Panel Statement

Panel: Bio-Architectures, Virtual Cities: The Revolutionary Human-Machine Community

The drive and expansion of industrial capitalism has led us to the total realisation of the consumer society. This society is split absolutely between leisure and labour: a leisure society in which we work to obtain the instruments of leisure, the machines of pleasure — and this split organises our thoughts in every way. In our desperation to free ourselves, we rush with open arms to the soothsayers of the technical futures, to the Utopias made possible by technology. We, and they, forget that it is purely a human and social decision how any technology is used. How do we meet the challenge to create the freedom, intellectually and psychologically, that will allow us to use technology the way we dream we are able to: to make a better world?
Through a reconsideration of the work of Henri Lefebvre and Raoul Vaneigem, in identifying and criticizing the passivity of consumer society, this paper investigates the relationships of new technologies, and concepts of media freedom. McIver will refer to her research on the Undercurrents radical video publishers. Adbusters and The Media Foundation, and to her own work in Russian television.

• Gillian McIver, Media Artist and Television Producer Colosseum and Volga Television