Fiscalización del pago por el RAF

Since the late 1960s, the emergence of sophisticated information technologies, transport systems, and communicational protocols began to determine a historical period where time was conceived as one of the most relevant aspects of social

development. Melvin Kranzberg, Professor of History of Technology and editor of the Technology and Culture Journal, states, “a single technological feat, no matter how much attention is showered upon it, does not by itself constitute a complete

technological transformation”. For Kranzbeg, a technological revolution is the result of many innovations that take place within the same period of time, creating a “synergistic, indeed, explosive, impact upon the production of goods and services” (Kranzberg 1985: 37). Therefore, pioneering efforts in launching artificial satellites by the Soviet Union and United States since 1975, the Cold War, the Space Race, and the development of nuclear and electromagnetic power sources for artillery marked, all together, a period of huge military development.

During the 1960s, the establishment of networking structures such as the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) involved a process of early developments in computer, programming, and digital tools for control and

coordination. Since the 1970s, the quick endowment of local-area computer networks based on signal standards – such as the Ethernet – in addition to the development of complex programming languages triggered an explosive augmentation of the volume and flow of data transference, affecting almost every stage of social communication. Later on, the significant technological transformations that arise with the creation and development of the World Wide Web (www), mobile phones, and satellite

communication determine a process of abstraction, speed increment, digitalisation and miniaturisation of technological devices that leads to a system that “seems essentially timeless” (Hookway 1999: 15), constantly looking for the ideal real-time.

[R]evolutionary advances in the flow, storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information, resulting from the improvements in computers, rightly entitle the future to be known as the Information Age.

These contemporary major technical changes—in materials, fuels and prime movers, machinery, the organization of work, transportation, and

communication—all involve more knowledge and more information (Kranzberg 1985: 41).

The structuration of standard processes, and the development of a network that allows a constant data flow interconnected by nodes and protocols reassert the idea that digital technologies debate is a cluster of diverse points of view. This cultural process – including a whole new productive system – modifies the overall social logic: from serial production to network production; from homogenising domination to

differential and distinctive treatment; from purely vertical hierarchy to a mixture of horizontal and interactive control structures. The new decentralised techno-economic condition determines a close relationship between human labour and high-tech machinery. Cybernetics and communicational flow establish new ways for production, new labour necessities and a completely new paradigm for spatial disposition on the work-floor.

As Branden Hookway affirms in his book Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory

Locales in the Postwar World, “new decentralized, environmental techniques of

social control situate Man within an encompassing techno-economic reality. This new organizational imperative can be said to be infiltrating all fields of human endeavour” (ibid., 20). This constant process of applying informatics to every aspect of social life creates a model “where intelligence is site-specific and fluid”(Hookway 1999: 23- 24).

Within this context, one possible way of conceiving the relationship between body and technology is to generalise the notion of technology, understanding it as a way towards flexible structures and organised methods. This premise, under liberal economies, creates a flexible system of control that breaks with old patterns of homogenisation. Jeremy Rifkin in the introduction to his book Time Wars: The

Primary Conflict in Human History relates the informatics term “nanosecond” to a

culture primarily based on computer temporal measurement, where time is “organized at a speed beyond the realm of consciousness” (Rifkin 1989: 23). For Rifkin, a

nanosecond – a billionth of a second – can be manipulated, theoretically conceived, and applied to everyday actions, but the intricate impossibility to experience it marks a turning point in the social relation to time.

The nanosecond culture brings with it a new and more virulent form of reductionism. The clockwork universe of the industrial age is being replaced, in fast order, by the computational universe of the postindustrial age. For several hundred years Western culture has defined mind and matter in mechanistic terms, reducing all of reality to the operating principles of

clockwork technology. Now, a new journey begins (…) We are entering a new temporal world where time is segmented into nanoseconds, the future is programmed in advance, nature is reconceived as bits of coded information and paradise is viewed as a fully simulated, artificial environment (Rifkin 1989: 218).

Therefore, it can be said that the rise of personal computers, digital networks, along with the emergence of a nanosecond culture established a social distribution where new patterns for labour, consumption, behaviour, and geographical standards evolve based on digital distance-diminishing technologies. These possibilities for production and the radically new communication apparatuses have created a landscape from where to approach contemporary ideas on the relationship between bodies and technology, within both, the industrial re-organisation and the development of performance arts that utilise technology as a core element for its creation.

Some of the main aspects of this transformation are the development of computer networks for internal and external organisation and communication. This produces a shift from stiff structures towards range and flexible systematisations, with a main focus on telecommunications, robotics and electronic databases. Accordingly, in the first part of this chapter, I will introduce some relevant concepts on flexible

specialisation as a model of production and regulation, bringing up a basis from where to understand the new patterns of work-organisation and the intricate relationship with human organisation. In the second part, I will focus on the introduction of digital technologies that, somehow, have shaped new ideas on time and production in relation to cinema studies, video games and performing arts.

Finally, I will present some general concepts on digital performance introducing some preliminary perspectives on embodied art creation within performing arts that, in a future research, will serve as a starting point for a deeper analysis.