ABSTRACT
In the late twentieth century, with modernity having lost its innocence, and its transparency having yielded to an unsettling opaqueness, a search for alternative categories of life has begun. The defining moments are no longer the dichotomies of time and space, past and future, near and far, but only the present and here. As Foucault (1979) noted, we are busy constructing the history of the present, freezing time into a new set of practices and discourses, and unburdening ourselves from the weight of history and the uneasy anticipation of the future. What we are creating is a world where we can lose ourselves and escape into the world of the hyperreal (or hype and real) manipulated by the ideologies and the technologies of the digital. In this phantasmagoric world, in trying to relinquish the vestiges of modernism, we are preparing to enter a futuristic world replete, however, with the symbolism of the distant past. Paradoxically, we seem to be seeking a reassurance that our physicality is still intact (if not real), and that we can touch, feel, see and smell the various (artificial?) life forms that spin around us. It is as if we are moving in a gigantic circulating machine where both fission and fusion, fact and fiction are caught in a vertiginous web. No doubt, all of this seems to have inspired the sci-fi writer, Gibson (1984), to characterise what was previously thought of as mere fiction but today experienced as the reality of our living space as cyberspace . To quote Gibson from his serious yet frolic-some classic, Neuromancer .
