Post-Ego

"Je est un autre." —ARTHUR RIMBAUD, Lettre du Voyant.

"... A new breed of developmental theory is likely to arise... Its central technical concern will be how to create in the young an appreciation of the fact that many worlds are possible, that meaning and reality are created and not discovered, that negotiation is the art of constructing new meaning by which individuals can regulate their relations with each other." —JEROME BRUNER, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.

Each of us is a unique reality, a personal universe, the only focus of a private world. It is precisely in our own awareness, our devoted concentration, that we are able to define -and finally to transform ourselves. As we know from day-to-day experience, reality is a bubbling stew of observations, memories and interpretations. For this reason, it is perhaps today's new mediartist, who most closely approaches and personifies Oliver Sacks' dream of a science of the individual. It took the human mind 20.000 years to arrive at this point in history; from the first primitive tool to the sophisticated computer of today. The beginning of 'self' consciousness is the prime creation of man and by doing so, man transforms himself. Moreover, man can communicate knowledge acquired by experience to other members of the group. From the moment word and creative gesture were born, man has tried to capture his subjective experience of time. In his struggle for survival, man takes possession of the natural by transforming it. By attaching significance to similarity - the process of mimesis: 'making alike', man transforms nature into art. With the use of tools he extended his power. But before man became a tool-maker, he was certainly a dreamer, already using his intuition and his imagination for concept formation: as a symbol-maker, a story teller, a sign —and a picture-maker, it shows the interrelated origins of art and technology. In a magical act of creation, religion, science and art were combined in a latent form.