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I was traveling between three conference in the past week and finally had some time to catch up with my blog and updates. I am in Istanbul now, 36 degrees celtius, and listening/watching CNN on TV while writing this post. My father always wondered how I could multitask - I have an unorthodox answer to that…

Had a great time at the conference on the futurists although not too much time to spend with old and new friends. The conference details are available on: (http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/french/Futurism_conference.htm)
 
DIGITAL AVANT-GARDE: PHYSICAL FREEDOM THROUGH TECHNOLOGY AS THE FUTURISTS’ CULTURAL INHERITANCE?

The Futurists altered the perception of the relationship between the body and the machine. No longer competitive entities, the body and the machine are merging elements that converge in new structures. The borders of the Avant-garde are those of a new entity, neither human nor machine, that embodies the frontiers of contemporary digital art.

The human body - by moving into new frameworks that allow the transpositions of the biological into the digital - has become a threshold to be superseded. Marinetti’s ideals and vision of a closer merging of the human and the machine is the basis upon which contemporary constructs of future visions, post-humanity, cyborgology, post-modernity, deconstructivism and human digitizations are shaped.

The concept of embodiment, presence, digital transformations and representations of visual cues and behaviors in Virtual Reality Environments and Second Life offer to the artists and scientists alike new futuristic territories to conquer. The digital avant-garde is at work in order to transfer the emotions, the anima of the body, into the light speed of electricity, making mankind, or what is left of it, ubiquitous, omnipresent and forever young.

The futurist’s debate on the role that art, science, technology, ethics, transformation of the body and transformation of the soul play in defining the concept of humanity and freedom has carried on from the 20th century into the 21st century. The digital conversion of biofeedback data in the visual representation of thoughts and dreams is one of the steps that is leading to the digital visualization of the brain’s processing mechanism.

The mind - increasingly disjointed by the body in forms of digital visualizations that as in the Matrix trilogy by Andy and Larry Wachowski are not linked to a functional existence in real space - is its own newly empowered machine which, with the speed of light, creates new spaces of artistic and social engagements.

The paper will conclude by arguing the role that futurism still plays in the contemporary digital avant-garde by shaping the artistic visions of a utopian and dystopian future where both the love and dread of the machine and of the digital coexist.

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