In the era of the digital revolution the human body has become romantic nature. When I edit my pics – having my selfhood dispersed on algorithmic platforms – I am not anymore “using” my own body, or I’m using it only as a material for a new, fluent pixel body that is much more capable for different tasks. At the same time something is left over from this process: the painful and carnal presence that we are only now starting to become aware of.

Doesn’t most of the digital hypermediaculture – with its continuous addiction to what is happening at the moment – twine around the mystery of presence? Almost like it would be trying to produce on a new level that specific something which has to be destroyed completely for it to exist.

Digit is Latin and means fingers and toes, orinally counting together with one hand’s fingers. To finish a calculation requires a fine-tuned ability to split into small, differing parts. This split is a condition for primateship, grasping, weapons and concepts.

Apps and devices are – like words – prostheses that change the notion of what a body can do. Digital technologies continue to split up the body and add new parts into it – parts that help it to modify itself. At the same time the whole human body is absorbed into systems larger than itself, whose body part or prosthesis it becomes.

The liberation of capital movements and carbon dioxide, the planetary outburst of production powers: economic, political and ecological upheavals have accompanied digital revolution that against all odds isn’t determined and doesn’t happen automatically, and isn’t primarily technical or technological by nature. Digitalisation has churned up everyday life, social relations, time, space and the experience of ourselves, but in a different way than was imagined in the first phases of the development. In the postdigital situation that we live in now, that flood wave has crashed through the structures of the society, churned us up thoroughly and left us alone to survive with new problems of incomprehensible scale.

This must not be misunderstood. There may be endless worlds where new escape routes open from this moment, new connections, new points of flow. They are still only highlighting the need to flee that is born out of contemporaneity that feels unbearable.

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