![]() The wonders of the Brave New World, all spick-and-span in whatever the period style of “futurism” happens to be, are nearly always paired with archetypal monsters and ruined versions of recent or current modernity, usually something on the order of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis gone Angkor Wat or New York City after the Bomb. In mass culture, the information age still lives in the increasingly picturesque shadow of the industrial revolution. To give just one example, consider the machines that, by way of a few computer keyboard tricks, imitate octopuses swimming in the grottoes of the Wachowskis’ drowned futurama even as they rise from the lower depths of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century imagination first plumbed by Jules Verne’s Nautilus. One must not forget that in the Wachowski brothers’ space opera, as in most of its ilk, the basic technologies of fantasy are in large part self-consciously retro. Thanks to saturation advertising, “matrix” is now a universal buzzword for the digital template in which all mathematical conflations and mutations of given reality occur. This metamorphic space has long been the preoccupation of science and the playground of science fiction. ![]() ![]() Actually there are several such places, and the zones in which difference blurs overlap, such that one can speak of a multidimensional matrix at the core of which the macrocosmic and microcosmic, the organic and the geological, the living and the dead are confounded. THERE IS A PLACE ON THE CONTINUUM OF VISUAL EXPERIENCE WHERE THE DISTINCTION between natural and geometric form dissolves.
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