Technology can be described as the absolute and instrumental control and manipulation of electromagnetic energies (embracing the sun and earth) through principles of negative feedback and a necessary, flawed opposition to gradients of entropy. The world as technological is thus a conspiracy imposing singular operations of destruction on the earth and its inhabitants. Both as wide-ranging industrial and economic principle and as micro-technical anti-thesis (embedded within all electronics as primary mode of operation), explosive cycles of controlled extraction and polluted return are enacted upon the planet, radically transforming all of its energetic exchanges with any outside universe. Occulted energies exposes the dark, cyclical and encycling historyof technology, tracing a transition from absolute world and material transformation and complete expenditure (the resource-hungry quest of medieval alchemy in search of the transformation of material into meaning or gold) towards a contemporary electro-chemical economy of light-ecology and social cybernetics. These cycles are embodied within the very design of modern networked systems, software and their grounding in electronics as the manipulation and control of electrons.
Martin Howse
Artist, Berlin/London
Occulted Energies: Earth, Alchemy, Electronics and Technology
[EC|EL]