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149
THE DEEPEST THING IS THE SKIN. BODY, TECHNOLOGY
AND NEO-MATERIALISM IN MEDIA ART
PAU ALSINA
January 2009)
PERSON, Lawrence, Notes Toward a
Postcyberpunk Manifesto http://project.
cyberpunk.ru (consultada en enero de 2010)
STEPHENSON Neal (1992) Snow Crash.
Guigamesh.
STERLIG, Bruce (1986) Mirrorshades. Siruela.
TOFFLER, Alvin (1979) La tercera ola. Plaza
Jans.
VIRILIO, Paul (1997) La velocidad de
liberacin. Manantial.
YEHYA, Naief (2001) El cuerpo transformado.
Paids.
ZIZEK, Slavoj (2007) En defensa de las
causas perdidas. Verso.
http://proyectoliquido.net (consulted in
February 2009)
http://www.taringa.net (consulted in March
2010)
ht t p://bai rescyberpunk. bl ogspot . com
(consulted in March 2010)
The deepest thing is the skin; beautiful and
mysterious phrase of Paul Valery
1
that reminds
us that we are only a fold of the externality,
where the whole body becomes a set of
contractions, retention and wait, a fold of the
subject-image, time-duration, fold appearing
as a difference, to be installed at the thought
understood as general dermatology or surface
art. The skin, the largest organ of the body
brings the inside in contact with the outside,
retaining, protecting, communicating, feeling,
storing or regulating this delicate balance that
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effervescent singularities.
The other skins of Media Art are relevant
to this unprecedented relationship with
the universe, the world and ourselves,
relationships in which a particular inventory
of membranes bring people in contact with
nature, people with other human beings,
people with machines or machines with
people, and their multiple combinations.
An inventory of membranes - interfaces of
the past, present or future to come - that
emerge from the same interaction between
art, science and technology where substrate
material enjoys the same entity as symbolic
structure that articulates them.
In a context in which science and technology
have become genuine co-articulating ways of
seeing living reality in our society, a large group
of artistic practices related to technoscience
are trying to develop their practice, sometimes
in a mostly critical form, sometimes with a
laudatory leave, but without falling into the
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We refer to the determinisms which shape
the socio-cultural context in an autonomous
form, establishing a relationship between
technology and society as if technologies
were falling from the sky like extraterrestrial
meteorites that impact on our society. Facing
this deterministic view one could think, on the
contrary, on the balance of power, in a true co-
production between technology and society,
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constructed to the same extent that the
social should be considered as technologically
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Sociology of Technology, and the so-called
Actor-Network Theory of some thinkers like
Bruno Latour, we wouldnt talk neither of
technological determinisms nor of autonomy
of the social, but of an effective interaction
between interdependent elements that are
built in the same interaction.
In this context one would understand the
skins of Media Art as coarticulators of these
new experiences that constitute the world.
Thus we should start thinking about the
contexts of interaction that support the
social and the cultural, as constituted of
artifacts, symbols, data or places that hold
an active role, a productive agency in the
construction of our society. So we would
highlight the active role of this material
culture, from technology itself to the co-
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150
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implies, in turn, taking into consideration the
fact that technology materiality in culture is
highlighted, it still places symbolic structures,
too, like vertebrate agents of this reality.
Media Art has often been the subject of both
discourse and technodeterministic practices
on the one hand, and on the other hand of
approximations that ignored the technological
component in the same theories and artistic
practices. In our view, neither position can
approach these practices properly, but, in
tune with the constructivist views of the
Actor-Network Theory, we should approach
from multiple and integrated perspectives,
thus overcoming the prejudice of art versus
technology, and technology versus art.
Indeed, since entering the scene, information
and communication technologies (ICTs) have
been waking up in man technophilia and
technophobia, utopias and dystopias of all
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RI WKH LQKHUHQW EHQHWV RI WHFKQRORJLHV IRU
whom these would come to change many of
the foundations of our culture, thus expressing
a new paradigm in gestation, in favor of
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ICT, technological innovation detractors, for
whom these would have nothing to add to
what already exists on a consolidated basis
in culture and society, but rather they would
only come to corrupt the nature of the human.
