Angelos Floros

Published: Floros A., on the work Brothel (Οίκος Ανοχής), in A. Kalfopoulos (ed.), Other Places (Άλλοι Τόποι), Hellenic Ministry of Culture / State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007, ISBN 978-960-89534-3-7

Written for: Other Places, group exhibition curated by Apostolos Kalfopoulos, 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2007

The exhibition took its title from Michel Foucault's 1967 lecture Des espaces autres, where the term heterotopia first appears — a place that exists alongside the ordinary world and inverts it.

This text takes the invitation somewhere unexpected: into Darwin.

If heterotopias are places that hold the world at an angle, then the question worth asking is not where they are, but what they are doing to us. Advances in biomedical science, and the ambient and pervasive information tools that now surround us, have made human existence itself something open to revision. Natural selection stops being a description of the past and becomes a question about the present.

Which leads to the argument of the piece, and it runs directly against the received one.

McLuhan taught that the medium is an extension of the human body — the wheel extends the foot, electricity extends the nervous system. Here the relation is reversed:

"Our bodies are an extension of the tools which we are using, by forcing the DNA to develop and to embody the necessary function."

The tool is not the prosthesis. We are. Technology sets the demand and the organism adapts to meet it — genetically, biologically, over time. In the relation between evolution and the tool, the tool leads.

Which makes cyberspace a heterotopia of a particular kind. Not a place we visit and return from, but one that changes what returns.