“Time is duration” -  Henri Bergson

This year began for me with a quest to define the aesthetics and the zeitgeist of today. I wanted to create a visual, conceptual quilt made of connecting pieces that were scattered around the edges of contemporary culture: alternative movements, fringe philosophies, utopian communities, old and new digitalisms and futurisms and revivalisms of sorts…

I made endless lists of trends; collected names of artists and places; rented a telescope of perception and ideas; sent multiple messages on multiple bottles; started to put together an army of nowdern minds; designed a flag of no color and no nation; went beyond my own nation…and back.  and forth.

And all of that only to finally realize that, according to Wolfgang Schirmacher, I never needed a telescope, but instead I needed a microscope. I went to EGS in Switzerland and for a month I did nothing else than read ancient philosophy; slowly and attentively listening to the formal sounds and structure of European classical thoughts… I went back to Aristotle and from Aristotle to Heidegger in the quasi-medieval teaching style of a master such as Giorgio Agamben… And from there jumped into the atemporal politico-poetics in the French-disguised-as-English spoken by Alain Badiou…

Badiou told us that all true questioning begins at Nothingness. Agamben told us about Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art; which could also be understood as The Origin of the Work of Technology. Behind all technology we find essential humanity. However, we become dazzled by the shining lights of ever more complex gadgets and devices and tend to forget sometimes about our own human essence… Even amidst the glowing, twinkling lights of technological wonderware, there is Man-as-Animal.

The fundamental questions of philosophy; the fundamental questions of humanity are still here, vibrant and alive, as fresh and unanswered as they were hundreds, even thousands of years ago… In fact, there is no Homo Technologicus, something which would require a new post-human, technological reframing. This is not the case.

There is only the Technology of the Human. There is only Homo Generator.

This technology-of-the-human is something that Wolfgang Schirmacher has been calling Artificial Life. No, it is not about computer programs that mimic biological cells; it is not about artificial, genetic engineered life; it is about Life-as-Technology. The fundamental questions of human life are also the fundamental questions of human technology. There is no separation. These essential questions keep haunting us from century to century; from generation to generation.

What does it mean to be human? What is the question of Now? What is the Being of Being? What is the “Be” of Being? What is the “with” of the Being-with? Is there sense, origin, purpose?

I realized that the question of Being knows no time; knows no epoch; knows no – dernity.

And I realized that the fundamental question of Now is a profound question; a question that belongs to the sphere of Being; a sphere of silence.

An immanent sphere of what exists before, within and after form; before, within and after life itself.

And it suddenly became very clear to me that taking moving pictures of a fleeting epoch might not be necessarily the way to make the most out of it…

I have officially abandoned the – dernity of the Now-dernity; and I am embracing a Now in which there is No – dernity at all.

Instead, what is there is a return to the basics that is not a return to the past; but which fully embraces the past.

Linear time has collapsed.

A No – dernity which embraces all dernities.

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Renata Lemos is a professional international surfer on the edge of contemporary culture. She has lived and worked in the US, France, Canada, Israel and it is now based in Brazil. She is a well published academic writer and scholar; a builder of transdisciplinary bridges that integrate culture, economics, politics, technology, science, art and spirituality. Her current conceptual exploration is about trying to identify and map the aesthetics of the edge of contemporary culture, that she is calling nowdernity.

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