Technophilia and technophobia, technological
utopias and dystopias, there have been all
kinds of reaction towards to different types
of technologies prevailing in each historical
moment. For example, lets remember the so-
called ludites,
2
a movement of English workers
in the early nineteenth century that destroyed
the machines of industry, who were perceived
as originators of the bad working conditions.
Or from a more positive side we recall some
utopian socialists such as Saint Simon
3
that
technology development to achieving the
desired progress for mankind, or as the
economist Adam Smith, who predicted times
of less effort and more free time available
and welfare through increased productivity
provided by new technologies of the moment.
Today these two basic approaches to
technology are still in force, but in any case,
there is no doubt that technology brings about
changes, some positive and some not so,
but after all, changes. Today, even through
multiple artistic practices, we can speak
of technophilias such as transhumanism,
which predicts how current technologies
can help improve the human species, thus
overcoming their natural shortcomings. We
even reach a kind of posthumanism
4
which
speaks of the obsolescence of the body and
physicality compared to the perfection of
the machines. Or technophilias that stem
from a deterministic view of the relationship
between technology and culture and society,
magnifying the positive transformative power
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were dealing with an interrelation, or co-
production, in different directions.
We could also refer to fully utopian discourses
associated with ICT as a democratizing force,
in essence, stripped of all power and control,
5

the excessive expectations in relation to
electronic commerce and real participatory
dynamic of the internauts, the advent of
virtual reality as well as substitutionary
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reproduce the properties of what we mean
by life, and that many artists have been
commissioned to explore in a utopian or
dystopian manner.
While it is true that the incorporation of ICT in all
spheres of society brings profound changes to
be studied, the so-called digital revolution is
often the subject of technophilias and utopian
discourses devoid of any critical component
needed in every type of innovation. Theorists
such as Eric Steven Raymond
6
or Pekka
Himanen,
7
opt for the enthronement of the
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inherited from the 70s counterculture- and
UNIVERSES AND METAVERSES: ARTISTIC APPLICATIONS OF THE NEW MEDIA
151
not so much of a reality contrasted with the
disparity of values cohabiting effectively in
the Internet.
On the other hand, the distrust towards
technology, which Ortega Gasset,
8
Martin
Heidegger,
9
or Jaques Ellul
10
preached
in relation to the impoverishment of
human experience, today is renewed with
phenomena as the Manifesto Unabomber,
11

the radical primitivism of John Zerznan
12
or the
pessimism inherent in the criticism of digital
technologies, according to the architect,
urban planner and philosopher Paul Virilio,
13

represent the loss of reality. But the truth is
that without falling into excessive optimism
or pessimism, and with the knowledge that
we have gained from seeing ICT burst into
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the ongoing transformations in culture and
society.
The fear that the technological developments
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robotics, biotechnology or nanotechnology
substitute humanity through an evolutionary
process -that starts with the cyborg-human
union and goes on to achieve a complete
extinction of the human being- has always
been present since the sixties with the
writings of authors such as Leroi-Gourhan or
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scientists like Marvin Minsky and Ray
Kurzweil made their most optimistic futurist
predictions; the latter predicted that in 2040
computers would have human intelligence and
learning capabilities, and in 2090 and there
would be no difference between a human and
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This posthuman vision is based on the
idea of that theres no difference between
bodily existence and computer simulation,
cybernetic mechanism or biological organism,
robot teleology or human objectives.
14
The
central concept that feeds the posthuman
ideology is that information is disembodied,
a concept based on the theory of information
by Shannon-Weaver, according to which
information is context-free, without
necessary connection with meaning, without
any materiality. From these assumptions of
information theory, along with cybernetics and
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the conceptual foundations that gave rise
to computer science were articulated and
therefore it became possible to develop
computers and programs that made them
function.
The digital is certainly accused of breaking
the truth of the reference in data processing.
