electronic trance: bodily interface with artificial environments >> by sherry mayo >> *spark-online9.0

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electronic trance: bodily interface with artificial environments

by sherry mayo

"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.

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 Cinema, Maisonneuve.