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Cyberlibertarianism (whose origins are popularly attributed to Wired ethos) has by now been exposed by some as a rather tunneled vision of digital culture. ßorsook (2002) infers the rights of the 'self' have been shown to be synonymous with the rights of every 'self' to feed on (or be force-fed) free market capitalism. Enter Transindividualism. Civil rights discourses are transmuted herein. McKenzie Wark argues that cyberlibertarian discourses (centred around modernist conceptions of the supremacy of the individual) are oblivious to the 'transindividual experience of telethesia' <quoted in Stanley, 1997>.

Easterwood's evocation of ‘cybersoma’, ‘a body which strictly speaking does not yet exist’ <1994> has an affinity with the transindividualist spectre. Derived from an understanding of 'soma' via modern Latin from Greek ‘body’, 'cybersoma' refers to the materiality of the cyberbody. 'The terms of this configuration,' writes Easterwood, 'have been anticipated by French postfreudians and sociolinguists, German phenomenologists and critics. But if Western intellectuals have been the theorists of such enfoldment, artists are its practitioners; or better said, they are its experimental ontologists' <1994>.

This project is my ontological experimentation. Mckenzie Wark's notion of transindividualism has sunk into obscurity: it is wholly under-theorised. Yet questions continue unanswered. Is McKenzie Wark's denunciation of Individualist, in favour of the transindividualist, telesthetic existence a misnomer? Is Individualism more than simply a semantic root of Trans-individualism? Don't individuals inhabit 'orders of discourse' (Foucault 1970, 1972) that inhibit the transindividualistic experience of telesthesia? By way of digital photography, and the transitions between CMYK and RGB colour spaces particularly, this interactive Web-based installation aims to provoke its users/authors/ subjects/objects to question these (re)emerging (indeed, converging) phenomena.

> > > paper presented at the AoIR Conference September 2004

 

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