Online Project
2022 The Urgency of Contactlessness
ss space
New Taipei City, Taiwan
https://www.ssspacespace.work/the-urgency-of-contactlessness
Permanent Vacation
Re-tracing Buro (Text by Julien Coignet)
https://www.ssspacespace.work/permanent-vacation
Since the beginning of human societies, people, facing wars, pandemics, natural disasters, have imagined, sought and planned better worlds. At each period, a collective imagination has been built, strongly influenced by religions, superstitions, fables or literature and more recently by cinema, sciences or technologies. This is how science-fiction has become a source of ideas endlessly exploited by the leaders of digital field, with technological advances facilitating the achievement of some of these concepts.
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg presented a long promotional video in which he introduced his plans to design a metaverse (as well as the new name of Facebook becoming Meta) made of over-communicating avatars in colorful environments. Starting with an auto-criticism of his own social networks being not immersive enough, with the limitations of current interfaces, he wants to move towards a digital universe parallel to our concrete reality, where, equipped with 3D glasses, users could travel anywhere, anytime, with whomever they want, in whatever form they want, in short, live a new parallel existence that would be richer and more entertaining than our daily experience of reality.
Seen like this, we might wonder what could prevent us from abandoning once and for all the more or less dull and repetitive reality, even more sanitized after two years of the covid pandemic. Two years that would have prepared us for this new non-contact society and that would have accustomed us to being distanced from each other by interposed screens. While we were still talking about mobility as a trend in contemporary life, in a few months we have moved towards near-complete immobility, individual isolation and an ever greater digitalisation of all our activities.
But already long before this pandemic, we have seen in many countries a trend towards the standardisation of the living environment and ways of life, in urban planning and architecture for example, where we have invested less in an open living environment with real public spaces (and not necessarily for commercial purposes) and more in technological, hyper-connected and supposedly environmentally friendly solutions with the smart cities that are being built or transformed all over the world.
If we imagine the future that seems to be prefigured here, we would see individuals remaining locked in their homes, with their interfaces connected to the infinite flow of digital data as their only windows to the outside world, and sustained for their vital needs with the help of platforms for delivering food and goods by drone, as proposed by Amazon. The automation and robotisation of all services would inevitably lead to the rarefaction and disappearance of all paid human activity.
This is why we have seen the reappearance of the idea of a universal basic income, which was put forward by Jeremy Rifkin in 1995 in “The End of Work » [1] and supported by the leaders of the digital industry (as underlined by Eric Sadin in The Silicolonisation of the World [2] ), to accompany this growing automation of all sectors. After the wave of automation in industry and administration from the 1960s-70s onwards, we could eventually see the replacement of human labour, even intellectual and creative works, by artificial intelligence in many new sectors, at least according to the main supporters of new technologies.
In all scenarios, however, this universal basic income would only allow for survival or at best a very modest life, and thus the absence of travel and entertainment, which could further push people to take refuge in the metaverse in order to escape a reality that is becoming less and less exiting.
What better way to imagine the future of metaverse than for individuals to be freed from the constraints of work and to be able to abstract and disengage themselves from everyday reality on the basis of a basic income paid to all? Will many be caught up in this artificial paradise of technology, in permanent vacation, participating in an all-encompassing entertainment far from all constraints? Doesn’t the Meta version of the metaverse aim to create a space detached from all current regulations, a world where all the rules of the game would ultimately be dictated by the demiurge creator of this new universe?
For the moment and in the near future, the metaverse envisaged look at best like a video game and it is still the marketing that show them as worlds as rich or better than reality. Are we not too fascinated by the simulacra of realities made possible by the advances of digital technologies to see their limits and sometimes their vacuity? And because of our addiction, we have step by step become unable to discover the possibilities offered by the real here and now, and not in this parallel universe of commercial and hyper-connectivity order called metaverse.
[ 1 ] Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work, 1995, Putman Edition
[ 2 ] Eric Sadin, La Silicolonisation du Monde, L’irrésistible expansion du libéralisme numérique, L’échappée Edition, 2016 – P.240 : « We oppose the new fad of the age. That is, the universal basic income, which ultimately aims to consent passively and irresponsibly to the replacement of humans in work by algorithmic systems, ratifying the Silicone Valley model and proceeding to an institutionalised renunciation. It is no coincidence that all the technolibertarians support this measure… »
Delusions in Virtual Parallel Spaces
Re-tracing Buro (Text by Somi Sim)
https://www.ssspacespace.work/re-tracing-buro
Exhibitions in the post-COVID-19 age uncover not only the relationship between contact-free digital technology and art experience, but also the change in human cognitive capabilities. The experiences of separation, inconsistency, and instability for the contemporary people who cannot keep up with the speed and volume of information transmission will no longer be called psychopathological syndromes. This change is because today’s art experience requires this psychopathological way of appreciation. Many exhibitions will remain empty without any physical artworks and welcomes the audience with a single QR code or microcode to enter a virtual parallel spaces. The exhibition experience is only possible when the audience separates themselves from the physical world and connects to the virtual link. In a way, we are demanded of a schizophrenic cognition. We now have entered an era in which we can no longer say that we saw the exhibition in person. Modern people’s anxiety, which heightens the more they connect, obsessively begets the contactlessness and non-place experiences.
Re-tracing Buro 