i'm trying to do a new practice of improvised speaking like this and so for the first sort of thirty seconds right now i have this

blood pumping through and this kind of terrible nerves and i feel you idiot why are you standing up here why haven't you

just got a piece of writing and i'm just you know on the borderline of running out of this room you know i can't remember

i've been working so much on this project but right now i can't remember any of the things that i need to say so i just need to ride

this out and maybe the ball helps me ride this out

also you know we usually have soccer training on tuesdays and so i'm

missing soccer training to come to this and you know that's a big thing for me as jo and joel from red room can tell you

so the ball had to part of it didn't it?

so pia has a work at the moment pia who organises sydney dorkbot at first draft

based on rimmington scales it's a six channel audio video installation some of you might have seen it but there's three cups

with wooden handles on them and if you lift up one of the cups then there's these i won't be able to explain it technically

there's these beautiful pieces of mercury that connect the circuit and there is two bits of mercury that connect two circuits

in each cup and then that feeds back into the video system and you can sort of play it so there's three cups and

three screens and i saw this and i started imaging what type of creature this thing is made for i was there with a friend

and there were two of us and it sort of didn't quite work because one of us would have one of the cups making the noise

and the other would two of the cups in the hand so there was something awkward about it and two people didn't quite work with

this thing i guess you could do it with three right you could have three people but i was also imagining it as an instrument

for one and what kind of creature would this be and this reminded me of the story that aristophanes tells in plato's

symposium of the origin of humans so in the beginning before we were like we are now humans were

actually double-bodied creatures so the story goes we were kind of fused back-to-back sort of like

siamese twins and and and we were big spherical creatures kind of blobs and these and we were sort of apparently

like clowns doing um doing sort of going over like that what's the word for it? doing sort of circles um and and

we were big blob creatures and we were um see here comes the nerves i've got to get over them

okay so we were big

blog spherical creatures and apparently we were very arrogant very arrogant and very powerful so arrogant were we

that we decided that we were going to scale the heavens and go up and go up and depose the gods i just need a drink

okay so we were so arrogant that we were going to go up to heaven

hmmm

why am i so nervous i can't even access my thoughts? right the ball kick the ball

okay forget the blobs

let's talk about tekhne which was where i was trying to get to with that story anyway okay so tekhne is the greek

word for skill first and foremost tekne means skill so what is a skill? now on sunday night we were here

and smith cooked us a roast upstairs it was a beautiful meal and the classic definition of skill is that oh

why is this so hard?

back to the ball

right so this is a skill but cooking is also a skill and classically

speaking cooking was more of a skill than this because cooking was taking raw matter and transforming it into other matter

okay so that's the whole area of craft skill as craft but it's very hard to figure out where the limits of skill are

because kicking the ball is a skill dance is a skill speaking is a skill a skill i'm not doing very well at the moment

language is a skill rhetoric is a skill and poetry is a skill so it's very hard to figure out where the limits of tekhne stop and start

so we need another story for the origins of humanity and a different one to the blog one that went nowhere okay so

i'm a bit more relaxed now so with the blob one we went up to heaven right we went up to heaven right we were going up to

heaven and zeus was like na i don't like that so i'm going to strike these blobs down with thunderbolts and then he was like

no that will kill them what i'll do instead is that i'll chop them in half right so we he did was he chopped us all in half so these

arrogant spherical blob creatures that we were who kind of just rolled around on the ground and masturbated and ate and were

just totally in love with ourselves right so he chopped them in half and then he left it up to apollo to sort of stretch our skin

over the top of us re-aligning our limbs and over to the belly and stitch us up there and so the belly button is the scar

left to remind us of our prior arrogance which of course then we forgot and that was the point and so this is

that story is in fact the origin of the myth of love and what i like about it is that when humans are made it means

love is there at the beginning of humanity in this myth which is a very appealing idea when humans start they start

because of love perhaps what's no so appealing about this story is the brutal cutting in half and the implication that love

is loss as well that love is lack where as i was kind of hoping that the idea of love was binding was fusion was not

bifurcating putting things into two equal halves okay so there is the blob story but there is no tekhne

in that and that's a problem so there's another story another greek story about the origin of tekhne that is

