent technical progress of telecommunication (video teleconferencing, appearance of a virtual reality, telepresence) moves from simply simulating the illusion of presence to actually realising this presence by letting the subject act over distance. Seemingly trivial insight crystallizes more and more to the fundamental finding of scientific and philosophical search for an consistent view of life. The high speed of the process creates a situation: from one side (Ego side), the illusion of overcoming of psychic trauma of the meeting with a fake reality (and any meeting with any kind of reality becomes a trauma); and, from the other side (Inter-Ego or Super-Ego side), the interweaving of human extensions into the common nervous network (M. McLuhan), or noosphere (V. Vernadsky).

    This process might be considered at the same time as technological denial, as well as self denial. This situation on the level of controller-controlled leads to an inside struggle between the ego and the Super-Ego, to the hypertrophy of conscience, and then to the possibility of dissociation of a human being, to the mechanisms of the syndrome of psychic automatism. The example of an utilization of highjacking of time and the syndrome of psychic automatism is virtual reality, which is the next religious Golem of consciousness. Virtual reality constructs a future gadget that transposes beings from the present to the “reality” programmed and controlled by the past. Controller and controlled are transitional notions; their interchangeability can be revealed in diachronic as well as in the synchronic systems. However, while it was previously possible to juxtapose the positions of controller and controlled, in the mass-mediatized society the face-to-face opposition is vanishing in the network of cables and wires. Thus, TV and computers might be considered as two different examples of the interactivity between controller and controlled.