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"I
think a love affair can get too involved, anyway, and it's not
really worth it…You do it like you watch a movie made for television"
-A.W.
Through the
static of mediation and sensory bombardment, the body hovers below
us as an obstacle to our virtual realities. What is the impact of
artificial systems on the body? Is it a purely technical revolution
or does the interface between body and the machine transform our
environment, radicalizing our critical consciousness? In order to
attempt to address technology's relationship to the body, elements
of visual media produced over a range of time need to be assessed.
The answers to the above questions regarding our future as bodies
living in simulated spaces are embedded in the non-verbal data that
we have produced with the technology of our time.
"The image
in the mirror is eroticized but remote; beloved but unapproachable;
needed but incapable of being possessed. The nearness and farness,
the presence and absence of the divided self are eroticized. For
itself" (Stephen Koch, 117).
Warhol's admiration
and reconstruction of the star were possible through his understanding
of desire and the mediation of the body as image. It is the ephemeral
reproduction of the body as image that produces an icon. Our recognition
of an image creates mass familiarity and results in star status.
In his early film work he addressed issues such as detachment, fiction,
image versus physicality, desire, sex, and death. The way in which
he understood the mechanics of star construction enabled him to
invent Ingrid Superstar, Edie Sedgwick, Divine and films such as
the Hustler. The Hustler, in particular presented an image that
denies the body. The Hustler presents Paul America as "just
a body," while ironically denying the reality of flesh. The image
of the body is rendered as an empty shell for the gaze. Koch's analysis
of the Warhol film collection concluded that, "The central reality
in this theater of the unreal is the body" ( Stephen Koch, 119).
The artist's
role has shifted from image-maker to editor. Warhol and Benjamin
understood the distancing of the screen and the transfiguration
of the body as image. Warhol's fascination with the screen motivated
him to elevate the deviant to stardom, while Benjamin's analysis
led to loss and decontextualization. It is the conceptual act of
selection, appropriation and compositing of existing audio/visual
bites from our atmosphere that enables an agent to act as artist.
Benjamin's aura has long ago been lost through reproduction, McLuhan's
global village is now inhabited, and art has become increasingly
more ephemeral, cosmic and illusory. What of these remote control
artists, clad in cybersurf gear, who sit stoic some 8-16 hours per
day, immobile in front of a screen, save the quick twirl of an orbit
mouse? Our Gen-X youth is oblivious to the everyday, interested
only in paranormal hyper-reality. The sense of corporeal loss due
to our interaction with machines is a by-product of image reproduction.
"This coalescence
of television and bodies forms a televisual body: the site of the
contemporary apocalypse. The static violence of the impulse-image
always already enframes images on the screen which trumpet the revelation
of the ultimate triumph of good over evil in the celebration of
the good life" (Turetzky,105).
Turetzky alerts
us to the fusion of the body and the machine--our extended extremities
for data collection. His interpretation of the montage of images
that enter via aural and visual sensation is enabled through an
invisible interface. While Turetzky addresses the viewer and the
machine, Deleuze jumps into the picture and suggests that projected
material is constructed to inform the viewer of their own dehumanization.
Deleuze looks at Italian neo-realist films and extrapolates; the
real becomes spectacularly perverse, in that the banal has become
erotically charged. We have seen the progression of this observation
in films such as Larry Clark's, Kids. The camera shatters
image; space becomes nonlinear and time simultaneous, as exhibited
in Quentin Tarantino's, Pulp Fiction. As the camera moves
around its subject, it acts as the eye for us all. The editor becomes
politically charged in his/ her role of revealing elements of a
film. The resultant film is a visceral and psychological experience
that is designed to affect each member of the audience in the same
way. The evenness in reception is controlled by the camera, which
allows only its own range of possibilities to the external viewer.
The digital
revolution, which converted our analogue monotheistic reality into
a digital pluralistic universe, yielded the global network. The
bombardment of electronic transmissions has not only consumed the
work of art but also of our bodies, ourselves. In a mouse click
sounds, images and text download to our desktops and feed us mediated
information. Our bodies are slumped into chairs motionless, offering
minimal input into transactions. Estrangement, remoteness, and pluralistic
individuality; starts off with the flickering of Muybridge's horses
across the screen, and lands us each into our own cubicles staring
blankly at a monitor while surfing the web. There is a global initiative
to homogenize cultural consumption and yield a universal matrix.
But, if you believe in magic, like Dave Hickey, then you will join
the body worshipers that insist in a range of possibilities based
on the uniqueness of individuality and the beauty of democracy.
