Wednesday, January 30, 2008

mirror doll/mirror android

Why dolls? Why are humans so fascinated with dolls? What is a doll? Well quite simply, it’s the art of replicating humans. And perhaps the greatest fundamental flaw is accompanied by breathing souls into dolls. Who'd want to do that? The definition of a truly beautiful doll is a living, breathing body devoid of a soul. An unyielding corpse, tiptoeing on the brink of collapse. The human is no match for a doll, in its form, its elegance in motion, its very being. The inadequacies of human awareness become the inadequacies of life's reality. Perfection is possible only for those without consciousness, or perhaps endowed with infinite consciousness. In other words, for dolls and for gods. Actually, there’s one mode of existence commensurate with dolls and deities. Animals. For example, skylarks are suffused with a profound, instinctive joy. A joy we humans driven by self-consciousness, can never know. For those of us who lust after knowledge, it is a condition more elusive than godhood. And this conundrum compelled humans to fabricate dolls that are inanimately dead. And what of this idea of death? Without knowing life, how can we know death? That is what Confucius says. It is a rare human who knows death. Most meet death unprepared, armed only with ignorant familiarity. In other words, people die simply because it is inevitable. But is death not a precondition of life for a doll? If so, would it’s inception address the following:

“The deceased hereby proclaims that on this day of this month, I have attained my own celebrated death.”

Truly disturbing, isn't it? I really understand. The doubt is whether a creature that certainly appears to be alive, really is. Alternatively, the doubt that a lifeless object might actually live. That's why dolls haunt us. They are modeled on humans. They are, in fact, nothing but human. They make us face the terror of being reduced to simple mechanisms and matter. In other words, the fear that, fundamentally, all humans belong to the void.

Further, science, seeking to unlock the secret of life, brought about this terror. The notion that nature is calculable inevitably leads to the conclusion that humans too, are reducible to basic, mechanical parts. The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual motion. In this age, the twin technologies of robotics and electronic neurology resurrected the 18th century theory of man as machine. And now that computers have enabled externalized memory, humans have pursued self-mechanization aggressively, to expand the limits of their own functions. Determined to leave behind Darwinian natural selection, this human determination to beat evolutionary odds also reveals the desire to transcend the very quest for perfection that gave it birth. The mirage of life equipped with perfect hardware engendered this nightmare. God's everlasting geometry if you will.

"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

1 comment:

veraicon reality said...

"How naked go the sometimes nude" ...