THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION - A proposal on othernes (ENG)

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION

A proposal on othernesBy

Francesco Monico, PhDArs Academy – Planetary Collegium (M)T-Node

Fak'ugesi Conference Witt University Johannesburg South Africa - December 2014 // Session 4: Technology Dreams // Session theme 1 // The Post-Digital Organic

Convened by Roy Ascott

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTIONPREMISES

The Happy family and the Car

Imagine a family traveling aboard a futuristic Alfa Romeo car equipped with steering,

braking, ride control and of course self-parking systems. This 'intelligent' system has the

function of assisting the driver, and/or to substitute it at certain times and contexts, for

example at times of parking but also of danger.

The car is running, when a semi-truck and trailer, for some mechanical reason, invades

the lane at the point just where the oncoming family is. The dynamic response is so fast

that the primary human nervous system (oriented response) is not able to react, but the

car is equipped with a sophisticated software, and in a time imperceptibly fast for

humanbeings: deactivates the commands, puts the car in a controlled slide, and performs

braking without locking the wheels, so as to avoid the truck while maintaining grip and

directionality.

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) – Francesco Monico 05.12.14 -

The family is safe, thanks to the sophisticated intelligence of the artificial in the car.

Then and now the family gets an idea, a symbolic thanks, that the Alfa car is serviced in

perfect condition as long as the money the family can afford it. The machine becomes the

target of the will of a sentient being, and by proxy for an entire family unit.

So far, so good.

But what if the artificial intelligence software was not able to save the happy family? The

surviving spouse would sue Alfa Romeo for putting on the market an inherently

dangerous product. In turn, Alfa Romeo would try to declare the controlling software of

new cars "individuals", ie carriers of standing, so that if any mistake is made, they, and

not the manufacturer, are in fact responsible for the error. In this way, whether the

software works or not, we face the birth of an entity having standing as the subject of a

question of law.


The Happy family and the Car


Imagine that an elderly wealthy lady is going through her last life years in a lonely

apartment in Venice. She is assisted by a robot in the guise of a child, which reminds her

when it's pills time, keeps her company, listens to her memories and reads texts, thereby

filling the empty space of the lonely house with a series of attitudes and a gentle

empathetic childishness. Suddenly the lady pass away, and during the reading of the will

the children and grandchildren find that much of the estate was left to the mechanical

child that has taken care of the old woman. Relatives are outraged and hire a number of

lawyers to invalidate the will, which is enforced by the public notary through the use of an

equally valid bevy of lawyers who start to give standing to the automatic child.

Here are two examples to explain, no need to disturb the technological singularity, as

the relationship between man and technology is setting the stage for major upheavals of

the view that the human subject has of himself and about himself.


The elderl and the mechanical child


In the Lives of Animal the main character, novelist Elisabet Costello, is haunted by how

we treat nonhuman animals in practices such as factory farming, a systemized and

mechanized killing that she compares (to the consternation of some) in its scale and in its

violence to the Holocaust of the Jews during the Second World War.

What haunts Costello here is the sheer weight and gravity of what has become one of

the central ethical issues of our time: our moral responsabilities toward nonhuman

animals.

Costello insist in the 'unspeakability' of how we treat anilmals but also the

'unspeakability' of the limits of our own thinking in confronting such a reality of

'experiences'.


Elisabeth Costello


Reason proves its power to itself, over itself. We gain knowledge, but only to lose the

world.

What philosophy can do in the face of existential and ethical challenges created by

technology and the loss of Nature? The relation between philosophical thinking (ie

concepts) and philosophy as writing practice today takes an importance – which is why

Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze among others write the way they do, which is to say

'unphilosophically', but we could say in a poetic and more artistic way.

We need and we have to use art in order to avoid the 'philosophical turn of the

twenthieth century. That mean ART as a conceptual tool of meaning.

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTIONMETHODOLOGY

The Quest of the Ordinary


Today we are all living in a syncretic realm, in the myst of nature and technologies.

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTIONCRITICAL TERRITORY The Technoetic present


What generates our moral response to animals is our sense of the mortality and

vulnerability that we share with them

What generates our need of a new moral response to technics is our sens of immortality

and invulnerability that we share with.

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTIONTHE NEW IDEA

The otherness in two direction


The debate on Moral Justice on Otherness is locked into a model of justice in which a

being does or does not have rights on the basis of its possession (or lack) of morally

significant characteristics that can be empirically derived: a knowledge of empirical

similarities and a differences.

