Our interest began in 1994 or perhaps even earlier. There was an extraordinary collection of people in the philosophy and literature departments at that time at Warwick. We're also now profoundly obsolete in the technological terrain that we've created. But we're all loosely associated around what we saw as the most exciting department in the whole university, the philosophy department, where Nick Land was a particularly compelling figure. I think one of the things that we thought would happen, or that we were interested in, was the relation between obsolescence of culture, of cultural norms that the internet and technology would usher in.
We thought it was a period of massive change. And the fact that we've generated now, or technology generates a speediness that accelerates the body to attain planetary escape velocity. All of a sudden the body finds itself in an immense extraterrestrial space. The body cannot cope. Its softness, its wetness, its complexity is not really suited to environments of this biosphere. We simply thought that things that people said when they came along to Virtual Futures because a lot of people from outside academia came. People who just happened to live in the area turned up
and they were very skeptical first of all about the existence of cyberspace, even in the first place. Sceptical about the internet, sceptical about even this idea of everyone using keyboards, computers. They thought, I mean, how is this going to happen? And it was left to us, first of all, we're very young at the time to point out, there's a built-in life cycle here, and it's a human life cycle, and all the people who are complaining would be dead within 30 years 40 years and already now I'm not even using a keyboard anymore I'm not typing I'm not texting when I use my mobile phone but I'm using something called swipe texting already has had an incredibly short life and it seems to be
dead we were fascinated by this kind of rapid change and how in our perceptions we thought that the rate of change itself was accelerated. Certainly, if you apply Moore's law and translate it on, let's say, a cultural basis, if you interpret it, whether you say metaphorically or not, if you interpret it as a law that has more than application merely to the speed of processes, but perhaps to the speed of change itself, then we thought, yeah, something is reaching a tipping point here.
I think for me personally, though this was certainly not the case for all of the people involved, one of the principal motivators for this fascination in the relation between technology and what we were studying, philosophy, was born out of the cultural atmosphere of the time. this was the height of techno of of open air rave parties 25,000 people kind of motoring down to the M25 and gathering in a field and partying there all weekend and to this
relentless machine music and so that was part of the spirit in which we organized it, as I say part of almost a punk spirit, but a punk spirit married with modern technology. And I think that this was, you know, one of the events where, I mean, it got covered so widely across the nation and, I mean, across the globe. There were, you know, TV crews came from Korea to film the whole thing, you know, and it plastered it all over the daily newspaper, the Jongang Daily News. clearly something was going on that people whatever warwick university thought of it people elsewhere took a lot of notice it was important you know elsewhere and so
as an aspect of that history i think that you know it deserves historical analysis on its own there was an element of theater always to the way we did virtual futures an element of entertainment which was the hook sure there was the hardcore cognition stuff there were people like George Kempis we brought from Hungary. It was, I think, maybe three people in the world could understand, never mind three people in Warwick. But at the same time, we had these, not to deprecate what they do, but they were artists, with tremendous popular appeal. And much of the publicity we did beforehand was playing that up, provoking people, letting people know that what was going to happen was not just a dry academic conference, but some kind of chaotic freak show.
Developed by P-Locomotion, two limbs become manipulators. With manipulators, we make tools, instruments, artifacts. So one can very well argue that the beginning of defining what it means to be human has always been coupled to the technologies that we've made. So technology isn't an alien other. It has always been coupled to the body and it always functions with the body, constantly redefining it and possibly now redesigning it.