There will no longer be clear distinctions between human and machine. Computers - neural implants - can be directly applied to the human brain. Neural implants will be available that interface directly to brain cells. The implants would enhance sensory experience and improve memory and thinking. With advance brain scanning the entire organization, including the brains memory, can then be re-created on a digital-analogue computer. With complete detailed maps of the computationally relevant features of the human brain these designs can be re-created in advanced neural computers.

Time. Uncertain, uncontrollable. Sometimes yesterday becomes like last year, and last year becomes like yesterday. When things get serious, things that seem to have happened in the next year suddenly become those happening in the last year. Here, time becomes episodic, scattered.

The crisis of perception, the automation of perception is threatening our understanding. The synthetic image is essentially a "statistical image" that can only emerge thanks to rapid calculation of the pixels a computer graphic system can display on a screen. In order to decode each individual pixel, the pixels immediately surrounding it must be analysed. The usual criticism of statistical thought, are generating rational illusions, thus necessarily comes down to what we might call the visual thought of the computer, digital optics now being scarcely more than a statistical optics capable of generating a series of visual illusions, rational illusions, which affect our understanding as well as reasoning.

Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995) is set in Los Angeles, during the last two days of the year 1999. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) is an ex-cop who deals "clips" for the illegal market of the Squid. This is a machine which records on diskette the wearer’s perceptions during a lived experience. A consumer/user may subsequently replay the diskette, "re-experiencing" the same event upon all perceptual levels. As Lenny explains to a new client, "This is not like TV only better. This is life. Pieces of somebody's life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex."

Strange Days becomes emblematic of the contemporary condition. Reality has becomes unstable. Human beings can only verify their "real" status via memory clips of experienced events - the contrast allowing orientation in present living time-space. Are we in such a condition? Do we fetishize the memory because so much else has become dubious? Is it impossible to distinguish a truthful narrative from the "fictive" in memories? Reality begins to dissolve into the fantasy world of consuming images.

"As religious plays designed to reveal the mystery of transcendence to men, the earliest theatrical forms were indeed the organization of appearances of their time. And the process of secularization of the theatre supplied the models for later, spectacular stage management. Aside from the machinery of war, all machines of ancient times originated in the needs of the theatre. The crane, the pulley, and other hydraulic devices started out as theatrical paraphernalia; it was only must later that they revolutionized production relations. It is a striking fact that no matter how far we go back in time, the domination of the earth and of man seems to depend on techniques which serve the purpose not only of work, but also illusion."
~~ Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution of Everyday Life"

Frederic Jameson identifies a disembodying of each place as it is pulled into a global system. He writes of "the conviction that in the simpler phenomenological or regional sense, place in the United States today no longer exists, or, more precisely, it exists at a much feebler level, surcharged by all kinds of other more powerful but also more abstract spaces….the increasingly abstract (and communicational) networks of American reality beyond, whose extreme form is the network of so-called multinational capitalism itself." (Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991).

Do you like the reality you are watching now?

Consider the real world by the standards of the virtual universe. Los Angeles, for example, is a game of SimCity played by a maniac, a satirical dystopia too weird to be anything but real. In this respect the interior dimensions of the virtual world can be regarded as a constant, reflections of one another. Los Angeles conveys the idea of a (real) contemporary city which is a maze of social and architectural vectors, the consequences of a process of fragmentation. Exploring the virtual world of glowing green and red lines, the exterior cities of America and Japan, become redolent of the deliquescing cities of science fiction.

n this context, the city has become a "pre-historic" concept to the modern virtual world inhabitant: pre-historic in the sense that real cities date from a time before virtuality, and as such are little more than the inspiration for further examples of gothic ruins - the cyber clichés of a post-apocalyptic society or the desolate rural settlement where occult forces have transformed the stock characters of 1970s Americana into a cast of living dead.

The essence of the cyber-world is never to simulate real life, but to offer a gift of the possible. In virtuality we are citizens of an invisible city where there is no danger only challenge.

From this perspective, this reality is not an illusion - the illusion is that it is the only reality. You are trapped on one channel because all your energy is focused on it. Today, the complexity suggested by forthcoming video games such as "Republic: the Revolution game", in which an entire country maintains it's own autonomous existence - even while the game is "turned off" so to speak - suggests yet further stages of development in new media. Linked to the ambition of television to create fully interactive programmes - thus dismantling the traditional meaning of "broadcast" - from the new media of videogames set to make virtual worlds which the players participates rather than simply plays. What is emerging is something close to a virtual Truman Show in which the video game becomes a window onto a "living" community and the player a benign version of the film’s creator Christof. Ultimately we are "playing" at being ourselves. Watching is only half the fun. You can be a star, an actor on the stage of life.