Hybrid Identities

- biologixcal reality,
- technological reality,
- hybrid reality.

1. The Biological Reality. Each species sees the world in its own way (for example, a dog doesn't see the world like a bat which sees the world throuch echolocation). Each species sees only a small sliver of the reality. The fact that we see a given number of things doesn't mean that something else doesn't exist. Human beings are built the same, therefore they see and understand the world in the same way. We recognize a number of things instinctively. There's no definition of life. We never needed any because we instinctively recognise it whenever we see it. We all agree on the fundamentals.

2. The Technological Reality. The perception of the world through both human and machine senses, creates suddenly an opening of the slivers of reality that we knew. The fundamentals that we had suddenly become trouble, blurred.
That's the source of the malaise that we feel. If you see a man or a table at the atomic scale, there's not much difference between them.
What is intelligent in the human being? Does it come from the grey matter? from neurons? What is alive in the human species? The cell? But we are hosting millions of cells, thus millions of living beings.
So far life was instinctively understandable. What was organic was alive. But suddenly we are confronted with variances of the organic, but are the alive? Can something be non organic and yet alive?

3. Hybrid reality. Intrusiion of technological realities into biology is so strong that our biological realities disappear. Everything that we get from our own senses, we start to distrust it. The body, this volume of flesh, we are now hardly believing in it.
In hybrid reality, our biological world is only a small tip of the iceberg, it can move and change but it has no impact of what is below.
The paradox is that we live in an organic world, yet we distrust it deeply. What we see doesn't matter anymore. It's what beyond it that matters. Think of the film The Matrix. What's important is what is unreal, we have the feeling that we are guided by something else, and we have no power over it.

So what's digital/electric art becoming? It's the consequence of hybrid reality, the bits that have no physicality. But even this "non-human" art forces us to wonder "Who amI?", electronic art like traditional art helps us share the suffering of the human condition. Even hybrid reality cannot escape that.

Ollivier Dyens (CA): associate professor at Concordia University Montreal; founder and webmaster of www.chairetmetal and continentx.com, websites dedicated to the study of cyberculture; author of "Metal and Flesh. The Evolution of Man, Technology Takes Over."