Digital images are fully numerical and yet
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without a distinction between original and
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This way digital information is calculable, and
therefore also subject to changes resulting
from algorithms in data processing. The
digital, installed inevitably in the rooted
Cartesian dualism of body/soul, is suspected
of marginalizing the role of the body and
relegating man to pure mind devoid of
corporeality. In fact, if we analyze it in
depth, the information theory of Shannon-
Weaver is based on a conception that
mistakes information with the signal, that
includes no meaning in itself, and thus leads
to the understanding of communication
as a simple transfer of information from
a sender to a receiver, without taking into
account neither the subjects participating in
the communication process, nor the context
in which it occurs, or its semantic value.
15

In contrast to the information theory of
Shannon-Weaver, Donald McKay developed
an alternative notion that included a view
of information directly related to the nature
of representation and its effect, considering
information as a measured action because
of the effect it causes to the receiver. If
the Shannon-Weaver model is about what
information is, the McKay model measures
information for what it does. And the one
imposed itself above the other because of the
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detriment of the latter. Although the model of
McKay involved a lot more problems for their
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152
use, if had been still investigated on the same
line it would have been possible to produce
an alternative model of notion of information
that could have generated not a post-human
vision but a vision of dialog and interaction
between nature, humanity and intelligent
machines, where the central role wouldnt
have been ceded to control but to dialog.
In this context we can talk about the role
of the body in the practices that interrelate
art, science and technology, where despite
the apparent disembodiment associated with
computers -commonly perceived as aseptic
machines of calculation- and the immateriality
of processed data, the body gets a more
relevant role. And so we may dare to predict
that this renewed relevance of the role of the
body and materiality manifests the transition
from a conception of a culture centered on
the visual to a conception of culture in a
haptic slope
16
as a new phenomenology in
dialog with Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin,
Gilles Deleuze that emphasizes the role of
the affective and proprioceptive, the tactile
dimensions of experience in the creation of
space, and by extension the visual media: a
shift in the centrality of vision in favor of the
internal bodily senses such as touch or self-
movement.
Thus, vision becomes haptic. Visuality
understood in this way is formed in much
more visceral terms than the abstract
power of sight: the body remains an active
part of the image, even the digital image.
For example this way we can say that Virtual
Reality is rooted in the biological potential of
human beings, as a conquest of the brain-
body, as an adaptation based on the biology
of new technological extensions provided
by the media.
17
The new media, says Lev
Manovich,
18
change our essential conception
of what we understand with the images
because they turn the display to an active user
that interacts with the image by activating it.
Digitization requires a reconception of the co-
relation between the users body and image
in a deeper way. The image itself, digital and
therefore calculable, has become a process in
itself and therefore it is inextricably linked to
the activity of the body. As Hansen said, the
image can no longer be restricted to the level
of surface appearance, but must be extended
to follow the entire process according to which
information is received through embodied
experience.
19
In this process, the body, doesnt
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and creates images, illuminating the world in
its experience. That is, the body itself frames
the digital information that is presented as a
report, thus creating images or other available
elements. This concept would be in contrast
with the conception of other theorists of the
digital image, as Friedrich Kittler
20
that starts
with an understanding of information as dis-
embodied, without any context. Kittler thus
conceives human perception as obsolete and
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age should never need to be adapted more
to the fringe of human perception but can be
extended in all directions, understanding that
this was previously restricted and should be
overcome.
For many years the computer was associated
with the mind in a clear parallel with the
classical Cartesian image that conceives
human beings as machines. The image of the
body understood as a watch remains in effect
in the assumption of the implicit equivalence
of the computer understood as a metaphor for
the human brain. This equivalence extends
to the association of the body as hardware
and the mind as software where the role of
the body as a factor that doesnt constitute
non-cognitive experiences is rejected. And
there was a time when the computer model
of mental activity became the predominant
vision of cognitive science and dominated
the entire brain research. It was common
to compare a human to a computer where
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as data processing and transmission of
information; that is, as a manipulation of
symbols based on a set of rules. But unlike
the budgets set by pre-conceptions that gave
this mechanistic view of the brain, recent
advances in cognitive science have made
UNIVERSES AND METAVERSES: ARTISTIC APPLICATIONS OF THE NEW MEDIA
153
it clear that human intelligence is radically
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21
Unlike
computers, where information is the key
element, the human nervous system does
not process any information, but interacts
with the environment through a constant
modulation of its structure, proceeds with a
constant adaptation and readaptation to tis
surroundings. As Varela tells us we must
question the idea that the world is given to
us and that cognition is representation. In
cognitive science, this means that we must
question the idea that information lies in
the world ready and is derived from it by a
cognitive system.