also the origin of humanity: zeus decides that non-immortal creatures so mortal creatures need to be brought

from night and into the light and so he goes to prometheus and prometheus is the titan blessed with foresight blessed with

knowledge blessed with immaculate memory and prometheus sort of comes with his twin brother who is also his double

who's epimetheus who's not really blessed with anything or he's blessed with forgetting he forgets

epimetheus is the dude who always forgets now zeus says to prometheus okay now that we are bringing these mortals from out

of the night and into the light it's your job to give them qualities it's your task i bestow the task upon you to give them qualities and so

prometheus is like okay yeah fair enough and epimetheus is with him and he begs him please please let me do it i want to do it

it will be awesome if i do it and prometheus is like well it seems like an arduous task so i'll let him do it and so he lets his little brother

or his twin who is in fact just a double of himself the opposite of himself but he lets him do it so epimetheus

goes around with a basket of qualities and hands them out to all the creatures right so to the zebra he gives stripes and speed

to the lion he gives power and roar these kind of things and so he does a great job especially for epimetheus of distributing

all the qualities very evenly and this distribution of qualities is responsible for the ecological balance the even chance that

things have to survive right except that when he gets to humans he looks in the basket and there is no more qualities left so

humans are those things that are forgotten left naked and forgotten with no qualities prometheus is like shit i'm going to get in

trouble for this so he decides that he will go to zeus a pretty made decision i would have thought and steal fire from zeus and

give it to humans so he steals fire and gives it to humans and as a punishment for this zeus straps him to a rock that's right

straps him to a rock and an eagle come and eat his liver and then the liver grows back and then the eagle comes back and eats

his liver and that happens for a long time so prometheus really suffered for giving us fire so fire is the symbol

of technology okay so in this in this myth of the origins of humans technology happens at the same moment as humans

happen so instead of having humans who invent technology what we get is humans that are constituted by their technicity

that's one way of putting it in a sense we are technological beings okay now this has some consequences for a lot

of binaries in in in our society that that we rest that we hold dear to ourselves anthropology and technology

so the human and the technological that's a split there's also nature and culture and there's also subject and object

but if humans are technological creatures from the beginning that is to say that they are defined by the fact they are technological

then these kind of oppositions they don't work so well okay so the the father of anthropology rousseau

who was a really interesting writer and he searched for an essence of man an original and eternal man and he wasn't a

fool he knew that he couldn't search for the origins of something without making a fiction about it so he knew that he was dealing

in a sense with fiction but nevertheless he was searching for this eternal figure now he was then accused later on

by nietzsche i think rightly of falling into the trap that so many philosophers have fallen into nietzsche called it a family

failing a family failing of philosophers is that they will not learn that man has become so there is this search for an eternal being

this kind of pure nature and essence but the reality is of course that we have always become now things like the fossil records

things like archeology paleontology and all these kind of things show that we have become okay so this allows us

so the human who is constituted by their technicity exceeds merely the biological so they are more than just

the biological that means that you can put you can put evolution you can put biological evolution into a broader

evolution of technological evolution which is to say that which is to say that the body itself is a technology

right okay so if the body is a technology now the nerves are coming back back to the ball

i walked here today and i had this all so walking along the street i had this all so spaced out and relaxed but in the moment

it all just kind of goes ergh okay so where were we technology we are technological beings we have become

there is no eternal essence there is only becoming so then we can talk about technologies of the body

right so technological evolution so one of the key technologies of the body is bipedalism so first we are on all

fours and then we stand up and now we're on two legs and we can walk about bipedalism is awesome technology

once we're up on two legs and we can walk about our paws can develop and they can develop into fingers and have opposable

thumbs opposable thumbs are awesome technology so bipedalism opposable thumbs technology so building on

those technologies of the body we can think of other ones right so gesture is another one that is allowed by the fact that we

are on our feet and that we walk around and that we have hands so i can make an obscene gesture hey fran [gives fran

the middle finger]

but now we can have speech as well so the face that was previously used for gnawing and grabbing food

and what not is now available for speaking for making facial movement and so forth so speech is another technology of the

body and then we have writing as well now writing is a key technology build on the other ones because what writing does is

it it externalises it externalises memory and it creates a material trace outside of your body okay so this is a kind of key

