Users Are People

How emodigital are you?

Our world is in vertigo rather than in transition. “The norms in this world are linked to the standards of my physical environment. My thoughts are alternately uploaded from the digital world and the physical world,” as Valerie van Zuijlen puts it. Her desktop film Scrolling into the Deep mirrors how those worlds dissolve on her computer screen. And not only there…

Our world is in between: Between a physical reality, whose realness some of us consider as absolute, and a digital reality which, in fact, proves to be just as real (and for some even is realer). However only a few effortlessly acknowledge that we are not wanderers in between two worlds anymore, but instead are deeply immersed in one single physio- and emodigital universe. Most of us still try to unlink what has become intertwined beyond a possible differentiation. And most of us cannot avoid to, once in a while, tumble into The Reality Gap: A sphere of knowing and nescience, hope and despair, feeling in control of the own future and free falling into an unknown whatever (do past, presence or future even matter?)…

Rather than fearing the unknown, the loss of control, one should face it. Anyway there is no way back. As Alice in Wonderland (the ‘forewoman’ of just letting go (but also her troubled by doubts)) said: ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’ And even if it is easier to evoke the well-known and perpetuate the proven – doing so only conceals the inevitable, and delays our making acquaintance with it. But if one does not try, one will never know. ‘It was much pleasanter at home,’ thought Alice, ‘I almost wish I hadn’t gone down the rabbit-hole – and yet – and yet –…’ So let’s jump and embrace the unknown. Let’s take part in a #mouseparty. Or a LAN Party. Both is possible at Depot Basel.

* Emodigitality: The confluence of the analogue and the digital, the natural and the artificial, the spontaneous and the programmed, the affective and the cognitive.