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Relevant to telematic connectivity (Ascott, 1994) is that under recent epistemological scrutiny has been what Jacques Derrida has described of as logocentrism: the once held distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity. Today, with perpetually heightening telematic connectivity, these logocentric distinctions are breaking down under the pressure of telematic (and immersive) art technologies. By identifying an individual's hyper-real presence in a vaporously technologically stored or moving set of bits, the post-modernist existential concept of the logocentric individual has been supplanted by the tabulated electronically produced simulacrum-persona. This quality of phantasmagorical replacement has formulated a new understanding of phallocratic existence which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called schizoid. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984 and 1987) According to Deleuze/Guattari, being is now inseparable from a technologically hallucinogenic/schizoid culture. With telematic connectivity, this understanding of consciousness has become central and now supplies society with a rich metaphorical tool with which to understand itself. >/p> In our wired age - given our heightened condition of maximizing data-flow (read overload) - once fixed logocentric identities based on Euclidean spatial distinctions are being continuously transposed by malleable, telematic, computational, and immersive configurations of self-awareness as the borders of the conventional logocentric object/subject relationship computationally bleed. (Kelly) Hence telematic immersion - with its insinuated inside-omni-everywhereness insight - is becoming the pertinent concept for the recognition of cultural being today.
It is the principle of non-logocentric telematic immersion as applied to culture which interests me, as I find electronically fabricated worlds only superficially connected to technological means - and more properly concerned with ideals of self-transcendence. Joseph Nechvatal
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