Virtual Impacts - The Hand is Dead

Virtual Impacts - The Hand is Dead

The hand is dead. I blame art. With art, we have chosen to de-sensitize our interpretations of the world around us. We abstracted our perceptions of the world in favor of intellectual and conceptual hierarchy. Art, objects which we know by our memories of materiality, skill, and making, is a practice of seeing and hearing. It's very clean. Art keeps the world at arms length. Art’s view point on the world is simpler. Touch must be too personal; too involved. There are three types of things we can’t touch in this world. Art, virtual reality, and the dead. Yet, even the dead must be moved at times. RIP.
Art, as we have considered it for its immaterial values, has placed craft and design as its inferior. Thus, art has set in our cultures mind that that which cannot be touched has more meaning. Hitched to the readymade, art has claimed all the material world as its own. We see the world not for its physical attributes, but for its immaterial and conceptual potentials. The physical world has been abstracted down to a mere framework for thought porn. Arts main contribution to culture? The cutting off of our hands; setting our minds free.
With all of these ideas, they needed a place to go, and so the advent of virtual reality. An immaterial environment based on the memories of the once meaningful physical world. What natural species creates their own environment? Not one. We are no longer a natural species. We have created a whole reality that is based on values we have exaggerated beyond necessity. Entertainment, communication and information have become the new social constructs of the virtual environment. We used to know a thing by its natural and physical law. Dimension gave as form, space and let us knew where we stood. But no longer.
We used to find value in our selves by the meaning instilled in things. Sentimental things, treasured heirlooms, honest tools, objectified memories... Now I wait for a message on my ‘wall’ or a text in the middle of the night. I am available all the time now. My virtual identity never sleeps. I never have privacy.
These thoughts are not new. Nor are they shocking. They have been around since the advent of communications and documentation technology. This much I know. What I do not know is how our digital sensibilities, our virtual reality will impact our notion of self. Both as individuals and as a species. As a craftsman, a maker of physical things, I wonder if I have been eliminated. Sure, people will retort, stating that my work is valid, but for how much longer. Technology has its own will, or it will someday. It is a force now, larger than we can grasp, literally and mentally. The world of things has changed dramatically. We are in the middle of great transition. As the immaterial world continues to expand, the physical world will become more and more unrecognizable. Where will I know where to stand? What markers will direct me? What will I be able to hold onto? If these questions do not come up in my lifetime, surly they will in the next generation's.