Abstract
We live in an "extreme present" in which "technology has outstripped our ability to absorb it at all", argue authors Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist in their visual essay The Extreme Self. Despite the fact that the new (and newer) media are constantly affecting human bodies, their planetarily distributed functioning defies the human capacity to individually affect these effects.
The language with which we are used to describe the world can no longer keep up with the inhuman speed of technology, and we are thus at the mercy of an uncontrollable flow of data, signals, images and sounds. This "extreme" situation has become the leitmotif of this year's Fotograf Festival, which aims to trace the impact of virtual worlds on human identity and to show "the disturbing directions in which technological development has taken us".