In modern thought and culture there is a disenchanted rationality and an obsession
with mystifying metamorphoses,
that is, quasi-religious metamorphoses that
are achieved in and through the very technologies often taken to realize or
embody modernity’s “disenchanted” rationality
‘Enlightened’ association of technology with secularization tends to overlook its historical role in materializing the sacred and in making such an
argument, the show managed to signal and illustrate with particular force a
mystical tendency in the human effort to frame reality, to capture all time and
space, the cosmos as a whole, in and through technoscientific media.
Such
media—from the sorcerer’s mirror through the lenses of the telescope and
microscope to the desktop processor—can indicate the operation or even the
realization in technology and science of a desire, much like that found throughout the mystical traditions, to transcend space and time, to achieve an omniscience and omnipotence in which the limited self would surpass itself, moving
ecstatically into a cosmic totality that, much like the mystical God and his
cosmic body, could never be objectively defined, discretely located, fully comprehended, or finally controlled
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