From the field of genetics we know that the changes in the genome of an organism occurs either naturally - by combinations and segregations, or as a mutation, i.e. by errors in the reduplication of DNA molecules, it means as a results of a damage in the molecular structure of DNA. For example caused by external factors. Mutations themselves are divided into a sort when changes can be observed only in the offspring of affected individuals, while by other sort are we able to observe the mutations over time by special methods and with technical devices directly. It is the latter kind of mutation that is characterized by the fact that it is the result of one or more ruptures inside the structure of chromosomes. Since chromosomes have a significant tendency to collide with each other, a damaged part of the chromosome can join another chromosome, a process which leads towards translocation.

This narrative borrowed from genetics can illustrate how are the structures changing, which provides a parallel narrative about the current global mutations, caused not only by new media, but also by multinational corporations, which - because of their fractal nature - generate further fragmentations of the national, political, or cultural "cores", stripping them off their "information centers". Caused by absence of local sites, are fragments completely and spontaneously attaching to other fragments - to the stronger and larger structural cores. It might look like that not only such translocations, but even their absence is familiar to us, and, for example, are becoming part of processes of McDonaldization, Globalization or Internetization. Isn't for example the demise of metaphysics of national taste and of national veracity part of the predatory metastasis of the transnational gastronomical system of hamburgers and chips?

Although certain translocational aspects can be found within society, I believe that the very nature of new media opened the question of legitimacy to apply genetic or mechanistic translocational analogies. Because current fundamental problems are not anymore the "translocational effects", but they create the environment itself, where changes occur, defining a "Place". Marshall McLuhan argues that: “Media are the establishment of the last phase of human extensions, when we expanded our central nervous system across the planet to such an extent, that we managed to "cancel a place". Not trans-location, not cybertopia, but a-location - it is the annihilation of a "place".

Such absence of "place" is an u-topia or a non-place. U-topia is therefore not a kind of the fictitious, non-existent texture of a place, which is projected into the distant future. On the contrary: it is a deterritorialized structure (as when under capitalism villagers were displaced from their own "territories", their own "homeland"), and of which the reality will acquire over time as a relict appearance.

To explain better the idea of U-topia, I would like to use a short historical digression: to understand the deep changes that we are currently facing, it could help to refer to the changes that occurred at the turning point between the Middle Ages and Modern era. It was precisely this ideological battle for "a place": castles and churches were during the Middle Ages erected on hills not only because of better defense. They were erected on the "higher" places because they as well created the embodiments of a structural hegemony of the transcendental power. Illiterate citizens were forced to obey such hierarchical and theological systems or feelings, being forced to interpret "texts" of the architecture. Until today, for example, castles are dominating points in the landscape, as churches are still dominating spots in towns and the pilgrim's buildings are dominating holy mountains, even their "sublimity" only recalls the previous glory of such utopian vertical and theological "places". The structure of the finite world, where things were subjected to the feudal system with its absolute order what is "above" and is "below". However, to be able to look at medieval places today, from such a universal center, they should be first de-topologized as u-topias.

The revolutionary turning point of the Middle Ages begins with the disappearance of the hierarchical arrangement of "place", where the Earth is not a center of Salvation, and becomes just an ordinary horizon and “a grain of sand” in Cosmos. The Renaissance, with its horizontal and proto-democratic stratification system - alongside with emerging of cities, trade and birth of a new class, began gradually u-topizing Middle Ages, and with its demise, the hierarchical arrangement of the feudal God-centered "place", irretrievably surrendered to the infinite Pascalian space that started to terrify us.

If we look at the history of the "place", we see that it is the history itself, not only its creation and its conquest, but also the history of Virilio's "Weakening of Being" and the history of the "Aesthetics of Disappearance". Even today we are fascinated for example by abandoned megalithic buildings. They fascinate us because of their u-topical melancholy, their powerful "burdened" relationship to an “absent place”. Or as a beautiful human being in mourning dress, as the symbol of absence of somebody we loved.

In Gazeta Wyborcza article Ralf Dahrendorf stated: “perhaps we are experiencing a radical transformation, similar to the painful transformation from feudal to capitalist society. I don't know where this process would lead us. We don't know how long our European values ​​will last." Do we not know, or are we rather afraid of knowledge, afraid of questioning the new era, the new power class and its instrumental environment? Isn't the decline of the modern "place", its absence and the birth of a new u-topia a prerequisite for the birth of a new epoch?

What kind of u-topia is disappearing today in the light of the announced "The End of Modern Age", "The Collapse of Communism", "The Failure of Modernity" and "The Hypertext of New Media''? And what are the actual symptoms of the impending demise of the "new" era of U-topicality? Are these symptoms, for example, the centrality, universality, totality, identity, unity, homogeneity, continuity, etc, which were rejected by The Age of Postmodernity? And if we would like to understand the nature of u-topicality of our age, is it not the prerequisite to realize that a completely new language, new ways of thinking radically rejected old language, while this departure should be as fundamental as was the transition from old alchemical system of thinking to the new chemical one, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said?