technological development in which we place a lot of ourselves outside our body in material so that you can have a book

somebody who has died has written a book and its in your possession and we can read it and here they are somehow a

trace of that person remains so there is a kind of ghostliness with this kind of thing as well okay so building from

the technologies of writing we also have communication technologies that we think of as media now the thing i wanted to try

and draw out the key shift from speech into writing is this putting it outside of ourselves making it exterior now

there was a fantastic example of this in the last doctor who episode that i watched and i'm not usually a big doctor who fan

but i happened to find myself watching doctor who and its an episode called day of the moon and in this episode its set in 1969

its set in america at the time that they are landing on the moon and these creatures known as the silence who are just very

tall men with cliche alien heads right maybe many of you have seen this episode already and the silence have ruled

have ruled humanity forever as long as their has been history the silence have ruled and they have a very nifty trick

this is how they rule us: if you are seeing them and looking at them then you see them you know they are there

they come up to you they intimidate the hell out of you they scare the hell out of you and they can manipulate you but as

soon as you turn away from them you can't remember that they were there at all you've completely forgotten about them

so that's how they rule us they don't enslave us with any sort of physical measure they have this amazing psychic

technology that can beat our technology of memory right so there is three technologies of memory that are worth

bringing up in this case so the first one is genetic memory and dna and the second one is the memories of each

individual each individual creature and how the individual creature gathers memories by gathering experience but

those individual experiences can't be communicated at the genetic level so if a goose has a particularly traumatic life

and learns in the course of its traumatic life not to do certain things in order to avoid the trauma it doesn't have a way of

communicating that information to its next generation okay so that's two and then this third type of memory technology

is one of putting outside of yourself and once you put it outside of yourself you can pass it on to the next generation

okay so going back to doctor who they've got this problem they have these aliens that they forget as soon as they are not

looking at them now one of the girls cleverly remembers to take a cleverly thinks to take a photo of one of them

with her mobile phone and she takes a photo like that but then of course she turns around and forgets she's got a photo

on her phone sometime later they discover this thing and i can't remember exactly how they get to the point of

realising that they need to figure out how to remember these creatures but the whole plot twists upon how they are going to create

an external form of memory to figure out how to beat these aliens and the first one they do is writing so every time

they see an alien they make a mark on themselves right so so if they turn up in a kind of child's orphanage and there's

writing scrawled on the wall and there's atmospheric lighting and then in the next shot if you're covered in marks you know

something really bad has taken place so they can trace the alien encounters that they are having by using the technology of

writing which is in effect a kind of ghostly medium because it is the trace of something that could otherwise not

be remembered okay so they've got this writing technology going but that doesn't help them communicate to these

aliens that they want them to go away and stop enslaving humanity for the rest of time so the doctor gets the doctor gets

this implant that he puts in the palm of everyone so that when you encounter the alien you can record and you can record the

sounds of the alien and then play them back later on so this is another way that they are able to put memory outside of

themselves and make a recording of it and get closer to figuring out how to beat these aliens spoiler alert but in the end

in the end what they do is one of them shoots an alien and then films the alien saying you should have killed us all and then the

doctor feeds that into the telecast of the moon landing so the whole world the whole world being america the whole world is

watching the moon landing and he inserts the footage of the alien saying you should all kill us you should kill us all you should kill us all

and that manipulates or programs all of the humans to them go and kill all the aliens when they encounter them so this

exteriorisation of memory this putting memory in a material outside of itself is kind of the key thing that i wanted to get at

and the key line i'm going to get my cheat sheet just to get the exact phrase of what he says okay so another way

instead of external we can call it prosthetic so the external is a prosthetic device the mobile phone with a camera is

a prosthetic the evolution of the prosthesis is not itself living by which the human is nonetheless defined as a living being constitutes

the reality of the humans evolution as if with it the history of life we to continue by means other than life this is the paradox of the living

being characterised in its forms of life by the non-living or the traces that it leaves in the non-living okay so this sense in which

life continues this paradox in which life continues because of the trace left in non-living things so this brings up this

question of ghosts and ghostly effects because in all of these technologies particularly from writing onwards that we

are talking about there's a real sense in which ghostliness comes into play and the creation of ghosts okay now

