Body, Nature, Machines, a Feasible, Necessary Balance

Abstract

For centuries and millennia, human experience has been living, natural, bodily, and only a minority, able to read and write, could think beyond. Visual culture, for all, was limited to painting, sculpture, architecture. Recently, within a few decades, radio, cinema, mass school, and the press came within everyone's reach, and television and internet across the Earth. Knowledge of the world for all humans is now mainly outside the lived experience, while our impact on the planet has become so strong that it endangers plant and animal species, the climate, and human survival itself. Examples show that balancing and reassembling the experience is not so desperate a venture. Virtual and real can easily meet and cooperate, though often we have to know the stories out of mainstream narratives, where actually people take part not only as spectators, but as active players in the planet in which they live.