Informateriality
Daniel Black · 2016
The new relationships between body and technology whose emergence was identified by Haraway have not produced strange new amalgamations as she had hoped, but rather a homogenisation that dissolved everything into a soup of information. The boundary separating human from machine has already been crossed in popular consciousness, but the result is a monolithic and all-encompassing new term that subjugates categories such as human and machine, rendering them fundamentally interchangeable: information. The sense that human bodies are becoming saturated or even replaced by information flows has been influentially discussed by & Katherine Hayles in her work on &s;virtuality&s;, which she describes as &s;the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns&s;. From ATMs to the Internet, from the morphing programs used in Terminator II to the sophisticated visualization programs used to guide microsurgeries, information is increasingly perceived as interpenetrating material forms.