22
The conventional idea
is that information is somehow out there
waiting to be picked up by the brain that has
some categories where the external data falls
into, but according to Santiagos theory the
nervous system does not process information
from the outside world but instead produces a
world in the process of cognition. Cognition is
therefore a creative process that depends on
the relationship with the environment as well
as all of our accumulated knowledge, culture
and art, constructed from coordination
actions with the environment, in connection
with social and cultural processes. The brain
lights up a world and makes it in contrast
to the computing machines that marginalize
the context of information they transmit and
are based on pre-established parameters
(although in recent years, computation is
being developed in interesting new directions).
In the 1940s, Bateson was instrumental
in developing the roots of cybernetics
and, from here, along with Maturana, they
created a revolutionary concept of mind.
Then Maturana
23
transcended the computer
model of cognition to develop a theory
where cognition is conceived as the act of
lighting a world and consciousness is linked
to language and abstraction capabilities.
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neuroscientists Maturana and Varela
24
we
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by bodily sensations and processes, and
although we often tend to try to suppress
them, we think with our body, as mind and
body are inextricably linked in the cognitive
process.
The separation between body and mind,
the dualism of Descartes res cogitans, is
overcome by this characterization of the
mind where it becomes a process of cognition
and life process, which operates through
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with the entire body. We should understand,
as we mentioned, that all this process of
cognition operates not only through the brain
but throughout the body, whether there is a
higher nervous system or not. To make things
clear, here cognition includes perception,
emotion and action, that is, the whole life
process, as long as cognitive interactions
of a living organism in its environment. In
the case of human cognition it als oincludes
language, conceptual thinking and awareness
of themselves as advanced evolutionary
creatures.
25
So we can say, as we mentioned
before, that the experiential state is always
embodied that is, immersed in a particular
HOG RI VHQVDWLRQ DQG WKHUHIRUH 0DWXUDQD
systematically establishes the link between
the biology of human consciousness and
language. For this, communication through
language does not consist in the transmission
of information but rather in the coordination
of behavior among living organisms, through
mutual structural coupling, as also stressed
by Vilarroya
26
in relation to the most current
advances in neuroscience applied to robotics
research by Luc Steels and its Aibo robots.
(France Cadet-)
In this sense we can say that the body in
immersive environments, telematic networks,
in connection with computers and robotic
devices that increase its skills and expand
its movements, is itself a body that expands
the epistemological horizons and possibilities
of cognitive experiences. Placing a living
body in the Internet raises a new concept of
ubiquitous identity, an absence that is present,
perhaps a nomadic identity or nonidentity
circulating as body-without-organs, as
Deleuze and Guattari point. Bodies would
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154
then be traversed by the logic of multiplicity
and the territory of the differences. In the
thinking of Deleuze and Guattari the body
is not the organism, in other words its not
an organized body attached to an identity,
but the organism constitutes a part of the
body in a similar manner of the organism
of modern soldier by virtue of disrupting
the peasants or the vagabonds body until
it becomes a body without organs to extract
new relations between material elements.
27

In turn, the body in regard to the organism
is considered as an anomaly, a monstrosity,
a threat of death or illness: the body disrupts
the organism, the organism threatens the
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which makes it possible to negotiate and
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meaning depending on the established
relations between different elements. The
image of the body and the body itself are
subject to the impacts caused by information
and communication technologies, thus they
are propelled to the understanding of new
experiences that come upon us: experiences
as the teleception (or remote perception of
things that are close to our body or touch
it somehow from a distance) the expansion
(or increasing the sense of loss of the
VSHFLFRZQSHUVRQDOERXQGDULHVDPXOWLSOH
personality (or the distribution of person by
the networks, expanding the scope and range
of the body) or proprioception (or the sense
that the body itself is there, the awareness
of internal happenings, namely the tactile
sense of both the inner feelings of oneself
as events and feelings of the immediate or
electronically expanded environment).