In 1848 Karl Marx could then emerging capitalist class accuse of its destructive bourgeois translocations: this class stole a solid "national common ground" under the feet of people and rural land became depending on town, converted family relations into monetary ones, translocating "old local and national self-sufficiency and enclosures" into "universal mutual dependence of nations'. We fail even today to describe the new “disappearance of  place” of our own u-topic nature of our own languages and ways of thinking? French sociologist Marc Augé in his an anthropological introduction to Postmodernism aptly entitled "Non-places" claims, that if we could define a place as something identifying, as something what relates to something and something what contains “history”, then "place" that we cannot define in this way is simply a non-place. According to Augé, are such non-places for example multinational hotel chains or international airports, which are almost identical everywhere, and their common feature is "the abundance of events". Let's focus for a moment on this symptom: can such “non-local 'excessivity" become a key to understanding our new age?

One of the traditional subjects in art is the flood as a "non-place", a carrier for "abundance of events". In the famous representation of the deluge in the Bible, are birds sitting on people's heads, people are caught in the "maelstrom" of a natural event and carried away by vortex, since all of the "places" were flooded by a "flow" as a non-place, as the element of water. Here the invalidity of implicit theory of place became clear, the theory that "everything has its own place". The message of the Deluge is a structural one: the world of "physical places" was replaced by the universe of "Fluid." Liquid structures (from the Latin term liquedare - to make something fluid) can "liquidate" everything that was "local", everything that was culturally and politically "grounded", civilizationally "rooted", can transform all  into circulation, into vortex of “new events”.

The metaphor of the future is nevertheless something rather abstract, something rather indefinite and haunted, as open flux, as waves of the ocean or atmosphere. Such "Flow" is change plus change, a movement plus a form. What was before non-solid is now crushing the solid matter. In the "Flow" are no more any beings, the subject in its place is no longer something stable, it starts to circulate like an orbit, and is transformed into the artificial planet. The Greek word planetés means orbiting and also relates to planaomai - to wander. "Place" is substituted  by "flow" - i.e. into an unstable state of a non-linear environment.

Because it is also everywhere and nowhere simultaneously has the planetary power, akin to the Internet, "liquid" nature. Or as a media hypertext, which does not force us to start reading in one place and to finish somewhere, as was the case of linear texts in books. According to Vilém Flusser: if history started with the invention of linear writing, it conceived the world as a founding story, as an event, as a process that could never repeat itself. Because every single event has its own reason and its own immediate rational consequences, then the world where the defining features are created by a variety of "currents", becomes a "post-historical world". There governs happenings of media hypertexts - a challenge and a crucial critical task: how to develop a new ability - technoimagination, which would allow us to discover the hidden powers of the techno-images and how to decode them as symbols?

We should not look at such a world as an observer standing on the fixed place of a cinema or at the video screen at home. We must start to perceive such a world as if we observe it from the perspective of a computer interactive screen. In such a constellation, it implements not only the canceling of local topologies of the subject-object relationship, but - as Marshall McLuhan claims - we could reach the last phase of human extension, when we have expanded our central nervous system across the entire Planet. To such an extent that we have canceled not only “The Place”, but even “The Time”.

Europe is slowly becoming an u-topia. Only some speak about it clearly: "All ancient civilizations, including the European one, are fragments / snippets which, taken out of its context, are orbiting around at the speed of light. To learn to live sensibly in such a fragmented universe, to become the citizen of Internet Nation - that is the new humanitarian ideal." (Václav Bělohradský,– Postbipolární démoni, stát a strach. Lidové noviny, 22. 3. 1996)

Modern European cities, proud and haughty, will be transformed into mere metropolitan nodes around which people will circle in a planetary network. Man will live no more in  "a place", but in “the circles" of the orbital - both in virtual and real space. We will become above all a social satellite of a new Chaocratic regime, members of the new planetary class, or rather being transformed into a wave, which with the post-democratic techno-social forces will form a social spaces designed for various currents – as  information, goods, pop-culture, capital, investments and humans. The structure of the new power will be neither vertical nor horizontal, but fluxional and liquid at the same time. This structure weakens and erases traditional polarities.

It does not make any sense to conquer Winter Palaces anymore, not because the power would be now more "dispersed", as Michel Foucault wrote, but because the Winter Palace itself, as a representation of  "The Place" of the virtual Power, already melted - and is now "floating". The age of "places" gradually comes to an end, alongside with the constructive-political “sanitations”, such as the fall of the Bastille or the fall of Berlin Wall. "Waves" are not subordinated to politics, but politics are rather dissolved by the "stream" of techno-images and victims of chaotic "privatization waves".

The contemporary question of conformity is starting from sex to digital information, not anymore "Who you are?" or "What is your position?" but "What acceleration is your planetary flux"? We don't "live" anymore because we are "floating".