ghosts and haunted media is something pia is very interested in and there's those stories of samuel morse in 1844

when he first hooked up a telegraph wire from washington to baltimore and the first thing he rapped out i love the way

that the use the word rap there he rapped out what hath god wrought which was the first question and all of these

guys who are scientists technological innovators were completely taken with the spirituality and the speaking with spirits

that they perceived in these mediums that they were creating thomas edison to his dying day believed that

well he spent a whole lot of time trying to fine tune his phonograph so that it would sensitive enough to pick up the voices of the dead

which he was sure were there and he died before he was able to do that but the point being that when new

communicational media like the telegraph and the phonograph come into play then there is at the outset this sense of

ghostliness this sense of spirituality that is taking place this idea that you are speaking with spirits but once those

communicational media become embedded inside the larger framework then there ghostliness is something that we forget about

and each communicational media encodes these kind of ghostly effects in their own way and so perhaps the first time we see

pixels or the first time we engage digital technologies and we see something that is not familiar to you maybe that ghostly sense

is activated then but as soon as that medium becomes an everyday part of all of our lives then we tend to forget the ghostliness

but in effect ghosts are everywhere around us all the time okay so

right so there is this beautiful film by the director ken mcmullen called ghostdance and its features jacques

derrida and he says in that that the future belongs to ghosts [somebody's phone rings] here's a ghost

that's what i mean by a ghost as well i don't mean some sort of mystical interpretation of a ghost i mean

the fact the actual medialogical fact the kind of material material ghosts that are present and about to enter the room

you should answer it it might be a ghost saying something important okay you're going to call it back

well say hi from me in this film ghostdance derrida says that future belongs to ghosts right and so

he thinks that new telecommunications media rather than diminishing the amount of ghosts because we're getting more

rational more advanced with our technology so things like ghosts and the sort of mysticism that's attributed to that

is now something of the past he goes the other way and i totally agree with him saying no the rise of communication

media and the perforation of it through all parts of our lives in fact are going to multiply the ghosts multiply the ghosts

everywhere and so that's how he gets to the statement that the future belongs to ghosts um okay

right so

what i wanted to say i've been inspired by pia's practice and the conversations that i've been having with pia about tekhne

ghosts haunted media and the strange things that she does with electricity and i'm particularly taken by this phrase

she has of letting the non-human life live so letting something which might not meet human definitions of living or which might

not fit into a rigid binary of non-living and living but nevertheless to let those things live to let the ghosts of electricity

if you like speak for themselves to allow them a place in the world and a place to exist and this is a kind of commitment to

letting ghosts come that is also a commitment to the future of allowing the future to happen with out pre-programming it

without saying in advance what it's going to be earlier on today i got an email from somebody with a link to the new york

times and it was a video of osama bin laden watching himself on tv which they got from his bunker after they killed him

it's a very strange video he's there rocking back and forth on his chair clearly chuffed with watching images of himself on tv

and i was sort of overcome by the levels of ghostliness going on here you know he's a guy who was ghost for so long

is now definitely a ghost watching ghostly images of himself on tv so the layerings of the ghosts going on there is

is quite intense but it also occurred to me let me backtrack for one second what derrida says in the ghostdance film is

that cinema + psychoanalysis = the science of ghosts and i won't bother talking about what he means by cinema or psychoanalysis

but you can look up the clip on youtube if you want but the idea of the science of ghosts and watching this video

of osama bin laden i thought to myself here's a dude who understood probably as good as anyone did what exactly

is at stake with the science of ghosts in other words the war of images he's somebody who understood inherently what it

was he was trying to do in images what it was he was trying to do with the dissemination and replication of his own image

in other words a ghost who understood how he wanted to disseminate himself as a ghost now this science of ghosts

is something that i don't really want to partake in i think it's a terroristic techno-science of ghosts and i should say that

i think the apparatus that executed him where a man named obama was sitting inside a command centre leading an operation

watching it in live time and then seeing him die i think that apparatus is also a terroristic techno-science of ghosts

so i have no interest in either of these science of ghosts but i do have an interest in what you might call the art of ghosts

which is another way to say what the activity of the dorks at dorkbot is is that it's the art of letting the ghosts speak for themselves