Surfer who has already become a cathedral himself

From Kroker's C Theory page The Ultimate Cathedral Mordechai Omer and Avi Rosen Translated from Hebrew by Sonia Dantziger

Since James Joyce vision of the cathedral seems to be the first envisaging of what we now know as cyberspace I found this article very interesting in its cross epochal hermeneutic application of cyberculture theory. - by Rich on Sun 21 Jan 2007 10:34 PM PST Permanent Link

In conclusion, throughout human history, man has tried to understand his relationship to the powers at work in the Universe, and to unite with them. The structures in their respective generations, from pre-history to the Pyramids, the temples and the cathedrals, were instruments to unify man with his God, according to man's technical ability. Man's hope was that unification would grant him eternal life. The digital media epoch turned cathedrals from physical structures to structures of digital information, so man too was privileged to transform his physical body to higher dimensions. This revolution led to a change in the way man is described graphically in the Universe.

Cyberspace has enlarged the range of human body and consciousness to the final boundaries of the speed of light, by means of electronic components (silicon), which connect man to the Universe. One can see in this description an expression of quantum mechanics in which particles are in a state of super-position, that is to say, at the same time in every location in space (net), until the act of differentiation is carried out, (action on net data), leading to the collapse of the super-position wave function to a discrete state absorbed by the surfer's consciousness. The surfer too is in a state of super-position and is part of the Universe wave function that comprises everything. Man's consciousness indeed influences the reality in his vicinity via cyberspace. Reality has again become, as in the distant past, a mixture of the products of soul, dream, trance, and myth, together with the material tangibility of daily existence. The cyclical concept of time and space, that dominated pre-historic culture, and was replaced by logical, linear, western concepts, has returned to its starting point, by way of the cyberspace closed loop of time and space.

The Super-cathedral containing the self reflection in cyberspace. Avi Rosen, 2006. [36] The Universe familiar to us becomes a link to every surfer who has already become a cathedral himself. Cyberspace electronically compresses the events in the Universe into the singularity of the electronic cathedral. Man is situated in this singularity, while a finger of his hand extends to almost touch the finger of God opposite him. He discovers that he is enclosed inside a spherical structure lined with membrane mirrors reflecting the images of everything around him. It resembles a scene from the movie "Matrix 3", in which the hero "Neo" confronts the creator of the matrix (the image of an aging man resembling God as pictured by Michelangelo) in a spherical cathedral covered with flat video screens displaying the image of Neo throughout his entire life.

For a minute, it seems to him that he has returned to Pythagoras' world, where man is the center of a flat-Universe, with planets and spheres circling him, and the whole enveloped in God's embrace, as in the medieval illustration described previously. The surfer's finger is trying to reach God's finger. To his amazement he discovers that the Heavenly embrace and the finger of God that he is trying to reach, and almost touches, is not God's finger, but his own. Life is carried in an electronic Panopticon, in which the subject looking out from the center sees around him a flat world circumscribed by his own body extensions. In cyber art the human image appears on silicon, implanted under the subjects' skin, which enables the global membrane extension of his body and consciousness. Existence in this ultimate cathedral is the continuous artistic act of a self-reflective hyper-subject.