The telematic is the construction of a transactional identity or token outside or beyond the realm of the corporeal. We tap the taps. As suggested and repeated often, the telematic suggests a world of many to many, the corporeal, the heavy weight of the body takes on a lightness of being, is in fact a being other than being as we know it, in fact where the corporeal need not confirm or affirm the agency that it has activated. In this realm of discourse the corporeal is a complex compendium of multiplicity, distribution, complete for a moment, in communion, in dispersion, in collective, mercurial, a unwieldy sign, might we say a mystery to the very 'person' living (the death of the author, life an uncanny authorship, history an archive, remembrance of things lost of things done). I would argue that the telematic is a kind of bouquet of presence. It is in this sense a total work, though unmapable. The net is the latest confirmation of the telematic, a material analogue giving visibility (think of the enlightment, Bacon, experimentation, material proof) as it defines an outer limit, heretofore without a nameable host (at least an operational one outside of metaphysics) to contain this knowledge and the idea that being may be a vast distribution (though numerous cosmologies from the sefirot to hindu vedas and native American myths have proffered such systems). The web, the ether of the telematic is the physical (rational, defensible) confirmation of a long held desire that there is a connection to all things, and that all can be accessed instantaneously across time and place (Edison, JP Morgan all believed this). Both nostalgic and forward looking, the telematic is the instantiation of a technologic instrumentation of non-location (memory palaces, sefirot) the platform of an emergent shape that suggests a enlarged realm of being. It suggests that the social body transcend its physicalness by moving beyond the boundaries of the carbon platform. (Oh! such lofty aspirations we have to return to the bosom of heaven! to confirm to ourselves like Thomas touching the flesh that there is something beyond, extended) Yes the telematic suggests the body is but the temporary hardware (Gibson) or OS of a vast and luminous immateriality (software, rucker) an agency with immediacy, beauty and without the decay of the body. It is perhaps the meta-internet, oddly a signal without a network admin.
It's all very silly, but this is good as it allows us to aspire to communicativeness that is much deeper and serene and may in fact help us understand the current artwork of Matthew Barney and others whose discourse is of the telematic but not performed through the net.
– Marc Lafia