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION THE PROBLEM

Empirism


It is not by denying the special status of 'human being' but rather by intensifying it that

we can come to think of nonhuman animals or entities not as bearers of 'interest' or as

'right holders' but rather as something much more compelling as our fellows in mortality

and immortality in life in this earth: 'FELLOW CREATURES & ENTITIES' -

And the difference between human and nonhuman may indeed starts out as a biological

difference, and it becomes something for human thought through being taken up and

made something of- by (next) generations of human beings, in their practice, their art,

their literature, their religion, those practices that enable us to imaginately read into

nonhuman expectations that originate in the human, the 'other'.

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTIONTHE NEW IDEA

FELLOWS


Today, the emergence of a global actors and attractors of meaning more and more

floating, the limits of progress and the damage done to the environment along with an

agreement reached in the relationship between man and technology, need to produce

new territories.

The above considerations have set the foundation for the creation of a posthuman

proposal, who wants to be a first meditation for a hybrid constitution. The idea has been in

the form of a traditional work of art considered and accepted as interactive because these

same principles trigger the reader/viewer a recompilation of concepts, visions and

territories.

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION TODAY ART (2011-2014)


The Artwork THE HYBRID

CONSTITUTION/MELEZ ANAYASA was

selected and presented in Istanbul, Turkey,

during the Amber Festival 2011. With the theme

title Next Ecology, amber called on artists to

interpret the life forms, production and

consumption patterns and politics of Next

Ecology from the vantage point of arts and

technology.

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION MELEZ ANAYASA


The idea was to state a constitution as a set of fundamental principles or established

precedents according to which common organization is governed. These rules together

make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is.

Thus was born the Hybrid Constitution, also kwnon as 'Melez Anayasa', as a tribute to

the city of Istanbul and of the latest modern constitution, the Turkish one of 1982, that

defines the principles upon which a HYBRID CONSTITUTION is based, the procedure in

which laws are made and by whom.



From the Code of Hammurabi to Japan's Seventeen-Article Constitution written in 604,

influenced by Buddhist teachings, and the Constitution of Medina (622), the المدینه ,صحیفة

a īfat al-Madīna, also known as the Charter of Medina, and to the Constitution of the Ṣ ḥ

Gayanashagowa, or 'oral' constitution of the Iroquois nation (1090-1150). The Magna

Charta in 1215, the United States Constitution, ratified on June 21, 1788, the Charter of

Quarnaro, 1920, (the symbols of the Hybrid Contitution reproduce those of the Italian

Regency of Quarnaro, 1919-1920) and the Turkish Constitution of 1982.


A RETRIEVING


This artistic Constitution is based on the assumption that best constitution is a mixed

system, including human, nature, and low and high tech elements.



The Hybrid Constitution it was set as a signed & framed in dark wood and glass Triptych

of: one silkscreen and ecological enamel 50X70, B/W containing the 8 principles

constituting the hybrid hypothesis; another silkscreen 50X50, B/W containing a graphical

draw shows the network of interactions of the nine principles; a medal for every nine

principle, handcrafted in pure silver 925/100, hand-engraved on a necklace where each

ring is pulled and hand-made. Also mounted on a frame 40X40.


1 - STANDİNG PRİNCİPLE (also Whole Sovereignity)

2 - ABSOLUTE LEGALİTY PRİNCİPLE (powers)

3 - PLURALİST PRİNCİPLE

4 - PURPOSE PRİNCİPLE

5 - EQUALİTY & DİVERSİTY PRİNCİPLE

6 - SOLİDARİST PRİNCİPLE

7 - TRANSPECİES & GENDER PRİNCİPLE

8 - PRAGMATİST PRİNCİPLE

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION THE PRINCIPLES


THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION THE NECKLACE


The Artwork THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION/MELEZ ANAYASA was also the argument

for the essay 'Premesse per una costituzione ibrida: la macchina, la bambina automatica

e il bosco' and published on 2013 in AUT AUT one of the most prominent italian and

international journal of philosophy.

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION LA MACCHINA, LA BAMBINA AUTOMATICA E IL BOSCO


THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION THANKS


To read the principles please go to

http://hybridconstitution.blogspot.com/ on the

net

If you have any suggestions please write to

[email protected] or skype to

francescomonico

http://hybridconstitution.blogspot.com/

mailto:[email protected]

THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION - A proposal on othernes (ENG)

Documents

Transcript of THE HYBRID CONSTITUTION - A proposal on othernes (ENG)