For example, according to Jean Baudrillard, sexuality will be in increasing tempo exposed to the pressure of the "accounting liquidity of flow and the accelerating circulation of the psychical", because sexuality and corporeality are the exact replica of the demands ruled by principles of market: "Capital must be constantly circulatíng, must not stop at one point, a chain of investments and reinvestments, market values must continuously be running. This is how values are ​​realized today. And sexuality, sexual models, are actually in this sense the bodily emissions."1

Vilém Flusser confirms this point of view, referring that somebody in California conducted experiments with teleorgasm, arguing that it is more permanent than a physical orgasm. Orgasm is not something physical, but something of neurophysiological experience: if nerves were irritated "telepresently", the orgasm as a fantasy would last indefinitely. The theoretician of telematics explains that in this way, one of the most common counter-arguments, that "two people cannot make love in telepresence", is losing its credibility.

Perhaps even social aspects of the topic of mass consumption of psychotropic substances can be precisely understood on the basis of gradual emergence of this new planetary regime. As the attitude towards consciousness as something determines the "flow" of events and experiences. Psychotropic substances are "liquid" and relatively affordable ballots by which the planetary voter is socialized into the realm of deterministic chaos.

McLuhan's vision of technological stimulation of consciousness, which will via media expand a creative process of knowledge collectively and universally to the entire human society, confirms the critical remark that "utopias are much more feasible than we originally  thought". Not only that the real world became u-topianized, but even the utopia itself was u-topianized.

As Kostas Axelos says: “Man called to govern the Earth became a planetary being wandering the Earth. From the very moment when humans decided to conquer the stars, is our march towards the end of humanity not anymore guarded by the stars. The fact that our century has to deal with totalitarian and partial questions is the reason why the challenge for planetary thinking remains so far unheeded. “Planetary Man”, "Universal Man" and the "Man of the World", is "something" that is not aware of what a Man means and in what sense is she/he a “planetary being”. Moreover, her/his knowledge and her/his activities throw her/him - including her / himself and her / his instruments of planetary technology - into theoretical conquest and in practical transformation of himself and what remains. 6

As a study by the European Economic Commission from 1994 suggests, the world consumption of various "local" commodities, such as "black gold", are declining, and the traditional local industries are facing difficult times. In planetary Chaocratic parlance: the genius of "places'' - land, mines, seas - has simply a "lower capital validity".

In his habilitation lecture, Michael Bielický pointed to the fact of a disappearance of "places", disappearance  of traditional "establishments" of art. He suggested that today any media artifact can be watched through, for example, a computer network by several thousand people simultaneously, while only a few dozen people can see it in a gallery. And isn't it the answer to the question why the "most visited" galleries today are the subway platforms, where a train covered with graffiti, flashes in the "flow" of images in front of the passengers?

If we are really entering the age of "abundance of events", then we shouldnˇt talk anymore about Translocation, not about Globalization, about Politics, Democracy, Economy, Subject, about Culture and such old "alchemical" concepts. Because such terms gradually became equally "u-topical" as are such terms as "Elixir of life", "Quintessence" or "Philosopher's stone" in chemistry.

_{1. The text was published in Czech language in the Art Journal Detail in 1999.}

_{2. https://archive.vaclavhavel-library.org/Archive/BookCatalogue?sort=3auth...}

_{3. Vodrážka, Mirek: Chaokracie z nového světa - A-vropy. Votobia, Olomouc 1997.}

_{4. Bělohradský, Václav:– Postbipolární démoni, stát a strach. Lidové noviny, 22. 3. 1996.}   

_{5. Baudrillard, Jean: O svádění. Votobia 1996, str. 47.}

_{6. Axelos, Kosta:  Kdo je to planetární člověk? in Filosofický časopis 3/1994, str. 481-486.}

_{1999 / Generali Foundation, Vienna, 27.1. – 11/04/1999. Works by Luchezar Boyadjiev (BG), Marina Grzinic (SL), HILUS (AT), Sanja Ivekovic (CR), Ryszard Kluszczinksy (POL), Josef Robakowski (POL), Keiko Sei (CZ/J), Jiri Sevcik (CZ), Tommaso Tozzi (IT)}

_{The Czech part was implemented in cooperation with VVP AVU. Group exhibition of collections of samizdat documents as authentic records of the art scene of Eastern Europe. Part of the Translocation/New Media Art project supported by the EU was an exhibition of the same name focused on the countries of the former Eastern Bloc (Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Slovenia), presented collections of materials created mostly unofficially, i.e. video archives, slide archives and samizdat. Eastern European archives have been highly regarded as an authentic treatment of local scenes and hitherto unknown parts of European visual culture. The exhibition marked a shift towards a trans-regional confrontation and a change of perspective from which the so-called Eastern European projects had been seen until now. The Czech part of the exhibition was represented by a selection from samizdat publications related to visual art (a total of 26 publications were exhibited) and a further edited set of 200 slides from unofficial events - Terezín 1980, Most 1981-2, Malostranské Dvorky 1981, Setkání, tennis courts Sparta 1982, Chmelnice Symposium - Mutějovice 1983, Confrontation 1984-87. The selected slide projections were processed in the media workshop in Vienna within the 45 minutes recording (Ruth Maurer, Jiří Ševčík).}