Who needs to?

“The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximise the time and place for production and minimise the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them."
(Solnit, Rebecca; Wanderlust: a History of Walking; pg 10)

“Machine interposition has increased exponentially, until today we have hardly any touching and little real human contact. Patients have been reduced to objects, and physicians to dispassionate feeders of the machines. As a group, physicians are becoming as evasive as politicians. A direct answer is hard to get because machines are used not as told, as extensions of our minds and senses, but as replacements for them. One is told, "Let's wait until the test results come back." "
(Cytowic, Richard; The Man Who Tasted Shapes; pg 38)

Who needs to write when you can type?
Who needs to talk when you can txt?
Who needs to learn to play an instrument when the sounds can be produced digitally?
Who needs to visit a shop when you can visit a website?
Who needs to visit places when google earth shows you everything from your computer chair?
Who needs to make when objects can be made with rapid prototype systems?

The craft of living is being eraditacted by the influx of technology.
We are all too swept up in the awe of how quickly things can be done that we stop to consider whether we actually enjoyed the process of acquiring the outcome.

Our intellectual and virtual spheres are ever expanding, but at the cost of our physical engagement and connection to the world we live in. The world that we have to actually exist in to be able to access these technologies.

"We have long believed as a society that technology serves us - we believe it saves lives, makes our work easier, improves communication, and is mostly good. I believe that, hardly realising it, we have come to serve technology even though we intended for it to serve us."

(Cytowic, Richard; The Man Who Tasted Shapes; pg 39)

Natasha Daintry, quoting Rebecca Solnit (from Wanderlust), in The Essential Vessel.

"The problem is when we become so detached from our bodies that we end up disembodied...It doesnt get very physical, suffer the elements, encounter other species, experience primal fear or much in the way of exhilaration. It is more a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed: "A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is a site of sensations, processes, and desires, rather than a source of action and production. Having been liberated from manual labour and located in the sensory deprivation chambers of apartments and offices, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.""


......and we wonder why sex sells, we have little else to locate ourselves in this physical world. There are very few other universally experienced and enjoyed physical activities that we, as a species, engage in any more. So it is of course exploited and glamourised, until we have what we now live in, a hyper-sexualised society.

SP6 Conference Abstract

Our sense of time-value has altered because of the fast paced lifestyle that society forces. “New time saving technologies make workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them. Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggest that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued…” 1 Time-value has been changing since the Industrial Revolution. Although technology has improved the standard of living beyond the ambitions of our pre-Industrial society, it has reached a point where its infiltration in daily life has become detrimental.
Communication and simulation technologies have opened up new ways of relating to and experiencing the world. Interface-to-interface relation is more common that face-to-face, or face-to-place, interaction. People navigate their daily lives within constructed interiors that limit interaction with actual people and the actual world.
My work does not demerit or elevate the presence of technology in our lives. It intends to encourage interaction between people and their environment. To offer reprise from a lifestyle that struggles to provide time and space for direct engagement.


1 Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: a History of Walking. New York: Viking, 2000. Print.