A literary robot, to solve crimes, here is the extension of the deductive spirit of Sherlock Holmes applied to the digital universe. ” This text is written by an algorithm, and if behind it sometimes there is a shadow of something“human”it is then simply the characteristics of the construction of the narrative », warns us from the first pages Porfiri Petrovich. Warning: do not rely on the apparent humanity associating first name and surname: we are in the presence of a powerful software.
Its primary function is to solve crimes, punish evil, defend virtue… and in parallel, to produce novels on its various subjects of investigation. But how to act truly when one is composed, even in a prodigiously advanced way, of bits? By drawing, like any good complex literary algorithm, from a few thousand years of combinations of words, language, expressions. And dialing back instantly.
So much for the how. Remain the what.
Art historian Mara Tchio enlists the services of Porfiri to help her with an investigation – when you’re rich, and you savor crab butter cookies, nothing is impossible. The skills of the algorithm in terms of investigation will logically be put at the service of art — more specifically, of digital art. The plaster. The advent of digital works, in the wake of NFT tools, will have led a few decades after our era to shape an ever more complex art market.
Especially since this future world juggles with technologies even in its sexual relations: when the Zika virus underwent terrible mutations, with versions 2, then Zika-3, congenital malformations multiplied. Some accuse Big Data companies of funding scientific research to produce even more intractable viruses. And this, in order to market digital sex, by promoting the rise of sex robots.
Thus, those who still indulge in somersaults of flesh are baptized “pigs”. And if necessary undergo reconditioning through which social imperatives are inculcated. Today, much more advanced machines make it possible to have a boosted sexuality, much more advanced than with the old method. Associating virtual worlds and sex bots unfolds a delirious field of possibilities. And as such, the iPhuck 10 is the most accomplished tool in the field: hours of pleasure as varied as they are secure. Nothing is safer than a disease-free world.
In contact with Mara, Porfiri discovers the marginal universe of digital art lovers, the codes and the works… But the historian hides many things – like this digital portrait of a woman, Jeanne, who strangely resembles the poet Sappho. As for his interest in works of art, he concentrates on a few pieces, themselves quite mysterious…
Science fiction, an explorer of the future and bearer of reflections on our condition — illuminating the present in the light of plausible futures — no longer needs to be presented. That of Victor Pelevine, impregnated with Russian references, all in a social landscape of a future Russia, takes us into a purple whirlwind. Attention, dear reader, dense work…
Between reflections on digital art, iPhuck becomes a veritable philosophical treatise (because it involves imagining a practice, from its origins to its achievements), which draws countless resources from the world of futuristic computing. That the machine and the human indulge in anti-STD coitus is in no way anecdotal: the whole of society revolves around this prohibition, which will soon be raised to the rank of law.
Thou shalt not fuck, imperious and new more than biblical commandment stemming from Big Data companies, eager to commercialize and monetize our data. All our data. However, the power of sexual life, once channeled through objects and enriched with fictional solutions, represents a financial windfall that is as impressive as it is industrially simple to build.
From love to art, since both belong to the digital domain, there will be only one step. iPhuck follows in the wake of Philip K. Dick, with its own identity and the excesses inherent in its environment. A novel as fascinating as it is complex, built on this very strange couple, Mara the historian and Profiri the algorithm.
A Holmes and Watson-style duo, which smashes the limits that we could still have in terms of future robotics…