28
On
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idealized bodies, extended bodies, monstrous
bodies, or networked digital bodies, software
bodies... Here are some of the different
presentations of the body in art and New
Media Society, bodies crossed by information
and communication technologies and the
powerful imagery attached to current science.
We should ask, for example: What images
and fantasies of the body are contained in
the new media art? What is the impact of
new technologies in the body and in your
perception? First we can think of cyborgs,
not only as cybernetic organisms, but as
spaces where the most extravagant fantasies
deposited on bodies take place, a space for
utopian imagination.
The information and communication
technologies affect our bodies and therefore
perception; the new media art that intersects
with science and current technologies, is the
space where these issues can occur and be
thought of, because practices emerging from
both the promise and the fears associated with
utopian imagination as well as surrounding
fatalism. We can see how the post-humanist
discussions of the early nineties have not yet
been completed and are still in force in various
ways, implied or otherwise. After futuristic
and apocalyptic forecasts that predicted
a machine body, new insights on body
entities have emerged as dynamic entities,
emerging as communication information
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of interconnected codes interacting with each
other.
If we move on to the origin of the body
imaginary associated with the technology
we see how cyborgs are presented as hybrid
creatures, not only as a cross between a
machine and an organism but also as a
construct that fuses together the perceptions
and social and individual projections, the
UHDOLWLHV DQG FWLRQV RI DOO NLQGV 'RQQD
Haraway in her Cyborg Manifesto makes it
clear to what extent a cyborg is a cybernetic
organism, understood as a hybrid of machine
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29
but
the question we must ask ourselves is what
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image of man. What are the conceptions of
the human body and of man that are implicit in
WKHGLIIHUHQWFRQJXUDWLRQVRIWKHUHODWLRQVKLS
between body and technology? Looking
back we remember how in 1960 Manfred E.
Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, as a part of a
NASA program, gave the name to cyborg,
UNIVERSES AND METAVERSES: ARTISTIC APPLICATIONS OF THE NEW MEDIA
155
understood as the result of imagining the
future man, a human capable of surviving
in outer space. The essential difference with
the astronaut were the technical devices that
equipped the human body, providing it with
additional skills and functions, that merged
organically with the body and ensured its
possibility to survive.
30
At the root of this conception is the recreation
of human life by mechanical means,
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cancellation. Throughout history such views
have led to the imaginary of mechanical
bodies, the construction of a being looking
like man through technologies such as
robotics, which leads us to think about how
the relation mind / body is present in our
society. So through the artistic practices that
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through the intensive use of technologies,
where the limits the body itself are called into
question through the embodied relations
with the technology itself , new constructions
of the body are raised; the body is understood
as located, active and perceptive, and at the
same time as a body traversed by the cultural
meanings it experiences. From the fantasies
associated with the creation of hybrid
institutions between humans and machines,
to the ideals associated with what became
known as Post-humanism, they are working
critically in the fantasies and fears associated
with such technologies in popular culture.
Theorist Donna Haraway says that a cyborg
exists when there are two kinds of problematic
boundaries: between animals (and other
organisms) and humans, or between self-
controlled and self-governing machines
(authors) and organisms, especially human
PRGHOVRIDXWRQRP\7KHF\ERUJLVDJXUH
born to the interface between the automaton
and autonomy.
31
And it invites us to think
that while the boundaries between animal and
human, or technological and human, remain
clearly marked this has no consequences
whatsoever for humans as they maintain the
illusion of control over animals and machines.
But cyborgs, acting on the boundaries or
limits of these binary divisions indicate that
these borders are permeable, and hence the
danger lies in the solution of the categories
which organize the real (... if we thought
that categories organize the real so that it
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there are many promises in the realm of this
dissolution of boundaries, it is the promises
of monsters, promises to overcome the
weaknesses of debilities associated with
biological existence, particularly to the
fragility and mortality of the human body.
But that awareness of fragility is also a deep
link between digital technologies and genetic
technologies, and this linkage is understood
as a step in the suggestive promise that
leads us to make possible the discovery and
reproduction of the formula of life and
therefore the full possession of the body.
The truth is that each socio-historical context
has its own way of conceiving and facing life.
