1: Experiencing the Machine
Chapter 1 of my 2005 PhD Thesis ‘A Journey of Integration’
Experiencing the Machine
I have been exploring the impact of the computer on our lived experience since 1985. The spread of new technologies, most especially the growth of the World Wide Web, is having a profound societal and cultural effect in every part of the world and giving rise to a cascade of new research areas, not least enquiry into creative and philosophical issues. I am especially interested in the conceptual physicalities of virtuality and how they connect to the physical spaces of everyday life. I agree with the Canadian critic Derrick de Kerckhove that:
There is an urgent need for artists to explore this new psychological condition so that they can begin to prepare the antidotes to potential traumas, and reveal the extent of the new possibilities that we are offered.¹
The virtual and the physical are constant themes throughout my writing and can be traced from my 1988 undergraduate dissertation Close Encounters of the Machine Kind², an exploration of the way people engage with computers; through my first published chapter ‘Between the Boys and their Toys’³, on boys and robots in popular film; to my 1992 novel Correspondence⁴, which examines human-to-machine metamorphosis; into the second novel…
