No longer information help someone to decide the best way to continue his path in life, but immobilizes him/her, overdosed with data, the artist sustains: "The role of information has changed. Information gathering was once justified because it helped clarify reality. Information overload now creates a new mysticism because of its bewildering array of disconnected data. The body inhabits a hostile landscape of raw bits of undigested data. It is immersed in a deadly field of fluctuating, fleeting and fragmentary information". (4) Empowered or not by the new technologies? Is the computer, the machine which best symbolizes the end of the millennium technology, giving us more freedom or giving us new ropes to be tied in? D.A. Therrien, a performer which deals with these questions, observes: "We may think we’re empowered by the fact that we sit in front of computers for eight hours a day, but is that really freeing us? Technologies are enabling people but at the same time government and industry want to control the technologies that enable the masses" (5)

Marshall McLuhan has a similar point of view, as one can deduct from his phrase : "Technologies are self-amputations of our own organs". But are they self-amputations or extensions? Is technology invading the body as a deadly virus or being slowly incorporated by flesh, as a benign vitamin? To the English writer James Ballard, humans are incorporating in their sexual performances the silicone, the electronic, the metallic, as he declared in a 1970 interview: "I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible (..) simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape". (6)  (continua »»)