The matrix may be a veneer that is comprised of standard 1's and
0's but the ripple from Debussy's Arabesque out to Jimmy
Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner causes enough particle-wave
interference to enable serendipity and yield original works of art,
even in the age of digital reproduction.
What of the
body that dangles below cyberspace? "A great fluid wave undulates
through her body. Johnny drops to the floor and stands poised and
alert like a young animal" (William Burroughs, 89). The hydremic
lover, our flesh somehow winces at the onset of our virtual lives.
Cyberculture has given us a neutral zone to compete in. A space
that affords room for the other and denounces the authority of pre-established
voices without the restrictions of the body. The increasing ephemerality
of works constructed of projections, illusions and holograms reflect
our own image of ourselves. However, visual thinking has expanded
with the advent of the hyper-real. Email has just replaced the letter,
word-processing the page, and CD-ROM the book and record, and iTV
(interactive web broadcast) has replaced TV. We are no longer the
one projecting the gaze onto the object, we have become the object
projected upon. The tool is an active agent in the rendering of
an image. It analyzes our data for us, offers options and responds
to our decisions. Our power is then choice; we are editors of a
prescribed subset. Our access to different subsets is defined by
economic standing and technical ability. The deadened social space
has been transformed into a cyberculture. The empowerment to be
in touch remotely and instantaneously has also built relationships
with other "bodies," before unknown. "The new generation of machines
produces an even more ecstatic identification, for they offer a
magical liberation from all kinds of rigidity, including the laws
of time and space" (Gillian Skirrow, 133).
The Web is
our new landscape and the spill over of simulacra into our physical
surroundings is immense. There is so much invasion of simulation
embedded into the real; discernible differentiation within the blend
is difficult. "I find myself struck by the fact that, while The
Strip always glitters with a reckless and undeniable specificity
against the darkness, the sunset smoldering out above the mountains,
every night and without exception, looks bogus as hell" (David Hickey,
52). The ability to create new constructs of simulacra and to exist
in these immaterial spaces cerebrally has been achieved. One could
argue that the psychedelic drug culture of the generation prior
has been replaced with hypnotic digital culture today. The escape
into alternative realms of psychological existence is still the
goal. This dematerialization creates similar destabilization of
accepted constructs. The computer processes data equivocally and
the boundaries between people, places and things have collapsed.
Our market is a cache of hybridization and our rules of aesthetics
have been bent, compounded and transformed. It is an endless return
with no exit, Gibbon's matrix construct has been born, an infinite
web of projected data. The question of the real is no longer a question,
but an accepted pluralism. However, the question that remains for
the next, is a notion of freedom, has technology freed us via expediency
and are we sated by the virtual? "This is the magic of a revitalized
myth of origins, addressing us personally from our television screens,
entering the intimate domestic spaces and rituals of the everyday,
but still in possession of all its mysterious, inaccessible, distant
power" (Jody Berland, 129). As we venture forth skidding off this
swiftly tilting planet into the vast cosmoscape will we be able
to continue to get in touch with our bodies, ourselves? The dreamweavers
will carry on their aesthetic pursuits with new tools and new hybrid
formations will result. How the flesh and bone substructure will
fair is up for conjecture. The struggle with the figure in the landscape
is a never-ending story.
Copyright
© Sherry Mayo 2000 All Rights Reserved
Sources
Benjamin, Walter
(1968), Illuminations, NY: Schocken Books.
Berland, Jody
(1996), "Mapping Space: Imaging Technologies and the Planetary Body,"
Technoscience and Cyberculture, Routledge, Martinsons & Menser (eds.),
p. 123-138.
Burroughs,
William (1959), Naked Lunch, NY: Grove Press.
Deleuze, Gilles
(1989), "Cinema 2, The Time-Image," MN: University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis.
Gibson, William
(1984), Neuromancer, NY: The Berkeley Publishing Group.
Koch, Stephen
(1973), Stargazer, Andy Warhol's World and His Films, London: Calder
& Boyars, Ltd.
McDougall,
Marina (1995), "Banalities of Information," in James Brook and Iain
Boal (eds.), Resisting the Virtual Life, City Lights, p. 207-219.
McLuhan, Marshall
(1998), Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, 7th ed. MA:
MIT Press.
Pollack, Rosalind
(1987), "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics
of Reproduction," Feminist Studies, 13(2), p. 263-292.
Sofia, Zoë
(1992), "Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist Point of View," Australian
Feminist Studies, 15, p.11-24.
Skirrow, Gillian
(1976), "Hellvision: An Analysis of Video Games," High Tech / Low
Culture, Manchester University Press, Colin McCabe (ed.) ch. 8.
Turetzky, Philip
(1993), "Televisual Bodies: Television and the Impulse Image," Crisis
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