Technology is not simply neutral knowledge
about reality, rather it is a mechanism of
production of social and natural reality.
In this way, we could say, for example,
that biotechnology - with the tremendous
Promethean expectations that they open- is
not so much a distortion of nature as the
production of nature, because what we see
when we look at the secret of life is life already
transformed by the technology of our look
32

and above because each historical formation
sees and shows whatever it can depending
on its conditions of visibility as well as says
all that it can, depending on its conditions of
statement.
33
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the possibility and necessity of knowing
the reality of social conditions, political or
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tells us what is the object, in other words
reality, by virtue of its location in a privileged
observation space tells us where science is.
A mythical space of objectivity detached of
context, which impels us to believe that when
science speaks, then an objective rationality
speaks, which reaches without distortions the
inherent peculiarities of observed reality.
34

(ENGLISH VERSION)
156
During the last decades the sociology of
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this mythical objectivity stops referring to
the fake vision that promises transcendence
of all limits and responsibilities, to pursue a
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35
that
lets us display the situational, contingent and
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Artistic practices related to technosciences
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black boxes and show the implications
associated with these, making visible whats
invisible in them.
In the world of Media Art all these issues
are present, a universe of membranes, the
claim of the organic and the visceral in a
hypertechnological context that often forgets
the underlying materiality, tangibility, affect
and the haptic which falls into what has been
hailed by the media as re-materialization.
Perhaps we could agree with Artaud that
the truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of
matter. The spirit of man is sick in the middle
of concepts. A truth that refers to a reality
of matter that has been supplanted by a dark
web of conventions, because the body and its
intensity have been replaced by a disciplined
organism; because its thought has been
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to repeat, as its only truth, the laws of
grammar.
36
Facing all this we could recognize
a held subject, which inevitably imprisons life
with its identity, but in its power of being it
constructs the escape lines that release that
life, which lead us to reach the unknown, to
be a nomad without ceasing to be an exile.
FOOTNOTES
1
As Gilles Deleuze observes hermosa
frase de Paul Valery, representa todo un
descubrimiento estoico que supone mucha
sabidura y entraa toda una tica, in
DELEUZE, Gilles (1989) La Lgica del Sentido.
Barcelona: Paidos. p 41.
2
The name Ludismo comes from one of its
founders Ned Lud; it started between 1811
and and extenderd throughout Europe. They
opposed to all kinds of technologies, because
they believed it made man a sclave to the
machine. This phenomenon was linked to
the deteriorisation of the working conditions
because of the introduction of machines to
work.
3
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utopian socialists talked about the process of
the industrialisation in his book La industria,
El sistema de 1823. His positivism towards
technologies would leave him augur what
would become accelerationg agents in the
creation of a new social model.
4
HAYLES, N. Katherine (1999). How We
Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
University Of Chicago Press.
5
Theorists like Albert Laszlo- Barabasi or Alex
Galloway have studied upon the subject of
the hierarchies of power in the physical and
virtual infrastructure of the Internet. For
example: BARABSI, Albert-Lszl (2002)
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to
Everything Else. New York: Plume.
6
RAYMOND, Eric Steven La catedral y el
bazar In: http://ftp.gnuab.org/textos/
catedralbazar.pdf
7
HIMANEN, Peka (2002) La tica Hacker
y el espritu de la era de la informacin.
Barcelona: Destino.
8
ORTEGA y GASSET, Jos (1970) Obras
Completas: La meditacin de la tcnica
(Vol.5) Madrid: Revista de Occidente.
9
HEIDEGGER, Martin (1989) Fites: La qesti
envers la tcnica. Barcelona: Laia.
10
ELLUL, Jacques (1960) El siglo XX y la
tcnica: anlisis de las conquistas y peligros
de la tcnica de nuestro tiempo. Barcelona:
Labor.
11
UNABOMBER (1999) El manihesto
Unabomber. Bilbao:Likiniano.
12
ZERZNAN,John ( 2001) Futuro primitivo.
Valncia: Numa.
13
VIRILIO, Paul (1999) La bomba informtica.
Madrid: Ctedra.
