Mann, Existential Technology Just As Steve Mann's Term Paper

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Mann, Existential Technology

Just as Steve Mann's 2003 article "Existential Technology" appears to be a description and philosophical justification for the author's artwork, it could just as accurately be described as a work of eerie prophecy. Reading Mann's document a little over a decade after its initial publication gives the uneasy feeling that this conceptual artist has actually foreseen the future. Of course, this is in many ways the function of art, if we recall Ezra Pound's famous dictum that artists are the antennae of the human race, picking up cultural and historical signals before the rest of us do. But it is remarkable in 2014 to see just how much Mann was anticipating back in 2003.

Although Mann describes himself in the article as someone who has "lived as a cyborg for 30 years" ( Mann 25) what he really means by this is that he has been incorporating computers and information technology -- often in the form of what he calls "in (ter)ventions," his neologism for inventions (gadgets) that also enact an intervention (a form of resistance) in the prevailing culture. But the things that Mann was resisting in 2003 are surely far more salient now than they were then. Although he names "surveillance and monitoring technologies" -- i.e.

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, the nonconsensual recording of information about individuals by large governments or corporations -- as one of the chief subjects of his explorations, the examples given by Mann are along the lines of CCTV camera surveillance and records of credit card swipes. The sort of surveillance that was revealed by Edward Snowden's actions ten years later is so far beyond the level of what Mann was resisting in 2003 demands that we give Mann credit for extraordinary prescience.

Such concern with surveillance, though, is only one of many things in Mann's account that seems so new and salient in 2014 that it is astonishing to see how well he foresaw the direction in which daily life was heading. Mann discusses his "apparatus of computer-mediated reality (e.g. wearing a computer and living in a computer-generated world)" but this is a decade before the much-hyped Google Glass attempted to make a consumer item out of the idea. Indeed Google Glass sounds like it was inspired by Mann's account of his 2000 project involving his "EyeTap system, eyeglasses that cause the eye itself to function as if it were a camera" (Mann 21).….....

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