Godfrey Reggio is an inventor of a film style that creates poetic images of extraordinary emotional impact for audiences worldwide. Reggio is prominent in the film world for his QATSI trilogy, essays of visual images and sound that chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment.

Godfrey Reggio, qatsi.org, 2002
Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The general focus of the QATSI Trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Naqoyqatsi) is the technological milieu. It is the purpose of the web site, qatsi.org, to foster a web-dialogue on this little understood, yet ubiquitous subject – the nature of technology. What we know about the subject is vastly promotive, over-the-top positive, coming to us from the producers of global technology. A glowing wonderland of unlimited opportunity is promised by the good life of the technological order. Infinite capacity, virtual immortality, superhuman cognition – attributes that until now have been reserved for the divine are indicated for technology. A new technological pantheon has been established in the horizonless world of the Blue Planet.

But is technology what it appears to be? Have we looked behind the shimmer of its glowing surface? Very little, if anything, reveals its meaning through mere appearances. Most everything is more complex, full with a universe of hidden dimensions. Is technology an exception to this common experience? Or, have we accepted its truth as the truth? Is technology a new and comprehensive environment, the host of life, that has replaced the natural order? Is technology the new universal religion? Can faiths unquestioned become our prisons? Should we place blind faith in the techno-clergy of the new order? Does the computer reproduce the world in its own image and likeness? Is technology a mere tool, as we are told, that can be used or misused depending on one’s intentions? Is technology neutral? Does it possess a life of its own? Is it the effect of technology on this or that (the environment, etc.), or is it that everything is situated in technology? Has technology become an addiction, an altered state that we cannot live without? Is technology a way of living? Do we use technology or do we live technology? Is it our consciousness that informs our behavior or is it our behavior that informs our consciousness? Do we now live in a world beyond the senses, in a micro-universe, where small is dangerous? Is technology synonymous with the machine or has it become ordinary daily living?

What better place to raise these and other questions that on/in the global Internet? This high-tech nervous system, this digital alchemy, this synthetic organism that is changing the world seems ideally suited for such a task. If entering the medium questioned to raise questions seems contradictory, this is because it is. To freely embrace this contradiction is the motivation for this site.

Like the oxygen we breathe, technology is the big force, omnipresent and inescapable. It appears as a force of nature. Who can question nature or acts of God? Something this prevailing, this present, is normally taken for granted. Only the heretic could dare to be so blasphemous.

Could it be that our language is no longer capable of describing the world in which we live? Perhaps, the world we see with old eyes and antique ideas is no longer present. Do we inhabit a technological universe the laws of which are unknown? The world we see is being left behind.

A new untellable world is unfolding. As the human race accelerates into the twenty-first century, we enter a virtual, digital environment, a world where far and near, past, present and future are simultaneous realities. The human center of gravity seems to be blasted into the void. Our bodies are less central to our lives; our physical involvement with an increasing synthetic world grows less. Have we arrived at an unthinkable post-natural and post-human condition? Does this singular event offer to all that will, the extraordinary opportunity to re-name the world in which we live? Are we, appearing to be human, already the cyborgs of the fiction of science?

In closing, we offer two reflections that articulate the point of view of this site: one from Elias Canetti, a Nobel Laureate for literature; the other from French philosopher and writer Jacques Ellul.