14
HAYLES, N. Katherine, (1999) How we
became posthuman: virtual bodies in
cybernetic, literature and informatics,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 3.
UNIVERSES AND METAVERSES: ARTISTIC APPLICATIONS OF THE NEW MEDIA
157
NANOART: TOWARDS A RE-MODELING OF
CONTEMPORARY ART
ALESSANDRO SCALI, ALESSANDRO CHIOLERIO
15
GIANNETTI, C. (2002) Esttica Digital.
Sintopia del arte, la ciencia y la tecnologa.
Barcelona:Angelot., p 55.
16
HANSEN, M. B. N. (2004) New Philosophy
for New Media, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
17
Recent Works in neuroscience provide the
material link that he was looking for. Francisco
Varela presented powerful arguments about
the sources of conscience of time. His ideas
will be presented subsequently.
18
MANOVICH, Lev. (2001). The language of
New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
19
HANSEN, M. B. N. (2004) New Philosophy
for New Media, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
p 10.
20
KITTLER, Friedrich. (1999) Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter, Standford, California:
Standford University Press.
21
CAPRA, Fritjof. (1998). La trama de la vida.
Barcelona: Anagrama.
22
VARELA, F.,THOMPSON, E., ROSCH, E.,
(1991) The Embodied Mind. Mit Press.
Cambridge, p.141.
23
MATURANA,H. (1996) La realidad:Objetiva
o construida?. Fundamentos biolgico del
conocimiento. Barcelona: Anthropos.
24
VARELA, F.,THOMPSON, E., ROSCH, E.,
(1991) The Embodied Mind. Mit Press.
Cambridge.
25
CAPRA, Fritjof. Las conexiones ocultas.
Barcelona: Anagrama 2003.
26
VILARROYA, O. La Disolucin de la mente.
Una hiptesis sobre cmo siente, piensa y
se comunica el cerebro. Barcelona: Tusquets
Metatemas. 2002.
27
DELEUZE Gilles, GUATTARI, Felix.. Mil
Mesetas, Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1988.
28
KERCKHOVE, Derrick. Inteligencias en
conexin. Barcelona: Gedisa. 1999 pag. 73.
29
HARAWAY, Donna. A Cyborg Manihesto:
science, Technology, and Soliasit Feminism in
the late Twentieth Century. In Simians, ciborgs
and Women: The reinvention of nature. New
York. 1991. In spanish: HARAWAY Donna,
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\IHPLQLVPRVRFLDOLVWDDQDOHVGHOVLJOR;;
en Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres. La reinvencin
de la naturaleza (1991), Ctedra, Madrid.
30
CLYNES, M. KLINE, N. Cyborgs and Space, a
Astronautics, no 26/27. sep1960, pp 74-75.
31
HARAWAY, Donna. Primate Visions, Race,
gender and nature in the world of Modern
Science. New York, 1989 p 139.
32
KELLER, E.F. (1996). The biological gaze
en Robertson, G. Et al. (ed) FutureNatural.
Nature, Science, Culture. Londres: Routledge.
p 20.
33
DELEUZE, G. (1987). Foucault. Barcelona:
Paids, 87.
34
MENDIOLA, I. (2006) El jardn biotecnolgico
: Tecnociencia, transgnicos y biopoltica.
Madrid: Libros de la catarata. p 75.
35
HARAWAY, D (1995) Ciencia, cyborgs y
mujeres. Madrid: Ctedra. p 326.
36
MOREY, Miguel (1990) Psiquemquinas.
Barcelona: Montesinos p 141.
From its height of 0.000000001 metres the
nanometre may be considered one of the
biggest players of modern times and its role
seems destined to subsequently become
gigantic in the near future. What is this
extraordinary attention concentrated for
some decades on our very small hero due to?
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entity to assume almost the role of saviour of
the human race?
Such unexpected visibility is undoubtedly
attributable to the development of
nanotechnology, which, all things considered,
has only recently appeared. Some dates
may serve as a reference: in 1959 Fenyman,
a teacher at the California Institute of
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for handling atoms and molecules directly
using machinery of molecular dimensions.
The term nanotechnology appears however
in 1974 in the article On the basics concepts
of Nanotechnology by the Japanese