04 Her — anyue

人算不如天算

I was asked to make a blog for the NYU IMA Low Res graduate program. (I started with no tangible experience in interaction design.) Math is nature’s poetry, and these are just diary entries.

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04 HER

IMALR-GT-101-04

WHEN: 0806/2024
WHAT: IMALR-GT-101

I can respect that Katherine Hayles believes in fighting the posthuman world that she believes we already live in... Even though I don’t fully understand it. If the human essence is “freedom from the wills of others,” rather than something as simple as biology. So, the debate is are we free?

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In my humble opinion, the two video clips represent two points on a linear timeline. Hyper-Reality is the past. It depicts a world that we’ve been residing in since the dawn of modern electricity; a world exponentially amplified with the rise of MMORPG games (just less colorful). We’ve seen the massive lightboxes, LCD OOH ads, smartphones holding 500 different loyalty cards, avatars, ads within ads, wrist-tap payments. And if you’re my age+, we’ve interacted with MSN Messenger, played World of Warcraft, used Skype, Myspace, Bebo, Xanga- This type of augmented digital world is not a novel concept...

Which brings me to the second point on the timeline: the present- where Her falls. (It reminds me of a clip from Bicentennial Man, an even older film .) This is the inflection point where we blur the lines between human and machine. There’s a strange sort of symbiotic feedback loop happening. As we’re making machines more human, they’re making us more mechanical. Our identities are becoming intertwined with subjective influence.

If the argument for posthumanism is based on the idea that we can easily equate humans to computers when “information loses its body,” then sure. We are posthuman. But what does that even mean? What is humanism?

I’ve always believed that the human body is the most complex piece of technology out there. I don’t know what we are. I don’t know if we’re “artificial,” and quite frankly, I don’t know if it matters. I just hope we’re all saying please and thank you to the LLMs.

Sources:
Movie Clip from Her
Hyper-Reality Clip

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